Despicable Me (2010)

Supervillains, as everyone knows, are indispensable. Without them, superheroes wouldn't have much to do, except maybe wait around for random natural disasters to occur. Without supervillains, superhero and spy movies would be kind of boring. Just imagine Batman without the Joker, or Spider-Man without Doctor Octopus or James Bond without Goldfinger. As it turns out, however, superheroes are not indispensable, at least not in Despicable Me, a movie that pits supervillain against supervillain in a battle to be baddest. 

The Me in Despicable Me would be Gru, a meanie with a long, pointy nose and no forehead. He wears turtlenecks and speaks (via funnyman Steve Carell) with a vaguely Eastern European accent. His underground lair is in the sub-basement of his suburban home. Gru has Mommy issues, thanks to his disapproving mother (Julie Andrews), who never thought he would amount to much. "Ehhhhh" she says, no matter what he does. Gru's minions, however, worship him. They're little yellow guys who look like supersized jellybeans, with blue overalls and either one or two eyes. They chirp and twitter and manage to goof up whatever task they've been assigned, which does not help Gru with his plans to be numero uno evil mastermind. Neither does he get much assistance from his partner in crime, the ancient Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand). What really gets his knickers in a twist, though, is when a newbie supervillain named Vector (Jason Segel) steals the Great Pyramid of Giza, thereby becoming the world's greatest villain. Gru's plan to retake the mantle of villainy is to steal something even bigger: the moon.

His plan is excessively complicated, as supervillain plans frequently are, and involves adopting three adorable orphans. Why? Because they sell the cookies that Vector can't resist, of course (and blah blah robots, blah blah shrink ray, blah blah...). The moppets are Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), the smart one, Edith (Dana Gaier), the tomboy, and little Agnes (Elsie Fisher), who loves unicorns like crazy. They live in a Dickensian orphanage run by Miss Hattie (Kristen Wiig), so they're pretty happy to be adopted, even if it's by a persnickety, curmudgeonly weirdo like Gru. Will these cute girls melt Gru's hard ol' villainous heart and turn him into a superdad? Faster than you can say 3-D rollercoaster ride.

Despicable Me is the first feature film from animation house Illumination Entertainment, and was helmed by a pair of French directors, Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud. It's a kitchen sink production -- everything is in there. Cute kids. Slapstick minions. Sharks, nerds, ray guns, rockets, amusement parks, orphans, sight gags, funny accents, funny voices, elderly people, some heartstring plucking, all in glorious 3D. Well, the 3D is no more glorious than usual, except for that rollercoaster ride, which is almost authentic enough to make  your stomach flip flop. There's surely an untapped market for 3D Imax movies of rollercoaster rides -- perfect for those who want the thrills without the long lines and death defying. I'd like a 3D surfing movie too, please.

Despicable Me is perfect for those who want a movie with a little bit of everything, but not a lot of anything. It's hectic and colorful, intermittently cute and fitfully funny, and it works really, really hard to please. It's passably entertaining, but doesn't leave a lasting impression. Gru's mom would surely give it an "Ehhhhh."

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)

The Twilight Saga isn't shy about drawing literary parallels. In New Moon, the second movie in this apparently unstoppable franchise based on Stephanie Meyer's best-selling books, it was Romeo and Juliet. Hey, if you're gonna aim, might as well aim high, right? Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), the 109 year old teenage vampire, and his beloved Bella (Kristen Stewart) watch Romeo and Juliet in their English Lit class. Later Edward tries to kill himself when he thinks Bella is dead. But she isn't. And then he isn't. Well, technically he is, but apparently there's dead and there's really dead when you're a vampire. But if you're gonna go all Shakespearean, you'd better be willing to kill off your heroes and heroines (even the undead ones), which is one thing The Twilight Saga will not (at least not yet) do. Romeo and Juliet might have ended tragically, but New Moon was a bummer from start to finish. The major crisis was instigated by Bella getting a paper cut. (I'll admit that's pretty original. Shakespeare never used the paper cut as plot device.) Never has love made so many so unhappy for so long. Never have paper cuts been so deadly. (Twilight the first, on the other hand, was a hoot -- even if it was unintentionally funny.)

Which brings us to The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, in which Edward and Bella continue to be desperately in love, and Bella remains wary of sharp envelopes. (No, not really. Not the envelope part.) But Bella's getting more desperate by the minute, weary, perhaps, of this extended exercise in delayed gratification. Even if Edward is immune to teenage hormones (an apparent perk of being undead), Bella is still human, so she isn't. Such is Bella's love (and lust) for Edward that she wishes to be made a vampire. Such is Edward's love for Bella, that he wants her to be spared from undead immortality. Methinks the boy's got a point.

