Snail's Pace: TURBO

Turbo, the latest family film from Dreamworks Animation, is stale and forgettable, but brightly colored and moves along at a brisk pace. I wish those colors and that speed told a fresher story or at least were put to use for something even halfway memorable. I better write this fast before the whole thing zooms out of my mind faster than a speeding snail. That might not sound all that fast, but Turbo clocks a snail’s pace at over 200 miles per hour. How’s that possible? The NASCAR fan snail at the film’s center (Ryan Reynolds) falls onto the highway and gets knocked into a tank of nitrus in a hotrod’s engine. A neat little sequence zooms all the way into the little guy’s atoms and shows them turning neon and zipping around faster and faster. Now he’s a super snail. Too bad he couldn’t be in a super movie.

In family film tradition, the speedy snail who names himself Turbo is alienated from his herd-mentality group of normal snails. They don’t understand his ambitions and therefore ostracize him, casting the fast-paced freak out of their snail habitat in a suburban garden. The poor fellow ends up with his still-slow brother (Paul Giamatti) at a failing strip mall in the middle of Van Nuys. There they are captured by Tito, a genial, bumbling snail racer (Michael Peña). I realize all that sounds a little strained and silly, but wait until you hear that the snail racer co-owns a Mexican restaurant with his brother (Luis Guzmán), so there’s double brotherly strife here. Turbo and Tito have big dreams that their brothers just don’t understand. Will the story bring all of these brothers closer together? Will dreams be realized, no matter how often they’re in doubt? What do you think?

The plot of the film involves Tito discovering Turbo’s speed and deciding to enter him in the Indianapolis 500. How, you might ask, does one enter a snail in a car race? Pay the entrance fee, of course. Tito raises the money from the strip mall’s other entrepreneurs (Richard Jenkins, Ken Jeong, and Michelle Rodriguez). They all seem to think that the exposure will reinvigorate their little corner of the local economy. Makes sense, I guess. If you’re going to be sponsoring a snail in a big car race, why wouldn’t you put the name of your business on the shell? Someone in Van Nuys might see that sign on that snail and think to go to your strip mall next time they want a taco. You never know, I guess.

There’s plenty of silly business along the plot’s sidelines involving the plain old slowpoke snails Tito brings along for some reason. They are a diverse collection of sluggish primary colors with the voices of Samuel L. Jackson, Snoop Dogg, Maya Rudolph, and Ben Schwartz. They’re the kind of cartoon characters that always seem to be smirking at you. I’m not sure exactly what these characters want, what their emotional journeys are, or even who they are, really. They don’t even get the typical one-trait sidekick development. By the movie’s end, they’re Turbo’s pit crew. Makes sense, I guess. There’s also a narcissistic French racing star (Bill Hader) who might not be so happy about racing a snail. Makes sense, I guess. You put in all that work to get to the top and some stupid snail is going to just zip by you like that? This is a movie built out of so many improbable plot elements that one simply has to stop questioning and go with it. The answer to any “Why?” would be “Because otherwise there wouldn’t be a movie.”

But it’s a jumble of elements you’ve seen before, too safely crafted to either satisfy or fail, utterly predictable every step of the way. This movie about a snail racing racecars around a racetrack can’t even manage to be a little odd or unexpected. Director David Soren, who co-wrote the script with Darren Lemke and Robert D. Siegel, pulled stock character arcs, booming pop songs, and silly sight gags together and assembled them in an appealing package that danced in front of my eyes without every once engaging me on any level. It was simply there. I’d call Turbo the most forgettable animated film of the summer, but I’m sure I’ve already forgotten the most forgettable animated film of the summer.

The one truly notable aspect of Turbo is not necessarily the visually pleasant animation. We’re at the point where smoothly rendered computer-generated visual detail can be so blandly proficient that it’s only worth calling out for being truly terrible or particularly stunning. It’s fine here, that’s all, although I was charmed time and again by the neon blue streak of light Turbo trailed behind him at top speed. No, the only aspect worth noting is the film’s casual diversity. It’s appealing and admirable to have a cast of characters (the humans, at least) who are different in age, gender, body type and background without making a big deal about it. I mean, I’d prefer if they were in a movie that actually created characters out of them that were more than cogs in the all-too familiar plot mechanics, but it’s a start.

