The Dark Knight Rises Review

The first word I would use to describe The Dark Knight Rises is ‘dense’. For an action movie, for a superhero movie, for a movie, there’s just a lot going on. You probably don’t need to be told that The Dark Knight Rises is the third and final chapter in director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and it has the responsibility first and foremost to see that the series goes out with a bang. This is does with energy and ambition, with the final third of its nearly three-hour runtime in particular upping the ante over what came before. As a standalone movie, it’s not quite as successful as its precursor The Dark Knight, but it should still provide plenty to chew on until such time as a producer gets the bright idea to reboot Batman yet again. So at least four years.

The Dark Knight Rises takes place eight years after the end of The Dark Knight. Batman has gone into retirement after taking the blame for the death of crusading district attorney/horribly disfigured psychopath Harvey Dent, and in his absence the Gotham City PD has cleaned up the streets with the help of the crime-fighting Dent Act. Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale, as if you didn’t already know) has become a Howard Hughes-ian hermit who holes up in his mansion to nurse his many, many grudges. I’ll freely admit that I love this take on the character, mainly because it allows him a number of glaring flaws in which I don’t think most superhero stories would indulge. You wouldn’t see Superman pulling this shit.

It’s that kind of expectation-busting antics that have set Nolan’s take on the Batman universe apart from others. He’s brought the Batman story as close to reality as it’s ever likely to get, and in doing so has given it a gravity that other superhero movies, even the good ones, just haven’t matched. Take the movie’s villain, Bane (Tom Hardy). Bane is a prison-born would-be freedom fighter intent on tearing down Gotham City as an act of indictment against the rotting, corrupt society he believes it to represent. To this end, he attacks the stock market, blows up a football game, and drags the wealthiest Gothamites out of their palatial estates to be beaten and publicly hanged. You don’t need to pay close attention to the headlines to know that Nolan, who co-wrote the script with his brother Jonathan, is pushing some very specific buttons here. He’s made the story immediate in a way that a movie about a guy in a funny cape isn’t expected to be.

So the movie doesn’t lack for ideas, and that’s a great thing. It is not, unfortunately, quite as tight in the pacing department. For starters, the cast of the movie is one or two extras away from becoming too big to manage. Besides Batman, other returnees include faithful manservant Alfred (an effectively understated Michael Caine), gadget guru Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), and the venerable Police Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman). Fresh blood arrives in the form of conflicted cat-burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), do-gooding beat cop John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and Wayne Enterprises board member Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard). Each of these players get their moment to shine, with Caine, Hathaway, and Gordon-Levitt doing the most with what’s given to them, but in the early going it’s a bit difficult to remember who’s working for who and why and when.

And it almost goes without saying that no character dominates the movie like Heath Ledger’s Joker did in the previous film. Tom Hardy is effectively implacable as Bane, but he’s not quite as terrifying as the script keeps insisting and his importance is diminished by a latter-half twist that leaves the movie without a villainous core. But maybe that’s intentional. While The Dark Knight focused on Batman’s most famous enemy, The Dark Knight Rises returns the focus to Batman himself, who spends the middle stretch of the movie doing some painful-looking soul searching before coming back stronger than ever.

Indeed, the final forty-five or so minutes of the movie are where it really takes off. Nolan’s vision of a modern city as war zone is thrilling and kind of scary, and the scenes involving giant crowds of combatants deliver something we hadn’t seen before. I’m even willing to ignore the whiff of sequel-bait given off by the ending on account of how successfully most of the threads are resolved. With these movies, Christopher Nolan and team have done a good thing for the credibility of superhero stories, and his latest sends the series off into the sunset with its head held high. Now begins the wait for the inevitable Batman reboot come 2018.

