The Amazing Spiderman

…shouldn’t be called “Amazing”. Maybe “The Usual Spiderman.” This feels like a TV movie version of a Spiderman movie, with none of the gravitas of the Sam Raimi movies. (I still maintain that Spiderman 2 is one of the best superhero movies ever made.) Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are appealing leads, but they’re both WAY too old and sophisticated. It’s like watching John Travolta and Olivia Newton John in Grease all over again. They could be teachers! It’s not so much that it’s a “bad” movie. There’s nothing wrong with it, per se. I’m sure the kids will like it. But it’s just a shame that Spiderman is no longer Jesus.

The Dark Knight Rises

After a few days to think about the movie, and in light of the people in Aurora who died to see it, it seems like bad form to say this but, here goes: this movie doesn’t make any sense. The plot and the timelines don’t track, the motives of the villain, Bane, are foggy, and the villainous plan is terribly flawed. In The Dark Knight, the Joker had some flawed plans too, but he was crazy and he was trying to produce some large-scale joke-shop trickery. Bane, who sounds like a cross between Darth Vader and Tim Curry, isn’t named “the Joker”, so his plans can’t be big jokes. They need to serve some purpose. And when all the twists come to light, it’s way too easy to deconstruct the plan and say, “What the fuck?? What did he WANT all this time?” Nevertheless, there are some epic, bone-chilling action scenes and a very good ending, so it’s still worth seeing, even if the plot has holes you could drive ten batmobiles through.

Bernie

A likeable dark comedy featuring Jack Black in one of his best performances. Director Linklater intercuts real interviews with actual accounts of Bernie, thus bringing a more realistic, docudrama feel to the story that might otherwise come off as too creepy to be true. The cast is great, the pace is speedy, and the creep factor, especially when Jack Black sings in the church choir, is high. It’s a fun movie.

Brave

** SPOILER TIME!!**

Is this a feminist parable? Is it symbolic of anything greater than itself? Is it based on some great Scottish fable? It’s really hard to tell. One third of the way into the movie, the main character accidentally turns her mother into a bear. A Bear! So then the rest of the movie is spent trying to figure out how to turn her back into a woman. Is that symbolic of anything? I know in many fairy tales there are candlesticks, toads, wooden puppets, and “beasts”, but bears? It feels like a Non sequitur. A beautifully animated Non sequitur.

Ted

A predictable bromance hitting all the major beats of the boy-meets-bear, boy-loses-bear, boy-gets-bear-back arc. Many of the jokes aren’t funnier just because the teddy bear is saying them, so they’re missing some situational potential. But the cast is likeable and committed, and the laughs come often enough, so no harm, no foul.