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

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Freddy Krueger is a scary horror monster in part because he's horribly disfigured, in part because of his slicey-dicey killer glove, in part because he's relentless in his pursuit of his victims, and in part because, since he's already dead, he can't be killed. Like a ghost, he can turn up almost anywhere. The catch is that Freddy haunts the dreams of his teenage victims -- and if he kills them in their dreams, they stay dead. That's a neat trick -- once his prey figure it out, they are afraid to sleep, perchance to dream. They try desperately to stay awake, until they're dead tired. And then just dead.

But since Freddy first turned up in Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the world has changed. Ritalin, Red Bull, and a Starbucks on every street corner (maybe even Elm Street) all help hapless teens stay awake a little longer. But Freddy can wait.

A Nightmare on Elm Street has been rebooted, though not very much reimagined, with a new Freddy (Jackie Earle Haley) now menacing the teens of Elm Street. Freddy likes to ask of his victims "Remember me?" That's a little inside joke, of course, although the primary audience for A Nightmare on Elm Street is teens who were in elementary school last time Freddy showed his scarred face, so they probably don't remember him. Neither do the kids he's currently stalking, and he's not especially happy that they don't -- his new mission is not just to have his revenge. He'd like his victims to remember what happened the last time he "played" with them. His backstory is much the same as in the previous Elm Streets (of which there have been eight) -- Freddy was a child murderer in his former incarnations. Now he's a pedophile, and still seeking vengeance after the vigilante parents of Elm Street killed him. It's not really their fault he came back gruesomely disfigured -- he wasn't supposed to come back at all.

As before, the heroine of A Nightmare on Elm Street is Nancy (Rooney Mara), Freddy's favorite victim in life and in death. Nancy's a scrappy and resourceful heroine, and not one to go down without a fight. She gets some help from Quentin (Kyle Gallner), a pasty-faced classmate with a ready supply of prescription uppers to help him stay awake.

The original A Nightmare on Elm Street was genuinely scary, witty, and grisly, but Freddy, played by Robert Englund, became increasingly familiar, campy, and less menacing as he stalked his way through seven sequels and becamse a pop culture fixture. Haley, a former child star whose rebooted career has been built on his ability to play unsettling characters (he was Rorschach, the only good thing about Watchmen, he played another pedophile in Little Children, and he's terrific in a recurring role in the TV series Human Target), is suitably menacing as Freddy. The character's disfigured visage has been shaped around the sharp architecture of Haley's own face, notably his prominent cheekbones and horizontal slash of a mouth. Topped off, of course, by Freddy Krueger's signature fedora. Haley returns Freddy to his nightmarish, maniacal roots as a serial killer and sexual predator.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is directed by Samuel Bayer, who previously directed music videos, and written by Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer. The filmmakers attempt to recapture the primal terror and creativity of the first (and best) Nightmare  -- it's no easy feat to imitate originality, however. Much of what made A Nightmare on Elm Street stand out from the rest of the slash pack -- the powerful heroine, the sinister mix of repressed childhood memories and unconscious fears, the inventive use of dream imagery -- is emulated in this movie. The results are adequate and passable -- A Nightmare on Elm Street is competent and sufficiently diverting, but not nearly memorable enough to have any lasting effects on the psyche. 

2May2010

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2010)

The Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is Men Who Hate Women (Män som hatar kvinnor), which is more descriptive, although perhaps it gives too much away. The film, by Niels Arden Opley, is based on the novel by the late Steig Larsson, part of his posthumously published Millennium Trilogy, and it is indeed about men who hate women, and a few of the women they hate. It's also about that girl (a woman, really, and the diminution of her status in the English title is inconsistent with her fierce persona in the film), the one with the large, dark, snaky dragon tattoo on her slender, sinewy back. She is Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), and she herself has been the object of men's hatred, and violence (sexual and otherwise), for much of her life. It has made her vindictive (and rightly so), and a ferocious fighter.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is also about another girl, one who has been missing for 40 years. Harriet was the scion of a wealthy industrialist family, the beloved niece of the aged Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), and she disappeared under mysterious circumstances when she was 16 years old. Vanger suspects that one of his hateful relatives killed her -- the family tree contains more than a few rotten branches, including three of Henrik's brothers, who were Nazis during World War II. Vanger hires Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) to find out what happened to Harriet.

Blomkvist is an investigative journalist, recently convicted of libeling a Swedish tycoon. He has six months of freedom left before he starts a prison sentence (they're tough on libelers in Sweden). As it happens, Blomkvist once knew Harriet -- she babysat for him when he was a young lad, during a family vacation. And as it happens, Lisbeth has been investigating Blomkvist in her job for a security firm. She's a hacker, and something of a genius, and watches Blomkvist's investigation from afar by snooping in his computer. She becomes interested in the case of the missing girl.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is long (152 minutes) and pretty slow going for a while -- there are a lot of pieces to be put in place before the story begins to move forward. After a plodding and fitful start, it does start to move, and when it does, it moves in unexpected directions. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo turns out to be about multiple crimes -- Blomkvist and Lisbeth uncover several murders that seem to be connected somehow to Harriet's disappearance. Unlike most films about murders, this one is more interested in the victims of violence than in the perpetrators. Indeed, typical for a murder mystery, it doesn't reveal the perpetrator until near the end, when the various pieces fall into place. What leads up to that, however, is atypical: a twisted, violent portrait of gruesomely dysfunctional families -- including Lisbeth's. The film wants to keep Lisbeth somewhat shrouded in mystery -- she doesn't care to reveal much about herself -- but it provides enough glimpses of her past (and present) to offer some clues about her rage, her damaged state, and the source of that massive chip on her shoulder. But despite the intriguing clues, and one satisfying scene in which she exacts some well-earned revenge on a tormenter, Lisbeth never develops very much as a character, and so the fascination is mostly in the mystery that surrounds her. Lisbeth is a commanding presence nonetheless -- it's impossible to take your eyes off of her. And she's far more compelling than Blomkvist, who is dogged, and nice (where Lisbeth is dogged but definitely not nice), and a bit of a dullard. Perhaps they'll flesh the pair out more fully in the two planned sequels.

