Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a movie about an eerily realistic-looking ape creature with dead eyes, who is surrounded by people insisting how smart he is even though he keeps making incredibly stupid decisions.

To be fair, though, I’ve heard he was pretty good in 127 Hours.

It also stars a CG chimpanzee named Caesar, who actually looked really good for about 90% of the movie. I started to wonder if they directed the other actors to be stiff and wooden so that the CG cast would look better in comparison.

Actually, that sums up how I spent most of the movie: wondering just how much of it all was intentional. Because the weird thing is that I really enjoyed it. But only because I tok it as camp where everybody was in on the joke and played it completely straight.

I counted about five references to the original Planet of the Apes (not Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which is more or less the movie that this is trying to remake; and definitely not the unfortunate Tim Burton remake of Planet of the Apes). That’s about three references too many, but it was enough to convince me that they weren’t being completely earnest when they had a gorilla (spoiler!) jumping onto a helicopter from the top of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Because that’d be silly.

I realize that my enjoying Rise of the Planet of the Apes would seem to make me a hypocrite, since I’ve complained about both The Transformers movies and ironic detachment at great length before. But there are some important differences. Rise of the Planet of the Apes isn’t a great movie, but unlike The Transformers, it’s not a lazy movie. They take the premise and they run with it.

And the self-awareness isn’t the usual tiresome making fun of itself, but having fun with itself. There’s a running gag where everything bad in the story happens to the guy from Stargate Atlantis, but it’s a gag that actually turns into a series of major plot points, plot points that are actually pretty well thought out.

What’s most interesting to me about Rise of the Planet of the Apes is Rain’s comment that the end of King Kong proves that you can make a CG ape that the audience actually cares about. She didn’t care about any of the characters in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, so when (spoiler!) a gorilla dies in Caesar’s arms, it didn’t have any impact.

The scene didn’t have any impact on me, either, but during the movie, it didn’t even occur to me that that was a problem. Action movies use scenes like that as if they were punctuation — it’s like ending a sentence with an exclamation point. I don’t actually mean anyone to get that excited! It’s just the way these things work. (And I should point out that they don’t take it too far; Caesar doesn’t look to the heavens and shout “NOOOOOOO!”)

For the record, I don’t recall crying at the end of King Kong either; knowing me, I very well might have, but it didn’t have any genuine impact on me on the level of “It’s been a tough year, Dad” or the like. And the moments in Rise of the Planet of the Apes that I think were supposed to have impact — no spoilers, but at a key moment, Caesar does something that apes aren’t supposed to be able to do — really did work for me.

So there’s the question: if movies keep throwing in meaningless scenes like this and we all just take it for granted and run with it, is that a case of lowering expectations? Have I become part of the problem? Or have I just been more interested in seeing chimps run down Market Street than in seeing chimps make me feel bad for them, and I finally found a movie that delivered?

I have finally solved the mystery of the Transformers movies. In retrospect, it’s so obvious that I’m embarrassed I didn’t catch on sooner.

First, let me set the scene so that future generations may recount the story like Alexander Fleming and penicillin: I’ve really needed to be working today, but instead have been stricken with a non-stop, straight-out-of-Greek-mythology headache. It’s hit me so hard that I can’t even concentrate on a game about zombies. It’s left me staggering across the internet like a wounded bear, where the smallest offense sends me into a berserker fury, hoping only that rage can cure what Advil can’t.

So instead of trying to work, I decided to read the least challenging and most non-confrontational thing I could imagine: a review of the third Transformers movie on the Comics Alliance blog. “Unchallenging” isn’t intended as an insult; it’s a blog about a subject I’m only barely invested in, with an article that I likely agree with completely.

Anybody who’s seen the internet in the past four years can immediately see the flaw in my logic: you can’t write anything — anything, anywhere — about the Transformers movies without starting an argument. That Comics Alliance post currently has 263 comments, after all. I’ve seen it, too; people who are happy to ignore me otherwise will respond every single time I say anything negative about the movies. This blog averages less than 100 views on a good day, but writing about a Transformers movie will get comments.

