I make no secret of the fact that I am not, in general, a big fan of the direction the James Bond movies have taken with Daniel Craig playing the role. The movies have been largely well received by both critics and audiences, but they have left me cold. From Casino Royale on the movies abandoned the more fantastic elements of the series, attempting to be more serious and realistic in tone. That tone carried over to Craig’s portrayal of Bond as a conflicted, tormented killer. While it does make it feel more real, it is also less charming and no fun at all. Skyfall backtracked a little to the more traditional Bond set up, and Spectre brings back even more of those silly fantastic elements. Unfortunately, the tone sticks with the dour realism, making the fun stuff seem out of place and attempts to be serious look ridiculous. Despite some good moments and performances, the movie seems hacked together and inconsistent. No matter whether you prefer the recent vintage of Bond or a more classic flavor, Spectre is sure to leave you unsatisfied.

Spectre starts with Bond on a secret, at least from MI6, mission in Mexico where he tries to kill someone on the orders of the previous M and manages to cause an international incident while doing so, and by happenstance thwarting the bombing of a Mexican stadium. From there he is grounded by the new M. MI6 is again under scrutiny about their place in the modern world, with a young punk working to supplant them with a new intelligence gathering system. Meanwhile, Bond evades his watchers to follow a lead on a secret organization that both his target in Mexico and Silva, the villain from Skyfall, belonged to. In Italy, he finds this organization and it leads him on missions around the world trying to stop the villain.

The movie brings back even more classic Bond elements that were excised in Casino Royale. Bond ends up with a super car, a gadget watch, Q and Moneypenny and a great big villain lair. Despite this, Spectre remains as somber and charmless as the previous three movies. The two different elements, the serious and the ridiculous, could be forced to work together, but the movie makes no attempt to do so. It plays the ridiculous stuff with as much seriousness as it did with the relatively realistic Casino Royale stuff. Reading a description of Spectre makes it sound so fun, but the movie sucks all the fun out of the concepts.

Take the villain, who [spoilers, I guess] is Blofeld. Except, he is known as Franz Oberhauser for the bulk of the movie. He whispers the name Ernst Stavro Blofeld to Bond during the requiste torture scene, but that didn’t need to be a twist. That name means nothing to Bond, it only has meaning to the viewers. And for reasons that will never makes sense, he is also given a childhood connection to Bond, because the fact that he is a master villain that is trying to destroy society is not enough of a reason for Bond to hunt him down and the fact Bond is a superspy that keeps ruining his plans is not enough to give Blofeld a grudge. Instead, there had to be a personal connection, even though it adds nothing. The whole movie is like that, trying to make things serious and personal that are inherently ridiculous.

If they had stuck to the serious stuff, Spectre would likely have been another movie on the level of Casino Royale and Skyfall. Craig is a fine actor and does good work with what he is given. Lea Seydoux and the rest of the supporting cast are great as well. Only Waltz and Bautista seem to come from a more fun version of this movie. Like many of the different pieces that make up Spectre, they are fine on their own, but the just don’t fit together and little effort seems to have been put forth to make them fit.

In a summer that had spy movies like Mission Impossible 5 (the plot of which bears a striking resemblance to this movie’s) The Man from UNCLE and even the comedy Spy, Spectre seems half-baked and wholly unsatisfying. It does give this version of James Bond an ending that is fitting for a more serious take on the character. Hopefully next time Bond comes with another fresh take, because this one is getting pretty stale.

Do you remember all of your favorite bits from the old Peanuts movies and holiday specials? Well, so do the people behind the new Peanuts movie and they can’t resist showing it. That is the biggest problem with an otherwise wholly enjoyable movie: that it offers little the viewer hasn’t seen before. That is assuming, of course, that the viewers are familiar with the past film versions of the Peanuts gang.  Or that they are familiar with the Peanuts gang at all.  Judging by the crowd in the theater I saw the movie in, they might not be and so The Peanuts Movie is a nearly perfect way to introduce them to Charles Schulz creations.

Like many Peanuts films, The Peanuts Movie has a nominal central plot thrust, Charlie Brown trying to work up the courage to talk to the little red haired girl, but is told in a series of loosely connected episodes.  It starts with Charlie Brown ignoring the snow to practice summer activities like baseball and kite flying.  Like the rest of the film, it is charming if familiar.  That initial snow day, which includes a reprise of the skating sequence from Merry Christmas Charlie Brown, serves as an introduction to both the primary characters, Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Sally, Snoopy and Woodstock and an introduction to the idea of Charlie Brown as a lovable loser.  From there it introduces the little red haired girl, as well as the rest of the Peanuts gang, and Charlie Brown’s quest to win her affection.

