Cinemutants - X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.
 

This week, from 2014, it’s X-Men: Days of Future Past. Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) into the past to save their future from mutant-killing Sentinel robots. In 1973, Wolverine has to bring together a despondent Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and the incarcerated Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) to stop Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from killing Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), the inventor of the Sentinels.

1. Securing our future. We can argue about whether this is the best X-Men movie (it’s easily top three), but there’s no debating the fact that this is the most X-Men movie. Two casts, parallel timelines, ready-made comics inspiration, and a continuity fix that only muddles the waters even further: Days of Future Past has everything an X-fan could want. While the change-the-past plot was intended to smooth over any errors in the timeline (or, at least, provide a plausible excuse for them), it only exposes the gossamer of the plot to brutal scrutiny. By the end of the film, just how much of the past has Logan undone? (Director Bryan Singer is at least erasing The Last Stand, but there’s a wink toward expunging X-Men Origins: Wolverine, as well.) You might still need a chart to understand how all the films relate to each other, but I’ll argue next week that, as far as time travel and continuity are concerned, Days walked so Deadpool could run.
2. Infinite outcomes. Along with being the apex X-Men movie, Days of Future Past provides something so unique that only the superhero genre can do. As incredible as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan were, James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender were equally inspired casting choices. And in virtually any other genre, you’d never have an opportunity to put them on-screen together; imagine a Godfather movie that saw Marlon Brando meet Robert De Niro, or a James Bond movie where Daniel Craig teams up with Pierce Brosnan. Another way Days cues up Deadpool is by implying that both versions exist out there somewhere, simultaneously; future films followed both Professors Xavier, and it’s inconceivable that Deadpool & Wolverine won’t see other iterations (or “variants,” in MCU-speak) of recognizable characters. Let’s hope the new castings are just as good. 
3. It all starts with her. In the comics, Kitty Pryde is the one traveling back in time to warn the X-Men about averting the future; here, though, it’s got to be Wolverine, both for the practical needs of the plot and for the fact that Hugh Jackman continues to be an audience favorite for his literal embodiment of the character. (The movie finds a creative way to keep Kitty relevant to the plot.) Meanwhile, the target of the future remains unchanged; it’s still Mystique, played by Jennifer Lawrence at the peak of her rising stardom. Two years after her Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook and a year before finishing her tenure in The Hunger Games, Lawrence makes a third-stringer background villain into a compelling and deeply human protagonist. It’s almost hard not to root for her, though Lawrence’s apparent fatigue with the role will become inescapable in the weeks to come. (A third woman, Anna Paquin’s Rogue, becomes an axis point in the “Rogue Cut,” which sees Rogue freed from a mutant prison to help Kitty Pryde save Wolverine.)
4. In the future, do I make it? It feels like it’s been true for most of these movies, but Days of Future Past really illuminates the paradox of accurately and lovingly bringing characters to life and then giving them absolutely nothing to do. Bishop and Blink, for example, look like they stepped straight out of a comic book, but I’d be darned to tell you why, on the strength of this movie, any fan would care about them. Even Storm suffers from this paradox; as cool as it is to see Halle Berry rocking the closest thing to a mohawk we got from her, Storm’s presence in the film is barely consequential, and the film seems not to have noticed that she is essentially the last surviving faculty member at the Xavier Academy. The X-Men might have the deepest bench in comics, but the movies always seemed to focus on the same dozen or so; next week, we’ll see Deadpool do right by Colossus, who’s had less personality than window dressing in these films.
5. Is the future truly set? Superhero storytelling is perpetually stuck in the second act; after you get through the first-act origin tales, most of these stories never truly end. (And when they do, like All-Star Superman or Old Man Logan, they’re in alternate realities.) Days of Future Past eats its cake and has it too by giving Logan a cheery send-off while also holding open the door for more stories in the First Class timeline. (Quite where Logan takes place, we’ll consider in a few weeks.) But it does seem a little suspicious – and possibly even sinister – that Bryan Singer’s happy ending seems to erase/retcon only the movies he didn’t direct. Of the beleaguered director’s many sins, this is far from the worst, but this film does seem to promise a new golden age that, more or less, never came to pass. Did the film that was meant to fix the franchise actually break it? The best films to come are the ones that play fastest and loosest with continuity...

Sound off in the comments, true believers: where does Days of Future Past sit in your estimations, and was it really ten years ago already? Up next, second chances all around when Ryan Reynolds gets another shot at the Merc with a Mouth in Deadpool.

Cinemutants - X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.
 

This week, from 2006, it’s X-Men: The Last Stand. The mutant world faces its greatest threat when a cure for mutation is developed. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) have their hands – and claws – full when Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) returns from the dead and allies herself with Magneto (Ian McKellen), who is leading the mutant resistance against the cure.

