This is one of these movies that doesn't fit neatly into a particular paradigm. Some of the posters for Horns make it look like a straight-up horror movie, while some of the trailers look a little more nuanced. So, what is it actually?
Essentially, Horns is a mystery mixed in with a fantasy fable, about a young man named Ig (Daniel Radcliffe) who is being subjected to incredible scrutiny by his community and local news media because, well, he killed his girlfriend.
Allegedly.
Very, very allegedly, though it looks bad indeed, and doesn't help that Ig can't remember the night too well.
So, there's the mystery.
But in the course of all that focused hate, a newspaper compares Ig to the Devil, and he wakes up after a drunken tryst with—you guessed it—horns. And not just benign, everyday horns, but horns which are, essentially, a manifestation of a satanic presence. In his presence, people are inclined to reveal their unbridled ids, and to ask his permission as to whether or not they should act on them.
So, there's the fantasy/fable part. Which is kind of neat, because it plays into the mystery aspect. On the one hand, the horns allow Ig to extract information that he otherwise couldn't from people; on the other, if Ig is innocent, why would he sprout horns? It ain't exactly a halo.
By the third act, the movie shifts gears and goes into actual horror territory, including a rather over-the-top climactic scene with some serious gore, snakes, and somewhat dubious CGI.
The Boy and I really liked it. The Flower could not be induced to come, but we might take her to see it because we think she'd enjoy it. It's an unusual sort of film, but it made me want to read the book (by Joe Hill).
Alexandre Aja (Mirrors, Pirahna 3D) wrote the script and directed.
Daniel Radcliffe does a damn good American accent, even if he is once again playing a beleaguered young fellow with mysterious powers and an unnatural relationship with snakes. Even though he has the weird child-actor-all-grown-up look, he's filled out a bit, and he can act.
Juno Temple (Killer Joe, Maleficent) is entirely plausible as the ethereal beauty who may be Ig's angelic faithful soulmate, or may be a dirty whore. Heather Graham has a small gem of a role as a remarkably evil waitress. James Remar and Kathleen Quinlan play possibly the worst parents ever, or maybe just the most honest.
Max Minghella (The Internship, The Social Network) is the faithful friend and Joe Anderson (The Grey, A Single Shot) plays the unreliable big brother. David Morse plays the girlfriend's father. Kelli Garner is the hot mess who pines for Ig.
What I'm getting at is, it's good acting. Interesting and entertaining story. Mostly a mystery, though with some serious gore at the end. Oh, it's also, essentially, a love story.
Critics are not liking it much, and when we saw it the audience ratings (which have now been retracted on RT, presumably in advance of a wide release) were equally indifferent/negative. The Boy and I enjoyed the hell (heh) out of it.
This makes an interesting comparison with the (much more serious) Calvary, in that when Ig is walking around in his horns, he finds out how truly awful the entire town is. It also makes an interesting comparison with Faust (I'm thinking of the 1926 version because that's the one I've most recently seen), in that Ig is given a certain power, but with a righteous cause.
The question is, will it tempt him away from that righteous cause? Actually, the funniest scene in the movie is him abusing his power in a way it's hard to disapprove of, as it involves the media. Or at least, it's hard for me to disapprove but that probably just means I'm very corruptible. (If only someone would try, dammit!)
Anyway, this seems like a rather bold choice of movie to make. Like I said, it's not neatly in any genre, but it perhaps enough pop-appeal to hit it big. No idea, really. (And with boxofficemojo.com having been absorbed into IMDB, I may never know.)
It opens wide this Halloween. We saw it earlier because...I don't know...Academy Award consideration? (Our theater does that a lot. We saw Two Faces Of January months ago and it just now got released.)
But if you're open to a fantasy love story and not put off by gore, this could be the movie for you.
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
A Walk Among The Tombstones
Liam Neeson doesn't know who you are. But he will find you, and he will kill you. Or so they say on that there Internet the kids are all hopped up on. I don't know how all these 60-ish guys do it. I work out, but after garotting a few guys and shooting some others, or just running 'em down in my car, I'm worn out for the night.
Not Liam, though. In A Walk Among The Tombstones, Neeson plays an ex-cop (now unlicensed PI) who gets roped into helping a drug trafficker whose wife has been kidnapped and very possibly killed.
In fact, someone is targeting the wives of drug traffickers all over the city. (New York City, of course. That's where we keep the serial killers. Well, there and Miami.)
Now, I always thought you didn't mess with drug traffickers because, y'know, they'll kill you. But our kidnapper/killer/crazy people manage to easily defeat the nonexistent security and just as easily extract money from our drug guys, who are strong family men, apparently.
Seriously, as part of the Liam Neeson action canon, this is a fine entry. Besides the action scenes, which are fairly spare but well done, there's actually a story here and a nice relationship story between Liam and a little black orphan (no, really!), which I enjoyed even as I felt it was sorta cheesy.
It's another one of these movies that takes place in the '90s, in this case just pre-Y2K, which is sort of a thing these days. The Lawrence Block novel on which it is based was released in the early '90s, so go figure. (Maybe the director wanted to bring it forward, but ubiquitous smart phones would have changed things too much, so he brought it forward as far as he could without screwing up the story.)
The Boy and the Flower both enjoyed it, as did I. Veteran writer Scott Frank did a fine job of directing here, and we look forward to seeing more from him in the future.
Not Liam, though. In A Walk Among The Tombstones, Neeson plays an ex-cop (now unlicensed PI) who gets roped into helping a drug trafficker whose wife has been kidnapped and very possibly killed.
In fact, someone is targeting the wives of drug traffickers all over the city. (New York City, of course. That's where we keep the serial killers. Well, there and Miami.)
Now, I always thought you didn't mess with drug traffickers because, y'know, they'll kill you. But our kidnapper/killer/crazy people manage to easily defeat the nonexistent security and just as easily extract money from our drug guys, who are strong family men, apparently.
Seriously, as part of the Liam Neeson action canon, this is a fine entry. Besides the action scenes, which are fairly spare but well done, there's actually a story here and a nice relationship story between Liam and a little black orphan (no, really!), which I enjoyed even as I felt it was sorta cheesy.
It's another one of these movies that takes place in the '90s, in this case just pre-Y2K, which is sort of a thing these days. The Lawrence Block novel on which it is based was released in the early '90s, so go figure. (Maybe the director wanted to bring it forward, but ubiquitous smart phones would have changed things too much, so he brought it forward as far as he could without screwing up the story.)
The Boy and the Flower both enjoyed it, as did I. Veteran writer Scott Frank did a fine job of directing here, and we look forward to seeing more from him in the future.
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Tusk
There is only one way a movie about a man who turns another man into a walrus (against his will) can go wrong, and that's by being boring. As such, Kevin Smith's new movie Tusk, is a success. But even more, this is an entertaining flick that straddles the line between horror and comedy in a way few movies do successfully.
The story concerns Wallace (oh, yeah, Wal-Lace), a podcaster whose gimmick is that he travels the continent in search of interesting stories that he describes to his partner Teddy, who is agoraphobic or doesn't like to travel or something. They call their show the Not-See Party. (Smith understands the podcast world pretty well, I'd judge.)
Wallace has journeyed to Canada to interview a handicapped kid he's been making fun of, but when he shows up, the kid has selfishly committed suicide, leaving Wallace without a story. A chance sighting of a flyer leads him to the home of Howard Howe, who may possibly be The Most Interesting Man in the World.
But behind Howe's oddly affable exterior lurks a sinister desire to turn a man into a walrus.
This is not just preposterous, it virtually dares you to take it seriously. And Smith never loses his sense of humor about the proceedings; but he also dares you to not take it seriously. Wallace is a real person—a jerk, to be sure, given to cheating on his girlfriend Ally, but in no way deserving of his fate. Ally and Teddy aren't exactly great, either, but their concern is genuine when they go to look for the missing Wallace, and down to the final scene which is both hilarious and touching.
Dark comedy, obviously. It reminds of many other movies, of course: It could almost stand as a parody of Silence of the Lambs, and it recalls The Human Centipede (without the gratuitous grossness). But the movie it most feels like to me is Motel Hell, which similarly straddles the line between sincere, campy and satirical.
The most instructive comparison is probably between this and Centipede. Both are body-horror type films, and as I've noted with regard to The Human Centipede, it used to be that this sort of mad scientist revolved around said mad scientist never accomplishing the desired goal. That's important because the dread is way more potent than the actualization, which is gross, unpleasant and (in the case of Centipede) frankly goofy.
Smith does an excellent job of creating the dread, as well as a few moments of genuine horror, which is perhaps a bit surprising coming from the guy famous for things like Clerks (although Dogma has its startling moments). There seems to be a consensus (insofar as these things go) that this part of the film is well done.
When confronted with the reality of the, uh, werewalrus, though, about half the audience bails (critics and commoners alike). I kind of think people are taking themselves too seriously, though. "I couldn't possibly enjoy a movie about a man turned into a walrus!"
Again, the only sin is to be boring, which is actually really easy to do: If you disrespect your characters, if you go for too many goofy jokes (rather than just letting the absurdity/horror of the situation speak for itself), if you just go too long—these are the landmines of the, uh, human-walrus hybrid film.
Smith steers through the minefield in his own idiosyncratic way, keeping his movie in the 90-100 minute range, and balancing the absurdity and horror with the human elements.
He does have one weakness: The long monologue (or sometimes dialogue) with a tight shot of the speaker(s), straight on looking at the camera. He does this effectively a couple of times here, and then a couple of other times less so, as with the Quebecois detective Guy Lapointe describing his encounter with Howe, and then again later with a long dialogue between Lapointe and Howe (pretending not to be Howe).
These word-storms actually manage the horror/comedy thing well at first (sort of like Gremlins Phoebe Cates' hilarious/horrifying monologue about why her family doesn't celebrate Christmas), then they go long, then they get absurd again, but then they go too long.
In a movie about a guy turned into a walrus, this is a pretty minor complaint.
Michael Parks ("Twin Peaks", We Are What We Are, Planet Terror/Deathproof) does an excellent job as Howe, as does Justin Long as Wallace. Genesis Rodriguez (Identity Theft, Big Hero 6) and Haley Joel Osmont (really!) play the concerned girlfriend and friend, respectively. Johnny Depp plays the French-Canadian detective (the kids did not recognize him). Smith's daughter Harley Quinn, and Depp's kid Lily-Rose Melody have cute roles as Canadian convenience store clerks. Even Mrs. Smith (Jennifer Schwalbach) has a short role as a waitress.
A lot of Canadian/American humor. We all liked it. Even weeks later we find ourselves chuckling over parts of it. There are a couple of really nice shots in here, too, which is always nice to see from the guy who revived "set the camera down and talk" as an art form.
This film does demand that you suspend your belief, of course, and you probably know if you're up for that. Weeks later, we still find ourselves chuckling over it, and The Flower has taken to using it as a new barometer. ("Gone Girl was pretty good, but you know what would've made it better? A walrus.")
EXTENDED SPECIAL BLOGGER'S CUT MATERIAL:
I'm going to add some insider stuff and some personal stuff, so if you want to geek out a bit with me here, read on.
You know, I always like Kevin Smith movies, even as I disagree (often vehemently) with whatever the underlying message is. Like, is a guy really supposed to roll with it when he finds out his girl has lied about her (as it turns out) extensive sex life (Clerks, Chasing Amy)? Is God's main message to Man really just not to believe very much in anything (Dogma)?
