Author: Arthur Martinez-Tebbel

Box Office Democracy: “Lucy”

The nicest thing I can think to say about Lucy is that it is exactly how I would have remade 2001: A Space Odyssey if I had done it when I was 16 years old.  I would have replaced the male astronaut with an attractive woman, kept the trippy end sequence and replaced the first two-thirds of the movie with a mediocre tribute to Hard Boiled.  I also probably would have struggled to fill 90 minutes and would have added some really strange filler to get it to a marginally respectful run time like 89 minutes.  Thankfully no one was willing to give me $65 million to make a movie when I was 16 (unfortunately no one will do it now) but we’re stuck with what Luc Besson made here.  I was stuck at least; you might still be able to save yourself. (more…)

Box Office Democracy: “The Purge: Anarchy”

Last year I reviewed the original Purge movie on my own blog and my chief complaints were that the movie was intellectually lazy for not exploring more of the complexities of the setting and for being so short that there was no time for any kind of real narrative.  The Purge: Anarchy leaves practically no stone unturned in examining what kind of culture would emerge around the idea of annual purges and it clocks in at almost 20 minutes longer with a far more nuanced story to show for it.  I got every thing I said I wanted and I still don’t like this movie.  It’s either a shaking moment for my credibility as a critic as I might have no idea what I want or this franchise is just not going to be no matter what they do.  I hope it’s the latter.

 The Purge: Anarchy dives deeper in to the world by focusing on a more diverse ensemble.  Our cast consists of a poor mother-daughter pair that is dragged out of their homes on purge night as part of some nebulous conspiracy that I won’t spoil mostly because it didn’t make a ton of sense.  They are joined by a couple on the rocks who have their car sabotaged so they can’t escape the purge, that committing crimes before the purge to make purging easier would seem to be against the rules is never brought up.  The last member of the ensemble is a police officer out for revenge who can’t help himself and saves the rest of the four and then takes on the role of their protector and displays some honestly godlike powers along the way.  Maybe it isn’t the annual purges keeping crime down the rest of the year and more that they’ve trained all their officers to be Batman on steroids.

The bigger cast doesn’t really change the original film’s reluctance to have characters change over the course of the film.  The sum total of character growth in this movie is one character decides that murder is always wrong, even in the case of revenge, and another decides killing people for revenge is therapeutic.  I’m not even sure if the film wants us to judge the character who decides that murder is the answer, she’s treated very sympathetically all the way up to that moment and is never seen after that.  “Is murder wrong?” is not a question a movie like this can be ambiguous about, that’s not what telling this story is about.

The first Purge movie had some uncomfortable race moments, a lot of menace seemed to stem solely from the idea that a white family should be afraid of a black man, and the second one tries to bounce back while completely missing the point.  This time around virtually every black character is virtuous but most Hispanic people are terrible.  It seems they got the feedback but missed the point.  This seems to be an unstoppable franchise at this point so we can all hope that by The Purge 5: Constitutional Monarchy they’ve sorted all this out.

Box Office Democracy: “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”

English: Andy Serkis at the Comic-Con 2011.

English: Andy Serkis at the Comic-Con 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes could have easily fallen in to the trap that many genre movies fall into of simply being competent.  They scarcely have particularly original or surprising stories (and Dawn is no exception on this front) but they usually get by through skillful execution.  Dawn of the Planet of the Apes does a masterful job of being a good tense thriller but what elevates it to something special is Andy Serkis as Caesar.  He takes a mediocre script and turns it in to Shakespeare without having to actually be on the screen.

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Box Office Democracy: “Earth to Echo”

If my eight year-old self had seen Earth to Echo this weekend he would have loved it.  It’s vaguely science-fiction-y and soft sci-fi was my jam back then.  It features clever resourceful kids and clueless adults and what kid doesn’t like to think themselves cleverer than their oppressors?  Earth to Echo also has a good pace to it, it goes quickly from action piece to action piece with very little fluff holding it down.  Unfortunately I had to see this movie as my 30 year-old self and so I enjoyed it a bit less but I would probably recommend it to my non-existent friends with kids in this age group who absolutely had to take their kids to a movie in a theater.

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Box Office Democracy: “Transformers: Age of Extinction”

Transformers: Age of Extinction is 165 minutes long.  This should really be the entire review.  Either you want to watch nearly three hours of Michael Bay throwing robots at the screen or you don’t.  If you’ve seen any of his movies you’ve basically seen this one, there isn’t anything new just the older stuff louder, brighter and longer.  Apparently this is something that has a lot of pent up demand.  People can’t get enough of this.  Isn’t that depressing?

