To Infinity and STAR TREK BEYOND

Star Trek Beyond is a fine entry in a venerable franchise that’s celebrating its fiftieth year. The movie is colorful and clever, with effective adventure sequences, cool visual concepts, and the core intelligence mixed with compassionate character moments that have allowed this whole endeavor to endure, from its original 1966 TV show through five more series and 13 movies with more on the way. Through its ups and downs, the late Gene Roddenberry’s creation remains sci-fi’s shining beacon of utopian spirit. What a pleasure in these dark times, when the world feels irreparably torn by forces of division, hatred, fear, and anti-intellectualism, to settle in for a journey to a possible future where the values of science, progress, and unity have built a better society. The values are comforting, but no less an adventure when the noble crew of the starship Enterprise find themselves drawn into a conflict in uncharted space. It’s a series that dares to dream of a better tomorrow, not one without conflict, but one in which the better angels of our nature can succeed through cooperation between heart and logic.

Beyond continues the recent string of Treks set in an alternate timeline of the first series, with J.J. Abrams’ 2009 entry sending time travel ripples imagining new rebooted, recast stories for familiar characters while avoiding tampering with or otherwise erasing classic lore. This time around director Justin Lin, fresh from making four Fast & Furious movies (including a few of that series’ best), takes a step back from his predecessor’s Into Darkness, a fast, exciting movie that was nonetheless more militarized, destructive, and paranoid than the franchise’s comfort zone. Lin’s film is more in line with the show’s original goals – to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before – in a movie that’s slightly smaller in scale, like a pleasing two-part episode with action blown out to blockbuster proportions between small character work and a journey through an alien landscape. Lin gets the spirit of the enterprise, and the simple appeal of sending a likable crew into a difficult situation and watching them think their way out.

It begins with Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) feeling that life in year three of their five-year exploration mission is growing “episodic.” (That’s a cute meta wink.) He’s starting to doubt his desire to captain. Likewise, his crewmates, like stoic half-Vulcan Spock (Zachary Quinto) and irascible doctor McCoy (Karl Urban), wear the weariness of space heavily on their shoulders. The ship docks at a Federation station in deep space – a wondrously imagined thing that’s an idealized spacious metropolis complicatedly constructed on the inside arcs of a gigantic sphere, the tops of skyscrapers nearly meeting in the middle – for some rest and relaxation. But they must cut their vacation short when a distress call comes in from beyond an uncharted nebula. Duty calls, and so off they go, Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Scotty (Simon Pegg), Sulu (John Cho), Chekov (Anton Yelchin), and the rest, straight into an ambush. A mysterious creature calling himself Krall (Idris Elba under layers of grayish-blue makeup) attacks them with swarms of bug-like ships, which results in the crash of the starship and the capture of most of the crew.

The screenplay by Pegg and Doug Jung is a little undercooked, but still a cleverly paired down and contained conflict of a familiar Trek kind. The crew must learn about this strange villain’s behavior – why has he captured them? what does he want? where is his army headed next? – and explore the planet to figure out how best to escape and warn Starfleet that this unknown being is bent on its destruction. There are lengthy sequences of dazzling spectacle, Lin bringing considerable visual energy with shiny future surfaces, baroque CG fleets of vessels, and complicated layers of lights and screens. With his usual cinematographer Stephen F. Windon he finds freedom in the floating vacuum of space to turn the camera topsy-turvy, then locks down in the craggy terrain of the unknown planet. But it all depends in the downtimes on the chemistry between the loyal friends aboard the Enterprise, separated in the crash and trying to reunite with each other, trade the information they’ve gleaned, and escape the villain’s evil clutches.

Through three films together, this cast has gelled naturally. Pine’s brash Kirk, Quinto’s logical Spock, and Urban’s crackling McCoy are a perfect Trek trinity, not merely resting on nostalgia for the old cast’s interpretations, but with distinct familiarity of their own. Cho’s Sulu and Saldana’s Uhura are allowed shadings and complications on the margins that make them fresh, while Yelchin (despite his appearance tinged with melancholy brought on by his untimely death) is fun comic relief as the lively and irrepressible Chekov. He gets a moment where he taps his foot to a catchy tune while he confidently pilots the Enterprise just ahead of a wave of fiery doom, a fun needle-drop melded with a fleeting grace note. Lin’s confidence as an action filmmaker is easy to spot, but it’s his light touches with actors that really animates the thrills. Here it’s a pleasure to see this ensemble reunite, and new additions – like a young tough alien scavenger woman also marooned on this planet (Sofia Boutella) – quickly fit right in with the team. Even Elba is allowed just enough brief moments to take a seemingly one-dimensional MacGuffin hunter under a pile of makeup and project his charisma and compelling fascination through it.

Lin knows it’s the eye on humanity that makes for good Star Trek and here he delivers the goods. Beyond might be smaller and thinner than you’d expect after the more slam-bang large-scale entries that came before, but there’s a bright throwback appeal and energy to the whole piece similar to spotting an old rerun while flipping channels. The characters and their world are so engaging that I couldn’t help but be drawn in, intrigued to see how they were going to outsmart their attackers and keep the galaxy safe. In the end the dazzling action climax – zipping in and around an outer space locale in supremely clever use of its lovingly imagined structure – isn’t only about shooting and punching, but more importantly thinking through the best course of action and executing it to perfection by luck and by pluck. There are no grand character arcs or overly heavy thematic preoccupations. It’s simply good old-fashioned space adventure that’s light on its feet, loves its characters, and can tap into the uniquely Star Trek sense of exploring the galaxy with a group of likeminded individuals committed to caring.

