Robert Redford Gives His 'All'

by Brett Parker

All is Lost has to be one of the purest man vs. nature films ever made simply because that’s all there really is to it: man and nature.  There’s no supporting characters, no cutaways to multiple locations, no flashbacks, no backstory, or no spoken dialogue (except for a voice-over reading a devastating letter), just a quiet man alone on a boat in the middle of the ocean trying to stay alive once everything goes wrong.  That may sound like something of a gamble, but All is Lost proves that stripping a literal ocean of cliches away from a survival tale can be quite riveting.

The film opens with an unnamed Man (Robert Redford) alone on a boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean.  The boat accidentally collides with a lost shipping container adrift in the ocean, ripping a hole in the hull.  The Man uses all the tools he can to patch up the hole, but these efforts prove to be useless once the boat wanders into a violent storm that eventually sinks the vessel completely.  This pushes the Man further out into the dangers of the ocean, armed with only an inflatable life raft and a small emergency kit.  As he fends off hunger, sharks, and more stormy weather, The Man tries to develop some kind of makeshift strategy to get himself through his increasingly disastrous situation.   

After making his feature length debut with Margin Call, All is Lost further shows writer/director J.C. Chandor’s taste for tales where men are stripped of everything they find important.  Yet while Margin Call showed characters giving into dread in the face of a financial collapse, All is Lost proves to be more uplifting by showing a character’s unrelenting fight to live in the face of certain death.  By giving obsessive focus to the simple yet intelligent tactics needed to stay afloat and alive at sea, Chandor is able to show the human will in its barest essence to highlight the strong perseverance that can be evoked in all of us against monumentally traumatizing odds.  Since a lot of moviegoers today can relate to losing things of great value and being knocked down to very taxing circumstances, they’ll especially find special resonance in this impossible survival tale (which would also help to explain the recently strong box office performance of Gravity, outside of its special effects).  That’s why a sailor’s level-headed strategy to overcome the ocean’s unforgiving conditions told in bare-bones form turns out to be way more entertaining that you’d initially suspect.

Robert Redford has certainly solidified himself as a Hollywood legend not only because of his matinee idol looks and efforts as an Americana auteur, but also for his internal army of simple acting gifts that one could easily blink-and-miss.  He’s proven to be a master of subtlety, getting more economy from controlled restraint than some of his more melodramatic counterparts, and he can display a rugged resourcefulness in adventurous situations.  Here these two ideals get the workout of their lives since Redford is completely isolated and plunked into one of his deadliest cinematic scenarios yet.  Since there’s no one to play off of, his performance has to rely solely on the steeliness of his actions and the aching look of impending agony in his eyes.  And since his character has no real backstory (or even a name), all we have to go on is his primal human need to survive, which Redford delivers with piercing feeling.  This performance is a master class in physical acting.

An interesting aside in Michael Feeney Callan’s biography of Redford suggests that most of his films could be seen as romances in which Redford is the romantic hero and Nature itself is “the girl.”  In that sense, All is Lost could be one of those relationship dramas in which a long-standing couple reach their breaking-point and test each other to see if they can keep going on together.  As a couple, Redford and Nature have certainly had their ups-and-downs over the years, but now Nature is fed up and dishing out all it’s capable of while Redford responds like a good husband fighting to keep things (literally) afloat.  These kinds of films usually end with the main couple staying together or completely dissolving, yet Chandor leaves it up to the audience to decide if Redford and Nature work things out or part ways permanently.  Considering everything we’ve ever learned about Redford and the Human Spirit in general, I’m optimistic that things ended on a happy note.  

A Wasted Trip to 'Vegas'

by Brett Parker

Much ado has been made about the cast of Last Vegas, for it marks the very first time Michael Douglas, Robert DeNiro, Morgan Freeman, and Kevin Kline have appeared together onscreen in the same feature.  Even the grumpiest of cinephiles has to smile at such a line-up, and what’s really delightful is that they haven’t been thrown together for a pretentious drama but rather a wild Vegas romp that allows the fellas to indulge in some guy’s guy shenanigans.  So it’s all kinds of disappointing that the final product comes up awfully short on big laughs and real feelings.  These veteran aces happily look more-than-game to get their crazy on, but they unfortunately don’t have a script or director willing to tap into their full potential.

As the film opens, we meet an older businessman named Billy (Michael Douglas) as he reads the eulogy at his friend’s funeral.  Feeling the wistful pinch of old age at that exact moment, Billy decides to propose to his much younger girlfriend (Bre Blair) right from the podium.  She accepts, and a wedding is hastily rushed into place.  Before he walks down the aisle, Billy thinks it’s best to throw a bachelor party in Las Vegas with his old pals.  So he calls upon Paddy (Robert DeNiro), a depressed widow, Archie (Morgan Freeman), an ailing grandpa with some life left in him, and Sam (Kevin Kline), a bored retiree, to help him celebrate his last weekend of being a free man.

Pretty soon, the gang flies off to Vegas and find out just how old they really are.  As the fellas tangle with drag queens, mixed drinks, VIP club life, and a bikini contest, they very much look like hopelessly confused seniors.  Making matters more complicated is a lounge singer (Mary Steenburgen) who conjures up old wounds between Billy and Paddy.  This causes the gang to work overtime to conquer their past, and ailing bodies, to party it up Vegas-style as best they can.

I literally laughed out loud when I first saw the joyous trailer for this film, but the buck truly stops there.  Repressed senior citizens let loose in America’s playground seems like an endless well of comic material, but the script from Dan Fogelman (Crazy, Stupid, Love.) reveals nothing but tired geezer jokes and low-level gags that would be too lame for a basic TV sitcom.  Hope could’ve been restored if the film held lyrical insights into the hardships of growing old, but everything here seems so damn contrived.  The actors on display appear to be going through the motions of a commissioned fluff job instead of pulling real perceptions from their weathered depths.  Director Jon Turteltaub is no stranger to putting movie stars in fish-out-of-water scenarios (and he directed the very funny Cool Runnings), but he usually just dishes out simple-minded standards and hardly seems like the right man to indulge in this cast’s inner-hedonists.  While it’d probably be a bit much to ask Todd Phillips to repeat his magic from The Hangover, perhaps directors like Judd Apatow, Ben Stiller, or Jon Favreau could’ve brought the fun we yearn for.

Incompetent comedies are unfortunately a dime a dozen, but this one feels more shameful because these cherished thespians hold an excited enthusiasm to cut loose and live it up way more than the film allows them to.  Morgan Freeman seems to be the most thrilled to be silly, and a scene where he gets drunk on Red Bull & Vodkas then decides to dance is easily the funniest moment in the entire film.  Kevin Kline has a blast toying with his serious image by showing us a man desperate to get wild but gets hindered by a lifetime of being uptight.  Michael Douglas can evoke a wily smoothie by just simply showing up, but he actually delivers the film’s only real moment of poignancy by delivering a wounded dialogue about how hard growing old is.  Robert DeNiro can deliver a hardened, no-nonsense personality better than anybody, but we really wish he wasn’t made to be so serious and let loose with some unhinged wackiness.  We know he can play gruff, but it would’ve been something if he could play zany here.

