The Mirror Up To Nature

Wow.  What a way to end a 4-movie weekend.  From Hobo With A Shotgun to The Troll Hunter to Green Lantern to…

The Tree Of Life: To be perfectly honest, I don’t really know how to review this movie without turning it into a 20-page treatise (but I’ll try…).  It’s an existential potpourri of family, nature, religion, evolution, science, love, loss, brotherhood, parenthood, and identity.  It is at the same time uncomfortable, satisfying, disturbing, and beautiful.  Terrence Malick has made a masterpiece of fragmented, non-linear, emotional cinema, and you should absolutely get out there and see it in the best theater you can find.

Sean Penn plays “Jack”- a man thinking back on his life, specifically his adolescent years, and his complicated relationships with his father, “Mr. O’Brien” (Brad Pitt) and mother, “Mrs. O’Brien” (Jessica Chastain) in 1950’s Waco, Texas. Mr. O’Brien is a hard-working, stern-yet-loving father.  Mrs. O’Brien is a stay-at-home, caring mother.  We learn at the beginning of the film that that Jack’s brother passed away when he was 19.  An adult Jack tells his father over the phone that has been thinking about his brother every day, for years.  When he sees a tree being planted in the city where he works, the memory of Jack’s adolescence begins…

…and anything linear, narrative-wise, ends.  The film cuts back and forth from Jack’s adulthood to his childhood, the family in various years of their lives, the formation of the Earth, the time when life first left the seas for land, the age of the dinosaurs…

A good portion of the movie is told through voiceover, by several characters in the film (I think Sean Penn actually spoke on camera only once), while images of the central family and their lives play out, sometimes at random, on screen.  The voices ask existential questions and offer observations about life, love, god, and nature.

The imagery is gorgeous, whether you’re seeing an erupting volcano, a spiraling collection of stained-glass windows, or Mrs. O’Brien standing next to a tree in her front yard.  Malick is a master of framing a shot without making it seem unnatural or forced.  There’s lots of directors out there, but very few of them are true artists.  Malick is definitely one of them.

And this is where I stop with a review because it’s absolutely a movie you have to see and interpret for yourself.  I will offer some (brief) thoughts, though…

My friend John said he was wondering if Tree Of Life was either the most pro-god movie out there, or if it was a big ol’ middle-finger to religion (and I haven’t discussed it further with him, so his thoughts may very well have moved on from there, since).  Personally, I think it’s neither.  It seems to me that this is a film about the struggle between religion and nature, father and mother, as told through the eyes of a boy who’s considering these things for the first time.  It’s no accident that the biggest portion of the movie takes place with Jack in his adolescent years- it’s the time in a boy’s life where, unknowingly, he’s struggling with everything he’s been told and everything he wants to experience, independent of all that prior knowledge.  It’s the rebellious stage.  It’s the time when you start thinking you’re smarter and wiser than your dad, and you start disobeying and talking back to your mom.  It’s when you throw a rock at the windows of an abandoned house or strap a frog to a bottle rocket, for no other reason than you’ve been told your whole life that it’s wrong, but you want to see for yourself why.  I think Jack is a metaphor for the human race.  As I said before, the movie takes us back to the formation of Earth, and jumps forward to various stages of evolution, both physically and morally.  There’s a scene where a wounded dinosaur is lying on the banks of a river and an equal-sized dinosaur of a different kind places its foot on the wounded dino’s head to crush it… then reconsiders and runs away- an example of primitive conscience, morality, and, most importantly, choice.  Jump ahead to our time on Earth.  As a species, we’re basically in our adolescence.  There’s some serious debate on how long humans have been around, but it’s at least in the tens-of-thousands (and more likely hundreds-of-thousands) of years.  Compared to the age of our planet, that ain’t much.  So, I’m going ahead with calling us, as a species, “adolescent”.  We’re actively questioning our father (god).  We’re disobeying our mother (Earth).  We’re acting out and not getting along with our brothers.  We’re bullying our weaker friends.  But we’re also making the choice not to crush our wounded enemies’ heads every time we come across them.   We’re allowing ourselves to remember the questionable things we’ve done in our past and feel ashamed by them.  Humans, as a race, are feeling the growing pains, but we’re still developing a conscience.  To me, this is what Malick is trying to say.  Of course, as with all movies (or books, or poems, or plays) that deal with asking questions, especially of the existential sort, there is no proper interpretation.  It’s not the artist’s job to answer such things- it, as Shakespeare said, “was and is, to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”

Go see it.  It’s not your average film.  You might end up hating it (like the guy in front of me did… very vocally…), but you owe yourself the experience.  Like it or dislike it, I can guarantee you’ll be thinking about it well after the credits roll.

10 out of 10 Questions With Many Answers

It’s Not Easy Being Green. Lantern.

4-Movie Weekend, Part III.  It’s taking me forever to get these out.  

Green Lantern: What the hell is wrong with people?  Have we always been this pessimistic and grumpy a society?  Is that the one great truth that the Internet has brought to light?  Now that everyone can voice their opinions to everybody else in the world, must everyone take it upon themselves to bitch and complain about everything?   And does everything have to either rock or suck?  Have we lost the ability to see the degrees in-between?  I mean, we all have our share of bad days, but DAMN.  Getting all worked up with nerd rage over something as intrinsically unoffensive as a comic-book film adaptation is just plain dumb.  Learn to pick your battles, yo.

