BIRDMAN

(Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu, 2014)

I liked almost every element of Birdman.
The big gimmick of the film - that it's been made to seem as if it has been shot in one long continuous take - starts off exhausting and nerve-wracking, but as the rhythm of the movie is established and stabilises, it works, becoming spontaneous, and jazzy; even witty in places. It is also crucially stunningly beautiful in places. Emmanuel Lubezki is a genius, and he takes full advantage of all of the surreal sights backstage at a theatre.
That world is vividly captured in all its shabbiness and glamour - this is a sensitively textured film, and that texture is a big part of the film's appeal.
The story is a simple one, but it succeeds in creating tension: A fading movie star named Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) famous for his role as a winged super-hero in the Birdman movies, struggles with his cast, his emotions, his ex-wife and daughter, his critics and his own expectations and issues as he approaches the opening night of the Raymond Carver adaptation he has written, directed and stars in. As that opening approaches and Riggan falls apart, the tension rises, as does the comedy. This is basically a satire of the showbiz world, full of caricatures (the pretentious method actor, the bitter critic, the desperate ageing Leading Lady) and broad moments, but some of it is hilarious.
The cast do a better job with those caricatures than anybody could have expected. Keaton has always been an underrated actor, but here he makes Riggan a haunted man, torn between his ego and his needs, his moods swinging wildly. He seems without vanity here. Edward Norton plays Mike Shiner, a pompous New York stage actor, who is most himself playing somebody else, and he makes him relatable and human and oddly affecting. He is also hilarious and hugely annoying. Emma Stone is Riggan's daughter, fresh from rehab and angry at her father and the world, and she makes a cliche of a part moving and fascinating, and her scenes with Norton may be the best in the film. Naomi Watts and Andrea Riseborough are the two actresses in the play, struggling with their leading men and their insecurities, and they both do quite a lot with not very much.
The score, improvised on drums by Antonio Sanchez, is perfect for the scattered nervous energy Inarittu is trying to create, and gels well with the photography.
So: I liked all of that. I'm just not sure it all adds up to much at all. It is a dense, intoxicating cinematic experience, but it doesn't provoke much beyond admiration at the technical feat of its making and the acting. It is saying something about the nature of creativity and what makes each of us special, but it says that in 5 minutes. Much of the rest of the time it is saying embarrassing things about pop culture (Superhero movies are BAD!!) and social networking (Twitter is RIDICULOUS!!), while those caricatured characters inevitably lead to more than a few caricatured plot eventualities.
Inarittu's big statement (and yes, he always has one) seems to be revealed in the final scene, when Riggan's powers (previously assumed to be either a magic realist flourish or confined to his imagination) appear to be real. Is he saying that we all have such magic inside us, but that the world means that we focus on other, less important qualities? Or is that final shot just his daughter moving into his fragile headspace?
It is all a bit vague, a bit studiedly ambiguous. Which feels like a bit of a cop-out.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2

(Marc Webb, 2014)

Here's a dumb move too many super-hero movies try to pull: make the villain sympathetic.
The source material rarely bothers. Oh, there are many sympathetic (or at least rounded, human) super-villains. But then there are also hundreds of thousands of super-hero comics from which they come. O the few dozen high-profile movies in the super-hero sub-genre, it is staggering how many attempt to make the super-villain somebody we can relate to. But who wants to relate to a villain? We can admire their energy, wit, style, intelligence, efficiency, combat acumen...but relate to them as people?
Partly it's to attract actors. They want interesting characters to play, with layers and emotional beats and moments. But they should know better. The truly memorable villains aren't memorable because they are sympathetic. Heath Ledger's Joker? Terence Stamp's General Zod?
In Marc Webb's sequel to his vaguely redundant Amazing Spider-Man, Jamie Foxx's Electro suffers from just this problem. Introduced as a humble electrical engineer at Oscorp (the Evil Corporation at the heart of this particular reading of the Spider-Man mythos) named Max, he stutters with a bad haircut, unappreciated, exploited and ignored. A chance encounter with Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield) makes him an uber-fan, and soon afterwards he is given electricity powers by a pretty familiar accident at work. His second encounter with Spidey leaves him feeling betrayed, and out for revenge on the wallcrawler and the world.
Here's another common super-hero movie issue: too many villains. Webb stuffs in the Green Goblin (Dane De Haan) and the Rhino (Paul Giamatti in what is effectively a hammy cameo, or a hammeo if you will) on top of Electro. They all face our hero in an overstuffed last act, and all this on top of a subplot about the disappearance of Peter Parker's parents when he was a child, the return of his boyhood friend, Harry Osborn, and his ongoing difficulties in terms of his relationship with Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone).
That is where Webb's real focus lies, and as is the case with each of the Spider-Man films, the material with Peter's private life is far more compelling than any of the cgi super-hero battles. Gwen is the love of his life, but having promised her dying father that he would keep away from her, lest she come into danger, he is in constant conflict with himself. Stone and Garfield are the best things here, and their genuine chemistry brings each of the scenes they share to life in a way the rest of the film struggles to match. Their relationship feels complicated and warm in a real, human way, giving the events of the last reel surprising emotional punch.
Aside from that, its a middling super-hero movie. Some good gags, a few nifty action scenes, a great evocation of what it might be like to web-sling through Manhattan, and far too much time devoted to dull villains and their back stories and nefarious planning. Webb's style is the very definition of emptily stylish, but he spends what feels like an awful lot of time creating effects suited to 3D screenings.
Stone and Garfield make it just about worthwhile, but really, this is no better than the worst Raimi Spier-Man film, the third. And that is a problem.

