Time for a look back at the summer’s best and worst in the 2014 Summer Movie Roundup.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
RELATED: See all of Marvin Brown’s reviews from his film archive.
Summer Movie Series
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Rated PG-13
Marvel Studios
This summer superhero action flick is going to be a hit because its emphasis is on humor and music—two elements that enhance any film when done well. We get to see things blown up real good, but mostly we like the songs and the banter and brawling between the Guardians. Marvel smartly gambled that audiences needing a respite from the onslaught of first-string superheroes might give this a try.
The Guardians is a ragtag team of, you guessed it, outlaws forced to combine its talents and snarky comments to take on a force bent on the destruction of, you guessed it, the galaxy. The enemies, the instruments of destruction, the far-flung interstellar locales, the double-crosses all fall within the scope of this kind of movie. But when Star-Lord pops a worn cassette tape into his Walkman and starts jamming out to earthbound hits circa 1970s, you smile at the absurdity and go along with it. Why not? Sure, we’re light years from earth and decades ahead of modern times, but why should that hinder our love for The Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back”?
Each of the five Guardians left an impression on me, but for my money I liked Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), a genetically altered raccoon who’s sadly aware of his manufactured nature and really into heavy weapons. That he doesn’t look ridiculous piloting starships or blasting away with guns at least as large as himself is a testament to the f/x team. I also like human Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), aka Star-Lord, who’s handsome, skillful, arrogant—the qualities always evident in superheroes—but more importantly good-hearted and repeatedly willing to make bold sacrifices for others. The kids will like Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), a treelike being whose mode of communicating consists entirely of the phrase “I am Groot!”
There’s a sad-sweet prologue of young Peter confronting his dying mother that’s well executed but gains depth when we return to the moment late in the film and truly recognize its value. I also like how the movie established pretty quickly that each of the Guardians for the most part like and accept each other. It’s a time saver. We know they’re going to make good teammates, they know they make good teammates so why waste time pretending like they’re not?
Guardians of the Galaxy goes down easy and certainly leaves space for a sequel—that’s the Marvel way. I suspect it’ll do even more business on video when those who didn’t think they had a taste for it finally see it at home and realize how much fun it is. And the music? Come on! “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” “Ooh Child.” “Cherry Bomb.” “Come and Get Your Love.” And its use of “Hooked on a Feeling” steals away that song’s long association with Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.
| Marvin Brown’s Movie Review Archive
Summer Movie Series
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014)
Rated R
Aldamisa Entertainment
I was gobsmacked as I watched the first Sin City in 2005. Not only was it visually sumptuous, but its noir-drenched characters were smartly drawn and its bleak interconnecting stories, individually and collectively, engaged. Every frame of the Robert Rodriguez–Frank Miller codirected effort vibrated with originality and purpose.
I was deflated watching this sequel. Not only was there nothing new to the proceedings, its visuals seemed to rest firmly on its laurels. No real effort seemed to be made to one-up the masterful look of the original. The films boast crisp, hyper-real black-and-white cinematography, with color splashed in here and there for effect. To recreate the look of Miller’s groundbreaking graphic novels, the films employ stylized camera angles and movement, smoke and shadow, jump-cuts, smash-cuts, projection, animation—everything.
Watching the first film, I remembered thinking a lot of effort went into how and when to apply color in an essentially colorless landscape. Blood or lips or eyes and teeth or eyeglass lens tipped the viewer to method and motive. This time there’s a randomness to the use of color, like there was a mission to put some color somewhere in every frame, without thought of why (or if) it’s needed.
The plot is a rehash of tales better told the first time around. We return to Basin City, a lethal, sess-pool metropolitan city inhabited by hardboiled lowlifes and dames in distress. In the first film, we spent time with the characters before the mayhem began; this time characters are tripping over each other with nary an arc between them. And remember the visit to Old Town, the red-light district where even the cops are afraid to go? In the original film, it’s populated and protected by prostitutes, several of whom are given names, personalities and things to do. This time, there’s a perfunctory trip to Old Town that renders the nameless women as relevant as any number of thugs running throughout the film.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Inception, 300 Days of Summer) brings bluster and consideration to a role that ultimately is much ado about nada. His plight and fate seemed completely avoidable and he seemed smart enough to sidestep all of it. Jessica Alba’s stripper character Nancy worked better the first time when she was a minor player; this time her expanded role underscores the character’s thinness. Josh Brolin (Oldboy, 2013), who usually engages, here is wasted in a snarling role that’s one note; at least Clive Owen had fun with the same character in the original film. Eva Green as the oft-nude femme fatale is ridiculously obvious from the moment she slinks into a bar until her final moments on screen. I never believed her character. Even Mickey Rourke’s fan favorite Marv (he returns out of chronology) can’t get this mess off the ground. Only Powers Boothe’s power-mad senator brings energy to the proceedings.
