Let's Go Out To The Movies: Maleficent

Directed by Robert Stromberg

Alo Party Peoples.

The reception to Disney's reworking of their archetypal fairy tale Sleeping Beauty has been, interesting to say the least. I imagine that this is going to be a big film for people with daughters, and I hate to be a party-pooper, but this might not be the best film for them. It isn't bad, in fact there are plenty of good things about Maleficent, but I'll try to explain.

As the film opens we see Maleficent as a young girl in the land of magic, she meets a human peasant by the name of Steven and they fall into a romance. Eventually they grow apart and she becomes the protector of the fair folk, while Steven has become a close ally of the king of the neighboring expansionist human kingdom. When said king is on his death bed he proclaims that he who takes out Maleficent shalt become his successor. So Steven goes back to the realm of magic and catches up with her. Then he, drugs her and cuts off her wings to present to the king as a trophy.

Well, that's definitely a step further than just being snubbed a party invite. Way to give Maleficent incredibly understandable motives for cursing the new king's daughter. At best, this is a metaphor for domestic abuse, at worst a metaphor for sexual abuse. I'm not the only critic to have picked up on this, and I'm wondering who at Disney decided to go there for the inaugural piece in their plans to retool their animated canon in live action.

Anyways, Maleficent is understandably furious about this, and once she hears that king Steven has had a child, she shows up at the party and does what she's known for in a shot for shot tribute to Sleeping Beauty. The other fairies decide to look after her, but in this version they're so bad at it that Maleficent ends up shadowing them so Aurora will live long enough for the curse to work. This is all rather rushed by the way, clocking in at one hour and 37 minutes, which is rather short for a blockbuster. A story of this size spanning years probably would have warranted the 2.5 hour treatment, unlike some recent fantasy blockbusters I could name.

The film looks gorgeous, if not terribly original, mostly borrowing from Harry Potter and Lord of The Rings, but still gorgeous. The effects are beautiful, the costume design terrific, and Angelina Jolie's Maleficent looks like the best translation from animation that you could have asked for. Jolie, incidentally, completely steals the show in the title role, she's clearly having a ton of fun in this part and she nails it. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast ranges from forgettable to annoying. Elle Fanning's Aurora is shallow, Juno Temple, Lesley Manville, and Imelda Staunton as the good fairies are obnoxious, but maybe that's intentional. This is after all, telling Sleeping Beauty from the view of Maleficent, so the traditional heroes are either evil, stupid, or unimportant. Case in point, Brenton Thwaites as the prince is essentially a cameo, and Sharito Copley as the king is kind of a terrible person, with a decent performance.

Disney's first horse out of the gate in terms of their plans for a live action retooling of their animated canon is kind of a mixed bag. On one hand it's a beautiful looking film with a fantastic lead performer in Angelina Jolie, but it's also a rather rushed film and the rest of the cast is just sort of there. Go ahead and see it I guess, but maybe wait a week for the crowds to die down.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Oh, and if you were wondering about A Million Ways To Die In The West, I didn't see it. Most of the professional's opinions have ranged from mediocre to terrible.

Let's Go Out To The Movies: X-Men Days Of Future Past

Directed by Brian Singer

Alo Party Peoples.

The X-Men movies have been going on for fifteen years now. The landscape of the film industry has changed significantly since then, especially for action. CG's gotten a lot better, studios have come to greatly rely on pre-existing brands - though that's probably been going on since Star Wars started the idea of the blockbuster - once thought impossible adaptations like Lord of The Rings and Watchmen got the expensive Hollywood treatment, you get the picture.

As far as the X-Men films go, general critical reception has gone something like this. The first two Bryan Singer films were excellent, the third main series film and the first Wolverine spin-off weren't as well received. Matthew Vaughn did an excellent job with the prequel First Class, there was another Wolverine solo job that I thought was pretty good, and now Bryan Singer has returned to tie all three branches of this franchise together in Days of Future Past. Named for and loosely based on a comic storyline from 1981.