I can forgive Jersey Girl's "Make this one big gesture to prove you love me or all is lost" thing because that's a standard Hollywood trope.
But they're fun, funny, and distinctive (an important thing). They're also short and not boring. I feel like I could comfortably say, "Well, they're entertaining, but not masterpieces" but then I think back to all the movies in that category from the '90s that get watched and re-watched and emerge as new classics.
The Big Lebowski, for example, had a meager $17M box office when it was released. And Groundhog Day, now a beloved classic, was received with the critical warmth of a golf clap, and finished somewhere between Free Willy and Demolition Man at the box office.
Re-watchability is a big deal.
Anyway, Tusk came about as a result of a podcast where Smith and hetero-life-partner Scott Mosier, wherein they came across an actual ad by a man who wanted to exchange rent in his house for someone willing to dress up as a walrus for about 2 hours a day. You can hear them actually map out the plot, almost as filmed, here. And here them talk about the box office failure here.
Though, as noted on the second podcast, with a $3M budget, there was no chance of losing money. Smith's attitude is instructive; he wishes it did better, but he has a laundry list of how it was great for him.
It will still make a lot more at the box office than Life of Crime, unless that gets a much bigger release somehow, but it won't make as much as Motel Hell, even without adjusting for inflation.
But I can't see how this doesn't get a place in the cult horror pantheon next to that film.
The story concerns Wallace (oh, yeah, Wal-Lace), a podcaster whose gimmick is that he travels the continent in search of interesting stories that he describes to his partner Teddy, who is agoraphobic or doesn't like to travel or something. They call their show the Not-See Party. (Smith understands the podcast world pretty well, I'd judge.)
Wallace has journeyed to Canada to interview a handicapped kid he's been making fun of, but when he shows up, the kid has selfishly committed suicide, leaving Wallace without a story. A chance sighting of a flyer leads him to the home of Howard Howe, who may possibly be The Most Interesting Man in the World.
But behind Howe's oddly affable exterior lurks a sinister desire to turn a man into a walrus.
This is not just preposterous, it virtually dares you to take it seriously. And Smith never loses his sense of humor about the proceedings; but he also dares you to not take it seriously. Wallace is a real person—a jerk, to be sure, given to cheating on his girlfriend Ally, but in no way deserving of his fate. Ally and Teddy aren't exactly great, either, but their concern is genuine when they go to look for the missing Wallace, and down to the final scene which is both hilarious and touching.
Dark comedy, obviously. It reminds of many other movies, of course: It could almost stand as a parody of Silence of the Lambs, and it recalls The Human Centipede (without the gratuitous grossness). But the movie it most feels like to me is Motel Hell, which similarly straddles the line between sincere, campy and satirical.
The most instructive comparison is probably between this and Centipede. Both are body-horror type films, and as I've noted with regard to The Human Centipede, it used to be that this sort of mad scientist revolved around said mad scientist never accomplishing the desired goal. That's important because the dread is way more potent than the actualization, which is gross, unpleasant and (in the case of Centipede) frankly goofy.
Smith does an excellent job of creating the dread, as well as a few moments of genuine horror, which is perhaps a bit surprising coming from the guy famous for things like Clerks (although Dogma has its startling moments). There seems to be a consensus (insofar as these things go) that this part of the film is well done.
When confronted with the reality of the, uh, werewalrus, though, about half the audience bails (critics and commoners alike). I kind of think people are taking themselves too seriously, though. "I couldn't possibly enjoy a movie about a man turned into a walrus!"
Again, the only sin is to be boring, which is actually really easy to do: If you disrespect your characters, if you go for too many goofy jokes (rather than just letting the absurdity/horror of the situation speak for itself), if you just go too long—these are the landmines of the, uh, human-walrus hybrid film.
Smith steers through the minefield in his own idiosyncratic way, keeping his movie in the 90-100 minute range, and balancing the absurdity and horror with the human elements.
He does have one weakness: The long monologue (or sometimes dialogue) with a tight shot of the speaker(s), straight on looking at the camera. He does this effectively a couple of times here, and then a couple of other times less so, as with the Quebecois detective Guy Lapointe describing his encounter with Howe, and then again later with a long dialogue between Lapointe and Howe (pretending not to be Howe).
These word-storms actually manage the horror/comedy thing well at first (sort of like Gremlins Phoebe Cates' hilarious/horrifying monologue about why her family doesn't celebrate Christmas), then they go long, then they get absurd again, but then they go too long.
In a movie about a guy turned into a walrus, this is a pretty minor complaint.
Michael Parks ("Twin Peaks", We Are What We Are, Planet Terror/Deathproof) does an excellent job as Howe, as does Justin Long as Wallace. Genesis Rodriguez (Identity Theft, Big Hero 6) and Haley Joel Osmont (really!) play the concerned girlfriend and friend, respectively. Johnny Depp plays the French-Canadian detective (the kids did not recognize him). Smith's daughter Harley Quinn, and Depp's kid Lily-Rose Melody have cute roles as Canadian convenience store clerks. Even Mrs. Smith (Jennifer Schwalbach) has a short role as a waitress.
A lot of Canadian/American humor. We all liked it. Even weeks later we find ourselves chuckling over parts of it. There are a couple of really nice shots in here, too, which is always nice to see from the guy who revived "set the camera down and talk" as an art form.
This film does demand that you suspend your belief, of course, and you probably know if you're up for that. Weeks later, we still find ourselves chuckling over it, and The Flower has taken to using it as a new barometer. ("Gone Girl was pretty good, but you know what would've made it better? A walrus.")
EXTENDED SPECIAL BLOGGER'S CUT MATERIAL:
I'm going to add some insider stuff and some personal stuff, so if you want to geek out a bit with me here, read on.
You know, I always like Kevin Smith movies, even as I disagree (often vehemently) with whatever the underlying message is. Like, is a guy really supposed to roll with it when he finds out his girl has lied about her (as it turns out) extensive sex life (Clerks, Chasing Amy)? Is God's main message to Man really just not to believe very much in anything (Dogma)?
I can forgive Jersey Girl's "Make this one big gesture to prove you love me or all is lost" thing because that's a standard Hollywood trope.
But they're fun, funny, and distinctive (an important thing). They're also short and not boring. I feel like I could comfortably say, "Well, they're entertaining, but not masterpieces" but then I think back to all the movies in that category from the '90s that get watched and re-watched and emerge as new classics.
The Big Lebowski, for example, had a meager $17M box office when it was released. And Groundhog Day, now a beloved classic, was received with the critical warmth of a golf clap, and finished somewhere between Free Willy and Demolition Man at the box office.
Re-watchability is a big deal.
Anyway, Tusk came about as a result of a podcast where Smith and hetero-life-partner Scott Mosier, wherein they came across an actual ad by a man who wanted to exchange rent in his house for someone willing to dress up as a walrus for about 2 hours a day. You can hear them actually map out the plot, almost as filmed, here. And here them talk about the box office failure here.
Though, as noted on the second podcast, with a $3M budget, there was no chance of losing money. Smith's attitude is instructive; he wishes it did better, but he has a laundry list of how it was great for him.
It will still make a lot more at the box office than Life of Crime, unless that gets a much bigger release somehow, but it won't make as much as Motel Hell, even without adjusting for inflation.
But I can't see how this doesn't get a place in the cult horror pantheon next to that film.
Atlas Shrugged Part 3: Live Free or Shrug Hard
You know, I've been pretty game about the whole Atlas Shrugged thing. I sat through the first one, mostly without laughing, and I appreciated the great strides in quality made in the second one. These are movies that I have to go out of my way to see, too. (A trip to a regular theater runs a good $40-$60 instead of my usual $22. Color me completely unsurprised that people aren't going to the movies.)
And I knew—I knew—that a movie that was bothering to kick-start $500K (the craft services tab of your average low-budget flick) wasn't going to make good on the promises of Ayn Rand's dystopic future.
And I haven't even read the book.
Which is okay, because Part 3 is more of a book report than a movie, sorry to say. Every cheap tactic you can think of is used to compress the story into what must have been a meager budget. And it's not that it's bad, really, it's that it's not entirely there. Which is a shame on a number of levels.
The new actors (they're replaced again from part 1 and part 2) are good: Laura Regan is even warmer and more appealing in this role than Samantha Mathis and Taylor Schilling, and she has some genuine chemistry with Kristoffer Polaha, who plays John Galt (replacing D.B. Sweeney and Paul Johannson, who had very minor roles in the previous films).
But the rest of the cast phones it in, and I mean that literally. Rob Morrow plays Henry Rearden, Dagny's love interest in the previous film, but his big scene here is a mutual break-up over the phone. (Love, like business, is something that entails no obligations on the parties involved beyond initial agreements, if I understand correctly.)
I like Morrow a lot; would've liked to actually see him in this film. Greg Germann who has been playing weasels since at least "Ally McBeal" (and possibly "Ned and Stacey"), plays Dagny's brother. What a great choice. He even has a few lines. Peter Mackenzie has probably the most substantial role after Dagny and John, as "Head of State Thompson".
I had some trouble with that. What is "Head of State"? Are they trying to say "President" without saying "President"? Did that come up in the previous films? It didn't bug me then, but it did here.
Anyway, the voice over is provided by an actual returning cast member, Jeff Yagher, who plays Jeff Allen. No, I don't know who "Jeff Allen" was in the movie. To me, the story, as I can piece it together from the movies, boils down to a power struggle between Productive Giants and Tyrants, with a love quadrangle between Dagny and, alternately, John, Henry and Francisco, and the big character arc is Dagny's as she is ultimately moved from fighting to her death to save her father's railroad (still makes me laugh—railroad!) to "going Galt".
So, the big climax in this movie is set up beautifully: The heart of her rail operation is this bridge. Galt has predicted this bridge will collapse due to government regulation/incompetence. She says she won't let that happen.
Obviously, obviously, obviously: The Bridge Is The Thing. The movie should revolve around the fate of that bridge. The climax of the movie should be a 10 minute desperate struggle to save the bridge from, I dunno, explosive railway regulators. Whatever.
Instead, we get a still picture of a collapsed bridge and a narration saying, "Yep, it collapsed."
I mentioned in the first movie how off-putting the philosophy itself is. And, by the way, I'm not saying that I understand Objectivism; I'm just going by what the movie presents. The second movie beat out the first by focusing on cannily accurate description of government overreach, and less on the revulsion toward altruism. It also cleverly wove actual current events into the story, where they fit seamlessly.
But where Rand excelled in her understanding of governments, she was seriously lacking in her understanding of humans, which apparently was based rated on the Autism Spectrum Disorder scale.
The Boy noted that Galt's Gulch was peculiarly unfree: You couldn't give food away, you had to charge for it. He made the point that, essentially, he just wants his stuff to be his, to sell or to give away as he saw fit. Indeed, that's freedom, in the end.
And to get into the magic machine room (the perpetual motion machine room), you have to take an oath: "I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
The contradictions in this are inherent in the movie itself though it never notices them, leading me to believe they're in the source material. The whole movie revolves around the tragedy caused by constantly grasping government; yes, it deals with it primarily in terms of individual sacrifice, but the apocalyptic scenario it paints is horrifying because other people matter.
We identify with Dagny (sorta) because she's competent and good at what she does; but the gravity of the catastrophe that unfolds is because millions will starve without her.
