The World's End

The World's End (2013)
Dir. Edgar Wright

5 out of 5

Nobody maximizes the value of a single movie ticket quite like Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, the madcap masterminds behind The World's End, their latest exercise in witty genre deconstruction after the rom-zom-com Shaun of the Dead and the buddy cop parody Hot Fuzz.  Yet in this, the duo's richest and most mature collaboration yet, categorization is almost impossible.  Starting off as a "lad's holiday" comedy about a group of friends attempting to relive one of the wildest nights of their youth that morphs into a sci-fi invasion thriller, The World's End winds up as an unlikely delivery system for messages about conformity, broken friendships, and the resilience of the human spirit. 

The film's lynchpin is Gary King (Pegg), a peacocking rascal still clinging to the hard-partying lifestyle he enjoyed as a teenager.  Despite his reputation as a mooch, a liar, and a generally selfish bastard, he smooth-talks four of his old high school buddies - meek Peter (Eddie Marsan), sharkish Oliver (Martin Freeman), earnest Steven (Paddy Considine), and chief skeptic Andy (Nick Frost) - into taking a second crack at completing a legendary pub crawl in their sleepy hometown.  However, as the night unfolds, the men uncover a sinister secret about their unremarkable village - an extraterrestrial plan to replace the residents with genetically identical automatons and lull the rest of humankind into docile obedience.  

To say more would spoil the pleasure of absorbing the movie's carefully crafted setups and marveling at their elegant, uproarious, and totally unexpected resolutions.  Wright is a magician in the truest sense of the word, a master of misdirection who nonetheless hides plot clues in plain sight to reward attentive viewers.  Like his other films, The World's End embodies a style of "total filmmaking" that uses every weapon in a director's arsenal - visual design, soundtrack cues, editing, dialogue - to ensure that no moment is without meaning.  And swapping the typical Pegg-Frost character dynamic is an excellent choice in a movie that doubles as a cautionary tale about living in the past, as Gary and Andy struggle to salvage a relationship that has destroyed them and defined them.

The World's End is an appropriately nostalgic "conclusion" to Wright and Pegg's Three Flavours Cornetto faux-trilogy.  It's also the crowning achievement that establishes Wright as the most important popular filmmaker of his generation.  Combining a penchant for impossibly layered storytelling and geeky predilections with the same indefatigable sense of wonder, go-for-broke technical chops, and obsession with suburban alienation found in Steven Spielberg's earlier work, Wright's features have progressively raised their emotional intelligence while never losing their pure entertainment value.  The World's End may be his farewell to youth, but hopefully the best is still yet to come.

Short Term 12

Short Term 12 (2013)
Dir. Destin Cretton

4.5 out of 5

Destin Cretton leaves quite an impression with the devastating Short Term 12, a movie that should also qualify him as a cardiologist for all its heart-rending drama.  Based on Cretton's experiences working in a group foster care facility, it's the type of film that puts you back together only after smashing you into pieces a good three or four times.  The heroine is Grace (a magnificent Brie Larson), who supervises the day-to-day activities of a diverse group of foster kids alongside her boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr.).  Their relationship remains surreptitious, however, as their jobs require them to project a level of hard-earned authority that's only complicated if they allow their vulnerabilities too far out in the open: "You kind of have to be an asshole before you can be their friend," Grace instructs a new employee.  You can see how these relationships are fraught with emotional complexity.  Grace is not technically a foster parent, but for all the time she spends with these kids, she's also more than a case worker.

Short Term 12 unfolds in bursts of blazing emotion, a tapestry of heartache and humor, of small victories and major setbacks.  The character-driven action wouldn't work without the committed, courageous cast assembled by Cretton to play the foster children.  His attention settles on a pair of the most troubled kids: Marcus (Keith Stanfield), a poetic African-American teen with anger issues, and Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever), a cutter who wears sarcasm as a suit of armor.  Each of the characters is observed with deep understanding and rarely stumble into cliché or stereotype, the major exception being the foster care administration that stands as a one-dimensional obstacle in a movie that already sets up plenty of challenges.  That being said, Short Term 12 is far from an educational tract.  It's an experiential drama, and one that's directed with the comforting assurance of its creator's convictions.

