No code of conduct, no interest

These days, superhero movies are almost guaranteed to be a box office hit. This modern revival of the age of superheroes is partly in thanks to X-Men. Back in 2000 when the movie X-Men came out, it opened to $54 million, which was decent. Each subsequent sequel opened to even more.

And it might be safe to say that America sort of fell in love with Hugh Jackman at that point. As Wolverine, an already popular character, Jackman was a central figure to the first movie and the second one revolved around his character even more. It only made sense that he should get his own deal.

It sure seemed as if X-Men Origins: Wolverine was going to be the first summer blockbuster movie. However, after some bad early reviews and the movie being leaked online a month early, that early prediction seemed to be less secure.

That being said, Wolverine by all rights shouldn't be counted as the first summer blockbuster. The movie is bad. I say this with complete disappoint because I went in thinking the movie was going to be awesome. I know superhero movies don't always get good reviews even when they are good, so I didn't pay much attention to the critics.

I should have.

What you will see if you watch Wolverine is two hours of sloppy plotline, pointless characters and a bad guy at the end that no one really cares about.

The format for the movie sort of feels like this: Logan is little and this happens. He and his brother do this. They get involved with this. Then this happens to him so he does this. Then something else happens so he does another thing in response. Then he finds out this. Then he searches for so-and-so. Then he finds the thing he was looking for. Oh, by the way, big boss battle. Also, we need to tie this up so it fits in, sort of, with the first X-Men movie.

Yawn.

Jackman has corny lines and he doesn't seem as interesting as Wolverine as he did for the X-Men movies. This isn't necessarily his fault. This is whoever wrote the script and whoever thought it seemed interesting. Instead of actually giving an interesting back story to one of the most complex characters of X-Men, they threw together a sloppy film to try and bank on Wolverine's popularity. In all seriousness, this movie could have been broken into at least two, possibly three, good, well thought out films.

In the movie we meet Logan as a boy when he first discovers he's a mutant. He and his brother, Victor, run away together and, as a result of their healing abilities, live a very long time, fighting in multiple wars until they get thrown in jail and are rescued by William Stryker (Danny Huston, 30 Days of Night), who we should remember from X2. Stryker recruits the two of them for his team of mutants that we don't really understand what it is they do, just that eventually Logan gets on his moral horse and leaves.


A few years later, Logan is settled down with a lovely woman. That can't last. So after he's disrupted from his cozy life, he gets the metal claws we all know and love, courtesy of Stryker and goes only by the name Wolverine. But, he goes AWOL and starts attacking Stryker and his operation. Turns out brother dear, Victor, aka Sabretooth, has been looking for Logan. Somewhere along the line, Victor stopped being protective of Logan and now wants to kill him. It makes very little sense.

In an attempt to make the fanboys (and girls) happy, they threw in a lot of characters from the comic books: the Blob, Bolt, Silver Fox, Gambit, Agent Zero, Deadpool, young Scott Summers aka Cyclops and young Emma Frost. Now, some were necessary but most were pointless and aggravating.

Gambit was totally unnecessary and was probably only put in because he is also a popular character. And young Scott and Emma, who later become the leaders of the X-Men and lovers, were almost ridiculous. Why were they needed? How did they further the plot? Oh, right, to make the end bad guy more bad.

The only good thing about the entire movie was Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber, Defiance). He gives a gritty performance as Logan's brother. He truly becomes a man obsessed with finding his brother and proving that Logan was wrong for leaving. Schreiber is interesting and ammoral, and maybe the movie should have been X-Men Origins: Sabretooth.

It's freaking ME out!

Okay, I'll admit that I'm a 21-year-old woman with a slight crush on Zac Efron. It didn't help that he's ridiculously funny in 17 Again. And while I've never watched any of the High School Musicals (except for part of the first before my little cousin fell asleep), there's no denying that Efron's a talented actor.

It was with surprisingly little struggle that I got my boyfriend to go see 17 Again; but it was even more surprising afterwards when he told me that he had liked the movie.

Admittedly, the plot line is a little corny: Mike O'Donnell (Matthew Perry, Friends) is unhappy with his life at age 37 and after a strange encounter with a creepy janitor, he finds that he is 17 again (the title of the movie!).

