Gamera: Guardian of the Universe

Here's another one from Ian:

Ever wonder why it is called “Gamera Guardian Of The Universe”?  It’s not as if he’s guarding the universe. He’s only guarding Earth, which is just one planet. Sheesh.

 Gamera came out at the same time as Godzilla Vs. Destroyah. In this movie, Gamera fights gyaos, the only monster to appear in more than 1 Gamera movie, not counting Gamera. Gyaos might not be as powerful as Destroyah, but he still packs a punch. He can fire a yellow beam from his mouth, which never fails to make Gamera bleed his greenish-blue blood. Things blow up, and monsters fight.

Even though the talking scenes are boring, this is one of those rare instances where you should watch all that talking. They could be saying something important that you will need to remember in later Gamera movies.

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus

Here's another review from my 12-yr-old son, Ian, whom I suspect will take over this blog before I know it.

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus was a good movie, but it had too much talking.

When will I ever learn to skip through the talking scenes? Godzilla and Megaguirus do some fighting and things blow up. What more could you want? Well there’s nothing more I want, I just want less of something. The talking!

This movie was fun to watch, so you should see it. The female main character was kind of a jerk, but not that much. 

Haywire

Haywire stars MMA & Muay Thai champion Gina Carano as a spy-for-hire who finds herself trapped in an espionage thriller made by people who appear to have no love for the genre.

We’ve all seen plenty of action thrillers headlined by women who look like they couldn’t hurt a fly.  I like waif-fu as much as the next guy, but let’s face it: force equals mass times acceleration.  I had a great time watching wafer-thin Zoe Saldana beat up grown men in Colombiana, for instance, but at no time did I believe her punches would actually hurt.  Gina Carano, on the other hand, is no waif: she looks like she knows her way around a steak dinner, she moves like the trained and experienced fighter she is, and I didn’t have to forcibly suspend my disbelief to accept her besting her foes.

Problem is, she’s a terrible actress.  Director Steven Soderbergh puts her onscreen with people like Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, and Michael Fassbender, and she comes across as wooden and overmatched.  I believed her when she was in action, but I couldn’t believe her when she was setting up the situations and motivations that put her in action.

And the action itself?  It isn’t much fun.  In fact, it feels like it was made by people who felt they were slumming.  The music just sits there, the fights are poorly edited, the double and triple crosses carry no heft, and the production has no sense of joy.  Compare Haywire with, say, Tai Chi Master.  Tai Chi Master is standard wuxia fare, but it’s made by people who love wuxia.  There’s an exuberance in the stunt work, the music, the performances, the editing, that you just won’t find in Haywire.

Look, I like action pictures.  I enjoy good fight choreography, I like fireballs as much as the next guy, and I’m a sucker for a good chase scene.  But you’ve got to meet me half way.  You’ve got to cast a lead who can act.  You’ve got to give your picture a sense of urgency and propulsion.  You’ve got to love the genre.  Haywire doesn’t, so I’m marking it down as one of Soderbergh’s failures.

The Mill and the Cross

I’ve never seen anything quite like The Mill and the Cross.  The film, a Polish production, takes us inside Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Way to Calvary (pictured, above), painted during the runup to the Revolt of the Spanish Netherlands.  Not only does it take us inside the painting, an already awe inspiring undertaking; it takes us inside Bruegel’s creative process, showing us his milieu and his sketches and his ideas and his vision for this masterpiece.

It does so while casting aside the constraints of narrative film.  There’s a general flow to the picture, but it feels more like a series of tableaux vivants.  In many sections, the painting comes to life with actors, extras, and animals doing their best to stay in position.  In others, the film gives us movement and dialogue that feels painterly, with a painter’s attention to compositions of light, shadow, drapery, and overall composition.  I’m no expert on Dutch painting – like most people with liberal educations, I have only a general knowledge of the “greatest hits” – but I felt like I was walking through a gallery, soaking in the very best of the art form.

