An avenging assemblage of superheroes

Despite the enraging experience of having to see the film a promotional screening — at which they tagged and bagged my phone out of the absurd fear that I would use it to record the whole movie and then sell it, even though the movie has been out in international markets for a week — I loved The Avengers.

I just saw a headline online that asked, “Is The Avengers the greatest comic book movie ever?” It’s the one of the click-here-and-argue-in-the comments sort of headlines that websites love because it gets readers to stick around and earn the site advertising revenue. I don’t know what the writer’s answer was, since I do my best not to read reviews before I write mine. But I know what my response to the question would be: No, it’s not the greatest comic book movie ever. I think there’s a case for The Dark Knight and possibly the original Superman; those are profound films that are also fabulous popcorn movies. The Avengers is about as deep as its superfluous 3-D effects, but it is the most entertaining, and most expertly made, big-budget action movie of the year. It’s a great way to start the summer movie season. Continue…

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Don’t get married

I kind of loathed The Five-Year Engagement. My review will run in LGBT Weekly next week, but it’s open now, so here’s a preview.

I’m currently getting divorced, so filmed engagements have started to irk me, and as I watched the opening scenes of The Five-Year Engagement, in which Tom (Jason Segel) fumbles through his proposal to Violet (Emily Blunt), I thought, “This is going to end in tears, you nitwits.” Sometimes a movie hits a little too close to home, and it’s hard to react to it as a critic when you’re so busy reacting to it as yourself. Of course, all criticism is personal, just as taste is, and all critics are idiosyncratic about what they like and what the hate. And so, I had a terrible time watching The Five-Year Engagement. I am fed up with the character Jason Segel has typecast himself as, and I found the script both absurd and retrograde, complete with offensive stock supporting characters and a subtly anti-feminist message. Continue…

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Whit Stillman, wordy WASP

I miss the early 90s. Sort of. Of maybe I miss the days when I thought it would be cool to live in a Whit Stillman movie. Here’s the link to my review, which is also here.

There was a period in the early 1990s when Whit Stillman was going to be the WASP Woody Allen. With Metropolitan and Barcelona, Stillman had made hyper-verbal, hyper-intellectual, and hyper-ironic comedies about privileged white people from the Northeast, been nominated for an Oscar for the former and lauded by critics for the latter. But 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, about the “urban haute bourgeoisie” trying to make sense of disco, didn’t work; it was stilted, a bit dull and not very funny. And then Stillman disappeared for 13 years. I adored his first two movies, so I was thrilled that he had a new one; I was primed to love Damsels in Distress. As Violet says in the film, “The past is over, so why not romanticize it?” But Violet, as it turns out, is somewhat of a dolt. Damsels in Distress reminded me of what I loved about Manhattan and Barcelona; I laughed and laughed. But it also revealed that Stillman has not gotten any better at directing movies or controlling his own wit. Continue…

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Bully them into seeing Bully

Bully isn’t a movie; it’s a feature-length public service announcement. But it’s one everyone should see. Here’s the link to the review in LGBT Weekly, and here it is also:

Unfortunately, most people only know about the documentary Bully because the Motion Picture Association gave it an R rating for an utterance of the word “fuck,” refused an appeal, and then, following a nationwide outcry orchestrated by the mogul and PR genius Harvey Weinstein, relented and gave the film a PG-13. The rating matters particularly for this film because it is about the bullying of teenagers, and with an R rating not only would it be a great deal harder for teens to get into the movie theater, but few schools would show the film or take students on a field trip to see it. And every teenager in the United States should be forced to see Bully. While it is not a particularly impressive piece of filmmaking, it is extraordinarily effective, and badly needed propaganda for a righteous cause. Continue…

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Don’t go in the basement!

OMG. I loved The Cabin in the Woods. It was all Whedonesque and awesomesauce. I dunno when it will appear on the LGBT Weekly site, so here’s my review.

If you’ve seen the ads for The Cabin in the Woods, I think you may have the impression that it is the same old horror movie: a group of sexy, stupid, and doomed young people go to the woods for a weekend of liquor and sex and they get attacked by creepy things wielding big knives. That movie has been made before, and you’ve seen it. But there are some quick glimpses in the ads of some things that don’t fit in the traditional hack-and-slash-in-the-woods film. You see a room full of computers, and some technicians are fiddling around with knobs and keyboards and on monitors above them, we see the nubile victims. They’re being watched, and maybe their fates are being controlled by these nerds. This makes the movie a little bit different, because it’s not a lone nut pulling the strings, as in Saw, but rather something like NASA. Continue…

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