Recently Seen

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days continues in the successful vein of the very good Diary of a Wimpy Kid.  Greg Heffley continues to try to make a go of adolescent life, though he struggles with concepts like honesty and selflessness that seem, to him, to come naturally to everyone else.  His is the struggle of ego and id translated for the pre-teen set.  Oh, and this is very important: made laugh-out-loud funny.

Microcosmos delivers a mesmerizing documentary about icky bugs.  Showing life on their scale with no narration and a wonderful score, the film just us the majesty of an animal kingdom right beneath our feet.  At least, it tries to.  While I admired the effort, I just couldn't get past the fact that bugs are icky.

The Crimson Rivers gives us Jean Reno and Vincent Cassel in a buddy cop murder mystery.  Reno's the famous detective brought in from Paris to solve a particularly gruesome murder, which Cassel's the impetuous young chief from a nearby ville.  Can this mismatched pair catch the killer and, perhaps, become friends?  Well, naturally, but it's the execution that matters.  Reno and Cassel are both fun to watch, there are some well-done fistfights, and I didn't see the twist coming.

Coriolanus

You don't see Coriolanus at many Shakespeare repertory theaters. It's a tough play about a hard man, the fickle masses, and one woman's insatiable drive for glory in a culture that will allow her to achieve it only through the men she controls.

Caius Martius is a patrician and a General of the Roman Republic. At home in the (relative) meritocracy of the Roman Army and a formidable battler, he wins a great victory over the hated Volscians at the Battle of Coriolae. Lauded in Rome and awarded the honorific "Coriolanus," his family sees this as his moment to stand for Consul.  But he can't do the things that politicians do. He can't pretend to be one of the people, whom he sees as a fickle, unwashed mass - there to be led or bullied. He has so completely absorbed the martial virtues that he can't stand to trumpet his victories or show his battle scars for the approval of the citizenry. In short, he's unfit to be Consul. When the entrenched politicians who see him as a threat perceive this, they mercilessly destroy his political career. The rest, well, it's tragedy for some and triumph for others. But it isn't nice and it isn't funny and it isn't pretty - not the stuff to pull in the fickle, unwashed masses who only turn up for yet another production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

So bravo to Ralph Fiennes for tackling one of the more challenging plays in this, his directorial debut. Taking a page from the theatrical tradition of transposing Shakespeare's plays to any number of historical and cultural settings, he sets his Coriolanus in the Balkans of not so very long ago. He casts 300's Gerard Butler as the Volscian leader, the omnipresent (and best-ever Hannibal Lecter) Brian Cox as Senator and family friend Menenius, James Nesbitt (delightful in the BBC's Jekyll and a standout in the first Hobbit movie) as an enemy politician, and the ubiquitous Jessica Chastain (who took my breath away in Tree of Life) as his wife. Most critically and successfully of all, he landed Vanessa Redgrave to play Volumnia, his mother and a woman so hungry for glory that she'll chew through every man in her family to get it and call it love.

Redgrave is Coriolanus's secret weapon, delivering the definitive performance of the role in modern film. In a cast filled with actors varying from promising to respectable to noted to outstanding, Redgrave is great. By "great," I mean Great. Her Volumnia is a masterpiece of ambition and calculation, Roman virtue and matronly control. And, yes, even of love. Fiennes, to his credit, lets her run. He demonstrates the self-confidence to embrace a performance that outshines his own very good one and, in the process, creates something magical.

Is Coriolanus perfect? Nothing is. The film's battles and knife fights are incomprehensible and could have benefitted from the touch of an editor with more experience in the action genre (An IMdB search tells me that editor Nicolas Gaster did the outstanding Moon and the indulgent MirrorMask, among many other credits stretching back to 1977, but he appears to have no major action credits to his name.). But that's about the only glove I can lay on it. When that's all I've got, you're doing ok.

I've always respected Ralph Fiennes as an actor. With Coriolanus, he debuts as a director and interpreter of Shakespeare worthy of note. I look forward to his next effort.

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.

The Adventures of TinTin

The Adventures of TinTin is a wonderful movie.

