Marvel's Contract Negotiations: The Movie!

Year: 2018

Director: Joe & Anthony Russo

Cast: C'mon

Run Time: 2 hours 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

So, the time has come. More or less the entirety of modern cinema has led to this, the culmination of ten years of multi-million dollar blockbuster filmmaking. People online have made fun of Marvel's comment about Avengers: Infinity War being the most ambitious crossover event in cinema history, but people online don't have a great track record of thinking things through. Marvel is right. Infinity War is an act of pure Hollywood hubris, cramming as many successful properties into one punch-kicking chunk as humanly possible. It was either going to be the best movie ever made or a fully incomprehensible hash.

Unfortunately, because the world doesn't live in binaries like we want it to, Infinity War lands somewhere in between. But honestly, that's the best case scenario, because it could have been so much worse and frankly we as a species don't deserve the glory of what would have happened if they threaded that needle.

But we DO deserve Danai Gurira and Chris Evans' beard being in as many movies as possible, so at least we're getting that started.

Oh boy. This is the part where we recap the plot of the movie. Wish me luck. 

Umm... remember all the Marvel movies since 2008? Well, you'd better. Every character you've ever known and loved and a bunch of characters who you assume are from the ones you didn't see are in danger, because the big purple Jay Leno alien known as Thanos (Josh Brolin) is finally ready to bedazzle his Polly Pocket glove with the sparkly Infinity stones that have been cropping up oh so often lately. Once he collects them all, he can send in the box tops to receive his prize: the death of half the population of the universe.

Turns out, people don't like that idea, so pretty much everyone who has a superpower or who looks good in a leather catsuit have assembled to prevent this catastrophe on as many fronts as possible. Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Rocket (Bradley Cooper voice, Sean Gunn mocap), and Groot (Vin Diesel) search for a mythical god-killing weapon. Meanwhile the rest of the Guardians of the Galaxy - Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Drax (Dave Bautista), and Mantis (Pom Klementieff) - head to cut off Thanos at the site of some Infinity Stone or other. 

Meanwhile meanwhile, Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) has disappointed girlfriend Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) by hopping onto the ship of Thanos' right-hand monster Ebony Maw (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) to save Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) with stowaway Spider-Man (Tom Holland).

Meanwhile meanwhile meanwhile, Vision (Paul Bettany) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) are trying to bone in peace, but he's got a big ol' Infinity Stone in his head so he must be evacuated to Wakanda by war criminals Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Falcon (Anthony Mackie) into the custody of Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and also Hulk is there (Mark Ruffalo).

Did I miss anything? Oh yes, 45% of the cast. Well, I tried. I really did.

I'm getting why Thanos wants to destroy half of these people. It would really make things easier to follow.

Much like the screenwriters of Infinity War, I really don't know where to start. There's a lot of good in Infinity War and a lot of bad, but they're all hopelessly entangled. Maybe we should start with Thanos, who has been lurking in the background of this franchise since the end credits tease in 2012's Avengers. The movie really wants to have a sympathetic villain, but doesn't quite stick the landing. Maybe it's the fact that it's easier to relate to someone who doesn't look like a CGI gummy bear. Maybe they cashed in their small supply of Good Villain points to make Killmonger back in February. Maybe it's just the fact that every time the script shifts to its serious tone, the gears start to grind a little bit. I'm going to assume it's all the above, but let's discuss the latter.

The screenplay, from the writers behind your favorite Marvel entries including Captain America: The First Avenger and Thor: The Dark World, is kind of a mess. Whenever it attempts to get profound (as any apocalyptic movie is tempted to do), it adopts a clownish grimace and forces its characters through a gauntlet of the most maudlin, overwrought monologues yet known to man. Combined with the barbaric clunkiness of the exposition every time that rears its ugly head, a lot of sequences in this movie are just punishing to watch.

A scene where you can see exactly where it's going within seconds drags out its overheated drama for full minutes, jam-packed with explanatory dialogue that finds endless ways to rephrase "you say that things are THIS way... But they're THAT way!" Infinity War never cuts to the chase, and its complicated labyrinth of life-or-death contrivances, arbitrary ticking clock action sequences, and bizarre character motivations isn't smoothed out by how painful and empty the emotional scenes are.

