Avengers: Age of Ultron

Released:  May 1^st, 2015

Rated:  PG-13

Distributor:  Walt Disney Studios

Starring:  Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, James Spader

Directed by:  Joss Whedon

Written by:  Joss Whedon

Personal Bias Alert:  Joss Whedon fan, bored of comic book movies

6.5 of 10

            The summer movie season is here, and Marvel is kicking it off yet again with Avengers:  Age of Ultron.  The team of Iron Man (billionaire playboy crime fighter), Hulk (green rage monster), Thor (golden god), Captain America (enhanced good ol’ boy), Black Widow (former Russian spy), and Hawkeye (bow and arrow dude) have reassembled to finish what they started in The Avengers:  to get every remnant of Loki off their planet.  Despite, or because of, their super powers/skills, they are incredibly bad at this task, with Iron Man instead creating a homicidal machine named Ultron.  Ultron’s got daddy issues, so the Avengers are the first on his hit list, followed by the rest of humanity.  So there’s your threat that only a super-special team can defeat, and the movie proceeds from here like pretty much every other movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

            As someone who’s not a fan of Marvel’s popcorn movies, the grinding gears of yet another bad guys vs. good guys plotline that does little delving into character or themes is getting annoying, but at least here you have Joss Whedon.  That means you get some good one-liners thrown in, but the Marvel franchise has replaced character traits with character connections, and the amount of i’s and t’s Whedon must dot and cross to keep the universe going leaves almost no time for anything outside the plot.  Marvel has drawn a line in the sand, and with the success they’re experiencing, they aren’t about to cross it to convert the stragglers like me.  It seems that most people enjoy what they’re cooking, and if you liked The Avengers and all the other movies, you’ll like Age of Ultron as well.

            The main cast of Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, and Jeremy Renner all return and play their parts with the ease of those who’ve been there and done that.  Joining the cast are Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen as twins with powers of their own and James Spader in the voice/motion capture performance of Ultron.  Taylor-Johnson and Olsen get a couple decent scenes, but mostly they’re navigating action sequences à la last year’s Godzilla.  Spader brings his trademark borderline-lazy nonchalance, which is to be expected but doesn’t quite work in the major villain role.  This failure mostly falls on Whedon, who wrote Ultron with Spader in mind and ultimately never got the character quite right.  Ultron’s presumptive and petulant, characteristics that don’t lend themselves well to a very menacing Big Bad, and there’s many illusions to him being an evil Pinocchio despite the fact that Frankenstein’s monster is a much more fitting comparison. 

Age of Ultron is hampered by many other problems, some of which stem from the film’s own premise.  The big difficulty with this group is that they aren’t really unified.  They come and go as their own priorities pop up, and their fighting abilities are all over the map.  The times when they’re actually all together are rare, and when they split up there always seems to be some character that is simply forgotten about.  Hulk is continuously left behind in action sequences, Thor disappears for a large portion of the down-time, and Iron Man is always flying away from everyone else.  They are a team in only the loosest sense of the word, and the effort it takes to bring them all together makes for some glaring contrivances.

            An even bigger issue is the nagging sense that the film feels tired, which comes from the audience as much as from the filmmakers.  Whedon has been vocal about how difficult Age of Ultron was to make, and many of the cast members have expressed interest in leaving the franchise.  Then you have the unfortunate fact that filmgoers have seen so many similar things in the past year.  Obviously, Taylor-Johnson/Whedon’s Quicksilver fails to live up to the frenzy that the character’s appearance in X-Men:  Days of Future Past created, but there’s also the success of Guardians of the Galaxy, which thrived on its sense of humor and makes the banter in Age of Ultron seem lacking.  Smaller things, like the humorous coincidence that the original brain-version of Ultron looks exactly like the robot brains in Ex Machina, doesn’t help the timing issues.  However, the main problem seems to be the lack of passion from Whedon and company, and it translates onto the final product.

            Despite these downfalls, those making Age of Ultron are talented enough to make a decent film even on autopilot.  With the expectations and the odds stacked against it, the fact that the film is even decent is a bit of a triumph.  But if the world’s going to invest a quarter of a billion dollars into anything, shouldn’t it be more than decent?

Other Notes (Ridiculous Superhero Version):

Ø  How is the ability to get in people’s head and shoot red things from your hands connected?

Ø  Why did they have that squishy CGI look in the opening sequence?

Ø  Why did they make Cap adamant that civilians weren’t getting hurt in the middle of a massive battle where civilians were obviously getting hurt?

