REVIEW: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012): Written and directed by: Lorene Scafaria. Starring: Steve Carrell, Keira Knightley and Martin Sheen. Rated R (Drugs, language and some shocking violence). Running time: 101 minutes.

3 stars (out of four)

A massive asteroid is on a collision course for Earth and humanity has only three weeks left in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, which sort of reimagines The Road as a mainstream road trip comedy, an idea that is far more successful than may initially sound.

In the opening scene, Dodge Peterson (Steve Carrell) learns mankind’s last hope of destroying the asteroid has failed and that the countdown is now official: In three weeks, Earth will be reduced to rubble. Upon hearing the news, his wife doesn’t hesitate. She bolts, leaving behind an unhappy marriage and Dodge, now single and alone as he faces a strange new world.

Life on Earth, needless to say, goes berserk. Cell phone towers shut down, commercial airliners stop flying and most people who haven’t already killed themselves make a mad dash to cross everything off their bucket list. There are riots and orgies and ample opportunities to try all the hard drugs you were always curious about.

But Dodge can’t quite get into the spirit of the insanity. He wants to spend his final days with the love of his life, a title that apparently no longer (and probably never did) describe his wife. He meets Penny (Keira Knightley), a twentysomething Brit who lives in his apartment building. They strike up a friendship because they seem to each other like kindhearted, reasonable people in a world that has suddenly become the opposite.

They learn they have something in common. Dodge wants to reconnect with his high school sweetheart – he has always regretted not marrying her when he had the chance – but he hasn’t a clue where to find her. Penny desperately wishes she could be with her family in London – she always ditched them in favor of spending time with whatever schmuck she was dating at the time – but she missed the last plane out of the United States. They will both be alone when the asteroid hits.

When riots break into their building, Dodge hatches a plan. He knows someone with a plane who can take her to her family. She has a car and can drive him to the childhood home of his old flame where he hopes to learn more about her present whereabouts. If she takes him to the house, he’ll take her to the plane. And so they embark on a trip through New Jersey, picking up a dog alone the way (a needless but undeniably adorable inclusion).

Occasionally, the movie takes a narrative shortcut – they conveniently pass through the neighborhood of an old friend who supplies a working car, access to a satellite phone, etc. – for which it may be forgiven; the end is nigh after all and time is short.

The script focuses more on character development, allowing the friendship between Dodge and Penny to gradually blossom. Typically, when two big stars of opposite sexes share marquee billing in a film, it is assumed their characters will fall in love. A few contrived obstacles might stall them but we understand that these are tedious delays of the inevitable. This is not quite the case in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. The possibility of a romance floats in the air but the movie doesn’t force it. They might fall for each other, they might not. Mostly, Dodge and Penny have bigger concerns and we spend the majority of the film getting to know them as they get to know each other.

Steve Carrell and Keira Knightley create a believable relationship. Mr. Carrell in particular has proven himself to be an actor of surprising range. He often plays everyday types we feel we know – an incompetent but well-intentioned boss, a comic-book collecting social-phobe – but he is capable of broader comedy as well. Here he plays a sedate and melancholic man who, aside from the occasional swig of a cough syrup and vodka cocktail, is keeping a good sense of humor given the situation. Ms. Knightley is convincing and charming as a flighty spirit who sees her fickle and indecisive lifestyle with new perspective in light of humanity’s impending doom.

Writer/director Lorene Scafaria nimbly walks a tightrope with regard to the film’s tone. The early portions are dressed in some very funny, darkly comic gags but by the end, the movie reveals its ooey-gooey sentimentality. When we get there though, the film has earned the right to be sentimental because we are invested in the characters and care about them. A divergent scene between Dodge and his father (Martin Sheen) feels a bit hollow, as though it was cobbled together from father-son conversations in other movies, but the misstep is brief.

Watching the film, I was reminded of last year’s 50/50 about a young man grappling with cancer, another life-affirming movie that finds a warm and inviting tone in grim subject matter. 50/50 is hardly the most emotionally raw film made about cancer but it is certainly one of the funniest and most enjoyable, and achieves this without sacrificing authenticity. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World does something similar for the end of days.