But it's hard to drum up stakes when you know that there are going to be 18 more of these movies in the next, like, three months. Especially when the punches are as hyperbolically pulled as this one. The Marvel films have always had a problem with balancing the power levels of its various characters, but Thanos is so perilously overpowered that when he stoops to the level of a punchfight, you wonder why he doesn't just crush these people like ants. His strength and ability wax and wane exactly as the plot needs them to, and that almost completely neuters his ability to be an impressive villain. He's literally upstaged by his sidekick Ebony Maw, who has a crazy frightening countenance, a startlingly powerful telekinetic ability, and a much more mustache-twistingly eeevil approach to his work.

The fact that the movie doesn't realize how freaking terrifying he is just goes to show that you shouldn't add characters willy nilly when you're stuck with the ones you've been teasing for a decade.

This arid, emotionless state of affairs isn't helped by the cast, which is like 800 pounds of sexy glowering shoved into a five pound bag. Whether it's because they're finally grown tired of their characters or if they just feel like they don't have to try too hard considering they'll only get like five minutes of screentime, a lot of our team roster here is on autopilot. Much like the script, these performances are leaning hard on the assumption that you already know and love these characters and they don't have to try too hard to earn your trust.

Robert Downey, Jr. has obviously getting tired of playing Iron Man for some time, and Chris Evans has literally been fatigued by the lifestyle he's had to live to keep Captain America afloat, but their disinterest is front and center here. Mark Ruffalo also seems to have lost his hold on what exactly Hulk is doing in these movies, and some of the one-scene reappearances from actors like Idris Elba are clearly catnapping. And Gwyneth Paltrow is practically comatose.

Luckily, this isn't an actors' movie. This is a posing in tight shirts movie, and that more than does the trick. And a lot of material is patched up by the people who really are pulling their weight, usually the newer additions to the franchise. The Guardians of the Galaxy, fresh off their sequel, are still packing a comic punch that keeps the lighter tone in the air, Danai Gurira from Black Panther owns the screen with just a twitch of her lip, and Chris Hemsworth is still harnessing the Kiwi magic that made Tho: Ragnarok so special. Plus, Tom Holland is flat out great, giving me the only scene that actually impacted my emotions in any way at all.

Even though the Iron-Spidey suit is... questionable.

OK, finally we've transitioned into the good parts of the movie, of which there are quite a lot. In an infinite universe all things are possible, and there's no universe as big as the MCU, so there was always going to be just as much good as bad. Or... almost as much.

The action scenes aren't all spectacular, but they're definitely engaging popcorn cinema, and one fight that brings back the magical aesthetics of Doctor Strange is a decadent visual feast, reminiscent of Dumbledore and Voldemort's showstopping battle in the Ministry of Magic in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Aesthetically, the film comes alive for a lot of its spacefaring adventures, painting worlds and landscapes we've never seen before with candy colors that are drunk on the visual potential of comic books. Not every setting is perfect (a climactic battle is staged in a location where everything is a different shade of "rust"), but there's a lot of big budget whimsy to be had here.

And when the script does shift to its lighter tones, the comedy pretty much always works. Obviously laughs are in the mouth of the beholder, but over the past few days since I saw this movie my mind has been irresistibly drawn back to a lot of the one-liners, of which I have retained a much higher quantity and with greater accuracy than even most straight-up comedy films I like. Again, the best of these are delivered by the actors who are actually trying, but everybody gets a shot at a line or two that undeniably works.

And... fine. Not all the melodrama is bad. I wish I could talk about it without spoiling it, but I can't, so I'll suffice it to say that a metanarrative decision on the parts of the filmmakers really drives home the emotional impact of an event in the third act, retroactively making it feel much more brutal than it felt, at least to me, in the moment. Ask me in the comments if you want more detail on that.

