The Amazing Spider-Man 2

The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Dir. Marc Webb

2 out of 5

Can you remember a time when a Spider-Man movie wasn't a commercial slam-dunk?  In 2002, Sam Raimi's lavishly-budgeted take on the webslinger was considered a flashy gamble in a genre that only had a couple modest hits to its recent credit.  These days, Spidey is the unofficial mascot of Sony, a financial bulwark that's counted on to bolster the film division's balance sheet.  Though he's forever a teenager (or a young adult), Peter Parker is undoubtedly a major Hollywood breadwinner.  

With great grosses comes great responsibility.  The stress of competition is written all over The Amazing Spider-Man 2, a follow-up to the so-so 2012 reboot that treats current blockbuster trends as obligations and desperately clings to a borrowed personality.  In the sequel, Peter (Andrew Garfield) is still struggling to cope with loss, from the impending departure of his Oxford-bound girlfriend Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), to the recent deaths of both his adoptive uncle and Gwen's police captain father, to the mystery of his own parents' disappearance when he was a young boy.  Once again, Peter's investigation into his "secret history" creates more adversaries with an all-important link to the tech monolith OsCorp: Max Dillon/Electro, a mousy electrical engineer (Jamie Foxx) who experiences a horrific industrial accident and turns into a human battery because electricity; and Harry Osborne (a shifty Dane DeHaan), the OsCorp heir who needs a transfusion of Spider-Man's genetically-altered blood to cure the poorly-explained hereditary disease that is quickly ravaging his body.

While the first film could fall back on an origin story so compelling that you kinda sorta liked hearing it again, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 tries to get by with a pu pu platter of material that struggles to achieve coherence, let alone convey excitement and adventure.  The tone varies wildly from scene to scene, and, despite a few bright spots courtesy of his talented leads and visual effects team, director Marc Webb can't replicate Raimi's patient buildup of tension leavened with trademark Spidey humor.  The movie also feels weirdly hermetic.  Besides a single confrontation with Electro in Times Square, this Spider-Man is rarely seen interacting with the outside world.  It fundamentally changes the narrative from one where we can see and relate to Peter's struggles to one where super-people remain frustratingly aloof and unknowable until it's time to punch each other.

To be fair, the filmmakers seem to realize this, but are unwilling or unable to come up with more creative ways to create an understanding of Peter/Spider-Man's dual life and the strain it places on his relationships.  (They even recycle the "costume staining the laundry" joke from Spider-Man 2.)  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 also fails to broaden the franchise mythology in any interesting way, with problems starting from the iffy opening scene in which respected scientist Richard Parker (Campbell Scott) channels Liam Neeson's hulking air marshal in Non-Stop.  Indeed, the movie's only real risk is to play up the silliness to a degree that suggests the influence of the Schumacher Batman films (right down to the misguided character designs), which is not the comparison you want in this more discerning era of comic book cinema.

But at least succumbing to camp - instead of teetering on the brink of it - would signal some sort of creative agency.  Unfortunately, Webb and his crew are far too content to imitate rather than innovate.  It's the product of a perceived superhero arms race where building a foundation for a promised future payoff is prioritized over a wholly fulfilling dramatic experience in the present, with the obligatory over-compensation of the last twenty minutes unable to salvage the alternately dippy and banal experience of the preceding two hours.  With more to prove than ever, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 discouragingly doubles down on the familiar. 

The Catch-Up: Spring 2014

I try to see as many movies as I can, so sometimes I need to purge the queue.  In this edition: that very special window between awards season and summer blockbusters.

