Crazy, Stupid, Love

"Love Sucks (A Cautionary Tale)"
or
"It Takes a Village (To Make a Divorce)"

The sad thing about romantic-comedies, circa the 21st Century, is their dependence on formula: Boy Meets Girl/Boy Loses Girl/Complications Ensue/Boy Wises Up/Happy Ending; or Girl Meets Boy/Girl Loses Boy/Girl's Self-Worth Depends on Boy/Romantic Rival Meets Terrible Demise/Happy Ending (of a sorts).  The last few I've seen of the genre have depended on hitting these plot-points, no matter what city, what occupation, or what sex the film centers around.  Even Bridesmaids, for all its wit and wildness, still ended with the assumption that everything will be alright if "the girl" gets "a man." The "by-the numbers" dance steps that most rom-coms boogie to have the ability to regress me back to the five-year old boy I was who hated "kissing scenes;" the final rosy fade-out inevitably spoils the most romantic of comedies for me, failing to warm my the cockles of my heart or make me feel all-gooey-fuzzy.  Instead, I walk away cheerlessly cynical.  Been there.  Done that.  A fish needs a bicycle.


So, it's a nice surprise, bordering on the revolutionary, when a romantic-comedy turns the formula on its ear enough that I enjoy it.  Don't get me wrong, Crazy, Stupid, Love* has a "happy ending," but there is also a nice glowing lack of resolution.  This is a movie that dares to say that Love is hard work, and, yeah, it sucks, but it could be worth it, because, like Life, it beats the alternative.

This is not where it starts, but where it starts to get interesting: Chick-magnet Jacob (Ryan Gosling,** he has a nicely subtle double-take for comedy) is in a bar in mid-closer with his latest fling when he takes the time to call over a half-stewed Cal Weaver (Steve Carell, showing exactly why he deserves to be out of TV and in films, something that doesn't happen nearly enough).  The reason?  Cal's moaning is throwing off Jacob's technique.  Cal's been doing that a lot lately (at the office he's told: "Amy heard you crying in the bathroom - we all thought it was cancer.") No, it's not cancer.  After 25 years of marriage, Cal's wife (Julianne Moore—she's great) has revealed she wants a divorce AND she's slept with another man (Kevin Bacon, he's also great).  This offends Jacob's self-absorbed sensibilities: "Seriously, I don't know whether to help you or euthanize you."

So, Jacob helps Cal to "man up"—a younger "Obi-Wan" to the elder's bowl-cut Luke with credit cards as lightsabers, and this, if not turning Cal's life around, at least making it busier.  And complicated.

Running parallel to the story is Hannah's (Emma Stone, big-eyed waif) relationship problems ("You're life is so PG-13!" says her token-Asian friend, Liz).  That's because she wants to be engaged to office co-worker Richard (Josh Groban—rather risky of him to look so bad in this movie) and is focused on that, so much so that she plays ignorant to Jacob's innuendos when he approaches her while trolling in a bar.

And, at this point, to say anything more would be saying too much, spoiling the fun and sending the whole Jenga-construction of the film crashing to the rec-room floor (In fact, I've probably said too much already).  Just when you think everything is going as smooth as satin sheets, the film-makers throw you an extra wrinkle, and it's been a log, long while since a rom-com has done that.  The dialogue is fresh though the situations seem familiar—everyone's conceptions of Love and Romance seem to be based on The Movies and directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa *** and writer Dan Fogelman **** are only too happy to skewer them, while paying some respect—the complications teetering on the sit-comish, then resolving with the most graceless of dismounts.  Applaud anyway because if they're not the best of executions (the performances help here), there are extra points for "artistic" and "difficulty."

Adding to the fray are the effects all this confusion have on "the kids" (Jonah Bobo, Joey King) and the friends (John Carroll Lynch—he's becoming one of my favorite character actors—and Analeigh Tipton).  It, after all, takes a village to make a divorce...very uncomfortable.  And special mention should be made to the movies' best utility player, Marisa Tomei, who surprises with just about every performance these days (Okay, okay, Marisa, you DESERVED that Oscar, okay?).

Highly enjoyable.  Bravo.