Anyway, there's really a lot wrong here, but I'm going to err on the side of enjoying popcorn cinema and forgive some of its sins in favor of the parts I did really like, at least on a shallow entertainment level. The sheer amount of balls they manage to juggle is impressive, and while it doesn't feel seamless, it's at least comprehensible, which it almost certainly didn't seem like it was going to be.

TL;DR: Avengers: Infinity War is surprisingly legible and certainly fun, but emotionally unavailable due to its jam-packed story.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1764

Reviews In This Series

Guardians of the Galaxy (Gunn, 2014)

Avengers: Age of Ultron (Whedon, 2015)

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

Doctor Strange (Derrickson, 2016)

Black Panther (Coogler, 2018)

Avengers: Infinity War (Russo & Russo, 2018)

Ant-Man and the Wasp (Reed, 2018)

Popcorn Kernels: Movies I Missed (On Purpose)

In which we release mini-reviews of two fairly recent comedy films that managed to pass me by until now.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Year: 2008

Director: Kevin Smith

Cast: Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Craig Robinson

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

In order to make enough money to pay their rent, two slacker friends decide to produce and star in a porn film, but how will this affect their relationship?

Pretty much any movie starring Seth Rogen between 2007 and 2010 was created explicitly to cater to the greasy, speckly daydreamers of the world who wanted to believe the busty blonde down the hall would find the lovable oaf buried deep beneath the Cheeto dust-crusted exterior. It’s the kind of nerd-fulfillment fantasy Judd Apatow has been trafficking in since day one, and the only person I can think of who is more suited to bring that icky feeling to life is Kevin Smith. …Enter Kevin Smith.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is about Elizabeth Banks falling for Seth Rogen and while both are admirable performers, the spark isn’t even there on paper. I’m not even talking about their disparate physical attractiveness. Zack could be played by Hugh Grant and Miri’s interest in him would still be deeply questionable. It’s all in the writing, which is skeevy and sweaty in a deeply disconcerting manner despite the supposed sex positivity of the script. 

The film crows over the female form like a cackling magpie, exempting men altogether from its bone-chilling leer. This is a movie strewn with completely naked women that treats its one full frontal male scene like it’s something shocking and disgusting. Male perspectives in sex films are just the worst, aren’t they? Despite Banks’ attempt at creating a shaded, multi-dimensional human being, Miri is merely a prize to be won: a fun fair sack of flesh, blood, and mammary glands. 

And Zack and Miri treats its minor characters even worse, if you can believe it. Craig Robinson is forced to contort into every stereotype in the book, and some that have been scribbled in the margins (whipped sitcom husband, wise best friend, irrationally angry black man), and the rest of the porno cast are given no introduction, with personalities ranging from one-note (Jason Mewes’ clueless sex fiend) to topless window dressing to “no seriously, who are you?” Then they’re sent floundering through a fundamentally broken story with a distended first act that swallows half the run time, a bungled time jump that kills the momentum at a climatic juncture, and a central relationship that vomits out manufactured filler drama in an unending stream. There are such deep cracks in the narrative here that James Cameron wants to make a documentary exploring them.

Is it funny? I suppose. Justin Long has an excellent extended cameo as a gravel-throated gay porn star, and there are jokes throughout that work when they’re not being extravagantly racist, sickeningly misogynistic, or they completely miscalculate the film’s capacity for scatological humor. Zack and Miri aims to shock, and it succeeds, but hardly in the way it intends to. Its sex is too tame to be titillating, and it can’t sustain such a deeply disjointed story on a pocketful of dick jokes. I say Zack and Miri Make a Porno is a tremendously lazy film, and the Windows Movie Maker credits that grace its front and back end seem to agree with me. I’d love to see this material handled by another director, but unfortunately Zack and Miri – and especially Kevin Smith – just don’t turn it on.

Rating: 4/10

Vacation

Year: 2015

Director: John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein

Cast: Ed Helms, Christina Applegate, Skyler Gisondo 

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A now grown-up Rusty Griswold decides to take his family on a road trip to Wally World in an attempt to smooth over their problems.

