Munchausen Weekend

The Hobbit - The Battle of Five Armies



Have these Hobbit films been any good? Well, that depends.

Were they absurdly stretched out? Were they leaden and somber where every word of the source material was light? Was every conceivable detail magnified to Brobdingnagian proportions, often flying in the face of narrative sense or common decency? Did the movies, which depended for their existence on an absolute fealty to every sentence of a short book still somehow take enough liberties to obscure everything charming and memorable about the original story? Unfortunately, the answer to these questions must be yes.

These movies were made the way they were made because there was money to be had, and without the participation of the Tolkien estate there will be no more films, leastwise until the rights change hands. (This is something of a shame, because there's lots of material in The Silmarillion and related texts that might make for decent films, without needing excessive padding.) Peter Jackson tried to resist but sure enough he loved playing around with these toys, and his affection - if not his fidelity - is manifest in every frame. Will I ever return to them? Probably not. I don't see them holding up as well as the Lord of the Rings films have, for all the same reasons why they are nowhere near as good as the previous series. But I don't regret having seen them in the theater, either. They were fun, if just that.

I long ago made peace with the fact that there is no use getting upset about the liberties these movies make with their source materials. I dearly love Tolkien's works and his world, and the quality or lack thereof of any movie adaptations does nothing to efface a single period or exclamation mark in the books themselves. (Let's just put aside the fact that, if Gandalf really did know for certain at the end of The Hobbit that Bilbo had the ring, there's no reason in the world they shouldn't have just marched to Mordor to destroy the thing as soon as possible. Cool story, bro.)

The Hunger Games - Mockingjay Part 1



I enjoyed this one far more than I think I probably should! I don't have the time to devote to actually reading the books themselves so I don't have any opinion on how good a job they do with these adaptations, but they feel sturdy and well-constructed in a way that too many similar YA adaptations do not. Get a good cast, some decent material with surprisingly heavy themes, and you're off to the races. There are some images of Katniss and her crew walking over mountains of cremated skeletons and rubble that genuinely surprised me in a movie of this pedigree.

The One I Love



Now here is a movie from which I expected very little but which actually turned out to be very good! We sat down to watch this more out of a sense of obligation to the people in it than anything else - Elizabeth Moss and Mark Duplass usually have very good instincts as far as these things go. Expecting some kind of bland mumblecore-esque relationship drama, we got . . . well, here's the thing. It is kind of that. But I can't say what else it is. It's bad enough that I even have to hint at something else to entice you. I've already said too much. Just ... go see it for yourself. I'll wait. Quite satisfying.

Housebound



Here's another movie that zigs when you think it should zag, only difference being that this a horror movie and these things are expected here. It's a New Zealand movie, and if you didn't know that going in you could probably pick it up from one of the many aspects of the film that are poached wholesale from Dead Alive (AKA Braindead if you're feeling pedantic). There's also the small matter of the Wes Craven influence . . . but telling you which of his films Housebound borrows from most liberally would be spoiling the whole game.

So I'm of two minds. On the one hand, it was a very well made, enjoyable film that was genuinely unpredictable and featured game performances from a handful of charmingly deadpan actors who I've never heard of before. It wears its influences gamely on its sleeve and has a lot of fun riffing on the audience's expectations. But on the other . . . some of the decisions made in the second half of the film seem to actively undermine the potential of the first half. It's one thing to watch a movie and be surprised when what you thought was one thing turned out to be something else all along, but another to be left thinking that the first thing you thought might well have been more interesting than what you actually got.

The Fall (2006)



I knew in advance this movie would be terrible. I watched it anyway. It was terrible. Why did I watch it? You're better off not knowing. The best part is when Thranduil from The Hobbit tries to trick a little girl into helping him kill himself by stealing morphine from the hospital pharmacy. Oh wait, that's all the movie. Yay?

The Interview



James Franco is the most absurd person to ever walk the planet, but I do have a soft spot for the movies where he spends the entire running time making fun of himself. It's a good look on him. And that's basically what The Interview is about, geopolitics notwithstanding: Franco is a self-centered idiot who doesn't understand why no one else takes him seriously, and in this he finds common cause with a genocidal dictator. It's a good look. The dick-and-shit jokes are slightly above normal caliber, and a splendid time is had by all.

That a movie this intentionally modest and silly became a cause célèbre on the field of international relations is weird. That the movie has been adopted by some North Korean exile groups, not because of its quality but precisely on account of its pervasive dumbness, is interesting. An argument I've heard from more than one source is that the film, being a bog-stupid comedy, works better at undermining the regime than the most powerful dramatic treatment could. It's flattering to the sensibilities of an America that prefers its political engagement as disengaged as possible, but there's some truth there as well.

