The LEGO Batman Movie

Grade: B

Director: Chris McKay

Starring the voices of: Will Arnett, Zach Galifianakis, Michael Cera, Rosario Dawson, Ralph Fiennes, Mariah Carey, Jenny Slate and Channing Tatum

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hr. 46 min.

The LEGO Batman Movie isn’t the DC movie we deserve, but it’s the one we need right now. In a time when the cinematic Caped Crusader feels both exhausted and exhausting, along comes a Lord & Miller-inspired parody to save the day. Director Chris McKay unifies the iterations, drawing its material from not just the Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan exemplars, but also clever callbacks to the Adam West-starring TV series, the Super Friends cartoon and even the Joel Schumacher debacles, It even offers an olive branch to recent critics by taking some knowing jabs at the Zack Snyder re-imaginings. Want a film that lampoons Suicide Squad one moment—”I got to do something!” exclaims Killer Croc—then Bat Shark Repellant the next? Well, this is the Dark Knight for you.

You won’t find a funnier thirty minutes of film than LEGO Batman Movie’s opening act, with its surfeit of pop-culture references (including a recurring Jerry Maguire gag, of all things) and comic-book cues. Joker (Zach Galifianakis) leads a battle royale between the entire Batman rogues gallery, plus a cadre of concocting baddies like “Egghead” and “Condiment King.” It’s just a matter of minutes before Batman (Will Arnett, reprising his role from The LEGO Movie) has foiled the Joker’s plans again, but not before the proudly angry and lonely Batman refuses to acknowledge Joker as his greatest nemesis.

A wounded Joker quickly hatches his path to renewed infamy when Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson) assumes the reins of police commissioner from her father. Normally, the sole duty of Gotham City police commish was the ability to push the button illuminating the Bat Signal. Barbara promises a new era of crime fighting based on “statistics” and “compassion,” and “not Batman.” When Joker and the rest of the traditional rogues gallery turns themselves into Barbara, it threatens to render Batman obsolete.

The rest of Joker’s plan rests on stoking Batman’s ego, exile to the Phantom Zone (yes, Superman doesn’t get off easy, either) and an escape accompanied by a new band of iconic villains: Sauron, Voldemort (Eddie Izzard), Gremlins, Dracula, Agent Smith, King Kong, Jaws and many more. It’s understandable if you spend large swaths of the film trying to figure out how the filmmakers acquired licensing privileges of all its characters.

Meanwhile, Batman’s psyche of solitude is invaded by both his latent attraction to Barbara and the arrival of orphan Richard Grayson (Michael Cera), who goes by “Dick” at school—”Well, kids can be cruel,” Batman retorts. The wide-eyed Grayson soon dons a red and yellow costume belonging to a scuttled hero named “Reggae Man” and adopts the moniker “Robin.” Nudged by the ever-reproving Alfred (Ralph Fiennes), Batman gradually recognizes the value of teamwork and embraces his new substitute family: Barbara the platonic coworker; Robin the surrogate son; and Alfred the father figure.

If the middle portion of LEGO Batman Movie appears to sag, it’s only in comparison to the joke-a-second opener. There’s little of the sentimentality of The LEGO Movie. Indeed, obvious appearances aside, LEGO Batman Movie is less a LEGO sequel than both a superhero send-up and an exhilarating standalone. It’s fun, family-friendly, and, in keeping with the heyday of Abrahams and Zucker, a searing satire accessible to kids and adults alike. Everybody do the Batusi.

Scott Pilgrims vs. the World

I think you're invading my space

Grade: C +

Director: Edgar Wright

Starring: Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Ellen Wong, Anna Kendrick, Chris Evans, Brie Larson, Brandon Routh, and Jason Schwartzman

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 52 minutes

Filmmaker Edgar Wright excels at uproarious parodies that double as durable entries in the very genre he lampoons. Shaun of the Dead is a genuinely scary horror-movie spoof. Hot Fuzz parodies Hollywood buddy-cop films but has a whodunit subplot and enough car chases to keep things interesting. Even his faux-movie preview Don’t, which played between Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse double-feature, is a 1970s’ Hammer House of Horror film trailer send-up that also boasts some truly disturbing imagery.

Wright’s film adaptation of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, based on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s popular graphic novel series, aims for more of the same. Like O’Malley’s source comics, the film revolves around the arrested development of the titular twenty-something slacker (played by Michael Cera, natch), who lives in Toronto with his sardonic gay roommate Wallace (Keiran Culkin) and wiles away his days jamming bass with his marginally talented garage band, Sex Bom-omb. He has also just embarked on his latest seemingly ill-fated relationship, this one with a 17-year-old Chinese-Canadian high-schooler, Knives Chau (Ellen Wong).

However, Scott becomes enchanted with Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a delivery girl with a curt personality and ever-changing hair color. As Knives starts stalking, Scott discovers that in order to capture Ramona’s heart, he must battle and vanquish – in ascending order of difficulty – her seven evil exes, including a skateboarder movie star (Chris Evans), identical twin DJs, and an all-powerful record producer named Gideon Gordon Graves (Jason Schwartzman).

