All Sizzle, (Almost) No Steak: A Review of Godzilla

The last Godzilla movie I walked into with any sense of anticipation was the 1998 big-budget remake by disaster-master Roland Emmerich (Independence Day) which turned out to be an unmitigated catastrophe. As a result, I wasn't particularly looking forward to this new installment, directed by relative newcomer Gareth Edwards, though early buzz and sneak peeks indicated that if nothing else, this would at least be better than the Emmerich-directed fiasco.

Last night, when confronted with a choice between killing time watching the new Godzilla  and wading through several kilometers of heavy traffic, I chose the former. Truth be told, I'm not really sure that was the better decision.

The opening credits feature some archival footage of nuclear testing from the 1950s, glimpses of a mysterious creature and the repeated appearance of the name "Monarch" before the film segues to 1999, when Dr. Ichiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and his associate Viviene Graham (Sally Hawkins), fly to a remote location in the Philippines, where miners have unearthed what appears to be the bones of a giant creature several feet underground. Startlingly, they also discover what appear to be eggs of enormous creatures, one of which has hatched, with its occupant having cut a swath of destruction out to the sea.

Not long after, in Japan, American engineer Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) who lives in Japan with his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche) and their son Ford (CJ Adams) and works at a nuclear power plant, is concerned regarding seismic activity happening right under the plant, but he cannot get his superiors to listen to his theories as to what is happening, until it is too late and a catastrophic meltdown occurs, with particularly terrible consequences for Brody.

Years later, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), now grown up with a wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and a son (Carson Bolde) of his own, lives in San Francisco and works in the U.S. Navy as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician. For all the time that has passed, however, Joe Brody has never let go of his obsession with finding out what really happened at the nuclear power plant. He gets arrested attempting to enter what has become a quarantined zone, where his old house, and the data disks it contains, are, and Ford has to bail him out of jail. Eventually he prevails on Ford to return to the quarantined zone, where the two of them discover something even more terrifying than Joe could have imagined in his all of his paranoid speculation. Soon a race is on to protect humanity from a threat they have never known before.

I'll be direct; I did not like this movie.

I walked in hoping for a giant creature movie in the vein of Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim and Peter Jackson's King Kong, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed, and instead I got a disaster movie with a grand total of, by my estimation, about six or seven minutes of actual screen-time for the title character. To say I felt cheated would be an understatement of monstrous proportions. 

There are things I liked about this movie, to be fair; I loved Bryan Cranston's performance. The only real poignancy in the film came from his story, in particular his relationship with his family. Also, while his histrionics may have seemed over the top at some points, of all the actors assembled, and there were quite a few notable ones, he brought the most conviction to his role; it was from his performance that one got the sense of urgency, that there was something terrible about to happen to all of mankind.  That he was written out of the script as early as he was really robbed the film of some genuine emotional heft.

Instead of Cranston's Joe, a truly tragic figure seeking redemption through the truth, the focus and intended emotional center of the film is his son Ford, played in adulthood by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who basically looked to me like he was sleepwalking through the whole damned movie. Olsen, as his wife Elle, is good at looking scared and running away, and little else. Between the two of them, these two actors don't come anywhere near what Cranston could have brought to the film had they kept him in longer, and yet it is on them that the filmmakers spend most of the film's running time. I get that the idea was to give the story a human core, and to get audiences to care about the people caught in the mayhem of Godzilla's titanic battles, but that only works when the leads are engaging, and neither of the two leads really is.

Also, Watanabe's Serizawa comes across as downright silly; there's something laughable about his belief that Godzilla (or "Gojira" as he correctly calls him) is some kind of benevolent force of nature. He's supposed to be a scientist, after all, and yet there's no evidence to support his theory of Godzilla's inclinations. His view seems more like a matter of religious faith than of actual scientific principle, a notion bolstered by the fact that Graham refers to the giant lizard as "a god."

It's not a total loss; the depiction of Godzilla is utterly magnificent, and allayed my fears that for all the filmmakers' efforts, he would still look like a guy in a rubber suit. No, the sight and sound of this creature are downright awesome, and I know that description may come across as trite, but I can truly not think of a more apt description. I missed seeing this in IMAX but I imagine that must be a special experience. Given, however, that he's barely ever on the screen in a two-hour movie, though, I wouldn't recommend spending the arm and a leg required to watch in IMAX theaters. Still, I applaud the folks at WETA Digital for rising up to the difficult task of visually updating such an iconic character, as well as the folks responsible for designing his distinctive roar.  The creatures he faces off against, the Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms or MUTOS, are similarly imposing, though not nearly as impressive to behold. The time Godzilla and his foes are filling the screen was quite a lot of fun to watch, which made the dearth of his screen time all the more infuriating.

