Podcast Episode 25: The GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY Are Here To Save The Summer

To quote a certain blaster-toting raccoon, "Oh...YEAH."

This summer has been pretty fucking grim.  With the exception of 22 Jump Street, it's been a a steady stream of mediocre box office filler like Hercules or outright trainwrecks like Transformers: Age Of Extinction.  That's not to say that the summer's been a complete waste, but even the few bright spots like Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, Snowpiercer and X-Men: Days Of Future Past have been largely dark and serious affairs - all three movies center around global apocalypse!  Where's the humor?  Where's the rollicking adventure?  WHERE'S THE GODDAMN FUN?

Turns out the fun lies with a sentient tree on the far side of the galaxy.

Marvel's Guardians Of The Galaxy, by far the company's biggest gamble to date, is an outright cinematic miracle.  On paper this, this movie simply should not exist.  Seriously, the very idea of a studio giving the Troma-raised James Gunn $170 million to make an outer space movie starring That Guy From Parks & Rec, a professional wrestler, a green-skinned assassin, a walking tree who only speaks three words and a smart-ass cyborg raccoon is absolutely preposterous.  The fact that it not only exists but has the same pound for pound entertainment value as The Avengers, a movie that needed five other films to set the stage before it could even happen, is mind boggling.

And yet, all these things are true.

Guardians Of The Galaxy finally sends the Marvel universe rocketing out into space and it's a fascinating place packed with oddball characters with whom you can't help but fall in love.  Sure, each character has their own particular set of quirks (Drax doesn't understand metaphors, Star-Lord is a font of 80's pop-culture references) that are essentially appealing on their own but it's the performances that truly elevate the material.  Chris Pratt cements himself as legit movie star (surely a relief to the Jurassic World producers) and Dave Bautista is an absolute joy on-screen, while Bradley Cooper brings a both acerbic wit and a wounded vulnerability to Rocket.  And for all the jokes about Vin Diesel playing a tree who only has one line, you'd be surprised just how much context and emotion can be conveyed solely in the phrase "I am Groot."  Special recognition should also be paid to Zoe Saldana and Karen Gillan as Gamora and Nebula, the daughters of Thanos.  Both characters are a tad clunky on the page, constantly tasked with delivering necessary exposition and explanation.  Yet each of these actresses just ooze so much charm and personality on screen that they're almost able to trick the audience into walking away thinking their characters are more substantial.  Still, they're each total badasses, and while their characters feel a bit thin I expect both will be much better served in their second outing.

This wonderfully endearing collection of misfits is what sets Guardians apart not just from the rest of 2014's summer movies, but all other Marvel movies as well.  The Avengers is probably the closest analog here, but even they are just a bunch of folks who fight together out of a sense of duty and honor.  They feel more like a group of friendly coworkers who do a job and then go home to their respective lives.  By the time the end credits roll, the Guardians are already so much more than that.  They're not just friends, they're family.  That's a dynamic that we haven't really seen in Marvel's previous films and it's so simple and affecting that I didn't even realize it was something I had been missing.

And that music!  THAT MUSIC!  Holy hell.  I really dig the score by Tyler Bates, particularly his main theme, but I defy you to walk out of this movie without humming any of the ridiculously catchy tunes that create the rich musical tapestry which seems happily omnipresent throughout the film's running time.  My only gripe is that Guardians didn't come out in June.  If it had, Peter Quill's Awesome Mix Volume 1 (available for download, naturally) would have absolutely been everyone's soundtrack of the summer.

Episode 25 of the podcast, featuring the return of my brother Tim, sees us breaking the film down character by character, along with lots of speculation as to how the Guardians might fit into Marvel's bigger picture heading into Phase 3.  Jamie reveals her own master plan for how Captain/Ms. Marvel should be woven into the MCU and, in light of Simon West's stated desire to see a space-based Con-Air 2, we all list off movies that deserve a crazy sequel set in outer space.  Also, I'm an idiot for not only saying there are five Infinity Stones (there are six) but also for referring to Yondu as Yondo through the entire podcast.  What can I say?  It was late and I still had to pack for an early flight.

Next Week: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with special guests!

Start Your Week Off Right With The New Trailer For GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

Captain America: The Winter Soldier kicked off the summer in grand style.  Now it looks almost certain that Guardians Of The Galaxy will serve as the appropriately kickass bookend and close the summer out with a goddamn bang.

Every look at James Gunn's entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe looks even more preposterously fun than the one before it.  Seriously, I still can't believe that I live in a world where an outer space adventure movie starring Chris Pratt, a foul-mouthed raccoon and a walking tree-person voiced by Vin Diesel is allowed to exist, let alone be bankrolled by a major studio to the tune of $150 million.  And make no mistake, every single penny looks to be up on screen.  It feels like the entire movie takes place in one those richly detailed worlds that Guillermo del Toro leaves dangling in the margins of his movies, places like the Bone Slums of Pacific Rim or the Troll Market of Hellboy 2.  Are we really gonna get a planet shaped like a giant skull?  Fuck yeah.

I'm sure there are those out there who will complain that they still don't know what this movie is actually about.  Those people are dumb people.  If rocket boots, space prisons, John C. Reilly: Intergalactic Beat Cop and an upright raccoon with a giant laser gun hoisted up on his shoulder while scratching his crotch doesn't put your ass in the theater, you're barking up the wrong Groot.

As a bonus, here's a poster that should be hanging in dorm rooms all across the country this fall.  Don't let me down, college kids.

A Great New York Night With A MOVIE 43 Chaser

"Cats don't even process images in that way."

