Spy

I’ve been slow to climb aboard the Melissa McCarthy bandwagon.  Her performance in Bridesmaids reminded me of Chris Farley, who made a string a successful movies built around fat jokes.  Sadly, Farley was consumed with self-loathing, and the drugs to which he turned eventually killed him.  Thus, it felt cruel to go to the movies just to laugh at the fat lady.  Cruelty is not my idea of a good time.

And yet, there I was: stuck in Coach on a long flight, having already seen most of the pictures the in-flight entertainment system had to offer.  I remembered that Spy garnered good reviews, so I decided to give it a (skeptical) shot.

I laughed all the way through Spy, from the first silly gag involving bats in the CIA Comm Center through the silly gags involving various sequel ideas that played through the closing credits.  Spy is not 90 minutes of laughing at the fat lady.  It’s 90 minutes of laughing with the clever, capable woman who just happens to be a little larger than normal.  Oh, and lots of laughing at Jason Statham.  Jason Statham.  Who knew?

Here’s the setup: McCarthy is a “back room” CIA agent along the lines of Mission: Impossible’s Simon Pegg.  Like Pegg, she winds up doing field work even though nobody (including her) thinks she’s up to the task.  Like Pegg, she turns out to be awesome.

Spy, of course, plays this setup entirely for laughs.  To do so, it recruits a murderer’s row of some of the finest supporting talent working in movies today, from Jude Law to Rose Byrne to Bobby Cannavale to Morena Baccarin to Peter Sarafinowicz to Allison Janney.  And this isn’t the kind of movie in which various big name supporting actors just turn up to cash a paycheck: each of them endows his or her character with enough personality, enough life, to make every moment pop.  Even the Big Bad, while dangerous enough to present a credible threat within the context of the film, exhibits just enough silliness to put a smile on our face.

I loved this movie.  Spy is raunchy and goofy and laugh-out-loud funny from beginning to end, and it’s all that not only without demeaning its star, but with making her absolutely awesome.  Writer/Director Paul Feig nails it, and I’m now firmly aboard the Melissa McCarthy bandwagon.  I can’t wait to see what the two of them do with Ghostbusters.

Music Double Feature

CBGB

CBGB tells the true(ish) story of Hilly Kristal, the owner of New York nightclub CBGB.  

CBGB, of course, was the epicenter of the Punk Rock movement and a launching pad for acts such as The Ramones, Blondie, The Talking Heads, and The Police.

Alan Rickman (CDNW) plays Krystal, a man with no business sense but a great ear for music.  Rickman’s just wonderful: slovenly, disorganized, kind of a jerk, but totally good-hearted; it’s difficult to see that man in this role and imagine him as anything else.

As for the story, well, I imagine that your response to this movie will depend on your affinity for the subject matter.  If you care about the history of alternative music in general (and punk rock in particular), this movie is for you.  If not, well, it’s a peek into a subculture that wasn’t your thing to begin with.  As for me, the soundtrack alone made it a great film to have on in the background while sorting through paperwork, even though it doubled the time required for my project because I kept putting it down to focus on whatever Rickman was up to next.  As such, I enjoyed CBGB.  I think I’ll buy the soundtrack.

Get on Up

Get on Up is a reasonably straightforward biopic, enlivened by an exceptional performance from 42’s Chadwick Bozeman.

This film, a James Brown biography, skips around the artist’s life to show us, warts and all, what this man was about.  A canny businessman, a relentless self-promoter, an artistic genius, a wife beater, a tax cheat, and an all-around SOB, Brown alienated pretty much everyone on his way to the top, and he kept on alienating them once he got there.

But man, that artistic genius part.  That’s really something. 

Chadwick Bozeman captures all of it, with a lightning-in-a-bottle performance that spans a hardscrabble youth, electrifying performing career, and drug-addled old age.  From the speaking voice to the dance moves to the odd, almost palsied shuffle, the actor has James Brown right on down.  The film is worth seeing for him alone.

As an aside, the film captured the imagination of my 15-yr-old, who’s on something of a ‘60s music and history kick.  I see some James Brown CDs infiltrating his regular Doors/Stones/Hendrix rotation in the very near future.

Crimson Peak

Crimson Peak is marvelous, if you like that sort of thing.