From there the movie falls into its episodic format.  It intersperses scenes of Charlie Brown coming up with a new idea to gain the attention of the little red haired girl with scenes from the book Snoopy is writing about his battles against the Red Baron.  While Charlie does have a goal, it mostly exists as a loose narrative structure to hang the scenes the movie wants to show on.

Some of the episodes are better than others.  Snoopy’s get to be a bit much, but they are easily the most visually impressive of the bunch.  Seeing the dogfights with all of the biplanes, and Snoopy’s doghouse, twisting around each other in midair is amazing.  The story of them is thin; Snoopy meets a lady dog pilot who gets captured by the Red Baron, so Snoopy fights him to save her.  Simple, but fun. As far as Charlie Brown’s segments go, I liked the school dance the best.  The talent show seemed to be pressing the characters and their interests a bit too much. The school dance, though, has Charlie Brown learning a skill the he could conceivably learn and then, in true Charlie Brown fashion failing utterly to employ it. Even when he does, he is interrupted by happenstance. Charlie Brown can’t help but fail even when he succeeds. The test and Charlie Brown’s elevation to resident genius is also fitting, with his one true success being not his at all.

The Peanuts movie may be a greatest hits album of memorable Peanuts moments, but it is a well put together greatest hits album. It gives every member of the gang a moment or two to shine, even though few of them get the chance to really matter in the course of things. Hopefully, this is a precursor of better, more focused Peanuts movies to come. As it is, it is a fun animated movie in a year that, Inside Out aside, has not had too many of those.

***1/2

Goosebumps is exactly what it proposes to be.  That is not an entirely good thing, but it is hard to fault the film for it. A film based on a series of somewhat spooky children’s books was never going to be more than a children’s movie.  Goosebumps goes strongly for humor rather than horror, but it is otherwise cashes in mostly on nostalgia for those old books.

Instead of adapting any of the dozens of books in the series, the Goosebumps movie is about the books themselves.  That allows it to feature many of the monsters that have appeared in the series at the same time.  It stars Dylan Minette as Zach Cooper, who moves from New York City to Delaware.  Living next door is the enchanting Hannah, played by Odeya Rush, and her reclusive and abrasive father played by Jack Black.  When Zach and his new friend Champ suspect something has happened to [], they break into the house, avoid the bear traps in the basement and find that his neighbor is actually RL Stine, famous author of the Goosebumps series.  Then they open a locked manuscript and free The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena.

That line about the bear traps should be the biggest clue that this movie is playing things for laughs rather than scares.  It uses all sorts of horror imagery, but is all jokes.  It works surprisingly well. It allows the movie to have sets like an abandoned carnival in the middle the woods and have characters spout lines like “the school is just on the other side of the cemetery.”  It is spooky themed silliness.  See, the monsters become real because Stine wrote his books on a haunted typewriter that made whatever he wrote become real.  Unfortunately, as they chase down the snowman, Slappy the evil ventriloquist dummy escapes and takes all the books with him.  As more and more monsters escape their books,

Your enjoyment of Goosebumps comes down to three things.  The first, and least important because most of it is self-explanatory, is a familiarity with the series.  There are numerous references that fans of the series, even if you haven’t read the books since you were in grade school, should pick up on.  The next is a tolerance for CG tomfoolery.  The CG is reasonably well done; though it never really fools the viewer into thinking any of it is real.  The giant insect, Sasquatch and werewolf all look similarly fake, but they share an aesthetic that makes it seem deliberately a little cartoony and not a failure to look realistic.  There are some fun shots, but it is all pretty cheesy.  Lastly is how much enjoyment do you get out seeing Jack Black mugging and talking in funny voices?  Because that is a big source of this film’s humor.  As a big fan of Black who grew up reading Goosebumps books, this mostly works for me.  The target audience is parents who read the books and their kids and this movie is likely to satisfy them.

***

As far as sci-fi movies go, The Martian is much more realistic than most.  It follows Mark Watney, an astronaut who, presumed dead, was left stranded on Mars.  Knowing that survival is a longshot, he determines to “science the shit” out of his problem and survive until the next Mars mission.  In four years. Despite his determination, survival is a longshot, but that does not stop him from trying.

The movie then becomes about Watney’s ingenuity and refusal to give up.  Being a Botanist by trade, Watney turns part of the habitat into a garden to grow potatoes and then rigs up a way to keep them watered without depleting his drinking water supply.  Every problem he faces he comes up with an on the spot solution.  It is an ode to perseverance and thinking on one’s feet.  Back on Earth, it is soon discovered that he is alive and NASA tries to figure out how to handle the problem and how to get Watney back home.  Even they have to scrounge up ways to help him.  

