Pan

Released:  October 9^th, 2015

Rated:  PG

Distributor:  Warner Bros.

Starring:  Levi Miller, Hugh Jackman, Garrett Hedlund, Rooney Mara, Amanda Seyfried

Directed by:  Joe Wright

Written by:  Jason Fuchs

Personal Bias Alert:  likes Joe Wright, not a big Peter Pan lover

5.7 of 10

            It’s been a mere 113 years since J. M. Barrie introduced the world to Peter Pan.  In that short amount of time, the impish boy has become ingrained in Western culture, carving out a place next to centuries-old fairy tales in the pantheon of childhood standards.  Today, the character is considered a personal favorite by many, a wondrous ode to childhoods we can never get back.  This love sets the bar high for any new version of the story, and anyone brave enough to meddle with the formula must either turn in a masterpiece or contend with the remonstrations of its ardent fans.

            Director Joe Wright and screenwriter Jason Fuchs are two souls brave enough to invent an origin story for Peter (Levi Miller), Captain Hook (Garrett Hedlund), and Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara) that shakes up their usual relationships.  Unfortunately, their gamble didn’t pay off well enough to be embraced by the masses, and the immediate backlash has made the off-kilter but enjoyable film out to be one of the biggest flops of 2015.  Hopefully its reputation softens over time, both because there’s a lot to appreciate here and because we should never discourage anyone from being bold enough to reinvent instead of just retelling the classics.

            Wright, who has made his fair share of good and bad movies, always turns in marvelous-looking films, and if for nothing else, this is why you should see Pan in theaters.  Few people pull back the camera quite like him, capturing big, meticulously staged sequences that are apt to take your breath away.  Shot for shot, few other filmmakers give us as consistently glorious visuals as he does, and the magical world of fairies and flying ships featured in Pan proves to be a ripe playground for his sweeping style.

            Wright is also well known for his scores, and while Pan features an appropriately swashbuckling one, it’s unlikely that anyone will walk out of the theaters remembering it.  Any commentary on the music in this film is sure to highlight the odd use of contemporary songs, most notably the jaw-droppingly weird sequence where we are introduced to Hugh Jackman’s Blackbeard by having thousands of men singing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.  Why?  This is never explained, although there is another similar scene a few minutes later.  Both take place early on in the film when everything that happens is so broad and utterly strange that none of it makes much sense.  These are some gratingly disjointed scenes, and if the rest of the film had continued to be that weirdly incongruous, we would be having an entirely different discussion.

            But eventually we are introduced to Tiger Lily, and the film is given a goal to steadily work towards.  The overt oddities subside, and we are left with a jaunty kids movie that has a delightful amount of weirdness.  The cast, who was previously hamstrung by Wright’s decision to go big and broad, settle into some actual relationships, and a calming force tamps the whole thing into submission.  Rooney Mara, inadvertently, I believe, is that force, as she was likely told to go big like everyone else but just didn’t have it in her.  She’s not a great physical actress, and while everyone else is prancing about, she walks through the film with the same shuffling gate as her version of Lisbeth Salander.  This isn’t to say that she doesn’t make her part work; if anything, Mara makes Tiger Lily into the most well-defined character in the whole shebang.   She just also brings the energy level down to a more palatable level.

            With such slapdash success, it’s wrong to label Pan as an outright failure.  It may not reach the heights that previous iterations of Peter’s story did, but there’s some wondrous moments to be found if you give it a chance.

Other Notes:

Ø  Some of the CGI here is atrocious, but I saw the same sort of doughy people in the opening of Avengers:  Age of Ultron.

Ø  I wasn’t as annoyed with Garrett Hedlund’s toothy performance as I thought I would be.

Ø  Maybe I’m just a sucker for Joe Wright’s style?