Despite what you may have heard, Green Lantern does not suck.  It is not a bad movie.  I’m not going to call it fantastic, hell, even saying great feels a little bit much… but it’s certainly better than good.   I think fun is probably the best word.  And absolutely better than the 26% it currently has at RottenTomatoes.com.  Actually, for the record, fuck that site.  Or, more accurately, fuck people for going to that site and allowing it to sway them one way or the other.  Get your own goddamned opinion and stop letting everyone who isn’t you tell you what you like.

See?  Now I’ve been infected with negativity.  It’s easier to catch than the common cold.  All apologies.

Anyway, Green Lantern.  Fun.  No idea how close it is to the comic book.  If I ever read a GL issue it would have had to have been a tie-in in to the Death Of Superman thing that happened in the early 90’s, which, along with Knightfall, remains my only flirtation with the DC universe (apart from special event stuff like The Dark Knight Returns (fantastic), Watchmen (brilliant), and Superman: Red Son (overrated)).  I’m sure it strayed from “canon” just enough (read: hardly at all) to piss off the droves of angry nerds whose opinions are currently stinking up the intertubes, but I just dunno.  I liked the flick enough to maybe check out an issue or two, though, so for at least one guy out there- Mission: Accomplished, DC & WB.

For the uninformed: Maverick fighter pilot Hal Jordan (Tom Cruise Ryan Reynolds) stumbles upon a dying alien who gives him a glowing, green ring.  He puts it on and is whisked away to another planet (“Oa”) full of aliens who are all part of an intergalactic police force (for lack of a better term) that have harnessed “the green power of will” and use it to defeat evil, wherever it may lurk.  Meanwhile, back on Earth, socially inept professor Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard), while performing an autopsy on the dead alien, is infected by what killed it- “the yellow power of fear”, which attracts the attention of the big bad that started it all, Parallax (voiced by Clancy Brown.  That guy rules).  With Earth in danger, Jordan has no choice but to train up and become one of these super good guys- the Green Lantern Corps.

Performances?  Mostly good.  Reynolds reigns in his smart-assedness a bit (but, thankfully, not completely) and retains his charm, Sarsgaard is appropriately awkward and uncomfortable, Tim Robbins plays “Senator Hammond” with a smile, a wink, and a knife behind his back (and, seriously, is every American Senator the head of a secret government facility that deals with super-weapons and/or aliens?  I guess I watch too many movies), Blake Lively as “Carol Ferris” is… well… she’s pretty, I guess… Mark Strong (who also rules) plays the sort-of head of the GL Corps., “Sinestro” with such an air of nobleness and confidence that I know I’d follow him into battle…

The special effects are a little undercooked, but I still liked them.  The complainers out there love to say, “it looks too animated… waaah, waaah, waaah”, but the reason for that is IT IS ANIMATED, JACKHOLES.  What, would you rather have had a Roger Corman-esque stop-motion model of “Kilowog” and “Tomar-Re” (voiced by Michael Clarke Duncan & Geoffrey Rush (rules!)) inserted into shots of some rocky outcropping in San Bernardino county, or something?  Oh, you would?  My bad.

Speaking of that, I loved all of that Planet Oa stuff.  There’s a bunch of alien races, each with their own Green Lantern ring and uniform, tailored to their wildly varying shapes and sizes.  Jordan learns the ropes from the aforementioned Kilowog (pig-faced brute), Tomar-Re (fish man), and Sinestro (pink Vulcan Dracula), under the watchful eyes of the “Guardians” (blue.  Big noggins), and through this we get the Corps exposition.  Worked for me.  I wish more of the movie dealt with this place, or, at least, with the GL Corps as a team.  It was a little less fun when we get back to boring Earth and Hal’s alone dealing with his main nemesis, who’s really just a drooling college professor with an expanding forehead.  But this was an origin movie, so there’s plenty of room for that stuff later.  In fact, they go right ahead and set up a sequel in the midst of the closing credits.  Of course, the killjoys and the people who worship a silly “quality-percentage” rating are threatening to destroy those sequel plans, so our brief glimpses at Oa may be the only ones we get.

Anyway, there’s some issues with the separate plotlines.  I’m not sure how necessary Hector Hammond’s story was.  When all is said and done he seemed to exist solely to to give the movie a slimy, ignoble, single-minded semi-villain to offset Hal Jordan’s self-doubting everyman hero… but Sarsgaard is so good at bringing the aforementioned awkwardness (and, yes, sympathy) that his weak(ish) plotline only just now occurred to me.  He doesn’t really do much more than kill one of the movie’s jerkwads, kidnap our hero’s moll, and call the real bad guy to Earth.  Those first two things were somewhat superfluous, but the last one (alerting Parallax to the humans’ presence) was sort of important, plot-wise… and yet it literally happened in a split-second (If I remember correctly, Parallax, somewhere up in space, does a double-take and changes course for Earth.  Not exactly.  Something like that).  Speaking of Parallax, I would have dug something more than a big, floating yellow head with tendril-smoke coming out of it as the biggest threat to the known universe.  Looked more like something Brendan Fraser killed twice in the Egyptian desert.  Or something a bunch of time-travelling midget bandits stole a map from (too esoteric?).  Still, it was better than what that second Fantastic Four movie did with its planet-eater.  Giant cloud, indeed…

