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

REVIEW: Moonrise Kingdom

Moonrise Kingdom (2012): Dir. Wes Anderson. Written by: Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola. Starring: Kara Hayward, Jared Gilman, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman and Bob Balaban. Rated PG-13 (Nothing you didn't know about when you were a kid). Running time: 94 minutes.

4 stars (out of four)

Wes Anderson seems to have learned a few things from his previous movie, the stop-motion animation Fantastic Mr. Fox. In the past, some of his films have run dangerously close to being too Wes Anderson – too quirky-cute, too self-consciously hip – and when that happens, his characters feel less like people than they do the tongue-in-cheek creations of a clever filmmaker. The solution to that problem was not, as it turns out, reeling it in or toning down his style, but going all the way with it. Animation offered him a newfound freedom that allowed him to be unapologetically Wes Anderson and the result was one of his best movies.

Moonrise Kingdom, his seventh feature overall, is not animated but it feels like it is. The camera pans from side to side as though Mr. Anderson were shooting on a two-dimensional backdrop. His shots are filled with embellishing details and visual gags, and his characters – a colorful and endearing group of caricatures – bound about these finely detailed sets with a ceaseless energy not often found in live-action people.

The story concerns two children who, on the cusp of adolescence and feeling the potent sting of young love, decide to run off together one summer in 1965. They live on a sparsely populated island in New England where the residents receive their mail by plane and rely on a ferry that runs twice daily for transportation to the mainland.

Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) is plagued with a restless angst she will probably grow out of one day but for the time being her parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) and her three younger brothers must deal with. She has been labeled “emotionally disturbed” by some out-of-touch physician, a diagnosis that is supposed to help her family cope with her issues and properly treat them, but only compounds her isolation and loneliness.

So she reaches out to Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman), a fellow outsider, and the two form an intimate friendship. Sam, an orphan who has been passed around foster families his whole life, is a Khaki Scout at Camp Ivanhoe, a summer camp for boys on the island run by Scout Master Randy Ward (a hilarious Edward Norton). Scout Master Ward is a boy at heart with a deeply held devotion to the Khaki Scout program. When his campers ask what his real job is, he replies that he is a math teacher. No, wait. He changes his answer. His real job is being Scout Master. He’s a math teacher on the side.

We learn through flashbacks how Suzy and Sam met the previous summer and spent the proceeding year as pen pals, keeping one another company through letters and confiding in each other the difficult emotions they can only just barely express in words. They agree they are the only ones who truly understand each other and must run away together.

Naturally, this causes some distress for the adults. Not just Suzy’s parents and the Scout Master but also Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), the lone police officer on the island. He sets out to find the kids with the help of Scout Master Ward’s Khaki Scouts, a motley crew who don’t see the point in bringing Sam back anyway because they hated his guts and are all the happier with him gone.

Moonrise Kingdom is a sweet and very funny movie. Wes Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola write some of their best one-liners and they revel in the idiosyncrasies of their characters. Mr. Anderson has assembled a sprightly cast that is light on their feet and they slip easily into their roles. They help to take what are essentially cartoon characters and give them depth. We get a few brief glimpses into the troubled marriage between Mr. Bishop, a wonderful new variant on Bill Murray’s sad sack persona, and Mrs. Bishop, a chipper but lonely woman who finds companionship in the dopey Captain Sharp.

Bob Balaban has an almost ethereal presence in the film as the island’s resident meteorologist, drifting in and out to narrate portions of the story. Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman and Harvey Keitel also appear in some fine bit parts, getting a chance for some comedic riffing alongside the main cast.

This story does not however belong to the adults, though their myriad issues and quirks could provide Mr. Anderson with material for a dozen more films. Moonrise Kingdom is about the kids and its young stars are wonderful. Suzy and Sam are confronting miniature-sized versions of the problems their grown-up counterparts face and Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman convey this with a subtlety that suggests much life experience.

I hesitate to call the film great and suspect it could fade away with time. It is a breezy film and I can’t quite say how much of it will leave an impression on repeat viewings. Still, the first time around, Moonrise Kingdom wraps you up its dizzy charm and smoothes over its own imperfections. The more time that passes after watching it, the more I think of reasons why this might not be one of Wes Anderson’s best. But his movies have always been more about feeling than thinking and the tone of Moonrise Kingdom is pitch perfect.

