Checked Off: THE TO DO LIST

I appreciate the effort to tell a casually randy teen comedy from the perspective of a young woman, make the film explicitly about labels and expectations that go along with being a woman, and end with the girl taking control of her body and coming out on top. I would’ve appreciated all that a whole lot more if Maggie Carey’s The To Do List managed to be funny while it was at it. Instead of another Bridesmaids, Easy A, or The Heat, the kind of funny female-driven comedy that leads for a round of patronizing women-can-be-funny-too surprise from certain predictable corners of the media landscape, this underachieving movie has a killer (and sadly underrepresented) hook in its point of view without the goods to back it up. It’s not an occasion to say, “women can star in a comedy, too,” but rather “women can star in a bad comedy, too.”

The movie’s essentially a loose collection of thin bits about a high school valedictorian (Aubrey Plaza) looking to spend her summer before college shaking her good girl image. Being a bookish, studious, conscientious young lady, she makes a checklist of acts to do in just a few months. Her attempts, cringingly awkward and gross, fall between gossip sessions with friends and shifts at the community pool. The success of the film hinges upon how funny a viewer finds these episodic sketches, which are light and forgettable, trending towards gross-out gags that are either too much or not enough. (One in particular, a riff on a similar gag in Caddyshack, is disastrously gross.) At most, I felt a desire to laugh without ever actually laughing. Nothing goes wrong enough to complain, but nothing goes right enough to entertain. It's a movie of good intentions and weak execution. It’s set in 1993, for example, but that idea never goes further than lots of great 90’s hits on the soundtrack and the wardrobe department dressing everyone in the most unflattering fashions of the era.

Similarly, the cast is underutilized. Plaza has a sardonic low-key approach that's an awkward fit with the anxiety and naivety in her character as written. She's a real talent - good on Parks & Rec and with great voice work in Monsters University and the English dub of From Up On Poppy Hill - but this movie doesn't play to her strengths. She's better than the material. That goes for the supporting cast around her as well. They’re all appealing performers – Alia Shawkat and Sarah Steele as the best friends, Rachel Bilson, as the vapid older sister, Connie Britton as the open-minded mom, Clark Gregg as the uptight dad, Bill Hader as the slacker pool manager – but even they don’t have more than a small moment or two to shine. As the guys the lead crushes on or who have crushes on her, Scott Porter and Johnny Simmons are appealing and underwritten, which is partly a good joke on how these roles are typically portrayed when a young man's in the lead and those roles are filled by young women. One’s a hot but dull blonde; the other’s a cute brunette who's taken for granted, but all around better for her. Sound familiar?

While watching the film, I intellectualized the novelty (importance, even) of the point of view and some of it was technically funny, but I just wasn’t entertained. Even the best moment would be the weakest in a better comedy. It's not bad, just, despite its raunch and purposeful button-pushing, weirdly sloppy and mild. A tepid milestone, it’s a film that says girls deserve crummy teen sex comedies too. True, but that doesn’t mean the results are any worthier than crummy teen sex comedies from a guy’s point of view.

Too Wise to Woo Peaceably: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

Some of the appeal of Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing comes from the story of its making. Exhausted from writing and directing the blockbuster capstone of the first wave of The Avengers movies, Whedon gathered up a group of his actor friends and threw what amounted to a Shakespeare party at his house. In modern dress, they acted out Much Ado and had such a fun time doing it, they've now invited the whole world to watch. It obviously didn't come together quite so simply or spontaneously, but it might as well have looking at the finished product, which feels so breezy and simple with undemanding black and white digital cinematography, a homey backdrop, and sense of actorly camaraderie. All involved are on a clear labor of love, and to that extent it’s a fun bubbly reenactment.

I think of Whedon as a writer first, director second. In everything from teen vampire slayers to superheroes to the Bard himself, every bit of his career reveals him to be a man in love with words, how and why people say them and what those choices can reveal and dramatize. It makes sense, then, that every choice he makes here is geared towards showing off the original language of the play. As near as I could tell, aside from some abridgment, he keeps the original text of the play, his actors' additional glances and gestures entirely nonverbal. The black and white look and matter-of-fact approach to setting - Whedon's camera regards the setting as one would one's own home, disinterested and familiar - strip away any interest in focusing on the mise-en-scene. Here it's all about the words, loud, clear, and classic.