The action is pretty good.  Jordan basically fights by making solid green objects with his thoughts that he can control- swords, machine-guns, jets… really, anything he can think of (although it’s mostly guns & ammo).  At one point he saves a crowd from a crashing helicopter by creating a car-like-thing around it and a green track to guide it away from the action.  Maybe a little silly, but…

…this is a super hero summer movie.  You’re not supposed to go in looking for hyper-realism and high drama.  It’s not called “Raging Green Bull” or “On The Green Waterfront”, people.  Chill out.  Try to enjoy yourselves, OK?  So there’s a guy in a glowing green CGI unitard and mask flying around saving people with glowing green catapults that he creates through a glowing green ring with the “green power of will”- at least you’re not at the office doing the bidding of your dick boss, or driving two hours to see your in-laws, or waiting in line to talk to a surly, illiterate loser at the DMV, or something.  Let that negativity go, man, and check out a non-serious, fun, and, at times, thrilling oddity like Green Lantern.  You might just have a good time.  I did.

7 out of 10 Glowing, Green .50 Cal Machine Guns

I Ain’t ‘Fraid Of No Troll

4-Movie Weekend, Part II.  Another “limited release” that you should see if you can find it at a theater near you.  Or just “On Demand” it, if that’s an option for you (it was for me).

The Troll Hunter (Trolljegeren): “Found Footage” movies are oddities.  They’re usually very engaging pieces of cinema that take you on a scary ride, culminating in a big, scary, exciting ending.  What separates them is the rewatchability factor.

Let’s talk The Blair Witch Project. It may not have started the “Found Footage” craze, but it certainly turned it into a viable (read: marketable) film genre (most of that has to do with the fact that it cost the filmmakers only $600,000 to make it and it grossed 250,000,000 bucks by the time it left theaters here and abroad).  Anyway, a movie that literally shows you NOTHING but three people in the woods with a camera (with seriously awesome batteries) for an hour and a half, and the only payoff was a quick shot of one dude in the corner wearing a dunce cap as the girl with the camera gets bonked over the head with… something, by… someone.  The End.  I’m being flippant, I know.  I’m ignoring my movie history.  These were the halcyon days of 1999, after all.  The multiplexes were still half-full of Die Hard and When Harry Met Sally clones.  We needed something new, goddammit…

So we got The Blair Witch Project, with all it’s “this is actually REAL” marketing (hey, it was the Clinton years.  We were so high happy, we’d believe anything), and we ate it up.

Then we rewatched it on DVD.  UGH.

And that’s the issue with the “Found Footage” genre.  If you’re not careful, the payoff renders the movie’s rewatchability impotent.  I haven’t yet revisited Paranormal Activity, but I feel like it would be the same thing.  The Last Exorcism, as well.  Cloverfield and Quarantine (no, I haven’t seen REC) mixed it up a bit- there’s stuff that happens throughout that makes both, if you liked them in the first place, pretty rewatchabe (Cloverfield’s little, toothy beasties and Quarantine’s rabid zombies, for example), so they got it right.

The Troll Hunter (almost forgot that’s what this was all about), thankfully, lives in the same camp as those last two.  It’s a “Found Footage” movie from Norway, and it doesn’t wait until the final shot to grace you with some hot troll action.  In fact, it pretty much has an anti-payoff ending (the recording just… stops).  You’ve seen all the cool stuff already, and it’s pretty rewarding for the simple fact that it both gives you variety (there’s all kinds of trolls, y’all) and builds itself from the first, hard to see creature, to something bigger, stronger, and more nuanced, to a pack of beasts, to one huge T-Rex-sized motherfucker.

Oh, right.  The plot, and stuff.  Well, there’s a group of college students out filming a documentary on bear hunters.  Or was it poachers?  Dunno.  Maybe both.  Anyway, they’re out to film these guys, and when they hear about a guy suspected of being a poacher, they track him down and try to film him.   It soon becomes clear that what he’s out hunting ain’t bears, but actual, really real trolls, like the ones talked about in fairy tales.  Turns out this guy works for a special branch of the Norwegian government that secretly keeps the troll population at bay so people can go about their lives happily ignorant and, you know, uneaten.  By trolls.  The troll hunter, fed up with his job, lets them tag along.  Crazy troll footage ensues.

One thing that’s very cool about The Troll Hunter is its mythology.  I know little about troll legends, so I don’t know how much of it is, er, “accepted troll canon”, but the film’s version of it is explained throughout.  Trolls can’t live in sunlight, they can smell the blood of a Christian man, they mark their territory like wolves, they love to eat wildlife (and humans), there are many varieties, they only spawn once each… basically, it’s not simply a movie that just says, “Trolls are real.  Here’s a few for you.”  It weaves its mythology into the plot naturally so you learn little snippets as the film crew does, some of which comes with an immediate payoff, and some of which works as effective foreshadowing.

