Creatures Of The Night

Year: 2016

Director: Tom Ford

Cast: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Fashion designer Tom Ford would not seem like the obvious candidate for a prestigious movie career, but his debut film A Single Man was just the right blend of overwrought ambigu-drama and stunning aestehtic that he caught the eye of the Hollywood elite. Now, 7 years later, we’re getting his sophomore feature, the thriller Nocturnal Animals. This is the most important movie of his career, the one that defines the direction of his narrative and aesthetic development to see if he can actually sustain a directorial career. Let’s see how that went.

So far so good.

The plot: Grotesquely rich visual artist Susan (Amy Adams) lives in Los Angeles with her husband Hutton (Armie Hammer) one of those moneyed types in suits who has a job so above the scope of day-to-day labor that you’re not actually sure what it is that he does. Also his named is f**king Hutton, so who needs more description than that.

Susan is reaching a personal crossroads, doubting every choice that she’s made in her life when her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) sends her the manuscript of his new novel, which she reads over the course of one sleepless weekend while F**king Hutton is on a “business trip” with some slinky model.

In the novel, which contains some disturbing parallels to her own life, West Texas father Tony Hastings (also Jake Gyllenhaal) works with local policeman Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon) to track down the man (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who murdered his wife (Isla Fisher) and daughter (Ellie Bamber) on the lonely highway one night. He attempts to overcome his own lack of strength to bring justice back into the world.

And take lots of showers.

Basically, Nocturnal Animals is a Western disguised as a prestige drama, which is actually pretty nifty. Did it need three layers of narrative to achieve this (her reading of the novel is also intercut with flashbacks of their life together)? Absolutely not. Does Amy Adams need to be involved? Well, definitely not as much as she is, but she’s a gorgeous canvas for Tom Ford’s most dazzling aesthetic, so we’ll let it slide. It’s a deliriously messy structure, but the story at its core is strong enough to survive the worst lashings of narrative incompetence.

First, let’s take a closer look at that core story, the Western thriller novel, also titled “Nocturnal Animals.” It’s definitely a narrative that would have made a decent film on its own, depicting the bond between two men who have nothing to lose and how their differing personalities chafe against a tense situation.

The roadside thriller sequence that opens this particular story is exquisitely terrifying, dominated by an unhinged Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who Deliverances it up without going too over-the-top. You can sense Tom Ford’s preference for grounded, character-driven drama in the way he nervously fumbles the film’s one true-blue action sequence: a car chase with no discernible geography that feels like two or three cars are just singular points barreling through the void with no particular relation to one another (seriously – I could have sworn three cars were involved, but only two come into play as the scene closes out) – but his work with the actors up-close and personal is phenomenal.

Jake Gyllenhaal is a marvel here, depicting his entire arc within a tremendously tactile performance that seamlessly differentiates his two characters through subtle physical cues.

And I don’t just mean shaving his beard, though that helps.

Gyllenhaal might be an offscreen character during the “present day,” but Nocturnal Animals is nevertheless all about him and he knows it. The only reason I’m not frustrated by the overused narrative-within-a-narrative conceit is that the film is explicitly taking a look at how we use fiction to cope with and redefine our reality. I really can’t overstate the subtlety of his performance in getting his message across.

But then you zoom out one tick more and land on Amy Adams. This section of the film is immensely frustrating, slashing up the flow of the novel with constant insert shots of her reading and looking sullen. Her performance is solid, but the script serves her extremely poorly. Her struggles add a frisson of social satire and four film-stealing, one-scene-only cameos from Laura Linney, Michael Sheen, Andrea Riseborough, and Jena Malone, but the tone is all over the place. These scenes are the mostly overtly comic, yet the atmosphere so clearly yearns to be dour and repressive.

This is also the area where Ford busts out his most self-consciously composed frames, using lush color blocking and glammed-up costume design for  carousel of poster moment that are stunning but don’t add up to much. When two-thirds of the film works so well, it feels wrong to complain about the rest – especially when it’s as well-composed as this- but this stuff just kind of fails to work. It sputters and stalls the film over and over and over again, in its desperation to be noticed (as evidenced by the opening credits, which rest on a truly shocking image that adds nothing to the film, existing just for its own sake).

