A less chaotic state: 2005’s Batman Begins

Posted on June 15, 2015 by reelentropy

Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Batman Begins is 10 years old today. Take a moment and let that sink in.

Batman Begins is simultaneously the extraneous sequel that was always going to get made and the crazy wet dream movie that should never have been produced. Before the modern era of mass-produced superhero movies, Batman was the second guy through the wall in 1989, behind the 1970s Superman movies. The first movie, an extraordinarily Tim Burton film, was followed by three sequels between ’89 and 1997, each one more Tim Burton than the last, despite Burton himself leaving the franchise after the second installment. This movie series coincided with a meteoric rise in Batman’s popularity outside of comic strips, with the acclaimed and instantly iconic Batman: The Animated Series TV show running 1992-95. The series was so popular, production was rebooted for two more years from 1997-99, and it gave rise to the just as acclaimed Superman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond and Justice League TV shows.

The fourth film, Batman & Robin, is still considered the worst superhero movie ever made by a wide margin, and despite taking in $238 million, Warner Bros. nixed the next movie in the series, Batman Triumphant, and took it back to the drawing board. Thus began several years of rejected proposals by filmmakers such as Darren Aronofsky and Joss Whedon before Warner Bros. realized what they wanted and hired Christopher Nolan and David Goyer to write the script.

The film threw out everything from the earlier Batman movies and started with a completely fresh take on the character and his environment. There was an all-star cast that included living legends Gary Oldman and Michael Caine, there was a director coming off of breakthrough hit psychological thrillers Memento and Insomnia — Where the series of movies had descended into camp that would make Adam West blush, this reboot was being treated like an actual movie that was expected to be well-received and remembered beyond its theatrical run, instead of just a cashgrab.

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Jurassic World just OK

Posted on June 14, 2015 by reelentropy

UPDATE: Jurassic World did it again, with Sunday estimates being a little too low. The actuals are in, and the movie squeezed out $208 million domestic, passing The Avengers for the best domestic opening weekend of all time.

I once forgot to feed my raptors for five weeks. I didn’t actually sell my last motorbike, I just forgot where I parked it. I don’t know how a mosquito could get caught in amber, and at this point I’m too afraid to ask. Photos courtesy Universal Pictures.

Early estimates had Jurassic World opening at an impressive $125 million. Then, the movie had an even larger than expected Thursday and that estimate became $155 million. Then $171-180 million. Then $190-200 million. The final count is $204.6 million, just shy of The Avengers’ all-time record $207.4 million opening from 2012. For context, the previous record opening for June was 2013’s putrid but hotly anticipated Man of Steel with just $116 million.

All those numbers are domestic. At the international box office it looks up at nothing, with a $511 million opening worldwide. The worldwide opening record holder going into the weekend was part 2 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at just $483 million.

The marketing effort that went into this is a subject for a different article. The only question here is whether or not the movie was itself is any good, and the answer is, “meh.”

The film has many characters in common with the original Jurassic Park, following two wide-eyed little kids, Zach and Gary Mitchell (Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins), who are relatives of the manager, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), on their trip through the park, which all goes wrong when a massive carnivore breaks lose. This time around, however, that carnivore is the indominus rex, a genetically altered hybrid of the tyrannosaurus, and the park is open and filled to the brim with screaming civilians. The stealthy and highly intelligent creature immediately begins a rampage across the park, killing everything in its path. Raptor handler Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) escorts Dearing through the restricted zone, where the first part of the movie takes place, to find her nephews, and then leads the charge to capture the indominus. They are surrounded by many secondary characters — park owner Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), evil geneticist Henry Wu (B.D. Wong), park tech operator and dinophile Lowerly Cruthers (Jake Johnson) and Vic Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio), who is pressuring Grady to militarize the park’s raptors. Their functions are exclusively to proselytize about the role of dinosaurs in modern society.

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Dying Girl wants to be more than a dumb high school movie, isn’t

Posted on June 11, 2015 by reelentropy

Gaines talks about how the cafeteria is a literal territorial warzone, because that’s not a joke that’s been made a million times. Photos courtesy Fox Searchlight Pictures.

