The Heat
Directed by: Paul Feig
Written by: Katie Dippold (screenplay)
Starring: Sandra Bullock, Melissa McCarthy, Demián Bichir and Marlon Wayans

The Heat is the second (and funnier) of the two comedies this year that are dependent on the outrageous on-screen persona that Melissa McCarthy debuted in Bridesmaids.  That it reunites her with that movie’s director, Paul Feig, is largely what makes it better than Identity Theft.  It’s a fairly standard buddy cop movie in terms of the characters and the story, but instead of men it’s women.

This is only important to the movie because it addresses gender in the workplace as another obstacle that the two main characters must overcome.  Balancing out McCarthy’s hot-headed, take-no-prisoners Boston detective is a cool-headed, anal-retentive FBI agent played by Sandra Bullock.  The two have good chemistry together, though McCarthy runs away with the movie and all Feig really has to do is keep up.

Unlike Bridesmaids, there is no one to really match her or balance out her extreme physical comedy.  She is more than up to the task of carrying the movie on her own, but it’s less simply because the characters don’t really build off of each other.  Though there’s no real problem with the way Bullock plays Agent Ashburn, it’s just that Katie Dippold’s script gives McCarthy’s Detective Mullins nearly every punchline.

There is a nice balance of both physical and verbal comedy here, which is something that’s quite rare in modern comedies.  The way McCarthy throws her body around and erupts into every situation is truly extraordinary.  She is among the finest comedic performers working today, and her gift with improv deserved better sparring partners.

Other than Bullock, there are really just other law enforcement officials, family members and villains.  None of them really stick out, and they exist mostly as set-ups to a grand, vulgar punchline.  Despite wanting the movie to challenge McCarthy a little more, what’s here is still by far one of the funniest Hollywood comedies of the year.  Their investigation is uninteresting, but their investigating is hilarious. Even when it clumsily succumbs to third act fatigue, it’s still funny.

Grade: C

The Bling Ring
Directed by: Sofia Coppola
Written by: Sofia Coppola (screenplay), Nancy Jo Sales (article)
Starring: Katie Change, Israel Broussard, Emma Watson and Taissa Varmiga

Comparisons between Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring and Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers are inevitable.  They both engage the surfacy perception of millennial femininity in shocking and brazen ways, and they both involve crime whose success is rooted in upper middle class privilege.

As for the two movies’ styles, though, they couldn’t be more different.  Korine uses pop music to heighten the experience to an almost sugary level, while Coppola denies that pleasure intentionally.  There are elegant scenes of slow motion and dance club outings, but they are rooted in an awkward realism and end so abruptly that it makes them hard to enjoy.  If Spring Breakers’ mantra was “Pretend like it’s a video game,” then this movie’s is almost certainly “Pretend like it’s a reality show.”

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The Purge
Directed by: James DeMonaco
Written by: James DeMonaco (screenplay)
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Lena Headey, Max Burkholder and Adelaide Kane

James DeMonaco’s The Purge is the worst American film since last year’s remake of Red Dawn. It is so filled with self-righteous indignation that its sadistic morality somehow manages to be worse than the sloppy filmmaking.  There wasn’t a single competently shot sequence in the entire movie, and any adrenaline jolt it manages to produce happens by accident.

The story centers around the Sandins, a wealthy white family that you’ve seen on almost every 30 minute sitcom; father brings home the bacon, mother tends house, the teenage daughter is a rebel and the young son is weird.  Ethan Hawke happens to play that father, and there a few times when he convincingly renders a character almost out of sheer force of will.

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Before Midnight
Directed by: Richard Linklater
Written by: Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke (screenplay), Richard Linklater & Kim Krizan (characters)
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick and Ariane Labed

In the third installment of this nearly two decade-long project, Richard Linklater’s Before series has turned a somewhat quiet, romantic examination of gender into a violent tango.  Calling the movies a battle of the sexes is wrong-headed, though, in that it assumes there are sides and that a viewer must choose one.  On the contrary, these movies are all the more rewarding when observed from the middle, where Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) always end up meeting even though that middle shifts in every movie.

Before Sunrise, the first movie in this series, was an irresistibly romantic and ultimately sad story of one day in Vienna where two people quietly fall in love with each other and then go their separate ways.  The second installment, 2004’s Before Sunset, has the two meeting up again nine years later in Paris, where wounds surface and the fate of their relationship is ultimately left up to the viewer’s preference.  At least until now.

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Man of Steel
Directed by: Zack Snyder
Written by: David S. Goyer (screenplay), David S. Goyer & Christopher Nolan (story), Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster (creators)
Starring: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon and Diane Lane

Superman is the definitive example of the hero-as-outcast, of someone who knows their origins as well as they know how far out of reach those origins are.  The entirety of Superman’s condition (and of countless other characters) can be summed up in those infamous final moments of The Searchers, where the hero, seeing that everyone is happy and the day is saved, turns back to the frontier destined to be alone forever.

In The Searchers, though, the protagonist matches every act of bravery with one of savagery, and the origins he so desperately knows are dying are those of the Confederacy.  The Superman of the movies could never be like this, especially not in the age of Hollywood.  What Zack Snyder shows us in Man of Steel is a man unburdened by complexity; a hero so vanilla that he is defined by both special effects and the natural attractiveness of the man playing him.  No matter how smoothly polished his crime-fighting or how chiseled his body, though, he never feels real.  As a result, neither do the “World is Ending!” stakes.

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