The Avengers: Ultimate Satisfaction

Everybody and his mother is writing about this movie right now, so this will be short and sweet.  Like a delicious dessert at the end of a scrumptious meal.  Which is how I felt seeing The Avengers — satisfied, sated, delighted, compliments to the chef.  Thank you, Joss Whedon and everyone, cast and crew, who created a fun, exciting, well-paced, and exceptionally written summer blockbuster.

There are no dull moments in this movie, but it is not just incessant battles and noisy explosions. It builds meaningfully and offers further glimpses into the pasts and psyches of some of the characters, though not all. The heroes finally come together, and not in a smooth way. They are like competitive siblings, and sometimes it’s not pretty. It can be painful to watch, but also hilarious. Best of all, this film has some awesome lines (Captain America: “I understood that reference.”) and sight gags (the Hulk taking one last swipe at Thor) of any of the superhero flicks. Especially surprising is how loveable the thus-far-beleaguered character of the Hulk ends up being!

Yes, Captain America (Chris Evans) remains my favorite in this new incarnation of the Marvel universe, though he’s a bit serious for my taste in this film. His able foil, Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), more than makes up for this with a plethora of snipes. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) redeems himself quietly and resolutely, and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) round out the team in a balanced way.

Of course, the good guys win.  But the “coming attractions” scene inserted in the credits tells us in no uncertain terms that this fight is not over. And I am so thrilled about THAT!  (And the final scene, at the very end of the credits, almost made me pee in my pants laughing. It’s this “we don’t take ourselves too seriously” attitude that I love about the creators of this franchise. That’s entertainment.)

Ahh!  Satisfaction.

Review: Rebecca

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve read this book before – what self-respecting avid book-lover hasn’t – and loved it. This time around, I loved it even more. Knowing the story and no longer being caught up in the suspense and mystery, I was able to focus during this reading on du Maurier’s rambling prose, imaginative description, and amazing rendering of the quintessential unreliable narrator. Rereading Rebecca was a treat, like having a box of delicious assorted chocolates.

As a movie freak, I also love Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation (1940), starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Though Fontaine, in my opinion, is too attractive and self-possessed to be the mousy and inexperienced second Mrs. de Winter, Olivier is absolutely perfect as Maxim.

I highly recommend both!

Report Card: Aug. 2011 ~ Pleasant Surprises … and Disappointments

It’s been a busy month! Nevertheless, the movie report card has some entries that take a bit more explanation than usual, so here goes:

The Pleasant Surprises

Ceremony (2010) is a peculiar glimpse into some pretty screwed-up lives, yet it leaves one feeling an odd sense of lightness and hope. Michael Angarano plays Sam, a pitiably adorable romantic and failing writer of bizarre children’s stories, who crashes the wedding weekend of a woman he once spent the night with. Most of the characters are pathetic in one way or another, but they curiously grow on you. Even the self-absorbed fiancé (Lee Pace) has a patient strength barely visible under his primping bravado but evident in the moments when he takes care of his flaky Zoe (Uma Thurman). It’s one of those films that you will either love or hate—and be aware that it begins rather slowly—but if you do give it a chance, you might find some pleasant surprises too.

Much to the credit of writer/director Max Winkler (son of Henry Winkler), the characters are not wrapped up in neat little packages, and I found myself wishing this film were a book adaptation so I could read the book and find out more about each of them. I wanted to know what had happened to Marshall (Reece Thompson) and why Zoe’s brother Teddy (Jake M. Johnson) was such a mess, though she loved him so fiercely despite that. I wanted to know their thoughts and their plans. They were real.  Ceremony is not for everyone, but if you like Feeling Minnesota (1996) or Wes Anderson’s films, you may be charmed by this one. I was.

B

Suck (2009) is a rock-musical-vampire-movie, written and directed by Canadian actor/director Rob Stefaniuk. He also stars along with Jessica Paré, Paul Anthony, and Mike Lobel, as a member of the band, the Winners (tongue firmly in cheek), who are barely making ends meet with their back-alley gigs while sleeping in their transportation—a hearse. Their ineffective manager (Dave Foley) says himself that they ought to fire him. And then, along comes a vampire and changes their lives. Now they are getting really popular, and all they have to worry about is Eddie Van Helsing *cough* (Malcolm McDowell) hunting them down. The bewildering cast also includes Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, Henry Rollins, and Alex Lifeson. I also really got as kick out of the effects surrounding the band’s travels through Canada and New York.  Fun to watch!

