War Horse tells the tale of a demonic horse who curses all who cross his path for the rest of their dramatically shortened lives.
Well, not really. But you couldn't prove otherwise.
This is one of the two Steven Spielberg movies we've been blessed with this holiday/award season, and it has Spielberg's trademark subtlety.
"Heh."
OK, the story is that, in a moment of pride, an Irish dirt farmer gets into a stupid bidding war with his landlord in order to buy the titular, completely inappropriate horse. In doing so, he gets his farm in hock (to same landlord), and his boy falls in love with the horse. Then the war comes, and the horse gets drafted, goes AWOL, and has many adventures. Or something.
I mentioned Spielberg's subtlety ironically, of course, but not sardonically. There's nothing necessarily wrong with bombast even if, like Spielberg, you don't even bother to hang a lampshade on it (which can feel a little insulting).
But this is a bizarre, bizarre movie that doesn't move fast enough to make you (or me, rather) overlook the weirdness of it.
This movie came from the mind of someone who felt that we're so inured to the horrors of war, we could only experience it if it were suffered by an innocent horse.
I know, right?
Especially World War I? That most wasteful, inhumane, horrific war. The Great War. The War To End All Wars? You know, the war that gave us All Quiet On The Western Front, Gallipoli, Joyeux Noel, A Very Long Engagement. Hell, even Hugo gave us the horror of war as it pertains to film.
But, no, Spielberg says you'll only get it if it happens to a horse.
As a result, Spielberg has the horse sort of anthropomorphized sporadically. Sometimes it seems like just a horse. Other times, it's acting noble, and saving the day, etc.
It's a children's story, but it's about the horrors of war. In WWI, cavalry lines met machine gun nests for the first time—an encounter which ended the cavalry line for all history, as horses were mowed down in a horrifying slaughter. (Actually the Poles would set their cavalry against German tanks in WWII, but the less said about that, the better.)
Since this would be a nightmare to watch, Spielberg does this bizarre thing where the charging horses are somehow spared, and break through the German lines completely riderless. As if only the cavalry soldiers themselves were killed. The effect is surreal.
And yet, later, we're treated to an extended scene of a horse being chewed up by barbed wire. I mean, you guys know me: I sat through all the Saw movies (but the last one) but this was truly horrifying.
For some reason (supporting my horse-of-the-damned theory) the last 20 minutes is shot in a kind of hellish red. I mean, clearly, the idea was that it was sunset, but they must've done it with computer color correction, since the scene lasted longer than any sunset south of Reykjavik could last.
The Boy's reaction to this was "That was a long, damn movie!" He didn't dislike it (or like it) particularly. He just thought it was long. And it is. Over 2-and-a-half hours long.
The funny thing is that there are a bunch of different strands, accounting for this length, and yet the various story resolutions seem contrived or abandoned.
However, The Flower liked it, as I suspected she would. I mean, it had horses and sadness and some happiness and some kids. She's ten.
Thing is, I don't know that I could call this a children's movie. Like, the violence in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom didn't bother me—it's cartoonish, and really didn't deserve the hubbub (that resulted in the PG-13 rating). This movie is chock full of dead kids and horses.
I don't regret letting her see it, and she was fine, but I think the audience for this movie is real narrow. Much older and she'd see the flaws. Much younger and she'd be traumatized.
I dunno. It gets a 7-point-something on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, though Metacritic gives it 7.2/6.0 (critic/audience). I can't really recommend it, though, beyond that demographic of relatively sturdy tween girls.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
The School Idea
When I was younger (ah hah) I fantasized about creating a school. This was in college, and as someone who had been in school since 21-months of age, I had begun to realize that the education I was waiting for was never going to arrive.
The entire premise of The School was that academic studies would be balanced with practical application that supported the institution and, yes, brought in money. Like, if you were teaching the arts, you'd put on shows. I was at UCLA at the time and it amazed me how little cooperation there was not just between the various disciplines, like art and music, but within just the music department itself. For example, if you're teaching music history, you have people listening to recordings of Gregorian chant and what-not, but those chants are never actually sung by the choir.
I thought this could extend nicely to occupational work, too, and you could end up with a largely self-sufficient school that provided a really broad experience to all the kids while also letting them get deep into their preferred subjects.
The various *-studies-type programs were just taking off back then; I don't think you could major in them. They were more points-of-interest than vocations. They wouldn't survive in this model, except through people who had a strong interest in them and were willing to work hard in other areas to support that interest.
The thing that stuck with me back then was the insurance. Inevitably some kind would get hurt and that would be that.
Newt Gingrich's comments about kids being janitors, cafeteria workers and clerks put me in mind of this.
There is a faction in this society that is dead set against kids working, like working is some horrible thing that adults have to do, and people should be spared it as long as possible. And I think this probably indicates that, you know, they feel that way about their lives and jobs.
But the side-effect of this has been to create adolescence. Wild teens. Juvenile delinquency.
As horrible as it is to communists, our sense of self-worth as human beings utterly depends on exchange. We value ourselves to the extent that we can produce things that other people want. And in a cruel trick of nature, we start out with very little to give and in tremendous need of help.
A lot of what is mistakenly perceived as attention-seeking in children is just their attempt to entertain. The parent who dismisses this shuts off an avenue for the child to pay back.
What's also difficult is the custodian-ship of the child's development into a genuinely helpful member of the family (and society). At first, when they "help", it's more work (sometimes a LOT more) than if they don't. (If I helped my mom clean up, she'd tell me how good I'd done, and then do it over. Heh.)
My kids aren't much like me. The Boy is very money-minded. Last year (at 15) he got a job (programming), and he's been walking dogs in the neighborhood. He's almost finished a pen-and-paper RPG he's going to try to build something around. He's been in college for a few semesters, primarily business and economics classes.
The Flower's industriousness is astounding. For money (and we pay her well), she cleans the dog stuff out of the backyard. For fun, she cleans the bathroom or the bedroom or the living room or the closet. She makes and sells her own wallets. She works for The Boy—he's programming a game and she's doing the art.
The Barbarienne, on the other hand? She's young yet, but I sense a different mind-set in her. (Probably closer to my own, growing up, than either The Boy or The Flower.) She's definitely more difficult to mentor through things.
They would all have benefited from the school I imagined as a young man, but I was too busy having them to build it.
Plus, you know: Insurance.
The entire premise of The School was that academic studies would be balanced with practical application that supported the institution and, yes, brought in money. Like, if you were teaching the arts, you'd put on shows. I was at UCLA at the time and it amazed me how little cooperation there was not just between the various disciplines, like art and music, but within just the music department itself. For example, if you're teaching music history, you have people listening to recordings of Gregorian chant and what-not, but those chants are never actually sung by the choir.
I thought this could extend nicely to occupational work, too, and you could end up with a largely self-sufficient school that provided a really broad experience to all the kids while also letting them get deep into their preferred subjects.
The various *-studies-type programs were just taking off back then; I don't think you could major in them. They were more points-of-interest than vocations. They wouldn't survive in this model, except through people who had a strong interest in them and were willing to work hard in other areas to support that interest.
The thing that stuck with me back then was the insurance. Inevitably some kind would get hurt and that would be that.
Newt Gingrich's comments about kids being janitors, cafeteria workers and clerks put me in mind of this.
There is a faction in this society that is dead set against kids working, like working is some horrible thing that adults have to do, and people should be spared it as long as possible. And I think this probably indicates that, you know, they feel that way about their lives and jobs.
But the side-effect of this has been to create adolescence. Wild teens. Juvenile delinquency.
As horrible as it is to communists, our sense of self-worth as human beings utterly depends on exchange. We value ourselves to the extent that we can produce things that other people want. And in a cruel trick of nature, we start out with very little to give and in tremendous need of help.
A lot of what is mistakenly perceived as attention-seeking in children is just their attempt to entertain. The parent who dismisses this shuts off an avenue for the child to pay back.
What's also difficult is the custodian-ship of the child's development into a genuinely helpful member of the family (and society). At first, when they "help", it's more work (sometimes a LOT more) than if they don't. (If I helped my mom clean up, she'd tell me how good I'd done, and then do it over. Heh.)
My kids aren't much like me. The Boy is very money-minded. Last year (at 15) he got a job (programming), and he's been walking dogs in the neighborhood. He's almost finished a pen-and-paper RPG he's going to try to build something around. He's been in college for a few semesters, primarily business and economics classes.
The Flower's industriousness is astounding. For money (and we pay her well), she cleans the dog stuff out of the backyard. For fun, she cleans the bathroom or the bedroom or the living room or the closet. She makes and sells her own wallets. She works for The Boy—he's programming a game and she's doing the art.
The Barbarienne, on the other hand? She's young yet, but I sense a different mind-set in her. (Probably closer to my own, growing up, than either The Boy or The Flower.) She's definitely more difficult to mentor through things.
They would all have benefited from the school I imagined as a young man, but I was too busy having them to build it.
Plus, you know: Insurance.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
The Artist
Big-name silent era movie star loses it all when talkies come into vogue while the girl of his dreams hits it big in those very same pictures. Sure, we've seen it before. But have we seen it in the past 40 years? (I'm thinking the Kristofferson/Streisand Star Is Born.) Have we seen it good in the past 75?
The Artist is a love song to '30s movies—more '30s than '20s in my estimation—done in beautiful black-and-white and pseudo-silent. George Valentin is Douglas Fairbanks-style action movie hero, on top of the world, who gives an ingenue Peppy Miller (a sort of Mary Pickford-type) her big break in the movies after a chance meeting throws her into the public eye.
Fortunes are reversed when talkies appear and Valentin refuses to talk even as Miller's star rises. What follows is a story of loyalty and love as people move in and out of Valentin's life.
This movie is filmed in black-and-white and is mostly silent, and is a wonderfully simple tale told elegantly, with Jean Dujardin in the lead role. He channels a mix of Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn and Gene Kelly, and he manages to do it with just enough broadness to make him feel like an authentic '20s actor and enough warmth to feel an authentic '20s person.
Bérénice Bejo is somewhat less successful, though not because she doesn't have the mannerisms down. She's a little broader, a little more like a zany Ziegfield girl, but ultimately very winning. Her only weaknesses are that, at 35, she's a bit old to be playing the ingenue and, as a modern actress, she's way too lean. (Modern actresses tend to be so lean their skin looks positively stretched over their faces.)
It feels nitpicky, but it's a bit jarring.
Director (and husband to Bejo) Michael Hazanavacius manages to capture a lot of the '20s/'30s directorial style while taking advantage of some modern shots to avoid the more static elements of old-style movie making. And his script manages to comfortably move between the depths of despair and comic lightness in a way that feels very true to the era and is still affecting nearly a century later.
This is the first (and so far the only) unalloyed success of the season, I would say. It reminds me how little we ask for in a movie, really: There's no complex plot, no fancy sets, no CGI to speak of (I assume there's always some in movies these days), the score is traditional... There's a heroic, loyal dog. It's just over 90 minutes, minus the credits.
Oh, it's not for everyone, I guess. Some people won't be able to accept the straightforwardness of it. The simplicity of the characters. The silent/colorless aspect. And it's very French in parts, with a couple of things you'd never have seen in a movie of the time.
But The Boy and I both liked it quite a bit. It'll be easily rewatchable.
Some stunt casting of American actors, presumably to try to draw in the American crowds: Penelope Ann Miller as Valentin's wife, Missi Pyle (who got high billing!) has a small part in a few scenes, Malcolm MacDowell, Stuart Pankin, and even '80s B-movie starlet Jewell Shepard has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it role.
John Goodman has a meatier part as the producer who sees the changes on the wind, and James Cromwell is the #3 character, playing Valentin's ever faithful man-servant.
This is worth seeing over the other Oscar-bait movies this year, and even in spite of its Oscar-bait positioning, if you have any love of the old films.
