Jake Does a Jake: A Review of Southpaw

directed by Antoine Fuqua
written by Kurt Sutter

This title is a bit of a misnomer; the only similarity between Jake LaMotta, the real-life man whom Robert De Niro portrayed in the 1980 film Raging Bull, and Billy Hope, the fictional man whom Jake Gyllenhaal plays in the current film Southpaw, is that both of them are professional boxers. It was worth drawing the parallel (apart from the identical names) because it seems to me that the only reason this movie was made was for Gyllenhaal to take a shot at the Oscar glory De Niro's performance thirty-five years ago earned him.

Southpaw is the story of Hope, an undefeated prize fighter from Hell's Kitchen who starts the film on top of the world, having fought his way to the very top of the heap. Having accompanied him from his humble origins to the top is his lovely wife Maureen (Rachel McAdams) with whom he has a lovely daughter Leila (Oona Lawrence), and the two of them are his whole world. Tragedy strikes, however, when the arrogant up-and-comer Miguel Escobar (Miguel Lopez), who yearns for a title successfully goads Hope into a fistfight (not the sanctioned kind) and the subsequent melee between the two fighters' entourages results in a horrifying death. Billy loses everything; his title, his money and even his daughter when the government deems him an unfit parent, and as a result he must fight his way back from the brink. Fortunately, he might have a little help in washed-out former boxer Tick Wills (Forest Whitaker), but it will take more than the bravado and brute strength on which he has gotten by so far. Billy will now have to learn how to box as he has never boxed before.

To be perfectly honest, I watched this movie for only two reasons: I was trying to sit out a terrible traffic jam and I wanted to hear one of the final film scores of my favorite film composer, the late James Horner. Not only was Horner's music among his less remarkable work, there was nothing else about the movie that was particularly compelling, either before, during or after the viewing.

As a boxing film, Southpaw commits the usual (and understandable) Hollywood sin of depicting modern-day boxing as simple brawling, with the fighters exchanging blows like their jaws and bodies were made of granite instead of trying to actually duck. This is actually made a plot point later in the movie, but it still doesn't make the depiction of fighting any less silly. Still, if they were going for utter hard-edged realism, audiences would most likely be treated to several minutes of clinches, ducks and backpedaling, which is what they saw during the last fight featuring a real-life undefeated boxer. Still, whether the film was justified or not in taking liberties with the reality of boxing, it ultimately brought nothing new to the table.

As human drama, the film is serviceable, and Gyllenhaal and Whitaker really sell the heck out of their characters' arcs, both as individuals and as an onscreen duo. Particularly impressive for me was Gyllenhaal's rapport with Lawrence, who played his daughter. The thing was, again, this wasn't anything that hadn't already been done before. The father seeking to be reunited with his daughter was done as recently as Ant Man, and quite frankly, that was a lot more enjoyable to watch.

The film isn't a complete waste of time; Fuqua certainly knows how to create atmosphere, and quite honestly I'd like to see what he could do with a less cliched script and a more compelling story, as the potential is clearly there. Also, I marveled at the makeup artists who not only did a good job of turning Gyllenhaal's face into hamburger, but in showing how boxing injuries to the eyes actually look after they've just started to heal. I doubt they'll win any award, but I think they deserve a shout-out.

Still, this was a movie I could just have easily waited to see at home, and had it not been for a traffic jam and the prospect of listening to one of James Horner's final works, I would have.




6/10

A Superhero Heist Movie: A Review of Ant-Man

directed by Peyton Reed
written by Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish, Adam McKay and Paul Rudd

As much as I have truly savored seeing the Marvel Cinematic Universe unfold since the very first Iron Man movie in 2008, I will admit that, after eleven movies, which include films I find utterly sublime, like the aforementioned Iron Man, The Avengers, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, I have finally started to feel a little fatigue set in, to the extent that at one point I was contemplating sitting out the MCU's twelfth film, Ant-Man.

More than just feeling tired of superhero movies in general and Marvel movies in particular, I was also one of the few film geeks who was put off by the fact that quirky British director Edgar Wright, who had basically devoted ten years his life to bringing this movie to the big screen, had left this film in a bit of a huff last year over "creative differences" with Marvel Studios. The trailer looked promising, though, and my kids were interested in seeing the movie, so partly out of curiosity and a sense of "duty" to my kids, I still went to see it, doubts notwithstanding.

I'm happy to say that I'm glad I overcame my misgivings and went to see the film; I had a really good time.

Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) has just done three years for burgling, and has resolved to go straight for the sake of his daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Forston) to the extent that he even resists the enticements of his former partner-in-crime Luis (Michael Pena), at whose apartment he is now staying with two other "associates" Dave (Tip Harris) and Kurt (David Dastmalchian). Things take a turn for the worse, however, as Scott's employer lets him go upon discovering his criminal record, and Scott realizes that he won't be able to see his daughter until he gets on his own two feet. In a fit of desperation, he takes Luis up on his offer, which is to break into the vault of a rich old man away on vacation. As it turns out, that rich old man happens to be Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) creator of fantastic technologies, one of which shrinks humans to insect size while giving them extraordinary strength and the other of which enables people to communicate with ants. Pym, who actually allowed Scott to break into his house and steal his things, deliberately chose Scott because of the skill he displayed in one of his previous jobs, in which he burgled an ulta-rich one percenter who happened to have the most advanced home security system on the planet. Pym needs Scott to break into the facilities of the very company he founded in order to stop his former protege Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) from using technology derived from Hank's own inventions to create and sell a weapon of frightening power. Scott will have help from Pym, his reluctant(and highly-skilled) daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) and most importantly, an army of Pym's most useful allies: ants. Scott is reluctant at first, but agrees when he realizes the stakes, even if it means getting in way over his head.

The good news is that, even though Wright did not direct this movie, Reed does a job that can reasonably described as a couple of notches above competent, and even more encouragingly, Wright's fingerprints can be seen all over the film. The movie's a bit breezy and a lot more lighthearted than other MCU films, which says a lot considering that, with the possible exception of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, most Marvel movies have a certain buoyancy to them which, while making them fun to watch, also opens them up to criticism from people saying that they're pure fluff. The humor works differently here, though, in an Ocean's 11 sort of way.

Casting Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, while not quite as spot-on as the selection of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, was a clever move that paid off, as was the choice of making Lang the lead Ant Man and casting Michael Douglas as Henry Pym. What I love about these top-caliber actors like Douglas and, before him, Glenn Close, Robert Redford and Anthony Hopkins, is that none of them are slumming it in these roles for a paycheck, or just so they can say they were in a superhero movie. They all put in really engaging performances, and Douglas is no exception. Evangeline Lilly does a great job as Pym's firebrand of a daughter Hope, but ironically the filmmakers kind of shot themselves in the foot by creating such a strong female character and basically relegating her to a supporting role. Stoll's Darren Cross, while appropriately menacing, is like a few of the other the MCU antagonists that have come before him, yet another throwaway bad guy. Judy Greer, an actress whose work I enjoy, is utterly wasted in her second mom role this year. I was happy, though, about Michael Pena and the rest of the guys playing Lang's crew, who provide wonderful comic relief. Pena, in particular, is central to two of the film's most memorable sequences. The three characters kind of play up to ethnic stereotypes, but the actors playing them are having such a grand time of it that it's hard to begrudge Marvel this little indulgence.

What I had a little difficulty with, though, was the sequences basically tying Scott into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which felt shoehorned into the script. Yes, they work from the logic of the MCU and achieve the intended result, but they feel disruptive of the film's overall narrative flow. This was a film conceived years before there was a grand design to fit all of these things together, and it definitely feels like it. About the only MCU insertion that feels right is the part of the script demonstrating and explaining Pym's disdain for Stark (played here by John Slattery, rather than the more youthful Dominic Cooper). At least it clearly establishes why Pym wouldn't run to the Avengers for help.

The movie was fun, though not anywhere near Marvel's very best. Still, it's definitely worth 120 minutes of one's time and a couple of hundred pesos. As with most Marvel movies, I skipped the 3D on this one.


7.5/10

Cinematic Junk Food: A Review of The Minions

directed by Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda
written by Brian Lynch

When the animated film Despicable Me came out in 2010, it captivated critics and audiences alike with its inventive story of a supervillain adopting three little girls. What the makers of the film may not have anticipated, however, was how popular said supervillain's droves of tiny, overall-wearing, gibberish-speaking henchmen, collectively called the "Minions" would eventually turn out to be the most influential pop-culture figures with yellow skin since Spongebob Squarepants. After increasing the exposure of the Minions in the second film, the next logical step, in view of their popularity, was to give them their own movie, and so we have the animated film "Minions."