B+

The Disappointments

The Help (2011) could have been so much better, given the talent involved, so I personally found it sad that it reminded me of another disappointing “movie of the week,” The Blind Side (also a movie that many others loved). How can I say this? I certainly will receive hate mail. Most people adore The Help. It seems unassailable, since it’s hard to say anything against a story depicting the triumph of the help’s quiet dignity over the malicious ignorance of pre-civil-rights-era bigots. *sigh*

That’s not the point—let’s look at it as a film.  It is not bad.  In fact, it’s mostly enjoyable, with wonderful performances. Leading the pack of talent are Viola Davis (as Aibileen Clark), Jessica Chastain (Celia Foote), and Bryce Dallas Howard (Hilly Holbrook); Emma Stone (Skeeter Phelan) is adorable and competent as always.

Where my problem lies with this film is that it’s a formulaic, gasp-a-minute tear-fest that glosses over any true character development and plays to the audience’s sense of “this is the good fight, so you must cheer,” even though the story is not even a true one.  Some of my fellow viewers pointed out, “But things LIKE this did happen. It’s based on stories from that era.” For my money, I would rather watch true reminiscences (and there are so many real stories out there) than musings that milk the sorrows and struggles of the period.

Those who had read the book also told me, “Well, the characters are better developed in the book.”  What?!  Whoever made a rule that when a film adaptation is made, the characters cannot be as rich or round as they are meant to be?  Plenty of films, including adaptations, present rich and realistic characters.  Stop using that excuse!  There is, for instance, no reason in the world that Skeeter’s mother (played by the wonderful Allison Janney, who was just wasted here) had to come off as an unintelligible psycho. Yes, I get the fact that she was both ill and bound by the mores of the day; that doesn’t mean she has multiple personalities, making her unrealistic as a character.

This film could have been so much more powerful had it been slightly more subtle and, of course, focused on character development—after all, what is more important in a film about the human spirit? As it was, the movie accomplished something that few have in the past: it made NOT want to read the book.

B-

Dylan Dog: Dead of Night (2010) is the worst comic-adapted-to-film I’ve seen since The Mutant Chronicles. I wish people would stop making putrid flops like this; that trend should have gone out with big shoulder pads.

I’ll watch just about anything supernatural or based on comic books, but it seems the moviemakers here simply wanted to cash in on moviegoers’ current love affair with vampires, werewolves, and all things alluringly monstrous. Speaking of which, Brandon Routh, bless his heart, may be eye candy, but he can’t act his way out of a paper bag. Even one of my faves, Peter Storemare, could not shine in this mess.

The only saving grace was Sam Huntington (Fanboys) as the sidekick, playing second fiddle to Routh again, as he did in Superman Returns. Unfortunately, even his amusing delivery can’t fix the awful writing.

D

Here are a few other films I watched over the past couple of weeks:

Film	Grade	Comment
The Jerk	B+	“I was born a poor black child.”  Classic silliness!  Gotta love Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters.
Hearts of Darkness	A-	For those of us who love Apocalypse Now, this is a terrific look behind the scenes, from learning about Martin Sheen’s personal difficulties and on-location heart attack, to seeing a 14-year-old Larry Fishburn waxing eloquent, to following the challenging journey of Francis Ford Coppola from dream to nightmare and back.  His wife, Eleanor, filmed this documentary footage and adds interesting insights about the journey into the jungle.
The Human Centipede (2009)	C-	I finally watched this sicko horror flick after hearing so many, ahem, intriguing things about it.  It was like a bad and bloody car accident—I was repulsed but could not look away.  The ending is truly freakish, especially if one thinks about what that poor “part B” girl is going to do now.  *shiver*  Astonishing is the fact that the creepy doctor (Dieter Laser) is even more horrifying than the creature he creates! Unless you are a diehard fan of gruesome horror flicks, skip this one.

Report Card: Latter July 2011 … and Other Movie News

It’s the end of July (holy chronometer, Batman, where does the time fly?), so it’s time for another movie report card.  It’s also an opportunity to wax eloquent about movie-watching in general.