In a not too distant dystopic future, giant T-1000 copies - I mean adaptable robots - named Sentinels that were built by the government to deal with the mutants have gone out of control and taken over the world. This isn't considered a good thing, so the remaining Singer X-Men have decided to send Marvel's most marketable mutant Wolverine back in time to 1973, where he will find the Vaughn mutants and convince them to stop the Sentinel program before it starts. They do this through another mutant by the name of Kitty Pride, who was in the third main series film and has never exhibited this ability before in any medium.

The film is a bit of a step down from First Class, but not a massive one. They manage to find a balance between the blue-grey aesthetic of the Singer films and the more vibrant, 60s Bond influenced aesthetic of First Class, and while it isn't a very original looking film, it still looks good. Speaking of balance, this film serves as a way for Fox to clean up the spotty continuity of these movies. Establishing that the events of Last Stand never happened - allowing them one more shot at the Phoenix Saga - and that any Vaughn mutants that weren't younger versions of Singer's mutants were found and killed by the company now making the Sentinels. That's unfortunate since First Class is probably the best one of these, but oh well.

The cast is doing a good job, Wolverine probably won't carry a great film any time soon, but Hugh Jackman is really good in this part. It's nice to see Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan returning to their roles, and James McAvoy and Micheal Fassbender do a wonderful job as the 1973 versions of Professor X and Magneto. Peter Dinklage shows up as the developer of the Sentinels, and he's good here, Jennifer Lawrence is alright as the younger Mystique, and Evan Peter's Quicksilver is surprisingly not terrible.

Actually, let's talk about that for a minute. We all had a good time making fun of Quicksilver's design when it came out. I mean good lord look at that thing, but he isn't in the movie that much. His one scene might just be "super bullet-time", but it's well shot, they picked a good song for it, and it did get a laugh out of me. I'm as surprised as anyone else, they actually made this character sort of work.


It's not been an amazing summer movie season so far. The new Spider-Man was mediocre, Godzilla had some problems with having engaging human characters, and most of the big movies - Star Wars Episode VII, Dawn of Justice*, Avengers 2, seem to have decided to wait for the next two years. For now, this is a well constructed action movie that gets all the things it has to right.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

*That's what DC's decided to call the Man of Steel sequel

Let's Talk About Movies: Why Do I Cover So Much Science Fiction?

Alo Party Peoples.

A lot, and I mean a lot, of my reviews cover movies with a fantastical bent. Why is that? I've asked my readers before if that's a problem to them. They assure me that it isn't, but I can't help but feel that it might lower my credibility in the eyes of some people. Speculative fiction, for all the money Hollywood pours into it yearly, isn't held in the highest regard. Maybe that's because Hollywood pours so much money into it. Most of their genre output is in the form of eye-candy blockbusters, and people don't usually think of blockbusters when they think of artistic achievement.

Unless it's Star Wars, or Lord of The Rings, or debatably the Matrix but I've already given my two cents about that. Did you notice a pattern? Most speculative fiction that does get critical respect tends to have had an influence. Star Wars kicked off the Blockbuster/Franchise Age  and gave a massive boom to the realm of movie merchandizing. The Lord of The Rings became the foundation of the fantasy genre in the West, and helped start the idea of a modern fandom along with Star Wars. The Matrix revolutionized the use of computer effects and popularized the grim grey aesthetic that became so commonplace in action. You can debate for yourselves whether any of that is a positive legacy, but it's still a legacy, and a big one.

Star Wars especially started Hollywood's current fixation on speculative fiction, and specifically science fiction. The problem with that, they might have also believed that speculative fiction in film had to be a blockbuster to turn a profit, and making those is expensive. Maybe they thought it necessary to dumb the stuff down to make it appealing to more people. Don't get me wrong, some good movies came out of the Blockbuster Age and fixation on sci-fi by Hollywood. In fact, I'll list some now.

• The Fifth Element
• Gattaca
• Pleasantville
• Peter Jackson's Lord of The Rings movies
• The currently ongoing Marvel Cinematic Universe is something unique
• The first two Christopher Nolan Batman movies
• Alien
• A good portion of Speilberg's backlog

But for every Dark Knight or Gravity, there will be a Batman and Robin or an Attack of the Clones.