What's truly surprising is how funny Short Term 12 is.  Cretton can send the movie soaring seemingly at will, a testament to how expertly the writer-director mixes humor with pathos.  Carried by a moving performance from Larson, the movie clearly wears the "tearjerker" label as a badge of honor, though it's also more nuanced than that term implies.  The way Grace and Mason juggle multiple crises at work - as well as developments in their personal lives - raises questions about how their lives came to be defined by their ersatz parenthood, a through-line that has a major impact on the fates of their foster children.  It also parallels the film's message about the necessity of living an examined life and how accepting help is often a prerequisite for helping others.  Cretton manages all this with a winning sincerity.  He's crafted an emotionally potent and satisfying film that grounds its biggest moments in the most ordinary kindnesses, suggesting that there's nothing more noble than caring for another human being.

This review originally appeared on Screen Invasion.

Elysium

Elysium (2013)
Dir. Neill Blomkamp

2.5 out of 5

Elysium is the rare mainstream science fiction movie that actually has an agenda or three - not surprising, considering it's written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, whose excellent debut District 9 distilled decades' worth of racial politics into a gripping narrative about displaced E.T.s and the paternal abuse of the bureaucracy tasked with protecting them.  No, the most shocking thing about Elysium is that the bad guys score the most cogent points.  "I always wanted a wife" muses the film's most despicable baddie, a gleefully sadistic war criminal played by Sharlto Copley; it's the clearest statement of purpose in this admirable but jumbled sophomore thesis on social inequity and the benign neglect of the working classes.  Full of ham-fisted talking points delivered via clunky dialogue, it's a movie that often seems to be speaking at, not to, its audience.

Matt Damon stars as the questionably-named Max Da Costa, a resident of Los Angeles in the 22nd century, when the entire surface of the Earth is one big polluted, crime-ridden ghetto.  Those with means live on Elysium, an orbiting space station teeming with parks, robot servants, and magical MRI machines that can heal just about any physical aliment in the time it takes to order a coffee.  After Max is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation at work, he joins a group of criminals who use him as a vessel to steal valuable information from the brain of a one-dimensional corporate scalawag played by William Fitchner in exchange for a one-way ticket to the bourgeois paradise.  Unfortunately for Max’s travel plans, the mental download includes plans for a political coup headed by Elysium's scheming defense secretary (Jodie Foster), who will use any extralegal means to secure the data residing in his head.

Clearly, a lot of time and effort went into creating the world of Elysium.  From the literal distancing of the haves and the have-nots to the gradual merging of man and machine (Max's sacrifice to the cause includes having a powered exoskeleton fused onto his body), the forward-thinking Blomkamp attempts to unpack several movies’ worth of intriguing ideas - too many ideas, in fact, meaning that few of them receive a proper explanation.   The action - admittedly exciting in a janky, unpredictable way - overwhelms the message in the film’s second half, but by then the narrative itself has become so confused that a retreat to broad storytelling convention is a respite.  Despite its heady aspirations, Elysium is equal parts stentorian lecture and brainless summer blockbuster, a murky approximation of a trenchant allegory that at least speaks powerfully through its visuals, if not its lackluster drama.

The Catch-Up: Summer 2013, Part 2

I try to see as many movies as possible, so sometimes I need to empty the queue.  Last month I looked at some of the summer's notable indie releases.  Here are more diversions for the dog days including character-building jobs at the shore and in the Texas countryside, a carefully-curated museum exhibit detailing the nascent days of the computer revolution, and a visit to the killing grounds of Indonesia's 1960s anti-communist purge.

The Way, Way Back

Dir. Nat Faxon and Jim Rash

3 out of 5

Most coming of age movies featuring painfully awkward teenagers are afraid to be just that: painful and awkward.  Not so in The Way, Way Back - Jim Rash and Nat Faxon’s follow-up to their Oscar-winning script for The Descendants - which subjects its protagonist, the shy, moody Duncan (Liam James), to a laundry list of humiliations when his mom (Toni Collette) drags him to the beach house owned by her new boyfriend, Trent (Steve Carrell), for the summer.  Trent’s callous appraisal of Duncan’s general attractiveness and charisma (he rates Duncan a “3” on a scale of 1 to 10) sets the tone for the movie’s first half as Duncan shuffles dejectedly among the party-hearty locals, including boozy next door neighbor Betty (Allison Janney) and wisecracking water park operator Owen (Sam Rockwell).