Obvious Child



This isn't the first time you've heard anyone talk about how great this movie is and it won't be the last, but it doesn't lose anything from hearing it again. it's a good movie! Not just because of the fact that it's got an abortion in it or anything, that's what it's "about" but it's only what it's really about if you're uncomfortable about the idea of an American movie treating abortion in anything but a critical manner. It's a character study of a fucked-up girl in the same way that we get a seemingly infinite number of character studies of fucked-up boys - the only difference being, if this were a boy's movie Jenny Slate's character would be played by Jonah Hill and the budget would have been somewhere around $40 million dollars instead of a half-eaten bag of shoestring potatoes and some Kickstarter spare change.

But most importantly, it's funny. In another world movies like this would get made all the time - you know, movies where being a woman isn't a problem to be solved but a fact of life for half the population. Calling it feminist just for existing is a poor complement, but that's the shitty world in which we live.

Trailer Park Boys - Don't Legalize It



By all rights Trailer Park Boys should have passed it's sell-by date a while back. The idea that a show about white trash Canadian petty crooks and the trailer park in which they live would have lasted fifteen years without any real interruption - even allowing for the series' rights changing hands in 2012 - is pretty improbable on the face of it. But they've managed to tap a surprisingly deep vein of class antagonism and scatology. Even if every season and movie from the very first tells the exact same story, they have shown remarkable ingenuity in switching around the component parts in such a way as to make it seem new with every turn.

The movies take place at a slight remove from the show, in terms of continuity and characterization. Whereas the show, eight seasons in, does a good job of maintaining a pretty rigid stasis for each character - the point being that they're all trapped in Sunnydale forever doing the same thing over and over again until the day they die - things change in the movies, people get married, actions have vague consequences. To wit, Bubbles finds out his parents have died, leaving him their "house." Ricky drives to Ontario with the purpose of protesting the impending legalization of marijuana, with the understanding that if pot is legalized, "small business owners" such as himself will be pushed out of the market for good. And Julian figures out a sure-fire way to make a lot of money selling clean piss from the nearby military base. As you might expect, none of these plans go exactly right. I keep expecting not to laugh anymore, to see that the jokes have gotten stale or the slapstick performances less inspired. But it hasn't happened yet.

Marmaduke



If you're clever you can figure out the common thread between this, The Fall, and The Hobbit. That's how I spent my winter vacation.

Thing is, I'm a sucker for talking animal movies like Garfield is a sucker for lasagna. I enjoyed this more than The Fall, and probably more than The Hobbit. The only thing this movie didn't have was a scene where Billy Connolly rides a pig, and honestly I'm still not sure how I feel about that.

Munchausen Weekend

Interstellar

Spoilers, I guess? If you care? I don't think the shelf life for discussing this movie is going to be very long, if that matters.

If you don't like Christopher Nolan, this isn't the film that's going to change your mind. Take me for example: I don't really like Christopher Nolan. He learned all the wrong lessons from Stanley Kubrick and makes films that look great from straight-on but are revealed to be resoundingly hollow the moment you change your perspective. With Interstellar he succeeded in making a film that I really wanted to like despite all my past experiences with the man, but which let me down because it ultimately refused to cohere as anything other than a Christopher Nolan film.

I wish I could remember where I saw this . . . an interview? One of his afterwards? There's a great bit from Stephen King where he talks about themes in stories. He says that you should never put themes in stories, but that the themes should arise naturally from the story you're trying to tell. That is fantastic advice. Obviously not always completely applicable, but, it's a bit of advice that more screenwriters could stand to learn. Because Interstellar? You know this was a story that began theme-first. You know it did. The reason you know it did is that, as with every other movie Nolan has ever made, the theme is the only truly legible thing about it, even if it makes no sense (more on that in a minute). As with Inception, as with all his Batman movies - they're great at establishing and developing themes, completely terrible at every other part of telling a story. He's a great, fantastic, filmmaker but an awful storyteller. And if he hasn't yet figured out the difference yet, having made a number of the most successful movies ever, he may never.