This animated adventure, filmed with a motion capture technique that keeps us just this side of the uncanny valley, features ‘splosions, chases, floods, storms at sea, pirates, more ‘splosions, elaborate and exhilarating chases, a massive flood, a great mystery, and gun battles in which all of TinTin’s adversaries seem to forget how to aim at just the right moment..  What more do you want?

Here’s the setup: TinTin, an investigative reporter, finds himself in the middle of a mystery.  He has, unwittingly, purchased that most dangerous of all objects: a Maguffin.  Problem is, he’s unsure exactly what the Maguffin is and why anyone would want it, much less kill for it. 

The Maguffin, of course, is just a reason to get TinTin on the road to adventure, just as Maguffins have in the past and, one assumes, they will again.  The joy of TinTin lies in the road itself, in the delightfully idiosyncratic characters our protagonist meets there, and in the flawless execution of the film’s elaborate set pieces. 

Though created with 3D in mind, the film looks beautiful on an iPad, its voice acting is first rate, and its story blends just the right amounts of danger and levity.  I can’t wait for the sequel.

War Horse

The problem with War Horse is right there in the title. It isn't Person in a War who Owns a Horse or People, War, and Horses. It's War Horse. It is, quite literally, a movie about a horse which finds itself in a war - WWI, to be precise.

The problem is that horses lack moral agency. They can't grow.  They can't choose to become better horses. They can only react to their experiences. Consequently, they make for lousy cinematic protagonists. In this film, the horse passes from owner to owner, from Englishman to German to Frenchman and back again, but so what? We don't spend enough time with the various owners to invest in them and it's impossible to invest deeply in a horse.

So that leaves us watching the film as a technical exercise. Oh, it's horrible. The zoom-in after zoom-in on the faces of various players while saccharine-sweet orchestral music swells and swells and swells. The compositions and set pieces that recall a technicolor version of How Green Was My Valley, had that movie been nigh-unendurable. The screenplay that sets up one overblown cliffhanger after another for a horse that is, in the end, just a horse.

Unquestionably, Steven Spielberg ranks among the finest American film makers. Even the best, however, can fail occasionally. War Horse represents such a failure. I just don't know if it's possible to make a compelling film about a creature that lacks self-awareness.

Recently Seen

I'm in the middle of moving from Florida to Rhode Island, so my writing time's rather limited.  Here are some short notes and redirects concerning the films I've seen recently.

Castaway on the Moon

When he was writing for chud.com, my friend Alex Riviello reviewed Castaway on the Moon. He did so well that, rather than write up a new review of my own, I'll just point you to his. Read it, then queue up the movie. I bet you'll be glad you did.

Sir Arne's Treasure

Ed Gonzales of 'Slant Magazine' wrote a nice piece on Sir Arne's Treasure. The film didn't quite work for me, as I found the pacing arduous. Nevertheless, it's one of the great achievements of early Swedish film; it merits an introduction.

Take Shelter

Take Shelter is a film a bout a good man, a family man, slowly coming apart under the assault of mental illness. I found its subject matter so painful and it's execution so slow that I couldn't make it past the 45-minute mark.

Here's setup: Michael Shannon is a skilled laborer with a house in the country, a committed wife (Jessica Chastain), a daughter, a dog, and the trappings of a respectable, middle class country life. Then the dreams kick in: dreams of disasters to come, of pets turning on their masters, of the world falling apart. He begins to react to these dreams, kicking the dog out of the house and getting to work on the cold-war relic fallout shelter in the back yard. His wife is worried. His friends are worried. He's worried.

And that's about where I hit the eject button. I'm a family man, a few rungs up the socioeconomic ladder from Shannon's character, but definitely on that ladder. I found myself empathizing with Shannon's fears and their consequences too much, such that Take Shelter was a painful, vice entertaining, experience.

Perhaps I'd have stuck with the film had it been a faster-paced.  Take Shelter is meditative, however. The net effect was like watching a slow-motion car wreck involving people who were uncomfortably similar to oneself.

BKO: Bangkok Knockout

They have universal health care in Thailand, don't they?

