A Clockwork Orange (1971)

A Clockwork Orange, the dystopian drama from Stanley Kubrick, places style over substance in its quest to reveal some particularly abstract ill of modern society. The film, based on a novel of the same name, follows Alex (Malcolm McDowell, an actor now world-famous for his fringe roles in The Artist and The Book of Eli), a troubled and violence-prone teen in a disjointed futuristic world. Alex leads his "droogs" around town, fighting, assaulting, and raping for the sake of it until, having been a bit too much of an asshole to the poor thugs he once called friends and/or mindless followers, he is mutinied and left to the police.

Sent to prison for years, Alex eventually becomes the test case in a government criminal rehabilitation program that strips him of his violent tendencies but also, it turns out, his free will. Let free, Alex, by some incredible strokes of disingenuous plot planning coincidence, systematically encounters every single one of the people he has wronged in the film's first act. In some of the worst strokes of luck of all time, a defenseless Alex is repeatedly subjected to beatdowns by each of his past victims.

Without spoiling the ending, suffice it to say that the thematic material here is painfully obvious and not particularly insightful. A hitting-you-over-the-head-with-it sermon on free will, A Clockwork Orange nonetheless fails to draw its own conclusion on the matter while simultaneously failing to help the audience toward its own. It may be important from a film-school perspective, but as a viewing experience A Clockwork Orange fails to follow through on the promise of its provocative opening 30 minutes.

Score: 2/4

Prometheus (2012)

Much like I had to do for Spider-Man, I should offer the disclaimer here that I haven't seen Prometheus' semi-predecessors Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, Alien vs. Predator, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, or Ridley Scott Shoots Himself on Film After Seeing What His Franchise Has Been Reduced To. That being said, Prometheus was marketed as not being a direct prequel to any of the Alien films, and I didn't find my inexperience with the franchise to preclude me from being as confused as everyone else in the theater was as to what exactly was going on half the time.

Basically, it's 80 years in the future, and humanity hasn't changed much except for now they have huge spaceships with mansion-like comfort and android people who look a lot like Michael Fassbender. (But does the android also have Michael Fassbender's legendary penis? Debate amongst yourselves.) In any case, mankind (or rather, one of our less fine specimens, a rich old guy played by a strangely cast Guy Pearce) has decided to combine its new toys into a pricey mission to a far-off galaxy where two scientists/lovers who most people seem to think are crackpots (Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green) claim live the aliens who begot us.

And guess what? After two years of voyaging (the ship is captained by Idris Elba/Charles Miner), the crew sets down on a planet that has clearly once housed life. Unfortunately, that life has mostly been run out of town by some scary aliens who some idiot crew member thinks are cute, at least until one has plunged its not-so-cute neck into his stomach and then back up through his mouth. This being an alien scare-fest, the aliens' work is just beginning. With the possible assistance of the wily android, David, the alien-folk wreak havoc upon the ship, culminating in a lot of people having tentacles plunged into them or extracted out of them as they desperately and somewhat stupidly continue to try to do research.

Ludicrous as it may be on the surface (and perhaps even more ludicrous symbolically), Prometheus is a relative success. Spellbinding for its entire two hour run-time, extremely stylishly shot in various gloomy shades of gray, and pulling off the rare feat of using 3-D to improve the aesthetic appeal unobtrusively, it's the kind of movie you'll have trouble complaining you paid money to see.

Score: 3/4

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

Before offering my opinion of Marc Webb's Spiderman, I should give the disclaimer that I did not see the Sam Raimi originals and thus have less of a basis for comparison. That said, I found The Amazing Spider-Man to be a passable mindless summer blockbuster in dire need of an ability to laugh at its own ridiculousness.

