Quick Review: Ant-Man

 Ant-Man is a tricky situation when it comes to reviewing the movie itself, but in the wake of my Fantastic Four review, I feel like it provides a much needed contrast. What Ant-Man had, going in, that Fantastic Four didn't, was a level of expectation on the part of much of Marvel fandom. Maybe not even Marvel fandom, but Edgar Wright fans to be certain. Ant-Man was, by Wright's admission, a passion project, and his very public departure from the film left Marvel and Kevin Feige with a serious PR mountain to climb. Ultimately, it turned out to be more of a molehill, or - wait for it - an anthill. At least for me; there's still some debate about what is vs. what "could have been," and I think that's going to last a lot longer than the "Fox won't show my Fantastic Four, which was a great movie" Twitter war.

 I get the easy jokes directed at Peyton Reed, who was hired to come in after Wright left the film (rumor has it over story changes mandated by Marvel's "creative committee"). Reed directed Yes Man and isn't considered to be much more than a puppet of the studio who hasn't made anything since Bring It On that you've heard of. For me, he also made Down With Love, (a movie only I seem to like) which nearly landed him the Fantastic Four gig the first time around, and would have fit in with the 60s vibe that Down With Love is an homage to. But anyway, visionary Wright out, hack Reed in - that's the narrative you can still see in reviews for Ant-Man. But then there's the tricky part, because the Ant-Man that is turned out to be pretty good.

  There are a few different factors in play that help Ant-Man: one is that is dispenses the "origin story" pretty quickly and integrates it into the narrative in a way that keeps everything moving forward. Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is a thief, recently released from prison, who can't get his life back together. He can't get a job because he has a criminal record, so he can't provide alimony payments to his ex-wife Maggie (Judy Greer) which complicates his ability to have any leverage to visit his daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson). Also standing in the way is Maggie's new husband, police officer Jim Paxton (Bobby Cannavale). This could be played very heavy handed and one sided, but there's a surprising effort to be balanced and not make Maggie or Paxton out to be antagonists. They want what's best for Cassie, and Scott is a thief.

 Like most ex-criminals, he goes back to his old habits to make ends meet, teaming up with his partner Luis (Michael Peña) and his new gang: Kurt (David Dastmalchian) and Dave (T.I.), who are working on a heist of "some old rich guy" who has a safe Scott might be able to crack. Unfortunately, when he breaks in, the only thing Scott finds inside is a suit, which he takes anyway. The "old rich guy" is Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), and he wanted Scott to steal his Ant-Man suit, because he needs him to use it for a particular heist involving Pym Industries. His former protégé, Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) has advanced the shrinking technology that Pym hid from his company (and S.H.I.E.L.D.) and he needs somebody to make sure Cross doesn't sell his work to the military (or worse). Pym's daughter, Hope (Evangeline Lilly) wants to do it, but Hank refuses, for personal reasons.

 The narrative of Ant-Man moves at a brisk pace, with Scott learning how to use the suit and become the new Ant-Man while also planning the heist. There's even time for the reveal of why Hank won't let Hope take the suit, which allows you not only to shrink but also to be able to control ants. It gives you increased power because of the reduced size, so Scott becomes "like a bullet" and has to meter out how hard he hits someone, as not to kill them. Rather than front load Ant-Man with this, Reed / Wright put it in the middle of the movie, and it never bogs down the film. It also helps that Ant-Man is balances comedy with superhero shenanigans in the same way that Guardians of the Galaxy does. It's never too silly or too serious, although Peña pushes it sometimes. Surprisingly, though, not in the rapid cut flashback/monologues he uses to very quickly get exposition across to Scott.

 The special effects are pretty impressive, considering that most of the film is from a very tiny perspective - the sequence where Scott shrinks in his apartment and falls through the floor to a neighbors party downstairs is quite good. His terror at nearly being stomped on while people are dancing and trying to navigate his way out (he doesn't know how the suit works) takes a fairly normal situation and makes it fun for the audience. Also kudos to the de-aging team for making Michael Douglas in 1989 not look like Arnold Schwarzenegger's body double in Terminator Genisys. It's a nice touch and gives the scene with Howard Stark (John Slattery, back from Iron Man 2) added gravitas. It makes sense why Pym would choose a thief over the Avengers, and why he'd have no second thoughts about sending Scott in to steal something from one of "Howard Stark's old warehouses". Of course, the warehouse turns out to be the New Avengers Facility, where Scott runs into Falcon (Anthony Mackie in an amusing cameo). The scene is mostly designed to set up Ant-Man's role in Captain America: Civil War, but I'll allow it because Mackie and Rudd make the scene entertaining. There's a much better use of foreshadowing later in the film, with a very quick reference to Spider-Man (now back in the MCU).

 If there's one thing that really elevates Ant-Man over most of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and I'm mostly talking about the Disney releases), it's the scope. Appropriate to its source, it's scaled back, smaller, but not simply because Scott shrinks down to ant-size. The trend, at least since The Avengers, has been to have a giant fight at the end of the movie involving something in the sky that's going to destroy the planet / our heroes / etc. Seriously, just take a look at the finales of Thor: The Dark World, Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and even Avengers: Age of Ultron, where they're trying to keep an entire city from crashing down from the sky and killing everybody. Airborne battles are, it would seem, the thing that Marvel loves the most. There are even variants of it in The Amazing Spider-Man and Fantastic Four because, you know, if the formula works, overuse it.

 Ant-Man, on the other hand, sets the climactic battle inside of the bedroom of Scott's daughter, and most of the final battle with Yellowjacket takes place on a Thomas the Tank Engine train set. Reed frequently cuts back from the action to actual scale so you can see what it would look like to normal people. It's mostly for comedic effect, but for this film, that technique works just fine. Ant-Man acknowledges its somewhat goofy premise without ever demeaning what Scott (or Pym) can do while in the suit. When he goes sub-atomic to stop Yellowjacket at the very end, the risk implied with doing so (involving the original Wasp) isn't treated like a joke. There's a fine balance between being silly and diminishing the movie overall. How much of that was Wright, how much was Reed, we're probably not going to know. Wright retains a writing credit, and by many accounts the first half of the film is almost exactly what he wrote. Increasing Evangeline Lilly's role as Hope (to set her up for future films as the new Wasp) is allegedly what pushed Wright away, but she didn't seem to overshadow Paul Rudd or Michael Douglas to my eyes. The only problem Ant-Man really has is the same one Marvel has struggled with since Iron Man: having an interesting villain whose name isn't Loki. Corey Stoll is mostly wasted as "angry scientist villain who is mad at Hank Pym for some reason and becomes Yellowjacket".

