The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games is a ridiculous film made plausible through its singularity of vision and the brilliant casting of Jennifer Lawrence, an actress who is rocketing her way toward Can Do No Wrong (CDNW) status.

The film is a take on the conceit of Battle Royale, which was a take on The Most Dangerous Game.  In The Most Dangerous Game and all the films that copy it, people are the quarry for hunters either rich or alien, which is basically the same thing as far as the films are concerned.  In Battle Royale, contemporary Japanese high school kids are trapped on an island and must hunt one another until only one remains.  In The Hunger Games, a random selection of teenagers from the provinces of a dystopian future America are forced to fight for survival amongst themselves in a high-tech dome that happens to replicate our heroine’s home environment of Appalachia.

By backing off from Battle Royale’s unflinching brutality, The Hunger Games allows the audience to maintain a kind of distance.  We know that kids are killing kids, but Battle Royale puts the horror front and center through grisly, unsettling practical effects.  The Hunger Games, on the other hand, shows us enough to get the point across while keeping enough back to maintain its tone as a grim adventure, vice nightmare-inducing horror show.  Further, The Hunger Games creates distance through its setting in a ridiculous future, one in which the ruling class prances about in laughable costumes and makeup that we barely accept only because its members are portrayed by gifted professionals such as Stanley Tucci and Elizabeth Banks. 

It keeps the distance in check through its conviction.  The film never winks at the audience, it builds and maintains its world consistently, and it shines in the casting of its star, Jennifer Lawrence.  Lawrence, who broke out in the magnificent independent film Winter’s Bone and showed that she could hold her own with performers like Kevin Bacon and Michael Fassbender in the tentpole X-Men: First Class, brings an earthy realism and courage to her role as Katniss Everdeen, a young woman who volunteers to compete in the eponymous games in place of her younger sister.  She comes across as smart and resourceful and completely engaged, and she takes us along with her because if she buys in, why shouldn’t we?

The result is a successful film, one that creates a consistent world, populates it with interesting people, and makes us care about what happens to them.  I understand that The Hunger Games is to be the first of a franchise.  I look forward to the further adventures of Katniss Everdeen.  This film made me believe in her.   

21 Jump Street & The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

21 JUMP STREET

Funny, exciting, and kinda sweet, 21 Jump Street is my biggest surprise of the summer.  The story’s nicely constructed and does a fine job of walking the line between schmaltzy and savvy.  Jonah Hill does a fine job, co-star Channing Tatum reveals a surprising gift for comedy, and the Third Act peril and action beats don’t overwhelm the generally light tone.

THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is basically BBC porn.  It puts together beloved actors from the British drama scene, gives them arcs that reward our love for them, and pays it all off with a tear-jerking finale that sends us out the door with smiles on our faces.

I mean, look: we’re talking about a feel-good movie starring Bill Nighy, Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Maggie Smith, Penelope Wilton, etc, plus Dev Patel as the eponymous hotel’s part-owner and manager.  These are all people we’re happy to spend time with for an hour and a half, and they’re happy to make us laugh, cry, and feel like we’re getting our money’s worth.  I know I did.

Three Noirs

Odds Against Tomorrow is a heist movie, a noir movie, and a racial parable all wrapped up in one.  Ed Begley is the disgraced former NYPD detective.  Robert Ryan is the hard-bitten ex-con who’d prefer to stay clean, but doesn’t mind a little dirt.  Harry Belafonte is the degenerate gambler who owes a lot of money to some very bad people.

Begley works out the score and recruits his accomplices, but there’s a problem: yan is a vocal racist and won’t trust Belafonte.  How will they work together when things inevitably veer off plan?

It’s a great premise, but it suffers in execution.  The film spends all but the last fifteen minutes setting up the characters and heist, but this leaves very little time for nuance when things go wrong.  I’d have appreciated more time in the crime, more reversals and counter-reversals.  As it was, I could see right off how things were going to go, and after that it was just waiting for the gears to turn.  I wanted to love Odds Against Tomorrow, but I found myself spending most of the film wishing it’d hurry up and the last few minutes wishing it would slow down.  Ah, well.

...

In Crime Wave, Gene Nelson is an ex-con trying to stay clean.  Ted de Corsia and a young Charles Bronson (as Charles Buchinsky) are escaped cons looking for a hideout and a big score.  Sterling Hayden is the police lieutenant out to get them all.  This is film noir, so there’s no telling what’s going to happen.

