Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Aloha": Notably Imperfect (PG-13 - Columbia Pictures - 1 hr, 45 mins)

Directed and Written by
Cameron Crowe

Alo Party Peoples.

One of the hardest parts of this gig is when something just isn't quite right. Transcendently terrific true art? That's easy to write about, the hard part is coming down from the contact high and looking for things that you can actually criticize. Mystifying, blaze-of-imagined glory, cinematic disaster-pieces? Those can be fun in a cathartic sort of way. But notably imperfect is not easy. Aloha is that kind of movie, the kind where there are a lot of parts that you like, and that you want to focus on, but it doesn't work in some nagging specific way that just won't let you ignore it. It's like a loose thread in the world's most luxurious coat, it ruins the whole thing and leaves you awkwardly itching for the entire day.

Bradley Cooper is a defense contractor for the Air Force sent to Hawaii to negotiate with a local nationalist group to set up a launch platform for a satellite owned by Bill Murray as an Elon Musk type billionaire looking to restart America's space program with some good old fashioned entrepreneurship. Along the way he reconnects with Rachel McAdams as his ex-wife - or old flame, it isn't entirely clear - and falls in love with Emma Stone as a local Air Force officer assigned to work with him on negotiations with the locals.

Although it isn't the primary focus of the plot, on a thematic level Aloha, like Interstellar and Tomorrowland is another movie about how we need to restart manned space travel if we want to remain a great power. Unlike those two however, it explicitly argues not only against militarizing space, but also against private sector involvement. The lynchpin of the Hawaiians' argument against allowing the launchpad is that it would involve moving the graves of their ancestors to make way for a wealthy Western businessman to make millions by launching weapons into the sky, which they hold sacred.

Unfortunately, again like Interstellar and Tomorrowland, Aloha has almost no subtlety or grace in how it conveys that message. Characters make exclamations like "You can't buy the sky" and "If we can't look up there with purity and purpose we're finished!" I get the sentiment, I'm all for pumping federal money into space travel, and I don't quite trust private entities motivated by profit to make mankind's message to the stars, but between these three movies, I also think NASA desperately needs better advocates.

There are some things I did like about Aloha, but mostly on a conceptual level and they fail in practice. Bill Murray and Bradley Cooper are great, but they feel like they're each playing a character written for the other, I could totally see Murray playing a down on his luck old pro Army guy and Cooper (still rocking that American Sniper body) playing a young hot shot executive convinced he can bring back American greatness by just throwing enough money at it. It's impressive that Crowe is willing to give the native nationalists and actual voice, and legitimate concerns that could get audiences thinking about issues of ethnic pride and colonial legacy and conflicting nationalisms, and all sorts of other stuff that you usually don't see explored in mainstream family movies... until they fade into the background for the entire rest of the movie.

I'm just going to say it, in 2015 there is no excuse for setting a film in Hawaii, arguably the most diverse cultural melting pot in the world, and still having the main cast be entirely white. The closest it comes to one of the main cast actually being Hawaiian is claiming that Emma Stone's character is 1/4 native on her mother's side. Then again, Emma Stone is great in this, it's like she's acting in an entirely different movie, one that I want to see since Aloha, with its ham handed message mongering, conflicted tone, and sad case of Return of the King's Endless Endings Syndrome, fizzles out like a rocket misfiring on the launchpad.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl": Meet Millennial Wes Anderson (PG-13-20th Century Fox - 1 hr, 44 mins.)

Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
Written by Jesse Andrews

Alo Party Peoples.

I was not looking forward to Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, at all. I read that terribly twee title, took one look at this trailer for it, saw that the Sundance set were freaking out over it, and instantly thought "This is a film made by and exclusively for coastal dwelling, Europe envying, Pabst drinking, MSNBC watching, Al Jazerra reading, Steve Jobs worshiping, libertarian leaning, Democrat voting, skinny jean and "ironic" T-shirt clad, eternally irreverent art school attendee wannabe auteur hipsters."