300: Rise of an Empire
Dir. Noam Murro

2 out of 5

The sword-and-sandals sequel 300: Rise of an Empire was, perhaps, an inevitability given the mad rush of copycat productions that followed Zack Snyder's wildly successful thunderdome of highly-stylized Hellenic ultraviolence.  Unfortunately, Rise is little more than an officially-sanctioned knockoff.  The packaging is right, but the favor is conspicuously bland.  Taking place around the same time as the events of 300, the sequel focuses on the Athenian general Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton) who is attempting to arrange a unified naval defense of the Greek city states.  While King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans slow the Persians' land advance, Themistocles leads his own outnumbered forces against Artemisia (Eva Green), a Greek woman allied with the Persian god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) and commander of his warships.

The film does show promise in its impossibly bloody fight scenes, of which there are many.  And Green gives a fine performance as the surprisingly complex Artemisia, a tough, vengeful woman who enjoys roughing up her enemies and sexual partners alike.  But the rest of the movie is strictly direct-to-DVD quality: endless digital blood splatters, cluttered visuals, soporific acting, and purely functional dialogue.  That last one is partly Snyder's own fault - though he didn't return to direct, he co-wrote the script with Kurt Johnstad - and it's indicative of the film's failure to effectively engage with what made the original 300 a surprise hit and bro-culture touchstone.  Returning cast members like Santoro, Lena Headey, and David Wenham pop up for a couple scenes each, and give off the vibe of college students returning to visit their old high school, finding it nostalgic and quaint while also a little beneath them.  At least 300: Rise of an Empire doesn't act like it's doing them a favor - it's unapologetic action schlock, and seems genuinely appreciative of the chance to borrow even a small amount of their luster.

Need for Speed
Dir. Scott Waugh

3 out of 5

Ironically, Need for Speed's biggest issue is its pacing.  Setting up Toby's cross-country scramble takes a lot of ponderous exposition.  The filmmakers' insistence on such a thorough, serious introduction is particularly puzzling in light of all the logic and physics-defying action thereafter.  Take for example the mysterious radio host - played with scenery-chewing aplomb by Michael Keaton - who runs the film's big underground racing competition.  Where is his broadcast center?  Does he sit there all day, filling time between big scoops in the underground street racing world?  Why don't the cops listen to his show?  How does he know about Toby's dead friend - was he famous or something?  And so on.

At the same time, Need for Speed is much better for ignoring the answers to these and other reasonable questions, fulfilling the audience's desire for wild stunts and reckless chases in photogenic locations.  It also understands the importance of levity, surrounding Paul's vanilla hero with a crew of cut-ups including Rami Malek and Scott "Kid Cudi" Mescudi, as well as a likable sidekick/love interest (Imogen Poots) who's a knowledgeable and worthy foil.  Though Need for Speed manages a bit of unexpected emotional resonance, it's an enjoyable addition to the canon of car movies whose affinity is more with the speeding metal objects than the people piloting them.

Cheap Thrills
Dir. E. L. Katz

4 out of 5

People degrading themselves for money is not a new concept.  However, the provocative pitch-black comedy Cheap Thrills argues that more research is necessary and enthusiastically investigates the idea via a twisted social experiment.  Married mechanic Craig (Pat Healy) and shakedown artist Vince (Ethan Embry) are old high school friends who randomly cross paths at a bar on the same day Craig loses his job.  While commiserating about their financial woes - Craig is on the brink of being evicted from his apartment, Vince struggles to find steady employment after a stint in prison - a wealthy stranger (David Koechner) invites them to join a birthday celebration for his young wife (Sara Paxton), which involves giving the two downtrodden men gobs of cash for completing a series of escalating dares.

Beginning with standard juvenile mayhem (drink that shot, slap that stripper’s ass) and steadily progressing to more dangerous and violent tasks, Cheap Thrills likewise turns from an exaggerated satire of reality TV and game show antics to a probe of the more sinister aspects of capitalism.  Craig, the more reluctant participant of the pair, has many opportunities to walk away, but views his fiscal obligations as a never-ending treadmill that justifies all sorts of immoral behavior.  That psychological spin is also how the movie justifies its visceral envelope-pushing; the splatter scenes may be front-and-center, but they have a purpose beyond shock value.  Even at a tautly-edited 85 minutes, Cheap Thrills is a surprisingly comprehensive and disconcerting look at nihilism in all its guises.

