Olden Days: YOUTH

A fairly routine contemplation of aging, Youth spends its opulent and repetitive time circling the contours of an elderly man’s worldview. He is Fred (Michael Caine), a retired composer and conductor who is staying at a luxury hotel and health spa in Switzerland’s picturesque countryside. The views are fantastic, the amenities deluxe, and the guests an odd collection of minor celebrities and assorted weirdoes. Diagnosed by his daughter (Rachel Weisz) as perhaps incurably apathetic, he spends his time going for long walks, sitting in hot tubs, getting massages, chatting with strangers, and hanging out with his oldest friend (Harvey Keitel), a filmmaker holed up with a bunch of doughy young writers hammering out a script for his next project. Director Paolo Sorrentino conducts these happenings in endless cyclical loops, through recurring discussions, discursive cuts to tableaus of other guests’ activities, and lyrical juxtapositions. It’s visually robust, but intellectually thin, as hypnotic and it is tiresome.

Caine brings an air of exhaustion to his performance as a man who has had a long and interesting life, but now finds himself preoccupied with what he’s lost, what he can no longer remember, what he hasn’t the energy for. In an obvious metaphor, Keitel has a younger colleague look at a mountain through a telescope. “It seems so close,” she says. (Never mind why she seems surprised by how the device works, I suppose.) That’s what it’s like to be young and looking to the future, he says, before asking her to look through the wrong end of the telescope. That, he says as if he’s brilliant, is being old and looking at the past. They’re always looking back. The old men wander the grounds of the resort discussing old memories, contemplating mortality, worrying about their legacies, and people watching: speculating about a mute old couple, staring at singers and mimes, and ogling pretty young women. (It’s Europe, so naturally portions of the spa are clothing optional, a fact on which Sorrentino certainly loves to linger.)

We’re trapped in this mindset of enfeebled masculinity, two old friends shuffling towards the end. Even the relatively younger characters seem burdened by the aging process, pained beyond their years – Weisz’s daughter character facing a bad breakup, a famous actor (Paul Dano) wishing he could do more important work. It’s all part of the creaky fog, the psychologically stifling connection to a vision of the world that’s more than a little musty. It’s not just that the wrinkled guys keep each other up to date on their urination habits and talk about broads they don’t remember sleeping with – part of its parade of not-so-insightful cheap details about getting older. Here’s a movie that hates pop stars and reality TV, has a character deride another’s past “experimenting with homosexuality,” and parades pretty women through scenes for the express purpose of making the men feel better about themselves. (Ditto frumpy or obese hotel workers and guests who are posed in displays against the rich décor in ways that accentuate luxurious grotesqueness.)

In fact, every woman in the movie is either a problem to be solved by a man (the only solution to Weisz troubles is to date a hotel employee who comically bugs out his eyes when he first sees her) or an object to be appreciated on aesthetic grounds. In one scene Sorrentino has a beauty queen (Madalina Diana Ghenea) – a character who, in a previous scene, was mocked for wanting to change careers – parades nude in front of Caine and Keitel at an otherwise empty pool for no reason other than to show off for their benefit (and ours, I suppose). What a relief, then, to find Jane Fonda stride into the picture for one glorious scene. She plays an actress who arrives at the hotel to turn down an offer Keitel has sent her. In an exquisitely played monologue, she punctures the movie’s airless cranky old man self-involved self-regard.

Sadly, the film returns to her for an additional quick scene that dilutes her righteous feminist fire by making her seem helpless and deranged (sadly of a piece with the rest of the film). But at least she snaps off a great line that inadvertently deflates the surrounding pretentions: “Life goes on, even without all that cinema bullshit.” If only the movie took its own wake up call. It’s a work of great surface beauty, Luca Bigazzi’s handsome cinematography filled with striking compositions. Sorrentino floats through convincing performances and lush production design with such ease, it’s possible to slip out of the narrative and enjoy it as a sensation, a parade of interesting images. The problem is only that Youth keeps insisting it’s adding up to some import, making some keen insights into the minds of its characters, or into the very process of living life to the fullest at every age. Such ambitions only lead to starkly reveal how empty and shallow it is. Sorrentino has prepared an elaborate airy dessert, but served it insisting it’s the entire meal.

Who You Gonna Call: THE LAST WITCH HUNTER

The Last Witch Hunter has wild ideas hidden in generic trappings. It features a gleefully nonsensical plot, a mysterious original(ish) concoction of mythology, and plenty of striking fantasy horror imagery. It starts in a murky distant past where men wielding flaming swords clash with shape-shifting witches in the cavernous roots of a massive dark tree that we learn is the source of the Black Plague. Then, we skip forward 800 years into the future – our time – to find the one remaining Witch Hunter. The dying Witch Queen cursed him with immortality, and so he has spent his centuries resigned to hunting down the evil witches and warlocks making the world a worse place. He does so under the careful watch of a supernatural council hidden in the bowels of a New York cathedral, the better for his Catholic priest assistants to help him. All that’s wonderfully ridiculous, and refreshingly nutty, but it moves in heaving clunks of bland thriller mechanics and endless expository dialogue.

