La La Land (2016)

In one of the most famous passages from his Confessions, Saint Augustine realizes he has been moved to tears by the suicide of Dido in Virgil’s Aeneid. In hindsight, Augustine recognizes that the true tragedy was not the death of the Carthaginian queen but Augustine’s blindness to his own reality as a sinner – that is, he had no tears for the reality of his soul but rather had wasted them on the dimension of the imaginary.

I couldn’t help but think of Dido while I watched La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s eagerly-awaited follow-up to the masterful Whiplash, because it does feel like Chazelle is directly rebutting Augustine on this count. Yes, La La Land seems to declare, it is right and proper for us to weep for that which is not real, that which we cannot help but imagine in the language of film, for reality can often be dispiriting, unexpected, or filled with fear of the future.

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone star as Sebastian and Mia, a jazz pianist and an aspiring actress whose paths continue to cross in Los Angeles until finally, inevitably, they surrender to temptation and fall in love. Amid the continual anxiety that they won’t make it in Hollywood, Sebastian and Mia inspire each other to pursue their dreams, even when they seem difficult and unattainable.

Aside from a few shots of single spotlights on jazz musicians, it’s difficult to tell that La La Land, wistful and nostalgic, comes from the same writer/director as the intensely furious Whiplash. Instead, La La Land feels like the postmodern thematic sequel to 2011’s The Artist, which reveled in the tropes of the silent film while reminding audiences of the acute sense of loss that came with the passing of an era. In the same way, La La Land embraces the aesthetic of the musicals of the 1950s (though in color, there are also affinities with the Fred-and-Gingers of the 1930s), lamenting the way that reality all so often fails to live up to the romanticized spectacle of a big Hollywood musical. Reality can be sweet, La La Land posits, but it’s got nothing on the polish and image surfaces made on a movie studio backlot.

And whether that makes the film’s final statement one of tragedy or beauty is, I think, in the eye of the beholder. If you have a romantic eye, thank God we have the movies; if yours is a cynical vision, how ignoble that we supplant reality with the image. But Chazelle is content to leave the rose-colored glasses of Hollywood in place as a filter, amplifying the emotions of the story by blowing them up into something extravagant, with a clever sense of humor that I hope isn’t lost on moviegoers. Mia and Sebastian’s first date takes them, naturally, to the movies, to see Rebel Without a Cause, but when things go awry they visit the Griffith Observatory, where parts of Rebel were set.

There, if we hadn’t been paying attention, Chazelle reveals his end game. What begins as a typical cute date turns into the fantastic (emphasis on fantasy) as they dance in the observatory and join the stars in a beautifully-shot midair waltz. It’s breathtaking in its unreality; there’s no doubt that this isn’t really happening – this isn’t Superman, after all; you won’t believe a man can fly – but isn’t it beautiful to imagine it so?

It’s really difficult to talk about this without discussing the ending of the film – and don’t worry, I won’t, because the third act has maybe the best gut-punch in recent memory, at least as far back as the last time my whole theater collectively gasped, at Frozen – so let’s shift gears and talk about the music. For those who, like me, still tremor a bit when thinking about the climax of Whiplash, there’s none of that in La La Land, thank heavens, but as far as the singing goes, I’ve seen a fair bit of critique laid at Gosling and Stone’s feet. While I do concede that they’re not the strongest singers on the screen these days, I do wonder if some of that is the point – Mia and Sebastian, as much as they want to be, are not stars just yet; Gosling’s piano playing, though, has rightly earned its share of accolades, and I do have to say that Emma Stone’s final number, “Audition” (as heard in many of the trailers), is as affective as Anne Hathaway’s “I Dreamed a Dream,” which in 2013 I described as a “heart-breaking . . . despairing ode that would drive even the stone-hearted Pharaoh to tears and will likely garner her an Oscar nod.” I have similar words to say about “Audition,” which pins all our hopes on Mia’s ability to connect with her auditioners, even as we quickly lose track of them and fall into the story Mia weaves.

La La Land is not Whiplash, although J.K. Simmons appears in both (here, he cameos as a club owner who’s a stickler for seasonal set-lists). Instead, it’s an elegy for a bygone film genre, a glimpse of a relationship which imagines itself in loftier terms, positing the question of whether “la la land” – suggesting Los Angeles, “la la” singing, and “la la” head in the clouds – is such a bad place to be. Under Chazelle’s watch, it’s anything but.

La La Land is rated PG-13 for “some language.” Written and directed by Damien Chazelle. Music by Justin Hurwitz. Starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone.

Birdman (2014)

It’s no secret around here that superhero films are really my cup of tea, and I love a good bit of deconstruction as much as anyone.  And with the Oscar race nearing the starting line, I’m ready what the studios have left in the barrel for 2014 to see what they consider to have been the best saved for last.  Birdman is a combination of all three, familiar in some places but oddly unique in others – mostly mystifying but never anything less than riveting.

