Quick Thoughts - Pacific Rim (2013)

11/13/13: Guillermo Del Toro's latest is essentially Independence Day with robots and sea monsters... And I mean that in a good way. Just about all large-scale effects showcases share a certain set of stock elements already, so should we really care if one shares a number of exact plot points with another? Perhaps it would be a negative if Pacific Rim didn't do so well what most of these films do so poorly, which is to create a universe in which these incredibly ridiculous events seem somewhat plausible; the most amazing thing about it is that the world of the film was as entertaining as the set-pieces themselves... The more I learned about this strange future, the more I wanted spin-off films dealing with various aspects of it. Generally, giant CGI blank versus giant CGI blank scenes are vapid and devoid of any real humanity, not to mention an entire film based on such a dynamic; after the prologue explaining that after alien monsters started destroying cities, man built huge robots to fight them, I thought I was in for a Power Rangers film and got nervous. But Del Toro's robots, manned by two pilots who must synchronize brains, lend an almost spiritual component that steers the film in interesting directions, focusing less on the CGI itself, which is crisp and beautiful, but more on the characters within it. ***1/2

Quick Thoughts - Wrong (2012)

11/13/13: It took me two sittings and a whole lot of will-power to make it through Wrong, Quentin Depieux's latest experimental offering. I was intrigued by his first film, Rubber, a send-up of the horror genre about a homicidal tire, but didn't have the heart to seek it out after hearing that it was unbearably pretentious. While I can't speak to that claim directly, I can say for sure that Wrong fits that description precisely. I have no doubt that Depieux could expound on what the film really means, or that some viewers, desperate to validate their experience spending ninety minutes watching it, could formulate some bullshit about how deep it is, but Wrong is about as shallow as it gets. Its absurdity comes off as jokes in search of a punch-line and its surrealism passes as nothing more than an attempt to cover up Depieux's lack of true imagination. I'm sure he'd argue that I just didn't get it, and to tell you the truth... I'm fine with that; given what's on the surface, I really don't care what's underneath. *

Quick Thoughts - Another Year (2010)

11/12/13: Mike Leigh is a master of writing brilliantly nuanced characters and pulling out truly raw performances from his actors. In this sense, Another Year is another notch in is belt, and Lesley Manville's broken, needy, alcoholic narcissist might be Leigh's greatest triumph as a writer/director. However, it's just about all the film has going for it as Leigh chronicles four dinners, separated by changing seasons, which Manville's character attends, invited or not. Seeing her through the eyes of her more mentally stable friends, a likable Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen, is interesting, and perhaps vital to her presentation, but the pair provide no real drama in the moments Manville is not around to stir things up and make the audience cringe, a chunk of time which is unfortunately too much to sit through waiting for something to happen. But still, a film by the great Mike Leigh, even half-cocked, is better than most. ***

Monsters University - **1/2

Outside of making gobs of money for Disney, selling Mike and Sully dolls to a new generation, Monsters University has no reason for existing. We didn't need to revisit these characters any more than we needed an update on the adventures of Lightning McQueen and his buck-toothed car buddy in Disney's Cars 2.

A few years ago Disney acquired Pixar and they have not wasted any time in taming and sanitizing the once-invincible animation house, stripping it of everything that made it great: innovation, creativity, and a boundless sense of wonder, leaving them to languish in the doldrums of generic storytelling and cash-grab sequels. With Monsters University, it seems that Pixar has surrendered whatever control they were still grasping onto. If not for the brilliantly inspired short that plays before MU, I'd say Pixar's creative muscle has atrophied; Pixar almost seems to be making a deliberate effort not to create a unique or even memorable film, making MU feel more like a naive act of defiance at having to spend three years producing it than the joyous splendor that its far superior predecessor, Monsters Inc., was.

