The Heat

Going into summer there were two movies I knew I would not be seeing. The first was The Lone Ranger and the second was The Heat. The trailers were so shockingly unfunny that there was no reason to believe it would be anything but stupid, dull and painfully void of humor. I was so adamant that I would not be seeing it, even though I typically like Melissa McCarthy (though not in her Bridesmaids schtik) and I enjoy Sandra Bullock doing her usual character of starting totally uptight and then loosening up. Essentially this movie was putting two women who are making careers playing one type of character and slamming together in a buddy cop film that looked terrible. Then my Facebook friends started talking about how funny it was and one Facebook friend whose cinematic opinion matters greatly really enjoyed it and I started to waver on my knowledge of not seeing it. This week a friend of mine wanted to see it and we were looking for a second a movie to see and The Heat fit the time, so my girlfriend, our friend, and I sat down and I had no idea what was going to happen. Was it going to be as bad as I decided it was going to be months ago, or was I going to be pleasantly surprised, or would it be somewhere in the middle?

Agent Ashburn (Bullock) is one of the finest Federal Agents in The Washington D.C office. She would be up for a promotion except no one likes her. She is a cocky know-it-all who does not play well with others. She is efficient, a staunch rule follower, and a brilliant mind, but she is alone all of the time. Even the cat she cuddles actually belongs to her neighbor. Her boss tells her that she needs to go to Boston and work with Boston P.D on finding a drug kingpin and if it goes well, he will consider promoting her. it takes Ashburn all off 30 seconds in Boston to piss off her would be partner, Detective Mullins (McCarthy). Mullins is brash, violent, a bit crazy and a rule breaker. She also gets along with no one, so of course, she and Ashburn are going to bump heads. Mullins loves her city and while they go about their business in different ways, Ashburn and Mullins need each other to get through this case. In order to catch a drug kingpin, Ashburn and Mullins will have to use all of their combined knowledge and skill and find a way to co-exist.

Let me be perfectly clear here, The Heat is absolutely hilarious. Not sure why the trailers were so incredibly dreadful, but they did not capture the sheer hilarity of this film at all. I think the problem is the trailer shows you Melissa McCarthy being crass and making her weight the butt of a series of physical comedy jokes because that is what people want to see, but it is not what I want to see. the reality is, McCarthy's physical comedy prowess, shown so well in Gilmore Girls, is used quite effectively and not because she is bigger, just because she is gifted. In context, the clip of her falling over the fence, is quite funny, but the best bit of physical comedy she does is when she has to park her car tightly between two cars and cannot open her door to get out. That scene had me rolling with laughter. McCarthy is a naturally gifted comedian and The Heat really shows a broad range of her skill set. She is funny in physical comedy and in one-liners and the film provides many one-liners for her. See, the reality is, the Sandra Bullock character's uptight nature is really the butt of most of the jokes. These two women have wonderful chemistry and while I would not like to see a sequel, if they did a series of these films, they could go down as one of the better buddy cop teams. hell, even with just one movie I think you need to stop having the conversation of best women buddy duos and just say, these two make one of the best buddy cop duos in film. They are that good together. it helps that on their own, both are good actresses with solid work in the genre of comedy and together they work so very well. I love playing Bullock's uptight character against McCarthy more loose nature.

The story often feels like it exists solely for jokes, but once Mullins' family gets involved the story starts to matter more. The scenes with the brash Boston family are hilarious, and it helps that all of brothers are actually from Boston. it makes the scene a loving tribute to a hard core blue collar town. They all play very well off of each other and the jokes come fast and furiously in their limited screen time. There is also a nice running gag with McCarthy running into dude she slept with once and then ditched. it shows McCarthy as a confident, almost sexy character and shows the Bullock character how to loosen up. I think the most memorable scene all the way through has to be the night club scene. You get this great chemistry between the two women as they hurry into the bathroom to give the Bullock character a clothing makeover, and you get phenomenal physical comedy from both ladies and it furthers the plot of the film incredibly effortlessly.

The Heat find the funny in every possible way, but it also shows McCarthy and Bullock to be talented actresses who excel when pushed by another funny person. It is hilarious without bordering into crude, and it provides a nice easy to follow story as the backdrop for the comedy. it does waste Taran Killam and Marlon Wayans into roles where they are not able to be very funny, even though they are both comic actors, but it is a minor squabble. I wish I could fire the guy who cut together the trailers and punch all of the focus groups who thought it was hilarious. It is a poor reflection of the actual film. Granted, the movie has made 143 million dollars, so clearly I was in the minority of that thinking anyway.

