The Weekend Review: Big Hero 6

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

For as lackluster of a job as it actually is, working for AMC is not without its benefits.  Being able to see any film that I want to for free lead me to seeing The Book of Life while it was still in theaters and kept my wallet from bearing the burden of seeing Interstellar.  Most recently it got me to go to Big Hero 6: a film that I probably would have waited before its DVD release to see otherwise.

Fourteen-year-old Hiro Hamaada is a robotic prodigy who wastes his genius on hustling participants of illegal, back alley robot fights.  Hating to see his little brother's talents squandered, Tadashi Hamada convinces Hiro to enroll in the Sanfransokyo Institute of Technology by introducing him to his eclectic group of friends and their current scientific endeavors.  But after Tadashi dies in a fire at the university, Hiro becomes convinced that it was no accident.  He retrofits Baymax - his brother's health care robot - into a super-powered fighter and joins with his brothers friends - electromagneticist GoGo, chemist Honey Lemon, laser spectroscoptist Wasabi and school mascot Fred - to bring his brother's killer to justice.

Although some have lauded Lucy as the most thematically pro-science film of the year, that honor unreservedly is held by Big Hero 6.  While most superheroes are creatures of physical prowess - think Superman, the Incredible Hulk and Thor - the Big Hero 6 are all defined by their intellectual attributes.  With the possible exception for Fred (whose heroics are based on his experience as a costumed mascot for the university), each character's powers are derived from the scientific discipline that they study.  Gogo's Flash-like speed and agility are based on her research in creating frictionless electromagnetic axles; Honey Lemon's versatile assortment of chemical bombs are based on her research as a chemist; Wasabi's light saber-like blades are based on his study of lasers; Hiro's integration with and upgrades to Baymax are based on his uncanny knowledge of robots.

The film also gives us the best justification of superheroics since Uncle Ben's famous mantra of "with great power comes great responsibility."  Before Tadashi can run into the burning auditorium to rescue people that he knows for a fact are still inside, Hiro grabs him and begs him not to go: it's obvious suicide.  With quiet resolve, he tells his little brother that "someone has to do something" before running in to his death.

The rest of the film deals with Hiro coming to terms with Tadashi's death with startling frankness for a PG-rated film.  When he accidentally activates Baymax, the robot insistently gets to work at improving Hiro's emotional state: helping him uncover the mystery surrounding the fire that killed his brother and assembling the Big Hero 6.  He does the latter not as part of a crime fighting crusade, but because contact with friends and loved ones can help Hiro work through his depression.  His insistence that "Tadashi is here," coupled with the test footage of Tadashi building Baymax, is perhaps the best realization of the lasting legacy of loved ones since The Lion King's revelation of "you see, he lives in you." 

The characters are all uniquely well-written, ranging from overly personal, emotionally disinterested, obsessively compulsive, lackadaisically zen and interpersonally distant.  Even Baymax, a character whose every trait is defined by pre-programmed responses, is as endearing and as memorable of a character as his human companions.  In some ways, however, this highlights the one problem that cropped up with the movie: its brevity.

Disney seemed so hyper-focused on how long a children's movie aught to be that they were blind to how long this one in particular should have been.  It's the same templated mind-set that nearly resulted in "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" - a cinematic highlight that went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song - being cut from The Lion King for runtime concerns.  I can't help but feel that an extra fifteen or twenty minutes would have made the film perfect: giving us more time with Tadashi's friends before he died, watching them interact with the ambitious young Hiro and more fully displaying their commitment to him as being something better defined than as an abstract obligation to a deceased friend.

I cannot wait for a director's cut of the film to come along and solve that one issue that I found with the film, because everything else about it is no less than fantastic.  It is a mature film that handles mature themes deftly enough that they can be understood and internalized by a very young audience without fear that it will be too much for them.  Hiro's first flight with the newly upgraded Baymax is as thrilling as hiccup's first flight with Toothless and Baymax's physical comedy is on par with WALL-E's wordless humor.  It is as exciting as any other film to come out this year and is easily one of my favorites of 2014.

The best way that I can endorse this film is to simply describe the how the seven-year-old that I saw it with reacted.  He was on the literal edge of his seat the entire movie: wide-eyed and mouth sluffed open.  He thrillingly cheered during the fight scenes - so much so that we had to quiet him down - and reflexively noted how sad Tadashi's death was.  The smarter-than-necessary script kept him constantly trying to predict what was going to happen next and who the villain in the Kabuki mask was.  He left the theater excited and smiling and completely enamored with the cuddly white robot cum superhero.

As for myself, I give the Big Hero 6 an incredibly high 8 out of 10, with the distinct potential that a longer cut of the film will bump it up to 8.  In a year of uncharacteristically strong animated features, Big Hero 6 is easily one of the best.  Although it's not quite up there with The Lego Movie nor The Book of Life - at least right now - it is an absolute must see for children, families and superhero fans.

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Piece of the Puzzle: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S2 E4 - A Hen in the Wolf House

In which I review the latest episode of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

It's no small wonder why Hydra wants the Obelisk, which they were first able to recover in Shadows.  With nothing more than tissue samples from its petrified victims, they were able to weaponize it to mixed results.  With the artifact itself, they could potentially do far worse than that: creating an extinction-level event to kill all non-Hydra operatives worldwide.  When undercover S.H.I.E.L.D. agent is put on the project, her cover within Hydra is blown, resulting in a hasty extraction.  Meanwhile, a desperate Reina comes to Coulson for Skye, whose father desperately wants her back in his custody.