 In a perfect world, we might know what Edgar Wright's Ant-Man looked like, and while I'm not happy about his departure, there is some solace in knowing that the version of the film we did get is still a lot of fun. I'd go so far as to say that I enjoyed Ant-Man more than Age of Ultron - a movie I've tried to write a review for repeatedly since May* - and am looking forward to watching it again. It has some of the problems of MCU movies, but eschews many of the "same old, same old" story structures in favor of a more character based narrative. While I wasn't crazy about the villain, Rudd, Lilly, and Douglas made for a fine combination, and I'd be happy to see more of their adventures outside of the increasingly unwieldy "crossover" films. As shoehorned in as it seemed, I actually liked the thieves, mostly because the chemistry between the four of them makes it entertaining enough to overlook the fact that Scott doesn't really need them to get into Pym Industries near the end. Reed also somehow made me feel bad for an ant, and not only that, but one with a terrible pun for a name. Good job.

  More importantly, since I brought it up in the first paragraph, whatever happened between Wright leaving and Reed taking over, the end result is less disjointed than in Fantastic Four. Without looking it up online, I didn't take a mental tally of "which part of the film came from which," and more to the point, I wasn't thinking about it at all. Instead, I enjoyed Ant-Man, Frankenstein-ed as it is. It has the benefit of being altered before cameras started rolling, but the mixture of original vision and studio mandated chicanery doesn't show in the same way it does with Fantastic Four. We're never going to see the pure, unadulterated versions of either film, but at least with Ant-Man I know there's one out there I would see again.




 * While in aggregate, I did like Age of Ultron, every time I sit down to think about it, or to focus on specific points, the draft ends up becoming a fanboy-ish critique of "Whedon-isms" throughout the film. They aren't so bad in their entirety, but when I have to address things like "well, I was born yesterday" or the party scene, it begins to feel like nit-picking. The fact that a HYDRA soldier actually says "no, it wasn't" after Iron Man shoots them and says "good talk," kind of annoys me. Anyway, the short review is that it's a fun movie that suffers from trying to set up too many parts of Phase 3.

Quick Review: Fantastic Four

 This one has been a tough nut to crack: on one hand, I really don't want to pile on to a movie almost everybody has been tearing a new one. Because, yeah, it's a mess. Most of it is pretty bad to really, really bad. Some of it is okay, maybe even pretty good, but then structurally it collapses again. On the other hand, there's almost something worth mentioning in Josh Trank's Fantastic Four that I've seen mentioned offhand in a few reviews, but that most people haven't picked up on, or at least discussed in depth. This isn't the first superhero movie that's dipped its toe into Cronenbergian "body horror," but in whatever it's original incarnation was - more on that in a bit - Fantastic Four is definitely the first mainstream comic book movie to have tried to specifically approach an origin story using that pervasive sense of dread.

 It's just too bad that we'll never see that movie, if it was ever finished. We will probably never know, at least until an "unauthorized" book comes out in a decade or so. Actually, blog post. I keep forgetting that's the world we live in now, where a book like The 50 Greatest Science Fiction Movies Never Made would now just be a series of articles on some geek friendly site. Anyway, the post-mortem on Fantastic Four is going to make for fascinating reading someday, more so even than the movie that came out of it. Which is, let's be fair, not worth seeing. I'm sorry, but even given what I'm going to tell you, the end product just isn't worth your time. It's not bad enough to be entertaining, and what few moments of interest it has don't amount to enough to make it worth your time.

 Without getting into the salacious details of what the director did or didn't do on set, or how Fox rushed Fantastic Four into production so as not to have the rights revert to Marvel, let's just say that the production of this film was haphazard. And it shows. If nothing else, there are clear markers of what scenes were reshot because Sue Storm (Kate Mara)'s hair color changes due to a comically mismatched wig she's wearing. It's more prominent later in the film, but you'll see it sprinkled throughout the first half as well. Apparently - and again, other than a deleted tweet from Trank and rumors, we have no real confirmation - Fox saw the completed footage and were shocked that the director of Chronicle was less interested in making a Marvel Audience Pleaser movie and was much more interested in a psychological exploration of what super powers do to the human body and mind. They also allegedly claim the film didn't have an ending, which might explain the embarrassingly bad one cobbled together from every other Marvel film, whether Fox owned the rights to them or not. There is a marked shift from the first half of the film, which at least looks like it was shot in practical locations, to the last 15 minutes, which were clearly shot on a green screen, in order to have a showdown with our heroes and the barely established Dr. Doom.

 As I said, that's not really what I found interesting. The final showdown with the giant beam in the sky that manages to steal from X-Men, Thor: The Dark World, and The Avengers (actually, both the first one and Age of Ultron, not that I think about it) is kind of par the course for Marvel movies now. To the point where a comparably small scale fight in a little girl's bedroom makes Ant-Man* a refreshing change of pace. But I digress. Back to the only thing about Fantastic Four that's vaguely worth discussing. There is a moment, in the middle of the film, when Reed Richards (Miles Teller), Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) and Sue Storm (Mara) are in Area 57, a top secret military facility. They've been exposed to the green goop from Planet Zero, which also swallowed up Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell) after they got drunk and used the Quantum Gate to visit the other dimension. It's a long, dumb, story, but basically Government Man (Tim Blake Nelson) wants to take the project away from Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) and send NASA to the other side. Anyway, I guess it's less dumb to go Ninja Turtles than "Cosmic Radiation".

 So they're in Area 57, and Franklin has been given access to visit them. When we first see our heroes, they're in separate, dimly lit rooms, strapped down and totally unable to control their powers. Reed's arms and legs are extended and he can't move his fingers. He doesn't even seem to be aware what's happening. Ben is screaming for help from his darkened cell, embedded in strange rocks from Planet Zero. Johnny uncontrollably bursts into flames, and Sue phases in and out of invisibility. Trank films these scenes to appear as disturbing as this sudden change would be - Reed is sweaty, distended, and horrified. Ben is a giant rock monster, and he's alone with no one to talk to him. Johnny is dangerous to the lab technicians - during a nightmare, he overheats and blows out the glass window they're watching him from behind. For a change, our young protagonists behave the way someone might actually behave if they experienced a radical change to their bodies, and while it might not be what audiences expect from a Fantastic Four movie - let alone Marvel in general - it's a refreshing take on comic book adaptations. This is a far cry from discovering you can stick to walls, or many of the "discovering your powers" montages from other comic book movies. This is all of Brundlefly, all at once - the power and the rotting fingernails. The fear, the loathing, alongside a perverse fascination. Trank does an admirable job of mimicking Cronenberg's fondness for shots that linger on "new flesh," so to speak. For a moment, I thought this might be a movie worth watching.

