Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Paper Towns" Genuinely Good (PG-13 - 20th Century Fox - 1 hr, 53 mins)

Directed by Jake Schreier
Written by John Green, Scott Neustadter,
and Michael H. Weber

Minor Spoiler Warning

Alo Party Peoples.

It's probably safe to say that I was too nice to The Fault in Our Stars. Don't get me wrong, it isn't terrible, it's backed by two promising young actors giving good performances, and it plays with some big ideas for a teenybopper romance story, but it's certainly no masterpiece, and it definitely didn't need to be on the Best of the Year list.* In retrospect I probably wouldn't have given it as much praise as I did if it weren't for it being sort of refreshing to see a YA movie that wasn't 1) yet another dystopia. and 2) actually had some level of thought put into it.

That, I think, is what distinguishes author/vlogger/social media titan John Green from the rest of the YA set. You can debate the actual quality of his various endeavors til' the cows come home, and I'd argue that his literature has only gotten worse ever since he started becoming an Internet celebrity and TFiOS was the first genuinely bad book, but I'd never call him stupid, or shallow, or say that he doesn't put serious thought and effort into his work, and even if The Fault in Our Stars was, in the end, more than a little pandering to the heartstrings of the Tumblrites that turned him into a semi-mainstream figure, it at least felt sincere while it did so and wasn't doing it just to sell books and movie tickets. It was good... for a YA movie.

Paper Towns, fortunately, is a strong enough effort that I can call it a genuinely good movie, no "... for a YA movie" qualifiers necessary. It's certainly a far better final product than The Fault in Our Stars, mostly because it's willing to take more liberties with the source material, keeping Green's mischievous wit intact while infusing it with the same kind of melancholic whimsy and genuine introspection that fuels the work of Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater. It's got the look of YouTube era music videos, the soul of The Breakfast Club, and some little touches of Moonrise Kingdom and Dazed and Confused thrown in for good measure.

Nat Wolff is Quentin, a senior at a high school in Orlando. He and his friends, overly cocky Ben, and sane, grounded Radar have never stepped outside their comfort zone a day in his life. The only time Quentin has ever come close, something he calls a "miracle", is when he was a child, when he lived next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman. One day the two of them came across a dead body by a tree, and they haven't really talked since, he's just heard stories about her disappearing off to do all sorts of incredible things. Running off to join the circus, opening for indie rock bands, pulling all sorts of incredible pranks, she's a larger-than-life, almost mythic figure. Until a few weeks before graduation, when Cara Delevingne as the grown up Margo invites Quentin out to participate in the pranking, and it looks like it'll be the start of something wonderful....

...until the next day when Margo doesn't show up for school, and the next day, and the next, until it looks like she might be gone for good, so Quentin recruits his friends to head off on a country-spanning road trip to find her.

Sure, that sounds like the most insufferable thing ever, but that's part of the point, and that unreality is where Paper Towns really tramps its perpetual journey. The cinematographer takes most of his cues from music videos, which gives the entire movie the look and feel of one big daydream, Nat Wolff always has a big ridiculous grin on his face, which makes it impossible to forget that what you're watching is an illusion. Practically every plot element, production point, background detail and camera move is designed to hammer in the point that "This is unreal." 

That point even extends to the title. During their night of pranking, Quentin and Margo head up to the top of a skyscraper and she calls the whole place a ...paper town. Full of paper houses and paper people, and I've never once met anyone that cares about anything that matters." Sure, she sounds like a self-absorbed teenager (not unlike many of Green's own fans), but that, again, is part of the point. Once he finally finds Margo, Quentin discovers that his image of her, the girl that runs away from home all the time to do incredible things, the one filled to the brim with way-too-much self confidence, that girl never existed. That was a paper-thin surface level illusion and underneath that Margo is just as human as anyone else. Sure, the message of "See other people as people." isn't exactly a new one, nor is it especially subtle here, but I'd argue that in the Digital Age, when today's youth, the majority of the audience for this movie, experience a huge amount of their social lives through the medium of inhuman words on a screen, (digital paper, if you will) that message couldn't be more important.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 4/5

*Before anyone asks, I would put Whiplash in that spot now.

