REVIEW: The Avengers

The Avengers (2012): Written and directed by Joss Whedon. Story by: Zak Penn and Joss Whedon. Based on The Avengers comic books by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston, and Samuel L. Jackson. Rated PG-13 (Crash, bang, boom). Running time: 143 minutes.

2 stars (out of four)

In The Avengers, we finally learn what happens when Thor’s mighty hammer comes crashing down on the impenetrable shield of Captain America. (Spoiler alert!) There is an explosion.

This is just one of many spectacles The Avengers offers, including an aircraft carrier soaring into the sky, a massive metal space worm demolishing Manhattan and the heaving bosom of Scarlett Johansson. If the idea of seeing Iron Man, The Hulk, Thor and Captain America sharing the screen excites you beyond belief, then The Avengers is not just the best movie of the summer, or even the year; it is the greatest movie ever made.

Earth is once again in trouble and the head of the top-secret organization S.H.I.E.L.D., Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), at last has an opportunity to assemble the team of superheroes he has been recruiting over the course of five movies. There is the tech-savvy playboy Tony Stark a.k.a. Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.); Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), the scientist who turns into the not-so-jolly green giant The Hulk when enraged; the extraterrestrial Norse god Thor (Chris Hemsworth); and Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), the cryogenically preserved WWII patriot Captain America.

Not that their personalities matter much in this film; the heroes only appear in diluted form in The Avengers. After all, with so many exciting things happening here, can you blame the film for skimping on something as inconsequential as characters? Loki (Tom Hiddleston), the greasy-haired estranged brother of Thor, has procured a magical blue cube that he will use to open a portal to a distant corner of the universe where a few of his alien cronies wait. He plans to enlist their help to decimate, and presumably take over, our planet.

As you can imagine, The Avengers will need all the help they can get, so Nick Fury has signed up a few more recruits for the forces of good. Jeremy Renner plays Hawkeye, an assassin whose marksmanship with a bow and arrow gives Katniss Everdeen a run for her money. Another invaluable member of the team is the sultry Russian agent, Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson). Ms. Johansson, who excels at playing coy and aloof, need not worry here about her limited range as an actress. As it turns out, her body excels at wearing leather, and it is this skill that is called upon in The Avengers.

The clash of these titans of comic book lore is presented in several plodding action sequences, including an especially mechanical one on the aforementioned aircraft carrier-turned-aircraft. Another takes place on the streets of Manhattan, where product placement conveniently doubles as the mise en scène of billboards and taxicab ads. Just as Thor did, The Avengers gives itself up to corporate uncreativity; it is loud, flashy and fleetingly entertaining but ultimately hollow and pointless. The special effects are absolutely spectacular and utterly soulless.

The film was written and directed by Joss Whedon, who is considered a demigod in some nerd circles (with all due respect to Thor and his Asgardian brethren). Those expecting something witty or cheeky, however, such as Mr. Whedon’s recent horror movie mash-up The Cabin in the Woods, will be disappointed. Any semblance of cleverness in The Avengers is limited to what material Mr. Whedon supplies Robert Downey Jr., who struts around in a Black Sabbath tee shirt, spitting out snarky comments and poking fun at the other heroes. These spare kidding moments are all but drowned out by the deafening assault of the film’s pursuit of blockbuster colossality. Even Samuel L. Jackson’s usual verve feels muted by his busy surroundings.

What a shame, since many of the movie’s jokes are genuinely funny. The very concept of this movie is totally absurd, so why not embrace that silliness and allow the humor to carry over into more than a handful of one-liners?

The movie is also surprisingly boring at times. The first third, which is bogged down with an excess of incomprehensible exposition, is particularly dull. We are expected to wait patiently though, because a lot of cool stuff will surely follow all this tedious jabbering. It must be said though that Mr. Whedon does handle some of this cool stuff pretty well. When the camera whizzes around the streets of New York in a computer-animated frenzy, capturing all our heroes in a single, unbroken shot, it is hard not to momentarily get caught up in the movie’s love of awesomeness for the sake of awesomeness.

Joss Whedon does not include anything unexpected in The Avengers but, to make up for that, he includes a wealth of things we fully expect, and even demand, to see: superheroes smashing superheroes, superheroes smashing supervillains, monologues delivered in monotone, Earth in peril and (spoiler alert!) Earth saved. To try to do anything else would be to risk the film’s status as the greatest ever made.