Minions is the story of a race of little yellow creatures that have been around since the dawn of time, whose overriding purpose in life is, as illogical as it may sound, to find and work for the biggest villain in the world. In the course of their lives, they work for such renowned bad guys as the Tyrannosaurus Rex, Dracula, and Napoleon Bonaparte, and always end up causing their bosses' undoing, as a result of which they end up living in an ice cave for over a hundred years, until one of them, Kevin (Coffin, who voices all other minions), decides to go out an find "the" big villain to whom all of them can devote their apparently eternal lives in servitude. Leaving the cave, Kevin, accompanied by fellow Minions Bob and Stuart sets out to find this "big boss" and their travels take them to New York City in the year 1968, where they learn while watching late-night television, that the supervillain they are searching for may just be in Orlando, a femme fatale by the name of Scarlet Overkill (Sandra Bullock). They travel to Orlando and through a madcap sequence of events manage to impress her enough to get her to hire them, whereupon she gives them their big assignment: they are to steal the Royal Crown of England. While they will have at their disposal the gadgets of Scarlet's husband Herb (Jon Hamm), it wont be an easy task, but the Minions are always eager to please.

The paper-thin plot is barely enough to sustain the running time of a full-length movie, but the good news is that the slapstick involving the Minions is virtually non-stop, so all told it's still about eighty or so minutes of nice, mindless fun with topnotch computer-generated animation, all set to a totally groovy sixties soundtrack (though I also appreciated the familiar musical cue from the Despicable Me movies, which was also a staple of the mobile device game). Speaking of the game, it gets quite the shout-out from the filmmakers at the movie's climax.

That's the thing about this movie, though; one remembers things like the toys and the video games because unlike the quirky first movie, which was really about a middle-aged man becoming an instant dad for the very first time, this one, with its nonsensical plot and celebrity walk-ons really feels like a slickly-packaged product, designed primarily to sell related merchandise. It makes no pretensions about what it is and is not, but watching it felt like going on a junk food binge. It was a tasty treat in its own way, but not quite what I'd call a truly satisfying cinematic experience.

The kids loved it, and I was happy to indulge them, but I wouldn't let them watch movies like this on a regular basis for the same reason I wouldn't let them eat hotdogs everyday; it isn't really good for them.



6/10

R.I.P. James Horner

Earlier today, I found out that one of my very favorite film composers, James Horner, probably best known for having composed the music and theme song for James Cameron's Titanic, died in a plane crash. Of all the celebrity deaths I've ever heard of, this is perhaps the saddest for me, along with Robin Williams' suicide.

I grew up with James Horner's music. When I was eleven I watched Amblin Entertainment's An American Tail on Betamax. As utterly ridiculous as this sounds, I was convinced I was in love with the main character's sister after hearing her (and the main character), sing the song "Somewhere Out There" in the course of the film. I was, of course, captivated by the song (though oddly enough, not the pop version by Linda Ronstadt) and in particular by James Horner's contribution to that melody. He wrote the score, which permeated the film and, as performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, was simply haunting. It left a heck of an impression.

About four years later, Horner blew me away, perhaps a bit more this time, with the soaring choral music of the Civil War epic Glory, a story of African-American soldiers fighting for equality during the War between the States. That was when he became one of my favorite composers of all time.

My love for his music continued into the 1990s, thanks to an aunt who brought me extremely hard to find CDs from the United States. His first foray into the superhero genre, The Rocketeer, was as magnificent as the film itself was ill-fated at the box office, but I was also a fan of his less bombastic stuff, like the jazz-flavored music of Phil Alden Robinson's Sneakers. I also liked his work on Edward Zwick's Legends of the Fall, the film that arguably launched Brad Pitt's career but which I remember better for its sweeping, if slightly overbearing musical score, which featured seventy-five glorious minutes of Horner music being played by the London Symphony Orchestra.

Then he came up with, for me, some of the very best work of his career: the one-two punch of Apollo 13 and Braveheart, the latter of which got him the job that would seal his status as a pop-culture icon: Titanic. People tell me they still cry when they watch that movie, even 18 years after it first came out, and I'm willing to bet Horner's music plays a huge part in that.

Of course, while everyone else went back to their pop music after that, Horner geeks like me continued to follow his work; in particular I loved his music score for Martin Campbell's The Mask of Zorro, yet another foray into the action-adventure genre, the very next year.

Then, the 2000s came, and with it the superhero renaissance courtesy of the X-Men and Spider-Man, and while these films dominated the box-office landscape for the better part of a decade, Horner kind of fell under the radar for me, although he continued to work. He even snagged a couple of Oscar nominations in 2002 and 2004 for A Beautiful Mind and House of Sand and Fog, respectively.

When James Cameron's Avatar started breaking box-office records in 2009, of course I bought and thoroughly enjoyed James Horner's high-flying soundtrack, but if I may be honest, after over twenty years of enjoying this man's music I found myself recognizing a little too often the hooks, motifs and cues from his other work, which kind of affected my appreciation just the slightest bit, especially that four-note "enemy" motif that has featured in a lot of his film scores, and I started wondering if he'd run out of tricks. He had always been guilty of a bit of recycling (which, arguably can also be said of the likes of Hans Zimmer and even the heralded John Williams), but it struck me a little that he was doing it quite a lot in this music.

