Scenes from a Marriage: IS THIS THING ON?

Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? is his third directorial effort, and the one that really clarifies his interests as a filmmaker. It also confirms he’s turning into quite a reliably good one. It’s another midlife crisis relationship movie, after his debut A Star is Born remake found an alcoholic country singer on a downward trajectory paused by a whirlwind romance, and his sophomore effort Maestro took composer Leonard Bernstein through biopic struggles with a long-suffering wife. This new one finds Will Arnett as a New Yorker with a finance job who, while stumbling towards divorce, discovers a new hobby: doing stand up comedy at open mics. Meanwhile, his soon-to-be-ex wife (Laura Dern) considers returning to her passion: coaching volleyball. This makes them a fit for Cooper’s other recurring interest: the ways in which the pursuit of performing something cultural and larger than one’s self can make, shape, break, and maybe, just maybe, heal a person. Cooper sees the tension between private lives and public personas; naturally, as one of our last great Movie Stars, he knows a thing or two about that. But in these movies he traces characters’ big emotions and big ideas with a fluid style that matches their moods, and a subtle sense of life. There’s none of the muscular musicality of A Star is Born or theatrical flourishes of Maestro here, and naturally so. 

As a smaller movie about intimate moments, Is This Thing On? Is a movie so low-key and unassuming in its scenes and shape, and yet so beautifully big screen in its bright, supple, unobtrusively professional cinematography, that it serves as a reminder that Hollywood craft put toward broad, but appealing, human stories are an abidingly pleasant pastime. Here’s a generous movie about people living lives, shot through with some gentle satire and loving specificity. It cares about them, and wants to see how they navigate life changes, bouncing off supporting characters—well-cast character actors forming a jostling friend group (including a very funny small role for Cooper himself as an endearing dope) and a warmly prickly family—with some crackle and sweetness. Arnett and Dern are two fine actors doing good work in observant and attentive dramatic scenes. Cooper’s feeling for performance, letting actors inhabit a scene and breathe life into fleeting moments, lets the movie lift above its looming sense of the familiar. How often have we been asked to think about the inner lives of comedians in our culture the last couple decades? He finds an interesting angle by simply inhabiting the experience here, watching how it’s therapy both as a compliment and insult, and willing to drift away from that, giving us a picture of a couple with a marriage falling apart as they each activate something deeper and more satisfying in their sense of professional possibilities. The movie’s warm and prickly and funny and ultimately a comfortable slice of uncomfortable life. 

Going Battty: THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE

The best joke in The LEGO Batman Movie is an admission that Batman is bad at his job. This LEGO Movie spinoff is set in a candy-colored brick-laden Gotham City where the residents live in a time bubble of continuity, leaving them a been-there-done-that populace yawning with memories of tonal whiplash (aware of every iteration, from Snyder to Nolan, Schumacher, Burton, the Animated Series, 60’s camp and so on back to the original pulp comics and serials). This gives the residents a blasé attitude to the latest supervillain eruption from Arkham Asylum. Batman, you’ve been at this for nearly 80 years, they say. And Gotham is still the most crime-ridden city in the fictional world. Isn’t it time to hang up the cape and cowl and let someone else try to fix the problem? The fun in this silly whirligig is watching Batman realize he should work with the people of Gotham instead of showboating with gadgets before hiding out in his cave for the next call on the bat-phone. In the words of Barbara Gordon, the new police commissioner fresh from “Harvard for Cops,” ”We don’t need a billionaire vigilante karate-chopping poor people.”

A manic tumble of in-jokes, meta-winks, and hectic LEGO action, this everything-is-awesome approach is continually cranked up to eleven. It’s a cute conceit. At best, the whole project has a loose goofy charm rat-a-tat-tat-ing silly voices and quick quips. Will Arnett returns with a narcissist’s growl as a Batman craving attention, but shrinking from connection. He’s surrounded in the soundscape by a who’s-who of distinctive, warm voices in iconic comic book roles – Michael Cera as naïve Robin, Ralph Fiennes as dry Alfred, Zach Galifianakis as needy Joker, and Rosario Dawson as Batgirl. The movie blasts forward on pep and cleverness, piling on neat commentary about Batman’s most boring plot ticks and thematic obsessions in between drooling geek deep cut references and kids’ movie bright colors and careening sentimentality. The style, a breakneck faux-stop-motion CG swoosh, stops for nothing: no emotion, no thought, no moment to catch a breath or your bearings. The cuts are fast. The pop music is loud. The explosions are plumes of colorful blocks. The guns go “pew pew pew.” For a giddy hour and change in a movie theater, you could do far worse.