That is, if you like haunted mansions.

If you like downright evil, hiss-able villains.

If you like tortured villains.

If you like virtuous, brave heroines.

If you like virtuous, brave heroes.

If you like sumptuous costuming and set design.

If you like Wuthering Heights in particular, and Brontë novels in general.

If you like House of Usher in particular, and Vincent Price movies in general.

If you like Mia Wasikowska, and Jim Beaver, and Jessica Chastain, and Tom Hiddleston, and Charlie Dunham.

If you like slow-burn horror.

If you like jump scares.

If you like movies.

If you like that sort of thing, Crimson Peak is marvelous.

The Martian

I liked The Martian so much, I hope it sparks a genre.

No, not near-future science fiction.  Not Mars.  Not even Survival.  I hope it sparks a genre called “Smart, capable people solving problems.”  Like Apollo 13, and even like All is Lost, it’d be a genre without villains and without gunfire (But ‘splosions are always ok.  What’s the point of a movie camera if you can’t point it at a ‘splosion?).  It’d just be people figuring out how to do stuff. In The Martian, near-future astronaut (and botanist) Matt Damon needs to figure out how to survive being marooned on Mars while NASA scientists need to figure out how to rescue him.  That’s more than enough drama for 144 minutes of film.

Why?  Because figuring out how to do stuff is absolutely fundamental to the human condition.  As such, drama about this process is both universal and captivating (if done right).

Hang on a minute: I’ve just described the “heist” movie.  Smart, capable, professional criminals solving problems are the bread and butter of heist movies.  Apollo 13, All is Lost, and The Martian are basically heist movies in which the characters are trying to figure out how to save a life instead of crack a safe.

Man, I love heist movies.

Ok, back to it.  Drew Goddard adapted The Martian’s screenplay from Andy Weir’s novel of the same name.  Goddard wrote and directed the superlative The Cabin in the Woods, another tightly plotted and thoroughly entertaining film.  In one his promotional interviews, director Ridley Scott said that Goddard’s Martian script was the best he’d seen since Alien, and I believe it.  I can’t wait to see what Goddard writes next.

As for the rest of the pieces of the puzzle, Christopher Orr says it best in this ‘Atlantic’ article.  The Martian is a tale of people who are good at their jobs doing their jobs well, and The Martian is a product of people who are good at their jobs doing their jobs well.  It’s a pleasure to behold.

Oh, on another note: Devin Faraci at birthmoviesdeath.com makes a great point about the inspirational power of this film.  No, not like those silly posters of people rowing crew that one finds on the walls of dispiriting cubicle farms.  The Martian is the kind of movie that inspires kids to grow up to work at JPL, or NASA, or the USDA.  Sure, it’s easy to make astronauts look cool, but your average kid has a better chance of growing up to play in the NBA than make it into the Space Program.  Show me a movie that makes science qua science, math qua math look cool, and you have a movie to which I am absolutely going to drag my kids.

Focus

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR FOCUS AHEAD.  This is a “con” movie, so these spoilers could ruin things.  Nevertheless, I don’t think I can write about the film without spoiling it.  Sorry.

Ok.  You’ve been warned.

I have three problems with Focus.  First, it’s a con movie without a long con, only shorter cons that keep the action moving.  Second, it has a romantic element that’s kind of creepy.  Third, costar Margot Robbie, while particularly attractive, is not a particularly good actress.

First, the con.  Early in the film, Smith specifically tells Robbie to misdirect, to deceive, to make the con so invisible to the mark that the mark doesn’t trip until the con man is far away.  It worked on me, because I was misdirected.  I spent the whole movie focused on Robbie, trying to sniff out her misdirections and the long con she had to be pulling on Smith.  But, alas, there was no long con.  What kind of a con movie leaves out the long con, the one in which the student outwits the master?  Or, at least, the one in which the student thinks she’s outwitted the master, only to find out she’s been the mark all along.  Alas, no.  Focus starts out a promising film about the art of the con, but ultimately it just fizzles out into another BS love story.  And there I was, staying focused for 90 minutes for no reason whatsoever.  I mean, c'mon.  It's right there in the title: the imperative Focus.  If you aren't going to follow through on your title, why bother?