If you've ever wondered why I cover so much science fiction. To be honest, partially because my interests are skewed in that direction, but it's also because Hollywood makes so much of it. 

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: Godzilla (2014)

Alo Party Peoples.



What do you think of when you hear the words "serious science fiction"? I think of stuff like Watchmen, Gattaca, or the 21st century Battlestar Galactica. This usually doesn't have to do with how strictly it adheres to actual science. Galactica has commonplace faster than light travel for example, and Watchmen has a immortal glowing blue man that makes enough lithium for electric cars to be commonplace in the U.S. by 1985, but I still consider them serious science fiction. Why? It's because of how seriously they present themselves, and also because they dare to aim higher. Watchmen and Galactica take themselves very seriously, and they play with big abstract ideas. The Adam West Batman show or Doctor Who on the other hand, don't take themselves that seriously. Neither approach is inherently superior, but those that take the somber road tend to get more critical respect.

What you probably think of when Godzilla is brought up.

Case in point, Japanese monster movies usually aren't considered high art. You probably think of stuff like this when Godzilla is brought up. It probably comes as a shock that a studio would try for a dark somber reboot of it. Believe it or not, this is actually a return to form. The original 1954 Gojira was actually a serious genre piece using the monster as an allegory for the atomic bomb from a uniquely Japanese perspective. Japan is the only country to have been on the receiving end of a nuclear attack. They had first hand experience of the horror such a weapon unleashes.

No matter how much you've prepared for invasion, or how strong nationalistic verve is among your citizenry, it cannot be stopped. It's practically a force of nature, and thus so is the monster. SF Debris did an excellent analysis of the 1954 film, which you should go watch later. Needless to say, Toho abandoned that track for Godzilla pretty quickly, which led to the franchise's dominant image in the United States. Said image being low budget schlock primarily made for younger audiences.

How is the attempt to return to form/remake the franchise's image in the West/displace the memory of the 1998 Roland Emmerich film? For one it's had a rather misleading ad campaign. All the trailers and promos for this movie have been selling it as a dark somber disaster movie, that just happens to have Godzilla in it, centered on ex-Breaking Bad lead Bryan Cranston. In actuality, it's more like someone took the template of Showa-era Godzilla, decided to take it seriously, gave it an actual budget, and Cranston is barely in the movie.

In 1999 an unexplained event levels a nuclear plant in Japan, and the area is sealed off under quarantine. Bryan Cranston is playing a former official at the plant who lost his wife in the disaster. He's convinced that it wasn't a meltdown, instead he believes that it was actually a giant monster. He's right of course, but he's killed when said monster breaks out of containment. Handing the leading man reins over to Aaron Tyler-Johnston as his son who is an explosives disposal officer for the US Army which is tracking the beast. Said beast is not Godzilla by the way, it's a several million year old MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) which is bee-lining for San Francisco to find it's mate. Since the monsters live off of radioactive material, our other focal character is Ken Wanatabe as a Japanese scientist trying to keep the Army from using the nuclear option to deal with it. Instead he want's them to let Godzilla, who is now also a millions of years old beast, deal with it because he was these thing's natural predator back in the day.

I couldn't find a decent looking picture from the
actual movie, but the tie-in figure is fair
approximation.

The movie looks amazing. Godzilla has never looked better, sure the CG will probably age quickly, but this is definitely a step up from a guy in a suit stepping on toys. As for the other kaiju, they don't look bad, but it feels like someone just borrowed the aesthetic from Pacific Rim. These filmmakers do know how to use suspense well, the monsters don't really show up for quite a while, and for the first 70 minutes we only really get glimpses of them. I mean, the characters aren't especially compelling, so you aren't in that much suspense, but it's all shot beautifully.

