Doctor Who: The Movie

Doctor Who is a British science fiction series about The Doctor (that’s his name), an alien who travels through time and space, rights wrongs, meets famous people, and has amazing adventures.  The show originally ran from 1963 to 1989, went off the air due to slipping ratings, and resumed in 2005.  It airs on BBC America and has become an unqualified, global hit.

In 1996, however, the show was basically dead.  But The Doctor is hard to kill, and thanks to an expatriate British tv producer in the US, it got a chance to relaunch in America.  Fox and the BBC teamed up to make a tv movie that could serve as a backdoor pilot, but Doctor Who: The Movie aired against the final show of the popular sitcom Roseanne.  It got crushed. 

Ok, enough history.  Is Doctor Who: The Movie any good?  Not really, no.  Eric Roberts, as the villainous Master, is all over the place – menacing one moment and campy the next.  Daphne Ashbrook and Yee Jee Tso, as the love interest and potential sidekick, respectively, don’t have enough charisma to keep up with Paul McGann as the Doctor.  The production’s too cheap to hold up, but not cheap enough to earn it a “good enough for tv” pass.

Now, on to the more important question: is it any good if you’re a fan of Doctor Who?  Sure.  The film stays in continuity with the old BBC tv series and is part of the continuity of the current iteration of ­Doctor Who, so it has plenty to offer those who keep up with such things.  McGann makes for a fine Doctor, the show strikes a decent balance between danger and whimsy, and the whole thing rocks along pleasantly for an hour and a half or so.

If you’re interested in checking out Doctor Who, don’t begin with Doctor Who: The Movie.  Instead, see the new-series episode “Silence in the Library,” available on Netflix streaming.  It’s as good as the show gets, and it just may hook you.  If you’re already hooked, Doctor Who: The Movie will fill in a gap and help scratch the itch until the next new episode.  It worked for me.

Megamind

Megamind is laugh-out-loud funny.

Here in the second paragraph, I usually describe the movie’s first act to give you a taste of what you’re in for.  You don’t the need that for Megamind.  Just know that it’s a cartoon about supervillain who’s not such a bad guy, once you get to know him.

This film looks great, with bright and colorful animation.  The story’s simple enough for toddlers, yet smart enough for parents.  The comedy balances slapstick and character-based humor to give everyone something to laugh at.  And the action sequences, well, they’re fantastic. 

I watched Megamind with my family (ages 2 - 43), and we all enjoyed it.  We laughed out loud, we got swept up in the characters, and we look forward to seeing it again.  Megamind is a winner.

The Lincoln Lawyer

In The Lincoln Lawyer, Matthew McConaughey plays a (mostly) shirt-wearing defense attorney of what we’d call the worst kind.  He rips off his clients, finds ways to get scumbags off the hook, and makes a lot of money.  This guy thinks he’s got it all figured out, until he takes a murder case with unexpected wrinkles.  Away we go.

I know what you’re thinking.  “Sounds like a disposable dime-store thriller.”  I won’t argue with you: The Lincoln Lawyer is a dime-store thriller.  Thing is, it’s a really good dime-store thriller.  The hero seems like a scumbag, but reveals hidden quality.  Marisa Tomei plays the love interest and, well, she’s Marisa Tomei.  The villain’s villainous, the plot twists and twists again, and at one point I genuinely couldn’t imagine how McConaughey was going to get out of his jam.  This film entertained and surprised me, and it wrapped up in a most satisfying way.  The Lincoln Lawyer shows what happens when a thriller’s done right.  I hope they make a sequel.

Cedar Rapids

In Cedar Rapids, Ed Helms plays what’s quickly becoming the Ed Helms character: a nerdy, uptight good guy who falls in with a bad crowd.  Hijinks ensue.  Valuable Life Lessons get learned.  Roll the credits.

Fine, fine.  The fish out of water is a comedic archetype for a reason: it often works.  Does it work here?  Well, ask yourself this question: do you find the concept of a guy who lives in Brown Valley, Wisconsin and works for Brown Star Insurance amusing?  If so, Cedar Rapids is for you.

