Movie Review - Avengers : Infinity War

   WARNING : AVENGERS : INFINITY WAR SPOILERS BELOW!!!

Avengers : Infinity War is Marvel Studios newest record breaking hit...

  I went with Kathy to see the Avengers : Infinity War in our local movie theatre for the Saturday afternoon matinee. Most of the opening weekend matinees I’ve attended have had attendance in the single digits but Infinity Wars played to a packed house which leads me to think this movie is on pace to the biggest super hero movie gross of all time.

  The movie follows three separate plots of ‘mini-teams’ that are trying to thwart the quest of Thanos to collect the six infinity stones and become the ruler of all reality. Thor and a part of the Guardians of the Galaxy are on a quest to create a weapon worthy of killing Thanos, the rest of the Guardians team with Iron Man, Dr. Strange, and Spiderman to fight Thanos on his home planet of Titan, while Captain America leads the rest of the heroes to battle Thanos’s army in Wakanda to protect Vision and his ‘Mind Stone’. The first third of the movie sets up the teams in their locations and provides some funny character interactions. The rest of the movie is devoted to the battle and the star of the movie, Thanos.

  Make no mistake, Thanos is the star of the movie. We hear him repeatedly explain that the reason he needs the infinity stones is because he is the only being that has the will to bring balance to the universe by killing half the life in it. In the comics Thanos is in love with the personification of death and wants to kill every living being as an offering of his love. I have to say I like the half-measured Thanos better. Thanos tells Tony Stark how his homeworld had more people than resources but his calls to eliminate half the population went unheeded and everyone (except Thanos of course) died but the worlds where he eliminated half the populations are flourishing. The movie even gives a flashback to how he adopted his daughter Gamora while having his troops bring ‘balance’ to her world by killing half the population which includes her mother.

  Josh Brolin and the Marvel CGI team combine to make a fine Thanos. He was menacing and powerful enough to beat the Hulk in combat but was relatable enough to show his relationship with his daughter Gamora. At a point in the movie he has to prove his love for his daughter (in a twisted Thanos type of way) and is able to show it in a way that made me believe that he really believes killing half the universe is the only way to save it. In this way he is no different than other Marvel galactic beings like Ego, Galactus, and Eternity who have the proverbial 10,000 feet view of all things celestial.

  The CGI for the Marvel films just gets better and better. Spiderman’s new suit with mechanical extendable arachnid legs was especially cool. Tony Stark’s new nanotech embedded Iron Man armor that can generate any number of weapons and shapes made him believable as someone who could go toe to toe with Thanos. After taking a beating from Thanos, the Hulk doesn’t want to take over for Bruce Banner anymore which led to a number of ‘almost-Hulk’ transformations. Doctor Strange was another beneficiary of the improved CGI. His mystic powers are very dependent on CGI and the Crimson Bands of Cytorrak seemed to crackle in his hands.

  The actions scenes were also great. The battle featuring Thanos’s ‘war dog’ army against Wakanda was the lengthiest battle. It was fierce enough to rivet me to the screen but didn’t distract me with cutting back and forth in each mini-battle like ‘Transformers’ movies tend to do. Even the non-battle scene of Thor restarting the planetary forge in order to create his Thanos-killing weapon was exciting. As if that wasn’t enough the interactions between Tony Stark, Dr. Strange, and Spiderman along with Rocket Racoon and Thor were hilarious without being the sort of out of character interactions looking for laughs that creep into many Marvel films.

  There was nothing techinal about Avengers:Infinity War’s acting, special effects, of film-making that I didn’t like and yet I left the theater disappointed. Why? Lots of characters die the extremely unsatisfying death of turning to ash with a bare minimum allowed to utter a few last words. The first few deaths were shocking but after awhile I was pretty numb to it all and it is obvious that not many if any of these deaths will carry through past the next Avengers Movie scheduled for next year since lots of the newly dead actors and characters are scheduled for future movies. The death scale was so rapture-like with cars and helicopters crashing in New York as half the world’s population turns to dust that the only solution will have to be either an ‘alternate-reality switch’ or a ‘changing of the past to wipe out the entire Infinity War future so it never happened’ plot device.

  Avengers: infinity War is a great film but spending 2 and a half hours watching with no resolution and more questions than answers makes me think it a mediocre movie despite all the great components.As a youngster I always preferred DC comics to Marvel comics for this very reason – a DC comic ened with a conclusion while a Marvel comic always made me feel like I was missing out if I didn’t read the last issue or I would never find the resolution if I didn’t have a quarter to spare the next month. I’m Ok with leaving our characters in the wind like Captain America and his crew at the end of ‘Civil War’ or the Hulk after ‘Avengers : Age of Ultron’ but a year long cliffhanger with such a down ending is too much for me. I’m sure the Marvel universe show runners have it all figured out and the next Avengers will likely break all the records that Infinity Wars set but I would rather have had an extra half hour added to the film to make it a three hour movie and resolved the Thanos conflict once and for all or perhaps even ending this movie before Thanos kills half the universe and start part two with it. This ending seems very much like ‘the Walking Dead's’ much maligned fake ‘Glenn’ death and I could have done without it.

Movie Review - Death Wish

The remake of Death Wish is out!

  I was looking forward to seeing the remake of ‘Death Wish’ as soon as I saw the previews and would have seen it on its opening March 2nd weekend except that it did not make it to the local Marshalltown movie theatre until this past weekend so Kathy and I went to the Saturday matinee with 11 other movie goers. 45 years later the original ‘Death Wish’ is dated but at the time it was a controversial film. There was an unprecedentedly graphic and violent rape/murder scene that was completely omitted years later for the movie's network television debut. But what caused the majority of the controversy was the correctness or incorrectness of the concept of vigilante justice. In the original film architect Paul Kersey’s wife is murdered and daughter raped in a home break-in. Kersey deals with his grief and the inability of the police to bring the perps to justice by arming himself and heading out to the streets of New York. Armed first with a roll of quarters in a sock and quickly graduating to handguns, Kersey makes himself a seemingly easy target who switches from victim to hunter and metes out justice as the judge, jury, and executioner.

  Aside from the monotonal all-time tough guy Charles Bronson as Kersey, the movie features solid character actor Vincent Gardenia as Detective Frank Ochoa who finds out that Kersey is the vigilante but allows him to escape charges if he moves into another city. This offer is due to the falling crime rates ever since Kersey has started his activities and the desire of the city authorities to use the vigilante threat to keep the crime rates down. The movie became part of the national consciousness and was propelled into franchise-hood after the Bernie Goetz ‘subway gunman’ shootings in 1984 brought the vigilante question back into the headlines.

  Bruce Willis was cast as Paul Kersey and given a new job as a Chicago doctor instead of a New York architect. I thought Willis was a good choice to give Kersey a lighter touch and was excited to see how the vigilante question would be treated 45 years after the original Death Wish with the debates over gun rights and ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws at a fever pitch and this was even before the firestorm caused by the latest school shooting in Florida.

  The movie starts out much like the original. Kersey is a law-abiding citizen livingh an ideal family life with his wife and daughter on Lakeshore Drive. There is even a bonus as his deadbeat brother is played by the exceptional Vincent D’Onofrio (Kingpin in Daredevil and Detective Goren in Law and Order : Criminal Intent). The story continues with the brutal murder of his wife in a home burglary but without the rape. Although the daughter still survives she is in a coma in Kersey’s hospital.

  The movie continues to track the original as Kersey sinks into despair at the loss of his wife and the ineffectiveness of the police to catch the perpetrators. One 21st century twist is that Kersey has a therapist to talk to so we know what is on his mind. Kersey tries to thwart a mugging but gets beat up for his trouble. He then flirts with the idea of buying a gun but ends up getting an untraceable one that improbably drops out of a shooting victim’s waistband while in the emergency room that he learns to clean, load, and fire from watching You Tube videos. While riding the trains to keep his mind off his troubles, Kersey uses his gun to thwart a carjacking and shoots a helpless and disarmed carjacker dead. In another 21st century twist the act is caught on a video that is uploaded and gone viral which leads the same detective that haven’t found Kersey’s burglars to look for the vigilante.

  At this point the movie stops following the ‘Death Wish’ plot and turns more into a revenge\morality play. At the hospital, Kersey looks at the gunshot wound of a child whose transgression was to go home from school through the territory of the drug dealer known as the ‘Ice Cream Man’. Using an address gleaned from the youth’s medical records, Kersey heads to the Ice Cream Man’s block in broad daylight and empties two clips in him. This premeditated act is not the kind seen in Death Wish. The only public controversy is from Chicago radio hosts debating vigilante justice and a chief of detectives demanding the same detectives that have a wall of unsolved crimes (including Kersey’s) catch the vigilante.

  The plot goes further astray when Kersey attends to the wounds of a gunshot victim that is wearing Kersey’s watch that was stolen in the burglary. The movie morphs from ‘Death Wish’ to ‘Revenge Wish’ as Kersey is no longer looking to rain death on criminals but just to avenge his wife. The rest of the movie is entertaining enough as Kersey tortures one of his wife’s murderers, dispatches another thanks to a well-timed bowling ball, and finishes off the third in a finale worthy of any action movie. It just isn’t Death Wish anymore. The movie ends with some similarities to the original in that Kersey and his daughter move to another city but instead of a tacit agreement on the part of the police Kersey is let off scott-free by the detectives that have gleaned his identity.

