That Awkward Moment

With man-child overkill at a crisis point in films and TV shows, any mainstream bro-com focusing on three attractive guys who aren't leftovers from "The Hangover" or second-stringers from the Apatow buffoon brigade is a relief. There might still be a place for Zach Galifianakis's unkempt insouciance, but it is nice to see that leading men who hold grown-up jobs and occasionally practice hygiene are making a comeback.

At the very least, the makers of "That Awkward Moment" should get credit for savvy casting, as the opening minutes of this surface-slick slice of post-college life among young male Manhattanites invitingly suggests. With Zac Efron still transitioning from his "High School Musical" teenybopper-dom, it was wise to match him with two talented stars on the rise, Michael B. Jordan of "Fruitvale Station" and Miles Teller of "The Spectacular Now" (of course, some of us have been on the Teller train ever since "Rabbit Hole" and his Willard in the "Footloose" remake).

With Efron as glib alpha male Jason, Jordan as straight man Mikey, and Teller as jokey sidekick Daniel, this bunch initially seems fun hang with. They do boy talk with brash aplomb, drink abundantly with no ill effects, enjoy the kind of hip-chic living quarters that they couldn't possibly afford (known as "Friends" syndrome) and can make a decent running gag out of how white people don't know who Morris Chestnut is. You might question Daniel's presumptuous need to hand out Viagra like breath mints to his pals as they head out on the prowl, but it does lead to one the movie's best sight gags.

But it doesn't take long—somewhere between Jason pronouncing how he hates it when a casual bedroom partner suddenly asks where their relationship is going (hence, the "moment" of the title) and Mikey learning that his cheating wife wants a divorce—before it becomes clear that this will be just another rehash of an all-too-familiar manly meme: Commitment-phobes who seek one-night stands without strings yet somehow end up getting tangled in amour.

Declaring solidarity with Mikey's sudden turn of events, the three take a vow of singlehood–which shouldn't be difficult, since that is already the path they supposedly have chosen. But then Jason falls for Ellie (British up-and-comerImogen Poots, all blue saucer eyes, funky blond hair and almost-OK American accent). Daniel suddenly decides to get serious with friend-turned-lover Chelsea (Mackenzie Davis, who proves captivating despite being stuck in one of several underwritten female roles). As for Mikey, all he foolishly wants to do is to woo his wife back.

If comedy is in the details, that is where "That Awkward Moment" falls short, with its plethora of plot holes and lapses in logic. Jason and Daniel are supposed to be genius book-jacket designers, but their art wouldn't be worthy of posting on a fridge alongside a kid's crayon scribbles. Meanwhile, Mikey is a doctor at a hospital, yet his schedule hardly oppressive. Ellie invites Jason to a "dress-up" surprise party for her birthday, and instead of donning his good suit, he shows up in an outfit that would make an S&M devotee blush. OK, Jason was confused about what "dress-up" meant. But why would he wear such an embarrassing outfit anyway, knowing that Ellie's friends and family would be there?

Matters grow more problematic as Efron's storyline begins to overwhelm that of his cohorts. The more we learn about Jason, it becomes clear that he is a world-class jerk, the kind who declares, "We are the selfish generation," as if that were a good thing. Is it really that romantic for him and Ellie to pose as a well-off couple interested in an expensive Gramercy Park abode and then steal the key to a private area when the real estate agent isn't looking?

For a raunchy comedy, there is surprisingly little sex, much of it perfunctory. Once an untimely death occurs and Thanksgiving arrives (apparently our saddest national holiday), all seems lost, and Efron—his hair pouffed perfectly, his facial scruff just so—must summon whatever outward sign of gloom and suffering that he can for the camera. And that is one awkward moment.

Captain America The Winter Solider

There are two post-credits sequences in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier," and it would be useless and unwise for me to spoil either. One of them will make no sense to you until you've seen the film. The other made no sense to me and I HAVE seen the film. I couldn't explain it if I tried, because it is merely set-up for the next Marvel movie. The audience I was with seemed to know what was going on (there were gasps). Whatever it is, it must have been pretty damn good.

