2014: The Battle of the Non-Marvel Produced Movies Based on Marvel Characters

Since Marvel Studios decided to start making their own movies some years back without the help of studio backers, things have gone pretty well for them. Every single movie they have made has managed to earn over $250 million at the global box-office, and it was arguably their early success that spurred the Walt Disney Company to buy out Marvel three years back. The gambit paid off in spectacular fashion last year when The Avengers became a box-office phenomenon, grossing $1.5 billion at the global box-office.

This year, they're following though on that success in pretty convincing fashion, with Iron Man 3 being the year's top-grossing film so far (and the top grossing in the Iron Man series) with a $1.2 billion global gross, and Thor: The Dark World arguably poised to exceed the performance of its predecessor.

Next year, though, seems to be a relatively low-key year for the Disney-owned Marvel studios in the run-up the 2015 sequel to The Avengers; in April 2014 they'll be releasing the sequel Captain America: The Winter Soldier, before the U.S. summer movie season where they probably hope to make Fast and Furious money, and in August 2014 or basically the "winding down" month of the summer season they'll be releasing The Guardians of the Galaxy, or their first non-sequel in several years.

In short, for the first time since 2009, when they didn't release any films, Marvel will be stepping off the scorching summer battlefield and leave two different protagonists to slug it out with movies made from their characters: Sony Pictures, who will release The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Twentieth Century Fox, who will be releasing X-Men: Days of Future Past, which marks original X-Men director Bryan Singer's return to the mutants that made him a household name. Both films will be released in May of next year, within three weeks of each other, and this will mark the first time since both franchises were launched, X-Men in 2000 and Spider-Man in 2002, that they will have movies in the same year.

I'm genuinely interested to see how this showdown will play out. Personally I'm more partial to Spidey and am quite fond of the first two films in the series. I also welcomed last year's series reboot, which brought mechanical webshooters and a better lead actor to the screen. I am also a fan, however, of Michael Fassender's and James McAvoy's take on the younger Magneto and Professor X, and of the whole period feel of X-Men: First Class. I am also quite fond of Ellen Page, who starred in the often-reviled X-Men: Last Stand before her breakout role in Juno, and am anxious to see her play X-Men mainstay Kitty Pryde in a decent X-Men film for a change.

What's more interesting, though, is the fact that Fox and Sony are the only two studios left holding rights to Marvel characters outside of Disney. Their contracts allow them to continue to hold the rights to these characters for as long as they keep making movies based on them. To be able to continue making these movies, the movies they make have to make money. By effectively going head-to-head by releasing their movies within weeks of each other, they are jeopardizing that proposition because each of the films may well cannibalize off the other's grosses given the proximity, though to be fair Sony had staked its first weekend of May slot long before Fox decided to bump their X-Men flick up to the Memorial Day weekend.

Spider-Man will probably come out on top, considering that the first weekend of May is prime box-office real estate these days, and considering that last year's reboot, which "everyone" supposedly hated, still grossed $750 million at the global box-office, which is something like $250 million more than any X-Men movie since the beginning has made at the global box-office, but for my part, I want both movies to do well, and I sincerely hope they do.

Now That's More Like It: A Review of The Wolverine

My review of the 2009 film X-Men Origins: Wolverine, was obliterated when multiply.com shut down its blogging section, and perhaps it's only fitting that it's gone forever considering how awful I found that movie to be. 

Four years later, Twentieth Century Fox, one of the only two studios left aside from Disney that has the rights to make movies based on characters taken from Marvel Comic books, appears to have learned its lesson and has come out with a movie that is substantially better than what came before it, this time simply titled: The Wolverine.

The film opens with a flashback in which the mutant Logan, also known as the Wolverine (played again by Hugh Jackman) is trapped in a prisoner-of-war camp in Nagasaki, moments before the atom bomb is dropped. With the bomb about to drop, Yashida (Ken Yamamura) a young Japanese officer decides to set the prisoners free. Because there is nowhere to run, the Japanese officers commit ritual suicide, but the young officer, Yashida, cannot bring himself to do it as he watches the bomb's catastrophic explosion. In that moment, Logan saves Yashida by throwing him into the hole in which he was imprisoned, which turns out to be the safest place to be, and covers him with a metal plate and his own body. While the blast basically flays Logan, his mutant healing gift restores his skin right before an astonished Yashida's eyes.

