The werewolf kid from the Twilight abominations dumps the sparkly vampires and dippy love interest to step into the tweener-action hero spotlight with Abduction, a occasionally fast-moving but inherently banal actioner with an improbable plot, even by the standards of the genre.
Taylor Lautner is a knucklehead jock dumbass who parties hard and doesn't have a care in the world. I mean, other than the father (Jason Issacs) who picks his hungover ass off the lawn of the crime and then makes him fight like a twisted scene from The Great Santini. However, he's not an abusive pop, just someone who's training Shark Boy for the rest of the plot. When Taylor finds a photo on a missing children website that looks like him, his attempt to find out about his past leads to his present being literally blown to pieces and the couple who raised him being killed by bad guys. With the CIA and Russian baddies chasing him and not knowing whom to trust, he takes off with the cute classmate from across the street (Lily "My daddy drums for Genesis" Collins) and the hijnks ensue.
Since the target audience is horny teenage girls, it's understandable how much superfluous rigmarole has to take place up front, in the middle, and at the end. While the action staged by director John Singleton (in his first feature since 2005's lackluster Four Brothers) is occasionally exciting and Lautner is a credible butt-kicker, the pace is too languid for such a threadbare plot. How do the bad guys manage to tap into the CIA's comms without fail? What exactly is the McGuffin they're chasing and why are we supposed to be surprised someone doesn't turn out as they initially appear? Can Taylor act or us he just a square-headed caterpillar with some charm to go with that prison-ripped bod? I'm the wrong audience for this movie, aren't I?
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.
"The Sitter (Unrated)" Review
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Judging from this trailer...
...The Sitter, starring Academy Award nominee Jonah Hill, looks like a stupid, raunchy retread of Adventures in Babysitting with the loutish, porcine Hill doing his usual loud moron schtick and for the most part, that pretty much sums things up. However, there is actually a little more depth and heart to the flick, though it doesn't maintain enough consistency in the laugh department.
For those who didn't watch the trailer - and why didn't you? - Hill is a tubby slacker who gets stuck babysitting for a friend of his mother's when he gets an offer of nookie from his fickle sorta girlfriend. Of course, the kids are punks - a mopey emo with "issues" (played by the kid from Where the Wild Things Are), a celebrity-obsessed girl, and an adopted El Salvadoran terror who spends half the movie blowing stuff up and relieving himself anywhere and everywhere - and hijinks ensue.
Where The Sitter actually scores some points is in making Hill not quite the disaster he initially appears, but more of an unmotivated victim of his own problems, which he eventually confronts and overcomes. Where it really gets crazy is when it pit stops in the crazy lair of a drug dealer (an unrecognizable Sam Rockwell) which is so genuinely weird that I don't even want to spoil the surprises in case you catch this sometime.
It's all meaningless and won't change your life, but if you burn 90 minutes on the couch viewing it, you won't wish you were dead. (There's some box copy!)
Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.
Judging from the credits and the IMDB parent's guide, there's not much more that has been added for this "unrated" version other than a quick scene of two people shagging with a brief glimpse of bare breasts. While much of the vibe is sort of like Eighties teen comedies, there is no nudity in the regular cut; the R comes from the barrage of F-bombs. It's the 21st Century; how are we getting more Victorian?
...The Sitter, starring Academy Award nominee Jonah Hill, looks like a stupid, raunchy retread of Adventures in Babysitting with the loutish, porcine Hill doing his usual loud moron schtick and for the most part, that pretty much sums things up. However, there is actually a little more depth and heart to the flick, though it doesn't maintain enough consistency in the laugh department.
For those who didn't watch the trailer - and why didn't you? - Hill is a tubby slacker who gets stuck babysitting for a friend of his mother's when he gets an offer of nookie from his fickle sorta girlfriend. Of course, the kids are punks - a mopey emo with "issues" (played by the kid from Where the Wild Things Are), a celebrity-obsessed girl, and an adopted El Salvadoran terror who spends half the movie blowing stuff up and relieving himself anywhere and everywhere - and hijinks ensue.
Where The Sitter actually scores some points is in making Hill not quite the disaster he initially appears, but more of an unmotivated victim of his own problems, which he eventually confronts and overcomes. Where it really gets crazy is when it pit stops in the crazy lair of a drug dealer (an unrecognizable Sam Rockwell) which is so genuinely weird that I don't even want to spoil the surprises in case you catch this sometime.
It's all meaningless and won't change your life, but if you burn 90 minutes on the couch viewing it, you won't wish you were dead. (There's some box copy!)
Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.
Judging from the credits and the IMDB parent's guide, there's not much more that has been added for this "unrated" version other than a quick scene of two people shagging with a brief glimpse of bare breasts. While much of the vibe is sort of like Eighties teen comedies, there is no nudity in the regular cut; the R comes from the barrage of F-bombs. It's the 21st Century; how are we getting more Victorian?
"Young Adult" Review
Saturday, March 10, 2012
The writing-directing tag team that brought us Juno, Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman, team up again with Charlize Theron for a dark drama with comic accents, Young Adult, which unfortunately doesn't live up to its pedigree and potential.
Theron is a 37-year-old divorcee in Minneapolis who drinks too much, sleeps around, plucks the hair out of her scalp in spots, barely cares for her Pomeranian, and makes her living ghost-writing a young adult series of books set in a high school. The movie's title has a dual meaning that her arrested development makes her able to capture the voice of her characters. It also helps that she always seems to be near teenage girls in time to overhear them say something she can crib for her books.
When she receives an email announcing the birth of a child to an old flame (Patrick Wilson), she obsesses over it until finally deciding to return to her home town of Mercury, MN and rescue him from the horrible life of domesticity she feels he's trapped in. While setting up her plan, she encounters Patton Oswalt, a dumpy guy who had the locker next to hers throughout high school whom she never noticed. Hobbled by a savage beating (more on this later), he quickly becomes her Jiminy Cricket, trying to talk her out of her plan. Of course, she's not listening.
While there are some hints of greatness throughout Young Adult, it simply doesn't gel up into a cohesive whole. Theron is unlikeable, which isn't a problem since she's supposed to be a boozy deluded mess, but her realizations and growth are undercut by Cody's script which seems to forget its points at the end. I thought Reitman's last film, the George Clooney-topped Up In The Air, fell apart in it's last act and ending and something similar happens here with the precisely wrong thing happening and then everything that could've been learned tossed out the window in a single scene in which someone basically tells her that her wrong-headed views were right all along. I honestly had no idea what the movie was trying to say at the end.
Theron is very good, managing to make an unsympathetic character earn our pity. (If you know the difference between sympathy and pity, you'll get the distinction I'm making.) She almost manages to make us overlook the gaps in the plotting like how Wilson seems to act as if they merely dated a short while in high school when it's revealed later that their relationship was much, much more involved. I place blame for this on Reitman who let him play it as if there had been little between them.
I had been enthused about seeing Young Adult because of the players involved, but it shows that past prowess provides little guarantee of future competence. I wonder if the makers have become too big for their britches and aren't being held to the standards of polish that others would (and should) be held to? While not especially bad, it's not particularly good in the final analysis because it manages to undercook the characters. Also, if you hated the Teenage Fanclub song "The Concept", you may want to steer clear of this movie because it gets played about five times and will stick in your head the next day.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.
Regarding Oswalt's beating ** SEMI-SPOILERS **: He was supposedly beaten with a crowbar by a pack of jocks because they thought he was gay - this is how Theron remembers him, as the "Hate Crime Guy" - and it was quite the scandal until it was learned that he wasn't gay; then it became a socially acceptable attack of jocks on a fat guy. That she doesn't seem to feel this is anything to whine about despite his walking with a cane and having mutilated junk makes the ending that much more questionable.
Theron is a 37-year-old divorcee in Minneapolis who drinks too much, sleeps around, plucks the hair out of her scalp in spots, barely cares for her Pomeranian, and makes her living ghost-writing a young adult series of books set in a high school. The movie's title has a dual meaning that her arrested development makes her able to capture the voice of her characters. It also helps that she always seems to be near teenage girls in time to overhear them say something she can crib for her books.
When she receives an email announcing the birth of a child to an old flame (Patrick Wilson), she obsesses over it until finally deciding to return to her home town of Mercury, MN and rescue him from the horrible life of domesticity she feels he's trapped in. While setting up her plan, she encounters Patton Oswalt, a dumpy guy who had the locker next to hers throughout high school whom she never noticed. Hobbled by a savage beating (more on this later), he quickly becomes her Jiminy Cricket, trying to talk her out of her plan. Of course, she's not listening.
While there are some hints of greatness throughout Young Adult, it simply doesn't gel up into a cohesive whole. Theron is unlikeable, which isn't a problem since she's supposed to be a boozy deluded mess, but her realizations and growth are undercut by Cody's script which seems to forget its points at the end. I thought Reitman's last film, the George Clooney-topped Up In The Air, fell apart in it's last act and ending and something similar happens here with the precisely wrong thing happening and then everything that could've been learned tossed out the window in a single scene in which someone basically tells her that her wrong-headed views were right all along. I honestly had no idea what the movie was trying to say at the end.
Theron is very good, managing to make an unsympathetic character earn our pity. (If you know the difference between sympathy and pity, you'll get the distinction I'm making.) She almost manages to make us overlook the gaps in the plotting like how Wilson seems to act as if they merely dated a short while in high school when it's revealed later that their relationship was much, much more involved. I place blame for this on Reitman who let him play it as if there had been little between them.
I had been enthused about seeing Young Adult because of the players involved, but it shows that past prowess provides little guarantee of future competence. I wonder if the makers have become too big for their britches and aren't being held to the standards of polish that others would (and should) be held to? While not especially bad, it's not particularly good in the final analysis because it manages to undercook the characters. Also, if you hated the Teenage Fanclub song "The Concept", you may want to steer clear of this movie because it gets played about five times and will stick in your head the next day.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.
Regarding Oswalt's beating ** SEMI-SPOILERS **: He was supposedly beaten with a crowbar by a pack of jocks because they thought he was gay - this is how Theron remembers him, as the "Hate Crime Guy" - and it was quite the scandal until it was learned that he wasn't gay; then it became a socially acceptable attack of jocks on a fat guy. That she doesn't seem to feel this is anything to whine about despite his walking with a cane and having mutilated junk makes the ending that much more questionable.
"The Dilemma" Review
Monday, February 27, 2012
What the hell happened to Ron Howard? When Opie (if you're old)/Richie Cunningham (if you're not so old) stepped behind the camera, he had a respectable run of decent to near-great (and in the case of Apollo 13, genuinely great; it should've won Best Picture) movies like Splash, Cocoon, Backdraft, and Ransom. Then around the turn of the millennium, things got dicey culminating in his contracting a lethal dose of Oscar Curse when he won Best Director and Picture for A Beautiful Mind, a movie so lackluster that I sold the DVD, something I almost never do. In the ensuing decade, I've only seen two of the six features he's made - The Da Vinci Code (which sucked) and Frost/Nixon (so-so and I was surprised to see he made it when I looked it up now) - because I simply haven't been interested in what he's been putting out and if the others were as terrible as The Dilemma, I'm missing nothing.
The Dilemma gets the ignoble honor of being the first movie of 2012 that I couldn't finish watching. I made it through 70 minutes of its 1:51 running time and if I laughed once, I don't recall. It was straining and struggling and feeling wrong from the very first scene and never got better. My girlfriend fell asleep early on (I was yawning a lot myself) and whenever she woke up, she'd ask, "Why are you still watching this?" When the window we had in between TV shows ended - which we'd agreed beforehand that if the movie was OK, we'd miss Fashion Police's Oscar special - there was no dilemma, we switched over and never went back.
Since I'm supposed to be reviewing this I guess I should....wait, does the trailer spell everything out? Check it out:
Pretty much! The only things unclear are that Vince and Kevin are making booming speaker systems that pump out the noise and vibration of a muscle car that is electric and that Kevin is the brains of the outfit - you didn't think Vince was, did you? - and that for him to learn his wife is cheating on him may be a company-killing distraction. However, I think the trailer does a good job and showcasing the incredibly unfunniness of The Dilemma. Howard and company mistake being REALLY LOUD for being energetic and at no time did I believe that these were people in the real world. The bit in the trailer about dancing takes place in the second scene and was a huge warning flare that this movie would blow.
Around the edges, there were slight hints that perhaps a total rewrite of the script and a different director could've made a barely interesting movie, but it didn't happen. The only one who actually tries to make this crap come to life somewhat is Winona Ryder, whom I've mourned her career exile as Angelina Jolie cruelly stomped her Oscar dreams in Girl, Interrupted, pretty much sending poor Noni into a personal death spiral that took Lindsay Lohan to erase from the public eye. The only thing that may have made me finish slogging through The Dilemma would've been to see how Winona's side of things turned out, but it wasn't enough overall.
Score: DNF. Skip it.
The Dilemma gets the ignoble honor of being the first movie of 2012 that I couldn't finish watching. I made it through 70 minutes of its 1:51 running time and if I laughed once, I don't recall. It was straining and struggling and feeling wrong from the very first scene and never got better. My girlfriend fell asleep early on (I was yawning a lot myself) and whenever she woke up, she'd ask, "Why are you still watching this?" When the window we had in between TV shows ended - which we'd agreed beforehand that if the movie was OK, we'd miss Fashion Police's Oscar special - there was no dilemma, we switched over and never went back.
Since I'm supposed to be reviewing this I guess I should....wait, does the trailer spell everything out? Check it out:
Pretty much! The only things unclear are that Vince and Kevin are making booming speaker systems that pump out the noise and vibration of a muscle car that is electric and that Kevin is the brains of the outfit - you didn't think Vince was, did you? - and that for him to learn his wife is cheating on him may be a company-killing distraction. However, I think the trailer does a good job and showcasing the incredibly unfunniness of The Dilemma. Howard and company mistake being REALLY LOUD for being energetic and at no time did I believe that these were people in the real world. The bit in the trailer about dancing takes place in the second scene and was a huge warning flare that this movie would blow.
Around the edges, there were slight hints that perhaps a total rewrite of the script and a different director could've made a barely interesting movie, but it didn't happen. The only one who actually tries to make this crap come to life somewhat is Winona Ryder, whom I've mourned her career exile as Angelina Jolie cruelly stomped her Oscar dreams in Girl, Interrupted, pretty much sending poor Noni into a personal death spiral that took Lindsay Lohan to erase from the public eye. The only thing that may have made me finish slogging through The Dilemma would've been to see how Winona's side of things turned out, but it wasn't enough overall.
Score: DNF. Skip it.
2012 Academy Awards Livesnark
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Unlike the past couple of years when I'd seen all the major nominees, I've only seen 4-1/2 of the 9 Best Picture nominees: The Artist (very sweet, but overpraised), The Help (stunningly mediocre and overrated), Moneyball (very good, but not great), Midnight in Paris (cute, but also overpraised), and half of The Descendents. I want to see Hugo, but have so little interest in War Horse, Extemely Incredible and Closely Loud (sp?) and whatever the other one is that I couldn't even hazard a guess as to when I'm going to see them. So, with little interest in who wins, let's snark this mutha up! (Refresh for updates all night.)
• The fashions on the red carpet have been blah. No one seems to know how to get clothes fitted. One exception: Natalie Portman with a cute red dress and tasteful jewelry.
• God Himself (i.e. Morgan Freeman) does the cold opener. BFD.
• The filmed opener was funny then got lame. "It's Time For Oscar" song was meh.
• Instead of opening with Best Supporting Actress, they've one-twoed Cinematography and Art Direction, both of which went to Hugo. The harbingers of an upset?
• They have a cruise ship band in the balcony with Pharrell Williams playing drums. Why?
• Nice touch with the nominations for Costume Design and Makeup to have people talk about their intent while showing clips from the movie. The Artist and The Iron Lady.
• Movie stars talking about their first movies. Who cares? What makes their experiences special? Oh, that's right, they're famous. Pfft.
