They Might Be Critics

Avatar

2010-02-17T10:31:00.002-05:00

People were making a big deal about this movie. And I had no idea why. I mean, when Titanic came out and people are making a big deal about it, you could kinda figure out why. But this? Aside from the name James Cameron, I hadn’t a clue. I thought, “Huh, looks weird. What’s with the blue people?”

Apparently, Avatar made and spent a ton of money. After seeing it, I understand. Now, weeding your way through the hype and publicity and Cameron-sized expectations, can you get an honest review from WLC? Absolutely.

The opening scenes introduce us to Jake Sully. It’s all a vague recollection to me, mostly because it wasn’t developed very much, but he’s in the military and currently a paraplegic. He signs up for a program on a different planet to take the place of his brother who died—I assume—recently. The program is on the planet (er, moon) Pandora, and centers around the fact that a resource mine of something called “Unobtanium” (ha, ha) is located in a place where Pandorian natives live. The age old question arises: how do we get what we want from those savages?

Thank god for Sigourney Weaver. She heads up the project to tackle this problem as the no-nonsense Grace Augustine, leading a team of scientists which formerly included Jake’s brother in the Avatar program. Basically, they climb into futuristic coffins and get their brains connected to a Pandorian avatar. Leading up to this process, Jake is criticized for his lack of background and study in the area. He hasn’t learned the language, doesn’t know the culture or landscape, and is ::shudder:: a former marine. Philistine.

Basically, humans are split on the issue: the scientists, including Augustine, believe in a diplomatic solution to obtaining Unobtanium. The special interest (translated: selfish) group, led by Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) and helped along by Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) just wants to get the stuff, and get it fast. Then there are the Pandorians, who want nothing to do with the humans and would love nothing better than to see them catch the next train out of town. Sully gets caught in the middle of all this. He ends up being accepted by the Na’vi (the Pandorian natives) and learns their way of life. He even develops a relationship with a woman named Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), and seems to forget about the world of humans when he inhabits his Avatar.

As is to be expected, humans grow impatient with the amount of time being spent with the Pandorians with no real progress being made toward getting the resource they want. A deadline is made, and Sully is removed from the project just as he realizes how important the Pandorian ways of life (as well as Neytiri) are to him.

In short, conflict arises between humans and Na’vi about the land, as well as inside of Jake Sully regarding where his loyalties lie.

Bravo to James Cameron for effectively helping me internalize conflict about this movie as well. However, probably not in the way he would like. The problem is, we’ve seen this movie before. More than once. We know what’s going to happen, and who is going to turn into what, down to the cheesy cliché one-liners that get thrown around way more than they should have been. And so, I’m torn between the beautiful scenes with fantastic imagery and the basically lame and uninspired plot. Creativity rose up in places it shouldn’t have (gravity-repellent land masses and lizards that spin like a top when flying) and was absent when desperately needed (natives called “savages” who wear loincloths and war paint.) Col. Quaritch evolves into a ridiculous caricature of evil. And you know, almost from the get-go, exactly what is going to happen to Jake.

Rating: 9

A feast for the eyes and ears, a famine for the mind. Does that even make sense? I don’t know, but it feels right: not much in the substance department, but oh, so pretty!!!

Julie & Julia

2010-01-23T22:31:00.005-05:00

You can keep your Transformers and your District 9s and your Legions and all your movies wherein what hangs in the balances is nothing less than the fate of the planet or the universe or the multiverse or whatever. Robots, aliens, demons stand down -- I still say that for my money, the best drama comes from pitting a character against him- or herself.

So it is with Julie & Julia, the parallel story of Julie Powell and Julia Child. Julie's quest was to make all 524 recipes in Julia Child's iconic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Julia's quest was to write the sort of cookbook that would inspire someone like Julie to think it worthwhile to undertake such a task. The movie hops back and forth between Julie and Julia as they face similar struggles--while outside forces do sometimes stand in the way, the real tension in this movie is between reality and the characters' lofty ambitions.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers only trust that iconic man (or woman, or in this case women) vs. self (herselves) drama so much, and so two thirds of this movie ends up being fairly average. For example, about halfway through the movie, Julie's husband, Eric, leaves following a big fight about Julie's obsession with cooking. Maybe that really happened. Maybe it even happened in real life exactly as the movie portrayed it. But you knew, as soon as you had the vaguest inkling of the plot, that it was going to happen. And while it didn't have to be, it came off as cliché. It seemed to happen because a film requires something like that to happen in the second act--some sort of interpersonal, rather than intrapersonal, drama. It didn't happen, in other words, because it revealed any truth about the human condition. It just satisfies the filmmakers' conception (and the audiences') of what the shape of a movie is. It also sets up and justifies the catharsis of the third act.

That's fine. Doing these things isn't really a bad thing, per se. It's just something all movies do, and so it's average. And I may not even have noticed it if the first 30 minutes of the movie weren't so surprisingly spectacular.

As the movie opens, both Julie and Julia are discontented government workers looking for something to give meaning to their daily routine. Julia settles on taking a cooking class; Julie gives herself the aforementioned task of cooking (and blogging) her way through Julia Child's book.

And it's here--and not toward the end, as is typical--where the movie is revelatory. It beautifully captures the breathless dizzy joy that comes from taking a pastime and turning into an avocation. Julie & Julia is a fine enough story, but where it does its finest work is in understanding and recreating that odd alchemical reaction that results from taking something you do because it's kinda fun and turning it into a project that defines you. Both Meryl Streep and Amy Adams skillfully conjure the surprised nervous giddiness that results when you tell yourself that you're going to do something that you don't know that you can do.

Adams does a fine job in the movie, but she was always going to be outshined by Streep, who, not content with merely doing an impersonation of Julia Child, somehow also manages to harness her soul. She's not just doing Child's odd vocal register shifts and dogged straight-ahead delivery; she's also managed to help us re-see the ebullient liveliness and stubborn goodheartedness that helped make Julia Child into "Julia Child." She's completely hilarious because she's not trying at all to be funny.

In the end, Julie & Julia (which drags just a bit at a little over 2 hours long) is worth seeing for that rich intrapersonal struggle of the first 30 minutes and for Streep's embodiment of Child. The rest is pretty standard fare but, at the same time, you could do much worse with a movie. The first acts clocks in at a 17; the second and third acts hum along at a 4. Average it all together, and you're left with a comfortably competent 9.

Bones, Season 1

2009-10-28T09:13:00.005-04:00

There aren’t a whole lot of things on TV I watch regularly. The Office would be top of the list, but if DW didn’t ensure it was a part of our routine I might even skip that. The ones that I do really like I either buy on DVD or rent. The most recent of these includes the show Bones, created by Hart Hanson and currently in its 5^th season. “Oh no!” you say, “Not another procedural/forensics show!” As much as I’ve avoided these up until now, I happened to catch a glimpse of Bones somewhere along the way and was drawn in.

Bones is loosely based on the real life of Kathy Reichs, a forensic anthropologist, professor and author. The character in the show that is based on her is named Dr. Temperance Brennan nicknamed “Bones” by her partner, Agent Seeley Booth of the FBI. She earns her name because she deals entirely with human bones to help Agent Booth and the FBI to solve murders. She’s the best in her field, and as a result ends up partnering with Booth to give him information about murder victims that ends up being evidence pointing to their killers: from a skeleton she can determine age, gender, illnesses, hobbies, manner of death, and favorite color. Well, ok, maybe not the last one, but pretty darn close.

The reason why this show appealed to me when others didn’t is because from my experience, most of these shows revolve around some tough guy cop/agent who always comes out on top and his adventures with his female sidekick. In Bones, Dr. Brennan is the central figure who drives the story and more frequently, Agent Booth defers to her.

The characters in this show are a lot of fun. Dr. Brennan is a brilliant anthropologist with a good heart but a brain that often overrides the good that heart could experience. She lives, eats, and breaths science and has great difficulty functioning outside of its method. Booth, in contrast, leads with his gut and is good at his job because of his instincts and theories. As such they make a great pair for solving crimes, but also tend to butt heads because of their differing approaches. Bones works with a team (or “squints,” also nicknamed by Booth) who all embody very different types of people as well, sometimes to a fault. Angela is a fun-loving artist who works to recreate the faces of victims. She’s also Bones’ best friend. Jack Hodgins is a scientist who works with everything that no one else wants to touch—namely insects and filth—and is a conspiracy theorist in his spare time. Zack Addy is a doctoral intern studying under Dr. Brennan whose abundance of intelligence as well as lack of social skills is staggering.

What I enjoy most about this show is the gender role reversal of Booth and Bones. While she is grounded in fact and reason, he is driven by emotion, faith, and passion for his work. This makes for some great sparring. Frequently, Booth tries to assert himself as the big tough FBI agent, only to be emasculated by the cool and calculating Bones. They definitely have some kind of chemistry, which gets dragged through the season as they either deny that it’s true or fail to recognize it.

I wouldn’t want to turn this into a rave, because as much as I enjoy Bones it definitely has its faults. One is that sometimes their favorite themes get redundant and tiresome. I love Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz in their roles as Bones and Booth, but there are times when she is too bland and robotic and he is too hammy. Also, because they’re dealing with decomposing bodies, it can get pretty gross. (I try to avoid watching while I’m eating!) Finally there is one character, not mentioned previously, that I felt took away from the chemistry of the characters: Daniel Goodman is the director of the Institute where they work, and doesn’t seem to fit at all. He’s a paternal type who is loosely connected to the goings on. Also, the actor allows his Shakespearean training to surface way too often. Thankfully, this problem was remedied by his absence from season two.

Rating: 10

Overall, Bones is a show with engaging, funny characters and some interesting scientific nuggets. The episodes have a little something for everyone: the mystery of solving a murder, the humor of the workplace, the science of forensics, and the chemistry of an attractive male and female lead. What more could you ask for? (That’s rhetorical.)

Favorite Scene: Booth and Bones are discussing their murder investigation in New Orleans and the claims that voodoo played a role.

BOOTH: Voodoo. Who's going to believe that stuff?

BRENNAN: It's a religion. No crazier than – well, what are you?

BOOTH: Catholic.

BRENNAN: They believe in the same saints you do, and prayer. What they call spells, you call miracles. They have priests.

BOOTH: We don't make zombies.

BRENNAN: Jesus rose from the dead after three days.

BOOTH: Jesus is not a zombie! All right? Man. I shouldn't have to tell you that.

Into the Wild

2009-10-13T13:27:00.004-04:00

“When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” This aphorism is intended to mean that when circumstances get harder, you have to rise to meet them, not run away from them. When you run away from your problems, they don’t go away. In fact, it usually creates more problems.

This is a truth which eludes Chris McCandless, the main character of Into the Wild, portrayed with skill by Emile Hirsch. Being a recent graduate of Emory University, he subsequently decides to donate his life-savings to charity, abandon his car out in Arizona, burn all the money in his wallet, burn his Social Security card, changes his name to Alexander Supertramp (I’m not kidding), and become a hobo. The language “hobo” is never used in the film (or the book it’s based on), but that’s what he is: a hobo. I shudder to think what he must have smelled like at the end of this movie.

Speaking of the movie, it was a simultaneously beautiful and frustrating experience. The main character is idealistic, childish, and ridiculously foolish. Ostensibly, Chris wanted to find God, or himself, or transcendence, or all of them in nature, to escape from the materialism of society, and seek the greater meaning of life. But really, he just wanted to get away from his family, meanwhile causing them a great amount of pain. He’s like a 7-year-old running away from home, only to Alaska instead of down the street. The hypocrisy of his motivations diminishes his actions.

Chris seems to be operating under one central idea: the misery of his life is caused by the people in it, so the solution would be to remove all people from his life. People = problems, so mathematically speaking, if the value of “people” is zero, then the value of “problems” must also be zero. But another truth which eludes him is that human connection means everything. All the beauty and transcendence of nature mean nothing if you don’t have another human to share it with. Now, this may seem like a no-brainer to you (it did to me), but Chris just doesn’t get it. He only realizes it at the very end of the movie, and his life, which only make the story more tragic.

To compound matters, Chris constantly meets people along the way that try to show him this truth, and are even living examples of this truth, examples that apply directly to him. The hippie couple who give him companionship; the young girl who lets him see a picture of what his life could be; the old man who shows him the meaning and effect of loneliness. They’re all trying to bring him out of his singularity to a place of glorious give-and-take, where he can truly love and be loved. But he squanders the opportunities they give him, and ultimately rejects their love.

Another reason this movie is frustrating is that the entire first half presents Chris’s journey of self-discovery as romantic, epic, and even exemplary. I have very little patience for people who think that the best way to solve society’s problems for themselves is to remove themselves from society. In Chris’s case, his no-going-back trek into nature wasn’t even born out of a genuine desire to find a higher state of being; he just wanted to get away from his dad. Towards the second half, the movie takes on a different tone, one in which the viewer realizes that nature isn’t all fun and games and kayaking without consequence to oneself. There are very real dangers to deal with, and you have to realize that you may have great reverence for nature, but nature doesn’t give two craps about you. Naïve people like Chris will eventually meet an end like his own.

There are some great performances in Into the Wild, including an Oscar nod-worthy turn by Hal Holbrook. The cinematography is simply breathtaking, and beautifully captures the grandeur and majesty of nature. Director Sean Penn has a gift for gentleness and an even hand. What he lacks is pace and a good film editor. I think the movie could have been about half an hour shorter or more, and is at times plodding. It also takes too many forays into the very stylistic, which I could have done without. It takes a long time to say what it has to say, and seems to be saying something completely different when it starts. I thought it had some great things to offer, but I ultimately thought the main character was too much of a naïve idiot for me to really enjoy it.

Iconic Lines:

“12 years? To paddle down a river?”

“What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?”

“The freedom of simple beauty is too good to pass up.”

22 Rating: -3

Particle Man

Suspiria

2009-09-28T18:47:00.003-04:00

Those who know me personally (or have read this blog before)are at least passingly familiar with my tendency to kvetch about the sad state of my favorite film genre, horror. So, there's no need to reiterate that old rant here, save that gore and shock are favored over atmosphere. But I've never talked much about films that did have that atmosphere in this space.....but that's changing. I'll start with one of my favorite films, and one of the most iconic, yet somewhat obscure, horror films ever made: Dario Argento's Suspiria.
Suspiria is the story of Suzy Bannion (Phantom of the Paradise's Jessica Harper), an American ballet student who arrives in Germany to study at a prestigious ballet school.....that may be run by a coven of witches. Like most of Dario Argento's films, the plot of Suspiria is not it's strong suit, though it bears mentioning that the story and acting are tighter here than in most of Argento's other works. What Suspiria's great strength is, is visual. One, it was the last film ever made in Technicolor, which I find a lot warmer than modern coloring systems. Two, this film has some of the strangest interiors I've ever seen, as far as the ballet school. It can be said in certain films that the location is an actual character......this was never truer than it is in Suspiria. This film has some of the strangest, most flamboyant sets you will ever see. Three, the lighting in Suspiria is the most dramatic I've ever seen in a film. Scenes are bathed entirely in bright, primary reds, blues, yellows, etc. Four, what Argento lacks in the department of structure and ability to direct actors, he makes up for in spades in the department of setting up a shot. His visual style remains largely consistent across his catalogue, which is notable considering that he has worked with several directors of photography. All of the above factors combine to make Suspiria the best-looking film I've ever seen, in any genre.
Special mention has to go to the soundtrack by Argento proteges/mainstays Goblin, who also scored the original Dawn of the Dead. The eerie main theme, with it's arpeggiated pedal point progression, is a clear inspiration to later iconic horror themes like Halloween and Phantasm.......and that's before you factor in the unusual use of the bouzouki and tabla on the title track. The rest of the soundtrack is about as strange, but you can't really get the impact from me telling you about it....you need to hear it. It's truly decades ahead of it's time.
There are, however, a few things that keep Suspiria from being counted amongst the all-time great horror film greats by more mainstream tastes.......the events of the film aren't as tight as they could be. There's a lot that happens, mostly character death, that does little to nothing to move the story along or raise the stakes. Also, some may find the performances somewhat dated.
Despite that, Suspiria is a remarkable film, and one that I heartily recommend. I give Suspiria an 18 out of 22 on the 22 scale.

9

2009-09-21T09:47:00.004-04:00

Ensemble movies are one of the basic foundations of film since its inception. In the past 10 years or so, digital movies have become commonplace at the theater as well. Naturally, the combination of the two is a natural leap to make. 9 was not the first movie to do this, however; that would be Toy Story. 9 isn’t even the first of its kind in the digital serious sci-fi arena. The horrible Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within comes to mind, though there might even be one earlier. So 9 is original… how?

That’s not to say the movie was bad; it wasn’t. It just wasn’t all that creative. Post-apocalyptic world… check. Futuristic Matrix-like man vs. machine setup… check. Female character who could kick yours and everyone in the theater’s asses… check. All the elements are in perfectly in place, which may be a good thing or a bad one, depending on how easily satisfied with conventions you are.

The one big thing 9 had going for it was that all the characters were machines made out of burlap and watch gears. That was pretty creative. The look of the movie was spectacular; lush and vivid settings and interesting-looking characters were consistent throughout. It was also a little interesting and different to have all the principles’ names be numbers (there are 9 of them, hence the title). In fact, nobody in the film has an actual name. The story concept was pretty great, too; a scientist’s creations must carry on his last mission after his death. Tried and true, but with a little futuristic twist.

While the visuals were phenomenal, and the story idea had a lot going for it, 9 trips up in the plot and story presentation, especially the dialog. The voice actors are all awesome in real life (the film boasts the talents of Martin Landau, Christopher Plummer, John C. Reilly, Elijah Wood, and Jennifer Connelly), and they lend their awesomeness to the digital screen to a certain degree. However, they don’t have a whole lot to work with. The script is pretty weak, and it relies heavily on action and visual wow to carry the film. Dialog and character interaction are given a backseat, and it’s clear that not a lot of time or energy were put into them.

Slight spoilers here, so watch out. The story idea was great, but some story elements were poorly explained in the film. This goes back to the dialog being very substandard. Also, the concept of the 9 living machines all being parts of the Scientist’s soul was interesting, but not well thought through. Also, the only ones left at the end of the movie are the two kids, a male and a female. The assumption is that they will repopulate the earth (that whole “this world is ours” thing), but… they’re machines. Machines can't copulate. Or if they can, that belongs in a different movie.

I’m glad I saw 9 in the theater, because it was quite the visual spectacle. That alone was almost worth the price of admission (or at least it would have been if NYC theaters weren’t so damn expensive). If you don’t expect too much else from the film, though, you’ll at least get to see some great CGI, if nothing else.

Iconic Lines:

I must have mentioned at least twice that the dialog wasn’t very good, so I got nothin’.

22 Rating: 4

Particle Man

Eternal Sunshine is Real

2009-09-04T14:53:00.002-04:00

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of my favorite movies, and easily belongs on the Top 10 list of movies of the decade. And it basically starts with this premise: What if we could erase painful memories?

Well, apparently science has once again caught up to filmmakers' imagination. According to this study, a team of researchers has figured out a way to erase the memories of rats. They trained the rats to associate a particular sound with an electric shock, so that eventually, whenever the rats hear the sound, they freeze. Adult rats never forget -- they always freeze. But when scientists injected a drug that's supposed to dissolve the protective sheath around the brain cells in the amygdala -- lo and behold -- the rats stopped freaking out when they heard the sound.

Now, this is being talked up as something that could become immensely helpful to those with PTSD. And I can certainly see that. But I also wonder how long it is before it goes from being PTSD specific to being prescribed to anyone who, like Joel and Clementine in Eternal Sunshine, are just sad about a lost relationship. In any case, it provokes the following questions: Should we erase memories at all? If so, what kinds? And who should be able to decide what kinds?

Anyone have any insights here?

