Hobbs and Shaw (4/5 Stars)

I have never had the opportunity to admit this in my movie review blog, but I have actually seen several of the Fast & Furious movies. I forget exactly which ones, but it hardly matters. They are all the same. Alpha males, fast cars, good-looking women. Oh and family, every single Fast & Furious movie is about family.

You need to be a good sport to watch a Fast & Furious movie. They are stupid, but if you play their game, well the stupid works. In this movie, a kidnapping takes place in a skyscraper. The bad guys bust through the window about fifty stories up and haul off a woman down the side of the building using very long ropes. Shaw decides to take the elevator down. Hobbs decides to jump out the window. His plan is to use gravity to catch up on the escaping bad guys heading down the ropes, to grab a hold of one to stop his fall, punch him in the face, and then jump to the next bad guy etc. This plan is stupid but it works. One must lend a lot of credit to the actors, in particular Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who is one of the best at keeping it straight in the face of endless absurdities.

This movie is shameless. It stars a few of the newer stars of the Fast & Furious movies, Jason Statham (“Shaw”) and Dwayne Johnson (“Hobbs”) and adds the one and only Idris Elba (“Black Superman”) and a kick ass lady named Vanessa Kirby. The bad guy introduces himself as “Bad Guy”. He has a plan to spread a super-virus that will wipe out most of the world in an attempt to weed out the weak and kickstart human evolution. One of the better scenes involves a scientist explaining a real easy way to stop the plot (kill one person who is the room) and a really really hard way to stop the plot (infiltrate the bad guys lair in the middle of an army base in a completely different country within 12 hours). The World is at stake. The first option is not seriously considered. Another great scene involves a car mechanic trying to repair a complex biological contraption with no training and no special equipment while Hobbs and Shaw yell at him to hurry up. Amazingly, the yelling helps and the car mechanic gets the contraption to work. Shameless. During the climatic battle, our guys Hobbs and Shaw realize that the way to beat the bad guy is to work together as a team. Shameless, shameless, shameless.

The most enjoyably shameless part of these movies is the Fast & Furious physics. Cars can’t do this shit. You can’t shoot people from the cab of a jeep while its doing a barrel roll, but there it is up on the screen proving your sense of reality and logic wrong. The director of the movie is David Leitch, who is more of a stunt coordinator that has been converted into a director. His one previous movie  was the very good Deadpool 2. You can tell because he fills out the supporting cast with actors from that movie: see Eddie Marsan, Ryan Reynolds, and Rob Delaney. I’m beginning to like the idea of stunt coordinators becoming directors. The other good movie this year that was directed by a stunt coordinator was John Wick 3. The fight scenes were of a higher caliber in John Wick 3, however, this movie however is funnier. The jokes are a bit clunky in the first half of the movie, but as everyone settles in, they start coming out smoother. Then Kevin Hart shows up and is hilarious for about forty seconds.

Let me give you a test: The movie relocates to Samoa for its third act for no particular story reason. The only conceivable reason it happens is to provide an excuse to see Dwayne Johnson dress in traditional Samoan warrior club and have a traditional Samoan brawl with a traditional Samoan warrior club. Before the climatic battle, The Rock stands on a bluff and with a totally straight face states, “I can’t believe this is where we’re going to save The World.” If that makes you chuckle, I’ve got a direct commercial flight from Moscow to Samoa to sell you.

Deadpool 2 (4/5 Stars)

Deadpool 2 makes such a big deal about its sub-class of superheroes. In one scene, as Deadpool wanders about the X-Men superfortress, he wonders where everyone else is. Didn’t this movie get the rights to anybody other than Colossus and what’s her name!? (A room full of the important X-Men quickly close there doors upon a glimpse). That is unfair. Deadpool does not lack for great superheroes. Well, perhaps not great but at least very fun superheroes. Take Deadpool, just by himself. Here is a man who that cannot die and does not care whether or not he lives or even gets hurt. Demonstrating how indestructible he is, he attempts to kill himself by incineration at the beginning of the movie. He literally lies on a bunch of gas barrels, drops in a lighter, and blows himself up into many pieces. No doing. He can’t die and just how he survives these sorts of things is fodder for many jokes, most made by Deadpool himself, an accomplished wisecracker.

