Tag: Paul Rudd

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Now Playing in Memphis: Let’s Get Small

Paul Rudd, Kathryn Newton, and Evangeline Lilly get small in Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania

The big release in movie theaters this week is the latest Marvel contraption, Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania. Reluctant Avenger Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), who usually gets just kinda small, gets super-tiny. We’re talking seething quantum foam of semi-imaginary particles small. His variably sized partner Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) and their daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton), who also sports a super-small suit, also get tiny, along with legendary super-scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer). There they meet Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), who will apparently be important in the next hundred or so Marvel movies.

If you’re not into getting quantum-realm small, how about a small indie romance from Australia? Of An Age is writer/director Goran Stolevski’s second feature film. Ebony (Hattie Hook) is a late-teen party girl whose bestie Kol (Elias Anton) is also her ballroom dance partner. When Kol has to pull Ebony out of a bad situation, he enlists her brother Adam (Thom Green) as a driver, and sparks fly.

But maybe you’re looking for a different kind of small. Short films are often the highlight of film festivals, but rarely get screen time in commercial theaters. There’s a great opportunity to watch the Oscar-nominated short films in the animation, documentary, and narrative categories at the Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grill this week. These films won awards at qualifying festivals, and now the up-and-coming filmmakers have a chance at Oscar glory. And who knows, maybe one of them will get slapped by Will Smith!

Speaking of Oscar contenders, on Wednesday, Feb. 22, Indie Memphis brings the nominated documentary All the Beauty And the Bloodshed to Studio on the Square. Directed by CitizenFour helmer Laura Poitras, it tells the story of legendary photographer Nan Goldin and her crusade against the Sackler family, pharmaceutical oligarchs who also happen to be big patrons of the arts. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed became only the second documentary in history to win the Golden Lion at Cannes, and it’s probably the frontrunner for the Oscar, too.

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Ghostbusters: Afterlife

McKenna Grace as Phoebe, with Logan Kim as Podcast, in Ghostbusters: Afterlife

Ghostbusters is a prime example of lightning in a bottle. There are some things that are just unique products of the time and place where they were created. They defy formula. Even if you put the same team back together and gave them all the tools and time they needed, they couldn’t replicate their success. 

The 1984 Ghostbusters was the product of the fevered mind of Dan Aykroyd. The story of a trio of misfit scientists who travel through time and space to battle supernatural threats was meant as a follow-up to his and John Belushi’s mega-hit The Blues Brothers, with the third part to be played by Eddie Murphy. After Belushi died in 1982, Murphy got his own franchise with Beverly Hills Cop, and Aykroyd retreated into a fallout shelter on Martha’s Vineyard with Harold Ramis to retool the script for Bill Murray and director Ivan Reitman. The Ghostbusters became supernatural entrepreneurs, more pest control than Doctor Who. 

Grace, Kim, and Finn Wolfhard cruisin’ in the Ectomobile.

Genre-wise, the fantasy action comedy had very little precedent. Reitman got the tone exactly right. It was the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom, so there was an ample budget for special effects. Aykroyd was still at the top of his game, Ramis played Spock-but-funny, Ernie Hudson was the relatable everyman, Sigourney Weaver was sexy as hell, and Murray delivered one of the greatest comedy performances of all time. Propelled by a theme song by former Stevie Wonder sideman Ray Parker Jr. that became an unlikely No. 1 hit, Ghostbusters became the most profitable comedy of all time. 

When the principals got back together five years later for Ghostbusters II, it wasn’t the same. The film has its moments, but the elements never gel the way they did the first time out. For years, Aykroyd worked on a third installment, called Hellbent, but Murray saw the writing on the wall and once Ramis died in 2014, that seemed to be the end of it. 

But Ghostbusters is all about coming back from the dead, so in 2016, a gender-swapped version was produced with Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon. It, too, had its moments, but lacked that certain magic, and was the subject of a sexist social media backlash. Which might be why Ghostbusters: Afterlife exists. 

