Step Brothers

Step Brothers is a one-joke movie.  Fortunately, it’s a funny joke.

Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly play 40-ish men who never really matured past the age of, oh, 13.  They live at home and act like children.  When their parents meet, marry, and move in together, they have to learn to get along. 

You could build a funny movie about spoiled kids becoming brothers with child actors, but the hook here is watching schlubby, middle-aged guys exhibit these behaviors.  A couple of kids climbing into a treehouse to hang out and gripe about their goody-two-shoes sibling could be amusing, but watching grown men do it is downright hilarious.

Is it shallow?  Yeah.  Is it formulaic?  Yeah.  Is it funny?  Well, yeah.  Go figure.

Observe and Report

I’m pretty sure Observe and Report is a comedy.  It’s billed as one, and it stars comedian Seth Rogen.  But it isn’t funny.  It’s disturbing.

In the film, Rogen plays a functionally psychotic head of security at a shopping mall.  He’s unstable and violent, but appears to have found a niche in which he can mask the former and occasionally indulge the latter.  Over the course of the film, events disturb his balance and he spirals down into a full-blown psychotic episode.

Observe and Report plays this for laughs, but it isn’t funny.  Rogen’s character is, by turns, pathetic and repulsive.  The people he hurts stay hurt.  The people he intimidates stay afraid.  Nothing about this is good, and nothing ends well.  This is a disturbing, scary, deeply weird film, and nothing at all like what I expected.  Perhaps the joke was on me.

Make Way for Tomorrow

I was on board Make Way for Tomorrow, an American precursor to the superior Tokyo Story, for roughly half the movie.  Then, one of the leads make a decision so stupid that he lost me, killed my disbelief, and tuned me out.  Once that happened, I saw for what it was: a one-note movie that plays its note on a title card before the story even begins. 

Here’s the setup: an older couple (roughly 70, which in the world of this film is absolutely ancient) calls their adult children home.  This is not a happy reunion, however.  They’ve invited them to announce to that they’ve lost their home and need to move in with somebody.  The kids are displeased.

Ok, I know where this is going and so do you: it’s right there in the title.  Besides, you’ve seen King Lear and Tokyo Story (What? You haven’t seen Tokyo Story?  Why are you wasting time reading this blog when you could be doing that?  Go on now, shoo.  I’ll be here when you’re finished.).  You know how this works out.

The rest of the film is, essentially, a slog to the bitter end.  But there’s a moment, about halfway through, when a friend presents the man of the couple an opportunity on a silver platter with a couple of mints and a lovely flower in a little vase.  The man waves away the opportunity because he’s an idiot.  This made me so mad, so incredulous, that I stopped seeing him as a man and started seeing him as a cardboard cutout with “pathetic” scrawled upon it in magic marker.  I wondered why the “opportunity” scene was even included.  And then I was done.

Make Way for Tomorrow is technically competent and decently performed, but it failed to make me believe.  What a disappointment.

The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life made me glad I sprang for an enormous tv and a good stereo.  I can’t imagine seeing this film on a computer screen.  This film trades on awe, and awe requires big picture and big sound.  I think the studio will put this back in theaters for awards season.  If you don’t have an enormous tv and a good stereo, take advantage of the theater’s setup and see this film properly.

Sean Penn’s a successful architect in his early 50s.  It’s his deceased brother’s birthday.  He goes about his day, but he’s lost in thought, reflecting on his childhood, his brother, his family, and life.  That’s it – that’s the whole story.

But it’s powerful and it’s beautiful and it’s absolutely effective, and it’s so because director Terence Malick captures the perspective of childhood as seen through the lens of recollection.  He uses vignettes and camera angles and selective audio to approximate how children see and adults remember.  He weaves it with a meditation on life, and the meaning of life, that put me in a profound, meditative state and took me on its journey.

I didn’t cry during   The Tree of Life.  I didn’t laugh.  Nothing blew up.  But this film moved me, its marriage of music and imagery touched me, and the experience felt like the most profound time I’ve had at the movies since Woman in the Dunes.

See this film.  Soak it in.  When you do, go large.

Green Lantern

I kinda liked Green Lantern.  It struck me as goofy fun.  All the goofy fun in the world, however, can’t mask its profound distastefulness.

Here’s the deal: Ryan Reynolds plays Hal Jordan, a test pilot with deep-seated insecurities who gets selected to be Flashlight Guy, er, Green Lantern, a space-cop who can use Lantern Power to focus his will into stuff like really big machine guns.  After bilging out of Space Cop Academy, he returns to Earth.  Once home, he’s confronted with Capital E Eeevil, overcomes his insecurities, and saves the day.  On the face of it, this makes for a good time at the movies.  My kindergartner enjoyed it, and I rocked along relatively happily.

But I can’t see how any self-respecting nerd can support Green Lantern.  As played by Ryan Reynolds, Hal Jordan is that jock you probably hated in high school.  He’s good looking and in great shape and has a ridiculously hot girlfriend whom he neglects.  As if that weren’t enough, he has an awesome car, the ability to lose his job without freaking out, and Space Cop powers.  But that’s not so bad.  Here’s the killer: his nemesis is you.  His nemesis is Chess Club Guy, the nerd with the crush on Ridiculously Hot Girl.

