Recent Movie Roundup 26

I haven't seen a lot of people take note of this--and what with everything else going on, that's hardly surprising--but 2017 is shaping up to be a really good movie year.  Specifically, the genre/action/adventure movies this year has served up have been genuinely strong and enjoyable, from envelope-pushing fare like Logan, Get Out, and Colossal, to well-made, thoughtful variations on familiar formulas like Wonder Woman.  (This is especially noticeable in comparison to 2016, which in terms of its movie offerings pretty much peaked with Deadpool.)  I didn't love all of the movies discussed in this post, but I enjoyed all of them, and more than that, I admired their attempts to do something different, even if in some cases those attempts didn't quite work for me.  In a movie scene that seems increasingly governed by formula and last year's successes, it's heartening to see so many idiosyncratic efforts, and hopefully their success bodes well for the future.

• Baby Driver - For months, reviewers and filmmakers have been priming us have our socks knocked off by Baby Driver, Edgar Wright's victory lap after being unceremoniously dumped from Ant-Man.  The praise for the film was as unanimous and rapturous as it was strangely unspecific--everyone seemed to love Baby Driver, but no one seemed able to say why, beyond some vague gestures towards its soundtrack (and you know, the last film I saw where the soundtrack was a major selling point was the second Guardians of the Galaxy movie, which is hardly an encouraging comparison).  So when I went to see Baby Driver, it was less in the spirit of enthusiasm and more out of curiosity--what was it about this movie that made people go so gaga over it?  I'm sorry to say that my questions have not been answered.  Baby Driver is enjoyable and well-made.  There are some extremely fun action and car chase scenes (though on that last front the film peaks in its first ten minutes, and never quite recaptures the same high).  But none of this is quite enough to elevate the film past its thoroughly generic story and characters.
  
  The premise of Baby Driver is so familiar that it practically follows from the film's description as a heist movie.  A demon-behind-the-wheel getaway driver agrees to do One Last Job for some shady characters in order to protect the lives of his loved ones, including his angelic girlfriend, and then things get complicated.  The one twist that Wright offers is that Baby (Ansel Elgort, in a brilliant physical performance that nevertheless feels like little more than a support beam for the film's plot) is obsessed with, constantly listening to, and filtering the world through, music, which he pipes in through the earbuds he hardly ever takes off, ostensibly to ward off the tinnitus that has plagued him since childhood, though like so much else about the film this is a plot element that is introduced and then quickly left by the wayside.  This turns Baby Driver into essentially a long sequence of music videos, an approach that is at first exhilarating, but quickly loses its flavor when it turns out that Wright doesn't have a second gear for it.  For a little while, it feels as if Baby Driver is trying to be the portrait of slightly different person (perhaps even neuroatypical), who needs a soundtrack to his life to function, and who can only truly express his humanity through movement--whether behind the wheel of a car, or walking down the street, or dancing in his apartment.  But as the plot of Baby Driver progresses, this obsession comes to feel less like a character trait and more like a gimmick, a way of establishing the film's coolness credentials--to which end it also gathers actors such as Kevin Spacey, Jon Hamm, and Jamie Foxx to play the over-the-top criminal types whom Baby squares against.  By the film's final act, in which Baby must save his girlfriend Debora (Lily James) while also retrieving the tape containing the last recording of his mother's singing, he comes off as a less engaging version of Guardians's Starlord, and the film's use of music feels just as calculated.  (This is also a good place to note how few and uninteresting Baby Driver's female characters are, all of them defined by the love, protectiveness, and vengefulness of men.)
  
  The most obvious point of comparison for Baby Driver is Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, and the difference between how these two movies handle their protagonist feels extremely telling.  Drive's most brilliant touch is the third-act revelation that beneath its angel-faced protagonist's placid exterior, there is a great big nothing.  That his coolness is merely a thin veneer for genuine psychopathy, which eventually tarnishes, and sometimes destroys, the lives of everyone he gets close to.  Baby Driver feels like the movie for people who found that conclusion too depressing, who wanted to be able to keep rooting for the Driver with no moral qualms or complications.  The contortions the film goes through in order to assure us that Baby is a good person, even an innocent--at the same time as he willingly participates in horrific violence--are ultimately more alienating than Drive's condemnation of its hero.  The film's ending feels almost like a parody of the way the American justice system bends over backwards to avoid "destroying the life" of photogenic white criminals.  This is a problem less from an ethical standpoint (though the film's approach to race is troubling, and deserves a lot more attention from reviewers than it's gotten) than from a storytelling one.  If Baby Driver won't give its title character a personality, and won't admit that the absence of a personality is an indication that there is something wrong with him, then all that's left is the film's obsession with coolness, which--for me at least--is not nearly enough to carry it over the finish line.
  