Plucking the play out of its Elizabethan context and placing it largely unedited in modern day California is a process not without wrinkles. Little details like characters gesturing with a smart phone when talking about a letter or referring to a holster as a scabbard are easily self-explanatory, but the plot itself is an awkward fit in modernity. After all, the delicate social comedy of Shakespeare's plotting in Much Ado rests on notions of patriarchal honor, arranged marriages, and a dispute over the nature of a female character's virginity, concerns which I assume are of much less of an issue in today's society. This is where I found it easiest to think of the adaptation as the exercise that it is. Viewed through a three-sided prism - Shakespeare, and cinematic comedy both screwball and romantic - the film becomes a three-ring salute to silliness at its most literate and lovely. If the film plays like a sunny party that flirts with darkness before turning out fine in the end, that's because it's precisely the soufflé the play is already baked into. The characters move through the play flitting to and fro trailing quotable bon mots behind them.

 A main reason we, or at least I, don't mind returning to see a new staging of old material is to see how new players approach the old characters. Here the material seems, if not fresh, then at least tricky and invigorating. As Leonato, the host of this party, Clark Gregg, lately Agent Coulson in the Avengers franchise, brings a charm and gravity to the proceedings, inviting his guests to stay, sup, and woo under his roof. As the couple whose hate just might turn to love, Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof bring broadness to their performances as Beatrice and Benedick, a big play-to-the-balcony prickliness that's pleasing. As Claudio and Hero, the couple who are negotiated together after some trickery, Fran Kranz and Jillian Morgese bring a dewy glamour. They're fine poles around which the film rotates.

All, from Sean Maher's Don John and Riki Lindhome's Conrade to Ashley Johnson's Margaret and Spencer Treat Clark's Borachio, are fine, but let me single out Nathan Fillion's delightfully underplayed work as the constable Dogberry. He's the only actor in the whole production who made me snicker consistently with each line, helped, of course, by linguistic contortions provided him in the source material. Fillion takes a typical Shakespearian clown and gives him the beautiful dignity he might deserve, which makes him all the funnier in the process. It's a fine bit of interpretation and a standout performance in a film of nice interpretations. Dogberry, indeed, may be the most important character in the play. He comes along to keep things funny at precisely the moment the main storylines have begun to veer into territory that seems, for the moment, irretrievably dark. As scholar Anne Barton writes in her introduction to the play in The Riverside Shakespeare, the constable "reassures the...audience that comedy remains in control of the action, even when the potential for tragedy seems greatest."

The deliberate slightness of Whedon’s filmmaking heightens the "nothing" of the title. The whole thing is a froth that's not entirely helped by the indifferent approach to modernizing a dusty set of social norms. Still, Shakespeare is an awfully hard playwright to mess up. Even if one were to spend time burdening his work with post-modern curlicues from a stylistic bag of tricks, the sturdiness of the material would surely hold to some extent. There's a sparkle of genuine affection - for the material, for the production, and amongst the cast and crew - that lights up the screen here. The beautiful smallness of Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing simply allows it to feel most fully like the after-superhero mint it was for him and now to a mid-summer audience that I suspect may receive this feature most gratefully.

Superhero Supergroup: THE AVENGERS

The Avengers is not the greatest superhero film ever made, but it sure is a great time at the movies. It’s a high-impact spectacle full of loud, funny, and satisfying sequences that send characters slamming into each other into full-tilt superheroics in broad, bright, colorful collisions. We’ve met the characters in question before, which is just as well since that’s also where their characterizations reside. This isn’t a movie that’s about telling a story with much in the way of emotional character arcs or weighty personal journeys. It’s a movie that gathers up the main characters from recent Marvel Comics adaptations, the one’s they’ve had the exclusive rights to, that is, and teams them up to save the planet. Original, it’s not. (And not just in film. Comics have been orchestrating crossovers like this almost as long as comics have existed.) But the skill, energy, and good will of it all makes it fun all the same.

