AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON (2015)

Avengers: Age of Ultron is bigger and louder than Marvel's previous mash-up of franchises. It also feels longer, but it is actually shorter by a scant 2 minutes.

Ultron begs you to consider the human cost of so much of its CGI-generated mayhem. Concerned heroes played by actors of varying levels of fame usher civilians out of the frame with furrowed brows, most likely so they won't get the fan bashing handed out to actor Henry Cavill and director Zack Snyder's blithely indifferent Man of Steel, where seemingly millions perished in the destruction of, well, pretty much every place Superman visited.

Ultron is better than that. Ultron wants you to consider the flaws of its steely, toned, and paradoxically glib and stoic leads. Captain America/Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) pines for his lost past yet embraces responsibility with square-jawed determination. Iron Man/Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) combats his need to both control and protect the planet with old-style movie star charm. The Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) maintains her poise even as she dredges up memories of her KGB training that look like outtakes from an Alan Parker film. The Hulk/Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) does what he always does: smashes things when hulked out, and then whines about it afterwards to anyone in earshot. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) carries a big hammer, and is useful, when he's not too busy. Hawkeye/Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) mostly stays out of the way and does his job.

The movie itself is basically the tale of an artificial intelligence experiment gone awry. Tony Stark unwittingly unleashes a powerful consciousness into the world by messing around with Loki's pesky alien sceptre, which has had more onscreen time in the last three years than Jeremy Renner. This AI is, for no apparent reason, called Ultron, looks like a renegade from the ghastly Transformers franchise, and speaks with the bemused tones of James Spader, presumably because Alan Tudyk was busy tossing off bemused voice-acting at the animation building next door.

Much globe-trotting follows, involving a sexy (and victimized) Korean geneticist played by Claudia Kim and two sexy (and victimized) twins from the comics, The Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who are somehow NOT the children of Magneto (nor are they mutants -- the ownership of the X-Men franchise by rival studio Fox prevents mutants from existing in this "universe"). Other characters from various and sundry Marvels occasionally drop in to let us know they'll be around if you want to, you know, catch their show on ABC. Whether they are sexy (and/or victimized) I leave to you.

Everything ends up with the world once again in danger, this time from Ultron's scheme to wipe out humanity with a simulated meteor strike. Stark's hubris is to create an immortal machine with such capabilities, yet also without the patience to simply wait for man to hurry up his own imminent demise through unfettered global climate change. Just wait it out, Ultron; we'll catch up.

All this hoopla has been ring-mastered by every geek's favorite pop culture guru, the estimable Joss Whedon, who by this time can probably do this kind of movie star wrangling in his sleep, which seems to be how much of the script was written.

Clunking cliches abound, even in the down-time-from-saving-the-world scenes (easily the saving grace of the last Avengers movie). Been awhile since you've heard the hilarious COUGHisaidsomething gag? Sure, it was officially eulogized in Bring It On, but that was only fifteen years ago, so we dusted that off for you! Been too long since you've heard one character angrily tell another to "DO THE MATH!"? Your prayers have been heard and answered.

Danny Elfman allegedly wrote the score that's been shellacked over the quick-cut editing (doesn't keep the movie from being unnecessarily long at 141 minutes), but at this point why bother hiring a composer? Modern blockbusters have been tricked by Team Zimmer into treating every event picture as a room that must be wallpapered as quickly and blandly as possible. Am I the only moviegoer out there who misses the thrill of John Williams working on all thrusters? I can't imagine Raiders of the Lost Ark without that iconic march, but a quick thumbing through any of the Marvel scores fails to conjure up any synonymous images (though I like much of Patrick Doyle's score for the first Thor, and that Alan Menken/David Zippel song in Captain America: The First Avenger is pretty neat).

The film is not without its own charms, but they are nearly surpassed by the pre-digested action going on around them. Even the post-film/pre-credits teaser scene offers nothing new if you've seen any of the half dozen or so prior Marvel films. As yet another CGI landscape erupted into wanton destruction, I found myself thinking I should probably get an AppleWatch so I'd have something to look at at times like this. I don't want an AppleWatch. I want my popcorn movies to be entertaining and surprising, and that's the biggest let-down for Avengers: Age of Ultron.

KING KONG (2005)

Watts, and friend.

originally published August 26, 2007

Colour, 2005, 188 - 201 m / Directed by Peter Jackson / Starring Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Kyle Chandler, Andy Serkis / Universal Pictures

Synopsis:  Ape meets girl. Ape gets girl.  Ape loses girl.

Peter Jackson’s followup to his epic masterwork Lord of the Rings saga, his re-telling of the film legend of Kong had been in the works for more than a decade.  With the staggering success ofRings, Jackson had unparalleled carte blanche to film his dream project exactly as he wanted, with the cast of his choice, and actors fought tooth and nail to work with the one seeming A-budget director who could deliver jaw-dropping special effects while still allowing dramatic and powerful performances to share the screen.