The next most fun is Domino (the more diverse and genderfied version of Longshot, my favorite superhero who I guess will never make it into a superhero movie now). Domino’s superpower is luck. She just gets lucky all the time. “Luck is not a superpower” retorts Deadpool. Well, what if you gave a dumb excuse to a movie production team and several screenwriters to make sure you escape in the most profound and unexpected ways from many many dangers. Yes, that just might be a superpower. Then there are the big guys like Colussus and Juggernaut. At one point they use their big metal fists to pound on each other. It’s fun.

You have already seen the plot of Deadpool 2. This engagingly humorous derivative product of superhero movies basically copies the twists and turns of two great prior movies Terminator and Looper. Terminator concerned a bad guy from the future who was on a mission to kill a hero before he became great. Looper a derivative of Terminator with a twist concerned a good guy heading back to kill a future bad guy, who at that point was still an innocent child. Deadpool 2 has the same exact plot, and it speaks to the power of these particular story-lines that they continue to have such power. It certainly works here. Why? Because time-travel is about regret, and that is universal. Deadpool is an ugly outcast second rate superhero (regret). Deadpool failed his loved ones (regret). Deadpool wants to help a child be a better person than he turned out to be (regret). Deadpool is one of us, just immortal and with a far more developed sense of humor.

I confess I did not like at all the first twenty minutes of Deadpool 2. A deep tragedy occurs in that time and, no, the sarcastic opening titles could not make me feel any shallower about it. Not until did I realize that time travel was going to be involved did I start to feel like I was allowed to have a good time. When Cable (played by Josh Brolin a fine straight man counterpoint to Ryan Reynolds wild and crazy Deadpool), a Terminator knockoff, finally shows up trying to change the past, I was finally okay, nothing matters, they’ll figure out how to change the past at some point here. Of course they do, and many other things that did not need to be changed at all.

I want to give a shout out to the soundtrack of Deadpool 2, the songs of which the movie would have you believe it is playing ironically. Yeah right, these guys obviously love Celine Dion and Barbara Streisand. And why wouldn’t they, they’re the best. Deadpool 2 also contains an extraordinary acoustic version of A-ha’s “Take on Me”. I had to mention it to the people I saw this movie with around 3-4 times before I got them to admit that they too believed it was great. There is no shame when your heart is in the right place, that’s what Deadpool 2 teaches us about life.

The World's End (5/5 Stars)

If Seth Rogen’s ‘This Is The End’ seemed like the last dying gasp of a creative mind, “The World’s End,” which sees the reunion of director Edgar Wright and actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost has to be the antidote for that same creative exhaustion. As far as end of the world comedies go they could not be more different. They both have plenty of laughs but where one comedy took the Apocalypse as an excuse for boyish men to become even more juvenile (ending in of all things a boy band concert from the late 1990s) the other uses it as an opportunity to finally grow up.

“The World’s End” is the third movie by Team Wright, Pegg, and Frost and as such is being the completion of the Cornetto trilogy. The term Cornetto refers to a brand of Ice Cream known (via Team Wright, Pegg, and Forst) as a decent hangover cure. The first two movies in the trilogy “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” apparently had a Cornetto joke in them, so the makers of “The World’s End” throw in one here and thus a trilogy is born with the ice cream linking all the movies together. This ignores the fact (or does it?) that what could be a far more obvious link between the movies is the setting of each movie: a seemingly innocent British town that harbors a massive conspiracy that each and every resident is in on. In ‘Shaun of the Dead’ the town was taken over by zombies. In ‘Hot Fuzz’ the entire town was a part of a religious cult dedicated to keeping the town picturesque via murder of its undesirable citizens. Murder I say! ‘The World’s End’ features an alien invasion, which turns the residents into things that are not exactly robots. Not-a-Robot Pierce Brosnan drops by as the chap’s old tweedy literature professor to explain exactly why they are not to be called robots per se. It is an enlightening discussion before he tries to eat them.

