Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018): based on characters created by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and others; written by Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Paul Rudd, Andrew Barrer, and Gabriel Ferrari; directed by Peyton Reed; starring Paul Rudd (Scott Lang/Ant-Man), Evangeline Lilly (Hope Pym/The Wasp), Michael Pena (Luis), Michael Douglas (Original Ant-Man/Hank Pym), Laurence Fishburne (Bill Foster/Goliath), Michelle Pfeiffer (Original Wasp/Janet Van Dyne), and Hannah John-Kamen (Ava/Ghost):

Genial sequel to Ant-Man gives Evangeline Lilly's Wasp the first titular mention of a female superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Actually, it's a two-fer. Michelle Pfeiffer, playing Lilly's mother, was the first Wasp just as Michael Douglas was the first Ant-Man. And hey, the hero called Black Goliath in the 1970's comics, played here by Laurence Fishburne, also appears without the superhero name that had that adjective because that's how we did it with non-white superheroes in the 1960's and 1970's!

At about 105 minutes, this breezy caper-comedy of cosmic dimensions would be about perfect. It's 15 minutes too much, pretty much all of it devoted to a plot thread starring Walton Goggins as an annoying super-tech black-marketeer. I guess if it were the seventies, he'd be Black Marketeer, but only if he were played by Jim Brown.

The stakes are personal in this movie, a nice change from the universal stakes of the last Marvel Joint, Avengers: Infinity War. Michael Douglas wants to save Michelle Pfeiffer from The Quantum Realm. Paul Rudd just wants to make it through his house arrest for being a superhero in contravention of the Sokovia Accords so that he can have fun with his daughter and stuff somewhere other than his house. The deftly, hilariously used Michael Pena just wants to get the new security firm he and Rudd are running into the black. Ant-Man's daughter wants him to embrace his superherodom. Superheroness? Whatever.

So there's lots of shrinking and growing action. Ant-Man spends about as much time being Giant-Man as he does Ant-Man. Oddly, the Wasp never grows. If she does, does her superhero moniker change to the Hornet?

Walton Goggins, though, and his crew. Phew. Killjoys' Hannah John-Kamen plays Ghost, a villain who really isn't a villain because she's trying to cure herself of a bad case of reality cancer. The real villain is... who again? A rogue agent of some kind, in it for the money. There's some cosmic trippiness in the Quantum Realm. Michelle Pfeiffer looks great. Certain things seem to be set up for Avengers: Infinity War, as I assume Ant-Man will get to participate in that superhero slugfest. Here, Peyton Reed keeps things light and semi-jokey. There are zingers that are actually funny. And Pena gets an extended monologue in the same style as the first Ant-Man, and it's hilarious.

So too his (true!) observation that "Latinos love The Mozz!" The Mozz is Morrissey, formerly of The Smiths, btw, and Latinos and Latinas really do love him, though not for The Mozz's increasingly xenophobic politics. 

The ants continue to squeak and vocalize, which is impressive for creatures without lungs who communicate through smell. Nitpicking the science in this movie is pointless, unless you want to note that shrinking into the Quantum Realm while keeping one's mass would eventually cause a hero to turn into a miniature black hole. Where the Hell does the mass come and go from with these crazy Pym Particles? And can you make a Pimm's Cocktail with Pym Particles? I'm asking for a friend. Recommended.

Animal Men

Point Blank: adapted from the Donald Westlake novel The Hunter by Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse, and Kate Newhouse; directed by John Boorman; starring Lee Marvin (Walker), Angie Dickinson (Chris), Keenan Wynn (Yost), Carroll O'Connor (Brewster), Lloyd Bochner (Carter) and John Vernon (Mal) (1967): God knows John Boorman has his flaws as a director, but lack of ambition isn't one of them. Here, he takes a straightforward novel of revenge by Donald Westlake and makes it burningly trippy and subjective without losing the narrative momentum or bleakness of the original work. Lee Marvin is great as the lead, a master thief and burglar betrayed and left for dead by his partners. The rest of the cast is strong. Many read the movie as being borderline supernatural -- is Marvin's character really alive or is he a vengeful spirit? -- and the film supports both the supernatural and natural interpretations of events. Remade as Mel Gibson's Payback. An essential 1960's thriller. Highly recommended.