{Aside: it just kills me that it always comes back to Ridiculously Hot Girl.  By whining about the fact that he’s invisible to Ridiculously Hot Girl, Chess Club Guy marginalizes all the Chess Club Girls.  In a sense, he’s marginalizing his own analogue and, thus, himself.  I hear you, Evolutionary Scientist Guy: Ridiculous Hotness often comes down to symmetry of feature, perfect averageness, and physical fitness, thus suggesting a good reproductive choice.  Nevertheless, the self-loathing inherent in the envy of the one whom Ridiculously Hot Girl finds attractive strikes me as both unjust and uncomfortable.}

So, what are we supposed to do?  Root for the Alpha Beta over the Tri Lamb?  Cheer Ryan Reynolds because he finally gets in touch with his inner JUMP THE SHARK GUY? Not going to happen.  The best we can do is quiet our misgivings and enjoy the pretty pictures.

And plot our revenge.  Mu ha ha.

Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol had me at the opening credits.  I’d forgotten that Brad Bird directed this film, and seeing his name flash on the screen assured me that I was in for a good time.

You see, Brad Bird directed The Incredibles and Ratatouille.  The Incredibles is the greatest superhero movie ever made, and Ratatouille moved me to stand and applaud when its credits rolled, something I’ve done exactly once.  This guy knows what he’s doing and it shows in this, his first live-action feature.

The Mission: Impossible movies imagine what James Bond would be like if he weren’t a sociopath.  Tom Cruise, as secret agent Ethan Hunt, can actually make and sustain friendships, lead people, and present himself as more than a collection of top-shelf stuff he read about in men’s lifestyle magazines.  This gives us an “in” to his character that the 007 movies simply can’t deliver.  This matters, because it overcomes the fact that this spy thriller is just another entry in the “stop a madman out to destroy the world / corner the market on X / extort ONE MILLION DOLLARS from the UN” genre.  We like Ethan in a way that we simply can’t like Bond.  We like his team, which includes recently omnipresent Doctor Who alumnus Simon Pegg.  We like his boss.  By God, we like the Impossible Missions Force, whose self-destructing messaging systems sometimes need a little whack to, y’know, actually self-destruct.  So we’re on board when things get rough.

And rough they get, giving Bird a reason to deliver breathtaking action set-pieces.  I’ve flown over Dubai’s Burj Khalifa tower a zillion times, but it took this film to bring home its awesome height.  I’ve been in sandstorms, but the sandstorm here felt more dangerous and more awesome than any I’ve actually experienced.  As a film buff, I’ve seen more stunt fights in industrial settings than I can remember; but I’ve never seen a stunt fight like the one this delivers in its climax.

A friend of mine recently said that Brad Bird should get a Bond film.  I say that Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol is as good as spy action-thrillers get, and better than any Bond film I can readily recall.  Brad Bird hasn’t just raised the bar.  He’s built a better bar, taller and stronger and cooler and just plain more fun than the bars that have gone before.

I can’t praise Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol enough.  Brad Bird knows what he’s doing.

PS  … except for that last scene, which looked like it was filmed on different stock and tied everything up far too neatly.  Hey, people who follow this kind of thing: was this a reshoot thing?  I just don’t understand how you do two hours of excellence, only to go mundane at the wrap.  Thoughts?

Hugo

In the first ten minutes of Hugo, Martin Scorsese delivers a breathtaking flight above the wintry streets of beautiful Paris, through the crowds at a downtown railway station, and into the very workings of the beautiful clocks that keep the people in the station on time.  Further, he introduces the ragamuffin boy Hugo, our hero, wins our sympathy for him, and dazzles us with the beauty of his photography and vision.

And then he gives us the opening credits.  Basically, the first ten minutes of Hugo is Martin Scorsese saying, “In case you’ve forgotten, I’m the best there is.”

He’s right, of course.  He is the best there is, and he uses his mastery of his craft to tell us a story (of the plucky young Hugo and his adventures in the railway station), experiment with and expand 3D technology, and proclaim his love for film, both aesthetically and technically.

He’s aided by the kind of cast a Scorsese can command: Christopher Lee as a bookshop owner who reveals hidden depths, Sacha Baron Cohen as the Station Inspector, Emily Mortimer as the flower vendor who’s the glint in his eye, and Jude Law as, in a sense, the soul of the picture.  And that’s just the supporting cast!  In the lead, we find the remarkable young Asa Butterfield as the titular Hugo, Chloë Grace Moretz (whom I’m beginning to see as the next Jodie Foster) as an educated young girl who yearns for adventure, and Sir Ben Kingsley in one of his most evocative roles since Death and the Maiden.

Right around here, I usually summarize the plot to help you decided whether the story’s for you.  Not this time.  The story’s good, and it’ll capture your imagination, but Hugo is for you simply because it’s beautiful.  It provokes a feeling of aesthetic wonder, a joy that mankind is capable of creating such visions and experiences, a shared delight in the possibilities of film as a medium.  I loved Hugo and consider it among the best films of the year.  I think you’ll love it, too.