Part of Bella's problem might be that teen wolf pal of hers, Jacob (Taylor Lautner). Jacob is desperately in love with Bella, so much so that he has apparently misplaced all of his shirts. He's tan and buff and warmblooded. Edward is pale and sparkly and cold as the grave, but fully clothed. Poor Bella -- so many choices. Which is why she is reciting Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice" to Edward as the movie begins. In a sunny meadow filled with wildflowers. With Edward wearing a shirt and sparkling in the sunlight as vampires do in Twilight world. I'd bet good money Frost never imagined his poem being read in quite those circumstances.

In addition to practicing abstinence (if that's something one can actually practice), Twilight steadfastly hews to the law of narrative economy -- there are no Macguffins in Twilight, no poem is recited and no Native American legend is recounted that will not figure later in the movie. And so, bitter rivals Jacob and Edward (aka Fire and Ice) face some choices in Eclipse too, for someone has raised up a vampire army to slay Bella. The vampire army is made up of "newborns," newly-minted vampires who are the most vicious and bloodthirsty vampires of all. Bella must be saved, for if Twilight is anything, it is an old-fashioned damsel in distress story, and Bella is the damsel, and she's in distress... again. She's in all kinds of distress, of course, because what Bella wants most is what is most dangerous of all: sex. That her two would-be beaus are both monsters who must suppress their wild natures and appetites for the sake of love is the simmering subtext behind everything that happens in The Twilight Saga, and, I suspect, its main appeal. Twilight is all about the safe sex, which is no sex at all. (Edward refuses, being the courtly, marriage-minded guy that he is, telling Bella, vaguely, that it is too dangerous.) And yet Bella is, it becomes quite clear, a tease. There's a word for the particular type of tease she is, and I bet that word never appears in the chaste Twilight books. 

The two rivals for Bella's undying affection must join forces to protect her from the crazy killer baby vampires, which makes Eclipse the best Twilight movie ever. Which may be damning with faint praise, but it's really not bad. 

Direrctor David Slade (who made the fast and furious vampire movie 30 Days of Night), has taken the mopey, morose, swoony Twilight Saga and given it a lusty, vital shot in the arm with competent, energetic directing. There's a lot more action, a lot more romantic comedy, and the characters actually show some personality, all of which is good. Fun, fighting, people doing stuff, vampires doing stuff, personality -- all good things in a movie. There's more violence, more feeling, and for the first time, a sense of what is at stake for Bella -- not just what she hopes to gain by her transformation into Edward's eternal one and only, but also all that she stands to lose. In making that more manifest, the movie also (finally!) starts to account for the devotion between Edward and Bella. It was just a given before, but the two of them were always so miserable (although admittedly more miserable apart than together) that it was never clear why their romance was worth the candle. There's still a fair bit of trademark Twilight silliness in Eclipse too -- strike a pose, you vampy vampires! -- although it feels a bit more like the cast are in on the joke this time around. At any rate, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is a movie that actually aims to entertain, and it mostly succeeds.

05Jul2010

Knight and Day (2010)

Why is this movie called Knight and Day? The knight part makes sense -- it's the real name of superspy Roy Miller (Tom Cruise), who, early in the movie, picks up a knight figurine from an airport gift shop. And Miller is a kind of a knight in body armor to June (Cameron Diaz). That's June Haven. Nobody in the movie is called Day. And while a goodly portion of the movie takes place in daylight, and on assorted days, the same is true of many movies that do *not* have Day (or Knight) in the title. The only logical explanation is that someone was taken with the punny possibilities of calling a movie Knight and Day, and forgot to include a Day. But Hard Day's Knight, or Knight Moves, or several other possibilities would have made more sense. The porn movie based on Knight and Day will probably be called Long Day's Journey into Knight. You heard it here first.

Maybe the nonsensical title is meant to be a MacGuffin, but once you get past thinking about who the heck Day is, Knight and Day is rather fun and enjoyable. The movie aims to combine the contemporary action-spy film and the romantic thriller-mystery movies of the forties and fifties. Sort of. It more or less succeeds, although the romantic part never convincingly gets off the ground, and the thriller-mystery stuff takes a back seat to the cars-flying, bullets-flying, helicopter-and-jetliner-flying, bulls-runnning action. Lots of things fly in Knight and Day, and lots of things crash too. The movie, in true spy movie fashion, hops the globe, and lands in Pamplona just as those bulls start a-running. It also goes to Austria, Boston, California, and the Azores via various motorized conveyances. The body count is quite high, although the movie is generally bloodless, and most of the casualties involve various anonymous peons of various bad guys.

Roy may or may not be a rogue spy, and he may or may not be crazy. Cruise, for all that he lacks as a thespian, does crazy pretty well, with manic eyes and a toothy grin that immediately set him apart as the go-to guy for crazy-but-competent running about and carrying on. He even says, at one point in the movie, "I'm the guy." Yes, he's the guy. Roy bumps into June -- she's the gal -- in Wichita, where she is trying to catch a plane home to Boston for her sister's wedding. June restores vintage American cars, for what it's worth. Several dead bodies and a plane crash later, June is being pursued by either the CIA or an arms dealer, or both, and also by Roy, who may or may not be a good guy who is trying to protect her from the bad guys. Roy is also trying to protect a nerdy scientist (Paul Dano) who has invented some kind of super-duper energy source. Maybe. 

