The Weekend Review: Ted 2

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

Ted 2 - the awaited sequel to Seth MacFarlane's 2012 comedy about a kid whose teddy bear comes to life - hit theaters this last weekend to surprisingly little fanfare.  It fell direly short of industry expectations and Ted 3 is doubtlessly not in the immediate future for MacFarlane's host of loyal fans.

Following marital difficulties with Tami-Lynn, Ted concludes that the only way to save his marriage is to have a child with her.  Being unable to impregnate her himself, however, he needs to find a sperm donor, the search for which dregs up the fact that, according to the United States government, Ted is not a person.  Having lost his job, rights and even his marriage, Ted and Johnny sue the government to restore his civil rights and personhood.

I'm skeptical of comedies as a rule, but never more so than in the weeks preceding the first Ted's release in 2012.  Now, I trusted Seth MacFarlane to make me laugh - his track record with Family Guy and American Dad was impeccable - but the movie itself just looked so incredibly stupid.  Combine that with it being his first movie - and live-action to boot - and going to see it ended up being a pretty hard sell.

But, to MacFarlane's credit, Ted proved to be downright hilarious.  It was clever, funny and even surprisingly emotional.  While it certainly had its share of issues - the same as any movie - it ended up being one of the most enjoyable and memorable movies of 2012.

The sequel... not quite so much.  Don't worry, it's still hilarious.  The various plot points of hunting for a sperm donor and suing the government are wrought with comedic strife that MacFarlane expertly navigates.  The problem's that this movie faces have far more to do with structure than content.

Somewhere between the first movie and the sequel, MacFarlane lost Mila Kunis.  Being a integral part of the movie's cast, her presence had to be explained away.  But rather than just keeping her off camera, they wrote her out entirely.  In the last three years, her character and Johnny got married and divorced, forcing a cheapened story arc on Johnny about getting back into the dating scene.

Amanda Seyfried's Samantha, while a worthy effort, inherently fails to measure up to Mila's Lori.  She's a plot-necessitated character that fails to challenge the status quo of the movie's headliners (Lori's greatest strength in the first movie).  Sure, you get some funny bits about a dick-shaped bong and a stellar acoustic number from her, but she fails to bring anything substantive to the film.

And for as sound as the first, and even second, acts were, the third act is a mess of tangled plot points and unnecessary narratives.  Donnie - Ted's stalker from the first film - returns with a Hasbro-backed plan to sabotage the bear's court case so that he's declared property, and thus far more susceptible to theft, so that Hasbro can dissect and mass produce sapient teddy bears.

You see the problem there, right?  Ted's quest for personhood is already far more interesting - not to mention grockable - than the plot line that supposedly informs it.  It recycles the previous movie's villain for some third act stakes-raising that ultimately feels like a tired retread of a much better movie.  That's not even mentioning how confusing and downright stupid it sounds on the face of it.

That's not even mentioning how half of the movie feels like it's been left on the cutting room floor.  In one scene, Ted crashes a car into a barn, stranding him, Johnny and Sam in a pot field overnight.  Great pains are taken to set up the field's owner - including dredging up a shotgun and guitar - who is never shown.  Judging by the movie's trailers, this was supposed to end in some kind of car chase, but just feels like a half-baked setup to a payoff that ultimately never happened.

Now, none of this is to say that Ted 2 is a bad movie.  On the contrary, it's a gut-bustingly funny one that fans of MacFarlane, Family Guy and the first Ted are bound to love.  It's a solid, if sloppily written, comedy that Becky told me to stop laughing so loudly during on at least one occasion.  Just don't expect it to be as good as the first.

So what did you think about Ted 2?  Was it as funny as the first Ted?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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The Weekend Review: Jurassic World

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

It may have taken 22 years and $150 million dollars, but we finally have a good sequel to 1993's Jurassic Park.  More than good, actually.  Thanks to Universal finally realizing what made the first movie so great to begin with, this may very well be the best Jurassic Park we've ever seen.

Years after the abject failure of the first park, Hammond's successor has succeeded in creating an actual, functioning Dinosaur Zoo.  The new park - named Jurassic World - has learned from the mistakes of its previous iteration.  Walls are built higher, surveillance is constant and Wayne Knight isn't allowed anywhere near the control room.