Second, the romantic element.  Will Smith is too old to be playing Margot Robbie’s love interest.  His character is supposed to be completely together, but how emotionally and intellectually stunted does a guy have to be to go for someone who never saw Ghostbusters on the big screen?  This whole element of the film creeped me out, as if it were the collective wish fulfillment of a bunch of old men in the entertainment industry.

Third, Robbie has this scene in which she’s supposed to break down and cry.  She can’t quite pull this off, so she does that thing where she covers her face with her hands and just sorta heaves her shoulders up and down a few times.  I don’t care how attractive an actress is: if she isn’t willing to learn her craft, I’m not willing to spend 90 minutes watching her.

So, there you have it: no long con, no compelling love story, one poor performance in a major role.  Focus on another film.

12 Years a Slave

12 Years a Slave is a great movie.  I never want to see it again.

This harrowing film, based on the memoirs of escaped slave Solomon Northup, brings to life the cruelty and inhumanity of the antebellum South through a faithful recreation of Northup’s luring away from his New York home, subsequent enslavement, and eventual repatriation to the land of the free.

The recreation is served by the production designer’s careful attention to detail, scarring performances on the part of the cast, and careful direction and photography that highlight the jarring cruelty of slavery by showing just how routine that cruelty had become.

The production design is immaculate.  From period construction equipment to architecture to clothing, 12 Years a Slave is better than a museum: it doesn’t just show us where people lived and what they used and wore; it shows us how they lived there, how they used the materials to hand, how the clothes they wore actually looked in motion.

The cast, well, it’s remarkable. Lupita Nyong'o as a fellow slave trying to maintain some humanity provides an unforgettable performance.  Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Fassbender, as slaveholders of variable degrees of humanity, provide contrasting images of the corruption of absolute power.  Paul Dano, as a foreman who, though below Cumberbatch and Fassbender on the social ladder, absolutely assumes his God-given superiority over the slaves under his dominion, creates a character of both weakness and power – a difficult, but important, station to portray. The anchor, as he is for so many films, is the great Chiwetel Ejiofor, who Can Do No Wrong.  His intelligence, his humanity, his fear, and his desperation provide both a hero for the film and an audience identification character.  From Dirty Pretty Things to Kinky Boots and now to 12 Years a Slave, Ejiofor is putting together a filmography that’s marking him as one of the most compelling actors working today.

Of course, without the right director and photographer, all this hard work would come to naught.  Director Steve McQueen and DP Sean Bobbitt, however, are up to the task.  Watching their film, one can almost feel the heat and humidity of the Louisiana Bayou.  One can almost smell the stench of a slave quarters.  Most importantly, one can understand how life goes on even as men and women are captured, tortured, raped, murdered, and buried in shallow graves time and again, year after year.

And of course, this is all part of our American heritage, as much a part of the fabric of our country as the rockets’ red glare or the New Deal.  It’s a part of our heritage we know about, but kind of gloss over because it’s so painful to contemplate.  That pain is why I don’t want to see 12 Years a Slave again, though I’m glad I saw it once.  Do not miss 12 Years a Slave.

Life Itself; All is Lost

Purely by coincidence, this turned out to be a death-themed post.  Sorry about that.  Here's a picture of a puppy and a kitten.

Life Itself

Roger Ebert is to the amateur movie blogger as Big Papi is to the beer league softball player.  Life Itself, a biographical documentary about the man and his declining months, doesn’t tell us much we don’t already know from watching his shows, reading his reviews and his blog, and following his career.  Nevertheless, it makes us part of the celebration, makes us witnesses to the man.  It’s an insightful, touching film, and I think Roger would have given it a thumbs up.

All is Lost

I watch a lot of movies on the installment plan: 20 minutes on the elliptical here, half an hour in an airport lounge there.  Do not watch All is Lost on the installment plan.

The movie’s about a solo mariner (Robert Redford) sailing his yacht across the Pacific Ocean.  When the yacht collides with a floating shipping container which smashes a hole below the waterline, the mariner handles the situation calmly and competently.  When faced with more, compounding problems, the mariner handles them in the same fashion.  Sometimes, however, life throws more at you than you can handle, calm competence or no.