The most memorable exe – and the film’s highpoint – is Todd Ingram (Brandon Routh), a vegan, rival bassist defeated after he advertently ingests some half-and-half. There’s knowing glee when the actor who last played Superman is rendered powerless by a green ray gun wielded by the Vegan Police.

Wright faithfully replicates O’Malley’s marriage of manga-inspired artwork and video game conceit into an overcaffeinated visual fest that plays squarely to its under-30 target audience. Scott’s world is populated by thought bubbles and acquaintances with designated “player ratings.” Successful exploits can earn you an extra life; even urinating is accompanied by a yellow bar that gradually slides to empty. And, each battle sequence is a hyper-edited melee squeezed into a replicated framework of comic book panels and video screens.

Breathless attendees who screened Scott Pilgrim vs. the World several weeks ago at the annual San Diego Comic-Con scurried to instantly label the film a generational milestone. In truth, viewers will feel as through they are not so much in a movie theater as trapped in some arcade peering over the shoulder of a seventh-grade gaming savant as he tries to beat his high score. That, or perhaps confused that they’re re-watching the Wachowski Brothers’ overcooked Speed Racer.

Either way, Wright’s normally astute ability to have his satirical cake and eat its narrative underpinning too falters in Scott Pilgrim. First, it is not insignificant that Simon Pegg, Wright’s longtime collaborator, isn’t around to star or co-written this screenplay, as he did with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Moreover, while the imagery is eye-popping and the dialogue generally witty (although occasionally banal), the film’s core resides with an emotional connection to and between characters that evaporates in the setting’s stylized ether. Instead, you’ll have to satisfy yourself with the welcome – and too infrequent – appearance of Anna Kendrick as Scott’s busybody sister and figuring out why the underrated Culkin has remained relatively AWOL since his breakout performance in Igby Goes Down eight years ago.

There is a parallel worth exploring between reality and the labyrinthine, fatalistic milieu of a video game: both are worlds in which you either die prematurely or, if you’re lucky, live long enough see your preeminent success and achievement rendered meaningless once life’s levels simply and unceremoniously end. Either way, game over.

None of that is present in Scott Pilgrim, which packages passing allusions to disaffected youth and uncertain, unrequited love with FX-enhanced rock band battles and a fracas between erstwhile Sapphic lovers: “It was just a phase,” explains Ramona between dropkicks. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a heady spectacle, but it’s ultimately a war without meaning.

Neil Morris

Youth in Revolt

Tyler Durden says to start lifting weights

Grade: B

Starring: Michael Cera, Portia Doubleday, Jean Smart, Zach Galifianakis, Erik Knudsen, Steve Buscemi, Adhir Kalyan, Fred Willard, Ray Liotta, and Justin Long

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

It’s a familiar plotline for anyone who has watched movies since the 1980s: sexually frustrated teen seeks to lose his virginity, falls head-over-heels for a beautiful girl, and then undergoes a series of wacky exploits on his way to accomplishing his goal.

That director Miguel Areta (The Good Girl; Chuck & Buck) embraces such a shopworn subgenre in adapting C.D. Payne’s farcical coming-of-age novel Youth in Revolt is itself an ironic commentary on the landscape of cinematic comedies. Still, this is no Porky’s or slice of American Pie. Youth in Revolt owes more to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Little Darlings, and even Jean-Luc Godard, and while it may not be in the same class as that esteemed company, it is heady, hilarious fare that is already the surprise film of the young year.

Michael Cera has seemingly played the character of precocious, neurotic teenager Nick Twisp since his Arrested Development days. The 16-year-old Nick is a Holden Caulfield with a penchant for Sinatra and autoeroticism who longs to both shed his virginity and sever ties with his divorced parents (Jean Smart and Steve Buscemi). Mom cycles through loser boyfriends while Dad is shacked up with a bikini-clad blonde closer to Nick’s age.

When Mom’s latest lout (Zach Galifianakis) lands in hot-water, they and Nick take refuge at Restless Axles, a Christian trailer park in northern California. Enter Sheeni Saunders (newcomer Portia Doubleday), an erudite Lolita with an abiding love for all things French, including her pinup of Jean-Paul Belmondo. She and Nick wax whip-smart and commence a PG-rated summer fling, but his coitus interruptus proves to be Sheeni’s handsome, French-speaking, piano-playing, Futurist percussive poetry-spouting boyfriend, Trent (Jonathan Bradford Wright).

When Nick returns home and Sheeni leaves to attend a French boarding school in Santa Cruz, his solution on how they might reunite revolves around mischief created by François (also played by Cera), a pencil-mustachioed, Gitanes-smoking figment of Nick’s imagination. The brazen François – part Jeff Spicoli, part Belmondo in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou – embodies Nick’s id and represents the sort of man he believes girls prefer. Spurred on by his inner Tyler Durden, Nick conflagrates his hometown of Berkley and sabotages Sheeni’s schooling.

