Marvel kicks it into high gear for Guardians

The best joke of the summer has no punchline, but the setup is priceless: A human, a raccoon, a green woman, a tree and a man incapable of understanding metaphors walk into a bar … If you really need a punchline, then stay tuned to Guardians of the Galaxy, and the sequel, and The Avengers sequel, and the raccoon spin-off, and the TV show, and the reboot 15 years from now, and read the comic book, and then its reboot. But that punchline will come, eventually. 

Ignore my condescension about Marvel’s franchise stretching — I really did enjoy Guardians of the Galaxy and its wackadoo cast of characters, who might not be as mighty as the Avengers, but are infinitely more interesting, funny and present. Even the raccoon, who nature tells us should be picking through the trash and clinging to human faces in Farrelly Brothers comedies, is a breath of fresh air blown over Marvel’s stable of increasingly stale comic characters. If you'll recall, Captain America slept through his last adventure, Iron Man seemed bored, Hulk is a pyrotechnic afterthought, and Thor is a third-rate thespian in an explosion-filled Hamlet. I've grown tired of these emotionally wounded men and their faltering identities, which is probably why James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy feels so invigoratingly unconventional. 

The movie is set in space as salvage captain and bounty hunter Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), aka Star-Lord, cruises through the galaxy looking for space junk to sell. When he finds a metallic sphere containing a piece of soul-sucking rock, he unleashes all kinds of problems that eventually unites him with green-skinned Gamora (Zoe Saldana), alien muscleman Drax (Dave Bautista), pint-sized Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and Rocket’s tree friend Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), who only says 'I am Groot,' yet Rocket understands him like Timmy with Lassie. Each character has their own personality and quirks, and I found myself cheering on all of them. None of the characters have superpowers, another refreshing tweak for a comic-movie, which means they have to get out of jams using ingenuity and teamwork. 

Their teamwork shines during several high-octane action sequences in a space-prison, which they escape from without the help of a man’s prosthetic leg, and a Mos Eisley-like trading post built inside the decaying brain of a deceased space titan. The locations are something else. In the brain station, Star-Lord, Rocket and Gamora jump into mining pods to engage starfighters on the edge of space. The scene features something I've never seen before in a sci-fi movie: Star-Lord crashes through the hull of a fighter and uses his mining pod’s robot arms to fly the enemy ship. It’s a man piloting a ship piloting another ship, and it's appropriately zany. Later we meet a man who can control a single metal arrow with a whistle — I wonder what the arrow does during a basketball game. 

Our five heroes are fighting back against Gamora's ex-partner, Ronan, who is trying to recover the all-powerful rock, one of five Infinity Gems, for his boss Thanos, a stone-faced villain whose throne is definitely not eco-friendly — even the armrests have little jetpacks on them to provide comfy forearm support. Thanos is the main villain, but he’s only here to tease future films, ones that will feature even more Infinity Gems and eventually the Infinity Gauntlet, which is some kind of no-limit credit card or something. I enjoyed this movie, but this sequel baiting is annoying. Fanboys might adore it all, but it all feels kind of icky and corporate the way Marvel has spread its storylines out across so many different mediums. Somewhere a marketing director is praying to a plaque that reads "synergy." 

All that aside, though, Guardians of the Galaxy is a whopper of a franchise starter. And not since the Hellboy franchise have I been this excited about a comic-movie. Guardians soars mostly because the characters are likable and funny. And because it has a different tempo than the other earth-bound comic movies. But mostly because it’s funny. Pratt, eternally Andy Dwyer from Parks and Recreation, is the right fit here as the smart-ass space jockey. He’s a big doofus, of course, but he’s also macho enough to carry the action, which is intensely orchestrated into gunfights, space races, laser battles and martial art spectacles. He has a gag about a blacklight in his dirty space cruiser that must have shot soda out of a dozen noses in the theater I saw it in. In another great line, he says he comes from Earth, "a planet of outlaws — Billy the Kid, Bonnie & Clyde, John Stamos."

Television wrestler Dave Bautista's Drax will also be a fan favorite. Drax speaks, hears and thinks in literal terms — metaphor and symbolism are beyond him. When a prison inmate threatens one of our guardians with the old knife-across-the-throat gesture, Drax seems perplexed: "I will not drag my finger across his throat … But I will kill him." Later, it's implied sarcastically that nothing goes over Drax's head. His response: "Of course nothing goes over my head because I will catch it."

