Movie Review: Captain America: The First Avenger

           Captain America suffers from what seems like an increasingly common trend in Hollywood. I’m talking about “setupitus” (pronounced “set-up-i-tus”), in which part/parcel of a film’s raison d’etre is to serve as a set-up for a larger series. C.A. is, in undeniable part, a set-up for the upcoming Avengers films. The/my problem with setupitus is that it can encourage a certain laziness on the part of a film’s makers, a certain reticence to tell the very best story they can possibly tell with the material they have to work with, which bothers yours truly when he’s just forked over like 25 bucks to watch the telling of said story.

Now, I’m not saying that setupitus is the only thing that prevented C.A. from being a better than merely decent super-hero movie, however, I couldn’t help but feel that setupitus contributed something to the film’s inadequacies. For example, the rag-tag squad of guys The Captain frees from prison, what the hell were any of their names? Or, when the Captain’s very, very best friend Bucky died (spoiler), who really cared (might we care later?!?)? The only things yours truly actually cared about in the film were (1) the super-awesome looking blue-cube that Red Skull used to build his army of Hydra, which, it turns out, is part/parcel to the Iron Man story, and (2) the romance between The Captain and Agent Carter (Haley Atwell), which the filmmakers spent a significant portion of screen-time building the significance of only to have the Cap’n crash Red Skull’s airplane into a snow-bank and leave us going, “Uh, what about agent Carter?”, which I suppose the film-makers thought was adequately addressed with Cap’s “I was supposed to go dancing...”

           Anyways, Captain America: the First Avenger wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t all that good: I wouldn’t pay any of my hard-earned money to see it again on the big screen; I wouldn’t Red Box, Net Flix, or On Demand it; and I wouldn’t sit my arse down to watch much of it if it happened to be on the old tube in like five years or whenever (but I also wouldn’t be like, “Oh God! Turn that crap off!!!”). That said, I can’t wait to see the upcoming Avengers movie! That’ll be awesome!!!

Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

             This review’s gonn’a be of the quick’n’dirty variety because I really don’t want to write about the thing that I found most interesting in H.P. and the D.H. (P.2), and that’s the whole Harry and Jesus thing (equal parts interesting and troubling, and I’m sure somebody else has already done a better job analyzing this than I ever could...).
              Anyways, I wouldn’t fork over any more of my hard-earned cash-money to watch H.P. and the D.H. (P.2) again in the theaters, nor would I Netflix, Redbox, or On Demand it. I also probably wouldn’t sit down and watch much/any of it again were it on The Tube, either. My lack of desire to see H.P. and the D.H. (P.2) again in almost any fashion (with one exception pending...) is not because it wasn’t good--well told, well made, and well acted, with a real kick-arse wizard battle scene or two--merely that it was super intense and neither thought-provoking nor exciting/fun enough to fan the flames of my desire to really sit down and re-watch it.
              H.P. and the D.H. (P.2) was, obviously, the climax to a seven part series, and it was an f’n serious climax at that, ergo it suffers in terms of re-watchability, at least for yours truly. My previously mentioned "one exception" is that I would want to watch it again if I were watching it as the epic conclusion to an epic “Harrathon” (Harry Potter movie-marathon), in which case, it’d be pretty, well, epic.

Movie Review: Transforms: DOM (Part 2)

            Alright, so I already wrote my straight-up review of Michael Bay’s most recent and, I dare say, best Transformers’ movie. This is not that review. This is my, I don’t know, critical-exploration of the thing that I actually found most interesting about Bay’s latest, something that I needed to see the movie twice for in order to adequately track, something that has almost nothing to do with the Transfomers, per se.
           At the beginning of Darkside, Sam/Shia has recently graduated from Harvard, is dating his second consecutive super-model girlfriend, and can’t get a job to save his life/pay the billz (how one lands a girlfriend, let alone ones second consecutive super-model girlfriend, without a job is beyond me). Sam’s been going to job-interviews for weeks if not months without any proverbial dice. He’s getting more and more flack from his U.S.-trotting, green jump-suit cladded parents, and getting more and more piney’n’winey to do something “important” with his life, something that “matters.”

