Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Director: Joss Whedon

IMDB Page

Score:

So, What I’m Basically Saying Is Joss Whedon Is Michael Bay If He Had Grown Up

It must be nice to be Joss Whedon, and yet, I can’t imagine the pressure of being the anointed Savior of the Nerds.  The original Avengers film back in 2012 helped break the mold of superhero films wide open by combining the entire Marvel universe into a frothy blended drink of humor, action, and an honest-to-God plotline.  It also netted $207 million on the opening weekend, which was nice.  So just imagine having to be the guy to follow yourself up after that kind of performance.

It was a tough act, but only made tougher by the way Joss went about constructing Age of Ultron alongside fellow writers...  oh right, there aren’t any.  There’s only two tacked on credits for the original comic stories, going to Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, which really only goes to show just how much of a maniac Joss Whedon truly is.

He not only brought back the entire cast of the first film, he also had to make it run concurrently in the greater Marvel universe, and he adds more characters.  This wealth of characters is really what separates AoU from Avengers.  The first film was tightly choreographed, with every character getting equal billing, equal motivation, and equal screen time.  AoU, meanwhile, just doesn’t have the sheer space that would require.  We’re introduced to not only the new baddie, in the eponymous Ultron (James Spader, and goodness isn’t he just creepy...), but also to our two new “borrowed” allies, Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his sister, Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen)—thankfully without the questionable family ties the alternate universe comics saw fit to give them.  Add in the appearances by War Machine, The Vision (Paul Bettany, finally out of the computer), Falcon, and a few others, and you end up with an active cast of eleven named characters in the final fight scenes alone, and a solid fifteen or more showing up throughout the runtime.

Thankfully, the previous and sundry films in the Marvel universe have done their jobs, so we know most of these characters (sudden, whiplash-inducing revelations about one of the Avengers notwithstanding), but you’d better have done your homework.  This film has no patience for questions, and there will be no stopping once the train is in motion.  Don’t remember who Quicksilver is?  Tough cookies.  Didn’t get to see Guardians of the Galaxy?  Well, then you’ll probably be very lost as to what they’re fighting over at the end (also, you’re a horrible person.  watch it).  Joss Whedon will not pull the car over, so you’d better have gone before you leave.  And even if you do know your backstories and catch the sly winks to other storylines, you still may have to fight to keep your brain from switching off into a numb stupor by the ending, which has so many characters running around it’s just madness to try to keep it all straight and pay attention to any one of them.

This is the greatest weakness of the film by far.  Even at 141 minutes, Age of Ultron is bursting at the seams with plot details that don’t have time to get fleshed out.  Ultron comes from... where, exactly?  Why was he an error, and how did he succeed is being created at all?  Why is Jarvis suddenly—you know what, this is gonna get spoilery, so I’ll just say that you’ll have to trust me that nothing gets explained.  At all.

Added to that is the film’s almost absurd reliance on CGI (over 3000 scenes were computer rendered, blowing apart any other film to date), and the fact that the soundtrack is repetitive and pounds you with the theme riff like Mjolnir (it more resembles the 10-second music loop of an early-2000’s DVD menu than anything by this point), and there’s enough legitimate quibbles to keep a critic in business for a while.

All that being said, if you’re the kind of person who just appreciates a Marvel movie for the action and some actually really well-written quips (and judging by the $192 million opening weekend, you likely are), you’ll be anything but disappointed.  Nobody but Joss can write this kind of stuff, where the action goes hand in hand with one-liners that come straight from the character’s psyches, and it just never gets old or comes off as forced.  The superhero genre as a whole is often plagued by power creep: the heroes overcame the previous threat, so something must be greater, which means the heroes must grow, which means the next threat must be even greater, rinse and repeat.  Joss seems to be a master of using all of these tropes organically, to break down the team by exposing its legitimate flaws and the members’ own personality quirks, and to build them up again into something whole.  Far from the Pizza Roll-esque junk food appeal that Guardians of the Galaxy had, Age of Ultron is a film without a lot of depth, but with some great points to indicate a good storyteller at work.  To someone like me who appreciates storytelling, it’s quite gratifying to see someone use such obvious cliches and stitch them into the background so well that you don’t even notice their presence.