  
• Spider-Man: Homecoming - If the rapturous reception for Baby Driver left me feeling warily curious, the only reaction I had to similarly positive reviews for the latest Spider-Man film was resigned fatigue.  As the sixth (!) Spider-Man movie in fifteen years, Homecoming seemed more like a chore than a pleasure, and the fact that Marvel was clearly only making the movie so that the web-crawler could appear in Infinity War and then become the lynchpin of phase four of the MCU certainly didn't help.  For all that Homecoming turned out to be a smart, charming movie, I'm still not convinced that this character needed to be rebooted for the third time.  But I am impressed with how Marvel has handled the significant challenges of doing so, with a great deal more wit and care than comparable franchise launches (much less re-launches) from other studios have managed.
  
  It's not surprising that Homecoming steers clear of the over-familiar tropes of the Spider-Man story (in fact some of them, like the burden of guilt Peter carries for the death of Uncle Ben, feel weirdly absent from this story, in which he is far too insouciant and carefree than your standard Peter Parker).  What I didn't expect was for the film to face head-on some of the growing problems with the more recent MCU movies, and to swiftly disarm them.  Homecoming strikes a compelling middle ground between the overheated bombast of MCU team-up movies, and the by-the-numbers plotting of recent standalones.  It tells a story with relatively modest stakes and scope, with a hero who is frequently out of his depth, and villains who are just trying to get paid.  But by giving its setting and characters room to breathe, it paradoxically ends up the most involving MCU movie in some time.  Tom Holland plays Peter as something between Tobey Maguire's soulful nerd and Andrew Garfield's dimwitted jokester, but most of all he plays the character as young.  His Peter is fundamentally decent and heroic, whether he's giving an old lady directions or thoughtlessly stepping up to take a bullet for a street criminal caught in over his head.  But he's also immature, playful, unclear on how this whole superhero business works, and star-struck by his recent adventures with Iron Man in Civil War.  That looseness in his characterization extends to the rest of the cast.  The kids in Peter's school--best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon), popular nice girl Liz (Laura Harrier), too-cool-for-school Michelle (Zendaya), asshole Flash (Tony Revolori), and even some of the background players--all get space to be their own, idiosyncratic versions of these types, each a little bit weird in their own way.  As a result, Homecoming ends up feeling more grounded than most films in this genre, like a teen movie about a superhero, not a superhero movie just waiting to shake off its teenage hero's ordinary life.
  
  There's a similar heft and humanity in the film's handling of its villains, whether it's a small-time crook played by Donald Glover, or the main bad guys.  All feel like people first and plot tokens second, with lives that exist outside of Peter's drama, and limits to their villainy informed by their being part of a community and a family (when Peter convinces Glover's character to give him information, he does it by pointing out that the bad guys have blown up a popular local sandwich shop).  The film's villain, Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton), breaks the MCU films' villain curse, ending up simultaneously terrifying and sympathetic.  He makes the largely convincing argument that people like Tony Stark cause tremendous damage that they never look down and notice, much less face consequences for.  Peter's heroism is expressed by recognizing the rightness of this criticism, but also the evil of Toomes's reaction to it--he steals and modifies alien technology, and sells it to criminals.  Even then, the true measure of Toomes's villainy comes not when he dons a terrifying flying suit, but through the mundane details of his double life--the hurt that he causes his family, and the damage he does to his community.
  
  Much has been made of Tony Stark's presence in Homecoming, with some critics even calling it half an Iron Man movie.  I was actually surprised by how little space Tony takes up in the movie, and more than that, by how Homecoming feels free to subtly criticize him.  If, like myself, you thought Tony's decision to recruit Peter in Civil War was reckless and irresponsible, then Homecoming will be the film for you, as it delves into the unintended consequences of that decision--such as Peter retreating from his life in the belief that he will soon be called to join the Avengers.  When Tony tries to repair the damage he's caused, he repeatedly overcompensates, either ghosting Peter completely or micro-managing him, in both cases expecting him to follow orders without considering that he is still a child.  A major component of Peter's growth into heroism and maturity is the fact that he outgrows Tony, rejecting his worldview and choosing to a be a street-level hero, someone who can address the damage that Tony and the Avengers don't see.  (The film also gets in a few jabs at Captain America, who appears as the star of some breathtakingly clueless PSAs screened at Peter's school, even as the teachers admit that he is currently a war criminal.)  It's an ending that also brings Homecoming full circle, back in conversation with the previous Spider-Man movies.  Whereas those films were driven by Peter's tragic inability to balance his life as a person and a hero, Homecoming concludes that it is essential to Peter's heroism that he maintain his humanity, and not ignore his life for the sake of the excitement of being a hero.  It's a little surprising for a Spider-Man movie to end up concluding that its hero should stay "close to the ground" (many of the film's jokes even rely on Peter's inability to find tall buildings and structures to swing from), but for this moment, in both the MCU and this much-rebooted character's existence, that feels like the right decision.
  