And it’s always, always the same response: “It’s an action movie, it’s not supposed to be high art.” “Bay knows what his audience wants.” And, unavoidably: “Just turn off your brain and enjoy it.”

Which is infuriating, of course, to those of us who actually like movies, because “turn your brain off” is not a defense of a movie. It’s like if you told someone his sister was ugly, and he responded by saying, “Shut up, you’re wrong. She’s just really stupid.” It’s presented as if it were an unbreakable finishing move in the discussion but it doesn’t make any sense and oh no the headache’s coming back.

It’s doubly frustrating because it’s got this built-in accusation of being insufferably pretentious and elitist, which is something I just can’t respond to, when I list Big Trouble in Little China as one of the greatest movies ever made. It’s just denial that there’s a wide range of possibility between Terrence Malick and Michael Bay, and that movies have a long history of making enjoyable, accessible entertainment that doesn’t leave you feeling like your brain has been raped.

In fact, based on the box office, thousands of people walked right past a perfectly entertaining, fun, exciting, and completely comprehensible action movie that wasn’t unforgivably stupid — Super 8 — and instead willingly and with malice of forethought paid for a ticket to Transformers 3. There are tons of movies that are not only more intelligent than the Transformers movies, but also have much better action sequences. You don’t have to sacrifice the basics of competent storytelling for explosions and robots; there are lots of movies that have both!

It wasn’t until I passed over a dozen constructive things I could have been doing, in favor of reading an article on a blog about comic books, that I realized what I’ve been missing all this time: the “appeal” isn’t just “this movie’s really stupid.” Non-confrontational entertainment is nothing new or unique to Transformers. (See: Futurama’s episode about the “Single Female Lawyer” series).

No, the appeal of the Transformers series is, “this movie is stupid and I’m completely aware of how stupid it is.”

They’re ostensibly based on toys (although I can’t imagine the bulk of the target audience is old enough to have played with the toys or watched the cartoon), so it seems like it’s a simple case of nostalgia. But that’s just a front — it’s a franchise in disguise if you see what I did there — it’s really nostalgia for the 1990s, the decade that bred the mindset of ironic pop culture appreciation. (I’m really hoping it’s the last death rattle of the 90s, but that’s probably just me being optimistic).

What this means is that Bay has actually accomplished something kind of profound: he’s made hipsterism mass-market and mainstream. It’s no great achievement to make a movie that anybody can understand. But it is somewhat remarkable to make a movie that anybody can understand is bad.

That’s not me being elitist, either: I generally consider myself to have pretty good taste, but I watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and got exactly what I’d wanted to get out of it. There are always some people who will find a way to enjoy what you’ve made if you give them even the slightest opening.

Usually, ironic detachment is a pretty hit-or-miss proposition: too much camp is just painfully deplorable, but too much effort just ends up being kind of sad. Bay’s movies satisfy some minimum ratio of moving image to synaptic firing rate that a majority of people can watch them without being bored, and they have enough of a “we’re not taking any of this seriously” vibe so that the most kind-hearted portion of the audience can make fun of them without feeling like they’re picking on the defenseless.

Most importantly, they’re movies that just about anyone can watch and come away feeling like they’re better than what they’re watching. These are, after all, movies that cast actors like John Turturro, Frances McDormand, and John Malkovich, and yet it’s Shia LeBeouf who believes that he’s slumming.

As much as I hate to admit it, I suppose that there’s often some primal need to feel superior, or at least to feel completely in control of what’s going on. It’s the same phenomenon that causes the baffling popularity of reality programming: people don’t watch The Bachelorette just because it’s easy to watch, but so that they can feel superior to any of the characters on the show and dismiss the whole thing as a guilty pleasure. And it’s more or less the same reason I tend to leave a movie thinking less about the movie itself and more about what I can write about it. To be able to take it apart and put it back together, to say that I’ve “beaten” it.

But that’s not “turning your brain off.”