- Steve Avigliano, 5/7/12

REVIEW: War Horse

War Horse (2011): Dir. Steven Spielberg. Written by: Richard Curtis and Lee Hall. Starring: Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson, Peter Mullan, David Thewlis, Benedict Cumberbach, Tom Hiddleston, Eddie Marsan, Toby Kebbell, Celine Buckens and Niels Arestrup. Rated PG-13 (Mostly bloodless war violence towards humans and horses alike). Running time: 146 minutes.

3 stars (out of four)

My experience with horses is extraordinarily limited. The only time I recall riding one, I was around ten years old and it seemed huge to me. In hindsight I was probably riding a pony but never mind that. My brief equestrian foray left me with two indelible impressions of the animal: its strength – “Don’t pull its tail or it’ll kick you in the face and kill you,” an instructor had gently advised me and the other young riders I was with – and its smell. While no attention is given to the latter in War Horse, the former is more or less its main theme.

You don’t have to be a horse enthusiast to appreciate the beauty of War Horse, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s children’s novel set during the First World War (and also recently made into a Tony Award-winning play). Indeed, it would be hard to miss the visual elegance of the film, which is almost relentlessly beautiful. Mr. Spielberg and his cinematographer James Kamiński make wonderful use of the English countryside’s landscapes, the blue skies and green pastures of which remain unpolluted by the sprawl of modern society.

This is a movie designed to be seen not on a TV or, heaven forbid, a phone, but in a theater where its breath-taking wide shots can fill the big screen: A windmill reflected in a pond’s still waters. Files of soldiers marching through a golden field. Charred black trenches lit by momentary bursts of fire and gunshots. A silhouetted horse and rider against the blood-orange sky of a sunset. To seal the deal, all are set to a typically sweeping John Williams score.

Though War Horse is indisputably gorgeous, its story is sometimes less captivating than the images used to tell it. The movie follows a horse, Joey, opening with his birth and tracing his path across Europe as he changes hands throughout the War. The first to become fixated by Joey is a haggard, alcoholic farmer, Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan), who buys the horse at a market auction and brings him home to his son, Albert (Jeremy Irvine). Ted’s wife, Rose (Emily Watson), scolds him for making such a foolhardy purchase. They need a good workhorse to plow their fields, not a thoroughbred meant for racing like Joey. If they cannot plow the fields, they cannot grow crops and subsequently, they cannot pay their landlord (David Thewlis), an improbably sinister man who revels in the family’s financial troubles.

But how can Rose turn away a horse her son has already so clearly fallen in love with? Albert swears he can train Joey (Albert is the one who christens Joey with his name, though Joey receives a few more names from other friendly humans during his travels) and train him he does. As the leading non-horse in the film, Jeremy Irvine is a passable protagonist. The role of Albert is nothing special and Mr. Irvine seems to have been cast for his pretty face and brilliant blue eyes (which give Elijah Wood’s a run for their money). Still, these opening scenes have a classically Spielbergian feel to them, a wide-eyed and charming innocence.

Once Joey is shipped off to war, however, the film loses some momentum. Had there been more vignettes like the opener, War Horse might have been an overwhelming success but not all of the characters Joey meets or all the situations he gets into are compelling. He charges into battle with a British military captain (Tom Hiddleston), briefly joins a pair of young German soldiers (Leonhard Carow and David Kross), is taken in by a French girl (Celine Buckens) and her grandfather (Niels Arestrup) and eventually finds his way into the trenches.

Steven Spielberg does not depict the trench warfare with anything near the brutal realism of the D-Day sequence from his Saving Private Ryan but he does capture the looming sense of dread in the young soldiers’ faces and there is a stunning moment set to bag pipes when they run out into battle. This segment also features the film’s best scene, a quiet moment when two soldiers – a Brit and a German – meet in no man’s land to untie Joey from tangled barbed wire. The strength of the human drama in this scene eclipses just about every other scene in film.

As you may have guessed from its title though, War Horse is less interested in its human characters than its equine ones. The horses, Joey in particular, are given anthropomorphic qualities such as compassion and self-sacrifice; we can actually understand their motives for behaving the way they do. In one sense, this is remarkable. In another, it’s awfully silly to see a horse glance back longingly at another horse. Whether horses are capable of such emotions I cannot tell you. Perhaps a true horse lover will be enthralled by moments like these.

Watching War Horse is like flipping through a beautifully illustrated history book. It offers an awe-inspiring and romantic view of the past without ever giving you too much of a sense of how it felt to actually live through it. Either you’ll get caught up in Joey’s journey or you won’t. For me, the sheer aesthetic power of the movie was enough even when the story was lacking. It’s probably for the best too that no one mentions the horses’ stench. That might have spoiled the mood.