Payne’s sharp wit translates well to the screen in the hands of writer Gustin Nash, whose coming-of-age Charlie Bartlett plowed similar, albeit less fertile ground. There are occasions late in Youth in Revolt when its comic elements almost explode into brilliant, full-blown surrealism, especially a couple of shroom-tripping sequences: Nick incorporates sex-manual illustrations into the first, while the other finds Sheeni’s otherwise bible-thumping dad (M. Emmet Walsh) smearing mashed potatoes all over his face over Thanksgiving dinner.

However, virtually all the film’s characters are zany to the point of derangement. Without a reliable straight/sane counterpoint, the narrative nearly implodes into inanity – casualties include underwritten supporting turns from Ray Liotta and Justin Long, who plays Sheeni’s half-baked brother. These spells are saved by Erik Knudsen as Nick’s childhood friend Lefty, Adhir Kalyan – who mirrors Cera’s deadpan wit – as Nick’s new high school pal Vijay, and Fred Willard as an aging hippie. But, ultimately this is Cera’s show, and he exhibits range while carrying the film on his lanky back.

Youth in Revolt congeals romance, sex, and infatuation into one dysfunctional, indispensable confection. Circumstance forces Nick to disguise himself in drag before he can finally enter Sheeni’s boudoir. In the end, love begets masculinity, not the other way around.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

Year One

Slaves to Apatow movie hell

Grade: D

Director: Harold Ramis

Starring: Jack Black, Michael Cera, Oliver Platt, and David Cross

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

Year One is to Life of Brian, its ostensible cinematic inspiration, as Monty Python’s titular Nazarene is to his Messianic stable-mate: a pale imposter. When the book is written on bad Jack Black comedies or the first major misstep in Michael Cera’s nascent career, this misguided, humorless disaster – more akin to bad Abrahams and Zucker than Mel Brooks – will be chapter one.

As inept tribesmen banished from their home village for sampling from the Tree of Knowledge (if only the filmmakers had dined at that table…), Zed (Black) and Oh (Cera) begin a loose jaunt through the Book of Genesis, sparking everything from the fratricide of Cain (David Cross) to Abraham (Hank Azaria) sparing his son Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) from sacrifice to indulging in the pleasures and perils of Sodom. Their goal, such as it is, centers around freeing themselves and their would-be objects of affection, Maya (June Diane Raphael) and Eema (Juno Temple), from slavery.

Just as Zed and Oh wander the wilderness, so too does Year One meander aimlessly through one half-baked sketch after another. Ignoring the wit and satire all but smacking him straight in his face, director Harold Ramis falls back on anachronisms and a steady stream of scatology. You know, the usual: Feces, urine, flatulence, testicles, and a glut of gay gags.

With Cera, McLovin, Bill Hader in blackface, and an uncredited Paul Rudd as the doomed Abel, this rotten tomato is a Jonah Hill walk-on away from an Apatow family reunion. Sadly, Apatow accepts a producer credit for this mistake, but the most amazing thing is that its bottom-barrel script was penned by two regulars for The Office, Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg. Too schlocky to be good and too charmless to be a cult classic, this is an unimaginative misfire that its stars would be well-advised to instantly scrub from their resumes. Black and Cera spout off a funny line here and there, but poor editing, writing, and staging steer Year One into very primitive territory.

Neil Morris

Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist

Where's Cloverfield when you need it?

Grade: B –

Director: Peter Sollett

Starring: Michael Cera, Kat Dennings, Alexis Dziena, and Ari Graynor

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Like its central leitmotif, Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist is an eclectic mix tape, intertwining alt-rock edginess with sappy love ballads while elevator music drones incessantly in the background. For his feature-length sophomore effort, director Peter Sollett (Raising Victor Vargas) fashions a nocturnal valentine to NYC, particularly its alternative club scene, fostering a buoyant sense of time and place.

Nora (Kat Dennings) had a crush on Nick (Michael Cera) before she even met him, thanks to rescuing the rad mix CDs Nick burns for a catty ex-girlfriend (Alexis Dziena) who promptly tosses them in the high school garbage can. By night, Nick plays bass guitar as the token straight in a Queercore rock band, while Nora tries to sift guys attracted to her earthy personality and good looks and those trying to nestle up to her father, a renowned record label owner. When the two finally meet-cute, they squeeze into Nick’s yellow Yugo and embark on an all night odyssey to track down New York City’s most popular indie rock band – along with Nora’s drunk best friend (Ari Graynor) – while coming to grips with loves both lost and newly found.

Cera yet again successfully reprises his Arrested Development nebbish, and the film’s final half hour offers a harmonic, Linklater-like apogee of romantic discovery. Unfortunately, the rest of the screenplay and supporting characters are like the single, icky piece of chewing gum that winds its way through the entire evening: flavorless and highly disposable.

Neil Morris