There is something uncommonly optimistic about The Martian.  It is that the closest thing the movie has to a villain is a guy who thinks it is more important to bring 5 Astronauts home safely than to risk their lives to have a better chance of saving one or that when faced with either using their secret rocket to help the Americans or keeping it for their own use, the Chinese space program barely hesitates to lend their aid.  The Martian supposes a world where human life is more important to people than political concerns and national borders.  It only vaguely resembles the real world, but it is a world we could have.

While there is much to love about The Martian, there are some weak spots.  The movie keeps introducing new characters for entirety of its run time, which can be jarring.  Some of the dialogue is more than a little one the nose.  In one scene, the guys at NASA breakdown how long it will take to get supplies to Watney and then end the scene by saying ominously “If nothing goes wrong.” That scene transitions right into things going wrong.  

Still, that is more than made up for by the wonderful hopefulness of the movie and its excellent effects.  Ridley Scott’s recent efforts may have produced middling results, but even his weaker efforts (*cough*Prometheus*cough*) have been visually captivating.  The cast is the very definition of star studded, with Matt Damon joined by the likes of Jessica Chastain, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sean Bean, Kate Mara, Michael Pena and Jeff Daniels, among other notables.  They all do good work, filling in some rather thin characters with glimpses of humanity.  

The Martian is utterly captivating.  Matt Damon makes the marooned Watney come alive.  It is not an especially complex movie, being largely Robinson Crusoe in space with an overriding love for science.  It is easy to compare it to last year’s science fiction hit Interstellar.  Interstellar, which also featured Damon and Chastain, was a more ambitious movie with a more ambitious plot, but the end result was less satisfying.  The floppiness of the ending, moving away from scientific principles to fancies weakened the overall structure of what was an excellent movie.  The Martian stays more grounded, though it is not without its fantastical moments, and feel more cohesive than Interstellar did.  The Martian is just a well-executed film that accomplished everything it set out to accomplish.

****½

This was a pretty good summer for movies. The superhero offerings all failed to live up to their hype to some regard or other, but that was offset by a trio of capers (to use the term loosely) and the unbelievably good Mad Max Fury Road. Plus, this summer had Pixar unarguably jumping back on top of the animated pile. Aside from Fantastic 4, even the disappointing movies were enjoyable. Really, while I only really loved the top few, this is probably the most I’ve enjoyed a crop of summer movies from top to bottom in a long time.

9: Fantastic Four – Miserable. Simply miserable. There really isn’t anything good to say about it. *1/2

8: Jurassic World – Dumb, but really quite enjoyable. It is half monument to the original and over the top escalation. Either way, I like it quite a bit ***1/2

7: Avengers: Age of Ultron – This was maybe the biggest disappointment of the summer, if only because expectations were unreasonably high for it coming it. Not bad, but it is feeling the emptiness that first managed to avoid. ***1/2

6: Ant-Man – Another example of Marvel executing their formula. This is good popcorn entertainment, but there is nothing new here. I enjoyed it slightly more than Marvel’s other offering. ***1/2

5: Furious 7 – This one goes above the Marvel offerings just because it had more that I hadn’t seen before. Mostly because it was too dumb to put in a movie, but Furious 7 managed to entertain with the audacity of its stupidity. ***1/2

4: The Man from UNCLE – Light and breezy and perfectly fun. It really elevated my opinions of Cavill and Hammer. ****

3: Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation – Tom Cruise and Simon Pegg are an entertaining pair. As long as they can keep the same essential cast together, with Cruise as an American Bond and Pegg as his more hands on Q, I’ll keep going to see them. ****

2: Inside Out – I am a big fan of even Pixar’s recent output. Monsters University and Brave were excellent. Inside Out, though, blows them away. It is excellent, a top 5 Pixar film. *****

1: Mad Max Fury Road – Not just the best movie of the summer, but maybe the best movie I’ve seen since I started reviewing movies on this blog. It is amazing. It may be the best movie I’ve ever seen in a theater. *****

So that was what I saw this summer, but what about the rest of the year? There are still a ton of interesting movies coming out in the latter part of the year. The fall and winter has a good mix of would be blockbusters and award bait. So what caught my eye while flipping through IMDB’s coming soon list?

Victor Frankenstein – A take on Frankenstein with McAvoy and Radcliffe. I like those actors and this story, this looks like it might be good.

The Jungle Book – Another well-known story with an interesting cast. Favreau has done good work with the Iron Man movies, but Cowboys & Aliens was drek. Still, this could be good.

Crimson Peak – I hate horror movies, but I love Guillermo del Toro, so I am torn on this movie. I really want to go see it, but I’m not sure I’ll have the stomach to sit through it.

Bridge of Spies – This is on here just because it is Spielberg. His best work may be behind him, but I’ve still enjoyed most of his recent efforts.

