Some Other Movies I Saw in 2014 (Part Three: It's Getting Better All the Time)

 Let's kick off this chapter of the "Great Recap of Twenty Fourteen" with the movie that went from being in every headline in December to being the punching bag of January: The Interview.

 I really do find it quite amusing that the negative reaction to the film seems to be based - at least, critically - on the fact that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's comedy about assassinating Kim Jong Un starring Rogen and Franco isn't a biting enough satire of the media or of politics. This, coupled with the somewhat ridiculous overreaction of everybody feeling like they need to see The Interview (because, y'know, 'Murica) emboldened the normally lazy Golden Raspberry Awards to stop just penciling in "Adam Sandler Movie" as their "Worst Picture" and to put The Interview right out front as their leading Razzie nominee. Why? Because people are still paying attention to The Interview, for reasons that are extremely fortuitous to Sony.

 Perhaps you buy into the conspiracy theory that Sony was worried nobody would see The Interview so they put together an outlandish and complicated "hacking" scheme to ensure everyone would want to see the newest Seth Rogen / Evan Goldberg movie. As conspiracy theories go, it's got some legs, because people I know for a fact would never go see Pineapple Express have said to me that they feel they have to see The Interview ('Murica!). The disappointment, I'm guessing, is all in the expectation, because The Interview is exactly what I expected when I saw the trailer and thought "eh, I'll probably rent it." At the time I was laboring under the illusion that Inherent Vice would make good on its promise to be in theatres "just in time for Christmas," so I didn't really give credence to making The Interview our annual Christmas outing.

 To be fair, we still didn't go see The Interview - we saw a movie you'll see much higher on this list - I watched it on demand on Christmas Eve. And, yup, it's a dumb comedy where Franco plays a borderline incompetent guy and Rogen is the straight man. It's a little too long, the beginning meanders way too much, but when it gets funny (shortly after Lizzy Caplan enters the film), things maintain a consistent clip of laughs until the rather violent ending. Trade out Lizzy Caplan's name with Danny McBride, and I think I just distilled Pineapple Express into a review. Or This is the End, which landed in a comparable position in last year's recap. I like them both, but they're not my favorite comedies, and like many entries in the post-Apatow Era, they all share certain pros and cons. There's an over-reliance on improvisation (find one of them that doesn't have a "Line-o-Rama" in the supplements), a ham fisted "we're friends but now we aren't but we will be again by the end" character arc, and a reliance on pop culture references over jokes. In Rogen and Goldberg's case, at least post-2009, this also includes the "wow, that escalated fast" move to extreme violence in the third act.

 This is not to say that The Interview doesn't work, because when it's firing on all cylinders, it's very funny. Don't think that I didn't laugh; I did, but I chuckled a lot, too. It was nice to see  seemingly pointless yet continued allusions to The Lord of the Rings pay off in a way I didn't even think about until Dave Skylark (Franco) points it out to Aaron Rapaport (Rogen) near the end. It almost offset the overdone "honeydick" jokes or Skylark's obsession about whether Kim Jong Un (Randall Park) has a butthole or not. Make no mistake about it, if there is bodily humor to be mined, Rogen and Goldberg found a way to write it into the script, including an appropriately timed shart during the titular event.  But this is not some scathing takedown of media obsession or a penetrating look into the myth of North Korea's leader. This is a dumb comedy that uses easy jokes with relatively good results, and says as much about the media as Rogen and Goldberg had to say about underage drinking, marijuana laws, or the Book of Revelations. And that's it. Not the worst movie of the year, and not anywhere near the best. If you liked Superbad, Pineapple Express, or This is the End, odds are you'll enjoy The Interview. If you didn't, I don't care how patriotic you're feeling, this is not going to be two hours well spent. In this case, track record says everything.

 While we're on the subject of "track record," you'll notice that Magic in the Moonlight follows Blue Jasmine in the "what's Woody Allen releasing this year?" filmography. If you've been keeping up with Allen, at least with respect to the movies he's making, you'll know that since his "return" to making movies people want to watch (let's start with Match Point), there's been a pattern of "really good to great one" followed by "pretty good one that you'll forget he made until someone brings it up." Like Scoop. Remember Scoop? It came out after Match Point, and is an amusing movie about Scarlett Johannson talking to a ghost and solving a murder mystery. It's okay if you only remembered Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the much better movie he made with Johannson and Penelope Cruz two year's later (I'm not sure anyone other than the Cap'n remembers Cassandra's Dream). After Vicky Cristina Barcelona came Whatever Works followed, the not very well regarded "Larry David as Woody Allen surrogate," which I liked a lot more than You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger. Midnight in Paris was followed by To Rome With Love, and so on. Ergo, Magic in the Moonlight is a perfectly pleasant, but at best is a trifle. That's not to say that a trifle can't be enjoyable on its own merits, particularly one whose stars are Colin Firth and Emma Stone.

 Magic in the Moonlight is another of Allen's "European" films, this one centered squarely in his favorite period: the roaring twenties. Wei Ling Soo (Firth), is probably not as well known by his given name, Stanley, but his "mystical magic of the Orient" still packs theaters. Stanley also fancies himself a renowned debunker of fraudulent "spiritualists," and when his old friend and fellow magician Howard Burkan (Simon McBurney) pays a visit, it quickly turns to Sophie Baker (Stone). Sophie and her mother (Marcia Gay Harden) have been making the rounds in France, providing advice from beyond the grave via the younger Baker's "gifts," and a family Howard is close to appear to be her next "mark"s, so to speak. Stanley can't resist the opportunity to expose her, but the unassuming Sophie may be more than he bargained for. In fact, she might even be the real deal...

 If there's something holding Magic in the Moonlight back from being more than just charming, it's that Stanley is, even to the end, an irredeemable egomaniac. When he's right, he lords it over other characters, but when he's wrong, he still finds a way to make it about magnanimous he is to admit he was mistaken (see the press conference he holds when he finally accepts Sophie as legitimate). It's a romantic comedy where you'd much rather Sophie end up with the "Baxter": the ukulele serenading wet blanket Brice Catlidge (Hamish Linklater), only because Stanley is so full of himself that he firmly believes he's doing Sophie a favor by suggesting they marry. It isn't, I suppose, that he's wrong, but he's so insufferable throughout the film that I scarcely felt like he deserved Sophie, a free spirit who loosens him up, only to make him less appealing. That said, much of the film looks marvelous, as Allen soaks in the French countryside and revels in the hot jazz, clothes, and cars of the era. Magic in the Moonlight is a fun movie to watch, but not one you'll be thinking about for long after. Then again, there's something to be said for well made fluff, even if the taste doesn't linger.

 On the more biting end of that spectrum, I would suppose, is Frank. I've already reviewed it, and depending on your taste for deliberately avant garde music or comedies with a serious dark side (and not always in a way that's funny), it may or may not be to your tastes. Michael Fassbender is something to see, however, acting for most of the movie from behind an oversized paper mache mask. Here's a snippet of the original review:

 "Were I you, I wouldn't go into Frank expecting a comedy, because while it is often funny (or at the very least, amusing), there's a dark undercurrent to the film. The original keyboardist isn't the only person involved in the band that gives up on living, and the contentious atmosphere never softens. While it's frequently an interesting movie to watch, Frank keeps you at a distance until the very end. The last scene brings about some sense of setting things right, but on its own terms, and in the meantime it's hard to find a character to sympathize with. Jon (Domhall Gleeson) transitions from affable to duplicitous not long after they arrive at the cabin, and the other chief option, Frank, is a mystery until late into the film."

 If you don't mind, I'd like to take a moment to address some films which would generally fall under the "kids' movies" umbrella. As you may or may not know, I am still a fan of much of it, but don't watch nearly as many as I used to. In fact, if we don't include the two-and-a-half I'm about to mention, you could argue that the only other children's movie I saw in 2014 was A Talking Cat?!?!?, and it's better that we not discuss that. Still, I did manage to catch Disney's first animated Marvel movie, one of their live action musicals, and a non-Disney movie that should, for all intents and purposes, just be a giant commercial. Surprisingly, then, it's The Lego Movie that I was the most pleased with.