I’ve never met Me and Earl and the Dying Girl director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, but I kind of want to punch him in the face.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is the movie version of that one hipster friend who totally swears he isn’t a hipster, a movie so obsessed, so up its own ass with cliches and references and desperate attempts to convince viewers that it’s cool that it becomes less of a movie and more of an advertisement for the movie it wants you to think that it is.

The movie follows Greg Gaines (Thomas Mann) through his senior year of high school, during which he befriends Rachel Kushner (Olivia Cooke), who is diagnosed with leukemia at the movie’s start. Through their friendship, Gaines is drawn from his private world of actively avoiding high school cliches and amateur moviemaking with Earl (Ronald Cyler II) and into a real life-and-death story about nagging parents, the importance of college applications and the true meaning of friendship.

Pretty much everything about this movie behaves as if it doesn’t have the problems that it has.

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Sir Christopher Lee dies at 93

Posted on June 11, 2015 by reelentropy

Christopher Lee, after an acting career spanning almost 70 years, died in a hospital Sunday morning due to respiratory and heart failure.

Known for his deep, sinister voice and high cheekbones, Lee had a storied career of villainous roles, most famously as Dracula in the 1958 film and its many sequels and as Francisco Saramanga in 1974’s Bond film, The Man with the Golden Gun. Prominent roles in this century include Saruman in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies as well as Count Dooku in episodes II and III of Star Wars. These famous roles barely scratch the surface of a more than 200 film career that includes such roles as Frankenstein’s monster, both Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, Comte de Rochefort and Death.

Before his film career, Lee served in the Royal Air Force in World War II. He was one of the initial volunteers providing aid to Finland during the Winter War in 1939, but returned home before the war reached England’s shores. He was told that he could not fly due to an optic nerve failure at the end of his training, and spent most of the war working in intelligence in the North African theater and up through Italy and Germany, eventually serving on the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects before retiring as a flight lieutenant in 1946.

Though not widely known for his charity work, Lee was a consistent supporter of Cinema for Peace and UNICEF.

Lee experienced a renaissance in fame in 2010 when he began his death metal career. Having long sung for soundtracks, Lee sung on a duet for the Rhapsody song “The Magic of the Wizard’s Dream,” which released in 2004, and it turned out to be a match made in metal Heaven. Lee released his own complete album, “Charlemagne: By the Sword and Cross,” in 2010, winning that year’s Spirit of Metal award. He would spend the rest of his life recording heavy metal covers, starting with a Christmas album in 2012. One of those tracks, “Jingle Hell,” made it to no. 18 on the Billboard Hot 100, making Lee the oldest artist ever to appear on the chart at 91.

Lee continued to release EPs every year until his death. When discussing “Darkest Carols, Faithful Sing” in last December, Lee said, “At my age, the most important thing for me is to keep active by doing things that I truly enjoy. I do not know how long I am going to be around, so every day is a celebration and I want to share it with my fans.”

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Insidious 3 focuses on correct lead, still tame, predictable

Posted on June 10, 2015 by reelentropy

Elise Rainer, the best part of the first two movies, finally gets her own feature here. Photo courtesy Focus Features.

So if they’re titling the movies like chapters in a book, shouldn’t this one be called Insidious: Prologue?

The deceptively titled Insidious: Chapter 3 takes place a few years before the first movie and chronicles Elise Rainer (Lin Shayne) coming out of retirement to save Quinn Brenner (Stefanie Scott), who is haunted by an asthematic demon called the man who can’t breathe after inadvertently calling out to him while trying to contact her recently diseased mother. Rainer had retired when she started being haunted herself by the woman in black, who similarly responded to her when she tried to call out to her own lost husband.

Insidious 3 is just as repetitive and not really that scary as the rest of the series and about eight times as derivative. The apartment is straight out of The Shining, the man who can’t breathe is Hannibal Lector with Darth Vader’s breathing apparatus, the plot is straight out of Poltergeist for the third straight time and references to J-horror, movies that have grown so similar themselves it’s hard to single out which scenes are referencing what, become more prominent as the film goes on. But even so, it’s well executed and difficult to take eyes off the haunting sequences. It holds attention. The formula is the formula for a reason.

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