Men in Black 3D

What a lackluster couple of weeks its been for any film without a Marvel character running around in it. Dark Shadows was a dud, Battleship crashed and burned. All eyes focused on Big Willie and Tommy Lee to see if they could go toe to toe with the Avengers. The end result last weekend was a success but a mild one but if you were to read Nikki Finke over the last few days you would think the movie world was coming to an end. That woman laments film openings with more angst than 5 years of Beverly Hills 90210 ever could. Calm down Nikki take your medication. However, as far as the industry is concerned, it is a shame that Men in Black didn't shatter expectations but if you continue further to my review you may see why it shouldn't be that surprising that it was lackluster. It made about 54 million through Sunday and another 14 million for Monday. Which puts it at about 68 million for the overall weekend. Now compared to the previous versions and to usual blockbuster fare of this magnitude it's middling for sure. The real test is how it holds on its second weekend with Snow White and the Huntsman coming out next weekend.

Men in Black 3 brings back Agent J (Will Smith) and Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) as the world weary team tasked with containing and sometimes eliminating threats to our world from Foreign and Domestic aliens. In this go-round an old baddie, Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement), that K locked away on a Moon prison escapes to get his revenge on his old nemesis. Boris decides to eliminate K Back to the Future style as he travels back to 1969. J is tasked with going back to save his partner before Boris sends an invasion force in present day to destroy the Earth. He of course, runs into K's younger self (Josh Brolin) as they try to stop Boris together.

Honestly I had fun with this movie it is by far much better than the previous installment but honestly that isn't saying very much. The performances, and the pacing were great but I feel like there were a lot of missed opportunities here. Especially given how well Josh Brolin pulled off playing the younger K. The thing that I always loved about the first Men in Black is that it was sharply written with a very clever plot. Not to mention it was genuinely funny. I felt that a lot of the humor in this one felt forced and a little stale. Admittedly we haven't seen a Men in Black movie in about ten years maybe it has become outdated. One of the better sequences was the Andy Warhol stuff with Bill Hader but they featured so much of it in the trailers it kind of ruined the surprise and fun of it in the film. The time travel plot while kind of fun felt well traveled already by many other more successful films and TV shows. The one character that was supposed to be interesting and funny was Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg) the temporal displacement guy who really only felt like a low rent Observer from the far more creative and interesting show Fringe. This plays into the narrative that we had been hearing about this film all along the past year or so that they were working off unfinished scripts and that Will Smith was being a diva about his massive trailer in NYC. Director Barry Sonnefeld denied the rumors about an unfinished script and I'm sure he's correct about it especially a film of this magnitude it would be extremely difficult to do on the fly but it does beg the question why not flesh the script out better? You had so many tacked on things here with Agent K and his watch and a somewhat lame payoff at the end. The relationship between older K and agent O (Emma Thompson) and then the weird attempt at a romantic angle in the past with Agent O (Alice Eve) that doesn't seem to go anywhere. These are very small things but they do add up and certainly take away some of the enjoyment for the film. As far as the 3D I think it holds up pretty well. This is definitely the kind of movie that 3D is made for. If you do see it I would suggest seeing it in all of it's 3D glory. Overall it's a fun but forgettable ride.

Grade: 3 Buckets

The Avengers

I've been waiting 25 years to see a movie like this and I waited a week and saw it twice before I decided to put pen to paper or in this case fingers to keys. After months of endless trailers, clips and tie-ins is it possible for a movie of this magnitude to live up to the hype and overall splendor it was intended for? The answer is just as easy-- yes, God yes may I have some more. The Avengers is the end result of a painstaking process that started in 2008 with Iron Man that sustained the tie-ins through 4 more films: Iron Man 2, The Incredible Hulk, Thor and finally Captain America. Were they all masterpieces? No, far from it but they continued a narrative sometimes subtly sometimes in your face but this narrative started the building blocks for a massive project that would put all of Earth's mightiest heroes in one film. Producer Kevin Feige deserves a lot of the credit for this as he has successfully tied together on one team a Demi-God, a smart ass genius billionaire, a soldier from a different era, an indestructible Goliath and two superb agents of Shield. The toughest challenge after putting this team together is executing it and Director/writer Joss Whedon rose to the challenge and crushed a Grand Slam.