I give much of the credit for this to directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (22 Jump Street), who managed to take a film that should have just been shameless advertising (look at the title, for crying out loud) and make it a fun and often very funny movie that sneaks in some pathos at the end. It even tugged at the heartstrings of this crusty old Cap'n. A first rate voice cast doesn't hurt, and The Lego Movie boast Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Charlie Day, Will Ferrell, Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman, Will Arnett, Alison Brie, and tons of cameos from the likes of Will Forte, Nick Offerman, Jake Johnson, Cobie Smulders, Keegan-Michael Key, Jorma Taccone, Billy Dee Williams, and Jump Street alums Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum and Dave Franco. The writing is snappy, the plot is breathlessly paced, and the CGI convincingly replicates Lego. And I didn't even really want to buy Lego sets afterwards, which is good because I know how expensive they are.

 Oh, and of course there's the song. You know the one. About how conformity is awesome and everything is cool when you do what you're told. What? Am I changing the words or something? That seems like the gist of it. Anyway, you have it in your heads again, unless you haven't seen The Lego Movie, in which case you didn't know that song your friends' kids were singing was from The Lego Movie. So here, watch this.

 Like another Marvel film that came out this year, I hadn't really heard of the source material for Big Hero 6, but I feel I can't be blamed for that, as it comes from the same collective who brought the Disney Channel Ben 10 Alien something or other. No actual offense intended, but other than briefly encountering Ben 10 merchandise at a toy store, I have no connection whatsoever to it. This has little bearing on Big Hero 6, which is still a pretty entertaining movie despite following the "superhero / team origin story" to the letter.

 To wit: Hiro (Ryan Potter) is a young slacker with a gift for making robots, but his lack of direction worries his brother, Tadashi (Daniel Henney). Tadashi takes his brother to the institute he studies at, one for young inventors like Go Go (Jamie Chung), Wasabi (Damon Wayans, Jr.), Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez), and Fred (T.J. Miller), under the tutelage of Professor Robert Callaghan (James Cromwell). Tadashi is working on Baymax (Scott Adsit), an inflatable robot designed to provide medical care, and Hiro decides to apply himself. Then, after an encounter with businessman Allister Krei (Alan Tudyk) at a convention ends in tragedy, Hiro loses his brother and finds solace in Baymax. They work together as a team to solve a murder mystery, there's betrayal, hurt feelings, and the surprise identity of the villain.

 And yet, despite the fact that you can guess exactly where Big Hero 6 is going every single step of the way, the film manages to be frequently amusing and engaging. Perhaps it's the jumbled near-future world of San Fransokyo, or the design of the characters as hero. Or maybe it's just Baymax, who is easily worth watching the film for. I can't attest to its originality or any novelty in storytelling, but sometimes when you do something familiar well enough, it can carry you through. Considering that one of my favorite movies of this year falls directly into that category, I can't therefore hold it against Big Hero 6, but it's middle-tier Disney / Pixar, and certainly not something I would choose over the likes of Wreck-It Ralph in the future.

 Serviceable is perhaps an unfair way to characterize Disney's Into the Woods, because it damns a perfectly fun Steven Sondheim adaptation with faint praise. I'm trying very hard to separate the film from the stage production, because while I understand the need for many of the changes, it doesn't make me miss the narrator's presence in the second "act" any less. What Rob Marshall (Chicago) chose to do instead makes sense in its own way, and creates a nice cyclical tone to the fairy tale presentation, but the film is decidedly less "meta" than its source. Still, everyone in the cast gives it their all (with the exception, perhaps, of a totally superfluous Johnny Depp cameo as the Big Bad Wolf, which amounts to "Johnny Depp with prosthetic whiskers") and it's always visually engaging. Meryl Streep might not be by Witch (that's staying with Bernadette Peters), but I can't act as though she doesn't do a fine job. James Corden and Emily Blunt make a fine pair as the Baker and his Wife, and Anna Kendrick is fitfully fretful as Cinderella being chased by her Prince Charming (Chris Pine, who I didn't realize could sing). MacKenzie Mauzy and Billy Magnussen make less of an impression as Rapunzel and her Prince, but it's more than compensated for by Daniel Huttlestone and Lilla Crawford as Jack and Little Red Riding Hood. It may not be my Into the Woods, but it's certainly a good starting point for younger audiences, even if Disney tried very hard to pretend it wasn't a musical in the advertising.

 Rather than repost my earlier Godzilla review (with bonus Godzilla on Monster Island coverage), I'll link to the original and include the following excerpt, in case you're fatigued from Into the Woods paragraph-ness:

 "But in all seriousness Godzilla 2014 is pretty good stuff. I give it some grief but generally speaking the monster fights at the end are worth the price of admission. I liked that Edwards decided to show most of the MUTO mayhem from the perspective of the people on the ground, where they lose sight of monsters in the dust or are falling from a carrier plane and can see part of Godzilla as the descend through the clouds. It's a good visual hook for the film and does convey the sense of carnage better than the obvious miniatures in Godzilla on Monster Island. Although those miniatures are pretty funny looking and are actually being smashed (or being burned with a flamethrower, in the case of tanks) I did chuckle every time Strathairn said "Godzilla," which wasn't nearly as often as I'd hoped.. In most ways, the newer film has the better budget and conveys the power and size of Godzilla better, but it also doesn't have Space Cockroaches."

Likewise, I'll provide you with the original review of Cheap Thrills, and tantalize you with this portion, wherein the Cap'n makes an unusual comparison to, uh, A Serbian Film:


"I'm intentionally not telling you how crazy things get because not knowing what's going to happen or how far down the rabbit hole [the characters] are willing to go is part of the fun of watching Cheap Thrills. Like Ti West's The House of the Devil, there is a sense early on that something bad is always about to happen, but [...] (r)ather than simply shoving our faces in the ugly side of humanity for 87 minutes, E.L. Katz makes sure there's also comedy peppered throughout [...] (there's a sequence of events late in the film involving a meat cleaver and an iron that shouldn't be as funny as it is, but a well disguised reveal makes the laughter more hearty).

 Black comedies are notoriously tricky to get right, but Katz threads the needle very well with Cheap Thrills, and does it without ever making what happens seem outside of the realm of possibility. Other than one challenge I can't imagine anyone have time to make up on the fly, everything in the film matches the verisimilitude with which it's presented, which is all the more impressive. Cheap Thrills is a great movie to watch with friends who don't mind a little twisted in their cinema, and you won't have to clean vomit up off of the floor (maybe). I don't think you can say the same about A Serbian Film, so I think I know which one I'd pick."

 And on that note, we'll make an uncomfortable left turn to discuss the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, an actor I've long admired who left sooner than I'd like. If there's any upside (and really, there isn't), there were at least a few finished films in the can we could enjoy, and I saw two of the three this year: A Most Wanted Man and God's Pocket. (I'm going to have to watch the first two Hunger Games movies if I want to see his final films*).

 I knew about the former but not the latter, in large part because A Most Wanted Man comes from Anton Corbijn (Control, The American) and is based on a John le Carré (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Constant Gardener) novel, which would imply a stripped down narrative presented in a low key fashion. Which, in fact, it is, sometimes to its detriment. The film follows Günther Bachmann (Hoffman), a spy operating a small operation in Post 9/11 Hamburg, as he picks up on and tries to intercept Chechen refugee Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) who sneaks into Germany. The US and German authorities are interested in this undocumented Muslim, but Gunther's interest is piqued when it becomes clear he's not radicalized, but is looking to claim the fortune of his father, a Russian general.

Gunther allows Issa to contact immigration lawyer Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams), and through her, the bank where his inheritance is being kept. The manager, Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe), is resistant, but Günther convinces both of them that they can use Issa's money to definitively prove that Islamic philanthropist Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi) is funneling cash into terrorist cells. It's an uncomfortable bargain, but Tommy agrees, Annabel has no choice, and Issa is none the wiser. The only person who concerns Günther more than the German authorities is Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright), a representative from the CIA who is more than aware of his previous failure, the one that landed him in Hamburg, constantly begging for more time from the locals.

 After it becomes clear in A Most Wanted Man what Issa is really after, much of the tension tied up with the "post 9/11" setting drains away, and Corbijn's film becomes strictly a character study of a man who has been down on his luck too many times. It barely sustains itself, narratively, and like many Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the ending is decidedly anti-climactic. This is not to say it isn't satisfying or appropriate, or that it shouldn't be inevitable for Günther, but it does rob the film of a certain quality. I enjoyed watching A Most Wanted Man, but not quite as much as I'd hoped. Hoffman is fantastic: sullen, slouched over like a man who knows failure all too well, for whom even sitting up is laborious. Once you work out his accent, it's a real wonder to watch Hoffman work. Wright, Dafoe, and McAdams are also very good in not particularly showy roles. I wouldn't hesitate recommending A Most Wanted Man, but don't be surprised if you feel a bit like Günther when it's all over.

