This column will introduce you to the most popular movies that are coming out in theaters this weekend.
What movie will you see?
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (re-release)
In celebration for its 40th anniversary, Close Encounters of the Third Kind will abduct theaters for 1 week only and play it in 4K restoration and directors cut. Richard Dreyfus, Melinda Dillon, and Bob Balaban star is this sci-fi flick. The great Steven Spielberg directed this one, as we all know. Spielberg’s next directorial features are Ready Player One, The Post (starring Tom Hanks), and an Untitled Indiana Jones Project. Must not forget about the animated Spielberg’s Closet, brought to you by Binge Media. Now, go check out Close Encounters of the 4Kind this weekend.
Tulip Fever
Tulip Fever tells the story of a 17th Century artist who falls in love with a young married woman while he’s ordered to paint her portrait. Starring in this romance drama are Alicia Vikander, Dane DeHann (Chronicle), Cara Delevingne (Suicide Squad), Zach Galifianakis, Christoph Waltz, Judi Dench, and more. Directing this period piece flick is Justin Chadwick. Chadwick has directed The Other Boleyn Girl, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, and more. I got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowb….Tulip Fever.
Unlocked
A CIA interrogator must stop a biological terrorist attack in the UK, however, there are some twisty turnys along the way. Noomi Rapace stars, while the rest of the cast includes, Orlando Bloom, Toni Collette, Michael Douglas, John Malkovich, and more. Great cast. Michael Apted is the director of this action drama. Apted has directed The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The World Is Not Enough, Gorky Park, and more. Go Unlock your car, and hit the road to a theater near you.
I’d be lying to you (poorly) if I said the original Star Wars Trilogy isn’t my absolute all-time favorite trilogy. There have been some amazing contenders, specifically Lord of the Rings, but for my money nothing in the realm of entertainment has ever made such a lasting imprint on me the way Star Wars has. Some of my earliest memories were of watching Return of the Jedi over and over again on VHS, having no concept of the fact that there were “other” movies in the series until my Uncle Bill hooked me up with copies of Episodes IV and V. Before that, all I knew was Jedi, which in a lot of ways was a blessing in disguise. Jedi is very publicly the least well-liked of the trilogy, but for me that has never been the case. When your only exposure to Star Wars is the least liked film, and when you’re so young that you’ll go on monthly binges of watching nothing but that one movie, it does wonders for your taste later in life. Of course, after seeing the other two films, I slowly but surely came to love them all equally, as I do today. Sure, we can nitpick whether or not the twist in Empire even remotely makes any sense, or we can laugh at the clear smears of Vaseline on the lens to mask the Landspeeder’s wheels in A New Hope, but why? The sum total of that trilogy is something truly amazing that has rightfully earned its label as the most sought-after entertainment brand in the world. That was, until, the Prequel Trilogy, where everything went to shit.
If you’re a fan of bad movies then you’d be hard pressed to find three more peculiar and awe-inspiring monuments of failure. When viewed as a trilogy, the films have few redeeming qualities. For instance, Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi was an inspired choice. He truly made the part his own and blended the wisdom of Alec Guinness with his own more youthful sensibilities and is still the standout performance of the trilogy. That’s not to say his performance is sometimes awful in its own right, but more on that later. You see, many have gone out on a limb and blamed George Lucas, solely, for the failure of these movies. When measuring them in dollars and cents, they are a rousing success without question. The biggest issue with these films is the lack of finesse and development as an artist on the part of Lucas, where he somehow manages to take Academy Award winning/nominated actors like Natalie Portman and Samuel L. Jackson and make them sound as if they have all the personality of a wet noodle. The directing and writing is at the center of the mess that is the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, an abomination that most of us wish never happened.
