Cruel and Usual: GOAT

Here comes Goat to give us the disgusting flip side of Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!! That was a nostalgia-soaked film about the upsides of sunny homosocial bonding and collegiate identity formation. Goat is the grimier underbelly, concerned mostly with a fraternity’s Hell Week hazing, showing in extended, unblinking, and repellent detail the extent to which these ritualized houses of horrors cater to every worst impulse a young man might have. Pledges are humiliated, stripped, attacked, pelted with garbage, caged, beaten, and made to imbibe as much alcohol as possible. And that’s only the first night. They’ll be put through a gauntlet of torture, beaten down emotionally and physically night after night. And for what? To say they belong to a fraternity? To gain access to the sociological benefits that come from such intense relationship forming coupled with a direct historical lineage for this brotherhood? One side character is affronted when his roommate suggests quitting mid-rush. “If the frat goes away, everything goes,” he says.

The lead character is a nice enough young man (Ben Schnetzer) who, in the summer before his freshman year in college, is assaulted. His attackers jump him outside an off-campus party where he was visiting his older brother (Nick Jonas). Bloodied and bruised, he’s clearly still suffering from post-traumatic stress when the fall semester rolls around. This is clearly someone who is psychologically not ready to endure the tortures of rushing a fraternity. But his brother is in the big frat on campus, and he wants to prove to him, and himself, that he’s man enough to become one of the guys. The fragility of his mental state isn’t hammered home, but it certainly amplifies the torture on display. As if seeing the slaps and hearing the shouting, watching the nauseating slurries of food and fluids and seeing the brutal pranks (urinated on while stuck in a large dog cage; blindfolded and marched to a bathroom where a banana is floating in the toilet, made to reach in and grab it; forced to down vast quantities of beer with the threat of a being forced to defile a goat as punishment for failure) weren’t hard enough, we have subtextual knowledge that makes it even harder to take.

What is it that makes the robbery in the film’s opening something worth investigating and punishing – one frat member sneers bileful scorn at “townies” – while the hazing goes on with near total immunity? The fuzzy dichotomy between lawful and unlawful beatings set up by writer-director Andrew Neel and co-writers Mike Roberts and David Gordon Green shows plainly that frats aren’t the root of all evil, but the way they codify and condone systematized toxic masculinity isn’t healthy. It’s societal rot. These aren’t boyish antics excused as japes and capers. These aren’t charming jerks redeemed – even only partially – by their camaraderie. The frat’s leadership is presented as entirely scary, even when feigning care or talking up the good of their unity. They hide behind tradition, proud it’s been this way for a hundred years, and excusing it because what they do is no different, they say, than what other frats do. Emboldened by their perceived immunity, they enact a torturous relationship with their pledges.

It’s enough to make one wonder if frats nationwide are nothing but hundreds of replicas of the Stanford prison experiment, authority inevitably corrupting to and emboldening of every testosterone-drunk freedom of impressionable young men. When they hear another frat has ratted them out for their intense hazing, they flip out. As the movie progresses there are cracks in the frat’s façade, with one member’s slow dismay over the recruits’ extra-nasty treatment leading him to ask, “is it harder this year?” When the dean brings extra scrutiny to bear, investigating charges, they are aggrieved. How dare they face consequences? The performances are committed, wild-eyed, at a fever pitch that approaches frightening intensity. Here are lost young men, radicalized by the pure adrenaline of power, big fish in a small pond allowed to devour anyone they wish.

Neel’s filmmaking is sensitive and restrained, simply recording the specifics in long, uncomfortable, unadorned sequences. Many are harrowing. Some are merely sad, like when an alum (James Franco) storms in for a visit, expressing great disappointment a job, wife, and child are keeping him from partying like the old days. He, too, has bought into the toxicity of the structure, and can’t get it out of his system. It’s poisoned at the root. As the lead character must decide what kind of a man he wants to be, how fully he wants to buy into this cracked situation, the movie gathers a quiet moral force. We see the pain on the pledges’ faces, see it swallowed back with a forced stoicism as they allow abuse to be piled on them even when it stings, even when it hurts, even when it bleeds, even when they should know better, even when their lives could be endangered. The vomit and the blood and the bruises cake the grotesque tableaus. It’s as good a reminder as any that no good frat is good enough to excuse the existence of the worst.

The Bad News Bros: THE INTERVIEW

For all the hullabaloo surrounding its release, from the hackers to the threats to the studio waffling and beyond, the new Seth Rogen/James Franco comedy The Interview has only minor pleasures to offer. With its high concept, dirty jokes, sporadic violence, casual insensitivity, and queasy morality, it’s the kind of movie that, were it made in the 1970s, would be a staple of exploitation pictures recommended by Tarantino. There’s a spirited absurdity to the whole endeavor that finds Franco and Rogen as a talk show host and his producer who land an interview with Kim Jong-un, ruler of North Korea, and are promptly asked by the CIA to help them carry out an assassination. It’s one part fish-out-of-water buddy comedy, one part spy spoof, and one part bloody satire. The whole thing’s deeply silly and omnidirectionally offensive.

Franco’s talk show is positioned as a vapid gossip peddler. He’s a force of personality who gets confessional interviews out of celebrities, a sort of super dumb Dick Cavett. He’s a total idiot, a self-absorbed nonsense man so totally lost in his own media stardom he’s convinced every thought he has is worth sharing. His producer, on the other hand, has aspirations of doing more important work. He’s the one who figures out how to land this monumental interview. Though, to be fair, he’s smarter than his boss, he’s only marginally less bumbling in practice. A CIA agent (Lizzy Caplan, excellent as always) gives them a scant briefing, some secret poison, and lets them on their way to meet with a dictator and take him down. It’s a dubious plan, but, despite utilizing a real country’s actual ruler as a character and target, this isn’t a movie big on sense.

