Film

This may be the darkest, the grimmest, the most depressing summer popcorn movie ever. It is not summery. It is not popcorny. There is no adventure here. There is no escapism. There is only grinding reality to be endured in the harsh mirror it holds up to us in the audience. For there can be no mistake that the people of Gotham are us, we 99 percent huddled in the dark and frantic for a hero we will not find.
In Christopher Nolan’s first Dark Knight film, Batman Begins, Gotham was a clearly fictional place: oh, inspired by New York City, no question, but the Gotham skyline was emphatically a fantasy. Here, there is no longer any pretense: The iconic buildings and bridges of the Manhattanscape are not disguised or altered. That is Fifth Avenue, symbol of luxury and wealth. That is Wall Street, symbol of excess and greed.

Just because Oliver Stone makes movies look cool doesn’t mean he always makes cool movies. Savages falls somewhere in between cool and ludicrous. O.K., let’s just say it has its moments. Weaving between overtly dark secrecy and over-the-top camp, Savages delivers a cartoonish version of deadly violent subject matter.
When Stone isn’t making some valiant statement in a lavish production (think JFK and Wall Street) he tears his style down to its bare essentials. With Savages, he dishes out a pretty standard story about drug dealing and a kidnap/hostage situation, but he isn’t trying to sell the viewer on much of anything with the use of black-and-white-to-color storytelling, non-linear editing and multiple film stocks.

I’m sure there will be people who argue that The Amazing Spider-man should be evaluated on its own merits, as a work separate from the legacy of Sam Raimi’s Spider-man films over the last decade. And I respectfully ask—after I catch my breath from the hysterical laughter—“You’re joking, right?”
Leave aside for a moment the cynical reality that Sony had to make this movie sooner rather than later, in order to preserve its rights to the character after Disney’s deal to buy Marvel Comics. The fact remains that we are not even a generation removed from one of the great pop-culture one-two punches in blockbuster history (I’m pretending that Spider-man 3 never happened, as should we all). We saw what a pretty-close-to-perfect Spider-man movie looks like. We know that it’s possible. And because we know these things, how is it possible to look at The Amazing Spider-man and not recognize how much it lacks?

As the Spiderman franchise reboots and comes wall-crawling back into our lives, it seems like a good time to look back at some of the highlights and lowlights of comic over the last 35 years. I’m specifically focusing on the super hero movies based on comic books, or else this would just be 500 words on Unbreakable…the greatest of all super hero movies.

Wes Anderson doesn’t care if anyone likes his films. I think if the world stopped paying to see them, he would continue to make them, with his own money and show them to friends when they came over for dinner. He’s an auteur and one of the handful alive today like Paul Thomas Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Michael Haneke and a few others. As with those filmmakers, it’s usually easy to tell within the first minute when you’re watching a Wes Anderson film. Yet for some reason, critics single out Anderson for his distinctive style.

The craziest thing about this movie is the film doesn’t live up to the campiness conveyed by the title. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is so deadly serious that it should be ashamed of itself.
It’s as if The History Channel morphed into a bad action movie with the now standard Matrix-like effects. Sure there’s blood spraying and wild wire-work fight choreography. But this kung fu kickery attributed to an influential historical figure is a trend that has got to stop. How far will Hollywood take this trend of putting real people in completely farfetched scenarios á la the recent Raven where Edgar Allan Poe helped fight crime?

At first glance, it looked like Pixar was about to do the unthinkable: Brave was going to stick us with another variation on the “Rudolph plot.”
It’s a phenomenon I’ve griped about many times before, this obsession on the part of animation filmmakers with tales of frustrated outcasts who just wanna be accepted for who they are, just like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Hermie the elf. The recent film with which Brave seemed likely to be compared—2010’s How to Train Your Dragon—went down that same road, for all its 3D visual majesty. Now here was a story being promoted as that of a tomboyish young princess rejecting the destiny of demure, ladylike domesticity laid out for her. Was Pixar, after flirting with that notion in the disappointing Cars 2, going to go the full Rudolph on us?

Sometimes a filmmaker’s lofty ideas get in the way of execution. Such is the case with Hysteria, a flick that just scratches the surface of the never-ending fun and/or pathos that should be derived from such a touchy subject matter. Director Tanya Wexler tells the story of the invention of the first vibrator with quaintness and cuteness instead of the raging satire it so richly deserves. The opening prologue of “based on a true story” is followed by the smug … “really,” leading us to believe that this might be a flick with wit and vigor. What we get instead is a romantic comedy period piece with the vibrator saga as backdrop. Personally, I feel the Victorian period is patently boring unless a werewolf gnaws on someone’s neck.

Bernie has a trifecta of actors that I usually can’t stand (Jack Black, Mathew McConaughey, and Shirley MacLaine) and a director who has never impressed me (Richard Linklater). To be honest, Linklater has perturbed me in a way no other director has with his fingernails-on-a-blackboard, over-wordy agendas and use of mostly bad acting to deliver the goods. All this has changed, at least for the most part, with Bernie.
The film is based on the true story of Bernie Tiede (Black). Bernie is an assistant funeral director (“they don’t call them morticians anymore”) in Carthage Texas, a singer for the church choir, an actor in the town’s community theater and an all-around nice guy seeking acceptance. Without giving too much away, Bernie befriends the town’s meanest widow, Mrs. Nugent (MacLaine), who’s rolling in dough.

Imagine this: You get directions to a house in the suburbs where you’re instructed to pull into the garage, close the door and await further instructions. A man comes out of the house, takes you inside and orders you to shower and to “be thorough” with the soap. After cleaning yourself and putting on a very New Age white robe, you’re blindfolded, zip-cuffed and driven to an undisclosed location in the San Fernando Valley. Then, after doing a complicated secret handshake, you’re taken to another room with a dozen other people in robes. Then she appears, the woman you’re there to see. Maggie. A beautiful, blonde mystery. Maggie then tells you a story about how she traveled back in time from 2056 to save her friends from a series of calamitous events that will change the world. Maggie has followers, maybe including you now, and she wants to take you to a safe place.