Thor (2011, Kenneth Branagh) ** (C-)
Tho, I'm mutht thay, I'm feeling mighty thor. It bums me out that Branagh has been reduced to this (and, I supposed, to strutting around the Olympic opening ceremonies); it's like he's kept all of his trademark bombast and lost any of his trademark insight. This was the guy who as a young man nailed the Agincourt speech to the wall, and who found a startling new interpretation of something as hidebound as "to be or not to be." Anyway, Asgard at least looks cool and Hemsworth bellows admirably. On the other hand, Portman and Skarsgård are given zilch to do, Hopkins snores (literally) and picks up a check, and the plot is either too impenetrable or too dull to follow, and I'm not going back to figure out which it is. Here's what "The Avengers" could have been without the Whedon wit.
Bonnie and Clyde (1967, Arthur Penn) ***1/2 (A-)
I admit it, I'm embarrassed. This is, after all, one of the ten or
fifty or at least 100 best films of all time, depending on who you ask. I
suppose I don't quite see it that way -- which is not to say that I
didn't like it a lot. It's a question of degree. It's certainly possible
to have grim and dramatic elements cohere with more broadly comic ones,
but it feels like this souffle was taken out of the oven a little
early. Performances and most individual scenes are masterful (a cloud's
shadow passing by in a moment of stunning serendipity immediately
followed by an ominous family reunion, Clyde's attempted robbery of a
closed bank, an aborted attempt at lovemaking), but I can't put the
Parsons or Pollard performances (or especially the hilarious Gene
Wilder/Evans Evans scene) into any sort of context with the sexual
dysfunction or the occasional swipes at foreboding or bloody ending in a
way that makes sense to me, and the (sporadic) attempt to make Bonnie
and Clyde the voice of the Depression's oppressed and marginalized just
seems ill-conceived, since they're obviously nothing more than brash
idiots. Maybe my issue is that Penn seems simultaneously to attempt to
send up and buy into the outlaw romanticism.
Warren Beatty just keeps fascinating me, though. Has there ever been another Matinee Sex God® who so consistently insisted on playing the buffoon?
Bottom Line: A very very good movie, but not the all-time Pantheon member it's been billed as. Still a stylistic landmark: I can see how this blew collective hair back in the late 60s.
Star Trek (2009, JJ Abrams) *** (B)
Pretty sure I reviewed this on this site already.
I don't know. I feel like I over-rated this at three stars. It was totally fun-watchable, but really dumb in a particular way that Star Trek usually isn't (not to say Trek can't be dumb, just not like this). Manages to look interesting, but ultimately the plot disappears into a wormhole of way too much 'whaaa?' Pine gives good Kirk (stupid, cocky, spiral-cut ham), Quinto Spocks it up effectively until the movie unkindly forces comparisons to Nimoy's original, but the rest of the cast gets short-shrift in favor of those two, making this episode 1 of How I Met Your Vulcan. Damn cool looking, though, lens flares and all.
Avatar (2009, James Cameron) **1/2 (C+)
Warren Beatty just keeps fascinating me, though. Has there ever been another Matinee Sex God® who so consistently insisted on playing the buffoon?
Bottom Line: A very very good movie, but not the all-time Pantheon member it's been billed as. Still a stylistic landmark: I can see how this blew collective hair back in the late 60s.
Star Trek (2009, JJ Abrams) *** (B)
Pretty sure I reviewed this on this site already.
I don't know. I feel like I over-rated this at three stars. It was totally fun-watchable, but really dumb in a particular way that Star Trek usually isn't (not to say Trek can't be dumb, just not like this). Manages to look interesting, but ultimately the plot disappears into a wormhole of way too much 'whaaa?' Pine gives good Kirk (stupid, cocky, spiral-cut ham), Quinto Spocks it up effectively until the movie unkindly forces comparisons to Nimoy's original, but the rest of the cast gets short-shrift in favor of those two, making this episode 1 of How I Met Your Vulcan. Damn cool looking, though, lens flares and all.
Avatar (2009, James Cameron) **1/2 (C+)
It needs to be said. This movie takes itself far too seriously to
allow for a MacGuffin as hilariously named as "unobtanium." Pretty
clearly the Academy dodged a bullet not giving its highest prize to this
thing, which I am betting plays much worse outside of the big screen,
surround-sound (3D, for what it's worth) setting within which I
experienced it.
Basically a breakthrough in tech and art direction in service of a storyline that would have been more sociopolitically offensive if it hadn't been so shopworn and ludicrous. For such a notoriously detail-oriented martinet, Cameron seems perversely oblivious to much of what his major plot beats are really saying. The Big Message finally boils down to either "white men make the best Injuns" or "you can destroy a girl's whole culture, but all will be forgiven if you get a bitchin' ride," which isn't exactly a great set of options. Meanwhile, the main character's actions, which include failing at any point to inform his lover or ANYBODY that they need to move to avoid genocide (which is, by the way, the entire point of his mission), make him the absolute opposite of the hero the film insists he is. That he takes that lover under the aforementioned false pretenses, within a culture that he already knows will view the fact of their physical union as a far more binding contract than he can possibly fulfill, seems not to matter to Cameron as much as the fact that the blockbuster cookbook requires the consummation of the love affair by the 2nd reel.
Still consistently breathtaking as spectacle, and I will have to give Cameron some props for at least sounding some of these anti-corporatist notes, albeit with all the subtlety and adroitness of a Thor vs. Hulk battle. I'd have probably appreciated this more as an exploratory piece with far less/no plot or dialogue, or if it didn't seem to think that it deserved the Nobel peace prize for a reductive ecological message.
Basically a breakthrough in tech and art direction in service of a storyline that would have been more sociopolitically offensive if it hadn't been so shopworn and ludicrous. For such a notoriously detail-oriented martinet, Cameron seems perversely oblivious to much of what his major plot beats are really saying. The Big Message finally boils down to either "white men make the best Injuns" or "you can destroy a girl's whole culture, but all will be forgiven if you get a bitchin' ride," which isn't exactly a great set of options. Meanwhile, the main character's actions, which include failing at any point to inform his lover or ANYBODY that they need to move to avoid genocide (which is, by the way, the entire point of his mission), make him the absolute opposite of the hero the film insists he is. That he takes that lover under the aforementioned false pretenses, within a culture that he already knows will view the fact of their physical union as a far more binding contract than he can possibly fulfill, seems not to matter to Cameron as much as the fact that the blockbuster cookbook requires the consummation of the love affair by the 2nd reel.
Still consistently breathtaking as spectacle, and I will have to give Cameron some props for at least sounding some of these anti-corporatist notes, albeit with all the subtlety and adroitness of a Thor vs. Hulk battle. I'd have probably appreciated this more as an exploratory piece with far less/no plot or dialogue, or if it didn't seem to think that it deserved the Nobel peace prize for a reductive ecological message.
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