Horner then wrote the music for the remake of the 1984 film The Karate Kid, and while it was serviceable, it felt even more like a regurgitation of his previous work than Avatar did. He seemed to be in a bit of a creative slump.

Then Horner did something I had not expected him to do: he joined the Marvel Age, and wrote music for Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man. I had always associated the comic book movie genre with the likes of Danny Elfman, Alan Silvestri and Zimmer. Heck, even John Williams only composed music for the first Superman movie (though the theme still endures thirty-seven years later, even after Zimmer's rather clumsy attempt to create a new one); I hadn't figured Horner would be a fit for this, even though he arguably had some superhero work under his belt with the little-seen Rocketeer. Suddenly, a childhood dream I didn't even know I had was being fulfilled.

Better still, Horner's work on the movie truly surprised me. Yes, there were cues borrowed from his other work, but the Shakuhachi (Japanese wood flute) and four-note motif were nowhere to be found, and with the full-bodied brass that played Spider-Man's theme when he swung across a bridge after foiling a carjacker, Horner convinced me that not even John Williams himself could have done a better job of scoring this movie. Not just that; but more than just about all of the superhero scores, including the work of the aforementioned Elfman, Zimmer and Silvestri I had heard over the last ten years prior to this, Horner's music had an extraordinary emotional range. I loved the Peter/Gwen theme every bit as much as I enjoyed the superhero-ey stuff.

What really took me by surprise was the fact Horner poured so much character into what could have easily been treated as another paycheck. I mean, Webb wasn't one of his frequent collaborators like Ron Howard, James Cameron or Mel Gibson, so he could have rejiggered another of his lesser known scores from the 1990s and passed it off as something new. After all, The Karate Kid had been nothing but a patchwork of all his former score. It wasn't the case here, and quite frankly I found myself falling in love with Horner's music all over again, and not just because Spider-Man happens to be my favorite comic book character.

Immediately thereafter, however, he went into a long period of silence. The Amazing Spider Man came out in 2012, and for two years thereafter nothing came out with his name on it. Sure, there were rumblings of a series of sequels to Avatar, but considering that James Cameron is not in the habit of making a movie more often than every six years at best, assuming Horner would even work on the movies, they were a long way into the future.

Finally, this year, Horner was slated to work on not just one but three movies, including a rather promising drama starring Jake Gyllenhaal entitled Southpaw.

And now he's gone.

It saddens me greatly that someone whose music I grew up with has passed on, and arguably well ahead of his time considering that he was a sprightly 61 (for purposes of comparison, consider that John Williams is now 83 and still composing music), but what pains me more was that he went at a time when I was starting to rediscover him. I take some consolation that I can look forward to at least three more movies with the music of my favorite composer of all, the wonderful James Horner.

Thank you for the music and the memories, Mr. Horner.

A Very Pleasant Trip Down Memory Lane: A Review of Jurassic World

directed by Colin Trevorrow
written by Derek Conolly, Colin Trevorrow, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver

I was not having a very good year in 1993 when I walked into Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, but when I walked out after having seen the film I was significantly happier. It really was a fantastic film, the kind that gets me excited about watching movies in the first place. The sequel four years later was simply awful by comparison, and by the time the third movie in the series rolled around, this one no longer based on a novel by the series creator, the late Michael Crichton, I had lost interest and caught it on cable television instead of in the theaters.

I'm not entirely sure why I was particularly impressed by the trailer of Jurassic World, the latest installment in the Jurassic series, which I can confirm is a sequel and not at all a reboot (and even features one of the cast members of the very first movie) but suffice it to say, I went to see it, my expectations having been tempered by my disappointment with the second and third movies and several years' worth of cynicism and blockbuster fatigue. Maybe I just liked the feeling that star Chris Pratt was kind of channeling his Star Lord character from last year's Guardians of the Galaxy. Whatever the reason, I'm happy to say that for the first time since 1993, I enjoyed a movie with the word "Jurassic" in the title.