After a lengthy, monotonous set-up where James is given little to do but sulk and brood, The Way, Way Back finally picks up once Rockwell begins stealing scenes as his confidence mentor, offering the kid a job at his "Water Wizz" amusement park as an escape from his dreary home life.  And while the film initially suggests that Duncan is merely trading one form of immaturity for another, there's more to Owen behind his carefree demeanor, an soulfulness that's contrasted well with Trent's duplicitous ways without descending into cliché.  (A more obvious film would no doubt contrive a way for these dueling father figures to fistfight.)  The Way, Way Back's agenda gets jumbled at times - is it a recollection of summer memories or a postmortem on child-of-divorce traumas? - but it reveals its inclinations in the climax, an epic winning streak for Duncan that places the film firmly in the tradition of "summer makeover" movies, where all loose ends are tied, all crushes are kissed, and all moral victories are won before Labor Day.  Rash and Faxon are a little more nuanced than that, acknowledging that Duncan still has obstacles to overcome outside of his beachside bubble.  But, boy, did he have one productive summer.

Prince Avalanche 

Dir. David Gordon Green

2.5 out of 5

David Gordon Green's recent filmography has the look of a delayed enfant terrible phase.  After launching his career with several finely-observed indie dramas, he jumped onboard the Apatow comedy train with Pineapple Express and explored his cruder mercenary impulses - to diminishing returns - in Your Highness and The Sitter.  Green's latest, Prince Avalance, marks a return to an intimate scale and a quieter, more nuanced sensibility, at least from a directorial standpoint.  Story-wise, however, it's still about two men avoiding responsibility while they indulge their juvenile impulses, resisting the forces knocking them from their perch at the center of their self-made universe.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

An adaptation of the 2011 Icelandic film Either Way, the two-hander stars Paul Rudd as Alvin, a Texas state road worker, and Emile Hirsch as Lance, his reluctant apprentice and brother to Alvin's girlfriend, as they re-paint miles of traffic lines after a devastating wildfire.  They consistently bicker about everything - music, work ethic, and especially women.  Alvin dreams of earning enough money for a planned move to Germany with Lance's sister, not realizing that his absence during the long-term project says more than the checks he mails home; meanwhile, the caddish Lance actually returns home on the weekends but, via the myopia of youth, claims he's "getting old" and complains about his diminishing seduction prowess.  

Apart from periodic interactions with a salty old truck driver (Lance LeGault) and a former homeowner (Joyce Payne) searching through the burned landscape for her belongings, it's strictly Rudd and Hirsch hitting the same familiar beats on the road to conscious self-evaluation.  The two stars provide amiable variations on past roles (see Killer Joe for Hirsch and Knocked Up for Rudd), and film's late 1980s period setting lends itself to minor visual gags (the movie really nails the wardrobe, particularly Alvin's "thirtysomething dad on camping vacation" duds).  But Prince Avalanche also comes with a strong sense of deja vu that has nothing to do with its retro affectations and everything to do with its resigned sense of complacency as yet another solid but unspectacular boys-becoming-men dramedy.

Computer Chess

Dir. Andrew Bujalski

3.5 out of 5

In an age where toddlers can play with their parents' iPhones before they are potty-trained, the early days of personal computing feel especially remote and alien.  Andrew Bujalski's contrarian comedy Computer Chess does its damndest to re-humanize that epoch of technological history.  It's a documentary-style chronicle of an early 1980s programming competition where bespectacled and flop-sweating men (and one woman, whose anomalous presence is awkwardly noted by the event's MC) pit their smartest chess-playing terminals against one another in a dumpy hotel ballroom.  It's somewhat ironic that Bujalski, a pioneer of the low-fi, no-fuss "mumblecore" movement in film, is paying tribute to an era where computer proficiency was a high-tech skill requiring specialized knowledge of programming languages and mathematical logic.  But his sincerity is apparent in his painstaking attention to detail, from the grainy video of the black and white Portapak cameras used to shoot the film to the interjections of technical dialogue to the quaint speculation on the applications of newer, faster computer technology.  (By 1986, a computer should be able to defeat a human at chess!)

Bujalski, however, is not trying to be Shane Carruth.  Computer Chess is populated with oddball characters from the new technological frontier - notably a young graduate student (Patrick Riester) investigating rumors that his team's entry was deliberately programmed to fail - and, as it progresses, begins to resemble a fish-out-of-water comedy when the programmers interact with an analog world that has yet to grasp the potential of these bulky metal boxes.  Bujalski's direction occasionally frustrates with its confusing, discursive narrative style and blasé approach to linking scenes together, but he coaxes some truly funny performances out of his non-professional cast of fellow filmmakers and real-life computer scientists.  Computer Chess is built to be re-evaluated from moment to moment, a sort of historical debugging exercise that allows us to laugh freely at the still-staggering gulf between artificial and emotional intelligence.  