And, yeah- the trolls are pretty awesome.  We get to see four varieties- the “Tusseladd” (tree-sized, skinny, three heads), “Ragelfant” (slightly shorter, bulkier, hangs out under bridges), “Dovregubben” (hairy, travels in packs), and “Jotner” (King Kong-sized).  We get plenty of views of them, both in night-vision green and good, old-fashioned “regular” vision, both by moonlight and in foggy daylight.  And, yes, the design is really, really cool.

The actors all do a mostly convincing job.  I mean, they really seem like a bunch of bright-eyed and bushy tailed college kids out making their first doc, and when the subject matter drastically changes, they do a fine job of adjusting to it, character-wise.  The troll hunter is a perfectly grizzled, somewhat tired middle-aged, big game hunter type.  And the filmmakers didn’t feel the need to give him a tortured troll past- he’s not the Norwegian troll-hunting version of Captain Quint.  He’s just a guy, former Navy Ranger, who landed a specialized government job killing errant trolls.

The troll scenes are all done really well.  They’re suspenseful, scary, violent, well-shot, plentiful (again, not Blair Witch.  They’re not just off to the right of the camera.  Full-frontal troll, here.  No, I don’t mean it like that.  You’re gross, dude).  There’s a tongue-in-cheek take off on the “Three Billy Goats Gruff” story that’s very cool- the hunter uses a goat on top of a bridge as bait, and when that doesn’t work he adds another… then another.  Another scene involves the “Mountain King” trolls (Dovregubben) coming home to rest in the cave our crew is investigating that’s pretty scary.  The big, Jurassic-Park-sized troll scene at the end is fun, thematically, and we get to see a relatively well-lit troll for the first time, capping off a steady build in both troll size and danger.

Oh, and there’s an environmental message.  Sort of.  I mean, they don’t hit you over the head with it, but “global warming” is mentioned as a factor in the trolls becoming restless recently, and that’s why they’re wandering outside of their borders.  Oh, and they also have rabies, which is why they’ve become so much more violent.  I don’t think the rabies bit is part of the message.

Some cons?  OK.  Well, I said that the actors did a mostly convincing job, and I used that qualifier for only one reason- the death of the cameraman (yeah, yeah, spoiler alert.  It doesn’t fucking matter, trust me).  The cameraman that’s with us from the beginning buys it about 2/3 of the way into the movie.  So they replace him with another student.  But no one ever seems to really care that he got mauled to death and eaten by fucking trolls.  What insensitive dicks!  I mean, there’s obviously some discussion about it, but really, as soon as they can, they get somebody else to risk their life without telling the new person that they’re here to film dangerous fairy tale creatures.  And when the new cameragirl sees her first troll, she just sort of accepts it.  Yes, we’re in the final act here, so another 10 minutes of “Oh, SHIT, these things are real?!?!” might have sucked, but it’s sort of necessary.  Or forget hiring someone else and just, you know, give the camera over to guy-with-microphone.  We’ve seen him for the last hour, so no great loss if he’s now behind the camera.  Another issue- if you’re a documentary cameraman, and I don’t care if you’re still in college, you should probably do your best to NOT HAVE THE FUCKING GIRL WITH THE BOOM MIC IN EVERY GODDAMN SHOT.  Yes, she’s an actor in a movie playing a documentary sound person (and, really, almost the only woman seen in the whole thing… and yeah, she’s a cutie), but if you want to try and pass your movie off as ACTUAL, REAL FOOTAGE then try and film it that way.  Speaking of that, giving us 2 minutes-worth of title cards at the opening of the movie overly explaining how this is “actual, real, no I mean it, really real, y’all, seriously” footage, “cut down to an hour and a half from 250 minutes of recordings” does nothing to make me believe you.  Too much explanation spoils the broth, or whatever.  Also, I feel like I should have been more bothered by the fact that it simply looked too clean for an amateur film… I mean the equipment these college kids were using was seriously quality, but I’m willing to let that pass simply because it allowed us great shots of the beasties.

But that’s it, really.  With the exception of the opening title cards thing, these things only bothered me after-the-fact.  While I was watching it was a very cool, original, exciting ride through Norway.  With trolls!  One thing I kept thinking- this movie did for Norway what The Lord Of The Rings did for New Zealand.  I really, really want to visit someday.  What a beautiful, environmentally diverse country.  And I’m not a Christian man, so the trolls can’t smell me!  Bonus!

7 out of 10 Bars Of Troll Stench

Hauer You Doin’?

I saw 4 movies this weekend.  I’ll get to all of them, eventually.  The first two, this and The Troll Hunter, are in theaters, but are limited releases, so they may be a little hard to find.  I tried something new (to me) and caught both of them on HD On Demand at home… which, as it turns out, is GREAT for a Saturday hangover!  No need to leave the apartment and face the harsh light of day!  

Anyway…

Hobo With A Shotgun: Yeah, I get it.  Grindhouse.  Lots of color.  Really bad, scenery-chewing acting.  Over-the-top, shocking gore.  Retro.

