"The Accountant" sure adds up for me

While The Accountant may be a movie of the sort of formula we’ve seen done before (I first think of George Clooney’s The American or Clive Owen’s The International, but there are others), it’s sure nice when one of these “international web of intrigue” flicks that we think will be so predictable turns out to be so enjoyable.  Sure, The Accountant’s plot is all but paper-thin and the major points of the third act are visible coming down the road from a mile away, but darn it, it’s just done so well that I enjoyed the crap out of this one.

This time around, Ben Affleck plays Christian Wolff (one of many aliases the character utilizes), a seemingly anti-social bean counter with a knack for bluntness.  In truth, he has a high-functioning form of autism with a “Beautiful-Mind”-like talent for numbers, apparently living a quiet life as an accountant, operating out of a non-descript strip mall office and helping struggling locals with their taxes.  On the side, however, he also investigates the money problems of dangerous clients and powerful corporations and “settling accounts” by any means necessary.  Having this sort of clientele is not without its risks, however, and thankfully Wolff was raised by his Army SpecOps father to hone and channel his disability, and is now an expert marksman and ass-kicker, should any such complications arise.  In an attempt to find some more legitimate business, his unseen secretary/handler/confidante (I know, it’s getting goofy-sounding, but just roll with it for now) steers him towards a freelance job investigating the books of a robotics company headed by Lamar Black (John Lithgow), where a low-level employee (Anna Kendrick) has discovered some accounting discrepancies.  

While there are three sets of characters to follow through the movie, and all of the supporting actors are terrific (maybe with the exception of Lithgow and Kendrick, but admittedly, neither had much screen time to work with), it’s obvious that this is Affleck’s movie, and he carried it with ease upon his now Rock-like shoulders.  Embracing the tics and maddening intensity of a true autistic, Affleck demonstrates once again how he has honed his acting skills into a much more restrained, nuanced performance than I believe he could have delivered a decade ago.  This is an actor who no longer accepts being a weak link in any of his films, and has worked his way to deserving leading-man status.

Director Gavin O’Connor (Miracle, Pride and Glory) brings to life a script that has been floating around Hollywood for several years (and even landed on the 2011 “Black List” of best unproduced screenplays), using flashbacks and changes in character perspective to deftly juggle the film’s numerous narrative threads. Admittedly, the movie occasionally drifts into territory that borders on farcical, but it always manages to rein itself in at just the right moment before straining the limits of credulity to the breaking point.  He succeeds at striking a balance between action and solemnity that will feel instantly familiar to fans of his well-received MMA drama Warrior.

The tone O’Connor sets is probably what I enjoyed about most about the movie.  With so many Bourne-esque thrillers of the last twenty years remaining so dour and serious throughout their runtime, The Accountant has just a handful of winks or dry-humor moments to break the tension for just a second without coming across as silly.  The result is a thriller that’s been tossed into a blender with a gleefully silly action flick and has come out far more compelling than either of those ideas would have been on their own, and also comes as a welcome reminder that even though the box office these days tends to be overrun with sequels, remakes, reboots and “re-imaginings,” it might be possible that Hollywood hasn’t quite run out of great ideas just yet.

"Ex Machina" brings Frankenstein to the Modern Day

Years ago, I reviewed Steven Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence, and said that while I could not honestly say anything about the quality of the movie other than how excellently-made it was, I could not recommend it. Despite how wonderful a storyteller Spielberg is, I believed he was asking his audience to do something that I found to not only be impossible, but also immoral - to presume that Man can artificially replicate human emotion. In my review of that film, I explained how I firmly believe that, despite the scientific wonders of which Mankind is capable, there are some things that are beyond science, things such love and pain. I always find myself hindered when watching any story about “robots” interacting with humans, as it seems to me that almost without fail, the story is asking me to feel some sort of sympathy for the robot/artificial construct in question, and I can’t feel sympathy for such a construct any more than I could feel sympathy for a toaster, or a hedge trimmer, or my cell phone. No matter what task or action it performs, or how it seems to display some human reaction, nothing will change the fact that IT IS NOT REAL.

Thus, the dilemma I faced when watching Alex Garland’s Ex Machina recently ("Ex Machina" being derived from the old literary device "Deux ex Machina," literally "God from the Machine," meaning some unexpected power or event saving a seemingly hopeless situation). We, the audience, are represented by young Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a lower- to mid-level programmer at a mammoth search engine company (called “BlueBook,” but who are we kidding? It’s Google) who is selected, seemingly at random, to visit the mountain retreat/estate/laboratory of the company’s founder, Nathan (Oscar Isaacs) for a week. While there, he is to administer a Turing Test to an artificial intelligence construct Nathan has created, a female-shaped robot called Ava (Alicia Vikander). 

What’s a “Turing Test,” you ask? It’s a scenario in which a computer or some other construct interacts with a human to a degree that the human is unable to determine that the computer is not human. Nathan is so firm in the belief that he has created what amounts to a new life form that he even tells Caleb straight up that Ava is artificial, confident that even with that knowledge, Caleb will come to accept her as indistinguishable from human. 

Nathan is portrayed as an almost total megalomaniac, freely admitting using his Google-like search engine database illegally as raw data for constructing his artificial intelligence. As if his desire to “become God” (his words) wasn’t evidence enough, his regaling Caleb with the young man’s fantasy of a bachelor pad stocked with alcohol, unlimited WiFi, a weight room and a silent, leggy Asian servant girl should seal the deal for you. He lectures Caleb on how his creation is not only wonderful, but is the next logical step in evolution, explaining how attraction and sexuality can be reduced to mere ones and zeros and programmed into a construct, resulting in reactions indistinguishable from “natural.” 

