Sucker Punch

Posted on March 24, 2011 at 10:13 pm

Girls in thigh-hi stockings and tiny spangled miniskirts take on steam-powered corpses, WWI bi-planes, samurai robots, and an angry dragon, along with a series of odiously predatory men in the latest film from Zack Snyder. His versions of “300” and “Watchmen” overwhelmed the storylines with striking, provocative visuals. Here, he solves that problem by pretty much not having any storyline at all. He literally and metaphorically cuts to the chase. It’s not so much punch, a bit more sucker.

Baby Doll is a young girl in blond pigtails, framed for her sister’s murder and thrown into a nightmarish mental hospital by her abusive step-father. Emily Browning plays her with just two facial expressions, which I came to think of as “Mom said I can’t go to the mall until I finish my math homework” and “I really want to go to the mall.” The step-father pays a corrupt orderly (Oscar Isaac, in the film’s best performance) to have Baby Doll lobotomized so that she cannot tell anyone what he has done, and that he tried to molest her after her mother died. She enters a dingy lounge area called “the theater,” where a sympathetic therapist (Carla Gugino, sounding like Natasha from “Rocky and Bullwinkle”) is encouraging the patients (all young and very hot women) to re-enact their stories.

The rest of the movie is best summarized by the song memorably performed by En Vogue: “Free your mind and the rest will follow.” Baby Doll then either sees or imagines the hospital as a brothel, run by the evil Blue (Isaac again, in sharkskin suit and gigolo-style mustache), where the girls are forced to dance for the customers. Baby Doll has the ability to mesmerize men with her dances, which somehow turn into deliriously deranged gamer-style battle sequences as she and the other girls must, in classic computer game tradition, obtain a map, fire, a knife, a key, and make some unknown sacrifice to achieve freedom.

They could have had fun with this, but instead everyone acts as though it is deadly serious, and so it just drags. The other girls, played by Jena Malone, Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, and Jamie Chung, are supposed to be tough but vulnerable, but they look absurd, racing around on heels in skimpy costumes as they fight with swords and guns, as though they believe they are exemplifying female empowerment and solidarity instead of parodying it. It is sad to see these talented actresses feel that they have no other opportunity for career advancement than to appear in this dispiriting dreck. A movie about finding freedom from that prison would be something worth seeing.

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Limitless

Posted on March 17, 2011 at 6:16 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving a drug, violence including disturbing images, sexuality and language
Profanity:	Strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Plot concerns a performance-enhancing superdrug,
Violence/ Scariness:	Some intense and graphic violence
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	March 18, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	July 18, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0051MKNV8

Most of us feel that there must be some way for us to unleash the best version of ourselves. Whole sections of bookstores, whole shelves of vitamins, dozens of infomercials, motivational speakers, and guides to personal growth, self-actualization, and personal and professional success are evidence of the powerful human sense that there must be some trick to getting us out of our own way. So, if someone offered you a pill that would do all that for you, you’d probably be tempted to give it a try.

That’s what happens to Eddie (Bradley Cooper) in this stylish thriller. He’s a guy who feels like a loser. He has yet to write a single word of the book he is supposed to be working on. His girlfriend (Abbie Cornish as Lindy) has dumped him. He lives in a dive and he is out of money and out of ideas. He has just about lost touch entirely with any notion of himself as a person in control, a person on track, a person with a sense of possibility. He runs into his former brother-in-law, who says he has moved on from selling street drugs to selling legal pharmaceuticals and offers him something new and special, a small, circular, clear little performance-enhancing pill. Eddie swallows it.

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It hits him like a combination of Ritalin, steroids, speed, and super-powerful ginkgo biloba. It hits him like spinach hits Popeye, if it grew his brain instead of his muscles. Suddenly, everything makes sense. Eddie has focus, confidence, motivation, clarity. The scales drop from his eyes. Everything makes sense to him, information, numbers, people. He can effortlessly access any information he has ever skimmed over, even if he was unaware of it at the time. He finishes writing his book in four days and it is a masterpiece. He can learn new languages almost instantly. He gets a haircut, cleans up his apartment, starts to work out. He gets Lindy back. He starts investing and the money pours in. A billionaire (Robert De Niro) makes him an offer.

But there’s a problem. Eddie becomes dependent on the drug. He keeps upping his dose and he starts to have black-outs. His ex-wife gives him a shattering glimpse of what it means to go cold turkey. The dealer has been murdered. Eddie has a stash, but no way to get more. Other people know about the drug and they desperately want him to get it for them. Can he out-think other out-thinkers?

