Snowpiercer

Joon-ho Bong is one of the most interesting directors going right now.  With Memories of Murder, The Host, Mother, and now Snowpiercer, he’s building a filmography of subtle, exciting, and thought provoking films.  This is a name that guarantees a spot on my queue.

Snowpiercer, Bong’s first production with a primarily Western cast, stars Captain America’s Chris Evans as the leader of a rebellion on mankind’s last ark in an apocalyptic snowscape.  Supporting cast members include John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, Ed Harris, and Alison Pill, as well as previous Bong collaborators Ah-sung Ko of The Host and the great Kang-ho Song of The Thirst.

Why throw all those names at you?  To tell you that Joon-ho Bong is a serious cat.  He’s someone with whom people want to work.

Snowpiercer’s a great example of why.  This is a carefully written, fully realized film that works as an action adventure, a social parable, and even something of a whodunit.  It features memorable performances, brilliant setpieces, and dialogue that provokes thought without ever drawing the viewer out of the film.

This is just a terrific movie, and well worth your time.  Fire up Snowpiercer.

Short Takes

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY

I saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy while recovering from surgery.  I was not at my cognitive best, and I remember little about it other than that I enjoyed it.  Sorry, friend.  Not much good to you here.

MY DOG TULIP

My Dog Tulip is the animated memoir of a man who loves his dog about as much as a man can love his dog.  Problem is, the man is a terrible dog owner. 

The dog’s an Alsatian, which should live in a house with a big yard.  The man lives in an apartment and wonders why the neighbors complain about his pet’s barking.  The dog’s out of control, not properly housetrained or taught to heel, and her bad behavior alienates everyone around him.  The man doesn’t clean up his dog’s waste if nobody’s watching, leaving landmines around his neighborhood.  The list goes on.

Somehow, we’re supposed to see man and beast as the man does.  We’re supposed to smile at the dog’s foibles and sympathize with the man’s “human troubles.”  Me, I spent the whole movie waiting for Cesar Milan to show up and set this family right.  90 minutes of anger is not my idea of a good time.

WIN WIN

Win Win, on the other hand, is my idea of a good time.  Written and directed by Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent, The Visitor), here’s a family drama with tension, humor, and pathos.  McCarthy has a great pen and a gift with actors, and it shows.

Judging by the cast he’s assembled, he must also have serious credibility in his profession.  Paul Giamatti (CDNW) stars as a struggling small-time attorney who shares a building with Jeffrey Tambor (CDNW), an accountant and his fellow high school wrestling coach.  He’s helping his best friend (Bobby Cannavale, also of The Station Agent) through a rough divorce.   Giamatti loves his wife, Amy Ryan (of ‘The Wire,’ which is required viewing) and his kids, but he’s swimming upstream and bills are due.  Enter the great Burt Young, who presents him with an opportunity, a burden, and a threat to his entire life construct.

And away we go.

Here’s the thing that makes Win Win special: McCarthy casts legitimately great actors to play these people, and it takes the time to let us get to know them.  Consequently, I felt immersed in their lives.  I laughed when they laughed, cried when they cried, chewed my fingernails when they got worried.  Win Win immersed me, engaged me, and moved me.  I loved it.

Alien

Oh, Alien is so good.

Here’s a movie that takes its time in the setup, and it pays huge dividends in the second and third acts.  When the crew members of the space cargo ship Nostromo awaken to a distress call from an alien world, we get to know them.  We get to know their ship and its layout.  These things matter, because the Nostromo’s world is one that has been lived in for quite some time, and we need to feel that it’s commonplace, that these are ordinary Joes doing an ordinary job.

Because when Hell breaks loose, we’ve become keyed up and ready.  When people start dying, we know who they are and have become invested in their fates.  When the alien’s acid blood starts eating through decking, we know what that means and can figure just how close the ship is coming to catastrophic hull breach.

This leads me to wonder: why is this so hard?  Why do so many filmmakers not seem to understand that the key to narrative film, even genre-type horror and science fiction, lies in the characters and their environment?  If we don’t believe in the characters and their world, we won’t believe in their predicaments or their heroism.  If we don’t believe in the characters, all we have is light and sound. 

Alien believes in its characters, and it makes us believe.  That’s what makes the film so effective, so scary, to this very day.  When many of the films we know have passed out of memory, audiences will still watch Alien.  If they’re smart, so will filmmakers.  This film has much to teach them.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

The very worst thing about INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL is John Hurt. Hurt plays an old friend and colleague of the Joneser, one who has lost his wits after peering too deeply into the eponymous Crystal Skull. The problem with this is that Hurt's performance recalls his Fool in the 1982 BBC production of KING LEAR. Attention filmmakers: if you want to drive a stake through the heart of your movie, cast a great character actor in a pale shadow of one of his career-high performances. It's a sure-fire way to get your audience thinking about how much better that other picture was than the one it's currently watching.