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Vacation": Lord/Miller Lite (R - Warner Bros. - 1 hr, 39 mins.)

Directed and Written by
John Francis Daley and
Johnathan M. Goldstein

Alo Party Peoples.

Well, I didn't see that coming. As I've said before, I'm absolutely sick of studios taking any IP that was remotely popular at any point from the late seventies to the turn of the millennium, and repackaging it for effect. But even I'll admit that you can sometimes get a pretty good final product. Tron: Legacy is a pretty good action movie, the new Star Wars looks pretty amazing, the ongoing Marvel Cinematic Universe continues to impress, for every Pixels there can still be a Lego Movie to balance things out.

So color me impressed that the decades later sequel/reboot of National Lampoon's Family Vacation is not only good, not only great, but it might just be one of the best comedies in recent memory. It ventures into Lord/Miller surreal meta-humor territory, and Vacation is fortunately smart enough to get that those two mad geniuses only made the Jump Street movies work because they can do meta-humor without becoming self-absorbed reference machines in the process. Because of that, even if you aren't familiar with the original (Why not? It's great.) both you and those that are will be having "[So] much fun you'll be whistling zip-a-dee-doo-dah out of your asses."

It's been several decades since the "original vacation", and Rusty Griswold has grown up, gotten a job as an airline pilot, and has a family of his own, his wife Debbie, his hipster son James, and a foul-mouthed little half-pint named Kevin. After finding out that Debbie hates the little cabin they go to every year, Rusty follows in his father's footsteps by going on an ill advised impromptu cross-country trip to Walley World. Everyone else thinks this is a terrible idea, his kids tell him that "They've never even heard of the original vacation.", so he tries to sell them on it by promising that there's a brand new totes' amazing new roller coaster there, and their new car has all sorts of new features (most of which have hilariously nonsensical uses) and they all agree that only the nostalgic fanboy actually wants to go there, but he ultimately forces them to go anyways.

That's where, if Vacation has any point other than to make the audience laugh, it comes across best. Going back to Walley World represents the rehashing of late-20th Century IP, and it works with flying colors. That's not to say it's the best part or the dominant feature of the movie, it's definitely Lord/Miller Lite, and it'll definitely sail over the heads of most of the people watching it, but if you do get it, it's hilarious.

Fortunately, the rest of the movie is hilarious too. The screenplay makes good use of the wide diversity of places that the Griswolds stop at on their way to Walley World, it lets in all sorts of colorful supporting characters, special attention has to be paid to Chris Hemsworth playing an arrogant Texan' ladies man that looks like he jumped right off the cover of a trashy paperback romance novel, and to say any more would probably spoil the jokes - which come at a pace of one super solid gut-buster every few minutes.

If Vacation isn't the comedy classic that the original is, that's only because the original is that, but Vacation is still easily the most fun I've had in a theater in a while, definitely worth seeing.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 5/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Ant-Man": Marvel Scales Itself Back To Astonishing Results. (PG-13 - Marvel/Disney - 1 hr, 57 mins)

Directed by Peyton Reed
Written by Adam McKay, Joe Cornish,
Edgar Wright, and Paul Rudd

Alo Party Peoples.

The production history behind Ant-Man is an astonishing tale in and of itself. Originally concieved as a part of Marvel's more modest Phase 1 trial run, it became notable for catching the interest of geek cinema legend Edgar Wright, and it then spent years in developmental delay, only to have Wright and the studio part ways over creative differences as it finally started shooting. Left with a half finished production, Disney handed the project over to close friend of Wright, Peyton Reed and had Adam McKay put together a version of Wright's screenplay that fit with plans for the post-Phase 2 Marvel Universe.