The Fly: written by George Langelaan and adapted by James Clavell; directed by Kurt Neumann; starring David Hedison (Andre Delambre), Patricia Owens (Helene Delambre), Vincent Price (Francois Delambre), and Herbert Marshall (Inspector Charas) (1958): I'll be damned if I know why this is set in Montreal. I guess the original short story was. Only one of the leads attempts a French-Canadian accent, and the maid's attempt at a French-Canadian accent occasionally slips into a Hollywood Irish brogue. One of the big-budget horror hits of the 1950's, The Fly now seems unthrilling and painfully slow. The spider-web sequence is great, though, and the Fly prosthetics still possess the ability to startle. Lightly recommended for historical reasons.

Ant-Man: based on the character created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby; written by Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish, Adam McKay, and Paul Rudd; directed by Peyton Reed; starring Paul Rudd (Scott Lang), Michael Douglas (Hank Pym), Evangeline Lilly (Hope van Dyne), Corey Stoll (Darren Cross), Bobby Cannavale (Paxton), Anthony Mackie (The Falcon), and Michael Pena (Luis) (2015): Jolly heist film masquerading as a superhero origin story. This would make a terrific pilot for a TV show -- indeed, it's a much more suitable TV project than Marvel's Agents of SHIELD. The large cast is affable, some of the writing is cleverly non-stereotypical, and the 'shrunken' sequences are nicely imagined. A brief scene showing the 'original' Ant-Man and Wasp in action against a nuclear missile is actually the most spectacular and interesting effects sequence in the movie. More of that! Recommended.

The Day of the Jackal: adapted by Kenneth Ross from the book by Frederick Forsyth; directed by Fred Zinnemann; starring Edward Fox (The Jackal) and Michael Lonsdale (Lebel) (1973): Tense, documentary structure and tone make this fictional account of a 1963 assassination attempt on then-French President Charles De Gaulle seem like a docudrama, to the extent that its events have often been confused with reality. This is one of the great thrillers of the 1960's, on par with The Manchurian Candidate. Edward Fox makes a suave cipher as the paid assassin who goes by the moniker 'The Jackal,' and French actor Michael Lonsdale is excellent as the police detective who leads the efforts to stop him. Old-school Hollywood director Fred Zinnemann (High Noon, From Here To Eternity, Oklahoma!) was never better. Highly recommended.

The In-Laws: written by Andrew Bergman; directed by Arthur Hiller; starring Peter Falk (Vince Ricardo), Alan Arkin (Sheldon Kornpett), Richard Libertini (General Garcia), and Ed Begley, Jr. (Barry Lutz) (1979): Hilarious comedy from a co-writer of Blazing Saddles sends Alan Arkin and Peter Falk on a spy odyssey around New York and New Jersey and ultimately to a (fictional) Central American banana republic whose dictator collects Black Velvet paintings and practices ventriloquism with his 'talking' hand. Falk's character is a CIA agent who is also the soon-to-be father-in-law of Arkin's daughter. Arkin plays a high-strung dentist who gradually comes unstrung as the plot unfolds. The film juggles verbal comedy and slapstick with great elan, and the actors all succeed marvelously. A young David Paymer shows up as a helpful NY cabdriver, while Ed Begley, Jr. plays a CIA wonk. Dreadfully remade in 2003 with Michael Douglas and Albert Brooks in the Falk and Arkin roles. Highly recommended.

Apatow Descending

This is 40: written and directed by Judd Apatow; starring Paul Rudd (Pete), Leslie Mann (Debbie), Maude Apatow (Sadie), Iris Apatow (Charlotte), Jason Segel (Jason), Megan Fox (Desi), Graham Parker (Himself), Chris O'Dowd (Ronnie), Albert Brooks (Larry) and John Lithgow (Oliver) (2012): This movie feels like it's 40 hours long. And not a good 40 hours.