Garland’s clever screenplay is essentially a three-character stage play, with the majority of the film taking place in one location with the three speaking characters (and a non-speaking one). Over the course of the week Caleb is present, Nathan passive-aggressively steers Caleb into developing an emotional connection to Ava (well, perhaps not even all that passively). He watches the interview sessions between Caleb and Ava via video monitors, sessions during which, strangely, Caleb is the one sealed in a locked enclosure, not Ava. We already know Nathan is playing Caleb and Ava off one another, attempting to engender sympathy in each for the other, but during almost regular power outages, Ava begins trying to get Caleb to aid her in escaping her creator. Garland keeps us wondering whether it is Nathan playing Caleb off Ava, or if it’s Ava playing him off Nathan, or if both possibilities are true. 

I say that Caleb is the only sympathetic character in this movie, but perhaps I should be more specific and say that he is the only HUMAN character for whom to feel sympathy. The vibe of the scenes between Caleb and Ava are obviously to evoke feeling for the robotic construct, such that Caleb will deceive Nathan and help the machine “escape,” but I again remind the reader that I can’t fall for that trap. If anything, I found myself amazed at how someone as supposedly intelligent as Caleb, someone specifically trained in computer science and the application/manipulation of data, could so quickly fall in “love” with something showing its wires. While I imagine his fate at the end of the film was supposed to engender a different reaction from me, I couldn’t help but feel that the dum-dum sorta asked for it.

Alex Garland has written some very good science fiction movies, 28 Days Later and Sunshine, just to name a couple, and I reiterate that this screenplay makes for a fascinating, engrossing story. This movie being his directing debut, he shows some skill in guiding the three actors playing the lead roles, as they are all wonderful in conveying innocence, insanity and awareness, respectively.  

Oh, there are discussions galore to be had about the subtexts and undertones in this film - Nathan’s God-complex, the sexism in his conscious decision to make all of his constructs in the female form and have them serve him, Ava’s ultimate fate and the coming of the Technological Singularity, etc. I won’t delve into those, however, in an effort to keep this essay a reasonable length. I will say that I honestly don’t know if my inability to enjoy this movie will make me the exception or the rule. I can see how some may find it thoroughly enjoyable. I imagine lots of people, Sci-Fi fans and not-so-much fans, will find Ex Machina something to generate lots of deep thought afterwards. 

However, my intellect and my Faith prevent me from following stories such as this one to the emotional places I believe their tellers wish me to go. This may very well just be some personality flaw that only affects me and prevents me from enjoying such entertainment, and perhaps might not affect any other viewer at all. As Popeye so famously said, however, “I yam what I yam,” so I cannot in good conscience proclaim Ex Machina to be an enjoyable film. A well-made one, without question, and one that can I can admire, but not enjoy.

The (Gorgeous, but Empty-headed) Man From U.N.C.L.E.

There are times when I go to a movie knowing it will be something akin to dating a supermodel - it’ll look fantastic, but there really won’t be all that much beneath the surface.  Sure, we all want things in which we invest time and money to have deeper qualities than mere beauty, but who in his (or her) right mind would turn down the chance to look at Kate Upton for a couple of hours? It’s not like you’re committing your life to her, and Hell, there might even be a few laughs involved.
That allegory can more often than not be used to try to describe Guy Ritchie’s movies.  None of his films will ever take a place alongside other landmark pieces of cinema, but they’re pretty much all lovely to look at, and (with the exception of Swept Away, of course) can be pretty darn entertaining.  His Sherlock Holmes reboots from a few years back may have been rather soulless, but they sure looked good, and thankfully had two leading actors with great chemistry to provide witty banter that provided enough entertainment to gloss over the story’s flaws.  The Man From U.N.C.L.E. follows this trend to the letter.
The movie (it really should be “MEN From U.N.C.L.E., shouldn’t it?) is, of course, a retread of the television series from the 1960s, and regrettably one that I have never-not-once had the opportunity to see.  It capitalized on the James Bond/Cold War-spy genre that was duplicated and ripped off by so many movie and television productions of the day, and made stars of Robert Vaughan and David McCallum.  Thankfully, this reincarnation avoids the trope of "updating" the source material and leaves the story set in the Cold War-60s and follows the joint CIA/KGB team of Napoleon Solo (Man of Steel’s Henry Cavill) and Illya Kuryakin (The Lone Ranger’s Armie Hammer) as they meet, team up, and attempt to prevent a criminal organization from producing an atomic bomb. They romp around East Berlin.  They romp around Rome.  They romp around the evil super-villain’s island lair.  They save the world.  Simple.  How complicated a plot do you really need? 
What makes Man From U.N.C.L.E. enjoyable is Ritchie’s obvious love for the style and look of early-60s cinema, which is glaringly obvious throughout the movie.  First and foremost, the muted colors and rainbow lens-flares, evoking the beginnings of the time when the majority of movies, not just the occasional spectacle picture, would be made in color.  The clipped dialogue spoken by the characters, the location shooting, and those oversized, yellow subtitles all harken back to the heyday of Fellini and Antonioni.  The music he uses throughout, the European pop of the day and Daniel Pemberton’s score, are great undertones to both the action and the scenes bridging the action. Ritchie’s editing pace is something of a trademark of his, as well, and he keeps this movie moving along at almost breakneck speed, never allowing the audience to linger on anything long enough to realize it may be missing something. Ritchie’s technical skills make this movie pleasant to watch, despite its shortcomings, which sadly are primarily found in the two things for which people primarily watch movies - the story and the actors.
Ritchie and his producer Lionel Wigram wrote the screenplay, and it oh-so-very much could’ve used another pass or two from a more competent screenwriter. Sure, the plot doesn’t NEED to be overly complicated, but I kept waiting for something that wasn’t stereotypical Our Man Flint-type stuff to happen, and it never did.  Even the villain’s ultimate fate was so underwhelming that I found myself expecting her to pop back up before the credits rolled, but no, that was actually her end…
Cavill plays Napoleon Solo as Chris Parnell played James Bond in Saturday Night Live skits, with all the lower jaw-jutting, smug smile-wearing, lady-killer strutting arrogance you would expect from someone making light of Sean Connery in his glory days.  Hammer doesn’t do all that much better, spitting out his something-akin-to-Russian accent with a bit more “Moose and Squirrel” than one can forgive, and the supposed sparks he shares with Gaby (Alicia Vikander), the East German defector they have along for the ride, cannot be taken seriously.  Vikander is the trio’s saving grace, being the only one seemingly having a real experience, and not one right out of a “Bullwinkle” cartoon.  Hugh Grant, as the British Intelligence operative who will become the team’s supervisor, is also great in his limited screen time, but when is Hugh Grant NOT fun to watch?
The overall effect of all this is to leave one with the impression Guy Ritchie merely staged a spy-themed GQ photo shoot, which is not in and of itself a bad thing.  As stated earlier, looking at pretty things can be entertaining.  Seeing The Man From U.N.C.L.E. may even leave you with the same feeling you might have if you were ever so fortunate as to have that chance to date a supermodel - you may very well come to the end of it knowing you enjoyed it, and that it was beautiful, but you sure can’t remember a thing it had to say.