That seems to be Marvel's "big risk" with Ant-Man, that is if a multi-million dollar tent-pole with the backing of the Disney Empire can be described as a risk in any way. Can the most old-fashioned producer-driven studio system since the Golden Age make something salable out of the remains of a collapsed production, and also manage to get a mid-summer hit out of it? The answer turns out to be that they do it very well, Ant-Man is a funny, slick, really enjoyable, well produced summer action flick that probably ends up on a lot of people's favorites lists and is a refreshingly grounded little production after the past few years of increasingly bloated blockbusters.

Back in the 60s, Michael Douglas as super scientist Dr. Hank Pym develops technology that allows him to shrink to the size of an ant while also gaining superhuman strength, as well as talking to ants, and uses it to thwart Cold War supervilliany as the superhero Ant-Man. couple decades later he loses the favor of SHIELD which forces him into retirement until... more-or-less now since Corey Stoll as his old associate Darren Cross has taken control of his old company and is developing a weaponized version of his technology that he calls the Yellowjacket which he plans to sell to HYDRA. Too old to use the Ant-Man suit himself and unwilling to let Evangeline Lily as his daughter take up the mantle, Pym turns to Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, an ex-convict eager to redeem himself in the eyes of his ex-wife and young daughter, and recruits himself to become the new Ant-Man and embark on a daring heist to keep the shrinking technology out of the wrong hands.

It's really refreshing to have a superhero movie willing to play things this small and this loose, especially after Age of Ultron's bloated climax. There's no apocalyptic menace threatening to destroy the world, the stakes are almost purely emotional rather than physical. The action is engaging not because of how many CGI cities they can destroy, but because the screenplay has a royal ball coming up with inventive ways and locations to use the size-changing powers in, culminating in a third-act set-piece where Scott and Cross get into a Man of Steel level destruction brawl... in a room full of children's toys. It has less in common with modern superhero epics than it does with late-20th Century live-action kids movies that Robin Williams would have led back in the day.

This is probably the most child-friendly superhero movie since the first Spider-Man, and while they might spend the first hour, where there's almost no action other than the training montages of Scott learning to use the suit and making adorable ant friends, wishing they'd seen Minions instead, that massive pickup in the third act will surely delight them as it goes from one crazy set-piece to another with crowd pleasing results.

Ant-Man is the perfect summer movie. It's funny, it's exciting, it's refreshingly down-to-earth, it's just a really good time at the theater. Since this is a Marvel Studios movie, I don't have to tell you to see it, but I'm still going to tell you to see it. Ant-Man is just plain fun.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 4/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Minions": The Little Yellow Devils Must Be Stopped (PG - Universal - 1 hr, 31 mins)

Directed by Kyle Balda and Pierre Coffin
Written by Brian Lynch

Alo Party Peoples.

Why? Why did this happen? Why did the Minions become so massively, incredibly, near omni-presently popular? Why are these little yellow pills on practically every cable channel, every movie theater, every billboard, and every toy aisle in the country? Is there some hidden brilliance I'm just not seeing?

It's not like I hate animation, not at all, the cartoonists and toymakers of this industry are doing far more than the "serious" film makers to push the envelope of purely visual storytelling. Hell, as a child Pixar was part of what got me interested in the medium in the first place. And I didn't hate Despicable Me either, it's a perfectly good little kids movie, but of all the aspects of it to franchise, advertise, and market the hell out of, why the Minions? The whole point of the Minions is that they have no real character, they're just interchangeable servants of whoever they happen to be serving.

But they're also cute and do slapstick and speak in occasionally amusing nonsense tongues, so they of course became huge with children, so huge that someone at Universal (Probably swimming in a lake of molten gold after having made an ungodly sum of money) signed off on a solo feature focusing on a one-joke supporting character of a move that wasn't that special to begin with. Minions is the end result of that.