 God's Pocket doesn't stray much further from the concept of "loser noir," if we're talking strictly from a protagonist's point of view. The passion project of John Slattery (Mad Men), who adapted Peter Dexter's novel (with Alex Metcalf) and directed, it's tonally akin to a film like The Drop - which I'll be reviewing in a future part of this series. Hoffman again plays a man accustomed to being browbeaten, not merely for his lot in life, but because of where he's from. Or, to be more specific, where he's not from.

 Mickey Scarpato (Hoffman) lives in the small community of God's Pocket, Pennsylvania, but he's not from there. That's a problem, because the working class of God's Pocket only give any credence to people who grew up there, so while Mickey is married to local gal Jeanie (Christina Hendricks) and delivers meat (that might be stolen) to restaurants around town, he's not of them. He's just there, and if you really ask anybody, Mickey has his father-in-law to thank for the business in the first place. His stepson, Leon (Caleb Landy Jones), is a real piece of work, and when he mouths off one time too many at work, he ends up on the wrong side of the pipe. The workers tell the cops it was an accident, and Jeanie goes catatonic, convinced of foul play and delusional about her son.

 Money for the funeral is going to be tricky, and Mickey knows that Smilin' Jack Moran (Eddie Marsan) either gets his full payment, or else. (The "or else," by the way, turns out to be a cruel and darkly humorous turn late in the film.) His only real friend in town is Arthur Capezio (John Turturro), a small link in the mob chain that Mickey sometimes finds himself involved in. But things do not go so well for Mickey and Arthur, and the death of Leon draws the attention of local newspaper columnist and "man of the people" Richard Shellburn (Richard Jenkins). A barely functioning alcoholic, Shellburn can't resist Jeanie, and the shell-shocked housewife is easy prey for a guy two steps removed from greatness.

 The story comes colliding together over the course of a few days, between Leon's death and his funeral, and carries over just a bit to include Shellburn saying just a little too much about the people of God's Pocket. And then, for good measure, there's an amusing epilogue which may or may not be a happy ending. I had heard that people felt "cheated" that God's Pocket wasn't a dark comedy, which perhaps it was billed as, but instead a character study that grows increasingly desperate. Yes, there are some (mostly) morbidly funny parts, but Coen-esque is not how I'd characterize Slattery's film. That said, if you come in with expectations properly in check, you're really going to enjoy God's Pocket, even if you're just an outsider, like Mickey.

 Finally, I'd like to mention that while I get why so many people are raving about The Skeleton Twins, it seems to the Cap'n like the film gets along largely on the charisma of its leads: Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader. Like St. Vincent, it's a story that's been told so many times that you can see the beats coming a mile away. Take two estranged siblings with a hinted at difficult childhood, reconnect after one or both attempt suicide, and drop the outsider sibling back hometown. There's a rekindling of a torrid love affair from long ago, a marriage that isn't as solid as it would appear, and maybe some other infidelity to boot. Hell, there's even a scene where the titular siblings are mad at each other, but overcome it and rekindle their bond by lip synching to Starship's "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now," and you know how I feel about Starship.

 And yet, it's hard to deny that despite some rote, dare I say eye-rolling moments that seem to come along with every film like this from, I don't know, Garden State onward, The Skeleton Twins is worth seeing for Hader and Wiig. It isn't just that they're playing against type - this film just barely qualifies as "comedy" - but that their real life friendship from years together on SNL bleeds onto the screen, making it very believable to buy them as brother and sister. There's a moment in the dentist's office where Maggie (Wiig) works that feels like improvisation. Maggie and Milo (Hader) collapse into uncontrollable laughter, and it's a genuine moment that helps The Skeleton Twins overcome its more predictable tendencies.

 There are a few other good characters in the film: Luke Wilson plays Lance, Maggie's "how did they end up together husband," who despite his role in the story manages to come out as a decent, honest guy who tries to include Milo into their dynamic. Ty Burrell has the second most substantive role as Rich, Milo's former English teacher who has issues of his own, and whose relationship with his former student is a serious sticking point for Maggie. Of course, she has her own issues with monogamy, and the current object of her obsessive infidelity is Billy (Boyd Holbrook), her scuba instructor. Joanna Gleeson has a cameo as Maggie and Milo's mother, and it gives some hint into their dysfunctional family history. But by and large, this is Wiig and Hader's show, and they're certainly worth the price of admission. Bear in mind that The Skeleton Twins is often a very dark movie, one that addresses suicide frequently throughout the film, so don't expect to chuckle your way through the film. We're not talking Heathers, here. Actually, IMDB lists Frank as a "similar" film, and now that I think about it, that's appropriate.

 Next time we'll take a look at some of the bigger releases of 2014 that I was really looking forward to seeing, and maybe didn't end up being so thrilled with. They're ones I get asked about a lot, so we'll take a look and figure out the whys and hows soon...



 * This is not to say I won't or wouldn't have otherwise, just that I haven't seen them yet. People I know and whose opinions I generally trust have vouched for them. I just haven't gotten around to it, yet.

Cap'n Howdy's Best of 2013: Spring Breakers

 It was around the ski masks and shotguns ballet to Britney Spears' "Every Time" that I began to really appreciate the twisted brilliance of Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers. That happens later in the film, to be sure, but up to that point I had appreciated, yet not quite been sure what to make of Korine's first brush with mainstream cinema since Kids* nearly twenty years ago. Audiences were polarized early in 2013 by a movie being sold as titillation but was anything but. Don't get me wrong, there's a great deal of nudity, almost all of it gratuitous, but nothing titillating about it. If anything, the opposite effect is the case. It's not meant to join the realm of Skinemax late night fare, and in tricking audiences into thinking otherwise, Korine pulled a fast one and brought them in to a fancier version of his art house fare.

 For Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), Cotty (Rachel Korine), and Faith (Selena Gomez), college life is a drag. The town they live in sucks, and no amount of drugs is going to change that. Faith at least has her Church Youth Group (led by former WWF Women's Champion Jeff Jarrett), but the other girls are obsessed with sex and living the wild life, like you see in movies. They want to go to Florida for spring break, and come hell or high water, that's what they're going to do. The only problem? They don't have enough money, so Candy and Brit decide to hold up a restaurant with toy guns. "Just pretend it's a movie," they tell each other, and with Cotty behind the wheel (of a car they stole from her professor), they get the money. Spring break, here we come!

 And for a little while, Spring Breakers is exactly what you'd think it is: a Bacchanalian celebration of excess. Gratuitous nudity, copious drug use, drinking, all in the open with Korine's (and by extension, our) voyeuristic gaze taking it all in. If you groan at the use of the phrase "phallic imagery," I suggest you watch Spring Breakers to see exactly what people mean when they use it. When I say a character literally fellates a gun like it's a phallus, I mean it. There's no other way to read that scene, but we'll get to that in a bit. One of the negative reviews that sold me on Spring Breakers compared the film to "Terrence Malick making a Girls Gone Wild video," which doesn't sound like a reason to stay away, and it's not far off. The credits sequence alone is a slow motion orgy of booze, boobs, and bros mugging for the camera, set to the cacophonous dub-step of Skrillex. That's just the mood setter.

 Korine gives us spring break as everybody imagines it (think that movie nobody saw, The Real Cancun, from a few years ago, or Piranha 3D), and as he giveth, so too does he taketh away. While the daytime is overblown contrast and bright sunlight, the nights are awash in a flourescent glow, giving way to a pallid, unseemly vibe as the girls continue to party on their own. The bright colors wash away, and everything and everyone looks worn out. Faith grows slightly uncomfortable with the joy Brit and Candy take from robbing the diner, but they're her friends, and spring break is everything she ever dreamed of (or, so she tells her grandma in a narrated letter). Reality just doesn't cut it.

