Wesley and Fred, together at last!
Seriously, in a world where romantic comedies are either R-rated sexfests or direct-to-video beneath-my-notice nice tries, how many true romantic comedies are the studios releasing theatrically per year now? Two? Maybe three? Of which I see zero per year at most. According to my personal moviegoing records, the last romantic comedy I paid to see writ large was 2003’s Down with Love. It’s been a while.
Honest truth as of this evening: Midlife Crisis Crossover calls Monsters University “the Best Film of the Year”! So far. Yes, the year is young. Proclamation subject to change without notice, possibly during Oscar preseason.
Seriously, though: looking back at my last several summer action blockbuster spectacular experiences, this Disney/Pixar reboot of Revenge of the Nerds requires less forgiveness of plot holes; boasts characterization truer to the original cast; doesn’t overwrite wide-scale urban destruction with perfunctory offscreen-slapdash-reconstruction happy ending; refuses to play bait-and-switch with its antagonists; and, like Toy Story 3, is a surprisingly top-notch sequel with its own topic to explore rather than acting as a hollow, superfluous extension of the original.
In Part One of this two-part non-epic, I covered what I liked best about Man of Steel, the new Superman treatment from director Zack Snyder, producer Christopher Nolan, and screenwriter David S. Goyer. As I mentioned there, despite the team’s successes on numerous fronts, I thought the film had room for improvement.
Those examples require a courtesy spoiler alert because a few of my complaints happen toward the film’s back end and involve major plot points. If you plan to see it pristine and unspoiled for yourself, abandon the reading trail here, and I look forward to seeing you next time.
…
…
Onward, then, to what I liked least:
After seeing Man of Steel today, that sweeping statement occurred to me and required two minutes’ worth of thought to confirm. It helps that I’ve seen all six of director Zack Snyder’s feature films to date, even the animated ones.
Of the other five: Dawn of the Dead was not bad for what it was — arguably his second-best, but not quite essential. 300 broke visual ground and set new standards for faithfulness in graphic-novel-to-movie adaptations, but makes me snicker in a few extraordinarily hammy spots. I’m glad someone finally adapted Watchmen so we could all say it’s been done and move on with our lives, but its brazen attempt to do for super-hero movies what the original miniseries did for super-hero comics didn’t have nearly the same intellectual impact or coherence. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole admirably demonstrated the visual techniques of 300 for an all-ages audience, but was incomprehensible unless you’d read the entire book series beforehand and could spot the dozens of pages’ worth of vital backstory that was excised for the big screen. (Thankfully my son was a fan and explained the crucial omissions.) And Sucker Punch was a skeevy, disjointed orphanage for outlandish sci-fi skirmishes that had apparently wandered away from the nonexistent movies that spawned them.
In comparison to the rest of the Snyder oeuvre, Man of Steel stands tall as his boldest achievement yet.
Superman doesn’t like it when someone ruins his story. (Art by Dave Gibbons from 1985’s Superman Annual #11.)
I’ve shunned Twitter’s outbreak of Man of Steel discussion groups. I’ve refused to read any reviews, whether they carry a courtesy spoiler alert or not. I’m even temporarily resisting the urge to read what I understand from several sources (while held at arm’s length, mind you) is a fascinating dissection of the movie by Superman: Birthright writer Mark Waid, a generally awesome comics creator who’s also one of the universe’s most devout Superman fans. Someday I’d love to read his thoughts, but it won’t be this moment.
The trailers for Now You See Me telegraph up front that you should expect a twist along the way. You’re teased and beguiled by the possibility of having the wool pulled over your eyes, and taunted for daring to look too closely. Sooner or later, this movie swears it will fool you.
It’s no spoiler, then, to reveal that yes, the movie does eventually have a twist. Despite the fancy stage-magician trappings, its base template is the heist-film genre, in which the viewer’s homework assignment is trying to guess which character will be revealed as a mole or a double-crosser by the end. In that sense, the genre expectations are fulfilled here, including the part where that big revelation turns several previous scenes into utter nonsense if you retrace your steps and rethink them too deeply.
