Pontypool

Pontypool does great stuff for nearly its entire running time.  It kinda blows it right there at the end, but you’ve got to give this picture credit for how much it gets right.

Stephen McHattie plays Grant Mazzie, a has-been shock jock relegated to reading the school closings listing at a third-rate AM station in the sticks somewhere outside of Ontario.  He has a deep, gravelly voice, perfect for radio; and a tired, weathered face, perfect for film.

Mazzie is settling in at his new gig when the first reports of something very disturbing start trickling in.  There’s a gun battle at a nearby lake.  A mob surrounds a doctor’s office.  People start killing each other in particularly nasty ways.  Everything’s quiet in the church basement where radio station’s studio is tucked away, but it sounds like the end of the world out there.  What’s going on?

Pontypool nails this.  McHattie gives a virtuoso performance as a man going from depressed, angry, and a little drunk to skeptical, worried, then scared.  Lisa Houle and Georgina Reilly, as his engineer and assistant, respectively, give him people to bounce off, to fight, to work with, but it’s his show.  His reaction to the offscreen threat makes it real, and it shows us how the anticipation of horror can be scarier than horror itself.

It’s at the end there, when the revelations and realizations hit, that Pontypool falls apart.  But right up ‘til then, when it’s all mystery and dread, this movie is fantastic.  Pontypool may be a qualified winner, but it’s a winner nonetheless.

Watchmen

The print version of WATCHMEN always struck me as Reagan-era sour grapes hippie bullshit. Sure, it was famous for its deconstruction of the superhero comic, but I don’t care about superhero comics, never having collected ‘em as a kid. So I was wary of the filmed version of the story. After G.W. Bush’s parody of conservatism and THE INCREDIBLES’ brilliant study of the superhero genre, what did WATCHMEN, in any form, have to offer?

Not much, really. It’s still hippie bullshit and its “post-heroism heroes” conceit has nearly become a genre staple. But y’know what? It’s really good hippie bullshit, and it’s really good genre criticism. It looks great, hits its marks, and moves right along, and it does something the print version doesn’t: it actually makes me care about Rorschach and the Night Owl and Sally Jupiter and all the rest. The reveals feel less forced. The characters feel more organic. The political and artistic commentary works as part of a unified whole.

Had this film been released ten years ago, it may have been revolutionary. It’s too late for that, politically or artistically, but WATCHMEN is still a good story well told. Peace out, bro.

Shoot 'Em Up

I should have loved SHOOT 'EM UP. I really should have. I've made relatives sit down for HARD BOILED. I think the BOURNE movies are top notch. Hell, I consider the two TRANSPORTER movies borderline classic cinema.

But I merely liked it. I suppose that's ok.

SHOOT 'EM UP stars Clive Owen as Bugs Bunny and Paul Giamatti as Elmer Fudd. Or is it Clive Owen as Roadrunner and Paul Giamatti as Wile E. Coyote? Owen as Tom and Giamatti as Jerry? Whichever, these two cartoon characters chase and get chased across a breathless 86 minutes filled with more gunfire, 'splosions, and chases than you can drop an anvil on. It's fun, or at least it starts fun, but it grows tiresome as the body count rises and it nihilistic tone comes to grate on the nerves. By the time this bulletfest turns into an anti-gun screed (talk about trying to have your cake and eat it, too), I'd had enough.

Paul Giamatti, the reason why I saw this movie, is delightfully, insanely evil. I can imagine the actor cackling and rubbing his hands together while reading this script for the first time. He's balanced against Clive Owen, an actor I've liked only in those BMW short films. People keep telling me that Owen is the Next Big Thing, but I don't get it. He just seems dour and angry, and if I want dour and angry I'll just look up an old girlfriend. Further, SHOOT 'EM UP wastes the magnificent Monica Belluci in a role that makes me wonder why she accepted it.

Yes, some of the stunts are spectacular. There's a skydiving setpiece that's simply breathtaking. There's some of the most creative gunplay I've seen since EL MARIACHI. But there's very little to leaven it. In addition to its action, SHOOT 'EM UP makes us sit through an hour and a half of human despair and degradation.

And that, I can live without.

300

Every now and then, the chance to see a movie in a theater drops into my lap. When those chances come around, I try to see pictures that I know just won't be the same when viewed on a laptop.

This weekend, I had just such an opportunity, and I used it to see 300. As far as tellings of the tale of the Battle of Thermopylae go, it's worse than Gates of Fire and better than the Frank Miller comic book 300, which it brings to life. I haven't gotten that far in my Herodotus just yet - give me time. As far as movies go, 300 is extraordinary.

300's stylized world, created almost entirely on a TRS-80 (or so I'm told), manages to both immerse and dazzle us. It takes us to a heightened reality, invites us to believe it, and rewards us for so doing with spectacle and audacity. I bought Gerard Butler's Leonidas, Rodrigo Santoro's Xerxes, and all the rest of the grunts and and monsters. I forgave the Spartans their convenient (and action packed!) deviations from their own military doctrine and I was willing to overlook the fact that steroids were not available in ancient Greece. I dug the look, I dug the story, and I dug the imagination.

I'm glad I saw this one on the big screen.