Punk'd: GREEN ROOM

Green Room is little more than an exercise in unrelenting tension. It locks its sympathetic protagonists in a small space, trapping them with danger all around. The situation doesn’t look good, and only gets worse as it springs a steadily more inevitable series of violent incidents upon them. There’s a grim competence to its interest in the process of their plight. This is writer-director Jeremy Saulnier playing to his strengths. His last movie, the small-budget success Blue Ruin, was a clammy revenge thriller that was at its best when methodically locked in on its squirming characters as they fumbled toward hard-fought empty catharsis. Here Saulnier brings only that sense of mounting dread, put to use for a movie more interested in conventional genre thrills, in building a contraption by which to torture its characters for our benefit. You could almost read it as a restrained sideways slasher picture, more muted and dry than that subgenre’s usual fare, but just as single-minded in its kills.

At its center is an obscure, struggling young punk band, members played by familiar faces Anton Yelchin and Alia Shawkat with young character actors Joe Cole and Callum Turner. Likable enough, they seem like cuddly rockers, the sort drawn to hard rock as a way of posturing over their vulnerabilities. In it for the love of music, they’ve barely enough in their coffers for a tank of gas. The group is so desperate for a gig they decide to head out to a backwoods skinhead bar where, through the cousin of an acquaintance, they’ve been promised $350 for a quick afternoon set. “Just don’t talk politics,” their helpful contact (David W. Thompson) advises. It goes off without a hitch until they happen to witness a murder, and then get locked in the green room – with the dead body, a hulking gun-toting guard (Eric Edelstein), and a frightened punk fan (Imogen Poots) – while the neo-Nazis gather on the other side of the door, wanting to get these interlopers out of the picture. Will they get framed? Tortured? Murdered? Whatever happens, it won’t be good, that’s for sure.

Saulnier gives the film a precision and clarity, capably mapping out the tight quarters and allowing us to understand the characters’ reactions. We process the threat as they do, while cutting between their claustrophobic fear and the looming threats assembling outside. The story is so quickly sketched there’s little room to understand the players as people or figure out their motivations beyond survival. What little background information there is gets doled out in convenient downtime lulls. The leads are so inherently appealing, however, that Saulnier merely has to ensnare them in his meticulous frames and crisp cuts to get the sympathy going. It helps that he has some real powerhouses for villains, making his Blue Ruin star Macon Blair into a soft-spoken henchman and no less than Patrick Stewart the main antagonist. He carries with him the aura of authority, lending much needed weight that's not exactly on the page to a mild-mannered Nazi who calmly assess the need to coax the band out to be killed, or, failing that, storm the green room and cut them up there.

So it’s a siege movie, like Assault on Precinct 13 or Die Hard, but played at a quieter and smaller scale. The sides are obvious, the goals are clear, and the obstacles are agonizingly stubborn. Saulnier provides good specificity to the locale, a dim and ugly lived-in bar with dangerous hate group fanatics growling and prowling. But the movie isn’t about a clash of ideology. That they’re neo-Nazis is only to provide shorthand for their villainy. (And for Shawkat to snark backstage that if Yelchin doesn’t do what she says, she’ll “tell them you’re Jewish.”) It’s not about ideas. It’s not even about music, punk rock only used for energy, background noise, and set dressing. It’s about strategy, watching as characters play out a literal and deadly locked-room game, making use of their wits to maneuver the few tools available to them and finagle a way to survive.

Crescendos of taut tension escalate to outbursts of truly disgusting displays of violence, detailed in the seeping wounds, spurting blood, dangling flesh, and gaping gashes. This is a slick, skuzzy, and carefully composed little thriller, Sean Porter’s cinematography so handsome and Julia Bloch’s editing so meticulous that Saulnier builds to Green Room’s most shocking moments with horrifying deadpan. It’s been a while since I heard an entire audience wince as one in response to an unexpected gory moment. The film may not add up to much beyond a visceral kick of surprise and terror while likable people get menaced, maimed, and murdered – and the tremble of relief as some find safety, even if it’s only temporary – but the experience is admirably tense. This is the sort of smartly constructed and capably executed thriller that may not have a lot on its mind, but at least it’s gripping on its own terms.

Date of the Dead: BURYING THE EX

There have been and will be worse movies than Burying the Ex this year. But I doubt many could match it for disappointment. It’s an uncharacteristically shallow work from Joe Dante, a beloved movie-mad director usually reliable in his ability to bring energy and complexity to all manner of theoretically disreputable genres, while retaining a core of deep affection for the material with which he’s playing. Just look for his name if you want to see clever, aesthetically appealing and subtextually rich creature features (Piranha), monster movies (Gremlins), backlot comedies (The ‘Burbs), sci-fi satires (Small Soldiers), mid-century B-movie love-letters (Matinee), self-critical sequels (Gremlins 2), and live-action cartoons (Looney Tunes: Back in Action). His latest is disappointing not just for falling far short of his usual standard. This is only his third feature in sixteen years. It’s a long-awaited return, enough to make one wish it was in service of a better script.

At the center of Burying the Ex is a horror geek (Anton Yelchin) working in a year-round Halloween shop selling costumes, décor, and curios. The set is lovingly festooned with copies of Fangoria and Video Watchdog, vintage posters for genre cinema, and a TV behind the counter playing Hammer horror. It’s a fandom repository, a place where the film’s macabre heart shines brightest. Throughout the film, the protagonist visits a repertory cinema for a Val Lewton double feature, attends an outdoor screening of Night of the Living Dead, and has his grating comic relief half-brother (Oliver Cooper) watch a Herschell Gordon Lewis DVD. If you’re one of the club, enjoying all these references piling up, you’re certainly on Dante’s wavelength. He loves this stuff genuinely, and knows that those who do will have lots in common with his main character.

Unfortunately, the plot around this guy takes that for granted, expecting us to love him because of the surface ways he’s like us. Screenwriter Alan Trezza concocts a scenario in which we’re supposed to hate the protagonist’s girlfriend (Ashley Greene) because she has no time for his collections and preoccupations. She’s a vegan blogger – shorthand for type-A and clingy, for some reason – who throws out his mint-condition posters to make room for her recycling bins. This is seen as reason enough to loathe her. The guy is going to break up with her, but before he can she’s hit by a bus and bleeds out on the street. At least now he can date the hot malt shop owner (Alexandra Daddario) we know is cool like him because she likes the same pop culture. They bond over Cat People and General Mills Monster Cereals. There’s nothing particularly charming or interesting about their discussions, nor are the characters anything more than what the plot demands.