What a bust.
| Marvin Brown’s Movie Review Archive
Summer Movie Series
Lucy (2014)
Rated R
Canal+
Director Luc Besson (The Professional, La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element) has been off his game for some time now. Lucy is a step back to form, but he doesn’t quite get there. The film wants to have more depth than its screenplay allows. In addition to being an action film, a fight film, a philosophical and literal take on the evolution of man, quantum ideas of consciousness, the film wants to explore the end of human existence and what may lie beyond it. Right. But mostly it’s an action film.
Lucy (Scarlett Johansson, Her) is an American studying in Taiwan who hooks up with Mr. Wrong, who inadvertently pulls her into a synthetic drug ring. Forced to be a mule for an improbable narcotic that will either kill you deader than dead, or jumpstart your brain function beyond its known capabilities, Lucy—through a ruptured implant—gets the latter.
At first we know the drill: we’ve seen Johansson as the Black Widow in three Marvel movies now. She can dispatch roomfuls of armed men using martial arts and various weaponry. But once the drug improves her brain function exponentially, who needs weapons when you can control matter … then read minds … then sense emotion in its purest form … then visualize human souls … then affect space and time itself?
Morgan Freeman’s on hand as a renowned scientist whose theories on the mysteries and depths of the human mind are validated by Lucy’s existence. She seeks him out after reading his life’s work in mere minutes. Meanwhile, the leader of the drug ring Min-sik Choi (Oldboy, 2003) wants his product back—by any means necessary. There’s something to be said about a man who continues to pursuit a woman who has stopped bullets midflight and can reverse time itself. He’s pretty cocksure.
All of this can be fun, and if you’ve come to this for the action and fight scenes alone, you’ll get your fill. But in trying to be more than an action film, while not really taking its philosophical components full weight, the movie feels disjointed.
It’s Besson’s incredible La Femme Nikita crossed with 2011’s Limitless (which itself bites off more than it can chew) but isn’t as good as either of those films.
This film might have erred by casting Johansson, who certainly has acting chops and action-film bonafides. Unfortunately, because she brings the expectations of a hide-kicking, name-taking superhero, we’re denied what should have been a jolt from seeing a vulnerable stranger in a strange land transformed into an awesome instrument of destruction and resurrection.
If Besson is trying to speak something to the nature of evolution and violence in society, it gets lost in the clutter.
| Marvin Brown’s Movie Review Archive
Campus MovieFest 2014
Universal Studios
DAY 3: The Films
I’ll let my brother John Brown handle this:
“So seven hours later 71 short films seen. Lots of laughs, incredible cinematography, great writing and story lines some touching moments and all with the best movie watcher in the world — my big bro!”
John Brown, left, and Marvin Brown at the 2014 Campus MovieFest at Universal Studios. Photo credit: John Brown
Campus MovieFest 2014
Universal Studios
DAY 2: Workshops
Producer-writer-actor Grant Heslov (Argo, The American) details the struggles and successes of the collaborative process. (Credit: Marvin Brown)
Tom Shadyac, with Marvin Brown. Shadyac, director of hits Ace Ventura, Bruce Almighty and the Nutty Professor remake, shares his experience of walking away from commercial films. Shadyac, seriously injured in a bike accident, would reevaluate his life and career, culminating in his life-affirming documentary I Am.
Director Jake Kasdan (The Zero Effect, Bad Teacher) fields question concerning his career, while promoting his upcoming comedy Sex Tape. (Credit: Marvin Brown)
Up next: Day 3, The Films
The Rover (2014)
Rated R
Porchlight Films
In some dystopian future, 10 years after the “collapse,” a man (Guy Pearce) sits in his car on a deserted Australian highway. As flies buzz around him and he stares into nothing as the sun beats down on his shaggy, haggard form, we notice the shot is held for quite a while. So long, in fact, we begin to wonder if the reel is stuck. The soundtrack punctuates the silence with atonal chords that seem louder than usual.