 And then that all falls apart, because of an unusual choice to cut ahead "One Year Later" after Reed escapes, where we're given quick exposition on what their powers are and how they work. The Government has been conditioning their powers to use in combat situations - Grimm first, but they're grooming Johnny to also be a weapon. Were it not handled so poorly, this might be an interesting extension of the creepy shift in approach to being a "super hero," but instead it's underdeveloped, like everything that follows. It's the first hint of the Scanners-like finale we might have seen (again, we'll never be sure), but once they rebuild the Quantum Gate and find Doom is still alive (albeit fused to his suit and glowing green), things quickly collapse. Most of this happens in the last twenty minutes and is rushed, to put it mildly. I'm not sure what part of Doom's powers made him a scanner, but he absolutely walks through the facility making people's heads explode. It's surprisingly violent for a PG-13, even when the lights conveniently cut off.

 This extension of Cronenberg inspired body horror is, however, quickly abandoned in favor of a much more conventional "fight it out" ending on Planet Zero with the punching and the fireballs and the invisible force field blah blah Doom sucked into his own portal whatever. Victor Von Doom goes from being a fairly interesting human character - albeit one that resembles the comic book version in no way shape or form - to being evil C-3P0 with scanner powers who decides to destroy Earth so that they can't exploit Planet Zero. We get that from two lines of dialogue before he pops Government Man's head like a zit with brain powers. I'm not honestly sure that Trank's take on the Fantastic Four could have worked for the entire film, or even how he had planned to close out his version of their origin story, but it was different. Admirably different, even: I had heard it was "dark and gritty," which is not exactly something I'd associated with The Fantastic Four, but it's not "dark and gritty" in the way that Batman v Superman looks. Instead, it's psychologically traumatic, drawing from The Fly and Rabid and Videodrome more than Spider-Man or any of the X-Men films.

 And yet, we're left with the mess that is Fantastic Four - one pretty good ten to fifteen minute stretch couched between a fairly stupid beginning (really, Dan Castellaneta was somehow Reed's science teacher in elementary and high school?) that cuts ahead to bored actors - Teller and Mara particularly seems disinterested the entire film - and peters out at the tonally incongruous coda. I wouldn't be the least bit enthusiastic about the further adventures of this foursome, even if Bell brings pathos to Ben Grimm / The Thing that makes a talking rock monster not inherently comical. That's an impressive feat, but it's one of a small handful of moments that make Fantastic Four that much worse. Because if it was just awful, like Terminator Genisys, I might even consider recommending it. But instead, there are some tiny, neat, ideas rolled up into a patchwork mess of a movie, one that's just going leave you dissatisfied. So stick with the real Cronenberg, and I guess if you need to see that world collide with comics, there's always A History of Violence...




* Speaking of a movie with its own sordid behind-the-scenes history, albeit one whose seams are much less apparent, and with a much more enjoyable end result.

Cap'n Howdy's Best of 2014: Guardians of the Galaxy

 So now it's time for the Cap'n to eat some serious crow. From the moment it was announced until the second I said "ah, what the hell, if people love it this much, I'll give it a shot," there wasn't a person more skeptical of Guardians of the Galaxy than me. There was no way it could work: we're talking about a comic book that nobody read (and even less have heard of) where a talking raccoon and a talking tree are major characters. Marvel had gone from "Dark Elves" to "What the Hell, We're Rich" hubris in no time, announcing Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, and Doctor Strange. Okay, there's no way. Guardians of the Galaxy? The hero's name is Star Lord? Seriously? I don't even read Green Lantern comics anymore, and I've never paid attention to Marvel's cosmic crap. There's no way it could be good. And the trailers didn't change my mind. It looks kitschy, obnoxious, loud, and unfunny. Drop the mic, I'm calling it: failure.

 And now I'm 0-3 when it comes to James Gunn. Somehow, I always doubt that he can make something so impossibly lame sounding be great, and he proves me wrong. Every time. Did I think Slither looked stupid? Yup. Wrong. Along comes Super, and I look at the poster and think "oh, great, hipster Kick-Ass." Totally wrong. So of course I foolishly thought that this time, as the director of a stupid space movie with talking trees, he wouldn't be able to craft a winner. That they'd mute his Troma sensibilities, and the end result would be watered down garbage nobody would like.

 Yeah, and how did that turn out?

 It's true that I'm not the only person surprised that Guardians of the Galaxy is one of the best movies of 2014, but at least I should have known better. Gunn's specialty, it seems, is finding the perfect tone of his movies, one that can comment on how ridiculous genre tropes are without undermining the story he's telling. It's a balancing act that not many directors are willing to try, the obvious exception being Marvel's other cosmic tinkerer, Joss Whedon. At the risk of sounding heretical and thus sending the internet into fan rage, I'm going to give the edge to Gunn, if only because in my limited field sample, he's more consistently successful*. Allow me to make my case.

 (In what might turn out to be a horrible idea, I'm going to assume anybody reading this already saw Guardians of the Galaxy, so the standard "paragraph or two synopsis" isn't going to be here, where it would normally be. Also, SPOILERS.)

 Guardians of the Galaxy, as presented in the film (I've still never read the comic), is an inherently goofy premise. If you want a very quick version of why, I highly recommend you watch the Honest Movie Trailer for the film. Putting aside the "Space Avengers" part, we are talking about a movie with more impenetrable monologues than the Star Wars Prequels combined, about characters we know nothing about, and can barely relate to - remember, Peter Quill / Star Lord (Chris Pratt) has been living most of his life in space. He has a better idea of what's going on than we do, and he doesn't really seem to know or care. Quill can barely remember that the girl he hooked up with is still on his ship. But that's what's great about how Gunn manages the world he's introducing us to - the serious moments, like everything building up to "I'm going to be honest; I forgot you were here" is played in equal parts important and "yeah, I know, this is kind of silly." There were a dozen ways to make the dancing to "Come and Get Your Love" groan worthy, but you know what wasn't? Using a dead space rat as a microphone.

 Mind you, this is all following the "young Peter Quill watches his mother die and is abducted by aliens" cold open, which isn't joke-y and sets the stage for things to come. While it's a completely different kind of movie, Guardians of the Galaxy shares with Captain America: The Winter Soldier the ability to be funny one moment and deadly serious the next. Gunn only uses it when necessary, but in many ways, he does it more successfully than the cheap kills in The Avengers or The Winter Soldier. I mean, yes, he kills Groot (Vin Diesel), but it's more of a sacrifice than a sudden "gotcha!" kill. When Baby Groot emerges at the end of the film, it makes sense that it was something he could do, and something that Rocket (Bradley Cooper) wouldn't realize was possible. Which is weird, because he's a living tree, so why couldn't he? Also, go ahead and be the hard hearted bastard that tells me you didn't well up a little bit at "WE are Groot." Go for it. It's the internet, and you can lie anonymously.