The spoken philosophy is practically an embrace of the cartoonish notion of businesses as profit-seeking narcissists, even as the exposition demonstrates that greatness is greatness because of the beneficial aspect of free economic exchange.
To say nothing of the fact taht the whole premise of the story is deeply 20th-century late industrialism: We still have industrial giants, but we are powered by millions of little Galts. There's a great story to be told there about how they, too, will "go Galt" in the right circumstances.
This trilogy probably isn't the movie series anybody wanted, and if we judge it by its own philosophy, there's little reason for a disinterested moviegoer to go see any of them. But there were a few Randians in the audience whose opinion seemed to be "Well, the book was better."
And I knew—I knew—that a movie that was bothering to kick-start $500K (the craft services tab of your average low-budget flick) wasn't going to make good on the promises of Ayn Rand's dystopic future.
And I haven't even read the book.
Which is okay, because Part 3 is more of a book report than a movie, sorry to say. Every cheap tactic you can think of is used to compress the story into what must have been a meager budget. And it's not that it's bad, really, it's that it's not entirely there. Which is a shame on a number of levels.
The new actors (they're replaced again from part 1 and part 2) are good: Laura Regan is even warmer and more appealing in this role than Samantha Mathis and Taylor Schilling, and she has some genuine chemistry with Kristoffer Polaha, who plays John Galt (replacing D.B. Sweeney and Paul Johannson, who had very minor roles in the previous films).
But the rest of the cast phones it in, and I mean that literally. Rob Morrow plays Henry Rearden, Dagny's love interest in the previous film, but his big scene here is a mutual break-up over the phone. (Love, like business, is something that entails no obligations on the parties involved beyond initial agreements, if I understand correctly.)
I like Morrow a lot; would've liked to actually see him in this film. Greg Germann who has been playing weasels since at least "Ally McBeal" (and possibly "Ned and Stacey"), plays Dagny's brother. What a great choice. He even has a few lines. Peter Mackenzie has probably the most substantial role after Dagny and John, as "Head of State Thompson".
I had some trouble with that. What is "Head of State"? Are they trying to say "President" without saying "President"? Did that come up in the previous films? It didn't bug me then, but it did here.
Anyway, the voice over is provided by an actual returning cast member, Jeff Yagher, who plays Jeff Allen. No, I don't know who "Jeff Allen" was in the movie. To me, the story, as I can piece it together from the movies, boils down to a power struggle between Productive Giants and Tyrants, with a love quadrangle between Dagny and, alternately, John, Henry and Francisco, and the big character arc is Dagny's as she is ultimately moved from fighting to her death to save her father's railroad (still makes me laugh—railroad!) to "going Galt".
So, the big climax in this movie is set up beautifully: The heart of her rail operation is this bridge. Galt has predicted this bridge will collapse due to government regulation/incompetence. She says she won't let that happen.
Obviously, obviously, obviously: The Bridge Is The Thing. The movie should revolve around the fate of that bridge. The climax of the movie should be a 10 minute desperate struggle to save the bridge from, I dunno, explosive railway regulators. Whatever.
Instead, we get a still picture of a collapsed bridge and a narration saying, "Yep, it collapsed."
I mentioned in the first movie how off-putting the philosophy itself is. And, by the way, I'm not saying that I understand Objectivism; I'm just going by what the movie presents. The second movie beat out the first by focusing on cannily accurate description of government overreach, and less on the revulsion toward altruism. It also cleverly wove actual current events into the story, where they fit seamlessly.
But where Rand excelled in her understanding of governments, she was seriously lacking in her understanding of humans, which apparently was based rated on the Autism Spectrum Disorder scale.
The Boy noted that Galt's Gulch was peculiarly unfree: You couldn't give food away, you had to charge for it. He made the point that, essentially, he just wants his stuff to be his, to sell or to give away as he saw fit. Indeed, that's freedom, in the end.
And to get into the magic machine room (the perpetual motion machine room), you have to take an oath: "I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
The contradictions in this are inherent in the movie itself though it never notices them, leading me to believe they're in the source material. The whole movie revolves around the tragedy caused by constantly grasping government; yes, it deals with it primarily in terms of individual sacrifice, but the apocalyptic scenario it paints is horrifying because other people matter.
We identify with Dagny (sorta) because she's competent and good at what she does; but the gravity of the catastrophe that unfolds is because millions will starve without her.
The spoken philosophy is practically an embrace of the cartoonish notion of businesses as profit-seeking narcissists, even as the exposition demonstrates that greatness is greatness because of the beneficial aspect of free economic exchange.
To say nothing of the fact taht the whole premise of the story is deeply 20th-century late industrialism: We still have industrial giants, but we are powered by millions of little Galts. There's a great story to be told there about how they, too, will "go Galt" in the right circumstances.
This trilogy probably isn't the movie series anybody wanted, and if we judge it by its own philosophy, there's little reason for a disinterested moviegoer to go see any of them. But there were a few Randians in the audience whose opinion seemed to be "Well, the book was better."
Something Wicked
We went to see the posthumous release of James Gandolfini's last (?) film but ended up seeing Brittany Murphy's last (?) film, a five-year-old why-are-they-releasing-it-now horror flick called Something Wicked.
The Flower was so appalled, it took me weeks to talk her into seeing another movie.
Solid horror movies are pretty rare. A lot of horror movies work well up to a point. The vast majority of horror movies do something well. It's not uncommon for a horror movie to set up a good atmosphere, for example, or an interesting premise. Most can manage a few cheap (but effective) shocks through (say) tight editing, and a few manage moments of suspense or boast a really fine performance.
These are all things missing from Something Wicked. Even its 90 minute runtime feels long and sloppy due to the editing, which does the acting no favors. Murphy does all right, I guess, but it's not like there's a lot to work with. I'm guessing the other actors actually can act, since most of them have pretty extensive credits.
The lead, Shantel VanSanten comes off particularly poorly, though this is doubtless due to the nature of the material, which can't really make up its mind what her role should be.
That's 'cause it's actually a big ol' cheat. In the desperate attempt to fool the audience with a "twist", the movie just lies to you from the first important scene—which, by the way, I spotted as it was happening.
That would be fine—I assume most people wouldn't see it coming, because it was really stupid, and you'd have to watch a lot of horror movies to pick up on it—but then the movie wants to set up a ghost story, for the cheap shock factor. And when I say cheap shock factor, I mean lone-girl-spooked-in-swimming-pool-goes-to-take-a-shower. (Because what girl doesn't respond to the threat of physical danger while scantily clad by getting naked in a publicly accessible yet more secluded place?)
Basically, the climax of the movie manages to both be completely absurd and totally unsurprising, punctuated by moments that are actually laugh-out-loud funny. Not enough of those to be in the so-bad-it's-good territory, unfortunately, but—well, at one point, while staring down the barrell of a gun he's just been shot with, a character says:
"Babe...have you gone crazy?"
As I said, it took weeks to get The Flower back into a theater, and I may never get her into another horror movie, since it's not really her thing to begin with.
Felt bad, though. There were two potentially good movies here, if they had picked one and stuck with it, instead of trying to Scooby Doo it up and give us a twist ending, and in the process invalidating every single plot point and possible moment of suspense. Even Scooby Doo doesn't do that any more.
Speaking of which, have you watched the latest Scooby Doo series, Scooby Doo, Mystery Incorporated? It ran for two seasons in 2010 and with a clearly planned and executed story arc. Ridiculously well done with an amazing cast and tons of in-jokes.
You should go watch that.
The Flower was so appalled, it took me weeks to talk her into seeing another movie.
Solid horror movies are pretty rare. A lot of horror movies work well up to a point. The vast majority of horror movies do something well. It's not uncommon for a horror movie to set up a good atmosphere, for example, or an interesting premise. Most can manage a few cheap (but effective) shocks through (say) tight editing, and a few manage moments of suspense or boast a really fine performance.
These are all things missing from Something Wicked. Even its 90 minute runtime feels long and sloppy due to the editing, which does the acting no favors. Murphy does all right, I guess, but it's not like there's a lot to work with. I'm guessing the other actors actually can act, since most of them have pretty extensive credits.
The lead, Shantel VanSanten comes off particularly poorly, though this is doubtless due to the nature of the material, which can't really make up its mind what her role should be.
That's 'cause it's actually a big ol' cheat. In the desperate attempt to fool the audience with a "twist", the movie just lies to you from the first important scene—which, by the way, I spotted as it was happening.
That would be fine—I assume most people wouldn't see it coming, because it was really stupid, and you'd have to watch a lot of horror movies to pick up on it—but then the movie wants to set up a ghost story, for the cheap shock factor. And when I say cheap shock factor, I mean lone-girl-spooked-in-swimming-pool-goes-to-take-a-shower. (Because what girl doesn't respond to the threat of physical danger while scantily clad by getting naked in a publicly accessible yet more secluded place?)
Basically, the climax of the movie manages to both be completely absurd and totally unsurprising, punctuated by moments that are actually laugh-out-loud funny. Not enough of those to be in the so-bad-it's-good territory, unfortunately, but—well, at one point, while staring down the barrell of a gun he's just been shot with, a character says:
"Babe...have you gone crazy?"
As I said, it took weeks to get The Flower back into a theater, and I may never get her into another horror movie, since it's not really her thing to begin with.
Felt bad, though. There were two potentially good movies here, if they had picked one and stuck with it, instead of trying to Scooby Doo it up and give us a twist ending, and in the process invalidating every single plot point and possible moment of suspense. Even Scooby Doo doesn't do that any more.
Speaking of which, have you watched the latest Scooby Doo series, Scooby Doo, Mystery Incorporated? It ran for two seasons in 2010 and with a clearly planned and executed story arc. Ridiculously well done with an amazing cast and tons of in-jokes.
You should go watch that.
The Drop
We went to see James Gandolfini's final (?) film, The Drop and (due to traffic) ended up seeing Brittany Murphy's final (?) film, Something Wicked. It's probably uncontroversial to suggest that Gandolfini got the better deal.
Newcomer Michael R. Roskam directs Dennis Lehane's screenplay, based on Lehane's short story, a tale of a hardworking bartender named Bob (Tom Hardy), who finds himself in a tough spot when the bar he works in, run by his dubious cousin Marv (James Gandolfini), is robbed.
The owners of the bar, as it turns out, are Chechen mobsters, who acquired the bar from Cousin Marv a few years back after he had a run of bad luck. It's a smallish amount of money, a few thousand dollars, but the Mob doesn't take kindly to losing even small amounts of money, which means Cousin Marv (and perhaps by extension, Bob) is on the hook. And, as is always the case with the mob, it's not so much the money as it is the principle.
On top of which, one bar is chosen at random to hold all the Mob's ill-gotten gains, and the robbery may be the set up for an even bigger robbery.
Bob sort of floats through all this, seeming positively naive about things, and dealing with his own issue: To wit, a puppy found in a woman's garbage can, that he must raise and train, only to discover the original owner wants to blackmail him over it. (As in, "Give me a lot of money or I'll go to the police and get my dog back, at which point I'll torture it to death.")
So, Bob's our hero, and we sort of see him through the eyes of the dog owner's ex-girlfriend, Nadia (Noomi Rapace), and as the movie unfolds, we learn about the history of Marv, Bob, Nadia and Nadia's ex (played by Matthias Schoenarts, of Veerhoven's Black Book).
By the way, Schoenarts is Belgian and Rapace, of course, she of the dragon tattoo, is Swedish, which means half our cast of Brooklynites is furrin'. They do a good job with their accents (especially when compared to A Walk Among The Tombstones, which made me wonder if New Yorker actors were in short supply).
