It's The End Of The World As We Know It

Year: 2016

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence 

Run Time: 2 hours 24 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

I owe a debt of gratitude to the X-Men films. The original trilogy powered me all the way through my childhood, giving me characters to root for and fueling endless playground discussions. I formed a bond with those people and that world, a bond so strong it allowed me to sit through X-Men: Apocalypse in its entirety without rending my hair and running away screaming. I don’t have particularly strong feelings for X-Men: First Class, the progenitor of this prequel cycle, and Days of Future Past was a gargantuan letdown, so I can’t say I had high hopes for Apocalypse, but even those feeble wisps of optimism were dashed into oblivion.

If this movie really was the End Times for this franchise, I can’t say I’d be upset.

In X-Men: Apocalypse, Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult) are happily running a school for mutants. It’s the 1980’s and the student body has received an influx of familiar faces: laser-eyed Scott Summer (Tye Sheridan) AKA Cyclops (although in typical comic book movie fashion, they go ahead and assume you already knew that), the telekinetic Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), and the fireworky Jubilee (Lana Condor), who the movie is even less interested in than I am. They are joined by the teleporting blue demon Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who is brought to the school by Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), shape-shifted into the form of Jennifer Lawrence, who rescued him from a mutant dogfighting ring led by a cross between Wily Wonka and Liza Minnelli from Cabaret.

Mystique brings bad news. After a personal tragedy, Magneto (Michael Fassbender, who mails in this performance) has resurfaced. The X-Men must band together, yadda yadda, CIA agent Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne) is back so we can pretend Charles isn’t super gay for Magneto, and so on. Also, the better Quicksilver (Evan Peters) is back. If you’re allergic to names in parentheses, you may want to skip this next paragraph.

Moira witnessed a cult resurrecting En Sabah Nur (Oscar Isaac), the mythical first mutant who is so powerful [sic] that he thinks he’s a god. He’s also called Apocalypse (gasp), but again the movie doesn’t see fit to divulge that apparently classified information. Apocalypse needs four horsemen to serve him, so he sets about gathering the strongest mutants in the world. Or, bar that, the first ones he bumps into: weather-controlling teen Storm (Alexandra Shipp), bewinged Angel (Ben Hardy), psychic sword lady(?) Psylocke (Olivia Munn), and Magneto. This arbitrary gaggle of mutants teleports around the world, power posing and generally wreaking havoc. Speaking of, Havok (Lucas Till) is in this movie too, for so long you’d actually think he was an important character. So yeah. The horsemen power pose and kill some people and, like, control the first or something, because they want to tear down this world and build a new one.

But mostly they just indulge in their hobby of recreating Backstreet Boys album covers.

From what I’ve been told, the Apocalypse run is kind of a big deal in the comics. An ancient, hyperpowered, megalomaniacal menace, Apocalypse is a formidable foe on paper (literally). But in the film, other than kicking up some monochromatic dust storms and tearing apart two or so sterile, humanless cities, the worst thing this omnipotent übermutant does is make James McAvoy go bald. He’s about as menacing as a kitten in a teacup, and the superb Oscar Isaac is totally buried beneath a metric ton of makeup and shouted dialogue more plum than his skin tone.

The musical score might cut itself open and bleed itself dry impressing upon you the monumental significance of what you’re witnessing, but there’s barely a shred of doubt that this pompous Blue Man Group reject will be destroyed by the power of friendship or whatever. X-Men suffers the same way Civil War does with a preponderance of overpowered characters (Jean Grey is this entry’s Scarlet Witch, pretty much any solving any story problem with her endless array of talents, then hanging around twiddling her thumbs so we can try to care about the outcome of a bout between two far weaker characters), rendering any conflict pretty much useless the second the movie decides it has gone on long enough. But boy oh boy, does Apocalypse really deliberate before making that decision.