Nocturnal Animals is far from a failure, but its just barely an improvement on A Single Man. Ford’ll have to work a little harder than this if he really wants to prove himself. But maybe he doesn’t, and that’s fine too. Nocturnal Animals is good enough to just be itself.

TL;DR: Nocturnal Animals is a gorgeous thriller that's a tentative step forward for director Tom Ford.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 941

The Best Friends Gang

Year: 2015

Director: Joss Whedon

Cast: Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo

Run Time: 2 hours 21 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but comics are kind of a big deal now. Audiences worldwide just can't get enough of hot women in leather, even hotter men in leather, robots, monsters, sardonic quips, and wanton property damage. After Marvel combined the superhero formula with the geek champion auteur Joss Whedon, the ne plus ultra of nerd culture was born: The Avengers. The film went on to make all the money in the world.

This year's sequel, Avengers: Age of Ultron is more or less the lynchpin of Marvel's Phase Two, the success of which could make or break the approximately 2,600 years of scheduling that the studio has already announced. It was inevitable that Avengers 2 would make money on name value alone, but a massive dip in quality could really poison audiences against the Phase Three efforts, which will include lesser-known properties like Doctor Strange, The Black Panther, and Captain Marvel.

Luckily for the company and for comic fans everywhere, Age of Ultron is a fairly worthy successor to the Avengers throne. Marvel ain't going nowhere just yet.

And yet there's still no Black Widow movie.

Age of Ultron begins where absolutely nothing left off: with the Avengers re-teamed, storming a Hydra stronghold to steal Mr. MacGuffin Loki's scepter. If you don't have a thorough knowledge of all 10 previous Marvel Cinematic Universe entries as well as one or two of the television shows, prepare to hit the ground sprinting and wheezing. 

While you're hacking up a lung, let's have a brief re-introduction to our main cast of characters. The assembled Avengers include Iron Man aka Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), the billionaire playboy weapons manufacturer with a robotic exoskeleton; Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), a gamma radiated scientist who turns into the opposite of the Jolly Green Giant when he's angered; Captain America (Chris Evans), the long-preserved purveyor of the American Dream; Thor (Chris Hemsworth), an otherworldly being with otherworldly deltoids about whom Norse mythology has been written; Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), an ex-spy with thighs that can snap your neck; and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), an ace shot with a bow and arrow, and my personal favorite Avenger. 

While we're on the subject, where's my Hawkeye movie?

The Avengers are mowing through the faceless goons when Hydra introduces their two newest creations, the X-Men mutants Eastern European experiment volunteers, the twin siblings Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). Their parents were killed by Stark weaponry and they want nothing more than good ol' fashioned revenge on Iron Man and his posse. Eventually, for reasons that he is a dick, Tony Stark decides to see if he can create artificial intelligence. He does, and it is called Ultron (James Spader, of all people), and it wants to destroy the human race. Good work, Tony.

While Ultron tries to find himself an enhanced body and wipe out the population of the Earth, the Avengers work their way through a series of interpersonal tensions and have climactic, building-leveling fights in just about every location across the globe that will let film crews past Customs.

My personal biggest concern with Age of Ultron was if it could capture the sprightly comedy of the first installment, and I was not disappointed. Sarcasm and wit drips from the eaves of the film like the aftermath of an explosion at the molasses factory. The best scenes of the film are those that take a break from the Important Comix moments to just let the personalities of the characters ping off of one another. As this was exactly what I was looking for, I was immensely pleased, but the fact remains that the film is a little lopsided. The renewed strength of the dialogue can't quite match the diminishing returns of the battle sequences.

I understand that there's only so many combinations of blows, laser beams, and hammer thrusts that the action scenes can provide (which they do, amply), but there's a certain lack of creativity behind the combat, especially in the climactic sequence. There are some admittedly terrific combo moves when two Avengers combine their powers, but for the most part these sequences feel disjointed. It doesn't feel like a team working together so much as a series of vignettes about punching.

Hella rad vignettes, but still.

The biggest flaw of the film, and the only one than comes even within a mile of being film-breaking is its middle third. There is a swath of about 30 minutes in which the humor is dropped in favor of arbitrarily introducing what feels like dozens of plot strands that make the whole mess far more complicated than it needs to be, leaning a little heavily on extracurricular comic-reading to get its point across. Also there's a few scenes sprinkled into the middle that feel like they're ripped directly from a 90's techno-thriller where high school kids battle online villains through the "'Net." It doesn't make a lot of sense and it's not particularly fun, but it doesn't take too long for the film to incorporate these elements and get back on its feet.