So, I liked Hobo With A Shotgun.  Director Jason Eisener really went for it.  Definitely the most colorful movie I’ve seen in a long time.  Shot composition was fabulous.  Story was nice and simple.  Certainly nothing subtle about it, which fits right in with the genre it both is and is paying homage to.  Took me back to the days of strolling in to 112 Video in Medford, NY and leaving with rented VHS copies of The Toxic Avenger and Street Trash (and maybe even a little Gore-Met Zombie Chef From Hell) for a Friday night view-a-thon in somebody’s basement.  I mean, Hobo isn’t a horror movie, per se, but it definitely shares it’s low-budget, bombastic style with those films.  I’m talking buckets of blood, unraveled intestines, bloody, crushed heads, compound fractures, mutilated appendages, decapitations, glass-chewing…

Anyway, story goes something like this: a hobo rides into town on a train, gets fed up with the ultra-violence he sees all around him, buys a shotgun, and takes matters into his own hands.  Boom.  Done.

There’s more to it, like an underworld kingpin who captures the local homeless so they can be tortured and killed in his video arcade, his two violent, drug-dealing kids, some dirty cops, and a hooker with a heart of gold, but, really… it doesn’t matter.  We’re on this ride to see Rutget Hauer exact bloody vengeance with his boomstick.  And he does, big time.

I mentioned, above, the bad acting.  And, yeah, it’s bad.  Some might say “gleefully bad”… but I wouldn’t go that far.  I get that this is a movie that’s supposed to fit squarely into the genre in every way possible, but would it have KILLED the filmmakers to try and get some real performances out of the cast?  To be clear, I only say this because Rutger Hauer is honestly so very great in this movie… which makes it so goddamned uneven.  When you’ve got one guy who’s leaps and bounds above everyone else, performance-wise (his speech in the hospital outside the newborn baby room is one for the ages.  I’m serious), it only has the effect of making everyone else look like an asshole.  Maybe they should have gotten someone not-so-good for the lead.  But I guess you need a name actor in there to get an audience for something like this.  Anyway, yeah- terrible acting.  I KNOW, I KNOW- IT’S ON PURPOSE, AND I GET IT… and it worked… for a while…

…in fact, I’d say everything that made this flick so “out there” worked… for about 2/3 of the movie.  But by then I started to realize how one-note something like this is, and it started to lose me.  Luckily I still had Hauer’s fantastic performance and some seriously stylized and, yeah, I’ll say it… beautiful cinematography to get me through.  Seriously, by the finale almost every scene went from a full palette of rich colors to almost exclusively duo-chromatic, and then on to monochromatic for a bit.  Very cool stuff.   Which is good, because, honestly, if not for that, the introduction of the much-talked-about-online, supernatural-ish, armored, G.W.A.R.-looking mercenary characters known as “The Plague” in the 3rd act would have had me turning that shit off.  It’s odd to me that introducing these out-there characters in a shlock-fest like HWAS would make me want to throw up my hands and give up, but I almost did.  I think it’s because Hobo, while certainly out there and over-the-top, thematically, still felt grounded in its own reality, but these hired killer metal guys felt like they were borrowed from another film.

I saw Machete last year, and it didn’t do it for me, overall.  It was a Grindhouse movie that tried so hard to be more than it was that it forgot to sit back, relax, and have some fun.  Hobo took things in the complete opposite direction and made a movie that has so much fun I was exhausted by the end.  Of the two, though, I prefer the latter*, and I think it’s because while both movies took some chances, Machete‘s were self-conscious, while Hobo‘s were completely shameless.  And, to me, that’s closer to the point.

Like I alluded to above, I ate this kind of shit up in High School… but tastes change and people sometimes grow up a little and realize some of their fondest memories were just a phase.  And that’s OK.  The whole point of having fond memories isn’t to make you pine for the old days, but to smile and think about how far you’ve come.  Hobo With A Shotgun did that for me.  And now I’m done with it.

6 out of 10 Manhole Cover Decapitations

*Drive Angry (<- Click it!) is still my pick for modern Grindhouse done right, post-Planet Terror & Death Proof .  It’s over-the-top exploitation not mired in “retro.”

Steven Spielberg Presents J.J. Abrams As Steven Spielberg

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

(Before you read this, you should know my stance on “spoilers”.  CLICK HERE for that.)

Super 8: Super 8 is 100% nostalgia fare.  J.J. Abrams has done a masterful job of capturing that mid-70’s to mid-80’s Speilberg thing.  An unseen menace threatening a small town (Jaws), a government cover-up of the supernatural (Close Encounters), a group of friends on the cusp of adolescence (Goonies)*, a being that just wants to go home (E.T.).

Thankfully there was no 1941 in there.