The movie is so heartbreakingly small it feels as though you could put it in your pocket. The tone is light and would have you believe that all of this is trivial. But it’s not. At least it’s not to these characters. And that’s something Mr. Anderson misses in some of his films. Occasionally he gets so caught up in the rhythms of his dialogue and the beats of his scenes that he neglects to give his characters real heart. Moonrise Kingdom somehow avoids this. There are moments here of startling honesty that resonate deeply, all the more so because they come by surprise in the midst of this airy comedy.

The soundtrack has its share of typical Wes Anderson tunes – dusty pop songs that capture emotions in flux – but the film’s real treasure is Alexandre Desplat’s score. Mr. Desplat keeps things pitched at “delicate whimsy” for most of the film but he also has a way of making grand the quiet emotions of children.

From our comfortable adult vantage points, we can see these kids’ adventure is minor, even inconsequential. From inside the bubble of childhood (and segregated geographically on their little island), however, it is as huge as life. They are running away from home, eloping in the name of true love and leaving behind their childhoods, ready (they believe) to take on whatever the future holds. The film never condescends to its characters or reveals their naiveté. That much, Wes Anderson assumes we in the audience will supply. Moonrise Kingdom is instead a movie you can escape into; watching it, you can perhaps even recapture a glimpse of what it felt like to run barefoot through the dirt, convinced the world is as big as you are.

- Steve Avigliano, 5/28/12

REVIEW: Battleship

Battleship (2012): Dir. Peter Berg. Written by: Jon Hoeber and Erich Hoeber. Based on the game "Battleship" by Hasbro. Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Liam Neeson, Alexander Skarsgård, Rihanna, Brooklyn Decker, Gregory D. Gadson and Hamish Linklater. Rated PG-13 (Aliens come down to Earth and make a lot of noise). Running time: 131 minutes.

0 stars (out of four)

After seeing Battleship, I left the theater shell-shocked and in that depressed malaise that only the very worst movies can bring out in me. This is the sort of movie that makes you question the way you live your life. Maybe I should donate more to charity? I should really call my parents more often. If the Mayans are right and the end of the world is coming this year, you only have a limited number of hours left. How do you accept the fact that more than two of those were just spent on Battleship? This is a question I do not have the answer to, as I am still grappling with it myself.

Battleship takes its name from the board game. As far as its entertainment value goes, the experience of watching the movie is roughly equivalent to the clean-up process of pulling out those little plastic pegs that always hurt your fingertips.

The opening text informs us that NASA has discovered a distant planet in the so-called Goldilocks Zone (a real term astronomers use). The planet’s orbit is just the right distance from its sun – not too hot, not too cold – and scientists suspect it may support life. So they launch a massive satellite that will transmit a message across untold light years in the hopes that contact will be made.

Well, that was a bad idea. Contact is made but it is they who contact us and their preferred method of communication is through obliterating explosions. Five mysterious objects come hurtling through our atmosphere and crash in the Pacific Ocean. There they float like colossal buoys in the water; they are ships, of course.

Lucky for us, there is an international naval exercise going on nearby. The American and Japanese navies are engaged in some friendly game that is never properly explained. At any rate, they are conveniently present to defend Earth, puny though their weapons may seem compared to those of the aliens.

For Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch), this means a chance at redemption. He is a sloppy, irresponsible sailor and an embarrassment to his older brother (Alexander Skarsgård). After a fistfight with a fellow officer, Hopper’s naval career is at risk, which is particularly awkward since the man he answers to is Admiral Shane (Liam Neeson), the father of his girlfriend (Brooklyn Decker). Hopper was just about to ask the Admiral if he could have his daughter’s hand in marriage when his immature outburst causes the good Admiral to question the young man’s character. If only Hopper could prevent an alien invasion and prove his future father-in-law wrong…

There are other humans in the movie too. Mick (Gregory D. Gadson) is a hulking brute who lost his legs in battle and is just learning to use his new prosthetic limbs. Hamish Linklater plays Cal, the requisite brainy tech guy who spouts computer jargon at all the worst times. And in her debut film role, Rihanna (rather ridiculously cast a petty officer) takes a crack at acting and, by my count, she says all of her lines correctly.

But the Earthlings in Battleship are so hopelessly, pathetically ill-matched against the aliens’ weaponry, rooting for them seems beside the point. Once you get a good look at the alien ships (and director Peter Berg makes sure there are plenty of sudden, dramatic zoom-outs to emphasize their size), our flimsy heroes look especially small.