Defiance

2009-08-11T09:59:00.002-04:00

As soon as I read the brief plot synopsis on IMDB of Defiance, I knew it was a movie that I wanted to see. While I missed the experience of seeing it in theaters, I finally caught it one night on television. Defiance, which is based on actual events, tells the tale of the Bielski brothers (mostly the older two) who are a Jewish family living in Belarus, when the Nazis decide to roll on through and carry out the “Final Solution”. After witnessing the atrocities that are being inflicted on their neighbors, the brothers flee to the forest in an attempt to escape the same fate of their neighbors. As the Nazis carry out their plan, more and more people are jeopardized. However, after hearing about the Bielski’s that are hiding out in the forest, people begin to join them, and what started out as one family’s hiding place turns into a woodland safe-house for over 1,000 Jewish refugees, with the elder Bielski’s in the roles as caretakers.
As I was watching this movie, there was one thing that kept on bugging me; I wasn’t feeling any of the emotion that the film should be rampant with. Of course there were instances where the audience served as the witnesses to the emotion, but I never felt it. This lack of feeling really caught my attention. In a time where there was so much to be afraid of, why didn’t I feel any of it.
Although some may say I am devoid of emotion, and that is the reason for the lack of feelings, I believe that the cause of this lay in the two main characters, Tuvia (Daniel Craig) and Zus (Liev Schreiber). Both did an admirable job acting, but there seemed to be only strength in their characters, and no emotional parts. I wasn’t sure if they were stonewalling because of their roles as the leaders, or if the emotion just wasn’t there. I know it may seem weird that I am focusing so much on the emotion of this film, but when it comes to films that have the atrocities of the Holocaust as their backdrop, I have found emotion to be the main aspect of the film.
As I said there seemed to be nothing wrong with the acting, nothing was over the top, as some films that deal with this historical period tend to do, but it seemed to be compensating for the films that overwhelm their audiences with emotion by allowing the audience to feel very little. It is very hard to lose yourself in the story when you feel as though a major aspect is escaping you. I understand that some people may find this review to be bad, but I have tried to write it several times, and I keep getting lost in the lack of emotion of this film. In the end I would have to say that this film allows the audience to be outsiders that are looking in, but not participating or connecting with the characters. This aspect has made it very hard to give Defiance a rating, but I feel comfortable giving it a 7.

My Sister's Keeper

2009-07-16T09:27:00.007-04:00

I read the book version of My Sister’s Keeper about a year and a half ago, and found my newest Favorite Writer. I’ve since read three more novels by Jodi Picoult (pronounced pee-ko), and loved them all to varying degrees, but none so much as My Sister’s Keeper. What I loved best about that book was not that each character was a fully realized person (which was great), but that the story had a completeness to it, such that you saw the entire picture only when you had read the last page.

Anna Fitzgerald is thirteen years old, and to the surprise of her family, she is seeking medical emancipation from her parents, the reason being that she was genetically engineered before birth to be a perfect bone marrow match from her sister Kate, who has leukemia. She has undergone countless medical procedures, all without being asked, in service to her sister. The ramifications of such a decision will be unpredictable, for Anna’s family and for Anna herself.

Book-to-movie adaptations are a tried and true convention of film, but some books are just begging to have movies made out of them. My Sister’s Keeper was kinda like that. After a small battle over rights and money, we have a Hollywood version of this movie, complete with an Oscar darling playing the lead role. But don’t break out the champagne just yet. The movie is pretty good, but takes some rather alarming departures from the book.

To start with, the movie had beautiful lighting and sets, and the directing made it flow rather nicely. Props go to Nick Cassavettes for having a pretty steady hand when it came to directing. The acting, however, left a little to be desired. Nobody in it was particularly bad, but I got the sense from most of the actors that this wasn’t a movie they were very invested in. Abigail Breslin is an exception; she portrayed Anna’s combination of spunk and timidity very well, and I could tell she was putting out her best effort. Cameron Diaz was also very well-cast, and was as good as she can be (which, granted, isn’t saying much). Alec Baldwin, however, completely phoned in his role and checked out of the movie. This is a real shame, because his character (Campbell Alexander, the lawyer representing Anna) was one of my favorite parts of the book, especially his numerous “he’s a service dog” jokes. He’s not given his due screen time in the movie, and is tragically underused. Though with Baldwin’s I’ll-be-in-my-trailer attitude about this role, it’s not all that surprising that he got cast aside.

Sofia Vassilieva puts in a very rote and cliché performance as Kate, cancer girl extraordinaire. Her reactions to everything are exactly what a 15-year-old girl’s would be, but that’s a credit to both the screenwriters and Picoult. She plays them just right, but in a way that doesn’t surprise the viewer at all. Evan Ellingson is given a somewhat large part and doesn’t really know what to do with it. The only other thing I’ve seen him in was a few episodes of 24 where he played Jack Bauer’s nephew, and was pretty bad. Joan Cusack plays a judge with a daughter who passed away, which scores points for plot resonation, yet Cusack turns in a mediocre performance.

***GREAT BIG HUGE SPOILER ALERT***

The thing that made this movie not nearly as great as it could have been was the change in ending. In the book, Kate survives because Anna dies in a car accident and posthumously donates both her kidneys, saving Kate’s life. In the movie, Kate dies in a completely ordinary manner, one you expect from the very beginning of the film, and Anna and the rest of her family move on to lead relatively normal lives. This switch in the movie transports the very meaning of the story to a totally different place than where it is in the book.

Now, given the moviemakers have the author’s approval (or the changes are thoughtful and make sense if the author is dead or otherwise unavailable), departures from original source material are acceptable. After all, Lord of the Rings strayed very far in the details from Tolkien’s original story, but by-and-large they were good and intelligent choices. So the differences from book to movie in My Sister’s Keeper don’t upset me all that much. It’s just that most of the choices the moviemakers made took away what made the story so wildly original, and thus popular. The story went from new, edgy and intriguing to kind of ordinary and unremarkable. Kate dying of cancer and Anna living a normal life afterwards are just so… well, ordinary. I have a feeling Picoult was involved in the changes that were made, though her approval is uncertain to me. Some of the changes have a novelist’s touch, but the switch to a more ordinary ending seems like a very un-Picoult move to make.

All in all, the movie wasn’t bad. I know that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement, but it was an emotionally wrenching and tear-inducing way to spend two hours, if you’re into that kind of thing. What’s great about this movie is that, if you’re a guy, you can cry at this movie and not feel like a panty-waist. It’s complicated and real enough that it feels like a tragedy that actually happened, rather than a contrived Hollywood tissue-fest.

In short, if you’re a breathing human being, you need to read this book. If there’s nothing better at the video store, you should see this movie.

Iconic lines (or exchanges):

Judge (the dog): BARK BARK BARK!!!

Judge De Salvo: Mr. Alexander, control your dog or he will be removed from the courtroom!

Campbell: Quiet, Judge!

Judge De Salvo: Excuse me?!?

Campbell: Not you, the dog.

Anna: Can I pet him?

Campbell: Judge is a service dog.

Anna: What’s he for?

Campbell: I have an iron lung. Judge keeps me away from metal detectors.

22 Rating: 8

Particle Man

Year One (video review)

2009-07-03T20:00:00.002-04:00

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

2009-06-11T12:42:00.003-04:00

I love fantasy movies and books, which I blame on Particle Man. However, despite his initial encouragement that I begin reading this genre. I have continued reading the books or seeing the movies with no prompting from him. One of the series that I became the most engrossed in while reading was the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. From the way these books are written, they were made to be transferred to the big screen. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe was the first in the series to be made into a film, and while it was enjoyable, I wasn’t exactly thrilled by it. Then next movie that was made was Prince Caspian, which I was hoping would be better than its predecessor.
Prince Caspian tells the tale of the Pevensie children after they have been away from Narnia for a year. On their way back to school, they are magically transported back to the land they once ruled, however, things have changed quite a bit. Also at the same time Prince Caspian, a prince of the enemies of Narnia, has escaped from his evil uncle and summons help to aid the Narnians in their reclaiming of what they once were. Caspian pictures that he will summon the Kings and Queens that originally saved Narnia, which he does, however, since they have been living in a different world for the past year, which is significantly longer in Narnian time, they show up only a year older then when they first entered Narnia.
As I said, although I enjoyed the first film, I was hoping that this one would improve upon what was started. I wasn’t disappointed. Although there were some changes to the story from the version told in the book, the general feeling of the story was still there. Much like the first film, the special effects continued to be exemplary and gave the audience the fantastical nature that they were hoping for, which is always enjoyable.
While special effects are important, it alone cannot carry a movie. The actors must lift some weight. I don’t know why, but I feel that the actors grew into their roles as actors more than they were in the first film. They don’t seem older than they should for the roles that they play, but I get the feeling that they were more serious about it than previously. I have watched Prince Caspian several times and each time I feel the acting is better than the previous film.
I think the main difference that I find in the quality of the films is determined in watchability. I have watched Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe a couple of times, and it served as a pleasant distraction, but I have watched Prince Caspian much more, and it has always been enjoyable. I feel that the director had a better sense of what he was doing in this follow-up and was therefore able to give us a more enjoyable story. I’m the kind of person who can watch movies repeatedly, and I find a comfort in the fact that no matter how many times I watch Prince Caspian, that it continues to be just as enjoyable as the first time. I give the movie a 10.

Bride Wars

2009-05-13T14:14:00.003-04:00

When I first began reading about the plot of Bride Wars, I was intrigued. It seemed like a cute little movie that was perfect for a Girls’ Night out. In fact I had hoped to go with my friends to see it, until I started hearing from people who had already seen it. My mother thought it was great, which for me is not a good sign for a movie, but I had heard negative reviews from other people, but felt like I needed to see it on my own and form my own opinions. I should have listened to other people.
Bride Wars tells the story of 2 lifelong friends in New York City, Liv (Kate Hudson), an attorney, and Emma (Anne Hathaway), a schoolteacher. These two are both in serious relationships, and one day while going through Liv’s closet, the girls find a box from Tiffany’s and without opening it assume that Liv’s boyfriend, Nate, will propose and she tells everyone that she is already engaged, even though he hasn’t proposed yet. While waiting for Nate to propose, Fletcher, Emma’s boyfriend proposes. This leads Liv to confront Nate about why he hasn’t proposed, which he does after the confrontation. Now that they are both happily engaged, they meet with their dream wedding planner, Marion St. Clair (Candace Bergen) and she announces that she has availability for weddings at the Plaza in June, which is a dream that the two friends share. They both pick different dates, since they are each other’s maids of honor. However, due to a scheduling mishap their weddings are booked for the same day. Neither wants to give up their dates, and they begin sabotaging each other and their weddings.
If this was supposed to be a movie about friendship and how true friendships always last, then I fear for the people who believe that. If this movie has one message it is that in this world you can only trust yourself and to never open up to anyone because you never know when a moment of weakness where you share something will come back to haunt you.
However, I have more problems with the movie than just it crap-tastic depiction of lifelong friendship. The movie didn’t bother to delve any deeper than the traditional bride mentality that is accepted as the norm. I mean this movie is basically about tow really big and expensive temper tantrums, where it is all about the bride and no one else matters. If the superficial emotions that are portrayed in this film were the only problem, it might be surmountable, but that isn’t the only problem,
There were a lot of actors in this movie, but I don’t feel like anyone was really acting. I had the same problem with Must Love Dogs. I feel that the script was so superficial that the actors didn’t really care about their characters. The film should have been called “Really Expensive Puff Piece and We’re Just Paying These People To Show Up.”
This wasn’t a good movie. There is no way around the fact. The plot was horrible, the characters were flat, and if there was any acting that occurred in this film, then it escaped me. I give it a -13. Just a tip for all you brides out there, NEVER ACT LIKE THESE WOMEN!

Vantage Point

2009-05-06T20:41:00.003-04:00

Eye-witness accounts, by and large, are very unreliable. In court, you need more than just somebody saying “I saw him do it” to get a conviction. The reason is that what we see is completely subject to our perceptions, attitudes and mindset. Memory is editable; things can be cut out, blocked out, and even not recorded at all. That’s why two people can see the same exact event, but have two completely different takes on what happened.

Vantage Point would seem, at first glance, to take advantage of that. But in the end, it kinda… doesn’t. The particulars of the story don’t really turn out to have anything to do with the idea of “perception ≠ truth.” That’s a little disappointing to a cerebral, outside-the-box thinker like me. Vantage Point doesn’t plumb the depths of what we see being the limits of our world, or any such thing. Where it scores major points, though, is in having a fantastic plot, being well-shot, and being excellently paced. Even if it can’t be a deep philosophical treatise (and let’s face it, not every movie can), it can at least get the other, slightly easier elements of moviemaking right; Vantage Point definitely does.

The motif that Vantage Point goes with is the story of an event being told from several different viewpoints, all weaving together to give the viewer a complete picture of what actually happened. Now, this is not a new idea to cinema. Rashomon-style movies have been done ever since… well, Rashomon. It requires an investment on the part of the viewer, as they must be paying attention the whole time. And the payoff must be great indeed to reward that investment. Vantage Point’s payoff is alright, if a little simple-minded. The “event” it concerns is an assassination attempt of the U.S. President during an international summit for peace he has arranged in Spain, shortly after the 9/11 attacks. There is a shooting, and a bombing shortly after, and then another very shortly after that. The entire plot of the movie takes place in approximately 30 minutes real-time, but the movie is just 90 minutes long. It seems longer, but not because it drags. I can’t think of a single moment in the entire film where I was bored or disinterested. It also felt longer in that there was just so much plot and so many characters that it felt very full. One of the strengths of this movie is that it holds your attention throughout.

The movie has varying degrees of success at doing several different things. It has a strong human element to the story, has plenty of action, and always keeps the tension high. Movies as jam-packed as Vantage Point have a tendency to paint the characters as two-dimensional, falling into good guys/bad guys categories, but it amazingly doesn’t do that. Those categories do exist, but they break down and bleed together at a certain point for some characters. The movie never quite lets you off the hook, and does some funny things with our perceptions of character. None of the acting is spectacular, with the possible exception of Forrest Whitaker. His portrayal of an average Joe who does the right thing because it’s what needs to be done is very real and appealing, though I’m sure it wasn’t even a shadow of a challenge for him.

That brings me to the plot, which in the contexts of narrative flow and storytelling, was out of this world. It had all the major elements that make a great plot solidly in hand: it was engaging throughout, kept us interested on multiple levels, and revealed essential plot points at just the right times. It would have been nice if the story had a deeper meaning, but it was such a great ride that I’m not that disappointed. It didn’t quite answer all my questions, and was ever-so-slightly unbelievable, but considering how far it could have gone off the deep end, it executed itself very well. It was tight throughout, and at the end, it made sense. As the viewer, I felt a sense of accomplishment that I was able to follow it, which is a tricky thing for a movie to pull off.

Vantage Point could have been better, but that might be asking a lot of a movie that already has so much going for it. All the elements come together very nicely, and the pieces all fit together to make a complete picture that I could understand. It’s a shame this didn’t do better at the box office, because it was a tightly constructed movie that didn’t make me work my skepticism too much.

Iconic Lines:
“He doesn’t even look like me.”
“The beauty of American arrogance is that they can’t imagine a world where they’re not a step ahead.”

22 Rating: 13

Particle Man

Synecdoche, New York

2009-04-28T21:43:00.003-04:00

I'm not quite sure how to explain a movie like Synecdoche, New York. So let's just start with some facts, in the order in which they become apparent.

The title, of course, is a pun. There is a city in New York called Schenectady, but synecdoche is a literary technique in which a part of something is used to represent the whole. Mickey Mouse is an simple example that comes readily to mind--his iconic circular ears are often used to denote the full Mickey, or sometimes the full Disney empire.

And the film is written and directed by Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman has established a reputation as a writer with his screenplays for Adapdation, Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But Synecdoche is his first time in the director's chair as well.

So, if you're me, you're really excited. The film is named after a literary device, it contains a pun, and it's written/directed by Charlie Kaufman. Maybe not everyone's cup o' tea, but it's an English geek's wet dream. Throw in a starring-Philip-Seymour-Hoffman and I'm sold.

The results? Sadly, it's a bit underwhelming. Or, rather, the type of whelm it aims for ends up trapping it into earning the prefix under-. Let me unpack that.

In the film, Philip Seymour Hoffman is Caden Cotard, a director living in Schenectady who, upon receiving a MacArthur "genius" grant, decides to finally write and direct his opus. Cotard puts his opus together on an enormous stage in New York City, bringing in thousands of actors, all of whom perform semi-related, equally important little vignettes. Essentially, it's New York City in miniature. It's one way the title gets enacted.

But really, the movie is about Cotard. Not just about his weirdly enormous, ever-evolving, and ultimately never-finished play. But also about his life and about his relationships--with Catherine Keener, his artist-wife who abandons him and takes his daughter with her; with Michelle Williams, his vapidish perennial actress; and with Samantha Morton, his box office assistant turned personal assistant turned true love.

The movie is very into being "real" -- for example, it spends an uncomfortable amount of time on Cotard's weird medical issues, such as seizures, an inability to salivate, and his sycosis (inflammation of hair follicles, not the more well known "psychosis" (another pun)). But it also gets at the real by injecting a lot of the surreal. As the play moves forward, the timeline becomes more and more confused (both in Cotard's head and in the viewer's.) His psychologist (Hope Davis) seems weirdly telepathic. Samantha Morton's home is always shown as burning (and no one seems to mind). This being Charlie Kaufman -- and this movie being named "Synecdoche" -- these things all mean something. But it seems like there's a lot that can't be fully comprehended in a first pass; the movie needs a second, third, fourth, fifth viewing. (Kaufman states as much himself. In an interview with IonCinema, he says: "You need to see it more than once. The trick is to get people to watch it more than once.")

But therein lies the problem. Because of its focus on being "real", it's also quite a bit sad, a tad hopeless, a little bleak. One of Cotard's remarks to his actors is that he "won't settle for anything less than the brutal truth. Brutal. Brutal." And brutal is not so bad a word for this movie; it's so emotionally raw that it hurts to be a part of, and so it's not something a viewer is necessarily eager to revisit. Which is a shame, because I'm sure much of Kaufman's use of symbol in this movie is brilliant, but I'm also sure that I won't be sitting through the entire film again anytime soon to find out.

To foist a bit of synecdoche upon you, dear reader, for me the film is summed up by Sammy Barnathan (Tom Noonan), whom Cotard hires to portray himself in his play. Sammy does a marvelous job capturing Cotard, but when he's not in character, he can smile. The smile really stuck out to me while I was watching the film, and I think it's because Cotard doesn't really have a smile in him (thus making fake-Cotard's smile all the more glaring). Sure, Philip Seymour Hoffman does turn the corners of his mouth up from time to time, but it's always an awkward, embarrassed, or unsetted smile. Never genuine. But Sammy's smile--the actor's smile--is genuine. And as a result, I'd suggest that he, not Cotard, is the more real, more genuine person.

In all his obsession to make his film "real," Charlie Kaufman left out joy, happiness, and (with a few notable exceptions) laughter. He seems to have given in to something that was always an impulse but never a controlling feature of his earlier work -- the equating of "real" with obscene, or uncomfortable, or upsetting. And those things are just part of the real, no more or less part than mirth is. And the tragedy is this focus on the ickiness in "real" has actually made Cotard--whom I imagine has more than a bit of Kaufman in him--into something like a two-dimensional character. Which means that, even for all its artfulness, I can't give Synecdoche, New York any more than a 2.

Quotes that serve as a part to represent the whole:

Caden Cotard: I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That's what I want to explore. We're all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we're going to die, each of us secretly believing we won't.

Sammy: (handing Cotard a slip of paper with his ex-wife's address on it) I want to follow you there and see how you lose even more of yourself. ... ... Research.

Minister: Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you'll never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved. And the truth is I'm so angry and the truth is I'm so fucking sad, and the truth is I've been so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long have been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own, and their own is too overwhelming to allow them to listen to or care about mine. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.

