MIB III

Saw Men in Black III.  Also a lot of fun.  People were actually laughing out loud in the theater and I was one of them.

Oddly enough this is the second movie that I have seen recently where Danny Elfman did the music and both of them included period music and from the same period.  Also, the mention of ‘happenings’.  I’m not sure if there is any significance to that, but it makes you go ‘hmmm’.

I did not see this is 3D so I can’t say if it was any good that way but I can say that it doesn’t need to be in 3D to be good.  I don’t think you can ever get back to the level of the first movie, but this was a good entry in the series.

Now this is not a deep, philosophical movie.  It’s a summer SF action movie and you know what to expect from the franchise.  Although there is some introspection and consideration of how people become who they are.

Again – as in Dark Shadows – we have a man out of time, though that isn’t the focus.  Agent J time jumps back to 1969 and there’s some commentary on racism, with some humor thrown in, and the attitudes and fashion and music are from then, but it’s atmosphere.  The major mention is really just the differences in technology used by the agents.  And of course the younger Agent K.

Personally, I think that Josh Brolin nailed the performance.  He is a young Agent K.  He is thoroughly enjoyable in this movie and a reason in himself to see it.  It was a lot of fun watching him.  I didn’t think there was anything distracting, either.  You just end up watching a younger version of the character.  If they want to replace Tommy Lee Jones, either because they think he’s too old or because he doesn’t want to do it anymore, they can just bring Josh Brolin’s version of the character to the future and take it from there.

I also really like the character of Griffin – a multidensional being who exists in pretty much all realities and potential realities of time at once with a thorough understanding of how and why they work the way they do.  He’s a bit odd at first, but funny and sympathetic and he brings some pathos to parts of the movie.  Don’t worry about how all that works, just see the movie, it’ll make sense.

Speaking of making sense, movies don’t always, especially if you take the time to think about them after you see them.  You think about the inconsistencies or where the storyline goes off from where they’ve been before.  But what matters most for me is whether or not you get pulled out of the movie by that while you’re watching it.  I didn’t.  Internally it all plays well and the movie holds together.

I say go see it.

And Frank, the pug, is sort of in this one, too.