Me, well, I didn’t laugh at that or any other joke in the movie.  It wasn’t that Ed Helms is a poor comedic actor or that the story didn’t flow.  It’s just that the jokes didn’t work for me.  I found Cedar Rapids to be genial company on a long flight in coach, but that was all.

Restrepo

Restrepo, a documentary about a year in the life of the soldiers manning Fire Base Restrepo in Afghanistan’s Khogal Valley, is phenomenal.  Expertly photographed and taughtly edited, it puts us right there in a valley that defines remote and isolated, and it helps us understand just what it is that we ask our young people to do when they don our country’s uniform and ship off to war.

Here’s the deal: National Geographic Channel made a deal with the U.S. Army to send a documentary team along with NAME OF UNIT on its # OF MONTHS deployment to Afghanistan.  The documentarians captured the daily lives of the soldiers at the firebase – their routines, their hijinks, their near-daily fighting with the Taliban enemy who controlled the valley before their arrival.  They also captured the unit on patrol -  cameramen Tim Heatherington and Sebastian Junger didn’t stay behind the wire – doing everything from trying to bond with the locals to fighting its way out of an ambush.

The effect?  We see these soldiers as real people, brave and afraid and risking their lives for an objective of questionable value.  This isn’t a movie about bugles and drums and soaring eagles.  It’s a movie about soldiers, low paid but well led, doing their best.  Restrepo is worth your time.

The Chaser

The Chaser is as good as thrillers get.

Here’s the setup: Joong-ho Eom is an ex-cop and a pimp.  He loans his women large sums of money; they work it off.  He’s running a good racket, but then his workers start disappearing.  He figures they’re running or being sold.  When he pressures one of his women to go out on a call and she disappears, he gives chase while the trail's still hot.

He’s about to find out that his women aren't running, but falling victim to a killer who’s even more evil than he.  He’s about to find out that his women are human beings.  In fact, he’s about to find out that he’s a human being. 

This is a great premise, and the film delivers with a clever structure and fantastic pacing that rockets along all the way through to the denoument.

Star Yun-seok Kim, as Joong-ho, finds a way to invest us in his evil pimp character.  As he navigates a world of well-intentioned but fallible police officers, untrusting and untrustworthy members of Seoul’s underworld, and the simple physical limitations of fatigue and stress, we both hang on his every move and root for his developing conscience.  Yeong-hi Seo as Young-min Jee, the woman whom Joong-ho pressured and whom he's now trying to save, creates a character with a combination of guts, vulnerability, and desperation that gives us a real, edge-of-our seats concern and fear for her well-being.  Finally, Jung-woo Ha, as the killer, delivers a bland insanity that gets under our skin and shocks us when he acts on his (impulses?) (needs?).

The Chaser takes these characters, puts them in a story that shifts among them as it develops, and creates the sense of urgency that comes from the certain knowledge that the clock could run out on anyone at any time.  I won't tell you how or even if it breaks that tension, but I will tell you that it sticks the landing.

If you like thrillers, you owe it to yourself to seek out The Chaser.  Be warned, however: this is a Korean movie, and Korean movies generally don't flinch.  If you're ok with that, stand by.

The Adjustment Bureau

In The Adjustment Bureau, Matt Damon falls for a charming young woman whom he is not supposed to love.  The Adjustment Bureau, the organization that ensures the universe progresses according to plan, gets very concerned.  Queue the running.

Ok, that’s fun.  The film overcomes the problem that nobody can run from God by having Him use the titular Bureau to enforce His will, then saddling it with a bunch of rules to make it inefficient.  This is a story about a guy who tries to exploit those inefficiencies to get his way.  But is it a good story?

It’s good enough.  It’s practically un-American to dislike Matt Damon, and I rooted for him here.  The Divine Enforcement Bureaucracy is a clever idea, and the film works it well.  The love interest is lovable, the story clips along nicely, and I enjoyed the whole thing.

But it’s been a week since I’ve seen it, and it’s already fading in my memory.  The Adjustment Bureau has no deep hooks, no big ideas, nothing to capture the imagination beyond a fun premise and professional execution.  It’s fine, but not fantastic.  How’s that for a lukewarm review?

