The Last Story Review

Japanese RPGs are currently experiencing something of a crisis. It’s been many years since the likes of Final Fantasy VII, games which featured turn-based battles and largely linear narratives, were among the most popular video games around. Their successors have arguably been less influential than Western role-players like the Mass Effect and Elder Scrolls games, which sport real-time combat and tell more open-ended tales. The Last Story, which comes courtesy of Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and his Mistwalker development studio, draws from both traditions and is one of the most satisfying Japanese RPGs I’ve played in a very long time.

IT’S NOT THE SIZE THAT COUNTS… 

One of the best things about The Last Story is that it’s small. By that I don’t mean that it’s boring or lacking in content. I mean that it’s focused; it knows its strengths and sticks to them. Take the setting, a verdant seaborne fiefdom called Lazulis Island. It is here that we’re introduced to Zael, a sword-wielding mercenary with a kind heart and a predictably stupid haircut. Although the story takes Zael and his band of merry mercs to some faraway places, most of their time is spent tromping round the island working for the local nobility in hopes of improving their social status.

The main storyline, which involves a power-hungry despot, an exiled race of blood-eyed humanoids, and a lady most fair, is a good one, but what really makes it sing are the grace notes, the in-between chapters that explore the far corners of Lazulis Island in often delightful detail. In one excursion, Zael and company help a local shopkeeper rescue his wife from a haunted mansion. In another, Zael does battle in the local coliseum only to find that the kingdom’s knights are throwing fights to him due to his favor with the ruler of the island. The Last Story tells a tale as exciting as anything in the genre, but we’ve played through too many of those to care without something more. It’s the little things, like the way Zael can smack his head against a low-hanging signpost or overhear conversations between pairs of people talking in the street, that give meaning the bigger ones, and The Last Story is a game that cares about the little things.

This fine shading extends to the cast of characters, who by most metrics lack distinction. Zael is an even-tempered nice guy of a leading man. The leader of the group, Dagran, is a stern patriarch. We’ve also got the bawdy, duel-wielding Syrenne, petulant mage Yurick, and soft-spoken healer Mirania. We’ve seen this group before, but as with the story, they’re brought to life by the little moments. The group talks to each other as they leap into battle, and the things they say are usually diverting enough to be worth having said. The voice cast of British actors is excellent, and the script gives them enough different tones to work with that they needn’t feel embarrassed by the credit. The Last Story is a character-driven game, so it’s fortunate that the characters are worthy of it.

Despite these accolades, the The Last Story’s story is far from perfect. It has its share of RPG clichés, plot-holes, and at least one baffling character about-face, but it’s filled out with just the right details in just the right places that it makes one want to think well of it. The musical score by Nobuo Uematsu is lovely; the main theme summons the kind of elegiac mood once reserved for the better Final Fantasy games. The art team provides a visual style to match it, bathing the game world in a lazy late afternoon haze. I even came around to the obtrusive narrator, who fills in details of the story we only occasionally need to know in a way that started off as annoying and at some point became charmingly dopey. The Last Story is a very easy game to like, and for that reason I found myself willing to look past some of its shortcomings.

…IT’S HOW YOU USE IT. 

This quality was helpful when it came to the battle mechanics, since the game’s ambitious combat system sometimes falls short of its lofty goals. Like most modern RPGs, combat in The Last Story unfolds in real-time, but the game avoids one of the most ridiculous images of modern gaming, that of a group of characters standing immobile around an enemy and whacking it while little numbers pop up over its head. Combat in The Last Story is dynamic, with a lot of running and climbing and aiming involved. It has its faults, but it’s still the best attempt I’ve seen by a Japanese RPG to use real-time combat, and is frequently a lot of fun.

When it comes to fighting, one of the game’s best innovations is to eliminate random, and even semi-random, battles entirely. There are no fights in this game that you cannot fight. Each one is planned out ahead of time, meaning that the developers can set up the geography, enemy formation, and available implements to ensure that each encounter is as interesting as possible. Players take control of Zael, who has a variety of techniques he can use to defeat his foes. Running up to an enemy will make Zael auto-attack. He can also manually aim his crossbow, take cover behind conveniently placed debris, command his allies to use their specialty abilities, diffuse magic circles left by spells to cause a wide variety of effects, and quite a bit more. The game introduces new techniques gradually right up until the end, so there’s usually something new to play around with.

What’s better is that the game actually makes you use the techniques it so generously provides, often in rather creative ways. I remember the moment I realized I was actually going to enjoy the fights in this game. My party was battling a doppleganger monster who fought us from the other side of a mirror, replicating my every move. Auto-attacking did nothing, since the monster would just copy me and our swords would meet in mid-swing. I had to order Yurick, my mage, to cast a fire spell on the floor near the monster, which left a heat residue that distracted it long enough for me to land a blow. I was very, very happy to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to win every fight in the game by thwacking the enemy to death.

Although there are times when that’s the case, particularly when the fights have large numbers of combatants and there’s too much going on to focus on strategy. In these moments, the battles can become frustrating and chaotic, but most of the time they’re intelligently laid out and, at their best, play more like miniature puzzles where someone dies at the end. If RPGs must have real-time combat, I strongly endorse this game as the model to build upon.

Buying weapons and armor outside of combat is a straight-forward affair, not so simple that there’s no strategy involved but not so complex that you’ll weep openly whenever you have to upgrade your equipment. Money is available but not absurdly plentiful, so you’ll actually have to prioritize what you want to buy and when you want to buy it. Plus, shopping will give you the opportunity to wander around Lazulis City, the game’s central hub and a memorable medieval metropolis packed with side-quests, collectibles, and a bustling torrent of NPCs. It feels lived-in and alive, vast in size but really residing in the sun-touched corners and windy side-streets. It’s a vibrant place with a surprise around the corner, and somewhere I’d love to see the industry return.