Decades later, and after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand, Logan lives as a hermit in the Yukon, his only friend apparently a large bear. When some local hunter kills the bear using an illegal poisoned arrow, Logan follows him to the bar and is about to lay waste to him and his companions when a mysterious Japanese girl named Yukio (Rila Fukushima) brandishing a katana and some serious skill intervenes, telling him that an old acquaintance of Logan wants to say goodbye to him in person. That old acquaintance turns out to be a dying Yashida (now played by Haruhiko Yamanouchi), who has, since Logan saved him back in the war, built an empire based on technology, and who basically asks Logan to give him his healing factor. Logan declines, but having set foot on Yashida's premises, with a shady doctor (Svetlana Khodchenkova) and Yashida's power-hungry son (Hiroyuki Sanada) basically just waiting for the old man to expire, Wolverine soon finds out that he is already in over his head. Before he knows it, he is on the run with Yashida's fetching granddaughter Mariko (the statuesque Tao Okamoto) from mysterious forces whose true motivation will shock him (though not necessarily the audience).

While the quality of this film is not exactly on par with other Marvel notables like the first couple of X-Men or Spider-Man movies, the first Iron Man movie or last year's global box-office phenomenon The Avengers, it is a substantial improvement over the first Wolverine movie, which was so unabashedly idiotic that it had the lead villain thinking he could erase Wolverine's memory by shooting him in the head with an adamantium bullet, and even worse, actually being right.  

Loosely based on a 1982 mini-series by noted comic-book creators Chris Claremont (X-Men) and Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns), this film explores Wolverine's character more than any of the other films in the X-Men series, even though the majority of them were already arguably Wolvie-centric, but more importantly, actually gives him dimension this time around. Here, he grapples with regret, desire, and later, fear. Sure, he's still Marvel's resident loner, but at least here, there's more to him that growling, howling, and his adamantium claws. Full credit for this turnaround goes to director James Mangold and his screenwriters Mark Bomback and Scott Frank, and, of course, to Hugh Jackman, whose earnestness almost elevated X-Men Origins: Wolverine past the utter schlock that it was. Here, his utter commitment to this role shows again, from his straight-faced line delivery, even when the film jumps off the rails in the third act, to his ridiculously ripped physique.

Fortunately, Jackman isn't on his own here; his supporting cast, made up mostly of Japanese actors, are, as strange as this may sound, more effective in their roles than a lot of the X-Men actors were in their supposed ensemble piece. Supermodel Okamoto, obviously cast so that the 6'2 Jackman wouldn't look too much bigger than his leading lady, surprises in her role as Wolverine's love interest Mariko, especially considering this is her first-ever feature film role. Veteran Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada does well with limited screen time as Mariko's dad Shingen, as do Yamanouchi and Korean-American actor Will Yun Lee with their roles.

For me, though, the real standout was Fukushima as Yukio. Like Okamoto, Fukushima is a model starring in her first feature film, but as a rather plucky action heroine, she's quite a find. I hope she doesn't end up in direct-to-video limbo after this; she deserves a heck of a lot better in my opinion.

A lot of reviewers have complained about how the film collapses in the third act, and truth be told, it does, but to be honest, the overall plot really isn't the movie's strong point, as it was basically designed to end up there in the first place. I will agree with them that Khodchenkova's Viper brings the film dangerously close to some of the low points of the last solo Wolvie pic, but the good news is that the movie has too much else going for it to let some moments of stupidity drag it down. The action set pieces are pretty impressive at times, and Wolverine's battle with Yakuza thugs atop a speeding train is quite easily a highlight. It is worth pointing that not all the fight scenes are all that good, though.

Whatever the film's flaws, though, there was nothing even approaching the stupidity of the memory-erasing bullet from the first Wolverine solo picture, and in any event, I was able to forgive the movie its various flaws after watching the nigh-obligatory, but this time positively tantalizing post-credits scene.