It doesn't really matter. Roy has a mission, there are bad guys, and some top secret thingie that must be kept safe. What works about Knight and Day is that the movie is pretty much implausible from start to finish, but nobody ever pretends otherwise. Realism is not what this movie's about. It's about a guy who can dispatch his enemies with maximal efficiency while simultaneously trying to reassure his increasingly hysterical hostage and/or protectee June that things are not as bad as they seem in spite of all the bullets and bombs and assassins and crash-landings. Roy's a real chatterbox, which is a most unexpected character trait in a superspy-assassin type. He's like Jason Bourne played by Cary Grant -- all talk, all action. June, for her part, holds up her end of the increasingly absurd conversation, although why she sticks with Roy when to do so is to live in mortal peril is... well, there's no reason she should, but if she didn't, this would be an entirely different movie, so it's just as well. There's nonstop banter in the script by Patrick O'Neill, and it sets Knight and Day apart from the action pack. There could have been more talk, and less action, but director James Mangold manages to juggle both the snappy patter and the hectic crashings and smashings and maintain the movie's sense of humor. In addition to laying on a thick base layer of chatter, the movie has fun elbowing all kinds of spy movie conventions in the ribs. Speedboats? Check. Parachutes? Check. Motorcycle chase? Got it. Mysterious meetings in narrow alleyways in Salzburg? It's in there. Post-it notes? Yup.

Knight and Day is fun, which is something spy movies usually are not. They can be cool, and intriguing, and exciting, and insightful. Knight and Day is not really any of those things. It has stuff that's sort of exciting and there's a little bit of mystery, but that's not the stuff that really matters. And the romantic part of the romantic comedy gets waylaid, because Roy and June are not very convincing as sweethearts -- they seem decidedly undecided about the whole thing. But that might just be the secret of their success -- they kind of grow on each other, and on the audience too.

1Jul2010

Toy Story 3 (2010)

The delight of the Toy Story movies has always been that they take very seriously the childhood belief in the realness, the genuine being of toys. Toys have adventures, and complicated lives, and do fantastic things, and can go anywhere that the fertile mind of a child can imagine (and to infinity... and beyond). But a toy also has a precarious existence. One day, you're shiny and new, and the next day, you're broken, or relegated to the depths of the toy box. You might be the favorite one day, only to be replaced by the latest, greatest thing again and again. And eventually, your child outgrows you, and you're kicked to the curb, sold at a yardsale, stowed in the attic. Or worse.

And so, the Toy Story saga is poignant because of the impermanence of a toy's life, and the sorrow and heartache that comes with attachment. That theme was explored with richness and emotional complexity in Toy Story 2, and it is more or less reiterated in Toy Story 3, although this time everything is a little darker, and grimmer.

The peril for Andy's toys in Toy Story 3 is that Andy (voiced by John Morris, who has been Andy for 15 years) is going away to college. Mom (Laurie Metcalf) has delivered an edict: everything must go. It's either the box bound for college, the box for the attic, the donations for the daycare center, or the trashcan. Andy's perennial favorite Woody (Tom Hanks) is ready for college, but through a mishap, the other toys -- Buzz Lightyear, Jessie the Cowgirl, Hamm the piggybank, Rex the dinosaur, Slinky Dog, and Mr and Mrs Potato Head -- end up at the Sunnyside Daycare Center. There, they are greeted warmly by the resident toys, including their leader, a purple bear named Lotso-Huggin' Bear (Ned Beatty), and the creepy, sad, droopy-eyed doll Baby. Lotso promises an idyllic life of play and leisure. Just what every toy wants. 

Life isn't as sunny as it seems at Sunnyside, however, especially after the newcomers are assigned to the toddler room where horrible things are done to toys. And then it gets worse, as they discover that Lotso runs a sort of fascist prison camp for toys. Lotso is a good toy turned bad, a broken bear embittered when he was, long ago, replaced with a newer model.

Lotso changes the mood and the stakes in the Toy Story 'verse in a way that is not especially welcome. He's a genuinely mean, depraved toy, not just a play nemesis, and he threatens the very existence of Andy's beloved (if neglected) playthings. While the movie remains playful, having fun with classic prison escape movie tropes and bringing a punny and literal *deus ex machina* in to save the day, the tone of the story is darker and the peril has been amped up. I guess I can't stand to see a toy in mortal danger, because I found Toy Story 3 less enjoyable than the previous two movies, and occasionally even unpleasant.