Transcendence

Transcendence

Dir. Wally Pfister

2.5 out of 5

All machines-run-amok scenarios share a common hurdle: how do you demonize hardware?  Most of them avoid this question entirely - the burden of guilt tends to fall on those creating or controlling the technology rather than the technology itself.  The techno-thriller Transcendence looks at the current Internet age and sees something more disconcerting than mad scientists or sleep-deprived programmers hitting the wrong keystrokes.  In a world where we've allowed various forms of artificial intelligence to exert so much control within our lives, how long until they realize how much power they truly possess?

To be fair, every system needs an input, and Transcendence has computer genius Will Caster (Johnny Depp), a rockstar inventor developing a sophisticated supercomputer called P.I.N.N. that mimics brain activity to achieve a almost-sentient consciousness.  Will, along his wife and fellow scientist Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and his colleague Max (Paul Bettany), believe in their work's ability to address massive global concerns such as poverty, hunger, and pollution.  However, a neo-Luddite terrorist group sees a perversion of nature, and one of its agents fatally wounds Will with a radiation-tainted bullet.  

Desperate with grief, Evelyn and Max use Will's last weeks to fulfill his last-ditch plan to upload his own consciousness into P.I.N.N., abandoning his mortal body in exchange for a prolonged digital lifespan.  Will dies but the gambit works:  he speaks to Evelyn first through a command prompt, then as a voiceover and eventually as an omnipresent 3D avatar.  The breakthrough causes a rift between Evelyn and Max, with the latter providing the obligatory warnings about overreaching technology while the former sees a way to extend both her emotional and academic relationships with her late husband.  Even for a grieving widow, though, she seems pretty naive; Evelyn barely bats an eye when Will casually requests to be connected to the Internet so he can probe global financial markets.

The film sustains itself largely upon its own admirable creative gumption as well as its talented cast, particularly Hall, who ably translates Evelyn's grief into a workaholism that conjures a sprawling solar-powered compound for Will's project - now called "Transcendence" - in a blighted desert town.  Renowned cinematographer Wally Pfister, best known for his collaborations with Christopher Nolan, also brings a fully-realized visual sensibility to his directorial debut:  a creeping claustrophobia that prominently features Evelyn among long corridors of servers, solar panels, and research bays, as if trapped in a literal labyrinth of technology.

Unfortunately, Pfister and writer Jack Paglan keep bumping up against the limitations of the undercooked yet overcrowded plot.  Transcendence has a way of awkwardly combining its heady, hard sci-fi themes with dramatic cues straight from a B-movie, and the tumble down the slippery slope begins when Will starts turning people into his own networked acolytes.  Much like the Transcendence project itself, the movie's ambitions often outstrip its logic.  Max's story is downright baffling, first with his eleventh-hour protests ringing hollow alongside his admiration for and acquiescence to Will.  Later he's kidnapped and apparently turned by the same Luddite terrorist (Kate Mara) who ordered the murder of his best friend, not to mention a bunch of other top computer scientists.  And too much time is spent on thinly-sketched, practically superfluous characters like Cillian Murphy's bland FBI agent and Morgan Freeman's wizened government scientist, who appear to be filling some kind of Nolan repertory quota.

