Ryan Reynolds Suits Up as the Green Lantern

I like to think of myself as being pretty geeky. Nonetheless, my knowledge of comic books remains limited, as blockbuster season often reminds me. Last night, I went into Green Lantern knowing nothing about the character aside from what my brother had told me. The main thing I knew about the movie itself was that it stars Ryan Reynolds, whose performances I have generally enjoyed, though I also heard that the critics weren’t too impressed with it. I didn’t hear why, so as I watched, I kept wondering which parts of the movie should be disappointing me. I’ve always been better at pointing out strengths than flaws in things, so maybe I just missed some glaring problems. But basically, I found Green Lantern to be quite an entertaining movie.

The film, directed by Martin Campbell, helpfully provides an expository introduction to get everyone up to speed on the rules of the Green Lantern universe. In this mythology, an ageless council of sage beings stands as guardians of the entire universe, which they have divided into 3600 sections, appointing a protector for each. These protectors wear green rings that harness the energy of will, which the guardians consider the strongest force in the universe. As the film begins, these green-garbed protectors face a grave danger from a growing threat that feeds on fear. Some of the finest of this elite group have fallen prey to the enigmatic entity; one of them needs to find a new bearer on Earth, and that’s where Reynolds’ character comes in.

While the beginning teeters on being a tedious information dump, it’s short enough and presented dynamically enough that I didn’t mind, particularly because it all felt like pretty essential background. However, it’s when Reynolds shows up that things really get cooking. He’s Hal Jordan, a flippant fighter pilot about to be late for work on the worst of all possible days. He has a big demonstration to pull off, and he manages some pretty fancy flying, but his daring feat is not exactly appreciated.

Hal is a loose cannon. I kept finding myself reminded of Maverick in Top Gun. Like Maverick, Hal is a highly skilled but reckless pilot driven to live up to his father’s legacy. Like him, Hal is romantically involved with a talented female fighter pilot. He even serenades her in a bar and uses flying lingo as a metaphor for their relationship. Later in the movie, after he has shown how irresponsible he can be, he must prove to a skeptical commander that he is up for the challenge of a lifetime. So even though I didn’t know a thing about Green Lantern, Hal’s trajectory felt very familiar to me.

That didn’t bother me. In fact, it made it easier for me to connect to Hal, as well as his rarely ruffled love interest, Carol Ferris (Blake Lively), daughter of his boss. In the beginning, Hal pilots fighter jets; by the end, he’s flying on his own through outer space. Turns out that he isn’t quite as fearless as he initially appears, but the same daring spunk he displayed in his firefight will be needed as he faces off against a grave enemy. That nemesis is the terrifying Parallax (Clancy Brown), who has harnessed the yellow power of fear and is using it to wipe out entire civilizations, growing stronger each time. He reminds me of no one so much as Hexxus, the grotesque sludge monster in the animated Ferngully who feeds off of pollution, growing stronger with each sip of smog or toxic goo. The scenes in which we see him directly are the most disturbing in the movie as he sucks the life force out of everyone who stands in his path, leaving nothing but a pile of dry bones to clatter in his wake. There’s very little blood in the movie, but these scenes could be traumatizing to sensitive young viewers.

Shortly after Hal puts on his green ring for the first time, he is whisked away to the planet where the guardians reside in order to be debriefed on his powers and his responsibilities. This is a visually dazzling sequence involving hundreds of intriguing alien life forms, a bustling intergalactic city and the dueling skills of multiple protectors as they try to break Hal in. The three major characters we meet here are Sinestro (Mark Strong), one of the most influential members of the Green Lanterns and a close friend of the protector Hal replaced; Kilowog (Michael Clarke Duncan), an imposing bestial alien who puts Hal through some intensive training; and the wise, gentle Tomar-Re, a fish-faced alien played by Geoffrey Rush. Of these, the last is my favorite, but the first is most significant to the story.

The other major character is Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard), who becomes the vehicle through which Parallax plans to conquer Earth. Hector is a jittery, socially awkward biologist who looks like Sesame Street’s Mr. Noodle. He’s hunched and withdrawn much of the time, but when he is chosen to examine the deceased alien who bore the green ring before Hal, he comes alive with excitement. For the first half of the movie or so, I found him mostly sympathetic, despite some slightly creepy tendencies. This is a man with a brilliant mind who has always felt rejected by society at large and his father in particular. His self-esteem issues run deep.