Despite the fact that Groot is Guardians of the Galaxy's equivalent of Minions or Penguins or Disney's anthropomorphized animals that every movie for kids have these days, we care about what happens to Groot because Rocket cares about Groot. And we care about Rocket, which honestly amazes me. I really did not think that I was going to be able to get past the "there's a talking raccoon in this movie," but the animators and Bradley Cooper and Gunn find a way. There's a moment, halfway into the film, where we learn everything we need to know about how a talking raccoon feels about being genetically modified. It's not dissimilar to the fight between Drax (Dave Bautista) and Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace), where the real weight of the former's need for revenge clashes headlong into his inability to actually carry it out. Ronan, who up until this point just did a lot of speechifying and sent Nebula (Karen Gillan) to do his dirty work, finally seems formidable. Drax doesn't stand a chance, and that's before Ronan has the Infinity Gem.

 See, that's an extremely nerdy sentence, and I'm not going to lie, I had to double check Karen Gillan's character name. Yet another reason why it's so impressive that Guardians of the Galaxy was not only a hit with fickle comic fans, but also mainstream audiences. It's not quite on the same level of "A Song of Ice and Fire is hit TV show? Seriously?" but we are talking about a movie that introduces us to planets, characters, races, and throws around terms like we're just expected to keep up. And we do! I had no idea that Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Nebula were adopted children of Thanos (uncredited Josh Brolin) or that Nova wasn't just one dude. Seriously, had I known the Nova Corps was the Marvel equivalent of the Green Lantern Corps, I might have hesitated even more. I think the only part of this movie I didn't know because of another Marvel movie (mostly Thor: The Dark World) was Howard the Duck. And let's be honest here, even if you read Howard the Duck, we all know why people remember Howard the Duck.

 But this is what I get for assuming it wasn't going to work. James Gunn pulls a fast one on me again, with a fantastic cast, razzle dazzle effects, smart (and smart-ass) plotting, and damn if I'm not looking forward to seeing more of them. He managed to introduce five major new characters and a dozen or so supporting characters without needing separate movies to do it. No offense, Phase One, but it turns out you can incorporate characters in one film, give them enough time to develop, and still be entertaining without spending two hours apiece with them. And hey, now I know who Chris Pratt is! He's not just the guy who crapped himself in Movie 43 anymore!

 Guardians of the Galaxy did something I didn't think was possible: it handily displaced X-Men: Days of Future Past and Captain America: The Winter Soldier as the best Marvel film of 2014. I'd say "comic book film," but if we're putting it up against Snowpiercer, it's a tougher case to make. It's a breezy, fun movie, one that has a soundtrack and vaguely 80s tone that appeal across the age spectrum, and Gunn even snuck in Nathan Fillion (Blue Alien in Prison), Rob Zombie (Ravager voice), and Lloyd Kaufman (Lloyd Kaufman Covered in Mud in Prison), just to keep his case for auteur in the mix. It might be super nerdy and have a talking tree and a talking raccoon, but dammit, they're fun. It's fun. Way to prove me wrong, James Gunn.




 * It's not an exactly fair comparison, but I do know several people who can't stand Joss Whedon and who had a lot of problems with the see-saw tonal shifts in The Avengers. They also didn't like Serenity for much the same reason, but enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy. So, uh, flame on, I guess.

Cap'n Howdy's Best of 2014: Captain America - The Winter Soldier

 Coming into 2014, I must admit that I wasn't very excited with Marvel's schedule. After the pretty good, but definitely "yup, we're going to do Dark Elves and crap like that" nerd-out that was Thor: The Dark World, it seemed like we were in for a year of Marvel spending testing how far a mainstream audience would follow them. Mostly by that I mean Guardians of the Galaxy, which I'll be getting to soon, but I wasn't particularly interested in Captain America: The Winter Soldier either. It had less to do with the premise - which was a pretty good arc in the comic - but more that I just didn't like Captain America: The First Avenger. I still don't, really: it's an assemblage of scenes without any clear narrative structure or, to be honest, stakes, designed to tell Steve Rogers (Chris Evans)'s origin story, introduce the Red Skull and the Tesseract, and then freeze Cap so he can be in The Avengers. It is not, however, a movie that I found to be worth watching again, and I tried.

 Accordingly, I had very little enthusiasm for The Winter Soldier, despite the presence of different directors (Joe and Anthony Russo instead of Joe Johnston) and a focus more on Cap's role in S.H.I.E.L.D.* over trying to sell the "shared universe." That is, to say, more like Iron Man 3, which everyone seems to hate but me, in part because I knew it was a Shane Black movie. Still, I didn't really have any reason to assume that the brothers Russo, veterans of Arrested Development and Community, were any better equipped to make a Captain America movie than the director of The Rocketeer. I also didn't know what kind of Captain America movie they were making - that it would be heavily influenced by 1970s paranoia thrillers, mixed with modern action films, but with slightly more coherent editing. Had I known that, I might have still been suspicious of the directors' background in comedy, but it would have assuaged any lingering concerns that The Winter Soldier would be anything like The First Avenger.

 In fact, The Winter Soldier isn't even anything like The Avengers, which worked Cap into the fold, but sometimes in uncomfortable, ham fisted ways. We're not talking Hawkeye levels of "why are you in this?", mind you, but if you look at the team dynamic, Steve Rogers has very little impact until late in the film, and even then it's mostly Iron Man's show. The Winter Soldier, despite the increased presence of Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), is mostly Steve Rogers' show. It's less a film about him adjusting to the present than putting Captain America's "good old fashioned American values" against the modern surveillance / defense landscape. More importantly, it's not necessarily clear that either side is totally right or totally wrong. Fury finds himself the target of an assassination, Cap and Black Widow end up on the run, and the head of S.H.I.E.L.D., Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford) has to make a decision about the organization's future.

 To say much more would spoil the movie, and by proxy, the end of the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and on the off chance you're the one person reading this who hasn't been prepping for The Avengers: Age of Ultron, I'll let you be surprised. If there's any character who gets the short shrift in The Winter Soldier, it's the titular character, who is limited to a "Darth Maul" level of screen time for much of the film. When he's onscreen - and for SPOILER purposes, I won't identify the actor - The Winter Soldier's impact on the story is felt, but his overall arc feels more like the beginning to a larger story. That said, he's part of several crackerjack action sequences, handled with aplomb by the Russo brothers. Both are essentially chase sequences: one with Fury, and the other involving Cap, Black Widow, and the man who will become Falcon (Anthony Mackie). Aside from John Wick, they may be my favorite sustained action sequences in a film this year, and I was not expecting that from Marvel. Not only are they well choreographed, but the Nick Fury chase scene is as suspenseful as anything I've seen in a while.