Now, here’s a movie I never thought I’d see, let alone like. A belated straggler from the 2000’s remake boom (seriously, other than Ghostbusters, who’s making remakes anymore? Remakes are so passé, sequels are what’s In this season), updating material that nobody has given a passing thought to in over a decade, Vacation seemed like the most obnoxious kind of family comedy. And to be honest, it doesn’t really try to be anything different. All the scatological gags, picked-clean sexual references, and oddly violent slapstick that you might expect are front and center, but Vacation prevails in spite of that.

I blame the cast. Ed Helms has always been a reliable comic presence, even if he doesn’t stand out in a sea of funny 40-something white guys. And he’s surrounded by a bevy of delightful professionals, first and foremost Christina Applegate. I’ve never paid much attention to Applegate beyond her cameo appearance on Friends, but she’s utterly brilliant here, wrapping up the classic Apatowian pent-up manboy archetype within the guise of a tired suburban mom. And then we have, packed in like sardines, Leslie Mann, Charlie Day, Caitlin Olsen, Michael Peña, Keegan-Michael Key, and f**king Chris Hemsworth, who Ghostbusters has taught us is a bona fide force of nature.

This cast elevates the mostly generic material, making it funny enough that when the script hits its patches of actual genius, they don’t seem out of place. The family car is a bubbling fount of hilarity with its endless absurdities and M.C. Escher-esque design, the young brothers are a wonderfully mismatched pairing, and there is a spot of psychosexual terror that cold-cocks your funny bone. It’s not highbrow, to be certain, but there are actual laughs here - laughs that Vacation comes by honestly, and that is a remarkable achievement.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 953

I Ain't Afraid Of No Girls

Year: 2016

Director: Paul Feig

Cast: Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Man alive, am I glad the remake of Ghostbusters is in theaters so people can finally shut up about it. This needlessly divisive remake has had the one-two punch of taking on the mantle of a virulently nostalgic property and igniting the raging misogyny of certain online cave dwellers, so it has not been a fun time being a member of the horror community. 

As pointless and awful as many remakes are, I’m always willing to give them a chance. Especially when they’re from the team behind Spy, my favorite comedy of last year. Not to mention the fact that Ghostbusters is an iconic franchise with a series of major narrative flaws spiderwebbing across its surface, making it a more or less perfect property to update, if we have to reboot movies at all.

Hollywood certainly seems to enjoy it.

Ghostbusters doesn’t recreate the original plot so much as it sets it back to square one with different characters and sees where they go from there. These characters are Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig), a meek doctor of particle physics who has attempted to suppress her belief in the paranormal in a weak stab at getting tenure; Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy), her high school best friend and a true believer who has dedicated her life to paranormal research; Jillian Holtzman (Kate McKinnon), a dubiously sane engineer with an anarchistic flair for creating extremely dangerous, untested machinery; and Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones), a subway worker who is the Ghostbusters’ first client and quickly becomes a part of the team.

As the Ghostbusters jet around New York City investigating apparitions, spirits, and grim grinning ghosts, they realize that a sinister someone is creating devices the amplify paranormal activity (which might explain why it got five sequels). They must figure out his plan and stop him before it’s too late.

Probably how most people felt when they heard this film was in development.

Is Ghostbusters better than the original? No. If you’re here on a hate odyssey, this is your cue to stop reading.

OK, now that the angries are gone, I’m safe to tell you that the remake is actually pretty good! As it should be. This is Paul Feig and Melissa McCarthy, not some anonymous music video director and Tiger Beat’s plastic Teen of the Week. Just like the original four Busters, these ladies weren’t chosen because they were sexy, of-the-now superstars. There’s a reason they didn’t cast Margot Robbie, Gal Gadot, Olivia Munn, and hell, Jennifer Lawrence, why not. They cast genuinely funny women who can sell a joke like it’s a Pokémon Go in-app purchase.