Loki (Tom Hiddleston), the God of Thunder's brother, has come to Earth to claim it for his own. His first action is to take the Tesseract or Cosmic Cube from Shield. For those of you unaware of what I am talking about look no further than after the end credits of Thor. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) brings in Dr. Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard) to study the Cosmic Cube and harness it's power. The Cube was also seen in the film Captain America - The First Avenger. The Red Skull used the cube to power his evil mechanical abominations until he was seemingly destroyed by the cube while fighting Steve Rogers, aka Captain America (Chris Evans). Loki snatches the cube and using his magic turns Selvig and Agent Clint Barton aka. Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) against Nick Fury and his fellow Shield agents. Fury is forced to go to plan B which is to re-instate the Avengers Initiative. He sends his faithful agents Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) to recruit Bruce Banner aka. The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Tony Stark aka. Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) to the team that already includes Captain America. They come together to fight Loki and a destructive alien force hellbent on destroying the Earth and claiming the Tesseract for themselves.

Again what more can I say, but damn, damn! It was by far one of the most entertaining films of the year but it may be one of the biggest summer films ever. God Bless Joss Whedon for his ability to put this together so well and curse him for doing it before I ever could. I always wanted to make big movies ever since I was a kid and to be able to be apart of something like the Avengers is pretty damn high on the bucket list if you know what I mean. The pacing, the script the overall action the balancing act of all of these heroes in one space. It was masterfully done and I tip my hat to him, honestly. Just trying to put a cork in Robert Downey Jr. alone had to be one of the biggest challenges, I love the guy but nobody has a bigger ego then that man. The Hulk was probably the best improvement of all. This is the first time they've gotten him right in any format. Mark Ruffalo played Banner with humor and pathos and really outshines previous Banners like Ed Norton and Eric Bana. As for the Hulk, he looked like Ruffalo and for the most part he seemed like he could be real as his emotions and playful side got some of the best Holy Shit moments as well as some of the biggest laughs. I also loved how Whedon bookended the other films and allowed the characters to breathe and grow. If you were to watch Iron Man to Iron Man 2 and then the Avengers you will see the evolution of Tony Stark that brings him into a larger more dangerous world that even he can't tackle on his own and they did it almost effortlessly.

Captain America also gets his due at being the leader of this team. This was also the part I was most concerned that Chris Evans wouldn't be able to step up to that plate and convince me he could do it. But he did that and more, throughout the film he was always the voice of reason and he was the only one to keep the focus on the mission without waver. He has a big moment during the invasion that in my mind solidified the character of Steve Rogers and showed without question that Chris Evans is more than capable of leading this team of extraordinary people. It was also great to see Black Widow get a nice chunk of the film to work with as she played it cool off of the Hulk and Loki. Poor Hawkeye doesn't get a whole lot of screen time but he is wonderfully played by Jeremy Renner who could totally take this character to do a stand-alone film of his own. He's got great range and he's tough and can effortlessly take over a film if given the opportunity. If anyone could make Hawkeye an A-list Avenger it's Renner. Tom Hiddleston's Loki also should get some massive credit here for weaving a complicated character like Loki into the fabric of the Avengers with his taunts and his aggression. It's hard to find an actor to play the role of such a despicable character like Loki and yet challenge the audience to still find a ray of sympathy for him. Which is what made his scenes with his brother Thor (Chris Hemsworth) that much more enjoyable. The two are masters in this realm and play up the scenes to make them even more dynamic then they probably intended to be. Hemsworth's Thor is also a difficult balancing act because of his Olde English vocabulary and the fact that he has otherworldly powers. Yet he brings a humanity to Thor that makes it easy to forget how much of another level he actually is on. Finally, with the support staff of Nick Fury, Coulson and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) the Avengers has something to fight for. I won't give away some of the story but there is a big death in the film and it carries a lot of weight that could only come about due to the extraordinary performances of these support characters. It literally gives the team its second wind to do what they have to do to bring Loki down.

I saw the film last week in 3D and this week in 2D and honestly it doesn't matter which format you see it in. I enjoyed it just as much on a 2D screen as I did a 3D one. Like many of the previous blockbuster films utilizing 3D they seem to focus more on space rather than shit flying at your face which is always a better strategy but it also makes you forget about the 3D altogether. There are so many great scenes and action set pieces that I would have to write a 200 page book just to describe them all. I'll just end by saying if you haven't seen the film like I don't know a few million over the past week, then what the hell are you waiting for?  I'm looking forward to seeing the new stand-alone films Iron Man 3, Thor 2 and Captain America 2 and I'm really looking forward to seeing Thanos in Avengers 2. Yes, that's right for all of you who do not read comics that was Thanos sitting in that chair grinning at the end and it looks like he's going to be bringing his Infinity Gauntlet to raise the stakes and kick some Avengers ass. I'll be first in line in 2014. Avengers Assemble!