One small touch I appreciated was a fairly novel use for the 3-D format which played around with the audience's point-of-view. Sometimes the mayhem is viewed through Ford Brody's goggles as he skydives, and other times through a car windshield, and other times still through an office window.

For me, the movie fails on two crucial points; it fails in terms of human drama due to actors who, for the most part, turn in utterly tepid, unconvincing performances, and as a monster movie considering that the title character is on the screen for less than ten percent of the total running time. Compared to Pacific Rim and especially King Kong, which were generous both with the development of their human characters and their creature exposure, this movie just fell woefully flat for me.

5/10

Hoping for Spidey's Skyfall (Spoilers)

The year 2002 was when which the Spider-Man film franchise kicked off in fine style, ending the year as the highest grossing film at the expense of such formidable opposition as the second Star Wars prequel, as well as sequels in both the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises. It was also the year in which another popular film franchise continued its downward spiral into virtually terminal schlock. Die Another Day was the twentieth film in the long-running (then 40 years) James Bond film franchise, and the fourth starring Irish actor Pierce Brosnan. After the first, well-regarded film Goldeneye in 1995, the subsequent films starring Brosnan got progressively worse, with Die Another Day representing a creative nadir. It got so bad that the solution was to start all over again from scratch, with a new bond in Daniel Craig, and a new timeline, though it retained Judi Dench from the Brosnan era as "M."  Casino Royale was a commercial and critical success.

It was not all smooth sailing, however; the next installment, Quantum of Solace, notwithstanding the goodwill generated from the Bond reboot, was not as well received as its predecessor and was seen as a creative misfire, notwithstanding the fact that there was clear narrative continuity between Casino Royale and itself. The new Bond series was conceived as a trilogy, but the second part, which was left conspicuously hanging for a third, sagged, leaving doubt as to the viability of the next installment.

So Sony cut their losses and made Skyfall, which had nothing to do with either of the two films that came before it, although they did retain Craig as Bond and Dench as M. They told a new story, unsaddled by previous baggage, and one conceived entirely as its own thing, and the results were dramatic.

Skyfall made a billion dollars at the worldwide box office, nearly twice the grosses of its immediate predecessor, garnered critical acclaim, and won a passel of awards, including two Oscars.

In the span of ten short years, the James Bond went from a creative low with Die Another Day to a creative high with Skyfall.

In that same period, the Spider-Man film franchise, which saw the release of the acclaimed, award-winning blockbuster Spider-Man 2 in 2004, has apparently gone in the opposite direction with this year's release of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, quantifiably the worst-received film of that entire series.

Now, when Sam Raimi's original Spider-Man films went the way of Die Another Day with the disastrous Spider-Man 3, Sony correctly decided it was time to start anew, and two years ago produced the flawed but nonetheless highly watchable reboot The Amazing Spider-Man, which wasn't quite Casino Royale to Die Another Day but which nonetheless provided the studio with a much needed clean break from the past.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is arguably the Quantum of Solace of this new series of Spider-Man movies, and even though it's still making money, to my mind the producers really have to start rethinking their approach to the series, which they apparently already have planned out for the next several years, just as the Bond producers did. Their plan is for Spider-Man to face off with the Sinister Six, his fabled team of enemies from the comic books. So confident are they, apparently, that they even have a spinoff planned for the supervillians. The underwhelming grosses and vicious reviews, however, should get them to seriously rethink their long-term plan.

My (admittedly unsolicited) advice for them is to keep things simple; focus on Peter's core relationships, which was one of the things they did well, even, in this widely reviled new installment, and they should never let another whole movie go by without Peter Parker ever mentioning Uncle Ben by name. That was just wrong on every narrative level. They should also make it a point to have his villains and supporting characters played by actors who play them less like cartoon characters and more like human beings.  Jamie Foxx (Electro), Paul Giamatti (Rhino) and Marton Csokas (Dr. Kafka) all went extremely heavy on the camp, and it was extremely distracting to watch. Imagine how horrid Captain America: The Winter Soldier would have been if Robert Redford's character had abruptly started speaking with a German accent.

As Batman and Robin showed back in 1997, all it takes to bury a film franchise is one bad film, but as Skyfall showed back in 2012, the converse is also true: an outstanding film can really turn things around for a franchise in freefall.  I'm still holding out hope that the next Spider-Man film is the latter type of sequel.