Hiatus

Hi folks,

I'm in the middle of a move right now.  Thus, I don't have time to keep the blog up to date.  Please feel free to browse around - you may find something that piques your interest.

Ip Man 2

Ip Man 2, while not quite as good as Ip Man (reviewed here), still ranks as a thoroughly successful martial arts picture.

Donnie Yen reprises his role as Ip Man (Ip is his surname, Man his given name.  If he were in the US, he’d call himself Man Ip.).  He and his family are refugees in Hong Kong, their pre-war lives of affluence in mainland Foshun nothing but a memory.  The first film indicated that Ip was a smart businessman, but even a smart businessman needs a little starting capital.  For Ip, that means offering lessons in Wing Chun. 

Soon, Ip’s standing before a gathering of the martial arts masters of Hong Kong, offering to fight any challengers for the right to be called Master.  This is a fantastic sequence, even better than the film’s climactic fight against a cocky English boxer.  It combines comedy (two Masters conferring, “You wanna go first?”  “No, I think you should go first.”) with class and grace, showing us Masters fighting hard, but pulling their punches so as not to do any real damage.  The battles convey a sense of respect and sportsmanship, with Ip bowing to each defeated opponent and telling him, “Thank you for letting me win.”  When Sammo Hung himself, as the Big Boss, takes center stage against our protagonist, the film delivers a real treat.  Hung has always been a big boy – he was the “fat one” during his days at Peking Opera – and it’s a real delight to see a man who’s pushing 250 lbs trading moves with the younger, fitter Yen.

So if Ip Man 2 still has Donnie Yen and even puts fight choreographer and director Sammo Hung in front of the camera, why doesn’t it measure up to Ip Man?  Simply put, the stakes aren’t as high.  In Ip Man, the hero tries to keep his family alive during the Japanese occupation of China.  In Ip Man 2, he’s just another immigrant trying to make it in a new town.  Nobody’s pointing a gun at him.  Further, the fights use more wire work, which is a distraction in the quasi-realistic world Ip Man 2 tries to create.  Combine that with a greater reliance on fast-paced editing in the fight sequences, and we have a film that, rather than the brilliance of its predecessor, merely checks in as very very good.

But hey, I’ll take very very good every time.  Ip Man 2, while not a masterpiece, is still better than most martial arts films on the market.  I’d happily watch it again.

L'illusionnist

The Illusionist is absolutely lovely.

The film concerns an aging French stage magician.  He practices an art that has gone out of vogue in a world that has passed him by.  What happens to him is, well, lovely.

The Illusionist, not to be confused with the very fine Edward Norton movie of the same title, has little dialogue.  It could have been a Chaplin film, with that Chaplinesque combination of comedy and pathos, all told with movement and photography and music.  In this case, however, the film uses a style of animation (it was nominated for Best Animated Feature in 2010) that recalls watercolors.  This gives it a soft and pleasing aesthetic, and it helps evoke a world just a little bit past, just a little bit mysterious.  The film’s music complements its visuals, accentuating and playing with them, giving The Illusionist a life beyond the screen.

My mind keeps coming back to the same word: lovely.  Lovely animation, lovely music, lovely everything.  I love it.

Somewhere

Sofia Coppola is one of the most audacious artists working in film.

Her latest, Somewhere, has the barest hint of a three-act structure.  It doesn’t seem to care where its people go.  Nothing blows up, nobody falls in love, the fate of the world hangs not in the balance.  Basically, Coppola uses it to explore ennui.  It is absolutely fascinating.

In Somewhere, Stephen Dorff plays a movie star who appears to live at the Château Marmont, a swanky hotel in West Hollywood (Fun fact: I used to know a guy who’d been mayor of West Hollywood.  His name was Steve Martin, and he was a lawyer who always had a funny story about some sex-related case he’d worked on.  We called him Steve Martin the Sex Lawyer.).  He has an ex-wife, a daughter, several hangers on, and a brother whose company he enjoys.  He has unlimited access to sex, drugs, and all the accouterments of the high life, and he’s empty inside.  He doesn’t love his work, he isn’t very good at sex, and he’s lost interest in pretty much everything but his daughter.  This is a film about a guy who’s going through the motions.

