You sank my Battleship!

In the pantheon of bad directors, the throne room of Michael Bay has found its court jester. His name is Peter Berg.

The honor couldn’t come to a more pompous jerk. Not long ago I saw a behind-the-scenes feature with Berg, who directs with a ferocious energy as he charges his way around the set, swearing loudly to himself and carpetbombing every shot with camera coverage so his editor can make the film for him. He struck me as a man who doesn’t really like movies, but looks upon them as things to be conquered, like Genghis Khan looking down at empty spaces on maps saying, “Mine.”

Berg is no stranger to bombastic skull-grinding action films: his past movies include the inexplicably dopey The Rundown, the blasé-blasé superhero romp Hancock, and The Kingdom, the war-thriller that’s notable to Valley residents because a man died on a Mesa freeway during its production. (He also made the movie version of Friday Night Lights, which was loud and kinetic, but also quite wonderful and heartbreaking.) Berg’s latest is a live-action version of the Milton Bradley tabletop game Battleship. The board game, developed commercially during World War II and popularized during the Cold War, was a naval strategy guessing game with little plastic ships and white and red pegs indicating hit and missed offensive strikes. You will be forgiven for not remembering the game’s space aliens.

The film stars Hopper (Taylor Kitsch from another big-budget dud, John Carter) as a washed-up reject who would much rather be lounging in a bathrobe carving bongs out of Granny Smith apples. Hopper is very susceptible to persuasion: his brother tells him to join the Navy and in the next scene he’s in the Navy, and an officer no less even though it seems highly unlikely he has the required college degree. Hopper is introduced in a sequence where he slapsticks his way through a convenience store heist. He is sent there by a busty blonde who orders her dinners — microwave-cooked chicken burritos is no way to keep that figure — from the local dive bar. But when the bar’s kitchen is closed Hopper heads across the street to raid the burrito bin in one the film’s funnier moments.

I liked this scene. It is silly fun, Kitsch’s timing is perfect as he falls from the ceiling repeatedly, and I loved how it was shot using the store’s security camera footage. But there’s a catch, one that proves this movie is a sham: this whole botched burrito heist is shot-by-shot remake of actual security camera footage of a man “epic fail”-ing a real-life robbery. Search YouTube for “store robbery fail” and there it is on the first page. Like everything else in this movie, this scene is a fraud.

Later Hopper finds himself on one of three Navy boats off the Hawaiian coast when five alien UFOs land in the Pacific. One breaks up in the atmosphere and crash lands in Hong Kong after bumping into an orbiting satellite, yet strangely the others all survive intact even after they hit the concrete-hard water at re-entry speeds, but nevermind the physics. The UFOs take defensive positions and then zap a force field over all of Hawaii and the surrounding ocean. And then the aliens wait. Maybe they plan to invade, or maybe they’re just making a pitstop between galaxies — Battleship has no plans on telling us. Eventually the two sides start fighting each other, and then all hell breaks loose as the film careens ever forward on the wobbly presumption that since many people paid to see Transformers 3 they would do so again if this time it was called Battleship.

Like Transformers, this film makes no visual sense. It’s hard to tell what boat we’re looking at, who’s commanding it and where other characters are in relation to landmarks within each scene. The film’s spatial awareness is limited to only what is on the screen at any given point, which makes being an audience member tedious and oftentimes confusing. The special effects look nifty, but they only disqualify the film further from what our eyes recognize as visual continuity. For example: one of the three boats is a Japanese ship, but the film is shot with such complex irregularity it’s nearly impossible to figure out which one it is, and why the aliens decide to destroy it and not an American ship. In another sequence, I was sure two people were climbing up a mountain to get to a control room, but we later see they were climbing down even though in previous scenes the control room was shown to be on the mountain’s tip-top peak.

What’s so strange, though, is that each individual scene in Battleship is flawlessly shot. The Navy scenes could be recruitment videos. The makeout scenes with Hopper and his blonde could be a perfume ad, or a fashion video. The action scenes are remarkable video-game cinematics. But sandwich all these sequences together and all you get is baloney (instead of bologna). I call this Michael Bay Syndrome: every shot looks like either a music video or a TV commercial, but the movie, seen as a whole, is a rancid stew of hyper-stylized disjointed movie clips. It reminds me of what Roger Ebert said about Bay’s Armageddon: “Here it is at last, the first 150-minute trailer.”

