If you have somehow made it this far without seeing the last theatrical trailer for Terminator Genisys then I urge you to stop reading this now and go see the movie. There is a terrible spoiler in the previews for this movie and if you’re still pure in this regard go and don’t look back. Everyone else stick around because I am pissed.
I was disappointed by Ted 2 and considering I didn’t think much of the original Ted I’m not sure where the hell I get off feeling like this. Ted was a flimsy frame upon which a few passable jokes were hung and Ted 2 is a slightly flimsier frame with fewer decent jokes but it makes a huge difference as Ted 2 collapses into joyless wreckage. It’s a lot like watching five back-to-back episodes of Family Guy without commercials in a dark room that you’re socially conditioned not to leave or do anything else in but watch the screen. I guess what I’m saying is Ted 2 is an awful lot like a nightmare you can’t wake up from.
Good comedy has to come from some sort of relatable character base and that simply isn’t present in Ted 2. The characters are just whatever they need to be to get the next punch line to work and have no consistency from scene to scene beyond Boston accents. Amanda Seyfried replaces Mila Kunis as the female lead and narratively we go from a woman disappointed that Ted and John (Mark Wahlberg) have no ambition in their lives to a woman who finds John to be a real catch despite his only character traits present in this film are being really hung up on his ex and consuming a copious amount of pornography. I suppose the shrewish girlfriend is a slightly more tired cliché than the inexplicable attraction to a loser trope but it isn’t fantastic work. Giovanni Ribisi returns as the villainous Donny who I had completely forgotten from the first movie because that movie also felt like it never had any stakes so why would anyone bother to retain any of the information? If Ted 3 comes along in three years I certainly won’t remember John Carroll Lynch played the bad guy in this movie an I think Lynch is a fantastic underrated actor unfortunately wasting his time here.
Setting aside the thin characters and the plot that doesn’t seem to care enough about its own integrity or consistency to even be worth seriously discussing the movie just isn’t that funny. I’m not going to say I never laughed but I’m sure I laughed fewer than ten times. It’s comedy that wants to get laughs by being shocking either by being gross or being inappropriate or sometimes even by being obscure and I’m not sure Seth MacFarlane is capable of surprising me in these ways anymore. I’m too on my guard to not see every race joke coming and I’m now too familiar with his childhood pop culture to laugh uproariously when they use a song from Revenge of the Nerds for their musical montage. I’m sure this does much better among a younger audience who are probably still sitting through their first million smoking weed jokes but if you’ve seen more than your fair share there’s nothing new or exciting here and unfortunately that applies to most of the material.
I can’t make heads or tails of Inside Out. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the film to pieces, it’s the best Pixar film this decade and one of the most emotionally wrenching experiences I’ve ever had in a movie theater. It’s a gift of a movie and I feel privileged to get to enjoy it. What I don’t understand is how this is a kids movie.
I frequently say that a good children’s movie should have plenty for parents to enjoy and frequently take weaker studios to task for aiming too low with franchises like Madagascar and Ice Age but perhaps we’ve gone too far in the other direction. Inside Out is a stunningly mature film and I don’t know what a younger audience could possibly be getting out of this except for the thrill of seeing their parents openly weep for 90 minutes.
This is, of course, a bit of an exaggeration— there are plenty of accessible parts of Inside Out. The characters are bright and broad and the voice talent is excellent. I expected fantastic things from Amy Pohler, Mindy Kaling, and Lewis Black but Phyllis Smith steals the show. I didn’t expect much from her because she never terribly impressed me on The Office but she’s hilarious as Sadness. The movie is consistently funny and the humor is nice and broad and seemed to be hitting with everyone in my theater. At the root the story is the very familiar fish out of water journey that is a hallmark of storytelling in general and particularly stories for children. There’s plenty for kids to like here.
What I’m having trouble reconciling is how amazingly sad Inside Out can be. The film deals heavily with the sense of loss that comes with growing up and the people and things we leave behind. Inside Out follows an eleven year-old girl, Riley, as she moves from Minnesota to San Francisco and the personified emotional turmoil this traumatic event creates. We see aspects of her personality physically destroyed, a thorough examination of what happens to forgotten memories, and a treatment of a beloved childhood imaginary friend that I’m not sure I’ll ever get over completely. Children probably won’t find these moments sad in the same way an adult would because the sadness comes from a place of nostalgia for childhood that comes with age, but absent that feeling I’m just not sure what these moments have to offer and worry that it’s a movie full of dead space.