Another intertwining theme from the first two movies is the many scenes that take place in a pub. In fact, the reason why the chaps are in town for the first time in two decades is to placate the desire of their former ringleader, Simon Pegg, to finish the Golden Mile, a glorious Pub Crawl they started but did not finish twenty years ago on the last day of high school. Simon tells the story of this pub-crawl in rapturous detail to his Alcoholics Anonymous support group and inspires himself to get the gang back together to finally do it. (“It was the best night of my life. And still is.”) Simon is very much still stuck in the past so much that even wears the same type of clothes that he did in high school. Meanwhile all the other chaps have grown up and got real lives and jobs. They include Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan, and Paddy Considine. All of them are welcome faces from the first two movies. Martin Freeman has probably become the most famous of them all what with his uncanny ability to land almost all of the iconic roles in British culture (Bilbo Baggins, Dr. Watson, Arthur Dent, Tim Canterbury). After much cajoling and a bit of deception they embark on their journey. The wit flows and hilarity ensues in a way that generally happens when a bunch of funny people who know each other well get together in the same room. Little by little they notice that the bars they go to all strangely seem like the same bar, with the same handwriting, and the same beer. Everything is homogenized, sterile, and suburban. Nobody recognizes them either, that is until the meet the town crazy man played by David Bradley. Fans of “Hot Fuzz” will remember he had the best line in that movie, “A Big Bushy Beard!” Well, he has the best line in “The World’s End.” After revealing the town’s secret he exclaims, “Why do you think I drink from this crazy straw! Not so crazy now, is it!!!” I guess you just sort of had to be there.

But what sets “The World’s End” apart from your typical end of the world comedy and especially the slapdash “This is the End” is just how incredibly well done it is in a technical sense. This is where the filmmakers, especially Edgar Wright, have matured in leaps and bounds from the first movie. “Shaun of the Dead” is a typical low budget independent movie. “Hot Fuzz” although obviously low budget stuns the viewer with its hyper style of editing. Edgar Wright’s next movie, “Scott Pilgrim v. the World,” was also a low budget movie but had so many brilliant visual and audio effects that it could have easily been passed off as a movie with a budget over 100 million dollars. “The World’s End” has the same proficient editing and brilliant effects, but here Wright also adds extremely competent fight scenes. I mean the Not-a-Robot bashing going on here is some of the best hand-to-hand combat in a movie I have seen outside of Asia. Nick Frost in particular is a badass in this movie. It find it somewhat ridiculous that a movie like this can barely gross 10 million at the box office when it seemingly has everything modern blockbuster audiences say they want: Lights, fights, laughter, a little sex, and plenty of alcohol. Edgar Wright has got to be one of the most underrated directors in cinema today. To have already made so many great movies in the populist milieu he works in and to have so little people seeing them is disconcerting. I would think the American equivalent has to be someone like Robert Rodriguez. Theses people are fun talented people. Go see their movies.

The last five to ten minutes kind of get a bit preachy but since the first two hours were so good it is totally forgivable. I don’t want to spoil anything but the world kind of does end, but it is a bit of an afterthought. The main thing is that after much violent soul searching and funny enlightenment, the Simon Pegg character learns something about himself and people. So even if the aliens respond by giving up on the human race it not totally a downer of an ending.

I would be very interested in seeing what the Team of Wright, Pegg, and Frost do next. I figure they could do anything and in style. 

War Horse (4/5 Stars)

Have you ever noticed in war movies just how lucky the main character always seems? Like for instance, if the army is charging into impending doom, than the people on the left may get shot and the people on the right may get shot, but the hero always seems to go unscathed. Bombs go off nearby but they never seem to hit their mark. At the end, the hero is surrounded by a sea of corpses, but he always is not dead, or if he does die, it always happens in the final battle, you know the one right before the movie ends. This may not be realistic but it is a basic necessity of storytelling. If you killed off the main character in the middle, then well, where does the story go from there? We aren’t all geniuses like Hitchcock.