I mean, they must. How else can one explain the utter disregard for personal safety exhibited by the cast of BKO: Bangkok Knockout? And I'm not just talking about the injuries they must have sustained while making the picture - they must have gotten on a first-name basis with their orthopedic surgeons just to get good enough at stuntwork to land their roles.

BKO: Bangkok Knockout, you see, is an extraordinary stunt picture. Though its plot is just another rehash of The Most Dangerous Game (with a whole team, as opposed to just one guy, in the crosshairs) and its acting is weak, its stunt work will remind you of the golden age of Hong Kong thrillers, when guys like Jackie Chan would stage an entire fight sequence on a moving bus crashing through a shantytown. This picture has cage fu, car fu, motorcycle fu, sword fu, chick fu, and even dude on fire swinging a burning axe fu. It's very nicely staged and photographed, with long takes and simple shots that show off the remarkable choreography of the various battles, as well as the athleticism and daring of the performers. Further, it rocks right along, with brisk pacing and just enough of a storyline to actually make you care who lives and who dies.

First credit goes to director Pana Rittikrai, who worked as the stunt coordinator on Ong Bak: Muy Thai Warrior, the action supervisor on Chocolate, and the director of Ong Bak 2 & 3.  The man has learned his craft, and he applies his lessons like a master in Bangkok Knockout.  He works with a fearless, first-rate team that literally risk life and limb to create one thrilling stunt sequence after another.  Together with the remainder of the crew, they create a film that delivers everything you could want in a Thai martial arts picture. I just hope it's cast didn't have to spend too much time recovering - I want a sequel!

The Grey

In The Grey, Liam Neeson plays a rifleman at North Slope oil operation. His job: shoot the large, fearsome wolves of Northern Alaska before they attack men out working on the equipment. For reasons that will be explained later in the film, he is deeply depressed and contemplating suicide.

On a charter flight from the North Slope down to Anchorage, his plane goes down. It falls to Neeson to rally the survivors and lead them first to shelter, then to home. This will pose challenge enough, until the wolves show up.  Now Neeson, without his rifle, must fight them for the survival of his pack.

What follows is an exciting, action-packed hour and a half of survivalist, wolf-battlin' action in the Frozen North. Neeson has both the acting and action chops to hold the film together, the set-pieces are both gripping and understandable, and the whole thing works. Will it provoke deep thought and long conversations? No. But it's a pleasant diversion and can make 90 minutes of your flight back in coach whiz right by.

Another Earth

Another Earth is an intimate drama with a science-fiction hook. The drama: a young woman's released from jail after killing a man's family through a drunken driving accident. She tries to make amends. The hook: a parallel Earth, from a sliver of the multiverse very like our own, appears in the sky the night of the accident. It floats there, out in space, the physical manifestation of the fantasies of those who dwell in the world of might-have-been.

The film, co-written by star Brit Marling, works on the level of intimate drama alone. The tragic thing about many DUI arrests and fatalities is that the culprits aren't evil: they're often just regular people who exercised poor judgement on a given night. Marling's just-released convict falls under this category. She's consumed with guilt and depression and wants to make amends. The man, sensitively played by William Mapother, wallows in depression and alcohol and needs someone to help him pull himself together.

At this point, you probably think you know what's going to happen.  You're about half right. The other half is the enigma posed by that new planet in the sky, that other Earth. Is it a world where the accident never happened? Would you go there, if you could? What might you find?

All this is handled delicately, sensitively, and much better than I'd anticipated. The second-act reveal plays much more provocatively than I'd expected, leading my wife and me to enjoy a long conversation exploring whether, if we were in the the man's shoes, we could ever forgive. We concluded that we could not, but I'll leave it for you to discover what he concludes and what that means.

Don't see Another Earth in installments or while doing chores. This a film about mood, and it needs time and space to create a mood in you. If you give it the attention it deserves, I'm confident that you'll find it worth your time.

Midnight in Paris

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who love Paris, and those who have never been. Woody Allen loves Paris, and Midnight in Paris is his song.

