Let's Go Out To The Movies: Lucy (R - 1 hr, 30 mins)

Directed and Written by Luc Besson

Alo Party Peoples.

One of the film news stories of the last twelve months is that Hollywood may be realizing that female targeted and/or led movies can in fact make all of the money, but that wasn't apparent because they weren't putting them out very often.

Once upon a time, the idea of releasing the indie scale romantic tragedy against the Tom Cruise action movie would have been insane, now the romance makes four times it's budget in one weekend, and the action flick still hasn't made it's money back domestically and is relying on overseas markets to turn a profit. One week earlier, the shockingly dark reworking of a Disney fairy tale headed by a nearly forty year old mother of six made over 70 million in one weekend, and kept the Tom Cruise action movie in third the next.

From The Hunger Games, to Frozen, to most of the YA phenomenon, to Maleficent, it's become exceptionally clear that there was an audience that the studios were overlooking. Now, sort of following this trend, we have Lucy, aphilosophical ramble smuggled into theaters as an R-rated Scarlett Johansson action vehicle, and the most bizarre and ambitious movie I've seen so far this year. Sorry Aronofsky's Noah, you were definitely trying, but Lucy takes the cake as far as insane arthouse blockbusters are concerned.

The story of this film concerns Scarlett Johansson as Lucy, an American student studying abroad in Taiwan that finds herself caught up in a drug ring. They kidnap her, and force her into smuggling an experimental new drug into Europe by surgically implanting a pouch full of it in her intestines. After one of her captors gets abusive, the bag bursts and she gets a massive overdose that essentially turns her into Neo.

Note-Incidentally, if you were worried about this film spreading long dis-proven bits of folk wisdom, don't be. Not only does the actual film make it clear that she's unlocked higher percentages of the brain's potential, which is slightly closer to reality, it's just how they explain each new set of superpowers and the actual mechanism behind her transformation is largely irrelevant. They could have claimed she merged with the Invisible Pink Unicorn, and it would have changed nothing about the films plot.-End Note

Anyways, since she has essentially become a living god, she calculates that she only has about a day before she ascends beyond corporeal form. So the bulk of the film is about her trying to get to Morgan Freeman as a neuro-scientist working on a theory that she has become proof of to pass her newfound omniscience onto.

If nothing else, Lucy is one of the most visually inventive films of the year. The first twenty minutes are inter-cut with stock footage of, whatever the director felt would go with the moment. A scene of Lucy being stalked by the drug ring has footage of of a cheetah stalking a gazelle cut in for instance, but after she contacts Freeman's scientist, that gimmick stops entirely. To be replaced with, I kid you not, her brain percentage being put up on screen in white block numerals on a black background. I mean it when I say that this is the most bizarre film of the year so far.

I have never seen a film that is at once so blatant yet so difficult to identify a central theme of. As I discussed with those I saw it with, Luc Besson is definitely trying to make a point, but we have no idea what that point is supposed to be. From what the professionals have said, apparently the idea that the pursuit of knowledge is the ultimate good, but I just wonder what film they were watching because this is just madness.

There isn't actually that much action in it, and what action there is, while definitely well composed, takes a back seat to the mad philosophical ramblings of Luc Besson. The trailers for this film made it look like a 21st Century version of The Matrix, and while there are definitely elements of that film present, as well as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Limitless, and Cosmos of all things, it manages to come off as it's own entity entirely. This is not an action movie, it's an arthouse movie with a blockbuster budget that has some action scenes sprinkled in.

Lucy feels like a film that was conceived of by a genius but realized by a lunatic. One that feels like, with a few runs through the editors, it could be brilliant, but the actual product is something that could only be the result of mad creative hubris. I'm not sure that I can in good conscience recommend it, but I'm not going to forget it any time soon.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Talk About Movies: The Marvel Cinematic Universe And Post-9/11 Allegory

Alo Party Peoples.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been a great financial success. None of it's components have failed to make a profit, two of them have made over a billion dollars in total, and they tend to be well received by audiences and critics alike, myself among them. I would say that much of that success is deserved, they have tried something that's never been done before on the scale they've done it. Bringing comic book style continuity to the silver screen, and sowing such disparate genres as cosmic fantasy, spy thrillers, pulp adventures, action-comedy, and soon a space opera together into a whole greater than the sum of it's parts.

