Summer Movies: Part III

Pacific Rim

This may have been the most fun I’ll have at the movies this summer.  In the moment, Pacific Rim is awesome.  Giant robots fighting giant alien dinosaur looking things is as epic as it sounds.  This feels like someone took a kid’s daydream from Power Rangers and Godzilla, amped it all up into one visually fantastic ride.

From what I gathered, a portal to another world or universe opened at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and Kaijus (the giant dino-monster things) came out and started attacking humanity.  In order to fight the Kaiju, the human race has come together to build giant robots manned by at least two compatible individuals.  Sure, making giant fighting robots may not seem like the most practical idea, but it is the most entertaining.  As more and more fearsome kaiju are passing through the portal, a drift pilot with a tragic past may need to get back into a robot and save the world.  It sound ridiculous, but in the moment, you eat that shit up.

Oh, and along with all that is a very fun side-plot: Dr Newton Geiszler, a scientist obsessed with the Kaiju (wonderfully played by Charlie Day), has figured out how to drift with one.  Sorry, drifting basically means two beings connecting and sharing a brain.  It’s how pilots make the giant robots move and it’s how Geiszler learns vital information about the Kaiju.  Day’s character and his antics are a very fun slice of comic relief and he makes a scientist seem like a rockstar.

Pacific Rim is one of those films you really have to relax and let all your inner inhibitions go.  It is so far fetched, with some major glaring plot holes, but just let it go and you will have so much fun.  I mean, you’re watching giant robots fight giant alien-dinosaurs and it’s all so artistically beautiful.  I loved how the Kaiju seem to have glowing properties, it all flows well with the setting.  I sense Pacific Rim could be up for the visual effects and art direction awards come Oscar season.

The Wolverine

If you ask an average kid to name their favorite X-Men character, odds are it’s Wolverine.  Not that he is the best, lets not open up that huge nerd-fueled debate, but as far as the movies are concerned, he gets the most screentime and one of the best actors.  Here, Hugh Jackman is back in his title role, but not with any other familiar faces, yet, it works.

The film starts with Logan (aka The Wolverine) held captive by the Japanese during the end of WWII, near Navasaki.  As sirens wail, Logan protects a young soldier, Yashida from the nuclear blast.  Seeing Logan’s healing power, Yashida spends his life obsessed with the idea of immortality.  In the present, Yashida is a wealthy head of Japan’s biggest tech company and on his deathbed. Yukio (Rila Fukushima) brings Logan to Japan, claiming to want a last goodbye, but Yashida is really seeking a way to take Logan’s immortality and use it himself.  However, when Yashida dies, an internal power struggle send thugs after his granddaughter, Mariko (Tao Okamoto).  Logan must protect her, even as his healing powers fade.

Last June, I said that I enjoyed Iron Man 3 because it was so character driven, the same goes for The Wolverine.  Superhero movies that are more than CRASH, BOOM, PUNCH are the best.  While we still get a lot of action and fighting, there is enough look at Logan as a tortured, lonely person that keeps me on board, wondering what will motivate him next.

What I didn’t expect, was a strong martial arts film.  With the majority of the film set in Japan, we get lots of samurai swords and ninjas running along the rooftops, they seem to blend well with Logan’s brash claws.  Logan is always an outsider, this just seems to attenuate?? it.  And thankfully, the girls can kick ass just as well as the guys.

And a last word of warning, if you’re one of those who bolts out of the theater once the credits start, oh, you’re missing one of the biggest X-Men treats yet!

The Way, Way Back

I walked into this film blind, and by choice.  All I knew was that this was by the same people and studio who made Little Miss Sunshine, one of my all-time favorite movies.  Once again, they led me down a wonderful path.

The Way, Way Back is many things.  It’s part coming of age story, part restrained family drama, set within a suck-tastic summer story with an awkward teenage protagonist.  Duncan (Liam James) is fourteen years old, about to spend a summer with his mom (Toni Collete) and her boyfriend Trent (Steve Carell) at Trent’s beach summer home.  It’s a quiet little beach town that adults think kids can have fun at, but really, it’s just spring break for the adults.  While they drink and party with the other adults, the kids are often alone, and unless they have a bunch of friends, brooding over what a raw deal they’ve got.