Now, Mike has a lot of problems to fix with his life, and it probably didn't help him that he's in his 17-year-old body while going through a divorce from his high school sweetheart. And not just any high school sweetheart, but the one for whom he left the most important basketball game of his life to chase after.

Figuring out, thanks to his nerdy best friend Ned (Thomas Lennon, I Love You, Man), that this transformation is supposed to help him figure out his path in life, Mike realizes that he has to fix things with his wife, Scarlett (Leslie Mann, Knocked Up) and get closer to his kids.

Efron plays young Mike as almost a young Chandler Bing (that's Perry's character from Friends if you didn't know). The awkward laughs and actions show that Efron probably studied up on Perry. So even though it's a bit of a stretch to imagine that Perry looked like Efron in high school, it's made considerably easier when Efron captures Perry's actions so well. And there is an undeniable chemistry between Mann and Efron as he tries to subtly woo his wife.


Amidst the high school antics comes a scene stealer of a couple: Lennon and Melora Hardin (The Office) as Principal Jane Masterson. As Mike's closest and oldest friend, Ned is the only one who knows the truth about Mike's transformation. Acting as his father, Ned meets Jane and makes a fool out of himself trying to get her to go on a date with him. As principal of the school, Jane will have nothing to do with it, until they realize their undying love of Lord of the Rings. Some of the funniest scenes in the movie come from Ned "peacocking" and the two of them speaking Elvish.

However, this comedy has it's eye-roll inducing moments. Since Mike got Scarlett pregnant while the two were still in high school, there is the obligatory scene where teenage Mike makes a long speech in health class about staying abstinent and all the girls swoon.

Even though most people will want to write off 17 Again as a comedy geared toward the tween group, it's really a lot of fun for everyone. In fact, there were many scenes that had my boyfriend and I laughing, but some of the teenagers didn't quite get the humor.

Slappin' the bass, man

The bromance is the new thing for guys and media is acknowledging that. MTV recently had a series entitled Bromance, in which a guy from The Hills looked for a new friend, or something like that. Shows like House and Scrubs have infamous bromances between the guy friends of each show.


And now we have a whole movie dedicated to the bromance: I Love You, Man. Unfortunately, the idea of the movie is actually better than the movie itself. When Peter (Paul Rudd, Knocked Up) proposes to his girlfriend Zooey (Rashida Jones, The Office) they quickly realize that while she has six bridesmaids he has no groomsmen.

His family prods him to try and find a best man, even if that means going out on some mandates with guys he barely knows. With the help of his family he goes to a soccer game with a guy who he can’t stand and a mandate that turns into a real date without Peter’s approval. He also gets ridiculously drunk and pukes all over the husband of Zooey’s friend.

And then he finds Sidney Fife (Jason Segel, Forgetting Sarah Marshall). Or, well, Sidney finds Peter’s open house. The two sort of hit it off and then begins the … well, courtship. Like a nervous boy asking a girl to the dance, Peter sets up a night of food and drinks with Sidney. And then they meet at the boardwalk and hang out in Sidney’s “man cave” (which is just the shed in back of his house). Soon enough the two are hanging out all the time.

There are more aspects about this movie that I didn’t like than ones I did like. I normally adore Rudd because of his sarcasm and his facial expressions that convey more than words ever could. Normally, he can play handsomely awkward without blinking, but in I Love You, Man Rudd just portrays awkward. The kind of awkward that exasperates your friends. The scenes can be painful to watch while he bumbles through social exchanges, spouting out nonsense in his attempt to be liked. Even Zooey finds Peter's antics annoying, pleading with him to stop.

Segel is okay, but he's nothing to elaborate on and Jones is adorable in her patience and understanding. The other character that stood out was Sarah Burns, who plays the single bridesmaid Hailey. Burns is a relative newcomer with I Love You, Man being her first big role. While she does a good job with the character, she falls short. Hailey seems as if she was written for a specific actress in mind: Kristen Wiig. Wiig would have nailed the performance with her under-the-breath comments and neediness. Burns, while funny, just seems a bit like a pale imitation of the Saturday Night Live scene-stealer.

In fact, the funniest part of the movie was probably the interactions with Jaime Pressly and Jon Favreau, who play a couple that bickers and exchanges sexual favors for an everyday favor. The two had just enough screen time because any more and they would have also lost their charm.

The movie is fun but overrated. To see Rudd and Segel at their best, rent or buy their previous movies, because I Love You, Man just isn't as good as it should be with the talent on screen.