Also there's some shockingly dark implications that the Avengers might not be much better than a terrorist group considering the widespread damage they inflict across the globe, some of which echoes 9/11 imagery a little too closely for comfort. The film seems tentatively tempted to explore this thread before it jams itself back into Fun! Action! Mode.

HA! HA! HA! Big funny Iron Man! Please don't think about the skyscraper we just leveled.

But the dark side of Age of Ultron isn't ample. It's not like this is a Christopher Nolan flick. For the most part it's an engaging, light adventure pic that reliably executes what should honestly be a premise as stale as a Big Lots gingerbread house. It's fun, it's big, and it's thrilling. What more could you want, honestly?

And now that we have an entire Avengers film and umptybillion Iron Man/Captain America sequels under our belts, we know the characters more intimately than ever before so the juggling act of handling so many personalities simultaneously is a little smoother. This is perhaps the only element of the film that's actively better than its predecessor. Age of Ultron grabs a handful of genuine character moments  and tosses them to each of the Avengers like an overeager flower girl. These developments are perhaps a little bit more reliant on basic emotional indicators rather than truly intensely three-dimensional personas, but holy hell we're talking about a comic book movie. This is revolutionary.

So overall, yes, Avengers: Age of Ultron is a fun time at the movies. It doesn't capture the lightning in a bottle that the original film did, but its light bulb in a bottle does the trick.

PSA: Once the black and white credits scroll, feel free to take off. You can stick around until the end of the credits if you wish, but brace yourselves for a fat wad of nothing.

TL;DR: Avengers: Age of Ultron is a reliably entertaining sequel to a generation-defining superhero hit.

Rating: 7/10

Should I Spend Money On This? You already have.

Word Count: 1217

Reviews In This Series

Avengers: Age of Ultron (Whedon, 2015)

Captain America: Civil War (Russo & Russo, 2016)

Avengers: Infinity War (Russo & Russo, 2016)

Ant-Man and the Wasp (Reed, 2018)

American Godz

Year: 2014

Director: Gareth Edwards

Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Olsen

Run Time: 2 hours 3 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

From the beginning, Godzilla was never going to please everybody. It's hard enough to successfully reboot a foreign franchise into an American market, but when the franchise is a beloved 60-year-old kaiju series with a despised American remake only 16 years earlier, it comes saddled with a lot of expectations.

On top of his limited directing experience, visual effects artist Gareth Edwards had to face the precarious challenge of updating a cultural icon just enough for it to seem fresh and relevant in 2014 while staying true to the character's original intent way back when he was introduced in 1954, as well as the ways the proceeding years shaped his development. It should come as no surprise that the film was a mixed success.

Poor guy can't catch a break.

Let us also not act surprised that the human element is largely clichéd. That one was a given and, in fact, is absolutely in keeping with the spirit of the franchise. The film is full of people shouting things into telephones and melodramatically putting on glasses, but you won't catch me complaining. It's all in good fun.

So, the humans. Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is an American worker in Japan, of all places. Basically, he has Homer Simpson's job, managing the local nuclear power plant. When his wife (Juliette Binoche) dies in a mysterious accident that collapses the entire structure, he dedicates the rest of his life to discovering the true cause of the devastation.

Fifteen years later, their son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson of Kick-Ass and current holder of the title of Broadest Man in the World) is all grown up in San Francisco and is a lieutenant in the Navy who works with defusing bombs. He has a wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and son (Carson Bolde) because of course he does. I'm just glad they aren't estranged and forced to reconcile during the inevitable disaster.

An ill-timed encounter with his father in Japan sends Ford smack-dab in the middle of a full-scale catastrophe as they discover the truth behind the wreckage - a massive insectoid monster known as a MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) that immediately flies off in search of more radiation to devour, destroying everything in its path.

It's impossible to find production photos of the MUTO so soon after the film's release. Please accept my apologies and this photo of Bryan Cranston.

So off they go to stop the monster menace before it finds its mate and destroys the world. But lo! Help is on the way in the form of a giant lizard known only as Godzilla, protector of the natural balance of nature. Will these giant monsters duke it out, destroying entire cities in the process while the sound designers pump out rumbling bass that will rattle the bones out of your sockets? Hells yeah they will.

