Movie Box Review

Over the past decade, audience hunger for "reality"--the word very much in quotation marks--has engulfed much of popular cultture, from YouTube videos to self-produced songs, from tweets to television series and even cable networks built around people playing manipulated versions of "themselves."  In movies, the trend has led to an increase in heavily improvised indie comedies and dramas, and also to the genre of "found footage," films that are basically scripted, but which present themselves as being shot by the amateur participants themselves.  The latter have existed mostly in the field of horror, kicked off by the giant hit The Blair Witch Project, and followed by, among others, Cloverdale, the Paranormal Activity franchise and this year's The Devil Inside.  (The genre reaches a meta level with the found footage compendium V/H/S, which premiered at Sundance.)

The new CHRONICLE, while playing even more fast and loose with any logical rules of "real" footage, at least provides a new twist on the form, since it inhabits the superpower genre rather than horror.  The brisk 83-minute story (including credits), directed by Josh Trank and written by Max Landis (from a story by him and Trank), is very basic:  3 teens--high-strung loner Andrew (Dane DeHaan), his nice-guy cousin Matt (Alex Russell) and popular Steve (Michael B. Jordan)--explore a hole in the ground one night after a party, and after they've touched some unexplained glowing thing down there, they find that they've acquired the ability to move objects with their minds and, before long, that they can fly.  

The center of the tale is Andrew, who has a horrific homelife (dying mother, abusive father)--he's the one supposedly carrying the camera through almost all of the movie (along the way he upgrades to incongruously high-quality equipment and learns how to make it all levitate, at which point the shots become far smoother and more professional).  At first, their powers are a pure thrill for the guys, who use their telekinesis for pranks and take joy rides in the sky.  But then Andrew starts wielding them to express his anger and frustration, and before long he's turned into an adolescent super-villain, tearing up the streets of Seattle. 

Chronicle's story doesn't offer much, and the found footage genre makes serious characterization all but impossible.  But this is one case where the conceit really works to the movie's benefit.  Even though we've seen all these stunts and CG effects before in massive franchise movies, watching them seemingly tossed off in this casual, supposedly "amateur" way makes them feel new.  (The reported $12M budget, while tiny compared to a comic-book epic, also isn't the $1M spent on Paranormal Activity and its ilk, and the actual cinematography is by veteran John Bailey.)

Trank and Landis make a lot of smart decisions in Chronicle:  the movie doesn't overstay its welcome, and  aside from a couple of chatty references to Schopenhauer, Plato, and the concept of free will, it doesn't try to be more than the modest thriller it is.  It delivers a compact, original take on a familiar story, and it holds together just about as long as it needs to.

The Hollywood Reporter has some rough early numbers for Friday's boxoffice, and the news looks good for CAPTAIN AMERICA:  THE FIRST AVENGER.  Including Thursday midnight grosses of $4M, it seems to be around $25M for the day.  This would be right in the neighborhood of its Marvel-mate Thor, which had a $25.5M opening day and a $65.8M weekend, and ahead of X Men:  First Class and Green Lantern, which both opened with $21.4M.  

Second place belongs to HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS (PART 2), headed for around $16M on Friday.  This would be well below the $20.8M of Deathly Hallows (Part 1)'s second Friday, and further demonstrates how frontloaded Hallows 2 is:  despite an insane 80% or more drop from its record-breaking opening day, it would nevertheless be $50M higher in total than Hallows 1 at this point in its run.  Hallows 2 should still easily be the highest grossing Harry Potter domestically, but a $400M total is starting to look like a stretch. 

FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS is in third place with around $7M on opening day.  This would put it almost even with January's No Strings Attached and its $7.3M Friday (and $19,7M weekend), and below Bridesmaids ($7.8M/26.2M), Bad Teacher ($12.2M/31.6M) and Horrible Bosses ($9.9M/28.3M).  Friends also has instant competition coming with next weekend's Crazy Stupid Love.  

Read Mitch Metcalf's weekend predictions here, and watch for his detailed analysis of Friday's full numbers and the weekend grosses later this morning.

There's a certain irony in the fact that, in this summer of Super 8 and its Spielberg rapture, the most successfully Spielbergian movie of the season is Marvel's CAPTAIN AMERICA:  THE FIRST AVENGER.  Its connection to Steven Spielberg is faint but important:  director Joe Johnston served as Art Director on both Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and later directed an episode of TV's Young Indiana Jones; not concidentally, this is something like the Indiana Jones 4 that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull never was, and although it has its limitations, Captain America is a surprisingly entertaining old-fashioned adventure.