At least it’s better than The Rise of Skywalker, the other film that was produced as a response to closed-minded people freaking out over changes to their favorite ’80s film franchise. Produced by Ivan Reitman and directed by his son Jason Reitman, Afterlife moves the action from New York City to rural Oklahoma. Callie (Carrie Coon) gets evicted from her New York apartment with her two children, Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), only to find out that her estranged father has died and left them a spooky old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. While Callie tries to deal with her late father’s estate, Trevor tries to fit in with the local teens — especially cool girl Lucky (Celeste O’Connor). Phoebe, a budding science geek who is too smart for her own good, is drawn into investigating unexplained earthquake swarms with her summer school teacher Gary (Paul Rudd). This part of the film is a solid kids-solving-mysteries story, like Goonies, but less annoying. 

As the story threads come together, Phoebe and Trevor learn that their grandfather, whom they never met, was Egon Spengler, a member of the Ghostbusters who cleaned up the Manhattan ghost flap of 1984. Naturally, the reason he moved to central Oklahoma was ghost-related, and now his grandkids must clean up the mess he left behind or, you know … human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! 

It’s weird to say, but it’s the familiar elements that derail Afterlife. Just when things get cooking with the new kids, we have to pause to re-introduce the Ectomobile. When the surviving old guys show up to help save the day, it seems perfunctory. Even the glorious moment when Bill Murray is doing Peter Venkman again undercuts the “action” part of “action comedy.” 

You can’t catch lightning in a bottle a second time. But I’m willing to give Ghostbusters: Afterlife the benefit of the doubt for two reasons: one, the screenplay mostly works, with the story flowing from the internal logic Aykroyd set up in 1984, even though it’s not nearly as funny. And two, Mckenna Grace gives an absolutely crackerjack performance. Mark my words, she’s a movie star in waiting. 

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Ten Things About Ten Years Of Marvel Movies

The Paradiso is filling the traditional late summer movie doldrums with some repertory at the IMAX. For the last week it has been the spectacular presentation of 2001: A Space Odyssey providing an unparalleled cinema experience. This week, Marvel Studios is celebrating their 10th anniversary with an IMAX marathon. In the Marvel spirit of giving people what they want, here are 10 highlights from the 20 Marvel movies, arranged in the form of a numbered list to give it that little bit of extra narrative tension. Everybody loves lists, right? Let’s do this.

10. The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Marvel

Back in the lean comic years of the 1980s, a struggling Marvel sold the film right to some of its creations. Marvel’s A-list superheroes, The X-Men, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four wound up with Fox or with the Sony corporate hegemony, where films of varying quality were made in the early 2000s that whetted the appetite for comic book films. When producer Kevin Feige took over in 2007, just as the studio’s business model was changing from licensing its intellectual property to making their own films, Marvel was forced away from their flagship heroes to mine deeper into comic history. This proved incredibly freeing, and opened up new opportunities. Guardians of the Galaxy (Saturday 3:40 p.m.), for example, was one of the most fun blockbusters of the past decade, even though it comes from one of the more obscure corners of the Marvel comics library.

9. Marvel’s Biggest Failure

Of the 20 films Marvel screening this Labor Day weekend, exactly one, Ant-Man and The Wasp (Monday, 10 PM) has a titular female lead. And Evangeline Lilly as The Wasp gets second billing to the worst lead actor in the entire Marvel universe, Paul Rudd. Black Widow, portrayed iconically by Scarlett Johansson, is arguably the most interesting Avenger. If Marvel had wised up and given her a solo movie five years ago, they could have stolen DC’s Wonder Woman thunder, and we could have possibly avoided the Ghost In The Shell debacle.