Eventually, Duncan escapes to the local water park and becomes an employee.  This becomes his the only place he is happy and a double life.  Though his mom asks, he never tells her where he spends his time, and she doesn’t pry.  As Duncan gets more involved at the park, and comes out of his shell there thanks to the sarcastic park manager, Owen (Sam Rockwell), things get messy back at the beach house.

From the very first scene, we are drawn in and taking sides.  As they’re driving to the beach town, Trent asks Duncan, as the rest of the passengers are sound asleep, how he rates himself on a scale of 1-10.  Duncan timidly gives himself a six, while Trent harshly dubs Duncan a three.  Who tells that to a kid?  Trent tries to make it sound like Duncan should try to improve his number over the summer, but we see Trent just as Duncan does, an asshole who doesn’t care about anyone but himself.

I doubt this will gain much recognition during Oscar season, it doesn’t have the level of heart and charisma that Little Miss Sunshine did.  However, it is very good, heartfelt, fun and one of my favorite films of the summer.  Allison Janney put on my favorite performance of the summer as meddling, middle aged lush next door, and I look forward to Liam James’ career.  Anyone who can remember how awful it was to be fourteen can identify with Duncan, and wish they had such a great summer job.

The Help

I try to avoid other opinions of a movie until I have seen it myself, but it is much harder to avoid the advertisements.  By just glancing at commercials and posters for The Help, I got the idea that it would be a slightly quirky film about women, for women with some laughs and a lesson about racism.  When I finally saw it, I was shocked at what a great movie it was.  The drama and issues brought up were a lot heavier than that yellow poster can let on.

The film is set in Jackson Mississippi in the 1960s.  When Skeeter (Emma Stone), an aspiring writer, returns home from college, she notices more and more tension between white women and their black hired help.  She can tell that her ill mother (Allison Janney) is lying about their old maid, Constantine (Cicely Tyson), who raised Skeeter.  The girls she grew up with are all now married with their own help and finding new ways to deal with “the colored situation.”  Not realizing the full danger at first, Skeeter tries to recruit the black maids to provide testimonials about what it is like to work for these white women.  As Skeeter gets deeper into writing the book, racial tensions rise across Jackson, and the country.

The strongest things in this film are the acting, variety of full bodied characters and how they fit together.  Viola Davis provides a strong lead as Aibileen.  As an older woman, who has raised many white children, but hardly had time for her only son, now dead, she has become bitter.  That bitterness and loss helps her find the strength to tell her story to Skeeter.  Viola’s best friend is Minny (Octavia Spencer), a bold maid whose sassy mouth and defiant attitude gets her fired by Hilly Holbrook.  Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard) is the queen bee of the white young women in Jackson.  What Hilly does, the rest do, which includes adding new outside toilets for the help, believing in racist propaganda about disease carried by black people, and shunning Celia Foote.  Celia (Jessica Chastain) is a sweet, ditzie young woman who lives outside of Jackson, whom all the white women think is white trash.  When she hires Minny as her first maid, boundaries are broken and big secrets are revealed.

There is a funny thing I have noticed about The Help, that I am not sure if it hinders or hurts the main idea about how real racism was within homes in the 1960s.  When characters like Hilly talk about ideas that the audience knows are backwards and outwardly racist, we tend to laugh at how absurd these women sound.  Thing is, Hilly is completely serious about “the colored situation” and other ignorant ideas.  To some degree I feel like she is being a comic character, a bit like George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove.  When she says, “They carry different diseases than we do. That’s why I’ve drafted the Home Health Sanitation Initiative.” we could compare it to when Scott says, “Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!”  On some level, that works fine since we are in a future perspective where her traits are laughable.  We clearly hear something that can be funny, but other characters in the film may not.  And later, some of the things that happen to Hilly are outright hilarious, so much so that I do not want to spoil the fun.  While we see Hilly as comical, she is still an obvious threat to our heroines.  Laughing at a villain can be a dangerous thing to do in film.

The Help is nominated for four Oscars.  Of those, three of them are well deserved acting nominations for Viola Davis for Lead Actress, Octavia Spencer and Jessica Chastain for Supporting Actress.   The other is for Best Picture.