Still, there’s something a little off-putting about the mechanized joy of the enterprise. Director Chris McKay (Robot Chicken) and screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) aren’t Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the man-boyish kings of threading the needle between product and meta-product in their string of unlikely successes: not just LEGO Movie (in which everything really was awesome, or near enough) but the stoopid/clever Jump Streets and their comic masterpiece Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, as well. They have the alchemy, the gee-whiz earnest commitment to serving up corporate brand deposits with winning grins. Here, though, we have their imitators making a double product placement: for a comic book franchise and for a toy company. The whole thing is plastered from beginning to end with reminders of the ledger sheets and advertising budgets at play behind the brisk bright nonsense. Think of it as feature length LEGO commercial also working as a calculated pressure valve for DC’s dour live-action slogs. Sure, it’s basically fun, and a reasonably good time, but the hollow production’s highs fade fast and leave little worth lingering over.

Secret of the Snooze: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: OUT OF THE SHADOWS

If you buy a ticket for a movie called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows you get what you paid for. It follows the stereotypical sequel strategy of “same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse.” Like its predecessor, the 2014 reboot of the 90’s big-screen live-action adaptations of the animated TV interpretations of the comic books – it’s a nesting doll of cultural recycling – it follows the continuing adventures of a quartet of teenage turtles who are mutant ninjas. Or are they teenage mutants who are turtle ninjas? Or would it be more accurate to call them mutant turtles who are teenage ninjas? However you arrange the adjectives, they’re a mostly indistinguishable group. You can tell them apart by their headbands’ colors, and the small particulars, like the nerd’s goggles and the brawn’s gruffness, and the dweeb’s annoying wisecracks. Anyway, there’s yet another threat to New York City and the turtles have to jump into action and save the day. Cowabunga and whatnot.

Out of the Shadows is a glossy live-action cartoon, with hulking steroidal turtles, buff beasts with hard shells and harder abs, bouncing through energetic adventure sequences. The plot, again by screenwriters Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec, is pitched at the lower end of the Saturday morning cartoon level, with thin motivations and broad conflict broken up into episodic chunks and strung along by clunky exposition and juvenile humor. But the action is often enjoyable as big, dumb, colorful excitement involving: a tricked-out garbage truck in attack mode; a mad scientist; evil ninjas; two felons mutated into vaguely humanoid large jungle animals by purple ooze; a tank; a waterfall; a hockey stick; three glowing MacGuffins; a portal in the sky spitting out a gigantic war machine piece by piece; and an interdimensional slimy tentacle-waggling brain stuffed inside a robot.

Director Dave Green – of the amiably passable kid-friendly found-footage E.T. knockoff Earth to Echo – knows his way around slick, silly movement, shooting it all in an energetic and propulsive style. It’s bouncy and convincing enough, even when a giant rhino man is chasing a dude who has slapped together makeshift rollerblades. Matching the first movie’s standout setpiece of a semi sliding down a mountain, this one features a sequence in which the turtles jump out of one plane onto another, fight inside that plane’s cargo hold, then crash it into a rainforest river that takes them down rapids while fleeing a tank. It’s a neat feat of totally nutty adventure. That’s fun. The rest of the movie can be a bit of a slog, trudging through flat human story beats, with returning reporter April (Megan Fox, used mostly for sex appeal in a movie ostensibly aimed at 9-year-olds) as a turtle ally. Meanwhile, her cameraman (Will Arnett) is taking public credit for the turtle’s heroism from the last time.