I’m probably overthinking this. I saw this film in a packed house with many families and there were none of the telltale signs of restless kids bored out of their skulls. I’m not giving the target audience enough credit nor am I respecting the filmmakers with a tremendous track record of making beloved films. I’m a little uncomfortable with how devastating Pixar is willing to be with these movies but if you made me choose between getting output like this and WALL-E, and Up or the comparably sedate stuff like Monsters University and Cars 2 I would rather cry my way through the more ambitious films.
If I had been given a vote I would not have supported making another Jurassic Park movie. It’s a franchise that I’m not sure even qualified as a franchise until this weekend. The original film is a masterpiece, one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had in a theater, a movie that defined cinema for an entire generation. The sequels, by contrast, feel like hastily assembled Frankenstein monsters cobbled together from good parts of the first film and whatever script fragments were in the Amblin Entertainment dumpster. All sort of movies in the 90s got two sequels that would never demand this kind of attention but Jurassic Park is special and Jurassic World is a movie that deserves to be a part of something special.
The thing that makes Jurassic World special, aside from the innate sense of wonder that comes from seeing exceptionally rendered dinosaur special effects, is the performance of Chris Pratt. Even though I strongly think that getting so much of handsome action star Chris Pratt is robbing us of the fine work we could be getting from gifted comic actor Chris Pratt it’s hard to deny how effective he is. The movie misses him dearly when he’s not on screen while it bounces between being a little boring and interesting but because someone is in imminent danger of being eaten. The character they gave Pratt, a velociraptor trainer who operates like a circus lion tamer, could easily have been a disaster on par with Indiana Jones in that refrigerator but he somehow makes it believable. Pratt is so good he draws attention away from the rest of the cast being sort of bland and forgettable. No one will ever be quite as good as Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm but it’s fantastic to see someone trying for it.
The original Jurassic Park films were very much defined by the dinosaurs that hunted the protagonists, from the velociraptors and the tyrannosaurus in the first film to the sequels shamelessly reusing all of the same things while adding useless bits of garbage dinosaurs. For Jurassic World the antagonist dinosaur, the Indominus Rex, is the kind of monster a clever eight year-old would come up with trying to one up a playmate while playing pretend. The movie even calls this out when the park’s operation’s manager (Bryce Dallas Howard) says patrons need dinosaurs that are bigger and have more teeth. She’s talking about us, the moviegoers who probably would not have been satisfied with just another chase scene with a tyrannosaurus, we need something with more teeth, with natural camouflage, that hunts for sport. It’s an interesting commentary on modern audiences for sure but it also leads to some rather mystifying moments when very late in to the movie the Indominus is still coming up with new powers tailor made to escape the predicament it’s in.
The film probably leans a little too heavily on nostalgia. The theme from the original John Williams score is used three times in the first twenty minutes and then often throughout including a piano version used to convey sadness. It’s all a little much. They also lean heavily on recycled imagery using similar shots of stampeding dinos or the unnecessary trip through the original visitors center, which has apparently not been touched in all this time. I understand the impulse to lean on this, to wink at the audience, but it isn’t necessary the new stuff in this movie is good enough to stand on its own and it isn’t helping to constantly raise the specter of such a powerful film.
Nothing will ever be like watching Jurassic Park in the movie theater when I was nine years old. That is an unfair standard to hold Jurassic World to even though I would very much like to. Jurassic World gave me everything I wanted, it was suspenseful, it was funny, it looked amazing, the action was thrilling, it was a completely enjoyable utterly riveting piece of filmmaking. I’m looking forward to seeing the next movie in the series, the sequel very obviously set up all throughout this one, and that is an optimism I haven’t felt about a Jurassic Park sequel in 18 years.
Ah, to feel young again.
I wonder how many excellent movies we’ve been cheated out of by Melissa McCarthy’s commitment to Mike & Molly. I understand the appeal of a regular paycheck and the success of the show has led to McCarty being the highest paid actress in Hollywood but Spy is such a good movie and couldn’t she be doing two or three of these per year instead of one and a season of bad television? Spy is the funniest movie I’ve seen in years and it isn’t close. I laughed so often and so hard I’m sure that I laughed over important dialogue and even other jokes. It’s the kind of movie that can shift the paradigm of movie comedy in the way the Judd Apatow movies of the early 2000s did and it can even be the movie you throw in your idiot friend’s face when he starts going on about how women just aren’t funny.
It is easy to praise McCarthy’s work in Spy. She’s effortlessly funny, she hits her dramatic moments, and she has an amazing physicality. I think she’s literally perfect for this role and I’m still worried I’m underselling her here. I’m also impressed at how competent they were willing to let her character be, it’s very easy to get cheap laughs out of someone being bad at their job but Susan Cooper is a good spy because she’s smart and because she’s trained very hard. A weaker movie would have been a string of pratfalls and idiot bungling. This movie doles out the bungling much more sparingly and is much better for it.
