10 minute read
Film
from Aug. 2, 2012
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Time bomb
The Watch
I was excited for The Watch, a comedy starring Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and Jonah Hill, simply because I love each of those guys. I started to get a little worried about it when I saw the confusing ad campaign that didn’t even acknowledge the fact that The Watch is an alien invasion movie. Aliens made it into the ads that surfaced in the final weeks after the Trayvon Martin case made neighborhood watches a bad subject. In fact, the film was originally called Neighborhood Watch, with Fox demanding the name change due to current events. The other thing that had me excited about this is that it was co-written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the guys who wrote Pineapple Express, a film near and dear to my heart. I liked the idea of them tackling sci-fi comedy. I envisioned Ghostbusters with aliens and a lot of curse words. The result is a total piece of junk that is, I must admit, sufficiently entertaining because of the actors involved. Stiller, Vaughn, Hill and British television star Richard Ayoade all get a decent share of laughs in a movie that doesn’t ever really find its groove. Much of the blame for this not achieving very good or classic status must fall on director Akiva Schaffer, whose previous effort was the Andy Samberg misfire Hot Rod. Schaffer does a good enough job of drawing funny moments from his ensemble, but the alien invasion element feels like an afterthought more than the driving force of the plot. It almost seems as if the filmmakers started out making an alien invasion movie, got scared, and decided to focus on dick jokes.
Granted, the dick jokes are often funny. I laughed loud more than a few times. Vaughn does his fast-talking asshole shtick, and I enjoy him in this mode. His character’s dealings with his rebellious daughter in the film are a nasty highlight. Stiller, basically playing the straight man, gets a few moments to shine. His Evan is a manager at Costco, where one of his employees turns up mysteriously dead. Evan’s speech by to a hometown football crowd, an impassionedBob Grimm attempt to recruit people for a neighborhood bgrimm@ watch, is a riot. I’m a big fan of when Stiller newsreview.com does the whole “really passionate but not quite sure how to say what he’s thinking” thing. Hill goes against type, playing a character3 reminiscent of Rogen’s own psycho cop wannabe in Observe and Report. This isn’t the funniest Hill has ever been, but he still contributes laughs. As for Ayoade, he truly shines in the film’s odd orgy scene. There’s also Will Forte as a jerk cop, and he gets what I will call the film’s funniest moment during the explosive finale. Billy Crudup takes a rare comedic turn as a creepy neighbor who likes Evan’s skin a little too much. As for the aliens, they’re pretty cool looking in their few minutes on screen. The film only had a $68 million budget, and that just doesn’t cut it these days when it comes to the special effects movie. Perhaps if Fox had thrown a little more money at this thing—and with this cast, you would think they’d have a little more confidence in the project—they might have had something that felt a little more complete. As it stands, The Watch feels a little half-assed. The film is already a certified bomb with the public and the critics. The Watch winds up being one of those movies that I admittedly feel a little embarrassed to admit I sort of liked. In one way, I see it as a colossal failure. In another way, I have to admit it made me chuckle a lot despite its shortcomings. The Watch had the makings of a great movie, but winds up something significantly short of that. I’m giving it a pass because it made me laugh, but I think most folks will hate it with a passion. What can I say? Sometimes a bad movie can be fun. Ω
Four guys, one big bowling ball.
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POOR
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FAIR
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GOOD
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VERY GOOD
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EXCELLENT
2The Amazing Spider-Man I think it’s fair to say that Marc Webb was not a good choice to helm a big budget summer blockbuster. His sole feature credit is the sweet (500) Days of Summer, a film that, to the best of my memory, had nothing like a big CGI lizard man in it. This is a “reboot” of the Spidey franchise, with Sam Raimi parting ways producers after his outrageously bad Spider-Man 3and an aborted attempt at a Spider-Man 4that would’ve seen John Malkovich as a vulture dude. Webb gets it all wrong, from his casting of SpiderMan (Andrew Garfield) and Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone), to the terrible operatic soundtrack, and, most disappointingly, a truly bad screen rendition of The Lizard (played drably by Rhys Ifans). As it turns out, Webb can’t handle an action scene to save his life. Garfield, so good in The Social Network, takes an “Oh-gosh-golly-gee-willickers-please-likemy-nerd-ass!” approach to the role of Peter Parker. It’s cute for about five minutes, and then it gets pretty painful to watch.
5Beasts of the Southern Wild This movie is unlike anything you’ve seen before. It’s the story of Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), a 6-year old girl living with her father (Dwight Henry) in a place called the Bathtub, a makeshift Southern community built near a levee and susceptible to storms. As directed by Benh Zeitlin, we see the film through Hushpuppy’s eyes, with the movie alternating between reality and fantasy. The results are enchanting, sometimes scary, and ultimately breathtaking. Wallis is nothing short of incredible in the central role, a child actress with astonishing power. Henry, as her father, Wink, delivers what’s surely one of the year’s best performances. The whole thing plays like a fairytale updated for modern times, but the modern times depicted feature very few modern amenities (no iPhones in this movie). It will draw many an emotion out of you. It’s one of the year’s best films.