• A Separation (from Iran) wins Best Foreign Language. The director makes a speech referring to the political tensions, but doesn't speak against the mullahs who've made Iran the terrorist pariah state they are. One guess as to why.
• Octovia Spencer gets Best Support Actress for The Help and loses it. Come on, it wasn't a surprise. Pull it together.
• Semi-amusing spoof of focus groups done with the Christopher Guest posse.
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a surprise winner for Best Editing. They should've edited out their terrible speech. With all the technical awards Hugo is racking up, it's surprising Thelma Schoonmaker didn't win.
• Hugo wins for Best Sound Editing and Sound Mixing. I'm really wishing I'd caught this. I'll put it on the top of the stack.
• The Cirque du Soleil number was impressive, but how did it really capture the experience of going to the movies.
• Above-average schtick with Iron Man and Pepper Potts. They cut the mike off on the Best Documentary winners.
• Chris Rock brings some much-needed edge to the proceedings with a great bit about how it's not hard to do animation for the actors.
• Rango wins Best Animated Feature. I still haven't seen this, but heard it's pretty good.
• I just adore Emma Stone, but that stupid bow on her dress sucks. Great schtick with Ben Stiller. She's got a future in this business.
• Hugo wins Best Special Effects. Got nothing to say about that yet, but Sucker Punch should've been nominated.
• Christopher Plummer sets the record for the oldest Oscar winner at 82 for Beginners thus leveraging never having won despite an illustrious career and playing a gay guy for the gold. Classy speech.
• Cute bit where Billy tells us what the people are thinking.
• The Artist wins for Best Score, which makes sense because that was the only sound in 99.9% of the movie. We will never hear from this guy again.
• Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis are funny, especially the latter mangling his own name in his introduction. They're willing to play the fool.
• The traveshamockery of the Best Song category results in "Man or Muppet" winning the coin toss. When other numbers like "Star Spangled Man" (from Captain America: The First Avenger) weren't even nominated, this category is meaningless. Either do it right or cut it.
• Angelina Jolie = YOWZA!!! Pop that leg out. Funny when Jim Rash apes the pose when The Descendents wins for Best Adapted Screenplay.
• Woody Allen wins Best Original Screenplay for Midnight in Paris. Meh, I guess so.
• The cast of Bridesmaids gets to hand out the awards that no one cares about. Harsh, but true.
• What's with the popcorn girls handing out snacks during the breaks.
• Billy Crystal keeps making these jokes pandering to the class warfare rage that the Left preens their support for. Is there anyone in the front part of this house who isn't in the top 1% of the supposedly evil 1%.
• Michel French Guy wins Best Director for The Artist, so if you had Hugo in your Oscar pool, The Walking Dead rerun is starting in five minutes.
• James Earl Jones and makeup artist deity Dick Smith won Honorary Oscars and Oprah gets the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. My life remains unaffected.
• The People Who Died montage was really heavy on behind-the-scenes personnel. I'm sure, "Who?", was the most-often voiced reaction.
• Jean Dujarden wins Best Actor for The Artist. Is he the next Roberto Begnini? (I'm not even going to look up whether I spelled that right.) We'll probably never hear from him again here.
• WHOA! Meryl Streep upsets Viola Davis for Best Actress. I'm sure Spike Lee is tweeting about how racist this is. Streep hasn't won in 30 years and this was her 17th nomination. I suspect the Academy figures Davis will be back soon. Yet another Oscar win for a performance which has a real-life person to mimic as opposed to creating a character from scratch. Don't actors understand this stuff? Guess not.
• The Artist wins Best Picture to the surprise of no one. Of the movies I've seen, I enjoyed this the most, but I want to see Hugo now.
Overall, it was a meh show. Billy Crystal seemed too impressed with his Borscht Belt jokes, but would Eddie Murphy have been better?
Score: 6/10. Whatever.
• The fashions on the red carpet have been blah. No one seems to know how to get clothes fitted. One exception: Natalie Portman with a cute red dress and tasteful jewelry.
• God Himself (i.e. Morgan Freeman) does the cold opener. BFD.
• The filmed opener was funny then got lame. "It's Time For Oscar" song was meh.
• Instead of opening with Best Supporting Actress, they've one-twoed Cinematography and Art Direction, both of which went to Hugo. The harbingers of an upset?
• They have a cruise ship band in the balcony with Pharrell Williams playing drums. Why?
• Nice touch with the nominations for Costume Design and Makeup to have people talk about their intent while showing clips from the movie. The Artist and The Iron Lady.
• Movie stars talking about their first movies. Who cares? What makes their experiences special? Oh, that's right, they're famous. Pfft.
• A Separation (from Iran) wins Best Foreign Language. The director makes a speech referring to the political tensions, but doesn't speak against the mullahs who've made Iran the terrorist pariah state they are. One guess as to why.
• Octovia Spencer gets Best Support Actress for The Help and loses it. Come on, it wasn't a surprise. Pull it together.
• Semi-amusing spoof of focus groups done with the Christopher Guest posse.
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a surprise winner for Best Editing. They should've edited out their terrible speech. With all the technical awards Hugo is racking up, it's surprising Thelma Schoonmaker didn't win.
• Hugo wins for Best Sound Editing and Sound Mixing. I'm really wishing I'd caught this. I'll put it on the top of the stack.
• The Cirque du Soleil number was impressive, but how did it really capture the experience of going to the movies.
• Above-average schtick with Iron Man and Pepper Potts. They cut the mike off on the Best Documentary winners.
• Chris Rock brings some much-needed edge to the proceedings with a great bit about how it's not hard to do animation for the actors.
• Rango wins Best Animated Feature. I still haven't seen this, but heard it's pretty good.
• I just adore Emma Stone, but that stupid bow on her dress sucks. Great schtick with Ben Stiller. She's got a future in this business.
• Hugo wins Best Special Effects. Got nothing to say about that yet, but Sucker Punch should've been nominated.
• Christopher Plummer sets the record for the oldest Oscar winner at 82 for Beginners thus leveraging never having won despite an illustrious career and playing a gay guy for the gold. Classy speech.
• Cute bit where Billy tells us what the people are thinking.
• The Artist wins for Best Score, which makes sense because that was the only sound in 99.9% of the movie. We will never hear from this guy again.
• Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis are funny, especially the latter mangling his own name in his introduction. They're willing to play the fool.
• The traveshamockery of the Best Song category results in "Man or Muppet" winning the coin toss. When other numbers like "Star Spangled Man" (from Captain America: The First Avenger) weren't even nominated, this category is meaningless. Either do it right or cut it.
• Angelina Jolie = YOWZA!!! Pop that leg out. Funny when Jim Rash apes the pose when The Descendents wins for Best Adapted Screenplay.
• Woody Allen wins Best Original Screenplay for Midnight in Paris. Meh, I guess so.
• The cast of Bridesmaids gets to hand out the awards that no one cares about. Harsh, but true.
• What's with the popcorn girls handing out snacks during the breaks.
• Billy Crystal keeps making these jokes pandering to the class warfare rage that the Left preens their support for. Is there anyone in the front part of this house who isn't in the top 1% of the supposedly evil 1%.
• Michel French Guy wins Best Director for The Artist, so if you had Hugo in your Oscar pool, The Walking Dead rerun is starting in five minutes.
• James Earl Jones and makeup artist deity Dick Smith won Honorary Oscars and Oprah gets the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. My life remains unaffected.
• The People Who Died montage was really heavy on behind-the-scenes personnel. I'm sure, "Who?", was the most-often voiced reaction.
• Jean Dujarden wins Best Actor for The Artist. Is he the next Roberto Begnini? (I'm not even going to look up whether I spelled that right.) We'll probably never hear from him again here.
• WHOA! Meryl Streep upsets Viola Davis for Best Actress. I'm sure Spike Lee is tweeting about how racist this is. Streep hasn't won in 30 years and this was her 17th nomination. I suspect the Academy figures Davis will be back soon. Yet another Oscar win for a performance which has a real-life person to mimic as opposed to creating a character from scratch. Don't actors understand this stuff? Guess not.
• The Artist wins Best Picture to the surprise of no one. Of the movies I've seen, I enjoyed this the most, but I want to see Hugo now.
Overall, it was a meh show. Billy Crystal seemed too impressed with his Borscht Belt jokes, but would Eddie Murphy have been better?
Score: 6/10. Whatever.
"Gone" Review
Thursday, February 23, 2012
When I saw ads for Gone, my initial reaction was, "So Amanda Seyfried is the new Ashley Judd?" As this trailer spells out, it sure looks that way:
What the trailer doesn't tell you are the little details which make it a slightly above-average thriller. Seyfried has a history of mental instability and was committed and her history of crying wolf whenever another girl went missing has worn the cops down. The screenplay by Alison Burnett (Untraceable, the new Underworld: Awakenings) is very cagey and takes its time setting up the fact that the missing sister has some issues, too, and made me wonder how they were going to wrap it up; with her being crazy or actually solving the mystery.
Familiar faces like Debra Morgan from Dexter, that creepy kid from American Beauty who put Rachel Nichols in a plunging nightie in P2, the nerdy scientist guy from Avatar, and Eddie from Eddie and the Cruisers show up briefly, but Gone is fundamentally a one-woman show and Seyfried is effective as a haunted, driven, but resourceful young woman. It could've easily been played shrilly or "crazy", but Seyfried does well in a drabbed-down, no glitz role. Other than a totally gratuitous shower scene in which we see her smokin' hawt body silhouetted through the curtain for a moment - not that there's anything wrong with that - it's all acting for her.
Along the way are some serious "just go with it" leaps in logic - I'm talking real "Why would anyone do THAT?" howlers - which if you think too hard about will derail your enjoyment, but Brazilian director Heitor Dhalia manages to keep things taut and not drag it out longer than its 90-minute (minus credits) running time. If you liked Untraceable, then this is about as good. As I left the theater, the girl from the screening team asked me for my thoughts. I told her (and now you)....
Score: 6/10. Rent it.
What the trailer doesn't tell you are the little details which make it a slightly above-average thriller. Seyfried has a history of mental instability and was committed and her history of crying wolf whenever another girl went missing has worn the cops down. The screenplay by Alison Burnett (Untraceable, the new Underworld: Awakenings) is very cagey and takes its time setting up the fact that the missing sister has some issues, too, and made me wonder how they were going to wrap it up; with her being crazy or actually solving the mystery.
Familiar faces like Debra Morgan from Dexter, that creepy kid from American Beauty who put Rachel Nichols in a plunging nightie in P2, the nerdy scientist guy from Avatar, and Eddie from Eddie and the Cruisers show up briefly, but Gone is fundamentally a one-woman show and Seyfried is effective as a haunted, driven, but resourceful young woman. It could've easily been played shrilly or "crazy", but Seyfried does well in a drabbed-down, no glitz role. Other than a totally gratuitous shower scene in which we see her smokin' hawt body silhouetted through the curtain for a moment - not that there's anything wrong with that - it's all acting for her.
Along the way are some serious "just go with it" leaps in logic - I'm talking real "Why would anyone do THAT?" howlers - which if you think too hard about will derail your enjoyment, but Brazilian director Heitor Dhalia manages to keep things taut and not drag it out longer than its 90-minute (minus credits) running time. If you liked Untraceable, then this is about as good. As I left the theater, the girl from the screening team asked me for my thoughts. I told her (and now you)....
Score: 6/10. Rent it.
Basil Exposition Must Die!!!
Friday, January 27, 2012
Last night was the preview of Touch, the new series created by Tim Kring (Heroes) and starring Jack Bauer himself, Keifer Sutherland. It was potentially interesting and I'll be watching it when it starts in earnest in March, but there were some instances of clunky writing that drove me up the wall. When discussing it with my girlfriend afterwards, she responded to one of my points with, "I knew that would bother you. Damn skippy! I've touched upon this sort of hackery before in my Avatar DVD review but seeing this junk happening over and over requires further discussion.
In case you're unaware, Basil Exposition is a character from the Austin Powers series of films played by Michael York who comes in and delivers the necessary expository (which is NOT something you stick in your butt!) background information in an info dump so the plot can get on with the gags. It's terrible writing, but that's the joke of it. What's not funny is to see so many shows which can't do this elegantly and heed the first rule of screenwriting: Show, don't tell.
As an aspiring screenwriter who has read a lot of books on the subject to help order my thinking and get a read on what a proper script looks like, over and over certain things are hammered upon, beginning with show, don't tell. It means don't have someone say, "Neo is the best kung fu master in the Matrix," when you can SHOW Neo opening a crate of whoop-ass on a hundred Agent Smiths.
What set me off on Touch was the ham-handed way Keifer's backstory was covered. When we meet him, we see him at his baggage handling job at JFK, but he used to be a newspaper writer. He has a son who has "mutism" (not sure if this is a real condition or not) and has never spoken in his entire 12 year life and doesn't like to be touched. His mother died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.
OK, that's the core of what needs covering. Widower dad, special needs (but magical) son, career changes, dead wife. How should that be presented? What Kring does is James Cameron/Basil Exposition level bad, using a social worker who has come to take the kid away as the mouthpiece to inform the audience. She comes in as a scold and then flat out states, "You used to be a writer for the New York Herald", in the context of sneering at Jack's (I'm gonna call Keifer "Jack", OK?) manual labor jobs that he can't keep because of the demands of raising his son. Later in the scene, Jack tells us that his wife was a stock broker and that's why they have a nice loft in the packing district. It's all very Basil Exposition. Later, he visits his wife's grave where we see the tombstone with the date of her death on it.
UPDATE: Here is where you can watch the full episode. (Link stays active until Feb. 21, 2012 or so due to the stupid setup online.) Jump to 13:30, after the first commercial break, to see what I'm talking about. I'll wait...
You back? Good. Moving on. The information isn't the issue - we should know about these people - but the manner in which it's conveyed is sooooo clunky; it would fail muster in an aspiring screenwriters class, so coming from a veteran show runner, I don't get it. How would I have handled this scene? Glad you asked. Something like this:
I've changed none of the plot points that Kring made, but in my not-so-humble opinion think it's much more subtle and subtextual.I wish I could include the clip so you could compare. As with the Avatar scene, there is no reason the writing needs to be this bad on anything after a first draft. With the army of craftsmen who come together to produce a movie or TV show, how is it that no one seems to recognize how lousy this stuff is?
As for Touch, I'll watch it when it comes back on, though the Magical Numbers conceit is already being worked by Ben and Jesus' Protective Services Agency, I mean Person of Interest. A lot of people hold the crashing and burning of Heroes against Kring like Star Trek fans spit when they hear the names of Rick Berman or Brannon Braga - I gave up on it about three episodes into the third season when I realized that, writers strike or not (which cut Season 2 short), they had no idea where they were going with the show. That it dragged on into a 5th season was surprising.
In case you're unaware, Basil Exposition is a character from the Austin Powers series of films played by Michael York who comes in and delivers the necessary expository (which is NOT something you stick in your butt!) background information in an info dump so the plot can get on with the gags. It's terrible writing, but that's the joke of it. What's not funny is to see so many shows which can't do this elegantly and heed the first rule of screenwriting: Show, don't tell.
As an aspiring screenwriter who has read a lot of books on the subject to help order my thinking and get a read on what a proper script looks like, over and over certain things are hammered upon, beginning with show, don't tell. It means don't have someone say, "Neo is the best kung fu master in the Matrix," when you can SHOW Neo opening a crate of whoop-ass on a hundred Agent Smiths.
What set me off on Touch was the ham-handed way Keifer's backstory was covered. When we meet him, we see him at his baggage handling job at JFK, but he used to be a newspaper writer. He has a son who has "mutism" (not sure if this is a real condition or not) and has never spoken in his entire 12 year life and doesn't like to be touched. His mother died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.