The story picks up some 22 years from the time the first movie left off (and as odd as this may sound, actually seems to disregard the previous two sequels) and things are quite different now; Jurassic World is a fully-functioning theme park, the kind that Richard Attenborough's John Hammond set out to build in the first movie, and has been for several years now. As often happens with any long-running business concern, costs are escalating, and the woman running it, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) has been looking for ways to incease the "wow" factor, and as a result she and her higher-ups, including the theme park's owner, magnate Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan) have given the scientists, headed by Henry Wu (B.D. Wong) from the first film free rein to create the most badass new dinosaur they could imagine. Meanwhile, another new approach Masrani is taking is having ex-sailor Owen Grady (Pratt) actually train the deadly velociraptors that menaced the humans during the first three films, and to his credit, Grady seems to have done a pretty good job, much to the interest of the park's head of security, Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio), who has his own sinister plans for the raptors. Claire is so preoccupied with improving the park's attendance that she completely neglects her two nephews Zach (Nick Robinson) and Gray (Ty Simpkins) who are touring the place while their parents (Andy Buckley and Judy Greer) lock horns over their divorce proceedings thousands of kilometers away. She leaves them in the hands of her equally indifferent assistant Zara (Katie McGrath). Unfortunately for just about every one of the 20,000 + human beings on the park, the Indominus Rex, the dinosaur that Dr. Wu and his cohorts have cooked up is bigger, meaner, and smarter than any other dinosaur, and in true Jurassic Park fashion, figures out a way to get out of its enclosure and cause all hell to break loose.

While I often bewail Hollywood's lack of originality given the proliferation of remakes, reboots, sequels and adaptations of existing material, Trevorrow makes this film work by paying effective homage to the original film, and a brace of other 80s and 90s science-fiction films, including James Cameron's Aliens. There's an overriding sense throughout the whole movie that the filmmakers know they aren't breaking new ground, so they try their very best to show their love for the original film and similar movies of the era, and by gum it works. There's a bit of investment in getting the audience to care what happens to the characters when the dino-poop hits the fan; the kids have to grapple with their parents' impending divorce, and their aunt's almost criminal negligence, Claire has to deal with, well, the greed of Jurassic World's shareholders, and Owen has to deal with the fact that while he seems to finally have achieved some kind of breakthrough in understanding dinosaurs (or at least velociraptors), no one else, save perhaps for Barry, one of the park's other wranglers (Omar Sy) seems to really care.

The humans are always peripheral in movies like this, though; at the end of the day their principal purpose is to serve as stand-ins for the audience so that they can feel they're in the thick of all the dinosaur-induced chaos, and to these humans' credit, they do a pretty good job. The real treat has always been the dinosaurs, and Trevorrow gets all of the important beats right, from concealing the big bad I-Rex (a jab, I imagine, at today's smartphone savvy generation) for most of the first act of the film, to dialing back the constant reliance on computer-generated imagery and giving animatronic dinosaurs some generous screen time, just as Spielberg did in the original. Still, the script calls for a lot of running, fighting and killing dinosaurs here, so heavy use of CGI is kind of a must, but at least Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) is very much at the top of their game here, no matter what the hipsters who love to bitch about CGI might say.

I also appreciated Michael Giacchino's unobtrusive music score, as well as his rather generous and very well-timed references to John Williams' regal theme.

It's worth emphasizing at this point that this film is nowhere near as good as the original, which set a benchmark for science fiction movies that stood for many years, but it's also worth emphasizing that it's not trying to be. Interestingly, like the first film, it also has something to say, though it feels more of a commentary about the greed of Hollywood than on the evil of messing with nature that was quite patent in the first film. There's some irony to that, considering that from one perspective this film may definitely be viewed as a cynical cash grab; a repackaging of a much older product to sell to newer audiences. There's even a loose end that is somewhat shamelessly left dangling so that Universal can pursue a sequel if the box office receipts justify one.

Ultimately, though, what matters is that the film, for all its flaws, is quite an entertaining affair. Trevorrow and his cast and crew have thrown together the best "Jurassic" movie since the original, and whatever success this film may experience when it opens worldwide is, to my mind, well-deserved.

(On a side note: I was somewhat amused by the fact that almost the entirety of the principal cast consists of actors who have starred in one adaptation or another of a Marvel comics property; Pratt, of course, was the lead in the aforementioned Guardians of the Galaxy, Howard had a supporting role in Spider-Man 3, Khan had a role in The Amazing Spider-Man, Simpkins had a pretty pivotal role in Iron Man 3, Sy had a small role in X-Men: Days of Future Past, and D'Onofrio was the arch villain in Daredevil. There were so many Marvel-movie or TV-show veterans around that if the Hulk had shown up at some point and started beating up the dinosaurs, he wouldn't have felt entirely out of place.)


The cast and crew have put together a solid, competent sequel to one of the most beloved Spielberg movies of all time, and while it wasn't exactly 1993 all over again for me, I had a really good time.


