Despite my best attempts otherwise it’s become inevitable that the older I’ve gotten, the more movies I’ve seen, and the more I’ve watched them in a somewhat critical state of mind, the more jaded I’ve become as a result. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still fully capable of enjoying films that are fun and exciting, but that sense of wonder and joy I had as a child watching movies? That’s been left behind, as I imagine is the case for most of us who have moved past our teens.
JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH 3-D brought it back for me.
It’s not that the film - as a film - is actually that great. The story is predictably full of thinly sketched characters, a forced underdeveloped romance, and little more than a “we need to get out of here” plot tying together its scenes of high adventure. There’s also some loose stabs at greater drama with Brendan Fraser and Josh Hutcherson struggling with the disappearance of their brother and father (respectively), and finding the joys of family in each other along the way. It’s not that surprising though because - as one of this sites regular commentators (Linda B.) pointed out a few days ago - when you think about it, this is really just a kids movie aimed to please that specific audience.
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There’s a scene in HANCOCK where the invulnerable reluctant super-hero played by Will Smith stops an oncoming train by standing directly in front of it. The sheer force of a speeding train ramming into an immovable object causes it to not only stop dead in its track but to be crushed, and all the cars behind it completely derail and scatter everywhere, making a huge mess.
It’s a perfect encapsulation of what goes wrong with HANCOCK halfway through the film, and what makes the Peter Berg directed movie the second Will Smith project (after I AM LEGEND) in a row that starts of promisingly and then violently and destructively derails. What’s more, in both films it happens after a very particular turning point that marks an abrupt change in each films’ narrative status quo.
Till that turning point occurs HANCOCK proves to be a somewhat refreshing, maybe even unique, take on the super-hero movie genre, by providing a distinctly anti (super) hero. John Hancock is a petty, alcoholic, abrasive, inept self-involved super. He’ll commit heroic acts, but it’s such an obligatory burden to him that he does it with callous disregard of property (ringing up millions of dollars in damage to the city) and others. As a result people have come to hate him, so he treats them and his surroundings with equal – and perhaps vengeful – distain. Hancock is a welcome spin on the superhero mythology by somewhat subversively suggesting that even if “with great power comes great responsibility,” if that responsibility isn’t accepted with the right intensions – or through only a sense of obligation – it’s perhaps more destructive than not accepting it in the first place.
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Every now and then you come across a film that reminds you exactly why you go to the movies in the first place. Why you time after time invest two hours of your life to be transported to other worlds, hoping that you will become emotionally wrapped up in them. Hoping to find a character whose emotional world you’re so invested in that every step he or she takes feels like your own. Hoping, above all else, for the sheer joy a movie can provide us. With more joy, more emotion in every frame than anything else you will see this year, WALL-E is exactly why we go to the movies.
WALL-E is an advanced garbage compactor, the last of his kind left behind on earth hundreds of years ago to clean up the post-apocalyptic garbage wasteland created by a consumerist society run amok. Day after day WALL-E sees his directive through but not without his own unique touch: a personality. He’s a curious fella, collecting knick-knacks, and tucking them away in his home. It doesn’t take us long to realize though that WALL-E is a lonely little guy, one who longs for the grand romance he finds in the musical numbers of the video of HELLO,DOLLY he watches so often. Sure enough when a much more sophisticated robot, EVE, shows up on Earth to test its habitability, our little hero falls adorably in love, and a chain of events occur that remind us to what lengths that emotion can push us to.
In many ways it seems as if WALL-E was the product of a dare. It’s as if somebody said to Pixar: “Bet you can’t make a great film and character with barely any dialogue.” Well, Pixar accomplished just that. WALL-E is such a phenomenal film because of its central character, whether he can talk or not. He is not only one of Pixar’s most endearing characters, he may just be one of the most enchanting ones I’ve ever come across in a film. I can think of few times where I was so enthralled by a character, so deeply invested in his emotions and goals, and so full of warm fuzzy feelings when they are realized. His journey made me laugh, aw, and even cry (a little).
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There’s something to be said for good old-fashioned guns, bullets, cars, and hot babes converging into a flurry of visually kinetic, pulse-pounding over-the-top action violence. All the more so when it occurs with creative relish and borderline fetishism yet without a single trace of apology. That’s exactly what Timur Bekmambetov’s WANTED does, and it’s precisely why it’s so much superficial fun.
