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
Saturday, May 30, 2015
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
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.
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.
Saturday, April 25, 2015
Bigger Isn't Always Better: A Review of Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron
written and directed by Joss Whedon
Following up the most successful superhero movie of all time was never going to be an easy endeavor. There were so many things that needed to be done right, and so many things that could have gone wrong.
Thus far, the template for Marvel Studios' so-called "Phase 2" films, specifically the sequels to the earlier "Phase 1" films has been, more or less, a combination of three things: 1) bigger action set-pieces, 2) more elaborate CGI, 3) more menacing villains, 4)the same blend of action-comedy that worked in Phase 1. In the case of two Phase 2 movies, namely Iron Man 3 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, one additional element is a major story twist midway through the movie.
Avengers: Age of Ultron is very much in that mold.
Following the evens of The Winter Soldier, in which Captain America (Chris Evans) and friends had to take down a S.H.I.E.L.D. that had been compromised by HYDRA, the Avengers --Cap, Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo and a lot of computer-generated imagery), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner)-- now find themselves having to chase down important artifacts that are in HYDRA's possession. One such artifact, the mind-controlling scepter wielded by the villainous Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in the first film, is in the hands of the villainous Baron Strucker (Thomas Kretschmann), who has used it to experiment on humans. The only survivors of these experiments are two superpowered volunteers, the Maximoff twins Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who has acquired superhuman speed and Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen), who has some form of telepathy and telekinesis. Strucker is captured in the Avengers' raid, but the twins escape, and not before Wanda puts a mental whammy on him, giving Tony Stark/Iron Man a glimpse of his worst nightmare: the death of the Avengers because of his inability to do enough.
This proves to be the catalyst of events to come as Tony, spurred by his apocalyptic delusion and with some help from Bruce Banner, decides to put into motion something he's been cooking up for a long time without the knowledge of their teammates: an artificial intelligence he calls Ultron programmed to protect the world with a gleaming metal robot army. He uses the energy of the scepter to try to infuse the Ultron A.I. with the little something extra it needs to be the ultimate global cop, then leaves with Bruce Banner to join the rest of the Avengers for evening cocktails, when the scepter apparently gets ideas of its own and Ultron (James Spader) "wakes up..." but with a twist. He envisions the better, safer world that his creator wants, except his particular vision involves the destruction of the Avengers and the human race in general. Ultron crashes the Avengers' evening get together, then, after a brief skirmish, flies off with several of Tony's robots and Loki's scepter.
The Avengers, naturally, have to shut Ultron down, but it won't be easy for a robot whose consciousness can jump in and out of the internet, especially after he recruits the super-powered Maximoff twins, who, it turns out, have a bit of an axe to grind against erstwhile arms-dealer Tony Stark.
It was always a given that this film would be bigger than the first one, and it is to Whedon's credit that he plunges the audience into the action right from the word "Marvel." The opening action sequence in the fictional Eastern European country of Sokovia (played by both England and Italy) is really a doozy, though oddly enough a few nanoseconds of the relentless computer-generated mayhem seem a little cartoony. Fortunately, most of the action (and there are a LOT of sequences to choose from) is quite expertly staged, and if I may be so bold, some of it will stand out as iconic over time, like the outstanding fight in Johannesburg between a rage-crazed Hulk (courtesy, again, of Wanda's mind tricks) and Iron Man decked out in an enormous suit of armor that was specifically designed for such an eventuality, known to comics fans as the Hulkbuster armor but here, simply called "Veronica."
The scope of the film is bigger, too; this is the first Marvel Studios movie that takes place in more than two main locations, with the action starting out in Europe, very briefly going Stateside before heading over to Africa, then over to Asia, and finally back again to Europe for the big climax.
Fortunately, Whedon still manages to sneak quiet moments between the action, some of which actually double as a surprise story twist for a specific character. I'd rather not spoil exactly what the twist is, but I will say that apart from giving the said character some much-needed dimension, the sequence really helped keep the film grounded, along with the brief evening cocktails scene earlier in the film in which most of the Avengers try to lift Thor's hammer, a joke that pays off hugely near the end.
There are a lot of nice character moments throughout the movie. Captain America has a running joke involving his age and swear words, Black Widow gets a back story and bit of a romantic subplot with Bruce Banner, who in turn finds himself grappling with the question of whether or not the Hulk is a hero or a menace. Hawkeye gets to do a lot more than spend two thirds of the movie being mind-controlled. James Spader is magnificent as Ultron, infusing the right amounts of menace and humor into a character that, to my mind at least, was a bit of a challenge to realize. Strangely enough, getting short shrift here were Iron Man, whose motivations for creating Ultron were articulated well enough but which still felt a little off, and Thor, who, outside of the action sequences, didn't really have much to do except make hammer jokes, take his shirt off, and sell the sequel to his own series. Tragically underutilized here was Andy Serkis (better known as Gollum from the Lord of the Rings series), who put on a really thick South African accent for less than ten minutes of screen time. Still, considering he was playing Ulysses Klaue, we may yet see him again, and with a more meaningful role. Thomas Kretschmann's Baron Von Strucker is utterly wasted here, as he barely gets more screen time than he did during his mid-credits Easter egg in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
Apart from the fact that a number of characters fell by the wayside (an inevitability in a movie with a cast this big), there were other things that didn't quite sit well with me. The narrative just didn't feel as tight as the storytelling in the first film, and the sense of urgency wasn't quite there. Sure, Ultron was a menace, and James Spader plays the character to the hilt, but by the climax Ultron and his army just didn't quite feel threatening enough. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, did a better job of depicting its heroes in peril, even though their enemies there only human beings (and one particularly tough human) and not an army of murderous robots.
That's actually my problem in a nutshell; I didn't find this film quite as engaging as I did the Captain America sequel. Sure, AAOU definitely has CATWS beaten in terms of pure pyrotechnics and visual flair, but in terms of the tautness of the narrative, character exploration and even the impact of the story, it falls surprisingly short. CATWS, with its revelation that S.H.I.E.L.D. was being run by HYDRA, basically shook the Marvel Cinematic Universe to its very core. In comparison, this film feels...inconsequential, and the fact that the really earth-shattering stuff seems reserved for the next chapter, the already announced two-part epic the "Infinity War" is distinctly disappointing. I mean, CATWS was just supposed to whet my appetite for AAOU; as it was, AAOU just felt like the dessert to the rib eye steak dinner that was the Cap solo movie, and as a dessert it felt loaded with a bit too many calories.