So if you’re looking for a quirky film with treasured elderly actors hamming it up over bromantic shenanigans while facing the wintertime of their lives, then Stand-Up Guys is actually the movie you’re looking for.  Of course that earlier film is just as equally contrived, but it’s a hell of a lot more funny and enjoyable than this Vegas flick.  So as we throw Last Vegas into the cinematic trash bin, I’m wishing on a movie studio that maybe another scheduling miracle can happen where these four stars can align again in a better and funnier vehicle.  For their rascally smirks, mischievous eyes, and dressed-to-the-nines swagger show they could be sensational in a more dynamite comedy.

'The Counselor' with Grim Advisements

by Brett Parker

The Counselor marks the first original Hollywood screenplay from famed novelist Cormac McCarthy, and if you were expecting something on par with his celebrated novels Blood Meridian or The Road, then you can be considered more optimistic than most.  From where I sit, the final result plays more like a watered-down and glamorized No Country for Old Men.  Yet on a pure entertainment level, the film makes us realize that snappy noirs don’t exactly grow on trees these days and we’re grateful to have Ridley Scott’s expert sizzle to guide us through this wild ride.

The film follows a lawyer (Michael Fassbender) known only as “The Counselor” (after all, this is a Cormac McCarthy character).  While he appears to have the perfect upscale life with a beautiful fiance (Penelope Cruz), he claims his “back’s up against the wall” with financial matters and decides to to go in on a drug deal with his shady business pal, Reiner (Javier Bardem).  Their plot revolves around distributing a shipment of drugs to be transported across the Mexico-Texas border in a sewage truck.  Even though a shady operator named Westray (Brad Pitt) warns him about all the brutal ways such a deal could go wrong, The Counselor still decides to go all-in with the plan.

Thanks to unforeseen violent dealings and catastrophic coincidences, everything with the drug shipment goes spectacularly wrong and The Counselor quickly gets a target on his back.  Reiner has no helpful advice for him and Westray advises him to run very far away, but The Counselor is terrified that cartels will get to his fiance before anything.  So a race beings to save his beloved, and himself, as it becomes painfully obvious that blood is about to be spilled.

No one will ever really accuse The Counselor of being one of McCarthy’s masterworks, yet the film itself brings back fond memories of a time when even the most generic of noirs dished out endless riches of crackerjack dialogue and colorful character bits.  Of course, all of this is basked in McCarthy’s bleak view of humanity, recalling No Country for Old Men’s ideas on the corrupting nature of greed and how magnificently unforgiving the drug world can be.  Perhaps the most distinctive thing about the script is its paranoid misogyny streak which would be pretty appalling if the philosophical style it’s presented in didn’t make us ponder that even cavemen and savages have feelings, too.  Besides, such feelings cumulate with the insanely startling scene where Cameron Diaz, as Reiner’s cold-hearted girlfriend, has sex with a Ferrari, so help me God.  Diaz’s acrobatics, McCarthy’s hilarious description of the act, Bardem’s facial reaction to witnessing it, and the aquatic metaphor used to describe such a things all help to instantly place the whole shebang in the pantheon of unforgettable sex scenes, for better or worse.  

Even if this is all Cormac McCarthy going through his familiar motions, it gets more verve thanks to Ridley Scott going through his motions.  His taste for glowing, gorgeous landscapes paint not the lived-in southern landscape of No Country for Old Men but an upscale, glamorous one that strongly exudes the greedy hollowness that holds a giant grip on this world.  While Scott tends to dab in varying genres, the one unifying thing in all his work is the bruising humanity that tends to rear its head in environments of immoral hysteria.  And it’s that very sneaky humanity that helps make McCarthy’s grim worldview more wrenching here than it’s been in past adaptations of his work.  This is greatly exemplified in a sensationally crushing scene where The Counselor disintegrates once he is elegantly told by a cartel official (Ruben Blades) about the true nature of grief and suffering.

Of course, Scott also holds a knack for allowing expert actors to show off some lively grit.  Michael Fassbender certainly has the movie star goods (a scene in which he gazes upon a poster of Steve McQueen damn near halts the film with its blatant allusions), and he wrings all the anguish he can from an underwritten role (for all his actions, we never truly do understand The Counselor’s financial desperation or desire to walk on the wild side).  Cameron Diaz pools all her resources to nicely exude icy blonde calculation, which certainly gets the workout of its life in the Ferrari scene.  Javier Bardem is a laugh riot as a flamboyant entrepreneur who hilariously cares more about satisfying his girlfriend than he does about the fact that he could potentially die at any moment.  Brad Pitt uses his curated coolness to wonderful effect as a man who’s seen it all, and his final scene will surely stay etched in your nightmares forever.  And Penelope Cruz may be pure window decoration here, but she’s easily convincing as the only virtuous person in sight.

Since we’re in Cormac McCarthy territory, you can be sure that The Counselor has a merciless and depressing ending that holds no sympathy for narrative conventions or audience comfort.  We may have reached the point where such business has become cliche for McCarthy, but his cliches still shatter most normal storytelling cliches.  It’s those very bleak and unconventional traits that make The Counselor a haunting and exciting affair, and it proves to be rather hard to shake.  The dialogue will inspire much laughter and alarm while the narrative treats us to a sex scene and a death scene we’ll never forget.  While it may not be transcendent, its greatest achievement is to show us how most Hollywood musings about the drug world just might be pure fantasy and drivel.  

The Nail-Biting Perils of Being 'Captain'

by Brett Parker

I remember that day in 2009 when America was glued to the startling suspense in the ordeal of Captain Richard Phillips, the cargo ship captain who was being held hostage by Somali pirates on a lifeboat in the ocean.  All the media outlets were hanging onto every bit of the unfolding drama until Navy SEALS intervened with awe-inspiring expertise to end the ordeal.  After feeling horrifying sympathy for Phillips, beaming pride in our navy, and great sadness over the awful circumstances that cause Somali piracy, the cinephile in me couldn’t help but ponder that this would all make for an exciting movie one day.

And so it has.  Director Paul Greengrass (United 93, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum) has taken his knack for wringing kinetic cinematic danger from real world events and applied it to Captain Phillip’s tale, turning it into a gripping thriller.  But nothing here feels terribly boasted or “Hollywood-ized.”  Greengrass appears to stick to the factual details of the horrible event, and that proves to contain all the high-wattage tension needed to give this film juice.  It also provides a lead role for Tom Hanks, who hasn’t had an interesting part in ages, that lets him shine with true grit.

On April 8th, 2009, the Maersk Alabama finds itself in dangerous waters as it ships 17,000 metric tons of cargo en route to Mombassa, Kenya.  Four Somali pirates, all between the ages of 17-19, board the ship with AK-47s.  The pirates’ leader, Muse (Barkhad Abdi), points a gun at Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) and starts demanding money or the crew will be killed.  Thanks to training on how to handle piracy situations, the crew knows enough to shut down the ship in its place and hide in the cargo room.  Thanks to quick-thinking, knowledge of the ship, and the crew overpowering one of the pirates, Captain Phillips is able to convince the Somalians to leave the ship with $30,000 from the safe.  But those circumstances turn out not to please the pirates, for they take Phillips with them on the ship’s lifeboat as collateral for more ransom.  

Thus begins a hostage situation in which Phillips is trapped on a 28-foot lifeboat with armed gunmen who plan on taking him back to Somalia and negotiate a million-dollar ransom for his release.  The U.S. Navy gets word of his capture and send in destroyer ships and Navy SEALS to try and rescue him.  As the pirates try to outthink the Navy to get what they want, Phillips tries his very best to talk some sense into Muse, who holds a hardheaded refusal to give up quietly.  It soon becomes clear that if the pirates don’t surrender, the Navy will have to hurt these young men, or Phillips himself will end up killed.