So what makes Somewhere fascinating?  What makes us care about some lazy rich guy’s ennui?  Coppola’s observational power does it.  When we watch Somewhere, we feel like one of Wim Wenders’s angels, looking on sympathy as this fragile human puts his faith in things and drugs and sensations.  We feel for him as he comes to realize that they are nothing, that the finest food and drink are ashes in his mouth, that he is dead inside.  We hope that he’ll find his way, that he’ll learn that detachment is a wall that doesn’t keep the world away from him, but him away from the world.  We urge him, silently, to engage: to engage the daughter who loves him, to engage the work for which he’s suited, to engage not living, but life.

Perhaps he will.  I don’t know.  But I do know that Coppola brought me into his world, as she has brought me into the worlds of people before him.  She made me care.  She made me engage.  She made me evaluate facets of my own life (he writes, from yet another empty hotel room).  Her steady gaze makes me not just look, but see.  I expectantly wait her next film and the opportunity to see once more.

Blue Valentine

I couldn’t wait for Blue Valentine to end.  The film, composed as a juxtaposition between the blossoming romance of a young couple and the stagger toward divorce of that same couple a few years on, felt too authentic, too sharp.  I felt like I was privy to the bedroom conversations of real people, and I felt like I was sticking my nose in their business.

Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling play the couple in two phases of their lives: young people with poor life management skills and older people with poor communications skills.  As young people, Williams is the kind of woman who chooses the wrong men, and Gosling is the kind of man who can unwittingly destroy the dreams of a smart, ambitious woman.  As older people, they’re a couple who talk past one another, who drink too much, who have become poison.  These were the kind of people I avoided when I was in my twenties, and they’ve grown into the kind of people I avoid in my forties.  I wanted nothing to do with either of them.

Williams and Gosling are very good at playing their roles, but they played people I didn’t want to be around.  I didn’t want to watch them fall in love because, even without the spoiler built into the film’s structure, I knew how things would work out for them.  I didn’t want to watch their relationship fall apart because I felt like that was their personal business and I shouldn’t get involved.

To steal a phrase from the brilliant Les Phillips, I think that Blue Valentine was the best Blue Valentine it could be.  But given the choice, I’d rather not have spent two hours with these people.

Get Carter

You know who’s a bad dude?  Michael Frickin’ Caine is a bad dude.

In 1971’s Get Carter, he’s a thug with the London mob whose his brother up North just died in car wreck after downing a bottle of scotch.  Problem is, his brother didn’t drink scotch.  Carter, played by Caine as a very smart, very evil man, wants answers.

You could go anywhere with that setup, a reality acknowledged by showing Carter reading a Raymond Chandler novel on the northbound train.  Here, the film goes for the slow burn.  Carter doesn’t know what happened to his brother, but he’s willing to us his nose for lies and his comfort with aggression to find out and seek revenge.  Most of the film, consequently, is a detective story with a very bad man as the detective.  As we piece together the circumstances of the mysterious death along with our protagonist, we find ourselves weighing various possibilities, trying to stay ahead of the players, wondering what’ll happen next.

Anchoring all this is, of course, Michael Caine.  He invests us in his self-described villain through the force of his personality and makes us actually care about whether this murdering thug lives or dies.  It’s a remarkable performance, and yet another indication why Caine is one of the finest screen actors of his or any generation.

Though Caine anchors the film, Get Carter is about more than Caine.  It’s about a grimy, bleak, sullenly desperate time and place and the people who live there.  It’s about men and woman who’ll do anything to get what they think they want.  It’s about a fatalistic world-weariness that breathes, “Yeah, mum and dad beat the Nazis.  And I’m stuck here.”  The film’s look and style reflect this attitude, and they make Caine a fish that swims very easily in these murky waters.  Get Carter doesn’t rush to conclusions and it doesn’t care for fast talkers.  It just has Caine, a hard man in a hard part of town looking to punish some hard people.

And when he does, look out.  This is one bad dude.