One of the most engaging things about Captain America as a movie is that it's as unpretentious as a $150M+ giant superhero extravaganza can be.  The first section of the movie tells the story of Steve Rogers (Chris Evans, CG'd in the way of Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button) a 90-pound weakling but endlessly stout of heart, who longs to join the Army in World War II and fight against Nazis, but is rejected because of his physical frailty.  Steve finally runs into Dr. Erskine (Stanley Tucci, putting on a great show), a German refugee scientist who has a magic serum--not to mention his gorgeous aide Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell).  Johnston and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeeley take their time with this part of the story, and it pays off; although we know that Steve will turn into, well, Captain America, we get to know him first as a plucky underdog.  Even after the transformation, there's a witty sequence where the new Steve is turned into a pitchman for War Bonds (it's like the comedy version of Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers), complete with a musical production number by Alan Menken--by the time Steve gets to Europe, we're as longing for him to see battle as he is.

The huge action sequences, when they finally arrive, deliver in size and design, but they're kept for the most part on a human scale--like the Indiana Jones movies, they stay just this side of what an actual human being might be able to do.  Evans is less interesting as the full-fledged Captain than he was as the puny version, but he has a few moments where he gets to reveal the scrawny kid within, and the rest of the time he hits the stalwart buttons effectively.  And there are welcome supporting actors to perk things up between battles:  Tommy Lee Jones does his Tommy Lee Jones thing--it's like he invented macho snark--and Toby Jones is a junior evil Nazi.  Atwell, who's been doing very good work under the radar in projects like Woody Allen's little-seen Cassandra's Dream and the TV miniseries Pillars Of the Earth, has a snappy way with dialogue to go with her looks, and the gadget man on Captain America's team is Howard Stark, who would one day father Iron Man (ah, Marvel); he's played by Dominic Cooper, who'll soon be seen to much splashier advantage in The Devil's Double.   

The very clever production design by Rick Heinrichs creates a larger-than-life version of 1940s archetypes without calling too much attention to itself (as opposed, say, to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow's attempt to do the same thing):  tanks, motorcycles and planes that make sense in the World War II context but are convincingly a bit beyond reality.  The photography by Shelly Johnson, unfortunately, is obscured by a terrible 3D conversion that has little effect beyond badly smudging the original image--this is definitely a picture where audiences should try to save the money and find a 2D auditorium.

Where Captain America really falters is in its villain.  Hugo Weaver, who may be out of fantasy role inspiration now that he's done The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Transformers and The Wolfman, seemingly does a deliberate Christoph Waltz imitation as Red Skull; he's your basic raving super-Nazi (he even listens to Wagner), with a little of Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Voldemort's noselessness.  Red Skull never says or does anything interesting in the picture, and that lowers the stakes of the drama quite a bit; at this point in movie history, if you're going to scare us with a Nazi villain, it takes more than a red digital make-up job to do it.

Despite that central flaw, Captain America is a fun ride.  It's actually disappointing that in their zeal to get the character into next year's all-important Avengers conglomerate (consumer note:  sit through all 10 minutes of credits and you'll be rewarded with the teaser for next year's everyone-but-the-kitchen-sink epic), Marvel was in such a hurry to pull him out of the 1940s.  This retro fantasy could have made a nice variation from their usual formula, but it's seemingly a one-time effort; although we must all believe in the powers of Joss Whedon, he'll have his hands full juggling half a dozen heroes in Avengers, and the Captain's charm may not age well.  That, however, is next year's movie problem.

This year's WONDER WOMAN pilot did not fly under the radar. 

Produced by Warner Bros Television for NBC, it was the subject of speculation before it was even placed with a network, scrutiny while it was being produced, and analysis after it had been rejected.  With the exception of Terra Nova and Smash, it was the single highest-profile pilot of the season.  Now, it seems unlikely to go forward.  But was it... any good?

Well, interesting more than good.  When Warners decided to hand one of their signature DC Comics properties to David E. Kelley, it seemed a curious fit.  Kelley, super-successful in the 1990s and 2000's, has always been known for his dialogue-heavy, mostly legal shows like The Practice, Ally McBeal, and the current Harry's Law.  He'd never tackled an action series, much less one based on comic book mythology.  The surprise of this Wonder Woman is that its heroine, as he's drawn her, is exactly in line with other Kelley protagonists through the years:  cheerfully rule-breaking, quietly lonely, and truly in her element when she's kicking some ass.  She could be Denny Crane's granddaughter.  (Never in the history of superheros has a script contained so much earnest discussion of the potential legal consequences incurred in crusading for truth and justice.)