The problem is, however, that it's been so successful for so long that the public's interest has started to wane, causing the higher-ups to panic and look for ways to up the "wow factor."  Their solution?  Genetic hybrids that combine the DNA from multiple dinosaurs.

The new dinosaur - fittingly named the Indominus Rex - is larger than a T-Rex, smarter than a Raptor, has thermal and visual camouflage and can sense heat signatures like a snake.  You can't run from it.  You can't hide from it.  And now it's loose on an island with the population of a small city.

The best part about Jurassic World - other than Chris Pratt leading a pack of Raptors into battle like he's some kind of pre-historic Star Lord - is the fact that it understands that it's an unnecessary sequel to a franchise from three decades ago.  More than just acknowledging that fact, it owns it: creating a meta-textual link to the first movie in a way that the "too serious for their own good" sequels never could have accomplished.

When Claire explains the Indominus' origins as their attempt to up the park's wow factor, Owen succinctly points out that "They're dinosaurs.  Wow enough."  When he points out how ridiculous the name Indominus Rex is, Claire asks him if he'd ever heard a kid try to say the dinos' actual names.  After all, Huehuecanauhtlus is a mouthful for just about anybody.

What's more is that we got all of this without having to sit through Jeff Goldblum's manic stuttering.  I know that the man - and in particular, his character - has his fans, but I always thought that he was a poor choice for Ian Malcolm in the first movie and found his insistent inclusion in its sequel despite dying in the first novel just short of insufferable.

Thanks to the upped stakes of a working park and more than two decades' advancement in CGI, the action scenes have never looked better.  The introduction to the Park - through the eyes of an pint-sized dinophile - is nothing short of the realization of Hammond's dream from the first movie.  The scenes spent varyingly hunting and running from the Indominus in the park are exceptional and the final, midnight confrontation between the Indominus, a pack of Raptors a T-Rex and an underwater behemoth whose name I can't even begin to pronounce is nothing short of spectacular.  It's Jaws with scales and every last second of it is fantastic to watch.

For as brilliant as the dino-side of the movie is, its human characters do noticeably pale when compared to the first's eclectic cast of characters.  Chris Pratt is basically just regurgitating his Guardians of the Galaxy performance, which loses a bit of its luster out of context and the second time around.  Although he and Claire are supposed to be the driving adult force of the film, the two lack convincing enough chemistry to justify their romantic entanglement.

The brothers themselves lack a complete arc and are there only to give Owen and Claire a reason to venture into danger that they would otherwise be running from (or helping alleviate behind the scenes).  For as much as I rag on Golblum's Ian Malcom, he at least had a noticeable personality and you cared about ever (potential) death in the film (okay, maybe not the lawyer).

Still, that's a drop in the water when compared to what the film gets right.  It's a powerfully entertaining, beautifully realized film that gave the franchise the shot in the arm that it needed in order to stay relevant in the 21st century.  While I have my doubts about where Universal can take the franchise from here, they have my attention, and I have absolutely no problem shelling out $10 a ticket to find out.

So what did you think about Jurassic World?  Was it as good as Jurassic Park?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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The Weekend Review: Insidious: Chapter 3

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

Going into the movie, Insidous: Chapter 3 was one of my most anticipated movies of 2015.  And it wasn't just because Blumhouse Productions is almost unerringly good at making horror movies.  With the first two movies, James Wan made a shockingly nuanced and highly visceral world of spectral terror.  The degree to which the second movie exploded the series' mythology outward actually made me appreciate the first movie more than I had, and I had every reason to believe that the franchise's third instalment would do the same.

After her mother's death, distraught teen Quinn Brenner tries desperately to reach out to her.  When she attempts to make contact through retired medium Elise Rainier, she is given an ominous warning to never try to contact her mother on her own again.  Because when you call out to one of the dead, all of them can hear you.

But it's already too late for her.  A spirit has already answered her call, and it's not her mother.  Possessed and at risk of having her soul devoured, it's up to Elise, her father and an unlikely pair of ghost hunters to bring her back from "the Further."

Although still thoroughly enjoyable - especially for long-standing fans of the series - the film ultimately fails to live up to the rest of the series' promise.  It's just a little too reliant on jump scares and it's pacing is just a little too ill-timed to permit it to take its place in the pantheon of Blumhouse's other successes.

