review Avengers

Here's what you need to know: In spite of the ridiculous hype surrounding Marvel's The Avengers, it's good. Really good.

The culmination of four years' worth of Marvel's superhero movies finally arrives, with Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America (Chris Evans) and The Hulk (new Hulk Mark Ruffalo) uniting on the big screen with Black Widow and Hawkeye (Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner, respectively) for an all-out action fest.

Helmed by geek-favourite director Joss Whedon (Buffy The Vampire Slayer), the action never lets up from the opening scene till the explosive final act where the heroes have their showdown with supervillain Loki (Tom Hiddleston), last seen in Thor, who's taken control of the Tesseract from Captain America and using it to welcome otherworldly invaders to Earth.

But this is no Bay-esque mindless action flick. Whedon balances the explosiveness with strong characterisation and an emotional centre that will have you rooting for all the heroes. The director - only his second time helming a feature film - has done the impossible by balancing a large cast of stars and giving each of them their time in the sun. The moment they rise from a tragic event to finally team up is especially stirring. No spoilers here, not to worry.

There are also laugh-out-loud moments throughout that cut the tension. Whether it's a snarky Tony Stark or a smashing Hulk (one of many memorable moments), The Avengers is very funny.

Sure, there are some imperfections. While not necessary, it does help to have watched the previous Marvel movies. The usually Machiavellian Loki, while generally menacing, also at times seems to lack conviction. But given all the positives, these quibbles just disappear. And don't expect the movie to be a treatise on the human condition - we have Batman for that.

All in all, this is a movie that works on many levels, from action to emotion. With the summer filled with superhero flicks like The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises, The Avengers sets the bar high, and even has the potential to be one of the best superhero movies of all time. It is definitely proof that you don't have to be dark and serious just to make a great comic-book movie - The Avengers is unadulterated fun.

As for the comic-book geek? Let's just say you won't be disappointed. ALVIN CHONG

Review The Raven (2012)

SYNOPSIS:

When a madman begins committing horrific murders inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s works, a young Baltimore detective joins forces with Poe to stop him from making his stories a reality.

REVIEW:

I’m no student of Edgar Allen Poe, I admit that fully & without fear of prejudice from anyone reading this review who might take umbrage with some of my opinions. I’ve read “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee” though and I’ve seen all of Roger Corman’s classic film adaptations of Poe’s work like “The Pit And The Pendulum” and “Masque Of The Red Death” (A personal favorite). But although I respect the man and his work, I hardly thought of him as some sort of action hero. Yet in James McTigue’s (V For Vendetta) latest film that is exactly how we’re supposed to envision the man. And while “The Raven” does have some moments of true suspense & a fair amount of grue as well ultimately it fails on a few fronts that just made it feel like more of a well produced cable movie for me. let me explain…

“The Raven” posits that there is a madman on the loose who is murdering people exactly as Poe has murdered them in his published work. Lead detective Fields (Luke Evans) recognizes the similarities and enlists Poe to capture the murderer. The murderer leaves clues at the scene of each murder and who better than Poe to interpret the clues and (Hopefully) figure out the killer’s next move and capture him before he murders someone else? The murders (Those that are featured onscreen anyway) are quite graphic & gory, surprisingly so in fact. But we are actually witness to one in all it’s gruesome glory, the others are shown after the dirty deeds are done but they are still exceedingly gruesome to look at.

Poe (John Cusack) immediately deciphers the first clue he’s given as being related to “The Masque Of The Red Death” and as there is a gala masquerade ball taking place the following night Fields convinces Captain Hamilton (Brendan Gleeson) who is running the event to allow him to put station some of his men amongst the revelers to capture the suspect as it is believed that he must arrive in a costume representing death in one way, shape or form. Well they get a man who bursts into the ball on a horse wearing a skull mask but not only is he not the suspect but as he created a diversion, Hamilton’s lovely daughter Emily (Alice Eve) is abducted & is now being held captive by the villain. The decoy on the horse has a message from him as well, one in which he challenges Poe to figure out where Emily is before she too is murdered. Although Hamilton despises the very sight of Poe (Who was to announce his intent to marry Emily at the ball), he must allow Poe to become part of the investigation since everything the killer bases his crimes are come from Poe’s written work.