Stupid, Crazy, Love is a Full-Price Ticket.

* Yes, it has the superfluous comma, you English Majors, but if you see the title as a list rather than "adverb, adjective, subject," it makes a bit of sense, and the film actually earns the charity for considering the possibility. 

** Gosling is an odd bird.  It's taken awhile for me to warm to him (I'm one of the few people to have seen his awful work in Fracture, but he has a nice laid-back dead-pan style of comedy—as displayed in Lars and the Real Girl—that hews closely to his dramatic work.  Just a nudge, either way determines comedy or tragedy.  He's dangerously good.

*** Okay, this is scary, but hear me out: Ficarra and Requa have written such films as the remake of Bad News Bears, Cats & Dogs, Bad Santa (a bit raw, but actually rather sweet) and...wrote and directed the little seen gay romance, I Love You Phillip Morris—as subversive and weirdly sweet movies to be seen in a long time.  Forgive the early credits—these guys are good.

**** Okay, now REALLY hear me out: Fogelman wrote the screenplay for Cars and the screen-story for Cars 2, wrote Fred Claus...but did fine work on both Bolt and Tangled for Disney.  Seems he can write for real people, too, and not just 'toons.

Green Lantern

"In Dullest Day, the Weakest Light..."
or
"Oa, the Humanity!"

When the silver-age of comics began in the late 1950's, the '40's age of super-heroes were being replaced with westerns, horror and science-fiction tales.  So, those earlier mystery-men were re-incarnated with sciency origins that no longer depended on mystic powers and a sense of right-and-wrong.  Befitting the times, the original Green Lantern was a railroad engineer, who happened upon a mystic rune that gave him extraordinary powers.  The modern GL was a test-pilot, bequeathed a magic ring by a dying alien who'd crash-landed his spacecraft while on patrol.  As the story progressed, the pilot Hal Jordan, found he had been made a part of an intergalactic police corps (based in no small part on E.E. Smith's "Lensmen" series and its "Galactic Patrol") led by a clutch of identical blue-skinned big-headed "Guardians of the Universe," who supervised the Corps on a planet in the middle of the Universe, Oa, where was built the Corps central battery from where all green power originated.  There are a lot of Green Lanterns, patrolling every corner of the Galaxy.  And they had two weaknesses: you had to recharge the ring or it would run out of juice after 24 hours, and it didn't work on anything yellow.

That's a lot of back-story.  Probably too much for one movie, and it pushes the credibility envelope that science-fiction movies can push before leaving general audiences in an anti-matter cloud of skepticism, if not downright derision.*  And the movie version of Green Lantern, written by a bullpen of the comics' writers crams enough emerald exposition to make any viewer green around the gills.  I know there are a lot of fan-boys out there who will probably cry crocodile tears if their favorite Lantern isn't in the movie (where's Ch'p?  And G'nort?), but it's only a two hour flick—you can't put the whole Universe (and Mogo) in it, though this one tries (Me, I just wanted to see that staple of Hal Jordan tricks—he can create anything he wants, and the thing he uses the most is a boxing-glove—I was not disappointed).

It took the rest of the movie to do that.  TMI is the least of this movie's problems.  As much as it pains me to say it, Green Lantern just isn't very good.  Casting is fine: Ryan Reynolds makes a great Hal Jordan, Blake Lively is merely okay as over-dependent on-again/off-again g-f Carol Ferris, and Peter Sarsgaard has a fun time screwing around with arch-villain Hector Hammond, affecting a John Malkovich whine before he turns into an über-brained cross between Joseph Merrick and Truman Capote.  Mark Strong does nice work as the devilish looking "bad" Lantern Sinestro.  And with that, it's a kick to see some of these characters brought to life.