The last time my family went to the theater, the ads that ran from the film’s scheduled showtime until the moment the feature presentation began spanned over twenty minutes. Many of the ads were movie trailers, but not all of them. Ads for new cars, smartphones, TV shows, and soft drinks are routine pre-show entertainment while you’re settling into your seat, mentally preparing yourself for temporary phone deprivation, swapping notes with your companions, and consuming your snack too early. Even when it’s ostensibly showtime, the commercial parade isn’t over yet, because a lot of manufacturers want a moment of your time, in exchange for keeping your theater in business.
According to a Hollywood Reporter article this week, the National Assocation of Theater Owners have decided that movie studios are taking advantage of your presence, and it’s all their fault that your time is being wasted. Obviously the owners can’t simply run fewer spots, because then here comes the poorhouse. To that end, NATO members are demanding an amended guideline limiting trailers to a maximum of two minutes, slashed from the current 2½-minute boundary.
We can infer from various statements in that THR article that owners believe this will reduce the length of the pre-show, instead of giving them latitude to run even more ads that eat up the same allotted minutes. They believe that it would be harder for shorter trailers to give away the entire movie, apparently forgetting that most romantic comedies can be boiled down to their primal essence in twelve seconds flat. They seem to think the current limit is a recent abuse of creative power, somehow unaware that trailers in the ’40s and other nostalgic decades could occasionally run well past the three-minute mark, sometimes spooling entire scenes instead of mere quick-cut snippets.
Does Benedict Cumberbatch’s new entourage stand a chance against hordes of delighted Sherlock groupies?
(Courtesy spoiler alert: the following segment takes place roughly 100 minutes into Iron Man 3, give or take a repartee exchange. Proceed at your own risk.)
[Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., is somewhere far away from espionage — somewhere therapeutic, idyllic, free from strife and warfare and stimulation. Let’s say a random hotel bar in Charleston, West Virginia. Fury is required by company guidelines to take a vacation at least once every ten years. S.H.I.E.L.D. agents may consider most HR guidelines a joke, but HR wins one out of every 1,000 battles. Mandatory decennial vacations was one of them. Saving the world may be a 24/7/365/eternal vocation, but Fury for once has drink in hand and nothing on his mind but sweet, rare solitude.
His eye is fixed on his Product Placement Phone lying on the tabletop. Predator is streaming via Product Placement MovieStreamCloud App thing.]
FURY: Man, I haven’t watched this in ages. The scrawny, four-eyed guy is even stupider than I remember.
[The worst scene in the movie is interrupted by the S.H.I.E.L.D. Priority Alpha Mega Alpha One Supreme Alert shrieking-HD-klaxon app. Fury sighs and taps the SPAMOSA icon. Agent Dodge, a relative nobody of an underling, is on the other line.]
NICK FURY: You just lost two pay grades.
Tony Stark and his sidekick, the Bot Wonder.
As with most big-budget sci-fi films nowadays, many viewers will spend half the running time of the new Tom Cruise vehicle Oblivion mentally tallying how many refurbished components they recognize from other sci-fi flicks. That doesn’t automatically make the film bad in my book, but it can be a pervasive distraction that turns my viewing experience into one long Highlights for Children puzzle. (Score one point for every borrowed element you spot! If you spot ten or more, you’re a Certified Movie Maven!) Oblivion is the second feature film from Joseph Kosinski, the director of Tron: Legacy, which was a visual wonderland and a surprisingly classy act considering it was a Disney sequel to a film I’ve disliked since I was ten.
You’ve seen the newest trailer for Man of Steel that was just released Tuesday evening, right? The one labeled as “Trailer #3”, with lots more Jor-El in it? At least once?
No? Really? No one mentioned it in your social circles? Do you believe in watching movie trailers online? Is your Internet connection above 56K? You don’t hate super-hero movies, do you? Not that I wouldn’t respect that, mind you. My oldest relatives aren’t super-hero fans, either. I’ve included it at the end of this entry, just in case. See, I even saved you a few seconds of Googling.
Once again our old friend the White House is humiliated, this time in G.I. Joe: Retaliation.
One of my least favorite moments in college was sitting in an intense English class and concentrating on maintaining a straight face while a classmate explained his theory of how the scene from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Morgue” in which a gorilla stuffs a victim up a chimney somehow, in his mind, represented a return-to-the-womb motif. I have no idea how he thought that related to the rest of the story at all. After the few first few sentences my mind turned to white noise in self-defense.