The actors don’t make matters any better. Gravel-voiced Kitsch is completely unprepared for roles like this. One minute he’s leading his men into certain doom and the next he’s hogging all the glory by sniping alien cockpit windows from the bow. Something tells me the Navy would frown on his brand of showboating and freewheeling. Model Brooklyn Decker wasn’t hired for her acting abilities so I won’t waste time discussing them here. And Alexander Skarsgård, so great as Eric on True Blood, is given dialogue so inconceivably wooden that he needn’t wear a life preserver while at sea. And finally, what does it mean when Liam Neeson has the best performance in a movie? Trick question: nothing, Liam Neeson has he best performance in every movie he’s in. But what does it mean when pop star Rihanna (Umbrella … ella … ella … ella) has the second best performance in a movie? I’m still puzzling that answer, so let me know if you have one that makes sense.

Rihanna has a funny role: she’s in every scene. Apparently she’s the most qualified person on the boat. She’s in the engine room, the torpedo room, the forward hull, the upper deck, the missile launch center, the radar monitoring station and the bridge. Early in the film she controls a machine gun on a rubber boat as it goes out to greet the UFOs and during breaks in filming she swabbed the decks. Someone create an internet meme where Admiral Rihanna turns up randomly in other movies.

Some of the Navy scenes are exciting, including an AC/DC-blasted sequence where current and retired seamen join up to re-commission the USS Missouri, a battleship on display in Hawaii after the Navy switched to destroyers. Young sailors are shown side-by-side with old salty dogs (probably real Navy veterans) as they turn the Missouri museum into a fully functional war machine. This should have been the whole movie, but alas, it’s shortlived.

Before I sign off here, let me discuss one more scene. The aliens have jammed all the tracking equipment on the ships, so the crew has devised a plan to use tsunami warning buoys to track water displacement. On the ship’s computer screen the buoys form a grid with blipping dots representing a possible UFO location. All they can do is launch a missile and blindly hope they hit something. If you’ve ever played the Milton Bradley version of Battleship then you’ll recognize this as the object of the board game, which makes me wonder if Peter Berg ever does a version movie version of The Game of Life, would he embed a giant spinning wheel into the nearest mountain range? 

Battleship is one of the dumbest movies of the last couple years, and certainly one of the worst “big” movies ever made. The money it took to make it could have paid the medical bills of thousands of leukemia patients, or funded food banks for decades, or sent thousands of under-privileged teens to college. Instead, here it is, a floating debris field captained by a mini Michael Bay. 

Roll Call: five heroes too many in Avengers

You might be familiar with the phrase “less is more,” but are you acquainted with the phrase “more is more”? Buckle your seatbelts, Marvel is ready to demonstrate.

After nearly a decade of grooming all its tights-clad franchises for the inevitable assemblage — “Avengers assemble!” — Marvel has finally brought the whole dysfunctional family together for a blockbuster picnic called The Avengers, a film that is not shy about its premise: “You liked one superhero, now try six.”

I say six, but I probably should clarify that it’s more like four-and-a-quarter. Demigod Thor counts as one, as do Iron Man and Hulk, but poor Captain America has barely anything to do. At one point he’s asked to pull a lever and he nearly botches that. Certainly he’s only two-thirds superhero. He can’t fly, can’t shoot rockets from his forearms, he can’t turn into a rage-monster and since he’s freezerburned from the 1940s he definitely can’t rock a Twitter feed (try @drunkhulk, and you’re welcome). Captain America is joined on the second-string team by Hawkeye, an archery expert and D-list hero, and Black Widow, a sexy spy who vamps around in clingy fetishwear. Add all of them up and The Avengers looks like a slightly more handsome line for the bathrooms at Comic-Con.

The film picks up kinda-sorta-maybe where Thor left off: Thor’s brother Loki has assembled an army on the other side of the cosmos. All he needs is the Allspark … I mean Tesseract, a cube of energy last seen in Captain America, to unlock an extra-dimensional gateway to Earth so he can warp his alien commandos down into New York City, specifically to the location dictated on the film permit, which is the Park Avenue Viaduct above 42nd Street. For such a broad invasion the film certainly uses one location an awful lot; Pershing Square will be picking dead alien bits out of their cobb salads for weeks.

