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Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
2010 (USA)
Director: Edgar Wright
Viewed: August 16, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza)

There’s no denying that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World seems engineered to tap into the brainstems of Gen-Xers raised on The Legend of Zelda, tickling their nostalgia centers with a blend of hipster banter and sheer awesomeness until they submit, giggling with delight.  More broadly, the film presents a romantic comedy that doesn’t just name-check slacker cultural touchstones such as comics, video games, and indie rock, but earnestly drapes itself in their idioms and aesthetics.  Based on the graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley, and set in a wintery, shabby Toronto of indeterminate era—characters fiddle with their Nintendo DS Lites, but also visit CD stores (how quaint!) and wrestle with AOL dial-up—Scott Pilgrim follows the amorous travails of the titular character, an awkward twenty-two-year-old played by Michael Cera (a bit redundant, I know).   Director Edgar Wright previously showcased his droll wit and rapid-fire stylings in the genre-tweaking, deliriously funny Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, co-written with leading man Simon Pegg.  Here his writing partner is actor Michael Bacall (last seen playing separate characters named Omar in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds), but Pegg’s absence hasn’t diminished Wright’s facility for maintaining a cutting and relentless comic cadence while slathering on outlandish spectacle.

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Dream a Little Dream a Little Dream a Little Dream

Inception
2010 (USA)
Director: Christopher Nolan
Viewed: July 22, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

“Ambitious” is a term frequently affixed to films solely due to the scale or complexity of their production, whether the work in question is one of the opulent, magisterial epics of old or a contemporary blockbuster that recruits battalions of computer wizards for its virtual world-building.  One could say that Christopher Nolan’s Batman films warrant the label, if only because of their fulsome design and dizzying scope.  However, Nolan’s taste for the ambitious is focused foremost on narrative, as epitomized in the disorienting, reversed chronology of his breakout art-house noir, Memento.  Two years after The Dark Knight trampled everything in its path, that film’s sprawling, relentless, and often preposterous plot nonetheless endures as a grueling feat of sustained anxiety and twenty-first century terror.  Now we come to Inception, the first feature written solely by Nolan since his 1998 debut Following, and it is, if anything, a doubling down on the director’s fascination with convoluted storytelling.  Who else but Nolan could weave a tale that unfolds simultaneously in four linked dream worlds, where time dilates to varying degrees but always ticks inexorably forward?  Who else would have the heedless ambition to even attempt such a thing, to convey such an elaborate scenario through the language of film? Who else but Christopher Nolan would even want to try?

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Late to the Game: Sherlock Holmes

2009 (USA)
Director: Guy Ritchie
Viewed: July 11, 2010
Format: Blu-ray - Warner Brothers (2010)

Guy Ritchie purges the Victorian starch (and elegance) from Doyle’s sleuth, while preserving Holmes’ spooky powers of deduction and highlighting forgotten character details, such as the Great Detective’s talent for bare-knuckle boxing and his penchant for narcotics.  Purists will doubtlessly blanch at the director’s approach, which paints Holmes as a superhero for a steampunk-tinged nineteenth century London.  However, Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal possesses sufficient odd-duck touches to render this Sherlock a credible (if multiplex-friendly) variation on the iconic character.  Witty and rollicking, the film focuses on a Holmesian mainstay—banal evil dressed up in mystical garb—and generally succeeds, despite a story stuffed with baffling plot holes. The gaggle of writers (surprise!) are too eager to sacrifice consistency for the sake of action, and leave far too much unexplained, despite a coda where Holmes sweeps away a plethora of seemingly supernatural events with his vaunted reason.  Still, there’s plenty of glint to admire on this bauble, whether in Ritchie’s flamboyant style, Hans Zimmer’s lively score (his most flat-out stimulating in years), or the consistently rich art direction, which relies heavily on conspicuous computer effects, but still manages to delight.  Sherlock Holmes suggests that anachronistic Victorian adventure can be guilty good fun, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen be damned.

Metal on Metal

Iron Man 2
2010 (USA)
Director: John Favreau
Viewed: May 16, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

If one regards it primarily as the second chapter in a presumable trilogy of films about billionaire industrialist Tony Stark’s super-weapon persona, Iron Man 2 is a slick slice of cinematic entertainment.  Director Jon Favreau and leading man Robert Downey, Jr. deliver heaping helpings of the essential vibrancy and wit that rendered the first entry in Marvel’s technophilic franchise such a giddy revelation.  However, while it functions well enough as a sequel, or as a mere episode in a broader saga, Iron Man 2 is bit soggy when approached on its own merits.  Favreau and scripter Justin Theroux—the actor/writer who penned the deliciously acidic Tropic Thunder—are aiming for too many targets in some scenes, while in others they seem to be spinning their wheels in anticipation of the next action set-piece.  Accordingly, the film has trouble conveying the sense of nitro-fueled urgency necessary for the Iron Man myth, which is at bottom a Popular Science wet dream with a dash of guilt and ambivalence.  The sequel just doesn’t hum along so effortlessly as its predecessor, which in retrospect, seems much leaner and more focused, as origin stories often are.  Favreau gives us a middle chapter that is preoccupied with mortality, legacies, and thinly veiled allegories about geopolitical blowback and loose nukes. These elements are tackled with aplomb, but cobbled together in such a manner that Iron Man 2 feels a bit haphazard.  Eh, no matter.  We’re all just here for Downey’s quips, right?

