Chris Pratt. That’s all.

I must admit that the biggest reason I was so excited to see Guardians of the Galaxy was Chris Pratt. I’ve been a fan since he guested as trustafarian college student on The OC in 2006, and I developed a silly school boy crush on him in Parks & Recreation, on which he’s played adorable dimwitted man-child Andy Dwyer for seven years. For much of his career, he’s carried some chunk, earning more than a few bear fans. After he was cast as a Navy Seal in Zero Dark Thirty, he started working out, and suddenly he went from dopey comedic sidekick to leading man, getting cast as the lead in the next Jurassic Park film and as Peter Quill, or Star-Lord, in Marvel’s massively budgeted space opera Guardians of the Galaxy.

I’d probably pay to see Pratt eat cupcakes for two hours, but I was quite happy when Guardians turned out to be hugely entertaining. It is not, however, deserving of the extreme adulation it has been receiving. Three days after its release, the voters on IMDb have declared it the 32nd greatest film of all time. This is, of course, absurd. Fanboys can get overexcited, and they can also develop blinders, not noticing the flaws in their obsessions.

Perhaps one of the reasons so many people loved Guardians is that, unlike Spider-Man, the X-Men, or Captain America, the Guardians of the Galaxy are not a group of superheroes so well known that any filmed representation of them is bound to be sneered at by legions of comic readers whining, “That’s not right! Star-Lord’s mom didn’t die that way!” (I uttered that sort of whine in my review of the latest X-Men film a few months ago.) In fact, a lot of people were perplexed that Marvel would make a movie based on characters that weren’t already a worldwide brand. With the $200 million budgets, that’s a risk, especially without a superstar to carry the film, like Robert Downey, Jr. did for Ironman. The risk paid off, however.

The film opens with Peter as a young boy. He is sitting alone in a hospital waiting room, listening to a mixtape on his Walkman. He is ushered into a hospital room, where his mother is dying. Peter is confused and scared, and after she succumbs, he runs from the hospital in tears. Suddenly, a space ship appears and beams Peter up. Twenty-six years later, Peter is played by Pratt, and he is on a strange, barren planet. In a scene more than a little reminiscent of the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Peter is searching ancient ruins for an artifact: a mysterious metal orb. So are a bunch of other mercenaries and evildoers (played by Michael Rooker and two-time Oscar nominee Djimon Hounsou), and Peter barely escapes with his life.

While he tries to sell the orb on the planet Xandar, two bounty hunters, the furry Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) and hilariously taciturn and wooden Groot (Vin Diesel), and green Gamora (Zoe Saldana), one of the henchmen of the evil Ronan (Lee Pace), attack Peter to get the orb. Instead, they all end up on a prison planet, where criminals and enemies become allies and heroes. Along with the super-literal muscle man Drax (Dave Bautista), they break out and try to prevent Ronan from using the orb to destroy Xandar.

From the moment young Peter runs out the hospital, the action barely pauses for more than the amount of time for needed for a brief plot explanation, a quick joke, or a testament to revenge, honor, or friendship. The pacing is breathless, and the cosmic, superheroic action – impressively directed by James Gunn almost entirely in CGI beautifully designed by Charles Wood and photographed by Ben Davis – is as thrilling as what Joss Whedon did in The Avengers or George Lucas did in the first Star Wars. But the nonstop action prevents any of the characters from developing into more than just, well, cartoons. I could tell Rocket and Groot had a long and deep friendship and I knew Peter and Gamora were hot for each other, but the details, the explanations, and the emotions are left out. I loved watching Pratt become a movie star, but the movie sent me to the richer, more complicated comic books, where I could learn something about the character he was playing. The film provided only a hint.

Guardians of the Galaxy

Directed by James Gunn
Written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman
Starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, and Bradley Cooper
Rated PG-13
In 3-D
At your local multiplex

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Ew. Just ew.

One of the problems Woody Allen faces when he is trying to defend himself against charges of pedophilia is how often the male protagonists in his films, usually well into middle age, pursue and win the affections of much, much younger women. Most notoriously, he cast himself, at age 42, as a man dating 17-year-old Mariel Hemingway in 1979’s Manhattan; this year, he revealed this story was based on his relationship with a high school student he met on the set of Annie Hall. In 1991, Allen left his longtime girlfriend Mia Farrow for her 19-year-old adopted daughter, Soon-yi Previn, who Allen has been married to since 1997. Dating women just above the age of consent is not pedophilia, of course, just very often icky, but Allen also been accused of molesting his and Farrow’s daughter Dylan when she was seven. Allen vehemently denied the charges, but that scandal was omnipresent in the early 1990s, even after the police decided they did not believe Dylan and a judge found the charges inconclusive. However, the charges reappeared last winter, when Dylan, now named Malone and an adult, repeated them in detail to Vanity Fair and then in an open letter in The New York Times. This set loose a deluge of blog posts, tweets, and status updates taking either Malone or Allen’s side, with everyone claiming to know a truth that time and emotion have made impossible to determine.

