Director: Martin Campbell
Writer(s):
Greg Berlanti
Michael Green
Marc Guggenheim
Michael Goldenberg
Greg Berlanti
Michael Green
Marc Guggenheim

Cast:
Ryan Reynolds – Hal Jordan
Blake Lively – Carol Ferris
Peter Sarsgaard – Dr. Hector Hammond
Mark Strong – Thaal Sinestro
Angela Bassett – Dr. Amanda Waller

Preamble: One of DC’s more interesting characters, a superhero who can manifest his will as real world objects using a special ring, comes to the big screen with Ryan Reynolds starring.

Plot: an alien high council learns to harness willpower, the greatest power in the universe, and uses it to build not only a home planet (Oa) but a guild of intergalactic policemen. But one of the council’s own is driven mad by his attempt to harness the power of fear, and banished to a lost planet. When he escapes the prison the others have built to contain him there, he begins tearing a path through the galaxy. Eventually this path leads him to Earth, where a newly anointed Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) must quickly learn the ropes if he hopes to save his planet.

The Meat: This sounds like a pretty good setup for a cosmic superhero story, allowing for big action and alien interaction as Green Lantern learns about the other members of The Corps. Somewhere amidst the six screenwriters, and who knows how many rewrites, the screenplay loses all emotional impact. And the blame can’t solely be placed on the CG, which is good but overbearing in many places.

Ryan Reynolds is competent but forgettable as Hal Jordan, a hero who supposedly is given this honor because of his fearlessness, but who turns out to be a whiny sissy for much of the movie. Whereas ‘Iron Man’ embraced Tony Stark’s arrogance and showed his weaknesses without apologizing for who he was, apparently Warner Brothers thought it would be a good idea to turn ‘Green Lantern’ into a Lifetime movie for men – complete with under-cooked daddy issues. To top it off, any momentum in the action is routinely broken up by a serene romance between Reynolds and Blake Lively’s Carol Ferris that feels more like a brother/sister bond than anything remotely sexual. That lack of sexual tension is a perfect example of what’s wrong with the movie – nothing goes very far in either direction, and what we end up with is a middling snoozefest.

Take the secondary villain, Peter Sarsgaard’s Dr. Hank Hammond, who is powered by a small infection from Parallax’s power of fear. He becomes telepathic and telekinetic(and insane). But everything he does is confined to small gatherings on Earth (a dinner party, a laboratory). Remember the scale of the story’s setup, and the potential for a cosmic police chase? Completely ruined now. Instead of epic outer-space battles, we’re left with a movie focusing on Hammond’s problems with his father and Hal’s self-doubts and budding romance with Ferris. Meanwhile Parallax barrels through the galaxy murdering millions of alien life-forms offscreen. We only see Parallax truly in action when he rips the souls out of a few individuals, and by then it always feels like an afterthought.

No matter how much happens at once on screen, the amazing thing is that Green Lantern is never entertaining. Not once did the large group of people involved in its making decide what this movie was going to be about. Character arcs are meaningless, the alien designs don’t work, the humor is saccharine, and the threat never feels real or, more importantly, epic. There also is almost no time spent with Hal learning to use his powers, so the idea that he’s ready to confront Parallax is ludicrous. There’s nothing engaging here. If they do make a sequel, let’s hope there are more set pieces and the filmmakers have the self-restraint to use makeup for some of the aliens. That way maybe it won’t feel like a series of nicely rendered video game cut scenes. On the good side, the CG is well done in many places, and the movie does end in less than two hours which was a huge relief.

The Movie: 4/10

Director: Tim Burton
Writer(s): Linda Woolverton

Cast:
Mia Wasikowska – Alice
Johnny Depp – Mad Hatter
Helena Bonham Carter – Red Queen
Anne Hathaway – White Queen
Crispin Glover – Stayne/Knave of Hearts
Matt Lucas – Tweedledee/dum
Stephen Fry – Cheshire Cat

Preamble:
A big failure – not nearly as bold as it should have been in that failure. Who is this shackled Tim Burton imposter?

Plot Points:
13 years after Alice’s last adventure, her father is dead, her imagination is wildly inappropriate for the stuffy world she lives in, and she’s just been proposed to by someone who repulses her. Running away, she stumbles into a post-apocalyptic Wonderland. The folks of “Underland” question whether she’s the chosen one they’ve been waiting for. “Chosen one” in this case being a champion ‘Alice’ due to use a famous sword to defeat the Red Queen’s vicious monster, Jabberwocky.

The Meat:
That’s right, Tim Burton has found the two things missing from Alice in Wonderland: bloated CG and the kind of god-awful, Hollywood, forced feminism found in such re-imaginings as ‘King Arthur’ and ‘300’. If you want an Alice that questions stuffy convention with trite exposition, uses a suit of armor, and rides a huge mythical beast, this is your movie. Completing the emo-cycle, Johnny Depp steps in as a very sensitive Mad Hatter, complete with tragic back story. As the feminine one in their relationship, he’s waited patiently for her return, and sacrifices himself repeatedly so that she may fulfill her destiny. Not to mention, he’s a genius with his needle and thread!

