Premium Rush

PREMIUM RUSH

** SPOILERS **

Being a bike messenger in New York City is an ill-advised and dangerous enough profession without being caught up in a plot involving Chinese gangsters, a corrupt cop with a gambling addiction, and illegal immigration. Such is the lesson Joseph Gordon-Levitt learns in Premium Rush, an entertainingly frenetic bike messenger Road Runner chase picture, complete with Gordon-Levitt's character being named Wiley. As in Coyote, several characters make sure to point out. Anyway, Gordon-Levitt could have gone to law school but he doesn't like to wear suits (he should try a Batsuit). He loves to ride, so much so he works for peanuts weaving through deadly NYC traffic on a bicycle he modified to have no gears and no breaks. Gordon-Levitt is such a born bike messenger, he even has Bike Messenger Spider-Sense, that allows him to slow-motion anticipate every possible crash scenario in traffic and choose the safest route so he never has to slow down. Tasked to deliver an envelope from Columbia University to Chinatown in 90 minutes, Gordon-Levitt finds himself chased by Michael Shannon, the aforementioned corrupt cop with a gambling problem who owes thousands to Chinese gangsters. Shannon is a scene-chewing trip; he introduces himself to everyone as "Forrest J. Ackerman" but his real name is the equally awesome Bobby Monday. (He also has a third name, "Douchebag", given to him by Gordon-Levitt.) Shannon wants the envelope in Gordon-Levitt's possession, but Gordon-Levitt is too much of a professional to hand it over. Hence, several increasingly absurd chases throughout Manhattan, involving cars, multiple bicycles, and even a "flash mob" of bike messengers. Premium Rush is amusingly stacked with geek cred: What we have here is John Blake from The Dark Knight Rises being chased by General Zod from the forthcoming Man of Steel, while lending support are Dania Ramirez, who was Callisto in X-Men: The Last Stand and Maya from Heroes, and Jamie Chung, who was one of the girls in Sucker Punch. I just wish Wiley used his first name - Robin - instead. It's pretty. But let there be no doubt Robin John Blake can carry a bike messenger action movie.

Total Recall

TOTAL RECALL

** SPOILERS **

The Fall Enslaves Us All

The funniest bit about the 2012 remake of Total Recall occurs at the very start of the opening credits when the logo of the production company Original Film is shown. Once the movie actually starts, Total Recall is pretty okay for a while, until everything just starts exploding and the explosions resolve everything. You know what else Total Recall is? The Bourne Identity. Stop me if you've heard this one: Colin Farrell is missing chunks of his memory, discovers he has deadly combat skills, and finds a message implanted in his body leading him to a safe deposit box filled with weapons, money (Barack Obama is on the money of the future), and false identification. He must then uncover his role in a vast conspiracy as he learns he's the most dangerous super spy in the world. Unlike Jason Bourne, however, Farrell has two really hot action movie-credible babes, Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel, fighting over him, sort of.

In the new Total Recall, it's the 22nd century and real estate is an uninhabitable Earth's most precious commodity. (Weird, then, that no one lives on Mars, though there's an in-joke from Farrell where he wistfully wishes he could go to Mars.) The only places people can live on Earth are the United Federation of Britain - where all the Caucasians with English and American accents live - and The Colony, which is what they renamed Australia, now home of all the Asians. The London of the future is a Jetsons-like multi-leveled city in the sky navigated by flying cars, though the original London remains on terra firma where people still drive cars on wheels. Australia has been impressively Blade Runner-ized into a colorful, blocky Chinatown where prostitutes offer their Total Recall trademark three boobs in the intriguing red light district. Farrell lives in The Colony with his wife Beckinsale but works in a military robot factory in Britian; everyone commutes* to work via The Fall, which is a Disneyland Tower of Terror ride that shoots passengers through the Earth's core. 

Farrell isn't happy with his meager life and he has dreams about Jessica Biel. So I can relate. When he visits the Rekall Center to get some exciting "memories" of being a secret agent implanted into his brain, he finds out he already is a secret agent and white storm trooper killbots arrive to kill him. Then he runs home to his wife Beckinsale and she tries to kill him. Farrell has no time to even comment on how he thought Beckinsale was American but when she reveals she's evil, she starts speaking with a British accent. Now on the lam, an increasingly confused Farrell gets picked up by Jessica Biel and finds out, via messages he left for himself, that he's not really Colin Farrell, factory worker, but he's in fact Colin Farrell, super duper future spy. He was a double agent sent by the evil Chancellor of Britain, Bryan Cranston, to infiltrate the resistance movement led by Bill Nighy. Or is he? Yes. But everyone keeps trying to confuse him. And kill him, especially Beckinsale, who gets more and more embarrassed each time she tries to kill Farrell and somehow fails. She can't seem to kill Biel either and that pisses her off even more.

In spite of the vast resources, including hordes of soldiers and robots led by Beckinsale, Cranston expends to kill Farrell, it turns out he didn't really want Farrell dead and was just using him to learn the secret location of Nighy and the resistance. Nighy barely has a walk on in the movie before Cranston arrives and pops a cap in him. At this point, just about everyone is hopelessly confused, as Cranston reveals that his grand scheme all along was to lead a full invasion into The Colony, slaughter all the Asians, and replace them with white people from England. There's also a quick explanation that "synthetics" will replace the Asians in doing all the menial work, because Asians don't dream of electric sheep, or something.

Cranston wants to do all of that and wanted to blame it all on Nighy. He just needed Farrell to find him. Or something? I'm not sure. No one is sure. And it doesn't matter because Farrell is captured, Biel is captured, and Farrell has to free himself and save Biel and kill Cranston, in that order. Also Beckinsale, who won't quit trying to kill Farrell because she really hated pretending to be married to him for six weeks, I guess. How does Farrell do all of this? With explosions! Because in the future, teeny tiny time bombs that can bring down enormous super structures have digital red countdowns on them, and Farrell's got more than enough to explode The Fall. The good news is, the explosions work. They work better than the copious amounts of automatic gun fire that never seems to hit anyone unless the script calls for Farrell and Biel to get clipped on the wing. Thanks to the explosions, Farrell accomplishes all of his goals and saves The Colony and gets a better future with Biel in the end. All of his dreams come true. Except going to Mars, but maybe he can have the original Total Recall planted in his brain for that.

*Total Recall does score brownie points with me for having Farrell reading a worn, dog-eared copy of Ian Fleming's classic James Bond novel "The Spy Who Loved Me" during his commutes on The Fall.

The Dark Knight Rises

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

** SPOILERS **

"There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne."

The Dark Knight Rises, the epic conclusion to Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, as it is now known, is like a massive jigsaw puzzle. Not all the pieces quite fit, some are jammed right in there to make for a scraggly patchwork. But when one steps back and sees the big picture, it's worthy of awe. Nolan and his screenwriter brother Jonathan have the brass balls to conclude their story about Batman, honoring the tropes of what has come before while blazing new directions. The story of Batman, and more importantly of Bruce Wayne, comes full circle, and in its final breath, The Dark Knight Rises does rise above its flaws and achieves a kind of magnificence.

The Dark Knight Rises pulls freely from Batman comic books of the 1990s, such as "Knightfall", where Bane breaks Batman's back, and "No Man's Land", when Gotham City is cut off from the rest of the world after a cataclysmic earthquake. Yet the Nolans craft an ambitious Batman story we've never quite seen before; if it angers some Batman fanboy "purists", it's because the Nolans treat Bruce Wayne not as a "superhero" but as a person first. A person who has to regain what's extraordinary about himself after suffering through the tragedies of the death of Rachel Dawes and Batman taking the blame for the murder of Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight. 