  ‘Death Wish’ is a well-made film. I like the idea of Kersey being featured in a viral video and getting firearm basic training from YouTube videos. Willis and D’onofrio give fine performances. To me the film’s glaring flaw is that it seemingly wanted as little as possible to do with the original except to draw an audience. This movie is a cut above Willis’s recent forays into the Direct-to-DVD market but has a lot in common with them as soon as it drops the transformation of Paul Kersey from citizen to vigilante. I’m sure the remake aspect was necessary to allow for a bigger budget but after three weeks has barely grossed its' 30 million production budget. I consider this a Red Box special which is a shame because by being truer to the original film I believe the movie would have capitalized on the growing discussion over gun ownership and violence instead of being a revenge vehicle for an aging action hero.

Ultimately the Death Wish remake misses out on the central theme of the original - the transformation of Paul Kersey...

For good or bad I must say they don't make gunfights (or hair) like they used to. The scenes from Death Wish III (my personal favorite of the series) from the 3:00 to 7:50 marks are classics!

Movie Review - Black Panther

The highly acclaimed 'Black Panther' is the latest Marvel super hero movie.

  I went to see Marvel’s newest superhero movie ‘Black Panther’ last weekend. While most of the movies I’ve gone to this past year had single digit attendances for the weekend matinees even on the opening weekend the theatre was half full. Unlike almost all the previous Marvel movies, ‘Black Panther’ was a self-contained film with no crossover appearances of other characters in the Marvel Universe except for the obligatory appearance by Stan Lee.

  The movie gives a fairly faithful rendition to Don McGregor’s ‘Panther’s Rage’ story line that appeared in Marvel’s Jungle Action comic of the mid 1970’s. McGregor excelled at showing the current king and Black Panther T’Challa not just as a super hero but as the King of the mythical African nation of Wakanda which is unique for having the planet’s only known reserves of the super-metal Vibranium which can absorb sound, vibration, and kinetic energy. This has made the country exceedingly rich and technologically advanced while remaining largely hidden from the outside world in order not to become a target for Vibranium thieving nations and villains.

  The film starts with a reference to a theft of Vibranium by a man named Klaue (Klaw) and a long ago confrontation between T’Challa’s father and his brother Prince N'Jobu in Oakland. It is revealed that N’Jobu aided Klaue in the theft of the Vibranium for use in helping Africans and their descendants around the world who have been victimized for hundreds of years revolt against their oppressors. The plot then skips ahead to the current time where T’Challa’s father has been killed in the ‘Captain America: Civil War’ movie and T’Challa is ready to take the crown. Wakanda is a land of deep tradition and T’Challa has to fight in ritual combat against any challengers to take his crown which he does. After taking his crown, T’Challa ingests the secret vibranium infused flowers that give him the Black Panther powers and enters the ‘ancestral realm’ where he meets his father.

  At this point the action leaves Wakanda while T’Challa and crew (his lover and chief spy Nakia and chief of guards Okoye aka Dabai Gurira / Michonne from Walking Dead fame) head to South Korea to attempt to capture Klaue and the long ago stolen vibranium. There is a gunfight in a casino and a wild car chase. Klaue gets away with help from Erik Killmonger who is a black ops specialist and Prince N’Jobu’s son which makes him T’Challa’s cousin and part of the royal family.

  When T’Challa gets back to Wakanda he meets with some disdain from the tribal leaders who expected him to return with Klaue but that is trifling compared to his finding out that his father killed his uncle and abandoned his cousin to the streets of Oakland. His real problem comes when Killmonger makes his appearance in Wakanda, exercises his right as a blood relative to challenge T’Challa for the crown and proceeds to beat the living tar out of him before throwing him off a cliff and take over the throne. Naturally T’Challa hasn’t died in his fall from the cliff and he manages to win a final confrontation with Killmonger and retain his throne and decides to bring Wakanda more into the open as a nation and surreptitiously help impoverished African descendants in other nations.

  ‘Black Panther’ is a box office hit and is also receiving critical acclaim. I would place it on the top shelf of the Marvel movies but a cut below 'Thor : Ragnarok' which was more of a fun movie. The plot was easy to follow and the action and fighting scenes were great with the exception of the South Korea street race which I found poorly lit and hard to follow. Killmonger was a true Marvel anti-villain – capable of evil deeds but with a backstory that makes him an understandable and sympathetic character. I especially liked the merging of technology and mysticism in the three visits to the ancestral realm where T’Challa and Killmonger meet their respective parents and discuss their decisions. The ‘morality play’ of keeping Wakanda hidden from the world or using its technological resources to take over the world was the overarching subplot of the movie and handled in a direct manner.

  The morality play is what I found most fascinating about the movie. Before Killmonger takes the throne the royal family seems to be steeped in the tradition of the Wakandan people and the five tribes that were affected by the vibranium metor. T’Challa is content to keep Wakanda’s vibranium and technological prowess hidden from the world as it has been for generations. Killmonger take the throne and decides to arm Africans and their descendants with vibranium powered weapons to take over the world. What struck me was how easily so many of the Wakandan royals discarded their traditions in an attempt to overthrow Killmonger after he attained the throne according to their own traditions. When Killmonger is ready to strike T’Challa a death blow he is stopped by the high priest who offers his life instead. T’Challa’s mother, sister, and Nakia leave Wakanda and bring the secret ‘Black Panther’ herb to a rival tribe in the hopes of overthrowing Killmonger.

  The morality I took from the movie is that people in power will do whatever it takes to keep themselves in power. Killmonger was open about using the Wakandan traditions as a means to getting power but everyone except the royal guards acted the exact same way except being less open about it. T’Challa’s father abandoned his nephew in America because bringing him back to Wakanda would have opened a debate of the use of Wakanda’s power. The royal family’s adherence to tradition comes to a screeching halt when tradition prevents them from holding their power. Only the royal guards followed their tradition of protecting the throne no matter who sat upon it. Everyone thought they were doing what was best for themselves or their country which made a nice parallel to the current day political climate where so many are so convinced they are so right that dissent is vilified rather than ignored or discussed.

Movie Review - Justice League

'Justice League' lived up to it's considerable hype in my opinion if not at the box office.

  The weekend after seeing Marvel Studio’s ‘Thor:Ragnarok’ Kathy and I went to see the DC super team flick ‘Justice League’ on it’s opening weekend. When I was a kid comic book readers were generally either in the DC or Marvel camp. Marvel was the cooler option with their large grey areas of flawed super-heroes and anti-hero villains set largely in Manhattan as opposed to DC’s white hat/black hat view of the world with the heroes living in fictional cities like Metropolis and Gotham. I was always a DC fan for a very simple reason – economics. 10 cents and later 12 cents were very hard to come by to get a comic in my youth and when I had that kind of cash to spend on a comic buying a Marvel story was almost a surety that I would walk into the beginning of a multi part story that I would not be able to afford to read to the conclusion of, the end of a story line that I had missed out on, or worse yet a crossover with another comic title that would be off the shelves before I ever had a chance to see it. On the other hand a DC comic was sure to have a self-contained story all in one issue and that made it my top choice. If these ‘comic wars’ were ongoing today I could characterize Marvel as the ‘limousine liberals’ of comics that had relatable characters but cost a lot of money to follow.

  This all changed in 1970 when DC brought Jack Kirby (along with Stan Lee the creator of many Marvel creations like the Hulk, Thor, and the Fantastic Four to name but a few) over from Marvel to create the ‘Fourth World’ of the peaceful planet of New Genesis and the hellish planet of Apokolips in perpetual war and Earth stuck in the middle. Kirby’s Fourth World got started in the formerly insipid pages of ‘Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen’ and continued in the issues of ‘New Gods’, ‘Forever People’, and ‘Mister Miracle’. The stories had overlapping plots and characters and made DC comics as hard to follow on a limited budget as Marvel was. When I got older and had more money I get the back issues of the ‘Fourth World’ series and was able to appreciate it for the epic saga it was. The addition of Apokolips, its leader ‘Darkseid’, and insidious allies like Steppenwolf, Granny Goodness, and Desaad revolutionized the DC Universe. Now DC had a cosmic scope to rival Marvel entities like Galactus and the Watchers and suddenly Superman seemed not nearly as super as before. The New Gods had made a brief appearance in the television series ‘Smallville’ but had not made it to the big screen, which made my anticipate the Justice League movie ever since I saw Kirby’s famous ‘Boom Tube’ make its appearance in the previews.

  Justice League takes place an indeterminate amount of time after the ‘death’ of Superman in last year’s Batman vs. Superman movie. The first third of the movie concerns itself with setting up the rest of the movie as Bruce Wayne (aka Batman) finds out about an invasion of the bug-like ‘parademons’ and finds out from Diana Prince (Wonder Woman) about an ancient battle for the fate of the earth between Steppenwolf and the allied forces of earthlings, Atlanteans, and the Amazons. Steppenwolf was going to recreate earth as a fire pit of a world by uniting three ‘mother-boxes’ that were split up after the battle. The parademons herald Steppenwolf’s return and he routs both the Atlanteans and Amazons to collect two of the three mother boxes.