Which may partly explain why, time and again, given the most interesting subject matter with which to play around, he unerringly finds the least interesting part of whatever subject matter he has at his disposable. Given Batman, he gravitates towards a dull brown and steel gray palette, gives us a gritty urban Batman set in freakin' Pittsburgh, and figures out the precise way to make all his villains as surly and mundane as possible. Bane's voice was the best part of The Dark Knight Rises because it was the only part that felt remotely fun and interesting. Inception was awful because, given the opportunity to make a movie about dreams, he made a dream movie about a heist movie with all the visual appeal of a Pierce Brosnan-era Bond flick. Nolan has yet to meet a fantasy genre he cannot somehow drag through the mud of oblivious banality, and you can now say the same for space opera.

Tell me you are making a film about space travel and the first thing I want to know is, how much time are you going to spend hanging out with farmers? Because the amount of time you spend hanging out with farmers is going to be inversely proportionate to the amount of time the movie spends doing interesting things. Someone at some point told Nolan and his screenwriting bros that all movies need to begin by establishing the human stakes of any narrative, and that requires spending a half hour to forty five minutes telling us about dust and famine and dumb ass crackers. The movie is about space ships. I can see the script wheels turning: we need to establish our characters. We need to establish our setting. We need to establish our conflict. We need to do all of these things as methodically as possible. Because, you know, the audience just will not know who to root for if we don't spend all this time telling them about the main guy's family and hardship and all that stuff. We're going to mistakenly start rooting for the robots because we haven't been given enough reason to think that Matthew McConaughey is interesting or important enough. Well, guess what: I rooted for the robots anyway because every motivation in your entire movie was as boring and predictable as the proper indentation on your screenwriting software. The robots, at least, were interesting, something I really hadn't seen before. Give me a whole movie about those awesome robots.

This belief that the human story is the most important element of whatever story you're trying to tell is erroneous and deadly. The audience doesn't need a human stake. The audience can figure out what the stakes are by seeing the characters do thing - not by seeing the movie spend 45 minutes running in place telling the audience what the stakes are. The audience isn't stupid enough that they need to be told that Matthew McConaughey is a human being with real feelings. You could cut out a great deal of the Matthew McConaughey Is Sad and Frustrated preamble and be left with a lot more than you think. Setting up your human characters with such painstaking and tedious emotional exposition is simply condescending to an audience you do not believe to be smart enough to understand the movie. And yet everyone does it.

Also while we're on the subject of what everyone is doing (so why can't we?), everyone is so far comparing this film to 2001. OK. If you want to play that game, it's not a game that works in Nolan's favor. How much time does Kubrick spend establishing Dr. Bowman's motivation? He goes right from a monkey throwing a bone to a spaceship flying through Earth orbit. Any contemporary screenwriter would tell you that you needed to spend twenty minutes establishing David Bowman's family life and relationship with his wife or girlfriend, and a relationship with some kind of father figure who relates some kind of wise koan whose meaning will only be understood in the film's final moments. (2010 does a little bit of this, it should be noted. Another unfair comparison.) Spending so much time giving us so much of Matthew McConaughey's motivations has the perverse effect of making him seem undermotivated: his motivations, such as they are, are actually kind of stupid. Drilling them into our heads again and again doesn't make them any less stupid. Maybe they're "relatable" in Hollywood-speak. But they're stupid.

(This makes for a great point of comparison with Transformers 4. That movie spent a little bit of time on Mark Wahlberg's motivation, but really, just enough to get you going. And the fact that Wahlberg's motivations stayed precisely the same throughout the entire running time of the film despite the fact that the fate of the world was at stake was awesome, and an attention to detail of the kind that Nolan can only hope to conjure. I have to stand by any movie that makes sure to tell us that the main human character is more concerned with his daughter losing her virginity than the fate of the world. It works better than all of everyone's motivation in Interstellar because it at least doesn't ask us to voluntarily lower our IQ in order to believe that real people might ever in a million years have emotions like these.)

What I've seen discussed less than Kubrick is the obvious debt Interstellar owes to Terrance Malick. There are scenes straight out of Days of Heaven - I mean, really, if you're going to burn a field, you better know people are going to pick up on that one. It's hard to imagine what this movie would have been - whether it could have been anything - in a world without Tree of Life. It's not just the presence of Jessica Chastain that drives that one home. Every time Nolan brings the music up, lowers the sound on the dialogue, and slides into a montage - particularly on Earth - you can't help but see, immediately, the seams of Nolan's construction. The themes in Interstellar have been carried over lock, stock, and barrel from Tree of Life.

Part of the problem is that, philosophically speaking, the movie doesn't have a brain cell in its head. Malick is a heady filmmaker in part because he is a philosopher. When he uses Heidegger to structure a film like Tree of Life, it makes sense because it's coming from a place of deep understanding. The problem with Interestellar is that, while Nolan pays a great deal of attention to his themes, he doesn't really understand them. He papers over his lack of understanding with some trite bullshit about the power of love, and that just doesn't cut it.