7.5/10

Not So Much a Misfire as a Miscalculation: A Review of Tomorrowland (Mild Spoilers)

directed by Brad Bird
written by Damon Lindelof, Brad Bird and Jeff Jensen


Once upon a time, animator/storyteller/director Brad Bird could do no wrong in the eyes of film critics. While dis debut animated feature-film back in 1999, The Iron Giant, did not set the box-office on fire (and was, in fact, a bomb), it was quite well-received by film critics, and to date it has a highly enviable 97% "Fresh" score of review aggregator site rottentomatoes.com. When Bird started collaborating with Walt Disney's Pixar Studios, the results were magical: 2004's The Incredibles and 2007's Ratatouille were both critical and commercial successes, and both movies won Brad Bird an Academy Award. They certainly made me a dyed-in-the-wool fan. He then successfully made the transition to live-action filmmaking with 2011's Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, the best-reviewed film in the series and one of the highest grossing ones as well.

As a result, when it was announced that Bird was working on a top-secret, live-action project for Walt Disney pictures starring George Clooney, there was quite a bit of excitement generated among fans like myself and the filmgoing community in general.

Tomorrowland is basically the story of a secret community of cutting-edge innovators who live just beyond the fringes of our reality, sort of a secret society of geniuses.

The story begins at the New York World's in 1964, where an 11-year-old boy named Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson), presents his invention a rocket pack that doesn't quite work, to a stern judge named David Nix (Hugh Laurie), in the hope of winning prize money and getting the opportunity to improve his invention further. He is summarily rejected, but not before he has piqued the attention of Athena (Raffey Cassidy), a young child like himself who hands him a pin with a "T" and tells him to secretly follow her and the rest of the judges headed by the unpleasant Nix. Frank complies, and finds himself in a fantastical city in the sky filled with robots and wondrous flying machines. One such robot ends up tweaking his jet pack, and not a moment too soon as Frank falls from one of the sky-high towers and finds himself using the jet pack to save his life, and, with his impressive display, securing his place in Tomorrowland.

Over fifty years later, fifteen-year-old Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), is at the end of her rope; her father (Tim McGraw), an engineer for NASA will soon find himself out of work as the launch platform where he works is set for dismantling for no other cited reason than that "people are running out of ideas," and Casey does everything she can that doesn't involve violence to stave off the dismantling, including sabotaging the heavy equipment. Unfortunately, her activism brings her in trouble with the law, and as she is being released into her father's recognizance she discovers, among her things, a pin very similar to the one given to Frank at the beginning of the film, one that shows her a fantastic place every time she touches it. In her determination to understand what she is seeing, however, Casey finds herself in grave danger, and she'll need the help of Athena, and the now-adult Frank (George Clooney) to get herself out of it. One thing is clear; Casey has to find her way to Tomorrowland, before it's too late.

A little over a week after its worldwide opening, Tomorrowland, has apparently disappointed across the board with underwhelming box-office receipts and lukewarm reviews. Personally, I really enjoyed it, but I think I understand what the problem was.

Tomorrowland is a film fueled by a wonderful sense of nostalgia, and hearkens back to a time when people's image of the future was all about jet packs and space travel. Unfortunately, we're living in an age where moviegoers have been to several other worlds, courtesy of Star Trek, Star Wars and even Avatar, where they've seen wondrous things like dinosaurs brought back to life and finally, they've seen men don suits of armor that can fly and shoot lasers, all of which make Bird's (and co-writer Damon Lindelof's) visions of tomorrow look positively quaint. The truth is, most people have already seen too much, whether on the big screen, the small screen, or even their handheld devices to be impressed by what this film has to offer. Now, I happen to be a fan of the brand of nostalgia that Bird is peddling, but I totally get why not many other people are.

To sort of compensate for the general lack of oomph, Bird and Lindelof wrap the story in layer upon layer of mystery, and to the credit of Disney's marketing crew, they followed suit. The problem was that all of the mystery surrounding the narrative made people wonder just what it was they were going to see, and with that much expectation, especially considering Bird's track record, he was basically setting himself up to disappoint.

I disagree with the notion that people rejected this for being a "message movie" considering that the highest grossing film of all time Avatar, is one of the most hackneyed message movies ever, but I do agree that Bird could have taken a different approach to proselytizing. Avatar may have been preachy, but it gave audiences a heck of a ride while it was doing it. As someone who's given audiences some pretty spectacular action scenes in the past, one would think Bird could have pulled this off with a bit more panache.