And Ghostbusters really is funny. That’s its greatest strength, which is probably good news considering it’s a comedy film. Obviously, humor is in the gut of the beholder, and the jokes are in a vastly, almost unrecognizably different vein from the original, but there’s a lot of great stuff at work here. Chris Hemsworth is an obvious standout because every line he’s given is a joke, but his ditzy receptionist nabs the best scene in the movie, a job interview-cum-Abbott and Costello routine that is delivered with diamond-sharp comic timing. Kate McKinnon is also a magnetic presence, presenting a spectacularly offbeat, unpredictable set of line readings that are always bizarrely fascinating. 

Probably the best overall performance is Wiig’s, because she effortlessly finds the po-faced wackiness in her straight-woman character while maintaining enough of an emotional throughline that she provides us an easy access point to the more out-there characters and developments.

Everyone else is good too, but I can’t just copy-paste the cast list here and call it a review.

Ghostbusters is very funny from beginning to end, but here’s the thing. At a certain point in the second act, it kind of stops trying to be funny. When the jokes come, they’re mostly just as solid, but during the course of its typically vast Feigian run time it slowly starts to kind of take itself seriously, presenting lots of ghostly action and the series’ traditional deus ex machina climax with hardly a glimmer of irony.

Then it attempts to tie a goopy little bow around everything with a series of character moments that strain to pump raw emotion from a one-dimensional well. These characters are great to watch as they quip and bounce off one another, but only Erin and Abby’s arcs have any meat on their bones. Everyone else is far too weak to support the more dramatic turn the film abruptly shifts into in the middle of the finale. Hell, even Erin and Abby are given a scene so heavy with melodrama and a wailing Schindler’s List score that it topples face-first into the dirt.

But after a bit, Ghostbusters remembers what it is and course corrects. It never fully recovers from that massive hit, but it’s still a sprightly, amusing popcorn picture. Once again, the trailers for this Feig comedy dreadfully undersold what it had to offer, so while it was better than I worried it might be, it wasn’t really as great as I’d hoped. Oh sure, it’s unique and hilarious enough to stand on its own two feet in the Ghostbusters canon and its fun cameos mostly avoid incessant pandering (mostly), but it’s not a resounding success to the tune of a Spy or a Bridesmaids.

The only thing I will concede to the haters is that the FallOut Boy cover of the Ghostbusters thing is truly dreadful (they also donated the worst song of 2014 to Big Hero 6), but the filmmakers know what’s up and they give Ray Parker, Jr. more than enough airtime. Anyway, go see it! It’s a dizzy, fun summer movie the likes of which haven’t really been packing multiplexes this year.

TL;DR: Ghostbusters is a wholly decent remake that isn't better than original but offers a unique enough entry to be worth watching.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1003

Reviews In This Series
Ghostbusters (Reitman, 1984)
Ghostbusters II (Reitman, 1989)
Ghostbusters (Feig, 2016)

Popcorn Kernels: Aw, Screw It

Hello, hello, hello, faithful readers! Normally I do my best to bestow full length reviews on current films, but I am so damn close to clearing my backlog that I can’t resist knocking out some of the less important, less current selections from last year with another slate of mini reviews. There’s got to be a statute of limitations on this kind of thing, right?

In the Heart of the Sea

Year: 2015
Director: Ron Howard
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Cillian Murphy, Brendan Gleeson
Run Time: 2 hours 2 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

In the story that inspired Moby Dick, the captain and first mate of a whaling ship pursue a massive white whale that destroys the vessel, leaving the crew stranded.

As helpfully pointed out by Hunter Allen (of Kinemalogue) in the comments on my Muppet Treasure Island review, I’m a hard sell on ship movies. So right off the bat, I was disinclined to adore Ron Howard’s massively ill-advised seafaring epic In the Heart of the Sea.

But you know what I dislike even more than schooners? Movies that use the lazy framing device of an author coaxing a story out of somebody for the express purpose of reminding people that hey, they read this book in middle school, isn’t that neat? This technique can be used well, but here it’s just an excuse to slice the film’s pacing into ribbons in order to bridge plot gaps by using the “storyteller” to handily provide us with an airdrop of exposition and convenient analysis. There is literally zero reason why the Chris Hemsworth storyline couldn’t have stood alone, and the film takes on a lot of water thanks to this decision.

