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)

Globe Theatre

Year: 2015
Director: Tom McCarthy
Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams
Run Time: 2 hours 8 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

For a while, the frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar was a little film called Spotlight, directed by the guy who made the second most recent crappy Adam Sandler movie. (Whether or not you worked on a slasher, I will dig those skeletons out of your closet.) Seeing as how Oscarbait heavyhitters and Brennan Klein get along about as well as the Brody family and great white sharks, I didn’t immediately rush out to see it.

However, during a harebrained attempt to screen all the nominees before the Academy Awards, I found myself at a late night screening of Spotlight. Lo and behold, it wasn’t as tortuous as I imagined it might be.

Even taking into account my allergy to true stories.

Spotlight is a dramatization of the real life reporters who uncovered the molestation scandal in the Catholic church. Geez, when will Tom McCarthy stop making these light-hearted comedies? Spotlight is the name of the crack investigation team of the Boston Globe, which has just been bought out by the Times, bringing new editor Marty Baron (Live Schreiber) to the table. As a non-Bostonian and therefore non-Catholic, he pretty quickly sniffs out a rat in a recent hushed-up spot of drama in the local church. He decides to shine Spotlight on the case.

Thus three reporters, the work-obsessed Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), lapsed Catholic Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and guy who won’t get into the Oscar reel Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James), as well as their editor Robby Robinson (Michael Keaton, who probably feels demoed, because he has the sidekickiest alter ego name ever written) get embroiled in the scandal and soon discover that there is corruption in the church that rises all the way to the top. They seek out victims of molestation and proof of the church’ negligence toward addressing the problem while facing enormous pressure from the church and the community to back off.

But if there’s one thing I learned from just Like Heaven, it’s that Mark Ruffalo doesn’t back off from ANYTHING.

Spotlight really is quite good. It’s a crisp, efficient film with a brisk pace and a quiet charm. I suppose that’s a counterintuitive way to describe a movie with such dark subject matter, but Spotlight goes very far out of its way to defang the material, honing in on the nitty gritty of journalistic investigation rather than the actual horrors behind closed doors. It wants to be a triumphant film rather than a bleak one, and the safe packaging of the scandal might make it a far less urgent and necessary piece, but it’s at least a palatable one.

Palatable is about all Spotlight is, but it does it very well. Other than effectively recreating the overlit hubbub of a newspaper office (you know this is a period piece because newspapers are still hiring), the cinematography only makes the leap into greatness once, during a shot of an interview dominated by a hulking church, which drives home the sense of creeping oppression the film strives to build. The rest is completely adequate, but it matches Spotlight’s true nature: a standard retelling of an important story rather than an essential work of cinema art.

Every element of Spotlight functions like this: bright, strong, and utterly typical. The music is jaunty, inviting, and appropriately somber when the time comes. The editing gets us from scene to scene at a steady clip. The characters are brutally functional, their lives outside of the office painted in brush strokes ten feet wide. It’s as precise and impersonal as clockwork.

Remember analog clocks? That really takes me back.

The most human aspect of Spotlight is, quelle surprise, the performers. Keaton, McAdams, and James perform roughly what is expected of them and Ruffalo gets his opportunity to shout his way into an Oscar nomination, but the real beating heart of Spotlight lies in its peripheral characters. Liev Schreiber manages to humanize a rather stifling archetypical role (the perfect, unflagging voice of reason/mentor) by exposing his nerves and flaws through vocal tics and precise control over his tone, and Stanley Tucci devours a rather meaty role even further on the sidelines. But the real driving force of Spotlight is the ensemble of relative unknowns portraying adult survivors of molestation. Without their commitment and talent, the emotional core of Spotlight would be null and void.

So, Spotlight has plenty of ups and plenty of downs, though the lower threshold of its downs is still pretty high. It’s a clean, safe presentation of a taboo topic and a showcase for performances just begging to be nominated. But does it deserve Best Picture? Oh, hell no.