Out of Ideas

I was originally planning to write a long, derisive post about Warner Brothers' announcement that they will be making a Justice League movie, immediately after their Superman vs. Batman film, which has yet to even start filming, but someone's comment on the internet summarized what I was thinking in less than ten words: I'll believe it when I see it.

What I can't quite believe, however, is Sony Pictures' announcement that they actually intend to make a Sinister Six spinoff, or, for the uninitiated, a whole movie about six of Spider-Man's deadliest enemies. Basically, Sony is betting that audiences, a large chunk of them families, will pay to see an expensive, two-hour movie about bad guys whose mission in life it is to kill Spider-Man.

I understand Sony's quandary; Spider-Man is the only Marvel property they have left, with the X-Men and Fantastic Four belonging to Twentieth Century Fox, and EVERYTHING else having reverted to Marvel, now owned by the Walt Disney Company. Once upon a time, Sony had rights to as many as THREE Marvel properties, including Spider-Man, but after squandering their resources on two Ghost Rider movies, both critical failures, the second a commercial failure, they let that property go. They were supposed to have a Killraven movie in the pipeline at one point, but that has since fallen through, and all they have left now are Spider-man and related characters.

Of those related characters, only one of them can even be remotely considered a "superhero;" the character Venom, originally conceived as a villain but which took on a life of its own as some sort of twisted anti-hero. Venom was originally the "marriage" of an alien parasite that grafted itself onto Spider-Man, only to be rejected by him, and Eddie Brock, a reporter whose sensationalized stories Spider-Man had unknowingly discredited by catching a criminal and exposing his stories as fraudulent. Marvel has since experimented with the alien costume by giving it a different host; for years it was supervillain Mac Gargan, a.k.a. the Scorpion, but since 2010, the alien has had as its host war hero and double amputee Flash Thompson, a longtime member of Spider-Man's supporting cast who finally joined the ranks of Marvel's superheroes. Whether or not Marvel deliberately took this direction with the character to make him more "movie friendly" or not, the fact of the matter is that "Agent Venom" is now a more viable big-screen hero than the creepy Eddie Brock incarnation of the character would ever have been. One could even imagine the character being featured in a spy-thriller akin to the Bourne movies or even the current Marvel Studios smash hit Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

With the Sinister Six, however, the options are a lot more limited; these guys are straight-up bad guys. They are criminals, basically. Thieves and killers, every one. While this might make the stuff of a great neo-noir movie, like a super-powered version of Reservoir Dogs, the fact of the matter is that a huge part of Spider-Man's target demographic is children, and neither children nor their parents will pay to see a movie about bad guys, so as bad ideas for blockbuster movies go, this one's kind of a doozy.

Avi Arad, who was no longer part of the Marvel Cinematic brain trust by the time Iron Man launched the studio in 2008, has boasted that Sony would only resort to a crossover between Spider-man and the Avengers if they had "run out of ideas."

Time to get on the phone, Avi.

Bloated: A Review of The Amazing Spider-Man 2

directed by Marc Webb
screenplay by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Jeff Pinkner

I will be candid: this review will be quite a bit longer than most of my reviews because of my affection for the Spider-Man character. To my mind, more than any other character in the Marvel pantheon, Spider-Man deserves a perfect movie, or as near as one can get to it, and it saddens me that, this time around, he did not get the masterpiece he deserved.

A lot has been said, much of it bad, about the sequel to The Amazing Spider-Man Sony Pictures' 2012 reboot of the cinematic saga of Marvel Comics superhero Spider-Man, who once upon a time sat atop the cinematic roost as king of comic book heroes and Marvel-based heroes in particular until he was displaced by the concerted efforts of six of his fellow Marvel heroes in a little movie called The Avengers.  The movie has, so far, gotten worst reviews of any of the films in the series (yes, even including the much-reviled Spider-Man 3) and the cacophony of fanboys calling for the failure of this film is at a fever pitch. Notably, these are no longer even just the DC comics fanboys cheering for their Nolan/Snyder produced "horses" but actual Marvel fanboys wanting Sony Pictures, who have had the rights to make movies on this property for the better part of two decades now, to lose money on this movie so that they will willingly cede the property back to Marvel, who now have their own film studio.

Since the Avengers stopped an alien fleet from destroying the world (or at least New York City), it seems to me that Sony Pictures felt they had to up the ante somehow from the flawed but entertaining first reboot with some really over-the-top flourishes. I can just imagine the meetings: "Let's shoot the whole movie in New York and not having Los Angeles or Toronto double for it!" or "Let's have two or more villains, one of them with the capacity to mess up the whole city!" or "Let's give Peter's parents their own action scene!" or "Let's hire the guys who wrote the Transformers movies!"

