Attack of the 50-foot foreheads.

The main qualification for being a Green Lantern is to have No Fear. Oh, and a high forehead.

What’s with all the giant foreheads in GREEN LANTERN? Ryan Reynolds is Green Lantern’s forehead – and I must say, the perfect visual representation of the DC Comics ring-bearer; the great Mark Strong (SHERLOCK HOLMES 2009) is Lantern Sinestro’s lavender forehead; Tim Robbins is a senator’s forehead; Geoffrey Rush voices the webbed forehead of Tomar-Re the fish Lantern; there’s Jay O. Sanders, legendary character actor forehead; and the powerful Temuera Morrison is lilac Lantern’s forehead, Abin Sur. Peter Sarsgaard is Hector Hammond, a mad scientist – not content with the size of his forehead, so makes it even bigger.

Now that we have that out of the way, shall we talk about how mustaches are evil?…

If you’re thirteen, this movie is as awesome as The Jonas Brothers. Justin Bieber liked it so much, he considered growing a forehead.

Test pilot Hal Jordan (Reynolds) is “chosen” by the magical “power ring” of a dying alien to be the first Green Lantern of Earth. The Green Lantern Corps is made up of thousands of chosen aliens, one from each sector of space, each a Green Lantern, all part of this intergalactic police force, combating evil throughout the galaxies, overseen by the immortal Guardians of the Universe from their planet Oa. (Hey, you can laugh when you stop believing in a virgin birth or a Tom Cruise spacecraft cult.)

Poffy Lantern (with requisite large forehead)

I applaud the filmmakers for being true to canon regarding the Lantern Corps. Director Martin Campbell and writers Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg could have opted to stay Earthbound, but instead do a wondrous galactic job outlining one of the more interesting superhero legends. A railway lantern to charge a ring that can materialize anything from your imagination?! Creators Martin Nodell and Bill Finger really threw in original twists on something used to flag down trains and something used to quiet down women! (Were they smoking something green?…)

The current evil threat is an entity named Parallax, who feeds on fear, represented as yellowness (good metaphor, no?), and who is moving towards Oa, with Earth directly in his path…

(Aficionados will know that Jordan is actually the second Green Lantern, the “Silver Age” reboot created by John Broome and Gil Kane 1959, after the original 1940 Alan Scott Green Lantern petered out).

GREEN LANTERN follows the yawn flow chart of Discovering Powers, Learning How To Use Them, Being Trained… Hal is told his ring is powered by Will. And works best when there is No Fear. A big dog-thing Lantern named Kilowog (voice of Michael Clarke Duncan) trains him by throwing green CGI threats at him, until Sinestro takes over the training and the green CGI goes bananas. It’s pretty cool stuff, even if you’re not thirteen.

Between Hal’s friend (Taika Waititi), his family life (he’s a beloved uncle, unreliable brother) and work (test piloting with smokin’ tight wingwoman Carol Ferris (Blake Lively), whom we suspect is anorexic when she turns sideways and her slim waist almost disappears), one wonders how he finds time to be an intergalactic policeman.

Well, that’s easily fixed when all the other characters disappear in the second half of the movie, honed down to his whining love interest, Carol. In the comics, Carol is Green Lantern’s Lois Lane but here she’s just a high maintenance shrike not worth the pleasure of that waist you can encircle with your hands from behind. She moans about his irresponsibility at work when he out-flies “unbeatable” robot planes; she moans about his irresponsibility when he takes her out for a drink, she moans about his irresponsibility when he’s just flown onto her balcony as Green Lantern. Just what is it going take to shut her up? (Ironically, maybe a ring–?!)

In the serious, Man’s part of outer space, Sinestro visits the Guardians of the Universe, wizened old guys who eternally perch atop lofty spires, with long robes and longer earlobes, grave countenances and – you guessed it – GIANT FOREHEADS. (In Lantern lore, Sinestro is a rogue Lantern; here, he is still begrudging pal to Hal Jordan, touchingly admitting Jordan’s worth when he calls him by his superhero name, “Good luck… Green Lantern!”) Sinestro outlines his plan to stop Parallax, who has grown so powerful and bloated on fear that he appears as a city-sized octopus-y thing with grainy-gray tentacles, a saw-toothed mouth and – Jesus Christ! Look at that forehead! It must be 50 feet wide!

Speaking of wide foreheads, Sarsgaard actually gets a chance to “act” here – or maybe the word is “overact” – either way, it’s miles more entertaining than his usual dead-eyed Quaalude performances. Tim Robbins plays his contemptuous father (we see the resemblance in the massive noggin).