Plus, I have to say that the constant banter, one-liners and physical comedy that worked so well in the first movie sometimes feel a bit strained here. CATWS had its share of laughs, too, but the Russo brothers, whose bread and butter, ironically enough, used to be directing sitcoms, showed considerably more restraint. I'm glad to know the Russos will be taking over the two-part sequel to this, The Infinity War.
Finally, the product placement just got a bit out of hand here; I was used to seeing a fleet of Audis on screen, but when Quicksilver, in preparing for the climactic battle, grabbed a pair of shoes with a clear focus on the Adidas brand, I just groaned. I'm normally quite forgiving of product placement, especially when it's of brands that I like, but this movie just took it a bit too far for me.
Don't get me wrong; I genuinely enjoyed Avengers: Age of Ultron and will probably watch it again in theaters at least once. I'm just a tad disappointed considering that this franchise is supposed to be the crown jewel of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, and yet it seems to have lost a bit of its luster.
8.2/10
Following up the most successful superhero movie of all time was never going to be an easy endeavor. There were so many things that needed to be done right, and so many things that could have gone wrong.
Thus far, the template for Marvel Studios' so-called "Phase 2" films, specifically the sequels to the earlier "Phase 1" films has been, more or less, a combination of three things: 1) bigger action set-pieces, 2) more elaborate CGI, 3) more menacing villains, 4)the same blend of action-comedy that worked in Phase 1. In the case of two Phase 2 movies, namely Iron Man 3 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, one additional element is a major story twist midway through the movie.
Avengers: Age of Ultron is very much in that mold.
Following the evens of The Winter Soldier, in which Captain America (Chris Evans) and friends had to take down a S.H.I.E.L.D. that had been compromised by HYDRA, the Avengers --Cap, Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo and a lot of computer-generated imagery), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner)-- now find themselves having to chase down important artifacts that are in HYDRA's possession. One such artifact, the mind-controlling scepter wielded by the villainous Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in the first film, is in the hands of the villainous Baron Strucker (Thomas Kretschmann), who has used it to experiment on humans. The only survivors of these experiments are two superpowered volunteers, the Maximoff twins Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who has acquired superhuman speed and Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen), who has some form of telepathy and telekinesis. Strucker is captured in the Avengers' raid, but the twins escape, and not before Wanda puts a mental whammy on him, giving Tony Stark/Iron Man a glimpse of his worst nightmare: the death of the Avengers because of his inability to do enough.
This proves to be the catalyst of events to come as Tony, spurred by his apocalyptic delusion and with some help from Bruce Banner, decides to put into motion something he's been cooking up for a long time without the knowledge of their teammates: an artificial intelligence he calls Ultron programmed to protect the world with a gleaming metal robot army. He uses the energy of the scepter to try to infuse the Ultron A.I. with the little something extra it needs to be the ultimate global cop, then leaves with Bruce Banner to join the rest of the Avengers for evening cocktails, when the scepter apparently gets ideas of its own and Ultron (James Spader) "wakes up..." but with a twist. He envisions the better, safer world that his creator wants, except his particular vision involves the destruction of the Avengers and the human race in general. Ultron crashes the Avengers' evening get together, then, after a brief skirmish, flies off with several of Tony's robots and Loki's scepter.
The Avengers, naturally, have to shut Ultron down, but it won't be easy for a robot whose consciousness can jump in and out of the internet, especially after he recruits the super-powered Maximoff twins, who, it turns out, have a bit of an axe to grind against erstwhile arms-dealer Tony Stark.
It was always a given that this film would be bigger than the first one, and it is to Whedon's credit that he plunges the audience into the action right from the word "Marvel." The opening action sequence in the fictional Eastern European country of Sokovia (played by both England and Italy) is really a doozy, though oddly enough a few nanoseconds of the relentless computer-generated mayhem seem a little cartoony. Fortunately, most of the action (and there are a LOT of sequences to choose from) is quite expertly staged, and if I may be so bold, some of it will stand out as iconic over time, like the outstanding fight in Johannesburg between a rage-crazed Hulk (courtesy, again, of Wanda's mind tricks) and Iron Man decked out in an enormous suit of armor that was specifically designed for such an eventuality, known to comics fans as the Hulkbuster armor but here, simply called "Veronica."
The scope of the film is bigger, too; this is the first Marvel Studios movie that takes place in more than two main locations, with the action starting out in Europe, very briefly going Stateside before heading over to Africa, then over to Asia, and finally back again to Europe for the big climax.
Fortunately, Whedon still manages to sneak quiet moments between the action, some of which actually double as a surprise story twist for a specific character. I'd rather not spoil exactly what the twist is, but I will say that apart from giving the said character some much-needed dimension, the sequence really helped keep the film grounded, along with the brief evening cocktails scene earlier in the film in which most of the Avengers try to lift Thor's hammer, a joke that pays off hugely near the end.
There are a lot of nice character moments throughout the movie. Captain America has a running joke involving his age and swear words, Black Widow gets a back story and bit of a romantic subplot with Bruce Banner, who in turn finds himself grappling with the question of whether or not the Hulk is a hero or a menace. Hawkeye gets to do a lot more than spend two thirds of the movie being mind-controlled. James Spader is magnificent as Ultron, infusing the right amounts of menace and humor into a character that, to my mind at least, was a bit of a challenge to realize. Strangely enough, getting short shrift here were Iron Man, whose motivations for creating Ultron were articulated well enough but which still felt a little off, and Thor, who, outside of the action sequences, didn't really have much to do except make hammer jokes, take his shirt off, and sell the sequel to his own series. Tragically underutilized here was Andy Serkis (better known as Gollum from the Lord of the Rings series), who put on a really thick South African accent for less than ten minutes of screen time. Still, considering he was playing Ulysses Klaue, we may yet see him again, and with a more meaningful role. Thomas Kretschmann's Baron Von Strucker is utterly wasted here, as he barely gets more screen time than he did during his mid-credits Easter egg in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
Apart from the fact that a number of characters fell by the wayside (an inevitability in a movie with a cast this big), there were other things that didn't quite sit well with me. The narrative just didn't feel as tight as the storytelling in the first film, and the sense of urgency wasn't quite there. Sure, Ultron was a menace, and James Spader plays the character to the hilt, but by the climax Ultron and his army just didn't quite feel threatening enough. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, did a better job of depicting its heroes in peril, even though their enemies there only human beings (and one particularly tough human) and not an army of murderous robots.