Like Kathryn Bigelow, Greengrass likes to take deadly situations and strip them down to as much bare-bones realism as possible.  Yet instead of focusing on heavy-handed dialogue and overly-done action, he likes to stay grounded in the character’s behavior and reactions to touch on bigger ideas.  Captain Phillips doesn’t betray this technique, for Greengrass keeps his shaky-cam tightly focused on the claustrophobic intensity of the situation for maximum effect.  This is especially felt in the battle of wills between Phillips and Muse, for the tension works a vice-grip on you once you realize these two leaders actually have lots in common: self-reliant resourcefulness, a strict adherence to duty, a clear-eyed view of the bigger picture, etc.  Since explosive violence feels like the impending result, their chess match keeps you on the edge of your seat the entire time.

The real-life Captain Phillips has expressed repeatedly how he’s no Superman, but just an Average Joe who did the job required of him.  Well Tom Hanks was born and bred to play resourceful everymen, and this is his first truly dynamite role in quite some time.  Ron Howard once noted how Hanks is a star that audiences love to watch while he thinks, and that ideal gets the workout of its life here, for Phillips really only has the experience and intelligence in his head as a defense and it’s exciting to watch his steely calculation even as his body language suggests a man mortified to his core.  The other ace performance comes from Barkhad Abdi, who makes Muse just as “professional” as Phillips while suggesting an inner-ocean of weariness the Captain can only hint at.  Instead of relying on cackling evil or reckless hysteria to get his effect, Abdi wisely illuminates an acute perseverance that must be followed to combat the dire circumstances of his home country.  If the dialogue doesn’t exactly fill in the harrowing circumstances that forced these Somalians into piracy, Abdi’s performance says it all.

Even though the current-events checker in us knows exactly how this true life story ended, the film’s final act still turns out to be as riveting as high-seas adventures get.  The mounting tensions, the erupting violence, the suggestions of death, and the Navy’s race to find a solution all create a whirlwind of intensity that will almost leave you feeling just as spent and shaken as Phillips feels in his devastating final scene.  Even though another director would’ve treated us to more poetic flourishes and philosophical muses, we realize that Greengrass’s tight and frantic busywork did all it needed to do to spell out the enormous power of the United States’ grasp and the monumental desperation that caused the Somalians to take them on with wrongheaded hostility.  It’s rare to find an adventure so thrilling, so true-to-life, and so packed with ideological melancholy, which is why Captain Phillips isn’t a movie to treat lightly at all.

'Prisoners' of Contrivance

by Brett Parker

Prisoners is a thriller that wants to display both the traumatized grit of Mystic River and the macabre perversity of Seven, yet it quickly shows us that such a combination can be  quite the tall order for even the most game of productions.  The film’s grand dramatic perceptions and kinkier plot points don’t exactly meld comfortably with each other, and they put a hindrance on the film’s hopes for transcendence.  But you can’t accuse the script of being lazy, for even the more boneheaded developments are intricately planted with a clockwork shrewdness, and the cast swings for the fences as if they’re utterly convinced this B-movie could be the next great American drama.

The movie opens on a rainy Thanksgiving where carpenter Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and his family celebrate the holiday with their married neighbor friends, Franklin (Terrence Howard) and Nancy (Viola Davis).  It’s a seemingly relaxed affair until  the grown-ups notice that their daughters Anna (Erin Gerasimovich) and Joy (Kyla Drew Simmons) went for a walk and never returned.  The girls were last seen playing near a mysterious RV parked in the neighborhood, and this leads to police detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) being called in to investigate.  Loki tracks down the RV parked by woods next to a highway, and he discovers a mentally-challenged introvert named Alex (Paul Dano) holed up inside.

A lack of any evidence inside the RV and Alex’s apparent low-I.Q. force the police to let him walk, but Keller expresses serious doubts.  Alex appears to have dropped some curious and ambiguous hints that he may have encountered the girls at some point and Keller is furious that the police aren’t doing anything more about him.  So while Loki hurtles himself into a complex and disturbing investigation, Keller kidnaps Alex at gunpoint and decides to conduct his own interrogation.  He holds him hostage in an abandoned apartment complex and plans on beating and torturing him until he reveals information about the girls’ whereabouts.  Can Loki solve the case before Keller goes too far?

The big idea here is how an unspeakable tragedy can turn everyone involved prisoners of tortured emotions and devilish impulses that come awfully close to resembling the dark forces that orchestrated the tragedy in the first place.  So the best thing about the film is the way the seasoned cast wrings startling anguish from their arsenals to give such themes a bruising resonance.  The big standout is Jackman, who relentlessly delivers such excessive intensity that you truly wonder if he passed out from exhaustion after every take.  If you’ve ever watched a thriller and thought certain characters didn’t get worked up or mad enough over a dangerous situation, then Jackman’s performance will stun you.  I think even Wolverine would flinch from this character, which should tip you off to how strongly Jackman’s rage illuminates the core of a desperate father pushed to the brink.  As for Gyllenhaal, it’s not hard to see parallels between his character here and the one he played in Zodiac, for both are morose obsessives fixated on a dark case.  Yet he’s alert and lively enough here to excel past police archetypes.  Howard and Davis also prove compelling in roles that reveal themselves to be the anchors of moral reasoning amidst the chaos all around them.  Dano nicely plays up his more neurotic and strange traits to craft a convincing outsider whose mental state truly keeps you guessing.  And I give Melissa Leo serious props for bringing a lived-in gravity to a seemingly simple character with a faulty background.

All of this is certainly gripping and suspenseful as it rolls along, but then everything starts to flirt with macabre territory that isn’t too terribly far off from, say, Psycho or The Silence of the Lambs.  The problem is that these developments prove to be either too preposterous or too vague to hold any real weight.  There’s much ado about a specific red herring character whose very nature is so magnificently ridiculous that I couldn’t buy it for the life of me (he could be the most insane literary nut ever, my apologies to Annie from Misery).  When everything is revealed in the end, the outcome is so strangely over-the-top that you feel it leans more towards screenwriting contrivances than realistic horrors.  To be fair, there’s enough hints and clues in the script to oppose the notion that the ending is all trucked-in nonsense, but it doesn’t color in the kind of credible depth the film’s bigger ideas cry out for.  

In spite of its sporadic clunkiness, Prisoners is still a gripping entertainment with considerable brains in its head.  Like any good mystery, it pulls you in deeper every step of the way and you’re willingly alert to every new revelation, even if they do turn out to be a bit unsatisfying.  Perhaps if the film ditched its horror show pretensions, it could’ve reveled more strongly in its ideas of end-justifying-the-means torture and hysteria breeding moral irresponsibility, turning up the temperature on a truly haunting critique of modern day America.  Even though the film pulls a few punches with this idea, it’s still impressive to see a Hollywood vehicle willing to dive into such darkness.  And it’s also thrilling to see that in a roll-call of powerful thespians, Jackman emerges as the hands-down champion in this acting event.