“The Raven” starts out slowly, showing us how far Edgar has fallen. He is an extremely opinionated drunk who suffers no fool and has no issues with critiquing other writers of the day whose work he finds inferior. There’s a great scene early in the film in which Poe is gobsmacked when he finds out that a piece he had written for the local newspaper was not used & replaced by a poem from Longfellow (Longfellow? LONGFELLOW?) whom he despises. As Poe, Cusack initially turned me off. His decision to portray Poe as a bug eyed, bellowing drunkard might have been historically accurate but he really chews up the scenery with an energy that reminded me of Nicholas Cage at the height of his, for lack of a better word, “Caginess”. But as the film progresses, he calms down since he has to pour all of that wanton energy into finding the woman that he loves. What started out as a “UH-OH” type of performance for me turned out to be a very nuanced one in which Cusack really displayed his range as one of the better (And criminally, unsung) actors of his generation.

All of the performances in the film are well cast and help to convey the period the film takes place in (Baltimore, 1879). I did find it odd that there were some English accents strewn about among some of the characters while others seemed to sound like they came straight out of a episode of “Jersey Shore”. It was a bit disconcerting for me to say the least but hardly a deal breaker. I also had a problem with the manner in which the crimes were disseminated by Detective Fields. Now I am no expert on police procedurals of the 1800′s but it seemed to me that Fields was a lot more competent than I would’ve thought a detective of that time might be. Sometimes he sounded like he was in an episode of “CSI” circa 1879 and while I (Admittedly) know nothing of how detectives investigated murders back then, something tells me that they weren’t this good. As Fields, Evans brings a bit of panache & determination to the role that was refreshing if a bit too modern sounding. Alice Eve & Brendan Gleeson are suitably convincing as father/daughter also. Ms. Eve has a near porcelain quality to her skin and is also suitably busty enough to wear the dresses of the era and Gleeson is appropriately gruff yet displays his feelings towards both Emily and Poe without leaving any doubt in the audiences mind.

The film looks amazing as well with excellent production design/cinematography throughout. A lot of thought went behind how this movie was going to look and it shows. In a film like this poor design and lighting would kill it before the opening credits have finished rolling but not here. Kudos to Roger Ford (Production design) & Danny Ruhlmann (Cinematography). It was shot in Belgrade and the look & feel of the backdrops are spot on. James McTeigue’s direction shows a strong understanding of the material & despite Cusack’s wild acting in the opening scenes of the film the film never drags and gets stronger as it moves ahead.

So what didn’t I like about “The Raven”? Well for starters, it’s about 20 minutes too long. Listed at 111 minutes in length it felt 30 minutes longer. Ten to fifteen minutes could have been shorn from it’s total running time with no noticeable difference. And the use of a Raven (Or Ravens) in nearly every other scene became extremely heavyhanded and obvious. The audience already knows what the name of the film is, we didn’t need to be reminded every other scene or so. and it’s fairly well known that Poe was something of an odd bird already, the inclusion of a raccoon as Poe’s pet seemed a bit over the top to me. It was a unnecessary quirk that seemed tacked on to make him seem even more peculiar.

There is a scene in which Emily seemingly becomes one extremely tough woman which seemed to be the polar opposite of the character we were introduced to in the beginning of the film. I won’t go into detail but you’ll know what scene I’m talking about when it arrives, I thought it was stupid and contrived. Some of the editing seemed to be scattershot as well. In one scene, we see Poe surrounded by policemen yet in the next scene he’s all alone in a foggy forest being shot at by the killer. And the bullet comes at him as if it was shot from a gun that existed in “The Matrix”, in slow motion with a shiny veneer to it. And does Poe take cover afterwards? Nope..he just sits there waiting for another slow motion slug to be shot at him. And when the killer is revealed, he tells Poe of his next target…Jules Verne! I’d love to know how he was planning to recreate some of Verne’s more elaborate creations, was he planning to build the “Nautilus”?