Jackson’s Kong is one of the most frustrating fantasy films ever made, because there is much about it that is breath-taking and wonderful.  However, instead of presenting audiences with a re-imagining of the familiar tale, Jackson’s film is a bloated, overpopulated remake of the 1933 original.  Without fail, the contributions of Jackson and his co-writers, Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh, take away from what makes the original so enduring, padding out the action with unnecessary characters and subplots.

The story takes an eternity to get moving, as we are forced to endure a lengthy New York sequence establishing backgrounds for actress Anne Darrow (Watts) and nature filmmaker Carl Denham (Black) that were effortlessly shorthanded into the first five minutes of the original film.  For some reason, Denham has brought along a harried playwright (Brody) and we are introduced to a young orphaned crew member (Bell) who is reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  The rough and rugged captain of The Venture haunted by his own personal demons (Kretschmann) also vies for our attentions, along with the callow leading actor Denham has brought along (played to excellent comic effect by Chandler, in one of the most criminally wasted roles in recent memory-- why couldn’t he have been the romantic lead?).  Instead of being given one core group of characters to root for, Jackson and his team have unwisely chosen to spread our sympathies among his motley crew, and we spend too much time with every quirky crew member on the boat to the island.

That crew seems to outnumber the primitive natives of the island, who nevertheless still manage to kidnap Watts and offer her to the giant ape Kong in a strangely pointless ritual.  This sequence also gives Jackson a chance to fall back on his annoying dropped-frame whip-pan inserts that popped up infrequently in his previous films.  Oddly, too, the geography of the village and the sacrificial altar are never clearly mapped for the audience, leading to some confusion as to how Black and his crew manage to follow Kong into the jungle (it seems as if they have leapt across a massive ravine to give chase).

Finally, more than an hour into the film, we meet Jackson’s Kong, a stunning CGI creation, whose movements were based on that of Serkis, who’d served a similar function as Gollum for Rings.  Paired with Watts’ sensitive performance as Anne, this is the only relationship in the whole sprawling enterprise that works, because certainly the men she’s left to choose from are hardly winners.  Brody is called upon to do a large share of heroic business, but it never makes any sense what he’s actually doing there to begin with.  Less effective is Black, whose Denham is stretched in too many directions (villain, hero, comic foil) to play any of them with success.

The film has its highlights, including the arrival at Skull Island, an exciting dinosaur chase, a fight between Kong and multiple tyrannosaurs, and all the island-based interaction with Kong and Watts.  These are almost completely outweighed by the film’s embarrassments:  the many irrelevant subplots (especially the ill-advised effort to tie Conrad’s examination of human weakness to the film’s plot), Brody watching a scene from his (apparently awful) play while thinking of Watts, and an “ice skating” sequence in Central Park.

The film’s biggest problem is that, in the end, Jackson’s Kong offers no reason for its existence.  The flawed but vastly underrated 1976 Kong justified itself by offering an environmental agenda as it recast its filmmakers an opportunistic petroleum company executive and his cronies looking for a new, untapped source of oil and finding Kong instead.  Jackson is content to retell the story in its original 1930’s milieu, adding fantastic action set-pieces and emotional complexity (warranted or not), and sacrificing pacing and streamlined storytelling.  Because the simplicity of the story has been lost, Black’s delivery of the original’s famous last line has no power, and nor can this Kongearn the truly haunting final moments of the 1976 film.

KING KONG (1976)

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BLACK SWAN (2010)

Once more, please, with feeling.

originally published January 20, 2011

Color, 2010, 108 m. / Directed by Darren Aronofsky / Starring Natalie Portman, Barbara Hershey, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Winona Ryder  / Fox Searchlight

Nina, pretty ballerina,

Now she is the queen of the dancing floor;

This is the moment she’s waited for,

Just like Cinderella. (Just like Cinderella)

                                --ABBA

What is Art? Who creates it? To achieve it, what must one be ready to sacrifice its name? Finally, what does it all mean, in the end?

The answers to none of these questions are found in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. Despite what you may have heard, the movie is not, in fact, a look at life inside the turbulent world of ballet. Those hoping to find this year’s The Red Shoes or, heaven help you, Fame, will be sorely disappointed. 

When Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger created their peerless The Red Shoes in 1948, they set the bar for movies about dance extremely high. Their film tells the tale of a dancer so consumed by her passion for dance that in the end she could not escape the very fate described for the role she portrays in the ballet-within-the-movie of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale. 

The Red Shoes deals with obsession and Art on many levels as its various characters suffer for their devotion to music, dance, theatre, etc. You come away from the film either terrified by its depiction of the high cost of success, or, as many people viewing the film did, with a renewed passion for Art. Countless girls became ballerinas in the years when the film was shown regularly, solely based on their emotional experience of being exposed to The Red Shoes at an impressionable age.