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Just For One Day

Kick-Ass
2010 (USA / UK)
Director: Matthew Vaughn
Viewed: May 11, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (AMC Esquire)

The high concept that undergirds Kick-Ass, while hardly a model of sparkling originality, at least holds the potential for a witty character piece or an intriguing flexing of generic norms.  Colorless, clueless high school student and comic aficionado Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) poses what he believes to be a fair question to his fellow geeks: Why has no one ever tried to be a real super hero?  The answers seem obvious to Dave’s pals.  Super-powers don’t actually, you know, exist, and even “regular guys” like Bruce Wayne are billionaires with access to science-fiction technology. Any real masked vigilante would end up in traction fairly quickly.  Dave will not be deterred, however.  Kick-Ass presents itself as a miserablist “What-If?” scenario about a scrawny kid donning a green wetsuit and attempting to fight crime.  Unfortunately, the film lacks focus: at times it prefers the mode of a violent comic book played straight, or a limp high school farce, or a deadpan send-up of the superhero genre.  Director Matthew Vaughn simply has no notion of where he wants to take this adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr.’s comic, and the film’s sporadic moments of droll inventiveness don’t redeem its awkward muddling of its pedestrian components.

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Quick Review: The Losers

2010 (USA)
Director: Sylvain White
Viewed: April 29, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (AMC Esquire)

Adapted from the comic of the same name by writer Andy Diggle and illustrator Jocks, The Losers suffers from a sloppy sort of faithfulness to its source material’s story, motifs, and dialogue.  Exaggerated generic elements are essential to the language of the comics medium, but on the screen, The Losers‘ techno-thriller gobbledygook and melodramatic tropes just seem like the markers of lazy film-making.  (”Hey, if we’re going to incinerate a bunch of hapless kids, we might as well linger on the charred teddy bear. Y’know, for pathos.”)  Still, aside from some cringe-worthy racial “humor,” there’s not much about this A-Team variation that’s actively bad.  The Losers delivers exactly what one expects of it: wise-cracking Special Forces badasses (and one obligatory hot chick) pulling off hyper-violent heists.  It’s often fun, occasionally funny, and utterly forgettable.  Unfortunately, few of the actors seems to realize just what sort of film they’re making here.  The exceptions are Jason Patric as spook super-villain Max, who nails the necessary blend of menace and high camp, and to a lesser extent Chris Evans, who’s clearly having fun playing a bit against type as a high-strung, motormouth hacker.  Ultimately, The Losers is just ninety minutes of stuff blowing up real good.

Things Fighting Bigger Things

Clash of the Titans
2010 (USA / UK)
Director: Louis Leterrier
Viewed: April 14, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (AMC West Olive)

Let’s be honest, here.  Desmond Davis’ 1981 swords-and-sandals-and-stop-motion fantasy epic Clash of the Titans is not a particularly good movie, and the affection that it engenders flows from nostalgia born of endless Saturday-afternoon telecasts on UHF stations in the decade after its release.  To be sure, the original Clash introduced Gen-Xers (your truly included) to special effects master Ray Harryhausen’s unreal creations, and served as a gateway drug for the discovery of his earlier works, such as Mighty Joe Young, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.  Today, stop-motion has essentially vanished from big-budget live-action films.  (Although not from film altogether, thankfully, as it has recently given us wonderful features such as Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox.)  Accordingly, French director Lois Leterrier’s remake of Clash can be properly regarded as neither a tribute nor a slap to Harryhausen’s creations, although it is rife with winking references to Davis’ film. This Clash is strictly a diversionary actioner for the era of computer-generated beasties, one that owes as much to the original Greek myths and post-Lord of the Rings blockbuster norms as it does to the 1981 film.  Of course, the force that really sired this update is the almighty dollar, and its target audience is composed of money-flush adolescent boys who can’t be bothered to seek out the original Clash.  So why bother?  Well, because Leterrier, his reputation as a flashy hack notwithstanding, knows how to direct a thrilling action sequence. And because sometimes an old-school fantasy quest is just what the doctor ordered.