“The Raven” smacks of an attempt to recreate the success of Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” films. The attempt to make Poe some sort of action hero doesn’t fail entirely but it doesn’t quite succeed either. John Cusack’s Poe doesn’t radiate the machismo that Robert Downey Jr’s Holmes does but the role wasn’t written that way so it’s not a killer blow to it’s success. The film ends with Poe sitting on a park bench just as it begins, how & why he ends up there is the meat of the story and it’s a pretty satisfying one but something is missing here. I wish I could put my finger on it but right now all I can say is that while I enjoyed it…It still left me feeling a bit empty when it was all said and done. But it’s hardly a bad film and it is an entertaining one so “The Raven” merits a three out of five on my Shroud-ometer. You don’t have to drop whatever you’re doing to see it on opening weekend but it is worth a watch when you have a couple of hours & $12 bucks to kill.

The Raven (2012)

Review The Five-Year Engagement

The Five-Year Engagement is cut from the same cloth as 2008′s Forgetting Sarah Marshall and shares many of the elements that made that film successful. It was co-written by Sarah Marshall writer/star Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller (who directed both FSM and this movie), and has a cast that effortlessly embodies the movie’s characters. Along with a certain sweetness that permeates both films, there’s also something here that most romantic comedies are sorely lacking these days: characters that actually feel like real people. Thanks to Segel and Stoller’s writing and the easygoing and likeable cast, I can easily imagine life for these characters both before the film starts and long after it ends, a feat to which I’m not sure any movie in the “Katherine Heigl” subgenre of rom-coms could lay claim.

Emily Blunt and Jason Segel star as Violet and Tom, a couple one character later describes as being “almost perfect for each other.” Tom is a chef at a sleek San Francisco restaurant and works with Alex (Chris Pratt), who I swore was his character’s brother, but realized upon looking it up he’s just his best friend. Violet is applying to grad schools to become a psychologist, and in the opening scene, the two get engaged and take the audience through a flashback of the night they met. Violet quickly gets accepted to a graduate program, but much to the dismay of her sister (Alison Brie) and mother (Jacki Weaver), the new program is all the way in Michigan, so the wedding is delayed. Tom gives up a head chef position and ends up working at a local college sandwich shop while Violet studies with her new professor, an arrogant ladies’ man named Winton (Rhys Ifans), and with wedding plans perpetually pushed back, you can see where the conflicts would arise.

I don’t want to make this film out to sound groundbreaking or anything, because it definitely follows a standard formula for these kinds of movies. If you’ve seen four or five romantic comedies in your life, chances are pretty good you’ll be able to chart out every major plot point in this film before you see it. But the same thing could be said about a lot of action movies after watching their trailers, and ultimately, enjoyment comes down to the execution. Segel and Blunt are wonderful to watch (and, I suspect, inherently likeable in almost any role because of their infectious personalities). The supporting cast is made up of a ton of funny people, including Brian Posehn and Chris Parnell as Tom’s creepy and sometimes-inappropriate friends and Kevin Hart and Mindy Kaling as Violet’s co-workers who are obsessed with masturbation and gossip, respectively.

Pratt and Brie are especially hilarious, but I’ll admit that my fondness for them stems heavily from being an avid fan of their NBC shows “Parks and Recreation” and “Community.” (Despite the fact that I may be blinded by bias, Brie’s English accent is impressive and consistent throughout the movie, even during an adorable scene in which she and Blunt speak to each other in Sesame Street character voices because children are nearby.)

Stoller seems to have mastered the art of directing talented comedians, employing his typical reserved style and allowing the performances to outshine the flashiness of the direction. There’s always something authentic about his films that seems to justify their existence outside of a simple premise or one sentence synopsis, and if I were to pinpoint that specific element, I’d say it’s a sense of heart. We care about what these characters are doing because they’re so well-crafted and well-acted; as we watch them for two hours, their relationships matter. I’ve seen a few criticisms that point out this film’s thesis is basically “settling is good enough,” but I don’t actually think that’s what’s being said here at all. Yes, one of the characters might have said those words (or similar ones) in the movie, but if you look at the larger picture and see what these two mean to each other, I think a more positive message can be taken away from this experience.