I admit there’s something intrinsically seductive about his visual style.  Everything is so slick and the camera moves are so majestic that it’s very easy to just settle in and let your eyes bliss out a little bit.  This is broken up a bit when the giant robots have to fight because event through four movies Bay hasn’t quite figured out a good visual shorthand for keeping the robots separate so the big fights, when not in slow motion, have a tendency to just look like a bunch of rolling metal until things shakeout and you can determine who won.  This is made dramatically more difficult by a new kind of Transformer introduced in this movie that transforms by turning into many tiny cubes and then floating in to a new form.  This just fills the screen with the equivalent of giant dust.  Bay is definitely capable of using the visual language of film and communicating a kind of poetry with it I just wish the poems weren’t profanity-laced limericks.

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Box Office Democracy: “Think Like a Man Too”

The original [[[Think Like a Man]]] was one of the worst movies I saw in 2012.  It was an overplotted mess of a comedy that tried to even the scales on gender relations and succeeded only in as far as it made every character seem like an atrocious human being.  The biggest sin that Think Like a Man Too commits is that it makes me feel bad for the first movie because this one just completely throws out any uniqueness they had and exchanges it for another cliché Vegas party movie that we’ve all seen a million times.

The original movie had a point of view.  Women needed to think like men to get men to do what they wanted which was overwhelmingly commit more but in one case was let go of everything he liked.  This movie substitutes that point of view for mother-in-law jokes that feel like they would be at home on the primetime comedy lineups of CBS or TBS.  Maybe they were going for something about focusing on having a good time on your bachelor/bachelorette parties but that really doesn’t seem like thematic content fit for a feature film.

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Box Office Democracy: “How To Train Your Dragon 2”

I came late to the first How To Train Your Dragon film.  I caught it on HBO well over a year after release and while I thought the “better than Toy Story 3” hype was a touch overblown it was a revelation for DreamWorks Animation, which had previously churned out franchises like Shrek and Madagascar that I flat out detested.  How to Train Your Dragon 2 is not quite as good as the first one but it’s a fine film that should hold up a little better to being driven in to the ground like every other shiny thing DreamWorks gets its hands on.

Where How to Train Your Dragon 2 shines is in the amazing action sequences.  The wide variety of dragons keeps it visually interesting and when it wants to the movi keeps the screen in constant fervent motion.  It’s definitely the kind of movie that can hypnotize a theater full of small children.  This is better action than Pixar produces, this is better action than Disney or Blue Sky put out, this is the standard bearer for animated action.  I don’t know what that’s worth as the rest of the field seems to be focusing on pulling on heartstrings and wow-ing academy voters but as a stalwart defender of the live-action popcorn action movie I must stand and recognize the efforts of the animated equivalent.

It might not be completely fair but I think the thing most holding me back on this movie is the performance of Jay Baruchel as the lead.  I hate the voice he’s doing here and you have to hear it an awful lot.  It’s grating and annoying and while I understand how that serves the character of an outcast intellectual Viking I can’t let my ears hang out in the platonic ideal the voice seems to be serving.  I don’t like hearing him talk and so I hated having the main character on screen.  That’s a pretty big problem for a movie to have.

I’ve also saluted the politics of Frozen and Maleficent so I feel obliged to ding How to Train Your Dragon 2 for feeling awfully regressive in places.  The movie does not pass the Bechdel Test and, more importantly, the second most prominent returning female character is given a storyline where she’s obsessed with this bad boy dragon trapper even after he’s terrible to her and even goes as far as to basically molest him at times.  None of the female characters here are ones I’d be comfortable with my non-existent daughter’s modeling themselves after and I don’t know that there’s space for characters like that in this genre any more.

But really, no one is considering or not considering this movie for its politics.  How to Train Your Dragon 2 is fun when it wants to be fun, stunningly sad when it wants to be sad and ultimately the best kids movie I’ve seen this year.  The shortcomings are far exceeded by the sheer joyousness of the picture and that’s a near impossible thing to nitpick away.

Box Office Democracy: “Edge of Tomorrow”

I’m always rooting for sci-fi action movies to succeed and when it became clear that Edge of Tomorrow was going to be equal parts sci-fi action and Groundhog Day I was ready to love this movie.  Unfortunately the movie they delivered has the distinct feel of studio notes all over it leaving it feeling a little too much like a Tom Cruise movie than any of the component parts.  I like Tom Cruise movies but it hurts this premise to make it hit all the same beats of a Mission: Impossible film.

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Box Office Democracy: “Maleficent”

Recent years have brought an avalanche of terrible fairy tale remakes. [[[Snow White and the Huntsman]]] was boring, [[[Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters]]] was dreadful, and [[[Jack the Giant Slayer]]] is so absent from my memory that I suspect it induced some kind of post-traumatic stress reaction.  I went to see Maleficent expecting to have an unpleasant experience along the lines of the others but was instead pleasantly surprised.  Disney has made a thoroughly pleasant, if not super ambitious, modern take on Sleeping Beauty.  They fall in to a few pitfalls along the way (if I never see another mid-to-large scale medieval battle it’ll be too soon) but emerge on the other end with a solid movie.