You know what I dislike even more than flimsy framing devices? The fact that Chris Hemsworth can apparently only get roles if they take place either centuries ago or in ultramodern yet inexplicably Medieval cultures. The man has talent, but he’s constantly shunted into stuffy roles with awful hair that clamp down on his range like an iron vise and surround him with such illustrious (read: pale) performers as… That guy from Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. And maybe wait until his Marvel contract is finished before you strand him on a desert island. With his scraggly beard and perfectly waxed chest, he looks more like a hipster barista than a marooned sailor.

But you know what I dislike even more than Hemsworth’s Buff, Waxed, and Stranded photo shoot? The whale! The CGI technicians do not commit to making this khaki monstrosity seem huge or white or menacing in any way, shape, or form. I’m all for cinematic realism, but would anybody be mad if the whale was a couple yards longer and bone white? If I had to hazard a guess, marine biologists are not in the primary demographic for this flick. Plus, it really doesn’t do anything impeccably beastly other than trawling around after our heroes like it’s Jaws: The Revenge and providing really obvious metaphors to conclude Our Hemsworth’s character arc.

If you don’t particularly mind any of these things, we are not on the same page and you can feel free to check out In the Heart of the Sea. But even putting those gripes aside, it’s still only a blandly functional adventure picture populated with stock characters and depicting oddly brutal animal violence. So have fun with that.

Rating: 5/10

Goosebumps

Year: 2015
Director: Rob Letterman
Cast: Jack Black, Dylan Minnette, Odeya Rush
Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG

A teen boy moves in next door to R. L. Stine. He befriends the author’s teen daughter, then must team up with the two of them when he accidentally unleashes Stine’s creations upon the town.

Because I am nothing if not a consummate academic, I am much more familiar with the Goosebumps books than the TV show. As such, I had absolutely no nostalgia for any visual R. L. Stine property and came to the Goosebumps film unclouded by expectation. This is the best way to approach it, though I feel that all but the grumpiest among us would be hard-pressed not to have a good time.

Goosebumps might be fashionably generic (new kid in town, single mom, struggling to find place amid wacky mayhem, it’s not exactly Proust), but it enacts those typical plot beats with an energy that at least makes them feel fresh. Dylan Minnette and Amy Ryan forge an excellent mother-son relationship, and the movie’s humor and heart branches out from there. This is primarily a comedy film of course, especially when Jillain Bell (as an eccentric aunt) or Timothy Simons and Amanda Lund (as two inept cops) are on the scene, but there actually is a decent amount of juice in the horror side of things.

The monsters are all rendered with a cartoonish CGI, which in a family film isn’t actually a liability (Mama, eat your heart out), but the effects spring into high gear when they get sucked back into the books from whence they came. Their bodies begin to unravel in a tornado of ink that’s both beautifully rendered and quite gruesome. It’s Goosebumps, so it won’t turn your stomach, but it’s just raw enough to remind you that kids movies can be scary too. Anybody who has seen Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory can attest to that.

Funny, scary, campy… Sounds like Goosebumps to me! The movie plays with a lot of classic monsters and scenarios, even conjuring up its own wicked twists. It might not be a perfect iteration of the Goosebumps mythos (sometimes the structure of a feature inhibits its ability to evoke some traditional Goosebumps storylines), but it captures the gleefully macabre atmosphere with no shortage of charm.

Oddly enough or perhaps no quite so unexpectedly, even taking into consideration the green teen talent, the weakest link is most obviously Jack Black. He hams it up like he works at a deli, and the taste of flop sweat curdles the tonal mixture a little bit. Goosebumps does exist in a heightened reality, so it makes a game attempt at assimilating his boisterous performance, but there are many moments that he tramples over by pulling faces and generally clowning around. It’s immensely frustrating, but this isn’t a movie about him. It’s about the young generation that loves Goosebumps, and for them the film is mostly a blast.