Grade 5 Buckets

The Raven

The Raven is a taut thriller that takes place in the Twilight of the great Edgar Allan Poe's life. Directed by the rising James McTeigue, most known mostly for his work on V For Vendetta. John Cusack stars in the title role as a man struggling in his craft only to discover that his writing is given life by a serial killer hell bent on recreating the macabre poems and stories in Poe's collection. It is up to Poe and the local Inspector (Luke Evans) to track down this killer before he takes another victim. You've got a really extraordinary supporting cast as well with the beautiful Alice Eve and the excellent Brendan Gleeson.

I'll be the first to admit I'm a sucker for a good murder mystery and the Raven is that in spades. This film is Seven meets From Hell and a much darker Sherlock Holmes. So if you are looking for a good dark thriller with some twists and turns along the way then this film is right up your alley.

The Raven is coming to a Theatre near you this Friday April 27th!

Lockout

Okay, I realize that I'm probably the only person who actually went to the theatre and saw this movie last week, but you need to ask yourself, why? This movie was for all accounts and purposes Die Hard in space. Now you may be thinking we have all seen this before and it's the same old action cliches over and over again. You aren't completely wrong but it doesn't suffer what most failures at the box office do, it knows exactly what it is and who to cater too. Even with a fast mouthed script with plenty of action it just wasn't able to make over 6 mil. A death sentence for a film of this type, especially around this time. I would lay the blame on the marketing, I saw a few trailers here and there no question and they weren't bad but the message was getting buried by every other flick out there. If it was too crowded they should have moved the film, it would have done much better in August, but what are you going to do. You can't please the Movie Gods all the time and sometimes not at all.

Guy Pearce plays it fast and loose as a smart ass cocksure rogue with a stream of one-liners and no real desire to play the hero. Snow (Pearce) is given a chance to redeem himself after a covert op he was working on goes south and he is left with the blame. The daughter of the President (Maggie Grace) is held captive in a space prison filled with hardened criminals and Snow is tasked with breaking into the prison and getting her out alive.

So it's a little bit Die Hard and a lot Escape From N.Y., you could surely see Snake Plisskin or John McClane trying to wiggle their way out of this claptrap. The script wasn't bad honestly, it was a straight up action movie with some funny lines and some annoying hapless good guys who can't ever seem to do anything right, except of course the protagonist Snow. It's textbook Luc Besson, that guy must write these things in his sleep, and or studios just want to make every little thing he writes in his sleep. Either way Pearce was pitch perfect and kept my interest throughout even when the plotlines began to get predictable and a little stale. It made me wish they had picked him up for some larger scale action movie a long time ago. The guy is a leading man no question about it and it's kind of sad it took this movie to prove that point. The bad guys were pretty much one-note you had a crazy prisoner (Joseph Gilgun) and his less crazy brother (Vincent Regan). The crazy one feels like he came from Mad Max or something and he was the least interesting and most annoying of the group and it would have been nice if they had just thrown him out an airlock in the beginning but sadly he makes it almost all the way through. All of this nitpicking aside, it's a fun little action flick and if you enjoy movies like little action flicks like the Mechanic or big action flicks like Die Hard or Escape From NY then you'll probably get a smile and some enjoyment from this flick, that is until Avengers comes out.

Grade: 3 Buckets

The Hunger Games

It only took an extra week but I finally took some time to go and see what the hell everyone has been freaking out about. I saw the trailers I knew right away this wasn't going to be Twilight, with its horrid scripts, awkwardly painful acting and just plain cheese factor. But I was still skeptical of anything that has an obsessive following, especially, by teenaged girls I'm always going to be highly suspicious. To tell the truth the film intrigued me even though I've seen this theme many times before: Logan's Run, The Running Man, Battle Royale and for the super geek out there who knows his sci-fi you can track all of these stories from two distinct sources, the short story called the Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell and, in my opinion, the episode of Star Trek that started this whole thing about a televised bloodbath for sport; Bread and Circuses from season 2 of the original series. I'm serious, watch the episode and tell me that you can't see the influences. Anyway, I have no background with this particular story. I never the read the books, so I can say pretty definitively I haven't drank the Kool-Aid.