So if there was so much wrong with this film, why did I like it? Well it still has quite a bit going for it, like Bird's gift for "retro-futuristic" visual flair, generous helpings of the humor and witty dialogue that made his best films as entertaining as they were, some excellently filmed action scenes apart from the disappointing climax, and some winning performances from his principal actors. The production design is wondrous to behold, though as I said, it really isn't anything new, and neither are the admittedly slick visual effects on display courtesy of Industrial Light and Magic.

Robertson is delightful as the lead; the scenes of her popping in and out of Tomorrowland are the centerpiece of the film's marketing (and of the film, to an extent) and she sells the heck of out of them. Clooney doesn't disappoint as the curmudgeonly version of Frank Walker, but the real surprise is how well Thomas Robinson, who actually resembles Clooney a bit, plays his younger version. Laurie makes the most out of a thankless role, as Nix, delivering the film's central sermon--er, message, at the climax. It's a terrible waste of a great actor, to my mind. For me, the breakthrough performance here was that of Cassidy as the mysterious Athena. It's hard to go into detail about her performance without spoiling a couple of surprises about her role, but suffice it to say that like Robertson, her role required her to do some pretty funny things with a straight face, and she pulled it off quite well.

This film is a bit of a hiccup for Bird, who really was on a roll for many years, though I hardly think it's set him on the same downward spiral that M. Night Shyamalan found himself on ten years ago.

I'm still waiting for him to come up with The Incredibles 2...


7.1/10

Better the Second Time (Yes, It's Been a Slow Week for Reviewing New Movies...oh and SPOILERS)

Recently, I watched Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron for the second time, because my kids had not yet seen it.

This doesn't happen very often (almost never, in fact), but in spite of all of my issues with the movie the first time around, I found myself enjoying it significantly more than I did the first time I watched it. A lot of that is down to the fact that, unlike my first experience, I dispensed with the utterly s***ty 3-D conversion, which really hampered my first viewing experience, and went with good, old-fashioned 2-D.

I still noted some of the things I had gripes with, like Thor's somewhat disjointed subplot that explained the whole "Infinity Stones" thing and which still felt like a vague plug for his upcoming solo sequel Thor: Ragnarok, and the fact that Tony Stark was an even bigger egotistical prick than before, but I was able to ignore them in favor of what I really enjoyed about this film.

I'm obviously not going to review the film again, but I will highlight a number of things I really enjoyed about the movie, in ascending order.

5. Improved Fighting Skills All Around - In this day and age of blink-and-you'll-miss-it martial arts sequences, it was really gratifying to show that the Avengers' fighting skills, particularly those of Captain America and Thor, have actually improved since the first movie. It was especially cool to see them double-teaming the bad guys with a one-two shield and hammer takedown. This is a team movie, after all, and it's great that it actually feels like it. It never felt right to me in the early MCU days that Black Widow had a monopoly on all of the cool martial arts sequences, something Marvel remedied with the Captain America sequel, and here it was gratifying to see Cap not only kicking gratuitous ass from start to finish, but also punching well above his weight when, he took on, without hesitation, a much more powerful foe in Ultron. The gratifying thing about a lot of the fighting is how grounded and practical it feels; basically it looks like the actors really worked out and actually took part in the meticulously choreographed fighting rather than letting their computer-generated avatars do all the work, something that happened rather frequently in the CGI-infested Hobbit films. The promised Cap/Iron Man throw down in Civil War got a bit of a sneak preview here in act three of this movie, and I have to say I'm really, really excited to see it play out in Cap's movie, which is now being touted as a de facto Avengers sequel of sorts.

4. Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch - Last year 20th Century Fox kicked off a bit of a "friendly" rivalry with Marvel Studios when it featured popular "Avenger" Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters, in X-Men: Days of Future Past. In that film, Quicksilver had a show-stopping display of his speed in the sequence in which he freed Magneto from his prison under the Pentagon, after which he was somewhat arbitrarily written out of the script, most likely because his further participation in the story would have obviated a lot of the narrative tension that follows, or in short, he could have solved everyone's problems. Well, as impressive (and humorous) as Bryan Singer's take on the character was, Joss Whedon's was superior in a number of ways. His overall look, starting with his costume, hewed much more closely to the comics than his Fox counterpart. His cocky personality and anger issues were a much closer approximation of the comic-book Quicksilver than the laid-back juvenile delinquent in Singer's film. Finally, MCU's Quicksilver was ultimately more heroic, saving dozens (maybe even hundreds?) of lives in Korea and later in Sokovia (and in the process, showing everyone what a dick Superman was in Man of Steel), and ultimately sacrificing his life to save Hawkeye's. Also, while he didn't have a protracted, money-shot of a sequence, his display of power was ultimately more impressive, and not only that, but his participation in the movie, from start to finish, makes more narrative sense.

