Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

The MCU's sardonic cul-de-sac adds one more showcase home. Is it as “nice” as the earlier constructions? Well, clearly no expense was spared, and it displays many of the features you would like if you’re in the market to buy: a strong cast of likable actors, plenty of eye candy (in the visual effects, not necessarily in the hottie sense), and your occasional decent stab at humor -- but frankly, the neighborhood has seen better days. It doesn’t particularly resemble the place it once was. And some of the new house’s features are somewhat odd and seemingly not entirely a good fit; they’re not necessarily innovations that a buyer couldn’t live without. All in all, this isn’t a bad movie, but it’s not something you should have been clamoring to pay money to see -- better to be a subscriber and have waited for this one to move into its permanent digs, where the value is much higher than in the newly-made market. That's hardly a level worthy of aspiration, but that seems to be where this thing is now. Whether you really need to visit this place depends pretty much entirely upon you.

Ant-Man and the Wasp

Fun. Not profound, to be sure, but certainly an entertaining piece of popcorn cinema. It's also an object lesson: when the first in this series came out, I was certain that it was a bridge too far for the Marvel milieu. Not so; this line of the story has its own niche--humor driven, narrowly focused (a family, instead of the world or universe)--and, so long as they keep the pseudo-scientific hooey to a minimum, entertaining instead of eye-rolling. Not bad for a minor, never-heard-of-it-before character and storyline. It helps, too, that the cast--leads and supporting actors alike--play their parts nearly perfectly; the right people are plugged into the right roles, and that creates plenty of leeway with the audience. The implication: keep things fresh, and fun, and light, and perhaps fantasies of an MCU in perpetuity may be possible--whether its focus characters are big or small.

Ant-Man

I avoided this movie when it first came out, and assumed I would not like it if I did happen to stumble across it. It seemed like just a step too far--into the absurd--for the Marvel franchise. But I happened to spot it in the on-demand listing and couldn’t resist the superhero siren-song. And the verdict is...it’s OK. Not awful, not great. The premise is indeed absurd, even for a superhero film; the formula--wisecracking, flawed do-gooder; oddball supporting cast; tech as both savior and source of villainy; ham-handed attempts at building a realistic emotional foundation--is competently done, but has been done better; and the promises of things to come, given what precedes, don’t really generate that much excitement. I suppose it’s all fine, but I can’t help feeling that, if all this effort had been put towards generating something truly new and interesting, that’s exactly what we might have gotten.

The Hobbit: The Battle of The Five Armies

Diseases sometimes run in families; that may be the best way to think of the things that are wrong with this movie. As with its brethren films, this installment in the "trilogy-that-should-have-been-one-movie" suffers from the same frailties; however, here those problems are magnified due to the fact that they have festered all the way through two films already. The liberties with the story--both wild extrapolations from the original text and outright fundamental revisions to the story--are welcome least of all here at the story's climax and denouement. These deviations are all the more glaring in their lack of respect for the original material. Certain Elves don't belong in this story; a minor character is given way too much screen time; and the attempt at epic scope in the final battle just makes things confused and unclear. Ironically, a lust for dragon's gold--in this case, box office wealth--is what did in this project from the start. Let it be a lesson to future filmmakers.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

The map within the frontispiece of this film should read, “Here There Be Bloat.” Again, the tidy little story gets the stretched out treatment. The result might be more impressive for someone completely unaware of the original book. Perhaps. For the long-time fan, the result is much more problematic. The initiated viewer is constantly aware of how much story stretching is going on, of how much of what he’s seeing is not in the original tale. That’s distracting, if nothing else, and negatively impacts the viewer’s experience. Ironically, then, this is probably a movie that one would only recommend to die-hard fans--exactly the people who will be most annoyed by the story manipulations. What’s done is done, but the “three movie arc” decision really was a huge mistake.

The Hurt Locker

I need to be cautious here. This is a good movie. A good movie. But this is not a Best Picture movie. I suspect that award had much more to do with the politics of the award-givers, and what they wanted to say, versus the actual quality of this film. The performances ring true, the direction is well done, and the scenes look for all the world like they really were filmed in Iraq in 2004. But again, this film is less a narrative plot than a series of scenes/vignettes on the subject of war and what it does to people (a.k.a. the Saving Private Ryan effect). I'm starting to think that this represents a trend in moviemaking on the subject of war; why the reluctance to show a real war story, instead of just a pastiche representing feelings about the conflict? Is there something there that filmmakers are trying to hide? Avoid? What's going on here? Answering those questions might eventually yield some real Best Picture war movie material.