 During a particularly raucous hotel party, things come crashing down and the girls end up in jail. Unable to pay their bail, they face another two days locked up, until an unlikely (and unsavory) savior comes to the rescue - Alien (James Franco), a local drug dealer / rapper / sleazeball. He runs a mid-sized drug operation with the Twins (Thurman and Sidney Sewell) and takes a liking to the girls because they're wild. Maybe even wilder than he counted on. Franco is the tipping point for Spring Breakers, where the debauchery becomes more interesting and less about just drinking and doing drugs, and it's when Korine really begins layering repetition of sound and imagery to create a hallucinatory effect.

 Alien seems to be a big man, but it's not long before we realize it's even more bluster than he's willing to admit. Showing off his house to the girls, with a bed covered in money, one wall covered in ball caps and another with guns and "ninja weapons," Alien reveals just how small time he is when he starts his "look at my shit" speech by saying "I got shorts of every color." He doesn't even take them to see the poolside pearl white piano until later - classic rookie mistake. Franco's Alien as a guy who acts the part but doesn't really want to deal with the consequences of who he is. He's a boy playing a thug, but he can't commit to it. Candy and Brit see through it immediately, which leads to the aforementioned fellating a glock scene, when Alien falls in love with them. They're really in for it, farther than he knew he could go, and it emboldens him. It's a reminder that when Franco isn't being "weird," he can really bring something to a character, and if often unrecognizable behind Alien's facade.

 Faith, on the other hand, sees right away what's going to happen, and she decides to leave. Later, when things get a little too real, Cotty also leaves, and Korine repeats the visual motif of riding away on the bus, right down to the positions the girls take in their seats. For Alien, Brit, and Candy, it's "Spring break... spring break forever," but too much of a good thing is enough for half of the original gang. From here on out, reality no longer applies. Just pretend you're in a movie.

 Korine repeats Franco's line about "spring break forever" over and over for the remainder of the film, punctuating montages and overlapping images that jump forward and backward in time. It's the only way Alien can mentally deal with the reality that his former friend / mentor Big Arch (Gucci Mane) is tired of sharing the drug scene in St. Petersburg, and has decided to end it, violently if necessary. With Brit and Candy egging him on, there seems to be only one way to go, but is Alien ready to go there?

 The final scenes of the film, when Korine turns the "just pretend you're in a movie" mantra into an actuality, works precisely because of the juxtaposition between reality and the fantasy of spring break. Alien wants to believe he can live spring break forever, but the girls really are living in some kind of warped version of reality, where they alone can survive a shootout unscathed and leave town on their own terms, not on some bus. By casting 3/4's of the female leads with former Disney / ABC Family stars, Korine is tapping into some sexualization of teen stars and turning it on its head. The girls are more dangerous than the gangsters, and they are (from the very beginning) as sex crazed as the boys (and men) who flocked to see Spring Breakers.

 Korine's larger point? I'm still mulling that over, because for all of the exploitation on display, it's worth noting that most of the nudity of the lead actresses comes from Kornine's wife. Up until nearly the very end, it's a bait and switch - promising Dirty Disney Girls and then providing flesh from nearly everybody else who steps near the camera - but Spring Breakers leaves one feeling sleazy during most of the partying. It is, to a degree anti-voyeuristic, showing too much, providing a sensory overload, so that when the real movie starts about halfway in, you're beaten down, ready for the dark undercurrent to bubble up. And then, and only then, does Korine let the movie fantasy take over, pushing further away from "reality," until the impossible ending is all but inevitable. There's something admirable about that, especially when you consider that Spring Breakers was marketed as a T&A comedy of sorts. Not too shabby coming from the guy who made Trash Humpers a few years ago.

 * Korine wrote Kids, but is probably (if at all) better known for directing Gummo and Mister Lonely. I'm guessing more of you are aware of Kids than the other two.

2013 Recap: Working Our Way Up to the Top (Part One)

 Now that we're done wallowing in the worst of 2013, it's time to move on and work our way up to the very best. When we last met I promised that starting with this batch, the Cap'n might not be covering the best that last year had to offer, but from here on out I'd recommend almost everything. There are any number of diverse options for varying tastes, and I suspect you'll find at least something to like in what I saw.

 Unlike the normal "list" format that you see so often on the Blogorium, I'm going to try grouping movies together under loosely unifying themes. It keeps things from getting too long in the tooth and will give you a rough idea of where I'm coming from while evaluating each entry. Some are more logically connected than others, but while I was putting this together, individual films gravitated together, so hopefully this works. Let's start with a fairly logical grouping:


 Three Disney Films That were Pretty Good, but I'm in No Hurry to Revisit.

 I didn't see Frozen last year, which I suppose is in keeping with an unofficial trend of missing newer Walt Disney animated films in theaters (I think the last one I saw during its first run was... The Lion King?), but I did see two live action features and the second sequel from the re-branded Disney / Pixar. Of the three, I probably enjoyed Monsters University the most; it's slight, and problematic in that it's a prequel to Monsters, Inc., so we already know that Mike and Sully will end up friends.

Putting aside the fact that they claimed to have met much earlier in life according to the first filmMonsters University is an amusing and sometimes clever Pixar version of the "college" genre. There are prerequisite references to Animal House and lots of foreshadowing of things to come in the movie we've already seen, but it's nice to have everybody back and Billy Crystal and John Goodman are clearly giving 110%. Steve Buscemi is in and out of the story as a younger, nicer, Randall Boggs, and the new additions (including Nathan Fillion, Charlie Day, Sean Hayes, Dave Foley, and Alfred Molina and Helen Mirren as faculty members) are all welcome. If there's one thing that pushes it slightly over the "prequel" trap, it's that while most of the most goes exactly how you'd expect it to, the denoument is quite a surprise. I'm impressed that Dan Scanlon, Robert L. Baird, and Daniel Gerson opted to take the road less travelled by in closing the story out, and there's a sense of earning the connection to Monsters, Inc. that I appreciated.

 While we're on the subject of prequels, Sam Raimi's Oz: The Great and Powerful got its share of grief for being simultaneously too much and not enough like The Wizard of Oz earlier this year. I will admit that the movie is perhaps not what it could be (although, what were we expecting?), the nearly unanimous consensus I've heard from friends - particularly ones with children - was that they were entertained. Unlike most people, I liked James Franco as the Wizard-to-be, and found some interest in the fact that Raimi keeps him as a basically weasely trickster for most of the movie. Whereas Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland sequel-ish thing for Disney headed down the Narnia-route with an unnecessary battle scene, Raimi keeps the great showdown between Oscar Diggs and the Witch of the East (yes, I'll still keep it a secret which witch is which) limited to an unorthodox clash between magic and illusion. The Wonderful Wizard triumphs specifically because he's so good at misdirection.

Is the rest of the cast great? Eh... maybe not. I liked Michelle Williams as Glinda, and Mila Kunis and Rachel Weisz are okay as Theodora and Evanora, but neither of them really get the chance to develop as characters. Bruce Campbell puts up with a beating from Tony Cox to secure his name in the opening credits (and he's in the movie for maybe five minutes, tops). Joey King's China Girl is something of a marvel as a character but Zach Braff's Finley the talking monkey is mostly there for Oscar to have someone to be mean to. The special effects range from very impressive to okay, but I did enjoy the vintage "Raimi inflicting pain on his lead actor" during the tornado after an otherwise okay opening. I will say the change in aspect ratio and color was a nice touch, but there are too many forced connections crammed in very quickly before Franco shuttles off to Oz.

 The parts may not all work or, at times, even fit together, but the sum is fitfully amusing for one of two viewings. I have no idea if I'm going to watch Oz: The Great and Powerful again any time soon, or if it will have any lasting replay value, but for one go-round the trip down the Yellow Brick Road was worth it.

 I don't mention it here a lot, but the Cap'n is a lifelong fan of Mary Poppins. It's not the kind of thing you'd probably expect, which is why it doesn't come up much, but it's true. Even Dick Van Dyke's terrible cockney accent doesn't bother me; I can settle down and watch it almost any old time and feel like a kid again. Accordingly, I was cautiously optimistic about Saving Mr. Banks, the Disney-approved story of Walt Disney's efforts to secure P.L. Travers' approval of the Mary Poppins we all know and love today (okay, I'm assuming you have the same affinity for it as I do).

 It's a double edged sword, because yes, some of the contentious opinions that Travers had during and after the film's released are, shall we say, smoothed over in favor of a more conventional "dealing with daddy issues" storyline. On the other side, I don't imagine any other studio could have shot on the Disney lot in the original locations (or approximations thereof) and had the level of access and imagery you'd need. Think about Fox Searchlight's Hitchcock, which somehow manages to avoid Universal Studios almost entirely, despite the fact that Universal released Psycho and the iconic house is on their tour.