Skye's father - the man that she has dedicated her entire life to learning more about, who was revealed to still be alive at the end of the last season - has been just as desperately trying to find her since the day that she was taken from him.  Coupled with the implicit revelation that Skye is in fact an alien - at least part Kree, given that she did not succumb to Agents Garret's and Coulson's fugue states after taking the Kree-based serum GH-325 - A Hen in the Wolf House ultimately raises more questions about her origin than it answers.  And despite my recent frustrations with Gotham's recently reset plot, I'm 100% fine with this.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has proven over its two seasons that it is more capable of developing, uncovering and ultimately deepening the mysteries surrounding its cast and setting.  These recent developments intensify, rather than frustrate, my appreciation for the show, taking the plot into interesting and uncharted directions.  Skye's father exudes a barely contained menace and an inherent desire to be with his daughter (who he has seen refer to him as a monster) that seems bound to explode in the very near future.  Coupled with the crossover potential with Guardians of the Galaxy, which included Kree among its major demographics, and the possibility of a small-screen adaptation of the Secret Invasion story line, the series has boundless potential with its new key players and plot points.

The reinsurgence of Simmons into S.H.I.E.L.D.'s main base of operations - and her strained reunion with Fitz - was impeccably handled.  Although she was doing incredibly well each week as a double agent inside of Hydra, and her physical absence was off-set by Fitz's hallucinated interactions with her, she is back where her character has the best potential to develop.  Here, her floundered relationship with Fitz can take off or stagnate as it will, with ample dramatic possibilities for the show to explore either way.  Fitz may darken or lighten as a character as a direct result, which again is in the best interest of the series' well-formed characters.

The final highlight of the episode was the introduction of fan favorite and Lance Hunter's she-devil of an ex-wife Bobbi Morse: codename Mockingbird, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.  When her cover within Hydra was not enough to gain access to the organization's high-priority projects, Simmons was brought in to work her way up through their scientific division.  In her short time on screen, Morse has proven to be a superior physical threat, a charismatic agent and an incredibly entertaining character.  Her future interactions with Hunter on the team - especially given how fervently he's gone off about her in previous episodes - are bound to be a highlight of the season.

The complications brought up in this episode as both substantive to the series as a whole as well as incessently entertaining to watch.  They're bound to have long-lasting implications for not just Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., but the MCU as a whole (even if it takes a while to migrate to the big screen).  Overall, I give the episode a solid 8 out of 10.

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Piece of the Puzzle: American Horror Story: Freakshow S4 E1 - Monsters Among Us

In which I review the latest episode of American Horror Story: Freakshow.

While investigating a woman's gruesome murder in rural Florida, police discover her shameful secret: her daughters, Siamese twins Bette and Dott Tattler.  They rapidly capture the grotesque imagination of the locals, as well as that of Elsa Mars, the owner of the new freak show located just outside of town.  Realizing that the twins murdered their mother, she convinces them to join her menagerie of freaks: the only real chance that they will ever have to fit in.  But when the police name the Tattler's the prime suspects in not just their mother's murder, but a string of killings occurring in the area, Elsa Mars and her company of aberrations will need to intervene on the twins' behalf in order to protect their new headline act.

Freakshow continues to prove that series creators' Brad Falchuk's and Ryan Murphy's decision to reinvent American Horror Story with each successive season was the perfect direction to take the series,  By doing so, each season has a distinctly unique identity : with a setting, cast of characters and narrative exclusive to that dozen or so set of episodes.  By shifting from ghosts to Nazi-created monsters to contemporary witches and now to a modern-day retelling of Tod Browning's Freaks, the series becomes a horrific experience that transcends the trappings of any one season.

American Horror Story's latest installment has what is easily the horror genre's best physical character design since Hellraiser's cenobites.  Inherently more unsettling than the fantastical extremes of the genre - phantoms, vampires, zombies and the like - real-world deformity provides a readily available source of visual discomfort for the audience: bearded women, flipper-handed carnies, conjoined twins, pygmies, amputees and other grotesques.  The visual highlight of the episode is easily Twisty the Clown - a deranged performer that's essentially a cross between Captain Spaulding and Leatherface.

In addition to the visual possibilities of the Freakshow cast, they also provide the narrative tension of the show.  Monsters Among Us presents an already escalating contention between the townsfolk that both hate and fear the freaks next door and the persecuted performers' decision that they've born enough abuse.  The Tattler's killed their mother because of her authoritarian need to keep them shut inside at all times: away from anybody who would possibly see them.  Elsa's landlord tried to evict the performers because the thought of them on his land gave his wife nightmares.  Local residents even tried to buy the freaks themselves as if they were slaves being paraded on auction.