In a way, All is Lost works as a metaphor for life.  We sail along in our prime, with the wind at our backs and the sun overhead.  Then something goes wrong, then something else, then another thing.  We handle it all as best we can.  We fight against the dying of the light.  But the light is temporary; it’s meant to die.  And calm as we remain, competently as we handle one health scare after another, we degrade, and fail, and sink beneath the waves.

Heavy stuff, I know.  So heavy, in fact, that I found All is Lost rather hard going.  I’m currently in the apogee of my own life, and contemplating my inevitable decline isn’t really my favorite way to spend a couple of hours.  Still, I’m glad I saw this film.  It’s ambitious, and it executes on that ambition.  If Robert Redford was once the perfect embodiment of death, he’s now the perfect embodiment of the process of dying.  You could do with a worse guide to inform you that all is lost.

Inside Out

In my notes on Terminator:Genisys, I wrote that I’ve lost interest in big budget, yet empty, animation festivals.

Inside Out is a big budget, yet rich, animation festival.  I loved it.

This is an amazingly ambitious picture, bringing together contemporary psychology theory, brilliant storytelling, and cutting edge animation to take us inside the mind, perhaps even the soul, of an 11-year-old girl struggling with a cross-country move and all the uncertainty that can bring.

Of course, this sounds like the type of thing you may recall from elementary school films, but we’re talking about a Pixar movie here.  This is the studio that sold us on the concept of paying rats to prepare our meals.  Inside Out makes us care about his girl and – I don’t quite know how to write this – the component parts of her psyche in a way that not only captures our imagination, but improves our understanding of ourselves and of those around us.

I love Inside Out.  I love everything about it.  It’s one of the best movies I’ve seen this year.

Terminator: Genisys

Oh, my goodness.  What a big, goofy, internally inconsistent, dumb, fun movie.  That left me flat anyway. 

Terminator: Genisys is a great movie for the casual fan of the Terminator franchise.  If you have a vague memory of the first two films and general feeling of goodwill toward the concept of time-travelling killer androids, this is just the picture to fire up when you’re sitting in Coach on Hour 6 of a 10-hour plane ride.

Here’s the premise: we start some minutes before the beginning of The Terminator. John Connor is about to send some meatball (who is supposed to be what Michael Biehn might have looked like if he’d gotten into steroids instead of whiskey) back in time to rescue his mom from young Arnold Schwarzenegger.  So far, so good, but …

SPOILERS AHOY.  NOT THE BIGGEST SPOILERS, BECAUSE THEY TAKE PLACE IN THE FIRST 5 MINUTES OF THE FILM.  STILL, IT’S A TWIST.  YOU CAN ALWAYS STOP HERE.  YOU ALREADY KNOW WHETHER YOU’RE GOING TO CATCH THIS ON VIDEO.

… oh, no!  The Terminators have infiltrated the Resistance!  One of them’s attacking John just as Not-Biehn is transporting!

And away we go.  And this is all fine.  We have a reasonably clever script, we have a woefully underused television star in a supporting role when he’d have brought so much more than a killer recipe for protein shakes to the not-Biehn role, and we have Arnold shooting guns and pulling faces.  It’s fun, but it’s missing something.  It took me a long time to put my finger on it, but it finally came together during a stunt sequence set on the Golden Gate Bridge.

See, there’s a bit where a school bus flips end over end, then rolls for a while, then flies through a fireball, etc.  Sarah Connor’s wearing a seatbelt, at least, but not Meatball.  There were two things wrong with this bit.  First, the crash was not survivable – seat belt or not.  If you’re making a movie about killer androids from the future, you need to get the little lies right in order to help your audience swallow the big lie.  Second, while the sequence used some practical effects, its climax –with the bus coming at the viewer while a fireball explodes- just doesn’t look real.  This would have been fine a year ago, when all the big action movies looked like this.  But this was the summer of the superlative Mad Max: FuryRoad, where a shot of a truck smashing into some obstacles, wiping out, and generating chaos was a shot of a real truck actually smashing into real obstacles, wiping out, and generating (real, though carefully planned) chaos.

