The World's End

Mediocre summer movies getting you down?  Here is some advice.  (It's a joke about how he's British.)  From a graphic design standpoint, I hate the fact that Simon Pegg's name isn't in caps, but the online Keep Calm generator wouldn't allow me to adjust the font size, and when it was in caps it spilled off the edges of the poster.  Yes, of course there is an online Keep Calm generator.

Oh, finally 2013 gives us a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful movie!  I had almost forgotten what it was like.  This has been such a lean year for movies.  So lean that as I write this, Despicable Me 2 is still playing at the eight-screen movie theater in the tiny town in West Virginia where I live.  I mean, I like wisecracking anthropomorphic Twinkies as well as the next guy, but the title of that movie ends in a numeral and it opened in July and it is now October.  There just wasn't anything worth a shit to replace it with.  All right, so Pacific Rim was good because of Guillermo del Toro and also you can't go wrong with Ron Perlman in armored golden shoes.  And Blue Jasmine was a lovely piece of filmmaking, a sensitively rendered portrait of one woman's psychological unraveling, a Streetcar Named Desire for the 21st century,* but it wasn't a bouncing-up-and-down-in-your-seat-with-delight kind of a movie.

The World's End was.

Here's Why You Shouldn't Watch Riddick

This promotional image, which is not intended to be ironic, is downloadable as desktop wallpaper from some website somewhere.  It has a hashtag on it in case you want to tweet something like "the latest #Riddick movie is really sexist and homophobic."

 
There are quite a few things about this movie that are forgivably bad, if you don't walk into the theater expecting much, but here's why you shouldn't pay a single solitary dime to watch Riddick, directed by David Twohy and starring Vin Diesel, who also has a producer credit.

Once again, Diesel's Riddick finds himself on a heavily art-directed alien planet with venomous space-beasts and ominous weather and difficult topography and so on.  He activates a sort of beacon-y thing and some mercenaries come and try to kill him.  All of them are men.

All except one.

She is a lesbian.

She is every douchey frat bro's fantasy of a really butch lesbian.

At the end of the movie, Riddick has sex with her.  Mercifully, this takes place offscreen, but he has sex with her.

Because you see, she was only a lesbian because she hadn't found a real man.

Fuck you, David Twohy.  Fuck you, Vin Diesel.  Fuck.  You.

Elysium

For plot reasons too convoluted to explain here, Elysium found it necessary to surgically implant a really old Garmin into the back of Matt Damon's head.

I just watched Elysium.  It was vivid, original, and flawed.  It made me uncomfortable, but I was riveted.  Quite a few reviewers disliked it.  I think I know why.

So yes, there were all kinds of things to dislike about how Elysium was put together.  The plot was a hot mess, full of holes and missing backstories.  The relationships between the characters seemed to take place at a distance.  A love story between Matt Damon and Alice Braga is gestured at but never fleshed out.  One character is killed and resurrected in a cheap, cheap, cheap plot twist.  Many actions are superficially motivated by concern for a sick child, but the movie treats her as nothing more than an adorable human football, to be whisked from one place to another for dramatic purposes.  We barely have the opportunity to know her.

Also, Jodie Foster's accent is all over the place, but you know, the movie is set in like 2152 or something.  Maybe in the 22nd century there's a whole country full of people whose accents are a shifting, vaguely patrician mashup of British-y, generic European-y, possibly South African-y actor-babble.  I mean, it's the future.  They have magic beds that cure your diseases and robot servants and a space station that looks like West Egg rolled onto the inside of a bicycle tire.  One lady with forced, stilted speech patterns is probably the least odd part of this movie's world.

This Is the End

This is a picture of a corn dog.  It isn't even from the movie.

Seriously, I have nothing to say about this movie.

The Heat

As a number of feminist bloggers have pointed out, some jackass photoshopped the living shit out of Melissa McCarthy in this photo, to the point that she doesn't even look like herself.  Fortunately, she looks like herself in the actual movie, and she's very, very funny.