Owen Wilson plays Gil, a Hollywood writer who gets paid decent money to crank out stuff like Cheaper by The Dozen 2, but really wants to create serious literature. He's in Paris with his odious fiancée and her odious parents. He wants to move there, as any reasonable person would, and she's horrified by the idea.  {IMPORTANT NOTE: If your significant other can't see her/himself living in Paris, run.  Run as fast as you can.}  But here's the twist: he doesn't just want to live in Paris: he wants to live in the Paris of the imagination of a college-prep high schooler. This is a man who has read A Moveable Feast so many times that he wills himself a seat at the table. Literally. The Fitzgeralds are delightful. Hemingway introduces him to Stein, who likes his work. He's ecstatic, and that's even before Marion Cotillard shows up. Suddenly, Odious Fiancée seems very far away, indeed.

And now we're in the love letter to a city, a time, and the very idea of cities and times and possibilities that may, just may, lie within our grasp. It's capital R Romantic stuff, and Woody makes it sing. Though the film has a jarring propensity to name-check just about everyone in A Moveable Feast, we forgive it because it's so earnest, so Romantic, so in love with its time and its people and its possibilities, and so beautiful. Paris, past and present, looks absolutely charming.   It glimmers in the rain and it holds manifold and wonderful possibilities.  Its denizens look like just the sorts of a people an imaginative man would hope to meet.

Me - I love Paris. I love the way city lights look when reflected on wet cobblestones. I love possibilities. And I love my wife's dog-eared copy of A Moveable Feast.  Midnight in Paris hit me right between the eyes. If you love Paris, I bet it'll work for you, too.

The Magic Serpent

Here's a review from my 12-yr-old kaiju fan, Ian:

The Magic Serpent is a lame movie based on an old Japanese legend. it is full of ripoffs.  The main antagonist is a ripoff of Toho’s Manda, the giant spider is a ripoff of  Toho’s giant spider Kumonga, and the eagle monster is a ripoff of Ookondoru.  The only monster that wasn’t a ripoff was the toad.  The roars of the monsters were all recycled Toho roars. The Manda-like monster has Godzilla’s roar, the eagle has Mothra’s roar, and the toad has Rodan’s roar.  The spider dosen’t roar.  Don’t rent this.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

[NOTE: In this entry, I’m going to make some generalizations about Japanese culture.  I spend a fair amount of time in Japan and believe that I’ve learned enough to get away with this.  I am, however, an outsider and always will be.  I could very well be dead wrong.]

Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a documentary by David Gelb, is about a man who may be the world’s greatest sushi chef.  More, it’s an examination of what makes Japanese so culture so wonderful and so constricting.

In Western culture, we revere the concept of the Renaissance Man, the well-rounded individual.  In Japanese culture, they revere the expert, the man who devotes his life to one thing and, with a Zen-like focus, does that thing as well as it can be done.  Jiro Ono is such a man.  82 years old, he first apprenticed in a sushi restaurant at the age of 9.  He works nearly every day, literally dreams of fabulous new sushi at night, and owns a restaurant that serves $300 meals and boasts a 3-star Michelin rating (the highest possible).  His elder son is his #2 and will, one day, take over the restaurant.  His younger son owns a branch in a different part of town.  They are gifted sushi chefs in their own right.

That focus, that lifelong drive for perfection in one thing, has made relatively tiny Japan a world leader in science, culture, and industry.  It has also led to an incredibly restrictive, hierarchical Japanese culture in which Jiro’s sons, regardless of their ability and effort, will never be regarded as the equals of their father.  The best that they can hope for is to achieve the rank of “not-disappointments,” and one of Jiro Dreams of Sushi’s triumphs is its ability to share with us their pride in their own achievements and their knowledge that, no matter what, they’ll never quite measure up to the Old Man.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi gives us all this, taking us inside these people’s world from a culinary, technical, and personal perspective.  It does so with an empathetic, engaged touch and a respect for its subjects.  While I lack the palate to justify a $300 sushi dinner, I came away from this film with a profound respect for those who do and for those who can prepare food that’s worth the price.  Jiro Dreams of Sushi succeeds as a personal and professional exploration of perfection, and I found it entrancing.  This is one of the best films I saw in 2012.

