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In this age, Summer and a certain crop of film go hand in hand, enticing audiences nation and even worldwide to forget about the hot temperatures in the air conditioning of a stadium seated auditorium. Unfortunately, the offerings of 2015 for the last 4 months have failed to deliver.
That’s not to say that the summer was devoid of anything worth seeing; far from it as more than one release will probably make my best of the year list. The experience on the whole however ultimately degenerated into something akin to wandering a desert landscape to be greeted by a bottle of water every 10 miles.
While far from the dearth of pleasure that a year such as, say 2010 was, this summer just wasn’t quite up to snuff. The nicest thing that I can truly say about it is that it all of the weeks in between worthwhile releases helped what worked about the good ones to truly stand out as models of what their peers should be working towards.
Winners
Ant-Man
“Age of Ultron” has shown that Marvel Studios is in need of a shake up to their films if they hope to maintain their momentum. “Ant-Man” isn’t quite the answer to that conundrum provided by their reliable but stale-growing formula but it is a major step in the right direction.
Setting aside its portrayal of gender relationships and a bit of unevenness with its utilization of character, “Ant-Man” was the reminder of how wonderful the superhero genre can be at a time in which it seems to be obsessed with being more “adult” like a teenager undergoing puberty; it doesn’t matter how ludicrous your subject matter is, you shouldn’t laugh at it because life and the real world are dark and not meant to be enjoyed.
After watching the DC universe spiral the drain for almost a year straight in order to match the tone of a single bat themed icon in a blatant attempt at audience pandering, while Marvel slowly becomes obsessed with treating its Cinematic Universe installments as feature length television episodes in service to an increasingly convoluted end, words can’t describe how refreshing it was to follow a hero undergoing a very relatable endeavor with his diverse cast of friends in a relatively light but entertaining romp ending with him at a family dinner table happily spending quality time with his daughter, who loves and supports him as a superhero and a person in general.
What I expected to be only a mild success may quite possibly be in my top 5 favorite installments of the MCU.
Inside Out
Having accepted the decline of Pixar for almost 3 years now, I was far from ready to see them serve up what may very well be an opus that trumps even the “Toy Story” franchise.
“Inside Out” is deceptively clever and insightful despite having all the potential to coast on merchandising and a non-discerning audience and in a summer full of masses pandering waste, that goes a long way towards leaving a lasting impression.
Many have theorized and discussed the film’s potential themes regarding depression, however I personally disagree. The adventure occurring in Riley’s subconscious is a perfectly healthy emotional crisis brought about by fast and immediate change and that, to me at least, is what makes it such a stupendous film; Pixar has managed to take a mundane and common but fully relatable issue and present it all in a straightforward yet elegantly complex fashion that sheds some light on aspects of the human condition that we may not quite think about quite often.
As they used to in their heyday, Pixar has taken a basic concept and turned into something exceptionally beautiful, intelligent, and eye opening that’s fun for all ages. Hopefully they can keep the streak up.
Jurassic World
Legendary is beginning to make a real name for themselves as cinematic monster makers.
Thanks to strong performances providing its franchise with some of its strongest human characters yet, a sly screenplay that both celebrates and mocks its own B-movie concept and Hollywood excess in good fun, and a director that has managed to instill more life in its creatures than even Spielberg was able to 22 years ago, “Jurassic World” is the only sequel to “Jurassic Park” that manages to live up to its predecessors legacy and quite possibly even succeed it were it not for the original’s novelty.
It’s light without being vapid, fun without being moronic, and flashy while keeping a bit of meat on its bones; everything a good blockbuster should strive towards.
Shaun The Sheep
90 minutes of dialogue free visual gags that are more clever than almost every comedy released this year, proving Aardman Studios are not only masters of their animated craft but arguably of storytelling in general.
“Shaun the Sheep” is one of the single most charming animated films that I have seen in over 5 years and the sheer fact that its lazier counterparts (*cough*Minions*cough*) more than likely took in the amount of its total North American gross within the span of a single weekend is depressing beyond words.
If the kids are after something to watch on DVD this holiday season, this is not one to skip; they’ll be sorely missing out on one of the funniest movies of 2015 with more than enough genuine emotion to boot.
Mad Max: Fury Road
Never would you have guessed George Miller was of senior citizen age by watching “Fury Road,” nor would you have even believed that his prized cinematic creation was absent from public consciousness for decades.