4Brave After the severe misstep that was Cars 2, Pixar gets back to goodness with this, the tale of Merida (voice of Kelly Macdonald). Merida is a princess who doesn’t want to conform to tradition, shooting arrows better than any of the boys in or around her kingdom, and not really too keen about marrying any of them under arranged circumstances. When a spell is cast on family members, she must search for a way to restore normalcy, while convincing her mom (Emma Thompson) that she has the right to choose her own destiny. Merida is a fun character, and Macdonald is the perfect voice for her. As for the look of this movie, it is beautiful for its entire running time. While I’ve liked many Pixar films more than this one, that is not a dig on this movie. It might not be one of the best the studio has offered, but it is still a highly entertaining piece of work.
4The Dark Knight Rises Director Christopher Nolan wraps up his Batman trilogy with a rousing, though occasionally clunky, conclusion. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has retired Batman, and is living a reclusive life in his mansion when Gotham is besieged by the masked revolutionary Bane (Tom Hardy). Batman is eventually forced out of retirement, and meets his physical match in Bane while also facing off against a crafty cat burglar (Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle, never referred to as Catwoman in the film but obviously playing that part). Hardy makes Bane a great physical adversary, but his performance is marred by a terrible voice dub that makes him sound cartoonish and out of place. Hathaway has a lot of good fun in her role, as does Gary Oldman returning as Jim Gordon. The movie has a lot of good action, and Bale has never been better as Batman. It’s not as good as the previous chapters in the trilogy, but it’s still very good and a fitting conclusion to a great story. 1Ice Age: Continental Drift The animated wooly mammoth (Ray Romano), saber-toothed tiger (Denis Leary) and sloth (John Leguizamo) take yet another journey to the land of the suck in this fourth, and undoubtedly not last, installment of the popular kiddie adventures. When the continents crack, the mammoth winds up on a floating piece of ice far away from the wife and kid, so he spends the movie trying to get back. Along the way, he does battle with a stupid pirate monkey (Peter Dinklage) that sings the dumbest song you will hear this or any year. Because this is in 3-D, the film offers a lot of action sequences, sacrificing plot for a whole lot of “whoosh.” In a summer that offers the likes of Brave, parents are better off just taking their kids to that movie twice than subjecting their prepubescent eyes to this thing. I actually got tired watching this due to all of the frantic 3-D movement. I fear these Ice Age movies are going to keep on coming.
5Moonrise Kingdom Writer-director Wes Anderson’s return to live action after his animated gem Fantastic Mr. Fox is probably the most “Wes Anderson” Wes Anderson movie yet, and that’s a good thing if you love the guy (I do!). The story here is set in 1965, where Sam the Khaki Scout (newcomer Jared Gilman) has flown the coop during a camping expedition, much to the worry of Scout Master Ward, (Edward Norton, in his funniest performance yet). Sam runs away with Suzy (Kara Hayward, also a newcomer), and they have themselves a romantic couple of days while parents and authority figures frantically search for them. The adolescent puppy love story is treated with the sort of storybook grace one would expect from Anderson. Every shot is a thing of beauty. Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand and Jason Schwartzman all contribute wonderfully in what stands, and will stand, as one of the year’s best films.
3Snow White and the Huntsman The 347th Snow Whitemovie this year is actually a fairly decent one, with Kristen Stewart doing a fine job as the title character and Chris Hemsworth contributing nicely as the ax-wielding Hunstman. Best of all the cast is Charlize Theron as Ravenna, a loony queen hell-bent on staying young and eating Snow’s heart. Director Rupert Sanders puts together a swell visual movie, especially in the way he creates dwarves out of actors like Nick Frost, Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins and Toby Jones. The movie is quite good when it features Snow White running around in various enchanted forests, though not so much in the final act, where it becomes a weird Joan of Arc movie. The last act feels tacked on, like it belongs on another film. Still, Stewart is quite winning here and Theron is a bona fide scene-stealer.
4Ted Family Guycreator Seth MacFarlane makes his feature film directorial debut with one of the year’s funniest movies. MacFarlane lends his voice to the title character, an obnoxious teddy bear given the gift of speech and life after a wish by his child owner, John. The two never part, even when John, played as an adult by Mark Wahlberg, is in his 30s. They become pot-smoking buddies, and John’s girlfriend (Mila Kunis) starts to get annoyed. For those of you simply looking for good, raunchy, super R-rated comedy, Ted has got the goods. But MacFarlane also takes the human elements of the story seriously, and they wind up being quite charming. It’s a major directorial feat when a first timer creates an animated teddy bear character that’s more well-rounded than most actual human characters in movies today.
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