The Skin I Live In

The Skin I Live In is a full-blown gothic horror movie by Pedro Almodóvar.

I’m just gonna let that sink in a moment.

Almodóvar’s films invariably place among the best movies of any given year.  He tells carefully constructed and observed stories with humanity and an impeccable eye for composition.  Films like Volver and All About My Mother offer not just an evening’s entertainment, but full-blown aesthetic experiences.

And here, in The Skin I Live In, he gives us a full-blown aesthetic experience that’s also a ‘mad scientist’ movie. 

Antonio Banderas, reminding us that he was an actor before he became a personality, plays the mad scientist - mad in both senses of the word.  His faithful assistant (and Almodóvar regular), Marisa Paredes, enables and supports him as only a faithful assistant in a mad scientist movie can.  The nature of his madness I’ll leave for you to discover.

The really interesting part of all this, however, is what Almodóvar does with Banderas’s madness.  He uses it to investigate and question our sense of self, of sexuality, of our relationships with the most important people in our lives.  What are they founded upon?  Are they malleable?  If so, how much?

And he does all this with the thoughtful, compassionate gaze and impeccable eye for beauty that marks all his work.  He takes a ‘mad scientist’ movie and turns it into something different, better, more.  He makes us think, and he makes us really see, and he gives us beauty at 24 frames per second.

Pedro Almodóvar can do no wrong.  The Skin I Live In marks yet another fine example.

Margin Call

Margin Call takes place in 2008, on the night before the global financial system went into free fall. It begins with an analyst in a major financial firm's Risk Management department smelling a rat, snowballs into late-night and early-morning meetings of increasingly powerful and terrified members of the firm, and culminates in the run that was the next day's market activity. It's terrifying stuff, way more terrifying than any number of dudes in any number of masks chasing any number of college kids through the night.

It's also annoyingly writerly. Many of the characters get big speeches, and those speeches nearly always sound more like the finger-wagging of hippie writers than the misgivings of mathematicians. Whenever Margin Call pulled me into its world through its spot-on set design and world class performances, it pulled me right back out again when some character started moaning about how he could have been building bridges instead of getting rich.

Nevertheless, the film's sense of mounting dread giving way to panic was effective; and its snappy editing and kinetic (for a film that felt like a stage adaptation) photography kept things moving along. Margin Call caught me up in its narrative in spite of its preachiness. Further, even though I knew how it was going to end, I wanted to know how it was going to end. Overall, I call this one as a good film. But I'd rather see the play.

Crazy, Stupid, Love

{Blogger doesn't do captions very well.  If it did, the caption for this photo would be "C'mon, look at that lighting!"}

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Crazy, Stupid, Love is a romantic comedy that didn't make me laugh, but did charm me and provided a sweet, pleasant time at the movies. It's a nice movie, populated with basically good people mostly trying to do the right thing, and it benefits from a tight script that hits all the right notes.

Here's the setup: Steve Carrel, not challenging himself in a typical Steve Carrel role, asks wife Julianne Moore what she wants for dessert. Her reply: "A divorce." And away we go. Carrel and Moore both try to adapt to their new lives. Their kids experience dramas of their own, sometimes only tangentially related to that of their parents. They're all trying to figure this love thing out, as are the people they meet and the people they meet.

And so we rock through an entertaining hour and half during which Carrel gets lessons from pickup artist Ryan Gosling, who seems to have moved on from life-sized sex dolls; Moore agonizes over whether she should reunite with the star of the movie; and Marisa Tomei shows up to prove, once again, that there are no small roles.

It all works, largely due to an enormously likable cast including, in addition to the above, welcome presences Kevin Bacon and Emma Stone. More critically, it works due to a gem of a screenplay by Dan Fogelman. This is a screenplay that has been written, rewritten, edited and lathed into smooth perfection, with reveals and reversals timed just right, characters that feel like they have lives outside the confines of their scenes, and just enough unreality to keep things at a comic distance. This movie made me feel like I was being entertained by pros who knew exactly what they were doing and who were very good at their respective jobs.