It’s doubtful that anyone watching Black Swan will be moved to do anything but stay far away from toe shoes and beware of waifish women staring blankly in subway stations. The more squeamish might have flashbacks akin to those who found their stomachs turned by David Cronenberg’s take on The Fly (1986), envisioning mascara-brush-like feathers erupting from their shoulders.

In his down-and-dirty Ms.45 (1981) director Abel Ferrara dropped us into a nightmare New York City where pretty, mute Zoë Tamerlis exacted revenge upon all men, the result of being sexually assaulted and having to murder her attacker. But, where Ferrara gave us a heroine who rose scarily out of the ashes of her degradation, Aronofsky is at sea with what do to with his, and Nina, played by Natalie Portman in one of those performances the baffled almost always refer to as “brave,” has little to do but react with bland incomprehension at each shuddering jolt of the plot.

Perhaps we are supposed to react to Nina as we did to the character played by Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski’s study of descent into madness, 1965’s Repulsion. In that film, Deneuve found herself (like Tamerlis in Ms. 45) increasingly isolated in her small world, enduring a series of escalating hallucinogenic experiences because she feels abandoned by her more outgoing sister.

But the differences between Repulsion and Black Swan are crucial. It is abundantly clear in every frame of Polanski’s movie what Deneuve’s mental state is. We see her collapse, and we respond to it, because we know she is unbalanced; the indicators are very clearly delineated. Aronofsky doesn’t make such distinctions. Consequently, we are left wondering, for example, if Barbara Hershey’s ridiculously unwound character is actually Portman’s mother, or just a figment of her unraveling imagination.

Aronofsky has always created hermetically sealed worlds within his movies, but, aside from his abortive The Fountain, this movie suffers the most from such a narrow scope. Despite a few cursory characters around the edges of her world, Portman’s conscious life seems to consist solely of interaction with her (possibly non-existent) mother, Vincent Cassel as her director, and newly arrived Mila Kunis. Sure, she has a teacher/coach at the dance academy, and there are other girls, but important dialogue exchanges are few and far between.

A prime example of Aronofsky’s attempt to cheat us with his “is it real, or isn’t it” approach is in the character of Winona Ryder’s recalcitrant star ballerina, whom Portman replaces in Cassel’s allegedly revolutionary restaging of Swan Lake. Ryder is forced to undergo increasingly unflattering contortions of overacting, sometimes within the same scene, in order to provide Portman something to react to. Their final encounter stretches credulity to the breaking point, and the movie’s refusal to address or even acknowledge what it insinuates (did Portman stab Ryder in the face with a nail file?) is as insulting as it is irresponsible.

Just what are we supposed to make of this movie? If it is a character study in madness, then why not address it in a world where we balance Portman’s insanity against, say, Kunis’ sanity? What is the point that Aronofsky is making here; that too much devotion to ballet is dangerous? And, if so, who suffers besides Portman? Is this Cabin Fever in toe shoes? Getting back to Cronenberg, his explorations of the body in revolt against itself are always directed at a theme: the inhumanity of media dependency (Videodrome), the internalization of rage (The Brood), even the over-dependence on video games in lieu of reality (eXistenZ). Black Swan only gives us the gruesome/borderline-idiotic symptoms without really commenting upon the cause.

In 2001, moviegoers were presented with In The Bedroom, which turned out to be, in the end, a high-flown remake of The Last House on the Left. With Black Swan, Aronofsky seems to be attempting to do for Suspiria what Todd Field and Robert Festinger did for Wes Craven’s early shocker. 

Unfortunately, the director doesn’t seem to have studied his source material very closely, and the movie rolls by, making very little impression at all, beyond its outré set-pieces and ill-advised CGI effects. The movie doesn’t even offer anything new in its presentation of Black Swan’s supposedly electrifying ballet; all its dance sequences seem piped in from PBS’s “Live At The Met.”

Dario Argento’s Suspiria operates almost entirely on dream logic, with its tale of Jessica Harper arriving at an exclusive European dance academy and discovering supernatural horror beyond belief. Argento plunges his characters into a Technicolor-saturated world that becomes a haunted house ride of the highest order. Aronofsky can’t even get the horror right, and when Black Swan finally decides that it wants to be the Rosemary’s Baby of ballet films, it treads upon its own bloody feathers. It’s Kubrick’s The Shining, re-conceived as a Revlon ad.

By the time her big opening night rolls around, we’ve been watching Portman behaving like a frightened kitten for the past hour and a half. I don’t know about anyone else, but for someone who “strives for perfection” and “dances perfectly, but without feeling”, her character never comes across as anything more than competent.

It’s no hidden truth that mediocrity works just as hard as genius; it’s only the end results that are different.