HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU, KIDNAP

Opening this weekend:

Bugonia--Pharmaceutical exec Michelle is abducted from her driveway, after vigorous resistance. The unimpressive kidnappers, Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a beekeeper and conspiracy theorist, and his affectless cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), shave her head and chain her to a bed in the basement. Teddy believes that Michelle (Emma Stone) is an alien infiltrator from Andromeda, and wants her to arrange a meeting with the Andromedan Emperor during an upcoming lunar eclipse to negotiate a withdrawal from their occupation of Earth.

Michelle stays calm and tries to reason with her captors, explaining that she isn't an alien, but that she is a VIP and the search for her will be relentless. Teddy is having none of it; he's anticipated every argument or play on their sympathies that Michelle can make, and he seethes with barely controlled rage. Gradually, we learn why.

Working from a script by Will Tracy, the mad Greek Yorgos Lanthimos directed this American version of a South Korean satire, Jang Joon-Hwan's Save the Green Planet! It's a bitterly funny, and sad, dramatization of how closed bubbles of belief can shut down the chances for productive human exchange. Michelle and Teddy lash out at each other with confident invective that suggests their positions are unassailable, impregnable.

Stone inevitably evokes sympathy; her eyes seem somehow wider and more plaintive under her shaved scalp, and the lotion smeared on her head gives her the spectral look of a Kabuki character. But she and Lanthimos also make sure we see that Michelle is a passive-aggressive bully, and in the midst of a grapple with Teddy she blurts out her Nietzschean view of their relationship.

Plemons is also superb, and he and Stone volley the dialogue at each other with skill and nuance. Delbis is touching as the apparently neurodivergent Don, who is pushed around by Teddy but at bottom seems to be more openminded and instinctively decent than his mentor.

It becomes clear that Lanthimos, following the Korean film's example, plans to finish Bugonia with a grand satirical topper. The route he takes, though admittedly funny, is heavy-handed, and diffuses the bite of what has gone before. Even so, Bugonia has more than enough brilliance and passion to be worth a look.

THE FAMOUS MR. EDDINGTON

Opening today in theaters:

Eddington--Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross in this one. He's the county sheriff of the titular New Mexico town into which writer-director Ari Aster tries to stuff all the nightmarish national rage and misery of early 2020. It's all there, or a lot of it, anyway--disbelief in COVID, anti-mask anger, George Floyd protests and calls to defund the police, social distancing, rampaging social media, talk radio conspiracy rants, a quasi-religious cult figure, even a Kyle Rittenhouse type.

Joe lives in a rural house with his distant, psychologically fragile wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her mother Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell), a 24/7 wingnut conspiracy receiver. He, too, is indignantly resentful of the mask requirement and refuses to wear one, even on the job. A wrangle over the policy in a supermarket leads Joe to impulsively announce his candidacy for mayor.

The incumbent, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), is Joe's rival in town politics, and also personally; he has a history with Louise. Ted is pushing for some sort of new high tech company to locate in Eddington, despite environmental and logistical concerns.

With the exception of his deputy Michael (Micheal Ward) and a tribal cop (William Belleau) from across the county line, Joe is, initially, the most likable of the major characters. But this isn't a high bar. Eddington isn't like Mayberry or Star's Hollow, one of those fictional small towns you might find yourself wishing you could move to. It's full of shifty characters, idiots and creeps. Ted and his allies seem like phonies and business shills. The kids who organize the protests are preposterously self-flagellating. The cult weirdo (Austin Butler) worming his way into Joe's family is repulsive.

By comparison, Joe Cross seems like a decent sort, obtuse and not especially bright but well-intentioned. Phoenix gives him a plaintive, singsong voice and sad eyes, and Aster makes you feel how overwhelmed he is, both by the baffling times he's in and by his own spiritual desperation over the collapse of his libertarian illusions. It may be Phoenix's best performance. 

As the story progresses, however, Joe descends, by disturbingly believable steps, from misguided and angry to monstrous. Aster, who specializes in grueling horror films like Midsommar and Heredity, spares his protagonist here nothing in terms of defeat and humiliation, yet not in a way that allows us the pleasure of schadenfreude. This long film climaxes with a wild, extended, very bloody shootout in the streets of Eddington, as Joe Cross is stalked by a mysterious killer in black. Mysterious to me, at least--is this gunman, who we see arrive by private jet, meant to be an "ANTIFA" operative? An agent-provocateur? A corporate asset? Does Aster intend him realistically? Satirically?