When the movie’s horror/comedy conceit kicks in, it’s about time. A devilish knickknack makes the dead ex’s dying wish – “We’ll be together forever” – come true. She’s reanimated, a lovesick zombie shambling back to her boyfriend. Clumsy farce follows as a scared guy scrambles to keep his new girlfriend from discovering his undead one and vice versa. This is potentially fruitful ground for genre kicks, and Dante stages the eventual zombie chomping with reasonably effective spurts of gooey fake blood (no phony digital spray here). But the horror isn’t scary – just one good jump scare – and the comedy isn’t funny. Trezza’s script is full of fumbling one-liners falling flat despite the best efforts of everyone involved, and predictable plot points slowly drag their way on screen.

It’s tepid sitcom plotting, without any of the sweet bite or grinning horror that defines Dante’s best work. He’s still capable of staging a light, colorful moment, and the cast is full of bright young performers who’ve been likable elsewhere. But all that can’t save a shrill, tone-deaf experience in which one-note stereotypes engage in underwritten antics. The love triangle is unconvincing, mostly because the guy and his new love interest are so flatly drawn. But even worse is the mean-spirited perspective on the zombie ex. She’s such an unrelentingly shrewish portrait, without any thought given to her inner life, closing off any poignancy or conflict over her death and resurrection. There’s simply no tension or complication to be found. The proceedings grow depressing as they drag on, a thin idea stretched beyond all sustainability, with only the faintest glimmers of personality for the dedicated auteurist to enjoy. I’d say it’s a for-the-diehard-fans-only proposition, but they’re also the ones who’ll be most disappointed. Every bit of Burying the Ex simply points towards ways it should be better.

Bored to Death: ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE

Living a life as long as the average human lifespan can get pretty boring. Days can pass slowly, tasks growing monotonous. Maybe depression sets in. The great George Sanders, the actor who gave us, among many fine performances, All About Eve’s droll theater critic Addison DeWitt, committed suicide at the age of 65, his note reading, in part: “I am leaving because I am bored.” It’s a tragedy, to be sure, and one that the pale and reclusive Adam (Tom Hiddleston) is contemplating. He simply feels he’s been alive for so very long, finding his days – no, his years – passing in a blur of moping around his dilapidated and cluttered house in an abandoned corner of Detroit. Occasionally he rouses himself to noodle with his beloved antique instruments and archaic technologies, sometimes composing a song. He orders a custom-made bullet to be made out of dense wood and thinks he might shoot into his heart for real this time. You see, he’s a vampire, and the endless centuries have grown dull. You think living 80, 90 years seems daunting? Try 800, 900 years, or longer.

This is the world of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, a vampire movie that thrums to its own frequency, vibrating on a chill and melancholic mood. It’s not a horror movie, or rather, not exactly a horror movie. It’s more a come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-vampirism party, a slow and consuming hangout movie with ghoulish and existential underpinnings. It doesn’t move quickly so as not to break the spell. Adam is quiet, still, contemplative. His wife, Eve (Tilda Swinton), leaves her home in Tangiers to come for a visit, blaming all the time spent with Romantic poets a couple centuries ago for her husband’s current funk. They move on a different time-scale than ours, able to big-picture our mortal world, sighing at our stasis, our cyclical crises. They watch humans making a mess of the world from the helplessness of the shadows. They’re tired of us. Says he to she, “They’re still fighting over Darwin. Still.”

The vampires of Jarmusch’s imagination here are neither suave bloodsuckers nor skulking monsters and they certainly aren’t out stalking human prey. No, they sit at home, sleep all day and sulk all night. They’re cultured, have read all the great books, seen all the great art, heard all the great songs. They have all the time in the world to appreciate their surroundings, but are tired of doing it and seeing human failings endlessly repeated. When hungry, they just go the blood bank and bribe their usual accomplice (Jeffrey Wright) for the bags of liquid life they need to sustain themselves, sipping small amounts for nourishment and what seems like a bit of a high. The camera pushes forwards as they tip their heads back, eyes ecstatic, mouth agape in dopey fangs-baring grins.

The vampires rarely go out, at most driving down dark, empty streets. Adam has something like a human buddy, a young man (Anton Yelchin) who stops by with vintage music equipment for sale and acts as a middleman between the secret vampire and Detroit’s underground music scene. He and the blood doctor are the film’s only connection to the human world. Jarmusch spends the runtime immersed in the day-to-day drudgery of these vampires, intensely observing the loneliness and alienation of the marginalized. What’s more marginal, fringe, than being literally unable to step into the daylight? They are in the world without being of the world. There’s an authentic ice-cold elitism in their attitudes, superiority and isolation accumulated over the centuries.

Hiddleston and Swinton are convincingly vampiric with flowing hair and dark eyes in ghostly white faces accentuating their cheekbones. When they go out at night, they wear sunglasses. They’re cool. They move deliberately and with grace, totally comfortable with their bodies and with each other, romantically entangled for what seems like hundreds upon hundreds of years. Of course, after centuries of practice, you would be awfully comfortable, too. These are enigmatic performances, drawing focus in any given frame with nothing more than their presences. Confident performers, they use stillness and quiet to great effect, engendering great curiosity with a strong sense of history and sadness. The vampires have had time to cultivate both. They have seen and experienced so much and yet only have each other to share it with.