Early in the film Matthew McConaughey explains to his daughter the meaning of the phrase Murphy's Law:

Murphy's law doesn't mean that something bad will happen. It means that whatever can happen, will happen.

This would appear to gesture towards the establishment within the film of a Humean world of absolute contingency. But in practice, the film - supposedly about the limitless possibilities of space travel - devolves into a closed-loop time travel narrative, an intricate structure of precise causality monitored by fifth-dimensional beings unhindered by our concept of time. Nolan as a filmmaker is unable to move past the closed loop: despite every opportunity to the contrary, he is unable to break free from the gravity of necessary causation. He is addicted to symmetry, and his movies suffer. His world remains doggedly, persistently Kantian. The frustration at the heart of the narrative - the inability and unwillingness to break free from necessity - could have been fixed by a copy of After Finitude.

Where is this radical contingency, the sensation that "whatever can happen, will happen"? Nowhere to be found in Nolan's film. The visual effects, while nice and occasionally breathtaking, are still nothing particularly new. Instead of grasping the opportunity to give us something new, Nolan gives us a brief flight through subspace, a handful of monoclimate planets, and finally a trip into the heart of a black hole. Maybe I'm jaded, maybe I should have approached the film from the perspective of someone who had never seen a sci-fi film before. Because that is unfortunately necessary in order to accept that this is at all visually interesting. My immediate takeaway from the film was that Nolan is a filmmaker who loves making sci-fi movies but dislikes sci-fi, and the lack of imagination on display here - a water planet with big waves! an ice planet with glaciers! - speaks to a larger lack of motivation. It all makes sense for the story, yes, that these are useless planets with no appeal, but that brings us back to Nolan's motivation at the heart of the movie - with all the resources of the most technologically advanced movie-making apparatus in history at your disposal, this is what you choose to show us? Ice Planet? Planet Waves?

I understand that some attempt was made to keep much of the film's science close to something we could reasonably call "hard sci-fi." In practice what this often (not always) means is that they take all the fun stuff out of the genre in exchange for people explaining why they can't do things. The film gets some play out of the divide here (in another echo of 2001), establishing that humans are limited more or less by the capabilities of real-world science, while the mysterious beings who give Earth the wormhole are not bound by the same laws. What we get is the hand-wave that the fifth-dimensional beings who set the plot in motion are able to do things - such as play with the laws of space-time as if they were taffy - that otherwise are impossible according to the laws of the universe. But after we establish that, the movie should obviously be heading towards some kind of revelation regarding these mysterious beings. 2001 gets around having to explain what the monoliths are and who built them by giving us instead more deeply intriguing questions, until finally ending the movie on a note of supremely satisfying mystery. There's no mystery in Nolan's universe: the question of who the mysterious beings are is answered by Matthew McConaughey in a toss-off line, with no real explanation as to how he came to that conclusion. Nolan can imagine blasting off to distant galaxies, but he can't imagine finding anything to look at more interesting than a mirror, and no mysteries more bewildering than the human heart.

For point of comparison, look at Contact, a movie that only gets better with every passing year. There was a movie with a startlingly similar premise that stubbornly refused to wrap everything up in a neat package. It also had Matthew McConaughey, which proves again that even though I get older, these actors stay the same age.

Maybe that's what some people want to hear. Maybe the fact that the movie essentially ends by reiterating that "the fifth dimension is love!" is a great way to end a movie in 2014, reassuring the viewing audience that regardless of how scary the universe may be we can stay grounded by sticking close to our good old fashioned down home values. I do like the fact that Anne Hathaway gives a big stupid speech about the power of love right before being shot down by the more pragmatic Matthew McConaughey - even if she is later revealed to be right because love will keep us together. No matter how big space is . . . and while we're on the subject, why did the put the wormhole next to Saturn? If they wanted humanity to use the wormhole to save civilization, why not put it somewhere closer? Like, say, anywhere closer than Saturn?

Also: the twist about halfway through the movie is the exact same twist as was in Saving Private Ryan. It's like all the filmmakers in the world looked into the heart of America and decided that the thing we most wanted out of our movies was surprise cameos by Matt Damon. I did warn you there'd be spoilers.

Munchausen Weekend

(Or: All the movies I've seen in the last couple months.)