 Saving Mr. Banks is structured alternating between "present day" 1961 and turn of the century Australia, where Pamela Travers (Emma Thompson) remembers her childhood and her whimsical father (Colin Farrell - I'm leaving out the character name on the off chance you don't know anything about Travers). Throughout the film, we learn more and more about her father, why they have to move around the continent, and the foundations of where the character of Mary Poppins comes from, all while Travers struggles with Disney (Tom Hanks)'s insistence the movie be made his way, with animated penguins and songs, much to her dismay. Travers has an inherent disgust for Walt Disney's films, and early in the movie watches Walt on TV with Tinkerbell, only to sigh "Poor (J.M.) Barrie."

 She's staunchly against giving over the rights to Mary Poppins and is reticent to deal with screenwriter Don DeGradi (Bradley Whitford) and songwriting duo the Sherman brothers: Richard (Jason Schwartzman) and Robert (B.J. Novak), who don't quite understand why. As an audience, we already know how this turns out, and as we see the kernels of what become iconic moments in Mary Poppins, we're obviously rooting for Travers to "come around." At the same time, Saving Mr. Banks is told primarily through Travers' perspective, and while she's often rude and dismissive, we like her. The film takes a few steps in the "easy" direction of softening Thompson as Travers, in particular through a totally sympathetic limo driver played by Paul Giamatti who just happens to have the perfect bonding moment at the perfect time with the writer. Wisely, Walt Disney is shuttled off to the background, so that the naturally likeable Tom Hanks is able to always be a voice of reason and never grouchy (they do show him smoking, though. Kudos to that).

 While it's a touch predictable and perhaps not the most forthright (I would recommend reading Vern's review for a more thorough examination of the negative reaction towards Disney and Travers from other critics) about the actual facts, Saving Mr. Banks is nevertheless a worthwhile "true story," and one people might not be familiar enough with. If you like Mary Poppins or Walt Disney or just Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks, it's an easy recommendation. Just don't expect anything too in depth about the man behind the Mouse or anything hyper-critical, and you'll have a nice time. I liked it, but will probably stick with Mary Poppins from here on out.

 Oh, and while we're on the subject of "true story with some liberties taken..."

 Speaking of "Inspired By a True Story"

 If you're going to watch Oprah Winfrey presents Lee Daniels' The Butler "Inspired By an Article We Read and Pretty Much Went from There," I would strongly recommend not doing so anywhere in the vicinity of 12 Years a Slave or Forrest Gump. It will bring up unsatifsying comparisons to the former and oddly specific connections to the latter, and in all honesty I have the feeling that most audiences will find plenty to enjoy about the story of Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), a White House butler that served Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, (I guess) Carter, and Reagan. For me, it didn't do much, but that's largely because the screenplay by Danny Strong (Game Change, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) is so predictable.

 The film is "inspired by a true story" in the way that Strong took Will Haygood's Article "A Butler Well Served by this Election" and used it as a springboard to cover race relations in the United States from 1926 to 2008. Eugene Allen became Cecil Gaines, and what Gaines doesn't see firsthand in the White House is covered by his son Louis Gaines (David Oyelowo), giving the film a sort of Gump-like tour through major moments in Civil Rights history. I'm trying hard not to diminish the efforts of Daniels, Strong, or the excellent cast, but the problem I had with The Butler is that you can predict almost like clockwork what's going to happen next based on perfunctory set-up scenes.

 For example (SPOILER, I guess), let's say that Cecil's other son Charlie (Elijah Kelly) has a conversation with Louis about how he's going to Vietnam and Louis warns him he's going to get killed. Charlie tells Louis (who is at this point a member of the Black Panther Party and on the outs with his father) not to come to his funeral if he dies. So when we get the scene that Charlie has been killed, does it happen during the same sequence when Cecil and his wife Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) are watching Soul Train and wearing Disco outfits? Look, I can understand the use of emotional juxtaposition, but you can spot it a mile away over and over again during The Butler and that really took me out of the movie.

 There's also a strange sense of moralization going on during The Butler that's reminiscent of Forrest Gump: Freedom Riders are good, Black Panthers are bad. Martin Luther King Jr. is peaceful, but the only scene involving Malcolm X (as Louis and his girlfriend are walking away from one of his speeches) ends with gunshots. Gloria has a brief dalliance with her neighbor, Howard (Terrence Howard), who ends up being shot by someone else's jealous husband. The Black Panther section, in particular, is almost cartoonish - Louis abandons the Freedom Riders after King is assassinated and brings his girlfriend to dinner, only for Cecil to throw them both out. But Louis also abandons the Black Panthers after one meeting that suggest retaliatory violence against the police, which is followed in the next shot by news of the Panthers being raided by the FBI. I'm sorry, there's no subtlety there whatsoever. Louis and Cecil finally reconcile during a rally to free Nelson Mandela, and then it jumps forward to the 2008 election. If you're wondering if someone dies of before she can vote for Obama, I suggest you look for Oprah Winfrey during the Supporting Actress nominations.

 I found that the end result was that while I watched The Butler, I began to wonder about the more trivial moments, like the often bizarre casting of the Presidents. Questions like "are they really not going to use anything other than a fake nose to make John Cusack look like Nixon?" to "I wonder what was going through Jane Fonda's mind while she was playing Nancy Reagan?" floated around with "why didn't they bother finding someone to play Jimmy Carter?" or "isn't Liev Schreiber too young to be Lyndon Johnson?" If you ever wondered what would happen if Alan Rickman was asked to impersonate Ronald Reagan, you'll get your answer in The Butler. Robin Williams is Eisenhower, James Marsden is Kennedy, and Minka Kelly is Jackie Kennedy (of whom Gloria is inexplicably jealous). The individual moments with the presidents are sometimes so odd that you forget the otherwise fine performances from Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Lenny Kravitz as Whitaker's fellow White House butlers.

 Make no mistake about it: I can be a hard audience for movies, in part because I'm always trying to put together where a film is going next, so The Butler was unfortunately too "easy" for me. Most audiences will find more to like about it than I did, and I'm not trying to say it wasn't good. But for the Cap'n, it wasn't anything more than "good," and I saw movies this year that were a LOT better than good.

  And to close this out, I'd like to take a look at another movie "inspired" on a true story (is this just the new thing to avoid people thinking that a condensed version of someone's life isn't 100% factually accurate?), Dallas Buyers Club. I will openly admit I know almost nothing about Ron Woodruff, the Dallas electrician / rodeo rider who contracted HIV and found a way to make money off of medicine not approved by the FDA by bringing it in from other countries. I listened to a segment about him on NPR shortly before the film's release and from interviews with people that knew him, the real Woodruff was perhaps even more gregarious than Matthew McConaughey portrays him in the film, and he cursed more, which is impressive considering the level of profanity in Dallas Buyer's Club.

 That said, I was rather impressed by the film from director Jean-Marc Vallée (Young Victoria) and screenwriters Craig Borten and Melissa Wallack. Woodruff, in the film, is a man out for number one, a gambler and ladies man who ultimately does a good deed mostly out of self interest, but who is often sympathetic even as we marvel at what a selfish, homophobic asshole he can be. Casting McConaughey goes a long way in helping to not be totally repulsed by Woodruff's actions and attitudes (at least early on); the actor has always been likeable, and string of recent performances went a long way to bringing him back from just a "naked bongo" punchline. Dallas Buyers Club is one of two movies I saw with McConaughey this year where I was very impressed with the actor, and his physical transformation as Woodruff is akin to Christian Bale's in The Machinist.

 But it's not just McConaughey, or some clever choices of misdirection early in the film (I'm thinking particularly of one scene where candles lead you to believe Woodruff is in one place when he's in nearly the polar opposite); Jared Leto is also something of a revelation as Rayon, a fellow AIDS patient who becomes Woodruff's business partner and slowly (though never unbelievably) something of a friend. Rayon never gives Woodruff an inch in his behavior, and the interplay between Leto and McConaughey is the film's strongest selling point. Jennifer Garner, Steve Zahn, and Griffin Dunne are also good in supporting roles, and Dallas Buyers Club mostly keeps things from wandering into maudlin or tear-jerker territory. Woodruff's battles with the medical industry and particularly with the FDA could easily fall into a "David vs. Goliath" narrative, but credit where it is due for keeping the story in less rigidly defined territory. It's a reasonably sober look at someone who did something good for maybe the wrong reasons, but did good nonetheless, and if I'm going to damn the other films in this section of the recap with faint praise, it only seemed fair to close out with something I think you'd all want to see.