But...it needs a bit of a power battery charge.  The pace is a little sluggish**—with all the global and galactic goings-on, there's a little too much Carol Ferris interaction for the movie's own good—she's not as integral as, say, Lois Lane is to Superman, and she never really came into her own as a character until she became a super-hero, too (don't ask), and it's not as if Blake Lively was demanding that she had more to do.  Fact is, the scenes between Reynolds and Lively are the worst of the picture, as they're stuck with Screenwriter 101 dialog*** and little chemistry between them to make it in any way interesting.****  The tone is just a little too proud of itself—the Corps is taken VERY seriously, even though that's the part that should have been the most fun, and although Hal Jordan has the most wise-cracks with his "fish-out-of-water" learning curve, this is the latter-day mythos Jordan, suffering from "The Marvel Curse" of being angst-ridden over some lack in his life, in this case "absent-father" syndrome.

And The Guardians are even worse useless ideologues than they are in the comics, their pretentious dithering and superiority making their scenes sound like they were transcripts from the U.N.

But, there's something else about The Guardians that solved the riddle of what bothered me about the movie from the start.  It's one of the darkest movies I've ever seen, as if it was a 100 watt movie projected with a 20 watt bulb (I saw it flat, so I can't imagine what the 3-D version, which is always less bright, must be like).  There is just no "brightest day" in Green Lantern. It's when The Guardians show up on their too-high-seats (that should give you a clue about them) and you can barely make them out—they look plasticine and animatronic, less life-like than the Lincoln at Disneyland.  But that's not the worst of it, the sight of the entire Corps must surely be impressive, but you get the sense that the crowd scenes are merely composed of randomly moving blobs, and the design of the main bad-thing, Parallax—a Guardian possessed of the essence of fear—looks like a particularly gnarly piece of Brillo-pad that's been set on fire, with a blocky Mt. Rushmore face in the middle of it.  It all points to one thing—the FX shots are substandard enough that the film-makers—partcularly director Martin Campbell, who directed (and invigorated) the two best Bond movies of the past 20 years had so little confidence in so many of these shots that the entire film has been desaturated to keep the bad shots from standing out from the good.  It's not all bad.  The FX-wizards did impressive work with the GL costumes (completely CGI) and the couple of Lanterns that we see well—Tomar-Re (voiced by Geoffrey Rush) and D.I. Kilowog (Michael Clarke Duncan)—some of the flying works, but the landings are a little rocky.  But the ring-constructs are kinda dull (that's the scripters' fault)...lasso's and jets and guns and...Hot-Wheels tracks???  If we're doing product placement how about beating people over the head with a bottle of Coke (label out)?  "The only limits are what you can imagine."  Earth is in trouble.  But the retailers should do fine.

But, I think the worst thing about Green Lantern is that nothing resonates, nothing inspires, nothing evokes a sense of wonder or service.  Nothing even made me crack a smile—except that the green energy coming from the most powerful accessory in the world is apparently painful (as well it should be).  As a fan of the comics who wanted it to be good, watching the movie was painful for me.

Now, if you would, please repeat after me Yojimbo's empowering adaptation of the Green Lantern oath:


"In dullest day, the weakest light,
the SFX might look all right.
To cure the need to see the sight
of comic-flicks...
Green Lantern might."

Because it's just a Cable-Watcher.

"Green Lantern ponders the Universal Question: "why is there so much yellow paint in the world?"

* The secret is to couch your sci-fi in legend or familiar genres—so Star Wars gets a pass because it borrows liberally from westerns, samurai movies and old sci-fi, but A.I. Artificial Intelligence featuring robot-mother-love, melted ice-caps and "the mechas will inherit the Earth" provokes superior chortling.
** But then, so's Hal.  A couple of times during battle scenes I was thinking, "This guy can jet across the Galaxy.  Shouldn't he be showing up now, before anybody gets killed?"

*** "Nice." "Impressive, isn't it?"  "I was talking about your dress."  Really?  Is that a line they use at Comic-con's?

**** The only interesting aspect to her is that she sees GL is Jordan almost immediately: "I've seen you naked, you think I wouldn't recognize you by hiding your cheek-bones?"  Good point.  Although he DOES lower his voice as is par for the course in superhero movies. 

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Shmukt!: Claws for Alarm

When the X-men movies lost its chief stylist Bryan Singer to do "Superman Returns" it was a double disappointment. "X-Men III: The Last Stand" was the most expensive movie ever made, and looked terrible. Top-heavy with stars that not only bloated the budget but capsized the script to fulfill their demands, it brought the X-series to a sad ending, x-hausted, x-cessive, and x-cremental (while "Superman Returns" felt like going to The Church of Kal-El and Klan).