The Five-Year Engagement deals with some complicated issues but never gets bogged down with them, always remembering that it’s a comedy first and foremost. A decent premise, honest characters, and a really funny script put this movie way above the average romantic comedy. Until next time…

We Bought a Zoo Review

Cameron Crowe has never been the most prolific director, but the interval since making Elizabethtown in 2005 has been the longest of his career. After immediately establishing himself as an authentic talent, writing and directing some true classics, the last decade hasn’t been as kind to the filmmaker, as his films took a sharp decline in quality. Now Crowe has returned with We Bought A Zoo, but sadly it’s more of a faint cry than a bang.

Based on a true story, the film centers on Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon), a recently widowed father struggling to raise a teenage son, named Dylan (Colin Ford) and a young daughter named Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones). Following advice from his brother (Thomas Haden Church) about a fresh start, Benjamin begins to look for a new house, but when he finds the perfect new home he discovers that it has a catch: it’s actually a defunct zoo. Seeing how much his daughter loves the place, Benjamin decides to take a leap and invest in refurbishing the menagerie and works with the head zookeeper, Kelly (Scarlett Johansson), and her strange assorted crew to restore the park to its former glory.

The greatest success of We Bought A Zoo is its characters and the bonds between them, aided by terrific performances from the entire cast. While Benjamin's relationship with his children couldn't be more different – one is sweet and lighthearted while the other is caustic and harsh – Damon’s has a great, authentic rapport with each of the child actors and the script does a good job developing both. The best developed arc in the movie, however, is between Damon and Johansson, as Benjamin struggles to prove his commitment to the park to the skeptical Kelly, and their relationship successfully blooms into a romance without beating the audience over the head.

While the film as a whole earns its emotional impact, there are definite moments where Crowe is manipulating the audience a bit too much. This is done largely by doing countless close-ups of Maggie Elizabeth Jones, who almost succeeds in being too cute. These scenes don’t taint the story as a whole, but they’re off-putting because the movie is filled with so many authentic feelings that the artificial ones stick out. The audience can tell the difference between sugar and high fructose corn syrup.

The film falters with its muddled and clumsy story, letting the strong central relationships overshadow smaller characters and important plot points. Patrick Fugit, Angus MacFadden and Carlo Gallo play park employees helping Benjamin rebuild the park, the central part of the movie, and though that plot line gets a solid resolution, the talented actors aren't given enough to do. There’s also a romantic subplot involving Kelly’s niece, played by Elle Fanning, and Dylan, which is sweet, but doesn’t have nearly the impact that it should because there’s so much else going on. But even the main storyline isn’t free from problems. Following the aforementioned resolution in the third act, the film immediately introduces another major conflict that throttles the pacing and winds up hurting all of the film’s final scenes.

What ends up holding back We Bought A Zoo are the little things, like the badly underdeveloped bit players or the exposition-filled, misplaced narration that opens the film. It has a lot of these tiny problems, but relationships between the characters, the performances and the story overall are good enough to at least balance them out. The movie isn’t nearly as strong as Crowe’s best work, such as Say Anything…, Almost Famous and Jerry Maguire, but it’s a solid effort following his six year hiatus and definitely a step up from Elizabethtown.

This Means War Review

With all due respect to General William Tecumseh Sherman, This Mean War isn’t hell. It just isn’t as fun as the various trailers and commercials make it out to be.

If you’ve seen the ads, you basically know all War has to offer. And if you haven’t, you’ll still be able to guess exactly where War is heading. Best friends Tuck (Tom Hardy) and FDR (Chris Pine) are the finest agents the CIA has to offer. But when a series of coincidences – and some sloppy screenwriting shortcuts – have them both dating a pretty product tester named Lauren (Reese Witherspoon), the guys wage a “friendly” competition to see who can win the woman’s hand.

More silly than chauvinistic, This Means War can’t decide if it’s an action-thriller with a little romance mixed in, or a formulaic rom-com with one or two memorable action set pieces. Thanks to its constant wavering and lack of clear-cut direction, it whiffs completely on both potential premises.

