Friday, July 27, 2012

Moonrise Kingdom - 4 stars

Set in New England in 1965, this movie is about a couple of kids named Sam Shakusky and Suzy Bishop.  Sam is an orphan and a Khaki Scout.  Suzy lives with her parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) and 3 younger brothers.  Sam and Suzy have been pen pals for a year.  Sam runs away from scout camp and Suzy runs away from home.  They meet up and spend several days hiking and camping while their romance blossoms.  Meanwhile the scout leader (Edward Norton), a local cop (Bruce Willis), the scout troop and Suzy's parents are all looking for the kids. 

This is a really charming and quirky little movie.  The cast is great fun.  Bill Murray has some strange and hilarious moments.  My favorite is when he walks down the stairs, shirtless, holding a bottle of whiskey in one hand and an axe in the other, and says "I'm going to find a tree to chop down."  The other is when he takes his shoe off and throws it at Bruce Willis.  Edward Norton is also great as the sincere scoutmaster.  Harvey Kitel shows up late in the movie as a scout 'commander' and Tilda Swinton is known only as Social Services.

There is a very sweet innocence to the kids' romance.  I think anyone who had a childhood crush will relate to these kids.  Also the dialogue is very inventive.  I don't think any twelve-year-old speaks the way Sam does, but we see right away why Suzy is the perfect match for him. 

It's impossible to describe the tone and feel of this movie, but right away I knew I was in good hands.  I was able to just sit back and let the story take me away.  Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the onscreen narration by Bob Balaban.  This is a great movie.

Savages - 3 1/2 stars

Savages is the best movie Oliver Stone has directed since Any Given Sunday.  It's a very refreshing return to form after misfires like W. and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.  It's also the first movie of the summer to star Taylor Kitsch and not suck.  He is now 1 for 3 (Battleship and John Carter, in case you were going to ask).

Kitsch and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kick-Ass) star as Chon and Ben, the most successful marijuana growers in southern California.  They share a hot girlfriend named O (Blake Lively) and the 3 are living in paradise.  Life is perfect.  Then a Mexican drug cartel led by Elena (Salma Hayek) asks them to join forces.  The guys resist, so the cartel kidnaps O and holds her ransom.  If the guys want her back, they have to work with the cartel for a year.

This movie is great.  I was never bored and the movie was full of surprises.  After the setup, I thought that the guys would go in to rescue O and it would be a big action climax at the cartel's headquarters.  I was picturing something like the end of Bad Boys 2.  This would make sense since Chon is ex-military and he has a bunch of Navy SEAL friends. 

But no, this is a different kind of movie.  They guys deal with a crooked DEA officer (John Travolta) and the cartel's sadistic enforcer (Benicio del Toro, who steals the movie).  They go along with Elena's demands while trying to double cross them at the same time.  While all that is going on, O is forming a kind of mother daughter relationship with her captor, Elena.  Elena's own daughter wants nothing to do with her, and she seems to view O as almost a surrogate daughter.

There is some good action in this movie, but more importantly these are interesting, smart characters who we really empathize with.  And there is a lot of humor in the movie.  I really enjoyed it.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

The Amazing Spider-Man - 2 1/2 stars

Before I went in to watch this movie, I tried really hard to not think about the Sam Raimi Spider Man movies of the last decade.  I tried to forget how good they were and judge this movie on its own merits. 

Even doing that, I was disappointed by this new Spider Man movie.

Once again, we have the origin story.  Considering that we got one only 10 years ago, couldn't they have just made a stand alone Spider Man movie?  Do it like the Bond movies.  We don't get an origin story each time a new actor plays James Bond (Casino Royale was the first time they had done that). 

This time, we get some back story on Peter Parker's parents.  His father was involved in some kind of secret research, and his parents abandon him when he's only 7 or 8 years old.  They leave him with Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) and Aunt May (Sally Field), and then they disappear.  Cut to 10 years later and Peter is an awkward high school kid (played by Andrew Garfield).  He has a nice old fashioned camera (not sure why he wasn't using digital), and we learn right away that he likes taking pictures.  We also see that he likes Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone). 

Eventually he will get bitten by a genetically altered spider, giving him his superpowers.  He will also inadvertently cause the death of his uncle Ben.  He will go after criminals in order to avenge Uncle Ben's death, he will make his Spider Man suit, and he will fight a supervillain, in this movie a man turned into a large reptile.

First, I will focus on some things I liked about this movie.  I liked Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy.  There are a couple of scenes between Peter and Gwen that were really fun.  They have a natural chemistry (it doesn't hurt that they are dating in real life), and she is very good at comedy.  Considering director Marc Webb's previous movie was the great (500) Days of Summer, it makes sense that he would do a good job with the scenes involving the romance.

I also liked the effects.  One thing that bugged me in Sam Raimi's movies was the CGI.  Every time Spider Man started climbing walls or swinging on his spider lines, it looked really cartoonish.  Not so this time around.  It looks like Andrew Garfield was really doing those things.  Sometimes the camera gave us a first person view of what Peter was seeing, and it was really cool. 

I also liked that his web shooters were things he made, which is how they were before Sam Raimi's movies.  I would have liked a little more detail about how they worked.  It looked like he kept them attached to his inner wrists with the suit on, but where were they when he wasn't wearing the suit?  I saw him shoot webs sometimes when he didn't have the suit on, so they must have been handy.  Was he ever in danger of running out of webbing?  Did he refill them every time he got back from a night of crime fighting?

I also liked the climax a lot.  I won't spoil anything, but the movie went further than I expected it to go.

Ok, things I didn't like.  The obvious one is this movie isn't necessary.  They basically remade the 2002 Spider Man.  They changed some story details, but the important beats are the same.  Like I said before, don't give us another origin story.  The first half of the movie is just waiting for the things you know are coming (the spider bite, Uncle Ben's death, ect). 

The music also bothered me.  Even without comparing the score to Danny Elfman's, the music was all wrong.  It was too triumphant and happy.  Within the first 5 minutes of the movie, we are getting music that is too overly dramatic and just didn't work for me at all.

I think Martin Sheen and Sally Field were the wrong choices for Uncle Ben and Aunt May.  They are just too well known from other roles to play these characters.  I did enjoy some of Martin Sheen's scenes, but Sally Field is given nothing to do.  I'm reminded of what an impact Rosemary Harris made as Aunt May in the other movies.   Also, the dialogue given to Sheen and Field is horrible.

The movie is too long, and it's boring in a lot of places.  There are some fun sequences, but there are several 10-15 minute stretches that were just boring.  I really didn't care much about Peter's father's back story.  And there are too many coincidental character relationships.  Peter's father worked with Dr. Curt Connors, who also happens to be mentor to Gwen Stacy, who interns at Oscorp Labs despite being in high school.  And Gwen's father just happens to be the police chief who is trying to capture the vigilante Spider Man.

Last, there aren't enough good scenes.  I can think of a dozen scenes from the previous Spider Man movies that were either exciting, funny, or dramatic.  But there are no scenes that really stick with me from this movie.

The only reason Sony made this movie (besides to make a lot of money) was so they didn't lose the rights to Spider Man.  They shouldn't be rebooting a franchise so soon.  They should have let Sam Raimi make Spider Man 4.