That may be the worst thing about Indy IV, but it has competition. The opening sequence, a car chase between people we don't care about and whom we'll never see again (punctuated with supposedly amusing animal reaction shots), starts the film on an offputting, wtf note. When the picture finally gets around to giving us Ford and Ray Winstone (clearly wishing he was in Ibiza), we've already nearly lost interest. Then Cate Blanchett shows up as the villain, she gets a boner joke, and the whole thing just runs off the rails.

Ok, I admit it. I wrote that whole paragraph just to find an excuse to work in a SEXY BEAST joke.

INDY IV is just plain boring. Dull. Flaccid. A yawner. And I like Spielberg. I like Ford. I like Allen, Winstone, LaBeouf, Blanchett, and Hurt. But my pulse never quickened. I never believed in what was happening. And at the climax, when I was supposed to be going, "Wow," I was only thinking, "Huh. Spielberg and Lucas didn't trust me enough to have the Blanchett speak Russian."

I may have seen this one for free, but I still want $10 back. For my time.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

(See my comments on "Hellboy" here.)

(See my comments on "Hellboy Animated: Sword of Storms" here.)

(See my comments on "Hellboy Animated: Blood and Iron" here.)

Sorry, Internet. "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" isn't going to change your life.

Well, I suppose it might, a little. It might encourage you to spend some time reading Mike Mignola's excellent "Hellboy" comic books, a delightful reinterpretation of ancient folklore cleverly disguised as an action-adventure starring a genuine prince of Hell (rebelling against his Old Man by working for the good guys). It might even make you think a little bit about the person other people want you to be and the person you want to be. Hell, it might even turn you into a Barry Manilow fan.

But it isn't the greatest film ever.

It's merely very, very good. Not only is it a well-told story, but it's phenomenally imaginative. Creator Guillermo Del Toro (who made "Pan's Labyrinth," one of the best films I've ever seen) opens the picture with faerie tale reminiscent of "Strings," another brilliantly imaginative tale, and builds on that tale by weaving it into an exciting and funny modern adventure starring Hellboy (the great Ron Perlman), his pal Abe Sapien the gill-man (Doug Jones, whom I still haven't forgiven for the nightmare -inducing Pale Man), and the love of his life, firestarter Liz Sherman (Selma Blair, who outdoes herself here). See, the elves are pissed. Long ago, the made a deal with humanity - humans got the cities, and faerie creatures got the forests. But humans kept cutting down the forests, and the elves are running out of room. Their hotspurred prince declares war and sets out to reanimate the Golden Army - a goblin-built brigade of automatons who can't be bargained with; can't be reasoned with. They don't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until all humans are dead.

There's your story, but just outlining the story doesn't do the picture justice. Del Toro has an extraordinary imagination, which is woven into every scene of this visually delightful film. From the throwaway creature designs to the evocations of other worlds, the man gives us the kind of movie we enjoy seeing in the theater but can't wait to frame-by-frame when we bring it home on Blu-Ray. There's so much detail, so much creativity at work; not only in the already-famous Troll Market scenes, but throughout the film; that this movie is more than the clever telling of a good story. It's a multifaceted experience that's well worth savoring.

But it won't change your life.

Well, okay, maybe a little.

V for Vendetta

I liked the filmed version of V FOR VENDETTA better than the comic. The comic felt like an overhyped revolt against Thatcherism, while the film makes the story more universal. While it gets in its digs at the Bush administration, the film feels more of piece with works like 1984, works which transcend the time in which they were created.

Here’s the setup: we’re in England, and things have gone sour. It’s roughly ten years after a political shift that ushered in an authoritarian government, but still thirty years or so before the system gets so entrenched that we’d be in the world of a 1984. Big Brother is everywhere, but the tvs still only go one way, if you will.

V4V asks the question, “What if someone rebelled before Big Brother could really get his hooks into everything?” In this case, that someone is an anonymous gent in a Guy Fawkes costume, a gent who was wronged by this regime and has taken is time, a la Edmond Dantes, to construct the perfect revenge. His plan? To move the people of England to rise up against their oppressors.

How he executes his plan, and how his actions affect those around him, I’ll leave for the viewer. Right now, I’m more concerned with how well the film executes its intentions; I’m happy to report that it does so quite well. Natalie Portman, the audience surrogate, reminds us that yes, she can actually act quite well. Hugo Weaving as the guy in the Fawkes costume, joins Willem Dafoe in the limited club of guys who can emote even when their face is hidden. John Hurt, who played Winston Smith in the filmed version of 1984, is a marvelous Big Brother, and the remainder of the supporting cast (including favorites Stephen Rea and Stephen Fry) also turns in professional work, without a single performance that pulls one out of the moment. The film looks slick, professional, and seamless. I bought everything it showed me, and I enjoyed the ride.