Cosmopolis Review

There’s a scene toward the end of Cosmopolis where Robert Pattinson walks up a flight of stairs. Pattinson, who plays a sinfully wealthy 28-year-old asset manager named Eric Packer, is looking to confront a man who for unknown reasons has been planning to kill him all day. The scene is terrifically directed. Packer ascends the stairs slowly, the camera floating along behind him and the soundtrack bubbling with impending menace. It’s tense, exciting, and completely unlike anything else in the movie.

That’s because Cosmopolis, the latest from indie director David Cronenberg, is a hard-core art film, very concerned with big ideas and very unconcerned with whether or not you’re entertained. Based on a 2003 novel of the same name, it follows the inscrutable Packer over the course of a very long day spent rolling across Manhatten in a tricked-out limousine on a quest to get a haircut. Along the way, Packer converses with a variety of associates, family members, and passersby who have all manner of opinions on the subjects of death, sex, and money.

People talk in this movie. They talk a lot, and much of what they have to say is very interesting. Take Packer’s chief of theory (Samatha Morton), who stops by his cavernous limo to tell him that “money has taken a turn.” Wealth, she posits, is now collected for its own sake. It’s lost the narrative quality it had in days past and is effectively “talking to itself.” Cosmopolis takes place in a near future when the divide beneath the haves and the have-nots has become so pronounced that the have-nots are starting to revolt. As Packer and his advisor calmly talk economic theory, a band of occupy-ish protesters spray-paint his limo and jostle it from side to side. The scene is finely textured satire, deftly directed and eloquently parsed, and far from the only such scene in the movie. The problem is that after it’s over, it’s over. Apart from the constant presence of the Packer character, there’s very little pulling the movie from one isolated encounter to the next.

And Eric Packer is not a character likely to hold an audience’s interest for very long. For most of the movie, he’s a cipher. Robert Pattinson puts his bland good looks to excellent use here, hiding whatever emotions Packer feels behind a set of dead blue eyes and matinee star cheekbones.

There are a couple of times when we sense a person beneath the gloss. A memorably erotic encounter with a security worker paints Packer as a man desperate for some kind of connection, even it’s not forthcoming. When Packer finally gets to the barbershop and has his hair cut by an old family friend, a man for whom money is a tangible thing rather than ephemera to be bought and sold from afar, he comes close to cracking a genuine smile. Pattinson, known mainly as a teen heart-throb, does some very subtle acting here which bodes well for his future. Packer’s personality may be as hermetically sealed as his sound-proofed limo, but Pattinson suggests the self-destructive impulses at his core in a way that prepares us for his long walk up those stairs near the end of the film. Packer has spent his day watching his fortune fall out from under his feet, the result of a bad bet he made on the international market. His last reason for bothering to get up in the morning thus removed, he goes to meet his killer so that he can be killed.

The final confrontation between Packer and his killer, a disgruntled former employee (Paul Giamatti), boils down to a long talk about the corrupting influence of money and the consequent rot of society. It’s bold, ambitious, and intellectually stimulating, but also cold, anticlimactic, and too much a scene onto itself to complete and give meaning to what came before. As disjointed as Cosmopolis is, I can’t help but think that the material might have been better suited as a collection of essays, or hey, a novel. At the same time, it creates a mood of low rumbling dread that lingers, and may be the kind of movie that benefits from a second viewing. At the least, it’s unlike anything else currently in theaters, and for that reason alone I’m glad it’s around.

Sparkle Review

Sparkle is a new old-fashioned melodrama about a trio of Detroit-area Motown singers living in 1968. It contains very little in the way of originality. The singers, sisters, begin as nobodies, break into the local soul scene, get mixed up in the seedier side of the business, take stock of their lives, and return triumphant. It’s been done. But the movie is well-cast, with Jordin “I won a singing competition once” Sparks in the title role, and well-directed, with a lush look and solid pacing.

Every once in a while, a producer will get take a stab at re-popularizing the long-dormant movie musical genre. The last notable attempt was Rock of Ages, a jukebox musical which featured covers of 80s rock songs scrubbed free of the grit that might have made them interesting. Sparkle isn’t a great musical, but it fares much better than that middling piece of insubstantia. It features old songs from the 1976 movie on which it’s based, a few Motown standards of the day, and new songs written by R. Kelly. It’s good stuff, and it’s sung well by a cast of people who either are or at one point were professional musicians. When the story sags, audiences can always sit back and enjoy the music.

And despite the best efforts of all involved, the story does sag. Sparkle, a burgeoning songwriter, lives at home under the command of her strict, church-going mother (Whitney Houston), who disapproves of the music business. Her older sister, who depending on your point of view is either confusingly or endearingly named Sister (Carmen Ejogo), is a burned-out vixen with a sexy stage presence. She fronts the group and helps lead it to success, but her vices eventually catch up with her, and the group suffers.

There’s also a sweet romance between Sparkle and a young band manager (Derek Luke) as well as a background role for the practically minded middle sister, Dee (Tika Sumpter). So the story has a fair amount of meat on its bones, but it rarely feels anything more than superficial. The script relies too much on expository dialogue to develop the characters, and the plot twists are predictable to anyone who’s seen a movie about the rise and fall of a band, sports figure, politician, or pretty much anyone else for whom the road to success is riddled with pot holes. All these clichés go down easy thanks to the energetic cast and some visually nifty direction, but they’re still clichés and the movie doesn’t find enough ways to make them feel new again.

As Sparkle’s mother, Whitney Housten gives a performance as intermittently dull and wonderful as the movie itself. This is the last film the famous singer made before her well-publicized death earlier this year, and although it doesn’t trade on that notoriety it’s hard not to think about it when watching. Her performance is nothing spectacular. She mostly just imitates other over-protective mothers from movies past, but there’s one scene where she sings a hymn in church and we get a glimpse of the complex character, and storied actress, underneath.

Luckily, director Salim Akil knows that the movie’s greatest strength lies in its music, and he steers it back in that direction whenever possible. Even the songs played over the montages are good. He also has a fine sense of timing. For most of the film, Sparkle sings backup while the sultry, charismatic Sister takes lead, but when it comes time for Sparkle to strike out on her own, her solo debut is worth the wait and closes the film on its highest note. The movie may be made out of showbiz movie clichés, but they’re marshaled by a director who knows how to get the most out of them and played by actors committed to their roles. Sparkle is a simple song, but a decent one.