Anyway, it's a good little story, with some well-done suspense moments and character development. Given the story, the ending was obvious, I thought, but necessarily so. That is, if it hadn't ended the way it did, the rest of the story really wouldn't have held together. This is a good thing.
The denouement between Bob and Nadia is very Lehane-y. I have mixed feelings about his view of male-female relationships, I confess. (Mystic River disgusted me, for example.)
Great performances all around. Fine direction. The Boy and I approved.
Newcomer Michael R. Roskam directs Dennis Lehane's screenplay, based on Lehane's short story, a tale of a hardworking bartender named Bob (Tom Hardy), who finds himself in a tough spot when the bar he works in, run by his dubious cousin Marv (James Gandolfini), is robbed.
The owners of the bar, as it turns out, are Chechen mobsters, who acquired the bar from Cousin Marv a few years back after he had a run of bad luck. It's a smallish amount of money, a few thousand dollars, but the Mob doesn't take kindly to losing even small amounts of money, which means Cousin Marv (and perhaps by extension, Bob) is on the hook. And, as is always the case with the mob, it's not so much the money as it is the principle.
On top of which, one bar is chosen at random to hold all the Mob's ill-gotten gains, and the robbery may be the set up for an even bigger robbery.
Bob sort of floats through all this, seeming positively naive about things, and dealing with his own issue: To wit, a puppy found in a woman's garbage can, that he must raise and train, only to discover the original owner wants to blackmail him over it. (As in, "Give me a lot of money or I'll go to the police and get my dog back, at which point I'll torture it to death.")
So, Bob's our hero, and we sort of see him through the eyes of the dog owner's ex-girlfriend, Nadia (Noomi Rapace), and as the movie unfolds, we learn about the history of Marv, Bob, Nadia and Nadia's ex (played by Matthias Schoenarts, of Veerhoven's Black Book).
By the way, Schoenarts is Belgian and Rapace, of course, she of the dragon tattoo, is Swedish, which means half our cast of Brooklynites is furrin'. They do a good job with their accents (especially when compared to A Walk Among The Tombstones, which made me wonder if New Yorker actors were in short supply).
Anyway, it's a good little story, with some well-done suspense moments and character development. Given the story, the ending was obvious, I thought, but necessarily so. That is, if it hadn't ended the way it did, the rest of the story really wouldn't have held together. This is a good thing.
The denouement between Bob and Nadia is very Lehane-y. I have mixed feelings about his view of male-female relationships, I confess. (Mystic River disgusted me, for example.)
Great performances all around. Fine direction. The Boy and I approved.
The Green Prince
It was interesting, after seeing so many movies of Palestinians turned to serve the Israeli Shin Bet, to see a documentary on The Green Prince, who surely must have inspired these stories.
In some ways, though, this documentary presents a cleaner narrative than any of the movies we've seen, which is also pretty interesting. Our Palestinian protagonist is Mosab Hassan Yousef, whose father is a high-ranking member of Hamas—though apparently the non-terrorist wing of Hamas.
The astounding thing about Yousef's story is that he is steeped in anti-Israeli propaganda his whole life, but upon being arrested and witnessing Hamas' actions in jail versus his treatment at the hands of his captors, he begins to realize that it actually is propaganda. The Israelis aren't the bad guys.
This is magnified by Hamas' terror rampage against civilians.
So, here's the real life drama of a guy who doesn't want to betray his country, especially doesn't want to betray his own father and family, but still has the integrity to see things as they really are.
Ironically, perhaps, the worst Israeli bashing comes from his handler, Gonen Ben Yitzhak. Much like in the movies, Yitzhak has a lot of issues with Shin Bet tactics in Palestine. This is understandable, given that he had to deal with the issue of betrayal, himself, though in his case, the betrayal was of Yousef.
At the same time, it's hard to fault the organization trying to (and often succeeding in) thwarting Hamas' despicable tactics.
On the three-point documentary Blake scale:
1) The material is good and interesting.
2) It's well presented, though sparing. This isn't a big-budget documentary with a lot of fancy recreations. There's one overhead shot of a guy getting into a van on a deserted road that's used several times.
3) Bias. None that I detected, except sympathy for the human beings involved. It doesn't really try to change minds on the nature of the conflict. It lets Yitzhak have his say about the Shin Bet. It also points out that the psychotic fixation Palestinians have on the Israelis makes them extremely gullible, as when the morons tramping around a funeral with RPGs accidentally fire one off. The smoke hasn't cleared before the Palestinians are convinced that it was a nefarious Jewish plot.
And as incompetent as these Palestinian terror groups are, there's always fodder to suspect The Jews.
In some ways, though, this documentary presents a cleaner narrative than any of the movies we've seen, which is also pretty interesting. Our Palestinian protagonist is Mosab Hassan Yousef, whose father is a high-ranking member of Hamas—though apparently the non-terrorist wing of Hamas.
The astounding thing about Yousef's story is that he is steeped in anti-Israeli propaganda his whole life, but upon being arrested and witnessing Hamas' actions in jail versus his treatment at the hands of his captors, he begins to realize that it actually is propaganda. The Israelis aren't the bad guys.
This is magnified by Hamas' terror rampage against civilians.
So, here's the real life drama of a guy who doesn't want to betray his country, especially doesn't want to betray his own father and family, but still has the integrity to see things as they really are.
Ironically, perhaps, the worst Israeli bashing comes from his handler, Gonen Ben Yitzhak. Much like in the movies, Yitzhak has a lot of issues with Shin Bet tactics in Palestine. This is understandable, given that he had to deal with the issue of betrayal, himself, though in his case, the betrayal was of Yousef.
At the same time, it's hard to fault the organization trying to (and often succeeding in) thwarting Hamas' despicable tactics.
On the three-point documentary Blake scale:
1) The material is good and interesting.
2) It's well presented, though sparing. This isn't a big-budget documentary with a lot of fancy recreations. There's one overhead shot of a guy getting into a van on a deserted road that's used several times.
3) Bias. None that I detected, except sympathy for the human beings involved. It doesn't really try to change minds on the nature of the conflict. It lets Yitzhak have his say about the Shin Bet. It also points out that the psychotic fixation Palestinians have on the Israelis makes them extremely gullible, as when the morons tramping around a funeral with RPGs accidentally fire one off. The smoke hasn't cleared before the Palestinians are convinced that it was a nefarious Jewish plot.
And as incompetent as these Palestinian terror groups are, there's always fodder to suspect The Jews.
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Frank
At one point during the offbeat indie-ish film Frank, things began to feel so real that I suspected it was based on a true story. I later learned that it was. And still later, I learned that it actually wasn't, although it was based on certain real events.
This is a credit to director Lenny Abrahamson, and to writers Jon Ronson and Peter Straughan (who collaborated on The Men Who Stare At Goats), who have taken a preposterous tale about a man spending all his time in a giant paper maché head fronting a difficult avant-garde band, and making it feel realistic.
Our story begins when Jon (Domhnall Gleeson, who was a Weasely in the Harry Potter flicks, but has been in a bunch of stuff, like Calvary, Anna Karenina, Dredd, True Grit) happens to be on the scene when the keyboardist for Soronprfbs (Frank's band) goes nuts and runs off into the sea.
Jon ends up being the keyboardist.
This leads to Jon spending a year or so recording an album with Soronprfbs, ultimately supporting them with an inheritance. Meanwhile, he's blogging and tweeting the experience, and gaining fans for his hard-to-pronounce band, while fighting off the white-hot hatred of Jon's girlfriend, Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal, looking all of her 37 years while returning to her roots as a weird bohemian artist chick type).
This movie, in so many ways, felt like an early '70s flick. It has an almost magical realism feel to it, except that nothing magical really happens, unless you count suicide and insanity as magical things. Frank has a guru quality, such that people are attracted to his talent and his words of wisdom, even as he demonstrates a certain detachment from reality.
I think that's probably it: The wise man who is detached from reality and ultimately destroyed by it was a big '70s theme, I think. (Can I think of any movies like that offhand? Apparently not. Tommy? Those Lindsay Anderson flicks?) Honestly, as a plot, I've always found it creepy and heavily influenced by drug culture. But that's just my take.
Frank avoids this nonsense, mostly. He's a talented guy, but fragile and weird. He's nice to Jon in a way the others are not, and it is really an exercise for the viewer to decide whether or not this relationship is a good thing. Jon means well, but he's more taken by Frank's talent than he is aware of Frank's shortcomings.
You could say that the movie has a tonal shift in the third act, but that's not really true. It's true that the first two acts are fairly light-hearted (with darkly comic overtones), while the final act is a lot less comic, but the events are rather incidental: The first two acts are funny for their fish-out-of-water character, for the (always tenuous) isolation of the characters from reality, but it's not like you don't see the train coming at you—hell, from the first scene.
I actually think that's a big part of why this works: Jon wants to bring Frank and his amazing talent to a wide audience who will then appreciate him (and make Jon a rock star, not incidentally) without seeing that Frank's very nature makes that nigh impossible. Even if we side with Jon, and less with the pissy bandmates, it's not like we can avoid the obvious fact that a man is wearing an enormous paper mache head.
Just as the initial part of the movie doesn't get zany for the sake of zaniness, the closing act doesn't get dark for the sake of darkness. In fact, the movie just destroys a beloved trope of artists—the tortured genius.
Well, that gets it a few points right there from me. The Boy and I both greatly enjoyed. A brisk hour-and-a-half story with a good narrative and strong characters, which will be seen by very few people.
But, hey, it's got about twice the box office of Life of Crime!
This is a credit to director Lenny Abrahamson, and to writers Jon Ronson and Peter Straughan (who collaborated on The Men Who Stare At Goats), who have taken a preposterous tale about a man spending all his time in a giant paper maché head fronting a difficult avant-garde band, and making it feel realistic.
Our story begins when Jon (Domhnall Gleeson, who was a Weasely in the Harry Potter flicks, but has been in a bunch of stuff, like Calvary, Anna Karenina, Dredd, True Grit) happens to be on the scene when the keyboardist for Soronprfbs (Frank's band) goes nuts and runs off into the sea.
Jon ends up being the keyboardist.
This leads to Jon spending a year or so recording an album with Soronprfbs, ultimately supporting them with an inheritance. Meanwhile, he's blogging and tweeting the experience, and gaining fans for his hard-to-pronounce band, while fighting off the white-hot hatred of Jon's girlfriend, Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal, looking all of her 37 years while returning to her roots as a weird bohemian artist chick type).
This movie, in so many ways, felt like an early '70s flick. It has an almost magical realism feel to it, except that nothing magical really happens, unless you count suicide and insanity as magical things. Frank has a guru quality, such that people are attracted to his talent and his words of wisdom, even as he demonstrates a certain detachment from reality.
I think that's probably it: The wise man who is detached from reality and ultimately destroyed by it was a big '70s theme, I think. (Can I think of any movies like that offhand? Apparently not. Tommy? Those Lindsay Anderson flicks?) Honestly, as a plot, I've always found it creepy and heavily influenced by drug culture. But that's just my take.
Frank avoids this nonsense, mostly. He's a talented guy, but fragile and weird. He's nice to Jon in a way the others are not, and it is really an exercise for the viewer to decide whether or not this relationship is a good thing. Jon means well, but he's more taken by Frank's talent than he is aware of Frank's shortcomings.
