Summer Movie Roundup

I watched some movies during the summer. Now I'm going to try to remember what I thought of them.

- Iron Man 2: Not as good as its predecessor, predictably. Whereas Iron Man was a perfect self-contained unit of entertainment, Iron Man 2 was designed, transparently, with its future sequels and spinoffs in mind -- there's a lot of semi-incoherent setup, and the expository scenes with Samuel L. Jackson are mostly without entertainment value. Tony Stark's rakish charm isn't as fresh or surprising as it was in the first movie, and screenwriter Justin Theroux is forced to invent tedious Behind the Music personal problems to buoy the character (surely there's more interesting stuff he could be doing?). Don Cheadle is duller than Terrence Howard was; sexy-dangerous Scarlett Johansson is shockingly corny. The action scenes remain very good, and Robert Downey Jr. is still fun to watch.

- Babies: Tiresome. The movie has cute images, for sure, but there just isn't enough here to warrant a feature-length documentary. It's YouTube material. Babies eat, crawl, cry. The film's unstated thesis -- that infants are all basically the same, regardless of place or race or wealth -- proves correct, but who is surprised? In fact, the accuracy of this observation ensures that the movie will only be repetitive and soporific. The footage is so humdrum at times that the film's attitude of joyful humanism, conveyed by its bright music and loving close-ups, seems affected: what are we celebrating here, and why? The movie's 79 minutes feel interminable. We admire the purity of director Thomas Balmes's aesthetic (no narration, no commentary, mostly just long uninterrupted shots of his subjects with very little adult interference); the babies simply don't pull their weight. Of course, I don't want to say that the little darlings are boring: I'm sure each one is a joy to interact with in real life. Just think how boring we adults would be if some documentarian plunked down in our home and pointed his camera at us.

- Robin Hood: As every critic noted, this is really just a medieval Gladiator. The charmer we know from Erroll Flynn's days has been replaced by a grim, humorless Russell Crowe warrior: even the jaunty hat is gone. The film behaves like a grave revisionist Western, as if under some strange delusion that it's providing us with the unembellished facts about Robin Hood that folklore-oriented predecessors distorted -- of course, Robin Hood was folklore all along. It's turgid and dramatically stiff, and every scene with Maid Marian is ridiculous, but it's also a heady action movie, well-paced, brutal, and visually detailed and ambitious. Battle scenes are chaotic but not disorienting. It's not an honorable movie, but it has some good surface-level drama.

- MacGruber: There's no reason for a feature-length parody of MacGyver to exist -- MacGyver itself never reached the big screen, and in 2010 this is truly an irrelevant spoof, with all its mockery of '80s and '90s action cliches -- but it's not as bad an idea as Superstar was (the ultra-repetitive SNL sketch, vaguely self-parodic like the "You like-a da juice?" skits from 1993, was at least funny), and every few minutes there's a crude throwaway gag that may snatch some laughter from you if you don't keep your guard up. Will Forte is a cheerful, dopey-likable comedian; Kristin Wiig doesn't have enough opportunities to be funny, but her sex scene with Forte is very amusing.

- Solitary Man: An OK character study of a glib car salesman, once very successful, now a washed-up seducer of young women and neglectful of his family. Michael Douglas is just right for the part -- slick-verging-upon-greasy, handsome in a not so friendly way -- but the character isn't especially fascinating, and he doesn't seem totally real, either: more a lothario-archetype than an individual. Though critical of him, the filmmakers don't dig deep enough, and the movie itself, a comedy-drama, has no truly substantial moments of comedy or drama. The cast -- Douglas, Susan Sarandon, Danny DeVito, Jesse Eisenberg -- makes the film better than it ought to be.

- Get Him to the Greek: A rollicking comedy more in the Todd Phillips mode than in the Judd Apatow mode, not always hilarious but pretty often funny, with sufficient grossout humor and estimable hijinks and characters who fall short only when they're removed from their natural adolescent-party habitat. Aldous Snow (played by Russell Brand) embodies a large percentage of the rock-star cliches we know from movies, comic and dramatic, about the music business, so it's a delight that he nevertheless is capable of surprising: for a self-deluded hedonist, he can be smart and candid and generous, too, in a way that seems genuine. Jonah Hill's charisma is inexplicable, but he does have some. The original songs -- "The Clap," "Bangers, Beans and Mash" -- are actually pretty good. Sean Combs's supporting role seems self-aggrandizing.

- The Karate Kid: A competent remake; I'm not really sure why it was such a big hit. It's likable in the same way that the original was -- it has a sympathetic young hero and a wise, benevolent, old Chinese man -- and it's also ridiculous in the same way, with all that affected solemnity about martial arts and the silly seriousness with which it regards fights between children. It's not really plausible that after a few training montages Dre would be the kung-fu master we witness in the final tournament, in which wire stunts help him defeat a bunch of kids who presumably have devoted their whole lives to the sport, but we know that's the way it has to go. Director Harald Zwart doesn't do much with The Karate Kid's new setting (the story has moved to Beijing) except go sightseeing -- we see the usual misty Chinese mountains, the Forbidden City, the Bird's Nest -- and create a lightweight culture-clash romance subplot. Jaden Smith is shallow but basically adept; the nepotism issue (the whole movie feels a little like a vanity project) will annoy some people. 