Once Loki shows up and proves he means business, it’s up to cyclopean hero-manager Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) — think Tommy Lasorda, but round, tall, black and less grumpy — to assemble the Avengers from bits of better movies. Captain America is in Brooklyn taking his frustration out on punching bags. Bruce Banner is on the other side of the world avoiding any Hulk aggression triggers. Iron Man’s Tony Stark is in plain site as he rockets up and down Manhattan. Finally, there’s Thor, who only materializes when he senses his brother’s presence, which made me wonder why he didn’t use that trick to shorten his Thor movie by a solid 30 minutes. Eventually, after some beleaguered prodding from Fury, the superheroes agree to form up to fight Loki and his smallpox-infested space-minions.

At this point The Avengers could have really flexed its muscles and shown us who’s boss. An action scene right about here would have served that purpose immensely well. Instead the film settles into a slow, plodding second act that takes all the bad parts of the Fantastic Four movies — fighting in public, power plays for leadership, whiny temper tantrums — and turns them into grueling high-concept performance art. When this many fantastically amazing people are assembled in one room and all they can do is bicker and argue, well then it’s time to rethink the plot. And hire a nanny.

This goes on for a long time, but eventually it clears the way for a whopper of a third act that is the big New York City battle. This might be the mother of all superhero fight sequences, with its smorgasbord of digital effects, battle tropes and comic clichés, and all the scenery smashing your insurance provider will let you witness before they raise your premium. And just when you think a giant flying mechanized tapeworm was the last of it, oh wait, here’s five giant flying mechanized tapeworms. More heroes, more villains, more explosions, more more more ... In case you’re missing the theme here, The Avengers is all about quantity, not quality, though I will admit the last battle sequence is quite stellar for all its incomprehensible grinding.

I did take issue with the post-9/11 doomsday scenarios in this massive war sequence. If you have some bizarre hankering to watch flying things crash into skyscrapers or buildings collapsing into their own footprints or ash-covered New Yorkers pecking through the debris as they fight for their lives, then boy is this the movie for you. It doesn’t quite exploit 9/11’s drama, but it does shamelessly plagiarize from that story’s back cover.

The cast may look silly in their little tighties, but they give decent enough performances. Chris Hemsworth plays Thor like the meathead he is. Mark Ruffalo is Bruce Banner’s third actor in as many movies, and he does a fine job conveying Banner’s debilitating duality. Chris Evans is underwhelming as Captain America, but Captain America is an underwhelming hero so it all works out. Robert Downey Jr., as Iron Man, continues to delight; he steals every scene he’s in. Jeremy Renner and Scarlett Johannson, as Hawkeye and Black Widow, needed more to work with even though they were playing peripheral characters. In the end, though, most of the heroes get their time to shine and fans of each one will find something especially exciting to latch onto.

The lead actors are charismatic and effective enough, but it all felt like a rehash to me. I blame the flat characters, who were done growing in each of their respective movies. For comparison’s sake, look at Batman, a superhero who is still growing and changing three movies in. These characters have no lofty ideas about good and evil, and they have no deeper story to unravel. They simply show up to smash things into bits.

Where The Avengers really scores points is with its sense of humor. This is a hilarious movie. I laughed harder in this action picture than I do in most full-fledged comedies. Many of the gags come from Iron Man, but a surprising number come from the Hulk, which is odd since the green monster only makes two appearances throughout the picture.

The Avengers is a middle-of-the-road comic movie with a boring middle section that’s counteracted with a terrific, if also overblown, final act. Comic fans will like it, but that’s not saying much since they have no discernible taste — The Avengers’ mere existence is all they require.

"Sweet Neptune's briny pants!"

Avast, you wretched maggots! Put down that grog. Strike the colors. Hoist the main sail. Secure the rigging. Let the brass cannons roar. Once more unto the breach, my dear scallywags!

And you thought we were done with pirates?! I won't slap irons on your mitts or throw you in the brig for thinking pirates retired from the cinema, especially after Jack Sparrow — that salty pirate dog! — turned in a scurvy last performance in the most mediocre Pirates movie, On Stranger Tides, one I wouldn't pick over Captain Blood (or even Cutthroat Island) any day of the week.