The Act of Killing
Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer

4.5 out of 5

Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing has one of the most bizarre - and effective - conceits of any documentary in recent memory.  In Indonesia, the leaders of paramilitary death squads and criminal gangs who murdered thousands of Communists, union members, and liberal sympathizers after a 1965 military coup are extolled as political heroes and get to live long, happy lives.  Oppenheimer connects with some of these men and provides them with a film crew (many of them credited as "Anonymous") to re-enact the killings in a mixture of genre tableaux that references their favorite Hollywood films.  The result is a historical document that's hilarious and horrifying, an essential chronicle of a dichotomous century defined by both the most heinous atrocities in human history and the golden age of mass entertainment.

With its focus on giving aged war criminals their 15 minutes of fame, The Act of Killing leaves almost no taboo unbroken.  Yet the film is far from a celebration of the wicked, and acknowledges that the reality of the situation in Indonesia - where, it's noted repeatedly, the word for "gangster" is derived from the term for "free man" - is not so cut and dried.  The most disturbing parts of the film involve the killers who are not affected by the emotional intensity of the re-enactments:  one of them dispassionately mentions stabbing his Chinese girlfriend's father in the 1960s, simply because the ruling powers instructed the paramilitaries to attack any ethnic Chinese.  The Act of Killing is less like the single-issue doc it appears to be - though it includes plenty of information about this forgotten dark period of Indonesian history - and more of a broad commentary on human nature, selective memory, and the proper pursuit of justice.  It's easy to get mad at these people getting let off the hook half a world away.  But where's the sustained outrage when we allow some of our criminals to hide in plain sight?

The Spectacular Now

The Spectacular Now (2013)
Dir. James Ponsoldt

2.5 out of 5

The soft focus of nostalgia always smooths out the rough edges of a bygone romance.  That goes double for teen romances like the one in The Spectacular Now, between popular party animal Sutter Keely (Miles Teller) and his sheltered classmate Aimee Finicky (Shailene Woodley).  Even though it takes place in the present day, director James Ponsoldt (Smashed) and co-writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber adapt Tim Tharp's novel in a way that suggests grown men attempting to iron out the wrinkles of the past - it's certainly not devoid of heartbreak, but it has an unfussy vibe that bends it closer to fantasy than a realistic examination of the challenges confronted by a messy, mismatched couple.

The spirit of Cameron Crowe permeates The Spectacular Now, which locates new sources of sweetness in the bad boy/nice girl love story trope.  Sutter is eighteen years old and already a maintenance drinker, packing a flask everywhere he goes, pouring it into giant 32-oz. cups of soda to keep his buzz going.  He's "100 percent serious about not being serious" and tries to inculcate Aimee with his live-in-the-now ethos.  While they rub off on each other in both positive and negative ways - Aimee quickly develops an affinity for the sauce - it's Aimee who takes the vapors of Sutter's blissful slackerdom and translates them into purposeful action, bringing his entire hakuna matata philosophy into question.

The Spectacular Now has enough charm to allow us to suspend disbelief to a point, like its claim that the luminous Woodley is invisible to boys.  However, the lack of verisimilitude becomes an issue once Sutter tracks down his deadbeat father (Kyle Chandler, playing marvelously against type) and begins a downward spiral that threatens to cost him everything.  Aimee in particular has the patience of Job; again, it's acceptable to a point for a shy girl in the initial ecstasies of True Love, but the film takes it too far into a gray area between understanding and abuse. 

There's still plenty to admire about The Spectacular Now, which is a great credit to its cast and Ponsoldt's ability to replicate the improbably dreamy tone of Crowe's films (Say Anything... is the touchstone here).  Teller has an easy charisma about him and effortlessly pulls off a character who's loved by everyone and yet is close to no one: "You'll always be my favorite ex-boyfriend," remarks Cassidy (Brie Larson), his previous partner.  Unfortunately, Ponsoldt assumes too casually that Sutter will be our favorite rascal as well, and waits too long to give us a reason to believe in his redemption.