While without a doubt an exuberant opening to a promising season, the film suffers by over-using Twisty the Clown.  Establishing his parallel narrative, which will undoubtedly prove linked to Elsa's Freakshow, through his initial double-murder was easily the most memorable scene.  Bringing up his murder spree in conversations with the other characters cemented his importance to the series.  The problem is that they continue to use him beyond that point.  Showing his entire string of murders, as well as how he torments abducted children through his failed attempts at clowning, strike me as moments that would be better used in a slow reveal over the next episode or two.  The show stands to gain more in withholding this character - building the tension and mystery surrounding him - then it does to make as much use of him as it did in this episode.

Freakshow continues American Horror Story's tradition of small-screen horror in the exact manner that I had hoped that it would.  All of the characters introduced - from the trick turning Jimmy Darling to the abusive Tattler twins - have immense dramatic potential.  Elsa Mars' desperate dreams of latter-day stardom directly channel Sunset Blvd.'s Norma Desmond without being a derivative rehash of a sixty-four-year-old character.  With its stellarly seasoned cast and proven writers, this may prove to be the series' best season yet.  I give this episode an 8 out of 10.

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Piece of the Puzzle: Arrow S3 E1 - The Calm

In which I review the latest episode of Arrow.

Because of Oliver's tireless vigilantism, Starling City is a safer place than he returned to two years ago, enough so that the police have stopped their manhunt for him and Oliver feels comfortable asking Felicity to dinner.  But when a new crime boss calling himself Vertigo begins consolidating the city's criminals under his control, his first order of business is to take out the one man who can stop him: Arrow.

Despite having always been a DC-sanction Batman rip-off, Arrow perfectly embodies the reasons for its title character's enduring popularity.  Whereas Bruce Wayne is motivated by vengeance - a desire to keep the tragedy that befell his parents from happening to anybody else - Oliver Queen is motivated by redemption.  Although Starling City shares Gotham's corruption, it is the willful inaction of good, capable people that is its downfall, not their physical inability to act.  While Batman's mythos presents him as the equivalent of an abused dog that lashes back after being kicked one too many times, the Green Arrow represents every person's potential to redeem themselves through selfless acts.  In this sense, Oliver Queen is DC's moral equivalent to Tony Stark.

While the Green Arrow has always draped himself in Batman's semantic trappings - an incredibly wealthy, non-powered, masked vigilante employing the guise of a flippant playboy in order to protect his loved ones from the reprisals of his increasingly eccentric cast of street-level villains -  he's such a good embodiment of those features that his unoriginality can easily be forgiven.  It's easy enough to write off Vertigo, a villain whose primary method of attack is to inject his opponents with a weaponized hallucinogen that forces them to experience their greatest fears, as a Scarecrow rip-off.  But to do so would be to deny what a entertaining villain he makes when reimagined as a street-level drug dealer with larger criminal ambitions than he was previously able to exercise.  It's about doing something well, rather than doing it first.

Beyond its villain of the week, The Calm is an excellent addition to an already excellent series.  It manages to retain its distinct visual style - rapid editing, swift pacing, muted color scheme and low key lighting - without falling into the ocular monotony that defined its first season.  Inferior writing would have made Oliver's one episode attempt to balance his role as the Arrow with his romantic feelings for Felicity into a frustrating narrative back peddle: the same "one step forward, two steps back" character development that made me give up on Inuyasha back in the day.  Arrow, however, convincingly threads it into Oliver's quest for self-improvement.  How can he be in a relationship with her if doing so threatens her well-being?

Arrow  has come a long way from the melodramatic series that it began as.  It has an earnest , almost desperate morality that makes it unlike any other comic-based series on TV.  Its inerconnectivity with the Flash and its central position in a growing DC Television Universe has only added greater depth to the series and its characters: making their personal quests for redemption the moral compass of a rapidly expanding world in the exact manner that Man of Steel's Superman is the moral center of the growing DC Cinematic Universe.  Overall, I give the episode an 8 out of 10.

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Piece of the Puzzle: South Park S18 E2 - Gluten Free Ebola

In which I review the latest episode of South Park.

After last week's failed business venture, Eric, Stan, Kyle and Kenny dejectedly return to school, only to find that everyone is mad at them for how they told them off when they left.  In order to win everybody back over to their side, they promise to host the greatest party in history: with pizza, cake and Lorde.  But when Mr. Mackey convinces everybody that gluten is poison, the USDA begins quarantining those exposed to it, threatening the lives of everybody in South Park.

"We're the USDA.  Without us, people would be eating dirt and... chairs!"

It's utterly staggering to me how certain health circles insist that Gluten causes seemingly every malady in the 21st century.  Gluten causes intestinal trauma.  Gluten causes ADHD.  Gluten causes Type 1 Diabetes, Multiple Sclerosis, Schizophrenia, Epilepsy and Autism.  When droves of parents inexplicably believe that an ex-Playboy Bunny with absolutely no medical training cured her son's Autism by putting him on a Gluten-free diet, you know that something's gone terrible wrong in the American eduction system.

When the Onion was awarded the 2009 Peabody Award, it was noted that their parodies were "not infrequently hard to distinguish from the real thing."  It could have just as easily been applied to South Park's parodic brand of comedy.  When Gluten is labeled as some form of hyper-toxin that causes every medical affliction known to man, is it really so far-fetched that it could make your dick fly off?

Yes, your dick.