I'm not sure, and in any case, I'm also not sure this frenzied gunfight doesn't drive this amazing movie off the rails a little in its homestretch. Eddington is unforgettable, but it's all too easy for me to imagine viewers who might share Joe's values seeing this persecution of him as a vindication of his despicable actions. Joe Cross is pitiable, but he's no hero.

CRUELLA TO BE KIND

Opening in theaters this week:

Cruella--The title character is Cruella de Vil, the notorious villainess from Dodie Smith's 1956 novel The One Hundred and One Dalmatians, by way of the 1961 Disney animated movie and its various remakes, sequels and spin-offs. In the original animated classic she's a fur-clad bag-of-bones rich hag with a demonic touring car. She covets the puppies for their black-spotted white coats; they match Cruella's own, weirdly yin-and-yang half-black half-white mop.

Cruella is to One Hundred and One Dalmatians (and the 1996 live-action remake 101 Dalmatians, where she's grandly played by Glenn Close) what the horned sorceress Maleficent was to Disney's Sleeping Beauty: The only truly memorable character. So, as 2014's Maleficent showcased Angelina Jolie, this new origin story offers a deluxe vehicle to Emma Stone.

In this telling, the character starts out simply as Estella; "Cruella" is a teasing nickname for the dark streak in her personality. Cast out of her school, Estella washes up homeless in Regent's Park, then gradually rises through the world of London fashion of the '60s and '70s. She goes to work for the Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson), an imperious designer, while at the same time developing her "Cruella" persona to get up to incognito mischief with her cronies Horace and Jasper (Paul Walter Hauser and Joel Fry, both appealing).

Give Disney its due: This lavish production is terrific to look at, and to listen to, as well; the soundtrack is a feast of gutsy, (mostly) '60s- and '70s-era pop hits. Both of the Emmas are in solid form--Stone with her half-sheepish little grins as she wreaks mayhem; Thompson with her unflappable slow burn--and both are costumed to dementedly chic grandeur. The script, credited to a mob that includes Dana Fox and Aline Brosh McKenna, has ideas and gags that recall everything from The Devil Wears Prada to The Winter's Tale to The Terminator, and is by no means lacking in wit or ingenious twists.

That said, Cruella, directed by the Australian Craig Gillespie of I, Tonya, is badly overlong, full of ideas that don't have sufficient payoff for the drag that they add to the narrative. Beyond that, it is, like Maleficent, like 2015's Pan, like 2014's Dracula Untold, even like 2007's Hannibal Rising and 2019's Joker, one of those sympathy-for-the-devil backstories of an iconic evildoer for whom audiences have developed an affection.

I'm not sure why it is that such revisionist sagas irk me, often at the same time that I'm enjoying them; why they bring out my inner Fox News commentator, judgmentally griping about creeping moral relativism in popular art. After all, villains in real life don't typically spring out of a vacuum. Past experiences do matter, and if a fictional ne'er-do-well inspires a fictional backstory, it's a testament to how vividly drawn the character is.

That said, qualifying and quantifying the menace of characters like Cruella or Maleficent reduces their status as symbolic villains, boiling them down to the sum of the specific trauma and betrayals of their youth. It's an impertinence to the scale of their villainy.

Cruella is a fairly enjoyable spectacle, but, like Maleficent, it shrinks its title character a bit. These filmmakers know some good music, but they should have listened more closely to the lyrics of a lesser pop song: In the wise words of Huey Lewis, sometimes bad is bad.

A Quiet Place Part II--This sequel starts as a prequel; writer-director John Krasinski takes us back before the events of the 2018 horror/sci-fi hit, to the day that Earth was invaded by shrieking aliens. Sightless, these ghastly quadrupeds are extremely sensitive to sound, and come charging in to maul any humans who make the slightest racket.

Krasinski appears only in this brief--but pretty enthralling--prologue, after which the movie picks up right where Part I left off. Intrepid Mom (Emily Blunt), her intrepid-er daughter (Millicent Simmonds) and cautious but brave son (Noah Jupe), as well as an infant requiring oxygen tanks, are forced to look around rural New York for a new quiet place. Eventually the daughter, who is deaf, strikes out on her own in search of a radio signal; somebody plays Bobby Darin singing "Beyond the Sea" every day at the same time.