That said, MU isn't the worst film out there, nor is it an ugly piece of animation; even in his sleep, Bobby Fischer is still going to beat you and nine other people simultaneously in a game of Chess. It's bright, crisp, and pleasantly entertaining... Everything you'd expect out of a direct-to-video sequel (okay, prequel), only they released it in theaters and had the audacity to put it in 3D and charge a few more dollars for a useless extra dimension. But even as cynical as I was about the whole thing I found myself giggling throughout the entire film; most of the jokes land, even if it is because Pixar wasn't aiming very high in the first place, opting to play it very, very safe rather than reaching for the stars, as they so boldly used to do. It may sound hypocritical and contradictory to follow such a take down with the confession that I enjoyed MU, but the fact is that I really do love these characters; not wanting another adventure with them is just a reflection of my desire for new characters to love, characters I know Pixar is more than capable of producing.

The success of the Toy Story sequels seems to have cursed Pixar into revisiting the rest of their catalogue. But where they were able to translate our natural connection to toys and our ever-changing relationship to them as we grow older into a meaningful and beautiful piece of entertainment that wasn't afraid to explore deeper issues, MU fails exponentially to come anywhere near that, with its monster-tailored college cliches and don't-judge-a-book-by-its-cover theme. Mike and Sully join fraternity Oozma Kappa (abbreviated "OK" for a solid (perhaps meta?) pun on mediocrity), but what does Greek life actually mean to monsters who don't know who the Greeks are, anyway? Roughly the same as what Monsters University actually means to me... Ultimately nothing.

Pain & Gain - Zero Stars

Director Michael Bay stated that Pain & Gain was a kind of synthesis of Fargo and Pulp Fiction. But where Fargo has rich atmosphere and subtlety, and where Pulp Fiction has style and wit, Pain & Gain has Michael Bay, who possesses all of the subtlety and wit of a lunkhead bodybuilder... or three lunkhead bodybuilders, to be more accurate. Michael Bay, for whom $20 million is a micro-budget, and for whom dick jokes and gay-bashing are still bottomless sources of gut-busting hilarity. Unfortunately for us, all Michael Bay took away from those films is shocking violence and endless vulgarity, leaving behind the grace and finesse that made those attributes palatable. To say that Pain & Gain scrapes the bottom of the barrel would be a generous understatement; Bay bores right straight through the barrel to mine every last nugget of tastelessness, stupidity, homophobia, and his now-trademark misogyny.

Pain & Gain has Mark Wahlberg playing personal trainer Daniel Lugo, who hatches a plan to kidnap Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub) a rich client who shows disdain for just about anyone he meets... And despite occupying the villain role, he's not even the most unlikable character! Lugo enlists the help of his trainer buddies, limp-dicked (literally and figuratively) Adrain Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) and pseudo-Christian Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson) as they steal his money, spend it, and need more, and unravel in a frenzy of drugs, greed, stupidity, and some misfired statement about American values, or the American Dream, or the American legal system... Or some reason that calls for having the American flag waving prominently in a way I'm pretty sure was supposed to be ironic.

These events are purported to be true, though they are so thoroughly filtered through Bay's teenage sensibility that the result is more cartoon than anything else. Regardless of how unlikable, unrelatable, vicious, dumb, or pathetic the real people may or may not have been, Bay fails immeasurably to give them any dimension, which might make these characteristics entertaining, or even tolerable. Instead he focuses on lending trivial voice-over narration to just about any character with a speaking role, opting for asinine witticisms over any genuine insight into what a Christian might have been thinking when he set a guy on fire and ran over his head with a van, or when he decided to erase a pair of murder victims' fingerprints by chopping off their hands and grilling them on a Weber across the street from a beat cop.

Aside from his narrative sloppiness, and cast of poorly drawn half-wits, it's the glee with which Bay presents scenes like these that make Pain & Gain such an unpleasant experience, stylizing the violence and brutality enough to divorce it from reality for the sake of entertainment while taking pride in the fact that this is a true story: While Dwayne Johnson twirls a pair of tongs in slow-motion like he's trying to sell them on some QVC affiliate geared toward douche-bags, flipping grilled hands, a caption slides across the screen reminding us that this is, indeed, still, a true story. Well, I wish we had gotten that story, because just as it is too bizarre to be true, the unique atrociousness of Bay's film has to be seen to be believed.