Kiltro

Kiltro is an Chilean martial arts film starring Marko Zaror, who played the villain in the exceptionally good Undisputed III: Redemption.  It has an elderly dwarf in a Yoda role who is both a martial arts master and sufficiently self aware to tell the hero, “I can’t fight the villain because I’m old.  And I’m a dwarf.”  It has a Ben Kenobi figure who’s a broken down drunk, yet suffers no withdrawals when he repairs to the desert to train Zaror for the big showdown (Complete with an “If you can snatch the pebble from my hand” homage!).  It has a pretty girl whose only function is to be rescued.  It has fanciful sets, a training montage, and henchmen in makeup that’d embarrass Stardust-era Bowie.  It’s terrible.

I know, right?  How can such a film be terrible?  Well, if a martial arts picture is dance movie with fake blood, it requires two things: rousing fight routines and an interesting protagonist to lead us from one routine to the next.  Kiltro has neither.

Kiltro’s fights display some flashes of creativity, such as a “circle” fight (one in which a group of opponents circle a central fighter) that involves more than one opponent attacking at a time.  However, they can’t surmount an amateurish choreography and editing that make the performers look more like enthusiastic stuntmen than martial artists.  This film features no extended takes and, when we do get to see more than one kick or punch strung together, they’re blocked so poorly that we feel we could march an entire high school band through the gap between attacker and defender.

And Kiltro’s protagonist, the aforementioned Marko Zaror?  We’re supposed to see him as a high-kicking Romeo dashing to the rescue of his Juliet, but he comes across as a sullen, hulking stalker with a violent streak.  Kiltro wants us to root for this guy, but I only wanted to put a restraining order on him.  Now, I’ll be more fair here than I was in my Thor review: the character’s whole arc is about his evolution from violent stalker to violent hero.  But I couldn’t root for him at the end of the film, either.  Even after he’d trained in the desert, snatched the pebble, and rescued the girl (Spoiler!), he still came across as kind of a dumb, scary dude.  Zaror just didn’t have it in him to play anything else.

If you’ve read this far, I know that it’ll kill you to pass on a movie featuring a self-aware Chilean Yoda.  But learn from my mistake:  leave Kiltro on the rack, where it belongs.

The Book of Eli

The Book of Eli is a western – a post apocalyptic western, sure, but a western nonetheless.

Denzel Washington plays a Man With No Name who wanders into a dusty Western town in search of water and supplies.  He carries a MacGuffin, and town honcho Gary Oldman wants it. 

Cue the bloodshed.  It’s as if Sergio Leone directed The Road.  Your enjoyment of this film will hinge on your fondness for Washington, Oldman, and bloodshed.  It also helps if you don’t like cats.  I like Washington, Oldman, and bloodshed, as long as the blood is fake; and I don’t like cats.  I walked away a happy guy.  You might, too.

Get Low

Get Low: it looks great, it sounds great, and you aren’t going to find better actors than Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Bill Murray.  Yes, the story’s thin, but you can’t always have it all.

In Get Low, Duvall plays an old hermit who lives in the woods.  He’s the man people fear, the one the kids whisper about around the campfire.  He’s tired of being whispered about, and hires funeral director Bill Murray to hold his funeral while he’s still alive.  He wants to give the townspeople a chance to tell their stories right out loud.  Could this be because Sissy Spacek, a presumed old flame, has returned to town after a long absence?

It’s no spoiler to say that Duvall’s character is more than meets the eye.  We wouldn’t have much of a film, otherwise.  As the drama unspooled, however, I found myself caring more about the actor than the character.  I felt like I was watching a great performer at work, and I dove into the film from that perspective.  In the film’s climax, Duvall gives us both barrels: I still recall this thing he does with voice and hands, and I challenge you not to be blown away.

This isn’t a great film, but it’s worth your time if you’re fond of these actors.  I am, and I walked away happy.

The Shining

There’s so much to love about The Shining that I don’t know where to begin.  This is the scariest ghost story ever put to film.  Its twin girls have become legendary.  “Here’s Johnny” brings Jack Nicholson, not Johnny Carson, to mind.  We remember Scatman Crothers not as a musician, but as a chef.