Filmmaker Lech Majewski worked with International Herald Tribune art critic Michael Francis Gibson (author of a detailed analysis of the painting entitled, shockingly, The Mill and the Cross (2001, Aucatloss, Lausanne)) to build a film around and in this work.  He cast Rutger as Breugel, Michael York as his patron, and Charlotte Rampling as both the peasant mother of a Flemish youth tortured and killed by Spanish-paid mercenaries and Mary, Mother of God.  They’re fine.  They’re just right.  But Rampling, oh, she’s everything the devastated Mary should be.  With her stately beauty and her sad, sad eyes, she creates a gaze that takes in not just her own heartbreak, but the heartbreaking panoply of human cruelty through time. 

So, what is The Mill and the Cross?  What is it, really?  It’s an illumination, a meditation.  It’s one art form exploring another, to the enrichment of both.  It is, quite simply, amazing.  You haven’t seen anything quite like it.

Destroy All Planets

Here's a review from my 12 year old son, Ian:

Destroy All Planets was a fine movie, just fast forward through the talking. There aren’t any important plot details you need to know, just watch the fighting. There’s quite a bit of stock footage, but you should watch it. It’s stock footage of monster battles, so it’s worth watching. I watched all of it and I regretted it. The talking was a waste of time. Gamera fights an alien monster who resembles a squid. Viras is the name of the alien and his main attack is to form a sharp point with the three tentacles upon his head and jump forward, stabbing Gamera, thus making Gamera bleed a large amount of bluish-green blood.

This was not as good as Attack of the Monsters(Gamera vs Guiron), but was better than War of the Monsters (Gamera vs Barugon).

The Avengers

I suspect that The Avengers is pretty much the best movie about The Avengers that it’s possible to make.  Consider this:

·      There are several Avengers, all of whom we should care about.

·      They need something to avenge, something that we in the audience feel needs avenging.  The audience needs to cry.  Then, it needs to get mad.

·      People liked Iron Man more than they liked The Hulk.  Message: make ‘em laugh; don’t make ‘em think.

·      Lots of stuff had better blow up real good.

Now, consider the following:

·      Joss Whedon is really, really good at screenwriting and directing.  His resume demonstrates an ablity to craft fully realized worlds, populate them with diverse and engaging characters, and give those characters interesting (and funny) things to say.

·      He’s not afraid to blow stuff up real good.

So, Item One: so many Avengers, so little time.  Whedon addresses this by taking characters who had been in bad movies (Captain America, Thor, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2) and cutting those film’s weaknesses.  Consequently, he capitalizes on their strengths.  Here’s a rundown:

Robert Downey, Jr.’s comic timing is Iron Man’s whole appeal.  Too much of it, however, and you want him to just shut up already.  The Avengers uses him enough to satisfy the audience’s thirst for its favorite player, but not so much that they hope for Sam Rockwell to show up and give ‘em a break.

Thor’s problem was that the whole movie was about two things: Thor’s magical transformation from dick to hero through the power of Natalie Portman’s smile, and Loki’s descent from someone who, reasonably enough, doesn’t like the dickish Thor to full-blown villain.  Here, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor begins the film understanding justice and humility while Tom Hiddleston’s Loki radiates gleeful malevolence.  Now, I’ve got a good guy I can root for and a bad guy I can boo. 

Edward Norton is a brilliant actor, no doubt about it.  But his Bruce Banner was just plain boring.  Eric Bana’s version, on the other hand, was masterful; but everybody (except for me) hated that movie.  Whedon’s solution?  Assume his audience already knows Banner’s back story and give us a whole new guy to play the character.  Mark Ruffalo plays Banner not as a rope about to snap, but as a decent guy with issues – a guy who can tell a joke.  We sympathized with Norton and Bana, but we like Ruffalo.

Captain America suffered from being just another origin story.  Its villains, extra-evil Nazis calling themselves Hydra, were an insult to every self-respecting actual evil Nazi still hiding out in Argentina.  I mean, c’mon!  How do you top real, historic Nazis for evil?  And Illinois Nazis don’t count.  Further, if you’re Captain America and you’ve already beaten the Nazis, where are you going to go next?  That’s why Loki’s the perfect foil: he’s the villain of Norse mythology, one of the touchstones of German National Socialism.  Further, Whedon leverages the fact that Chris Evans’s Captain America is an actual Army captain, schooled in small unit tactics and experienced in leading capable people under stressful conditions.  Throw in some fish-out-water material (he had to get the character to 2012 somehow), and you are maximizing the potential of this character.