"Ant-Man" isn’t short on fun

The “Heist” movie.  What an under-served film genre.  Some of the most exciting action/thrillers in film history fall under the “heist movie” heading. Most recently, folks would probably name the Clooney/Pitt Ocean’s Eleven (and Twelve… and Thirteen) flicks, but there are also such entries as Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, Michael Mann’s Heat, and the original Italian Job (although the remake wasn’t awful, either).  When Marvel’s chief of production Kevin Fiege announced all those months ago that Ant-Man would be Marvel’s “heist” movie, my interest was piqued.  Sure, it’s the next installment in the ongoing Marvel Cinematic Universe series, so I’d have gotten in line and bought my ticket even if I knew it was going to just be two hours of Captain America and Falcon doing their laundry.  More casual moviegoers will probably hope for something a bit more dramatically involved, however.

So what’s it about, you ask?  Well, Paul Rudd plays Scott Lang, a professional thief in San Francisco, who winds up helping old, affluent scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) prevent his protégé, Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), from doing terrible things with a special suit that allows the wearer to shrink down to a bug-size super-soldier. Pym has a suit of his own, which he gives to Lang. With the help of Pym’s envious daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly, who, in a pageboy wig, doesn’t look a day over Barbara Hershey), Pym trains Lang to break into his lab, which Cross controls, dismantle the new suit and wipe out all the data and research necessary to produce more.  And that is mercifully that.

If you’re not aware of all the drama involved in bringing Ant-Man to the screen, that most likely means you’re not one to follow the ins and outs of the movie industry and probably don’t care.  Take my word for it, though - given how much went on in the eight years it took to get this movie to the big screen, it is amazing that the finished product is as good as it is. Director Peyton Reed (Down With Love, Bring It On) was a marvelous (no pun intended) choice to replace Shaun of the Dead's Edgar Wright, who left the project due to those infamous “creative difference” a mere weeks before filming was to begin.  Reed’s experience with placing a light-hearted, but not outright ridiculous tone on material proves we should never doubt Marvel’s decisions about what’s right for THEIR material.  The way I imagine Edgar Wright would’ve made this film would almost certainly have resulted in something that was more HIS and not Marvel’s, and we just can’t have that, now can we…?

What allows Ant-Man to flourish is that it largely turns its back on the solemnity and self-importance that occasionally hamper Marvel features and instead traffics in the same sort of freewheeling frivolity seen in last summer's Guardians of the Galaxy.  For that, thank the four screenwriters — Wright, Attack the Block's Joe Cornish, “Funny or Die”'s Adam McKay and Rudd himself — and their ability to include witticisms both verbal ("tales to astonish" is there for the comic fans) and visual (I loved -the bug zapper, and is that oversized toy with the happy face a nod to Ghostbusters?).  Rudd and a scene-stealing Michael Peña (as Lang's ex-con buddy) further contribute to the gee-whiz spirit, with Douglas and Lilly staking out most of the dramatic content.  Even Ant-Man’s encounter with a particular Avenger, while obviously shoehorned into the movie as a means of tying the movie to the larger Universe, was written and executed so well that it didn’t bother me or make me feel the plot had ground to a halt.

The effects are excellent in general, particularly the final showdown in a child’s bedroom.  The sequence is such a contrast to the world-sized, city-destroying spectacle climaxes of most superhero flicks that it must be applauded for merely trying it.  That the film pulls it off is even better. Ironically, only the film’s ants fail to completely convince.  Granted, they're not laughable creations on the order of the insects seen in the '70s shlock flick Empire of the Ants, but they're obvious enough as CGI to bug all but the most forgiving of Marvel devotees.