Eight years have passed since the events in The Dark Knight and Bruce Wayne has become a shell of himself, haunting the rebuilt Wayne Manor, a Howard Hughes-like curiosity to the rest of the world. Even after eight years retired, the time he spent as Batman left Wayne with no cartilage in his knees, kidney damage and a scarred, ravaged body. The fanboys rage: "Batman would never quit being Batman!" They demand Batman fight the never-ending battle against evil. But the Nolans have always floated the idea that there's a human being behind the cape and cowl, someone who wouldn't and shouldn't be Batman forever. Harvey Dent even said so in The Dark Knight: "Whoever Batman is, he doesn't want to do this forever. How could he?" Batman the symbol, the legend, can go on, but let us truly consider Bruce Wayne the man and what he needs. The Nolans display a compassion and a hope for Bruce Wayne that is simply unprecedented in any media.

As Bruce Wayne, Christian Bale is once again the primary focus of Rises. Bale throws everything into the role of Bruce Wayne/Batman this final time: limping, growling, screaming, leaping, falling, agonizing, and triumphing as the best cinematic Batman ever. Batman shared the stage more evenly with Harvey Dent, the heroic Commissioner James Gordon, and The Joker (never mentioned) in The Dark Knight, but Rises is mainly and fittingly about Bruce Wayne. Gordon becomes a casualty early and spends most of the movie in a hospital bed while missing and pleading for the Batman to return. (Gary Oldman's Gordon is unabashedly in love with the Batman, almost to the levels that Adam West's Commissioner was in love with him.) Note for all police commissioners: do not personally lead SWAT teams into the sewers; it doesn't work out so well. Michael Caine gives his most emotional performance as Alfred J. Pennyworth, whose monologues serve almost as a surrogate for the Nolans' vision for a better life for Bruce Wayne than being Batman. Meanwhile, Morgan Freeman returns, bemused as ever, giving Batman his most wonderful toy yet, a flying assault vehicle called (fittingly) The Bat*, before being horrified as his vast armory of Batman weapons and vehicles is stolen by Bane and the League of Shadows. Cillian Murphy in a cameo once more as Jonathan (The Scarecrow) Crane draws some welcome laughs.

New playmates for Wayne in this final chapter of the saga include cat burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway purring Hedy Lamarr-style and slinking about in a form-fitting updated Julie Newmar catsuit) and police detective John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an angry young orphan who has magic Angry Young Orphan X-Ray Vision that allowed him to see right through Batman's mask and figure out he's Bruce Wayne. Wayne/Batman mentoring Blake in his philosophy for masked nocturnal vigilantism is almost as much fun as Batman and Catwoman (no one ever calls her that) in costume smacking down Bane's thugs, though there isn't quite as much of it as one would like. Hathaway is rather fetching sprawled out on Batman's Bat-Pod and barreling down Gotham's streets blowing up Tumblers. Nolan doesn't deviate from the natural conclusion one reaches when seeing Batman and Catwoman together in their matching black night-time gear: they're made for each other. Selina Kyle's main motivation, besides being all excited about the "storm coming" and then freaking when it's Bane bringing the storm, is chasing after "the clean slate", which is a computer program metaphor that wipes away your past. Very necessary for the sexy cat burglar on the go.

The Academy Award-winning performance of the late Heath Ledger as The Joker is an impossible act to follow, but as Bane, an enormously jacked and masked Tom Hardy, creates a different kind of arch villain. Personally, I found Bane fascinating, and Hardy's Bane voice is amusing to imitate. I especially liked the joke of the young boy singing the national anthem and Bane noting, "He has a lovely, lovely voice!" Bane's comic book smarts are maintained, and while Nolan eschewed the notion of Bane gaining super strength through the super steroid called Venom, Bane remains an imposing physical threat who does break the Batman's back in a ferocious, if straightforward fight. I did enjoy Batman's futile screaming and desperation as he falls to Bane, completely outclassed and unprepared for whom he was facing. Bane is a great deal of nasty fun, especially when he launched into what seemed like a ten minute super villain monologue or when he taunted Bruce Wayne about his failures ("Your greatest victory was a lie.") and when he would have Bane's permission to die. In the climactic rematch with Batman, Bane gets his mask damaged and visibly panics, desperate to end the fight as he's overwhelmed by agony and defeated by Batman.

Then there is the mysterious character of Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), the new CEO of Wayne Enterprises, a quickie lover for Bruce Wayne, and a big believer in clean energy and Wayne's fusion reactor. Taking cues from his magic show movie The Prestige, Nolan hides Miranda Tate's true purpose and identity in Rises in plain sight, decoying and feinting with stories about Bane's origins that reaches right back around to R'as Al-Ghul and reveal Tate as Talia Al-Ghul, Daughter of the Demon. Batman was simply shocked when Talia shanked him, but it's understandable: While trapped in Bane's prison pit and healing from his broken back, Bruce Wayne was visited by R'as Al-Ghul (Liam Neeson)'s Force ghost. And like Obi-Wan's Force ghost did to Luke Skywalker several times, R'as mislead Bruce into believing Bane was his son. And speaking of hiding in plain sight, the ultimate destiny of John Blake - full name Robin John Blake - was a jawdropper.

The plot of The Dark Knight Rises is labyrinthine. Details involving the theft of Bruce Wayne's fingerprints by Selina Kyle, a Russian nuclear scientist kidnapped by the masked mercenary Bane, the wheeling and dealing at Wayne Enterprises which causes Bruce Wayne to lose his vast fortune as Miranda Tate is installed by Lucius Fox as CEO, an underground army plotting to take over Gotham City, and a fusion reactor beneath Gotham River which is turned into a nuclear bomb as Bane reveals his grand scheme to destroy Gotham City and fulfill R'as Al-Ghul's destiny a la Batman Begins are lobbed fiercely at the audience. The third act is almost an hour of Gotham City under siege, occupied by Bane and the League of Shadows under the threat of a nuclear holocaust, as Bruce Wayne must find a way to escape a Middle Eastern prison and lead the war to save Gotham City as the Batman. 

The #OccupyGotham act of Rises is the most unwieldy and problematic. Gotham City was really Chicago in the previous installments, but Gotham has grown in the last eight years and has now jarringly become Chicago, Manhattan and Pittsburgh side by side, linked by bridges destroyed by Bane. For five months, Bane and his small army held a city of twelve million people hostage; with many people isolated from their homes, like the executives of Wayne Enterprises trapped in Wayne Tower. Yet somehow everyone was able to maintain their haircuts and made sure to be dressed well even when they had no way to shower for months. Three thousand police officers are trapped in the tunnels under Gotham, but they were able to get food..., uh, why? Why would Bane allow them to not starve to death so they couldn't rise up against him later? As one character notes, "this situation is unprecedented", but many of #OccupyGotham's intricate and logical details seemed to slip through Nolan's grasp, at least until Bruce Wayne returned to Gotham (the hows remain a mystery), became Batman again, and mounted an explosive, all-out assault on Bane's forces.

As Bane mounted #OccupyGotham, Bruce Wayne was trapped in the 'worst hell on Earth' prison, which gave him the chance to heal and regain his true Batmanity. We're told this prison pit where Bane was born is filled with the worst murderers and thieves on Earth, but it didn't seem so bad. Supposedly it's a dark place with no light - Bane says he didn't see light until he was a man - but the place seemed awfully well lit. Maybe Bane was speaking metaphorically. The inmates seemed like a bunch genial chaps who all enjoyed watching rock climbing and chanting together. One of them can even smack a protruding vertebrae back into place. Look hard and maybe you'll see one of those guys helping Tony Stark build a suit of armor in a corner. I really enjoyed Wayne's multiple attempts to climb the pit and duplicate the leap and escape a child once made (who turned out to be Talia). Bruce Wayne is always driven by anger and a lack of fear of death, but he learned the importance of that fear, that he cannot truly rise unless he eschewed his tether and does so with the fear of failure and death. These heady notions would serve Bruce Wayne well into the ending of Rises.