1. An age of darkness. It’s generally been agreed that The Last Stand is where the X-Men franchise begins to drop the ball, and in some ways you might say it never fully recovers. At least three of the subsequent films reckon with the legacy of this one, with a snide joke in Apocalypse acknowledging that third films in trilogies don’t always work. After nearly twenty years, this one is strikingly grim, killing off [SPOILERS!] both Cyclops and Professor X before spinning its wheels until a third act that looks staggeringly like a television soundstage. Meanwhile, amid a host of dark plotlines, the film is littered with jokes of an astonishingly dated sensibility, giving one the distinct impression that The Last Stand is a cartoon brought to life by an edgy teenager.
2. Dark Phoenix rising. Last week I called the Dark Phoenix Saga “the franchise’s Everest summit,” and The Last Stand is a spectacular failure of an adaptation. Where the comics were a sober meditation on absolute power and the ethics of mutantkind’s response to genocide, this film recasts the Phoenix as Jean Grey’s uncontrollable power… only for her to stand around not doing very much with that power. It’s a classic “show, don’t tell” failure, compounded by the confusing decision to subordinate her abilities to Magneto’s will. We’ll see the franchise take one more swing at Dark Phoenix in the film of the same name, which finds entirely new ways to drop the ball, while Jean’s ultimate fate will haunt Hugh Jackman’s Logan for much of the rest of his tenure.
3. Pyro mania. I was pretty surprised that the Deadpool & Wolverine trailer announced that Aaron Stanford would be returning as Pyro, but that’s because I’d forgotten how the Pyro/Iceman rivalry became weirdly central to this trilogy. After Pyro threw his lot in with Magneto in X2, The Last Stand spends a not-insignificant amount of time teasing his inevitable showdown with Iceman, whose pure ice form is reserved for the pinnacle moment of their big fight sequence. The movie even clears Mystique (Rebecca Romijn) from the deck to make room for Pyro. While I’m sure that there will be no shortage of recognizable faces in the new Deadpool trailer, using Pyro feels like leaning into the idiosyncrasies of dead continuity – which, to be fair, is on brand for Deadpool.
4. Too much of a good thing. At an hour and forty-four minutes (the exact length of X-Men, mind you), The Last Stand has way too much going on for a coherent story. Its three antagonists – Magneto, Phoenix, and the cure – feel packed together, bulging with superglue to hide the storytelling seams, while new characters like Angel, Beast, Juggernaut, and Kid Omega (in name only) barely get anything to do because almost the entire cast has returned from the last two films. It’s a critical mass of screenplay elements, compounded by the fact that almost nothing interesting happens with any of these new toys (with one exception, below); Kitty Pryde does more running but gets hardly any plot action, while The Juggernaut quotes YouTube videos from the mid-2000s. It almost feels as though director Brett Ratner cut ten minutes from each of 10 different X-Men movies and tried to frankenstein them together here; your mileage may vary on which of the ten you’d have rather seen.
5. Oh, my stars and garters. The one thing The Last Stand did unequivocally right was casting Kelsey Grammer as a note-perfect Hank “Beast” McCoy. Grammar leans fully into the role, spot-on casting for a mutant of above average intelligence with a supercilious command over the English language. Kudos to Grammer, too, for submitting to the full-body makeup required for his beastly transformation. And in a film that tries to its detriment to cram everything into its abbreviated runtime, there’s a certain thrill in hearing Grammer deliver Beast’s ostensible catchphrase just before leaping into battle. It’s little wonder that, after Patrick Stewart in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Grammer was the second Fox-era mutant retained for the MCU, in a post-credits cameo from The Marvels. We all know what they say about broken clocks.

Sound off in the comments, true believers: has The Last Stand aged like cheese or wine? Was it ever either? Join us next week for a blast from the past with another exceptional casting choice, X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Cinemutants - X2: X-Men United (2003)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.

This week, from 2003, it’s X2: X-Men United. After a mutant attempt on the president’s life, the X-Men are scattered when Col. William Stryker (Brian Cox) leads a raid on the Xavier mansion. Logan (Hugh Jackman) leads a group of kids to safety while Professor X (Patrick Stewart) seeks answers from his imprisoned friend Magneto (Ian McKellen). Meanwhile, Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) tracks the mutant assassin (Alan Cumming), even as her powers begin to overwhelm her...

1. Empire state of mind. You can take a few different tacks with a sequel, but X2 wears its influence on its sleeve when it comes to The Empire Strikes Back. Like Empire, X2 lets the villains win in the first act, separates our heroes for their own journeys, and then reconvenes the cast for a life-and-death third act. It’s also like its sci-fi forerunner in that it’s arguably better than its predecessor, but while you could make a reasonable case for Star Wars over Empire, it’s hard to say X2 isn’t an improvement in nearly every way from the already-strong X-Men. As immediate sequels go, X2 is in fantastic company, setting the bar in a way that nearly every second MCU installment (Winter Soldier aside) misses.
2. We’re not as alone as you think. The X-Men comics have one of the deepest benches of characters, with so many distinctive faces and abilities across what was then forty years of storytelling. A standout feature of the comics has always been their delightfully soapy quality, with long-running storylines that feel at times more like daytime television. X2 continues the masterful juggling act from the first film and adds in the likes of Colossus, Nightcrawler, Pyro, Lady Deathstrike, and (after a fashion) Mastermind, with expanded roles for Iceman and Mystique. Surprisingly, the film never quite plays favorites; while some performances are stronger than others, there’s an incredibly balanced approach to the disparate plot threads. (Excepting, I think, Colossus, though his inclusion feels a bit like living scenery for the mansion. We’ll see him get his due in surprising fashion in a few weeks.)
3. The war has begun. While Ian McKellen is pretty safely the best villain the X-Franchise has ever had, Brian Cox is a very close second as William Stryker. In the seminal comic God Loves, Man Kills, Stryker was a televangelist with a rabid anti-mutant agenda; here, he’s the military scientist attempting to exterminate mutantkind, with the added backstory of being the architect of the project that turned Wolverine into Weapon X. Stryker will end up being a subplot that weaves through nearly all of the X-films (often unsuccessfully, as Wolverine’s mysterious origins tend to disappoint the more we tug on that thread). But when you want to anchor a franchise to Hugh Jackman’s performance, it’s helpful to have Brian Cox’s quiet menace lurking in the background, pulling the strings while McKellen gets to have all the snarling, snarky fun befitting a Shakespearean actor of his stature.
4. Have you tried not being a mutant? While everyone’s suddenly upset of late that the X-Men “went woke” (which incoming comics editor Tom Brevoort recently and smartly dismissed as a meaningless "infinitely adaptable scarlet letter" these days), those of us who have been paying attention know that the X-Men have always had a progressive bent, with mutants standing in as a sliding signifier for any tyrannized minority. Stan Lee occasionally claimed not to have intended the subtext, but it’s hard not to read the series without seeing any myriad of political controversies at play. At roughly the same time that Grant Morrison was exploring mutants as queer allegory, X2 is overt with its gay reading of mutants; Bobby Drake’s conversation with his parents reads inescapably like a “coming out” scene, replete with his mother’s tone-deaf “Have you tried not being a mutant?” At every turn, mutants are persecuted, hunted, and enslaved, and X2 is unflinching in allying itself with the oppressed.
5. Something bad is supposed to happen. If X2 is the franchise’s Empire moment, the good guys can’t win outright at the end; Magneto gets away, with an X-recruit in tow, and the whole thing concludes with an invocation of “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” arguably the comics’ most iconic and expansive storyline. In it, Jean Grey succumbs to her repressed powers, becoming a cosmic force of unspeakable strength and annihilating an entire solar system. Nearly all of us knew that the first time Jean’s powers malfunction, X2 was promising that the Phoenix was going to rise. It’s tremendously confident to tease the Phoenix in the film’s final frames (a moment that might probably be a post-credits scene today), but we’ll see that the Phoenix often becomes the franchise’s Everest summit, tempting to approach but perilous to scale. 