That's actually my problem in a nutshell; I didn't find this film quite as engaging as I did the Captain America sequel. Sure, AAOU definitely has CATWS beaten in terms of pure pyrotechnics and visual flair, but in terms of the tautness of the narrative, character exploration and even the impact of the story, it falls surprisingly short. CATWS, with its revelation that S.H.I.E.L.D. was being run by HYDRA, basically shook the Marvel Cinematic Universe to its very core. In comparison, this film feels...inconsequential, and the fact that the really earth-shattering stuff seems reserved for the next chapter, the already announced two-part epic the "Infinity War" is distinctly disappointing. I mean, CATWS was just supposed to whet my appetite for AAOU; as it was, AAOU just felt like the dessert to the rib eye steak dinner that was the Cap solo movie, and as a dessert it felt loaded with a bit too many calories.
Plus, I have to say that the constant banter, one-liners and physical comedy that worked so well in the first movie sometimes feel a bit strained here. CATWS had its share of laughs, too, but the Russo brothers, whose bread and butter, ironically enough, used to be directing sitcoms, showed considerably more restraint. I'm glad to know the Russos will be taking over the two-part sequel to this, The Infinity War.
Finally, the product placement just got a bit out of hand here; I was used to seeing a fleet of Audis on screen, but when Quicksilver, in preparing for the climactic battle, grabbed a pair of shoes with a clear focus on the Adidas brand, I just groaned. I'm normally quite forgiving of product placement, especially when it's of brands that I like, but this movie just took it a bit too far for me.
Don't get me wrong; I genuinely enjoyed Avengers: Age of Ultron and will probably watch it again in theaters at least once. I'm just a tad disappointed considering that this franchise is supposed to be the crown jewel of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, and yet it seems to have lost a bit of its luster.
8.2/10
Saturday, April 4, 2015
No Place Like It: A Review of Home
directed by Tim Johnson
written by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember
I could be mistaken, but I think that the brand new Dreamworks' Animated film Home has the distinction of being the most benign alien-invasion movie ever made.
Here, an alien race known as the Boov, led by the idiotic Captain Smek (Steve Martin), travel across space, constantly fleeing from a terrifying alien race known as the Gorg, and settling on new worlds and then fleeing once the Gorg has caught up with them. The chase has left several destroyed worlds in its wake.
Finally, the Boov arrive at earth, and take over in fairly short order. There are no death rays here; they simply whisk people out of their homes using bubbles and giant vacuum cleaners and summarily displace the human population to a gigantic settlement in Australia, filled with all of the things that Captain Smek thinks will pacify them, like amusement parks and candy.
The Boov then begin the process of resettling yet again, and one of them, a particularly unloved Boov named Oh (Jim Parsons), who also happens to be completely clueless as to his unpopularity, tries to throw his neighbors a party. Unfortunately, he ends up sending the message all the way across the galaxy to everyone within "earshot," including the Gorg. Oh ends up on the run from the rest of the Boov, and runs into Tip (Rihanna) a girl who happens to be the sole human to escape "relocation." Tip has a car, and Oh has knowledge of Boov tech, which basically means the ability to make things fly. They strike up a deal to find Tip's mom (Jennifer Lopez), though unbeknownst to Top, Oh secretly plans to flee to Antarctica. The friendship that inevitably blossoms between them, however, might prove to change everything, even the fate of the world.
While this movie hardly the most cleverly written film in Dreamworks' library, which stretches back nearly two decades, it is reasonably entertaining, and quite notably makes the best use of the studio's considerable technical prowess in a long time by providing the viewer with some of the most colorful visuals seen in a Dreamworks' movie since 2013's The Croods.
As far as offering compelling characters goes, though, the movie falls sadly short of the better DWA movies like Kung Fu Panda or How to Train Your Dragon. The film tries to establish Boov as lonely but only succeeds in making him as unlikable to me as he was to his fellow Boov. The filmmakers do well enough to establish how and why Tip is, like Oh, lonely and in need of a friend, but apart from giving her adorable curls and Rihanna's voice there is not much else to her. Also, it was hard for me to separate Rihanna from her onscreen avatar considering that her songs came blaring over the movie's soundtrack every five minutes. It was quite annoying.
All that said, though, I still find myself recommending this film because it is just...so...pretty. Animated films in general are very colorful affairs, but this movie, I daresay, really stands out, even in a market that's been saturated with computer-generated cartoons, many of them from this very studio. It is guaranteed entertainment for kids under twelve (my two daughters, both below ten, had a good time, while thirteen-year-old son groaned at every Rihanna song, just as I did), so it has that, but even as a cynical adult, I was able to enjoy this feast for the eyes.
6/10
written by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember
I could be mistaken, but I think that the brand new Dreamworks' Animated film Home has the distinction of being the most benign alien-invasion movie ever made.
Here, an alien race known as the Boov, led by the idiotic Captain Smek (Steve Martin), travel across space, constantly fleeing from a terrifying alien race known as the Gorg, and settling on new worlds and then fleeing once the Gorg has caught up with them. The chase has left several destroyed worlds in its wake.
Finally, the Boov arrive at earth, and take over in fairly short order. There are no death rays here; they simply whisk people out of their homes using bubbles and giant vacuum cleaners and summarily displace the human population to a gigantic settlement in Australia, filled with all of the things that Captain Smek thinks will pacify them, like amusement parks and candy.
The Boov then begin the process of resettling yet again, and one of them, a particularly unloved Boov named Oh (Jim Parsons), who also happens to be completely clueless as to his unpopularity, tries to throw his neighbors a party. Unfortunately, he ends up sending the message all the way across the galaxy to everyone within "earshot," including the Gorg. Oh ends up on the run from the rest of the Boov, and runs into Tip (Rihanna) a girl who happens to be the sole human to escape "relocation." Tip has a car, and Oh has knowledge of Boov tech, which basically means the ability to make things fly. They strike up a deal to find Tip's mom (Jennifer Lopez), though unbeknownst to Top, Oh secretly plans to flee to Antarctica. The friendship that inevitably blossoms between them, however, might prove to change everything, even the fate of the world.