"O" is for Oz - The Great and Powerful

 Allow me to begin with a seemingly unrelated anecdote: the reason I was hesitant to write a full review of The Hobbit last December was that when I found myself describing it to friends, I almost always began by saying "well, it's not as bad as you've heard it is." Beginning a review from a defensive position is tricky, and I find it's much more helpful when you have the benefit of time and context to help support enjoying a film with strong assumptions about its quality or lack thereof (see Retro Reviews of Tron and Dazed and Confused, both of which refute the most common stereotypes surrounding the films.)

 Meanwhile, movies that are more recent exist in the echo chamber that is the internet, where everything sucks more than it might actually and movies that are considered to be very good to great will also suck in a year's time*. So movies that are good but not great or that generally succeed in being entertaining for the target audience - let's say, kids - from directors held to impossibly high standards are therefore "total crap" and "a waste of time."

 And so the Cap'n finds himself in the unenviable position of explaining to you that while Sam Raimi's Oz - The Great and Powerful is nowhere as good as we thought we deserved, it's still a mostly harmless bit of Disney-fied Raimi as anyone should reasonably expect. Considering that trying to make anything tied to The Wizard of Oz without anything specifically trademarked in the MGM film (which, let's be honest, is where more people base their knowledge of Oz than Baum's novels), it's an admirable, if flawed, end result.


  Being that it's a prequel, I'm guessing you know that Oz - the Great and Powerful doesn't have Dorothy or the Tin Man or the Scarecrow or the Cowardly Lion (well, the latter two in a form you'd recognize, anyway) but it does have a young version of the Wizard - Oscar Diggs (James Franco) is a carnival con-artists and serial ladies man who finds himself in the wrong hot air balloon during the wrong tornado in Kansas and ends up in Oz. You might have heard of it. He meets three witches - Theodora (Mila Kunis), Evanora (Rachel Weisz) and later, Glinda (Michelle Williams) - one of whom will be a Wicked Witch of the West by the end of the film. Can you guess which one?

 SPOILER - It's Glinda. Totally Glinda. Those bubbles are toxic, man.

 Since Oscar isn't the Wizard we know yet, that means he has some adventures with characters not appearing in that other Oz movie (and also not that OTHER Oz movie or the OTHER OTHER OZ movie - sorry Tik-Tok and Pumpkinhead), so we meet some other Baum characters or variations thereof, like Finley (Zach Braff), a talking money who wears a bell-hop's uniform, and China Girl (Joey King) who is thankfully not a racist stereotype but is instead a little girl made of china. Also there's Knuck (Tony Cox), who I mention because it amuses me that the only thing he really wants to do is play a fanfare and nobody will let him.

 They have adventures, etc, and then Oz becomes the Great and Powerful by slaying the Jabberwocky... wait. Wrong Disney reboot of a famous children's novel turned movie. Actually Oz - The Great and Powerful manages to resolve itself without a huge battle, which puts it a notch above similar relaunches of crap that was for kids but is now bad-ass action (Snow White and the Huntsman, Jack the Giant Slayer, Alice in Wonderland). There's some ingenuity and good old fashioned misdirection to Oscar's plan that logically places him where we remember the Wizard from that other movie we can't see the likenesses of characters from. Hence the "sexy" Wicked Witch.

 I know, I know - I'm making it sound as bad as you assumed it was. The truth is that Oz - The Great and Powerful does a few things very right and plays it safe in a lot of other ways, and the end result is pleasant but mostly forgettable. It's summer popcorn fare a little bit earlier than usual and I suspect children love it. Good for them. It's not a timeless classic but it's a LOT better than I was expecting considering Alice's Adventures in Narnia is its spiritual ancestor in this round of "what property do we have people remember fondly?" If Oz - The Great and Powerful HAD to happen, this is at least a better version of it than I'd anticipated. There are some nice homages to the film done within legal parameters and I appreciated the Academy Aspect Ratio that opens the film (black and white, full frame, not sepia. We don't want to upset the ghost of Louis B. Mayer!)

  Also, when you compare it to the Raimi-produced Evil Dead remake, Oz - The Great and Powerful is a LOT better!

 Speaking of Evil Dead movies -  I'm not sure why people are clamoring so much for Army of Darkness 2 when it seems pretty clear to me that, like he did from Evil Dead to Evil Dead 2, Raimi remade the film and Disney slapped a different title on it. Make no mistake, were this film to star a younger Bruce Campbell and not James Franco (The Ape), you'd be wondering why Ash was fighting flying monkeys and non Deadites. But how, you ask? Allow me to explain:

 Both Army of Darkness and Oz - The Great and Powerful have a protagonist who is basically a good guy but who has some serious character flaws. Both are sucked through a vortex to another time / place and they immediately agree to the assumption that they are the great savior everybody has been waiting for. They take advantage of this for a brief period of time before being sent off on a quest that will rid the land of evil, and subsequently fail to do what they set out to do (yes, the reasons are different, but stick with me). They rally a small group of willing locals to fight a witch they were somewhat to directly responsible in creating and use modern science to overcome their foes. The only difference is that one leaves and the other one terrorizes a lion he will one day bestow courage onto. Also another witch turns into the "Raimi Hag" after being defeated, and will eventually be crushed by a house.

 (I couldn't find "The Classic" but have heard it's somewhere in there, despite the fact that Raimi's Oldsmobile would stick out like a sore thumb in turn of the twentieth century Kansas or in the land of Oz)

 I'd like to point out that I disagree with the common held argument that James Franco is wrong for the Oscar Diggs / the Wizard but that Robert Downey, Jr. (initially cast) or Johnny Depp (approached after Downey left) would have been better choices. While hating James Franco is almost as in vogue as hating Anne Hathaway or Kristen Stewart, he brings the right kind of sleazy but affable charm to the role. I like that he has his con man act down, and he's a non-threatening sort of lothario - charming but ultimately incapable of much more than skipping town.

 Robert Downey, Jr. has, for all intents and purposes, been showing us what his version of Oscar Diggs would be like since Iron Man - and to be frank, his presence would be overpowering in this movie. He's sweep in to Oz like a human tornado, chewing the scenery and owning the place from the moment he arrived, and it would, quite frankly, rob the reveal of "the Wizard" at the end of much of its power.

 Similarly, bringing Johnny Depp in would for Oz - The Great and Powerful into one of two directions - either Oscar Diggs would end up an eccentric when the audience desperately needs a protagonist who is closer to normal or we'd end up with the toned-down Johnny Depp of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, a leading man he was never meant to play. You bring in Depp for eccentricity, because when he plays the straight man or is forced to carry a film like this without being quirky, it collapses on itself.

 Not to mention furthering the connections between Oz - The Great and Powerful and The Tim Burton Players Present Alice in Wonderland, which already share a studio and producers. So hate James Franco all you want, but shy of Bruce Campbell circa 1993, he's as good of a choice as Raimi could make.

 Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Oz - The Great and Powerful's tangential connection to Disney's other Baum-inspired film, the traumatizing Return to Oz. Is Return to Oz a better movie? Well, it certainly elicits a stronger reaction from me than The Great and Powerful did, but that's because it scared the living daylights out of me as a child and some of the imagery (the hall of heads, the Mountain King) continue to haunt the recesses of my memory. Oz - The Great and Powerful mostly plays it safe instead of opting to give children nightmares, but one aspect of the film that I think gets overlooked is that it's still very much a Sam Raimi film - just in a context we're not necessarily used to seeing it.

 You need to wait no longer than the hot air balloon scene in the tornado to see the love that Raimi has to torment his leading man, as sharpened stakes of wood come at Diggs from every direction with ferocity and a sense of cruel glee coming from behind the camera. It continues throughout the film, after Diggs lands in Oz, although Raimi saves a bit for Bruce Campbell (who apparently managed to make it into the opening credits by spending the 60 seconds he has on screen by being beaten by Tony Cox with a stick). As I mentioned before, the return of the "Raimi Hag" was a nice surprise, although how I could have forseen him making a movie with witches and NOT including that, I don't know.