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Quick Review: Green Zone

2010 (USA)
Director: Paul Greengrass
Viewed: April 3, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (AMC West Olive)

In Green Zone, Paul Greengrass employs his relentless, You-Are-There approach to action film-making to establish a liberal, skeptical cinematic counter-myth to the corrupted, calcifying historical Iraq War narrative.  This loose adaptation of Imperial Life in the Emerald City is justly cynical about the 2003 invasion.  However, Greengrass’s fictionalized take on the subject diminishes the real lies and crimes behind the war.  While journalists from Thomas Ricks to Greg Palast are still searching for the truth, Greengrass seems content with a pat conclusion that casts his film as a kind of anti-war First Blood.  At least Greengrass is a sufficient talent to render the enterprise stirring, and Green Zone throbs with the same searing momentum as the director’s Bourne installments.  One barely gets a moment to breathe as the film’s (all-too-believable) conspiracy unravels.  Greengrass’s imagery of fiery, war-shattered Iraq is both jarring and gnawingly familiar, and Damon is working at the peak of his tough-guy powers.  However, artful thrills can’t mask the formulaic outline to the proceedings—Will Greg Kinnear’s slimy Pentagon bureaucrat get his comeuppance?—or the sense that this subject deserves better.  Seven years on, the definitive film about the Iraq War is still In the Loop.

Mr. Cameron Wants You to Be Comfortable While He Does His Thing

Avatar
2009 (USA)
Director: James Cameron
Viewed: December 22, 2009
Format: 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (AMC West Olive)

I was only one year old when Star Wars was released in 1977, which means that for all practical purposes, I’ve always lived in a post-Star Wars world.  While I later participated quite enthusiastically in the broader consumer phenomenon often summed up as simply “Star Wars,”—encompassing sequels, toys, comics, and card games, to name just the few products I personally devoured—I was too young to catch Star Wars: A New Hope in its original theatrical release.  Even if I had been a few years older at the time, I obviously wouldn’t have been able to appreciate it as anything other than an entertaining tale of adventure.  Accordingly, when older generations speak of the revolutionary nature of Star Wars as cinema, of how it blew their minds and opened up previously undreamed possibilities in terms of the places movies could take us, I’ve always nodded along without ever truly understanding what they were saying.  How could I?  Subsequent cinema has been irrecoverably altered—or tainted, depending on your point of view—by the existence of Star Wars and is phenomenal commercial success.

Perhaps the highest praise I can bestow on James Cameron’s mind-bogglingly expensive 3D science-fiction epic, Avatar, is that I can now understand how my forebears felt when they first settled in to let Star Wars wash over them.  There’s nothing particularly nuanced about Avatar, which is essentially a standard science-fiction adventure, straight up, no chaser.  Thematically, emotionally, and structurally, its ambitions are modest, even pedestrian.  However, like Star Wars before it, Avatar is a revolutionary film.  You’ve heard it a hundred times before, but this time is indisputably true: This Is Like Nothing I Have Ever Seen.  It is fitting that it has been birthed by James Cameron, a technophilic film-maker whose finest works tell simple stories with relentless energy and discreet intelligence.  It’s a cliché to insist that a movie must be seen in the theaters to be appreciated, but Avatar is the first film in memory than positively demands that it be experienced in its full glory, and that means 3D digital theatrical projection.  This is a film that will be a shadow of its former self on even the most elaborate home theater system.  Trust me on this: cough up the funds for that overpriced multiplex ticket, and prepare to see a new world unfold before your eyes.

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Late to the Game: Terminator Salvation

2009 (USA)
Director: McG
Viewed: December 18, 2009
Format: DIRECTV DEMAND

Just as Nick Stahl’s skittish, fatalistic John Connor fit Rise of the Machines‘ ferocious rush towards a bleak future, a zealous yet cynical Christian Bale–plagiarizing his Batman growl–suits Terminator Salvation’s gritty realization of that future.  This, and the admittedly seamless visual effects, is about the only thing that McG’s distressingly rote sequel gets right.  This outing’s central conceit–SkyNet has spawned an experimental half-human, half-machine abomination (a rugged, essentially charmless Sam Worthington)–isn’t remotely meaty enough to sustain a feature film.  The story is as limp as a noodle, but even as a mindless science-fiction actioner, Salvation fumbles.  At about the halfway point, McG trades genuinely frightening early set pieces for dull sensory incoherence.  Blessedly, it’s not the nerve-frying visual lunacy of a Michael Bay film, but just the undistinguished smash-bang nonsense that has characterized vast swaths of the past two decades’ action films.  That such mediocrity has befallen that Terminator saga is all the more frustrating given that the film-makers are clearly besotted with the previous films, loading Salvation with references and homages that range from the blatant to the clever. If only fanboy enthusiasm alone were sufficient to conjure a good film.