South Park took public ignorance and paranoia toward Gluten to what is sadly its most logical extreme.  Gluten is a disease for which there is no cure.  It must be contained at all costs.  Concerned citizens must inform the authorities of suspected Gluten users.  Those who have been exposed to the "toxin" must be indefinitely quarantined to prevent its spread.

Gluten Free Ebola is an excellent follow-up to last week's season premiere, taking on another social concern with the same irreverent audacity as it did crowd sourcing and the Washington Redskins.  While every joke may not have been a success (such as Randy singing in drag while pretening to be Lorde), the central parody is spot on.  The episode exposes the absurdity of the USDA's constantly-changing dietary standards and the public's slavish devotion to them regardless of what common sense dictates.  I give the episode an 8 out of 10 and eagerly look forward to what in-the-news topic the series will lampoon next week.

"Chicken nuggets... breading.  Burritoes... full of wheat.
Ice cream... no Gluten.  Ice cream's healthy!

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Piece of the Puzzle: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S2 E2 - Heavy Is the Head

In which I review the latest episode of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

After last week's pyrrhic victory against Hydra, a broken S.H.I.E.L.D. continues to track down "Crusher" Creel, who successfully stole the Obelisk - a mysterious artifact capable of transforming organic tissue into stone.  But with agents Hartley and Idaho dead and the questionably-loyal Agent Hunter captured by Brigadier General Talbot, S.H.I.E.L.D. is running out of options.  When Coulson is contacted by Reina - the former head of Project Centipede - he sees a chance to neutralize Creel and secure the Obelisk from enemy control.

Heavy Is the Head concludes the events of Shadows so completely that the two should have been merged into a two-hour season premiere.  Combined, they compose a far more complete view into Coulson's new S.H.I.E.L.D. and its component members than either alone can provide.  Coulson is not simply bearing the burdens of his responsibilities as Director, but has been regularly slipping into the same fugue state that we saw him in at the end of Season 1 - carving the same circuit-like symbols into the walls that John Garrett was after taking the drug GH-325.  Its apparently increasing frequency raises the question of whether or not Coulson is beginning to succumb to Garret's psychosis, while its impossible cohesion with Garret's designs suggest that it is something altogether more profound.

It appears as if Agent Fitz is not as completely oblivious to his delusions of Agent Simmons as Shadows seemed to suggest.  When fellow technician Alfonso Mackenzie failed to acknowledge the hallucinated Simmons' presence, Fitz deflected his ignorance rather than confronted it.  When asked about how he felt about her leaving, he looked directly at his hallucination while answering Mack's question.  He is not ignorant of his hallucinations, but chooses to believe in them rather than facing the truth of Simmons' absence.  And after the end-of-episode preview for Making Friends and Influencing People, I can only imagine what confronting the real Simmons - and the circumstances surrounding her defection - will do to the increasingly unstable Fitz.

Perhaps the most interesting development of the episode occurs once Reina acquires the Obelisk.  Despite knowing what it has done to every single person who has ever touched it - including the seemingly immune Creel - she grasps it with her bare hands.  Rather than petrifying her, it turned on, calling to mind her question to the "enlightened" Garrett: "what will I become?"  And, given her now suspect physiology as well as her association with Skye's allegedly monstrous parents, I can't help but ask "what will Skye become?"

Like its preceding episode, Heavy Is the Head promise second season that's far superior the show's first.  It continues to broaden the scope of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s missions, plumb the depths of its mysteries and expand the conflicts of its growing cast of characters.  Overall, I give this episode an 8/10 and eagerly look forward to next week's installment.

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From the Vault: In the Mood for Love

In which I review a randomly-selected film from my collection.

As you might recall from last week's Date Night, I've gotten into a really bad habit of blind-buying movies and then simply never watching them.  Although I was recently able to cross off Zodiac, the list was never-the-less extensive: the Three Colors trilogy, Reservoir Dogs, Dr. Strangelove, Infernal Affairs, Lawrence of Arabia and In the Mood for Love.  In light of this, I opted to bend the rules of this series and randomly-selected one of those eight films to review.  And because of a slight mix-up concerning when tonight's episode of Gotham aired, I found myself with a little bit of extra time on my hands to hammer something out.

When Secretary Su Li-zhen and her husband move into the same building as Journalist Chow Mo-wan and his wife in 1960's Hong Kong, it seemed like a brave new chapter in both couples' lives.  But with Su's husband always away on business and Chow's wife always working late, their happiness soon deteriorates into isolation and longing.  Drawn to each other's company, Su and Chow begin to suspect that their spouses are having an affair with one another.  But despite their partners' infidelities and their growing romance, they know that they can never act on their mutual feelings for one another without repeating their spouses' cycles of lies an betrayal.

Having been exposed to director Wong Kar-wai through Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love was not the follow-up that I expected.  Whereas Chungking Express was erratically paced and edited - lurching eagerly from shot to shot with no consideration for how it would get there - In the Mood for Love is slowly paced, methodically strung-together and constrictively shot.  Abandoning an aesthetic of enthusiasm over experience, the film expresses an insightful maturity towards its subjects that its predecessor would have lost in its youthful exuberance.

Chungking Express: a constant blur of action and movement. 