The film hits the ground running hard and never lets up for a moment as Miller, having access to a pool of resources he could have never gathered in the 80s, brings a grandeur to his vision of the post apocalypse that is not only surreal in the presentation of its elegantly chaotic visual style but a technically marvelous and above all else, human, tackling moral questions of how we define ourselves in regards to our places in society.
Regardless of its debatable placement within its own franchise or the portrayal of its newly recasted title character, “Mad Max: Fury Road” does way too much right in the domain of visual storytelling to hold its own arguably thin writing against it.
Losers
Terminator: Genysis
At this point the name Terminator should pretty sufficiently speak for itself so I’ll try to keep this one short.
Let’s disregard the conceptual failing of making a post-Terminator 2 sequel and just focus on the core problem here; if you’re going to soft reboot something by changing the sequence of events within your franchise, you should probably start with 2 simple questions. How and Why?
If you fail to tell how your movie’s story is possible and why it makes even the slightest lick of sense, I don’t care if the Governator is back; I just care about why you wasted 2 hours of my life reminding me of 2 substantially better films that I could be watching.
This franchise is obsolete. Let it enjoy its long deserved rest.
Pixels
At this point, the world has said all there needs to be said about “Pixels.”
Yes, it’s the single most insulting thing that cinema has done to video games since Uwe Boll and if you contain even an iota of humanity within you, its depiction of manchild entitlement to fame, fortune, and the opposite sex, regarding a trivial activity of recreation that is represented so poorly that it begs the question why they even bothered to make it a theme to begin with, goes beyond the territory of disgusting into being downright pitiful on top of being an agonizingly boring comedy to boot.
Let me instead pose the question of why the hell is everybody so shocked?
Happy Madison productions headlined by Adam Sandler and/or Kevin James are pretty much the cinematic anti-quality equation and this is still better than both “Grown Ups” movies and “Jack and Jill” combined, 3 movies with which Sony very promptly laughed their way to financial success with.
So why, after nearly 5 years of ambivalently allowing Sandler to ride off into the sunset with millions of dollars provided by boring, smug, sexist, gross out comedies for douche bags, are we so suddenly outraged that he made a boring, smug, sexist, gross out comedy for douche bags?
I’m not even angry at Sandler at this point. Honestly, I feel sorry for him. He looks flat out bored with himself throughout this entire film, which still managed to bring in a profit despite its poor word of mouth.
You know what didn’t profit him well? “Funny People” and “Reign Over Me,” the good movies he’s done featuring multilayered performances.
I’ll jump on the Screw “Pixels” bandwagon the day he does something great that actually made him money. Until then, I will do what I have continued to every Summer for nearly 5 years; ignore Happy Madison’s existence.
Hitman: Agent 47
35 seconds in the words Written by Skip Woods appear on screen and it is at this point all hope was promptly abandoned.
How that man continues to get work is beyond the brightest minds on the planet but that he somehow played a hand in making a “Hitman” movie somehow worse than the 2007 feature is an almost remarkable accomplishment.
The absurdity of the dialogue would almost be hilarious were the sedate performances and pedestrian action scenes not so boring. The nicest thing that I can say about “Agent 47” is that it’s so mercifully short and ultimately forgettable that it will be virtually erased from my memory within a few days, much less year’s end.
Tomorrow Land
Not the biggest disappointment of the summer by a long shot but the absolute hardest to talk about in a negative light.
“Tomorrowland” very clearly has is heart in the right place; its message about facing the future with optimism by finding beauty in ugliness is more than admirable and at its best, meshes with the splendidly bright visual palette to create an infectious energy that you desperately want to find endearing. Unfortunately, all of that energy is sucked clean out by a paper thin chase plot involving protagonists so one dimensional, they’re out acted by a child actress instructed to behave like a robot.
In the final 5 minutes, the film makes a move towards a certain direction that could have allowed it to become a larger franchise that ironically should have been the tact it took to begin with. Seeing the eyes of kids in the theater light up with hope for the potential wonders of the future and how they wished to do more for the world when they grew up was both heartwarming to see and all the more disappointing with the realization that these children would most likely never see something that impacted them at an influential time in their lives developed out into something greater.
It’s far from any worst list I could ever come up with but to see its entire potential circle the toilet while inadvertently hurting Disney’s willingness to take a chance on other properties beyond its obvious moneymakers (with the sad cancelation of Tron 3 as exhibit A), it’s apparent that regardless of its good intentions, “Tomorrowland” may have ultimately delivered onto its company and Hollywood in general, the opposite effect of what it strived to achieve
Fantastic Four
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