And in Adrianne Palicki (once and forever Tyra Collette in the minds of Friday Night Lights fans), Kelley has an actress capable of filling the role, both physically and in acting chops.  But Kelley's version of the character is so odd as to be schizophrenic.  She actually has 3 identities:  the crimefighting vigilante herself; Diana Themyscira, a tycoon who is openly Wonder Woman, and whose marketing of dolls and other products in her own image pays for pricey jets and her other crime detection gadgets (it's as if Bruce Wayne, instead of inheriting his wealth, sold Batman dolls for a living); and Diana Prince, a mousy (as mousy as Adrianne Palicki is capable of being) singleton who keeps a small apartment with a cat in order to lead a "normal" life.  The Prince persona makes no sense on any level, and luckily it takes up only a few minutes of the pilot. 

More problematic is that the show never finds a tone or a target audience.  It's clearly not aimed at kids (Diana the corporate mogul delivers a speech about the "tits" on her latest Wonder Woman action figure), but it's still a campy action show where the villains are Elizabeth Hurley as an evil pharmaceutical zillionaire and her steroid-enhanced minions.  While Diana has some depth, the other regular characters (Tracie Thoms and Cary Elwes as her loyal colleagues) are cardboard.   Also, the glaring difference between a movie budget (like the current Warners/DC epic Green Lantern) and TV are made clear by the relatively few special effects and the uninteresting production design.  Pilot director Jeffrey Reiner, who directed many episodes of Friday Night Lights but also the more action-oriented The Event, handles the fight scenes without much oomph.

In gauging Wonder Woman as a show that could have gotten on the air, a comparison with the new Charlie's Angels is worthwhile, since it's another reboot of a female-oriented action franchise (and featuring another Friday Night Lights alumna to boot) which did get chosen.  Wonder Woman gets points for having an original point of view, and a star more charismatic than the 3 new Angels combined.   It fails to deliver, though, on the basic requirements of excitement and a consistent tone; Charlie's Angels may not be much (and in fact it isn't, but it knows what it is. 

To commemorate Green Lantern's arrival, 10 superhero movies that couldn't fly:

10. WATCHMAN (2009):  Not a total disaster, but Zack Snyder's failed epic earns its place by providing definitive proof that monk-like faithfulness in adapting a comic to the screen is doomed to failure:  endlessly long (more than 3 hours on DVD!), impenetrably plotted, and neither viscerally nor intellectually exciting.

 

9.   THE GREEN HORNET (2011): Seth Rogen as an idiot fratboy schooled by Asian sidekick Kato into becoming an idiot superhero.  The last movie on earth Rogen should have made, and so badly directed it seemed like Michel Gondry's name in the credits had to be a typo.

8.   DAREDEVIL (2003):  Ben Affleck as a blind lawyer who moonlights as a crimefighter.  Luckily for Affleck, he can direct.  (There are people who claim that Mark Steven Johnson's  "Director's Cut" available on DVD is actually good, but it's just slightly less bad.  Johnson, by the way, has a special place in Bad Superhero Movie history since he also directed Ghost Rider, which just narrowly missed this list.)

7.   CATWOMAN (2004):  Halle Berry won the Oscar for Monster's Ball and jumped into this; her career never really recovered.  Sharon Stone, as a supervillainess cosmetics executive, set new standards for campiness.

6.   MY SUPER EX-GIRLFRIEND (2006):  The only movie here not based on a preexisting comic:  Ivan Reitman's supposed comedy about a bitchy crimefighter embarrassed Uma Thurman, Luke Wilson, Anna Faris, and self-respecting superwomen everywhere.

5.   BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997):  Joel Schumacher's garish exercise in superhero fabulousness killed off the franchise for 8 years (Christopher Nolan practically had to perform an exorcism to bring it back), and almost took George Clooney down with it.  And let's not forget Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl.

4.    THE PHANTOM (1996):  If Billy Zane's turn as a masked avenger is released in theaters and no one goes to see it, does it make a sound?

 

3.   .THE SPIRIT (2008):  Frank Miller's adaptation of the Will Eisner comic was an utter mess of stylized visuals, arch dialogue and clunky action.  With Samuel L. Jackson as the Nazi villain (his character needed to catch up on world history).

2.   THE SHADOW (1994):  Would you believe... Alec Baldwin as a superhero?  No one else did, either.

1.   SUPERMAN IV:  THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987):  A sad end to the franchise that began the whole genre 9 years earlier, with Christopher Reeve (who also took a story credit) battling dirt-cheap special effects when he wasn't making windy speeches about World Peace.  The franchise hasn't yet managed to come back:  Bryan Singer's attempted reboot with Superman Returns was a pompous bore, and next year The Man of Steel will try once again... directed, as we come full circle, by Zack Snyder.