He seems to have an ally in the calm Dr. Amanda Waller (Angela Bassett), who takes him to perform the autopsy, but that isn’t enough to keep him from going off the deep end once he becomes contaminated with the yellow power of Parallax. One thing the movie demonstrates very effectively is how evil can corrupt even the most well-intentioned. The yellow power made me think of Lord of the Rings, since it is a formidable force but those who use it always fall under its vile influence. When one Green Lantern forges a yellow ring meant to wield that energy, you just know that no good will come of it.

Having two competing forces allows for some pretty impressive battles as one hurls destructive forces and the other repels with creative forces. A Green Lantern has the ability to create anything imaginable, provided he is properly focused. Watching Hal experiment with these abilities is a lot of fun, as is seeing him take to the skies in his bright green suit. Despite Parallax’s all-consuming destruction and Hector’s more traditional mayhem, the movie does not feel particularly violent, especially considering the genre. I didn’t notice any profanity, and although the first time we meet Hal he’s hopping out of a bed he shared with a one-night stand, most of the romance in the film is quite chaste. Flashbacks to Hal’s childhood and the introduction of his 11-year-old nephew help bolster the interest for children. While I was hoping to see more of that nephew toward the end of the film, his tender scene with Hal early on made the hot-headed hero easier to empathize with.

The movie blatantly sets up a sequel, especially if you sit through the credits for a few minutes, so I’m sure this isn’t the last we’ll be seeing of the Green Lantern on the big screen. I have no idea how faithful the movie is to its comic book origins, but I thought it had just the right mix of elements to be a fun summer blockbuster. It didn’t make me laugh quite as much as Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, but there was still enough humor to offset the darkest elements of the movie, and it’s effects-laden enough that the movie pops on the big screen in a way that you know it won’t quite do on all but the biggest televisions. If you like this type of movie, I’d recommend catching it in theaters. I certainly enjoyed the ride.

Meet the Robinsons Isn't Pixar, But It Is Terrific

Ever since I started seeing previews for it, I’ve been curious about 2007’s Meet the Robinsons. This was partly because it was computer-animated, but not in collaboration with Pixar. I also found myself chortling over a couple of scenes in the previews, those involving the hyper woman in the lab coat with caffeine patches and the Tyrannosaurus Rex who can’t fulfill his mission because he has a big head and little arms. On the other hand, I hadn’t been much impressed with Chicken Little, and I feared I might have the same reaction to this Disney flick. I finally saw it, and happily, it was better than I expected.

Lewis (Daniel Hansen / Jordan Fry) is an exceedingly clever but lonely lad. He’s spent all of his 12 years in an orphanage run by the kind-hearted Mildred (Angela Bassett); though she treats him well, he longs to leave, to have a family of his own. But he’s undergone 124 adoption interviews, and somehow, he’s failed to attract a single set of parents. His inventions have a way of scaring people off. But when Mildred suggests that the mother who abandoned him might have done so out of necessity rather than lack of love, he becomes obsessed with finding her. To that end, he toils for days on a memory scanner that will allow him to retrieve an image of his mother from the depths of his memory.

When the day of the science fair finally arrives, Lewis is convinced that he has succeeded. But testing the machine out leads to disaster, thanks to the interference of a teenage boy named Wilbur Robinson (Wesley Singerman) who claims to be a secret agent from the future and a sinister man (director Stephen J. Anderson) dressed in black, from his shoes to his signature bowler hat. Wilbur insists that Lewis must return to the science fair and try again, but he’s hardly in the mood, so to give credence to his case, Wilbur whisks Lewis off to the future in his time machine. Lewis is suitably impressed - but then the time machine crashes, and until he can figure out how to fix it, he’s stuck in the future, surrounded by an extended, eccentric family and pursued by a villain with a definite axe to grind.

In some ways, Meet the Robinsons is a pretty silly movie. With all of Lewis’s unstable inventions, there are explosions aplenty, and once he is introduced to the Robinson family in the future, the mayhem really begins. Wilbur’s mom teaches singing to frogs. The family has an octopus for a butler, and toothless Grandpa has a funny habit of walking around with his clothes on backwards. The future is full of eye-popping sights, like people traveling around in bubbles or dogs wearing glasses. It’s all very well suited to animation, and thankfully the characters look much better here than they did in Chicken Little.

But this movie isn’t just an excuse to show off in the visual department or to elicit giggles over slapstick. No, it’s the story of a pair of orphans, Lewis and his roommate Goob (Matthew Josten), both oddballs looking for families to love them. In that way, it reminds me quite a bit of Angels in the Outfield. Lewis, like Roger, is particularly focused on reclaiming a connection to his biological parent. Unlike Roger, he is a man of science, and so he turns to his experiments to help him achieve his dream of a real home. What he finds in the future is that there are many different ways to make a family and that love is the most important ingredient.