3.5/5

Snails For the Win: A Review of Turbo

There was nothing quite as effective in shattering my resolve to wind down my movie-watching for the next couple of months as the entreaties of my ultra-cute three-year-old daughter that she wanted to watch "snail" which was what she believed to be the title of Dreamworks' Animation's new movie Turbo, starring the voices of Ryan Reynolds, Paul Giamatti, Samuel L. Jackson and a whole slew of other Hollywood stars. This movie actually piqued my curiosity with its distinctly ironic premise of a snail becoming fast enough to race in the Indianapolis 500, but after sitting through a glut of action movies and two consecutive animated films in the last three months or so I didn't really know if I had it in me to sit through yet another cartoon.

As it turns out, pardon the pun, I had just enough in the tank to appreciate this one, which was pretty good, all things considered.

Theo, or as he likes to call himself, Turbo (Reynolds) is a garden snail living somewhere in California with his brother Chet (Paul Giamatti) and several other garden snails, but who has a very peculiar personality quirk; he is a speed fanatic. He spends his days in a greenhouse with several other snails, knocking rotten tomatoes off their vines, and his nights watching the Indy Racing League on an old television in the garage, at least until the T.V. gets broken. He wanders around town and, amidst the speeding cars, he falls from a bridge right onto a car about to start a drag race. He is sucked into the hot rod's blower, and, when the driver of the car turns on the nitrous oxide feed that is supposed to give his car a boost in speed, Turbo is flooded with it, and when he is spit out of the car's exhaust, he is a changed snail. He has been endowed with super speed.

After a disastrous incident in the garden involving his new-found speed and a sadistic little boy with a tricycle, Turbo and Chet leave the garden and end up being captured by Tito (Michael Pena), the truck driver and co-owner of a taco restaurant in a strip malls somewhere in Van Nuys. Tito enters Turbo in a snail race he regularly has with the other business operators of the strip mall, not quite realizing what he has on his hands, and when Turbo demonstrates his incredible speed, Tito realizes he has a chance to promote not only the taco stand he runs with his brother Angelo (Luis Guzman) but the whole strip mall as well. Meanwhile, Turbo befriends the "crew" of snails headed by Whiplash (Samuel L. Jackson) who admire his speed but show him that they still have a thing or two to teach him.

With his blazing speed and the encouragement of his new friends, Turbo decides to pursue his greatest dream: to win the legendary Indianapolis 500. It won't be easy, even after he convinces Tito, through a series of overt gestures, to enter him in the contest, he still has to face five-time Indy 500 winner Guy Gagne (Bill Hader), who also happens to be Turbo's idol.

The premise of this film, by itself, is a lot of fun, but not exactly the kind of conceit that, by itself, can sustain a feature-length film. To address this, the filmmakers threw in a few other plot devices, like Turbo's own feelings of inadequacy, as exemplified by a scene involving a perfect tomato, as well as parallel "brothers" stories between the two snails on one hand, and Tito and Angelo on the other, with Chet's support and approval being the one thing that Turbo apparently needs to succeed.  The paper thin villain of the film is the kind who will easily be forgotten, and Turbo's "crew" of snails look designed to sell toys and to give him characters to interact with in the reported spin-off series. In short, for all of the padding the writers have thrown in to extend a half-hour cartoon into a ninety-minute film, and despite some earnest performances by the voice actors, I really felt the thinness and familiarity of the well-worn plot of pursuing one's dreams. Henry Jackman's endlessly derivative score, which seemed to have been yanked right out of Cars in a few scenes, did not help things either.

What really carried the film, however, were some stunning visuals, especially of the magnificent racing sequences. Until I see Ron Howard's Rush, due out later this year, I will have to content myself with the depiction of open-wheel racing in this film, and it was genuinely interesting to see the racing from a snail's point of view, with the "marbles" or bits of rubber flaking off the tires looking absolutely enormous. The marbles would play an important role in the race later on, as well. I was also amused by the sequence in which the racing cars metamorphosed into giant rolling tomatoes in Turbo's mind's eye as he remembered his big moment of failure from earlier in the film; to my mind it was pretty imaginative.