The Witch Hunter is Kaulder (Vin Diesel), a towering bald tough guy who swaggers around showing magic users what’s what. There’s a scene in which he enters an underground bar for magic people and they preemptively flee. The owner (Rose Leslie) lets him know that her kind view him as a genocidal fascist, which, considering the whole single-mindedly hunting their kind for centuries, seems like a fair enough label. Still, we’re to understand Kaulder is a kindhearted guy out to indefinitely imprison only bad witches. That’s nice. He’s soulfully mourning his mortality by staring off into space, hiding his psychic wounds behind a jaded exterior. His priest chaperone (Michael Caine) chastises him for always running late. “Time works differently for me,” he rumbles. Diesel has commitment, and investment in the loopy ins and outs that helps bring some reverence to the ridiculous.

Caine’s priest tells us plenty about the history of the Ax and Cross, a secret order of Catholic officials who have passed the Witch Hunting legacy down one at a time for centuries. A new, younger one (Elijah Wood) is waiting in the wings. The movie starts to shape up like a buddy cop movie in a conspiratorial cultish underground monster movie mode, investigating, say, a blind warlock (Isaach De Bankolé) whose butterfly-infested bakery uses mind-altering grubs in the dough. Soon, though, they learn the long-dead Witch Queen (Julie Engelbrecht) has minions (like Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) plotting to revive her and take over the world with her Plague once more. This leads to one of the movie’s best moments, where the camera pushes in on a character who has put two and two together and murmurs the one place that has enough dark power to restore this dormant evil to full life: Witch Jail.

It’s a race through dream spaces and nightmarish hallucinations to find the MacGuffins necessary to restore order to the world and stave off a malevolent resurrection. The main problem is Kaulder’s memory, though it is totally understandable that he can’t remember a crucial detail from 800 years prior and thus must hunt down a spell that’ll restore him. He teams up with the bar-owning witch and his priests to walk around explaining the rules of the magic, the monsters they encounter, ancient curse antidotes they need, right when each new factor appears. Sure, there are swordfights and spells cast and glowing doodads flipped around. But mostly those involved make sure to thoroughly explain what they’re about to do, and then, once done, explain what they just did. And even then I still didn’t really understand every detail.

It’d be more fun if the screenplay by Cory Goodman (Priest) and Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless (Dracula Untold) would let its characters shut up for a second, take a deep breath, and be more than exposition spigots, because director Breck Eisner (Sahara) does a credible job selling the outlandish ideas visually. When a sorceress uses a necklace to awaken a tree monster, it’s not hard to figure out the causal relationship. And when a sword impaling one character causes pain in another, the connection is clear. We don’t necessarily need people tiresomely expounding. Just move along. Show us cool things. I liked the Witch Queen’s look: like a life-size woodcarving brought to life, with a mop of greasy spaghetti hair and a thick brain stem braid. It’s icky and creepy. And when she’s dead (the first time) she looks like burnt firewood. It’s all the better for remaining mysterious, unexplained. This is a movie about deep, dark magic threatening to burst forth from underneath the surface of modernity, and instead of urgency or menace, it’s just neat to look at.

Spies of the Roundtable: KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE

Director Matthew Vaughn is always making movies about other movies, not subverting formula or deconstructing tropes, but doing his favorite genres louder, gorier, and goofier than before. The British gangster picture Layer Cake, fantasy Stardust, and superhero movie Kick-Ass are of equal falseness, movies for the sake of movies. They have their moments, but is it any wonder his X-Men movie is his best? The dictates of franchise care required him to play it straight, funneling his skills into his energy and staging instead of stunted and narrow movies borrowing real world pain for nothing more than bloody riffs, one step further removed from anything worth caring about. His latest, Kingsman: The Secret Service, is a colorful goof on the James Bond formula, following the basic outline of the typical 007 plot but playing it looser, faster, bloodier, and cheekier. It’s an enjoyable movie right up until it isn’t.

Maybe it’s more accurate to call Kingsman a half-serious Austin Powers for how consciously silly the plotting, how fawning it is over retro gadgetry. It’s eager to tell us how smart it thinks it’s being, which takes some of the charm out of its self-congratulatory deployment of Bond-style gadgets – bulletproof umbrella, poison pen, exploding lighter – and plot turns. After all, this is a movie with a megalomaniac villain and his exoticized henchwoman trying to execute their convoluted plot for world domination, complete with a giant glowing countdown clock. Several times characters make reference to fictional spies – Bond, Bourne, Bower, you get the picture – and trade the barb, “It’s not that kind of movie.” Oh, but it is. From the first notes of Henry Jackman’s John Barry-esque score, it’s obvious what territory we’re in.