This is the film adaptation from the novels by Suzanne Collins, but of course you would have to have been living under a rock over the last year if you didn't know that. You don't glean a whole lot about this futuristic world they are living in but it isn't pretty. Apparently the U.S. is now called Pan-Em and there was a Civil War many years ago and the victors, in all of their wisdom, decided that the best way to keep order is to break the rebels into 12 districts and every year choose two, a boy and a girl between the ages of 12-18, from every district to compete in combat against each other to the death, all live on TV. They call it the Hunger Games. The Poor folks from the districts live in backwater towns and do not seem to have many choices for occupations other than the mines. The folks in the capitol however are living high on the hog as they wear frivolous clothes and strange hairdos and it appears they also live fairly frivolous lives.  So right away you can see the divide quite clearly. Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is a tough 18 year old from district 12 who has the burden of taking care of her little sister, Prim (Willow Shields) and her traumatized Mother (Paula Malcomson). She likes to sneak out beyond the gates with her bow to hunt with her best friend and possible love interest Gale (Liam Hemsworth). When her sister is tasked with putting her name in the lottery called the Reaping for the first time she is shocked to find that she is the girl chosen to go. As you saw in the trailers Katniss jumps in as a tribute and volunteers in her sister's place. Apparently people don't usually just volunteer for this, and once you see everything unfold, it's kind of easy to see why. She joins fellow district 12 lottery pick Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) as they are sent to the capitol to train for a few weeks before the games begin.

So in a nutshell, yes I really enjoyed the movie, it's a tough fucking movie to watch but it was pretty good all the same. The script seemed sharp and the pace and the acting was steady and good, this isn't Oscar fare or anything but for a popcorn movie with a message it certainly delivers. It's a gritty survival flick that feels a bit like Rambo meets Deliverance. But I stress this is not for kids under 13. It's brutal and pretty depressing when you get down to it. But I don't really need to make the pitch for this movie so far it's made over 200 million domestic and it's looking to recoup more over the next few weeks. For a big blockbuster movie it does a lot of things right. I could see the influence of all of those movies and TV shows inlaid in the myth created here. And given how large this world is with all of these characters I felt that they focused their time on the right characters to move the story along. There are some benefits having not read the book, and I don't want to give any secrets away, but I thought that throwing the Peeta character into the mix without much explanation allowed his character to seem more ambiguous and therefore more interesting. Is he going to take her side or is he going to stab her in the back? I was told this was much more clear in the books, in the movie, not so much which I think added to the suspense.

I thought that the sub-characters were great too. It's always fun to see Woody Harrelson and he brings quite a bit to his character Haymitch, a former winner of the Hunger Games from District 12. I was also surprised that singer Lenny Kravitz could act, totally surprised me, he was great as Katniss' sponsor, Cinna. I usually love Elizabeth Banks and she did a great job but her character was so shrill and annoying and her costume was so ridiculous. Not her fault but she definitely had a thankless job as Effie Trinket. You then had the mainstays Donald Sutherland as the cold and ruthless President of the territories and Wes Bentley as the Games master. Hadn't seen that guy in forever. Also you had Stanley Tucci as the host of the games, he's always good even rocking the weird blue hair. The other kids in the games were all over the board you had the cute yet crafty Rue (Amandla Stenberg) and the psychotic bad ass Cato (Alexander Ludwig).

This was a massive undertaking that probably could have been split into two. Especially with trying to explain this country, they missed some opportunities to tie it to our world, just with a place card they could have explained if this was our Earth or even the former United States which apparently is better explained in the books. I also thought the cinematography was all over the place especially when they were on the game grid. It was effective in some places but it went from static shots and sweeping camera to the Bourne Identity type camera work, and I'm not fully knocking that but it did feel a little inconsistent. Otherwise I had a good time with this flick, I liked it a lot more then I thought I was going to. I guess a part of me was thinking it was still going to be another carbon copy of the Twilight series. Now having forced myself to watch the first two in that series I can happily tell you this is NOTHING LIKE TWILIGHT, thankfully, not even close. They may have similar fans but that's where the similarities end. So I'm sure as I'm writing this you have either seen Hunger Games or on your way to see it, so that would render this post moot, and more of a bandwagon one, but whatever, I call them like I see them. Happy Hunger Games.

Grade: 4 Buckets