The 'World's' First Booze-Soaked Social Sci-Fi Flick

by Brett Parker

The beauty of filmmaker Edgar Wright is how he sets out to make humorous, tongue-in-cheek send-ups of beloved film genres and ends up making masterful displays that can stand with any film in said genre.  Shaun of the Dead brought a surprisingly lyrical heart to a zombie picture while Hot Fuzz dished out expert cops-and-robbers excess that put most action flicks in its genre to shame.  And of course, the towering masterpiece Scott Pilgrim vs. the World put the youth genre through the pop culture ringer to create of one of the most acute understandings of young emotions Hollywood ever produced.  Now comes The World’s End, which aims to be a silly spoof of alien invasion flicks but ends up doing social sci-fi better than most serious social sci-fi movies.  To wheel out big laughs while showing off expert cinematic goods is the mark of a great director, and I definitely think Edgar Wright is one of the best directors working today.

As the film opens, we meet Gary King (Simon Pegg), a hedonistic alcoholic recounting tales of his wild youth for a therapy group he's in.  Gary's favorite youthful memory is the time him and his old school mates attempted to complete "The Golden Mile," a pub crawl consisting of 12 pubs in his small hometown of Newton Haven.  The young lads never did make it all the way to the final bar, "The World's End," and this has always irked Gary.  So it's now that Gary decides to track down his old buds so they can finish what they started 20 years ago.

As Gary tries to round up the old gang and convince them to once again attempt such a drunken quest, he discovers that they've all moved onto comfortable yet boring grown-up lives.  The timid Peter (Eddie Marsdan) is now a married car salesman, self-conscious Steven (Paddy Considine) is a divorced construction boss, no-nonsense Oliver (Martin Freeman) is a successful realtor, and disillusioned Andie (Nick Frost) is a lawyer who wants nothing to do with Gary anymore.  Yet through the power of cockeyed persuasion, Gary gets the gang back home to try the pub crawl once again and see how it plays out.

As the fellas throw themselves into the follow-up to their boozy adventure, they find things aren't as breezy as the last time around.  Not only has the passage of time hardened their once sweet friendships, but the town of Newton Haven itself seems spectacularly bland and sanitized.  The guys wonder if something fishy is going on, and their suspicions are confirmed when Gary unwittingly takes a bar patron’s head off in a bathroom and discovers a robot's body underneath the human skin.  The guys soon gathers that some higher entity has been replacing the citizens of Newton Haven with compliant human replicas.  But who, or what, exactly is in charge of such a supernatural scheme, and will they let the fellas survive the night?  Gary convinces his friends that the only way to stay safe and get to the bottom of this scary conspiracy is to continue on with the pub crawl and hopefully get out of town alive in the end.

After a zombie plague and a police shoot-em-up, an alien invasion feels like the next sensible territory for screenwriters Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright to shine their comedic light on.  But instead of an Attack the Block-style slugfest, The World’s End aims to send up Invasion of the Body Snatcher, the classic about an alien race trying to eradicate human free will through creepy clones.  Yet as Wright tears through this alien tale with booze-soaked hilarity, the story ends up speaking oceans about the current state of society we live in.  Steven at one point notes how all the local pubs have been “Starbucked,” whereas a higher power has sanitized the shabby charms and hole-in-the-wall distinctions right out of the pub-going experience.  And it’s definitely not hard to see how we live in a world where corporations are out to make everything accessible to everyone by draining the world of independent coarseness and colorful shabbiness.  At one point, the aliens inform Gary how they’ve utilized personal technology to keep Earthlings in line, and even the most enthusiastic iPhone user has to admit that we’ve become slaves to machines.  It’s hilarious how this film turns out to be more ideologically savvy than The Invasion, the recent “classy” body snatchers film starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig that was an instant flop.

Not only does The World’s End set out to spoof Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but even The Big Chill as well.  In the midst of all this intergalactic craziness, the characters hold one of those midlife reunions where grown-up complacency and Peter Pan Syndrome hold a death match with each other.  So it’s extra fun seeing how an alien attack energizes the living hell out of the fellas’ past traumas and adult hang-ups.  Not only does the suburban comforts and real-world conformity that most of these lads favor make them ripe to become the very robot replacements they’re battling against, but Gary’s frowned-upon wildman instincts make him the ideal candidate to lead them all through a supernatural crisis situation.  In a more serious film, Gary’s devil-may-care recklessness would be a source of tragedy, but here it gets recast as awesome heroism.  It’s a great joke that a chaos-prone head-case like Gary would make for an excellent doomsday warrior who could make mincemeat of Mad Max.

Wright has stated how The World’s End is the final chapter in the “Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy,” which allowed Pegg and Frost to tear through their favorite adrenaline-fueled genres with comic glee (all three films are also linked by the presence of Cornetto ice cream in each film).  I wish these Cornetto movies could keep going on forever, for Pegg, Frost, and Wright could probably bring big laughs and exhilarating skill to every genre there’s ever been.  Not only do these films show the excitement of fanboys dropped into cinematic situations they’ve only dreamed about, but they also prove that friendship can survive in any disastrous situation.  Yet even as this exciting trilogy comes to a close, it warms my heart to know that Pegg, Frost, and Wright will continue working in general.  For Pegg and Frost reading the phonebook could have us in stitches and Wright directing a chamber drama could turn out to be cinematic dynamite.

A 'Wolverine' with Dramatic Juice to Spare

by Brett Parker

The Wolverine is perhaps the one film in the X-Men canon that comes closest to being a character drama, maybe even more-so than Bryan Singer’s beginning installment.  Director James Mangold (Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma) usually favors subtle displays of slow-burn dramatics and applying that method here helps illuminate deeper ideals hidden within one of America’s favorite bad-ass superheroes.  While the final result isn’t exactly the Solaris of Marvel movies (which would be awesome, by the way), it’s still miles more worthwhile than the sugar-high hokiness of Wolverine’s last stand-alone outing.

The film continues the long-winding adventures of Logan, a.k.a “Wolverine,” the immortal mutant warrior whose skeleton is encased in enhanced metal that supplies him with metal claws hidden between his knuckles.  We catch up with Logan some time after he left behind his fellow X-Men mutants and chose to live as a recluse in the Canadian wilderness.  He is still mourning the loss of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), the mutant love of his life, and is mentally tortured by the prospect of everlasting life.  Tracking him in the wilderness is Yukio (Rila Fukushima), an assassin who works for Yashida (Hiroyuki Sanada), a Japanese billionaire who Logan saved from an atomic blast many years ago.  Yashida has requested that Logan come and visit him on his deathbed in Japan.

Logan travels to meet with Yashida and discovers that the dying billionaire wants to repay him for saving his life by giving him the one thing he can’t have for himself: mortality.  Yashida has invested a fortune in medical technology and claims he can extract the immortal genes from Wolverine’s body, leaving him human and able to die in the process.  While Logan considers this offer, a bloody battle ensues around him as corrupt forces fight for control of Yashida’s fortune.  His granddaughter, Mariko (Tao Okamoto), is reluctantly at the center of this war, causing Logan to try and fight for her.  But as Wolverine engages in battle, he discovers that his body is growing weaker and not healing like it used to.  Someone or something has infected him and his indestructible nature is slowly dissolving.  Wolverine must struggle to find out what exactly is happening to his body if he hopes to protect Mariko’s life.  