Escape From Tomorrow
Directed by Randy Moore



I had high expectations for this movie, almost all of which were unmet. If you know the premise of the movie, you might have been excited too: a guerrilla film project about Disneyworld, featuring a cast of unknowns and turning the theme park into a setting for psychological horror. Good promise, abominable execution. There are snatches of a good movie here and there, but the film is undercut by its ambition - instead of merely a low-budget, samizdat satire in the vein of The Blair Witch Project, the movie quite ambitiously descends into a weird melange of sci-fi, fantasy, and relationship drama, none of which work and much of which is patently terrible. I've rarely seen a film with such a great premise devolve so quickly into something terrible. I'm almost tempted to say it's bad enough to qualify as interesting, but really, it's just bad. (If you need proof, let me offer you two words of explanation: cat flu.)

People have speculated as to why Disney allowed this film to be released, instead of suing it into oblivion. Besides the fact that satire should be legally protected, that still doesn't answer the question of why the notoriously litigious Disney company chose not to acknowledge the film. Having seen the film, the answer is obvious: any attempt to suppress the film would have made it into a cause célèbre, and would almost certainly have resulted in more people seeing it. The worst thing Disney could have done to this film was to allow it to be released. This way, no one will ever see it.

Electrick Children
Directed by Rebecca Thomas



I watched this movie based solely on the premise. It looked interesting. It was actually quite good! This is about a fifteen-year-old girl raised on a remote farm by Mormon homesteaders, kept apart from the modern world, and convinced their father (Billy Zane!) is a prophet. Rachel (Julia Garner) becomes pregnant, and is convinced that she was impregnated by the Lord in the form of a rock & roll song heard on a tape recorder in the basement. (While the film doesn't explain exactly how she became pregnant, it's pretty obviously the work of Billy Zane, who is surprisingly credible as a terrible, creepy Mormon patriarch.) She leaves the farm to go in search of the man who sang the song on the tape - a cover of Blondie's "Hanging on the Telephone" - and falls smack into the world of the Las Vegas punk scene circa 1996. (There's a Culkin in here, too - weird-looking Rory, if you're keeping track at home.) This was the debut of director Rebecca Thomas, and the film is sufficiently confident and compellingly minimal to mark her as someone worth keeping an eye out for.



After Earth
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan



I suppose I should be careful what I ask for. On paper, at least, this movie does everything it is supposed to do, and all the things I often criticize big-ticket blockbusters for not doing: the plot is straight-forward and not unnecessarily complex, it focuses on a small cast and allows the characters lots of room to breathe and develop, character development builds very clearly from the film's action sequences, and character beats clearly parallel the films theme. The problem is that even though it does all these things that we should want an adventure movie to do, it does them so terribly that it's like watching a cruel parody of competence. There's not one decision in the entire running time of this movie that makes any sense: not the weirdly antiseptic and strangely janky production design; not Will Smith's decision to play his character as an unlikable sociopath whose major goal is to instill in his son with the same brand of sociopathy; not Jaden Smith's incapacity to speak a single line of dialogue without sounding like someone about to be cut from the El Segundo community theater production of Endgame.

Considering that Smith was once an appealing actor with effortless charisma, it's depressing to see him sink so low. He has entered that rarified field of superstardom where he's completely lost touch with the difference between compelling and creepy - something which, for all the bad press, even Tom Cruise still understands. Basically, the Will Smith here is a stocky flesh suit that vaguely remembers the Will Smith who first emerged from West Philadelphia back in the late 1980s. But the resemblance stops at a few features on his doughy face. This movie supposedly cost $130 million dollars but looks like the actual budget was closer to $130. It's been fashionable for a while to dogpile on Shyamalan every time he makes another stinker, but in this instance I think it's fair to say that not even Martin Scorsese could have polished Smith's turd of an ego trip.

12 Years A Slave
Directed by Steve McQueen



I put off this one for a while because I knew it was going to be heavy going, and feared (despite, or maybe because of, the laudatory reviews) it would be mawkish in all the ways these kinds of movies can easily be. I am happy to report I was proven wrong! This is a great film that does justice to its source material by resisting the temptation to fall into the same kinds of easy sentimental cliches with which we are familiar from years of similar projects. I especially appreciate the decision to replicate as much of the rhythm and cadence of Solomon Northup's original nineteenth century prose style as possible. Even at 150 years remove, the overall feeling the movie conveys is one of respectful fidelity, as if every effort has been made to preserve Northup's own voice, and to not allow it to be drowned in self-righteous Hollywood schmaltz. The story really doesn't need to be sensationalized in any way, it's bad enough without any exaggeration. I especially like that the slaveowners are portrayed not as forces of grand, demoniacal, or charismatic evil (the nearest the film goes is Benedict Cumberbatch's cluelessly "gentile" plantation owner, who is completely unable to control his own overseers), but as bust-ass crackers whose cruelty is exacerbated by their stupidity.