There are other Avengers, like Scarlett Johansson, whom we like because she’s Scarlett Johansson, and Jeremy Renner, whom we like because we remember The Hurt Locker.  And you know what?  It all works.  Whedon takes the best, most entertaining aspects of his characters, cuts the fat, and gives us concurrent arcs in which we can believe.  Success!

Item Two:  Whedon does give them something to avenge, and it works on a personal level.  This isn’t, “Hey, you wiped out a Dunkin’ Donuts, and now we’re really mad.”  It’s, “You have gone too far, and this shall not stand.”  Going in to the details would spoil the film, I think.  But I’m comfortable telling you that Whedon surprised me, saddened me, angered me, and made me hungry for revenge.

Item Three:  The Avengers is funny.  I laughed out loud more often than I did at Bridesmaids.

Item Four:  Lots of stuff does, in fact, blow up real good.

So, there’s all that.  There’s plenty that didn’t work for me, as well.  The “Let’s fight before we team up” stage went on a little long.  I’m convinced that Tony Stark’s true nature is that of an amusingly selfish jerk, sentencing us to film after film in which he learns to not be such a jerk, only so that he can forget those lessons in time for the next outing.  I never have been able to get past the fact that a hovering aircraft carrier is a profoundly stupid idea.  But that’s ok.  By taking the best of the films that preceded it, The Avengers crafts an exciting, spectacular, fun time at the movies.

Movies like this are what popcorn is made for.  Or shawarma.  Whatever.

Clash

Clash is a terrible movie.

A Thai martial arts picture, Clash has all the earmarks of a train wreck: lazy choreography, poor blocking, wooden acting, and a story that’s just plain dull.

Let’s start with the story: it’s a Maguffin hunt, pure and simple.  The heroes don’t say much.  The villain listens to opera and wears white shoes.  There’s a shootout at the end.  Boring.

Fact is, however, that you can get away with that in your action picture so long as the set-pieces work.  Clash’s don’t.  Yes, there are a number of good stunts.  But Clash doesn’t show me anything I haven’t seen before, and the blocking ensures that I’ll notice the inch between the foot/fist/weapon of one stuntman and the face of the other.

It doesn’t help when your leads know three expressions: scowling, sullen, and cackling. 

Not for one moment did I believe I Clash was showing me real people.  Not for one moment did I feel any sense of vicarious danger.  Not for one moment did I believe.

I was hoping for so much better.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

NOTE:  This contains a spoiler.  The spoiler won’t be about the story, but about how the story is told.  If you read this, you won't learn less about the plot than you would in most professional reviews.  However, you’ll learn about an element of the film’s structure that I don’t think the filmmakers want you to know up front.


===


"Tell me a story."  It’s what we want films to do.  Take us away, capture our imagination, perhaps expand our mind.  Begin it.  Develop it.  Let it reach its climax.  Craft a satisfying denoument.  This is how stories go.  This is how we’re wired to hear them.  This is what we want.


Martha Marcy May Marlene begins with a young woman’s escape from a back-to-the-land cult.  It’s the climax of a story that began when she joined, one we get in flashback as we watch the story of her reintegration unfold.  That story begins when Marcy moves in to her sister’s place.  It develops.  It reaches an unsatisfying climax.  Then, just when we think we're in the denoument, it indicates a fuller, better climax is still on the way.  Next - whammo!  Black screen.  Roll credits.  What the heck?


So Martha Marcy May Marlene only tells us part of a story.  I'm sure the filmmakers had their reasons.  "Ambiguity is good."  "People will have something to discuss after they leave the theater."  "We like screwing with our audience."  I'm not buying it.  In the words of noted sage Sammy Hagar:


C'mon, baby.  Finish what you started.
I'm incomplete!

Short Takes

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY

I saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy while recovering from surgery.  I was not at my cognitive best, and I remember little about it other than that I enjoyed it.  Sorry, friend.  Not much good to you here.

MY DOG TULIP

My Dog Tulip is the animated memoir of a man who loves his dog about as much as a man can love his dog.  Problem is, the man is a terrible dog owner. 

