The power of flight means a lot to me.

Man of Steel is the movie that will do for Superman what Batman Begins did for Batman. This does not mean it’s perfect. Like with Batman Begins and due to their having the same writer, there are stretch-marks here and there that feel like the pangs of a mighty child whom suffered a difficult birth. Man of Steel is probably a much better film than Begins, however, if only because as a directorial effort it far surpasses the often clumsy Begins. The only reason I compare these movies is because it is the Dark Knight trilogy of Christopher Nolan’s that most directly informs the project. This ends up coming up more as a writing comparison, because of David Goyer, than anything else.

Zack Snyder is making movies at his peak right now and Man of Steel is the finest distillation of his tremendous, possibly unique strengths and sensibilities. He knows what kinds of things people want to see in a Superman movie and he was absolutely the right guy for this job. He understands instinctively how to shoot and score and direct in a way that keeps this movie both epic and grounded which seems to me like a very difficult balancing act. The purest joys of Man of Steel are derived from its cinema, not it’s story. For one thing, Man of Steel is a sensory slam dunk with constantly beautiful imagery accompanied by rousing, grandiose music. I said the same sort of things about Sucker Punch and probably about Watchmen but here is a creativity backed by serious resources and unhampered by the demands of adaptation or of authorial vision. Free from the responsibilities of writing the movie or slavish translating a beloved, singular story, Snyder is allowed to play in the sandbox like the visionary architect that he is.

All credit where it’s due, Goyer is consistently a writer whose work I struggle with liking. His pretentious, on the nose themes and speeches and indulgence in cheesy, pandering one-liners that induce cringes instead of the limp grins they’re going for. That said, Goyer frequently takes ideas and concepts from comics and makes them work on a very different kind of paper. He’s the guy who made Blade work (though he deep-sixed that franchise when he tried to direct it) and he’s likely who we have to thank for fucking ninjas in Begins and the best-written (let alone performed) Joker we’re ever likely to get. Man of Steel is not free from his irritating indulgences: they have been pared down making cringey shit few and far between but also resulting in that shit being even more noticeable and jarring than usual. I’ll get to specific examples later.

FROM THE DEPTHS OF SPACE COME SPOILERS. GO EASY, STAR-SAILOR.

There’s quite a bit of Krypton in this movie.

One of the best and most surprising things in the movie is the expansive prologue on Krypton. Not only do we witness the birth of Kal-El, the first “natural birth” on Krypton for centuries, but we also see the entire fall of not only the stagnating Kryptonian society but the planet itself. Jor-El (Russel Crowe) is the planet’s foremost scientist and tries to warn the government that the planet is about to be destroyed. Their massive energy needs have caused them to push the place past its expiry date, a grave error made in spite of the warnings of Jor-El and his colleague Zod (Michael Shannon), the planet’s foremost military leader. General Zod means to hold the government (and their silly fucking hats) responsible for their misdeeds and wants to save the Kryptonian future. Kryptonians are born under a Matrix-like machine apparatus complete with a eugenics program that selects individuals for certain roles in society. Kryptonians are bred to be warriors like Zod or scientists like Jor. Understanding that this is one of the reasons their civilization fell, Jor opted to let his son be born naturally as a symbol of freedom of choice for his people. Imbuing him with the genetic history of Krypton, he sends him off into the stars in defiance of Zod’s eugenics-centric plans for a new Krypton. Zod thinks some “bloodlines” are less worthy than others, pointing to the government’s endless debates and inaction as a condemnation of softer, intellectual selection as unworthy. Jor, given his ideals, rejects this and they have them a big ol’ fight as civil war rages across Krypton.

This sequence is staggering, simply staggering. Not only is Krypton a wildly fantastic place, the kind of thing that seems like it jumps right off the cover of a 1940′s dimestore scifi novel, but everything about it is informed by incremental world-building. The technology, based seemingly on metamaterials and particle manipulation, feels consistent and unique. Alien, also, which is very important. Even the ornate clothing and armor feel consistent to the alien culture and environment of Krypton. Even the flora and fauna get a bit of attention, with Jor riding a dragon (as you do) in a thrilling chase that is one of the better of the many great action sequences in the film.

Russel Crowe is all over this movie.

One of the writing problems consistent in David Goyer’s work is his occasionally half-assed approach to character motivation. A question that sort of makes you pause during the prologue is “why do Jor and Lara stay behind?”. One could surmise a number of reasons, had the movie not gone there, or they could simply have supplied one. Why does Jor stay behind? Because their fate is “tied to Krypton’s”. They simply refuse to leave and it doesn’t really make much sense when the means (as we see later) are present. Why do they have to stay and die? I can accept that they do, of course, but not the reasoning as given. Ultimately a minor issue but one that belongs to a category of writing problem that threads through this movie and pretty much all the movies Goyer has written.

With baby Kal safely dispatched to Earth, Zod is arrested by the council and sent to the “Phantom Zone” along with his handful of lieutenants. Before going, we get a brief but intense measure of the insanity and zealotry that boils beneath the surface of a man who claims to be serving “the greater good”. Zod is the kind of villain that gets almost as much development and attention as the hero. It’s always nice when a villain has a better motivation than “being evil” and it’s through Zod that we begin to understand what Jor meant when he said that Kryptonians had “lost something” when they started their eugenics program. The burden of being trapped in a predetermined role is at the center of Zod’s aggression, ruthlessness, and eventually his insanity. It’s all up to Shannon, who is more than game for it, to get across that complex vortex of emotion running underneath the veneer. In a less than subtle movie, Zod is a character whose motives are subtly handled even as he speechifies about them.

Getting Shannon was a coup.

People may be surprised, given Man of Steel‘s very effective trailers, that the movie does not segue from the fall of Krypton to Kal’s childhood. Instead, we meet Kal-El/Clarke Kent (Henry Cavill) as an adult. Lost in the world and trying to stay that way, Clarke has grown to his 30′s still not knowing the full scope of his origin. However, he’s compelled to help people and Snyder presents the audience with a statement about how he’s approaching this as a superhero movie. Clarke doesn’t hesitate to save a burning oil rig full of people, revealing himself to them (inexplicably shirtless) as he does so. He crumples doors, withstands flames swirling around his body, and holds up a control tower in the space of a few minutes, a dizzying display of realistic application of his powers that shows how coy Snyder is not going to be about them.

Not just Clarke’s powers, but also his limits. He is not limitless. The feat of strength required to hold up that tower is probably the greatest he’s ever attempted by this point (the reason to think so is given by the movie a bit later) and it causes him to pass out after the whole fucking thing falls on him. Alone, he drifts under the waves and flashes back to his childhood. The formative years of Clarke’s life are delivered to the audience intermittently, in sequences much like this one. Sometimes the triggers are a bit thin (the school bus for instance) but it is an interesting, if not entirely effective, way to both do and not do the conventional origin story. Superman’s origin is ultimately familiar to us and this movie only delivers what it has to, saving time and energy for the stuff that is remixed or given a fresh coat of paint (like the Krypton stuff).

Henry Cavill looks remarkably like Hugh Jackman here.

An element that rings out as Clarke awakens underwater, with playful whales swimming above him, is the sense of awe and wonder evoked by Snyder’s camera. It is not an accident that people compared some of the shots of sunlight over Kansas corn-fields to Malickian capture of natural beauty as a means to evoke almost cosmic wonder. Man of Steel plays with this as well, and it’s a subtle intelligent hint about what differentiates Earth from Krypton (it’s a barren, harsh world) and why Clarke may feel enough of a connection to his adopted world to choose it over Zod’s plan for a terraformed, Neo-Krypton version.

After the oil rig episode, Clarke goes back to business as usual. He moves around, place to place (even Canada), taking odd jobs and occasionally finding opportunities to help people. Urban legends spring up wherever he goes but he’s always trying to cover his tracks in respect to his human father, Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner). Clarke is a man who has a pathological need to use his powers to help people. This need springs naturally and evocatively from the movie’s handling of flashbacks detailing all the times he’s had to hide who he is, even at the cost of his father’s life, and how using his powers to help people began as an impulse toward rebellion. Now, as an adult, that impulse is beginning to blossom into something else. Clarke isn’t quite Superman yet and even though it may have been partially intentional, he doesn’t feel like a character that Goyer and Snyder quite pinned down on the page.

I do really like the anonymous, David Banner style of Clarke’s transience.

While Clarke’s penchant for doing good comes across well as a core characteristic, and I like the tension the movie sketches between he and dad, there’s not much else about Clarke that gives the impression of a strong character. I think this may have been partially intentional because this is a guy who is still figuring out who he is. But in true Goyer style, he’s also spouting off about himself whenever the script needs him to. One minute he’s referring to Krypton as “my world” and the next he’s telling General Swanwick (Harry Lennix) that he’s as “American as it gets”. It’s like the script can’t decide if Clarke is an alien or not, whether he’s entranced by his true origin so much that he immediately identifies with it, etc. There are some really obvious emotional journeys Clarke could have as a result of everything he is and learns but they are roads not taken. I would have preferred something generic over nothing at all. As it is, Clarke has surprisingly little to say throughout the movie and even less that helps us identify what he is thinking and feeling. Superman was always a mild-mannered boyscout and Henry Cavill gets that across well, with a wide-eyed benevolence exuding from his shiny blue eyes and ridiculously chiseled jawline. Beyond that, it’s hard for me to say much about him as a character with an emotional arc. He is already predisposed to helping people so I suppose his arc is deciding between Earth and Krypton. The movie does keep this at the forefront of the plot, but Clarke’s feelings about it never really come out through interaction. His interactions with other characters are sterile, even with supposed love-interest Lois Lane (Amy Adams).

The age of 33 is not a coincidence. Though he’s probably more correctly understood as a Moses figure, Superman has also long been infused with Christ-like characteristics, imagery, and allegory. That Clarke Kent is 33 years old when he discovers who he is, receives his moral imperative from his father, and gets thrust into a larger destiny, is totally intentional as a reference to this connection. And fine, I guess. Superman Returns did it a lot more ham-handedly than does Man of Steel. Aside from one glib reference and the circumstantial connection, there’s not much made out of Superman as Christ. This is wise, I think, as I don’t know much patience contemporary audiences have for a geek idol being turned into Jesus.

That said, Superman is a figure with enormous responsibility but with the moral character to wear it lightly. This does eventually come through in the movie, but it also renders the character more inert than he should be. He’s remote, detached, and omnipotent. Is this supposed to be somebody’s characterization of a God?

Clarke has struggled with his powers and the urge to use them his whole life.

Part of the reason Superman never really feels like a three-dimensional character is that once he actually becomes Superman, the movie takes off running and never stops. He barely has any time to interact with the human cast, people like Lois Lane and the slew of unconvincing generic military types. Well, except for Harry Lennix. That man would exude militaristic authority if he were playing a transvestite retailing golf clubs. Lois Lane’s attraction for Clarke is completely underdeveloped, though I suppose it’s because he catches her falling like forty times in the movie. Too many times, really, for a character that is way more self-motivated and “strong female protagonist” than usual. This is all good stuff and Lois is well served by a script that constantly keeps her in the mix. It’s just that Goyer uses her falling off shit as an easy infusion of stakes and he uses it too many times.

Clarke’s attraction for her makes more sense, really, since she’s his first friend who actually knows him and his need for human connection (while understated probably too much) is also one of those pieces of characterization he does get. When they finally kiss, a Goyerism is produced to ruin the moment as Lois says “you know it’s all downhill after the first kiss right?” and Clarke quips about being an alien. I cringed so hard I have three eyes.

Plus, the actors have simply no chemistry. I hate mentioning that because it feels so trivial in some way, but it’s really not. You buy movie romances that hinge on very little precisely because the actors are able to convince you via inflection, body language, etc. In this case, none of that is there. What sparse accounting for the relationship is present on the page is all there is. This subplot reminded me of how the relationship is handled in Thor but Chris Hemsworth is allowed to have more charm in his beard than Henry Cavill is allowed to have in his entire meaty body. Fortunately, nobody behind Man of Steel was trying to make Lois and Clarke’s romantic interest in each other a centerpiece for the movie. It’s obligatory, yes, but a good way to dodge obligatory romance is to reduce its importance to the plot.

Seriously, he’s practically her Google Car.

Up until Zod lands on Earth and fucks up everyone’s year, Clarke has mostly stuck to accidents and natural disasters. He has not learned how to fight, that we see, or match his powers against others like him. Earlier, when Clarke gets an infodump from the computer-bound ghost of Jor-El, he hears about how the only way to know his limits (and to stretch them) is to keep testing them. This beautifully recalls the oil rig where we see him somewhat vulnerable, just as it beautifully sets up his attempts to break gravity’s hold over him. We understand that so far as we see, Superman is not at the full height of his powers. As the movie progresses, his unwillingness to give up is what keeps him in the game. It’s not skill or training, he doesn’t have those, and the movie doesn’t always do a great job of conveying this. When we see Superman fighting Zod and his underlings, we’re supposed to probably understand that he keeps getting his ass kicked because he’s out of his league, but it’s that willpower that makes the difference. Unfortunately, it’s not until Zod actually points out this shortcoming that we can contextualize the beatdowns we’ve been watching.

Plus, Clarke’s inability to take out one or two Kryptonians on his own necessitates a perfunctory and disappointing exit for all of them except Zod. They get sent into a singularity after an incredibly techn0-babbly and silly plan that feels a bit too much like the way the bomb in The Dark Knight Rises was handled (thanks again, Goyer) for comfort. Only this time, instead of flying it away from the city they are using the MacGuffin Device (Clarke’s ship) as a bomb against the Kryptonian world engine that is violently terraforming the planet.

Almost like something out of He-Man. Almost.

The body count in this movie is a huge troublesome thing. In The Avengers, the first thing the heroes do during the climactic fight is try to contain it and come up with a plan to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. Man of Steel pays little attention to considerations like this until it’s convenient. This is a movie where Supes tells people in Smallville to go indoors while his battle (and the military’s ill-informed intervention) basically level the whole fucking place. Planes crash into the streets, Supes gets knocked into and out of buildings, and he eight foot tall Kryptonian soldier throws a fucking train. It’s madness.

It’s also nothing compared to what is visited upon the people of Metropolis. The world engine uses gravity to somehow alter Earth to be more like Krypton. The effect is huge in scale and levels several blocks of the city center. We see plenty of people presumably die during this chaos. Buildings shatter and fall over, people get caught in fireballs or rubble, and that’s before Superman and Zod start their version of the super burly brawl.

And yes, talking about this begs a comparison to The Matrix Revolutions. While that movie is dated, effects wise, it has a better version of the same fight. Zod and Supes don’t fight for very long, anyway, and it’s punctuated by melodramatic speeches, making it a disappointment for being something you’ve waited the whole movie to see. You keep waiting for Superman to have a really iconic godlike moment and it never really comes. You find yourself preferring the smaller (it’s almost funny thinking of it that way) acts of superheroism he does earlier in the movie. To wit, I found his actions on the oil rig much more heroic and moving than when he destroys the world engine in the Indian Ocean or any single moment he spends fighting Zod. It’s not as if it isn’t a glorious action sequence. It is. It just gets tiring watching super-strong, indestructible guys punch each other.

Though it does make for moments like this one.

In spite of the size and spectacle, the last reel or so of the movie just doesn’t connect. The most major sign that additional course-correcting was needed comes when Superman kills Zod. By this point, the two of them have probably killed hundreds in collateral damage. Their fight is a natural disaster of monumental proportions. We do see that there’s a lot of Metropolis that doesn’t get destroyed, but it’s hard to shake the bombed out buildings and familiar white ash that the human characters are left with on the ground. Given all this, it seems trite and unbelievable that Superman finally ends the battle as Zod is about to heatray a family in a train station. After the unimaginable death toll no one seems to care about, it’s actually having to be up close and personal with the cost that freaks him out enough to kill a guy. He’s like a talking predator drone.

Okay, though. Superman shouldn’t just execute motherfuckers, that’s not who he is. But they really couldn’t spare a throwaway line during or after the fight to explain or justify all that death? They couldn’t leave Superman partially haunted by it?

Instead, the ending barely works because they expect the audience to believe that Superman’s face isn’t the most well known face on the planet by this point. Because the movie works like only five people are ever involved with this huge, global scale alien invasion event (come to think of it, Man of Steel is as much an alien invasion movie as a superhero movie), I guess they thought that having Clarke go work at the Daily Planet would be an acceptable thing. My criticism here is less that this happens (it’s part of the Superman mythos after all) but that they so lazily support it as a thing that could actually ever happen after the events of the movie.