The Artist is a love song to '30s movies—more '30s than '20s in my estimation—done in beautiful black-and-white and pseudo-silent. George Valentin is Douglas Fairbanks-style action movie hero, on top of the world, who gives an ingenue Peppy Miller (a sort of Mary Pickford-type) her big break in the movies after a chance meeting throws her into the public eye.
Fortunes are reversed when talkies appear and Valentin refuses to talk even as Miller's star rises. What follows is a story of loyalty and love as people move in and out of Valentin's life.
This movie is filmed in black-and-white and is mostly silent, and is a wonderfully simple tale told elegantly, with Jean Dujardin in the lead role. He channels a mix of Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn and Gene Kelly, and he manages to do it with just enough broadness to make him feel like an authentic '20s actor and enough warmth to feel an authentic '20s person.
Bérénice Bejo is somewhat less successful, though not because she doesn't have the mannerisms down. She's a little broader, a little more like a zany Ziegfield girl, but ultimately very winning. Her only weaknesses are that, at 35, she's a bit old to be playing the ingenue and, as a modern actress, she's way too lean. (Modern actresses tend to be so lean their skin looks positively stretched over their faces.)
It feels nitpicky, but it's a bit jarring.
Director (and husband to Bejo) Michael Hazanavacius manages to capture a lot of the '20s/'30s directorial style while taking advantage of some modern shots to avoid the more static elements of old-style movie making. And his script manages to comfortably move between the depths of despair and comic lightness in a way that feels very true to the era and is still affecting nearly a century later.
This is the first (and so far the only) unalloyed success of the season, I would say. It reminds me how little we ask for in a movie, really: There's no complex plot, no fancy sets, no CGI to speak of (I assume there's always some in movies these days), the score is traditional... There's a heroic, loyal dog. It's just over 90 minutes, minus the credits.
Oh, it's not for everyone, I guess. Some people won't be able to accept the straightforwardness of it. The simplicity of the characters. The silent/colorless aspect. And it's very French in parts, with a couple of things you'd never have seen in a movie of the time.
But The Boy and I both liked it quite a bit. It'll be easily rewatchable.
Some stunt casting of American actors, presumably to try to draw in the American crowds: Penelope Ann Miller as Valentin's wife, Missi Pyle (who got high billing!) has a small part in a few scenes, Malcolm MacDowell, Stuart Pankin, and even '80s B-movie starlet Jewell Shepard has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it role.
John Goodman has a meatier part as the producer who sees the changes on the wind, and James Cromwell is the #3 character, playing Valentin's ever faithful man-servant.
This is worth seeing over the other Oscar-bait movies this year, and even in spite of its Oscar-bait positioning, if you have any love of the old films.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Greece Is The Word
In his transition to conservative, the great Frank Miller penned a comic book called 300, based on the story of the Spartan's stand at Thermopylae. It was a romantic retelling, but well researched, and true to the cultural spirit of the story. When Zack Snyder gussied it up for the big screen, he made it more comic book-y (ironically, I guess) by adding some monsters here and there.
The new movie Immortals, which follows in this tradition spits in the eye of 300 and kicks Greek mythology in the 'nads for good measure.
Which, frankly, I expected.
And yet, I was retroactively disappointed when the credits rolled and Tarsem Singh's name appeared as directory. Singh's two previous credits were the J. Lo vehicle The Cell and the under-rated The Fall. If I had expected the level of imagery in those movies here, I would've been utterly deflated. The imagery here is fairly standard CGI-superhero fare, with the exception of a lot more cool gore effects.
This does not a movie make.
This barely rises to the level of a movie, too, which is typical of a Tarsem flick. There's a real poetry to his earlier works, and this allows one to overlook, for example, that the actual plot of The Cell is about five minutes long, and the whole "entering a killer's mind" premise is completely superfluous.
The same is true here, minus the poetry. In the opening scene, we learn that...uh...crap...I've forgotten. It's a retelling of the story of Kronos and the Titans versus Zeus and the Olympians. These are the titular immortals. Except that we learn in the first few seconds of the film that they discovered a way to kill each other.
The first rule of immortals is: there aren't any immortals.
Anyway, this leads to a war (though it seems like it should be the other way around, with a war leading to discovery of mortality) and the gods lock up the titans in 10x10x10 cubicle. (These are decidedly non-titanic titans.) And the only thing that can set them free is a magical bow.
The thing that makes this bow magical, I think, is that it's the only bow in all of Greece. Seriously. There's a big battle scene. There's a siege. But nobody has a bow, except for the guy with the magic bow. Which, by the way, looks like something out of Diablo.
So the plot is that Mickey Rourke—who is back to being sleazy and unappealing after a brief hiatus—plays the conquering Hyperion (who in the actual mythology, all we know of is that he was a Titan) whose big plan is to—well, he's got two plans. The first is to rape all of the known world, a la Genghis Khan. The second is to find the magic bow of Epirus (who, in actual mythology was a mortal girl who died young and relatively uneventfully) and use it to travel to Tartarus (a city/mountain and the place with the titan-cube).
Tartarus seems to be the closest thing this movie makes to a hit to actual Greek mythology. Some Titans were imprisoned in Tartarus, but it was considered to be a place in the underworld.
OK, so, shutting off the part of the brain that knows anything about Greek mythology about five minutes into it, we're left with a bunch of incoherent plot lines and unsupported character backstory.
Like, the fact that Rourke's two evil plans contradict each other. He releases the titans, they destroy the world: So much for all the raping he wants to do. (He never talks about ruling the world or looting or pillaging. He's all about the rape.)
There's a kind of Star Trek-style prime directive going on with the gods: According to Zeus, the law is that no god may interfere directly with mortals as a god (biting tongue) even though he's apparently been going down in the form of John Hurt to raise the atheistic hero of our piece. That's not "as a god" so, loophole!
Now, this could make sense as a dramatic device, right? Just like in "Star Trek," it could prevent deus ex machina type escapes and keep the tension high. If the audience knows that the gods can intervene at any time, after all—just stop right there, buster. This movie completely depends on deus ex machina.
Actually, not just deus ex machina but villain ex machina. The villain manages to have henchmen everywhere. Including, at one point, an artifact fetching jackal/hyena/dog thing. Who happens to be right where the artifact is. Even though the villain had already left that spot. And the movie goes through great pains to make sure we know the villain doesn't know where the artifact is.
Truly, the hero's actions are completely irrelevant, or possibly negative. There's really nothing heroic about him. He fights good, I guess. And he's good to his mom. He's less offensive than the other characters, so he's got that going for him. He also has some casual sex that would seem pretty reckless in terms of the whole saving-the-world thing (avoiding spoilers).
The Greece of this movie is populated with atheists, true believers, apostates and pragmatists. The hero is an atheist (up to the point where Zeus actually spanks him), the villain is an apostate, most of the rank-and-file seem to be believers, but the residents of Tartarus are more pragmatic. But everyone's chief gripe about the gods is that they don't get involved, and the difference between the villain and the hero is that the hero chooses to believe that means there are no gods while the villain decides it means there ARE gods and they hate him, and so therefore deserve to die (along with the rest of existence).
Good lord, in the beginning of the movie, a well-meaning cleric tells Rourke that he only need ask for forgiveness to set all right with the gods. (You know, 'cause what's the difference between the Greek gods and Jesus?) Of course, the Greek gods would've struck the villain dead for defiling the temple—that's what they did—but setting that aside, there's no space in even the movie-created theology for forgiveness, or much of anything other than a blind partisanship.
The relationship between the gods and mortals seems to be trivial, at best, and inverted at worst, with Zeus emphatically assuring the hero that he (Zeus) believes in him (Theseus).
Weirdly, in the first few minutes of the movie, the narration tells us that the titans were "called" evil because they lost the war of the heavens. We're never given any idea of the gods as being good, or frankly being of much interest whatsoever.
The gods, by the way, look like a campy re-enactment of The War Against The Titans done at Ceasar's Palace. "How will anyone be able to tell the gods apart? They're all unshaven brunette 30-year-old men wearing togas." "I know, let's put 'em in goofy hats!"
It's a greatly reduced pantheon, by the way: Zeus, Athena (who seem to be leering at each other while expositing on how they're father and daughter), Ares, Helios and Poseidon are, I think, all we see. Though maybe Apollo pops in at the end.
Aw, hell, I've already given more thought to this movie's theology than anyone actually making the movie did.
Immortals manages to offend on nearly every other level as well, though. For example, Tartarus is a walled city. Wait, did I say "walled city"? I meant to say it's behind freaking Hoover Dam. They have the technology to build a wall that's a thousand feet high, but they have no means to defend it whatsoever. No bows. No boiling oil. No nothing. Just a wall.
And when The Only Bow In Creation blows through the front of the gate like a bazooka, the villain never ever fires it again in battle. (The Bow is problematic in terms of how much force it can deal. Apparently the answer is "how much do you need?")
It's kind of insulting.
Also, they know where the villain is headed: To free the titans. Post guards? Why no, why would you? The thing there is, the villain could easily have dispatched them (magic bow, remember?), so why not even put out the effort to show us that our putative good guys are kind of thinking?
Some guy named Henry Cavill plays some dude named Theseus. Stephen Dorff plays a lovable rogue who breaks character at the first convenient plot point. Frieda Pinto, as Indian looking a woman as you can ever imagine, plays the Oracle, and has a spectacular body double for her nude scene (which screams body double). Luke Evans, fresh from playing Apollo in Clash of the Titans, plays Zeus-with-a-five-o-clock shadow here. The other hottie is Isabel Lucas, playing Athena.
I have no opinions about any of these people based on this movie. I've liked Stephen Dorff since he was a kid in that goofy demon-summoning movie The Gate. But really, none of them are particularly relevant. This isn't a movie about characters. Or plot. Or continuity. Coherence.
The music is heroic.
I would've gone to see this, on the strength of Tarsem's name. He's doing one of the three Snow White rehashes next year (his is Mirror, Mirror and the other two are Snow White and the Huntsmen and—hmm, maybe there's only two) and I won't be lining up to see it.
P.S. Ares actually throws a hammer in this flick. A hammer.
The new movie Immortals, which follows in this tradition spits in the eye of 300 and kicks Greek mythology in the 'nads for good measure.
Which, frankly, I expected.
And yet, I was retroactively disappointed when the credits rolled and Tarsem Singh's name appeared as directory. Singh's two previous credits were the J. Lo vehicle The Cell and the under-rated The Fall. If I had expected the level of imagery in those movies here, I would've been utterly deflated. The imagery here is fairly standard CGI-superhero fare, with the exception of a lot more cool gore effects.
This does not a movie make.
This barely rises to the level of a movie, too, which is typical of a Tarsem flick. There's a real poetry to his earlier works, and this allows one to overlook, for example, that the actual plot of The Cell is about five minutes long, and the whole "entering a killer's mind" premise is completely superfluous.
The same is true here, minus the poetry. In the opening scene, we learn that...uh...crap...I've forgotten. It's a retelling of the story of Kronos and the Titans versus Zeus and the Olympians. These are the titular immortals. Except that we learn in the first few seconds of the film that they discovered a way to kill each other.
The first rule of immortals is: there aren't any immortals.
Anyway, this leads to a war (though it seems like it should be the other way around, with a war leading to discovery of mortality) and the gods lock up the titans in 10x10x10 cubicle. (These are decidedly non-titanic titans.) And the only thing that can set them free is a magical bow.
The thing that makes this bow magical, I think, is that it's the only bow in all of Greece. Seriously. There's a big battle scene. There's a siege. But nobody has a bow, except for the guy with the magic bow. Which, by the way, looks like something out of Diablo.
So the plot is that Mickey Rourke—who is back to being sleazy and unappealing after a brief hiatus—plays the conquering Hyperion (who in the actual mythology, all we know of is that he was a Titan) whose big plan is to—well, he's got two plans. The first is to rape all of the known world, a la Genghis Khan. The second is to find the magic bow of Epirus (who, in actual mythology was a mortal girl who died young and relatively uneventfully) and use it to travel to Tartarus (a city/mountain and the place with the titan-cube).