All of that is, I suppose, part and parcel with taking toys seriously. But just what are we taking seriously here? Toys are real because they are animated by a child's love and freed from mere thinghood by the life breathed into them by their little creators. They come to life, as do we all, at their peril, for life is treacherous and full of sorrow, full of leavings and returnings, but also full of joy and laughter and fun. Toys get old, as do we all, and must face their own kind of mortality. In Toy Story 2, Woody was forced to choose between sterile immortality in a museum, and his loyalty to Andy, and the messy, temporal love of a fickle child. My objection to Toy Story 3, I suppose, comes down to this -- the existential crisis of toy being, as eloquently and poignantly depicted in the previous movies, is not literal annihilation, but the loss of meaning, the loss of significance, the indignity of being forgotten and unloved. (Arguably, this is also the existential crisis of human beings -- not death itself, but the loss of everything else that is valuable to us.) Toy Story 3 threatens the toys with literal extermination at the same time that they wrestle with all the other losses that come with being the playthings of a grown up child. Which is to say that Toy Story 3 rehashes the major theme of Toy Story 2, and then adds an element of additional (trumped up) danger that is, frankly, kind of cliched. It stops being uniquely about the toy experience (and the unusual perils of toyhood, and the toy's eye view of the world), and more about the kinds of experiences that characters in action-adventure movies have. Toy Story 3 is less emotionally resonant and satisfying because it is less about how toys are us, and more about how toys are just a filmmaker's playthings.

21June2010

The Karate Kid (2010)

The main challenge for Jackie Chan in The Karate Kid, a remake of the venerated1984 movie, is not to replace Pat Morita's Mr. Miyagi. No, the challenge is to fight with kids without ever striking kids. This is something that Chan, who specializes in creative and humorous kung fu fight sequences, manages quite handily by getting those kids -- the movie's kung fu fighting bullies -- to hit each other, get tangled up in their own clothing, and fall down with just a little non-contact assistance from the stealth master.

The kid this time around is Dre Parker (Jaden Smith), a Detroit kid whose mother (Taraji P. Henson) is transferred to Beijing. The culture shock is bad enough, but Dre quickly becomes the target of Cheng (Wang Zhenwei), the star pupil of a kung fu academy whose curriculum appears designed primarily to create bullies and fascists. After Dre befriends Meiying (Han Wenwen), an aspiring violinist, Cheng and his gang make Dre's life miserable with regular beatings. Then Mr. Han (Chan), the gruff, shuffling handyman for Dre's apartment building steps in. He fends off the bad guys with some inventively nonviolent defensive maneuvers and eventually challenges Cheng and his headmaster to a very public duel at a kung fu tournament.

And, true to the original movie (except that the karate is replaced by kung fu), Mr. Han begins training Dre in an unconventional and, to the kid, annoyingly baffling manner. Mr. Miyagi had his young pupil waxing a car with the memorable "Wax on, wax off." Mr. Han waxes his own car (in a nod to the original) and makes Dre take his jacket on and off, on and off so that he might learn both the ways of kung fu and practical household skills. "Take your jacket off, hang it up, put your jacket on" doesn't have quite the ring to it that "Wax on, wax off" had, so it's not likely to become a cultural meme. But Mr. Han and Dre also climb picturesque mountains, visit exotic monasteries, and practice on the Great Wall. The movie, directed by Harald Zwart and filmed in China, develops a nice sense of place, plopping Dre and his mother into the hustle and bustle of Beijing's busy streets, lively parks, and active rooftops. The movie takes advantage of the exotic locales to enhance Dre's sense of cultural isolation, and to give the story some added authenticity. It also firmly locates The Karate Kid within the Asian martial arts movie tradition. The Karate Kid is not so much a nostalgia trip as a restaging in a more traditional location -- the original movie was already a remake of traditional Asian martial arts movies, repackaged by Hollywood for an American audience, and following the classic plotline in which an unlikely hero is challenged and defeated, masters kung fu, and is honorably redeemed in battle (after suffering a near-repeat defeat).

The Karate Kid is funny and charming, and takes advantage of Chan's penchant for deadpan, stonefaced humor (but also lets him display his acting chops for a change). Smith is just cute as a button -- I predict the kid will be a big star, and since The Karate Kid is a bilingual Chinese-American production, it will get him noticed by those billions of Asian moviegoers who already adore Chan. The level of violence in the movie is just right for youngsters -- no blood, no death, but Dre does get pounded pretty hard more than a few times. Lessons are learned, tears are shed, and Dre, a fatherless boy, gains a father figure while Han, a sonless father, gains a son. Most importantly, the bullies learn a thing or two about fairness, honor, and respect. 

At more than two hours, the movie is just a wee bit long for kids who haven't yet mastered the focus and stillness that Master Han imparts to Dre. But it's consistently fun and entertaining, and offers a spoonful of pop enlightenment too.

14June2010

Splice (2010)

The murky-yucky opening credits of Splice give a hint as to what's next: Something icky this way comes. A modern day Frankenstein, Splice is a sci fi horror hybrid, kind of like the chimerical creature at the center of this parable of science run amok. Splice plays on the fears of genetic tinkering, but also explores scientific hubris, bad parenting, and corporate science in a smart, creepy, disturbing film.