 I noticed that The Winter Soldier has a slight shift in the way that Cap / Steve Rogers is portrayed: Chris Evans adds more nuance to the "good guy" type from The First Avenger and The Avengers. He's trying to fit into the world now, and not just in a way that generate anachronism laughs. The Winter Soldier is frequently funny without relying on "Rip Van Winkle" jokes - although his notebook of pop culture to catch up on is amusing in its own right. The film also bridges the first and second film by having a few returning characters, mostly presented in logical ways. It's a bit sad to see an elderly Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) suffering from Alzheimer's, even if we also meet her granddaughter (Emily VanCamp). Technically that might be a SPOILER, since the film doesn't necessarily address it yet, but instead lays the groundwork for her character as an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. in a few critical junctures of the story. The most surprising cameo has the potential to be the dumbest, as it is the equivalent of the "Bond villain explains his plan" moment in the film, but the audacity behind it makes the scene work. In fact, it's hard to think of a moment that doesn't work in the film, other than maybe the Big Dumb Climax.

 Like Guardians of the Galaxy, and Thor: The Dark World, and Iron Man 3, and The Avengers, and I would argue, even The First Avenger, The Winter Soldier ends with Cap and Falcon trying to bring down three flying weapons of mass destruction before they, well, destroy everything. How you feel about this apparent strategy to end every Marvel film the same way is going to depend on your mileage for this overused finale. It's not any better or worse than the others, and its impact will be felt on the larger Marvel universe in movies we haven't gotten to yet (Ant-Man, how do you feel about the collapse of, uh, SPOILER nevermind). It does seem silly to use this as the backdrop for a moment between Captain America and The Winter Soldier, as the film does end on a series of quieter moments, but maybe the blockbuster comic book movie demands it. I mean, Days of Future Past isn't a lot different, what with its "dropping a stadium around The White House", and while I didn't see The Amazing Spider-Man 2, I sure heard about its Big Dumb Ending.

 Anyway, I was quite mistaken in thinking I wouldn't like Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It's a thriller disguised as a comic book movie, one that's clever and works hard to stay ahead of its audience for as long as possible. A background in comedies, particularly comedies like Arrested Development and Community gives the Russo brothers the skill to convey information quickly without dumbing it down. Instead, they can rely on audiences to pick up hints and foreshadow events without spelling it out again. Characters go through some serious doubt and don't come out unscathed at the end. Now the Russos are going to bring Civil War to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and this is a very good sign of things to come for Captain America. It wouldn't be the first time I was wrong about Marvel's direction in 2014, but I'm glad I resisted my misgivings and watched it. And then watched it again. And then with the commentary...





 * As a side note, it's probably worth mentioning that I had been so underwhelmed by Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. after the first few episodes that I stopped watching, and didn't finish the first season until after The Winter Soldier came out. The back half of the first season is considerably better than the first six or seven episodes.

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.

2013 Recap: The Final Stretch Before the "Best Of" (Part Four)

 At long last, the recap of what constitutes "the middle" is nearly over. Comparing this project to last year's one post, title and quick synopsis / review, I think I'm happier to spend the time giving you a better idea of the strengths and weaknesses of each film, and explaining why they're worth seeing, but not quite the best movies I saw last year. Hopefully the feeling is mutual, but if not, I can go back to the old way next year.

New York (and Jersey) State of Mind.

 As much as I personally enjoyed Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha, it's been a struggle to recommend it to friends. I'm not really sure who will like it and who won't; Baumbach and Greta Gerwig's distinctly American version on the French New Wave might strike a lot of you as precious and contrived. Some might find it annoying and might be turned off completely by the title character (Gerwig) and her inability to commit to any one direction in life. I say this because that's consistently been the criticism from people who hate it (and I mean HATE). Others take umbrage with its adoption of the FNW aesthetic, arguing that the film is a weak imitator that can only be enjoyed by those who aren't versed in Truffuat or Godard or Malle. Maybe that's so, but I'm not convinced of that argument. Maybe Frances Ha has to catch you in just the right mood.

 It is true that Frances (the character) is an acquired taste: a late 20-something woman who drifts from roommate to roommate, convinced that she wants to dance but doesn't want to branch out and choreograph for herself. She needs money but doesn't seem interested in taking a job that's practically handed to her, and is willing to go back to her Alma mater and work as an RA / waitress while her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) is planning to get married and move to Japan for work. Her roommate Benji (Michael Zegen) calls her "undateable," and on a whim she decides to fly to Paris, only to sleep through most of her two day vacation. So yes, there's a lot of Frances Ha that goes nowhere and if you don't take to Gerwig from the beginning, it might be a lost cause, because you're in for a long 86 minutes.

 On the other hand, if it does strike your fancy, you'll find a lot to enjoy in what is an essentially jubilant and upbeat take on the quarter-life crisis. Baumbach borrows music from The 400 Blows, Bed and Board, Contempt, and King of Hearts to set the tone, and the film is, to me, structured a bit like Vivre sa vie, although nowhere as depressing. Rather than break the film into chapters, Baumbach divides each  chronological section of Frances Ha using a title with Frances' current mailing address. Gerwig is in every scene of the movie, and while the character can sometimes be infuriating, her performance as Frances is always riveting. But I'm still not sure how many of you are going to take to the film, so if you watch it and hate it, don't say I didn't try to give you a head's up.

 Don Jon, the Jersey equivalent of Frances Ha (sort of but also not really) is the directorial debut of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who also wrote and stars in the film. Like the titular character, Don Jon has confidence to spare, and the film is tremendously charming, which is a good thing. It stumbles a little bit on the back end (I'll get to that in a moment), but for most people you won't even think twice about it. The trailers have been misleading you into thinking it's just about Gordon-Levitt trying to date Scarlett Johansson while also having a porn addiction, but that's less of the story than you might be expecting.

The running theme(s) of Don Jon is mostly concerned with objectification and routine, specifically by Jon (Gordon-Levitt), who likes his life to follow a certain order. We never see the "work" part, but that's followed by going to the club with his boys, picking up a girl (always given a numerical score, and Jon only takes home 8's or better, which is why they call him the "Don"), watching porn, going to church, confession, dinner with the family, and then the gym (where he says the Lord's Prayer and his Hail Mary's while working out). Repeat. He likes his sex like he likes his porn, to follow a certain routine, but the sex never seems to match up to the porn, so he'll often get out of bed after hooking up with a girl and watch some pornography while she sleeps in the other room.

 This you probably knew from the trailer, and that he also meets Barbara Sugarman (Johansson), the rare "10" that Jon knows he wants immediately. But Barbara isn't so easily won over, and the "Don" has to play the long game to win her over, which begins disrupting his routine. She doesn't like that he cleans his own apartment. She wants him to go to school in order not to be a bartender forever. She really objects to the porn, but Jon keeps watching it on his phone (sometimes at school). But her friends like Jon and his family loves her, and most of the things she wants are improving his life, so how can he complain? He likes porn, she likes dumb romantic comedies (one of the ones they go to see in the movie stars Anne Hathaway and Channing Tatum in amusing cameos), what's the difference? It's all fantasy, right?

