Big Hero 6

When Disney bought Marvel five years ago, there was a widespread fear among comic fans that all its storied characters would get a cutesy kiddie makeover. So far those fears have been unfounded, all the company’s adaptations being very faithful to the comics and catering mainly to the grown-up superhero fan. At least, until now. But if Big Hero 6 is what happens when a Marvel product gets the Disney treatment, all those worried fans should eat their words. Turns out the people working for the Mouse know what they’re doing.

Based on a somewhat lesser-known Marvel team, the film follows Hiro (voiced by Ryan Potter), a teen with an impressive knack for robotics living in the city of San Fransokyo (think a cross between Tokyo and San Francisco with a little futuristic anime thrown in). He hopes his newest invention, a batch of tiny robots that takes the shape of whatever the controller thinks, will be his ticket to get into a prestigious technology university. But a tragic series of events leaves his brother Tadashi (Daniel Henney) dead and his invention in the hands of a masked villain. To protect the city from this madman, Hiro teams up with his Tadashi’s school project, a medical bot named Baymax (Scott Adsit), and his other university pals.

Like Pixar’s The Incredibles, the movie is clearly written by people who love and get superheroes. It’s not quite on the level of Pixar’s great film. While The Incredibles was a smart deconstruction of the superhero mystique as well as a family drama, Big Hero 6 is keeping it simpler and just having a ball spoofing the genre. Its parody, however, actually does everything about a superhero movie, particularly those of Marvel Studios, very well (speaking of which, don’t forget to stay after the credits). The narrative is a solid origin story that establishes the main characters flawlessly. The action is PG-friendly but still as good as any live-action superhero film (its animation not so far off from the CGI of many blockbusters), and the look is much more colorful and imaginative. And Disney has its eyes on the big picture, as the various supporting characters all have potential for spinoff projects.

It’s also got a wonderful sense of humor. Most of it comes from Baymax, who despite his place in the narrative quickly becomes the star of the picture. Even though he looks designed with easily mass produced toys in mind, the cuddly android turns out to be one of the funniest Disney characters in at least a few years. His physical comedy and unknowing deadpan are quite amusing, the latter containing a refreshingly sweet innocence rather than cynicism. He’s the one who makes the movie, although there’s plenty of other laughs from the rest of the goofy hero team, as well as a few really funny riffs on the genre itself.

The superhero movie renaissance may be getting long in the tooth (and will only get longer still with all the upcoming projects from Marvel and DC), but Big Hero 6 feels almost fresh and new. Maybe it’s because it’s so much fun and imaginative instead of dark, brooding, and overly serious (it’s a nice respite for fans before the darkness that will be Avengers: Age of Ultron next summer). And even if you don’t really like superhero movies or are just sick of them, it’s still a great family film, one that does not have any songs that you'll come to despise like a certain other Disney hit.

South Park, "Cock Magic"

This episode at first appears to be not what you think from the title. But, eventually, it becomes exactly what you were thinking. It's so bad that I’m actually angry at myself for laughing at one part; surely, I'm better than this! The show can certainly do better, too.

The title actually refers to an underground sport the boys get involved with that's like cockfighting, except instead of killing each other, roosters are forced to play the card game Magic: The Gathering. The show has made allegory out of stupider scenarios, but there’s none to be had here. The episode settles for pretty obvious and lazy double entendres. Eventually, Randy, the show’s go-to character for everyman idiocy, even acts out the most obvious one, over and over. At best—and this is being very, very generous—it’s like a small gag from a better episode stretched out to fill 30 minutes. In fact, it plays like a typical random, less-funny-when-it’s-acted-out gag from—Brace yourself!—Family Guy, despite South Park’s established contempt for the Fox cartoon.

But that scene with Randy at the birthday party had me howling, in spite of having nothing good to say about the rest of the episode. Maybe it’s because it took me back to the show’s best years around the turn of the millennium, before it was such an issue-focused show, or at least when it only tackled issues as fodder for the most vulgar, line-crossing, and hilarious humor on TV. This one wasn’t anywhere close to as good as any of those classic episodes, but it connected with the immature teenager in me.