While I learned enough about all the protagonist characters to interest me and bring me to care about them, I admit I’d like to have seen a bit more development of the villain, Darren Cross.  I suppose in one sense, he’s the bad guy and we see that he’s a sicko, and that should be enough, but part of me wished for some more insight on why this guy was so intense in his dislike-bordering-on-hatred for his mentor/father-figure, and how on Earth he’d risen so far being so obvious a nut-job. The movie is called Ant-Man, though, not “Yellowjacket,” so if this is my only beef with the film, it must be a pretty trivial one.

The final result of all this is that I must say Marvel appears to be bulletproof. I certainly wouldn’t begin to think of placing Ant-Man on a list with such “heist” classics as I’ve listed earlier, but it doesn't do that label any disservice.  While that may be the mindset the brain-trust at Marvel used as inspiration for the movie’s tone, it’s not what actually resulted.  But that’s fine - what did result was an entry in an on-going film series that fits perfectly, yet can be viewed independently and enjoyed all by itself.  Ant-Man is funny, clever blast of a movie.

"Fifty Shades of Grey" leaves me wondering where the other forty-nine are…

I don’t quite know where to begin with this one.  Movies that result from cultural-phenomenon books present a bit of a quandary for a reviewer.  One is expected to review a film as a solitary entity, standing alone and free of whatever faults the source material may have had.  On the other hand, it’s unreasonable to expect a writer to express an issue with a part of such a movie without knowing that some reader somewhere will be shouting at the review “yeah, but in the book, blah, blah, blah, so of course, you don’t get it!!!” There’s no denying some story has existed before, and there are times when it must be acknowledged.  So, let’s get started with some acknowledging...

I even wonder how much a synopsis of the film is necessary, as the book was such a cultural happening three years ago that any reader is most likely already familiar with at least the basic premise.  We all know of the titillating aspects of the story, and how it opening on Valentine’s Day weekend is something of a sick joke on Universal’s part (is THIS the kind of tale you equate with your affection for whomever you hold dearest…?).  Millions of women, and a few men, I suppose, have lost themselves in the modern fairy tale-type story of young college grad Anastasia Steele and her surprising and unexpected “romance” with the cold, intimidating, dominating billionaire Christian Grey.  I’m sure there are quite a few babies out there that were born exactly nine months after their mothers finished the juicier parts of the first book.  Given how I have no intention of reading it, or the other two, I’ll just take the incredible sales figures of the books as testament to the story’s quality.  The movie is what we’re talking about today. 

I hesitate to call Fifty Shades of Grey a flawed film, because I find it hard to point to any individual thing in the movie and think that fixing it would have resulted in a better product.  Dakota Johnson conveys the naiveté of Anastasia believably, and while Jamie Dornan as the movie’s titular Grey character comes off as a bit of a cold fish, one could argue that might have been appropriate for the character. The dreary, rainy Seattle and other Washington State settings (locations all duplicated in the Hollywood-North that Vancouver, British Columbia has become) fit into the “gray” tone of the film, as with two hundred days of rain per year, I imagine there’s not much else for people up there to do besides stay indoors and beat on one another with whips and chains.  I even found director Sam(antha) Taylor-Johnson’s choices of where to place the rare instance of brighter color pretty impressive, the occasional red or blue punctuating some particular emotion in a given scene.  Even the “money” shots of the bondage/domination practices that everyone came to see are done as tastefully as they possibly could be, avoiding the NC-17 rating that would result if such a story were told in any realistic fashion.

The point where Fifty Shades of Grey fails can be placed before production even started - the story itself is a load of crap.  Let’s face it - it’s an open secret that the source material for this tale began its life as Twilight fan-fiction, and even after being reworked by its author into an original work, it still appeals to the same crowd as drugstore romance novels once did.  As such, when turned into something visual, its inadequacies are laid out for all to see. The poor-innocent-girl-meets-maddeningly-handsome-rich-gentleman story is as old as time, and there isn’t much variation on the theme here, with the possible exception of the addition of a ball-gag and dog collar or two… or three.  Waking up in opulent hotel rooms, having drivers whisk you off in black limousines to meet Mr. Handsome, who will fly you away in his helicopter… all of the stereotypical Cinderella-story tropes are here, and all details period-appropriate for the early 21st Century in the Tech Capital of the Pacific Northwest. 

The movie follows these two primary characters along what is supposed to be an evolution for both of them, but they are both such cardboard-cutouts that I couldn’t invest myself in them emotionally.  I believe the word “telecommunications” was uttered once at the beginning of the film to explain how this young hipster has more money than Bill Gates at the ripened, experienced age of twenty-seven, but that’s as far as we go in learning about how this young pup has all this “success” before most men have made it out of their first cubicle.  We got a little more explanation about Anastasia’s roots than Christian’s, but what little we learned about him was of how he is now, not his past.  We did learn he was adopted, but not much else after that.  

This is the point where I begin to hear all the readers out there screaming “you learn all that from what they say in the second book!” Fine and dandy, but I’m talking about this movie, not some book I’ll never read, and this movie didn’t tell me enough to make me care about these people, and if this dialogue was brought over from those books, then it should’ve been dumped for more life-like speech.  Lines which may work on the printed page of best-selling novels are sometimes cringe-worthy when actually heard spoken aloud (as Harrison Ford claims he once said to George Lucas on the set of Return of the Jedi, “you can write this shit, George, but you sure can’t SAY it!)