While the uneven X-Men Origins: Wolverine relied on an adolescent comic-book-come-to-life tone, Mangold wisely calls upon Japanese dramas and Western anti-hero tales to craft his Wolverine film.  Not only does this do considerable justice to Chris Claremont and Frank Miller’s original Wolverine comic book work, but it also compliments the finer points of the character we cherish so much.  Japanese dramas tend to bring unique focus on honor, loyalty, and devoting oneself to a cause worth fighting for, and these are conflicts that torment Logan deep down even as his disgruntled shell suggests otherwise.  Of course, the Wolverine character has always held a resemblance to a grizzled lone cowboy myth, with his Clint-Eastwood-on-steroids exterior and his strict adherence to personal morals in an uncertain world.  And that ideal has never felt stronger than here since Wolverine is a stranger riding into a strange land to fight villainous forces and protect the innocent simply because it’s the right thing to do.

The most interesting revelation this outing discovers about Wolverine is that when faced with the choice between mortality and immortality, our hero might just lean more towards the latter.  While he’s undoubtedly haunted by the loss of love and wanders around hopelessly in search of a cause, urgency and desperation energize him once he becomes seriously wounded for the very first time.  Whatever pain haunted him earlier in his lonesome travels holds nothing on his newfound fears of physical annihilation and being completely eradicated from his warrior skills.  Although I wish the dialogue reflected the philosophical implications more, the events in this film force Logan to fully realize how his immortal powers can be used to help the powerless and he seems to fully accept his role as an indestructible ronin who’ll forever protect the innocent when need be.  

Of course none of this would feel as compelling if it weren’t for Hugh Jackman’s seasoned talents and movie star magnetism.  While most aspects of the Wolverine character are inherently ridiculous, Jackman’s pitch-perfect embodiment of the hero’s persona, along with his acute sense of haunted alienation, delivers the hyperbolic grandeur this lone wolf cries out for.  While some steps in the X-Men playbook have proven lumpy and downright silly, Jackman is the beacon of incongruent bad-ass humility that keeps pulling us back again-and-again to this mythic world.  Even though it’s dramatic scenes never transcend its pop narrative and it ends up falling hopelessly into blockbuster pratfalls, the film still honors and deepens everything we dig about the superhero and it proves to be worthy of his pop stature.  

Sam Rockwell Will Show You the 'Way'

by Brett Parker

Picture this: you’ve found yourself attending a party that didn’t turn out to be as much fun as you expected.  The affair could be either mind-numbingly boring, much of a muchness, or filled with guests who are too strange or alienating to engage.  Yet just when you’re about to give up all hope for the situation, in walks a fun-loving buddy of yours.  This friend is an energetic and hilarious life-of-the-party who’s just what the doctor ordered.  He’s the kind of person who can surely transform the proceedings into an absolute blast.  That’s exactly how I’ve been feeling about Sam Rockwell at the movies lately.  There have been numerous films recently that were on shaky ground until Rockwell walked in and upped the ante.  He was the one spirited supporting player who wasn’t hindered by diminished screen time in Iron Man 2 and he elevated the uneasy lunacy of Seven Psychopaths to comic gold.  Now with his latest flick, The Way, Way Back, he’s dished out a jolly good performance in familiar mush that is worth the price of admission alone.  Giving a competent performance that adds to an entertaining movie is the mark of a good actor, but catapulting a movie from mediocre to worthwhile is the sign of a real treasure.

The Way, Way Back tells the story of Duncan (Liam James), an unhappy 14-year-old who is forced to spend his summer vacation in the beach house of his mother’s new boyfriend, Trent (Steve Carell).  Duncan’s Mom, Pam (Toni Collette), wants her son to give the new man in her life a chance, but Duncan rightfully suspects that Trent is an untrustworthy creep.  Duncan fits the mold of an awkward teenage loner and he doesn’t fit into his newfound summer environment too easily.  It doesn’t take long before Trent’s local beach friends brand the kid as some kind of weirdo.  

Things start looking up once our hero visits Water Wizz, a local water park.  It’s there that he meets Owen (Sam Rockwell), the goofy manager of the park who senses an ocean of loneliness inside Duncan and decides to take him under his wing.  Owen makes him a fellow employee, and pretty soon this laid-back jokester is teaching the kid how to have fun with life and not take everything so seriously.  It turns out that Water Wizz is filled with outsiders and misfits just like Duncan who help him come out of his shell and be more assertive with himself.  Pretty soon, Owen’s care-free jolliness inspires Duncan to rattle things up within his own family, as Trent grows increasingly mean and Pam grows slowly unhappy.  

The Way, Way Back treads familiar grounds with a coming-of-age-in-the-summertime story mixed with a tale of a teenage outcast trying to fit in.  Writer-Directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (Academy Award Winners for their script work on The Descendants) don’t really add any fresh insights to either ideal, but you can’t say it isn’t all handled with delicacy.  The one major strength this tale has is an acute performance by Liam James, whose embodiment of teenage alienation is miles more convincing than most teen actors in this territory.  James conveys lonesome wallflower anguish with such morose, mopish detachment that you realize he’ll be great in serial killer roles when he grows up.  So that’s why this movie really lights up when Duncan learns to open up and enjoy himself more, which is like watching a zombie indulging in a school playground.  Scenes where local kids teach him how to breakdance and Owen assists him in an epic water slide challenge add peculiar uplift and the small, joyous smile Duncan eventually displays in his Employee-of-the-Month photo conveys a genuine and surprising warmth.

As for the supporting players, Faxon and Rash employ the tactic of casting seasoned veterans in smaller roles to help build a sense of realism around their world.  While Allison Janney is able to build a colorful character, the capable Amanda Peet is merely window decoration and the comically gifted Rob Corddry is given no outlet for his humor.  Steve Carell is drummed up simply to be a condescending jerk in the kind of role Greg Kinnear could sleepwalk through, but it’s such a refreshing treat to see Carell playing something other than the self-pitying sad sacks he’s grown an annoying taste for.  It’s just too bad his comic instincts weren’t allowed to chip away at any real depths in his meanie character.

Of course, Rockwell steals the entire show and becomes the main attraction in this enterprise by miles.  Faxon and Rash have stated in interviews that the inspiration for his character came from Bill Murray’s Tripper in Meatballs and it’s a testament to Rockwell that he could go toe-to-toe with Murray on similar comic grounds.  As fast-talking irreverence and zany wisdom pours out of this hipster Yoda, you realize that every word out of his mouth is golden dialogue and the only major laughs in the movie originate from this overgrown frat boy.  Even when it comes time to turn on the sentiment, Rockwell conveys a sneaky sincerity and an inner-weariness that’s touching as he shows just how much affection he actually has for Duncan.  If the rest of the script matched Owen’s manic hilarity and quirky morals, than this movie would’ve been just as dynamite as Rockwell is.

The main lessons we draw from The Way, Way Back tell us to always stand-up for your happiness, even if it doesn’t fit in with the accepted order of things, and how friendship can be the best cure for one’s inner-woes.  These aren’t exactly earth-shattering revelations, nor are they presented in a terribly original package, but they’re very important lessons nonetheless and I welcome being reminded about them on occasion.  The success of this movie is that it earns those lessons, and it’s such a blessing to have Sam Rockwell help deliver them to us.  He’s the shot-of-adrenaline a lot of comedies need these days and I hope his filmography keeps building on his gifts towards something truly awe-inspiring.  