Final Grade: B+

The Wolverine

I love Wolverine. Growing up my three favorite superheroes were Spider Man, Wolverine and Johnny Storm. In any X-Men video game, or Marvel video game that exists, Wolverine is always my favorite player. As a got older and started to understand comic book mythology better and grasped character and tone and all of these other terms that exist in the world of fiction, I grew to love Wolverine even more. The X-Men movies of the early 2000s began the comic book movie revolution. Yes, Sam Raimi's Spider Man proved they could be the most successful movies, but if Bryan Singer's X-Men had been a failure, who knows if anyone would have taken much of a chance on the entire genre the way they have now. Remember,, Batman Forever and Batman and Robin kind of destroyed the genre there for a while. Hugh Jackman's Wolverine is without question, my favorite Superhero performance. Robert Downey Jr. makes a perfect Tony Stark, and I cannot imagine anyone else doing that, but RDJ kind of is Tony Stark. Hugh Jackman, in interviews and appearances, does not appear anything like Wolverine AND he perfectly captures my idea of what Wolverine is, what my idea of Wolverine has always been. I am pretty sure I will never get tired of watching Jackman as Wolverine as long as he never gets tired of playing him. One of the best parts of The Wolverine is that Jackman is clearly not tired of playing him.

Starting sometime after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand, The Wolverine finds our hero (Jackman) hiding in the woods somewhere, keeping to himself. He is haunted by nightmares of killing Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) and has sworn to never be that soldier again. One night, after a group of hunters track down and kill a bear, Wolverine finds himself in a bar about to confront them, when he stopped by a mysterious Japanese woman, Yukio (Rila Fukushima) asking Wolverine to come with her. She works for a man, Yashida (Hal Yamanouchi), who wants to thank Wolverine for saving his life years ago during World War Two. In a flashback we see Wolverine, still with the bone claws, pull this man into a pit and shield him from the atomic blast in Japan. back to modern day, Wolverine goes to Japan meets with the old dying man and the dying man offers Wolverine something: freedom from the chains of immortality. Yashida believes he can transfer Wolverine's power of healing to himself and Wolverine can finally grow to be an old man and die with all of the people he loves. Wolverine declines, the old man dies, and all hell breaks loose from there. In his sleep Wolverine is injected with something that makes him vulnerable and the next day when Yashida's granddaughter, Mariko (Tao Okomoto) is nearly kidnapped, Wolverine springs into action, but when he is shot, he does not recover quickly. He is not used to dealing with prolonged pain. he escapes with Mariko, but he knows they are not truly safe.

The Wolverine is an incredibly mixed bag. There are wonderful moments within the film, but the third act spins wildly out of control climaxing with a ridiculous action sequence involving a giant robot Samurai. However, when it was all done, my immediate thoughts were about how insanely violent the movie was. No, there is not a tremendous about of blood and no real gore, but is that what really makes a movie violent? Wolverine is shot repeatedly, stabbed half a dozen times in the climax and for most of this movie, he is mortal. He feels the pain, he passes out from the gun shots and we see and hear the agony of it. I love how his unusual pain is filmed because it would be this weird feeling for him. Wolverine jams his adamantium claws into dozens of people, ripping through their necks, stomachs, chests and legs. It is done with the full force of a violently angry man. At one point Wolverine is shot with over 30 arrows and he falls to the ground as these arrows stick out of him. I know superhero movies are typically action packed and are typically full of anonymous bad guys falling by the wayside, but The Wolverine feels like an R rated action movie that gets away with being PG-13 because it is a superhero movie. It is somewhat surprising to me how messed up the ratings system is. I know I am not the only person to think this, as badassdigest.com ran a whole story on this very thing. I am not a prude, nor do I much care if a movie is rated R or PG-13, but The Wolverine is a violent movie and I think it is silly that such violence, because of the lack of gore, can be put in a movie that children have easy access to.