Michael Keaton stars as Riggan Thomas, a washed-up superhero actor who hung up his Birdman costume after three successful films twenty years ago.  In a bid for new relevance, Riggan is helming a Raymond Carver stage adaptation, a Broadway show with more obstacles before opening night – chief among them the interference of a thespian (Edward Norton) who takes himself far too seriously, the skepticism of his producer (Zach Galafianakis), and the backstage presence of his recently-rehabilitated daughter (Emma Stone).  All the while, Riggan seems to be haunted – or is that possessed? – by the voice of Birdman.

I’ll begin by echoing what nearly everyone has already said – the 87^th Oscar for Best Actor is really Michael Keaton’s to lose.  The apparent self-reflexivity of the role – Keaton left Batman after two films, amid creative differences and concerns of typecasting – had lured me to the theater, but it is by far the least interesting thing about the role, which says something about the staggering amount of depth Keaton brings to the part.  It’s weird that the last time I “saw” him was as Ken in Toy Story 3, a part which had already seemed so perfectly cast.

More interesting than the modest overlap between Riggan and Keaton’s career is the similar approaches to relevance.  Where Riggan wants to be admired once more, his whole arc in the film a bid to be taken seriously, there is no scent of that desperation in Keaton’s work.  Instead, any renewed relevance comes ipso facto from the fine performance.  Keaton, like the best comic actors, is able to walk the line between pathos and punchline; he can turn it on or off as needed but often finds more versatility in the gray areas.  Especially remarkable are the scenes where he and the other actors are rehearsing the play, the rapid-fire conversation toggling between the playscript and their own actor’s notes on the script.  These are brilliantly done, showcasing the number of levels on which Keaton can work, and they raise one of the film’s most significant themes – the blur between truth and performance.

I’ve always been aware of Alejandro González Iñárritu, but I’d never seen one of his movies before Birdman.  As it stands, this interrogation of performativity is absolutely fascinating, inviting comparisons with Black Swan, which similarly dealt with a performer’s questionable grasp on sanity at the key moment of her career.  Unlike Black Swan, though, Iñárritu has so many themes on his plate that the balanced attention he gives to all of them is a superpower in and of itself.  In the film’s two-hour runtime, Iñárritu tackles performance, love, respect, blockbusters, reinvention, social media, critique, and a handful of others.

This deft balance of the film does, however, leave me a bit perplexed in the sense that Birdman is such a full-bodied satire that I don’t fully know where we stand by the end of it.  Iñárritu is obviously not a fan of superhero blockbusters (Riggan complains that all the good actors are wearing capes), nor does he have any patience for the pretensions of the arthouse crowd (Norton’s technique-obsessed Mike Shiner, a spot-on caricature, is only real on stage).  Iñárritu dismisses lawyers, loathes anyone with a cell phone in front of their face (“Can’t you just have a real experience for once in your life?”), and isn’t too fond of art critics, either.  Birdman targets all of these to expose their absurdity, but the ground on which we’re left is a little shaky.

Many critics are falling over themselves to talk about the film’s apparent long-take filming, and while Iñárritu has clearly disciplined his cast to handle these scenes, I’m not too impressed by the overall longness of the takes because I’m certain there’s some digital fakery afoot.  It does, after a while, start to feel like a gimmick – Hitchcock did the same thing in Rope, and it called attention to itself there, too.  Fortunately, however, it’s not a gimmick that takes away from the film, just another neat thing Birdman does.  (Just setting the record straight – it was impressive when Hitchcock faced the challenge on film, but in a digital world, it’s nothing we didn’t see in Children of Men.)

I mentioned the film’s shotgun-style approach to satire, but I do think that ultimately what you make of the film depends entirely on its ending.  The “ambiguous final shot” is so pervasive these days that it’s almost to the point of a cliché, so I would be interested to know what others make of the film.  For me?  Without spoiling anything, I’m a subscriber to the “happy ending” interpretation, for all the science-fictional/superheroic implications that come with that.  Your destination may vary, but your mileage won’t – Birdman is a fabulous thought-provoking crowdpleaser.  I didn’t always know what to make of it, but it managed to feel compelling all the way through.

Birdman is rated R for “language throughout, some sexual content and brief violence.”  The film is littered with F-bombs and other adult language.  A man is seen nude from behind, and in another scene his costume reveals an (exaggerated) outline of his genitals.  There are about three bloody scenes (many involving fake blood for the stage) and a few hamfisted fistfights played for laughs.

Take Two Tuesday: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) ...or, how I learned to stop worrying and love comic book movies that aren't Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Well, this is a first.  “Take Two Tuesdays” is a series that I hope I won’t have to use too much, because the goal of a “Take Two” review is to reevaluate a film I’ve already reviewed here – put another way, backpedal on a review.  I’m usually pretty consistent in terms of my opinions on movies, but every once in a while I’ve been egregiously wrong.  A few examples that come to mind are The Shining and Anchorman, both of which I appreciated much more the second time around; on the flip side, my recent excursion through the Star Wars prequel trilogy proved to be way less fun without my childhood lenses in place.  So in those rare moments when my current opinion contradicts a review I’ve already published, “Take Two Tuesdays” will be my chance to set the record straight.