While Crime Wave counts as minor noir (Definition: anything I haven’t heard of before a friend turns me on to it), it’s successful.  Filmed almost entirely on location in ‘50s Los Angeles, it takes us to a place we can never (re)visit and makes us feel at home.  It gives us menacing villains, conflicted, heroes, and hard-boiled cops, and it puts them in a story with enough tension and surprise to keep us on edge and delight us to the end.

Crime Wave is a B-side to films like The Maltese Falcon and Out of the Past, but it’s a solid B-side.  If you have a hankering for a new noir, Crime Wave will scratch the itch nicely.

...

Decoy comes as part of a double bill on the same DVD as Crime Wave.  Unlike Crime Wave, which is tense and rewarding, Decoy is dull.

Here’s the deal: some guy in a suit shoots a dame.  Why?  Hey, why not?  It’s ‘50s: everybody wears a suit.  The film goes on to tell us why he shot the dame, but we don’t really care.  Why not?  Because we don’t care about the dame.  Sure, she’s good-looking enough, but she lacks that star quality, that indefinable something that makes us wonder what she’s thinking and what she’s going to think about next, that the part requires.

Sure, there’s another hard-boiled cop (Sheldon Leonard, hamming it up), an innocent, a devilish plot, and perhaps the most fatale femme in the history of the genre.  But the cop’s a jerk, the innocent is a terrible actor, the plot is simplistic, and the femme makes you wonder if she got the part by sleeping with somebody (right up ‘til you learn that she was married to the director).

Ultimately, Decoy just isn’t very good, and that’s too bad.  I was all set to like it.

Yankee Doodle Dandy

Yankee Doodle Dandy is one of the best movies ever made.  Not greatest, mind you: as far as I know, it didn’t do much to change or advance the medium of film.  But it’s one of the best because it’s so energetic, so ebullient, so flag-wavingly patriotic, and so much fun that you can’t help but love it.

James Cagney plays George M. Cohan, a man who grew up performing with his family in vaudeville.  As he matured, he developed into a pillar of the Broadway scene.  He wrote, produced, and starred in hit after hit, and he penned canonical American music such as “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and “Over There.”  As the film tells it, he was also a swell guy.

This is a musical biography long on production numbers and Horatio Alger allusions, and it works due to Cagney’s effervescence.  And here’s the amazing thing: prior to this film, Cagney had been known as a ‘tough guy’ actor, with hits such as The Roaring Twenties and Angels with Dirty Faces.  When he sang and danced and mugged his way across the screen, audiences were as amazed as we would be if Jason Statham revealed that he’s been studying tap for the last twenty years and has the moves to prove it.  The film won Cagney an Academy Award for Best Actor and, though he went on to play tough guys once more in classics like White Heat, it changed Hollywood’s view of him forever.

But that’s neither here nor there.  For us, Yankee Doodle Dandy offers a delightful story, characters we can get behind, and production numbers we can remember for years to come.  As an added bonus, it has such a great ending that it motivates us to be better than ourselves.

This is a wonderful film.  If you haven’t, you owe it to yourself to see Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Red Tails

Red Tails tells the combat story of the 332^nd Fighter Group, an Army Air Corps unit notable for the fact that its pilots were graduates of the Tuskegee Airmen program.  It was an all-black unit assigned, initially, to undemanding flying well back from the fight in the European theater.  The film dramatizes their commanding officer’s fight to get them in the war, and it lauds their remarkable success once he succeeded.  It’s a great story and one worth reading.  Unfortunately, Red Tails isn’t a particularly good film.

Even though Red Tails looks professional and its air combat sequences are sure to thrill anyone with an interest in that sort of thing, the film simply can’t overcome its leaden screenplay and one-note performances.  Its villains, American and German, are ridiculous stereotypes who induce more groans than fist-shaking.  Its heroes end the film no more heroic than they began it.  Everyone speaks dialogue so clunky that we spend half the running time wondering how much better the film could have been with a first-class screenwriter.  Nobody changes, nobody grows.  A bunch of stuff happens to a bunch of good guys.  At the end of the film, they’re just a bunch of good guys who went through a lot of stuff.

This is a shame, really, because Red Tails is such a labor of love.  Producer George Lucas worked for years to get this film made, finally fronting his own money to pay for its production and distribution.  Some shots in the film are direct recreations of archive photos of the 332^nd.  This film clearly worships them men it depicts but, by presenting them so unidimensionally, it short-serves them.

I wanted to like Red Tails.  I’ll probably show it to my boys and I hope they love it.  But its characters aren’t rich enough, its story not complex enough to do justice to the real-life heroes it lionizes.  Too bad.