The Loon 'Ranger'

by Brett Parker

It’s pretty obvious that Disney wants to do with The Lone Ranger what it did successfully with Pirates of the Carribean: take a halfway-recognizable brand name attached to a popcorn genre and interject it with an offbeat Johnny Depp performance and all the big-budget blockbuster fixings of our current era.  But while pirate flicks form a B-movie genre no one really thinks too hard about, the western film is one of the most enduring, beloved, and analyzed of all American genres.  So one of the strangest things about this new Lone Ranger is its indecisiveness about whether to honor the innocence of the source material or acknowledge the entire history of true grit westerns that have flourished between then and now.  We can sense the filmmakers trying desperately to bridge the gap between the two opposing ideals, and while the finished film doesn’t reconcile itself into a powerful whole, I must admit that the wild west antics I saw on screen is far more interesting than the typical disposable summer fare that can numb one’s brain.  

In 1869 Texas, we meet John Reid (Armie Hammer), a lawyer who has traveled to the town of Colby to visit his older brother, Dan (James Badge Dale).  Dan is a Texas Ranger who sets out with his comrades to capture the nasty outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Ficthtner) and his gang.  Thinking he can be of assistance, John asks to join the Rangers in tracking down Butch, and Dan deputizes him with a badge and allows him to tagalong on an expedition to find the evil outlaw.  But soon into their journey, Butch ambushes the rangers and all of them die a violent death.  

Soon after this deadly attack, a mysterious Comanche indian named Tonto (Johnny Depp) discovers the bodies of the Rangers and finds that Silver, a white spirit horse thought to be sacred with the Comanche, has revived John back from the dead.  Tonto explains to John that he is now a “spirit walker,” one who has been to the other side and cannot be killed.  Grasping his second chance at existence, John seeks to avenge his brother’s death and enlists Tonto to help him.  The Indian agrees, but only if John wears a mask to prevent his identity so those who think he is dead will continue to do so.  This gives John the new identity of The Lone Ranger, a ghostlike lawman whose thirst for justice leads him not only towards Butch, but a shady railroad tycoon named Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson) who is conducting a sinister conspiracy that reveals painful trauma from Tonto’s past and threatens the family of John’s deceased brother.

One of the more distinct and unsettling things about The Lone Ranger is its tonal identity crisis which veers between slapstick comedy and dark western grit.  One moment, Tonto will be having a silly moment with a dead bird resting on top of his head, while the next moment finds Butch cutting out the organs of another man and eating them (off-camera, thank God).  I never thought I’d ever see a Hannibal Lecter moment in a Disney movie, and for that matter, I never thought I’d see Disney foot the bill for a shotgun marriage between a Martin-Lewis comedy and a Cormac McCarthy novel, but such are the wonders of life.  Yet if you’ve been watching Gore Verbinski’s movies all along, you’d know that creating uneasy balancing acts between ridiculousness and disparity has always been his M.O.  Just think of how you couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry while watching The Weather Man or the way jarring violence kept bringing the sweeter parts of The Mexican to a standstill.  Hell, even the Pirates of the Caribbean  movies had fearful thoughts about isolation and change lurking beneath the Hollywood busywork.  Absurd silliness and crushing misery co-existing in the same movie sounds like a strange concept until you catch on that life itself can often play out in that same way.

The only reason we’re even looking at a modern day update of The Lone Ranger in the first place is because Johnny Depp wanted to use his box office clout to create a populist western that illuminates the plights of Native Americans across U.S. history.  So the thing I admire most about the movie is how major plot developments bring considerable insight into tragic ordeals that Native Americans actually faced.  While the script lifts from older, better westerns to help get this point across, it’s still good to see these brutal truths given attention in a crowd-pleasing blockbuster tent-pole flick.  Most will probably have an awfully hard time swallowing the irony of the Disney corporation constructing a mass entertainment that frowns down upon big corporations, but I find it pretty damn funny how Johnny Deep used his star power to make a big capitalist entity point out the evils of big capitalism.

It quickly becomes apparent that the idea of Depp willing this movie into existence is far more interesting than his idea of an updated Tonto.  Depp’s objective was to give Tonto more prominence and personality than he’s been given in the past, making him just as heroic and independent as The Lone Ranger himself.  Yet Depp’s knack for exposing an independent character’s inner-weirdness and allowing their freak flag to fly puts a damaging hindrance on this western sidekick’s impact.  By making the Comanche warrior a crackpot misfit with slapstick tendencies, it’s obvious that Depp is trying to inject that old Jack Sparrow outcast appeal into the role, but it doesn’t create a dynamite hero Native Americans can be proud of.  I’m not saying that Native Americans are humorless people, but making Tonto a goofy loon isn’t really liberating the character from the numbskull stereotypes they've been plagued with throughout Hollywood history.  Perhaps if Depp played him straight, making him a proud thinking-man’s warrior, he could’ve honored his ancestors better while delivering one of his electric dramatic performances a’la John Dillinger.  Oddly enough, the straight-arrow Armie Hammer turns out to be the ace here, even as the script tries to damper-down his white-bred heroics.  The joke is that The Lone Ranger isn’t as knowledgable or savvy a western figure as myth would have you believe, but Hammer has a gift for making cracks in a golden boy image work to his advantage.  The way he overcomes shy-guy shakiness and bumbling inadequacies to fully honor the mythic character’s heroic ideals is very impressive.

Since we're on summer blockbuster territory here, you can bet that this flick ends with the expected pull-out-all-the-stops action finale.  But as far as these things go, it's more efficiently-staged than usual.  Instead of just being a mish-mash of explosions and fury, Verbinski actually puts his Jerry Bruckheimer-meets-Buster Keaton sensibilities to good use like he did in the better parts of Pirates of the Caribbean.  The result makes for plucky action that represents the one moment in the film that connects the strongest with the innocent charms of the older Lone Ranger adventures.  As the movie’s plot chugged along, I considered myself mildly amused by it all, but once the "William Tell Overture" started playing on the soundtrack and Hammer got on his literal high horse to ride off into this action climax, my inner-child actually got pretty damn excited the way he used to for Disney adventures of yesteryear. 

The history of classical pulp heroes points out that The Green Hornet is actually a descendant of The Lone Ranger, with both heroes sharing the surname of "Reid."  So it's worth noting that the modern-day cinematic updates of both those heroes weren't content to just convey the simple pleasures of their modest myths, but basked their adventures in post-modern irony and jazzed-up action adrenaline.  The sad truth is that if these updates stayed ultra-faithful to the classical feel of their heroes' origins, it probably wouldn't grab the attention of most modern moviegoers.  Yet the beauty of molding a pop hero towards the changing times they show up in is how shrewd a marker of culture it can serve as.  Just ponder the contrast between the campiness of the 1960's Batman TV show and the ultra-grittiness of the Dark Knight's recent big-screen outings, and you'd have enough material for endless college essays.  So while many may shake their heads at the dizzying tone and over-the-top action of the 2013 Lone Ranger, you have to keep in mind that it’s a testament to the entertainment era we're living in.  You may be complaining now, but there may come a time in the distant future where you'll look back with a smile and say "now THAT'S how they used to make them!"

A 'War' Between Book and Blockbuster

by Brett Parker

World War Z, the apocalyptic horror novel by Max Brooks, has to be one of the most gripping and intelligent horror tales I’ve ever read.  Inspired by Studs Turkel’s The Good War, Brooks used the gambit of wartime interviews to imagine an account of a devastating zombie war on a global scale.  As people from around the world recounted how their individual countries dealt with a ramped and hostile zombie threat, Brooks shrewdly illuminated allegorical connections between government incompetence, class warfare, and human negligence.  The scary revelation from the work is how the arrogance, carelessness, and cynicism that have hindered our own progress in everyday society would royally screw us over in the face of becoming zombie snack food.  