So, the big question then: did I enjoy it?  You bet your—(Language...)  Sorry, Cap.  Yes.  Yes, I did.  And I’m wagering you will, too.

Scores (out of 10)

Acting: 7

Story: 6

Visuals: 9

Sound: 6

Enjoyment: 9

Overall Score: 8/10

Mud (2012)

Director: Jeff Nichols

IMDB Page

Score: 8/10

Perfect Imperfection

Mud is an oddball sort of movie.  I didn’t remember hearing much about it, as far as hype goes, but everything I had heard had been overwhelmingly positive.  The movie sort of fell from my mind and was left languishing in my Netflix queue, until I finally decided to give it a watch the other night.  I’m so very glad I did.

This is not an adventure story.  It’s not one where every detail gets meted out in the end to the audience’s satisfaction.  In fact, it’s easy to say that pretty much every character in the movie is demonstrably worse off by the end than they were at the start, but that’s because of what this movie is: a dyed-in-the-wool Coming of Age story.

The concept is simple, and almost timeless; a boy/girl on the edge of adulthood realizes that the world as it is doesn’t line up with the world as they think it should be.  In this case, the boy in question is Ellis, played by Ty Sheridan (formerly of Tree of Life), and given a depth that seems well beyond the young actor’s seasons.  Whether to credit that to the actor or the director is a mystery, but no matter what, the part is played to perfection.

I wanted to give Ty his credit where it’s due, because most of the buzz about this movie is due to the performance of Matthew McConaughey as the eponymous Mud—and it’s well-deserved buzz, at that.  This is a movie almost custom-made for McConaughey.  While he’s not as flighty and unstable as a method actor, Matt is a true chameleon, capable of wearing any skin and blending into a roll so completely that you truly lose sight of where the actor ends and the role begins.

That honesty is a trend throughout Mud, from the simple look at river life in Arkansas to the pains and disappointments of growing up.  There’s no Hollywood-esque slap when the husband and wife are fighting, there’s just a whack to the head that sends a message more than it could possibly have delivered pain.  Everything is dirty, and realistic, and imperfect.  And that’s really what Mud is about.  It’s a story of how utterly imperfect people are, that no one can really live up to the dreams and ideals we may have, and how all we can do about it is move forward and either learn to deal with it or wallow in our own miserable denial.

Mud isn’t quite worth the “masterpiece” moniker, but it’s a heartfelt movie.  The emotions it delivers are very real, and equally valid.  Jeff Nichols has proven himself in the past to be quite adept at this style of storytelling (Take Shelter, Shotgun Stories), and Mud seems thus far like a culmination of his abilities as a writer/director.  

Scores (out of 10)

Acting: 9

Story: 7

Visuals: 6

Sound: 7

Enjoyment: 8

Overall Score: 8/10

Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010)

Director: Banksy (sort of)

IMDB Page

Score: 8/10

Spot The Joke

-or-

In Which Your Reviewer Waxes Poetic On The Nature Of Art

Exit Through The Gift Shop is a film that I finally saw for the first time, despite knowing it by reputation for years now.  Even if you aren’t familiar with the reclusive street artist known as Banksy, you know his art, and you almost certainly know his name.  He’s one of the most iconic non-faces to ever meet the artistic scene, and his exploits blur the line between art, satire, social commentary, and gigantic social engineering prank-fest.  His reluctance to be seen or known is as famous as his tags, which makes this documentary a bit out of left field.

The problem in reviewing this documentary lies entirely in how much you believe in it.