“War Horse,” is an ingenious solution to that problem. In this movie, we follow a horse, not a person through the mire of World War I. The horse impossibly survives (as it must for storytelling reasons) but the various people that own it are still subject to the dangers of the War. In effect, because a horse is not much of a main character even though the story follows it, we are introduced to and say goodbye to a series of main characters that are not required by the storyline to have blindingly good luck. When they should die, they do. Moreover since the horse is not a person, it has the ability to be captured and switch sides in the war. The warhorse here does exactly that, starting off with the British, than being captured by the Germans, and back and forth again. Since everybody the horse meets is neither too cruel nor vicious, the movie, even though it takes place in a war, does not have a bad guy or evil side. So unlike other war movies where you would root for the good side because you don’t want the good guy to die or the bad guy to live, in this one you just want the war to end. As anti-war movie structures go, this particular one is rather ingenious.

The emotion and dialogue of this movie remind me of very old movies. There was less cynicism in those movies (perhaps because of the time or perhaps because the movies weren't very good) and that lent them a certain unapologetic sappiness. For that reason, this movie is kind of hard to get into, particularly in the beginning when there isn’t a war going on. The movie makes a big deal about the horse being able to plow a rocky field. An actual crowd of neighbors turns out to yell inspirational things as if they were in a Disney movie about an underdog sports team while the surly landlord becomes disgruntled because the farmers may actually be able to pay the rent and keep living on the land. It’s a bit too much for peacetime. When the war starts to pick up, the forthrightness and sincerity of the characters feels a bit more comfortable. In a life and death situation, a certain level of sappiness can be forgiven and even be appealing. The ending is ridiculously beautiful or plainly ridiculous depending on how you feel about group hugs and glorious sunsets that tint the entire landscape a golden hue of sepia. I liked it. I also like how we have apparently gotten to the point in special effects where we can manipulate the rate of snowfall to that exact point where it looks the most beautiful and not the least bit cold. The cinematographer of the movie, Janusz Kiminski, should be a shoo-in for an Oscar Nomination.

There is something that is rather weird about this movie. Look at the posters and the commercials and the unapologetic sappiness. This is being sold as a family movie and it is rated PG-13. At the same time, the director Steven Spielberg (same guy who directed such very R historical masterpieces like “Schindler’s List,” and “Saving Private Ryan.”) has once again done his homework. We see the arc of World War I, from the first fights on horseback to the stalemate of trench warfare. We are also treated to the murder of deserters; the horror of waiting for the artillery to maybe hit your part of the trench; the suicidal nature of a trench assault against machine guns; and to top it all off, a nerve gas attack. This is a PG-13 movie. The way Spielberg pulls this off is by a conspicuous lack of blood. We may see a line of men run into machine gun fire, but when they are hit with bullets, they merely scream out, crumple, and collapse.  There is however no blood. Even when the camera zooms out over the battlefield for a crane shot, we may see a field littered with corpses, but the kids should be unaffected because the corpses aren't leaking blood. And when a 14 year-old-boy is executed by a firing squad for deserting, for the sake of the children, the camera is conveniently located behind a rotating windmill. So we see the boy standing there with a firing squad in front of him. The windmill rotates and obscures the boy for a moment, the firing squad shoots their guns, the windmill moves again, and reveals the now dead corpse of the boy on the ground. Thank God for the kids that there is no blood. PG-13.

This is disconcerting for a couple of reasons. First of all, are we really fooling the kids? They aren’t stupid. If someone gets shot with a gun and dies, they have obviously violently died no matter how much blood is actually seen. And if we hear guns going off and see the dead corpse of a boy that was one moment before still alive, isn’t it obvious what happened whether a windmill partially obscured our view of the event or not. Secondly, isn’t it a bit disrespectful to the people who died in the war by pussyfooting around what actually happened? (Deserters were indeed shot in WWI.) At least that is what I thought was the very point Spielberg was making when he bluntly showed how people died in “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan.” There was something very noble about those movies. Spielberg made you look the characters in the eyes and recognize their humanity before they were brutally killed. It wasn’t glamorous and it wasn’t gratuitous. It just was. I’ve got nothing against family films and nothing against realistically violent war movies, but to combine the two harms both genres. This movie should have been rated R and there should have been blood. If you want to make a nice family movie, don't make it about the horrors World War I. 

