MIB3 (A)

Before I begin, I have to address the stupid name.  Why in a series where the first entry was Men in Black and the second entry was Men in Black II is the third MIB³.  In the English language, abbreviations are supposed to exclude anything that isn’t a verb, adverb, noun, or adjective.  The Center for Disease Control isn’t the CFDC, it’s just the CDC.  The Food and Drug Administration isn’t the FADA, it’s just the FDA.  Therefore, the Men in Black Agency should be the MB Agency, not the MIB agency.  

Furthermore, scientific notation is used when saying something is multiplied by itself.  For example, 3² is 3x3 and 3³ is 3x3x3.  The third entry in a series should be noted with a simple number (in the case of the Men in Black series, this should be a roman numeral since Men in Black II wasn’t Men in Black 2).  A subscripted three says that the third Men in Black movie is actually a Men in Black movie times a Men in Black movie times a Men in Black movie.  

If the effort was to distinguish itself, it doesn’t work, since the stupid subscript thing has been numerous times (Alien³).

Anyway, here is the review.

Josh Brolin & Will Smith

Nine times out of ten, time travel story arcs end up stupid with glaring continuity errors. The “fish out of water” jokes of being in a new era wear out there welcome very swiftly and the bored audience has nothing to do except count the glaring errors in the plot.

Tommy Lee Jones & Smith

This means it is a great surprise to see that time travel brings more to the Men in Black series, making MIB the best in an already great franchise. The story is the most touching and most witty, and the new cast members are just as good at acting as the old ones.

When we last saw Agents J and K, they were once again partners protecting the world from alien threats, with all of K’s memories restored. In MIB, the duo are still working together, but their relationship has grown strained due to the coldness and lack of empathy of K. Meanwhile, an alien named Boris the Animal escapes from his lunar prison and vows revenge on K, who shot off his arm and imprisoned him decades ago.

Boris steals a time travel device and uses it to go back in time and kill K. The current scientific theories suggest that this would in fact not matter to the J we know since he would have killed an alternate universe K, but apparently this reality-warping time travel device doesn’t work that way. K is now gone and J is the only one who remembers the old universe. J must not travel back in time--to 1969--and prevent Boris from killing K.

Jemaine Clement as Boris

This sounds confusing; I know. But the movie ends up overcoming the logical gaps with a surprisingly witty story that takes its science (slightly) more seriously than the previous two entries in the series. Written by Etan Cohen--on a hot streak after penning the hilariously funny blockbusters Tropic Thunder and Madagascar 2--the picture gets consistent laughs, but remembers to keep the touching bittersweet elements of the first two. In fact, MIB is the darkest in the series, but it isn’t so dark as to forget to be humorous.

Barry Sonnenfeld is still directing the series, and the action sequences are top-notch. The CGI elements are better than before as well. It is worth noting, though, that the majority of the effects are still created by legendary make-up designer Rick Baker.

Rick Baker Cameo (he has the exposed brain)

Will Smith(Agent J) andTommy Lee Jones (Agent K) are just as charming as team as they have always been, but MIBbrings in a bunch of new actors who definitely add to the charm. Emma Thompson doesn’t have much to do as Agent O (the new head of the Men in Black), butJon Heder is hilarious in a cameo as Andy Worhol. Michael Stuhlbargbrings great depth to a melancholy alien that sees every possible future at once but is unable to determine which one will occur.Jemaine Clement takes the already cool character of Boris and makes him what I hope to see become one of the great villains. As the young, vain Boris of ’69, Clement shows an intimidating and ruthless biker who dominates every scene he is in. As the older, one-armed 2012 Boris, Clement (and Cohen’s script) give us a tragic figure who is filled with regret and goes back to redo his life, but fails to remember the past, and is thus doomed to repeat it.

The best performance--one deserving of a Best Supporting Actor nomination--is from Josh Brolin. As the younger Agent K, Brolin’s impersonation is dead-on, but isn’t just a rip-off. This K is happier, calmer, and friendlier without the years of regret Tommy Lee Jones’s version had. Seeing how even if K survives he will be forever haunted by what happens to him in the next few days haunts every scene, but Brolin has all of Jones’s charm and thus keeps us laughing all the same.