Writer-director Judd Apatow's greatest weakness (other than the colour yellow) has been his inability to trim even his best movies, leaving the viewer with comedies that seem to always clock in with about 20 minutes too much footage. Here, that inability to edit really infects the entire film. This entire movie could be deleted from the space-time continuum without any harm being done.

My two favourite review titles for this movie are 'First-World Problems' and 'Here's a Bunch of Things That I've Been Thinking About, In No Particular Order.' We follow a week in the life of some supporting characters from Knocked Up, primarily married couple Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann). Pete runs his own failing record label. Debbie runs her own clothing boutique. They have a giant house in Los Angeles. They are having marital problems. I don't care.

I suppose part of the problem is that Paul Rudd really needs to either get back into television or start playing supporting roles again. He's an amiable actor with a gift for improv, but he can't carry a movie.

And Leslie Mann, who in the real world is Mrs. Judd Apatow, is fine as a supporting actress but also becomes quite irksome quite quickly as a lead actress. I think part of it is that she has a character actor's face, which is to say she has a distinct and permanent look to her face, in her case that look being 'comically aggrieved'. And it just doesn't work when she's expected to emote in ways that aren't supposed to embody comic aggrievedness. She just looks constipated.

Much of the writing here is lazy, whether it was actually improvised (as happens a lot on Apatow films) or written down beforehand. The characters are flat, their problems weirdly attenuated, possibly because they're too upper-middle-class to be sympathetic without the movie working a lot harder to give them character traits other than 'whiteness' and 'permanently aggrieved.' Pete and Debbie are written as increasingly tiresome whiners, but almost always in a comic mode. The moments in which we're supposed to feel genuine sympathy -- or in which the film expects us to engage with what's happening as if it were a well-written drama -- fail utterly.

And then there are Judd Apatow's daughters. Because his daughters played the daughters of Pete and Debbie in Knocked Up, Apatow has them reprise their roles here. But Knocked Up didn't have the two on-screen in every other scene. The actual child (Iris) is passable in the way child actors can be, though her line readings in certain scenes are stilted.

Poor Maude, playing 13-year-old Sadie, is terrible. Sofia Coppola in The Godfather III terrible. The writing presents Sadie as an angry, screaming young teen. Indeed she is. So she's very yelly and jumpy, in the manner of young actors in middle-school theatrical productions everywhere. Shrill. Even more yelly. Why do this to your daughter? She can't act!

So anyway, this is a crappy movie. There are funny lines and situations scattered throughout, and a number of funny performances break through the crap, the always charming Chris O'Dowd and the always entertaining Albert Brooks chief among them.

There's also a shamefully, embarrassingly tone-deaf sequence in which Pete mocks the accent of an East Indian doctor. And there's a dreadful waste of Melissa McCarthy's talents, not because she isn't funny, but because the movie uses her size and brashness as objects of ridicule, and then has her character comment upon this ridicule as if to defuse the problematic construction of fatness and brashness as being funny when set against the much better looking and more socially acceptable Pete and Debbie.

But all McCarthy's meta-commentary does is make it clear that Apatow is well aware of what he's doing -- and apparently thinks the situation is funny anyway. See, she's fat and obnoxious! And she wrongly accuses Pete of touching her breast! Ha ha, what fun! What a moment of familial triumph when Pete and Debbie make her look stupid!

Oh, and Megan Fox plays one of Leslie Mann's clerks at her boutique. And of course Fox's character also moonlights as a hooker. Sorry, escort. And the other clerk turns out to be addicted to Oxy. And in Judd Apatow's world, Oxy makes you speak like the possessed Linda Blair in The Exorcist and makes you an object of simple ridicule as well. What larks, Pip, what larks! So, a terrible movie, and an intermittently odious one. Not, not, not recommended.

The Aniston Effect

Wanderlust: written by David Wain and Ken Marino; directed by David Wain; starring Paul Rudd (George Gergenblatt), Jennifer Aniston (Linda Gergenblatt), Justin Theroux (Seth), and Alan Alda (Carvin) (2012): Some day, years from now, someone will write a computer program that will remove Jennifer Aniston from all movies not entitled Horrible Bosses or The Good Girl and replace her with someone funnier. Anyone funnier.