Because this takes place in the not-so-distant future, it’s fun to look at those Lewis meets and contemplate whether we might have seen them before in Lewis’s own time. The story behind Bowler Hat Guy is especially interesting. I guessed his connection to Lewis fairly early on, but that didn’t make his back story any less interesting or his antics any less entertaining. As villains go, he’s pretty nonthreatening; he reminded me very much of Count Olaf from A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Jim Carrey even was invited to provide his voice. He is over-the-top and easily bested by smarter, more accomplished parties, not to mention manipulated by a reprehensible (albeit comical) henchman. Despite his drive for revenge, he rarely comes across as truly vicious, and one of my favorite aspects of the movie is the fact that he is offered a shot at redemption.

Although I would never confuse this with a Pixar movie, it’s still a very high-quality film, with a tender message or two to go along with the futuristic hi-jinks. It’s a little bit Lost In Space and a little bit Back to the Future, but mostly it’s a whole lot of fun, culminating in a lesson from Walt Disney himself to “keep moving forward” because “curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” I wouldn’t hesitate to introduce anyone to these Robinsons.

Akeelah and the Bee a Super Story About Spelling and More

When I was in eighth grade, I won the school spelling bee. It was my third and final shot at it, and I managed to take the top slot, taking home $50 and the promise of a chance in the city-wide competition. I studied diligently; I made it to the second round, when I psyched myself out into thinking "buttress" was spelled with one "t". I'm a pretty decent speller, but I don't think I had what it takes to make it to the national spelling bee. I was getting tired of all those words after just a few weeks; I can't imagine spending my entire eighth grade year focusing most of my free time on learning to spell obscure words. Still, I can understand the attraction and the excitement.

In Akeelah and the Bee, we meet 11-year-old Akeelah Anderson (Keke Palmer), who lives in a tough Los Angeles neighborhood with her over-worked mother (Angela Bassett) and older siblings. Although she is an intelligent girl, Akeelah hates school and frequently misses class. She seems to be headed for trouble. Then her teacher, noticing the fact that she has never missed a word on a spelling test, encourages her to take part in the school-wide spelling bee, and when that fails to interest her, the principal, Mr. Welch (Curtis Armstrong), coerces her by holding her absences over her head. So despite her love of words - derived from her doting father (Wolfgang Bodison), who died tragically several years earlier - it's a very reluctant Akeelah who participates in the school spelling bee, but she wins easily nonetheless, only to be taken down a notch by Dr. Larabee (Laurence Fishburne), a distinguished professor and former spelling bee finalist who begrudgingly agrees to coach her.

As the movie progresses, Akeelah must overcome many different challenges in order to progress in this bee. There's the matter of the words themselves, thousands of them, words whose origins and meanings Dr. Larabee encourages her to learn, beyond mindlessly memorizing words with no thought to their practical value. She must bury her attitude for her lessons, and she has to find some way around the fact that her mother does not support her in her efforts. Beyond all that, as she begins to gain acceptance with the other young spellers, her best friend begins to feel rejected and no longer wants to spend time with her. It's a lot for an 11-year-old to deal with. But there are triumphs, each time Akeelah spells a word correctly in front of a large crowd, and eventually she helps to bring a community together in support of her year-long journey.

It's a fairly typical film about a down-and-out person beating adversity for some sort of personal achievement, into which more and more people are gradually drawn. The movie's focus is primarily on Akeelah, who is spunky, sensitive and studious, but other key players include her mother, whose apparent harshness at the beginning of the film does not prevent her from being a sympathetic character, her principal, who desperately wants some good press for his school so he can get more funding, and her mentor, who is authoritarian and aloof but has a little more heart than we might initially guess. I found Fishburne's presence in this film interesting because he also played mentor to the young chess whiz Josh in Searching for Bobby Fischer, though Dr. Larabee's no-nonsense approach is more like that of Josh's stern other coach, played by Ben Kingsley.

We see Akeelah at all levels of the spelling bee, and the film captures the pressures of these events well. But it's not all grim competition. At the local level, she meets Javier (J. R. Villarreal), a sweet-natured boy who becomes her faithful friend throughout the year. My favorite character in the film, he is absolutely adorable, especially in one scene during which he stalls for time at the state spelling bee until Akeelah, caught in a confrontation with her mother, can make it back to the stage. Also notable is 14-year-old Dylan Chiu (Sean Michael), Akeelah's most intense competitor, who is determined not to walk away with yet another second-place finish.

There's a bit of an after-school special tone to this movie, but that doesn't bother me. An inspiring, family-friendly film about perseverance and fair play, Akeelah and the Bee is s-t-u-p-e-n-d-o-u-s.