Both previousMen in Blackfilms had the same theme of marveling at a universe we can’t begin to understand. The more in-depth conclusion to the trilogy (if it stays a trilogy) makes that idea more poignant than ever.

MIB is summer entertainment at its best--clever, funny, action-packed, and ultimately uplifting.

P.S. Check out Screened's Fan Art section for some amazing artwork (not mine).

Snow White & the Huntsman (B-)

Should have seen that one coming!

Despite a runtime of over two hours, Snow White has little idea of what it wants to say. With good acting and great visuals, it almost fools one into thinking this is an exciting fantasy adventure, but there is an omnipresent feeling you are watching a storyboard, not a story.

When a movie of this scale and intensity fails to have much of a plot, the reason tends to fall into one of two categories: The picture was rushed into production before the script was polished up, or the original script was too long and some idiot cut it down into its current mess. There are three writers on Snow White, which doesn’t prove it one way or another, though it is always a little risky to have so many cooks in the kitchen. Especially when the director wasn’t involved in the script. Not to say it never works; it just doesn’t here.

The first major flaw to come up is the absurd level of self-consciousnessSnow Whitehas. In absolute terror of being seen as a childish fairy tale, the picture is loaded with eye-stabbing, nudity, worm-infested corpses, onscreen spousal murder, rape, incest, hallucinogenic drugs, occult human sacrifices, and other nasty stuff you didn’t see in the Disney version. The problem is, it isn’t particularly well-incorporated into the screenplay. In fact, it comes off as absurd in a Tropic Thunder-style parody sort of way. It doesn’t help that unlike last summer’s similar Conan the Barbarian, which was guilty of the same mistakes, this movie takes everything deadly seriously.

Snow White is a rough retelling of the story--a beautiful princess named Snow White (Kristen Stewart) flees her evil step-mother queen(Charlize Theron) and runs into a forest. The queen sends a huntsman(Chris Hemsworth aka Thor) to find her, but instead he helps her. There is also a prince (Sam Claflin) and dwarves, but those seem tacked on in this version of the tale.

Before her coronation

I was humored to see Charlize Theron playing the same character she did in Young Adult. No, seriously--the exact same character. She plays a sensually selfish lady nearing middle-aged obsessed with finding youth. The scenes where she begins to age, but then undoes it with middle age are a near shot-for-shot redo of the Young Adult scenes featuring the application and removal of make-up.

Hemsworth is, as usual, charming, but by making him play a hopelessly depressed widower there is little he can do. In fact, there is little anybody can do. The characters spend there whole time running from and fighting with each other; there are few moments reserved for actual interaction.

The plot makes little sense with several astounding coincidences and uses of deus ex machina. There is a subplot involving a feud between the Huntsman and the queens pervert brother, Finn (who for an unexplained reason is played by Sam Spruell dressed up to look albino); there is also a love triangle set-up for a sequel between the prince and the huntsman, though that goes nowhere. Towards the end, the movie abandons the whole story-line of the fairy tale, but not for a particularly good reason. Substituting the Huntsman as the love interest for Snow instead of the Prince should have a reason--instead the Huntsman merely plays the same role as the Prince, albeit he doesn’t have a kingdom.

Frustratingly, the dwarves are used solely for comic relief and as a way to provide extra info to the audience; this is necessary since about ten minutes into the film the narrator who previously wouldn’t shut up suddenly dies and we never hear him again.

Legendary costume designer Colleen Atwood has designed some coolish costumes, though they each seem to be duplicates of ones from other movies (mostly her own). Rupert Sanders (in his directorial debut) and the visual effects team do a great job of creating fantastic settings and award-winning cinematographer doesn’t go overboard with artificially darkening the images (most of the time). The action scenes are entertaining, though they would be more-so if there was a story to go with it.

There were lots of doubts surrounding Kristen Stewart’s ability to act. I think it is safe to say that whatever problems there were in her performances in Twilight 1 and 2, she has either outgrown or were solely due to that character. She does a better job than most actresses her age in Snow White & the Huntsman.