Cooper has become one of Hollywood’s most appealing leading men and this movie, which he co-produced, plays to his strengths. If he is not exactly convincing as the pony-tailed mess at the beginning, he has all of the genuine movie star gloss to make the newer, better Eddie look, as Dolly used to sing, better than a body has a right to. Director Neil Burger keeps the movie amped up, making us feel a little wired as we watch. It’s fun to get inside the head of someone working at 500 percent capacity, seeing how he thinks through his options, trying to maintain control internally and externally, balancing the swings between extraordinary powers and terrifying dependence and vulnerability.

Even those of average intelligence to spot the problems Eddie overlooks — or the obvious solution it takes him the entire running time to figure out. But it is still a lot of stylish fun to see Bradley Cooper inhabit the fantasy — and deal with the fallout.

Paul

Posted on March 17, 2011 at 6:01 pm

Director Greg Mottola (“Superbad,” “Adventureland”) is an expert at mixing raunch and sweetness. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (“Shaun of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz”) are experts at making funny but knowing and affectionate tributes to movie genres. Together, they’ve made an uneven but amiable road trip sci-fi comedy about an alien with sly references to everything from “Star Trek” and “2001” to “Alien” and “Battlestar Gallactica.” And, of course, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “ET.”

It begins, as all pop-culture-obsessed stories should, at Comic-Con, the annual San Diego fanboy extravaganza. Two English fans, Graeme (Pegg) and Clive (Frost) begin their long-awaited first visit to America, starting at Comic-Con and continuing on a road trip to Area 51, Roswell, and other legendary UFO locations. They happily put an “Alien On Board” bumper sticker on their camper. But that doesn’t mean they are prepared to actually have a close encounter of their own.

And certainly Paul (stoner-ish voice of Seth Rogan) is not at all what they had in mind. He immediately reassures them that the business about the probes is just an urban legend. He’s been on Earth for quite a while, so he has had a chance not just to absorb a lot of American culture but to influence it as well (Steven Spielberg has a clever cameo). He thought he was a guest, but has learned he was a prisoner. Now a fed (Jason Bateman) and a pair of cops (“SNL’s” Bill Hader and Joe Lo Truglio) are after him and Graeme and Clive are in for an adventure beyond their wildest dreams, which were already pretty wild (as shown in their comic book).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5ipZwwQPcY

They meet a variety of people along the way, including Jane Lynch as a sympathetic waitress and Kristin Wiig as Ruth, a fundamentalist Christian with a bad eye who wears a creationist t-shirt showing Jesus shooting Darwin. Paul and the Brits cause her to have massive cognitive dissonance, questioning everything she has ever believed. Wiig manages to make Ruth’s child-like delight in catching up on a lifetime of unused swearwords is sweetly innocent. Mottola keeps things going briskly with some surprising cameos as more people join the chase, including Ruth’s gun-totin’, Bible-thumpin’ father, some angry biker types, a woman whose life was transformed by a close encounter with Paul when he first landed, and the head of the shady government agency trying to capture Paul before he makes it to the mother ship. The crudity, drug humor, and attempted satire about fundamentalism fall flat most of the time, but the affectionate understanding of fanboys and their obsessions, the unpretentious sweetness of the friendship and budding romance, and a couple of plot surprises make this something to phone home about.

Battle: Los Angeles

Posted on March 11, 2011 at 3:40 pm

Destined to be remembered primarily as yet another step toward closing the gap between games and movies, the essence of “Battle: Lost Angeles” is a lot of boom-boom and a bunch of “ooo-rah.” And essence is all it is; no room here for anything but action. That’s a good thing because every time they start talking, you hope for the chases and explosions to start up again.

We see that the world is under attack and then we see 24 hours earlier, just enough time for brief introductions to the characters we’ll be following. Come on, say it along with me! Seen-it-all and seen-too-much vet on his last assignment, still struggling with survivor guilt over the men who died on his watch, innocent from the sticks whose mother signed for him to enlist at 17, guy about to get married, Navy corpsman earning his American citizenship and hoping to become a doctor, team leader just out of Officers Training School and about to become a father, etc. etc. It doesn’t matter much because pretty soon they will all be wearing so much gear and running around so fast we will hardly be able to tell them apart.