The film takes its time establishing its premise: Peter Parker/Spidey (Andrew Garfield) is ditched by his parents as a child for reasons we will eventually find out in some unnecessary sequel down the road, and sent to live with his aunt and uncle (the comically overqualified duo of Sally Field and Martin Sheen). We ditch kid Peter and pick up the story once he has become 25-year-old-in-high-school Peter. After playing some eye footsies (basically interacting in the kind of way that people who play footsies with each other would, without actually playing footsies) with a very cute and definitely-graduated-12th-grade-by-now Emma Stone, soon-to-be-Spidey goes to some corporation's limb-regeneration (I think) lab and gets bitten by a radioactive spider.

Ta-da! Eduardo from The Social Network now has superpowers! So what does he do with them? Really cool skateboard moves, obviously! Pretty pumped about being a human-spider hybrid whose vast majority of unusual traits have nothing to do with humans or spiders, Eduardo's next move is to start "stopping" crime at night. One night, having foregone picking up his aunt at work to pursue his new pastime, he gets into a fight with his uncle and flees home, with the uncle in pursuit. Unfortunately, Uncle Tom (definitely not his name) is shot by a petty thief in a classic wrong-place-wrong-time-gee-this-makes-the-plot-more-compelling-what-a-coincidence accident.

Distressed, Spideduardo (TM) starts scouring the city day and night for Uncle Tom's killer, a habit he drops (permanently, I believe--his love for Uncle Tom only goes so far) only when his father's former partner turns into a lizard-dinosaur-man and starts trying to make the rest of New York City into such beasts as well. Feeling threatened by such an unrealistic yet intimidating computer-generated terror, Spideduardo attempts to defend New York against Lizard-man, stopping only for the occasional make-out sesh with Emma (once you slip on that Spideduardo suit, you basically get everything).

Eventually, Lizard-man kills Spideduardo, all of Gotham's citizens are turned to Lizard-men and jointly bomb a football stadium... sorry, this superhero stuff is blurring together. I don't think I really need to say what happens at the end, though, besides that [spoiler alert] it involves cranes. For the throngs that have been clamoring for construction equipment-based grand finales, this is your movie!

In seriousness, Amazing Spider-Man was extremely decent. It was some of the most very decent filmmaking I've seen in a while, in fact. If you're the kind of person who applauds decent movies, you might want to pick up a copy of Amazing Spider-Man on VHS, the only medium average enough to properly display such mediocre work.

Score: 2.5/4

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

The most recent winner of the film critics' let's-all-jump-on-one-movie-coming-out-of-Sundance sweepstakes and act like it's Citizen Kane sweepstakes is Benh Zeitlin's coming-of-age-ish tale Beasts of the Southern Wild. I can safely report that this is both a good movie and one that, in the process of rushing to give itself many congratulatory pats on the back, can be overly cute with its artistic ambitions.

Case in point: the film, which follows a young black girl, Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) in a deeply impoverished area of New Orleans called the bathtub, uses scenes showing ancient beasts called aurochs--basically black pigs rendered three times bigger by a computer--to represent something or other, probably Hushpuppy's progression into maturity. It is a rushed, complicated progression, to be sure--Hushpuppy is, like, six or seven years old and is in the midst of losing her father, her mother having disappeared years ago--but one that probably doesn't need cut-ins of hogs traipsing around the bayou to illustrate it.

Much of the film's promise, though, is carried through on the backs of its lead performers, both acting for the first time: Wallis, only six when the film was shot (I can use Google really well) is incredibly impressive in the kind of way that suggests she is either playing herself or is a future Meryl Streep, or some combination of the two; Dwight Henry, playing her father, is alternately powerful and exposed, a forceful screen presence in his own right.

Zeitlin and co-writer Lucy Alibar's affinity for throwing around symbols and metaphors difficult for a layman to interpret muddy up bits of the film, but the raw emotion of the performances and of the script as a whole make Beasts pretty successful in the end. It's hard not to wonder, though, how much more successful it is in the mind of someone who understood what it was trying to do from start to finish.