Cell 211

Cell 211 is a Spanish thriller about a young man in an impossible situation.  Though unpredictable, it’s also a movie that makes sense.  Nothing happens without a reason, decisions flow from prior decisions, and characters behave consistently with their backgrounds and circumstances.  It’s a tense film, one that kept me engaged and trying to outthink it throughout its running time.  I enjoyed the heck out of it.

Here’s the story: Juan is a young man with a family who is on a tour of a local prison prior to his first day of work there as a guard.  Unexpectedly, he finds himself in the middle of a riot and passes himself off as a new inmate, one assigned to Cell 211.  What follows is an hour and a half of Juan trying to survive, prison authorities trying to find a way to both get him out and end the riot, and the prisoners’ leader weighing how much he can trust the new guy while negotiating an improvement in prison conditions.

The leader is a vicious killer, but he’s smart and adaptable.  Thus, the tension: how long can Juan keep him fooled?  How far is he willing to go to maintain his act?  What’s going to happen next?

Tension mounts without straining our credulity and without resorting to deux ex machinas.  The film has a careful eye for group dynamics on both sides of the bars.  By the end, we’re no longer entirely sure what anyone stands for, and the lines between good and bad have been blurred without resort to treacle or silliness.  And we bite our nails, then bite some more.  Cell 211 isn’t going to change your life.  It isn’t going to move you in the manner of a Kinyarwanda.  But it will grip you and entertain you and leave you shaken.  I'll take that any time.

Kinyarwanda

Kinyarwanda ranks among the best films I’ve seen this year.

This is a film about the Rwandan genocide.  Unlike the fine Hotel Rwanda, which uses the story of one courageous man as a device to explore the horror, Kinyarwanda tells overlapping and intersecting stories about people on all sides of the genocide.  And unlike Crash, Kinyarwanda handles its transitions and reveals with delicacy and grace.  Like Munyurangabo, this is a film that rewards repeat viewing, though it’s so heartbreaking that I understand should anyone wish to forego the experience.

It’s easy to write a page about the failings of a film like John Carter, but it’s hard to write more than a few paragraphs about a film like this.  I can only tell you that it’s perfect and that it moved me.  I can only press it into your hands, implore you to overcome your hesitation if it isn’t “your kind of movie,” and ask you to trust me.  Kinyarwanda is powerful and brilliant and entirely successful in every way.  Trust me.

John Carter

I was all set to give John Carter a fair shot.  I like and respect the previous work of its director, Andrew Stanton, I’m always up for a science fiction adventure, and the love interest is pretty.  For its part, John Carter did its best to wow me.  It had all the elements of an exciting story, it introduced cool creatures and civilizations, and it ended in a rousing battle of good vs. evil.  Unfortunately, the film felt flat.  It put me off right at the beginning, and I never could bring myself to invest in what was happening onscreen.

John Carter begins with two false starts.  They make sense by the time the closing credits roll, but they made me hesitate to commit once the main story got underway.  Once the story does get moving, we’re introduced to the eponymous Carter, realize it’s a year or two after the close of the Civil War, and learn that Carter was a Confederate cavalry officer in that war.  Judging by his conduct toward the U.S. Army officer who wants his help for something, we gather that he has a deep hatred for the Union and the soldiers who fought for it.

Ok, you lost me right there.  The Confederate cause, which they labeled “states’ rights,” was actually the right of states not only to choose to enslave human beings, but to extend the Peculiar Institution to newly chartered states and territories.  Screw anyone and everyone who was on board with that program.  [Personal aside #1: I have children in Florida public schools.  The Ellermann family position on the Civil War does not go over well.]  [Personal aside #2: I can’t wait to leave.]  John Carter didn’t bother to give its protagonist exculpatory dialogue, so I began the story in opposition to him.  When he finds himself on Mars and clapped into chains, I thought, “Serves him right.”

Dominic West, whom everyone who has seen ‘The Wire’ thinks is a great guy, plays the antagonist.  He’s a Martian warlord who’s supposed to be really evil, but is no more evil than any number of other conquerors in history.  Had John Carter allowed him to Rickman it up and have some fun, we might have enjoyed him.  He plays the material straight, however, which made our only grounds for opposition the fact that he meant to unify his planet. 