8. The Most Comic-Book-y Comic Book Movie

I’m going to offer the hot take that Christopher Nolan has been bad for the superhero genre. He successfully brought gritty realism to comic book movies, but in the process he sacrificed the comic book form’s biggest strength: outlandish visuals. Marvel films, especially the later ones, have embraced the possibilities of CGI. None have veered farther from photorealism than 2016’s Doctor Strange. Director Scott Derrickson channels the Sorcerer Supreme’s creator Stephen Ditko with wave after wave of psychedelic freak outs — while also lifting some licks from Nolan’s Inception for good measure.

7. You Need A Good Villain

You know why Batman is everybody’s favorite superhero? Because he’s got the best villains. Superhero films live and die by the charisma of the bad guy, and the plausibility of their plan. The best recent example was Michael Keaton as Vulture in Spider-Man Homecoming (Sunday, 9:50 p.m.). The sotto voce threats he delivers to Tom Holland’s Spider-Man while Peter Parker is trying to bone his alter ego Adrian Tooms’ daughter Liz on homecoming night may be the single best acted scene in any Marvel movie.

6. The Guardians’ Secret Weapon

Who is the heart of the Guardians of the Galaxy sub-franchise? If you said ubiquitous hot guy Chris Pratt’s Star Lord, you’re mistaken. The correct answer is Karen Gillian as Nebula. Gillian has been low-key walking away with every movie and TV show she’s been in for the better part of a decade. She propped up Matt Smith’s mediocre Doctor Who for three years as Amy Pond, one of the best companions in the show’s 50-year history. Just last year she stole the Jumanji reboot out from under The Rock. Nebula, tortured and twisted and intensely physical, plays nemesis to her sister Gamora, and the scenes between Gillian and Zoe Saldana always crackle with emotion. When she reluctantly teams up with them, in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (Sunday, 7 p.m.) her pouty sarcasm fits right in with the rest of the crew. In real life, Gillian just wrote and directed her first feature film, The Party’s Just Beginning.

5. The Third Act

The “Marvel Third Act” has become a shorthand for a big ending where our colorful heroes fight a horde of grey, identical monsters, with lots of attendant property damage, but no consequences for the heroes. It was perhaps best executed in 2012 by Joss Whedon in The Avengers (Friday, 3:40 p.m.), but its unimaginative imitators have been a plague on the multiplex ever since. Interestingly, Whedon commented on the Marvel Third Act in Avengers: Age Of Ultron (Saturday, 7 p.m.), when the destructive aftermath of the Battle of Sokovia would haunt the heroes.

4. Smaller Is Better

One of the problems with writing stories about superheroes is that they’re larger than life. That means the stakes must always be growing larger to give the overpowered protagonists a decent challenge. But after the fifth time you’ve seen someone save the world, you think maybe it isn’t that hard. The best Marvel stories turn out to the ones where the stakes are smaller, and the heroes alone. Ant-Man (Saturday, 9:55 p.m.) excels despite its flat lead because the conflict is almost beside the point. The real fun is the giddy special effects sequences that are like a jazzed-up version of The Incredible Shrinking Man.

3. The Evolving Hero

The creeping Batmanization of the world compels every lead character to be dark, tortured, and brooding. Only manly men who experience no pleasure in their lives can aspire to the title of hero. Marvel has resisted this, and their bread and butter has become redefining what a hero can be. In Captain America: Civil War (Saturday, 1 p.m.), Vision, played by Paul Bettany, wears a sensible sweater/oxford combo and cooks breakfast for his superpowered girlfriend Wanda Maximoff (Elisabeth Olsen). Then, in Avengers: Infinity War (Monday, 7 p.m.), he offers to sacrifice himself to save half the universe.