In this installment, it’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2.  The headline here?  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is better than I gave it credit.

In my earlier review of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, I bemoaned the overfull quality of the film, calling it “a more sprawling narrative that feels inflated by the demands of producers who want to lay groundwork for future films rather than let those films develop organically.”  The kindest word I had for the film was “serviceable,” but I lamented, “‘serviceable’ just isn’t good enough any more.”

I’ll be honest:  in the wake of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, my comic book movie radar needs some serious readjusting.  It’s probably my second favorite comic book movie of all time at this point (you know the first), but it’s making the others look bad.  I noticed this problem after seeing X-Men: Days of Future Past.  While I waited for the inevitable postcredits stinger, my first thought was, “Eh.”  Immediately, I checked my premises; aside from one or two very small bits, I hadn’t had an unkind thought during the film itself.  The only thought I could rally behind that lukewarm off-the-cuff reaction was, “It wasn’t Winter Soldier.”

And that’s no way to review a movie.  On its own merits, X-Men: Days of Future Past was a smash success for me, and that’s the review I wrote.  Reapproaching The Amazing Spider-Man 2 with a similar sensibility (and a clearer sense of how all the moving pieces fit together) yielded comparable results.  It is, perhaps, the sequel I was waiting for after The Amazing Spider-Man.

The positives I cited still stand – Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone have extraordinary chemistry together, Jamie Foxx’s Electro is a vastly original and highly entertaining nemesis.  And I have better things to say about Dane DeHaan’s Harry Osborn; I love that the film takes him down a different path than James Franco’s, and his character arc is much more compelling the second time around.

I remain, however, disgruntled about two pieces, though in revisiting the film they loom less large than I had perceived.  On the subject of DeHaan, I’m still miffed that the film doesn’t spend as much time developing his third-act twist, and I’m still sore about the “I’ll be back” cliffhanger.  I would have much rather spent more time with him than on my second grievance:  I still maintain that the subplot surrounding Peter’s parents is mishandled in the film.  These scenes don’t contribute anything to the narrative, don’t bear logically on the plot at hand, and ultimately don’t even resolve themselves.  Either the film needs to foreground this subplot – it is, after all, the opening scene of two films now – or drop it in favor of something more closely connected to the central story.  If it doesn’t pay off in The Inevitable Amazing Spider-Man 3, I think we all know when to get our popcorn refill.

In hindsight/retrospect (not sure which one), these are much smaller issues than I had initially felt.  I had a blast with The Amazing Spider-Man 2, especially the first hour (I know, because I got my refill at the moment when Peter digs out his father’s briefcase).  But the rest of it didn’t disappoint; I found myself laughing, caught up in the entertaining parts of the film and asking myself, “When exactly did I space out the last time?”  I couldn’t find that moment.

I feel the same way now about The Amazing Spider-Man 2 as I do about X-Men: Days of Future Past.  It doesn’t revolutionize the genre, and it isn’t The Winter Soldier.  But it doesn’t have to be.  I had forgotten that a film needs only to entertain and, time permitting, say something important.  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 more than succeeds at the former.  And the bits about hope at the very end tickle the Dark Knight Rises enthusiast in me just fine.

In short, I’ve upgraded this one to “buy on DVD.”  (That’s high praise coming from someone who still doesn’t own The Amazing Spider-Man.)

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

If I ever get accused of making up my mind about a movie before I see it, I’ll point to The Amazing Spider-Man 2.  I desperately wanted to love this film, even after and in spite of the disappointment I faced with the first film in the reboot franchise.  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is not a catastrophe by any stretch of the imagination; there are things it does quite well, things that might have made the film an unqualified success, but the parts that don’t work did impede my enjoyment enough.

Fraught over his promise to her father, Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) doesn’t know where his relationship with Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) is going, nor does he know what to make of his former best friend Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) returning to New York to inherit his father’s company.  What’s more, Peter is still wrestling with the mysterious disappearance of his parents all those years ago.  As Spider-Man, though, he knows that the arrival of the demigodly Electro (Jamie Foxx) spells bad news for the city.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2’s greatest undoing is its obvious ambition; like an overeager patron of a fifty-year buffet, director Marc Webb and a quartet of screenwriters load up their plate with no fewer than seven running subplots, borrowing from wide stretches of Spidey’s comic book mythology.  And like at any buffet, there are entrees that taste great and other dishes that add only empty filler to the meal.

Let’s start with the bad news.  A lot of my complaints about the first film still stand, particularly about the subplot regarding Peter’s parents.  In a film that has so much going on, a subplot that has no direct link to the main plot should have been excised or made more relevant; it does serve to tie up a loose end from the first film, but it’s a conversation-closer rather than a motivator for the characters.  Furthermore, it’s the focus of much of the film’s middle, which means that the plot of the film screeches to a halt while Peter looks at computers until he finds the right file.