  This leads Batman and Wonder Woman to recruit the super beings hinted in ‘Batman vs. Superman’ – Aquaman, The Flash, and Cyborg to form a super team and battle Steppenwolf. While the first part of the movie had some Batman and Wonder Woman action the assembling of the team was full of angst as Cyborg is full of angst at the half human-half robot he has become and Flash is full of angst because his innocent father is in prison for the killing of his mother. Aquaman is the funny man of the group but Seems more angry than funny. The team realizes that they cannot stop Steppenwolf from getting the third ‘mother-box’ so Batman hatches a plan to resurrect Superman using the mother box combined with Kryptonian technology. Superman is duly resurrected but is in no mood to team up with Batman so the group has to battle Steppenwolf alone until Superman rejoins the team and turns the tide to save the earth.

  Justice League was a good but not great movie and in my opinion far better than its reviews. When the team gets together the battle scenes are great. Steppenwolf made a fine villain and even though he was no match for Superman hopefully Darkseid will show up in a future movie to give Superman a challenge. The main thing I disliked about the movie was the time spent trying to introduce the three new characters to the moviegoing audience. Ben Affleck makes a great aging Batman and comes across as one scary guy even though he has no super powers. His interactions with the new members were great but there was too much of trying to get to know Cyborg by having him interact with his father and the Flash (through a macabre gravedigging scene when retrieving Superman’s body). Flash and Cyborg would have been better served by showing off their interesting powers more and talking less. Aquaman was a comic relief vehicle and had the same problem that the character has in the Justice League comics – if there is no underwater action he’s just a strongman and if the action is underwater the rest of the League is too slow to keep up.

  Wonder Woman was epic in her action scenes especially in the opening when she takes out a group of terrorists single handedly. She had a great fight scene with Batman (that was over in one punch) but she took a backseat like most of the characters when Superman made his inevitable appearance. I liked how the ‘Man Of Steel’ and even ‘Batman vs. Superman’ portrayed Superman as an alien that was distrusted by humanity and distrustful of humanity to a degree. Justice League gave Superman near-deity status and far too much screen time as he had to get his bearings after his death experience. As much as I like the Superman character the Henry Cavill version has all the personality of a block of wood and the character is still just too super for earthly adventures.

  The box office for the movie was disappointing but it was still enough of a money maker to justify more DC team-up movies. Justice League was very much like a DC comic in that it was self-contained except for Superman’s death which was covered well enough that any first time DC movie patron could follow the plot. I appreciated that this movie was only a single year after Batman vs. Superman and the same year as the Wonder Woman movie. I wish the Marvel movies could bang out the headline movies every year. Next year is scheduled to bring a Batman movie which will hopefully bring a Nightwing or Batman Beyond character. There is no Man of Steel movie on the schedule which doesn’t surprise me since Warner Bros/DC does not seem to have any idea how to make the character relatable or less super. When Superman is on the job there doesn’t seem to be any room for the other heroes to shine. Hopefully DC will be able to bring more of the New Gods saga to the movies as this is probably Superman’s best chance to have a worthy antagonist.

Movie Review - Thor:Ragnarok

'Thor:Ragnarok' is easily the best Thor film to date.

  I went to see the latest Marvel superhero movie ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ at the local theatre with Kathy three weeks ago on the opening weekend. The Saturday night showing we went to was half full which was expected for the #1 movie of the weekend but far from the norm for most movies I go to see in Marshalltown. This is the third Thor movie in the current series following 2011’s ‘Thor’ and 2013’s ‘The Dark World’. The first two movies alternated between Thor’s cosmic realm of Asgard and Earth with the major subplots being Thor’s relationship with earthling Jane Foster and his half-brother Loki’s persistent betrayal of Asgard and his adoptive father the all-powerful Odin. The movies were good but the earth action and constant showing off of the grandeur of Asgard made them slow-moving as well.

  ‘Ragnarok’ starts with an action scene and never lets up. It begins with Thor battling the demon Surtur on a hell-like planet. After his ultimate victory, Thor brings Surtur’s head back to Asgard for safekeeping as it was foretold that Surtur was the harbinger of Ragnarok (otherwise known as the end of Asgard). Upon his return Thor immediately sees that his father Odin is being impersonated by the mischievous Loki and the pair head to earth to retrieve Odin from the Norwegian village where Loki banished him.

  The trip to earth was as light-hearted as the battle with Surtur was action packed. This was a hallmark of ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ – the movie had both a great humor and superior action and the ability to switch between the two in an unforced manner. On Earth, Thor has a funny run-in with Doctor Strange who proves to be Thor’s match in every way and sends him to find Odin and Loki where Odin dies after giving some expository on his first born daughter Hela. Hela immediately appears and she is every bit the menace she is shown to be in the comics and more as she destroys Thor’s hammer with one hand and banishes Thor and Loki to the far ends of the universe by disrupting their escape through the warp-like BiFrost as she heads to Asgard to begin her quest for domination of the ‘Nine Realms’ (Asgard, Earth, etc..).

  At this point the movie takes another about face as Thor finds himself marooned on a planet controlled by the ‘Grandmaster’ where he is put to work as a gladiator while being enslaved by an electric shock device. Thor is desperate to get back to Asgard and promised by the Grandmaster his freedom if he can defeat the gladiator champion in battle. It turns out the Grandmaster’s champion is none other than the Incredible Hulk who disappeared at the end of Avengers: Age of Ultron. The Grandmaster is crazily played by Jeff Goldblum who oscillates between being a cutthroat killer and a party animal.

  After a great fight between Hulk and Thor (which Thor seemed to be winning until being ‘shocked’ into defeat by the Grandmaster), the movie pivots to Thor’s attempts to escape from the Grandmaster’s planet and reminded me a lot of ‘Star Trek Discovery’ except with super heroes. There is the help from a resident of the planet, finding an escape ship, and the eventual escape and obligatory chase scene. The best part of this section of the movie was the screen time afforded to both Bruce Banner and the Hulk. Instead of the mono-syllabic Hulk of the Avengers, this Hulk was intelligent in a petty and child-like way and liked being the ultimate gladiator of the Grandmaster’s planet. When the Hulk finally turns into Bruce Banner Mark Ruffalo’s Banner is not the mild-mannered scientist I’ve been used to but more of an arrogant type that argues he is more valuable than the Hulk because of his doctorate degrees but also manages to keep his pulse rate down while flying the escaping space ship.

  After the funny adventures on the Grandmaster’s planet, Thor and his team of Loki, Hulk, and Valkyrie (a confidant of Grandmaster but originally a resident of Asgard) head to Asgard for the final battle against Hela in which the good guys win but at a tremendous cost.

  This was a well-made and fun movie and in my opinion the best Marvel Studios production to date. The other Thor movies seemed too full of the ‘grandeur’ of Asgard or Thor trying to find himself or figure out his relationship with Jane Foster but this movie was just action or humor. Cate Blanchette was an incredible Hela with a bone chilling disregard for anything but revenge and power. Her costume was an improvement over the comics with an expanding headdress that gave her battle horns a ‘Medusa-like’ quality. Mark Ruffalo and the Hulk were perfect complements to the ever serious Hulk and stole every scene they were in. Tom Hiddleston was his usual superb self as Loki and Chris Hemsworth mixed humor and gravitas as he has seemingly figured out how he wants to play Thor.

  With the exception of February’s awesome looking Black Panther, this is the last Marvel Studio release until next spring’s much anticipated Avengers: Infinity War starring Thanos the Destroyer. I know it will be a big box office success but I wonder why after nearly a decade of Marvel Studios films there are still only three movies a year being produced. This year saw Spiderman: Homecoming, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, and Thor: Ragnarok and that was it. Each movie did gangbusters at the box office. Marvel films are such proven moneymakers I can’t understand why they aren’t coming out at least every other month until the market proves it is oversaturated. There is such crossover between characters that these movies could be made two or three at a time for later release. I can see why a Planet of the Apes or Transformers movie can only come out every few years – the story centers around a basic theme and characters. I can’t understand why a multi-faceted franchise like the Marvel Universe can’t produce their movies like the money-making factory they have proven to be.

Next up from Marvel Studios is 'Black Panther' in three months. It looks incredible if it is even half as good as this trailer.

Move Review - The Foreigner

'The Foreigner' shows Jackie Chan in a more serious side...

  I went to see ‘The Foreigner’ starring Jackie Chan on Saturday afternoon with Kathy at the local Marshalltown theater where we were joined by five other patrons. I hadn’t seen any television ads for this film but there seemed to be ads for it before every YouTube video I watched over the last month. While I like watching Jackie Chan in action I’ve never cared for his movies which paint him as either the straight man in buddy movies like the ‘Rush Hour’ series or in ridiculous situations like ‘The Tuxedo’ or 'Legend of The Drunken Master’ that paint him as a martial arts idiot savant. The YouTube ads played up the notion of Jackie Chan as a man in pain out for vengeance with what looked like a lot of action without inane situations. Pierce Brosnan was shown to be the heavy of the piece as former IRA terrorist turned Irish politician Liam Hennessy that is the target of Chan’s quest to find his daughter’s murderers.