The characters in Seeking a Friend alternately riot, party, pray, weep and love in reaction to news of the world’s demise and today’s filmmakers appear to be taking similarly varied approaches to the subject. Some craft bleak and beautiful tragedies, others make overblown action blockbusters. Lorene Scafaria has made a charming and clever romantic comedy. I suppose the apocalypse is what you make it.

- Steve Avigliano, 6/25/12

REVIEW: Brave

Brave (2012): Directed by: Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman and Steve Purcell. Written by: Mark Andrews, Steve Purcell, Brenda Chapman and Irene Mecchi. Featuring the voices of: Kelly Macdonald, Billy Connolly and Emma Thompson. Rated PG (Mild bear slaying). Running time: 93 minutes.

2 ½ stars (out of four)

Disney/Pixar’s Brave features a princess, a castle and a witch’s spell but lacks the majesty needed to place it in the ranks of classic Disney fairytales. Neither is the film one of Pixar’s best, having little of the emotional depth or narrative subtlety we have come to expect from the studio’s finest works. Instead, Brave settles for being a lively and energetic, though mostly unoriginal, piece of kids’ entertainment.

The princess is Merida (voiced by Kelly Macdonald), a spunky tomboy who has inherited a love of archery from her father, a medieval Scottish king. She bounds about the woods on horseback shooting practice targets and boasting an impressive marksmanship, her red curls bouncing and billowing behind her. Her mother (Emma Thompson), however, has no patience for such unladylike shenanigans. As a future queen, Merida should be preparing for marriage not prancing around, pretending to be a warrior.

The King (Billy Connolly) encourages his daughter. He is a towering, barrel-chested brute of a man with one wooden leg in place of the one he lost in battle with a great bear. He is known in his kingdom as the Bear King, having a special knack for slaying the beasts (except, of course, the one that got away with his leg). Perhaps he sees something of himself in Merida – his only other children are his three sons, an impish trio of toddlers still too young for warfare – and he hesitates before inviting the Three Clans to the castle so that his daughter may select a husband from the first-born sons of the Clans’ leaders, as is tradition.

The Clans are a motley bunch and their sons aren’t much to choose from. At any rate, Merida rejects the idea of a forced marriage and sets out to change her fate. Enter the witch and the spell, the latter of which Merida hopes will change her mother’s adamant stance on marriage. What follows are some unfortunate misunderstandings and a few human-to-bear transformations, a plot development that should be whimsical and enchanting but is mostly silly more than anything else. The movie plays this magical turn for laughs; the big reveal occurs in a slapstick sequence that goes on far too long.

Around this point, you can feel the movie grasping for ideas. There is potential here for a grand tale, one that carries some real emotional heft, and to see the movie opt for an easier route is a bit disappointing. The development of the mother-daughter conflict (and their subsequent bonding and reconciliation) follows obvious and familiar paths; more than one scene seems primed for Brave-themed Mother’s Day cards.

The characters also have a tendency to over-explain themes and plot points. Pixar films are usually more trusting of their audience; the best of them expect us to get what’s going on without announcing (and repeating) it.

This is still a Pixar film though and the earmarks of their high standards for animation are all here. The landscapes are vividly depicted in sweeping wide shots and the characters’ faces are subtle and expressive in ways few animated films achieve.

But the arc of the story never matches the ambition of the visuals or the grace with which Pixar’s animators render them. Brave rests comfortably in that lower tier of Pixar films alongside the Cars movies and the latter portions of Up (the opening sequence of that film remains something of a self-contained masterpiece), which is to say that it is solid family entertainment on par with or exceeding the output of other animation studios. It is bright and cheerful and full of clever moments in spite of the loudly grinding gears of its predictable plot. That the film might have been better makes its modest success more than a little underwhelming.

- Steve Avigliano, 6/22/12

REVIEW: Prometheus

Prometheus (2012): Dir. Ridley Scott. Written by: Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof. Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Idris Elba, Logan Marshall-Green and Charlize Theron. Rated R (Graphic violence and the appropriate swearing for such occasions). Running time: 124 minutes.

3 stars (out of four)

In Prometheus, scientists land on a breathtaking world many millions of miles from Earth and, as is often the case, some pretty horrible things are waiting for them there.