You could say that the movie has a tonal shift in the third act, but that's not really true. It's true that the first two acts are fairly light-hearted (with darkly comic overtones), while the final act is a lot less comic, but the events are rather incidental: The first two acts are funny for their fish-out-of-water character, for the (always tenuous) isolation of the characters from reality, but it's not like you don't see the train coming at you—hell, from the first scene.
I actually think that's a big part of why this works: Jon wants to bring Frank and his amazing talent to a wide audience who will then appreciate him (and make Jon a rock star, not incidentally) without seeing that Frank's very nature makes that nigh impossible. Even if we side with Jon, and less with the pissy bandmates, it's not like we can avoid the obvious fact that a man is wearing an enormous paper mache head.
Just as the initial part of the movie doesn't get zany for the sake of zaniness, the closing act doesn't get dark for the sake of darkness. In fact, the movie just destroys a beloved trope of artists—the tortured genius.
Well, that gets it a few points right there from me. The Boy and I both greatly enjoyed. A brisk hour-and-a-half story with a good narrative and strong characters, which will be seen by very few people.
But, hey, it's got about twice the box office of Life of Crime!
The Fault In Our Stars
We are not usually in the demo for teen romances, so it took a long, long time for us to get around to seeing The Fault In Our Stars, which combines romance with tragedy. Indeed, the film had been out for over three months before I talked the kids into it, pointing out that the reviews were good and three months is a hell of a long time for any film to be playing.
It is good, despite many opportunities to be bad.
Consider: You have Hazel (Shailene Woodley, The Descendants, The Spectacular Now), a teenage girl with terminal but indefinitely suspended cancer who meets recovered one-legged conquer-the-world teenage boy Gus (newcomer Ansel Elgort, Carrie, Divergent), and the two fall in love despite Hazel's determination to prevent that (to spare Gus's feelings).
You have the opening that tells you this is not like all those other bullshit cancer stories, a make-a-wish style meeting with a great author (Willem Defoe), a visit to the Anne Frank museum, jaded teenager contempt/concern for parental units (Laura Dern and Sam Trammell)...I mean, you can see how disastrous this could be, right?
And yet it's not.
It's touching without being mawkish. It's romantic without being romanticized. It doesn't flinch from the awful details of cancer (and it's horrific treatments) nor does it wallow in those things. It also kind of flips the script in the second act in a way that changes perspective on the whole story.
I'm inclined to credit newcomer director Josh Boone, and screenwriters Scott Neustader and Michael H. Weber (who co-wrote The Spectacular Now and 500 Days of Summer) with this careful threading of delicate subject matter.
The acting is excellent as well. Woodley can act, as demonstrated in Spectacular, and I didn't want to punch Elgort in the face, which is often the case for the "charming hero" in these teen movies. I didn't even want to punch the comic-relief best-pal Isaac (Naked Brother Nat Wolff).
I had much the same reaction to this film as I did to The Spectacular Now, come to think of it, though I think this is a better film. In particular, as a teen movie, the kids are way less cartoonish than they are in the John Hughes-era films. Hell, not just the kids—the parents, everyone. Even Willem Dafoe's ridiculously hot assistant Lotte Verbeek ("The Borgias", "Outlander") turns out to be kinder and have more depth than the role "foil-of-the-crotchety-writer" might suggest.
The shallowest character, actually, in the movie is the leader of the support group where Hazel and Gus (what about those names, by the way, are kids actually being named "Hazel" and "Gus" these days?), who is a guy (played by comedian Mike Birbiglia) who has parlayed his beating of cancer into a lifetime of living in his mother's basement and doing a Christian outreach at the cancer support group.
Yeah, I rolled my eyes a little at that, but the character is well done, and it's not like we don't see most middle-aged (now called "young") men as slackers these days.
Anyway, I and The Boy—not at all the target audience—liked it a lot, as did The Flower—who really should be the target audience by demographics, but isn't by interest. Definitely worth checking out even if you're not into this sort of thing, generally.
It is good, despite many opportunities to be bad.
Consider: You have Hazel (Shailene Woodley, The Descendants, The Spectacular Now), a teenage girl with terminal but indefinitely suspended cancer who meets recovered one-legged conquer-the-world teenage boy Gus (newcomer Ansel Elgort, Carrie, Divergent), and the two fall in love despite Hazel's determination to prevent that (to spare Gus's feelings).
You have the opening that tells you this is not like all those other bullshit cancer stories, a make-a-wish style meeting with a great author (Willem Defoe), a visit to the Anne Frank museum, jaded teenager contempt/concern for parental units (Laura Dern and Sam Trammell)...I mean, you can see how disastrous this could be, right?
And yet it's not.
It's touching without being mawkish. It's romantic without being romanticized. It doesn't flinch from the awful details of cancer (and it's horrific treatments) nor does it wallow in those things. It also kind of flips the script in the second act in a way that changes perspective on the whole story.
I'm inclined to credit newcomer director Josh Boone, and screenwriters Scott Neustader and Michael H. Weber (who co-wrote The Spectacular Now and 500 Days of Summer) with this careful threading of delicate subject matter.
The acting is excellent as well. Woodley can act, as demonstrated in Spectacular, and I didn't want to punch Elgort in the face, which is often the case for the "charming hero" in these teen movies. I didn't even want to punch the comic-relief best-pal Isaac (Naked Brother Nat Wolff).
I had much the same reaction to this film as I did to The Spectacular Now, come to think of it, though I think this is a better film. In particular, as a teen movie, the kids are way less cartoonish than they are in the John Hughes-era films. Hell, not just the kids—the parents, everyone. Even Willem Dafoe's ridiculously hot assistant Lotte Verbeek ("The Borgias", "Outlander") turns out to be kinder and have more depth than the role "foil-of-the-crotchety-writer" might suggest.
The shallowest character, actually, in the movie is the leader of the support group where Hazel and Gus (what about those names, by the way, are kids actually being named "Hazel" and "Gus" these days?), who is a guy (played by comedian Mike Birbiglia) who has parlayed his beating of cancer into a lifetime of living in his mother's basement and doing a Christian outreach at the cancer support group.
Yeah, I rolled my eyes a little at that, but the character is well done, and it's not like we don't see most middle-aged (now called "young") men as slackers these days.
Anyway, I and The Boy—not at all the target audience—liked it a lot, as did The Flower—who really should be the target audience by demographics, but isn't by interest. Definitely worth checking out even if you're not into this sort of thing, generally.
Calvary
John Michael McDonagh and Brendan Gleeson, writer/director and star of The Guard, respectively are back. Back in Ireland. And Ireland's not doing so well in Calvary.
In the build-up to seeing this, most of my time was fixing the boy's pronunciation of "Calvary". If you've never said it, but you've said "cavalry" a lot, it's actually kind of hard. I remember seeing "Calvary" on a church when I was young and thinking "Hey, they spelled it wrong...?" (I figured that wasn't really likely.)
Anyway, for you heathens, Calvary is the place where Jesus was crucified. (Also known as Golgotha, I guess because when you transliterate a word from ancient Middle Eastern languages, anything is possible!) And the little town where Gleeson is priest is in serious need of salvation, let me tell you.
This is a really, really fine movie, in contention for year's best. The story is this: Gleeson is one of two priests in this rural Irish community, and while sitting in confession, a man comes in and describes his brutalization at the hands of a Catholic priest. Gleeson comes up with every reasonable way to help the guy, but nothing can be done really, since the molestor is long dead.
And so, the penitent (who isn't, really) tells Father James (Gleeson) that he's going to kill him. Precisely because Father James is innocent. Next Sunday.
Of course, it's a small town, and Father James has a good idea who it is (though we, the audience, don't) and the movie takes place in the week from the confession to the following Sunday. In that week, we meet the corrupt and sinful people of the town.
And boy, are they sinful.
We start with a simple domestic violence case—a woman with a black eye—and it just gets worse and worse. And, you know, people are sinful, that's kind of the premise of Christianity (and all religions at least nod toward the corrupt nature of Man) but these people are not just sinful, they're blasphemous and shameless.
I don't mean they're blasphemous in the sense of run-of-the-mill abuse of scripture. You know how a certain kind of atheist is more obsessed than any religious person with your belief in God? I mean, some atheists just don't believe in God, and you don't really hear about it. But some, they're obsessed with disabusing you of any notions regarding the mere possibility of the divine.
That's the kind of blasphemy you find in Calvary. It's not the agnostic indifference to God but antagonism toward Him.
This never ends well.
On the one hand, this movie evokes the story of Saint Patrick going among the barbarian Irish and trying to convince them of a way of life that isn't nasty, brutish and short, where passions are restrained to the benefit of society, with the promise of greater things to come.
On the other, the other priest, Father Leary (David Wilmot, The Guard, Anna Karenina) represents the worst of what The Church has become. He's not a molester or anything (thank God) but when it turns out that a black man may have caused that aforementioned black eye, he cautions Father James to be aware of cultural differences and sensitivities.
As if the concept of sin didn't apply. As if getting along was more important than being righteous. Saint Patrick obviously didn't convert the heathens by saying "Yeah, just go ahead and do whatever you were doing." (Given that we saw this movie shortly after the Rotherham story broke, it probably felt more evil than the narrative alone meant it to be.)
In perhaps a direct nod to St. Pat (I'm far from expert on this stuff), Father Leary is far more concerned with the money he can get from a local well-to-do fellow than he is with saving the hollow man's soul.
James, by contrast, is practically the Dirty Harry of Catholicism, doing whatever he can to steer people the right way, in a manner that doesn't always please his superiors. Only, unlike Harry Callahan, he's not much of a hero to the people, either. (Who wants to be saved from his own sin, after all?)
Kelly Reilly, who's legally obliged to be in 25% of all feature films, apparently, plays Gleeson's suicidal daughter. Chris O'Dowd (The Guard), Aiden Gillen ("Littlefinger" from "Game of Thrones"), Dylan Moran (the douchey David from Shaun of the Dead), Isaach De Bankole and Marie-Josee Croze (both of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), and the great M. Emmet Walsh (he's still alive!) round out the cast.
M. Emmet Walsh's role is an interesting one. He's known only as The Writer, and he sits in his little cabin writing and listening to Hoagy Carmichael records (which maybe was a big Brit/Aussie thing, given that it turns up in Tracks, too), and asks Father James for a gun so he can kill himself when the time comes, i.e., before he's too infirm to take care of himself.
As I was watching this, I was sort of tallying off the deadly sins. The Writer is anticipating the (no longer canonical) deadly sin of acedia, which I believe originated in monasteries and is characterized by extreme boredom—a listlessness leading to despair and perhaps ultimately suicide, the sin of Not Loving God Enough, if you will. (I believe that became sloth.)
But it seems like most everyone here commits most every sin. Sorta like life. There's no food gluttony that I recall, but consumption to excess? Oh, my. Is there anything else these days? There's not much else in the movie.
The other thing might be envy. I'll have to review it and think about it, but I could almost sense envy for Father James beneath the outward contempt that people had for him. The notion of a man being godly, and further devoting his life to an archaic institution? How can the modern man not be contemptuous of that—and also a little envious.
Anyway, you get the idea. It's that kind of movie that makes you think about stuff. Even though I saw the ending coming from...well, the opening scene of the movie...I didn't mind. It had to end the way it ended, and the coda was, if not upbeat, then redemptive.
The Boy and I both liked it a lot and, as mentioned, consider it a top-runner for our Best of the Year.