We’re introduced to new people who only exist to push along the plot. There’s Stephen Amell as a police officer determined to find the now-fugitive Shredder (Brian Tee) after seeing him escape on his watch. There’s Tyler Perry as the aforementioned mad scientist, amusingly playing him like a slightly goofier Neil deGrasse Tyson. There’s Laura Linney as a no-nonsense detective, totally straight-faced while talking to CGI teenage mutant ninja turtles like they’re real people. None of these people are characters; they're barely even story. Eventually the gooey brain (with the voice of Brad Garrett) is threatening to emerge and, I don’t know, smash up New York a bit. The whole thing is conventional summer blockbuster stuff, with the bad guys snatching up MacGuffins and the good guys trying to stop a disaster movie from breaking out.

Sure, the PG-13 cartoon roughhousing is sometimes diverting enough, but without a reason to care it’s hard to get invested beyond the surface spectacle. I suppose it comes down to me not liking the turtles, and not even being able to tell them apart most of the time even though they introduce themselves at least three times over the course of this movie. They’re not as poorly characterized as the humans, but they’re still hard to know beyond the token “likes pizza” and “good at ninja things” details. They don’t even have much conflict, idly wondering if people would ever accept them out of the sewers before re-embracing their secrecy. They learn to work together and share their feelings. It’s rote kids’ movie moralizing, just another unsuccessful way to make it seem like this silly distraction amounts to something worthwhile beyond its all too fleeting goofy flashes of excitement.

As Long As You Love Me: POPSTAR: NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING

A light and frivolous comedy with a pitch-perfect recreation of modern celebrity culture, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping need only present a tiny exaggeration of the lifestyle of a coddled music industry star to count as satire. In the guise of a concert tour documentary done in a self-mythologizing slick puff piece style, a la Justin Bieber: Never Say Never or Katy Perry: Piece of Me, complete with talking head acclaim from colleagues and clouds of social media reaction flying out of the screen, this movie is too cozy and celebratory to be a devastating satire. It knows its lead is dumb and shallow, and wants him to succeed anyway. But it’s smart, and totally dead-on, in its evocation of our buzzing echo chamber, with so many outlets and avenues chattering, demanding access to celebrities’ lives every hour of every day. To be a music icon these days is to be living your life as performance art, always on, oversharing taking the place of actual insight.

The movie invents the dim but apparently talented Connor4Real, an egotistical practitioner of the smooth falsetto pop/R&B with rap breaks the likes of Bieber and Justin Timberlake put out. Connor (Andy Samberg) rose to fame with his two childhood best friends (Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone) in the group Style Boyz, which was part Beastie Boys, part Backstreet Boys. Eventually he went solo, while the others became a D.J. and a farmer, an unpleasant split that nonetheless resulted in a hit album. (He called it Thriller, Also.) Now, as the movie begins, he’s about to go on tour for his second album, and it is terrible, full of songs like a belated and self-aggrandizing marriage equality anthem that constantly reminds the listener Connor isn’t gay, a booming braggart’s club beat about how humble he is, and a filthy number of elaborate metaphor comparing lovemaking to the death of Bin Laden. The movie concerns Connor’s slowly dawning sense of his waning cultural relevancy and his desperate moves to grab it back.

We’re told the songs he’s promoting are terrible, but really they’re insanely catchy, put together by The Lonely Island, the stars, directors, and co-writers of this movie and the comedy rap group responsible for the terrific Digital Shorts from their time on SNL. Of course the guys behind such memorable music video parodies as “Lazy Sunday” and “I’m On a Boat” would be smart enough to write songs so beautifully stupid. The music in the movie is consistent with those earlier parodies, with elaborately produced videos and stage performances that are smartly constructed silliness, crude lyrics with melodies cleverly matching existing popular genres. Still, we get the idea these are songs no one wants, especially after a disastrous corporate cross-promotion gets them beamed into every refrigerator in the country. That’s a funny swipe at U2’s last album’s sudden appearance, and a good jab at synergistic corporate-sponsored album releases of all kinds. As Connor says, “there’s no such thing as selling out anymore!”