  
• Okja - Bong Joon Ho's follow-up to Snowpiercer (produced by Netflix and available to stream on it) is, like its predecessor, a film that veers somewhat haphazardly between dark social satire and earnest social commentary.  Also like Snowpiercer, Okja is a collection of set pieces that vary wildly in tone and even genre, but without the organizing principle of a journey along a train, the result feels even more bitty.  That's not necessarily a complaint.  Some of Okja's set-pieces--chiefly a truck-heist/prison-break scene in the streets of Seoul that gives Baby Driver a run for its money--are worth the price of admission in their own right.  But especially for a film so driven by its message, it can be hard to get a grip on the story Okja is trying to tell.
  
  The title character is a genetically engineered pig hybrid the size of an elephant, bred as a new, environmentally-friendly food alternative.  Ten years ago, sample piglets were handed out to farmers all over the world, as a publicity stunt meant to normalize the new protein source.  Now, with Korean-raised Okja deemed the "best super-pig" and carted off to the US to be fêted (and then slaughtered), Mija (An Seo Hyun), the granddaughter of the farmer who raised Okja, sets off on a journey to rescue her friend.  It's a fairly basic animal-in-peril story, and yet Okja veers into some extremely weird tangents that never quite coalesce into a coherent whole, whether it's the animal rights group that helps Mija (led by a pacifist Paul Dano and a slightly shady Steven Yeun), or the dissipated former animal show host who has been coopted by the corporation to put a smiley face on Okja's looming fate (Jake Gyllenhaal, in what is easily the most deranged performance of his career).  Some of these bits work very well--the fact that the corporation's CEOs are twins both played by Tilda Swinton, one a money-obsessed monster, the other an airy wannabe-celebrity desperate to remake her company's image, ends up making a subtly cutting statement--it doesn't matter which of these women takes over the running of the company, because the end result of animal abuse will be the same, whether or not it's sugarcoated with good PR.  And even when the film's weirdness doesn't work, it's so expertly done as to be fun to watch.  But the constant shift between absurdism and utterly serious animal rights rhetoric--chiefly a long sojourn in a super-pig slaughterhouse that has definite concentration camp associations--can make it hard to know how to react.
  
  Perhaps the most significant way in which Okja holds back from its audience is the title character itself.  The CGI for Okja can get a little ropey in the film's action scenes, but it works where it counts, in convincing us that this is a feeling creature whom Mija loves and who is capable of returning that affection, and in making us root for her survival.  And yet Okja, as a character, feels curiously absent from the movie that bears her name.  In most animal in peril stories, the animal is in many ways in the main character (think, for example, of the way Dawn of the Planet of the Apes spends its middle segment focused almost entire on Caesar).  But in Okja, even in scenes in which she is alone (or alone with her abusers), the focus is almost always on the human characters, not on Okja's feelings.  (This is particularly strange because there's a strong implication in the film that Okja and the other super-pigs are a lot smarter than suspected, perhaps even self-aware, and yet ultimately nothing is made of this.)  Okja only really comes to life when she's paired with Mija, and though that pairing, and the love and devotion the two have for one another, are never less than entirely convincing, it's yet another way in which Okja feels confused about what it wants to be.  It's a film that I'm glad exists (not least for how it pushes forward Netflix's willingness to take a shot on strange material and creators from outside of Hollywood) but it's worth watching more for its pieces than its whole.
  
  
• Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets - On paper, Luc Besson's latest movie (based on the comic by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières) should be an unmitigated disaster.  The plot is predictable and frequently relies on the characters being stupid, or worse, following stupid rules and regulations.  The characters are flat, with informed personality traits that never manage to emerge from the actors' performances.  In particular, Dane DeHaan is woefully miscast as the title character, a rougeish adventurer with no time for rules (except right at the end of the film, when he suddenly decides that abiding by the rules defines him).  It's a role that ends up wearing him, rather than allowing him to make it his own.  The film's decision to hang its emotional arc on a putative romance between him and his partner, Laureline (Cara Delevingne), is almost comically misguided--not only is DeHaan completely unconvincing as a lothario whom Laureline desires but can't trust, but the film never gives us any reason, any romantic or sexual spark, to make us root for Valerian and Laureline as a couple.  And despite aiming at a message of inclusivity and tolerance, Valerian's character work frequently plumps for thoughtless stereotypes, particularly in an ill-advised sojourn in a red light district, where Valerian befriends a shape-changing prostitute (Rihanna) who can't get away from her hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold type, or the racially insensitive guises her clients favor.
  