In the Mood for Love is a perfect case-study of cinematic cohesion.  From conception to execution, every facet of the film - writing, acting, shot composition, score - fits together like pieces of a puzzle, forming a greater picture than its components parts could ever manage on their own.  Every fragment of dialog, lingering silence and subtle motion builds upon its central themes of social confinement and impossible desire.  You don't watch In the Mood for Love, you experience it.  Wong Kar-wai's singular, driving aesthetic inserts his audience into the narrative so subtly and so completely that it is impossible to leave without living through the heartbreak and dejection of its protagonists.

More than anything else, the film shows off Wong Kar-wai's flair for cinematography and shot composition.  Scenes involving the supporting cast are crowded and uncomfortably closed-in.  Shots are framed by windows, doorways, stairwells and curtains: closing off the natural scope of the camera to a mere fraction of what audiences - especially Western audiences - have come to expect from a contemporary film,  Character's bodies are often segmented into mere bits of anatomy - feet, hands, shoulders, back, head - or speak from off-camera entirely, reinforcing the impression that there is not enough room for them in the world in which they find themselves.

Su and Chow pass each other in a confined alley.

When either Su or Chow are shown in isolation from the rest of the cast, however, the cinematography changes.  They are shown in more familiar medium close-ups, from far greater distances and free from the obstructions that clutter the more claustrophobic group shots.  The spaces that they find themselves in alone at night are broad and expansive, emphasizing their isolation in a vast, lonely world that seems to be populated exclusively by themselves.

What is most striking however, is the manner in which the audience views the protagonists.  While supporting characters are often shown directly, Su and Chow are rarely scene front-on.  They are viewed through their mirrored reflections and kaleidoscopic refractions.  Even when not shown through an intermediary, they are often either shown from behind or with their faces otherwise obscured.  It is as if their true selves - their longing for meaningful relationships and personal connections - are so isolated from the world, that they refuse to show them even in solitude, with only the camera to bear witness to it.

In the Mood for Love is the kind of film that stalks the recesses of your conciousness long after the credits stop rolling and the screen fades to black.  If I would have been asked even a day ago what I felt about it, my opinion would be far different from what it was the day before and even what it is today.  Its a romance veiled in smoke: twisting tendrils parting to reveal new meaning even as it shifts to obscure others.  I am confident that it is a film that will only grow more signifigant and appreciated with time.  Overall, I would give it an 8/10.

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Diamond in the Rough: Batman: Assault on Arkham

In which I review an obscure, must-see film.

You're probably going to see a lot of posts like this popping up in the future: new article series that will both debut and be developed as they're needed (basically whenever I happen to watch something that fits their criteria).  The main three (Date Night, From the Vault and Unreality Companion) will still be just that: my main, go-to article series.  Just expect to see more versatilely-themed and differently-focussed posts in the coming weeks.

                    

Sometimes I feel like a bad nerd.  If you would have asked me about Batman: Assault on Arkham a week ago, I would have guessed that it was a video game.  If you would have asked me who Deadshot, Captain Boomerang, Black Spider, King Shark, Killer Frost  and KGBeast were, I would have guessed that they were carnies.  If you would have asked me who The Suicide Squad was, I would have guessed it was an off-shoot of Al Qaeda.

Batman: Assault on Arkham, an adaptation of DC's Suicide Squad comics, follows a government-run team of incarcerated C and D-list supervillains that are used as deniable assets in high-risk black ops missions in exchange for commuted prison sentences.  While Batman tears Gotham apart looking for where the Joker hid a dirty bomb, government operative Amanda Waller recruits a new Suicide Squad roster with the mission of breaking into Arkham Asylum and recovering stolen, top secret data hidden inside of the Riddler's cane.  To ensure compliance, each member of the Squad  has a bomb surgically implanted into the base of his or her neck, which Waller can remotely detonate at her discretion.  Everything isn't as simple as it seems, however: as tempers flare on the team and Harley Quinn comes face-to-face with her old ex, Waller gives Killer Frost her own, tangental mission to assassinate the Riddler.

                     

Like Guardians of the Galaxy, Assault on Arkham seems to exist solely to prove that an obscure property composed of obscure characters (with only a few A-lister cameos) can be successful at a time when any comic book property is pretty much fair game.  And, in that respect, the film is a resounding success.  Despite a rocky start, a mere fleeting connection with the Batman franchise and Harley Quinn as the only Suicide Squad member that anybody comes in caring about (and probably have ever heard of before), Assault on Arkham's pitch-perfect execution proves why DC is pretty much the only name in animated comic book films these days (despite Marvel's best efforts to prove otherwise).

Assault on Arkham is ultimately successful for the exact same reason that The Avengers was: as an excuse for throwing together a rough-shod cast of flawed characters who have absolutely no reason to like nor trust one another on a mission and see what happens.  And, just like The Avengers, that actually turned out to be all that was needed for a great movie.  Harley Quinn is equal parts unsettling lunatic and hilarious comic-relief as she nostalgically strolls through her old stomping grounds. Killer Frost's and King Shark's nacent feelings for one another is surprisingly touching to watch develop and makes future team-ups between the two not just convincing, but compelling.  Deadshot and Captain Boomerang's rivalry for command of the Suicide Squad is as hotheaded as it is amusing to watch.  And Black Spider, an assassin of criminals, provides a chilling reminder of the even darker path that Bruce Wayne could have taken as Batman.