I am officially all cartooned-out; I have seen five animated feature films this year and I am pretty sure that, no matter how sweetly my three-year-old asks me, I do not want to see another for quite some time.

Still, if nothing else,, this film was at least more lively than the somewhat tepid, presumptuously-named Epic, and is reasonable fun for grown-ups who have an hour and a half to spare, especially the ones with kids who know how to ask very nicely if they can watch a movie.

3.5/5

Welcome to Nerdtopia: A Review of Pacific Rim (Mild Spoilers)

Director Guillermo del Toro is a rarity; he's one of the few directors who knows how to captivate awards-giving bodies and fanboys. Like Peter Jackson, who was basically a fanboy god after the first Lord of the Rings trilogy, with multiple Oscars to boot, del Toro has won a slew of awards, including Oscars, for his 2006 masterpiece Pan's Labyrinth, and has won plenty of fanboy street cred with his Hellboy films and his work on Blade II. His latest film, Pacific Rim, panders more to his second demographic than the first, and it does so in a huge way...literally.

In the near future, the Earth is invaded by giant monsters called Kaiju, which enter our world through a dimensional portal that has opened deep beneath the Pacific Ocean. After the monsters attack and level several major cities around the world, with the usual weapons proving ineffective, humanity decides to create a new weapon: giant robots (as tall as skyscrapers) called Jaeger, which are operated by two human pilots locked in a neural link. Over time it becomes clear that not even the jaegers are enough to repel the relentless kaiju invasions, and the world's governments decide to just build giant walls to keep the threat out, which proves to be an exercise in futility. However, one of the pioneers of the jaeger program, a "marshall" named Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) believes the massive robots are key to a plan that could end the threat once and for all, and together with his protege, Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) he approaches washed-up jaeger pilot Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) whose last outing in a jaeger ended in tragedy, to take one last shot at taking the kaiju down. Armed with the four remaining jaeger suits from America, Australia, China and Russia, the people of the Earth make their last big push to save the planet.

If social networks are any indication, it would seem that fanboys the world over are gushing over this film, and for pretty good reason, in my opinion. The designs of both the giant monsters and the giant robots, easily the stars of the film, are the stuff of fanboy wet dreams.  In particular, the jaeger robots look like they stepped out of any of a number of anime from the 80s or 90s, albeit with some pretty innovative design quirks, and with a good measure of grittiness thrown in by their designers, and the wizards at Industrial Light and Magic who brought them to life. The grotesquely cool kaiju are somewhat more varied in design than their robotic nemeses, though pretty much all of them seem inspired by monster movies of old, with some of them sporting giant crab claws or tentacles and others looking like a cross between King Kong and Godzilla. Still, the robots were the stars here. Though Gipsy Danger was the "hero" jaeger, I was a bit partial to Australia's Striker Eureka, which of all the jaeger robots on display seemed the most anime-inspired of the lot. These robots, unlike the similarly ILM-generated metal creatures of the Transformers movies, had a real weight and heft to them and really looked like they could both take and dish out a world of punishment.

Another, more crucial element that sets this movie apart from the narrative disaster of the Transformers movies, though, is the human element; there's a lot going on outside the field of battle, and much of it involves Pentecost as the head of the jaeger program, scientists Newton Geizler  (Charlie Day) and Hermann Gottlieb (Burn Gorman) and sleazy black-market kaiju body parts dealer, Hannibal Chau (Ron Perlman). There are a lot of surprisingly strong performances here, led by Elba as Pentecost, who delivers a Braveheart-esque speech that makes the one during the climax of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King seem embarrassingly inadequate and  whose utter conviction basically elevates the kitschy script he is given. The bickering scientists played by Day and Gorman, the entertaining walk-on by Perlman and the mostly taciturn performance turned in by Kikuchi are pretty effective in reminding the audience that there's a bit more to this movie than just robots punching monsters and vice versa. Lead actor Charlie Hunnam is actually kind of the weak link here, but he is, at least, adequate.