  The film doesn’t waste much of its two hours setting up the plot as it starts with Quan Ngoc Minh (Chan) picking up his daughter Fan from her London school and rushing across town to the store where all the ‘cool’ kids shop to get a dress for an upcoming dance. There is a big hurry because Fan is wired to the internet and knows that there are only two of the prized dresses left in her size. It’s a shame that Fan couldn’t have used her ‘dress app’ to reserve the dress since as soon as she enters the shop a bomb explodes, killing her along with dozens of others.

  A variant of the IRA claims credit for the bombing and there is political pressure on Brosnan to give up the bombers which he deflects by blaming a rogue element while bargaining for some IRA terrorist pardons in return for his cooperation. Quan is devastated and continually calls and visits the British agency investigating the bombing. Even though this agency has cameras everywhere and instant access to all sorts of information no one bothers to find out that Quan was a special forces operative who lost his wife and other two daughters escaping from Thailand. We don’t find this out until much later but we already knew that Quan had some training because after all this is Jackie Chan.

  Quan quickly traces down Hennessy as the man most likely to give him the names of his daughter’s killers and heads to Belfast to talk to him. Hennessy’s office also fails to check on Quan’s identity until after he plants a bomb in Hennessy’s office building even though he call has called and visited repeatedly . This leads to the meat of Chan’s action scenes. There is a battle in his rooming house that carries over to the neighboring rooftops and streets which lets Chan display some of his acrobatic moves but without the silliness of his other movies. After that Chan lays siege to Hennessy’s county house with a hunt in the woods reminiscent of the classic mountain scene in ‘First Blood’ from the Rambo series. Then there is a fight with Hennessy’s special forces nephew and the climactic battle in London with the murderers.

  There wasn’t the amount of action one would expect from an action movie but the action was intense in its bursts. Luckily the movie wasn’t just an action film but had the elements of a spy movie as Hennessy’s perfect little diplomatic life slowly unravels. He finds out that his wife is sleeping with his nephew and she betrayed his plans to trade the bombers for British pardons to the same IRA lieutenant that was working with Hennessy to plan the bombings in the first place. This lieutenant is responsible for subverting the targets from banks to civilians. And to add insult to injury the girl that Hennessy is cheating on his wife with is part of the terrorist cell that has been perpetrating the bombings.

  In addition to the action and spy movie elements ‘The Foreigner’ has some Big Brother\police drama themes as well. The London unit assigned to catch the terrorists does most of their work by cross referencing the all-encompassing camera shots with facial recognition software to come up with the name of one of the terrorists who lapses for a second and lets his face be seen by a camera when he drops his keys. The unit arrives at the terrorists flat en masse with swat teams, snipers, and a camera snaked through the air vent to see inside the apartment. At that point however, this supposedly elite unit falls on their face as Chan gains entry to the apartment as gas leak repairman without being seen visually or on camera. Then the swat team manages to arrive only after the climactic battle which allows them to torture one of the terrorists into giving up the location of a bomb that is meant to be planted on an airplane.

  Aside from the police turning from elite unit to keystone cops to elite unit as needed, ‘The Foreigner’ was a tight and entertaining film. Switching from action movie to spy movie to police work is hard to pull off but the film managed to seamlessly integrate all three genres. Chan gave a great performance as the tortured Quan. Chan could show pain at losing his family without descending into pointless angst but was also able to be an action star without turning into a joker or mindless killing machine. Brosnan was workmanlike as the part terrorist part con-man Hennessy. Brosnan was most effective showing the ruthless aspects of the character and seemed to struggle showing the inherent weakness of the character as he spirals downward. The best of the supporting characters was Hennessy’s wife Mary (Orla Brady) and right hand man McGrath (Dermot Crowley) who are the major actors in plotting his demise.

  This was a fine movie and gave me a whole new slant on Jackie Chan as a serious actor. The film was also a financial success despite only 7 people attending the Saturday matinee in Marshalltown with $12 million in the opening US weekend and over $100 million overall for a $35 million budget. Hopefully Chan will spend his twilight years with this sort of film instead of Rush Hour sequels.

Movie Review - Spiderman: Homecoming

Spiderman: Homecoming is a largely successful attempt to return to the fun-loving roots of the character.

  I went to see Spiderman: Homecoming last week at the local movie theatre on Saturday night along with Kathy, Ben, and 9 other movie goers. This is the second reboot of the character following the acclaimed 2002-2007 trilogy starring Tobey Maguire and the less than successful 2012-2014 reboot starring Andrew Garfield. The Maguire films were revolutionary for the time with iconic characters like The Green Goblin, Sandman, Venom, and Doctor Octopus brought to life battling with Spiderman across Manhattan and to my recollection was the first movies to make super hero battles look like they were really taking place in New York city with our heroes (and the bewildered onlookers) having to dodge bricks and edifices falling from the tall buildings surrounding them. This decade’s reboot was still financially successful but seemed too dark and out of tune with the generally light-hearted tone of the comic Spiderman I remember. In the comics it took years to lead to the death of Captain Stacy and then another couple of years for the demise of his daughter Gwen Stacy but the reboot led off with these two darkest moments of the comic series. The lack of overwhelming success led Sony (who own the license for Spiderman and related characters from Marvel) to delay their plans to create a ‘Spiderman Cinematic Universe’ and re-license the Spiderman character back to Marvel. Spiderman made his Marvel Studios debut in last years ‘Captain America: Civil War’ and was well received with teenage Peter Parker (aka Spiderman) mentored and given a spider suit by none other than Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) who proceeds to put the moves on the rebooted franchise’s younger attractive Aunt May. The Spiderman character looked great in Civil War and whetted my appetite for his return to the screen this year.

  I was pleased to see this reboot skip right past the origin and Uncle Ben getting killed. Instead we get to see the origins of the villain of the piece, Adrian Toomes (aka The Vulture), who is a general contractor that made a winning bid on cleaning up the wreckage of the Avengers HQ from the first Avengers movie when he is put out of business by the government and Tony Stark’s decision to clean up the wreckage using their own personnel for security reasons. These reasons prove to be well founded when Toomes and his exceptionally technologically proficient cleanup crew fashion devastating weaponry out of the alien technology they found on the job site. The weaponry includes Toomes’ Vulture suit, the Shocker’s powerful glove, and enough tools to allow the crew to steal more alien technology from the official cleanup crew.

  The movie centers itself around Peter Parker as a high school sophomore and his balancing act between his school life at the talented and gifted school he attends and his secret identity of Spiderman. Parker’s internship with Tony Stark allows him the freedom to stay out late fighting crime without undue scrutiny from his aunt or classmates. And it’s a good thing too because the movie spends a large amount of time in Peter Parker’s high school training for the academic decathlon challenge, or in detention, or preparing for the Homecoming dance. One good thing about the emphasis on the school is that Parker has a buddy (Ned) who learns his identity and even hacks into his Tony Stark designed spider suit to allow access to the suits advanced features which include a personal assistant named Karen. Tom Holland as Peter Parker/Spiderman seems more suited to playing a light-hearted character and needed a foil to bounce lines off. It was a welcome change from the brooding Spiderman with the weight of the world perpetually on his shoulders although those aspects of the character do make their way into the movie occasionally.

  The school stuff is pretty boring but the action more than makes up for it. Michael Keaton is a great Vulture, menacing and brilliant and tough while being a devoted family man and a perfect Spiderman anti-villain and there is a great plot twist written for him. His crew is mostly a bunch of dimwitted goons but their enhanced weaponry make them at least able to compete with Spiderman. The Vulture’s crew seem best at making high powered laser beams so there are plenty of buildings, cars, planes, and boats being sliced and diced for Spiderman to contend with. My favorite action sequence was Spidey being scared of heights while climbing the Washington Monument and his inability to break the thick window to get inside. The task is eventually accomplished but the limits of Spiderman’s powers make him more of a likable superhero that has to use his wits to get by.

  There are a few plot holes like the absence of any media speculation as to why Spiderman was in Washington in the first place without anyone trying to figure out his secret identity. Too much of the action was set at night where the action was hard to follow. I think Spiderman is better off in the daylight looking like an insect set against the skyscrapers of New York. There were guest appearances by Captain America in high school motivational videos that served as welcome comic relief with the Tony Stark/Happy Hogan/Iron Man interactions serving more as plot devices to keep the story moving along. The high school dramatics were a little much for someone like me that is almost 40 years out of high school but maybe younger people have a more favorable view. I liked the new take on Parker’s high school friends with the exception of Flash Thompson changing from a jock/bully into a spoiled rich kid with a fancy car who teases Parker instead of physically threatening him.