For that matter, This movie never felt real.  I never feared for any of the leads’ lives.  I was disappointed that the brilliant Matt Smith was given so little to do.  I just- well, Terminator: Genisys offered a couple of hours of nostalgia and ‘splosions, and that ain’t bad.  But that doesn’t really cut it any more.  Give me a $5M movie about Thai or Malaysian stuntmen fighting each other over a MacGuffin.  I’ll take that – a little movie with actual people executing difficult stunt sequences – over a big budget, yet empty, animation festival.

The Equalizer; Into the Woods; Going Clear

The Equalizer

Lone superman eliminates the entire Russian Mafia in Boston.  I don’t get it – it’s not like they killed his dog.

Yes, The Equalizer is basically John Wick with Denzel Washington.  I’m actually ok with that, because I liked John Wick and I like Denzel Washington.  I liked The Equalizer, but I didn’t love it for two reasons.  First, it was so bleak that I felt depressed while it was on.  Second, the fight choreography and photography weren’t particularly compelling.

If I were the kind of guy who gave scores, I’d add bonus points for the Chloë Grace Moretz's turn as an actress affirming that, yes, she is the next Jodie Foster.  Further, I’d add points for casting Marton Csokas as the villain.  He’s kind of a stock Russian baddie, but he was in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.  And I really love Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

Into the Woods

About halfway through Into the Woods, I paused it checked to IMDB to learn whether the guy who wrote the music is the same guy who wrote Cats.  I hate Cats.

That said, Into the Woods does provide yet another example of why Meryl Streep is enjoying such a long and lauded career.  Frankly, it's as if she were in a different movie.  While the rest of the performers seem to be there to make one of two statements ("I may be a movie/tv star, but I can do musical theater!"  "I may be a Broadway star, but I can do movies!"), Streep is assaying an actual character.  Yes, she sings and dances, but she's alive and she brings the movie alive whenever she's onscreen.

Perhaps I'll remember Into the Woods as the move that made me think, 'Maybe I will queue up Ricki and the Flash, after all.'

Going Clear

One day, my college roommate came home with a copy of Dianetics.  I threw a fit, warned him not to get involved with that evil cult, and convinced him to toss the book.  Going Clear, a documentary exposing Scientology, proves me right nearly thirty years later.  I’m just glad my roommate listened to me way back when.

While the film lingers a bit too long on celebrity scandal for my taste, it succeeds in making its case that Scientiology is an evil, rapacious swindle.  It does so in a careful, compelling way that makes it succeed as entertainment, as well.  I recommend this one without reservation.

 

 

Casting By

Casting By, a documentary about casting directors, sheds light on the dawn of the casting director as an independent creative player in the world of film and television.  It’s interesting stuff if you’re a movie buff, but I suspect it would put a general audience to sleep.

The story takes focuses on Marion Dougherty, a brilliant New York casting director who defined the job.  Just as Dougherty was coming into her own as a casting director in New York – based network television, the studio system was coming apart in Los Angeles.  When the studios stopped keeping a roster of reliably stereotypical role players on contract and transitioned to hiring afresh for each new film, they needed someone who knew the talent pool.  They needed someone who knew how to read a script and see a certain performer or type of performer.  They needed a casting director.

Dougherty filled that role, and in so doing she garnered the respect of many of the great filmmakers of her day.  While she was at it, she trained the next generation of casting directors and shaped her profession for years to come.  Casting By tells her story with verve, and sprinkles it with interviews with such luminaries as Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen, and Martin Scorsese.  However, the film assumes a familiarity with the motion pictures of the late sixties and early seventies (Dougherty’s heyday) that many viewers may not share.  If you haven’t seen Midnight Cowboy, you can’t know how perfectly cast John Voight and Dustin Hoffman were in that film.  The same goes for Robert Redford and Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, or a number of the other actors in a number of the other films Casting By expects you to have seen.

That said, Casting By taught this film buff a few things about the history of auteur-era American filmmaking, and it did so in an entertaining fashion.  If you’ve done your homework, you’ll probably enjoy Casting By.  I know I did.

The Best Offer

The Best Offer could as easily been entitled Geoffrey Rush is a Really Good Actor.  In the film, Rush plays an art and antiques valuator and auctioneer with a tightly controlled, distant life.  He is his work, and he is very little else.

Until, that is, he meets a girl.