Add into all this Bradley Cooper's exasperated snickering, Vin Diesel's octave-busting "I am Groot," and the lovely Zoe Saldana all covered in green skin and you have a wild, free-wheeling sci-fi flick with a stellar cast, some genuine laughs and a damned fine soundtrack of ’70s rock. I can't ask for any more from Marvel. Except maybe fewer movies.

(The press stills are really great, so I'm adding most of them. Sorry if they take forever to load.)

 

 

 

 

Music elevates James Brown biopic

Like James Brown himself, Get On Up is a hot mess with a great soundtrack.

Not to speak ill of the dead — Brown died in 2006 — it's just that the singer had some very public problems with drugs, alcohol and domestic violence. He was also a gifted showman, a riotous performer and a larger-than-life personality. Get On Up chronicles both sides of the Godfather of Soul's life within a competing collection of scenes, time periods and themes cobbled together with little precision in Tate Taylor’s rudimentary bio-picture. Ray and Walk the Line this is not. 

Holding the jumble together, though, is Chadwick Boseman as the irascible James Brown. We last saw Boseman in 42 playing Jackie Robinson, and here he again transcends the historical role to wear the many faces of James Brown, from his pampadour'd beginnings as a gospel-soul singer to his later performances with the jumpsuits and capes. Boseman's Brown does something I wasn't expecting, though I much appreciated: he breaks the fourth wall and talks to the audience. 

"James Brown touched everything, every record," he says referencing himself in the third person during the opening scenes in a House of Cards-like breakaway from the action. "James Brown brings the super-heavy funk, you know it." Boseman winks and cringes and stares back at us, channeling Brown in effective little snippets of the man's persona. In one monologue spoken directly to us, he explains how he worked around payola and other radio tricks to get his music on the air and in concert halls. 

The movie begins near the end, with Mr. Brown — everyone had to call him that — strolling into his office to find that someone has "hung a number two in muh toilet." Needless to say, I didn't expect this introduction. Brown walks out to his truck, grabs a shotgun and fires it into the ceiling accidentally. Sirens start screaming in the distance. Then the movie cuts to the golden years, when Brown had a private jet, fur coats and briefcases full of money. 

But don't settle in, because it jumps again, this time back to his childhood in rural Georgia, where his mother and father abandoned him, first with each other, then with an aunt at a brothel. It's the early 1940s, and we see a very young James working at the brothel hustling Army soldiers on leave into the red-lit hallways and the waiting girls. One morning he wanders through town and stops at a church, where he witnesses the congregation, and their rapturous preacher, dancing in an evangelical daze, as if possessed by God. The movie doesn't say it bluntly, but it makes nudging suggestions: James Brown found success when he crossed sex and gospel. 

After several time warps through Brown’s life, Get On Up starts feeling very gonzo and self-aware. The fact that it's all in non-consecutive snippets adds to its manic style and tone. Some viewers will see sloppy filmmaking — and there is evidence there to support that — but squint just a little and the structure looks like wild improvisation, the kind that made Brown so brilliant on a stage. I enjoyed the hectic jumping around, even if it makes the film disjointed and non-linear. It turns events into context-free episodes that reveal his true character, like the time Brown sings in the prison medical center, or clocks his wife in the face while wearing a Santa Claus suit, or when he berates and fines his band members for minor infractions, or when he hijacks a Little Richard show. In another mini episode, Brown is flown into Vietnam to entertain the troops. The plane takes enemy fire coming in, and an unfazed James is chatting with the tense pilots — "You can't kill the funk," he tells them. Though they aren't always linked, these scenes start to form the sum of Brown's frenzied legacy. 

Some of these sequences add up to larger themes, but many don’t. A Boston concert after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. is ready to explode into a riot, but Brown admonishes and then rallies his fans to preserve the peace. Later, Brown is in the studio recording children singing Say it loud / I'm black and I’m proud. Surely, race and the Civil Rights Movement will play a larger role in the context of Brown's life, right? Wrong. Race is a dead end, even as Allison Janney (and others) turn up to say the N word, or as James and his first band, the Famous Flames, play to a 'honky hoedown' of white faces on television. 