Let's get into it. Because the good largely outweighs the bad, why don't we start with that? The film takes a lot of cues from Jaws and Jurassic Park in the first act, using a slow burn tactic and subtle imagery (pencils rolling off a desk in an aircraft carrier and a terrific "airplane domino" scene are reminiscent of the rippling glass of water in the latter film) to hint at the impending doom before we get our first true glimpse of the titular monster.

The action is excellently choreographed across the board, at least where the humans are concerned and during the bulk of the monster mayhem, interspersed with some dazzling shots that I will not ruin here. I'll just mention the one used in the teaser trailer of parachuters falling over San Francisco, trails of lights following their paths. It is majestic and truly epic and not the only sequence in the film that feels that way. Edwards really knows how to frame an event for maximum import.

This scene is accompanied by a taut orchestral piece by Alexandre Desplat that is the standout in a mostly nonintrusive score and is certainly one of the best cinematic moments of the year, if not the decade so far.

That and Aaron Taylor-Johnson shirtless.

So that's all fine and dandy. The artists behind Godzilla had a real eye for visual storytelling and it is a massive benefit to the film as a whole. But it can't entirely overcome some of the more telling weaknesses in its plotting.

Unfortunately, the largest issue is, in fact, literally the largest: Godzilla. At the risk of sounding like a petty fanboy, he's not in the movie nearly enough. The human scenes are great, as are their tense interactions with the unleashed monsters, but this ain't the MUTO show. This is freakin' Godzilla and he only gets about a fifth of the screen time that they do.

It's the arrogance of man (specifically Edwards) to think that he can sideline our title creature - a veritable force of nature and king of the monsters - for some B-side kaiju of his own creation. And while there are some great moments in the monster clash finale, it's all a little clunky and haphazard and Godzilla is a little too fallible. 

Not that I'm asking that there be no element of conflict or suspense, but I just wish we could have spent more time with Godzilla destroying crap instead of wrestling crackerjack original creatures. I'm sure some people agree with me. And I'm sure some people don't. 'Tis the nature of the medium. But for what it's worth, it's still massively enjoyable even with what I consider its wasted potential.

Speaking of wasted potential, let's talk about the female characters. There are two women with major speaking roles and both are sidelined almost immediately, even though one of them - a scientist played by Blue Jasmine's Sally Hawkins - is ostensibly an expert on the subject of giant monsters. The other, Ford's wife, spends the back half of the film running around in the rain and crying.

It's like she was trapped in a Nicholas Sparks poster.

I do understand that the human characters are inconsequential in a Godzilla film. But come on, people! We can do better than this! Other than that though, Godzilla is a great popcorn flick and I have absolutely zero regrets shelling out the money to go see it. I'm just hoping it'll garner enough money to warrant a sequel where they can work out the kinks and bust out a truly magnificent American kaiju film. It's in the DNA of Godzilla, we just haven't quite reached it yet.

TL;DR: Godzilla is a terrifically tense action flick but some missteps with the giant monsters deflate it somewhat.

Rating: 8/10

Should I Spend Money On This? This month, you've got Godzilla or X-Men. Nothing else matters. If you're on a budget, pick one. If you're into pop culture at all you'll already know which one you'd rather see.

Word Count: 1165

Half Assed

Editor's Note: This post is rated R for necessary swearing in the plot synopsis. Although considering that it's  Kick-Ass 2, so you should really already know what you're in for.

Year: 2013

Director: Jeff Wadlow

Cast: Aaron Taylor Johnson, Chloë Grace Moretz, Christopher Mintz-Plasse

Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Am I the only one who thinks it's weird that all three of the top-billed cast members have triple names? People have got to calm down. You gotta earn that distinction. When you think you can reasonably compete with Neil Patrick Harris or Sarah Michelle Gellar, give me a call.

First, a caveat. I have little to no recollection of the original Kick-Ass, so forgive me if I sound like an idiot for not understanding a couple minor plot points.

Second, Jim Carrey has renounced his support of this film due to its violent content, and we shall make no judgements on or further mention of this stupidity.

"There's a dog on your balls." 

That quote could be from a number of his movies, to tell you the truth.