Moonrise Kingdom Review

Moonrise Kingdom is a movie about two troubled tween-agers, the pedantic, overly earnest Sam (Jared Gilmen), and the dreamy-eyed, unpredictably violent Suzy (Kara Hayward).  The year is 1965, and the two of them live on a sleepy, mist-covered island somewhere off the coast of New England.  Sam is unpopular and gets into trouble so often that his foster parents no longer want to harbor him.  Suzy lives with her family, but she doesn’t much like them.  She’s particularly put off after she finds one of her mother’s books.  It’s called “How to Deal With a Troubled Child.”  Sam and Suzy bond over their mutual unhappiness and decide to run away together.

That’s one way of describing this movie.  Another way is to say that it’s a new movie directed by Wes Anderson.  And boy, is it ever directed by Wes Anderson.  The camera prefers to stay put and show us things from a head-on point of view, turning what in the hands of most directors would be a dynamic landscape into the inside of a diorama.  Quirkiness abounds.  Tilda Swinton, for example, plays a character simply known as Social Services, and one pivotal scene involves Sam and Suzy dancing to a French torch song on a beach.

You’d think that these two things would be at odds with each other, but they’re not.  Somehow, Anderson manages to tell a genuinely involving story AND indulge all of his little directorial fancies at the same time.  It helps that the story here really is worth telling.  Sam and Suzy are memorable characters, and Anderson gets right up close and personal as they experience first love, first sex, first brush with real danger.  I believed in them and their situation straight through to the end.

Meanwhile, the rest of the island is driving itself crazy trying to find the runaways.  Suzy’s lawyer parents (Frances McDormand and Bill Murray) mean well but are perhaps having too many problems of their own to provide a great example for their daughter.  Sam belongs to a Boy Scout-like organization, and his Scout Master (Edward Norton) also gets in on the search, as does local policeman Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis).  The great thing about the script is that it doesn’t blame the incident on anyone in particular.  The kids feel displaced and want to run away.  The adults are all decent people who only want the best for them, but as much as they try they just can’t quite make a connection.

And now we come to the style, that Wes Andersonian way of doing things where the frames always look a little too pre-arranged and the people always speak a shade too precisely.  The danger of such affectations is that they risk pulling the audience out of the story and forcing them to focus on how darn clever the whole operation is.  Well, it ends up that when the whimsical visuals aren’t compensating for a story that’s not there, they actually add a lot of atmosphere.  As disaffected youths, it makes sense that Sam and Suzy would view the world as a little bit askew.

Plus, with its fondness for dimension-squashing frames and faded pastel colors, Moonrise Kingdom is just plain fun to look at.  The opening sequence shows off the rooms in Suzy’s home as though they’re on the inside of a dollhouse.  Later, a couple of characters have a conversation in the foreground of a shot while legions of Boy Scouts storm-troop by in the background.  You’ll notice lots of little details; a weird tracking shot here, a bit of costuming there, that turn the world of Moonrise Kingdom into a uniquely memorable place.  Sprinkle that on top of the genuinely warm story and prop it up by several strong performances, especially by Bruce Willis and Edward Norton, and you’ve got the best movie Wes Anderson has made in years.

Ted Review

So this is what a feature film written and directed by Seth MacFarlane would look like. MacFarlane, a television producer best known as the creator of Family Guy and a couple of other TV shows a lot like Family Guy, has had the fart-joke market cornered for years. Ted is his first full-length feature, and although it doesn’t stray very far from formula it’s a fun enough hour-and-a-half at the movies. Odds are good that we’ll see MacFarlane’s particular brand of funny up on the big screen again before too long.

If that happens, MacFarlane will have plenty of company, because despite its wacky premise Ted fits very comfortably within a pattern of comedies produced over the last seven or so years. Ted, like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Wedding Crashers and Knocked Up before it, is a movie about an arrested adolescent. The man-child of the moment is John Bennett (Mark Wahlberg), a 35-year-old rental car clerk who’s best friends with a walking, talking teddy bear named Ted (Seth MacFarlane). When he was a young boy, you see, John wished upon a star that his teddy bear would come to life and be his friend. The bear obliged.