The Campaign Review

The Campaign is a timely movie that doesn’t take quite as much advantage of its subject matter as I would have liked. It tells the story of a Congressional race for a small district in North Carolina. On the Democratic ticket is Cam Brady (Will Ferrell), a smooth-talking career incumbent who expects to run unopposed. Opposing him is Marty Huggins (Zach Galifianakis), a naïve nice guy who’s running mainly to impress his influential father (Brian Cox). As an indictment of the American political climate, the movie fights with the kid gloves on, but committed performances from the leads ensure at least a passably funny hour-and-a-half at the movies.

The Campaign was directed by Jay Roach, a man whose previous credits include Meet the Parents and the Austin Powers movies. Here, as there, his main talent lies in getting out of the way and letting his actors have a good comic go of it. As Brady, Ferrell channels a bit of George Bush and a lot of Ricky Bobby to create a character who’s appealingly sleazy if a little familiar. It’s Will Ferrell. He yells a lot and nabs a couple of laughs with his deadpan delivery. He’s not stretching himself here, but even Will Ferrell on auto-pilot is good for a chuckle or two.

Better and slightly more surprising is Galifianakis as Marty Huggins. A small-town family man, Huggins has no idea how to play the political game. He tells an utterly inconsequential story about his dogs at a campaign event. He sits in his car trying not to cry after a particularly nasty debate. Eventually, the king-making Motch (rhymes with “Koch”) brothers (Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow) dispatch a high-powered campaign manager (Dylan McDermott) to whip Huggins into shape. With his effete drawl and leisurely waddle, Galifianakis turns Huggins into a reliably funny character, especially in the early stretches before the political process begins to harden him up. Later on, as Huggins battles his conscience over whether to go along with the Motch brothers’ plans, he provides the movie with the closest thing it has to a heart.

Along the way there are more than a few laughs, but to be honest there weren’t as many as I’d hoped. The script aims pretty low, with a lot of jokes about sex, violence, and the other usual suspects. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but many of them are on the uninspired side of funny. Any screenwriter hoping to squeeze a laugh out of the line “If it’s rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’” probably needs to work a little harder. As it stands, the funniest gag in the movie involves a Chinese maid forced by her wealthy Southern employer to speak like a house slave from the 1840s, and that has nothing to do with the main plot.

Considering that it’s about a political campaign, I’m also a bit disappointed that the movie is so uninterested in talking about politics. Cam Brady is a Democrat, but this fact is only mentioned briefly at the very beginning of the movie and not brought up again. The script spends a couple of lines decrying the nation’s disinterest in hearing about “the issues” but doesn’t voice an opinion on any issues itself. It introduces one candidate, introduces another, and falls quickly into a pattern in which each tries to one-up the other with increasingly hostile attack tactics. Some of them are funny. Brady’s camp, for example, produces an attack ad that blurs the line between campaign advertisement and pornography, but nothing is treated with enough subtlety to actually say anything new about partisan politics.

As satire, The Campaign is slow-pitch soft ball. It’s a Nerf ground war. As a laugh-a-minute comedy, it’s just above water. But as a vehicle for a couple of very funny people with a good amount of chemistry, it’ll do.

Total Recall Review

Total Recall is a movie set in a dystopian future where chemical warfare has rendered most of Earth uninhabitable. In Europe, a gentrified upper class sits pretty in a city that seems inspired by the bright, bold, criss-crossing metropolis from The Fifth Element. In Australia, now called the Colony, a put-upon lower class slaves away in what looks like a slightly cleaner version of the slums from Blade Runner. Also in play are a memory-implanting machine, a secret agent who doesn’t know he’s a secret agent, a rag-tag resistance movement, and a mass transit system that shoots through the center of the planet.

There are enough elements here for the makings of a cracker-jack sci-fi movie, so why is almost everything about Total Recall instantly forgettable? We can start with the performances. Colin Farrell, rocking an American accent and a bangin’ beach bod, plays Douglas Quaid, a factory worker who is understandably unsatisfied with his life as a Colony plebe. One day after work he goes to Rekall, a business that implants customers with false memories which allow them to live out their fantasies. Quaid chooses the secret agent package, but before it gets underway he’s assaulted by a pack of federal goons. Turns out he actually IS a secret agent who’s been implanted with the memories of a workaday peasant, and the government had to step in because the Rekall process would have activated him too early, or something.

The movie isn’t particularly concerned with details and exists mostly to usher Farrell and company on to the next action scene. The role of Quaid was previously played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1990 film of which this movie is a remake. Farrell is probably the better actor overall, but Schwarzenegger has more screen presence, and that’s something this movie could have really used. As Quaid, Farrell is a cipher, and very hard to root for. I will likely already have forgotten almost everything about Melina (Jessica Biel), Quaid’s partner in arms, by the time I finish writing this sentence. The only character who makes any impact is Quaid’s wife Lori (Kate Beckinsale), who it ends up is only working undercover as his wife to keep tabs on the government’s lapsed asset. She gives decent vampy badass.

Again, the movie seems to have the raw material to turn into something interesting, but it always comes up way short. For instance, while trying to regain his memories, it is suggested to Quaid that none of what he has experienced is real and that he is still at Rekall, living out his fantasy of being a secret agent while hooked up to a memory-implanting machine. This is an interesting angle, but the movie blows right past it in favor of more action. And the action isn’t even that bad. There’s some effective fight choreography and a lot of impressive CGI set design. But great CGI is nothing new. The best action scene in the world wouldn’t rescue the boring script.