Let’s take a moment and lament the loss of a noteworthy action comedy, because the pieces appear to be in play for a legitimate winner cut from the cloth of 48 Hours, Lethal Weapon or, at the very least, Tango & Cash. War director McG might be coming off of 2009’s somber, dour Terminator: Salvation, but he has two lightweight Charlie’s Angels adventures on his resume, and he’s certainly capable of cranking out a lightweight lark. A little bit of the frivolous helium he injected into the goofy Angels series might have helped lift War off the ground, because this humorless bird rarely takes flight over its near-two-hour run.

Hardy and Pine do have the combustible chemistry needed for a yin-yang buddy comedy. A smart studio executive would hand these two a Shane Black script, then sit back and count the money as it came rolling in. Pine continues to show off the loose charm and natural charisma that he used to carry J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot. It’s Hardy, though, who shows off a previously unseen sense of humor and easygoing personality. At the very least, I’m glad War drew out that side of the talented Warrior and Bronson star before Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises -- and the long, dark shadow of Bane – swallows up his future career options.

Too bad Tuck and FDR’s pursuit of a Russian baddie (Til Schweiger) – and their unmistakably flirtatious banter – has to be shelved every couple of minutes so screenwriters Timothy Dowling and Simon Kinberg can belabor the ludicrous love triangle that hangs around this picture’s neck like an anchor. There’s a solid concept at play here, with secret agents using the full resources of the CIA to investigate a girl they want to know a little better. But War doesn’t make Lauren anything more than a beautiful piece of meat who needs a crass sidekick (Chelsea Handler) to tell her how to think, act and feel. The women are an afterthought in War. Witherspoon poses adorably but can’t manage much else from her poorly developed part. And Handler hammers the same booze-soaked note she brings to virtually every project. The best screenplays have a way of snapping together, like small pieces of a large puzzle. When War reaches a narrative obstacle it can’t explain, it cuts its puzzle pieces in half, then glues them back together. Sloppily.

There is one thing that caught my eye, though, and it bears mentioning. Instead of coming up with at least one halfway-decent action sequence, McG pays attention to the movies that are playing in television screens in the background of scenes. I spotted Young Frankenstein, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and, in a lengthy scene, James Cameron’s Titanic. It might be the only time I can think of that the movies playing away from the action were infinitely better than the film in which they are being played.

Declaration of War Review

The revelations are minor but forceful in Valerie Donzelli's exuberant melodrama Declaration of War, which casts the director as the mother of a two-year-old who is diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor. The father of the child, the literal Romeo to her Juliette, is played by Jeremie Elkaim, Donzelli's co-scripter and the father of their son, Gabriel, whose struggles with terminal illness were the antecedent of the film's narrative core. The personal weight of the story is abundant but as the title infers, Donzelli's film is not an ode to anguished soul-searching in the face of that most blunt notice of mortality.

Faith and its more popular mandates are of little matter in Donzelli and Elkaim's script, as are fiscal worries while coasting through France's universal health care system. This allows Donzelli to investigate the effects of tragedy, and the strengths and stresses of community, family, and partnership under these conditions, with a consistently inventive and yet remarkably clear-eyed and sober stylistic eye. Family and concerned community are of equal weight, indeed almost inseparable, in Romeo and Juliette's life. Few films in recent memory have approached such communities, which includes Romeo's lesbian mother (Brigitte Sy) and her partner, without even a hint of condescension or dull moral scrutiny.

The most fascinating figures in this gathering are Romeo and Juliette themselves, who are not married (neither are Elkaim and Donzelli) and yet share an emotionally rich and well-detailed partnership as the film progresses through a litany of specialists, nurses, diagnosticians, social workers, and surgeons. Donzelli catches the central couple in moments of cathartic partying and self-exploration (or indulgence?) in between hospital visits rather than scenes of repetitive sentimentality that attest to wholly unearned, thrift-store pride and survival of spirit. Indeed, one of the more refreshing things witnessed in Declaration of War is Romeo and Juliette's wanton youth, which is constantly unleashed and consistently humbled by the humanist work being done by the hospital workers and doctors; never is Juliette's maternal instinct held up as somehow more wise or right than the opinions of educated professionals.