That ending. Despite The Dark Knight Rises' flaws, Nolan's biggest gamble and triumph was truly ending his story of Batman, and he does so in a better, more uplifting fashion than Frank Miller did when he gave Batman his "ending" in the seminal graphic novel "The Dark Knight Returns". Batman takes it upon himself to use The Bat to fly the nuclear bomb away from Gotham, perishing in a nuclear explosion. But Bruce Wayne did not die. How did he survive? After giving it a good deal of thought, I discovered the answer: I don't care. I don't care. Because I didn't want Batman to die. More importantly, I didn't want Bruce Wayne to die. What the Nolans achieved with Rises' conclusion was something the comic books, which must publish Batman stories ad infinitum, can and will never do: give Bruce Wayne the happy ending he's deserved for 70+ years. Because "anyone can be a hero", and Batman is a symbol who can rise again if he's needed. But this Bruce Wayne, our best Bruce Wayne, deserves a chance at something more, a better life, "a clean slate" with Selina Kyle. In grand style, The Dark Knight Rises finally, bravely and boldly, gives a noble and fitting end to Bruce Wayne's dark nights.

* Note that Batman never drives a Tumbler Batmobile in this movie. Why would he? He has The Bat. Once you go Bat, you never go back.

Ted

TED

** SPOILERS **

Ted starts off so promisingly, with a flashback to a snowy Boston Christmas in 1985 narrated by a foul-mouthed Patrick Stewart. Young outcast Mark Wahlberg receives a teddy bear and makes a magic wish that his bear would come alive and be his best friend. It does, and Ted, the living talking teddy bear voiced by writer-director Seth MacFarlane, becomes a pop culture phenomenon, even appearing on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The concept of a living teddy bear becoming famous is an intriguing one. But then Ted jumps forward to present day to an adult Wahlberg, stunted in arrested development, still co-dependent on Ted, who is now a drunken, pot-smoking burnout, and the magic of Ted is immediately, irrevocably lost. Ted immediately settles into a bland, conventional rom-com plot where Wahlberg, in a relationship with Mila Kunis, has to learn to grow up and be a man who isn't emotionally clinging to his talking teddy bear. At her urging, Wahlberg kicks Ted out of the affluent Boston apartment he can't possibly afford on his salary working for a rental car lot. Ted relocates to a Chinatown tenement and starts working at a supermarket check out. Meanwhile, Kunis' sleazy boss Joel McHale, makes a play for her hand romantically and I'm bored just describing this lurching, eye-roll-inducing plot. If Ted and Ted were as raunchy and funny as promised, the paint by numbers plotting wouldn't matter, but outside of a few fleeting funny lines, Ted is oddly limp on actual comedy. Instead, Ted is a showcase for MacFarlane's idiosyncratic 1980s pop culture fetishes, from the theme from Octopussy that Wahlberg sings badly at the Hatch Shell (a scene were I was an extra in the crowd), to a parody of the dancing scene in Airplane!, and especially the camp classic Flash Gordon, complete with Flash himself, Sam J. Jones, in a cameo that well-past overstays his welcome. The blatant fellating of Flash Gordon throughout Ted goes way overboard, and I'm a guy who is also a lifelong fan of that wonderfully terrible movie Flash Gordon. There's also a grating subplot where Giovanni Ribisi wants to kidnap Ted and give him to his fat son that just pads the running time, giving an excuse for a car chase through Boston (with questionable geography where the Southeast Expressway suddenly exits into the Fenway area) and an action finale in Fenway Park. Ted "dies" at the end, which would at least have been a ballsy finish, but Ted chickens out of that to give Wahlberg and Ted a "happy" ending. Ted somehow has sex with numerous women in the movie, including Norah Jones, despite having no genitals. Like Ted the bear, Ted the movie has no balls.

The Amazing Spider-Man

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN

** SPOILERS **

The Amazing Spider-Man takes a song everyone knows by heart and self-consciously rearranges the notes. It's the same song but with different cadences and crescendos. Rebooting Spider-Man back to his most fertile ground as a teenager who leads a double life as a misunderstood web-slinging superhero, director Marc Webb's Amazing mines the sticky emotional issues of childhood abandonment, young love, guilt, angst, and teenage rebellion for its drama, eschewing the cheery, day-glo derring-do of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy still fondly fresh in audiences' memories (except for 3). In some respects, Amazing is better than the Raimi movies. In other respects, it's just different for the sake of being different. At its best moments, Amazing could be [500] Days of Spider but with thrilling superhero action and heightened emotional stakes. 

Our new Spider-Man, Andrew Garfield, plays Peter Parker like a raw, open wound. It's a powerful, visceral performance filled with anguish and heart. We all know Peter Parker, a bright science nerd who gets bitten by a radioactive spider, tragically loses his Uncle Ben via his own negligence, dons a red and blue unitard, and fights crime as Spider-Man. At school, Peter is bullied by Flash Thompson, who later gets awfully bro-mantic with Peter after newly Spider-empowered Peter has stood up to him. Amazing makes it a point to 'modernize' Spider-Man so that Peter Parker has Internet access, a cell phone, and his web-swinging is captured on YouTube. And yet, for the amount of time Peter is in the Spidey suit sans mask (or letting little kids wear his mask), he sure is unbelievably lucky his face never ends up streaming to millions of followers.

Beginning with a flashback to a dark and stormy night, elementary school-age Peter is abandoned by his grim scientist father Richard (Campbell Scott) and mother and left with his kindly Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) and Aunt May (Sally Field). Richard Parker was working on something Top Secret and Important (not a Supertrain in Seattle - get that reference, kids?), important enough to run from his son and never look back. Years later, teenage Peter discovers the satchel his father left behind, conveniently containing the Top Secret and Important Files his father wanted hidden. Luckily, Peter is a chip off the old block in the brilliant scientist department and has the know-how to decipher the math. 

At Oscorp, the company owned by Norman Osborn (who we're told is dying off-screen), Peter is bitten by the fateful radioactive spider, as he must, and gains its proportionate strength, speed, and agility. His powers don't manifest overnight; a quick nap on the subway before being accosted by strangers is all the time Peter's body needs to transform him into something Amazing. An ongoing runner of Peter not being able to control his super strength draws consistent laughs. Peter discovering and developing his spider-abilities is handled in a thrilling series of trial and error, often in first person POV. Some lip service is even paid to how Peter Parker acquires his Spider-Man costume. ("Spandex! Everything's spandex!") There's a neat nod to the famous wrestling scene in his comic and Raimi origin where Peter crashes into a wrestling ring; his Spider-Man mask is inspired by the masks of luchadores. Spider-Man has always owned a surprising amount of his very conception to pro-wrestling.

Garfield's Peter Parker, taller, lankier, is more spider-like than his predecessor in the role, Tobey Maguire. He more strongly evokes the Spider-Man depicted in Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's classic Marvel Comics, though Amazing draws most of its inspiration from the modern Ultimate Spider-Man line of comics. Unlike Maguire's Peter, who manifested organic web shooters, this Peter uses his scientific acumen to design mechanical web shooters ("biocable") he wears on his wrists, though the classic comic book bit of Spider-Man occasionally running out of web fluid when he needs it most still isn't utilized. Garfield's Peter is established early on as a photographer but Amazing does away with the side story of Peter working part time at the Daily Bugle, which is fleetingly mentioned. J. Jonah Jameson barking at Peter with cigar in hand is not missed. High school is one of Amazing's key settings, so much so that the villainous Lizard even brings his beef with Spider-Man right to its hallways and classrooms. This is fitting as the Lee and Ditko Spider-Man in the comics was often attacked in his high school.