Clocking in at around 144 minutes of disconnected vignettes about any of a half million different characters, Apocalypse really struggles to find a personality. Sometimes it’s a sprawling superhero adventure. Other times it’s a wacky high school comedy about mismatched teens. But mostly it’s a dreary, deafening plea to be taken seriously. Honestly, when did comic book movies stop trying to be fun? One bungled Wolverine cameo later, and the film has depleted every last resource at its disposal. Then there’s an hour of flailing before the end credits mercifully inter the godforsaken mess.

Unfortunately, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from X-Men, it’s that dead things rarely stay that way.

The movie isn’t exactly helped by a visibly exhausted cast. The teens try their hardest to punch up their hokey storyline, but the only adult who even seems to be aware they’re on a movie set is James McAvoy. Rose Byrne performs her thankless role with the brute efficiency of a machine, Jennifer Lawrence falls back on prickly Katniss-isms, and Michael Fassbender is a million miles away. His palpable desire to be anywhere else does little to sell a forced family tragedy shoehorned in to give him a bit of insta-motivation, and it certainly doesn’t render palatable an exceedingly tasteless scene set at Auschwitz.

Although, truth be told, Magneto is mostly played by a CGI Ken doll being dragged around the screen. You can practically see the mouse pointer. That’s right, this entry continues the venerable tradition of rendering its mutants with special effects that were outdated in the WarGames era. They’re lucky a large theme of the movie is Mystique and Beast resisting their powers, because their SFX budget begins and ends with one (1) set of metal wings and maybe a handful of explosions. The rest is an X-Men: Evolution cartoon-level of work. The winking humor about how third sequels always suck can’t save the ruthlessly disastrous aesthetic of Apocalypse.

Now that I’ve purged my bile, I will submit that there are maybe a smattering of good things about the movie. McAvoy provides some solid first act comic relief, the teens are sufficiently likeable, and the crummy sub-Big Bang Theory opening credits that zoom through history’s greatest hits feature an exploding swastika, which is pretty righteous. And of course, there’s the obligatory Quicksilver slo-mo scene, which is shameless, pandering, inexcusably lazy, and still the best thing in the whole damn movie.

When Evan Peters makes more of an impression than Michael Fassbender, you know something has gone terribly wrong. And indeed it has. Many volumes of somethings. Unfathomable depths of somethings. It’s far from the worst movie out this year, or even this month, but it is a solemn disappointment.

TL;DR: X-Men Apocalypse is a sprawling, inept mess that wastes a bevy of talented performers.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1210
Reviews In This Series
X-Men (Singer, 2000)
X2: X-Men United (Singer, 2003)
X-Men: The Last Stand (Ratner, 2006)
X-Men: First Class (Vaughn, 2011)
X-Men: Days of Future Past (Singer, 2014)
X-Men: Apocalypse (Singer, 2016)

Road Rage

Year: 2015

Director: George Miller

Cast: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult

Run Time: 2 hours

MPAA Rating: R

Action movies aren't really my thing. I can muster up an appreciation for them, as with most films, but when a new action flick comes out in the theater, I usually just leave it to my friend Zach at Better Clear On Out the Back. 

And I'm no Mad Max fanboy, either. In fact, I haven't seen any of the original three films in the franchise (though that will be swiftly rectified this summer).

I'm telling you these things so you can properly understand the gravity of my statement when I tell you that Mad Max: Fury Road is the best damn movie of 2015 so far. Hell, I'm going to go ahead and call it right now as the best movie of the summer. 

Unless San Andreas pulls the rug out from under us all. 

Mad Max: Fury Road has a plot. In fact, it's quite involved, taking place in a lush world that's teeming with detail. But the tricky part is distilling it into a couple paragraphs, because so much of it takes place at the fringes of the main action, informing and instilling life into it, but not necessarily playing an active role in the goings on.

I want to make it clear that this is not a detraction. In fact, it's quite the opposite. The true narrative of Mad Max: Fury Road is buried within every detail of the production design, every line of dialogue, and every line in the sand. It is a film that not only assumes that you - the audience member - are intelligent and demands that you engage with it as an active viewer on every single level, but richly rewards you for doing so.