Monster Smash: PACIFIC RIM

Hollywood may be in the business of talking Earth’s destruction to death, but at least once in a while we get a lumbering blockbuster done with a light touch and clear affection for the genres it inhabits. Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim grabs gleefully two classic standbys of Japanese science fiction, the giant monster attack and the man in huge robot suit, and hurtles them together at top speed. The result is an exuberant creature feature that’s thought through the implications of its premise in satisfyingly complete ways that serve as a nice backdrop for larger than life one-on-one boxing matches between hulking mechanical defenders and slimy, resourceful beasties.

Del Toro, of Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy, among other great fantasies, has always been interested in creating cinematic worlds to wander around in, feats of imagination that feel fully realized. He’s done it again, this time in a film that’s as fast and forward moving as anything he’s ever done. It’s a crackling thin B-movie blown up on an A-budget, alive with the power to be as big as the filmmaker’s imaginations. It’s exactly the movie it wants to be, simply and sincerely and nothing more.

It starts with a rift in the Pacific Rim that allows monsters from another dimension to slip through one at a time. Called Kaiju, these massive creatures, a sort of combination of dinosaur and shark, wage devastating attacks on coastal cities. All seems lost until humanity bands together to create gigantic robots to fight back. As tall as skyscrapers and sturdy as tanks, these enormous fighting machines are too powerful for just one pilot. To move, to fight, and to win, it takes two people moving in perfect synchronization. They call it a “neural bridge” through which they “cerebral drift,” just some of many priceless bits of technobabble here.

The robots are successful. The problem seems to be contained. And here’s the first sign that we’re not in the hands of a filmmaker who will be content to serve up the concept and stop there: that all happens before the title card. We skip ahead several years and the monsters are still arriving, but now with greater and greater frequency. Mankind needs a last ditch effort to shut these Kaiju down once and for all or the apocalypse will surely come thundering down. The film follows a band of international military and scientific personal (refreshingly global-minded) as they scramble to save mankind from certain doom.

The characters are vibrant B-movie types: tough guys, nerdy researchers, control room button-pushers, ambitious young professionals, nervous civilians, and flamboyant criminals. And yet del Toro and co-writer Travis Beacham haven’t been content to stop there. They’ve created flesh-and-blood archetypes that don’t just pose and snap jargon at each other. They have interior lives that are quickly drawn in big gestures and through action, but are no less impactful because of it. The film is in some ways narratively skimpy, but in all ways imagination rich, with characters there to provide just enough emotion to power the enthusiastic exploration of the simple, infectiously entertaining premise.

The cast is important to pulling this off. The leader of the team is Idris Elba, all gravitas and stillness, exerting complete unquestioned authority over the mission. He recruits a talented pilot (Charlie Hunnam) who retired years earlier after, as we see in the pre-title sequence, suffering a devastating loss of his co-pilot in a Kaiju attack. Elba needs the pilot’s expertise to attempt the endgame, pairing him with a hugely talented, but untested, pilot (Rinko Kikuchi), who has traumatic attack-related memories of her own. The relationships between these three form the solid core from which we can care somewhat about the people in the mechanical contraptions punching monsters in the jaw.

But that’s not to say the rest of the characters contribute nothing to the larger picture. A father-and-son team of pilots (Max Martini and Robert Kazinsky) provides additional emotional investment and there are fun turns for, among others, Charlie Day as a monster-obsessed scientist and Ron Perlman as a flashy king of Hong Kong’s black market for Kaiju organs. Once the monsters appeared, many people found new jobs to do and more money to make. These roles are examples of how del Toro so purposefully thinks through the way the world has changed in the years since the monsters first appeared.