Elsa (Sarah Polley) and Clive (Adrien Brody) are genetic engineers. (Their names are playful allusions to Elsa Lanchester and Colin Clive, two stars of James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein.) They work for a pharmaceutical company, experimenting with gene splicing to create hybrid lifeforms whose enzymes, it is hoped, will lead to new drugs for humanity's ills. They're passionate about their work, and also about the slug-like Fred and Ginger, their squirmy, gooey, living laboratories. Fred and Ginger look more like enormous inside-out slugs than garden variety slugs, but to Elsa and Clive, they are things of beauty. And to the world, Elsa and Clive are rock star scientists -- they've been on the cover of Wired magazine. But when their corporate masters threaten to pull the plug on their work, an ill-conceived plan is hatched -- they create a human chimera, a mix of human and "other" DNA. Just what that other DNA is remains a mystery, but the resulting lifeform, H-50,  looks like a fetal rabbit crossed with a naked chicken, with a little scorpion mixed in for good measure. Kind of cute, but also kind of icky. H-50 grows up fast, eventually becomes more humanoid (she grows arms that can hug her creators), and is renamed Dren (Abigail Chu plays the child Dren, Delphine Chaneac is the adult Dren). Grown up Dren, with her wide-set eyes (and, looking past the persistent cleft in her skull), looks a bit like a young Michelle Pfeiffer, which is to say, pretty darn attractive. As psychological complications go, creating an attractive monster is far worse than creating an ugly one. 

Directed by Vincenzo Natali, a former storyboard artist (who also co-wrote the screenplay), Splice is a terrifically creepy, crazy, provocative, and stylish film. The movie's look is persistently industrial-dreary and grungy, the color pallette dominated by fluorescent blue-greens and dirty browns. Could anything but a monster be born and raised in a world so grimly institutional?

Casting Polley and Brody was inspired -- they are neither one of them ordinary looking, and both are believably tormented by the unexpected development (and literal and figurative growing pains) of their creation. Elsa, especially, views Dren as more than a test-tube experiment, but her maternal impulses are badly warped by her own only hinted-at childhood with her Mommy dearest. As for Dren, she evokes a confusing welter of feelings: dread, revulsion, pity, sympathy, affection, attraction. Dren is a marvelous creation, both technically (she's a seamlessly spliced-together hybrid of different film technologies), and as a character -- she's an imaginatively and fully realized, brand new being.

Splice inspires more shivers and repugnance than outright fear, and the gore is judiciously applied so as to maximize its effect. The visual effects are very fine, and the evocatively shplicky, shloopy, chirpy sound effects add immensely to the  experience of the film. Splice is an intelligent movie that's interested in the weighty ethical issues raised by genetic meddling, and by Promethean scientists unbound by moral insight and foresight, and inspired by equal parts glory and greed. It also explores complicated family and couple dynamics made even more confusing by the human ability to procreate in ways that the birds and bees never imagined. As it was with Frankenstein, so it is with Splice: in the end we are left to wonder who is the real monster.

6June2010

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (2010)

Back when I was in film school, my chums and I made a mockumentary called Winds of Time. It wasn't really about much of anything. A blizzard in April prompted the whole thing, as I recall, but the title was chosen because it was vacuous and pompous sounding, and thus in keeping with our intention to poke fun at a particular variety of pompous documentary film. This has nothing to do with Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, except that the title of that movie is also vacuous and pompous sounding. It is about time sand, however, which is some kind of mystical, magical sand that can reverse time, but only for the person who pushes the jewel button on the magical dagger that contains said time sand. And if the plot of Prince of Persia sounds like less fun than getting sand in your bathing suit, you're not too far wrong. The movie, which is based on a popular video game, is a bit of a snore. Bits of plot exposition, with a wee bit of halfhearted romantic verbal sparring, are inserted between action scenes. Mostly it's about jumping and sword fighting and knife throwing and swirly time sand, which might be fun in a video game, but, as is often the case with game-to-movie adaptations, not that much fun to watch.

The story concerns a young prince who started life as a pauper. Prince Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the son of King Sharaman (Ronald Pickup) of Persia. Dastan was a plucky orphan boy who was adopted after he impressed the king with an act of courage and daring. Grown-up Dastan remains brave and reckless as a young warrior, fighting alongside his brothers Garsiv (Toby Kebbell) and Tus (Richard Coyle), and their scheming uncle Nizam (Ben Kingsley). The brothers conquer the holy city of Alumat, after Nizam claims that his spies tell him the city is manufacturing weapons for the enemies of Persia. In Alumat, Dastan takes possession of the magical dagger, which, should it be misused, is a kind of weapon of mass destruction, and he meets the dagger's sworn guardian, Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton). She instantly loathes Dastan, so you know that love can't be far behind. You know this, watching the movie, but there is absolutely no spark -- not the teeniest bit -- between Dastan and Tamina, nor Gyllenhaal and Arterton, so the romance remains strictly hypothetical, although the movie pretends it's real anyway.