That aside, this episode offers nothing. Not only nothing in the way of humor, but not even much of a narrative or reason for even animating the thing. It screams of either desperation or laziness. At the very least they could have stolen from The Simpsons again; that show filled time with nothing and created a classic gag.

South Park, "Grounded Vindaloop"

There are two things I’ve always wanted to happen on South Park. One is for the ever-evil Eric Cartman to really get what’s coming to him. This has happened once or twice, but because of his constant evil deeds and the fact that he gets away with most of them, it will never cease to be satisfying to see it happen again. The other is for Butters, the show’s pure, oblivious child who’s frequently victimized by outside forces as well as his overbearing parents, to finally snap and let everyone and everything that’s ever tormented him have it.

We got a taste of the latter last night, and it was oh so sweet. Sure, Butters was swiftly put back in his sad place. But as a longtime viewer who’s seen the character befallen by many tragic events (and laughed until I couldn’t breathe at them), seeing it even happen at all was a little cathartic. Hell, just seeing Butters sock his awful father in the groin would have been enough for me. Everything else he did on top of that was just a bonus. And the fact that the audience only hears it made it even funnier, for some reason (I guess the old horror film adage about what you don’t see being more effective also applies to comedy in some cases).

It was a great Butters moment, and also a strong initializer for an overly (and I’d guess intentionally) complex plot about virtual reality. At the onset, it seems like Cartman’s just leading Butters astray once again (Butters not realizing his rampage is actually taking place in the real world). But a turn of events reveals that it’s actually Cartman who’s stuck in virtual reality. Or maybe it’s Kyle. Or Kenny. Or none of them. The twists and revelations keep piling on and don’t make lot of sense. But I think that’s the point. In fact, the plot isn’t just unreasonably difficult to follow, but the instances where the characters somewhat break the fourth wall by staring at the audience and cursing them seem downright hostile to the thought of us trying to figure it out.

Nothing that came after was quite as funny as Butters letting loose, but the episode was still fun. The deliberate confusion was a great satirical takedown of convoluted brain-twister sci-fi movies, and a few elements that at first seemed repetitive and not very funny—the twists on top of twists, Steve from Customer Service—eventually grew on me, as they actually tied into the plot very well. And as for that ending, I really did not expect that.

Interstellar

It’s fitting, perhaps, that Christopher Nolan’s picture about mankind stepping into the unknown is also a step up for him as a filmmaker. Don’t get me wrong. He already was very good before, both technically impressive and exhilarating in his direction, and highly intellectual in his screenwriting. He’s made at least one great film (The Dark Knight), and no bad ones. But up to this point, they’ve mostly been breakneck-speed cinematic freight trains, their tone ranging from tense to frantic. 

Interstellar has the amazing, imaginative visuals and masterfully crafted exciting sequences that Nolan always delivers. What sets it apart, however, is that the director slows things down. Whereas all his previous films left little room for anything that wasn’t a necessary part of the whole, here, Nolan takes time for little things. Things like long shots to just sit back and take in the beauty of what’s onscreen, or small plot details that say so much about the future he put on film. More so, taking it slow allows for scenes of mood and atmosphere (even though it’s in space), and the characters to showcase feelings not of the adrenaline-fueled variety. That’s the most important thing, as it gives such an ambitious, broad space epic an emotional intimacy.

The film takes place in a future that’s unspecified but doesn’t look too far off from right now. Earth has a dire food shortage and, in the corner of American farm country where most of the earthbound action takes place, things look like the Dust Bowl. Through a series of strange events (which I won’t describe so as not to spoil a single thing), failed astronaut-turned-farmer Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) discovers that NASA, thought to have been disbanded years before, is working in secret on a mission to save humanity. A wormhole appeared near Saturn a half-century prior, and the plan is to send astronauts through it to find a new planet for mankind to colonize. And Cooper is chosen to lead the mission.