Okay, back to the actual movie. For the first 35 to 40 minutes, The Wolverine is a bit slow. it is not boring, just slowly paced for a movie about a character who runs around fighting with such reckless abandon. However, the pacing in the front half is replaced by nonsense in the second half, so the movie comes off feeling incredibly disjointed. Jackman is as excellent as ever, sporting an incredibly ripped body, courtesy of The Rock's training program. He gets Wolverine's anger pitch perfect, but here, he has to express way more than he has in any other film because he has to express physical pain, but it cannot just be physical pain, it has to be confused physical pain. This is a man who has never had to deal with physical pain before. He always heals so quickly that it never fazed him. I always think of that awesome sequence in X2 when he gets shot in the head, falls to the ground and the bullet pops out of his head and he just stands up and gets ready to fight. It is such an iconic X-Men moment and in this film, he has to have a bullet surgically removed by a veterinarian student. it is a shocking disconnect if you have seen all of the movies featuring Wolverine. For a good majority of the film, Wolverine is wounded. It heightens the stakes in a way that has never been done for the character, but the coolest thing about it is that Wolverine does not change anything about how he reacts to bullets or arrows or anything. His attitude never wavers. He is going to do what he has to do to win.

The highlight of the movie is the bullet train sequence. I am so glad I did not watch it when the studio released it on-line. Why they would release the single best sequence from the film for free is beyond me. It is a truly dazzling action sequence. It is lightening fast, wonderfully choreographed and staged and most importantly, it is an incredibly awesome idea. The fact that it happens at roughly the midway point does make the rest of the film feel anti-climatic, but seriously, it is worth going to see this movie just for that sequence. I found myself gasping audibly a few times during it because I could not believe just how cool it was. It also features some of the best usage of Wolverine's claws. The claws look way more crisp here than they have in any of the X-Men movies and certainly better than in the first Wolverine movie. In the bullet train sequence, they really get to shine.

There is a wonky love subplot that serves only to remind us that Wolverine cannot get attached because they grow old and die and he stays living. The main villain, The Viper, is kind of stupid. She has some neat tricks, but the actress is awful and eventually she is overshadowed by the ridiculous Silver Samurai robot. I wanted more of the Yukio character. She was a total bad ass swordstress and had a truly miserable mutant power: being able to tell when people were going to die. The actress was great and I am hoping she will stick around in the X-Men movies or wherever FOX is taking this franchise. I found the story to be incredibly interesting, but I felt like the third act just kind of collapses the entire movie.

Final Grade: C+

Fruitvale Sation (spoilers if you are unaware of the real life events)

I am not going to spend too much time diving back into the emotions I felt when I first heard about the Oscar Grant story the night it happened. It was, and still is, an insanely tragic story any way you slice it. A young black man is out on BART on New year's Eve, gets into a fight, gets pulled off the train by the cops, is questioned, punched and eventually put face down, cuffed with a knee in his back and a knee on his face. What happened next was unimaginable. A BART cop pulls out his gun and shoots Grant in the back, Grant dies, the cop is convicted of involuntary manslaughter and served 11 months of a two year sentence. The cop claimed he thought he pulled his Tazor gun out. No matter how you slice it, it is tragic. Fruitvale Station is the story of the last day of Oscar Grant's life. It is from first time writer/director Ryan Coogler and stars up and upcoming star Michael B. Jordan as Grant. The minute I heard they were making a movie and that Jordan was attached, I knew this would be something special to watch. I was not disappointed.

Oscar Grant (Jordan) has had a rough life and he has made some bad decisions. After a bid in prison he is trying to get on the right path and provide for his girlfriend, Sophina (Melonie Diaz)and his little girl, Tatiana. He just cannot seem to figure it out. We meet him on December 31st 2007. It is his mom's (Octavia Spencer) birthday and of course, New Year's Eve. Sophina wants to go to San Francisco for the night to watch the fireworks and celebrate, but Oscar is not sure. He eventually agrees. While Sophina is at work, Oscar is alone for the day. He calls his mom to wish her happy birthday and he find out what he needs to get at the store for her celebration. When Oscar arrives at the store, we have been led to believe he works there. That is not the case, he used to work there but was fired for being late. he has not told anyone and while picking up some food, he tries to get his former boss to give him a second chance. When his boss says no, Oscar's quick temper flares up. He eventually calms down, but the day does not get easier. His sister calls to borrow money, he watches a dog die and he struggles with this very idea of wanting to better himself. He has a lot of weed he could sell, but that is what got him in trouble in the first place. He cannot find work, presumably because of his past and his conviction. What he is supposed to do. Before he picks up Sophina to head to his mother's house, he decides it is time to be a better man and dumps his weed. His mom convinces him he and his friends should take BART into the city so they do not have to worry about having a designated driver. The night was going so very well until Oscar runs into an old prison rival. Punches are thrown, a fight ensues and when they hear the BART cops coming everyone tries to escape, but the cops snatch up Oscar and most of his friends. With video cameras on them and a tense situation rising, Oscar tries to stay calm, but the cops are egging him on, kicking he and his friends, calling them names and abusing their power as cops. Things start to get out of hand and Oscar is pinned and eventually shot.