Repo! The Genetic Opera

2009-04-21T17:09:00.004-04:00

Last year, I started seeing and hearing about some weird movie called Repo! The Genetic Opera. I knew that it was going to be directed by Darren Lyunn Bousman, of Saw infamy, and that it had a really interesting cast including Anthony Stewart Head (Giles, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Sarah Brightman(!). The movie got delayed for a while, but then got a limited release in about 10 theaters before hitting video. I was disappointed, since it sounded interesting, and since Lionsgate is starting to get a reputation for This Sort of Thing. I rented Repo! a few weeks ago, and the reasons for the limited release were very, very clear: this is one musical that the curtain should have stayed down on.
Repo! takes place in the future, in your cookie-cutter post-apocalyptic world, with the same Road Warrior/Blade Runner aesthetic that you've come to expect from this type of movie. Sickness is rampant, and replacement organs have become commonplace. So commonplace, that they are treated like houses or cars, or other expensive commodities: miss a payment, and the Repo Man comes calling to take the merchandise back. There is a company run by dying magnate Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino), and his useless children (Bill Moseley, Paris Hilton, and Nivek Ogre). There is Blind Mag (Sarah Brightman), the singer whose eyes Largo replaced, and who unbeknownst to her is due for repossession. There is Nathan Wallace (Anthony Stewart Head), the reluctant Repo Man; and his sick, rebellious daughter Shilo (Alexa Vega). And you know, there's a lot of blood, gore, and singing.
If it seems like I'm not doing a very good job recalling the plot, the problem is that there wasn't much plot to recall. There's something about Rotti dying, and trying in vain to pick an heir to his company. There's something about Nathan getting fed up with having to hide his gruesome profession from his daughter, and her feeling locked in by her father due to her health. Situations change for some characters, but nobody who survives to the end of the film grows or really learns anything. I didn't care about a single character. That is bad, bad script design. Strike One.
There are some puzzling choices made in this movie. For a musical (and one with no spoken dialogue that I can remember), there are an awful lot of non/poor singers in the film. Sarah Brightman is an opera singer, and acquits herself nicely as expected. Repo! writer/composer Terrance Zudnich does an ok job, and Anthony Stewart Head does ok despite the fact that he is forced to do an American accent. That aside, he shows great range and versatility with some gutteral, quasi-death-metal deliveries. But those of us who have heard what an incredible singer he is know that the material is holding him back. Ogre does an ok job, but Sorvino, Hilton, Moseley, and Vega should have restraining orders issued against them from the microphones of the world. Strike Two.
But for all the bad/mediocre performances, the best actor/singers in the world couldn't have saved this movie from its biggest enemy: its insufferably boring music and story. Out of 58 songs, I would deem ONE of them "ok" at best. There are no strong hooks or memorable melodies. And this is a MUSICAL. WITH HARDLY ANY TALKING. Strike Three. You're out, Repo.
A movie as weird and graphic as this should never be boring, but I was suffering for virtually every minute of its hour and a half running time. I give Repo! a -18 out of 22 on the 22 scale. I would have given it a lower score, but an actor as compelling as Tony Head will always bring something to the table, even in a movie as abysmally incompetent as this one.
-Your Racist Friend

Doubt

2009-04-15T10:09:00.007-04:00

The word "doubt" is a word that for most frequently elicits feelings of discomfort and uncertainty. Often seen as something negative, doubt is usually something that haunts us rather than blesses us. And because of that, people don't want to feel it, talk about it, or deal with it.

I recognize Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams to be some of the best, if not the best in the business. The previews for this movie looked dramatic and intense, and the content potentially troubling. This combined with the title created an unconscious aversion for me. I mentioned to several people that I had seen Doubt, and the common reaction was "How was that? I was interested in seeing that but didn't get around to it." This answer makes me believe that I wasn't alone in my intrigued yet hesitant feelings.

Some have said that the movie is slow, which I can see but don't necessarily agree with. This is one of those films that centers mostly around the dialogue of a few characters without a lot of plot twists, bells or whistles. Meryl Streep is Sister Aloysius, a severe nun whose by-the-book approach to the church and school is powerful, yet unappreciated by most. Opposite her is Hoffman who plays Father Flynn. (Opposite being the operative word.) Where she is condemning, he is forgiving. Where she finds fault, he finds potential to learn and grow. Where she is cold and distant, he is warm and approachable. And yet director John Patrick Shanley somehow avoids the tempting "good cop/bad cop" formula and gives them an impressive amount of depth. Why impressive? Because for most of the film, we see each character around other people, interacting in conversations in church and class, projecting how they want to be perceived, not necessarily how they really are. The third member in this triumvirate is Amy Adams as Sister James. She is a gentle and caring woman who teaches for the private school and seems to have a love for what she does. She is nervous, however, and doesn't assert herself as much as Sister Aloysius, who criticizes her for this very reason.

The year in which the story is set is 1964, and the school has it's first black student named Donald Miller. Each of the adults want things to go well with him, but go about making that happen in different ways. Father Flynn decides to befriend him and at one point calls him out of Sister James' class to go to his office. When Donald returns he seems upset, and out of concern Sister James talks to Sister Aloysius. Sister Aloysius assumes the worst and begins a crusade to discover what Father Flynn has done and bring him down.

These three characters completely drive the story. Adams beautifully and sincerely portrayed a less experienced nun with a fresh love for for people who is caught in the middle of a potential scandal. She filled some important shoes, because her thoughts and motivations most closely resemble our own as we watch the whole thing unfold. I've always loved Philip Seymour Hoffman, and this film gives me no reason to doubt this love. While some might say he was out-acted, I think an important piece of puzzle here is that his character is a mild-mannered "man of the cloth." And this type of character next to Meryl Streep's large and ominous presence is going to experience some shrinkage.

Meryl Streep...do I really need to go on? Dr. Worm described her in this film as "in her own orbit," and this description fits aptly. What I love about her is that even though she's played threatening and powerful characters before, they aren't the same person. This is a problem many actors face in that they lean towards having character categories, whereas Streep avoids duplicating personalities. Sister Aloysius is a complete person which I think in the end makes her even more threatening...

Despite its obvious strengths, Doubt was a tough one for me to rate. I recognized the aspects that set the film apart as well-acted, well-scripted, and well-directed. My eyes were glued to the screen throughout, and I was blown away by so many wonderful performances and scenes. And yet...something was missing. "What on earth could be missing??" I wondered. Eventually I figured it out: clarity. Now, I'm not one of those people who needs or wants movies to spell out every little thing for me...I appreciate uncertainty and ambiguity in general. However, ambiguity, as the title might leave you to believe, is the main ingredient here. And when we have very little idea what has actually occurred, it's difficult to invest ourselves in one particular person or idea. And this is was distanced me from Doubt.

Rating: 13

It's tough to give a research paper a low grade when it provides all the correct facts and includes the appropriate information, but fails to create a big picture and a reason to exist. That's the best metaphor I can come up with for my feelings about Doubt. Excellent on pretty much all counts, for me, it still failed to be something more than the sum of its parts. This is because I felt unable to invest in something or someone, and the actual content of the film wasn't what I would generally consider "enjoyable." Doubt is definitely worth a watch, especially with its wonderfully appropriate ending. But I consider my appreciation of it like that of the C&E Catholics for church: nominal at best.

Deadgirl

2009-04-06T15:40:00.002-04:00

Frequent readers of this blog will have surely noted my constant complaints about how sameness is a problem at the cinema. In my defense, this shouldn't be a big surprise since I'm the oldest member of TMBC, and the one whose seen the most films in a wide variety of genres (though I think Wicked Little Critta is catching up fast....). Therefore, it only makes sense that I get more excited and impressed when I find something truly original. And I get REALLY gratified if and when I see something that not only breaks the mold, but smashes it into dust, and sweeps it into the gutter, to never been seen again. And after seeing innovative horror like Deadgirl, all other common horror films can say is this: Hello from the gutter.
Deadgirl is a film unlike anything I've see before, and has the most intriguing/mortifying hook I've seen come down the pike in a long time. I saw Deadgirl at the Boston Underground Film Festival, where festival co-director Kevin Monaghan told the audience something to the effect of, "I can't say that I hope you enjoy Deadgirl, but I hope that you take something away from it, that it affects you". I'm leaped at the chance to see this film at BUFF, because when I read about what the film was about, I doubted that it would get even a very limited theatrical release. After actually seeing it, I'm sure of that. But...enough foreplay.
Deadgirl follows the story of two teenagers, Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and JT (Noah Segan), local high school rejects, Trenchcoat Mafia types. At the beginning of the film, they cut class during a fire alarm to smoke weed and drink beer at an abandoned local asylum. There, they find themselves in the basement where they make a startling discovery: a beautiful, naked woman handcuffed to a gurney. And she's dead.....or at least she looks it........JT wants to free her, call 9/11, and GTFO. But Rickie? He wants to....keep her. To say much more would be going into very heavy spoiler territory, but the "dead girl" has a secret that makes deciding what to do with her (or to her.....) very squarely into "morally grey"....or at least squarely into that territory for Rickie.
If you're thinking that this sounds pretty tasteless, you would actually be very wrong. Deadgirl deals with it's very unorthodox and very dark subject matter with a lot of insight and restraint, and some very black humor, as appropriate. It does not revel in the extreme levels of gore and shock of it's ugly, stupid cousins in the "torture porn" genre. Having said that, this film is clearly NOT for the squeamish. Horror films have frequently been somewhat simplistic morality plays in America, but Deadgirl takes a very clear situation, and builds the plot and action around it, as opposed to shoehorning in lazy subtext in which teenagers who drink, do drugs, and engage in premarital sex are killed arbitrarily.
I liked Deadgirl, at least as much as I actually can like a film that has such brutal subject matter. The acting, directing, and writing are all very, very good. This film disturbed me, made me jump from time to time (but not in that cheap way), and made me shake my head with disbelief with it's final scene. I wish that I could go into more depth about the plot, but it's one of those films with a very minimal plot, so even simple elements of the story constitute huge spoilers. If requested, I might be able to put up an addendum on I Should Be Allowed To Think, TMBC's sister site.
Deadgirl is a powerful film about slippery slope moralities, and how "little deaths" become so much bigger. I will never forget this film. For originality, solid content, and superb craftsmanship, I give Deadgirl a 17 out of 22 on the 22 scale.

P.S. HUGE props go to Radiohead for letting this film use one of their songs.

-Your Racist Friend

Twilight

2009-03-22T22:38:00.005-04:00

Here’s a fun experiment for everyone to try. Put yourself in a big group of females, mention the name Edward Cullen, and see how many swoon. Edward Cullen is of course one of the main characters of the Twilight series. This book series has been adapted to the big screen, with more installments to come, and was just released on DVD Narch 21st. To celebrate the big release of the DVD, many places had midnight release parties like they’ve done with Harry Potter. However, I’m sure many of our loyal readers are asking themselves what the big deal is with these movies. Let me explain to you my experience.
Twilight is the first in a series of four books. The first installment introduces us to Isabella Swan, who moves from Phoenix, Arizona to Forks, Washington to live with her dad Charlie Swan. On her first day there she meets her Biology lab partner, Edward Cullen, who seems repulsed by her very presence. However, as the film progresses and these two get to know each other, we learn that Edward, who is described as being a gorgeous model type teenager, may have more to him than we think, which could cause problems for not only his family, but also for Isabella.
I saw this movie a while ago, and have kept thinking about it. I don’t want to lead people on in believing that it is such an amazing movie that I just haven’t stopped thinking about it, because that isn’t exactly the case. I’ve read the books and hoped that the transition from book to movie would be smooth, more specifically as smooth as Edward Cullen is said to be ;). However, this is not what I experienced. I didn’t like how some of the things that were in the book got changed, and I’m not talking about slight things, like to color of the water, I mean pivotal scenes that were kind of ruined and were only slightly reminiscent of the scenes in the book. If I hadn’t read the book I probably would have liked the movie more than I did.
The acting was fine. Nothing outstanding. Robert Pattinson, who is known for being the courageous Cedric Diggory from Harry Potter, played Edward Cullen. While I’m not saying that he is bad looking in any way, I didn’t see him and this drop dead gorgeous creature that had been described in the books. He did seem tortured, which is what the character called for, but he probably also had problems with the changes from the book. Kristen Stewart fits well in the looks department with her character, Isabella. Her acting was fine but I think she needs to get deeper into the role. She said the lines right and her facials expressions were good, but I didn’t get the feeling that it went much deeper than that superficial level.
I know that this review will not go over well with the fans of Twilight, and I count myself as one of them. But before you all decide to hate me forever let me recap what I have said. The movie would have been better for me if I hadn’t known about the book. The acting was average and could have been deeper. I liked the music and the scenery as well. I am going to give this movie a 6 and challenge those involved in New Moon, the Twilight sequel, to make me eat my words.

Marie and Bruce

2009-03-10T13:59:00.002-04:00

Initial Reaction: "What the hell was that?"

If ever there was an off-putting movie, it would be Marie and Bruce. It's about an unhappy married couple, and not much else. I thought it might offer us some insight into the joy, pain and often never-ending struggle that couples experience. Some might say it did, but geez, I thought insight of any kind was hard to find here.

Marie and Bruce claims fame with me as one of the few movies I didn't want to finish. I mean, I kept thinking that maybe, just maybe the end would redeem it somehow. But the rest of it made it become less and less worth it. I did finish it though, and because of that I am able to bring to you a more complete and negative review.

Marie and Bruce have been married for a number of years, and (thankfully) have no children. The film begins in the morning, and we hear Marie, played by Julianne Moore, telling us how much she dislikes her husband, played by Matthew Broderick. And this isn't just "I'm not sure if I love him anymore" or "Things have changed." This is full on hatred. She's filled with disgust, and as she looks at him sleeping in the bed next to her, refers to him with a string of profanity. He wakes up, and as he does so, she throws up her hands in frustration and whines "No!! Don't wake up!" This opening scene sets an interesting mood and tone that last for the majority of the film.

After they get up, they both make their way into the kitchen and start talking. They go back and forth between extreme politeness dripping with sarcasm and open distaste. When he tells her he's going to have lunch with Roger, she exclaims about how wonderful that is and goes on and on about how she's sorry she'll have to miss out on all of the interesting things Roger will have to say. It's very obvious she feels the opposite.

So this is essentially most of their interaction. They go throughout their day, trying to stay occupied since they're both unemployed and certainly don't want to spend their free time together. He goes out to lunch with Roger (played by Bob Balaban who does an incredible job being boring), then checks himself into a cheap hotel to drink and watch people through their windows. Marie goes out to lunch (apparently though they're unemployed they still have plenty of dough) and ends up being followed by a stray dog as she walks through the city streets. This ends up as a strange, almost dream-like scene in the woods by a river where she actually seems happy for a while.

You know, it's difficult to write this review because I feel like I don't have much to work with. Most of the time the main characters are pretty shallow, and when they're not, there's really nothing going on. From the very start of the film, Marie keeps telling us that she's planning to leave him. The same day, in fact. That night, when they got back to the house, she would tell him she is going to leave him. That's pretty much what keeps us somewhat interested in what is going to happen.

Marie and Bruce, I found out after the fact, is adapted from a play of the same name by Wallace Shawn. I had actually thought while I was watching it that it would make a better play. I might have appreciated it more that way, but now that I've seen this version I don't know if I'd want to sit through something else even closely resembling it again. The characters don't have many layers, and we basically just get to go through their miserable day with them. Even the ending, in which the mood changes slightly, was significantly wanting.

Rating: -13

Dull, sad, uncomfortable, and discouraging, Marie and Bruce left a lot to be desired. Good performances? Yes, but the script and plot just didn't deliver much in the way of meaning. I don't think you could even make the case that this is what a lot of couples deal with. Unpleasant from beginning to end, all I was left with was a feeling of "eww..." and for me, that's never a reason to recommend a movie. So, unless this sounds right up your alley, (and I mean you, Eeyore...) then please don't bother.

Tropic Thunder

2009-02-23T22:42:00.003-05:00

Tropic Thunder is a Hollywood movie in pretty much every sense of the word. It's made by Hollywood about Hollywood, and pretty much every single actor in Hollywood is either in it or is made fun of in it (sometimes both).

It's a parody movie and a parody of a movie. It stars actors whose characters are the sort of actors who do things the way the actors who portray the characters would do things. If you look at it the right way, TT is a bit like that M.C. Escher painting with all the stairwells leading everywhere and nowhere at once.

Not that it's even a bit confusing. Tropic Thunder tells a story that's been told many times before: The story of performers being forced to really do the thing they only pretend to do. (See, for example, Three Amigos or A Bug's Life.) In this case, the performers are actors in a war movie who then must become reasonable facsimiles of real soldiers in order to save one of their own.

The characters in the film are types, absolutely, but they're types with such readily recalled real-life analogues that they seem entirely real. Ben Stiller (who also directed) is Tugg Speedman, a once bankable action star who is seeing his clout plummeting (Stephen Seagal? Tom Cruise?). Robert Downey Jr. is Kirk Lazarus, an Australian actor known for his method acting and for his multiple Oscar wins (some combination of Russel Crowe and Daniel-Day Lewis?). Jack Black is the beloved and belittled (and drug-addicted) star of films such as Fatties: Fart 2--in which he plays every character in a fat and flatulent family (not even a veiled reference to Eddie Murphy). These three are joined by Brandon T. Jackson as Alpa Chino--a rapper most known for hawking a soft drink called "Booty Sweat"--and Jay Baruchel as Kevin Sandusky, the first-time actor who happens to be the only one doing things as the director intends.

The plot gets legs when the director, Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan), gets reamed out by producer Les Grossman (Tom Cruise in a lauded cameo) for blowing several million dollars on an expensive, explosive shot in which none of the actors were doing what they needed to do. At his wit's end, Cockburn takes the advice of writer and war veteran Four Leaf Tayback (Nick Nolte), who tells him that the actors need to experience some real combat in order to be able to properly make this film.

Of course, as is the case with films of this sort, the actors gradually realize that what was once make-believe has become real, and--again, according to the formula--they rise to the occassion.

But, as is the case is in comedies, the plot is only there as delivery vehicle for jokes. And the jokes here do pretty well on average. As with any parody, it occassionally falls into the pattern trailblazed by Family Guy (on the good side) and Not Another Date Disaster Epic Movie (on the evil side): merely substituting reference (and, sometimes, crudeness) for comedy. But Tropic Thunder does deliver some solid comedy, and some of its best work is very referential. Take, for example, Lazarus' speech to Speedman, who is just coming off an ill-advised and much-derided role in which he plays a retarded character called Simple Jack:

Lazarus: Everybody knows you never go full retard.

Speedman: What do you mean?

Lazarus: Check it out. Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man, look retarded, act retarded, not retarded. Counted toothpicks, cheated cards. Autistic, sho'. Not retarded. You know Tom Hanks, Forrest Gump. Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and won a ping-pong competition. That ain't retarded. Peter Sellers, "Being There." Infantile, yes. Retarded, no. You went full retard, man. Never go full retard. You don't buy that? Ask Sean Penn, 2001, I Am Sam. Remember? Went full retard, went home empty handed..."

Tropic Thunder is the second movie that Ben Stiller has directed, and already some themes are beginning to emerge. He enjoys poking fun at those who are lauded for superficial reasons, despite being a bit empty inside -- yet he also makes those characters his heroes. He loves employing the well-timed cameo (Tom Cruise here, David Bowie in Zoolander). He loves his stupid humor, but he's proven capable of employing it in some smart ways.

And like Zoolander, Tropic Thunder is pretty good. But only pretty good. It delivers enough laughs in enough ways that you don't feel as though your two hours were wasted. But it doesn't offer a character memorable enough or a vision transformative enough to push the film from successful to excellent. Tropic Thunder is a bit more sophisticated than Zoolander, but--in receiving an 8--it still can't crack that double-digit barrier.