A great deal of Sam’s frustration with his circumstances comes from the fact that he’s the same guy--or so he tells us/others all the fricking time--who saved the world from the Evil Forces of... The Decepticons, twice! And even got some awesome medal in honor of his services, from Obama (can’t tell if Bay and Co. were being ironic with Sam's apparent excitement with his having had received a medal from Obama...). And yet, wtf, nobodoy cares enough about the fact that Sam not only graduated from Harvard but also saved the world, twice, to give Sam a job, ergo, Sam’s frustration:

Finally, after a series of horribly awkward interviews with people whom Sam seems to have just as hard a time respecting as convincing to hire him, he winds up in front of John Malkovich, the apparent megalo-head of some tech company, who tells Sam, “Impress me”. Sam somehow manages to do this by spouting off crap like, “I’m a killer, blah blah blah”, which, it turns out, was totally unnecessary for Sam to do because the reason Malkovich actually wanted to hire him in the first place is because Sam has a letter of recommendation from Sam’s (super-model) girlfriend’s boss, Patrick Dempsey (whose motivation for trying to help Sam find a job makes, by the end of the film, absolutely no sense--that is, unless Dempsey just knew, deep down that if Sam got a job at Malkovich’s company he’d uncover the whole moon-mystery thing and somehow get the Autobots to go to said moon and bring Sentinel back to earth and back to life, which, COME-THE-F*CK ON!!!).

Anyways, Malkovich tells Sam he can have a job in the literal mail-room, and that he reminds Malkovich of a younger version of himself (?!?), in response to which Sam scoffs and feigns leaving, telling Malkovich that he’s saved the world (twice!) and shouldn’t be working in no stinking mail room! Malkovich responds to Sam’s disrespectful impudence by saying something pretty damn interesting and good for somebody of Sam’s/my generation to hear. He says, “Sam, the only thing standing between you and the job you want is your unwillingness to start with the job you can actually get” (I paraphrase, of course, but that’s basically what Malkovich said). Sam hears what Malkovich is laying down and takes the job in the mail-room, which necessitates that Bay and Co. give us a, like, five minute Sam-Working-Hard Montage. And then the Evil Forces of... The Decepticons attack.

The message of the most recent Transformers' movie is thus almost, “Quit being so f’ing entitled, all you recent college graduates (even/especially you ivy-leaguers!), and do some real f’ing work to get what you want out of your lives, whether that be meaningfulness or money”, but becomes, after the Evil Forces of... The Decepticons attack and Sam abandons his hard-work montage and takes it upon himself to help defeat them and save the world for what I’m sure he’ll tell us is the third time, “Don’t worry, all you recent college graduates (even/esp. you ivy-league punks), you won’t have to spend a very long time toiling away in the kind of tedium that real-f’ing people have to toil in to earn the kind of lives they want to live, the impending equivalent of a Decepticon attack is on the horizon!”

            Now, I know what you’re probably saying, “But Max, it's a fricking Transformers movie! The Evil Forces of... The Decepticons had to return at some point, and Sam had to save the world yet again!!! And you’re reading way too much into all of Sam’s job woes and the significance of the Decepticons showing up right after Sam finally gets a job...” I know, I know, I know. However, this doesn’t mean I can’t bemoan the lost possibility of a Transformers' movie in which Bay and Co. lure us in with the promise of epic robot battles only to trick us into watching a meditation on the importance of not living an entitled existence and learning to do the often hard work necessary to make our lives what we want them to be. And this coming from a guy who wants almost nothing more in his life than epic robot battles...

Cruisers, Road-Bikes, and Hermeneutics

Last week my brother and I were talking on the phone about all manner of things--Harry Potter (review pending), my most recent date-night at the Jupiter Hotel (awesome), the military (Biff wants in, sort’a), early-morning exercise routines (gott’a have ‘em), our mutual quasi-hatred of Jonathan Franzen (‘nuff said), self-defense training, dreams, you know, the euj’--when I mentioned that I was becoming something of a cycling-monster, to which my brother responded with the kind of “me too” that tends to ignite the flames of sibling-rivalry like little else.