What's interesting and unusual about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is that the film goes to some pains to avoid fetishizing the gruesome murders, and neither does it make any attempt to humanize the killer. To discover the killer, Lisbeth and Blomkvist have to connect the dots and uncover the motive, but there's never any doubt that they are dealing with a monster, and an especially ugly one at that. It would seem, on the evidence, to be a hard thing for a movie about murder to avoid at some point showing sympathy for the devil. That sympathy seems to play into the public fascination with serial killers and their crimes, although why we find them so compelling (and why they make for such compelling entertainment) is an interesting psychological question, and one that we might be happier not fully understanding. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is not terribly exciting or action-packed as thrillers go, but it dares to question the appeal of the murder mystery/serial killer thriller by telling a story that is frequently quite ugly and hard to watch, and which is ultimately compelling because it is about a woman  who is ferociously committed to surviving. The film manages to keep its focus and its sympathies decidedly and unwaveringly with its fierce femme fatale, and not with the men who hate her.

29April2010

Kick-Ass (2010)

Why, wonders teen schmo Dave Lizewski, don't ordinary Joes such as himself ever try to be superheroes? Surely the lack of superpowers is no impediment, as Batman proves. Ah, but Batman has super gadgets (and millions of dollars), Dave's friends remind him. Dave and his pals spend much of their free time reading comic books, talking about comic books, and thinking about comic books. They are well-versed in the logic and lore of superheroes. Dave (Aaron Johnson), despite his solidly middle class family and scrawny physique, is unpersuaded that his superhero dreams are doomed to fail. So he buys a green and yellow scuba suit, sets out to fight crime and... almost gets himself killed for his troubles. This does not deter him, and when one of his heroic escapades is captured on amateur video, Kick-Ass the superhero goes viral. An anonymous star is born.

That's the basic premise of Kick-Ass, a scrappy, weird little superhero movie directed by Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake, Stardust), and adapted (by Vaughn and Jane Goldman) from the graphic novel by Mark Millar and John Romia, Jr. Kick-Ass is fast, furious, extremely violent, and sporadically funny as it both satirizes and embraces the cliches of action movies. 

Kick-Ass soon discovers that he's not the only DIY superhero in Manhattan. Notably, there's Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), who sports a Batman-esque rubber suit, and daddy's little girl Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz), a leather-jumpsuited spitfire in a mask and purple wig. Hit Girl, it must be said, totally rocks -- she's equally deadly with a katana sword, a switchblade, and a gun. (Moretz, who is now 13, was only 11 when she played the potty-mouthed, super-violent Hit Girl, which has prompted consternation in some quarters about the exploitation of child performers in movies they are not old enough to see themselves. This issue seems to pop up every now and then -- Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby, Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, Natalie Portman in The Professional -- and aside from hand-wringing, nothing much ever comes of it. Indeed, Shields, Foster, and Portman all seem to have survived both being child performers and Ivy League students. Whether it's the language or the violence in Kick-Ass that's setting off alarm bells, the movie fully and consciously intends to push those buttons. And so it does.)

Hit Girl and Big Daddy are vigilantes who are particularly intent on destroying a drug kingpin named Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong). D'Amico thinks it's Kick-Ass who's after him, so his teen son Chris hatches a plan to catch the superhero by inventing yet another superhero, Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Before long, Gotham is crawling with superhero wannabes.

Kick-Ass has got the usual complement of teen boy troubles -- he's ignored by girls, except the hottie who thinks he's her gay BFF -- to go along with the  superhero sturm und drang. But never mind him; he's not actually that interesting. Well, okay, what's moderately interesting about Kick-Ass is that he regularly gets the snot beat out of him -- he bleeds real blood, and never develops any discernible fighting skills, yet he continues to fight the good fight until it becomes too much of a drag for him. Hit Girl and Big Daddy are far more compelling. Cage does one of his fun n' creepy weirdo turns here as a father who brainwashes his little girl, creating the perfect avenging angel assassin. He's nuts, and it's child abuse, of course, but he adores his daughter and Hit Girl loves her daddy and seems to be having a good time. Plus, she's got mad skills and the weapons are the neatest. (Cage also has Big Daddy talk in an Adam West-as-Batman voice -- an incongruously funny bit of campy homage for a guy who takes his crime fighting very seriously.) Moretz, with her cutie pie looks and voice, completely holds her own as the wall-climbing, knife throwing, guns-a-blastin' half-pint killer. She and Cage are great together, and, at any rate, aside from a quick backstory that reveals the source of Big Daddy's animus for D'Amico, the movie's not terribly motivated to dig into this nutty and unsettling parent-child relationship. It might be quite interesting if it did, but there's little time for that with so many bad guys to annihilate.

The movie ends with a big blowout, a battle royale in which Kick-Ass has to decide if he's really a superhero, or just a poseur. To end an action movie with a big ol' fight is de rigueur, and Kick-Ass isn't so original that it's going to forgo that tradition. Nonetheless, it's in the denouement that Kick-Ass puts a (slightly) new spin on the superhero story -- Hit Girl was groomed for vengeance from toddlerhood, but Kick-Ass has to will himself to heroism, setting aside fear, ineptitude, and a pretty lame costume if he's going to kick some bad guy ass. 

18April2010