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.

Ready Player One (4/5 Stars)

Steven Spielberg, the father of blockbuster, made his splash in the genre in 1975 with the movie Jaws. In addition to being a great action movie, it had a great “making of” story. Apparently the main reason Spielberg kept the shark off-screen for most of the movie was because he couldn’t get his fake-looking mechanical shark to work. He spent most of the making of the movie innovating off of the top of his head various ways to accomplish the presence of a fearsome creature while not actually showing it. Contrast this situation with his latest Ready Player One, a movie backed by fully mature computer technology that can materialize anything Spielberg could possibly want and then some with an absurd ease. The climax of the movie is an insanely complex battle that takes place on an entirely digital snowscape with entirely digital characters, the most notable being Mecha-Godzilla and the Iron Giant. Think about it: only forty-three years ago, Spielberg couldn’t get his shark to work. The seemingly exponential progress of the visual arts in movies is absolutely mind-blowing.

Ready Player One seems preternaturally designed to exploit this new capability. The movie takes place in 2045 in a dystopic version of Columbus, Ohio. Apparently the outside world has turned to shit, so everyone now spends their lives in a virtual reality called the Oasis. The Oasis is everything you could possibly want it to be and you can be anybody you want to be in it (at least physically). It was dreamed up by a man named Halliday (played by Mark Rylance). It has rules much like World of Warcraft and leans heavily an ethos of ultimate freedom i.e. anarchy. Apparently if you kill someone in the Oasis, you get to keep all of their digital money and purchases. This lawlessness has seeped into the real world. A giant corporation has monopoly power on much of the Oasis and uses rent seeking to gain more. It also has a sort of debtor’s prison set up, where if you go into debt buying their stuff, you can end it up in a box in a warehouse in the real world spending your days mining virtual gold.

What drives the plot in Ready Player One is the last wishes of the Oasis creator. Apparently he hid an Easter Egg somewhere in the Oasis. The person who finds it, gets control of the entire thing. The Oasis creator also really loved 1980s pop culture, so every character who wants to find the Easter Egg has to steep himself in that stuff. In fact, there is a scene where the CEO of the evil corporation (who not coincidentally looks exactly like the principal in “The Breakfast Club”) tries to buy the services of our humble hero Wade. He attempts to do this by making a lot of 1980s pop culture reference, as if you know, he really cared about that stuff.

I for one do not care about 1980s pop culture references and believe that any author/screenwriter who believes that anyone in the 2045 would care is delusional. As Mr. Spielberg is responsible for many of the 1980s references himself, one could add the term narcissistic to delusional. And on a personal note, I have a general protest against metaness, in this case a heavy reliance on references to 1980s pop culture. Meta-ness is a bit like telling the same joke twice. It is remembering how great and/or funny some thing in the past was, which is generally an inferior experience to viewing something great and/or funny right now. (Why watch a movie that relies on your memory of past movies to work? Why not just rewatch the old movie? That is what I say.) But its not correct to simply attack the conceit of the movie without addressing how a movie is about it. Putting aside the silliness of the idea and the inferiority of meta-ness, the movie is well made. I mean that first car chase scene. Amazing.

My favorite part of this movie is the inclusion of a mercenary character named I-R0k, who is unmistakably voiced by the great T.J. Miller. The character looks like a bad ass. He has a cavity in the shape of a skull in the middle of his torso. However, he talks like a total nerd and gives away the underlying absurdity of this world, that however elaborate and mind-blowing it looks, it is actually just a bunch of people in trailer parks sitting on their couches wearing goggles.

Given how far the visual capabilities in movies have come in the last fifty years, it seems like it should continue to progress. But look at this movie, what is left to be accomplished in this field. What can be done visually that has not already been done before? Perhaps at this point, when visual delights like this become routine and maybe boring, the movies will come full circle and recreate the problem Spielberg encountered in Jaws. That is, the shark wasn’t working so he could not rely on anything visual to create action and suspense. Instead, he focused on story and character. If scenes like the war in Ready Player One become common-place, and there is nowhere bigger and elaborate to go, perhaps the movies will finally get back to the basics of storytelling.

Our Idiot Brother (4/5 Stars)

Good writing and nice people: A typical Paul Rudd comedy

The majority of comedies are about mean and obnoxious people. The idea being that gleeful and aggressive shocks of violence and rude behavior elicit laughs. And they do. Quite a lot of these movies are very funny. But every once in a while it is a pleasure to see a comedy take the opposite route and have the running joke be that the characters are too trusting, lovable, and sweet. Or in Ned’s case (played by the funniest nice guy in movies, Paul Rudd) all those characteristics to an idiotic degree.