Harley Quinn, Black Spider, Deadshot, King Shark, Killer Frost and Captain
Boomerang: The Suicide Squad.

In what actually turns out to be the most pleasant surprise of the film, the Joker's Inclusion as Assault on Arkham's true villain doesn't feel like a cop-out to provide it with greater name recognition.  His appearance organically flows from the film's plot and never leaves us questioning his narrative necessity.  Troy Baker plays the Joker as a proper Victorian gentleman gone mad: somewhere between a sadistic wife-beater and Hannibal Lector.  His savage treatment of Harley - coupled with dismissive dialog like "women: can't live with 'em, can't throw 'em out of a moving car" - is an unsettling portrayal of real-world violence.  If not for Heath Ledger's iconic performance in The Dark Knight, this would be my favorite film portrayal of the character.

Assault on Arkham's only real downfalls are its brisk seventy-five minute run-time and its PG-13 rating.  While we get all of the fun that the Suicide Squad has to offer, we don't get much of the depth.  Killer Frost's and King Shark's relationship was another one or two moments away from being truely memorable while Deadshot and Harley's relationship barely managed to scratch its surface.  Another fifteen or twenty minutes could have fleshed these characters out in ways that would have made the Squad's interactions - as well as Harley's decision to leave Deadshot for the Joker - that much more dynamic.  Bumping its rating up to R would have made Harley and Deadshot's night of passion more than just a quicky as seen from outside of their hotel and given the Joker room to flex his New 52 muscles: skinning a security guard and wearing his skin like Leatherface.

                     

More than anything else, Batman: Assault on Arkham proves that straight-to-video films can be just as well-made and entertaining as theatrically released ones (or better, when you consider previous Batman outings).  It succeeds at skillfully threading together multiple parallel plotlines where other films fail to convincingly present just one.  Overall, I would give the film a high 8 out of ten: a definite must-see for fans of DC and action films alike.

Random Movie #11: Battle Royale

This last unhappy trend of movies (for which Becky is solely responsible) was finally bucked by a mutual pick: the 2000 Japanese action film Battle Royale.  Having previously seen the movie, which I initially took as a poor man's Hunger Games, I figured that it would be right up Becky's alley.  Having previously read the novel on which it is based, Becky got the exact same idea.

In the face of widespread social unrest (especially from the student population) Japan passes the B.R. Act.  This new law dictates that once each year, one randomly selected class of students will participate in a Battle Royale: a free-for-all fight to the death from which only a sole survivor will walk away from.  This year's participants, class 3-B, are fitted with electronic collars that will explode if there is no victor after three days.  Now, armed with randomly distributed weapons (ranging from paper fans to machine guns), it's every boy, girl and clique for themselves.

Battle Royale is both strongly and immediately comparable to The Hunger Games.  The premises of each are identical: a dystopic government, fearful of social uprising, abducts children and forces them to fight each other to the death as a means of terroristic control.  Both competitions are controlled by a centralized "game maker" who uses a variety of strong-arm tactics to funnel participants toward one another (ranging from The Hunger Games' traps / mechanized weaponry to Battle Royale's explosive collar and "danger zones").  Both include "career tributes" that have an unfair advantages in training and experience.  Both present alarming disadvantages in terms of the equipment distributed among the participants.  Both see the creation and dissolution of alliances as a means of survival.  Hell, even both sets of protagonists are romantically involved with one another.

The differences between the films, however, are infinitely more profound.  The Hunger Games functions primarily as a political allegory.  It emphasizes the brutality of Snow's regime and the harsh inequities between The Capital and The Districts.  It focuses on The Games as a means of control and, subsequently, the intensity of the unfolding action within them.  At its core, The Hunger Games is an action movie centered around combat and survival: "blut und ehre."

Battle Royale, however, is a surreal portrait of Kafkan intensity.  Director Kinji Fukasaku does not invest the film in the politics of the Republic of Greater East Asia or its subsidiary of Japan any more than is absolutely necessary to provide context for the battle royale itself.  The closest explanation for this free-for-all comes in the form a disarmingly cheerful orientation video, which is itself cut short when "game maker" / teacher Kitano (Takeshi Kitano) impales a girl with a knife for whispering to another girl during their orientation (every teacher's fantasy).  We (along with class 3-B) are then thrust into hypnagogic pandemonium before the implications of "why"  of the situation can sink in.

Near the end of the film, Kitano resumes his role as the chief agent of surrealism when he reveals a picture that he painted over the past three days.  Rendered in the simplistic style of a child's watercolor, it shows how every student in class 3-B died during the past three days.  It depicts children pin-cushioned by arrows, run through by swords, impaled by hatchets, leaping off of cliffs and having their heads explode, all sprayed with bright, cartoonish blood.  In the center is Noriko (Aki Maeda), untouched by the carnage, smiling serenely and haloed in light: the only student that he wanted to win the competition.  After being shot (and seemingly killed), he gets up and casually answers his ringing cell phone, carries on a brief conversation and shoots his phone in frustration before slumping over dead.