In the build-up to seeing this, most of my time was fixing the boy's pronunciation of "Calvary". If you've never said it, but you've said "cavalry" a lot, it's actually kind of hard. I remember seeing "Calvary" on a church when I was young and thinking "Hey, they spelled it wrong...?" (I figured that wasn't really likely.)
Anyway, for you heathens, Calvary is the place where Jesus was crucified. (Also known as Golgotha, I guess because when you transliterate a word from ancient Middle Eastern languages, anything is possible!) And the little town where Gleeson is priest is in serious need of salvation, let me tell you.
This is a really, really fine movie, in contention for year's best. The story is this: Gleeson is one of two priests in this rural Irish community, and while sitting in confession, a man comes in and describes his brutalization at the hands of a Catholic priest. Gleeson comes up with every reasonable way to help the guy, but nothing can be done really, since the molestor is long dead.
And so, the penitent (who isn't, really) tells Father James (Gleeson) that he's going to kill him. Precisely because Father James is innocent. Next Sunday.
Of course, it's a small town, and Father James has a good idea who it is (though we, the audience, don't) and the movie takes place in the week from the confession to the following Sunday. In that week, we meet the corrupt and sinful people of the town.
And boy, are they sinful.
We start with a simple domestic violence case—a woman with a black eye—and it just gets worse and worse. And, you know, people are sinful, that's kind of the premise of Christianity (and all religions at least nod toward the corrupt nature of Man) but these people are not just sinful, they're blasphemous and shameless.
I don't mean they're blasphemous in the sense of run-of-the-mill abuse of scripture. You know how a certain kind of atheist is more obsessed than any religious person with your belief in God? I mean, some atheists just don't believe in God, and you don't really hear about it. But some, they're obsessed with disabusing you of any notions regarding the mere possibility of the divine.
That's the kind of blasphemy you find in Calvary. It's not the agnostic indifference to God but antagonism toward Him.
This never ends well.
On the one hand, this movie evokes the story of Saint Patrick going among the barbarian Irish and trying to convince them of a way of life that isn't nasty, brutish and short, where passions are restrained to the benefit of society, with the promise of greater things to come.
On the other, the other priest, Father Leary (David Wilmot, The Guard, Anna Karenina) represents the worst of what The Church has become. He's not a molester or anything (thank God) but when it turns out that a black man may have caused that aforementioned black eye, he cautions Father James to be aware of cultural differences and sensitivities.
As if the concept of sin didn't apply. As if getting along was more important than being righteous. Saint Patrick obviously didn't convert the heathens by saying "Yeah, just go ahead and do whatever you were doing." (Given that we saw this movie shortly after the Rotherham story broke, it probably felt more evil than the narrative alone meant it to be.)
In perhaps a direct nod to St. Pat (I'm far from expert on this stuff), Father Leary is far more concerned with the money he can get from a local well-to-do fellow than he is with saving the hollow man's soul.
James, by contrast, is practically the Dirty Harry of Catholicism, doing whatever he can to steer people the right way, in a manner that doesn't always please his superiors. Only, unlike Harry Callahan, he's not much of a hero to the people, either. (Who wants to be saved from his own sin, after all?)
Kelly Reilly, who's legally obliged to be in 25% of all feature films, apparently, plays Gleeson's suicidal daughter. Chris O'Dowd (The Guard), Aiden Gillen ("Littlefinger" from "Game of Thrones"), Dylan Moran (the douchey David from Shaun of the Dead), Isaach De Bankole and Marie-Josee Croze (both of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), and the great M. Emmet Walsh (he's still alive!) round out the cast.
M. Emmet Walsh's role is an interesting one. He's known only as The Writer, and he sits in his little cabin writing and listening to Hoagy Carmichael records (which maybe was a big Brit/Aussie thing, given that it turns up in Tracks, too), and asks Father James for a gun so he can kill himself when the time comes, i.e., before he's too infirm to take care of himself.
As I was watching this, I was sort of tallying off the deadly sins. The Writer is anticipating the (no longer canonical) deadly sin of acedia, which I believe originated in monasteries and is characterized by extreme boredom—a listlessness leading to despair and perhaps ultimately suicide, the sin of Not Loving God Enough, if you will. (I believe that became sloth.)
But it seems like most everyone here commits most every sin. Sorta like life. There's no food gluttony that I recall, but consumption to excess? Oh, my. Is there anything else these days? There's not much else in the movie.
The other thing might be envy. I'll have to review it and think about it, but I could almost sense envy for Father James beneath the outward contempt that people had for him. The notion of a man being godly, and further devoting his life to an archaic institution? How can the modern man not be contemptuous of that—and also a little envious.
Anyway, you get the idea. It's that kind of movie that makes you think about stuff. Even though I saw the ending coming from...well, the opening scene of the movie...I didn't mind. It had to end the way it ended, and the coda was, if not upbeat, then redemptive.
The Boy and I both liked it a lot and, as mentioned, consider it a top-runner for our Best of the Year.
Sunday, September 21, 2014
America: Imagine A World Without Her
After some initial pleasantries, Dinesh D'Souza's latest documentary, America: Imagine A World Without Her, shows General George Washington leading a charge into battle (as he often did), then being struck dead by a sniper's bullet.
And me, your movie-going cynic, your urbane sophisticate, your student of rhetoric and propaganda, well, I got a little choked up by that.
I guess I'm a patriot after all. Who knew?
I sort of thought that America would be a sort of alt-history kind of movie, a little more fantasy than documentary, but it's actually a stone cold work of non-fiction, less speculative than its wildly successful predecessor 2016. (And, actually, this movie starts with a kind of "I told you so" as D'Souza outlines his predictions from 2016 that came true—which shows you what I know, given how dubious I was over said predictions.)
Largely, however, this movie just engages five of the biggest criticisms against the United States. It addresses the ones that are just false, and contextualizes the ones that have some basis in truth. It doesn't do a lot of "tu quoque", which is sort of my favorite defense: The USA is bad compared to what?
There wasn't a lot I didn't know here, but I learned a few things that gave me a different, and I think interesting, perspective on some historical events.
The five topics covered are Native Americans, Slavery, stealing territory from Mexico, being imperialist, and being exploitative generally (via capitalism). Turns out D'Souza is for all those things!
No, of course not, that'd be silly. But that is about the depth of the complaints against this film.
You know, if the world were a cool place, you could get a rebuttal from...well, anyone who disagreed. But we won't see that. Mostly it'll just be ignored. After all, they ignored the last one, and it was one of the highest grossing documentaries ever. This one may not be the #1 documentary this year, what with Disney's Bears.
It's a shame: You sometimes think with all this talk about "wanting to have conversations", there'd be more attempts to actually have conversations.
But some people can only enjoy modern affluence by running it down, and particularly running down those who continue to promote the values that make it possible. So I doubt the persuasive value of movies like this.
Good doc, though: Quickly, on the three-point BMR (blake's movie reviews) scale: It's a worthy topic, well-presented, that wears its bias on its sleeve. D'Souza is on his way to becoming a political prisoner, so it'll be interesting to see what he does next.
And me, your movie-going cynic, your urbane sophisticate, your student of rhetoric and propaganda, well, I got a little choked up by that.
I guess I'm a patriot after all. Who knew?
I sort of thought that America would be a sort of alt-history kind of movie, a little more fantasy than documentary, but it's actually a stone cold work of non-fiction, less speculative than its wildly successful predecessor 2016. (And, actually, this movie starts with a kind of "I told you so" as D'Souza outlines his predictions from 2016 that came true—which shows you what I know, given how dubious I was over said predictions.)
Largely, however, this movie just engages five of the biggest criticisms against the United States. It addresses the ones that are just false, and contextualizes the ones that have some basis in truth. It doesn't do a lot of "tu quoque", which is sort of my favorite defense: The USA is bad compared to what?
There wasn't a lot I didn't know here, but I learned a few things that gave me a different, and I think interesting, perspective on some historical events.
The five topics covered are Native Americans, Slavery, stealing territory from Mexico, being imperialist, and being exploitative generally (via capitalism). Turns out D'Souza is for all those things!
No, of course not, that'd be silly. But that is about the depth of the complaints against this film.
You know, if the world were a cool place, you could get a rebuttal from...well, anyone who disagreed. But we won't see that. Mostly it'll just be ignored. After all, they ignored the last one, and it was one of the highest grossing documentaries ever. This one may not be the #1 documentary this year, what with Disney's Bears.
It's a shame: You sometimes think with all this talk about "wanting to have conversations", there'd be more attempts to actually have conversations.
But some people can only enjoy modern affluence by running it down, and particularly running down those who continue to promote the values that make it possible. So I doubt the persuasive value of movies like this.
Good doc, though: Quickly, on the three-point BMR (blake's movie reviews) scale: It's a worthy topic, well-presented, that wears its bias on its sleeve. D'Souza is on his way to becoming a political prisoner, so it'll be interesting to see what he does next.
How To Train Your Dragon 2
Well, I'm confused. When this sequel to (what else) How To Train Your Dragon first emerged, I was pretty sure it hadn't gotten good reviews from audiences or critics. Not bad ones, but just marginally acceptable ones. I checked again right before taking the Barbarienne to see it and the RT score was 92/92!
But having seen it? Meh.
It's not that there's anything wrong with it, exactly. Or there is, but...well, it's weird. It's not as funny as the first one, now that I think about it. But let me start from the beginning:
HTTYD2 starts about five years after the first installation, which is cool. Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) is grown-up (still going by "Hiccup", though, of course), and looking at a marriage with Astrid (America Ferrara) and, less enthusiastically, toward being the chief in place of his father, Stoick (Gerard Butler).
Hiccup is more into exploring, however, and this creates a tension between him and his father, who's come around to having a lot of respect for the boy. This part is also good.
This reveals the new menace and antagonists for this film. This part feels a little familiar, but, okay.
Then—and this is in the trailer—Hiccup finds...his mother. That's when things get weird.
I'm not going to go into detail because, like I said, this has rather high ratings, with some people considering it better than the first, but for me this had two problems that got increasingly problematic and kept me from engaging very seriously with this.
First, the story ends up being very, very similar to the previous film. In fact, it's close enough to the first one to where you have to wonder—hell, you have to conclude that the Vikings in the first film had it right: All dragons should be destroyed.
I mean, obviously, you're not supposed to come to that conclusion, but, as we frequently note here at the Bitmaelstrom, a lot of these kidflix are based on premises that don't bear close scrutiny and can't really withstand much in the way of deep development.
It doesn't mean a movie's gonna be bad, and if we're being fair, kidflix have a better track record for sequels than just about anything. But this movie really dares you to overlook the problems suggested by rubbing your nose in them.
Especially with the second major problem: The introduction of Hiccup's mother (Cate Blanchett) into the storyline. Now, I know that there's a series of books on which this based, sorta, but I'm guessing this is just some serious retconning: Unplanned changes to history in order to come up with interesting material for a sequel.
The weird thing is that it's not done badly in and of itself: The scenes with Valka (his mother) and Stoick and Hiccup are emotionally affecting in a deeper way than (e.g.) the first movie dared to go. Or most kid movies. Maybe because it's not entirely appropriate?
Appropriate or not, here, it's really...weird. It raises a whole bunch of questions it can't possibly answer satisfactorily. And it ties into the first problem about the nature of the dragons.
It just didn't add up, not at all. So, even though effectively done, it didn't feel earned. What's the word for that? Kitsch?