This is, after all, a summer special effects extravaganza and plausible characters are pretty far down on the list of priorities for this kind of movie. Unfortunately, the action sequences in Battleship feel like second-rate knock-offs of scenes from Michael Bay’s Transformers films and – if this is possible – they are even less coherent. I feel for all those poor computer animators whose hard work was haphazardly tossed together in this confused jumble. (Three different editors are credited on this film.)

Michael Bay at least has style and a vision; Battleship only has a budget it needs to spend. And watching the filmmakers spend that budget seems to be at least part of the appeal of movies like this. Battleship recklessly wastes so much money – on indistinguishable set pieces that just get demolished anyways, on large crowds of extras that appear onscreen for three seconds – I wonder if it might not have been more fun to have a pop-up ticker in the corner of the screen tallying the film’s expenses (more than $200 million).

Battleship goes on and on for a punishingly long 131 minutes, dragging its heels as though it were stalling for time. Peter Berg’s direction is utterly inert and the script by Jon and Erich Hoeber is almost shockingly lazy. All the while, Steve Jablonsky’s musical score beats you over the head, trying to convince you that you are watching something interesting and exciting. In the end though, Battleship turns out to be one big bellyflop.

- Steve Avigliano, 5/22/12

REVIEW: The Dictator

The Dictator (2012): Dir. Larry Charles. Written by: Sacha Baron Cohen, Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer. Starring: Sacha Baron Cohen, Anna Faris, Ben Kingsley and Jason Mantzoukas. Rated R (Cursing, racial slurs, masturbation, nudity, decapitation. All in good fun.) Running time: 83 minutes.

3 stars (out of four)

General Admiral Hafez Aladeen, the autocrat at the center of Sacha Baron Cohen’s new satire The Dictator, is a type of ruler in increasingly short supply of late. His idols, and perhaps former poker buddies, include Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and, of course, Kim Jong-il, to whom this film is lovingly dedicated. These are men who led grand lives of opulence, occasionally stepping out onto the balconies of their shimmering gold palaces to address the famished, oppressed people of their nation and reassure them that the country is in good hands. When Aladeen delivers one such speech to announce that development of weapons-grade uranium is almost complete (to be used for medical purposes, naturally), he can barely keep a straight face.

The same would not be said of Sacha Baron Cohen, the prankster who gave us Brüno, Borat and Da Ali G Show, and master of keeping a straight face. His Aladeen is a ravenous egomaniac whose hatred of the West is matched only by his antisemitism, yet – and this is one of the great pleasures of Mr. Baron Cohen’s comedies – no matter how despicable the character, we can’t help but wind up rooting for him. When Aladeen’s dictatorship faces the threat of becoming a democracy, I’ll be damned if I didn’t find myself hoping he makes it to the UN building in time to declare continued tyranny over his country.

That country is the fictional Wadiya, which we briefly see on a map, its borders cleverly drawn in along the North African coast. The threat of democracy comes from his top political advisor and uncle Tamir (Ben Kingsley, believe it or not, in a fine straight man performance). Aladeen unwittingly finds himself in that capitalist hellhole, the United States, forced to wander the streets of New York as an average American.

How and why this happens I will not say – the other great pleasure of this movie is the breakneck speed at which it races through a dozen or more crazy ideas and twists – except that he meets a young woman from Brooklyn, Zoey (a very funny Anna Faris), who agrees to take him in. Zoey is a Vegan and a feminist who runs an organic grocery store and is on hand to politely correct Aladeen’s political incorrectness.

You might say Sacha Baron Cohen walks a fine line with his movies but the more accurate description would be that he stomps all over that line until it is no longer visible or relevant. He blends smart commentary with crude shock gags and the style works for him. His satire rarely digs deeper than a few barbed one-liners, which may be a wise move. The hypocrisy of dictators is an easy target and he knows it, so he uses his tougher, political jabs sparingly. The remainder of The Dictator is spent on broader, mostly raunchy comedy.

In this area, Mr. Baron Cohen and his creative team are old hands. Director Larry Charles, who helmed Brüno and Borat, is a Seinfeld alum, and co-writers Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer are all writers or producers for Curb Your Enthusiasm, among other TV shows. They ensure that The Dictator has a satisfying laugh quotient: there are a few belly laughs, at least two outrageous gross-out gags, and plenty of chuckles and grins scattered throughout. It helps too to have cameos from John C. Reilly, Chris Parnell, Fred Armisen and many other comedians. Jason Mantzoukas, as Aladeen's weapons developer, has some funny scenes too opposite Sacha Baron Cohen.