A lot of people had to have seen his face, right?

Even though it seems that Zod has knocked out all the electronic equipment (not actually so, but people will argue it), there’s enough people who see Supes up close that it would be impossible to keep his likeness a secret. No credence is paid to this in the movie. Audiences are not really tough on unlikely things so long as they are attended. Had they done an Avengers style bit of the world coming to grips with the events and character(s), the movie could have avoided this criticism. It’s jarring while you’re watching it. Too much of the last act boils down to “wait, what?” for the spectacle to be enjoyed without pause.

There’s a sense to which spectacle and raw cinema at this scale and of this quality sort of undermines issues posed by narrative or writing problems, uncrossed t’s and undotted i’s, but there’s also no denying that Man of Steel would be a better movie if they’d paid more attention to that shit. In fact, I think Man of Steel is going to register as an uncomfortable but minor disappointment on a couple of levels. For some people, spectacle matters more than anything else (it’s why they go to the movies). At the end of the day, Man of Steel is not the sacrifice of good sense/taste to spectacle that, say, the Transformers movies are. I only mention this because I’m afraid I may be giving the impression that it’s some empty-headed CG-fest when it isn’t. Snyder is too good at creating images and moments that rouse, move, or amaze for that to be the case.

For all its problems, it is not a stupid film. It’s just so well realized so much of the time that stupid shit (Zod can somehow enter Superman’s dreams?, “I just think he’s kinda hot”, etc) is jarring and it feels like precisely the kind of stupid shit that isn’t well-intentioned but lazy or pandering or cloying. The unfortunate reality of things is that if your quilt is immaculate, that one fucked up patch brings the overall quality far more into question than does a rough patch on a rough quilt. Blights mar astonishingly beautiful things more than they do the mundane things, which is why a movie like Fast 6 gets an overwhelmingly positive review while Man of Steel gets the “good but not great” treatment.

“Evan, stop it. It’s just a mooooovie!”

Overall, I think there’s a ton of merit in Man of Steel in spite of how much time I’ve spent discussing its flaws. A lot of people are reviewing the movie less charitably. There’s a lot of talk about how boring it is and I just don’t agree. It’s structure (not quite an origin, but trying to have that cake and eat it too) and pacing (long foreplay, too quick to climax) create or cement its narrative flaws, but there’s a lot of thought behind this movie. It has fucking themes, even if the movie kind of rolls over them. Henry Cavill is a plenty good Superman and I hope to see more of him and his cape. Some people are going to wonder if they alter the explanation for Superman’s powers, or change them around, or do Kryptonite. This is a good place to describe why I say there’s a lot of thoughtfulness here. Like I said earlier, Superman is still just figuring out his powers. By the time he’s Superman, he’s only tested them fully this once and they seem to grow a bit even over the course of that. He’s had longer to adapt to Earth’s atmosphere and solar radiation than his fellow Kryptonians, and it makes a noted difference in his ability to handle all that extra power. Only Zod figures out how to fly, in one of the better moments during their fight, and the others avoid the disadvantages of superhearing and Xray vision by staying protected in their cool, transparent breathing masks. There’s a nod to the concept of Kryptonite, even. Superman is weakened by Krypton’s atmospheric conditions because he has never had to adapt to them. It provides the same function and is somehow less hokey than Kryptonite.

I also hope to hear more of Hans Zimmer at this caliber. The score is brilliant, iconic, and informs every scene. Like his score for Inception, Zimmer works with a basic theme and reinserts it, bolsters it, thins it out, or lets it sing whenever the movie calls for it. What it amounts to is probably one of the most memorable scores for a superhero movie, if not the most.

There’s a lot of unnecessary shaky-cam in the movie, but fuck it if Snyder doesn’t shoot the big stuff like a boss.

With Zimmer’s help, Snyder has crafted a memorable movie that features some truly awe-inspiring ideas and moments. That’s where its merit is. It’s one of the great superhero movies, though seldom are they as ambitious as Man of Steel is. I tend to think that Snyder made this movie almost because it afforded him the opportunity to do that Krypton sequence. I hope so. Everything from the weird robots to the insectoid design of their ships and armor feels like it could just as easily be from some as yet unmade Miyazakian epic. Man of Steel will be a success and with that success will come a legacy for new Superman movies and possibly DC finally catching up to Marvel. But more than that (I’m a Marvel guy anyway), I hope that this movie proves the viability of cosmic-scale, ridiculous worlds and characters. I want to see more Kirby-inspired spectacle, dammit.

I think I’m going to see Man of Steel again for that Krypton bit. Honestly, I grinned like a happy infant for a lot of the first half of this movie. The beauty and wonder Snyder is able to evoke kinda washes pleasantly over you until the plot sets in. In its hurry to get the big action shit going, though, it sacrifices too much of the more thoughtful and unexpected stuff that made the early parts work so well. I wonder if I’ll feel the same way after watching it again. Sometimes you appreciate a movie more when expectations are left to the side and you’re cognizant of where the flaws are. I am at least sure that Superman may come off as a fuller character on a rewatch.

Eager to find out.

]]> http://thunderclam.wordpress.com/2013/06/14/where-were-you-trained-on-a-farm/feed/ 0 thunderclam man-of-steel-img-610x374 man-of-steel-krypton-at-war Man-of-Steel-Trailer-Images-Jor-El-Russell-Crowe-and-Lara-with-Baby-Kal-El-570x237 Man_Of_Steel_SupermanTrailerPic29.jpg Man_Of_Steel_SupermanTrailerPic14.jpg Krypton factor … Henry Cavill in Man of Steel reg_1024.ManofSteel6.mh.121112 man-of-steel-powers man-of-steel-12 man-of-steel-metallo-or-steel Man of Steel SwP0fEq Man_of_Steel_Teaser http://thunderclam.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/can-we-please-go-to-fucking-carls-jr/ http://thunderclam.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/can-we-please-go-to-fucking-carls-jr/#comments Thu, 13 Jun 2013 20:04:47 +0000 thunderclam http://thunderclam.wordpress.com/?p=2605 ]]>

Featuring all the 25-35 year old actor/comedians you love.

I have a weird relationship with comedies. The SNL-alumni stuff is usually hit or miss for me. I also don’t think Apatow really knows what he’s doing anymore. But Apatow’s heirs apparent are probably Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. I have loved every movie they’ve written with the exception of The Green Hornet and their brand of comedy is one that really works for me. Part of this is the self-aware, tonally agile style of their movies. Part of it is Seth Rogen himself, as a lead actor in movies that frequently blend traditional broad comedy with occasional forays into other genres. The biggest part, though, is probably the themes that unite all their films. Every one of them is about friendship between men, running the gamut from the endearing and sweet (and homoerotic) to the kinds of drama men have (but is frequently unrepresented in TV and movies) and always, always hilarious. Every one of their movies has a warm, friendly core and an affable reality that grounds all the laughs in something that feels authentic, if not realistic.

This is what lets them get away with something like This is the End, which is a movie that probably shouldn’t work. Self-reference/parody is tricky to pull off with grace. It’s also one of the common measures taken by public figures who start to get stale or over-exposed. Rogen has experimented with roles that have been “against type” and probably will keep doing that. He probably doesn’t think of it in those terms and good for him if so. Here, however, he shows that he is totally aware of the potential tiredness of his “schtick” and the fickle nature of audiences who complain about a performer always seeming to come off as “the same guy” and yet line up to see it over and over. Rogen is not quite at the point where he hates us all (as Adam Sandler undoubtedly does), and This is the End suggests that he may never get there. Good, I say. I like the guy, I like his brand, and I never get tired of it.

In spite of its bottle-episode structure, This is the End functions well as a survival/apocalypse story even as it spends most of its energy on the character-derived comedy all these guys are so fucking gifted at. By the last twenty minutes, This is the End has morphed into an epic which is both surprising and unsurprising at the same time. You trust these guys to pull something like that off, but you’re still amazed when they do it.

Shit, the Jesus freaks were right!

As everybody knows, this is one of those movies where the actors all play themselves. Of course they aren’t really playing themselves. Instead, each one is heightened or skewed in ways that are funny, self-referential, and above all self-aware. The point starts off being “how would these guys react to the apocalypse?” and ends up being just as much about how they react to their own images. This is more relevant for some, like James Franco, than others because they don’t all have equal public exposure. Skewering those personae is a project of the movie, though, showing that all these guys have a huge sense of humor about everything up to and including the end of the world but especially about themselves.

Seth Rogen is enjoying the lifestyle and relationships his success has brought to him. He has a bunch of friends in L.A., many of whom made in the Apatow days and others from his more recent work. Jay Baruchel is his oldest friend, though, and they’ve been growing apart recently due to pretentiousness and obliviousness on both their parts. It takes a long time for the movie to really equalize the relationship so for most of it, Jay just seems like a whiny anti-social dick.

Though part of the point the movie makes is that, when the chips are down, friendship is all that really matters.

He thinks the affable, positive Seth has sold out and changed too much. He hates the L.A. entitled lifestyle, he hates L.A., and he may even be starting to hate Seth. However, they are all set up to have a weekend together to hang out and rekindled the friendship after almost a year apart doing their own things. While we do see Rogen doing dickish things to Jay for the sake of his new friendships, we spend way too much time watching Jay Baruchel act like a brat to really fault him. The bad relationship is a bit one-sided and I think they probably intended it to be more equal in terms of blame for its problems. But I wouldn’t say the way it all comes together is unearned. I was actually a bit surprised that they were willing to go so far into douchey territory with Jay, risking any audience sympathy for the guy. That may be partly based on sensitivity to his reluctance to hang out with Seth Rogen’s L.A. friends, who we know (and Seth explains) are a collection of actors and comedians that the audience already adores.

Of course, Seth drags Jay to a party at James Franco’s house and the apocalypse happens. This has a way of complicating their plans but also forcing them to confront the ways they’ve been dicks to each other and why they should bro down and hug up.

The elite survivors.

Though the first act features a bunch of cameos, some small and others larger, they pretty much all die before the movie switches from awkward party scenario to “how do these idiots survive the end of the world?” scenario. It would be silly to list off all the cameos but most of them are funny. The highlights are Michael Cera and (much later) Channing Tatum. Cera probably plays the most ridiculously extreme version of himself and this because he dies first when the apocalypse actually hits. Before that, we see him snorting coke and macking ladies and getting slapped hard by Rihanna. Cera nicely summarizes the way this movie is willing to send up aspects of these guys for weirdness and laughs. There’s no way Michael Cera is as creepy and incorrigible as he appears here, but there’s this box people put him, as a performer and personality, into. That box no longer exists.

Now for Channing Tatum. Though he’s only in it for a second, the interplay with Danny McBride and the way the movie sets up and pays off both Tatum’s inclusion and McBride’s character arc is just staggeringly brilliant. It’s the funniest thing in an incredibly funny movie.

Glorious.

This is the End could easily have been these actors playing roles. Instead, there’s another layer to the approach of having them play exaggerated or parody versions of themselves. It’s playing off the sense people have from seeing these guys so much and often in similar roles that they know who they are. There’s an idea of who James Franco is based on an amalgamation of interviews, public appearances, roles, and factoids about him that makes people think they know who the guy is. And a lot of people don’t like that guy. Franco gets called out a lot, and is an especially favored target in this movie. His capacity for self-mockery goes way beyond everyone else. Interestingly, Evan Goldberg told the press that he was the only person besides Seth who never said “that’s going too far” in terms of skewering their public image. I can’t imagine what else they could have asked Michael Cera or Danny McBride to do that goes much further than what we see here.

As the fellowship of buffoons go into lockdown in Franco’s kitschy house, Jay tries to point out that this is the actual rapture and maybe they can still be saved if they redeem themselves in the eyes of god. Meanwhile, they deal with the challenges of food and water shortage, getting tired of each others’ shit, and dealing with the anarchic Danny McBride. McBride plays a version of his Kenny Powers character (from Eastbound and Down) that is unleashed by the apocalypse, rather than humbled by it. He reacts to the desperate nature of their situation with no fucks to give. Once he walks out on them, the movie has a void to fill where McBride’s confrontational comedy used to be. He’s an asset in every fucking thing he’s in and if he didn’t pop back up later to deliver the best, most hilarious scene in the movie, I’d have been a bit disappointed. However, that self-awareness Rogen and Goldberg seem to have in bulk saves the day as they replace the funny and hostile drama with an episodic, hilarious bit that brings the movie back to its “Christian Apocalypse” concept full-bore.

The exorcism scene is where Jonah Hill finally gets to let his hair down.

One of the longest cons in the movie is Jonah Hill’s nice, sensitive guy thing. Very little of the quipping or funny reactions/exchanges come from Hill. He’d be the straight man if this movie had one. The persona he’s lampooning is one quite divorced from his usual selfish-jerk thing. In fact, it’s the opposite kind of personality and that’s key. If you’re clued in, you might be amused at how he keeps the benevolent, sensitive front up. If not, it’s still funny both on a meta level and in the movie when he gets possessed by demon rape and brings on the full Jonah Hill style against his friends as they make a lame attempt to exorcise him. I’m a big fan of Hill, so this scene was delicious for me as was the realization that over an hour of screen time had been devoted to setting up this one big joke about Hill’s typically abrasive, sarcastic characters.

By the time Hill goes rogue on them, we’ve already seen a couple of demons kicking around and they are surprisingly convincing. I was expecting demonic characters, or maybe possessed people cameos, but the movie eschews all that mythic level stuff and sticks to the humans. This does not preclude an epic and stunning finale where Seth and Jay face off against a giant demon with seven snake heads and a swinging, fiery cock. This is not only convincingly done on an effects level (as much as it can be, anyway) but is just where they take the craziest and biggest ideas and imagery they can come up with and run with it. And why not?

Light on females as it is, both Rihanna and Emma Watson get to have some fun.

If you’ve seen Pineapple Express or Superbad or even 21 Jump Street, you have some idea of the style of comedy and the general thematic content/tone that this movie is going for. This is the kind of extra depth and nuance that pushes otherwise unremarkable comedy into the stratosphere. And given my love affair with Parks and Recreation I think it’s confirmed that I have a strong love for comedies with big hearts (but I also love the Coens so what does that say?) and This is the End has a huge one.

It’s also one of the funniest movies of the year. Not that 2013 has been packed with great comedies. In fact, This is the End makes it clear how conspicuously absent the comedy landscape has been so far this year. With another “bunch of friends deal with the end of the world” movie coming out later on, hopefully This is the End gets some competition not just as a comedy but also as an apocalyptic comedy. Which… is that a thing now?

If not, it should be.

Some stunning shots in this movie.

I expected a Shyamalanatastrophe with After Earth. Although the first, stunning trailer was very good, the more information that came out about this movie the more convinced I was that it would be fucking awful. I read all about how Will Smith came up with the idea and decided to make a multimedia empire around this detailed, ludicrous backstory. A 300 page “Bible” was written, comic book guys were brought on to make supplementary stuff, and the whole project ignored all the other attempts to do this that feel dismally flat (The Matrix, Southland Tales, etc). Honestly, I expect the same for After Earth. It won’t become some new Star Wars even with the considerable influence of Smith.

That said, the movie is not bad. In fact, it’s pretty good. Maybe a bit slight, given that it tells a small scale story in a large scale world. Like YA books, it uses its big concepts more for backdrop and setting than for actual storytelling. The story is intimate, with only a few characters and some straightforward thematic work (which is resonant almost in spite of itself). People who are expecting bigger payoffs to the lore are going to come away disappointed. This is a movie that does world-building by implication more than exposition. As such, we aren’t told much that we don’t expressly need to know to follow the core story. The one exception is a long bit of lumpy exposition delivered in the drawling “space human” accent of Jaden Smith. Still, there’s a distinct likelihood that this is going to frustrate a lot of viewers. In many ways After Earth feels incomplete with many opportunities to show off concepts and details left to fall by the wayside. I assume the idea was to get away from conventional tropes and payoffs, but there’s a balance that this movie doesn’t quite get to.