Which was all quite a shock when it first happened, but the movie quickly stops treating the fact of Ted’s existence as a miracle and starts depicting him more as a washed-up child star. 27 years after coming to life, Ted is living in Boston as John’s roommate where he’s become a listless, foul-mouthed pot fiend. Much of the humor derives predictably from contrasting Ted’s cuddly look with his hard-partying antics. “Predictable” may not be the first word you’d think would describe an R-rated comedy about a sentient stuffed animal, but if you’ve ever watched Family Guy I can guarantee that much of the humor will be familiar. There’s a lot of politically incorrect dialogue, quick cutaways to random jokes, and a ceaseless parade of pop culture references both obvious (Ted and John recreate the bicycle bit from E.T.) and obscure (an extended joke about kitschy 80s sci-fi flick Flash Gordon).

And if you get a kick out of Family Guy, I can also guarantee that you’ll get a kick out of this. MacFarlane is willing to go pretty far for a laugh, and there are some creatively vulgar one-liners that it ends up do indeed sound funnier when said by a wee little teddy bear. The script mixes up jokes that sound like they were written for some edgy romantic comedy with physical gags that seem plucked from Looney Tunes. The movie’s best comic roll comes at a party Ted throws at his apartment, where an angry duck, an intergalactic space emperor, and a lot of cocaine mix to pretty funny effect.

Not all the gags work. MacFarlane’s slacker-speak can be a bit much, and sometimes you get the idea that his jokes are funny to him first and foremost and to the rest of us on an ad hoc basis, but when the funny fails the story is there to catch it. John has a girlfriend named Lori (Mila Kunis) who he’s been dating for four years. She’s ready to take it to the next level, but John would rather get high with his best bud. That his best bud happens to be two feet tall and made of felt doesn’t make the story any less formulaic, but all the actors commit to their roles, with Wahlberg showing a solid sense of comic timing and Kunis doing what she can with the thankless role of The Girlfriend. In the end the story is still subservient to the gags, but Ted actually seems more invested in its characters than something like, say, The Hangover, which provides a threadbare line on which to hang jokes and calls it a day. There are earnest chucks of this movie that involve no jokes at all.

And honestly, I could have stood to have a little more, or less, of that. As it nears the home stretch the movie looks like it’s going to dive a little more deeply into its themes, but it chickens out at the last minute and ends with a silly, funny, silly monologue by Patrick Stewart telling us what became of the cast. And that’s okay, because randomly having Patrick Stewart send off a movie in which he should have no place is good for a chuckle, but I still wonder what would have happened if MacFarlane took just a few more risks. Maybe when he grows up.

Brave Review

Few modern movie studios can boast the track record of Pixar. Just look at some of the feature-length movies they’ve cranked out since 1995: Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Wall E, Up. Pixar has been out Disney-ing Disney in the family film department for years, which is why Disney’s buyout of Pixar in 2006 was such a brilliant move. Pixar’s latest, simply titled Brave, is set in medieval Scotland and revolves around Princess Merida (Kelly Macdonald), a tomboyish proto-feminist who clashes with her more traditionally-minded mother, Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson). Can Pixar put this one on the shelf next to the rest of their classics-in-the-making, or have they finally proved themselves fallible and produced a dud?

The answer to that question is an emphatic ‘neither.’ There are certainly plenty of things that Brave does right. It’s eye-meltingly gorgeous, for one. There’s an early scene where Merida rides through a verdantly colored forest, shooting arrows from the back of her horse as she goes, and which it was happening all I could do was sit back and thank Pixar for making their entirely fictional world so much prettier than the real one. Between the pop of primary colors, the sweeping camera, and the quicksilver fluidity of the animation, this is yet another Pixar movie that looks even better than the one before it.

I’ve also got to commend the art team for creating a great sense of place. I’ve never been to Scotland and don’t really have plans to go, but I’m happy to imagine that it looks as it does in Brave: as a deep rolling country full of treacherous mountainsides and hidden green glens. The art direction is suburb, from the drafty ramshackle castles to Merida’s scraggly mane of fire-red hair, everything has its place. As a visual experience, Brave is top-notch.