2. Killmonger Was Right

Why was Black Panther (Monday 3:40 p.m.) so good? The number one reason is that director Ryan Coogler did his homework and delivered a perfectly constructed action movie. Each scene builds on the last and leads to the next. And most importantly, both the hero Black Panther (the unbelievably charismatic Chadwick Boseman) and the villain Killmonger (the unbelievably charismatic Michael B. Jordan) have believable motivations and coherent cases to make for their sides. T’Challa is the king and defender of the status quo in Wakanda. They have been kept safe by their advanced technology for hundreds of years. But Killmonger rightly points out that while Wakanda has stayed safe, they have allowed the colonization and genocide of Africans outside their borders. Killmonger wants to use the power of Wakanda to rectify that situation and colonize the white world right back. Black Panther defeats Killmonger, but T’Challa is moved by his vision and opens Wakanda up to the world, hoping to make it a more just place. It’s a rare bit of moral complexity in a genre that is pretty much defined by its black and white ethical structure.

1. Captain America: The First Avenger

Coming in at number one on our countdown that is in no way an actual countdown is Captain America: The First Avenger (Friday 1 p.m.). Director Joe Johnson hits the superhero sweet spot with this Nazi-punching triumph. Johnson’s influence looms large over the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He is a special effects innovator whose debut film Honey I Shrunk The Kids, was basically a look book for Ant-Man. His 1990 film The Rocketeer, about a man who finds a super flight suit and battles Nazis in the 1930s, was a box office failure at the time, but provided a template for The First Avenger. Chris Evans, who had previously played The Human Torch in Sony’s failed Fantastic Four adaptation, gives a performance on par with Christopher Reeve’s Superman as the once-scrawny kid from Brooklyn who would become the moral center of the Avengers. The overriding theme of all of the Marvel movies is Stan Lee’s maxim “With great power comes great responsibility,” and no one sets a better example than Captain America. 

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Ant-Man and The Wasp

This Friday, July 13th, The Orpheum Summer Movie series will screen Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. The 1989 film was the directorial debut of Joe Johnston, who got his start in film as a concept artist for Star Wars, and later won an Academy Award for art directing Raiders of the Lost Ark. Memorably led by Rick Moranis as a complacent suburban dad turned wacky inventor, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids gave Johnston an excuse to go nuts with visual gags derived from The Incredible Shrinking Man. Forced perspective, giant spools of thread, and angry ants are a winning combination.

A lot of the Marvel films are other genres in comic book drag. Captain America: Civil War is a paranoid ’70s spy thriller. Guardians of the Galaxy is more space opera than superhero flick, which is why it plays particularly badly with the others in Infinity War. Ant-Man and the Wasp is basically Honey, I Shrunk the Supers, and its unpretentiousness is pretty refreshing.

Joe Johnston would have been a good fit to direct Ant-Man and the Wasp, but he’s only done one Marvel movie: Captain America: The First Avenger, which, if pressed, I would probably call my favorite of the whole bunch. Instead, we get Peyton Reed, a comedy director who took over the first Ant-Man after Edgar Wright was fired mid-production. He opens Ant-Man and the Wasp with a sequence in which Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) leads his little daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) through a cardboard maze they built in his apartment, echoing the events of the first film. It’s a winning little bit of self-reference, but, unfortunately, the only time in the film when Paul Rudd shows a pulse. Rudd was workable in the first film and in his subsequent cameos, but here he’s lackadaisical.

Paul Rudd returns to the role of Marvel’s Ant-Man.

Fortunately, Ant-Man is not the only hero on order. Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) has inherited her mother’s super identity, The Wasp. She and her father, super-scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) are trying to rescue Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) from the Quantum Realm, where she has been trapped for three decades after she and Hank got waaay too small. To do that, they have to deal with shady arms dealer Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins), a sniveling villain right out of a lost episode of The A-Team. His betrayal gives The Wasp her first big solo action sequence, positioning her as the real heart of the film.

Instead of building to a Marvel Third Act, where our heroes must fight an onslaught of faceless minions of the big bad, Ant-Man and the Wasp keeps the stakes relatively low, opting for an A plot and B plot which begin independently and then get quantumly entangled. One of Rudd’s few laughs in the film is when, in a tense meeting with Hank Pym and his physicist frenemy Bill Foster (Laurence Fishburne), he belts out “Do you guys just say quantum in front of everything?” Once semi-disembodied villain Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) gets involved, everything from a World’s Greatest Grandma trophy to Pym’s Incredible Shrinking Laboratory get their turn at being the MacGuffin for a few minutes.