OSCAR PICKS 2009

2009-02-20T22:19:00.002-05:00

It's kinda late in coming, but here are what all the TMBC critics think about what's coming with the Oscars on Sunday night. Please let us know if you agree or disagree with anything on here.

Best Actor

Dr. Worm: Mickey Rourke - The Wrestler

Particle Man: Frank Langella - Frost/Nixon

Stormy Pinkness: Mickey Rourke - The Wrestler

Wicked Little Critta: Sean Penn - Milk

Your Racist Friend: Mickey Rourke - The Wrestler

Best Actress

Dr. Worm: Kate Winslett - The Reader

Particle Man: Meryl Streep - Doubt

Stormy Pinkness: Anne Hathaway - Rachel Getting Married

Wicked Little Critta: Kate Winslet - The Reader

Your Racist Friend: Meryl Streep - Doubt

Best Supporting Actor

Dr. Worm: Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight

Particle Man: Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight

Stormy Pinkness: Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight

Wicked Little Critta: Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight

Your Racist Friend: Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight

Best Supporting Actress

Dr. Worm: Penelope Cruz - Vicky Christina Barcelona

Particle Man: Amy Adams - Doubt

Stormy Pinkness: Viola Davis - Doubt

Wicked Little Critta: Taraji P. Henson - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Your Racist Friend: Taraji P. Henson - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Best Animated Film

Dr. Worm: WALL-E

Particle Man: WALL-E

Stormy Pinkness: WALL-E

Wicked Little Critta: WALL-E

Your Racist Friend: WALL-E

Best Directing

Dr. Worm: David Fincher - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Particle Man: Danny Boyle - Slumdog Millionaire

Stormy Pinkness: Danny Boyle - Slumdog Millionaire

Wicked Little Critta: Danny Boyle - Slumdog Millionaire

Your Racist Friend: Danny Boyle - Slumdog Millionaire

Best Picture

Dr. Worm: Slumdog Millionaire

Particle Man: Slumdog Millionaire

Stormy Pinkness: Slumdog Millionaire

Wicked Little Critta: Slumdog Millionaire

Your Racist Friend: Slumdog Millionaire

The Wrestler

2009-02-18T19:04:00.001-05:00

The dilemma posed in Darren Aronofsky's latest film The Wrestler is an interesting one. We are introduced to Randy "The Ram" Robinson (Mickey Rourke), an aging professional wrestler who still performs in old VFW halls and the like, working part-time at a local supermarket in New Jersey, barely living hand-to-mouth. We see his aches and pains, and signs of age very clearly. But he does what he needs to do to do what he does, including using steroids. He hangs out at a local strip joint and is friendly with a stripper known as Cassidy (Marisa Tomei). He lives in the past and is generally happy despite his squalid conditions.....until he suffers a heart attack after a particularly brutal match and is told that he needs to make some changes. Kicking the steroids, fine. But when told that wrestling was "not a good idea", he looks at the cardiologist like he was the stupidest man on the planet. "But Doc......I'm a professional wrestler." Randy attempts to make a go of a "straight" life, and to repair his damaged relationship with his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood). But can he, or more importantly, does he even want to?
The story of The Wrestler, written by former The Onion Editor-In-Chief(!) Robert Siegel showcases some interesting parallels and paradoxes. The squalor of Randy's life as a professional wrestler, and the satisfaction he gets from it. The violence the wrestlers in the film inflict upon each other in the ring, and the brotherhood they have outside of it. The parallels between Randy and Cassidy, as aging practicioners of "trades" that value flesh and youth above all. The material here is nowhere near as harsh as Aronofsky's signature Requiem For A dream, but it is visceral, and will stay with you. I liked the scene where Randy is at a small fan convention signing, and he looks around the room, regarding some fellow elder statesmen of the sport and the price they paid....one falling asleep, one paralyzed from the waste down with a catheter, etc.
But as solid as the story is, this is a performance driven film. Mickey Rourke, enjoying a major comeback as of late, has never been better. He offers a completely believeable, likeable Randy, and makes sure we feel every thumbtack in his back during an "extreme" match, the chest pain he experiences when attempts to jog shortly after his bypass, and the hopelessness when he makes a mistake with somebody....for the last time. He carries this film with ease. If there is any justice in this world, he will receive his Best Actor Oscar next weekend. Evan Rachel Wood also acquits herself nicely as Randy's exasperated, estranged daughter. Some of the scenes she shares with Rourke are much harder to watch than any gore or violence Aronofsky could portray.
While The Wrestler doesn't break much new ground, it is a good story that is well told, and another fine credit for Darren Aronofsky, who is surely a future legend as a director. I give The Wrestler a 16 out of 22 on the 22 scale.

Run Fatboy Run

2009-02-03T10:33:00.002-05:00

Run Fatboy Run is not the type of movie you would typically see me reviewing. In reality, the fact that I watched it in the first place surprises even me. The preview turned me off: another movie about an idiot and his idiot ways. Do we really need another one of these?

Apparently, we do.

Was I surprised? A little. Was I impressed? Maybe a smidge. But these are mostly because all I saw from the preview was an unappealing Simon Pegg looking ridiculous as he gets in shape. How much can a person expect from that?

The opening part was actually interesting enough that I thought, “Maybe there’s more to this than I originally thought.” Pegg plays Dennis Doyle, and we first become acquainted with him when he runs away from his girlfriend, Libby (played by a too-attractive Thandie Newton), leaving her at the altar. Pregnant. Fast forward to 5 years later and he’s living by himself in a shabby apartment, not paying his rent on time and not exactly being a shining role model for his son, Jake. He clearly loves Jake and is involved in his life, but Dennis is just terrible at following through on things.

Even though Dennis left Libby at the worst possible time, he still cares for her and has high hopes of them getting back together. She deals with him politely enough, only wanting to make sure Jake has a relationship with his father. Eventually she finds a new man, Whit, an American businessman who’s in excellent shape and does something that Dennis doesn’t: finish things. Of course this guy pisses Dennis off, and he feels like he has to compete with Whit for Libby as well as Jake.

In his lame, desperate attempts to convince Libby that he’s better than Whit, Dennis learns that Whit runs marathons. In fact, he’s running in one coming up in London. What better way to compete with this guy? What better way to gain admiration from his son and his friends, and prove to Libby that he really IS a finisher?

And so, with three weeks to train (I will say, there were some decent humorous moments here) and with a little help from his friends, Dennis learns some discipline and stamina. He starts to connect with some of the people around him in a new way as he gains their support. Through the process, he learns more about himself and what he can offer. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but if you’ve ever seen a movie before, you probably won’t be too surprised. ;)

Run Fatboy Run is directed by David Schwimmer in what I believe is his first film attempt. I’ll be honest: it’s not very promising as a first shot at directing. To his credit, Schwimmer recognizes good acting and directs his characters pretty well. But just because Simon Pegg, Thandie Newton and Hank Azaria can act doesn’t make this film worth watching.

Even though Run Fatboy Run is full of stupid gags, it still has a lot of heart. I can get behind that, definitely. And Simon Pegg is able to portray his characters in such a unique, complete way, which I absolutely admire. However, none of these things were enough to save it for me. The comedic moments were so base and I barely got a smile out of most of them. And the plot unfolds in such a way that I could predict almost exactly what was going to happen throughout the entire thing. In the end, I really felt I got very little out of the experience. There was an abundance of predictability, corny-ness, and eye-rolling moments. For me, none of these things really make for a very enjoyable movie-watching experience.

Rating: 1

Run Fatboy Run fell flat for me. A good lesson, it had some heartfelt moments that were sprinkled heavily with run-of-the-mill slapstick humor. As a result, the moments didn’t successfully complete their purpose. The cast saved it to a degree (in keeping it from being terribly dull) but I didn’t feel particularly moved or entertained. It was so pre-packaged, trite and cliché that I couldn’t invest myself at all, I just kept looking for the next predictable ingredient in the plot recipe.

Though I’m overflowing with apathy about it, I have to say that the few moments I laughed and the sweetness of it all pushed it over into the positives. While I would say that I didn’t really like it, I’d have to admit that I’d rather watch it than stare at a blank television screen. Most of the time.

Burn After Reading

2009-01-26T21:36:00.004-05:00

After the Cohen Brothers’ unbelievable (and undeserved, IMHO) Oscar success last year, they’re in a pretty good position. They already had the clout and respect to make any movie they wanted, and with No Country for Old Men winning all those awards, they could also have any star they wanted. They basically said, “Let’s write all the things we’ve wanted to write for years, and make up our dream parts for our dream actors, and the mash them all together.” They did just that, and out of the primordial ooze we have Burn After Reading. If it feels thrown together and random, that’s because it is.

I’ll be honest; I think the Cohen Brothers are very overrated. That comment will most likely make indie snobs everywhere want to get out their pitchforks and torches, but it’s true. O Brother, Where Art Thou? was great, but a bit of an odd duck in their filmography, I found. The rest of their movies are so much darker that they almost seem like they were made by different people. They were total pricks for their Best Picture acceptance speech last year, but I will say that no one does dark comedy quite as well as the Cohens. No Country for Old Men contained almost no comedy at all, just darkness, while Burn After Reading is pretty much the opposite.

It also contains some good performances, Brad Pitt and George Clooney in particular. Pitt plays Chad, a personal trainer at a local gym. Chad is a dork. He and his buddy Linda (Frances McDormand in a good but non-challenging turn) find some “files” on a CD-RW at the gym, belonging to Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), former mid-level CIA analyst who is writing his memoirs. His wife Katie (Tilda Swinton), unsatisfied in their marriage, is screwing Harry (George Clooney), who in turn starts screwing Linda. Linda and Chad try blackmailing Osbourne for the “files,” which he thinks are his memoirs. Also in the mix is Ted (Richard Jenkins), mild-mannered manager of the gym where Chad and Linda work. Jenkins is sadly underutilized, and his character basically just gets in the way.

Burn After Reading is about the two worlds of the complicated and the simple, and what happens when they collide. The two worlds seem very different at first glance, but you come to realize that they have in common that they’re both filled with complete idiots. But the movie is also about fantastically dumb people, and the trouble they get themselves and each other into. Almost everyone in the movie is looking for something, and very pointedly not finding it. Linda wants a new body, and thus a new confidence. Harry wants human connection, and thinks he can only get it through sex. Osbourne wants to be respected. Katie wants to be in control of absolutely everything. Ted just wants to be loved. Chad wants money. But all of them are just so incompetent at getting what they want. It’s like watching a bunch of blind-folded people trying to turn off a lamp.

Ethan and Joel Cohen’s twisted sense of humor kinda alienated me, as it usually does, and the story didn’t really keep me engaged. There were some definite laugh-out-loud moments, and I appreciated the very snarky and character-driven comedy, but the movie suffered from not really being about anything in particular. The CIA supervisor said it best at the end of the movie. “What did we learn, Palmer? I don’t fuckin’ know. I guess we learned not to do it again. I’m fucked if I know what we did, though.” As a viewer, that sums up my feeling after the film. I’m clueless as to what lesson I should take away from this, and I have a sneaking suspicion that there wasn’t a lesson at all.

Iconic lines (or exchanges):

Harry: Go around the corner, we’ll do it in the back.

Katie: You’re so coarse.

Harry: Back of the car… not a… rear entry situation.

Osbourne: I have a drinking problem? Peck, you’re a Mormon! Compared to you, we ALL have a drinking problem!

Linda: Does he look like he would have a sense of humor?

Chad: Looks like his optometrist has a sense of humor.

22 Rating: 4

Particle Man

The Other Boleyn Girl

2009-01-19T11:17:00.002-05:00

King Henry VIII is quite a famous figure in European History. In fact, he is so popular that there have been many incarnations of him on both the large and small screens. Now I hate to burst people’s bubbles, but he did more than kill a bunch of wives and father two queens of England.
However, that is usually the only thing that most people remember about him. Phillippa Gregory certainly did not shy away from this when she wrote the The Other Boleyn Girl. In this story there are two sisters who are both vying for the affections of the still married King of England, one out of genuine love for the king and the other out of a hope to achieve the highest position that she and her family can obtain. The names of these sisters are Mary and Anne Boleyn. This story became quite the best seller and naturally was adapted for a movie version.
I watched this movie begrudgingly. As a historian I hate to see history being butchered and simplified because the writers are afraid that the actual events won’t captivate their audiences, but that is a rant for another day. Now this movie wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t necessarily a piece of cinematic genius either. It was somewhat entertaining and had pretty costumes, but the praises kind of end there.
Let me tell you what one of my biggest problems with the movie was. In this story Mary Boleyn is 14 years old, which considering how she is traded by her family and husband for advancement makes me throw up a little. Now the wonderful people who brought us this film decide to hire Scarlett Johansson to play her. WTF!!!!!!! I understand that Hollywood doesn’t always hire actresses who are the same age as their character, but c’mon someone in their early twenties portraying someone in their early teens, is a bit much. I am in no way saying that she is not a good actress, but she was very miscast in this role. To play someone that is incredibly young may be a job for a younger actress, but that is of course only if they want the movie to be credible.
Natalie Portman, as Anne Boleyn, portrays the calculating older sister who is also angling for the Kings attention. She does a good job at portraying a backstabbing witch, and looks younger than Johansson, which was also a mistake in casting. But at this point the directors were probably mostly thinking of how much star power they could get into this movie.
There really weren’t any other standout performances in this film. However, as someone who has always loved the clothing of that period, the costumes were lovely. But really isn’t it a bad sign when the costumes are the biggest plus of a movie, not the plot, or acting? As I said before, this wasn’t a terrible movie and does have the potential to be slightly entertaining, but I feel that it would a denial of who I am to give the movie anything above a 4.

Hancock

2009-01-13T00:08:00.004-05:00

Hancock is a summer movie--with all the connotations that come with that. It's big and bold and brassy but also broad and basic and a little brainless.

The real shame of it is that it comes with a potentially nifty conceit: Will Smith, as Hancock, is a boozy, anti-social, drifteresque superhero. It's a premise with promise, and the film, in the first half, even does a bit of fiddling with the tantalizing contradiction of being universally recognized as a city's superhero versus being universally overlooked as a member of the city's underclass.

Alas, it doesn't last. Smith's Hancock halfheartedly thwarts some criminals, drunkenly destroys some property, and then, fatefully, saves Jason Bateman from being hit by a train. In return, Bateman, a PR agent, offers to help rehabilitate Hancock's image. He suggests that Hancock voluntarily incarcerate himself until the citizens of Los Angeles need him again, at which point they'll embrace him with open arms. So he does. And they do.

A non-summer-blockbuster might have spent the whole movie unraveling the complexities involved in being entirely exceptional, yet still needing to have approval from the mediocre masses. But in this version of Hancock, this happens in a manner that's a bit too . . . uncomplicated. Smith's transformation doesn't seem to be all that difficult, and it's pretty much fully realized by the time the first 45 minutes of the movie are over. The filmmakers seem to have decided that that's all the introspection summer audiences could handle.

So, instead, we get The Twist. I will say this about The Twist: I didn't see it coming. If you want to remain similarly surprised, you'll do well to heed this:

******************SPOILER ALERT**************************

So, just as Hancock was rounding into a perfectly acceptable superhero--thanks to Jason Bateman's PR acumen--we find out *gasp* that Hancock is NOT, in fact, the only one of his kind. In fact, he's a member of a now nearly extinct race of superbeings, the only other surviving member of which is Jason Bateman's wife. (Man, what are the odds!)

Bateman's wife is played capably by Charlize Theron, but her shift from typical housewife to superbeing is too sudden and jarring to work. As Theron explains to Smith, she and he were "made" together, the result of which is that they're inexorably drawn to each other via some weird superanimal supermagnetism. But there's a drawback: The more time they spend together, the weaker their powers become. This is the sort of conceit that I might accept from a superhero universe with a bit more history to it, but in this 2-hour arc it felt a bit forced and hackneyed.

In any case, this all ends predictably, with Smith having to make the heart-rending decision to leave Theron in order to save her life. (Bateman, by the way, seems to be affected very little by all these proceedings. If I found out that, not only was my wife a superhero who could easily kick my ass, but that she has a superhero lover out there who could kick it as well . . . Well, I have to believe I wouldn't sleep very well at night.)

******************END OF SPOILERS**************************

In the end, Hancock is a interesting premise that somehow turns into an entirely forgettable experience. There's hardly any investment in the characters, which, unfortunately for the studio, somewhat negates their investment in high-priced special effects. The result is a movie provokes a "hmm," followed by a "huh?", followed by a rather weak: "oh." And that "oh" resonates to the tune of a -2.

Punisher: War Zone

2008-12-16T20:06:00.001-05:00

As most of you would have noticed, I've been on leave this fall due to school. Finals aren't until Tuesday, but I couldn't resist coming back early after WLC's review of Wanted, and her issues with the film. She brought up a lot of good points about violence in certain films that, much to my chagrin, are aptly illustrated in the latest failed attempt to bring Marvel Comics' dark vigilante The Punisher to the screen, in Punisher:War Zone.
A brief primer, for the uninitiated: The Punisher, aka Frank Castle first popped up in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man as a foil to Spider-Man. Castle was a former Marine whose family had been killed in the crossfire of a mob hit in Central Park, leaving Castle the only survivor. Completely shattered by the experience, he became The Punisher and declared a (very literal) war on crime, executing pimps, drug dealers, etc. Astute students of pop culture will note a resemblance to a certain Mack Bolan, Executioner. The character enjoyed massive popularity in the 1980s before burning out thanks to excessive exposure and market saturation. After several aborted attempts to revive the character, the Irish writer Garth Ennis successfully brought the Punisher back to the forefront with stories heavy with violent black humor and new depths of characterization that redefined the laconic Frank Castle. This popularity continued through Ennis' dark "mature readers only" take on the character that had little to nothing in common with the mainstream Marvel universe, in which the aging Punisher had been racking up the kills for dozens of years, and was undoubtedly the most dangerous man in his universe.
Sounds simple, right? A tortured man that had lost any chance at a normal life, who fought to end the worst evils mankind had to offer? This has been used successfully elsewhere (*cough, Jack Bauer, cough*), so how did they screw it up so badly? The story is as follows: The Punisher (Rome's Ray Stevenson) conducts a raid on a mafioso's mansion at the beginning of the film, and accidentally kills a deep cover FBI agent while cleaning up loose ends. Stricken with guilt, he decides to quit his vigilantism. Meanwhile, mafia hitman Billy Russotti (The Wire's Dominic West) survives being tossed into a glass-crushing machine by the Punisher and begins calling himself Jigsaw, and moves to take over organized crime in the city, and kill the Punisher. Throw in the dead FBI agent's partner out for revenge, the dead agent's wife (BTVS/Angel's Julie Benz, in one of the worst performances of the year) and child in Jigsaw, and wackiness ensues, as the man said.
There were a lot of different people that worked on the script for this one, and as a direct result, there are a lot of things wrong with it. First and foremost, the tone of the film isn't quite "there". It seems to be based on the early Ennis Punisher tales, and is a lot more humorous. But....what works on a comic page doesn't necessarily work on the silver screen. The filmmakers would have been better off making the film more serious. Also, there's quite a bit of terrible or cliched dialogue.....if it's 2008 or later, and you're writing a script in which an FBI agent refers to a room full of cops as "Krispy-Kreme scarfing m***********s", you might want to step back and reconsider. The Punisher's crisis of faith took far too little to trigger in such a fanatic character, and wreaks havoc with the believeability of the film.....the Punisher will likely stop hunting down criminals as soon as Amy Winehouse stops smoking crack, and this sticks out. If you need a driven character to harbor serious doubts, at least give them a deep-seated and personal reason to do so (like Batman is given with the death of Rachel Dawes in The Dark Knight). The violence in the film feels very fake and "video game", and that's a problem on several levels. One, it looks silly, CGI blood everywhere. What's wrong with practical effects, squibs and such? Two, there is little to distinguish the Punisher's behavior and motivations from the criminals, except that he only goes after "bad guys". This is another greviously damaging aspect of the movie. Had we been shown definitive proof that the Punisher was absolutely necessary, it would be easier to root for him. Not that it's all that difficult, but this could be one of the reasons the film didn't/isn't resonating with non-fans. Probably the worst crime of the movie is that while the character is portrayed more or less accurately, the film version of Jigsaw is a carbon copy of the Jack Nicholson's Joker from the 1989 Batman film, right down to a scene where a doctor explains that there was nothing left of his face and he had very little to work with. This kind of hackery can't even be passed off as homage, and has no place in a professionally crafted script.
Now.....for the good. I have quite possibly never seen a bad film with so many good performances, especially from Ray Stevenson. Stevenson is easily the best screen version of the Punisher, and does a lot with such a dialogue-sparse character. He excels at dry humor (as demonstrated in a scene with the second best on-screen use of a pencil this year), and handles some rough dialogue and questionable scenes with great skill. It's too bad that this material give him the opportunity to show us even more. Dash Mihok shines as the pathetic Detective Soap, police stooge for the Punisher, drawing most of the intended laughs in the film. The film has a great, grainy look with lots of harsh neons and a New York City that looks truly filthy and pre-Giuliani. Think of the look as "Dick Tracy Goes to Hell", and Punisher cover mainstay Tim Bradstreet would certainly be proud. And for all the unevenness that precedes it, it has a truly killer final scene.
While this is a vast improvement over the previous Punisher films, it's still not that great. I will see it again, and probably watch it on video, but all the while thinking of what could have been. I give Punisher: War Zone 9 out of 22 on the 22 scale, and the score is ONLY that high because I'm a big fan of the source material.