I cop to being in the dark about the minutiae of the Marvel Universe. Outside of Spider-Man, which I read as a kid, everything I know about superheroes I've learned from their movies. My problem with many of them is that they only preach to the choir, operating under the assumption that everyone in the audience knows all the hymns. It's a lot easier—and lazier—for a screenwriter to simply do a roll call of characters and events while letting fans fill in all the blanks. Sometimes the onscreen information is so sparse that the studio should pay you for doing all the work. Plus, the slavish devotion to lore sometimes comes at the expense of making a good movie.

With that said, "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" is a very good movie, the rare film in this genre that serves as both entry point and continuation. For a change, you can walk in cold and you won't be too lost. The actors inject some welcome, unexpected emotion into their characters. Despite the fight sequences' occasional visits to the Jason Bourne/Cuisinart school of editing, the action scenes are suspenseful. And the story has a hint of the '70s era paranoia films that starred Robert Redford and Warren Beatty.

Speaking of Redford, he shows up in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" as the type of shady power figurehead he would have been running from in hisSydney Pollack movies. Alexander Pierce is a bigshot at S.H.I.E.L.D., in charge of a defense project that has more than a hint of "Minority Report" to it. Once launched, it has the ability to zap millions of potential and actual threats with the push of a button. Of course, this needs to fall into the wrong hands, and Pierce has no problems finding a few. Redford clearly relishes his villainy, but he makes the expert decision to underplay it even while shooting people in cold blood.

When S.H.I.E.L.D. becomes compromised, and it looks as if Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is behind it, Pierce sends out an amazing amount of firepower to kill him. The most impressive weapon in his arsenal is The Winter Soldier of the title, a Russian assassin with a metal arm and an intensity matched only by another of his targets, Captain America (Chris Evans). Avoid the IMDB if you don't want to know who The Winter Soldier is, but I expect you know already. I won't tell you anything except that the final showdown between hero and assassin is rife with a refreshing amount of fraternity and sacrifice.

"Captain America: The Winter Soldier" re-introduces Evans' nearly 100 year old character, Steve Rogers, as he is jogging around Washington D.C. Rogers runs his laps so quickly (after all, he IS a superhero) that he keeps passing Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) before Wilson can complete one of his. "To your left!" Rogers keeps yelling as he passes by, much to Wilson's bemused annoyance.

When the two officially meet, Mackie and Evans play the short scene in a manner that immediately suggests the start of a beautiful friendship. (This makes sense if you know who Sam Wilson really is.) Their chemistry allows us a more personal investment in their action sequences, some of which I'm almost ashamed to admit had me worried for the good guys.

What struck me most about how Mackie, Evans and Scarlett Johansson (who returns as Natasha Romanoff) interact is the way they look at each other. Watch their body language as they gently tease each other in their quiet scenes, and notice how directors Anthony and Joe Russo frame them. There's a genuine emotional shorthand at work, especially from Johansson, who is excellent here. Jackson's Nick Fury also has a good rapport with Evans, whose "aw shucks" boyishness is a perfect fit for a guy named "Captain America." Jackson does more with a line reading than some of his lines deserve.

Jackson's Fury also gets a good amount to do in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier," including a leading role in the film's best action sequence, a demonstration of just how indestructible (or rather, destructible) Fury's motor vehicle is. He also gets one of those "Deep Blue Sea" moments you will not see coming, and a nod to "Pulp Fiction" that only eagle-eyed viewers will catch.

During its 136 minutes, "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" unleashes a lot of what the MPAA refers to as "intense sequences of violence, gunplay and action." Every villain has a weapon that fires a gazillion rounds of ammo, yet nobody is as accurate as ScarJo with a pistol. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely keep the plot streamlined and the verbal interplay brisk. They find not only a great cameo for Marvel veteran Stan Lee, they also work the gag as an excuse for the superhero equivalent of a throwback jersey.