The Parkers subplot is the only thing that Amazing Spider-Man 2 has too much of, and it certainly interferes with the pacing of the film because nearly everything else feels underrepresented and rushed.  While DeHaan is quite good as a Harry Osborn vastly different from James Franco’s interpretation, the script pushes him through one too many character transformations and then bails on him with the knowledge that he’ll be back for another film.  Similarly, Foxx is – pardon the pun – electrifying as Electro, an iconoclast whose hero worship collapses when Spider-Man forgets his name, but the film shuffles him offstage so that the aforementioned computer scenes can take precedence.

It bears comparison to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, which juggled a healthy amount of subplots and struck a commendable balance between Peter Parker’s angst and his superheroic struggle against Doctor Octopus (played brilliantly by Alfred Molina).  Raimi knew where to draw the line between plots and came out with a fantastically tight narrative; Webb’s is a more sprawling narrative that feels inflated by the demands of producers who want to lay groundwork for future films rather than let those films develop organically.

I don’t, however, object to the brief treatment of Paul Giamatti as The Rhino.  His scenes are fun bookends that get us in and out of the film rather deftly, and they’re cleverly scripted to tell us exactly what we need to know about Spider-Man at those moments.  He might be back for future sequels, but if not this is a perfectly fine way for movies to acknowledge the wider comics mythology without getting bogged down.  (See also Batroc in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Scarecrow in The Dark Knight.)

One thing that Amazing Spider-Man 2 does especially well, though, is the relationship between Peter and Gwen.  Perhaps because of the real-life relationship between Garfield and Stone, these scenes are the most genuine and the most compelling in the entire film.  Garfield is pitch-perfect as the tormented teen, truly conflicted about the tension between his feelings and his dangerous lifestyle; he downright masters the chatty Web-Slinger persona, too, giving Spidey a New York edge to his wit that Tobey Maguire seemed to lack.  And Stone – well, you’ve probably read my blog long enough to know that I think she can do no wrong, and she continues to ace it here; we can feel her frustrations with Peter but also know from whence those feelings arise.

And I’ve spoken well of Foxx’s performance as Electro, and the scenes with him are honestly among the best in the film.  Webb, previously best known for his eloquently beautiful (500) Days of Summer, proves himself a solidly capable action director to boot.  I’m not sure quite what to make of Hans Zimmer’s dubstep-inflected score, but the action sequences in which the bass line drops and Electro pummels Spidey are probably the best such scenes in any Spider-Man film, realistic without a fanboy-tongue-in-cheek wink (as the Raimi films always seemed to do).  Or maybe it’s just that they’re set at night? 

Either way, in these moments Webb gives us the Spider-Man film we want.  And if the film had been a little more focused on these pieces instead of pushing toward too many finish lines, it might have even exceeded Spider-Man 2 in the realm of comic book films.  But your mileage, true believers, may vary.  Perhaps this is the future of the Spider-Man franchise, and I’m wrong about its misdirection.  Maybe I’m stubbornly clinging to a previous generation’s Spider-films, but I sense from the critical reception that the problem isn’t with me.  

I'm willing to be wrong - I want desperately to be wrong about this film, but the problem is that this Spider-Man just isn’t amazing enough.  It’s serviceable, but in a world where Captain America: The Winter Soldier is playing a few screens away, “serviceable” just isn’t good enough any more.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi action/violence.”  We have a lot of zapping, kicking, and punching, with a little bit of burning and exploding; one character death might be traumatic and certainly ups the angst quota for the film.

Come back on Wednesday for the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month as Timothy Dalton makes his curtain call as James Bond in Licence to Kill!

Gangster Squad (2013)

Gangster Squad, a movie about assembling a team for a top-secret mission, is a film whose story resembles its own structure, in that the film is as much an assembly of component parts from other prominent films in the genre.  Whether this collage method hurts the film is up for debate (though I contend that the comparisons do violence to the film), but the final product before us is a stylish and reliably enjoyable experience.

Los Angeles, 1949, is the playground of mobster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), who lives beyond the reach of the corrupt law force until Chief Bill Parker (Nick Nolte) establishes an extralegal “gangster squad” to take down Cohen without the sanction of their badges.  Among others, “Sarge” John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) recruits smooth-talking Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling) to join the squad, unaware that Wooters has been romancing Cohen’s girl Grace (Emma Stone).

When I initially described the movie as a cross between the plot of The Untouchables and the look of L.A. Confidential, I tried to do so without derision, recognizing almost immediately that Gangster Squad is not of the same A-list caliber as those two instant classics.  In fact, my chief complaint about Gangster Squad – that it doesn’t do anything particularly new with the genre – stems from my familiarity with the other two films to the point of absorption; knowing The Untouchables as well as I do made the similarities apparent to the point of prediction and distraction.