Rarely does Woody Allen use his films to comment on politics, let alone on his personal life. Neither his break up with Mia Farrow nor his relationships with Soon-yi seem to have been fictionalized in any concrete way. He often focuses on issues of love, shame, class, and beauty, but finding the connections in Allen’s plots and character to his actual life has been folly. That said, in his latest film, the slight romantic comedy Magic in the Moonlight, the connection and the commentary seem rather clear, making obligatory romance between the middle-aged man and much younger women much ickier than ever.

In the 1920s, Colin Firth plays Stanley, a stiff British rationalist who does not suffer fools gladly yet happily makes money fooling them as a stage magician named Wei Ling Soo. After a show one night in Berlin, an old friend and fellow magician named Simon (Simon McBurney) visits and asks Stanley if he’d be willing to come to the French Riviera and help unmask a woman pretending to be a psychic whose act is particularly skillful. Exposing fakers is one of Stanley’s favorite hobbies and his Aunt Vanessa (Eileen Atkins) lives nearby, so he agrees. Upon meeting Sophie (Emma Stone), the mystic in question, Stanley pokes and prods the beautiful, young American, but he is increasingly unnerved as she seems to be able to read his mind and know things only a psychic could. Within days, he is as taken in by her as the rich family she and her mother is staying with who has been hanging on her every word. The son Brice (Hamish Linklater) is in love with Sophie, who is coyly weighing his marriage proposal. But now Stanley is in love with her, too.

The film is, as all of Allen’s are, full of dialogue as witty, wise, and funny as the best written in English, and it is directed with the bounce and effervescence expected of his light comedies. Firth, who rarely plays anyone other than a witty fuddy-duddy does this particularly wonderfully, and Stone, the only young American actress who can compete with Jennifer Lawrence in a charm contest, is also delightful. They are cute together, but Firth is more than twice Stone’s age, and when they kiss, it’s truly creepy. But it is not as creepy as the connection between the plot and Allen’s life. Stanley is determined to expose the lie of a very young woman, a lie central to her and her mother’s survival. The lie, and the desire to expose and be taken in by it, seems to me to represent Malone’s claim of abuse and the ease by which people believed it. By the end of the film, Allen makes a pretty clear statement about magical thinking, but the resolution is not comforting for those discomfited by Allen’s predilections.

Magic in the Moonlight
Written and Directed by Woody Allen
Starring Colin Firth, Emma Stone, and Eileen Atkins
Rated PG-13

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More human than the humans

Few film franchises have been rebooted as successfully as the Planet of the Apes. When Rise of the Planet of the Apes arrived in 2011, audiences were still smarting from Tim Burton’s bloated and boring remake of the eponymous 1969 film that started the series. No one had very high expectations that a little known director and a screenwriter whose previous film was 1997’s The Relic would have much success. But Rise was a revelation, combining an emotionally rich stories about fathers and sons with CGI so exquisite the apes seemed, well, real. At the end of the film, the research that helped make the apes smart and capable of speech also ended up creating a virus that killed 99.8% of the human population, setting up the ape-ruled world in the future. The movie earned rave reviews, a huge group of new Apes fans, and great anticipation for its sequel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which is now out. It’s a great science fiction action film, but despite what some fans are claiming, it’s hardly perfect.

Dawn takes place ten years after the events in Rise, with very few humans left alive and those who survived are isolated and increasingly desperate. The super-smart apes from the first film have settled into the Muir Forest north of San Francisco, where they are led by Rises’ hero Caesar (Andy Serkis, doing motion-capture). The colony has multiplied and thrived, with only the elders remembering the horrible treatment they faced as captive science projects. Caesar’s best friend Koba (Toby Kebbel) is particularly scarred, both literally and psychologically. When his son is shot by a terrified human named Carver (Kirk Acevedo), Koba is the first to demand swift, violent revenge. Instead, Caesar is persuaded by a human named Malcom (Jason Clarke) to allow Malcolm and other survivors from San Francisco to restart a hydroelectric dam in the ape’s territory. Because of Carver’s loathing of apes, who he blames for the plague, and Koba’s loathing of humans, who he sees as dishonest and cruel, the truce between the humans and apes becomes increasing tentative. Finally, after Koba watches the humans, led by a former soldier named Dreyfus (Gary Oldman), in San Francisco massing arms for a coming battle, correctly assuming the apes are their target but incorrectly assuming the attack was imminent, he takes a page from Hitler’s early playbook and starts all-out war.