While this movie hardly the most cleverly written film in Dreamworks' library, which stretches back nearly two decades, it is reasonably entertaining, and quite notably makes the best use of the studio's considerable technical prowess in a long time by providing the viewer with some of the most colorful visuals seen in a Dreamworks' movie since 2013's The Croods.
As far as offering compelling characters goes, though, the movie falls sadly short of the better DWA movies like Kung Fu Panda or How to Train Your Dragon. The film tries to establish Boov as lonely but only succeeds in making him as unlikable to me as he was to his fellow Boov. The filmmakers do well enough to establish how and why Tip is, like Oh, lonely and in need of a friend, but apart from giving her adorable curls and Rihanna's voice there is not much else to her. Also, it was hard for me to separate Rihanna from her onscreen avatar considering that her songs came blaring over the movie's soundtrack every five minutes. It was quite annoying.
All that said, though, I still find myself recommending this film because it is just...so...pretty. Animated films in general are very colorful affairs, but this movie, I daresay, really stands out, even in a market that's been saturated with computer-generated cartoons, many of them from this very studio. It is guaranteed entertainment for kids under twelve (my two daughters, both below ten, had a good time, while thirteen-year-old son groaned at every Rihanna song, just as I did), so it has that, but even as a cynical adult, I was able to enjoy this feast for the eyes.
6/10
Monday, March 16, 2015
Bippity-Boppity-Boo! A Review of Cinderella
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
Written by Chris Weitz
Following the success of their live-action adaptation of their animated classic Alice in Wonderland back in 2010, Walt Disney Pictures has begun giving several more films from its library of animated movies the live-action treatment, complete with a 21st century sensibility. Last year they came out with Maleficent, a retelling of 1955's Sleeping Beauty which basically turned the movie on its head, making Maleficent, previously the antagonist of the animated film, into the hero of the live-action film. This year, they've taken a slightly less radical approach with their latest live-action update of Cinderella, starring Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine) as the evil stepmother and Lily James (Downton Abbey) as the title character.
The story is essentially as I remember it: Ella (James, played by Eloise Webb in her childhood) is the only child of a kind, landed colonialist (Ben Chaplin) and his wife (Hayley Atwell). After her mother dies tragically of illness, her father remarries. His new wife, the widow of a former business partner, is the cruel, haughty Lady Tremaine (Blanchett) who promptly moves in with her two daughters Anastasia (Holliday Grainger) and Drizella (Sophie McShera) and proceeds to make Ella's life miserable while her father is away on his frequent business trips. Then, tragedy strikes anew, and Ella is left alone with her stepmother and her stepsisters, and things really get nasty as Tremaine dismisses all of the household staff to save money, and turns her stepdaughter into the household's only servant. Things couldn't possibly get worse for poor Ella, who at one point is dubbed "Cinderella" by one of her stepsisters after she spends one cold night sleeping by the hearth rather than her usual drafty room in the attic and wakes up with ashes all over her face, but for all of that she tries to stay kind to her new mother and stepsisters, and refuses to leave the house which her parents cherished, and which had been in her father's family for generations. After one episode of particular cruelty Ella rides out of her house to escape for a few moments, and meets the prince (Richard Madden of Game of Thrones fame) who is out hunting. She helps the stag he is hunting get away, and then enchants him with her protestation against the very concept of hunting, just before she leaves without even giving her name. The prince is utterly taken with her, so much so that he holds a grand ball open to everyone in the kingdom just to find her. Tremaine is determined to have one of her daughters snag the prince, but even though the prince himself has "democratized" the ball so that anyone and everyone can go, the evil stepmother and stepsisters live up to their billing and prevent Cinderella from going, ripping up her mother's dress and leaving her sobbing. It is then that Cinderella's fairy godmother (a scene-stealing Helena Bonham Carter) disguised at first as an old crone, to whom a despondent Ella gives a cup of milk in spite of her abject misery, appears, and gives Ella everything she needs for the night of her life: the coach, the footmen, the driver, her dress, and of course, her glass slippers (which, the fairy godmother assures her, are quite comfortable). Cinderella goes to the ball, meets the prince who recognizes her instantly and thereafter, but for a few twists thrown in to update the story a little bit, things play out just as anyone who's seen the old cartoon would expect them to.
As I write this, I find myself remembering Andy Tennant's 1998 film Ever After the last live-action retelling of the Cinderella story that I watched because I was quite honestly struck by how it had managed to influence this film. From the period garb to the prince played by a Scottish actor (Dougray Scott was Drew Barrymore's prince there) to, most importantly, the much more outspoken Cinderella. Branagh's updating of the story is hardly the somewhat progressive take on the lore that Tennant's film managed to be, but it does make some pretty important changes to the storytelling. This incarnation of Cinderella is considerably more empowered than her animated incarnation of over half a century ago.
At its heart, though, the story is still about a girl meeting a boy, falling for him, then getting him in rather short order. I have to credit screenwriter Weitz with his attempts to throw nuance into a 112-minute kids' movie by beefing up Cinderella's back-story as well as that of Prince Charm--excuse me, Kit--who now has more screen time with his father, the king (Derek Jacobi), and a somewhat trying relationship that vaguely evokes Branagh's fondness for Shakespeare.
While the tweaks to the story, while crucial, are still minimal, from a technical perspective Branagh truly brings the film into the new millennium with some amazing production value. This is a cartoon fairy tale brought to life, and Branagh, having cut his teeth on the mega-budgeted Marvel blockbuster Thor four years ago, does an excellent job visualizing that. This film is beautiful to look at.
Lily James is quite capable her role as Ella, and truth be told I enjoyed her performance all the more thanks to her lovely accent. Neil Patrick Harris was right; everything does sound better with a British accent (or at least, fairy tales do). It was also nice that Cinderella got to show acts of kindness other than feeding talking mice. Helena Bonham Carter was an absolute joy as the fairy godmother, and her screen-time was way, way too brief. I would have wanted her to at least show up again at the end, although she was the narrator all throughout. Cate Blanchett looked like she had a grand old time chewing the scenery as the wicked stepmother, especially in her outlandish, anachronistic outfits. Madden and Jacobi strike up a nice father-son rapport, too, but really, it's all about the ladies here.