The first film had a wide-awake intensity and deliberation, but Krasinski seems to have grown as a director with this follow-up. Here he gives us sustained, bravura sequences, like the centerpiece in which he intercuts between three currents of action, and the scenes bounce thematic echoes off of each other. This isn't the sort of movie that Hitchcock cared for, but I bet if Hitchcock watched it, he would admire Krasinski's work.

Like the first film, this one has dubious elements. You may look at the aliens and think: Really? These screeching, squalling horrors, looking like creatures from the Francis Bacon triptych, were advanced enough to master interstellar travel? And having arrived on a new planet, they seem to have nothing better to do but to obsessively wait for one of the natives to drop or bump into something. Admittedly, though, plenty of human behavior would probably seem equally incomprehensible to intelligent alien observers.

The family has also discovered the achilles heel of the aliens, and while it's satisfying to see them brought low, it also seems a little too easy. It's essentially the same weakness that the aliens had in the Twilight Zone episode "Hocus Pocus and Frisby."

But Krasinski's taut yet passionate direction carries us past such objections while we're watching the movie, as does the acting. Blunt has a heroic, warrior-goddess presence here, like the carving on the prow of a ship. The kids are superb, especially the soulful Simmonds; Cillian Murphy is effective as a frightened, bereaved neighbor who's given up on humankind, and Djimon Hounsou contributes a warm bit in the later acts.

And aside from all of these merits, any movie that holds up Bobby Darin singing "Beyond  the Sea" as a promising sign of civilization shows good sense to me.

A BUBBLING CROODS

Opening today:

The Croods: A New Age--2013's The Croods, an animated feature about a primitive nomadic family struggling to survive, and about the father struggling to adapt to his daughter growing up, was, as I recall, a sweet, mildly amusing film, but nothing that screamed for a sequel. So I was almost as surprised when this one showed up, seven years later, as I was by 2016's Zoolander 2, a decade and a half after the 2001 original.

I was even more surprised that A New Age is better than the original; more imaginative, thematically and visually more interesting.

Once again the central characters are dad Grug, voiced by Nicholas Cage, and his daughter Eep, voiced by Emma Stone. The other Croods are Grug's wife Ugga (Catherine Keener), son Thunk (Clark Duke), younger daughter Theep (Randy Thom) and the formidable Gran (Cloris Leachman), Ugga's bewigged mom. Traveling with them is Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a rather advanced young man who is Eep's love interest and Grug's nemesis. Eep and Guy are starting to talk about striking out on their own.

The movie takes a startling turn when Grug, looking for a stable new homeland to prevent this breakaway, leads his family straight to...a wall. Sure enough, this movie turns into a flexible allegory for both the immigrant experience and the class mobility experience, seen mostly from the point of view of the aspirant have nots rather than the defensive haves.

The wall demarcates the estate of the Bettermans, hubby Phil (Peter Dinklage), wife Hope (Lesley Mann) and daughter Dawn (Kelly Marie Tran), upscale types with amenities like privacy and beds and windows; staring out of the latter is as addictive to young Thunk as television or smartphone screens are in our time. It turns out that the Bettermans knew Guy as a child, and feel duty bound to reclaim him from the Croods.

This sort of thing is trenchant enough, and happily the satire, if it even rises to the level of the term, remains good-natured and unpretentious. But in the final third of The New Age we learn why eating the copious bananas around the Betterman compound is taboo, and after that the movie pretty much goes, well, bananas. It's quite frenetic all the way through, come to that; feverish slapstick sequences are edited to pop hits, and the fanciful fauna we're shown is seriously weird, ranging from pet sloths to a giant sabertooth cat to land sharks to "punch monkeys," so named for exactly the reason you'd guess. There are even multi-eyed spider-wolf hybrids.

The New Age isn't especially deep, but it's admirably freewheeling and festive and heartfelt. It also has a rather rousing cover of "I Think I Love You," performed by Tenacious D, under the end credits.

LA LA LIVE STREAM

Streaming this evening as part of the Lionsgate Live: A Night at the Movies! series is 2016's La La Land. Here's what I said about it then:

La La Land—Mia (Emma Stone) is a struggling actress, working as a barista on the Warner Brothers lot in the title town. Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a struggling jazz pianist who wants to open his own club. The story of how they meet, fall in love, drift apart and so forth unfolds via original songs staged as elaborate production numbers.