A kind-of-sort-of prequel to the Alien films, Prometheus reveals its relation to those movies only loosely at first, mostly by borrowing their imagery and visual style, and builds a new mythology meant to coexist with the already established franchise. Knowledge of how all these parts from various films fit together is inessential to enjoying this one though and, at any rate, the mythology may or may not be too important. This is a straightforward sci-fi thriller wrapped in lofty ideas and a complex plot but its pleasures are relatively simple.

Onscreen text informs us the year is 2093 and that a crew of seventeen is onboard the spaceship Prometheus heading toward an undisclosed location. If you’ve seen movies like this before, not the least of which being the Alien films, you will recognize that seventeen is a large number of characters and that something bad will surely happen to at least a few (and quite probably many more) of them before the movie is over. Your intuitive suspicions will be reinforced when you learn that only a handful of these characters get substantial scenes and more than one of the supporting players are outright jerks. I trust you see where this is going.

Among the main characters are Elizabeth (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie (Logan Marshall-Green), archaeologists who discover a pattern in several otherwise unrelated cave paintings across the Earth. The pattern points to a distant galaxy where, they believe, they will find the intelligent beings that created humans some millennia ago. An aged billionaire (Guy Pearce underneath a lot of makeup) agrees to fund a mission that will send them and a crew of technicians and scientists to that galaxy (specifically one moon in that galaxy) to see if they can make contact. Leading them is an icy corporate overseer, Meredith (Charlize Theron).

Also onboard is David (Michael Fassbender), an artificial intelligence robot. While the crew slept in a cryogenic stasis for two years en route to their destination, David was awake, studying human culture (old movies, mostly) and learning ancient languages so that he may hopefully translate an alien-human conversation should there be one.

Noomi Rapace, the original girl with the dragon tattoo, is an intensely focused and amazingly resourceful heroine and Charlize Theron’s cold, calculating performance is a welcome reprieve from all the shouting she did in Snow White (I swear I could hear her in the theater next door). Logan Marshall-Green is a likable actor, though I don’t buy the character’s flippancy in the face of such monumental discoveries (or maybe Mr. Marshall-Green is just too ruggedly handsome to convincingly play a scientist). As the ship’s gruff captain, Idris Elba is a delightfully charismatic presence. It says something about a person when, after being cryogenically frozen for two years, the first thing he does is smoke a cigarette.

Michael Fassbender, however, steals the show. His tone of voice and facial tics always seem on the verge of showing emotions aside from the polite conviviality David has been programmed to convey. In a subtle way then, Mr. Fassbender’s performance gives depth to ideas the script only dances around regarding the extent of David’s humanity. We watch his reactions closely: Was that menace in his voice, or just the unsympathetic reasoning of a computer?

The script, written by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, introduces a lot of enticing mysteries, including David, who seems to know something the other don’t. There is also the far grander question which Elizabeth and Charlie intend to ask when they meet their makers-in-question: If aliens created humans, for what purpose did they do it? And why leave clues in the cave paintings? The film gets a lot of mileage out of dangling these mysteries in front of us, though I am not sure they all get resolved in satisfying ways. Prometheus cares about its existential intrigue only so far and then it cares about the more obvious joy of watching humans get murdered by creepy-crawlies.

The score by Marc Streitenfeld creates a majestic mood as the scientists explore the alien moon and its runes, rightly characterizing their discoveries as the greatest in mankind’s history. But the characters don’t always see it this way. They’re too busy endangering their lives in all sorts of reckless ways. In their version of Earth circa 2093 are there no horror movies to teach them that they should never reach out and touch, much less taunt, an unidentified tentacle?

Prometheus is not without its sophistications, however. It is marvelous to look out and boasts one of the best production designs in a movie in perhaps years. Director Ridley Scott, who also made the first Alien, adds splashes of color to his earlier film’s rusty palette; consoles in the ship’s sleek interior light up yellow and purple.

There is also a wonderful attention to detail. Hours after waking from their two-year slumber the crew dons their spacesuits for the first time and their movements are understandably clumsy. When they try to cram into a small rover, their large helmets bump up against each other. Not many movies include moments like that.

