Sumer is icumen in! A summer that is surely going to be a Much Bigger Deal than last year, and probably Not As Good, though the latter point is of course subjective. But seriously, it was terrific few months, and 2015 looks to be... franchisey. Even by normal standards.
1.5.2015
And what could be more franchisey than a new Marvel film that's pretty much earmarked to sail to some of the biggest box-office numbers ever? Here comes Avengers: Age of Ultron, Film #11 in a franchise also including five short films and three televisions series, and at a certain point I simply ran out of any ability to give a fuck. "I remember when I saw that exact thing but it was funnier and more entertaining the last time, and I barely liked it then" is not by any means the kind of headspace that one wants as one heads into a ridiculously crowded opening weekend theater crowd. But hey, you gotta pay your pop culture bills.
8.5.2015
Faced with the ugly prospect of counter-programming what will surely be an enormous second weekend, the best the studios could come up with for a wide release is Hot Pursuit, which actually makes great marketing sense: a woman-driven action comedy feels just about right for all the various needs the film must fill. But ye gods, that trailer is dire...
Not wide release, but the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Abigail Breslin's dad in the low-key indie zombie film Maggie is, at any rate, fascinating.
15.5.2015
Two sequels to cult hits! Having not seen the original, I have no real sense of what we should expect from Pitch Perfect 2, but the ads promise a lot of broad humor about how fat girls are gross, which doesn't seem to fit the "empowering!" motif I've heard. But then there is Mad Max: Fury Road, and I know exactly what I expect, based on the two-thirds of the original movies that are awesome, and the best trailers currently in circulation. I expect the best movie of the summer, is what I expect. In fact, the best popcorn movie of this year and probably next. It's going to be ugly on this blog that weekend if the film is less than perfect.
22.5.2015
So there's a new Brad Bird movie coming out. And that's the only thing that appears to be working in Tomorrowland's favor, given the almost complete lack thus far of plot specifics in the ad campaign, or even a solid sense of what the movie is even going to look like. So Brad Bird. A man who has comfortably gone four-for-four on his movies to date. Working with the notorious screenwriter Damon Lindelof, who has fucked up some very unfuckable properties in his career. I really, really wish I could be excited for this one, but it's not working.
Also, Poltergeist remake, because why not.
29.5.2015
If a gifted director can't get me onboard with a movie, a goofily entertaining star surely shouldn't be enough. And yet there's even less reason to be excited for San Andreas - not just a disaster movie, but a disaster movie in the most dubious of all disaster movie subgenres, the earthquake picture - but the mere presence of Dwayne Johnson is literally all I need to put this in my #2 slot for the month. Not a great month, sure, but a month.
Sharing space with it: Aloha, which finds Cameron Crowe doing the Cameron Crowe romcom thing, with a breathtakingly splendid cast, and hopefully that's enough to compensate for a story that can't even by synopsised in a two-minute ad without every damn beat of the plot being totally obvious.
29 April 2015
15 comments:
Just a few rules so that everybody can have fun: ad hominem attacks on the blogger are fair; ad hominem attacks on other commenters will be deleted. And I will absolutely not stand for anything that is, in my judgment, demeaning, insulting or hateful to any gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. And though I won't insist on keeping politics out, let's think long and hard before we say anything particularly inflammatory.
Also, sorry about the whole "must be a registered user" thing, but I do deeply hate to get spam, and I refuse to take on the totalitarian mantle of moderating comments, and I am much too lazy to try to migrate over to a better comments system than the one that comes pre-loaded with Blogger.
Avengers 2 has thus far done what I had assumed to be impossible, skirting dangerously close to the dreaded "70%" line on RT. I tend to assume that any tentpole movie which fails to clear that threshold (given the seemingly all-too-forgiving standards by which such films are graded) has something bad wrong with it, and as a contrarian grouch I am glad to see the Marvel juggernaut stumble critically at least, even if the film's commercial success is as much a foregone conclusion as the Sun rising in the East.
ReplyDeleteWhoa whoa whoa...you haven't seen Pitch Perfect?!
ReplyDeleteI don't want to overhype it, but it was maybe my most surprisingly pleasurable film experience of the last few years. It's the kind of movie that I'll watch pretty much whenever I stumble upon it on HBO.
Curious to see when your ambivalence towards the Marvel films started. Crummy Thor/Iron Man 2 aside, you seemed to have enjoyed Marvel's chain of three star corporate blockbuster cinema, in a 7/10 "Good all around. Not terribly special" way. Solid performances from a great cast, lot of good spectacle, sharp dialog, not much of a directorial flair or much in the way of memorable music cues, but you and everybody else in the theater had a fun time at the movies.
ReplyDeleteCourse this is all prelude to the movie to end all movies, Mad Max: Fury Road. Cinema had a good run these past 120 years, but all good things come to an end, and what a way to go out. Bless you, George Miller, if a God is permitted to bless himself.
Speaking as someone who actually is broadly on board with the Marvel franchise machine so far, I came away from Avengers 2 kinda deflated. I loved the first one, and it's perplexing that the patron saint of geeks, Whedon himself, who did such a fine job delicately balancing all of the component parts in the first film, should stumble like this doing basically the same thing again. It's not a bad film, really - it's still fun, and funny, with snappy dialogue and plenty of well-composed, rousing CGI spectacle, and I'm on board with all that. But its also awfully muddled and overstuffed with characters. Various subplots fizzle out and render themselves moot, set pieces feel crammed in without much connection to the plot unfolding around them. As much as I enjoy the dialogue and the action and the time spent in the company of vividly drawn characters, the plot progression and structure feel a bit... "Transformers-y," for want of a better word.