Another dead end: Brown's confusing personal life, which included drugs, alcohol, stints in jail, various women and lots of wacky appearances and mugshots. A great deal of time is spent with musical partner Bobby Byrd, who took more abuse than he was being paid to receive. Byrd is played by Nelsan Ellis (Lafayette from True Blood), who needs to be in more movies. Dan Aykroyd also turns up as Brown's manager and promoter, while Octavia Spencer plays the madame at the brothel and Viola Davis plays his mother. 

So let's talk about the music — it's amazing. All the hits are here as well as some deeper cuts, and to hear them loud on the big screen is just electrifying. The songs have momentum, too, including in that Little Richard sequence or when Brown counts it off and drops into that super-heavy funk. Boseman's lip-syncing is frequently off, but he more than makes up for it in his fancy footwork, spins, twists, windmills and splits. It was exhausting just watching him. 

Is that enough to get you into Get On Up? If you like James Brown's music, then that's more than enough. 

 

 

 

 

Surrealist Mood Indigo dazzles, then fizzles

Part quirky comedy, part Salvador Dalí surrealist fantasy, part Dr. Seuss dreamscape, Mood Indigo is probably best described by its scenarios, which are oddly fascinating, not to mention utterly baffling:

• A man takes a bath in purple water. When he's done he uses a power tool to drill through the bottom of the tub and the ceiling of the tenant below him. The grape-colored water drains through the holes into a flower pot, which then instantly sprouts a full-grown flower.

• Eels peek out of a kitchen faucet until a chef can grab them and prepare the squirmy little creatures for dinner. After dinner is prepared, the dishes spin and dance around the prep table until they can be carried to a wavy wooden dinner table with roller skates on the legs.

• Rows of typists frantically hammering on typewriters being moved down the line on conveyor belts. The text they're typing seems to be the thoughts and actions of the main character, who later, inexplicably, takes a job in the facility that likely represents his own brain.

• A device called a pianocktail works like mechanized bartender attached to a piano. As the keys are played — minor keys for more nostalgic drinks, major keys for more optimistic drinks — a little train carrying a glass circles the piano adding ingredients to the musically derived cocktail.

• A man uses a Rubik's Cube as a day planner. When asked about a day later in the week, he twists the sides until they line up for the day he's planning.

• When characters shake hands, their entire hands rotate at the wrist several revolutions.

• At a party someone brings out "oven-baked snacks," which are flaky pastries individually baked in miniature ovens.

• The bride and groom at a wedding are determined by an obstacle course involving boxcar racers with cross-shaped wheels. And the preacher arrives by parachuting out of an iron rocket that circles the inside of the church's cathedral.

• At an office building, a man passes a memo by crumpling it up, loading it into a large revolver and firing it into a tube that snakes through the building. 

• When someone dies and their family can't afford a proper funeral, workers come to the house and remove the body by throwing the casket out the window. It's taken to the cemetery not by hearse, but by a delivery truck that belches smoke and soot. 

• Two characters ride in a street-side amusement attraction, a fiberglass cloud hoisted up by a giant crane that can reach across all of France.

• A tiny mouse, played by a man in rodent costume, wanders throughout many scenes, including inside the kitchen, where he silently fetches items for the chef. 

The french movie is certainly eccentric, and I've only scratched the surface on its odd scenes. It’s directed by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director Michel Gondry, because of course it is. Although it sounds too arty and symbolic for a plot, it does have one: Colin (Romain Duris) meets and falls in love with Chloé (Audrey Tautou, Amélie), named after his favorite Duke Ellington song. Deep into their relationship, she develops a water lily in her lung that cripples her and requires Colin to jump into gear to save her life. 

Mood Indigo starts out pleasant enough, but doom and dread slowly creep into the whimsical mixture. This turn is gradual at first as the music switches keys and grows more ominous, then the shots get slow and steadier, and finally the color is sucked from the frame until the film ends in black and white. I wasn't ready for the sudden depression, but then again I wasn't ready for any of it.

While unique and visually fascinating, the film is hollow and lacks humanity and compassion. This is not the first time Gondry has out-dreamed his vision — recall the sad disappointment of Be Kind Rewind — but it's likely to be his most ambitiously visual picture, which is its own reward, great film or not. 