This is compounded by a major character death toward the end of the movie that feels really cheap, like the the death had to happen for narrative reasons, when it would've been much more interesting (if more challenging) to deal with the story without the death.
I don't know. People like it. A lot, even. Heck, The Barb liked it, and that's all that matters. Intriguingly, she liked Rio 2 better, and she didn't like Rio 2 very much. (Apparently, birds trump dragons. Who knew?)
Kit Harrington, of the "Game of Thrones" series, has a kind of interesting role as a caddish rogue, but it never really gets developed.
So, I don't get it. Unless people are still impressed by extensive "whoosh" scenes where people ride around on dragons in "thrilling" fashion, I can't figure out why people dig this and I don't.
But having seen it? Meh.
It's not that there's anything wrong with it, exactly. Or there is, but...well, it's weird. It's not as funny as the first one, now that I think about it. But let me start from the beginning:
HTTYD2 starts about five years after the first installation, which is cool. Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) is grown-up (still going by "Hiccup", though, of course), and looking at a marriage with Astrid (America Ferrara) and, less enthusiastically, toward being the chief in place of his father, Stoick (Gerard Butler).
Hiccup is more into exploring, however, and this creates a tension between him and his father, who's come around to having a lot of respect for the boy. This part is also good.
This reveals the new menace and antagonists for this film. This part feels a little familiar, but, okay.
Then—and this is in the trailer—Hiccup finds...his mother. That's when things get weird.
I'm not going to go into detail because, like I said, this has rather high ratings, with some people considering it better than the first, but for me this had two problems that got increasingly problematic and kept me from engaging very seriously with this.
First, the story ends up being very, very similar to the previous film. In fact, it's close enough to the first one to where you have to wonder—hell, you have to conclude that the Vikings in the first film had it right: All dragons should be destroyed.
I mean, obviously, you're not supposed to come to that conclusion, but, as we frequently note here at the Bitmaelstrom, a lot of these kidflix are based on premises that don't bear close scrutiny and can't really withstand much in the way of deep development.
It doesn't mean a movie's gonna be bad, and if we're being fair, kidflix have a better track record for sequels than just about anything. But this movie really dares you to overlook the problems suggested by rubbing your nose in them.
Especially with the second major problem: The introduction of Hiccup's mother (Cate Blanchett) into the storyline. Now, I know that there's a series of books on which this based, sorta, but I'm guessing this is just some serious retconning: Unplanned changes to history in order to come up with interesting material for a sequel.
The weird thing is that it's not done badly in and of itself: The scenes with Valka (his mother) and Stoick and Hiccup are emotionally affecting in a deeper way than (e.g.) the first movie dared to go. Or most kid movies. Maybe because it's not entirely appropriate?
Appropriate or not, here, it's really...weird. It raises a whole bunch of questions it can't possibly answer satisfactorily. And it ties into the first problem about the nature of the dragons.
It just didn't add up, not at all. So, even though effectively done, it didn't feel earned. What's the word for that? Kitsch?
This is compounded by a major character death toward the end of the movie that feels really cheap, like the the death had to happen for narrative reasons, when it would've been much more interesting (if more challenging) to deal with the story without the death.
I don't know. People like it. A lot, even. Heck, The Barb liked it, and that's all that matters. Intriguingly, she liked Rio 2 better, and she didn't like Rio 2 very much. (Apparently, birds trump dragons. Who knew?)
Kit Harrington, of the "Game of Thrones" series, has a kind of interesting role as a caddish rogue, but it never really gets developed.
So, I don't get it. Unless people are still impressed by extensive "whoosh" scenes where people ride around on dragons in "thrilling" fashion, I can't figure out why people dig this and I don't.
Sunday, September 14, 2014
Life of Crime
Frank Dawson is skimming the money from his housing projects and Ordell and Louis know it, but can't prove it. So to extract money from the corrupt developer, they decide to get a little bit of extra leverage by kidnapping his wife, Mickey.
Frank is too busy ignoring his son, Bo, and diddling his mistress, Melanie, to notice. When Louis and Ordell make him aware of his plight, it takes very little persuasion from Melanie to convince Frank not to negotiate with the kidnappers: win-win, either way, right? Louis and Ordell, meanwhile, are struggling to keep Mickey reasonably safe while they shelter her in the house of neo-Nazi Richard.
The first thing you've gotta be grateful for when someone adapts a crime story, particularly one by Elmore Leonard (3:10 to Yuma) is that you can follow it, and this one you mostly can. I couldn't quite figure out how Ordell sussed out Melanie's plans, nor did I exactly buy the relationship between Mickey and Louis.
But the bigger mystery is how a movie with Jennifer Aniston (Mickey), Tim Robbins (Frank), Mos Def (Ordell) and Isla Fisher (Melanie) ends up with under 50 theaters for its opening. Maybe it's 'cause of John Hawkes, who plays Louis, who is restricted to independent films (Martha Marcy May Marlene, Winter's Bone) by law, apparently.
I mean, it's not great, sure. But it's good. It's fun. It's dark, but not overly so. Writer/director Daniel Schecter moves things along at a pace that allows you to appreciate the cleverness and gloss over the silliness.
So I guess it's the Leonard thing. People who go see films based on Leonard's work have expectations. I guess those expectations were met by '90s films like Jackie Brown and Get Shorty, both of which are probably over-rated.
Guessing. I've only ever seen the 3:10 to Yuma flicks, and John Frankenheimer's ugly and unpleasant 52 Pickup. (The latter film along with the even worse film The Men's Club, released the same year, left me with a life-long aversion to Roy Scheider films.)
I don't know who makes these decisions. After a summer when Lucy is still in the top 10 in its 9th week, this movie (in its second week) is sandwiched between Land Ho! and Snowpiercer which are both in their third months! In fact, those two films are picking up theaters while this one languishes after a not-even half-hearted attempt to market it.
Did you hear of it beforehand? I didn't. It was just playing and not awful (though the popular RT score has dropped from the 60s into the 40s since it first came out).
Anyway, it's fun, short, dark, and maybe too cute for some. Good acting, especially from Aniston (not in Rachel mode) and Hawkes (who's always good). Mos Def and Tim Robbins are doing their things: It's not a reach for either of them, with Def seeming only slightly more sleazy than he did in Begin Again and Robbins having perfected the Evil Republican caricature years ago. (Of course, the character's party is never mentioned out loud but you know what template Robbins is drawing from.) Mark Boone Junior is amusingly loathsome as the Nazi.
I was struck by how long-in-the-tooth Isla looked in this. She's 38, but the lighting really revealed a heavily applied makeup. Perhaps that was a deliberate choice; I know I've never thought in the past, upon seeing Fisher, "She's getting long in the tooth." Aniston, 45, looks great. Like a woman in her 40s, but not one mutilating herself in an attempt to look like a woman in her 20s.
So, maybe it's deliberate, to keep the audience from identifying too much with Melanie. On the other hand, Melanie is far-and-away the most evil character in the story, so I'm not sure that was ever an issue. (Actually, given that the movie takes place in 1978, they're all too old for their roles.)
I spotted two things in Life of Crime that struck me as anachronistic: At one point the smarmy country-club confrère play amusingly by Will Forte (Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 2, Nebraska) is about to dial 9-1-1. And at another point Aniston talks to Robbins about "quality time". Those things were '80s in my world, but 9-1-1 has a long history and the first recorded use of "quality time" is in the '70s, so maybe both things were in the original book, written in '78.
Anyway, details aside, The Boy and I liked it.
Frank is too busy ignoring his son, Bo, and diddling his mistress, Melanie, to notice. When Louis and Ordell make him aware of his plight, it takes very little persuasion from Melanie to convince Frank not to negotiate with the kidnappers: win-win, either way, right? Louis and Ordell, meanwhile, are struggling to keep Mickey reasonably safe while they shelter her in the house of neo-Nazi Richard.
The first thing you've gotta be grateful for when someone adapts a crime story, particularly one by Elmore Leonard (3:10 to Yuma) is that you can follow it, and this one you mostly can. I couldn't quite figure out how Ordell sussed out Melanie's plans, nor did I exactly buy the relationship between Mickey and Louis.
But the bigger mystery is how a movie with Jennifer Aniston (Mickey), Tim Robbins (Frank), Mos Def (Ordell) and Isla Fisher (Melanie) ends up with under 50 theaters for its opening. Maybe it's 'cause of John Hawkes, who plays Louis, who is restricted to independent films (Martha Marcy May Marlene, Winter's Bone) by law, apparently.
I mean, it's not great, sure. But it's good. It's fun. It's dark, but not overly so. Writer/director Daniel Schecter moves things along at a pace that allows you to appreciate the cleverness and gloss over the silliness.
So I guess it's the Leonard thing. People who go see films based on Leonard's work have expectations. I guess those expectations were met by '90s films like Jackie Brown and Get Shorty, both of which are probably over-rated.
Guessing. I've only ever seen the 3:10 to Yuma flicks, and John Frankenheimer's ugly and unpleasant 52 Pickup. (The latter film along with the even worse film The Men's Club, released the same year, left me with a life-long aversion to Roy Scheider films.)
I don't know who makes these decisions. After a summer when Lucy is still in the top 10 in its 9th week, this movie (in its second week) is sandwiched between Land Ho! and Snowpiercer which are both in their third months! In fact, those two films are picking up theaters while this one languishes after a not-even half-hearted attempt to market it.
Did you hear of it beforehand? I didn't. It was just playing and not awful (though the popular RT score has dropped from the 60s into the 40s since it first came out).
Anyway, it's fun, short, dark, and maybe too cute for some. Good acting, especially from Aniston (not in Rachel mode) and Hawkes (who's always good). Mos Def and Tim Robbins are doing their things: It's not a reach for either of them, with Def seeming only slightly more sleazy than he did in Begin Again and Robbins having perfected the Evil Republican caricature years ago. (Of course, the character's party is never mentioned out loud but you know what template Robbins is drawing from.) Mark Boone Junior is amusingly loathsome as the Nazi.
I was struck by how long-in-the-tooth Isla looked in this. She's 38, but the lighting really revealed a heavily applied makeup. Perhaps that was a deliberate choice; I know I've never thought in the past, upon seeing Fisher, "She's getting long in the tooth." Aniston, 45, looks great. Like a woman in her 40s, but not one mutilating herself in an attempt to look like a woman in her 20s.
So, maybe it's deliberate, to keep the audience from identifying too much with Melanie. On the other hand, Melanie is far-and-away the most evil character in the story, so I'm not sure that was ever an issue. (Actually, given that the movie takes place in 1978, they're all too old for their roles.)
I spotted two things in Life of Crime that struck me as anachronistic: At one point the smarmy country-club confrère play amusingly by Will Forte (Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 2, Nebraska) is about to dial 9-1-1. And at another point Aniston talks to Robbins about "quality time". Those things were '80s in my world, but 9-1-1 has a long history and the first recorded use of "quality time" is in the '70s, so maybe both things were in the original book, written in '78.
Anyway, details aside, The Boy and I liked it.
Saturday, September 13, 2014
Rifftrax Presents: Godzilla
I did not go see the 1998 Emmerich/Devlin Godzilla in the theaters. And when I put it on the cable many years later, I got immediately distracted, and only looked at it glancingly to think, "Well, now, this isn't very good at all."