Most of the movie plays out in Kim’s vast grey compound as the two guys stumble their way around, trying not to mess up the mission and utterly failing most of the time. There are real jabs at North Korean ills – famine, executions, propaganda, isolation – mixed into scenes of technical malfunctions, missed connections, and endless coarse banter between the leads. Rogen’s the straight man, while Franco delivers a weirdly artificial performance in which every gesture, every line is letting us know he’s in on the joke. It rarely works. Funniest, even lovable at times, is Kim himself, played with charisma and sly charm by Randall Park as an insecure guy who just wants his guests to like him.

Best is the relationship they develop, as the talk show host finally meets a man as egocentric and needy as he is. There’s something biting in there about an American celebrity, especially one in something like the news business, finding much in common with a dictator. But the film’s largely sloppy as satire, blending sharp commentary and free-range goofiness. There’s also a heaping helping of the typical R-rated bro comedy’s crutches of so-called ironic sexism, racism, and gay panic, masked with a thin veil of knowing wink-wink ain’t-this-awful posturing. It’s part of the film’s broad jumble of potent nihilistic cynicism and gross out gags.

The film was helmed by Rogen and Evan Goldberg, writing partners whose directorial debut was last year’s funny-at-times, and even sloppier, This is the End. Here they wrangle their story, scripted by Dan Sterling, into a mix of bro hangout, male anxieties, and satiric jabs, until culminating in an absurdly violent third-act shootout. It’s a big, hard-edged, live action cartoon, at its best when it steers straight into the absurdity. I especially liked a recurring Katy Perry song used to undercut, and later amplify, tension, the right kind of dopily weird. Otherwise, it’s a mixture of easy geopolitical points, mild media teasing, and sex, drugs, and poop jokes.

The comedy is hit-and-miss, and it’s too goofy to offend as much as it wants. But in the end, the worldview on display through the parade of idiots and violence is more scathing than maybe it thinks. At one point a North Korean propagandist (Diana Bang) discovers their plan to enact a CIA-backed overthrow of a foreign dictator and asks, “How many times will America make the same mistake?” Franco shouts back, “As many times as we have to!” Here’s a movie that says the whole world’s supremely screwed up – with dumb Americans, cruel dictators, and the empty-headed media rhetoric of them both – and the only people who eke out a win are those whose buffoons control the message. 

Teen Spirits: PALO ALTO

On a plot level, there’s little that happens in Palo Alto that looks like my teenage years. And yet, in its evocation of adolescent confusion and uncertainty, it feels achingly true. There’s something about being a teenager that’s incredibly isolating. While you’re living through it, you might think your particular combination of problems are completely your own, that no one could possibly relate. Awkwardness, loneliness, and introspection are closed systems. But then somewhere along the way, as you find getting older leads to perspective, if you let it, a switch is flipped. Suddenly you can see the teenage experience for what it is. Surface details of teen lives differ wildly, but the feelings underneath are universal. The best movies about teens understand this.

The teens in Palo Alto don’t have the perspective about themselves and about the world that would bring their problems into focus. They care too little and too much in the same instant. In the liminal middle of their teenage years, choppy emotional waters rage underneath protective layers of disaffected monotone. It’s written and directed by Gia Coppola, a third-generation director, granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola and niece of Sofia Coppola. She confidently captures an adolescent state of mind with the specificity and sympathy of someone far enough removed to have perspective, but not too far removed to still feel its immediacy. She’s 27 and has a photographer’s eye. The world of the suburban high-schoolers she explores is lived in, captured in details casual and right. It’s not art-directed stylist-driven product-placement “teenage.” It is languorously shot by Autumn Durald, hazily lived in, scuffed-up, stretched, with details that don’t fall off on the sides of the frames.

The film follows four teens through a short period of time in their lives as they drift with anxiety, apathy, and uncertainty. April (Emma Roberts) is shy and sensitive, sweet but often ignored. She finds herself drawn towards and intimidated by male attention, but usually too busy with schoolwork and babysitting to act on it. Teddy (Jack Kilmer, son of Val Kilmer and Joanne Whalley, in his debut role) is nice, artistic, and curious, but troubled. He hangs with bad influences and finds himself in trouble with the law. Fred (Nat Wolff) is twitchy and unpredictable. He seems to be play acting “bad kid,” with a quick temper, teasing danger, and affected odd behaviors that make it hard to tell whether he’s only fooling or genuinely disturbed. Emily (Zoe Levin) flirts and fools around with lots of boys. But though she’s willing, her interior life is more conflicted. At one point she hollowly grumbles, “I’ve never been in love.”

They float in similar social circles, their paths crossing from time to time. But even together they seem so lonely, all in the process of figuring out who they are, what they like, and who they will become. They never quite figure it out in the time we spend with them. The film ends before any resolution of that kind. But that’d be too simple anyway. It’s not a film with a big statement about Kids These Days or the State of the American Teenager. It’s not moralizing or message-based. It’s a movie of small gestures and modest shifts within the prickly fog of adolescence. Coppola summons the ambiguity of high school days. These characters are stretching away from the children they so recently were, reaching towards the adults they’ll become. This stretched state is dangerous business.