Of all the Avengers characters, Captain America is probably my favorite. Heed that when you notice my 3-1/2 star rating. It's his old-fashioned corniness that intrigues me. Though I liked two of his movies, Tony Stark is an R-rated, debauched smartass trapped in a PG-13 convention. The Hulk only works in small doses. And I never knew what to make of Thor, and judging from his movies, neither do the filmmakers. Captain America seems closest, at least in these movies, to a character whose human alter-ego doesn't seem canned and set in stone. There's a vulnerability to Steve Rogers; he has growth potential, both as a man and a hero.

This is the most fun I've had at one of these Marvel movies since the first "Captain America" movie. Take that with whatever grain of superhero salt you wish.

The Avengers

At my screening of Marvel’s The Avengers, the audience couldn’t wait until the end of the film before erupting in applause. In the midst of a massive action sequence in the third act of the story, the entire Avengers team, including Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Hawkeye, and Black Widow, assembled on screen and seeing them together was too amazing to ignore. It was a tribute to how entertaining the film truly was; a reaction to a wonderful payoff moment built up by well-crafted characters, witty dialogue and a thoroughly thrilling script. And I won’t be surprised if happens again and again once the movie is released worldwide. 

A direct sequel that follows the events of the previous Marvel Universe movies, the film begins when Loki (Tom Hiddleston) finds his way back to Earth and steals the Tesseract – an alien source of pure energy – and threatens to enslave the human race with the help of his extraterrestrial army (called the Chitauri). Seeing no other option, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the leader of the covert government outfit known as S.H.I.E.L.D., assembles the team of superheroes known as The Avengers (Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner) to stop Loki’s plans. 

Rather than creating an uneven mix or trying to focus more heavily on any one specific character, writer/director Joss Whedon has constructedThe Avengers as a balanced ensemble. In addition to everyone getting at least one great action sequence, all of the characters are fully fleshed out and given an arc to work with, whether it’s Captain America’s struggle to adjust in the modern world, Thor’s guilt about his brother, Iron Man’s ego and single-mindedness, or Hulk’s fear of his own power. Even Black Widow and Hawkeye, who were largely minimized in their previous appearances, are fully fleshed out and provided with backstories that give us a better understanding of their characters. 

As fun as the other Marvel movies have been to this point, the action sequences have operated on a small scale, and The Avengers does more than compensate. Seemingly taking on a philosophy of “go big or go home,” the action is not only pure spectacle, but perfectly paced and shot by Whedon, who makes frequent cuts so that we can see everything that’s going on with the different heroes. The final battle sequence between the superhero team and Loki’s army is better than all of the action in the other Marvel movies combined and multiplied by ten. It earns the buildup from all the preceding films by being the most epic title we’ve seen with these characters yet. 

Over the course of his career, Whedon has become well known for his smart characters, quick wit, and emotional gut punches, and this film will only serve to bolster that reputation. Though never even coming close to spoof territory, the movie is actually very funny, both in dialogue (such as Captain America actually recognizing a pop culture reference from The Wizard of Oz) and physical humor (most notably a confrontation between Hulk and Loki). Though a tiny bit off towards the beginning, the pacing of the film quickly comes together as the writer/director is able to both tell the story he wants to tell and mix in multiple high-tension fight and action sequences. 

As a lifelong comic book fan, I walked into The Avengers with the highest hopes and deepest fears. A little over two hours later, as the credits began to roll, I turned to the friend sitting next to me, smiled and exclaimed, “They actually did it!” What Whedon and Marvel have created here is not just extraordinary, but one of the most entertaining and satisfying comic book movies yet.

Lucy

Towards the sticky end of a summer of films based on toys, comic-books and other films, here, at last, is a film based on the Kantian model of transcendental idealism.