The problem with Snow White is mainly due to a lack of a story. As a mindless action flick, this movie would work just fine, if you can handle the fact that it treats itself so seriously. Still, some superior recent fantasy epics like Eragon seem to have gone under the radar. It might be more fun to see one of them instead.

An Argument on Why BATTLESHIP is Actually Awesome!!!!!

Generally, my reviews are spoiler-free affairs. However, the unfortunate reaction to Battleship compels me to resort to a spoileriffic analysis of all the reasons this movie is secretly awesome.

There is one big flaw with this movie that must be gotten out of the way first: The aliens have terrible, terrible strategic planning. Yes, it is true that colonization generally turns out poorly for the less technologically advanced race (a la Columbus & the Indians). However, the aliens’ basic approach towards colonization is terrible. Sending out a small fleet of explorers to see whether Earth is worth colonizing? Good idea. Having that small fleet needlessly pick a fight with Earthlings before it radios back for help? Bad idea. This is the equivalent of Columbus landing the Santa Maria, finding the first tribe of natives, shooting a bunch of the weaker members of the tribe, and then camping out in America a few days before returning to Spain to get reinforcements. The aliens would be much smarter to wow the humans with their spectacular entry, give them a few gadgets, wait for reinforcements, start colonizing, wait until humanity gets annoyed at their destructiveness, arm a few terrorist groups with futuristic weapons so as to keep the world busy fighting itself for a while, wait until humanity finally tries to attack the now developed alien fortresses, and then start sending out the helicopter killing droids (or, more effectively, send one of the ships around Earth at light-speed for a bit). Like the Europeans did (sort of).

Then again, a few implausibilities can be excused. Perhaps the evolution of the aliens (while presumably started by the same genes as humans, due to their striking resemblance to us) has built brains that think differently from us, lacking the ability to foresee events more than twelve hours into the future, or to design spaceships that can use their fantastic speeds in combat. Or maybe the aliens are in fact a quite primitive species that merely bought/stole the weapons and spaceships from another alien race (one that knew how to use them). Anyway, if people can accept that the toys in Toy Story don’t talk around humans except for Sid or that Joker can really escape from the police station by triggering a cell phone bomb in his henchman’s stomach or pretty much anything that happens in a Transformers movie, then people can handle these somewhat dim-witted antagonists.

Let’s get started on the secret reasons Battleship is awesome.

Fan-made poster

1. There is absolutely no reason anyone should have a problem with a movie based on a board game. Before it even released a single production still, Battleship was under attack due to the fact it is based on a board game. It seemed the epitome of Hollywood unoriginality. The arguments (generally given by the same people) boiled down to two stupid excuses that contradict each other. The first is that the board game Battleship is not suitable grounds for a movie. This is dumb because it should be assumed that the screenwriters would add more to the story. Isn’t it okay for artistic inspiration to come from anything? And what is the problem with letting Hasbro spend millions marketing your movie just for you to name it after one of their games?

The other complaint was that the movie was nothing like the game. “Aliens? Robots? Rhianna? That isso unfaithful!” This would be a legitimate complaint if it was a book adaptation, short story adaptation, TV show adaptation, video game adaptation, song adaptation, fable adaptation, or any other kind of adaptation of something with a semblance of a plot. That is because the original creators of those stories wanted to actually tell something and the fans wanted to see it brought to the screen. It is hurtful to see no one take any care to please the people who made something popular in the first place. This is not a valid argument for a board game (especially one as simplistic as Battleship) since there is no story to mess up and no one is seriously hurt that the movie isn’t a two hour reconstruction of little red dots and white dots hitting little plastic ships while people sit thoughtfully guessing what square might have a little plastic ship.

It really doesn’t matter that it is based on a board game.