TL;DR: Spotlight is an efficient and brisk film that never flags, but isn't exactly an artistic masterwork.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 816

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)

Once More

Year: 2014

Director: John Carney

Cast: Keira Knightley, Mark Ruffalo, Adam Levine

Run Time: 1 hour 44 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

In 2006, the indie Irish production Once burst onto the scene, dazzling critics with its meandering not-quite-romance between two Dublin-based musicians. In 2014, that same director tried his hand at the indie rock sort of musical genre once more with the aptly named Begin Again. It's much less esoteric than Once, which will certainly enrage many fans, but places it more firmly in my wheelhouse.

As much good as Once does in reinvigorating the movie musical and telling a unique love story without all that pesky romance, it really does rely entirely upon people standing around playing music. It worked magic with the budget that was available to the filmmakers, but as a narrative it was severely lacking in many regards.

This new film is far from perfect, but it manages to translate Once into the modern age and marry it to a story that, while full of stock situations and characters, manages to feel lively and brisk rather than full of dead space. The songs aren't quite as revelatory and that might bring the energy down from time to time, but there's enough going on around the music that Begin Again doesn't bore.

I could never be bored with a movie featuring both Adam Levine and beards.

So, how about this "plot" thing I've been hearing so much about? Gretta (Keira Knightley) is a young songwriter who recently broke up with her musician boyfriend Dave (Adam Levine) after he gets a record deal, some bigger britches, and a sexy mistress of his very own. Dan (Mark Ruffalo) is a down-on-his-luck record producer and Deadbeat Alcoholic Dad™ complete with an estranged wife (Catherine Keener) and daughter (Hailee Steinfeld) expansion pack.

It's a match made in movie heaven when the two meet at an open mic night at a local New York bar. Although Dan is on the outs at his company, he and Gretta set out to record an album live in places around the city and change the face of the music industry. You know, like they did in that one Glee episode where Santana and Mercedes sing in a dingy basement? Exactly like that.

Whatever, nobody's watching Glee. I'm not even  technically watching it. I merely ran afoul of a cursed karaoke machine a while back and am doomed to view it weekly until its finale.

Ah, the bliss of the ignorant.

One of the most interesting things about Begin Again is how seamlessly it integrates modern technology (see: Apple) into the narrative. Rather than clumsily inlaying texts over the screen like The Fault in Our Stars or Non-Stop (thank you for the tip-off, Hunter), the film merely includes the use of technology as an organic way of interacting with other people in the modern world.

In one especially indicative scene, Gretta uses a handheld video on her iPhone to initiate a flashback sequence. The way she mugs to the camera with the phone itself is obviously crass product placement (although in the wake of Transformers: Age of Extinction, they could have decorated the entire apartment with iPads and still seemed like a subtle complement in comparison), but the narrative function it serves is a terrific step in the ongoing synthesis of narrative storytelling and modern communications.

And the visual style, while still considerably routine and average, is miles ahead of the freshman Once, especially in an early scene with an invisible orchestra. This scene does everything Smash did with sledgehammer blows and turns it on its ear with elegant beauty. This was the single most valuable point that got me on the movie's side in the early going.

It's like ice cream for the eyes.

Now, Mark Ruffalo has been tearing it up in the notices lately thanks to The Normal Heart (thank you, Normal Heart), and he does fine here, but he's consistently outshined by Keira Knightley. Where Ruffalo merely does his Ruffalo thing (which is, on average, outstandingly higher than, say, the Keanu thing), Knightley is turning in her best performance in years, forging a quick chemistry with a wide array of actors like Ruffalo, silver screen newcomer Adam Levine, accomplished neophyte Hailee Steinfeld, and Cee Lo Green (All that's missing is Aguilera and we'd have a full-on The Voice reunion.)

Let's put a pin in that for a second because Cee Lo Green provides some of the most hilarious unintentional comedy I've seen this side of Troll 2. He's only in about one and a half scenes, but those appearances provide about one-third of the cuts in the movie. He's only ever onscreen for a consecutive three seconds or so before they cut to a different angle or something else entirely.