A few others of their kind drift into the picture. One is Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt). Yes, that Marlowe. He’s just a little bitter that Shakespeare took credit for his plays on the small technicality that everyone thought Marlowe was dead. Oh, well. A secret is a secret. Another guest is Eve’s adopted sister (Mia Wasikowska). They haven’t seen her in 87 years. She’s clearly a younger vampire, relatively speaking. Inhabiting the body of a blonde party girl, she embraces entirely unselfconsciously her status as a flighty, impulsive, adorably energetic disruption and danger to her relatives’ stasis. She crinkles her nose in an ingratiatingly cute way, but she’s as needy as she is deadly. “You know how it is with family,” Eve deadpans. The story, such as it is, concerns the way these characters interact with each other and with the world of the humans, but it’s mostly an intoxicating mood piece and character study.

The film’s characters are written with bone-dry wit of a familiar Jarmusch style, speaking leisurely and precisely in diction that’s bookish, moody, and in keeping with deliberately paced actions, cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s brooding slowly or unmoving shots, and the sound design’s extended patches of silence mixed with the low throb of a score. It coheres as a picture of a long, slow, philosophical existence. The vampires are often condescending, secure in the knowledge that they’ve seen so much and understand the world from a large first-hand sample size of history that the humans around them have no hope of catching up. They stick together because only another vampire can understand the particular, peculiar, entrancing boredom of immortality.

Top Warp Speed: STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS

Undoubtedly the most breathless of all Star Trek pictures, Star Trek Into Darkness is a nonstop barrage of spectacle, movement, and noise. It’s manipulative, relentless and a fun time at the movies. It gets the job done. With 2009’s Star Trek, director J.J. Abrams got a great deal of entertainment value out of dropping a wormhole into Trek continuity, scattering the familiar pieces every which way and providing a shock of delight as the pieces snapped back into place. It’s about as clever as a combination sequel, prequel, reboot, and remake of a nearly 50-year-old franchise could be. While Into Darkness can’t have the same pleasurable jolts of fresh perspective, what it lacks in discovery it makes up for in chemistry. The cast crackles through energetic banter and terse exposition as they’re forever running up and down the gleaming corridors of the starship Enterprise, desperate to solve the latest crisis in which they’ve found themselves.

With a plot that’s in some ways an extended riff on a classic bit of Trek – to even say whether it’s a movie or a TV episode would probably be enough for Trekkers to spring the film’s secrets sight unseen – the screenplay by longtime Abrams collaborators Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof is packed with dramatic incidents and fan-friendly winking. It’s an expertly calibrated event picture that hurtles from one bit of action or humor into the next without any room to slow down. We start urgently in the middle of a high-energy action sequence with Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban) fleeing an angry alien tribe while Spock (Zachary Quinto) proceeds logically into a volcano to shut it down and save this foreign world. As the sequence plays out, all of the returning cast – Zoe Saldana’s Uhura, Simon Pegg’s Scotty, John Cho’s Sulu, and Anton Yelchin’s Chekov – get their little moments to shine. It’s like stumbling into the last few exciting minutes at the end of an episode and then sticking around for the next couple in the marathon. There’s recognizability and comfortability the cast has in the roles and with each other that provides an instant anchor and funny rapport amidst the chaos around them.

Chaos quickly comes in the form of a terrorist attack on Earth that blows up a Starfleet base in London. The man responsible is John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch), one of their own who clearly has his secret motives for turning against them. The scheming scenes leading up to and including these surprise attacks have a scary edge. As the film progresses and Cumberbatch gets to put his sonorous voice into full intimidating villainy, the relationships his character develops take a few interesting twists and turns. Meanwhile, back at Starfleet, the good admiral (Bruce Greenwood) and crusty admiral (Peter Weller) agree to let Kirk take the Enterprise after the attacker in a rare show of force from this research and peacekeeping group that finds a new science officer (Alice Eve) escorting top secret missiles on board. They’re not out boldly going where no man has gone before. They’re on a manhunt.

This streamlined feature slams through its sequences of energetic intensity with sensational special effects and top-notch sound design expected from a Hollywood blockbuster in this budget range. Abrams, not particularly invested in the more cerebral, allegorical aspects of Trek lore, sees fit to deliver a slam-bang spectacle with phaser battles, whooshing warp drives, and brusque threats around every corner. This leaves plenty of time for the film’s politics to be a little muddled, if benign, with the exception of a weirdly misjudged bit of disaster overkill in the final stretch. It’s one thing for a movie like this to destroy a chunk of a metropolis, sending skyscrapers crumbling to the ground. It’s another thing entirely to do so almost off-handedly, skip the aftermath, and then put a strange title card in the end credits proclaiming tribute to post-9/11 workers. (Seriously, what’s going on there?) It’s a film that summons up War on Terror paranoia (potential drone strikes, brief pointed debates about killing terrorists without trial) and twisty conspiracy theories, but uses it only as set dressing for a plot that’s all present tense forward movement. Gone is the Cold War-era utopian optimism of Roddenberry’s original concept. This time it’s all about fear, dread, and explosions.

But it’s amazing how far momentum alone can take you. Abrams has made a film that’s a crackling roller coaster that’s all dips, dives, drops, and top-speed loops with an excellent, blaring score from the ever-reliable Michael Giacchino. The intensity never slows, even when the movie self-consciously incorporates a debate with itself about what kind of mission this Trek is following. “This is clearly a military operation,” Scotty disappointedly tells Kirk. “Is that what we are now? I thought we were explorers.” The fact of the matter is that Trek on TV had room to be as eggheaded as it wanted (at best, thrilling so), whereas the movies have always largely been about elaborate revenge schemes and potentially world-ending super-calamities. This just happens to be a particularly single-minded action adventure that’s constantly chasing the next thrill. And that works.

It works not just because Abrams and crew are skilled technicians, but because of the people on screen as well, with characters filled wonderfully by the talented cast working from borrowed cultural awareness without much original characterization in this particular script. (There’s an assumption, rightly or wrongly, that the audience will know who these characters are and what they mean to each other, so that all emotional development can be left to shorthand.) These characters have lived long and prospered in the cultural imagination for a good reason. The core of the film is the crew, the group of professionals thrown together by duty, bound together by the friendships that developed. Even at their prickliest, when Kirk and Spock speak sharply to each other, engaging in their expected debate between reason and emotion, there’s a core of respect and love that’s a comfort and a constant, even when everything is constantly blowing up around them.