- Toy Story 3: A predictably laudable entry in Pixar's vaunted series. It's sweet and colorful and emotionally engaging, and the story works, and though the gags don't have much bite, they manage not to be groan-inducing even for adults. It doesn't deliver anything more than the bright, professional product we expect of Pixar, but I can't imagine that its target audience will mind.

- Cyrus: An observant, humane comedy about screwed-up people. Its plot is predictable from start to finish, but it's written and filmed as though it were a chunk of real life, not a farcical romantic comedy inescapably destined for happily-ever-after. The movie's centerpiece, the creepy-intimate mother-son relationship between Marisa Tomei and Jonah Hill, is for the most part not played for laughs, yet the movie still is reasonably funny. Reilly is very sympathetic, although -- let's face the sad facts -- the film would be more believable if he were more attractive or if Tomei were less attractive. Catherine Keener plays the kindest ex-wife in cinematic history; in most cases, her character would be a termagant, and it's a relief that she's not. The story's resolution comes a little too easily.

- Grown Ups: Actually funny. No kidding. The script is a formulaic, saccharine, family-friendly "comedy" about husbands and wives and parents and children, filled with cheesy gags and lame sitcomish problems and simplistic solutions. Dennis Dugan has done this sort of thing with Sandler before. But this time he's loosened his reins and allowed his feeble plot to slip into the background, where it can't exert much control over the comedians who populate it. The movie's best lines all sound ad-libbed. Grown Ups is a lethargic, dawdling summer vacation; it's filled with pointless scenes where Adam Sandler, David Spade, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider, and Kevin James sit around beside a lake and crack jokes, and it's a shock to find out that these actually are still funny guys -- not monumentally, electrifyingly funny, but amusing for sure. Sometimes you can feel the tension here between the intentions of the screenplay and the intentions of the actors -- there's the horrible movie Grown Ups is supposed to be, and there's the likable one it wants to be -- but the actors nearly always win. So many comedies are less funny than normal people can be on any normal day; here, the people in front of the camera are relatively untethered, and we're all better off for it. If Chris Farley had been alive to occupy the Kevin James role, it might have been a small classic.

- The Last Airbender: Ridiculous and stupid, but not unwatchable. The absence of 3-D at my theater probably helped. The story is massively incoherent; the dialogue is solemn mystical mumbo jumbo. The air-bending itself is pretty cool, but it's probably not a good sign when a movie isn't as much fun as the Nicktoon upon which it was based -- Shyamalan's self-seriousness makes it less engaging. Still better than the recent James Cameron movie that stole its name.

- Despicable Me: Not a particularly accomplished animated feature, but it has some surprising voice work by Steve Carell, Jason Segel, and Russell Brand; the latter two are almost totally unrecognizable as a hyperactive nerd and an elderly scientist, respectively. This kind of movie is more outrageously cartoonish than Pixar's work is, and in some ways that's a good thing -- one of the purposes of animation is to create wild sights that couldn't exist in the real world -- but it's too restricted by its conventional script to be the crazy ride it ought to be. The nonsense it embraces is strictly visual; it chickens out everywhere else. Gru's little yellow Minions were designed very obviously with Happy Meal toys in mind; their cuteness is a little cloying.

- The Kids Are All Right: A warm, realistic comedy about lesbian parents and their children. Some of the disagreements and dilemmas of family life that we see here are familiar from other movies, but the marriage between Annette Bening and Julianne Moore feels real, and their children never say or do anything that real teenagers would never say or do. Only in the final minutes does the movie's agenda become apparent, when it revises and debases Mark Ruffalo's character in order to make a point about the legitimacy of lesbian parenthood. Here, it chooses politics over life, whereas every preceding scene seems to do exactly the opposite.

- Inception: See here.

- The Other Guys: Nonstop wackiness that sometimes falls flat but, on the whole, provides more laughs than any other movie this summer. In large part it's a lampoon of the buddy-cop genre, and it uses its status as a parody to disentangle itself from even the smallest expectations of plausibility; from there, it employs a long line of weird gags, some of which are aimed at 48 Hours and Bad Boys and Lethal Weapon and Blue Streak, some of which are aimed at nothing in particular. Will Ferrell schtick seemed to have gone stale in recent years, but here it's once again as effective as it was in Talladeega Nights. Mark Wahlberg employs the same ridiculous intensity that I loved in I Heart Huckabees. The best part of the movie, however, may be Michael Keaton as the police captain who moonlights as a Bed Bath & Beyond employee.

- Scott Pilgrim vs. the World - A boring story about boring Canadian hipster-love, dressed up with video game references and comic-book editing in an effort not so much to generate laughs as to celebrate some lame subsection of youth culture that Hollywood doesn't "get." Its target audience will appreciate seeing itself on screen in a film designed to be as painlessly enjoyable and ADD-accessible as possible; the chasm beneath its peppy visuals and deadpan humor will annoy only outsiders. This selfish, callous version of the Michael Cera character we've seen in Superbad and Juno is truly repellent, and director Edgar Wright doesn't seem to recognize it at all.

Comments

[Valerie]

Good info and insights! This will help with my Netflix queue. . .

[Brett Yates]

Thanks.

I'd forgotten that I'd watched Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, so I added it to the list just now.

[James Rios Loves Juice Extractor]

Some movies listed above are really good.I really appreciate your post for letting me know about other movies too.

James Rios

Juice Extractor