It’s the little things, like the neighborhood built into a huge Kaiju skeleton in Hong Kong, that remind you how fully and convincingly drawn this future society is, scuffed, worn and torn as if people actually live and die in it. But that’s just the del Toro way, to create fully imagined worlds by lovingly synthesizing a variety of influences through his recognizably soulful and loving genre vision. Pacific Rim is the stuff of anime and Godzilla, Transformers and Harryhausen. (There’s also a computer voiced by Portal’s Ellen McLain, a nice sonic touch.) I suppose such smoothly incorporated variety is only natural for film that’s a product of a Mexican directing a Hollywood riff on Japanese sci-fi.

Here the pieces work together in perfect harmony. It’s a film of absorbing special effects and terrific design. It’s so lived in and the characters have such ease within it that the film practically plays like a promising original effort and its bigger better sequel at the same time. Guillermo Navarro’s cinematography is a palate of inky primary colors from which emerge the gorgeous cold blues and warm reds of robotics and readouts, and scaly green and brown creatures from the deep. The sound design is rich with clicks, whirs, growls, and punches. Each step of the beasts both unnatural and manmade makes the theater quake with thunderous bass. The fights are occasionally confusing, but always spectacularly framed for maximum impact of scale, our attackers and defenders towering over us. It’s altogether a spellbinding sensation.

We see all kinds of digital destruction every weekend lately, but here’s a kind that’s grounded and thought through. It brings back some of the simple power of wonder, to stare up at unreal sights that dwarf us and makes us feel something of the nourishing power of the fantastic once again. The film is one of massive scale handled with a light touch, overpowering without overwhelming. It’s not a great movie, but it’s great creature feature fun, a rare ebullient expression of serious spectacle.

Agree to Continue: TERMS AND CONDITIONS MAY APPY

Talk about good timing. In a summer during which the news has been filled with stories of the NSA’s capabilities to spy on Americans and the man who leaked the information is forced to flee the country for doing so, the exact nature of who can know what about us is fresh in the public consciousness. Fortuitously, here's a new documentary about who can access digital information called Terms and Conditions May Apply. Director Cullen Hoback, whose last doc looked at live-action role players, has pulled together a clear-eyed primer on what information companies allow themselves to collect and store indefinitely, an ability we grant each and every time we click "Agree" to use an app or even simply hit return in a search bar. I'd say this brisk, informative documentary is not for paranoid people. But after watching it, they wouldn't be paranoid any more. They'd know they're onto something.

It's a documentary that features not one new or startling fact. Rather, it gets its ability to startle out of a collection of bits and pieces of news and information that have dribbled out over the past dozen years or so that take on sharper meaning when viewed in totality. Run back to back, it's easy to be freshly troubled by how little "Privacy Policies" protect users, and how much those tiny-print documents with the check box at the bottom are used to grant companies enormous leeway in using data collected in the course of browsing, uploading, chatting, emailing, and tweeting. The film finds personal anecdotes about people with innocuous digital moments twisted: a writer for the murder-solving procedural Cold Case whose job-related search terms sure look suspicious, a seventh grader’s Facebook message of concern for the president that was misread by the Secret Service, and a tourist whose tweet using the word "destroy" in the party sense finds him in trouble with immigration.

Human interest stories aside, the strength of the film sits squarely in the accumulation of cold hard facts. Interviews with journalists, lawyers, tech writers, analysts, and experts of one kind or another, as well as news footage and the requisite cheeky appropriations of movie and TV clips, outline the insidious creep of surveillance in modern society. The more technology evolves to connect, collaborate, and communicate with speeds ever faster and devices ever smaller, the more the potential for uses and abuses. The argument is tracked back politically and economically to the Patriot Act. We’re shown footage of George W. Bush proudly announcing new laws to allow law enforcement easy and total access to any kind of communications "used by terrorists." Unspoken in his statement is the not-insignificant fact that people who aren't terrorists tend to use email and cell phones too. The film goes on to chart the continued refinement of these practices which most certainly did not end when the public discovered them or when the presidential administrations changed.