Tartarus seems to be the closest thing this movie makes to a hit to actual Greek mythology. Some Titans were imprisoned in Tartarus, but it was considered to be a place in the underworld.
OK, so, shutting off the part of the brain that knows anything about Greek mythology about five minutes into it, we're left with a bunch of incoherent plot lines and unsupported character backstory.
Like, the fact that Rourke's two evil plans contradict each other. He releases the titans, they destroy the world: So much for all the raping he wants to do. (He never talks about ruling the world or looting or pillaging. He's all about the rape.)
There's a kind of Star Trek-style prime directive going on with the gods: According to Zeus, the law is that no god may interfere directly with mortals as a god (biting tongue) even though he's apparently been going down in the form of John Hurt to raise the atheistic hero of our piece. That's not "as a god" so, loophole!
Now, this could make sense as a dramatic device, right? Just like in "Star Trek," it could prevent deus ex machina type escapes and keep the tension high. If the audience knows that the gods can intervene at any time, after all—just stop right there, buster. This movie completely depends on deus ex machina.
Actually, not just deus ex machina but villain ex machina. The villain manages to have henchmen everywhere. Including, at one point, an artifact fetching jackal/hyena/dog thing. Who happens to be right where the artifact is. Even though the villain had already left that spot. And the movie goes through great pains to make sure we know the villain doesn't know where the artifact is.
Truly, the hero's actions are completely irrelevant, or possibly negative. There's really nothing heroic about him. He fights good, I guess. And he's good to his mom. He's less offensive than the other characters, so he's got that going for him. He also has some casual sex that would seem pretty reckless in terms of the whole saving-the-world thing (avoiding spoilers).
The Greece of this movie is populated with atheists, true believers, apostates and pragmatists. The hero is an atheist (up to the point where Zeus actually spanks him), the villain is an apostate, most of the rank-and-file seem to be believers, but the residents of Tartarus are more pragmatic. But everyone's chief gripe about the gods is that they don't get involved, and the difference between the villain and the hero is that the hero chooses to believe that means there are no gods while the villain decides it means there ARE gods and they hate him, and so therefore deserve to die (along with the rest of existence).
Good lord, in the beginning of the movie, a well-meaning cleric tells Rourke that he only need ask for forgiveness to set all right with the gods. (You know, 'cause what's the difference between the Greek gods and Jesus?) Of course, the Greek gods would've struck the villain dead for defiling the temple—that's what they did—but setting that aside, there's no space in even the movie-created theology for forgiveness, or much of anything other than a blind partisanship.
The relationship between the gods and mortals seems to be trivial, at best, and inverted at worst, with Zeus emphatically assuring the hero that he (Zeus) believes in him (Theseus).
Weirdly, in the first few minutes of the movie, the narration tells us that the titans were "called" evil because they lost the war of the heavens. We're never given any idea of the gods as being good, or frankly being of much interest whatsoever.
The gods, by the way, look like a campy re-enactment of The War Against The Titans done at Ceasar's Palace. "How will anyone be able to tell the gods apart? They're all unshaven brunette 30-year-old men wearing togas." "I know, let's put 'em in goofy hats!"
It's a greatly reduced pantheon, by the way: Zeus, Athena (who seem to be leering at each other while expositing on how they're father and daughter), Ares, Helios and Poseidon are, I think, all we see. Though maybe Apollo pops in at the end.
Aw, hell, I've already given more thought to this movie's theology than anyone actually making the movie did.
Immortals manages to offend on nearly every other level as well, though. For example, Tartarus is a walled city. Wait, did I say "walled city"? I meant to say it's behind freaking Hoover Dam. They have the technology to build a wall that's a thousand feet high, but they have no means to defend it whatsoever. No bows. No boiling oil. No nothing. Just a wall.
And when The Only Bow In Creation blows through the front of the gate like a bazooka, the villain never ever fires it again in battle. (The Bow is problematic in terms of how much force it can deal. Apparently the answer is "how much do you need?")
It's kind of insulting.
Also, they know where the villain is headed: To free the titans. Post guards? Why no, why would you? The thing there is, the villain could easily have dispatched them (magic bow, remember?), so why not even put out the effort to show us that our putative good guys are kind of thinking?
Some guy named Henry Cavill plays some dude named Theseus. Stephen Dorff plays a lovable rogue who breaks character at the first convenient plot point. Frieda Pinto, as Indian looking a woman as you can ever imagine, plays the Oracle, and has a spectacular body double for her nude scene (which screams body double). Luke Evans, fresh from playing Apollo in Clash of the Titans, plays Zeus-with-a-five-o-clock shadow here. The other hottie is Isabel Lucas, playing Athena.
I have no opinions about any of these people based on this movie. I've liked Stephen Dorff since he was a kid in that goofy demon-summoning movie The Gate. But really, none of them are particularly relevant. This isn't a movie about characters. Or plot. Or continuity. Coherence.
The music is heroic.
I would've gone to see this, on the strength of Tarsem's name. He's doing one of the three Snow White rehashes next year (his is Mirror, Mirror and the other two are Snow White and the Huntsmen and—hmm, maybe there's only two) and I won't be lining up to see it.
P.S. Ares actually throws a hammer in this flick. A hammer.
Monday, December 26, 2011
Puss In Boots
Well, at least it's not another Shrek movie. You can start there with Puss In Boots, though The Flower declined to see this, stating she wasn't interested in any prequels or spin-offs or any of that nonsense. (A friend of mine went to see this and was crushed that it wasn't about the real Puss In Boots stories.)
In my book, it's probably better to set something in the same universe as another film than to try to wring out another sequel from poor ol' Shrek and Fiona, and the change of focus keeps them from dragging out a bunch of references to the original films that were tired in Shrek 4.
Unfortunately, this replaces them with even older tropes, in most cases.
You don't want to make the cat angry!
I make this look good!
PiB is the story of the rogue cat (voiced by Antonio Banderas) and his childhood pal, Humpty Dumpty (Zach Gallafianikis, of course) who gets him into trouble when Puss becomes a hero and Dumpty a thief. So, it's Dead End with an animated cat and egg.
They're seeking out the magic beans in order to get to the castle where the Goose That Lays The Golden Egg resides, and Dumpty has solicited the help of Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek, of course) in their adventure.
The Barb liked it. People in the audience actually clapped when it was over and I saw no alcoholic beverages being served.
I thought it was by-the-numbers and not all that well done, lacking most of the cleverness of the Shrek movies—though at least seeming less tied into the pop-meme-of-the-moment. Actually the hacky phrases above are pretty indicative. It relies a lot on the "cat's are cute" idea, and clearly the producers had been influenced by "Family Guy"'s Brian (the dog) and "South Park". Not vulgarity-wise, but there's a strong hint of the Pandemic episode of "South Park" at the climax.
Not unpleasant, but way below the bar set by animation in recent years. That's actually pretty true of all the animated films this year.
At some point, with all my "meh" reactions of late, I have to wonder: Maybe it's me?
In my book, it's probably better to set something in the same universe as another film than to try to wring out another sequel from poor ol' Shrek and Fiona, and the change of focus keeps them from dragging out a bunch of references to the original films that were tired in Shrek 4.
Unfortunately, this replaces them with even older tropes, in most cases.
You don't want to make the cat angry!
I make this look good!
PiB is the story of the rogue cat (voiced by Antonio Banderas) and his childhood pal, Humpty Dumpty (Zach Gallafianikis, of course) who gets him into trouble when Puss becomes a hero and Dumpty a thief. So, it's Dead End with an animated cat and egg.
They're seeking out the magic beans in order to get to the castle where the Goose That Lays The Golden Egg resides, and Dumpty has solicited the help of Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek, of course) in their adventure.
The Barb liked it. People in the audience actually clapped when it was over and I saw no alcoholic beverages being served.
I thought it was by-the-numbers and not all that well done, lacking most of the cleverness of the Shrek movies—though at least seeming less tied into the pop-meme-of-the-moment. Actually the hacky phrases above are pretty indicative. It relies a lot on the "cat's are cute" idea, and clearly the producers had been influenced by "Family Guy"'s Brian (the dog) and "South Park". Not vulgarity-wise, but there's a strong hint of the Pandemic episode of "South Park" at the climax.
Not unpleasant, but way below the bar set by animation in recent years. That's actually pretty true of all the animated films this year.
At some point, with all my "meh" reactions of late, I have to wonder: Maybe it's me?
The (Other) Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
It gets hard to defend Hollywood—and why would you try, really?—when they seem to reinforce the worst ideas people have. Like cowardice and completely paucity of original ideas.
I mean, when people talk about all the sequels and movies derived from other sources these days, it's easy to note that this has always been the case. Yeah, we have four Resident Evil movies but there were ten Ma & Pa Kettle flicks. Seven—or was it eight?—Saws? Try sixteen movies in the Andy Hardy series. There were nearly thirty Charlie Chan flicks, I think.
Point is, film has always been a derivative medium.
And I wanted to say, "Well, hey, this could be a good example of Hollywood making a foreign movie their own, with David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en) at the helm." And there's no doubt this is a Fincher film. Plenty of sickly yellow and greenish lighting, shadowed faces, unusual camera dollying.
Still, it seemed like a sort of pointless exercise. It's actually more lurid than the original (though not enough to warrant the pissy review over at Big Hollywood) but this seems less effective because it's such a slick product. Complete with Macs, Coca-Cola and MacDonald's Happy Meals.
There were a few things I liked better than the Swedish original: The Swedish movie is harder to follow. Not just because it's Swedish but because the sprawling story involves over a dozen characters, and clue-gathering that doesn't really engage you in the mystery per se but that you feel like you have to keep track of to follow the story. As a result, when you finally learn the whole story, it's easy to be confused about who was who.
This version is a bit more careful—and longer—about making sure we know who the important characters are. On the good side, that means when Lisbeth meets with her guardian (social worker) we know who he is and why he's so important, and also gives us an insight into her personality.
On the bad side, the interaction with the bad guy is such a cliché of American cinema, that it's impossible to be surprised by the reveal, even if you've never seen the original films. In fact, even if you never seen any film ever.
There's another funny change. At one point, Lisbeth steals a whole bunch of money with her 1337 hacker skillz. I sometimes roll my eyes at that, you know, because I have some idea of the challenge involved and the movies make it seem like magic. (The American movie does this when Lisbeth reads Mikael's encrypted e-mail like it was nothing. But that actually makes sense to the degree that she's been watching his machine for some time.)
So, the American movie actually shows theft. In extensive detail. And I just wanted it to end. In retrospect, it was necessary for the number one change they made which I'll discuss in a bit.
The Boy and I thought it was okay. Way too long (at over 2.5 hours). The acting is good, of course. I warmed up to Rooney Mara. Daniel Craig is probably right where they wanted him to be (more on that in a bit, too). Chris Plummer—I'm just glad to see him going strong, as strong as ever, really, and getting such good roles in his 80s. Stellan Skarsgaard (apply diacriticals as needed), fresh from his flamboyant role in Melancholia—he's kinda subdued here.
You could do worse, that is, if you don't mind the squalid. (Though Melancholia is pretty squalid, too.) It's better if you haven't seen the original. My mom hasn't, but she had read the book, and said that it was pretty faithful to the book, without expressing enthusiasm for same.
Now I want to talk about the major change from the Swedish movies, which necessarily contains SPOILERS! In a very real way, these movies are primarily interesting because of the relationship between Lisbeth and Mikael, so do not read on if you don't want to be spoiled.
OK?
So, the Swedish movies feature Blomkvist, who's a good guy, and Lisbeth, who's more of an anti-hero. Lisbeth is seriously damaged—the backstory of which forms the basis for the second and third movies, and which is no trivial matter.
In the original, at one point, Lisbeth basically uses Mikael for sex. It's a cold, mechanical and bizarre interaction, her on top until she's done, after which she leaves the room, and leaves Blomkvist bewildered.