So, a group of kids are at a train station filming a no-budget movie (on a Super 8 camera) when an Air Force train derails.  Something survives the crash.  The military quickly takes over.  The kids continue to make their movie, but, as people start mysteriously disappearing, they take it upon themselves to find the truth.**

What follows is, again, a classic Spielbergian (!) cinematic ride.  Honestly, you’ve seen all of this before (see above), but Abrams is so good about setting the tone of a movie that it rarely feels rehashed.  Even when a scene or two gets über-specific in its style and shot composition, like the very Jurassic Park (ya, I know that’s 90’s S. S.) “overturned bus attacked by creature” scene, it feels simultaneously fresh and reminiscent, in the most pleasant way.   Even Michael Giacchino’s score is an homage to classic John Williams.  At the risk of sounding a bit clichéd, it’s a movie that actually made me feel young again.  I met up with my friend John and we took an N-train to the Ziegfeld in Manhattan to see Super 8, but there were times I felt like it was 1982 and we had walked to the Plaza Theater in Patchogue, NY.  Seriously, it’s like this movie was tailor-made for me.  I imagine there’s a million people out there who feel the same way, but that’s the mark of a good movie- one that makes each individual feel something special in their own unique way.

OK.  Enough with the touchy-feely.  The movie wasn’t perfect.  There were some little odd choices here and there that didn’t completely work.  The first 2/3 of the movie kept the creature mostly hidden (a good thing), besides a quick glimpse of an appendage, or a faded reflection in the hood of a car, so when we finally got to see it in all its glory it was a little bit of a letdown… mostly because it sort of looked like a smaller retread of the Cloverfield beastie.  I liked that it wasn’t a wholly good or bad creature, but nuanced, which is more realistic (it had no problem killing innocents to keep itself alive, but that was a result of being kept prisoner like an animal for 20 years), but because we spend almost no time with it before the finale, it comes across as more of a mindless being that will hurt anyone, with only some exposition dialogue inserted to remind us that it’s a thinking creature that can fly a spaceship.  Another nitpicky thing- the group of friends could have been more fleshed-out.  I mean, we get the basic characters right away, and the “main three” were well-defined (“Joe” (Joel Courtney), “Alice” (Elle Fanning), and “Charles” (Riley Griffiths)), but the nerdy kid (Gabriel Basso), the pyro kid (Ryan Lee), and the… other one (see?) (Zach Mills)… could have used some more development.  Also, there was a love-triangle between the aforementioned “main three” that I didn’t even know was happening until I was told.  One more thing- Joe and Charles were supposedly the best of friends, but Joe ends up taking pyro-kid with him to save the maiden fair at the end, which was odd, because, 1. best friends, and 2. love triangle.  I know pyro-kid had the necessary plot-device explosives, but really, ANYBODY can light off a string of Black Cat Firecrackers, so why leave best friend Charles behind to tend to wounded nerdy kid?  Not a deal-breaker, but certainly a head-scratcher.

The grown-ups were all really good.  Kyle Chandler plays Joe’s dad, “Jack”, and he’s pretty great at juggling strength and weakness, usually in the same scene.  He’s the town Deputy, and we learn right off the bat that his wife has died in a horrible steel-mill accident, so he’s been awkwardly thrust into single-parenthood.  And Chandler plays it so realistically- we’re frustrated at his unwillingness to truly engage with his son, but we’re empathetic to his plight as a deeply sad widower.  And now the Sheriff has gone missing, so he’s in charge of keeping the town safe and calm during this crisis.  But he’s given absolutely no help from Noah Emmerich’s “Colonel Nelec”- a cold, calculating military man who is ruling over the situation with a tight lip and iron fist.  Emmerich is really good at playing the lie-to-your-face-with-a-smile backstabbing asshole (as he also does in The Truman Show and somewhat in AMC’s The Walking Dead).  You simply want to like the guy, even as he’s preparing to inject poison into your IV tube or unjustly locking you in a cell to keep you quiet.  Ron Eldard plays Alice’s dad, “Louis”, – an alcoholic who may or may not be indirectly responsible for the death of Joe’s mom.  He and Jack are like opposite sides of the same coin- both are troubled in their own way following the steel mill accident, and both have trouble relating to their kids on an emotional level.  The difference is Louis doesn’t have Jack’s duties and responsibilities, so he sinks deeper into an alcohol-fueled depression.  But we feel sympathy for Louis on the same level as we feel it for Jack- these are real people with real problems, and we can all relate to that.  But this is a movie, so, thankfully, we’ve got an alien being thrown into the mix to force some kind of resolution on all fronts.

So, again, really great movie that hits all the right emotional buttons at just the right times.  I’ve had a hard time all week writing a review, because every time I’d get started I’d start reminiscing about old times and old friends (that means you, Jeremy, Andrew, and, of course, John), which is definitely the mark of a “thumbs-up” movie.  You can throw in impressive visuals and technical mastery as much as you want in a film, but if it doesn’t make you feel anything, it’s a complete waste (*cough**cough* George Lucas *cough*).  And Super 8 absolutely makes you feel.  Occasionally it’s a bit much- at times Abrams could have lightened up a little on the emotions in order to fine-tune plot-coherence and pacing, but in the long run it’s refreshing to have such a positive and optimistic movie in these days of pessimism and negativity.  It’s maybe a little sad and telling that it had to take place 30 years ago in order to be so optimistic… but that’s a discussion for another time.  For now I’m just going to continue thinking about Super 8.  And smiling while I do (barf!).

(Super) 8 out of 10 All-White Rubik’s Cubes

*Written & produced by Spielberg

**I also got a real Stephen King’s IT (the book, not that TV-movie abortion) vibe from the group of kids and their mision to save their town from this arachnid-like creature.  I know Abrams is a King fan, so… how about a J.J. Abrams-helmed IT movie?  Who’s with me?