The film’s one clever idea is to recast the double-ohs as a clandestine organization carrying out secret spycraft, a good old Spies of the Roundtable complete with codenames like Lancelot, Galahad, and Merlin. Called The Kingsman, they’ve had a sudden opening. And so respectably stuffy Colin Firth, properly situated in a sharp suit, recruits a rough, tough, street-smart lad (relative newcomer Taron Egerton) and bets he can turn him into a proper superspy, a sort of My Fair Lady actioner (a reference explicitly made). Vaughn, with his usual co-writer Jane Goldman, milks these riffs on pop culture past for bright engaging action. It’s often jolly good fun, drawing on X-Men: First Class montage swagger for early team-building training sequences as Egerton grows from a street kid to a spy, then turns into a adolescent power fantasy. Save the world, get the girl, and all that jazz.

There are giggles to be had in seeing Firth turn into an action hero in elaborately staged, CGI assisted, action sequences. The kid’s quite good, too, holding his own against the older folks while looking dashing in his eventual spy uniform. Their colleagues include a comic relief Q figure (Mark Strong), an underwritten-but-capable pretty girl (Sophie Cookson), and a wise old mentor (Michael Caine). Their villains are nasty, a crazy billionaire (Samuel L. Jackson, hamming it up) and his flunky (Sofia Boutella), a woman with razor-sharp prosthetic legs that make her as fast and deadly as a certain Olympic athlete. The cast is engaging and entertaining, having as much fun playing broad comic book shtick as Vaughn is having a good time whipping up scenarios for near-death action movie experiences for them, like a tense skydiving sequence that’s the cleverest the film gets.

More fun than not for awhile, the movie goes wrong by giving in to its regressive fantasy, probably leaking in from the Mark Millar source material. His are the most gleefully ugly comic books around, trafficking in unapologetic laddish humor and smug shock violence. Kingsman isn’t that bad, but it is a movie in which the villain is an evil lisping black man and the only hope for the world is a bunch of upper-crust white guys and the one up-from-his-bootstraps recruit whose eventual reward is access to a woman’s body. The optics are obnoxious. It’s a movie so caught up in its splashy R-rated cartoonishness that it loses sight of what, exactly, it is enjoying. It spends its time tweaking tropes in the name of escapism, but can’t escape the implications of its giddy gore that ends up giving rightwing nuts something to cheer. (I’d trim two scenes of a real-life world leader if I could.)

Its most troubling scene is a turning point between goofy wish fulfillment and poisonous misanthropy. An elaborate gory massacre is played for laughs, scored with rock and staged with slapstick. It’s followed immediately by the death of a major character we’re supposed to mourn. (How we’re to care about deaths, and yet also find exploding heads hilarious is beyond me.) As this rockets the movie towards a crescendo of climaxes, the movie wants us on the edge of our seats fretting over the fate of the world as violence erupts here, there, and everywhere. I felt the suspense, was effectively manipulated by the crosscutting. And I would’ve enjoyed it more but for the feeling the film was reveling in the carnage and wouldn’t mind if its heroes failed to stop it. It’s a brisk, exciting movie, better in its breezy charming moments than its splashy nasty conclusions.

To Boldly Go: INTERSTELLAR

Interstellar is a film out of time about a man out of time. It’s set in a future world in which climate change isn’t solved, leading to food shortages, dust storms, and economic collapse. In other words, it’s our world if we don’t get our acts together. It’s gotten so bad, a highly skilled engineer and pilot like Cooper (an earnest Matthew McConaughey) has found those jobs gone, forcing him to take up farming. There amidst the cornfields he, widowed, lives a frustrated life with his kids (Mackenzie Foy and Timothée Chalamet) and his father-in-law (John Lithgow), working the land and watching the skies, lamenting the lack of opportunity not just for himself, but for his children as well. They’re doomed to work the land for a starving planet losing habitable soil by the day. His father-in-law tells him, “You were born forty years too late, or too early.” How strange to hear that said about a future person, wishing himself back in our day.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan is a man out of time as well. His brand of pop seriousness, with the likes of The Dark Knight and Inception, may be in vogue, but his insistence on un-franchised tentpoles and shooting on film (full IMAX and 70mm, no less) make him an outlier. Sure enough, he, along with brother Jonathan who co-wrote, makes Interstellar an old-fashioned science fiction tale. It’s built out of bits and pieces of major sci-fi landmarks past, with the slow build of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the workaday travelers of Alien, the matter-of-fact procedure of Contact, the trippy leaps of 2001. There’s also some Gravity, Apollo 13, and The Right Stuff mixed in. And the opening sequence even has talking heads literally reappropriated from Ken Burns’ Dust Bowl, an odd choice.

The film steadily takes its time, gets its thrills out of the power and excitement of the unknown, and finally leaps beyond its reach into an ending as intuitively satisfying as it is both literal and baffling. Cooper is recruited by one of his old bosses (Michael Caine) to join a secret last-ditch effort to save humanity by looking to the stars. The plan is to travel through a wormhole near Saturn to a distant galaxy perched on the edge of a black hole and scout habitable worlds. Feeling the weight of the doomed Earth dying fast and taking his kids’ futures with it, he agrees to embark on this difficult and potentially indefinite mission. The film, which up until this point is appealing without being gripping, achieves liftoff at the same time the spaceship does.