Hoback, in a trim 79-minute runtime, isn't content to lay the blame entirely on the Patriot Act, looking at the surveillance industry and societal shifts as well as base political motives. The film is no screed - it pulls footage from both Fox News and MSNBC - in the way the evidence is displayed. It merely collects information and sorts through what it finds pertinent, drawing a path from the dawn of the Internet until now that seems to be heading in a quietly ominous direction for personal privacy. Rather than a heated argument, the damning evidence against governmental and corporate espionage, spying all Internet users are to some extent complicit in on some level, adds up only to a simple request to those institutions that track our every digital move: Can you please stop?

More (and Less) of the Same: DESPICABLE ME 2

Did you like the 2010 animated slapstick comedy Despicable Me? Well, have I got news for you. Here’s Despicable Me 2, featuring more of everything you liked about Despicable Me except 1.) the sense of surprise, 2.) narrative momentum, and 3.) a non-monetary reason to exist. Oh, sure, Steve Carell’s Gru, the failed supervillain who decided being a dad is even better than being bad, is still a funny voice performance married to distinctive hunched design. His adopted daughters are as precocious and cute as ever. His army of yellow, nugget-shaped, gibberish-babbling Minions represents an often-hysterical expression of pure cartoony id in the best Looney Tunes tradition. But what’s missing most of all in this sequel is a sense of purpose. It’s cute, but the scope of this film feels so small, cramped even. It’s pitched at the level of a not-especially hardworking Saturday-morning cartoon series, smaller stakes, simpler emotions, and a safe, comforting plot that never strays too far from the status quo. As a handful of episodes in this hypothetical TV show, it’d be an amiable time-waster, but as a feature film, this doesn’t quite cut it. Though still amiable, on the big screen its time-waster status looms large.

Since tradition dictates sequels need plots, this one gets one. Gru, having retired from supervillainy at the end of the first film, is asked by the Anti-Villain League to put his skills to use spotting a supervillain in hiding. He turns them down at first. He has a comfortable life throwing his daughter’s birthday party and putting his Minions to work making a line of jams and jellies. But, plot intervenes, and one Silas Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan, in a pinched, nasally voice) pairs Gru with Agent Lucy (Kristen Wiig) to go undercover in a snazzy geodesic-dome-shaped mall and find the person responsible for pilfering an entire Arctic research station in a giant flying electromagnet. (In true cartoon fashion, the ship is in the shape of, what else, a giant horseshoe magnet. I liked that.) So this time around Gru is a good guy who helps the good guys. Gone is the sweet-and-sour core that gave the first film its altogether unexpected, but most welcome, bite. Now it’s just a typical busy kiddie flick that’s broad and appealing without ever much breaking out of the box it has built for itself.

And that’s not a bad thing, necessarily. To sit and watch Despicable Me 2 is not an unpleasant experience. There are bright colors and funny noises and sometimes the 3D bops something towards your face. There’s bouncy cartoon-violence slapstick and plenty of silly moments throughout. Several subplots bounce around within the main throughline: a mysterious something is kidnapping Minions; Gru’s oldest daughter (Miranda Cosgrove) has a crush on a cute boy (Moises Arias) she met at the mall; Gru’s youngest (Elsie Fisher) is struggling with her lines for the Mother’s Day pageant (sadly the middle child (Dana Gaier) is left without a plot of her own); the flighty Lucy just might be a source of Gru love if he ever realizes it. On a simple plot level, a lot is happening here, and it converges into a climax that ties up all the plotlines in a pretty bow. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all mildly entertaining, sometimes kicking up past mild and into very. At one point, the Minions recreate a mid-90’s pop ballad and the scene had me in stitches, though I bet the little kids in the audience might’ve wondered why it was that funny.

