Captain America: Civil War (4/5 Stars)

At least once a year I feel the need to point out the moral ambituity of large-scale action sequences in modern blockbusters, specifically the untold and unfelt thousands of deaths that necessarily must occur when entire cities are reduced to rubble. I had been crying in the wilderness to nobody in parituclar about this for so long that I expected that I would continue to do it indefinitely. Imagine my pleasant surprise then when Marvel’s new movie, “Captain America: Civil War” not only admits the reality of human collateral damage but makes it the focal conflict for the entire story.

It starts with a covert operation in an African country by Captain America, Black Widow, Hawk, and Scarlett Witch (new to me but apparently introduced before). A bad guy is trying to steal a biological weapon. The fight starts in a parking lot moves to an office building and finally ends in a crowded marketplace. The bad guy has a suicide bomb in which he means to kill everybody. Scarlett Witch, whose mutant power is to telekinesis, moves the bomb explosion from the marketplace to the air but miscalculates and ends up killing about fifteen people in an office building. The Avengers given that they are conducting vigilante military operations are held suspect for this outcome. A proposal is passed to give the United Nations oversight over the Avengers.

Iron Man, aka Tony Stark, feels guilty enough for this occurrence (The fifteen dead were charity workers although any fifteen dead people would have been good enough for me) to support the resolution. Captain America, coming out against democracy, believes that the resolution would stop him from taking action for or against whatever he deems himself to be important. It may be obvious whose side I am taking in this conflict. I’m with Iron Man all the way. Captain America apparently thinks he knows better than entire democratic societies. That is the sort of behavior that gives Freedom a bad name.

The amount of characters and superheroes already introduced in this umpteenth of Marvel movies makes listing all of them and the actors playing them time prohibitive, but they line up in equal numbers on each side. Thankfully Thor and The Hulk are somewhere else, as their presence would seriously tip the scale against the more destructible members of the Avengers. The action sequences are better and more entertaining than previous Marvel movies. This is because instead of relying on the spectactles getting bigger and more explosive, the superheroes fight themselves (and thus aren’t nameless pushovers) and thus humor and creativity have to be employed to make sure nobody gets embarrassed. The abandoned airport fight is especially good. Also, as I said before, no massive human collateral occurs. The result is a very enjoyable movie and my favorite Marvel movie so far.

Joining the Marvel universe for the first time is SpiderMan (the other two Sony franchises have not happened in this particular franchise) and Black Panther. Now this is a good opportunity for a compare and contrast between what is considered to be one of the most beloved characters of Marvel and what is sure to be the most boring.

Spiderman, aka Peter Parker, is a dorky teenager who lives with his Aunt May in Queens, New York. Black Panther is the handsome well-mannered prince of the aforementioned African nation. When Stan Lee created Spiderman, his stated intention was to give the character all the regular flaws a teenager generally has like immaturity, acne, and a hopeless crush on a girl. Such honesty and relatability became endearing pushing Spiderman to an upper echelons of popular superheroes. Black Panther, in contrast, seems to be a corporate marketing committee’s response to an outcry for political correctness. He stands in like Two-fer in “30 Rock” as proof that the corporation believes black people can be noble, properly educated, and not sidekicks. It is perhaps a good thing that the effort was made but the fact that they went about it in a way that crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s goes a long way in making the character generally unrelatable and almost as important, boring. He has no flaws and by the end of the movie his one conflict is resolved. I can’t imagine what will happen in the next movie that will allow the character to learn and grow in complexity. Perhaps he will join Thor battling interstellar ice monsters. Peter Parker as we all know has a long journey ahead of him since not incidentally he starts from a far humbler beginning.

(I doubt anyone else has noted this but the term ‘black panther’ refers to the militant wing of an oppressed poor minority group. Is it not culturally insensitive for a wealthy member of a ruling majority class to appropriate the moniker? Or does this not count because they are both black.)

But enough about this. I really liked the movie and would recommend it to anyone interested in seeing a blockbuster. The humor, the action, and most importantly the maturity set it apart from most others. Finally I have added the original Captain America movie to my DVD queue. For the first time I have wanted to see it and fill in that particular gap in my Marvel movie knowledge.