The scientists (Anne Hathaway, Wes Bentley, and David Gyasi) joining the journey are embarking on exploration meant to resist the prevailing earthbound public sentiment to merely manage decline. No, they’re out to discover a way to save mankind, a standard sci-fi trope here done slowly, seriously, and well. Nolan takes the opportunity to find the absorbing detail of scientific exploration, the majesty of awe as all manner of cosmic phenomena drift by.

Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema makes gorgeous images out of the interplay between the gunmetal grey ship and the gleaming, glittering panoply of stars, nebula, wormholes, and singularities lighting up the night sky. A host of talented artists conjure gorgeously rendered effects as beautiful as anything Douglas Trumbull cooked up for 2001 and The Tree of Life. Hans Zimmer’s score makes use of a pipe organ, making the connection between swirling space and spiritual reverence, the resonances of hope and progress as a light in hopeless darkness, the cosmos a cathedral of wonder and fear. It’s a film that’s reaching, and often thrilling in that reach.

That’s all in line with Nolan’s typical interest in concept over all else. His filmmaking is interested in process and rules, in films that constantly explain their preoccupations with puzzling over magic tricks, rattled memories, and layers of dream spaces. This is narratively his most straightforward film, thrilling to the step-by-step procedures that launch our team of astronauts (plus a Bill Irwin-voiced faceless box of metal robot who gets all the best lines) towards strange new worlds. There they find moments of peril and thriller plotting, including a late-arriving big name put to great use in a twist a lesser actor wouldn’t sell nearly as well.

The screenplay’s construction is clever in its use of the theory of relativity’s stretching space travel time to tell two connected stories on vastly different tracks. First, the tense interstellar mission spanning what feels to the characters like weeks. Second, a decades-spanning story for those left on Earth, like Cooper’s kids who grow up to be Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck, wondering if their father will ever return or if he’s lost in space forever.

This is the film’s animating anxiety, not the potential end of humanity, but a broken family trying to pick up the pieces. They’re separated by time and space, in need of reconciliation and reunion that may never come. That’s the big beating heart at the core of the film, for all its spacey wonder and eventual squishy mumbo jumbo conclusion. The stars are an impressive backdrop, and the tense spaceship maneuvers and equation crunches are gripping outgrowths of, moments as simple as a father weeping while watching his children grow up fast from afar. The people in the film are representations of ideas more than round characters, but the talented cast breathes life into them and the feelings shake through. It’s a testament to the level of craft on display that the film can routinely verbalize every idea, and then feel them, too.

It’s Nolan’s most humane film, building on the metaphors for grief that drove Inception, working towards greater heights of narrative tension as expression of character needs. In the end, these twin, sometimes fumbling, impulses towards scientific and emotional exploration lead the film into a resolution that’s partially an explosion of abstract images, but more often an overly literal explanation that actually doesn’t make much sense. But the journey there is often stirring and exciting, overwhelming and marvelous with powerful images and sensations. I couldn’t help but admire the overreach of the final moments anyway, as it turns sci-fi loops that resolve the story tightly where I might’ve preferred a greater sense of poetic ambiguity. It’s a film of great ambition, a big, uneven, intensely personal vision that sneaks up and overpowers my objections.

Vanished: NOW YOU SEE ME

If you had stopped the heisting magician thriller Now You See Me halfway through, I’d have been just as happy with the movie’s conclusion. Actually, I’d have been a smidge happier, since that would mean I got to leave the theater an hour earlier. Everything about the movie feels arbitrary to its core. If, at the midway point, you’d asked me to explain who the characters are, I’d have been at a loss. They’re given absolutely no characterization outside of what the plot demands of them, which is very little and up to change with the whims of the twists. If you’d asked me to describe the plot, I would’ve vaguely muttered something about stolen money and investigating cops. What happens makes little to no sense in the moment and less when you stop to think about it. By the movie’s conclusion, it’s easy to tell that Important Things are cohering, but awfully hard to figure out why or why we should care.

Within the first few scenes, it’s clear the movie has already failed Siskel’s lunch test: Is this movie more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch? When you see the names in the cast, it’s easy to think a filmmaker can start with this much talent at his disposal and end up with at least a mildly diverting film. (You’d be wrong, by the way.) Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson, and Dave Franco play magicians who are given the blueprints for an amazing trick under mysterious circumstances. Michael Caine plays their bankroller (and a reminder that The Prestige is a much better magic thriller). Mark Ruffalo and Melanie Laurent are detectives who enter the picture when the magicians appear to heist millions of Euros out of a Parisian bank during their Vegas act. Finally, there’s Morgan Freeman as a magician debunker who exists herein as Mr. Explanation. I knew something had gone horribly wrong when I actually forgot he was in the movie when he wasn’t in a scene.

The arrogantly nonsensical plotting from screenwriters Ed Solomon, Edward Ricourt, and Boaz Yakin does nothing to explain why these magicians are suddenly famous. Their act looks lousy with terrible patter and a sparse collection of cheap tricks, the worst of which are clearly aided by CGI. But, they’re famous nonetheless and though we never get a good sense of their personalities or how they relate to each other beyond what we surmise about the actors themselves from other roles and public personas, they’re supposed to be, well, I don’t know. Are the magicians our protagonists? Maybe. Their stunt ends with the possibly stolen money rained down on the audience. How very Robin Hood of them. But then there’s the dogged detectives, who have a slight edge in the sensible, stable characterization department. I liked them more, but couldn’t make heads or tails of what the movie was trying to do with them.