Fruitvale Station opens with the real video footage from the moment Oscar Grant was shot. It ends with footage of his now teenage daughter and the vigil held every year on January First for Oscar. The fictionalized film that those real life events bookend is phenomenal. it is hard to believe a first time writer/director managed to tell a story this well known and have it be done so well. The writing feels very real. The dialogue sounds incredibly organic and the screenplay beats are wonderful. The pacing is excellent. Never once are we bored. He lets some scenes linger just long enough (the stunning beach scene) and some he lets linger longer than we are comfortable with, but that need to be shown ( the dog scene). His understanding of how to draw emotion out of characters without making it ever feel manipulative is outstanding. he paints Oscar as flawed young man who was trying. he was dealt a bad hand and did not react well to it. Oscar was a victim of of his own circumstance, but he also created bad situations. he cheated on his girl, so she does not trust him. He clearly has a temper, is immature, and has a tough time taking responsibility for his life, but the system is keeping him down as well. His death shows that. The way Coogler presents Oscar to us makes everything so much more tragic. Oscar is a real person with real flaws. He is not a good guy, not a bad guy, he is simply a guy trying to do what he can to survive and provide.

As Oscar, Michael B. Jordan hits every single note perfectly. He helps Coogler flesh out this complex young man who loves fiercely, but cannot stop making his life harder on himself and his family. The flashback scene with his mother visiting him in prison is one of the most brilliant pieces of acting you are likely to see. Jordan goes through a whole scale of emotions and so much of it is shown in his face. I have been waiting for Jordan to find a break out role for a few years now and am so happy he is getting a chance to shine. He should be an Academy Award nominated actor this year. He gives so much incredible depth to Grant and his portrayal makes the filmed events even more tragic. He is in every scene in the movie. It breathes through him and he lifts it up and carries it. His moments with the young actress playing the daughter are warm and fuzzy, and heart wrenching. Knowing exactly what is going to happen in this film made it impossible for me to view with a dry eye. I was in tears from the moment it began and full on weeping during the stunningly heart breaking final act. The film even gives us the sweetest possible image as the last image, just to break your heart even more.

Is this a relevant movie to our current time? yes, absolutely. It is impossible to watch this movie and not think of Trayvon Martin, another young black man who was murdered. Does it give a clear cut understanding of what was going on with the cops during the melee? Absolutely not. We see one cop who is clearly a jerk, we see a bunch of young black men being harassed as they are held down and kicked by these authority figures and we see a rising situation clearly capable of escalating. Do I believe the cop purposely shot Oscar Grant with all of those people watching, no I do not. Do I think the young cop let the situation get the best of him and do I think he was out of line even pulling out a tazor gun on a guy who was clearly incapacitated, yes I absolutely do. is it a travesty that the man responsible for killing a young man only went to jail for 11 months, yes I do. Does any of that matter to be riveted by this film, I don't think so. I think you can believe whatever it is you want to believe and still find this film to be moving, tragic, and incredible. Coogler does a good enough job presenting a chaotic circumstance in the BART station that night to give many different ideas of what happened, but the result is the same: A young man who was laying face down and unable to move was shot in the back and lost his life. His daughter was left fatherless. Does race play an incredibly important role in that? Yes, it clearly does.

Fruitvale Station is an important young American film. It is the best movie to this point in 2013 and it is a film that will linger with me for years. It left me emotionally gutted. I was exhausted when it was over because of all of the emotions felt throughout. A movie like this, when done well, stays with you and just when you think you are done thinking about it and feeling sad, angry and helpless, it comes back and leaves you feeling sad angry and helpless all over again. I expect great things from Ryan Coogler in the future.

Final Grade: A+