OK, that's the core of what needs covering. Widower dad, special needs (but magical) son, career changes, dead wife. How should that be presented? What Kring does is James Cameron/Basil Exposition level bad, using a social worker who has come to take the kid away as the mouthpiece to inform the audience. She comes in as a scold and then flat out states, "You used to be a writer for the New York Herald", in the context of sneering at Jack's (I'm gonna call Keifer "Jack", OK?) manual labor jobs that he can't keep because of the demands of raising his son. Later in the scene, Jack tells us that his wife was a stock broker and that's why they have a nice loft in the packing district. It's all very Basil Exposition. Later, he visits his wife's grave where we see the tombstone with the date of her death on it.
UPDATE: Here is where you can watch the full episode. (Link stays active until Feb. 21, 2012 or so due to the stupid setup online.) Jump to 13:30, after the first commercial break, to see what I'm talking about. I'll wait...
You back? Good. Moving on. The information isn't the issue - we should know about these people - but the manner in which it's conveyed is sooooo clunky; it would fail muster in an aspiring screenwriters class, so coming from a veteran show runner, I don't get it. How would I have handled this scene? Glad you asked. Something like this:
INT -- JACK BAUER'S AWESOME LOFT -- EVENING
There is a KNOCK at the door. Jack answers it to find SOSHA WORKAH. He lets her in.SOSHAI'm from Child Protective Services andI'm here to take your kid away.JACKDammit!She looks at her files and then looks around the luxurious loft, taken aback. Jack notices.SOSHAIt says here that you're
a construction worker?
JACKThat was three jobs ago. I workat JFK handling baggage now.She raises an eyebrow.JACK (con't)My wife was a stock broker.
She worked in the North Tower.She acknowledges this and stops and looks at NEWSPAPER AWARDS on the bookshelf.SOSHAYou were with the Herald?JACKYes. Before.SOSHAI'm sorry.JACKJake had to come first.
I've changed none of the plot points that Kring made, but in my not-so-humble opinion think it's much more subtle and subtextual.
As for Touch, I'll watch it when it comes back on, though the Magical Numbers conceit is already being worked by Ben and Jesus' Protective Services Agency, I mean Person of Interest. A lot of people hold the crashing and burning of Heroes against Kring like Star Trek fans spit when they hear the names of Rick Berman or Brannon Braga - I gave up on it about three episodes into the third season when I realized that, writers strike or not (which cut Season 2 short), they had no idea where they were going with the show. That it dragged on into a 5th season was surprising.
"Killer Elite" Review
Sunday, January 22, 2012
I almost forgot to review that I saw this movie. (It's two days later.) That pretty much sums it up, doesn't it?
Jason Statham and Robert De Niro are mercenaries in 1980. After a rough gig, Statham quits the biz and moves to Australia where he is repairing an old schoolhouse and making googly eyes at the chick from Chuck (whom I didn't recognize) whom I think he went to school with or something. A year after his retirement, a package arrives with a photo of De Niro showing he's being held hostage. He was hired by a sheik in Oman and failed and Statham has to complete his mission to kill three British SAS (the British version of Delta Force) men who killed the sheik's sons in battle. For some reason, Statham has to get confessions from them and make their deaths look like accidents. When one of Statham's crew is overheard nosing around a SAS bar, a local secret society of ex-SAS men dispatches Clive Owen to investigate and stop the killings. Little does he know that it's all going to be so dull.
I don't even care to hash out everything that's wrong with the misleadingly-named Killer Elite other than to say its neither. The politics of the caper are too obscure. It says it's based on true events, but we all know that means that England and Oman are real countries and everything else is BS. I found it hard to remain engaged and even the usual Statham ass-kicking antics don't elevate the proceedings much. I'm done here. Move along.
Score: 3/10. Skip it.
Watching the trailer now really makes me marvel at how misleading it is. It really implies waaaaay more action and interaction than really happens. Heh.
Jason Statham and Robert De Niro are mercenaries in 1980. After a rough gig, Statham quits the biz and moves to Australia where he is repairing an old schoolhouse and making googly eyes at the chick from Chuck (whom I didn't recognize) whom I think he went to school with or something. A year after his retirement, a package arrives with a photo of De Niro showing he's being held hostage. He was hired by a sheik in Oman and failed and Statham has to complete his mission to kill three British SAS (the British version of Delta Force) men who killed the sheik's sons in battle. For some reason, Statham has to get confessions from them and make their deaths look like accidents. When one of Statham's crew is overheard nosing around a SAS bar, a local secret society of ex-SAS men dispatches Clive Owen to investigate and stop the killings. Little does he know that it's all going to be so dull.
I don't even care to hash out everything that's wrong with the misleadingly-named Killer Elite other than to say its neither. The politics of the caper are too obscure. It says it's based on true events, but we all know that means that England and Oman are real countries and everything else is BS. I found it hard to remain engaged and even the usual Statham ass-kicking antics don't elevate the proceedings much. I'm done here. Move along.
Score: 3/10. Skip it.
Watching the trailer now really makes me marvel at how misleading it is. It really implies waaaaay more action and interaction than really happens. Heh.
Welcome To DirkFlix!
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
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"Man On A Ledge" Review
The reviews for these types of movies are so easy to write. Why? Watch this:
What do you think happens? Do you think he clears his name and is able to escape the conspiracy against him? Do you think that his brother and his superhawt girlfriend, played by Genesis Rodriguez, who looks like this...
...will be able to put off a jewel heist worthy of an Ocean's film to clear his name, thanks to just about everyone reacting exactly as necessary? Duh.
Man on a Ledge is a competently-assembled, sturdily-performed movie that's meant for watching on cable on a lazy, rainy day. It moves along the rails, checking off the requisite trope check boxes, and hopes you don't stop and wonder just how the hell they have the skills to pull off the caper. Also, what are the ramifications of breaking and entering and doing phenomenal amounts of damage in the name of clearing an innocent man's name. They don't care to think that deeply.
While I wasn't bored, the only thing that struck me as neat was when The Clash's "Police On My Back" started to play to segue into the end credits.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.
What do you think happens? Do you think he clears his name and is able to escape the conspiracy against him? Do you think that his brother and his superhawt girlfriend, played by Genesis Rodriguez, who looks like this...
...will be able to put off a jewel heist worthy of an Ocean's film to clear his name, thanks to just about everyone reacting exactly as necessary? Duh.
Man on a Ledge is a competently-assembled, sturdily-performed movie that's meant for watching on cable on a lazy, rainy day. It moves along the rails, checking off the requisite trope check boxes, and hopes you don't stop and wonder just how the hell they have the skills to pull off the caper. Also, what are the ramifications of breaking and entering and doing phenomenal amounts of damage in the name of clearing an innocent man's name. They don't care to think that deeply.
While I wasn't bored, the only thing that struck me as neat was when The Clash's "Police On My Back" started to play to segue into the end credits.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.
"The Thing (2011)" Review
Monday, January 2, 2012
John Carpenter's 1982 remake of The Thing is a horror classic. Kurt Russell trapped at the bottom of the world, menaced by a shape-shifting monster - the landmark work of Rob Bottin - from outer space. Good stuff. It opened with a dog running across the snowy plains of Antarctica, chased by a helicopter with someone shooting at it. Why were they shooting at the dog and what happened at the Norwegian research station they find abandoned and burned out?
This. (Watch the trailer to see the movie without the monster shots.)
In this totally unnecessary prequel, also titled The Thing, we get an almost beat-for-beat remake of Carpenter's Thing, which is pretty coincidental considering the storyline of an organism that mimics its host to near perfection. The only real changes are the addition of a couple of women, including star Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and the use of mostly CGI instead of foam latex to make the new (old?) monsters. Otherwise it's the same old song and dance. Who's the alien? BOO!!! There are a couple of BOO! jolts and a few good effects, but it doesn't really work, especially at the end with the alien ship and its jigsaw Tetris-looking thingie. How does a lifeform looking the way it does create and use a giant spaceship? Wouldn't it suffice to be just an organism with extraordinary infectious properties? The movie isn't interested in exploring the myriad ways for the world to be observed or building chills, it just runs a checklist of things the original remake did. (e.g. Remember that axe in the wall in Carpenter's film? Now you know how it got there. Put it on your resume.)
Half remake, half prequel, all unnecessary.
Score: 4/10. Skip it.
This. (Watch the trailer to see the movie without the monster shots.)
In this totally unnecessary prequel, also titled The Thing, we get an almost beat-for-beat remake of Carpenter's Thing, which is pretty coincidental considering the storyline of an organism that mimics its host to near perfection. The only real changes are the addition of a couple of women, including star Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and the use of mostly CGI instead of foam latex to make the new (old?) monsters. Otherwise it's the same old song and dance. Who's the alien? BOO!!! There are a couple of BOO! jolts and a few good effects, but it doesn't really work, especially at the end with the alien ship and its jigsaw Tetris-looking thingie. How does a lifeform looking the way it does create and use a giant spaceship? Wouldn't it suffice to be just an organism with extraordinary infectious properties? The movie isn't interested in exploring the myriad ways for the world to be observed or building chills, it just runs a checklist of things the original remake did. (e.g. Remember that axe in the wall in Carpenter's film? Now you know how it got there. Put it on your resume.)
Half remake, half prequel, all unnecessary.
Score: 4/10. Skip it.
"Fright Night (2011)" Review
Sunday, January 1, 2012
I never saw the original Fright Night, but I was familiar with the concept: A kid suspects his neighbor is a vampire. Hijinks ensue. It's a small-time horror-comedy (I think) classic, not really demanding a remake, but they did it. They shouldn't have bothered.
Anton Yelchin (Chekov in the Star Trek reboot) lives in a subdivision outside of Las Vegas with his cougar real estate agent mom. (No, that doesn't mean she sells land to mountain lions.) Though he's nerdyish, he's got an inexplicably hot girlfriend (Imogen Poots - whatever happened to Hollywood renaming actors whose names sound like they fart?) in the Disturbia vein. One day, his former best friend, McLovin (played by McLovin from Superbad), tells him his new next door neighbor, Colin Farrell, is a vampire. Anton doesn't believe him and tells McLovin to get lost because he's no longer into his nerd games. When McLovin disappears, Anton realizes something may be up with Colin and Colin lets Anton know that he knows that Anton suspects that...wait, where is this going? Oh, yeah....hijinks ensuing!
The real surprise of this lumpy tale is that the script was by Marti Noxon, writer of 23 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The structure is very awkward, with McLovin warning Anton and then getting knocked off in the first 20 minutes and then a short pause followed by one chase after another, all of it pretty much predictable. Farrell has a little fun sinking his campy teeth (heh) into the role, but if felt like warmed over Bullseye. Sofia Vergara's less-endowed-but-still-hot sister has a bit part and one of the recent Doctor Whos is funny as a Cris Angel/Russell Brandish magician/vampire hunter with a show at a casino. On the plus side, it's nice to see vampires stick to the rules for a change and blow up in sunlight and not have reflections. Take that, sparkly abominations!
On a Motion Captured podcast around the time Fright Night and some other remakes were coming out, Drew McWeeny was saying that instead of wasting money on IPs that aren't really aching for remakes, Hollywood should be just ripping off the themes for newer ideas without the the baggage of an old movie. With that in mind, after watching this, I pitched my girlfriend this idea: A kid suspects his next door neighbor is a vampire and try to prove it. Little does he know that there are vampires across the street and they're framing the neighbor. Hijinks ensue!
She liked it. She also fell asleep during Fright Night. It's not terrible, just needless and mediocre.
Score: 3/10. Skip it.
Anton Yelchin (Chekov in the Star Trek reboot) lives in a subdivision outside of Las Vegas with his cougar real estate agent mom. (No, that doesn't mean she sells land to mountain lions.) Though he's nerdyish, he's got an inexplicably hot girlfriend (Imogen Poots - whatever happened to Hollywood renaming actors whose names sound like they fart?) in the Disturbia vein. One day, his former best friend, McLovin (played by McLovin from Superbad), tells him his new next door neighbor, Colin Farrell, is a vampire. Anton doesn't believe him and tells McLovin to get lost because he's no longer into his nerd games. When McLovin disappears, Anton realizes something may be up with Colin and Colin lets Anton know that he knows that Anton suspects that...wait, where is this going? Oh, yeah....hijinks ensuing!
The real surprise of this lumpy tale is that the script was by Marti Noxon, writer of 23 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The structure is very awkward, with McLovin warning Anton and then getting knocked off in the first 20 minutes and then a short pause followed by one chase after another, all of it pretty much predictable. Farrell has a little fun sinking his campy teeth (heh) into the role, but if felt like warmed over Bullseye. Sofia Vergara's less-endowed-but-still-hot sister has a bit part and one of the recent Doctor Whos is funny as a Cris Angel/Russell Brandish magician/vampire hunter with a show at a casino. On the plus side, it's nice to see vampires stick to the rules for a change and blow up in sunlight and not have reflections. Take that, sparkly abominations!
On a Motion Captured podcast around the time Fright Night and some other remakes were coming out, Drew McWeeny was saying that instead of wasting money on IPs that aren't really aching for remakes, Hollywood should be just ripping off the themes for newer ideas without the the baggage of an old movie. With that in mind, after watching this, I pitched my girlfriend this idea: A kid suspects his next door neighbor is a vampire and try to prove it. Little does he know that there are vampires across the street and they're framing the neighbor. Hijinks ensue!
She liked it. She also fell asleep during Fright Night. It's not terrible, just needless and mediocre.
Score: 3/10. Skip it.
"Melancholia" Review
Happy New Year! The Mayans say that the world ends this year, so we decided to kick off the last year of Earth with Lars von Trier's Melancholia, in which the Earth is destroyed by the titular planet. Based on this movie, perhaps ending the human race would be a good idea because when the first movie of the year has guaranteed itself a spot at the top of your Worst list, how much hope can you have?
Gawd, where to begin? Opening with a series of Kubrick-wannabe imagery with soaring Wagner music, we see the Earth annihilated. Some of those images will be reprised later, but, oddly, many aren't. Then we get an interminable scene of a stretch limo unable to navigate a tight country road turn. In the back are newlyweds Kirsten Dunst and Eric from True Blood. When they finally walk up to the reception, they're two hours late and everyone has been waiting for them. Didn't they call? Couldn't have someone picked them up? Doesn't von Trier have a tripod for that shaky camera?
It doesn't get better as her father is doddering; her mother sneers a toast about how she doesn't believe in marriage; she has depressed moments which lead her to disappear to take a bath; her boss is there demanding her to create a tag line for an ad campaign; none of it seems real and no one acts remotely like a person on this planet. When she's too bummed out to consummate the nuptials, the marriage is effectively over at that moment. Didn't he notice her moods before proposing and buying her an orchard or did they meet two days earlier? REAL PEOPLE DON'T ACT LIKE THIS!!!!
The second half focuses on her sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) whose husband, Jack "DAMMIT!" Bauer, paid for Dunst's pooch (and intern; don't ask) screw of a wedding as she takes in her now-crippled-by-depression sis while the mysterious planet of Melancholia (so named because "El Destroyo" would've been racist) closes in for the End of the World®. Yawn. As the end nears, the previously catatonic Dunst becomes functional and everyone else falls apart. There's something about a horse not crossing a bridge and you get to check out Dunst's ginormous snoobs (link NSFW, so make sure the boss/kids/girlfriend aren't around), but by the end, you will have wished they'd ended the movie after the overture.
I've never seen a Lars von Trier movie before and now have zero plans on picking up his previous work. What is it about this garbage that attracted this cast? There isn't a single realistic character in the whole mess. Jack Bauer owns an 18-hole golf course and enormous mansion, but we have no idea how he's made his fortune. The wedding reception appears to last all night until the dawn and there's a trailer serving soup on the golf course and I can count the number of times I've even heard of such a thing happening on zero fingers. There's a little boy who doesn't react to anything crazy that's going on; no, "Hey, mom. Where's daddy? Why is it hailing? What's that gigantic planet in the sky? Didn't you have enough of von Trier after he had you cut your clitoris off in that last movie? Can I have the new Pokemon?" None of that.