But there is one thing, one thing about which I hadn’t given much thought to prior to my last screening.  Musically, The Shining is extraordinary.  Yes, we all remember “Symphonie Fantastique” and the opening credits.  But think back to Jack and Danny in the bedroom, when Danny asks his father if he’d ever hurt him.  The music is another voice in the room, not just underlining the dialogue but mimicking, feeding off, building it into something more than two guys talking.  Or think about Wendy and the manuscript and the scampering strings like rats running up and down your spine.

So I wonder: is there a musical commentary track to The Shining out there somewhere?  I’d love to hear Gordon Stainforth, who edited preexisting music to replace the unsuccessful original score, walk me through his choices scene by scene, beat by beat.  His work is masterful, and I’d love to learn more about it.

Now that I think about it, I’m going to do a deep dive on The Shining.  I’m going to read what I can and watch whatever commentaries are out there and sink my teeth into this one.

It’s worth it, because The Shining isn’t just one of the best horror films ever made.  It’s the best, and it’s worth the effort.

Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go is basically Parts: The Clonus Horror, but for chicks.  Is has the same premise as Parts, but it goes for melancholy romance instead of horror thriller.

It would have been better as a horror thriller.

Never Let Me Go, which is about three clones and their love triangle, is supposed to make us cry as they try to find happiness in the face of mortality.  It made me think about how much better it would have been if they’d set out to confront an unnaturally long-lived Peter Graves.  This is a drab, depressing, ultimately dull film, and I wish I had a clone so it could have sat through it instead of me.

Bummer.

The Fighter

Recently, I looked through a buddy’s photos from Afghanistan.  Mark Wahlberg had come to his base to premiere The Fighter, and one of the photos showed the movie star carrying all his own gear out of the back of the C-130 on which he’d flown in.  Wahlberg, apparently, was a great guy: eating with the junior Marines, making time for a word and a photo with all who asked, and generally making his momma proud.

I’m sure Wahlberg went all the way to Afghanistan because it was the right thing to do.  It also worked as a promotional strategy, because I rented The Fighter the day I saw those photos.

It’s a hell of a good movie, but it’s hard to watch.  Wahlberg plays Mickey, a small time boxer in a family devoted to small time boxing.  His older brother Dicky (Christian Bale, phenomenal here) may have knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard once upon a time, but now he’s a pathetic crackhead.  His mother (Melissa Leo, unrecognizable after Frozen River) seems intent on managing him into oblivion.  The rest of the circus that comprises his family doesn’t seem much better.  Then Wahlberg meets Amy Adams (Enchanted, Charlie Wilson’s War), a local bartender and very tough broad who shows him another way.

I know what you’re thinking: “Why would I see this movie?  If I want to spend time with a dysfunctional family, I’ll go home for Christmas.”  See it for the performances.  See it for Mickey, a fighter who must learn to stop worrying about making everybody happy.  See it for Dickey, an ex-fighter who may never learn that it’s impossible to be a cool guy who also smokes a little crack on the side.  See it for their mother, who believes she’s the proud matriarch of a noble clan when, in fact, she’s a 70-year-long train wreck that’s about 2/3 of the way through.

The Fighter works, and it works because of these great performers.  Seeing this movie is like seeing a master class in the art of acting, and I enjoyed it for that alone.  All that, and Mark Wahlberg’s a good guy.  What more do you need?

The Secret in Their Eyes

The Secret in Their Eyes: this is how you make a good movie.

The picture, winner of the 2010 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, weaves the story of a murder investigation with the developing relationship between two of the people working the case.  I know, it sounds like something you’ve seen on screens, large and small, in numbers beyond measure.  But stay with me.

The key to this film lies in the fact that it’s about people who think and feel.  Most films, it seems, are about people who speak and act, and we sometimes wonder if they say or do anything that doesn’t directly advance the plot of their collective story.  The Secret in Their Eyes, by contrast, presents us with complete and plausible human beings.  Yes, they’re complete and plausible human beings involved in an investigation, but in some ways that comes second.

And since we know them and since we care about them and since we believe in them, we buy into this film.  We connect with its people and go along with all its twists and turns, its reveals and surprises, and in the end we’re left with a movie that’s more than good – it’s satisfying, the way spending time with interesting people is satisfying.  This is how you do it right.