These issues are invariably due to James Wan's departure from the series in order to direct Furious 7.  Longtime collaborator Leigh Whannell is a well-enough director, to be sure, but he lacks the sense of timing and suspense that made Wan a household name among horror fans.  His framing is adequate, his lighting is sufficiently moody and it's obvious that he knows the difference between shocking and frightening.  So even though he dips a bit further into jump scares that I personally care for, they are used properly (to accentuate drawn-out moments of tension) and more sparingly than the genre's biggest offenders.

Casual movie-goers will be treated to a fairly standard horror flick about ghosts and the busting thereof: a little worse than the first movie, but not bad in its own right.  Fans of the series, however, will be treated to a plethora of in-references to the previous movies, including cameos by Insidous' Lipstick Demon and Insidious: Chapter 2's Bride in Black.  There are a few great visuals that will stick with you well after you walk out of the theater (in particular, Quinn's tormented soul in the Further) and a few genuinely well-played scares.

The real problem with the film, however, is the fact that I found myself far more drawn to the narrated back-story about Elise's suicidal husband, her journeys into the Further to find him and the spirit that she brought back with her from that dark realm than I ever was with the main plot of the movie: Quinn's possession by the Man Who Couldn't Breathe and the reunification of her soul.  The former was a far more emotionally resonant story, far more interestingly handled and with a set of far more meaningful and personal stakes than some random girl who misses her mother.

So if you're a fan of the series or just in the mood for a good scare, you could do far worse for yourself than Insidious: Chapter 3.  It's the best - if the least ambitious - horror movie to come out this year, beating out the disappointing Lazarus Effect, the almost good It Follows and the surprisingly solid Poltergeist.  Fans will find plenty to love about a third go-around with some of their favorite characters, even if it's wrapped up in a somewhat duller plot than they're used to.

Rating: 6.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  Only if you want to own the entire series.

So how do you think that Insidious: Chapter 3 measures up to the rest of its franchise?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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The Weekend Review: Mad Max: Fury Road

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

It still surprises me that Mad Max: Fury Road is one of the big movies this summer.  On a lot of levels it makes perfect sense: its bleak, dystopian setting is certainly something to school all of the YA derivations with.  Its hard R rating stands out among all of the teen-friendly, PG-13 summer fare that tones down the violence in exchange for a much larger audience to drawn from.  While a lot of great action movies have been getting broad praise for being "more than just an action movie," Fury Road goes in the opposite direction: making the entire movie about its genre, rather than working against it out of some kind of meta-fictive spite.ng into the summer I wouldn

The most recent Mad Max movie is nothing more than it ever sold itself as: an unrelentingly action-packed two hours of death and insanity that'll cost you $10 and a bag of popcorn to see.  It's brutal, savage and one Hell of a ride: a stark contrast to the comparatively light-hearted competition and what will invariably prove to be the best action movie of the summer.

That last part is key to understanding just why this movie works so well.  There's no question in my mind that Age of Ultron is and will continue to be the better of the two movies.  Its witty dialog, nuanced characters and trademarked blend of action and comedy will see to that.  The latest Avengers flick is a great many things, only one of which is an action movie.

Fury Road, however, is not.  It is exactly one thing: a two hour chase scene intermittently broken up by smidgens of world building.  It is, however, the best movie in theaters at what it does.  Say what you will about the rest of Age of Ultron, but the action felt a little samey when compared with the first Avengers.  Nothing really stood out from the fight scenes and the best bits of the movie were always in its down time: whether a party at Avengers Tower or regrouping at Hawkeye's rustic abode.

Mad Max, however, is the epitome of an action movie.  It has great set pieces, exhilarating fights and chases and the most astounding and memorable use of practical effects that I've seen since The Cabin in the Woods.  It doesn't have the sleek veneer of a typically Hollywood production and that's a large part of its charm.

It knows exactly the kind of movie that it wants to be and went well out of its way to be exactly that.  We're dizzyingly entreated to ambitiously scaled, in-camera chase scenes where every crash and explosion is the real deal.

So what if it lacks Marvel's character development or genre hybridization?  So what if Max - or really anybody other than Nux - lacks anything even close to resembling a character arc.  So what if the plot exists only as an excuse for protracted chase scenes?  It invariably delivers on everything last thing that counts in this kind of movie.