I saw that they worshiped at the altar of Wes Anderson, already a filmmaker often accused by many of exclusively pandering to irreverent skinny jean clad wannabe auteurs, and that they were proving those people right by making a film about irreverent wannabe auteurs filtered through his lense of melancholic whimsy - with the only significant difference being that while Wes' usually evokes the mid-20th Century with his work, these film makers decided to use it to evoke the mid-90s.

That aesthetic choice, sort of makes sense. There's more than a little cultural nostalgia for the brief happy period between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror, the same kind of cultural nostalgia that existed for the postwar period during Wes Anderson's formative years. They've both been seen as a bygone, almost mythic age when life was simpler, and all sorts of amazing things were possible, and also as something that can never really happen again since the crushing weight of reality long ago set in. The magic economy was unsustainable in the long run, the Land of the Free is not invincible, and the Tooth Fairy is a figment of your parent's imagination.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is about that sense of disillusionment... as seen through the eyes of a snarky teenage wannabe auteur with a serious case of senioritis. If that sounds like the most insufferable thing ever to you, like it did to me before I saw it in practice, then you probably won't enjoy Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. But if you can get behind that, or identify with any of its main cast, or if you really want to see what an Andersonian take on a book that John Green never wrote looks like, then Me and Earl and the Dying Girl will probably be one of your favorite films of 2015.

Greg Gaines is a socially awkward teenager that just doesn't fit in with his peers, to the point that he's "afraid to call anybody his friend" and puts on a show of lightly interacting with everyone while never delving into any kind of relationship that requires real emotional investment. He's so averse to relationships, that he refers to Earl, the closest he's ever come to a best friend, as a "co-worker" since they spend their ample spare time making no-budget spoofs of classic films. (Said spoofs include Senior Citizen Kane, A Sockwork Orange, A-Box-o'-'Lips Wow!, etc.)

This wall of "carefully cultivated invisibility" comes crashing down when Greg's parents require him to spend time with Rachel, the neighbor's girl that has just been diagnosed with leukemia. They're both hesitant at first, but over time they start to fall for each other, she even starts watching their spoofs and they sort-of agree to make one for her. He gets so fixated on making it just right that he does "literally zero schoolwork" just to keep working on it.

I know that sounds like exactly the sort of pandering thing I railed against at the beginning of this article, let's go through the list. Limited color palates, check. Lutes and 60s Brit pop twinkling across the soundtrack, check. Plot involving amateur film making, check. A main character just self-absorbed enough to be funny but hopefully not enough for the audience to hate them, check. By any logic I should have hated this. But there are two reasons I didn't, the acting is good, and they aren't mimicking Wes Anderson just because they can.

If they had made even one bad casting decision among the film's main cast, the whole thing would have just fallen apart. As written, Greg Gaines is just the worst kind of person. He's convinced that everyone around him is a jerk (because he constantly blows everyone else off), that no one understands him (because he's intentionally isolated himself from his peers), constantly moping about his lack of prospects (while doing absolutely nothing about it himself). If they screwed this part up, everyone would want to reach through the screen and strangle this kid, but Thomas Mann brings real humanity to the role and makes him sympathetic and even relatable after a while, especially when you combine it with why the film-makers are making a tribute to Rushmore.

The film's Andersonian melancholic whimsy (somewhere between Rushmore, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Moonrise Kingdom) is, sort of brilliantly, used to show us the world as seen through the eyes of two people that think they have no future (she's dying of cancer, his grades are nowhere near good enough for a scholarship) at a time when everyone around them is saying they have their whole lives ahead of them. The limited fading color palette and the weird dialogue and the ever-present miasma of 1996 adds a vaguely tragic element to this, because they, and by extension the audience, are hit with a longing for something that constantly surrounds them, but that they have no real experience of themselves, which will definitely strike a cord with the legions of socially awkward teenagers that will give this film a passionate following once it comes out.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is going to be a divisive film once it starts coming out on June 12th. Some people are guaranteed to love it, others are guaranteed to hate it, most won't be able to look past the surface-level self-aware quirk to see the raw adolescent wannabe auteur angst fueling the film, and a few will see that they themselves are fueled by that engine. I know I saw a bit of myself in Greg Gaines, and not just because of a shared name.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Tomorrowland" (PG - Disney - 2 hrs, 10 mins)

Directed by Brad Bird
Written by Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof

Alo Party Peoples.