I shouldn't have worried. This is definitely a movie by the same director who brought us Hunger, which I will go out on a limb and call the best movie about political protest so far this century.

Her
Directed by Spike Jonez



Although my respect for Mr. Jonez as a filmmaker knows few bounds, I nonetheless approached Her with some degree of trepidation. Although his first films remain essential, I found Where the Wild Things Are to be a significant misstep - too much whimsical melancholy bolted onto a children's story that wasn't necessarily well suited to articulating the ennui of middle-aged men. It wasn't bad, by any means, but it signified for me that the invincible filmmaker who gave us Being John Malkovich and Adaptation was all too mortal.

Reviews seemed split on the film, with some hailing it as a triumph and others criticizing it for being, again, a fluffy parable of whimsical melancholia (some reviews even managed to articulate both positions). What I wasn't prepared for, and which I haven't seen discussed, is that Her is actually at its core fairly hard sci-fi. Sure, the story focuses on Jouaquin Phoenix as a loveably pitiful schlub who buys a newfangled self-aware AI operating system in the hopes of finding a friend who won't leave him, like his ex-wife. On the surface, that's the movie's premise. But the movie is also about the consequences of creating a form of artificial intelligence with the capacity to learn, to reproduce, and to better itself, and what happens when these computer intelligences figure out just how much smarter they are than us. The fact that the movie foregrounds Phoenix's character obscures the movie's real focus: if this were any other film, like, say, Kubrick's 2001, the evolution of an artificial life form to surpass its creators would be a major, civilization-changing event. It's here, too, but by keeping the focus firmly on the small-scale consequences of this historical movement, Jonez manages to sneak a story of cosmic consequences in around the margins of a relationship drama. Definitely a return to form for Jonez.

Mr. Nobody
Directed by Jaco van Dormael



I didn't go in thinking this would be great, please don't mistake me. But I was morbidly curious to see where this was going. Like Her, this sold itself as science fiction with human drama foregrounded and a slight philosophical edge. But unlike Her, this movie stubbornly refused to cohere into more than the sum of its parts, and completely fell apart in the third act.

To my surprise I actually don't mind Jared Leto as an actor. He's pretty ludicrous as a person, but onscreen he has an aptitude for transformation that belies the vacancy of his public persona. This is a well-made movie with a number of compelling elements. The narrative gimmick of pursuing the same life down multiple different possibilities - a continuously-branching series of "what if" scenarios expanding throughout the movie - is interesting, if nowhere near as novel as the filmmakers so patently appear to believe. The sci-fi stuff is actually the least convincing part, with the last few minutes devolving into whimsical nonsense that threatens to overshadow the rest of the film, even the good parts. There are good parts, don't get me wrong. But there's also enough in the way of head-scratching nonsense to make the experience unfulfilling.

X-Men: Days of Future Past
Directed by Brian Singer



People who dislike superhero films on principle will dislike this as well, as it is by far the most "superhero-y" of the X-Men films to date. That's all to the good: I am seemingly the only person unimpressed with the Singer films' po-faced naturalism, and this movie goes a good ways towards remedying this situation by portraying the kind of day-glo hyper-frenzy spectacle that comes as second nature to all good X-Men comics. I mean, sure, static scenes of Xavier and Magneto sitting down and hashing out their differences are a staple of the franchise, but so are pointless neon action scenes. The filmmakers have so often in the past deluded themselves into thinking that these are supposed to be Important Films that we've been shortchanged in terms of idiot spectacle. This movie gives me hope that when Apocalypse shows up in a couple years we will finally get the balls-to-the-wall 80s X-Men extravaganza we've been dreaming about since we were all Reagan babies.