Score: 3/4

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Clap your hands if you were certain The Dark Knight Rises was going to be fantastic before you set foot anywhere near a theater to see it. If I had the number of readers I deserved, you would be hearing thunderous applause right now. Expectations for this final Batman installment were literally so high that, had they been knocked over, they would have easily crushed a small country (or, even better, Mississippi). [Now is as good a time as any to mention that there are very minor spoilers ahead.] But these expectations were not just of the, "Gee, this will probably be awesome!" variety. They were more of the, "There is no way I am walking out without my pants being substantially wetter than they were when I walked in" variety. So from that angle it's not surprising that Dark Knight Rises scored an 87% rating from Rotten Tomatoes critics, much the same way as the abominable HP7.5 picked up a 96%. But, from the angle that "shitty" "poor" is the first word I would use to describe it, it is very surprising (to me, at least) that DKR did so well with both critics and audiences. Hold on a second, hear me out. Where to even begin? Well, how about with this: what made the first two Batmans (or what I remember of Batman Begins, which I loved as a 10-year-old) so good is that, despite being completely unfathomable in this universe, they seemed realistic. This latest movie lost me at, "Let's modify the core of this unused energy reactor and create a giant bomb with a six-mile blast radius!" Oh, sorry, didn't realize we teleported to Marvel-land, where everyone has supernatural powers and we're allowed to suspend disbelief without feeling gypped. As if the principal plot contrivances weren't enough, whoever wrote the movie felt the need to litter its scenes with incredibly anticlimactic set-ups for potentially great lines that were never delivered. It would go something like "Gotham needs a hero..." (oh man, this is going to be such a great line!) "...and I am a hero, as evidenced by my cape." Furthermore, to quote the always perceptive Mark Hernandez, "Every other line is some reversal--e.g., 'You want chaos...' 'No, I need equality!' or 'You think I'll fail!' 'No! I'm afraid you want to!'"*. Beyond the plot's inherent ridiculousness and the disappointing quotes, the movie's screenwriters (the Nolan brothers) failed as well in deciding it was necessary to toggle between as many possible caricatured minor characters as possible. This character stew was most likely meant to make for more lengthy, potentially "epic" montages built around flashing between all our beloved heroes and abhorred villains' faces whilst backed by a not-at-all repetitive ominous orchestral soundtrack. Do we need Joseph Gordon-Levitt? Duh! How else will we provoke sequel rumors? Do we need the various police commissioners and sub-commissioners? Of course! Who else is going to play the "he's a good person, no he's a bad person, no he's a good person" role? What about Catwoman? She's important, right? She's almost almost a superhero! The list goes on. Of course, when the previous two movies had been so good, a little bit of a slump in the trilogy's finale could have been excused. We could have ignored the fact that the newest movie was an hour too long and a world away from cinematic excellence if it had just ended spectacularly. Wrap up a historically great series with a big bang, right? Well, maybe you thought it ended spectacularly, if you're into the aforementioned dramatic montage effect. But if you're not that big of a fan of completely dropping the person who's been built up to be the villain for 130 minutes in, like, literally four seconds--traded in for an accented young woman by thirty seconds of a why-did-we-need-this? plot twist explanation and one second of an anticlimactic gunshot wound--then maybe you didn't like the ending that much. Maybe, say, the movie would have been better if certain protagonists actually died. Isn't Batman mortal? Isn't that almost the whole point? Whatever. If you liked Dark Knight Rises, good for you. But I submit that your taste for the movie probably lies more in what you assumed it would be than in what it actually was. The previous installation (The Dark Knight) was, of course, a little overrated itself--"BEST MOVIE EVER" pronouncements may have been a dash of hyperbole--but it was very, even abnormally, good big-budget cinema. This one was just, well, big-budget cinema done like the rest of big-budget cinema. Save yourself the self-serious pretension of Dark Knight, plus 20 minutes, and see The Avengers instead. Gosh, who thought three months ago that that would be reasonable to say? Score: 2/4 *--(copyright 2012 Hernandez Productions, all rights reserved) [Originally published on quitetheoptimist.com.]