Now keep in mind that this is just conjecture, but the only possible explanation is that the man gave a performance so epically terrible that his lines had to be salvaged in small chunks haphazardly pasted together in order to seem like he accomplished anything even close to "acting." He is frequently overdubbed on other shots or has lines tossed in from the back of his head. In the scenes that show his face, he seems addled and unsure, which is compounded by the sheer mass of takes it must have required to get so much coverage. 

Hats off to editor Andrew Marcus, who is on my short list for an Oscar nomination due to his Herculean efforts to composite this footage into something that resembles a "scene" without having to squint one's eyes. But enough about the poor promotional tie-in man. Knightley is transcendent (and she'd have to be to have chemistry with the anthropomorphic wood block that is Ceel Lo Green), and she's not a half bad singer to boot.

And an even better leaner.

Thanks to Knightley and Ruffalo's chemistry and Carney's able direction, Begin Again is a delightful indie musical film. It's not my genre, so I doubt I'll ever have the inclination to revisit it, but it's certainly worth a watch.

TL;DR: Begin Again is a decently solid effort bolstered by a terrific performance from Keira Knightley.
Rating: 8/10
Should I Spend Money On This? Well, I'd certainly have you spend it on this rather than Transformers, Tammy, or Echo.
Word Count: 1055

Out Of The Closet, Into The Fire

Year: 2014

Director: Ryan Murphy

Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer, Julia Roberts

Run Time: 2 hours 12 minutes

When Sergio first told me about wanting to see the HBO film The Normal Heart I thought "Oh yippee, another dreary gay movie about AIDS." You see, as a gay man it is always nice to see movies about people who think like you, act like you, whatever, instead of the boring heteronormative poobah you get everyday. But the use of AIDS has become such a tired trope that it has become a running joke that you can't watch a movie with LGBT characters without it becoming a tragedy.

So I was understandably wary. Especially considering that director and executive producer Ryan Murphy has a history of headlining ambitious but messy productions *cough* Glee *cough*. But The Normal Heart, a story of the AIDS crisis in the early 1980's based on a play of the same name by Larry Kramer, despite being almost exactly what one might expect in terms of frothy period drama, is also one of the most harrowing portrayals of the disease put onscreen to date.

This ain't no "straight man learns to love the queers" story like The Dallas Buyers Club or Philadelphia, nor is it a quasi-romanticized Bohemian art piece like Rent. The Normal Heart is a straight up medical horror film, depicting the queasy reality of life for gay men in the early years of the decade as they were being cut down in record numbers by a disease that nobody understood and struggling to find anybody willing to help them.

It's gonna be pretty hard to be funny in the captions on this one.

Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo) is a gay reporter/activist who, along with several of his close friends, begins the Gay Men's Health Crisis organization to try to spread awareness and promote AIDS research after the death of his friend Craig (Jonathan Groff). With the help of the scrappy wheelchair-bound Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts), he and the board of the organization work tirelessly to right the wrongs committed by the American government, who seem to be content simply allowing the gays to die in record numbers.

As more and more of his friends and acquaintances end up dead, Ned's anger grows until he is constantly lashing out at the establishment on the air and in person, always shouting, never pulling a punch where he can help it. He can't stand the inequality of a world where a plague that is killing hundreds of people can simply be ignored by their own leaders because they don't want to get their hands dirty with LGBT policy. Perhaps his approach is tiresome and alienating, but it is the exact response a crisis of this level deserves.

When he falls in love with the debonair LA Times reporter Felix Turner (Matt Bomer), he begins to soften until the fateful day that Felix begins showing symptoms. The film turns into a race against the clock as Ned pushes harder and harder for adequate research, drug importing, and social recognition in a world where dead gay men are given no autopsy and stuffed into garbage bags. He's shouting into a void, trying vainly to save everybody he loves from near total annihilation in the face of a new plague.