Considering the grand scope of the novel and the way it packs in more troubling ideas than a muckraking political documentary, it would’ve taken a Herculean act from the cinematic gatekeepers for the book to leap to the screen with its dignity intact.  So it’s not without a certain Klaus Kinski-like frustration to discover that Marc Forster’s big Hollywood adaptation of the novel pretty much just extracts all the blockbuster elements from the book while completely discarding all the brainier elements and uncomfortable allegories.  Yet the fact that the movie turns out to be watchable may be a small miracle in itself.  Vanity Fair reported earlier this year how the making of the film was plagued with on-set drama, a ballooning budget, an incoherent first cut, and an expensive, blood-soak ending that had to be completely discarded.  The good news is that the final product is able to overcome all of those annoyances to present itself as a surprisingly enjoyable popcorn flick.

As the film opens, we meet Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) a former United Nations employee now living in Philadelphia with his wife (Mireille Enos) and two kids (Sterling Jerins and Abigail Hargrove).  As they sit in heavy city traffic one day, a commotion erupts with people running from an unknown threat that soon turns into all-out chaos.  As Gerry tries to make sense of his surroundings, he soon discovers that corpses of people are rising up and turning into hostile zombies.  Gerry tries protecting his family while hordes of fast-moving and demonic-looking zombies begin chomping on every live human in sight, and a helicopter from the U.N. shows up just in the nick of time to rescue them as the City of Brotherly Love falls to the plagued.  

The helicopter flies them off to a U.S. naval fleet off the coast of New York City and it’s there where Gerry learns that a zombie virus is quickly taking over the world.  A relentless zombie infection has been spreading on a worldwide scale and countries are rapidly crumbling under the vast reach of this mysterious sickness.  Because of his expertise as a former U.N. investigator, Gerry is recruited to help discover the origin of the virus to see if a cure can be found.  This journey will take him all over the world to places like South Korea, Jerusalem, and Wales where he’ll meet weary survivors, dodge terrifying zombie attacks, and observe the strange peculiarities of the undead to see if any weaknesses can be spotted.  

Once you accept the fact that this movie wants nothing to do with the novel’s intelligence, you’ll find yourself refreshed by the unfussy way it churns out the blockbuster goods then acquits itself like a mob boss who just had his charges dropped.  Due mostly to a PG-13 rating that hopes to net wider ticket sales, this zombie flick isn’t so much a horror gore-fest as it is an adventure thrill ride.  The big idea is to hop around foreign locales while wheeling out the latest in zombie effects.  Of course, none of these global pitstops really say anything significant about foreign governments or cultural reactions to a crisis situation, but as far as zombie thrills go, this is all more entertaining than usual.  A scene where zombies frantically pile on top of one another like rats to scale a giant wall in Jerusalem is a truly epic sight and a zombie outbreak on an airplane in flight makes for a golden action sequence.  This movie certainly gets brownie points for trying to add creativity and adrenaline to a horror scenario we’ve seen a million times before.

David Fincher once pointed out that Brad Pitt doesn’t really have a towering iconic role such as James Bond or Han Solo to call his own (unless Tyler Durden counts.  The Fight Club leader has his own posters, but does he have his own action figure?).  So it’s pretty obvious that the producers here are hoping to turn his character into the Indiana Jones of zombie flicks.  It’s not a bad sell, really, for Pitt’s weathered calm is a nice balance between the terrified hysteria and nihilistic cynicism we usually get from humans facing the undead.  His performance hints at how Robert Redford probably would’ve handled himself in a zombie movie, and those two opposing temperaments between star and material would’ve proved just as compelling as it does here.  

The film’s ending is so jarringly an open-ended sequel set-up that we don’t even realize the climax is actually the climax until the ending notes that we just witnessed the climax.  There’s definitely a “is that all?” feeling as the end credits approach.  Considering that the film clocks in at just under two hours and doesn’t exactly wear out its welcome, I can’t help but wonder if the filmmakers could’ve tacked on the ultraviolent original ending.  Reportedly, it revolved around an epic, crimson-covered decapitation fest in Russia where Pitt tore through zombies like Rambo tore through the Vietnamese.  Since this is a movie that swings for the popcorn fences, I don’t feel that ending would’ve been terribly frowned upon.  Anyways, it’s a testament to the movie we actually have here that it has me looking forward to future installments.  I just hope, for the love of Romero, that the sequels study up on the source novel and incorporate the more intelligent and philosophical points from the book into the script.  World War Z proves that it’s one of the more fun recent zombie flicks, now it’s time to prove that it can be one of the more thought-provoking ones as well.  

An 'Internship' Worth Taking

by Brett Parker

The Internship shows Vince Vaughn playing a man hard-up for decent work who turns to Google, considered one of the best places to work in the world, to help him out of his rut.  Since the credits reveal that Vaughn helped develop this film’s script, it’s not hard to see how this plot could all be a thinly-veiled peak at the current stage of his own career.  For it’s been a while since Vaughn has made a decent comedy (hardly anyone would consider Couples Retreat and The Dilemma to be on the same level as Old School) and perhaps he’s looking to the inherent fascination of the Google company to generate a likable flick.  Along for the ride is his old Wedding Crashers pal Owen Wilson, undoubtedly so the duo can try and recreate the magic from their last bromantic collaboration.  The Internship is nowhere near as funny as that earlier movie, but I appreciate the effort and I find myself strangely drawn to the overwhelming sunshine this Hollywood product blasts through the screen.

The film opens with watch salesmen Billy McMahon (Vaughn) and Nick Campbell (Wilson) being laid off from their job when their employer goes out of business.  Since most watch sales are being transacted online nowadays, the need for face-to-face salesmanship is quickly being diminished.  Realizing that their personal skills won’t net them much in today’s job market, Billy comes up with a plan to score the duo an internship at Google, the company revolved around the popular search engine website.  Google is widely regarded as one of the best companies to work for, due to its increasing popularity, endless perks, and innovative growth.  Billy convinces Nick that mastering an internship would not only get them jobs at one of the happiest organizations on Earth, but might even provide them with technological skills that would give them a leg-up in an ever-changing world.  

Thanks to a goofy yet sincere webcam interview, the pair score an internship and they soon discover that Google truly is a Willy Wonka-like nirvana for techie freaks.  The only problem is that most of the young interns are so intellectually advanced that they make Billy and Nick look like thick-headed dinosaurs.  Billy and Nick try to put their best resources forward, but they keep getting pummeled by the computer geniuses around them.  The only way the duo can hope to keep afloat is to find clever ways to apply their personal skills and charismatic personalities in accomplishing increasingly difficult digital tasks.  

The Internship has been accused of being an overblown product-placement commercial for the Google company.  It more or less is, but so what?  Google is certainly one of the most colorful, innovative, and generous places to work, and it’s been ripe for the Hollywood limelight to show up for quite some time.  Yet the use of Google here isn’t completely vapid, for the script is out to shine light on the ordeal of an older generation completely bewildered by today’s technological landscape.  Vaughn and Wilson clearly belong to a generation that once upon a time didn’t have to rely heavily on smartphones, online social networking, and elaborate computer smarts to function in the real world.  Their oafish fumbling through the Google world not only reflects their own anxieties but also the anxieties of many older Americans.  The comforting revelation here is that the fella’s humanity, which contains down-to-earth charm, bar banter, and warm face-to-face engagements, triumphs infinitely in the face of the digital age.