Sound off in the comments, true believers: is X2 still one of the best superhero sequels ever made? Or has it aged poorly in the wake of its paler imitators? Join us next week for X-Men: The Last Stand (and it very nearly was).

Cinemutants - X-Men (2000)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.
 

First up, from 2000, it’s X-Men. Caught in a war between Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and the villainous Magneto (Ian McKellen), Logan (Hugh Jackman) joins the side of the X-Men, a group of mutants dedicated to saving a world that fears and hates them. Meanwhile, Marie (Anna Paquin) discovers her own unique abilities before joining Professor Xavier’s academy. 

1. One hundred minutes and counting. I’ve seen this movie more times than I can count, but I was floored this time to realize/remember that the film is under two hours long. At 01:44, X-Men is incredibly lean and astonishingly well-paced. Some of the expositional dialogue is a little didactic, but the bevy of (uncredited) screenwriters balance a cast of no fewer than ten named mutants with a plot that forces all of them together fairly swiftly. Whatever Marvel does next with the mutants, it’s hard to imagine the storytelling being as efficient and economical as it is here.
2. What a cast of characters. Last time I did one of these, I mused that Raiders of the Lost Ark had one of the all-time best casts in movie history. X-Men, quietly, might also be in that running. From their first scene together, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen positively crackle, and I’d even argue that the whole thing succeeds on their lofty pedigrees. The rest of the mutants are no slouch; Hugh Jackman might be a foot too tall for Wolverine, but he’s got the attitude and the walk. This time out, I was impressed by James Marsden as Cyclops, playing the unenviable straight man but nailing the boy-scout leadership that makes the comics character such a stalwart soldier. Even Bruce Davison as the smarmy Senator Kelly feels uncomfortably prescient in his role as a fear-mongering politician.
3. Evolution leaps forward. Even back in 2000, I was aware that X-Men felt like a sea change in superhero cinema. It felt serious, but more importantly it was earnest – it didn’t treat the source material with suspicion or derision. Instead, it mined nearly forty years of rich storytelling for an equally pointed take on issues that have never really left us. Prejudice, political mobilization, and the kinship of found families: these elements have been present in X-Men comics since the beginning, and a one-two punch with Spider-Man two years solidified the new superhero milieu. Put another way, these movies walked so the MCU could run.
4. What would you prefer, yellow spandex? While X-Men taught us the virtues of treating the source material with reverence, the film had a little less patience for the superficial trappings of superhero comics. Having just gotten over the Day-Glo disaster that was Batman & Robin, perhaps moviegoers weren’t ready for comics-accurate costuming from the X-Men, who notoriously don’t always look like they all belong in the same book. The 1992 animated series crystallized the Jim Lee costumes for a generation, but the movies went for a more subdued black leather palette, leaning into the post-Matrix cool aesthetic. (The comics, as ever, would follow suit the next year, with Grant Morrison’s New X-Men positing a fashion-forward vision of mutantkind.) Having said that, the leather suits are perhaps trying a little too hard, but darned if they don’t look cool, and it’s no wonder that I hoarded the action figures (and still do).
5. The war is still coming. I remember sitting in a theater in 2000 feeling like everything had changed, but also that everything was just beginning. Part of the success of X-Men must have been its terrific ending, which cues up a number of really interesting ideas for the franchise to come. Best of all, unlike most superhero movies, it leaves its chief villain (and his shapeshifting lieutenant) alive for the sequel, and that image of Magneto jailed in a plastic prison is such a resplendent final tableau. We also get teases regarding Logan’s mysterious past and Rogue’s new life at the mansion, and we’ll see each of those blown into one of the best superhero sequels ever.

Sound off in the comments, true believers: where does X-Men fit into your superhero canon? And where does this one in particular land in your X-Rankings? Join us over the next twelve weeks; we’ll be back next time with X2: X-Men United.

Monday at the Movies - July 2, 2018

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, a forgotten film with comic book ties – it’s the pulpy adaptation of The Shadow.