Palace intrigue, machinations, assassinations, and a false accusation later and Dastan and Tamina are on the lam, he to clear his name, and she to protect the dagger. On the evidence, I doubt Tamina could keep a rock safe from a feather duster, and she's not much help on the dagger front, although she tells Dastan that the dagger must be taken to the Secret Guardian Temple or something sensible like that. Dastan apparently invented parkour there in ancient Persia, and likes to leap across rooftops and scurry up walls while fending off assorted assassins sent to eliminate him and steal the dagger. Sandstorms, camels and bandits happen as well.

Alfred Molina turns up for some much-needed comic relief, playing Sheik Amar, an entrepreneur who poses as a brigand so as to avoid paying taxes. He hates taxes and big government, but he loves ostriches. Twas when Molina showed up that it became clear that  Prince of Persia has *Pirates of the Caribbean* pretensions (it was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who launched the pirate franchise for Disney, too). Molina is the Captain Jack Sparrow stand-in here, a desert pirate with a heart of dented gold, and he is a hoot (as he so often is), which is all the more welcome because the rather unfortunate attempts at romantic comedy between Tamina and Dastan have all the fizz of flat seltzer. 

Director Mike Newell, who used to make chipper romantic movies, then launched into supernatural action movies (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), directs  Prince of Persia with the trademark Bruckheimer look -- lots of sepia filters, and big, complex, CGI-heavy action sequences. The plot is a throwaway, a generic action-fantasy movie plot that could have been set in any time and any place. Which is to say, anyone looking for a timely message about, say, the current political and/or historical situation in Iran or some such is most definitely barking up the wrong palm tree. Even the accents are generic movie British (or authentic British in some cases). Gyllanhaal's accent is passable, and he's definitely buffed up for the part, although his hairstyle is positively dreadful. Arterton looks, sounds, and acts like she walked in from some other generic sand-based movie, and, as the sole feminine presence in the film (save for a few harem girls), she's sorely out of place. I'm not convinced she could survive a walk across a sandbox, let alone a trek across the movie's vast deserts. Kingsley, although a very fine actor, hasn't yet played a bad guy without it being instantaneously obvious that he's playing the bad guy, especially when he has a little Van Dyke beard and kohl-rimmed eyes. So it will surprise no one to learn that he's a duplicitous uncle and the villain of the movie. 

The handiness of the time-reversing dagger is that it's only a matter of time before Dastan gets a do-over, so there's very little peril for him or anyone else in the movie. If I had a magic time dagger, I think I'd push the button and go see a different movie.

30May2010

MacGruber (2010)

Vegetables are abused in MacGruber. This is better than abusing animals because vegetables are not sentient and don't actually care what happens to them or in which bodily orifice they are inserted.

That's the last good thing I'm going to say about MacGruber, a relentlessly unfunny movie, based on a Saturday Night Live skit. MacGruber is a parody of the 1980s TV action show MacGuyver*, in which a resourceful crime fighting guy foiled bad guys by defusing bombs and making weapons out of chewing gum and tomato soup cans, or something like that. I never actually watched MacGuyver, so I can't speak authoritatively. All I know about MacGuyver is what I gleaned from previous parodies of it, of which there are many. Which makes MacGruber not only unfunny, but unoriginal and pointless as well.

How unfunny is it? Pretty dang unfunny. Things blow up, people blow up, grunty sex happens, and F-bombs are dropped with enough frequency to suggest that the screenwriters decided to make hay while the network censors couldn't bleep them. I doubt the network censors bleepin' care. 92 percent of the jokes in the movie are precisely this: characters say the name of the movie's villain, which is Dieter von Cunth (Val Kilmer). The joke is that the H is almost silent. Isn't that bleepin' hilarious? Now imagine hearing that joke repeatedly for 90 minutes and you'll know exactly how much you do or do not need to see MacGruber. The other 8 percent of the humor involves MacGruber (Will Forte) doing incredibly stupid things, usually more than once. Doing incredibly stupid things is not inherently funny, and I'm willing to declare that Forte is also not inherently funny, which is 8 percent of the reason why MacGruber isn't funny. The other 92 percent is that saying Cunth over and over again isn't funny either.

The movie was written, more or less, by Forte, John Solomon, and Jorma Taccone, who also directed. The plot is an effort to string together various cliches from 80s TV shows and action movies. Cunth steals a nuclear missile. MacGruber, an extremely decorated veteran of, apparently, all of the various branches of the armed forces, who has won every possible award and medal, is in retirement in Ecuador when Col. James Faith (Powers Boothe) convinces him to hunt down Cunth. Why? Because the villain killed MacGruber's wife on their wedding day. MacGruber assembles a team composed of straitlaced Lt. Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe) and Vicki St. Elmo (Kristen Wiig). Wiig is a very, very funny woman. She can be funny just blinking her eyes. She is, in fact, funny in MacGruber despite everything going on around her. She specializes in characters who know they deserve better, quiet seethers who are surrounded by idiots. Vicki, one suspects, knows that MacGruber is an idiot, but she just can't help herself. She loves him anyway. Maybe it's because she has feathered hair a la Farrah Fawcett circa 1970s, while MacGruber has an 1980s vintage mullet, and sports a khaki vest and plaid shirt. That would make MacGruber very fashion forward in Vicki's eyes.