The hot button issue of cross-species genetics is the cause of all the trouble in Amazing. Richard Parker was allies with Dr. Curt Conners (Rhys Ifans), a misguided genius trying to use reptilian DNA to re-grow his missing right arm. Conners was a minor character throughout the Raimi trilogy fans waited in vain to see transform into the villainous Lizard. In Amazing, the Lizard takes center stage, though it's interesting that the serum that turns Conners into an eight-foot, prehensile-tailed "dinosaur man" was meant to restore the mysteriously dying Norman Osborn back to health. Conners becomes Peter Parker's mentor, someone he can talk science-y stuff with that's beyond the understanding of his working class aunt and uncle. Peter is quick on the uptake when Conners becomes The Lizard, but it takes Conners seeing "Property of Peter Parker" stamped on his camera via label maker (a hilarious nod to when Bart Simpson fell down the well), for The Lizard to realize his teen protege is really his arch foe Spider-Man.

When Conners becomes The Lizard, he looks and sounds curiously like Lord Voldemort. He also starts hearing voices in his head (much like how Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin helmet spoke to him in Raimi's Spider-Man) but the voices sound just like Lord Voldemort. (No surprise that Harry Potter screenwriter Steve Kloves is one of Amazing's credited writers.) Later, Conners decides he wants to turn his Lizard serum into a gas cloud that will make everyone in New York City Lizards like him. Curt Conners loves being the Lizard so much! Why wouldn't everyone else love it too? (This scheme is the same as Magneto's plan in Bryan Singer's first X-Men movie, where Magneto wanted to turn everyone in New York into mutants.) 

There's always a girl in Peter Parker's life, and this time, it's blonde, knee-high go go boot-wearing Gwen Stacy, played fetchingly by Emma Stone. Mary Jane Watson who? In a fictional comic book movie featuring wall-crawling superheroes and sewer-dwelling lizard men, Gwen Stacy is Amazing's most fanciful creation: a beautiful, stylish, high school knockout who is patient, understanding, also a scientist who is smart-but-not-as-smart-as our hero, and acerbically witty. Much of Gwen's appeal is owed entirely to Stone's own considerable charms as the character isn't much more on the page than a collection of conveniences, such as how Gwen is conveniently an intern at Dr. Curt Conners' lab in Oscorp, which allows her to be a convenient plot device in helping to manufacture the Lizard antidote when Spider-Man is otherwise preoccupied hunting the Lizard and getting shot at by the NYPD. When on screen together, Garfield and Stone crackle with bristling chemistry. They have moments together in their high school and in Gwen's bedroom (Peter prefers coming in through the window, like that other Peter, Pan) that could have been the heart of a sharp, winning teen rom com if this weren't a Spider-Man movie.

Martin Sheen as Uncle Ben Parker steals scenes early on as he tries to comprehend his moody nephew's comings and goings. He tries to impart wisdom to Peter about power and moral responsibility but avoids repeating the hoary "with great power comes great responsibility" line that was driven to the ground by Raimi and Maguire. There's a palpable sense of real loss when Sheen is gunned down on the street by a common criminal. Later, Sally Field's teary-eyed Aunt May has to weather Peter's nocturnal excursions, never fully comprehending why he returns battered and bleeding when he was supposed to be out buying a dozen eggs. The tragedy of Uncle Ben's death pushes Peter into thrill-seeking vigilante-ism, where, as the smack-talking Spider-Man, he stalks the streets of New York hunting for his uncle's killer, a man with a star tattoo on his left wrist (whom Spider-Man never does locate and capture.) One of the strongest cues Amazing takes from the mega-successful Christopher Nolan Dark Knight trilogy is the idea of Spider-Man being a public menace hunted by the police. 

Amazing's best character might be Denis Leary as Gwen's father, police Captain Stacy, a no-nonsense, honest cop who makes arresting Spider-Man his personal mission. (How much do New York City police captains earn, anyway? The Stacys live 20 stories up in a midtown Manhattan apartment with a gigantic wrap-around balcony that must cost millions.) One of Amazing's best scenes involves Peter having an awkward dinner with the Stacy family and defending Spider-Man's vigilantism, before getting schooled by Captain Stacy that Spider-Man doesn't understand the greater consequences of his actions and is impeding months of important police work. Even when The Lizard is rampaging through the streets of New York, Stacy makes apprehending Spider-Man his top priority. Later, after discovering her daughter's boyfriend is the vigilante he's been after, Stacy is damned heroic fighting side by side with Spider-Man and blasting away at The Lizard with a shotgun. When Stacy is killed by The Lizard, it brings the tally to Peter losing two fathers and Gwen losing one. Curious though that Captain Stacy got a funeral scene but Uncle Ben did not.

The Amazing Spider-Man reboot is kind of amazing. It's overall a success, though a modest one; calculated and pleasing but a few webs short of outright exhilarating. Amazing does boast some marvelous superhero beats like Spider-Man saving a boy from a car falling off the Williamsburg Bridge and the blue collar construction operators in New York lining up their cranes to give their injured hero Spider-Man a clear path to web-sling to Oscorp Tower. More of Garfield and Stone in the inevitable sequels will draw no quarrel from me. Ultimately, Amazing takes great pains and its sweet time to inform us that we don't know all we think we know about Peter Parker, and neither does he. Did we really need to know anything more about Peter Parker? Are whatever 'new' revelations Amazing offers worth knowing? That's for you to determine, true believer. 

Brave

BRAVE

** SPOILERS **

In Braveheart, the evil King Longshanks famously mused, "The trouble with Scotland is that it's full of Scots."  Brave would like to correct Longshanks - the trouble with Scotland is that it's full of Scots that turn into bears. There are five bears in Brave! So many bears. I'd love to have sat in on the Pixar story conferences when the idea of "the queen mother turns into a bear" was floated and everyone said, "That's it! Let's see where that goes. But we're gonna need more bears." Seemingly an adventure yarn about a plucky, fiery-haired heroine with bow and arrow, Brave turns out to be a story of about a mother and daughter's relationship, where the plucky, fiery-haired* heroine with bow and arrow, Princess Merida (winningly voiced by Kelly MacDonald), must learn to come to an understanding with her overbearing (pun intended) but good-hearted mother (voiced by Emma Thompson). Carefree and prideful Merida chafes under her mother's instructions on how to be a proper lady who will one day become Queen, and rebels outright when the first born sons of the three other clans in Scotland present themselves for her betrothal. (Merida should be glad no mention is made of prima nocte.) After a terrible row with her mother, Merida is lead by will o'the wisps to a witch in the forest, who gives her a spell to "change her mother". Into a bear, it turns out. And this bear thing has happened before; why their Scottish legends turn out to be riddled with tales of rulers who are turned into bears. A good portion of Brave involves Merida and her mother the Queen Bear bonding in the forest as they try to reverse the spell and prevent the clan war threatening to bear down (I had to) upon the realm. In spite of such a strange turn of events, Brave is charming and witty, with heaping physical comedy provided by the king (voiced by Billy Connelly), who lost his own leg to - you guessed it - fighting off a bear. In the end, after the evil bear possessed by the spirit of a dead prince is killed and the queen and the royal triplet sons are all transformed back from bears to human at their Stonehenge, imagine the utter bewilderment of all of the clansmen. They're Highlanders, by God, but that had to be the strangest gathering they've ever had to bear witness to (sorry).