Interestingly, it became clear at one point that this movie was not set in 18th century France but in a time and place of the filmmakers' own making, where clothes from various eras and people from various cultures and climes were basically all smashed together.
The thing about this PC overload, however, which hearkens back to 2013's Oz the Great and Powerful is that it feels like pandering of sorts. It's also worth noting that the first persons of color we see in the film are the servants of Ella and her family. Now, I'm all for equal representation in Hollywood, but this was rather patronizing, and a little hypocritical as well, considering that the lead characters were still white. The "diverse" cast ended up looking like employees at Disneyland rather than the ambassadors for racial equality they were probably meant to be.
Finally, as lovely as Patrick Doyle's music score was, I found it a bit overbearing; his orchestra was blaring for the vast majority of the running time as if to compensate for the absence of the show tunes that were such a staple of the first film. The only singing here was some wistful warbling by Cinderella's mother, and later, Cinderella herself (though James does a wonderful cover of "A Dream is a Wish" which plays during the end credits). Make no mistake, Doyle's music was beautiful, but it was also a bit cloying at times.
Speaking of cloying, I was amused by the animated short that preceded the film, Frozen Fever a sequel of sorts to Disney's billion-dollar grossing megahit from 2013, but I was also struck by the blatantly by-the-numbers approach employed in making it. It reproduced, in a few short minutes, most of the things that kids loved about the movie, from the song number between Elsa (Idina Menzel) and Anna (Kristen Bell) to the sisterly love, to Anna's messed up hair, to Olaf's childlike demeanor, to Kristoff's clumsiness, to...well you get the picture. They even managed to sneak in a line from "Let it Go." I dearly hope the recently announced sequel takes the characters into new territory. Still, as a short this film was a nice little confection.
All told Cinderella is worth watching, especially for the people who grew up with the cartoon. Frozen Fever isn't half bad, either.
7/10
Written by Chris Weitz
Following the success of their live-action adaptation of their animated classic Alice in Wonderland back in 2010, Walt Disney Pictures has begun giving several more films from its library of animated movies the live-action treatment, complete with a 21st century sensibility. Last year they came out with Maleficent, a retelling of 1955's Sleeping Beauty which basically turned the movie on its head, making Maleficent, previously the antagonist of the animated film, into the hero of the live-action film. This year, they've taken a slightly less radical approach with their latest live-action update of Cinderella, starring Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine) as the evil stepmother and Lily James (Downton Abbey) as the title character.
The story is essentially as I remember it: Ella (James, played by Eloise Webb in her childhood) is the only child of a kind, landed colonialist (Ben Chaplin) and his wife (Hayley Atwell). After her mother dies tragically of illness, her father remarries. His new wife, the widow of a former business partner, is the cruel, haughty Lady Tremaine (Blanchett) who promptly moves in with her two daughters Anastasia (Holliday Grainger) and Drizella (Sophie McShera) and proceeds to make Ella's life miserable while her father is away on his frequent business trips. Then, tragedy strikes anew, and Ella is left alone with her stepmother and her stepsisters, and things really get nasty as Tremaine dismisses all of the household staff to save money, and turns her stepdaughter into the household's only servant. Things couldn't possibly get worse for poor Ella, who at one point is dubbed "Cinderella" by one of her stepsisters after she spends one cold night sleeping by the hearth rather than her usual drafty room in the attic and wakes up with ashes all over her face, but for all of that she tries to stay kind to her new mother and stepsisters, and refuses to leave the house which her parents cherished, and which had been in her father's family for generations. After one episode of particular cruelty Ella rides out of her house to escape for a few moments, and meets the prince (Richard Madden of Game of Thrones fame) who is out hunting. She helps the stag he is hunting get away, and then enchants him with her protestation against the very concept of hunting, just before she leaves without even giving her name. The prince is utterly taken with her, so much so that he holds a grand ball open to everyone in the kingdom just to find her. Tremaine is determined to have one of her daughters snag the prince, but even though the prince himself has "democratized" the ball so that anyone and everyone can go, the evil stepmother and stepsisters live up to their billing and prevent Cinderella from going, ripping up her mother's dress and leaving her sobbing. It is then that Cinderella's fairy godmother (a scene-stealing Helena Bonham Carter) disguised at first as an old crone, to whom a despondent Ella gives a cup of milk in spite of her abject misery, appears, and gives Ella everything she needs for the night of her life: the coach, the footmen, the driver, her dress, and of course, her glass slippers (which, the fairy godmother assures her, are quite comfortable). Cinderella goes to the ball, meets the prince who recognizes her instantly and thereafter, but for a few twists thrown in to update the story a little bit, things play out just as anyone who's seen the old cartoon would expect them to.
As I write this, I find myself remembering Andy Tennant's 1998 film Ever After the last live-action retelling of the Cinderella story that I watched because I was quite honestly struck by how it had managed to influence this film. From the period garb to the prince played by a Scottish actor (Dougray Scott was Drew Barrymore's prince there) to, most importantly, the much more outspoken Cinderella. Branagh's updating of the story is hardly the somewhat progressive take on the lore that Tennant's film managed to be, but it does make some pretty important changes to the storytelling. This incarnation of Cinderella is considerably more empowered than her animated incarnation of over half a century ago.
At its heart, though, the story is still about a girl meeting a boy, falling for him, then getting him in rather short order. I have to credit screenwriter Weitz with his attempts to throw nuance into a 112-minute kids' movie by beefing up Cinderella's back-story as well as that of Prince Charm--excuse me, Kit--who now has more screen time with his father, the king (Derek Jacobi), and a somewhat trying relationship that vaguely evokes Branagh's fondness for Shakespeare.
While the tweaks to the story, while crucial, are still minimal, from a technical perspective Branagh truly brings the film into the new millennium with some amazing production value. This is a cartoon fairy tale brought to life, and Branagh, having cut his teeth on the mega-budgeted Marvel blockbuster Thor four years ago, does an excellent job visualizing that. This film is beautiful to look at.
Lily James is quite capable her role as Ella, and truth be told I enjoyed her performance all the more thanks to her lovely accent. Neil Patrick Harris was right; everything does sound better with a British accent (or at least, fairy tales do). It was also nice that Cinderella got to show acts of kindness other than feeding talking mice. Helena Bonham Carter was an absolute joy as the fairy godmother, and her screen-time was way, way too brief. I would have wanted her to at least show up again at the end, although she was the narrator all throughout. Cate Blanchett looked like she had a grand old time chewing the scenery as the wicked stepmother, especially in her outlandish, anachronistic outfits. Madden and Jacobi strike up a nice father-son rapport, too, but really, it's all about the ladies here.