 For a film about goodness and light or some crap, the man in the title never really drops any of his misleading ways, right down to the establishing of his iconic throne room (I guess MGM couldn't prevent that one from happening, although the ruby slippers, Munchkins, and Flying Monkeys are absent or changed considerably). He's still a charming scoundrel, one that scared off one truly wicked witch and one that was basically evil because of him. While you can go home happy with your children, there's an undertone of cynicism in the film that I don't think gets attention.

 Since most of you will probably Redbox or Netflix Oz - The Great and Powerful (I can't believe I just used both of those as verbs), the hyperbole of internet complaining will be softened and you might even enjoy it. It's a trifle of a film, to be sure, and I'm not convinced we need more of these movies (don't tell Disney that), but it's honestly not as bad as you've heard. In fact, sometimes it's pretty good, or at least better than okay.

 Can you choose something better? Of course you can - there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of fantastic films out there just waiting for you - but let's be honest with ourselves. We all like a little mindless popcorn fun every now and then, and this isn't going to ruin your day with nit-picking or insultingly stupid narrative decisions. And it's Sam Raimi, so if you're going to make your case that I should watch Evil Dead because his name is attached, the least you can do is meet me half way.


* True story - while reading the comments under a review of Oblivion, I learned that Wall-E is over-rated, that Tron Legacy is better than Prometheus, and that Wall-E ripped off Short Circuit, therefore Wall-E sucks. Also that Wall-E is shit and everybody hates it just like Christopher Nolan fuck that guy.

"A" is for The Ape

 Back in 2005, James Franco was best known (to me) as the guy who played mopey, insular, navel-gazing male leads, exemplified by Harry Osborne, the only more tortured comic book character in the Spider-Man films than Peter Parker. He was the title character in Sonny and also James Dean in a movie of the same name and would continue along this path throughout most of the early to mid-2000s in movies like Annapolis and Tristan + Isolde before people (read: me) learned he was really more of a weird spaz who enjoyed arty movies that confounded mainstream audiences.

  I mean that in a good way, but since I was late to the Freaks and Geeks party, I didn't know that James Franco was funny or had an off-kilter sense of humor until after Pineapple Express. In fact, I may be one of the three people on Earth who didn't hate him as co-host of the Academy Awards because I had seen the SNL Franco hosted and that's pretty much exactly how I thought he would approach the Oscars.

 I can only imagine what people thought of The Ape in 2005 (provided anybody saw it then), Franco's adaptation of a play he wrote with Merriweather Williams and performed in California. It has the same kind of schlocky premise that would make Happy Madison a small fortune (in fact, The Zookeeper is probably the Sandler-fied version of this movie) but is tonally in a completely different zone. You know, as movies about talking gorillas go.

 Franco plays Harry, a struggling writer who abandons his family and moves to the big city (Hoboken, if I'm reading the signs correctly) to live alone in an apartment and finish his masterpiece. That is, of course, until he discovers that included with the apartment is a gorilla (Brian Lally) who talks and wears Hawaiian shirts, khakis, and sometimes beanie caps. The ape points out that there's even a provision in the lease that renders Harry responsible for "upkeep of the ape" and therefore, just like the last tenant, Harry has no choice but to live with his new roommate.

 There are, of course, shenanigans, and based on the premise alone I bet you can guess a few: Harry has an overbearing boss (Allison Bibicoff) that forces him to give a big presentation with short notice, Harry's wife is convinced he's seeing someone else while she works on pottery with her mentor, Flies with Eagles (David Markey), and Harry just can't seem to find time to write his novel. Because of the 800lb gorilla in the room, of course.

 So here's where it's pretty clear that The Ape is not a Happy Madison movie that goes exactly where you think it's going to, even when it does have similar narrative conceits. For one thing, Franco plays the whole thing like a drama, a serious, deadpan existential struggle that just happens to have a guy in a gorilla suit (that you can see light shining through in profile).

 Let's take a relatively simple gag from early in the film, one that would have the cheap seats howling with laughter in any other version of this story. Harry is resigned to living with the ape, but he insists that the gorilla is NOT sharing the bed with him. The ape, who has been taking what sounds like a really painful shit in the bathroom, flings his poop onto Harry and then jumps into the bed. The camera lingers on Franco for a moment, and then he lets out a scream of abject terror. Cue laugh track. The Ape is a movie that ends up being funny precisely because it's not funny. By design, I'd wager.

 Since he is the co-writer / director / star, I feel comfortable in assigning most of the tonal decisions to Franco, which makes The Ape a much more bizarre experience. It's hard to tell if he's making a comment about dumb gimmicks in comedies or if / when we are going to laugh at the film. I mean, it is funny, but almost never in the way a buddy movie with a talking animal normally is. In fact, it's hard to be sure whether the gorilla really exists or not. The landlady insists there's no clause in the lease, but Harry also gets lice from his roommate and it's so bad they have to send a memo out at work about it. There's a sense of "this is a low budget movie, so let's just go for it!" even when it isn't necessarily clear what "it" is supposed to be from scene to scene.

 Harry works for the HR department of the phone company, and there's a long scene about an hour into the film where Harry's co-worker Beth (Stacey Miller) has a conversation with another employee (Vince Jolivette) - who we've never seen before and won't see again - about what people really want out of life and then tangentially manage to tie it back into Harry, even though he's not in the room at any point.

 This isn't the only flourish that says "independent movie," by the way: as transitions, The Ape frequently cuts back to another primate that held up the title cards during the credits, and who will eventually let us know that the film jumps ahead "three months later." Franco, working with View Askew regulars Dave Klein (DP for most of Kevin Smith's films) and editor Scott Mosier (Smith's long time producer), makes a nice looking movie that only periodically looks like it was made on the cheap. I mean yes, there's a scene where Beth overhears Harry and his boss getting wild that's clearly out of focus and the transition from the beginning of finally writing his novel to the end of the first chapter is a little cheesy, but I can look past most of that. Even the performances, which range from pretty good to not so good, I don't mind. Credit where credit is due, Lally never overplays the gorilla - he's just sort of there, very matter of fact, and I kind of got a chuckle out of the line "I'm living the dream - I'm a gorilla living like a white man in the big city."

 However, The Ape takes a serious turn into "What the Hell Was That?" territory in the last ten minutes, making two rapid tonal shifts in a short span of time. Since I don't imagine many of you will ever watch this, I'll go ahead and say that yes, the titular character is a product of Harry's imagination, but that doesn't necessarily explain why Franco's hair is becoming more gorilla-like or the ape sex-doll he bought his buddy for Christmas. I'm pretty sure that was really there, although I guess you could argue that everything after Harry quits his job and loses his wife is totally in his head. Fair enough.

 The ending reminded me a little bit of the ending of Killer Joe - which while the movie technically came out after The Ape, the stage production is much older - in that while it's appropriate for the story being told, I'm guessing it works a lot better on stage than it does in the movie. Killer Joe at least went for abrupt ambiguity - The Ape literally fades the house lights before completely going to darkness.

 I gotta say that I admire Franco for making a movie like The Ape - it totally makes sense considering his life since Pineapple Express reads like an extended audition for I'm Still Here Part 2  - but I don't know that I'd watch The Ape again, or even recommend it. For one, I'm not entirely certain what Franco was saying or that he was successful in any of the possible readings of the story. I don't necessarily agree with the IMDB user review that said the movie was great because Franco was visibly high in scenes (I mean, it's possible, to be sure), but it's probably a little bit better than a 4.1.

 Well, maybe that's about right. I can't see many people that I know liking The Ape, or even really wanting to finish the movie, but I kinda appreciated the experience. If nothing else, it's going to change the way I watch Rise of the Planet of the Apes the next time I see it. It's an auspicious way to start off The ABCs of Movie Masochism, and that's what I was going for, y'know? Trying new things out...

 See you soon with "B" for Bullet to the Head, starring Sly Stallone and Jason Momoa.

Blogorium Review: Your Highness

  Sucks is a strong word. It's the kind of word that describes a movie that you loathe, that you actively hate beyond the point you'd forget other movies. Roger Ebert devoted an entire book to it, based on his disgust for Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, when he told Rob Schneider that "your movie sucks." There are very few movies for which I have so much venom for that I'd say they sucked. To no one's surprise, Your Highness doesn't really suck.