* The animation of Brave is truly gorgeous, especially the textures and rendering of Merida's red hair. Looking at her hair alone is almost worth the price of admission.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

** SPOILERS **

A sweet, downbeat romanti-tragi-comedy about the apocalypse, neither Steve Carell nor Keira Knightley were technically seeking a friend for the end of the world, and yet they managed to find each other. In Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, a 70 mile asteroid named Matilda is set to collide with the Earth. Humanity is doomed; we learn via news reports (anchored by Duck from Mad Men) that a last ditch effort to send a space shuttle to destroy Matilda failed with all lives lost. Matilda strikes in 21 days (though a late joke about that ETA earns big laughs) and soon everyone will be dead. Carell plays another of the frowning on the outside, crying on the inside, grin-and-bear-it schlubs so different from Michael Scott he has mastered portraying in his movies, but this might be his finest performance. Carell's wife, played by his real life wife Nancy Carell, literally runs away from him "as fast as a human being possibly can". In the midst of mass riots and drunken, promiscuous "end of the world" parties everyone else is throwing, Carell learns that he is next door neighbors with Knightley, a British free spirit ("I'm an optimist!") who can't return to England to see her family because the apocalypse has permanently grounded all commercial air travel. Their soon-to-end lives thrown together, Carell and Knightley hit the road together, so he might find the missing love of his life and then take her to someone who owns an airplane so she can see her family. Along the way they encounter a plethora of funny people, including Connie Britton, Patton Oswalt, TJ Miller, Gillian Jacobs, Amy Schumer, Rob Corddry, and Martin Sheen. Carell and Knightley share an unlikely but palpable chemistry as they slowly get to know one another while ticking off the hours until the world ends. Filled to the brim with gallows humor, Seeking a Friend is really about connection and humanity, backed by writer-director Lorene Scafaria's obvious and persuasive love of songs by The Walker Brothers, Wang Chung, PM Dawn and INXS (it's a great soundtrack). Staying honest and true to their characters no matter how dire the world has become, Seeking a Friend earns its touching conclusion to Carell and Knightley's story. I'm glad I got to know those two; their final moments together in the movie are my favorite thing.

Prometheus

PROMETHEUS

** SPOILERS **

For months, Prometheus played coy about whether or not it is a prequel to Alien. It absolutely is a prequel to Alien. With Prometheus, director Sir Ridley Scott returns to his old outer space stomping grounds. The trappings are familiar, visually stunning and, at its best moments, truly thrilling: a starship in deep space, its crew in cryo-sleep woken by a human-like robot whose behavior they question, a hostile-environment planetoid they land on, a gruesome-looking vessel they explore, and the disgusting, malignant monsters they encounter, which will not stop until they kill them all. Unlike Alien, a horror tale of a locked box of humans trapped with a monster, Prometheus has other ideas, other questions it's looking to address, especially the big one: Who Created Mankind? Prometheus has the hubris to offer a direct answer. 

Prometheus, in the Greek myths, stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. In Prometheus, set a mere 80 years from our present but optimistically positing that corporations have the technology and financial resources to fund deep space expeditions, human explorers led by scientists Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green (a dead ringer for Tom Hardy) are funded by the Weyland Corporation to travel to a distant world seeking the origins of Man. In 2089, Rapace and Marshall-Green found star maps in archaeological sites around Earth. They believe these point to a planet that promises the answer to Who Created Us? Four years later, the gorgeous, trillion-dollar starship Prometheus and her crew, captained with swagger by Idris Elba and cooly overseen by Charlize Theron, land on the planet LV-223. They, and we, get our answers, and horrors, and deaths, and Aliens.

Rapace calls Man's potential progenitors "The Engineers". We know them as jacked, bald, ivory-skinned giants, one of whom eats an Alien substance that shatters their DNA and turns them to dust at the start of the movie. If these are the guys who made Mankind, they're probably not worth meeting, except to find out what kind of core workout they use to get their eight-pack abs. But Rapace doesn't know that, so she optimistically leads her team into a familiar H.R. Giger-inspired construct on LV-223. Her group includes The Hatchet-Faced British Woman, The Japanese Guy, The Guy Who Actually Wrote Shakespeare's Plays, The American Guy With Glasses, and the Redhead Who Looks Exactly Like WWE Superstar Sheamus. This is about the level we get to know the characters, most of whom we instinctively know are Alien fodder. There are other members of the crew who pop up here and there, mostly hanging around the hangar bay. None of them wear red shirts, but we know what their role is.

The most intriguing character in Prometheus is David, the robot played by Michael Fassbender, no doubt constructed to be well-equipped down there. David, curious about humanity, watches the dreams of the crew in cryo-sleep and adjusts his own effete, British look and manners based on watching Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia over and over. The intriguing philosophical questions Prometheus would like us to ponder are posed by David, but you can see how saying things like "It must feel like your god has abandoned you" to Rapace irritates the human crew. David is serving a different, sinister agenda, however, and directly feeds an unwitting Marshall-Green a dollop of Alien DNA in his champagne. The old Alien in the champagne trick! Works every time.

The best human characters on Prometheus are Elba as the captain and Theron as Weyland corporation head honcho Meredith Vickers, simply because both convey the clearest and most relatable motivations among the cast. Elba wants this mission to go well, then lift off and go home. Theron would like the same, but with a healthy and prudent distrust of the scientists, the android with them, and the company she works for. Theron, ever fetching and imminently watchable, is in the toughest, most thankless spot, responsible for everyone and everything. Elba can't help but notice how tightly wound she is and a flirtation between them is the sole sexy and funny moment Prometheus offers. Less sexy is a love scene between Rapace and Marshall-Green, as we know by that point he's been infected by an Alien. As soon as Rapace announces she's unable to have children, we know where this is headed. Unprotected sex has horrific consequences, especially in space, and especially in an Alien movie.

Rapace's team are initially presented as a group of intelligent scientists and professionals who are, naturally, wary of why they find themselves billions of miles from Earth - especially after a less than inspiring speech by the ancient Chairman of the Weyland Corporation, which turns out to be Guy Pearce in ghastly, unconvincing old man makeup. The facade of competent professionalism is shattered almost immediately when they're exploring the caves and they all decide to take their helmets off - completely disregarding any protocols about contamination. "Helmets Off" becomes the new protocol, even when they all know their enemy will literally jump down their throats. They see holograms of the "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi" kind all over the caves and find the decapitated head and body of an Engineer, which is curiously wearing the Dream helmet of Morpheus in The Sandman. So The Engineers are actually Sandman cosplayers! Once Rapace and Hatchet-Face performed forensics on The Engineer's head and it exploded, the practical move would have been to pack up and send Prometheus home. But it is the folly of Man to not leave well enough alone.

Things get worse, much worse. The two biggest fraidy cats on the crew, American With Glasses and Sheamus, are left behind to spend the night in the caves and meet a disgusting Alien eel that they pretend is a cuddly kind of puppy or something. Soon they are dead, burned with acid blood with the alien burrowed in their bodies. Marshall-Green transforms immediately into a mutated Alien that Charlize personally and correctly lights up with a flamethrower. Matters get even worse from there as Rapace discovers she's pregnant with an Alien. Fassbender's bedside manner is hilarious as he delivers the single worst line a pregnant woman can hear: "Of  course, this is not a traditional fetus." Rapace rushing across the ship to get into the surgery pod and have the robot arms literally carve the Alien, with its grasping, screaming tendrils and tentacles, right out of her babymaker and then staple her stomach back together is a horrifically bloody, gonzo sequence that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for Prometheus as a serious science fiction parable. 

From there we discover two things: old Guy Pearce is alive on the ship and there is an Engineer alive on the planet. The trains shall meet and it shall be a train wreck. In perhaps the most disappointing moment of First Contact since Kirk, Spock and McCoy met "God" and He turned out to be just some alien asshole, David awakens The Engineer, speaks to him, and we hope and wait for something profound, an idea, a transcendent moment... Nope. The Engineer decides to just start punching, ripping them apart, and kill them all. What a dick, and what a letdown. The dying old man Weyland came all the way to LV-223 but didn't get to say, Roy Batty-style, "I want more life, fucker." The Engineer activates his ship and launches for Earth... with a cargo hold full of millions of urns containing Aliens. Why does The Engineer want to annihilate humanity and replace us with Aliens - which by the way, they are terrified of and can kill them as well? Rapace wants to know, but first things first: The Engineer's ship can't be allowed to leave LV-223.