What Gangster Squad does not do, then, is break new ground.  But does it have to?  On one level, probably, because who wants to see remake after remake, but on the other hand my proclivity for writing favorable reviews stems from my chief intention when going to the movies:  I want to have a good time.  And Gangster Squad allowed me to do just that.  I admit the film isn’t perfect – the Manichean worldview with accompanying narration is a bit heavyhanded, and we never really find out Grace’s angle – but what works in the film is the atmosphere of old Hollywood mixed with the contemporary aesthetic and sense of humor.

Brolin and Gosling turn in reliably engaging performances, and the other members of the squad – though likely not authentic – possess a modern sensibility and delightful self-awareness, particularly Robert Patrick’s Wild West throwback.  The biggest surprise is not Stone finally playing a postwar vamp (a type, incidentally, into which she fits quite well) but rather Penn’s performance as Cohen.  Obscured behind Dick Tracy makeup, Penn never plays too cool for the room nor hides behind his Oscar cred (or otherwise irksome off-screen persona); instead, he gets right into the spirit of the movie and embraces the hammy characterization required of his villainous role.  While Gosling is clearly a rising star (if he’s not there already), it’s hard not to say that Penn steals the show even more than De Niro did in The Untouchables.

Gangster Squad exists somewhere in the gray zone between modern mobster movie (i.e., The Departed) and retro gangster chic (i.e., Boardwalk Empire).  But the blending of the two modes works for the film because of how unapologetically stylized it is; nothing seems accidental, and the film seems aware of its own indulgences, particularly the video game-esque shootout sequences.  I’m usually opposed to movies that play the “video game card,” but Gangster Squad knows itself well enough to ramp up the visuals in order to compensate for that potential distance from the audience.

It isn’t an instant classic, to be sure, but I suspect that the people who will be drawn to Gangster Squad are exactly the kinds of people for whom the film was made – those who will find themselves entertained by the time the credits roll.  Count me among them.

Gangster Squad is rated R “for strong violence and language.”  The film is surprisingly bloody, almost Tarantino-lite, and the language is standard “R” fare, with a few implied sexual encounters for good measure.

On Thursday, our road to the Oscars continues with Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty.  Stay tuned!

Monday at the Movies - July 30, 2012

Welcome to Week Twenty-Eight of “Monday at the Movies.”  A few romantic comedies on tap this week, plus a film so disturbing I feel uncomfortable saying I enjoyed it.

A Clockwork Orange (1971) – A long, long time ago, I directed readers to an essay by David Bordwell in which he draws the distinction between an excellent film and a film that is to one’s liking.  I invoke Bordwell here because I think he might be the key to my take on Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange; it’s a great film, certainly, excellent by technical standards and one of Kubrick’s more accomplished films, but it’s entirely different to “like” on a purely evaluative level.  For one, its protagonist Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell in the epitome of a career-making performance) is a brutal sadist who spends his evenings raping and engaging in “ultra-violence.”  Perhaps worse, Kubrick’s filmmaking attempts to get us to sympathize with – and even like – Alex, a disconcerting premise once you realize what’s afoot.  I’m probably in the minority on this one, but I usually find Kubrick a bit... boring; Dr. Strangelove is, I admit, genius, but I’ve never been able to watch 2001 or The Shining in one sitting because they seem plodding and aimless – which may be the point, perhaps, but they’re just not “to my liking.”  (The first hour of Full Metal Jacket, though, is brilliant.)  But here Kubrick displays his ability to keep a scene moving even if the camera is stationary, and though much of the film is repulsive on a moral level, it’s transfixing on an aesthetic one, helped in no small part by the quirky yet unspeakably evil performance McDowell turns in.

Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) – I’m on record as not being the world’s biggest Steve Carell fan, and Crazy, Stupid, Love does very little to swing me in the other direction.  Which is not to say that the film isn’t enjoyable – halfway far from it.  I say halfway because there are really two movies going on in Crazy, Stupid, Love (one, it seems for each unnecessary comma in the title):  in one, divorcee Steve Carell tries life without his wife Julianne Moore, while in the other his womanizing wingman Ryan Gosling reforms his ways after meeting girl-of-his-dreams Emma Stone.  As is usually the case with these kinds of films, it’s the latter plot, the supporting one, that succeeds far more than the former.  The problem, perhaps, is that Carell is too real as a man who’s had his heart ripped out; just when the supposed comedy is getting to the funny bits, Carell mopes into frame with his sad-sack character to remind us just how miserable he is.  It’s a shame, because Gosling and Stone are so talented and so charismatic together that one wishes for a movie revolving solely around them.  As a consequence of being so schizophrenic, the film’s message is a mixed one – is love possible or not?  Or is it merely difficult but worthwhile?  If the latter, tell me something I don’t know.  Aside from the Gosling/Stone scenes, I will credit the film with a rather clever third act twist, something I didn’t know to see coming.