The film starts out innocuously enough. Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) is a young man with no backbone. He works in a dead-end job where he gets repeatedly chewed out by his raging boss, suffers from crippling anxiety attacks, and pathetically turns a blind eye to the fact that his supposed best friend is sleeping with his grating girlfriend. Wesley, however, has a spine forcefully shoved into his back when Fox (Angelina Jolie) comes into his life (with a cacophony of guns, bullets, and cars), and informs young Wesley that he has a much greater destiny. He learns his estranged father was not only recently killed, but belonged to a guild of assassins called The Fraternity that take their orders from fate itself. To avenge his father’s death, Wesley must let the Fraternity unleash his inherent potential, and then realize his destiny. (On a side note, comic fans looking for a faithful adaptation of the graphic novel should look elsewhere, but not without hearing a choice word or two from me about the issue).
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Like that old nugget of wisdom, THE GO-GETTER knows that life is in the journey, not the destination. That’s not to say where you’re going isn’t it important, but it is saying that sometimes how you get there is just as significant.
The journey in the THE GO-GETTER is that of young Mercer’s (indie “it” kid, Lou Taylor Pucci). With his mother recently passed away he has become lost in numerous ways, most of all existentially. He is anchorless, purposeless, so he does the only thing that makes sense to him, and that removes him from the familiar: he steals a car, and decides to track down his long lost, deadbeat half-brother and inform him of their mother’s passing.
In the tradition of all existential, coming of age road movies, what ensues are a series of detours and adventures along the way that teach Mercer a little about himself and life. Unlike those typical road movies though, THE GO-GETTER is much more irreverent in its side-steps. As the tagline for Martin Hayes’ work goes, “life doesn’t come with a roadmap” and though that’s a typical cloying line for a film like this, it’s for once accurate. Even though there is a narrative thread here, the pleasure of the movie is that it knows that road-trips and life don’t function with a roadmap, and instead deviate into strange but often entertaining and illuminating areas.
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GET SMART is in many ways your average, typical summer comedy action buddy flick. Story-wise it’s complete fluff, with a paper-thin story featuring loads of underdevelopment and gaping plot holes. That means if you want to emerge from the theatre having been fully entertained, the comedy will have to be good enough to help gloss over those shortcomings, the cast will have to be on-the-ball, and the concept (if not its narrative expansion) has to be involving enough. For the most part it succeeds in that.
In terms of comedy, we’ve got Steve Carell here and that’s more than enough for me. It’s incredibly hard for me to not laugh at anything he does, especially in a film like this where the humor is perfectly tailored to his comedic stylings. Carell is undoubtedly the star of this film and it’s the better for it. In fact, it’s a big reason why it still succeeds to entertain.
He’s not alone though. Though I wasn’t sure she could do it, Anne Hathaway completely blossoms her as a serious, sexy in-charge super agent. It’s nice to see she can expand outside of her pigeonhole, and she contributes a lot here, most notably great comedic and romantic chemistry with Carell. Their characters’ relationships is one of the most underdeveloped parts of the film, but in the moment of their interactions you’d be hard pressed to realize it because the actors’ shorthand makes up for a lot.
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Though M. Night Shyamalan’s recent endeavors, most notably THE VILLAGE and THE LADY IN THE WATER, were interesting in their own way, they were still failures. They were never catastrophic ones though because they were conceptual missteps. The ideas propelling the fundamental plot were flawed, but the craft in telling the narrative still demonstrated Shyamalan to be an excellent filmmaker.
THE HAPPENING, unfortunately, is not only a monumental conceptual failure, it’s also one on every level of craft. It is, I’m sad to say, nothing less than an outright bad – even ridiculous – film and most certainly Shyamalan’s worst. As a fan of the man, and general defender of him and his films (see here), I say that with sadness and a heavy, defeated sulk.
The beginning is eerie enough. A certain strange toxin appears to be causing people to kill themselves. Nobody is sure who or what is doing it. “Terrorists” is the immediate explanation but as the suicides become more prevalent, and begin occurring in smaller locations, that seems to be a slimmer possibility. Shyamalan handles the opening in his usual impressive way. His mastery of producing tension manifests itself here in how he manages to create an unsettling feeling in you as you watch the sinister scenes of people killing themselves (further accentuated by Shyamalan’s trademark calm visual style). There are some fantastic sequences here, some of which rank among some of Shyamalan’s most effective.
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With months of bad buzz, questions of whether a reboot was necessary (or wanted) so soon, and a swirl of rumors about the bad blood between Edward Norton and Marvel Studios (if you want the full breakdown, Anne Thompson has it summed up here), coupled with my opinion that the Hulk is one of the silliest and uninteresting characters in comics, I didn’t think there was any way THE INCREDIBLE HULK could be good.