GANGSTER SQUAD

(Ruben Fleischer, 2013)

Gangster Squad plays like somebody saw The Untouchables and L.A. Confidential and thought: I can do that.
Only they couldn't.
Instead what they made was a dumbed-down, simplified version of similar material. This is James Ellroy for the Playstation generation; what it takes from Ellroy and classic gangster pictures are the superficial things - the hats, the suits, the cars, the art deco architecture, the tommy guns. What it misses out is what makes Ellroy so good and so distinctive - the vicious characterisation, the sprawling narratives, the gaudy peppering of sex and violence, the intensity, the wit.
This is a film that manages to do everything it does badly. A massive climactic tommy gun battle is tedious and predictable. The romance between Ryan Gosling's charming detective and Emma Stone's moll is dull and somewhat perfunctory. Ganglord Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn, channelling a villain from Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy) intimidating then having inept underlings murdered in creative ways is second-hand and cliched. The scene where Josh Brolin's heroic cop O'Meara rounds up his squad is laughably silly, as is his voiceover narration ("Evil can only thrive when good men do nothing") while his relationship with his pregnant wife is copied more or less verbatim from The Untouchables but lacks the sincerity and charm of the equivalent scenes in that film.
The story follows the establishment of an off-the-books squad of Los Angeles cops in 1949, brought together in order to wage covert war against the massively powerful and ruthless mobster Cohen.
In reality the story lurches along from one middling action scene to the next, doling out cardboard character beats in between. It all looks very slick and pretty; too much so. These cops are immaculately tailored, their cars gleaming, hair beautifully coiffed. Every twist and turn is telegraphed, and Fleischer mainly seems to be showcasing his own ability to handle a big property like this one perhaps in the hopes of landing a big studio blockbuster as his next movie.
The real shame of it is the immense waste of that cast, filled with great faces and huge talent as it is. Only Penn really registers. Brolin is boring, Gosling seems to be parodying himself, and nobody else has enough of a character to really play. Instead they just concentrate on looking good and advancing the plot, much like the film itself.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN

(Marc Webb, 2012) Setting aside the question of whether this "reboot" of a character last seen in cinemas only five years ago is even necessary - Colombia Pictures has to release a Spider-Man movie every five years or else they lose the cinematic rights to the character, which is all the answer you need - let's first focus on the question of the need for yet another origin story. Well, the greatest Super-hero characters all have suitably great, resonant origin myths. Batman, Superman, the Hulk and Spider-Man - the characters absolutely everybody knows - each possesses a unique, powerful beginning. Get that tale right - and The Amazing Spider-Man does, for the most part - and you have the basis for a solid piece of genre filmmaking, and maybe something more if all the necessary constituent elements line up just right. Spider-Man is at heart a fundamentally teenage character, and in such a power fantasy the emotional elements are familiar from other genres: angst, isolation, alienation, heartache, social awkwardness. Webb's film gets all of that right. Indeed, it's strongest material is the non-superhero stuff; this film opts for Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone) as Peter Parker's Midtown High love interest, and perhaps unsurprisingly given the directors form with romcoms (his previous film was 500 Days of Summer) the scenes of their faltering romance are by far the best in the film. Andrew Garfield is terrific as Peter; more cool outsider than the kooky geek Tobey Maguire played in Sam Raimi's trilogy; and he and Stone have genuine chemistry. Their relationship is sweet, believable, and finally even a little moving, with just a note of the foreboding necessary in any such romance in the Super-Hero genre. Garfield is great at all the pain Peter endures, funny when he needs to be, and communicates the euphoric rush his powers bring him, but in his scenes with Stone he is all vulnerability and longing. She is set up as perfect for him, smart, brave, strong and beautiful, and her characters look is a geek-pleasing homage to the John Romita-drawn Gwen of the comics, with the same hair and love of knee-high socks and boots. The other supporting characters have been beautifully cast; the warmth and cozy affection of Peters life with his Aunt and Uncle is nicely played by Martin Sheen and Sally Field so that when he loses it, the loss feels immense, and Denis Leary gives Gwen's Police Captain father a decency and crotchety intensity which works perfectly for the character and serves the plot. All of that gives the film a surprisingly hefty emotional kick, especially in the last act, but the Super-hero material is generally less successful. Not the action scenes; the cgi-assisted sequences of Spider-Man and the Lizard (Rhys Ifans, decent if a little rote) in whirling, acrobatic combat are thrilling enough, the scenes of our hero mixing it up with policemen and common criminals far grittier and more effective, and the web-swinging passages are vertiginous and occasionally beautiful. But the plot is a mess; filled with gaping holes, evidently cut to ribbons in the editing suite (how else to explain the way several seemingly key threads - most notably the story of Peter's parents - absolutely disappear without explanation?), and consisting of a series of derivative, overly familiar beats. The heroes origin is tied up with that of the villain, the threat eventually effects an entire city, the exposition which sets up that plot is on the dull side while the villains descent into madness, is, rather, humanised in a tortured, cliched manner: all common factors in lesser Super-Hero films. It helps that everything looks nice, Webb aiming for an edgier, slightly more realist look than Raimi's stylised comic book world but keeping it all glossy with the help of Michael Bay's old cinematographer John Schwartzman, but James Horner's score is unremarkable. There is one formula in Super-Hero genre franchise creation; the first film can be solid, so that the second can be much better (see Raimi's trilogy, Brian Singer's X-Men films and Nolan's Batman series for good examples). Let's hope Webb can stick to that, since he's got the soild - if a little uninspired - first part out of the way already..