The buzz I had heard going in to this film was that Jason Statham was the breakout comic performance of the film and I didn’t think that was possible. I knew Jason Statham was funny, I had seen his work with Guy Ritchie, I has enjoyed his work in the Crank films, I thought he couldn’t surprise me in this way and I was 100% wrong. Jason Statham is funny for pretty much every second he’s on screen. I don’t think he has more than a couple lines that aren’t punchlines. His delivery is impeccable. I can’t decide if I think this is just incredible direction from Paul Feig, or if working with McCarthy brings out the best in people, or maybe we’ve all been deprived of years of work from the most unlikely comic star since it turned out Channing Tatum could steal 21 Jump Street from Jonah Hill.
I could write a gushing paragraph about every actor in Spy, the cast is so consistently amazing, but I don’t really have the space or inclination so let’s cover a bunch of people right here. Rose Byrne is terrific, between this and Bridesmaids I would be quite content to have her, McCarthy, and Feig just do movies together forever. She doesn’t have the most original comedic voice in the world but she does what she does so well. I was not familiar with Miranda Hart’s work in the UK so it’s an awful lot like a fully mature talent just sprung up at me from the ether. She’s a scene-stealer and, this might not seem remarkable, but a very big out-of-the-ordinary character that I’m never unhappy to see on screen. Jude Law looks great in a suit and is very handsome and that’s all this movie asks of him. Bobby Cannavale should really work more because I’ve never not liked him in something. I was very sure Morena Baccarin was going to be an important part of this movie when she was introduced and was very sad when she was used only sparingly.
There were a few things I thought worked less well. They go to the “You look like” joke construction a few times too often. It seems to be a McCarthy staple at this point and in a vacuum they’re all funny but at the end of a two-hour movie they aren’t hitting as hard. Peter Serafinowicz plays an aggressively flirty Italian agent that I thought was deserving of maybe 20% of the screen time he was allotted and I ended up cringing through most of his work. There are a couple jokes that use slurs for seemingly no reason other than to shock and that’s not a style of comedy I prefer. I thought a moment at the end where Cooper and Rayna Boyanov make nice was unearned and is just trading on the fact that we know the two actresses have a history. These are very small marks on an otherwise fantastic movie and nothing is ever going to connect with all of their jokes.
Paul Feig is on quite a roll with his third consecutive very funny McCarthy-led hit. In a more cynical time I would wonder if one or the other of this pairing is leaning too hard on the other, if perhaps the success of one is a smokescreen created by the supreme talent of the other but that’s just not how I want to think about things anymore. This collaboration is something special and we ought to cherish it before one of the nefarious forces in Hollywood that destroys all good things comes for this one. I thought I couldn’t be more excited for Feig and McCarthy’s Ghostbusters remake but it appears I was wrong. Hell, Spy was so good you might even be able to get me to see The Peanuts Movie, God help us all.
I’ve been dreading San Andreas since the first trailer I saw of it. I don’t like movies where cities get destroyed especially if they’re cities I happen to live in, I think 9/11 ruined that for me forever. I do, however, have a deep, profound, love for Dawyne “The Rock” Johnson going back to the late 90s, long before any buildings fell down around me. San Andreas is a battle between a genre that’s felt stale for as long as I’ve been aware of it, one that offends me personally, and a man who is possibly the greatest American action star in history. Unfortunately, not even The Rock can carry this movie and judging from the size of his arms these days that’s probably the only thing he can’t carry.
San Andreas is the same as Volcano, which is the same as The Day After Tomorrow, which is the same as 2012. It hits all of the same beats and has basically all the same characters. The Rock plays the action hero, in this case a LAFD rescue chopper pilot his family is collapsing around him but nothing that can’t be patched up by saving them from a cataclysmic once-in-a-lifetime disaster. Paul Giamatti’s considerable talent is wasted as the scientist who tries to warn people but is ultimately useless because no warnings he gives could possibly be useful and all of the science is nonsesne anyway. There’s the smug rich guy (played by Ioan Gruffudd) who treats everyone like garbage as soon as things start going wrong and gets his comeuppance in a seemingly random twist of fate. There’s the attractive young woman, in this case Alexandra Daddario playing Johnson’s alarmingly white daughter, who is constantly in peril while wearing impractical clothing. I suppose the twist on the formula is that Daddario’s character is stunningly competent and frequently saves the men around her as opposed to the other way around but I’m not sure it counts for anything when none of these characters have any sort of depth or even narrative arcs. Every character just sort of runs towards or away from things as needed and the movie doesn’t end with any resolution just by the characters all being in the same place.