The race of Minions has been around far longer than man, and ever since they first wriggled up on dry land, they've dedicated themselves to serving "the biggest villian" they can find, but their childlike enthusiasm and equally childish antics have always ended up either killing their master or getting them fired. After killing Napoleon, they go into hiding and over the next hundred years begin to grow apathetic about their lack of a job (If only this script were intelligent enough to further explore that idea), leading Minions Bob, Stuart, and Kevin to go on a brave quest to find a new master, leading them to 1968 Orlando, where they hear of VillianCon, where all the world's supervillains meet to network, mingle, share evil schemes, and hire new minions. (How this organization remains secret when they broadcast ads for it on television, publish their own magazine, and/or somehow lobbied to make it legal is never addressed)

There's where they meet and are hired by Sandra Bullock as Scarlet Overkill, the world's first high profile female supervillian, and head off to her castle in London (Are supervillians operating in secret, or are they celebrities, or are they like the Mafia or something, make up your mind!) and try to steal the Crown from Queen Elizabeth, and hijinks ensue. If that sounds like a boilerplate heist premise that has nothing to do with Despicable Me, then that's because that is all that Minions is. Normally with that kind of premise you at least have some nice dynamics among colorful characters played by skilled actors to keep the production afloat, but the stars of Minions have no distinguishable character. (To the point that they're all voiced by the same person, franchise creator Pierre Coffin) Originally, like I mentioned above, that was by design, they were practically a background joke, but when they're the main characters you have to do a lot more than give one of them a little stuffed bear and say they're the cute one.

I hoped that the supporting characters would at least pick up some of the slack, and they definitely try their hardest. Sandra Bullock is clearly having an absolute blast hamming it up as Scarlet Overkill, ex-Mad Men lead Jon Hamm is plenty of fun as her husband/assisstant Herb, Jennifer Saunders as the Queen steals every scene she's in, they're all trying. Unfortunately, they seldom get to have the screen for more than five minutes as all the film's attention is focused squarely on the Minions. I find that they're shtick tends to get old after fifteen minutes, let alone an hour and a half.

If nothing else, it at least looks really good, that's always been the saving grace of the Despicable Me franchise, which remains the only semi-decent production to ever come out of Illumination. Their aesthetic sensibilities feel ripped straight from midcentury newspaper cartoons, and that carries over into Minions, which puts a surprisingly large amount of effort into recreating 60s America and Britain, which leads to myriad pop-culture references that are sure to fly over the target audience's heads, and feel like they were put there by the animators to keep themselves from going mad while rendering this, and also a genuinely well curated era-appropriate soundtrack.

You might have noticed the parentheses with snarky comments and thought "Your'e just being cynical, can't you enjoy this for what it is?" Yes I realize that this is a kids movie, but making a kids movie isn't an excuse to not try. If anything, it's a call to try harder. Since your audience is made up of impressionable children, shouldn't you try to leave a good impression? Or at least something they'll think about on any level other than surface level amusement?

If you really need to keep your kids quiet for 90 minutes and you don't want to sit through Frozen for the fifty-gazzilionth time, please don't take them to this. Take them to see, oh I don't know, Inside Out. Or Max if it's still playing, or Jurassic World if you think they're old enough, but please stay away from Minions. It is not worth your time, it is not worth your children's time, and it certainly wasn't worth mine.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 2/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Max": As American A Picture As There Ever Was (PG - Warner Bros. - 1 hr, 51 mins)

Directed by Boaz Yakin
Written by Boaz Yakin and Sheldon Lettich

Alo Party Peoples.

In the current mass entertainment film making landscape, Max feels like an anachronism. Here's a premise that feels like it could have come straight from Amblin Entertainment in the 80s or from Disney in the 90s, (or from the Disney Channel in the '00s) presented completely straight with total sincerity. You normally don't get away with this level of earnest emotional enthusiasm unless your name is Spielberg and your'e making a a movie about a British army horse during the Great War.