While the tributes' confrontations in The Hunger Games emphasized actual combat skill, Battle Royale's deaths are rarely the result of the students' fighting prowess.  When Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) kills Glimmer (Leven Rambin) or Marvel (Jack Quaid) kills Rue (Amandla Stenberg), it is because they either outsmarted or overpowered them.  In Battle Royale, however, it is based on a factor that none of them had any control over: their randomly selected "weapons."  Yukiko (Yukari Kanasawa) and Yumiko (Misao Kato) are murdered by Kazuo (Masanobu Ando) when they attempt to use their "weapon," a megaphone, to get people to stop fighting one another.  Likewise, Hiroki (Sosuke Takaoka) is killed by Kayoko (Takayo Mimura) when he uses his weapon, a tracking device for each student's collar, to find her so that he could confess that he liked her.  Except for Kazuo replacing his paper fan for a stockpile of guns and grenades, the deaths predictably play out based the fatalistic distribution of weapons.

In perhaps the most memorable scene of the film, Shuya (Tatsuya Fujiwara) is rescued and nursed back to health by a group of girls.  One of the girls, Yuko (Hitomi Hyuga), witnessed him accidentally kill fellow classmate Oki (Gouki Nishimura) and poisons his food.  Another girl, Yuka (Satomi Hanamura), grabs the food and eats it, subsequently dying after vomiting up blood like one of Danny Boyle's Infected.  The group of girls devolve into accusations of foul play, resulting in a massacre that leaves only Yuko alive (which she corrects by committing suicide after freeing Shuya).

The entire scene plays out with the brilliant senselessness an old episode of The Twilight Zone, where social order breaks down over veritable non-issues.  Having secured a safe base of operations, this close-knit group of friends had managed to not only survive the carnage thus far, but were planning on meeting up with another group of students to escape from the island on which they were being confined.  But because Yuko blamed Shuya for Oki's death (when, in fact, Oki brained himself with his own hatchet after falling down a hill while attacking Shuya), she committed one small act of vengeance in poisoning his food.  In a bout of fatalistic irony, her attempt to preserve their social order (by saving them all from the "murderous" Shuya) snowballed into killing every last one of them after fear and suspicion turned them on one another.

With The Hunger Games as an immediate comparison, it is easy to mistake Battle Royale as an inferior film.  There is less build-up to the titular bloodbath, less character development and an unwieldily cast of characters (42, compared to 24) that we cannot possibly begin to grow attached to.  When Rue dies, it is heart wrenching; by watching her shadow Katniss, help her escape from the careers, nurse her back to health and then share intimate details of her life in District 11, we grew as attached to her as Katniss had.  By comparison, when Kazuhiko (Yasuomi Sano) and Sakura (Tomomi Shimaki) commit suicide at the outset of the battle royale, all that we know about them is that they are boy #21 and Girl #4.

Despite being most of the cast's first or only film, Battle Royale features an exceptionally good cast, perhaps assisted somewhat by the fact that so few of them had a significant amount of screen time.  Both Masanobu Ando and Yousuke Shibata fully immerse themselves into their characters, conveying the psychotic and chilling nuances of Kazuo and Mitsuri.  Takeshi Kitano provides a straight-faced juxtaposition to the unfolding chaos of the film, able to deftly switch between the romantic longing, murderous rage and droll lecturing of Kitano.

Battle Royale is the other half of The Hunger Games coin: existential and absurd.  It plunges into its subject matter with nihlistic glee and never slacking its pace to allow our sensibilities to catch up with our senses.  It is as entertaining as The Hunger Games and twice as wicked.  Becky and I both rate this film an 8, putting it on par with American Psycho, Fearless and Kwaidan.

Random Movie #7: Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn

For our seventh Netflix incursion, Becky and I watched the 1987 horror-comedy Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn.  Interestingly, this particular film is one that both Becky and I chose for the bucket.  We have both seen and enjoyed the original 1981 film (her more than myself) as well as its 2013 remake (myself more than her).  And having also seen the admittedly Army of Darkness, the second installment was the only one that I had not yet seen, which I had often seen referred to as the best of the series.

After surviving the undead assault of his possessed friends the night before, Ash (Bruce Campbell) finds himself no less in danger.  Still trapped by the bridge collapse, he desperately fights a losing battle against demonic possession and his own growing madness.  Meanwhile Annie (Sarah Berry), the daughter of the cabin's rightful owner, research partner Ed (Richard Domeneier) and locals Jake (Dan Hicks) and Bobby Joe (Kassie Wesley) make their way to cabin to translate the missing pages of the Necronomicon that may prove to be the key to saving Ash's soul.

The film begins with one of the most head-scratching openers that I have ever seen: a "recap" of the first films that completely retcons everything that happened in it.  Among the most dramatic alterations that it made was that it completely wrote out third, fourth and fifth wheels Cheryl (Ellen Sanweiss),  Scotty (Richard Demanincor) and Shelly (Theresa Tilly), changing the friendly weekend hangout in the woods into a secluded romantic getaway.  In addition to retconning the first film, it also serves the purpose of expanding upon the previously non-existant lore of the Necronomicon, providing deepening layers of interest in the events of the film.