As a result of what I strongly suspect is an effort to outdo Marvel studios in the fireworks department, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is at least twenty minutes too long and feels a little bit cluttered at many points.

The movie picks up from where the last film has left off; Peter Parker a.k.a. Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield) is about to graduate from high school, while struggling with the secret behind his parents' disappearance as well as his on-again, off-again relationship with girlfriend Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), mainly due to his promise to Gwen's departed dad, Police Captain George Stacy (Denis Leary) to keep her out of Spider-Man's dangerous life. Things get even more complicated for him when Gwen is offered a scholarship into Oxford University...which happens to be in England.  Then, shortly after mentally-unbalanced electrical engineer Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx) has a little workplace accident that transforms him into the deadly Electro, and an old friend, Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) returns from an extended visit to Europe to visit his dying dad Norman (Chris Cooper), only to discover somewhat troubling secrets about himself, Spider-Man comes face-to-face with challenges that will change him forever.

The subplot involving Peter's parents was always suspect, even when the new Spider-crew introduced it with the reboot, and here it simply takes up too much screen time and pays off in a revelation that seems meant to be important but feels utterly superfluous. By itself it's already ten minutes of the film that could have been cut right out, leaving the rest of the film none the worse for its removal.

Another misstep the producers took this time was the realization of Jamie Foxx's Max Dillon, a.k.a. Electro. I'll grant that Dillon is painted as a lonely, maltreated, mentally unstable electrical engineer before he transforms, courtesy of a rather silly accident into Electro, but to my mind the transition from disturbed individual to full blown psychopath feels extremely abrupt. The script's approach to Electro, as well as Foxx's portrayal of the nerdy Dillon, feel unnecessarily campy, and as fantastical as the character's origin is, I had a particularly hard time suspending my disbelief here. I groaned in the theater when Max called a colleague of his to shut down the electrical grid where he was working so that he could repair a broken cable, only to be told that this man was calling it a day and could not be bothered to help him. So, Oscorp, a multi-billion dollar company has only one person working its whole power grid, who would rather rush home than help another employee fix a building's broken power cable that could potentially screw up the entire building? That's the kind of contrivance one could expect from a 1960s comic book, but not from a contemporary feature film. The consolation, though, is that once Foxx goes into full-on villain mode, he is quite convincingly menacing, and the effects that go into visualizing him are absolutely top-notch.

My final major gripe is the story arc of this particular version of Harry Osborn, played by Dane DeHaan. Truth be told, I quite enjoyed DeHaan's performance. In fact, of the two new kids on the block, him and Foxx, I have more praise for DeHaan, who takes a decidedly different approach to the Osborn character from that of his predecessor James Franco. There are still the daddy issues, to be sure, but DeHaan's Harry, who learns he is virtually terminally ill, does a good job of conveying desperation on top of the pathos of a neglected child, and DeHaan channels a younger Leonardo diCarpio, not just because of the physical resemblance but on account of more than a few of his mannerisms. Most importantly, however, his screen chemistry with Garfield's Peter is palpable, so that even if their friendship isn't quite as close as it was in the Raimi's films, there's still a genuine sense of tragedy when things inevitably go sour. What I did not at all appreciate, however, was the corporate mutiny plotline that the filmmakers rehashed from the very first Spider-Man movie. It was, in a word, irritating. Surely, I thought, there are other ways to motivate a character other than by taking away his money and power.

I have a minor quibble too, and it is with the presentation of the character eventually known as the Rhino, but without spoiling too much I can categorically say that he has hardly any screen time and therefore hardly any bearing on the story. What I sincerely disliked about the character, though, was Paul Giamatti's over-the-top, utterly hammy performance, which depressed and annoyed me in equal parts considering that Giamatti is one of my very favorite character actors and could have done so much better, no matter how small this role was. Heck, legendary actors like Robert Redford and Anthony Hopkins have taken their supporting roles in comic-book-based movies much more seriously, with Hopkins even having to wear garish costumes and speak flowery English, so Giamatti could have at least tried to act like he was in something other than a Saturday morning cartoon.