The character arcing of Hal from being a scaredy-cat to suddenly attaining No Fear is handled as deftly as the PR lie that the Jonas Brothers are virgins. Although I will say that the Green Lantern Oath (“In brightest day, In blackest night…”), as corny and nursery-rhymey as it is, somehow takes me back to a carefree youth when my piles of comics threatened to block out the sky and tying a superhero towel around the neck and swishing about was actually a preferred weekend activity before girls and grog existed. (Another cool thing about Green Lantern: he was one of the first superheroes who didn’t depend on a towel around his neck to be dynamic and sexy. Which meant I’d have to borrow my sister’s leotard…)

Viewers and reviewers alike have to stop creating this gap between fun and quality, as if they are mutually exclusive states. A film like SEVEN SAMURAI is total quality, yet it is still “fun.” Because of its quality. Yet when a film is classified as exclusively “fun” it’s almost as an excuse for its lack of quality. GREEN LANTERN is a fun film (exhilarating, frenetic, bombastic, fast and furious, yet subtle in very cool ways, especially in the visualization of the Lanterns’ organic spandex), but its lack of quality does not stem from it being fun, but rather in trying to cram too much into one movie and sacrificing good editing and storytelling.

There is a grandiose metaphor fighting for primacy in the film’s climactic moments when Parallax is annihilating an Earth city and Green Lantern faces him down. Parallax’s attack conjures memories of 9/11 (his tentacles dustily sweep through avenues, crushing skyscrapers, as people run screaming from the destruction) and Green Lantern must stop him. Now recall that the power ring works best when there is No Fear. As Lantern faces down the terror-inspiring entity, his Will flags and Parallax forces him to his knees. But he rallies with that nursery rhyme Oath (‘scuse me while I break out my leotard) and chokes down his fear, enabling him to triumph.

Hence: “terrorists” who prey on our fear only win when we FEEL fear; for us to triumph then, all we have to do is feel No Fear. (Was it mere coincidence this scene resembled 9/11?) Amongst the dynamic poses and ripped abs, is this the underlying forthright message of GREEN LANTERN?

Uh, probably not.

We already know that the underlying message is that mustaches are evil.

END

A Tale of Two Townies.

On the one hand, THE TOWN seems to be the movie Ben Affleck wanted to make with GONE BABY GONE – a tough, suspenseful actioner with enough lonely heart to drive it to a tragic climax; on the other hand, Affleck bows to numerous conventions that rob the movie of originality. Yet as director, co-screenwriter and star, Affleck executes the tale well, with terse direction, street cred kineticism and a three-day growth to die for.

The blue-collar neighborhood of Charlestown, Boston, we are told, “has produced more bank robbers and armored car thieves than anywhere in the world”; a federal agent opines, “Bank robbery became like a trade in Charlestown, passed down from father to son.”

Affleck is Doug MacRay, tacit leader of a group of organized bank robbers who grew up together on the mean streets of Charlestown, Boston. During a holdup, volatile gang member Jem (Jeremy Renner) decides to take a teller hostage, Claire (Rebecca Hall), who is later released unharmed. While shadowing Claire to ensure she doesn’t alert the police, Doug ends up dating her, to the chagrin of Jem, who was considering the safer and more fun solution of raping and killing her.

Jem would follow “brother” Doug into hell, would beat the shit out of anyone at Doug’s whim, or do jail time for Doug without a whimper; as with any family, he expects reciprocation, but suspects that in dating the teller chick, Doug is getting the street whipped out of him. He’s right.

Claire is not a “townie” (from Charlestown), but an out-of-towner that the locals call a “toonie.” Doug sees in Claire a person who can lead him out of the small pond where he is a big fish.

GOSSIP GIRL Blake Lively is Jem’s sister and Doug’s longtime throwaway lover.

Chris Cooper is Doug’s jailed dad, who has kept a damning secret about Doug’s mum all these years.

Pete Postlethwaite is Fergie, the flower store mob boss whom all the thugs pay royalties; Doug, begrudgingly. (Postlethwaite is at last beginning to look his age; whereas he was eternally 50 for the last 20 years, now he actually looks at least 51.) When Doug wants to walk away from the thug life, Fergie won’t let him. (Sadly, this would be Postlethwaite’s second-last role before his death in January 2011 at – I would never have guessed – 64.)

Doug finds himself trapped between two worlds when Fergie’s hoods come after him to – ironically – keep him in the business, while the FBI (led by MAD MEN’s Jon Hamm) wants to put him OUT of business; while naive Claire thinks he’s just a mysterious guy who gives good square-jawed lovin.’

Renner gives another nutso performance as Jem, always going off-book to create more violence than necessary. Having done nine years inside, he dreads going back in, so warns Doug before their last heist, “If we get jammed up, we’re holding court on the street.” When Renner played the bomb disposal expert in HURT LOCKER, his unpredictable edginess made him a hero. Playing the same character here, now he’s anti-hero! Or nutjob. (In the military, you’ve got a license to be crazy; in society, you’re an outlaw for the same character traits. I’m not saying every trooper is unbalanced – but it helps. Conversely, the unbalanced get a pass from society because they join the military. Now jarheads are going to come unglued at that statement because – as is always the case – they didn’t read it right.)