Another summer weekend; another superhero epic.  What used to be an extravagant event genre is now hard-pressed to muster more than a yawn.  What is there to say about GREEN LANTERN?  Well, it's better than January's sophomoric Green Hornet, so at least it's got color war going for it.  Apart from that, not much.

Green Lantern is more a consumer product than a work of creative impulse, so let's look at it from that angle.  For Warner Bros, it's a crucially important property, because their decade-long cash cow franchise Harry Potter is about to expire.  And although next year will bring the sure-thing blockbuster Dark Knight Returns, Christopher Nolan appears to be serious about it being his last Batman movie, and no franchise has ever been so dependent on its director (there's also the reboot of the Superman series, but with Zack Sucker Punch Snyder behind the camera, that's a big question mark).  So the studio desperately needs to generate some serious revenue out of its DC Comics affiliate, especially since the last 2 tries, Watchmen and Jonah Hex, were money pits.  (And competitor Marvel is kicking sand in their face.)

Possibly because of all this commercial pressure, Green Lantern is as impersonal as an adventure can be.  It offers a buffet of attitudes we've seen in other superhero pictures (a little smart-aleck wit from Iron Man, a bit of faux grandeur a la Thor, a touch of romantic fantasy as in Spiderman), without committing to any of them fully.  The result is very busy, but it doesn't arouse much interest, and when the inevitable mid-credits easter egg scene set up the sequel, no one in the audience seemed thrilled about it.

The picture doesn't get off to a bad start:  after the outer space prologue (portentous narration by Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush, introduction of the personification-of-evil enemy creature Parallax), we're introduced to Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a cocky test pilot who blows mechanized planes out of the sky when he's not bantering through his on-again off-again relationship with heiress Carol Ferris (Blake Lively). Before long, though, since this is an origin story, we're sentenced to the land of endless exposition in the script credited to Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg.  Hal is given his magic green ring, weapon and insignia of a corps of intergalactic guardians, by an elder warrior (Temeura Morrison) who's in the process of dying from Parallax-inflicted wounds.  Then Hal has to be transported to the planet of the greenies for training by the digitized Rush and Michael Clarke Duncan, and the heavily made-up Mark Strong; Hal is told repeatedly that he's the first human ever to be honored with a ring (the lantern corps apparently isn't subject to civil rights laws).  He learns that the ring's powers are basically limitless, since a ring-bearer can bring into existence anything his will can create.  Meanwhile, a speck of Parallax has found its way into Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard), an old colleague of Hal and Carol and a fairly mad professor to begin with, who's soon transformed into a nutcase with a seriously receding hairline.  Many speeches about tactics, will, fear and responsibility later, the blob that is Parallax shows up for the final confrontation, and we can all go home.

Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent to realize all this, and even though the director is Martin Campbell, who did a sensational job with the James Bond reboot Casino Royale, there's scant excitement and more than a little dullness here.  Reynolds is a very lightweight hero--fine when he's flying planes and displaying his romantic-comedy chops, less so when being stouthearted.  Despite all the articles and interviews presenting Lively as a movie star in waiting, nothing she does in Green Lantern suggests a reach beyond Gossip Girl.  Sarsgaard mostly lets his prosthetic devices do his acting, and everyone else who shows up (Tim Robbins as Sarsgaard's senator father, Angela Bassett as a government agent) barely registers.  There are plenty of digital effects, but they have surprisingly little impact.  Partly it's because the things Hal visualizes and thus brings into being all emerge in glowing green (the color of will; if you're decorating, yellow is the color of fear), so none of it looks real, and the same goes for his digitally painted-on suit and mask.  Parallax is an animated lump with a generic "face" that's neither scary nor unique, and the expanses of the various planets we see look like the same CG backdrops that show up in other movies. 

After decades of superhero pictures, we're all a little jaded; the merely spectacular is now routine.  Kids may like this Green Lantern--there are lots of creatures, and objects get thrown about loudly--but for the rest of us, it's merely inoffensive and forgettable.  And we're not done:  a few weeks off for Pixar, Transformers 3, and the last Harry Potter, and then the next superhero to bat will be Captain America.  Be still my heart...

Put it this way:  the new superhero epic THOR cost something like $150M to produce, required the diligent services of hundreds of professionals over a period of 2 years, is being presented with all the trappings of IMAX, 3D and super-stereo, and yet there's not a moment in it as exciting--let alone as much fun--as last night's paintball episode of "Community."   Now "Community"s paintball episodes are completely awesome, so that's a fairly high standard... but still. 