Without going into the gory details, we all know where things are now. Disney owns Star Wars, Kathleen Kennedy is producing and masterminding the universe, Lawrence Kasdan is involved in several of the films now in development and it’s being kickstarted by JJ Abrams. Disney did everything in their power to remove Lucas from the equation, leaving him on with no more than a producing/story credit on the upcoming film. This is a good thing across the board. In fact, their main selling point behind this year’s Comic Con panel was to hammer the idea into our heads that the film is being made with “real, practical effects”, something that is welcome but annoying to hear over and over again. Despite all of this, here’s the thing…this past year is the last one where we won’t have a new Star Wars film on the horizon. Think about that. The only studio to do something near this level of production is Marvel Studios…coincidentally paired with Disney as well. There’s no argument that Marvel’s business model is the new Hollywood trend with everyone from Jurassic Park to Fast & Furious trying to build their own “universes”, but is this a good thing for Star Wars? We’ve all wanted this for a long time. Someone to come in and do another GOOD Star Wars film. I make no qualms about it, I am in the camp of wanting more of this universe on screen. My rationale is simple, and is tied to this past week’s Ant-Man.
Ant-Man shouldn’t have worked as well as it did but it proved a bunch of things to me all once. Slap “Marvel” in front of your movie and you will be #1 at the box office without question (see last year’s smash hit “Tyler Perry in Marvel’s ‘Medea Goes Transgender'”). Seriously though, you had a troubled pre-production, mostly unknown character, kind of bland trailers/promos and a director best known for rom-coms. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did, and I think it had to do with the corporate machine that is Marvel Studios. Marvel is bigger than any one piece of its films at this point, so much so that they can “will” their films to success. Granted, there have been some duds in the MCU, but they’ve done a good job taking the good elements from the shittier entries and using them later to further validate the company’s ideology, i.e. using older Howard Stark in the opening moments of Ant-Man. So let’s apply that logic to Star Wars. Will all the films be great? No, but odds are a few of them will be. Right now we have a 50/50 chance of Episode VII being a great film. People, it could very conceivably be an awful movie. All signs point to it hitting us right in the childhood with references to the original films, but honestly, this film could be a gigantic kick to the nads outside of that.
Where do I stand? I’m ok with this plan. I know Marvel is what Marvel is now but their structure has been imitated to give us Fast Five, the upcoming Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice/Suicide Squad and even the Rocky spinoff Creed. We can rage about the finer points of quantity over quality but in all honesty, so what? If they keep trying, odds are some of what we’ll be getting will be pretty good. Well, at least 50% of it.
So what do you think? Are you happy about the upcoming plan over the next few years or would you rather they left it alone? Let us know below! Enjoy your week and Binge On!
Starring: Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Pena, David Dastmalchian, Tip ‘T.I.’ Harris, Wood Harris, Hayley Atwell, John Slattery, Martin Donovan, Garrett Morris and Corey Stoll.
After over a decade of start-stops, and one year following dreams of comic book enthusiasts everywhere getting smashed with the announcement of longtime Ant-Man character fan Edgar Wright leaving the project, Ant-Man, the film about a suit able to render its wearer the size of a peanut M & M, is finally upon us. One thing Marvel Studios and replacement director Peyton Reed need to adapt to is even if their resulting film pleases the masses, the film geeks they are trying so hard to please will inevitably wonder how Wright’s vision could have improved the end result. There was something genuinely intriguing to me about making the last film in Phase 2 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe into an intimate comedic character piece as opposed to yet another catastrophic global danger/destruction porn piece. Though it can be argued that the world’s in danger’ dial was already at its limit after Joss Whedon’s Avengers: The Age of Ultron from earlier this year.
Armed with a likable lead and endearing overall story, Ant-Man works in bunches. The original heist film concept Wright and his writing partner Joe Cornish (who both retain story and screenplay credit) came up with is better realized than you’d expect. Especially considering the vision was taken over by the director of Bring It On. Comic book purists know that Hank Pym (Douglas) is the actual original member of The Avengers and Scott Lange (Rudd) ends up eventually taking the torch that Pym passes to him. Here, the story starts us off in a flashback to 1989, when Pym originally comes up with the Pym Particle. He then makes the by now cliche proclamation that nobody will ever get the formula as long as he lives. Yeah. Right. Of note in this section of Ant-Man is the incredible CGI job done on Douglas, as he looks like he stepped directly from the set of 1988’s Wall Street onto this one. Combined with the similar success of doing the same to Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator Genisys, I’d say CGI artists are 97% to seamless realism, as opposed to the distraction it was in, say, 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand. The film has a modest (in Marvel standards) $130 million budget, and I would venture to say at least a third of that went to getting this de-aging job just right.