 

This tendency towards ambiguity in terms of social habits and sexual preferences puts focus on the inner life of Romeo and Juliette, expressed with audacious style by Donzelli - a musical interlude, a make-out party, a fast-paced dash through the corridors of the hospital, stately narration. Through rushes of house and dubstep, careful, active framing and uniformly strong performers, including Frederic Pierrot, Anne Le Ny, Michelle Moretti and Philippe Laudenbach, Donzelli creates a lively aesthetic environment in which Juliette and Romeo's unique relationship becomes a truly personal matter, as it often is, and not a matter necessarily swayed or distinguished by trauma, social stigmas, or psychological quirks. In fact, the most public issue that Romeo and Juliette are tied to is the health of their child which, in what might seem like a socialist dystopia to some, is here portrayed as an axiom of public good and civility.   

Chronicle Review

When you hear that director Josh Trank and writer Max Landis (son of John) are out to reinvent the superhero origin story via Chronicle, their found footage sci-fi film effort, all kinds of warranted warning flags go up. After all, this is a genre that can't decide between making one anxious (via the whole 'you are there' narrative) or nauseous (thanks to all the shaky camera antics). Worse still, there's the nagging "why are you filming everything?" element that never seems to be addressed. Finally, many of these movies avoid big, lavish special effects in order to maintain a level of lo-fi "realism." Thankfully, Trank and Landis are prepared to address these concerns and then some. The result is one of the best uses of the filmmaking format since a trio of documentarians entered the Burkittsville Woods, looking for a certain witch.

Confirmed class outsider Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan) has just bought himself a new video camera. Why? Well, his mother is dying and his drunken dad likes to take out his frustrations on the boy's face. Apparently, our lead needs something to record the abuse. Picked on at school, his only friend seems to be his cautious cousin Matt (Alex Russell). One night, at a party, they catch up with school sports icon Steve Montgomery (Michael B. Jordan) and together, they discover a mysterious cave containing a bizarre alien artifact. A few weeks later, they each have become 'empowered' with certain abilities -- telekinesis, flight -- and are enjoying their newfound superhero skills. Then Andrew's rage at the world grows out of control and soon battle lines are drawn between the trio.
Chronicle is terrific. It argues for the effectiveness of the found footage gimmick while giving us the kind of comic book kick few films in the genre can even pretend to deliver. A lot like M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable in both tone and approach, it's as if Trank and Landis found a way to merge The Breakfast Club with the typical "birth of a hero/villain" plot to show what would really happen should adolescents, minds confused and hormones raging, become capable of almost anything. We get the fun of discovering the limits inherent in one's new abilities while never once going wholly overboard into raunchiness or ridiculousness. These guys don't try to destroy society or advance some personal perversion. Instead, they use their new gifts as a means of empowerment -- and in the case of Andrew, escape.

Indeed, this is Andrew's movie. He is the reason we get the camera footage, the reason the footage continues in a new and novel way (you have to love how Trank and Landis solve the inherent 'constant camera' complaint) and the organic way his path goes from halting to hurt to harmful. Like a flawless four frame epic, Andrew appears destined to be the damaged god who gives way to a supervillain, and who better to be his adversary than his reluctant champion cousin. All throughout Chronicle, we watch as things build to a head between the trio. Even better, the ending delivers the kind of rock 'em, sock 'em payoff the premise promises. Few films of this type even come close (we're looking at you, The Devil Inside).

But this is more than just a stunt well done. Chronicle will resonate with anyone who felt/feels high school is nothing more than a melting pot of socially mandated misery, where the populars pick on the nerds because...well, because it's somehow an acceptable part of the whole "growing up" ideal. In this case, however, Andrew and his friends learn that a little cosmic comeuppance can make homeroom a bit easier to handle -- until the pain becomes real. As entertaining as it is inventive, Chronicle is a minor masterwork.