Movies like this make me wish we still had a viable market for animated short films. Why force Gru, his girls, and his Minions to fill a feature length runtime with every outing? They’re hugely appealing and animated with bright, round, colorful visuals. Imagine a world in which Universal opts to create dozens of six or seven minute shorts with these characters. Wouldn’t a few minutes of inspired Minion madness be just the thing to show before, say, Furious 6? (Maybe Fox could jump on the bandwagon and put Scrat the prehistoric squirrel before X-Men or something.) Alas, that’s not what we’re considering here. Despicable Me 2 is a safe and competent kids’ movie that’s happy with its smallness and tameness (not to mention sameness). It’s a quintessential “good enough” sequel, satisfied to simply say, you liked this last time so here’s some more. It’s coasting on audience goodwill.

Off the Rails: THE LONE RANGER

In a summer when so many Hollywood entertainments, even the halfway decent ones, seem to be on autopilot, it's a relief to find that The Lone Ranger boldly and confidently flies off the rails the first chance it gets. Here's an improbable movie: a darkly cartoonish 149 minute Western that's not only an attempt at bringing to today's audiences the adventures of the old white-hat radio-serial hero and his Native American sidekick, it is also a Fourth of July release in which capitalism and the U.S. Army are major villainous forces, and a live-action Disney movie with a subplot about a prostitute who has a wooden leg that's also a gun. At long last, 2013 has served up a summer tentpole where, no matter what you end up thinking about its quality, you won't hear a description and think "Oh, yeah, another one of those."

This is the work of Gore Verbinski, the talented director who brought us indelible entertainments like the shivery J-horror remake The Ring, the iconic Pirates of the Caribbean and its boisterously overstuffed sequels, and the madcap animated postmodern Western Rango. He has a knack for creating clear, creative imagery that rises out of unrestrained imagination without irretrievably swamping the narrative momentum of his films. The haunted videotape in The Ring contains perhaps the most memorably frightening collection of horror images of the last decade or so. The Pirates films are some of the best large-scale action fantasy efforts in recent memory. And Rango, why that's nothing short of a masterpiece, essentially putting part of the plot of Chinatown into a Western populated by animals and pulling out all the stops on a wild roller-coaster of set pieces, casual surrealism, and tricky thematic loop-de-loops.

His Lone Ranger is a bit of all of the above, bloated, messy, and prone to whiplash between tones in an instant. It's a film of woozy pseudo-mystic native spiritualism, a few red-blooded Rube Goldberg action sequences, and a heaping helping of reflexive genre criticism. There's almost too much going on at all times, but even when it contorts into awkward shapes and narrative confusion, there's bounteous visual satisfaction to be found. After a start in 1933 where an elderly Native American haltingly starts telling the story we're about to see to a young boy visiting a carnival, we're thrown right into the action. It's 1869 and a new prosecutor (Armie Hammer) is on a train to Texas. Also aboard is captured fugitive Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) who is promptly rescued by his gang who shoot up the train and cause it to crash past the station and slam into the sand. So you see, the film is already quite literally off the rails and the plot soon threatens to follow, with only Bojan Bazelli’s gorgeous widescreen celluloid cinematography and the eccentric period-piece bric-a-brac production design to hold it together.

A posse rides out to recapture the criminals, but the gang ambushes them, killing them all. But the prosecutor survives and, in a nod to Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 Western Dead Man, a helpful native finds him in the desert. Here the help is Tonto (Johnny Depp, in a performance full of weird tics again, but not entirely successfully), a strange man who wears apparently permanent war paint, a dead bird on his head, and seems to be speaking nonsense half the time. He’s looking to bring Cavendish to justice as well. They team up, Tonto advising the prosecutor to wear a mask, using his assumed death as a disguise to help in their search. With that, The Lone Ranger and Tonto begin their journey. It may seem easy enough, but with a plot this complicated, it takes some time to really get going.  As the hunt begins, so to does an all-out war between settlers and the Comanche after it appears a land treaty has been broken in the wake of the Transcontinental Railroad. As if that’s not enough, the film also contains a frontier woman (Ruth Wilson) and her son (Bryant Price) – the Ranger’s nephew – who get caught up in this conflict, as well as a U.S. military man (Barry Pepper), a tenacious railroad official (Tom Wilkinson), and the aforementioned peg-legged prostitute (Helena Bonham Carter). And did I mention that there’s silver in them there hills?