The Avengers (2012)

Despite Disney's desperate claims in its failed last-minute marketing of John Carter, this year's first blockbuster was not a contrived March release about a civil war soldier who somehow ended up on Mars. Instead, it was Marvel's The Avengers, a flashy, unsurprisingly entertaining effects bonanza about a superhero all-star team that includes Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo).

The plot, a minor annoyance that exists mainly to be circumvented in search of more scenes of witty banter between superheroes and shots of things blowing up, revolves around the return to Earth of Thor's evil brother, Creepy Snake-Dude, who plans to destroy the planet and take it over for some weird-looking, comically animated extraterrestrial overlord. In this regard, Avengers seems to ask that its viewers first see Thor, a fairly unreasonable request given that it was the least publicized and well-received of the precursors (which also include the wildly successful Iron Man and Iron Man 2, plus last year's Captain America).

In any case, the set-up quickly falls into the background as the heroes fight the evil that the villain lavishes upon them, learning to work as a team together all in the name of the human race. This premise--the "these ten dudes are defending all people, and we're people, so we should root for them in this totally ridiculous movie"--didn't work for me, but at some point the group adjacent to mine in the theater literally began to cheer for the Avengers, so it clearly elicited some degree of the reaction it was hoping to.

In making the film, one of the key decisions must have been how to break down the screen time between so many characters who hold down their own successful franchises single-handedly, and it is one that writer-director Joss Whedon handles capably, if not spectacularly. More camera time for Iron Man, the most charismatic and generally interesting character by a long shot, might have been in order, as would toned-down roles for patriotism-sweating Captain America and super-powerless spy extraordinaire Black Widow (Scarlett Johanson).

(While on the topic of Black Widow, a few of my viewing companions ridiculously suggested that Director Fury's (Samuel L. Jackson) sidekick, played by Cobie Smulders of How I Met Your Mother, was more attractive than Black Widow/Scarlett Johannson. This assertion is ridiculous. Cobie Smulders is the Avengers to Scarlett's Dark Knight Rises--an attractive sideshow to be sure, but we know she's just filling time for the main attraction. Glad we could get that cleared up.)

In all, The Avengers proves a tremendously watchable summer(-ish) diversion, the cumulation of years worth of Marvel films and millions of dollars spent on special effects (which are, for the record, staggering in many places and slightly ludicrous in others). A bit more guided plan, rather than the fairly haphazard sketch series that it seems to be, may have done wonders, but as it is Avengers is quite good, especially relative to the disaster it could have been. We'll take it.

Score: 3/4

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Quentin Tarantino's debut feature Reservoir Dogs is fast-paced, crisply executed, and an all-around pleasure to watch, inasmuch as movies about terrible people, some of whom end up in pools of blood, can be pleasures to watch. The clever premise, which explores the crew of a botched bank robbery before and after the heist without ever showing the crime itself, allows for maximum character development by drawing its plot points out through dialogue and interaction rather than by showing them explicitly occurring. Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, and Steve Buscemi co-star as the principles in the operation, with a fairly passable appearance from Tarantino himself, but the show is stolen by a terrific and deeply haunting Michael Madsen.

Each pawn in the robbery (one of whom, it appears, is a "rat") is known only to the others by his code name, a color (Mr. Blue, Mr. White, Mr. Orange, etc.), such that each character knows as little about the others as we do. For the first half of the film, the mystery unravels for us as it does for the characters, until we are suddenly given an omniscient view into the build-up to the crime and the identity of the snitch is revealed. This decision to break the secret so early may seem a misstep at first, but the quickly unfolding action immediately afterward is enough to make one forget such thoughts. To its brutal, hectic end, Reservoir Dogs holds the viewer's utmost attention, proving to be a cutthroat crime thriller that rings in the audience's memory far past the final, tragic shot.

Score: 4/4