A Pirate's Life for Them: THE PIRATES! BAND OF MISFITS

There’s something so charmingly handmade about the stop-motion animation of Aardman, the British studio of Peter Lord and Nick Park, who have made the Wallace and Gromit films and Chicken Run. Knowing that every moment, down to the smallest detail, involved a painstaking process of moving the characters and props incrementally a frame at a time means that not a single sight gag or bit of background tomfoolery went without careful planning. These are dense movies with visual jokes layered and lovingly presented and yet their stories are so breezily charming in the telling it hardly feels like work. Repeat viewings reveal an even greater appreciation for the high level of consistent craftsmanship. It’s mighty hard work to feel this slight and effortless.

Perhaps that’s why Aardman’s forays into CGI have been a mixed bag. In Flushed Away (fine) and Arthur Christmas (a wee bit less than fine), some of the comedic appeal is still present in the writing. But for some reason seeing the same designs – round eyes, doughy faces, toothy grins – and detail in a shinier computerized package takes the viewing experience a step away from the handmade qualities that is clearly an integral part of the Aardman experience. It’s hard work to make a CGI movie, to be sure, but I never stop marveling at the level of dedication and planning it takes to pull off even the littlest touch with stop-motion.

And so I was predisposed to like the company’s return to that form of animation in a feature length way. Luckily, The Pirates! Band of Misfits rewarded my hopeful predisposition with a film that’s so silly it’d be hard not to get caught up in it all. It’s been adapted by Gideon Defoe from his book The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, a much better title. (In fact, it’s been released under that title in the UK.) The story follows a group of pirates in the late 1800s desperate to win the Pirate of the Year award for their captain Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant) and prove themselves worthy scoundrels.

Pirate Captain has lost the award twenty years in a row, so he figures he is overdue. His crew, with the voices of Martin Freeman, Lenny Henry, Anton Yelchin, Ashley Jensen, Brendan Gleeson, and Al Roker (?), is a motley collection of peg legs, patches, a suspiciously curvaceous pirate, and one really fat parrot. They may not accomplish much in the way of looting and plundering, but they care about each other, so that’s nice. Besides, they seem much more interested in having fun waterskiing, putting on disguises and eating ham, though not all at the same time.

On their way to find “lots of sparkling booty,” they end up running into Charles Darwin (David Tennant), hence the original scientist-referencing title. Darwin and his trained monkey butler (a “man-panzee”) end up getting the pirates into a mess of trouble involving a maniacal Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton) and the Royal Academy of Science, with special cameos from Jane Austen and the Elephant Man. From that alone, you can tell this is a movie refreshingly out of step with contemporary family film trends. It’s not a hipper than thou kids’ flick with contemporary pop culture references and grating lowest-common-denominator gags a la the Chipmunks or Smurfs updates or the worst of Dreamworks (or, even worse, sub-Dreamworks) Animation. It’s a movie that is content to reference late 1800s culture in all kinds of ways both subtle and obvious.

It’s a film of sophistication and class in that way, that rewards intelligence and curiosity, which makes it all the more giggly to descend into droll, good-natured silliness right along with these sweet, lovable rapscallions. These goofy pirates make this an animated period piece that’s an unabashed cartoon willing to rustle up historical context in which to spin out crazy slapstick, unexpected non sequiters, a handful of tossed off anachronisms and occasional meta winks in a beautifully straight-faced style. The whole story is a funny mix between a small (very small) amount of real history and hysterical silly fictions. Director Peter Lord and the whole Aardman crew go wild with the hilarious detail. I liked how Darwin’s taxidermy creatures all have terrified expressions on their dead faces and Queen Victoria’s secret-throne room floor is covered with trapdoors. The walls of all the little sets are plastered with small visual jokes that zing by so fast I know I didn’t catch them all.

Narratively speaking, the film is a tad bumpy. It takes quite a while for the plot proper to kick in and, because the characters are purposefully thin archetypes, it’s hard to get all that invested in their emotional arcs, such as they are. But it’s all so winningly detailed in dialogue that zigs and zags and visually, especially in action sequences with oodles of moving parts. And it’s such a well-played goof that’s it’s hard to mind so much that it’s ever so slightly uneven and ultimately a bit less satisfying than the best that Aardman has been. It’s the kind of movie where an island is known as Blood Island because “it’s the exact shape of some blood,” a pirate wonders if pigs are fruit, and Pirate Captain won’t sail a certain route because it would take them right through the spot where the map’s decorative sea monster resides. It’s the kind of movie where London’s scientists pick the Discovery of the Year with an applause meter, one of the attendees of a secret gathering of heads-of-state is Uncle Sam, and a monkey butler communicates through a seemingly endless number of flash cards. The whole film has a likable feeling of sharp, exaggerated silliness of a most lovingly handcrafted kind.

There Goes the Neighborhood: FRIGHT NIGHT

Fright Night, a Todd Holland film from 1985, is a horror comedy about a teenaged horror fan who is convinced that there is a vampire living next door. It’s a film that’s fitfully amusing and frightening and very much of its time. When I saw that, very eighties, film for the first time earlier this year I found myself affectionate towards it while seeing room for improvement. Now, here comes Craig Gillespie’s remake, a film with gimmicky 3D effects, a soundtrack featuring Kid Cudi and Foster the People, and characters checking their smart phones for important information. In other words, it’s Fright Night marked specifically for posterity as belonging to 2011. It’s also, luckily, a slightly better movie in some ways than its predecessor, a little bit funnier, a little bit scarier, a little bit slicker. It’s a good story that’s now been well told twice.