Yes, there is a lot that is wrong with this movie, but I will not join the bandwagon of hate against it because to my mind, Sony got the most important things right, starting with the title character. To my mind, Andrew Garfield IS Peter Parker, just as much as Robert Downey, Jr. IS Tony Stark and Tom Hiddleston IS Loki. He made a pretty good argument for his casting in the last movie but basically solidified it here. He has struck the delicate balance between Parker's inner loneliness and sense of guilt and responsibility on the one hand, and the unbridled cockiness and snark he assumes when he puts on the mask on the other, a duality that has been a hallmark of the character for fifty-two years, and which Tobey Maguire never even came close to accomplishing in any of the Sam Raimi movies. I cannot emphasize this point enough; for three movies I put up with Maguire's squeaky voice and misguided, at times borderline-condescending portrayal of Spider-Man. I didn't yearn for better because frankly, that was the hand I, along with all other movie viewers in the world, was dealt.  What Garfield has done with the character, therefore is virtually miraculous; he has made this Spider-Man almost everything that Maguire's was not in the ways that truly count, and when this film is at its most ridiculous he remains its saving grace.

More than just Garfield's portrayal of the character, however, his relationships with his supporting cast also go a long way towards carrying the film. Peter' interactions with characters such as Sally Field's Aunt May, Gwen, and Harry, are defining moments in the film that come across as truly heartfelt stuff, and manage to give the film an emotional center of gravity even when the big-budget craziness threatens (as it does, many, many times) to carry the whole enterprise away like a runaway tornado. Full credit goes to Webb and all of the actors involved for getting this crucial aspect of the film right, but Garfield is at the heart of it all. His chemistry with real-life girlfriend Stone, as embodied in their dialogue and the body language they share, is utterly magical, and again, is far superior to any of the romantic sparks that flew between the Maguire's take on Peter and Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane Watson, his squeeze in the old movie series. Also, I think Field's Aunt May is a lot more convincing than Rosemary Harris' ever was. In terms of the smaller, more intimate moments, this movie offers scenes that are just as good as, if not better than the very best that the Raimi movies had to offer. Every time they have these scenes it feels like a well-scripted independent movie about family and relationships has wandered onto the screen.

Not only that, but clearly a lot of effort has gone into making Spidey more convincing than he's ever looked; digital Spidey is looking slicker than he ever has before, and nearly every gravity-defying action sequence with him in it is utterly breathtaking, especially in 3-D. It helps that the filmmakers have outfitted Garfield and his stuntmen with the best Spider-Man costume that has ever been filmed, which brings back the best aspects of the Raimi-era suit and adds some welcome touches, like the snazzy oversized eyepieces which hearken back to the Spider-Man I grew up with: the McFarlane-era Spidey. Also, as overblown as many of the action sequences are, I genuinely appreciated the fact that one of the most impressively-staged ones involved Spider-Man using his head and his lightning-fast reflexes to save a whole bunch of bystanders from getting both squashed by a flying car and fried by one of Electro's blasts. More than being just an orgy of computer-generated imagery, this scene punctuated something very important about Spider-Man: his sense of responsibility extends to all civilians caught in the crossfire of his titanic battles and he will do everything in his power and skill to save them.

 All told, to my mind the film's biggest problem was that its makers were constantly trying to one-up the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut that is Marvel Studios in the slam-bang action department, and so rather than let this film be its own thing, like the Spider-Man films of old used to do, they tried to make almost everything "bigger," from the multiple bad guys to the work of composer/fanboy god Hans Zimmer and his "Magnificent Six."  I appreciated Zimmer's work here, though at some points of the film it struck me that he was repeating his new theme for the character as often as he was in order to drum out of the viewer's head the music that his predecessor James Horner had written for the character. Well, sorry Zimmer, but I for one am still partial to Horner's music, mainly because, like the parts of this film that work, it feels more intimate, and more personal.

In closing, I think that Sony would have done well to learn from Marvel's most recent, acclaimed blockbuster Captain America: The Winter Soldier, in which the massive CGI-laden climax was practically a footnote to a film that had already spent the majority of its running time building up its plot and characters. In crafting the sequel that is probably all but a foregone conclusion at this point, I hope Sony remembers a valuable lesson from this film: while good characterization and awesome CGI will always have a place in a Spider-Man movie, bigger isn't always better.

6/10

By the Numbers: A Review of Rio 2

directed by Carlos Saldanha

The fact that the animated sequel Rio 2 is riddled with narrative cliches ranging from bad in-law jokes to "save the forest" tropes is hardly its biggest sin. Filmed storytelling, even the animated kind, has been around so long that repeating stories from older films is almost inevitable, but the perfunctory way the filmmakers toss everything together is nearly unforgivable.