  And yet for all these flaws, I found Valerian utterly delightful, for the simple reason that the film's world is so broad, so varied, and so much fun, that it's possible to tune out the leaden dialogue, the annoying characters, and the idiot plotting, and simply enjoy the ride.  This isn't simply a matter of visuals--though these are spectacular and constantly evolving throughout the film's run--but of worldbuilding.  Valerian mostly takes place on a travelling space station, Alpha, where humans and other species have for centuries mingled freely and peacefully, adding modules and segments as each species joins the journey.  The film's opening scene, which shows us Alpha's origins as an international space station orbiting Earth, establishes a theme of tolerance and mutual respect, and though, as noted above, that's something Valerian honors as much in the breach as in the observance, it's still a powerful message that informs how Besson builds his world, and how Valerian and Laureline move through it.  This isn't a Guardians of the Galaxy-esque setting, where entire space-faring civilizations exist solely for our heroes to punch their way through.  It's a living, functional world, whose rules and values are worth preserving because they allow its inhabitants to live in (relative) peace and prosperity.  It's no surprise that the villain of the piece turns out to be someone who thought he had the right to tear through another civilization for his own goals, and that our heroes triumph not just by defeating him, but by bringing him to justice.
  
  All of this is to make Valerian sound a great deal more high-minded than it actually is (not least because, as noted, for all the film's lofty intentions its actual execution is at best awkward, at worst actively working against its message).  But the belief that the world he's constructed is interesting and worth exploring informs how Besson constructs his action plot, and as a result Valerian never stops moving, and never stops showing us new corners of its world.  The film is made up of several gargantuan, and incredibly fun, set pieces, from a chase through an intergalactic market that exists in several dimensions, to Valerian pursuing aliens who have kidnapped his commander by jumping from one environ in Alpha to another, to an underwater quest for a jellyfish that will help Laureline find a missing Valerian.  Perhaps most importantly, the aliens whose dispossession is the film's inciting incident have a society that feels, if not exactly realistic, then sympathetic and interesting.  You find yourself rooting for them to have a happy ending, and it almost makes Valerian and Laureline bearable that they clearly see this as a more important goal than obeying orders.  None of this is enough to make Valerian into a good movie, but it's one that left me feeling a great deal more hopeful and exuberant than any other recent example of this genre, and that's worth celebrating.

Recent Movie Roundup 19

Spring has sprung, and with it a whole bunch of movies I want to watch have arrived at the movie theater (as well as this bunch, see my recent review of Snowpiercer at Strange Horizons).  Though I haven't exactly been suffering, there's certainly a somewhat fannish slant to my recent moviegoing that verges on the embarrassing--I need to get around to watching some grown-up films, pronto.  Of course, it being the end of April these are nowhere to be seen, and by the time fall and its award-bait movies roll around I'll probably have forgotten this resolution.  In the meantime, here are my thoughts on some the films I've seen recently.

• Veronica Mars - The Kickstarter-funded return to the world of the beloved TV series proves two things.  One, that it was always a mistake for the show's second season to pick up immediately where the first season left off and try to recreate its "mystery in a high school" plot.  And two, that while the world of Neptune, California and the character of wise-cracking, tiny, blonde private detective Veronica Mars had more life in them than just that first season, it really wasn't that much more life.  The common complaint raised against Veronica Mars, the movie--in which the title character, who has abandoned detective work because of the damage it caused to her family at the end of the show's third and final season, is called back to investigate one last case when mythological ex Logan (Jason Dohring) is accused of murdering his girlfriend--is that it prioritizes servicing the fans (who after all made the film possible) over telling its own self-contained story that might attract new fans and maybe even jumpstart the franchise again.  The film, accordingly, takes place at Veronica's ten-year high school reunion, and features multiple cameos from nearly all of the show's beloved recurring characters (perhaps most egregiously, this includes bringing back Chris Lowell's Piz just so that he can get his heart stomped on again as Veronica and Logan rush back into each other's arms).  But to my mind, the real problem with this film is that it exposes the seams and cracks in the show's original concept.
  
  The fact is, the high school detective premise doesn't work very well when your detective is ten years out of high school, and yet Veronica Mars behaves as if the problems that plagued Veronica as a teenager are the same ones that will dog her for the rest of her life if she returns to Neptune.  Mapping the class system onto high school cliques was brilliant in the show's first season, but it becomes more and more of a stretch as Veronica and her contemporaries get older and move further away from who they were in high school, a fact that the film fails to acknowledge--which is how we end up with a scene in which Veronica's third-season sex tape is screened at the reunion to the general appreciation and bemusement of her former classmates, because this is something that a room full of 28-year-olds would find funny and appropriate.  Similarly, behaving as if Veronica--who is now a lawyer--is just as powerless before Neptune's power structures as she was as a child is unconvincing, and so the film's "Forget it Jake, It's Neptune" conclusion--in which Veronica's only response to being confronted with the town's corrupt, borderline murderous sheriff's department is to go back to PI work (as opposed to launching an actual counter-offensive through the courts and the media)--feels demeaning to the character's much-lauded strength and intelligence.  It's all very well to tell a noir story, but that noir tone needs to be earned, and this Veronica Mars doesn't do.
  