Dunst won Best Actress at Cannes for her unimpressive performance; it's really limited by the script, but I guess if you cry and show your boobs, you can win. (Anne Hathaway joked about her nudity in Love and Other Drugs and how she thought it was supposed to get an Oscar nomination and after seeing this, she's got a legit beef.) The supporting players are similarly crippled, so I suppose if they made any impression, it's due to their talents and not von Trier's craptastic "writing" and direction. Someone needs to hit him with a planet to spare us all the misery of any other films.
Score: 1/10. Cue the asteroid!
Gawd, where to begin? Opening with a series of Kubrick-wannabe imagery with soaring Wagner music, we see the Earth annihilated. Some of those images will be reprised later, but, oddly, many aren't. Then we get an interminable scene of a stretch limo unable to navigate a tight country road turn. In the back are newlyweds Kirsten Dunst and Eric from True Blood. When they finally walk up to the reception, they're two hours late and everyone has been waiting for them. Didn't they call? Couldn't have someone picked them up? Doesn't von Trier have a tripod for that shaky camera?
It doesn't get better as her father is doddering; her mother sneers a toast about how she doesn't believe in marriage; she has depressed moments which lead her to disappear to take a bath; her boss is there demanding her to create a tag line for an ad campaign; none of it seems real and no one acts remotely like a person on this planet. When she's too bummed out to consummate the nuptials, the marriage is effectively over at that moment. Didn't he notice her moods before proposing and buying her an orchard or did they meet two days earlier? REAL PEOPLE DON'T ACT LIKE THIS!!!!
The second half focuses on her sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) whose husband, Jack "DAMMIT!" Bauer, paid for Dunst's pooch (and intern; don't ask) screw of a wedding as she takes in her now-crippled-by-depression sis while the mysterious planet of Melancholia (so named because "El Destroyo" would've been racist) closes in for the End of the World®. Yawn. As the end nears, the previously catatonic Dunst becomes functional and everyone else falls apart. There's something about a horse not crossing a bridge and you get to check out Dunst's ginormous snoobs (link NSFW, so make sure the boss/kids/girlfriend aren't around), but by the end, you will have wished they'd ended the movie after the overture.
I've never seen a Lars von Trier movie before and now have zero plans on picking up his previous work. What is it about this garbage that attracted this cast? There isn't a single realistic character in the whole mess. Jack Bauer owns an 18-hole golf course and enormous mansion, but we have no idea how he's made his fortune. The wedding reception appears to last all night until the dawn and there's a trailer serving soup on the golf course and I can count the number of times I've even heard of such a thing happening on zero fingers. There's a little boy who doesn't react to anything crazy that's going on; no, "Hey, mom. Where's daddy? Why is it hailing? What's that gigantic planet in the sky? Didn't you have enough of von Trier after he had you cut your clitoris off in that last movie? Can I have the new Pokemon?" None of that.
Dunst won Best Actress at Cannes for her unimpressive performance; it's really limited by the script, but I guess if you cry and show your boobs, you can win. (Anne Hathaway joked about her nudity in Love and Other Drugs and how she thought it was supposed to get an Oscar nomination and after seeing this, she's got a legit beef.) The supporting players are similarly crippled, so I suppose if they made any impression, it's due to their talents and not von Trier's craptastic "writing" and direction. Someone needs to hit him with a planet to spare us all the misery of any other films.
Score: 1/10. Cue the asteroid!
"Blade Runner: The Final Cut" Blu-ray Review
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Do I really need to review this? Duh.
Score: 10/10. Buy it.
Two thoughts about the vision of November 2019 as viewed from 1982:
1. It's not gonna happen. We're eight years away and I don't think mass-produced Daryl Hannah sexbots and Off-World colonies are going to happen by then. Did they really think that 37 years from then all this would happen? Really?
B. It's amusing to see old movies presenting a vision of the future with interstellar travel, but all the computer monitors and TVs are big old CRTs. It's doubly ironic when watching on a giant flatscreen.
Score: 10/10. Buy it.
Two thoughts about the vision of November 2019 as viewed from 1982:
1. It's not gonna happen. We're eight years away and I don't think mass-produced Daryl Hannah sexbots and Off-World colonies are going to happen by then. Did they really think that 37 years from then all this would happen? Really?
B. It's amusing to see old movies presenting a vision of the future with interstellar travel, but all the computer monitors and TVs are big old CRTs. It's doubly ironic when watching on a giant flatscreen.
"The American" Blu-ray Review
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
George Clooney is an assassin on the run after being ambushed by Swedes on a frozen lake (that looks like it's across the lake from where Hanna and her dad's place; heh) in The American, the latest effort from noted (and IMO totally overrated) photographer Anton Corbijn.
After the attack kills his lady friend - though you'll be shocked by the circumstances of her death - he is directed by his boss to head to an isolated mountain village in northern Italy to await his next mission: To construct a custom rifle for a woman who is planning a hit of her own. While marking time, he seeks companionship at a brothel and (of course) falls in love with his favorite whore, Violante Placido, who looks like this:
I know that the guy falling for some babe whom he met the way she meets all the other guys she's boinking - by paying her - is a hoary (heh) trope, but to believe that Clooney, even with his charisma dial turned all the way to the left, needs to pay for women makes disbelief suspension difficult. Yes, he's a loner under instructions to "not make friends" and all glowering and taciturn, but it's not like he's Patton Oswalt. (Never mind the whole conceit that prostitution is a good way for women to meet nice guys who'll take them shopping, as Bongwater once observed on their The Power of Pussy album.)
With very little action, The American is a languidly-paced film to the point of bordering on boring. What keeps you awake is the lovely cinematography and compositions that are well-represented by the Blu-ray as well as copious amounts of skin from Placido. (She'll be in the Ghost Rider sequel, but I don't think she'll be as naked there.) As far as plot, it's pretty much slight enough to fit on a business card and lacking in surprises overall. Corbijn keeps the mood going, but there's simply not enough to latch on to here as the story chooses skeletal inferences over engaging characters and exposition.
As I noted above, the Blu-ray looks great, but as far as extras go, it's only got some deleted scenes (most are just extended versions) and a brief making-of featurette; I didn't listen to Corbijn's commentary track.
Score: 5/10. Rent the Blu-ray if you're inclined; otherwise catch it on cable.
Oh, those wacky Canuckians.
After the attack kills his lady friend - though you'll be shocked by the circumstances of her death - he is directed by his boss to head to an isolated mountain village in northern Italy to await his next mission: To construct a custom rifle for a woman who is planning a hit of her own. While marking time, he seeks companionship at a brothel and (of course) falls in love with his favorite whore, Violante Placido, who looks like this:
I know that the guy falling for some babe whom he met the way she meets all the other guys she's boinking - by paying her - is a hoary (heh) trope, but to believe that Clooney, even with his charisma dial turned all the way to the left, needs to pay for women makes disbelief suspension difficult. Yes, he's a loner under instructions to "not make friends" and all glowering and taciturn, but it's not like he's Patton Oswalt. (Never mind the whole conceit that prostitution is a good way for women to meet nice guys who'll take them shopping, as Bongwater once observed on their The Power of Pussy album.)
With very little action, The American is a languidly-paced film to the point of bordering on boring. What keeps you awake is the lovely cinematography and compositions that are well-represented by the Blu-ray as well as copious amounts of skin from Placido. (She'll be in the Ghost Rider sequel, but I don't think she'll be as naked there.) As far as plot, it's pretty much slight enough to fit on a business card and lacking in surprises overall. Corbijn keeps the mood going, but there's simply not enough to latch on to here as the story chooses skeletal inferences over engaging characters and exposition.
As I noted above, the Blu-ray looks great, but as far as extras go, it's only got some deleted scenes (most are just extended versions) and a brief making-of featurette; I didn't listen to Corbijn's commentary track.
Score: 5/10. Rent the Blu-ray if you're inclined; otherwise catch it on cable.
Oh, those wacky Canuckians.
"Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol" IMAX Review
Tom Cruise is back in action with Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, a summer popcorn flick being released for some reason at Christmas. This also marks live-action directorial debut of Brad Bird, whose animated work includes The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille.
Opening with a brief confusing prologue with Josh Holloway (in what's barely a cameo) and then a rousing prison escape sequence to spring Cruise from a captivity (whose reason is doled out throughout the plot), the IMF trio of Cruise, a returning Simon Pegg, and new face Paula Patton (she was the teacher in Precious) are on the move to Moscow to sneak into the Kremlin to find out who is behind the McGuffin of stolen Russian launch codes. But the bad guys are already there and the USA is framed for blowing the place up, leaving the IMF totally disavowed and on the run. To save the world and clear their names, the three and Jeremy Renner trek to Dubai and Mumbai - it's the *bai World Tour! - to stop the bad guys (and girl) from whatever they're up to.
And that's the problem with Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, the same issue weak James Bond movies have: lame villains. I think the head baddie is trying to end the world for some vague pseudo-scientific reason and the sidekicks are hired guns, but why are they helping a guy bent on triggering global thermonuclear war when they'll have to live on the ruined Earth? One scene implies that one bad guy is disguised as another bad guy, but it makes no sense. Other than a oblique video clip, we never get much sense of who the bad guy is and what he wants to do. I know it's a trope to have the mustache-twirling bad guy monologue about his schemes, but M:IGP could have benefited from a bit of expository detail. (No, that's not something you stick up your butt.)
Bird's action set pieces are quite good, especially Cruise's climb up the tallest building in the world and subsequent chase in a dust storm and the final fight in an automated car-parking tower. There isn't much shaky-cam, but they could've backed the camera up to capture the geography a little. The performances are adequate, but Pegg steals every scene he's in.
I'd heard good things about the IMAX presentation and was considering dropping the $13.75 to see it at the Henry Ford IMAX Theater, but I'm sure glad I didn't.* I sat dead center about four rows from the front and the normal frame most of the movie is in was so large that when it popped to the full 1.44:1 IMAX ratio, it was well above and below the the eyeline; it didn't feel like it was drawing me in more. Perhaps if I'd sat in the back - I was in the back of the line, so those seats were taken when I got into the room - the effect would've been more acute, but seeing it in a nice big normal movie theater will suffice.
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is a quite acceptable action flick that puts more emphasis on the spectacle than the story and thus renders it superfluous. If you're missing the warmth of summer and want some cheap thrills, accept the mission to see it, but don't pay $14 for the ride.
Score: 7/10. Catch a matinee or dollar show at a big-screened theater.
* Because it was a free preview screening, they ran the film ahead past the previews and, most importantly, the hotly anticipated prologue from The Dark Knight Rises introducing Bane. Thanks for nothing, killjoys.
Opening with a brief confusing prologue with Josh Holloway (in what's barely a cameo) and then a rousing prison escape sequence to spring Cruise from a captivity (whose reason is doled out throughout the plot), the IMF trio of Cruise, a returning Simon Pegg, and new face Paula Patton (she was the teacher in Precious) are on the move to Moscow to sneak into the Kremlin to find out who is behind the McGuffin of stolen Russian launch codes. But the bad guys are already there and the USA is framed for blowing the place up, leaving the IMF totally disavowed and on the run. To save the world and clear their names, the three and Jeremy Renner trek to Dubai and Mumbai - it's the *bai World Tour! - to stop the bad guys (and girl) from whatever they're up to.
And that's the problem with Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, the same issue weak James Bond movies have: lame villains. I think the head baddie is trying to end the world for some vague pseudo-scientific reason and the sidekicks are hired guns, but why are they helping a guy bent on triggering global thermonuclear war when they'll have to live on the ruined Earth? One scene implies that one bad guy is disguised as another bad guy, but it makes no sense. Other than a oblique video clip, we never get much sense of who the bad guy is and what he wants to do. I know it's a trope to have the mustache-twirling bad guy monologue about his schemes, but M:IGP could have benefited from a bit of expository detail. (No, that's not something you stick up your butt.)
Bird's action set pieces are quite good, especially Cruise's climb up the tallest building in the world and subsequent chase in a dust storm and the final fight in an automated car-parking tower. There isn't much shaky-cam, but they could've backed the camera up to capture the geography a little. The performances are adequate, but Pegg steals every scene he's in.
I'd heard good things about the IMAX presentation and was considering dropping the $13.75 to see it at the Henry Ford IMAX Theater, but I'm sure glad I didn't.* I sat dead center about four rows from the front and the normal frame most of the movie is in was so large that when it popped to the full 1.44:1 IMAX ratio, it was well above and below the the eyeline; it didn't feel like it was drawing me in more. Perhaps if I'd sat in the back - I was in the back of the line, so those seats were taken when I got into the room - the effect would've been more acute, but seeing it in a nice big normal movie theater will suffice.
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is a quite acceptable action flick that puts more emphasis on the spectacle than the story and thus renders it superfluous. If you're missing the warmth of summer and want some cheap thrills, accept the mission to see it, but don't pay $14 for the ride.
Score: 7/10. Catch a matinee or dollar show at a big-screened theater.
* Because it was a free preview screening, they ran the film ahead past the previews and, most importantly, the hotly anticipated prologue from The Dark Knight Rises introducing Bane. Thanks for nothing, killjoys.
"(Tim Burton's) Alice in Wonderland" Blu-ray Review
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
My review for the theatrical release is here and it stands; this review covers the Blu-ray.
After our beloved PimpVision® - a 51" Sony RPTV - blew its convergence circuits two weeks ago to the day, it was time to upgrade and we ultimately went with a 60" Sharp LED set which arrived today and after some calibration looks downright snazzy. After checking out some bits and pieces of Avatar, it was time to christen it with a movie and since the lion's share of Blu-rays were at home we cracked open the Blu-ray of Alice in Wonderland. We'd seen it in 3D at the show and frankly this is the first time we properly saw it. Without having to contend with the blurry image that fast action and post-conversion brings to the tea party, details we'd totally missed before like monkeys being used as candelabras in the Red Queen's castle were noticed. It looks great. On the extras front, it's a little lightweight, but generally informative especially on the special effects front where you can marvel at how little in the way of actual sets were built. There's a whole lot of green to be seen.
If you liked the movie, definitely pick up the Blu-ray.
After our beloved PimpVision® - a 51" Sony RPTV - blew its convergence circuits two weeks ago to the day, it was time to upgrade and we ultimately went with a 60" Sharp LED set which arrived today and after some calibration looks downright snazzy. After checking out some bits and pieces of Avatar, it was time to christen it with a movie and since the lion's share of Blu-rays were at home we cracked open the Blu-ray of Alice in Wonderland. We'd seen it in 3D at the show and frankly this is the first time we properly saw it. Without having to contend with the blurry image that fast action and post-conversion brings to the tea party, details we'd totally missed before like monkeys being used as candelabras in the Red Queen's castle were noticed. It looks great. On the extras front, it's a little lightweight, but generally informative especially on the special effects front where you can marvel at how little in the way of actual sets were built. There's a whole lot of green to be seen.
If you liked the movie, definitely pick up the Blu-ray.
"Red State" Review
Monday, December 12, 2011
Kevin Smith says he's retiring after his next movie, the hockey flick Hit Somebody. Frankly, he should've quit two movies ago, thus sparing his former fans the one-two letdowns of simply awful Cop Out and now the jaw-droppingly terrible Red State. This has been Smith's passion project for over five years, something he always said was next after whatever he was making or promoting. Supposedly a horror film, the only horror is how bad it is.
A trio of horny high school boys seeking to hook up with a 38-year-old woman one met on the Internet walk into the most obvious trap ever and find themselves held captive by a family of religious weirdos with a ton of guns. (Think: Fred Phelps' godless hate mongers crossed with the Branch Davidians of Waco massacre infamy.) When a sheriff's deputy is killed at the cult's compound, the ATF arrives on the scene and things rapidly degenerate into what can only be described as government-conducted genocide. It's so unrealistic that even as satire, it stretches disbelief suspension beyond the breaking point.