So some movie development person watched Bridesmaids and thought, "Melissa McCarthy is hilarious!  Why don't we have her play pretty much the same character in a really by-the-numbers buddy cop movie with two women instead of two men?"

They did that and the result is a lot of fun.  You should go see it.  McCarthy is the wacky cop and Sandra Bullock is the hard-nosed, by-the-book FBI agent who just needs to loosen up.  They're a charming comedy duo.  There are vagina jokes in place of dick jokes.  There are also dick jokes.

Until I saw this movie, I didn't realize how fatigued I'd become with a summer movie lineup full of self-serious, CGI-driven blockbusters in which zombies gnaw people's faces off, civilization crumbles to the beat of a relentless thumping musical score, sleek and muscular superbeings careen purposefully through the air, and by the end of the movie a major American city lies in smoldering ruins.

The Heat makes no such tiresome demands on the audience.  It's just a series of solid comic scenes wrapped around a plot involving crime or drug-smuggling or some damn thing that you will probably care about for forty-five seconds, total, over the entire course of the movie.  Time flew by in the dark theater, the audience all laughed together, and John and I walked out into the rainy night feeling happy, relaxed and refreshed.

Man of Steel

This is SPARTA!!!!!1

I'm really not sure whether to recommend Man of Steel to you or not.  It's very wonderful to look at, a little bit too long, and absolutely gagging on its own sincerity.  I liked looking at it more than I liked watching it.  The pictures are pretty but the plot is a mess.

Like director Zack Snyder's earlier film 300, Man of Steel brings many of the pleasures of reading a graphic novel to the big screen.  Krypton is beautiful and ancient and corrupt and dying.  There's a great version of that old sci-fi trope, the Wise Alien Council, with elderly sages in robes and elaborately sculptural headdresses sitting in really fancy chairs in a cathedral-like throne room.

Kryptonian technology is Art Deco-y and full of nods to H. R. Giger in skull-like helmets and fabulously complex alien machines, many of which really look like stylized penises and vaginas.  (I'm not making this part up.  When the Kryptonian high council or whatever it is imprisons the evil General Zod and his minions in the Phantom Zone, they first seal them into giant flying space dildos.  Seriously.  Watch the movie and tell me I'm wrong.  Also, Superman's mother is frequently accompanied by a giant flying robotic uterus that talks to her.)

Now You See Me

Mark Ruffalo and Mélanie Laurent appear baffled by this magical camera doohickey, which is festooned with fluorescent tubes for some reason.

Now You See Me, although a bit short on substance, is pretty to look at and fun to watch.  It has talented, well-known actors in it, delivering performances that are consistent with their brands.  Morgan Freeman is twinkly and avuncular and knows something you don't.  Dave Franco always smiles like he just got away with something, maybe something dirty.  Mélanie Laurent constantly looks like she's about to take a long drag on a cigarette, exhale while rolling her eyes, and then say something bored and world-weary, yet fascinating.  (I don't think she actually smokes in this film, she just always looks like she's about to.)  Woody Harrelson is once again a cute, non-threatening, stoned redneck.  And Mark Ruffalo is doughy and sweaty, yet still oddly attractive.

Anyway, the movie is the story of four magicians who get a big break from a mysterious benefactor who summons them to an abandoned apartment in New York's Chinatown using Tarot cards (each of them gets a Tarot card with an address on the back of it, and they all go to that address without questioning why they're doing it and they all arrive at almost exactly the same time even though some of them have to travel across the country.  Whatever.)  Anyway, using a rose and some dry ice, the mysterious benefactor instructs them to start doing expensively produced shows that involve magically stealing huge amounts of money and giving it, Robin-Hood-style, to the audience.  Interpol (Laurent) and the FBI (Ruffalo) end up chasing them through nicely filmed versions of Las Vegas, New Orleans*, and New York City.