Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2" (PG - ColumbiaPictures - 1 hr, 34 mins)

Directed by Andy Fickman
Written by Kevin James and Nick Bakay

Alo Party Peoples.

I had no intentions of seeing Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 this weekend. I already had a perfectly good post about Ex Machina up, and I thought to myself "No, just no. This is below my dignity as a filmgoer and as a film critic, I refuse to pay money in order to subject myself to Paul Blart 2." I was not alone in this, Sony didn't hold press screenings for it - which almost never happens unless they have something truly terrible on their hands - and critics that did decide to see it have universally panned it.

I decided to take my girlfriend out to a different movie instead, so I gave her a call, and it turned out she didn't want to see Unfriended (why is that coming out now and not in October?) so we were talking about alternatives, and I brought up that she probably didn't want to see Paul Blart 2. But then she said to me "It can't possibly be that bad, let's give it a shot!", and I said "Really?" and she said "Yes, really." so we did just that. Two minutes in, they tried to make a joke out of an old woman being run over by a truck, and I knew this was a mistake.

Surprising absolutely no one, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 is a terrible movie, a seriously, seriously terrible movie.  Joke after joke lands with a resounding thud, every character has no discernible personality - even by the very generous standards of modern family films - there is no sense of place with its setting in Las Vegas, and the whole thing is just alternately depressing or dull, depending on whether or not you care in the first place.

Kevin James as Paul Blart

It's not like the first Paul Blart was a masterpiece or something - not by any stretch of the imagination - but it wasn't bad, or it was at least tolerable. The sequel on the other hand, is horrible, mostly by virtue of the age old problem of bad comedy sequels. It has no new perspective to give on the concept and mostly feels like reheated leftovers of the first installment. To wit, after saving the mall in the first one, Paul Blart has hit a rough patch in his life. His wife of just six days filed for divorce, his mother was run over by a milk truck, and his daughter is growing up too fast since she's been accepted to ACLU.

At the same time, Paul gets an invitation to a security officer's trade show in Las Vegas, or more specifically at the Wynn Hotel and Casino TM, and decides this is just the opportunity he needs to bond with his daughter, and he stumbles upon an attempt by organized thieves to steal the hotel's art collection. If that sounds familiar, that's because it is. Paul Blart 2 is just Paul Blart again, but in a different setting, sort of. You see, this is a film from Happy Madison, which is Adam Sandler's production company. Also known as Adam Sandler's excuse to take a bunch of his fellow comedians out on vacation with Sony and the moviegoers of Middle America footing the bill.

Jack and Jill was an excuse to go on a cruise, Blended was an excuse to go out on a safari, and Paul Blart 2 is an excuse for Sandler, James and company to hit the Vegas Strip, but we never get to see the strip for ourselves since leaving the Wynn TM would mean doing actual work. Once the characters get to the hotel, we never leave it. It's almost like a feature-length commercial for the Wynn TM, which I'm sure was a significant source of funding to make up for the surprising lack of Sony's signature product placement.

The bottom line is, Paul Blart simply isn't funny, at all. It's a comedic black hole that sucks any humor or charisma out of Furious 7 playing one theater over. Every joke falls flat. Every. Single. Last. Joke. They're mostly composed of Paul Blart running into heavy objects, Paul Blart being a prick for no reason, or sad attempts at banter. The first one may not have been comedy gold, but it was at least in good spirits, this one isn't even trying, and Blart himself has gone from a likable shlub to an insensitive obstinate prick. As a result the film's emotional core, his growing ever more distant from his daughter, just doesn't work because we want her to get away from this jerk.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 is a failure. A lazy, uninspired sequel to an original that couldn't sustain a sequel. At least in my mind, this does more damage to Sony Pictures' reputation than North Korea or Wikileaks could ever manage to inflict. An instant contender for the Worst of the Year title, and it's April.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Ex Machina" (R - Universal/A24 Films - 1hr, 48 mins)

Directed and Written by Alex Garland

Alo Party Peoples.