Ever since Avengers however, the films have gotten a bit more serious. Iron Man 3 is about Tony Stark dealing with PTSD from his work as one of the first respond-ers to Loki's invasion of New York, characters regularly intone that "New York changed everything", and Stark is hunting the Mandarin, a terrorist mastermind that has designed his public image to be an amalgam of all the things that 21st' Century Americans fear. Captain America: The Winter Soldier deals with how S.H.I.E.L.D, i.e. the U.S. government, responds to Loki's invasion. With a massive military boost in the form of a fleet of weaponized helicarriers, and a secret program designed to monitor the world's communications to find potential threats before they become a problem.

The titular Captain finds himself in the position of exposing said program in a way that destroys the public's trust in SHIELD and gets him declared a traitor. Thor: The Dark World, is a more serious film than it's predecessor, but the allegory doesn't quite extend to it.

Marvel Studios obviously isn't the only entity engaging in this allegory. 2008's The Dark Knight also alluded to the Patriot Act when it's hero wiretapped Gotham's cellphones to find the Joker, 2005's War of The Worlds drew on 9/11 imagery to invoke a feeling of insecure terror in the audience, and last year's Man of Steel depicted the citizens of Metropolis outrunning dust clouds, but made the decision to so with a pre-9/11 approach to destruction. What's my point in writing this? I propose that perhaps enough time has passed since the World Trade Center attacks that it's no longer in poor taste to allude to them.

Granted, part of that feeling has to do with personal experience, I was three when the attacks happened, and thus have no conscious memories of them from the time. I know of them from my family recounting their reactions, and from history class. Maybe I only don't have a gut reaction because I have no real personal connection, but there is an entire generation just entering high school that doesn't have one either.

Either way, I look forward to seeing how the US History curriculum of the 2030's discusses this era.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes

Alo Party Peoples.

Directed by Matt Reeves

Reboots can be a funny thing. Sometimes you get a work that takes existing characters and settings and gives a new and intriguing perspective on them, like the 21st' Century Battlestar Galactica, or at least the first two seasons. Other times you get a work that just takes existing characters and settings and uses them to get people into the theater, like the Amazing Spider-Man films. Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, despite its awkward title, belongs in the prior category, taking the route of a character focused drama that just happened to be about a chimpanzee.

Said chimpanzee was a test subject named Caesar, played by motion-capture specialist Andy Serkis, who was granted human level intelligence by an experimental drug meant to treat Alzheimer's disease. After a rather rough experience with animal control, he liberated the other apes there, granted them super intelligence as well, and lead a charge out into the forests around San Francisco.

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes picks up a decade later, after said drug has started a plague, dubbed the "Simian Flu", which has wiped out most of humanity. Caesar's colony of apes has continued to grow, and as far as they are concerned, it doesn't matter whether there were good humans, they haven't seen any of us in two years. Until one day, a chance encounter with a group of survivors seeking to restart a hydroelectric plant where the apes have built their home rekindles old conflicts. Caesar wants peace with the humans and thinks that if he just lets them fix their lights, they will go home and leave the apes alone. His general Koba, an animal testing survivor that has only ever seen the bad side of humans, believes that they cannot be trusted and desires to lead an invasion of their colony.

One of this movie's strong points is that it doesn't paint either side as entirely right or wrong. Koba has good reason to mistrust humans, and not just his personal experiences as a test subject. When he sees that one of the human repair crew brought a gun with them, he interprets it as war and decides to frame them for an assassination attempt against Caesar. The human's commander, played well by Gary Oldman, has good reason to not work the apes. The humans have almost run out of fuel for diesel generators, and he is determined to get that power running again, and he's not going to let a bunch of animals get in the way. A major theme of this film is how fragile peace is, and that all it can take is one madman, or ape, with a gun to shatter that peace.