Moviemakers are an insufferably self-satisfied and self-important group of people. As if it weren’t enough to hold an annual pageant of self-congratulation and broadcast it around the world, they’re constantly making movies about making movies. Sometimes it’s just a backdrop, other times it’s a metaphor or post-modernist deconstruction or something, and sometimes it’s a cry for help. Even when it’s a satire, it’s making the arrogant assumption that we’re all fascinated by what their world is like, and not that we just want them to shut up and entertain us.

Sometimes, though, it’s a completely sincere attempt by a filmmaker to convey exactly what it is he loves about the movies. Super 8 is the best example of that; it feels like J.J. Abrams’s attempt to recreate a childhood as a nerdy kid on the cusp of seeing his first summer blockbuster. Back before the summer blockbuster got completely overwhelmed by marketing and effects, before the core of the blockbuster rotted away and they became soulless commercial entertainment product.

It’s a shameless love letter to the movies of his co-producer, and it’s an unabashed nostalgia trip. And as it turns out, you can go home again.

Part of the old-school feel comes from the secrecy around the movie, an attempt to give teasers and previews a year before the movie’s release but still hark back to a time before blogs and conventions, when people would go see movies knowing little more than what was on the poster. (A blog post on Wired talks more about that, but reveals more about the movie than I would have, so I recommend not reading it until you’ve seen the movie). That paid off brilliantly — I knew very little about the movie going in, and even what I’d thought I knew was confounded by well-edited trailers. It’s not even a case of going in expecting the shocking twist, it’s just a case of letting the movie gradually reveal itself to an audience that’s not constantly second-guessing it.

I’d recommend it highly, though, and I’ve got a few more thoughts about it for those who’ve already seen it.

Continue reading →

When I saw all the reviews for Bridesmaids calling it The 40 Year Old Virgin for ladies, I’d assumed that was just typical movie reviewer laziness, desperate to come up with a pithy one-liner. But sure enough, it is pretty much exactly what it says on the box: a Judd Apatow movie with all the genders reversed.

Which is weird, because Judd Apatow movies already struck me as kind of girly. Lots of guys chatting with their friends about their feelings before finding their soulmate and going on to a happy ending. And for all the raunchy reputation, they were predominately conservative: a story about the value of abstinence or maturing into a responsible father and husband (and avoiding abortion). They already seemed targeted at all of us guys who weren’t being properly serviced by all the Jason Statham and Vin Diesel movies. Basically: romantic comedies with all the genders reversed.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I liked 40 Year Old Virgin well enough and Knocked Up a lot. And Bridesmaids is pretty funny and enjoyable. And it’s enjoyable for exactly the same reasons: the marketing emphasizes the raunchiness, but there’s nothing remotely transgressive or subversive about any of these movies. Even with Melissa McCarthy shitting into a sink and Maya Rudolph taking a dump in the middle of the street and the other women vomiting on top of each other.

What is unusual about Bridesmaids and these other movies is that they have likable, semi-realistic characters stumbling through otherwise formulaic romantic comedies. Kristen Wiig gets plenty of opportunities to do almost all her schtick from Saturday Night Live, but there are just as many scenes where she’s having conversations that don’t sound written, with people she has a genuine chemistry with. Sure, I’ll pay to watch Wiig hang out with Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd from “The IT Crowd.” Those moments are the real appeal.

Well, those moments along with any scene with Melissa McCarthy, because she pretty much runs away with the whole movie. (I didn’t realize that her seatmate on the plane is played by her real life husband, which is kind of awesome).

You still end up with those semi-realistic moments pumping up a formulaic structure that’s threatening to collapse in on itself. I started to wonder whether they put so much emphasis on Kristen Wiig having written the script with a Groundlings colleague because if it were written by a man, it’d be laughably sexist. Granted, I’m one of the least qualified people on the planet to speak about “what women like,” but so much of the movie seems like videogame companies’ attempts to pander to female players by putting in more shopping and making everything pink. Bridesmaids has: a career woman with low self-esteem, having sex with Jon Hamm, planning her best friend’s wedding, jealous of a (ostensibly) younger and prettier woman who eventually gets her comeuppance, and finding a cute and funny cop she can fall in love with and also he has an accent.