Wanted

2008-12-03T11:07:00.003-05:00

Initial Reaction: "Bleh...I feel used..."

...Used in the sense that Wanted took advantage of my enjoyment of action films. I didn't experience an action-packed, edge-of-my seat thrill ride with cool new sequences and moves. I felt I had been marketed a cheap copy of films that have actually been successful in this genre. It's one of many, and frankly I'm getting sick of it. Allow me to elaborate.

When the film opens, James McAvoy is Wesley Gibson, an account manager for company X. He's living in a crappy apartment with a girlfriend who's sleeping with his best friend, and he suffers from anxiety attacks for which he takes medication. He can't stand his life, and feels completely numb to everything around him. But something exciting is in store for Mr. Gibson. (Literally...it happens in a store.)

Enter Ms. Jolie as Fox (ha, ha) to tell Wesley that his father was one of a league of assassins, one of the greatest that ever lived. He had just been killed by a rogue assassin who--in the same scene--shows up and begins trading gunfire as Fox tries to protect Wesley. She brings him to meet their leader, Sloan (Morgan Freeman) who explains that Wesley's fate is to become one of them and to kill his father's murderer. Appropriately, the wimpy Wesley is freaked out beyond belief and runs away. But as I'm sure you can guess, he finds his way back to the group after going back to his normal life and realizing he can't go through with it anymore.

This was one of the first problems I had with Wanted. Gibson goes from being a sad, boring account manager to a giddy killer. Literally in hours. With the first glimpse of the assassin gang and the traumatizing circumstance of shooting and being shot at, he's terrified and disbelieving. Probably a good response. Then the next morning, he suddenly finds some strength to tell the people around him to f*ck off, and now becoming a killer is an enticing, satisfying option. Oh, I can see that...the last time I was in a shoot-out and captured by an assassin gang, my next day at work was extremely dissatisfying.

Please.

Next is the "Becoming an Assassin 101" part of the film. He's beaten, cut up, interrogated, and through these experiences learns valuable lessons such as fighting atop a moving train, catching a spindle, and the oh-so-cool "curving a bullet." This part is decent enough, but aside from the interesting bullet thing, just an excuse for some more violence.

And of course, our dear sweet Wesley becomes sufficiently bad-ass. He's given his first assignments and starts to live the life of a true assassin. The best part of the film in my opinion is where the plot decides to go in the second half of the film. We see a little more realness in the struggle of killing people he doesn't even know, and there's a decent plot hitch that made me more interested in the ending. The ending itself was headed in a good direction, I think, but ended up shooting itself in the foot.

Lastly, my least favorite part of the film: the moral of the story. Or rather, the anti-moral. **slight spoiler** It offers a rallying cry to its viewers to do something with their lives. But, wait...wasn't this about assassins? Are you telling me to improve my quality of life by committing murder? REALLY?? And I thought I was living a good life by NOT participating in such things. Guess I was misled. I don't care if this was only meant as a joke, because then it's even worse; it makes the lead character and practically the entire film just that: a joke.

Violence has become sort of pornographic, taking center stage as filmmakers think of creative ways to dispose of people and spatter blood across the screen. This is a trend that is turning me off to action films. I'm not so "prudish" that I can't stand any killing or fighting, I think that physical conflict and force is something that occurs naturally in the world and, while I don't necessarily condone it, can appreciate the art of fighting and the apparent justice of "killing the bad guy." But to derive pleasure from torturing and killing people is a truly disturbing place, and I think that as time goes by we get closer and closer to that end.

Rating: -6

With adequate acting, action-packed (though somewhat recycled) fighting sequences and an intriguing plot, Wanted has a lot going for it. I can see how many people liked it. But everything else drags it way down. I didn't buy Gibson's character or motivations, and the gratuitous violence and pathetic message were terrible. Not just any action-packed bloodbath will do anymore, people. In my book, this junk is just plain NOT wanted.

∏

2008-11-20T19:02:00.005-05:00

My fiancé is a conspiracy theorist. While I laugh appreciatively and smile with a “you’re crazy” look on my face when she goes off on the occasional rant, there is a part of me that really gets going on the things she suggests. I don’t let that part of myself have center stage that often, but it’s always interesting when I do. The central idea that it believes in is that there is a hidden side to everything. For every idea that presents one face to the world, it has twenty other faces that it hides. It is also this part that likes the idea of numerology; the idea that everything can be broken down to numbers and the combinations thereof.

∏ (heretofore referred to as Pi for ease of typing) brought that part out like no movie I have ever seen. When it was over, my mind was simply buzzing with possibilities and eventualities. Pi didn’t just have a great numbers game in it, though. It also presented some pretty wild ideas, and did things with character and story that many higher budget movies can’t pull off.

Pi’s central character is Max Cohen, a mathematical genius doing research on ∏ and its relation to complex systems, namely the stock market. Also, Max has a mountain of mental problems. When he was a kid, he stared too long at the sun, and he consequently gets very intense headaches from time to time. He’s paranoid, anti-social, unfriendly, and emotionally unstable. One day, when his personal supercomputer named Euclid spits out a couple of stock picks, it immediately crashes afterwards, but not before printing out a seemingly random array of 216 digits. Frustrated and saddened, Max throws the printout away.

Max is approached by a pushy Jewish numerologist who is looking for some mathematical significance in the Torah, or the Old Testament. He and his colleagues are convinced the Torah is some sort of mathematical code sent to them directly from God, and they want to understand its mysteries. They think the 216-digit number that Euclid printed out is the key to the entire thing. Also confronting Max is an equally pushy financial executive who wants to have Max’s findings on the stock market. After bribing him with a military-grade processor for his computer, he tells them of the 216-digit number. They irresponsibly apply it, though, and in the process bring about the country’s worst financial crisis in history. Sound familiar?

This movie presents the idea of the interconnectedness of everything, and that was really what made me appreciate it as much as I did. Another central idea of Pi was that some ideas are just too big for us, and that genius and madness look very similar to each other. Max is wrestling with ideas that have a huge impact on our world, and they drive him crazy. As the film progresses, he psychoses increase and increase, and he starts seeing some pretty disturbing stuff. You as the viewer are not even sure what’s real and what’s not. Director Darren Aronofsky takes a very personal and claustrophobic approach to the film, using close-ups and a rig where the camera is attached to the person its filming to keep the viewer in very close contact with the main character. You can’t really get away.

What Pi has to say about the nature of genius and the advancement of ideas is startling and harrowing. Can we as humans only get to a certain point, and then God drives the people who exceed it insane? Or is God the one who presents the advancing ideas in the first place, always trying to push humans in a certain direction, taking into account our free will? Max believes at one point that God has “chosen” him. That could very well be legitimate, but it sounds a lot like a crazy person talking. So is it divine appointment, or serious psychosis? Or is it both? Did Max get chosen by God, and that made him crazy?

This is a lot of meat for a 90 minute film, and a lot of other movies can’t cram nearly as much in. Pi is not the flashiest picture, and has a pretty small budget. The black and white filming on high-contrast reversal film brings a lot of dirt and grime to the experience, accentuating the feeling of alienation and psychosis, bring us into Max’s world a little. It’s a little distracting, but it successfully brings on a feeling. Unlike Aronofsky’s second film, Requiem For a Dream, I would potentially watch this again. Don’t get me wrong; I’m very glad I saw Requiem. The experience was just too traumatic. Pi, however, is a fascinating film, and even manages to bring out the conspiracy theorist in me. My fiancé would be proud.

Iconic Lines:

“Assumption: patterns are everywhere in nature. Evidence: the cycling of disease epidemics; the wax and wane of caribou populations; sun spot cycles; the rise and fall of the Nile.”

“If you want to find the number 216 in the world, you’ll be able to find it everywhere. 216 footsteps from a near street corner to your front door. 216 seconds you spend riding on an elevator. When your mind becomes obsessed with anything, you will filter everything else out to find that thing everywhere.”

“There will be no order; only chaos."

22 Rating: 13

Particle Man

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

2008-10-28T07:19:00.005-04:00

You’ve already seen this movie. Trust me. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist has nothing new to offer, no new revelations to show, no mysteries to solve. It won’t expand your mind or teach you anything about yourself. But you know what? I really liked it.

The reason I say that you’ve already seen it is that it uses a lot of clichés and conventions, and the plot goes exactly where you expect it to go, with little to no deviation. There’s the drunk friend, the indie soundtrack, the creepy older-guy quasi-boyfriend, the Holy Grail-like quest (this time it’s for an elusive show by an elusive band), and the climax that involves every character in the film. If the movie were just the sum total of those parts, it would be boring, trite, and a little insulting. But instead, it’s charming, sweet, and winning.

Why? This is almost completely due to the chemistry between the two leads. Michael Cera plays Nick, a completely stereotypical emo kid: quiet, passionate, plays bass, drives an ugly car, and runs on low-octane emotions exclusively. His girlfriend Tris (Alexis Dziena) dumped him a few months ago (on his “b-day”), and he’s been sending her mix CDs (he’s on #12) in an effort to win her back. She’s just throwing them out without listening to them, laughing at what she presumably started dating him in the first place for. Norah (Kat Dennings), a frienemy of Tris’s, is fishing them out of the trash and falling in love with him, despite the fact that she’s never seen him. Nick is still hopelessly depressed over the breakup, but is convinced to come out for a gig with his band (and put on some pants) by a rumor of a secret show by his favorite indie band (the fictional Where’s Fluffy).

Thus begins a night of hilarity and goofiness. At Nick’s band’s gig, Tris attends with an anonymous guy in tow, as does Norah and her vodka-soaked friend Caroline (Ari Graynor). In an act of desperation, Norah asks Nick (not knowing who he actually is, of course) to be her boyfriend for five minutes, just to prove to Tris that she came with someone. When Tris sees that Nick has a new flame, her mindset instantly changes, and she sets out to get Nick back. Add to that Nick’s band members (who are both gay), who volunteer to bring Caroline safely home while Nick and Norah hunt for Fluffy. While tons of comedic mileage is provided by Caroline’s drunkenness, her alcohol consumption is eventually shown as pretty icky and disgusting.

Nick and Norah have an instant connection, one that is undeniable. This is a movie couple you really root for. I wanted to see them end up together, and the movie really would have left a sour taste in my mouth if that hadn’t happened. In this way, it’s very good that the movie was predictable. But their relationship is not without complications, both internal and external. Both of them are too easily offended, but also very willing to forgive. Then there are their ex-es. Tris is one, and Norah’s semi-ex is Tal (Jay Baruchel), who does a pretty good Matthew McConaughey impression. He’s older, Jewish, conniving, and so creepy he makes Travis Bickle glance nervously at his shoes. Norah and Tal have a “friends with bennys” thing going on, and Norah just goes to him when she needs to feel special, ignoring the fact that he’s just using her for her rich father’s connections and the fact that she can make restaurant bills evaporate. The time comes when Nick and Norah must makes choices between their ex-es and each other. You can guess how it goes.

There are a lot of laugh-out-loud moments, some great music, and beautiful New York imagery, but the real thing that makes this movie worthwhile is the Cera and Dennings pairing. These two simply sparkle. They’re great in their own rights, but they really shine together. Nick and Norah, as well as Cera and Dennings as actors, have more chemistry between them than all the Brads and Angies this world can muster.

Credit also has to be given to director Peter Sollett, who is only on his second film. Credits that ride on the coat-tails of Juno aside, he has a good if predictable grasp of the teenager road flick genre. The movie takes place in New York City, and Sollett lovingly peppers the movie with shots of famous NYC landmarks in such a way that you know he’s proud of where he comes from. He also shows a sweet sensitivity and emphasis on the beautiful and touching, showing them in the most subtle way.

While Nick and Norah doesn’t cover any ground that movies like American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused, and Sixteen Candles didn’t, it updates the motif for a new generation, and tries to capture a modern moment the same way those films did. It deals too much in stereotypes and is completely predictable, but the sterling performances by Michael Cera and Kat Dennings more than redeem it. You’ve seen it already, but this is the sort of movie that bears repeating.

Iconic Lines:

“Why would you buy these pants?”

“I love you so much it’s retarded!”

“I found Jesus!!! He’s much taller in person…”

22 Rating: 10

Particle Man

Sex and The City

2008-10-21T09:07:00.004-04:00

Sex and the City was a big hit when I was too young to understand the show, however after catching reruns after I got older I realized that it was a show I really liked. Naturally, I was excited that a good show was being made into a full length feature, as opposed to some of the crap we're handed these days. I had heard great things about the movie from people who had seen it before I did, which is basically anyone who saw it in theaters since I didn't catch it until it was on DVD, but now I sit here and wonder what happened.

The movie picks up five years from the series finale in which everyone gets their happy ending. Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is finally with Mr. Big (Chris Noth), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) has gotten word that her and her husband Harry's adoption application for China was accepted and that they'll soon be the parents of a baby girl, Samantha (Kim Cattrall) who is the one of the group who hates monogamy has fallen in love and moved to L.A. with an actor, and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is living the married life with her husband and their son Brady. So when we get to the five years later part everything seems to be in place. Of course true to Sex and The City style, something has to go wrong and the conflict is mainly presented in the pending marriage of Carrie and Mr. Big.

As I said before I was excited when I heard this movie was coming out, but I have to say that this story was better off in half hour episodes than a feature length film. It is drawn out too long and becomes very stagnant. There are some humorous scenes but you know what is going to happen in the end so it feels like there is this pointless journey. The acting was alright and some of the clothes were nice to look at (which is part of what Sex and the City is all about). Jennifer Hudson has a supporting role as Carrie's assistant and adds a whiff of freshness as the newbie on the cast. I just think that this movie was good on paper and not so good in practice (kinda like Communism). If they wanna reunite the cast they should do it in the original form. Sadly, I have to give this movie a -10.

Religulous

2008-10-14T17:44:00.003-04:00

The main idea of Religulous seems to be pretty well encapsulated in its title's portmanteau: Religion is ridiculous. But a film that seems like it might just be a lighthearted—if slightly mean—romp through a cascade of religious idiosyncrasies takes a left turn down a dark path in its final five minutes.

In a lot of ways, this isn’t so much a documentary about religion as it is about Bill Maher, or, rather, about Bill Maher’s views of religion. And, to Maher’s credit, he does not zero in exclusively on one religion. The film has him talking to (to name just a few) Christian truckers, Jewish scientists, a Muslim singer, and ex-Mormons. He takes shots at Scientology, at Ken Ham’s Creation Museum, and at the religion of Jose Luis De Jesus Miranda—a man with followers in about 35 countries who calls himself both the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and the Antichrist.

Of course, this scattershot approach means Maher really can’t go any more than ankle deep in any of these discussions. But that’s really his point: You don’t need to go beyond ankle deep. To Maher, religion is just that shallow.

This helps explain why he doesn’t spend more than a minute or so with genome researcher (and Christian) Francis Collins: It’s not as easy to make him look ridiculous (though Maher and director Larry Charles—who also directed Borat—do their best). Father George Coyne, former director of the Vatican Observatory and another proponent of the compatibility of science and religion, comes off significantly better; Maher’s purpose with Coyne is simply to undercut the creationist Ken Ham.

In the end, two things really bothered me about Religulous. The first was pretty predictable: The interviews were somewhat akin to bullying—just intellectual rather than physical. While Maher was certainly able to mine some comedic moments, my response as an audience member was caught in that uncomfortable place between wanting to laugh and wanting to shout “Hey! Pick on someone your own size!”

The other troublesome aspect was the film’s jarring—and somewhat unexpected—final moment. Bill Maher delivers a rousing monologue—intercut with images of suicide bombings and terrorist attacks—that essentially boils down to this: Religion has been used to violent ends in the past, and it will be again, only now we have nuclear weapons. He calls upon his allies—atheists, agnostics, even the religiously uncommitted—to come out of hiding, to break the polite code that we don’t talk about religion, and to challenge religious people’s beliefs.

Certainly, certainly, certainly, Maher means well. His intentions, by all means, seem completely pacifistic and idealistic. The problem is this: We’ve seen calls to convert the unconverted in this way before, and—even when they’re delivered by the most well-intentioned, non-violent messengers imaginable—they frequently do devolve into hatred, resentment, and violence against those not in the group with the “truth.” He’s not really speaking to religious believers in this film (as the R rating will ensure); he’s rallying his base.

In the end, one of the most prescient lines in the film comes from the unlikely source of Tal Bachman (the musician famous for his 1999 hit “She’s So High,” but interviewed by Maher because of his credentials as an ex-Mormon). Bachman, answering a question from Maher about why more people don’t leave Mormonism, explains that once you call into question the teachings of founder Joseph Smith, you’ve severed a bond with your family and friends.

Unfortunately, the moment passes with no follow-up comment. Which makes sense: There’s no reason for Maher to explore the idea of religion as a social adhesive. His goal in this film was to splash around in the puddles of religion, not to plunge into the ocean.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

2008-10-06T17:18:00.002-04:00

If you were in charge of marketing the film, you'd have no hesitation before deciding to advertise Forgetting Sarah Marshall as the latest from producer Judd Apatow. Which is why it's a bit ironic that this film would be better if we were somehow able to completely forget that Apatow's earlier films existed.

Sure, Forgetting Sarah Marshall was written by first-timer Jason Segel, but this film (along with Superbad, the recent Pineapple Express, and the upcoming Zack and Miri Make a Porno) is unmistakably part of the Apatow franchise. It centers around a positively Apatowian slacker-star; it features numerous references to cannabis; and, while it does cash in quite a bit on gross-out humor, it does so without checking its brain at the door.

Writer Jason Segel, recognizable as one of Seth Rogen's stoner friends in Knocked Up, also serves as the star of this film, a musican named Peter Bretter. The movie begins with Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell), the star of a prime-time crime procedural drama called "CrimeScene: Scene of the Crime," breaking up with Peter, who does the music for the same show. Peter's pain is magnified by the fact that Marshall is now dating Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), a vaguely Liam Gallagher-esque British rocker. The pain is further compounded when Peter takes a Hawaiian vacation to ease his pain, and ends up at the same hotel that Sarah and Alduous are staying at.