There's been a lot of talk about the so-called "feminist agenda" of the movie, which is really nothing more than a genre-specific backlash of the number, focus and development of the movie's expansive cast of female characters.  As one twitter user succinctly put it, "at one point during Mad Max there are 12 women on screen and they all have speaking roles & none of them are talking about a man."

I understand that the Bechdel Test has been ballooned well beyond the point that it was initially trying to make, but its criticism still rings true: movies - especially popular ones - predominantly star, are about and concern themselves with men.  Rightly or not (and the answer is typically "not"), it's a fact of the industry that women are grossly under-represented and their narratives are usually subservient to a man's.

The weird thing is that this movie's become a beacon of internet misogyny, as if daring to make a story where women act like Human beings and can be in charge of the nature and direction of their own narratives is somehow cinematic blasphemy.  Fury Road has a menagerie of fantastic female characters, all with their own reason for being where they are.  The story is one of mutual survival, rather than whisking away with or rescuing the helpless women who got in over their heads.  They don't need Max in any more profound way than he needs them, and that rocks some people to their very core.

Fury Road is without question the single greatest movie in the Mad Max franchise's history.  It post-apocalyptic vision is the best realized yet and the action is, in a word, sublime.  It's a critical step forward to meaningful gender equality in film, especially within the traditionally hyper-masculine action genre,  If you harbored any doubts about this movie before, you can rest assured that Mad Max's only real competition in 2015 is going to come from Spectre.

Rating:  9/10

Buy on BluRay:  Hell yes!

So what did you think of Fury Road?  Was it as good as The Road Warrior?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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The Weekend Review: Woman in Gold

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

It's been a while since The Weekend Review was about something that didn't just come out in the last week.  Seriously, you'd have to go back to mid-February when I reviewed Tusk.  Everything else was either something that hit theaters, Netflix or the internet right then and there (or was at least given a wide release in the US).  It's kind of refreshing, then, to reach back even a few weeks to something that isn't fresh off the press (even if it's still cloying to predominantly Avenged theaters).

When her sister dies, Maria Altmann - an elderly Holocaust survivor - discovers letters among her effects that reveal her sister's failed attempts to reclaim family portraits from the Austrian government that were stolen from them by the Nazis.  Wanting no more than to be reunited with her aunt Adele - Gustov Klimpt's famed "woman in gold" - she seeks the reluctant help of a young lawyer to take the Austrian government to court.

When Becky told me that she wanted to see this movie, I struggled to form a deeper opinion on the matter than the stillborn indifference of watching a mid-year period drama.  It had a good cast and a solid premise, but good dramas are never released this close to blockbuster season.  They're either released during the late fall prestige season (like Birdman) or get pushed back until January if the competition that year is especially fierce (like Shutter Island).  They aren't unloaded on the public in April.

Maybe that's why I was so impressed with it.  It was a shockingly well-made drama whose producers had confidence enough in the film to release it at a time when it wasn't going to be dismissed as cloying Oscar-bait.  Woman in Gold is not going to tear up this year's Academy Awards - and probably never was - but it will most certainly prove to be a far more confident and capable story than many that stand a reasonable chance to.

So many "high end dramas" prove to just be one thing: one good performance, one good director, one good script, one good scene.  These are the Gravities and Theory of Everythings of the world.  Oftentimes these are enough to make it worth watching and enough to make off with a few awards.  But that's not the kind of film that Woman in Gold is.

Woman in Gold is not just one thing: but a confluence of quality that is shockingly rare in its genre.  It has a more than capable cast between Hellen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds.  It's deftly helmed by My Week with Marilyn's Simon Curtis, who portrays the weight of the narrative without giving into its sentimentality.  Its surprisingly nuanced narrative is ably penned by freshman screenwriter Alexi Campbell.  So while more prestigious films might decidedly beat it out on any one of these fronts, it is a more balanced and more resilient film on the whole for its evenly capable execution.

The film has an organically non-linear narrative that uniquely feels both natural and necessary.  Whereas most films that attempt the same structural sleight-of-hand do so in order to mask the inequities of anemic writing, Woman in Gold falls in the tradition of The Imitation Game.  Its decades-spanning narrative is resolutely focused on the present, slipping into flashback only when it reveals something new about the characters in precisely chosen moments.