(One of my favorite things about the movie is that they just cast the charming guy they liked and didn’t spend any more than a token attempt to explain how he could be Irish and a cop).

Of course, the romantic comedies for him show dudes getting stoned, playing videogames, spending all day at work, and going out to bars to try and get laid. So maybe at some point you’ve just got to relax and and stop getting so hung up about reinforcing stereotypes.

By the time they got to the extraordinarily conventional ending of Bridesmaids, I’d already gotten enough genuinely pleasant entertainment out of it to give the rest a pass. But after two hours (it’s really too long), plus an additional 15 minutes of trailers so clearly not directed at me that I’d considered slinking out into a cartoon or another screening of Thor, I started to wonder if I was witnessing the white dwarf-like implosion of an entire genre of movie.

All of the trailers (except for Super 8) were for interchangeable, near-indistinguishable chick movies, plus the inspiring story of a woman writer who overcomes a rich racist white woman, and a movie where womanizer Ryan Reynolds does a Freaky Friday with married man Justin Bateman after they both piss in a magic fountain. So: girly movies that are advertising themselves as being edgier than girly movies.

The worst offender was for a movie with Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake as friends-with-benefits who — gasp! — might actually be falling in love. The characters deliberately set out to defy “Hollywood romantic comedy cliches,” and the trailer even has a scene with Kunis complaining about Katherine Heigl movies and screaming at a poster of The Ugly Truth. In a movie that has exactly the same premise as No Strings Attached, a near-identical romantic comedy that came out just this year.

It’s a kind of self-loathing that pervades these movies. Bridesmaids is also being packaged and sold as an antidote to the typical chick movie, even though the most appealing scenes, the only scenes that make it feel unique, are the ones that are the girliest: two women having a genuine conversation with each other.

Talking about this movie requires me to be a little crass, so be forewarned: Watching Sucker Punch is like getting an unwanted erection.

Every guy has had to deal with it: you’re walking along, perfectly content with your high-minded Dr. Jekyll life, and then you see or hear or taste something that makes Mr. Hyde assert himself, and you’re left with nothing but a disappointed, “Oh, man. Really?!” (And I know it happens to every guy or else there wouldn’t be Catholicism).

Sucker Punch isn’t a very clever or thought-provoking movie. I don’t even think it was all that original; I kept having the vague sense that all the imagery already exists somewhere in a pop art gallery or a sci-fi magazine. But despite that, you cannot deny that it has reasonably hot women fighting clockwork zombie Huns with railguns in alternate-history WWI trenches and a battle mech styled like a WWII bomber.

Against my better judgment, I’m hard-wired to like this.

Other things I’m hard-wired to like: “Army of Me” by Björk. Samurai. Giant samurai who shoot light out of the hole when you slice them up with a katana. German blimps over a ruined cathedral. Orcs, goblins, and dragons, and orcs getting cut up by helicopter blades. “Tomorrow Never Knows” by The Beatles. Space trains on the moon of a ringed planet. Studebakers. Jon Hamm.

Sucker Punch is only — self-consciously — a list of those things. It’s got a framing story that should be just an excuse to string all those things together. A young woman’s wrongly committed to a mental institution by her wicked stepfather, and she plans to escape an impending lobotomy by distracting her captors with passionate dance sequences that we never see, but which take her into a series of fantasy worlds. Also the institution’s a brothel, somehow, or maybe it’s not. And the whole thing is either a fairy tale story or a stage play.

That framing story is 90% of the problem: it’s a half-assed effort to make a adolescent male fantasy T&A movie that makes a commentary on T&A movies. I left the movie thinking that I just didn’t understand Zack Snyder at all. Which would be worse? If he genuinely thought he was making something significant, or if he knew exactly how insignificant the movie was, but added the framing story in an attempt to defend himself against making something so shallow?