Unfortunately, Prometheus isn't armed with nukes, photon torpedoes, phasers, or anything of the sort. Poor Charlize has to rush into a space suit and launch into an escape pod as Elba makes a damn heroic decision and channels Mr. Worf -- ramming speed! Incidentally, having The Japanese Guy as the pilot of the ship on its kamikazi mission is a bold choice, Sir Ridley. Prometheus successfully destroys itself and brings the alien ship crashing down on the surface of LV-223, right on top of poor Charlize, who undeservedly dies the ignoble death of being squished by a space ship. But The Engineer is not dead, nor is Rapace's Alien baby, both of which chase her into Charlize's escape pod and run into each other. A more familiar-looking Alien (still a comedown from the original H.R. Giger design, but it's a proto-Alien) chest-bursts from their union. 

Meanwhile, Rapace is contacted by a still-functioning David and the two of them, despite him being a decapitated robot and her suffering from numerous injuries - including just giving birth via C-section to an Alien - as well as unreasonable physical and emotional trauma, push believability well past its breaking point when they somehow get another Engineer ship space worthy. Are they going to home to Earth? No, Rapace wants to go to the Engineer homeworld and demand answers. Yeah, ask them why oh why they made Aliens to begin with. Lady, you're insane. Good luck with that. And yet, despite the whole shebang spiraling out of control in a dizzying barrage of illogic, explosions and bewildering behavior, Sir Ridley Scott, like a maestro, shows us things we people wouldn't believe.

Snow White and the Huntsman

SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN

** SPOILERS **

Snow White and the Huntsman is as empty as the core of a poison apple. Blending lush, sumptuous production values with a plodding, threadbare story, #SWATH, as is its preferred hashtag on Twitter, is like Game of Thrones for dummies, right down to the seven Imps and the blonde brother and sister strongly implied to be humping. In a fairy tale world closely resembling medieval England, including Snow White uttering Christian prayers, evil Charlize Theron bamboozles the King into marrying her in a day and then stabbed him in their honeymoon bed. Everyone in the castle loyal to the dead King immediately skedaddled once Charlize easily won the game of thrones.

Now Queen, Charlize goes on to do absolutely nothing but frown miserably and fret to her creepy moron brother and her liquid gold magic mirror about how she can stay eternally young. You see, Charlize is a sorceress who can remain immortal, but she has to do things like eat bird hearts and suck in the life force of comely maidens. She's also immune to being stabbed. Charlize doesn't enjoy herself in the slightest as Queen, but we can all agree being a miserable young-ish monarch beats being old and poor. The magic mirror tells her, at least ten years into her reign, that the answer to all her problems is Snow White, the fairest of them all. Charlize has to eat her heart, or something (the mirror was vague), and she'll instantly look like a movie star forever, and not like she did when she won an Oscar for Monster. The mirror does warn that only Snow White can kill Charlize, so that's troublesome.

Kristen Stewart is Princess Snow White, whom Charlize locked in a tower the day she killed her royal daddy. Charlize then apparently forgot all about her. Stewart is still considered the fairest of them all, despite rotting in a dank stone cell uneducated and not shaving her legs for a decade. Yet for some reason, Charlize allowed her leather pants and boots, which come in very handy when Stewart escapes captivity and goes on the lam. Stewart absconds to the Tim Burton Dark Forest, where magic mushrooms shoot psychedelic mist in her face and really trips her out, man. Whoa, does that tree, like, have bat wings?! To track Stewart down, Charlize enlists the help of Chris Hemsworth, the Huntsman of Thunder, a swarthy but honorable drunk who swings the uru ax Mjolnir. Hemsworth takes not very long at all to decide helping Stewart escape to the Duke's castle, the Duke being the only guy loyal to the King but hasn't done anything to rise up against Charlize for a decade, is better than helping that bitch on the throne. 

Thus, Snow White and the Huntsman spend what seems like an eternity wandering across the land Lord of the Rings-style trying to get to the Duke's castle while chased by all the Queen's horses and men. They spend the night in the Fishing Village of Scarfaced Ladies then find their way into Live Action Disney Forest, where they meet the Seven Dwarves. The Dwarves are fine British actors like Ian McShane, Toby Jones, Ray Winstone and Nick Frost, whose heads are computer generated into actual dwarves' bodies. When Stewart wanders off and meets Harry Potter's Patronus, a silver stag, everyone realizes Snow White is magic and decides to help her kill Charlize. Charlize, really stressed out as she grows more and more wizened and crone-like in her castle, goes on a rare field trip. She takes the form of Stewart's childhood boyfriend and feeds her a poisoned apple. Then Snow White dies. The End.

As I was getting ready to leave the theater, I learned to my dismay it wasn't The End. Stewart is merely in a coma, but I say she was faking it like Buster Bluth on Arrested Development. She was faking it so she could get a kiss from teary-eyed Thor. #KissFromThor wakes Stewart up and, once she realizes she isn't a vampire, she gives an earnest but considerably less-than-Braveheart-level speech to get everyone to follow her into war against the Queen. Hemsworth compliments Stewart that she looks "quite fetching in [chain]mail". She does, indeed. Meanwhile, no one gave Hemsworth any armor. No armor for a mere Huntsman? 

And so it was Kristen Stewart led an army in full heraldry to siege her father's castle. With her best "Grrr! Here I come!" face usually reserved for Edward Cullen, Stewart somehow survives flaming catapults, a hail of arrows, boiling oil and a clusterfuck of a battle long enough to make it into the Queen's chambers to confront Charlize. Too bad she didn't train to fight or swing a sword or anything. Hemsworth taught her one basic block-and-stab maneuver in the forest. Sure enough, it's all she needs when an overconfident Charlize got too close as she reached to pluck her heart from her chest. As the magic mirror foretold, only Stewart is (arguably) pretty enough to kill beautiful Charlize. Snow White and the Huntsman finally ends with the curious sight of Kristen Stewart crowned as Queen of what's essentially England, even though she routinely forgets to speak with a British accent throughout the movie. No one at that coronation looks happily ever after.

Piranha 3DD

PIRANHA 3DD

** SPOILERS **

"Welcome to Rock Bottom."

Truer words were never spoken. The man who utters them, David Hasselhoff, ends up dominating the latter portion of Piranha 3DD, hogging up the lion's share of screen time while a fish massacre occurs in the water park behind him. To reward him for signing on to play himself, the 1,200 credited producers for Piranha 3DD treated The Hoff like he's Marlon Brando. What terrible disease does Hasselhoff have to pay for that he took this blatant cash grab? Oh right, alcoholism. 

Piranha 3D was lightning in a fish tank. For some reason - that reason being go for broke, utter, gleeful shamelessness - Piranha 3D worked like a charm. The naughty je ne sais quoi of the original is completely missing from this half-baked, bottom-feeding sequel. Although to their credit - is "credit" the right word? No. - the sequel does remember a piranha ate a penis in the first one so they do it again, this time with some John Wayne Bobbit action and with a riff on Alien starring Katrina Bowden from 30 Rock for good measure. You'd think a girl would notice if a day ago, a piranha swam up her vagina. Think again.

A year after the events in the first movie, a water park in Merkin County (heh) called The Big Wet ("3DDs Swim for Free!") owned by sleazeball Todd Packer from The Office is threatened by another swarm of disgusting CGI piranha. Warned by returning piranha scientist Christopher Lloyd, Packer's stepdaughter, "marine biologist" Danielle Panabaker and her charmless, dim bulb friends are all that stand in the way of a much less gory, much less interesting or entertaining repeat of fish-on-man death dealing. Also having a walk on, to an extent, is comeback kid Ving Rhames, who tries to overcome his newfound fear of water and briefly fights off the piranha like Rose McGowan in Planet Terror. This is a movie where a toy plastic trident is the deadliest weapon known to man or piranha.