There’s a lot that’s really good about this picture, and it’s hard not to admire its ambitiousness. Written and directed by Damien Chazelle, with music by Justin Hurwitz, and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, it’s a serious, un-ironic attempt to do something that seems to me very much worth doing—reinvent the old-school movie musical as a fully contemporary form. So I feel like a bit of a bum not being able to join in the general critical rapture. But I don’t think La La Land entirely comes off.

It’s possible that Chazelle has succeeded in creating a sort of neoclassical style for musicals that can be built on. But La La Land’s jazz tunes, though pretty, are a little tame and unvaried, and the large-scale dances have the feel of flash-mob cavorting—they don’t bristle with the intensity and insolent precision of the numbers in, say, a ‘50s-era MGM musical, or, for that matter, of the average "Bollywood" musical.

More problematically, the leads aren’t natural musical performers. Gosling and Stone have a touching rapport as actors—you believe they’re in love—and they dance well. But their voices seem featureless and slight. They’re vivid screen presences until they start singing. As soon as they do, their personalities recede.

For many of us, there are few forms of entertainment that have the potential to generate the sheer excitement of the musical, both on stage and screen. If La La Land brings the genre back to vitality, I’ll rejoice. But while much of this movie is clever and enjoyable, I can’t say I found it exciting.

LONE STAR

Opening this weekend:

Rogue One—In the advertising, it’s referred to as Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, but on the screen it’s simply titled Rogue One. That’s the first of many things I liked about this movie—it’s not Episode Anything or Chapter Anything.

This truly seems to have been conceived as a stand-alone tale, and not as a new branch of the franchise. It doesn’t open with the familiar John Williams fanfare—the fine score is by Michael Giacchino, with borrowings from Williams where necessary—or with a crawl of exposition. We get an occasional subtitle explaining what planet we’re on, but that’s it. The atmosphere is tense and hectic and dark and, despite quite a lot of effective comedy, rather fatalistic.

Having said that, this movie nonetheless felt far more authentically like a “real” Star Wars movie to me than Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones or Revenge of the Sith, the “official” opening trilogy of the series. Like The Force Awakens last year, Rogue One is a strikingly retro work—by necessity, as it's set just before the events of the original George Lucas Star Wars movie, made in 1977.

So the lovingly re-created sets and costumes have a flaky, dated look to them. They feel as self-consciously “‘70s” as bell bottoms or lava lamps. And while there are, among the leads, plenty of women and non-European-looking men—not to mention robots and aliens—the space fighter pilots and the Imperial officials are mostly played by the same kind of saggy white dudes that generally played such roles back in the ‘70s.

If I had to speculate, I’d guess that the script—by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy (based, in turn, on a story devised by effects master John Knoll and Gary Whitta)—grew out of dissatisfaction with a perceived implausibility in the first Star Wars flick: the idea that the whole Death Star could be blown to smithereens by just two wimpy torpedoes from Luke Skywalker. The heroine here, a surly, hard-fighting young delinquent named Jyn (Felicity Jones), is pressed into service by the Rebellion to contact her surrogate father (Forest Whitaker) in hopes of gaining intelligence on that colossal, planet-shattering weapon of mass destruction.

She’s thrown together on this mission with Cassian (Diego Luna), a Rebel agent of uncertain motivation, and K-2SO, a snide, kvetching robot voiced by Alan Tudyk. Along the way, this trio picks up a variety of scruffy misfit allies, and after many twists and turns the story comes to a head in a massive Rebel raid on a force-field-fortified Imperial base.

Director Gareth Edwards, of 2010’s imaginative low-budgeter Monsters, handles the epic action sequences rousingly, and there’s no shortage of visual wonder to the movie. The Death Star and the huge Imperial ships hanging in the skies have a chilling, oppressive awe to them; conversely, there’s a sprightly wit to the sight of swarms of Rebel ships springing out of hyperspace like popcorn kernels popping. The focused storyline allows for less in the way of digressive episodes and strange creatures, although there’s a mind-reading tentacled horror that’s pretty memorable.

But the general visual vocabulary of Rogue One owes as much to classic WWII movies as to sci-fi. “There’s fighting on the beaches,” somebody says at one point. Inevitably, some of the dialogue echoes with contemporary political resonance, and no matter what your ideology, you’re likely to cast “your” side as the Rebels and the other side as the Empire. In any case, the line “Rebellions are built on hope” figures prominently in this film, and hope is something that many of us are sorely in need of right now. 