The Wolverine

The Wolverine (2013)
Dir. James Mangold

4 out of 5

When Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man established the axiom “with great power comes great responsibility,” it created an unwritten rule: superheroes don’t deal with small problems.  Origin stories aside, they are protagonists with huge macro-level worries about saving the city, the planet, or the corruptible soul of humanity.  Surprisingly, the second Hugh Jackman-starring X-Men spin-off The Wolverine doesn’t really have anything to do with the greater good.  It’s a simple matter of life and death and the personal responsibility of its titular character, a genuinely character-driven story that’s a rarity in this era of the onscreen superhero arms race.

Indeed, the only arms (and torso, sneer, and sideburns) of note in The Wolverine belong to Jackman.  Counting his cameo in X-Men: First Class, it’s the sixth time he’s played the prickly mutant soldier Logan - known colloquially as “Wolverine” for the prehensile claws that protrude from between his knuckles - and his affinity for the role shines through in this standalone story following the character to Japan, where Logan is summoned by Ichiro Yashida (Haruhiko Yamanouchi), a man he saved from the atomic bombing of Nagasaki nearly 70 years before.  Yashida, now dying of cancer, covets Logan’s immortality and, somewhat insidiously, proposes a “transplant” that will allow Logan to age and die naturally while Yashida prolongs his own life.  But Yashida unfortunately doesn’t live to hear Logan’s answer, triggering an assassination plot against his handpicked heir, granddaughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto). 

Here The Wolverine becomes an elaborate chase narrative with Logan protecting Mariko - and Mariko’s childhood companion, katana-wielding mutant psychic Yukio (Rila Fukushima), protecting him as he discovers that Yashida’s enemies somehow managed to suppress his self-healing ability.  Director James Mangold (3:10 to Yuma) constructs a thrilling game of cat-and-mouse while using the reverse-Highlander premise of mortal Logan to meaningfully explore the character’s pain and personal loss.  Yet for a film that is plenty dark - with its detailed depictions of nuclear warfare and Logan’s haunting visions of his dead lover Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) - it still finds room for kinetic action sequences (a fight staged on top of a bullet train ranks among the summer’s best) and a heroic arc that doesn’t feel rushed or perfunctory, thanks to the liberal sprinkling of character beats and the sudden removal of Logan’s invulnerability.

The Wolverine points to an intriguing “one-shot” paradigm for future comic book movies.  Given the super-sized cast of the next X-Men movie, it’s unlikely to metastasize anytime soon in this corner of the Marvel universe.  Still, Mangold and his team should be commended for demonstrating that the blueprint to an effective summer blockbuster can omit all the alien invasions and crumbling skyscrapers, and feature more of the moral rectitude and herculean burdens that actually define comic book heroism.  These days, any movie with a big effects budget has the power to become a large, clattering Doomsday Machine.  What’s admirable and ultimately memorable about The Wolverine is that it takes seriously the responsibility to find another way.

The Catch-Up: Comic-Con 2013

I’m still a little woozy/dehydrated/sleep-deprived from my visit to this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, but it was all worth it.  I made some new friends, partied on a pirate ship, and was shooed out of a bathroom by Harrison Ford’s bodyguard!  

I also wrote a bunch of posts for Screen Invasion.  Check out my links, bro:

- Ender’s Game had a big presence at the Con, with a “fan experience” walkthrough and a press conference, where even the professional journalists still ask Ford stupid questions about Han Solo.

- The South Park: The Stick of Truth panel devolved - as Comic-Con panels must - into a series of hyper-specific fanboy questions posed to Trey Parker and Matt Stone, as captured in my live blog.

- Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright graciously answered questions about their upcoming film, The World’s End, in a series of down-to-earth roundtable interviews.

- I camped out in a hotel ballroom to confirm that the final season of How I Met Your Mother will indeed have a mother, and live blogged the remarkably organized True Blood panel.  Though it was arguably more fun getting caught up - via Wikipedia and in-person fan summaries - on the insane plotlines of the latter (I had stopped watching True Blood after Season 4, but it sounds like the show is finally returning to its roots).

- Shockingly, I managed to get a scoop from sitting in a cavernous room and letting Kevin Smith gab at me.  I covered his annual Q&A live from Hall H, where Smith gave details about a couple movie projects he’s currently developing: Clerks III and a quirky horror movie entitled Tusk.  I was later cited by /Film and Bloody Disgusting, premium linkage that’s almost as exciting as seeing your name in print.

Just a reminder that you can see all my non-Amblog work on Screen Invasion, in addition to tons of other great content.  We now returned to your regularly scheduled Amblogging...