I have not seen the original Total Recall, the one starring Schwarzenegger, but a cursory look at clips on YouTube shows what appears to be a much livelier and more imaginative movie. An example: in both films, Quaid is in possession of a memory which, if unearthed, will help the resistance movement. In the first Total Recall, a mutated conjoined fetus uses psychic powers to dig the memory out of Quaid’s brain. In the remake, Bill Nighy hooks Quaid up to a machine. In the original, Quaid tries to slip past a customs barrier by wearing a robotic helmet which makes him look like a middle-aged woman. When he throws the helmet, it explodes. In the remake, Quaid wears a holographic collar that makes him look like a different guy. The mandate for this movie seems to have been to remake the original but with less humor, less imagination, and more action but less violence. If that sounds like something you’d enjoy, by all means see this movie. If it doesn’t, congratulations on salvaging two hours of your life.

Castlevania: Rondo Of Blood Review

Ah, 1993.  A time when men were men, women were women, and video games pounded players into submission until they were sobbing uncontrollably into the armrests of their easy chairs.  Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, the tenth game in Konami’s venerable Castlevania franchise, is very much of this era.  The game was originally released on the TurboGrafx-16, a home gaming console popular in Japan but which never really got a foothold in the American market.  For this reason, Rondo of Blood went unplayed by American Castlevania fans for many years.  It is now available, among other places, on the Wii’s Virtual Console, and audiences everywhere have the opportunity to crumble beneath its difficulty.

Because Castlevania: Rondo of Blood is hard.  You play as Rhictor Belmont, of the Transylvania Belmonts, who needs to make his way through Dracula’s castle to rescue his kidnapped fiancé.  The game is broken up into several side-scrolling stages, and they are merciless.  Much of the difficulty comes from Rhictor’s inability to maneuver himself.  You can’t, for example, do much to control your jumps once you’re in the air, a problem for a game which requires microscopically precise platforming.  Enemies take off a lot of life per hit, and opportunities to recharge are rare.  Rhicter fights Dracula’s army of monsters armed with a bevy of sub-weapons and his trusty whip, but the whip has a limited range of movement and the sub-weapons often aren’t as powerful as they need to be.

The result: you’ll die a whole Hell of a lot before you finally conquer whatever obstacle has been giving you grief.  But once you do, you’ll feel terrific.  Rondo of Blood operates on a risk-reward system taken from an older school of game design, one which treated video gaming more as an ordeal to get through than as an experience to savor.  The game says to the player “Beat me if you can” and the player either rises to the challenge or leaves to go do something useful with their time.

For players who stick it out, the game rewards them with a flashy production and generous extras.  Rondo of Blood has a bright, clean look and a bountiful visual imagination.  The art team clearly enjoyed themselves in designing all manner of nasty monsters to throw at you, and even as they tear you to shreds for the umpteenth time you can’t help but appreciate the variety.  The elaborate boss battles are especially distinctive, not to mention especially difficult.  Many of the designs are so solid that they were reused for the game’s more famous sequel, Symphony of the Night.

The connections between Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night don’t stop at the visuals.  Rondo of Blood is notable for being the first Castlevania game to not be entirely linear.  You still traverse levels one at a time, but many of those levels have more than one exit, and each of those exits lead to different stages.  Eventually, all roads take you to Dracula, but how you get there is up to you.  In Symphony of the Night, Konami famously tossed off the level-by-level format and made Dracula’s castle one giant interconnected environment.  Rondo of Blood is an important step on that path.

There’s also an additional playable character, named Maria, to whom you gain access after rescuing her in one of the game’s early stages.  Maria is much lighter on her feet that Rhicter, and her attacks are a bit more versatile.  She takes some of the crushing difficulty out of the game and is very welcome.  Rondo of Blood can be beaten fairly quickly if you know what you’re doing, but the addition of Maria and a network of alternate paths means that there’s quite a lot of game here to enjoy.  For fans of Castlevania, fans of gaming history, and fans of throwing their controllers against the wall in anger, Castlevania: Rondo of Blood is a worthy investment.

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.

Snow White and the Huntsman

Charlize Theron as the movie's saving grace.

    It seems we’re in the middle of a fairy-tale movie revival.  2010’s Alice in Wonderland recast the titular heroine as a mail-wearing, sword swinging leader of men, Julia Roberts put her spin on Snow White’s evil queen earlier this year in Mirror, Mirror, and Angelina Jolie is poised to take on Sleeping Beauty’s villainess Maleficent in a 2014 release of the same name.  Is the public hungry for live action morality tales?  Has nostalgia gotten the best of Hollywood producers?  Or are these movies just trying to make a quick buck off properties people are already familiar with?  If Snow White and the Huntsman is any indication, it’s probably the latter.  This isn’t a bad movie, but too much of it feels perfunctory and derivative, as though it went through one too many focus groups before seeing release.

    Snow White and the Huntsman shares many things in common with Disney’s 1937 cartoon classic: there’s a handsome prince and a bunch of dwarves and a poison apple and so forth, but this is not your father’s, or rather your grandfather’s, Snow White.  In this much darker version, the princess Snow White (Kristin “Vampire Bride” Stewart) grows up locked away in a tower where she’s been imprisoned by a wicked queen (Charlize Theron).  She escapes, of course, and the queen dispatches the beer-swilling Huntsman (Chris “God of Thunder” Hemsworth) to collect her.  And the game is on!

    Or at least it would be if the movie didn’t become so tedious so quickly.  Part of the problem is the performances.  As Snow White, Kristin Stewart is mostly a dud.  Other characters keep talking about how Snow White is pure and good and innocent, but Stewart looks vaguely irritated throughout the entire movie, as though wondering whether she’s doomed to play fantastical damsels for the rest of her career.  She also betrays a lack of dramatic chops in a later scene where she gives what’s supposed to be a rousing call to arms but what plays more like a strange bellowing fit.  Chris Hemsworth brings a dependably brawny swagger to his role as the Huntsman, but the movie never slows down long enough to develop him or his would-be romance with Snow White.