In the early going, the movie also shows some of the adroit story-telling upon which Pixar has built its reputation. As a girl of, I’m guessing, around 14, Merida is reaching what in medieval times passed for marrying age, and her mother the Queen is looking to hitch her up with one of the local noble-folk. Free-spirited Merida disapproves, and the script takes its time exploring her feelings, exploring her mother’s feelings, and building to a confrontation that feels all the more meaningful because we know exactly what’s at stake. One thing Pixar movies have often had over their relatively more pedestrian counterparts like Ice Age is their commitment to a certain internal reality. The images are all computer-generated, but the feelings are real.

And Brave maintains that virtue throughout, but a twist around the midway point is perhaps less inspired onscreen than it was on paper. The back half of the movie exchanges some of that simmering familial tension for a slightly convoluted backstory and a series of pratfalls that, while funny, feel a bit too much like… well, like what you’d expect out of a ‘G’ rated animated movie. If Brave falls a bit short in its storytelling, it’s only because the rest of the studio’s output is so strong.

Because if Brave were pitted against the average animated family film showing in theaters today, it would come out the winner. It’s got rapturous visuals, a memorable central character, and the directorial vision to make the most of both. But it’s not being compared to those films; it’s being compared to other Pixar movies, and in that respect it feels a little lacking. At a brisk 100 minutes, Brave can count itself among those prized number of movies with the conviction to be exactly as long as they need to be and not a needlessly overstuffed minute more, but I left the theater wanting something it didn’t quite give me.

Kids are sure to love it, but kids will love just about anything. Really, try playing with a laser pointer in front of one sometime.

Rock Of Ages

Let’s be clear about something right up front: Rock of Ages, the new movie musical directed by Adam Shankman, isn’t even slightly rock and roll. It has some of the trappings. It’s set in the late eighties in and around a smoky Los Angeles dive called the Bourbon Room and stars Tom Cruise as a hard-drinking Axl Rose-ish rock superstar, but all of the grit and grime that accompanied that portion of rock history has been completely removed. The songs are covers, the lone sex scene is more of an energetic dry hump, and the fresh-faced young stars look like they would be afraid to try a cigarette, much less shoot themselves full of heroin. Rock and roll is dirty, filthy even, but Rock of Ages is the cinematic equivalent of a sanitary wipe.

Which shouldn’t suggest that there’s nothing here to enjoy. The songs, which come courtesy of bands like Foreigner, Pat Benatar, and Def Leppard, are at least hummable, even if they have been scrubbed clean of their imperfections and put into the mouths of baby cherubs. The story is a highly predictable yarn that follows small town girl Sherrie (Julianne “Future Mrs. Ryan Seacrest” Hough) as she chases her dreams to Hollywood where she meets city boy and would-be rocker Drew (Mexican pop star Diego Boneta). If you’ve ever seen a movie, or even heard about a movie, you know what happens next: the two fall in love, split up over a manufactured disagreement, and eventually get back together before signing off with a rousing rendition of Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believing’. But despite the cookie-cutter script, the movie occasionally summons enough wide-eyed innocence and sugar-rush energy to make you tap your toe, even though any buzz it generates dissipates mere seconds after the credits begin to roll.

The characters, like the movie itself, are mostly paper-thin, but the casting director has rounded up a pretty impressive roster of stars to play them. Alec Baldwin and Russell Brand have fun trading quips as the managers of the Bourbon Room, and an underused Catherine Zeta-Jones shows far more sex appeal than the alleged rockers as a neo-puritan crusading against the corrupting influence of rock music. R&B singer Mary J. Blige shows up as the owner of a strip joint and has a far bigger share of singing than her glorified cameo of a character deserves, but since she’s by far the best vocalist in the movie I didn’t really mind.