They’re brooding and troubled, trying on personas, nervous and self-conscious, shyly testing one another. They provoke and are provoked, experimenting with alcohol, drugs, sex, art, music, relationships. The film doesn’t let them off easy while showing a great deal of compassion for them. They’re often photographed alone or in pairs, chatting in cars, sitting in bedrooms, loitering in parking lots and driveways. Most revealing is when they are alone. One kid writes a song on a guitar. Another puts on a dress and tests out flirty poses. They’re free to try the boundaries of their identity most fully when alone. Get them together and the experiments dissect, altering in response to the others.

Adults, and role models in general, are rare. They drop in for platitudes before carrying on with their own preoccupations. There are benign parents, teachers, and judges upholding the line between children and adults. Then there are adults creepily muddling that line. For example, there’s a soccer coach (James Franco, who also wrote the short stories on which the film is based) who stares sleepily, seductively across the line. He’s only a decade or so older than his students, but the developmental importance of those years is painfully obvious. The glimpses of adult life we see on the margins of the teens’ stories are ghosts of future possibilities.

Coppola is content with making Palo Alto a hazy mood piece, getting a contact high off of the characters and their interior struggles acted outwards. She gets relaxed controlled performances out of her young cast. They act like real kids, and the movie watches what they do, how they act, and how it affects them. It hangs back observing, capturing moments in time that are critically important and yet, if they survive, doomed to fade in importance with astonishing speed as they have the rest of their lives ahead of them. When the movie ends, the characters are unresolved, open-ended. They have long ways to go. Some of them are more fully down bad paths with no easy way out. Others have started to hesitantly, incrementally move forward in better directions. This film has the compassion to respect their lived experience and evoke it with care. 

Self-defense: HOMEFRONT

If there’s one thing Breaking Bad taught us, it is to avoid injuring the pride of anyone involved in the meth business. But Jason Statham isn’t too worried about doing so in Homefront, especially when the meth-heads he’s dealing with are a skeletal Kate Bosworth and her brother, the local dealer named Gator who is played with satisfied teeth-gnashing and deep fried accent by the omnipresent James Franco. Too bad for all involved that, after Statham’s daughter (Izabela Vidovic) defends herself from Bosworth’s bully son on the playground by beating him up, the meth people won’t let the insult stand. Bosworth gets her brother to menace Statham, who is new to their small town in the backwaters of Louisiana. This leads to all manner of complications, including the revelation of Statham’s character’s undercover D.E.A. past, which is all the incentive Franco needs to call in the big guns. As it must, this means Statham is going to have to spring into action and punch people in creative and effective ways. Once he stabs a bad guy’s arm to a post and smashes a mason jar on the back of the guy’s head. Hey, you use what’s around you.

Statham has become one of our most reliable action stars, eking out an appealing B-movie career for himself. He’s now the kind of guy with tremendous affection from his core audience, who gets applause and attention simply for turning up. Even so, he’s not coasting. He’s hard at work being compelling. In a cameo in a big movie earlier this year he single-handedly made for the most exciting mid-credits teaser in a long time (and maybe ever). Something about his stubble-covered dome and virtuosic working of his smirk – from deadly serious all the way to happily serious – makes him an aerodynamic charmer, ready to leap into any conflict if it means saving himself, his mission, or those he cares about. He’s always a man with a code, and when that code breaks, duck. Unlike overly muscled action stars of the past, he’s lean and compact, like an average fit guy who can knock you senseless in no time at all.

Homefront isn’t one of his better efforts, but it’s often tense and gets the job done. The script, adapted from a book by Chuck Logan, is written by Sylvester Stallone. Yes, that Sylvester Stallone. He’s a man capable of churning out an effective actioner, even if he’s rarely cast as an everyman. Here he writes a part for his Expendables pal Statham that’s grounded in a sense of reluctant action. Here’s a guy retired from the force after a drug bust turned violent. He is called to punch, stab, scheme, and shoot his way to safety in order to keep a protected environment for his little daughter. Statham’s a guy who can do these things, but would rather not. They just leave him no choice. He’s personally insulted and assaulted, his tired slashed and cat kidnapped. That’s one thing. But threaten the safety of his daughter and watch out! It’s a clear cheap ploy for audience identification – the child-in-danger thing works every time, no matter how earned or unearned it is.

It raises the red meat knee-jerk vengeance quite well in a movie that’s frontloaded with exposition. If Stallone’s script tells you once it tells you three or four times every pertinent bit of plot information. Gator is dangerous. The town finds Statham suspicious. The sheriff (Clancy Brown) seems awfully buddy buddy with the meth operation. But for all this repetition, it’s strange to see characters drop in out of nowhere, like a gang of thugs who snarl at Statham on two separate occasions before he beats them all up, both times. Who are they? Who do they work for? Why are they angry? Where do they end up? Beats me. Same goes for the daughter’s teacher (Rachel Lefevre) who has a promising subplot dropped entirely after a couple of scenes. Other characters, like a welcome Winona Ryder who provides Franco access to a hitman, are nicely detailed, but ultimately exist to bumble the plot towards a conclusion.

It all builds to the shoot-‘em-up climax it continually foreshadows. Along the way, director Gary Fleder, who ten to fifteen years ago was a go-to guy for James Patterson and John Grisham adaptations or imitations, finds merely competent ways to make this interesting. It’s a watchable, straightforward and grungy B-movie all the way down the line, mostly worth it for Statham’s charmingly stoic loving father and the few passably exciting action beats, although there are fewer than you’d expect or like. You want to be on Statham’s side, not just for the plot’s sake, but for the sake of his persona. You just know that no matter the outcome, no matter the obstacle, even if said obstacle’s a middling thriller, Statham’s going to be okay. 