Connor’s tour tanks as ticket sales are low. To make matters worse, the album isn’t exactly flying off shelves. He’s just not the celebrity he used to be. The movie follows his increasingly desperate attempts to get attention for himself, trying to maintain his lavish bubble and protect his thin skin until he can hear the roar of uncritical success once more. (Maybe if that doesn’t work he could run for president?) It becomes a slap-happy lampooning of the modern media landscape, a predictable movie about how predictable a pop news rise-fall-rise narrative can be. He goes on The Tonight Show and gets suckered into a nostalgia act. He tries to get E! to cover his impending engagement live on the air. (His girlfriend (Imogen Poots): “Aw, you invited the press!”) He Snapchats and tweets and vlogs, clearly emotionally troubled but egged on by all the chatter swirling around him, a cycle of scandals and photo-ops, manufactured mostly, but sometimes accidentally real, like a quick change that leaves him naked on stage for ten seconds. “A third of the way to Mars!” Connor shouts, in one his most Zoolander-like moments.

There’s nothing particularly serious about Popstar, which uses its laser-focused precision for playful surfaces on which to goof around, but it moves too quickly to be anything less than a good time. It’s chockablock with cameos, SNL vets making the most of tiny roles – Tim Meadows, Sarah Silverman, Maya Rudolph, Bill Hader, and the like making memorable impressions – and music world legends – Ringo Starr, Questlove, Usher, and many, many, many more – playing brilliantly to or against their public personas. It just zips right along, through enabling entourages, crazy fans, wasteful lifestyle choices, pranks, paparazzi, chattering gossip programs, colliding camera crews, and concerts. My favorite moments, sparingly but cuttingly used, are a perfect parody of TMZ’s show, with Will Arnett an uncanny Harvey Levin type draped over a cubicle and cackling with his reporters. The movie is breathlessly ridiculous, never lingering too long on any one aspect of pop stardom, tightly packaged and efficiently silly. Is it a modern-day Spinal Tap? No. But it’s the closest thing to it.

Give 'Em Shell: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

I must admit the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have never really worked for me. There’s something about their characters that holds me at a distance. Maybe it’s because they’re so similar in look – big humanoid turtle things differentiated only by the color headbands their wear – and personality. They have the names of Italian Renaissance artists: Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Donatello. They all love pizza, do martial arts, shout “cowabunga,” and live with their adopted mutant rat father in the sewers below New York City. It’s a collection of silly details that never quite grabbed me in any form be it comics, animated series, video games, or feature films.

I still felt that distance in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a reboot of the live action big screen turtle movies. But somehow this transparently silly goof of an adventure movie kept me distracted, if not quite entertained. It’s not a good movie, but it’s competent as it runs through a standard superhero plot with a big bad threatening a city and the heroes who save the day. That its climax only puts about 10 city blocks in immediate danger is a nice change of pace. Is it progress that this summer spectacle is a retread of blockbuster beats from a decade or two ago instead of staking a claim in the apocalyptic stakes race we’ve been living through the last few years?

The movie follows an intrepid reporter (Megan Fox), the sort of ambitious young newsperson who is sick and tired of fluff pieces and wants to do serious journalism. One night she spots a group of mysterious vigilantes breaking up the evil Foot Clan’s nefarious deeds on the docks and comes face to face with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Some fun is had with their improbable details as Fox tries to explain to her newsroom colleagues (Will Arnett and Whoopi Goldberg) what she has discovered. She sounds crazy. Meanwhile, desperate to keep their existence secret, the turtles and their rat father set out to find and befriend her.

The human characters are stock flat types that don’t make much of an impact beyond whatever charms the actors bring. But there’s a CGI realism to the textures of the turtles’ and rat’s skin that makes them marginally more convincing as living beings. It also makes them far creepier than the phony rubbery costumes of their previous early-90’s live action appearances. Now they’re uncannily real and utterly fake in the same instance. We’re not talking the apes from Rise and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes here. The Ninja Turtles speak with energetic voices (provided by Johnny Knoxville, Alan Ritchson, Noel Fisher, and Jeremy Howard) as their faces light up with giggly banter and gain flashes of gravitas. Their rat guardian Splinter (Tony Shalhoub) has damp and furry features of uncomfortably verminous countenance as his dojo voice intones ponderously.