2. The protagonists are genuinely interesting. Obviously, a movie like this isn’t going to have much depth. Duh. But this movie does a better job than, say, Transformers of making characters we actually care about. For example, the opening scene features the protagonist, Alex (Taylor “Box Office Poison” Kitsch), being a level one imbecile. He drunkenly breaks into a convenience store, nearly kills himself trying to crawl out a skylight, causes a three car pile-up by running across a highway, and gets himself tased all to give a girl he knows nothing about a chicken burrito. This is a perfect way to negate the fact that for the next two hours he will be a composed, highly skilled, genius assassin who is not going to be familiar to your average audience member (like myself). When we see Alex coming up with a stunning plan to misdirect the enemy, we can still care whether or not he succeeds because we remember seeing him as an ordinary klutz doing stupid things. (It is quite possible this is only a selling point for me).

3. There is a real exposition. How long into Battle: Los Angeles did the aliens show up? The time it took you to think of the answer was longer than the answer itself. This is a key problem to many action films: we barely know the characters or their relationships before the fighting starts, and thus we have no investment in what happens (in the case of Transformers 3, that is a good thing, since we already hate Shia and the rest of the protagonists so much knowing any more about them will cause us to root for the Decepticons). In Battleship, there are a good twenty-five minutes before the aliens show up, and in that time we see several interesting characters and real conflicts that go beyond Earth bazooka vs Planet-G bazooka. We see Alex and Yugi bicker incessantly, Alex constantly rely on his big brother, Liam Neeson (who cares what his character is called?) humorously express exactly why he loathes Alex, and Captain Browley struggle to adjust to life without legs. Then we see the aliens.

Not a BATTLESHIP Alien

4. The aliens actually look cool. Modern movie aliens tend to all be arachnid/crustacean hybrids. The prawns in District 9, the slimy crab things in Battle: LA, the Cloverfield monster, the light-up jellyfish inSkyline, the miniature Cloverfield monster in Super 8, the spider worms in War of the Worlds… They all look like something that would be really satisfying to step on. I don’t know about you, but I really want to see a vertebrate attack Earth for a change. All these creepy-crawly aliens look the same. Even the alien spaceships in Avengers look like giant lobsters.

The Battleship aliens look like people mixed with lizards, two of which are animals people actually enjoy looking at. Furthermore, they wear space-suits, so they don’t get themselves killed by touching water or breathing oxygen (you know what movies I’m talking about). Yes, their suits look like Halo clothes minus repulsor blasters: But aren’t Halo suits really awesome?

5. The references to the game Battleship. The scenes where the characters must play a real-life version of the game and even let out phrases like “it’s a hit!” or “no, I missed!” are funny, but best of all they fit into the plot and have a lot of build-up. They are funny in-jokes that were obviously part of the screenplay, not tacked on in last minute rewrites in the vein of “I’m the Juggernaut, b****!” (see X-Men 3 to understand what that is about).

6. The government isn’t behind the attack. This shouldn’t be that impressive, but in most of these movies the US government is directly planning the chaos, even when it makes absolutely no sense. The closest in Battleship is that NASA sent out an interstellar telegram saying “hello” that happened to land on a planet full of sociopaths.

It isn’t just that. Unlike most other movies (yes, Transformers must be brought up again) there is nothing in Battleship that is very offensive or destructive. No positive alcohol abuse moments; no gratuitous sex scenes; no buck-toothed angry black men….

7. Battleship is patriotic. On a related note to the previous point, Battleship is both an awesome tribute to the servicemen and a satisfying tales of all different types of Americans united together for the common good.

8. All the plot threads are resolved and in a satisfying manner. There are a lot of different story arcs going on in Battleship: Alex learning humility and reason; Alex and Yugi learning to respect each other; Alex manning up and not constantly disappointing his fiancé; Captain Bowley finding meaning to a life without legs; Hal growing a pair and fighting for the good of Earth… They are all resolved, but not one-by-one, but all at once. Earth is saved by the simultaneous efforts of the battleship, Bowley and his crew, and Liam Neeson’s fighter jets. And it isn’t forced—we know that Hal is going to man up, but the film waits until we have forgotten about him before he shows up to save Bowley, and he uses the suitcase he was bragging about earlier.

These are by no means the only benefits of Battleship. It is fun to see the older heroes teaching the younger ones; the jokes are actually witty; the acting is above average… But I hope what I have said hear is enough for you to rethink what you’ve heard and maybe realize Battleship is awesome.