The Shadow (1994) – In my ongoing effort to see and review any superhero movie I can get my hands on, it’s worth enrolling The Shadow in that tradition. Based on the hero of pulp novels and radio programs, from whom we can trace a direct line to Batman, The Shadow introduces Alec Baldwin as Lamont Cranston, a man who “knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men” because he’s intimately acquainted with the darkness in his own heart. After a Tibetan prologue that feels presciently similar to the first act of Doctor Strange, Baldwin dons a black hat and red scarf to fight crime in New York City, where a descendant of Genghis Khan (John Lone) has come to finish his ancestor’s work of conquest. As a devout fan of The Rocketeer, I had hoped that The Shadow would live up to that brand of retro-heroism; it doesn’t, though it does feel a lot like Rocketeer by way of Sam Raimi’s Darkman. The Shadow does an excellent job inhabiting a noir-esque version of New York between world wars, effortlessly classy and yet sufficiently dangerous. It also boasts a frankly astonishing cast of talented players in minor roles – Tim Curry as a sycophantic assistant, Peter Boyle as a cabbie, Jonathan Winters as a police commissioner, and Ian McKellen as an atomic scientist – all gifted character actors whose ilk we just don’t seem to have anymore, charming and magnetic screen presences no matter what they’re doing. As Margo Lane, Penelope Ann Miller more than keeps up with Baldwin, though the film never quite seems to know what to do with her. Nor does the film’s plot quite hang together as tightly as it pretends; many of the scenes feel fairly perfunctory, without sufficient character development to justify subplots of romance or archrivalry. The Shadow instead feels like a movie that paints by the numbers without obscuring those same numbers, including one moment when a title card explains a multiyear gap between scenes. The Shadow is ultimately somewhat charming, unmistakably of its time, and a property direly in need of being revisited now that Hollywood has a better sense of how to mine such rich source material. The Shadow is perhaps forgotten by virtue of not excelling, but its quaint approach to the process of adaptation merits it a place – if a curious one – alongside bygone efforts like Rocketeer, Dick Tracy, and The Phantom.

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

Beauty and the Beast (2017)

It’s a tale as old as time, and it’s certainly one we’ve seen before. But for the first time in Disney’s ongoing project of remaking its animated classics into live-action big budget fairy tales (with or without a healthy dose of revisionism), Beauty and the Beast both makes the case for another retelling of the story and manages to be a compelling and potent riff on the original.

If you’re like me, you probably have vast swathes of the 1991 animated film committed to (or seared into) memory, and you’ll likely be singing along in your head to the musical numbers, which get a few bonus verses here and there but are otherwise largely unchanged. So too is the plot translated fairly directly to live-action: bookish villager Belle (Emma Watson) finds herself imprisoned in the castle of the Beast (Dan Stevens), a prince turned monstrous by a curse, in order to save her doddering father Maurice (Kevin Kline). While local ape-man Gaston (Luke Evans) pines for her, to the consternation of his compatriot LeFou (Josh Gad), the castle’s lusty candlestick Lumiere (Ewan McGregor), fussy clock Cogsworth (Ian McKellen), and maternal teapot Mrs. Potts (Emma Thompson) conspire to bring beauty and the beast together to lift the spell.

In the case of Disney’s continued remake renaissance, I wouldn’t say there’s been a complete win. Maleficent was at once too distant from its source material while simultaneously pulling its punches on that difference. Meanwhile, Cinderella and The Jungle Book were visually stunning but ultimately more of the same as far as the originals were concerned. With Beauty and the Beast, however, I recall thinking several times during the film, “Oh, so that’s why they remade this!” Between its new characters and its patched-up plot holes, elucidated backstories and added lyrics, this Beauty and the Beast is a lot like a new brand of your favorite flavor of ice cream. There’s a lot that’s recognizable and reminds you what you love about it, but there are added nuances that gives this incarnation a life all its own. (It’s like the time I discovered they made cookie dough ice cream out of monster cookies and M&Ms.)

Perhaps the greatest strength of the film is its cast, which is positively bang-on from the word “go.” Watson and Stevens are well cast as the star-crossed lovers, in a romantic plotline that doesn’t feel obligatory and includes a few very well-crafted turns of character that give believability to the courtship plot. (That one such moment revolves around a library is perhaps preaching to this bibliophile’s choir, but I’d fall in love with a beast too if he had a library of his own to make Alexandria blush.) That McGregor, McKellen, and Thompson are note-perfect is right up there with “Water Wet” in terms of headlines, nor should one be surprised by the frankly stunning special effects work. What’s genuinely surprising is that Evans and Gad create something really quite special in Gaston and LeFou. Though it’s by no means sympathy for the devil, the script gives Gaston a refreshing amount of psychological depth, and Gad plays LeFou with an understated tenderness that gives LeFou a few legitimate reasons to hang around a specimen as deplorable as Gaston.

Indeed, what Beauty and the Beast does quite well is clarify a few of the nagging details and polish up the bits that work in order to present a fresh version of the story to an audience who is a little older, a little wiser, and a bit more sophisticated. This is hardly an “adult” version of the story, but it does feel a bit more grown-up, more willing to go to places the original didn’t – the question of Belle’s mother, for one, and the aforementioned update to Gaston: neither of which changes the characters or the plot but brings them into sharper focus.

Perhaps most importantly for this moviegoer, Beauty and the Beast never forgets to embrace with exuberance the playful weirdness of a film that includes a talking wardrobe, a barking footstool, and a boisterously romantic candlestick who turns a dinner invitation into something out of Busby Berkeley. It is the kind of film that touches the heart in the right places but isn’t embarrassed to leave you with a big dumb grin on your face as a talking clockface excretes gears in alarm. It’s a film that has more emotional range than we have any right to expect from a remake of an animated fairy tale.

But it’s also a film that, as the song goes, may have something there that wasn’t there before. I’m reticent to call it a brain or a heart or something so reductive, nor do I want to chalk it up to je ne sais quoi, though one character actually does. But unlike some of Disney’s more recent live-action updates, it has an unflappable demand to exist and ends up a worthy successor to the original.