Iron Man 3 - *1/2

Iron Man 3 has everything I've come to expect out of a $200 million franchise film, and most of the things I desire out of one: a bold villain, snarky hero, surprisingly sharp wit, and a whole tangled mess of unnecessary explosions. And yet the most amazing thing about Iron Man 3 is how indifferent I felt about it walking out. The whole thing feels empty, routine, with no discernible style or voice. Yes, it dispenses it's action and humor at the necessary intervals, but it feels more like a connect-the-dot exercise with which the writers are hitting a series of obligatory points rather than using these sequences to tell a story. And not that blockbusters like this need to be an intellectual experience, but the only thought Iron Man 3 manages to evoke in its 2+ hour running time is, "So what?"

Taking place on the heels of the events of last year's Marvelous display of hollow fatuity, The Avengers, this new (and hopefully final) Iron Man shows us a Tony Stark addled by panic attacks and sleep deprivation, holing up in his basement, producing an endless series of prototypical variations on his Iron Man suit. Meanwhile, the Mandarin taunts the President, using malfunctioned genetically enhanced amputee war veterans (yes, you read that correctly) as bombs to teach a series of "lessons" to America.

Of course there is more to it, but every bit of summarization exponentially increases the number of plot holes and convolutions which coincide with each detail, and outside of a rather inspired plot twist concerning the Mandarin I don't have the heart to spoil, none of it is really worth the endurance necessary to either write or read such a description. The most irritating of all of Iron Man 3's myriad issues is its needless tie-in to The Avengers, which constantly provokes the question, "Where the hell are the other Avengers during this crisis? Why is this a solo world-saving adventure? Why does Tony enlist the help of a twelve-year-old rather than, say, Thor?

Though the finale does provide some solid spectacle in the form of forty of those insomnia-inspired prototype suits on auto-pilot attacking a bunch of bad guys on an oil rig... Swooping, firing energy rays, and blowing up with no real purpose or effect, Iron Man 3 has already numbed you to anything but the poignant realization that such a sequence is the perfect metaphor for the ephemeral pleasures of the recent rash of superhero films. I wish I could say this signals the downturn of disappointments like Iron Man 3, that the superhero craze has finally run its course and is sputtering out into obscurity, but I'm sure that, like Tony's army of remote-powered suits, there will be plenty more to take its place and do the same goddamned thing.

Secretly Awesome - The Cable Guy

Release Date: June 14, 1996

Director: Ben Stiller

Writer: Lou Holtz Jr.

Cast: Jim Carrey, Matthew Broderick, Leslie Mann, Jack Black, Owen Wilson, Andy Dick, Janeane Garofalo, George Segal, Bob Odenkirk, David Cross

Box Office: $60,240,295

Rotten Tomatoes: 54%

The Cable Guy is the black sheep of the early Jim Carrey filmography, failing to meet expectations set by his earlier work, like The Mask and the Ace Ventura films. I don't know how recently you've seen any of those films, but some of them really don't hold up very well, while The Cable Guy just gets better with age. Between Carrey's over-the-top neediness, the film's darkly bizarre silliness, or simply images like Carrey rubbing the spot on Matthew Broderick's wall where he'll install the cable like it's a nipple, I honestly don't know what's not to love about it.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 - **

Deathly Hallows Part 2 feels incomplete. Maybe that's because it is only half of a movie, with no discernible structure, no beginning, middle, and end, which means that it feels every bit like half of a movie. If you're like me and you haven't read the books, and were too bored by Deathly Hallows Part 1 to revisit it to refresh your memory on what is going on, being thrust into the middle of a five hour film is disorienting, especially when the characters start throwing around magic terms and looking for horcruxes National Treasure style. For once I was actually hoping for at least one shamelessly expository line, like, "Four down, three to go, Harry," just so I could know many more infiltration scenes followed by an obligatory CGI action spectacle with a dragon or fire monster were left.