Eventually, as a nefarious C.E.O. (William Fichtner) and Shredder (Tohoru Masamune), the head of the Foot Clan, team up to spray poison from the top of a skyscraper and make billions off the cure, the turtles and their new human ally get drawn into saving the day. It’s a small, thin plot. You’ve seen the basic beats before and here they’re replayed dutifully. Even the surprises aren’t surprising, you know?  At least it has a small, thin sense of humor about itself.

Arnett becomes Fox’s sidekick, providing sarcastic asides, while Goldberg gets the most charm out of far too little screen time. (I could’ve used at the very least one more scene with her wisecracking editor.) The screenplay by Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec, and Evan Daugherty is peppered with corny wisecracks and laughs that may not be entirely intentional, but still fit the silly mood. It's not much of a plot, and I certainly couldn’t tell you which turtle was which at any given time, but at least there’s room for a villain preparing to get inside a robotic samurai suit to say, “Tonight, I shall dine on turtle soup.” That’s the kind of straight-faced laugh line that makes me smile.

Speaking of straight-faced, director Jonathan Liebesman, behind spectacles both bad (Battle: Los Angeles) and okay (Wrath of the Titans), directs with a heavier hand than the material requires. It’s kid’s movie bounciness – the turtles are goofballs – smashed up against PG-13 roughness – a bad guy is dissolved from the inside out in somewhat graphic fashion. Lulu Carvalho’s beams-of-light-soaked cinematography is presented with a glossy seriousness, cut together in a standard amped-up chaos cinema style. I suppose when you’re dealing with material this flimsy, and so half-aware of its own inanity, grounding it in a sense of thriller weight makes the utterly weightless bounding of its inhabitants slightly less likely to float away into nothingness.

The overly familiar plotting is done and over with quickly and not as painfully as the who-is-this-for? tone or the tediously expositional rat would lead you to believe. The movie is completely empty-headed, a bland and mostly undistinguished effort that spends more time acting like it’s fun than actually being fun. It mostly goes through the motions, but at least it’s not a total waste. In the movie’s action centerpiece, a semi slaloms down a snowy mountainside as bad guys give chase and characters fall in, out, and around. It has a zip and novelty that makes it one of this summer’s better spectacle sequences, provided you can forget that there’s no towering mountain a mere 19 minutes out of Manhattan. But by that point you’ve already accepted that there are man-sized mutant turtle teenagers with ninja skills. What’s a little geographic confusion on top of that?

Playtime: THE LEGO MOVIE

You’d think by now I’d have more trust in writer/directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Instead, I’ve gone into each and every one of their films suspicious of the entire project and left feeling pleasantly surprised, won over by their manic energy and thoughtful thematic playfulness. Who would’ve guessed their Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a feature-length expansion of a slight, whimsical picture book, would be one of the funniest movies of any kind in recent years? Or that their reboot of musty old TV series 21 Jump Street would be a jocular undercover-cop comedy perceptive about shifting teen mores and feature one of the best cameos I’ve ever seen?  Now they’ve tackled The Lego Movie. That’s right. It’s a movie based on the tiny bricks with instructions on how to build them into vehicles and buildings that come with square, stiff yellow people to put inside. I don’t see the story in it, although Lego has tried some original fantasy brands and media-tie-in parodies for TV on occasion to move product. Thankfully Lord and Miller found a way to make more than an advertisement. Under their direction, The Lego Movie is a freewheeling and clever family film.