Transcendence ultimately boils down to the same old conclusions about new technology.  On paper it almost resembles a darkest-timeline version of Her.  In practice it's the kind of film where a scientist can mysteriously vanish from mainstream academia and triumphantly reappear as a liaison between terrorists and law enforcement.  Give Pfister credit for wanting to make a Nolan-esque "big ideas" movie within the boundaries of a satisfying plot-driven genre thriller.  Sadly, Transcendence only lives up to half of that billing, a movie that winds up showcasing the flaws of man and machine alike.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Only Lovers Left Alive
Dir. Jim Jarmusch

3 out of 5

"Zombies" - that's the derogatory term for humans used in by the vampire Adam (Tom Hiddleston), a moody rock musician living in a nearly-deserted Detroit neighborhood.  He can't stop complaining to his undead mate in Tangier, Eve (Tilda Swinton), about how the living have a limited grasp of genius, be it artistic or scientific.  Maybe if they'd lived for a dozen centuries, they would have an appropriate frame of reference.  As it is, Adam sighs, they're "still bitching" about Charles Darwin.

You wouldn't expect a powerful supernatural being to have such a defeatist attitude, but Only Lovers Left Alive confirms that the ennui of modern life is unavoidable even for bloodsucking immortals.  Beyond that, however, indie film godfather Jim Jarmusch's farcical take on vampire mythology doesn't attempt to rewrite or revolutionize the genre's conventions so much as it refracts them through the auteur's deadpan sensibility.  "Jim Jarmusch vampire movie" is not just shorthand; it's an accurate plot description.

But the film does have a plot, concerning Adam and Eve's struggle to maintain anonymity in an age where privacy is eroding quicker than the Motor City's property tax base.  Resisting their natural urge to feed on the blood of living people, they rely on networks of trusted allies and ethically malleable doctors for sustenance.  With their predatory instincts hampered, these vampires have an eternity with nothing to do but seek knowledge and beauty...but only when the sun goes down.  Adam's response to these limitations is to slip into a deep funk, one so bad that he instructs his assistant - an oblivious burnout played by Anton Yelchin with slackerish aplomb - to commission the creation of a single wooden bullet.

It doesn't take long for Eve to reunite with her partner and pull him out of the doldrums, but still, Only Lovers Left Alive is in no rush to go anywhere.  The film revels in the witty solipsism of these romantic loners who view the world as one elaborate arch joke - a viewpoint that could easily become insufferable, but Hiddleston and Swinton wear it well.  Though the former fits neatly into Jarmusch's personal arrangement of vamp archetypes, the latter hardly registers less as a monster and more as a dreadlocked earth mother with a Vitamin D deficiency.

Beyond the winking, bone-dry humor, however, there is an unmistakable sense of boredom.  There's something interesting to be extrapolated from the way that Jarmusch, himself a cultural icon, takes some of the most libertine creatures in cinema and hands them the personalities of laconic art school grad students.  The introduction of Eve's free-spirited "sister" (Mia Wasikowska) feels almost like a begrudging apology for the film's lack of tawdry business, and is easily the film's most predictable character.  Only Lovers Left Alive is best approached with the same cool, detached attitude its characters display for the world created by the "zombies" - a world not necessarily worthy of unconditional love, but rather a curious and particular appreciation.

Cuban Fury

Cuban Fury
Dir. James Griffiths

3.5 out of 5

If you were to make a list of the ideal candidates to play the leading man in a dance-themed romantic comedy, odds are that Nick Frost (best known as the Falstaffian counterweight/BFF to Simon Pegg in Edgar Wright's "Three Flavours Cornetto" trilogy) would be overlooked.  Still, I can't imagine anyone but Frost playing Bruce Garrett, the one-time salsa dancing prodigy at the center of Cuban Fury.  After a run-in with some bullies before a major competition derailed his dreams of dance-floor stardom, the shy Bruce has eased into a contented, if lonely, life as a mechanical engineer harboring a crush on his new boss, Julia (Rashida Jones).  As it happens, Julia is also a salsa dancer, providing Bruce with the spark he needs to reignite his passion not just for dance, but for life in general.