There's a running joke that circulates around film circles that Pixar veteran Brad Bird is a secret Objectivist, mostly built around really cynical readings of The Incredibles, a story about natural-born superheroes being forced into normality by society, with a villain who's big master plan involves forcibly leveling the human-superhuman playing field. "If everyone's super, no one is." 

I don't necessarily agree with that reading of his work - part of the message of The Incredibles is that the exceptional have a responsibility to use their talents for the betterment of society as a whole, which runs directly counter to Objectivism's putting fulfillment of selfish desire above all else, but most creative folk have thought "the rules and regulations inherent to the social contract only hold back human progress" at some point.

So if Brad Bird really does sleep with a copy of The Fountainhead under his mattress, it's no more so than most other film makers. That being said, if The Incredibles is Brad Bird's Anthem, then Tomorrowland is his Atlas Shrugged, mostly because it's also Disney's happy, family friendly, explicitly sci-fi version of Atlas Shrugged.

To wit, we open at the 1964 World's Fair, where plucky young inventor Frank Walker has designed a prototype jetpack which catches the eye of Athena, a young girl that invites him into Tomorrowland, a retro futuristic utopia where mankind's best and brightest minds have gone to freely create all sorts of wonderful things. Sustainable cold fusion, faster-than-light space travel, honest to god flying cars, all of these and more have been achieved in Galt's Gulch - I mean Oz - I mean Krypton - I mean Tomorrowland.

Then we cut to the present, a grey, washed out dystopic hellscape that has all but forgotten how to dream. But some, like Britt Robertson as Casey Newton haven't lost the spark of optimism, to the point that she's breaking into Cape Canaveral to stop the dismantlement of the Space Shuttle program, which sparks the attention of Athena and sets her on a quest to reach this Zeerust paradise. She finds George Clooney as the now adult Frank, who was kicked out of Gene Roddenberry's Shownotes for inventing something he shouldn't have, and they discover that something's gone wrong, and that Tomorrowland has become a decaying shell of a million broken dreams.

Just as the fictional Tomorrowland is contrasted with the real world's pessimism, Tomorrowland the movie posits itself as a direct contrast with the grim, self serious state of 21st Century blockbusters in general, and the current glut of post-Hunger Games dystopic sci-fi in particular, emphasized by both a running gag of a fake movie poster for ToxiCosmos 3 (no, seriously), and by multiple characters directly stating this to the audience. Brad Bird has achieved a level of visual mastery on par with Neill Blomkamp, and he has also achieved his level of subtlety, which is to say he believes it involves sledgehammers. (not that Bird was especially subtle to begin with, The Incredibles was essentially Watchmen for third graders)

Here's the thing, I'm on the same page as Brad Bird vis a vis being absolutely sick of grim, dystopic futures in popular culture, and I'd like to see us return to a mindset where science can actually improve the world rather than end it - and if he had written an editorial on that subject I'd totally back him, but he went and hung a story around that framework, and it doesn't quite fit.

Not that Tomorrowland is a bad movie, it's masterfully directed and better designed, it's a godsend to see bright, vibrant colors in a live-action feature, Britt Robertson is a for real rising talent, the action, although it leans a little heavy on slapstick for my taste, is consistently exciting and makes fine use of all the wacky raygun gothic super-science on display, in all honesty it feels like a fully realized exploration of the good parts of Interstellar. But it's script is at once incredibly optimistic and incredibly cynical, and not in a good way, especially since it feels like the current wave of dystopian futures is finally starting to crest.

I can imagine Brad Bird as an old man waving a cane and screaming "Back in my day, the future was a better time, what happened to us?" I get where he's coming from, and I want to back him up on it, but at the same time I feel like he's blinded by nostalgia for a "good old days" that never really existed.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Pitch Perfect 2" (PG-13 - Universal - 1 hr, 55 mins)

Directed by Elizabeth Banks
Written by Kay Cannon and
Mickey Rapkin

Alo Party Peoples.