What a good and compassionate heart Ned has. In the first scene we see him happily running a biodynamic vegetable stall at the local farmer’s market. He charges fair prices and lets little kids steal strawberries with a smile. A uniformed cop walks up to him and asks for marijuana. Ned is hesitant. The cop confides in Ned that it’s been a really rough week for him. Ned, ever so trusting and empathetic, decides to give him a bag of marijuana on the house. No, the cop insists, he wants to pay for it. Ned relents and gives a price that must be a rather large discount for that amount of marijuana. The cop pays and informs Ned that he is being arrested for selling drugs. It takes Ned awhile to realize that the nice cop had been lying to him all along.

Ned is thrown in prison for eight months and is released four months early for being “Most Cooperative Inmate” three months straight. Outside he finds that he has lost his job, his girlfriend, his place to live, and his much loved dog, Willie Nelson. The way he handles all this would make Socrates, Thoreau, and Jeffrey Lebowski very proud. He even makes dudely peace with his girlfriend’s new boyfriend, played here by the very funny T.J. Miller. He drops by his mother’s house where there are still family dinners routinely held. Around the table are his three sisters. One is Emily Mortimer, a wife and mother to an oily Steve Coogan and ten-year-old Dillon respectively. Another is Elizabeth Banks, a hard-working journalist on the verge of a career-making story. Finally there is Zooey Deschanel, a stand-up comedian currently engaged to Rashida Jones, a hipster lawyer with a must-mention sense of style. This is a very good cast. Most of them have worked together before and it has a way of showing. Elizabeth Banks was Rudd’s opposite in “Role Models” and Rashida Jones was Rudd’s opposite in “I Love You, Man.” Those movies too were very nice and funny comedies about good people. You can put this one up there with them. Good writing and nice people. I think it can be said that Paul Rudd is developing a solid reputation for these types of movies.

From there on, Ned couch surfs from home to home causing problems with his honesty and humility. Generally speaking, the problem already exists but Ned has a way of bringing them out in the open because of how his compassion and empathy (which makes him very easy to confide in) combines with his complete inability to tell a lie and childlike belief that the truth brings out the best in people. People tell him things he shouldn’t hear and he shares things to others he isn’t supposed to tell. Soon Emily’s marriage to Steve Coogan is on the rocks (as it should be because the guy is no good), Elizabeth’s career is put in danger (as it should be because her employers are telling her to do shady things), and Zooey’s relationship with Rashida is endangered (as it should be because Zooey has a bad habit of infidelity). All of this happens because of “our idiot brother.”

The first half of the movie is enjoyable but there were very few laughs. The movie did pick up steam, however, as it went along and by the end the laughs were big and numerous. The characters in general are so likable that laughing becomes a very easy reaction to indulge in. I especially liked the raid on the organic farm by Ned and Rashida Jones to steal back Willie Nelson. It goes bad almost immediately and they don’t get the dog back, but T.J. Miller is a really cool dude about the midnight trespassing and all. He even goes so far as to sort of apologize for not giving Ned the right information for when him and the girlfriend would be out of town to see a Dixie Chicks concert. “Next Thursday” apparently in Miller’s mind means every Thursday down the road that isn’t “this Thursday.” Ned kindly informs him that for future reference he should say “Next Next Thursday” if he means the Thursday after next. Sorry Dude, my bad. That’s totally okay, Dude, sorry for the trespassing. The movie did miss an opportunity in its underutilization of Zooey Deschanel though. This is an actress I have seen being truly hilarious before (The Good Girl, (500) Days of Summer). In this movie she plays a stand-up comedian. It would have been funny if she had a decent act that made people laugh or something.

Is Ned truly an idiot? The sisters treat Ned with that special kind of passive aggressive disdain women reserve for honest and humble men. Ned isn’t really an adult in their eyes. Ned tolerates this not only because he has to in that he is sleeping on their couches but also because he loves his family and understands their various problems. There is a very telling scene where Ned finally gets angry. Here is a man who was unjustly sent to prison via an act of compassion, lost his job, his home, his girlfriend, and essentially the respect and dignity in the eyes of his family. Does this make him bitter? No, he is still a good person, tries to do better, and spends much of the movie apologizing to those who are unfairly pissed off at him. What does he get angry about? He gets angry when on family night his sisters essentially ruin a game of charades. They break the rules, won’t have fun, and treat the concept of a family game as a stupid waste of time. It is easy to roll one’s eyes and claim that this is an idiotic thing to get angry about. Or one could perhaps reflect on their priorities in life.