 

La La Land—Mia (Emma Stone) is a struggling actress, working as a barista on the Warner Brothers lot in the title town. Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a struggling jazz pianist who wants to open his own club. The story of how they meet, fall in love, drift apart and so forth unfolds via original songs staged as elaborate production numbers.

There’s a lot that’s really good about this picture, and it’s hard not to admire its ambitiousness. Written and directed by Damien Chazelle, with music by Justin Hurwitz, and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, it’s a serious, un-ironic attempt to do something that seems to me very much worth doing—reinvent the old-school movie musical as a fully contemporary form. So I feel like a bit of a bum not being able to join in the general critical rapture. But I don’t think La La Land entirely comes off.

It’s possible that Chazelle has succeeded in creating a sort of neoclassical style for musicals that can be built on. But La La Land’s jazz tunes, though pretty, are a little tame and unvaried, and the large-scale dances have the feel of flash-mob cavorting—they don’t bristle with the intensity and insolent precision of the numbers in, say, a ‘50s-era MGM musical, or, for that matter, of the average "Bollywood" musical.

More problematically, the leads aren’t natural musical performers. Gosling and Stone have a touching rapport as actors—you believe they’re in love—and they dance well. But their voices seem featureless and slight. They’re vivid screen presences until they start singing. As soon as they do, their personalities recede.

For many of us, there are few forms of entertainment that have the potential to generate the sheer excitement of the musical, both on stage and screen. If La La Land brings the genre back to vitality, I’ll rejoice. But while much of this movie is clever and enjoyable, I can’t say I found it exciting.

BY DE FAULT

Opening this weekend:

San Andreas—A good disaster movie can be great fun. So, for that matter, can a bad disaster movie. Indeed, the line between a good and a bad disaster movie is tough to define, and depending on your criteria, either adjective can be applied to this California earthquake melodrama. It couldn’t be more preposterous, and it’s fun.

After trashing Hoover Dam as an appetizer, the movie gives us the long-dreaded Big One. The title fault finally splits wide, L.A. buckles like a house of cards, then the crack spreads north toward San Fran. But The Quake hasn’t counted on The Rock: our hero Dwayne Johnson, an L.A.-based rescue-helicopter pilot, heads for the Bay Area with his estranged wife (gorgeous Carla Gugino), because his college-age daughter (Alexandra Daddario) is trapped there.

San Andreas feels like a pure throwback to ‘70s-style mayhem. Starting with Charlton Heston for Johnson, it’s easy to recast every role with a familiar character actor from four decades ago, and even Andrew Lockington’s music sounds like something that John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith might have written back then.

Mostly San Andreas is good for laughs, but it does have a potent demonstration of the power of acting. Paul Giamatti plays a Cal Tech seismologist who looks directly into a TV camera and tells San Franciscans that they must get out right away, and that whiny, strangled, almost apologetic voice of his gives more of a chill than all the apocalyptic special effects the movie has to offer.

The special-effects spectacle isn’t really anything we haven’t seen before, but it’s geographically expansive—we get to see both the Hollywood sign and the Golden Gate Bridge brought low. Thus the movie may have some extra appeal for Tea Partiers and other reflexive Cali-haters.

Oh, and over the end titles we hear a spooky version of “California Dreamin’” performed by Sia. Nice touch.

Aloha—In Cameron Crowe’s peculiar new romantic comedy, Bradley Cooper plays Brian, a defense contractor fallen on hard times after being wounded in Afghanistan. Brian gets a minor, foot-back-in-the-door job in Hawaii, facilitating a diplomatic formality with the indigenous people on behalf of a creepy billionaire (Bill Murray) who’s about to launch a satellite with the collaboration of the U.S. Air Force.

The gig throws Brian back in touch with his old girlfriend Tracey (Rachel McAdams), now married to a taciturn pilot (John Krasinski) and raising two kids with him at Hickam Field, but unable to conceal her love for her old flame. It also introduces him to Captain Ng (Emma Stone), his exuberantly forward aide during the proceedings. He’s put off by Ng’s overenthusiastic manner at first, but over time…

Well, you can guess. On the one hand, Aloha is a meet-cute romance set against the paradisiacal backdrop of Hawaii; on another it’s a satire about rich guys buying their way into national (and global) political and military power, and about the vaguely guilt-ridden Faustian flunkies like Brian that help them do it.