Anyway, the bare bones of the thing is this: Max (Tom Hardy) is a guilt-ridden wanderer through the post-apocalyptic, irradiated desert of what we can assume through franchise pedigree is Australia. Haunted by the ghosts of the people he couldn't save, his only instinct is to survive the barren terrain. The only ample source of water is the Citadel, which is ruled by the diseased despot Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and his mutated brood.

So, basically it's California in three years.

When the town champion Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) diverts her war machine on what was supposed to be a routine supply run, Immortan Joe realizes that she has absconded with his wives, the enslaved healthy women which he uses for breeding. Max has been captured and used as a human blood bag for Nux (Nicholas Hoult), a member of the sickened, brainwashed slave race known as the Half-Lives. As the nobles of the Citadel pursue Furiosa along with their Half-Life army, Max escapes and reluctantly joins forces with her. She wants to take the girls to the Green Place, a safe zone across the continent, and he just wants to survive, but for the time being they find it mutually beneficial to work together.

I mean, she needs someone to help make sure her super awesome makeup isn't smudged. The ass-kicking she can handle herself.

The most definitive aspect of Fury Road is its outrageous sense of style. Its dominating aesthetic is downright lunacy, pushing so far over the top that it's visible from space. From the bulbous, fleshy creatures inhabiting the Citadel to the wraithlike Half-Lives who run staccato like they're in a Keystone Cops short, the film constantly prods and challenges the traditions and tenets of film costuming and design.

And they ain't afraid to be disgusting.

These delightfully insane characters populate a world of ramshackle glories: souped-up cars with porcupine spikes, massive green towers with waterfalls that flow over the unwashed masses, men dangling on pikes, and just about everything you can imagine. With a healthy sprinkling of things that you can't, which is what separates the geniuses from you or I. And this world is lit with bold, saturated colors that assault the frame with unnatural beauty.

Da ba dee, da ba die.

It's bloody gorgeous, is what it is, and this ludicrous, beautiful, terrible world is the perfect setting for the most unflagging, high octane action flick I've ever seen. Fury Road hits the ground sprinting and only picks up the pace from there, hardly even stopping to introduce its narrative universe, asking you to pick it up from the flecks of shrapnel that fly through the haze of battle.

As Max, Furiosa, and the Breeders storm their way through one massive action setpiece after another, the excitement never dwindles. Some all-action films can get dull and repetitive, but Fury Road knows the game and plays it with admirable skill. Packing handfuls of story, emotion, sacrifice, and distorted dystopian imagery in between every frame, there is more than enough to chew on aside from the truly astounding, ever-escalating practical effects work that dominates the landscape.

Honestly I'm surprised that director George Miller (of the three Mad Max films and most recently - and bafflingly - Happy Feet and its sequel) received the budget that he did to put this film together at such an unrelenting, raucus level, but the fact the Mad Max: Fury Road exists means that somebody is doing something right in Hollywood.

Also whoever designed the flamethrower guitar has an automatic pass to marry me.

As if we needed anything more to like about the film, the acting is across the board superb. Charlize Theron shows no cracks as a dauntless warrior, the villains are uniformly and unequivocally menacing, and Nicholas Hoult utterly inhabits a role as screamingly high octane as the film itself, but the unbeatable standout is Tom Hardy. 

With nothing but a few choice words and a series of animalistic grunts, he paints a detailed and nuanced portrait of a man broken beyond his own humanity. His impressively physical accomplishment completely transforms the actor, ripping him out of any sense of reality and throwing himself directly into the heart of the Mad Max universe. If any performance were to permanently break the barrier between summer blockbusters and Oscar nominations, it's Tom Hardy right here, right now.

The cherry on top of the towering ice cream sundae that is Mad Max: Fury Road is that it's a remarkably feminist and progressive action piece. The large amount of women in the film leave a safe, but enslaved life for the dangers of independence and claim their personhood. One of the Breeders says "We are not things,"and she is absolutely right. The women of Fury Road are an unstoppable force of good, fighting against a world that devalues them.

Also, ableism be damned.