If that doesn't sound like a horror film, then you clearly haven't seen as many as I have (which, in all likelihood, is probably the case even if you agree). An alienated man with friends and loved ones dying all around him while people in positions of authority are either helpless or unwilling to give aid (pun absolutely not intended)? That could be any slasher movie. That could be any number of haunted house pictures. That IS Jaws.

Two scenes in particular, a wild beach party on Fire Island where Craig's healthy exterior begins to falter and a subway ride where a symptomatic Matt Bomer sees the impact of his condition, literalize that horror undercurrent in a strikingly obvious and resolutely impactful way through jarring editing and stunning cinematography, two of the most (and some of the only) visually impactful moments in a film that derives most of its power from dialogue and performance rather than framing and color.

Unless you count skin tone.

Ned is met with opposition from both sides. Hey, you try telling an entire population of gay men who have fought their entire lives for the right to be physical with one another that maybe they should cool it on the whole "having sex" thing for a while while we wait for funding.

I rarely stick with movies over two hours long, especially ones that depict the political process in as much detail as this one, but The Normal Heart has an edge on those other films. It is an absolutely true story, a mind-blowing outrage that 1) Happened just barely over a decade before I was born - that's pretty modern if you ask me and 2) Has gotten nowhere near the amount of press that it deserved.

Sure, people will say that it's sensationalist, that there's two sides to every story. Maybe some straight people wanted to help. Whoop dee doo. They didn't. Not really. And it's hard to ignore the importance of the gay side of the story in the HIV epidemic, but that is exactly what has been happening for decades.

Which is clearly a mistake because: fabulous.

The film itself is haphazard, but strong. Ryan Murphy tips his hand somewhat with a lengthy series of bombastic and on-the-nose Awards Bait speeches and those surreptitious shifts in character that he is so known for. And the film, especially toward the end, has very little in terms of narrative thrust or momentum. The film can be aimless in terms of storytelling more often than it hits the mark. But man, can Mr. Murphy wield an emotional sledgehammer.

The sheer tortuous reality of The Normal Heart is an emotional wringer, operated by winning performances from A-list actors. Julia Roberts and The Big Bang Theory's Jim Parsons especially bring the film an emotional core that shakes your bones and keeps you thinking about the film, even days later. And Mark Ruffalo is a fine actor who turns in a terrific performance, but he pales in comparison to the actually gay actors bringing their all around every corner - most of them, like Parsons and Bomer, drawing upon recent coming out experiences to fuel their rage and alienation.

Even the minor characters bring it all to the table. In fact I'd argue that the little known Danielle Ferland, who doesn't even have a picture on her IMDb page, turns in the most harrowing and committed performance in a cast full of tremendous talents turning it up to 11. I'm not ashamed to admit that I was crying in the car the morning after thinking about her scene. And I'm emotionally sturdy enough to handle LA traffic every day on my way to work.

I really should be getting an award for that.

The Normal Heart is an utterly necessary film for our generation and it's lucky enough to have a wide array of stars that will hopefully draw in viewers from a much broader demographic than it might have. It's inelegant and at times overwrought, but there is no denying the tremendous importance of bringing history to life in the most tactile, emotionally raw format imaginable. And not just for gay people. For everybody.

Because this fight isn't over. HIV transmission in America is still at epidemic rates and climbing. It doesn't get the press that it used to once people chilled out about the gay panic and focus shifted to Africa, but everybody - gay and straight - is putting themselves at risk because of lack of awareness. Gay men are still at highest risk of transmission because they are naturally exposed to the top tier of risky behaviors by default, but this is happening everywhere. A quarter of new infections are contracted by heterosexuals yearly and the CDC estimates that, if we don't get more careful now, over half of college aged gay men will have HIV by the time they are 50 and the risk to straights isn't much less terrifying.

Maybe this isn't what The Normal Heart set out to do, but the bleak, terrifying depiction of real life events should spur a new generation to learn the risks and how to prevent them. Living in the sheltered 21st century, it's easy to reduce the impact of what history teaches us, but the film hits a nerve, bringing the horrors of the past to today like no other.