This version bursts to life in a stylish way. Bold, graphical splashes of blood-red credits announce the film’s visual energy. The camera swoops in bird-of-prey circles around the little neighborhood, spinning mid-air to capture the isolated tract housing, the place with the unseen menace lurking under a deceptively normal setting. The movie situates the suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of Las Vegas, the city that never sleeps. It’s the perfect cover for this vampire who can claim his blacked out windows and nocturnal habits are because he works the night shift in a downtown tourist trap. Jerry the Vampire trades in his relaxed, suave Chris Sarandon eighties wear for a grimy workingman wardrobe placed on the muscular shoulders of Colin Farrell. He’s a physical creature, a matter-of-fact menace, and a disarmingly regular guy who digs around in his home improvement projects and kicks back with a beer in front of his TV to watch some iteration of the Real Housewives.

The kid next door knows what’s really up, though, but not at first. The kid (Anton Yelchin) is Charley, a high school student. He’s a former nerd who’s distanced himself from his best friend (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) in exchange for entry into the cool crowd, including a budding relationship with a class hottie (Imogen Poots). The new neighbor only registers as a mild annoyance until Charley’s friend comes to him with proof of strange goings-on. People have been disappearing and a chart of last know positions puts Jerry’s house at the center of the mystery. That seems to point to more than just an annoyance next door. With a little research (well, spying and Googling), it becomes clear that Jerry is indeed a vampire. But we already knew that.

The film then becomes more or less what you’d expect, an escalation in the tension between the teens and the vampire. Charley’s mom (Toni Collette) is a little oblivious. She thinks she might have a chance with the attractive neighbor. Charley’s girlfriend’s weirded out. Why doesn’t he want to make out with her, prefering instead to leap up at the sound of a car in the neighbor’s driveway? Charley finds this all distressing. Why won’t anyone believe him? It’s bad enough that the vampire tells him to his face that his mom and his girlfriend have nice necks, but now his friend is among those who have disappeared. (Maybe Charley should ask for help from the Vegas magician (David Tennant) who claims to be expert in the occult). It all builds to a series of splashy effects pieces, well rendered conflict between the horror creature and the only mere mortals who know what he really is

This is effective, energetic popcorn filmmaking. Like the original, it’s a halfway decent teen comedy that turns into a series of effects sequences. Laughs are lightly mixed in with the flowing tension and gooey gobs of CGI blood. The performances are largely charming and the adapted script by Marti Noxon (a writer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) knows its way around teens and vampire hunters while still humanizing them all. There’s enough grist of psychological complexity (not a lot, mind you, but just enough) to ground the insistent effects and showy scares in some small semblances of reality. The film also makes great use of a score by Ramin Djawadi that contains a wonderful melodic flourish that works hints of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor,” a piece associated with old-school horror, into the film’s musical texture. All of this just to say that this new version of Fright Night surprised me. It held my attention and entertained me by being better than I expected it to be. It’s not a lazy remake of a minor 80’s hit. It’s reworked and, as they say, reimagined into a proficient new telling of a solid story.

Fools Rush In: LIKE CRAZY

Like Crazy is not quite the worst movie of the year, but it has a good chance of being one of the least interesting. It’s a romance that attempts to bring a more realistic edge to its story, showing the difficulties in the central relationship that cause the couple to strain and to stray, all the while cooing at each other and declaring their soul mate status. Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones play the college kids who fall head over heels over the course of a montage. It, the movie, has barely started and they’re already eating ice cream cones and driving around the go-kart track together. Is there anything less interesting than watching, devoid of context, two people snuggle and whisper and say that they’re in love? These two say it, but I don’t believe it. I believe they like spending time together and they’re attracted to each other. But love? I’m not buying it.

They’re a couple with no obvious chemistry and have almost nothing of interest to say. When I read that the many scenes in the film were largely improvised I wasn’t surprised. That means the blame for the unimpressive dialogue, mumbled and repetitive, should fall on the cast for being bad improvisers as well as the writer-director Drake Doremus and his co-writer Ben York Jones for creating such unconvincing scenarios. There’s such a vague, wobbly feeling to it all as these two characters are living lives that are hastily sketched.

It’s a feeling brought about by the annoying, carefully careless hand-held camerawork as well as the facts of the story. Yelchin wants to make furniture. Jones is on a student visa and has to return to England soon. That’s the extent of what we know when they start staring longingly at one another and saying that they’re in love. I guess we’ll just have to take their word for it. They think they’re in love simply because they whispered to each other, swapped life stories, had a little bit of fun, and can’t stand to be apart. Not that they’d had any real experience apart before they reached that conclusion.

The real conflict of the picture comes out of their bad decisions. She doesn’t want to part with her college sweetheart so she decides to stay for a few months past her visa’s expiration. She either naively believes that True Love will erase the very real rules of immigration or she’s really stupid. By overstaying her visa, all because she literally tells her boyfriend that she “doesn’t want to be sad,” she is unable to reenter the country after she goes back to her homeland for a week’s stay for her friend’s wedding.

This leads to a tearful scene when she’s denied reentry to the United States and is told she’s being put on the next plane back. It’s played as tragic, but this could hardly be less so. If she had left when her visa expired, there would be no problem if she wanted to come back as a tourist. Instead, she just made things harder on herself. Those couple of months – yes, two whole months! – of separation she skipped are replaced with endless red tape and a much longer separation. This isn’t a story about runaway bureaucracy catching up innocent lovers in inscrutable, unfortunate rules. This is a story about a couple that know the rules, break them anyways, and then are surprised they can’t be together.

But, of course, they can be together. Yelchin could move to England. He just seems like he doesn’t want to. Besides, he’s started his furniture business and his secretary is the very pretty Jennifer Lawrence (she deserves much better than this). So, he’s not going. He’ll visit a few times, but he won’t make the move. Jones’s lawyer goes to work on her visa and she goes to work at a magazine. Their lives move on. They should just acknowledge a good time, a learning experience, and get on with better things. But the movie, for some strange reason, keeps trying to push them together. This is a futile film romance with all subplot and detail stripped away. It’s not really interested in their careers or affairs. It’s not even interested in their families, even though Jones’s sweet, loving parents (Oliver Muirhead and Alex Kingston) are the only interesting, well-acted characters in the entire movie. No, the whole the film is focused on why these two characters need to be together despite, or more likely because of, their total stupidity.