Once he meets a girl, the plot kicks in.  It’s a perfectly fine, if heavy handed, tale, but the tale isn’t the draw of The Best Offer.  The draw of this film is the opportunity to watch Rush assay a particular kind of solitary gentleman, then to watch him develop this character into a three-dimensional man.  He really is breathtaking, even if the film he’s in begins to fade from memory mere days after its viewing.  I do enjoy Geoffrey Rush.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen

The Bitter Tea of General Yen is a melodrama set in 1920s China, the late warlord period in which various factions vied for power while Japan quietly built its strength across the sea.  It involves a young missionary woman, a crafty warlord, and the collision of idealism with the practical requirements of power.

A very young Barbara Stanwyck plays the idealistic missionary woman (more of a girl, really, but I don’t think Barbara Stanwyck was ever truly a girl – she was probably the savviest young woman in the second grade), and Nils Asther plays General Yen.  Either Stanwyck is miscast or I just can’t get over the impact of movies like Ball of Fire and Double Indemnity.  I just didn’t buy her idealism, and she can’t quite sell a religious speech on which the movie’s story hinges.  Asther makes a fine general, charming and ruthless, but I couldn’t help but be distracted by the fact that he was a made-up European guy surrounded by an Asian supporting cast.

Since I never bought into the female lead’s character, I never could quite suspend my disbelief and buy into the movie.  Yes, the photography was lovely, as were the sets and costumes.  If nothing else, Ms. Stanwyck was always a pleasure to watch.  But when the spell doesn’t work, we’re left with nothing but pictures and sound.  I wanted to love The Bitter Tea of General Yen, but it didn’t work for me.

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation pits Tom Cruise and his pals against SPECTRE KAOS HYDRA SMERSH COBRA FOWL VILE SCORPIO – aw, jeez, guys.  “The Syndicate?”  You’re putting them up against “The Syndicate?”  I could come up with five better names for evil organizations right off the top of my head:  1. SPAWN (Special Project for Anarchy, War, and Nachos (seriously, those things are really bad for you)); 2. OUCH (Organization to Undermine Capitalist Hypocrisy); 4.  MTI (Moustache Twirlers International); 5. The Bay City Rollers.  Honestly, this stuff isn’t hard.

Fortunately, choosing a boring moniker for the villains appears to be the only serious shortcut taken by this latest entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise.  Here’s a spy fantasy with a cleverly written script, well-shot action set pieces, cool gadgets, a beautiful heroine, and movie star’s movie star Tom Cruise busting his tukkas in one incredible stunt sequence after another.  This movie has exotic locales,  gymkata, motorcycle chases, gunfights, even a hacker character pushing a big red button – I mean, it has it all.  Best of all, it has laugh-out loud humor, a wonderful sense of fun, and absolutely world-class production values.  

While it can’t boast a sequence that tops the amazing Burj Khalifa bit from Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol, this entry in the series delivers everything one could possibly hope for from this kind of film.  If you like this genre, I don’t see how you could possibly not enjoy Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation.

How to Train Your Dragon 2

Man, I just reviewed Paddington, which will probably make my yearly Top Ten.  How do you follow that?

Well, you could do worse than How to Train Your Dragon 2, a CGI action-adventure with beautiful animation, thrilling set-pieces, and touching emotional beats.

The film follows the continuing adventures of Hiccup and Toothless, a rider / dragon team, and the rest of the members of their Viking village as they seek to spread peace and love for dragonkind throughout their stylized version of Scandinavia.

Yes, there’s a villain.  And yes, there are more and bigger dragons, and yes, the stakes are (expectedly) higher in the sequel than in the original.  Ho hum.  Nevertheless, it’s all in the execution, and How to Train your Dragon 2 executes the material at the very highest level.  This is a wonderful adventure, technically awesome yet with a beating heart.

It just isn’t Paddington.  I think I should have watched a couple of episodes of Breaking Bad to cleanse my palate, because it turns out that a gentle little movie about a talking bear was one hard act to follow.

Paddington

Paddington is a carefully crafted, well intentioned, entirely adorable movie that my whole family enjoyed.  If you’re the kind of person who won’t see a kids’ movie without kids present, go make or find some and sit them down for Paddington.