Is there a point down there?

Performances are hit or miss – one imagines Burton being too distracted with some of the technology involved to pay attention. Glover is good as the Knave of Hearts. Depp’s performance and accent are all over the place, and at turns echo Capt. Jack Sparrow and Willie Wonka. Anne Hathaway has moments as the White Queen, but is mostly forgettable and seemed to be a mockery of the character more than not. Mia Wasikowska does her best, but this simply isn’t an interesting antagonist. Isn’t it a bit much, to ask those familiar with the original stories to get excited over a 19 year old Alice fighting a dragon? Huge miscalculation. The one decision working out very well, though, was casting Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen. Her appearance does more to cause excitement than anything else in the movie, including Alice’s entrance to, and exit from, Wonderland. Most of the film’s funniest moments involve her, and the best visuals may be the severed heads that float along her castle’s moat.

It’s not clear what exactly Burton thought he was adding to Lewis Carroll’s mythos here. If he was so bothered by Alice’s origins, why not make a new fairy tale without the name branding? It would have lifted whatever restrictions prevented him from making real advancement of the story (adding slogans from the Spice Girls albums doesn’t count), and might have opened his famous imagination up to some new ideas. This also brings up the superiority of actual animation to so many of these live action/animation hybrid. The movements of the Knave of Hearts and a few other characters are distractingly stylized (although the Red Queen is perfect), and the quality of the backgrounds and costume designs can’t make up for it. I’d love to say that somewhere in here is a good movie, but the reality is that somewhere in here is a good story we’ve already seen told correctly.

Movie – 3/10

Director: Spike Jonze
Writer(s): Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers

Cast:
Max Records – Max
Catherine Keener – Connie
Forest Whitaker – Ira
James Gandolfini – Carol
Lauren Ambrose – KW
Catherine O’Hara – Judith
Michael Berry Jr. – The Bull
Chris Cooper – Douglas
Paul Dano – Alexander

Preamble:
The 1963 children’s book by Maurice Sendak, 48 pages and 10 sentences long, gets adapted to live action by Spike Jonze.

Plot Points:

There isn’t much in the way of plot, as the original picture book was largely unconcerned with it. The essence though, is that a child is upset, runs away, and imagines a better world for himself where his home life is “easier” and controlled by him.

The Meat:
The natural inclination when seeing a movie like this is to question the need for its existence. With such bare bones source material, isn’t the adaptation rife for failure? Is there so much visual invention in Spike’s work that he can cover up the lack of a human cast and linear storytelling? There’s plenty potential for a Transformers 2 type “why the hell was this movie made” response. The movie’s greatest achievement, however, might be in reminding adult viewers that ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ never existed to service a plot.

Max’s parents are probably divorced, at the very least his mother is dating. She’s not paying full attention to him, and the man she’s being friendly with downstairs (instead of playing with Max) certainly isn’t his father. Max has just learned that the sun will die one day. That’s the plot setup for the film, and it’s all we need. Escaping into a nearby forest area after losing it with his mother, still wearing his wolf costume, the imaginative protagonist does what many children do instinctively – he acts as his own therapist. Who better to illustrate the session than the director of ‘Adaptation’?

Max projects all of his emotions onto imaginary wild beings, unable to grasp larger concepts in more realistic terms. If the Sun is going to die and parents don’t stay together, a child’s frame of reference for things like permanence, love, and friendship is shattered. He has to redefine these things, prematurely forced into an emotional form of puberty as so many children in single-parent households are. It’s the aftermath of a car crash, and Max goes to regain his bearings in the forest. Here, he re-imagines sections of arguments he’s heard, combined with his own fears and wishes for both the adults in his life and himself. Wishing himself to be king and trying his best to bring happiness, Max takes ownership of a situation where he was powerless. He forces all the giants around him to just… “be still”. He then sets out to accomplish his stated mission, making everyone happy again.

The problem of course, is the way these giants make things more complicated than play time and sleep time(the illustration of selfish affection is especially well done). Carefully considering the nature of consequences and complex emotions, he realizes in time his own smallness. As one of the characters says about the Sun “why worry about that little thing when I’m so big?” It’s sad to see Max finally gain perspective, and appreciate all those “you’ll understand when you’re older” conversations; but it’s also fun watching him oversee a group of Giant creatures building a life-sized version of a child’s fort along the shore. ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ alternates heavily between the two emotions, between real grave situations and fantasy, and our protagonist acts and talks like children with overactive imaginations generally do. There’s never a “creepy child actor who speaks too well for his age” moment despite Max Records being nearly the only human actor for most of the film. For that, there aren’t many better examples of character studies of children in memory. Pan’s Labyrinth has a sister.

*Special nod for the voice work, which is as good as any animation.

Movie – 10/10