The dog’s an Alsatian, which should live in a house with a big yard.  The man lives in an apartment and wonders why the neighbors complain about his pet’s barking.  The dog’s out of control, not properly housetrained or taught to heel, and her bad behavior alienates everyone around him.  The man doesn’t clean up his dog’s waste if nobody’s watching, leaving landmines around his neighborhood.  The list goes on.

Somehow, we’re supposed to see man and beast as the man does.  We’re supposed to smile at the dog’s foibles and sympathize with the man’s “human troubles.”  Me, I spent the whole movie waiting for Cesar Milan to show up and set this family right.  90 minutes of anger is not my idea of a good time.

WIN WIN

Win Win, on the other hand, is my idea of a good time.  Written and directed by Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent, The Visitor), here’s a family drama with tension, humor, and pathos.  McCarthy has a great pen and a gift with actors, and it shows.

Judging by the cast he’s assembled, he must also have serious credibility in his profession.  Paul Giamatti (CDNW) stars as a struggling small-time attorney who shares a building with Jeffrey Tambor (CDNW), an accountant and his fellow high school wrestling coach.  He’s helping his best friend (Bobby Cannavale, also of The Station Agent) through a rough divorce.   Giamatti loves his wife, Amy Ryan (of ‘The Wire,’ which is required viewing) and his kids, but he’s swimming upstream and bills are due.  Enter the great Burt Young, who presents him with an opportunity, a burden, and a threat to his entire life construct.

And away we go.

Here’s the thing that makes Win Win special: McCarthy casts legitimately great actors to play these people, and it takes the time to let us get to know them.  Consequently, I felt immersed in their lives.  I laughed when they laughed, cried when they cried, chewed my fingernails when they got worried.  Win Win immersed me, engaged me, and moved me.  I loved it.

The Man Who Laughs

In The Man Who Laughs, one of the last great films of the silent era, Conrad Veidt plays Gwynplain, the victim of a horrible childhood disfigurement.  Someone once took a knife to his mouth, carving his face into a perpetual, horrific smile.

He’s a freak, a sideshow attraction, who also happens to be smart and sensitive and good.  How can someone like that hope to find anything approaching happiness in 18^th century England?

I’ll leave you to discover the answer.  More interestingly, you should know that The Man Who Laughs, though a Universal production, is among the last great gasps of German Expressionist film.  Director Paul Leni, one of the great German Expressionists, made Waxworks.  Star Conrad Veidt made The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.  Executive Producer Paul Kohner, formerly head of Universal’s German arm, helped bring them together in Hollywood to make the picture (all three, German Jews, had fled the Nazis).  [Source: Roger Ebert]

Even more interestingly, you should know that this adaptation of a Victor Hugo novel is a genuinely gripping film.  As with most silents, it may take you twenty minutes or so to reorient your brain to the slightly different format.  Once you dial in, however, you’ll find a sympathetic hero, a seductive temptress, dastardly villains, sly humor, and a level of sophistication that’ll inspire you to want to view the movie a second and third time.  All this, plus swordfights, pathos, and even a heroic dog.  What more could you ask for?

So go into The Man Who Laughs to do your homework on German Expressionism, Victor Hugo, and even the history of DC Comics.*  Once you’re there, you’ll lose track of time, lose yourself in the story, and root for Gwynplain to overcome all who stand between him and happiness.  The Man Who Laughs is a historic film.  It’s an influential film.  Most importantly, it’s a good film.

*In 1940, Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson, and Bill Finger created The Joker character to serve as Batman’s nemesis in “Batman #1.”  According to Kane, they modeled the Joker’s look on Veidt in The Man Who Laughs.

Source Code

With his first feature, Moon, director Duncan Jones established himself as a filmmaker capable of creating the kind of fascinating, challenging science fiction we associate with Golden Age writers like Asimov, Bradbury, and Leiber.  With Source Code, his second feature, Jones delivers a science fiction thriller offering an intriguing premise, riveting execution, and a satisfying denoument.  Jones not only sticks the landing, he sticks the entire film.