What makes the movie good is that it’s fully in command of that smaller, core story. With the resonant themes, sense of scale, and a well designed world to play around in, Shyamalan and writing partner Gary Whitta take Smith’s story idea and do fine, unambitious work with it. There’s room in the world for humble, one-off stories that leverage an epic backstory for intimate storytelling. That said, don’t expect a legitimate science fiction movie out of After Earth. It’s a fantasy movie that happens to have neat technology, space ships, and aliens. It is not speculative or scientific in the least.

Smith is playing the ultimate badass but we barely see it.

The backstory of the movie is quite involved and little of it is fully explained or shown by the movie. A bit too much telling over showing is what I was getting at when I talked about a feeling of incompleteness. A great example is Cypher Raige (Will Smith) and his status as the Prime Commander of the Rangers, humans first line of defense. Not only is the alien race that attacks humanity’s colonies, even the new homeworld Nova Prime, but the details of how this war proceeds aren’t present. There’s only the briefest glimpse of Cypher’s combat prowess, used to explain the concept of “Ghosting” and no explanation given for why humans don’t use projectile weapons a thousand years from now.

After ruining Earth, humans venture out into the stars where they make a new home on a desolate, arid world that looks like Arizona (with accents to match). Once they’ve established themselves, they are attacked by hostile aliens who use biologically engineered hunter-killers called ursas. The ursas are dropped from pods and track humans by smelling our fear (we give off pheromones). Ghosting is a technique employed by the best Rangers in which they switch their fear off and become effectively invisible.

All this information is delivered to us by voiceover from Kitai Raige (Jaden Smith). Both the Raiges, and seemingly no one else in the movie, use vague and drawling accents that suggest the Southwest United States. When I first heard it I thought “cool, a movie that acknowledges how speech patterns would change after a thousand years” though even this would be nominal. Of course, every other character has a different accent so it just comes off like some weird affectation rendered unnecessary by inconsistency. This is one of many smaller hiccups in the presentation of the movie and I mention it specifically because it bothered me a bit that there was no payoff or point.

Families that breathe together stay together.

The core story of the movie is much simpler. Kitai is a cadet Ranger and his impulsiveness and petulance have kept him from advancing. Wanting desperately to please his distant father, the great warrior and general Cypher Raige, he has thrown everything into this and is left despondent and insecure. Though Cypher knows what his career has cost his family and himself (as a father and husband), he still has a hard time relating to his son. Poised to retire, he follows the advice of his wife Faia (Sophie Onokedo) to take Kitai along with him on one last journey.

The source of a lot of the angst among the hilariously named Raiges is the death of the even more hilariously named Senshi Raige (Zoe Kravitz), Kitai’s older sister. Senshi followed in their father’s footsteps first, becoming a Ranger. Through flashbacks that serve less as a reveal or plot device and more as a thematic reminder, we see that Senshi died badly fighting an ursa and trying to protect Kitai. Both male Raiges blame themselves but think they blame the other, so there’s a lot of tension and undealt with trauma in their relationship. Faia sees all this and delivers an actually beautiful, soft lecture to Cypher about what their son needs from him. It’s an early sign about where this movie’s heart is.

En route to a planet where Rangers are trained fighting captive ursas, their ship the Hesper, comes across a freak asteroid storm. The ship suffers severe damage and has to jump away using a wormhole-based FTL. The computer autoselects their destination and they wind up in Earth orbit. Earth is now a “Class 1 Quarantined Planet” which means it’s totally unsafe for humans. Without another choice, Cypher orders his pilots to attempt landing. Unfortunately for all involved, the ship breaks into two in its descent, with the tail section holding a captive ursa. Everybody except Kitai seems to be dead until he finds his gravely injured father in the rubble of the ship.

Zoe Kravitz manages to do quite a bit with limited screen time. We really feel her death, especially as more of its grisly barbarity is revealed.

With two broken legs, a broken emergency beacon, and only his untested (unworthy?) son to get them saved, Cypher’s situation is pretty desperate. He’s a tough SOB, however, and he quickly establishes a plan of action. The bulk of the movie follows Kitai’s perilous quest across the desolate, deadly landscape of the changed Earth. On the surface, this is a survival story. Slightly beneath that surface, there’s the conflict between these two characters and the realization of their bond. Kitai needs to overcome his fear, which means overcoming his past, and his father needs to learn who he is so he can accept him. They both struggle with false impressions of each other, all tied up with inner turmoil over Senshi’s death. Kitai believes he should have done more and projects this guilt onto his dad, expecting and seeing disapproval in every facial expression and word. Cypher also thinks he should have done more, should have been there period, and his guilt manifests as coldness and a vague disapproval of Kitai’s path (even he probably doesn’t realize he wants Kitai to be safe, thus not a Ranger). The pathos and motives of these characters comes across wonderfully. The challenge is that Kitai’s petulance and fear make him a tad annoying at first. He makes a lot of mistakes and whines quite a bit but the point is that he needs to settle his inner conflict and guilt in order to rise above these limitations.

As a statement about overcoming fear, After Earth may reach significant levels of poignancy for people who struggle with anxiety. A lot of the reactions Kitai has in his hostile surroundings feel natural. This movie’s version of the Litany Against Fear (from Dune) functions both as Cypher’s badass explanation of the mental state of Ghosting and as an expression of the Zen Buddhist fatalism that informs the frequently Japanese motifs in the movie (names like Senshi, for example). It’s also a great, focused iteration of a theory of fear (and overcoming it) that probably works well for people who can pull it off. Cypher telling the story of his first Ghosting and how he accomplished it while Kitai shivers in rain, cold, and danger is just a great moment that solidifies who Cypher is, good and bad. Here’s a man who’s hard as nails, both remote and inspiring to his son (and us). This kind of nuanced characterization is definitely After Earth‘s strong suit.

Also nice is the appreciation and awe of the altered, wild Earth.

Some have joked that After Earth is a sequel to The Happening. In that abominable film, Shyamalan showed us a world that was trying to kill us in ludicrous ways. The gist was that we were fucking the environment and it was determined to fuck us right back. After Earth takes place a thousand years after we’ve left a planet we ruined, but it’s probably not supposed to be a continuation of The Happening (funny as that is). It seems to have got on just fine without us. As ridiculous as the notion that “everything here evolved to kill humans” is (how, when humans are gone?), there’s a sense of wild splendor that imitates that of Avatar‘s Pandora. The flora and fauna are changed, but not unrecognizable. And as hostile as the place is, there’s still beauty and possibly even companionship amidst the death and danger. In an example of a nice touch that I wish was less undercooked (sort of a theme for me and this movie), Kitai is half-befriended by a giant goddamn bird that winds up sacrificing itself for him. This movie takes death pretty seriously, to its credit, and Kitai is almost constantly in very real danger. But not just him. Earlier, we have to watch a bunch of jackal-cougars kill the baby birds, for example. Not pretty.

Kitai’s quest to retrieve a working beacon from the tail end of the ship is also on a timer, if the environment wasn’t bad enough. This is a movie with stakes, even though they aren’t epic stakes. If Kitai can’t get to the beacon fast, he’ll die as he runs out of rebreathers. Likewise, Cypher will bleed out due to a ruptured artery in his broken leg. He tries to do an arterial shunt, which brutal, but it doesn’t work and he’s basically dying slowly the whole movie. But he won’t leave Kitai alone, if he can help it. He even refused to take painkillers because they will muddle him up.

The movie is full of cool tech and gadgets that are internally consistent and heavily reference materials science.

On top of the dangerous world, the ticking clock, and his daddy issues, Kitai is also being stalked by the fucking ursa. Oh yes, that thing. It’s still alive, and uses “fear triggers” which is basically impaling people on spikes to scare survivors so it can stalk them. The ursa is a poorly and busily designed insectoid. It looks exactly like the aliens in Cowboys and Aliens and Super 8. That said, what it does and how it functions are scary enough that the poor design is of smaller consequence.

Speaking of design. After Earth features a pretty unique spin on futuristic tech. Yes it has the silly jumpsuits and gleaming spaceships, but it also emphasizes metamaterials more than most “scifi” does. The Lifesuit that Kitai wears is practically a character in the movie. It changes color in response to toxins, temperature, threats, etc (and even gets bumpy and armored in texture) and has inbuilt backpack, communicator, and holster for a cutlass, the Rangers’ signature weapon. The cutlass is very cool. It’s basically a rod with smart metals in the shaft which can be expanded and configured into a variety of different blades and tools. It can even be split and wielded ambidextrously. It’s an iconic weapon and I bet kids will love it. Similarly, After Earth bases a lot of its other technology on “smart” materials like fabrics. Even the ship looks like it’s made of cloth on the inside at least. Three dimensional maps, thick-fabric utility closets, and an organic-looking air filter are all other examples of cool tech in the movie.

Kitai splits the cutlass into two katana-like weapons in preparation for his final battle.

As Kitai progresses through his adventure, he flashes back to Senshi’s death over and over. It’s only when he lets himself remember all of it that something clicks into place. No longer feeling guilt for being too afraid to come out of the capsule and die alongside his sister, he accepts his fear and gets past it. Ghosting, he fights and kills the ursa in what is actually a pretty great sequence. That this echoes the story of Cypher is relevant, especially when the cheesy earlier scene with the soldier who Cypher saved forcing himself to get up (on one remaining leg) to salute his hero. When Kitai again faces his father, Cypher imitates the behavior of that soldier and Kitai not only gets his love and acceptance reaffirmed, he also accomplishes his earlier goal of becoming a good Ranger.

And really, the fucking kid deserves it. I expected more of a kid superhero vibe from this movie. Instead, Kitai is a flawed and scared little boy. This works way better, really, and is something Jaden Smith does well (Kitai isn’t so different from his character in The Karate Kid). While Will plays restrained and stoic, Jaden plays volatile and emotional. In a relatively humorless movie, there’s some subtle humor here and there that works well and breaks up the seriousness almost as well as the movie’s big beating heart.

I wonder how much of the movie’s story echoes what life is like for the Smith kids with their busy father.

Though they don’t save the universe from the anonymous aliens, the catharsis works nicely. I would liked a bit better execution and payoff for some of the silly lore in this movie, but what you get instead is far from bad. A lesser movie would have just done the paint by numbers race from setpiece to setpiece with no stakes and only the barest adherence to some kind of emotional core. After Earth actually bothers to try and get you to care about Kitai and Cypher’s estrangement and survival.

It isn’t a great big sweeping deal like maybe they wanted it to be. Instead, it’s a small victory. A minor win for Shyamalan who needs all the wins he can get. For the Smiths, it’s a safe and probably fun team-up that is a challenge if only because neither of them is coasting on charm here.

For us, it’s a minor league fantasy movie that will probably score bigger for the kids who are going to end up seeing Epic instead. Meanwhile, bloodthirsty millenial geeks like me will sparsely attend After Earth hoping it’s a trainwreck and finding that it’s actually all right. It’s always confusing when you expect to hate a movie and don’t love it, but kinda like it instead.

The word is family.

Something to get out of the way: this series has no naming convention, with each entry reinventing the titling to such a point that I’ll just refer to them with the word “Fast” and numerically by order of release. This will hopefully be a lot less confusing for everybody!

Every Fast and Furious movie echoes a specific movie. With the sixth entry of what has become one of the best original cinematic franchises out there, that movie is The Avengers. It turns out that it’s not only superhero movies that now exist in a post-Avengers world. One of the things I’ve always liked about the Fast series is that it’s been made by filmmakers who dearly love movies. Cohen, Singleton, and then the long (but now complete) run Justin Lin had all have that in common. Though not as much a love letter to The Avengers as the first one was to Point Break, the signs of Lin’s, and writer Chris Morgan’s, appreciation for the most recent blockbuster game-changer is a prevalent and noticeable ingredient in their superhero team-up movie.

We’ve watched all these characters, and the actors who play them, grow up with the franchise. Each Fast movie is, if not better, more self-assured than the last. The commitment to continuity and the themes of its ridiculous universe has always been a major strong suit for the series. It’s surprising every time, especially rewatching the whole shebang, at just how well this thing supports itself.

In Fast 6, everything that makes the series what it is has been dialed up to eleven. Lin is going out with a bang and here proven himself to be one of the highest potential action directors out there. For all that Fast 6 contains the familiar humor, themes of family and redemption, and ridiculous sense of its world, the place where this movie really outdoes itself is in the action. While this has always been an action series, Fast 6 is the first one that features not just one or two great or iconic moments but a dozen of them. Just as the heroics echo The Avengers, the action feels like Lin picking up elements he loves from other movies and floating them through the world of Fast. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, but somehow the Bourne-style fisticuffs and Michael Mann gunfights (this is one of the rare movies with loud, realistic gun SFX) are less welded on and more breathed in. The confidence with which Lin includes these touches is breathtaking and makes you completely believe in the action, which in turn ripples through everything else in the movie no matter how ridiculous.

Fast 6 plays the oldies beautifully.

The credits stinger at the end of Fast 5. sets up the mission of Fast 6 and a larger arc for at least a trilogy’s worth of movies (if you include Fast 5). It turns out that Letty (Michelle Rodriguez doing maybe her best work) is not dead, as everybody believed her to be since Fast 4. Instead, she’s working for an ex-military hijacker who is one step ahead of everyone after him. Hobbes (Dwayne Johnson) tracks down Dom (Vin Diesel) hoping to use Letty as a way to get the help of the Fast 5 crew in taking down the hijacker. Dom is enjoying the retired life with Elena (Elsa Pataky) in Spain while Brian (Paul Walker) and Mia (Jordana Brewster) raise their son Jack not far away. Letty is enough to bring Dom back into the fray. Like before, his first instinct is to go it alone but family is about not being alone and Brian has his own reasons for wanting to get to the bottom of Letty’s resurrection.

We get to see what everybody’s been up to since making off with millions of dollars at the end of Fast 5. Before long, Dom and Hobbes have assembled them all in London to deal with Owen Shaw (Luke Evans) and his own crew of expert criminals. As Roman (Tyrese Gibson) remarks halfway through the movie, Shaw’s crew is like a mirror image of Dom’s right down to having a hulking slab of muscles, a handsome black dude, and an Asian. This pays off major dividends both later and in the moment. The fact that the movie stops and has its primary comic relief character acknowledge this device is awesome in a way that I don’t know if I can articulate. I guess the best way would be to say that it shows how self-aware this movie (and series) is and how much fun its having with its own ridiculousness. It’s inviting us, the audience, to enjoy these elements with full awareness that they are ridiculous and fun.

We’d be suckers not to.

This movie is bromances.

Though it has a fairly complex logistical plot, Fast 6 puts this and the MacGuffins on mute and focuses instead on character pairings, the emotional thrust of the story, and the conflict between Dom’s code of family and Shaw’s code of precision. It doesn’t really matter what Shaw is trying to steal and sell (some sort of EMP bomb) or exactly how anyone in the movie does what they do. While this isn’t glossed over (the movie even makes time for Brian to take a sidetrip to L.A.), it’s simply unimportant. I appreciate this and so should you. The Fast series is one of complex heists/operations/etc and thus risks the same thing all such stories risk: to become bogged down in the details. Inception this ain’t. It’s very tricky to pull off an expository heist movie with both style and satisfaction. Fast 5 flirted with its given the Ocean’s 11 riffing, but one of the things that differentiates 6 from 5 is that 6 is by far the more mythological of the two movies. By this I mean that everything is bigger, crazier, even less believable (in a good way), and therefore iconic.

Letty is the character with the biggest arc this time around. The attempt on her life before the events of Fast 4 have left her an amnesiac. Shaw, it turns out, was responsible not only for Braga (John Ortiz, who returns for a great cameo) and his whole empire but also for getting Letty “killed”. As Shaw creepily explains to her, she’s the only one his crew that he feels any attachment to. The rest are disposable if they make mistakes and violate his edict of precision. Shaw is therefore the polar opposite of Dom. Dom relies on others and takes care of them in return, it’s messy but his self-sacrifice and protective instincts often get his ass out of the fire and even when the laws of probability should snuff him out, the metaphorical level of the story rewards Dom’s code because at heart, Fast is all about doing for others.

Letty gets not one but TWO brutal, awesome fights with Gina Carano.