We don’t seem intended to take this strand, about Murray and his satellite, very seriously, however. At times the movie feels almost like the contemporary equivalent of an early sixties comedy, with Stone in the Doris Day part and Cooper standing in for James Garner. You expect Arthur Godfrey and Paul Lynde to turn up in the supporting cast.

This movie was at a disadvantage with me from the start—Bradley Cooper’s charm continues to elude me, I’m afraid. He’s been undeniably proficient in several films I’ve seen, and on TV interview shows he comes across like a nice guy, but something about his onscreen manner, some unseemly petulance or neediness, makes me reluctant to see movies in which he stars. His work here is professional, but just about every other member of the cast—like Danny McBride, amusing as a put-upon Colonel, or even Alec Baldwin at his most shamelessly hammy as a splenetic General—has so much more presence that Cooper begins to seem like a dead spot at the movie’s center.

I also resisted Aloha for a long time from a desire not to be played by Cameron Crowe. His cute, preciously hip, knowingly indirect dialogue can work my nerves, and for a while it did here, until…

Well, until it didn’t anymore. By the end of Aloha, despite the silly implausibility of its plot, I had succumbed to it, as I almost always do to Crowe’s films. I wanted to be these people—these attractive, flawed yet decent folks with their charming, flirty, oblique-angled way of conversing.  With the exception of the miserable Vanilla Sky, Aloha may be Crowe’s least successful film, but it won me over in the end.

DEBUNKER MENTALITY

New this week:

Magic in the Moonlight—Colin Firth plays Stanley, an English stage magician, in this latest from Woody Allen, set in the late ‘20s. Stanley buries himself in the disguise of a stereotypical Chinese—he looks like Henry Brandon in Drums of Fu Manchu—and performs his spectacular tricks in high style, to the strains of Stravinsky or Ravel or Beethoven. But, like many of his trade, he doesn’t buy into magic in any sense beyond the theatrical. He’s a hardcore nonbeliever when it comes to the metaphysical, and he’s sneeringly contemptuous of faith in any form.

Stanley is invited to the south of France to debunk Sophie, a young American clairvoyant played by Emma Stone, who has enchanted a wealthy American family there. Sophie’s manner is corny and unconvincing, but her revelations are startling, and Stanley finds his skepticism beginning to waver.

It’s a perfectly good set-up for a romantic comedy, and, as usual with Allen’s work in this mode, there’s much to like in the movie. The period detail and settings are sumptuous, Firth and Stone are funny, and the supporting cast is full of capable types like Simon McBurney, Marcia Gay Harden, Jacki Weaver and Eileen Atkins, who’s especially good as Stanley’s doting aunt. Also memorable, as the ukulele-strumming rich kid infatuated with Sophie, is Hamish Linklater, who seems to be flawlessly channeling the young Bradford Dillman.

But Magic in the Moonlight isn’t quite magical. It starts off wonderfully, and for about a half-hour looks like it’s going to be a real gem. And Allen does come up with some inventive flourishes. But the dialogue dithers and dawdles, and the romantic connection between Firth and Stone never becomes urgent or convincing. Allen’s movies don’t always come off, but I can’t remember one, at least in the last twenty years or so, that was this uneconomical.

Guardians of the Galaxy—This is the movie with the talking raccoon you’ve been seeing TV ads for recently. It’s based on some Marvel comic series I never read, and is about a motley quintet of minor league space fugitives who band together under that rather grandiose title.

Chris Pratt, excellent in Moneyball and as the voice of the everyman hero of The Lego Movie, is the earth-born leader, a bland, less-than-brilliant ladies man with a fondness for ‘70s-era soul-funk-pop connected to a trauma he suffers in the film’s prologue. Zoe Saldana is the gorgeous and much smarter green-skinned warrior-woman, and Dave Bautista is a literal-minded strongman seeking revenge. There’s a guileless ambulatory tree voiced by Vin Diesel, and Bradley Cooper is the fast-talking raccoon. There’s a talking raccoon in this movie.

The villain is a standard, growling Darth Vader type. The McGuffin they’re all chasing, called “The Orb,” is staggeringly uninteresting, and the long, explosion-filled climactic battle is almost—but only almost—as tedious as the similar finales in the Thor and Iron Man movies and The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier and the other superhero flicks of recent years.