This film departs from the bustling city of Rio de Janeiro (which makes the title a bit of a misnomer) and heads for the jungles of the Amazon, where Tulio, the ornithologist from the first film (Rodrigo Santoro, strangely enough the only Brazilian with a major role in the film) traveling with his wife Linda (Leslie Mann) discovers that there may be more blue macaws in the rainforest, a species of bird previously thought on the verge of extinction. Meanwhile, back in the city, Linda's and Tulio's domesticated Blue Macaws Blu (Jessie Eisenberg) and Jewel (Anne Hathaway), who now have three kids, happen to see their "guardians" on television. Jewel, who came from the Amazon, is ecstatic at the thought that there might be more birds like them, and basically twists Blu's wing into going there with the whole family. Blu tells his friends, yellow canary Nico (Jamie Foxx), red-crested cardinal Pedro (will.i.a.m), toucan Rafael (George Lopez), and bulldog Luis (Tracy Morgan), and they encourage him to take the trip to make his wife happy, though the three birds also accompany them. A surprise awaits Blu and his family in the forest as they encounter not one but a whole tribe of blue macaws led by Jewel's father Eduardo (Andy Garcia) and her childhood friend Roberto (Bruno Mars). Jewel is also welcomed back by her aunt Mimi (Rita Moreno). Things are not hunky dory for everyone; Roberto, a strapping, singing specimen of a bird makes Blu insecure, while Eduardo views the highly domesticated Blu with considerable disdain.

These, however, could be the least of Blu's problems as an illegal logger (Miguel Ferrer), threatened by the thought of his cash cow being declared a wildlife sanctuary, has evil plans for Tulio and Linda, while Nigel (Jemaine Clement), the murderous cockatoo from the first film, who survived a plane crash but is now flightless and working as a sideshow attraction, has evil plans for Blu, plans which involve the venom of a tree frog (Kristen Chenoweth) and a porcupine's quill fired from the snout of an anteater.

I don't quite know what was played out worse, the whole in-law, old-boyfriend-by-whom-the-hero-feels-threatened storyline, or the whole animals get together to save-the-rain-forest story.  The problem wasn't that these stories are cliche (even though they are); it's that I could discern no effort on the part of the filmmakers to present them in a fresh way. Sure, there are lively visuals and livelier musical numbers and the movie is still good for some laughs, but, really, in this day and age lush visuals are practically a dime a dozen; Blue Sky studios gave us similar eye-candy with last year's Epic, and after Frozen, nearly every musical number in this movie feels second rate, especially Jemaine Clement's insipid cover of "I Will Survive." As for the slapstick gags, just about every animated movie has those too, even the low-budget ones. There is very little about this movie that makes it stand out.

For me, the movie's one truly saving grace was the positively manic performance by Kristen Chenoweth as Gabi the poisonous tree frog who is head over heel in love with Nigel, replete with a show-stopping song number and a Shakespearean twist near the end of the film. The whole film is the better for having her in it; she brings an energy and enthusiasm to her role that none of the other actors in this film did. Quite honestly everyone else feels like they're phoning it in (and with an animated film, this possibility feels even more distinct than usual), especially next to Chenoweth.

I really don't know what else to say. Kids will love it, to be fair, especially the very young ones who haven't seen this sort of thing several times before, but the adults who will accompany them to see it really shouldn't expect anything.



5.5/10

Marvel's Canny Marketing

Last year, Marvel Studios stepped out of their traditional summer comfort zone by releasing Thor: The Dark World in November. The gambit paid off; the film grossed over $200 million in North America and over $600 at the worldwide box office. They did the same thing again this year, releasing Captain America: The Winter Soldier in April, a full month ahead of what is traditionally called the summer movie season in North America, and have again struck gold; the movie's opening weekend in the U.S. and Canada outgrossed its predecessor by 46% ($95 million to the first movies $65 million), and its worldwide grosses are currently at over $300 million. It's already earned more in the rest of the world (outside North America) in two weeks than the first movie made in its entire run. Clearly, Marvel movies can thrive even without the benefit of the "summer season," as long as the product is strong and awareness is high.

In the wake of the success of The Winter Soldier, Marvel has made an interesting revelation. Some months ago, rival studio Warner Brothers, responsible for the filmed adaptations of the characters of the DC Comics Universe, announced that they would be releasing their highly-anticipated film Batman vs. Superman, on May 6, 2016, or the first weekend of the U.S summer movie season. This was a big announcement for two reasons: first, for 7 of the last 10 years, and for every year since 2007, the movie released on that date has always featured characters sourced from Marvel Comics and second, an unnamed Marvel movie had already been staked out on that spot. In the wake of the successful opening of The Winter Soldier, Marvel has now announced that the movie intended for that release date is the next Captain America movie, whatever it will be called.