Here’s the setup: Paddington is a walking, talking anthropomorphic bear who journeys from darkest Peru to modern London, there to find a family who will love him.  Upon his arrival, he meets the Browns, led by Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville (who got my wife’s attention) and Sally Hawkins (who got mine).

[A quick aside about my feelings for Sally Hawkins: I first noticed her in Happy-Go-Lucky, in which she played a willfully cheerful and optimistic woman who, even though she often exasperated those around her, raised spirits and souls through her example.  Next, I saw her in Made in Dagenham, in which she played a union organizer of uncommon wiliness and determination.  Sally Hawkins could play Hannibal Lecter, and I’d root for her to find a particularly charming Chianti.]

Mr. Brown’s not too keen on inviting a bear into his home, but Mrs. Brown overrules him and opens the door, much to the delight of their boy and horror of their girl.  What follows is a lovely story of a little bear trying to fit in, trying to find a home, and trying to elude the devilish taxidermist / commando / all-around villain Nicole Kidman.

[Another aside, this time about actors, villains, and children’s movies: You can tell a lot about an actor by how he or she approaches the role of villain in a children’s movie.  On the one hand, you look at David Cross in Alvin and the Chipmunks.  He’s clearly slumming it, holding his nose while he goes through the motions and collects the paycheck.  On the other, you admire the gold standard: Peter Dinklage in Underdog.  Dinklage understands that a serious actor can take portraying a comic villain in a children’s film seriously, hitting just the right balance of menace and harmlessness.  It is hard to do, and only the best can pull it off.]

Ms. Kidman makes for a wonderful comic villain: evil enough to give the climax real stakes, yet icily silly enough to avoid actually frightening young viewers.  She measures up to the Dinklage Standard of age-appropriate villainy, turning in her best performance since The Others.  It helps that she has the good taste to recruit, for a henchman, the wonderful Peter Capaldi (In the Loop) – another actor who absolutely nails it.

I sense a theme emerging.  Producer David Heyman lined up top talent for Paddington, from voice actors like Ben Whishaw, Imelda Staunton, and Michael Gambon, to the onscreen performers I’ve noted above.  The talent lineup, however, doesn’t stop with the cast.  Paddington the Bear, himself, is a wonder of computer animated and practical effects.  Falling somewhere between photorealistic and teddy bear, he’s like a real bear, but with the rough edges sanded down and wearing an adorable hat.  The costuming, the set design, the color palette, everything about this film is captivating, serving to create a world just real enough to keep things grounded, yet magical enough to whisk us away. 

In short, Paddington is a wonderful, wonderful film.  Bravo to director Paul King and everyone who came together to make this gem.  I loved it.

Ant-Man

Walking out of Ant-Man, my oldest engaged me in the following conversation:

“Whadja think, Dad?”

“It was fine.”

“Why didn’t you like it?”

“I did like it.  It was fine.”

“But not good.  What was wrong with it?”

“Nothing.  It was fine.”

It really was fine.  It starred Michael Douglas and Paul Rudd, both of whom are always welcome presences.  It featured solid supporting work from Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll, Bobby Cannavale, Judy Greer, and especially Michael Peña.  I laughed at the jokes.  I grooved to the visuals.  I lost track of time.

However, Ant-Man never entirely captured my imagination.  It set itself up as a caper movie, then paid off the caper at the end of the second act and segued into just another superhero fistfight picture.  Granted, Ant-Man has some fun with this trope by setting the fight on a toy train (the combatants are ant-sized, after all).  However, this just led me to wonder why the villain’s laser beams blow up the train set’s wooden models, as opposed to simply burning holes through them.  Were the models filled with gunpowder and gasoline?  Who makes toys like that?  And at what point were we supposed to find dog-sized (relative to the protagonist) ants charming, instead of revolting and scary?

Perhaps I’m tiring of the genre for the same reason I never got into superhero comics in the first place.  The outfits and motivations may change from title to title, but they all seem to boil down to the same thing: men in silly costumes punching one another.  I’d just as soon watch one of the better Rocky movies.

That said, the actors *are* fun to watch.  The jokes *do* land.  The visuals *are* cool.  I really did lose track of time.  Ant Man is by no means a bad movie.  It’s pleasant.  It’s fun.

I liked it.

It was fine.