I’d have actually gone along with it if it gave the actors more memorable reasons for doing what they do. Maybe the problem isn’t that it’s nuts, but that it’s not nearly nuts enough. Either way, I sat dumbfounded by how little I cared. Director Louis Leterrier, who started his career with promising actioners like The Transporter and The Incredible Hulk before hitting Hollywood junk like Clash of the Titans, films Now You See Me in a blur of fast-moving images that can’t move fast enough to outrun the looming sense of unsatisfyingly unstable plotting. Scattershot plot points, aggressively explained shrugs of twists, and nothing characters all contribute to a singularly mindless two-hour sit in a theater. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense to me; it’s that the movie can’t even be bothered to come up with parameters for itself with which it could make sense. At least this movie about magic manages to pull two good vanishing acts. The first was when my money disappeared from my wallet. The second was when the movie’s specifics left my mind almost entirely even a mere 12 hours after leaving the theater. 

Knightfall: THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

After Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight concluded with Batman (Christian Bale) fleeing into the night, taking the fall for a series of crimes so that Gotham City may still have hope, or something like that, it makes a certain amount of sense that The Dark Knight Rises would position the caped crusader as a public figure who has slunk away from the spotlight and is poised to earn back the city’s trust. There’s no such trust problem for this big-screen iteration of the famed comic book hero. If anything, Nolan has earned, rightfully or not, an astounding surplus of fan trust, a rabid kind of fervor that had a great many convinced of the movie’s perfection sight unseen. It’s to Nolan’s credit that the film doesn’t coast on franchise loyalty and therefore manages to avoid the major problems that typically befall the third entry in these sorts of series. It’s a movie of high-quality craftsmanship from all involved, nicely shot and terrifically staged. It's a startlingly big movie, containing sweeping establishing shots and grand gestures of spectacle (the better to maximize the added value of your IMAX tickets), a rapidly expanding ensemble of characters, and the most apocalyptic villainous plot yet. The film can’t live up to its own best moments, but it’s still a solid entertainment that builds to a tremendous finale.

In the murky rising action of this spectacle, a cult of angry anarchists led by a fearsome mask-wearing savage called Bane (Tom Hardy) are gathering strength and numbers, planning nothing less than a terrifying full-scale takeover of Gotham city, propping up faux-populist sentiments to mask their violent lawlessness, to use the leverage of a scared, powerless populace to get what’s best for a few reckless ideologues, all under the threat of mutually assured destruction. And where is the Batman while all this is going on right underneath the unsuspecting city? He’s slowly but surely getting coaxed back into his cowl, after living a Howard Hughes existence as his true self, Bruce Wayne, holed up in his mansion with only Alfred the butler (Michael Caine) to keep him company. And what’s the inciting incident that causes the Batman to climb out of his cave? Why, it’s nothing less than a daring robbery from cat burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway). It might not take lifelong Batman fandom to figure out that she’s Catwoman, even though she goes without that moniker here.

That’s about as much plot as I’ll get into here, seeing as this happens to be a film that people seem particularly averse to having spoiled. It’s just as well, for the movie is indeed a large twisting narrative filled with lots of little surprises coiled around scenes of spectacular effects and effective tension. Let me just suggest that a great deal of the film’s pleasure comes from the new members of the cast. Of course Bale and Caine are solid as always, as are Morgan Freeman as Wayne’s resident technical expert and Gary Oldman as good old Commissioner Gordon. Of the new additions, Hardy’s Bane is fearsome, even though the design of the mask means his performance is mostly communicated through forceful eye acting and a muffled voice over in a stylized accent. Just turning towards the camera is enough for his intensity to crumple the surroundings in anxiety.

But best of the new here is Hathaway, who plays Catwoman as a sort of slinky Robin Hood by way of Han Solo, a mercenary thief and black market operative who is both a help and a hindrance. Runner up is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, playing an especially determined and skilled cop. Hathway’s take on her iconic character is that of a satisfyingly sleek, glamorous anti-hero. (I was ready to follow her Catwoman into a different movie where she could stretch out in a starring role). Gordon-Levitt’s part calls for steely professionalism and sympathetic humanity, both of which he provides quite nicely. And I quite liked the little twist given to his character in the final moments that caused me to strike a brewing quip about his role from my mental rough draft. The two of them add immeasurably to this world, bringing real vitality to what, let’s face it, would otherwise become insufferably dower.