Until these last two flops, my least favorite Smith film was Dogma in which I thought his ambition outstripped is directorial skills to manage his sprawling thesis, but that was his fourth movie; Red State is his tenth and other than some trademark potty talk, there is nothing which indicates this movie was made by Smith. The action direction is haphazard and mistakes shaky camera and narrow-angle shutter for kinetic technique and he is so in love with his script, he allows the sermons by Michael Parks (magnetic as the cult leader) to prattle on until I started nodding off. Less successful are the supporting performances, especially a shrill and unrecognizable Melissa Leo as one of Banks' daughters.
After the shenanigans Smith pulled at Sundance this year - retaining the distribution rights for himself to exhibit it on a road show basis to cover for the fact that no studio wanted to put it out, including longtime backers the Weinstein brothers - and the buzz about the clumsy religion-bashing, I'd been unenthusiastic about watching Red State, but nothing could've prepared be for just how bad the whole thing is.
There were several spots where I wanted to just shut it off, but gutted it out to see just how far down the elevator went. (Do I get a medal?) The characters never quite make it to being two-dimensional and thus with no one to root for and no understanding of the villains other than they be crazy inbred Jeebus rednecks, it's just a grating endurance test. It's sad to see that Smith has crawled up his own fat ass and died, insulated from the need to make competent movies by millions of Twitter followers who will lap up whatever he gives them. Robert Rodriguez has been slipping as of late, but he hasn't slid off the cliff like Kevin Smith. Yet.
Score: 1/10. Skip it. Seriously.
A trio of horny high school boys seeking to hook up with a 38-year-old woman one met on the Internet walk into the most obvious trap ever and find themselves held captive by a family of religious weirdos with a ton of guns. (Think: Fred Phelps' godless hate mongers crossed with the Branch Davidians of Waco massacre infamy.) When a sheriff's deputy is killed at the cult's compound, the ATF arrives on the scene and things rapidly degenerate into what can only be described as government-conducted genocide. It's so unrealistic that even as satire, it stretches disbelief suspension beyond the breaking point.
Until these last two flops, my least favorite Smith film was Dogma in which I thought his ambition outstripped is directorial skills to manage his sprawling thesis, but that was his fourth movie; Red State is his tenth and other than some trademark potty talk, there is nothing which indicates this movie was made by Smith. The action direction is haphazard and mistakes shaky camera and narrow-angle shutter for kinetic technique and he is so in love with his script, he allows the sermons by Michael Parks (magnetic as the cult leader) to prattle on until I started nodding off. Less successful are the supporting performances, especially a shrill and unrecognizable Melissa Leo as one of Banks' daughters.
After the shenanigans Smith pulled at Sundance this year - retaining the distribution rights for himself to exhibit it on a road show basis to cover for the fact that no studio wanted to put it out, including longtime backers the Weinstein brothers - and the buzz about the clumsy religion-bashing, I'd been unenthusiastic about watching Red State, but nothing could've prepared be for just how bad the whole thing is.
There were several spots where I wanted to just shut it off, but gutted it out to see just how far down the elevator went. (Do I get a medal?) The characters never quite make it to being two-dimensional and thus with no one to root for and no understanding of the villains other than they be crazy inbred Jeebus rednecks, it's just a grating endurance test. It's sad to see that Smith has crawled up his own fat ass and died, insulated from the need to make competent movies by millions of Twitter followers who will lap up whatever he gives them. Robert Rodriguez has been slipping as of late, but he hasn't slid off the cliff like Kevin Smith. Yet.
Score: 1/10. Skip it. Seriously.
"Another Earth" Review
Sunday, December 11, 2011
What is an actor to do if they aren't getting good roles? They write one for themselves to star in, frequently leading to fruitful careers. Sylvester Stallone created Rocky; Matt Damon and Ben Afleck co-wrote Good Will Hunting and won an Oscar; Nia Vardalos wrote My Big Fat Greek Wedding which went on to be one of the biggest indie movies of all time. Now you can add Brit Marling to the list as the Sundance Audience Award-winning film, Another Earth, that she co-wrote with director Mike Cahill has launched her career into orbit. She's filming Robert Redford's next movie with more Oscar-winners and nominees to mention; another movie co-starring Ellen Page; and has Arbitrage, co-starring Richard Gere, already in the can. Talk about making your own breaks!
Marling stars as Rhoda, a brilliant young woman - she was accepted to MIT at age 13 - who gets drunk at a party and crashes into another car, killing a pregnant woman and young child, leaving the composer husband in a coma. She gets four years in prison and when she gets out requests a menial job as a high school janitor. She's isolated from the world, but decides to reach out to the man whose life was destroyed by her careless driving. She intends to apologize, but chickens out and pretends to be offering a home cleaning service trial. Over time, she brings order to his life as well as his house, but he doesn't know who she is - as a minor, her records were sealed.
Lurking overhead is the weakest aspect of the movie, the titular other Earth. If you watch the trailer below, you'd think that this mirror planet and the possibility of duplicates of us all is the major plot, but it's a fraction of the story that if it wasn't around, would hardly change the main story of redemption and healing. I wonder if some of the acclaim Another Earth has garnered is because of this superfluous detail, much as the Oscar-nominated nothingburger The Kids Are Alright glossed over its banal plot by making the leads boring lesbians instead of boring heterosexuals. (If you've seen it, I explore the biggest goof the other Earth premise doesn't handle below.)
I had a hard time warming up to Another Earth, but my girlfriend really loved it. I didn't think the relationship between the man - well-played by William Mapother (who will always have "Tom Cruise's half-brother" tag following him around) - and Marling really felt right and the contrived way he doesn't know this woman killed his family makes the inevitable revelation feel formulaic. The look of the film belies its low-budget origins a little too much as well. I also found the way the planets contact each other to be ludicrous. If you knew this other planet was there, you wouldn't try to contact them or send probes for YEARS?!?
While I seem hard on Another Earth, it's not because it's a bad movie but rather because I didn't connect with it; it's just too slight when it could've been more profound. It's a little movie, but that's no excuse for not having bigger ideas.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.
*** SPOILER ZONE BELOW - ONLY READ IF YOU'VE SEEN THE MOVIE (or never plan to) ***
The theme of the movie is that the mirroring of the two Earths diverged when they became aware of each other as shown in the very last shot as the other, clearly more successful Rhoda appears. Now if that means the other Rhoda didn't ruin her life with a car crash AND still had the winning entry in the contest (what would've been her essay?) and came here, then it follows that Mapother's family is intact over there, INCLUDING DADDY! What's going to happen when he travels over to be with his not dead family and finds that they already have a father in the form of their version of him?
Marling stars as Rhoda, a brilliant young woman - she was accepted to MIT at age 13 - who gets drunk at a party and crashes into another car, killing a pregnant woman and young child, leaving the composer husband in a coma. She gets four years in prison and when she gets out requests a menial job as a high school janitor. She's isolated from the world, but decides to reach out to the man whose life was destroyed by her careless driving. She intends to apologize, but chickens out and pretends to be offering a home cleaning service trial. Over time, she brings order to his life as well as his house, but he doesn't know who she is - as a minor, her records were sealed.
Lurking overhead is the weakest aspect of the movie, the titular other Earth. If you watch the trailer below, you'd think that this mirror planet and the possibility of duplicates of us all is the major plot, but it's a fraction of the story that if it wasn't around, would hardly change the main story of redemption and healing. I wonder if some of the acclaim Another Earth has garnered is because of this superfluous detail, much as the Oscar-nominated nothingburger The Kids Are Alright glossed over its banal plot by making the leads boring lesbians instead of boring heterosexuals. (If you've seen it, I explore the biggest goof the other Earth premise doesn't handle below.)
I had a hard time warming up to Another Earth, but my girlfriend really loved it. I didn't think the relationship between the man - well-played by William Mapother (who will always have "Tom Cruise's half-brother" tag following him around) - and Marling really felt right and the contrived way he doesn't know this woman killed his family makes the inevitable revelation feel formulaic. The look of the film belies its low-budget origins a little too much as well. I also found the way the planets contact each other to be ludicrous. If you knew this other planet was there, you wouldn't try to contact them or send probes for YEARS?!?
While I seem hard on Another Earth, it's not because it's a bad movie but rather because I didn't connect with it; it's just too slight when it could've been more profound. It's a little movie, but that's no excuse for not having bigger ideas.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.
*** SPOILER ZONE BELOW - ONLY READ IF YOU'VE SEEN THE MOVIE (or never plan to) ***
The theme of the movie is that the mirroring of the two Earths diverged when they became aware of each other as shown in the very last shot as the other, clearly more successful Rhoda appears. Now if that means the other Rhoda didn't ruin her life with a car crash AND still had the winning entry in the contest (what would've been her essay?) and came here, then it follows that Mapother's family is intact over there, INCLUDING DADDY! What's going to happen when he travels over to be with his not dead family and finds that they already have a father in the form of their version of him?
"The Ides of March" Review
Saturday, December 10, 2011
The Ides of March had Oscar-bait written all over it: Directed and co-written by Oscar-winner George Clooney, starring fellow winners Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei and nominees Ryan Gosling (who has starred in one of every three movies released in 2011) and Paul Giamatti, it should've been a slam dunk for nominations, but pretty much sank without a trace at the box office, shrugged off by the critics? What happened?
Gosling is a hot shot campaign consultant to Clooney, the Democrat (what else?) governor of Pennsylvania who is running for President and whose campaign is working on Ohio. Clooney's candidate is such a paragon of liberal tropes that he makes Obama look like a grubby Republican and if a conservative filmmaker was making this movie, it would've been an obvious satire of the Utopian blather Democrats spew. (e.g. Clooney says that we can prevent wars in the Middle East by having cars that don't use oil, so if elected he will command that all cars in a decade be alternative energy only, as if all that's holding this magical rainbow and unicorn fart-powered dream cars from happening is a lack of some emperor-wizard decreeing it be done.) For all his awesomeness, though, the nomination isn't in the bag as his undefined primary opponent whom we're told no one likes is still challenging, so he desperately needs the endorsement and delegates held by Jeffrey Wright, who isn't letting them go without extracting a plum gig for himself.
Gosling adores Clooney - he's a True Believer - but he's getting nibbles from the opposing camp and takes a meeting with Giamatti, which pisses off Hoffman and sets off a chain of events that intertwine with a scandal skeleton in Clooney's closet that eventually leads to an actual body being found. As Gosling sinks into the mud, his determination to drag everyone else down with him leads to an underwhelming conclusion.
The problem with The Ides of March isn't it's lefty politics - to hear howlers about how the poor decent meek Democrats need to learn how to fight dirty like the mean old Republicans and for left-wing looney bin MSNBC to be shown as a legit news outfit was to be expected going in - but how dull the scandal is and how it reflects on the characters. I suspect that Clooney and company wanted to make a statement about how politics corrodes the souls of good men, but they're too in love with government and power to make the indictment stick. (It's be like me trying to make a movie about how pizza and hot Asian babes are killing baby pandas and that's a bad thing.) A scorched-earth artist like Paddy Chayefsky (whose Network is my 2nd favorite film of all time and still rings true 35 years later) would've argued that evil men go into politics because they're too fat for robbing gas stations.
The performances are all top-notch, if not Oscar-grade, though I'm still baffled as to why Gosling is so adored. He just comes off too blank for me. Clooney is a good director and the script adapted from a play is OK, but the way the story loses gravitas when it should be upping the stakes and the makers unwillingness to really put their politics under an unbiased magnifying glass just makes the compelling parts of the plot less so.
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.
Gosling is a hot shot campaign consultant to Clooney, the Democrat (what else?) governor of Pennsylvania who is running for President and whose campaign is working on Ohio. Clooney's candidate is such a paragon of liberal tropes that he makes Obama look like a grubby Republican and if a conservative filmmaker was making this movie, it would've been an obvious satire of the Utopian blather Democrats spew. (e.g. Clooney says that we can prevent wars in the Middle East by having cars that don't use oil, so if elected he will command that all cars in a decade be alternative energy only, as if all that's holding this magical rainbow and unicorn fart-powered dream cars from happening is a lack of some emperor-wizard decreeing it be done.) For all his awesomeness, though, the nomination isn't in the bag as his undefined primary opponent whom we're told no one likes is still challenging, so he desperately needs the endorsement and delegates held by Jeffrey Wright, who isn't letting them go without extracting a plum gig for himself.
Gosling adores Clooney - he's a True Believer - but he's getting nibbles from the opposing camp and takes a meeting with Giamatti, which pisses off Hoffman and sets off a chain of events that intertwine with a scandal skeleton in Clooney's closet that eventually leads to an actual body being found. As Gosling sinks into the mud, his determination to drag everyone else down with him leads to an underwhelming conclusion.
The problem with The Ides of March isn't it's lefty politics - to hear howlers about how the poor decent meek Democrats need to learn how to fight dirty like the mean old Republicans and for left-wing looney bin MSNBC to be shown as a legit news outfit was to be expected going in - but how dull the scandal is and how it reflects on the characters. I suspect that Clooney and company wanted to make a statement about how politics corrodes the souls of good men, but they're too in love with government and power to make the indictment stick. (It's be like me trying to make a movie about how pizza and hot Asian babes are killing baby pandas and that's a bad thing.) A scorched-earth artist like Paddy Chayefsky (whose Network is my 2nd favorite film of all time and still rings true 35 years later) would've argued that evil men go into politics because they're too fat for robbing gas stations.
The performances are all top-notch, if not Oscar-grade, though I'm still baffled as to why Gosling is so adored. He just comes off too blank for me. Clooney is a good director and the script adapted from a play is OK, but the way the story loses gravitas when it should be upping the stakes and the makers unwillingness to really put their politics under an unbiased magnifying glass just makes the compelling parts of the plot less so.
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.
"Act of Valor" Review
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Act of Valor is getting a lot of push well ahead of its Presidents Day weekend release next year - February 17 24, 2012 - from conservative media and it's easy to see why. The military for the past decade has been almost universally smeared by Hollyweird as crazed Rambos, stupid redneck racist gun freaks, poor minorities and general victims of the corporations that supposedly pulled Dubya's strings to go to war for oil or whatever madness the Left spews. Other than Michael Bay, who (in the words of an AICN writer) "shoots military hardware like porn" and makes icons of our soldiers, we've been treated to a decade of screeds like In the Valley of Elah and Redacted which used our fighting men and women as props to vent their hatred for America. (It must do some grunt proud to know he's wearing 80 lbs. of gear in 120F heat in Jihadistan so that Susan Sarandon can sit comfy in Manhattan believing that he's a time bomb waiting to go off.)
What makes Act of Valor different is that instead of the usual running actors through a mini-boot camp to get them into a semblance of looking and acting like soldiers, the filmmakers have used actual Navy SEALs to portray a fictional story and the result plays out like a fusion of Tom Clancy novels and the Call of Duty video games. Frequently slick and exciting, but somewhat awkward dramatically, Act of Valor has to be graded on a slight curve.
After a terrorist bombing in the Philippines kills the U.S. Ambassador, a female CIA operative in Costa Rica is abducted by a Chechnyan drug and weapons runner's outfit and brutally tortured in the jungle. The SEALs rescue her in the film's best action sequence and uncover evidence of a much larger, scarier plot to infiltrate jihadists with new undetectable suicide vests through drug smuggling tunnels on the Mexican border. As the plot grows, the SEALs trot the globe to hunt down the bad guys and save America.
The action scenes are the best as the SEALs precisely execute their maneuvers while coping with sometimes incredible odds. While I don't doubt the mad skillz of SEALs, the bad guy body counts and sheer percentage of head shots is more videogame than anything. The Call of Duty parallels continue with some nifty first-person views where we see the view through the holo sights and they use graphics to mark the transitions from place to place. If you've played the games, you'll recognize the style.
Where the movie suffers is in asking the SEALs to act in service of some of the hoariest tropes. The lieutenant looks like Peyton Manning and acts about as well as Manning does in commercials. The Charlie Sheen spoof of Top Gun, Hot Shots, made fun of Goose's doomed fate with a character named "Dead Meat" and it's unfortunate that we are able to predict immediately who is going to die. It's not spoiling when if you've seen one movie about a soldier with a baby on the way back home, you can tell what's going to happen. They even have a bit referring to foreshadowing which is too meta for the material.