These things—the lingering shot, the abrasive sound—establish not simply tone, but theme. You’re going to be subjected to both for the rest of the film.
Pearce eventually gets out of the car and walks across dusty, sun-scorched road and into some kind of makeshift store. Its proprietors are silent, worn men and boys who can hardly be bothered by Pearce’s presence.
While he’s in the place, a carful of panicked thieves wreck nearby and steal Pearce’s car as a substitute. The rest of the film concerns Pearce’s pursuit of the thieves.
This is a strange, uncomfortable film that repeatedly uproots expectations. The more we learn about Pearce the less we like him; it’s probably for the best that he’s hardly defined. We know he’s handy with a gun and he doesn’t blink at shocking violence. He just wants his car back.
Aside from deliberately held shots and grating ambient score, David Michôd’s film builds a creepy undertone by presenting women as scarce, while shirtless boys hover in the corners of many scenes.
Pearce is united with the abandoned brother (Robert Pattinson of the Twilight series) of one of the thieves. He’s a “half wit” who can’t decide if he wants to reunite with his brother or kill him.
Pearce brings his dependable intensity to the proceedings. He’s so hard externally we don’t know what to make of his character when he sheds tears. Pattinson, nearly unrecognizable and intriguing with his mumbling accent and vacant stare, with this film and Cosmopolis (2013) firmly establishes capabilities beyond playing a brooding, glistening vampire.
The film is bleak and humorless, offering a convincing pull into its atmosphere. There’s a powerful scene of Pearce detailing the fate of his wife. And another in which a young girl becomes a causal victim of violence.
But you’ll wonder how, despite so much violence, death and a short runtime that it still feels like you’ve lived hours drifting in this dusty, dirty, sweaty, sticky off-beat film. I wanted to take a shower afterward.
| Marvin Brown’s Movie Review Archive
Campus MovieFest 2014
Universal Studios
DAY 2: Bloodcast
Clarke Wolfe of Nerdist.com and Ryan Turek of ShockTillYouDrop.com participated in the Bloodcast workshop during the 2014 Campus MovieFest at Universal Studios.
The humorous duo can whip up engaging discussions out of thin air. That fact that they know their stuff, horror-wise, made this one of the best workshop sessions of the festival. Horror topics ran the gamut, from old school flicks to torture porn gross-outs to meta-rrific genre classics like Scream.
Great stuff.
Clarke Wolfe, left, of Nerdist.com and Ryan Turek of ShockTillYouDrop.com
Up next: Workshops
Me, with Tom Shadyac, director of Ace Ventura, The Nutty Professor, Patch Adams and Bruce Almighty.
Writer/director/producer Grant Heslov (Argo, The Monuments Men)
Film Review
Very Good Girls (2013)
Rated R
Groundswell Productions
Very Good Girls is an uneven coming-of-age drama featuring Dakota Fanning and Elizabeth Olsen (Godzilla, Martha Marcy May Marlene). The ingredients are here—two skilled actors, a summer of sexual awakening, a lovers’ triangle, a sudden death—but the film never gels.
Best friends, college-bound Lily (Fanning) and earth-child Gerry (Olsen), make a pact to lose their virginity before summer’s end. Things get complicated when they fall for the same fellow, David (Boyd Holbrook, looking indistinguishable from actor Charlie Hunnam).
The film immediately engages with an impressive cast, then, strangely, begins to falter, scene by scene. The problem, I think, resides at the screenplay level.
Writer/director Naomi Foner Gyllenhall’s secondary characters are wasted in snapshot scenes. Gerry’s Bohemian parents—Richard Dreyfus and Demi Moore—are the expected hippy-attired, folk-music-playing cutouts. Lily’s folks—Clark Gregg and Ellen Barkin—are standard middle-class, middle-aged, boozy professionals. To be fair, Gregg has a couple of father-daughter scenes he attempts wrangle from cliche.
Every time a scene arrives—a death, an infidelity—it’s blunted by pacing or odd character responses. One exception is a gentle first-time love-making scene that is effective in its use of music, framing, acting and tone.
The film might have held together better, been more impactful, if balance had been brought to the main characters. This is Fanning’s show, and she can act. But Olsen, who can also act, is wasted. If equal measure had been brought to each girl, the conflict—both girls falling for the same artsy bad boy—might have moved us.
| Marvin Brown’s Movie Review Archive
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