Unfortunately, I never had a reason to oppose his conquest beyond a general sense of “conquest is bad.”  The “good guy” city-state, led by the great Ciaran Hinds and represented by the remarkably attractive Lynn Collins, didn’t show me why it was better than Westville.  In fact, it was led by a moron and had a princess who was willing to sacrifice untold numbers of her subjects’ lives to avoid marrying someone she didn’t like because “that’s no way to live.”  Sure thing, lady.  Tell it to the widows and orphans of the men you sacrificed on the altar of your quality of life.  The other sentient race we met, which also feared Western domination, was brutish and nasty and could have used a little Baltimore justice.

And away we go, I guess.  John Carter does a fish-out-of water thing when Carter first arrives on the planet, then kicks over to a reluctant hero narrative with space monsters and a princess whose costume design could have used a little more Frazetta and little less drapery.  It has sword fights and laser beams and betrayals and heroics and all the hallmarks of a grand adventure, but I never had a dog in the fight.

I’ve seen Stanton run rings around stories like this in Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and WALL-E. Next time around, here’s hoping he returns to form and gives us heroes we can root for, villains we can love to hate, an adventure we can get into, and some depth of meaning.  Unfortunately, John Carter simply does not deliver.

Tigerland

Tigerland is your mark one, mod zero movie about a rebellious military draftee sticking it to The Man.  Unlike Catch-22, which has something to say about the arbitrary nature of life and death or M*A*S*H, which is laugh-out-loud funny, Tigerland only succeeds in showcasing a petulant jerk and trying to make a hero of him.

Colin Farrell plays the jerk, a Vietnam-era draftee trying his best to fail out of infantry school.  He’s amused to find himself in the middle of a “platoon movie,” complete with earnest writer, redneck sociopath, doo-wop group, reluctant hero, and even good- and bad-guy sergeants (As with most platoon movies, Tigerland is actually about a squad.  Platoons consist of 36 people, squads 12.  36 characters are just too many for most films to handle.). He intentionally misses targets on the range.  He sabotages equipment.  He undermines his unit’s training at every opportunity.  Of course, he’s a natural soldier and a brilliant leader and could save lives in country if only he’d apply himself.  I was supposed to root for him.  Instead, I spent the film thinking, “I’m sure glad we don’t have a draft any more.”

See, the problem with a draft is that it forces a military organization to deal with people who don’t want to be there.  It’s hard enough to train, motivate, and discipline volunteers.  Once you have to waste time corralling troublemakers you can’t simply release for fear of opening a floodgate of calculated insubordination, you can’t get that time back for teaching your people they skills they need to survive and execute your mission.

So I never bought into the movie.  I didn’t accept its “screw the Army” ethos.  I didn’t believe in its characters any more than it did (The Reluctant Hero actually says, “What do you think I am, the Reluctant Hero?” I rolled my eyes.).  I spent more time ruminating on the draft than I did caught up in the narrative.  Tigerland just did not work for me.

Prometheus

I have mixed feelings about Prometheus.  I love its look, its feel, its ambition.  I appreciate its casting of serious, high-quality actors.  However, its screenplay needed a few more passes before it was ready to go into production.

Prometheus weds a big budget to a high concept.  Its sets are magnificent, its world dazzling.  I saw this film in 3-D, mostly because an old friend of mine was one of the camera techs, and the effects were more immersive than distracting.  Add the casting of proven performers like Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Michael Fassbender, and Guy Pearce, and this looks and feels like elite work.  The concept, well, we’re talking about finding the origin of human life on Earth, and the film’s characters have the kind of existential questions director Ridley Scott tackled in his classic Blade Runner: “Where do we come from?  Why are we here?  Why can’t we have more time?”  While we have mixed feelings about the answers the film provides or withholds, we have to credit the production with going after them.

Prometheus gets so many things right that it’s a shame the picture can’t keep our suspension of disbelief alive.  As the audience in a science fiction movie, we walk in willing to believe in technologies that defy the known laws of physics.  We can’t, however, believe in people that don’t act like people or in organisms that can, say, grow without eating.