At first, it appears to be meteor showers that for some reason were undetected until they were about to crash off the coast of California and some other regions. But then we learn that the objects hurtling toward earth are slowing on descent; they are mechanical. And then stuff starts blowing up in a “textbook military operation” from another planet. And they have all the intel. We know nothing about who they are, what they want, what weapons they have, and basically, how to stop them from the complete annihilation that appears to be their goal. Troops are mobilized and deployed, with circumstances changing so quickly around them that quickly they are providing more information and support than they are getting. Our group is originally sent to rescue a small group of civilians and get them out of the way before US forces bomb the city to eradicate the enemy. But things are far worse than they thought. Contrary to their briefing, the aliens are attacking by air as well as ground. Their mission becomes survival, recon, and then out and out combat.

It tries to be “Independence Day” crossed with “Black Hawk Down.” It doesn’t come close to either. It’s howlingly bad in places, with clunky construction and ham-handed attempts to insert moments of drama in the midst of all the action (one of the men just happens to be the brother of a Marine who died under the Staff Sergeant’s command, and sadder but wiser civilians and fighting forces learn that war with aliens is hellier than ever). No one expects this film to be anything more than a delivery system for adrenaline and testosterone, with a bit of alien autopsy and some welcome recognition of the abilities and integrity of the military, but even in that category, it doesn’t pass muster.

Mars Needs Moms

Posted on March 10, 2011 at 6:00 pm

There is one perfectly charming moment in “Mars Needs Moms,” but it does not come until the closing credits, when we get some live action glimpses of the voice actors. Their faces are covered with reference dots and they are strapped into contraptions so that computers can turn them into computerized 3D animation. We get to see them perform some scenes we have just watched with much more energy and life than anything in the movie. Important note: if you are going to make a film whose moral is that mechanical objects can never replace people (or Martians), you should try not to make exactly that mistake.

Based on the illustrated book by “Bloom County’s” Berkeley Breathed, it is the story of Milo (voice of Seth Dusky, movements of Seth Green), who must rescue his mother (voice of Joan Cusack) when she is captured by Martians.

Milo’s mother makes him take out the garbage and sends him to bed after dinner for lying about eating his broccoli. He angrily tells her, “My life would be so much better if I didn’t have a mom at all!” Feeling guilty when he can’t sleep, he gets up to apologize only to see her being carried off in a space ship.

He manages to stow away. All of the females on Mars are busy imposing order and marching around in armor, so the children have to be raised by super-strict “nannybots.” They want to use Milo’s mom and her memories to program the nannybots because their reconnaissance revealed that she did not spoil her son the way some of the other Earth mothers do.

On Mars, Milo meets up with another human, Gribble (voice of Dan Fogler), a pudgy tech-whiz who has been hiding out from the Martians for 25 years and is given to enthusiastic exclamations like “Gribble-tastic!” Milo wants to rescue his mother before sunrise, when the emptying out of her brain will destroy her. At first Gribble wants Milo to stay so he can have a companion beyond the hairy underground creatures who have been the only living beings he has seen. But both Gribble and Milo learn something about the responsibility and joy of taking care of someone else. So the rescue gets underway with help from Gribble’s nuts-and-bolts pet and a rebel solider who intercepted some US transmissions of a silly 60’s sitcom. She thinks being a hippie chick is groovy (Elisabeth Harnois as Ki) and wants to know more about that “crazy love thing.”

This is decidedly second-tier Disney with third-tier visuals. It makes sense to give the Martians a drab color palette to evoke their oppressive environment, but it makes the experience of watching dull as well. The rows of marching female soldiers in armor evoke many other, wittier, images from “Monsters vs. Aliens” to “Metropolis” and Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” video. And there’s something just creepy about imagining a world in which the females are all domineering and robotic and the males are all incompetent and ignorant. The vertiginous 3D effects work all right unless you move your head, causing the edges of the images to splinter. And the script is weak and predictable, even for children.

The biggest problem is what animators refer to as the “uncanny valley,” the feeling of disorientation and unease we get when we see a depiction of a human face that is close but not quite right.

Our brains are naturally wired to recognize and empathize with faces with the merest suggestion of eyes, nose, and mouth. As Pixar and Disney have shown us, we can happily feel affectionate toward fish, cars, mice, dogs sharing spaghetti, and even bugs as well as simplified human-ish faces that are intended to look like plastic, as with Buzz and Woody in the “Toy Story” movies.

“Mars Needs Moms” would have worked much better if the faces of Milo, his mother, and Gribble were more stylized and caricatured. Instead, based on reference dots and computer algorithms, they are at the same time too close and not close enough to make us feel that we are watching our own species. The Martians appear more familiar than the humans, as we are powerfully reminded with the live action shots at the end when it literally comes to life. That makes this movie only Gribble-so-so.