Jones turns in what has to be the whiniest performance of the year, Yelchin, one of the least energetic. It is so very hard to care about them. I didn’t buy it as a romance. I didn’t even buy it as a movie romance. The whole thing’s cruising towards an unhappy ending and, when it gets there, it rings just as false as the opening mush. It’s a movie that improbably pushes its leads together at every turn, only to end up saying sometimes love can go wrong. Of course it can, but the film’s structure of coincidences and celebration of soul mate status sure did a good job of convincing these characters otherwise. I nearly strained my eyes with all the rolling they were doing. It’s the kind of movie that, after a while, I merely sat through, seething with impatience, desperately awaiting the end credits.

Radical Therapy: THE BEAVER

The Beaver is a film with good ideas, good performances, and good effort, but it doesn’t add up to a good movie. It’s nearly there, but not quite. I enjoyed each individual piece, to a point, but there’s a sense that with just a bit more prodding, with a push just a bit farther, the whole could be much more than good. It could even be great. Instead, we’re stuck nearly there. We can see greatness from here even if we can’t quite reach it.

In the film Mel Gibson plays Walter Black, a deeply depressed and alcoholic executive of a failing toy company. When we first see him, he’s presented as a man who once was a huge success but has had his professional reputation and personal relationships crippled by his mental illness. Because of the resonances with Gibson’s personal life that have left him an incredibly unpopular figure – his alcoholism, his abusiveness, his signs of mental illness – this dark comedy gets off too a painfully realistic start. Walter’s wife (Jodie Foster) and two sons, one a moody teenager (Anton Yelchin), the other a precocious grade-schooler (Riley Thomas Stewart), are starting to think he won’t get better. He spends all of his spare time, and most of his workday, sleeping when he’s not trudging along barely alert.

After a bungled suicide attempt, Walter finds himself talking through a beaver puppet that he pulled out of a dumpster. The beaver talks to him, encourages him, and gets him back to a state of confidence and alertness that his family and his colleagues find surprising in its speed and its apparent insanity. Walter walks through life a new man, almost literally. He wears the puppet on his hand at all times, speaking through it and for it in a thick brogue. It’s a complicated dance of identity and neurosis.

Gibson is playing two characters that are also two aspects of one character. It’s tricky territory, at once darkly funny and bleakly emotional, but Gibson pulls it off in a truly good performance. It’s not easy, but its power comes not just from its novelty or level of difficulty. This is some fine acting. Also quite good is the supporting cast that surrounds the central joke and dysfunction of the film. Foster (who also directs) is nicely rattled yet hopeful about it all and little Riley Thomas Stewart is awfully cute.

Meanwhile, Yelchin gets a fairly meaty subplot featuring a romance with a fellow high-schooler played by Jennifer Lawrence. So good in last year’s Winter’s Bone, Lawrence plays her character with a wounded fragility covered up by her cheerleader valedictorian status. She and Yelchin have an easy, unforced chemistry. Unfortunately, their story is neither fleshed out enough to be a compelling subplot nor satisfying enough to be merely a sweet footnote. They’re good enough to deserve a movie all their own.

The movie is swamped by the story of Walter Black. All else fades into the background, much like the presence of Gibson has distracted press from the actual movie itself. Walter sets the tone of it all, a dark, depressive sadness that leeches through its outer covering of quirk. Kyle Killen’s screenplay takes strange turns and is loaded up with obvious symbolism (sticky-notes listing similarities between two characters, a hole in the wall, a memory box, a paper-mache brain) and overly explanatory emotional reveals which have characters just flat out speaking their feelings in improbably ways. Foster’s solid direction holds things together, but the film ultimately doesn’t add up. There was so much to like about what was on screen that I almost couldn’t believe it when the credits rolled and I felt the whole thing come up empty.

Terminator Salvation (2009)

The first Terminator, way back in 1984, is a B-movie blast: a dark – and darkly funny – sci-fi actioner that uses a cool time-travel hook only to get us into a merciless hunt-hunt-hunt kill-kill-kill chase movie. By the time 1991 rolled around, director James Cameron had made, with Terminator 2, the universe of his initial film more expansive with a more daring exercise in mythmaking. The film is looser and longer, but the budget, and the boom, is bigger and more resonant. There’s a real sense of inevitable tragedy as Linda Hamilton, as Sarah Connor, and Edward Furlong, as her son John, race against time to stop the evil robots from taking over the world, all the while knowing that if they succeed, John would never exist because the events leading up to his birth would never have been put into place. The two movies work so well, both together and separately, that there was never any time to slow down and think about the logic of the time travel contained within.

With the blander third picture and a TV spinoff, there was ample time to consider why the time travel plots used in this franchise open up too many questions that lead down ridiculous roads. If any thought is put into it, the franchise really shouldn’t exist at all. Why don’t the evil robots send a terminator even farther back in time where the humans wouldn’t be able to fight back? Why don’t the evil robots just fill the world with poison which would kill off humanity while leaving mechanical objects intact? But that’s a dangerous road to go down if one wishes to keep enjoyment of these movies intact.

The biggest question I had going in to the fourth film, Terminator Salvation, was whether or not the film would successfully get past the time travel hangups and allow me the pure enjoyment of a summer action picture. The answer is: yes, for the most part. The movie, directed by the relatively lightweight McG, is a big, grim, action movie with satisfying visuals and cool special effects. It suffers from a serious case of mid-film drag but manages to shake loose for a fun climax. It doesn’t add much to the overall mythology of the franchise but at least it entertains. It succeeds in a way that the first Terminator film does; it takes a standard sci-fi trope (the man with no memory and the machine with a consciousness) and uses it for a bit of pathos, but mostly an excuse for more action.