Thor isn't the worst superhero picture to come our way (remember the Fantastic Four movies?  the Joel Schumacher Batmans?  Superman:  The Quest for Peace?), but it may be the most underwhelming.  Marvel presumably hired Kenneth Branagh to direct because of his association with Shakespearean drama (it certainly wasn't because of his action movie chops), and under his helm the picture presents itself with extreme seriousness--the hero's backstory is interweaved with Norse mythology, which here takes place in an Asgard located in outer space, and Thor himself, not a mere immigrant from his planet a la Superman, is essentially a god.  The Asgard scenes take place in massive, fake-looking sets that look like they were re-lit from Cecil B DeMille's Egyptian palaces in The Ten Commandments, with equally phony CG landscapes that seem modeled after the matte paintings in David Lynch's version of Dune.  In case that wasn't enough, no less than Anthony Hopkins was brought in to roar his way through the role of the one-eyed King Odin, father of Thor (if I was hearing correctly, he's called "Allfather," although it's not clear if that's his convenient last name or a salute to his parenting skills).  

As written by Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz and Don Payne (from a story by J. Michael Straczynski and Mark Protosevich), the Asgard section of the tale gives Thor (Chris Hemsworth) an evil brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston)--we know Loki is evil because he's made up to look like Richard E. Grant (unlike Thor's robustly Aryan good looks) and he turns out to be adopted--who plots with the nearby ice people (kinged by Colm Feore behind a lot of digital effects) to take advantage of Thor's impulsive arrogance and depose Odin, banish Thor to Earth and take over the throne.  But not to worry, Thor still has 4 warrior buddies on Asgard--a fat one, a hot babe, an inexplicably Asian one, and one who looks oddly like the young Kenneth Branagh--to protect his interests.  Meanwhile, back in banishment (specifically New Mexico), Thor crashes to Earth right in the path of spunky, lovely young scientist Jane (Natalie Portman, this having been shot before she knew Black Swan was about to change her career), her kooky sidekick Darcy (the criminally underused Kat Dennings, from Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist) and mentor Erik (Stellan Skarsgard, Hollywood's go-to professor).  This will come as a shock, but spunky scientist Jane finds herself falling for the hunky god-in-exile, while he learns a handy lesson about appreciating humanity and accepting self-sacrifice, which is useful because--did I mention?--only when Thor shows he is worthy can he regain possession of his magic hammer Mjolnir, which apparently has been watching "Camelot" on Starz and is stuck immovable in a rock until such time as a worthy god can retrieve it.  And since this is a Marvel movie and everything has to lead to their megafranchise Avengers picture next year, Clark Gregg from Iron Man (and eventually Samuel L Jackson) are lurking around, although how Thor will connect with SHIELD is left unclear in this installment.

And you know what?  All of that, as dumb and dense as it is, would be fine if the movie were just enjoyable (try talking yourself through the storyline of Batman Begins one day).  Branagh does some things right--he gets humor from Hemsworth, Portman and Dennings in the fish-out-of-water New Mexico scenes, and Hiddleston is a fine villain once you realize he's going to act like the "trusted" family friend in 1940s movies who turns out to be a Nazi spy.  There's also one genuinely cool CG moment when a giant robot Loki's sent to Earth manages to reverse itself back-to-front without turning around.  But Branagh doesn't know how to edit the action sequences--he completely muffs the big moment when Thor regains his powers--and the script, which probably went through many more writers than those credited, dribbles off at the end, so the final confrontation between Thor and Loki has so little impact you expect the real climax to follow.  (The 3D, as increasingly expected, is virtually without impact.)  Even the coda scene (you have to sit through all 10 minutes of credits to get there, unlike Fast Five, which mercifully lets the audience go after the first couple of minutes) delivers less of a set-up for the next chapter than you'd hope.

Thor's florid tone is completely different from the more sophisticated, character-based wit of the Iron Man series (not to mention those of the two failed Hulk movies), which makes one wonder just how they're planning to bind them all together for The Avengers.  But that's next summer's problem.  The good thing about summer blockbusters is that they're like buses--if the first one that stops doesn't look like a comfortable ride, just wait and there'll be another.  The buses have just started to run for Summer 2011, so let's hope the vehicles to come have better engines.

(THOR - Paramount/Marvel - 117 minutes - PG 13 - Director:  Kenneth Branagh - Script: Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz, Don Payne (story by J. Michael Straczynski, Mark Protosevich) - Cast:  Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins, Stellan Skarsgard, Clark Gregg, Kat Dennings, Idris Elba, Colm Feore, Ray Stevenson, Tadanobu Asano, Josh Dallas, Jaimie Alexander - Wide Release)