This is the second big Disney kids release that bucks the traditional fairy tale view of true love.  In last year’s [[[Frozen]]] the moment of true love was between two sisters and in Maleficent it’s a decidedly maternal gesture.  It’s refreshing to see them move to stories about characters that don’t have to be boy/girl romantic love stories and in Maleficent the love story is pushed so far to the periphery that I’m not sure it was in every draft of the script.  I’m not cynical enough to say that I never want to see Disney do another love story but it’s wonderful to see a company with so much access to the building of romantic ideals of generation after generation of young girls start to acknowledge that other relationships can be loving and that boys aren’t the be all and end all.

Speaking of characters pushed way to the periphery, the trio of multi-colored fairies from the original animated film are done quite a disservice this time around. They’re just blithering idiots in this film and are reduced to scenes where they think infants should eat carrots and radishes straight out of the ground and reenacting magic-assisted versions of old Three Stooges routines.  They also made some kind of horrible casting blunder by casting Imelda Staunton as Knotgrass, the leader of the trio.  To an entire generation she’s Delores Umbridge, the phenomenally evil teacher from the [[[Harry Potter]]] films and I couldn’t help see anyone else even when she was in the throes of a hair-pulling slapstick routine and I can’t imagine little kids are doing any better.

The movie is completely carried by the command performance by Angelina Jolie.  What ultimately separates this movie from the other fairy tale remakes is that Jolie is in an entire other class as a movie star than the actors in those other films.  Letting her run loose with such an iconic character is a delight to watch and the effortless way she brings you along even as she does some honestly terrible things is a tremendous accomplishment.  I don’t mean to take anything away from Elle Fanning who does a fine job being an adorable foil but this movie was always going to live and die on Jolie’s prosthetic cheekbones and it not only lives it thrives.  I came in hating this entire genre of movie and left something of a believer and that’s as high a compliment I can imagine paying this film.

Box Office Democracy: “X-Men: Days of Future Past”

Bryan Singer was making watchable superhero movies when no one else was and because of that I want to give him a lot of slack.  I’ve even mostly forgotten Superman Returns ever happened.  I liked more about X-Men: Days of Future Past than I didn’t but there’s a nagging doubt in the back of my mind that if this were a movie by a less famous director I would be ripping it apart instead of trying to patch the pieces together.

The plot is so much of a continuity nightmare that I spent a fair amount of time wondering if it was a bizarre homage to mid-90s X-Men comics.  I’m not sure anything in the first two movies holds up at all anymore and I’m quite curious when exactly Mystique decided she wanted to look like Rebecca Romijn instead of Jennifer Lawrence as most people are pretty much done changing physically in their late 20s.  An awful lot of characters that act like they have no history at all in the first X-Men film had apparently been hanging out regularly for some 30 years before it started.  I understand this is the consequence of a movie series lasting 14 years and starting before every superhero franchise had to be a well-crafted franchise but I can’t ignore that this movie now exists in a world with those well-crafted franchises in it and it just all feels so unpolished.

There are also some insane contrivances in service of the plot.  Charles Xavier doesn’t have his psychic powers because he’s hooked on Hank McCoy’s mutant heroin that lets him walk.  I’m not bringing external baggage with that heroin comparison as it is absolutely dripping off the screen.  I could have lived and died without needing to see Professor X tying off a vein.  Wolverine is also incapacitated by a traumatic flashback during a scene where he could have easily fixed everything that goes wrong and sets up the third act.  The Wolverine I know and love from the comics isn’t quite so delicate and I’m really not buying that time travel makes someone so consistently portrayed as hard this emotionally vulnerable.

X-Men has the most star power of any film franchise and the cast really shines in this one.  James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender are, again, amazing as Xavier and Magneto and watching them have more and more emotionally charged scenes as their friendship moves toward the enmity that will define their relationship going forward.  Hugh Jackman has to carry a lot of plot in this one and he does it while still managing to radiate Wolverine in that way he’s done so much.  While rebooting the series might clean up some of the continuity and put them on equal footing there’s something about having people like Jackman (and Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan and even Shawn Ashmore) inhabiting these roles for a decade and a half that serves the belivability of a movie about people who can walk through walls and turn in to metal.

Spoiler: Like every movie that involves time travel, X-Men: Days of Future Past ends with a scene where the main character comes back to see the changes he’s made.  In this movie one of the first ways Wolverine knows that he’s in the good future instead of the bad one is that Bobby Drake is dating the person he’d rather he be with.  A touching moment but also a shout out to the ‘ship culture of the Internet I thought.  A moment of “hey, Wolverine is just like us” thrown in to what is otherwise a bit of a soft reboot.  It’s not good or bad it’s just interesting and that is, unfortunately where a little too much of this film ends up.

 

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