The strains of politics, greed, business, and revenge all twist about in a film that’s complicated, needlessly so, perhaps, and certainly overlong. It’s shockingly cruel and ugly, even literally, the characters are all sweaty and dirty, covered in dust, muck, and dried blood. It’s a "family film" featuring cannibalism, mass killings, a rough-and-tumble tone, and bone-deep cynicism about the future and oft-scoffed "progress." The script by Justin Haythe, Ted Elliott, and Terry Rossio is intent on undercutting easy heroism with gags and silliness amidst the historical sadism. It’s a Western with an understanding of the tragedy, the national sin, befalling the Native Americans. This is subversive stuff, occasionally clumsily handled, poking through a film that often feels close to sliding out of control and sometimes does.

It gains a sort of moral force from a wounded spirit that's also played as a joke. Tonto is a madman and an outcast. Years ago, we learn, his tribe was killed. He roams the desert seeking revenge. He babbles and pulls faces, using underestimation as his greatest defense. To treat Tonto as a joke and a tragedy is queasy-making, but the attempt is noble. It's better than playing it straight as simple condescension, even if the execution is questionable. It's a tricky, not entirely successful, portrayal, helped by Depp playing the elderly storyteller who frames the story as a story. Are we to take it all at face value? Not especially. The elderly Depp is housed in a carnival. The events of the film are not without nuance, but are largely broad and even vaguely satiric. Here's a film that's saying perhaps time has passed for these kinds of stories, but gee, aren't they fun anyways?

It's nearly a slog for a while, falling into an odd pattern of jokes, massacres, slapstick, and showdowns. In one scene, the cavalry chases down a tribe, and then we cut back to attempted humor from a horse licking the Lone Ranger's face. Hammer's square-jawed classical performance is sunny and without a hint of winking, the better for the odd details to accrue around him. Long scenes of halting banter between Hammer and Depp sometimes fall flatter than they should, but once plot and other actors enter the scene more forcefully they snap back into a sense of purpose. But even while drifting, it’s at least worth looking at, a film determined to echo John Ford, Sergio Leone, and Buster Keaton on its way to finding new images of its own.

Once all the pieces  fall into place, the film hurtles through a climactic series of events most satisfying, especially a massive sequence involving two trains and plenty of expertly and elaborately choreographed and clearly edited bits of action set to the “William Tell Overture.” To get there, though, is a mad, uneven jumble, but I can almost say it's worth it. The film is befuddling and beguiling, exhausting and exciting. I left worn out, but more than ever convinced that Verbinski's one of the best directors cooking up blockbusters in Hollywood today. In lesser hands this would've been even more of a mess than it already is. Here’s a work of visual invention and real subversion, albeit so bustlingly uneven that it made my head spin.

Update 7/6/13: 

My affection for the film lingered even as the critical reaction grew increasingly negative. I went back to the theater and saw it again, not because I wanted to see what others hated, but to see again the parts of the film I - and a band of defenders - admired. (I was especially craving another look at that dazzling climactic action sequence.) Upon a second viewing, my opinion of the film has only grown. I still think it's a film dangerously close to sliding out of control. But I'm more convinced that Verbinski's a filmmaker in complete control. There's a difference between a film that's tonally slippery and tonally sloppy. The Lone Ranger is the former. A common comparison kicking around cinephile circles, at least amongst those of us who like this picture, is Spielberg's to-this-day underrated Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Both films feature a structure – early and late action with comedy, shocking violence and gross out gags in between – and tonal mix – dark, strange, funny, exciting, silly – that could easily catch a viewer unaware and knock them clear out of enjoyment. But repeat viewings, when more fully aware of the big picture and the filmmaker's strategies, reveal a hurtling fine-tuned roller coaster of an adventure film. Those moments where the whole thing seemed to take a curve too fast and you thought the clattering contraption would go flying off in a deadly crash? That was no mistake. It was built to thrill. The Lone Ranger is a terrific film, boldly conceived and executed to subvert expectations. Instead of viewing the film as a failed version of what it's not, trying to fit the film into boxes - modern summer blockbuster, live-action Disney movie - into which it refuses to fit easily, it's far better to view and enjoy the film as it is.