In his 1781 page-turner, the Critique of Pure Reason, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant warned that the human brain, in its pinky-grey feebleness, has to rattle the world into an order it doesn’t possess purely to make sense of it. Otherwise, as Kant snappily puts it, “all constitution, all relations of objects in space and time, indeed space and time themselves, would disappear.”

Lucy, the new film from Luc Besson, is about a young woman whose brain becomes powerful enough to see the world as it really is – which, as it turns out, is exactly like a Luc Besson film. The plot has been inspired by the old myth that human beings use only 10 per cent of their potential brainpower – which, like all myths, speaks to deeper fears about the universe and our dispensable role within it.

The title character, played by Scarlett Johansson, is a student in Taipei, and when we meet her, lingering on the steps of a hotel with a dope in a cowboy hat, her smeared make-up and leopard-print jacket tells us she’s a habitual maker of bad decisions. Sure enough, she’s soon shanghaied into a narcotics-smuggling operation, and a pouch of blue crystals – “something the kids in Europe are going to go crazy for,” the gang’s boar-like kingpin, played by the Oldboy star Choi Min-sik, explains – is stitched, kangaroo-like, into her belly.

But the bag bursts, an enormous dose of the experimental drug is absorbed into her bloodstream, and her brain goes into overdrive. Side-effects include: mind-reading, the ability to manipulate matter at a distance, and the tendency to fizz like a human Alka-Seltzer.

Handily, while Lucy’s latent powers begin to manifest, an eminent neuroscientist, played by Morgan Freeman, is simultaneously delivering a lecture on the mind’s most far-flung abilities in a Paris Lycée. This stuff, he says, is what happens when the brain reaches 20 or 30 per cent of its operational capacity. “What happens at a 100 per cent?” a student asks. “Well, we’re reaching into the realms of science-fiction,” hums the professor. “But we just don’t know.”

Besson, however, has a few ideas, and the film goes hurtling off, with an exhilarated loopiness that clashes joyfully with Johansson’s deadpan poise, towards this neurological event horizon. As Lucy becomes ever more sharply aware of the world around her, Johansson’s eyes scan the faces of the people around her, if her pupils are mouse-pointers searching for hotspots to click on. You can hardly wait for her to climb behind the steering wheel of a car: when she finally does, it’s in Paris in the middle of rush-hour, and she weaves between the oncoming traffic like a sheep dog through a slalom.

In a memo attached to the shooting script, Besson described Lucy as a film in three acts: “The beginning is Leon The Professional, the middle is Inception, the end is 2001: A Space Odyssey.” That’s an honest admission of the familiarity of the film’s ideas, but also a boast about how high it’s stretched in order to pinch them: Besson could just as easily have cited Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life or the Wachowskis’ original Matrix film as Lucy’s legitimate forerunners. (It also bears a resemblance to the 2011 Bradley Cooper vehicle Limitless, in which a drug is also used to breach the mythical 10 per cent brain barrier, although Besson has said in interviews that his script predates the Cooper film.)

It’s also, happily, part of an impromptu Vedic cycle of contemporary science-fiction films starring Scarlett Johansson. Having transcended human life in Besson’s film, the actress returns to Earth as a benign digital spirit in Spike Jonze’s Her, and then again as a heavenly destroyer in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. That reminds us she’s the actress making the most consistently fascinating choices in Hollywood right now, and also that everything she does is, at the very least, worth watching. Lucy is more than that. It’s the blockbuster of the summer.

Guardians of the galaxy

You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but there was once a time when I had quite a bit of expertise in the Marvel Universe. I came as close to tearing up while reading a comic book as I’ll ever do when the Scarlet Witch finally married The Vision­—as eloquent an argument for marriage equality as genre fiction has ever essayed, by the way. I did, I must admit, check out well before the entity called The Guardians of the Galaxy turned up in said universe. I bring this up because there are some MU characters in the movie "Guardians of the Galaxy" that I did recognize—super-evil demigod Thanos, Drax The Destroyer, and one or two others I guess—but I ultimately found that it was that particular continuity, the need to tie this movie’s adventures into something larger, that made the movie lag a bit.