As the leads, Boneta and Hough are the weak links. Boneta can get into a good roll when belting out a number, but once the music stops he has all the charisma of an Executive Ken Doll. Hough confuses me. As a professional country singer, I’d expect her to at least have a decent set of pipes, but she has the flattest, most boring voice out of the entire cast. She should’ve been billed below the auto-tune machine in the credits. The one person who nearly escapes this pit of insubstantiality is Tom Cruise. As burned-out rock god Stacee Jaxx, Cruise oozes charisma in an effortless way that makes you remember why this guy was a movie star in the first place. I’d gladly watch a better movie focused on his character.

At a little over two hours in length, Rock of Ages is at least thirty minutes longer than it needs to be, with a solid chunk of it padded out by ancillary characters grabbing their moment in the spotlight. I’ve given the movie a lot of grief, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have some fun watching it. Rock of Ages is enjoyable in the same way a can of Diet Coke can be enjoyable: it’s slight and weak and vastly inferior to the real thing, but it can tide you over until the real thing turns up. Once upon a time, musicals were among the most popular genres of movies produced, but that time is long gone and Rock of Ages isn’t going to bring it back. The pickings for fans of musicals such as myself are very, very slim, but I’ve got to get my fix somehow, right?

Prometheus Review

When director Ridley Scott released his sci-fi horror flick Alien back in 1979, the movies were a very different place. The studio system of the 1960s, a system that had churned out glitzy, star-studded melodramas to the point of exhaustion, had collapsed, and in their panic Hollywood turned to guys like Scott to help revitalize the industry. It worked. Alien was a smash that spawned three direct sequels, influenced many future filmmakers, and created a mass of fans who were beside themselves with excitement when Scott announced that he would be helming a prequel to Alien called Prometheus.

Tough luck for those fans. While Prometheus has many of the earmarks of a great movie, it’s noticeably constrained by the demands of a new studio system, a modern one that’s forever chasing after the almighty Blockbuster. I imagine the pitch meeting for Prometheus went something like this:

Ridley Scott: I’d like to make a prequel to Alien that examines the nature of man’s relationship to God.

Producer: Okay, but there’s gotta be a scene where the heroes save Earth from an alien invasion. And at least two sequels.

Ridley Scott: Can I hire an unknown Scottish actress to play a minor role?

Producer: Fine, but only if you cast Guy Pearce as a super-old guy.

If I seem bitter, it’s only because the movie is so very, very good before it starts to suck. We begin on planet Earth, where archeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) has discovered a series of cave paintings she believes suggest that human life is extraterrestrial in origin. She gets some funding from the shady Weyland Corporation, and faster than you can say “suicide mission” she and a small team of scientists, mechanics, and corporate overseers blast off in search of a faraway moon where humanity’s alien progenitors may still be living. Their spaceship, naturally, is named the Prometheus. It’s a heady concept, and screenwriters Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof have no problem diving into what it may mean for humanity to come face to face with their makers. The film stops very short of becoming a philosophy lesson, but it’s nice to see a big budget movie willing to tackle Life’s Big Questions.

The crew of the Prometheus is a personable lot, and Scott gives most of them time to breathe during the firm’s slow burning first hour. Standouts include Charlize Theron as icy corporate enforcer Meredith Vickers and Idris Elba as blue-collar space jockey Janek. The most interesting character is Michael Fassbender’s nearly human android David, who acts as the group’s translator and affects his haircut and persona from Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. These are assured, nuanced performances, and there’s a surprising amount of convincing rapport for a movie that eventually becomes about aliens eating off people’s faces.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and make no mistake that Scott and his design team give us some face-eating aliens for the ages. The special effects, from the creatures to the sets to the pyrotechnics, are absolutely top notch, with the interior of a crumbling alien catacomb and a particularly nasty, many-mouthed fella toward the end taking the cake for eye-popping goodness. It’s just that by the time the movie reaches some of its more memorable visual wonders, the script has lost its way. The home stretch, which conspires to turn what had been a vaguely cerebral special effects-driven creep fest into the final scenes from Armageddon, is particularly disappointing. Also troubling is the sequel-bait ending, not so much because it exists but because it’s so blatant. You’d figure that a prestige piece like Prometheus would be above stuff like that.