  All that said, the things that kept the series going past the point where its story could carry it are back in force here.  Kristen Bell and Enrico Colantoni are still brilliant as Veronica and Keith, dropping right back into their familiar rapport, which remains as powerful and compelling as it was even in the series's weakest moments.  Logan clearly exists solely to satisfy shippers who can't get enough of his chemistry with Veronica--which is still palpable--and though the story the film offers for his post-series life is borderline absurd, it does provide a justification for toning Logan down, and making him Veronica's love interest and reward rather than the disruptive presence he was in the series.  And though the film's worldbuilding is questionable, it's used in the service of Veronica's own journey towards understanding the kind of person she is.  Though again, I don't find the choice the film offers, between being a successful lawyer away from Neptune and a hardscrabble private detective tilting at windmills in it, terribly believable, the terms in which Veronica Mars chooses to phrase this choice--as the struggle with an addiction to the PI life--are intriguing.  It might have been interesting to see Veronica finally growing up, and embracing detective work from a place of power rather than helpless addiction, but if you take it as a given that Veronica Mars is, like the TV series, trapped by its core concept, what the film does with this concept has enough glimmers of originality to make it worth watching, and a worthy successor to the show's brilliant first season.
  
  
• Frozen - Six months of the internet falling over itself to crown Disney's latest the greatest thing since sliced bread probably didn't do it any favors with me once I finally sat down to watch it.  Frozen is a good film, but for the most part it recapitulates the plot and structure of Tangled, and does them slightly less well.  There's a bright-eyed, adventurous but sheltered heroine eager to see the world, a cynical and world-weary love interest who starts out helping her for selfish reasons but quickly finds himself won over by her infectious enthusiasm, and a time-sensitive mission they embark on together, during which they fall in love.  There's a little more than this to Frozen, which might be why it's so awkwardly paced--it takes forever to set up its story, then rushes through its most important emotional beats (among them, the development of all its central relationships, including the central romance).  Along the way, the jokes are less funny (though Josh Gad's talking snowman is delightfully surreal) and the songs are less good (even the famous "Let It Go," though a good song in itself, feels weirdly out of place in this movie, a pop anthem lost amid the rest of the musical-style soundtrack).
  
  The crucial difference between Frozen and Tangled is, of course, the fact that its central relationship--its central love story--is between sisters, not lovers.  Based very loosely on Andersen's "The Snow Queen," Frozen imagines the title character as Elsa (Idina Menzel), a princess born with a power over ice that she can't control, and whose parents have isolated her from the world and convinced her to completely suppress her powers.  When the pressure of keeping herself under total control proves too much for Elsa, she runs away and inadvertently starts a permanent winter, and her younger sister Anna (Kristen Bell), who has spent her life hurt and confused by her sister's absence, tries to rescue her--from her own power and from the opportunistic, power-hungry nobles trying to snatch their throne.  It's an intriguing premise, but one that Frozen for the most part fumbles.  The most interesting thing about Tangled was its complex and often ambivalent depiction of the smothering, abusive relationship between Rapunzel and her mother, and Frozen has the opportunity to do the same thing--this is, after all, a film about a child who was mistreated by well-meaning but horribly misguided parents, and the sibling who doesn't understand her family's dysfunction but was nevertheless damaged by it.  And yet Frozen repeatedly flattens what should be Elsa and Anna's complex personalities and relationship.  Elsa should be angry and conflicted towards her family, but because the film kills her parents off in its prologue, there's no one to direct that anger at except "innocent" Anna, which allows the film to neatly solve what should be Elsa's complex issues through Anna's simple love.  Her ambivalence about her powers is similarly very neatly solved--the exhilaration she feels at finally letting them loose in the film's middle segments, and particularly "Let It Go," is replaced by domesticated, safe applications by the film's end, with no sign that after years of confinement, Elsa might want to stretch her wings a little further than making summertime skating rinks (even the glorious castle she builds as a demonstration of her power is abandoned by the film's end).  The result is a character who can only be classified as good because she doesn't feel precisely those emotions that feminism identifies as crucial to self-actualization--anger, and a desire to be powerful.  While it's obviously a good thing that Disney is creating movies about (positive) female relationships, I can't help but feel that there's quite a way to go from where Frozen ends up.
  
  
• The Grand Budapest Hotel - Wes Anderson's latest bills itself, in its promotional material and closing credits, as inspired by the works of Stefan Zweig.  That's certainly noticeable in the film, which shares several of Zweig's writerly tics and preoccupations--the multiple, nested framing stories, the ornate, storytelling dialogue, the tone of nostalgia for a pre-War, central European world of gentility and fading aristocracy.  But for all this obvious fondness for Zweig and his writing, The Grand Budapest Hotel is ultimately its director's film, which means that the kind of story that Zweig might have told as a melodrama, it tells as a farce.  As fond as I am of some of Zweig's writing, I can't deny that this is an attitude he might have benefited from himself, so I certainly don't have a problem with it in the film, which moves past the dry, absurdist humor of Anderson's previous films to become, at points, uproariously funny.  Ralph Fiennes plays M. Gustave, the implacable, unfailingly considerate butler of the titular hotel, in the fictional country of Zubrowka shortly before the outbreak of something very similar to WWII.  Gustave is the favorite of the hotel's spoiled, elderly, wealthy guests, attending to their every need and basking in their dependence and admiration.  When one of his charges dies suddenly, leaving him an expensive bequest, her jealous family accuse him of her murder, and Gustave and his protege Zero (Tony Revolori) must escape and prove his innocence.
  