The morning after the wedding we slept in till almost noon, thus sadly missing out on brunch and the chance to say goodbye to some folks.  But eventually I made my way back to Manhattan so that I could sign the paperwork and make the marriage official.  (Hilariously, Kristina accidentally signed on the line marked for a witness instead of the bride, which I maintain was a brilliant attempt to get out of the wedding without anybody noticing.)  Jamie and I met up with some local friends who weren't at the wedding for a drink at the Blind Tiger on Bleecker St before returning to the Bronx to get cleaned up for the evening performance of Once, based on the film starring Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova.  We're both fans of the original movie as well as the incredible soundtrack, but the big draw for us was that the main character was played by Arthur Darville, a.k.a. Rory The Roman from Doctor Who.  Darville was fantastic and the show was loads of fun; they even have a working bar on stage that you can get drinks from during the pre-show and intermission.  Personally I prefer the film to the stage version, as I think they've made the guy too passive and the woman has become a total Manic Pixie Dream Girl, which she very much is not in the original.  But the staging is pretty clever and the music is still great.  Also, the guy's father was played by fucking Luthor from The Warriors!  (Thanks to Billman for pointing this out to me after the fact.)

During intermission I got a text from Rob.  It seemed that Cochran, one of the groomsmen, had his birthday plans foiled when his fiancee Michelle came down with a wicked case of food poisoning.  Being the good guy that he is, Cochran wouldn't leave her alone in the apartment they were staying in, despite her insistence that he go out and enjoy his birthday.  So instead we took the party to him, gathering up beers, bourbon and snacks and showing up at his door around 11:30 PM.  We had goddamn blast, drinking and playing "The Hat Game" (like "Celebrity" mixed with charades) into the wee hours of the night.  As is typical with our group, there was a lot of laughter that night.  It's a rare occasion when we're all together in the same room and at one point I just sat there and looked at this collection of some of my oldest friends, giving each other shit and cracking ancient inside jokes...it was one of those moments you just want to live inside of forever.

But eventually we had to trek back to the Bronx and I still had a movie to watch.  By the time we got back to the apartment it was about 3:30 AM, so I needed something short and funny.  I selected Movie 43, a movie which I was drawn to for three reasons: first of all, every trailer made it look like a modern day Kentucky Fried Movie, a movie that blew the damn doors off my brain the first time I saw it.  Secondly, the list of on-camera talent is amazing, featuring a unique mix of both comedians and Oscar winners including (but not limited to) Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Jason Sudeikis, Justin Long, Terrence Howard, Elizabeth Banks, Dennis Quaid, Greg Kinnear, Chris Pratt, Ana Faris, Naomi Watts, Liev Schreiber, Stephen Merchant, Halle Berry, Johnny Knoxville, Sean William Scott and Gerard Butler as a foul-mouthed leprechaun.   And finally, while each segment has a different director, the whole thing was shepherded by Peter Farrelly*, who is quite simply one of the funniest guys I've ever met.

The film is pretty uneven, with some segments being insanely great while others left me scratching my head in confusion.  Halle Berry and Stephen Merchant playing Truth Or Dare simply does not work, and neither does "Machine Kids", "iBabe" or the weird connecting tissue with Dennis Quaid as an unstable director who's pitching all these shorts to Greg Kinnear's studio exec.  But there are some solid bright spots too; considering I was watching the movie alone at approximately four in the morning, the fact that it not only kept me awake but actually elicited honest laughter is more than a bit impressive.  There's a pretty good "superhero speed dating" segment by James Duffy that serves as a pretty good followup to his original online short starring Justin Long as Robin and Sam Rockwell as Batman.  Schreiber and Watts are great in "Homeschooled" as parents who home school their teenage son with extra emphasis on all the psychological torment of high school, while Elizabeth Banks directs a funny segment about two teenage guys who go into a blind panic at the sight of a girl having her first period.

The two standout segments, however, are the ones that bookend the movie.  At the opening we get Kate Winslet on a blind date with Hugh Jackman as a wealthy bachelor with neck balls.  That's right, Hugh Jackman plays a man with testicles hanging below his chin.  I feel like the scene is a triumph simply for existing, and I love that both Jackman and Winslet each read that script and said, "Neck scrotum?  SIGN ME UP!"  But by far the best segment is the very last one, directed by James Gunn and entitled "Beezel."  It's about a perverse and sadistic animated cat who's jealous of his master's new girlfriend.  Credit to Josh Duhamel for really throwing himself into an extremely silly role, while Elizabeth Banks kills it as the girlfriend who's pulled into a knock down drag out with this "Garfield reject."  The actual animation for Beezel is super low budget, but it totally feels like a twisted dry run for Rocket Raccoon in Gunn's upcoming Guardians Of The Galaxy, which is easily the most exciting of all the impending Marvel movies.

Oh, and if you want to really cry laughing, then read this email exchange between Gunn and the studio about the song he wrote for Beezel called "That Gay Fucking Cat."  In truth, Gunn's list of potential song titles makes me laugh harder than anything in Movie 43.



*Full disclosure: the Farrelly brothers are friends of the family and I worked as a PA on Fever Pitch in college, so I'm usually predisposed to like their shit.

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Title: Movie 43
Directors: Elizabeth Banks, Steven Brill, Steve Carr, Rusty Cundieff, James Duffy, Griffin Dunne, Peter Farrelly, Patrick Forsberg, Will Graham, Brett Ratner, Jonathan van Tulleken, James Gunn
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Jason Sudeikis, Justin Long, Terrence Howard, Elizabeth Banks, Dennis Quaid, Greg Kinnear, Chris Pratt, Ana Faris, Naomi Watts, Liev Schreiber, Stephen Merchant, Halle Berry, Johnny Knoxville, Sean William Scott, Gerard Butler
Year Of Release: 2013
Viewing Method: Redbox DVD