This is their relationship in a nutshell. Mutually beneficial, but strained. Lisbeth does, slowly, come to trust him, to a degree. But at no point do you get the idea that we're in for some sort of odd-couple detective TV show pilot, like "Tatts and the Kvist" or whatever. (I guess Larson wrote a fourth book where they fight crime in Canada, though, so the old commie might have been open to that.)
Point is, all (Swedish actor's) Nyqvist's Blomkvist really has going for him is his integrity. He's not an action hero. Lisbeth has to save him. And while he saves her in the second movie, it's after all the action is over.
He's just beta.
This makes a whole lotta sense with Lisbeth's character. She's been abused badly by men for a long time. The actual title of the book (and I think the Swedish movie) is Men Who Hate Women. Blomkvist's laid back attitude is about the only way Lisbeth can trust a guy.
So, in the American movie? Lisbeth is sort of nurturing Blomkvist after he gets injured. She's more timid in approaching him for sex. They interact. She mounts him. Then? He flips her over to be on top.
Pardon my graphicness here, but while the sex is explicit, it's not gratuitous. It's an important part of the character development. And they botched it here.
Afterwards? They cuddle.
So, after years and years of abuse, all she needed was the passing fancy of a sufficiently handsome guy, I guess.
Worse still? The original had Lisbeth vanishing at the end, and striking at Blomkvist's enemy, Vanager. (This was the part drawn out in the American movie.) And she's in love with Blomkvist. And he breaks her heart by not knowing about it.
Really? Really?
Ugh.
Now, it's not fair to bash this aspect of the American movie on the basis of how it compares to the Swedish movie. I mean, it's fine to have a preference, but the American producers can draw the characters however they feel. (I think it fails to ring true to the extent that they didn't really change the other details of Lisbeth's story.)
But it feels like pandering. I was a little sick of Blomkvist's wimpiness by the end of the trilogy, I admit, but however much Craig dials it down, he's still Daniel "James Bond/Cowboys and Aliens" Craig.
This probably some focus testing BS, like what ruined The Lord of the Rings. We can only have one kind of story, one kind of relationship in a film. Bleah.
Another weird change: In the Swedish movie, Lisbeth is confronting the villain and has a chance to save his life. She doesn't. When she tells Mikael, he's not down with that. He doesn't treat her badly over it but he disapproves.
In the American version she asks for permission to kill him—and then he dies without her getting the chance to.
Meh. Maybe they wouldn't detract from your experience if you hadn't seen the original. (Though my mom said the movie was true to the book, not in an especially favorable way though.)
Did I mention it's over two-and-a-half hours long?
I mean, when people talk about all the sequels and movies derived from other sources these days, it's easy to note that this has always been the case. Yeah, we have four Resident Evil movies but there were ten Ma & Pa Kettle flicks. Seven—or was it eight?—Saws? Try sixteen movies in the Andy Hardy series. There were nearly thirty Charlie Chan flicks, I think.
Point is, film has always been a derivative medium.
And I wanted to say, "Well, hey, this could be a good example of Hollywood making a foreign movie their own, with David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en) at the helm." And there's no doubt this is a Fincher film. Plenty of sickly yellow and greenish lighting, shadowed faces, unusual camera dollying.
Still, it seemed like a sort of pointless exercise. It's actually more lurid than the original (though not enough to warrant the pissy review over at Big Hollywood) but this seems less effective because it's such a slick product. Complete with Macs, Coca-Cola and MacDonald's Happy Meals.
There were a few things I liked better than the Swedish original: The Swedish movie is harder to follow. Not just because it's Swedish but because the sprawling story involves over a dozen characters, and clue-gathering that doesn't really engage you in the mystery per se but that you feel like you have to keep track of to follow the story. As a result, when you finally learn the whole story, it's easy to be confused about who was who.
This version is a bit more careful—and longer—about making sure we know who the important characters are. On the good side, that means when Lisbeth meets with her guardian (social worker) we know who he is and why he's so important, and also gives us an insight into her personality.
On the bad side, the interaction with the bad guy is such a cliché of American cinema, that it's impossible to be surprised by the reveal, even if you've never seen the original films. In fact, even if you never seen any film ever.
There's another funny change. At one point, Lisbeth steals a whole bunch of money with her 1337 hacker skillz. I sometimes roll my eyes at that, you know, because I have some idea of the challenge involved and the movies make it seem like magic. (The American movie does this when Lisbeth reads Mikael's encrypted e-mail like it was nothing. But that actually makes sense to the degree that she's been watching his machine for some time.)
So, the American movie actually shows theft. In extensive detail. And I just wanted it to end. In retrospect, it was necessary for the number one change they made which I'll discuss in a bit.
The Boy and I thought it was okay. Way too long (at over 2.5 hours). The acting is good, of course. I warmed up to Rooney Mara. Daniel Craig is probably right where they wanted him to be (more on that in a bit, too). Chris Plummer—I'm just glad to see him going strong, as strong as ever, really, and getting such good roles in his 80s. Stellan Skarsgaard (apply diacriticals as needed), fresh from his flamboyant role in Melancholia—he's kinda subdued here.
You could do worse, that is, if you don't mind the squalid. (Though Melancholia is pretty squalid, too.) It's better if you haven't seen the original. My mom hasn't, but she had read the book, and said that it was pretty faithful to the book, without expressing enthusiasm for same.
Now I want to talk about the major change from the Swedish movies, which necessarily contains SPOILERS! In a very real way, these movies are primarily interesting because of the relationship between Lisbeth and Mikael, so do not read on if you don't want to be spoiled.
OK?
So, the Swedish movies feature Blomkvist, who's a good guy, and Lisbeth, who's more of an anti-hero. Lisbeth is seriously damaged—the backstory of which forms the basis for the second and third movies, and which is no trivial matter.
In the original, at one point, Lisbeth basically uses Mikael for sex. It's a cold, mechanical and bizarre interaction, her on top until she's done, after which she leaves the room, and leaves Blomkvist bewildered.
This is their relationship in a nutshell. Mutually beneficial, but strained. Lisbeth does, slowly, come to trust him, to a degree. But at no point do you get the idea that we're in for some sort of odd-couple detective TV show pilot, like "Tatts and the Kvist" or whatever. (I guess Larson wrote a fourth book where they fight crime in Canada, though, so the old commie might have been open to that.)
Point is, all (Swedish actor's) Nyqvist's Blomkvist really has going for him is his integrity. He's not an action hero. Lisbeth has to save him. And while he saves her in the second movie, it's after all the action is over.
He's just beta.
This makes a whole lotta sense with Lisbeth's character. She's been abused badly by men for a long time. The actual title of the book (and I think the Swedish movie) is Men Who Hate Women. Blomkvist's laid back attitude is about the only way Lisbeth can trust a guy.
So, in the American movie? Lisbeth is sort of nurturing Blomkvist after he gets injured. She's more timid in approaching him for sex. They interact. She mounts him. Then? He flips her over to be on top.
Pardon my graphicness here, but while the sex is explicit, it's not gratuitous. It's an important part of the character development. And they botched it here.
Afterwards? They cuddle.
So, after years and years of abuse, all she needed was the passing fancy of a sufficiently handsome guy, I guess.
Worse still? The original had Lisbeth vanishing at the end, and striking at Blomkvist's enemy, Vanager. (This was the part drawn out in the American movie.) And she's in love with Blomkvist. And he breaks her heart by not knowing about it.
Really? Really?
Ugh.
Now, it's not fair to bash this aspect of the American movie on the basis of how it compares to the Swedish movie. I mean, it's fine to have a preference, but the American producers can draw the characters however they feel. (I think it fails to ring true to the extent that they didn't really change the other details of Lisbeth's story.)
But it feels like pandering. I was a little sick of Blomkvist's wimpiness by the end of the trilogy, I admit, but however much Craig dials it down, he's still Daniel "James Bond/Cowboys and Aliens" Craig.
This probably some focus testing BS, like what ruined The Lord of the Rings. We can only have one kind of story, one kind of relationship in a film. Bleah.
Another weird change: In the Swedish movie, Lisbeth is confronting the villain and has a chance to save his life. She doesn't. When she tells Mikael, he's not down with that. He doesn't treat her badly over it but he disapproves.
In the American version she asks for permission to kill him—and then he dies without her getting the chance to.
Meh. Maybe they wouldn't detract from your experience if you hadn't seen the original. (Though my mom said the movie was true to the book, not in an especially favorable way though.)
Did I mention it's over two-and-a-half hours long?
Paranormal Activity 3
They're baaaaaacck! Those groovy ghoulies haunting Katie and Kristi are back knocking over chairs and hating on kitchen appliances. Except that this is a prequel so they're not really back so much as here for the first time. Until the next prequel.
We have speculated that they could keep going back, at least to the grandmother's story, since it seems to have been her supernatural shenanigans that started the demonic wheels in motion. Except, as The Boy pointed out, "accidentally" filming it gets trickier the farther back you go.
If you were interested in telling the story it would make a lot of sense to switch to a more traditional sort of movie. But you're just interested in maximizing profits and number of sequels, you'd just switch to super 8, 16mm, or whatever. So, there's not much doubt as to which way this franchise will go.
This movie takes place in the dark days of 1988, with young Julie and her two daughters, and Julie's boyfriend, Dennis, a wedding videographer (VHS, baby!) all living together happily somewhere in the suburbs.
Then, you know, stuff happens.
The form and technique of this movie is the same as the previous two in the series, as you might imagine. The characters are a little more likable, with Lauren Bittner and Chris Smith in the parental roles. Dennis, in particular, is more in tuned and aware than his wife, unlike the previous two films where the husbands were aggressively clueless.
I'm liking the backfilling of the story, though it's not as tightly integrated as the second film, and things we were told in both the previous movies wouldn't seem to be true. I don't count this as a lack of continuity, as the "unreliable narrative" device is not only logical, it's pretty well explained by this film.
Sadly, since it was Christmas vacation, we had the usual contingent of clueless teens who can't tell the difference between their living room and a public theater and they'd been hitting the bong pretty hard. When the family travels to Moorpark, California, the howling didn't subside for 5 minutes. (We saw the movie just outside of Moorpark.)
We liked it anyway. The devices are holding up, in the sense that if you liked them in the previous films you'll probably still like them. It won't last forever, of course.
Anything else of interest? Well, Lauren Bittner is awful cute. (How cute? One of her credits is "Basbeball Cutie".) Both she and Smith I think look better in their '80s styles than their current looks. The '80s vibe is over-all kind of cute.
They have to use a book on demons instead of the Internet.
Liked it, but I'm not exactly champing at the bit for the inevitable fourth movie.
We have speculated that they could keep going back, at least to the grandmother's story, since it seems to have been her supernatural shenanigans that started the demonic wheels in motion. Except, as The Boy pointed out, "accidentally" filming it gets trickier the farther back you go.
If you were interested in telling the story it would make a lot of sense to switch to a more traditional sort of movie. But you're just interested in maximizing profits and number of sequels, you'd just switch to super 8, 16mm, or whatever. So, there's not much doubt as to which way this franchise will go.
This movie takes place in the dark days of 1988, with young Julie and her two daughters, and Julie's boyfriend, Dennis, a wedding videographer (VHS, baby!) all living together happily somewhere in the suburbs.
Then, you know, stuff happens.
The form and technique of this movie is the same as the previous two in the series, as you might imagine. The characters are a little more likable, with Lauren Bittner and Chris Smith in the parental roles. Dennis, in particular, is more in tuned and aware than his wife, unlike the previous two films where the husbands were aggressively clueless.
I'm liking the backfilling of the story, though it's not as tightly integrated as the second film, and things we were told in both the previous movies wouldn't seem to be true. I don't count this as a lack of continuity, as the "unreliable narrative" device is not only logical, it's pretty well explained by this film.