Here’s the setup:  Captain Colter Stevens is an Army helicopter pilot who awakens strapped in a kind of time machine.  This machine comes with a twist: it puts him in the body of another man, and it can only send him to one 8-minute stretch in the man’s life: the 8 minutes before he dies.  Colter’s mission: discover who’s responsible for killing the man and everyone on the commuter train the man happened to be riding when it exploded. 

Go.  Fail.  Die.  Try again.

It’s a great premise, mixing aspects of Groundhog Day, “Quantum Leap,” and Day of the Jackal.  Jones fleshes it out with a strong cast, starring Jake Gyllenhaal (a favorite since October Sky), Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, and Jeffrey Wright.  He complements them with direction and photography that reveal enough to keep us oriented and in the game, but hide enough to keep us questioning and worrying our nails.

And it works.  We share Colter’s disorientation, his desperation.  We want what he wants, we feel what he feels, and we walk out of Source Code exhilarated, satisfied, and ready to live those 90 minutes over again.

With Moon and Source Code, Duncan Jones is officially two for two.  I can’t wait to see where he goes for number three.

Rango

Rango is a great Western.  It’s a great kids’ movie.  It’s just plain great.

This beautifully animated film both ribs and pays homage to the Western, and particularly the spaghetti Western.  It’s a tale of an evil boss and a new sheriff, and it references enough classics of the genre to keep the aficionado in deep clover.  More importantly, it tells its own Western story, and it does so well enough to capture the imaginations of children for whom it represents their first exposure to the genre.

Johnny Depp voices the titular Rango, a chameleon who dreams of adventure and heroism.  When he wanders into an Old West town populated with (beautifully rendered) desert creatures, he tries to blend in.  After all, that’s what chameleons do.    Next thing he knows, he’s the sheriff.  Now, if he can only figure out how to work that gun …

And away we go.  Rango has gunslingers, saloons, jailbreaks, and even a plucky belle struggling to save her ranch.  It also has great music, funny jokes, and the most beautiful animation I’ve enjoyed since Kung Fu Panda.  I loved it, my wife loved it, and my kids loved it.  Now, if only I can get ‘em to watch Stagecoach.

Blood and Bone

Blood and Bone is a simply constructed, competently shot fight movie.

Michael Jai White plays Isaiah Bone, an ex-convict trying to get by in LA.  He fights in elaborately staged “underground” matches whose production values would make Don King burn with envy.  Of course, he catches the eye of the local top thug, played with relish by the underappreciated Eamonn Walker (who nailed the role of Howlin’ Wolf in the underseen Cadillac Records.).  Oooh, there’s gonna be fightin’.

Ok ok ok.  You don’t queue up a movie like Blood and Bone to revel in intricate plotting and razor-sharp dialogue.  How is the fightin’?  It’s fine, really, but nothing spectacular.  Michael Jai White is a competent martial artist, but his choreographer lets him down with simple matches that lack spectacle.  I rocked along well enough for an hour and a half, but the only fight I remember as of this writing is the very first one.  I hoped for more from Blood and Bone.

Hamlet

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who love Shakespeare, and those have not been properly introduced.

If you fall into the latter category, you may not enjoy the 2009 RSC Hamlet, starring David Tennant and Patrick Stewart.  As a TV film of a stage production, it’s well, stagey.  The 1990 Zeffirelli Hamlet, starring Mel Gibson and Glenn Close, is much more cinematic and, in my opinion, a better introduction to the play for non-aficionados  (I love Kenneth Branagh.  I really do.  But his 1996 film struck me as bloated and flat.).

If you’re a member of the former category, however, you’ll love this Hamlet.  The staginess won’t put you off, and you’ll home in on the quality of the direction and performances.  You’ll find that David Tennant, who found fame playing the eponymous Doctor for four seasons of the BBC’s hit show ‘Doctor Who,’ is an actor gifted with range as well as charisma.  He goes big with his Hamlet, and that “bigness” sets off the intimacy of the soliloquies.  Patrick Stewart, as Claudius, demonstrates how even the subtlest of gestures or tics can illuminate a character and generate sympathy in unexpected ways.  With the same motion, he can show us why Gertrude loves him and Hamlet hates him, and he can make us do a little of both.