Jem and the Holograms – The trailer looked like they sapped everything interesting out of this in the process of making it. If some of the craziness of the 80’s cartoon makes it through it should be interesting.

Spectre – I may be a critic of Craig’s Bond movies (they’re good, not great) but still I will be going to see this. Hopefully it is at least as good as Skyfall, which was easily the best of Craig’s movies.

The Peanuts Movie – Peanuts is great. I hope this is as well. I don’t have much else to add.

The Martian – The trailer looked good, I still have a little irrational faith in Ridley Scott and I like Matt Damon. So I’ll likely be seeing this.

The Good Dinosaur – Another Pixar joint, another trip to the cinema for me. That’s all there is to it.

In the Heart of the Sea – Another good (at least occasionally) director, good cast and interesting story. I’m not certain, but I’ll like be there for this as well.

Star Wars Episode VII – The Force Awakens – The big daddy of second half of the year movies. I thought I was over my Star Wars love, but I am getting caught in the growing hype for this. It looks and sounds really good. I can’t wait.

Sisters – Tina Fey can do no wrong by me. 30 Rock was great, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is great, Mean Girls was great. As long as she, and Amy Poehler, are involved I am interested. I realize they didn’t write this, but still, I’m in.

The Hateful 8 – Quentin Tarantino. Of course I want to see it. It might be hard to work it in around Star Wars, though.

Of course, it is unlikely in the extreme that I end up seeing all of these movies this fall, but they are the ones that look interesting. Are there any I’ve missed? If so tell me what else I should keep my eye on.

 

Coming off of the highly enjoyable Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, any sort of spy movie was going to be hard pressed to leave a favorable impression.  The Man from UNCLE, fortunately, was up to the task.  Like Mission Impossible, UNCLE is based on an old TV show.  Instead of modernizing it, something that would have been hard to do with a concept set so completely in the Cold War as The Man from UNCLE, the movie is set in the time that the show aired.  The result is a stylish, brisk caper that keeps the audience smiling the whole way through.

Guy Ritchie is a director that in past films was loath to let viewers forget his presence.  His finest films, crime movies Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, used a lot of quick dialogue and fast cuts to set an unmistakable visual style that Ritchie has retained in his later films.  What felt fresh and enjoyable in Snatch, though, felt a little tired in Sherlock Holmes.  His movies remained enjoyable, Swept Away aside, but they didn’t match those first two classics.  The Man from UNCLE has Ritchie at his most anonymous.  His style is still there, but it is not as omnipresent.  It is allowed to drift into the background, with split cuts and fast cuts saved mostly for action scenes. The movie feels not quite so completely his, but the slightly lighter touch makes the touches work all the better.

The Man from UNCLE stars Henry Cavill as Napoleon Solo, a suave American thief turned spy. He charms his way through the movie affecting to be above it all.  Across from him is Armie Hammer as Illya Kuryakin, his taciturn Russian counterpart.  Facing an unthinkable threat, surviving Nazis getting their hands on the capacity to make nuclear bombs, the Soviets and Americans team the two up to stop them.  They are joined by the daughter of a kidnapped scientist Gabrielle Teller, whose uncle is one of the Nazis.  The three of them go to Italy to get to the bottom of things.

While Illya is clearly the more accomplished fighter, his short fuse occasionally endangers the mission.  Solo is unflappable, no matter how flippant his manner seems.  The two of them play off of each other wonderfully.  With Vikander’s character added to the mix things just sizzle.  The opening scene, where Solo extricates Gabby from Soviet controlled East Berlin under the nose of Kuryakin, is just about perfect. It maintains that unmatchable level of energy all the way through the two spies’ simultaneous infiltration of a hidden base, the highlight of the movie. Cavill, who was allowed to show very little personality in Man of Steel, is a delight in this and Hammer makes a great gruff counter point to his smooth charm. The rest of the cast is good as well, especially Vikander and Elizabeth Debicki, who plays one of the villains. The plot twists around, but it never feels cheap or convoluted.

The one flaw is the ending. The action builds and builds, but instead of a bang to cap it all off, it instead just sort of fizzles out. Our heroes feel just a little too good at their jobs and while the world is technically at stake the ending doesn’t really sell that notion. It is a bewildering note for an otherwise excellent film and since it comes so close to the end the movie has no opportunity to recover.

The Man from UNCLE also does that incredibly annoying thing where it sets the whole movie as something of a prequel to the concept. The spy organization UNCLE isn’t mentioned until the closing seconds. While it doesn’t actually hold back the concept, it does make the whole thing feel like set up. It is too bad that the box office results aren’t encouraging, if there is any justice this movie will see a sequel that continues right where this one leaves off. Still, the slightly deflating ending doesn’t change how good the rest of the movie is. I don’t know that I liked it quite as much as Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, but it is still loads of fun.

****