Taylor-Johnson only has one previous feature film to her directorial credit, 2009’s Nowhere Boy, a speculative-type study of the early life of John Lennon.  I have not seen this film, but I see on IMdB that it received widely-varied reviews, further evidence for me that Fifty Shades’ failings may not all be her fault.  As I mentioned earlier, I thought she did as good a job as she possibly could have with what she was assigned to do, although I wonder if she had the filmmaking wisdom to realize this material needed lots of reworking before any frame should have been shot, or was she so grateful for the job that she didn’t want to rock the boat and suggest changes to something that was already so wildly successful in another medium.  Alas, I may never know.

There possibly could be a very interesting story about the emotional damage that would lead someone into such deviant sexual habits, and how those personality shortcomings could destroy any potential for a fulfilling, healthy relationship… Oh, wait, there has been - it was Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris.  THAT’S the movie this flick wishes it could be.

"Guardians of the Galaxy" is Out-of-This-World Fun!

Can you imagine some young-buck producer trying to pitch this idea to some big-wig studio boss of yesteryear’s Hollywood?  Eager producer storms into studio head’s office and starts, “Hey, J.B.!  How ‘bout this? We take five characters from comic books that hardly anybody has heard of (only one of ‘em human, by the way, since the others are a green gal, a walking tree, a talking raccoon and an oversized literal-minded wrestler), and run ‘em all through space spitting out rapid-fire dialogue at each other; we fill the soundtrack with a bunch of songs from forty years ago (that most of the kids in the audience won’t have ever heard of), have ‘em fight a villain that wants to destroy everything just because he can, and make the movie’s climax the almost-destruction of a planet that has nothing to do with any of the characters! Whatta ya think, J.B.!?!?”

(studio boss takes long pull on cigar before speaking…) “Kid, get the Hell outta my office!”

Well, thankfully, old Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer aren’t behind some desk at the Mouse House these days.  Behold the world-devouring behemoth that Marvel Studios has become!  Forget that Disney owns them - the House that Stan Lee Built would be ruling the world right now even without Disney’s might behind it.  Guardians of the Galaxy is without a doubt the most off-beat of all the entries Marvel Studios has created for its Cinematic Universe to date, and if it isn’t the most pure, all-out fun movie they’ve made yet, it’s only surpassed by the original Iron Man.  If ever there was a movie to fit the term “Popcorn movie,” this is it.

Attempting to summarize the plot would serve no purpose other than to create a less-than-stellar impres-sion of the movie, as it boils down to a megalomaniac bad guy who wants to kill everything/everybody want-ing some Orb that contains an Infinity Stone that would help him do exactly that, and lots of disparate characters who at first dislike each other coming together to prevent him from getting it.  It’s not a horribly original idea, but as Shakespeare (or some wise old soul or another) once said, there are only seven or eight really original stories in all of mankind’s history that have ever been told, anyway.  

The Orb, a Hitchcockian “Maguffin” if ever there was one, is never fully ex-plained, other than the Infinity Stone it contains, but who cares?   The beef Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) has with the Kree Empire over their peace treaty with the planet Xandar (just stay with me, folks) is murky at best, but again, who cares? The involvement of the mad Titan, Thanos (an uncredited and unrecognizable Josh Brolin), gives comic-book nerds like me a big thrill, but the average movie-goer may not feel a surge of nerd-gasm over it. Yet again, who cares??? The movie is fun, folks - I mean really, REALLY fun - and that’s what counts.

Rapid-fire smart-aleck one-liners abound here, as all five of the protagonists are very funny, and in five very different ways.  The wise-ass human thief Peter Quill/ ”Star-Lord” (Chris Pratt) seems to draw all the action to him, and will all-but-certainly begin to melt the tough exterior of the green space-ninja-badass Gamora before film’s end (one could begin to wonder just how many colors Zoe Saldana can play over the course of her movie career - I count three so far).  Sure, the Walking Tree only says three words over and over (“I AM GROOT”, croaked to great effect by Vin Diesel), but the timing of those words, and the actions and facial expressions that accompany those words, are priceless.  A computer-generated talking raccoon named Rocket may strike you as ludicrous, and it may very well be, but it works here, primarily due to Bradley Cooper’s voice-over performance, which would be Oscar-worthy if such a category existed.  All five characters fit a stereotype, yet all five seem to be in on the joke and exploit that knowledge to comedic effect.  One couldn’t ask more of a screenplay.  

Director James Gunn, whose primary claim to fame before now has been the indie horror/comedy Slither (which I have not yet seen, but really want to), has created such a fantastic mood for this mish-mash of science fiction, slapstick comedy and buddy/action movie that I marvel (no pun intended) at Marvel’s foresight in realizing how perfect he would be to bring this concept to the screen.  With so much going on in the script, he finds ways to relate important stuff to the audience in a way that we get it, or at least enough of it to keep us up to speed.  His use of the 70s-era pop tunes that litter the soundtrack is one way he keeps us grounded, and are almost part of the overall joke, as the characters all hear and react to them.  They keep us, the audience, rooted in the unbelievable story, too, reminding us that “Star-Lord” is just a dude from Earth, just like us (well, most of us, anyway).  

Guardians of the Galaxy has some of the same “vibe” that the rest of the Marvel movies do, but in some other hard-to-describe way, doesn’t really feel like a part of the same series.  Maybe because there is no “superhero” for the audience to latch on their attention, the movie feels separated from the Earth-bound flicks we’ve seen so far. Nonetheless, with Thanos as part of the mix, and given his post-credit appearance after the first Avengers film, we know all of these paths will meet at some cinematic point in the future, so we have that to look forward to. In the meantime, we have this movie, very possibly the most fun flick of 2014, to revel in, and thanks be to Nerd Heaven that Disney’s studio bosses these days seem to be a little more open-minded than those of olden days might have been.