Lucy in the sky with ... EVERYTHING

Lucy begins in two very odd places: on a microscopic stage with several splitting cells doing a glowing mambo, and 3 million years ago as a shaggy cavewoman sips water from a river. What happens next is a science thriller so bananas that to explain it thoroughly would require lectures from Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson, with visual annotations from John Woo, Quentin Tarantino and Terrence Malick. And possibly drugs. 

The movie is directed by Luc Besson, whose films have wavered in quality over the years, but his command of the language of film has always been impeccably fluent and precise. Recall the immediacy of La Femme Nikita or the rhythmic editing of shots and music in Léon. His plots don’t always find their marks, but the journeys they provide are rarely boring. And here he might have outdone himself with a sci-fi flick so dementedly high-minded that it will draw serious comparisons to Malick’s Tree of Life, or maybe just a version re-edited with more kung-fu, gunfights and enough spacey cracked-out science theories to make Bill Nye's bowtie twirl.

Lucy is bonkers. It's settings include Taiwan, France and the Eagle Nebula — seriously. Its weapons include guns, knives and inky brain matter that devours a whole laboratory. The title character speaks dialogue usually said between bags of Funyuns, but here she is entirely genuine when she says, "I can feel space, gravity, the rotation of the earth, my own brain … I remember the sound of my bones growing." The film ends when a character is literally absorbed into the space-time fabric of the universe. "Bonkers" doesn't seem to cover it all in this case. 

All this cosmic lunacy is caused by a synthetic drug ingested by Lucy (Scarlett Johansson), a party girl caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time. The crystallized blue drug, when consumed in just the right way, allows the brain to access more and faster computing power in the firing synapses of the mind. Humans use no more than 10 percent of their brains. Dolphins, for comparison purposes, use 20 percent — the extra 10 percent gives them the ability of echolocation. So, the movie reasons, just think of what would happen if humans could go to 20, or 50 or even 100 percent. Lucy pushes that envelope until she becomes a god. And Besson's movie is her Genesis.

But before it gets all theoretical and trippy, especially in its final 20 minutes, Lucy is a rather straightforward action thriller. Lucy — the woman, not the movie — is told to deliver a metal case to drug kingpin Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi from the original Old Boy), whose consideration of human life is negligible. The scene is perfect Besson: Lucy is handcuffed to the case and told, through a telephone interpreter, that she must open it. But before she pops the lid, Mr. Jang and his crew of henchmen all stand behind armored shields, never a good sign. Later, Lucy has the drugs sewn into her belly for smuggling abroad. The plan is going smooth until a wayward kick from a handler dislodges the drugs and sets Lucy on her metaphysical journey through all of Einstein's theories.

But before she goes all omniscient, some smaller miracles happen: she gains the ability to distort and manipulate matter, control other humans and also distort time. She can also see electrical and magnetic fields, which provides a beautiful visual: Lucy plucking electric strings that are the wireless signals for all of Paris. Her new powers of perception allow for a spirited wrong-way chase through France. She can also see inside bodies and minds, change her hair style the way most people refresh their browser windows, and make guns disintegrate in the hands of her enemies. What does your brain capacity have to do with manipulating matter in this manner? I have no clue, but Lucy is a believer so just roll with it.

The movie is slickly edited and shot, and Besson throws in all kinds of inserts, time lapses, B-roll and nature footage to prove his points. When Lucy is in danger, we see two cheetahs eyeing a stray antelope, or a mouse circling a mousetrap. A reference to sex cuts to a shots of animals getting it on. When Lucy begins "colonizing her brain," the entire universe unfolds before her with animation, space imagery and even more time-lapse shots. This will be the most famous scene in the movie — equivalent to the Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey — as Lucy swipes her hand in front of her, like she’s using God’s iPad, and time creeps backward to the 1960s, then the 1800s and then quicker until the continents mash together, the dinosaur-killing comets are sucked back into space and organic matter sinks into lava-spewing volcanoes. But as if that weren’t enough, we zip into space to witness black holes, the birth of the galaxy, the Big Bang and what might be the first particle of anything ever. Ambitious? Lucy has everything. Literally everything.