Not that MacGruber warrants all that much consideration of why the characters do the things they do. The reason is simple: it's in the script. Why it's in the script, however, I can't explain. Maybe someone thought it was funny, but I rather doubt it. 

Movies are expensive and time-consuming to make. Even bad movies like MacGruber. Given limited money in the world, I can't fathom why anyone would bother throwing millions of dollars into a trashcan like this. I also don't know why anyone who didn't have a professional obligation to do so (someone such as myself, your faithful, long-suffering servant) would stay to the end. In the interest of full disclosure, I must report that I heard a few half-hearted laughs from the audience I saw the movie with. During a particularly belabored and noisy sex scene, the girl behind me said "He sounds like he's dying!" Actually, that was the sound of a movie dying.

23May2010

Letters to Juliet (2010)

Letters to Juliet is a charming little movie. Really, it is two movies, one a little better than the other. In one, a lovely young woman finds love in Italy. In the other, a lovely older woman finds love in Italy. The young woman's story is a trifle dopey, one of those movie romances where fate slams together an obnoxious man and a confused woman and conspires to make them fall in love whether they like it or not. The older woman's story is just grand, a sweet story of enduring and mature love, of it's-never-too-late love. The young woman is Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), a fact-checker for *The New Yorker* who aspires to be a writer. She has a cute fiance named Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal) who is a chef, and is about to open an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. Sophie and Victor go to Verona for a pre-wedding honeymoon, where he plans to eat, drink, and meet food suppliers. Sophie mopes a bit because her fiance would rather look at a dark, dank wine cellar than explore scenic Verona. But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? Oh, it's golden, sun-dappled Tuscany! How bad could it be? It's warm, and there's gorgeous Italian food everywhere, and it's beautiful and if you don't want to live there ten minutes into the movie you're just not paying attention. 

Sophie's dolce vita is about to get even sweeter. While wandering Verona alone -- Victor is off in search of truffles or some such -- she comes upon the House of Juliet. Yes, that Juliet, whose famous balcony inspires lovelorn women to pin notes to the walls of her house. Notes of sadness and misery and broken heartedness. Ever the fact-finding detective, Sophie soon discovers the secretaries of Juliet, a group of plucky, spunky women who answer those letters. She also discovers a 50 year old letter tucked behind a stone in Juliet's wall. She decides to answer that letter, written long ago by a young British exchange student named Claire.

Once a sad Juliet who ditched a young Italian lover named Lorenzo Bartolini (her family did not approve), Claire (Vanessa Redgrave) is now a widowed grandmother who travels to Verona, inspired by Sophie's epistolery efforts. Claire wants to find her long lost Lorenzo. She brings along her stick-in-the-mud grandson Charlie (Christopher Egan, a cross between Heath Ledger and Ryan Phillippe), who very much disapproves of his grandmother's silly quest. He also very much disapproves of Sophie and her meddling ways, and takes an instant disliking to her. Sophie, naturally, instantly dislikes him too. It must be love. Fate, of course, will see to it that Claire, Charlie, and Sophie all wander together through oh so scenic, golden Tuscany in search of Lorenzo.

They find many elderly Lorenzos, all of them more than willing to be The One. Lovely, radiant Claire brings out the romantic (and sometimes the horndog) in the gentlemen of Verona. Movies do not ordinarily appreciate old love -- it tends to be a source of discomfort, comedy, and ridicule. Indeed, the kind of romance that movies specialize in is young love --  desperate, aching, passionate Romeo and Juliet style love -- not patient, enduring, mature romance. While Letters to Juliet finds comedy in the acculmulation of Lorenzos who would be more than happy to romance Claire, it doesn't laugh at the notion, the very possibility, that people past retirement age might have emotional lives, and experience love.

It doesn't especially make a mockery of young love either, although Sophie and Charlie are stuck in one of those love-hate relationships that can only happen in the movies (or Shakespeare's comedies) because the individuals involved are so irresistibly attractive. Ordinary mortals would shrug and walk away unless forced by destiny, or the whims of a screenwriter, to soldier on exchanging barbs and half-hearted insults while inexorably falling in love. Sophie's no shrew in need of taming -- just adorable and ever so romantic -- and it turns out Charlie isn't so bad and stuck up after all, and even the neglectful fiance Victor is pretty charming and passionate. How bad can a movie be when both the cads are really decent fellows? Sophie's romantic complications smack of cinematic artifice, of the kind of momentary roadblocks that occur along well-worn, AAA-approved path from Can't-Be-Lovetown to Splitsville to True-Loveburg. Meanwhile, Claire's unlikely romance turns out to be not altogether implausible, given a certain understanding of the way unlikely events and coincidences actually do tend to occur in life, just to keep us on our toes. Letters to Juliet is warm and pretty and quite pleasant, a modest, charming exercise in wish fulfillment that gets the job done and leaves you hungry for a big plate of pasta.