Interestingly, it became clear at one point that this movie was not set in 18th century France but in a time and place of the filmmakers' own making, where clothes from various eras and people from various cultures and climes were basically all smashed together.
The thing about this PC overload, however, which hearkens back to 2013's Oz the Great and Powerful is that it feels like pandering of sorts. It's also worth noting that the first persons of color we see in the film are the servants of Ella and her family. Now, I'm all for equal representation in Hollywood, but this was rather patronizing, and a little hypocritical as well, considering that the lead characters were still white. The "diverse" cast ended up looking like employees at Disneyland rather than the ambassadors for racial equality they were probably meant to be.
Finally, as lovely as Patrick Doyle's music score was, I found it a bit overbearing; his orchestra was blaring for the vast majority of the running time as if to compensate for the absence of the show tunes that were such a staple of the first film. The only singing here was some wistful warbling by Cinderella's mother, and later, Cinderella herself (though James does a wonderful cover of "A Dream is a Wish" which plays during the end credits). Make no mistake, Doyle's music was beautiful, but it was also a bit cloying at times.
Speaking of cloying, I was amused by the animated short that preceded the film, Frozen Fever a sequel of sorts to Disney's billion-dollar grossing megahit from 2013, but I was also struck by the blatantly by-the-numbers approach employed in making it. It reproduced, in a few short minutes, most of the things that kids loved about the movie, from the song number between Elsa (Idina Menzel) and Anna (Kristen Bell) to the sisterly love, to Anna's messed up hair, to Olaf's childlike demeanor, to Kristoff's clumsiness, to...well you get the picture. They even managed to sneak in a line from "Let it Go." I dearly hope the recently announced sequel takes the characters into new territory. Still, as a short this film was a nice little confection.
All told Cinderella is worth watching, especially for the people who grew up with the cartoon. Frozen Fever isn't half bad, either.
7/10
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Thank You for the Music, Marvel
Amid the glut of hype for the impending megablockbuster The Avengers: Age of Ultron, there is one news item that is of particular interest to me: Danny Elfman will be involved with writing some music for the movie.
For the uninitiated, Danny Elfman is something of a god among fans of comic book-based movies, having written well-loved music for both Tim Burton's Batman films and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films. He's a frequent collaborator of both directors and there are few directors more respected in terms of genre filmmaking.
When Sony hired Elfman to write the music for Raimi's movies, I rejoiced because it was clear that they were serious in their respect for a truly iconic character. I was a little let down by the theme he eventually wrote but overall he turned in solid work for two whole movies. Whatever damage Sony may have done to the credibility of the Spider-Man franchise over the years, Elfman's reputation as a craftsman remained intact.
When Marvel Studios launched their unprecedented, sprawling cinematic universe with Iron Man back in 2008, they got a lot of things right, most of them in fact, but one aspect of filmmaking that was sorely neglected was, to my mind, one of the most important: the music. To compose the score for the first Iron Man, they hired composer Ramin Djawadi (of eventual Game of Thrones fame), whose work on the film was sadly, utterly generic. So forgettable was the music, in fact, that when Djawadi was replaced two years later with John Debney, no one seemed to care.
In 2011, however, Marvel finally seemed to understand the importance of some solid musical scoring, and hired veteran composer Alan Silvestri to write the theme of Captain America: The First Avenger, and more critically The Avengers. The former was a delight to listen to and hearkened back to the rousing, marching-band appeal of the old Indiana Jones movies, but the latter was much more important, because The Avengers is, all exaggeration aside, the centerpiece of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It had to have a theme that was no less than iconic, and to Silvestri's credit, he achieved just that with his theme, which was right up there, I would say, with his work on Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future movies. The Avengers has become the most successful comic-book based movie of all time, and people started humming the theme and even started covering it. (This one's my favorite).
Then, inexplicably, Marvel replaced Silvestri for what portends to be one of the biggest sequels of all time with Brian Tyler, best known for his work on the Fast and Furious movies, and who had already done work for Marvel on Iron Man 3, and Thor: The Dark World. So enamored is Marvel with Tyler, in fact, that he has even composed the "Marvel fanfare" that plays at the beginning of every film. The problem with Tyler is that his music is, even more than Ramin Djawadi, extremely generic, and in fact, his music last year for the distinctly non-Marvel Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles remake sounded like he had basically lifted it from all of his Marvel music. By giving him their most important movie franchise to score, Marvel was essentially saying something like "all of them sound the same, anyway," and apparently taking a giant dump on the importance of iconic film scores. I suspected that Tyler was a relatively cheap composer, and that this was at the heart of the decision.
Then, Danny Elfman's name appeared on the final "Avengers" poster as providing "additional music." As it turns out, this meant he was brought on board to "refresh" Alan Silvestri's original theme. Apparently, Marvel has finally noticed how cookie-cutter Brian Tyler's music is as well.
That Elfman has been brought on board, however, is a source of relief for me, and while I would have preferred Silvestri to have stayed on board, it's enough for me that Marvel has shown interest in some sort of musical continuity. It's the thought that counts.
For the uninitiated, Danny Elfman is something of a god among fans of comic book-based movies, having written well-loved music for both Tim Burton's Batman films and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films. He's a frequent collaborator of both directors and there are few directors more respected in terms of genre filmmaking.
When Sony hired Elfman to write the music for Raimi's movies, I rejoiced because it was clear that they were serious in their respect for a truly iconic character. I was a little let down by the theme he eventually wrote but overall he turned in solid work for two whole movies. Whatever damage Sony may have done to the credibility of the Spider-Man franchise over the years, Elfman's reputation as a craftsman remained intact.
When Marvel Studios launched their unprecedented, sprawling cinematic universe with Iron Man back in 2008, they got a lot of things right, most of them in fact, but one aspect of filmmaking that was sorely neglected was, to my mind, one of the most important: the music. To compose the score for the first Iron Man, they hired composer Ramin Djawadi (of eventual Game of Thrones fame), whose work on the film was sadly, utterly generic. So forgettable was the music, in fact, that when Djawadi was replaced two years later with John Debney, no one seemed to care.