This calls to my mind a marketing tactic pulled by Sony Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn Mayer Pictures back in 2006, when they were marketing the James Bond reboot Casino Royale.  Before its release in November, 2006, Sony and MGM, confident in the quality of their film which some naysayers were already pooh-poohing, largely because of opposition to the casting of Daniel Craig in the title role, announced that they already had a release date for the sequel to the yet-unreleased film: the first weekend of May, 2008, a date which then-fledgling Marvel Studios had already staked for their inaugural release, Iron Man.  Some befuddlement followed; studios were not nearly as aggressive about staking out release dates back then as they are now, and 2008 was, for the most part, a clean slate. Iron Man director Jon Favreau was supposedly quoted as describing Sony's move as "fighting for a slot in an empty parking lot." What they didn't realize back then was that Sony was less concerned about selling a movie that had not even been made yet and more preoccupied with selling the pricey, risky reboot they were just about to release.  In the end, Casino Royale made lots of money, and interestingly enough, the follow-up, Quantum of Solace moved out of the May 2008 slot to a November 2008 release date.

By announcing that Captain America will take on Batman AND Superman in terms of release dates, Marvel's marketing people no doubt hope to generate large amounts of buzz for their current release, CA: TWS by getting people wonder what it is about this film that is so good that Marvel has so much confidence in their next one. Time, and the final grosses of CA: TWS will tell if this move was a smart one.

In any case, it doesn't even matter if Marvel moves out of the spot, as they have already established that their movies will sell no matter when they're released.  The August 1 release date for the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy no longer seems so strange. Heck, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if, someday, Marvel actually dared to schedule films for release in the typically fallow months of January and September.  Truth be told, the only other studio that has experienced this kind of near-infallible box-office reliability is Marvel's Disney stablemate Pixar, though it must be said that Marvel has proven a bit more ballsy than Pixar in terms of release dates as evidenced by the early spring release for the Cap sequel.

Incidentally, boxofficemojo.com, a website dedicated to tabulating movie grosses, has just announced that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the highest grossing film franchise in North America, ever.

It is a damned good time to be a Marvel fan...

Brains AND Brawn: A Review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier

NOTE: I'm changing my perfect score to 10 rather than five, as it allows me more flexibility in my scoring.

When Marvel Studios made Captain America: The First Avenger a few years ago, they did a rather curious thing: they launched a film franchise using a story format they could not possibly hope to repeat in future installments. They set that film during World War II, drawing on period films like Raiders of the Lost Ark for narrative inspiration. They even hired Joe Johnston, who had previously directed a period comic-book film in The Rocketeer, to infuse the film with that old-fashioned sensibility. Then, they ended the film in the present day, thus ensuring that any future films would not be able to draw on that particular narrative well except perhaps for the odd flashback. Then, of course, Cap appeared in the global box-office phenomenon The Avengers, and there was simply no turning back.

For the sequel to The First Avenger, therefore, Marvel had to do something completely different, and with the new film Captain America: The Winter Soldier, they have not only done that, but they've given audiences arguably their some of their finest work yet, even when compared to films as well-loved as The Avengers and the first Iron Man. Brothers Anthony and Joe Russo take over the director's reins from Joe Johnston this time around.

Even though The First Avenger screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely return for scripting duties, what they've turned in here manages to both be faithful to Marvel canon and yet a huge departure in tone not just from the first movie but from every other Marvel movie that's come before it.

Two years after the events of The Avengers, Steve Rogers, a.k.a. Captain America (Chris Evans) works as an operative of the Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement Logistics Division, or S.H.I.E.L.D. for short. His first mission in the film has him sneaking aboard a hijacked S.H.I.E.L.D. cargo ship to rescue the hostages from the dastardly Algerian pirate Batroc (Georges St. Pierre) and his crew together with fellow operatives Natasha Romanov, a.k.a. the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson)  and Brock Rumlow (Frank Grillo). It turns, out, however, that while Cap's mission was to rescue the hostages, apparently the Black Widow was on a slightly different errand for Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who, when confronted by Cap, reveals S.H.I.E.L.D.'s grand plan: they intend to launch three fully-armed Helicarriers into the sky, in a perpetual, sub-orbital patrol. The idea is to have S.H.I.E.L.D.'s guns trained on all potential threats at all times, a preemptive mindset with which Cap vehemently disagrees. As it turns out, Fury has his own misgivings, which he expresses to his superior, Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford).