Sadly, since it was Christmas vacation, we had the usual contingent of clueless teens who can't tell the difference between their living room and a public theater and they'd been hitting the bong pretty hard. When the family travels to Moorpark, California, the howling didn't subside for 5 minutes. (We saw the movie just outside of Moorpark.)
We liked it anyway. The devices are holding up, in the sense that if you liked them in the previous films you'll probably still like them. It won't last forever, of course.
Anything else of interest? Well, Lauren Bittner is awful cute. (How cute? One of her credits is "Basbeball Cutie".) Both she and Smith I think look better in their '80s styles than their current looks. The '80s vibe is over-all kind of cute.
They have to use a book on demons instead of the Internet.
Liked it, but I'm not exactly champing at the bit for the inevitable fourth movie.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Shirley's Game of Shadows
So we saw the second installment in the newer, 'splodier Sherlock Holmes series with Robert Downey Jr as the titular detective and Jude Law as his sidekick, directed by the former Mr. Madonna Guy Ritchie.
Honestly? You could just read my review of the first movie, and it'd do. OK, subtract the matte rant, there's much less of the cheesy THIS IS CGI LONDON 1894, or whatever. Subtract any concern that might have arisen from thinking this was going to be a traditional Holmes mystery, 'cause it's even less justified then before.
Crank it up to eleven. This is Holmes as superhero. His super-smarts give him the ability to anticipate (sorta) how combat is going to play out, allowing him to fight multiple opponents in hand-to-hand combat. It sorta works.
Also, crank up the slow-mo-to-super-speed-camera tricks to about a zillion.
We all liked it, if not wildly. The Boy's reaction to this was exactly the same as it was to the last one. The Flower was okay on it, but really liked the end. Predictably, her favorite parts revolved around Holmes' puckish shenanigans, more than any aspect of the action or "mystery".
Noomi Rapace, the original Girl (with the dragon tattoo/who played with fire/who kicked the hornet's nest) plays a gypsy in this and what first hits you is that she's really cute. I mean, you could see it in the "girl" movies but she plays Lisbeth so well, it's hard to see her as being attractive, exactly. In this, she's much bigger emotionally as she searches for her missing brother. Acting!
Resident Evil—I mean "Mad Men" star Jared Harris plays the eeeeevil Moriarty, set on starting World War 1, and the ever doughy Stephen Fry plays Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes' smarter, nuder brother.
So, there you are. Pretty much what's expected. You know if you like this sorta thing.
Honestly? You could just read my review of the first movie, and it'd do. OK, subtract the matte rant, there's much less of the cheesy THIS IS CGI LONDON 1894, or whatever. Subtract any concern that might have arisen from thinking this was going to be a traditional Holmes mystery, 'cause it's even less justified then before.
Crank it up to eleven. This is Holmes as superhero. His super-smarts give him the ability to anticipate (sorta) how combat is going to play out, allowing him to fight multiple opponents in hand-to-hand combat. It sorta works.
Also, crank up the slow-mo-to-super-speed-camera tricks to about a zillion.
We all liked it, if not wildly. The Boy's reaction to this was exactly the same as it was to the last one. The Flower was okay on it, but really liked the end. Predictably, her favorite parts revolved around Holmes' puckish shenanigans, more than any aspect of the action or "mystery".
Noomi Rapace, the original Girl (with the dragon tattoo/who played with fire/who kicked the hornet's nest) plays a gypsy in this and what first hits you is that she's really cute. I mean, you could see it in the "girl" movies but she plays Lisbeth so well, it's hard to see her as being attractive, exactly. In this, she's much bigger emotionally as she searches for her missing brother. Acting!
Resident Evil—I mean "Mad Men" star Jared Harris plays the eeeeevil Moriarty, set on starting World War 1, and the ever doughy Stephen Fry plays Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes' smarter, nuder brother.
So, there you are. Pretty much what's expected. You know if you like this sorta thing.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Be My Melancholia...Bayyyyyybee
The third and final pic in our trilogy-of-films-we-didn't-really-want-to-see is Lars von Trier's Melancholia. Trier (the "von" is an affectation) is like Almodóvar, in that I've never seen one of his movies until recently, though von Trier is a bit more avant-garde with his last film featuring all sorts of depravity, mutilations and infanticide, I'm told. Trier famously sympathized with Hitler at Cannes a few months ago, said shenanigans earning him a trip to the principal's office for violating various stupid European laws.
In essence, he proved there was something stupider than sympathizing with Hitler.
That kind of sums up this movie, in a weird way. Just about every predictable criticism you could level against this film is true—and yet...there's some there there.
The movie opens with about a 5-10 minute encapsulation of the film done in super-slow-mo super-high-res glory, culminating with the earth being smashed by a giant planet. To Wagner's Tristan and Isolde no less. And...scene. This is done so that you have no delusions about how this story is going to play out.
Part 1 of the movie involves Justine (Kirsten Dunst), blushing bride, at her reception. Thing is, she's depressed. Her mom's (Charlotte Rampling) a total bitch. She gets up at the wedding to make a speech on the futility of marriage. Also she's dressed really inappropriately (and in the fashion of a rampaging planet). Dad's (John Hurt) a flibberdagibbet who can't keep one Betty straight from another. Her sister (Charlotte Gaisnbourg) and wealthy brother-in-law (Keifer Sutherland) have spent a lot of money on this lavish party to try to make her happy, and all Justine wants to do is hide from everyone and sleep and take baths. And occasionally have some sort of sexual interaction with her husband or, you know, whomever.
What we have, in other words, is an externalized picture of severe depression, possibly manic-depression but I'm not up on my DSM, and there's a high degree of stylization here. I mean, within a few hour period, Justine is in love, married, fights with her parents, gets a promotion, gets fired, has an affair, ruins her marriage, etc.
Nobody really gets that she's depressed beyond depression. Nobody can accept it. It is a really good dramatization of how depressed people feel, I think.
As you might imagine, this is not incredibly entertaining. It's kind of interesting. But it's also kind of self-indulgent. Kind of way self-indulgent. And that makes sense, really, because depression is self-indulgent on some level.
But that ain't peanuts compared to part two, focused nominally on Clair, Justine's sister, who's trying to help her out of this depression. Clair seems like a good woman with a perfect life. She doesn't have Justine's good looks but she's married to Jack Bauer and somehow he's gotten incredibly rich. She has a nice son.
Clair's problem? The world is ending.
The big ol' rogue planet Melancholia is going to smash into earth in about five days. Her husband Jack—okay, his real name in the movie is John—has reassured her that Melancholia is going to pass by Earth, not only leaving it unscathed but creating the most beautiful astronomical event of anyone's lifetime.
Meanwhile, in the most realistic use of the Internet ever shown in cinema, Clair can't help herself from going to the Internet and reinforcing her sense of DOOM! Weirder still, her basket case sister Justine, who can barely feed herself at the beginning of this part, seems to be growing stronger and eerier as The End looms nigh.
As part one is a semi-literal rather narcissistic depiction of depression, part two is a completely allegorical utterly narcissistic and nihilistic depiction of same: Depression isn't just going to destroy Justine, it's going to destroy the Earth and everything that Earth ever was or stood for.
"Life is a mistake," Justine says at one point. "Life is only on Earth. And not for long."
So. Yeah. About as subtle as a hand grenade. As subtle as Wagner. As subtle as Lars von Trier apologizing for making such a perfect movie, and hoping people would somehow be able to find flaws in it to enjoy. As subtle as sympathizing with Hitler.
I could do a whole page of "as subtle as" from this movie. As subtle as the 19th hole on a golf course. As subtle as guessing—knowing—the number of beans in a jar. As subtle as wearing a dress that looks like the surface of an incoming rogue planet. As subtle as showing Kirsten Dunst naked and frail-looking at the beginning of part two and then later showing her naked and erotically bathing in Melancholia's light.
As subtle as making sure everyone knows Dunst appears naked to shore up your box office.
You know, we didn't hate it, The Boy and I, though The Boy had to go out and get a refill on the mega-beverage they give you at the theater.
Trier definitely has some skills. And it's not hard to see why actors like working for him. Dunst gets to have scene-after-scene that's sort of like an actor's workshop. The very artificiality and pretentiousness is grist for the actor's mill.
And it's not consistently boring. The problem with being this unsubtle is that you really don't need to spend an hour on each part, no matter how enamored you are with your various ways of re-stating the same thing over-and-over again. Especially when you go out of your way to beat the audience out of any semblance of hope or meaning.
Not something one can casually recommend to just anyone. In fact, not something one could argue against, if you wanted to say "this is a pretentious piece of self-indulgent crap". But just like I can't really explain why I don't particularly like Scorcese, I can't really explain why I sorta liked this.
In essence, he proved there was something stupider than sympathizing with Hitler.
That kind of sums up this movie, in a weird way. Just about every predictable criticism you could level against this film is true—and yet...there's some there there.
The movie opens with about a 5-10 minute encapsulation of the film done in super-slow-mo super-high-res glory, culminating with the earth being smashed by a giant planet. To Wagner's Tristan and Isolde no less. And...scene. This is done so that you have no delusions about how this story is going to play out.
Part 1 of the movie involves Justine (Kirsten Dunst), blushing bride, at her reception. Thing is, she's depressed. Her mom's (Charlotte Rampling) a total bitch. She gets up at the wedding to make a speech on the futility of marriage. Also she's dressed really inappropriately (and in the fashion of a rampaging planet). Dad's (John Hurt) a flibberdagibbet who can't keep one Betty straight from another. Her sister (Charlotte Gaisnbourg) and wealthy brother-in-law (Keifer Sutherland) have spent a lot of money on this lavish party to try to make her happy, and all Justine wants to do is hide from everyone and sleep and take baths. And occasionally have some sort of sexual interaction with her husband or, you know, whomever.
What we have, in other words, is an externalized picture of severe depression, possibly manic-depression but I'm not up on my DSM, and there's a high degree of stylization here. I mean, within a few hour period, Justine is in love, married, fights with her parents, gets a promotion, gets fired, has an affair, ruins her marriage, etc.
Nobody really gets that she's depressed beyond depression. Nobody can accept it. It is a really good dramatization of how depressed people feel, I think.
As you might imagine, this is not incredibly entertaining. It's kind of interesting. But it's also kind of self-indulgent. Kind of way self-indulgent. And that makes sense, really, because depression is self-indulgent on some level.
But that ain't peanuts compared to part two, focused nominally on Clair, Justine's sister, who's trying to help her out of this depression. Clair seems like a good woman with a perfect life. She doesn't have Justine's good looks but she's married to Jack Bauer and somehow he's gotten incredibly rich. She has a nice son.
Clair's problem? The world is ending.
The big ol' rogue planet Melancholia is going to smash into earth in about five days. Her husband Jack—okay, his real name in the movie is John—has reassured her that Melancholia is going to pass by Earth, not only leaving it unscathed but creating the most beautiful astronomical event of anyone's lifetime.
Meanwhile, in the most realistic use of the Internet ever shown in cinema, Clair can't help herself from going to the Internet and reinforcing her sense of DOOM! Weirder still, her basket case sister Justine, who can barely feed herself at the beginning of this part, seems to be growing stronger and eerier as The End looms nigh.
As part one is a semi-literal rather narcissistic depiction of depression, part two is a completely allegorical utterly narcissistic and nihilistic depiction of same: Depression isn't just going to destroy Justine, it's going to destroy the Earth and everything that Earth ever was or stood for.
"Life is a mistake," Justine says at one point. "Life is only on Earth. And not for long."
So. Yeah. About as subtle as a hand grenade. As subtle as Wagner. As subtle as Lars von Trier apologizing for making such a perfect movie, and hoping people would somehow be able to find flaws in it to enjoy. As subtle as sympathizing with Hitler.