Time to re-boot, so here we have, rising as he always does from his own ashes, "Wolverine Begins" with Hugh Jackman reprising his break-out role. It's a smart move. Jackman was "the" star of the "X-men" movies and after the first, they were tailored for him, like his strategically ripped wife-beaters. One is hard-pressed to think of another movie where he is used so effectively (and succeeded at the box-office).

But this is a curious re-boot. At a time when most super-hero movies are dusting off the cliches, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" (the title says it all) coats itself in the dust and the muck and the mire and revels in it. For instance: there is not one, but two scenes where Jim Logan (Jackman) looks up at a conveniently omniscient overhead camera and yells his frustration to the skies and his x-communicating God.

Are you kidding me? Hasn't that shot been decommissioned after all the easy laughs it's garnered on "The Daily Show?"

It has. But nobody told director Gavin Hood ("Rendition"). He seems unconcerned about cliches or recycled material (or "sell-past" dates), as the movie lurches like lead villain Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber, but it was Tyler Mane in the original where they didn't know each other) bounding from one bad idea to the next, linked as they are by the most mainstream of transitions—the one-to-one dissolve. We get a lot of them in the Main Title. After the Bruce-Wayne-Meets-Oedipus childhood trauma opening Hood shows the brothers Logan fighting in war after war, guns fading into guns and helmets into helmets. It's quite "artily" if unimaginatively done,* but Hood keeps using it until you start looking for the detail he might use in the transitions. Flames? Ocean waves? How about a dusk to dawn transition? That hasn't been done since...well, since I started writing this.

A lot of the problem is that Marvel—"The House of Ideas," as it likes to trumpet—has culled so much from other stories that the whole Wolverine opus reads like a Reader's Digest Omnibus of Comic Literature. Logan gets recruited to join a Dirty X-Dozen black-ops unit, then declares himself "Wolverine no more" and becomes a lumberjack (and that's okay) until his school-teacher gal-pal is killed, and he swears revenge (cue the overhead camera and the underhanded cliche). He then submits to a "Frankenstein" experiment under the control of his former superior Stryker (Danny Huston, prequeling for Brian Cox), that coats his skeleton with indestructible adamantium. He escapes Stryker, and hides out with an old farm couple, the Kent's...er, no, the Hudson's, before being attacked—again—and hooking up with Gambit (Taylor Kitsch) for a full assault on the villain's headquarters, where like Spartacus, he leads a "mutie" revolt, that includes a young Scott Summers (Tim Pocock, looking like Ben Stiller rather than James Marsden).

There are lots of Marvel folk appearing (briefly): Bolt, Deadpool, The Blob, Agent Zero, and Kestrel. The inconsistency with their comic-book counter-parts will drive some fan-boys nuts (not to mention Wolverine's brylcreemed pompadour from the first two films is gone, too). This fan-boy had trouble with the fights, all based on other movies: the war action from "Saving Private Ryan" (by way of "Crank"), another based on John Woo's hyper-dramatics and aerodynamics, and another, straight out of the "Star Wars" prequels.

So much recycled material to so little effect. Using the character's own onomatopoeia, it's ten pounds of snikt!TM in a five pound bag.

"X-Men Origins: Wolverine" is a Cable-Watcher. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh!

"C'mere, Kid. Got a lousy movie to show ya!"

* If you ever want to see it done to death, check out Danny DeVito's direction of "Hoffa."

** Spoiler Alert: Good place to put spoilers, isn't it? In case you think you're missing something, you're not. There's a cameo by Professor X (Patrick Stewart reprising his role), although why is Scott (Cyclops) the only guy X was reaching out to?—seems he could have contacted all the escaping mutants (because it would have killed the suspense is why), and the by-now standard "Marvel Tag" at the end of the credits is no big deal—Wolverine at a bar: "Drinking to forget?" "No. Drinking to remember." Supposedly, there are three others. If they're all that "good," don't bother collecting them all.