A underdog character study masquerading as a romance, Cuban Fury takes as much inspiration from Rocky as it does from the rom-com tradition.  There's the chauvinistic rival (Chris O'Dowd) who's constantly undermining the hero's sense of worth, the crusty mentor (Ian McShane) who uses unconventional methods to motivate his protégé, and the doubts that plague Bruce as he tries to let people into his life without letting them down.  And it's Frost's physicality that really sells the premise.  Not only is it much easier to share in Bruce's trials and triumphs with an actor who doesn't fit the traditional mold of a movie star, but it's genuinely exhilarating to watch him gain confidence and self-esteem as he reclaims a part of himself that went missing long ago.

A confident first feature for director James Griffiths and writer Jon Brown - both with plenty of prior TV experience - Cuban Fury still has its flaws apart from its awfully nondescript title.  There some broad elements that don't always mingle well with the film's refreshingly restrained sense of humor.  Jones adds another pleasant-yet-uninspired dream girl to a résumé of underwritten roles, and the flamboyantly gay novice dancer (Four Lions' Kayvan Novak) who befriends Bruce comes uncomfortably close to being a straight-up stereotype.

That being said, funny can forgive a lot, and Cuban Fury is a frequent generator of belly laughs.  The stacked supporting cast is capable of stealing scenes at any moment, whether it's the hilarious Novak playfully puncturing Bruce's uptight demeanor or McShane lovingly contributing his nasty streak to an otherwise gentle film.  Frost delivers a sweet-natured, charming performance that gives the humor an emotional resonance, detailing Bruce's attempts to remain hopeful in the face of life's disappointments.  Even at his lowest moments, Griffiths and Brown never make him the target of pity.  Cuban Fury cheerfully advances the notion that even our small-potatoes struggles are worth fighting, a happily low-key endeavor with a surplus of what's paradoxically missing from so many other romantic comedies:  heart.

Nymph()maniac: Volume 2

Nymph()maniac: Volume 2
Dir. Lars Von Trier

3.5 out of 5

My thoughts on Nymph()maniac: Volume 1 can be found here.

Contrary to the recent history of epic-length films broken into installments, Nymph()maniac: Volume 2 really does have two discrete halves - in other words, it's more Kill Bill than The Hobbit.  And while the opener was no Sunday drive, Vol. 2 is unmistakably a Von Trier film, a dark chronicle of pain and suffering and occasional pathos that serves as a fitting companion piece to the more sensuous Vol. 1.  After a few brief scenes picking up the pieces of Vol. 1's semi-cliffhanger, the flashback timeline catches up to a point where Joe - the woman recounting her sexual autobiography to Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard), the bookish Samaritan who discovered her beaten and bruised in an alley in Vol. 1 - is now played by Charlotte Gainsbourg.  The casting switch coincides with wholesale changes in Joe's life, including a child fathered by her bad penny-lover Jerome (Shia LaBeouf) and the loss of her ability to achieve sexual satisfaction.

The latter obviously presents certain challenges for a nymphomaniac, which allows Von Trier to explore his obsession with the extremes of human behavior.  Joe begins dabbling in riskier forms of sex in her effort to recapture the thrill, trying everything from random encounters with non-English speakers (the theory being that sex without verbal communication presents a certain level of danger) to submitting herself to a sadomasochist (Jamie Bell) who doesn't believe in the concept of a safe word.  (In a development that will surprise no one familiar with his work, Von Trier quickly picks up on the analogous nature of pain and pleasure.)  

It must be stressed, however, that this is even less lurid or erotic than Vol. 1, which already had its share of raw, unsparing moments.  Von Trier seems more determined than ever to remove his subject matter from a titillating context, employing a drab visual style that emphasizes late 20th-century aesthetic decay in its crumbling council housing, copious fluorescent lighting, and the characters' increasingly frumpy wardrobes.

More than just a controversy magnet or an exercise in miserabilia, Nymph()maniac is Von Trier's bid to recontextualize sex in as many ways as possible.  In Joe he has a character who explores a definition of the sexual impulse beyond an expression of love and intimacy or a biological urge to the point where, in her world, it's simply a reflexive response: a viewpoint that comes into play when Joe launches a mid-life career as an expert interrogator/debt collector for an upmarket dirty work specialist (Willem Dafoe).  

