Ten Statements About....SUPER (2010)

Let's be honest...this is the only thing about this film most
of you are interested in...

"Look what happened to you when you don't have a kid sidekick! You get shot by people!"

1) Maybe it's because my previous exposure to Rainn Wilson has only been when he was playing that grotesque on The Office, but I was struck here by how much more nuanced an actor he was. Throughout the first act, there's such a well-meaning patheticness to Wilson's Frank that speaks volumes about the desperation of his life. There's echoes of Dwight in his performance (an argument could be made that Frank is Dwight in the real world), but it's shorn of the broad artifice.

2) That being said, I have to wonder if this film isn't damaged by its super-hero-in-the-real-world angle. Once Frank puts on the costume of the Crimson Bolt and starts wacking people with a pipe wrench, the film loses focus for large portions of the second and third acts. Especially jarring are the moment where the darkness that infuses most of the comedy sloughs off in favor of goofiness with Wilson struggling to change in a car and playing secret identity games with him boss. The costume is the biggest thing that blurs the trajectory of Frank's character arc.

After being let go in the 80's, the Domino Noid struggled with
his identity....

3) Luckily, we have Ellen Page's thoroughly insane performance as Libby, who forces herself into the role of Frank's sidekick 'Boltie.' Spastic, energetic, and demented on every level (her laugh, which is calculatedly too manic to be natural, practically becomes an element of the score), Page gives that portion of the film a jolt, while also providing a much needed contrast to Wilson's underplaying.

(And yeah...Page's costume is hideous in concept....but the way she fills it out is anything but...)

4) While James Gunn has done some good films as a writer and director, he seems to have problems here maintaining a consistent tone. The first act is strictly indie comedy....then it veers into farce, then black comedy, then gory action thriller before finally discovering his its path back to the indie comedy it's finally revealed as being. Gunn really needs to have more control over his projects, as the sliding around from tone to tone, from genre to genre, makes the film narratively murky.

5) ...and adding to that murkiness is the quirky touches Gunn uses sometimes, like the imposition of comic art elements to key moments. That wouldn't be so bad, if it wasn't done so arbitrarily. I can certainly understand the usage of comic sound effect elements during the fight scenes, but filling the screen with 'bombs' in different comic letters when Wilson says the word makes no sense.

6) Look, I know I once said I wanted to see Nathan Fillion playing Green Lantern, but after seeing him filling that yellow Holy Avenger costume like an overstuffed sausage, the opening in his mask emphasizing his double chin....I rescind that statement.

"And this is for badmouthing Steve Carrell!"

7) As Frank's, ummmm, nemesis, Kevin Bacon's Jacques is pretty damn cool. Bacon chooses to play the drug dealer not as a villain, but as a regular workaday guy. Almost all of his mayhem is executed by the people around him (headed by Michael Rooker), and he actually tries to reason with Frank at several points in the film. What that does is make his descent in the climax to a full-on murderous thug all the more impactful.

8) I almost wish we got to see more of John Elway lookalike Gregg Henry's Detective Felkner. His performance seems to hint at something more going on inside the guy's head, and his early exit from the film at the hands of Michael Rooker's Abe and his henchmen robs the film of its opportunity to do its take on the comic book trope of the policeman rival....

9) You know--and I think I blame Gunn's script for this, although it could also be my perceiving a chemistry between the actors--Linda Cardillini has a very small role as a Pet Store Employee who tries to sell Frank a pet rabbit that seemed to indicate she would have a slightly larger role. And yet she doesn't appear again, and I'm sorry that's so especially in light of how the rabbit plays a part in the film's coda.

10) I continue to be struck about how Liv Tyler--who plays Frank's wife Sarah, the character who unintentionally is the center of the story--has grown into her face finally. She's shaken off the creepy Steve Tyler-esque cast to her features, and is now just an attractive woman who is a competent actress.

Overall...while there is loads to like in this film, Gunn's script comes off as narratively ADD and could have been more successful if he didn't impose his comic book obsession on it. There are some great performances, especially from Wilson and Page, and if you're interested in some of these actors, you might want to give it a look.

Ten Statements About....INCEPTION (2010)

And this behavior is business as usual in this film

1) Christopher Nolan's entire catalog is about perception--even the Batman films. And this one doesn't break that streak.

2) Some people may be dissatisfied that there isn't a tremendous about of the wacky 'bending space' sort of special effects the film's trailer was full of. But that's because the bending space stuff is not the focus of the film. At its core, it's a caper film that literally never leaves a single room...which oddly makes it part of that trend this year for caper films that also includes The Losers, The A-Team, and The Expendables. Hell, given the situation diCaprio's Cobb is in at the beginning of the film, this movie is a lot closer to those three than you would think.

3) Ellen Page (le sigh)'s Ariadne turns out to be the single most important character in the film--and her name makes it very clear. Just as the mythological Ariadne guided Theseus through a labyrinth, so does this Ariadne serve to guide DiCaprio's Cobb through his character arc.

Know the rules if you want to stay awake...

4) Nolan understands a simple precept far too many directors do not--namely, lay out the ground rules early on for your entropic elements, and stick to them. He spends so much time laying down the rules for the Extraction Method in the first act that when new paramutations are introduced, we can extrapolate the reasons why these things happen very easily.

5) Also, Nolan is able to make his action sequences work without all that caffiene-cam nonsense--even when dealing with actions that occur on several different planes of consciousness (each plane distinctive precisely so we, the viewer, never lose sight of where they are), we comprehend exactly what happens.

6) Nolan confines the bulk of the big special effects sequences to the first act, where Cobb introduces and trains Ariadne in the art of being an 'Architect.' And it's the kind of imagery CGI should be used for--the sort of weird 'what am I seeing?' sort of mind fuck that makes Dark City one of my favorite films. Plus, by hitting us full on with a series of big shouty effects, it makes us much more accepting of later, smaller effects when the caper is actually underway.

 7) The team--because what would a caper film be without a team to pull it off--is well-cast, and does create a certain level of chemistry between them. The real break-out is Tom Hardy's Eames, who has a very subtle sense of humor and whose brogue definitely acts as an aural contrast to the others.

8) I absolutely adore the way the film has absolute mastery of its interior logic--to the point where, when Cobb returns to a place he tells Ariadne he spent time in and abandoned many years ago, it's suffering from disuse and entropy.

9) I like how every level of the setting in which the bulk of this plot occurs gives the person on it a different puzzle to solve. While Joseph Gordon-Leavitt's Arthur is the most compelling, all of the controllers of the levels have something to work out.

10) And best of all--Nolan doesn't feel the need to wrap everything up in a nice little bow. The ending is consciously ambivalent, inviting you to decide whether Cobb was successful or not in his own quest.

In short...I love a movie like this that assumes we're smart, we're willing to follow the story through several literal and metaphorical levels and that we'd be willing to do some of the work ourselves. This is, I suspect, one of those films that will give up new treasures with every viewing.

The trailers were an odd sorting, including The Last Exorcism (Eli Roth wants in on all that Paranormal Activity money, and shows once again that he and subtlety has never met), The Social Network(I like the slightly unconventional approach to the trailer, although I wonder if its montage of people clicking on stuff to a female cover of Radiohead's "Creep" is just covering up that it's got nothing good to show me), the hideous looking Due Date, and the absolutely dire-looking Dinner For Schmucks. But the real question for me is what will I end up seeing first on August 13th--The Expendables or Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World? Which part of me do I feed--the testosterone-laden action fan or the hipster doofus who loves candy-colored storytelling?