Film Review: "The Deep Blue Sea" (***)

With Cannes Film Festival going on in the backdrop, it felt like as good an opportunity as ever to get up to date on some festival treats from yesteryear, and this one's just been beckoning to me for months. Quite often with a period film, the filmmaker becomes so preoccupied with pretentious mannerisms and stiff set design that they simply ignore the other aspects of the film. "The King's Speech" seems all too easy an example to be made of period-piece opportunities being trumped by period piece aesthetic. "The Deep Blue Sea" finds its setting as a necessity of its story, and not the other way around. As such, everything about the design comes from the meaning of the narrative.

A romance about a woman who decides to leave her husband in favor of an exciting younger man isn't the most original thing in the world, and writer/director Terrence Davies realizes that just under the wire. To that point, the film begins with the recital of a suicide letter, written by Rachel Weisz' Hester Collyer. The conditions of this letter aren't quite known until they're slowly revealed. Usually you'd expect a suicide to be the definitive end of a story, but the world and the people in it need something more from Hester to let her get away with dying so easily. It's worth watching simply for the fact that it doesn't cop to what's been done before.

Film Review: "The Avengers"

"And then Shawarma after."

There is a juncture about 90 minutes into Joss Whedon's superhero extravaganza "The Avengers" that states my feelings towards the film better than any words could. Mark Ruffalo's newly tuned Bruce Banner awakens in a pile of rubble to the company of a janitor played by none other than Harry Dean Stanton. It's a short scene played almost entirely for humor, with the hilarious delivery of the words, "I think you have a condition". That may very well be my absolute favorite moment of the film's two hour and twenty minute running time, filled enterprisingly with bombastic action, interpersonal conflict, and character articulation. A random cameo talking to a nude guy who just got busy breaking apart an air fortress.

It's that moment where I realize that this could easily have never happened, just as this film could have gone awry at any juncture. They had five films to build up to this one, and if one of them had been entirely horrible, this one would have fallen apart entirely. Against any possibility, this geek pipe dream has become a reality, and for nearly everyone else who sees it, it will be received as miraculous. Indeed, ignoring the film entirely, we have to spend a moment to acknowledge just how difficult it has been to bring us to this point, where a film like this is not only possible, but absolutely fluent. But if I'm building it up as a disappointment, it surely isn't.

"War Horse" Theatrical Trailer

There's a lot more of the same in the new trailer for Steven Spielberg's "War Horse", and why the hell shouldn't there be? After all, the teaser trailer played brilliantly with pretty much every demographic, and even those who weren't quite so taken with it could still admire it as a trailer. But, it's still all there in the trailer. It's a war film. There's a devoted horse trying to get back home. There's a boy who loved the horse, though NOT in the same way as "Equus". And there's that Niels Arestrup line, which got people illogically pushing for a Supp. Actor nod, even though his presence in the film is likely confined to that scene. And somewhere along the way there are cameos from Emily Watson, Peter Mullan, David Thewlis, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Tom Hiddleston. What more do we need to know? We'll see it. That will certainly happen.

Film Review: "Midnight in Paris" (***1/2)

Please take a look at the film ratings I've given out recently, and you'll see they've been scaled back, because exceptional work deserves to be seen as just that. I thought I might be kind enough to give Super 8 a complete three stars, but still chipped off 1/2. I thought 1/2 more might be deserving of Kung Fu Panda 2, but it was ultimately not too special. Midnight in Paris was just the right film to knock me back into reality, as it was the first film this year that truly defied my expectations going in. We set such specific standards going into films, and without seeing them it is entirely too easy to make calls on certain features.

It starts out with a series of images documenting modern day Paris from morning to nighttime, and the immediate impact is as something hollow. People walking idly by, shelling out cash in stores, rushing through rain under cover of umbrella, and ultimately not taking advantage of the beauty of the place around them. Wasted potential is a good way of putting it. Then the credits roll, and we hear Gil Pender, played earnestly by Owen Wilson, raving about the beauty of Paris, and how much he wishes he could live there. His fiance Inez, played by Rachel McAdams, is not as convinced.

Gil is a former Hollywood screenwriter trying to punch out his first novel, and he has a decidedly more idealist view of the world than Inez and her parents. Inez comes from the viewpoint of survival rather than passion, much like most of us. She's fascinated with Paul Bates, portrayed by Michael Sheen, a cynical and pedantic pseudo-intellectual who tries his utmost to best anyone else, even to the point of factual disconnect. After a day of sightseeing and wine tasting, Gil walks home drunk on his own and ends up being picked up by an old style car that takes him to the Paris of his dreams.

Film Review: Thor (***)

I remember a few months ago when we were all in discussions about how awful this film was going to be. It's surprising how much negativity it has spawned so prematurely, and it's not even intelligently so. Originally people were worried that it might go for what's been called the Transformers style of humor, which can be more easily categorized as something called comedy. Admittedly, Thor is a particularly tough superhero to bring to the screen, and even more difficult to bring into the same world as Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, and Steve Rogers. Now the complaints about this film are focused around the phrase, "It could have been a lot worse." That's a very backhanded compliment, and it embellishes this film as just barely making it.

In actuality, I would say that Thor counts solidly as an equal superhero origin story as Iron Man was three years ago. The film starts out with a man plummeting to Earth from inter-dimensional vortex, right in front of dorky astrophysicist nut Jane Foster. We then flash back into the sky to find out who the man was, and where he came from. It turns out he's the mighty Thor, next in line for the thrown of Asgard, a Utopian type of realm that protects the other realms from certain annihilation. So when Thor decides seek foolish revenge upon one of the more stubborn realms, his father, Odin, banishes him to Earth.

I actually find it kind of bemusing that people are hoping that this film cuts back on the goofy humor, when that is actually one of the best parts of the film. The opening half hour of the film, action packed though it may be, is filled with a certain lifelessness. Maybe it's the bleak knowledge of what is coming, but for me it was more of the wanting it to happen sooner. So when we're blasted back to Earth, things become much more lively. Jane Foster and her groupies assistants brought such a likable sense of lighthearted criticism to the goofy ways of Thor and his ilk. Natalie Portman has been wandering about different roles that aren't as meaty as her role in Black Swan, and the same applies here. She's not meant to be taken seriously, because she's just a ditsy little nerd who believes in crazy tangents of science fiction. I feel like this role would have been better suited to someone else, but Portman does a good job making sure the audiences sides with her.