Shaw likes Letty because her amnesia makes her blank. She has no history, no family, nothing hitching her up or inviting mistakes. Unlike Shaw, Letty’s divorce from conscience is not self-imposed. After he recruited her and gave her a purpose, Letty would have had no reason to question either him or her place in his operations. It’s only when Dom and his crew interrupt those operations that Letty is forced to confront who she’s in bed with and what this signifies for her. She’s drawn to Dom and his people and she doesn’t know why. In this way, she’s a great stand-in for the newcomer viewer who maybe hasn’t watched all the previous movies or who still hasn’t quite gotten the appeal. Yes, Letty (and newcomer), Dom’s crew is a lovable but inexplicable bunch. Embrace them and they will embrace you.

Watching her find herself is actually one of the stronger parts of the characterization (which is quite good) in this movie. Michelle Rodriguez is not known for being a master actress, but here she leverages the tough physicality and attitude she is best known and most often cast for against a furtive vulnerability that I didn’t know she had in her. Like Paul Walker’s deepened pathos in Fast 4, one of the tools in the box for these movies is giving one or two characters enough room to breathe and arc and all that fun stuff while also providing for smaller arcs or character moments for secondary and tertiary characters. Here it’s Letty who gets to surprise the most, but Han (Sung Kang) and Gisele (Gal Gadot) wring plenty of drama out of their doomed love affair as well. Walker continues to bring a quiet maturity to Brian. Gone is the jittery, nervous energy of the character’s youth. Now he’s an ass-kicker, his cool blue eyes telling the story of a gunslinger as opposed to a street racer. He’s also a father haunted by his role in Letty’s fate and the film gives him (and us) a chance to find out the truth, visit with a couple of guys from Fast 4 (aforementioned John Ortiz as well as Shea Whigham), and bust some heads before the big climax.

Rome and Han make for a great surprise team.

Most of the second act is spent on fun character pairings. Because the Fast series now has a fairly sprawling cast, the only way to give everybody some time to do their thing is to split them up. This was nice in Fast 5 where it’d been some time since we’d last seen some characters (Roman, Tej (Ludacris)) and also presented an opportunity to give the secondary characters their own relationships with each other. In Fast 6, the opportunity to pair characters who didn’t hang out in 5 is taken full advantage of.

Hobbes is eventually paired with Tej which is surprisingly fun in itself, but also frees him from the charisma suck that is Gina Carano.

Carano is at her best whenever it’s action time, so I guess that undermines some of my ire for how noticeably bad she is everywhere else.

She is just bad in this movie, no two ways about it, and really stands out as such even in a cast of actors whom most people wouldn’t normally rate as especially great (with a few possible exceptions). Carano seems to exist primarily as a punching bag for Letty which is awesome and almost makes up for her shitty line delivery and bored expression. That she turns out to be the mole who has helped Shaw keep tabs on Hobbes, Dom, and the rest is only surprising because she is so consistently forgettable. Did Lin do this on purpose? It seems way too convenient to think so but I do have to acknowledge that Carano’s character being a bad guy did surprise me. It also feels just a tad tacked on but then again, it provides another excuse for she and Letty to square off.

Evans is consistently solid especially in roles like this.

When I spoke earlier of how great the action is in this movie, I not only meant the actual fighting but also the ridiculously huge (even for this series) set-pieces. Though there is plenty of big action throughout, the first two acts are mostly made up of smaller fights. I could talk about Michelle Rodriguez and her fights with Gina Carano all day long, but I wanted to also give a shout out to the other prominent fistfights in this movie. First, though, I should say that fistfights and fight choreography in general were never a big part of this movie. There were always fists thrown here and there, but never at this level. It’s one of those things that fit the series much better than you might have thought. After all, Brian points out that this isn’t cops and drug dealers like before (implying that those were people this crew could handle). Ex-military or whatever, Shaw’s crew seems at least as dangerous as Dom’s and you have to wonder how a bunch of upjumped street criminals can hope to match it. But this is the Fast series and there’s plausibility even where there’s fantasy.

For example, Brian knows how to fight (and always did) and he gets a spectacular brawl during his sojourn to L.A. Interestingly, Lin opted not to have Sung Kang’s Han be a stereotypical Asian martial arts master. Han is actually clumsy with his fists and during he and Rome’s awesome fight with The Raid‘s Johannes Taslim, it’s actually Rome who seems to have a better idea of what he’s doing. When it comes to gunplay, the skills are a bit more evenly spread with Gisele still being the “expert” and getting a couple of beautifully John Woo-ish moments to show it.

Eminent badass, even hanging off the side of a car.

When the third act comes along, Fast 6 goes into overdrive the same way that The Avengers did during the Chitauri invasion. With only a brief pause for breath to separate the two big sequences, it’s pretty much forty minutes of nonstop fuck yes. First is the bridge sequence wherein Shaw has commandeered a tank and Letty gets her clearest image for how batshit he really is. He gleefully drives the thing into traffic, murdering civilians in their cars on a truly astounding rampage. I mean, this movie has quite the fucking body count and rather than ignoring it, attention is paid to the fact that Shaw is murdering a lot of people. Letty freaks out and Dom insists that they do what they can to distract Shaw and give people a chance to get out of the way.

I can’t really overstate how great the bridge sequence is. Like many of the big action sequences in the series, this one hinges on a lot of high-speed driving, vehicular mayhem, and preposterous (super)heroic manipulations of physics through the totemic power of car. If there was any doubt that Lin is deliberately loving on The Avengers with this movie (after the ‘Samoan Thor’ gag, there shouldn’t be), it’s with this movie’s version of the joygasm-inducing catch save.

First you’re all like “where is this going?”

Then you’re all like “holy fucking shit”.

I only wish I had a better picture of this fantastic, ridiculous moment.

I laughed and hooted throughout the majority of Fast 6 but it is only as Dom suicidally car-frogs his way over a chasm separating the two lanes of the bridge that I wanted to stand up in my fucking seat. “No way!” I said as Letty, thrown from the tank, soared majestically in the air with Dom rising up toward her like a bald, beefy phoenix. Then there was only “yes! God yes!” as he catches her and they plummet onto, of course, the hood of a sportscar. “How did you know there’d be a car to break our fall?” she asks him moments later, swooning only an iota compared to me. How indeed.

Justin Lin said “fuck it, let’s make Fast 6 a superhero movie” and so it is.

Not to be outdone, Rome also imitates a mythical bird.

After that fucking stunt, you’d be forgiven in thinking that Fast 6 is done with you. But it isn’t. Oh no. Shaw is a pretty good villain, probably the best that the Fast series has had. Once he’s bagged, he isn’t really “bagged”. He has an ace in the hole named Mia and even though her life isn’t worth the thousands or millions that Shaw’s plans might cost in the moral calculus of a mind bent on precision, even Hobbes has by this point given in to the all-consuming power of family. He points a gun right at some soldier motherfucker and though Shaw gets to saunter out, nobody is letting him walk.

The second climax is the night-time assault on a Hercules plane. This entire sequence, like the bridge, is in motion. Somehow, Lin has figured out the magical formula of unique action (fistfights and gunfights are pedestrian, he’s almost saying, I can do that in my sleep fuckers) is to keep everybody moving and moving and driving and jumping car to car until the audience is bombared by clear, legible action that is as undeniable as the girth of Dwayne Johnson’s right bicep.

The once-Rock is having quite the year.

If you aren’t getting the picture, this shit is like a tantric on switch for action lovers. That Lin pulls it off predominantly with practical effects and makes it look easy is why Fast 6 is fourteen steps above even Fast 5 (let alone the rest of the series), which was itself a classic action movie. If the bridge isn’t enough for ya, this movie makes it a point to square each member of either crew against their spiritual opposite.

I mean. How do you even make a Fast 7? Stay tuned for the end credits to see fucking how. Fast 7 is being made for imminent release and I wait with baited breath and jubilant expectation.

“Paul, we don’t even have a big fuck-you shot for the climax. What are we gonna do?”

“Wait a second, Jordana. Is that what I think it is?!”

Why yes, it’s Vin Diesel driving a car through the front of an exploding plane.

But in the end, Fast 6 isn’t about the flashy cars, the big explosions, or the oily muscles. Fast 6 is about building a family and standing up for them. Instead of dismissing Elena, who was there for Dom after Letty, the movie hammers home its maturity (perhaps the most surprising of all the qualities the franchise has accumulated over time) and deals with it face-first. Just as hard emotional realities have to be dealt with alongside the bullets and blood, there’s always got to be time for family. How appropriate, then, that Fast 6 ends where the series began: sharing a moment around barbeque in the heart of L.A.

Fuck I love movies.

]]> http://thunderclam.wordpress.com/2013/05/24/you-dont-turn-your-back-on-family-even-when-they-do/feed/ 0 thunderclam fast-furious-6-cast fast-and-furious-6-uni04 Fast And Furious 6 970822_10151646465162631_2007192242_n Fast Furious 6-0013-20130501-69 header-fast-and-furious-6-cool-new-tv-spot Fast-and-Furious-6-Luke-Evans1 Fast-&-Furious-6-drive-review- fast-and-furious-6 ff6-banner fast furious 6 slider mgid uma video mtv.com 898758 hr_Fast___Furious_6_20 fast-six-plane-crash http://thunderclam.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/khaaaaaaaannnnnn/ http://thunderclam.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/khaaaaaaaannnnnn/#comments Tue, 21 May 2013 21:24:03 +0000 thunderclam http://thunderclam.wordpress.com/?p=2550 ]]>

An appropriate image for taking things a bit darker.

It won’t win me any favors to say so, but The Wrath of Khan is an outrageously overrated movie. To dig the hole further, I put it in the same category of adorable geek over-praise as the animated Transformers movie and the Indiana Jones trilogy. I say all this not to provoke nerdrage (inevitable anyway) but to set up a point.

Star Trek Into Darkness is a ballsy half-remake of Khan and it works for me precisely because I don’t give a shit about Star Trek in any special sense. Being that I think Khan can only be considered a good movie if you only compare it to other Star Trek movies. Star Trek Into Darkness is a legitimately good movie. But you wouldn’t know it from the majority of nerdy critics. To them, Darkness commits two major sins: 1) it dares to play with the sacred Khan and 2) it is occasionally pretty stupid.

I really didn’t expect to like Into Darkness as much as I did. It’s got its problems, mostly the same writing problems as usual with this team of creatives, but it overcomes them without asking the audience for a bail-out. The only reason to get worked up over this movie is because you are the butthurt Trekkie that Abrams is baiting. I applaud the gumption it took to do what they did here, even if they do try to pad out the impact with fan-service references and acknowledgment of nostalgia. More than that, I applaud a fun, visually stunning science fiction movie that just happens to be Star Trek.

Probably needless to say but SPOILERS, guys. Though… the review title is itself a spoiler? Whatever.

This movie features the most homoerotic genre bromance since The Lord of the Rings.

The first “sin” kind of takes care of itself. It’s a stupid, uninsightful complaint. It ignores the fact that Abrams has a mandate (which everyone helped create by making Star Trek 2009 a smash success) to remake the original continuity as he sees fit. It also ignores that the original Khan still exists for its odious fans to brow-beat neophytes with whenever they question the supremacy of whatever.

The second is overstated. If you liked Star Trek 2009, which is a pretty stupid movie full of irresponsible writing, then you had to ignore its almost brazen stupidity. Sometimes stupid is okay. I tend to be tough on stupid, but usually when it’s the kind of stupid that is all about cheating the audience or insulting them. Movies like Prometheus or Cowboys and Aliens fit that bill. Star Trek Into Darkness is not that kind of stupid. It doesn’t take itself seriously enough for that. It’s more akin to Indiana Jones or The Fast and the Furious. Those are movies that define enjoyable dumb.

And to be honest, Into Darkness is the first time I’ve felt like Abrams’ favorite hack writers actually bothered to dot their I’s and cross their T’s. Kurztman, Orci, and Lindelof are responsible for some of the worst written successful movies in a generation. Seriously, I am getting tired of having to explain to people why these guys are the worst and have pretty much always been the worst (Lindelof graduated to “worst” status after Prometheus and he isn’t doing himself any favors since). IMDB the fuckers. They make Akiva Goldsman look good.

But I’m not kidding when I say they at least tried to keep their script free of plot-holes. Almost all of the popular complaints (and I’ll get to many of them) have an in-movie justification, even if it’s one line of dialogue. I often praise good movies for asking the audience to pay attention to keep up with themes, characterization, etc. Though in Darkness it’s mostly plot stuff that gets explained this way, I have to respect that because the movie gets extremely expository one or two times but avoids making a problem out of it.

People have had enough of Kirk, man.

Probably the most important theme in the movie is this: what are leaders willing to give up for the sake of the people they lead? So far, Kirk (Chris Pine) has been coming up short as an effective leader mostly because of his massive ego and disregard for Starfleet protocol. At the beginning of the film, he and an away team are trying to stop a volcano from destroying a primitive tribe on the planet Nibiru. This is pretty cool stuff and a nice nod to the essentially benevolent nature of Starfleet. It also sets up the point that Kirk, for all his faults, really is the type of leader who is willing to sacrifice everything for his people. He breaks the Prime Directive to save Spock (Zachary Quinto) from the volcano, something that the literalist Spock disapproves of, but that makes complete emotional and moral sense to Kirk and everybody else. Except Pike (Bruce Greenwood), who gives Kirk one of the best dressings down I’ve heard in a while.

Essentially, Kirk still has a lot to learn. This movie is sort of about that. His ego needs to be tempered, and Into Darkness is the crucible in which it happens. The movie therefore focuses more heavily on him and its closest secondary characters than it does on the sort-of-ensemble of the 2009 movie. Characters like Sulu (John Cho), Chekov (Anton Yelchin), and even Bones (Karl Urban) don’t get as much to do. Still, this movie very wisely makes sure that everybody gets a few lines or moments (like Sulu being a badass, somehow a staple now) to remind the audience why these guys are hugely beloved as characters and that Abrams et al are genuinely interested in continuing that legacy.

Also, Spock keeps walking that fine line between irritating and awesome. This time with fire.

After Nibiru, Kirk gets bumped down to First Officer and Spock gets transferred to a different ship. However, terrorism is happening in London and all the captains and their first officers are called together in a disastrous meeting. The terrorist is a man named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) who is really Khan Noonien Singh. He has a big ol’ bone to pick with Starfleet and the magic regenerative blood needed to manipulate people to do his dirty work. In spite of the later issues revolving around that blood, the movie establishes very early that it’s important.

For all that Abrams seems to subsist on cynically manufactured “mystery” to bamboozle people into being interested in his shit, there isn’t really that much subterfuge going on within the movie itself. Everybody knows that someone is going to die in this movie. The big twist is that it isn’t Spock. The early notice about the Khanblood is as good as saying “don’t worry, it won’t stick”. Now this is sort of annoying, in a way, because it drives down the stakes. If we know Spock won’t really die, why worry about it? Unfortunately, this is a reboot of an existent story so we already know two things: 1) Spock dies and 2) Spock is resurrected in the sequel. Where Abrams gambles (and wins, I think) is in turning this around and killing Kirk but also reviving him in the same movie. This may not have been the only way to divert the stakes to something surprising (if you can’t have stakes, have twists is the logic, I guess?) but it is the way they took and it works.

For all his many faults, Kirk doesn’t really hesitate.

Anyway. Pike dies in Khan’s brazen attack on the meeting and this puts Kirk into revenge mode. Although this movie is about Kirk getting his house in order, we need this sort of catalyst to put him at odds with his crew. At his weakest, Kirk starts out by letting his fatal flaws lead him around by the nose. Earlier, he lectured Spock about friendship after Spock’s truthful report on Nibiru cost him his job. Spock in turn lectures Kirk and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) about how mortality and loss seriously freak him out. This becomes very important when contextualizing the big death scene.

Kirk’s rampage puts him in Admiral Marcus’s (Peter Weller) big weathered palms. He allows Kirk and Spock to lead a mission to the Klingon homeworld where Harrison/Khan has fled. Once there, they are supposed to bomb him from orbit using 72 special missiles. This is calculated move all around. The Klingons are scooping up territory and acting generally hostile toward Starfleet. Khan knows that Starfleet can’t follow him, or at least that they’ll be slowed down while he plans his next move. Marcus, on the other hand, is revealed to have used Nero’s attacks on Earth in the 2009 movie as an excuse to begin converting branches of Starfleet to a paramilitary organization. He wants to fight a preemptive war against the Klingons, believing them to be a direct threat to Starfleet and humanity. This is very interesting both in terms of navigating the darker timeline Nero created vs. the generally benevolent nature and purpose of Starfleet as well as in terms of the extent to which Into Darkness is commenting on how lies, power, and ego can coalesce into aggression as it does with Marcus and Khan (dark reflections of Kirk’s brief flirtation with the same).