This animal war story comes to us courtesy of Remember The Titans helmer Boaz Yakin, and if Max were in the hands of anyone less skilled at wringing emotional responses out of an audience, it would have fallen apart into self-parody, but Max is a completely "irony" free zone, and as a result it's both a phenomenal family film, and a far better story about veterans adjusting to civilian life than American Sniper could ever hope to be.

To wit, Max is about an all-American military family in suburban Texas. Pamela, a God-fearing compassionate housewife, Ray, a small business owning veteran of the first Iraq War, and their son Justin, a moody teenager that spends his days glued to his computer playing and selling pirated video games. When Justin's brother Kyle dies serving in Afghanistan, the family adopts the titular dog, who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and Justin is the only one that Max feels comfortable being around. As they spend more time together, Max gets Justin to spend more time outside with his peers, and Justin helps Max recover from the horrors of war.

The actors fill their family film archetypes very, very well. The wise old father figure, the matron-saint of a mom, the wisecracking best friends, but the best actor in this film is easily the dog. The reason so many family films are built around dogs, they're an animal that humans, and especially children, tend to immediately empathize with, so having a dog involved in the Afghanistan war both doubles down on that and adds an element that adults will empathize with as well. It's so cannily assembled and well executed that it's enough to make one suspect that Boaz Yakin sacrificed a bald eagle to the Founding Fathers in order to bless the set and make Max the most American motion picture that ever was.

If there's one place where Max does trip up, it's in including a subplot involving Tyler, a man that served with Kyle in Afghanistan that has been selling weapons to a Mexican drug cartel, and is hell bent on having Max put down because... he growled at him when he got home from the service, I guess? Anyways, I don't think this story needed to have a villain, Justin helping Max recover from the horrors of war was more than compelling enough to hang a film on, but it's not like it breaks the movie or anything, it's just one okay element of what is overall a very well executed production.

Max is broad, arch, and it yanks on the heartstrings harder than anything else in recent memory. There's plenty that the Press Irreverent will mock, such as Justin and Max riding a bike together and leaping right into a deliberate homage to E.T, or juxtaposing Kyle fighting off the Taliban with Justin playing a military shooter. But Boaz Yakin really is just that good at this stuff, and everyone from the most God-fearing, red-white-and-blue-blooded patriot, to the most cynical, snarky Rifftrax wannabe in the audience will find themselves tearing up.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 4.5/5

Let's Talk About Movies: "Jurassic World" And The Nostalgia-Industrial Complex

Alo Party Peoples.

Jurassic World is dominating the box office. It has trampled and devoured the competition to become one of the highest grossing movies of all time. As I write this, it has passed the billion dollar mark worldwide and become the eighth highest grossing film ever, according to Box Office Mojo. It is, to overuse a pun, a monster hit.

This isn't a discussion of Jurassic World's artistic merit, not by a long shot. Box office has never been an indicator of quality, for example, Transformers: Dark of the Moon is also on that list, and Avatar is the all time champ. I'm not interested in whether Jurassic World deserves to be doing so well, I'm interested in why. Why this film? Why is what amounts to a multi-million dollar B-movie so massively, utterly dominating movie screens?

This isn't like the original Jurassic Park where the CGI creatures were a novelty by virtue of being CGI, today practically everything remotely difficult to film is done via CGI, and Jurassic World's CGI isn't even that impressive, the dinosaurs never feel real, they feel like ethereal forms floating about among the actors. Nor does it have the natural talent of Spielberg backing up the spectacle, this has a no-name indie brat brought on-board by Universal since new talent is easier to control. Even if he did get some cheeky gags in about the bloated nature of blockbuster sequels (see the screenshot of a CGI monstrosity devouring a shark, i.e. the natural results of forty years of post-Jaws stakes escalation in blockbusters) they're clearly not the primary intent of Jurassic World.