"Legends of the Fall" revisited

In the autumn of 1994, I saw Legends of the Fall on its original theatrical run.  I looked forward to this film for two reasons: Edward Zwick, the director of Glory, and Anthony Hopkins, whom I am yet to see give a bad performance in anything (and given his volume of work, that’s saying something).  I drove 45 miles to a “decent” movie theater, as I did for most all movies in those days, as my local theater was only worthy of bad porn.  I braced myself for what I was sure was going to be one of the best films of that year, as I sat in the dark and marveled at the panoramas of the Montana countryside, so beautifully photographed by Oscar-winning cinematographer John Toll.  I fell a little in love with beautiful Julia Ormond, who so sadly vanished from the American movie scene for so many years after this film was released.  And then I left the theater greatly disappointed.

Why, you ask?  Because the hero and central focus of the movie, Brad Pitt’s Tristan, is a JACKASS!!  A completely spoiled rotten, irresponsible, unethical, self-centered JACKASS!!  Have I made it clear enough that he was an utter and total JACKASS!!??  I hope that I have.  Allow me to explain.

Hopkins portrays a grizzled old veteran of the Indian Wars of the 1870s, bitter at the Indian policy his government ordered him to enforce.  He ranches cattle now, a few years shy of World War I, and has three sons on this ranch, along with several Native American hangers-on.  His wife has long left him, but his youngest and oldest sons have their mother’s disposition.  Only the middle son, Pitt’s Tristan, is his father’s child.  After the youngest child, played by E.T.’s Henry Thomas, brings a European fiancee’ (Ormond) home, he leaves for the war in Europe, where he promptly dies.  This leaves the other two brothers to fight for their dead brother’s fiancee’s hand.  Got it?

I had thought that now, twenty years later, I might would see this film again and find something I had missed the first time and see it in a new light.  After a Braves game a week or so ago, insomnia sets in, so I spent an evening flipping around Netflix and stumbled across it amongst the suggestions the service so all-knowingly provides.  Never let it be said that wisdom will overpower insomnia, as I did the dumb thing and cued up the movie, and alas, two hours and fifteen minutes later, I find that I’m going to have a very long day at work the next day, and that my take on this flick hasn’t changed.

Just as I remembered, almost all of the parts here are wonderful, except for one very essential property: a worthwhile hero.  The plot comes from a novella of the same name, written by author Jim Harrison, whose work has been compared favorably to Faulkner’s and Hemmingway’s.  Of course, I’ve not read the source material, so I cannot speak as to how faithfully Zwick and his screenwriters adapted Tristan’s actions for the big screen.  I can (and will) speak of the film, and will state that the movie is not horrible at all, because it has several good things going for it.  The locations are lushly photographed, the costumes and sets are perfectly detailed, and all of the performances are terrific, even Pitt’s.  Here’s an example of how one can assemble the perfect cast, the perfect director and the perfect crew in the perfect setting and begin to make a can’t-miss film, only to end up with something less than perfect.  It is not the performance of Pitt’s character that lessens this film; it is the character itself.

Legends of the Fall has the feel of a grand American Epic, in the fashion of Red River and The Big Country (both of which are amongst my favorite Westerns of all time).  The story winds through the years after World War I and the Prohibition era, with the characters aging and changing as they advance in years and alter their outlook on the world.  In that sense, it is an epic.  However, in the course of the epic events happening in these characters’ world, we’re presented a case study of a family that is dysfunctional in epic proportions, and the obvious hero of the entire story is so self-centered, immature and asinine in his choices and behavior that I can feel no sympathy for him, only for the folks whom his choices affect, often disastrously so.

Leaving a woman who loves him alone with HIS family for years while he wanders the Earth in “search of himself” (and not even having the decency to drop her off in Europe with HER family while he’s headed that way) is just one of numerous instances where this odd son puts those closest to him through absolute Hell.  I’m reluctant to go into much more detail, because as I much as I may loathe this particular character, he is the protagonist of the film and describing his actions in detail would give away too much of the story.  But shouldn’t a protagonist be likable, or least bearable?  It must suffice to say that while I understand a tragic figure can make for good drama, a selfish, stupid one just makes for a tragically wasted film.

Ridley Scott's "The Counselor" leaves me in great need of counseling...

Here's a recipe for a Can't-Miss "Great Hollywood Film" - 1.) take an original screenplay from Cormac McCarthy, the author of such hallmarks of recent American literature as "The Road," "Blood Meridian" and "The Sunset Limited."  2.) Get epic-master Ridley Scott, the director of such crowd-pleasers as Gladiator, Alien and Blade Runner to direct.  3.) Assemble an all-star cast consisting of Oscar winners and nominees like Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt to bring the story to life.  Your result from mixing all these ingredients will without a doubt get you one of the greatest films ever made, no matter what they turn out, right?  Right?  Well...

I watched The Counselor around 8:00 on a Sunday evening, and I am writing this review about eighteen hours later.  I watched the unrated, extended home video edit of the film, not the version that played in theaters last fall and was so savaged by critics and what few moviegoers paid to see it.  I watched it without distraction and without interruption, so as to assure my full attention be devoted to it.  As a result, I have suffered a mostly-sleepless night afterward, having the reprehensible things depicted in this movie invade my dreams and keep me awake for a lot longer than a more enjoyable movie would.  I have struggled to decide just what I think, or more simply, how I even feel, about this film.  I’m still struggling, but perhaps crafting this essay will help me decide just what my final opinion should be. 