One of the great things about Ridley Scott’s Alien was that it took things a while to get going.  We go to know the crew of the Nostromo not by having them stand up and recite their bios, but just by following them around for a while.  Once we knew them, we cared about them and believed in their story.  Prometheus gives us an implausible roll call followed by a mission briefing PowerPoint set after the ship has reached its destination, and –bang- we’re into the action.  We in the audience are left thinking, “Really?  These people are just now meeting each other for the first time?  Did they not chat while they were loading their stuff aboard back on Earth?  Oh, and how is it possible that any scientist would sign up for a long, potentially career-derailing, mission without knowing what’s involved?”  So we’re left with thumbnail sketches:  there are Redshirt One, Redshirt Two, Redshirt Three, and Redshirt Four, plus the actors whom we recognize.  Once they’re on Planet Danger, they begin acting in ways that violate even what little we do know about them: the biologist who signed up for a space journey freaks out at the prospect of alien life, then actually tries to pet a scary space-snake.  The geologist runs away from someplace he finds terrifying, only to seek refuge in the exact same place for no real reason.  These examples come right off the top of my head, and the more I think the more I recall.  How can I believe in the plight of these people if I don’t believe they’re people?   (Note: Michael Fassbender’s android character is the most consistent and fully realized of the bunch.  It’s possible that the film’s saying the android is more human than the humans, but that’s the kind of thing you think of later.  While you’re watching the film, you’re thinking, “This doesn’t make sense.”  From there, it’s a short step to “I call BS.”)  And then there’s the funky biology: creatures in this universe appear to have the ability to metabolize thin air.  Humans in this universe can undergo massively invasive abdominal surgery, then run, climb, fight, and singlehandedly rappel fifty feet without tearing open the wound and bleeding out.  And the list goes on.

And that’s the thing about Prometheus.  Those big ideas?  They’re really cool.  That art direction?  That set, costume, and creature design?  Really really cool.  The performances?  The world-class cast acts the heck out of the material, and Michael Fassbender continues his steady march toward Can Do No Wrong status.

But the writing isn’t there.  The characters feel like characters, and the revelations provide more WTH moments than “Oh, wow!” moments.  Prometheus excels at all the “elite filmmaking” stuff, but it stumbles on the fundamentals.  This could have been a great, fascinating, entertaining and wonderful classic that melded the best of Alien and Blade Runner into a rousing, challenging, enriching whole.  Instead, it’s a beautiful failure.  I wanted to love Prometheus.  I was ready to love Prometheus.  I couldn’t love Prometheus.

Gamera: Attack of Legion

Here's another one from my 12-yr-old, Ian:

This movie was a successful sequel to Gamera: Guardian Of The Universe.  Some slight CGI was used, but the monsters were still classic guys in suits or string puppets. Unlike Gamera: Guardian Of The Universe, this movie did not bore me with dialogue, and has a good balance between action and talking.

I liked this movie as much as I liked Gamera vs. Guiron. Godzilla movies without too much dialogue are rare and think Gamera fits into the Godzilla genre. So rent this, grab a soda, and enjoy.

Edward James Olmos Double Feature!

The Green Hornet is one of those movies in which the villain shoots his right-hand man for no good reason, only to have his second-tier henchmen drag the body away and charge into battle.  You've got to wonder how that works.  I mean, let's say you're a henchman.  You're talking to your headhunter and weighing competing offers from Hank Scorpio and the villain from this movie.  Scorpio offers a free dental plan and contributes to your 401(k).  This guy offers you a speedy climb up the ladder, followed by a quick and violent death if you happen to catch him on a bad day.  I don't know about you, but I'm going with Scorpio.

The worst thing about this villain is that we've seen so many like him.  Yes, The Green Hornet is an action-comedy, so he's made silly (and Christoph Waltz sells the material), but he's just lazily written, as are the other villains, the heroes, and even Edward James Olmos as Gravitas Guy.  In fact, the whole thing feels lazy and shambling, including the car chases and the ‘splosions.  I did enjoy how The Green Hornet paints its star as an unrelenting doofus and his sidekick, Kato, as the bright and competent one, but even that joke got boring after the first fifteen iterations.

Now, Blade Runner, on the other hand: there's a movie.  A sci-fi noir, it offers an intriguing vision of the future, tackles big questions, and creates sufficient ambiguity for thirty years' worth of conversations.

Blade Runner takes place in Los Angeles, 2019 (!).  It's January or February because it's raining, it gets dark early, and its characters can get away with wearing trench coats when they want to look cool.  In this future, short-lived artificial humans known as "replicants" serve as slave labor in the offworld colonies.  Sometimes, they escape and make their way back to Earth.  Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckard, the titular Blade Runner.  His job is to hunt down runaway replicants and kill them.  Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) is a replicant, but he's stronger, faster, smarter than most.  He's angry because he feels that he was created only to suffer and die.  He wants to face his Creator.  He wants to beg for more years.  He wants to know why he was made.  He wants to lash out.