Note: A second viewing also sharpened the plot for me. Scenes that I found a little confused at first are improved with the full knowledge of what's to come, a clarity that extends to some of Tonto's seemingly nonsense dialogue, which, when viewed within the full context, reveals that he's generally a step ahead of the Lone Ranger, and the audience as well.

Too Wise to Woo Peaceably: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ad Men: NO

Like Spielberg's Lincoln, the Chilean docudrama No is a procedural about political power. Set in the late 1980s, a time during which the country's ruling regime, after much international pressure, agreed to hold an election, the film follows an ad man (Gael García Bernal) who agrees to help run the opposition's television advertising campaign. Where Spielberg's film focuses on a 19th century American political hero going face to face winning over votes for his cause, No takes place in a time when mass media allows political persuasion to be taken to the entirety of a county's populace. By the 1980s, technologies have changed the nature of political argumentation. The election's rules allow for 15 minutes a day for 27 days of televised arguments for voting 'Yes," keeping Augusto Pinochet in power, or voting "No," and potentially toppling the military dictatorship. This will be a battle of persuasion not fought at gunpoint or in smoke-filled rooms, but out in the open on the screens of the nation’s television sets.

The ad man's idea for the "No" campaign boils down to selling not a political movement or dissent, but happiness and freedom. He creates vibrant, modern, fast-moving pieces filled with smiling faces, catchy songs, and good feelings that stand in stark contrast to the serious lectures and manufactured exaltations that are the pro-Pinochet advertising. The "No" spots look closer in spirit to the humor and music of the taped segments of Saturday Night Live or bouncy asides on Sesame Street in America at the time. My favorite bit in all the ads finds an off-screen voice asking a man "What would you say to a dictator?" The man thinks for a beat, and then sticks out his tongue, upon which is written "NO!" Also good is a scene in which a man begs a woman “Yes?” while she responds “No!” until he gives up and shouts “No!” too. They may be in bed, but they’re talking about voting. One socialist comrade grumpily says they look like "Coca-Cola ads." But, though it takes some convincing on the part of the ad men to let the campaign they envision go out over the airwaves, the ads eventually start to work. Powered by a hugely catchy jingle, the “No”s are gaining traction. Slowly, their efforts shift the conversation and the forces of the status quo feel the need to fight back.

No becomes a film of dueling campaigns that gets great humor and tension out of strategy meetings, shifting motivations, questioned allegiances, and disputed best advertising practices on both sides of the political conversation. It's a film of high-stakes meetings behind closed doors that then explode across the country on television screens, ads that are by turns exciting, hilarious and troubling. Director Pablo Larraín shoots the entirety of No in a square, washed-out, lo-fi style that accurately reflects the kind of video technology that would have been available at the time. This creates a sense of fly-on-the-wall verisimilitude, a convincing approximation of what we might've been able to see if there was a crew of documentarians around the principal figures. I found the visual style distracting at first, but was quickly swept up in the fast-moving tick-tock plotting, involved and invested. It grows only more gripping, picking up momentum and pressure as it goes along.

A talented cast of actors playing mostly men in suits with varying positions and points of view, but some select family members and friends as well, act out a vibrant screenplay by Pedro Peirano (from a play by Antonio Skármeta) which charges forward with a fine sense of purpose and drive. It delivers a sharp critique and celebration of media power in the political arena, both focused on its effectiveness. After all, the "Yes" campaign can spread a distortion as fast as the "No"s can agitate for hope. The film is bookended by scenes of Bernal doing his typical ad man job and everything in between shows him putting his skills to work for what comes to be seen as a higher purpose. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but here's a film that says TV is mightier than the machine gun.