This evening I had flashbacks to that moment while watching Rodney Ascher’s thought-provoking new documentary Room 237, an examination of hidden meanings in Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel The Shining. Whether you hated or loved either or both, few would accuse Kubrick of taking a slapdash approach to the project, regardless of the lengthy list of differences between it and the book. Room 237 is narrated by five Shining enthusiasts: ABC News war correspondent Bill Blakemore; playwright/novelist Juli Kearns; author/conspiracy theorist Jay Weidner; history professor Geoffrey Cocks; and Excepter frontman John Fell Ryan. Each one has their own interpretation of the recurring motifs and subliminal imagery buried in the mix, all adding up to a grand design on Kubrick’s part in their minds. The nature of that grand design, though, varies wildly by viewer…very wildly, in this case.
photo credit: Articulate MediaWorks via photopin cc
I can’t remember what impressionable age I was when I first encountered their popular syndicated movie-review series Siskel & Ebert at the Movies. Our local affiliates sometimes aired it on Saturday afternoons, sometimes in the dead of night, and occasionally found it useful for filling any programming holes outside primetime. I’d never seen anything like it; thirty minutes of two movie fans sitting in a deserted theater balcony and telling viewers whether they thought the latest movies were good or bad. It sounded like a dull concept for a TV show. I could imagine the fun if they were brandishing weapons, but just sitting there? Talking? Why?
We saw the White House blow up in Independence Day. We saw it blow up again in 2012. As I type this it’s being blown up yet again in theaters in Olympus Has Fallen. Add your own memories here of the White House’s repetitive history of exploding again and again and again at the movies, whether at the hands of terrorists, invaders, or bad weather.
Now add one more death scene to the list, as director Roland Emmerich, the White House’s arch-nemesis, has directed yet another film in which the poor, beleaguered establishment takes a discouraging beating for entertainment’s sake. In the trailer for Emmerich’s new film White House Down, the President’s workspace is targeted neither by aliens nor by Mother Nature. This time the bombs are coming from inside the country:
As unimpressed as I was with the trailer, The Croods turned out to be an unexpected delight, with a sincere message for parents who want to protect their children from the world, but struggle with the knowledge that someday that job won’t be theirs anymore. (Says the nervous guy counting down the days until his son begins college.)
This judge handed down the guilty verdict. Clearly this is all his fault. LET’S GET HIM.
We can read about the verdict in the now-infamous Steubenville trial, in which two high school football players have been convicted of rape in a juvenile court, much to the consternation of local football fans, bookies, rape advocates, and anyone who treats sports as their church of choice. Sidebar: the victim probably remains traumatized, possibly even sad. Local newshounds have been unable to confirm if she’s allowed the incident to affect her views on this year’s draft or on March Madness.
As of this weekend, I can now say I’ve seen every full-length motion picture directed to date by Christoper Nolan. In December 2012 his debut, Following, earned a Criterion Collection re-release. Shot in 1998 in 16mm black-and-white, it was minimally restored for this edition, with the original aspect ratio and much of the old-media grittiness retained for historical verisimilitude. Its seventy speedy minutes contain an amateur no-star cast (as well as crowds of unwitting “extras” captured on the fly) and were shot for just five thousand dollars, a bargain compared to other self-financed B&W debut films from the same decade (e.g., Kevin Smith’s Clerks, Robert Rodriguez’ El Mariachi). With such budgetary constraints and no established names involved in the creative process, a casual browser would expect Following to feel like a young-adult vanity project fit only for YouTube.
Shame on that casual browser, then, with so little faith in the Nolan brand name. Continue reading
File Photos Guaranteed Not to be Used on Anyone Else’s Veronica Mars Article #49: the time she went undercover as a gamer.
I later caught up with the DVDs and stuck with the show to the bitter end, by which I mean I was bitter. Eventually I moved on, but I’m not opposed to revisiting Veronica’s world if the occasion warrants.
The March 22nd issue of Entertainment Weekly summarizes creator Rob Thomas’ planned premise:
Set a decade after the show’s third and final season, the plot has Veronica returning to her hometown of Neptune, Calif., after much schooling (a bachelor’s from Stanford; a Columbia Law School degree) when she gets a distress call from ex-boyfriend Logan: His pop-star girlfriend has been murdered, and he’s the prime suspect.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 