(Mild Spoilers)



For all the shortcomings of any of the human actors, all is forgotten when the robots vs. monsters slugfest begins in earnest. As thrilling as the fight scenes were, I confess to being slightly disappointed that most of the jaeger vs. kaiju action took place between Gipsy Danger and its monstrous opponents, and that two of the much-hyped jaeger robots, Crimson Typhoon from China and Cherno Alpha from Russia, both of which featured prominently in the marketing materials and which were described as virtual legends in the movie itself, went down as quickly as they did without so much as taking down a single kaiju. I would have wanted to see Crimson Typhoon's unique three-arm attack do some real damage before the robot and its operating team of Chinese triplets went down for the count. At least Striker Eureka got to wallop a kaiju early in the movie, and got some good shots in later, during the film's climax. 

On top of that, I found it slightly silly that Becket and Mori whipped out Gipsy Danger's sword AFTER they had basically used a freighter as a club against the kaiju, to apparently little effect, especially considering that one well-placed slash from the sword was basically able to take the kaiju down completely.  In the anime of old, the sword was the principal weapon, and an effective one at that, a concept which this film echoes, which made me wonder why the heck they didn't use it sooner.

And then of course, there are questions like, how could a thousand-ton (or more) robot survive a 50,000 foot drop, how could a giant monster with wings climb 50,000 feet in a few seconds when it takes a commercial airliner at least a few minutes to climb to half that distance moving at just under the speed of sound, and so on and so forth. Train the harsh eye of science, even just one branch of it, like physics, on this film, and it will almost surely fall apart. But that's not really the point.



(End Spoilers)



Gripes and implausibility notwithstanding, there is no point in my denying how much fun I had watching this film, especially having grown up with giant robots in the 70s and 80s. Spiritually, this was a lot more effective as an anime adaptation than the Wachowskis' notorious flop Speed Racer,and considering del Toro's gift for visual panache that he prominently put on display in Pan's Labyrinth and the second Hellboy film, it was always going to be a visual feast.

The genius of del Toro, however, is that he isn't content to simply let the monsters and mech do all the talking. He also plays a lot with thematic elements as well, and the fact that he chose to set the story years after the invasion began opened up a lot of interesting narrative possibilities; the bodies of slain kaiju litter the landscape, and it's fascinating to see how humanity adapts. As mentioned, there is a bustling underground trade in kaiju body parts and even skin parasites (!) which takes place in--where else?--Hong Kong, and some people have even turned the kaiju skeletons into places of worship! Del Toro basically creates  a world that's as grimy, sleazy and uncomfortably believable as the one we live in, for his fantastical creatures to inhabit, and this actually makes it easier to look past the absurdity of the larger-than-life grudge matches that play out on the screen.

While this film may not have the crossover appeal of other recent genre films like the Avengers or Dark Knight movies,  I humbly submit that there is more to it than just a fanboy love fest, and because I would love to see a sequel to this movie, I am giving it a big ol' thumbs-up.

4.5/5

Yellow and Loving It: A Review of Despicable Me 2

Like just about everyone else who powered the 2010 animated film Despicable Me to a worldwide gross of over half a billion dollars, I was a huge fan of the film and more than ready to shell out cash for Illumination Studios' highly-anticipated sequel, Despicable Me 2, which did not disappoint, or at least not too much.

Steve Carell's now-ex-villain Gru is back with his three adopted little girls Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Elsie Fisher), his mad scientist colleague Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand) and his tens of thousands of hilarious little yellow minions (Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, speaking their patented multilingual gibberish). In this film, Gru is approached by a super spy organization called the Anti-Villain League in order to help track down a mystery villain who has stolen a powerful mutagen that can turn even the most harmless animals into murderous, indestructible monsters. The AVL boss, Silas Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan) assigns Gru to stake out a mall where the villain might be hiding, and pairs him up with AVL agent Lucy Wilde (Kristen Wiig). At the mall Gru runs into Mexican restaurant owner and proprietor Eduardo Perez (Benjamin Bratt), whom he believes is a former supervillain named El Macho who supposedly died several years before. Much to Gru's dismay, Margo then finds herself infatuated with Antonio, Eduardo's flirtatious tweener son. Worse still, a mysterious villian starts abducting Gru's beloved minions in droves. Time is clearly running out for everyone's favorite ex-villain.

