Showing posts with label Jay Baruchel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jay Baruchel. Show all posts

Sunday, June 15, 2014

High-Flying Adventure: HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2


Like all good fantasy sequels, Dreamworks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon 2 takes the world its predecessor built and expands upon it. The first film introduced us to the tiny island of Berk where a village of Vikings lived to fight off dragons preying on their flocks of sheep. It followed Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), the shrimpy son of the leader (Gerard Butler), as he learned dragons aren’t so bad once you get to know them. By the end, he’d trained a fierce and adorable one he named Toothless as a pet and saved his village from destruction in the process. Now, as the sequel starts, the village lives in peace with the dragons, having realized they’re lovable, loyal, useful animals. There’s no conflict there, so the movie pushes forward, opening five years later on Hiccup and Toothless flying out over the ocean exploring new islands and finding new species. When they land on what is to them uncharted territory, he takes out his hand-drawn map and adds a new page, as fitting a symbol for the start of a new chapter as any.

Writer and director Dean DeBlois, who served as co-writer and co-director with Chris Sanders on the first film, takes the light boy’s adventure and enriches it by foregrounding the boy’s evolution into a man and bringing the cast of background characters more clearly into focus. While struggling with his status as heir, Hiccup, now taller, more toned, and with a touch of stubble on his chin, is drawn into conflict. First, he runs into dragon trappers, led by a hunky, ambiguously bad guy voiced by Game of Throne’s Kit Harington. They’re mercilessly poaching the majestic beasts. But that’s merely prelude to bigger trouble care of a distant warlord (a growling Djimon Hounsou) who threatens hostilities with his army of captive dragons. With a name like Drago Bludvist, pronounced “blood-fist,” he’s born to be bad. Riding out to help quell this new conflict are Hiccup’s father, as well as a likable ragtag band of villagers (America Ferrera, Craig Ferguson, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, T.J. Miller, and Kristen Wiig) who last time were background color, but this time come into focus as their own distinct characters with subplots and emotional throughlines. 

The first time around, the dragon training was a highlight, a boy-and-his-dog dynamic between a scrawny teen and a jet black, bat-winged, puppy-dog-eyed salamander. Never better than when in flight, the 3D animation dipped and spun with immediacy and vertiginous beauty. It was a thrill. This time, the thrill comes not just from that relationship and the dragon flying, which is as nicely and excitingly rendered as before, but also in the conflicts complicating this fantasy world. The threatened destruction is at a higher magnitude, the characters have more at stake, and the scale towers over them with subwoofer-rattling rumblings. New dragons include a skyscraper-sized alpha beastie that breathes icy breath leaving jagged icicles in its wake. The damage to dragons is also more personal. The introduction of a mysterious figure in the wild, a protector of dragons (Cate Blanchett) who unlocks further secrets of the species, finds time to highlight sliced wings and missing limbs, the result of near-misses with hunters. There’s an ecological weight to this film, a sorrow and responsibility.

The dragon protector has an important connection to Hiccup and much to teach him. The way the plot unfolds finds surprisingly rich emotions to tap into as their relationship is fully explained. The scene where this woman meets Hiccup’s father is astonishing in its tenderness and maturity. It could’ve gone in many big ways – tearful, scary, or regretful – but instead goes for a hushed whisper and a sweet folk song. The film is all about surprising with those kinds of scenes. An early moment between Hiccup and his love interest has a loose conversational quality as they flirtatiously tease each other. A late turn that deepens and darkens the relationship between boy and dragon is unsettling and a real shock, making the resolution all the more stirring. There’s seriousness to the storytelling here that respects both the fun of its colorful fantasy and the emotional lives of its characters.

It’s a movie about responsibility, aging, death, abandonment, and environmental destruction. You know, for kids! It’s bright, vibrant, has a soaring score and rousing action. But there’s a melancholy beneath that’s unexpected in its gravity. I appreciated how respectful of its audience the film is, unwilling to talk down to children and not feeling the need to stretch for adult attention. It’s simply a good story told well. And that’s more than enough to captivate. The animation is gorgeous, digital-painterly tableaus of fantasy landscapes and fluid character movement. The images within stir the imagination. A swarm of dragons flutters about like a flock of birds. Rising slowly and silently out of the clouds, a lone rider wearing a horned mask and carrying a rattling staff, sits atop a massive creature. A boy flies his dragon into the wild, and returns something closer to a man. It’s a terrific, exciting, involving adventure told with great feeling and a good eye.