The meat of the picture is the special effects riffs made possible by protagonists for whom scale has become arbitrary. This is a $160 million movie that is not afraid to just drive a little remote controlled car down the street and film it. A flatbed truck gets used as a skateboard, there’s a completely appropriate Hot Wheels tie-in, and it wouldn’t be a movie about shrinking without a giant salt shaker. As the film goes on, the goofy practical effects give way to the Steve Ditko-inspired, psychedelic vistas of the Quantum Realm.

Reed’s playful sense and light touch manages to avoid superhero fatigue for the most part. The biggest crossover element to connect the story to the larger universe ends up providing gags, as Scott Lang is under house arrest after botching his part of Captain America: Civil War, and he must gaslight his FBI handler Jimmy Woo (Randall Park). Even though he’s top billed, Ant-Man gets overshadowed, but the rest of the cast makes up for him, especially given the pleasantly surprising amount of screen time Michael Douglas receives. With Rudd a void at the center, a game Lilly leads the rest of the cast in saving the picture, and the day. Marvel’s as big as ever. It’s the Ant-Man who got small.

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Captain America: Civil War

Another May, another superhero movie. How far along are we on this wave of superhero movies? I date it from Bryan Singer’s X-Men in 2000, although you could argue that it goes back to Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. The studios have refined the hit-making formula, crowding all other genres out of the blockbuster space. Only Star Wars brings in that kind of business, and, as great as The Force Awakens was, it clearly showed the marks of the Disney/Marvel method. As long as the returns remain good, the culture will be papered with comic book movies — and with Captain America: Civil War opening to $673 million on a $250 million budget, there’s no sign the returns are going to fall off any time soon.

Constraints breed creativity, and as formulaic as big-time superhero movies have become, Kevin Feige has a good process in place that both delivers the corporate goods and encourages filmmakers to do good work. Two of the Jon Favreau/Robert Downey Jr. Iron Man movies have been exceptional, but the real heart of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s overarching narrative is the Captain America franchise since Chris Evans was introduced as Steve Rogers in 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger. Directed with a classical flair by Joe Johnston, The First Avenger established Captain America as a link to the country’s most heroic period: fighting the Nazis to save freedom. Steve Rogers has become a stand-in for America’s best version of ourselves. Whether it’s a super weapon in the hands of the Red Skull in his first film or an unaccountable surveillance state in Winter Soldier, how he reacts to the problems thrown at him is in accordance with the best angels of our civic religion.

Much of the credit for the success of the Captain America movies must be laid at the feet of Evans, who plays Steve Rogers as empathetic and fundamentally decent but with a strong sense of melancholy befitting a man out of time. The series has also been bolstered by strong direction, first from Johnston and then from Joe and Anthony Russo, who plunged the stalwart super patriot into a world of spy vs. spy intrigue in The Winter Soldier. The best superhero stories come when the heroes are confronted with challenges they are not well-equipped to face and a villain with enough vision to turn the heroes’ strengths into weaknesses. Captain America, the super soldier created to fight the Nazis, the ultimate external threat, found new depth when he had to tease out friend from foe inside the government he has sacrificed everything to serve.

There are two sides to every story — Chris Evans (above) as Captain America; Robert Downey Jr. and Don Cheadle as Iron Man and War Machine.

The Russos are back at the helm for Civil War and have once again tried to tie into the zeitgeist of a divided America. 2016 gives us two blockbusters about superheroes fighting each other. The first was Zac Snyder’s dismal Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Civil War is much better in every respect, largely living up to Winter Soldier.