The movie cashes in on the pathos of Peter's impossibly bad trip for awhile, until he starts falling for the hotel's hospitality director, Rachel (Mila Kunis). Then there's the excitement of new love, the confused and complicated mixture of feelings for lovers old and new, the inevitable misunderstanding, and, finally, the satisfying resolution.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall is helped quite a bit by the loving attention it devotes to its smaller roles, most notably the suddenly ubiquitous Jack McBrayer as a sexually confused honeymooner. It's also helped by the fact that it avoids making any character entirely into a villain. Sure, Sarah Marshall cheated on her boyfriend, but it's not like he was being an ideal boyfriend at the time. Sure, Aldous--as the new boyfriend--is kind of a tool. But he's also--as Peter admits--kind of cool.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall is hurt by the fact that it seems about 30 minutes longer than it needs to be. And by the fact that it's kind of, well, forgettable. But why is it forgettable? Well, that'll require us to glance back at the recent history of comedy.

When you do look back, there's actually a pretty predictable pattern with comedy franchises. There's the Discovery, the Crowning Achievement, and then the Gradual Decline. For example:

The Farrelly brothers announced themselves to the watching world with Dumb & Dumber, established themselves as a lucrative comedic force with There's Something About Mary, and then released a few more movies that ranged from decent to abysmal, none of which could come close to matching the success of Mary.

While Will Ferrell made his reputation on Saturday Night Live, he got "discovered" by the greater public by being the funniest thing in Zoolander. He was then given a vehicle that was distinctively his in Anchorman, and has yet to match the success of that vehicle.

Even a more highbrow comedic director like Wes Anderson fits this model: He announced himself with Rushmore, had his financial crowning achievement with The Royal Tenenbaums, and hasn't had any movie do as well since.

So it shouldn't come as any surprise that the Judd Apatow franchise is falling into the same pattern. He was "discovered" after 40-Year-Old Virgin, crowned after Knocked Up, and is now enjoying a very slow decline.

So what really hurts Forgetting Sarah Marshall is the same things that hurt all the other comedic franchises listed above. What makes any comedy sparkle is the element of freshness, of surprise -- the ability of a comedic mastermind to make you see something in a way that you've never seen it before. But the Faustian trade-off of the Crowning Achievement is that once you've been crowned, you're known. And your perspective--which was once fresh, unique, surprising--is now, well, mainstream.

That's not necessarily a death knell; comedic franchises can go on to have long and successful Gradual Declines (as Adam Sandler has proved). But it's nearly impossible to recreate the success and excitement that comes with the Crowning Achievement.

So for better or for worse, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is sort of what you'd expect. It offers that same Apatow sensibility that you already know, which is both its benefit and its curse. In the end, it's not an embarrassment, but neither is it a triumph. In short, it's about a 5.

Iconic lines:
"When life gives you lemons, just say 'F*ck the lemons,' and bail."
"You have Christ between your thighs... only with a shorter beard."
Aldous, in a music video, holds up a sign that reads "Sodomize Intolerance."

Becoming Jane

2008-09-29T19:44:00.007-04:00

Initial Reaction: Well, excuse me, but I liked it.

I'm what you may call a fan of Jane Austen. Considering the time in which she lived and what she accomplished, I find her works inspiring and comforting. I've read four of her novels, and have watched film adaptations of all of her works. I could watch the movie Pride and Prejudice (both 1995 and 2005 versions) every week, and sometimes I do. The film Becoming Jane, based on her life, exceeded my expectations.

I didn't rush out to see Becoming Jane, actually I only watched it during a late night babysitting on my laptop. I didn't really have much in the way of expectations, since a few people I know (you know who you are) saw it and didn't like it. It also didn't do well by the way of the critics, if you pay attention to that sort of thing. Ironically, I think these factors probably helped me to enjoy Becoming Jane even more.

The film has the same flavor of film adaptations of Austen's books. The plot is loosely based on Jane Austen's life, since very few details about her life are actually known. Jane lives with her parents, the Reverend and Mrs. Austen, her engaged sister Cassandra, and her brothers Henry and George. She writes for enjoyment, and surprisingly, her family seems fairly supportive of this.

Only now as I sit down to write this do I realize how little actually happened in the film. But that's something that I really appreciate about Jane Austen's writing...so much of what happens with the characters is based on social interaction and internal struggles, not depending on a lot of external events to drive the story. Anne Hathaway stars as Jane Austen herself, and James McAvoy was her love interest Thomas LeFroy. In the roles she plays, Hathaway seems to carry a bit of confidence and spark, which works here. McAvoy is thoroughly believable as Thomas LeFroy, having an interesting balance of goodness and sex appeal beneath his devil-may-care attitude.

Austen, like so many of the women she wrote about, is young and in want of a husband. Her want isn't so great, however, that she would accept the first proposal that comes her way. She refuses it, in fact, because she can't justify marrying for anything other than love. She is thrown to the lions of society and criticised for her ill-advised choice by family and acquaintances alike. In the meantime she meets Thomas LeFroy, a carefree young man studying the law under his Uncle and who is determined to enjoy himself in spite of his responsibilities. After a rocky start and some witty banter, the two become better acquainted and recognize an undeniable attraction between them. As anyone who has ever seen a film will tell you, however, all is not as simple as it initially appears, and Jane and Thomas must come to grips with some harsh realities.

Negatives? There were a few ... one being that in reality, I wouldn't necessarily see Austen and LeFroy falling for each other. Their motivation for doing so is unclear to me, unless it was only physical attraction. But the audience is led to believe there was more to it than that. Also, though I think most people assume that not everything in these "based on real people" films is true, I think that many will take away what happens in the plot as more or less true, which is the dangerous thing about these movies.

One thing I very much enjoyed was the struggle of Jane in dealing with being a female author. We know that Austen was fairly respected in society and came from decent family, and she wasn't seen as a rebel or outcast or anything like that. Yet she embraced who she was and pursued her ideals in a time when doing so had serious consequences. It added some weight and inspiration to the story mostly centered around her love for LeFroy.

Rating: 14

I'll admit: I'm extremely biased to these kinds of stories. Give me an oppressed heroine in the 19th century who falls in love with a man despite what society may say, throw in a "I bid you good day," and I'm sold. Maybe this allows me to make more concessions than most, but I don't care. I loved it! I thought the acting was extremely satisfactory, the characters interesting, and the story beautiful. Take that, nay-sayers.

Bobby

2008-09-22T19:17:00.005-04:00

When Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, I was actually -13 years old. I was not even a “glint in my father’s eye,” as it is said (though not in my mother’s, either, I imagine). Suffice to say, I was not around. But all it takes is just the right director with just the right movie to put me in the correct emotional state to feel what people where feeling on that night in 1968. Bobby was that movie.

It starts with something very simple. Bobby Kennedy was fatally shot in a crammed hotel kitchen right after delivering his victory speech for winning the California presidential primary. There were 77 other people in that kitchen at the time. Emilio Estévez, the director of Bobby, had a question to which the answer was ultimately this movie: “What about those 77 people?”

Now, the cast of this movie simply boggles the mind. There are no less than 16 very famous faces in this movie, including two Oscar winners (Anthony Hopkins, Helen Hunt) and two nominees (Laurence Fishburne, Sharon Stone). No doubt, under normal circumstances, this movie would have an astronomical budget from salaries for the actors alone. The only explanations I can come up with for this movie getting made with so much proven talent are these: all the actors are Estévez’s friends, or a film about Bobby Kennedy truly spoke to them, and they wanted to be a part of it. Both are probably true. Despite the out-of-this-world star power this movie has, no one really grabs the spotlight from anyone else. I am astounded that this movie didn’t even get nominated for a single Oscar. C’mon, Academy! You love ensemble casts!

The closest things to standout performances come from Martin Sheen (the director’s daddy) and Anthony Hopkins. Sheen plays a rich socialite who contributed to Kennedy’s campaign and who was treated for depression. Helen Hunt plays his young wife, a very vulnerable and scared woman. In each other, they rediscover the meaning of love. Hopkins plays John Casey, semi-retired doorman for the Ambassador Hotel. He and his friend Nelson (Harry Belefonte) are struggling with old age, and John deals with it by continuing to do a job that no one has required that he do in 25 years. William H. Macy plays the hotel’s manager who is cheating with a hotel switchboard operator (Heather Graham) on his wife (Sharon Stone), who is also the hair and nail salon manager in the hotel. Also in the mix are two high-level campaigners in the Kennedy campaign, played by Joshua Jackson and Nick Cannon, the latter of which is doomed to be an angry black man till the day he dies. Shia LaBeouf and Brian Geraghty play low-level campaigners who skip out on their door-knocking to get high on LSD sold by Ashton Kutcher, the three of whom provide the film’s comic relief. In the kitchen of the hotel, Freddie Rodriguez and Jacob Vargas are both working double shifts as busboys. Rodriguez has Dodger tickets he can’t use (Don Drysdale shattered a record that night by pitching 6 consecutive shutouts) that he gives to the head cook (Laurence Fishburne). Vargas is upset at the racial inequality in this country that is keeping Mexicans down, but Fishburne offers a different and interesting perspective. Svetlana Metkina plays a Czechoslovakian reporter who is very determined in her quest for just 5 minutes with senator Kennedy, but is blocked by Jackson’s character because she writes for “a communist paper in a communist country allied with the Soviet Union.” To top it off, Lindsey “Disney Druggie” Lohan plays a young woman marrying a young man (Elijah “Frodo” Wood) solely so he won’t have to go to the front lines of Vietnam. Her confusion with the war is translated into compassion for him, but morphs into love.

And that’s not even everyone. But the film parades all the characters out in front of you in a pretty easy fashion. Because no one character has a very big arc, no one has a lot of screen time. Arcs do exist, however. Notable arcs are the ones Lohan’s, Cannon’s, Macy’s, and Sheen’s characters go through. Almost everyone makes the most of limited screen time, and the editing is such that no one has the spotlight, yet no one seemed like they were short-changed.

But all that misses what Bobby is really about, and the reason it’s a great movie. Bobby, more than anything else, is a snapshot of a time and place. Bobby Kennedy is not an actual character in the movie (all his appearances are stock footage of the real man), and his assassin only has two appearances and one line. That’s not what the movie is about. It’s really about that turbulent turning point in American history, 1968. The movie tells you about that time not through historical instruction or exposition, but rather through empathy. It presents you with snapshots of several people living in that time, in the hopes that at least one of them will connect with something you’re going through yourself.

Bobby is also about what, at its bare bones, the real Bobby’s campaign was about: that underneath all the strife, division, hatred, and miscommunication, America is a great nation made up of great people. Flawed people, yes, but that’s part of what makes them great, and the nation great in turn. The idea that we can put aside our differences and remember that we are all brothers, even for a moment, is revolutionary, even in this day and age.

Indeed, Bobby has relevance now that it didn’t when it was made. Like Bobby before him, we have a presidential candidate who may have a unifying ability. Barack Obama is a politician who, against all odds, is giving people hope for the future, and possesses a lot of promise to fulfill that hope. Let’s just hope his fate is a lot brighter than that of Bobby’s. Now, some believe that he’s just another suit and smile, that his program of positive change can never come true, and maybe they’re right.

But maybe they’re wrong.

Iconic lines:

“Clearance sale!!! Everything must go!!!”

“You’re more than the shoes on your feet or the designer dress on your back. You’re more than the purse you carry or the money inside it. You and I are more than the stuff, more than the things in our lives. Somewhere between our things and our stuff is us. I don’t want to lose us.”

“Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.”

22 rating: 16

Particle Man

Circle of Friends

2008-09-14T21:34:00.003-04:00

When I was 12 or 13, my aunt took me to see a movie called Circle of Friends. Of course it wasn’t exactly a movie my parents would want me to see at that age, but my aunt always felt that I was more mature than everyone gave me credit for. So I sat there in the theater thinking that Chris O’Donnell was pretty dreamy and that was it. However, it was the first “grownup” movie I had seen so I was very pleased with myself. About 13 years later, I still think of the movie occasionally, so I decided to review it.
Circle of Friends tells the tale of Bernadette Hogan, Eve Malone, and Nan Mahon, who were raised in Knockglen, Ireland. The movie, set in 1957, follows these three childhood chums through their college experience (which includes love, lust, and betrayal) and how each of them comes through these experiences. The story mainly focuses on Bernadette Hogan (Minnie Driver) who is an only child who is shouldering a very unreasonable expectation. As everyone can relate to, there are times when parents think they know what is good for their children and that the children should just obey. Benny (as she known in the movie) is facing the fact that her parents think she should be with their creepy store clerk, Sean (Alan Cumming), but Benny has already fallen in love with a man she met at college, Jack Foley (Chris O’Donnell). Although Benny is obviously the heroine of the movie, we still see the lives and struggles of her two childhood friends Eve and Nan. Benny’s main struggle is that she is not classically beautiful. I would say that she is on the average to pretty side of the looks continuum. Her main problem with herself is her irrational belief that she is too fat for anyone to want her. But what girl hasn’t felt like that at one time or another?
This was an extremely hard movie to locate. I could only find it at one store around my area. This puzzled me because I remember the movie being very popular, but after having viewed it, I can somewhat understand the less than thrilling demand of this movie. The acting is average, there is nothing horrible about it, but I feel that acting didn’t wow me this second time around. I think my main issue with the acting was the Irish accents, which could have been better. It seemed like there was a constant switch between Irish and English accents.
Another problem that I had with the movie was the pacing; there were many times were I felt bored and that the pacing of the movie was too uneven. I switched from almost turning it off to being really interested in the scenes multiple times. I think that more could have been done with the story to fill in these gaps. I wasn’t expecting a fast paced car heavy shootout in the middle of an Irish village, but there was definitely room for improvement.
One interesting thing about the movie was the casting of Alan Cumming. This Scottish actor is probably most commonly known for portraying Nightcrawler in X-Men 2. Cumming played the role of the creepy store clerk with an eye for our heroine. As much as I enjoy his acting, I feel like he was type cast. He doesn’t have the conventional Hollywood look and all he had to add was a few sketchy looks and moves to transform into this creepy guy.
I like the story of this movie and did enjoy watching it for the most part. I certainly do feel that they could have done better with the acting, but it’s not like they didn’t try, like in some movies I have reviewed. Overall, I would say that the movie is worth a viewing, and Chris O’Donnell is still pretty dreamy, especially when he gets his Irish accent right. So unlike my personal circle of friends, which I would give a 22, I’ll have to give the movie Circle of Friends a 5.

The Onion Movie

2008-09-08T20:19:00.003-04:00

A few years ago, I was having a sleepless night. Rather than try to fight it, I went into my living room, grabbed a snack, and started flipping through channels. When I got to C-SPAN 2 (the least-watched channel at 4 a.m.), something caught my eye: an interview with a handful of the editors of The Onion. The Onion had been my favorite satirical news website for a few years at that point, so I stopped to watch. Of all that was said that early morning, one thing stuck with me. One of the editors (I forget who), was asked a question about some of The Onion's articles being in bad taste. He answered by saying something like: "I think there's such thing as good taste in bad taste."

That summed up The Onion perfectly for me: Sure, they'd print outrageous and inflammatory headlines (example: a picture of a janitor with the caption "Mexicans Sweeping the Nation"), but they were always irrepressibly clever or so well honed on the idiosyncrasies of our modern life that they made you double back and wonder what, really, should have been offending you in the first place.

That impossibly long intro (I'm sorry) brings me to The Onion Movie, which seems closer to "bad taste" than it is to "good taste in bad taste." The Onion Movie is primarily a series of seemingly unrelated skits, interspersed with an anchor reading random news headlines -- headlines that will seem very familiar to Onion aficionados ("8-Year-Old Accidentally Exercises Second-Amendment Rights", "Georgia Adds Swastika, Middle Finger to State Flag").

Some of the new material includes: Steven Seagal (really!) as the big-budget action hero Cockpuncher, a sultry teen singer who earnestly proclaims the innocent intentions of songs like "Take Me From Behind," and a subtle twist on a normal suburban evening when murder mystery game is replaced by a rape mystery game.

If you watched just a short glimpse, you couldn't be sure you weren't watching an example of the infernal pox that is the _____ Movies (fill in the blank with "Date" or "Epic" or "Not Another Teen"). The jokes, in general, are fairly lowest common denominator. But The Onion Movie never really tips its hand as to whether it's revelling in lampooning these easy targets or lampooning those who would lampoon. (Which, I suppose, includes themselves.) In one of the its best bits, The Onion Movie breaks from itself to get commentary from a panel of distinguished film critics, one of whom decries the film's pandering to the masses. The panel host then introduces the next commenter: The Masses (played by a frat boy wearing a "Beer F***ing Rules" shirt). "The Masses" talks about how gay the critics are and how awesome the Cockpuncher bits were, and then the movie resumes where it left off.

These brief flashes of self-awareness -- and the occassionally hilarious one-liners, such as the man who overcomes adversity to become the world's first comatose diver -- make it hard to get a real handle (a.k.a. rating) on this film. In the end, though, the pass-it-on factor seems the most fitting. With the best moments of the print version of The Onion, I eagerly pass on headlines, articles, and man-on-the-street interviews to my friends (whether they want to hear them or not). With The Onion Movie, I really wouldn't be bothered if not a single other living soul watched it. Moments of hilarity notwithstanding, that can't afford The Onion Movie any more than a -6.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

2008-08-25T20:28:00.016-04:00

Unfortunately, I watched this film for the first time so long ago that I don't remember my initial reaction. It has, however, left an everlasting impression.

I was actually surprised when I looked at the DVDs on my shelf that neither I nor Dr. Worm have reviewed this movie yet. Eternal Sunshine falls in my top 5 films of all time, and whenever I get to chance to talk it up to an unsuspecting passer-by, I jump at it. It gets better with time, and in my opinion, this is due to the great performances and incredible attention to detail by the filmmakers. I didn't watch it in full before I wrote this review, but I popped it in to refresh myself on a scene or two, and had a hard time turning if off again.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a romantic comedy starring Jim Carrey (as Joel) and Kate Winslet (Clementine), directed by the incredibly artistic Michel Gondry and written by himself and Charlie Kaufman. In this film, the exceptionally timid Joel Barish meets and falls for the demonstrative and quirky Clementine. Seemingly an unlikely pair, the two awkwardly hit it off and begin a relationship. But the film, which jumps around in time a bit, quickly fast forwards to their break-up and a broken-up Joel. After an encounter with Clementine that he doesn't understand, during which she seems to pretend she doesn't even know him, he turns to his friends in confusion and pain. Eventually Joel learns the truth: that Clementine had him erased from her memory.

Joel can't seem to wrap his mind around this idea, so he finds the doctor who performed the procedure. Angered that she would do such a thing, he decides to undergo the same procedure out of spite and a hope that maybe this would help the pain to go away. And so most of the rest of the film happens in Joel's mind, as we track his memories of his relationship with Clementine backwards through time. As he relives these memories, he feels vindicated that the recent, tumultuous times they'd been experiencing are no longer his to remember. As he goes further back, however, he begins to realize the true meaning and the gravity of his choice. Unfortunately, once the procedure has begun, there is no backing out of it.

The other characters in Eternal Sunshine complement Carrey and Winslet to a T. Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst and Tom Wilkinson all stand out without being overpowering. There are some really great comedic moments, but it really isn't as straightforward a comedy as most others are, more subtle and dramatic due to the fact that it's portraying a difficult break-up.

This movie is incredibly filmed. Every time I watch it, I notice some detail or nuance that I didn't see before. Even though it jumps around in time, it doesn't happen in a way that is too confusing or difficult to put together. I absolutely loved how memory is represented, and how the filmmakers depict the erasing of those memories. Carrey and Winslet are absolutely wonderful--they have great chemistry, and they seemed to effortlessly show us honest feelings and depth of character.