There’s shifting in the Movieverse of Zu.  I finally got me a wi-fi enabled blu-ray player, which I adore. It streams Netflix, Amazon, CinemaNow, and more. And now come the decisions.

The first is the pending decision about whether to continue subscribing to Netflix. As many will have heard, Netflix, the haven of watchers of unusual, classic, cult, foreign, and documentary films, has announced a change on September 1 that basically raises prices and changes services in a way that makes it tough for some of us to decide what to do. For example, I currently subscribe to getting two DVDs at home at a time plus unlimited streaming, which runs $14.99 plus assorted taxes. The new price for this plan is $19.98.  That’s an increase of over 30 percent!  So, now I have to decide whether to go with JUST streaming for $7.99 (seriously cutting down on the selection available to me and thereby negating one of the main resons I signed on with Netflix in the first place) or streaming plus one DVD at home for $15.98 – still an increase in price over my current plan and a decrease in DVDs.  A third alternative, of course, is to scrap Netflix altogether for this bungling of plans and rely on the new options available to me.

Decisions, decisions.

And now, back to movies. I’ve been working like a madwoman the past few weeks – er, months, actually – so I needed something to give myself as a reward and help me relax with at least a couple of hours of leisure each weekend.  So, what better reward for the Movie Freak than to go see a movie at the theater?  So far, so good.  I love it when a plan comes together.

Here are the recent highlights. These are, by necessity of limited time, very brief reviews, but I had to take these first three out of the report card table, if only so I could include the gratuitous eye candy.

Captain America: The First Avenger

A

First Avenger, hellz yeah! (Yes, it’s true … I am a comic-adapted-to-film nerd.)

Drumroll please, my latest heartthrob is Chris Evans (always liked him — in Fantastic Four, The Losers, Push, Cellular, and Scott Pilgrim — like him even more now). Among the excellent cast, Tommy Lee Jones steals every scene he’s in, IMO. And Hugo Weaving is appropriately menacing as Red Skull.

The story provides well-paced background about the first Avenger, and the final post-credits scene makes Marvel geeks everywhere salivate for May 2012.

The film does an excellent job of immersing viewers in the WWII era and introducing the Captain from his humble beginnings. Though I’m not super-excited about CGI in live-action films, the talent behind the film did an amazing body-shrinking job to make pre-serum Steve Rogers appear short and scrawny.  Of course, post-serum Steve (the real buff physique of Chris Evans) needed no special effects enhancements.

 

Limitless

A

This splendid mind-bender with super cinematography and terrific talent opened to less-than-stellar reception.  It’s hard to say why, though it may have something to do with the fact that the story itself is somewhat bendy. Our good guy is quite the antihero. Conclusions about ethics and the means to reach an end are open to viewer interpretation. It’s not all wrapped up in a neat and shiny bow at the end, and that tends to rattle audiences used to having everything, inclusive of character motivations, ironed and folded.

The film features some amazing cinematography, with sequences that zoom viewers through the streets, alleys, and dwellings of New York in seemingly uninterrupted shots. Made me dizzy … seriously.

And then there are Bradley Cooper’s amazing eyes.  0_0  Um, sorry … what was I saying?

 

Cowboys and Aliens

B+

Well, I may be guilty of being too hyped up on the marketing to give this one a fair shake, but it seemed like a hot mess to me. Oh, it has its moments, and it boasts a terrific cast, bad-ass aliens that are unequivocally baddies, and some awesome Wild West scenery. I really wanted to love this movie. I was waiting to get blown away by it. The storyline is excellent — a real throwback to the feel of old comics that threw together completely implausible combinations in amazingly workable mixtures. But as much as director Jon Favreau talked about it being both about the characters and their relationships and about breathtaking FX and shootouts, it seems somewhere in between to me.  The scenes that are supposed to be heartfelt come off as a bit contrived to me; the action, on the other hand, is stymied in deference to that supposed character development. Something intangible is missing, and I can’t quite put my finger on it.  What I can put my finger on, however, is that some of the reactions of the supposed frontiersmen to being attacked by aliens is less than realistic, and that’s one way in which credibility could certainly have been built.

It’s definitely worth seeing, and I am certain to add it to my collection. Perhaps repeat viewings will change my tune about some of the details. Nonetheless, this is my first reaction … I wished I’d gone to see Captain America again.