It's almost a disappointment that Cranston is barely in this, he's good in his part, and I guessed from the trailer that the drama would come from him being unable to accept the existence of something like Godzilla. I like the idea of a blockbuster where people's worldview is broken by the existence of the fantastic.* Instead, like I said, it's a less schlock-y version of Godzilla with an actual budget, and Aaron Tyler-Johnston is just utterly unremarkable as the lead.

Go ahead and see it. It's a well constructed disaster movie. If nothing else, it shows that you can take material like this seriously without looking like a complete fool.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

*On that note, the Man of Steel sequel should have a scene establishing a First Contact Memorial where Metropolis once stood.

TV Time: Marvel's Agents of Shield Season One (Fall 2013-Spring 2014)

Note-A Level 3 Spoiler Warning is in effect. It is simply not possible to talk about this show without spoilers for Captain America The Winter Soldier. It hasn't been for seven weeks. If you haven't seen that movie yet and you don't want the latter two acts spoiled, you probably don't want to read all of this article.-End Note

Alo Party Peoples.

So Here Is Everyone Left, Darn.

When I heard that Marvel was doing a TV show, I got pretty excited and there were some reasons for that.

For one, Marvel was doing something that hadn't been tried before, or at least not on this scale. There had been the odd novelty film like Alien vs Predator before, but a crossover on the scale of the Avengers, one where the preceding films were intended to crossover from the start, that was something inconceivable, but it somehow worked and made a ton of money.

Then they decided to take it to the small screen. Not that taking a film and doing a TV show based off of it is something new. Stargate spawned a TV series that lasted a decade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was sort of based on a movie that Joss Whedon had written in 1993, several films got animated series in the 1980s' and 90s', the list goes on for a while. However, usually there is a more direct connection to the film, not just centering around a side character that the fans of the movie series had latched onto.

Speaking of Joss Whedon, when I heard that he was heading the show, I was officially pumped. The man is a legend among nerds, known for making some impressive stuff, and it seemed that he was almost guaranteed to be able to finish his plans this time. (Whedon is also famous for his shows not lasting very long) Agents of Shield wasn't some weird and hard to categorize thing like Firefly was, this show was drawing from the most successful of a very lucrative series of films. The combination of the sheer size of Marvel's fan base, and the - to be frank - obsessive nature of Whedon's fan base insured that there would be viewers for this show, and I was among them.

Let's be honest, Agents of Shield had some very real problems in the first half. Granted, not all of them were it's fault, but they were still there. Skye isn't a very interesting character, the actual connection to the Marvel movies was tangential at best until fifteen episodes in, and the combination of a slow episodic start with an erratic broadcast schedule was definitely not helping. The show took week long breaks seemingly at random, was put on hold for a month by the Sochi Olympics, and one time it was interrupted to air what was essentially an hour long commercial for Marvel Studios. Was the early stuff bad, not really, in fact the weird thing about this poly-franchise is that it has yet to make something truly bad, but it wasn't especially good, and I probably would have dropped the show if it wasn't connected to the Marvel movies.

Then, around sixteen episodes in, the new Captain America movie came out and things got all shaken up. If you didn't take the warning above, this is where the spoilers start, if you don't want that movie spoiled, stop reading here.

Seriously, here be spoilers.

I've already talked about this movie and it's twist before, but here's the short version. Shield is full of undercover mad science Nazis, it has been since they got drafted into Shield in the 1940s. They attempted a coup, Captain America stopped them, but not before Shield is branded a terrorist organization by the UN. Which makes Coulson and company wanted men, and it also makes Agents of Shield much more interesting to watch.

The results of the Hydra incident, besides causing Hydra to trend on Twitter for a few weeks, allowed for much change to the show's status quo. Gone was the episodic tedium of the early episodes. We got some entertaining new characters out of Bill Paxton, Patton Oswald, and Brett Dalton. That wasn't a slip of the tongue, Brett Dalton's character is very different after the Hydra incident, he's also much more interesting. With Fitz in critical condition, Ward captured, and Coulson set to rebuild SHIELD from the ground up, we've got our setup for Season 2.