The picture is quite a meticulous, impressively constructed vision. The ambiguity of just how close this future is to our present gives it a frightening prescience; with all the talk of catastrophic climate upheaval, what's onscreen seems like a very real possibility of where we're headed. Several small lines and throwaway details hint at a fully developed world with fascinating, and alarming, implications. Once things leave Earth, the technology and science in the film have a strong authenticity. More than just adding realism, it makes everything seem plausible when the plot travels to places beyond our scientific understanding, even if the results seem a little more fiction than science. Strictly scientific or speculative, though, everything that happens is interesting and riveting, and brought to life with incredible effects. And regular Nolan collaborator Han Zimmer’s score is a great one, capturing the vastness of the void of space in a beautiful musical tapestry. The movie elicits comparison to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and while it’s not as open-ended or ambiguous as Stanley Kubrick’s picture, the visual awe and sense of wonderment are comparable.

There’s even one crucial element where it bests Kubrick’s film: humanity. The cast includes veterans like John Lithgow and Nolan favorite Michael Caine as well as current stars like Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway, all of them very good. McConaughey is the one that shines, however, arguably giving the strongest performance yet in his recent hot streak of great roles. As Cooper, he embodies the charismatic All-American hero archetype of movie astronauts, a characterization that seems to be by design. But in more private moments, he’s not a melancholy sci-fi protagonist who waxes poetic in strenuously written monologues. His emotions are the plain, real type emblematic of a father’s love. He breaks down and cries from missing his daughter (played by Mackenzie Foy as a child, Chastain as an adult), and it feels real, not scripted. Plotting at the familial level goes beyond just giving the hero motivation and adds a desperate urgency to the characters’ mission. In comic book sci-fi, we‘re always sure the heroes will prevail even if they seem down and out early in the story. In Interstellar, every mistake, every setback, every wasted second could mean the end of the human race, and with it the ones we love. And yet framing it this way reveals an irony about our species, which the movie makes sure to point out at one point.

Nolan’s films are never short, and this one is his longest yet at almost three hours. Yet, it never drags or loses its grip on the audience, and never ceases to fascinate with its ideas or stun with its visuals. If anything, it could be even longer; it could be extended to four hours or even multiple movies, further exploring the future bits we only see in the background and elaborating on a few fast-moving subplots, and it wouldn’t be boring. But while all that is what makes it great science fiction—probably the best pure sci-fi production since Blade Runner—it's the affecting narrative strength at the human level that makes it a truly great film.

South Park, "Freemium Isn't Free"

I’ve never been one for electronic games that consist of performing the same action over and over and over. For me, the monotony not only fails to ignite any addictive feelings, but doesn’t even manage to be fun for more than a few minutes. There have been many occasions where I’ve played Tetris or other repetitive games and either just quit or intentionally lost the game because I got bored quickly.

So, watching this episode, I sympathized less with Stan, who’s shown to be addicted to the new Terence and Phillip mobile game, than with the other three boys who tell him the game is terrible. I, too, just don’t get how people could become addicted to similarly pointless, substance-free games like Candy Crush, or Farmville, or any of the mobile and Internet timewasters that have gotten so many users addicted the last several years. I also very much agree with the Canadian government’s long descriptions about how the freemium business model blatantly and unethically preys on addictive aspects of consumers’ behavior (also, “freemium” is the second term this season that I hadn’t heard before watching).

True, the episode was almost all soapbox, and frankly I probably enjoyed it because it was relating to me an opinion I already had. But to be fair, Trey Parker and Matt Stone don’t beat us over the head with their opinions. The tone is obviously very negative toward games that charge people for full access, but they mostly let the shadiness of that business model speak for itself. I just have to wonder: Is addiction to these types of games really as much of a problem as life-destroying addictions like gambling and alcoholism?

It’s no matter, though, as the episode had several good bits of humor that mask any not-so-strong points its trying to make. I was happy to see the show’s smart, sensitive Satan return as the voice of reason (the most unsubtle way possible for Stone and Parker to make their opinions on such games clear), and the Canadian jokes made me laugh, whereas I most often find the Canada plotlines really stupid. There was a line from Jimmy that was kind of mean but also very clever and funny. And although I’m not sure the show was too apt in its comparison of pay gaming addiction to alcoholism, the fake “drink responsibly” ad was hysterical and spot-on.