It's a fascinating, energetic, wonderfully realized action film that never loses fuel, and it's spectacularly unlike anything you've ever seen before. Fans of more sit-down, low key dramas are best advised to sit this one out, but I think its unrelenting, explosive charm should appeal to just about anyone with a pulse that needs racing. 

TL;DR: Mad Max: Fury Road is outrageous, high octane, nonstop fun.
Rating: 10/10
Should I Spend Money On This? Yes, unless you really hate exciting movies.
Word Count: 1195
Reviews In This Series
Mad Max (Miller, 1979)
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (Miller, 1981)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (Miller & Ogilvie, 1985)
Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015)

L Is For Loss

Hello everybody! Today's Blogging From A to Z Challenge will be brief because I just put together a massive project that took me hours to complete so I'm not feeling incredibly alive at the moment. But, then again, neither is Colin Firth's lover in A Single Man and the whole movie is pretty much about him.

Year: 2009

Director: Tom Ford

Cast: Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The latest in Sergio's attempts to make me a deeply enriched person was A Single Man, the Colin Firth movie that I never got around to seeing a couple years ago. And you know what? I rather wish that I had, especially considering that any review at this point is coming pretty late in the game.

But I watched it, so review it I shall. 

Nothing could stop me n- ooh look at his hair.

A Single Man is somewhat of a passion project for first-time director and most-of-the-time fashion designer Tom Ford. Starring Colin Firth as George Falconer, an English professor in 1960's Los Angeles who, even one year later, is still reeling from the death of his partner of 16 years (Matthew Goode). Although his body mechanically continues along its daily routine, his mind has shut everything out.

He keeps this up for some time, mostly ignoring his best friend Charley (Julianne Moore), a delightfully effervescent personality who can tell that something is wrong but is powerless to help. But a series of small events over the course of several days begin to turn things around for George, starting with an interaction of mutual admiration with a student (Nicholas Hoult).

George has several small encounters with people who share their perspectives on life with him. Some of them directly, some of them accidentally. But each person he meets drags him irrevocably back into the world of the living, where passion and color reign even under the looming fear of the Cuban Missile Crisis (somebody call the X-Men).

Sepia man to the rescue!

Tom Ford is a green director and it shows, especially in the pacing of many early sequences (take out the slow motion photography and the entire first act would be about six minutes long), but sometimes it takes a person who is totally unfamiliar with the art form to shake it up and make a statement. And Ford's use of color and light do exactly that, showcasing his true strengths as a visual artist.

Whenever George comes across another life that shines brightly through the grey fog of his waking nightmare, the lighting literally reflects this. It might sound a little too on the nose, but trust me. Seeing Colin Firth's face literally light up when he pets a dog is a marvelous achievement in cinematography.

Not since Hitchcock has a film been so integrated with a designer's mentality. Every color and every splash of light in every frame is there for a reason, and as the story progresses, the visuals only deepen and become more wonderful. And Colin Firth's performance is a knockout, but Julianne Moore steals the show as his opposite counterpart - a vibrant and alive woman who takes every knock she gets in life in stride. Julianne Moore is an unsung treasure of cinema. Somebody should correct that.

The biggest achievement of A Single Man, at least on a personal level, is that it is a gay film without the Gay. Many films depicting homosexual men feel the need to be "about" something, whether it be coming out, the AIDS crisis, or intolerance in society. And that's great. We need those films. Those subjects are all very important and continue to be massively relevant.

But at a certain point, one wishes for a movie that just tells a story instead of being a PSA. Brokeback Mountain did that pretty well. Weekend was a great one. But those kinds of films are few and far between. The triumph of A Single Man is that it tells a tale that is marvelously human, rather than just being "gay". 

The story itself is perhaps not entirely to my tastes (far too few machetes were involved), but that is through no fault of its own. But any man who can consistently make Nicholas Hoult look like the beautiful angel he was meant to be deserves some credit, and Tom Ford has proven himself as nothing more than a master of lighting and design with this simple yet richly realized film.

Warm Bodies can go suck a toad.