Even with the unavoidable anachronisms of an older science-fiction property, Blade Runner's world looks and feels futuristic enough to entice the imagination.  There might be slavery on the offworld colonies, but at least there are offworld colonies.  The clothes look different from contemporary fashion, yet they still look like clothes actual people might wear.  Best of all (and like Scott's classic Alien), we can imagine actually living in this world.  We can imagine what it smells like, sounds like. Yes, Blade Runner has flying cars.  But they make sense, and they belong.  [Note: here's a neat little appreciation for Blade Runner's F/X work from Popular Mechanics.]  

The best science fiction, of course, is philosophy or social criticism made up to look like a genre tale.  Blade Runner is more the former, and how.  It's an existential shout at God, asking, "Why am I here?  Why is life so short?  Why do we suffer?"  It mourns the idea of death.  Read Roy Batty's dying words:  "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."  Who hasn't despaired in the face of the transience of beauty, of the fleeting nature of joy?  'Of course there's an afterlife,' we tell ourselves.  'Otherwise, all of this would go to waste.'  But if there isn't, oh, oh.

Of course, I'm a guy who welcomes seeing a film as an invitation to explore 2500 years of Western philosophical tradition; but I get that I'm in the minority.  Blade Runner also offers something for people who just like a good mystery.  First, there's the mystery that drives the plot as we're actually sitting in the chair: who are the replicants, where are they, and what do they want?  For coffee afterward, the film leaves open the question of Deckard's identity.  He might be a replicant.  His memories, his history might be implanted.  This ambiguity is baked into the film: Ford says he thought Deckard was human, while director Ridley Scott thought otherwise.  On a related note, what does the Edward James Olmos character know, what does he think about it, and what will he do?  This is chewy, fun stuff: the kind of material that's fuelled many a late-night bull session over the years.

To sum up, Blade Runner is a classic, a masterpiece.  Even if Ridley Scott hadn't made Alien or Thelma and Louise or Black Hawk Down, we'd know his name for this film alone.  Even if you've seen it, even if you love it, it'll be worth your time to see it again.

The Innkeepers

Fun, suspenseful, and genuinely scary, The Innkeepers is a great time at the movies.


Here’s the story.  It’s the last weekend for The Yankee Pedlar Inn before it closes and gets razed for a parking lot.  The Inn, established in 1891, has been around long enough to generate at least one good ghostly legend, and employees Sara Paxton and Pat Healy mean to get to the bottom of it before they shutter the place.


That’s  a fine premise for a “haunted hotel” picture.  Now, it’s all about the execution.  The Innkeepers executes well by creating an appropriate atmosphere, putting interesting characters in the middle of it, generating suspense, and delivering on the big scares.  The Yankee Pedlar actually exists (and it’s still in business – here’s its web site), and it’s everything one could want in an old hotel: quirky, lived-in, and comforting in one light while sinister in another.


Paxton and Healy are relatable and interesting.  They’re kinda aimless, kinda dorky, and not very bright; but they have an awkwardly sweet dynamic that plays well against the horror to come.  The tension begins to turn when that sweet dynamic starts to stress under the duo’s mounting fear, even as we wonder whether they’re witnessing an
actual haunting or just psyching themselves out.  It grows as we come down on one side or the other and realize that either conclusion is equally rich with possibility.  It hammers down in the best ways when they explore the basement or try to make contact or go after a mysterious guest.  And when the time comes for the big scares, man, they’re big and graphic and scary and earned, because the movie took the time to build up to them.


So it works.  It all works.  The Innkeepers is as fine a modern ghost story as you’re going to find, and I dare you to try and go right to sleep just after switching it off.  As for me, I wish I hadn’t seen it in a hotel.

Gamera: Guardian of the Universe

Here's another one from Ian:

Ever wonder why it is called “Gamera Guardian Of The Universe”?  It’s not as if he’s guarding the universe. He’s only guarding Earth, which is just one planet. Sheesh.

 Gamera came out at the same time as Godzilla Vs. Destroyah. In this movie, Gamera fights gyaos, the only monster to appear in more than 1 Gamera movie, not counting Gamera. Gyaos might not be as powerful as Destroyah, but he still packs a punch. He can fire a yellow beam from his mouth, which never fails to make Gamera bleed his greenish-blue blood. Things blow up, and monsters fight.

Even though the talking scenes are boring, this is one of those rare instances where you should watch all that talking. They could be saying something important that you will need to remember in later Gamera movies.

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus

Here's another review from my 12-yr-old son, Ian, whom I suspect will take over this blog before I know it.

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus was a good movie, but it had too much talking.