As with Rise, the computer-generated special effects are wondrous, and unlike the Pandorans in Avatar or the various creatures in Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, the apes are believable, not only in their physicality but in their emotional depth. They are more sympathetic and, oddly, better actors than the humans. Serkis and his animators created a more interesting – charismatic, wise, and agonizingly moral – character than Clarke, Oldman, or Keri Russell (as Malcolm’s girlfriend) do. Mostly this is because Caesar is a better and better-written character. The humans are a bit dull, and a few of them are written as plot points, annoying ones. Carver is the worst action film trope, the angry, dumb guy with a itchy trigger finger. Russell’s character Ellie, the only female in the film to speak, is walking stereotype, the smart motherly hero.

It’s been a summer of films about future dystopias, and like most science fiction, their plots are commentaries on contemporary anxieties. X-Men: Days of Future Past is about preemptive strikes and the fear of technology, and Snowpiercer is about how climate change will exasperate economic inequalities. Dawn is about war, trusting and mistrusting the Other, and the vicious power of old traumas. It was hard for me not to think about the current war between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza, though the film, made last year, is probably not commenting on that. The filmmakers are showing that war seems to be both absurd and inescapable, started by anger and selfishness, and suffered by so, so many innocents. With its utterly fatalistic ending, Dawn depicts the bleakest of this summer’s dystopias. Whether or not this is entertaining is unclear.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Directed by Matt Reeves
Written by Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver
Starring Andy Serkis, Jason Clarke, and Keri Russell
Extraordinarily violent, yet rated PG-13
Unnecessarily in 3-D

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Boy, is it good

Richard Linklater filmed Boyhood over 12 years. This is what you hear when the movie is discussed, and it’s an important fact. In 2002, he cast a boy (Ellar Coltrane), his sister (Lorelei Linklater), and their mother (Patricia Arquette) and father (Ethan Hawke). Both Coltrane were eight years old at the time, thought they were playing six and seven respectively; Arquette and Hawke were both major Hollywood actors in their early thirties, playing a recently divorced couple in Texas. Then Linklater filmed them for three or four days every year until Coltrane’s character Mason graduated from high school and went to college, taking them through growing pains, stepfamilies, first loves, and the burgeoning self-awareness of adolescence. Linklater deserves a slew of awards simply for overcoming such a film’s logistical difficulties – flighty children, lengthy contracts, the ravages of time and history – but he and his actors also managed to create a film as true to the emotional journey of childhood and modern American family life as any in a generation.

Like the life that Linklater is depicting, Boyhood does not have a plot as much as it has a series of vignettes focused around key moments in Mason’s childhood. At the beginning of the film, his mother is struggling, he and his sister Samantha (the younger Linklater) are squabbling, and their father, their mother’s ex, is a somewhat listless manboy who loves his children but does not know how to be a good father. The parents fight when Mason’s mother comes home after his father had them on a day of fun and the kids have not yet done their homework; Mason and Samantha watch them argue from an upstairs window and wonder whether they’ll get back together.

A few years later, the mother brings Mason to her psychology class, where he meets her professor, who ends up becoming Mason’s first stepfather. While he has money and children Mason and Samantha’s age, it becomes quickly apparent that he is a bully and a drunk, and the mother, Mason, and Samantha are forced to flee. In a new school and a new town, Samantha is livid as a teen-agers often are, while Mason is scared, confused, and watchful. His mother overcomes abuse and poverty and his father overcomes immaturity and impossible dreams, and Mason marvels at the beauty in front of him, recording it through his camera lens.

As he grows older – through junior high, drinking with friends, trying to act older, his first job, dealing with his mother’s next husband – Mason is quiet as he observes the world around him and struggles to live up to the expectations of his parents and parental figures. When he does speak, his vocalized introspection is precocious but never seems to be written by Linklater, but rather it seems to come authentically from Mason, channeled by the brilliant young Coltrane. Like many adolescents, Mason makes pronouncements that verge on delusions of grandeur, and they are sweet and funny, but they are also utterly believable. The last scene of the film, for instance, depicts him and three new friends from his college dormitory finding enlightenment through mushrooms. They speak in the banalities of mistaken profundity, and I found it oddly glorious.