20May2010

Iron Man 2 (2010)

Superhero movies, like the comic books that birth them, are ready-made for sequels, and barring absolute incompetence, sequels generally follow. They generally follow in the summer, and Iron Man 2 kicks off the summer movie season with a bang and a boom and more than a few laughs.  What's that? A superhero movie that's funny? Fear not -- Iron Man 2 (I really like the unpretentious title. You want more Iron Man? Here's more. Precisely one more.) is also serious, but it does not see fit to go all dark and dreary. Like the first Iron Man, this one is cool and goofy, and recognizes that a guy flying around in an armored suit is not by itself endlessly amusing, even for the easily amused. Far more interesting is Iron Man's alter ego, Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), the billionaire industrialist playboy, bad boy, and world class narcissist who, in the first Iron Man (2008), invented that nifty flying suit.

Since then, we learn, the U.S. government has been trying to get its hands on that marvelous Iron Man suit, and Stark has impolitely declined their offer to steal his invention. World peace has broken out, thanks to Iron Man's efficiency as a military deterrent. Stark has been having some trouble with his battery-powered artificial heart, however, which seems to be killing him. Meanwhile, a rival weapons mogul named Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) is more than willing to give the military what they want, except that what they want is what Stark's got. Stark's frenemy Rhodey (Don Cheadle, replacing Terrence Howard in the role), an Air Force colonel, finds his loyalties divided between his unpredictable buddy Stark and good ol' Uncle Sam. And if that's not enough agita, a Russian ex-con named Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), who has long been nursing a grudge against Stark (whose father allegedly betrayed Vanko's father), comes looking for revenge. Vanko's a genius physicist -- his own armored suit is equipped with electrical whips, which may not be the most efficient weapons, but they look pretty darn cool as they slice through metal like buttah. (For those keeping score at home, Vanko's a variation on the Whiplash/Blacklash/Crimson Dynamo characters from the comic books.)

Iron Man 2 is loaded with more than enough smashy smashy boom boom action sequences, but in between, there's plenty of snappy dialogue penned by Justin Theroux (Tropic Thunder). This is particularly true of the exchanges between Stark and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), his gal Friday, now elevated to CEO of Stark Industries. Stark and Pepper have a relationship of miscommunication, devotion, and frustration (of assorted professional, sexual, and romantic kinds), and they're evenly matched in the witty back-and-forth that injects a little romantic comedy into the mostly masculine proceedings. Director Jon Favreau (who plays Stark's chauffeur-gopher Happy), as he did in Iron Man, emphasizes character over action, and is happy enough to let the stars outshine the hardware. None are as incandescent as Downey, who is a fascinating and eminently watchable creature. Downey makes Stark a fast-talking egomaniac, a techno-genius, a free-market capitalist ("I've successfully privatized world peace" he tells the Senate) and a likable rogue. He's smart, impetuous, mercurial, a textbook case of adult ADHD, and just a whole lot more interesting than the plot that requires him to periodically don a mechanized red suit and fly around shooting things. In Iron Man 2, Stark's daddy issues emerge, and he faces his own mortality, but there's no self-pity -- he's too busy tinkering with his toys. 

Downey spars with a couple of terrific villains in Rockwell's Hammer and Rourke's Vanko. Rockwell combines put-upon huffiness, comedic cluelessness, and self-absorption as Hammer, a weapons mogul whose armaments are as ineffectual as he is. The telltale sign of his vanity is the self-tanning stains on the palms of his hands -- that stuff's as hard to wash off as the blood of innocents. (Or so I've heard.) Rourke, on the other hand, oozes menace and malevolence as Vanko, an embittered, fleshy, tattooed madman whose appetite for vengeance has left him scarred inside and out. Both Rourke and Downey are enjoying -- really enjoying -- their resurrected careers, and treating Iron Man 2 with the kind of seriousness that, say, one might expect from the *Dark Knight* movies. At the same time, though, they're clearly having fun with their characters, because keeping the comic in comic book characters is the distinguishing feature of the Iron Man movies.

Iron Man, as the first screen outing for the man in the Iron Man mask, was a fairly straightforward superhero origins story that offered few surprises in the plot department, but had plenty of substance. Iron Man 2 is apparently setting up future complications for Stark and Co., with a plot that sends more telegraphs than it delivers. Scarlett Johanssen's curvacious S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Natalie Romanoff, and Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury are on hand, but not to do very much... yet. Or so it seems. The trick for Iron Man going forward will be to keep the characters as lively and interesting as they've been so far, to pay enough attention to the mental machinery, and not just the gear and gadgets. So far, so good.

10May2010