The film looks amazing, the motion capture animation used for the apes manages to climb out of the uncanny valley on the side of realism, and the actors underneath do a fantastic job. Most of the action is set aside for act three, much like the first Apes reboot, but said action is thrilling. It's well shot, the effects have never looked better, and it manages to be taken seriously despite the image of a chimpanzee dual wielding assault rifles on horseback. One critic described it as "a war movie, but with monkeys".

There are problems to be sure, a subplot involving Caesar's mate giving birth to a second son feels like most of it was cut for time, and understandably since at 131 minutes it pushes the tolerable length of non-fantasy blockbusters, and it is odd that after the first film was so un-subtly pro-animal rights, that the apes are now using horses as beasts of burden. However, those are only minor issues in what is one of the best films of the summer. As far as reboots go, Planet of the Apes has certainly gotten a better treatment than say, Star Trek has. I strongly recommend it.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: Earth to Echo

Directed by Dave Green

Note- I apologize for not covering a movie last weekend. That was unprofessional of me, I failed to do my job, and I'm sorry. As for what played last week, Snowpiercer didn't play in Dallas, and Transformers: Age of Extinction, by all accounts, is either horrible, or only as good as the low budget toy commercials it's based on. -End Note


Alo Party Peoples.

I didn't see that coming. It isn't like I didn't know that Earth to Echo was coming out, I saw plenty of ads for this, but those ads are really underselling the resulting production. Judging from the promotions, this film was just E.T. shot on a webcam, and it is that, but it's also a bit more than that. I've seen other critics describe it as a "Millennial E.T.", but the cinematography, writing, and performances strike me as distinctly post-Millennial, i.e. after the year 2000.

We set our story in a small town in Nevada that is about to be bulldozed to build a highway. Our leads, a bunch of local kids, are rather annoyed by this. A few days before they have to move, their phones start to display random blue static, which they discover is actually a map leading out into the middle of the desert. They follow it and find Echo, an alien that's been looking for an aid in rebuilding it's ship so it can get home. It would have done this sooner, but it's been blocked by the construction crew, actually conspiracy theory-esque alien hunters looking to disable the ship permanently.

It really does feel like a post-Millennial E.T., the whole thing is shot to look like a video blog filmed on webcams, cellphones, and spy glasses, and the way the leads are written is spot on in capturing the lingo of today's youth. They deliver it in the way that most modern children would speak among themselves, and it manages to be timely without feeling immediately dated or obnoxious.

Earth to Echo is a movie that I probably wouldn't have seen if it wasn't my job, and now I find myself recommending it. It's a solid script, the child actors are really good for their age, and Echo himself is charming. It was a pleasant surprise, your kids will probably love it, and parents nostalgic for the like of E.T. will enjoy it too.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Talk About Movies: Pleasantville (1998)

Directed by Gary Ross

Note-A Level 3 Spoiler Warning is in effect for the film Pleasantville. If you haven't seen this film before, and you plan to, maybe wait until after that before you read this.-End Note.

Alo Party Peoples.

Why? Nothing came out this week and I need to fill a slot in my schedule.

Gary Ross' Pleasantville is one of my favorite movies. It might actually be my favorite movie. I don't think it's the best movie, or that nothing can come close, but it happens to be my favorite. It came out the year I was born, and I didn't see it until I was at least seven when it showed up on cable, but I remembered it fondly.

Years later, I remembered the name and searched for it to be sure I didn't hallucinate it. Sure enough, I saw that it did exist, and soon got a second hand DVD to watch it again. When I did so, not only was it still good, as good as I remembered it, it got better now that I could appreciate the subtext. I even tried to write a review of it last year in October, but I don't think that piece does it justice. I wasn't exactly a great writer at the time, and this movie deserves better.