Making terrific use out of the mix-and-match ability of Lego, the filmmakers have thrown out the instruction book. Actually, that’s the crux of the film, a conflict between the two basic ways one can use the product. Computer animation that looks like the expensive Hollywood version of what you’d get making stop-motion Lego movies on your bedroom floor (a quick YouTube search reveals this a popular subgenre of amateur filmmaking) builds a world built entirely out of these multicolor bricks. It’s a generic metropolis filled with generic Lego people: construction workers, police, cat ladies, surfers, coffee shop patrons. They all follow the rules, the same homogenous lifestyle that uses each and every brick in exactly the way the manufacture intended. Disruption comes when an average Lego man (Chris Pratt) finds a legendary brick and falls in with a motley group of assorted outcast Lego people, Master Builders who insist that the bricks can be used to make anything you could dream up. Ostentatiously evil President Business (Will Ferrell) wants to keep the masses oppressed and in line, but our hero teams up with the Master Builders in a last-ditch effort to save their Lego-world by opening it up to be played with however they want.

The film moves at a breakneck pace through colorful madness that spoofs the usual three-act structure of big sci-fi fantasy spectacle. There’s our naive Chosen One who finds the piece and is told by a wise old bearded Master Builder (Morgan Freeman) that he’s the fulfillment of prophecy and the savior Lego-world needs. That this is obviously phony makes for a fun, adaptable running joke. Their allies include a funny mix of characters from various Lego product lines – a punk woman (Elizabeth Banks), Batman (Will Arnett), a pirate (Nick Offerman), a unicorn kitten (Alison Brie), and an astronaut (Charlie Day). Their goals are typical stuff – find this crucial object and use it to shut down a superweapon – but it’s treated with a wink and a sly sense of humor. At one point, a character explains backstory most movies of this kind would take very seriously indeed, but here it literally devolves into “blah, blah, blah.” All we need to know is that our heroes are being pursued by President Business’s henchman Bad Cop (Liam Neeson) and his robots in elaborate, endlessly clever action sequences that hop through a variety of Lego worlds like a wild west set, a pseudo-medieval land, and a hodgepodge oasis of secret imagination.

The Lego nature of everything from the clouds in the sky to the water in the oceans, down to even the explosions and dust plumes, is put to good use. Good guys frantically rebuild the necessary equipment on the fly, while the baddies march forward mercilessly rule-bound. Cameos from all sorts of Lego types litter this high energy romp through relentless action and invention, from Shakespeare and Shaq to Wonder Woman and C-3PO, all cracking a joke or two before falling back into the big picture. It’s all such an exuberant sense of childlike play, the characters and setting deconstructing themselves and building new fanciful wonders before our eyes with delightful speed and complexity in the rapid-fire action slapstick. Imagine those charming moments in Toy Story when we watch Andy act out scenarios with his toys stretched to fill 90 minutes and you’ll get a sense of the tone here. This exceptionally, endlessly cute and quick film isn’t afraid to go very silly and step out of its narrative. The villain hoards mystical objects, like a massive used Band-Aid he calls the Shroud of Bahnd-Aieed. In the climax, his giant evil machine sounds exactly like a little kid making a growling engine noise.

For the longest time, I was simply charmed by what was an awesomely high-functioning technical exercise. But in its final moments, Lord and Miller take the film a step towards brilliance, pulling back the focus and revealing new information that moves away from thin genre play and towards something deeper, but no less hilarious. I won’t spoil it for you, but it says something almost profound about the way the act of creativity can bring people together. There’s also something in there about free will and a higher power. One character we meet late in the game is literally named The Man Upstairs. But it’s all folded into a sugary blast of entertainment. It’s amazing how a movie so light on the surface opens up bigger questions effortlessly. Just as amazing is that this multi-million dollar corporate advertisement doubles as an anti-corporate call to individuality in the face of crushing conformity, that this blockbuster movie doubles as a commentary on how blockbuster plots are built out of material as generic and interchangeable as Lego blocks. Lord and Miller are masters of having it both ways and getting away with it too.