Johnson tries his best to save this movie and he very nearly pulls it off. He has the same effortless physicality he brings to all his movies; impossible things look more possible when he does them. He gets all the best stunts, approximately 90% of the emotional content of the movie, and he gets to perfectly pilot three different vehicles through every manner of hell imaginable. Everything that works in the movie works because of him but that doesn’t save it from being a bland, predictable film with a script that feels two levels above a Syfy original movie.
I suppose it’s the spectacle of San Andreas that’s supposed to make me fall in love with it but it doesn’t do it for me. The grandness of the destruction is counterbalanced frequently by just how blatantly the film ignores how things would actually happen. Not that I expect this to be some kind of slavishly accurate depiction of a big earthquake but I feel like with all the tsunamis that have caused such devastation in recent years that I’ve been told so many times how they work to just completely ignore that. There are also some particularly pandering shots of things like the American flag being flown in the rubble of the Golden Gate Bridge and fences full of fliers looking for missing persons that are designed to evoke real world tragedies in a way that feels less authentic than exploitative. In a movie with more genuine heart I might give it a pass but everything feels just a bit too slick and phony in San Andreas.
It’s profoundly irritating just how lifeless Tomorrowland is. I’m not even talking about how in the grand climax there was clearly no budget for extras so it just seems like three people fighting in a bunch of cavernous empty sets. I mean that one of the biggest movie stars of a generation joined forces with a director that could seemingly do no wrong and they made a movie that always seems like the next scene is the one where things are finally going to kick in to high gear, but instead it just sits in neutral and slowly sinks in to the mud. Tomorrowland is a promise of a future never fulfilled and I wish I could believe that was a really deep metaphor and not a punchless script.
There’s one really fantastic sequence in Tomorrowland set in the 1964 World’s Fair with a young boy presenting his entry in to an invention contest and proposing a thesis on the virtue of imagination and technology’s role in inspiring people to dream, we then get some coverage of the fair followed by our first peek in to the titular Tomorrowland. It’s a killer sequence, it’s funny, it’s compelling, it feels consistent with the ideas behind the theme park the inspired this film. Unfortunately, this is the first ten minutes of the film and it never gets back to that level again. Maybe we shouldn’t even be making movies inspired by theme park sections.
The remaining two hours of movie are just so spirit-destroyingly bland. Plucky young NASA fanatic Casey Newton is a character desperately in need of a character trait deeper than “really likes science” or maybe just a visual aesthetic more complex than “wears a hat.” Then there’s Athena, the young precocious British girl who exists solely to dole out secrets at the appropriate times and not get in the way at others. I’m getting quite sick of the precocious British children cliché and maybe the trope should be discarded completely if you feel the need to have the emotional climax of your film to be a prepubescent girl explaining what love means to a man in his 50s. It gets a little creepy. George Clooney is fine, I suppose, he only ever really performs grumpy and somewhat less grumpy but he has enough raw movie star magnetism to steal every scene he’s in. It feels like a waste of his talents but it also feels a bit like he got tricked in to being in this movie, like he met Brad Bird at a party and gushed about how much he loved Iron Giant and signed a blank contract. There’s no chance that’s the real story but I can’t believe Clooney either liked this script or needed this money.
Tomorrowland is disappointing most of all because it is the first misstep from Brad Bird. He’s had a 16-year run of directing exclusively excellent movies (ok Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is only pretty good) and I wanted to believe he could do that forever. That’s the way I identify most with this movie: the same way George Clooney feels let down by the future utopia that never came, I feel like I’ve been let down by my idealized version of Bird. There are no cities with elevated multi-level pools and ample municipal jet packs, just as there are no Spielbergs who never made Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. We can’t live in a perfect world but we can try to live in an interesting one, and that is not one that includes Tomorrowland.
In 2009 my parents visited me in Los Angeles for the first time and I needed to show them a movie as the Arclight chain of theaters because I wouldn’t shut up about how great they were. There wasn’t anything out that we were dying to see so we saw the latest movie from Jason Statham more because we liked him than because we thought we would see a fantastic movie. That was the first time I saw Crank: High Voltage and it changed what I wanted from an action movie: pace above all other things. I want a movie to move as fast and damn the audience if they can’t keep up. Mad Max: Fury Road is the first movie since that feels like it is genuinely pushing at the limits of the genre and it makes for a truly impactful filmgoing experience.