ReplyDeleteOh, and yes, Fury Road looks like the absolute tits.
ReplyDeleteWhat it is, actually, was Guardians being by a country mile my favorite of the Marvel films so far, and almost totally because absent a couple of clunky individual scenes, it didn't try to advertise the next movie or play off the last one. It was a self-contained action-adventure movie, and having to go from that back to the sausage factory of the main continuity, without even the genre tinkering of The Winter Soldier, feels like going back to square 0.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, I'll be patching that Pitch Perfect-shaped hole in the very near future.
I liked the first Pitch Perfect too. It's very silly, but it knows it, and it just wants to be as silly and fun as possible. Although its basic audience is probably 14 year old girls, so, you know, your mileage might vary a little.
ReplyDeleteAnd from interviews, even Whedon seems to feel he could have done a better job with the movie, and they're going to have an extended director's cut on DVD to flesh out some things. But I still like Marvel, and I still like Whedon, and I'm still looking forward to it. Infinity War, though, is just starting to sound exhausting at this point.
I'll be interested to see which Damon Lindelof shows up for Tomorrowland: Lindelof The Head Honcho, who wrote his Star Trek film as an answer to the question "What can we learn from Transformers;" or Lindelof The Punch-Up Guy, who concluded his Big Damn Summer Zombie Movie with a tight, small-scale suspense sequence that was the best part of the whole thing. Maybe Bird, who also receives credit, can reign in his more excess instincts? I want to believe. I want to believe real bad.
ReplyDeleteThrash - Whedon has actually permanently parted way with Marvel now because of creative disputes with Marvel regarding the final cut of Age of Ultron, because he specifically wanted to make it a more functional, self-contained narrative and Marvel insisted he hack out large swathes of the movie to insert in-film advertisements for upcoming sequels instead. That makes him the second beloved-by-nerds-everywhere director to leave Marvel frustrated and alienated over corporatised meddling, which part of me hopes will mark a turning point or a bubble burst of some kind. I believe James Gunn was also frustrated over being forced to shoehorn in the MCU-building moments in Guardians.
ReplyDeleteWhedon is nonetheless entirely to blame for the fact that the film's villain is distractingly and insufferably sarcastic and quippy despite that making absolutely ZERO sense for the character, simply because Whedon doesn't know how else to write dialogue.
Outside James Spader's performance and a couple of isolated character beats, I'm having trouble remembering anything in Ultron that worked at ALL, a week out. It's nearly as wholly shitty as something so blandly polished could possibly be.
"Whedon has actually permanently parted way with Marvel now because of creative disputes with Marvel regarding the final cut of Age of Ultron, because he specifically wanted to make it a more functional, self-contained narrative and Marvel insisted he hack out large swathes of the movie to insert in-film advertisements for upcoming sequels instead."
ReplyDeleteI think almost every single word is this sentence is false, which is kinda amazing.
There you go. I'll admit I was too lazy to do any fact-checking at all beyond the word of mouth I got and the reports of the final theatrical cut being a good 40 minutes shorter than Whedon's first cut, plus the Russo brothers taking over MCU-shepherding duties, plus the aura of total creative fatigue hanging over Age of Ultron like a shroud, I decided it sounded true enough. Apologies!
ReplyDeleteIt makes sense, but given that Whedon's going to be overseeing the extended cut (right?), it's clear that not all the bridges have been burned.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, that fact, plus the general tenor of the reviews I've read leads me to believe that my first response will be "that needed to be longer", which I have literally never once thought about a superhero movie.
Andrew- My fear is that it will be the third Lindelof, full of big ideas he doesn't know how to express, the one who show-ran Lost and gave us Prometheus
YEY! WE GET TO SEE TOMORROW MORROW LAND!
ReplyDeleteJust saw Age of Ultron. There was one very scary part in a flashback, where it appears little girls are kidnapped and forced to undergo a physically and emotionally destructive routine in order that a few of them may excel at it before succumbing to what it has done to them, but fortunately it turns out they're only going to be sterilized and turned into assassins, not forced to become professional ballerinas as it first appears.
ReplyDeleteI got a weird 90's vibe from some of this dialogue (someone actually says "not a fan" at one point), and of course having James Spader voice the villain is always a blast from the past. Maybe Mr. Whedon would rather be doing something else. Since gender issues are sort of my thing, I have to say, constant cleavage notwithstanding, these are some of the best female characters I've seen in a superhero movie. Yes, that's a low bar, but I liked them anyway.
Anyway, I am the target audience for all this continuity porn, and I freely admit, I will watch every one of the movies it is hinting at if they ever exist. Ant Man and the Fantastic 4 reboot actually look pretty fun from the trailers.
Jurassic Park: Whatever, though..
Look. I know they want to come up with something better than a T-Rex, but they won't. Whatever monster they invent, it won't be the one all of us grew up wanting to have as a pet or riding mount or summonable familiar.
Don't get me wrong, I'm going to see that in Imax. I am a total whore for anything involving dinosaurs.
I really loved A: AoU.
ReplyDeleteBut I call the director God rather than his name, so... Not an unbiased source.