The center of this subplot is actor Sam Worthington, who first appears in the opening scenes of the film as a prisoner on death row who signs away his body to science. He shows up again years later, after the opening credits and an explosive action sequence, mysteriously the same age and with no memory of the intermediate years. He may or may not be a robot now, but he becomes the emotional center of the movie for me. The emotional center of the movie is certainly not Christian Bale, as John Connor, fine actor though he may be. Here he operates in two modes: intense and grim. He doesn’t elicit my compassion or my sympathy, although, to give Bale credit, the script is definitely no helper in that department. I cared about John Connor only because I had seen the other Terminator movies.

This movie takes place in the future, after the robot uprising, and contains thrilling scenes of robotic combat. Although the Terminators have none of the personality or singular scariness of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s or Robert Patrick’s models, they generate a kind of terror and awe of their own. The gears grind as the mechanical beasts clang forward and shoot and punch. There are slick robotic motorcycles that zoom through the barren landscape, charging down renegade humans, the ones that haven’t been picked up by startling appearances by giant metal claws. Struggling to survive being hunted by these technological terrors is Kyle Reese (franchise devotees will recognize that name), played by Anton Yelchin – young Chekov in Star Trek just a few weeks ago. If Worthington is the emotional center of the movie, then Yelchin is the emotional drive. I cared about him, not just because I had seen the earlier movies, but because Yelchin, with no help from the script, plays at the genuine human beneath the cog in the plotting.

This film has more in common with Star Trek than just Yelchin. It reinvigorates a sagging story, although here it is less radical reinvention and more canonical doodling in margins. It’s filled with all kinds of winks to franchise history that cause me to smile. You can believe someone says “come with me if you want to live” and you would be kidding yourself if you thought no one would say “I’ll be back.” Linda Hamilton shows up in a vocal performance only and I felt a surge of excitement when Ahhnold himself (with somewhat convincing CGI de-aging) steps out of a cloud of steam. It felt earned – it felt right – that the original Terminator was doing battle again. But also, like Star Trek, this movie made my inner thirteen-year-old very happy. It’s not as good a movie, or as satisfying an overall experience, but Terminator Salvation sets out some modest action-oriented goals and meets them, while taking the franchise a step back from mediocrity with fresh promise for future endeavors.

Star Trek (2009)

It’s refreshing, after all these years of diminishing returns and dormancy, to see Star Trek back and as good as it has ever been (which, for me, is the second film Wrath of Kahn and TV series The Next Generation, although that's certainly not all I've enjoyed). The new movie is both an excellent starting point for people whose relationship with the franchise is little to none and a great chance for rediscovery for those, like me, whose interest has waned some in the years since the franchise last churned out interesting product. It is a fast-paced (I’ve seen it two times in two days now and, boy, does this thing move) crowd-pleaser of the summer-popcorn variety and a great revival of these classic characters.

The movie is a reintroduction to the general public, focusing mostly on young Kirk and young Spock, at least at the beginning of the film. Chris Pine (as Kirk) and Zachary Quinto (as Spock) create distinct performances, respectful without ever copying the original performances. Quinto, especially, seems to get into the core of Spock, his Vulcan calm hiding tumultuous humanity. It’s a testament to his performance that when, through a time-warp, Leonard Nimoy shows up playing Spock, Quinto’s portrayal does not seem any less true.

I know it’s traditional for reviews to set up the plot of the film but the movie is so startlingly solid that I hesitate to reveal much at all. The movie’s actual plot (by which I mean the villain’s evil plot) is the weakest link, but it’s not terrible and we needed some way to explain away inconsistencies, round up the characters into one place and show us why we liked these characters to begin with, even all the way back to 1966 when they were first revealed. Director J.J. Abrams and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have allowed the movie to create charges of recognition as the plot gathers steam. I never thought it could be so exciting just to hear the word “phasers” shouted again. Uhura (now Zoe Saldana) is just as striking, but with more emotional complications. That has to be McCoy; Karl Urban’s doing a great job matching DeForest Kelly’s intense yet jovial mannerisms. There’s the Enterprise! It looks great! Now we’re on the bridge. There’s Sulu (John Cho) and Chekov (Anton Yelchin). Where’s Scotty? Don’t worry; he’ll show up, and Simon Pegg will play him perfectly.

The movie gives great moments to all the cast members and I was so grateful for it and the great rush of nostalgia the movie gave me. This is the kind of big-budget science-fiction space opera movie I’ve been loving since I was a kid, the kind of movie that is fast, loud, colorful fun, by turns funny and suspenseful, filled with the latest, greatest bells and whistles and stuffed full of surprising and delightful turns of events. My first viewing I was distracted by catching all the in-jokes, the winks (look at the member of the away team in the red jumpsuit, ha ha), and the recognitions that I ended up nitpicking the movie as I watched it, wondering if the chances taken with the established back-story were paying off, questioning if the surprising wholesale destruction of a major element of the universe was worth it. And is it just me or is the middle of the film a bit soggy?

My second viewing dissolved all such doubts. This movie works as fast and as successfully as it moves, propelled along by great visuals and a great score (by Michael Giacchino, who has fast become one of my favorite composers). Abrams finds room in the pacing for beautiful shots amid some unfortunately blurry action. Early there’s a wide-angle shot of a line of shuttles moving away from a wounded ship which will be echoed later with a similar shot of a line of missiles moving towards a ship.

So it looks great, sounds great, and moves along quickly. I guess that means the movie is very satisfying, and a total blast to boot. It’s one of the most welcome and enjoyable franchise reboots and, unlike Bond and Batman, doesn’t exist completely outside the established canon. By the end of the movie, I’m energized (no pun intended) and ready for more Trek. I can’t wait to see where the franchise will go after this most promising start. It's okay that they left out Klingons and the reflections of contemporary social issues. They had to leave room to grow.