Beauty and the Beast is rated PG for “some action violence, peril, and frightening images.” Directed by Bill Condon. Written by Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos. Starring Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Josh Gad, Kevin Kline, Ewan McGregor, Ian McKellen, and Emma Thompson.

Monday at the Movies - August 17, 2015

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.”  We haven’t done one of these since May, but it seems worth commenting on the “director’s cut” of X-Men: Days of Future Past, dubbed “The Rogue Cut” for reasons that will become apparent.

X-Men: Days of Future Past - The Rogue Cut (2014/2015) – I’m not doing a full review of The Rogue Cut, which adds about fifteen minutes of unseen footage, because my original sentiment still stands. I called the theatrical release “one of the better outings in the series,” and The Rogue Cut doesn’t change that. If anything, it makes the film a stronger one, filling in what I had perceived to be a stumble before the third act begins, the beat when Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) goes missing. Here, The Rogue Cut fills in the gap by 1) restoring Anna Paquin’s turn as Rogue in the dystopian future of the film, and 2) giving Mystique a wonderful moment with Beast (Nicholas Hoult) in 1973. While I concede that the theatrical cut isn’t less by omitting these sequences, the film is overall richer for having them. In fact, I got more of a sense that I was entering a world during The Rogue Cut, rather than the crossover event the theatrical release felt like. Although the changes are almost universally positive additions to Days of Future Past, I have a small complaint, which might not even be a negative. The Rogue Cut juxtaposes Magneto (Michael Fassbender) retrieving his helmet with Magneto (Ian McKellan) rescuing Rogue, and while I think the cross-cutting is a nifty formal trick, I can’t help but feel the former sequence was better served on its own, building more tension as we got inside the young Magneto’s head. But it’s a moment that only rings hollower if you’re familiar with the original incarnation, and everything else in The Rogue Cut is so well-crafted that it might now be my new favorite X-Men film. PS – Stay tuned for a new mid-credits sequence! (The original post-credits scene is still intact.)

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

Mr. Holmes (2015)

Amid the recent Sherlock Holmes renaissance – two films and two television shows in six years – there seems to have been something of an effort to find the “more authentic” Holmes by doing something quite different from Basil Rathbone in a deerstalker cap. Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes takes a similar tack, albeit by locating Holmes in his later years, giving us a more sobered and more affective detective than the others, one that succeeds largely on the shoulders of its star performer, Ian McKellen.

Mr. Holmes finds the great detective (McKellen) in exile-by-retirement with his housekeeper Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney) and her son Roger (Milo Parker). While tending his bees and staving off senility, Holmes is haunted by his failing memory of his last case and the need to resolve it before his powers of deductive reasoning falter for good.

First of all, Ian McKellen is absolutely amazing in this film. Among the panoply of talented Sherlocks we’ve had in the past few years, McKellen is, I can safely say, in a league of his own. I confess I haven’t seen much of Jonny Lee Miller’s Elementary performance, but Robert Downey Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch have wildly different though engaging screen presences; both, however, do have a similar superhuman aesthetic about them, detaching them somewhat from the Doyle stories. McKellen’s Holmes, on the other hand, is the definition of grounded, all the more so because of the weight of his past and, he confides in one of the film’s most intriguing turns, the burden of his own fame in the wake of Watson’s publications.

McKellen is mesmerizing, unsurprisingly so given the fact that he apparently can do anything on screen. In another striking debut by a child actor, though, it’s Milo Parker’s scene-stealing turn as young Roger that makes the best impression. As a kind of new Watson to the aging Holmes, Parker plays precocious deftly, reminding one just a little bit of Thomas Brodie-Sangster in Love Actually. (Or maybe I just think all British children are alike.) To make one’s mainstream debut (setting aside Robot Overlords, of which I hadn’t so much as heard) opposite two giants like McKellen and Linney is one thing, but to hold your own is something else entirely. Parker provides the biggest laughs in the film, as well as the most emotional moments when we see what constitutes growing up in a home with Holmes.

Perhaps the thing that surprised me the most was the pronounced lack of action in Mr. Holmes. Obviously, we wouldn’t expect rousing fight choreography from a septuagenarian playing a nonagenarian, but the big screen Sherlock has of late been something of a master martial artist, but Condon’s treatment is much more contemplative, much more sensitive than the casual (or careless) snark of RDJ and Cumberbatch. Consequently, the film has an air not of melancholy but of introspection, mirrored quite well by the film’s balance of three distinct timelines which unfold and interweave to address all the unfinished business of Holmes’s life.

Mr. Holmes is a quieter Sherlock Holmes film than that to which we are accustomed of late, but it’s in the vein of what we might call “traditionally British” – the same as what Eddie Izzard satirized as “room with a view with a pond and a staircase.” I don’t recall a pond, but there is still the same serenity in Mr. Holmes, something very calming amid the otherwise blockbuster summer season. And at the center of it all is a very wonderful performance by Ian McKellen, one which ought to be seen by any self-professed admirers of the great detective.

Mr. Holmes is rated PG for “thematic elements, some disturbing images and incidental smoking.” There is mention of miscarried pregnancy, bee stings, and loneliness; Holmes discusses smoking pipes and cigars.

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

Are we still in the first Golden Age of comic book films?  Or, post-Avengers, are we seeing a renaissance of comic book movies that wrestle with heavy thematic material in the way that previously only Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight Trilogy” had?  I suspect the latter, though the X-Men franchise has always used the mutant metaphor to wrestle with issues of tolerance and persecution.  With Days of Future Past, the seventh (seventh!) film in the series, though, X-Men kicks it up a few notches for one of the better outings in the series.