American History X… Men…

X-Men: First Class: When they first announced this movie I figured it wouldn’t be so hot.  From what I understand, the production was rushed because if a new X-Flick wasn’t churned out by this May (or whenever), FOX would lose the rights to the characters.  Then I started seeing trailers and thought maybe we were actually getting something fantastic, despite the shitty legality-based genesis of the project.  But, as usual, the reality falls somewhere in-between… but definitely (and luckily) more on the good side.

So, it’s the 1960’s.  Young Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is a mutant who can read and control minds.  He is “recruited” by CIA operative Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne) to assist in finding Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon.  Yup.) – a powerful mutant hell bent on starting World War III in order to eliminate us “normals”.  Also pursuing Shaw is Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), a mutant who can control magnetism and who’s mother was murdered by Shaw in front of him at a Nazi concentration camp 20 years earlier.  Erik & Charles team up, seek out other mutants, and become involved in preventing mankind’s total annihilation during last century’s biggest Mexican standoff- the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Surprisingly original stuff, actually.  I haven’t read an X-Men comic in at least fifteen years, so I don’t know if this was based on an established storyline (I mean, besides history, obviously), or if it’s truly an original piece.  I hope it’s the latter.  Anyway, really good story.  Director Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass) does a pretty top-notch job of weaving fantasy and history into a coherent, exciting period piece about secret superheroes protecting the world, only to ultimately be despised by those whom they’ve saved.  And as an origin story for the established X-Film continuity, it hits all of the right marks without feeling forced…

…and this is the part where I don’t gush over said “established continuity”.  Admission:  I’ve never been 100% sold on the X-Men films.  I have liked all of them (yes, including Wolverine.  Yes, it’s far from great, but NO it isn’t the shit-fest some of the nerd reactionaries (no offence- I’m one of you) love to whine about.  I’d even go so far as to say it’s better than X-Men: The Last Stand.  If nothing else, it took more chances than that movie.  Hey, wow- long parenthetical, eh?), but have never truly loved any of them.  There’s always been something off-putting about them that I can never seem to put my finger on.  Even X2, the best of the lot, has this pervading sense of uncomfortability (?!), even during its best moments.  I don’t think it’s any one reason, but rather a lot of little things.  Bryan Singer’s style is one thing (I get the same feeling from literally everything he’s done since The Usual Suspects), varying degrees of acting talent is another (Halle Berry is just bad in these movies.  Search your feelings, you know it to be true), the humor is, at times, cringe-worthy, I get a real cosplay vibe when I should just be digging these heroes’ suits, there’s a few too many characters to follow, um… anyway, like I said, it’s lots of stuff, so it’s hard to pinpoint.  And I think this weirdness has transferred over to First Class.  Singer has his hands in this one as a producer, so… there’s that.  And Vaughn has, again, done such a great job of keeping the continuity going that he seems to have inherited Singer’s style.  But, in the long run, I guess that’s what the series needed- a return to form.

The performances vary from just good to fantastic.  Luckily, the three roles that need to knock it out of the park, do- McAvoy, Fassbender, and Bacon (mmmm… bacon…).  Xavier is the perfect cocky genius professor here, a flawed dreamer who naïvely believes in a world of perfect harmony.  And he can still walk!  The future Magneto is a sullen, angry, violent revenge-seeker, uncomfortably thrust into a world where he isn’t alone and his philosophies about his place in society are challenged for the first time.  Shaw is a hyper-intelligent, calculating, smirking anarchist with a serious hard-on for exterminating we, the people, by any means necessary.  Seriously, great stuff by these three.  The rest of the cast doesn’t fare quite as well.  Jennifer Lawrence is OK as Mystique.  I mean, she’s at least as good as Rebecca Romijn was (duh…), but I think her acting talents are wasted in a movie like this where she’s, at best, an ensemble character forced into a slightly larger role because, hey, she’s an Academy Award nominee.  And yeah, she was brill in Winter’s Bone, so it’s weird to see her walk through a puffed-up role, upstaged by weird blue makeup (again, cosplay, dude).  The other muties range from promising (Lucas Till as “Havok”) to dull (Nicholas Hoult as “Beast”), to slightly embarrassing (Caleb Landry Jones as “Banshee”), to, uh, thankfully silent (Álex González as “Riptide”).  Also, Jason Flemyng is awesome as Shaw’s ninja-demon-like teleporter, “Azazel”, but they give him almost nothing to say.  And that guy’s a good actor.  Weird.

The action scenes are mostly passable.  Once again, Vaughn seems to have Singer-fied himself with them.  I still maintain his scene in Kick-Ass where Big Daddy takes out the warehouse henchmen in slo-mo is one of the best stylized bits of masked hero-dom ever filmed… but Vaughn doesn’t do anything as cool as that in First Class.  He does do some truly awesome stuff with Azazel *bamf*-ing around, getting in hits between teleportations, grabbing people, blinking out, then back in at 1000 feet and dropping them to their deaths, but ultimately, it’s what we saw Nightcrawler do in X2.  The final standoff at the OK Corral on the Cuban shore is very cool- when you mix missiles, ships, submarines, and a guy who can control magnetism, you’re bound to get something special.  And you do.  It’s the actual fight scenes that are a bit watered-down.  Can someone please step up to the plate and show us a good, clear, choreographed battle between two superhumans?  I mean, fuck- if that hack George Lucas can do it so well with ruttin’ laser swords in Episode Dumb, SOMEBODY should be able to do it with hairy-blue claw-hands, weather-breath, plasma beam eyes, or some telekinesis shit in these movies, no?