 (It's okay, you read that right.)

  Your Highness is one of those movies that people sure think sucks. It'll probably win some Razzies if it's an easy enough target, and it was one of two black eyes for David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls): he took it hard for the first film and then was summarily dismissed for (presumably) ripping off Adventures in Babysitting with The Sitter. I wouldn't know, because I didn't see it. In my defense, I'd just watched Adventures in Babysitting two weeks prior. It seemed redundant. But I did see Your Highness.

 Before we jump into the review proper, it's probably important to mention that I'm not exactly a devotee of the "sword and sorcery" films that Your Highness is paying homage to (or making fun of). I've never seen Krull or The Barbarian and the Sorceress or the dozen of other movies that dominated the "Sci-Fi / Fantasy" section of Video Bar. I saw the covers and shrugged. Eventually I saw (and enjoyed) Conan the Barbarian, but Your Highness is paying tribute to a cinematic subgenre I'm not that versed on. Take that for what it's worth.

 Thadeous (Danny McBride) and Fabious (James Franco) are the sons of King Tallious (Charles Dance) in the kingdom of... well, I'm sure they mentioned it somewhere. Fabious is always on quests and Thadeous is at home picking on Courtney (Rasmus Hardiker), his squire or slave or something. When Fabious brings home Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel), a prisoner of the evil wizard Leezar (Justin Theroux), to be his bride, the sorcerer doesn't take it lying down. He captures Belladonna and Fabious, Thadeous, Courtney, Julie (Toby Jones) and brave knights head out to rescue her. With the help of the mysterious warrior Isabel (Natalie Portman), they race to find the Unicorn Blade and slay the wizard before the moons eclipse and Leezar's "Fuckening" begins.

 Your Highness is a film of unmitigated vulgarity. To what end, I'm not sure - profanity seems to exist for the sake of punctuating sentences. There's also some marijuana-based comedy, but nowhere to the degree of Green's Pineapple Express, which I would think people would make a connection to based on Franco and McBride. Beyond that, I'm not really sure what's supposed to be funny in Your Highness, which is unmistakably a comedy. If the mere image of Danny McBride in a suit of armor falling down stairs is the kind of thing that tickles your funnybone, get ready for yuks! There's also a pot smoking puppet that molested Fabious as a child and requires our heroes to, well, give him a "hand" before continuing on their quest. The best joke is an arguably clever bit of misdirection involving Thadeous' punishment for violating the Queen of the Dwarf People.

 I get that there might be some audience out there for people who want to see a minotaur sodomize Courtney before Danny McBride chops its johnson off and wears it around his neck. It's not a large audience, apparently, but I get that McBride and Ben Best (The Foot Fist Way) wrote this in the way a thirteen year old watching this film would re-enact it with his buddies. It's a hard R movie on a large scale (or it looks it, anyway - at 49 million I guess that's pretty moderate) that didn't seem to find its target market. I'm not saying that there isn't one; I'm just not sure how many hardcore Krull fans wanted to see a movie where the evil wizard promises to defeat Fabious with "magic, motherfucker" (actual line).

 So I get why there's so much animosity towards Your Highness. I don't see how it's the worst movie of last year, or even close to it, but the movie never "clicks." That said, I didn't really HATE Your Highness. It's not a "good" movie, but it's not unwatchable. I have no idea who thought this would be funny (well, my pet theory is the people who made it) but it's sporadically funny, there are some decent action scenes, and the relentless profanity can catch you off guard and induce a chuckle. It's also extremely violent at points, which works in its favor. I'm not saying you SHOULD watch Your Highness, even if you are, shall we say, stoned out of your gourd, but if it was on Showtime one afternoon and you were, shall we say, stoned out of your gourd, it's not going to kill your buzz. The cast is clearly having fun (especially Justin Theroux) and the stupid is kind of infectious after you give up trying to figure out why this movie exists.

Blogorium Review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

 Despite hearing over and over again that "it was WAAAAYYYY better than I expected," I came into Rise of the Planet of the Apes with some trepidation. Like many of you, I had been relieved to hear that the reboot / prequel to the series was actually good and not just a nostalgia cash grab, but the lingering taste of Tim Burton's incomprehensible mess from ten years ago kept me cautious. I also heard - often from even the best reviews - that while the apes were amazing, the humans were one dimensional and one longed to return to Caesar's story.

  To be sure, the story of Will Rodman (James Franco)'s search for a cure to Alzheimer's isn't all that engaging. John Lithgow does the best he can as Will's father, Charles, but most of the time he just plays "confused," "surprised," or "frustrated." Freida Pinto is left with even less as primate veterinarian Caroline Aranha, who somehow dates Will for five years and never thinks to ask him why Caesar is so intelligent or even look into his research on ALZ 112. Gen Sys project manager Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo) is a bottom line driven, moustache twirling baddie, and for good measure there's Will's neighbor whose only emotion seems to be "indignant."

 A series of misunderstandings lead to the death of Will's test subject, Bright Eyes, and the cancellation of his research, so he smuggles home Caesar (Andy Serkis) and some of the ALZ 112 and tests it on his father. Bright Eyes genetically passed on the 112 to Caesar, and his intellect is formidable, which becomes threatening through more misunderstandings. The good news is that most of the film is less about Will and more about Caesar, and if you've seen Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, you have some idea why that justifies Rise of the Planet of the Apes in and of itself.

 It's telling that the apes are listed first in the credits, because Rise is very much their film. Any misgivings I might have about the humans (who fall into the "sympathetic to Caesar" or "evil jerks" with no shades of gray in between), Rise of the Planet of the Apes is totally compelling and successful when it Caesar and the other apes are on screen. After Caesar is separated from Will, he ends up in a primate refuge run by disinterested keeper John Landon (Brian Cox) and his cruel, bored son Dodge (Tom Felton), although they are secondary to what happens. We're treated to an ape version of a "prison" movie, and the way that Caesar not only takes control of the other apes but wins over his "alpha" competition, Rocket, is inspired storytelling. All of it done without dialogue and based entirely on Serkis' performance as Caesar.

 This is somewhat secondary to the review itself, but I'm not sure that Rise of the Planet of the Apes needed so many references to the original series. Now it isn't just Tom Felton saying (verbatim) Charlton Heston's "damn dirty ape" line, or naming many of the apes after memorable moments from the original series (Bright Eyes, Cornelia, Maurice, and Rocket*). It gets silly when you realize that Will's experimental drug is named after the running time of Planet of the Apes (no, really; the screenwriter nearly named it RT-112), and I don't know that we needed the subplot about the space mission to Mars and the Icarus disappearing, or necessarily how it was that apes began riding horses. On the other hand, I liked the way writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver incorporated the line "it's a mad house! A MAD HOUSE!" into the film (also through Felton) and a hint of why humanity declined as apes ascended the evolutionary ladder.

 I really can't heap enough praise on Andy Serkis for bringing Caesar to life. I know that there are other performers behind Rocket, Buck, Koba, and Maurice, not to mention a host of WETA programmers and animators hard at work to make everything look real. The cgi is, initially, noticeable, especially when Caesar is very young, but before long I found myself engrossed in the story and how emotive Caesar was. Watching the raw footage in the extras, it's clear that Serkis is not only the physical template for Caesar, but his acting, his facial expressions, and his presence carry over perfectly. It would, I feel, be a shame if Serkis isn't nominated for Best Supporting Actor for the film, but I suspect instead the Academy will create a new award for Motion Capture. That said, what Serkis does goes beyond motion capture - without Serkis as Caesar, Rise of the Planet of the Apes doesn't go anywhere.

 So here's the deal: Rise of the Planet of the Apes may lack some of the pulpy touches that fans of the series are accustomed to, but the polished nature doesn't diminish anything going for the film. It erases the memory of 2001's Planet of the Apes remake and exists as a sort of alternate retelling of Escape and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. You'll be pleasantly surprised how much better Rise is than anyone would hope from the studio who botched Alien vs Predator and Live Free or Die Hard (not to mention the Star Wars prequels). I'm actually looking forward to the next film, which has been hinted at as being a "Full Metal Jacket" of the Apes. With what Rupert Wyatt and 20th Century Fox have done with Rise, count me in.



* There's an extra on the disc that helpfully explains that Maurice is named after Maurice Evans, who played Doctor Zaius in Planet of the Apes, and that Rocket is named after one of the crew members in the film.