In many respects, “Guardians,” directed and co-written by indie wit James Gunn, and starring buffed-up former schlub Chris Pratt and Really Big Sci-Fi Blockbuster vet Zoe Saldana (here dyed green as opposed to her "Avatar" blue), is a fun and relatively fresh space Western. Think “Firefly” pitched at 15-year-olds, with a lot of overt "Star Wars" nods. And super-“irreverent” dialogue that is, more often than not, genuinely funny. The wisecracking by the characters played by Pratt (a kind of junior Han Solo) and voiced by Bradley Cooper (whose Rocket Raccoon, who is, yes, a genetically altered raccoon) is so incessant viewers of a certain age might wonder whether this movie has been put through the "What’s Up Tiger Lily" dialogue-replacement treatment before release. 

Pratt’s self-styled “Starlord” and Rocket are not the strangest of initially inadvertent teammates in this intergalactic posse. Saldana’s Gamora is a stealthy warrior princess who’s been lying low in an evil family before revealing her good intentions; wrestling star Dave Bautista’s Drax is a vengeance-driven behemoth whose florid language only briefly masks his inability to take anything other than literally; and Rocky’s “muscle,” Groot, is a walking, minimally talking tree. These guys are entertainingly motley, which makes the fact that their mission, to save the universe from a mass-murdering megalomaniac who seeks an item which will grant him unimaginable mass-murdering power (yes, more mass-murdering power than he ever had before), is generic in a way that’s pretty consistent with movies of this sort.

You may have noticed, incidentally, that a lot of film critics tend to get kind of defensive when reviewing movies based on comic books. Like, you probably noticed that up top I tried to claim some comic book-respecting bonafides. I’ve done this thing before when reviewing comic-book movies. Some day, I may have to actually bring out the big guns, like the fact that I used to be palsy with Mike Kaluta, or that I once went to a Halloween party at Berni Wrightson’s house. I don’t do this because I’m afraid of getting death threats from easily irritated comic book fans (which hasn’t happened to me, and thanks). I do it because as someone who got a lot out of comics growing up, and still has a healthy respect for the graphic form, I find comic book movies kind of frustrating, and am bent out of shape by having my frustration chalked up to a lack of understanding of the form. 

What does this have to do with “Guardians?” It ties into what I mentioned before. While this movie is pretty lively in a lot of its particulars, the stilted portent with which its villains—the bumpy-jawed Thanos (Josh Brolin, not that you can tell) and the megalomaniacal Ronan (Lee Pace)—make themselves felt is pretty tired. The “funny animal” tribute/homages of “Guardians” bump up uncomfortably against the faux-majesty of the bad guys in a way that the actual comic-book form is malleable enough to at least sidestep. I think Gunn knows it, too: one of the movie’s only genuinely subversive jokes sees one of the heroes actually yawning in the pro-forma slow-motion “walk to destiny” shot that heralds the movie’s climax. Which climax is, as is also pro forma, big and loud and filled with indiscriminate destruction and slaughter of sentient beings. But as it takes place on a planet other than the one the audience is on and so doesn’t involve the razing of a recognizable city, it’s a little less troubling than it might have been. 

It seems as if I’m listing a lot of not-fun things in what I’ve called a fun movie, but again, I’m just voicing some frustration because, in my puny mind—which can only imagine the extent to which Gunn and his team had to fight for every bit of creative license they were allowed—the not-fun parts seemed entirely avoidable. What will win the day among those not given to overthinking will be the charm of the cast—which also includes Benicio Del Toro in a bit role that allows him to exercise a generous amount of his legendary performing eccentricity, and Michael Rooker in a gruff part that would have gone to Ron Perlman had Guillermo Del Toro directed the movie—the sunniness of its eventual optimism, and the infectiousness of its vintage-Earth-pop soundtrack. A soundtrack the film’s characters appreciate as much as the audience will, which is part of the whole point.