In conclusion, if you can persevere a slow start, it picks up after the first ten or so episodes. If you can't stand a slow start, just skip episodes 2-9 and you'll probably be fine. Agents of Shield has been renewed for a second season which airs this fall on ABC.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Agent Carter Show Gets The Greenlight

Alo Party Peoples.

Marvel Studios, after the recent critical success Agents of SHIELD, has decided to greenlight another spinoff of of one of their movies. This time, Agent Carter, centered on the character of the same name from the first Captain America movie. My first reaction to this news was "I can see that working", then I started wondering what direction this show is going to take.

Will it be an un-ironically straight-faced pulp adventure like it's parent movie? Or a serious period drama set in the post-war Marvel Universe? One of my readers suggested it being a pulp-noir crime drama, since it's focusing on the early days of the SHIELD organization.

"...she never gives Howard Stark a chance, and he never stops trying..." 

                                                                             One of my readers (In a Facebook comment)

Haley Atwell has been set to return to the title role, and no other details are known at this moment. We'll see how this works out.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (The Title Is Misleading)

Alo Party Peoples.

As an independent film critic with my own site to publish reviews on, I have very little oversight in regards to what I put out. This means I can freely pick and choose what gets reviewed here. Sometimes that doesn't work out, like the last two weeks, but for the most part I have the final word on what you see here. I'm very grateful to have this platform, and I try to live up to my promised schedule so I can show you my gratitude.

Since I was unable to cover Transcendence last weekend (the professionals have savaged it by the way), and literally nothing else came out in wide release this weekend, we're talking about the new Spider-Man movie. I originally didn't plan to cover it, because it looked terrible, but I haven't put out a review in a while. Two years ago, Sony decided that they couldn't let Marvel/Disney get the film rights to the Spider-Man franchise back, and they decided that an ultra marketable, slick and gritty reboot was the easiest way to hold onto them. It didn't really work as a movie, but it made a killing at the box office, which led Sony to give the green-light for five more of these. Here's how the first of those sequels turned out.

Peter Parker is having serious work-life balance issues between his vigilantism and his relationship with Gwen Stacy, while digging further into his father's spider research for Oscorp. Which has been taken over by Harry Osborne who's dying of a hereditary disease that he thinks can be cured by the blood of Spider-Man, which Peter is reluctant to give him because it might turn him into the Green Goblin. Oh, and an Oscorp electrical engineer named Max Dillon falls into a vat of electric eels which turns him into the super-villain Electro. I know that doesn't have much to do with the rest of the story, but I only bring it up because the movie gives this character a lot of screen time.

Let's get this out of the way, this is technically better than the first film in the 'Amazing' line. There's definitely been some improvement, the Spider-Man suit looks a lot better, mostly due to getting rid of the all black reflective eyes, and the action is probably the best in the Spider-Man movies. However, that doesn't make this movie good. I do think that the professionals might have been a little too hard on it, but I can't say it's a good movie. There are serious pacing issues, when it isn't in full on action mode I kept thinking "Dear lord, get on with it", and the tone is constantly in flux between that full on action and drawn out Twilight-esque romance that just isn't engaging. What chemistry Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone do have is definitely coming from their relationship off-camera, not from the script.

See what I mean?

Speaking of performances, Jamie Foxx is not very good as Max Dillon/Electro. As Max his goofy as hell character just doesn't fit with the tone of these movies, and as Electro he just looks ridiculous. No, I didn't think the version of Electro from the comics would look good in live action, but this movie's version looks like, in the words of one critic "homeless Doctor Manhattan", and it is just as ridiculous. As for the rest of the cast, Sally Field is a solid Aunt May, but Dane DeHann isn't very good as Harry Osbourne. I don't buy that this kid has only weeks to live, and my father remarked that his hairstyle was terrible.

In conclusion, while I can see some improvement from the last one, in all honesty The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is pretty mediocre. The professionals have made it out to be 'the worst kind of passionless, financially motivated, corporate film making of the franchise age' but that might be a little harsh. Oh, I can see why they feel that way, especially with all the Sony product placement, but there are definitely worse examples of corporate film making out there. It isn't terrible, but I can't recommend seeing it.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B