I could do a whole page of "as subtle as" from this movie. As subtle as the 19th hole on a golf course. As subtle as guessing—knowing—the number of beans in a jar. As subtle as wearing a dress that looks like the surface of an incoming rogue planet. As subtle as showing Kirsten Dunst naked and frail-looking at the beginning of part two and then later showing her naked and erotically bathing in Melancholia's light.
As subtle as making sure everyone knows Dunst appears naked to shore up your box office.
You know, we didn't hate it, The Boy and I, though The Boy had to go out and get a refill on the mega-beverage they give you at the theater.
Trier definitely has some skills. And it's not hard to see why actors like working for him. Dunst gets to have scene-after-scene that's sort of like an actor's workshop. The very artificiality and pretentiousness is grist for the actor's mill.
And it's not consistently boring. The problem with being this unsubtle is that you really don't need to spend an hour on each part, no matter how enamored you are with your various ways of re-stating the same thing over-and-over again. Especially when you go out of your way to beat the audience out of any semblance of hope or meaning.
Not something one can casually recommend to just anyone. In fact, not something one could argue against, if you wanted to say "this is a pretentious piece of self-indulgent crap". But just like I can't really explain why I don't particularly like Scorcese, I can't really explain why I sorta liked this.
Hu Got To Be Kiddin' Me!
OK, up front: I'm just not a Martin Scorcese guy. I've said it before, I'll probably say it again. I can explain it any number of ways—he makes movies about topics I'm not particularly interested in, with people in them who don't seem to be worthy of the attention, for example—but when you get down to it, I'm just not into him.
I don't deny he has considerable talent. He makes beautiful movies. He knows how to block a shot and how to light a set. All that. But when I see his movies? I don't hate them. They just completely fail to reach me. I was mildly entertained by The Departed and seriously bored by (and slightly offended by the naivete of) Shutter Island but ultimately, his movies are just a big meh in my book.
So, I'll redundantly say of his new family-ish film Hugo: Meh. The Boy echoed that. The Flower thought it was okay, not up there with your average Pixar/Dreamworks film. What's different about this film, compared to other Scorcese pictures, is that I should have loved it, based on the subject matter.
The trailers are really misleading. This is not an animated child's film about mysterious city, robots and adventures. This is a live action movie with ridiculous, atmosphere destroying CGI pull outs to a completely fake looking 1931 Paris.
Yeah, it's Paris in the '30s again. The story is about a freshly-made orphan who lives in the service areas of a train station winding the clocks to cover for his drunk (and missing) uncle, while stealing parts from a toy repairer to try to finish a project he and his dad were working on right before his dad got killed by some really silly looking CGI fire.
The project is an automaton which, contra the trailers, isn't a robot or any sort of fanciful thing, but a genuine wind-up automaton, like they used to have in the 19th century. (Here, buy this $500 book through my Amazon link.) While occasionally Scorcese imbues the proceedings with a certain fantastical aura, the movie is a very literal period piece.
The plot crosses through the work of the grandfather of film sci-fi, Georges Melies, so I should have been in movie nerd heaven throughout most of the film. And yet.
Well, look, I've already said Scorcese just doesn't reach me, so anything I add is going to be gratuitous. That said, this is a self-indulgent film. Not horribly so, but enough to need to be edited down by half-an-hour. Kind of like how I could have edited this entry down and eliminated these last paragraphs.
If you're a Scorcese person, and a film person, you'll probably dig it.
I don't deny he has considerable talent. He makes beautiful movies. He knows how to block a shot and how to light a set. All that. But when I see his movies? I don't hate them. They just completely fail to reach me. I was mildly entertained by The Departed and seriously bored by (and slightly offended by the naivete of) Shutter Island but ultimately, his movies are just a big meh in my book.
So, I'll redundantly say of his new family-ish film Hugo: Meh. The Boy echoed that. The Flower thought it was okay, not up there with your average Pixar/Dreamworks film. What's different about this film, compared to other Scorcese pictures, is that I should have loved it, based on the subject matter.
The trailers are really misleading. This is not an animated child's film about mysterious city, robots and adventures. This is a live action movie with ridiculous, atmosphere destroying CGI pull outs to a completely fake looking 1931 Paris.
Yeah, it's Paris in the '30s again. The story is about a freshly-made orphan who lives in the service areas of a train station winding the clocks to cover for his drunk (and missing) uncle, while stealing parts from a toy repairer to try to finish a project he and his dad were working on right before his dad got killed by some really silly looking CGI fire.
The project is an automaton which, contra the trailers, isn't a robot or any sort of fanciful thing, but a genuine wind-up automaton, like they used to have in the 19th century. (Here, buy this $500 book through my Amazon link.) While occasionally Scorcese imbues the proceedings with a certain fantastical aura, the movie is a very literal period piece.
The plot crosses through the work of the grandfather of film sci-fi, Georges Melies, so I should have been in movie nerd heaven throughout most of the film. And yet.
Well, look, I've already said Scorcese just doesn't reach me, so anything I add is going to be gratuitous. That said, this is a self-indulgent film. Not horribly so, but enough to need to be edited down by half-an-hour. Kind of like how I could have edited this entry down and eliminated these last paragraphs.
If you're a Scorcese person, and a film person, you'll probably dig it.
The Dispirited Descendants
"George Clooney can't act! Whatever he does, whatever his character is feeling, his expression is the same!" So began The Boy's tirade against The Descendants, the Alexander Payne Hawaii travelogue. So I think it's fair to point out that The Boy revised that opinion somewhat for this film, with the additional good news that whatever Clooney has done to his face, he does seem to be able to move it now more than Up In The Air.
So, yeah, this is the first in the trilogy of films-we-didn't-really-wanna-see-but-whatchoo-gonna-do? with Hugo and Melancholia rounding out the trinity of Oscar-bait crap crowding out potentially good films like Tucker and Dale vs. Evil and The Human Centipede 2.
Verdict? Welllll, meh. The Boy had a somewhat favorable response, saying that he hadn't seen a movie like that before so it held some interest. My response was, well, meh, because I've seen About Schmidt and Sideways and Election. The Descendants falls somewhere between About Schmidt and Election in terms of entertainment value, and closer to About Schmidt in terms of characters.
Also, you know how, if you see a Tim Burton film, you're gonna see the director wrestle with his daddy issues? With a Payne film, you're gonna see the director wrestle with his woman issues. Women are going to be some combination of controlling, emasculating, cuckolding.
Having seen all of Payne's feature films (except Citizen Ruth), I think it's fair to say that Sideways is far-and-away the best and that allows a lot to Paul Giamatti's irascible lovableness.
In The Descendants, Clooney's character sets off on a journey around the Hawaiian islands to tell his friends that his comatose wife is dying (boat accident). The kicker is that his elder, delinquent daughter has let him know that his wife was cheating on him before the accident. (This is all in the trailers, and revealed early in the film, so it's not meant to be a twist or nothin'. In fact, I think that dramatic tension is supposed to be the compelling interest.)
So, it's a combination of telling everyone the tragic news, trying to find out more about the Other Man and, as in Sideways and Schmidt, finding some redemption in the journey.
Added to the mix, and giving the movie its title, are the descendants: People who own a big, undeveloped chunk of one of the islands, who are being forced to sell. Clooney's character is the controller of the trust, one of the descendants who makes no money from the trust, but lets it appreciate in value while working his modest legal business.
If I were going to fault Payne for anything, in general, it would be an apparent tendency to be muted. Like, WASPy-muted, as if big dramatic tension or emotional displays are in bad taste. And you can make an argument for that in real life, I guess, but in movie-making it means that, for example, when the cuckold has a chance for revenge, but that revenge will potentially destroy a lot of people around him, Payne will work to defuse that as quickly and quietly as possible.
At the same time, there's this pall of horribleness over the whole thing—a woman with one young child and one troubled child is going to die—so the potentially humorous moments are also very muted.
So, yeah. It's not as low-key and depressing as About Schmidt but the journey and redemption lack the exuberance of Sideways. View at your own risk.
So, yeah, this is the first in the trilogy of films-we-didn't-really-wanna-see-but-whatchoo-gonna-do? with Hugo and Melancholia rounding out the trinity of Oscar-bait crap crowding out potentially good films like Tucker and Dale vs. Evil and The Human Centipede 2.
Verdict? Welllll, meh. The Boy had a somewhat favorable response, saying that he hadn't seen a movie like that before so it held some interest. My response was, well, meh, because I've seen About Schmidt and Sideways and Election. The Descendants falls somewhere between About Schmidt and Election in terms of entertainment value, and closer to About Schmidt in terms of characters.
Also, you know how, if you see a Tim Burton film, you're gonna see the director wrestle with his daddy issues? With a Payne film, you're gonna see the director wrestle with his woman issues. Women are going to be some combination of controlling, emasculating, cuckolding.
Having seen all of Payne's feature films (except Citizen Ruth), I think it's fair to say that Sideways is far-and-away the best and that allows a lot to Paul Giamatti's irascible lovableness.
In The Descendants, Clooney's character sets off on a journey around the Hawaiian islands to tell his friends that his comatose wife is dying (boat accident). The kicker is that his elder, delinquent daughter has let him know that his wife was cheating on him before the accident. (This is all in the trailers, and revealed early in the film, so it's not meant to be a twist or nothin'. In fact, I think that dramatic tension is supposed to be the compelling interest.)
So, it's a combination of telling everyone the tragic news, trying to find out more about the Other Man and, as in Sideways and Schmidt, finding some redemption in the journey.
Added to the mix, and giving the movie its title, are the descendants: People who own a big, undeveloped chunk of one of the islands, who are being forced to sell. Clooney's character is the controller of the trust, one of the descendants who makes no money from the trust, but lets it appreciate in value while working his modest legal business.
If I were going to fault Payne for anything, in general, it would be an apparent tendency to be muted. Like, WASPy-muted, as if big dramatic tension or emotional displays are in bad taste. And you can make an argument for that in real life, I guess, but in movie-making it means that, for example, when the cuckold has a chance for revenge, but that revenge will potentially destroy a lot of people around him, Payne will work to defuse that as quickly and quietly as possible.
At the same time, there's this pall of horribleness over the whole thing—a woman with one young child and one troubled child is going to die—so the potentially humorous moments are also very muted.
So, yeah. It's not as low-key and depressing as About Schmidt but the journey and redemption lack the exuberance of Sideways. View at your own risk.
Sunday, December 4, 2011
My Week With Marilyn
We're entering the craptacular award season and that can mean only one thing: Pretentious movies! Our favorite local theater got in Like Crazy, Hugo, The Descendants and My Week With Marilyn. So maudlin romance, mob-genre director does family-holiday pic, desultory director with a thing about cuckoldry doin' what he does, and...well, a by now relatively inoffensive sounding flick about a young British lordling who stumbles into his first film job, and finds himself babysitting Marilyn Monroe.
The Flower wanted to come so...yeah, I felt safest with the Marilyn pic. Can it be a biopic if it's only a week long? Would that be a weekopic? A septimanopic? (It sounds cooler in Latin, eh?)
I digress.
This is a fairly pleasant little fantasy pic with Eddie Remayne as the Brit, Colin Clark, who wrote up his little tale in the '70s (and again with uncensored parts included in the '90s). The Flower liked it. The Boy less so.
I liked it more than they did, of course, but there's a lot of a film geekery that's totally over their head. Kenneth Branagh hamming it up as Lawrence Olivier. Julia Ormond (looking older than her years) as Vivien Leigh, whose concern is that Larry might not just fool around with Marilyn but get more seriously involved. Emma Watson as the wardrobe-girl-next-door who gets involved with Colin despite her reservations, only to be dropped precipitously in the presence of Marilyn.
Dame Judy Dench adds some character as Dame Sybil Thorndike. As much as I enjoyed her performance, her role, as the kind voice of wisdom, was a little too neat. That's why I called it a "fantasy pic". Nothing wrong with that.
Of course, a movie like this rises and falls on Marilyn, or the reasonableness of the facsimile thereof. In this case, we have Michelle Williams, who does a very good job indeed, especially considering how little she looks like Monroe. She gets the mannerisms down, the moves, and she presents a plausible image of the personality behind the icon.
