Velcrometer

The thing about reviewing any Ice Age movie is that you're actually reviewing two films. One—and the one that gets butts in seats, I suspect—is a near-silent slapstick piece about Scrat, a hapless saber-toothed squirrel (sic) who's like Wile E. Coyote, but instead of being constantly outsmarted by a bird, he's always thwarted by the intellectual might of an acorn. The other movie is about the ever-growing assortment of prehistoric creatures facing increasingly outlandish threats to their existence posed by the very earth itself. But I can still save some time by saying that both franchises are running out of steam, at least writing-wise.

In fact, the "main" storyline in the fourth Ice Age movie is more like the first Madagascar movie, with a thin storyline stringing together a clattering series of references to, and tropes from, tons of other (and in most cases better) movies. There are bits from The Perfect Storm, Return of the Jedi, Mean Girls, Pirates of the Caribbean, Last of the Mohicans, and any number of other movies that I, and more to the point your kids, haven't even seen. The plot starts out with a smart move, separating the original movie's trio of Manny the mammoth, Diego the saber-toothed tiger, and Sid the sloth from the rest of the bloated cast (Manny's wife Ellie, their now-teenage daughter Peaches, Ellie's opossum brothers Crash and Eddie, and a whole goddamn zoo of supporting voices), but they're soon just dealing with another menagerie, namely a pirate crew. Hijinx, as you might imagine, ensue. Just not particularly clever ones.

As for the Scrat storyline, that's already been taken as far as it can possibly go, and beyond, several times. And yet this time it goes farther. I have to admit to some grudging admirations for the imaginations that can make you say, "Oh, come on" to new scenes about a saber-toothed squirrel who has in the past survived multi-mile freefalls, travels through time, and blunt-force trauma that would pulverize NORAD.

This is not to say the animation isn't pretty amazing. There's a storm scene in particular that's astounding – but mostly after the fact. Maybe it sucks that so many people worked so hard to render all those crashing waves and raindrops in such loving detail and I'm so ungrateful to them for it, but what I really would have appreciated is another round of punch-ups to the script. Even M. Edium got bored the second time he saw it.

And of course one doesn't expect slavish devotion to realism in a movie about talking animals, but this one doubles down on the previous movies' attacks on geology, zoology, paleontology, and physics, adding in some major affronts to oceanography, seismology, and cetology for good measure. It's not often you see characters trying to outrun a continental shelf. In fact I think the last time was at the end of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Hence my theory that this movie doesn't take place on prehistoric earth at all, but some kind of Genesis 2.0 world.

But I'm sure I'll still take M. Edium to the fifth Ice Age movie, with its increasingly anachronistic core cast and a colon and a subtitle rather than a number. But I wish I were looking forward to it more.

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The Amazing Spider-Man really could have been the biggest movie of the summer. Or rather, a summer. By which I mean a summer that didn't also have The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises in it. And a summer that's more than a decade after the first Spider-Man movie, when a reboot would seem less premature. Not this summer, though.

As it is, comparisons are unavoidable. Only two weeks into its theatrical run, I saw it in a theater packed with four other people. There was a much bigger crowd in attendance when I saw the original ten years ago, in a bigger theater, and that thing was a goddamn turd. Maguire and Dafoe stunk the place up, and newly minted blockbuster-maker Sam Raimi directed it with the confidence of a whore in church. At some point very late in the movie, my friends and I realized we were the only ones in the theater laughing, and to this day we still don't understand why.

By that undemanding comparison, The Amazing Spider-Man is certainly an improvement. As Peter Parker, Andrew Garfield seems to understand that being "awkward" calls for more than just buttoning your shirt to the neck and walking like you have a stick up your ass; Emma Stone's smart, brave, and ultimately indispensible Gwen Stacy could kick Dunst's insipid MJ up and down Manhattan (in fact, please do); and Martin Sheen and Sally Field class things up as Peter's Uncle Ben and Aunt May, respectively. I thought I'd have trouble getting past Garfield's distracting physical resemblance to Glark (complete with camera, although Peter's has film and yet he touches up the photos on his computer), but Peter's got a dickish streak that sets him apart. Even better, the CGI technology has improved in the intervening years, so now when Spidey's swinging among the towers of Manhattan he looks like a skinny, knobby-kneed kid in a suit rather than a video game character.

But then, if "better than Spider-Man" is damning with faint praise, it's hard to come up with something less…faint. Against all odds, Spider-Man 2 remains one of my favorite superhero movies ever (possibly the favorite until this past May, which, see above), and this movie is no threat to that whatsoever. My suspicion, in fact -- and stay with me here -- is less that Marvel was trying to make a new Spider-Man trilogy than its own version of the new Batman trilogy.