In my brother and I’s conversation, sibling-rivalry first took the form of us virulently differentiating ourselves from each other, i.e., me saying that my monstrosity is nothing like his, him saying (more or less), “And that’s how I friggin’ like it!” Case in point, my brother has ridden a beach-cruiser for the past year and a half, and (I imagine) looks something like the following while he rides said beach-cruiser:

(Can you see the sh*t-eating grin on the guy’s face? I can...) 
         I, on the other hand, ride a hard-core, super bad-*ss, hill-eating machine of a “cross-bike” (somewhere in between a road-bike and a mountain-bike)--



--and look something like the following while I’m taking Joelle (that’s right, my bike’s got a name, a sexy name) up one of the many steep hills to be found in the Portland-Metro Area:



(I’m the guy in red, duh.)
    Anyways, after my brother and I adequately differentiated ourselves and managed to sequester our own respective senses of superiority (his had to do with being quite happy to take 45 minutes to ride 3 miles to work, mine had to do with being happy to take 15 to ride just under 7, amongst other things), it came up that my brother’d recently had his bike stolen and was looking to get a new one. Enter Max Goins, salesman:



          My initial sales-pitch was, basically/impudently: Cruisers like my brother’s are stupid and road-bikes are awesome, and my brother should try and find himself a good road-bike of the touring/commuter variety (steel frame, slightly thicker tires than a standard roady, wide range of gears, drop-down handle bars). I mostly talked about speed and flexibility and, well, speed, in making my sales-pitch. My brother countered with, “But I like to sit upright while I ride” and “I’ve ridden road-bikes before, Max, and I just don’t like them...” We went back and forth like this for longer than I’d like to admit, each of us getting increasingly frustrated, me eventually saying in an explosively patronizing manner, “I bet you cash-money that if you road a decent road-bike for like three weeks, you’d never go back to a cruiser”, him responding with a kind of damp reproach, “I don’t feel like you respect my right to choose what kind of riding experience I want to have”. We were, I realized, not only having a good, old-fashioned sibling tiff, but also talking apples (road-bikes) and oranges (cruisers). Enter hermeneutics.

Hermeneuteics is a branch of philosophy that deals primarily with questions of interpretation (e.g., textual, such as the bible) and meaning (where does it come from? how is it determined), in which meaning is always what is called “immanent”, i.e. contained within a text or a tradition or a language.

What the hell does the philosophical tradition of hermeneutics have to do with my brother and I’s conversation above? Well, it became apparent to me that my brother and I were talking at each other from within different traditions, so to speak, him from the tradition of leisurely cruiser-riding, me from the tradition of super-awesome/fast road-bike riding. I pointed this out to my brother (after I’d insulted him and he’d reproached me) and said something to the effect of “Hahahahah, there’s actually nothing I can say that will convince you of the truth of what I’m saying because you haven’t ridden a road-bike for long enough to actually know what I’m talking about, but don’t worry, this isn’t like some moral-failure on your part, it’s just hermeneutics: We’re coming at each other from different traditions, or, at least, you think I’m coming at you from a different tradition and I’m failing to articulate myself in a way that you can understand from within yours...” (I paraphrase/edit for the purpose of making myself sound both smart and reasonable, of course.)

My brother heard what I was telling him about what makes road-bikes awesome and concluded that riding a road-bike meant one couldn’t/shouldn’t cruise, that “cruising”--taking ones time, sallying around at a non-break-neck pace, catching the sights and sounds of your surroundings, not sweating profusely, etc.--wasn’t a desirable or respectable way to ride from within the narrow framework of road-bike riders such as yours truly. “Not true”, I told him. “I cruise all the time on my road-bike. However, I can also go at break-neck speeds, should the desire or need present itself, and that’s the limitation of the cruiser: Yes one can cruise, but that’s all one can do”. In hermeneutic-speak, the tradition or practice of road-bike riding actually encompasses/understands the practice of cruiser riding, but the practice of cruiser riding does not encompass/understand that of road-bike riding.