Filmed in harsh, cold tones; gritty, tight, visceral, like the inhabitants of its cloying streets, THE TOWN offers us a love-hate dichotomy, like its inhabitants: “I’m proud to be from Charlestown. It ruined my life – literally – but I’m proud!” Even though these thugs rule the streets, yet they long for a better life elsewhere.

From the novel Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan, despite the film’s toughness and originality (the most striking disguises they use are the rubber-faced nuns; blessedly iconic!), the conventions threaten at every turn: the good-hearted thief, the loose cannon, wanting out and being pulled back in, the FBI guy who takes it personally, the beautiful chick a paragon of niceness (volunteering for a boys and girls club, community gardening), the Big Shootout where the gang dies in reverse order of screen billing, and the worst offender of all, the “one last score so I can walk away with my dream girl” convention.

Affleck’s director’s cut runs 4 hours, and I trust the conventions would have more depth in that version. He doesn’t need to prove himself any more as director, writer and actor, displaying a solid grasp of subject matter and story structure… but in caving to test audiences for the film’s theatrical release, instead of a journey to a wild place beyond our safety zones, he gives us just another night on the town…

END

Entirely Unacceptable.

In the tiresome ACCEPTED, Justin Long is Bartleby Gaines, rejected from a series of reputable colleges. To appease his parents, he forges an acceptance letter to a fake college, and then finds he must create an actual campus to follow through with his ruse. So is born the South Harmon Institute of Technology (the sophomoric acronym S.H.I.T. used with ubiquitous abandon and little effect).

Slackers from around the state attend and the “college courses” (Math-turbation, Men Are Weak, Exploding Things with your Mind, Watching Bikini Girls, etc.) are actually accredited by movie’s end
through the methodology of Inspiring Movie Speeches Accompanied by Music Swells (be still my SCENT OF A WOMAN).

Writers Adam Cooper, Bill Collage and Mark Perez, and director Steve Pink ask us to accept too much without so much as a giggle in return. Photoshopping letters of acceptance is one thing; designing a website that would pass scrutiny for parents about to shell out $10,000 for semester fees is quite the stretch.

That’s just the film’s first obstacle. Which it hurdles by making the parents desperate enough to pay a college whom they can’t even contact through its website. (Parents are dumber than their kids, right? Fuggedaboudit!)

Then come bleating at us the uncountable clichés: the tomboy chick friend, the fat friend, the black friend, the stupid friend, the geek friend, the hot chicks, the jock fraternity trying to bring down the fake geek university (and being regarded as the Bad Guys for doing so – even though the geek university is a scam), Bartleby’s smart-aleck twelve-year-old sister, who can see through his ruse even though his parents can’t (she says of South Harmon, “I haven’t heard of it” – maybe because you’re twelve, snot!).

The implausibilities multiply like lemmings: Bartleby and four friends transform a derelict mental hospital into a college campus that – once again – fools the parents (whom by this point we know must be mildly autistic); a wacko acquaintance installed as ersatz dean (Lewis Black – the only funny thing within ten miles of this garbage); local council and authorities are completely incurious as to the hospital being reconditioned; electricity, water and maintenance concerns don’t exist in this universe…

At nearby Harmon College, the movie continues the grand American tradition of disparaging “real” education: students struggling to keep their eyes open, playing video games, or unknowingly turning into corporate monkeys due to being educated the “conventional” way. In other words – there is NO WAY for an American Idiot to be educated. This is the message of ACCEPTED. And we wonder why the rest of the world laughs at America.

The movie espouses some valid points, but since the resident Madman (Lewis Black) makes these points, they are lunatic ravings. The education system in America IS an Agrarian Age system, more interested in leaching the inquisitive mind of the desire for knowledge and pimping students unto society as peons for the workforce than it is in “educating” individuals. But the dropouts and losers who populate the fake South Harmon college are not there for real “education” either. They are goofing off in lieu of learning and seeking diplomas for it. Like those commercials advertising you don’t have to break a sweat to get great abs with their lazy machine – but if you don’t break a sweat, you’ll NEVER have great abs, with or without their useless machine. Arguing that leaving the dropouts to their devices will produce the scientists and scholars of tomorrow is demonstrably asinine.

But enough impassioned movie speechifying and inspirational music and you can achieve anything, kids!

Justin Long has established a flollopy niche for himself (although his attempts at slapstick are entirely unnecessary) and he carries the movie well as a jumpy leading man, but not through any overt talent or charisma; rather because his supporting cast display such a lack of charisma (Jonah Hill, Adam Herchman, Columbus Short, Maria Thayer), it seems they’re only appearing in ACCEPTED because, like their characters, they were rejected from everything else they auditioned for…

END