If you take everything at face value, then Exit is one of the most honest and subversive documentaries in history, in addition to being one of the best-made and most entertaining.  It follows a bizarre French filmmaker-turned-street artist named Thierry Guetta, a man whose look, mannerisms, and outrageous naivete towards art would rival even the likes of Tommy Wiseau.  His compulsive habit (and I do not use the term lightly) of filming everything he sees turns golden when he stumbles into the world of street art and becomes the sole documentarian of one of the most secretive art movements in history.  Upon the art turning into a commercial success, Banksy approaches Thierry about creating a documentary that would truly show street art for what it is and the messages it tries to spread—but the result is so abhorrent and incomprehensible that Banksy effectively steals Thierry’s film while he’s out money-printing his way to fame and fortune as a big-time art dealer and creates the documentary about Thierry instead.

The major problem with this is that Banksy is a well-known subversive, who revels in using irony and back-biting sarcasm to mock his targets.  It’s this knowledge that effectively leans me into the camp that sees Exit as—perhaps—the greatest satire in film history.  If true, this means that Banksy set up the character of Guetta, enlisted his friends to make a false narrative and an entire art exhibition out of scratch, and hoodwinked all of the art world with barely a wave of his hand.

It all comes down to how badly you fear being caught out of the joke when the cards fall.  If you take the story at face value, then you get a documentary about how easily art can be faked.  It’s a story that explains in excruciatingly poignant detail why everyone hates having their little brother tagging around after them: it’s not that you hate him, it’s that you can’t really have fun doing what you do when you know that in the back of your mind, your little brother is going to screw everything up, and you’re going to have to cover for him as the fun ends for everyone else.  However, if you believe that the documentary is in fact a mockumentary, then you risk being the joke in yet another of Banksy’s social experiments, running circles around yourself trying to glean more meaning from art than is actually there.

Personally, I find it all slightly too much to believe—and yet I can absolutely see it all happening for real.  When you see the most uninspired, cynical, and derivative photos selling for millions upon millions in fine art auction houses, you realize that Exit really is only a fake documentary for the fact that it came out a few years too early to be true.

Maybe the joke really is on all of us.  Banksy has certainly shown no reluctance to put himself into the sights of his own jokes before, especially as he’s achieved commercial success in a medium that despises commercialism itself.  It’s an odd paradox, which might just be the brilliance of the whole thing, really.  In the film, one of the artists really lays it all out very well, when he says that “The more important [the repeated artistic motif] seems, the more people wanna know what it is, and it gains real power from perceived power.”

Despite it all, the film really does beg some major questions that any critic, art lover, or artist must at some point answer for themselves.  Can a true artist ever make a living off of his art?  Does street art really achieve its end goals, or do street artists even have a goal to begin with?  Just what is art, anyway?

I’ve never actually been a fan of Banksy’s art, if I’m being perfectly honest.  If you ask me (and since you’re reading this, I assume you do), I find street art to be in a very hard-to-define category.  I don’t really consider most of it art, in the Justice-Potter-Stewart-I-know-it-when-I-see-it sort of way.  To me, art is an interaction between the artist and the viewer.  In the same way that you can’t have a one-sided dialogue, art has to have an idea, and it has to convey that idea.  Street art wavers in most cases between True Art Is Incomprehensible and outright Propaganda, both of which I despise with all my being.  If your audience can not interpret the meaning behind your work on their own merits (and without you explicitly spelling it out for them and/or beating them over the head with it), then you have failed as an artist.  Even Banksy himself wavers across lines for me, existing as he does mainly on shock value to attempt to scare his viewers into thinking.

The Shamalayan-esque twist, however, is that Exit Through The Gift Shop might be better at delivering a message about art than even Banksy himself is.  Banksy has (or had, at least) reached a point where his name might have just been shouting out his own message, and taking a step back behind the guise of Exit might have given him just enough distance to let us all have a moment to think about art and what it can—and should—be for all of us.

Scores (out of 10)

Acting: 7

Story: n/a

Visuals: 7

Sound: 6

Enjoyment: 9

Overall Score: 8/10