No, the pirates have returned, and this time in clay. Or plasticine. Or whatever they're doing stop-motion movies in nowadays. It looks like bakery fondant to me.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits might be the cheeriest film so far this year. It made me smile and smile and smile. It also continuously surprised me: the way it worked in little jokes around the edges of the bigger ones, the way it hid little nuggets of humor in the background and the way it exaggerated, to the point of parody, every element of pirate culture. You've seen a man with a hook on his hand, or peg on his leg, but have you seen a man with a cork where his nose should be? What about a wooden elbow? Neither had I.

The film stars The Pirate Captain. That's his name, and I'm pretty sure if he could produce a birth certificate, on the back of a treasure map perhaps, it would prove it. Pirate Captain and his band of pirate droogs — ol' cork-nose, an albino teen, a British deserter and a woman pretending to be a man — are storming the high seas (and low ones) looking for gold booty. They don't really crave wealth, just a prized Pirate of the Year trophy that's given annually to the pirate who does the craziest pirate stunts. At the trophy party, one pirate arrives inside the mouth of a captured whale like a rock-star Ahab.

Pirate Captain is in for a tough competition, but he thinks he found an inside scoop when he discovers his chubby parrot is actually the last remaining dodo bird in existence. The bird brings the attention of Charles Darwin — a risky joke in a country where Darwin and science are being written out of school textbooks — and his scene-stealing human-like monkey called Manpanzee. Also turning up is Queen Victoria, who is a member of a foodie club that eats rare creatures. Her menu has a space for Dodo Delights somewhere between the Panda Face Fritters and Pygmy Elephant Nuggets. Don't tell me these plot elements aren't making you smile. 

The film has a wonderful cast of voices, including the great Brendan Gleeson as Pirate With Gout and Imelda Staunton as Queen Victoria. Hugh Grant voices Pirate Captain splendidly, though he was so good I didn't hear any of Grant's sheepish trademarks. In fact, I had to consult the credits to discover that Grant was the main voice actor, to which Pirate Captain might say, "Sweet Neptune's briny pants!" This is a small enhancement, but it helps animated films: Pirate Captain would not have been as magnanimous had we been picturing a celebrity's face. Adding to the audio is a soundtrack full of punk, British ska, fuzzy garage-rock, songs from TV's Flight of the Conchords and other music anachronisms. It's OK to walk out humming The Clash.

Band of Misfits was made by the British studio Aardman Animation, the company that previously gave us Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit. I adore this studio and their high-functioning brand of creativity. There are no lulls in their films, just wave after wave of brilliant imagination. And they really jam it in, too, so much so that no two viewers will notice the same things. I noticed the name on one boat, the Napoleon Blownapart, that a colleague missed completely. And he noticed a gag about a peg-leg replacement store that I missed. There are hundreds of delightful little touches like this peppered throughout Pirates that it feels less like a film and more like a comedy scavenger hunt. My personal favorite was the cannonball delivery system that resembled a classic skee ball machine.

Two or three months without movies this exhilarating and I start to grow bored and frustrated with Hollywood. How many ways do I really need to see robots crush cities? If it's not Transformers 1-3 (a fourth is on its way soon), then it's Battleship or The Avengers. Those movies have spectacle for sure, but no pluckiness and heart. Do yourself a big favor and go see The Pirates! Band of Misfits, with or without your children. You will not see more creative filmmaking this summer. 

Author's Note: I love these photos so, what the hell, I'm going to include all of them. Here they are. They're all clickable. More after the jump.

Aardman Animation at work on Pirates!

My review for The Pirates! Band of Misfits will be posted momentarily, but before it goes live I wanted to post these photos of Aardman Animation hard at work on the film. 

I love this stuff: people hard at work on these little characters on their miniature sets. It's essentially grown-ups playing with toys for endless hours. Oh, and there's some photography thrown in for good measure. This is old-fashioned moviemaking and it feels pure and real. I adore most stop-motion animation, but Pirates! really surprised me. I found myself thinking about its gags, its set pieces, its moments of spontaneous action. There was one sequence with several characters riding a bathtub down Charles Darwin's staircase. It reminded me a lot of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the minecart scene that used optical effects, miniatures and live actors working in harmony to achieve a nail-biting sequence of peril. Pirates! doesn't just use stop-motion, but also digital effects and other tools to create sequences with just as much suspense, and humor to boot. This is a terrific film, and one of my favorite features of 2012. 