I explained all this to my brother and did my best to couch my explanation in terms that I (like all good salesmen) knew he’d understand. How’d I do this? I talked about it being desirable to be “prepared” (a recent concern of my brother’s that I was aware of and that I was not above exploiting for the purpose of resolving our tiff/making my sale): What if my brother needed to cover 3 miles in 10 minutes instead of 45? Or, god-forbid, a distance longer than 3 miles? What if he wanted to ride his bike for, say, 10 miles? Or 20? 30? 40? “On my bike”, I told him, “not only can I travel under 10 miles really quickly, I can travel around 40 miles in less than 2 hours. And not that you necessarily want to ride 40 miles in less than 2 hours all the time, but it sure is nice to be able to when you want/need to. On a cruiser, both the speed at which you can travel and the comfortable distance are limited and, ergo, you’re unprepared for the possible demands of a change in either your circumstances or your desires”. My brother liked this pitch better than my previous “Crusiers drool, road-bikes rule!”, and, smelling the close, I sweetened the deal, “You know, you could always have two bikes, a cruiser and a road-bike?” A few days ago I received a text from my brother telling me, "I decided to buy a stupid road-bike", and road-bike riders everywhere were happy to welcome yet another into their ranks.

Movie Review: Midnight in Paris

First things first: I probably wouldn’t fork over a first-run-full-ticket-price’s (“F.R.F.T.P.”) worth of my hard earned cash-money to see Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris in theaters again; however, I would gladly accompany someone else if they invited me along and offered to pay my way; and I wouldn’t mind seeing it again at a second-run theater, especially if said second-run theater was a brew’n’view; I would also consider paying money to watch it again On Demand or to get it from a Red Box; and yes, I’d Netflix it. In short, I loved Midnight in Paris, I just don’t think that enough would be added to my love by a second viewing on the big screen in order to justify forking over another wad of my hard earned cash-money.

Midnight in Paris’ tone reminds yours truly of Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo--a film that almost nobody under the age of 30 seems to know of or appreciate--in that it’s a both incredibly fun and quite poignant meditation on the difficult-importance of not running away from ones reality, whatever it may be, and learning to live and love ones present.

A great deal of the fun in Midnight in Paris is to be had amongst the wonderfully colorful characters that populate Woody’s vision of Paris in the 1920s: Zelda Fitzgerald’s (Alison Pill) silly-drunkenness, Erest Hemmingway’s (Corey Stoll), well, courage (“Who wants to fight?!?”), Salvidor Dali’s (Adrien Brody) twisted little mustache, not to mention Owen Wilson’s time-traveling Gil Pender, whose consistently bemused aw-shucks, kid-in-the-literary-candy-store performance was amazingly difficult for yours truly to not identify with (the first time he meets Stoll’s Hemingway and is like “Really!?!” I let out a little school-girl giggle of joy). Now, if you’re one of those people who says things like “I’ve never once departed from reality and/or fantasized about anything, let alone meeting my literary/artistic heroes!” then you should probably avoid Midnight in Paris--a film in which Wilson's Pender miraculously time-travels and gets to meet all his literary and artistic heroes while visiting what he thinks of as the golden age of Paris--and/or stop wasting your money/time at the movies.

Midnight in Paris’s poignancy comes from it’s almost (again, see The Purple Rose of Cairo) un-Woody like message at the end, in which (spoiler alert!) Wilson’s Pender decides to not stay in the Paris of the 1920s, instead choosing the Paris of the present (and saying “peace” to his fiance, the fantastically b*itchy Rachel McAdam’s, and his life as a Hollywood-hack). Pender’s realization is primarily facilitated through his romantic relationship with Marion Cotillard’s Adriana, who, living in the 1920s Paris of Wilson’s fantasy (and dating Picasso and Hemmingway before Wilson's Pender, yeah...), herself fantasizes about a time before her own time, wanting to live in the Paris of the 1890s instead of the 1920s. Pender eventually concludes that Adriana’s crazy for not realizing how great she’s got it, and through his perception of her craziness himself realizes that the answer to the adage “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone” is not that we come up with crazy-schemes and fantasy-scenarios to get back whatever it is we’ve lost, but, rather, that we learn to appreciate the lives and times we have, while we're lucky enough to have them.