What results is predicable but no fun. The nudity is upped in quantity but not in quality - nothing here comes close to the underwater skinny dipping ballet performed by Riley Steele and Kelly Brook in Piranha 3D. Elizabeth Shue and Adam Scott, or any remains of him, are nowhere to be found. All that's left is cheapo, amateurish shlock clocking in at a little over an hour plus 10 minutes of bloopers over the credits, mostly starring Hasselhoff. 3DD gives the Piranha franchise a bad name.

Chernobyl Diaries

CHERNOBYL DIARIES

** SPOILERS **

Like the movie title The Neverending Story, I can think of at least one thing wrong with the title Chernobyl Diaries: no one in the movie keeps a diary, about Chernobyl or otherwise. That's like if no one in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants wore traveling pants. Chernobyl Diaries, from the producers of the smash phenomenon Paranormal Activity, outdoes Paranormal Activity in setting its stock horror tale in an eerie, haunting real place in the real world. Set in the abandoned ghost city of Pripyat, a stone's throw from the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant, Chernobyl Diaries makes effective use of its location. It's a shame the horror the movie inflicts on its half-dozen thrill seeking youngsters on an "extreme" vacation in Russia doesn't live up to the potential of the location. Two brothers, two girls, and an English couple ignore warnings and good sense in order to explore the ruins of Pripyat under the aegis of their burly Russian tour guide (the most interesting guy in the whole picture). When the wires of their guide's van are cut, they are remarkably slow on the uptake that a bear didn't sabotage their vehicle. Soon they are attacked, in a confusing, illogical manner, first by radioactive dogs, and then by bald, radioactive Russian vampire-types, a whole civilization of which seems to live in the irradiated shell of the Chernobyl plant. Despite vastly outnumbering the tourists, the radioactive Russians still play horror movie games like sending out a little girl (with hair) to distract them so they can kidnap them from the shadows. A cat and mouse chase that leads directly into the still-hazardous nuclear reactor provides some ghastly consequences but it's too little too late. Interest irrevocably depletes once it settles in that the characters are beyond screwed with no chance of survival and no real answers as to why any of this happened are provided. Chernobyl Diaries is bleak and pointless, though a wink to Blinky the three-eyed fish from The Simpsons did provide one genuine LOL.

Battleship

BATTLESHIP

** SPOILERS **

What's the opposite of pride that you paid money to watch a movie in a movie theater? Shame? What's worse than shame? Battleship. In the noisy and excruciating Battleship, we humans built giant beacons on top of the mountains of Oahu (the Hawaiians must have been delighted to have their natural wonders defaced) to send a beacon to an Earth-like planet detected millions of miles away. The aliens took us up on our invitation to come to Earth and play Battleship with us, but these aliens are so incompetent, they crashed their communications ship into one of our satellites while entering the atmosphere; the debris of their ship lands in and wrecks Hong Kong while the rest of their fleet lands in the Pacific near Hawaii with no radar or means of communications. I believe this is what the movie says is what happened. Meanwhile, the US Navy is playing war games and gets caught in a force field the aliens erect over Hawaii, rendering their fleet without radar either. So now, both sets of fleets "can't see" each other - except they can because their ships are usually close enough to shoot each other - and thus can play the game Battleship with real ships, real guns, real explosions and real dying. Playing for the humans are the Dillion Panthers, led by Tim Riggins himself, Taylor Kitsch, a screw up of a lieutenant commander with poor character, terrible decision-making skills, and a yellow streak down his back. Landry is there too. So is Rihanna for some reason. There's also Admiral Liam Neeson, but he's largely benched; Neeson is in the movie for about ten minutes tops. Meanwhile, Kitsch's supermodel girlfriend Brooklyn Decker is inexplicably in a movie of her own; she's a physical therapist trudging through the Oahu mountains with The Man With No Legs, and they run afoul of the aliens, who are humanoids dressed like Master Chief from Halo. And get this, the aliens came all the way to Earth but they're vulnerable to sunlight. Battleship assaults the audience with relentless, mind-numbing nonsense, as our Navy sailors lose the game and get all their ships sunk, until the last hurrah when Kitsch and his crew re-commission the ancient USS Missouri, complete with the original crew from World War II and Korea manning the steam engines and guns, to sink the alien ships and save the world. No one ever says "You sank my battleship!", but that sinking feeling lingers long after one leaves the theater.

The Dictator

THE DICTATOR

** SPOILERS **

The Dictator, a rude, ribald comedic gift to the Zionist West, is a bit of a cinematic departure for Sacha Baron Cohen. The wildly successful and beloved Borat and its follow up, the less successful and less loved Bruno were both loosely scripted ambush comedies featuring Baron Cohen immersed in method character playing bumbling foreigners confronting both common and celebrity Americans, awkwardly but hilariously revealing prejudices about race, religion, and political correctness. The Dictator is strictly a scripted comedy, though no less fearless, shameless, and  incredibly funny, with Baron Cohen once more playing a bumbling foreigner gleefully riffing on Western bias towards the Middle East as well as poking fun at every race, creed, and cultural ideal under the sun. Baron Cohen goes back to the well with a different bucket and finds it overflowing once again. The titular Dictator Baron Cohen plays is Admiral-General Aladeen, idiot supreme ruler of the oil-rich North African nation of Wadiya and the last of the great dictators -- his peers like Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, and Gaddafi are no longer with us. On a visit to the United Nations, Aladeen finds himself unwittingly embroiled in a plot to replace him as dictator and have him executed the way he executed hundreds of people who displeased him in some way or another, like maybe, possibly questioning his intelligence. Aladeen finds himself lost in New York City, but befriends a crunchy organic grocer played by Anna Faris, a relationship that strains belief as if one were tugging on Aladeen's Beard of Doom. Somehow Aladeen must reclaim his position as supreme ruler of Wadiya and maybe learn a little something about democracy along the way. To say more would ruin the multitude of gut-busting gags, though it all leads to a monologue by Baron Cohen about how Americans couldn't possibly understand what it would be like to live under a dictatorship that is a scathing and devastating indictment of our current cultural and political landscape. The Dictator falls in between Borat and Bruno, but upticking towards the crowd-pleasing qualities of Borat. It's a very Aladeen comedy. The Dictator is so Aladeen, it redefines the word Aladeen. Though parts of it may be too Aladeen for some. 

Dark Shadows

DARK SHADOWS

** SPOILERS **

The entirety of Dark Shadows' budget must have gone to Tim Burton's Verizon bill because he totally phoned it in. The latest patented crazy costume/goofy accent love fest between Burton and his manly muse Johnny Depp is a visually sumptuous but lackadaisical affair where Depp plays Barnabas Collins, a vampyre buried alive (er, undead-alive) in the 1760s and resurfaces in 1972. A bona fide family man, Barnabas must reestablish himself as the paterfamilias to the descendants of his line, his great great great -- whatever -- there's Michelle Pfeiffer, Chloe Grace Moretz, Jonny Lee Miller, and, because this is a Tim Burton Joint, there's also Helena Bonham Carter, who is of no relation to anyone in the Collins clan but lives in their giant gothic mansion anyway. How Barnabas, who was unlucky (to say the least) in love and never sired any children before becoming a vampire, even has descendants is a question Dark Shadows avoids like a vampire avoids direct contact with sunlight. Two amusing runners of Deppula trying to find a comfortable place to sleep (sometimes upside down) and anachronism jokes of this old-timey bloodsucker out of place in the culture of the Me Decade fleetingly distract from what Dark Shadows is really about: two immortal entities trying to control the fishing business of their sleepy town in Maine. The other immortal is Eva Green, a slinky, snarling witch who wants Depp's loins but cursed him to vampirism and then spent two centuries grinding the Collins family under her proverbial heel. Speaking of snarling, Moretz keeps her lips in a perpetual curl and speaks in a constant rasp: by this point in her young acting career, she has now played every monster archetype in the Twilight franchise (she was much better -- than Depp, even -- when she played a vampire in a much better film). All is resolved in a special effects action set piece where the Collins clan is basically revealed to be the Munsters. The kids of today should defend themselves against the vampire soap opera remakes of the 70s.