    One performance that does work, and works in a rather grand way, is Charlize Theron’s as the evil queen.  Theron is the movie’s secret weapon and easily the best reason to see it.  She purrs with menace as she seduces the king, Snow White’s father, before betraying him to claim the throne, explodes with scorching anger when displeased, and generally gives great high bitch.  At the same time, Theron adeptly suggests the fear festering at the root of the queen’s ambition, and with the help of a few well-placed flashbacks turns her into the movie’s most interesting character.  The special effects team pitches in to give her a number of eye-popping powers that add to her evil majesty.

    When not focused on showing us how the queen can transform into a flock of ravenous birds or commune with her liquid chrome mirror, the visual effects awe and underwhelm in about equal measure.  First-time director Rupert Sanders is clearly a man of considerable vision, but he doesn’t always get to express it.  An early stretch of the movie set in an evil forest looks blotchy and dark; whatever interesting art design may be there is blotted out by the muddy photography.  But a later section, set in an enchanted glen filled with playful sprites and cheerful woodland critters, looks terrific, like a live action version of the cartoon original married with the surreal visuals from Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.  I particularly enjoyed the clump of mushrooms that opened their eyes to peer at Snow White as she passed by.

    Enchanting as that interlude is, the movie moves all too swiftly toward its conclusion, which consists of a medieval siege of the queen’s castle that draws incredibly unfavorable comparisons to far more impressive sequences in movies like Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.  Why fantasy flicks would even attempt something like this in the wake of those movies I’m not sure.  More satisfying is the final confrontation between Snow White and the evil queen, but Kristin Stewart is less than convincing as a fierce warrior and it’s probably a bad sign that I was half-rooting for the queen to win.

    Looking back, I’m left asking myself just who this movie is for.  The main characters are female, but young girls will likely be put off by the morose action.  Likewise, young boys probably won’t find enough of it.  This version of the Snow White story is too different from others to trade in nostalgia, and the whole production just isn’t done well enough to attract people simply looking for a good time at the movies.  Like me, I think that most people will leave the theater feeling indifferent, so maybe the moral of this fairy tale is just not to see it.

The Dictator

Beware the beard.

 With The Dictator, shock-jockeying actor-comedian Sasha Baron Cohen makes his first foray into the realm of scripted comedy.  Cohen scored a hit in 2006 with his ambitiously titled Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, in which he flounced around as a backwater third-world hick and shocked the consciences of unsuspecting middle-class Americans.  Satire came pretty naturally to that movie: all it had to do was put Borat in the same room as someone not in on the joke and watch.  The Dictator takes aim at some of the same topics, but in moving to a scripted format loses a bit of edge.

This time around, Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, supreme ruler of the fictional nation of Wadiya.  Aladeen is stupid, spoiled and, due to his country’s vast oil reserves, rich enough to do absolutely whatever he wants.  An early scene shows him competing in Wadiya’s answer to the Olympic Games, where he’s allowed to carry a gun and shoot athletes that threaten to outperform him.  These preliminary sections are a straight-forward send-up of real-world dictators like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il (to whom The Dictator is dedicated) and provide the movie’s biggest laughs.

When Aladeen heads to New York City to address the United Nations, his advisors scheme to replace him with a dim-witted double.  Aladeen soon finds himself wandering the streets of Manhattan, bereft of his power and his beard, reduced to working as a grocer at a health food store run by Zoe (Anna Feris), an environmentally conscious, politically liberal feminist whom Aladeen begins to fall for despite their vast, vast cultural differences.  These things… a plot, a romance, an arc… are things that Cohen didn’t really use in his previous movies.  That’s not to say he’s now a slave to them; the script frequently whisks Aladeen away on madcap misadventures designed purely to get laughs, but the fact that they’re here at all makes The Dictator feel a touch more traditional than I had expected.

And considering his pedigree, I’m not sure that traditional is a good look for Cohen, at least not the kind of halfway-there traditional on display here.  Like Borat, The Dictator trades mainly in vulgar, barf-into-your-popcorn kind of gags.  Most of the ordinary bodily fluids get a good workout, and there are some choice lines about the value of female infants.  It’s strange to then watch Cohen shift gears and play the vulnerable rom-com lead in his scenes opposite Feris or toss off softball references to Eat, Pray, Love.  Maybe we’re catching Cohen in a transitional phase on his way to producing more ordinary multiplex fare, but if so the transition is a bit awkward.

In fact, even the outrageous bits don’t hit quite as hard as they should.  There’s one scene, for example, where Aladeen loses… something (I’ll let you find out the details yourself)… in a pregnant woman’s uterus.  We then get a view, surely the first of its kind, of the object from an insider’s perspective.  The joke keeps building from there, and it’s one of those moments when everyone in the theater lets out a collective groan, part delighted exasperation and part violent recoil, the likes of which Cohen was probably going for.  But even that joke is a little, dare I say, safe when compared to similar moments from Borat.  Even if it’s an inventive and no doubt dutifully prepared bit, it lacks the thrill of spontaneity that made the previous outing so popular.

One thing The Dictator does have going for it is its willingness to engage with material that’s relevant on a macro level in the world today, something beyond the merely personal stuff explored time and again by its contemporaries.  True, lampooning brutal dictatorships hardly amounts to making a controversial statement, but Cohen displays enough of an understanding of the mechanics behind dictatorships to ensure that his film actually has a point.  There’s a speech toward the end that draws a lot of comparisons between dictatorships and democracy, and while it’s all a bit on the nose I was glad to see the movie arrive somewhere.

The Dictator is a bit softer than Cohen’s earlier stuff, but I suppose he couldn’t have kept on making movies that lived on the precarious edge of bad taste forever.  If this flick truly does represent Cohen in transition, I hope he keeps going in that new direction.  He’s a smart guy and The Dictator is a smart movie, and I’d love to see what he could do with something not required to be so broad.

Xenoblade

To vistas.