This production’s biggest surprise, however, is Oliver Ford Davies as Polonius.  Davies, who earned the undying enmity of all people everywhere by appearing in not one, but all three, of the Star Wars prequels (Sio Bibble, governor of Naboo.  Hey, everyone has bills to pay.), steals every scene he’s in.  His Polonius is smart, funny, wily, and beginning to succumb to senility.  His dialogue drips off his tongue just so, and we in the audience light up every time he enters the frame.  In fact, I’d say his is a definitive Polonius: someone worth trusting, worth obeying, worth avenging.

So, there you have it.  Outstanding performances, reasonably well shot in an RSC-for-tv kind of way, and as good as any Hamlet you’re likely to see.  This Hamlet is a winner.

Game Change

I loved Game Change.

Granted, I follow politics the way normal people follow sports.  I burned with envy when my wife would come home from her job in Georgetown and report that she saw some junior senator from a jerkwater state like New York at a restaurant.  It killed me when my job status prevented me from volunteering for my presidential candidate of choice.  I’ve burned hours upon untold hours debating the minutiae of American policy with fellow obsessives on internet message boards.  I read all those Woodward books.  This is my thing.

Game Change gave me not just a peek, but an extended tour behind the curtain of the 2008 McCain presidential campaign.  Now, if you take the time to read an obscure blog like mine, you’ve probably already read about the HBO film’s remarkable performances, fair portrayal, and overall quality.  I agree, and I’ll be shocked if Ed Harris and Julianne Moore don’t win at least Emmy nominations.  But my favorite thing about the film was the sense it gave us of being caught up in tricky decisions.  It’s four days ‘til you have to name a vice presidential nominee and you’re trailing an opponent who seems unassailable: what do you do?  Your hastily vetted choice turns out to be wildly underprepared and may be melting down:  what do you do?  You’ve allowed a measure of populism and fear to enter your campaign, and it’s turning ugly and spinning out of control: what do you do?

This stuff, the gap between ideals and actions, the strategizing and counterstrategizing, are what makes so politics so fascinating.  Game Change brings the fascination home, and I loved every minute of it.  If you have HBO, see it this month.  If not, queue it up.  You’ll be glad you did.

The Ides of March

The Ides of March reminds me of the (very good) Robert Redford film The Candidate.  Where The Candidate focused on Robert Redford’s candidate for Senate, The Ides of March focuses on Ryan Gosling’s consultant to the presidential primary campaign of George Clooney.  Both films are about ambition and compromise, and both succeed.

The Ides of March, based upon a stage play, relies upon its performances to sell its dialogue-heavy running time.  This works, and it works thanks not only to the aforementioned Gosling and Clooney, but to pros like Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeffrey Wright, and Marisa Tomei.  Watching them perform, we feel like we have seats to an all-star production on Broadway.  Granted, it’s a production that feels earnest even while it tries to plumb the depths of self-interest and manipulation (Clooney, the Democratic Primary candidate, gets off all the Democratic talking points and zingers that left-leaning writers shout at their televisions during news conferences.), but I welcome earnestness when done well.

Does the plot twist and turn?  Yes, in ways both expected and surprising.  Do we feel for the characters?  Yes, though our loyalties shift.  When the credits roll, are we glad we spent 90 minutes with these people?  Yes, because they’re played by world-class actors speaking interesting dialogue in a story that, while not dazzling in its originality, benefits from being one well told.  I enjoyed The Ides of March.  If you like smart stories about interesting people, you probably will, too.

Short Takes

Here are some short responses to some of the films I've managed to see over the last couple of weeks:

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN

I’ve never cared about Marilyn Monroe one way or another.  Sure, I enjoyed Some Like it Hot as much as the next guy, but she never lit my fuse like, say, Barbara Stanwyck does.

That said, My Week with Marilyn made me care about Marilyn Monroe quite a lot.  The story reminds one of My Favorite Year: a show-business neophyte befriends a star, to mutual benefit.  Michelle Williams plays Marilyn in the full flower of her stardom, every bit as dazzling and insecure as history remembers her.  Lawrence Olivier (the brilliant Kenneth Branagh) has hired her to come to England to film a movie, and she’s so intimidated she can barely function.  Enter Colin Clarke, the neophyte and audience surrogate, who finds himself in the Star’s confidence.  