Girls Gone Wild: SPRING BREAKERS

Spring Breakers is a film that has its cake and eats it too. It’s a turbulent high/low collision, an art house exploitation film and moody mainstream wallow. It springs from the head of Harmony Korine, a once-precocious filmmaker who has made a career out of creating films that serve as thumbs in the eyes of both propriety and audiences in detestable artfully artless small-scale grime like Gummo and Trash Humpers. (The outlier is the sweetly, emptily bizarre Mister Lonely.) What’s left to do once you’ve so thoroughly cultivated a niche aura of punk unpredictability? His new film is a stab towards something like mainstream disreputability with a topsy-turvy R-rated update of the squeaky clean 1950s teen beach movies that’s been driven off the surf and into a neon beach out of a Michael Mann film, a feature-length montage overlaid with Malickian voice over and a non-stop dubstep and hip-hop soundtrack (Skrillex wrote the music with composer Cliff Martinez). It’s a film that sends its characters straight into a horrifying bacchanalia and keeps pushing until it finds the even more horrifying criminality simmering permanently underneath. It’s ugly, volatile, occasionally offensive, largely troubling, and always mesmerizing. What a trip.

It all starts at an unspecified any-college, where whomping bass seeps out of carousing frat house gatherings and bored youths stare vacantly at their history professor, the darkened classroom a sea of glowing laptop screens. We first meet Faith (Selena Gomez) at a campus church group. Afterwards, one of the other young congregants (Glee’s Heather Morris) asks Faith if, for Spring Break, she still plans on going to Flordia with a group of rowdier girls. “I’ve known them since Kindergarten,” Faith says, summoning a kind of protective innocence. (Her friend’s advice? Pray.) Everything will be fine, Faith thinks. It’s all going to be fun. But, with her religiousness and her name being clear thematic markers, what she’s really in for is a trip to a metaphoric Hell above and beyond the collegiate partying she’s witnessed. She’s also not aware that, with money tight, her travelling companions (Ashley Benson, Vanessa Hudgens, and Rachel Korine) have just raised the money necessary for their travel by robbing a diner armed with squirt guns and a sledgehammer.

That this information, when revealed, isn’t an immediate red flag to Faith is a little disconcerting, but away the young women go, itching for adventure, St. Petersburg bound. Once there, they find themselves in the middle of the prolonged beachside riot of drugs, alcohol, and young bodies in slippery swimsuits that is Spring Break in certain areas of the nation’s warmer climes. Korine films it all so closely and lovingly that I felt the need for a new word, one that would go above and beyond “ogle.” The way his camera lunges towards and lingers on extras, but especially at his constantly skimpily attired stars, is about as subtle as a cartoon “ahoogah!” Numerous scenes of youthful people engaging in varied, energetic, and dangerous activities immediately follow. Now, I don’t think I’m being a premature fuddy-duddy to say that this kind of partying seems to have nothing to do with fun. It’s an endurance test of ingesting the most mind-altering, mood-scrambling substances, damaging property, staying out in the sun all day and risking severe bodily harm all night. Inevitably, I suppose, the girls end up in jail when a party they’ve stumbled into gets broken up. Standing in the courtroom for sentencing – pay a fine or spend two days in the slammer – wearing only their Day-Glo bikinis, the judge takes one look at them and asks “spring breakers?” knowing full well the answer. He must see a lot of them this time of year.

The girls are unexpectedly bailed out. Alien, a creepy low-level, drug-dealing, wannabe rapper who gazes out at them from over dark sunglasses with a smile so wide they can admire his grill, pays their fines in full. Played by James Franco in spectacularly ratty cornrows, this self-styled gangster brags about wanting to “do bad,” not wanting to “do good,” shows off his guns and knives, lets them try his weed, and makes sure to put in a plug for his music which he proudly says can be heard on YouTube. He oozes a sense of danger and razor’s-edge impulsiveness that informs the rest of the film as the college girls (all at first, but as some return home, their number grows smaller and tougher) get slowly pulled into the local underground scene of drug dealers, thieves, and club owners that feeds parasitically off the marginally more reputable waves of spring breakers that annually flood the city. Let’s just say that the guns at play are squirt guns no more. That in this final narrative descent, Franco’s rival, played by Gucci Mane, is the only black character to have any lines and is here only to create a clear villain (or something close to it) is ugly, an example of the film’s occasionally offensive jumble.

But, troubling though it is, Korine’s film is both ugly and sublime, sometimes at once, as in a string of shakedowns shot in slow motion and accompanied by only the sound of Britney Spears’s ballad “Everytime.” (Earlier, the girls goofily sang “…Baby One More Time” to each other, though the Britney songs that you’d think would be most apt to the proceedings – “Oops! I Did It Again” and “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Women” – go unheard.) It’s hard to parse if the film is reveling in the teasing debauchery or drawing a stark lesson in its inevitable descent into greater and greater criminality. Is it a film of instant-gratification nihilism or stylish hedonism? Is it aghast or roused by the behavior on display? Is it corrosive or celebratory? I choose all of the above. It’s at once objectified youth culture hothouse and giddy satirical denouncement. Is Korine creating a millennial Gatsby party or participating in the emptiness of it all? (A key may be the fate of Faith.) It’s often hard to tell with a movie so close to an embodiment of the subject at hand if we’re experiencing a work of understanding or scorn or both at once. My verdict was prone to shifting mid-scene. Either way, it’s artful trash that’s far from Korine’s usual overthought sloppiness; it comes by its loose sliminess, its casual beauty, and its most offensive qualities quite honestly. In fact, one might call it a trash-terpiece.