She doesn't have it, alas. I mean, I've never been a fan, particularly, but that Marilyn Monroe had something special is as undeniable as it is opaque. Since I get that she's supposed to be her, I get a lot of the buzz that probably didn't seem that clear to the kids. But it's not like you can CGI that stuff in and the movie does a good job of supporting it.
Overall, it works, much in the mold of other "coming-of-age" type stories. So it was probably the best choice for us at that moment in time.
The Flower wanted to come so...yeah, I felt safest with the Marilyn pic. Can it be a biopic if it's only a week long? Would that be a weekopic? A septimanopic? (It sounds cooler in Latin, eh?)
I digress.
This is a fairly pleasant little fantasy pic with Eddie Remayne as the Brit, Colin Clark, who wrote up his little tale in the '70s (and again with uncensored parts included in the '90s). The Flower liked it. The Boy less so.
I liked it more than they did, of course, but there's a lot of a film geekery that's totally over their head. Kenneth Branagh hamming it up as Lawrence Olivier. Julia Ormond (looking older than her years) as Vivien Leigh, whose concern is that Larry might not just fool around with Marilyn but get more seriously involved. Emma Watson as the wardrobe-girl-next-door who gets involved with Colin despite her reservations, only to be dropped precipitously in the presence of Marilyn.
Dame Judy Dench adds some character as Dame Sybil Thorndike. As much as I enjoyed her performance, her role, as the kind voice of wisdom, was a little too neat. That's why I called it a "fantasy pic". Nothing wrong with that.
Of course, a movie like this rises and falls on Marilyn, or the reasonableness of the facsimile thereof. In this case, we have Michelle Williams, who does a very good job indeed, especially considering how little she looks like Monroe. She gets the mannerisms down, the moves, and she presents a plausible image of the personality behind the icon.
She doesn't have it, alas. I mean, I've never been a fan, particularly, but that Marilyn Monroe had something special is as undeniable as it is opaque. Since I get that she's supposed to be her, I get a lot of the buzz that probably didn't seem that clear to the kids. But it's not like you can CGI that stuff in and the movie does a good job of supporting it.
Overall, it works, much in the mold of other "coming-of-age" type stories. So it was probably the best choice for us at that moment in time.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito)
A mad scientist loses his wife in a automobile fire and seeks solace in recreating her appearance on an unwilling victim. Avant-garde cinema or cheesy B-movie plot from the '50s and '60s? Well, why not both, as we see here with Al-muh-DOH-var's—I assume that's how you pronounce Almodóvar—The Skin I Live In. I'm old enough to remember when he still used his first name (Pedro) but this would be the first of his movies that I've seen. Like Tarantino, Spike Lee and a few others, I've always found the trailers to Pedro's films sufficiently off-putting that I never felt the need to see his movies. (A reaction I've overcome in the last few years with Tarantino, to my everlasting ennui.)
Although it's not the best fit, I kept thinking about The Brain That Wouldn't Die, the '62 potboiler about the scientist who saves his girlfriend's head after a car crash, then spends the rest of the movie scouting strippers for a new body while she hectors him from a lasagna pan about his lack of ambition and nags him to take out the garbage. (Or something, it's been a while since I've seen it.)
It's amusing (at least to me) the extent of this movie's overlap with that older one (and other similar old flicks I'm not remembering at the moment). This is a sleazy film filled with unlikable characters, creepy situations and sexual violence. There are also moments of what today might almost be considered high camp.
When the movie opens, Plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) is presenting on a new kind of transplantable skin mutated from human and pig cells he developed in honor of his broiled wife, after which some of his shocked peers warn him of the consequences should SCIENCE discover his lapse in ethics. (Mutating human and animal stuff is apparently a no-no.) This scene is reprised later on, when one of his formers business partners threatens to blackmail him by outing him to the scientific community.
Interestingly enough, the whole pig-human thing doesn't really go anywhere. His victim in all this, Vera (the ridiculously beautiful Elena Anaya of Point Blank) doesn't develop super-powers or get bulletproof skin or anything like that. I thought there was going to be a twist where the science went wrong but the movie plays out straight revenge tragedy, basically.
Not that there isn't a twist, mind you. Oh, yes, there's a twist, though I didn't see it coming until about 10 minutes before it popped.
There are other sorta '60s things about this movie, too. The color doesn't used the washed out blue-gray feel that's so popular (hacky!) today, but a more vibrant one. Not exactly Technicolor but Kodachrome(ish). Antonio Banderas has his hair slicked back and walks around in a tuxedo at one point, evoking a Sean-Connery-as-James-Bond figure that's amplified when he holds a gun.
In fact, if you listen to the semi-techno song used in the trailer (and also in the movie's one chase scene), the electric guitar sound is very mid-to-late '60s. I'm not hitting bulls-eyes today but the '60s surfin' classic "Wipeout" comes to mind.
There are no cell phones, computers or modern devices, except for large-screen viewers, which were pretty commonly faked in '60s movies.
So, what's not '60s about it? Well, there's a lot of nudity and it's pretty pornographic which wasn't common in a mainstream, high-budget '60s flick. It's not gratuitous, but it is gross. (The nudity isn't. Did I mention that Elena Anaya is gorgeous?) The sex is done covered or far-away, but it's still very explicit (and often violent) in terms of the imagery Pedro creates in the viewers' mind.
I see this movie being fetish-fuel for a small but intense niche.
Overall? We liked it all right. It could've been shorter. The Boy found it disturbing but it's a fool's errand to try to create much of an impact on the younger generation through shock or transgression. As for myself, I was expecting something bizarre! titillating! shocking! along the typical lines that certain directors endear themselves to certain critics, and I was only put off-guard by the naivete of the genre.
I mean, really: Who makes mad scientist movies any more? In my lifetime, there haven't been that many. The (speaking of pornographic) Re-animator series, that Peter O'Toole/Mariel Hemmingway oddity from '85, Creator, sorta—but really, the modern science-gone-awry is more likely to feature a noble, avuncular scientist rather than a mad one. The science goes awry (these days) because of the evil businessman or a tangential individual's greed.
This movie's sort of like taking Humanoids from the Deep (where mutated fish-men emerge from polluted water to rape women) or Creature from the Black Lagoon and exploring seriously the potential for relationship between the fish-men and the women they kidnap.
So...odd. Well, done, for the most part. Good acting. The music's a little heavy-handed. The graphicness is going to be off-putting for some, to say nothing of the indecency. Vera is the closest thing to a hero the movie has, and for reasons that can't be explained with spoilage, she's hardly pure.
The Boy said he would have a hard time recommending it, and I tend to agree.
Although it's not the best fit, I kept thinking about The Brain That Wouldn't Die, the '62 potboiler about the scientist who saves his girlfriend's head after a car crash, then spends the rest of the movie scouting strippers for a new body while she hectors him from a lasagna pan about his lack of ambition and nags him to take out the garbage. (Or something, it's been a while since I've seen it.)
It's amusing (at least to me) the extent of this movie's overlap with that older one (and other similar old flicks I'm not remembering at the moment). This is a sleazy film filled with unlikable characters, creepy situations and sexual violence. There are also moments of what today might almost be considered high camp.
When the movie opens, Plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) is presenting on a new kind of transplantable skin mutated from human and pig cells he developed in honor of his broiled wife, after which some of his shocked peers warn him of the consequences should SCIENCE discover his lapse in ethics. (Mutating human and animal stuff is apparently a no-no.) This scene is reprised later on, when one of his formers business partners threatens to blackmail him by outing him to the scientific community.
Interestingly enough, the whole pig-human thing doesn't really go anywhere. His victim in all this, Vera (the ridiculously beautiful Elena Anaya of Point Blank) doesn't develop super-powers or get bulletproof skin or anything like that. I thought there was going to be a twist where the science went wrong but the movie plays out straight revenge tragedy, basically.
Not that there isn't a twist, mind you. Oh, yes, there's a twist, though I didn't see it coming until about 10 minutes before it popped.
There are other sorta '60s things about this movie, too. The color doesn't used the washed out blue-gray feel that's so popular (hacky!) today, but a more vibrant one. Not exactly Technicolor but Kodachrome(ish). Antonio Banderas has his hair slicked back and walks around in a tuxedo at one point, evoking a Sean-Connery-as-James-Bond figure that's amplified when he holds a gun.
In fact, if you listen to the semi-techno song used in the trailer (and also in the movie's one chase scene), the electric guitar sound is very mid-to-late '60s. I'm not hitting bulls-eyes today but the '60s surfin' classic "Wipeout" comes to mind.
There are no cell phones, computers or modern devices, except for large-screen viewers, which were pretty commonly faked in '60s movies.
So, what's not '60s about it? Well, there's a lot of nudity and it's pretty pornographic which wasn't common in a mainstream, high-budget '60s flick. It's not gratuitous, but it is gross. (The nudity isn't. Did I mention that Elena Anaya is gorgeous?) The sex is done covered or far-away, but it's still very explicit (and often violent) in terms of the imagery Pedro creates in the viewers' mind.
I see this movie being fetish-fuel for a small but intense niche.
Overall? We liked it all right. It could've been shorter. The Boy found it disturbing but it's a fool's errand to try to create much of an impact on the younger generation through shock or transgression. As for myself, I was expecting something bizarre! titillating! shocking! along the typical lines that certain directors endear themselves to certain critics, and I was only put off-guard by the naivete of the genre.
I mean, really: Who makes mad scientist movies any more? In my lifetime, there haven't been that many. The (speaking of pornographic) Re-animator series, that Peter O'Toole/Mariel Hemmingway oddity from '85, Creator, sorta—but really, the modern science-gone-awry is more likely to feature a noble, avuncular scientist rather than a mad one. The science goes awry (these days) because of the evil businessman or a tangential individual's greed.
This movie's sort of like taking Humanoids from the Deep (where mutated fish-men emerge from polluted water to rape women) or Creature from the Black Lagoon and exploring seriously the potential for relationship between the fish-men and the women they kidnap.
So...odd. Well, done, for the most part. Good acting. The music's a little heavy-handed. The graphicness is going to be off-putting for some, to say nothing of the indecency. Vera is the closest thing to a hero the movie has, and for reasons that can't be explained with spoilage, she's hardly pure.
The Boy said he would have a hard time recommending it, and I tend to agree.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Spy Kids 4: Waste of Time
I said a few reviews ago that all our great directors suck, which is kind of sad, but to my mind not as sad as all our young turks—the promising film-makers of 20 years ago—seem to have not matured into greatness but stay wallowing in the stuff that made them famous without adding any real polish or sophistication.
I've never been a Tarantino fan but when I express disappointment, everyone tells me to go back to Reservoir Dogs. I could make an exception for Kevin Smith, because he really tries to grow and change—and Red State is supposed to be good—but he says he's going to make one more movie (a hockey movie he's been working on for quite some time) and then retire.
Which brings us to Robert Rodriguez and Spy Kids: All The Time In The World. Rodriguez is one of these guys who acquired his skills through tons of time behind a video camera. His movies have always been fast-paced, a little chaotic, and also kind of sloppy and poorly thought out. He usually overwhelmed his shortcomings with style, but the style is played out a bit.
Sin City may be his best movie, simply because so much was laid out in the comic book and he could follow it (and made the choice to follow it) so closely.
In some ways, the Spy Kids series is the ultimate expression of Rodriguez' style. It doesn't have to make any sense as long as it looks cool, any situation can be resolved with CGI, and there's no limit on how ham-handed you can make your pro-family-time message.
The Flower refused to go see this, with her point being that they just kept getting worse and worse. She's not wrong. (The Barb doesn't really care as long as the popcorn keeps flowing, but I couldn't get more of a "pretty good" out of her.)