Marvel has been building to The Avengers for five years now, kicking off superhero franchises one by one with the express purpose of bringing them together for this one big blockbuster. And so, when Loki (Tom Hiddleston), the brotherly villain of Thor, comes shooting out of the vastness of space through a glowing portal into the middle of a top secret military installation and, promising war, makes off with a brainwashed archer (Jeremy Renner) and a volatile blue energy cube, the otherworldly MacGuffin from Captain America, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the connective cameo from all of the earlier films, assembles his team of avengers. The film takes its time – a bit too much, perhaps – reintroducing the superheroes one by one, and it’s a credit to the consistency of quality in this many-pronged experiment in comic book adaptation that it’s nice to see them all again.

Fury himself calls in super-strong Captain Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and dispatches right-hand man, Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg), to round up the rest of the recruits. He has master assassin Black Widow (Scarlet Johansson) pick up the cursed Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo, taking over for Ed Norton, who took over for Eric Bana – maybe stretching into the Hulk causes slow shifts in appearance). Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) flies in with his high-tech suit of armor; Thor (Chris Hemsworth) thunders down from the land of Asgard swinging his mighty hammer. The gang’s all here, though not without some complications on their way to assembling as a group. With such variety in powers and personality, interpersonal conflicts are bound to arise even as Loki’s threat of intergalactic war draws closer to reality.

This is a movie juggling multiple characters (even Stellan Skarsgard and Gwyneth Paltrow return, briefly) while fitting them into one coherent film narrative. Even the tones these heroes bring from their separate films could have easily competed instead of blending. The sarcasm of Iron Man, the pseudo-Shakespearean goof of Thor, the earnestness of Captain America, and the brooding pulp emotion of Hulk gave their films a personality of their own. Removed from their solo efforts the supergroup as a whole has less emotional resonance, as this film is unable to fully explore their outsized, but recognizably human, personalities through the metaphors supplied by their powers. In that sense, the movie is thin. It’s a lot of fun, but the characters arrive fully formed from other movies and end this one with little in the way of growth or development. But, still, this is a movie that throws together great characters and watches them interact asking, “isn’t that cool?” And, yeah, it’s cool.

With so many characters it could have been nothing more than a clash of tones while characters jockeyed for the spotlight. Luckily writer-director Joss Whedon has given these characters a movie in which there is no need to compete for attention. It plays out like the work of a fan who deeply loves these Avengers, each and every one of them, and has spent time thinking about the ways in which the powers and personalities could clash and connect. It’s an affectionate film. Whedon has always had a warm wit which shines clearly through genre material and that’s certainly the case here. This is a movie just crammed full of one-liners that actually land. He seems most comfortable writing for Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark, but the other characters certainly have funny moments of their own as well.

But it’s more than funny quips and clearly defined characters. It’s all about timing. There’s just enough room for the one-liners and amusing visual gags to breathe, but just enough concision to make them unexpected. That’s where Whedon’s pet theme – teamwork – comes into play. (His work, mostly and most notably in TV with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, consistently revolves around a group of people who must learn to work together.) This movie is filled with long sequences of the characters talking to one another, strategizing, arguing, joking, threatening, comparing internal struggles, and finding common ground. The actors are up to the task; dialogue pings around the room with precision. (It’s almost enough to make one think that if Howard Hawks had made a superhero movie, it might have looked a little like this.) Later, in the action scenes, the way characters spring into motion utilizes the best each has to offer in terrific synchronization. This is a film that plays to the strengths of everyone involved.

Like his fellow TV-to-film auteur J.J. Abrams, Whedon is a writer and director who has a way of injecting a serialized slam-bang cliffhanger style into a film. The Avengers starts with what is essentially a cold open, slams into a title card, and then moves from set-piece to set-piece finding some surprises along its fairly standard action movie path. It is an efficient spectacle delivery device. It’s a bright, loud, crashing crowd-pleaser, a blockbuster superhero movie with an impressive sense of narrative escalation. Each action sequence feels bigger and more complicated with higher stakes than the one before. By the time the film hurtles into a lengthy, chaotic, but coherent, climax (that has a few similarities to a similarly sprawling big-city brawl in Transformers: Dark of the Moon), it’s hard not to get swept up in it all. It is a movie designed to show off cool effects while likable, familiar characters clash and jest, explosions seasoned with genuinely funny one-liners, and some neat visuals, and, with a light touch and fondness for the material, Whedon more than gets the job done.