TL;DR: A Single Man is an interesting and fresh film produced by someone who speaks the language of art, color, and design, but not of cinema.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 787

Archive: March 3, 2013

Warm Bodies

Year: 2013
Director: Jonathan Levine
Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, John Malkovich
Run Time: 1 hour, 38 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

It’s poor blog etiquette to keep apologizing for long hiatuses (hiati?), but I’m a little bit ashamed of myself that I haven’t been producing content for a while. I could say I’ve been busy with schoolwork and whatever, but that’s never really stopped me before. To be completely honest, this January-February season has been so weak that I’ve had very little to say about any of the films that have been released, and am even actively sickened by a few of them (*cough cough Identity Thief cough*).

However bogged within the mire of this travesty of a season is, well I wouldn’t call it a gem, but a movie pleasant enough to watch that it seems like a masterpiece in comparison to the likes of The Last Stand, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, and yes even Mama (And it pains me to say this, as devoted as I am to the horror genre, Jessica Chastain, and the 2-minute Spanish short film upon which it is based, but Mama just didn’t deliver for me.).

But let’s dive into the real meat of the business, shall we? Warm Bodies is a simple story (based on the 2010 Isaac Marion book of the same name) in which R (Nicholas Hoult), a zombie, and Julie (Teresa Palmer), a human girl, fall in love in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Their love starts to have repercussions - namely the humanization of the previously incurable walking dead.

Their love is forbidden. If Julie’s warlord father (John Malkovich, who is given absolutely nothing to do here) finds out that his daughter’s new boyfriend is an undead corpse, he will be none too happy. And for good reason - R is kind of a bad influence, having just hours before eaten her ex-boyfriend (Dave Franco)’s brain.

So here we have the tragic tale of two star-crossed lovers from warring families - um, factions. Their love, born from an ancient grudge, breaks the world into new mutiny and undead blood makes living hands unclean. For never was a story of more woe than this of Julie, and her slowly rotting Romeo.

This balcony scene seems famila- Ah, I see what you did there.

The biggest problem with this movie is that there’s really no actual conflict. It plays like a shallow work of theater. The plot zooms along and hits all the right points but doesn’t really seem to connect to anything on its way there.

While this movie was enjoyable, I’ve had dreams that better explore the implications of love after the zombie apocalypse, and if dream logic beats your screenwriting, we need to talk.

There is some business with the bonies - horrific CGI monstrosities (the CGI is horrific, not the monstrosities) - who, although this is never adequately explained, seem to be undead zombies that have given in to their animal instincts and are completely remorseless, incapable of the magical self-curing by love thing that the other zombies seem to have going on.

I’ve seen better special effects in an elementary school production of Alice in Wonderland

Once the zombies start to humanize, their hearts begin beating again and they become prey for the bonies, who devour any living thing. Well, in theory. You see, the bonies don’t actually seem to be much of a threat because not once did they kill something onscreen in the entire 98 minute run time of the movie. This may have been a ploy by the creators to reduce the gore in what is primarily a paranormal romance, but it greatly diminishes any sort of suspense these creatures might have generated.

Another serious problem is how inconsistent the zombies are with the rules of their own universe. In the beginning, it is stated that zombies can only talk in grunts or, rarely, drawn-out single words. Also in the punchline to an early scene, the fact that zombies can only move at a slow shambling pace is established. But whenever it’s convenient, our zombies are running around like all of a sudden Danny Boyle is directing the film or forming completely coherent sentences even before they even start to humanize.

But enough complaining. The movie delivers enough charm, especially in the form of Hoult’s performance to endear itself to the audience. And with its tight little 98 minute span, it zips along merrily, never really going anywhere profound, but also being profoundly aware that it doesn’t really need to.

Take a gander at zombie Nick Hoult. You could just eat him up.

TL;DR  Warm Bodies is a harmless little nothing of a movie that doesn’t do a lot with its core concept but is redeemed by its sweetness and charm.

Rating: 6/10

Should I spend money on this? It may not continue to be in theaters for very long, but it is still the best date movie out there at the moment, at least until James Franco: The Great and Powerful comes out.

Word Count: 865