But, again, what we get, while familiar, is still really good and mostly exciting, and the mashup of fantasy and history is ballsy, story-wise.  I’m holding out hope that seeing this one again, down the road, at home, will increase my appreciation.  I’m always the first guy to admit that sometimes you just don’t completely get it the first time around.  But this is the first time around, so I’m calling X-Men: First Class…

7 out of 10 Diamond-Encrusted Babes (January Jones as “Emma Frost”.  She was… good)

…Never A Bride…

Bridesmaids: A good chick flick?  Say it ain’t so!

The trailers had me fooled.  I thought this was going to be an over-the-top comedy about a group of girls going to Vegas for a bachelorette party.  Like The Hangover, but with estrogen.  And I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, because let’s face it- a wacky ensemble comedy about pre-wedding shenanigans can go either way these days.  Just look at The Hangover, Part II– Grade-A dog shit on a moldy bun.  But after seeing that bucket of infected vomit last week, I was wholly prepared to walk in to Bridesmaids with the lowest of expectations and come away with something at least passable.  To my surprise, I got something great.  But still…

…I was tricked into seeing a chick flick (is it wrong to still use that term in 2011?  Probably.  I don’t care).  Annie (Kristen Wiig) is asked to be her best friend Lillian(Maya Rudolph)’s Maid Of Honor.  Annie is going through some rough times, career and man-wise, and to make things worse, Lillian has a new, rich, needy friend, Helen (Rose Byrne), who seems intent on pushing Annie out of the picture.  After a couple of failed bridesmaid gatherings, dates with men, and being forced to move back in with her mother, Annie hits rock bottom.  But no worries- everything gets better, and we get a nice, sugar coated ending with a cherry on top.

Kristen Wiig is completely awesome.  I’ve seen her in two things now (Paul being the other), and I’m totally on board with her as an actor (no, I don’t watch SNL.  Do yourself a favor and don’t ask me why.  Just know- I’m that guy).  She can bring the funny and the touching at the drop of a hat, and she understands that most basic of performance concepts: character arc.  I can’t wait to see what she does next, and my hope is she doesn’t only get cast in comedies.  Maya Rudolph is… pretty good, I guess.  She’s the thankless “straight man” in this one.  Rose Byrne is perfect as the rich bitch- you really just want Wiig to claw her eyes out in almost every scene.  The other ‘maids are all good, too.  Wendi McLendon-Covey (“Rita”) and Ellie Kemper (“Becca”) are fun, but woefully underused.  Melissa McCarthy is shameless and fantastic as Lillian’s future sister-in-law, Meg.  There’s a scene where she visits Annie during her rock-bottomest that’s altogether funny, awkward, and touching.  Jon Hamm shows up as Wiig’s “fuck buddy” (as he eloquently puts it)… who’s name I can’t remember.  Or look up, because he’s oddly uncredited.  But that guy is really great.  I haven’t seen Mad Men, but every time I see Hamm on Conan I dig the guy more.  Seriously, he’s the perfect combination of handsome leading man and humble goofball.  He reminds me of Chris Meloni a bit- another guy who’s willing to “go there” in his roles, image be damned (see Harold & Kumar & Wet Hot American Summer if you don’t know what I mean).  Who else… oh, right- Chris O’Dowd is also really great as Wiig’s love interest, Officer Nathan Rhodes.  Real down-to-earth and likeable.

So, yeah.  Lots of funny, uncomfortable scenes (like when Annie tears the bridal shower apart), a few missed opportunities (they set up what would have been a pretty funny subplot with an attraction between Rita and Becca that goes nowhere), real, heartfelt drama (Annie & Officer Rhodes), raunch (Meg “seducing” the guy sitting next to her on the plane is fun-NAY), some scatalogic… ness (food poisoning + bridesmaid dress shopping = oh, boy), and a couple of choices that fell flat (like the stuff with Annie’s weird British roommates.  A little too far on the uncomfortable side, if’n ya ask moi), all combine together to form a slightly uneven, yet still satisfying, chick flick that guys can handle.  I was fearing it would be The Female Hangover… but after seeing it, I actually sort of wish they had leaned a little more in that direction.  What we got was a little more original than that… but at the same time, slightly safer.  You can decide for yourself whether that’s a good thing or not.  I’d go back and see for myself, but for my money, it’s a one-and-done.  No need to see it again.  Even if I do have a total crush on Kristen Wiig.

7 out of 10 Tennis-Balls-To-The-Boobs

Boo. Hiss.

I was going to write a review, but instead I think I’ll just post this short Facebook conversation:

2 out of 10 Uninspired, Unfunny, Recycled Scenes