This is where Act of Valor frustrated me: On one hand, the action is visceral and thrilling - I told the girl taking comments afterward that it was more exciting than Chicago being destroyed in the last Transformers movie - and allowing for some Hollywoodization, it's interesting to see the cool efficiency of the SEALs. (Unlike another Charlie Sheen movie.) The story is Clancyesque, but there are some intriguing aspects to the relationship between the bad guys as childhood friends grow radically apart. That said, the movie rides a wobbly line between pseudo-documentary grit and slick popcorn audience-pleasing and somewhat mawkish emotion in spots. Much of the cinematography is beautiful - really lovely and worthy of a Bay film - and the direction and editing is clear, but there were places that I wished a more traditional storytelling hand was steering things.
One thing that may've slanted my perceptions was at the screening there was a short introductory clip from the directors discussing the movie and how a few bits were done. I love behind-the-scenes stuff on DVDs, but seeing it before the movie made me think throughout about how what I was seeing was made and wondering what was really realistic and what was pumped up for entertainment. There were also no end credits or music; the film just ends. The film may undergo some final tweaks in the 2-1/2 months before it releases, but it looks finished to me.
The boosters of Act of Valor are pushing the great respect our brave fighters are shown. As I said, a decade of bashing has made it long overdue for some positive portrayals of the warriors who keep film critics like me safe to watch movies, but that doesn't mean the film doesn't have some rough edges. I suspect the liberal media will bash it as jingoism and the conservative media will hail it as the Greatest. Movie. Ever. If you want to make a statement of support for movies that don't hate the troops, then by all means hit a matinee and tell Hollyweird what you're willing to shell out your hard-earned cash for, not that they care. If you're less motivated to activism, it's worth watching later.
Score: 7/10. Rent it.
What makes Act of Valor different is that instead of the usual running actors through a mini-boot camp to get them into a semblance of looking and acting like soldiers, the filmmakers have used actual Navy SEALs to portray a fictional story and the result plays out like a fusion of Tom Clancy novels and the Call of Duty video games. Frequently slick and exciting, but somewhat awkward dramatically, Act of Valor has to be graded on a slight curve.
After a terrorist bombing in the Philippines kills the U.S. Ambassador, a female CIA operative in Costa Rica is abducted by a Chechnyan drug and weapons runner's outfit and brutally tortured in the jungle. The SEALs rescue her in the film's best action sequence and uncover evidence of a much larger, scarier plot to infiltrate jihadists with new undetectable suicide vests through drug smuggling tunnels on the Mexican border. As the plot grows, the SEALs trot the globe to hunt down the bad guys and save America.
The action scenes are the best as the SEALs precisely execute their maneuvers while coping with sometimes incredible odds. While I don't doubt the mad skillz of SEALs, the bad guy body counts and sheer percentage of head shots is more videogame than anything. The Call of Duty parallels continue with some nifty first-person views where we see the view through the holo sights and they use graphics to mark the transitions from place to place. If you've played the games, you'll recognize the style.
Where the movie suffers is in asking the SEALs to act in service of some of the hoariest tropes. The lieutenant looks like Peyton Manning and acts about as well as Manning does in commercials. The Charlie Sheen spoof of Top Gun, Hot Shots, made fun of Goose's doomed fate with a character named "Dead Meat" and it's unfortunate that we are able to predict immediately who is going to die. It's not spoiling when if you've seen one movie about a soldier with a baby on the way back home, you can tell what's going to happen. They even have a bit referring to foreshadowing which is too meta for the material.
This is where Act of Valor frustrated me: On one hand, the action is visceral and thrilling - I told the girl taking comments afterward that it was more exciting than Chicago being destroyed in the last Transformers movie - and allowing for some Hollywoodization, it's interesting to see the cool efficiency of the SEALs. (Unlike another Charlie Sheen movie.) The story is Clancyesque, but there are some intriguing aspects to the relationship between the bad guys as childhood friends grow radically apart. That said, the movie rides a wobbly line between pseudo-documentary grit and slick popcorn audience-pleasing and somewhat mawkish emotion in spots. Much of the cinematography is beautiful - really lovely and worthy of a Bay film - and the direction and editing is clear, but there were places that I wished a more traditional storytelling hand was steering things.
One thing that may've slanted my perceptions was at the screening there was a short introductory clip from the directors discussing the movie and how a few bits were done. I love behind-the-scenes stuff on DVDs, but seeing it before the movie made me think throughout about how what I was seeing was made and wondering what was really realistic and what was pumped up for entertainment. There were also no end credits or music; the film just ends. The film may undergo some final tweaks in the 2-1/2 months before it releases, but it looks finished to me.
The boosters of Act of Valor are pushing the great respect our brave fighters are shown. As I said, a decade of bashing has made it long overdue for some positive portrayals of the warriors who keep film critics like me safe to watch movies, but that doesn't mean the film doesn't have some rough edges. I suspect the liberal media will bash it as jingoism and the conservative media will hail it as the Greatest. Movie. Ever. If you want to make a statement of support for movies that don't hate the troops, then by all means hit a matinee and tell Hollyweird what you're willing to shell out your hard-earned cash for, not that they care. If you're less motivated to activism, it's worth watching later.
Score: 7/10. Rent it.
"Midnight In Paris" Review
Monday, November 28, 2011
Woody Allen had the biggest hit of his career with the winsome Midnight in Paris, a winsome fantasia about nostalgia and artistic angst.
Owen Wilson has the Woody surrogate role as a successful Hollywood screenwriter on vacation in Paris with his shallow harpy of a fiance (Rachel McAdams) and her rich parents. He's struggling with writing a novel about a man who works in a "nostalgia shop" selling vintage knick-knacks. One night, while lost trying to find his way back to the hotel, he is picked up by a classic motor car and when he gets out, he finds himself in the 1920s, hanging out with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston, Loki from Thor, and Allison Pill, the drummer of Sex Bob-omb in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody), and many more. If you're an art or literature buff, it's a hoot. During his return visits, he is beguiled by Marion Cotillard because, well, she's Marion Cotillard and, unlike McAdams, she's not a grating beyatch.
I had a hard time getting into Midnight in Paris at first because of the typical Woody dialog in which everyone sounds like Woody - all hyper-literate and unrelated to natural vocal cadences. However, when Wilson starts time-tripping it mellows out and becomes a nice ride. It's been compared to his 1985 classic, The Purple Rose of Cairo, in it's conceit of impossible co-mingling but this isn't as good because the modern "reality" is clearly so deficient to the Roaring Twenties, but Woody addresses this in an insight late in the picture.
Woody will be turning 76 in a few days and he'd probably benefit from cutting back from his annual release schedule in favor of alternating years because for every little gem like Midnight in Paris or 2008's Vicki Cristina Barcelona - I still need to catch up with 2005's Match Point (are you noticing the pattern here?) - he's had twice as many facepalms that are watering down his legacy. (He will burn in Hell for Annie Hall winning over Star Wars, though.)
My girlfriend actually liked Midnight in Paris more than I did because she appreciated some of the references more than I did. (I had to pause the movie and have a lengthy riff involving a Jean-Paul Sartre play explained to me. Sue me; I went to public school.) It's not profound, but it is a nice light treat and worth a look.
Score: 6/10. Rent it.
This trailer is TERRIBLE! It focuses on the worst part - the modern day stuff - and consigns the magic to a few quick flashes. It's a miracle anyone wanted to see this movie based on what's here.
Owen Wilson has the Woody surrogate role as a successful Hollywood screenwriter on vacation in Paris with his shallow harpy of a fiance (Rachel McAdams) and her rich parents. He's struggling with writing a novel about a man who works in a "nostalgia shop" selling vintage knick-knacks. One night, while lost trying to find his way back to the hotel, he is picked up by a classic motor car and when he gets out, he finds himself in the 1920s, hanging out with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston, Loki from Thor, and Allison Pill, the drummer of Sex Bob-omb in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody), and many more. If you're an art or literature buff, it's a hoot. During his return visits, he is beguiled by Marion Cotillard because, well, she's Marion Cotillard and, unlike McAdams, she's not a grating beyatch.
I had a hard time getting into Midnight in Paris at first because of the typical Woody dialog in which everyone sounds like Woody - all hyper-literate and unrelated to natural vocal cadences. However, when Wilson starts time-tripping it mellows out and becomes a nice ride. It's been compared to his 1985 classic, The Purple Rose of Cairo, in it's conceit of impossible co-mingling but this isn't as good because the modern "reality" is clearly so deficient to the Roaring Twenties, but Woody addresses this in an insight late in the picture.
Woody will be turning 76 in a few days and he'd probably benefit from cutting back from his annual release schedule in favor of alternating years because for every little gem like Midnight in Paris or 2008's Vicki Cristina Barcelona - I still need to catch up with 2005's Match Point (are you noticing the pattern here?) - he's had twice as many facepalms that are watering down his legacy. (He will burn in Hell for Annie Hall winning over Star Wars, though.)
My girlfriend actually liked Midnight in Paris more than I did because she appreciated some of the references more than I did. (I had to pause the movie and have a lengthy riff involving a Jean-Paul Sartre play explained to me. Sue me; I went to public school.) It's not profound, but it is a nice light treat and worth a look.
Score: 6/10. Rent it.
This trailer is TERRIBLE! It focuses on the worst part - the modern day stuff - and consigns the magic to a few quick flashes. It's a miracle anyone wanted to see this movie based on what's here.
"Trespass" Review
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Peruse the shelves of your video store - whoops, I'm showing my age, I mean browse Netflix - and you'll see loads of movies starring Big Name Movie Stars that you've never heard of. I'm not talking Wesley Snipes either. How does a movie starring a pair of Academy Award-winners, directed by the generally competent Joel Schumacher get dumped straight to video and VOD? How did producers spend an estimated $35 million producing a movie to gross about $16,000 in theaters? Is Trespass - no relation to the Ice-T/Ice Cube flick from the early-Nineties - really that terrible?
No, but it doesn't mean it's all that good. Nicolas "Will meals be provided?" Cage and Nicole Kidman star as a rich couple with a minor problem. No, not their cherry bomb teen daughter who wants to go to a party but the gang of masked gunmen who want the millions in diamonds and/or cash they believe are in the safe. Hijinks ensue and by hijinks I mean lots of yelling and screaming and injury and yelling and screaming and "shocking" plot twists. Oh, and more yelling and screaming.
The script relies too much on red herrings and revelations to keep things moving, but by the end there have been a few too many double-crosses and crazy people delusions to keep things grounded. (On further reflection I realized that one revelation moots a whole bunch of other stuff they've shown us, so I'm not really sure what the heck was happening and I'm wondering if the filmmakers knew either?)
Schumacher hustles everything along and it's only 90 minutes or so, but at it's core, if it had less swearing and starred Ashley Judd and Bruce Boxleitner, it could've been a Lifetime movie. Cage's readiness to make anything for a check is legendary, but what was the attraction to Kidman? Did she see this as her chance to make a Panic Room, the movie she started shooting and had to drop out of after being injured early in shooting and being replaced by Jodie Foster? What happened to her career? She still looks good; can't Julianne Moore spare a part for her?
Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.
No, but it doesn't mean it's all that good. Nicolas "Will meals be provided?" Cage and Nicole Kidman star as a rich couple with a minor problem. No, not their cherry bomb teen daughter who wants to go to a party but the gang of masked gunmen who want the millions in diamonds and/or cash they believe are in the safe. Hijinks ensue and by hijinks I mean lots of yelling and screaming and injury and yelling and screaming and "shocking" plot twists. Oh, and more yelling and screaming.
The script relies too much on red herrings and revelations to keep things moving, but by the end there have been a few too many double-crosses and crazy people delusions to keep things grounded. (On further reflection I realized that one revelation moots a whole bunch of other stuff they've shown us, so I'm not really sure what the heck was happening and I'm wondering if the filmmakers knew either?)
Schumacher hustles everything along and it's only 90 minutes or so, but at it's core, if it had less swearing and starred Ashley Judd and Bruce Boxleitner, it could've been a Lifetime movie. Cage's readiness to make anything for a check is legendary, but what was the attraction to Kidman? Did she see this as her chance to make a Panic Room, the movie she started shooting and had to drop out of after being injured early in shooting and being replaced by Jodie Foster? What happened to her career? She still looks good; can't Julianne Moore spare a part for her?
Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.
"Sleeping Beauty" Review
Saturday, November 26, 2011
My one-sentence review for Stanley Kubrick's dying film, Eyes Wide Shut, was that he somehow managed to make a movie featuring naked Nicole Kidman and rich weirdo orgies boring. As ridiculous as that mess was, there's a new opaque hunk of supposedly erotic art house weirdness in town that manages to suck any remaining molecules of atmosphere from the already airless genre: Sleeping Beauty. No, it's not anything like the fairy tale.
Here's the major selling point of this thing: Emily Browning (Sucker Punch's Baby Doll) spends half the movie totally naked. That she's (willingly) drugged unconscious for wealthy old guys to paw over is the gruesome price you pay for seeing the goodies. While she's beautiful and so porcelain-complexioned that she looks like she's made of china, the movie is so listlessly skeevy and her character so poorly-defined that there's nothing to grasp on to. The Internet was invented to grant access to the "good parts" without have endure the aimless non-plot, so get to Googling, kids, cuz there's hardly anything to discuss about this as a movie.
Browning is a student who apparently needs to work several jobs and volunteer for medical research when she's not possibly whoring at an upscale bar when she answers an ad for a job that entails wearing lingerie while serving creepy old rich people. That the other girls are way more naked isn't really explained. Then she's offered a promotion: For more money she will be drugged into a deep sleep for guys to molest as they see fit short of penetration and the main thought I had while watching these scenes was how she managed to not react to the abuse she gets from one John in particular.
The problem is that we have as a non-perv audience is that we have no effing idea what Browning is about. There are allusions to her tramping, but no details as to what she's actually up to. She gets evicted by her roommates for non-payment of rent, but goes and rents a luxury apartment with her new income. Worst is when she lets a friend commit suicide rather than try and help him, ironically showing the most emotion in the whole piece. For a moment it seemed like writer-director Julia Leigh was going to fill in the blanks, but alas she doesn't. There is so little substance to Sleeping Beauty that I think most critics who are praising it simply projected their views of exploitation of women and other bogeymen upon the blank whiteness of the frame and read the imagined Rorschach. (I also think if a man had made this exact same film, he would have been pilloried. Somehow, having a woman calling the shots makes it all better.)
Unless you want to marvel at the naked, nubile Browning tossed around like a sack of grain without flinching, there's nothing here worth waiting for nothing to happen when you could spend the time watching an exciting muddled mess of a musing about exploitation of women, namely her Sucker Punch. She's a lot hotter in her little sailor girl outfit slaying dragons than totally nude here.
Score: 2/10. Skip it. Watch Sucker Punch twice instead.
Here's the major selling point of this thing: Emily Browning (Sucker Punch's Baby Doll) spends half the movie totally naked. That she's (willingly) drugged unconscious for wealthy old guys to paw over is the gruesome price you pay for seeing the goodies. While she's beautiful and so porcelain-complexioned that she looks like she's made of china, the movie is so listlessly skeevy and her character so poorly-defined that there's nothing to grasp on to. The Internet was invented to grant access to the "good parts" without have endure the aimless non-plot, so get to Googling, kids, cuz there's hardly anything to discuss about this as a movie.
Browning is a student who apparently needs to work several jobs and volunteer for medical research when she's not possibly whoring at an upscale bar when she answers an ad for a job that entails wearing lingerie while serving creepy old rich people. That the other girls are way more naked isn't really explained. Then she's offered a promotion: For more money she will be drugged into a deep sleep for guys to molest as they see fit short of penetration and the main thought I had while watching these scenes was how she managed to not react to the abuse she gets from one John in particular.