Behind the Curtain: OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL

It can’t be easy to set out to make a film dancing around in the iconography of one of the greatest films of all time. Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful, a film that may not be great and powerful, but is certainly good and entertaining, uses memorable aspects The Wizard of Oz both big and small in inventive and surprising ways without embarrassing itself or seeming a diminishment of a beloved cultural masterpiece. That is some kind of wonderment. The film itself, which is set decades before the 1939 classic and follows a Kansas con man magician into Oz, is an earnest work of sturdy craftsmanship and showmanship, sparkling with a zippy sense of fun. Though it seems to wobble here and there, threatening to fall flat on its face, it rallies for a rousing ending. Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire’s script constantly walks up to convention only to back away in delightful flourishes.

James Franco plays the magician who will become the Wizard of Oz. He’s not quite believable, which is in some ways the point. (Just don’t imagine what Raimi’s regular character actor Bruce Campbell, who appears late in the film in a cameo, could have done with the role.) He’s a huckster with sparkling charisma hidden behind a desperate layer of slimy smarm. The prologue, set in a classically square aspect ratio and filmed in jaw-droppingly gorgeous black and white, finds his magic act at a county fair dying painfully when a sweet girl in a wheelchair begs him to make her walk again. The crowd turns on him (“He’s not a real magician!”) and on Oz’s face is written both the pain of a performer facing a hostile crowd and a man torn up by the fact that there’s nothing he can do to help someone in need. He feels like an unhelpful man without a purpose, unable to scam more than a few coins from people he considers country bumpkins.

His personality problems don’t go away, but take on larger phantasmagorical stakes when circumstances conspire to send him over the rainbow. When he’s sucked into a tornado, he’s terrified that he’s about to die, a natural reaction I’d say. When he lands in Oz, the screen expanding, filling with color and obvious digital fakery, he’s befuddled and amused, but tries to hide behind an opaque confidence that slips a bit when the real magic starts sparking around him. It’s an interesting role that calls for a leading man to fall into the background, confused and adrift in a sea of colorful spectacle, while, thrillingly, the women around him hold all the real power in this land and, whatever emotions romantic or otherwise they feel towards him, view him as a pawn in their game of thrones. He meets three witches (Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, and Michelle Williams). At least one is a good witch. One’s a bad witch who, by film’s end, becomes awfully wicked. The third will probably have a house dropped on her head at some point in her future.

The man who would be Wizard is told he’s fulfilling a prophecy by showing up in Oz. To claim the Emerald City’s throne – and all the riches the position supplies – all he must do is kill a wicked witch. Seems easy enough, so off he shuffles down the yellow brick road where, along the way, an ingratiating flying monkey (Zach Braff) and a broken China Doll (Joey King) join the quest. Raimi draws upon his directorial skill sets from both his horror background (The Evil Dead, Drag Me to Hell) and his big budget spectacles (Spider-man, Spider-man 2), staging sequences like a tantalizingly creepy/funny walk through a gloomy forest with ominous crows, snapping plants with glowing eyes, and a hooded figure gliding out of the fog of a graveyard, modulating tension and relief in supremely entertaining ways, cut together in a variety of pop art frames with smartly varied pace. Later, he’ll stage a dazzling witch-on-witch battle that follows a supreme visual and narrative pleasure in the reveal of the surprising way the fraudulent Wizard claims him throne. It’s all of a piece with Raimi’s skill with mixing humor and thrills, creating playful spectacle that’s always aware of its own fiction without lessening the impact of its storytelling.

And what storytelling! It’s lumpy in spots and the character arcs are obvious, but the film is wrapped up in an old-fashioned, hyper-earnest sense of theatrical flourish. By the time the curtain (quite literally) falls, there’s a sense of a master showman shouting “ta-da!” To the tunes of one of Danny Elfman’s best scores in recent memory, the screen is filled with colorful CGI landscapes and charming creature work that’s gloriously fake, approaching the Technicolor perfection of The Wizard of Oz’s painted backdrops. But that’s not to say the effects are wholly unconvincing. On the contrary, they’re often quite spectacular when they need to be. Franco’s travelling companions are effects that work incredibly well. The monkey, for instance, sells some nonverbal punchlines through nothing more than the shifting expressions on his face. The look of the film is appealing through and through. The Land of Oz itself is a glittering jewel of manufactured whimsy and the witches’ elegant wardrobes look like they were cut from the same cloth as MGM’s 1930’s costume department. To top it all off, the 3D is as dazzling as any I’ve seen. (Put it on the short list with Avatar, Hugo, and Life of Pi as essential live action 3D.) Oz is a funny, surprising magic music box of sturdy childlike wonder.

Note: Although I like this film a bit less than the unfairly maligned and forgotten John Carter, it’s interesting to note that two years in a row Disney has released in March an expensive live action film inspired by turn-of-the-20th-century genre fiction about a man in the early 1900s who is whisked away to a different world where he’s just the variable needed to tip the balance in a struggle between competing factions.