The Counselor weaves a tale (or tries to) of the titular El Paso lawyer (Fassbender), who is never referred to by any name other than “Counselor,” planning on making some sort of drug deal with a powerful, shadowy Mexican cartel; a one-time occurrence that will theoretically set up him and his bride-to-be (Penelope Cruz) financially for life.  Since he can only afford to fly to Amsterdam and buy a 3-carat stone for her engagement ring, he apparently needs the money something fierce.  He works with a fairly successful drug-dealer acquaintance (Bardem) and a middleman connection to the cartel (Pitt) to make a sale to dealers in Chicago.  Through a series of double-crosses and mistaken assumptions, the Counselor quickly finds just how incredibly naive he has been, how hopeless his predicament is, and how many people will suffer the consequences of his decisions. 

The plot, as much of one as there is, is fairly simple, and mostly unnecessary, as the bare-bones story structure is mostly a means to provide these characters opportunities to have McCarthy-esque philosophical conversations with one another, so I’ll spare you any deeper summarization than that.  Save for a few minor action/violence scenes to bridge scenes of dialogue, the film flows more like one of McCarthy’s stage plays, with a great number of scenes consisting primarily of two characters talking at great length. Of course, there is that much-talked-about scene with Cameron Diaz doing… oh, how shall I say it?... gynecologically immoral things to the windscreen of a Ferrari, but even that scene is a talking scene, a flashback playing over Javier Bardem’s character talking about the event to the Counselor. 

Cormac McCarthy always populates his stories with morally bankrupt figures, and he may have surpassed his quota here.  There are no redeemable characters to be found anywhere in this film, save for the Counselor’s poor fiancee’, although one might could claim the level of her innocence/naivete’ is almost so pathetically great that she deserves what she gets, too.  Cameron Diaz’ portrayal of the cheetah-spot tattooed, cheetah-keeping girlfriend/business manager Malkina is so vampy that it’s either a brilliant acting choice or her acknowledging the absurdity of the character, but I’m not sure which.  Even Brad Pitt is not stretching his acting chops much, as he seems to be pretty much playing the same character he portrayed in Thelma & Louise twenty-two years earlier, but perhaps twenty-two years older, and in the only place in life that character could’ve ended up.  Fassbender and Bardem, however, do a credible job, Bardem in particular chewing the scenery enough to convey his character’s feelings of inferiority when next to the sexually and intellectually superior Malkina. 

I can’t imagine that any of Cormac McCarthy’s written work would translate word-for-word to an audible presentation in any conversationally believable manner.  Now, I’ve never heard any of his works in audiobook form, so I suppose I can’t rule out that medium as a possible mean of enjoying his complex dialogue, but there is a reason that (until now) he has never penned the screenplay for any of his other works adapted to film.  Sure, previous movies based on his books are notable for characters waxing philosophic in rather dreary/poetic ways (think Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men or Matt Damon in All the Pretty Horses), but the screenwriters of those films did a pretty reasonable job of following the Less-is-More rule.  The Counselor, being straight from Cormac McCarthy’s own hand, has no such filter, and for whatever reason, it seems Ridley Scott decided to film every bleepin’ word McCarthy wrote.  For example, Ruben Blades is in only one scene of the movie, speaking to the Counselor over the phone, giving a lengthy Hispanic/New Age-ish existential assessment of the Counselor’s situation, ending by quoting some obscure Mexican poet at length, (literally) driving the Counselor to tears.  Hell, it almost drove ME to tears. 

Avarice seems to be the focal point of whatever moral lesson the film wishes to teach. All of these characters are fabuloulsly wealthy by most any rational person’s definition of the word, yet all of the poor decisions, shady dealings and violent acts the characters exhibit are in pursuit of even greater riches.  The drug trade is the means to that end in this movie, but we never see any drug deals or (with one very brief exception) even any drug use.  There isn’t anything one could construe as a just ending for any of the characters here, so Scott or McCarthy certainly didn’t have any notions of delivering any sort of emotionally satisfying experience to an audience. It seems their only definition of success they possibly could have hoped to achieve was to deliver a blistering morality tale about the inevitable outcome of unchecked greed, and on that level, I suppose I must grant that they did succeed.

In the interest of full disclosure, I remind you that Ridley Scott is one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, so take my views on his work with whatever grains of salt you wish.  His work the last ten years has been spotty, as I acknowledge that his last great work was probably Kingdom of Heaven (and even the theatrical release of that film had structural problems; it was his Director’s Cut that made it to home video that restored lots of excised footage and produced a wonderful film).  Each of his films since, with the possible exception of A Good Year, has had script or story structure problems, probably culminating with how almost-incomprehensible Prometheus turned out to be.  He continues to be the consummate visual artist he has always been, however.  I challenge anyone to deny ALL of his films are visual feasts, and The Counselor is no exception, but I wonder why it seems he cannot identify weak screenplays as he advances in years. There are so many scenes and characters in the Blu-ray version of this movie that serve absolutely no purpose in driving the narrative that I wonder how much Scott’s long-time editor Pietro Scalia was actually in the cutting room during post-production.  Malkina’s visit to a confessional to tease a priest and a scene with John Leguizamo and Dean Norris discussing bodies in barrels are just two such scenes that should have been the first to go.