The Potter films have always had flaws, but until these last two they've always been too much fun to get hung up on minor details. Deathly Hallows Part 2 almost seems designed to call its flaws to your attention, with its mess of pure action, numerous monumental plot twists, revelations of characters' true allegiances and motivations, and the piss-poor invention of a certain character's back story, not to mention the most out-of-place utterance of the word "bitch" since Juggernaut declared who he was in X-Men: The Last Stand, which unfortunately comes less than ten minutes after a speech from Dumbledore on the power of words... I cringed so hard I almost fell out of my seat.

Worst of all, the magic is gone in Deathly Hallows. It's missing the pleasure of discovering and rediscovering this world and its strange characters. Also lacking is the sense of danger that I came to enjoy in the last few installments, even though Harry and friends are constantly in harm's way. Revealing that Lord Voldemort, the source of that danger, grows weaker every time Harry destroys a horcrux doesn't help, especially considering the entire first half of the film has Harry destroying horcuxes, yielding shots of Voldemort in agony, scurrying off in retreat.

This is also the first film in the series in which we see and hear nothing of the real world, the non-wizard world... Curious, considering the events in this one more than any other make me wonder about the impact they would have on the real world. It made me ask myself what the significance of this whole war is at all. What is at stake here if Voldemort and the bad guys win? They never really say what they'll do. Is it just that he wants to kill a character I've grown to enjoy?

It's not all bad, though. There are some nice moments, and some great performances, Ralph Fiennes especially. And though it's a mess dramatically, most of the action is pretty well staged, though sometimes a bunch of kids zapping each other with wands does look a little silly. And the effects are great for the most part, if I ignore the aforementioned fire monster chase, which resembles that awful waterskiing sequence from Die Another Day. Still, I think the biggest compliment I have for it is that I didn't hate it, but maybe that's because I was trying so hard to love it.

Secretly Awesome - Notting Hill

Release Date: May 28, 1999

Director: Roger Michell

Writer: Richard Curtis

Cast: Hugh Grant, Julia Roberts, Rhys Ifans, Dylan Moran, Gina McKee, Hugh Bonneville

Box Office: $116,089,678

Rotten Tomatoes: 83%

I suppose Notting Hill would be considered a "chick flick," and it's movies like Notting Hill that make me dislike that term, which carries the negative connotation of formulaic simplicity solely aimed toward women. As with any genre, romantic comedies and dramatic love stories can be just as appealing to men as they are to women, when done well, and are just as essential to a balanced viewing diet as heavy dramas and big dumb action movies. But that point is almost irrelevant here, because, though it adheres to the conventions of a "chick flick," I think Notting Hill is as much a guy's movie as it is a girl's, if not more so.

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Transformers: Dark of the Moon - **1/2

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is an intelligent, well-crafted action/drama that serves as a biting commentary on today's socio-economic landscape. The battle between the Autobots and the Decepticons has over the course of three films evolved into a layered metaphorical critique on current Unite-- Okay, no it hasn't, nor is there any biting social commentary, but we knew that going in, right?

The Transformers series is about one thing, and that's spectacle. Dark of the Moon has great effects and well-staged, if not almost exhausting, action sequences and, yes, the female love interest is most definitely introduced by a close-up of her ass... The spectacle is there. And what's better is director Michael Bay and his writers seem to have learned from the second film that the robots are not interesting as characters, which yields far less scenes of the robot teams just hanging out on world monuments talking strategy. Oh, and no racist robots this time, either.

So what else occupies its bloated 150 minute run time? A great opening sequence that was sort of ruined by being the film's teaser trailer, nine minutes of over-the-top comedic gold from Ken Jeong that is better than anything and everything in The Hangover 2, and John Turturro delivering some of the weirdest lines in recent memory ("Megatron! Let's tango!").

Is it perfect? No. Is it kind of hollow and empty inside? Sure. Could they have shaved 40 minutes off of the run time? Yup. Will you probably forget most of it twelve minutes after leaving the theater? Absolutely, but while you're watching it, it's honestly a pretty good time.