Marvel's The Avengers

MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS

** SPOILERS **

On The Simpsons, Milhouse once lamented, "When are we gonna get to the fireworks factory?!" For Marvel's The Avengers, the answer is about two hours in, although a lot of shit blows up well before the spectacular alien invasion closes the picture. Four years and five previous Marvel movies in the making, writer-director Joss Whedon helms The Avengers into movie theaters to a global audience that largely made up its mind to love it well before anyone in the movie ever utters the famed battlecry, "Avengers Assemble!". Which, by the way, never happens. The Avengers are here and they will kick ass and save the world. And if they can't, they'll damn sure avenge it, whatever that means.

A lean, mean fighting machine, the two and half hours of The Avengers isn't. Culling from previous plot points from Thor, a cosmic cube of limitless energy called The Tesseract has landed on Earth and is in the possession of SHIELD, the paramilitary security force of men in black and attractive women in tight-fitting jumpsuits headed by Col. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). Loki (Tom Hiddleston), the Asgardian god of mischief and (adopted) brother of the Mighty Thor (Chris Hemsworth) was rescued from his predicament of floating through space by a bunch of reptilian aliens. He gets a pretty sweet deal from them: go to Earth, get the Tesseract, and use it to open a wormhole so that they can invade the Earth, and after they kill all humans, Loki gets to rule what's left. Loki is down with this plan but then, he's a god with no other options.

To achieve his end of the deal, Loki comes to Earth and mind controls some SHIELD folks, including Thor alumnus Stellan Skarsgard and SHIELD's expert marksman Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). They steal the Tesseract and head off to parts unknown (Germany, it turns out). In response to this imminent global threat, Fury calls upon The Avengers Initiative, which was an idea of gathering up the world's burgeoning superpeople and getting them to fight as a superteam. This idea was scrapped at the behest of "The (Jedi) Council", a bunch of faces on screens lead by Powers Booth, who yell at Fury and bark orders at him. Orders Fury feels free to ignore at his whim, which he does throughout the movie. Whenever the Council overrides Fury, Fury just launches RPGs at their jets and overrides them right back. This is some organization protecting us, SHIELD is. At least our taxes are going to one bad ass looking Helicarrier.

With help from the perpetually pouty Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) with the lovingly photographed black leather-clad derriere, Fury assembles his super team, including the First Avenger recently unfrozen from ice, Captain America (Chris Evans), lovable wise cracking super rich brilliant inventor and dashing rogue Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), who is publicly Iron Man, and troubled gamma scientist Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo, replacing Edward Norton, who replaced Eric Bana), who becomes the Incredible Hulk (affectionately referred to constantly as "The Other Guy") whenever he gets angry. And, as Banner later points out, "I'm always angry!"  Soon after, Thor shows up because, well, it was time for Thor to show up. (Note that the Marvel girlfriends get shout outs: Gwyneth Paltrow barefoot cameos as Stark's lover Pepper Potts and the whereabouts of Natalie Portman, Thor's girl Dr. Jane Foster, are specifically addressed. No love for Liv Tyler, Dr. Banner's babe Betty Ross, alas.)

In Marvel Comics tradition, the heroes immediately start fighting. Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America get acquainted by using their superpowers to beat the bejezzus out of each other. Once they're done throwing Uru hammers, repulsor rays, and indestructible vibranium shields, they just argue amongst themselves with spot-on hilarious patented Joss Whedon snappy patter. What they should be doing is looking for the Tesseract, which Stark and Banner are onto, except they never do locate it. They get too distracted by arguing. It doesn't matter anyway since Loki's people just conveniently put it on the roof of Stark's Tower in New York City (complete with convenient force field that can't be penetrated until the exact moment Black Widow can, right when she needs to.) It's also doubtful whether Loki himself can fully explain just exactly what he was doing, beat for beat, during the entire movie. He was not lacking for seething speeches of his superiority, but what, pray tell, was he doing besides swinging a scepter around and getting into shouting matches with Thor and Tony Stark?

Once the heaping amount of exposition is dealt with, The Avengers gets down to business, first with an assault on the SHIELD Helicarrier that catches our heroes with their pants down. Except for the Hulk, who gets unleashed for the first time, and his purple pants stay on. A death trap designed for the Hulk by SHIELD gets used on Loki and then ends up trapping Thor, but said death trap - dropping the superhuman 30,000 feet - should probably go back to the drawing board since the super beings it was designed to trap don't end up in death, not by a longshot. However, the heroes learn to work together and save the Helicarrier. There's some dissension when the Avengers discover SHIELD wasn't just using the Tesseract as a means to develop renewable energy but to also develop super weapons to kill super beings and aliens, but no one seems too upset about it once the aliens finally do arrive in New York City.

A weakness of the previous Marvel movies have been underwhelming third acts, but The Avengers saved its best for last, with a sustained 30+ minute battle sequence of furious scope and wanton destruction.When the Avengers assemble in New York to repel the aliens and their enormous armored flying eel creatures, The Avengers settles into a groove of non-stop superpowered action that makes the long, strange journey of getting there ultimate(s)ly worth it. The aliens, indistinguishable, personality-devoid, and, it turns out, controlled by a central mothership, are basically CGI bowling pins for the Avengers to knock down.

Every superhero is given moments of marvelous derring-do: Captain America confidently assigns battle strategies and holds the street level, Black Widow and Hawkeye perform more human than human stunts of bravery, Iron Man zips through the skies taking out aliens and giant armored eels alike, Thor calls down the thunder, and the Hulk -- the Hulk absolutely steals the show. (Ignore, if you wish, the plot hole of Banner somehow making it to the New York war zone on a Vespa despite being separated from the group by several hundred miles.) Whedon's Hulk is a mean, green smashing machine delivering the two biggest laugh out loud moments in the entire picture, at the expense of Thor and his brother Loki. After two previous cinematic misfires, the pure, perfect essence of the Incredible Hulk in a motion picture is finally captured by Whedon and the formula is ingeniously simple: instead of human soldiers hunting Hulk, simply let Hulk smash alien soldiers and demi-gods without regret or fear of reprisal to his gamma-irradiated heart's content. Satisfying and hilarious.

Whedon, the creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and one of Hollywood's greatest advocates of strong female characters, devotes his emphasis on the only girl Avenger, Black Widow, the voluptuous, mournful Russian spy with "a particular skillset" and "a lot of red on her ledger". (Uh huh.) Operating in his favored wheelhouse, Whedon gives Black Widow a tragic backstory of death and regret, including an ill-defined torrid past with Hawkeye, and even a Hannibal Lecter/Clarice Starling-like scene with Loki. Whedon then apes through familiar Buffy ground, with Black Widow fighting off demons, monsters, and aliens, including a pulse-pounding sequence of being stalked and nearly killed in the cramped tunnels of the Helicarrier by the rampaging Hulk.  Whedon's mission was clear: make Black Widow essential the way she never was in Iron Man 2. Please like Black Widow enough after this and she may get her own movie after all, a first for a superheroine under the current Marvel/Disney regime. 

Despite the overwhelming odds against them, and the final act of heroic sacrifice by Iron Man that ended the invasion with a big bang, there's never truly a sense the Avengers can or will fail. They don't. They get tired and beaten up during the fight, sure - them's a lot of aliens - but the Avengers keep on ticking from all the lickings they're given. The Avengers suffers a tragic loss, the beloved Son of Coul (Clark Gregg) falls in the line of duty, which is a damn shame since he was the only SHIELD agent with a discernible personality. Midtown Manhattan is leveled to the cost of billions and billions of dollars, but the Avengers have other concerns. They'll assemble again, in 2014, when a Mad God from Titan in love with Death, comes calling like he promised over the closing credits.