Evil Dead 2 is essential The Three Stooges meets The Exorcist in Pewee's Haunted Playhouse.  It somehow manages to avoid outright farce to deliver something which is equal parts comedy and terror, akin to F. W. Murnau directing Modern Times.   Sam Raimi infuses the film with a crazed, manic energy derived from rapid tonal shifts between slapstick antics, body horror, sight gags and psychological torture.  In the over-the-top battle with his own possessed hand, Bruce Campbell delivers a "Three Stooges" one-man show (complete with the famous eye-poking gag), which quickly changes to horrifying as he cuts off his own hand with a chainsaw.  The scene comes full circle when Ash traps his disembodied hand under a bucket weighted down with a copy of A Farewell to Arms.

Due to the psychological nature of the horrors that Ash must face, it is often not clear whether or not he is truly under assault by demons (which mean to possess him) or merely insane (and dismembered his girlfriend in a fit of madness).  The boundaries of the real are continuously blurred in the film, ranging from the mounted animal heads hysterics to Ash interacting with his own tangible reflection.  Even Annie's possessed mother ambiguously shifts between murderous "deadite" and helpless old woman, bringing into question what really happened when Ash and Linda were alone.

Visually, Evil Dead 2 is a macabre masterpiece, whose makeup mutilations comparable to those featured in The Thing: decayed, gray-toned skin; rotted teeth; blind, pupil-less eyes; sharply defined facial bones.  These deformations are further enhanced by extremely high-contrast lighting and the frequent shifts between the actors in and out of their possessed forms' makeup.  When combined with scenes of Linda's head being crushed in a vise, Ash severing his own hand and any number of characters being showered in geisers of blood, it creates a singular vision of bodily deformation and horror.

The film also features what is absolutely the most astoundingly good use of stop-motion outside of fully animated features like The Nightmare Before Christmas.  The scene in which Linda's decapitated skeleton dances in the woods like putrefied ballerina is the film's crowning achievement: a sickeningly entrancing image of ghoulish beauty.  She twirls, pirouettes and even juggles her head about her skeletal frame before disappearing like a lingering wisp of smoke, leaving us to wonder if she was ever there at all.  Even the ultimate confrontation with the manifested evil from the Necronomicon is suitably epic, sickeningly riveting despite the film's paltry budget and out-moded style of special effects.

While a shade more slapstick than a usually care for, Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn strikes the proper balance between scares and laughs for a horror comedy.  In the true tradition of Paris' Grand Guignol theater, the juxtaposition between comedy and horror makes the scares scarier and the jokes funnier.  I give the film a high 8, the same as I have given to Scream, The Hills Have Eyes and Ghostbusters.  Becky gave the movie a 6.5

Random Movie #2: Equilibrium

Another random movie has come and gone without incident.  For our second selection, Becky and I saw the 2002 sci-fi action film Equilibrium which was, needless to say, a pretty stark contrast to Monsoon Wedding.  This was another film that I had previously seen that I thought that Becky would enjoy (this time on recommendation from a friend).

The film is set in the aftermath of a devastating third world war.  As humanity crawls from the ashes to rebuild its shattered civilization, it is agreed that the world will not survive a fourth such war.  In order to prevent mankind's extinction, the new government attacks what they see as the root of "man's inhumanity toward man: his ability to feel."  By governmental decree, the entire populace is medicated with an emotional suppressant called Prozium and anything that could elicit an emotional response (which ranges from the Mona Lisa to puppies) is strictly prohibited.  Both failure to medicate and possession of banned materials are capital offenses.

John Preston (Christian Bale) is a Grammaton Cleric: a special operative that suppresses terrorists who have gone off of their state-mandated Prozium and incinerates any contraband that they might possess.  After accidentally missing a dose of Prozium himself, Preston begins to feel for the first time: awe at the beautiful works of art that he destroys, remorse for killing his rogue partner and sympathy for the men and women who simply refuse to be medicated any longer.  While he tries to make sense of these new emotions, he becomes a double agent for the terroristic resistant movement while attempting to dissuade his new partner's growing suspicions about his loyalty to the state.

Equilibrium is basically what would happen if the Wachowski brothers directed Fahrenheit 451: a slick, stylized action-thriller with some incredibly riveting fight sequences.  As masters of Gun Kata, a combination of martial arts and markmanship, the Grammaton Clerics are this film's equivalent of The Matrix's Agents.  In the very first scene, we see John Preston enter into a blackened room surrounded by armed terrorists.  After they send off some panicked, scattered fire and a few whispers, Preston makes a series of precise shots to every man in the room.

While it's not exactly "the thinking man's action movie," it never-the-less is thoughtful.  The treatment of the dystopic future is very intimately unsettling.  Robbie Preston (John's son) is largely comes off as the second coming of The Omen's Damien: calm, composed, insightful - essentially nothing like what an actual child is like (owing to Prozium).  The tragedy that befalls Preston's wife is genuinely heart-wrenching, both in John's inability to defend her and the nature of why it happened to her.  Most memorable of all is the Clerics' inability to understand why the terrorists would keep adorable Bernese Mountain Dog puppies (one going so far as to ask if they ate them)

While the film is not without its faults - including a minor case of Reindeer Games' "One Twist Too Many" Syndrome - they are not so great as to detract from what is an admittedly exciting film that delivers everything that it promises.  While essentially a poor man's Matrix, it is still a more thoughtful, measured and entertaining addition to its genre than most other action movies.  Both Becky and I rate this film an 8, putting it on par with The Boondock Saints, Fearless and I Am Legend.