Go Ape: RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

The main character of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a combination reboot / remake / prequel of the kind increasingly common to moribund franchises these days, is a startlingly well-drawn, patiently developed and deeply sympathetic creation. He’s an incredibly talented youngster who grows exponentially in intelligence and capacity as he ages. One unfortunate day, he attacks a neighbor while defending a member of his surrogate family and is locked away in a prison-like environment. There, he discovers his own kind and begins to plot an escape. His name is Caesar and he is a chimpanzee.

All of his character development is done with a handful of sign language symbols sparsely translated, but otherwise through entirely wordless passages in which body language and small shifts of expression – it’s all in the eyes – tell more than you need to know about his emotional state. Even more impressive than just the mere fact that an expensive studio production would willingly turn over so much time to quiet and nuance is that Caesar is a computer-generated character, quite possibly the most convincing one yet. He’s performed via motion capture by Andy Serkis, the same digitally-assisted chameleon who breathed life into the pixels of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and the giant gorilla in Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Not only is Caesar convincing, but he captured my emotions as well. I had a rooting interest in this character and was on the edge of my seat waiting to see what he would learn, what he would decide to do next.

When Caesar arrives amongst other primates, very convincing effects work all, in an animal control prison lorded over by an inattentive Brian Cox and a sneering Tom Felton, encounters with chimps, orangutans, and gorillas are similarly convincing, thrilling, and suspenseful. The hierarchies of this little prison society are made startlingly clear in what seem like lengthy sequences in which the only sounds are growls, snorts, and various ape vocalizations. By the time the simian inmates form a makeshift army – after some convoluted sci-fi business about enhanced intelligence – their strategy meetings are similarly thrillingly clear despite the lack of speaking. It’s all in the eyes, which in these cases are most definitely windows to souls.

If this movie were mostly just apes, this review would be on-track to be a nearly unqualified rave. As it is, the film has lots of human stuff dragging down the level of quality. Perhaps that’s because, unlike for the apes, writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver are required to write speaking role for the humans. There is so much intelligence, thought, and humanity in the wordless ape roles, that it’s a shame that the movie lacks human intelligence. Oh, they all play their parts just fine but the dialogue is really clunky and the plot requires some humans to make Very Bad Decisions for the sake of moving things along. The lead human is scientist James Franco who is close to a breakthrough in his work for a cure to Alzheimer’s. We see that he likes to take his work home with him when we learn that his father (John Lithgow) is suffering from said disease. When Franco’s work testing his cure on chimps is shut down by his Big Pharma boss (David Oyelowo), he saves a baby chimp from being put down and brings him home too. That would be Caesar. It’s a good thing that Franco woos a pretty veterinarian (Freida Pinto) who can keep a secret.

The slick production just blasts forward, rocketing upwards at a terrific pace, escalating all the while. Director Rupert Wyatt, in his first big studio effort, has a great hand at keeping the effects perfectly utilized. He neither leans on them, nor tries to hide them. He knows he has a good thing going and makes great use of the skilled work of thousands of animators and dozens of mo-cap performers. The spectacle is truly spectacular, made all the more so by the simple fact that I cared about what was happening on the screen. Not since 1968’s Planet of the Apes found astronaut Charlton Heston falling through time and space and landing on a future Earth ruled by the apes, has a Planet of the Apes film been so fully satisfying.

Rise flips the frightening central scenario. Instead of a man being oppressed by apes, this film shows apes being oppressed by men. It’s a terrifying what if scenario both ways. What if apes got tired of being treated as second-class species? Though Rise sees unwilling to maintain the same commentary on the cauldron of societal ills that informed the sensibilities of the original films, there is still a potent sense of wrong in the treatment of these animals, and a potent terror in their eventual strike back. It’s all the more terrifying for seeming justified. Caesar is a charismatic character who grows into a charismatic leader. The great success of the film is not only the way it so brilliantly builds this character, but also in the way it has an audience rooting for the defeat of mankind, rooting for the rise of the Planet of the Apes. The film doesn’t quite get there, concluding by merely leaving tantalizing threads for future sequels. It’s funny that the franchise, which started with Heston’s angst at the destruction of humanity, has come full circle to the point where an audience cheers it on. It’s excitingly transgressive. When a character in this new film shouts “Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” The film’s thrilling, hugely entertaining and disturbing answer is “No.” 

Not Mad, Just Disappointed: YOUR HIGHNESS

Despite the ample warnings provided by the deluge of negative reviews, Your Highness filled me with a deep, awful disappointment. It is a film of so many painful, unanswerable questions, but chief among them is simply “Why?” Why does this movie exist? Why did David Gordon Green, one of the most promising talents in Hollywood today, waste his time with this nonsense? I suppose he thought it would be funny, and maybe it is for some. I wasn’t laughing.

Green’s heart wrenching indie character piece George Washington is one of the greatest debut features in recent memory. He followed that up with a heartfelt romance, All the Real Girls; a gripping slice of Southern Gothic, Undertow; a deeply felt ache of a small-town portrait, Snow Angels; and a goofy stoner action comedy, Pineapple Express. I love all of those films to varying degrees, even Pineapple Express, which was a slight drop in quality from his string of masterpieces but has grown on me as time passes.