The problem is that we have as a non-perv audience is that we have no effing idea what Browning is about. There are allusions to her tramping, but no details as to what she's actually up to. She gets evicted by her roommates for non-payment of rent, but goes and rents a luxury apartment with her new income. Worst is when she lets a friend commit suicide rather than try and help him, ironically showing the most emotion in the whole piece. For a moment it seemed like writer-director Julia Leigh was going to fill in the blanks, but alas she doesn't. There is so little substance to Sleeping Beauty that I think most critics who are praising it simply projected their views of exploitation of women and other bogeymen upon the blank whiteness of the frame and read the imagined Rorschach. (I also think if a man had made this exact same film, he would have been pilloried. Somehow, having a woman calling the shots makes it all better.)
Unless you want to marvel at the naked, nubile Browning tossed around like a sack of grain without flinching, there's nothing here worth waiting for nothing to happen when you could spend the time watching an exciting muddled mess of a musing about exploitation of women, namely her Sucker Punch. She's a lot hotter in her little sailor girl outfit slaying dragons than totally nude here.
Score: 2/10. Skip it. Watch Sucker Punch twice instead.
"Tower Heist" Review
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Competently made but generally pointless, Tower Heist is a cut-rate Ocean's 11 wannabe that is so vanilla, it's hard to get to get worked up about it. I'm just glad I snuck into it.
After a sleazy Bernie Madoff-type Wall Street (Alan Alda) loses the pension funds of the workers of The Tower, a ultra-high-end NYC apartment skyscraper on Central Park West, the general manager (Ben Stiller) who asked Alda to manage the funds devises a complicated scheme to break into a safe in Alda's penthouse they believe holds $20 million. Needing some profession criminal advice, Stiller recruits his neighbor, Eddie Murphy. Hijinks ensue somewhat.
Tower Heist is a well-made movie with nice cinematography and some subtle character moments at times, but it never rises to anything remotely resembling rousing. Murphy just recycles three-decade old Reggie Hammond motormouth schtick unaware that no one says the n-word anymore in movies (other than Evil White People), but it could've been Chris Tucker, so we should be minimally thankful for that.
There are a few good laughs, but little ambition here. If it comes on cable on a rainy afternoon and you're not particularly motivated to surf around for something else, it won't make you suicidal to watch. (There's a quote for the DVD box!)
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.
After a sleazy Bernie Madoff-type Wall Street (Alan Alda) loses the pension funds of the workers of The Tower, a ultra-high-end NYC apartment skyscraper on Central Park West, the general manager (Ben Stiller) who asked Alda to manage the funds devises a complicated scheme to break into a safe in Alda's penthouse they believe holds $20 million. Needing some profession criminal advice, Stiller recruits his neighbor, Eddie Murphy. Hijinks ensue somewhat.
Tower Heist is a well-made movie with nice cinematography and some subtle character moments at times, but it never rises to anything remotely resembling rousing. Murphy just recycles three-decade old Reggie Hammond motormouth schtick unaware that no one says the n-word anymore in movies (other than Evil White People), but it could've been Chris Tucker, so we should be minimally thankful for that.
There are a few good laughs, but little ambition here. If it comes on cable on a rainy afternoon and you're not particularly motivated to surf around for something else, it won't make you suicidal to watch. (There's a quote for the DVD box!)
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.
"Paul" Review
Monday, November 14, 2011
You probably recognize the nerd stars, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, of the disappointing sci-fi comedy Paul from their pairing in cult genre comedies Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz so it's a little curious as to how flat Paul turns out despite the how it should have been with its pedigree. The story of a pair of British geeks who start off at the San Diego Comic Con and travel the Southwest in an RV and then encounter an honest-to-goodness alien named Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen) could've been a hoot, but ends up a slack - not slacker - yarn laden with cliches.
I think the problem begins with the script by Frost and Pegg. Pegg co-wrote Shaun and Fuzz with those films' director, Edgar Wright, but the swap of Wright for Frost and then having the pages directed by Adventureland and Superbad shot-caller Greg Mottola just never catches fire. Too many of the gags are really obvious Star Wars references and there's more interest in bashing Christians as ignorant clowns than really tweaking the foibles of the Nerd Nation who can take a punch and would revel in some humor that's smarter than a honky-tonk band playing the "Cantina Theme."
The CGI effects integrating the alien into the scenes are seamless and the performances are uniformly OK, especially Kristen Wiig as an aforementioned Bible victim who cuts loose; she manages what was written as a really nasty stereotype and manages to make it somewhat sympathetic. It takes a bit to get used to Rogen's basso voice coming out of the skinny alien body, but you'll eventually roll with it.
Proving far less than the sum of its parts, Paul isn't a so much a bad movie as movie that's not very good.
Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.
Trailer is here; they didn't allow embedding.
I think the problem begins with the script by Frost and Pegg. Pegg co-wrote Shaun and Fuzz with those films' director, Edgar Wright, but the swap of Wright for Frost and then having the pages directed by Adventureland and Superbad shot-caller Greg Mottola just never catches fire. Too many of the gags are really obvious Star Wars references and there's more interest in bashing Christians as ignorant clowns than really tweaking the foibles of the Nerd Nation who can take a punch and would revel in some humor that's smarter than a honky-tonk band playing the "Cantina Theme."
The CGI effects integrating the alien into the scenes are seamless and the performances are uniformly OK, especially Kristen Wiig as an aforementioned Bible victim who cuts loose; she manages what was written as a really nasty stereotype and manages to make it somewhat sympathetic. It takes a bit to get used to Rogen's basso voice coming out of the skinny alien body, but you'll eventually roll with it.
Proving far less than the sum of its parts, Paul isn't a so much a bad movie as movie that's not very good.
Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.
Trailer is here; they didn't allow embedding.
October 2011 Review Roundup
Monday, October 31, 2011
Another slow month as TV ate up too much time.
Oct. 2 - Wayne's World (8/10)
Oct. 4 - Footloose (2011) (4/10)
Oct. 12 - We Are The Night (6/10)
Oct. 15 - The Empire Strikes Back (10/10)
Oct. 16 - Real Steel (8/10)
Oct. 31 - The Crow (8/10)
Month's Movies Watched: 6
Previously Unseen: 3
Theatrical: 2
Home: 4
=====
Year-To-Date: 92
YTD First-Timers: 76
YTD Theatrical: 33
YTD Home: 59
Oct. 2 - Wayne's World (8/10)
Oct. 4 - Footloose (2011) (4/10)
Oct. 12 - We Are The Night (6/10)
Oct. 15 - The Empire Strikes Back (10/10)
Oct. 16 - Real Steel (8/10)
Oct. 31 - The Crow (8/10)
Month's Movies Watched: 6
Previously Unseen: 3
Theatrical: 2
Home: 4
=====
Year-To-Date: 92
YTD First-Timers: 76
YTD Theatrical: 33
YTD Home: 59
"The Crow" Blu-ray
The Crow has always carried with it a macabre mystique due to the tragic accidental shooting death of star Brandon (son of Bruce) Lee during production. (It's really easy to spot when they use a body double: If you aren't seeing his face, it's the double.) But there is more to its lasting appeal than Lee's death that's made it a lasting cultural touchstone which lead to even South Park making this crack a dozen years after its 1994 release:
Killer, huh? (In case you haven't seen the full episode, Satan shows up dressed as The Crow.)
Anyways, it's been ages since I've watched the whole movie straight through and I'd forgotten how briskly paced, almost impressionistic the first half was in spelling out the scenario of Eric Draven and this fiance, Shelly, being murdered on Devil's Night, the day before their Halloween wedding and how Eric crawls from the grave a year later and with the invulnerability that a crow grants him hunts down and kills his and Shelly's killers. There is very little extraneous stuff in the first half, though it slows a bit as the original gang of knuckleheads is dispatched and the focus switches to their master, Michael Wincott, and his half-sister (Bai Ling in her American film debut) and their interest in this interloper with mystical powers.
Director Alex Proyas followed The Crow up with the similarly dark and moody Dark City in 1998, but the new millennium saw him making lackluster films such as Big Willie vs. the Evil Robots, er, I meant I, Robot and the Nic Cage Doomsday bum-out Knowing. The rain-soaked, monochromatic nighttime setting is pretty well rendered in this Blu-ray transfer. There was a little noise in the reds of the first optical shot showing the crime scene in the miniature's window, but it was isolated to there and it generally looks good and clear with all the black and black imagery. The audio was less impressive, but more a limitation of the source track than a problem with the disc.
On the extras front, I didn't listen to the Proyas commentary yet or watch the 33-minute interview with a seriously twitchy creator James O'Barr, but the archival interview behind-the scenes was interesting and sad as you realize how articulate and intellectual Lee was. The Extended Scenes are better described as Rough Cut First Edit Scenes as they feature much more violence, especially the addition of a poor woman at the arcade T-Bird and boys are introduced blowing up who is terrorized and left trapped in the exploding building.
The Crow isn't a flawless or unqualified "great" movie, but as a mood piece and Goth-comic touchstone it's got its merits. This new Blu-ray is available for around $10-$12 if you know where to shop, so there's no reason for fans to skip adding it to their collections.
Score: 8/10. Buy it.
Killer, huh? (In case you haven't seen the full episode, Satan shows up dressed as The Crow.)
Anyways, it's been ages since I've watched the whole movie straight through and I'd forgotten how briskly paced, almost impressionistic the first half was in spelling out the scenario of Eric Draven and this fiance, Shelly, being murdered on Devil's Night, the day before their Halloween wedding and how Eric crawls from the grave a year later and with the invulnerability that a crow grants him hunts down and kills his and Shelly's killers. There is very little extraneous stuff in the first half, though it slows a bit as the original gang of knuckleheads is dispatched and the focus switches to their master, Michael Wincott, and his half-sister (Bai Ling in her American film debut) and their interest in this interloper with mystical powers.
Director Alex Proyas followed The Crow up with the similarly dark and moody Dark City in 1998, but the new millennium saw him making lackluster films such as Big Willie vs. the Evil Robots, er, I meant I, Robot and the Nic Cage Doomsday bum-out Knowing. The rain-soaked, monochromatic nighttime setting is pretty well rendered in this Blu-ray transfer. There was a little noise in the reds of the first optical shot showing the crime scene in the miniature's window, but it was isolated to there and it generally looks good and clear with all the black and black imagery. The audio was less impressive, but more a limitation of the source track than a problem with the disc.
On the extras front, I didn't listen to the Proyas commentary yet or watch the 33-minute interview with a seriously twitchy creator James O'Barr, but the archival interview behind-the scenes was interesting and sad as you realize how articulate and intellectual Lee was. The Extended Scenes are better described as Rough Cut First Edit Scenes as they feature much more violence, especially the addition of a poor woman at the arcade T-Bird and boys are introduced blowing up who is terrorized and left trapped in the exploding building.
The Crow isn't a flawless or unqualified "great" movie, but as a mood piece and Goth-comic touchstone it's got its merits. This new Blu-ray is available for around $10-$12 if you know where to shop, so there's no reason for fans to skip adding it to their collections.
Score: 8/10. Buy it.
"Real Steel" Review
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Imagine what a movie about a down-on-his-luck robot boxing fighter stuck with an 11-year-old son he barely knows from an ex-girlfriend who has passed away who finds a gutsy old sparring bot that the kid spruces up and they take to a title fight against the World Robot Boxing champ would be like? Got it in your head? Congratulations, you've just plotted out Real Steel! However, the movie manages to pull of a super neat trick: Despite not really having a single surprise in its entire story, it manages to be a rock 'em, sock 'em good time without insulting your intelligence.
It really could've been a corny, treacly mess, but the kid, Dakota Goyo, is cute and precocious without you wishing a robot would fall on him. He's bright and behaves exactly as a kid who has a robot that can mimic him dancing would act. Jackman is excellent as the shifty hustler who learns to have some integrity. (Awwwww...) And the robot fights benefit from having seamless digital effects and a clear sense of pacing and geography, not relying on shaky cam and edit fu to provide energy. I've managaged to miss all of director Shawn Levy's previous movies (both Night at the Museum flicks; the Steve Martin Cheaper by the Dozen and Pink Panther remakes) other than last year's nice Steve Carrell/Tina Fey comedy Date Night, but this is a slick bit of kit.
"Predictable" is usually a pejorative and it would apply to Real Steel if it wasn't just so well done. I saw a review that dubbed it ROCK-E and that's right on the money; the crowd at my showing was cheering and clapping. (The time I saw Rocky IV at the old Americana theater with an opening weekend crowd going nuts was a singular experience.) Even my girlfriend, whom I pretty much dragged along and went in expecting to hate it, grudgingly admitted to liking it. When family-friendly is considered another pair of dirty words, it's cool to see something for kids of all ages that doesn't make the older half feel dirty for being there.
A couple of quibbles: The kid doesn't seem to be too affected by the death of his Mom - if Disney flicks have no problem with whacking Mom, why so shy here, especially when it could've led to the improbably cute roboboxer mechanic Evangeline Lilly balking at being a surrogate mother. I suppose they didn't want to go too heavy on the maudlin. Also, for a movie set in 2027, the product placement is pretty 2011 - Sprint will still have the same slogan, Bing will have stadium naming rights, and Microsoft will only be up to the "Xbox 720" with the same logo design as the Xbox 360. Other than a few futuristic-looking cars and the cell phones and computers having transparent glass screens (have you ever tried to use a computer where the windows have transparency turned on so you can see through them? Then you know clear screens wouldn't work) there is little to indicate this is the future.
However, all told, unless you're a cynical indie hipster hater opposed to having fun at the movies, Real Steel is the real entertainment deal. Also, if you're in Detroit, it's fun to play "spot the locations."
Score: 8/10. Catch a matinee.
It really could've been a corny, treacly mess, but the kid, Dakota Goyo, is cute and precocious without you wishing a robot would fall on him. He's bright and behaves exactly as a kid who has a robot that can mimic him dancing would act. Jackman is excellent as the shifty hustler who learns to have some integrity. (Awwwww...) And the robot fights benefit from having seamless digital effects and a clear sense of pacing and geography, not relying on shaky cam and edit fu to provide energy. I've managaged to miss all of director Shawn Levy's previous movies (both Night at the Museum flicks; the Steve Martin Cheaper by the Dozen and Pink Panther remakes) other than last year's nice Steve Carrell/Tina Fey comedy Date Night, but this is a slick bit of kit.
"Predictable" is usually a pejorative and it would apply to Real Steel if it wasn't just so well done. I saw a review that dubbed it ROCK-E and that's right on the money; the crowd at my showing was cheering and clapping. (The time I saw Rocky IV at the old Americana theater with an opening weekend crowd going nuts was a singular experience.) Even my girlfriend, whom I pretty much dragged along and went in expecting to hate it, grudgingly admitted to liking it. When family-friendly is considered another pair of dirty words, it's cool to see something for kids of all ages that doesn't make the older half feel dirty for being there.
A couple of quibbles: The kid doesn't seem to be too affected by the death of his Mom - if Disney flicks have no problem with whacking Mom, why so shy here, especially when it could've led to the improbably cute roboboxer mechanic Evangeline Lilly balking at being a surrogate mother. I suppose they didn't want to go too heavy on the maudlin. Also, for a movie set in 2027, the product placement is pretty 2011 - Sprint will still have the same slogan, Bing will have stadium naming rights, and Microsoft will only be up to the "Xbox 720" with the same logo design as the Xbox 360. Other than a few futuristic-looking cars and the cell phones and computers having transparent glass screens (have you ever tried to use a computer where the windows have transparency turned on so you can see through them? Then you know clear screens wouldn't work) there is little to indicate this is the future.
However, all told, unless you're a cynical indie hipster hater opposed to having fun at the movies, Real Steel is the real entertainment deal. Also, if you're in Detroit, it's fun to play "spot the locations."
Score: 8/10. Catch a matinee.