Did I like The Counselor?  I don’t think this movie is really meant to be “liked.”  It is possible that it is meant to be admired, or even respected.  In the end, it seemed to me that Scott and McCarthy were more intent on illustrating how God laughs at us when we make plans than they were on providing us a tale of redemption from evil or growth from baser desires.  I suppose it is a testament to Scott’s power as a filmmaker that, even in his mid-seventies, he still has the sway to get such a film financed, attract such a cast and get such a story on film despite its obvious shortcomings.   

I can say positive things about the stellar cast and how wonderful a job they all did with what they were given to do.  I can rave about Scott’s gorgeous use of the desert landscapes and corresponding color palettes to make yet another visually luscious film. I can’t see how I could bring myself to say I liked it, however.  As a fan of Ridley Scott, I’m glad I saw it, but I don’t think I’ll be making a point of watching it again.  I’ve lost enough sleep over it already.

Marvel does it again with "Captain America: The Winter Soldier"

The concept of Freedom-versus-Security has been prevalent in the popular discussion to varying degrees for the last decade and a half, perhaps at its most heated these last couple years thanks to the doings of Edward Snowden.  There are some who claim that when our society cried “never again” after that day in September of 2001, we began the possibly-irreversible process of willingly surrendering our freedoms in exchange for some sense of safety.  Perhaps the deep thinkers among us wouldn’t think of looking to an entry in the Marvel cinematic universe for an illustration of this concept, but in a rather simplified fashion, that is just what we find in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  

While nobody would confuse this movie with such 1970s political conspiracy thrillers as The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor, there is a similar vibe running through The Winter Soldier that sets it apart from earlier Marvel films, and makes it possibly the best Marvel film since the first Iron Man movie.  The fear of spoilers shall keep me from outlining the plot of the movie in too much detail, but I suspect that most of those reading this will have a fairly good notion of what’s going on.  Even if you are not pre-educated about the particulars of Captain America’s literary universe, however, this follow-up to the first Captain America solo film three years ago probably serves you better than most of the other Marvel movies, as one could come into this movie cold and not find it very difficult to keep up.

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo and their screenwriters pull off a pretty nifty balancing act, moving the film along from action set piece to action set piece with actual interesting character development, and the development of SEVERAL characters who are dramatically limited by our knowing they will all be included in future movies.  We all read IMdB, so we know who the “Winter Soldier” turns out to be.  We all know (or can surmise) who will turn out to be the movie’s ultimate villain.  We all know that Cap and Natasha and Falcon and Fury will all survive (although one supporting character who has shown up on the S.H.I.E.L.D. television show a couple of times this year did bite the big one in this movie, much to my surprise… oops, Spoiler… sorry).  The trick is telling us a great story and taking us on a cinematic ride despite those limitations, and the Russos manage to do the job.

Here we find “Captain” Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) farther along in his acclimation to modern life than he was when we last saw him in The Avengers, even keeping a small notebook of things he makes a point of researching (the “Rocky” movies, the music of Marvin Gaye, etc.).  He meets Army veteran Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), who will later become the mechanically-winged Falcon, at the beginning of the story, and it is the proverbial Start of a Beautiful Friendship that helps humanize this story and keep it from devolving into a mere collection of action set-pieces. Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow also comes to this movie and provides enough one-liner delivering and wire-work butt-kicking to make it apparent that a lack of her OWN film is something that must be rectified at some point, in my humble opinion.  Thankfully, the chemistry these three actors share, conveying so much of their communication with each other via glances and body language, does a lot to keep the story actually being about something a little more human.  

Samuel L. Jackson’s S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury gets to chew up and spit out dialogue yet again, as only Jackson can do, but he has a bit more plot-driving function in this script than he did in The Avengers, as well as revealing a bit more about the character.  He is even the focal point of perhaps the best action sequence of the movie, a machine-gun filled car chase throughout the streets of Washington, DC (well, it was actually Cleveland, but we can all pretend) where we first run across the metal-armed assassin, the “Winter Soldier.”  

With all that being said, it saddens me to report that Robert Redford is probably the weakest link in this stellar cast.  Playing a S.H.I.E.L.D. executive uber-boss, he definitely embodies a shadier character than he has since Indecent Proposal.  While Redford may be a living movie legend, he wanders through this movie in a vague, stern-grandfatherly manner, never getting very animated, even when the plot may require it, and never totally convincing me he knew what exactly to do with the role.  I’ve always thought him a rather “cold” actor, and that was pretty apparent here.  His final line of dialogue in the film, which I am reluctant to reveal for spoilering reasons, fell so totally flat with me that I almost groaned, but that was the only such moment.

I thoroughly enjoyed this entry in the Marvel movie saga.  I darn well should, as I am exactly the audience at which it is aimed (well, almost - I’m probably about twenty years older than the target demographic, but I fit the criteria in all other respects).   Long-time comics reader that I am, I loved the tone of the story and thought the shoot-’em-up/blow-’em-up sequences to be fantastic, which is all one could ask of a superhero movie.  From crashing flying aircraft carriers to raging gun battles in city streets to a gang fight within the confines of a glass elevator, there is no shortage of kinetic energy here.

As it is an entry in an ongoing franchise of other films, while at the same time being another chapter in a series about one particular character, Winter Soldier operates under some restrictions to which even a rather formulaic series as the James Bond films are not subject.  How well the movie managed to tell a quality story that felt topical and relevant, and also managed to keep me in suspense and throw some surprises at me, is a testament to the creative team’s abilities.