This time around, it's Jessica Alba in the maternal role. The story goes that Rodriguez was on the set of Machete when Alba's one-year-old let off a diaper bomb and he thought, "Yeah! Mommy spy with baby bombs!" Or maybe, since the Spy Kid franchise has been far-and-away his biggest hits, he just was looking for an excuse to bring it back after eight years.
Alba plays stepmother to two new kids, a gentle hard-of-hearing boy and his really bitchy sister. I thought the sister was older, and maybe she's supposed to be, but the boy actor is actually a little older than the girl. (The actors, Rowan Blanchard and Mason Cook, are fine; the characters are who Rodriguez made them.) Mom is dead, and Alba has to pay, apparently.
Alba's also an ex-spy who's given up her career to raise her baby with Joel McHale, who's a doofus-y TV personality.
Meh. I've already lost interest in explaining it. None of it really matters. It's just a big mess comprised of smaller messes. There's a whole lot of insulting stupid, even for a Spy Kids movie.
Jeremy Piven has a fun role as head of the OSS, who's doing a fast-talking '40s thing. The original kids are back and all grown up. Vega is a hottie now, and Sabara has gotten even odder looking; but even here Rodriguez is just rehashing the same old themes. You know, how many times do these people have to re-learn their family values before they stick?
Oh, Ricky Gervais is the voice of a robotic dog. The English whore.
I've already said "meh" and I don't want to say it again, because this is not a two "meh" movie.
I've never been a Tarantino fan but when I express disappointment, everyone tells me to go back to Reservoir Dogs. I could make an exception for Kevin Smith, because he really tries to grow and change—and Red State is supposed to be good—but he says he's going to make one more movie (a hockey movie he's been working on for quite some time) and then retire.
Which brings us to Robert Rodriguez and Spy Kids: All The Time In The World. Rodriguez is one of these guys who acquired his skills through tons of time behind a video camera. His movies have always been fast-paced, a little chaotic, and also kind of sloppy and poorly thought out. He usually overwhelmed his shortcomings with style, but the style is played out a bit.
Sin City may be his best movie, simply because so much was laid out in the comic book and he could follow it (and made the choice to follow it) so closely.
In some ways, the Spy Kids series is the ultimate expression of Rodriguez' style. It doesn't have to make any sense as long as it looks cool, any situation can be resolved with CGI, and there's no limit on how ham-handed you can make your pro-family-time message.
The Flower refused to go see this, with her point being that they just kept getting worse and worse. She's not wrong. (The Barb doesn't really care as long as the popcorn keeps flowing, but I couldn't get more of a "pretty good" out of her.)
This time around, it's Jessica Alba in the maternal role. The story goes that Rodriguez was on the set of Machete when Alba's one-year-old let off a diaper bomb and he thought, "Yeah! Mommy spy with baby bombs!" Or maybe, since the Spy Kid franchise has been far-and-away his biggest hits, he just was looking for an excuse to bring it back after eight years.
Alba plays stepmother to two new kids, a gentle hard-of-hearing boy and his really bitchy sister. I thought the sister was older, and maybe she's supposed to be, but the boy actor is actually a little older than the girl. (The actors, Rowan Blanchard and Mason Cook, are fine; the characters are who Rodriguez made them.) Mom is dead, and Alba has to pay, apparently.
Alba's also an ex-spy who's given up her career to raise her baby with Joel McHale, who's a doofus-y TV personality.
Meh. I've already lost interest in explaining it. None of it really matters. It's just a big mess comprised of smaller messes. There's a whole lot of insulting stupid, even for a Spy Kids movie.
Jeremy Piven has a fun role as head of the OSS, who's doing a fast-talking '40s thing. The original kids are back and all grown up. Vega is a hottie now, and Sabara has gotten even odder looking; but even here Rodriguez is just rehashing the same old themes. You know, how many times do these people have to re-learn their family values before they stick?
Oh, Ricky Gervais is the voice of a robotic dog. The English whore.
I've already said "meh" and I don't want to say it again, because this is not a two "meh" movie.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Into The Abyss with Werner Herzog
Probably the greatest capital punishment movie ever is Dead Man Walking. The temptation—succumbed to frequently throughout the decades by Hollywood—is to show an innocent man wrongly convicted and killed. It's far more interesting, and fair, to show a heinous criminal being killed.
Werner Herzog takes his own interesting approach in his new documentary Into The Abyss. The German film-maker (Grizzly Man, Rescue Dawn) gives us the story of a brutal, senseless crime that echos of Crime and Punishment.
Two young men kill a grandmother, Sandra Stotler, for her car for a joyride. Before stealing the car, though, they go deposit the body in a nearby lake. When they go back to get the car, it's after dark and the woman's gated community is locked up. So they wait for her son (Adam Stotler) and his friend (Jeremy Richardson), in order to lure them into the woods to kill them—in order to get the remote to get into the community and steal the car. Later the two are captured after an extended gun battle with the police.
One of the criminals, Michael Perry, is given a death sentence. The other just barely escapes that fate and gets 50 years in prison.
Herzog shows his brilliance—repeatedly—here. First, he says right off the bat that he's against the death penalty, and he lets Perry make his case for his own innocence. (He blames his partner in crime, Jason Burkett.) But then, he details the horrific nature of the crimes, and lets the victim's families expound on their lost love ones. This takes the first third of the film. Further, he never lets the movie go on very far without bringing back on the families.
Herzog is determined that you never forget what these two young men did. Further, he presents sufficient evidence of their guilt. He never tries to present a case of innocence.
For Burkett, though, he also unflinchingly shows the tragedy of his life. His father's in jail across the street, after a lifetime of drug use and dealing, and he's interviewed. Apparently he's got a brother in jail, too. Burkett's father is a particularly tragic figure, whose closest familial memory is a Thanksgiving dinner shared with his two sons who were also in jail.
Indeed, to my eye, these people, who have escaped the executioner's needle, are far more tragic types. They seem redeemable and our system is almost completely incapable of providing any redemption.
But even here, Herzog's not taking a bleeding-heart approach. Among the people interviewed are a couple of other locals who were touched, indirectly, by the crime. One of them was an illiterate miscreant who learned to read in jail—and also learned to stay out of jail and go straight.
Jeremy Richardson's brother was himself a miscreant who was arrested at Jeremy's funeral, and who laments having introduced him to the Perry (or Burkett, or both, I'm not sure), but he seems to be doing better now.
In fact, one thing Herzog does is detail the incredible amount of violence, crime and family dysfunction in Conroe, Texas, which can't help but throw into sharp contrast that most of the people manage to survive the craziness without randomly killing people.
A couple of other good segments include the opening, where the priest who works death row describes his experiences doing it, and a segment where one of the executioners describes how he gave up his job and pension after facilitating over one hundred executions.
A weirder part is the story of Jason Burkett's lawyer who ultimately ends up marrying him and—well, you'll have to see it. (Or Google it.) I think Herzog was trying to say something about hope and life, but it struck me as a tragic echo of Burkett's own life. Or maybe Herzog was just recording the facts.
Despite Herzog's inclination, he lets Adam's sister (Sondra's daughter) describe how seeing Perry's execution lifted a huge weight off her shoulders. He prompts her with "Would a life sentence also have worked?" She agrees, but also quickly slips back into "Some people don't deserve to live."
Herzog wasn't trying to make a political statement or even an issue movie, and he succeeds. He's crafted something much more genuine and complex. Now, one of his producers thinks this is a searing indictment of Rick Perry's Texas but I'm thinking it's just like Dead Man Walking: People who are for the death penalty are going to see that the system worked.
I'm not pro-death penalty myself, but I felt like the system worked here. It's tragic, but Burkett was (and no doubt is) a dangerous man, deserving of a long sentence.
And Perry?
Well, I don't know how Herzog felt, but after getting over the jarring incongruity of the smiling, boyish looking Perry claim his only crime was being homeless and accepting charity from Burkett, I became quickly convinced that he was a sociopath of the first order, like that other famous murderous Perry.
Anyway, this is about more than capital punishment, and definitely worth watching if you're interested in crime (or punishment).
The Boy also liked it, though he felt it, as all documentaries, dragged a bit.
Werner Herzog takes his own interesting approach in his new documentary Into The Abyss. The German film-maker (Grizzly Man, Rescue Dawn) gives us the story of a brutal, senseless crime that echos of Crime and Punishment.
Two young men kill a grandmother, Sandra Stotler, for her car for a joyride. Before stealing the car, though, they go deposit the body in a nearby lake. When they go back to get the car, it's after dark and the woman's gated community is locked up. So they wait for her son (Adam Stotler) and his friend (Jeremy Richardson), in order to lure them into the woods to kill them—in order to get the remote to get into the community and steal the car. Later the two are captured after an extended gun battle with the police.
One of the criminals, Michael Perry, is given a death sentence. The other just barely escapes that fate and gets 50 years in prison.
Herzog shows his brilliance—repeatedly—here. First, he says right off the bat that he's against the death penalty, and he lets Perry make his case for his own innocence. (He blames his partner in crime, Jason Burkett.) But then, he details the horrific nature of the crimes, and lets the victim's families expound on their lost love ones. This takes the first third of the film. Further, he never lets the movie go on very far without bringing back on the families.
Herzog is determined that you never forget what these two young men did. Further, he presents sufficient evidence of their guilt. He never tries to present a case of innocence.
For Burkett, though, he also unflinchingly shows the tragedy of his life. His father's in jail across the street, after a lifetime of drug use and dealing, and he's interviewed. Apparently he's got a brother in jail, too. Burkett's father is a particularly tragic figure, whose closest familial memory is a Thanksgiving dinner shared with his two sons who were also in jail.
Indeed, to my eye, these people, who have escaped the executioner's needle, are far more tragic types. They seem redeemable and our system is almost completely incapable of providing any redemption.
But even here, Herzog's not taking a bleeding-heart approach. Among the people interviewed are a couple of other locals who were touched, indirectly, by the crime. One of them was an illiterate miscreant who learned to read in jail—and also learned to stay out of jail and go straight.
Jeremy Richardson's brother was himself a miscreant who was arrested at Jeremy's funeral, and who laments having introduced him to the Perry (or Burkett, or both, I'm not sure), but he seems to be doing better now.
In fact, one thing Herzog does is detail the incredible amount of violence, crime and family dysfunction in Conroe, Texas, which can't help but throw into sharp contrast that most of the people manage to survive the craziness without randomly killing people.
A couple of other good segments include the opening, where the priest who works death row describes his experiences doing it, and a segment where one of the executioners describes how he gave up his job and pension after facilitating over one hundred executions.
A weirder part is the story of Jason Burkett's lawyer who ultimately ends up marrying him and—well, you'll have to see it. (Or Google it.) I think Herzog was trying to say something about hope and life, but it struck me as a tragic echo of Burkett's own life. Or maybe Herzog was just recording the facts.
Despite Herzog's inclination, he lets Adam's sister (Sondra's daughter) describe how seeing Perry's execution lifted a huge weight off her shoulders. He prompts her with "Would a life sentence also have worked?" She agrees, but also quickly slips back into "Some people don't deserve to live."
Herzog wasn't trying to make a political statement or even an issue movie, and he succeeds. He's crafted something much more genuine and complex. Now, one of his producers thinks this is a searing indictment of Rick Perry's Texas but I'm thinking it's just like Dead Man Walking: People who are for the death penalty are going to see that the system worked.
I'm not pro-death penalty myself, but I felt like the system worked here. It's tragic, but Burkett was (and no doubt is) a dangerous man, deserving of a long sentence.
And Perry?
Well, I don't know how Herzog felt, but after getting over the jarring incongruity of the smiling, boyish looking Perry claim his only crime was being homeless and accepting charity from Burkett, I became quickly convinced that he was a sociopath of the first order, like that other famous murderous Perry.
Anyway, this is about more than capital punishment, and definitely worth watching if you're interested in crime (or punishment).
The Boy also liked it, though he felt it, as all documentaries, dragged a bit.
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