 And then Don Jon takes a left turn, introducing a character you don't see in the trailer and whose name you'd certainly recognize if I told you (her name is on the poster, by the way). That's where the movie starts to diverge from whatever you expected based on the trailer. I don't want to say too much because not knowing is Don Jon's greatest strength - leading you into thinking this is one kind of romantic comedy and then heading in another direction midway through. Let's just say that Jon's routine starts to come apart a little bit, and maybe that's not such a bad thing for the "Don."

 If anything, I wish Gordon-Levitt had been willing to go a little further than he does; I kept waiting to see where the story was going, to see what he had up his sleeve, only to realize that Don Jon was going to be far more conventional than I'd hoped for. The ending isn't bad, necessarily, but it's safer than I was expecting, more fitting of the typical "three act structure" romantic comedy that the movie seems to be poking fun at and less willing to really take the genre to task. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't end the way you'd assumed based on the trailer, but by mentioning that there's another character you haven't seen in the previews, you can probably guess what happens.

 Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a fine job directing, even if the writing is more conventional than the Cap'n would have liked. I'd also like to give him kudos for casting, especially with Jon's family. Not only was it nice to see Tony Danza and Glenne Headly again (I can't remember anything I've seen her in since Dick Tracy), but along with Brie Larson, they felt like a real family sitting down for dinner after church. Everybody has great chemistry and the fun is infectious, so I have the feeling you'll come out of Don Jon smiling, as long as you can handle fleeting glimpses of porn. Guys, I guess you should be prepared to address that question if you watch this on a date. That's your head's up.

Science Fiction Double Feature

Is Pacific Rim just a dumb, loud movie that caters to the twelve year old boy inside of 20-30 something nerds that like to see robots fighting monster? Probably. Are the characters, at best, wafer thin with ridiculous names you wouldn't say out loud even if you could remember them? Almost certainly. Did Guillermo del Toro decide to make a silly movie inspired by Japanese kaiju pictures when he left The Hobbit and At the Mountains of Madness was to dark and too scary for a major studio? Pretty much. Do I care? Not really.

 Pacific Rim is about as close as the Cap'n will ever get to watching a Transformers movie, and I've already watched it twice on Blu-Ray. That in addition to the first time I saw it, and I tend to show people who are on the fence about seeing it the fight in the middle of the movie where the kaiju attack Hong Kong and Gypsy Danger comes in to save the day. That scene is a good barometer of whether you're going to want to watch the rest or not, but the truth is that Pacific Rim lets del Toro indulge in his compulsive and obsessive world building (complete with body parts preserved in jars and parasites that live on the giant monsters and their usefulness to the black market) while also feeding a basic need for destruction on a massive scale and robots punching monsters, which is really why this film is a popular as it is for a very specific subset of geeks. I don't feel guilty about enjoying it, but I couldn't possibly defend it if challenged. It's a smart dumb movie, or vice versa. Take your pick.

 Gravity has some truly inspiring camera work and visual effects, and watching the movie is like riding on a roller coaster with more suspense than an Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece. I can totally understand why it took Alfonso Cuarón seven years to make this, and some of the camera work and (seemingly) unbroken takes are genuinely impressive. It was everyone's favorite movie this summer, the "must see" event that friends and family and audiences in general couldn't get enough of, and now I'm not hearing so much about it. It didn't make my "Best Of" at any point, really, despite its myriad of achievements and how gripping the entire film is. Why?

 Some people have trouble with the liberties taken with the science, but the whole Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeting brouhaha didn't phase me much. It's a movie and of course Cuarón was going to take some shortcuts to streamline the narrative, so things get a little fuzzy with the "scientifically accurate" part, although I can't honestly remember that being a bragging point. I think the problem, for me, goes to the story. It's far, far too simple, and no amount of visual flair or tension or long takes is going to overcome that fact that when Gravity is over, there's not a lot to hang on to. Yes, I thought the scene where Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is spinning and can't stop and Cuarón pulls all the way inside of her helmet and back out was really cool and I feel her dizziness and disorientation too, was great stuff. But I didn't care about her dead daughter, or when she detaches from Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and he floats off to near certain doom. The isolation of space, the silence, was impressive, and Bullock's desperation to stay alive and to not die out there, I liked, but I couldn't tell you anything about why she needed to get back to Earth.

 Gravity is wholly successful at being a movie you want to watch, and to experience, even if it seems thoroughly implausible at times. On an IMAX screen, I'm sure it felt like "you are there," particularly in those first person perspective shots of trying to grab the space station(s). It's a triumph visually and in design and execution. There are shots in the film that continue to impress me when I think about them now. But the longer I go since I've seen Gravity, the more fleeting my engagement with the predicament of Stone and Kowalski is, so while I remain dazzled with what Cuarón achieved visually, I'm less enthused about the whole package.

Based on a True Story but Actually (kind of), This Time.

 Previously on Cap'n Howdy's Blogorium... documentary recap! While not all of the movies covered in the recap were from 2013, it does reflect how I feel about Rewind This! and Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony. This section should be about the documentaries I didn't get around to seeing but wanted to, like Blackfish, The Act of Killing, and Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay, all of which I hope to watch in the new year. Maybe We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, but I did just watch the fictionalized / Cumberbatch-ized version, The Fifth Estate (not in time for the recap) and it was just okay.

 What I left off of the documentary recap (for space, mostly) were two other documentaries I saw in 2013 - Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie and Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th. I feel like the latter should (and probably will) get its own post some time soon, but I thought we could spend this time together covering them as I think you would enjoy one or the other based on its subject matter.

 I remember The Morton Downey Jr. Show existing, kind of; I was still pretty young and it ran for less than two years, but the cultural impact of his talk show paved the way for Jerry Springer's three ring circus a decade later. He also played a version of himself on one of my favorite Tales from the Crypt episodes, "Television Terror," so I was interested to learn more about the man who never quite moved out of his father's shadow. Also, Evocateur begins by drawing parallels between Glen Beck and Morton Downey Jr. with "man on the street" interviews with Tea Party Patriots members and Downey audience members. And then it ends with a Downey-fied version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show's "Science Fiction Double Feature." What's not to like?

 Well, Morton Downey Jr., for starters. Whether his TV act was just that (an act) or not, there does seem to be a great disparity between the activist of the 1960s who wrote a book of poetry and supported the Kennedy's and the foul mouthed, caustic, abrasive radio turned talk show host who berated his guests until they walked out. Meanwhile, he took his show on the road and recorded a folk album with a long time friend (from what you hear in the movie, it's pretty terrible). The documentary covers Downey from all angles - friends who knew him before and during the show, executives, producers, audience members, and impressively, some of the guests. Alan Dershowitz and Gloria Steinem appear on camera and seem to have fond memories of sparring with Downey on the air.