And in 1979, you might have been right, but times have changed. In 2012, Prometheus is a great movie that perhaps was never allowed to be anything more than good. Scott marshals much of his considerable talent to build a convincing, eerie alien world, but he loses his grip by the end and I left the theater disheartened. At the same time, I can’t in good conscience tell people to avoid the movie completely; it may be worth seeing once for the visual imagination alone, but the search for movies as wonderful as they want to be continues.

Dark Shadows Review

It’s odd to think that Tim Burton, a director known for creating ghoulish characters like Beetlejuice and Jack Skellington, has only now made a movie about vampires. Burton’s new film, Dark Shadows, stars Johnny Depp as Barnabus Collins, an 18th century bloodsucker trying to make his way in a 20th century world. The movie is based on a soap opera of the same name that ran from 1966-71, and it has a lot of what audiences have come to expect from a Tim Burton film, namely Johnny Depp as a displaced misfit, some imaginative gothic imagery, and a thin, largely uninvolving story that never lives up to the sumptuous visuals.

The movie’s opening sequence introduces us to Barnabus as he was in the 1700s, a human aristocrat who moved with his family to America where they founded the bustling fishing village of Collinsport, Maine. Angelique (Eva Green), a servant to the Collins family and a practicing witch, turns Barnabus into a vampire as punishment for spurning her advances, riles the townsfolk into an angry mob, and buries Barnabus alive for 196 years. It’s a strong, delightfully overblown opening, full of wailing period melodrama and heaven-sent cries of despair.

When Barnabus is freed in 1972, things take a turn for the tiresome. Angelique has used the time Barbabus spent sub-terra to corner Collinstown’s fishing market, and the Collins family has suffered as a result. Their once immaculate family mansion has fallen into disrepair and familial relations are strained. After he convinces matriarch Elizabeth Collins (Michelle Pheiffer) of his legitimacy, Barnabus vows to restore the Collins family to its former glory, a process that mostly boils down to a series of halfway funny jokes about how Barnabus doesn’t understand modern times. He mistakes a car’s headlights for the eyes of Satan. He’s fascinated by a lava lamp, and so on. Some of the jokes are good for a chuckle, but few stand out, and after a while you get the idea that screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith is using them in place of developing a worthwhile story.

And Grahame-Smith needs to develop a worthwhile story, because Tim Burton isn’t the kind of director who will do it for him. Burton’s got the look down pat. The Collins mansion is a love letter to old world elegance and the town itself is constantly shrouded in two tons of thick Maine mist. The makeup, likewise, is immaculate. Many of the characters’ faces have been drained completely of color, and Depp’s fingernails are extended into long, claw-like digits. It’s a visual rebuke to the vampires in movies like Twilight, who look like they walked off a Hollister bag and onto the big screen.

The problem is that the script provides almost no context in which these visuals can become meaningful. For the majority of the movie, all that’s pulling the audience from scene to scene are the lackluster jokes and a series of subplots no doubt lifted from the text of the original soap opera. A few, like the one about new governess Victoria Winters’ (Bella Heathcote) encounters with a ghost, are at least intriguing, but even those aren’t given enough screen time to properly develop.

Dark Shadows is the eighth film on which Burton and Depp have collaborated, and by now we’ve learned to expect good things from the leading man. As Barnabus, Depp gives a supple performance that’s part mannered nobleman and part wacky sitcom neighbor. He shifts easily between light comedy and a dangerous, sensual intensity that’s more reminiscent of Bela Lugosi than Robert Pattinson. As fun as Depp is, the real scene-stealer is Mendes, who as the villain is given free reign to vamp it up and chews the scenery into itty bitty bits. These are good performances, but ultimately they too are left floating in the void left open by the script. Dark Shadows is a movie that doesn’t bother aiming for greatness, and ultimately ends up landing just a notch below good.