War Horse

War Horse

War Horse is a tough film to review.  It certainly isn't the best film in the world and yet I find myself often defending it to my friends.  Maybe I just don't agree with the reasons they don't like it...or maybe I'm just being fussy in my old age.  Either way, War Horse is definitely a mixed bag.

Joey is a special horse (as we are reminded constantly) and develops an immediate bond with young English farm boy, Albert Narracott (Jeremy Levine's debut performance).  But the farm is destitute and Mr. Narracott is forced to sell Joey to the English army on the eve of World War I.  Little Albert is shattered and swears he'll see his horse again.  What follows is the episodic adventures of Joey as he navigates his way through war torn Europe and hopefully back to Albert.

A problem with most episodic movies is that they are full of a lot of short little stories, and if some of these episodes aren't strong, it can drag down the whole movie.  I definitely think this is the case of War Horse.  Some of the stories are terrific, especially the World War I excerpts, such as when Joey serves as the cavalry mount of dashing British Captain Nichols (Thor's Tom Hiddleston channeling a killer T.E. Lawrence vibe) and when he is forced to pull literally tons of heavy artillery up a steep slope to their firing positions.  These sequences are truly superb and depict some of the best representations of World War I that I have seen.  But then we also have a story where Joey becomes the pet of a precocious little French girl (Celine Buckins), that I suppose is sort of cute, but completely drags the momentum of the movie down.

The other major complaint about the movie, and one that I agree with, is that it tends to be overly sentimental.  Spielberg has always worn his heart on his sleeve as a filmmaker and I admire the fact that he doesn't restrain his emotional side, but he goes overboard here, especially in the last act.  Everything following the superb barbed wire scene right up to the sunset finale is just thick, thick syrup - and too much for me to handle without rolling my eyes.  It's just started to be a bit too much.

But I've also heard a lot of people complaining that the movie is just unrealistic.  It bothered them that with hundreds of thousands men being slaughtered, why does everyone care so much about a horse?  It's just a horse!  I don't think that is the right way to look at the movie.  War Horse isn't realistic.  It's a fable and the horse is a metaphor, a symbol of an earlier, simpler time - when people were tied to their land, and when there was a certain nobility and chivalry in combat, before the world was violently dragged into the modern world by the horrors of mechanized warfare.  World War I was the transition to modern war and that transition is handled brilliantly by Spielberg and Company.  The characters in the film yearn for the world of yesteryear, for a happier time before barbed wire, mustard gas, and trenchfoot.  It makes sense that everyone in the film is touched by Joey.  He is a symbol of everything they have lost.

Overall, I think the movie's greatest strength is how old fashioned it is (which is ironic because I think its greatest weakness is how old fashioned its sentimentality is!).  I think this is Spielberg's John Ford film.  Truly, I think if John Ford had made War Horse in 1948, it would have been remarkably similar to what we ended up with 2011.  It's the classic style of the filmmaking, and it's the way the camera sets the characters against the landscape, tying them intrinsically to the earth.  I admired that.  There is actually a lot to admire about War Horse.  If the story had been just a bit tighter, and if the attempts to yank on our tear ducts had just been a bit more subtle...well, we would have had something terrific.

MVP:
Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg's Director of Photography, is the clear MVP here.  He's brilliant with the camera, both with his framing, and his great use of filters and lighting.  He gets the MVP for two moments in particular - the first is an insane sunset at the end of the film, a return to the English farm set against a blood red sky.  At first, I grumbled, because I thought, "why did they use CGI for that sunset??"  Except then I read that it was actually a real sunset and that the colors in that part of England are that insanely vibrant.  It's a heck of a great shot.  But my favorite shot is actually earlier in the film, when Joey makes a dash through the trenches.  We are treated to a superb tracking shot, the camera keeping just ahead of Joey as he twists and turns, men toppling to each side, explosions filling the air above him.  It's a brilliant shot and I'm not quite sure how they did it.  Kaminski is the Man!

BEST LINE:

Geordie: How are things in yonder trench?
German: Delightful.  We read.  We knit sweaters.  We train our rats to perform circus tricks.

TRIVIA:
Fourteen horses played Joey in the film.  The primary acting horse, Finder, also played Sea Biscuit.