- Steve Avigliano, 1/13/12

REVIEW: Midnight in Paris

Midnight in Paris (2011): Written and directed by Woody Allen. Starring: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Michael Sheen, Carla Bruni, Corey Stoll, Tom Hiddleston, Kathy Bates and Marion Cotillard. Rated PG-13 (some sexual references). Running time: 100 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

Woody Allen loves Paris. And the Parisians love him right back. That he has taken this long to shoot a film there is something of a wonder. Recently, however, Woody Allen’s films have departed from his hometown of Manhattan and the auteur so beloved by Europeans has gone on something of a world tour of the major European cities.

There was London in the devastatingly understated noir Match Point and Barcelona in the sizzling romantic comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona. There were other lesser films in between and since those but as any Woody Allen fan will tell you (myself included), when a filmmaker of this magnitude still produces a movie a year – this is his 41^st since his debut in 1966 – we are willing to overlook the mediocre efforts in favor of the really good ones.

Midnight in Paris falls perhaps just a shade below the two aforementioned films, standouts of latter-day Woody Allen. This is a comic fantasy akin to the director’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, where a movie star walks off screen and falls in love with a loyal moviegoer. The plot of Midnight in Paris was a surprise to me (I avoided the early reviews from Cannes) and some critics have made a point of not spoiling its story. I am not sure the secrecy is necessary; the film is a delight whether you know what it’s about or not. Still, those looking to see the film fresh can stop here and continue reading after seeing it.

The film opens with Gil (Owen Wilson), a somewhat neurotic Hollywood screenwriter looking to restart his career as a literary novelist, professing his love of Paris in the rain. He would give anything to live in Paris in the Twenties, when the city was a cultural hub of bohemian artists and writers. His fiancé Inez (Rachel McAdams) is not as enthused. There is nothing fun about getting wet, she says. The two are accompanying her parents on a business trip in the City of Light when they bump into an old friend of Inez’s, Paul (Michael Sheen), an insufferably stuffy scholar who is in town to give a lecture on Monet.

Gil needs to get away. Alone, he goes on a late night drunken stroll down the cobblestone streets and, of course, gets lost. At the stroke of midnight, a car stops for him and some lavishly dressed Parisians invite him to a party.

And what a party it is. Elegant partygoers smoke from cigarette holders. There is a pianist playing Cole Porter songs. Gil is in heaven. But when a fellow American, Zelda, introduces him to her husband, Scott Fitzgerald, Gil realizes where he is. Those cigarette holders are not nostalgic kitsch – they’re the real deal. That’s not a well-trained impersonator on the piano – it’s Cole Porter. Somehow Gil has been transported back to Paris in the Golden Age. But just when he’s been invited to Gertrude Stein’s place for a critique of his novel, he’s back in the twenty-first century.

From here, the movie whisks us back and forth between past and present-day Paris. In addition to the Fitzgeralds (played by Alison Pill and Tom Hiddleston), we meet comic caricatures of all the big names that drifted in and out of Parisian cafés and bars in the Twenties including Hemingway (the exceptionally funny Corey Stoll), Stein (Kathy Bates), Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo), Dali (Adrien Brody) and more.

Woody Allen has never been shy about expressing his opinions in his films and he is not subtle in showing his adoration for Paris in both eras. Allen, now 75, has recently taken to casting younger actors to play the parts he might have once written for himself. Owen Wilson is given the Woody Allen shtick here and the choice is a perfect fit. Wilson knows just how to deliver those stammering witticisms without ever coming across as imitating his director. McAdams fulfills the role of Gil’s disenchanted wife, a familiar character in Allen films, and Sheen is excellent as the biting academic. The rest of Allen’s typically strong supporting cast includes the French First Lady Carla Bruni as a museum tour guide and Marion Cotillard as a beauty from the past.

Midnight in Paris is a delightful movie that serves as a love letter to the city and its culture but also provides some wonderful insight late in the film into the ways in which we romanticize and idealize the past. This is probably not the film that will convert a non-fan of Allen (for that I would recommend Match Point and Barcelona or earlier classics such as Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors) but it reaffirms my own love of Allen as all his best films do. It’s no wonder the Parisians love him.

- Steve Avigliano, 6/23/11

REVIEW: Thor

Thor (2011): Dir. Kenneth Branagh. Written by: Ashley Edward Miller, Zach Stentz and Don Payne. Story by: J. Michael Straczynski and Mark Protosevich. Based on the comics by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby. Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins and Stellan Skarsgård. Rated PG-13 (sequences of intense sci-fi action and violence). Running time: 114 minutes. 