    Various publications have called Xenoblade Chronicles “a landmark achievement,” “a towering triumph,” and “the best RPG [of] this generation.”  One review raved that “everything it does dramatically improves and innovates the RPG genre.”  People like it, and while I certainly enjoyed my time with the game I don’t think it’s quite worthy of evangelization.  It’s towering, all right: huge and complex and epic in a way that’s downright Biblical, but its ambition occasionally gets in the way of its playability.  It takes the Japanese RPG down some new roads, but not all of those roads are worth traveling.  And it may well be the best JRPG of this generation, but considering the competition is that really much of an accomplishment?  It’s a big, bold, beautiful game with a lot to admire, but the second coming of the JRPG juggernaut it is not.  But if we’re lucky, it’s a herald of better days ahead.

Tall Tale

    Xenoblade Chronicles was directed by Tetsuya Takahashi, a JRPG veteran who worked on classics like Chrono Trigger before helming original games like Xenogears and Xenosaga.  Xenoblade is not a sequel to those games any more than the latest Final Fantasy is a sequel to the one before it, but they share a breadth of creative vision that is undeniably interesting.  The narrative idea at the core of Xenoblade is sort of brilliant: a long time ago there were two titans, the Bionis and the Mechonis, who fought against each other in an epic battle.  In the millennia since their fight, civilizations have sprung up to live on their corpses.  The Bionis has cities on its head, marshes on its thigh, and jungles on its chest.  It’s an intoxicating notion and a pretty effective expression of the well-worn idea that the world is a living thing.

    The level designers take this idea and make the most of it.  An early area located just above the Bionis’ knee shows off what they have in store: it’s a vast plain complete with swooping valleys, craggy mountainsides, intricate cave systems, and more, all of it seamlessly connected with zero loading times.  Monsters, not all of them hostile, dot the landscape, and in the distance there is always the Mechonis rising menacingly above the horizon.  Add in weather effects, a day-night cycle, haunting music, and a draw distance that has to be seen to be believed, and the world of Xenoblade approaches something like beauty.

    I just wish the game gave players more reasons to explore its painstakingly detailed geography.  Those who take it upon themselves to traipse off the beaten path are rewarded with crystals, implements that can be used to upgrade equipment by way of a mind-numbingly dull mini-game so boring I actually resisted exploration for fear that I would eventually have to engage in it.  Players can also take advantage of the game’s quest system by talking to certain NPCs (conveniently marked with exclamation points hovering over their heads) who will send them off on a variety of undercooked, uninvolving errands that feel more like taking out the Sunday trash than embarking on a grand adventure.  In the end, the best reason to explore the game’s environments is to see what beautiful sight the developers have queued up next.  That’s a great compliment to the art team, but it leaves the game world feeling strangely sterile despite all the love that clearly went into building it.

    Luckily, the central story is strong enough so that players can more or less afford to ignore the piteous extras.  The main characters fall into recognizable types familiar to anyone who’s ever played an RPG.  There’s Shulk, the fair-faced, soft-spoken hero.  His friend Reyn is the boorish tank.  There’s also a couple of ingénues, a taciturn swordsman, and a roly-poly, two-foot tall woodland critter who would be outlandish in any other game but who fits into a distinct JRPG mold as old as the genre itself.  The group doesn’t break any new ground, but they’re still a likable lot drawn with just enough specificity to set them apart from their long line of forebears.  They’re also well-acted by a cast of mostly British actors, and after spending upwards of sixty hours with them I admit I grew attached.

    The story itself isn’t half bad, either.  For as long as Shulk has been alive, his home on Bionis has been under periodic attack by the Mechon, malevolent robots from Mechonis.  After a particularly brutal assault on his home town, he sets out on a quest for revenge that slowly builds into something bigger.  The tale is well-paced, with few cut-scenes lasting longer than a couple of minutes and a healthy stock of interesting ancillary characters.  There are a few baffling twists along the way (what JRPG would be complete without them?), but the story rights itself by the home stretch and barrels ahead to a satisfying, if safe, conclusion.

Turn-Based Battles and Other Dirty Words

    Takahashi, whose Xenosaga titles often felt like a sci-fi miniseries occasionally interrupted by gameplay, shows admirable restraint in cutting down on the number of obtrusive cut-scenes.  For the first time in his solo career, the emphasis is on the part of the game you actually play, so it’s unfortunate that the best I can say about Xenoblade’s gameplay is that it could have been a lot worse.  In another much-lauded move, Xenoblade’s combat unfolds in real time.  First, players approach monsters in the field.  Before beginning a battle, they choose one party member to control while the game’s AI takes over for the others.  When not auto-attacking, each character can choose from their own list of special skills, each of which have their own effects, cool-down times, and tricks to using properly.  The battle system is fast-paced, clean, reasonably deep, and I kind of hate it.

    Look, I don’t know exactly when the RPG developers of the world got together and banished turn-based battles to the deep dark pit currently occupied by save points and auto-aim, but this shit has got to stop.  The Xenoblade team actually does a lot to make their real-time fights more involving.  Some moves work best when deployed from a certain angle, periodic glimpses into the future allow you to stop particularly deadly assaults before they happen, and chain attacks allow players to string together complimentary techniques from different party members.  But even with these updates the combat too often feels rote, like playing an MMORPG without all the social interaction that make MMORPGs worth playing.  There may come a day when some enterprising developer effectively marries the kinetic satisfaction of real-time combat to the mental massage provided by turn-based battles, but today is not that day.  Today is just Friday.

    Outside of combat, the menu-based character building is satisfyingly rich, perhaps too much so.  There’s a lot to do.  AP earned in battle lets you update techniques, passive skills are learned and even shared over time, and a relationship system affects how well characters work together in battle.  Generally, the game introduces these and other factors gradually enough so as not to overwhelm the player.  The exception is the inventory management system, which is simply too dense to be any fun.  Each character can be outfitted with a weapon, armor, leggings, helmet, shoes, and armguards.  Each of these can then be bedazzled with a limited number of attribute-enhancing gems (the product of our mind-numbingly dull crystal mini-game from before), which can then be rearranged to achieve different effects.  The end result of all this complexity is that whenever I saw a new shop, I cried a little.  Equipping your party takes a depressingly large amount of time, and while I grant that many less obsessive players may not have a problem with this, I think the better solution would have just been to simply the process.  Who wears armguards, anyway?