One of the lasting legacies of Steven Spielberg is what he has done to the MPAA ratings system. No other single director has made such a big impression on it. The very reason we have a PG-13 at all is because Steven Spielberg somehow got “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” rated PG. Lots of parents took their little kids to see it and sort of thought that the whole tear-out-the-heart-for-a-human-sacrifice scene a bit too much. (By the way I love that movie.) Then with “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan” he introduced the rule that no level of violence would ever make a movie NC-17. Now he has again raised the bar for violence in a PG-13 movie by killing an untold amount of people of all ages. In his defense, Spielberg gets away with this because all of these movies are very good and basically respectful. The problem is that our rating system is objective, so if a movie director wanted to do something really disgusting on the PG-13 level, all he would have to do is point to “War Horse,” and say, “See, if this has already been done before why aren't you letting me do it.”

Oh well, maybe if we split PG-13 into PG-10 and PG-15.


 

Sherlock Holmes (4/5 Stars) January 10, 2010

A highly intelligent thriller

Sherlock Holmes is reincarnated for the 22nd time (or so Ebert says) in the new film by Guy Ritchie (Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch). This is the first Sherlock Holmes movie I’ve seen. I haven’t read any of the books either, I sort of skimmed Hound of the Baskervilles once upon a time. I have seen plenty of pictures though and had what I thought was a pretty good idea of who Holmes was all about. Let’s just say that the character has been updated with a dose of kick-ass coolness. For instance, Holmes not only peers at things with a magnifying glass in this movie, he also knows how to brawl and can beat up men twice his size by observing the pressure points in their bodies and hitting all the places. Dr. Watson, his sidekick and roommate, also packs a punch. They are played by Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law respectively. The bad guy is the dark lord of a Satanic Cult played by Mark Strong. Rachel McAdams plays Holmes ex-girlfriend/master criminal. 

The plot is completely new. It kind of had to be to incorporate Guy Ritchie’s action packed trademark style. The good thing though is that Sherlock is every bit a brilliant genius as he traditionally was. The only difference now is that he is an action hero. The only actor I can think of that can pull off this kind of dynamic is the great Robert Downey Jr. Making an action movie these days is not very hard what with the help of special effects, but you can’t fake smart. To pull off a brilliant character a movie needs a smart script and an actor who knows what it’s like to be brilliant. For example Sherlock is eccentric to the point that he is excited by very hard cases and insufferably bored by everything else. When he doesn’t have something to work on he locks himself up his apartment and lives in squalor constructing devices and experimenting on his dog. The character by its nature is anti-social, unhygienic, and obsessive. Only a guy like Downey Jr. can stay true to that type of character and still be very likable and totally badass. This part was tailor made for Downey Jr. I think he has an outside chance of an Oscar nomination. 

I really enjoyed seeing Jude Law in a good movie for a change. It’s been years. What’s cool about his role is that he doesn’t play the dumb sidekick. Dr. Watson is very smart too. The dialogue between him and Sherlock are some of the most intelligent back and forth I’ve seen in a mystery movie. Sherlock never has to explain to him that something is elementary. Dr. Watson is very capable in an investigation and not to mention in fights. By the way, I don’t know if anyone else caught it and maybe I was just seeing things but I kind of also gauged a little bit of homoerotic tension between the two. I don’t necessarily think that Dr. Watson was gay. His character is about to leave their apartment and get married. But I did get the sense that Sherlock was rather fond of Dr. Watson. Think about it. He’s very anti-social and can’t stand anybody but Dr. Watson, they were living together, and they bicker like an old married couple. Nothing is ever explicitly said, but hey it was the Victorian Era. It’s not like anybody could have admitted that sort of thing. 