With Your Highness, Green creates a bumbling fantasy comedy about a chivalrous prince (James Franco) and his doofus brother (Danny McBride). They set out with a faithful servant (Rasmus Hardiker) on a quest to save a princess (Zooey Deschanel) from an evil wizard (Justin Theroux). Along the way they encounter Natalie Portman as a very earnest warrior who exists to look pretty, provide reaction shots, and move the plot along by simply being the most competent person in the room. The worst part of all this is that that’s a hugely promising set-up for a rollicking R-rated comedy. Even as I sit here typing this, knowing full well how much I don’t like the movie, I find myself intrigued. Add to that concept a collection of truly talented people and it starts to seem impossible that it could be that bad. I only have to remind myself how painfully low the supply of laughs actually is and I’m brought back down to the reality of just how bad the movie is.

I can think of no clearer way to review comedy than for a critic to honestly report the number of times he or she laughed. Your Highness made me laugh exactly zero times. (I did, however, smile once). Green follows unchecked impulses (and a script from McBride and co-writer Ben Best) into an unceasingly violent, vulgar, and sloppy comedy that seems to pound away at ideas for jokes instead of committing to the actual jokes themselves.

When the camera pulls back and swoops across the untamed wilderness the characters traipse through, there’s a feeling of a building fantasy epic that could be nicely undercut by the character’s deeply flawed personalities. Instead, the joke is that McBride likes to get high and is socially awkward and that Franco is too seemingly perfect to see just how imperfect he can be. That could also be funny, but what it ultimately boils down to is two characters stomping around using phony, vaguely British, accents and slipping into modern-day idioms and swearing. Tee-hee, we’re supposed to think, aren’t they naughty? But it’s not too long at all before it’s not funny, just wearing.

Quick Look: HOWL

Beat poet Allen Ginsberg has been on the periphery of several recent films. He was portrayed in a David Cross cameo for Todd Haynes’s 2007 experimental Bob Dylan pseudo-biopic I’m Not There. He showed up in archival footage and in an animated version with the voice of Hank Azaria in Brett Morgan’s criminally underrated Chicago 10. So, it was only a matter of time before he was the subject of his own film. In Howl, James Franco portrays Ginsberg. He has the glasses, the beard, and the cadences more or less right. Unfortunately, the performance is undercut by the movie itself, which is too jumbled for its own good. Written and directed by documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (between them, they have the Oscar-winning 1984 feature Times of Harvey Milk and the acclaimed 1995 Celluloid Closet on their resumes) the plot has Ginsberg speaking to an unseen reporter in New York while an obscenity trial concerning his poem “Howl” unfolds in San Francisco. The trial is populated with a host of wonderful character actors like David Stratharin, Jon Hamm, and Jeff Daniels. In between these two parallel threads are painfully obvious and clumsily inserted animated interpretations of the poem while Franco as Ginsberg recites its lines in voice over. Despite the efforts of everyone involved, scene after scene falls flat. There’s a lot of juggling going on and the potential impact ends up shattered.

Quick Look: 127 HOURS

One of Danny Boyle’s greatest skills as a director is his ease with unease. Through his throat-grabbing jump cuts and frenetic cinematography (mostly, as of late, from Anthony Dod Mantle), he summons up great dread. It’s not just his horror films (28 Days Later) or druggie portraits (Trainspotting) that utilize this skill. Even his most crowd-pleasing Slumdog Millionaire is a film with characters perpetually on the edge of potential destruction. Now, with 127 Hours, Boyle once again utilizes unease to maximum effect in telling the true story of Aron Ralston, the hiker who found himself alone and pinned to the side of a canyon in a freak accident when a boulder landed on his arm. James Franco, as Ralston, brings a laid-back charm to the opening scenes that nicely complement the dire circumstances he soon tumbles into. He’s a compelling screen presence, easily entertaining even in an increasingly desperate situation. Naturally, the film progresses with its protagonist trapped in one location, but Boyle surrounds him with a cacophonous visual and aural collage. It’s electrifyingly busy filmmaking that uses the character’s excruciating pain and increasing claustrophobic isolation and hopelessness to fuel a hallucinatory stream of consciousness with imagery and sound. After five days, when Ralston decides that the only way to be free is through self-amputation, it’s a highly charged moment of gore and viscera followed by a denouement of overwhelming, transcendent release. While the thematic elements of the film feel a bit schematic at times, the film’s pulse of emotion, deriving its power from the unceasing visceral unease and tension that course through the movie, leaves an undeniable impact.

Julia's World: EAT PRAY LOVE

Under the direction of Ryan Murphy, most recently notable for creating the TV show Glee, the popular Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat Pray Love has become a star turn for Julia Roberts who holds the screen with movie star style as she poses in exotic locations. This is a pretty travelogue with gorgeous scenery and well-dressed costars. What other leading lady in recent memory gets to be romanced by James Franco and Javier Bardem in the same picture? What other leading lady gets to indulge in lovingly prepared meals, walk through lush jungles and beautiful ruins, and look consistently endearing? This is a movie of wish fulfillment, allowing an audience to trek to Italy, India, and Indonesia with a beautiful travelling companion who lets us meet beautiful people.

It’s also a movie dripping in syrupy schmaltz, a gooey, sloppy mess that results in a movie that practically slides off the screen. This isn’t a chick flick; its a woman’s picture, but one portentous in the deep meaning it thinks it’s passing down to us. Roberts plays Elizabeth Gilbert, a writer who leaves her husband (Billy Crudup), has a fling with a struggling actor (Franco), and is all around unsettled. She tells her close friend (Viola Davis) that she feels disconnected from life, unsure of whom she really is. What she decides she needs is some time to get in touch with her appetites, her spirituality, and herself. Thus the eating, praying and loving that happens on her yearlong trek across three exotic locales.