In 2011, however, Marvel finally seemed to understand the importance of some solid musical scoring, and hired veteran composer Alan Silvestri to write the theme of Captain America: The First Avenger, and more critically The Avengers. The former was a delight to listen to and hearkened back to the rousing, marching-band appeal of the old Indiana Jones movies, but the latter was much more important, because The Avengers is, all exaggeration aside, the centerpiece of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It had to have a theme that was no less than iconic, and to Silvestri's credit, he achieved just that with his theme, which was right up there, I would say, with his work on Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future movies. The Avengers has become the most successful comic-book based movie of all time, and people started humming the theme and even started covering it. (This one's my favorite).
Then, inexplicably, Marvel replaced Silvestri for what portends to be one of the biggest sequels of all time with Brian Tyler, best known for his work on the Fast and Furious movies, and who had already done work for Marvel on Iron Man 3, and Thor: The Dark World. So enamored is Marvel with Tyler, in fact, that he has even composed the "Marvel fanfare" that plays at the beginning of every film. The problem with Tyler is that his music is, even more than Ramin Djawadi, extremely generic, and in fact, his music last year for the distinctly non-Marvel Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles remake sounded like he had basically lifted it from all of his Marvel music. By giving him their most important movie franchise to score, Marvel was essentially saying something like "all of them sound the same, anyway," and apparently taking a giant dump on the importance of iconic film scores. I suspected that Tyler was a relatively cheap composer, and that this was at the heart of the decision.
Then, Danny Elfman's name appeared on the final "Avengers" poster as providing "additional music." As it turns out, this meant he was brought on board to "refresh" Alan Silvestri's original theme. Apparently, Marvel has finally noticed how cookie-cutter Brian Tyler's music is as well.
That Elfman has been brought on board, however, is a source of relief for me, and while I would have preferred Silvestri to have stayed on board, it's enough for me that Marvel has shown interest in some sort of musical continuity. It's the thought that counts.
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Hail to the King: A Review of Kingsman: The Secret Service (spoilers)
directed by Matthew Vaughn
written by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn
The prospect of seeing the prim-and-proper Colin Firth (The King's Speech) kicking some serious ass was more than enough to make me want to see this adaptation of yet another hyper-violent comic book series written by Mark Millar, this one titled "The Secret Service," and I'm happy to say that this film does not disappoint on that front.
The title refers to a super secret independent organization of spies founded just after World War I by wealthy English aristocrats who had lost their sons to the war. At the beginning of the film, a team of Kingsman agents invades an unnamed fortress in the Middle East, and are in the middle of interrogating a man they have captured when he detonates a grenade with his teeth. One of the group sacrifices himself, covering the grenade with his body and getting killed in the process. The group leader, agent Harry Hart a.k.a. Gallahad (Firth), contacts the late agent's wife and son, giving them a medal and a pledge that the organization will grant them a single favor through a phone call, whenever they should need it. The widow is too grief-stricken to accept, but the young Eggsy takes the medal, no questions asked.
Seventeen years later, the now adult Eggsy (Taron Egerton) and his mother live in a squalid apartment with her abusive new husband, a local toughie with a gang of young thugs as his entourage. When Eggsy, in a fit of pique following a verbal tussle, jacks the car of one of the thugs and crashes it, finding himself looking at jail time, he glances at the medal he has been wearing around his neck all these years, and decides to make the phone call. Charges are dropped immediately, and Eggsy receives a visit from Harry himself with a bit of a job offer. One of Kingsman's agents (Jack Davenport) has gotten killed by the mysterious, blade-legged Gazelle (Sofia Boutella) and there's an opening on the team.
After initially refusing, Eggsy decides to try out for the spot, but it isn't that easy; with the exception of fellow applicant Roxy (Sophie Cookson) he doesn't make a whole lot of friends, and the trials themselves are quite difficult. Fortunately, Eggsy is quite capable, and has considerable talent to muster, and not a moment too soon; Kingsman will need a good recruit to be able to take on multimedia magnate Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson with a lisp), employer of the aforementioned Gazelle, a multi-millionaire with the best of intentions but the most murderous of grand plans.
While Firth as a gentlemen spy with some mad fighting skills was the highlight of this movie for me, it has a lot of other things going for it, like Jackson's campy villain, Boutella's somewhat novel henchwoman, a reasonably affable lead in Taron Egerton, and some pretty good laughs. Oddly enough, this movie shares DNA not only with James Bond but with Austin Powers, complete with a rather crude sex joke at the very end. What it doesn't have is anything compelling to say about the human condition, which is all right, considering I wasn't expecting anything like that from the get-go. Millar being Millar, there seem to be some subversive undertones to the narrative, but they are drowned out by the somewhat prodigious displays of violence.
(mild spoilers)
Speaking of the violence, while it wasn't really surprising that the director and writer behind Kick-Ass would produce yet another searingly violent tale, I confess I was genuinely uncomfortable with one stretch of somewhat protracted violence late in the film, and it wasn't the kind of discomfort I would feel watching a video about the Holocaust or the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. The church massacre scene, arguably the action centerpiece of the film, is actually a masterclass in camera movement and fight choreography, but thematically, I had problems with it. In it, Jackson's Valentine takes his electronic doomsday device out for a test drive, ramping up the aggression of everyone in range of the signal and removing all of their inhibitions. Think of it as an electronically-induced version of 28 Days Later. Firth's Hart gets caught up right in the middle of it, but is saved by his considerable fighting skills...that is to say, he butchers almost everyone around him. Now, all of this happens at a hate church in Kentucky, so clearly there's some kind of intent to have the audience cheering through all of this gore. To cap it all off, Vaughn plays frenetic, somewhat upbeat rock music throughout all of the carnage. Basically the entire thing is played for laughs, but frankly, after the first fifteen seconds of mass slaughter I didn't really find it all that funny. A friend of mine said it pretty well, though; it was sickly hypnotic.