Other Notes (Regular Version):

Ø  Those twins were awkwardly close. 

Ø  The crowd shots really highlighted how utterly white the Avengers are.

Ø  Can we discuss the fact that the woman named Scarlett didn’t play the Scarlet Witch?

The Kids Are All Right (2010)

Released:  July 9^th, 2010

Rated:  R

Studio:  Focus Features

Starring:  Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Mia Wasikowska, Josh Hutcherson, Yaya DaCosta

Directed by:  Lisa Cholodenko 

Written by:  Lisa Cholodenko, Stuart Blumberg

Personal Bias Alert:  liked High Art, excited by the praise the movie received

4.5 of 10

            Writer/director Lisa Cholodenko seems very interested in the fluidity of life.  In the two films I’ve seen of hers, this and 1998’s “High Art,” love, sexuality, profession, and addiction are explored, and the boundaries that come with each are pushed.  Where is the line between recreational user and drug addict, hobbyist and professional, cheater and strayer?  People like their boxes, but Cholodenko brings the blurriness of life into her films, often making it the most interesting aspect of the story.  “The Kids Are All Right” draws from these questions, which only serves to amplify how pat and familiar everything else in the film is.

            At its core, this is a story about a nuclear family:  two parents, two kids, all that’s missing is the dog.  The kids are in their late teens, and are the usual angsty but decent suburbanites.  The hook is that the parents are two women, Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore).  The kids, curious about their sperm donor father, contact the sperm bank and set up a meeting with their donor, Paul (Mark Ruffalo).  Paul’s sudden presence shakes the family, and their functional little unit becomes threatened from several angles.

            This could have been a fun little movie.  It’s a solid setup for the low-budget dramedy it is, but it never quite comes together.  Individual scenes are good, including a standout conversation between Nic, Jules, and son Laser (Josh Hutcherson).  It’s funny and smart and honest and it made me wish so much that the rest of the movie was like that.  Unfortunately, it too often falls back on clichés and easy answers to have any true emotional resonance.

            Undoubtedly, the weakest link in the whole movie is the characters.  It feels like writers Stuart Blumberg and Cholodenko never expanded upon them from their initial pitch.  Everyone fits into their little boxes and can be easily summarized in one sentence.  Nic is an uptight career woman.  Jules is a spineless wanderer.  Joni is a pleaser who always does what she’s told.  And Laser is, well, simply undeveloped.  They do point out that he’s not very in touch with his emotions, which lets them slip in some clichéd jokes about men (and gay men).  But let’s focus in on the worst offender:  Paul.  He’s a laid-back, plaid-wearing, organic and local gardener/restaurateur.  Of course Mia Wasikowska’s Joni thinks he’s cool, because that’s all he’s trying to be.  Nic detests him, and I’ve got to say that that drew me closer to her.  I never understood why everyone was so interested in him.  He is nice, and I guess Nic’s abrasiveness makes everyone want someone like him, someone who will just tell them that everything’s fine and they’re fine and whatever.  That still doesn’t make him an interesting character.

            As I said, Cholodenko is very interested in blurred boundaries.  Here, alcoholism and love is challenged, with Nic being a borderline alcoholic and Jules cheating.  Jules is the more interesting example, with her fling being based more on the need for support than a lack of love for Nic.  The boundary between straying and outright cheating is different for everyone, with many people claiming that a physical act isn’t cheating as long as your heart remains focused on your long-term partner.  Then there’s another version of straying, which I think the line “I’m not unfaithful but I’ll stray” from the song “Back in Your Head” by Tegan and Sara describes best.  I’ve always thought that this refers to the ebb and flow of a relationship and being honest about the fact that there will be times when your interest in the other person wanes.  In these instances, you become more interested in something or someone else, but you always come back to your partner.  Jules’s cheating falls at an intersection between all these definitions, and that makes it particularly challenging to figure out just how bad her actions are.

            These complications are interesting, but they never hide the fact that the characters are thin and the plot is stale.  I don’t understand why this script got such high praise, and I can’t help but feel that this film seemed more interesting to people simply because the home was headed by two women.  Of course two women can form a family, and of course they can have the same problems as heterosexual couples.  I don’t think that’s a novel idea, even way back in 2010.

            Other Notes:

Ø  The dialogue is clunky, especially early on.  There are exchanges that, while natural, are boring to watch.

Ø  The kid’s friends are clichés, and boring ones at that

Ø  Like Paul, this movie seemed a little self-satisfied.