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

New Model, Old Parts: ROBOCOP


The remake of RoboCop is a solid science fiction entertainment. It’s packed with sleek, modern special effects, moves swiftly through pertinent and provocative questions of technology and its military-industrial applications, and is filled up with welcome performances from dependable character actors. It’s the best RoboCop film since the first, working through its themes of the nature of free will in tech-human hybrids and devious corporate influence in matters of public interest. It has a sturdy competence that’s thrilling and nicely controlled. And yet the differences between the 2014 model and the sui generis 1987 original – a masterpiece, in my estimation – tell us at least as much about the difference between then and now in the entertainment industry as it does our tech corporations. Now, in a Hollywood landscape where a man who dresses as a bat to fight crime is only ever glowering or brooding, and where our newest Superman movie has no time for bumbling Clark Kent, the idea of a robot cop has to be taken very seriously indeed.

Paul Verhoeven’s ’87 RoboCop wasn’t afraid of embracing the inherent silliness of the concept that finds a wounded cop turned into a crime-fighting machine, while recognizing that making the concept fun and funny need not take away its power or its savage satiric sarcasm. It all takes place in a future Detroit so crime-ridden and cash-strapped it allows a corporation to test new robot officers, the better to privatize the police force with. It’s a serious subject still achingly relevant today – poverty, crime, corporate influence pushing for increased profit by taking over public sector institutions that should be working only for the greater good – but is attacked with such bloody vicious humor, expressing its Reagan-era futurist capitalism ad absurdum through hugely entertaining action and sly playfulness. There’s no scene in 2014’s RoboCop to match the hilariously cold logic that finds a board member shot dead by a prototype during a test that goes all too well.

Instead, Brazilian director José Padilha makes a RoboCop that treats itself only seriously, not allowing the concept’s potentially bitingly funny political and technological arguments free reign to run the tone. It’s more somber, neater, and composed. It deals with big ideas right up front, and throughout, mostly contained in a ranting TV show hosted by a swaggering pundit played with excited anger by Samuel L. Jackson. He tells us how the United States has used ever-evolving drones to police foreign conflicts in which we’ve embroiled ourselves. Some might call it bullying overreach, but he calls it patriotic duty, keeping our soldiers safe by letting robots fight our wars. Why can’t we use these robots to patrol American streets? He blames robo-phobic attitudes. This is satire Colbert Report style, Jackson angrily inhabiting the opposite of the film’s sometimes hard-to-parse political leanings as he badgers the American public and politicians to let OmniCorp privatize police work and keep the streets safe through superior surveillance and strategic outbursts of techno-violence.

The head of OmniCorp (Michael Keaton) decides to up his profits and slip around an anti-domestic drone law by asking his top doctor (Gary Oldman) to help him put a man inside a humanoid law-enforcement machine. The law says no robots, but there’s a cyborg-shaped loophole ripe for the exploiting. They’re in luck Detroit cop Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) recently ran afoul of a local crime syndicate and fell victim to a car bomb. He’s lying injured, in need of immediate drastic treatment if he’ll ever be able to return to work, let alone live. Murphy’s wife (Abbie Cornish) signs off on the procedure, so the doctors – as well as a corporate suit (Jennifer Ehle), a marketing guy (Jay Baruchel), and a weapons’ expert (Jackie Earle Haley) – swoop in and fit the mortally wounded police officer with the best tech billions can buy. He’s part publicity stunt, part supersoldier, all under the control of OmniCorp with his belief in his free will a hardwired fantasy. Where the original slammed Murphy into the suit right away and expected the audience to go along, this new version takes its time trying to make us buy it. We get training sequences and scenes of scheming committees. We get a scene in which we see the poor RoboCop without his suit, a pathetic and gross sight as he’s represented as essentially a jar of pulsing pink goop with a face.

By the time RoboCop goes into action, we’ve sat with the character, watched his agonizingly human face, seen the reactions of the kindhearted doctor and the coldhearted C.E.O., as well as the tearful responses of his wife and child (John Paul Ruttan), and the wariness of his old partner (Michael K. Williams) as his refurbished friend whirs back into the office. The screenplay by Joshua Zetumer soon quickens into a fast-paced actioner with wall-to-wall gun violence and frantic machinations of corporate, media, and political interests. The action is crisp, competent, and smoothly presented. But because we’ve lingered on the pain of the procedure and ruthlessness of the suit and tie villains, it’s no simple kick. The original found great power in characters and plot painted in bold archetypes and sharp satire. Padilha, who directed cop thrillers like Elite Squad and Elite Squad: The Enemy Within in his home country, makes his RoboCop a glum and serious affair, trying for some shading while rattling with periodic outbursts of numbing rat-a-tat gunfire.

