Opening this weekend:
Jupiter Ascending—Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is an immigrant from Russia—she
was actually born aboard a ship at sea, like Marina in
Pericles—now stuck
working as a housecleaning drudge in Chicago. Then alien goblins try to kill
her, but she’s rescued by a hunky wolf guy (Channing Tatum) who, with the help
of an old ally (Sean Bean) spirits her off to space.
There she learns that she’s somehow the heir of a galactic royal family and
that, essentially, Earth belongs to her. There’s a creepy, whispering Prince (Eddie
Redmayne), however, who wants our planet for nasty commericial purposes and thus
wants Jupiter dead. Wild battles and chases ensue, as well as romantic yearning
between Jupiter and Wolf Guy.
This sci-fi fairy-tale from The Wachowskis pillages freely out of sources
ranging from
Cinderella to
Barbarella to
Star Wars, from
Flash Gordon to
Brazil
to
The Wizard of Oz to
The Graduate. The movie is long, and the exposition is
so dense that I was lost at times. But I liked it anyway (so did The Kid, who
remarked when it was over “It was too long, but I wouldn’t change anything,” a
first-rate piece of paradoxical movie reviewing). I especially liked the look
of it, a sort of Victorian whimsicality with spaceships like dragonflies or Alexander
Calder mobiles, and haywire paper-pushing bureaucracies in the midst of
space-age cities.
Kunis, whose hard-around-the-edges Eastern European beauty is softened by
dark peepers big enough to have been painted by Margaret Keane, goes for as
much bemused comedy as she can. I liked how she reacts to her new situation as galactic
princess with something like irritability, as if she’d been stuck with a
volunteer committee chairmanship when she was out of the room.
Seventh
Son—For some reason, according to this movie, the seventh son of a
seventh son is likely to show special aptitude for fighting monsters and other
forces of darkness. Shaggy old Jeff Bridges is Gregory, one such warrior, referred
to as a “Spook.” Having lost his apprentice of ten years, he purchases a new
one, Tom (Ben Barnes), from the poor kid’s family, and quickly has him tangling
with giants, shape-shifting bear-men, sabre-tooth cheetah women and witches who
can change into harpy-like dragons with more ease than most women can change
for dinner.
The leader of these nuisances is Julianne Moore, with whom old Gregory has a
history—he sealed her in a pit for decades. She’s out now, and it’s fair to say
she’s pissed.
This fantasy, based on a book by Joseph Delaney and set in a vague
fairy-tale past only a little grungier and more convincing than the one in
which
Into the Woods took place, seems to be trying for the feel of a Harryhausen-style
episodic adventure. To the extent that, for me, this is possible without the
idiosyncratic charm of stop-motion animation,
Seventh Son succeeds, at least
intermittently. The story is boilerplate and the dialogue mostly insipid, and
the younger actors don’t exactly bristle with sophistication and chemistry,
although the ingénue, the Swedish Alicia Vikander, is quite beautiful.
But the monster scenes are strong, as are the veterans in the cast. Moore
is an elegant, flirty menace as the Witch Queen Mother Malkin. Bridges continues
to speak in that same pouty-lipped manner that he did in
The Giver. Maybe it’s
just how he talks now; in any case it makes him sound amusingly petulant.
The
Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out of Water—The stakes are high in this second
feature treatment of the adventures of Stephen Hillenburg’s insistently cheery
denizen of the deep—it follows 2004’s
The
Spongebob Squarepants Movie. The top secret recipe for Krabby Patties
vanishes, and it’s revealed that these burgers, which the title character
spends his days happily flipping, aren’t just the livelihood of his avaricious
boss Mr. Krabs, they’re also the glue that holds Spongebob’s hometown of Bikini
Bottom together.
As soon as the town becomes aware of the Krabby Patty shortage, mob rule and
apocalyptic violence commence almost immediately. To the extent that Bikini
Bottom may be seen as an allegorical Anytown, this movie suggests, not for the
first time in the cartoon’s history, a certain skepticism about how durable
civility is in human affairs.
Spongebob and the diminutive, cyclopean villain Plankton must team up to
recover the recipe, which is now in the hands of a manic pirate captain
(Antonio Banderas in a live-action strand). Teaming up is tough on Plankton, to
whom the concept of cooperation is so alien that he isn’t even sure how to
pronounce the word “team.” The ensuing saga involves time travel, space travel,
a dolphin with a clipped British accent and many other aspects.
Too many, perhaps. It’s possible that this sort of relentless, undiluted
silliness works best for five to eight minutes at a stretch, and doesn’t
sustain well at feature length. In any case,
Sponge Out of Water comes off as, of all things, overambitious, and
it drags a little. The Kid (who may, admittedly, be getting a bit too
cool for this sort of thing) thought the film was too long, and that the climatic
live action/CGI confrontation between Spongebob and his pals and Captain
Banderas should have been arrived at sooner. I thought that it had plenty of
laughs, but I’ll grant that shaving eight to ten minutes from the movie’s
length wouldn’t do it any harm. The Sponge could stand to get out of the water
a little more quickly.