We need to see it, both to learn the true story of the AIDS crisis and to prevent another from striking. To win a war, you have to start one. And that, hopefully, is exactly what The Normal Heart is going to accomplish.

TL;DR: The Normal Heart can be clunky at times but it is a harrowing and utterly necessary film.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1509

July Cleanup

When I began this blog, I made a pact to myself to write about every movie I see, even if I've seen it before and no matter how old or random it was. The thing is though, sometimes it's hard to keep up. When I hang out with Henri or Cassidy, we'll usually watch two or three movies at a time and writing one review takes me about two hours with research, pictures, formatting, writing, and distribution. Did I mention I have a job?

So while I've done an admirable job (if I do say so myself) of matching review output with movie input, there are a couple films that slipped through the cracks. In an attempt to catch up with myself, I'm gonna throw down some mini-reviews.

Chopping Mall

Year: 1986
Director: Jim Wynorski
Cast: Kelli Maroney, Tony O'Dell, Russell Todd
Run Time: 1 hour 17 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

My notes on Chopping Mall are just as scattershot and hallucinatory as the film itself.

"flare in boob/spiders and snakes/can't imagine life/if all movies were good"

Produced by Roger Corman('s wife), Chopping Mall very clearly wants you to think it is a slasher movie, but it is so much more than that.

Park Plaza Mall has just installed a new security system in the form of robots that shoot lasers. This is awesome. And while the movie does follow a slasher recipe for a while - a group of teens has a late night party in the mall and begin to get mowed down one by one by the malfunctioning robots - by the third act it has transformed into an explosive 80's cheesy action extravaganza.

Full of Terrible Horror Movie Decision Making, weird sci-fi/action setpieces, and chipper robots telling their still-smoking victims to "have a nice day," Chopping Mall is one of those B movies that will forever have a devoted following.

Champion Dialogue: "Waitress, more butter!"

Rating: 6/10

The Truman Show

Year: 1998
Director: Peter Weir
Cast: Jim Carrey, Ed Harris, Laura Linney
Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG

Although I already talked about this film in Sunday's installment of the Movie ABC's, it is worth pointing out that the world building in The Truman Show is unmatched in most 90's comedies. To carry out a high concept like "man's life is unwittingly broadcast worldwide" involves a lot of examinations of the repercussions of this format which are explored somewhat in the film - enough to hint at a much larger world around Truman that is clearly well thought out but not detracting from the major storyline of the film.

Rating: 8/10

The Kids Are All Right

Year: 2010
Director: Lisa Cholodenko
Cast: Julianne Moore, Annette Bening, Mark Ruffalo
Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

I had been pressed on all sides to see The Kids Are All Right. Sergio wanted me to see it because he loved the film. My mom wanted me to see it because she didn't care for it. Naturally, I resisted. My childish impulse was to shy away from the film that other people so clearly wanted me to watch, but I finally bit the bullet and popped in the DVD.

It turns out I fall just about exactly in between. The Kids Are All Right is a very human depiction of a particularly strong upheaval in the lives of a family headed by two lesbian partners. When Laser (Josh Hutcherson) convinces his sister (Mia Wasikowska) to contact their birth father Paul (Ruffalo), a wrench in thrown into their "idyllic" family life.

The control freak Nic (Bening) and her partner, the free-spirited Jules (Moore) find themselves on opposite sides when Jules embraces Paul's presence and begins work redesigning his back garden. The tensions that had previously existed between the two (Nic is too focused on her work; Jules doesn't understand the consequences of her actions) flare up brighter than ever in the presence of this new catalyst.

With an ensemble cast that breathes life into a pretty routine story, The Kids Are All Right is a pleasant but meandering exploration of the relationship between a long-standing couple that has taken their mutual love for granted. The most important element, the fact that a central couple is a pair of lesbians, is not treated as a novelty or a gimmick, which is the factor that led most to my enjoyment of a film that I typically wouldn't consider to be in my wheelhouse.

Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 756