One more thing, and I say this with but the expertise of a person who has seen an almost ridiculous amount of movies. Movies do not glamorize drugs, at least not the good ones. I have seen people drink themselves to death (Leaving Las Vegas), I have seen people ruin their lives with heroin (The Wire, Requiem for a Dream, Basketball Diaries), I have seen people make ridiculously bad decisions while on cocaine (Goodfelllas, Casino, Scarface, Boogie Nights, Bad Lieutenant). I have seen drug overdoses aplenty (Pulp Fiction, Traffic, Trainspotting, SLC Punk). Not once have I seen the movie where somebody smoked marijuana, became addicted, overdosed, or routinely went about their self-destruction. I think the worst I have seen was the case in Dave Chappelle’s Half Baked where one of the characters literally smoked himself retarded. True I have seen potheads that are lazy and stupid, but being lazy and stupid is not a crime and here is the point I want to make. We don’t need to be wasting the police’s time and the taxpayer’s money putting people like Ned behind prison bars. It has been argued that marijuana may lead to heavier drugs and more criminal behavior. You can say the same about losing your job, your girlfriend, and your home, which has a tendency to happen when someone gets thrown in prison. The problem isn’t being solved. Thank God that in this movie, Ned had a good family to fall back on. I think we must remember that there is a difference between behavior that is morally objectionable and behavior that is criminal. It can definitely be said that it would be better for the smoker or drinker to exercise prudence and refrain from intoxicants. But it must also be understood that indulging in mind-altering substances is a universal thing amongst human beings as a species. Basically every religion on the face of the planet has some kind of drug that they use in their functions or tolerate in society. It is a truth that people in general have rough weeks and look for a chance to escape every now and then. When this is made a crime, there will be a ludicrous amount of people behind bars that otherwise could be functioning productive citizens (ex. the United States of America). Drugs use is a very serious thing and those that are addictive, manipulative, and dangerous should be illegal. Marijuana is not one of those. If you would like to know exactly what it does, please read Michael Pollan’s “The Botany of Desire.” Of course, like anything else, marijuana may be abused. But that is a problem that should be dealt with by a family, a church, a support group, or a community. Using lawyers, courts, prisons, and parole officers to solve such a problem is akin to swatting flies with a baseball bat. You’re bound to cause far more damage than if you did nothing at all. 

Cloverfield 02/09/08

This movie can be summed up in one word: Ingenious. Just the concept is a fantastic idea and I'm sure the creators were excited when they finally set out to make the film. This is a moment in cinematic history. For the first time ever we have a blend of the grainy images of camcorders we are all familiar with and multimillion dollar special effects. Combined they prove to make a monster movie something it has never been before: Basically Human and very Personal. 

Now how could a story about a gigantic monster descending on New York City be personal? Haven't we seen countless movies about large scale disasters (Armageddon, Godzilla) that prove the contrary. This movie solves this problem by not being about the monster, which stays in the background mostly the entire time. It isn't about how they plan to kill the big monster or theories on how the monster could have gotten there. This film doesn't care about that because it doesn't matter. Basically the monster is a MacGuffin, just a device to get the film rolling and into what it does care about. And that is a quest by Rob and his "twentysomething" friends to rescue the woman he loves but hasn't shared his feelings toward. She is trapped in an apartment building and they travel into a very dangerous situation to rescue her. Does that sound heroic? Yes it is. 

Given that we are suspending our disbelief in order to pretend that a big monster is attacking the city, the rest of the story is realistic. The camcorder is jumbled and bounces around alot when people are running, the characters aren't exaggerated or do superhuman feats. They don't find the secret weakness in the monster and defeat the beast themselves. At one point in the movie, a characters mom calls (Something all moms due during a crisis). That's when I knew I was watching a different movie.

They made an intelligent decision when they cast the movie with unknowns. This is but one of many techniques that help personalize the movie. We don't feel like were watching a blockbuster. There is plenty in here you haven't seen. Bless my heart, but this movie is also surprisingly romantic. The ending is perhaps the most touching I think a monster movie can be.