  Fiennes is absolutely brilliant as Gustave, turning on a dime from romantic sentimentality to foul-mouthed hard-headedness and back again, but never losing Gustave's defining ability to transform the world around him into the kinder, more genteel place he wants it to be by sheer force of his belief in it.  When Zero visits him in jail, Gustave explains, in his typical flowery, didactic tones, that he has "beaten the shit" out of a fellow prisoner who mistook him for an easy mark, then pauses; "he's actually become a dear friend," he adds.  It's a fantastic performance, and I look forward to it being criminally ignored alongside similarly sublime turns in Anderson's previous films, such as Bill Murray in The Life Aquatic.  But like the rest of those films, what contains this performance is on the effervescent side, so much so that less than a day after watching it, very little of The Grand Budapest Hotel lingers in my mind.  The conversation about Anderson, and whether his films have substance to match their distinctive style, is of old standing, and this entry doesn't bring me any closer to an answer--not even the reliance on Zweig can fill the film with meaning, since nostalgia is by its nature an empty emotion.  Still, if there isn't much more to this film than pretty production design and wonderfully mannered acting, it is still an extremely funny story set in wonderfully realized alternate world, and that makes it worth watching.
  
  
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier - One of the impressive things about the MCU films--besides their very existence and the megafranchise's success and overall watchability--is how each of the sub-series that make up the universe has begun developing its own tone and genre.  Watching the first Captain America film in preparation for this one, I was struck by how sombre it is, when compared to the Iron Man or Thor films, suffused with its title character's melancholy, first at not being allowed to help those in need, and then at the things that those in power choose to do with his strength.  Winter Soldier takes that approach to--possibly egregious--extremes.  Where The First Avenger was sombre, this film is practically dour.  It's also talky and a little on the long side, laying out a convoluted conspiracy within SHIELD that Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and new character Falcon (Anthony Mackie) have to unravel and then save the world from.  Like Iron Man 3, The Winter Soldier is rather bold in calling out the war on terror and the security state as distractions--in this film, an actual villainous plot concealing an attempt to establish a global tyranny--but by its nature this sort of plot doesn't give a character like Captain America much room to change or grow.  His purpose is to be a fixed point of goodness and integrity to which those members of SHIELD who still cherish the ideals of freedom and democracy can flock, but whereas being that sort of fixed point made Steve compelling in The First Avenger, when he still had a great deal to prove, it leaves him feeling rather inert in The Winter Soldier, in which he's so accustomed to his strength that he nonchalantly jumps out of planes without a parachute.  The movie gestures in some interesting directions in its first act when it discusses the difficulties of soldiers returning from war, not just with Steve but with Black Widow, Falcon (an Afghan vet), and even the Winter Soldier itself.  But as the film's plot develops this strand fades into the background, since even Steve's newfound ambivalence about following orders can't justify the mayhem he causes without an additional discovery of perfidy at SHIELD's core.
  
  More successful are Steve's growing friendships with Black Widow and Falcon (though it's a shame that the SHIELD plot shunts the actual Winter Soldier, and the dilemma that his identity poses for Steve, to the side; this is clearly setting up the next film in the Captain America series, but if nothing else it makes the film's subtitle puzzlingly inapt), but this does nothing to alleviate the feeling that Winter Soldier is centerless--especially as the film eventually comes to seem as if it were as much Black Widow and Nick Fury's (Samuel L. Jackson) story as Steve's.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing--if Marvel is trying to build the MCU as a fully integrated, multi-part story (which is a rather interesting thing to do with feature films, especially in the risk-averse blockbuster division), then The Winter Soldier shakes up the universe's status quo quite impressively and sets up situations that the next several films (and the TV series Agents of SHIELD, which might now require a name change) will be dealing with.  And it does so while delivering several very good action set pieces that flow together much more smoothly than in most MCU films.  I just wish the actual Captain America didn't end up getting lost in the shuffle.
  