The Scarlet Witch, who will be sticking around a lot longer (barring a Phil Coulson-like character resurrection for Pietro) was not quite as flashy, but she had some of the film's very best moments, such as her utterly creepy mind-control sequences, her primal scream of grief when she senses the death of her brother, and the utterly satisfying scene in which she rips out Ultron's "heart." It was great to know that she'll be part of Captain America: Civil War, which is actually a notable innovation from the original comic book series (from which Wanda was notably absent), and I can't help but feel, and hope, that the filmmakers there will play up her rage at Tony Stark, which has to have somehow been exacerbated by the fact that her brother was killed by Stark's creation.

3. Hawkeye's Turn to Shine - I was one with Jeremy Renner in feeling that Hawkeye, easily one of the most beloved Avengers from the comics, got the short end of the character development stick in the first Avengers film. While this was inevitable given how many characters Whedon had to juggle in what was then the most ambitious-ensemble themed big-budget movie ever, it still felt like a distinct disservice to such an important staple of the team. Well, Whedon made it up to Clint Barton, Renner and all of us fans in the best possible way, by giving him a healthy dose of back story, a wife (girlfriend?), kids and a lovely farm in the middle of nowhere, where the entire team spends some much needed down-time after a rather harrowing sequence of events. On top of that, he gets a lot of really juicy character moments in this movie, and even a not-so-subtle jab at the fact that his character spent the majority of the last movie mind-controlled. Renner has real affection for this character, and it shows. My favorite bit took place in the climax, where he basically talks Scarlet Witch into becoming an Avenger. Wonderful stuff.

2. Location, Location, Location - The last time I really enjoyed a superhero film's location shooting was when Batman climbed out of Christopher Nolan's version of the Lazarus Pit in The Dark Knight Rises and emerged in an incredibly exotic, ancient-looking city which, as it turned out, was somewhere in India. It gets tiresome seeing action movies set in America, which is what makes films like the Bourne series, with their varied locations, such a treat to watch. Well, it was nice to see Marvel finally getting in on the globetrotting action, with as many as four different locations for the movie, and with a significant part of the action taking place in a very old looking part of Italy that, amusingly enough, doubled for the fictional Eastern European republic of Sokovia. I say amusing because, back in Marvel's two-penny, half-penny days, the direct-to-video adaptation of Captain America was filmed in the genuinely Eastern European republic of Croatia, which doubled for all of the film's locations, including the United States. Well, here it's obvious that Marvel wasn't just after tax breaks or cheap labor; Whedon makes extensive use of what looks like a medieval fort for the staging of the action in Italy, and considering that huge chunks of the action also take place in Seoul, South Korea and Johannesburg, South Africa (more on that next), this film is ultimately much more global in scope than any Marvel movie that has come before it. The Johannesburg sequence, in particular, was a real doozy...

1. Hulkbusting Glory - When I reviewed this film, for all of my nitpicking, it was without reservation that I heaped praise on the Hulk/Iron Man fight in Johannesburg, going as far as to call it "iconic" and I totally stand by that pronouncement. Watching it again, without the piss-poor 3-D conversion was pure, unadulterated joy. In a film full of excellently-staged action sequences, this truly stands out. Whedon expertly dances along the line between fast-paced and coherent action, which says a lot considering that this fight could easily have degenerated into a Bay-tastic blur of flying fists and shredding metal, and it's gratifying to see that at all times during the battle, civilians' lives matter. No matter how hard it is, Tony Stark (but obviously not the mind-f****d Banner) does everything he can to make sure people are safe. The interaction of so many elements in this sequence, including real backdrops and actual extras, really sold this sequence for me and, I suspect, a lot of other people. This is the sort of sequence comic-book fans have been salivating for since "The Avengers" was first made into a movie, as evidenced by the fact that it was the single most prominent part of the film's marketing campaign, and to my mind it has completely and comprehensively lived up to the hype. There is nothing in any other action film (yes, I am being all encompassing here) that even comes close to measuring up to this battle. If there was any justice in the world, this sequence alone should win Industrial Light and Magic their nth Academy Award for visual effects, but even if it doesn't, to my mind, this is one of their greatest achievements as a visual effects house so far.


While it looks as though the new adventures of Mad Max are getting raves from critics, limited funds means I have to choose which movies I can watch, so I'm saving up for Brad Bird's Tomorrowland, his first new film in four years and his first original property in eight. It looks like an incredibly ambitious piece of science fiction, and its release (for me) cannot come soon enough.

For now, though, I was more than happy to take one more joy ride with Earth's Mightiest Heroes.