This interview with Synder on Movieline sheds a little light on the creative process, and it’s pretty grim. It sounds like he was making a completely sincere, genuine attempt at the standard movie-audiences-as-voyeurs theme.

Except it’s all kind of clumsy and ham-fisted. Symbolism is fine; symbolism deliberately simplified for adolescents is pandering. The movie starts out with a curtain opening on a stage and a voiceover about stories and then segues into a dialogue-free backstory music video, all to make it clear that you’re watching a story. A short time later, a montage showing what’s going to happen to our heroine shifts into a rehearsal for a stage play. One of the characters angrily walks off stage, asking what kind of audience would want to see a beautiful woman be lobotomized. It doesn’t come across as cleverly self-referential so much as Synder covering his ass.

There’s no sense of discovery or interpretation. It’s not like art, but more like Cliff’s Notes of art. It smashes together all the elements that usually add depth to movies — self-reference, implicating the audience, using imagery and symbolism — but then leaves them lying there, inert. By the end, it’s all just muddled and meaningless, defying any attempt to make sense of it. There’s a lot of gross violence towards women towards the end of the movie; is it genuinely misogynistic, or is it just intended to be a contrast to the girls-kick-ass fantasy of the last hour and a half? I honestly couldn’t tell.

I hate the whole concept of the “you just have to turn your brain off” defense of bad movies. But I actually wish Sucker Punch had abandoned the pretense of commentary and just embraced its role as spectacle. This isn’t like Transformers or National Treasure; movies like those are doomed to failure, because they’re too literal. They insist on aping real movies, they don’t have enough imagination to turn into pure fantasy, so they fail as both story and spectacle. If Sucker Punch hadn’t tried to make a weak attempt at absolving itself of being T&A, it could’ve landed safely in the zone of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow-style spectacle.

Instead, it gives up any notion of Sky Captain‘s self-aware fun, and tries to have Kill Bill‘s self-aware significance. But while the fantastic imagery of Sucker Punch works on a gut level — again, it’s a really pretty movie, even when it’s being ugly — it doesn’t feel as innovative or exhilarating as Kill Bill. Both take images they’ve seen elsewhere and throw them together onto the screen, but one feels as if it’s creating something more out of them, the other feels like it’s just regurgitating them. There’s not the same sense of inspiration.

It’s such a retread that I spent the whole movie being creeped out that they’d somehow CG-reanimated David Carradine, only to get to the credits and realize that the part of David Carradine was being played by Scott Glenn.

One other thing about inspiration: when I first saw the posters and trailer for Sucker Punch, I made up a version of the movie’s origins that has nothing to do with reality but is a lot funnier. I imagined that Zack Snyder had just made 300, an unabashed, balls-out fuck-yeah war movie for MEN. And he was stunned to release it and discover he’d just unintentionally made one of the gayest of gay movies ever. (Right down to the obligatory self-loathing bits).

So, undaunted, he tried to overcompensate by making a movie that was nothing but hot chicks in all kinds of skimpy outfits shooting guns at monsters and zombies. And he borrowed from all the least homo sources he could think of: Women in prison b-movies! War movies! Dragonslaying epics! 90s sci-fi action! (I’m assuming the only reason there’s not a drift-racing sequence in Sucker Punch is because of studio interference). It’d be a mash-up of his own visual style with Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction and The Lord of the Rings and Aliens, and all he needed was a distinctive style for the framing story of his totally not-gay adolescent male fantasy…

Moulin Rouge! Perfect! I’d known that I was just making shit up based on a poster, but my theory was totally blown out of the water when Sucker Punch started out just like a Baz Luhrmann movie. Which may be part of why I was predisposed to like it. In retrospect, it was wrong of me to make unfair assumptions, because for all its grossness, there’s really not that much to feel strongly about. If anything, it feels so slight partly because it’s so sheepish and ashamed to be objectifying women and showing so much gratuitous T&A&E (explosions). I hate to go out on a blurb-ready closing line, but: it’s got all the punch of the posters in a teenage boy’s bedroom.