Ant-Man and the Wasp (4/5 Stars)

Like an antidote to universe-sized seriousness, Ant-Man and the Wasp sneaks into theaters just a few months after Avengers: Infinity Wars. Importantly, it takes place before that movie. A good thing since the Ant-Man franchise is notable in its complete lack of bigness in both themes and superhero size. It stars the nice and cute Paul Rudd as a petty thief named Scott Lang who teams up with the reclusive scientist Hank Pym (played by Michael Douglas) who engineers for him a suit that shrinks his size but outsizes his strength, you know, like an ant. Hank’s daughter, Hope Pym (Lost’s Evangeline Lily), gets her own suit this time around and becomes The Wasp. Really, she was better at this thing than Paul Rudd was even in the first movie. She was the one who trained him after all.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is all fun and action. I mean really, it is a Paul Rudd movie (everybody is nice or at least means well) but with car chases and quantum mechanics. However, to explain anything that happens in this movie takes a stupid amount of exposition. In fact, this movie could serve as a screenwriting class on exposition. There are some really good examples and others not so good.

Exposition is something that all movies need to do. Since Ant-Man and the Wasp is like the twentieth movie in an intertwined Marvel Universe, much exposition is needed to explain what this particular movie is about. The best exposition in this movie happens in the first ten minutes as a soliloquy performed by the scene-stealing Randall Park. (I’ve been doing this for so long that I can say about Randall Park what I said about Paul Rudd after “Knocked Up”, I think this guy is a leading man who needs his own movies). Randall Park plays a FBI agent who is checking in on Scott Lang during his house arrest. Scott Lang’s seven-year-old daughter asks why the FBI doesn’t like her daddy. Randall gets down on his knee to better connect with the little girl. “It must be hard to understand for you,” he relates and then speaks at length in a direct and literal tone about the various legal codes in effect since Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War. Classic. This does three things: One it explains the most important events of past Marvel movies concerning Ant-Man’s situation. Two and Three: It is a character-defining joke, the FBI agent seemed like he knew how to relate to a girl by getting down on her level but comically revealed that he was too straitlaced to do so.

The worse exposition concerns all the explanations concerning Hank Pym’s wife being lost in the quantum realm, how the quantum realm works, and the nature of the movie’s bad but not so bad guy Ghost. These do not come along with jokes or character development. They are necessary scenes but pales in comparison with good exposition as above. In fact, it pales in comparison with a scene of unneeded exposition provided by Luis (played by the scene-stealing Michael Pena) who answers the simple question “Where is Scott Lang?” in a very funny not simple at all way.

But besides the exposition, what is this movie like? Well, it’s got a bunch of good people trying to figure out problems. There are a few bad guys but they are either kind of goofy (Sonny Burch played by Walter Goggins) or mean well (Ghost played by Hannah John-Kamen). They have car chases over and about the hills of San Francisco. You may have seen that before, but have you seen it with cars that shrink and unshrink and sometimes a huge Ant-Man? It is good times.

This movie has notable diversity. It is a casting laundry list of the better actors of various ethnicities in its supporting roles. Obviously Paul Rudd is the straight white male. But two main superheroes beside him are both female (The Wasp and Ghost). Paul Rudd’s friends who run a security agency are hispanic (Luis), some sort of Eastern European and black. The FBI agent is Korean. The lesser bad guy is a southern gentleman (Walter Goggins) who employs at least one Indian. Given the movie’s location, San Francisco, the cast seems possible and besides me, I don't think anybody has made a point of it.

The Ant-Man franchise adds another complexity to the nature of the Marvel Universe. Thor and Guardians of the Galaxy added the vastness of the universe. Dr. Strange added new dimensions. Ant-Man adds the minute quantum realm. The science behind these complexities is real if thinly realized. What is more interesting perhaps is how these various thin interpretations of real science will interact with one another. This is bound to happen in the next Avengers movie given how Ant-Man ends.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (4/5 Stars) October 1, 2010

Oliver Stone: Angry no more
In 1978 a movie came out called ‘Midnight Express.’ It told the true story of Billy Hayes, a young American who had attempted to smuggle a small amount of hashish out of Turkey in order to fund his university studies. It was a stupid thing to do and he was caught and sentenced to a draconian four years in a hellish Turkish prison. In his final year, Hayes appealed only to be resentenced to an astounding 20 more years. The laws had changed in the meantime and the Turkish Constitution had no ex post facto provision. What followed was one of the most incredible scenes I have ever seen in a movie. The Young American is given a chance to speak to the court at the end of his trial. He has apparently given his fate much thought and he speaks of justice and mercy with much eloquence and intelligence. But as he gets to the end of the speech, he can’t help himself; he also has this to say: “For a nation of pigs, it sure is funny that you don’t eat them. Christ forgave the bastards, but I cannot! I hate! I hate you! I hate your country! And I hate your people! And I fuck your sons and daughters because they’re pigs! You’re all pigs!” The world of cinema had just witnessed the debut of a great new talent. It was the writer Oliver Stone and come Oscar night he would holding a golden statuette for the first screenplay he had ever written. 