Prometheus is tense and exciting enough that you do not mind that it neglects to answer every question it raises (or even most of them), at least not until you are well on your way out of the theater and discussing it. The elaborate backstory ends up being a little beside the point and I wonder why it was included if it was to be left undeveloped. There will probably be a second film that addresses the unsolved mysteries but am I the only one who wishes movies would just stand on their own without always setting themselves up for a sequel?

- Steve Avigliano, 6/11/12

REVIEW: Snow White and the Huntsman

Snow White and the Huntsman (2012): Dir. Rupert Sanders. Written by: Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini. Based on Snow White by the Brothers Grimm. Starring: Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron, Chris Hemsworth, Sam Claflin and Sam Spruell. Rated PG-13 (Some scary creatures). Running time: 127 minutes.

2 stars (out of four)

In Snow White and the Huntsman, the evil Queen’s mirror slides off the wall in a metallic ooze and takes on the shape of a cloaked figure. Later, we see a majestic forest where a white elk stands beneath a tree filled with nymphs. During the climactic battle, our heroes fight warriors made of black glass shards that shatter on contact and reform instantly. The visuals in this film are bold and stunning and they mean absolutely nothing.

Snow White would seem to be a sturdy enough classic for another pointlessly gorgeous reimagining but when the quality of storytelling is this lazy, the barrage of dazzling effects feels like an exercise in extravagance or, worse, like a crutch.

The tale is a familiar one though perhaps told a shade darker than usual. A deceptive beauty named Ravenna (Charlize Theron) weds a widowed king and, after murdering him on their wedding bed, claims the throne. She has a grab bag of magical powers that include eternal youth, great strength and, I’m pretty sure, a few telekinetic abilities. The one condition of her sorcery is that she must be the fairest woman in the land. So she rules her kingdom with tyrannical vanity, literally sucking the life out of all the pretty girls. Assisting her is her brother Finn (Sam Spruell), a wormy creep who steals the occasional incestuous glance at his sister.

Ravenna’s rule is threatened when one day her talking mirror delivers some bad news: She is no longer the fairest of them all. That title belongs to the recently matured Snow White (Kristen Stewart), the King’s only daughter and rightful heir, who has been locked away in a tower since the Queen’s takeover years earlier. (One of the biggest suspensions of disbelief the film asks of us is accepting that the pouty Kristen Stewart is fairer than Charlize Theron.)

The rivalry between Snow White and the Queen is never absorbing though, largely because of the performances of Ms. Stewart and Ms. Theron. This incarnation of Snow White, with a vaguely weepy expression permanently fixed on her face, is a lousy heroine. She has no spunk or life; she wanders around without agency, letting other people make her decisions for her. Ms. Theron, meanwhile, turns the dial to eleven too often, too quickly, never giving the wretched Queen a chance to earn her reputation as a feared villain. She is loud and shrill but not menacing.

Actors take a backseat to everything else in this movie though. Snow White escapes into the Dark Forest, which gives the film’s art directors and set designers another opportunity to flex their creative muscles. Look out, Snow White! That tree branch is really a snake! Get down! A troll is heading right for you! One after another, the movie throws its ideas at us but they do not add up to anything; the filmmakers fail to build a cohesive world where all these different parts could fit together.

The only two men brave enough to face the digitized terrors of the Dark Forest and find Snow White are a huntsman named Eric (Chris Hemsworth), who the Queen hires by dangling before him the prospect of reviving his dead wife, and William (Sam Claflin), a childhood friend of Snow White’s. Eric and Snow White engage in the standard squabbling between movie tough guys and distressed damsels but wait! Did they just share an extended, melancholic stare? Yep, they must be in love. They are, after all, the film’s top-billed stars so a romance between them is a foregone conclusion. Add the old friend William and we have ourselves a love triangle. (Never mind that William is a total bore.)

Some dwarves show up too (seven of them) and they take turns being quaint, wise and off-color. Like everything else in the film, however, they are cogs in a beautiful machine that has no purpose or function. The final battle is predictably well shot and edited but also dull and forgettable.

Snow White and the Huntsman is also hurt by a clunky script full of groaners spoken in faux-Victorian language. Movies like this tend to fall back on flowery dialogue in an attempt to cover up how vacuous the characters’ conversations are but all this really does is force us to decode the language before we realize just how dumb it is. “The forest gains strength from your weakness,” explains Eric. All right. Whatever that means. Later, when giving Snow White advice on how to kill a man, he instructs her not to remove her dagger until she sees her victim’s soul. What? This guy is a master hunter and that’s the best tip he can give?