Rating: 7/10

We Are Your Friends

Year: 2015
Director: Max Joseph
Cast: Zac Efron, Wes Bentley, Emily Ratajkowski
Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A young DJ meets an older producer, igniting a friendship that will lead to love, loss, success, failure, and eventually growing up.

We Are your Friends is not a lucky movie. If no for the box office cavalry of Jem and the Holograms, WAYF would have scored the lowest opening weekend of the entire year. Seeing how I’m obsessed with cinematic failure and Zac Efron is on my celebrity freebie list, I couldn’t rest giving the film a looksie. Boy, am I glad I did.

We Are Your Friends isn’t ever going to be unearthed as a true buried gem, but taken as the generic coming-of-age story in the modern world that it is, it couldn’t be better. It’s a mini prestige picture, hitting all the beats of larger, more successful films with just enough twists to keep it lively. My single favorite element is the editing, which a voids the temptation to turn the whole thing into an EDM music video, rather creating a slick visual rhythm that jumps off the screen with graphic and text overlaps. It’s an edgy, modern style that has certainly been seen before, most recently in The Big Short, but it’s an exciting cinematic presentation that works wonders for the film. These flashy technical moments unfortunately decrease as the movie foes on, but their presence gives WAYF a spark that never fades.

Also, honestly, the cast is pretty incredible. Wes Bentley is magnetic as a self-destructive mentor, Walking Dead alum Jon Bernthal gets his Matthew McConaughey in Wolf of Wall Street moment in the sun, and Zac Efron turns in what is unequivocally the best performance of his career, one that’s tempered, at least slightly layered, and miles away form his standard dreamboat duties.

Please don’t leave this blog thinking We Are Your Friends is a life-changing motion picture, but aside from a bit of an unfocused narrative drive and a deeply generic plot structure, it really ain’t half bad. It’s messy, it’s foolhardy, occasionally deep, and plugged into some great beats; an imperfect love letter to modern youth that doesn’t talk down to them. I genuinely enjoyed this movie. That may or may not be a socially suicidal admission, but it’s the truth. Check it out!

Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1468

Popcorn Kernels: We're Five College Students On Our Way To An Old Abandoned Cabin In The Woods

For this round of mini reviews, let’s get back to basics by trekking to a secluded area where there’s no cell phone reception. It’ll be just like the olden days! I hope our car doesn’t break down.

The Cabin in the Woods

Year: 2012
Director: Drew Goddard
Cast: Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison
Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

For our podcast episode, featuring an in depth review of Cabin in the Woods, click here.

Five college students vacation in a secluded cabin where they are beset by a zombie redneck torture family.

The Cabin in the Woods does for cabin in the woods movies what Scream did for slashers, although it flips the script. Where Scream was funny because the hip 90’s teens were aware they were in a horror flick, the bronzed babes of Cabin in the Woods are funny because they have no idea they’re in the middle of a movie. If you’re not into midway spoilers, here’s where you jump ship. You see, the horror movie scenario is being manipulated by office workers intent on making sure everybody but the virgin perishes.

The humor comes from the absurdly casual manner that these men and women orchestrate teen destruction as if it were a pencil pushing day job. Unfortunately, though the teens are entertaining thanks to a snappy script co-written by Buffymeister Joss Whedon, this renders the actual horror story pretty rote and pointless. Every time we return to our campers (including a pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth sporting the best hair of his career), the sparkle fades somewhat until we can return to what really drives the narrative.

However, a dimmer glimmer is still a glimmer, and Cabin in the Woods never stops being a fun tromp through the flattened brush of the horror genre. It’s far more comedy than horror, but a few atmospheric scenes do send a tingle down the spine. But where the movie really triumphs is in neither scares nor laughs, but rather sheer cleverness. The construction of the film is so elaborately detailed that it’s hard not to just sit back and marvel at its postmodern perfection.

This is one film that certainly demands a second viewing, because the flavor of the first half changes tremendously given the context of the finale. In essence, The Cabin in the Woods is two different films, with more subtleties emerging from the woodwork upon rewatch. And depending on how much moral fiber is in your diet, you might just switch sides. In a way, CitW is like a football game or a Twitter feud, with equal fun derived from rooting for either team.