  
• The Amazing Spider-Man 2 - Two movies in, the second Spider-Man series remains the most inessential of today's superhero franchises.  Which is not to say that there's anything actually wrong with these films.  In some respects, in fact, I think that the new series improves on Sam Raimi's trilogy.  Andrew Garfield, though obviously too handsome to play geeky loser Peter Parker, is very good as the wisecracking, irreverent Spider-Man, both in and out of his costume, and manages to convey the frustrations of being a troubled teenager and a superhero without sinking to the kind of depths of angst that made Tobey Maguire frequently unwatchable.  Garfield also has a better rapport with Emma Stone's Gwen Stacy than Maguire did with Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane, and the fact that Gwen knows Peter's secret and assists in his crimefighting helps to balance the film and take some of the weight of its storytelling off his shoulders.  Perhaps most importantly, between a new director and improvements in CGI, the new Spider-Man films look a hell of a lot better than the old ones, and the exhilaration of swinging through the city with Spider-Man is far more palpable in them, even in 2D.
  
  Still, for all that the Amazing Spider-Man films have good performances and effects, these are not so good, in themselves, as to justify the films' existence, or the time and money we spend watching them.  Neither is the plot of this sequel--in which Jamie Foxx (as the first black character of any import in both Spider-Man trilogies, which makes the fact that he's a villain all the more unfortunate) runs afoul of that source of all mischief, OsCorp, and gains power over electricity, while Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan, magnetic in his few scenes but wasted by a script that can't wait to turn him into a monster) goes through the motions of his counterpart's character are in the first trilogy--terribly interesting.  Which begs the question: why, apart from the fact that Sony doesn't want to lose the rights to the character, should anyone care about these films?  Like its predecessor, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 makes a faint stab at charting its own path by developing the story of Peter's parents and their connection to his powers.  But as in the previous film, this story is advanced only infinitesimally.  From what I've read, Sony are trying to develop a megafranchise similar to the MCU by hanging it on the skeleton of this mystery, and then presumably developing it in other films not featuring Spider-Man, but this does not make this plot's halting progress here any more tolerable or compelling.  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ends with a huge (and yet heavily telegraphed, for anyone who reads the comics or who reads people who reads the comics) development, which could potentially take the Spider-Man character in interesting directions.  But it's asking quite a bit for a film series to go two films--the latter of them absurdly overlong--before starting to find its own identity.

Recent Movie Roundup 4

The summer of three plus one.

1. Spider-Man 3 (2007) - I appear to be one of the few people on the planet to have liked the second Spider-Man film, mainly because, rather than reiterating its character's core concept as so many other superhero films do (Batman: the fine line between fighting evil and becoming it; X-Men: being different is something to be celebrated, not feared, or lorded over others) it expands upon it, using it as jumping-off point for character development. The first (and, I've always thought, severely over-praised) Spider-Man film got the 'great power = great responsibility' formula out of the way, and while the second film plays around in the same neighborhood it ultimately uses the Spider-Man framework to expand on the theme of heroism, ultimately bringing Peter to the realization that his doesn't originate in his superpowers, and that even ordinary people can be heroic from time to time. The third film takes the same premise and uses it to discuss the journey to adulthood, and the necessity of casting away the simple, one word definitions that told us who we were in high school and accepting that adult life is more complicated, and rarely black and white. Unfortunately, the film itself isn't very good (although the dialogue is about ten times better than the overblown, cringeworthy stuff Spider-Man 2 delivered). Its plotting is predictable, none of the leads appear to be working very hard, Bryce Dallas Howard is wasted, and Topher Grace walks away with the whole film, his witty performance putting Maguire's to shame (actually, that's not entirely true. Maguire's best scenes are the ones he shares with Grace). I think the Spider-Man films may be unique among the recent spate of superhero films in that they actually try to replicate the comic's extraordinarily detailed, densely populated universe, and in trying to tell more than one kind of story about their character, but their ambition repeatedly outstrips their capabilities.


2. Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End (2007) - better than the second film (hardly a great achievement), but not nearly as much fun, or as funny, as the first. The problem is first that the film isn't trying to be fun, but instead shoots for a muddled convolutedness that neither the characters nor their universe are complex enough to support. A bigger problem, however, is that some characters just work better as supporting characters than as leads, and Captain Jack Sparrow is one of them (the same holds, by the way, for the other Captain Jack). Orlando Bloom catches a lot of flak for his blank performances in all three films, and there's no question that he isn't delivering on the same level as any of the other leads. That said, Bloom has the unenviable task of playing straight man to an overacting Johnny Depp, a slightly-less overacting Geoffrey Rush, and a love interest who seems to have become an emo cross between Dark Phoenix and Xena. It's no wonder he gets lost in the shuffle, but in the one or two scenes in which he comes to the fore, he presents an interesting combination of intelligence and naiveté, and we get a glimpse of the far more compelling film (not films, as there is really not enough story here to justify two 2+ hour movies) that might have been made with Will in the central role and Jack as the chaotic neutral. Apart from that, there are a few fun and energetic scenes (the shipboard wedding was particularly enjoyable) and I still care enough about the characters to be slightly miffed at the raw deal that Will and Elizabeth get at the end of the story (I also join in the chorus of complaints at Elizabeth's apparently domestic role in the ten years between the end of the story and the post-credits coda. Making her a superhero pirate is absurd, but if you're going to do it, don't back down), but Jack Davenport is criminally underused and, after successfully skirting the issue for two movies, Elizabeth's 'they may take our lives, but they will never take our ability to rape, pillage and murder indiscriminately' speech tossed me right out of the story.