Rather than competing with one another for importance, past and present sequences augment each other in ways that a more traditionally plotted narrative could not.  The primary narrative being rooted in the present keeps the focus on what's most important: restitution and reunion.  The interspersed scenes set in the past elaborate on precisely why they're important: on what was really stolen from Maria - not a painting, but the very memory of those dear to her.

So if you find yourself with time on your hands and money in your pocket this weekend, I would urge you to check out Woman in Gold before it rotates out of theaters.  It is an exceptional drama that can never hope to achieve the notoriety that it deserves.

Rating:  7.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  Yes.

So what is your favorite WWII drama?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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The Weekend Review: Avengers: Age of Ultron

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

I think that it pretty much goes without saying at this point that Age of Ultron has been my most anticipated movie of the year.  Marvel's been doing everything right with their Cinematic Universe - from getting Spider-Man back on board to finding an in-universe replacement for the X-Men.  Their movies have been fantastic, their TV series have been fantastic and even their short films have been fantastic.  To top it all off, The Avengers is easily one of my favorite movies, and I'm a sucker for a good-looking sequel.

When The Avengers reclaim Loki's Scepter from Hydra, Tony Stark and Bruce Banner finally have what they need to create Ultron: an artificially intelligent, global peacekeeping initiative.  They envision "a suit of armor around the world" that will be able to fend off extraterrestrial threats while they focus on terrestrial ones or, God forbid, are allowed to hang up the cape an retire.

But in meddling with a power that they cannot begin to comprehend, they create a monster.  Ultron destroys Jarvis, steals the scepter and escapes into the internet, using Hydra's abandoned bases to construct legions of bodies for himself.  Obsessed with creating "peace in our time," Ultron envisions a world free from pain, suffering, war, famine and disease: in short, a world where every Human is long since dead and buried.

For all of its bells and whistles, Age of Ultron is basically a massively entertaining retread of The Avengers.  While it further develops Stark's post-new York paranoia, Cap's moral line in the sand, Banner's Hulk-inspired angst, Thor's acclamation to life on Earth and Romanov's and Barton's nuanced relationship, it's still basically the same movie that we got in 2012.  An psychotic villain with daddy issues uses the Scepter and a vast, technologically advanced army to publicly destroy The Avengers and take over the world.

The strange thing is, though, that this weirdly specific formula works nearly as well the second time around.  Now I'm not saying that there weren't a few well-deserved groans when Ultron starts using the scepter to mind-control scientists into making him some absurdly far fetched piece of technology in a scene lifted straight from the first movie nor that the darker version of the character that they were advertising wasn't inherently more interesting than the one that we ended up with.  I'm not even saying that the action was as good the second time around.

Age of Ultron was a comparatively far cry from being the movie that The Avengers was and at least another comprehensive rewrite away from being the movie that it wanted to be.  I'm just saying that it worked, and worked exceptionally well.  The plot was as nuanced as a blockbusting cross-over based on a comic book needed to be.  The action, although a bit of a step down from 2012, was every bit as exciting as it wanted to be.

As with The Avengers, the focus was always on the characters' interactions with one another.  This is why the best scenes of the movie aren't the Hulk duking it out with the Hulkbuster nor the obvious stakes-raising Battle of Sokovia.  They were Stark's party and the Avengers' retreat to Barton's home: a bunch of otherworldly heroes sitting back with a beer and talking.

What I remember is the endless debate over which one of them - other than Thor - is worthy of wielding Mjolnir.  I remember Aunt Nat playing with Lila and Cooper.  I remember Laura holding up newborn Nathanial Pietro Barton.  I remember Banner's face when he's told that he's not the only monster on the team.  The scheming and the fighting and the explosions are all well and good, but Joss Whedon has always made his movies about the characters first, and that's served him just fine so far.

Age of Ultron is further proof that the meta-franchise is more than capable of solving "the Marvel problem:" in that they lack especially memorable or interesting villains.  Loki is one of the most dynamic antagonists that we've seen in recent years.  The Mandarin was a intelligent deconstruction of terrorism and international policy.  And now we have Ultron: a Frankenstein's monster of good intentions and what it really means to have "peace in our time."

