Summer Comes Early…

…to the multiplex, if not Boise Idaho, which is still cold, wet and gloomy as, er... a night in an English bog.

All the locals are still saying about the weather, “It’s never like this!” It’s only a matter of time before they put two and two together and come up Witches, and we are burned at the stake to appease their pagan weather deities.

Until then, I’ve been going to the movies.

I Facebooked last weekend about what a surprisingly cool flick Rango was. It worked for me on every level. Pixar is really going to have to earn that Best Animated Feature statue at next year’s Oscars.

I went in with zero expectations—let’s face it, Johnny Depp’s hit-to-miss ratio is about 50/50 at best. Add that the movie takes place in the vast, arid plain of the great American Southwest (where I was brought up, much to my dissatisfaction and without a hell of a lot to show for it), and I thought it was going to be just a dreary ordeal. My disdain for the Southwest is almost as vast and withered as the land itself, and I went strictly out of a sense of parental/spousal obligation.



I can’t remember a time recently when I was so happy to be so wrong. It has a couple of cameos that alone make it worth seeing the movie. (One flashes by very quickly in the opening sequence, but if you’re a fan of Johnny Depp and his onscreen relationship with Gonzo Journalism, is priceless.)

The whole affair is so damned clever and fun and good-quirky. The Boy loved it and didn’t get itchy-assed even once. Plus, the Sunday matinee audience was packed with families and small kids, and as always, listening to the kids whisper questions/observations to their parents was almost as much fun as the movie.

Then yesterday I finally wriggled free of some onerous, odious work obligations and snuck off to see Matt Damon’s latest paranormal thriller, The Adjustment Bureau.

Now I usually never give away plot points, but in this case, I feel like I must. So, SPOILER ALERT, Last Boy Scout: I thought this was going to be a movie about sci-fi, time-travel/alternate universe stuff, but it ended up being a much more traditional, old-Hollywood kind of affair. You know, like the last episode of Lost.

What’s interesting is that as I’m writing this, I realize that if The Adjustment Bureau had been released, say, 70 years ago, nobody would have batted an eye. The atheist lobby were very much in the closet back then. But even I took a little umbrage at the plot turn of events. I kept waiting for the Morgan Freeman cameo, if you know what I mean.

But in classic-era Hollywood, this kind of plot would have been almost by-the-numbers. Sometimes magic actually did occur, like Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, or even as recently as Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait in the late-’70s.

But today it just felt preachy. In retrospect, I don’t think it was, but relative to the current cultural environment, it was kind of a bold move to go the spiritual route rather than the sci-fi/tech-run-amok. Especially after the media and fan backlash against the last episode of Lost.

I also think it was deliberate marketing misdirection—I fully went in expecting high-end sci-fi, not squishy theology. That and the fact that I had stumbled into a barely-attended close-captioned screening of the film really left a bad taste in my mouth. I felt like I had been lied to, twice.

Anyhow, I hit the head briefly after the screening, and on my way out, struck up a conversation with another guy exiting the bathroom. We were still talking as he approached his two buddies, waiting for him outside of the theater playing Battle Los Angeles. The four of us walked in together.

I haven’t snuck into a movie since I was a kid. It seems much more scary now. I don’t think I’ll be doing it again soon.

Battle Los Angeles certainly lives up to its title. There’s this movie-length battle, see, and it takes place in Los Angeles? The end.

Oh, and the bad guys are really bad. Evil aliens, like high-tech Predators, bent on the annihilation of mankind. Naturally, they came extremely well-prepared to meet that goal.

And of course, the evil ET’s foolproof plan also has an Achilles Heel a mile wide that an intrepid but diminishing force of good guys spend the movie looking for and then finding a way to exploit.

Throw in a few just-plain-folks who require rescuing—a plot MacGuffin that would be bewildering if the movie ever slowed down enough to give one time to ponder it—and you’ve got a B-grade summer blockbuster. Except the numbers-crunchers must have watched it and said, “Sorry, don’t quite have room for it on our summer super-calendar.”

It’s kind of Cloverfield meets Platoon, with an emphasis on Cloverfield. Or maybe it’s a just a feature-length advertisement for the United States Marines, in which case, it succeeded admirably.

Still, the couple of hours passed quickly and pleasantly enough. But I’m not sure it passed the “Would I finish watching this at home on DVD?” test.

Today the family went together to see Mars Needs Moms. I guess it’s based on a beloved book I’ve never heard of, but it was family-appropriate and we like to expose the kid to class n culture and whatnot, as much as possible.

The animation style was that awful motion-capture stuff. Not the photo-realistic Avatar-style either, more the Polar Express kind. Actually, exactly the Polar Express kind, this film coming from the same animation studio, whose name escapes me.

Maybe it was meant to better capture the otherwordly aesthetic of the source material. Hell, maybe it even succeeded, but I just find this style of animation… outmoded. Like it was a cool idea for a little while, but it didn’t pan out. They even ran film clips of the actors being filmed wearing their blue-dotted space-suits over the end credits, completely destroying the illusion for anyone who might have been buying it up till then.

Plus, you could have hung meat in that theater. It was the Regal theater at Overland and Cole. If you’re local, you know the one. I went out early to complain—politely—about the cold, but was ignored. It wasn’t until The Missus went out about a sub-zero hour later that the temperature finally began to climb.

Anyhow, it’s been a lot of movies in a short while. Seems like every weekend the next couple months has an almost-blockbuster coming out. It’s like the summer movie season developed mission-creep. A lot of people will bemoan this fact because a lot of people just like to bitch about everything. But for hard-core geeks like me, hopefully it’ll mean not having to choose between two or three films I want to see every weekend between May and July, because a lot of them will have been released in March and April.

Man, I sure hope Atlas Shrugged opens in Boise!