 Not appearing, but a large part of the discussion, is the Reverend Al Sharpton, whose continued presence on the show during the Tawana Brawley case helped increase the prominence both of him and Downey. The legendary brawl at the Apollo Theater during one of Downey's live tour is given a new perspective from the point of view of the show bodyguard, who considered it to be more of a "party" than a riot. Throughout the documentary there's a discussion of what was real and what was exaggerated on the show and whether its host even believed what he was saying. Interspersed between are animated segments that reminded me a bit of American: The Bill Hicks Story, as well as readings from his book "Quiet Thoughts" Make the Loudest Noise (published under Sean Morton Downey). There's never a dull moment in the documentary, and worth checking out.

 Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th is the follow-up to Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy from Daniel Farrands, and at nearly seven hours, it would be hard to argue that it wasn't exhaustive and thorough. I liked it, but not as much as Never Sleep Again, and it's not so much that I enjoy A Nightmare on Elm Street more, but that I feel like Friday the 13th has been covered more often in different places.

 To start with, the documentary's title comes from Peter Bracke's excellent oral history of the films (a coffee table book you can still find on Amazon, by the way), but in addition to that, unlike most of the Nightmare DVDs and Blu-Rays, the Friday the 13th films have always had some degree of "making of" documentaries for each film, so there's a built in familiarity with some of the stories being told (in comparison, the only part of Never Sleep Again that I knew very well was the section about the first film). Crystal Lake Memories also (sparingly) re-purposes footage from His Name Was Jason, a much shorter Friday the 13th series documentary also directed by Farrands, and for Freddy vs. Jason, portions of Never Sleep Again (although the focus skews heavily on Jason this time, understandably).

 There's still a LOT to learn here, and like Never Sleep Again, my least favorite Friday entries often produce the best stories (parts V, VIII, and the remake). If you're a fan of the series who hasn't read or seen tons of anecdotes about Friday the 13th, there's going to be a lot to love here (and if you're lucky, maybe you can score a copy with the bonus disc that includes another 4 1/2 hours of additional interviews), but die hard fans should know that there's a good deal of ground covered here you already know, as entertaining as it is to hear again.

Where Have You Been?

This last section is designed to cover directors I'd been waiting to see follow-up well known (or at least, well liked by me) films or, in the case of one of them, return to making a style of movies most thought he'd long abandoned. In any other sense, these films have almost nothing in common, but you have to close out somewhere, right?

 I had been waiting for a long time for Shane Black's next film after the riotous, irreverent, clever take on detective films, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and finally got it in the form of Iron Man Three earlier in 2013. Like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, it takes place during Christmas, has deceptive narration, and doesn't take itself, the source material, or even the films that preceded it in the Marvel Universe too seriously. The last part was a serious sticking point for hard core Marvel fans, as Black's insouciant attitude towards The Mandarin soured many a fanboy and the internet is still screaming about how Black and Ben Kingsley "ruined" their favorite Iron Man villain.

 Black's sense of humor seems to mesh very well with Robert Downey Jr.'s "take nothing seriously" portrayal of Tony Stark, and the two were a fantastic pair in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang eight years ago, so I wasn't worried in the slightest about Iron Man Three. What surprised me was the other side of the coin: Stark is visibly traumatized by the battle at the end of The Avengers, has night terrors, and is obsessed with perfecting his armor in order to be ready for when (not if) it happens again. Instead of an alien invasion, Stark finds himself picking a fight with international terrorist The Mandarin (Kingsley) while Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) fends off the advances of Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), a scientist who has his own history with Tony. Along for the ride are Colonel James Rhodes (Don Cheadle), re-branded as the Iron Patriot, and one of Killian's former associates, Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), who is more than a little worried about her boss's association with The Mandarin.

 Much credit is due to Black for doing two things you should never do: 1) keeping Stark out of the Iron Man armor for most of the middle of the movie and 2) introducing a kid "sidekick" for Tony during the same stretch of film. Not only is Stark forced to be more resourceful, but we see how he deals with someone that, in a million years, Tony would never pair up with but has no choice. And rather than being the typical obnoxious child, Haley (Ty Simpkins) goes toe-to-toe with Tony and their bickering manages to avoid most of the problems with involving a kid in the story.

 The film is loosely adapted from the Extremis story in Iron Man, but it's probably going to be remembered less for the balance of action and comedy and more for the introduction of The Mandarin and the (SPOILER) subsequent revelation that he's just an actor playing the part of a terrorist. Comic fans hated Black taking down the Mandarin mythos and revealing him just to be some guy hired to be the face of the operation, and I get it. It's a huge bait-and-switch and no amount of theorizing that "Trevor Slattery" is "actually really The Mandarin doing a double fake-out" is going to assuage taking the piss out of the villain.

 All the same, I must say I really enjoyed Iron Man Three (spelled that way in the closing credits, which means it's how you should address it, mmkay?) and Black's foray into the Marvel Universe. Based on interviews where he was asked, it sounds like he doesn't really want to do any more Marvel movies, so I look forward to whatever he's up to next. Let's just not take another eight years, if that's cool.

 While on the subject of Marvel directors, Joss Whedon surprised everybody in 2013 by revealing he had, mostly in secret, already completed his next film, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing. Filmed entirely at his house (where he staged regular Shakespeare readings with friends) and starring vast swaths of cast members from the Whedon-verse, Much Ado About Nothing is a breezy, enchanting modern take on the Bard that, thanks in large part to its location, brings a sense of intimacy to the story. It's also a marked contrast to The Avengers and Serenty in scope, and closer in execution (if not tone) to his television work.

 For those who didn't read the play in high school, here's as quick of a recap as I can give: Don Pedro (Reed Diamond) has arrived at the home of Leonato (Clark Gregg) after a successful campaign in battle, bringing along his brother, Don John (Sean Maher), and associates Benedick (Alexis Denisof) and Claudio (Franz Kranz). Claudio is taken with Leonato's daughter, Hero (Jillian Morgese) and hopes to marry her with the help of Don Pedro, and Benedick is a self professed bachelor who likes nothing more than to bicker with Hero's cousin, Beatrice (Amy Acker). Leonato and Don Pedro decide to conspire to bring Benedick and Beatrice together, with the help Claudio, Hero, and the rest of the house. Everything seems to be going well until Don John and his friends Conrade (Riki Lindhome) and Borachio (Spencer Treat Clark) decide to disparage the honor of Hero and ruin the wedding, but with the assistance of two bumbling offices, Verges (Tom Lenk) and Dogberry (Nathan Fillion), all might not be lost...

 Whedon makes an interesting decision at the beginning of Much Ado About Nothing to explicitly show Beatrice and Benedick's romantic history preceding the story, which is (maybe) hinted at in the play but never stated. It adds an additional layer to the banter between Acker and Denisof (who already had great chemistry on Angel, sorry but I am a nerd). It takes a moment to adjust to Shakespearan dialogue in American dialect (the last time I heard it presented that way was in the awful 2000 version of Hamlet), but once you've settled in the presentation and black and white photography seem perfectly natural. Whedon once again indulges in including a song in the film ("Say No More") and while he didn't write it, for some reason I just can't get into the presentation of music in any of his projects, which makes a critical scene early in the film more of an annoyance for me than it should be. But that, I know, is completely my issue and won't affect many of you at all. Just know that "Once More with Feeling" and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog are not my favorite Whedon related projects. Technically I suppose Much Ado About Nothing is supposed to be a 2012 film, but there wasn't anywhere I could see it before 2013, so that's how I'm counting it. It's a welcome change of pace from an always unpredictable voice in geekdom.