KA2 presumably follows the events of the first film, which is but a shimmering mirage on the highway of my memory. Kick-Ass/Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor Johnson) has retired from superherodom, but when a slew of copycat vigilantes takes to the streets, he decides high school is too boring and begins his training again under the guidance of his old friend Hit Girl/Mindy Macready (Chloë Grace Moretz).

However, Mindy's new guardian has decided that maybe a fifteen-year-old girl shouldn't be out fighting crime, even if she is awesome at it. She is forced to attempt to assimilate into the world of a normal high school freshman and Dave, rudderless, joins a crew of vigilantes known as Justice Forever, led by Colonel Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey).

Unbeknownst to the teen, his old arch-rival (or ex-friend. I don't remember, I don't care, but he hates him. He killed his dad with a bazooka. That would make anybody mad. Even Gandhi, probably.), Chris D'Amico (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) has donned leather bondage gear and is parading around under the moniker The Motherfucker, gathering a group of heavy hitters to become the world's first real supervillain and destroy Kick-Ass once and for all.

And then violence and punching, mainly.

And pube beards.

The film's best scenes are invariably the ones where Hit Girl gets the most to do as she takes on hooded baddies and Regina Georges with aplomb. 

During her brief retirement from kicking ass, she is mentored on the art of being popular by a girl who's clearly 20 (The fact that Moretz is 16 in real life only highlights how outrageously old all the other "high school students" in the film are). She auditions for the dance team with some spectacular martial arts-derived moves, falls in love with her first boy band (In the form of a clear One Direction parody that, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a real band. Ouch.), and is left in the dust by what turns out to be a group of very Mean Girls.

Moretz just can't catch a break between this and the whole pig's blood thing at prom, so after getting revenge on the girls in a truly cheap and un-hilarious vomit gag she jumps right on into the best action setpiece in the entire film, taking on a moving van of villains as they try to escape, Kick-Ass in tow.

He's a character too, I guess.

If I could only talk about Moretz for the rest of this review, I would, because she is without a doubt the most accomplished person on the set and a lot of fun to watch, leaping deftly between fish-out-of-water comedy and foulmouthed badassery and taking it all in stride.

The other actors do their jobs, for the most part. I would like to take a moment to call out a certain Mr. Mintz-Plasse, though. Perhaps this is just typecasting rearing its ugly head, but the whole "spitting out your words like a rabid chipmunk" thing just isn't doing it for me anymore.

His performance is clumsy and annoying, much like the film's handling of the overarching themes of identity and bloodletting. I can't begrudge a film with a name like Kick-Ass 2 for wielding its theme with a sledgehammer, but when every scene says some variation of "the mask doesn't define you" or "I may wear a mask, but so do you," it gets old.

Hey she's wearing a mask! I get it now!

The time has come. We had to get to the violence eventually. While some scenes are pretty great action pieces, like the aformentioned "moving van beatdown," the brutality can get a little intense, especially when it comes to characters we care about. Or at least characters with names.

The film spends its entire first half trying to ground itself in reality, exploring the real-world consequences of a man putting on a mask and fighting crime. The second half involves a guy getting his peeper ripped off with pliers and fed to him (to be fair this is implied and may not have actually happened), a man's teeth knocked about before being decapitated, and a lot of up-close gore (stuff like mouths and eyes that hit the audience harder than just seeing somebody get stabbed or punched).

While the best scenes work according to the ancient tradition of suspending disbelief, some of them are far too intense, especially in the face of all the movie's attempts to convince the audience that the world they display is as real as possible.

We watch action movies and enjoy all the face punching and stabbing and explosions because we understand innately that there are no real world consequences. It's only a movie. But when a film tries as hard as Kick-Ass 2 to tell us that it isn't, the more hardcore scenes are just a little too jarring to be truly enjoyable.

All in all, Kick-Ass 2 is a decent action movie with some great scenes and general good humor (and a gay character who is well-written, immediately accepted, and doesn't die to boot!) but sometimes it backslides into something a little bit more sinister, and that's not what you want out of your summer popcorn fare.

Last Word: If you give your characters racist names and comment on how they're racist, it doesn't change the fact that they are, in fact, racist. Bad doggy.

TL;DR: Kick-Ass 2 is enjoyable but uneven.
Rating: 6/10
Should I Spend Money On This? I'm sure you expected this answer but only if you liked the first film.
Word Count: 1113