Quick Look Early Review: When in Rome (2010)

Kristen Bell is cute, but cute doesn’t carry a movie, especially one like When in Rome which has a script that was seemingly written by an ersatz rom-com robot (actually it’s worse, the writers of Old Dogs) capable of only creating dialogue and situations that play slightly better than clanging pots and pans together for 90 minutes. It’s a painfully unbelievable and unlikable story about a career woman (Bell) who takes coins from a fountain in Rome which causes the previous owners of the coins to fall in love with her (all of the coins were thrown by New Yorkers, coincidentally). The way the character is written and performed, magic would be needed to fall in love with her. She’s incredibly annoying, as are the men who follow her around in a lovesick haze, the rules of which change according to the whims of the filmmakers. These men are played by Josh Duhamel, Will Arnett, Danny DeVito, John Heder, and Dax Shepard, likeable performers, but their likability is drowned in the mush. Most incredibly, someone tricked Anjelica Huston into appearing in this mess. Don’t ask me how. The movie makes no sense and proceeds from one hopelessly unfunny moment to the next, inspiring nothing but pure hatred that I could direct towards the screen. It’s shot without distinction and directed by a seemingly uncaring Mark Steven Johnson who previously made superhero movies like a bland Ghost Rider and an okay Daredevil (yeah, I kind of liked that one). Even he is slumming here. Everyone involved deserves much, much better than this, especially the audience.

Monsters vs. Aliens (2009)

Forget Monsters vs. Aliens, the real fight is Pixar vs. Dreamworks Animation. Pixar, long in the lead with their deft mix of masterpieces and mere excellence, has Dreamworks down for the count. Even though Kung Fu Panda and the first two Shreks are fun and Over the Hedge is not without its charms, the rest of their CG-feature output is pretty dismal. More often than not, Dreamworks seems to be trying too hard to satisfy all ages whereas Pixar makes it seem so easy. Monsters vs. Aliens does nothing to reverse Dreamworks's trend and I suppose it’s not all that surprising given their track record, but it’s always depressing to see a promising concept so thoroughly squandered. This is a hollow movie. There aren’t any great characters here despite the great ideas for characters. They stay designs up there on the screen, fun looking creatures with hip celebrity voices spouting cringingly obvious pop-culture references that are just enough out-of-date and out-of-place that they caused me to feel a little embarrassed for the filmmakers. “Dance Dance Revolution” and An Inconvenient Truth jokes? What is this, 2006?

The story concerns monsters called into service by the president (Stephen Colbert, who unfortunately never rises above the obvious stunt-casting) and General W.R. Monger (Kiefer Sutherland) to fight an alien invasion. There’s one nice set piece in the middle of the movie involving a fight on the Golden Gate Bridge but, otherwise, the movie’s bafflingly slow in setting up the concept and remarkably uneventful after that. The concept isn’t all that complicated - the trailers, even the TV spots, set up the whole thing in seconds flat - but of the film’s two action sequences and the handful of funny moments, most have been cannibalized into the advertising. The movie takes forever to start, even longer to arrive and then spins its wheels once it gets there.

This is anything but satisfying on a plot level but some of the voice work is very strong. Reese Witherspoon’s Susan, who becomes Ginormica, is a strong character, a great girl-power gust in an otherwise routine movie. Also memorable is Seth Rogen’s gooey Bob who’s an absolute goof, and a funny one. (Ginormica and Bob are much better than the material deserves. Can someone find a better movie for the two of them?) More disappointing are Will Arnett as a fish-man and Hugh Laurie as a cockroach-man. They’re funny actors but here they’re floundering with little to do and barely caricatures to play; they have vaguely focused traits but little else. And Rainn Wilson as Gallaxhar, the invading alien, is a curiously nonthreatening creature. As a result, the movie never seems to have any real stakes. Sure, the world might be destroyed, but if the movie doesn’t care why should I?

The monsters are clearly 50s creature-feature throwbacks and there’s myriad references to various other, better, sci-fi movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. but the references are more than just winking at other movies, they’re reminders of how unsuccessful this movie is. It’s all commerce and little art for this enterprise which seems to have been tailor-made to sell cheap toys. During a scene near the end, while I should have been nervous that our heroes would fail, I was instead looking in the background at all the alien robots and wondering if that’s what the back room of a Toys 'R' Us looks like right now.

Additional Note: The 3D looks just fine but doesn’t seem worth the fuss. For every scene where a paddleball of piece of debris flies out, there’s a scene during which I found myself wishing I could take the glasses off and just admire the very beautiful animation, the one flawless aspect of the movie.