I do wish the zombified antagonists were a little ore interesting and the deaths a little less indifferent ,but these complaints are heartily addressed (and then some) by a gonzo finale. It’s just plain an exuberantly fun movie, no two ways about it. While I’m certainly a little perturbed by the movie’s eagerness to indict horror viewers for not abhorring the violence of the genre, it’s nevertheless an infinitely witty twist on the genre that pushes meta horror to the next level. I’ve vacationed in this cabin many times before and I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.

Rating: 8/10

Cabin Fever

Year: 2003
Director: Eli Roth
Cast: Jordan Ladd, Rider Strong, James DeBello
Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Five college students vacation in a secluded cabin where they are beset by a nasty flesh-eating virus.

I genuinely liked this movie for about five minutes, which is a pretty decent record for an Eli Roth picture. The characters seemed vulgar but kind, the humor was licentious but fun, and the zany atmosphere was settling in nicely. Then Eli Roth remembered who he was and the whole thing went straight to hell in a severed hand basket.

Above all else, Roth has a talent for writing venomously irritating douchebags, a skill he displays right from the get-go. Once you have a chance to get to know them, the characters populating Cabin Fever are downright nauseating. Their already trite dialogue (“safe sex” is a quip that wouldn’t pass muster in a Leprechaun movie, a franchise that had two straight entries that took place “in da hood.” And those were the better ones!) quickly runs out of steam, mutating into a sick competition to see who can pointlessly shout the F-word more times. It’s not a script so much as a laundry list of groundless obscenities. Not a single conversation can go by without somebody bursting into a rage and calling somebody a slut, whether they’re talking about killing a man or debating their favorite beer brands.

Look, I’m no Puritan about language. I’ve seen The Big Lebowski, I can handle a little cursing. Hell, that film is a monument to the four-letter word. But there comes a point when the cussing drowns out the script, the result of an amateur director looking to shock but never really understanding why. It’s like a smoke alarm that needs new batteries, dutifully shrieking with brainless devotion. Instead of being fun, it’s just immensely frustrating. When your viewers only continue watching because they’ve succumbed to exhaustion and no longer have the energy to reach the remote, you’ve got a problematic film on your hands.

A lot of the film’s failures can be chalked up to a first-time filmmaker. Abrupt fade-outs and jarring edits suggest that the coverage wasn’t quite what he wanted it to be, and the slapdash experimentation with color and alternative POVs show a Raimi-esque ambition but none of that master’s innate flair for the macabre. In fact, Cabin Fever is largely composed of material regurgitated from other classic films like The Last House on the Left and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, with a sizable dollop of Friday the 13th. This kind of construction is typical for a neophyte, but the personality sprinkled atop that amateur framework is one that will haunt Roth throughout his career.

No matter how far you run, you always bring yourself along for the ride, and that’s why Cabin Fever’s major flaws are just as unforgivable as those that riddle Roth’s films a decade down the line. He might get more experienced, but he’s still stuck with himself. Because, wonky construction aside, this movie really just isn’t very good at all, which is a shame considering its truly solid potential.

Unbearable characters with microscopic motivations (including a cop who must get a dollar for every time he says the word “party”) rattle around a pinball machine of effective but hardly revolutionary gore (the standard tune of my Roth reviews, or so it seems), plus Roth himself steps in with what is unequivocally the most grating, soul-suckingly unfunny cameo in the history of cinema. Armed with a soul patch and a sub-par Zoolander impression, he stabs the movie in the heart and leaves it to die.

The one bright beacon of hope in this incessantly boorish film is the convenience store, the location of the film’s two best scenes, as well as its most haphazardly iconic. Here, largely thanks to the unforgettable, breathy performance from ingenious unknown Robert Harris, the film’s intention shines brightest and it briefly becomes the palatable, silly horror venture it constantly wishes it could be. Cabin Fever is a major disappointment, but these scenes prevent it from being utterly contemptible, which Ii admittedly rare with this particular director.

Rating: 5/10
Word Count: 1242

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)