Of course the one big flaw in my premise is the Rachel McAdams character, apparently the one and only woman Sherlock was ever involved with. (Not that Sherlock shows her much attention in this movie only getting close enough to kiss her on the cheek.) But you know, I didn’t really believe the whole thing anyway. Rachel is certainly gorgeous but she’s not nearly weird enough to be the girlfriend of a guy like Sherlock Holmes. Frankly she wasn’t weird enough to be a mastermind criminal. Rachel just acts and speaks to damn normal. It doesn’t work. Why? Because super smart people can’t fake normal. She should have been channeling Juno and this script should have given her better words to work with. 

The plot centers on the mysterious resurrection of a dead man. This is the Dark Lord of a Satanic Cult played by Mark Strong. Upon miraculously busting out of his grave, he commits several impossible murders, and threatens to poison Parliament with a magical gas. The game is afoot. Not only does Sherlock have to catch the guy, he also has to prove that there is no such thing as magic and sorcery. Data, data, data there is only observational fact. I must confess before the speech at the end where Sherlock explains everything, I had no idea how the Dark Lord was doing any of this stuff. That is where the movie was perhaps too smart for me. The best mystery movies are both surprising and obvious at the same time. When things are explained the best reaction should be, “Oh my God, how come I didn’t see that!” Here the explanation was simply surprising. I didn’t see any of it coming. I couldn’t have seen any of it coming. It had to do with Chemistry, and Biology, and Science stuff. I guess Sherlock Holmes is just a heck of a lot smarter than me. That’s why this movie didn’t get five stars.

Happy-go-Lucky (4/5 Stars) 01/09/09

What would I give just to see one scene in which Poppy, the happy=go-lucky star in this movie played by Sally Hawkins, meets Clint Eastwood's character, Kowalski, from Gran Torino. I'm sure the sparks would fly in all directions. 
Poppy is an extremely cheerful person. I've only met two or three people like her in my lifetime. They always seem to be in a good move. So much so that you start to wonder whether its all an act. This movie delves deeply into that suspicion and comes out the other end convincing us that yes indeed this sort of person can exist in a three dimensional way. The idea in this film is to surround poor happy Poppy with the most unhappy repugnant people I have seen in a movie in a long time. The worst of which is a driving instructor so acidic that he comes very close to overshadowing Poppy's optimism and cheeriness. The exchanges between them are really a great battle of personalities and it is fascinating to watch them go at it. Will Poppy make the driving instructor nicer or will the driving instructor push Poppy into being mean? I will not ruin it whether Poppy wins, loses, or draws a truce but it does all erupt in a climax that had me leaning back in my seat stunned. 
Sally Hawkins has been getting Oscar buzz for this role and it is completely called for in this role. She has created one of the most likable characters of the year, certainly in the last ten years, and maybe ever. I wanted to hug her already right after the first scene. And very rarely have I ever wanted a happy ending for a person so much than I did in this movie. She's just so darn good. 
There is this one scene in the movie that especially caught my eye and that's when Poppy, for no real reason, sees a homeless man and starts talking to him. The guy is out of his wits and is mumbling the same words over and over. Most people would be freaked out or pretend not to notice. They would walk on the other side of the street probably. But Poppy stays with the dude and talks to him. After a while their eyes connect the guy mutters "y'know?" Poppy very empathetically says she does and he walks away. There are sometimes scenes in what seems to be an ordinary movie that make me realize I'm in the middle of watching something special. Like for instance the scene in 'Groundhog Day' when Bill Murray tells Andi Macdowell that he is a god and spills the beans about killing himself several times. Or Jack Black's acapella rock monologue in 'School of Rock.' or in 'Tropic Thunder' when Ben Stiller accidentally kills a panda. This is one of those scenes. It comes out of nowhere but makes perfect sense and elevates the entire movie to a different level. 
If I have one complaint about this movie its that it ended a little too soon. I could have used a little more dialogue or maybe just even a little more Poppy. Have her riding a new bike over the end credits. That could have book-ended the piece and given me a little more time to say goodbye.