The secondary theme, then, is how easily threats can change a person, or organization, into a darker version of what they were. The Into Darkness title refers directly to this. Not only does Kirk go darker (for a while) but so has this timeline (world) and all the people in it. Carol Marcus (Alice Eve) is now a weapons specialist, where in the original series she was a more benign scientist.

The Klingons are barely in this. I expect more in the threequel.

Being that there’s some set up for Movie 3 in this one, the Klingons are barely featured. A hint of things to come, it seems like, though I have some doubts about that given where Into Darkness leaves off. More on that later. For now, the significance is in keeping the settings exotic and interesting and creating great setpieces for explosive action sequences. The strongest part of the 2009 movie was never its action scenes. It was cool watching Spock and Kirk play gunfighter on Nero’s ship. Here, there’s a lot more chasing, butt-kicking, phaser-shooting, etc and it’s all great. This, even more than the impressive design and geography, makes me think Abrams will do right by Star Wars. At least more right than I would have thought prior to seeing this movie.

Some people are going to be annoyed by the fact that Into Darkness is an action movie. These people rightly expect Star Trek to present the exploratory, scientific dimension of the science fiction genre. I don’t know if this confusion of genres is really a problem for the movie, though. Into Darkness is what it is and it makes more sense to me to go after it, critically, for problems it has with what it is than for not being something else.

Cumberbatch overacts the whole movie.

Into Darkness is not a subtle movie. This is not the same as being obnoxious, which it isn’t, but it does create some close calls. Benedict Cumberbatch is a great actor who is usually amazingly subtle. In this movie, he goes very broad and while his voice gives all necessary gravity to Khan’s huge ego and crazy schemes, his ridiculous facial expressions challenge that gravity and dare comedy. I think mileage will vary on that one but it is undeniably a performance almost too big for the movie. I guess he’s trying to fill Ricardo Montalban’s shoes or make people forget he’s white or something, but it’s a performance that pulls double duty both undermining the self-seriousness edging into the movie and reinforcing the inherent lightness of the adventure flavor of the movie. It’s like Iron Man 3 in that it flirts with the darker, grittier tone and sensibility but ultimately veers back into adventure/fun mode. I like this. It shows a sense of commitment to the foundational aspects of these respective franchises. In other words, Star Trek can get dark but it’s not dark at heart.

Ultimately, Khan’s grievances with Starfleet fall at Marcus’s feet. It was Marcus who used him to design weapons and who gave him access to restricted technology like Scotty’s super-transporter formula from the 2009 movie (which explains one of the “plot-holes” people are talking about). Then Khan went rogue to save his 72 comrades. Evil as he turns out to be, Khan’s concern for his brethren make him somewhat relatable to the extent that he’s a representative of the lesson Kirk has to learn. On the back of that small dose of empathy, Kirk partners up with Khan to attack Marcus’s warship and save the Enterprise. It’s a fun team-up but really breathless in that it’s the tail end of the second act and there isn’t much time for the characters to play cat and mouse. Kirk pretty much knows that Khan will turn on him, just as Khan plays fast and loose with his presentation of his motives (he isn’t really a victim, his small army of supermen are guilty of horrific warcrimes). In a bizarre scene that probably caused a lot of groaning among franchise fans, Spock calls up Old Spock (Leonard Nimoy) to ask about Khan. In 2009′s movie, Old Spock had sworn not to reveal anything to Young Spock so that the timeline wouldn’t be continually fucked over. However, this is sort of the exception (we’re told) because Khan is so dangerous.

Dangerous but awesomely smug… Khan is a much better character after Kirk frees him. Especially when he gives Marcus the ol’ Roy Batty.

As a result, Spock is able to formulate a plan that sorts Khan out but also puts the Enterprise in jeapordy. There’s a bit where the ship free-falls into the atmosphere of Earth only to rise up in the clouds. As preposterous as it (and the whole movie) is in terms of realistic physics or even world-building (where is Earth’s response to a huge ship falling on it?), it’s a grandiose and iconic image that works as a stunning proof for the extent to which sacrificing sense for drama can work in a movie’s favor. If the movie doesn’t take external logic too seriously, anyway.

Less successful at this is Kirk’s “Russian Spacestation” engineering. He essentially kicks the fucking warp core back into place to get the Enterprise going again. Doing so means sacrificing himself due to the lethal amount of radiation in the core’s housing. This is the big twist of the movie. Khan has indirectly killed Kirk instead of Spock and after a moving, bromantic death scene, Spock’s earlier remarks about how loss and death mess him up come to the fore and he turns into an even bigger vengeance-machine than Kirk. This is a nod to the idea that Vulcans suppress their emotions because they feel so intensely that letting them go messes them up. Spock being the only one who can go toe-to-toe with Khan is cool. Also, in spite of the complaints that kicking the core is nuking the fridge, I think it’s completely consistent to the character. The scene isn’t just an inversion of the death, but an inversion of how the day gets saved at the price of that death. In Wrath of Khan, Spock does handyman engineering shit to save the day. That’s in-character for him. Spock is calculated, reserved, and competent. Kirk is impetuous and blunt. He doesn’t know what to do, technically, but he can see that one of the core’s pylons is out of sync and he knows he needs to fix that so he kicks it until it works as a gut instinct. Gut instinct is what Kirk is all about and this is returned to again and again in the movie, starting with saving Spock on Nibiru at the eventual cost of his captaincy, and repeatedly until it culminates in this moment.

Goddamn emotions.

Much of the character work in these movies is about showing Kirk and Spock complete each other. In this one, they are established friends but still with a lot to learn both from and about each other. While some fans are complaining that Kirk’s death is thematically meaningless because Kirk and Spock haven’t been friends for 15 years. This would make the use of this in Darkness a cynical rehash of familiar material just for the sake of shocking fans or something. I look at it a different way. Given that I’m not a swinging dick Trekkie, this may mean I don’t know anything, but let’s try this thought out and see where it goes.

The movie isn’t trying to capitalize on 15 years of friendship. Conversely, it is capitalizing only on Kirk learning the importance of self-sacrifice and Spock learning the importance of friendship. There’s enough work done for either character to justify their big moment together. This is more about realizing how important they are to each other in potential terms, than it is about the heavy loss of an old friend. Spock and Kirk are still “finding each other” and yes, it’s as gay as it sounds. Which is awesome. Kirk doesn’t even get a romantic subplot this movie, and Spock’s thing with Uhura is even more perfunctory. That’s because everybody knows which romance is actually important to these movies.

The only way this scene and the whole setup/payoff of the reversal doesn’t work is if you bring a bunch of Wrath of Khan baggage to the mix. Taken on its own and with the material that’s actually in the movie, it works. This is enough for me. If they’d simply skimmed through and done this scene without any supporting work, it would be the type of move that I hate most and criticize most fiercely when I encounter it in stories. Here, it’s being unfairly maligned by fanboys.

This does not mean that the movie isn’t stubbornly insistent of its own stupidity fairly often.

Now while I’m both defending and praising the pleasant surprise I got out of Into Darkness, I have to spend time on its myriad flaws. One of the minor ones, pictured above, is gratuity. This isn’t Bay’s Transformers series, so the gratuity is fairly minimal. This, however, makes it even more noticeable. Alice Eve undresses for no reason and then we get this carefully composed shot of her sexeh bodeh just to tickle the nascent pickles of pre or omnipubescent fanboys that creatives still think compose the majority of genre fans. Somehow, Hollywood hasn’t really figured out that nerds are the new normal and things like Star Trek aren’t the primary property of sweaty, virginal troglodytes. But it’s like they’re convinced they still have to drop the brow a few notches to appeal to these people, if they even exist anymore.

Again, it’s a minor quibble because it’s only one scene and it’s not that bad. Kirk is in his underwear in the movie too, and Chris Pine is way more sexy than Alice Eve anyhow. Plus, this movie is gayer than Hobbits (like I keep applauding) and that sort of repeals those moments where it pretends it likes girls.

If someone really wants to have a go at Star Trek Into Darkness for being dumb, it’s going to be in all the same ways that most plot-centric adventure movies are dumb. It contains many contrivances like the fact that nobody on Earth responds to the Enterprise’s plight in orbit. It contains many compromises between sense and drama. You can actually have both sense and drama, as much better science fiction movies continually prove. However, the Star Trek of the aughts isn’t really about being science fiction. It’s just window dressing, but very nice and pleasing window dressing. In effect, these are the kinds of rollicking, fun-first-questions-later movies that feel a bit antiquated in the contemporary world of armchair scientists refusing to suspend disbelief because they read io9′s article about warp drives.

Besides: spectacle.

Now the one exception, it seemed to me, was the magic Khanblood. It doesn’t bother me that it’s a thing. It’s dumb the way the Matrix of Leadership was dumb in Transformers 2 (thanks again, Orci and Kurtzman!) but at least it’s a tangible resurrection tool. It’s hocus pocus, sure, but it’s not necessarily the bad kind. What irks about it is that the crew of the Enterprise waits in suspense and Spock goes after Khan and Uhura follows to make sure Khan’s blood is retrieved (thus Khan needs to be alive). Why does it need to be Khan’s blood when there are 72 other supermen onboard the Enterprise in their cryotubes? Some line about how their security is “sequenced” suggests that they are actually unable to open the tubes. This is one of those times where it’s too thin, too throwaway to count as an actual explanation. It’s also such a crucial moment (much more so than Spock and Kirk being at the big Starfleet meeting) and therefore requires more justification to have full impact. Unfortunately, the movie drops the ball here. It’s not as spectacularly sloppy as when they disappeared Nero and his ship for 25 years to wait for the plot to happen in the 2009 movie, but it’s still fairly sloppy.

So while Into Darkness surprised me and did a little to rehabilitate my assessment of J.J. Abrams overall filmmaking skill, it has not really undone the damage that Orci, Kurtzman, and Lindelof have done to scripts and their images over the last 6 or 7 years. It seems like they all do better work when they are separated. Put them together and you get Cowboys and Aliens.

Love this image. Couldn’t think of a better place to put it.

Thankfully, Star Trek Into Darkness doesn’t hate its audience. It may not give much of a fig about the embedded Star Trek purists and Abrams may have stupidly tried to hide the identity of Khan by lying directly to everybody, but this is a movie made for people like me who love science fiction, think Star Trek can be a cool universe to play in, but who ultimately don’t give a fig about those purists either. Not even a little. To me, complaining about Into Darkness‘s many deviations and glib references to its overrated source material is the same as bitching that The Mandarin in Iron Man 3 is not the Yellow Peril caricature he was in the comics. If there’s any connective tissue at all to those two movies and how they relate to their audience, it’s in that. Iron Man 3 did it better, but Abrams can always learn new tricks.

The major takeaway as a fan culture is this: old stories are not sacred texts. If you want that kind of fandom, please see the Bible.

The major takeaway about this movie is this: sometimes dumb can be good, and it doesn’t do anybody any good to get outraged about dumb that loves you and wants you to have a good time. Save the raging for dumb that insults you, hates you, and thinks you’ll pay to be shat on like it’s amateur hour in Amsterdam.

Like a cat and a laser pointer.

The Great Gatsby is classic Baz Luhrman. Like most of his other films, it’s a big messy thing that sweeps you up in its ambition and only occasionally lets you drop. Mirroring the story of its enigmatic central character, the movie is big on imagination but small on coping with things not working out as planned. It’s impossible that this was intentional, but I feel like it’s an insightful observation to make about a resonant coincidence.

More than the book, Luhrmann’s Gatsby is a melodrama through and through. Occasionally this induces cringes as some scenes are just too maudlin (in some ways, the book is also an ode to maudlin) or too cheesy to withstand the instinctive rejection of melodrama in and of itself. The movie frequently overplays its hand, resulting in gimmickry that feels cheap rather than the ornate that it’s going for.

Instead of trying to derive some topical, modern-friendly message from what is essentially Rich White People Have Problems: The Movie, Gatsby commits utterly to the somewhat off-history context Luhrmann has crafted for it. This makes it essentially a fairy tale, and it follows through with the conventions until it all begins to fall apart and twist into a tragedy that is almost certainly Shakespeare-inspired. That goes for the book as well, but where the book is tidy and concise, the movie is bombastic and draped over the audience like a cigarette model with too-long legs.

Sometimes you just want her to move.

Gatsby’s ridiculous castle.

Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire, seemingly ageless) is a wannabe writer who moves to New York City to join all the excitement of the stock trade. He’s related to Old Money but is not essentially “of” it, so he lives in a little cottage right next door to the Jamie Foxx of 1920′s mansions. Across the bay, his cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan) lives with her boorish husband Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton, chewing the movie like Doublemint). Always the outsider and observer, Nick gets caught up in the petty intrigues and social abandon of New Yorkers in the 1920′s. He meets professional lady golfer Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki) and together they are pulled into the grand plan of Nick’s reclusive owner.

Five years ago, Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) met and fell in love with Daisy Fay only to disappear after the war (WWI) which left her to marry Tom. Now he’s come back to win her heart again. All the pomp and circumstance he can muster with what seem to be inexhaustible fortunes go toward this project. As he takes up an affair with Daisy, Nick continues to play the chronicler and watch the drama unfold. It’s a tricky proposition for a modern story, actually. I wouldn’t have been surprised if an adaptation of the book dropped Nick’s perspective and made Gatsby more protagonist and less subject. The Great Gatsby is a very faithful adaptation to the book, underneath all the visual stuff, and therefore keeps Nick in the watcher role, providing plenty of opportunities for unnecessary voice over (I think it’s definitely a crutch too often in this movie) and the book-end device where he’s in a Sanitarium writing this all out as a book. Plenty of magical typing across the screen ensues and it is all bad.

Leo is a good reason to see any movie.

Anyway, back to Gatsby’s plan.

There’s something romantic about it and if you can forget about the contemporary cynicism at the excesses of rich white folks, it’s enjoyable in much the same way as the The Count of Monte Cristo. In fact, I always loved the grandness at the heart of Gatsby’s plans and his efforts to realize them. In the movie, this is given huge emphasis and is brought to life by Luhrmann’s particular flair for pageantry, anachronistic music, and beautiful images that are almost slaps.

Leonardo DiCaprio is a treasure and his performance in this is filled with the kind of nuanced, quieter moments that he’s so good at. It’s interesting to note that he and Luhrmann go back to Romeo+Juliet. Gatbsy is the first time DiCaprio has leveraged his boyish looks rather than tried to make us forget them. His Gatsby is full of childlike wonder and imagination and the same stubborn insistence on his own reality as you’d expect from a headstrong boy. While Nick tells us that Gatsby is the greatest because he’s so hopeful, we see a desperate and naive boy who doesn’t get his way and has a hard time dealing with it. I think DiCaprio’s performance tells us that this is intentional, that it’s actually thematically relevant that what we get from Gatsby and what Nick gets are somewhat different things.

Because Nick, too, is boyish and naive.

Like in the book, Gatsby is the most interesting thing about the movie. The mystery surrounding his life story, his wealth, and his motives all swirl around throughout the movie and provide the stronger substructure on which is laid those draping legs, that persistent and pretentious melodrama. Less interesting are Nick or Jordan, the latter being my favorite character in the book and here underused in spite of a great performance from Debicki.  However, Carey Mulligan can basically make any character sympathetic and her line readings for Daisy keep her compelling even as the plot assassinates the character, making her more foolish and more frivolous over time. In the book, Daisy feels like the “beautiful fool” she describes early on and never much more. In the film, you get major depth and pathos from Mulligan, enough to garner real sympathy for Daisy and understanding (if not approval) of the choices she makes. Her delivery of the “beautiful fool” line is haunting and it gives the line significance in the movie that I don’t remember it having in the book (where it felt like a witticism in a book full of them). Even Edgerton can’t rescue Tom from being a total cad, but he walks away with just about every scene he’s in and manages to infuse the most repulsive character in the movie with something like human emotions during the movie’s double-climax.