That being said, the movie is certainly not without its fair share of issues (issues that an additional rewrite or a few reshoots could have fixed).  Although endlessly entertaining to watch in his current form, a far more interesting take on Ultron would have been him specifically gunning after the Avengers, because they were the actual threat to global peace.  While the extinction-level climax was still a great way to end things, it seemed more comicky than Marvel movies tend to get as a general rule (similar to, although not nearly as bad as, the Silver Samurai from The Wolverine).

While Age of Ultron did start to bring the issues of Civil War to a head, it didn't go quite so far with them as I would have hoped for.  In fact, the movie ended on such an amicable note between everybody involved that I can't help but wonder how they're going to get from this to Captain America 3 with only Ant-Man as the segue.  And while Age of Ultron definitely made far better use of its Quicksilver than Days of Future Past did, the X-Men movie's version was still the much more interesting version of the two characters.

Although it didn't quite live up to all of the hype surrounding it, I would be shocked if Age of Ultron didn't end up as my favorite movie of 2015 by the end of the year.  It's the perfect blend of summertime fun and character-driven story that I imagine everybody who saw The Avengers should like about as much as it.

Rating:  9.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  Definitely.

So what did you think of Age of Ultron?  Was it as good as The Avengers?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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The Weekend Review: Ex Machina

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

As you may already be aware, Ex Machina is a movie that had been on my radar for quite some time.  The trailers promised a dark, cerebral sci-fi thriller.  The premise was about as trippy as the best of science fiction.  Throw in Alexander Garland - the man behind the scripts for 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Dredd - and I knew that I simply had to see it when it hit theaters stateside.

When Caleb is selected for a cutting edge research project, he doesn't know what to expect.  Nathan is a programming savant who invented the equivalent of Google when he was still a teenager.  But after being flown to Nathan's remote estate, Caleb is informed that over the next week he'll be administering a Turing Test to the world's first artificially intelligent machine.  But as he begins his tests, he realizes that nothing is as it seems, and that Nathan has an insidious agenda of his own.

If Oscars were awarded based on the strength of a movie's premise, Ex Machina would unquestionably be this year's best picture.  While the dark implications of AI are hardly new, this particular twist on the idea has never been filmed before: somebody testing and giving serious thought to the idea that a machine has the same level of sapience as a human.

When you combine that with Alex Garland's intelligent and stalkingly patient direction, you end up with an exceptionally cerebral, aesthetically measured film.  Seriously, if I didn't know any better going into Ex Machina, I would have thought that Alex Garland was an experienced director with decades worth of experience in that regard, rather than a screenwriter tackling is directorial debut.

The film is one of the most methodically staged and paced films that I've seen come out in my lifetime.  For Ex Machina, Garland adopts a Kubrickian style of photography, in which every shot has a deliberate, pre-ordained purpose to the film as a whole.  While some frustrated movie-goers bemoaned how it it dragged, I never thought that it moved any slower (nor faster) than it needed to.

That's not to say that Ex Machina wasn't without its flaws, just that none of them were visual.  Caleb is a poorly fleshed out  character, especially when contrasted with the only other human of any narrative importance: Nathan.  Nathan was an incredibly interesting, nuanced and unsettling character: the kind of person that looks perfectly fine on the surface but feels all sorts of wrong at his core.

Caleb was given a disproportionate amount of screen time compared to the amount of development he was afforded.  While I  understand that Garland's focus was always on Ava and the question of her personhood, there were more than enough quiet, isolated moments that could have been repurposed to delving further into his character.  Or when Ava reverses the Turing Test on Caleb, she could have probed further into the idea of who he was and the validity of his personhood (like a sci-fi Hannibal Lector).

There was also a moment near the end - involving Ava and an exceedingly minor Human character - that fails to hold up under logical scrutiny.  I won't reveal exactly what happens, but the unquestioning ease at which this other character goes along with the situation at face value doesn't make sense.  This would have either blown up into a physical confrontation or dissolved with a simple refusal to go along with Ava's request.