The film's late push to make Joe's sexual experience "useful" allows Von Trier to take potshots at his favorite target - therapy - and leads the metaphorical interplay between Joe and Seligman, one of the more unexpected pleasures of Vol. 1, into more didactic territory.  Seligman's final monologue feels a bit too tidy and academic after nearly four hours of the Von Trier's emotional battery, but it's followed by a final twist so improbably wild and over the top it either ruins or saves the film, depending on how much you prefer to see Seligman as the filmmaker's surrogate.  Whatever the case, Nymph()maniac is a fully realized, fully adult emotional journey that speaks seriously and sympathetically to the wanton and the chaste alike.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Dirs. Anthony and Joe Russo

2.5 out of 5

Patience is a virtue when it comes to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  The long-term nature of the Marvel movie franchise is, by now, common knowledge to savvy moviegoers and casual fans alike, a development that protects a film like Captain America: The Winter Soldier from a more rigorous scrutiny.  A pedestrian addition to the MCU canon, Cap's latest adventure epitomizes the concept of these interlocking movies as a exercise in anticipation for the next chapter, sometimes at the expense of creating a dramatically satisfying stand-alone piece of entertainment.  And this happens to be one of the times where Marvel sells the sizzle reel while making the audience think it's getting the steak.

Set almost entirely in Washington, D.C., Winter Soldier centers on Captain Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and his post-Avengers life as an operative for S.H.I.E.L.D., the secretive multinational defense organization headed by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, finally given more to do than just glare and issue orders).  While on a mission to ostensibly rescue a S.H.I.E.L.D. vessel hijacked by Algerian pirates, Rogers observes his colleague Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johannson) collect data from the ship's computer.  Rogers begins to question the moral rectitude of an organization that's seemingly spying on itself - fears that Fury does nothing to assuage when he briefs Cap on a new global surveillance program to be carried out by three new computer-controlled, heavily-armed helicarriers.  A security crisis promptly places Rogers under suspicion of treason, and soon he and Romanoff are on the run, trying to evade the reach of senior S.H.I.E.L.D. official Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford) and clear Captain America's name.

Placing the most naive member of Marvel's cinematic stable of superheroes at the epicenter of a political thriller is a clever premise, but unfortunately one that's not given enough room to breathe.  Captain America: The Winter Soldier feels crammed with subplots and characters that add to the spectacle but do little in terms of story cohesion: there's Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), an American military veteran and ally of Rogers with access to a cutting-edge flight suit; Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp), a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent whose cover is blown immediately after she's introduced onscreen; and the mysterious Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), a genetically-enhanced assassin who periodically drops in to shoot people and glower at the Captain and generally look like the cover of a futuristic Assassin’s Creed video game. 

You'd think that the nemesis would earn his subtitle, but Winter Soldier is intent on masking intentions and emotions for the sake of a few plot twists: some interesting, some terribly telegraphed.  Outside of those moments, however, it's a lot like climbing an expository ladder - one that often finds Captain America retracting his past and makes the film feel like it's covering old ground.  Last November, I praised Thor: The Dark World for being an outside-the-box extension of the Marvel brand; Captain America returns the company to business as usual, creating copies of past successes and relying on sideways allusions and we'll-get-back-to-that-later teasers to give the illusion of story propulsion.  

Directors Anthony and Joe Russo, known mostly for their work in the world of TV sitcoms, are tentative action helmers who don't exactly put their stamp on the Marvel house style, but there are glimpses of their prowess - they squeeze more tension and humor out of Fury under siege in his souped-up SUV than in any of the other standard fight-and-chase sequences.  In the end, maybe a fairly inconclusive film like Captain America: The Winter Soldier is the price of watching an ambitious cinematic universe unfold.  Sometimes you've just got to wait for the good stuff.