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Should I stay or should I go?

By Fred Richardson

Summer Movie Round Up

By Fred Richardson

So the summer movie season is well under way and I’ve got a little catching up to do. Here we go in chronological order. First up is Spider-Man 3. This movie frustrated me in ways that took days if not weeks to quite understand. Much like the middle installments of the Batman franchise, there’s an attempt to cram in multiple characters from the larger continuity as a way to make up for the lack of a well-known (to the general public) villain. This time around we get Flint Marko/Sandman (Thomas Hayden Church), Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard), Captain Stacy (James Cromwell) and Eddie Brock/Venom (Topher Grace). All characters from different points in the Spider-Man comic book history.

Not being a huge Spidey fan through the years, I really wasn’t bothered by the divergences from the print version the first two times around, but this time it really got to me that character arcs were so fundamentally different than in the comics. And the interpretation of Spider-Man/Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) seemed to be going backwards. He seemed to grow up a little in two, but in the third installment he’s reverted back to being more nerdy and goofy than before. He’s the 60’s high-school character, not the more mature adult in the recent comics. And that’s my problem, I guess. I just couldn’t get on board there and it made me hypercritical of the films other flaws: the constant mask-on mask-off, the goofy/asshole “dark Parker” sequences, the short shrift given to Venom, and the freaking insanely conveniently-timed butler speech! All of those might have been forgiven if I’d been on board with the interpretation of Peter Parker.

There are some bright spots. For the first time I felt like Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) was a person and not a prop. There’s a great action sequence or two. The Bruce Campbell cameo proved once again that he is godlike. In the end, I say stay home, look up Bruce’s Old Spice commercials and just wait for DVD.

28 Weeks Later does something I really didn’t expect. It actually works better than it’s predecessor, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. Yes, it has some problems but you’d have to seek them out and dote on them to really spoil your enjoyment of this tightly paced smartly written horror film. Robert Carlyle does some incredible work here and I’ve not liked him as much in anything previous, including Trainspotting. (One a side note- I wonder if he’s EVER going to get a new hairdo.) As a suspenseful horror film, I can’t really go into the plot at all without interfering with what is one of the best thrill-rides of the summer. You should go see the thing in the theater before it gets swallowed up by giant tent-pole monstrosities our next movie…

Pirates of The Caribbean: At World’s End. To say it’s all over the place would be a bit like saying Paris Hilton might be a little bit spoiled. As dark as the opening sequence is, I expected we might just be in for a little more depth than the previous films, but alas, it was just to show how bad the bad guy was and to set up a pirate mythology with a song. No… Really.

Sure, there’s magic and curses and such in the first two “Pirates,” but this thing has a goddess, a guy responsible for the souls of the dead and rock crabs that, well, um… yeah. Just gonna stop there. Then there’s the way the characters change their minds about things. Yes, I understand that pirates are liars, cheats and backstabbing scalawags but people make their decisions for reasons that could only be to serve the needs of the script. People make choices to be selfish or sacrificing not based on their apparent nature but on what needs to happen on screen next. But I guess something has to drive this unwieldy monstrosity of a plot forward. It’s all so complicated one might need a scorecard to keep up if the characters didn’t explain exactly what was going on every now and then.

What’s really surprising is that Johnny Depp doesn’t sparkle as Captain Jack Sparrow like he did in the previous installments. Sure, he has moments, but he gets upstaged by Geoffrey Rush’s Barbossa and Chow Yun-Fat’s Captain Sao Feng. Sadly, Orlando Bloom got kind of boring as Jack Turner while Kiera Knightly’s Elizabeth Swann is much better this time around than in part two. The rest of the cast performs well enough with not much to make them stand out as particularly bad or good. This all being said: didn’t we know it would be just a big dumb blockbuster action adventure?

By his own admission Depp based his performance of Sparrow partly on Rolling Stone guitarist Keith Richards so it’s fitting that he should have a small yet significant role as Captain Teague, Jack’s (very) old man. Their scenes together make the film worth the price of admission.

And finally, this past weekend I saw Knocked Up, the latest comedy from Judd Apatow (40 Year-Old Virgin and TV’s Freaks & Geeks).

It’s sentimental. It’s brilliant. It’s great. It’s amazing. I need to go see it again when the theater is less crowded so I can hear the lines I missed cause the laughter was downing out the dialog. There’s not a bad performance in the whole thing. Standouts include Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann (who happens to be Apatow’s wife) and my new favorite small part player Kristen Wiig. A current SNL cast member, every line Wiig utters is comedy gold in delivery and timing.

Then there are the lead players. Seth Rogan and Katherine Heigl are perfect. The whole freaking movie is perfect. The laughs come from the real characters and situations, not cleverly written lines.

Trust me, even the most cynical kid-hating grumpy old smart ass will find something to love about this movie. You should go. Go now. Really. Drop the paper, go to the theater and buy a ticket. Forget about work. You can always find another job. Movies like this don’t come around all that often.

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