Kingsman: Secret Service; Creed; The Judge

Kingsman: The Secret Service

Andrew Ting said it best: Kingsman: The Secret Service is an amusing spy romp with an undertone of unsettling nastiness.  I’m still not sure whether that works for me or not.

Creed

Creed made me lose track of time.  Creed made me cry.  Creed didn’t move me in quite the same way as did the superlative Rocky Balboa, but you can’t blame a good movie for not being a great movie.  I’m ready for Creed II.

The Judge

There’s a scene in The Judge in which protagonist Robert Downey, Jr. tries to make an uncomfortable confession.  “This is going to be rough,” he says to himself.

This one line encapsulates my problem with the film.  At this point, I’ve already been watching for over an hour.  I know what he needs to confess, I know to whom he needs to confess it, and I can guess at the very serious consequences this confession will entail.  And yet, The Judge thinks I’m an idiot so it tells me that yes, this confession will be rough. 

This is just one of many ways The Judge thinks I’m an idiot.  It thinks I’m an idiot because it underlines the film with a score designed to inform me, in very clear terms, when to laugh and when to weep.  It thinks I’m an idiot because it’s compelled to show me, again and again, how unimaginably idyllic Indiana really is.  It thinks I’m an idiot because it expects me to believe that absolutely everyone in its protagonist’s life has been stuck in time, like mosquitos in amber, since the day Downey moved away some thirty years before.  [Interlude]Look.  I come from an idyllic small town.  My wife comes from an idyllic small town.  We each moved away from our respective idyllic small towns roughly thirty years ago.  When we return for the occasional visit, we may run into one or two people who remember us and are happy to see us.  But nobody’s accusing us of having run out, of having turned our backs on our roots.  We’re just nice people who moved away to another idyllic town.  Those old friends are happy to see us and chew the fat for a bit, but they’ve moved on.  That’s how life goes. [/Interlude]  It thinks I’m an idiot because it photographs its heroes in the golden light of hagiography, its villains in the harsh blues of villainy.  Basically, it thinks I’m an idiot.

All of which leads me to inquire: what kind of an idiot reads a script that’s basically My CousinVinny with all the jokes torn out and replaced with heavy handed family dynamics, “coming home”
mythology, and uncomfortable incest subplots, and thinks, “Bingo?”

I’m not sure, but I am sure that I’ll be very careful about investing the time to see said idiots’ next film.  I know they didn’t mean to crash the car, but that doesn’t mean I need to be in a hurry to climb back in.

Interstellar, Dark Shadows, and others

Interstellar

I’m a father who loves his children.  I’m a pilot who spends an enormous amount of time on the road.  I still own the copy of ­Black Holes and Warped Spacetime I ordered from the Science Fiction Book Club in 1982.  Interstellar could not have been more calibrated to my sensibilities if it had been coded to my DNA.

Here’s the setup: Earth is fast becoming uninhabitable.  In the first act, scientist Michael Caine tells hero Matthew McConaghey that his children will be the last generation to live to old age.  The solution?  A journey to another solar system, via wormhole, to find a habitable planet.

That’s a great setup for any number of films.  You could go thriller, horror, hamhanded political screed, religious allegory – you name it.  Interstellar blends aspects of exploration adventure and introspective head trip to create a film that evokes Kubrick’s 2001 while maintaining a sense of desperate tension.  All that, and it provides the best exploration of time dilation in popular science fiction since Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War.  There’s even a snappy android played by Sesame Street’s Mister Noodle.

Really, what more could you ask for?

Dark Shadows

Dark Shadows has all the elements of a solid horror-comedy: a classic vampire, a vampy villain, ghosts, and werewolves.  However, it never quite comes together.  Its hero is a genuine monster, making it hard to root for him.  Its villain has clear motivations that make no sense, its plot is muddled, and its climax says “to heck with it” and departs even from the rules of its own fantasy world.

And on and on and on.

One gets the feeling that some producer decided to exploit his or her rights to a nominally familiar horror franchise, called Tim Burton, and handed him a sack of cash.  Burton did his thing, complete with a real live Corpse Bride, but the movie spent too much time in production and not enough time in the word processor.

Ah, well.

My Fair Lady

My Fair Lady combines a fairly risible story (once you think about it) with one catchy production number after another.

I like catchy production numbers.  I’m still humming “Ascot Opening Day.”  I’ll watch this any time it comes on.

The World’s End

The World’s End is lovely.  While hampered by a rocky first act, the picture gets to swinging once the world actually begins to end.  It’s funny, it’s heartfelt, and it’s a winner.