While this doesn't diminish what Ex Machina actually was able to accomplish, it does keep it from taking its place among the greater pantheon of science fiction.  It's basically a more commercially-minded - and worse - take on Under the Skin with a few painfully obvious script issues.  If you can get past the movie's deliberate pacing, its mind-bending premise and its occasional scriptural shortcoming, you owe it to yourself to check out one of the best sci-fi movies to come out in years.

Rating:  7.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  Probably not (if only because I have my doubts about its rewatchability)

So what is your favorite cinematic take on artificial intelligence?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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The Weekend Review: Unfriended

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

When I first saw this movie's trailer, I figured that it was an easy one to skip.  This inane-looking take on Millennial angst over social media seemed like it was the latest in a long string of mostly terrible movies trying to make the Internet frightening.  But when word started coming in on the movie - from sources that I typically trust - it was surprisingly, even begrudgingly, positive.  While nobody was saying that this was the must-see horror movie of 2015, their take-aways from the film left me some hope that it would at least be worth the second half of my weekly double feature.

It's been a year since Laura Barns tragically killed herself as the result of a merciless campaign of cyber bullying instigated by her supposed friends.  But while they may have moved on from their complicity in her death, she has not.  When the six people most responsible for her harassment casually sign into a Skype chat to discuss their plans for prom, Laura's there with them with a sinestral plan of her own.

Unfriended is in every respect a far better movie than it deserved to be (and a far better one than it was marketed as).  It actually makes better use of its found footage gimmick than most higher-profile horror movies.  Because we are privy to just one of six computer screens, we're treated to a more intimate perspective on the unfolding events than we would have had access to otherwise.

We see what Blaire is privately looking up in the middle of her Skype chat, giving us snippets of information (like the infamous Laura Barns videos or the meaning behind California police codes).  We see Blaire repeatedly type, consider and edit her mid-chat IMs and PMs: granting us insight into her internal struggles with the truth of Laura's harassment and far more information about Laura's personal problems than the other characters are aware of.

The computer screen that we saw was likewise verisimilitudinous enough to really make it feel more realistic than it otherwise would have been.  We see overlapping windows, multiple running programs and numerous open tabs: if not an exact replica of our computing habits, than a reasonable approximation of one.  It even replicated for us how the protagonist would tune out the Skype chat in order to focus on any number of different things that she was also doing on her computer: lending an eerie air of realism to the film.

While the movie has found footage down almost perfectly, the script itself is about as weak as you'd expect from the trailer.  Every single character in the movie is the most hilariously unrealistic "worst person ever" despite only being in high school.  While I could get behind them being inherently bad people - or each one uniquely terrible in his or her own way - I can't buy the extreme absurdity of them being this bad by the time that they're in their late teens.

We have the cheating love birds with multiple counts of infidelity between them.  We have the narc who ratted out his friend to the police.  We have the girl who stole hundreds of dollars from her supposed friend.  We have instances of malicious slander, grave defacement, DUIs, rape and even forced abortion.  This is in addition to the cyber bullying that resulted in a girl's suicide.

On top of that, it really kind of flounders when it comes to the horror part of its description.  The kills are all thoroughly lackluster, seemingly there just to move the only somewhat interesting revenge plot along.  While I loved the fact that they did show the typical Skype glitches (frozen screens, lagging video, pixelated images), they really went overboard with it near the end.  I get that Laura's presence was supposed to be interfering with the computers, but it was obviously done because it was an easy way to make things look creepier.

So while I can enthusiastically say that Unfriended was actually a lot better than it let on, I still can't really recommend that people see it, especially when there are so many better horror movies coming out later this year.  Hell, there's even a much better horror movie that's still hanging around in some theaters.

Rating:  5/10

Buy on BluRay:  No (seeing it once was enough for me).

So what is your favorite found footage film?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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The Weekend Review: The Problem with Daredevil's Costume

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

Normally, this article series is dedicated to reviews of things that I saw over the weekend.  The problem is that I really didn't see anything over the weekend that really qualified.  I rewatched a few things that I already weighed in on, watched one movie intended for another article and revisited a few episodes of Dragonball Z.  I had intended to review Daredevil, but my packed schedule kept me from seeing it all in time.

So I thought this once that I could weigh in on something here that's been tugging at the back of my mind since Marvel released their first image of Daredevil's iconic costume.  Coming off of traditional renderings of already awesome costumes (Iron Man) to dramatic reimaginings of substandard ones (Yellowjacket), the general consensus was that Marvel's perfect costuming streak had ended.