If you liked Inception or Alien or The Matrix, then you will likely enjoy Ex Machina. If you want sci-fi with some intellectual meat to chew on, something in the spirit of The Twilight Zone, then you will enjoy Ex Machina. If you were disappointed by Lucy and want to see its themes properly explored, then you will love Ex Machina. I meet those criteria, and I suspect that Ex Machina will be one of the best films of 2015.

The reason Ex Machina is such a great film is simple, it's a great script playing with big ideas paired to a good director and good actors, with an amazing technical department to boot. It all adds up to a lean, tight, no-nonsense sci-fi thriller that Lucy wanted to be but utterly failed to.

Domhnall Gleeson plays Caleb, a computer programmer for a massive tech company that wins a contest to spend a week with the company's reclusive founder Nathan played by Oscar Issac, at his secluded mansion out in the middle of the wilderness. He finds out that it wasn't a contest, and that he was chosen by Nathan the human component of a Turing Test, sort of. Nathan has built Ava, an intellegent AI played by Alica Vikander, and he wants to find out if, even though she is obviously not a human, she acts enough like one for people to still empathize with her. She definitely passes, perhaps too well, and Caleb starts to suspect that Nathan has some ulterior purposes in mind.

Domhnall Gleeson as Caleb, Oscar Issac as Nathan

This is the directorial debut for novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland, and it shows. Huge segments of the film are presented with chapter headings, the screenplay is filled to the brim with allusions to myths, legends, scriptures, and visual arts, and it is just so rare to see cinematic sci-fi these days asking deep questions about free will and authority and what it means to be human and society and technology's place therein. Most cinematic sci-fi tends towards the fanciful realms of action or horror, so when something like Ex Machina comes along, it is something to be deeply cherished.

The actors are great, Domhnall Gleeson's Caleb is a relatable schlub, but in a very connectable way. Alica Vikander as Ava is simply amazing. This role requires absolute muscle control to show just enough emotion so the audience can empathize with them, but hold enough back to remind them that she's still essentially the daughter of HAL 9000 and Siri. Oscar Issac, oh dear lord, Nathan is a great, complex character. He plays him like an amalgam of Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Larry Page that created the source code for a search engine at the age of thirteen, and grew stinking rich off of it, and isn't happy with it at all. He's so unhappy wit the rest of humanity, and has such a massive ego, that he's convinced he can create a better version of it, hence his creating Ava. (oh hey, that's really similar to Eve)

Alica Vikander as Ava

Ex Machina is practically the definition of a well produced film. Alex Garland seems to be taking his cues from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Apple. So there are a lot of stark, sterile whites, and greys, and the whole house looks like the inside of an iMac, the precision of design almost makes it look like Wes Anderson's The Shining. Not to mention the seamless effects work it took to make Ava look the way she does. It took  It also does amazing things with sound, like, it had better win the Oscar. Unlike, say, Interstellar, the pounding sonic weight of the soundtrack emphasizes the action onscreen instead of drowning it out.

Ex Machina is brainy, big idea sci-fi of the best possible kind, and an instant contender for the Best of the Year title. It has already played in much of Europe, but is currently playing at select theaters in the US before going national next week. It's definitely worth checking out if you get the chance.

Have a nice day

Greg.B

TV Time: "Daredevil" (TV-MA - Netflix/Marvel/Disney - 13 ep., 50 min. avg.)

Note- Once upon a time, I saw Winter Soldier and thought, "This is the best Marvel movie period." Then I saw Guardians of the Galaxy and thought "This is the pinnacle of modern blockbuster filmmaking." I couldn't wait to see another film from these mad geniuses that reached those levels, and I found it in a Netflix Original.-End Note

Created by Drew Goddard

Alo Party Peoples.

One of the unique advantages the Marvel Cinematic Universe gets from being an interconnected universe is that there is a wide variety of story types and genres that can be explored within that universe. Captain America can go from old-fashioned pulp adventure to paranoid conspiracy thriller, Guardians of the Galaxy is a comedy space opera, Thor is a science-fantasy epic, they can do anything.