  I think Spiderman: Homecoming was a small cut below the Maguire series in terms of quality and storytelling but it would fit in and if this was the first ever Spiderman movie I think it would have been a huge hit. I found it superior to the Garfield pair of movies. It was light hearted, well-made, showed Spiderman/Peter Parker in an understandable light without going overboard on the teen angst, and the Vulture was an awesome villain that I hope will return someday. I don’t think it is a must see theatre movie for non-comicphiles but I think this movie was looking at a larger audience.

  Despite starring what is THE iconic character of the Marvel Comics universe, this film has grossed a fairly disappointing $250 million in its first three weeks which is in line with the last reboot despite having the guest appearance in ‘Captain America : Civil War’ as a lead in. I see a number of factors for the less than overwhelming box office numbers. This is the first Marvel character to have its THIRD reboot. Batman can be successfully rebooted since he (and the Joker) can be played by a-list actors that will attract moviegoers who want to see their favorite actor’s interpretation of the iconic characters to offset the lack of excitement at yet another retelling of the Batman origin, etc… As a teenager, Spiderman will almost always be played by an actor without that kind of following which leaves nothing to offset the inevitable character fatigue. The X-Men franchise suffered slippage at the box office with its reboot and we have yet to see Marvel Studios replace Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, etc… which they will surely have to do over the next half dozen years as the actors age beyond the point of believably.

  This reboot places Spiderman at a much younger age with the Daily Bugle, Harry Osborn, Gwen Stacy, Curt Connors, etc... still to come. I think this movie was more of an investment in the future than a cashing in of the present value of the character. By going so young I think Marvel is hoping to attract a younger audience that can grow along with the character as apposed to yet another Marvel superhero movie. This was a large part of the initial attraction of Spiderman in his debut over 50 years ago. Peter Parker was the same age as the DC sidekick heroes like Robin, Kid Flash, Speedy, and Wonder Girl but was a full-fledged hero with real world problems instead of a second banana to the real hero with a secret identity of a well-heeled ward to a rich superhero. In this sense Spiderman has truly had a homecoming and perhaps a realistic chance at reclaiming his place at the head of the Marvel Universe.

Movie Review - Wonder Woman

After the obligatory slow-moving yet brief origin, Wonder Woman was a well-made faced-paced, action-packed movie.

  I went with Kathy to see the latest DC super hero movie ‘Wonder Woman’ at the local movie theater last weekend. Wonder Woman is the one of the three DC characters (along with Superman and Batman) to make it from the Golden Age of Comics in the 1940’s to the present day relatively unchanged. The character lost her superpowers and costume briefly in DC’s ‘flower child’ period of the early 70’s but was quickly restored back to her skimpy American flag based costume and was vaulted to iconic status with Lynda Carter bringing the character to life in the television show in the late 1970’s before heading back to obscurity for the next 40 or so years before being chosen as a pillar of the new DC movie universe.

  The character was revived with Carter look-alike Gal Gadot playing the character in last year’s Batman vs. Superman movie. Gadot’s part was more action oriented but there was some byplay with Batman’s alter-ego Bruce Wayne that showed her posing as a socialite while trying to obtain information from Lex Luthor’s super computers. This was a welcome change from her previous alter-ego’s persona as the meek subservient librarian type that was very Clark Kent like without the authority that Kent garnered from being a journalist. Wonder Woman’s action skills were shown battling the super-monster Doomsday alongside Batman and Superman but the true nature of her powers weren’t evident since her part in the fight was to occupy screen time before the movie’s climactic ‘Death of Superman’ moment. The Wonder Woman involvement was a necessary introduction to this year’s solo movie and the Justice League film scheduled for later this year.

  The theater had about 50 people to see the film which was pretty impressive for a movie in its third weekend in Marshalltown. The movie won its first two weekends and is well on its way to an impressive box office number which will fall slightly short of last month’s Guardians of the Galaxy #2 but more than enough to ensure another movie in the DC rotation.

  Since the character had already been established last year I was disappointed that this film insisted on starting with an origin showing Wonder Woman as a young girl and then a teenager who wants to be a warrior but is forbidden by her mother the Queen. We spend 20 minutes learning all about how Wonder Woman was created from a piece of clay blessed by Zeus and her name is Diana and she lives in an Amazon civilization and their island is mystically hidden and all kinds of stuff that probably could have been explained in a few minutes showing Princess Diana learning to become the most fearsome Amazon Warrior of all which we end up seeing anyway.

  Finally the action gets underway when Steve Trevor (played by none other than Chris Pine aka Captain Kirk of the new Star Trek movie series) crashes a World War I German fighter plane into the hidden Amazon kingdom and is followed by a fleet of German ships. The Amazons get to show off their fighting skills which aside from hand to hand combat with swords include horseback riding with swords and spears and the ability to fire three or more arrows at once with deadly precision while doing double and triple somersaults off horses and cliffs. None of these skills prove especially effective against the few Germans that are able to get off rifle shots to wound and kill some of the Amazons.

  After finding out from Trevor using the iconic ‘lasso of truth’, the Amazons find out that the world is at war (as if there hadn’t been wars from the beginning of time) and Diana decides to accompany Trevor off the Amazon island in order to bring peace to the planet by killing Aries the God of War who she has been told is the Amazon’s sworn enemy.

  From this point on this is an excellent movie. There is the comedy of trying to dress the baddest warrior on the planet to fit into early 20th century Britain, a bit of social consciousness with Diana’s frustration at the politicians and generals who don’t take her seriously because they don’t take any women seriously, and mostly great action. After the politicians and generals decide the upcoming peace armistice is more important than Trevor’s discovery that the German super evil scientist Dr. Maru (aka Miss Poison) and General Ludendorff have concocted a lethal gas that can eat through gas masks and kill thousands instantaneously, he rounds up some flawed but adventure loving friends to go on road trip to stop General Ludendorff and Dr. Maru themselves. Along with Wonder Woman, of course.

  Our brave group of heroes makes their way to the Maginot line at the front where Wonder Woman frees a small village from German oppression by breaking through the enemy line of fortified tunnels, tanks, and machine guns with a small amount of help from her non super-powered friends. The actions scenes are great with Wonder Woman using her shield to stop mortar fire as well as destroy tanks and machine guns. Her hand-to-hand combat scenes are also excellently shot with my only quibble is the continual freezing of the action to show some dramatic action pose before resuming the action at an accelerated speed. This is fine to do once or twice but when done too often as here it makes the action hard to follow. The villagers take a picture of their liberators which is a nice tie in to Wonder Woman’s introduction to Bruce Wayne in Batman vs. Superman when she attempts to get the picture form Lex Luthor’s computer system at the same time Bruce Wayne is trying to also pilfer the computer system.

  After liberating the village, the group head to the castle where General Ludendorff and Dr. Maru are having a party to celebrate the mass production and test of their new batch of poison by destroying the very town that Wonder Woman and co. just liberated and prepares to wipe out all of London with a futuristic super plane. I don’t want to give away too much of the climactic battle but I will say that for the most part the good guys win and Aries makes a guest appearance for an epic and explosive ending.

  This was the best made superhero movie I have ever seen, The origin was dispensed with quickly and the film had a well-defined plot with none of the meandering soul-searching angst most of the other superhero movies are full of. Even though Wonder Woman leaves her Amazon community to fight we are not subjected to doubts ad recriminations – there is just a well scripted mission and action galore mixed in with a little of the ‘buddy movie’ type of character development. Gadot was a great Wonder Woman, tough without being overbearing and compassionate without being mushy. Pine as also a fine Steve Trevor. The scene where he tries to seduce the hideously disfigured Miss Poison was a classic. Elena Anaya as Miss Poison and Danny Huston as General Ludendorff were sufficiently psychopathic to make belivably menacing villains. I hope Wonder Woman remains the warrior character of the new Justice League and doesn’t settle into a background role or be some sort of den mother. Having this movie set in a period piece gives no evidence how well Wonder Woman will fit into a modern setting. The Justice League will likely showcase Batman at the expense of all the other heroes which means it might be at least three years before Wonder Woman gets into the modern age in her own movie although she may be trapped in the past like Indiana Jones for her solo adventures. This movie was a tremendous step forward for a classic character. Hopefully Warner Bros. and DC can build on it.

Up next for Wonder Woman is a role in Justice League. Here's hoping for another solo adventure soon.

Movie Review - Logan

Logan is the latest (and last?) move of the Hugh Jackman/Wolverine franchise.

  I went to see ‘Logan’, the latest installment of the ‘X-Men/Wolverine’ movie series at our local movie theatre with Kathy on the Friday night of its opening weekend. The movie was about a third full and garnered a respectable $85 million for its opening weekend, enough for the top spot on the weekend's box office list and well in line with previous entries from the franchise. The movie was billed as the finale for Hugh Jackman in his role as Wolverine although with all the time jumping and alternate realities the X-Men movie series has gone through I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Jackman reprise this role at some point. The X-Men segment of the Marvel Universe Fox purchased is thriving with a reboot of the X-Men series, the emergence of Deadpool as a feature star, and movies featuring Gambit and X-Force in the planning stages.