At its best, this is a film of terrific blockbuster entertainment with charming asides and great flourishes of action, but for long stretches of this 164-minute movie, Nolan is grabbing hold of more ambition than he can wrangle as he gets bogged down in slow scenes of uncertain stakes and confused tension. In Bane’s evil plot grows a scattershot Rorschach test of tangled political messages that coast off of current unease and generate tension in odd ways that are at once potent and dispiriting. It’s hard to make out whether the film is a relentless fascist machine or just rotting cynicism underneath which lies nothing but nihilism. Either way, this is an extremely bleak film, through which the fun (the kind of sugary, lighthearted, propulsive excitement of The Avengers) pokes through like a small circle of light glimpsed from the bottom of a deep dark pit. Such a pit – a hardly-believable quasi-Middle-Eastern prison that works more as metaphor than literal location – makes a pivotal appearance in the lengthy middle section of the film that finds Gotham closer to ruin than ever before. Although Tom Hardy’s Bane certainly doesn’t make for as memorable a villain as Heath Ledger’s Joker – the script and character design simply don't allow it – his scheme, once it explodes into action, ups the all-consuming anxiety of Dark Knight until the only thing rising in this film is the sense of despair.

Perhaps it’s precisely because of the ways in which Nolan, no longer content to just use the series as a way to mix around with the iconography of Batman, scrambles ideology so thoroughly that the movie is so difficult to parse, so deeply unsettling. Here when a revolutionary rhetoric is twisted with evil intentions until chaos and anarchy in turn provokes a scrappy cop counter-coup, the resonances, as dissonant and confused as they are, become Triumph of the Will versus Battleship Potemkin, propaganda without a cause. Maybe Nolan knew that there was simply no way of satisfying the typical requirements of sequel escalation and superhero bloat and decided to steer his massive blockbuster right into the skid.

The film is, for quite a while, nothing less than a series of exceptionally well-executed extraneous noise and action. A prisoner’s mid-air escape from a plane, a couple of Catwoman heists, and the inevitable triumphant return from retirement for Batman are all early, satisfying, summer movie moments, but upon reflection they’re actually tangential to the plot. It’s not until a brutal mid-movie one-on-one fight scene, shockingly bone crunching and hard to watch, that I felt honest dread wash over me. But soon, the massiveness of the plotting sidelines one major character or another (in a hospital bed, in prison, or both at once) for what feels like ages. The film grows as fuzzy and slow as it is dark. But from there, Nolan nonetheless manages to pull out a startling and effective escalation of tension that becomes a series of exciting climactic action sequences. The film grows horrifyingly high stakes, blowing out destruction more vividly shot and more destabilizing in its implications than I could possibly have expected.

It’s difficult to think of The Dark Knight Rises in terms of the superhero genre. It hits all the right story beats, but it’s so oppressively grim, with only the faintest glimmers of fun, and far less Batman, at least before the massive and intense climax, than many will be expecting. What it represents is a filmmaker given total control to make whatever crazy ambitious blockbuster spectacle he felt like making and an assertion that he was the one who brought this big-screen Batman into this world and only he can bring this particular version to a close. (That said, there’s plenty of room left for a sequel.) He makes a Batman movie that brings the Batman legend, the tortured nature of the hero, the intense, incomprehensible insanity of the villains, and all those corruptible, flawed characters in between, to a depressingly, almost totally hopeless endpoint, into a climactic conflagration that’s unlikely to be easily matched. I’m not sure I’d want anyone to try.

The sparkle of hope that rises from Gotham’s rubble in the film’s final minutes is barely enough to wipe out the preceding barrage of paranoia and despair. The movie is too confused about its underlying themes, its plot too eager to make leaps of logic despite its otherwise dense build-up, to make use of its potent moods beyond that pure sensation of it all. It’s an impressive film, technically accomplished and overwhelming in many ways. But it’s so unrelentingly without thematic coherence that, for all the sensational spectacle, in the end it feels somewhat underwhelming. And that’s difficult to reconcile. Here is a film that at once thinks big and thinks small, mechanically creating grim spectacle for entirely surface reasons. Its best moments land with such confident grandiosity that, despite some shaky elements and disappointing moments, it’s still a film with an undeniable impact. At least this trilogy of Batman films doesn’t fade away in disgrace. It goes out with a big and mostly satisfying finale.

Adventure Time: JOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND

There was no good reason to get excited about Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. It’s a late arriving sequel to the little-loved 2008 family movie Journey to the Center of the Earth, a loose adaptation of the Jules Verne classic. It was a cheesy, erratic, CGI monstrosity that took full, sloppy, insufferable advantage of the then-novelty of a 3D resurgence. Of that movie I can only recall a mugging Brendan Fraser and a moment in which Seth Meyers smirks as he thrusts a tape measure out of the screen. Having seen this new movie, I must admit that my reticence was unfounded. Journey 2 is a fun time at the movies, a gee-whiz spectacle made with great energy and an authentic, pleasing sense of adventure.

Ditching just about everything that made up its predecessor up to and including the writers, the director, and most of the cast, Journey 2 makes it nice and easy to recommend ignoring its sequel status and jumping right in. It doesn’t take much time at all for the script by Brian and Mark Gunn to get the plot off and running. A teenage boy who considers himself an explorer (Josh Hutcherson) convinces his stepfather (Dwayne Johnson) to help him try to find The Mysterious Island. You know, the one that Jules Verne wrote about.