3. Zodiac (2007) - I knew, going into David Fincher's latest film, that unless he was planning to play very fast and loose with the facts of history, he was not going to reveal the identity of the Zodiac killer, who attacked at least nine people (killing seven of them) in various parts of California in the late 60s and early 70s, and was never caught or definitively identified. Going into the film, however, I trusted that Fincher would be able to make something other than a mystery out of the story. He doesn't seem to have done this, or at least, he doesn't seem to have done enough to justify nearly three hours of story. The film's main point seems to be an examination of the ways in which the Zodiac investigation consumes three men--a San Francisco police detective who barely manages to walk away from the investigation with his career intact (Mark Ruffalo, in a solid but perpetually overshadowed performance); a crime reporter for a San Francisco newspaper who descends into alcoholism and becomes a ranting recluse (Robert Downey Jr., giving as good a performance as ever, but the character is not sufficiently explored, and it is at any rate perhaps time to admit that Downey doesn't so much portray characters as give the same, delightful, performance in every film he's in); and a cartoonist for the same newspaper, who allows his career and family life to gutter as he pursues the killer for reasons that not even he fully understands (an excellent Jake Gyllenhaal, although the adjective is somewhat redundant). Unfortunately, this is a fairly flimsy hook on which to hang an entire story. Once the point is made, all that's left are Fincher's excellent historic recreations. I was particularly impressed with his depictions of the murders, which manage to strike just the right midpoint between accuracy and sensationalism (it's hard to believe that this is the same man who made Se7en, which evinced a nearly pornographic fascination with violence). At times, one gets the impression that Fincher is less interested in telling his own story than he is in reporting a real one, and although the result is impressive, it is also mostly hollow.


4. Ocean's Thirteen (2007) - as with Pirates, better than the second film (and again, this can't have been hard) but not as good as the first. What's missing in this case is a sense that anyone--the writer, the characters, the audience--cares about the plot. We are talking, after all, about a heist film. Plot should be key, with complications, fakeouts, and hairpin turns keeping the audience at the edge of their seats. There's a desultory attempt to deliver all of these elements, but the film doesn't even pretend to be nervous about, or even particularly interested in, the outcome of all these efforts. What's important, it repeatedly tells us, are the characters (mainly Clooney, Pitt and Damon, and my use of the actors' names rather than the characters' is entirely deliberate), or rather their unflappable coolness. So intense is the focus on this antarctic coolness that many scenes in the film consist mainly of the character quipping, for the most part rather obliquely, at each other, and just wowing us all with how cool they are. One gets the sense that Soderbergh is trying to recall the original Ocean's Eleven, which was less of a heist film than a chance for the Rat Pack to cut loose and show off how, yes, cool they were. Like the original film, Ocean's Thirteen is a love song to Las Vegas (probably one of the reasons that Thirteen works better than Twelve is that it moves the action back to that city), with the characters waxing nostalgic about the city that used to belong to Sinatra and his cohorts and lamenting its loss. The only problem with this approach is that the Disney-fication of Las Vegas happened a long time ago. The battle was fought and lost, and it is quite strange for Soderbergh to set his story on the Strip--the rotting carcass of Sinatra's Vegas--and pretend that it is still ongoing.


5. Shrek the Third (2007) - this film is not better than the second in the series. Neither is it worse. It is precisely as good, precisely as inoffensive, precisely as unworthy of the original Shrek, and has almost precisely the same plot. Like Shrek 2, it diligently works to reassemble many of the original Shrek's signature elements--pop songs on the soundtrack, humor that references contemporary culture, cultural satire, particularly when it comes to Disney films. The problem, of course, is that in the six years since Shrek wowed us all by eschewing the Disney mentality, these elements have become de rigeur in any animated film. Even Disney is using them these days. Meanwhile, the less revolutionary, but ultimately more important, elements of the original film are nowhere to be found. Shrek the Third is neither clever, nor genuinely funny (except in a few spots involving, you guessed it, Puss in Boots, and in an absolutely uproarious scene in which Shrek pretends to be a spoiled diva), nor emotionally interesting. Like the original Shrek, it has a predictable (Disney-ish) emotional arc--in this case, Shrek panicking about his impending fatherhood and then learning that he has what it takes to be a father by mentoring the heir to the Far Far Away throne--but unlike its predecessor, it doesn't work very hard to sell it, relying on the character's popularity and the story's familiarity to do the writers' work for them. In other words, the Shrek franchise has become just as lazy and soulless as the Disney films it once lambasted, and whereas Disney took decades to get to that point, the folks behind Shrek turn out to have had only one good film in them. Oh well, at least we still have Pixar--bring on Ratatouille!