Flash forward to modern day. Pym is now a has been losing hold of his company after his former protege Darren Cross (Stoll) metaphorically pushes him out. On the personal end, Pym’s daughter Hope (Lilly) does not have the best relationship with her father and this relationship gets even more strained when Hank decides to turn his attention to down on his luck, former prisoner Lange instead of working on being a father to his real daughter. At the same time, Lange is fired from Baskin Robbins and gets kicked out of a party for his daughter by his ex wife (Greer) and her new beau (Canavale). This line of parallelism between the two father-daughter relationships could have seemed clunky. Though he will never be mistaken for Spielberg, Reed makes it work without getting too sappy.
Though the villain in Ant-Man is better than most Marvel bad guy incarnations, Cross (Stoll) is still one twirl of the mustache away from being cliche. He certainly has some nice moments (the final battle, which consists of changing toys and bugs into different proportions, is a stand-out), but overall I just did not fear nor endear myself to him. Say what you will about Ultron. At least I was in constant fear of what he would do next. Here, Cross makes proclamations to ‘end war as we know it,’ but doesn’t get much more than a blink of an eye and a hand to my yawning mouth each time he did. The fact that Ant-Man is not about the title character as much as Cross’s relationship with his former mentor is a real fault of the movie.
With the villain a non factor of enjoyment, Ant-Man‘s success with me lie in how successful Rudd was at channeling his inner Downey and making the role of Lange his own. No matter what I think of the rest of the film, Rudd (who worked with Reed on Yes, Man) is fantastic, and Marvel could not have picked a better star to fill Ant-Man’s little shoes. The comedy that revolved around Rudd worked for me, though I cannot say the same thing about Pena. While I can certainly see Pena being a standout to most people, I did not laugh at nor like his scenes -specifically his in synch with the action monologues- at all. It almost reminded me of Guardians of the Galaxy in the way that I can see how most people could like him. It just did not fit in with what I feel works from a successful comedic standpoint.
I don’t want to act like I did not enjoy Ant-Man, because in some ways I did. One thing a comic book movie brought down to this intimate a scale does is force writers to work more on characterization than how the villain is going to take out the world. This is where Ant-Man is most successful, as the smallness of the character hides just how big an overall heart the film really has. Nothing about the warmness of feelings these characters had felt manufactured, and the way Rudd plays off all of it is what makes it work. Also, while Pena gets most of the big lines, Dastmalchian is the second hand character who works the best and was a major highlight for me.
Don’t let all the character moments I am describing make you assume Ant-Man is nothing more than a rom-com in disguise. The action in the film comes in strides and hops instead of sprints and leaps, and those who come to Marvel films expecting nothing less than city wide destruction will be disappointed to know the de-porn in Ant-Man is limited to a house. Still, seeing how the suit works is what makes the film’s later action scenes pay off as well as they do, and Reed fills these scenes with items you would not think of as being dangerous. There are great sections involving bath tubs and Thomas The Tank Engine (not kidding) which make any sort of danger Cross brings seem almost microscopic.
I guess that’s my main problem with Ant-Man. As much as I tired of seeing Bad Guy 1 try and out destruct Bad Guy 2 in films past, there was always a sort of scope and danger knowing anything was possible within them. By making Ant-Man a more intimate film, Marvel has painted themselves into a corner, as they have to rely on comedy and drama to move the story forward. As much as I enjoyed the effort, when both of those means of storytelling don’t work, they are going to have problems like this.