Who Watches the Watchmen?

At 12:01 on Friday, March 7, it would have been easier to answer the question, “Who doesn’t watch the Watchmen?” The extra $3 didn’t discourage college students from packing the IMAX theater to watch the unfilmable comic book on film at last.

The 12 issues of Watchmen were released in the late ’80s and portrayed an alternative history where superheroes emerged a few decades earlier in history and after the war in Vietnam was considered a win, Richard Nixon is still president. However, during 1985 these superheroes are now outlawed with only Dr. Manhattan (the only one who has superpowers) and the Comedian working for the government.

We begin with the Edward Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Grey’s Anatomy), aka the Comedian, who, despite his early demise, is the center of the films plotline. He is shown exiting his apartment via the window with a little help from a shadowed figure who just spent the first few minutes brutally beating the Comedian.


One of the most interesting Watchmen, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley, Little Children), can’t fathom a regular burglar killing the Comedian and so, armed with the belief there is a mask killer on the loose, he warns the remaining Watchmen: Daniel Dreiberg (the second Nite Owl), Laurie Juspeczyk (the second Silk Spectre), Dr. Manhattan and Adrian Veidt (Ozymandius).

Each character has his or her flaws: Daniel (Patrick Wilson, Lakeview Terrace) is middle-aged and seems to have had no trouble falling into the life of a common man; Laurie (Malin Akerman, 27 Dresses) is in an empty relationship with Dr. Manhattan, (Billy Crudup, Big Fish) who she finds is more and more detached from humanity; Adrian (Matthew Goode, Brideshead Revisited) is the world’s smartest man and a ruthless businessman who revealed his identity as Ozymandius; and Rorschach is paranoid, dangerous and unshakably certain.

Rorschach narrates the movie because he is the one man interested in the Comedian’s murder, who could have done it and what was coming next. Although Dr. Manhattan has the power to make people explode, Rorschach is scary and dangerous in his own way, witnessed when he shouts in prison “I’m not locked up in here with you! You’re locked up in here with me!” He propels the plot with his untiring search to find out what happened to the Comedian.

The movie does a good job showing aging and retired superheroes who can’t quite seem to let go of the glory days, not when there’s a hint of something afoot. Director Zack Snyder filmed the movie in normal colors, unlike his previous project 300, but he kept the slow-motion fight scenes. These helped showing the superheroes as super again and showed the audience just why the Watchmen were people to be afraid of.

The actors didn’t have easy characters to play, but they managed to embody each troubled superhero. Crudup was believable as the godlike Dr. Manhattan, spewing lines about seeing time differently from humans in his soft, emotionless voice. However, the most surprising turn was Morgan. The Comedian is a very different role from Morgan’s stint on Grey’s Anatomy, and he pulls of the gun totting, trigger-happy, warmongering Comedian believably and with a dash of dark humor. However, it is Haley’s performance as Rorschach that drives the film as the central focus of the plot. He touched on the character’s insanity and ruthless drive.

Along the ride the movie hits some bumps that makes it feel like its two-hour length. The flashbacks, while helpfully giving insight into who the Comedian was to each of the remaining Watchmen, doesn’t help to move the plot forward much. They break the already slow action of the beginning and probably cause some to lose interest. It’s only in retrospect that the purpose of the flashbacks gains meaning: this isn’t just a superhero movie about good guys fighting bad guys. This movie has ambiguous good guys and ambiguous bad guys, and the comic was more about the characters and who each one was, rather than the end storyline.

One serious gripe is that the film was obviously aimed toward the fanboy out there. Case in point: the sex scene. It is corny and really only serves to gratify the fanboys who cheered when Laurie is finally shown naked and then giggled and guffawed when an inadvertently hit button activates a flamethrower, an obvious symbol of ejaculation that was eye-roll inducing in the book and even more so in a movie.

Although the story takes place during an alternative version of America’s history, the opening credits recreate the new history. As Bob Dylan sings “The Times They Are A-Changin’” we see the original Watchmen, who they were and what they were to the country, and, eventually, how they fell apart and to the wayside. This new history shows the superheroes in memorable roles in our history.

The movie is just another step away from campy superheroes toward the more human and fallible ones. Superheroes don’t come any more flawed than the Watchmen.