Through her travels, Julia Roberts remains remarkably well put-together. She devours tempting plates of pasta that are sumptuously photographed. After many of those meals she mentions her need for wider pants, but when we get the shot of her struggling to button her jeans, she still looked skinny to me. She also stays remarkably clean, even when she tumbles off of a bike into a muddy ditch.

Figure and cleanliness aside, Roberts brings some small nuance to a role that, as scripted, has very little nuance inherent. She stands before breathtaking vistas, bikes through dripping, green rainforests, and meditates at an ashram in the heart of bustling India. She’s a great surrogate traveler for the audience, experiencing great beauty at every turn.

At each location, she meets people who help her along on her journey of self-discovery. The most intriguing is the sixtyish man from Texas whom she meets in India and is played by the always welcome, always excellent, Richard Jenkins. He has a moving background and a warm screen presence. Later, in Indonesia, Javier Bardem enters the picture and nearly steals the whole thing away with his effortless charm.

Yet, for all its amazing sights and charming cast, the film is frustrating in its lack of introspection. This is a story about a woman’s self-discovery, a woman coming to terms with whom she is, mentally and spiritually, finding a perfect balance and a sense of completeness. And yet, this is a film that gives us almost no sense of her interior thoughts. Sure, we get a few passages of on-the-nose narration, but we are otherwise left stranded with only occasional quivering lips, moody flashbacks, pensive eyes, and, maybe, a single tear rolling down Robert’s cheek. It’s a film that goes out of its way to convince an audience that this woman has learned Big Lessons on her journey, lessons that will change her life, change her outlook, for the better. And yet, as the credits rolled, I remained unconvinced.

Still, I found Eat Pray Love to be an agreeable experience. I liked the scenery and I liked the actors that I had to share it with. As the movie started, I found myself resisting it. I found it too maudlin, too episodic, and too full of polished imagery covering up its hollowness, it’s hodgepodge spirituality, it’s reductive view of foreign culture and it’s navel-gazing dullness. But the film outlasted my will to resist. While my early complaints still stand, by the film’s end I found myself lulled into a sense of small pleasure. It’s a shiny, big-budget, continent-spanning film with fine actors and a nice look, pleasant and undemanding. Robert Richardson’s sun-soaked cinematography is consistently lovely and the cast is enjoyable company. The film is far worse than it thinks it is, but much better than I was expecting, hardly necessary, but certainly watchable.

DATE NIGHT: It's a Date!

Date Night is what we tell ourselves Hollywood used to create more consistently. It’s a high concept blockbuster with big stars and a big budget. It’s an action-comedy that’s genuinely exciting and more than a little funny. It moves at a fast pace with a light touch. It’s a perfectly enjoyable night at the movies, even though, as it was winding down, I found myself mildly disappointed that it wasn’t just a little bit better.

After all, the movie stars two of the funniest people working today. Steve Carell and Tina Fey play a married couple whose weekly date night takes a screwball turn when a case of mistaken identity turns their night into a wacky and dangerous race through New York City in order to stay alive and clear up the misunderstandings. Their madcap adventure contains plenty of capably staged action and plenty of laughs. They come into contact with a host of funny characters who are played by a host of funny, talented performers. There’s a hunky security expert (Mark Wahlberg), a mob boss (Ray Liotta), a policewoman (Taraji P. Henson), two shady tough-guys (Common and Jimmi Simpson), and a couple of goofy lowlifes (James Franco and Mila Kunis) who are the real couple that should be at the center of the mess. Needless to say, Carell and Fey are far removed from their suburban-family existence and their circle of friends (which include the always welcome Kristen Wiig and Mark Ruffalo).

Carell and Fey have enjoyable presences on funny sitcoms (The Office and 30 Rock, respectively) and here create an easy rapport. They seem like a real married couple. They have complications and frustrations, sure, but they seem to truly love each other. And when the action movie kicks in, they don’t discover hidden depths in each other, or suddenly become butt-kicking action superstars. Their relationship is a little touching and sweet as their characters remain consistent throughout: likable and relatable. With lesser leads, the movie would be nowhere near as good, even with the excellent supporting cast that has been assembled.

Certainly, the story would not be as memorable if it weren’t for the people acting it out. The plot keeps a lot of thriller and screwball elements in the air, and there’s a feeling that it doesn’t ever develop the ideas more than the plot requires. But what a plot! I’m sure there are plot holes. It’s not complicated, or even particularly distinguished, but it’s certainly enjoyable and involving as it sends the characters racing through ridiculous scenarios and it managed to keep me smiling and chuckling for almost the entire run time. Sure, it retroactively bothers me that the underlying theme about marriage is never fully explored and that the great supporting cast is seriously underused. But the movie was fun enough at the time.

The director is Shawn Levy who ruinously remade The Pink Panther and wasted a perfectly good premise in not one but two Night at the Museum movies. Here, he finally makes a movie that works all the way through. It’s a film that’s energetic without seeming manic while funny without seeming to stretch for laughs. The timing is excellent, the leads are well-deployed, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. In fact, it all seems to resolve too easily and quickly. If anything, I wanted the movie to go on a little longer. There needs to be just one more turn of the screw, one more unexpected complication. The plot resolves a bit too quickly and easily. Then again, I should be careful what I wish for. This is just an easy, uncomplicated, and enjoyable experience. It's a fun, slick entertainment that’s, at the risk of sounding too willing to be quoted, just right for date night.