Friends with Benefits (2011) – Remember that time that the two leads from Black Swan starred in separate movies about casual sex?  I certainly do, but after seeing Natalie Portman in No Strings Attached (with an uninspiring Ashton Kutcher as her co-lead) I wasn’t exactly ready to join Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake in Friends with Benefits.  Turns out the joke was on me, because Friends with Benefits is by far the better of this odd couple.  Director Will Gluck, who made such a winner out of Easy A with Emma Stone, creates a solidly funny film here, which is by and large victorious thanks to the infectious chemistry between Kunis and Timberlake; their characters are likeable from the first, and – pivotally for a comedy film – they’re funny, too.  Also back from Easy A is Patricia Clarkson, who reprises her role as the kooky and sexually liberated mother, this time of Kunis’s character.  The only part of the equation that doesn’t fit is Richard Jenkins as Timberlake’s Alzheimer’s-afflicted father, whose outbursts lead not to comic relief but to unexpectedly heartfelt pathos.  While the film falls prey to the clichés of the romantic comedy genre, it does so more credibly than No Strings Attached, without asking us to cry for the protagonists when their bizarre experiment complicates itself.  Wisely, the film remembers that we have to like our characters in order to want to see them together, and Gluck and company – particularly his leads – achieve both by leaps and bounds.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

The most unfortunate thing about The Amazing Spider-Man, Marc Webb’s reboot starring Andrew Garfield as the titular web-slinger, is that it wasn’t released in a different year.  In any other year, you might have been reading a very different review of this film, but as a superhero film released in 2012, The Amazing Spider-Man stands between The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises – easily two of the best superhero movies of all time – and the comparison makes The Amazing Spider-Man’s faults all the more apparent.

Not that it’s a bad film, by any stretch of the imagination.  We’re not looking at another Batman & Robin or even Superman III; in fact, it’s even better than the last two-thirds of Spider-Man 3.  There is much that The Amazing Spider-Man does right, but it’s bogged down by pulled punches and an overreliance on attempting to distance itself from the Raimi trilogy.

From frame one, the focus is on Peter Parker (Garfield) and not Spider-Man; we learn more about his parents, who died under mysterious circumstances, and he doesn’t don the costume for what feels like a very long time (more on that later).  He romances classmate and science intern Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) in what must be the most awkward courtship ever while Oscorp’s desperate herpetologist Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans) seeks to stabilize his reptilian vaccination against human weakness.

In a post-Dark Knight Rises world, remembering the value of hope, I’m going to close this review with a consideration of what succeeds in The Amazing Spider-Man, but first, the bad news.

First and foremost, the film feels overly long; at two hours and sixteen minutes, it’s the shortest of the Big Three this summer (The Avengers 2:23 and The Dark Knight Rises 2:47), but it doesn’t feel like it, mostly because the film takes a very long time to get started.  While there is much about the film that is original, a lot of it feels very familiar; it’s only been ten years since the first Spider-Man film, and though there are minor changes to the origin story it’s mostly intact from before.  You can even see the filmmakers trying to swim around the original when Uncle Ben (played with quiet graceful authority, as always, by Martin Sheen) talks in circuitous language in an attempt not to say the exact words “With great power comes great responsibility.”  While the film, as a remake, can’t rely on what went before, the attempts to distance itself focus too much on cosmetic details and not on retelling the story in a significant way.

As a consequence of this over-familiarity, the film feels as though nothing’s happening.  The interesting plotline of Richard and May Parker is abandoned early on, apparently on reserve for a sequel; while I understand the desire to build a franchise, this thread might have sufficiently distanced Webb’s interpretation from Raimi’s, as the Parkers were entirely absent from the earlier trilogy.  Instead we get an Uncle Ben who’s only in the film to die; Sheen, though as good a choice as Cliff Roberston, is an actor whose skill is squandered.  (As Aunt May, Sally Field is an expected disappointment; her teary performance feels stilted and a poor substitute for the moving Rosemary Harris.)  Similarly, the Curt Connors plotline is only interesting insofar as the audience knows he’s going to become The Lizard; audiences who aren’t aware of this plotbeat don’t have any foreshadowing to lean on and may wonder why we’re spending so much time with a one-armed scientist who knows less about the Parkers than Peter thinks he does.

It’s a quest narrative that is abandoned not only by its storytellers but by its protagonist.  The film is set up as the story of Peter’s attempts to understand his parents, but when the film stops looking for answers so does Peter.  In this respect it’s an even bigger cop-out than the ending of Prometheus – at least in that film someone was still interested in the questions that incited the plot in the first place.

In many ways, the comparison to Prometheus is apt because The Amazing Spider-Man, too, is a weak story told extremely well.  Aside from the disorienting POV shots that seem designed to sell videogames rather than put us in Spidey’s shoes, Andrew Garfield is pitch-perfect as Peter Parker and as Spider-Man, capturing the teenager’s innate awkwardness but eminent likeability while also mastering the graceful body language of the hero, in flight and fight; he puts the friendly back in "friendly neighborhood Spider-Man."  You won’t be surprised to hear that my opinion of Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy is similarly high; it’s no wonder she’s Peter’s first great love, a connection fostered not by the script they’re given but by the chemistry they develop.  It’s perhaps too convenient that she’s an intern at the one place where a friend of Spider-Man is needed, but she ably executes her main function in the script – the love interest, the damsel sans distress (she saves Spidey’s keister at least twice in moments that mercifully don’t feel shoehorned in by the PC Police).