I know of a few people who were offended by the fairly crude sex joke at the end, though I can admit I chuckled a little at it. I cannot, however, quite get over that church scene. A few months ago, at the beginning of season 5 of The Walking Dead, the show's protagonists killed a group of cannibals who were basically trying to hunt them down and eat them. From a narrative perspective, one would think it would feel righteous and satisfying, but instead, it felt unremittingly dark, especially considering that it took place in a church. Here, the melee in the church is supposed to be funny. Now, I laughed when Hit Girl skewered, sliced and diced a bunch of lowlifes in Kick-Ass, and in truth, I laughed for a few seconds when the fight in the church broke out, but damn, it was just too long. I know there have been similarly bloody sequences in films like The Raid: Redemption, but I haven't seen them so I can't really compare.
I do know that this scene has offended a lot of people; the authorities of a few Asian countries have cut the scene from the movie altogether. I would never advocate censorship, not even for this, but I get where they were coming from. The scene really felt like violence for the sake of violence, really.
(end spoilers)
To end the review on a high note, though, I genuinely enjoyed this movie, my qualms with the church scene aside. It was worth the time and money spent, and delivered on what it promised: a stylish action-packed send-up of the spy genre. And just as I hoped, I got to see Colin Firth as an amazing, ass-kicking superspy. He has erased the image of his hilarious non-fight with Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones Diary from my memory with his startling action-hero turn.
7/10
written by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn
The prospect of seeing the prim-and-proper Colin Firth (The King's Speech) kicking some serious ass was more than enough to make me want to see this adaptation of yet another hyper-violent comic book series written by Mark Millar, this one titled "The Secret Service," and I'm happy to say that this film does not disappoint on that front.
The title refers to a super secret independent organization of spies founded just after World War I by wealthy English aristocrats who had lost their sons to the war. At the beginning of the film, a team of Kingsman agents invades an unnamed fortress in the Middle East, and are in the middle of interrogating a man they have captured when he detonates a grenade with his teeth. One of the group sacrifices himself, covering the grenade with his body and getting killed in the process. The group leader, agent Harry Hart a.k.a. Gallahad (Firth), contacts the late agent's wife and son, giving them a medal and a pledge that the organization will grant them a single favor through a phone call, whenever they should need it. The widow is too grief-stricken to accept, but the young Eggsy takes the medal, no questions asked.
Seventeen years later, the now adult Eggsy (Taron Egerton) and his mother live in a squalid apartment with her abusive new husband, a local toughie with a gang of young thugs as his entourage. When Eggsy, in a fit of pique following a verbal tussle, jacks the car of one of the thugs and crashes it, finding himself looking at jail time, he glances at the medal he has been wearing around his neck all these years, and decides to make the phone call. Charges are dropped immediately, and Eggsy receives a visit from Harry himself with a bit of a job offer. One of Kingsman's agents (Jack Davenport) has gotten killed by the mysterious, blade-legged Gazelle (Sofia Boutella) and there's an opening on the team.
After initially refusing, Eggsy decides to try out for the spot, but it isn't that easy; with the exception of fellow applicant Roxy (Sophie Cookson) he doesn't make a whole lot of friends, and the trials themselves are quite difficult. Fortunately, Eggsy is quite capable, and has considerable talent to muster, and not a moment too soon; Kingsman will need a good recruit to be able to take on multimedia magnate Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson with a lisp), employer of the aforementioned Gazelle, a multi-millionaire with the best of intentions but the most murderous of grand plans.
While Firth as a gentlemen spy with some mad fighting skills was the highlight of this movie for me, it has a lot of other things going for it, like Jackson's campy villain, Boutella's somewhat novel henchwoman, a reasonably affable lead in Taron Egerton, and some pretty good laughs. Oddly enough, this movie shares DNA not only with James Bond but with Austin Powers, complete with a rather crude sex joke at the very end. What it doesn't have is anything compelling to say about the human condition, which is all right, considering I wasn't expecting anything like that from the get-go. Millar being Millar, there seem to be some subversive undertones to the narrative, but they are drowned out by the somewhat prodigious displays of violence.
(mild spoilers)
Speaking of the violence, while it wasn't really surprising that the director and writer behind Kick-Ass would produce yet another searingly violent tale, I confess I was genuinely uncomfortable with one stretch of somewhat protracted violence late in the film, and it wasn't the kind of discomfort I would feel watching a video about the Holocaust or the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. The church massacre scene, arguably the action centerpiece of the film, is actually a masterclass in camera movement and fight choreography, but thematically, I had problems with it. In it, Jackson's Valentine takes his electronic doomsday device out for a test drive, ramping up the aggression of everyone in range of the signal and removing all of their inhibitions. Think of it as an electronically-induced version of 28 Days Later. Firth's Hart gets caught up right in the middle of it, but is saved by his considerable fighting skills...that is to say, he butchers almost everyone around him. Now, all of this happens at a hate church in Kentucky, so clearly there's some kind of intent to have the audience cheering through all of this gore. To cap it all off, Vaughn plays frenetic, somewhat upbeat rock music throughout all of the carnage. Basically the entire thing is played for laughs, but frankly, after the first fifteen seconds of mass slaughter I didn't really find it all that funny. A friend of mine said it pretty well, though; it was sickly hypnotic.
I know of a few people who were offended by the fairly crude sex joke at the end, though I can admit I chuckled a little at it. I cannot, however, quite get over that church scene. A few months ago, at the beginning of season 5 of The Walking Dead, the show's protagonists killed a group of cannibals who were basically trying to hunt them down and eat them. From a narrative perspective, one would think it would feel righteous and satisfying, but instead, it felt unremittingly dark, especially considering that it took place in a church. Here, the melee in the church is supposed to be funny. Now, I laughed when Hit Girl skewered, sliced and diced a bunch of lowlifes in Kick-Ass, and in truth, I laughed for a few seconds when the fight in the church broke out, but damn, it was just too long. I know there have been similarly bloody sequences in films like The Raid: Redemption, but I haven't seen them so I can't really compare.
I do know that this scene has offended a lot of people; the authorities of a few Asian countries have cut the scene from the movie altogether. I would never advocate censorship, not even for this, but I get where they were coming from. The scene really felt like violence for the sake of violence, really.
(end spoilers)
To end the review on a high note, though, I genuinely enjoyed this movie, my qualms with the church scene aside. It was worth the time and money spent, and delivered on what it promised: a stylish action-packed send-up of the spy genre. And just as I hoped, I got to see Colin Firth as an amazing, ass-kicking superspy. He has erased the image of his hilarious non-fight with Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones Diary from my memory with his startling action-hero turn.
7/10
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