To defeat Superman, you must put Lois Lane in danger. He’s too powerful to beat on his own, so you have to trick him into making mistakes. Similarly, the way you defeat Captain America is to put Bucky Barns (Sebastian Stan), aka the Winter Soldier, in danger. Bucky is Steve Rogers’ only link to the life he left behind in the 1940s, and Rogers feels partially responsible for Bucky getting the Soviet super soldier treatment that transformed him into a brainwashed assassin. When Civil War opens, Bucky’s been lying low since his escape at the end of The Winter Soldier. Captain America and his revamped crew of Avengers — Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Vision (Paul Bettany), and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) — are engaged in their usual business of keeping the world safe by chasing the fabulously named superterrorist Brock Rumlow (Frank Grillo). But, as usual when an “enhanced persons” donnybrook breaks out in an urban area, there are collateral casualties. In this case, a delegation of development workers from the reclusive African kingdom of Wakanda, the source of the world’s vibrainium, the material that Captain America’s shield is made from. The king of Wakanda, T’Chaka (John Kani) leads a movement to bring the Avengers under the formal control of the United Nations, and other countries, seeing the devastation wrought in the Avengers’ former battlegrounds, quickly come on board.

After Tony Stark is confronted by the mother of a young man killed during the final battle of Avengers: Age of Ultron, he decides to back the UN resolution, known as the Sokovia Accords after the city that Ultron levitated into oblivion. But Steve Rogers disagrees. The Avengers were created to keep the world safe from superpowered bad guys, and Rogers is absolutely sure that he is the only person qualified to determine when and how those threats can be identified and neutralized. He and Stark are already on the outs when a truck bomb blows up the United Nations meeting on the Accords, and his old friend Bucky is tagged as the guy to blame. Rogers is torn between loyalties to his friend, to his government, and his own moral sense, and his path splits the Avengers into factions: the Iron Man-led, pro-accord forces, which include Black Widow, Vision, War Machine (Don Cheadle), and T’Challa, (Chadwick Boseman), aka Black Panther, the son of the slain Wakandan monarch who has vowed to kill Bucky. Standing with Captain America are Falcon (Anthony Mackie), Scarlet Witch, Ant Man (Paul Rudd), and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). To tip the odds in his favor, Stark tracks down Peter Parker (Tom Holland), who has only been Spider-Man for six months, and recruits him with an offer of a new spider suit.

The introduction of Spider-Man, the Marvel comic book empire’s greatest character creation, is just one demonstration of how superior the Marvel touch is to the DC regime. The Russos know we’ve seen Spider-Man’s origin story onscreen twice in this century, so when Stark asks Parker how he got his powers, he just mumbles “It’s complicated,” and leaves it at that. Holland’s version of Parker is closer to Toby Maguire’s goofy persona than the Andrew Garfield iteration, which is a big improvement.

Boseman’s Black Panther is a welcome addition to the MCU. He gives T’Challa a regal bearing that suggests he would fit in on Game of Thrones. The end of Civil War charts an interesting future for him, which we’ll get to see more of in his solo movie scheduled for 2018.

The centerpiece of Civil War is a great set piece inside the evacuated Leipzig airport where the two factions go at it for what feels like a good 15 minutes. Here the Russo’s major inspiration for the film comes into focus. The Empire Strikes Back brought moral complication into the Manichaean Star Wars universe, and Civil War attempts to do the same by making Rogers choose between competing goods at every turn. While defending Winter Soldier from Iron Man, Captain America says he’s doing it because Bucky is his friend. “I was your friend, too,” the wounded Stark says.

The shifting allegiances give the Russos a chance to bounce different pairs of characters off of each other, and it’s obvious this is where their interests really lie. Especially good together are Downey and Renner, who capture the raw anger of a longtime friendship betrayed.

Civil War is massively overstuffed with characters and fragmentary storylines intended to connect to the bigger universe but which bogs down the present story. Captain America: Civil War is a fun time at the movies, and among the best of its breed, but you can be excused if you feel superhero fatigue setting in.