Soon enough, I was in.  Through Clarke’s eyes, I came to see Marilyn as an impossibly tough, delicate, and ultimately inscrutable woman entirely worthy of fascination.  So much did this film pique my interest, I’m queuing up the Olivier/Monroe pairing The Prince and the Showgirl.  I want to spend more time with Marilyn.

THE MUPPETS

Hey, you.  Yeah: you.  You like big production numbers?  Silly jokes?  Evil villains?  Boom: here you go, then.  The Muppets is for you.

Here’s the story: Jason Segel and Amy Adams help the Muppets reunite and put on a show.  That’s it.  Have at it.

So, enough about The Muppets.  Let’s talk about Amy Adams.  If ever an actress could lay claim the to the title, “The Next Julie Andrews,” it’s her.  She can sing.  She can dance.  She can act.  She can do all three at the same time, and do them well.  In fact, I’m kind of sorry that she was born too late for the era of the Great Hollywood Musical.  Given the right material, she could have passed in to legend, like Andrews.  She’s young, still, and she has plenty of time.  I loved watching her in The Muppets, I think she’s the real deal, and I hope someone out there is building a musical around her. 

I’d be there.  Opening day.

THE DESCENDANTS

 

The Descendants is one of those films that takes a basically likeable guy, piles a ton of manure on his head, and observes.  George Clooney (CDNW) plays the guy, nearly everyone else plays pilers, and we observe. 

The result?  A rich and rewarding character study of a man going through the hardest period of his life, told with tenderness and care.  The Descendants is worth your time.

BRIDESMAIDS

Bridesmaids revels in the comedy of the uncomfortable.  I found it so writhingly uncomfortable that I couldn’t wait for it to end.

ATTACK THE BLOCK

Attack The Block introduces us to a gang of young thugs in training, exposes them to an alien menace, and tries to get us to root for the thugs as they battle monsters.

I never could bring myself to care about the thugs.  Thus, I felt no tension.  Many of my friends laud this film as an innovative monster movie with a nifty hook, but to me it was just another chore.  Pass.

THE CAPTAINS

William Shatner is a terrific interviewer.  He’s so blithely self-absorbed that he puts his subjects at ease, comfortable in the knowledge that all they need to do for the next hour or so is sit back and hit the softballs he tosses between monologues.  And then they’ll inadvertently say something genuine, reveal a doubt or a weakness, and whammo!  He homes in, relentlessly questioning until he gets at its kernel, and we learn something.

In The Captains, Shatner interviews the actors who’ve played the Captain roles in the five Star Trek TV series, as well as the one who played Kirk in the newest movie.  Of the group, Avery Brooks is the most slippery and Chris Pine the least reflective (I’m not saying he’s callow or dumb, just that he’s not yet at that stage of his life path.).  They come across as a smart bunch, they know how to tell good stories, and Shatner really gets it out of them.

If you love Star Trek or if, like me, you’ve outgrown it but still love the idea of Star Trek, you’ll love The Captains.  As for me, I understand that William Shatner has an interview show on basic cable somewhere.  I’m going to look it up.  The man is really good at this.

Real Steel

Real Steel.  It’s a fighting movie without any actual fighting.  Yes, enormous animated robots duke it out in various venues, but they’re just robots.  This could be a movie about slot car racing or flying model airplanes.

Here’s the deal: it’s the near future.  Hugh Jackman plays a derelict drifter, one whose sole possessions appear to be a semi truck, a rock ‘em sock ‘em robot, and a 6-pack of cheap beer.  Oh, and he must have a full gym and a nutritionist and a personal trainer and some actual motivation in there, too, because I’ve never heard of a derelict drifter in the kind of shape this guy’s in.  Anyway, he drives from town to town, putting his ‘bot in small-time bouts for chump change and making bets he can’t cover.  He’s bad at it.  Enter a long-lost son.  Time to grow up.  Time to make something of himself.  All that.  You’ve seen it before.