But I still found Guardians of the Galaxy, co-written and directed by the gifted James Gunn, very entertaining, because of its central joke: The unassuming, colloquial manner of these characters against the backdrop of all this cosmic bombast. It would be hard for me to dislike any movie in which the hero dances to “Come and Get Your Love” on the surface of a distant planet under the opening credits. Or, for that matter, a movie with a talking raccoon. Did I mention that this movie has a talking raccoon?

BACKSPIN

Andrew Garfield looks like a spider—a daddy longlegs. That is to say, he looks like a daddy longlegs with the head of a Byronic poet.

As the title character in The Amazing Spider-Man, the young actor, who previously made an impression as Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network, commands an inhumanly svelte torso, like a ballet dancer’s, with long spindly limbs that seem both frenetic and graceful in motion. Unmasked, as Spidey’s hapless alter-ego Peter Parker, Garfield’s delicate features often wear a smile, but it’s a bleak one, as of resignation to disappointment in love.

Spider-Man, Sam Raimi’s excellent rendering of the Marvel Comics saga with Tobey Maguire as the superhero, was released back in the dimly remembered bygone year 2002, so The Amazing Spider-Man is a “reboot,” a new retelling of Spidey’s origin story. As before, Parker is a lovelorn high school kid who gets bitten by an irradiated spider, and soon finds himself super-strong, able to climb walls and swing from Manhattan skyscrapers via webs slung from dispensers at his wrists, and imbued with a “Spidey-Sense” of impending danger. A momentary indifference to a crime he witnesses leads to a personal tragedy, thus teaching him that with great power comes...

…well, if you’re more than passingly interested in Spider-Man, you probably already know that with great power comes great responsibility. You aren’t alone if you wonder why it’s now thought essential to laboriously re-do the origin of a superhero, or even a near-super-hero like James Bond or Captain Kirk, just because it’s deemed time to re-cast the role with a younger actor.

Garfield makes a splendid Peter Parker, particularly adept at the character’s tragic side, and while I thought he was perhaps slightly less comfortable with the smartass quips as Spider-Man, the performance is still an impressive success. But I really think audiences could have accepted the change of leading man without the obsessive do-over. Because of the early point in the narrative, characters like J. Jonah Jameson or Norman or Harry Osborn are kept offstage—presumably for the sequels. But these figures account for some of the Spider-Man atmosphere, as does the sense that Spidey’s an accepted part of the New York scene. You may find the prospect of having to go through Peter Parker’s adolescence again only marginally less wearying than that of having to go through your own.

Or maybe that’s just me; the film is aimed, after all, at those who haven’t gone through their own yet, and Peter Parker is an eternal self-projection for angst-ridden youth. Also, the re-do is, at least, well re-done, under the direction of Marc Webb (yeah, I know). A music-video specialist, Webb’s work here is smooth, fast and efficient, if less magical than Raimi’s. The movie really took off for me toward the end, when it’s finally time for Spidey to face-off against the movie’s supervillain, my favorite from the old comic: Dr. Curt Connors, aka The Lizard. The Doc, played by Rhys Ifans, is a scientist who, trying to re-grow his missing arm, takes a dose of lizard juice and turns into a rampaging reptilian megalomaniac, and he at the Webhead have a couple of fine scraps before their main event above Manhattan.

Ifans can be a striking presence—he even managed to keep his dignity as Oxford in the absurd Anonymous—but he seems a bit sheepish here, even though he was allowed a ripe moment in which he gets to quote Michelangelo’s great sonnet “The Silkworm”: (“…That, changing like the snake, I might be free/To cast the flesh wherein I dwell confined…”). The other performances are strong, however: Emma Stone as Peter’s beloved Gwen Stacy, Denis Leary at his nettled best as her police captain father, Campbell Scott in the small role of Peter’s dad, and Martin Sheen and Sally Field as Uncle Ben and Aunt May—that’s right, Gidget and the Flying Nun is now of an age to play Aunt May.

And if that isn’t enough to make you feel old, how about: RIP to Don Grady, Mouseketeer and one of the sons on My Three Sons, passed on at 68, and to his My Three Sons castmate Doris Singleton, better remembered as Caroline Appleby on I Love Lucy, passed on at 92.