 

The Avengers

The Avengers

And this is it.  After years of planning and hundreds of millions of dollars invested, Marvel's master plan has finally come to fruition and The Avengers has been released in theaters.  The film is the culmination of a strategy that began with 2008's Iron Man, a plan to introduce all the major Avenger super heroes in their own films and then bring them together in a big old fashioned crossover.

And the strategy worked brilliantly.  The Avengers lives up to expectations and even manages to exceed them.  After his defeat in Thor, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) comes into contact with an evil alien race called the Chitauri.  He makes a deal with them.  He will retrieve the all-powerful Tesseract (the super weapon from Captain America) and turn it over to them in return for an army with which he will conquer the Earth.  What stands in Loki's way?  The Avengers!  Assembled by S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), The Avengers team includes Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), and Captain America (Chris Evans).  Together they have to band together, defeat Loki, and save the planet.

That's a lot of characters and that is where Marvel's gambit paid off.  Because we have already been introduced to these characters, we don't really need to waste time delving into their back stories.  We can just jump right into the movie.  Because I'll be honest, the movie is two and a half hours long, as it is.  If we had to introduce audiences to these heroes, we would be in big trouble.

As it is, the film's weakness is in its first half hour.  We have all these characters and we need to get them all together somehow.  Sometimes these moments seem a bit forced, others - such as Thor's introduction - are downright contradictory to the earlier films.  Not that these scenes are particularly bad.  They just have some...speed bumps, I guess you could say, and are not as strong as the rest of the movie.

Because once we have everyone in the same room, the film really begins to hum, and then it churns, and then it explodes.  Every member of the cast is pitch perfect - especially newcomer Mark Ruffalo, who replaced Ed Norton as Bruce Banner/Hulk.  I initially thought Ruffalo was miscast, but he won me over pretty quickly.  And now I think he is the best cinematic Banner we've had yet.  He's almost the MVP of the movie.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that even though this movie is super crowded, everybody - and I mean, everybody - has their moment to shine, including smaller characters like Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg).  Every hero has a crowd pleasing kick butt moment, especially in the final battle.  This is a tricky juggling act and we have to credit Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy and Firefly) for shepherding such a complicated cast through the film.  Give him credit, too, for the great sense of humor that permeates the film.  Simply put, The Avengers is funnier than most of the comedies we get these days, plus we get great effects, great heroics, and great acting, too.  There are other summer films coming out that might end up being better than The Avengers, but I doubt any of them are going to be anywhere near as entertaining.

But in the end, The Avengers is not just a fun summer film, it is also accomplishes a remarkably feat -  it captures the spirit and the magic of the comics.  The Avengers really feels like a comic book come to life.  It is easily Marvel Studios' best film and rightfully takes its place as one of the best comic films of all time.


MVP:
Full disclosure - I am not a Whedon fanatic.  I think he is a talented writer and director, but I do not fawn over everything he does.  I loved Firefly and Serenity, but Buffy was just okay (here comes the hate mail) and Angel was just slightly better.  I want to qualify that just so you know I can be unbiased about this whole MVP thing, because I gotta say that Whedon just upped his game 500%.  I felt comfortable as soon as he was hired because I knew he was adept at handling team dynamics.  But I didn't think he would knock it out of the park like he does here.  I am still incredibly impressed how no character was under-utilized.  Everyone had something important and relevant to do - and we had eight major characters.  That is pretty remarkable.  And as a writer, he was able to give each hero their own distinct voice, which is also pretty difficult to do.  It's just impressive all around.  Whedon captained this ship and gave us one of the best of the genre.  I can't wait to see what he does with the sequel.  This was an easy MVP decision.

BEST LINE:

Ouch, so many.  Lots of good lines.  But I can say this line got a lot of cheers in the theater:

Captain America: "Ma'am, there's only one God, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't dress like that."

TRIVIA:
Some fans were disappointed that the villainous aliens in the movie weren't the Skrulls, Marvel Comics' go-to evil alien race.  The aliens in the film, the Chitauri, actually come from the Ultimates comic version of The Avengers.  In the comic, they do claim that they go by other names, including The Skrulls.  So why not just use the Skrulls name?  Well, turns out there were some legal issues.  The Skrulls were also villains in the Fantastic Four series, and since Fox Studios currently has the rights to Fantastic Four, that means they couldn't be used in The Avengers film.  Bummer.