  Jackman has done a great job at capturing the essence of the comic book Wolverine I remember – a savage force of nature prone to going on berserker rages yet with a streak of kindness toward strangers and unwavering loyalty to his friends. The kind of guy you wouldn’t want to mess with but not the kind that messes with anyone either. Wolverine was the central character of the X-Men comic reboot of the mid-80’s and the movie X-Men franchise. ‘Logan’ take place in a distant future of 2029 where mutants are all but extinct and not even being born except for a secret hospital in Mexico where experimental mutants are grown in the womb with specific DNA to be used as government weapons. The mutants are born and being trained when they are rendered obsolete by a new method that can clone fully grown mutants from DNA. As the young mutants are being rounded up for execution by the villainous gang called the Reavers the hospital workers help them to escape and they are all headed to a spot in North Dakota that an X-Men comic book used as a safe haven called ‘Eden’.

  Wolverine gets involved when he discovers one of the mutants was created using his DNA which makes her his daughter kind of sort of. Logan has his own problems. His healing power doesn’t seem to be working very well and we discover during the movie he is being poisoned by his Adamantium skeleton and claws. Logan is making money as a limo driver and is taking care of the 90+ year old Professor Xavier who has to be heavily medicated or else he has seizures that cause debilitating pain to everyone within a half mile of him. Professor X is kept in a giant tank in the desert and the pair are aided by the mutant Caliban whose powers to track mutants come at the cost of an albino appearance that causes him to burn when exposed to sunlight.

  After some plot explanation, Wolverine, Professor X, and Laura (Wolverine’s DNA daughter who has her own adamantium claws on her hands AND feet) are discovered by the Reavers and embark on a road trip to North Dakota’s Eden even though Logan knows that the comic book tale is just a tale and there is no safe community for mutants. The chase leads through a convenience store where Laura attacks the clerk and an Oklahoma casino where Professor X has a massive seizure just as the Reavers discover the group. Eventually the group is befriended by a farming family but is found by Reavers yet again but this time the Reavers unleash their new weapon – a freshly DNA-generated Wolverine with all Logan’s powers and no conscience to speak of.

  I don’t want to give away too much of the plot so I’ll just say that after chasing through the United States to North Dakota there remains hope for mutant kind gained at the cost of some painful losses. An entire group of mutants were introduced along with the junior Laura-Wolverine with powers ranging from the fearsome (one mutant can create earthquakes) to the freaky (another mutant can control nature, dissecting one Reaver with a pine needle barrage and mummifying another in grass), to the mundane (the normal assortment of electrical barrages, flamethrower arms, and freeze breath).

The intense savagery of the movie made attempts at humor like the beginning of this trailer seem unfunny and out of place.

  This was a well-made movie with a bent towards gratuitous violence and lots of it. The plot was easily understandable and the fight scenes superb. Hugh Jackman gave a great performance as an aging, poisoned, world weary Wolverine and it was a treat to see Patrick Stewart’s Professor X again even if his part was written to be more of a Shakespearean madman. What I thought the movie was missing was the humorous qualities of past movies with Jackman’s Wolverine. There were attempts at humor with Logan chauffeuring drunk bridesmaids and his scenes with the ever-cantankerous Professor X but they were swallowed up by the dark tone of the movie. The constant violence in the film along with the overmatched and injured Wolverine and with a Professor X on the fast track to senility made the attempts at humor seem out of place and unfunny.

  As well-made as the movie was I have to rank ‘Logan’ in the bottom half of the franchise’s efforts. I like to see my super heroes be super and not shells of themselves. I was looking forward to watching Wolverine going into berserker rages in bars and battling super villains but this movie had the famed Wolverine limping around and dragging himself through fights along with a decrepit Professor X and was not the way I like to see my super heroes. There was one fight scene where a chemically enhanced Wolverine fights like the good old days and that was much more to my liking. Laura-Wolverine fight scenes had a lot of energy but she was so young that her berserker rages seemed more like temper tantrums. I get that the movie was a ‘coda’ for Wolverine but I see no reason he couldn’t have been dying of his poison or had reduced healing powers but still with his full strength and fighting abilities.

  The mutant theme of X-Men has always thrived in dystopian settings where mutants are at war with each other and human led governments but ‘Logan’ takes this theme a little too far in a future where mutants are eradicated except for those conceived in a laboratory. I don’t mind seeing my heroes in desperate situations but I do want to see hope for the future at the end of the day. Logan doesn’t provide much hope for the future of mutantkind. I felt it was a disappointing end to a great character’s story.

So long Wolverine...I was sorry to see you go out this way...

Movie Review - Rogue One (A Star Wars Story)

  I went to see 'Rogue One: A Star Wars Story' on the day after Christmas with my neighbor Don. Originally, the entire family was going to see the film but one by one everyone dropped out leaving Don and I to go alone. The movie has won its first two weekends and the early (12:50) show on Monday had a sizable crowd of over 40 moviegoers mostly made up of young adults.

  I’ve never been a huge fan of the Star Wars franchise. It always seemed light on action and heavy on artificially induced dramatics (replete with music). When it was on, the results could be breathtaking. The opening half hour of ‘Return of the Jedi’ is some of the best filmmaking I’ve ever seen. But for every great scene or great character like Jabba The Hut, Yoda, of my personal favorite Admiral Akbar there seemed to be hours of silliness with chattering droids, whining simians like Chewbacca and my least favorite characters the insufferable Ewoks who somehow manage to defeat an empire squadron by using giant logs they must have spent years chewing into battering rams and such. As great as the beginning of ‘Return of the Jedi’ was the Ewoks and the transformation of Luke Skywalker from a dynamic young Jedi to whining brat begging his daddy (Darth Vader) to save him made the second half of the movie unwatchable.

  Instead of continuing the Star Wars saga after the third movie, creator George Lucas decided to make his next trilogy the prequel to the first three movies so that movie #1 (Star Wars) was really movie #4, Movie #6 was really #3, and so on… If you get it good for you because it confuses me so much I can’t discuss these movies because I still think of the first movie as the first movie. After the second trilogy the Disney corporation bought the rights to the Star Wars franchise and is remaking the Star Wars universe in its own image with enough Easter eggs for the diehard fans but also bringing the story line forward with new characters and presumably enough marketing power to rival the comic book franchises of Marvel and DC for decades to come.

  ‘Rogue One’ takes place a little before the start of the original Star Wars movie which is either the first or the fourth in the series depending on your world view. In the beginning our protagonist is Mads Mikkelsen who normally plays the baddest of bad guys from the title character in the Hannibal television serues to Le Chiffre in the Casino Royale James Bond film and Kaecilius in the recent Doctor Strange movie. In this film Mads plays Galen Erso, the lead engineer of the famous planet-destroying ‘Death Star’ who has run away from the Empire. Since Erso is key to completing the project he is hunted down and forced back to the project but not before he manages to squirrel away his daughter in the care of rebel Saw Gerrera (played by Forest Whitaker in his normal contemplative to the point of somnambulant manner).

  We then flash forward to the present time of the move which is really long ago and far away when the daughter Jyn Erso is captured by the rebel alliance in the hopes of forging an alliance with Gerrara. Jyn agrees to try to set up a meeting and is escorted by a team led by Cassian Andor, a rebel captain and one of the few biped humanoids in the entire movie that doesn’t speak with an English accent with vaguely Shakespearean intonations. Along the way the pair pick up some allies on a planet hopping journey to three separate planets to meet up with Jyn’s father and the Empire’s recordkeeping planet in order to steal the plans for the Death Star to find the fatal flaw built into it by Jyn’s father.

  I liked this movie a lot more than I thought I would. There was all kinds of action on each of the planets with hand to hand combat, spaceship battles, those camel type machines, and even a guest appearance by Darth Vader himself. Vader was awesomely menacing as he cut down rebels with his light saber and keeps his allies in line by causing them to be unable to breathe with the slightest gesture and warning them not to ‘choke on their ambitions’. What I didn’t miss from the other Star Wars movies I’ve seen was inane filler masking itself as political intrigue and the idiotic droids that are meant to provide comic relief. One of the main characters is a droid (K-2SO) which had predictably idiotic dialog but at least it was a battle droid that was a fighter. There was one piece of idiocy that I really enjoyed and that was the fish headed Admiral Raddus who leads the rebel space ship fleet and just like his predecessor Admiral Ackbar has a knack for interrupting the battles with a close up of his giant fish head to state some obvious point and then it’s back to the action. The Admiral has one sterling moment when he orders his ‘Hammerhead Corvette’ around to slam two Starship Destroyers into each other in a serious breach of the laws of psychics.

  The movie is a bit darker than most of the other Star Wars movies I’ve seen. The ‘Death Star’ gets to show its stuff twice and I wouldn’t advise getting too emotionally attached to many of the characters that are featured in the movie. I wonder if someday this will become thought of as a seminal movie in the use of CGI instead of human actors. There are many characters from the 1977 ‘Star Wars’ movie that appear in this film as incredibly lifelike animated characters. I wonder how long it will take Disney to make it cost effective to have the leading roles in future films of the Star Wars franchise played by CGI characters that are indistinguishable from live actors. It seems to only be a matter of time when our future superstars stop getting replaced due to contract demands or old age because they don’t exist outside of a computer chip. I didn't think that would be possible a couple of years ago but that was before I saw how easily the local Wal-Mart replaced a dozen cashiers with eight scanners for self-checkout.