Ted 2

Released:  June 26^th, 2015

Rated:  R

Distributor:  Universal Pictures

Starring:  Mark Wahlberg, Seth MacFarlane, Amanda Seyfried

Directed by:  Seth MacFarlane

Written by:  Seth MacFarlane, Alec Sulkin, Wellesley Wild

Personal Bias Alert:  haven’t seen Ted, not a big MacFarlane fan

3.5 of 10

            Seth MacFarlane has been a staple of American pop culture for over a decade now.  His television series and movies have filled our screens almost nonstop, and while the output is impressive, the variety has been lacking.  His television series, which at one point took up half of Fox’s Animation Domination, have been largely criticized for their similarity, especially when it comes to characters.  My only firsthand knowledge of MacFarlane’s work has been Family Guy, which I watched and enjoyed 10 years ago.  Now having seen Ted 2, I have to throw my support in with those who cry uniformity, because Ted 2 is up to the exact same tricks Family Guy was pulling ten years ago.

            MacFarlane’s humor is still a manic mix of bawdy crudeness, pop culture references, and randomness that often gets unfairly criticized for being dumb.  There’s nothing dumb about the amount of jokes and references he can cram into a piece, nor is it, as others have asserted, an unfairly offensive brand of humor.  It’s a completely fair brand of offensive humor, riffing and finding disgust in almost every type of human being.  Rest assured that Ted 2 will hit on whatever your particular sensitivities are, be it homophobia, sexism, racism, nerdism, or dumbism (I’m making up words now, but you get the point).  In these moments, you’ll squirm with discomfort and your blood will boil, but later on your even-keeled head will recognize that he was tearing down pretty much everyone, and I guarantee that you’ll have belly laughed at several potentially offensive moments.

            No, the problem isn’t that MacFarlane’s humor is undeserving of praise; it’s the package it comes in that’s often its downfall.  That’s the case with Ted 2, which suffers from an overlong, disjointed plot.  It should have stuck to the main storyline where the magically sentient teddy bear named Ted (voiced by MacFarlane) must fight for legal human rights.  Instead, the film gets distracted by subplots and offshoots and an annoyingly long setup that makes the whole thing feel disjointed.  Despite its very clear goal, the whole movie seems aimless, wandering around from joke to joke in a way that distracts from the main plot and inhibits you from getting all that invested.  The sad thing is that MacFarlane does seem to be trying to make a tongue-in-cheek point about human rights, but any weight that might carry gets lost in all the meandering.

            The one subplot that does work in the film is the romance between Ted’s best friend John (Mark Wahlberg) and his lawyer, Samantha (Amanda Seyfried).  Seyfried can do broad comedy in her sleep (we’ve all seen Mean Girls), and there’s good chemistry between her and Wahlberg.  The relationship also gives Wahlberg something to do besides pal around with Ted, where he often hams things up too much, and lets him be the jovial idiot his character is supposed to be.  If the rest of the offshoots had been cut, Ted 2 could’ve been a lean, mean, laugh-inducing machine.

            But MacFarlane likes his offshoots, which here mostly exist just for a joke instead of any real plot point.  He was doing this stuff ten years ago in Family Guy, and the same rule applied then as it does now:  if the joke’s funny, then the diversion is worth it.  Unfortunately, too many of the inconsequential jokes in Ted 2 fall dead flat, and it’s not just an issue of personal taste.  Entire scenes would pass in my screening where the theater was quiet enough to hear crickets, including three people who were clearly MacFarlane fans, because they guffawed at every joke that landed.  Even these folks were silent for far too long, and the buildup of these long dry spells suffocated the occasionally riotous moments.

            The barometer for straight up comedy films will be different for everyone.  If you’re someone who evaluates them purely based on the number of times you laughed, then this film will probably be much more satisfying to you.  It undeniably will make you laugh many times, but I happen to value sustained comedy more.  A five minute mashup of Ted 2’s best jokes would make for an incredibly satisfying YouTube video, but in the film you must sit through nearly two hours of dullness just for these few laughs.  That’s not a satisfying comedy to me.

Other Notes:

Ø  The CGI for Ted looked very seamless.

Ø  I got the various references, but they weren’t funny.  What’s the point if they aren’t funny?

Ø  I really disliked the music in this.  I mean, that title number didn’t fit in, and most of the song choices were way too intrusive.

Ø  The height of Ted made for some weird shots.  I don’t know if I’ve ever seen so many inadvertent legs and crotches in the frame.

Ø  There was a lot of manspreading from Wahlberg.