As for Ifans, he’s an oddball choice by virtue of being a master oddball.  His descent into schizophrenia – in which Webb finally masters a comic book’s use of internal dialogue by employing voiceover smartly – recalls his expertly creepy turn in Enduring Love, and his scenes as The Lizard (assisted, of course, by CGI) create a foe that is successfully unlike anything from the Raimi trilogy.  While The Lizard was teased by the appearance of Dylan Baker as Dr. Connors in the Raimi films, this Lizard is a foe worth fighting, with a bizarre plan that never feels out-of-place thanks to the film’s clear translation that the once-good doctor is losing his mind.

And Marc Webb, known for his directorial debut on (500) Days of Summer, demonstrates that he’s aptly named, since he gets inside of Spider-Man’s head and directs the action in an efficient manner.  He handles the romantic plot better in some ways, since the chemistry between Garfield and Stone is so tangible that it salvages a somewhat clumsy and unenthusiastic screenplay in that regard.  While it’s hard not to get a good movie out of one as well-performed as this one, it’s significant that Webb’s only apparent misstep is the odd and uneven use of POV shots when Spidey swings into action; perhaps these looked better in 3D, but that’s a remark a film reviewer should never have to make.

Ultimately, The Amazing Spider-Man is too many films for its own good; the Parkers’ past and the origin story are neglected and uninspiring, respectfully, while The Lizard’s arc is the best of the three but is introduced as a distraction before becoming the main plot.  But none of these films are told poorly; the actors are gifted, the effects dazzling.  What redeems this film is that it’s just good enough to suggest that a sequel might be truly great; now that the obligatory ground has been walked, the franchise can move in a new direction with a cast that embodies Stan Lee’s original stories perhaps better than Raimi’s crew ever did.

Who knows?  When all’s said and done, the sequel could even rival Spider-Man 2.

The Amazing Spider-Man is rated PG-13 “for sequences of action and violence.”  The action sequences are more personal here than before, with large slashes and cuts rendered in each combatant’s body in bloody but not graphic detail.  Some of The Lizard’s transformations might be frightening to younger folk, but overall the film is bloodier than Raimi’s work.

Tuesday at the Movies - July 10, 2012

A day late but not a dollar short (since we’re still free of charge), welcome to Week Twenty-Five of “Monday at the Movies,” in which I pregame for The Amazing Spider-Man with Emma Stone and the latter two Sam Raimi Spider-Man films.  (I reviewed Spider-Man [2002] back in May 2008.)

Easy A (2010) – There are some movie stars who can carry a film solely on charisma.  Perhaps the newest face in this crowd (which includes such personalities as Denzel Washington, Judi Dench, and Samuel L. Jackson) is Emma Stone who, while making her big debut in Superbad, garnered international attention for Easy A, a take-off on Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter in which Olive Penderghast (Stone) becomes the talk of her high school after a rumor about her romantic escapades takes on a life of its own.  I’m a sucker for literary updates (most of the time, at least, but I make no apologies for digging Twelfth Night by way of She’s the Man), and here the story works because it doesn’t use Hawthorne as a crutch but rather winks at the relationship and self- references itself in a clever way; a similar relationship with the John Hughes canon is fostered, as well, and the comparison is a successful one.  But as for charisma, Stone is insanely charming, extraordinarily gorgeous, and unceasingly hilarious as Olive; if the script is campy, it’s on her shoulders that the film succeeds.  Credit, too, should go to the supporting cast, which includes Stanley Tucci as Olive’s scene-stealing father, Thomas Haden Church as her favorite and most sympathetic teacher, and Amanda Bynes as the school’s antagonistic “Jesus freak,” an inverse Penny Pingleton.  Though the film relies on Olive’s webcam as a narrative guide, it’s a bad gimmick that works because of Stone’s aforementioned charm.  While Easy A may not yet be a classic like 10 Things I Hate About You, it deserves to stand in those ranks.

Spider-Man 2 (2004) – Under the capable direction of Sam Raimi, Tobey Maguire’s second outing as Peter Parker stood for a long time as arguably the best comic book film (up until, y’know, The Dark Knight), and it’s still exceptionally strong almost a decade later.  Here we see the classic “second film” plotline of the hero questioning his place in society, finding trouble navigating the disjunct between secret identity and public persona, even – channeling the famous comic plotline – quitting the hero game for a time.  This thread is especially strong, ably guided by a strong screenplay which makes the webslinger’s struggle seem plausible but never forced.  Alfred Molina’s role as Doctor Octopus in particular contributes to the film’s success, layering the villain with a complicated mixture of pathos and psychosis.  Spider-Man 2 makes the smartest choice of all, which is to play itself almost completely straight, save for J.K. Simmons’s spot-on performance as J. Jonah Jameson (note to the rebooters – bring him back at all costs).  And if Spider-Man 2 is indeed a perfect superhero film, it’s because it avoids the temptation of the sequel to replicate and overfill, instead moving the series in a new direction and allowing its plotlines to breathe.  Reflecting on this film makes me think about the very nature of good reviews; it’s difficult to reach my standard 250 words because the film is exceptional.  In the words of Stan Lee, ’nuff said?