Speaking of that climax, The Great Gatsby is too long. I understand the necessity of the two climaxes (the hotel scene and the accident), but there are two long breaths taken before the end where not only is the whole movie explained back to us by crappy VO, but the whole thing just grinds to a frustrating halt. The first happens before Gatsby dies, the other afterward as Nick goes ballistic and we get to learn all about how he ended up in the Sanitarium writing his book. Even though the book provides an ending, it seems like Luhrmann had trouble wrapping up the movie. Everything after Gatsby’s death especially feels like a movie that can’t quite figure out how to end. With a more concise, abrupt climax, The Great Gatsby would have went out with at least a whimper. As is, it goes out with a self-referential and tedious sigh.

New York is practically a character in the movie.

In spite of its structural clumsiness and narrative shortcomings, The Great Gatsby is a movie that deserves just about every aesthetic accolade you could give it. It’s impeccably designed, self-consciously mythologizing New York in a way that somehow feels fresh and exciting. I mean, it’s the most mythologized and romanticized city in the United States and Luhrmann makes that feel special anyway. That’s really something.

There’s also that The Great Gatsby is probably the best use of 3D in a live-action film since Avatar.

Though The Great Gatsby is a fairly shallow film overall, and it could be easily said that its visual flair is just more superficiality to disguise its lack of depth, I think it’s more fair to attribute credit to the sensory effect of a movie that is honestly and obviously trying to achieve such an effect. There are parts of Gatsby where wonder is invoked in the audience, where real beauty stands out in a world that is primarily about artifice, and where you can’t help but admire the vision that semi-obnoxiously coats everything else in it.

The Valley of Ashes is sort of a non-starter.

The one half-hearted attempt Gatsby makes at saying something about the poor is in its depiction of the coal-mined wasteland between Long Island (where the characters live and conduct most of the affairs that make up the movie) and the citadel of New York. This is where the poor, broken down people live. Some hand-waving is given to that the Valley exists to support the partying New Rich that populate the movie, but it doesn’t stick.

Jason Clarke and Isla Fisher play a married couple, the Wilsons, operating a gas station. Myrtle Wilson is Tom’s mistress and a secret thrust upon Nick even though Daisy is a relative. It seems like helping Gatbsy with Daisy is a way for him to balance the scales in terms of secrets and betrayals, but Nick is never able to fully realize his own motivations and the movie too quickly flits back to pageantry or melodrama to bother much with introspection. Nick’s ennui after Gatsby’s death doesn’t really feel like the end-road of his role in all this. He’s too much on Gatsby’s side and not enough on the side of getting away from all these lies, schemes, and secrets. The last secret he keeps is that it was Daisy who killed Myrtle. Maybe Gatsby’s last wish, that no one know it was Daisy, is the element that’s supposed to solidify him as a grand romantic hero. It doesn’t stick, in spite of Nick’s assessment of his character, because it’s still about Gatsby’s master plan and eliminating all obstacles to it.

It’s actually hard to consistently talk about the themes and characterization because while they are present and noticeable, they remain shadows of a story more interested in what these characters do than why. This is also why I called it a bit of a fairy tale. In fairy tales, things happen according to fairy tale logic and people can extract whatever metaphors and meanings they desire. Or they can take the whole thing literally and accept what the narrator or other “authority” in the story tells them about what they just saw. The Great Gatsby plays with the idea that Nick is an unreliable narrator, but there’s no commitment to actually exploring this. The fairy tale is not interested in interpretations, it only wants to set up and pay off.

Rare scene where The Great Gatsby breaks from its self-serious, maudlin tone and lets itself be awkward and funny.

All in all, The Great Gatsby has too much going for it to be a failure. Though even Luhrmann’s failures are interesting, to be honest. This is one of those movies where the flaws are easily overlooked if you can conceptualize it as a fairy tale and enjoy the sensory ride. Because of the great performances and visual beauty, The Great Gatsby can be enjoyed even if you note the flaws. It’s not expressly a dumb movie, even though it is shallow, and pretentious is often better than careless. I can imagine a version of The Great Gatsby that I would prefer more (as an adaptation of the book) but that doesn’t take away from Luhrmann’s silk and neon romp through his fantasized approach.

I have a strong instinct to criticize this movie on the grounds that it doesn’t acknowledge its social context whatsoever, and embraces the problematic aspects with abandon. I’ve restrained that instinct and reserved what little discussion I can offer about this.

I think a lot of people are going to dismiss or rail against this movie in light of contemporary attitudes toward wealth, excess, and even romance. In some sense, for example, Gatsby’s romanticism borders on creepy. He’s possessive and obsessive and all that fun stuff. Unsurprisingly, the Twilight crowd already seems to be eating this up. Likewise, the MTV Cribs dimension of culture will look at the opulence of Jay Gatsby in much the same way as Tony Montana is remembered. And Tony Montana was satirical, even. That Gatsby is a bootlegger and criminal? Even better. The pop culture impact of Gatsby, if it has much of one, will be depressing.

Can’t really imagine anyone else playing the guy.

All that said, it seems unfair to go at this movie on that level. Why should the adaptation of a book that’s almost 100 years old be reformulated to acknowledge the way some of its cultural contexts have changed over time? It’s a difficult question to answer. I can imagine good arguments going either way. I could even imagine criticizing a movie for not being more responsible with itself under different circumstances. The Great Gatsby is a trivial movie in many ways and perhaps that’s why I don’t care that it isn’t going for irony when Tom talks about the “Colored Empires” (though Daisy does make jokes about this) or when Gatsby is throwing his ridiculous parties on the bones of a working underclass. If it was less trivial, its story more affecting and profound, then we might rightfully expect some reflection of current social responsibility. But the book doesn’t exactly dwell on or explore those issues and it didn’t need to. It’s an interesting question to ask, whether these Rich White People Have Problems narratives are valid in spite of the cynicism they deserve.

It’s something I’ll probably wrestle with as the discussion of the movie rolls out among my friends and other writers. Let me know what you think in the comments!

Which is really the hero?

I think Iron Man 3 is only slightly less ballsy than The Avengers. It’s another of Marvel’s growing crop of “they really fucking made this? they really fucking made this!” movies. This is not to say that it doesn’t have problems or that it’s going to be a crowd-pleaser the way The Avengers was. You really can’t fault Marvel for a lack of boldness, though. If nothing else Iron Man 3 is really trying (and I think succeeding) in shaking things up and turning expectations upside down. It also wants to be a serious psychological exploration of character and on this front, credit goes to the allowances given to Shane Black to really make this movie his.

A lot of peoples’ enjoyment of this movie is going to rest on whether or not they get its broader context. Even broader than that it’s a Marvel movie. Or a superhero movie, for that matter. It doesn’t always feel like one, after all.

Because this is a Shane Black movie through and through (Christmas setting, introspective voice-over, snappy dialogue, funny and realized henchmen, monologuing Bond villain, etc), it will definitely help calibrate the reception of its sprawling tone and loose arrangement of Jungian psychological metaphor if you know your Shane Black. Even people who only ever saw the seminal Kiss Kiss Bang Bang will feel something familiar about Iron Man 3 that goes beyond the inclusion of Robert Downey Jr.

Marvel knows we’re living in what I called the post-Avengers world. Both in the film, where things are somewhat darker and more personal (seems this is being extended to other Phase 2 films given Thor 2‘s trailer), and outside of it. They are not trying to emulate the gangbusters approach they (and Joss Whedon) took to The Avengers. Rather, this is about scaling things back and dealing with the aftermath of a world-shattering event. This just feels right. I don’t know how else you could describe it.

But lets get back to the movie.

SPOILERS ACTIVATE!

Things get a little spooky after New York.

In all three Iron Man films, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) deals with some kind of suffering that threatens to hamper his unflappable confidence. This suffering provides a context for his growth as a character. Basically, he’s always been on a trajectory leading away from being such a selfish asshole. Physical conditions like the shrapnel in his chest or the iridium poisoning from IM2 seem a lot easier than tackling Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but Iron Man 3 goes there. He’s got the physical stuff, the heart condition and so on, pretty well squared away by now. But after almost dying in Loki’s invasion, Tony is left unable to sleep and driven to deep distraction trying to be prepared for any contingency. Even though he’s had plenty of experience managing the downsides of being a superhero, he’s driven far further into this part of his identity. No wonder, after encountering not only alien monsters but actual gods. He’s continued to build more and more Iron Man suits, though we don’t see most of them until the film’s somewhat disappointing action finale (40 unique suits zipping around in the dark…. really?).

As you’d expect, Tony’s issues have taken on a life of their own. He’s become reclusive and paranoid, his relationships with his few friends strained, and a new threat is rising in the meantime. In the Jack Bauer world of Colonel “Rhodey” Rhodes (Don Cheadle) who is now the Iron Patriot, a super-terrorist called the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) has declared war on the President of the United States (William Sadler as President Ellis… nice shutout to Warren Ellis, one of the best comic book writers alive and who originated the Extremis storyline heavily sourced in this movie). The Mandarin is a mysterious figure who has appropriated iconography, speech patterns, and techniques from a host of sources. He is like an aggregate meme of 10 years worth of War on Terror topography. This makes him an interesting specter of a villain but, given the way he is used in this movie, a fairly decisive political statement as well.

The Mandarin hovers over the movie like a hen. Ben Kingsley knocks every aspect of the character all the way to Thanos.

If Iron Man 3 is the end of a trilogy, which it definitively is, a unifying arc for it is Tony’s crusade against war profiteering. He’s often been called a symbol of American Power and combined with Iron Man as a figure of independent heroism and warlike technology, it’s hard to argue with this. But interestingly, Iron Man has morphed through the movies to be a symbol of the rehabilitation of that power. Or an aspiration to that, at least. See, Tony gives up being an arms dealer and then winds up fighting people who want to conjure or otherwise manufacture conflicts that will justify their technologically-derived accumulation of wealth. Pure commerce motivates people like Justin Hammer and Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) and this seems at least as American as who has the biggest gun. Be that as it may, Tony Stark and Iron Man stand against that notion of America and Iron Man 3 dramatizes this in singular and effective fashion. He leads by positive example, by dropping the trappings of power in favor of sharing it (his clean energy program in The Avengers being an example) and represents the now-elusive specters of American innovation, philanthropy, and charm.

But then there’s Killian, who wants to trade truth for dollars and global security for personal advancement. Killian shows up with his Extremis tech, which seems to be potentially beneficial to people for the recovery of wounds but which also makes people super-powered. They heal fast, get strong, and can explode if triggered. In Killian’s case, they even breathe fire. In practice, it’s all a bit ridiculous and hand-wavey in science-fiction terms but it totally fits the loosey-goosey approach to science that all the Iron Man movies have (let alone The Avengers and the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe). The plausibility of Extremis isn’t really an issue, but it’s execution is. Later in the film, Tony’s army of suits battles a group of leap-frogging, fire-punching Extremis anonymities. This comes off as a step down from Hammer and Whiplash’s army of drones from the second movie, if you can believe that. There just isn’t much too these guys and their design feels lazy and dumb. Oh, they glow from the inside out. It’s boring.

Thankfully, they aren’t that important. Iron Man 3 is too busy being a a beautiful chimera of symbolism, wit, and style to derive personality from whatever bullshit makes its thugs dangerous. Black is far more interested in having fun, humanizing the thugs occasionally, and otherwise playing in as many cinematic sandboxes as possible all in the same superhero threequel.

James Badge Dale is pretty fun as one of the few Extremis soldiers who rises above anonymous henchman status.

As you’re no doubt aware by now, Iron Man 3 has a fucking lot going on. It’s a miracle that it holds it together, really. If it’s any kind of great, it’s great because of an effortless handling of its own ambitious mass. While watching it, it’s sort of perplexing how much this movie makes time for without ever feeling fat. It’s got none of the second-act drag that Iron Man 2 suffered from. For some, it will feel tonally slipshod and maybe a bit scatter-brained but the script is actually airtight. Maybe too tight for the ending to fully work, actually. This being a Shane Black movie, it’s got time to mix in all kinds of stylistic references from the hard-boiled detective genre to classic James Bond films.

While the marketing made it look like Iron Man 3 was going to go very dark, and I acknowledged its darker overall tone earlier, don’t worry about it. Iron Man 3 is easily the funniest of all three films, scoring hit after hit with great one-liners, Black’s specialty set-ups and payoffs, and the kind of grand banter you’ve come to expect from Tony Stark. Robert Downey Jr has always been this franchise’s one and only weapon of mass destruction. To some extent, this is actually a flaw all three Iron Man films have in varying degrees. Without RDJ, there may not be much else to get excited about.

The movie wisely tries to get around the implicit “we’ve seen it already” side of the suit coin.

The darkness is really not external, as the trailers suggested. They had to lead with the Mandarin to throw people off Killian’s scent. The reveal that the Mandarin is just a stooge, a false-flag Killian has used to obscure his true intentions and plans, is perfectly handled in a uniquely comedic way. It also feels adult, and not because The Mandarin’s actor is actually a deranged hedonist, but because it asks you to roll with this twist not as an “aha!” moment, but as a genuine opportunity for absurdity and commentary.

It’s no secret that many believe the American government has done its own false-flag work to spur economic and military churn. The Iraq War feels like a distant memory in some ways, even while it still rages, but Iron Man 3 remembers it and remembers how easily people are fooled by even a messy stage show. Black gets away with this by wrapping it up in the absurdity of the reveal. It really works on many levels and it is (rightly) pissing off the purist, foolish “fans” who are the same people that wanted The Mandarin to be the Yellow Peril caricature he started out as. With how Iron Man 3 handles this alone, Marvel (and Kevin Fiege) prove themselves to be astonishingly savvy, bold, and intelligent.

They are not fucking around and The Avengers wasn’t a fluke nor the last word on super hero movies. They still have shit to show us.

Guy Pearce is in the “having so much fun” phase of his career.

One of the core themes of this series is that “no man is an island”. Not even Iron Man.

Tony always fights shadowy versions of himself. In this way, Iron Man is always playing with psychology as a dimension of storytelling. In the third film, Tony’s shadow is Aldrich Killian. Like Obediah Stane or  Justin Hammer, Tony has history with Killian. In their case, it’s as simple as Tony being an asshole and Killian being an awkward interloper. Fast forward 13 years and Extremis has rehabilitated Killian into a 90′s era villain. Right down to his suits. The movie flirts with the idea of forming love triangles between Tony-Pepper-Killian or Tony-Pepper-Botanist, but never actually goes there. This may be due to script changes (and certainly some stitches are visible here and there), but it feels more right than if the triangles actually happened. The focus remains on Tony learning to keep calm and carry on, and the secondary characters are there to facilitate, motivate, and complicate this process.

Iron Man 3 gives a lot of ground to secondary characters. This is because it’s important for Tony to learn how to graciously rely on others. Not only series mainstays like Pepper and Happy, but newcomers like the “inner child” figure represented by Harley Keener (Ty Simpkins) or even the projection of Tony’s own subconscious: Jarvis (Paul Bettany). And, subsequently, the Iron Man suits themselves. Tony may be Iron Man, but he’s also a man who tries to split himself into different selves, each responsible for different things. For example: Jarvis is not a true A.I. but rather a reflection of Tony, first representing the part of him that is organized and productive, and later taking over the spectrum of power represented by Tony’s 40+ Iron Man suits. Learning how to let this stuff go and internalize rather than externalize is part of Tony’s journey.

Iron Man 3 goes back to basics!

The core Tony is the “mechanic” and his greatest strength is improvisation. The Superhero is an abstraction (or distraction), and the movie doesn’t waste much time beginning to deconstruct the very idea of Iron Man. Early on, Tony one-ups himself in terms of activation technology and interface with the suits by making them remote-controllable. While being inside the suits helps with his anxiety, he no longer needs to literally be Iron Man. By the time he’s got Jarvis piloting his army of suits, the big question looms: where do you even go from here? Is Jarvis now Iron Man in some way?

I say no, by the way, given that Jarvis is just a, albeit sophisticated, program.

The fact that Tony Stark no longer has to be the man in the suit raises big questions for the super status quo familiar to comics readers. It’s a very interesting move, but not one I’m sure really works (as I get to later). When it does work, it’s in showing just how capable Tony is without the signature armor. In two sequences that don’t seem to have much in common but totally do, the shift in centrality for the “Iron Man” identity surfaces.

This works much better as superhero stuff than the big finale.