Sequels to animated films, with the exception of the Toy Story films, usually tend to decline in storytelling quality relative to their predecessors, especially when the original film carries a unique premise. The first Despicable Me, for example, stood out because of the very interesting notion of having a villain adopt three little girls to further an evil scheme, only to fall in love with them later on. It even had to compete with a similar "what-if-villains-had-feelings" film, Megamind, and came out on top. Of course, with Gru's adoptive daughters now having domesticated the former bad guy, the original storytelling conceit had to give way to the question of how he would adjust to civilian life, and how the writers can introduce a woman into his life.

While I definitely enjoyed the first film more than I did this one, I'd like to credit the filmmakers with maintaining many of the elements behind the success of the first film. Even though he's already been a dad for awhile, Gru is still wonderfully awkward and Steve Carell, still sporting his faux-Eastern European accent, is still a lot of fun to watch. By introducing new elements to his character, such as a romantic interest and, at the same time, the stress of having a budding adolescent daughter (Margo) taking an interest in boys, the filmmakers are able to keep things fresh. Of course, the three orphans in the film are just as cute as they were last time, and the scene-stealing Agnes has a little bit of a subplot involving her desire for a mother. Agent Wilde is a fun character, but surprisingly bland, especially given actress Kristen Wiig's comedic resume. In terms of zaniness, she could have easily gone toe-to-toe with Carell's Gru, and a slightly wacky accent couldn't have hurt, at least in my opinion.  The new potential bad guy, Eduardo Perez, is a significant stylistic departure from the first film's nerdy villain, Vector, and there's something to be said about the new approach. Part of me regrets that the filmmakers discarded the recording of Oscar winner Al Pacino, who originally did the voice-acting for the character, but Benjamin Bratt, who had previously lent his voice to a character in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, was, to my mind a suitable replacement.

The visual design of the characters and locales, old and new, retained a lot of the flavor of the first film, which was basically a mix of the illustrations of the late artist Edward Gorey and some bright pastel colors, therefore much of its charm as well.

I would, of course, be remiss if I failed to mention the real stars of this movie, the characters who have already become the official mascots of Illumination Studios: Gru's minions. Even more than in the first film, the gibberish-jabbering, clumsy, and consistently hilarious little henchmen basically steal the film right out from under Gru's beak-like nose. They are even more prominent here than in the last film as they are actually now an integral part of the plot rather than just a constant source of laughs (though they are still that). As in the previous film, directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud lend their voices to these little critters, who are basically just vitamin pills with eyes, arms, legs, goggles and overalls, and to me it really is amazing how iconic these little creatures have become.

Unlike the last animated film I reviewed, Monsters University, DM2 is not about subtext or messages for adults but really is just about laughs, and this movie delivers plenty of them. While this is still basically a movie for the young and young at heart, I will go so far as to say that this a movie the whole family can enjoy.

4/5

Pixar Takes on the Academe: A Review of Monsters University

I've been very busy lately, so unfortunately I was not able to review this movie immediately after I saw it nearly two weekends ago, but this was a solid entry in Pixar's library which definitely deserves a review, no matter how late.

Now, I love most Pixar movies, and a lot of other animated feature films from their competitors as well, because they are able to speak to my inner child, but most of the time, Pixar stands head and shoulders above its competition because it is able to address the adults in the audience as well, on a variety of themes, from mortality (Toy Story 2 and 3), to the challenges of single parenthood (Finding Nemo) to middle age (The Incredibles). Monsters Inc., was, surprisingly, one of the less "mature" Pixar hits as it posed the interesting hypothetical question -- "What if the monsters in our closet were more afraid of us than we were of them?"-- which basically captivated anyone who had ever been a kid dreading the bogeyman in the closet or under the bed. It was also one of Pixar's bigger hits over time, as it gained an enormous amount of goodwill over the years on home video and cable TV. While the decision to make a prequel was not something I, personally, welcomed as much as I would the decision to make a sequel to The Incredibles, I was reasonably enthusiastic about watching it the new installment, Monsters University, just the same.