Anyway. A lot of criticism against this movie has been leveled against individual character motivations - seemingly arbitrary changes halfway through, etc. Maybe I'm much more of a sympathetic reader than I should be here, but it's hard for me to see these things as movies qua movies. I'm so intimately familiar with the characters in their two-dimensional incarnations that it's hard not to just plug-and-play previous knowledge instead of demanding that each movie present coherent and plausible motivations in and of itself. Therefore, Magneto's switch in the last third of the movie, which I've seen some people deride for being arbitrary, makes perfect sense if you assume (as I do) that movie Magneto keeps the same running internal commentary as Claremont's Magneto: while he's a brilliant and decisive tactician, Magneto (like many [though obviously not all] terrorists) has always been a piss-poor strategist. So obviously if he sees a clear and present danger to his agenda he has no qualms about teaming up with Xavier, but the moment that problem is "solved" he also has no problems with turning on a dime and using the same crisis as an opportunity to retake control of the narrative. That was his problem with Mystique as much as anything, after all: he was personally hurt that she had taken control of the "movement" (quote-unquote since, yeah, not a lot of revolution actually onscreen) in his absence, and needed to regain control through whatever means necessary. Which meant that, yes, once he had single-mindedly prevented her from carrying off the assassination of Bolivar Trask, he was perfectly happy to step-up and do something 1000x worse, i.e. kill the president and his cabinet, demolish Washington, DC, and fire the first salvo in the exact same war he was ostensibly trying to prevent. Because of course, the only thing that really matters to Magneto is that whatever happens, he's in charge.

And as for Mystique - well, it's interesting to see her crucial role from the original story upheld, although it's also worth noting that the reason for this has less to do with any desire to maintain fidelity to Claremont and Byrne than the fact that the producers really lucked out in signing the biggest actress in the world to a multi-picture deal back when she was still a nobody. So of course they're going to get every ounce of Jennifer Lawrence on screen as they possibly can. Even though J-Law is about as good at broadcasting menace as a Shih Tzu, I'm still completely on board for this. One thing they've missed, however, is not introducing Destiny - that's the best part of Mystique's backstory, and one whose absence has been sorely missed since Mystique's death in 1989. The idea of of someone who is for-all-intents-and-purposes immortal falling in love with someone they have to watch get old and die is a great hook, after all, and enriches her character a lot more than just "bad mutant lady who likes kicking people a lot."

(Oh yeah, funny thing, in case you were wondering, I didn't know about the accusations against Singer literally until I was in the theater before the film looking at my phone. So, uh, yeah, moral crisis averted through ignorance, or whatever.)



Godzilla
Directed by Gareth Edwards



In my eyes there was only one significant problem with this movie: it's obvious that the film was written and contracts were signed before the end of Breaking Bad. How else can you explain Bryan Cranston's domination of the ad campaign but scarcity in the movie itself? They thought they were signing up a respected character actor for a supporting role. They couldn't have known that in time between him signing the contract and the film being released Cranston's stock would go from warm to incandescent. That's obvious from the commercials, all of which focused on Cranston's role, which, as everyone knows, is nowhere near as prominent as anticipated.

Otherwise, I found little to fault. Any problems Godzilla may have are intentional and reflect the filmmakers' obeisance to the source material. Of course the main protagonist is a bland dude; of course the first half of the movie consists of precious little kaiju and a lot of checking your watch waiting for the big man to show up; and of course they even managed to sneak in a couple scenes of small children believing in Godzilla. As anyone who grew up watching all the classic Godzilla movies on Saturday afternoon local TV knows, these are features, not bugs. It's like a wrestling match: you have to wade through a boring undercard; when the face finally shows, he suffers numerous setbacks; he almost appears to be down for the count a few times, until the last possible moment when he rises up and vanquishes his foe with an awesome finishing move.

Among many, many other missteps, one of the great errors the 1998 film made was in attempting a remake of the original 1954 feature. As has been pointed out, the original film is an outlier in relation to the rest of the series, a disaster movie with Godzilla as the force of natural retribution who is eventually vanquished. Whatever other problems the movie had, the fact that Godzilla died at the end in 1998 was a huge downer. We've lived with Godzilla for sixty years. Aside from that first classic film, he's been a beloved hero for decades. We want to root for the guy. The 1998 film shot itself in the foot by killing its hero. This version, however, gives us back the Godzilla we grew up with: King of the Monsters, warden of Monster Isle, ready and willing to step the fuck up when other monsters step out of line. Long may he roar.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Directed by Marc Webb



Oh boy! This was not a good movie! What was good about this movie are the same things that were good about the first - namely, Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone. They always look like their scenes together were spliced in from another, better movie that was being filmed down the hall. He's a good Spider-Man - he's actually funny and not a completely unbearable wet dishrag like Tobey Maguire, and hey, he even gets to keep his Spider-Man mask on when he's fighting now. (They long ago figured out who the real star of these movies is, and it's not the guy playing the toy.)