This island has to be real since the boy has picked up a coded message transmitted from the middle of nowhere that has to be, just has to be, from his missing grandfather (Michael Caine). Proving the existence of this island was the old man’s life’s work. I like how the kid figures out where the secret message originates by casting aside his iPad and paging through dusty volumes of fantasy literature and comparing the map inside The Mysterious Island with the ones inside Gulliver’s Travels and Treasure Island. You see, these maps all have clues as to finding the actual Mysterious Island, because, why not?

Sensing an opportunity to bond with his stepson, the trip is planned. Stepfather and stepson hitch a ride on a rickety helicopter with the owner (Luis Guzman) and his plucky teenaged daughter (Vanessa Hudgens). They all get sucked into a swirling storm cloud that deposits them onto the unknown shores of Mysterious Island. There they find grandpa of course, as well as gigantic bugs, gargantuan lizards, and miniature elephants. It’s a veritable phantasmagoric jungle menagerie of identifiable beasts in unexpected sizes. The movie is little more than these broadly sketched and immensely likable characters hiking through the jungle and encountering these strange sights. “You should have expected mysterious things,” the stepson tells his stepfather. “It’s in the title.”

This group is made up of easily identifiable types played with earnest, affable verve. The boy adventurer, the strong-but-kind muscle man, the white-haired veteran explorer, the pretty girl, and the comic relief are imbued with characteristics that bounce off each other in ways that are the right mix of predictable and comfortable. With someone as charismatic and charming as Dwayne Johnson, the other actors are left scrambling to win audiences’ affection. The effort pays off. I found I liked spending time with them as they spend their screen time marveling at strange sights and running away from them when things get dangerous, all the while trying to find a way off this island without getting stomped on, eaten up, or submerged under water.

The movie is a particularly enjoyable version of this particular kind of movie, the kind of movie that gets a kick out of giants beasts lumbering about and flying around in classic Ray Harryhausen style, albeit in a just-convincing-enough modern CGI fashion instead of that special effects master’s use of stop-motion animation. (In fact, Harryhausen did the effects for a 1961 adaptation of The Mysterious Island, a film I absolutely need to see). Director Brad Peyton (who made his directorial debut in 2010 with Cats & Dogs 2, which is best forgotten) handles the large-scale effects and the swift script with a nice, unhurried style. It’s just plain sturdy adventure filmmaking. It’s bright, colorful, and energetic with big monsters, beautiful scenery, and an exuberant and agreeable use of 3D effects. (Objects noticeably pop out and extend backwards without being too distracting).  It’s a B-movie matinee right out of the 1950s when it would have been called something like a boy’s adventure story and played to theaters of happy children on a Saturday afternoon.

The fact of the matter is, that I saw this movie in a theater filled with happy children just last Saturday afternoon. They howled and giggled and exclaimed right on cue. Reader, I could totally see where they were coming from. The fact of the matter is, the movie just plain works. This is not an especially ambitious movie, but it’s a satisfying one for what it is. It’s good-natured and sweet, with a relaxed sense of humor that’s only sometimes too easy or corny. It’s silly and it knows it. The movie comes with a nice family-friendly moral without becoming moralizing, with zippy action sequences that are exciting without becoming frightening. What can I say? It put a big goofy grin on my face.

Downshift: CARS 2

It is a testament to Pixar’s consistent level of excellence that their Cars 2, a movie I more or less enjoyed watching, feels like a disappointment. It’s a movie that’s fast, colorful, frenetic, and funny, but gone is the deeper feeling we’ve come to expect of productions from this company. This is all surface level whiz-bang silliness, highly watchable and fairly entertaining but also Pixar’s worst effort thus far.

It’s all in what you compare it to, I suppose. After an impressive string of masterworks (Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Up among them), broken only by some relatively weaker entries that were merely pretty great (A Bug’s Life, Cars), Pixar has built a reputation for consummate craftsmanship, movies that entertain with great flair and originality while also managing to emote with a precision built on surprising grace and beauty. They’re gorgeously animated and layered films with heavy emotional content – a post-apocalyptic romance, a widower fighting the march of time, abandonment – handled tactfully and powerfully.

The first Cars wasn’t one of Pixar’s crowning achievements but it sure was fun. It takes place in a world much like our own but instead of a human populace there are fleets of vehicles with wide eyes staring out of clear windshields and bumpers twisting about like lips. It’s odd and off-putting at first, but in motion and in an involving plot, it all seems so natural. When I pushed toy cars across my childhood bedroom did I ever imagine people inside them? I don’t think so. For all I know, the cars themselves were racing each other all on their own. Cars has an egotistical racecar Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) zoom into Radiator Springs, a crumbling small town, and discover the slower pleasures of roadside Americana. It’s a movie about nostalgia versus modernity that comes down on the side of progress while still arguing for embracing what got us there.