I never put my finger on why. The idea didn't seem too bad. Make Godzilla nimbler and more reptilian in movement, and don't scale it up so that it's crushing model buildings under foot, rather have it dodging in between New York's skyscrapers. Have Godzilla be (SPOILER!!!!) pregnant, for example. None of these are bad ideas, per se.
Having now sat through the entire feature in a theater, I can sum it up in three words:
Oh. My. God.
This movie is so bad, it was hard to watch even with the Rifftrax guys (Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy's always lovable baritone) letting the jokes fly fast and furious.
It's not that the ideas, as I mentioned, were bad: It's that they're mishandled at every turn. For example, making Matthew Broderick your "action hero" could work, because it's not like anyone's going to be punching out Godzilla, or pulling out a minigun to take him one-on-one.
But making Matthew Broderick your hero when he's doing the exact same mugging he does in Ferris Beuller? That's catastrophic.
Unleashing the possibility of dozens of Godzillas? Kinda cool. Using that to rehash scenes out of Jurassic Park? Oh, so lame. Especially after the 6th or 7th time someone tries to stop these little velocizillas by bolting a door, having witnessed all previous attempts not even slow them down.
Feisty love-interest for Broderick? Good. Sociopathic love-interest with virtually no redeeming qualities? Not so good. Even if he did end up marrying Sarah Jessica Parker in real life.
Hank Azaria and Mary Pitillo presage "Jersey Shore" with their, ahem, broadly drawn characters. Harry Shearer practically reprising his Simpsons character, Kent Brockman.
The parade of French clichés that is Jean Reno.
The CGI was state of the art for 1998, and it's unbearably bad now. I mean, the old '50s movies with the rubber suits holds up better. (I think one of the reasons Jurassic Park still largely works is the practical effects.) So even the effects don't help save this thing, even with the kind of cool ideas about how Godzilla should move and act. (Also, he's ridiculously nimble: Dodging missiles right and left.)
Honestly, you have to go back to Coleman Francis or Manos: The Hands of Fate (or maybe The Doomsday Machine) to find a film as unwatchable as this. Sometimes I think watching these things is like having a baby: Incredibly painful but when it's all over, you had a lot of laughs (and a sore abdomen), so you forget until the next time.
I should talk more about the riffing, but it's always hard to encapsulate these things. This is really, really funny. Really, really, really funny. The main problem with MST3K is that there would be lulls: There would be long stretches of rapid fire humor, and then things would slow down a bit, and sometimes too much.
There are a few breathing points here. But not a lot. Not all the jokes land but maybe 90% or more do, which is damn good. Well, the Boy may have missed a few more, since he knows nothing of the '90s, doesn't know who Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane or Sarah Jessica Parker is, and so on.
It's fun to watch in a theater, too, because the audience roars.
The next Rifftrax "live" show is Anaconda, which is a truly terrible film, but I think I actually managed to watch that on TV after it came out. It's kind of a compelling bad as I recall, with a good part of the time you going, "What the hell is Jon Voight doing with his voice?"
Anyway, the 1998 Godzilla needs Rifftrax to survive. NEEDS IT! Otherwise, it only has the distinction of not being the worst film Devlin/Emmerich ever made.
I never put my finger on why. The idea didn't seem too bad. Make Godzilla nimbler and more reptilian in movement, and don't scale it up so that it's crushing model buildings under foot, rather have it dodging in between New York's skyscrapers. Have Godzilla be (SPOILER!!!!) pregnant, for example. None of these are bad ideas, per se.
Having now sat through the entire feature in a theater, I can sum it up in three words:
Oh. My. God.
This movie is so bad, it was hard to watch even with the Rifftrax guys (Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy's always lovable baritone) letting the jokes fly fast and furious.
It's not that the ideas, as I mentioned, were bad: It's that they're mishandled at every turn. For example, making Matthew Broderick your "action hero" could work, because it's not like anyone's going to be punching out Godzilla, or pulling out a minigun to take him one-on-one.
But making Matthew Broderick your hero when he's doing the exact same mugging he does in Ferris Beuller? That's catastrophic.
Unleashing the possibility of dozens of Godzillas? Kinda cool. Using that to rehash scenes out of Jurassic Park? Oh, so lame. Especially after the 6th or 7th time someone tries to stop these little velocizillas by bolting a door, having witnessed all previous attempts not even slow them down.
Feisty love-interest for Broderick? Good. Sociopathic love-interest with virtually no redeeming qualities? Not so good. Even if he did end up marrying Sarah Jessica Parker in real life.
Hank Azaria and Mary Pitillo presage "Jersey Shore" with their, ahem, broadly drawn characters. Harry Shearer practically reprising his Simpsons character, Kent Brockman.
The parade of French clichés that is Jean Reno.
The CGI was state of the art for 1998, and it's unbearably bad now. I mean, the old '50s movies with the rubber suits holds up better. (I think one of the reasons Jurassic Park still largely works is the practical effects.) So even the effects don't help save this thing, even with the kind of cool ideas about how Godzilla should move and act. (Also, he's ridiculously nimble: Dodging missiles right and left.)
Honestly, you have to go back to Coleman Francis or Manos: The Hands of Fate (or maybe The Doomsday Machine) to find a film as unwatchable as this. Sometimes I think watching these things is like having a baby: Incredibly painful but when it's all over, you had a lot of laughs (and a sore abdomen), so you forget until the next time.
I should talk more about the riffing, but it's always hard to encapsulate these things. This is really, really funny. Really, really, really funny. The main problem with MST3K is that there would be lulls: There would be long stretches of rapid fire humor, and then things would slow down a bit, and sometimes too much.
There are a few breathing points here. But not a lot. Not all the jokes land but maybe 90% or more do, which is damn good. Well, the Boy may have missed a few more, since he knows nothing of the '90s, doesn't know who Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane or Sarah Jessica Parker is, and so on.
It's fun to watch in a theater, too, because the audience roars.
The next Rifftrax "live" show is Anaconda, which is a truly terrible film, but I think I actually managed to watch that on TV after it came out. It's kind of a compelling bad as I recall, with a good part of the time you going, "What the hell is Jon Voight doing with his voice?"
Anyway, the 1998 Godzilla needs Rifftrax to survive. NEEDS IT! Otherwise, it only has the distinction of not being the worst film Devlin/Emmerich ever made.
Sunday, September 7, 2014
The One I Love
I am willing to speculate, somewhat tentatively, that I prefer the Duplass brothers as actors and producers to directors. The Boy and I have seen three of the boys' movies (Baghead, Cyrus, and Jeff, Who Lives At Home), only missing their most recent (The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, I think it was called) probably because, well, something more promising was playing.
In fact, I think it might have been the delightful Safety Not Guaranteed, which they produced and in which Mark (the acting brother) had a role. Actually, Jay also acts, but I think Mark acts more and Jay directs more. I don't know. They do a lot of everything.
The key thing about them, though, is that their projects have a distinct style. Their stuff always screams "independent film". Also "low-budget" but "independent", because they don't really do exploitation stuff—even Baghead, ostensibly a slasher flick—was more a character study than kin to Friday the 13th.
So, what makes a Duplass brothers film? Well, it's going to be low-key. It's going to have a starkly realistic feel, and if there's a non-realistic aspect to it, that's going to create a certain mystery that causes you to doubt whether or not the non-realistic aspect is really real...or not. Heh.
There's gonna be a lot of acting. Not hammy stuff. Not showy stuff at all, in fact. But a whole lot of subtle exchanges and character dynamics never fully expressed in words.
It's gonna be short. It may not feel short, however, because of the low-key thing.
And so we come to The One I Love, directed by newcomer Charlie McDowell and written by newcomer Justin Lader, the mysterious story of a couple (Mark Duplass, Elizabeth Moss) sent to a get-away-from-it-all-and-repair-your-marriage spot by their therapist (Ted Danson).
Things start out pretty well. Then they get weird. Then they get really weird.
The movie is powered entirely by Duplass and Moss, and typifies (to the extreme) what I mean by "a lot of acting". Duplass performs well, and Elizabeth Moss (who I guess is a TV person, a regular on "Mad Men" and "West Wing") holds her own next to him. The range of emotions and intentions and character developments that they must communicate is very impressive indeed, and also necessarily constrained by the situation.
Which you'll notice I'm not describing in any way.
Because that would spoil it.
It's a fun film. It's not, as I was somewhat worried, an icky psychodrama, as movies around marital difficulties can be. The movie doesn't really try to solve their problems so much as raise the ultimate question of what it actually means to be in a relationship with someone. There's a light touch to this, a bit of a thriller-ish aspect, even.
The Boy and The Flower both enjoyed, and agreed that one of the reasons it worked was that it didn't try to explain too much. It simply set up the rules, dropped a few clues, and let the drama play out, as the correct focus of the film.
As I say, I think I liked it (and Safety Not Guaranteed) better than the Duplass written and directed films, perhaps because the touch of fantasy/mystery/suspense in this and Safety make a more compelling hook to engage with.
Directed by newcomer Charlie McDowell and written by Justin Lader, whom we hope to see more of in the future.
In fact, I think it might have been the delightful Safety Not Guaranteed, which they produced and in which Mark (the acting brother) had a role. Actually, Jay also acts, but I think Mark acts more and Jay directs more. I don't know. They do a lot of everything.
The key thing about them, though, is that their projects have a distinct style. Their stuff always screams "independent film". Also "low-budget" but "independent", because they don't really do exploitation stuff—even Baghead, ostensibly a slasher flick—was more a character study than kin to Friday the 13th.
So, what makes a Duplass brothers film? Well, it's going to be low-key. It's going to have a starkly realistic feel, and if there's a non-realistic aspect to it, that's going to create a certain mystery that causes you to doubt whether or not the non-realistic aspect is really real...or not. Heh.
There's gonna be a lot of acting. Not hammy stuff. Not showy stuff at all, in fact. But a whole lot of subtle exchanges and character dynamics never fully expressed in words.
It's gonna be short. It may not feel short, however, because of the low-key thing.
And so we come to The One I Love, directed by newcomer Charlie McDowell and written by newcomer Justin Lader, the mysterious story of a couple (Mark Duplass, Elizabeth Moss) sent to a get-away-from-it-all-and-repair-your-marriage spot by their therapist (Ted Danson).
Things start out pretty well. Then they get weird. Then they get really weird.
The movie is powered entirely by Duplass and Moss, and typifies (to the extreme) what I mean by "a lot of acting". Duplass performs well, and Elizabeth Moss (who I guess is a TV person, a regular on "Mad Men" and "West Wing") holds her own next to him. The range of emotions and intentions and character developments that they must communicate is very impressive indeed, and also necessarily constrained by the situation.
Which you'll notice I'm not describing in any way.
Because that would spoil it.
It's a fun film. It's not, as I was somewhat worried, an icky psychodrama, as movies around marital difficulties can be. The movie doesn't really try to solve their problems so much as raise the ultimate question of what it actually means to be in a relationship with someone. There's a light touch to this, a bit of a thriller-ish aspect, even.
The Boy and The Flower both enjoyed, and agreed that one of the reasons it worked was that it didn't try to explain too much. It simply set up the rules, dropped a few clues, and let the drama play out, as the correct focus of the film.
As I say, I think I liked it (and Safety Not Guaranteed) better than the Duplass written and directed films, perhaps because the touch of fantasy/mystery/suspense in this and Safety make a more compelling hook to engage with.
Directed by newcomer Charlie McDowell and written by Justin Lader, whom we hope to see more of in the future.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