    As tedious as parts of the Xenoblade gameplay experience could be, I appreciate that they came mostly from a desire to overachieve.  So the battle system never quite takes off into the stratosphere.  It gets the job done and it introduces new ideas that can be expanded upon in future titles.  So the story never quite lives up to the potency of that initial image.  It’s still a good yarn told with breathless earnestness in classic JRPG fashion.  So it doesn’t reinvent the JRPG.  Who said it needed reinventing?  All the genre needs is games of vision and caliber, and despite its shortcomings Xenoblade possesses these two things in earnest.

The Avengers

Two men in Halloween costumes fight to save the world.

The Avengers is, among other things, one of most audacious marketing ploys Hollywood has ever conceived.  Sure, it’s a summer blockbuster at heart, complete with an enormous budget and a smorgasbord of special effects designed specifically to melt the eyes out of your head, but it’s more than that.  It’s a direct continuation of no less than three entirely discrete big-budget super-heroic action movies, and in making it Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Pictures have demonstrated a commitment to bigness seldom seen even in an industry as overblown as the movies.

Thinking about it, something like The Avengers was bound to happen sooner or later.  Comic books about superheroes are known for taking place in complicated, densely interconnected universes, so it makes sense that the movies based on them would eventually start to link together.  You don’t need to have seen the movies leading up to The Avengers to enjoy it, but a bit of context helps.  The plot revolves around the Tesseract, a mysterious alien cube of great power that was last seen plunging to the bottom of the ocean in Captain America: The First Avenger.  The Tesseract is currently being studied by S.H.I.E.L.D., a clandestine espionage agency headed by veteran spy Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson).  When it’s stolen by demi-god Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who himself was last seen plummeting through a dimensional worm-hole at the end of Thor, Fury enlists the help of super-spy Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) in rounding up a crew of heroes capable of getting it back.  That group includes the brilliant but abrasive Iron Man (Robert Downy Jr.), recently revived World War II legend Captain America (Chris Evans), and Bruce Banner, aka The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo).

Thor (Chris Hemsworth), god of thunder and Loki’s brother, eventually joins the team as well.  It’s a big cast, and each of them brings along their own unique star power and iconographic baggage.  To manage it, the producers tapped writer-director Joss Whedon, a man known mostly for the creation of television series like Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  It was a smart hire.  Whedon has plenty of experience directing super-powered ensembles, and his script takes the story seriously enough so that we can get invested but not so seriously that the going gets dreary.  Laughs are plentiful, and they go a long way toward helping viewers settle into the premise.

Whedon also does a good job of pacing the movie such that almost everyone is given a chance to shine.  As the smug, cynical Iron Man, Downy Jr. gets the lion’s share of the crowd-pleasing lines along with the movie’s most moving heroic moment.  Evans’ Captain America provides an effectively earnest foil.  Chris Hemsworth’s Thor adds conviction and weight to the central plotline, and Tom Hiddelston has a blast smirking and sniveling his way through his role as the villain.  Even Johansson’s Black Widow, who has no superpowers, feels like she matters.  She has an especially great scene with Loki where she tries to fake him out into revealing some incriminating information.

Everyone, in short, is sure to have their favorite, and for me the Hulk nearly runs away with the show.  Ruffalo is the third actor to play the role in recent years, and he brings a wry, smirking self-pity to it that somehow never becomes grating.  The lone dud of the group is Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), an expert marksman whose role is so slight it almost feels like he doesn’t need to be there at all.  That hiccup aside, each member is well-developed enough so that we don’t want them to die once they arrive at the inevitable special effects-laden battle toward the end of the third act.

As spectacular as that battle is, and much credit is due to the effects team for some imaginative and technically immaculate work, its inevitability does take away slightly from the overall effect.  For all of its meticulous craft, for all the jokes and the bombast and the carefully choreographed characterization, The Avengers is occasionally too busy being an action blockbuster to dive as deeply into the characters as I wanted.  That’s part of the plan, of course.  If the movie holds things back, it’s so they can be better explored in the series of spider-webbing sequels.  The Avengers is a great time at the movies, but it’s also a link in a chain so wide I don’t think even Marvel knows where it ends.  With The Avengers, Marvel has committed not only to a franchise but to a network of franchises, and if the quality remains this high it’s a network in which I’m glad to be caught.

Chasing Ghosts

    Imagine that you’re in the back of a dimly lit bar in rural North Carolina.  You’re talking to a bespectacled, heavy-set gentleman, slow of eye and soft of speech, who’s pouring out his life’s woes to you between slurps of amber draft.  He tells you that he has no job, that he lives alone, and that he is not on speaking terms with his best friend, not since the two had a blistering fight over twenty years ago.  “What did you two fight about?” you ask.  And the man says that the friend beat his high score in Berserk.

    Do you laugh at this man?  He did, after all, just say something ridiculous.  Or do you sympathize with him, unable to mock a guy for whom this is clearly a very, very serious business?  If you ever happen to catch a 2007 documentary called Chasing Ghosts, and I think anyone with a subscription to Netflix and even a passing interest in video games should, you’ll get to make your own decision.  The man’s name is Joel West, and he’s one of a group of guys who back in the grand old 80s considered themselves to be the greatest video game players in the world.

    Of course, this was in the days when video games were confined mainly to arcade machines like Pac Man and Asteroids.  The title of Greatest Video Game Player in the World means something very different today, but just try telling these guys that.  Watching this movie, I caught myself absentmindedly gaping more than a few times after one of the now middle-aged arcade heroes reflected on their gaming pasts.  Consider our Berserk player from above, who at one point looks into the camera and says without a trace of irony that “there are days when you and the game become one.”  Or take Roy Scildt, a Missile Command prodigy, who talks down to his colleagues for playing “pansy-ass” games like Pac Man rather than “macho” ones like Missile Command.  The movie’s best running joke, or maybe it isn’t a joke, is that these guys take what looks from a distance to be a trifling hobby deadly seriously.  They talk about their high scores in Donkey Kong as though they’re Olympic gold medals.  Half the time I wasn’t sure whether to double over laughing or burst into tears.