Movie Review - Suicide Squad

  Suicide Squad is the latest DC comics inspired movie, featuring supervillains (except for one) previously unseen on the screen as the protagonists instead of superheroes. The film’s opening weekend occurred during my trip to Duluth so I went this past weekend to the local Marshalltown theatre with Kathy and our neighbor Don. The movie was critically panned and even though it led the box office on opening weekend with 133 million dollars it was criticized on its second weekend for only drawing 48 million which is more than a 60% drop-off. With the number of people having home theaters that can rival almost any movie theatre I can’t imagine many people paying $20+ dollars to see a movie a second time when it can be rented for $2 and seen in HD and surround sound at home.

  The Suicide Squad is a group of super-villains on death row that are injected with remote controlled explosives and tasked with eliminating two magical villains bent on destroying the planet. The Squad is controlled by government power broker Amanda Waller who ruthlessly kills the first member that threatens to rebel against her. The Squad is comprised of Deadshot, Harlequin, Diablo, Killer Croc, and Captain Boomerang. We are introduced to the Squad by Waller explaining how each was captured (including some guest appearances by Ben Affleck as the Batman) so the origins allow for some action scenes along with the seemingly obligatory slow moving scenes to introduce each character whiling away their life sentences in a max security prison.

  As soon as I saw the movie had the Joker I was looking forward to it more than even Batman vs. Superman. Batman and the Joker are the iconic characters of the DC universe. While the Joker is a proven psychopath each successive reinvention of Batman is darker and brings the Dark Knight closer and closer to using the Jokers methods of fear and intimidation to meet his goals. Batman has been in eight DC movies but the Joker has previously been in only two movies. Jerod Leto’s version of The Joker is more layered than his predecessors because his motivations aren’t just psychopathic mayhem – he is trying to rescue his girlfriend Harley Quinn (Harlequin) from prison and the predicament she has been placed in by being a member of the Squad. This allows The Joker to float in and out of the movie to advance the plot as needed.

  This Joker had cartoonish aspects like a machine gun firing henchman in a panda suit and Joker outfits ranging from a tux to a boy band leather jacket to go along with his trademark green hair. But the Joker is still a psychopath – just a younger hipper one with gold teeth, a body full of Jokerish tattoos, and the means to fund his criminal empire. The scenes where he seduces his insane asylum psychologist Dr. Harley Quinn into embracing his madness and becoming Harlequin was classic Joker and not something the previous Joker incarnations were ever allowed to attempt. The most terrifying Joker stunt was when a scientist refuses his commands only to shown a tablet facetiming his wife held at knifepoint begging her husband to ‘do whatever he says’. I always felt that Jack Nicholson’s Joker was JACK NICHOLSON playing THE JOKER while Heath Ledger’s Joker never had to explain his motivations except through Alfred’s ‘Some men just want to watch the world burn’ comment. Leto’s version is more similar to Ledger’s but with a punk rock sort of twist and a human side that I really liked especially in the small doses he appeared in through the movie.

  There were three main Suicide Squad characters: Harlequin (Margo Robbie), sharpshooter Deadshot (Will Smith), and the military leader of the group Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) . The rest of the Squad had minor roles designed to provide pathos (Diablo as a super powerful flame throwing pacifist, Katana as the mourning widow and Flag’s super heroine accomplice to keep the squad in line), comic relief (Captain Boomerang does little except drinks beer and say silly things in an Australian accent), special effects wizardry (Killer Croc who never seemed very terrifying except when eating prison guards) or a plot device to demonstrate the potency of the bombs injected into each of the Squad to ensure their compliance (Slipknot’s all too brief appearance).

  The Squad’s mission is to hunt down rogue member Enchantress, a millennia old sorceress and Suicide Squad member who happens to inhabit the body of Flag’s girlfriend. Enchantress escapes from the Squad and revives her equally ancient brother Incubus. The pair forces the evacuation of Midway City, turns U.S. soldiers into monstrous minions, and commences to create a machine that will destroy mankind.

  The Squad’s battles to get through the minions, disable the doomsday device, and stop the Enchantress/ Incubus duo was well choreographed, contained great special effects, and had a lot of action. The problem I had was that the magical villains of the piece were far too powerful for these Suicide Squad members to even hope to contain much less defeat. Incubus shoots tendrils out of his arms that behead people and destroy tanks yet Harlequin is able to fight him with a baseball bat and merely gets kicked around instead of disintegrated. Except for Diablo’s flame powers and Killer Croc’s super strength there are no super powers here to speak of since Deadshot and Captain Boomerang are weapon dependent. I guess that is the point of the ‘suicide’ in Suicide Squad but it made no sense to me that this group would even have a chance against super powered magical forces.

  I liked the interactions between the squad members but when the group obtains their freedom after Waller is seemingly killed I didn’t like their sudden turn to becoming sort of noble good guys after a ‘pep talk’ from Flag who had done nothing but threaten the crew with an explosive death for most of the movie. It would have made more sense to have the crew bond and then have one of their group butchered by the Enchantress as their motivation for risking their lives to stop her.

  Articles about the movie claim that is was originally written in a dark tone but was extensively remade to be more clownish just months before its release and it certainly has the feel of a movie that couldn’t decide whether to go dark or be funny. I would have liked to seen the antagonists of the movie be more on the pedestrian side of villainy as that would have played more to the strengths of the Suicide Squad’s lack of a-list super powers. This is an entertaining film but not the epic saga that will set the standard for the DC movie universe. If the Joker wasn’t in this film I would have considered it a jumbled mess of a film and wasted money but those that swear by the Ledger or Nicholson Joker as THE definitive portrayal of the character will likely be very disappointed.

  Despite the movie’s shortcomings, DC has set the table for an X-Men type (Deadpool and Wolverine) spin-off for Deadshot since Will Smith is still sort of a top-tier movie star and Harlequin whose brand of insanity could be great in a lighter movie. The big question to me is will The Joker get his own movie or will he be the Marvel version of Loki that pops in and out of other movies. I liked the Leto version of the Joker as a punk rock crime boss with brains and unlimited resources with a psychopathic side that can called upon as necessary. Hopefully DC will be able to build a franchise around the Clown Prince and not mothball the character for another decade until yet another Batman reboot.

Movie Review - Star Trek Beyond

Star Trek Beyond took a page out of the James Bond playbook by featuring a song by a top recording artist.

  ‘Beyond’ is the third installment of the current Star Trek movie franchise and made its appearance in the local movie theatres last week. I went with Kathy and our neighbor Don to the local Fridley Theatre in Marshalltown Iowa on Saturday night to see it. The movie ‘only’ brought in around 60 million dollars on its opening weekend which made it the number one box office movie of the weekend but the lowest box office draw of the three Star Trek movies since the 2009 reboot.

  The theatre was sparsely filled on Saturday night which may be because the movie was on three screens along with three showings of the latest ‘Ice Age’ animated movie and two theaters of ‘Ghostbusters’. There was only room for a handful of other movies with 8 of the 13 screens being taken up by just three films.

  The movie starts out in a light hearted vein with Captain James T. Kirk trying to broker a peace deal with ferocious looking lion type aliens who are revealed to be the size of Chihuahuas. The Enterprise is in the third year of its five year mission to explore the galaxy and Kirk is questioning his commitment to explore space which seems to entail less adventure and more negotiation than he would like. As the Enterprise docks at the Yorktown starbase, Spock finds out about the passing of the Spock from the alternate reality that started the reboot (a nice homage to original Spock actor Leonard Nimoy who passed away in 2015) and decides to leave the Federation to help rebuild the Vulcan civilization. Before these ideas can be acted upon the Enterprise is drawn to the far-away Nebula on a rescue mission.

  This is a big budget movie (185 million) and the special effects showed no signs of skimping. The Yorktown starbase looked like something out of Inception or an M.C. Escher drawing with skyscrapers towering at seemingly impossible angles explained by the artificial gravitational fields that allows water fountains to flow normally while at a 90 degree angle to its adjoining building complex. The Nebula was a predictable jumble of asteroids to be avoided or crashed into but soon an epic space battle takes place when a swarm of ships of Krall (the bad guy of the movie) overwhelm the Enterprise and force a crash landing on Krall’s planet. The space battle was a little too frenetic for my tastes but was generally easy to follow.

  From there the crew is split up with most of them captured as prisoners waiting to have their life force sucked out from them to replenish the apparently ageless Krall’s energies. Spock and McCoy are stranded together and exchange some age old Spock-McCoy banter. The other group of non-prisoners comprise Kirk, Scotty, Chekov, and Jaylah the typical gorgeous exotic alien female who atypically fails to fall hopelessly in love with Captain Kirk. The group improbably finds an early generation Federation Starship on this planet on the edge of the galaxy, gets it in working order, rescues the prisoners, gets off the planet, and stops Krall from using his newly assembled doomsday device on the Yorktown starbase.