I am certain it is pure coincidence, but these films keep coming back to stories about corporate juggernauts stealing the golden ideas of hard-working creators like a dog circling its own vomit. This, the first Amazing Spider-Man, the second Spider-Man, the first Iron Man film - it's almost as if there's some kind of repressed memory that keeps trying to bubble up through the surface . . . nah. Still: this movie is overstuffed by half. I dislike the Green Goblin for the most part, and taking Harry Osborn - the most interesting Goblin by far - and shoehorning him into this mess was a tragedy. I liked the Rhino, I would have loved a whole movie just of Paul Giamatti cussing in Russian, but he's in here for fives minutes so whatever.

And I know there aren't a lot of people bemoaning the sanctity of Electro's characterization, but still: go back to the Ditko. Electro is another in the line of the first half-dozen Spidey villains who represents an alter-ego for Peter during his formative days - an older man with no moral compass whatsoever who gains power and immediately uses it for the most selfish ends possible. There's a reason why J. Jonah Jameson initially thinks Spider-Man and Electro are the same guy in Amazing Spider-Man #9 - not just because JJJ is a dick (although, yeah), but because we're supposed to pay attention to the fact that all these broken older males - the Vulture, Doctor Octopus, the Lizard, Electro, JJJ himself - represent "paths not taken," alternative versions of the same power / responsibility narrative at the heart of Spider-Man, and which Stan & Steve beat like a drum back in those early days. (He's always being tempted to use his powers irresponsibly in the early issues, if you recall, and he even does stuff like falsifying photos to pay for May's surgeries, so he's still not got it all completely worked out.) Spider-Man in the beginning was constantly being tested against funhouse versions of himself. Electro here is just a CGI schmuck with characterization cribbed off the back of a cereal box, and another in a long line of Jamie Foxx's tragic non-Tarantino career missteps.

Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier
Directed by Anthony & Joe Russo



This was a good movie! It came out months ago so the statue of limitations has obviously passed, but it was one of the best of the whole bunch as far as all the modern superhero movies go. A lot of the criticism I saw against these, at least on the Nerd Internet, was along the lines that this wasn't the movie people wanted to see: it came out around the same time as The Raid 2 so of course people were comparing it negatively to that, like a movie with some muscular actors who had a few months to train fake fighting could ever be the same kind of film as a movie starring a guy who's done this since he was ten years old. And because Robert Redford was stunt cast as the villain people were comparing it negatively to Three Days of he Condor, which is maybe not the best way to be fulfilled by your entertainment choices.

You know what this movie was, even with all the little bits on the side that maybe didn't hang together perfectly? This was a great Captain America movie. Do people not get how cool that is? All the other Marvel Studios characters were changed in some notable ways before they made it to film: Robert Downey, Jr's Iron Man is a completely different guy from the character I grew up reading in Michelinie, Layton, and O'Neil's runs. Thor has lost so much of the gravitas and self-seriousness that defined his character since the 60s - he doesn't even talk shit like comics Thor. But Cap - well, Cap in the movies is still Cap. Don't you love Captain America? Don't you get a thrill just from watching a movie where Captain America acts like Captain America?

This movie had me in its corner from the very beginning. The way these Marvel Studios films have spent so much time portraying the national security industrial complex as the "good guys"; using S.H.I.E.L.D. as an organizing principle for the first batch of movies because obviously we can't be expected to believe anything so strange as that a bunch of characters would actually come together to do good on their own without being told by the government; giving us a picture of superheroes that, while occasionally very compelling, was still strangely bureaucratic in a way that always seemed off - well, this movie comes in right from the top and upsets that apple cart. Captain America steps up, takes a look at the massive expansion of peacetime intelligence and the casual acceptance of "preventative warfare" and says, nope, this isn't right. That's exactly what the Cap I grew up reading would do, and I had just about given up hope of seeing that Cap onscreen.

Sure, you can hem and haw - S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn't really corrupted, it was infiltrated; the end of the movie hedges its bets by trying to have its cake and eat it about the necessity of using super espionage agents to enforce American interests - but the fact is, this is a movie where even before they know Hydra exists, Captain America decides to take on the military industrial complex, and doesn't stop until the entire illegal national security apparatus is destroyed. I mean, they defeat Hydra by going full Wikileaks, for goodness' sake. Tell me you were ever expecting to see that in a Marvel movie.

(One quibble - if the Widow released all S.H.I.E.L.D.'s secrets, wouldn't Coulson's resurrection be public knowledge, then? Or were we able to dismiss that with a hand-wave when Skye magically erases all traces of Coulson's unit's existence after S.H.I.E.L.D. collapses? Why the fuck do I care?)