    And yet, there are times when the movie inspires genuine wistfulness.  Director Lincoln Ruchti structures his documentary around a 1982 gathering of these gamers in Ottumwa, Iowa, the self-proclaimed video game capitol of world.  They were meeting to compete against each other in the pursuit of all-time high scores at the Twin Galaxies Arcade, and the strange thing is that some people actually took notice.  Life Magazine profiled the event as representative of the age, local cheerleaders became gaming “groupies,” and a few of the best players got the chance to compete against each other on national television.

    But of course it couldn’t last.  Arcades started to empty as home consoles came to the fore, and most of these kids seemed unwilling to make the switch.  In another of those tragi-comic moments, one gamer criticizes Street Fighter 2 for being too ostentatious and lacking the character of simpler games like Millipede.  Some of the guys grew up to be the kind of navel-gazing, basement-dwelling stereotypes modern gamers have been trying to escape for decades, but most of them moved on, got jobs, and started families.  What they have mostly in common is that they all look back on their days as gaming superstars as some of the happiest of their lives, and after a while I admit their nostalgia proved catching.

    So how are we supposed to react to these guys?  Laugh or cry?  Viewers could be forgiven for doing the former.  We’re talking about men who freely admit to playing Galaga for 48 hours straight and then smiling smugly as if they’d just won a Nobel Prize.  But there are too many moments of real vulnerability to take the entire thing as a joke.  Battlezone specialist Sam Blackburn has a particularly open moment, admitting that he took to video games after braking up with his girlfriend, killing time by moving flashing dots across an arcade screen when he wanted to be spending it with someone special.  The role of video games in society has evolved so much over the past thirty years.  They’re in our homes, they’re shared with our family and friends, and to play them, even to play them a lot, is considered an ordinary hobby rather than a strange handicap.  But I wonder if there aren’t some gamers who still feel a bit of a sting when they tell someone they love video games and get a flustered look in return.  Maybe the guys profiled in Chasing Ghosts are pioneers, digital frontiersmen who legitimized gaming for future generations.

    Or maybe they’re hopeless nerds.  Watch the movie and decide for yourself.

The Cabin in the Woods

    When Wes Craven’s Scream was released in 1996, it was hailed as a unique take on the horror genre.  The plot was standard issue slasher flick.  There was a killer.  There were victims, most of them young, many of them girls.  There was an attractive cast of teenagers destined to either solve the mystery or die trying.  But unlike so many teenagers in so many horror movies before it, these kids knew they were in a horror movie and tried to use the rules of the genre to their advantage.  That gave the movie a satirical edge, but as layered as Scream became it never broke those rules, even if it had some fun bending them.

    Not so with The Cabin in the Woods, a new movie co-written by geek god Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, Whedon’s longtime collaborator and the film’s director.  If Scream attempted to deconstruct the horror genre, The Cabin in the Woods rips it open stem to stern, stuffs it full of dynamite, lights a match and lets the chunks fall where they may.  It starts, as these flicks so often do, with a group of photogenic college students: there’s good girl Dana (Kristin Conneley), bad girl Jules (Anna Hutchison), alpha jock Curt (Chris Hemsworth, lately of Thor), beta jock Holden (Jesse Williams), and affable stoner Marty (Fran Kranz).  As this quintet sets off for a weekend at the titular cabin in the woods, we can already tell that the script is more carefully written than we might have expected.  It would have been easy to write these characters off as stereotypes, but the writers actually give them personalities and at least a few clever lines apiece.  As a longtime Whedon devotee, I enjoyed hearing his brainy brand of banter battered across the big screen.

    But it soon becomes clear that the film has other things on its mind.  For even before the kids set out on their vacation, the audience has been privy to the pithy discussions of two office drones (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford), bored salary slaves who work in some vast underground complex teeming with employees all seemingly bent on monitoring the every move of our protagonists.  Much of the fun in these early stretches comes from slowly uncovering the details concerning just what these two layers have to do with each other.  Unpredictability, it turns out, is one of the film’s strongest assets.

    For reasons I’ll leave you to discover for yourself, it ends up that the underground office exists to manipulate our heroes into acting out a typical American horror movie, and Whedon and Goddard spend the film’s middle sections poking fun at familiar horror staples.  Characters who are otherwise well-rounded individuals find themselves devolving into genre stereotypes, amalgamated redneck zombies rise from the earth to splatter our group’s guts across the forest floor, and the heroes inexplicably want to split up (to cover more ground, of course) even when it’s painfully clear they should stick together.   At this point, I became a little concerned that the movie would be satisfied to just point and laugh at the absurdity of the horror genre, but it’s in the third act, when the movie’s two worlds collide, that things get really interesting.  To spoil what happens would do you a disservice, but rest assured that the film’s final third is very dynamic, very imaginative, and a lot of fun to watch.

    The final act also takes a bit of a left turn into profundity that comes off as a touch insincere.  The script goes beyond satire into something approaching philosophy, openly pontificating about the nature of horror movies, why people continue to see them, and why society may need them.  The Cabin in the Woods is practically made out of right angles so the shift isn’t as jarring as it might have been in a different film, but some of the diatribe still made me want to roll my eyes.

    The movie, perhaps inevitably, is unable to find a consistent tone.  Parts of it play like a straight-up zombie flick, parts like an office sitcom, one chunk like a special effects bonanza and one part, at once the most interesting and tiresome part, like a sociological dissertation.  At a lean 95 minutes, The Cabin in the Woods is probably too short for all of these segments to be fully realized and joined into a cohesive whole, but if it went on any longer I fear it would lose its frenzied, sharp-turn-over-a-deep-drop spirit.  It’s too bold a movie to be perfect, but it’s a lot of giddy fun and should especially please those who take their humor with a heavy dose of irony.