Pain and Gain (4/5 Stars)

You may think you have seen this movie from director Michael Bay before. You may have taken a look at the trailer, noticed the macho men, the strippers, and the conspicuous consumption of fast cars, big houses, flashy clothes. You’ve seen it before glorified and sensationalized in other Bay movies like the “Bad Boys” franchise, “Armageddon,” and the “Transformers” franchise. And yes “Pain and Gain” has all of that but there is a fundamental difference here. “Pain and Gain” does not glorify any of that. Instead it has contempt for the arrogance, greed, and stupidity that all of the above. It’s like Michael Bay grew a conscience about the types of movies he was making or something. There is morality in this picture. This movie, like his previous, is still heavily tasteless of course. It contains gratuitous violence, heavy substance abuse, and a cast largely made up of beefcakes and supermodels, sure, but it is not an amoral movie. The message is clear: The characters being portrayed here are, to borrow a direct quote from the movie, really “fucking dumb,” and the movie quite successfully makes much humor out of their stupidity. That is of course before they get so stupid that people start dying. Then the laughs kind of peter out and one watches the movie in what must be described as a state of awe.

This is a true story. The screenplay was based off of a series of Pete Collins’s news articles in the Miami New Times. Now what does that matter? For anyone who has seen Michael Bay’s “Pearl Harbor” we all know he would gladly and immediately sacrifice the truth if it means he could use more explosions.

(One of my favorite movie critic anecdotes belongs to a man who took it upon himself to listen and rank every single audio commentary in the Criterion Collection. Apparently the best one ever consists of the science advisors from the inexplicable inclusion of Michael Bay’s “Armageddon” sharing anecdotes about how they kept on telling Michael Bay that none of what was on the screen was good science or remotely possible and Michael Bay ignoring their advice in favor of more explosions.)

And it is true that Michael Bay still does not care about the truth. I had the pleasure of looking up the news articles and finding out that about half of what is on screen never happened. But here is the best part: The story is so wacky and bizarre that I bet you would not be able to tell just by watching the movie which parts were made up. You may as well flip a coin for true or false on every unbelievable thing you see. That is after all the reason the real police (as they do in the movie) did not believe the story and refused to investigate even in the face of an incredible amount of evidence left over by really dumb criminals. Imagine my shock when I learned that Michael Bay did not add any explosions. That one explosion happened. It did.

Mark Wahlberg stars as Daniel Lugo, the manager of Sun Gym. He is the type of guy who believes big muscles and the right attitude as opposed to say an education or honest work is the key to success in America. He attends get-rich-quick seminars from a Tony Robbins-like personality named Johnny Wu, played by Ken Jeong. Johnny believes in the American Dream and it isn’t the old 1950s consumerist fantasy of a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, two cadillacs, a wife, and a couple kids. His American Dream is a mansion bigger than your neighbors, a flashy speedboat in addition to a flashy car, and the ability to pick up the most expensive golddiggers at the most expensive strip club. “I had a wife and kids,” says Johnny, “then I stopped being a loser. Now I have seven honies to pick from.” And Johnny points to seven supermodels in the front row. Daniel Lugo nods his head and thinks, “Man, this guy totally gets me.” To my great delight he also references the Al Pacino character in 1983’s Scarface as one of his role models. Like I’ve said before, no other statement in a movie or in real life will so easily certify a person as a Grade-A moron. What is Johnny Woo’s golden advice: “Do be a doer. Don’t be a don’ter.” This mantra will be repeated throughout the movie to justify kidnapping a millionaire, torturing him in a warehouse for several weeks, forcing him to sign over all his assets, and then attempting to murder him. And then doing it again to an unluckier soul once the original money is all gone.

Nobody has played dim more successfully in more good movies than Mark Wahlberg has (Boogie Nights, The Other Guys, Ted) and I’m trying to phrase that in a way that sounds like a compliment to his acting ability. After all playing stupid convincingly requires the intelligence to know why what you are doing is stupid and the humility required with the knowledge you are doing is something stupid. Tack on that the many scenes where Wahlberg is either shirtless or in a kiss the cook apron and I think you can say this is a pretty brave performance. The role of Daniel Lugo could have very easily taken a dark turn and in doing so sacrificed much of the humor in this picture. For instance at one point Daniel Lugo decides it is a good idea to take back a malfunctioning chainsaw to Home Depot for a refund. The chainsaw is malfunctioning because human hair has gotten stuck in the chain. Only halfway through the conversation with the return desk cashier does Lugo realize it might not have been a good idea to return a chainsaw with human hair and blood on it. The scene is macabre but Wahlberg’s performance never allows Lugo to be a more frightening presence than he is a laughable one.