Though I had to agree with the assessment, I couldn't help but feel that the odds were stacked against this particular costume from the start.  And no, I'm not talking about the irony of a blind man designing a crime-fighting costume for himself.

But where did the costume go wrong?  While I think that most people will agree that the new costume is underwhelming compared to the traditional one, what's really all that different about it?  It has the same stunted horns, the same crimson coloring and the same visual style.

Sure, the mouth opening is wider on the physical costume.  The red is darkened and mixed with some black swatches.  The texture is overhauled with overlapping Kevlar panels.  It's still essentially the same costume.  Outside of a new ornamental modifications, nothing's really been changed.

There is an argument to be made that Ben Affleck's costume in the movie was a better version of the costume, but think back on that.  Was it really all that good to begin with?  The color's a bit closer to the comics and it lacks the series' tactical reimagining, but it still looks awfully silly in the flesh.

When staring at the new face of Daredevil, I realized the key reason why the costume wasn't up to snuff: the only real difference that can account for the difference between badass and visual pushover.  One is from a comic and the other is from a TV series.

Seriously, that's it.  There's nothing inherently wrong with the new costume.  There's nothing that they messed up on.  There's nothing that you can ultimately blame the makers of the show for doing to the costume.  It's problem is that it was physically made.

Whether we want to admit it or not, what visually works in a comic book doesn't always translate to the big (or small) screen.  A live-action costume needs to be made of actual cloth and fit on an actual person.  It can't be made of some non-descript red fabric that fits the character perfectly in all that places that count, allows them a full range of unhindered motion and still makes him look like a total badass on every page.

The visual concerns of a comic are vastly different from a TV series.  Comics used bright, heavily saturated colors for the combined purpose of drawing in young readers and making each character as visually distinct as possible.  Certain colors popped off the page so perfectly that they were constantly recycled (consider Beast's, Mystique's and Nightcrawler's blue coloring) or were used no matter how idiotic it would look in real life (Wolverine's traditional yellow costume).

There's a reason why we haven't seen Hugh Jackman in yellow spandex yet.  There is no possible way that Fox could make that look good.  The closest that we actually got to seeing him in costume is the black getups from from the first movie and Days of Future Past.  That's because black is easy to make look good in camera.

For as awesome as he looks in the comics, base-yellow costumes are hideous to look at in real life.  They're too bright, too garish and far, far too silly.  It's the exact same reason why Yellowjacket had his color scheme inverted for the upcoming Ant-Man.  Black works, while yellow doesn't.

This is why Batman visually translates to movies and TV series so well.  Bat-nipples aside, there really hasn't been a bad Batman costume, because base-black (or gray) combined with a somewhat-tactically grounded sensibility is perfect for the televisual medium.

Some costumes are just doomed from the start, barring dramatic reimagining.  But that option, too, carries with it a lot of risk.  People are tuning in to see Daredevil, not some blind guy with a baton.  If you change the costume too much, especially for your protagonist, there will be a backlash.  Daredevil has too much to live down with its infamously bad live-action movie to risk maligning fans any more than it has to.  In this sense, a poorly visualized costume is far more preferable than an unrecognizably altered one.

Wolverine gets away with it because the X-Men franchise is first and foremost  about a team, not any one individual.  Sure, you don't get your iconic Wolverine, but Cyclops still gets his iconic visor, Magneto still gets to look like M. Bison and Mystique is still iconically blue whenever she can afford to be.  If you do enough things right by the characters, you can allow a few details to slip by.

Likewise, Yellowjacket gets away with it because he's not the hero.  Less people are familiar with him than Ant-Man and even less people are all that invested in him in the first place.  His secondary status as the villain allows him more leeway with switching up his costume, especially when Marvel absolutely nailed its protagonist's iconic look.

Daredevil's costume was doomed to fail from the start.  Either you piss everybody off because you messed with his costume too much, or your disappoint them because of how underwhelming it looks in real life.  Some costumes can't maintain fidelity to their source material and look good doing it.  Iron Fist faces a similar problem when his series hits Netflix later this year.

So what other superheroes' costumes do you think will be difficult to realize on the big / small screen?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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