Cheers to the movies!

Movie Review: Transformers: Dark of the Moon

         First things first: I do not count Revenge of the Fallen as a part of Michael Bay’s Transformers oeuvre insofar as I’ve removed what may/may not have been my one-time viewing of said thing so far from my conscious mind that it basically shares head-space with everything else that’s ever happened to me that’s so abso-f’ing-lutely horrible that were I to even come close to remembering such a thing I might suffer a total--like Dan Akroyd in Trading Places total



--meltdown. That said, I definitely think that Dark of the Moon is the best of the two M.B. helmed Transformers movies, and I’d definitely fork over some more of my hard-earned dollars to see it again while it’s in theaters. That said, I’m also a died in the die-cast metal Transformers fan who owns the entirety of (and regularly watches) the U.S. cartoon series that began back in my birth year (‘84, b*tches!), has watched the original, animated, f’n-rocking Transformers: The Movie--



--like 2,346 times, owns (and semi-regularly... OK, regularly plays with) in excess of 100 of the G1 toys, and really-truly-madly-deeply wanted to be a transformer when he was a young boy (between the ages of 3-27). Yeah, I’m a fan. However, this doesn’t mean that I’m incapable of (feigning) objectivity in my assessment of Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
          Dark of the Moon suffers from a number of the same problems as its predecessor: convoluted plot, underdeveloped transformer-characters (I actually know how this problem could have been avoided, but then M.B. and co. would have to go back and start from scratch, which Hasbro if you're reading this and looking for someone to write TF 4...); crappy human-characters (sorry Shia fans and fans of that Asian guy from The Hangover and anyone who has mad-respect for John Turturro); unnecessary romance (sorry fans of the girl who’s, thankfully, not Megan Fox); and a seemingly pathological unwillingness or inability on the part of the writers (which in the case of D.M. is Hollywood-lifer/hack Ehren Kruger) and director (M.B.) to pass up any/all opportunities to insert lame and typically mildly offensive jokes (which are almost universally offensive to both ones comical and ethical sensibilities, simultaneously--which is actually kind of hard to consistently pull-off, if you think about it).

However, what Dark of the Moon gets right, it gets pretty f’ing right: Laser Beak is terrifying and cool (I was really pissed at the outcome of the fight between L.B. and Shia, I’ll tell you that much...); the Decepticon siege of Chi-Town (awesome); the fact the Decepticons try to use the SPACE BRIDGE (!!!); a number of the chase scenes (I loved the highway scene where the dog-like Decepticons chase Bumble Bee and Shia); the super-sleazy Patrick Dempsey (who brought to the mind of yours truly another humanoid who forsook humanity in an allegiance with the Decepticons, Dr. Arkeville); the whole moon-race revisionist history thing (which actually helps make sense of the real moon-race, you know? Otherwise... The moon? Really? How many ba-jillion dollars were spent to get there before the Russkies?!?); no Megan Fox (the next Marilyn Monroe? Please!); and, last but not least, the humans doing the whole squirrel-glide thing into said Decepticon-sieged Chicago (I know what my Make-A-Wish would be... Squirrel-glide into Decepticon-sieged Chicago! Did I just make a joke that was mildly offensive on both an ethical and a comedic level? Wow, that was hard to do!).

    
           In light of everything I think M. Bay and co. did right in Dark of the Moon I’d like to conclude this review by reiterating that yours truly would be willing to fork over even more of his hard-earned money to see it again in theaters; I'd also like to take this opportunity to share my favorite image of M. Bay, the undeniable steward of the Transformers for the past 10 years (may he live a little bit longer and proper, mildly):