Of course stealing scenes left and right is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in what is perhaps the first and only decent role he has landed in his entire movie career. He plays the third and most innocent wheel of the Sun Gym Gang: a body builder of enormous size and recently sober and born again Christian. He is roped into helping Lugo and his partner Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) because he really needs the money and is dumb enough to believe Lugo when he promises there will no be violence in the operation. The man is a huge contradiction but then again so is Dwayne Johnson, which is at least my theory as to why he has never had a good movie role before. The man is incredibly hard to write for. Because he is such a huge guy, you would think that he would be perfect for action blockbusters. The problem is that he does not have a tough looking face. In fact, it can be described as angelic, which would explain why he has done a lot of children’s movies. So the perfect role for this guy would seem to be a really shy body-builder. And guess what? Pain and Gain is one of those rare movies that contain such a non-cliché character. Dwayne Johnson plays his character with as much humility as Mark Wahlberg. In fact, I would say the action sequences are better characterized as physical comedy routines, especially when Johnson tries to rob an armored car and the bank bag explodes green slime in his face in the midst of a crowded beauty salon. That was funny.

This is Michael Bay’s best movie. It is not totally without flaw however. You may at several points think to yourself, say isn’t this movie running a bit long. Such is always the problem with Michael Bay. He generally does not understand that simply because he can do something with a camera, that it does not mean he should. Each shot taken as itself looks good but there are too many superfluous scenes that taken in whole extend the movie at least a half hour past where it should end. I am still of the belief that one of the best things Michael Bay has done was achieved when he still made commercials. He is after the creator of the first “Got Milk” commercial; a true achievement in how much information can be conveyed in a one-minute time frame. The important thing about this movie though is that Michael Bay limited himself to 25 million dollars and almost no special effects. As such, the movie is far more interesting to watch than the epics of catastrophic proportions known as all his other movies. I swear the more limitations put on the man, the better his movies will be. When he gets several hundred million to make his movie and creative control as well they turn into three hour long gargantuan messes. Pain and Gain succeeds where his other movies fail more because of what he is not doing (focusing on robots and special effects) than what he is doing (characters and story). I hope he makes more small movies in the future.

It is at a time like this when the death of Roger Ebert comes into full focus. Ebert never wrote better reviews than when they were aimed at a Michael Bay feature. I would have loved to read his review of this movie. Perhaps we can imagine his surprise when he found out he did not completely hate it. 