Things then take a turn for the deadly as a mysterious assassin named the Winter Soldier shows up, and it's up to Cap and his allies, including the Black Widow and veterans' counselor Sam Wilson a.k.a. the Falcon (Anthony Mackie) to stop him and the sinister forces behind him.

This movie has often been compared to political thrillers from the 1970s not only by critics but by the directors themselves, who cite Three Days of the Condor, which starred Redford himself, as a direct inspiration. Personally, I've never seen any of those movies, though I saw a number of similarities between this film and political thrillers of more recent vintage, specifically the Bourne movies of Doug Liman and Paul Greengrass. Like those films, this one tackles the evils of the military industrial complex, and wears its anti-establishment colors on its red, white and blue sleeves. The good news for me is that I am a huge fan of the first three Bourne films (the ones that actually featured the character of Jason Bourne), and this film has actually captured much of what was great about those films as far as political commentary goes.

Also, like the Bourne series of films, this film has generous helpings of bone-crushing action sequences, easily on par with anything those films had to offer and head and shoulders above anything that's been seen in a superhero movie to date. This was extremely gratifying to see onscreen because I have been longing for some proper fight choreography in a superhero movie since Bryan Singer and his writers decided that Wolverine was completely ignorant in martial arts when they made the X-Men movies. It always bothered me that an ordinary spy/assassin like Jason Bourne had much more impressive fighting skills than a killing machine like Wolverine and comic-book martial arts experts like Batman and Daredevil.

This particular film answers that particular gripe of mine: movie-Captain America makes movie-Batman (yes, the one played by Christian Bale) look like he's fighting underwater, movie-Daredevil look like he's doing an interpretative dance, and movie-Wolverine look like a complete idiot. Heck, THIS Cap could probably take down all three of them at the same time, considering what he did to a dozen guys in an elevator. Oh, and yes, I am fairly convinced that this Cap could also kick Jason Bourne's ass.

There's much more to the film than chop-sockey scenes, though. Evans is no Robert Downey, Jr., but he really has made the role of Steve Rogers his own through some truly earnest acting which is, as it was in the first film, premised on the fact that at heart, under all the muscle and fighting skills, Steve Rogers is still a 95-pound weakling who just wants to do the right thing. This movie is also notable for being Johansson's breakthrough in terms of her Black Widow character, who appeared rather expansively in The Avengers but whose character was not explored very much. The good news is that Johansson is very much up to the challenge; she finally expands her character beyond diminutive badass to someone who is actually vulnerable, especially when she finds out that she did not necessarily enjoy the trust of someone important to her. Similarly, Jackson's Nick Fury gets to do more than glower and spout out one-liners; much of the plot hinges on the things he does or that happen to him. Perhaps one drawback to this is that for the first time since he sauntered onto the post-credits scene in Iron Man, Jackson really is starting to look a bit old for the role. Still, this is one for which he will be remembered well; I exhort eagle-eyed fans to catch the "Pulp Fiction" reference in the film.

The new additions to the cast also help Marvel raise their game; Redford is a perfect casting choice as Pierce, which is about all I can say without spoiling anything. He isn't slumming it or passing on through for a paycheck; he genuinely sinks his teeth into this material and it is utterly gratifying to watch, much like watching Anthony Hopkins bellow his lines as Odin was in the first Thor movie. Ditto for Anthony Mackie, who reportedly pursued the role of Sam Wilson quite aggressively. He looks like he's having an absolute blast as the character, especially when he straps on the character's signature wings, which get a truly awesome cinematic touch-up.

There have been gripes about the allegedly generic finale with copious explosions and computer-generated mayhem, but while it's admittedly easy for the fanboy in me to forgive such climaxes, I think it's also worth pointing out that there was some narrative precedent for the eventual climax; the foundation for what happened in the end was laid fairly early in the script. Not only that, but we would have been robbed of some incredible flying sequences featuring the Falcon had the end not played out as it did. Finally, by the time the climax rolled around, the filmmakers had already given the audience plenty of incredibly gritty, somewhat more grounded action sequences, like the extended gun battle in the streets of Washington D.C. which has drawn comparisons to the nigh-iconic shootout in Michael Mann's Heat. 

I had actually thought that Marvel Studios would be taking it easy this year, content to let their "lesser" properties make some decent coin while preparing to take no prisoners next year with The Avengers: Age of Ultron. With this film, however, easily the best of "Phase 2" of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel had made it clear that they have no intention of taking a break from giving their fans some of the very best movies based on these characters they could possibly hope to see.

8.8/10