Spider-Man 3 (2007) – Take a breather.  Spider-Man 3 is not as bad as we remember.  The film is flawed, to be sure, but it’s not irredeemable; had it not been preceded by Spider-Man 2, things may have seemed different, but the film certainly suffers by comparison to its antecedent.  For the first hour, the film is strong, among the best of Raimi’s trilogy; consumed by revenge, Spider-Man hunts The Sandman while under the influence of a malicious alien symbiote which feeds on his vengeance and budding narcissism.  But the film escapes Raimi’s control near the beginning of the second act; the film is overfull, with Bryce Dallas Howard miscast as Gwen Stacy, who literally has nothing to do in this movie and whose absence would have no effect on the finished product.  What’s more, we have three villains (Sandman, Venom and New Goblin) who never get fully developed beyond shallow and poorly scripted motivations.  Worse, the film badly fumbles the symbiote plotline, opting for slapstick and easy laughs instead of focusing on the internal perversion and darkening of Spider-Man.  How much better might the film have been if we got a truly frightening Symbiote Spider-Man rather than the Emo Peter Parker we found tousling his hair and thrusting his pelvis?  What’s good about the previous films still holds – J.K. Simmons still aces his part, Thomas Haden Church as Sandman is another great villain – but Spider-Man 3 has a strong first act but spirals out of control like the Goblin’s glider.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Zombieland (2009)

After Jennifer's Body (and after the last few posts retroactively updated the blog with reviews I'd written a while back), I needed a fresh movie to restore my faith in the cinema. It was with reservation that I slid Zombieland into my DVD player, but within moments my trepidation was assuaged.

You see, I love a zombie movie that doesn't take itself seriously - Shaun of the Dead is on my as-yet-unpublished "Best of the 2000s" list - and if the undead tongue is firmly in the decaying cheek, I'm right there. Zombieland is another entry in a long line of zombie movies with a sense of humor, and it's one of the better ones.

In an America populated primarily by zombies and where identities are subordinated to destinations (our protagonist is named Columbus, because that's where he's going), survival of the fittest is the order of the day, and the prize for those who make it is the promise of the last Twinkie on earth. Narrator Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg, who seems to be the B-list Michael Cera) meets up with Tallahassee (a fabulous Woody Harrelson), who's all about one-upsmanship and making zombie-killing an art while searching for that last Twinkie. The unlikely duo match wits several times with con artist sisters Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) before a delightful showdown at the most bitingly contagious theme park this side of Disney World.

While I'm not a big fan of Eisenberg - Adventureland (also set, curiously, at an amusement park) left me cold and I'd much rather watch Michael Cera do the same act - Harrelson rarely lets me down, and his turn as Tallahassee is iconic for all the right reason, setting a new standard for infectiously fun zombie-killers in the same way that Zac Efron redefined teeny-bopper musicals. Stone is cute in a quirky kind of way, and she's entirely believable as a sneaky survivalist. Breslin's cute, too, like a less pretentious and more talented Dakota Fanning with more appeal to a broader audience. So the cast is a lot of fun.

(Note: I think the statute of limitations on spoilers has expired, but just in case... skip this paragraph if you don't want a pleasant mid-flick surprise spoiled.) The most fun, though, comes from an entirely unpredictable and extremely kitschy cameo appearance by Bill Murray, playing himself as one of the last remaining non-infected humans. Murray plays himself, but he does it with as much dry wit as in his most acclaimed roles (Groundhog Day and Ghostbusters, which gets a name check here). There's nothing un-funny about his five or so minutes in the middle of the movie, and the rest of the film almost feels like a letdown once he exits the stage.

The second half of the film has a different feel after the dynamically rip-roaring opening hour, but it's still a lot of fun. It's hard to believe that, in the forty or so years since George Romero made zombies cool, there are still creative ways to kill the undead (again). But how about garden shears? A car door? A piano? Zombieland has all that and more, especially the unforgettable "Double Tap" rule that must be seen to be fully appreciated.

The film is gratuitously violent, but its excessive nature is not purposeless, because the film is so ludiccrously over the top that the blood-and-guts effects have to be similarly beyond the pale. So while some fans might object to the slow-mo shot of a zombie vomiting blood over the opening credits, those of us who are in on the joke know that Zombieland is intentionally dialing the genre up to eleven. Watching Tallahassee do his thing - giggling maniacally and taunting the zombies as he goes - should be proof enough that the filmmakers are having as much fun as they'd like us to have.

It's a biting good time.

Zombieland is, no surprise, rated "R for horror violence/gore and language." The gore certainly isn't for the squeamish, but the language wouldn't make Joe Pesci blush.