I picked up V4V on a whim – it was sitting right there on a counter at the library, and I knew I’d have a little free time coming up. I’m glad I did. V FOR VENDETTA turned to be pretty good.

The Proposition

Ray Winstone. Guy Pearce. Danny Huston. John Hurt. That spooky Aborigine tracker from RABBIT-PROOF FENCE. These guys are serious guys in a serious movie, THE PROPOSITION, written by Nick Cave and directed by John Hillcoat with brutal pitilessness. Winstone's the law in an arid Outback town that may as well be called Tombstone, and he's out to capture or kill Huston. Others will die, some by intention and some by accident, but it matters not: Huston's the rabbit, Pearce is the hound, and the rest, well, perhaps they'll survive.

But then things change. I won't say how or why, but I will say that they do so in ways I did not expect. That's the trick of this film, and its unique allure, though I'm not sure if it's enough to recommend a viewing. THE PROPOSITION is difficult to watch not because it's brutal, but because it's brutal to people about whom we come to care. Further, it's slow, reflecting a time during which patience wasn't a virtue so much as a requirement. The two combine to create a sense of dread that, while powerful, is far from pleasant. One can imagine that this is how people lived, and this is how they made the decisions they made, and this is how they came to regret them.

So, THE PROPOSITION. It's a well-made film, but I did not enjoy viewing it. Your mileage may vary.

Spaceballs

SPACEBALLS, as seen from the perspective of my 7-year-old boy:

Ha. "Pizza the Hutt." That's funny.

Darth Vader is silly.

Ewww, kissing. Gross!

What, a giant vacuum cleaner transformer? This is like the worst STAR WARS movie ever!

Let's send it back. Right away.

Now, SPACEBALLS, as seen from my perspective:

SPACEBALLS is a failure. It fails to generate laughs, insight, or even a hummable theme song. It's as if the whole thing were done on autopilot for the express purpose of making a quick buck, and it couldn't even do that. It's a wonder Bill Pullman's career survived this debacle. Avoid it all costs.

Valiant

VALIANT, the story of a british homing pigeon in WWII, retools the standard heroe's journey for a young bird trying to do his part in the war effort. The bird, voiced by Ewan McGregor, befriends a slovenly Trafalgar Square pigeon on his way to the recruiting depot, and before you know it they're in occupied France, working with the mice of the French Underground to get a vital message back to the allies.

It's standard stuff, but it's well-crafted stuff. The ocean work is so beautiful that it merits several pauses and rewinds, the chases and aerial stunts imaginative and visually exciting, and the whole enterprise serves as a good introduction to war movies for the younger set.

Would I recommend VALIANT to people without kids? Absolutely not - as I said, it's pretty standard stuff. For those with kids, however, this one is worth it for the eye candy alone. VALIANT makes me want to spring for an HD-DVD player.

Hellboy Revisited

I've been on a Hellboy kick lately, mostly because I'll reinforce pretty much anything that gets my kid to read. That said, I revisited Guilllermo del Toro's live-action HELLBOY film over the weekend. I enjoyed it much more this time around.

When I saw HELLBOY during its theatrical run, the comics were fresher in my mind. This, of course, led to constant comparisons between what I was seeing and what I'd read and, while I liked what I was seeing, it simply couldn't compare to my imagination. That, and there was no Lobster Johnson.

This time around, the comics have faded in memory and I was able to enjoy the film more on its own terms. The audience surrogate -character doesn't grate, the throwaway references don't feel underdone, and themes of Hellboy really carry through. You see, HELLBOY is all about choice: it's just the thing to appeal to believers in the Leibnizian monadic soul, like me. In the film, as in the comics, Hellboy was created to be the Antichrist and unleash cosmic, Lovecraftian horror upon the world. He was brought into the world by evil forces to do evil deeds, but gets an early exposure to the good guys. Ultimately, he chooses sides, and his self-determining choice defines him more than all the external factors that combine to force his hand.

This is great stuff, and HELLBOY delivers it in a package filled with slimy monsters, catchy one-liners, and a double helping of fun.

Still no Lobster Johnson, though. Perhaps in HELLBOY 2.

Hellboy Animated: Blood and Iron

HELLBOY ANIMATED: BLOOD AND IRON just isn't as much fun as SWORD OF STORMS.

B&I puts the Hellboy gang in a haunted house that's just been purchased by a Richard Branson -esque character. Before you know it, they're in the middle of a vampire and ghost story that's too gory for the kids and too familiar for the adults. Tack on a third act that recreates and truncates the Hellboy-Hecate storyline from the comics, but doesn't feel organic to the vampire/ghost story, and you have a wholly unsatisfying experience.

Color me underwhelmed.