It largely works. I’ll take a derivative genre picture tangling seriously (even if, in this case, sometimes clumsily or unemphatically) with big ideas over a slickly competent film without a thought in its head any day. It’s entertaining, teasing out fun concepts and appealing sci-fi imagery, even though they’re borrowed from a better film. Some of its new ideas - an early scene of a man with new robo-hands learning to play the guitar, say - are fast, fascinating, and add a fine touch of humanity to this otherwise bloodless trigger-happy PG-13 approach. And the concept is smartly updated in some ways, incorporating modern-day drone anxieties and surveillance state concerns. (Plus, this time around RoboCop is assembled in China.) The ensemble is well cast, filled with performances that find fun in thin roles, and the leads lend some weight to a token emphasis on familial reunion and tech ethics. Even if in the end it’s not quite as effective or jolting, and certainly not as darkly hilarious, the filmmakers wisely don’t even try to copy Verhoeven’s tone or style. They find a distinctly 2014 approach that’s enjoyable enough, though not possessed with as idiosyncratic a personality or power as lasting. Let me put it this way: it’s effective, but it’s not the kind of movie that will inspire people to erect a statue twenty years from now.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Left Behind: THIS IS THE END


You can almost see the good version of This is the End within it, which makes it all more disappointing this isn’t that. The concept’s solid. Some celebrities are having a party at James Franco’s house when the apocalypse happens. That’s kind of funny, right? What follows is a film that’s entirely too self-satisfied and cripplingly indulgent, resting for far too long on the audience’s assumed delight at watching recognizable faces play themselves. The only truly apocalyptic aspect of the film is the feeling that we’ve well and truly gone past the point of caring about the umpteenth narrative of stoner manchildren haltingly realizing they need to grow up. If This is the End should represent the end of anything, it should be Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, and the others putting aside this played out character arc once and for all.

Filled with the gentlest of self-critical mockery and hyperbolic play with personas, the film is, for the most part, locked up in Franco’s mansion while fiery Armageddon rages outside. The opening bit of spectacle swallows up a bunch of welcome cameos and scoops up extras in the Rapture, leaving us with Franco, Rogen, Baruchel, Hill, Craig Robinson, and Danny McBride huddled together with dwindling supplies. They fight over survival strategy, have extended comic riffs, and develop spats extrapolated out of their fictional relationships. As is to be expected with this group’s standard R-rated comedy routine, there are endless gross out gags, cultural references both obscure and obvious, and lengthy conversations about every natural bodily function and a few unnatural ones as well. It’s rarely surprising, even at its most unexpected.

This has been written and directed by Rogen and his long-time writing partner Evan Goldberg. It’s pretty clear that every bit of the film is a result of a funny (more likely funny at the time) idea that either they or a member of the cast fumbled their way towards during some session of brainstorming or improvising. The result is an uneven experience, sometimes funny, usually not, as if a sloppy dorm room thought experiment has somehow made it to the big screen largely unchanged. Like, dude, what if the world was ending? And what if we hid in this house? Like, you’d be like this and I’d be like that and, oh man, you know so-and-so would totally die right away. But the difference between engaging in this kind of freewheeling teasing in a hypothetical scenario with your buddies and doing that but for a worldwide audience of moviegoers is that when a major studio bankrolls you, each dumb digression is literalized. You might think suggesting a friend would eventually get possessed and projectile vomit demon juice is a funny idea, but when seen on the screen, there’s a good chance it’ll look like overkill at best, an inside joke at worst. And so it goes here, over and over again.

I’m mostly frustrated with the way the creative energies behind this movie conjure up world-ending stakes and then use them to only poke soft fun at their public personas and circle the same tired types of jokes they’ve been making in film after film for years now.  It could be funny to take a celebrity perspective on disaster. It gets there a couple of times, like when Jonah Hill says he’d expect celebrities to be saved first: “Clooney, Bullock, me, and, then if there’s room, you guys.” But the film dwindles away into disconnected silliness that grows tedious as the claustrophobic minutes tick by, the guys repeating the same basic actions and tics. When the group finally gets out of the house, the energy picks up with the kind of surprises and surprise cameos this thing could’ve used more of. But by then we’re in the last ten or twenty minutes of the picture and it’s all too late. The movie is just a big concept filled up with small ideas, inadvertently saying the only way these guys will grow up is through the intervention of God himself.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Charm Offensive: THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE

It’s not every day that you can see a big summer action-adventure based on a Goethe poem that was previously adapted into a short segment in the beloved Fantasia, but that’s exactly what you get with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. It’s loud and expensive, much like other Jerry Bruckheimer productions including the dumb National Treasures which share, in Jon Turteltaub, the same director as this new feature. They also share the same star, Nicolas Cage, but Sorcerer’s Apprentice has the good sense to embrace the actor’s loopier side.