Much Ado About Nothing

Meh.  There ain’t no Beatrice and Benedick like Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh’s Beatrice and Benedick.

The Heroic Trio

Oh, what an abomination.  Stupidly plotted, poorly choreographed, badly shot, and amateurishly dubbed, The Heroic Trio is a sad waste of the talents of Maggie Cheung, Michelle Yeoh, and Anita Mui.  Give it a pass.

The Dark Knight Rises

I saw The Dark Knight Rises while staying home with a sick child.  Consequently, I saw it in two sessions while my little one slept.  I spent the film’s entire 2.5-hour running time with my finger on the volume control.

The problem, at least with the film’s BluRay release, lies in the sound mixing.  The gunfire and explosions are so loud in comparison with the dialogue that I felt it was giving me a choice between waking my son during the action sequences or understanding the dialogue during the rest.  If you live in an apartment or share space with people who don’t wish their living room to sound like Armageddon, be warned.

On to the movie.  The Dark Knight Rises asks the filmic question: what if the Occupy people get their wish?  Its answer: French Revolution 2.  Despotism.  Kangaroo Courts.  Chaos.  Only the rich, working anonymously and unfettered from the rule of law, can protect the cringing middle class from the depredations of the fickle mob.

I’m not even a hippie, and I could see that message as if it were carefully painted in Sterno on an icy bridge in the middle of the night and set afire because some rich guy thought it would look cool.

Ok, but is the film any good?  Well, it does move along at a speedy clip, the freakishly beautiful Anne Hathaway actually made me forget about Michelle Pfeiffer for a good two hours, the rest of the cast turns in respectable performances in none-too-demanding roles, and lots of stuff blows up real good.  In other words, you get what you paid for.

Just keep your finger on that volume button.

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.

The Dark Knight

I went into THE DARK KNIGHT skeptically, wondering whether the ballyhoo surrounding Ledger's performance was justified or sentimental. It was justified.

The Joker, as written in this film, is a high wire character. The actor who plays him will either fail or succeed spectacularly, and Ledger succeeds. His Joker is terrifying and sad and sickly funny and wholly compelling, the Joker by which other incarnations of the character will be judged. As for Batman and Gordon and Dent and Dawes, well, they're all fine, but the fact is that I can barely remember them. That Joker, though, he gives me the shivers. And not in a good way. From voice to mannerisms to makeup to worldview, he's a complete character, one who espouses chaos while wreaking it through meticulous planning; one whose backstory shifts and morphs with each retelling; one you can't put your finger on, but who stays with you.

Wow, what a performance. What a movie. I look forward to seeing THE DARK KNIGHT again.

Children of Men

Ahh, the Sixties. The dope was great, the people were groovy, the music had a conscience, and everything would have been all right, man, if only the fascist pigs hadn't screwed it all up. CHILDREN OF MEN, supposedly a science fiction movie, is the most backward-looking film I've seen in a long time.

In the world of the future, the conservatives won. They had their wars, they polluted their planet, and they blew it. Now, Mother Nature is exacting her revenge by wiping out the human race through the infertility of its women, and the only thing standing between us and human extinction is a sold-out ex-yippie; an idealistic hippie; and the personification of Earthly fecundity, a pregnant young African woman named, obviously enough, Kee. In the world of the present, the bores won.

What is it about the '60s countercultural movement that so captures the creative imagination of generations too young to remember it? Director Alfonso Cuarón was born in Mexico City in 1961, so he wasn't even around for the really good stuff. Nevertheless, the film's moral center (played by an always-engaging Michael Caine) is a guy for whom time stopped in 1969. He grows his weed, he listens to his Beatles records, and he cares for his invalid wife (crushed under the boot of The Man, of course) in an eco-friendly home that's safely tucked away from the horrors of the outside world. Here's the thing, however: if the movie's set in 2027 and the Caine character is 74 years old, that means that he has dedicated his life to a world that moved along when he was twenty years old. It's as if I decided to dedicate my life to the Reagan '80s and moved my family to a country house where I could revel in supply-side economics and Devo music 'til the end of my days. It's crazy. It doesn't make sense. In the world of CHILDREN OF MEN, it's about the best possible thing a man can do.

Anachronistic ideology aside, CHILDREN OF MEN is a decent chase thriller with the requisite twists and set pieces. Though it criminally misuses Chiwetel Ejiofor in the Sean Bean role and its denoument clunks like the shed chains of the Liberated, it does have some magnficent bits and it does move along. Now if we could just get a science fiction movie set in the future.