Vaughn and Wilson have developed such a superb comic wordplay in their own rights that they’ve accumulated a peculiar gift for making deranged dialogue sound like it’s coming from a genuine place.  The Internship relies too heavily on their interplay, putting a strain on it that hinders the Wedding Crashers exuberance it’s gunning for.  Most of the blame can probably be attributed to director Shawn Levy (Date Night, Just Married), who hasn’t exactly proven to be a masterful comic director.  While I enjoyed his Real Steel, I find most of his films to be tame and dimwitted comedies that lack any real bite or edge.  While he may deliver competence, he hardly delivers any real laughs, and that doesn’t exactly make him the ideal candidate to indulge in Vaughn and Wilson’s wildest impulses.  Yet The Internship is one of Levy’s more tolerable comedies, perhaps because he knew enough to sorta stay out of Vaughn and Wilson’s way and even provide a cameo for one of their Frat Pack buddies whose become the patron saint of insane cameos.  This is all really Shawn Levy trying to be Todd Phillips, which is considerably more enjoyable than Shawn Levy being Shawn Levy.

The Internship doesn’t exactly provide a surplus of laughs, but I found myself enjoying the movie anyways because its blind optimism about today’s world is kind of charming.  One of the things we’ve come to expect from studio fluff is positive energy magnified in a heightened, candy-coated reality that suggests backhanded ways everyday moviegoers can deal with life’s problems.  And when that positive energy is being served up by two gifted comic actors in one of the most interesting places in the country, I kind of don’t mind meeting it halfway.  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t leave the theater feeling sunny vibes, and I think sunny vibes are a fair trade-off with today’s ticket prices.

A 'Purge' From Happy Thoughts

by Brett Parker

When horror flicks are on their game, they can pack more unwelcome ideological thoughts than any hotbed political thriller.  That’s why it’s hard not to marvel at The Purge, a simple and economical home invasion thriller that touches on an ocean of decaying morals lurking beneath the American dream.  To be sure, the movie is an assembly of horror movie standards we’ve seen many times before, but the way they evoke disturbing secrets about the world we live in now is rather impressive.  Reflecting on the movie long after the credits have rolled, I’d have to reach back to Funny Games or the original Swedish The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to recall a thriller that unnerved me to my core like this one.

The film imagines a future America where once a year, the nation hosts a 12-hour period where all crime is legal.  A random holiday devotes it’s evening hours to allowing every american the chance to rob, steal, rape, break, and murder everything in their path with zero repercussions.  All medical and police personal are suspended during that time, and Americans waste no time in destroying property and blowing their fellow man away with bloody glee.  The next day, the bodies are cleaned up and property is restored and the nation gets back to normal.  Supposedly, this window of release for the citizens has allowed the country to grow into a dream haven where unemployment and crime is at an all-time low, allowing the blissful end to justify the horrifying means.  

We follow an upper-class suburban family during one of these annual purges.  Security expert James Sandin (Ethan Hawke) has made a fortune selling state-of-the-art security systems, allowing himself and his privileged neighbors to lock themselves down extra-tight during the chaotic holiday.  So Sandin plans on spending his purge like he does every year: by locking himself inside his home with his lovely wife, Mary (Lena Headey), and his two children, Charlie (Max Burkholder) and Zoey (Adelaide Kane).  Yet as the annual purge commences, scary violence shows up right on their doorstep when Charlie allows a Bloody Stranger (Edwin Hodge) to seek shelter in their home.  It turns out the Stranger is hiding from a group of upper-class psychopaths who are hungry to kill him.  A Polite Stranger (Rhys Wakefield) who leads the group informs Sandin that if they don’t give up their target, then they will penetrate the security system and murder everyone inside.  This causes the ordinary family to question their morals and strength as they try to wrestle down their bloody houseguest and fend off the bloodthirsty gang gnawing at their front gates.

The Purge is one of those horror flicks that efficiently uses limited, low-budget resources to evoke giant scares with cinematic shrewdness.  Even though the film’s central idea hinges on a deadly event played out on a grand national scale, the film’s action is entirely confined to a suburban home, using dark shadows and things-that-go-bump-in-the-night to get its scares.  Director James DeMonaco gets assists from tons of past flicks, including The Strangers, Last House on the Left, and Funny Games, but the sick ideas about America blasted underneath the familiarities sure do heat things up.  Part of you wonders if a greater movie could be made if the cameras went outside into the night of violence (especially through the eyes of the Bloody Stranger), so it’s a testament to this film’s restrictions that it gets your imagination working overtime.  

The Purge is filled to the brim with so many troubling thoughts about society that I wouldn’t be surprised to see it inspire hundreds of analytical blog posts, or maybe even a few college papers.  Of course, the film’s most immediate and alarming idea is that the American people’s worst impulses would need to be filtered, not eradicated, in order for the country to improve.  And if our darkest recesses were allowed to come out and play for the night, then minorities and the poor would probably be at the top of the casualties list, an observation that’s felt through the Polite Stranger’s obsessive need to kill a homeless black “swine.”  Since rich white people would obviously have the best chances of survival, you would think they would form a community of teamwork and charity to help each other out, but one of The Purge’s more disturbing insights reveals that rich people’s egotism and resentments would cause them to turn on each other, providing a chilling theory on why this country is dealing with so many problems in the first place.  All these collective thoughts make us ponder that keeping the entire movie confined to a house isn’t just a money-saving gambit, but also represents how most of the audience would realistically deal with a purge: by rigorously defending their own turf while turning a blind eye to the chaos outside their door.

As all-American types who contais a reservoir of scrappiness and moral conflict, the main cast acquits themselves rather nicely.  While their increasingly stupid behavior is undoubtedly the worst thing about the movie, both Max Burkholder and Adelaide Kane embody everyday, jittery teenagers convincingly.  Lena Headley takes a seemingly thankless role and proves that she can be one of the most resourceful and sexiest of suburban housewives.  Rhys Wakefield is wonderfully mannered as a white-bread psychopath, making you wonder if he studied The Joker or Patrick Bateman more for his performance.  And of course, it’s always fun to watch Ethan Hawke bring his dedicated thespian skills to a Hollywood product.  Hawke is a pleasure to watch in material like this thanks to his duck-to-water understanding that generic fluff can inspire just as many interesting performances as indie arthouse flicks.  He makes for a fine avatar through this horror ride, especially in a scene where he shows dazzling true grit pounding away on two violent intruders who’ve found their way into his home.  Since Hollywood will eventually remake everything one day, and the Rambo series will undoubtedly be on the menu, Ethan Hawke gets my unapologetic vote to play the super-soldier.  

While it’s typical of horror films to inspire a long, tiresome series of watered-down sequels, I actually think The Purge has enough material here to inspire more thoughtful and epic chapters.  Perhaps for the next go around, the story can go out into the world for a future year’s purge, and we can witness firsthand the vast landscape of massive bloodshed and startling mayhem.  There’s so many ideological sparks in this film alone that the possibilities for future sequels are endless.  For if the filmmakers keep things brainier as opposed to indulgent, then The Purge has quite the potential to grow into one of the most significant and terrifying horror franchises we’ve ever had.