The Hurt Locker (5/5 Stars) July 15, 2009

The Hurt Locker is the latest by Director Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break). It was written by Mark Boal (In the Valley of Elah), and is based on his experiences while following a bomb squad around Baghdad circa 2004. The squad is composed of the bomb disarmer Staff Sergeant James (played by Jeremy Brenner), Sergeant Sanborn (played by Anthony Mackie), and Specialist Eldridge (played by Brian Geraghty). In supporting are a couple of Indie heavyweights like Guy Pearce, as the doomed Staff Sergeant whom James replaces, and Ralph Fiennes, as a British mercenary. Rounding out the cast are known character actors David Morse, as a hotshot Colonel, and Evangeline Lily, as James’ estranged wife. Sometimes in great comedies you will find big name comedians jump in for short roles just because they want to be apart of something special. That seems to have happened here with these dramatic actors. 
The Iraq war so far has been a box office and critical dud. I talked for some length as to why I think this has happened in my review of Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies last fall. Having said that, I believe that Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker may have cracked the code, at least in terms of critical response. This is the best non-documentary film to come out of the Iraq War and there are a couple good reasons for it.
First of all, it is nonpartisan. Now, I’m not saying that a war film should not judge the merits of a war. Cinematic history just goes to show that the best judgmental war films were made years sometimes decades after the war had already ended. (Oliver Stone’s films Platoon (1986) and Born on the 4th of July (1989) are good examples.) This is because judging a war requires some perspective. Since we are still in the midst of the Iraq War it is hard to look upon it from a distance. So it helps that this movie is unconcerned with whether we should have gone to war in Iraq. In fact there is not a single mention of Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Hussein, or WMDs. The soldiers in this story are primarily concerned with doing their job and staying alive, which makes more sense then having them philosophize over American politics. One of the big turnoffs of the earlier films (Boal’s own In the Valley of Elah in particular) was that they weren’t really about soldiers in combat. They were about politics, parents of soldiers, CIA operatives, or soldiers returning home. They may have been “about” the Iraq War but all the information was abstract. Mix that with heavy-handed moral messages and the outcome was two hours of muddled theoretical outrage. The Hurt Locker is the opposite. This film shows the nuts and bolts operation of a bomb squad in Iraq presently and since the bomb squad doesn’t care about politics, the movie doesn’t either.
Second, the movie doesn’t draw too heavily on the cliche’ of the crying vet. What I mean by ‘the crying vet’ is that increasingly prevalent scene in a serious war films that either has a soldier start crying uncontrollably or, on the other hand, flying off the handle in a psychotic rage. Do these episodes happen, sure. Is PTSD a serious issue, of course. But this certainly doesn’t happen to every veteran that sees combat. In fact, what is remarkable about trained soldiers (and far more interesting) is how they can keep control in dire situations, not lose it. In this movie, Sergeant James may be described as a wild man, but he is also blessed with an extraordinary gift of concentration under fire. Sergeant Sanborn may be intensely in touch with his own mortality, but he is always disciplined, capable, and follows orders readily. Eldridge may be a rookie, but his outlook is mature. There is real danger in this movie. The bomb makers, who look just like civilians, sometimes hang out on balconies overlooking the bomb squad’s progress. Because the soldiers aren’t about to fire on people who may be civilians, serious suspense is built in these scenes. But even though there are some very intense situations, the soldiers don’t panic or make stupid mistakes. They deal with the problems in concerned but controlled ways, as if they were (gasp) trained soldiers. It makes sense to involve a crying vet in a WWII or Vietnam movie because there were plenty of enlisted men completely out of their element in those wars. But in Iraq the army is ‘all volunteer’ and it is suspected that every soldier has seen the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan and has accepted the fact that they just might die in a not so noble way. Soldiers in an Iraq War movie shouldn’t be taken completely off guard by the horrors of war. Frankly, I would suspect that they would act like they do in this movie: Courageous, not cowardly.
Third, the actions scenes are played as action scenes, not melodrama. There are no slow motion melees with violins soaring in the background. We are not subject to speeches about how people don’t understand the true nature of war. On the other hand, there isn’t any John Wayne bullshit either. The bombs explode like real bombs. One person even gets killed by a shockwave. (Say What? I thought the only way you could die from an explosion was to be engulfed in the flames, and even then you could always outrun it.) The special thing about this movie is that its action scenes are realistic, but they are played for excitement, which is a combination rarely seen in blockbusters or serious war movies. In fact, at times, the Sergeant James seems to be enjoying himself, as if defusing bombs was like some sort of death defying crossword puzzle. Unlike the vast majority of serious war movies, this one admits that war can be fun. That it can be exciting. Sergeant James has defused 873 bombs. He has volunteered to do so. He is not fighting for God and country (at least not completely). He’s there for the adrenaline rush. Is this realistic? For some people, you bet. Does firing a gun make one feel powerful? Damn right. Is wearing a full body armored suit kinda cool? Fuck yeah. Can saving trophies from bombs that almost killed you make a person feel like he is a master over life and death? Hoo-rah! Can war be a drug? Unfortunately yes. The inclusion of a character like Sergeant James makes The Hurt Locker a more complete psychological study than recent anti-war movies, which omit characters like him precisely because they are trying to make a political point. Stephen Brenner’s performance in this movie is capable of snagging a Best Actor Nomination. The film itself should easily get a Best Picture Nomination now that the category has been expanded to ten films. This is one of the best films I have seen so far this year.
Some may find it odd that this seemingly pro-war film about a gung ho bomb disarmer was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who is obviously a woman. I don’t think so. Perhaps it takes a woman to point out that some men will perform death-defying feats compulsively for no particular reason (whereas in regular blockbusters men will usually perform these feats to ‘save the world’ or ‘save the girl’ etc. etc.) Frankly, women have made some of the best movies that deal with this profoundly male trait. American Psycho was adapted for the screen by Guinevere Turner and directed by Mary Harron. Protagonist, a magnificent documentary, was made by Jessica Yu. And you can’t get much more of a testosterone fueled adventure than Bigelow’s own Pointe Break. Surely women can become obsessed and perform death-defying feats themselves, but I’ve never heard of one that would do it just for the hell of it. As Billy Crystal joked once, “Women need a reason, men just need a place.” Or maybe some of them do. Perhaps that should be the subject of Bigelow’s next movie.