The Avengers

I’ve been hacking up mini-critiques of movies lately.  All I can say about The Avengers is that it is a great movie.  Go see it.

The action is good, the dialog is good, the script is good, the humor is good – people laughed out loud more for The Avengers than for MIB III, the character development is good, the acting and the direction are good.  Add it all up and it’s a great movie.

See this movie.  Be sure to stay until after the credits – not just the first part, stay until the very end.  There were only a half dozen other people in the theater with my wife and me by that point and we were all laughing out loud.

Snow White and the Huntsman

The trailer for Snow White and the Huntsman makes it look like a typical Hollywood fantasy action adventure movie.  It fits that genre, complete with the evil queen, the heroine she wants to kill and the kind of scruffy hero, but there is more to it than that.  The movie is also a fairy tale.  Well, it tries to be.

Before I go any further let me say that I liked the movie and I recommend it.

The story was good and that makes Snow White and the Huntsman a good movie, though it needed a better script.  I also thought that the pacing was a little off and it didn’t build the world as much as I would have liked, but that’s just a personal complaint.  They did seem to know what they wanted to do with the characters but they didn’t quite fit them all together well enough.

The blending of fantasy and the folklore elements was a little uneven but I’m impressed that they tried to do as much as they did.  To be a good fantasy adventure a movie needs more embellishment than a story built around elements of folklore and archetypes.  Fantasy requires more explanation that fairy tale archetypes need, and they did that (with the exception of my above complaint), but I don’t think they tied everything together well enough.  Still, what they did was impressive.

Don’t get me wrong, like I said, I enjoyed the movie and I say go see it.  My complaints aren’t enough to recommend against it.  Most of this is the kind of thing you only think about after the fact and I can always nit-pick.  This is a good film.  It is visually appealing, the settings and effects were good, and though the effects were used heavily in some places they weren’t distracting in their overabundance.  There are scenes suffused with CGI that are not overwhelmed by it.

I’ve read several negative reviews and I really don’t think the people who wrote them saw the same movie I saw.  Every one of them missed things and then complained that they weren’t there or they complained about things that weren’t in the movie.  Almost no one got the point of it being a fairy tale and all that that involves.  I have a feeling the reviewers were all expecting something and when they didn’t get it they criticized the movie for not being what they wanted it to be.

Everyone does seem to like Charlize Theron though, and with good reason.

The good definitely outweighs any weaknesses, which are probably not anything most people would care about anyway, so go see it.

Oh, if you are planning on taking young children be aware that there are dark parts to this film.  Actually, it is overall a dark – as in atmosphere and lighting – film.  Though the young girl next to us seemed to handle it all well.  The infant crying in the back of the theater had other reasons to do so – probably just a critic.

Don’t worry, there’s more

I fell off a bit in the movie postings but there are a couple more on the way.

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.

Dark Shadows

My wife and I saw Dark Shadows and we liked it.

I’m old enough to have watched the series when it was originally on TV so I have a concept in my mind of what Dark Shadows should be.  I never expected the movie to match that since you can’t reproduce a soap opera, or even a story arc from a TV series, in a movie.  What I was hoping for was something different that would stand on its own.  That’s pretty much what I got.  It was enough its own story that you could separate it from the series and I liked it as a retelling of the story.

I have to admit that I was worried that the movie would be too campy.  Which is not to say that there was no camp in the series, but it was a different sort than you can get from Tim Burton and Johnny Depp.  Fortunately, they did not go too far.  There was definitely more intentional humor but I thought that it was well balanced and well used. 

I say intentional because, if you don’t know the series, there was humor in unexpected and unintended places.  If they snuck a scene in the movie where the walls moved or a stage hand was on camera I missed it.  That sort of thing happened on occasion in the show and I wouldn’t have minded seeing that in the movie as a sort of homage to the original.

As an aside, the people who made Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country missed a golden opportunity to put in the line: “Damn it, Jim!  I’m a doctor not an engineer!”  But I digress.

I did catch, I think, Jonathan Frid’s brief cameo which was nice to see.

The movie played on the man out of time element without overdoing that either.  Speaking of overdoing it the foreshadowing of the McDonald’s snark was really obvious.  Actually, I didn’t see it coming as foreshadowing at first, I just thought it was a somewhat hidden joke.

Overall I liked the movie.  It was entertaining and a fun movie going experience.  That is not faint praise, that is what I usually look for in a movie.  My wife and I don’t make it to many movies in a year – 3 is average – and what I want is entertainment and fun. 

As far as aesthetic, the movie is not quite as atmospherically dark as the series, but the look and feel of Collinwood were very well done with some scenes on the rocky coast that could have been from the TV show.  While they didn’t use the original theme – which I sort of wanted to hear – there was a brief reference to it with some flute themes in the score.  The use of period music was fun, too, and I’m sure it was a lot of fun for Danny Elfman to do.

The blend of comedy, horror and drama did a good job of evoking the feel of the series.  I would have done some things differently, but I say go see the it.  I was afraid I wouldn’t, but I enjoyed it.

Oh, and stay until after the credits.

And now for something completely different

Not a man with three buttocks or with a tape recorder up his nose, but some posts that aren’t about politics.

It’s all about where the money goes

If you look at the policies regarding public education there is no effort being made to cut overall spending by the state.  This isn’t really about saving.

The attacks being made are against public schools, teachers and unions – where the money goes – but not against the spending.  The cuts are enormous and devastating, but while funding for public schools is cut, the collection of taxes is not.  The idea isn’t to eliminate the revenue but to redirect it.

If you cut the funding to public schools enough then you can make the schools look bad, which reinforces what is already being said.  Yet the alternatives have nothing to do with making school funding equitable or lower or even with improving public schools.  The only alternatives offered are private and charter schools.

Vouchers are intended to fund private schools with tax dollars just as charter schools are funded with tax dollars.  That’s the redirection.  The idea is to take tax money away from public schools and public employees and funnel it into private corporations who will take over the education of America’s children.  This plan offers less accountability, lower standards and no improvement in education.  Recent studies have shown that charter schools do not perform better than public schools.

No one is talking about cutting taxes or reducing overall spending.  There are only two goals: breaking the teacher’s unions and putting tax dollars into the pockets of private corporations.

It’s about money.

It’s not about education.