Look, Jackman’s a super-talented man, Dakota Goyo, who plays the son, is a super-talented boy, and it’s hard to screw up the “man-child grows up and bonds with his kid” storyline.  But that storyline is really just a framework for the film’s showcase battles between various androids, and I couldn’t bring myself to care about them.  Not because I didn’t care about Jackman père et fils, but because a fight in which the contestants neither tire nor feel pain is no fight at all.  I’m not holding myself out as an expert fighter, here – I’m basically going on memories of Plebe boxing at USNA.  But I remember how I felt after only three rounds, when it was all my opponent and I could do to keep our gloves up and lob feather-light jabs at one another.  Real Steel’s robots can’t know what that’s like, so I couldn’t care about them.  And since I couldn’t do that, well, the movie’s marquee moments fell flat.

I think Jackman and Goyo could have carried a movie about a down-on-his-luck boxer who needed someone to believe in him.  The very conceit of Real Steel, however, left me with no skin in the game.

The Hangover: Part II

The Hangover: Part II is a misnomer.  The Hangover told a crass, yet funny, story about a bunch of guys who had a big night in Vegas that went horribly wrong.  It was a self-contained narrative that set up its situation, developed its protagonist, faced its villain, took its bow, and went home.  It wasn’t a Part I of anything.  The Hangover: Part II tells the same basic story, but in Bangkok.  The situation’s nearly identical, the protagonist is identical, the villain is extraordinarily similar to the villain in the last picture, and even the bow is the same.  They should have entitled the film, The Hangover: Let’s Make Some More Money.

Ok.  But is it funny?  Actually, yes.  I didn’t laugh as much as I did for the first film, but I did laugh out loud once or twice and chuckled often.  I liked the characters, I enjoyed the setting, I thought about 25% of the jokes worked, and I generally had a pleasant time.

Would I see The Hangover III: Salt Lake City?  I doubt it, not unless they can find somewhere else (dramatically) for these people to go.  Even a reasonably funny retread is still a retread.

In Time

In Time is a workmanlike dystopian haves vs. have-nots science fiction picture. 

Here’s the story: in a few hundred years, someone figures out how to halt the aging process at 25.  To stop overpopulation, at 25 a one-year counter starts ticking off on the person’s arm.  Once that counter goes to zero, the person drops dead.  As with any economic system, people separate into haves and have-nots.  Everyone seems more or less ok with this, until one man (Justin Timberlake) trips to the fact that the haves are rigging the system.

It’s a neat premise that follows in the grand tradition of science fiction as social commentary and popular entertainment.  Add that Timberlake is a likeable film actor and that both his love interest/accomplice (Amanda Seyfried) and antagonist (Cillian Murphy) know how to hit their marks, and you have a fine picture.

So, what’s the difference between “workmanlike” or “fine” and “good?”  Ambiguity.  Vision.  Creativity.  In Time feels like a low-budget third draft.  It’s all too simple and clear to be actually “good,” and the use of time as a metaphor for money stops being interesting after about ten minutes.  Toss in a future LA whose very best neighborhood appears to be the Wilshire District around 7:00 am on a Sunday and technology that’s only about $100,000 worth of production budget cooler than our own, and you wind up with “workmanlike” and “fine.”

And yet, workmanlike and fine are, well, fine.  I don’t recommend that you go out of your way to see In Time, but if dystopian haves vs. have-nots science fiction is your thing, well, have at it.

Warrior

The poster for Warrior tells you most of what you need to know about the movie.  Two guys who appear to know their way around a hypodermic needle are going to fight.  One of them’s probably the bad guy, and one of them’s probably the good guy.  There’s gonna be a training montage, and someone’s going to look to a woman in the audience for inspiration.

For the most part, you’d be right.  Nevertheless, Warrior steps enough outside that mold to keep itself interesting, and it delivers a fine montage, great fights, and enough of an emotional wallop to choke me up at the end.  See, the fighters are brothers.  With issues.  They bond.  I’m a sucker for that kind of thing.

Yes, yes, yes.  We’ve seen a number of the story elements a million times.  And really, how do you do anything new with a shot of supporters back home cheering at their television sets?  But hey, I liked these people all the same.  I cared about them and I cared who won the big fight, and why, and how.  Warrior is a perfectly respectable entry in the “fight movie” catalogue.