Looking through a mess of long hair and a floppy fedora, with a long trenchcoat flapping behind him, Nicolas Cage certainly looks the part of a more than one-thousand-year-old sorcerer now living in Manhattan, who trained under Merlin and has spent centuries searching for his master’s replacement. Cage hams it up, bugging out his crazy eyes and strutting through each scene with a magical confidence. He’s also hilarious. Early in the film, following a statement made by Cage, a character asks “how do you know that?” Cage spins and fixes a wild gaze on the character while shouting “because I can read minds!” Total commitment to a ridiculous role is the name of the game here, and the film is better for Cage’s participation.

It helps that Cage is facing off with a rival ancient sorcerer played by Alfred Molina, who brings an equal commitment to his suavely villainous cheeseball. He makes a grand entrance, forming out of a squirming mass of cockroaches. Out of all the actors in the world, perhaps only Molina could look so effortlessly nonchalant about a cockroach crawling up his nostril in his first big close-up. He’s having a ball, chewing on all his lines with clear satisfaction and infectious fun.

The two sorcerers are after a nesting doll that contains the trapped essences of various evil magicians from centuries past. Cage wishes to keep it out of the hands of Molina, who wants to free the evil in order to raise an army of the dead. To further complicate matters, this hunk of magical wood was inadvertently lost a decade earlier by college student Jay Baruchel, who may just be the one true heir to Merlin’s powers. Cage suspects as much, so he takes the lad under his wing to teach him the ways of using sorcery for good, not evil. And, of course, he’ll need his help to battle all the encroaching forces of darkness. What would a summer blockbuster be without encroaching forces of darkness?

This all sounds complicated, but the film wears its mythology lightly, preferring instead to go right for the big, splashy, effective set-pieces involving all kinds of kinetic magical danger and derring-do. Mixed in is a healthy dose of humor. This is a movie that is faintly aware of just how ridiculous it own story is. Cage and Molina aren’t the only ones having a ball. Baruchel is charming and funny as a geeky asocial guy who only cares about this girl (Teresa Palmer) that he’s loved since he was ten and with whom he just might be making a connection. She might even want to, you know, date him. And then all this crazy stuff about legends and curses and magic and good and evil? It’s almost more than he can take.

I went into the theater with very low expectations and, while I wasn’t blown away, I was pleasantly surprised. This is a mostly fast moving and enjoyable experience. The effects are convincing and are put to good use. It’s genuinely exciting and amusing. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is not great, but it’s much better than the majority of this summer’s offerings from this genre, and it’s certainly just right for an uncomplicated couple of hours at the multiplex.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Training Day: HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON

How to Train Your Dragon is a well-crafted and memorable computer-animated film. It has likable characters, crisp dialogue, and smooth, detailed, expressive animation. It has a rousing score and great widescreen compositions. It’s exciting and more than a little moving. I was pleasantly surprised. The film comes from Dreamworks Animation, but the creators are Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, who created Lilo and Stitch, the last genuinely great film to come out of Disney Animation. They bring with them all of the above, but also a deep sense of story and character that finds no need for pointless celebrity gimmickry or in-jokes laced with quickly dated references, the symptoms that have plagued most of Dreamworks’s prior output.

The plot feels familiar. In the past ten or fifteen years, nearly every animation studio has put out an epic adventure-comedy about an outcast young person whose unappreciated talent just might end up saving his community. That’s Disney’s Hercules, Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, Warner Brother’s Happy Feet, Sony’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and even Dreamworks’s own Kung Fu Panda. But what Sanders and DeBlois bring to this formula is energy and passion, resulting in a telling that feels so expertly realized that it becomes the kind of filmmaking that follows formula without ever once feeling stale.

Besides, the world the filmmakers create is interesting and fun all on its own. It’s hundreds and hundreds of years ago in an unspecified place and time in a Viking village that has a problem with big pests that carry off sheep and burn down buildings in the middle of the night. Those pests just happen to be dragons. The whole village trains to fight the beasts which flap their way out of the darkness on still and quiet nights. This feels like a fully realized fantasy setting, not just something slapped together out of spare parts.