I am about as far from the target audience for the Pitch Perfect movies as you can get. It's a series aimed alternatively at female college-age Millenials and overworked parents on family movie night, I'm a young man on the border between the Millenials and... whatever we decide to call the generation after. My personal taste tends to run pretty far from modern family films and from the tastes of other people my age. Oh, and I cannot stand accapella, I just can't. If I wanted to listen to "Wrecking Ball" for some ungodly reason, I'd listen to "Wrecking Ball", not a bunch of people making a rough approximation with their mouths.

So I was not going into this movie expecting anything good. It's a comedy sequel that isn't being helmed by the Lord/Miller duo, why would I expect anything but an unfunny muddled mess? And Pitch Perfect 2 starts off like it's going to fall into the all too common comedy sequel trap of just expanding the scope of the first installment without having anything new to add to the premise. Which in this case is the trials and tribulations of the Barton Bellas, a women's acapella group at a university. But then, somehow, it slowly becomes something with it's own distinct character that comes off as legitimately funny, and almost becomes worth a matinee, before sadly overstaying it's welcome.

Pitch Perfect 2 picks up with the Barton Bellas completely blowing their success from the previous installment and getting suspended from their nationwide tour, but they find a loophole in the paperwork allowing them to get back in if they win at the global level. To do that, they have to defeat the touring act that's replaced them, a big-shot artsy, sorta-edgy German group named Das Sound Machine.

It's basically the first Pitch Perfect, but with more stuff in it. More antics from Rebel Wilson's breakout character Fat Amy, which alternate between landing with a chuckle or a collapsed thud, more understated antics from Hana Mae Lee as Lily the mostly silent oddball of the group, more acapella pop songs, ranging from a tear inducing rendition of "Uprising" from Das Sound Machine to "Cups (When I'm Gone)" a pretty good original song performed by the Bellas.

Then things start to get interesting when the Bellas head out to a secluded forest retreat to "re-harmonize" themselves and "rediscover their sound" in preperation for the big contest. The characters are really able to shine, director Elizabeth Banks infuses some real visual energy into what would otherwise be a series of lightly edited improv routines, the whole thing starts to feel like it could be a really solid family comedy.

But then it gets to the big championship concert and sort of falls apart. Even if acapella isn't your thing, and it isn't mine, the characters had been so solid so far that you could ignore that, helped by the fact that none of the songs have anything to do structurally or thematically with the plot. But the finale is all acapella all the time, and it goes on, and on, and on... The whole thing just sort of goes on about half an hour too long for its own good.

I don't know that Pitch Perfect needed to be a franchise, but it's second installment is a mostly solid distraction, and with some fine tuning I suspect the series could become something truly worthwhile.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Hot Pursuit" (PG-13 - Warner Bros. - 1 hr, 27 mins)

Directed by Anne Fletcher
Written by David Feeney and
John Quaintance

Alo Party Peoples.

Objectively, there is very little reason for Hot Pursuit to exist. Warner Bros. certainly thinks so, why else would they release it one week after an Avengers sequel? But as an introduction for Reese Witherspoon and  Sofia Vergara as a comedy team, it mostly does it's job.

If you can get behind the pair's manic energy, you won't mind that Hot Pursuit is a by-the-numbers road trip buddy comedy with nothing in the way of surprises or fancy technical tricks, but Witherspoon and Vergara really are a good enough pairing to make it all feel a bit more substantial than it really ought to - at least in the moment.

To wit, Reese Witherspoon plays Cooper, a high strung by-the-book San Antonio police officer charged with escorting a witness in a high profile drug case to trial. When her charge is assassinated by a rival cartel, she flees the scene with Sofia Vergara as the witness' wife and through a bit of corruption is blamed for the murder of one of her fellow officers and ends up on the lamb as she desperately tries to get her new charge to Dallas to give her testimony, and of course various hi-jinks ensue along the way.

Those hi-jinks mostly involve the two leads bickering to show off their chemistry, which is often pretty fantastic. If you like Vergara's schtick as a melodramatic, hot-tempered ethnic caricature on Modern Family, you will like her here, and Witherspoon makes a great straight-man to play off her. They really are a great comic-duo, I just wish they had a better script to be funny in.