The movie assumes we will take its hokey, underdeveloped mythology wholesale and without question. There is magic but we never get a sense of its limits or its rules. The spells and curses and fluttering fairies only exist to justify the top shelf set pieces. Snow White and the Huntsman tries to be epic and profound but all it is is sleepy and dopey.

- Steve Avigliano, 6/4/12

REVIEW: Men in Black 3

Men in Black 3 (2012): Dir. Barry Sonnenfeld. Written by: Etan Cohen. Based on the graphic The Men in Black, written by Lowell Cunningham. Starring: Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Jemaine Clement, Michael Stuhlbarg and Emma Thompson. Rated PG-13 (Blue, green and orange blood). Running time: 106 minutes.

2 ½ stars (out of four)

Sure, the world didn’t need a Men in Black 3 but it exists and, hey, look at that: it’s not bad. It’s not as good as the first Men in Black, an entertaining movie that featured Will Smith at the peak of his charm and likability and had a clever, original concept (always the best thing going for it). I can recall almost nothing about Men in Black II except that I was excited entering the theater and disappointed exiting the theater. I was twelve at the time with much lower standards and expectations than I have today, so that’s saying something. I imagine my twelve-year-old self would have been much happier leaving Men in Black 3, a slight but enjoyable sequel.

The movie opens with a jailbreak from LunarMax (you know, the secret prison we built in one of the Moon’s craters to house alien prisoners). The escapee is Boris the Animal (though he prefers just Boris), a burly Boglodite with a biker beard and a nasty overbite (an unrecognizable Jemaine Clement chewing the scenery). Boris has been imprisoned for more than forty years after the Men in Black, top-secret government protectors of Earth and all-around super-agents, prevented him from destroying the planet in 1969.

Our very own Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) was the one who put him away so naturally Boris’s first plan of action is to exact revenge. But he doesn’t just want to kill K. Boris also lost his left arm in his scuffle with K and he plans to get it back by time-traveling to 1969 and killing K before the arm is severed. (Now seems as good a time as any to say that Boris’s right hand opens up and is home to spider that shoots deadly spikes. If you get a kick out of that sort of thing in moves – I know I did when I was twelve – it’s pretty neat.)

Meanwhile, Boris’s Boglodite buddies in the present seek to finish what they started years earlier: to demolish Earth. This leaves K’s partner, Agent J (Will Smith), to go back in time too and kill both present day-Boris and 1969-Boris to ensure that this whole messy affair never happens at all. If you find yourself already struggling to keep track of everything, worry not. Men in Black 3 does not take its temporal tampering very seriously and the pressing dramatic question boils down to the usual: Can J defeat the bad guy in time to save the day?

An essential ingredient in the previous Men in Black movies was the comedic chemistry between Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, with Mr. Jones playing straight man to Mr. Smith’s fast-talking wisecracking. Though Mr. Jones is mostly absent in this film, replacing him is Josh Brolin, who plays the young Agent K and does a fine Tommy Lee Jones impression. His presence helps to freshen up a stale formula and give Will Smith (whose shtick has long ago gotten old) someone new to play off of.

Most of the early gags fall flat on their face – the jokes during a visit to a Chinese restaurant are at best corny and at worst racist – but the movie picks up as it goes along, finding its stride in the 1960’s scenes. The retro MIB headquarters is filled with chattering typists with bob haircuts and aliens wearing big bubble helmets that recall the sci-fi imagery of the era. And there are some clever bits regarding MIB technology still in development. (An early version of the pocket-sized neuralyzer memory-eraser fills an entire room.) I also particularly enjoyed Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg), a fifth-dimensional being capable of seeing all possible realities before the real one plays out.

The studio was no doubt trying to get this movie made for years and one gets the impression that a dozen or more scripts floated past the desks of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones before they settled on one that was good enough. And indeed, Men in Black 3 is just that: good enough. I find it hard to imagine this working a fourth time around but, then again, that’s exactly what I was saying about this movie a few months ago, so I suppose you never know.

- Steve Avigliano, 6/2/12