Actually, funnier isn't even necessary: we just need someone who isn't a black hole that devours all laughs when the camera is on her. Her film career is only rivalled by Ed Helms' last two seasons on The Office, in which he's become The Man Where Laughs Go To Die. It's as if the two of them somehow generate a malign radiation known as Unlaughter.

Wanderlust comes from many of the same writers and directors and actors who gave us the brilliant Wet Hot American Summer, a fine parody of pretty much every teen movie cliche. Here, they're a little hamstrung by the dictates of a conventional narrative, though there are still some satisfyingly bizarre moments. Also, you know, Aniston.

Paul Rudd and Aniston play a down-on-their-luck New York couple who, through various misadventures, end up staying the night at Elysium, a hippie commune turned bed-and-breakfast near Atlanta. Things seem much more appealing there than back in the real world, so they end up joining the commune. And things get wacky. Well, they already are wacky -- David Wain and Ken Marino love the wacky. Wackier. Things get wackier.

There are a few dead moments not caused by Jennifer Aniston, along with a final plot twist that requires one character to suddenly become a hypocritical jerk without any development of said jerkiness. The cast is a lot of fun, the movie's nice and short, and there's a weirdly compelling sub-plot involving a nudist who's written a political thriller. If only Jennifer Aniston were not the female lead! Lightly recommended.

Holy Fool

Our Idiot Brother: written by Evgenia Peretz and David Schisgall; directed by Jesse Peretz; starring Paul Rudd (Ned), Elizabeth Banks (Miranda), Zooey Deschanel (Natalie), Emily Mortimer (Liz) and Rashida Jones (Cindy) (2011): Genial, whimsical, low-budget comedy follows genial Paul Rudd -- a hippie so nice and lacking guile that everyone, especially his sisters, thinks he's an idiot -- as he tries to get his dog Willie Nelson back from a former girlfriend while simultaneously screwing up the lives of everyone around him. Except that he actually fixes the lives of everyone around him. They just take awhile to realize it.

Very low-key, though it was marketed as being another Judd-Apatow-style yuck-fest, something it isn't. All the performances are strong, and I wouldn't have minded spending another half-hour with the characters. Recommended.

Underfinished

How Do You Know?, written and directed by James L. Brooks, starring Reese Witherspoon (Lisa), Paul Rudd (George), Owen Wilson (Matty), Jack Nicholson (Charles) and Kathryn Hahn (Annie) (2010): James L. Brooks, uber-TV producer (The Simpsons) and writer/director of such film hits as Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets, can pretty much do what he wants now. Apparently, with How Do You Know? he decided to make a movie from what really seems like a first draft.

This romantic comedy isn't bad the way most contemporary romantic comedies are bad. The characters are recognizably human and Matthew McConaughey is mercifully absent. But the script meanders along, losing one entire subplot for 20 minutes as if Brooks had forgotten how to cross-cut and generally taking forever to get to the point.

Witherspoon plays Lisa, a 31-year-old woman who's played softball for the US National team her entire life. But now she's been cut from the most recent squad and has no idea what to do with her life. Enter Matty, a loveable, narcissistic MLB pitcher played pitch-perfectly by Owen Wilson, and George, a depressed CEO being investigated for company crime actually committed by his weaselly father (Jack Nicholson).

Preston Sturges could probably have gotten 100 minutes of classic screwball comedy out of the collision of high finance and sports; Brooks instead goes for a slow burn. A really slow burn. So slow that Nicholson's appearance here is somewhat pointless -- he doesn't have much to do, and casting Jack Nicholson in a part that seems like a classic James Cromwell role really seems like overkill.

The love triangle lurches along slowly...very slowly. Wilson and Rudd supply a surprising number of laughs, and Witherspoon is still as cute as a button, whatever that means. There are nice touches throughout, from the collection of specially made sweatshirts and pants Matty keeps for his one-night-stands to wear home the next morning like some sort of parting gift, to Lisa's encyclopedic assortment of inspirational phrases Post-It-noted all over her mirror, to George's peculiarly formal mode of speaking. This isn't a great movie (though compared to most modern rom-coms it's a classic), but it's a perfectly cromulent time-filler. Lightly recommended.