That being said, Lucy is still awkwardly paced. Some of the action is anti-climactic, and much of the non-action just kinda sits there with nothing to do. The ending, which I adored, is so obscure that some audience members would likely rage-quit out of the theater if the movie didn't abruptly evaporate into the ether first. Oh and Morgan Freeman's in it doing everything you'd expect a Morgan Freeman cardboard cutout to do. I wanted him to have a larger role. Johansson is fun, though. She's grown more familiar with high-octane action flicks, and here she seems to be purring with wonder, even as the camera hovers over her universe-filled eyeballs.

Besson deserves a lot of the credit for Lucy's audacious ideas. He walked to the edge of the galaxy to fish out this bizarre action-science hybrid. I'm grateful that movies like this are made, even if their ideas are as nutty as a Baby Ruth. And about that zaniness: yeah, it's all bogus, but surrender your brain at the door. Or at least 90 percent of it.

 

 

Metalheads devour their way through Hellion

The adage of "boys will be boys" only stretches so far until it breaks. And then there’s Hellion, which takes the saying out back and beats it with rusty fence posts until it’s whimpering in the Texas mud.

Yeesh, these boys. The movie opens and they’re relentlessly smashing a pickup truck with hammers and pipes in the parking lot of a high school football game. One kid climbs on the hood to pulverize the windshield. Another kid lights a fire in the front seat. They’re like piranha devouring a Christmas ham. 

We've seen teens do worse things in movies. Remember Kids, or when Anne Hathaway rolled dice to see how many gang bangers she had to sleep with in Havok. A generation of daughters won't be let out of their bedrooms by their overprotective fathers because of that scene. But the Hellion kids are 13 years old, with baby fat still on their cheeks and action figures still on their dressers, and there they go lighting fires, starting fights and pulling revolvers during home invasions. Something tells me a long grounding isn't going to correct this behavior. 

Hellion follows Jacob (Josh Wiggins) as he pals around with his little crew of metalheads as they break the law, ride dirtbikes and generally terrorize their neighborhood in sudden violent outbursts. Jacob lets his kid brother, the tiny tyke Wes, hang around with him and his buddies, even as their caustic influence starts to seep into Wes’ little noggin. In an early sequence, Jacob won't let Wes look at a porn magazine, but in the next scene Wes is being forced to commit arson as a form of gang initiation — priorities are all over the place. 

Jacob is screwed up mostly because his dad, Hollis (Aaron Paul), is a deadbeat drunk, whose only expression of emotion comes when he drops flowers by the intersection where his wife was killed in a car accident. Hollis hardly registers when cops bring Jacob home in handcuffs, or when a social worker takes Wes out of the home to live with his aunt Pam (Juliette Lewis). Eventually, though, Hollis does start giving a damn, but it may be too late for his children, who are pushing away from him faster in their downward spirals. 

The writing, persuasively realistic in tone and mediocrity, is uneven and frustrating because the film lurks forward without any serious motivation. At times Hellion feels like a slice-of-life documentary, which gives it an authentic feel but little narrative arc. I could have used a few less shots of the boys just sitting around, or wandering the streets on their bikes. And Hollis apparently doesn't have a job, which means he can sit around and hammer stuff all day with no progress to show for it.

The children are convincing (and also terrifyingly cold) and so is Paul, who doesn't show as much range as he did on Breaking Bad, though he does have a heartbreaking scene in a pizza joint that will crush your soul. It is interesting how the film ponders Lewis's Pam: she's the only character with her act together, yet the film frames her like a villain, the child-stealing homewrecker. And I adore Lewis. Somewhere, perhaps in different interplanetary dimension, Juliette Lewis is a beloved national treasure.

Hellion tries overly hard to convince us it has some kind of metal cred. The tweens wear genre-clashing T-shirts of Skeletonwitch, Slayer and Pig Destroyer and have circle pits in their living rooms to vintage Metallica songs — and the film features a Transformers-level of product placement for the band The Sword — but the effect seems to be an exact response to Spender Susser's equally headbanging delinquent-teen drama Hesher. I initially disliked Hesher when it came out, but the film's subversive, nihilist streak has won me over after several viewings. It worked because the metal soundtrack was great, but also because the film had an emotional payoff. Hellion can't say the same with its more realistic, but abysmally more depressing, final moments.

In the end, Hellion just dishes out too much turmoil, so much that it starts to shove you away. That’s not to say the acting or the directing, by newcomer Kat Candler, aren't stellar, because they are. It’s just the film is too loud, too scattered and a little too gritty.