Here are some other flicks I watched over the past couple of weeks.  Looking forward to hearing about your movie-watching adventures!

Film	Grade	Comment
Deep Red (1975)	A-	Dario Argento classic horror film, often considered his best. David Hemmings (Blow-Up) is an expat musician in Italy pulled into a mysterious series of murders. Though some of the acting is melodramatic and the random dubbing/subtitles can distract, it’s an engaging psycho-drama and mystery with plenty of creative kills to satisfy horror fans.
Rango (2011)	A+	Brilliant satire!  There’s enough “animated movie” here to please the kids, but this most definitely a film with plenty of material for adult sensibilities. Ostensibly an underdog-hero tale, Rango rattles the cage of everything from Old West heroes to water conservation issues. Awesome cast and amazing graphics; the uncut version is a must-see!
The Iron Giant (1999)	A	What can I say? Even with today’s mind-boggling advances in animation, this movie remains a gem.
Dark Harbor (1998)	C	Um, I had seen this before and “forgot” – as one forgets things one would like to unsee.  Naw, it’s not THAT bad … it’s just slow as molasses for a while, with a surprising yet oddly creepy crescendo. But like I’ve said many times, I will watch anything with Alan Rickman in it.
Deadtime Stories: Volume 1 (2009)	D	What saves these crappy short flicks from being a complete F is that the stories are actually interesting in an old-fashioned comic-book horror kind of way. But the truly horrific production values make this compilation painful to watch.  Perhaps narrator/producer George Romero didn’t suspect the end result; then again, maybe he didn’t care.
Barney’s Version (2010)	B-	Meh. I kind of didn’t get it as a story, except as a John Irving-esque “here’s a life” portrait (but without Irving’s marvelous life lessons, except maybe the lesson “try not to be an asshole”), but the performances are fabulous. Paul Giamatti is awesome as usual, but I wish he’d quit playing only such sad-sacks and get back to his comedic roots.

Report Card: Mid July 2011

It’s been a  good movie-watching month so far, and I hope to keep it up all summer!  Let me know what good flicks you’re seeing as you seek the AC inside those theaters.  I’ve been bringing a hoodie along every time I go — brrr!  But it’s all right if it’s cold as long as the movies are hot. Am I right?

Film	Grade	Comment
True Grit (2010)	A	Excellent adaptation. The original will always rule, but this is (one of least favorite terms but applicable here) an instant classic.  The Coen Brothers seldom disappoint, and Jeff Bridges abides.
Super 8 (2011)	A	Spielberg strikes again. Nothing new here, but fun and well-made. It’s a little bit Goonies, a little E.T., even a little Stand By Me … and it’s non-stop watchable.
Independence Day (1996)	A-	Watched on July 4, of course!  Fun, schmaltzy, “Aliens invade and humans band together” flick. Favorite line: Cpt. Hillen (Will Smith) telling alien invader “Welcome to Earth!” and then clocking him.
X-Men: First Class (2011)	A	A terrific addition to the X-Men films for all us Marvel geeks.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)	A+	A perennial favorite!  “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Thanks for the reminder.  Save Ferris!
The Breakfast Club (1985)	A++	One of my favorite movies EVER.  The defectives of Shermer High always entertain.
Cat Ballou (1965)	B+	Hysterically silly “western” worth watching for Lee Marvin’s performance alone.
Eagle Eye (2008)	B+	Rewatching this riveting thriller reminded me I’d liked it the first time, and I still do. Fun weekend entertainment … and Shia LeBeouf.
127 Hours (2010)	A-	Watched grudgingly, only because I’m a fan of director Danny Boyle. I didn’t go see this in the theater in last year’s Oscar rush because I don’t really see Ralston (real person the movie is about) as any kind of hero. But I’d be a big hypocrite if I didn’t separate eh film from the real-life story, and the film is good. Kudos to James Franco for his one-man show (thought only Sam Rockwell could do that, ha!).
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011)	A-	Johnny Depp maintains command as Jack Sparrow (er, sorry, there should be a Captain in there somewhere). I wasn’t expected that much, but this movie is very entertaining. Ian McShane is a hoot, and I’m happy to see more of Sam Claflin (The Pillars of the Earth).
Horrible Bosses (2011)	B+	Hilarious!  Didn’t blow me away, but great fun.