I'm being serious. While watching The Amazing Spider-Man, the comparison that kept coming to mind wasn't the Raimi films, but Batman Begins. Like that film (which I have yet to see, embarrassingly enough), TAS-M offers a new origin story to an audience who still has the original fresh in their minds, sets up an ongoing mystery that's clearly going to run through the whole series, and matches the novice hero up against some deep cut of a villain that only fans of the comic book will remember (here it's the Lizard taking the place of Scarecrow). The problem is that it's not going to pull it off. For one thing, the Batman trilogy has an A-list director, and while I was watching one of the admittedly impressive POV shots of Spidey zipping over the city, I realized I had no idea who had directed the film I was watching. That's a sure sign of a second-tier Marvel project. The two upsides were that a) the director turned out to be Marc Webb (who I've never heard of, but perfect name) and that Marvel is now a big enough movie studio to have tiers.

And also, there's just something kind of low-budget-looking about it. Maybe that's because I saw it in the cheaper theater, where films just don't look quite as glossy, but I don't think so; Ice Age: Continental Drift looked just fine there a few days later.

For now, I just have to conclude that The Amazing Spider-Man isn't bad. It's not great, either. It's fine, in fact. But the best adjective I can think of to describe it is…unnecessary.

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M. Ovie Reviews: Ted

John Bennett is a grown man still attached to his teddy bear, Ted. The fact that Ted is an entertaining hang who moves and talks and has a sincere, fuzzy face that belies what a foul-mouthed, hard-partying bundle of bad influence he is only mitigates things slightly. One doesn't need to have done a lot of textual analysis in graduate school to unpack the deep symbolism that John clearly needs to grow up. Which is odd given that this story comes from writer/director/Ted-voicer Seth MacFarlane. Who, arguably more so than any other figure in current pop culture, has built an entire media empire based solely on juvenile humor.

I don't actually have anything against Seth MacFarlane. I know he gets a lot of crap for his freshmanic style, but I have to admit that the first couple of episodes of Family Guy (the last ones I watched) cracked my shit up. However, I haven't seen enough of his work over the intervening decade-plus to have formed a negative opinion of my own. Well, that's been rectified.

So did you like The Muppets, but thought it should have been darker, dirtier, and aimed at the first generation of Muppets fans rather than our kids? Then this is the movie for you. Both films have a blank slate of a leading man-child (Mark Wahlberg rather than Jason Segel in this case) with an out-of-his-league, unaccountably patient girlfriend (Mila Kunis taking Amy Adams's place here) and a short, fuzzy sidekick he probably should have outgrown decades ago. Now make Walter a miniature, ursine Shakespearean vice figure and throw in a lot of offensive jokes and you've got Ted.

Don't misunderstand me, I think there's a lot of humor to be mined from crossing lines. But, you know, after an hour and a half of first-draft drug jokes, sex jokes, ethnic jokes, gay jokes, an angry Asian neighbor literally wielding a hatchet and a live duck, and not one but two 9/11 jokes, one begins to forget the line ever existed. MacFarlane establishes early and often that he's ready and willing to "go there," but once you're "there" you still have to be funny.

And it's all hung on the flimsiest possible framework of a story. MacFarlane obviously loves to have incongruously inappropriate dialogue coming out of the mouths of the most unlikely characters (hence the popularity of Stewie, and the attempt to milk laughs from making a Patrick Stewart-sounding voice-over narrator say "shit"), but as a result the movie takes way too much time establishing whether Ted really loves John unselfishly as a friend, or is deliberately sabotaging John's life to keep their relationship alive. Or maybe it's my fault, and the fact that I even entertained the latter possibility meant I was giving the movie way too much credit.

So how did I even end up at this movie? Well, my plan was to see Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, since BuenaOnda and I didn't get around to it while we were in California like we'd planned. But again, circumstances (and my favorite movie site being a filthy liar) conspired to leave me stranded in the theater with nothing to see. I called Trash to see if she wanted me to bring anything home for a late dinner, but she suggested I see Ted instead. Which is nobody's fault but my own, because from the first moment she saw the trailer and couldn't believe the movie was even real, I'd been pretending like it looked awesome and couldn't wait to see it. Now she was calling my bluff, and I finally knew what that kid in the lunchroom felt like when he actually had to follow through on the dare to eat everything on his tray all mixed in together.

There seems to be one other axe MacFarlane likes to grind, if Ted is any indication, and that's former celebrities. Several of them pop up here, possibly as some kind of half-baked commentary on Ted's own child-star history, now long past its sell-by date. Or, as seems more likely, maybe former celebrities are simply something else MacFarlane thinks are funny, just all by themselves, without any more work on his part. It'll be interesting to see if he still feels that way when he is one.

2 Comments:

Good review. I'm not a fan of Family Guy, so when I saw this and realized how freakin' clever Seth MacFarlane really can be, I was taken aback and had a great time with this flick. Ted is such a great character, too, and Wahlberg works so well with him.

So did you like The Muppets, but thought it should have been darker, dirtier, and aimed at the first generation of Muppets fans rather than our kids? Then this is the movie for you.

I'd go for "Meet the Feebles" myself. Dark, much, much dirtier and completely screwed up.