While Monsters, Inc. was primarily about bigtime "scarer" James "Sully" Sullivan (John Goodman) and the relationship he formed with a little human girl, as well as his partnership with Michael "Mike" Wazowski (Billy Crystal) MU focuses primarily on a young Mike and how he chases down his dream of becoming a top-class scarer someday. Of course, he does what anyone aspiring to be a professional would: he goes to college, in this case, the scaring school of renowned Monsters University.  He faces several challenges there, such as bullies, headed by alpha-male Johnny J. Worthington III (Nathan Fillion), head of the Roar Omega Roar, a legendary but extremely strict Dean of the School of Scaring, Abigail Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren), and, surprisingly, the scion of a renowned clan of scarers, the talented but lazy James P. Sullivan. He also finds himself befriending several misfits such as Squishy (Peter Sohn), Don (Joel Murray), Art (Charlie Day) and two headed monster Terri (Sean Hayes) and Terry (Dave Foley). Mike soon learns that, if he wants to pursue his dream of being a scarer, he will have to learn to work well with others, including those with whom he has seemingly insurmountable differences.

Even more than its predecessor, this film tackles decidedly adult subject matter as it takes a swipe at the formal education system in the United States, particularly among the so-called "Ivy League" schools. Basically the adult subtext for this particular film is that the top universities in the United States, as represented by Monsters University, do not truly recognize nor can they properly nurture certain types of genius.  It's pretty daring subject matter for a Disney movie, especially one geared largely for schoolchildren, to whom Disney is undoubtedly selling cuddly stuffed versions of these characters. The delivery of the message is a little heavy-handed here, and not quite done with the panache of Pixar's earlier movies, but this movie is still a fine return to form for Pixar after the debacle of Cars 2 and the slightly wobbly narrative of lats year's Brave.

Of course, in terms of character design and visuals, Pixar is still very much at the top of its game. In addition to familiar characters like Mike, Sully, and Randall (Steve Buscemi) from the first film, director Dan Scanlon and his crew have introduced a number of interesting new character designs which effectively straddle the line between cute and creepy, though my personal favorite of the bunch, the stern Dean Hardscrabble, basically made my skin crawl while not looking altogether terrifying. The hallowed halls of academe are not quite as interesting as the ocean floor in Finding Nemo, or the exotic jungles of south America depicted in Up, but Pixar does great work here nonetheless.

All told, this was a prequel that was worth making, and worth watching.

4.5/5

Man of Steal (MASSIVE SPOILERS)

At the outset, I'd like to declare one simple fact: Superman is the FIRST superhero ever. Without Superman, whether as a comic-book character or a big-screen hero, there would be no Spider-Man, no X-Men, no Iron Man, and none of the colorful characters whose adventures I have enjoyed reading or watching on the big screen since my childhood days.

It amused me quite a bit, therefore, that when I watched the latest Superman movie, Man of Steel, I recognized a number of plot devices/scenarios that had already been used in other superhero or superhero-inspired movies.

1) The death of a father figure following a cruel statement by the hero, from Spider-Man -This one was the most glaring for me.  In the 1978 Superman film, Jonathan Kent died of a heart attack, and the poignancy of that death stemmed from the fact that for all of his powers, there was nothing Superman could have done. That was retooled a bit for MoS, with the elder Kent basically allowing himself to get sucked up into a tornado so that Clark's superpowers could stay a secret, with Clark looking on helplessly. Now, scant minutes BEFORE that happened, there was an exchange of words between Clark and Jonathan in a car wherein Clark, knowing his extraterrestrial origin, haughtily asserted to Jonathan (and Martha, who was in the back seat), that they weren't really his parents. Wow. Powerful stuff. At least that's what I thought when I first saw this scene in 2002's Spider-Man in which Uncle Ben tried to engage in a heart-to-heart with the now super-powered Peter Parker, also in a car, and said "I know I'm not your father" whereupon Peter shouted "then stop pretending to be!" When I saw it in MoS, for all of its tweaks to differentiate it, all I could think was "hey, that was a lot like Uncle Ben's death!" This wasn't the first similarity I noticed between MoS and other superhero movies, but for me it was hands-down the most striking because this was clearly meant to be a pivotal character moment, and the fact that it felt altogether lifted from another script was more than a little distracting.