2 stars (out of four)

Thor, the latest superhero flick to enjoy the Marvel Studios branding, is a slick and efficient product designed for summer consumption. Many of the Marvel movies in recent years have succeeded because, in spite of their big-budget excesses, they felt like labors of love, made by people with a real appreciation of the films’ characters and mythologies. Thor unfortunately appears to have been made more with product placement and the eventual Avengers tie-in in mind. The result is not a bad film but certainly a disposable one that does little to convince non-fans why the Norse god needed to be brought to screens.

Turns out Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is not actually Norwegian at all but an extraterrestrial being from the mythical world of Asgard where a monarchy is led by the wise King Odin (an eye-patch donning Anthony Hopkins). As the firstborn and rightful heir to the throne, Thor is anxious to begin his reign. Meanwhile, his younger brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) steals jealous glances at the heir apparent. Naturally, no one takes heed of Loki’s less than subtle glowering until it is too late.

Another danger looms outside the kingdom – the age-old enemies of the Asgardians, the Frost Giants, who were long ago defeated by Odin and his army. When a few Frost Giants break into Odin’s palace to steal an ancient relic, Thor insists the formally vanquished enemies are gearing up for another fight. Eager to reignite war with the icy foes, Thor gathers a team of his warrior buddies to pay the villains a visit in spite of his father’s warnings not to. Odin punishes Thor for this disrespect by banishing him to a planet populated by wee mortals – Earth.

Shakespeare veteran Kenneth Branagh directs the film, an apt choice for this story of jealous heirs and regicide. Unfortunately, Branagh’s directorial talent cannot illuminate a dull and uninspired script. What pleasure there might have been in a twisted tale of royal family troubles is drained away by dialogue that relies on faux-fancy talk and characters over-explaining their thoughts and motivations. There are few details of the story that are not belabored in exposition-heavy dialogue.

Thor is not entirely without its entertaining moments though. Back on Earth a young astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) finds the exiled Thor in the New Mexico desert with a fellow scientist (Stellan Skarsgård) and their assistant (Kat Dennings). There are some amusing scenes of Thor adjusting to life on Earth providing some much-need comic relief from the stiffness of the antiquated speech found on Asgard. The film’s occasional sense of humor though rarely pokes fun the hamminess of Thor’s somber mythology. When Thor wields his hammer late in the film and Portman marvels, “Oh my God,” the irony of the line is lost.

The lack of self-awareness is a shame because the film’s extravagant visual design might have lent itself to camp. The costumes have a made-for-TV silliness about them, looking distinctly plastic when they are meant to resemble armor.

As a character, Thor is likable hero. He is a showman and a little cocky, and Chris Hemsworth, a relative newcomer from Australia, plays him well. In fight scenes, we catch him smiling at his own strength and he is amused by the quaint ways of the mortals he meets on Earth. Still, compared with the leads in more character-driven Marvel movies such as Spider-Man and Iron Man, Thor feels two-dimensional. Was this really a character that needed his own film? When he flies with his red cape billowing behind him, can anyone not think he of him as little more than a second-rate Superman?

Thor receives little help from his supporting cast, a wonderful batch of actors all given lifeless roles. Portman, cashing in her last big paycheck before she has a baby, has little to do. Her supposed romance with the hunky god is limited to a handful of flirtatious scenes but nothing that will get anyone’s heart rate up.

The ensemble of warriors that fight by Thor’s side, all of whom are interchangeable and easily discarded, is particularly troublesome. There is mention early on of Jaimie Alexander’s honored place as a woman in the army, but this hardly a consolation for a cardboard cutout character who serves no purpose in the story. And why, if everyone on Asgard talks in a British accent, is the only Asian (Tadanobu Asano) on the planet relegated to speaking monosyllabic Engrish? Similarly, Idris Elba, a black actor, spends the whole movie grunting and snarling. That these characters are included at all only serves as a reminder that all the heroics in the film are carried out by our dashing, blonde-haired, blue-eyed star.

Thor is not an especially bad movie but it makes no effort to surprise us. I have no problem with a movie of this kind featuring a formulaic or familiar story, but when the motions of the plot can be seen from the opening scenes the result is tedium. Escapism entertainment is one thing, but one feels trapped by Thor’s predetermined plotline.

No doubt the film will do well at the box office; saturation marketing ensures that much. But how much longer can studios expect audiences to plop down cash to see these costumed heroes without offering anything new? When I sit down to watch a movie, I’d like to be told a story, not sold a product.

- Steve Avigliano, 5/8/11