 As divisive as Iron Man Three and Frances Ha are likely to be (for different reasons), I think Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives is going to take the cake. If you hated Drive (and I know several people who were quite vocal in their disagreement over its place in my 2011 "Best Of" list), you're really going to hate Only God Forgives. If you liked Drive (as I did and continue to), there's still a very good chance you're going to hate Only God Forgives. It's even less direct in where it is going, even more abstract in its storytelling, and even more withdrawn in its performances. The subject matter is consistently brutal and borderline abhorrent, and the violence is more extreme. There are no characters worth pulling for, and nobody really wins in the end. So that's your warning. That said, I think I really liked it. Didn't love it, but I'm pretty sure I really like it.

 Only God Forgives has less of a story than Drive, and that's saying something. Where Drive was a neo-noir that followed the wrong character (traditionally speaking, the Bryan Cranston character should have been the protagonist based on most noir conventions), Only God Forgives is a revenge film where the person seeking revenge a) doesn't want to and b) is grossly outmatched in his opponent, but he's been coerced into doing it, so things probably won't end well.

 Julian (Ryan Gosling) lives in Thailand with his brother Billy (Tom Burke), and runs a boxing club that's also a front for drug deals. Julian fancies himself a fighter while Billy has tastes that run... dark. While out one night, Billy decides to hire an underage prostitute and then kills her, which brings the attention of Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), the "Angel of Vengeance" of the police force. Chang brings the girl's father to the scene of the crime, and allows him to kill Billy as retribution, but then cuts off the father's hands for not protecting his daughter in the first place. Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas), arrives not long thereafter, and immediately begins browbeating Julian about the death of his brother. She's their mother, and has an unhealthy (at best) relationship with her boys, and a particularly strange attachment to Billy (let's just say she brings up their respective, *ahem* lengths while at dinner with Julian and a stripper he's pretending is his girlfriend).

 When Julian isn't acting fast enough in taking revenge, Crystal hires his associates to do the job and kill both the father and Chang, and it doesn't end well. Chang is a brutally efficient killer with a stringent moral code. When he's done committing horrific acts of justice, he sings karaoke. Julian has premonitions of losing his beloved hands to Chang, but is pressed onward by his warped mother (also revealed to be the boss behind the drug dealing) to murder the police officer. Julian tries to fight him and loses (badly), but presses on, even though no good can come of this.

 Every character in Only God Forgives is unlikeable, from the practically comatose Julian to the loathsome Billy to the repressive to the point of extreme outbursts Chang. Crystal is probably the worst of all of them, egging Julian on to kill someone he can't hope to defeat, but she's seeking retribution for her dead son. Then again, Julian's in Thailand because Crystal asked him to kill his own father and he did it. Nothing about Only God Forgives is pleasant, but there's a strangely hypnotic quality in Refn's opaque presentation of what little story there is. It's a march towards inevitability, to be sure, but one that transfixes. And one that most of you will find every bit as loathsome and unappealing as its protagonists.

 Ryan Gosling is nearly motionless for long stretches, to the point of appearing catatonic. Pansringarm is stoic, even during moments of violence, and the juxtaposition in the karaoke lounge doesn't waver much from that. On the other hand, the nearly unrecognizable Kristin Scott Thomas oozes malice and manipulates everyone in her sight, breaking the formality. I don't suppose the droning score will help, or the mostly neon lighting, or the long opening section (in what is a fairly short movie) where nothing happens. The only appeal, I suppose, is if you desperately need to see Ryan Gosling get his ass handed to him, because that does happen. Otherwise, I would proceed with caution - this is going to be a seriously divisive film for years to come.

 On the opposite side of the spectrum, I never thought I'd seen the David Gordon Green who made George Washington, All the Real Girls, and Undertow again. After Pineapple Express, Green seemed to be enjoying making high concept lowbrow comedies that people really didn't warm to, like Your Highness and his ill-advised remake of Adventures in Babysitting, The Sitter. For a stretch there, one could assume he was happy making comedies for major studios. But then again, you know what they say about assuming...

 To everybody's surprise, Green announced he'd already finished a new movie, filmed on the low down, and would be releasing it in 2013. Prince Avalanche, based on a Swedish film called Either Way, is David Gordon Green returning to minimalist storytelling, to his independent roots inasmuch as that's possible, and it's a fine return to form. I also didn't know Either Way existed, so there was no basis for comparison in my mind while watching it, if that's a mitigating factor for anybody.

 In the summer of 1988, after wildfires ravaged the Texas country side, Alvin (Paul Rudd) is working on repainting the roads out in rural areas. He brought along his girlfriend's younger brother, Lance (Emile Hirsch), in part because he asked but also because Lance is a "city boy." Alvin is surprised and disappointed that Lance has no idea how to fish or fend for himself, but Lance is just interested in getting to the weekend so he can go back to town and get laid.

 That is, without spoiling anything (if that's possible), the plot of Prince Avalanche. While there are a handful of other characters (a Truck Driver played by Lance DeGault and a mysterious Lady played by Joyce Payne), the film is largely a two man show. But boy howdy is it a joy to watch Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch bounce off of each other for 90 minutes. Their relationship is predicated entirely on the fact that the older Alvin is dating the younger Lance's sister, and they listen with amusement to the other rambling on about their big plans. Alvin wants to learn German and move away, and he's saving up to make that happen, while Lance is excited to go to the not-quite Miss America pageant where he's pretty sure he can hook up with one of the losers.

 If you're in the mood for a small movie that's more character driven than narrative, I think you'll do very well to watch Prince Avalanche. With Rudd and Hirsch starring, I suppose it's somewhere between and "indie" movie and a major release (it's something I think we would have had at The Galaxy), and it's the best thing Green's done since Pineapple Express. And if you didn't like that, I'd happily tell you this is as good as All the Real Girls, if even more limited in scope. That's not a bad thing, by the way. Prince Avalanche also makes me want to seek out Either Way, which is something to do between now and Green's next film, Joe,  another drama with Nicolas Cage. Count me in.

 This is it. We've finally made it to the end of the middle, as strange as that sounds. All that remains now are the final twelve, the best of the best. My favorite movies of 2013, and as we've built towards them, you can imagine how enthused I am to share them with you. Most of them I've already seen more than once, and I've been driving my friends crazy for the last three months to see all of them. But that you must wait a little bit longer for. Not too long, but a little suspense will do you good...