The screenplay isn't exactly bad, far from it, it moves along at a good clip, there's no glaring plot holes or anything that insults the audience's intelligence or anything like that, but there's a significant lack of substance and very little directorial style to make up for it. That doesn't make Hot Pursuit a bad movie, just an unremarkable one. Its worth seeing for any fans of the two leads, but I'd avoid rushing out to the theater and wait for DVD or streaming.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Avengers: Age of Ultron" (PG-13 - Marvel/Disney - 2 hrs, 30 mins)

Short Version- It's good, not as good/iconic as the first one, but it's still a total blast to watch. Take the kids, they'll love it. Only one mid-credits scene, so you can go home early.-Long Version...

Alo Party Peoples.

Directed and Written by
Joss Whedon

If The Avengers was the original Star Wars, and Winter Soldier was The Empire Strikes Back, then Age of Ultron is Return of the Jedi. The first rewrote the book on modern action cinema, the second went bigger, bolder, and completely rejiggered the status quo with massive revelations, and the third is still a satisfying action film but doesn't quite reach the highs of either of its predecessors.

Make no mistake, Age of Ultron will likely be one of the summer's finest offerings of spectacle. It's funny, it's gorgeous, it's entertaining, but there's no "Puny god." or "I'm always angry." or this scene to make it something truly amazing and push it into pop-culture immortality like it's predecessor. With such a large expansive universe juggling multiple platforms, one of these movies just being good was probably an inevitability for Marvel, but they've set such a high standard for themselves that it feels like more of a letdown than it is.

Age of Ultron picks up in the wake of Winter Soldier with the Avengers picking off the last remnants of Hydra and capturing a base containing Loki's scepter, which has been used by a mad scientist to turn a couple of war orphans with a grudge against Tony Stark into the super-humans Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. When Stark and Banner discover that the Scepter basically works like a computer, they decide to use it as the basis of an artificial intelligence program meant to run a global network of Iron Legionaries meant to tackle threats too big for superheroes. This "suit of armor around the world" quickly becomes an iron maiden when the AI immediately becomes a deranged lunatic that decides that making the world safe means killing the Avengers, and the rest of humanity not long after. Except for the war orphans since Scarlet Witch's telepathy proves useful in seeding discord among the Avengers.

Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Jeremy Renner,
Scarlet Johannson, and Chris Hemsworth as the Avengers

This is the kind of big, ridiculous storytelling that could only originate in characters originally meant to entertain children, and while certain other superhero films treat that legacy like a burden, Age of Ultron embraces it wholeheartedly without any sense of irony or self-depreciating humor. This makes it, more so than any other Marvel Studios production, feel like a live-action cartoon in the best possible way. The action scenes are a ton of fun, the dialouge is consistently funny and quotable, delivered by actors that are by now immensely comfortable embodying these characters, and no matter which one is your favorite, you will love what they do with them, especially a much expanded role for Hawkeye that somehow turns him into an interesting character.

James Spader as Ultron

If there's one place where it comes up short, besides lavish editing for time that turns a second act spirit quest by Thor clearly meant to set up his third solo-outing into a weird digression that goes nowhere, it's Ultron himself. Don't get me wrong, he looks gorgeous, and James Spader is clearly having a blast playing him as having a serious god complex and a fragile ego, but he's a surprisingly shallow villain. Sure, this isn't and was never going to be an Ex_Machina level exploration of AI, but there's no real reason for him to immediately go crazy and decide that genocide is the only route to peace. There's not even a scene of Tony Stark being a prick to him that pushes him over the edge or something, it just comes out of nowhere.

But that's mostly nitpicking in what's almost certainly going to be a real highlight for summer 2015. When I say that Age of Ultron is only good, that's in comparision to the other Marvel Cinematic Universe films, and their standards are set so high that just 'good' is closer to amazing. Age of Ultron may not as good as it's predecessor, but it's still a fantastic action film. I had a wonderful time with it, and I'm sure that many of you will as well.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B