But not every story possibility lends itself to blockbuster film making. You can easily get a big audience draw from Thor, or Captain America, with Iron Man or The Avengers you can even pass the billion dollar mark, but I'm not sure there's a sizable amount of people on Earth that want to see a movie about Howard the Duck. (although that didn't stop George Lucas from trying) That's why I was excited when Marvel announced that they would be doing Netflix series based around their more obscure street-level characters, it shows that they're big enough to go small. Streaming services in general has opened the floodgates for concepts that wouldn't be viable in theaters or on broadcast TV to find a dedicated audience. The inner workings of the ascent to power of a congressman, or the complex social hierarchies of a women's prison, generally stuff too taboo for mainstream audiences to touch, suddenly gets to flourish under this new business model.

Besides changing what we expect from media, it's also been changing the way we consume media. Once upon a time, if you didn't watch something as it aired, you generally didn't expect to ever get another chance too see it outside of reruns. That's why so many shows were episodic in nature, i.e. each episode was its own self contained story, you just couldn't expect everyone to tune in week to week. VHS may have mitigated the problem somewhat, but the tapes had limited storage capacity, degraded over time, and took up far too much shelf space for keeping an entire season of something to be practical - all of that assuming you had a VCR to record and play back shows with.

Then the arrival of DVDs, and later time shifting services like DVRs and on demand streaming changed everything. It suddenly became a lot easier to do over-arching interconnected storylines with complex characters, because people could now follow it more easily since they didn't need to be in a certain place at a certain time to do so. Fifteen, even ten years ago, something like Game of Thrones or Mad Men or Orange is the New Black - or even the MCU itself now that I think about it - probably couldn't have existed, and they certainly wouldn't have been the norm, but now they increasingly are.

Daredevil is definitely a departure from the norm for Marvel Studios. The closest entry I can think of is Winter Soldier, and even that's a stretch since Daredevil is much smaller in scale and very different in tone. Regardless of their genre, Marvel Studios so far has kept up a standard approach to aesthetics for the most part, usually resembling comic panels come to life. Daredevil ditches that for harsh lighting, handheld cameras, and a pulp-noir texture that feels somewhere between Agent Carter and Gone Girl. To wit, Matt Murdock was blinded as a child by toxic chemicals that enhanced his remaining senses to near-superhuman levels. He grew up, and by day he works as a defense attorney alongside long-time associate Foggy Nelson, but by night he becomes the mysterious masked vigilante only known as "the Devil of Hell's Kitchen". While doing his job, both personas stumble upon an organized crime ring targeting the neighborhood eventually discovering a plot by mysterious billionaire Wilson Fisk to clean up the streets via forced gentrification.

Netflix's loose content restrictions allow Daredevil to go where the movies cannot. Like, the Iron Man movies are a good time, but Disney would never let them go into Tony Stark's drinking problems. This is best exemplified in the Daredevil's approach to action. Whereas most of the action in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been built around lasers and monster punches and magic hammers, but Daredevil's action is built around close-quarters brawling among mostly normal humans with mundane weaponry, which makes it feel a lot more brutal, tactile, and immediate. It's less like The Avengers' candy colored CGI fireworks and more reminiscent of Asian martial arts films ala Bruce Lee.

The action, while certainly impressive, is not the primary focus of Daredevil. Instead, it's a much more character driven show, and that means it lives or dies on the acting, which is phenomenal. Charlie Cox comes across as an immensely likable cad as Matt Murdock, and his Daredevil is appropriately menacing. Eldon Henson brings great comic relief as Foggy Nelson, Deborah Ann Wol works wonders as client turned co-worker Karen Page, and they all have great conversational rapport, but the best by far is Vincent D'Onofrio as Wilson Fisk.

If Marvel Studios has had any real weakness, it's that besides Loki they generally don't have very compelling or memorable villains, but Wilson Fisk is a great, complex character. He has a very specific image of what he wants the new Hell's Kitchen to be, and he will do anything and everything to achieve it, operating with the shy emotional maturity of a twelve year old. All those poor people already living there are either obstacles to be overcome or tools to be used in his sociopathic pursuit of his dream. He comes across as very comfortable with his position at the top of the ladder, but he's got a rage barely concealed below the surface that is always threatening to come loose.

Daredevil can go toe-to-toe with the best of the Marvel Cinematic Universe while also being utterly distinct from it. Even if you don't care for or about the Marvel movies, if you have Netflix, Daredevil is a must watch.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B