If we assume that Hatred is an emotion that arises from ignorance, than it must follow that Education has a soothing effect on such strong emotion. Correctly done, education should promote understanding, which should naturally lead to empathy and wisdom. Thus it can be assumed (and frequently witnessed) that Angry People are usually inarticulate, wild, and plainly mistaken. But every once in awhile there comes a person who can intelligently articulate such strong emotion. They have been educated. They certainly have a vague notion that anger is not the mature response. But they cannot help themselves. They have been Hurt and they Hate too much. 

Oliver Stone was raised in a conservative Republican family. His father was a stockbroker. When Vietnam broke out, Oliver didn’t wait to be drafted. He signed up for the Army because he wanted to serve his country. He completed two tours of duty in Vietnam and there something bad must have happened. From then on he was a fire-breathing liberal, he moved to New York, and he started making movies that all had a common thread in them. Almost all of them were about young men who were betrayed and/or had rejected their father figures or country (Scarface, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK) Perhaps the most formidable of all of Stone’s dastardly fathers was Gordon Gekko, the investment banker played by in an Oscar-winning role by Michael Douglas in the original Wall Street (1987). He was brilliant, ruthless, and merciless. He broke companies not because he wanted the money because he liked breaking people, dominating them and wringing out the weak. He glorified himself as the pique of evolution and justified his treatment of others as a sort of natural selection. The point of the game is to beat the other guy, right? Well, then a hostile takeover of a business that ends up in the liquidation of thousands of employees but garners the maximum possible return is not simply a means to greed; it is the point in and of itself. The more people you push around, the bigger the victory. Wall Street wasn’t about greedy people. It was about assholes. 
That sort of thing is pretty much absent in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. There aren’t any real jerks in this movie. Gekko gets out of prison, but is now against the system, not for it (He just wrote a book, Is Greed Good?). His new protégé’s, played by Shia Lebouf, main goal is to marry Gekko’s daughter and finance a green energy company. This contrasts greatly with Bud Fox in the original who wanted to be a player in the game and lusted after a glamorous gold-digger. There aren’t any real victims in this movie either. The biggest injustice is the failure of a big bank and the suicide of its CEO, played by Frank Langella. This plot point draws a close parallel to the fall of Bear Stearns in real life. But who would think of the financial collapse of 2008 and think that the biggest victim was the CEO of Bear Sterns. The original Wall Street had an ordinary victim. He was Fox’s father and Gekko got him fired in a hostile takeover. This movie never really leaves Manhattan. We don’t see any of the catastrophic results of a decade of very wrong banking practices. There is no populist rage. All we have is Gekko wisely musing about bubbles from a historical perspective. Yeah, I know about the Dutch tulips. We think its funny now sure, but we forget that it completely ruined lives back then like every other bubble has done since. (It is actually kind of amazing how many people in this movie declare that they don’t care about the money. I suspect it is really because they are all well off and don’t have to.) 
The movie does do a very good job of not dumbing anything down. We hear technical language about credit default swaps, short sales, stock rising and falling etc. Lebouf at one point even takes the time to explain his fusion energy project that captures energy from seawater (He gets it right too. I studied that in high school Academic Decathlon). Then there are several scenes that take us into the boardrooms of the Federal Reserve during the point in the crisis where the bankers stared into the abyss and finally asked the government to bail them out. These seem to be about right too, but they are distracting because they take place in a fictional movie. Descriptions of these historic moments really ought to be in a documentary. I kept wondering if they got it right. 
Of course the big question is whether prison actually had any impact on Gekko’s ruthless personality and whether this father figure, so vilified in the original, would be any different this time around. He is, more or less. The new Oliver Stone is older and wiser and his villains now are more often “mixed bags” as Gekko relates himself to at the movie’s end. I liked particularly how Stone coaxed Gekko over to the good side in ways that weren’t righteous or melodramatic. He presents the choice as a business decision with Gekko’s most important asset being time. It makes sense even if you intend on remaining a greedy bastard. If anything else, this movie should not inspire a generation of jerks like the last one did. That happens when you refuse to tell stories about those types of people.
In the last half of Stone’s career, he stopped telling stories about betrayed youth and started telling stories about tragic leaders (Nixon, Any Given Sunday, Alexander, W). Perhaps it as his way of trying to understand that which he has had a lifelong distrust of. The movies are sad and the subjects are flawed but Stone is more empathetic than judgmental of the old graying patriarchs. One movie in particular, World Trade Center, was striking for its whole-hearted patriotism. Perhaps with that movie he had finally forgiven his country. And with Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, with its wiser more sympathetic Gekko, perhaps Stone has finally forgiven his father. There very well may be a movie out there someday that portrays exactly how we felt about the financial crisis, but it won’t be made by Oliver Stone. He is angry no more. Perhaps he should start making comedies. I wonder what an Oliver Stone comedy would look like.