I have seen The Help twice, simply because I enjoyed it so much the first time I knew I needed to see it again.  All the acting is wonderful, the whole cast creates a great ensemble.  While this is mainly a drama focusing on heavy racial issues from a perspective many of us may not have considered before, there are some wildly funny moments that help lighten the whole film.  And in the end, it feels like an inspiring film full of bravery and a heart of gold, without getting at all sappy.

“Minny don’t burn fried chicken.”

If the Academy wants to award a film with a perfect blend of drama, laughs and uplifting revolution, The Help will win the Oscar for Best Picture.

Juno

I came home from college one weekend to take my sister and brother to see Juno.  They were seventeen and thirteen at the time, right in the audience demographic.  When we got home, dad asked us about the movie.  They casually told him it was about a sixteen year old girl who gets pregnant.  I got drilled, but just for a moment.  I told him flat out that there’s nothing in the film that glorifies or encourages risky teen behavior, it was quite the opposite.  That calmed his nerves, but he still asked if they learned anything.  My sister said, “Yup, don’t get pregnant.”

Juno (Ellen Page) is a typical sixteen year old girl, yet not so typical.  She has a walk, talk and actions that seem like she wants people to know that she knows who she is, but we soon find out that she has a lot to learn.  When we first meet her, she casually walks down the street swigging a gallon of Sunny D and buys her third pregnancy test of the day at the mini-mart without even trying to hide it.  I don’t think I’ve known anyone at sixteen to be that independent and confident in such a huge pickle.

Juno first breaks the news to her friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby), who is loyal, but seems to be a bad influence.  In their hamburger phone conversation, we get the idea that she’s helped other friends secretly get abortions and is sexually active herself, like it’s no big deal.  Many times kids follow their friend’s lead, it makes me wonder if Leah is one of the reasons Juno decides to have sex.

That brings us to the father, Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), a skinny boy constantly running with the track team that gallops across the town like a herd of horses in bright yellow shorty-shorts.  He’s a very soft spoken boy and when Juno breaks the news to him, she leaves exits casually saying, “Sorry I had sex with you.”  All he can do is stand on his stoop for a moment wondering out loud, “Who’s idea was it?”

So after Juno chickens out of an abortion, she and Leah look for a nice couple “desperately seeking spawn” in the PennySaver.  They stumble upon a picture of Mark and Vanessa Loring and decide that they will be the adopted parents.  Now that Juno has a plan all figured out, she can finally tell her parents.

And cue the two most dreaded words a parent can hear from their teenage daughter: “I’m pregnant.”  They would rather deal with Juno being expelled or into hard drugs, anything but this.  Juno’s father and step-mother (J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney) are obviously disappointed, but immediately jump into support mode.  I love Simmons in this scene, the disappointment is in his voice as well as in his face.  “I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when.”  Ouch, a hard blow from dad, and all Juno can muster is, “I don’t know what kind of girl I am.”

So Juno and her father go to meet Mark and Vanessa (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) to hammer out legal details over the adoption.  While there, Juno discovers that Mark is a musician and starts to bond with him, creating a very slippery slope.  Later, she drops by unannounced to show him ultrasound pictures and again for no real reason.  Juno is much too young to understand that her maternal instincts are drawing her closer to the future adopted father of her child or the danger she’s creating by spending time with him.

Around Juno’s eighth month, shit hits the fan (I won’t tell you how) and she finally breaks down.  She’s been able to hold herself together and keep a brave face through pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and the thought of giving her child away, but this is too much.  It’s like she’s finally realized (made us realize as well) that she is just a kid and that all these issues she’s dealing with and everything happening inside her is bigger than she can really comprehend.  “Just out dealing with things way beyond my maturity level.”

I hope people now see why I took my teenage siblings to see Juno.  The way the film illustrates the very real issues of teenage pregnancy can be a huge eye-opener for adolescents, and the immature dialogue and quirky characters will help pull them into the film.  Kids aren’t prepared to deal with all these issues and they get annoyed with their parents and teachers warnings.  I’d suggest watching Juno to help open up the teenage-sex-is-a-dumb-idea/don’t-get-pregnant talk with your kids.  They’re more likely to listen to a good movie and base the conversation off of that.

“Uhhh, I hate it when adults use the term “sexually active.” What does it even mean? Am I gonna like deactivate some day or is it a permanent state of being?”