The leader of the village is the most fearsome dragon-killer (Gerard Butler), but is ashamed of his wimpy son (Jay Baruchel), a weak Viking who is constantly building contraptions. The son is sent to dragon training with the other young people, including the cutie (America Ferrera) he has a crush on. The group of youngsters is led through training by a tough old dragon-fighter (Craig Ferguson) who has a peg-leg and hook-hand to show for his many years of experience. But the son has a secret. One night, he shot down a rare breed of dragon and has been visiting the creature in the forest. It has broken its tail so it can’t fly away. The two of them form a bond, with the son helping the dragon back into the air, and the dragon helping the son learn about dragons. The animation with the dragon is expertly handled. There is no dialogue; the creature remains an animal. All emotion and expression comes through with body language and the eyes. When the dragon finally takes flight, there are several scenes of stunning flight so perfectly realized that I felt like I was flying right along with them. This is a tender and well-told story of emotional interaction between man and beast.

The film leads, as it must, to an epic confrontation with revealed secrets, strong declarations, abrupt changes-of-heart, and fulfillment of romantic subplots all leading up to a huge battle against the true villain. But to say it in that way is to make it sound boring or unexciting. That’s just not the case here. The action is lots of fun; it’s incredibly energetic and well-staged with a great sense of space and energy. The gorgeous animation puts stunning images on screen, not just in terms of detail, but in composition and framing as well. I wasn’t even bothered by the 3D. It seems to work well, and I write that as someone who is still a firm septic when it comes to the longevity or usefulness of the gimmick. The 3D here shames even the much-hyped technique in Avatar in effortlessness and usefulness. It never once pulled me out of the experience.

This extends to the rest of the film as well. It’s an exciting, fast-paced and absorbing story. The voice acting is superb across the board. The actors give soulful, heartfelt performances that are matched by the performances the animators give in bringing them to life. The movie doesn’t quite generate the same emotional wallop that Pixar has become so good at, nor do all the supporting characters add up to much more than scenery. But this is still a very strong effort, high quality all the way. The film is a total delight from beginning to end.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Not a Big Splash: SHE'S OUT OF MY LEAGUE

She’s Out of My League is a thoroughly ordinary romantic comedy. It appears to be slanted more towards a male audience than is usually expected from this type of bland outing, but aside from that it offers up very few surprises. It’s comfortably helmed by Jim Field Smith in an unmemorable way. It has pounding pop songs, slick photography, and a photogenic cast. It even has a few jokes, or at least some mildly amusing moments where other, better comedies put their jokes.

Longtime second-banana Jay Baruchel, from Knocked Up and Tropic Thunder to name a few, becomes the lead-banana in a movie of his very own. He stars as the kind of guy whose old girlfriend (Lindsay Sloane) still gets invitations from his parents to join them for dinner or to go on family trips. She can even bring her new boyfriend along. Don’t we all know someone like that?

Anyways, this guy works at an airport doing his part to keep America safe by inspecting each passenger that moves through his security station. One passenger he doesn’t mind inspecting is a woman (Alice Eve) so attractive that we get a slow motion montage of drooling, wide-eyed men as she moves on her way to catch her flight. She loses her cell phone. He finds it, but she’s already airborne. They decide to meet (meet cute) when she gets back in town so he can return it to her.

So, they start dating, right? But all this guy’s friends (T.J. Miller, Mike Vogel, and Nate Torrence) say things like “Hey, dude! She’s hot! You’re a 5! She’s a 10! This can’t work out!” or variations thereof for, like, the next 40 minutes. Then, well, you’ve probably seen a few romantic comedies before, so you can probably guess what happens. You know, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, etcetera.

This is an acceptably standard rom-com and when so many in the genre can’t even pull that off, it’s some small accomplishment. Then again, “Not Painful!” is not exactly something that can be slapped on an ad in the paper. There’s some nice chemistry between the cast, even though the gaggle of babbling dudes plays like hand-me-down Apatow and the Perfect 10 remains too distant and idealized, so much so that a chance for emotional connection to these people is allowed to escape. It also doesn’t help that the movie plays like a gentle PG-13 forced into an uncomfortably fitting R, which also does nothing to stem the undercurrent of cruelty in the presentation of the protagonist’s family and ex-girlfriend, who are played as rude and ridiculously over-the-top idiots at a level that seems out of context with the rest of the movie.

The movie never becomes a dull dance of numerology, but it never quite becomes a satisfying romantic comedy, either. I didn’t have a bad time watching it. I smiled from time to time, I even managed a few chuckles, but as I left the theater the movie threatened to leave my mind. I kept it in my thoughts long enough to type out this written equivalent of a shrug, but I’ll let it go now. One day, a few years from now, I’ll be channel surfing and spot it and think: what’s this? That’s right, I think I saw that.