Why do I love this movie? I love it because it dared to aim higher. It's premise of a pair of 1990's twins trapped in a 1950's sitcom called Pleasantville easily could have been just a silly comedy, that would have been enough. It would have still been a good movie. However, what makes it my favorite is that it chooses to explore this concept more, it decides that their modern sensibilities would cause serious problems in the utopia of Pleasantville.

The fictional Pleasantville is a 1950's sitcom about a suburban town of the same name. In this town, life is simple, the weather is always 72°F and the skies are always clear, the basketball team never misses a shot, it's a nice place. Tobey Macguire plays David, a massive fan of the show that ends up getting a magic remote from a mysterious TV repair man. He ends up trapping himself and his sister Jennifer inside the show, and from there the opening act plays out as what the film was sold as, a light toned comedy about 1950's sitcoms.

Then things get interesting. Jennifer was always the rebellious type, and in Pleasantville there's nobody to reign in those urges, so she ends up sleeping with Skip, the star of the basketball team. After this experience, while driving home, Skip notices a rose, it's red, really red. This ends up spreading to the point where the town is split between the monochrome traditionalists and those that embraced these changes and ended up in technicolor.

Margret: "Go on, try it."

That's the thing about the town of Pleasantville, it's name is quite descriptive. As Mr. Johnson, the owner of the soda shop puts it "it never gets any better or worse". Which leads me to the big allegorical touchstone of this movie. Around the end of act two, David has begun to accept some of the changes in Pleasantville, and he takes a technicolor girl named Margret out to Lovers Lane, which has become entirely technicolor because of all the, changes, brought on by Jennifer, while there she spots an apple.

She gets the still monochrome David to eat the apple, and this causes the first rainstorm in Pleasantville. This understandably freaks out the towns inhabitants, and David calms them down with a line that sums up the films message.

"It's rain. It's okay, it's fine, nothing to be scared of. Here, I'll show you. It's just rain, it's okay. It's fine, come on out."                                                                                                                                                                David/Bud, Pleasantville

In case you didn't get the symbolism (and how could you not), Pleasantville is the garden of Eden. The siblings arrival disrupts that paradise, they are the serpent. The TV repairman, who pops up from time to time to check in on the twins, is not happy that they've been causing changes in his little utopia, he's God. However, since some people, understandably, think the film is glorifying sin, I have to say something. The film is more complicated than that. As my evidence, I point to the character of Jennifer. Like I said earlier, she was always the rebellious type, she drinks, smokes, and all that stuff. She is the one to introduce change in Pleasantville, in her words, "[She's] had about ten times as much sex as any of these girls, and I still look like this. [monochrome]." It's only when she decides to study, instead of going out to Lovers Lane again, that she becomes colorful.

The Town Council doesn't exactly like these changes. After a riot at the soda shop over a painting of a nude woman, they institute rather strict rules in response. Lovers Lane and the town library are closed off, paint colors besides black, white and grey are banned, music of a non pleasant manner is also banned. People start putting up "NO COLOREDS" signs in businesses. This film isn't exactly subtle with it's message. That change isn't something to be feared, that it's a natural part of life, and that trying to stifle it causes more problems than it solves.

In general, I love this movie. It's creative, funny, and it tries for some big ideas. Sure, it's about as subtle as being kicked in the face by a florescent blue donkey, but that's not a big issue with me. Because it easily could have been just a silly comedy, that would be fine, but it tries to be something more. I respect that about the movie, and it's especially good for a first directing job. Besides that, it's well written, there isn't a bad performance to be seen, and Randy Newman's musical score is just amazing.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's (Not) Go Out To The Movies: Trust Me

Directed by Clark Gregg

Alo Party Peoples.

If there's one good thing to come out of the Digital Age, it's the unprecedented ability to be heard. Today, more people can express their views to larger audiences than at any point in human history. Fifteen, even ten years ago, it would be unthinkable that, I for example, would be able to have my opinions on contemporary film heard by a literally global audience.