The movie is nice and short, leaving little room to stall or get dull. One gets the impression Mr. Baron Cohen and Mr. Charles made a three-hour movie and cut it down to the best possible 83 minutes (credit should also be given here to editors Greg Hayden and Eric Kissack). No doubt there will be some good deleted scenes on the DVD.

For his next movie, I might like to see Sacha Baron Cohen try something new. If The Dictator does break away from the mockumentary format of Brüno and Borat, it is still made from the same DNA as those films. For now, however, this movie allows him to continue to do what he does so well: dig his teeth into a hot button topic with reckless abandon and let loose a lovably horrible (or is horribly lovable?) character to wreak havoc on our collective sense of decency. And that is a very good thing.

- Steve Avigliano, 5/21/12

REVIEW: Dark Shadows

Dark Shadows (2012): Dir. Tim Burton. Written by: Seth Grahame-Smith. Story by John August and Seth Grahame-Smith, based on the TV show Dark Shadows by Dan Curtis. Starring: Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Eva Green, Jackie Earle Haley, Jonny Lee Miller, Chloë Grace Moretz and Bella Heathcote. Rated PG-13 (Plenty of blood-sucking and some suggestive but non-graphic sex). Running time: 113 minutes.

2 stars (out of four)

At this point, one may safely assume a new Tim Burton movie will not break new ground. He has found he can work comfortably in his pop-goth niche producing mixed results and he rarely has much interest in expanding his aesthetic or exploring outside the box. What he does instead is find new ways to play inside that box, or coffin, as the case almost always is.

This time he revives the late-1960s vampire soap opera Dark Shadows (unseen by me) for a tongue-in-cheek broad comedy. Mr. Burton’s pal Johnny Depp plays Barnabas Collins, the heir to a wealthy fish-packaging family who is cursed by the family’s young maid, Angelique (Eva Green), when he does not reciprocate her love. She is a witch, apparently, and transforms Barnabas into a vampire. She then turns the townspeople against him (torches, pitchforks and all) and they bury him alive.

There he rests until 1972 when construction on a new McDonalds unearths his coffin. To the old Collins manor he goes, to see what living relatives he may have who are willing to help him exact revenge on Angelique. The current residents of the Collins manor include Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer), her daughter Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz), her brother Roger (Jonny Lee Miller) and his son David (Gulliver McGrath). David claims to be able to communicate with ghosts (in particular his deceased mother), an oddity the family treats by hiring a boozing, live-in doctor (Helena Bonham Carter) to hang around the house and watch him.

Also employed at the manor are a drunken groundskeeper (Jackie Earle Haley) and Victoria (Bella Heathcote), a young woman who has just arrived from New York and bears a striking (perhaps even mystical) resemblance to Barnabas’s dead lover. (Did I forget to mention Barnabas’s lover was killed by Angelique back in the day?)

Not that any of this matters much. The lengthy introduction turns out to just be a set-up for gags involving Barnabas wandering around and marveling at modern innovations such as automobiles and ice cream. The jokes in these scenes are tired and predictable but, thanks to Mr. Depp’s unflagging enthusiasm, made me chuckle about half the time.

At any rate, the comedy is more interesting than the undead love triangle that is supposedly at the center of this dramatically limp script by Seth Grahame-Smith and John August. The movie fails to convince us its characters are worth even paying attention to, much less emotionally investing in their fates. A number of scenes drift past without leaving any impression.

Playing eighteenth-century vampire-types must be a walk in the park for Johnny Depp by now but he finds ways to have fun with the part. Bella Heathcote’s gaunt, bug-eyed face makes her a classic Burton babe and she plays the character dull and submissive, which is how Mr. Burton typically portrays innocent and virginal young women. Michelle Pfeiffer and Helena Bonham Carter are amusing in underdeveloped bit parts and Jackie Earle Haley, in a rare comedic turn, seems to be enjoying himself. The weak link here is Chloë Grace Moretz, usually a firecracker, who here stomps around in one-note teen angst.

In one of the movie’s last scenes, a character reveals a major secret about herself but kindly asks everyone in the room to not make too big a deal out of it. Fair enough. Dark Shadows is not a movie that warrants a big response. It disappears from the mind as quickly as an apparition.

- Steve Avigliano, 5/13/12

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