Finally, I really love the main thrust of the film. So often when we experience a particularly painful loss, we want relief as immediate as possible. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people who would jump at the chance to erase someone or something from their memory. But if that happens, we lose a part of ourselves as well. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind aptly proclaims this message and helps us to see the beauty in our day to day pain.

Rating: 20

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is beautifully and creatively filmed. Joel and Clementine have a captivating story, and the outlandish nature of the plot nicely highlights some simple, basic truths about life and love. It's funny, touching, life-affirming, and well-done...just what I think a movie should be.

Favorite Lines:

"Sand is overrated. It's just tiny, little rocks."

"I'm making a birdhouse."

4-Year-Old Joel: "I really want her to pick me up. It's weird how strong that desire is."

Flags of Our Fathers

2008-08-19T19:20:00.005-04:00

Movies, at their fundamental level, are for entertainment. They’re a way to occupy two hours, and you’ll hopefully get something out of those two hours. Now, good movies will teach you something about yourself that you didn’t know before, or connect with a part of you like nothing else can, and it will do all of this while entertaining you. The subject matter doesn’t necessarily have to be uplifting, but the story has to engage you, and reward you for investing yourself.

That’s part of why I didn’t like Flags of Our Fathers, and why I generally don’t like war films. I fully recognize that it was a competent and good movie. Acting, cinematography, plot flow, theme, music, etc., all those elements were in place for Flags; but it wasn’t entertaining. Why? It was about war.

War sucks. I don’t think anybody actually likes war. It’s tiring, it’s messy, it’s evil, and it crushes the human spirit if carried on too long. Sometimes it’s necessary, but it’s never glorious, never loving, and never a good thing to do. Nations will do what they have to do, but when they go to war, they better damn well have NO other options left. The idea that war is a last resort isn’t new, and has indeed been around since the first time a human did something that another human didn’t like.

Flags of Our Fathers didn’t suck, but its subject matter did. That’s not a death sentence for a movie, but war is pretty much the suckiest of the suck. To me, war is never a good place to start a story. You can have a war in it, but start with something else; a character, an event, a blade of grass, anything. There have been lots of good war movies, and Flags can count itself as one of those, but none of them have been entertaining experiences for me. Schindler’s List had that Spielbergian element of hope and goodness to it, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the dismal subject matter. Platoon had fantastic acting, but that’s very cold comfort among the horribleness of Vietnam. And I’m blanking out on other war films I’ve seen; I dislike them so much I black them out.

And therein lies the problem with Flags of Our Fathers. Because it wasn’t entertaining, I didn’t feel satisfied at the end. It wouldn’t even be all that different if it had a very good story, or more relatable characters, neither of which it had. It didn’t try to give you resolution or have a summation; none of the Clint Eastwood films I’ve seen do, actually. On top of that, it contained some pretty horrible things, because hey, war is pretty horrible. Two sequences in particular stuck with me; one in which a main character is having flashbacks of all the men he saw die during the war, and one in which some soldiers stumble across an underground bunker where some Japanese have set off a grenade on themselves so as not to be found. That’s the kind of thing you wish you could unsee.

Now, the themes of Flags were not lost on me. I totally got the idea that we should pass down things from generation to generation, so as to always learn from our forbears’ mistakes. I also saw the value in honoring those that made the ultimate sacrifice in service of their country, those who died abroad in order to protect the safety of those at home. Also, there was the idea of what a hero actually is, and how all the people we say are heroes would strongly disagree with us. There was even an indictment of American sensationalism, and how great things are made fake and cheap through over-attention. So don’t get me wrong; I think this movie has a lot to offer. But I can’t in good conscience recommend it since I didn’t enjoy it, and sorta wish I hadn’t watched it at all.

Iconic Lines:
“Well what’d you do, raise a goddamn flag every time you stopped for lunch?”
“With all your friends dying, it’s hard enough to be called a hero for saving somebody’s life. But for putting up a pole?”
“You want us to plant a flag on a mountain of papier-mache?”

22 Rating: -2

Particle Man

The Chipmunk Adventure

2008-08-12T20:06:00.002-04:00

It looks like a hula-hoop isn’t the only thing Alvin wants. Recently, I caught the end of the new Chipmunks’ movie. After seeing that I was inspired to watch a beloved classic from my childhood, The Chipmunk Adventure. This 1987 movie shows us an exciting chapter in the lives of these adorable and mischievous chipmunks. Dave is packing for a European trip and Alvin is begging to be allowed to tag along. The babysitter, Ms. Miller, will arrive soon and then Dave will be off. To distract themselves from missing Dave, the Chipmunks decide to hang out with the Chippettes and play videogames. After an intense argument over who would win a balloon race in real life, they are given the chance to find out by two smugglers and the adventure begins.
I really enjoy this movie. I didn’t know if it's memories of sitting in the movie theater watching it (this was the first movie I’d ever seen in theaters) or if it was just that good. There are some just movies that just stick with us. It seemed time to give it another try and measure my enjoyment. As it turns out, I would still enjoy this movie as much if it hadn’t been the first movie I saw in theaters. I love Alvin and Brittany’s narcissistic tendencies and the way they clash with another. I love cute little food obsessed Theodore who just wants one meal without a music duel or scary henchmen interrupting it. I also love Simon and Jeanette’s pragmatic views, and how they still go along with everything Brittany and Alvin decide to do.
This movie shows us the wonder of cartoons, where anything can happen and since it is a cartoon no one is really expecting reality. Don’t get me wrong, I wish I could belt out a rock song on top the ancient ruins of Greece, or return a kidnapped baby penguin to its parents, but alas I can’t. However, I can still live this fantasy vicariously through this movie. There is also something wonderfully beautiful in the simplicity of the movie. It’s not pretentious just enjoyable. I feel like (with the exception of this summer) there have been many movies in the recent past that go for that thrill factor instead of relying on the audience's enjoyment. There were no crazy plot twists; it was just a straightforward story with no real subplots. I know my readers may think I am being a bit nostalgic, but what are some older films that you just enjoy? They may not even be good, but you enjoy them.
I am actually kinda hesitant to give this movie a rating. My enjoyment of the movie is really high up, but I don’t know if the movie is actually that good. So to appease myself I’ll give it two ratings. My enjoyment rating is 15. However, the movie is nothing that is going to change the world or knock everyone’s socks off like The Dark Knight, so this movie gets a 10. Oh yeah, and a hula hoop!

The Savages

2008-08-05T22:35:00.003-04:00

Back in October of 2006, in a review of the stinkbomb Man of the Year, I included the following parenthetical: Does anyone do hard-working-but-lonely better than Laura Linney?

Since then, I've thought of Linney as essentially a one-note actress. She plays her note faithfully, dutifully, competently, but it's just one note. Well, The Savages altered my perception. Linney is still playing essentially the same note, but it sounds so much richer when it's used in just the right song.

The Savages is the story of your average American dysfunctional family, but all grown up. Wendy Savage (Linney) and Jon Savage (Philip Seymour Hoffman) are middle-aged brother and sister, living relatively normal and successful separate lives, when Linney receives a phone call indicating that their father has dementia. The bro-and-sis combo must fly from New York to New Mexico, clear out their father's house (their mother has been out of the picture for some time), find a good nursing home for him, and basically wait for him to die. Sundance's Geoffrey Gilmore calls it a "coming-of-middle-age story," and that's really a good way to think of it.

In that vein, it's more or less a straghtforward drama. There's no big explosions, there's no steamy sex scenes, there's no huge laugh out loud moments (though there are a few mild chuckles). It's really just a pointed look at two people dealing with one of the uncomfortable realities of being adults.

That can be tiresome if it's not well-written and well-acted. Fortunately, The Savages is. Writer/director Tamara Jenkins does excellent work by almost letting you forget she had anything to do. The dialogue isn't particularly snappy, the plot twists aren't particularly brain-twisting, the camera angles aren't particularly experimental. It just feels like you're watching a slightly edited slice of life--an effect that seems much easier to produce than it actually is.

Jenkins has ample help from her cast. Linney particularly shines (she was nominated for an Academy Award)--but, again, not so much because she transcended her estabished acting ability, but because she found a vehicle that made her specialty seem special. In Man of the Year, for example, she's just the cliché of the modern conscientious-but-overwhelmed female dealing with all the demands society puts on her. She's that here, but she's more. In the context of The Savages, something about the roundness of her eyes seems to suggest that she's not just yet-another struggling, working, lonely woman, but that she's really deep down inside still a very vulnerable child who is doing everything she can do keep from being exposed by the never-ending demands of the adult world. With that infintesiminal shift, she becomes much more watchable and much more likable.

Philip Seymour Hoffman's reputation for excellence is well-established, but he, like Linney, has also found a film that suits him perfectly here. He plays the rumpled theater-teaching realist to Linney's put-together playwrighting idealist. Both seem to be struggling with the pressures of adulthood, but she looks like she's trying way too hard and he looks like he's not trying hard enough.

It's also easy to overlook the performance of Philip Bosco, who plays Len, the dying Savage father, and that's sort of the point. Jon and Wendy Savage must deal with the storage and disposal of their father, and as much as they know he's a person, his utter dependence can't help but turn him into a bit of an object. The film lures the audience into this easy-but-erroneous categorization of old-guy-as-baggage, but at two or three points subtly reminds the viewer that Len is still a person, too. The relatively unheralded Bosco does superb work in yielding the spotlight to Linney and Seymour Hoffman but in hitting all the right old, infirm, slightly demented, and human notes that he's asked to hit.

If there's a bone to pick with this movie, is that it's not particularly earth-shattering. It keeps the interest and says something both truthful in relevant, but it's not something that will particularly change the viewer. It's just a simple, well-made film about two people dealing with a difficult task. So it gets an 10. It's not a movie you need to rush out and see, but if you're at the video store and nothing else looks good, this is a perfectly suitable choice.

The Dark Knight

2008-07-28T21:26:00.003-04:00

The recent comic book movie boom, despite it's ubiquitousness and financial success, has a lot to answer for, as far as I'm concerned. Sure, quality has been fairly high this year, so far, but the level of storytelling generally misses the mark when most of the films are measured against the original source material. The X-Men movies gave us a cast of dozens, who were mostly poorly introduced and developed, and swapped scrappy little Wolverine for Clint Eastwood tall, good looking, get-them-gals-into-the-theater Wolverine. The Spider Man movies were more or less faithful to the stories, but somehow couldn't resist adding a thick layer of cheese to the material that was neither warranted or welcomed, in addition to bland, uninspiring casting choices for the two most important characters in the films. Superman Returns was almost a fine return to form, if it hadn't been so quiet and slavishly faithful to the old Richard Donner films. But then came The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's follow up to 2004's excellent Batman Begins, and I say, his masterpiece thus far.
The Dark Knight picks up directly from Batman Begins: Batman (Christian Bale) and Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) are quickly changing Gotham, keeping the mob on the run and backing them into a corner. But, problems are still there: amateur copycat Batmen are popping up, giving Batman more to worry about when fighting crime. Also, an unpredictable criminal mastermind known as the Joker (Heath Ledger) has been making the scene, and offers his services to the mob to rid them of Batman. Add to the mix idealistic DA Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), who both helps and complicates matters by aligning himself with Batman and Gordon, and dating Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhal, ably replacing Katie Holmes from the first film). Things are going to get worse before they get better.....a hell of a lot worse.
It's been said that The Dark Knight is a writer's movie, and that's putting it mildly. TDK takes the standard script/act formula for a summer tentpole and smashes it to pieces. There are multiple story subtypes in the main theme, an unorthodox act structure, multiple climaxes (!), but Christopher and Jonathan Nolan make it all work. Nolan has acknowledged inspiration from Michael Mann's Heat, and it resembles that film in some ways (a high-profile bank robbery, archrivals, lots of attention to the supporting cast, really an ensemble piece at heart), but to say that it's a superhero version of Heat is selling it short. When I walked out of Batman Begins, my mind was reeling with all the possibilities that they could continue with. Nolan took all of those opportunities, and one or two I didn't think about. We see more of Batman, his tactical genius, his detective skills, and even him working during the day as Bruce Wayne, where Batman can't go. Gary Oldman's part is substantially expanded from the first film, as he gets to hit all the right notes for Gordon: hero cop, family man, Batman's greatest ally. As Harvey Dent, Aaron Eckhart nearly owns the picture for his portrayal as a man so inspiring that Bruce Wayne wonders if he could and should replace Batman as the hero Gotham City deserves. The film has a truly epic feel, yet the dialogue is pretty minimalist: I don't think there's a single wasted word in the script. There is no kid stuff to be had here: this is a superhero movie for adults, and it's tone exceeds other dark second acts (if they make a third.....) like The Empire Strikes Back and The Two Towers. The film is rated PG-13, but it felt R-Rated to me. A daring status quo is established at the end of the film that makes me want to see another to see how it will play out, if for no other reason.
The thing that got some extra interest for the picture, for better or worse, was Heath Ledger's tragic overdose earlier this year. Watching him in TDK only makes that sadder, because I had no idea how much potential he had. Had he not died, there would still be a lot of buzz about him because really, he's that good as the Joker. We see performances this incendiary only once in a great while. Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter. Peter O'Toole in The Ruling Class. Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. Geoffrey Rush in Quills. And Heath Ledger does that here. When the Joker is onscreen, there is not a second in which Ledger isn't conveying a very palpable sense of danger and chaos that Jack Nicholson couldn't convey with his nonthreatening Joker from Tim Burton's Batman. With his unkempt hair, strange makeup, and Chelsea grin, he disappears completely inside the character (isn't that what an actor's supposed to do anyway?) The Joker seen here is the closest we've seen to the comics in terms of his unpredictability, threat level, and criminal genius, but with a touch of added anarchy. Nolan and Ledger did a fine job indeed of pulling the garish Joker into the "real world" nicely. It should be noted that Ledger does not overpower any other actor in the film, IMHO: everybody does solid, careful work with characters less outlandish than the Joker. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, respectively reprising their roles as Alfred Pennyworth and Lucius Fox from the first film, get a lot done with very little screen time. If Alfred had a bigger role in this picture, I would say that Michael Caine deserved an Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actor. Honorable mention also goes to Eric Roberts, for his portrayal of smarmy mob boss Sal Moroni.
TDK is a summer movie in almost every sense of the definition: while a lot smarter than the typical summer movie, it's no less fun. The ante is upped with several major action sequences that far surpass the very competent, but much smaller in retrospect, Batman Begins. TDK whizzes along at a breakneck pace that makes the two and a half hour film feel much longer, without actually dragging. Multiple viewings are practically required to really absorb the story, and its subtleties. Despite that, TDK is easily the most satisfying film I've seen in years. And now, there's no looking back. Comic book movies have no excuses for playing it safe now that this film has raised the bar, and given us the crime epic that a character as great as Baman deserves. This formula can be easily applied to other existing franchises. I don't believe that Sam Raimi put Spider Man through the wringer half as much as he could have, and the character wouldn't (and shouldn't) react by simply crying and turning disco, either. Give us X-Men that are the misunderstood freaks who protect those who fear and hate them, instead of the really, really, really, good-looking mutants. I want an Iron Man movie heavy on the political/military intrigue, ala Tom Clancy. Throw Tony Stark's alcoholism into the mix ala Leaving Las Vegas, and you have something potentially very powerful indeed.
The only caveat I have with TDK (if you can even call it a problem) is that it's a pretty hard act to follow, even for a filmmaker as gifted as Christopher Nolan. Still, I believe that he is capable of it. After all, he just gave me the superhero film I've been waiting for for a very long time now. I had absurdly high expectations for TDK, and it met them handily. This movie is Best Picture nomination (if not outright deserving of the prize) good, no joke. This is genre filmmaking on a level never, ever seen before. Still, I hope that Christopher Nolan can pull off a third act that at least meets this one in quality, if not beats it. It's because of that hope that I give The Dark Knight a 21.5 on the 22 scale.

Memorable Lines:

The Joker: "You see, nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If I told people that a gangbanger was going to get shot, or a busload of soldiers was going to get blown up, nobody would panic. Because it's all part of the plan. But tell people that one tiny little mayor is going to die and everyone loses their minds!"

Batman: "Why do you want to kill me?"
The Joker: "Kill you? I don't want to kill you! What would I do without you? Go back to ripping off mob dealers? No, no, you... you complete me."

Maroni's Mistress: "It's too loud in here, we can't hear each other talk."
Salvatore Maroni: "What makes you think I want to hear you talk?"

The Joker: "Do you wanna know why I use a knife? Guns are too quick. You can't savor all the...little..emotions. And..you see..in their last moments...people show you who they really are. So, in a way, I know your friends better than you ever did. Would you like to know which one of them were cowards?"

Harvey Dent: "The night is darkest just before the dawn. And I promise you, the dawn is coming."

La Vie En Rose (or, La Môme)

2008-07-22T23:17:00.010-04:00

Initial Reaction: Sacré Bleu!

As self-appointed foreign film specialist of TMBC, I bring you a French biopic about one of the most famed singers of France whose talent reached international renown in the 1950s and 60s. I think the reason that I enjoy biopics so much is because though I’m not really one to get interested in history or biographies, watching a film about someone’s life is totally captivating. These films offer very unique experiences, and I love being able to expand my horizons by feeling or seeing what another person has seen or felt.

Édith Piaf had a tragic, soulful voice which matched the things that happened throughout her personal life. From her childhood until her death, Piaf was haunted by misfortune and tragedy. For the most part, the movie spans her entire life, but not sequentially. It consistently jumps to different times in her life, which at first is a bit disorienting, but it’s pretty easy to catch on. As a young child, Édith went from living with her mother, who was a street singer, to her maternal grandmother, then her father, and eventually to her paternal grandmother who ran a brothel. For several years this was her home, and she grew close to one of the women there named Titine. Titine came to look at Édith as her own child, caring for her and encouraging her pray to Saint Theresa. During this time, Édith also suffered from an illness which gave her long-term temporary blindness.

Regardless of these things, Édith seemed to be happy and loved in this environment. But her bad luck came back full force when her father returned unexpectedly and uprooted her, bringing her with him where he worked in the circus as a contortionist. At first things seemed even more unfair than ever, since she wasn't even allowed to watch the acts and was forced to cook and clean for her father, but this is the first opportunity she got to experience what would be her love affair for life: singing.

One big plus for this film is the music. Mostly, the songs are being sung by Piaf herself, (a good choice by director Olivier Dahan) and aside from maybe the first number, Cotillard did a great job lip-synching. Piaf had a very unique sound and style, which was described as being “the soul of Paris.” I was ashamed to realize after watching the film just how famous Piaf was, not only in France, and I wasn’t even aware.

Now, in regards to Marion Cotillard and her performance in this movie: wow. I have a lot of respect for this actress, and she totally deserves the academy award she got. The amount of time she spent learning how to stand and sing like Piaf has got to be staggering, but she says herself that she didn’t only strive to copy the singer. She made her a real person, and embodied her spirit. Also noteworthy is that she acted as Piaf as a young woman, spanning the years until she is at the end of her life. This was when she was in her 40s, though because of extremely poor health, she looked more like she was in her 60s or 70s.

So, why should you see La Vie En Rose? While I think most will probably accept the fact that it's extremely well-done with one of the best acting performances ever, I don't think many are rushing to the rental store to pick it up. Here are some reasons why you should: the story of Piaf's life is really an incredible one. I've given you a small piece of her childhood, but her adult life is what really touches our human core as she lives, loves and continues on in spite of everything that would seek to drag her down. The music is wonderful...she is truly unique and not only performed, but sang with truth and spirit that came from her life. The film is extremely well-done, clearly fashioned with great attention to detail and a successful attempt to capture her story and her life. Finally, if none of these things appeal to you, Cotillard's performance should. I've seen her in other films before, but until I looked her up on the Internet Movie Database after seeing this movie, I didn't think I had ever seen her. She has thrown herself into this role, and in doing so has brought Piaf back to life, renewing interest in her legacy and allowing us the chance to connect with the experiences of others, no matter how far removed and distant those experiences may seem.