Cars 2 has no deeper ambitions. If anything, it works to refute the stop-and-smell-the-roses relaxed pace of its predecessor. This film is proudly childish as it slams cars around in zippy action sequences driven by a silly round-the-world spy story. Surprisingly satisfying in its dizzying tangles of plot, events are kicked off by British secret agent car Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) dangerously and daringly discovering something of grave import aboard a menacing oil rig in the middle of the ocean. Soon enough, we learn that an eccentric billionaire (Eddie Izzard) has decided to promote his new alternative fuel by throwing a World Grand Prix, inviting the best racers from around the world. The race is on, which gets Lightning McQueen and his best friend, hick tow-truck Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), out of town and circling the globe.

Stops in Japan, France, Italy, and England provide the backbone of the plot, which is mostly an excuse for a diversity of deeply detailed backgrounds. Japan’s Tokyo is rendered as a world of little Hondas zipping around a bustling neon metropolis. A coastal village in Italy is a lush town where a little car speaks with the big voice of legendary Italian actor Franco Nero (!) and the boats in the harbor sit there pleasantly bobbing and blinking. In Paris, Notre Dame is encrusted with winged cars for saints and gargoyles, while in London the royal car family rolls up with their Land Rover bodyguards. It’s so very weird. Unlike the first film, during which I found myself unquestioningly accepting vehicular anthropomorphism, this time around I found myself wondering how cars managed to do just about anything, from building cathedrals to writing with pencils. And why would cars have to go through a metal detector in an airport? It’s a tribute to the nutty mise en scène, the total commitment to a truly strange concept, that endless unanswerable questions encroach every shot from all angles.

At each stop on the world tour, antics and action are around every corner. McQueen deals with his competition, like a hotshot Italian racecar (with a zooming, motor-mouth patter from a crazed and goofy John Turturro) in what ultimately becomes a glorified subplot. Meanwhile, in the main plot McMissile and his curvy assistant Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer) mistake sweet, dumb Mater for a fellow spy. The plot’s strictly pro forma, not much more or less than an adequate Bond picture when you get down too it, though I liked the evil cabal made up of, well, I guess I won’t spoil it, but the makes and models of the villains are a fun concept. As the story zooms along, the spies take precedence over the racers.

Mater, with his deep accent and unfortunate misunderstandings, gets increasingly wearing the more the film gets tied to his character and sidelines the infinitely more charming McQueen for far too long. Good in small doses, like his moments of comic relief in the first Cars, Mater is overused here. As much fun as the detail and speed of the humor, the action, and the locations are, less enjoyable are the few attempts to make it all mean something. We’re supposed to laugh at Mater and feel bad about it too. There’s a Life Lesson here, but it feels forced and unconvincing. Nevertheless, Cars 2 has a fast pace and it goes down smoothly. It’s a pleasant diversion. Lots of gags hit their marks, though countless others miss entirely, and the gun-toting, bomb-throwing cars make for unlikely, but often awfully satisfying, action heroes.

After churning out so many outstanding movies it’s a shame to see that here Pixar has slipped in overall quality, but it’s clear from what’s seen on screen that it’s not for lack of trying. It’s incredibly detailed animation with meticulous sound design and mostly fantastic voice work; in typical Pixar fashion it looks and sounds absolutely wonderful. It’s light, inconsequential fun. It feels somewhat difficult to criticize Pixar’s team for trying something different, using their technical skills for something less meaningful. If it seems like I’m holding Pixar to a higher standard than I would any other animated company, it’s only because they’ve conditioned me to expect so much more than they offer here. And yet Cars 2 feels very much like exactly the kind of movie that they wanted to make, a broad, silly, punny, busy kids’ movie. I simply had a passably fun time, is that so bad? In this case, it almost feels that way.

Quick Look: GNOMEO AND JULIET

It has made nearly 190 million dollars worldwide, played in the local multiplex for a few months, I just finished watching it on Blu-ray, and I’m still not entirely sure that Gnomeo and Juliet exists. I’m not losing my mind (of course it exists), but perhaps that’s the better alternative to acknowledging that (1) someone made a kid-friendly Romeo and Juliet starring lawn gnomes with a happy ending and (2) it was actually kind of popular. The CG animation is bright and colorful with appealingly rubbery textures that make the whole thing look like a Playskool toy’s daydream. I quite liked the colors, but beyond that my level of engagement with the material was somewhere ever so slightly above somnambulant. I simply didn’t care about the long-lasting feud between the red gnomes and the blue gnomes and all of the reasons that the lovers couldn’t be together. It plays out as if the screenwriters (all nine of them) and the director (Kelly Asbury) made a list of the worst tendencies in modern children’s animation and then proceeded to use said list as a checklist. There are annoying winks towards pop culture (even poor Bill Shakespeare gets dragged into this). There’s the eccentric panoply of celebrity voices (from stars James McAvoy and Emily Blunt to parts for Michael Caine, Maggie Smith, Patrick Stewart, Jason Statham, Ozzy Osbourne, Hulk Hogan, and Dolly Parton). There’s a reliance on cheap and easy humor. And, last but not least, there are endless dance sequences to 70’s rock. (Elton John serves as a producer and generously granted his music to be dishonored). The whole thing barely lasts 80 minutes before the end credits, but it manages to feel much, much longer. Perhaps kids will enjoy the movie, but shame on all of the adults who created it for believing that kids should settle for this.