 

Three Stooges, as done by Two Stooges

In the world of comedy, the Three Stooges are a sacred cow. Look upon them with reverence and respect. Whatever you do, don’t remake them.

Someone forgot to tell that to Peter and Bobby Farrelly, the two dunces who have spent something like 17 years trying to bring this white-hot heap of disaster to the big screen. And what do we get for all that waiting? Baby urine!

Really? I mean really?!?! It was bad enough when one baby was peeing in Curly’s eyes and open mouth, but then three babies. And then a whole nursery of babies being aimed and squeezed for the amusement of the Stooges. At one point, so much urine is being shot around that Curly is nearly gargling on the stuff. Movies like this can’t be good for beverage sales at the snack bar.

Where this picture fails its audience is not with the baby pee — though that sequence certainly does help — but at the head-on collision the Farrellys orchestrate between the classic Stooges and a modern-day incarnation of the Stooges. The resulting mess is neither funny nor nostalgic. It is quite simply a failure of epic proportions.

The Three Stooges tries very hard to be a classic Three Stooges feature. You’ll hear the familiar music, you’ll see all the gags, and you’ll hear all of Curly’s nyuk-nyuks. But the spirit and soul is missing.

Frankly, it’s just not funny. I didn’t laugh for the first 20 minutes. The joke: Curly, forgetting that the head of a sledgehammer is in a bucket of water, douses a nun in the face. The sledgehammer bashes against her brow with a metallic clang, to which Curly says, “See, I told you there is too much iron in the water.” It wasn’t even a hearty laugh.

The movie starts at the beginning with Larry, Curly and Moe abandoned at an orphanage. Thirty-five years later and they’re still there doing the whole dog-and-pony show to prospective parents. They also torture the nuns, who might be willing to suggest contraceptives to the mother who bore these three imbeciles. “They are full of heart and dim of wit,” one nun says. Due to the Stooges’ excessive insurance liability, the orphanage is under threat of foreclosure, so the trio hit the road to raise some cash and save their home full of orphan clichés.

Most of the film is a series of slapstick routines that loosely follow a subplot involving a gold-digging wife, her rich husband and her desperate lover. And then the cast of The Jersey Shore shows up to shit directly into the proverbial fan. There’s a joke about the Kardashians — “Three idiots, where? The Kardashians are here?” — and I was half expecting them to turn up because, what the hell, Snooki’s here so why not.

Even novice fans of the Stooges will recognize all the trademark gags: eye pokes, hammering noses, nostril pulls, three-face slap, the belly punch and all of Curly’s exaggerated facial slaps. The physicality of the Stooge humor is commendable, and the actors inhabit the original jokes well enough. But it all just feels so wrong. A scene with a choking dolphin. A bit with a girl being lifted into the air by a dozen balloons. A nun in an outfit made with less material than one of Rick Santorum’s handkerchiefs. A prop gag with a salmon farm falls especially flat.

My real issue, though is with the pee sequence. The inclusion of the scene proves that the Farrelly Brothers have no respect for the material. And how do these guys get out of bed in the morning without laughing at the site of their own dicks? “It’s a penis! Haha! Let’s watch it urinate. Haha!” I can handle scenes involving semen in hair, pubic hair glued on faces, bad comb overs, freakishly tan and wrinkled old ladies, Amish men pooping into urinals, laxatives in coffee and all other kinds of immature boy humor, but not here with this film.

Could this movie, under different circumstances, ever be good? Maybe. The Artist aped from early silent classics and still managed to be a modern-day version of those genres. Surely the Stooges could get a similar treatment that would be equally new and nostalgic at the same time.

This version is not it. And in terms of bad ideas, this one is a milestone, right there with Steve Martin’s performance as Inspector Clouseau, another sacred cow that should have never been reinvented.

I will say this, though, Stooges got one thing right: Shemp doesn’t show up once.