Rating: 18

La Vie en Rose is one of those stories that you keep thinking about after you see it. Édith Piaf is a French icon whose story and contribution to music should not go unnoticed. This movie doesn't seek to overly glorify her or paint things in ways that they didn't happen; it delivers to us a real person who, though she might not always be likeable, draws us in with her vibrant spirit, incredible talent, and tenacity, which kept her singing until her life was cut short. Mais, elle ne regrette rien.

Strange Days

2008-07-14T22:12:00.002-04:00

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a system, or the inability for a system to do its work, will increase over time, eventually reaching a maximum at equilibrium. Now, to me, that’s a lot of gobbledygook; I just looked it up on Wikipedia. The Irish poet W.B. Yeats had a much simpler and more understandable way of saying it: things fall apart. Anything that’s set in motion will gradually break down, till there is no motion at all. Love fades, food rots, and our bodies continue their downward slide. So what the hell, let’s make a movie!

Strange Days is a film made in 1995 set around New Year’s Eve 1999, a time when the country is basically going down the crapper. Projections about the very near future are never a good idea, especially when they’re as radical as the ones in Strange Days. Granted, they’re not that the shape of the earth has changed or that we’re living in pods in outer space, but their just extreme enough to make people in 2008 snicker a little. A particularly funny moment was when there was a lament that gasoline was over $3.00/gallon.

It technically qualifies as a sci-fi movie, and here’s why. Central to the plot are illegal devices called SQUIDs. A SQUID is a device that goes over your head like a hairnet, and when you plug a mini-disc-like cartridge into the remote device wirelessly connected to it, you can have an audiovisual/tactile experience in first person, as if you are there. The cartridge is a recording taken from the cerebral cortex of someone also wearing a SQUID. People get hooked on it like drugs, and like some drugs, overuse of it makes you paranoid. Strange Days’s main character is a dealer of these black market devices named Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes). He’s an ex-cop now working on the wrong side of the law, but still basically a good person. Also in the story are his friend Mace (Angela Bassett), a tough-as-nails limo driver, Max (Tom Sizemore), his P.I. buddy, and Faith (Juliette Lewis), a singer/hooker who happens to be the (only) one that got away. The trouble starts when Lenny gets sent a mysterious “black jack” cartridge (the SQUID equivalent of a snuff film) depicting the brutal rape and murder of Iris, a hooker friend of Faith’s. Iris indicated that Faith might be in danger before she died, and because of his obsession with Faith, Lenny gets involved.

Strange Days is very story-driven, so I won’t reveal much more than that. The screenplay, written by James Cameron of Titanic fame, is smart and tightly wound, even though it doesn’t make sense in places and is slightly ridiculous. However, I’m not sure who Strange Days thinks it’s appealing to. It’s too violent, disturbing and swear-ridden to appeal to sci-fi geeks, and it’s too cerebral and futuristic to appeal to the meatheads that would like the guns and bad people in it. In the end, it winds up being a jack of all trades, master of none. Acting is competent from all involved, especially Angela Bassett. It strikes me that she would be perfect for the role of Storm in X-Men, and would do an infinitely better job than Halle Berry. Strange Days has far too long of a beginning, though, and consequentially clocks in at almost 2 and a half hours. The director (Kathryn Bigelow) could have trimmed the fat without taking out the punch or grit, which the movie had in spades.

It was a little too needlessly graphic and pessimistic for my taste, and I didn’t like the anti-society message the movie (perhaps subconsciously) seemed to present. It had a great premise, and the screenplay was intricate and intelligent with fantastic dialogue, though the plot holes eventually made it look a little like Swiss cheese. The cinematography comes from an age when CGI wasn’t the thing that it is now, but in this case, it’s a good thing. The set and costume designs (and lack of CGI) make the world the characters exist in eerily like our own, but fast-forwarded enough to still make it escapist. But overall, the problems Strange Days has make it difficult to recommend very highly. It’s definitely not for everyone.

Iconic lines:
“Cheer up. The world’s gonna end in ten minutes, anyway.”
“The issue’s not whether you’re paranoid. The issue’s whether you’re paranoid enough.”
“Two million years of human evolution and that’s the best you can come up with?”

22 Rating: 5

Particle Man

Love's Labour's Lost

2008-07-07T21:17:00.003-04:00

I love Shakespeare. I love musicals. So obviously by putting those two together would send me to heaven. Well before we get to that, let’s examine the plot of Love’s Labour's Lost. Kenneth Branagh is at it again with an interpretation of the immortal bard. Again, our friend Mr. Branagh does not make Shakespeare into anything crazy. The language is the same; only this time he is mixing it with song and dance routines. Nothing crazy like contemporary dances, but those you would find in the classic musicals of the 40s or 50s. Which works very well since the movie is set in 1939.
Branagh brings us into the story with a newsreel reminding the viewer that WWII is very near entering France. While I applaud Branagh’s attempt to merge the story with a different time, the newsreels that occur throughout the film do get somewhat tedious. We are told that the King of Navarre and his 3 cronies have decided to shut themselves away for three years of intensive study. The biggest thing about this is that no women can be seen by ANY of the scholars or the King’s subjects, along with other crazy rules. Of course that oath is swiftly tested when the Princess of France visits with her 3 ladies in waiting. The oath takes a beating from him and his compatriots as well as by his subjects.
This movie was enjoyable. I feel that saying it was good would be exaggerating slightly. This movie had a lot of famous people in it but I don’t think that improved it any. As always, Nathan Lane delivers a top-notch performance as the court clown, and gets to sing and dance as well. For the “Men of Navarre” Kenneth Branagh is the most famous person with Matthew Lillard coming in a distant second. While I found Branagh convincing as the sarcastic and self-loving Berowne (yeah, like he really had to act), Lillard was horribly miscast. Although he can sing well enough, I guess, he does not come off as even remotely masculine. Even when wooing his Lady of France he seems to be trying to convince the audience and himself that he is not gay. The “Ladies of France” have as their recognizable star Alicia Silverstone. She does a competent job in conveying the princess, and despite her convincingly acting ditzy in Clueless, did not trip over the big Shakespearean words. Timothy Spall turns in a showing as the weird count. I think he was supposed to be whimsical, but is just plain weird and weird looking as well. Richard Clifford as Boyet is on the side of good this time as the servant to the Ladies of France. Last time I saw Mr. Clifford he was serving the evil and sulky Prince John in Much Ado About Nothing.
As I said before, I love both Shakespeare and musicals but I don’t know if they gelled together the way they were envisioned. Something about Kenneth Branagh in a wife beater trying to be all sexy while seducing Alicia Silverstone just does not do it for me. Nevertheless, the movie is an enjoyable musical romp with a few missteps thrown in. Obviously, I did not hate it enough to avoid buying it. I would have to go with a 9. I think there is one line in the movie that defines what happened. “Let’s face the music and dance.” This seems to be a good idea of director Branagh assessment of the situation. “Well, it is not going to be stellar, so let’s just have fun!”

WALL-E

2008-06-30T21:00:00.003-04:00

Pixar is an embarrassment to the moviemaking industry.

By that, I mean that every other studio in Hollywood should be embarrassed that Pixar consistently outshines them.

Rival studio executives hoping for a little schadenfreude at Pixar's expense will have to keep on waiting—by every conceivable measure, WALL-E, Pixar's latest offering, is a huge success. It racked up a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 93% on Metacritic. It earned 63 million dollars in its first weekend—easily outgrossing a film whose trailer prominently featured Angelina Jolie's unadorned back. It currently sits at #6 on IMDB's top 250.

I'm here to tell you that these metrics all undersell it.

If you haven't already heard, WALL-E tells the story of its titular robot, a trash-compacting droid still plugging away on Earth hundreds of years after humans—and pretty much all other forms of life—have left. Starved for company (aside from his pet cockroach), WALL-E whiles the day away picking up trash, compacting it into tight little cubes, and stacking these cubes miles high. When Eve, a plant-sensing robot hundreds of years more advanced than WALL-E, arrives on the godforsaken Earth, WALL-E looks past her apparent indifference to him (and the fact that she could easily destroy him) and attempts to befriend her. Just as his persistence begins to pay off, WALL-E shows Eve a plant he found, causing her to snatch it from him, stow it, and go into a dormant mode until she is picked up by a spaceship. WALL-E, not allowed to let his one friend disappear without a fight, stows away on the spaceship in hopes of rescuing Eve.

Of course, that little plot summary does the film absolutely no justice.

Pixar has long made a living creating characters that are adorable without being sickening, and flawed without being irredeemable. WALL-E ratchets up the adorable while still adroitly avoiding the sickening—probably because he's so much more than that. He's clever, he's dogged, he's inquisitive, he's resourceful, he's hopeful, he's loving, and he's refreshingly unconcerned with himself. He'll also probably go down as one of the most memorable characters of this decade.

Pixar has never really shied away from putting small social messages in their films, but they probably make their boldest statement here. Not only is the Earth left completely uninhabitable by human consumption, but the humans out in space do nothing but consume, converse, and coast around in these neat little hover-chairs. Their every whim seems to be catered to by a conglomerate called "Buy-n-Large"—a not even remotely veiled swipe at Wal-Mart. (And in what I understand is the first appearance by an actual human in a Pixar film, the inimitable Fred Willard plays the CEO of Buy-n-Large at the time of Earth's evacuation.) That said, the environmental and consumerist warnings are delivered with enough of a wink that they at no point seem preachy.

WALL-E does all of what Pixar does best. It's gorgeously rendered. It features a subtle but incredibly efffective score. It uses non-human characters to remind us what it means to be human. But WALL-E outstrips its Pixar predecessors in a number of key ways as well. While all Pixar movies take us deep into the psyche of a three-dimensional main character, WALL-E takes us there with barely a shred of dialogue. While all Pixar movies offer a new way to see the world, WALL-E goes further by offering a whole new world to see. But where WALL-E really blows away the competition is in its contagious, infectious, intoxicating sense of discovery. It's enough to turn even the most stone-hearted viewer into a state of wide-eyed wonder.

I don't know what more to say. WALL-E made me laugh. It made my eyes well up. It made me cheer. It filled me with hope. It did everything you'd ever want a movie to do, and only my extreme hesitancy to use the very top number on our belovéd scale is keeping WALL-E at a 21.

The Incredible Hulk

2008-06-23T22:17:00.003-04:00

There are few things more pleasing than when a film surprises you with how damn competent it is, especially in this day and age when we've seen everything. There are several reasons this happens, including poor promotion, but it seems more impressive when it happens against poor speculation towards it's prospects, ala The Bourne Identity. That's why it was so pleasing to get a double-surprise of Ed Norton returning to form as a leading man in Hollywood, and to do it via a star/producer/co-writer vehicle in The Incredible Hulk.
Norton stars as proto-geek Bruce Banner, the man with the most conspicuous anger management problem on the planet. The film begins with a credit sequence that refreshes people on the "familiar"* origin of the Hulk in about a minute and a half (THANK YOU. This is how origins should be dealt with), and moves on to show Banner hiding out in Brazil, working as a janitor in a bottling plant, and studying with a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu master to defend himself and control his anger. What? I know, right? Not your typical superhero fare. This early sequence of the film showcases the honestly beautiful cinematography in the film (most notably a shot of the crowded city that circles up.....and up.....and up.....), and showcases Banner's plight in hiding, the consequences of not being able to maintain absolute control, and the general tragedy of being the Hulk very vividly. Meanwhile, General "Thunderbolt" Ross (William Hurt, phoning it in) is determined to catch the Hulk, and use him for his original purpose: as a bio-weapon, with the assistance of Royal Marine Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth). The crux of the plot revolves around Banner's determination to find a cure for the Hulk aided by the mysterious "Mr. Blue," and how his quest is opposed by Ross and his obsession with the Hulk.
Much has been made of the maligned (and rightfully so) 2004 Hulk film, and people were wondering if the franchise was cursed. How does this new version compare to the Ang Lee version? The answer is, very, very well. French director Louis Leterrier (The Transporter 2, Unleashed) handles directorial duties nicely, in a fast-moving, funny, and thoughtful popcorn film that makes it very easy to care about the protagonist. The script by proven Marvel adapter Zak Penn holds up well, especially the Norton-added references to the Hulk's universe, and a hard-to-miss reference to Captain America via the Super-Solider Serum. BUT, the easter eggs and references never get in the way of the plot, or story.
There was a lot I liked about this film that I hated about the first one. The Hulk gets his powers from gamma radiation, not sea-cucumber splicing. The Hulk talks. The Hulk fights a super-villain, not the Army the whole time, which leads to one small caveat: how stupid are these guys anyway? They spend millions of dollars pursuing the Hulk, and yet they can't figure out he's bullet-proof, so maybe they shouldn't waste any ammo lesser than, say, a Stinger missile on him? If I were a taxpayer in the Marvel Universe, I'd be pretty pissed off that they were spending all that money going after domestic "problems" like the Hulk, instead of Dr. Doom and his weapons of mass destruction. Screw diplomatic policy.
All in all, it's been a great year for comics at the multiplex. While not quite as good as Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk pretty much lives up to its name. I give it a 15 out of 22 on the 22 scale.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

2008-06-16T13:14:00.004-04:00

Initial Reaction: "Whew!" (reaches for tissue).

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (or Scaphandre et le Papillon) is based on a true story of the man Jean-Dominique Bauby (Jean-Do), the editor of Elle magazine who in 1995 suffered a stroke and was diagnosed with "locked-in syndrome." Essentially, this means that while he was cognitively fully functioning, he is unable to move or speak at all. In the film, Jean-Do wakes up from a coma after this stroke and learns that he's paralyzed from head to toe. The movie wastes no time with exposition, because the situation lends itself beautifully to introduce the story and the characters.

This is a French film directed by American Julian Schnabel who won best director at Cannes Film Festival. It stars Mathieu Amalric who was praised for his role as Jean-Do. While there was nothing lacking in his performance, I have to say that I'm not quite sure what could be so amazing about playing a guy who can't move at all. (I was curious about how they got his lip to droop, though.) The only thing that Bauby can control is his left eye, and with help from the hospital staff he learns how to use this to communicate. The amazing thing is that through this method of communication he is able to write his book, the memoir that the film is based on. The rest of the characters, including Emmanuelle Seigner as Celine, Marie-Josee Croze as Henriette, Anne Consigny as Claude, and Max von Sydow as Papinou (among others) made so much of their characters. I loved how genuine and understated their performances were. Even though this script has the potential to be a drama-filled weep fest, it didn't go there at all.

Another way that this film was honest with us was in the actual character of Jean-Do. While I can't say that the story's representation of Bauby is completely accurate, it didn't attempt to make him a hero or a sacrificial lamb. From the very beginning we hear his internal monologue as he lives through the experience, and he is a complete person with all his bitterness, sarcasm, grief, and fear. An example of this is when he first sees himself in the reflection on a window, the same point at which we first see him. He is taken aback by the face staring back at him, and so are we, because all we've been aware of is his youthful, healthy voice, the voice he himself is used to hearing. As he looks at the reflection, he bluntly says to himself "I look like something from a jar of formaldehyde."

This was not a film I'd recommend for pure entertainment value. It's a difficult movie to watch, not only for the reason you think. It is filmed from Jean-Do's perspective, so the majority of the movie is what he is seeing or experiencing. As a viewer, this doesn't conjure up pity as much as empathy. Rather than looking at this pathetic creature bed-ridden and unable to do anything himself and thinking "Aw, poor guy, that sucks," we're looking out from his eyes and thinking "Hey, you there! On the outside! This sucks!" The way that director Julian Schnabel achieves this is through some very creative, unusual camera work. We literally are in Jean-Do's head, the cinematography reflects this realistically and seamlessly.

Rating: 16

This film is much more of an experience than a story. We get to experience the horror of locked-in syndrome, but also the simplicity and hope of life newly-realized. While I give credit to a great movie where credit is due, it was a bit difficult to watch, and so my enjoyment of it went down a smidge, which resulted in a 16. What a wonderful tribute to a man and his incredible story.

Baby Mama

2008-06-09T17:21:00.002-04:00

Tee-hee, procreation is funny.

But seriously, a huge part of creating comedy is finding the amusing in the everyday. Something that might not seem funny to you can be given a whole new spin in the hands of a skilled comedian. Now, I’m not saying that we should have comedies about the Holocaust or suicide bombings; some things are just out of bounds. But most of the good comedy movies would work nearly as well as serious dramas. Melinda & Melinda explores this idea more thoroughly, but that review is for another time. In this one, we’re talking about Baby Mama, and whether or not it worked.

The answer to that question is, “for the most part.” It wasn’t all giggly moments, which I appreciated, but some moments fell flat, and others were just plain not funny. The story involves a 37 year-old woman in Philadelphia named Kate (Tina Fey), whose biological clock is telling her she needs to have progeny. Since she’s married to her career, the traditional method of getting pregnant isn’t really an option, so she tries other ways, eventually settling on having her eggs fertilized and placed in a surrogate. That lucky lady is Angie (Amy Poehler), a Dr. Pepper-drinking party girl just a step above white trash. Kate works for a health food company owned by a whacko sketch-monster named Barry (Steve Martin), and lives in a posh apartment building with a ghetto doorman (Romany Malco).

While scoping out sites for a new store the company wants to open, she runs into Rob (Greg Kinnear), a small-business owner/ex-lawyer who runs a clone of Jamba Juice, who becomes her significant other. Things proceed as normal, except that Angie has all the motherly instinct of a sledgehammer, and she and her skeezy boyfriend (Dax Shepard) have a secret. Fey is all right as the straight woman, but I like her better when she’s playing the sardonic jokester, as she did so often on Saturday Night Live. Poehler, another SNL alum, really gives it her all with Angie, and the result is a very funny character, with moments of seriousness amidst the levity, both of which she does quite well. She has a knack for ridiculousness and flamboyance.

But, as with all ensamble comedies, the real gems are the supporting characters. Kinnear is splendid as Rob, with surprisingly good comedic timing. He’s a great match for Fey’s kinda buttoned-up control freak. Malco is the shiz as Oscar the doorman, though he plays largely the same character as his 40 Year Old Virgin gig, the only other film I’ve seen him in. Maura Tierney plays her role as the sensible sister competently, though she seems a little out of place. Sigourney Weaver even shows up as the weird and kooky head of the agency where Kate has her surrogacy done. And Siobhan Fallon provides several guilty giggles as a birthing instructor with a massive speech impediment.

Baby Mama had plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, but nothing was too out of the ordinary, with the exception of a very odd scene where Angie is getting pregnant with Kate’s eggs. Let’s just say it was a sex scene like no other. This movie had an all-star cast, though nobody really stole the spotlight from anyone else. Though the story mostly centered around Kate and Angie, each of the minor characters had their moment (or moments) in the sun. I also appreciated the happy ending, even if the movie was a tad sentimental before then.

Michael McCullers (an SNL writer sitting in the director’s chair for the first time) does a good job of balancing humor with weight, though the flow of his narrative leaves something to be desired. The dialogue is a little stilted, especially for someone who wrote for SNL. But I might have been spoiled rotten forever, since Arrested Development. I could also pick on his directorial and editing style, but this is his very first movie, so that seems a little hard-hearted. And the message of the movie seems to be that in this age of so many new ways to become parents, there is one thing that never changes: love. This gets it a lot of points in my book.

In general, Baby Mama is a fun lark, though it need not be watched on a theater screen; DVD will do just fine. It was released at a pretty inopportune time, what with Indy 4 and Iron Man still running, but it’s worth the ticket.

Iconic Lines:
“Yeah, I just don’t like your uterus.”
“Congratulations, Kate. Now, I’m going to reward you with 5 minutes of uninterrupted eye contact.”
“I’m gonna bang all your friends! Consider them banged!”

22 Rating: 8

Particle Man