When will I ever learn to skip through the talking scenes? Godzilla and Megaguirus do some fighting and things blow up. What more could you want? Well there’s nothing more I want, I just want less of something. The talking!

This movie was fun to watch, so you should see it. The female main character was kind of a jerk, but not that much. 

Haywire

Haywire stars MMA & Muay Thai champion Gina Carano as a spy-for-hire who finds herself trapped in an espionage thriller made by people who appear to have no love for the genre.

We’ve all seen plenty of action thrillers headlined by women who look like they couldn’t hurt a fly.  I like waif-fu as much as the next guy, but let’s face it: force equals mass times acceleration.  I had a great time watching wafer-thin Zoe Saldana beat up grown men in Colombiana, for instance, but at no time did I believe her punches would actually hurt.  Gina Carano, on the other hand, is no waif: she looks like she knows her way around a steak dinner, she moves like the trained and experienced fighter she is, and I didn’t have to forcibly suspend my disbelief to accept her besting her foes.

Problem is, she’s a terrible actress.  Director Steven Soderbergh puts her onscreen with people like Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, and Michael Fassbender, and she comes across as wooden and overmatched.  I believed her when she was in action, but I couldn’t believe her when she was setting up the situations and motivations that put her in action.

And the action itself?  It isn’t much fun.  In fact, it feels like it was made by people who felt they were slumming.  The music just sits there, the fights are poorly edited, the double and triple crosses carry no heft, and the production has no sense of joy.  Compare Haywire with, say, Tai Chi Master.  Tai Chi Master is standard wuxia fare, but it’s made by people who love wuxia.  There’s an exuberance in the stunt work, the music, the performances, the editing, that you just won’t find in Haywire.

Look, I like action pictures.  I enjoy good fight choreography, I like fireballs as much as the next guy, and I’m a sucker for a good chase scene.  But you’ve got to meet me half way.  You’ve got to cast a lead who can act.  You’ve got to give your picture a sense of urgency and propulsion.  You’ve got to love the genre.  Haywire doesn’t, so I’m marking it down as one of Soderbergh’s failures.

The Mill and the Cross

I’ve never seen anything quite like The Mill and the Cross.  The film, a Polish production, takes us inside Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Way to Calvary (pictured, above), painted during the runup to the Revolt of the Spanish Netherlands.  Not only does it take us inside the painting, an already awe inspiring undertaking; it takes us inside Bruegel’s creative process, showing us his milieu and his sketches and his ideas and his vision for this masterpiece.

It does so while casting aside the constraints of narrative film.  There’s a general flow to the picture, but it feels more like a series of tableaux vivants.  In many sections, the painting comes to life with actors, extras, and animals doing their best to stay in position.  In others, the film gives us movement and dialogue that feels painterly, with a painter’s attention to compositions of light, shadow, drapery, and overall composition.  I’m no expert on Dutch painting – like most people with liberal educations, I have only a general knowledge of the “greatest hits” – but I felt like I was walking through a gallery, soaking in the very best of the art form.

Filmmaker Lech Majewski worked with International Herald Tribune art critic Michael Francis Gibson (author of a detailed analysis of the painting entitled, shockingly, The Mill and the Cross (2001, Aucatloss, Lausanne)) to build a film around and in this work.  He cast Rutger as Breugel, Michael York as his patron, and Charlotte Rampling as both the peasant mother of a Flemish youth tortured and killed by Spanish-paid mercenaries and Mary, Mother of God.  They’re fine.  They’re just right.  But Rampling, oh, she’s everything the devastated Mary should be.  With her stately beauty and her sad, sad eyes, she creates a gaze that takes in not just her own heartbreak, but the heartbreaking panoply of human cruelty through time. 

So, what is The Mill and the Cross?  What is it, really?  It’s an illumination, a meditation.  It’s one art form exploring another, to the enrichment of both.  It is, quite simply, amazing.  You haven’t seen anything quite like it.

Destroy All Planets

Here's a review from my 12 year old son, Ian:

Destroy All Planets was a fine movie, just fast forward through the talking. There aren’t any important plot details you need to know, just watch the fighting. There’s quite a bit of stock footage, but you should watch it. It’s stock footage of monster battles, so it’s worth watching. I watched all of it and I regretted it. The talking was a waste of time. Gamera fights an alien monster who resembles a squid. Viras is the name of the alien and his main attack is to form a sharp point with the three tentacles upon his head and jump forward, stabbing Gamera, thus making Gamera bleed a large amount of bluish-green blood.

