Author: Ryan

The Mighty Thor does not require a puny mortal origin story.

Superhero movies remain hot stuff in Hollywood, and we’re all going to have to accept it. Some of them are good, and some of them are bad, but one thing is certain: There are too many origin stories. Since studios would like to turn every superhero into a franchise, the first film in a theoretical series has to introduce and explain everything. And it all becomes rather tiring, because while the details are different, the song remains the same: Average guy (usually a nerd) lives his regular life until a life-changing event turns him into a costumed vigilante.

Spider-Man, Batman, and Iron Man have all done it with great success. Green Lantern and Captain America are going to try it later this summer. Regardless of the quality of the actual film, it often ends up feeling like two hours of setup so the second movie can get moving quickly.

But Thor isn’t an average superhero. He’s not some schmuck who suffered through a trauma or got exposed to the good kind of radiation. He’s a god. He’s been flying around and smashing people in the face with his giant hammer for thousands of years. (more…)

Towards the end of The Adjustment Bureau, Matt Damon turns into a crazed, psychotic stalker and accosts a woman while she’s composing herself in the washroom. He tells her about all the things keeping them apart, and then punches a man who walks in the door because he’s wearing a hat. Even though he’s charmingly Matt Damon-ish, it’s still pretty damn creepy.

Rewind a bit: Aspiring politician David Norris (Damon) is planning his concession speech after an unsuccessful run for the Senate. He meets Elise, who’s in the hotel crashing a wedding. They talk. They connect. One might say they fall in love, if one believes falling in love can happen in five minutes. Then they’re separated, never to meet again. Until they do, several months later, by chance, on a bus. They talk, they connect, she gives him her phone number. He never calls her.

They don’t see each other for several years, until they have another chance encounter. This time they’re determined to be together, but things end even worse, particularly for Elise.

But since this is David’s story, we know that he has a good reason for treating Elise so horribly: He’s found out that his life, and the lives of others, are being influenced and occasionally controlled by mysterious hat-wearing figures. You could call them angels, even though no one does in the film. When possible, they adjust people’s destiny through small moves – a spilled cup of coffee was supposed to prevent David and Elise’s second meeting – and sometimes they’re more direct and modify or erase minds. They’ve determined that David and Elise’s destinies are incompatible, and they’re intent on keeping the would-be lovers apart.

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There’s something gloriously unhinged about Sucker Punch. Zack Snyder’s tale of mental asylums, nightclubs, fantasies, and general sexiness is utterly divorced from reality. Like Alice in Wonderland or Moulin Rouge, Sucker Punch has its own set of rules, and Snyder makes no apologies or accommodations. You can get on board or not, but you’re stuck in Snyder’s movie.

And there are times when Snyder makes you forget the real world. He’s an impressive visual stylist – the History of Superheroes montage in Watchmen was beautiful – and he seems to have devoted his entire career to making things look as cool as possible. The opening of Sucker Punch features a silent, fairy tale horror story set to a haunting cover of Sweet Dreams, and there’s almost no dialogue for the first five or ten minutes. Some of the fantasy sequences are marvels of imagination and special effects, particularly a raid on a WWI German bunker defended by zombie soldiers. There are plenty of “oooooh!” moments.

But just because you’re telling a story about dreams and fantasy doesn’t mean you can completely abandon logic, character, and basic human decency. To wit:

Pretend you’re a young girl. (You’re actually 20, but dress like a 12-year-old beauty pageant contestant.) Your mother has just died.  Your stepfather is an awful man, but that’s okay because your mother left you and your sister all her money. Except it’s not okay, because your stepfather, who is an awful man, tries to rape you and your younger sister. Then you end up in a 1920s-era mental asylum where your awful stepfather is planning to have you lobotomized.

It’s natural you’d try to escape. If you couldn’t physically escape, perhaps you’d concoct an elaborate fantasy as a coping mechanism, change your view of the world into something less threatening and more manageable. In this reality, you’d be… a prostitute? An indentured servant at a burlesque house ruled over by a mobster who uses violence and threats of rape to keep his women in line.

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I try to avoid spoilers when writing reviews. But lately, a lot of people have been coming to my blog searching for spoilers, so I thought ‘d oblige them with some answers. So beware:

There are spoilers below for Barney’s Version, Biutiful, and Blue Valentine. (more…)

Alejandro González Iñárritu does not make light movies. They’re full of death, abandonment, trauma, and misery. In Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel, Inarritu piles adversity upon adversity on his characters to see what happens. Sometimes they thrive, sometimes they collapse. It’s never easy entertainment, but it can be compelling, emotional filmmaking.

Biutiful is not short on suffering, though most of it is directed at one man. Uxbal (Javier Bardem) works with illegal immigrants in Barcelona, trying to find them jobs and keeping them away from the authorities. Uxbal is no saint: He always gets his cut, and it’s hard to deny the immigrants are getting screwed – two dozen Chinese immigrants sleep on the floor in a cold basement, woken every morning at six to be shuttled off to sweatshops. But he’s making the best of a bad situation, as he seems to be genuinely concerned about their welfare.

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When overly-enthusiastic Barney Panofsky promises the love of his life that he’d do anything for her, she chastises him for his grand and unrealistic gesture. “Life is made of little moments,” she tells him. Unfortunately, there are very few little moments in Barney’s Version; it’s a collection of big, important life events that are meaningless without the lives they punctuate.

Barney’s Version suffers from the same problem as the Harry Potter films: It’s a lovingly made adaptation of a book that chokes on all the material the filmmakers couldn’t bear to leave out. The entire life of a man – in this case, Barney Panofsky, played by Paul Giamatti –  is a fine subject for a novel, but a tight fit for a two-hour film without some sharp editing. In trying to include everything from the novel, the film loses any chance at depth or focus. It’s tough to care about someone dying when they’ve only been on screen for five minutes, or a marriage falling apart when one character is a cardboard caricature, but Barney’s Version serves up tragedy after tragedy, deaths and weddings and adultery and more death.

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