  That one paragraph synopsis probably makes the movie sound contrived but all the seemingly disjointed plot elements come together well before the end of the movie and in a way that makes sense in a Star Trek type of vein. The starship sequences were great and as I said earlier the wild architecture of the starbase was incredible. The script’s mix of action, humor, character interaction, and an understandable plot would not have been out of place in the original Star Trek television show which was so well written the show became an iconic franchise despite the special effects that were pretty poor even for the 1960’s.

  I found this to be a great movie because the Star Trek characters were portrayed exactly how I like to see them even though the faces were different. The interactions between McCoy and Spock were especially good with the good doctor playing the perfect straight man to bring out Spock’s nerdy dry wit. The changes in the characters from 50 years past are all for the better. Chris Pine isn’t as sure a starship captain as William Shatner or as gifted a fighter but his penchant for risk-taking and inventiveness surpasses the original. Karl Urban’s Dr. McCoy is more of an action type than the original and even takes a turn piloting a ship in this film. And as in the original series Mr. Spock steals the show and the movie is written for him to steal most of the scenes he appears in. Zachary Quinto correctly doesn’t try to imitate the classic Nimoy Spock but captures his unintentional humor and occasionally intentional jokes at McCoy’s expense. Chekov, Uhura, Sulu, and Scotty had about the same roles as they did in the television series which isn’t much except for Scotty needing a bit more screen time to keep the ships running.

  The only part of the movie I didn’t like was the juxtaposition between the angst of Kirk and Spock and Krall’s deep seated need to use his doomsday weapon against the Federation. While Krall’s motivations become clear as the movie progresses I didn’t understand how they convince Kirk and Spock to forego their well-considered plans to leave the Enterprise. That is a small quibble for an excellent film that ranks with ‘Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home’ and ‘Star Trek: First Contact’ as the best Star Trek movies made. Star Trek is a viable and popular brand. The movies are hits and a new television show (Star Trek: Discovery) is planned by CBS to lure subscribers to their non-broadcast ‘All Access’ platform. With all this success I can’t understand why a profitable movie series like Star Trek needs three and four years between movies. By the time the fourth (already approved) movie rolls around the characters will start getting too old and the series will need to be rebooted yet again. The cast has already lost one member with Chekov actor Anton Yelchin dying in a car accident last month. This is a shame because this version of Star Trek has a great mix of character interaction and action. The chemistry between Spock, Kirk, and McCoy is excellent and may be hard to reproduce with another cast. I wish Paramount and the movie makers would get cracking and give me a new Star Trek movie every year!

Movie Review - Batman v Superman - Dawn of Justice

The long awaited Batman vs. Superman movie. These two should be on film more than once every 3 or 4 years.

  The DC Comics superhero movie ‘Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’ came out last weekend. This is the first Batman sighting since 2012’s ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ ended the Christian Nolan Batman trilogy and Superman’s first appearance since the 2013 ‘Man of Steel’ rebooted the Superman character on the big screen. The movie has garnered mostly unfavorable reviews which didn’t surprise me since I have been hearing criticism since the announcement that Ben Affleck was to play Batman. I paid no attention to the reviews but I did pay three hours and $24 to take Kathy and Matt to see it on Saturday Night.

  We went to the same Marshalltown Iowa Fridley Theatre that wouldn’t give me a refill of my $4.50 soda because the $11 popcorn/soda combo I bought didn’t include the slightly bigger $5 soda cup. This was my first visit to the Fridley Theatre since that infamous day last November and I decided to keep my 11 dollars in my pocket and let the Fridley Theatre have their 20 cents of soda syrup and mountain of popcorn that they slather with that orange goopy artery clogging stuff that they pour on it if you ask for butter. The movie theater was about a quarter full if you count the occasionally screaming baby in the row behind us. I was surprised at the smallish crowd but since the movie has made $200 million worldwide in it’s first two nights I assume most people went early.

  This movie takes place two years after the near destruction of Metropolis in the ‘Man of Steel’ movie with the plot driven by the reactions of billionaire Bruce Wayne (also known as the Batman) and billionaire scientist Lex Luthor to the presence of a super powered alien on their planet. Both billionaires come to the conclusion that Superman must be destroyed. Luthor discovers a Kryptonite meteor and sets about smuggling it into the country when the government refuses to give him carte blanch to weaponize it while Batman sets about trying to steal the Kryptonite from Luthor. Meanwhile Superman is just doing his thing – enjoying his romance with Lois Lane, reporting for the Daily Planet as Clark Kent, and saving people whenever he can.

  Ben Affleck plays an older Bruce Wayne who recollects being in Metropolis while Superman’s battle with General Zod destroys much of midtown Metropolis including Wayne’s skyscraper. Affleck’s Wayne is more over the edge violent than recent versions. He brands criminals with a bat symbol and has nightmares of his parent’s deaths, shooting criminals, and his parents bursting from their tombs as zombies as he goes to visit them. I suppose this unhinging is necessary to explain Wayne’s decision to steal Kryptonite from Luthor and use it to murder Superman since Batman is not normally a murderer.

  Apart from the whole murdering Superman thing, I liked Affleck’s performance as both Wayne and Batman. Affleck’s Bruce Wayne persona was mostly all business with none of Bale’s playboy act in the last Batman iteration. The action scenes as Batman were less acrobatic than Bale’s version but far more powerful (possibly due to an augmented suit). I especially liked how Affleck’s Batman seemed massive but didn’t use Bale’s Vader-esque voice. Batman is the scariest, most remorseless superhero on the planet and Affleck brought that aspect to the forefront.

  Henry Cavill’s Clark Kent/Superman has more of a social conscience than ‘Man of Steel’ but is still the same wooden character except for one playful moment in the beginning of the film where Kent jumps into Lois Lane’s bathtub fully clothed which let the audience know that they were an item and that Lane was aware of Superman’s identity. I like the alien in a strange land take but there was no advancement of this character. Superman just goes about his business saving lives and except for the one early bathtub scene with Lane and a confrontation with Batman he pretty much sticks to his strong silent type routine. I don’t see this Superman ever being the franchise cornerstone until his brooding angst is defined to the point where he becomes the unwelcoming protector of an untrusting planet by virtues of his ‘super-ness’.

  The villain of the piece is Lex Luthor played by Jesse Eisenberg. In the comics I remember Lex Luthor as a scientific genius and ruthless businessman who truly believes the world would be better off if he ran it. Eisenberg’s Luthor is a spoiled rich kid who happens to be a super genius. This film had Luthor trying to act like The Joker (Batman’s arch-enemy) having him make silly jokes and uttering nonsensical off hand comments. I get that The Joker is probably the biggest movie property DC Comics has (watch and see - this year’s Suicide Squad movie be the year’s biggest box office hit) but there is no reason to try to make an iconic villain like Lex Luthor a clownish character. A good model for Luthor would be Vince D’Onofrio’s Kingpin in Netflix’s Daredevil season 1 – a larger than life character that carries himself with grandeur and a stone cold killer. Luthor was at his best when he blows up the US Capitol building to create distrust of Superman and creates the fearsome Doomsday with Kryptonian technology and the corpse of General Zod. In those scenes he seems like a cold blooded genius but when he coerces Superman into rescuing his kidnapped mother by killing Batman he was back to being a juvenile prankster instead of an evil billionaire that gets what he want any way possible.

  This movie was meant to be the launching point for DC’s Justice League group of super heroes to compete with Marvel’s Avengers and there was the briefest of nods to various other DC properties. Aquaman and the Flash make brief appearances on some computer data Wayne hacks from Lex Luthor’s headquarters. The only hero to make a live appearance is a heroine – Wonder Woman (who isn’t called that) who has a random meeting with Bruce Wayne when he is hacking Luthor’s data. Wonder Woman has a big role in the climactic fight scene with Doomsday but otherwise was a plot device that did nothing for the movie except to make it longer. If DC really wants to compete with Marvel on the movie front they will have to get their heroes out in the theaters a lot more often then every three or four years. While it took DC 3 years to get Superman on film for the second time, Marvel has gotten their heroes in multiple films thanks to crossing over characters in multiple movies. By the time DC actually gets around to havin Flash, Aquaman, and Wonder Woman in their next movie their appearance in this file will have been forgotten about.

  The fight between Batman and Superman was epic as well as their eventual teaming up with Wonder Woman to fight Doomsday. I left the movie theatre feeling entertained but not like I saw an epic film like the ‘The Dark Knight’. I think the film would have been better served by telling the story from either Batman or Superman’s point of view and cutting out the time spent integrating Wonder Woman into the plot and one less Bruce Wayne nightmare about the death of his parents to bring it to two hours. This movie would have been a great Batman film or a mediocre Superman film. Instead it tried to be both a Batman and a Superman movie and ended up being unfocused and far too long. Batman fans will really like his movie, Superman fans will be lukewarm towards it, action movie fans will think it was way too long, and non comic book fans will wonder of they can get a refund. I’m a Batman fan and really liked this movie except that it was too long and there wasn’t enough Batman since there can never be enough Batman for my taste.