Linklater’s naturalistic direction, with which he made minor masterpieces in Dazed & Confused and the Before Sunrise trilogy, is perfect for Boyhood. The film feels like documentary, like cinéma vérité, but the emotional power of his choices in editing, of the acting he elicited from his actors both young and old (particularly Arquette, doing the best work of her career), and in the beauty of his landscapes and light is something we usually only see in finely crafted narrative films. Boyhood is not perfect – it’s long and rough in places and the plotting seems a forced at times – but it is nonetheless an extraordinary monument to the power of art, film, and family.

Boyhood
Written and Directed by Richard Linklater
Starring Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke
Inexplicably Rated R

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Let’s put on a show! (Or, rather, let’s make an album!)

trailer-for-once-directors-new-film-begin-again-with-mark-ruffalo

In the first scene of Begin Again, a blond Brit named Steve (James Corden) finishes his song at an open mic night in New York’s Lower East Side and coaxes his friend Greta (Keira Knightley) onto stage. She reluctantly, almost begrudgingly sings “A Step You Can’t Take Back,” which she claims is new, and the audience barely notices. There is some polite applause, which Greta rolls her eyes at. She’s already down because, as we quickly find out, she has just broken up with a boyfriend of five years, an up-and-coming rock star (Dave, played by Adam Levine). However, in the middle of the crowd is an enrapt, drunk, mussed man (Dan, played by Mark Ruffalo) in his 40s, who is in awe. Neither the audience in the club nor in the movie theater knows why; the latter audience finds out ten minutes later when we see the scene from Dan’s perspective. As he watches Greta’s perform, he imagines other instruments joining in, all played by invisible musicians. Suddenly, the song soars. And we get a lesson in music producing, which is what Dan does for a living. Or had. He was fired that morning.

With this set up, the rest of the plot shouldn’t be too hard to predict. Dan persuades Greta to work with him. Dan needs to be redeemed as a producer after a drunken, depressed crash brought on by his divorce from Miriam (Catherine Keener) – which means he needs to be redeemed as a husband and father to Violet (Hailee Steinfeld), too. Greta needs to prove herself as a songwriter and performer after being relegated to being “Dave’s girlfriend,” particularly after Dave cheated on her with a record company assistant. Without any money, Dan and Greta decide to record an album entirely outside, from alley ways to rooftops. They recruit a band, pay them on the cheap, and start recording one delightful song after another. Meanwhile, they start developing a powerful, possibly romantic, friendship and work to repair their other relationships.

The plot of Begin Again is slight, using a few of the clichés of the let’s-put-on-a-show! genre and focusing on a rather simple redemption narrative in order to string together a bunch of beautifully directed musical performances. Writer-director John Carney’s last major feature, the magical Oscar-winning Once, had an even thinner story to link an Irish love story. That story was emotionally much more powerful, possibly because it snuck up on you, acted as it was by utter unknowns. Ruffalo, Knightley, Keener, and Levine are the opposite: They are huge stars and are all a bit distracting at first. Can Knightley Sing? Can Levine, an actual rock star, act? Is Ruffalo going to do that disheveled loser thing for the whole movie?

Yes, yes, and yes.

Knightley is always good, utterly convincing in both period dramas like Atonement and contemporary comedies like Bend it like Beckham. And she’s stunningly beautiful, as delicate as blown glass, and she has a sturdy charisma that standard ingénues tend to lack. With Begin Again, we discover she can also sing, with a voice something like a cross between Suzanne Vega and Lucinda Williams. Combining her emotional expressiveness and her voice makes for powerful musical numbers, particularly when she sings to Dave’s voicemail with “Like a Fool” or when she gleefully finishes the album accompanied by Violet’s guitar with “Tell Me If You Wanna Go Home.” Levine, who acts with smooth naturalism, gets the final song, however, singing the Greta-penned “Lost Stars” as a grand and gorgeous audition for the Oscars. (“Falling Slowly” from Once won Best Original Song in 2008.)

Ruffalo doesn’t sing in the movie; during the musical numbers that he is producing, he is mostly a conductor and infectious cheerleader. Dan is a stereotype of an aging music executive – his theme song is probably LCD Soundsystem’s “I’m Losing My Edge” – and Ruffalo’s performance is reminiscent of the early disheveled stoner roles that made him a star. As Dan and Greta grow closer, he becomes more believable. By the end, however, the film belongs to Knightley and Greta, who refuses to compromise, in music and in love.

Begin Again
Written and Directed by John Carney
Starring Keira Knightley, Mark Ruffalo, and Adam Levine
Inexplicably Rated R

 

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