The first is Tony’s solo assault on The Mandarin’s mansion where he uses gadgets and weapons he cobbles together from whatever he has on hand. Like Harley tells him, his real strength is that he can always just “build something”. The second is the lauded sequence where Tony helps rescue a bunch of passengers from an exploded Air Force One. I say “helps rescue” because this scene, nick-named The Barrel of Monkeys, is a perfect symbol (in a movie full of symbols) of Tony’s need to cooperate with others to achieve best results. He doesn’t simply catch all the passengers as, perhaps, Superman would. Instead, he helps them help each other by providing the encouragement and anchoring force they need. One by one, he has them scoop each other up until they have essentially saved themselves.

The optimism and “reach exceeds grasp” attitude is central to Tony Stark and makes for truly thrilling superheroics.

Pepper is only the damsel for a little while before getting the most ass-kicking moment in the film.

So I mentioned above how I think there’s a sense in which the ambition of the movie undermines it. My one narrative complaint about Iron Man 3 is that it feels just a bit too final. With that, it also feels easy when it waves away both Tony’s iconic chestplate and Pepper’s Extremis in order to come to its too-neat conclusion. It is seriously Dexter sort of neat.

At the end, Tony says “I am Iron Man” but it is unclear what this now means. He has destroyed all his suits, tossed the Arc Reactor into the ocean, and seems to be starting a new chapter in his life. As this movie handily demonstrates, Tony’s real super power is his brain. That said, the way Iron Man 3 ends makes it feel like he’s going into retirement. That the credits include bits from all three movies seems to cement that this is a send-off, a real end for the RDJ era of the character.

Tony no longer needs to be Iron Man for psychological armor. He no longer has any physical tether to the suit. He no longer needs to redeem himself for his war-profiteering days. By the end of Iron Man 3, all the things that made Tony Stark a superhero are essentially gone. He’s become a completed character. Many are going to argue that they’ll find a way around this but I think whoever writes Iron Man 4 has their work cut out for them then. And they likely won’t have the charisma powerhouse that is Robert Downey Jr, the man most probably owed primary credit for the very existence of the MCU.

Making this a night scene was a mistake.

This may go a bit wide of being a criticism of the movie, but it definitely leaves the audience wondering “what the fuck?” even as a presumably reassuring card comes up reading “Tony Stark Will Return”. It isn’t reassuring, by the way. In fact, it feels like Marvel capitulating to the rumors swirling around that this is RDJ’s last solo outing with the character. Though cute, the after-credits bit where we find out that the narration that bookends the movie is meant as the intro and outro of Tony confiding in Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) doesn’t lessen the confusion.

In a broader sense, Iron Man 3 is a stirring call to arms for the “what comes next?” aura around Phase 2. It shows that stripping these characters down to a more intimate level works as a way to keep them relevant. Mix in a bold writer-director like Shane Black and you’ve really got something that ups the ante without actually having to outdo The Avengers in terms of pure comic book spectacle. My misgivings about the finality of this particular chapter of the grand storyverse Marvel is building for us aside, the future is very bright and very intriguing for fans of these movies and characters.

]]> http://thunderclam.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/tony-need-gary/feed/ 3 thunderclam HTS0080_v001.1052_R.JPG Iron_Man_3_screenshot_620x380 Iron-Man-3-The-Mandarin iron-man-3-extremis im3-1 aldrich_killian-e1366923546108 ca10926r Iron-Man-3-Air-Force-One iron-man-3-pepper-potts-1 iron-man-3-iron-men http://thunderclam.wordpress.com/2013/04/26/ill-be-your-stepfather-in-about-a-week/ http://thunderclam.wordpress.com/2013/04/26/ill-be-your-stepfather-in-about-a-week/#comments Fri, 26 Apr 2013 20:45:01 +0000 thunderclam http://thunderclam.wordpress.com/?p=2511 ]]>

This is a ridiculous, misanthropic film. 

Michael Bay is a well-known fan of the Coen brothers. He frequently casts Coen regulars (John Turturro and Frances McDormand for example) and sometimes seems to flirt with some of their human-hating dark humor from time to time. Even in kids’ movies like Transformers. In Pain & Gain, Bay returns to the world of R rated high saturation ridiculousness that he left behind for ten years to do progressively worse giant robot movies. This is the world where Bay belongs, however. This means that Pain & Gain is here to remind us what the guy can do with obnoxious, somehow nuanced, vulgarity when he feels like it.

One of the things I like about Bay is how unafraid he is to mock his own trademarks. 

Pain & Gain isn’t some kind of masterpiece, but it is definitely the most 90′s movie of 2013. That has to count for something, right?

It’s a very funny, very entertaining film with a bevy of great performances. It’s basically a cinematic list of great lines, scenes, and small beats that keeps piling on itself and rarely lets up. To get a bit more sophisticated for a moment, it is also a great companion piece to Spring Breakers. This movie is also showing us a great big mirror held up to a dimension of the American psyche with much wit but little judgment. Like Spring Breakers, I think Pain & Gain has a very high potential to be misunderstood and championed by a crop of idiots for whom this movie has a condescending affection. They will want to be just like Daniel Lugo and fail to realize that not only is Lugo a sociopathic monster, this movie isn’t shy about it.

It is also worth mentioning that I read the articles this film was based on and it is fairly faithful from what I can remember. I read the pieces back when this movie was first announced. Pain & Gain might be the most entertainingly bizarre “true story” movie ever made.

This movie is sort of a present for people who like Mark Wahlberg.

Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) is a half-smart gym trainer who aspires to be a lot more. He’s the classic scumbag who is just smart enough to bamboozle dumber people but not quite smart enough to realize that he is being bamboozled just as often. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t realize that self-help gurus often make money on the saps who listen to them, not on some secret they discovered beforehand. Ken Jeong has an extended cameo as Johnny Wu, exactly the sort of guy Lugo listens to and wishes he could be. That the audience is (or should be) clued into what Wu is all about divorces them from Lugo’s obliviousness and shows him for the fool he is. I just hope that’s what most people get from this because there is no sense that Lugo, in real life or as depicted, is at all heroic. Entertaining? Yes. You want to see his adventures and antics precisely because he’s entertaining and his interactions with Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson) and Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) are so consistently hilarious.

This is something Wahlberg brings to the table alongside the film’s approach to the story. Pain & Gain is a crazy story and a lot is made of how unbelievable it all is. Pete Collins’ articles could have been approached in a way more straightforward way. It’s to Bay and his writers’ (Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) credit that they decided instead to focus on just that unbelievability and commit to it utterly. This makes scenes that probably didn’t happen (Lugo and the kids) play out in a way that feels consistent to the characterization and tone while also being as bewildering and entertaining as pretty much anything else that happens.

Kershaw is a great Bayhem character.

As Lugo uses his low-grade cunning to help Sun Gym up its profile, to the delight of owner John Mese (Rob Corddry), he starts training Vic Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub). Kershaw is a self-made man in exactly the kind of way that Johnny Wu probably isn’t. Rather than “generously” sharing his secrets, Kershaw has a chip on his shoulder as deep as the Marianas and wastes no opportunity to be a staggering prick about everything. Lugo is just another loser to him and the film suggests that its Lugo’s deep-rooted envy combined with Kershaw’s arrogance that sets his whole whacky scheme off. Lugo decides to stage a kidnapping, have Kershaw sign over his assets, and then get away with it all by preserving his anonymity. To get this done, he recruits his best friend Adrian (a moronic juicer with erectile dysfunction) and the recently freed Paul Doyle (a big, lovable born-again with impulse control issues). Lugo is a gifted liar and uses every inch of that gift to string his friends, and everyone else, along. They hold Kershaw for weeks. He refuses to break and even forms a twisted friendship with Paul. When he finally does break, they ineffectually attempt to kill him and make it look like an accident. He survives, though, which is actually deepens the menace in the movie instead of alleviating it.

The cops don’t take Kershaw seriously so he reaches out to a private investigator, Ed Dubois (Ed Harris) who is retired and feels like a bit of a cliche. He’s the most cinematic character in the movie, kind of, the quintessential retired cop/retired detective who takes on one last case on instinct, though at first he has the same incredulous reaction to Kershaw’s story as the police did. One of the points the movie returns to is that the cops really dropped the ball and take a lot of responsibility for the further misdeeds of Lugo and his “gang”.

As much as Lugo sucks at being a criminal (and boy does he), he was really good at working for Sun Gym. In another life, Lugo could have become a fitness guru not dissimilar from Johnny Wu (who is more a “boats and bitches” guru apparently) and really had the empire he so desperately wants. The fun of the movie, though, is in just how badly Lugo and friends fuck things up. The film is structured as a series of progressively more bizarre and intensely stupid misadventures. Every time it threatens to turn into something more pedestrian, Paul does some coke or robs an armored car and the movie is back off anything resembling rails. This is a good thing.

Everybody in the movie is good but The Rock fucking owns.

Pain & Gain is a pretty stylish movie but is light on gimmicks or Bay’s characteristic touches. One of the gimmicks that works surprisingly well is the voiceover. In conventional wisdom, voiceover is a crutch used by lesser screenwriters who can’t get the message across with staging. In this movie, Bay and the writers show how little they care about that conventional wisdom and give every major character their own voiceover. Sometimes this is broken up and you don’t hear any for a few scenes, other times the voiceover swings from character to character in the same scene. It’s one of the ways we get introduction to these people, and it’s actually an excellent delivery system for comedy. I usually don’t mind well-done voiceover in a movie and here it’s so much a part of the joke that it feels irreplaceable. It’s actually kind of stunning how well it’s woven between the characters, it’s almost like the movie is doing third-person omniscient. I think the last movie I remember that did something similar (besides Detention but, well, y’know) was Election.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Michael Bay and I’m glad he’s got movies like Pain & Gain still in him. This is a movie that is preoccupied with an exaggerated definition of not only the “American Dream” (which is often referred to) but in a warped definition of masculinity. In Lugo’s world, a real man has the sculpted body of a God first and everything else should follow from that. It’s a sort of entitlement that might seem a bit foreign to younger people, but it does make you understand Lugo’s mentality and just how twisted he really is (if you’re paying enough attention anyway). Though this movie enjoys its idiotic, violent criminals it doesn’t try to glorify them. They glorify themselves and the movie is happy to stand back and watch it happen. This is very familiar after seeing Spring Breakers but I imagine it’s hard for audiences to get a good handle on. I mean, we are far more used to anti-hero stories (or at least misinterpreting satire as heroism, see Scarface) that would have made Lugo and friends a tragic story of things simply getting out of hand. They definitely do get out of hand, but it isn’t because of cosmic unfairness or oppression but because of stupidity, shortcuts, and the entitlement of the American Dream.

Broad irony is something Bay occasionally does very well, if never subtly.

Like I keep saying, a lot of people are going to miss the irony of Pain & Gain even if they grasp that this is not a movie where we’re supposed to root for Lugo and his buddies (at least too much). It’s sort of hard not to root for Paul and as he is somehow the funniest and also least culpable of the three, the movie is okay with this and it gives you permission to be as well. His ending is downright pleasing, in some ways, because while movie Paul Doyle might be different from real-life Paul Doyle, you get a sense that this is basically a man who means well but is too gullible, stupid, and caught up in his addictions to have the fortitude to withstand a man like Daniel Lugo. Lugo and Adrian are simply numbskulls who overreach and deserve exactly what happens to them. Lugo started out as a wannabe white collar hustler, which we can more or less get behind as long as he learns a lesson, but this film makes sure you understand that this guy is like a serial killer: fantasy and small potatoes are not going to be enough forever.

Wahlberg has our attention if not our sympathy, then, and while Pain & Gain is way past hard lines of good guys and bad guys (far more like a Coens film this way), there is a sense to which Lugo’s path is carefully structured so that things go really bad around the third act and the dawning realization that there’s no redemption for him is a late one. It’s a delicate balancing act and I appreciate this approach to the story on pure entertainment grounds. You have to get people to like Lugo (at least) enough to follow him through a movie where he essentially does bad things to people because of envy, greed, and self-entitled delusion. You have to kind of hope he’ll make a turn-around or someone more morally reprehensible than he is will turn up. That character never appears because Lugo is the only real monster in the movie. Adrian is his dupe, Paul is a stooge, and Kershaw is an Ari Gold-level asshole.

Rebel Wilson fits perfectly well in a Bay movie somehow.

Pain & Gain is the kind of movie where you and your friends quote or refer to scenes for days after seeing it. Dwayne Johnson’s cokehead scenes are flat-out worth the movie on their own. He steals the movie but also shows more of his acting muscle (sorry I had to) than the other kind. He always seems just on the verge of breaking out of the “omg he large” mold of action/comedy that he’s done so far. Roles like this and his small one in Be Cool (which started a lot of the buzz he had for a while as a REAL LIVE ACTOR) should open more doors for him if he chooses to go through them. I for one would love to see that. This is a movie where, if it had more Coen DNA, you’d feel the same sort of detached bemusement for Paul Doyle as you did for Brad Pitt’s character in Burn After Reading (they are similar in some ways after all). Instead, Johnson completely wins you over and it’s a special sort of magic that this doesn’t undermine the movie’s ironic affection for the characters.

Bay will never be a classy sort of director, and he shouldn’t be. He’s a step above your standard schlock director and is willing to go places and show you things that you’d never thought you’d see let alone enjoy on some twisted level. He’s a reveler in the vulgar, saturated dimensions of the culture that produced him. He’s an interesting motherfucker, in other words, and he makes very interesting movies, too, even when they suck.

Luckily Pain & Gain doesn’t suck.

We watch a lot of TV in my household. Since narrative television, especially in the “genre” camps, has been going through a renaissance of high quality, popular content, this is a good problem to have. I seem to spend almost as much time getting into new shows as I do continuing on with ones I’ve been watching for years. I try a lot of stuff or I will revisit stuff with good word of mouth after it’s been on a while if I somehow missed it from start date.

The reason I write this article is because, every now and then, there are shows that come out that deserve a bit of championing. Some of them don’t really need it, even when they do deserve it, while others might because they are risky or underwatched shows that need every viewer and all the internet buzz they can muster. I didn’t write about Last Resort and I should have. That was a great show that was canceled (though it got to have a conclusion of sorts which is better than most get). I did write about Caprica but that was only after it got canceled. Not writing about Last Resort was a concession to that show’s cancellation. I couldn’t quite dredge up a semi-bitter PSA like I did with Caprica.

But rejoice. This article is about good shows that have a strong chance of being successful (if they aren’t considered successful) already. These aren’t black sheep TV shows, either, but stuff you may have heard about. In this write-up, I’ll talk about four recent shows that are at various stages of airing (one is wrapping up it’s first season next week, another is only just through it’s second episode) and why I think you should be watching them.

Vikings (History Channel)

Confidently coming out of nowhere, Vikings is History Channel’s foray into the gritty medieval landscape populated by Game of Thrones and the various attempts of Starz to rebottle the lightning that is Spartacus (which, incidentally, ended its run gracefully this month). Because it launched a few weeks before Thrones, it felt like Vikings was meant to be a salve on the anticipation of that (amazing) show’s third season. Though it does feature the blood and back-stabbing of it’s extremely distant cousin, Vikings submits itself as a relatively historically-accurate tale of the semi-mythic Ragnar Lothbrok (Travis Fimmel) who is an intellectual, curious war-leader who bucks tradition and carves himself a place of power by maneuvering an autocratic Earl (Gabriel Byrne) and revolutionizing the raiding traditions of his clan.

Vikings just cleared the 8th of its 9 episode first season so I’ve had more time to get into it and assess its quality. It’s also the one show on this list that probably doesn’t have as much exposure, though I have been surprised by bringing it up or being asked if I watch it. The reason people like it has almost everything to do with Fimmel. The other members of the cast are great, especially Gustaf Skarsgard as Floki and Kathryn Winnick as Ragnar’s wife and battle companion Lagertha. Fimmel is a chemistry machine with every other actor, especially Winnick, and the show maintains a puckish and somewhat risque sense of humor about sex and gender roles, domestic responsibilities, etc.

The bulk, though, is a pseudo-political drama about Ragnar’s rise to power and status among the vikings. There’s court intrigue, albeit at a small scale, rivalries with other men and leaders (even a Robert Baratheon-like English king), and plenty of smartly orchestrated and shot battles. On the whole, Vikings is much smaller in scale than some of the other big shows of the last few years, but that shouldn’t bother you when it’s as appropriate and well-used as it is here. The other thing to enjoy about it is the way it is both affectionate and critical of Christianity (from the perspective of fatalist pagans) as well as including cultural clashing, curiosity, and authentic references to Scandinavian beliefs, customs, myths, and history.