Mad Max: Fury Road is a 120-minute movie that has well over 110 minutes of action. Fast action at that, breakneck paced, innovative fire-belching action that constantly threatens to overwhelm the senses of the audience. Chase sequences so far above and beyond the norm that it feels like the cinematic equivalent of the invention of the steam engine and it’s like we skipped a thousand steps and went from farming to factories in no time at all. That they could do these choreographed ballets of explosions, high speeds, and flying bodies almost exclusively with practical effects defies belief. It all simultaneously looks like it would take a million takes to get right but would only really ever accommodate one. (more…)
It was easy to deduce that no one involved believed that Hot Pursuit was a good movie. Reese Witherspoon is fresh off an Academy Award nomination for Wild, Sofia Vergara stars in a TV show widely credited, however accurately, as reviving the sitcom, and, if internet coverage is any indication, people are clamoring for comedies with predominately female leads. If Hot Pursuit were any good at all it would get a big release at a time where it could do big business, not thrown in the wake of Avengers: Age of Ultron where it will sink anonymously. You can know before you see it that Hot Pursuit is a bad movie, but even that might not prepare you for just how drab and boring it truly is.
Basically every joke in Hot Pursuit is based on the Odd Couple-esque relationship between Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara and it just fails over and over again. Witherspoon plays the regulation-obsessed police officer with all the believability of a bad improv performer, she talks less like a police office and more like an alien from another planet who has never heard of colloquialisms or compound words. They also keep referencing a faint mustache that makeup apparently couldn’t be bothered to give her. Vergara is more or less playing the only character I’ve ever seen her play, the beautiful snobby diva with a surprise twist to make her relatable in the third act. There’s no difference in her here than in any plot she drives on an episode of Modern Family. Neither character feels like a real person to me so the jokes feel very abstract and they, for the most part, don’t hit. The most successful joke in the whole movie comes from the two women grossing men out about their periods, and while it isn’t the most original joke I’ve ever heard it’s at least coming from a relatable place.
The plot is thin, which is honestly an accomplishment for an 87-minute movie. The heroes make what appear to be clean escapes from the bad guys chasing them and go to some out of the way places only to have to escape at a moment’s notice again. There are character turns that come out of nowhere and that they seem to expect to have impact, but the characters they come from only had expository lines up until now so it’s hard to care about them being evil. They also expect me to believe that the main characters bond not over the stressful circumstance they’re in but that they’ve both had family members die. I hardly think there’s a secret fraternity of people who have had relatives die or it would include just about every person on earth.
The most damning criticism I can make of Hot Pursuit is that it feels like three episodes of a sitcom run back-to-back. With the exception of one slumming A-list actor there’s nothing here that couldn’t be found on a night watching CBS. The material isn’t funnier, the scope isn’t larger, the production values aren’t better, and it’s just a bland collection of elements I could get for free and don’t even want then. Hot Pursuit is what happens when a cash grab comedy goes off the rails and becomes a festering pit where comedy goes to die. It’s like an Adam Sandler movie with marginally better gender politics.
It’s almost impossible for me to be too positive about Avengers: Age of Ultron. It’s a movie that would have been the movie of my dreams when I was 10 years old, when I was 20 I would have told you there was no chance it would ever happen, even at 25 I would have thought it was far too optimistic. It is as good as superhero movies get and as a life long fan of superheroes I loved it to pieces. I love how the fight sequences feel like playing with a big box of action figures but with a quarter billion dollar budget. I love Joss Whedon’s banter and the performances he gets from his actors each of whom feels perfectly cast. I even love it for the flaws, that it’s a little too packed with winks and teases, that there’s a pervasive refusal to call people by their code names, the dawning realization that I don’t care about Iron Man at all. I’m overjoyed that I’ve been able to see comic book movies get to where they are right now that when the standard bearer for the genre comes back I can only stand back in awe.
James Spader is so unbelievably good as Ultron. I thought Ultron was a mistake as a villain, I just didn’t believe he was interesting enough to pull an entire movie when I never cared for his comics, but Spader is so good I literally couldn’t remember Tom Hiddleston’s name when it was over. Spader turns a character I frequently thought had no personality (and I’ve read very few Ultron stories so it might not be a fair assessment) and turned him in to a character that had a sense of humor, and more importantly a real point of view. There’s a moment early in the film where Ultron accuses Tony Stark of not wanting peace but quiet and after the events of this week in Baltimore that hit particularly hard. While Spader is the glittering jewel of the new cast Elizabeth Olsen is also a treasure, she provides some human emotion to moments that would otherwise feel too large and fantastical to connect with and I’m quite thrilled to have her in the Don Cheadle level of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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