I was pleasantly proven wrong. THE INCREDIBLE HULK is exactly what a Hulk movie should be: an action packed tale that fully (and almost joyously) demonstrates the overwhelming power of the Big Green Guy. With this reboot, Marvel Studios has above all else given us a classic Hulk story straight from the comics. It’s got everything from Banner wrangling with his dual personalities, his anger, and depression over his curse, to a scientific race to find a cure while being pursued by the military who want to harness the destructive force of the Hulk for their own ends. The hunting is led by the menacing General Ross, played effectively by William Hurt, who is in turn aided by Emil Blonsky, Tim Roth a soldier who sees the Hulk and the super soldier serum as his way to reach the next level of challenge in combat. Bruce Banner who is played surprisingly well by Edward Norton (who is a great actor, but I didn’t think he’d fit this kind of role) is aided by the Betty Ross (a lovely Liv Tyler) in his Jason Bourne like attempts to stay off the grid and avoid his pursuers.
Given that we’re effectively dealing with something as inherently silly as a scrawny science nerd who turns into a giant green monster, the film succeeds in both remaining dramatically loyal to the comic roots (there are numerous fan-friendly nods, ranging from reused theme songs, guest stars, and comic allusions), but also having a little fun with it all. It helps alleviate the film from becoming too serious, or being overburdened by its action.
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In the first ten minutes of INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL, I was worried. Harrison Ford didn’t seem like Indy. He was dressed like him, he looked like him, but after he gets pulled out of a trunk his lines and interactions seemed forced, stilted and awkward. They were hollow with the significant gap between what his delivery was and what it should have been. It’s as if Ford was doing his best Indy impression rather than just being Indy again. It didn’t bode well for the film as a whole.
Thankfully though as the minutes go by, and the main plot started revving up, we’re treated to a legitimate (if not complete, but more on that later) INDIANA JONES experience. After all, that’s what we’re looking for when we watch an Indy movie. An experience. One that sweeps us up along with the adventure, where when things really get going we’re right there in the thick of it with our hero. It’s why we go to the movies. It’s also why it’s easier to overlook CRYSTAL SKULL’s flaws, of which there are a few (some minor, some major). It’s not a perfect film, nor is it one that surpasses any of its predecessors, but it’s an INDIANA JONES film, one that’s exciting and adventurous, and that’s more than I could have hoped for.
That’s never more apparent than in the deliriously staged action-sequences, including a great motorcycle chase earlier in the film, and an intense jungle sequence in the film that is quintessential INDIANA JONES in the way the stakes increasingly get raised, and one perilous situation dominoes into the next. It’s also apparent in the puzzle solving, map following, and tomb raiding/studying sequences, which are unfortunately loaded down by David Koepp’s somewhat clunky and exposition heavy script, but still contain the thrill that wells up in us and Indy (so lovingly conveyed again by Ford) as he gradually solves his way to the goal. All of that proves that Steven Spielberg still knows how to direct the crap out of an action/adventure film, and his decision to not shoot in non-digital, gives CRYSTAL SKULL a wonderful look, even if it’s sometimes interrupted by much more CGI than we were led to believe would be in the film. But that’s the price of working in Hollywood and Georce Lucas these days, and it remains largely and thankfully pretty unobtrusive.
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Todd McCarthy apparently has never heard of the sophomore slump, as his second film THE VISITOR is just as good as his first, THE STATION AGENT, which means something coming from me as I consider the latter to be one of my favorite movies ever.
Richard Jenkins – in a beautiful, deceivingly simple Oscar worth performance – plays Walter Vale, an Economics professors in Connecticut whose life has stagnated. A widower, who has spent twenty years teaching the same course, Walter is one of those people whose been stuck in a rut so long that he doesn’t even know it, unaware of the indifference, apathy, and gruffness with which he greets the world around him. When he travels to New York City to present a paper and arrives in his rarely-used apartment, he is shocked to find a Syrian drummer named Tarek (an impressive performance from Haaz Sleiman), and his Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira), living there, scammed by a supposed friend. When Walter agrees to let them stay till they can get settled elsewhere, he gradually emerges from his shell, gently encouraged by the compassion and friendliness of Tarek who seems to instinctively sense that Walter is a man unconsciously longing for more, but simply not sure how to go about realizing his desires. However, as Walter and their friendship bloom, Tarek is unjustly arrested and it turns out that both he and Zainab are in America illegally.
Many films at this point would step up onto a soapbox at this point and start preaching, but THE VISITOR avoids that. Yes, it does have political undertones, and has its fair share to say about immigrant/deportation policy in post 9/11 United States, but it remains ancillary to the film’s more human interests. It never strays from being a sweet, lingering, human story that involves watching Walter delicately emerge from the cocoon of his stagnant life with the gentle cajoling power of human compassion and friendship, and rediscover the long dormant pulse of his life and quicken it.
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