It’s probably the best show or movie that is about or includes vikings. Ever.

Orphan Black (BBC America)

Set in Toronto and featuring a lightly science fiction backstory, Orphan Black‘s big draw isn’t the clone intrigue but its effortlessly complex tone and characterization. Like a more mature, less ambitious (not in a bad way) Dollhouse, this is a show that wants to be about the mutability and malleability of identity while also featuring plenty of drama, mystery, and did I mention the characterization?

The heart and soul of Orphan Black is Tatiana Maslany. I don’t know where they found her (yes I do, fucking Regina) but she is immensely talented. Her performance, in which she must play several distinct versions of the same woman (sometimes opposite herself or selves) convincingly, can’t be overestimated. The kicker is that the core version, our main protagonist and heroine, is Sarah who is a rough-and-tumble British-born punker chick. Without an iota of hesitation, Tatiana Maslany can swing from accent to accent, mannerism to mannerism. In the four episodes that have aired, we have seen five or six versions of her and each one makes you sit back and marvel that this is the same actress.

If that wasn’t enough, Sarah is supported by a charming and fairly dynamic cast of supporting characters. While she’s ostensibly trying to figure out who is killing all her fellow clones and trying to prevent it from happening to her, the show is also about Sarah’s journey from self-absorbed asshole to someone a bit more balanced and “good”. You love her in spite of her flaws, and she has many, because she is relentlessly competent and resourceful. The show walks a super fine line in keeping her resourcefulness believable and so much of the enjoyment of watching it is in the surprise and joy you feel as they pull it off every fucking time. It’s also important to mention that this is a show that is content to take its time with the big mythology stuff (such as it is) and slowly tease out the science fiction elements as it deals with the day to day challenges of pretending you are a cop clone of yourself. I usually get bored of episodic, procedural shows but Orphan Black only follows that model at the loosest possible level and is therefore completely engaging in spite of its “slowness” (it does not feel slow, trust me).

Defiance (SyFy)

I was a bit tipsy as I watched the 85-minute premiere of Defiance. This is an incredibly ambitious show in terms of sheer scale. However, it does the smart thing and wraps that scale around a solid core of familiar, flexible tropes that it is already (only two episodes in) beginning to tickle. As it goes on, I suspect Defiance will actively target its own molding and the archetypal tropes, characters, and situations that inhabit its wonderfully realized world.

There are some easy nitpicks to make about this show. It has very human-looking aliens (in the Star Trek tradition), for one thing. Almost all of its characters feel pretty stock at this point, for another. But that said, you’ll find yourself marveling at the scale and attention to detail. This is a show built on world-building. It won’t be the Game of Thrones of scifi TV but it is definitely coming from the same place when it comes to crafting a detailed, authentic-feeling world. It’s also a huge mainstream show almost tailor-made for serious science fiction TV fans. It calls back to all the “bunch of aliens working together dysfunctionally” shows (Farscape, DS9, Babylon 5) while also soldering a healthy slice of the Western genre on top of it all. Its excuse for changing Earth into a bizzarro frontier? Alien terraforming! This may seem hand-wavey, but it never feels like it. This is a show where you know they have a “show bible” thicker than two stacks of the good book wherein every single seemingly insignificant detail is thought through and explained. Not everybody cares about stuff like this, but SyFy’s audience definitely does.

It is early days for Defiance yet and it could still go the way of Terra Nova or Revolution (up its own ass, in other words) but there are no red flags for this and the second episode did not have the customary sophomore slump. If anything, it was more interesting than the first one. I am optimistic with this show and had a lot of fun with it so far. But it’s probably the biggest question mark in this list, fair warning.

Hemlock Grove (Netflix)

Unlike the other shows, Hemlock Grove is not being schedule-released on cable. Netflix bought the show, developed by Eli Roth, wholesale and all the episodes are available on their streaming service. Of the four shows in this article, this is the hardest one to broadly recommend. Grove is a weird show, clearly inspired by the boom of teen and adult horror lit shows (True Blood and Vampire Diaries for example), it feels more dangerous and edgy than almost anything else I’ve watched on “TV” lately. This isn’t just a matter of blood, guts, boobs, or adolescent drug abuse. It’s something atmospheric in the show itself. It feels like a Stephen King book but not the usual sort of show that gets made out of them. Roth apparently drew inspiration from Twin Peaks and from what I understand of that show, atmosphere and creepy creep was paramount.

Hemlock Grove has its mysteries, both supernatural and potentially science fictional, and it is taking its time getting into them. Like Orphan Black, it has a coy and clever sense of itself as a genre show. Case in point: everybody knows that the show features werewolves (as Orphan Black features clones) but they didn’t know that there’s a seemingly evil medical company experimenting on people, mind control, physically deformed empaths, and Famke Janssen (actually good for a change).

The kids in this show, of which there are many, feel like kids. The pro adult cast (Janssen, Lili Taylor, Dougray Scott and even Battlestar Galactica‘s own Chief Galen Tyrol aka Aaron Douglas) elevates things beyond the usual droning teen angst. There’s also that there’s pretty much no droning teen angst. Instead, it simply feels like some of the characters happen to be teenagers. I don’t think Hemlock Grove is meant to be about the “teen condition” or any kind of coming of age story. It’s a mystery show, but with interesting and clever treatment of the tropes it is using.

I mean, even though I liked the pilot, what has totally sold me on this show is the vulnerable, somehow sweet budding friendship between Roman (Bill Skarsgard and get this, he’s another son of Stellan Skarsgard and brother of Alexander and Gustaf, of Vikings, who are both actors) and Peter (Canada’s Landon Liboiron, who was also in Terra Nova). These kids just recognize something in each other and even though there’s caution and curiosity, there is also an overwhelming sense of fatefulness shadowing them. Seeing how this plays out, whether it’ll be a Kal-El and Lex Luthor deal, is going to be one of the main draws of the show for me.

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So anyways, let me know if you check these shows out and want to chat about them. I want to know what you think about them, what you like or dislike, and so on. It’s cool that everybody loves and talks about Game of Thrones but let’s share the love!

By the way, I also sometimes watch bad shows and don’t continue. Da Vinci’s Demons? Bad. Sorry Starz. Keep trying!

Ryan Gosling doesn’t star in this movie, he haunts it.

I actually saw The Place Beyond the Pines before the last two movies I reviewed (Evil Dead and Oblivion) but it’s taken me a lot longer to conjure a review. This is partly because I wanted to like this one more than I did. It’s also because, whether it works for you or not, The Place Beyond the Pines is one you have to sit with for a while. It’s thematically dense and takes itself very seriously. It mostly succeeds in expressing its themes effectively and leaving the audience with the semi-melancholy feeling that pervades it. That said, the structure undermines the movie and it seems like they should have presented it for what it is rather than hiding its generational scope behind the promise of its leads doing impressive dramatic work, which they do.

Overall, The Place Beyond the Pines is hampered by the conceits that don’t work. On a deeper level, though, it’s a movie that should connect strongly on the strength of its essential theme: what sons inherit from their fathers, good and bad. I think that The Place Beyond the Pines is probably a more enjoyable experience if you know about the plot and a pretty major character death before actually seeing it. Without this knowledge, the feeling is that Pines is trying to be surprising and it ends up feeling frustrating instead. Because of this, I won’t caution you to avoid spoilers on this movie unless you are just fundamentally against them on principle. With this opening scrawl, I’ve respected that as usual but I will be including spoilers in the main text of the review.

Luke Ganton walks a fine line with audience sympathy.

Luke is a traveling motorcycle stuntman covered in the kinds of random, awful looking tattoos that instantly make a person off-putting. He looks like a hesher, dresses in the same dirty moth-eaten clothes all the time, and chain-smokes cigarettes like the modern caricature of the Lone Rebel that he is. Ganton is not self-aware enough to know what model of masculinity he’s adopted, but the movie wants us to be very much aware of it. Part of the point of Pines is using these models and deconstructing them. The intellectual value of the film is in how well it pulls this off. What undermines Luke’s fringe exterior is the existence of a son.

On a roll through Schenectady, NY some time ago, he had a fling with Romina (Eva Mendez) and she became pregnant. When he finds out, Luke quits the life he’s seemingly satisfied with and begins to exist in the gray and fuzzy place between a familiar archetype and something more human and unpredictable. Gosling imbues the character with a reserved edginess, the same feel he gave his character in Driver. This is only appropriate given that both movies are dealing with the same archetype and approaching deconstruction from different places. Unlike the Driver, Luke quickly loses control of his cultivated aura of cool and “don’t give no fucks”. He becomes almost creepily desperate to build some kind of domestic life with Romina and their son. Meanwhile, Romina has a fella but this doesn’t seem to stop either of them. The romance of the idea is what snares her, while Luke quietly self-destructs trying to live up to some kind of fever-dream he has about their future.

This is a beautifully shot movie, by the way.

Luke hooks up with Robin (Ben Mendelsohn), a man who is like him but maybe fifteen years older. Robin tells Luke how easy it is to rob banks and away they go. Robbing banks to make enough money for his new family is exactly the kind of romantic masculine fantasy that appeals to Luke. His entire manner revolves around that model he’s trying so hard to follow. His possessiveness, his desperation, and his delusion all make him a bit threatening to the viewer. At the same time, his vulnerability and commitment endear him to us, making us see the man beneath the image. There’s no doubt he actually loves his son and wants to be a good father, and it’s the journey between the want of the connection and the responsibility of the relationship that is thematically important. For the whole film, too, not just for Luke. It’s a sentiment that echoes in every fiber of it.

Luke’s trajectory is quickly overpowered by his inability to control the variables. Robin’s caution or Romina’s unwillingness to let go of Kofi (Mahershala Ali), the more stable man in her life. As we watch Luke do the robberies, we see how he wants to be powerful and commanding (he ignores Robin’s advice to be subtle) even as his voice breaks and he yells shrilly like a punk kid. This intensifies as he goes until finally, a domino cascade of small mistakes lead to his demise.

The fact that Luke dies about 45 minutes into the movie isn’t clear from the marketing. This in itself might not be an issue inherently (perhaps we shouldn’t even consider marketing, though it’s hard not to). It is one of the reasons I said knowing some “spoilers” beforehand might increase appreciation for the movie, though. I mean, up until this point it feels like Pines is about Luke Ganton trying to make do. Instead, the first third of the movie is like a mini-movie about that. It’s familiar in some ways, but it’s really there to service the overarching theme. As Luke dies, we switch to the man who killed him.

Bradley Cooper gets the more difficult arc.

Cooper plays Avery, a rookie cop who happens to encounter Luke after his botched heist. Luke knows he’s going down and his last request is that Romina not tell Jason, their son, about him. This follows from an earlier scene where he sheds tears in a church. It’s the culmination of Luke realizing that the fantasy is a fantasy and that he actually is zero good for his son and Romina. He lets Avery kill him, it seems like, but they really shoot each other in an almost comically authentic moment of confusion and instinctive violence.

Afterward, Avery is a reluctant hero to his department. The problem is that his friends want him to help them be dirty cops easier. Avery feels like a good man who wants to do right, but his father encourages him to be political. Avery is obviously a smart guy and at first we like him because he seems straightforward, ethical, and brave. Like Luke, however, this is a man who is living up to a model. When the facade slips away, he’s every bit as corrupt and tactical as Ray Liotta (playing cop #816) or his crew. More dangerous, too, because Avery is smart enough to negotiate himself into positions of power. You’re meant to notice the influence of his father and contrast this with the lack thereof in Luke’s case. Both men want to be men and have different ways of doing that.

Where the film flirts with quiet brilliance is in its strokes of connection between Avery and Luke. Avery feels it pretty heavily until the turning point where he abandons his upright model for a less sterling true self. At the same time, he “gives up the ghost” of Luke Ganton. In one scene, he tries to give Romina back the money that Luke had given her earlier. His words are echoes of Luke’s and Romina’s rebuff basically functions as a symbolic end to Avery’s fantasy of masculine responsibility.

Dane DeHaan and Emory Cohen are very good.

The last third of the movie takes place fifteen fucking years later. I don’t think most people watching it understood that it was going to spend significant time on the “next generation”. This is also where the film’s tripartite structure works against it. If Luke’s portion was a mini-movie using the familiar tropes of the tragic criminal, then Avery’s was a mini-movie of the cop tempted by corruption. The third unexpected movie is the legacy of these fathers on their teenage sons. As unlikely as it seems, and the contrivances will bother some people, Jason (Dane DeHaan) and AJ (Emory Cohen) become friends. In spite of Avery’s efforts to keep them apart, they circle each other as the audience sits back and waits for Jason to realize who AJ’s father is.

AJ’s model of masculinity is inspired by Jersey Shore. He has a fake accent, a gross tattoo that says “Arrogance” and basically acts like somebody’s idea of a joke. But, thanks to his father, he’s a rich kid and he’s also big and handsome so he gets away with his schtick. Jason, meanwhile, is a smaller more broody kid. He’s one foot into a bad path and has connections to drug dealers which AJ can exploit. They don’t ever quite become “real” friends, but there’s a weird sense that AJ sort of wants them to be. Jason hasn’t really developed an identity for himself yet and you can feel the tension of the absent father he knows almost nothing about. For AJ, not being the white collar prick his dad is seems pretty important. For Jason, it’s about figuring out who Luke Ganton was. As he does so, the film becomes about yet another romantic model and makes a clear statement about how these things get passed on generation to generation.

He should be in everything, this kid is that good.

Jason wants to be like his dad. He’s a romantic, and thinks his criminal dad was a badass. When he finds out that it’s AJ’s dad who killed him, he doesn’t bother to think about how it happened or why. He’s too angry, confused, and lost to even care that Luke may not have ever given Avery a choice or that Avery was, by and large, just doing his job. Of course, there are shades of gray in all that, but in no way is Jason justified in seeking revenge against Avery. Instead, he’s trying to live up to the badass fantasy of the vengeful son.

Like all the other false paradigms of masculinity explored in this film, Jason’s model is undermined by real emotion. Avery, prick though he has become, is only worried about AJ. As Jason kneels him down in the pines presumably to kill him, Avery doesn’t beg for his life. Instead, he asks after his son’s and he tells Jason that he’s sorry. This crystallizes the difference in the lives of sons who have fathers, and sons who don’t, sons with bad fathers who have good intentions, and sons who don’t have fathers at all. It also is the point at which Avery finally shifts to a truer mode. If it can be said that his corrupt, political guise is just another model of manhood he’s following (his father’s example) then this is when he finally breaks down to what’s important and really acts like a man.

Jason, meanwhile, breaks the cycle that could almost start here while committing to its repetition. He spares Avery but strikes out on his own, buying a motorcycle and riding it off into the distance chasing his father’s ghost.

This scene busted me up. Super tense and emotional.

As much as you’re thrown by the contrivances and by the movie’s structure (it takes a few minutes to realize that the Jason/AJ stuff isn’t an epilogue but a whole third chapter), there’s no denying that there’s something in the emotional substance of the movie that really works. I didn’t find it profound, though perhaps it wanted to be, but it certainly flirts with profundity. I do think this will be more accessible to men, but paradoxically men are brought up with a lot of difficulty lowering the barriers that prevent them from being genuinely emotionally affected by something as penetrating as The Place Beyond the Pines.

There’s a lot of bias toward the subject matter and the narrative/thematic threads in this review. I usually am fairly biased toward narrative matters when doing the critic thing. I think it would be easy to dismiss this movie for messily securing its own point, but I just can’t quite bring myself to be overly distressed by the structural conceit or the contrived plot devices. This is an ambitious film, trying really hard to reach for and grapple with a difficult, layered subject that almost seems doomed on the grounds of who it’s intended for. Men aren’t stereotypically good at the kind of reflection that Pines is asking us to do. However, there’s no veneer of badassery or cultivated cool to latch onto. Unlike Fight Club or The Grey,  there’s no chance of men confusing the deconstruction and critique of masculinity in Pines for an ode to macho individualism and physical violence.

I think this is precisely why this movie will not make much of an impact. I’d like to say it’s because of its structural weaknesses and the misdirection of its marketing, but I can’t. I really think it’s just going to confuse and/or bore most men who watch it. Especially the younger men for whom it is most important.