While former enemies Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellan) have united against the threat of mutant-exterminating Sentinel robots, they send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) into the past to 1973 to unite their younger selves (James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender) against the path to dystopia:  if Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) kills the Sentinels’ creator Bolivar Trask (an inspired casting choice in the form of Peter Dinklage), the future is doomed.

Days of Future Past is equal parts sequel (to The Wolverine’s post-credits sequence and to First Class), prequel, and timey-wimey reboot, and with two principal casts working the same plot in two timelines, the film very easily could have spiraled out of control – both in terms of runtime and narrative.  But to returning director Bryan Singer’s credit, the film is tighter than that alleyway in Inception’s Mombasa chase scene.  Singer is obviously a fan at heart, and his passion for the project grants him a gifted hand at the wheel.

There is, throughout the film, a very present and nagging sense that much of the time travel in the film is designed to pull two profitable timelines together and, in the process, clean up some of the less popular missteps from films like X-Men Origins: Wolverine and X-Men: The Last Stand.  Fanboys and casual filmgoers alike will not complain there, so long as the film is anchored by a compelling central narrative that feels more like storytelling than like sweeping up.  This is actually a time-honored tradition in comic books, with the richer comics giving us more than just continuity clean-up.  By giving us characters and stakes to care about, Days of Future Past justifies its own existence beyond a simple “pretend those other films never happened” attitude.

Aside from a beat just before the third act begins, Days of Future Past never meanders, never bogs itself down in excess exposition or backstory.  Some of it doesn’t even jive with the past films, but thank heavens the movie doesn’t tie itself to its own inheritance; we know enough to jump into the world without having our hands held, and the filmmakers know it.  (Note to Zack Snyder when it comes to including Batman in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice – we know the origin already.)  Instead, Singer and company cut loose and have fun with the source material.

At times, that fun is a little too juvenile for me, as in the case of the speedster Quicksilver (Evan Peters).  When the casting was announced, it seemed a bit of one-upmanship with Joss Whedon’s Avengers 2, where Peters’s Kick-Ass costar Aaron Taylor-Johnson will be playing the hero.  Peters’s interpretation of Quicksilver is actually quite entertaining, and the special effects used to present his abilities are stunning.  That said, as cool as it is to see a man move quickly enough to reposition a bullet in midair, the beat when he pauses to give an assailant a wedgie is more Ratner than Singer.  It’s an incredibly nitpicky nit to pick, but it’s a poke in the eye during an otherwise winning eyeball kick of a set piece.

As in First Class, the scene stealer is Fassbender’s Magneto, who’s less “early days” McKellan and more of an original stamp on the character as derived from his Holocaust origins.  Lawrence gets a few solid scenes in as the revenge-embittered Mystique – not too far from Magneto, in that respect.  While those two play extensions of their First Class iterations, McAvoy has the harder task by carrying the emotional arc of the film, rebuilding himself out of despair and toward the Patrick Stewart we know he’ll become.

The inevitable sequel X-Men: Apocalype (teased in a nifty stinger) will focus on the First Class cast, which is fine, obviously, plus we’ll probably have Hugh Jackman along for the ride as Wolverine – again, fine.  The part is essentially his by now, and he’s more than earned it.  I hope, though, that we haven’t seen the last of the “classic” cast; seeing Stewart and McKellan and a few other familiar faces reminds us just how spot-on those casting calls were.  In this respect, Days of Future Past is a lot like checking in with old friends while meeting some new ones, and it’s my hope that we don’t walk away from the former as we gain the latter.

X-Men: Days of Future Past doesn’t reinvent the superhero wheel, and it doesn’t transcend the genre into something utterly inspired like Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but it does its job more than capably well.  It’s vastly entertaining and engaging, well-acted and well-crafted.  It doesn’t have the metaphorical depth of past outings like X2, but that depth is supplanted by an emotional one that hooks the audience without preaching to it.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is rated PG-13 for “sequences of intense sci-fi violence and action, some suggestive material, nudity and language.”  There’s plenty of slicing and dicing and exploding and the usual whizz-bang stuff; male rear nudity is seen once, and we get a reference to the F-bomb heard round the world from First Class.

Monday at the Movies - August 6, 2012

Welcome to Week Twenty-Nine of “Monday at the Movies.”  This week I’ll be covering the original X-Men trilogy.  (The prequels will be getting their own post further down the line.)

X-Men (2000) – In many ways, we comic book movie fans owe a lot to Bryan Singer, who demonstrated in this film that the genre was a viable one beyond the self-parody of the Schumacher era.  Singer wisely opts to throw viewers into the midst of the mythology without a lengthy origin sequence; we join Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and Rogue (Anna Paquin) as they meet the X-Men, a group of powerful mutants led by Professor X (Patrick Stewart) in opposition to the evil Magneto (Ian McKellen).  Using Wolverine and Rogue as entry points is genius; diehard fans already love Wolverine, and newcomers will find Jackman one of the more engaging comics-to-film translations.  But the film is populated by fantastic actors – including Halle Berry, who doesn’t do much but does it well – and none are more brilliant than Stewart and McKellen, who as dueling foes are more Shakespeare than Stan Lee (who cameos, by the way – his first in a Marvel movie).  Even James Marsden, who’s usual more milquetoast than Patrick Wilson, proves a good fit as the stick-in-the-mud Cyclops.  As director, Singer does a great job making the soap opera source material accessible and streamlined without sacrificing the emotional complexity of the characters; there are hundreds of X-Men, but Singer picks the big ones and never loses sight of the fact that their interactions are more interesting than the giant machine Magneto builds for the surreal climax of the film.  Above all, this is a film that feels real, that winks not ironically but lovingly at its source material, acknowledging its depth without overloading its audience.