2) The small town battle from Thor - In the 1981 sequel Superman II, General Zod, then played by Terence Stamp, and his two flunkies wreak havoc in a small town, though Superman isn't around to battle them. In Man of Steel, though Superman and two of Zod's minions actually throw down in a small town in Kansas this time, basically leveling the whole place with their punches, flying bodies and the resulting explosions (although to be fair, the United States military helps the mayhem along quite a bit). One of the minions, a computer-generated Kyptonian, looks like he's about nine to ten feet tall.  That kind of calls to mind the slugfest in 2011's Thor in which the roughly-ten-foot-tall Asgardian robot called the Destroyer is sent to kill Thor and ends up wrecking a small town in New Mexico while duking it out with Thor and his comrades-in-arms, the Warriors Three. Again, even with tweaks (and superior visual effects for MoS), the similarity was pretty striking.

3)  The babies grown on trees from The Matrix - the idea of genetically-engineered babies, unless I'm mistaken, is a concept that's new to the Superman film franchise, with all Kryptonian babies grown in pods attached to what look like trees, all immersed in what I assume is a gigantic artificial womb known as a "genesis chamber." Now, The Matrix films, while not about a comic-book superhero, were no doubt inspired by Superman's exploits given that the hero, Neo, had fantastical powers, including flight. In fact, in one scene during which Neo was flying around the Matrix, one of the operators said "he's doing his Superman thing." Well, the whole concept of babies being grown in enormous fields on mechanical trees was realized quite vividly in the very first Matrix film, so vividly in fact that the moment I saw the genesis chamber of MoS I remembered it.The fact that two Matrix alumni, Laurence Fishburne and Harry Lennix, were part of the MoS cast only reinforced the connection for me.

4)  The climactic flying fistfight from The Matrix Revolutions - Back when he reviewed this film in 2003, popular (and sometimes infamous) geek guru Harry Knowles gushed over the flying fight scene between the heroic Neo and the villainous Agent Smith, and said something to the effect of "wouldn't it be cool if a future Superman movie had a fight that looked just like this!" Apparently Zack Snyder, Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer, the respective director and screenwriters of MoS, read Harry Knowles' review. Also, considering that the movie never really explained how a man who grew up on a farm in Kansas with no formal fight training managed to hold his own in hand-to-hand combat against people who had been training for combat all their lives, all of whom had the same super powers as he did, I can't help but wonder if, in the beginning, when Jor-El "downloaded" the Codex into Kal-El, he basically downloaded fighting skills as well, like the "plug and play" martial arts learning that took place in the Matrix films.

5) The cataclysmic, city-leveling battle from The Avengers and Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Of all the story devices which seemed to have been cribbed from other blockbusters this one is perhaps the most understandable, considering that disaster porn is always fashionable, but it is no less glaring considering that in past incarnations of Superman on screen, specifically in Superman II, Supes would have been appalled to have caused as much destruction as he did and would have done everything to move the fight away from a populated area, something he did not seem particularly interested in doing while smashing Zod into buildings. To go back to the small town fight, at least he told people to get out of harm's way and shouted "it's not safe," but when he got to the city, he pretty much had at Zod without apparently sparing a thought for the thousands of innocents inside the buildings they trashed. At least the Avengers worked to get the civilians out of harm's way. If anything, Superman was more like the Transformers, who like him didn't seem to give a shit about civilians either when battling the bad guys. The subtext is disturbing; the Superman of the film was more like an alien robot than an actual hero. Ironically enough, it was when he finally killed the bad guy that he actually started showing some concern for life again.

For all of this, and for all the flaws I perceived in the script, I still enjoyed Man of Steel, but I cannot help but chuckle thinking about how liberally the filmmakers borrowed from movies based on characters whose existence was basically inspired by Superman, especially the Marvel characters.  Part of me wonders if the makers of the Marvel movies recognize this, and if they feel like Pepsi did when "New Coke" came out over twenty years ago.