Jupiter Ascending

There are two kinds of people in the world:  those who can get behind a wonderful, over-the-top inheritor of the Flash Gordon mantle such as Jupiter Ascending, and those without an ember of joy in their cold, dead hearts.

Here’s a story straight from the Pulp Age of Science Fiction: a peasant learns of a royal heritage, endures a wobbly period of uncertainty and disorientation, then finds his courage, saves the world, and gets the girl.  However, there’s a modern twist: the peasant’s a woman.  She gets the boy.
Beyond that, Jupiter Ascending is pretty standard stuff.  You’ve got your evil, decadent overlords bent on no good.  You’ve got your knight errant.  You’ve got your fantastical creature designs, thoughtfully designed alien landscapes & technologies, and fate of the world-type stuff hanging in the balance.

 

That said, Jupiter Ascending is *good* standard stuff.  Eddie Redmayne goes well over the top as a villain in the finest tradition of Ming the Merciless.  Channing Tatum is up for anything as the knight errant, imbuing the hokiest science fiction exposition with urgency and color.  And Mila Kunis, as the peasant girl with royal blood in her veins, does a marvelous job of showing us her character’s arc from dissatisfied nobody (But I was going to Toshi Station to pick up some power converters!) to resolute somebody (You’re up to no good, Villain.  And I’m going to stop you!).

So the question to ask yourself is this: do you enjoy pulpy, goofy sci-fi adventure crafted with love and an eye toward fun?  If so, expect to start smiling very early in this film, then keep smiling right up to the credits.  Jupiter Ascending is a pleasant surprise.

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

If you enjoyed The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, I have good news for you.  The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel offers another ninety minutes with the first film’s delightful cast.  These ninety minutes are warm, they’re cozy, and they offer more than a few opportunities to wipe your eyes.

The story picks up perhaps a year after the close of the first film.  Your favorite regulars remain at the hotel, and Sonny & Sunaina are preparing for their impending marriage.  There’s a primary story involving a hoped-for acquisition of a second property and the threat of a rival for Sunaina’s affections, but the magic of The Second Exotic Marigold Hotel happens around the periphery of that story, as the hotel’s pensioners and assorted guest stars live their own small dramas.

So, the question to ask yourself is simple:  Did you enjoy spending time with Judy Dench & Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith & Celia Imrie, Ronald Pickup & Diana Hardcastle, and assorted other stars familiar to those who spend a lot of time watching PBS and BBCA during The Exotic Marigold Hotel?  I did, and I thoroughly enjoyed spending another ninety minutes with them.  I look forward to The Third Exotic Marigold Hotel.

Minions

We’re 2/3 of the way through Minions.  Nobody’s laughing.  Families have walked out.  My 8-year-old is reading his popcorn box.  My wife leans over and whispers, “Will this movie never end?”  I whisper back, “Two words: catastrophic failure.”

The film begins with a short history of minions, little yellow thumb-like creatures who live to serve villains.  It shows them serving a cute T-Rex, then accidentally tipping it over into boiling lava.  This is played for laughs, but nobody laughs because there’s nothing funny about falling into a pit of molten lava.  Later, it shows them serving an Egyptian pharaoh, then accidentally tipping over a carefully balanced inverted pyramid and crushing their master and his party underneath.  Again, this is played for laughs.  Nobody laughs because there’s nothing funny about being crushed to death.  Later in the film, there’s a long sequence involving hijinks in a torture chamber.  Again, nobody laughs.  With the notable exception of The Princess Bride, there’s nothing funny about torture chambers.

The whole film is filled with missteps such as these.  The bulk of the action’s set in late ‘60s / early ‘70s London, a time as alien to the average 8-year-old as medieval China.    There’s gag after gag taking the wind out of hippie culture.  There’s a Jimi Hendrix joke, complete with guitar lick, and even an “Abbey Road” cover photo joke with a complete setup, payoff, and denouement.   All this must have seemed wonderfully amusing to whatever 67-year-old executive greenlit the film, but it was lost on the young families in my theater.  I just sat there wondering who this movie was actually supposed to be for.

And yet, when the credits rolled, my 8-year-old and his friends declared that they loved it; so what do I know?  All I can say is the Minions is the worst film I, personally, have seen so far this year.