X2:  X-Men United (2003) – Singer proves the rule here with a comic book sequel that is leaps and bounds better than its predecessor (which, if you’ll recall, was no slouch).  Unfettered by the necessity to introduce the characters and their world, Singer dives headlong into the central problem of acceptance by pitting the X-Men against military bureaucrat William Stryker (Brian Cox), whose policy of indiscriminate mutant genocide unites heroes and villains.  Everything successful about the original stands here, as well, turned up to 11; the acting excels, from McKellen as caged animal Magneto to newcomer Cox, whose performance drips sadistic menace with each drawled consonant.  The cast of characters is beefed up a little, but never disproportionately beyond what the film can handle and never without significant narrative and thematic purpose; each addition deepens rather than overfills.  X2, perhaps more than its antecedent, operates on the level of metaphor, something I really want my superhero films to do.  Here the metaphor is on the nature of intolerance, which Singer carries off without being overbearing; in one standout scene, among my favorites in the trilogy, a mutant’s mother asks, “Have you tried not being a mutant?”  It’s an oddly quiet moment in a summer blockbuster, but it’s one that reminds us what’s at stake behind the flash of optic blasts and the snikt of razor claws.  Bonus points for its clever link with Stryker’s abuse of his own mutant son, which reminds us that bigotry isn’t a spectrum.  Even the previous film’s villain recognizes this, and McKellen’s nuanced return is a more than welcome one.

X-Men 3:  The Last Stand (2006) – When Singer stepped aside from his pet franchise to direct Superman Returns, Brett Ratner stepped in.  It’s a series of bad decisions that led to a pair of lackluster films (more on Superman Returns later), which is a shame because there are obvious moments where X-Men 3 is on the right track and other moments when it obviously goes awry.  The introduction of the “mutant cure” is in many ways a perfect end to a trilogy about what to do about heterogeneity, but Ratner seems to overcompensate for getting a shot at the X-Men toy box by cramming the film with scores of new characters who don’t do much at all.  (Ask yourself how many of their names you can remember.)  Worse, the film kills off some of the more interesting characters very early on, presumably to make room for the new faces, but for my money the film never really recovers from (spoiler warning) the death of Professor X.  The film trades in clichés, as when a military drill sergeant is played by R. Lee Ermey or when a character repeats, dead serious, the bromide about a woman scorned.  The climax is among the better action sequences in the trilogy, if only on a purely visceral level; Magneto’s manipulation of the Golden Gate Bridge is a brilliant visual, and the execution of the “fastball special” is as fun on film as it is on panel.  But the film fumbles so much before that point – and butchers the “Dark Phoenix” plotline almost beyond recognition – that X-Men 3 tries to be too much and ultimately never succeeds at being much at all.  The trilogy deserved better.

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

Monday at the Movies - April 23, 2012

Welcome to Week Seventeen of “Monday at the Movies.” We take a break from The Godfather franchise, and – in honor of the impending arrival of Arrested Development, Season 4 – we join director Ron Howard for a controversial book adaptation.

The Da Vinci Code (2006) – I was a bit of a Holy Grail nut in high school, mostly because of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade marathons. I was a fan of Dan Brown’s novel, but I took it with a grain of salt because I never believed in the idea of the grail as a Christological bloodline (the cup is a more compelling and textually supported artifact). With Ron Howard directing the film adaptation, I enjoyed it immensely the first time around, appreciating the combination of Indiana Jones meets National Treasure. But on this most recent rewatch I found myself less enamored with the movie. Here we follow Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon in his move to solve the murder of a Louvre curator, which quickly embroils him in a centuries-old struggle between secret societies over the mystery of the Holy Grail; with Ian McKellen at his side and Alfred Molina against him, it’s a first-rate cast. McKellen in particular was a treat for me since I forgot he was in it, but he imbues Sir Leigh Teabing with enough eccentricity to make the character more than just a flat exposition machine. Unfortunately, the movie relies a lot on extreme leaps of logic that seem to work better in prose; I wasn’t convinced that Hanks was piecing together so much of the puzzle in his head, where the Robert Langdon in my head would have been able. My other major critique of this film is that Ron Howard isn’t an action director, as many of the “intense” action sequences fall flat; he is, however, an expert with jump scenes, as I found myself startled at several moments. But as I recall, many of these grievances are rectified by 2009’s Angels and Demons.

With one Robert Langdon feature down, stay tuned for more reviews of this franchise. But for now, that does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Monday at the Movies - March 26, 2012

Welcome to Week Thirteen of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, we continue a trend that began on this blog three weeks ago and finally conclude a journey nearly a decade in the making.