This was not as good as Attack of the Monsters(Gamera vs Guiron), but was better than War of the Monsters (Gamera vs Barugon).

The Avengers

I suspect that The Avengers is pretty much the best movie about The Avengers that it’s possible to make.  Consider this:

·      There are several Avengers, all of whom we should care about.

·      They need something to avenge, something that we in the audience feel needs avenging.  The audience needs to cry.  Then, it needs to get mad.

·      People liked Iron Man more than they liked The Hulk.  Message: make ‘em laugh; don’t make ‘em think.

·      Lots of stuff had better blow up real good.

Now, consider the following:

·      Joss Whedon is really, really good at screenwriting and directing.  His resume demonstrates an ablity to craft fully realized worlds, populate them with diverse and engaging characters, and give those characters interesting (and funny) things to say.

·      He’s not afraid to blow stuff up real good.

So, Item One: so many Avengers, so little time.  Whedon addresses this by taking characters who had been in bad movies (Captain America, Thor, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2) and cutting those film’s weaknesses.  Consequently, he capitalizes on their strengths.  Here’s a rundown:

Robert Downey, Jr.’s comic timing is Iron Man’s whole appeal.  Too much of it, however, and you want him to just shut up already.  The Avengers uses him enough to satisfy the audience’s thirst for its favorite player, but not so much that they hope for Sam Rockwell to show up and give ‘em a break.

Thor’s problem was that the whole movie was about two things: Thor’s magical transformation from dick to hero through the power of Natalie Portman’s smile, and Loki’s descent from someone who, reasonably enough, doesn’t like the dickish Thor to full-blown villain.  Here, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor begins the film understanding justice and humility while Tom Hiddleston’s Loki radiates gleeful malevolence.  Now, I’ve got a good guy I can root for and a bad guy I can boo. 

Edward Norton is a brilliant actor, no doubt about it.  But his Bruce Banner was just plain boring.  Eric Bana’s version, on the other hand, was masterful; but everybody (except for me) hated that movie.  Whedon’s solution?  Assume his audience already knows Banner’s back story and give us a whole new guy to play the character.  Mark Ruffalo plays Banner not as a rope about to snap, but as a decent guy with issues – a guy who can tell a joke.  We sympathized with Norton and Bana, but we like Ruffalo.

Captain America suffered from being just another origin story.  Its villains, extra-evil Nazis calling themselves Hydra, were an insult to every self-respecting actual evil Nazi still hiding out in Argentina.  I mean, c’mon!  How do you top real, historic Nazis for evil?  And Illinois Nazis don’t count.  Further, if you’re Captain America and you’ve already beaten the Nazis, where are you going to go next?  That’s why Loki’s the perfect foil: he’s the villain of Norse mythology, one of the touchstones of German National Socialism.  Further, Whedon leverages the fact that Chris Evans’s Captain America is an actual Army captain, schooled in small unit tactics and experienced in leading capable people under stressful conditions.  Throw in some fish-out-water material (he had to get the character to 2012 somehow), and you are maximizing the potential of this character.

There are other Avengers, like Scarlett Johansson, whom we like because she’s Scarlett Johansson, and Jeremy Renner, whom we like because we remember The Hurt Locker.  And you know what?  It all works.  Whedon takes the best, most entertaining aspects of his characters, cuts the fat, and gives us concurrent arcs in which we can believe.  Success!

Item Two:  Whedon does give them something to avenge, and it works on a personal level.  This isn’t, “Hey, you wiped out a Dunkin’ Donuts, and now we’re really mad.”  It’s, “You have gone too far, and this shall not stand.”  Going in to the details would spoil the film, I think.  But I’m comfortable telling you that Whedon surprised me, saddened me, angered me, and made me hungry for revenge.

Item Three:  The Avengers is funny.  I laughed out loud more often than I did at Bridesmaids.

Item Four:  Lots of stuff does, in fact, blow up real good.

So, there’s all that.  There’s plenty that didn’t work for me, as well.  The “Let’s fight before we team up” stage went on a little long.  I’m convinced that Tony Stark’s true nature is that of an amusingly selfish jerk, sentencing us to film after film in which he learns to not be such a jerk, only so that he can forget those lessons in time for the next outing.  I never have been able to get past the fact that a hovering aircraft carrier is a profoundly stupid idea.  But that’s ok.  By taking the best of the films that preceded it, The Avengers crafts an exciting, spectacular, fun time at the movies.

Movies like this are what popcorn is made for.  Or shawarma.  Whatever.