It's also allowed for entirely new models of distribution for artistic ventures. Streaming content on services such as Netflix or YouTube allows artists to more or less work around the studio system entirely and provide their craft directly to the audience. This means that things that might seem like risky business to the aforementioned studios can now see the light of day. Today's topic, Clark Gregg's Trust Me, is one of those.

Clark Gregg plays Howard, a talent agent for child actors who's been down on his luck lately. After his last client was stolen from him by Sam Rockwell as Aldo, a long time rival of his. He strikes it big by discovering an unknown young actress by the name of Lydia, played by Saxon Sharbino, and bags her the lead role in a YA franchise. He faces opposition from Paul Sparks as Lydia's volatile father.

The cast work off each other alright. Clark Gregg is fantastic in the lead, and the rest of the cast do their jobs well. This isn't Gregg's first credit as a writer, but it is clear that this is his pet project, and it's alright, I guess. Honestly, there isn't that much to talk about here. It's not bad, the script is solid, it holds together well, but it just doesn't aim that high. I guess I can say that it's a bit inconsistent, the first two acts play as a semi-serious comedy with hints of drama, and it's good comedy. However, then it becomes all out drama in a way that I won't reveal because it's 1) a spoiler, and 2) goes against keeping my blog PG, but it just doesn't fit with the preceding first hour.

Trust Me got a limited theatrical release and it's now available via iTunes and on demand in the United States. I can't exactly recommend it, but not much came out in theaters this weekend, so go ahead and watch it.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: Edge Of Tomorrow

Directed by Doug Liman

Alo Party Peoples.

Lindsay Ellis once called Tom Cruise "a one man lifeboat for non-franchise scifi movies", I'm not sure that's entirely accurate, and if it is, that's only recently, but his movies do tend to do well, and in the Franchise Age, original anything is in short supply.

Sure, Oblivion wasn't exactly Hugo Award material, not by a long shot, but it was something new and it at least tried to play with some big ideas. That's something else to cherish, when most blockbusters assume that the audience either can't handle or just don't want any challenge from mass entertainment, it's nice to see films that dare to aim higher.

I imagine the pitch for Edge of Tomorrow went something like "let's cross Aliens with Groundhog Day to make the best video game movie ever." Five years into a meteor borne alien invasion, the beasties have taken over most of Europe. In a last ditch effort to save mankind, an assault is planned from London. Tom Cruise plays a U.S. Army Major whose been managing PR for the war effort and promoting the Halo/Starship Troopers/Call of Duty inspired exoskeletons used in the invasion. Unfortunately for him, he gets drafted onto the front lines, and dies within ten minutes of landing in northern France. Fortunately, he's now discovered why the aliens are so good at killing humans, they've got infinite continues.

Every time the humans came close to winning, they could just restart the level and try again. After killing one of the alien commanders, Cruise has acquired control over the temporal Game Genie, and he's found Emily Blunt as someone who was in this situation before. They decide to train him to find the alien's hive mind/get to the final boss, and take them out for good.

This is probably the best original sci-fi movie I've seen since Pacific Rim. I keep coming back to the video game comparison because that really seems to be the visual inspiration, the main recurring action beat looks like something straight out of Mass Effect, and I could see EA or Activision deciding to take their by now finely tuned first person shooter engines and releasing tie-in DLC for this movie.

Tom Cruise is great in this, at first he comes off as just the worst kind of person. He even states that he took the job of PR manager just to stay off the front lines, and his character development is shown by him slowly becoming the natural born action hero that Tom Cruise plays so well, and Emily Blunt as Cruise's mentor, the "Full Metal B****" totally sells the hard bitten soldier routine.

Edge of Tomorrow is probably going to come off to some as counter-programming to The Fault In Our Stars, which has been kicking Edge's ass at the box office. For now, this is strongly recommended, it's an entertaining action movie, there are some good performances from some good actors, and it's one of the most inventive pitches I've seen at the movies this year.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B