The Jazz Singer (1927) – First up, another silent film, the third in as many weeks on this site; again, an unintended and unofficial “series” within this series of weekly reviews. While I didn’t enjoy The Jazz Singer as much as The Artist, it was a bit more fast-paced than The Italian and contains a lot of formal innovation on which I can now tell The Artist was riffing. Al Jolson stars as cantor-in-training Jakie Rabinowitz, who reinvents himself as ragtime performer Jack Robin against the wishes of his traditional father (Warner Oland, before his stint as Charlie Chan). But most don’t remember the film for the story, instead focusing on the technical novelty of lip-synchronized audio and the absolutely brilliant self-conscious meta-commentary of Jolson’s big line, “Wait a minute, wait a minute – you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” I’ll voice the same complaint that I’ve had about all three silent flicks thus far; they’re a bit slower than what I’m used to, and in this one especially the conflict between personal success and familial obligation is dragged out a little too long for my tastes. But The Jazz Singer wins points for continually surprising me with the ways it uses audio; while a few moments are obviously just showing off and flexing muscles, most of them seem to be deployed cleverly and with just the right amount of self-reflexivity. And I have to comment on the blackface scenes, since they seem to be the most widely discussed; it’s controversial, sure, but what’s most distressing for me is that the film doesn’t provide a reason for Jack to don the burned cork, leading to a controversy which could distract from what the film seems truly to be about – moving forward.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) – Finally, we come to the end of a long road, more than nine hours long and ten years of doubts and procrastination. The first two of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films were among the inaugural reviews in this series; I was surprised to enjoy Fellowship of the Ring but retained my position that The Two Towers was dull and overlong. With this third installment, Lord of the Rings finishes two and one... in the films’ favor. The Return of the King is exciting and fast-paced, with a lot of plotlines coming to satisfying fruition amid a sense of impending danger, something most action films don’t pull off successfully. The film is, admittedly, overlong, a fact of which it seems to be aware, what with the widely-lampooned “multiple endings” in which the film seems to conclude with a meditation on the nature of endings before starting up again. What comes before, though, is high action, easily the equivalent of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End for this franchise and most likely my favorite installment of this trilogy. The ensemble cast is successful, perhaps more so than in The Two Towers, but the inclusion of characters like Theobard and Faramir even redeem the middle film a bit by validating those plotlines which seemed to meander away from what really mattered. Again, the star performance is from Sean Astin, whose devotion to his friend and to the mission even might moisten a few otherwise dry eyes. All told, I’m glad I saw this thing through, and I’m happy to have been there and back again.

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

Monday at the Movies - January 9, 2012

Welcome to Week Two of "Monday at the Movies." On the docket for this week, four films adapted from popular novels (an unintentional link), including one where The Cinema King reverses a decade-long antipathy toward a particular fantasy film!

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (2011) – I’ve never been overly captivated by the Harry Potter franchise. That is, I’ve never fallen head over heels in love with the movies, but I’ve taken them for what they are – well-done and imaginative but otherwise unremarkable fantasy adaptation films. And this film (affectionately dubbed 7B by myself and others) had to do a lot to win me over, mostly because I couldn’t approve of paying to see it after my now-legendary attempt at a midnight show of 7A. Now that I’ve rented it (for free), I’m ready to say that 7B was a well-done close to the franchise, but I think a lot of reviewers fell over this movie in a dead faint by overstating the film’s good attributes – chief among them a strong cast of England’s Finest (including a great turn from Ralph Fiennes as Lord Voldemort) and exciting action sequences. This is an effective second half of a film, but as a film in its own right 7B doesn’t quite work. There were plenty of moments where the film faltered by standing on its own, including moments where a quick expositional memory jog would have filled in gaps or even moments where the film didn’t clearly articulate what was happening (i.e., the moment when one character dies – but it’s not clear which of two characters). I liked it, and I wouldn’t unsee it, but it didn’t quite live up to the hype. Fans and devotees, though, will gobble this up.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) – Mark it, loyal readers. The Cinema King has to reverse policy. The first time I saw Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the Tolkien series, I fell asleep. After a rousing introduction narrated by Cate Blanchett, the film faltered for me. But after ten years of decrying the film as “The Wizard of Oz without ever actually getting to Oz,” the browbeating of literally everyone else who saw it induced me to give it a second shot. And honestly, I’m kind of glad I did. Fellowship is much more exciting then I remember, with plenty of great cast members and a plethora of well-directed rousing battle scenes. I’ve also tried reading the Tolkien novels, but those I find completely impenetrable because the story takes a backseat to the mythology and the linguistics; fortunately, Jackson makes knowledge of each creature’s name nonessential and wisely prizes the narrative and character interactions. The best of these is Sean Astin’s level-red dedication to and compassion for his friend Frodo (Elijah Wood, who’s nowhere near as amiable as his traveling companion). I was glad that I opted to rewatch this film and moved toward the second one with eager anticipation.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) – After a good experience with the first film, I was incredibly disappointed with The Two Towers. Here is the glacial pace I remember, the problems of divergent focus, the not-much-happening mood pervading most of the whole film. After a promising first installment, the Lord of the Rings franchise starts to fall apart for me. Where the first film had strong character interaction, here Peter Jackson loses track of many of his key players every so often without a thematic link to bind them together. The film’s only significant action sequence comes at the end, much like in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End; here, though, the two hours of buildup are nowhere near intriguing enough to merit a three-hour runtime. While new characters Gollum and the Ents are entertaining and well-performed, they’re not given much to do other than tease things to come in the third installment. And my problems with Frodo continue here; he’s generally unlikeable, frequently misled, and more than a bit condescending. And a closing monologue about the nature of endings alludes to the problems of this film as a story – there isn’t one. But the promise of an ending is enough, I believe me, to do something I never thought I'd do - watch the third film.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) – Knowledge of the cast alone (Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, Mark Strong, and John Hurt) was enough for me to pick up the John le Carré novel before even seeing a trailer, and I’m pleased to report that the film lives up to the book’s reputation and does a classy, thorough job of adapting the source material. Gary Oldman plays the uber-collected mole-hunter George Smiley, pursuing a double agent at the top of British intelligence during the height of the Cold War. The performances here are solid, as expected, although the atypical nature of this spy story (nothing blows up, and more relies on what is not said than what is actually done) might alienate some. Additionally, the plot is obtuse, although like Inception the right amount of mental calisthenics will prevent audiences from getting too lost in the details. But director Tomas Alfredson does an extremely solid job creating a very 1970s vibe throughout the whole movie, juggling flashbacks and multiple settings with great visual cues (such as the color of Smiley’s trademark specs). If Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy doesn’t net Oldman the Oscar he’s deserved for so many years, it might be time to hang it up as far as the little gold man is concerned.

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