In the absence of any other explanation, the reason Jurassic World is ruling the Earth right now is the same reason that Transformers dominated the box office, the same reason that Sony has fought tooth and nail to keep some aspect of Spider-Man under their control, and the same reason that a Jem and the Holograms movie is happening at all, let alone decades after it was supposedly popular. It is the nostalgia-industrial complex. The only thing that Jurassic World's box-office haul means or proves is that it is powerfully profitable to pander to an entire generation's desire to wrap themselves in warm memories of their late-20th Century childhoods.

The late 20th Century was in many ways a massive turning point for the way people consume media. The Digital Revolution made it easier and cheaper both to find and find out about all sorts of shows and songs and movies and everything else, the Blockbuster Age brought a standard release cycle to the film industry and brought it out of the Broadway model of touring films across the country, but there was also one other change. As part of the Reagan administration's aims of supercharging the American economy via deregulation, the FCC's rules against television shows being 30 minute advertisements were done away with.

While shows aimed at adults mostly resisted becoming more blatantly commercial, since adults tend to notice that, shows aimed at children almost immediately embraced the new reality and started turning out half-hour toy commercials by the truckload. The result is that Generations X and Y are the first generations for whom their pop-cultural touchstones came in commercial form. And when those children grew up and had disposable income, the entertainment business wasted no time in repackaging those properties to turn a tidy profit off of their happy childhood memories with the dawning of the Franchise Age.

You'll find no one more dismayed by the current status-quo of American film making more than I am. I am dismayed that the Adam Sandlers and Michael Bays of the world can put the least effort imaginable into their craft and still get the mobs of Middle America to turn over their money hand over fist. I am dismayed that studios hyper-focus on existing intellectual property to the extent that a movie about Peeps is happening, and that we're already on our third cinematic Spider-Man. I am especially dismayed that this also means that shallow vlogger after shallow vlogger are able to get films, while tens of thousands of people with talent and vision to burn slaving away in the commercial and music video salt mines would kill for that opportunity.

But I'll never say that that is the entire film industry. The indie scene has never done better for itself, Whiplash, Ex_Machina, and Birdman were all able to find dedicated audiences, and that last one even won Best Picture. For every Happy Madison there is also a Pixar. For every Last Airbender there is also a Lego Movie. For every Boyhood there is also a Grand Budapest Hotel. Is the bad stuff incredibly, omnipresently visible? Absolutely, but there is still a lot of good stuff if you go out and look for it.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

"Smosh: The Movie" Trailer: This Is The Closest We've Gotten To A Millennial Auteur

Alo Party Peoples.

If there's one thing I'll admit is a real downside to the Digital Age and the democratization of information, it's that it has greatly reduced the value of that information. The prime example is probably still books. The printing press made the written word accessible to the common man, rather than just the nobility and the clergy, and the worthy price paid was that once anyone can write a book, you eventually end up with Divergent.

The same thing happened with film-making and YouTube. Now pretty much anyone with a cellphone can try their hand at film making, but now doing so is far less special. "If everyone's super, no one is."

This trailer for Smosh: The Movie, based off of a long running online sketch comedy show of the same name, is exactly what you would expect from a broader, dumber version of something that was already pretty broad and dumb to begin with.

This is the digital age equivalent of Cool as Ice or Freddy Got Fingered, taking some inane fad that infatuates the youth and only works (relatively speaking) in its native medium (music, television, online video) and forcing it into a format that it just can't work in.

As for Smosh specifically, it looks pretty bad. Online video is already a medium dominated by people that never quite grew up, you could even say that it is the Millennial Medium in the worst possible way. So it's not a surprise that the plot of Smosh: The Movie, which seems to involve the titular comedy duo leaping into YouTube to pull a video down from the inside, feels like something thought up by a hyperactive fifth-grader, right down to the juvenile humor and amateur - even for an indie production - effects work. This hits theaters on July 23rd, and it's sad to think that this is as close as we've gotten to a Millennial auteur.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B