"We Are the Night" Review
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
It's safe to say that vampires in pop culture these days are ubiquitous to the point of obnoxiousness. Whether in goth fashions at the mall to movies and TV shows populated with them, it's hard to swing a dead rat without hitting some sort of undead thing. While the various stories put their own twists on the genre - e.g. Twilight's abominations don't blow up in the Sun while The Vampire Diaries uses magic rings to grant daywalking privileges - it's hard to find new story blood in the old blood-sucking stones. In search of a different spin, we head to Berlin for We Are the Night, a slick German (I watched an amusingly dubbed version) production with a few twists before collapsing into convention.
Lena (you haven't heard of any of the actresses, so I won't bother) is a scruffy street urchin pulling petty crimes. One night, at a rave, she encounters Louise, who as we've seen in the prologue possesses some superpowers; she and her two younger companions have killed all the passengers and crew of an aircraft and flee the scene by merely hopping out the door in mid-air. She bites Lena, sending her on the path to vampiredom. On Lena's trail is a young cop who had encountered her before and is investigating the vampire gangs' crime scene. He realizes that she's mixed up in the hijinks and her forbidden attraction to him leads to the predictable complications for the vamps (see what I did there?) and him.
Where We Are the Night is best is in its edgy German energy and gritty, stylish visuals. (The way Lena's transformation is shown in one seamless CGI-enhanced shot is nifty. You can glimpse it at :51 of the trailer below.) While not as over-the-top as Run Lola Run, its use of European beauty sensibilities actresses immediately sets gringo viewers off-kilter. The rules of the world are mix of the traditional (e.g. fire BAD!) and novel (i.e. there are only female vamps and they have the ability to walk on walls and ceilings) and while that's cool, the story beats eventually slip into the trope rut leading to unsurprising developments. There is also some confusing inconsistency as to when they can eat people as one victim is offed, but their companion is somehow off-limits.
Perhaps all these vampire tales are doomed to run into the same sorts of plot ruts because there are only so many ways they can play out. But if you're bored of angst-filled glittery mopey vampire bohunks and willing to try some grrrl-powered Teutonic trollops, give We Are the Night a tumble.
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.
Lena (you haven't heard of any of the actresses, so I won't bother) is a scruffy street urchin pulling petty crimes. One night, at a rave, she encounters Louise, who as we've seen in the prologue possesses some superpowers; she and her two younger companions have killed all the passengers and crew of an aircraft and flee the scene by merely hopping out the door in mid-air. She bites Lena, sending her on the path to vampiredom. On Lena's trail is a young cop who had encountered her before and is investigating the vampire gangs' crime scene. He realizes that she's mixed up in the hijinks and her forbidden attraction to him leads to the predictable complications for the vamps (see what I did there?) and him.
Where We Are the Night is best is in its edgy German energy and gritty, stylish visuals. (The way Lena's transformation is shown in one seamless CGI-enhanced shot is nifty. You can glimpse it at :51 of the trailer below.) While not as over-the-top as Run Lola Run, its use of European beauty sensibilities actresses immediately sets gringo viewers off-kilter. The rules of the world are mix of the traditional (e.g. fire BAD!) and novel (i.e. there are only female vamps and they have the ability to walk on walls and ceilings) and while that's cool, the story beats eventually slip into the trope rut leading to unsurprising developments. There is also some confusing inconsistency as to when they can eat people as one victim is offed, but their companion is somehow off-limits.
Perhaps all these vampire tales are doomed to run into the same sorts of plot ruts because there are only so many ways they can play out. But if you're bored of angst-filled glittery mopey vampire bohunks and willing to try some grrrl-powered Teutonic trollops, give We Are the Night a tumble.
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.
"Footloose (2011)" Review
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Have you seen Footloose, the 1984 kids-gotta-dance movie starring Kevin Bacon? Sure you have. After some hayseed Southern town suffers a tragic auto accident that kills several high-schoolers, the town - at the urging of Rev. John Lithgow - bans dancing. In comes Bacon from out of town where he can't believe the yokels are so backwards, but he makes friends with Chris "Sean's brother, sorta like Jim Belushi" Penn and attracts the eye of Rev. Lithgow's wild rebellious daughter, Lori Singer. After several iconic Eighties pop tunes and montages, Bacon restores dancing to Yokelslavia and everyone buys the soundtrack cassette. The end.
Well, replace Lithgow with Dennis Quaid; Singer with some girl who looks a little like Jennifer Aniston and has really blue eyes; Penn with a hillbilly John Cusack; the friend played by Secretariat Jessica Parker with a black girl; and Bacon with a discount store Skeet Ulrich (himself a discount Johnny Depp); and toss in some modern country and Dirrrty South hip-hop and you've got the new - strike that - you've got the utterly recycled and unnecessary Footloose (2011 Edition). I'm not sure what co-writer and director Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow; Black Snake Moan) was trying to accomplish other than make a "green" movie because just about everything is recycled from the original.
Not only is the plot almost beat-for-beat ripped off (relive the Bible quotations scene again!), but they use Kenny Loggins' title tune (twice) and Deniece Williams' "Let's Hear It For The Boy" during the training-the-hayseed-to-dance scene. Just as there's a fine line between clever and stupid, the line between homage and laziness isn't blurred into irrelevance. (See below.) Really early on, I was bored and with a few exceptions, I never thought I was getting much out of this other than delaying getting home to do my laundry.
There is just no need for this movie to be remade now or ever. I saw it a quarter-century ago and haven't given it another thought since. It's not poorly made - the cast is OK and the stereotyping is kept under control - but other than showing the near-Utopian racial harmony (break dancing and boot scooting co-exist, though how in a town where dancing has been banned do they get the mad skillz to compete in a Step Up movie is a mystery), there's just nothing new here. It's just all so....unneeded.
I heard a young boy, perhaps 12, in the theater hall afterwards exclaiming that "it was awesome," so perhaps I'm just being an old fuddy duddy, but it's more likely that having been there and seen it the first time around, I don't need this lazy nostalgia trip.
Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable if you've never seen the original before.
The feedback loop of the original and its place in the cultural timeline can be summed up by this video. The first half is the scene in the original where a frustrated Bacon blows off steam in an abandoned factory. (I'd forgotten the car; Skeet Jr. drives the same VW in the remake. More laziness.) What made me smirk during the movie tonight was the second half, from Hot Rod where Andy Samberg "punch-dances out his anger." The new Footloose unironically apes the first one's scene (this time with a greasy White Stripes tune), but after it's already become a punchline.
Well, replace Lithgow with Dennis Quaid; Singer with some girl who looks a little like Jennifer Aniston and has really blue eyes; Penn with a hillbilly John Cusack; the friend played by Secretariat Jessica Parker with a black girl; and Bacon with a discount store Skeet Ulrich (himself a discount Johnny Depp); and toss in some modern country and Dirrrty South hip-hop and you've got the new - strike that - you've got the utterly recycled and unnecessary Footloose (2011 Edition). I'm not sure what co-writer and director Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow; Black Snake Moan) was trying to accomplish other than make a "green" movie because just about everything is recycled from the original.
Not only is the plot almost beat-for-beat ripped off (relive the Bible quotations scene again!), but they use Kenny Loggins' title tune (twice) and Deniece Williams' "Let's Hear It For The Boy" during the training-the-hayseed-to-dance scene. Just as there's a fine line between clever and stupid, the line between homage and laziness isn't blurred into irrelevance. (See below.) Really early on, I was bored and with a few exceptions, I never thought I was getting much out of this other than delaying getting home to do my laundry.
There is just no need for this movie to be remade now or ever. I saw it a quarter-century ago and haven't given it another thought since. It's not poorly made - the cast is OK and the stereotyping is kept under control - but other than showing the near-Utopian racial harmony (break dancing and boot scooting co-exist, though how in a town where dancing has been banned do they get the mad skillz to compete in a Step Up movie is a mystery), there's just nothing new here. It's just all so....unneeded.
I heard a young boy, perhaps 12, in the theater hall afterwards exclaiming that "it was awesome," so perhaps I'm just being an old fuddy duddy, but it's more likely that having been there and seen it the first time around, I don't need this lazy nostalgia trip.
Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable if you've never seen the original before.
The feedback loop of the original and its place in the cultural timeline can be summed up by this video. The first half is the scene in the original where a frustrated Bacon blows off steam in an abandoned factory. (I'd forgotten the car; Skeet Jr. drives the same VW in the remake. More laziness.) What made me smirk during the movie tonight was the second half, from Hot Rod where Andy Samberg "punch-dances out his anger." The new Footloose unironically apes the first one's scene (this time with a greasy White Stripes tune), but after it's already become a punchline.
September 2011 Review Roundup
Friday, September 30, 2011
An absolutely terrible month which proves that Hollywood's fear that television would kill movies was justified. A slew of new shows started that interested me and I was racing to plow through the second season of The Vampire Diaries in order to be ready for the third season's beginning. Despite my slamming it as Twilight: The Series when it started, my girlfriend was a big fan and was begging me to watch it for two years. She'd been right about Supernatural and once the show got past its more teeny-bop tendencies in the first 6-8 episodes, it's been pretty good stuff; check it out sometime. Regardless, movie watching lost out to the boob tube in September and nothing got a review finished. Fail.
Sept. 21 - Star Wars (10/10)
Sept. 27 - The Lincoln Lawyer (6/10)
Month's Movies Watched: 2
Previously Unseen: 1
Theatrical:0
Home: 2
=====
Year-To-Date: 86
YTD First-Timers: 73
YTD Theatrical: 31
YTD Home: 55
Sept. 21 - Star Wars (10/10)
Sept. 27 - The Lincoln Lawyer (6/10)
Month's Movies Watched: 2
Previously Unseen: 1
Theatrical:0
Home: 2
=====
Year-To-Date: 86
YTD First-Timers: 73
YTD Theatrical: 31
YTD Home: 55
August 2011 Review Roundup
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Another decent month of viewing, up one from the previous month.
August 3 - Disturbia (5/10)
August 5 -Unthinkable (8.5/10)
August 6 - Bad Teacher (5/10); Super (3/10)
August 7 - Crazy, Stupid, Love (7/10)
August 7 - Rise of the Planet of the Apes (7/10)
August 8 - Blitz (4/10)
August 14 - Final Destination 5 (8.5/10)
August 15 - Green Lantern (0.5/10)
August 24 - Spread (3/10)
August 25 - Columbiana (4/10)
August 28 - Wet Hot American Summer (3/10)
Month's Movies Watched: 12
Previously Unseen: 12
Theatrical: 5
Home: 7
=====
Year-To-Date: 84
YTD First-Timers: 72
YTD Theatrical: 31
YTD Home: 53
August 3 - Disturbia (5/10)
August 5 -Unthinkable (8.5/10)
August 6 - Bad Teacher (5/10); Super (3/10)
August 7 - Crazy, Stupid, Love (7/10)
August 7 - Rise of the Planet of the Apes (7/10)
August 8 - Blitz (4/10)
August 14 - Final Destination 5 (8.5/10)
August 15 - Green Lantern (0.5/10)
August 24 - Spread (3/10)
August 25 - Columbiana (4/10)
August 28 - Wet Hot American Summer (3/10)
Month's Movies Watched: 12
Previously Unseen: 12
Theatrical: 5
Home: 7
=====
Year-To-Date: 84
YTD First-Timers: 72
YTD Theatrical: 31
YTD Home: 53
"Wet Hot American Summer" Review
Sunday, August 28, 2011
From time to time there are movies that when you look back in retrospect are amazing for how many actors in them went on to Big Time Stardom or at least significant careers. American Graffiti had Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Harrison Ford, Richard Dreyfus, Mackenzie Phillips, Paul LeMat, Charles Martin Smith, and Suzanne Somers. The Outsiders had Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, and Emilio Estevez. Big groups of talent, all in one place, in service well-regarded movies beyond their casts.
Which brings us to 2001's Wet Hot American Summer, a low-budget indie comedy with a cult following that was featured a couple of months back in Entertainment Weekly, marking its 10th anniversary. Check out this cast: Bradley Cooper (Limitless), Paul Rudd and Elizabeth Banks (both in Our Idiot Brother which opened this weekend), Janeane Garofalo (before she became the insane liberal hater she is today), David Hyde Pierce (Niles on Frasier), Christopher Meloni (Law & Order SVU), Amy Poehler and Molly Shannon (SNL), Judah Friedlander (30 Rock), and Michael Ian Black (all those VH1 retrospectives). They all seem to have loved making it and would be open to doing a sequel, but I have to ask one question: Why when the first movie is such a mess?
Set on the last day of summer camp in 1981, WHAS focuses mostly on various pairs of the camp counselors trying to hook up while egregiously ignoring their charges. (So many kids drown on Paul Rudd's non-watch that I'm surprised Camp Firewood didn't spawn more machete-wielding killers than Camp Crystal Lake.) While there are a few narrative threads, most of the film feels like they had index cards with ideas on them like, "Crazy 'Nam vet thinks a can of beans is talking to him; ends up humping a refrigerator," or, "Woman going through a divorce is comforted and finds love with 10-year-old boy." Part of this random non-continuity is deliberate, but some segments feel like they sprinkled PCP on their weed for breakfast and then made movie under the influence. There's a chase which culminates with a single bale of hay in the middle of the road acting as a roadblock which just made me scratch my head. Then there's the scene where the counselors run into town with a montage that starts off with them getting ice cream and beer and then rapidly descends into purse-snatching and shooting smack in a dope house before showing them returning to camp within an hour, none the worse for wear.
I like oddball humor, but too much of Wet Hot American Summer feels like the cast enjoying themselves - hey, it's like Cannonball Run II! - and we're on the outside looking in at all the familiar faces. I'd missed it when it first came out and I was still digging on Janeane (man, she went nuts; so sad) and had always been meaning to catch up on it. Having done so, I'm genuinely baffled at the cult fave regard it's held in. It's simply not that good other than as a good hub film for 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
Score: 3/10. Watch it on a friend's cable so you can both go, "Hey, is that...?"
Which brings us to 2001's Wet Hot American Summer, a low-budget indie comedy with a cult following that was featured a couple of months back in Entertainment Weekly, marking its 10th anniversary. Check out this cast: Bradley Cooper (Limitless), Paul Rudd and Elizabeth Banks (both in Our Idiot Brother which opened this weekend), Janeane Garofalo (before she became the insane liberal hater she is today), David Hyde Pierce (Niles on Frasier), Christopher Meloni (Law & Order SVU), Amy Poehler and Molly Shannon (SNL), Judah Friedlander (30 Rock), and Michael Ian Black (all those VH1 retrospectives). They all seem to have loved making it and would be open to doing a sequel, but I have to ask one question: Why when the first movie is such a mess?
Set on the last day of summer camp in 1981, WHAS focuses mostly on various pairs of the camp counselors trying to hook up while egregiously ignoring their charges. (So many kids drown on Paul Rudd's non-watch that I'm surprised Camp Firewood didn't spawn more machete-wielding killers than Camp Crystal Lake.) While there are a few narrative threads, most of the film feels like they had index cards with ideas on them like, "Crazy 'Nam vet thinks a can of beans is talking to him; ends up humping a refrigerator," or, "Woman going through a divorce is comforted and finds love with 10-year-old boy." Part of this random non-continuity is deliberate, but some segments feel like they sprinkled PCP on their weed for breakfast and then made movie under the influence. There's a chase which culminates with a single bale of hay in the middle of the road acting as a roadblock which just made me scratch my head. Then there's the scene where the counselors run into town with a montage that starts off with them getting ice cream and beer and then rapidly descends into purse-snatching and shooting smack in a dope house before showing them returning to camp within an hour, none the worse for wear.
I like oddball humor, but too much of Wet Hot American Summer feels like the cast enjoying themselves - hey, it's like Cannonball Run II! - and we're on the outside looking in at all the familiar faces. I'd missed it when it first came out and I was still digging on Janeane (man, she went nuts; so sad) and had always been meaning to catch up on it. Having done so, I'm genuinely baffled at the cult fave regard it's held in. It's simply not that good other than as a good hub film for 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
Score: 3/10. Watch it on a friend's cable so you can both go, "Hey, is that...?"
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