So, there you have it: Crazy, Stupid, Love is a romantic comedy that's reasonably romantic, reasonably comedic, and altogether successful. It's a great way to spend some time on the couch with the one you love.

Ball of Fire

Ball of Fire has everything anyone could want in a movie: gangsters, dames, car chases, fist fights, and English professors. There's even a production number.

I know: I had you at "English professors." But wait - there's more! Barbara Stanwyck (CDNW) plays the dame, the star of a singin' and dancin' review who can neither sing nor dance, but who has more charisma than just about any actress of her day. [NOTE: Stanwyck came up as a chorus girl in the Ziegfield Follies. I can only assume that the wooden performance she gives during the number is intentional: suggesting, perhaps, that the character didn't get the job on talent alone, if ya know what I mean.] Gary Cooper plays the professor, and his job is to stumble around and act like a bookish innocent who happens to be the best-looking guy in the room.

So, what do they do? Well, Stanwyck's in trouble with the mob and she needs a place to hide out. Taking advantage of Cooper's innocence, she wiles her way into his academic sanctuary. The sanctuary is a New York mansion which Cooper shares with his colleagues in a decades-long effort to write a new encyclopedia, but don't pay too much attention to the mechanics. All you really need to know is that she's Snow White and Cooper & pals are the dwarves.

Naturally, Stanwyck and Cooper fall in love. This is inevitable because (a) who wouldn't fall in love with Barbara Stanwyck, and (b) chicks dig English majors. But, of course, he doesn't know that she's using him, the mobsters are going to have to come for her eventually, and all kinds of other complications must ensue before we get to the kiss and the credits.

And that's fine, and sufficiently madcap. Howard Hawks directed the picture, Billy Wilder co-wrote it, and Gregg Toland (hot off of Citizen Kane) filmed it, so you know Ball of Fire looks great and the jokes hit and everything works. The real revelation here (assuming you haven't seen the transcendent The Lady Eve) is Stanwyck, who is absolutely luminous as the bad girl with a good girl's heart. (Note to impressionable young English majors: in reality, bad girls have bad girls' hearts - that's why they're bad girls.) If you only know the actress as the matriarch in The Big Valley or as Evil with a capital E in Double Indemnity, stand by. The film's named appropriately - she really is a ball of fire.

So there you have it. With a fun story, slick production, and extraordinary performance from one of cinema's greatest stars, Ball of Fire is everything you could want from a night at the movies. I might just watch it again right now.

[NOTE:  Thanks to Thor Klippert for pointing out the Toland connection!]

American Reunion

American Reunion is awkward and unfunny, just like an actual high school reunion. It's a comedy that didn't make me crack a smile. It's a relationship picture in which not one single relationship feels authentic. It's a mess in which characters show up for the sole purpose of cashing a check and getting the heck out. And it's a considerable waste of the talents of Seann William Scott, who really won me over with Goon.

Here's the setup: it's 13 years since the events of the excellent American Pie. As one might expect with a successful ensemble piece, some of the players' careers have advanced and some haven't. So it is with the characters they play as the characters descend upon their home town, get themselves into awkward situations, and resolve a variety of relationship issues.

But it all feels forced and unfunny. Characters who aren't central to the narrative show up merely for the audience to say, "Hey, I remember that guy!" Rather than inspire guffaws, awkward situations only make us wish we were somewhere else. The story comes from its outline, as opposed to flowing organically. Something about the whole production reeks of desperation.

I felt icky and sad while watching American Reunion, much the same way I imagine I'd feel if I had to watch actual thirty-somethings recreate their high school years. Pass on this film. Forget it ever existed. Hopefully, they won't try to make another.

Lincoln & Skyfall

I haven't had much time to write lately, so I share with you these excellent reviews of Lincoln and Skyfall.

http://badassdigest.com/2012/11/08/movie-review-lincoln/

http://www.hitfix.com/motion-captured/review-skyfall-represents-a-series-high-by-humanizing-the-superhuman-james-bond

Enjoy.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I took my wife and oldest child to see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. I loved it, which isn't saying much. I'm wedded to the source material, you see. The book was my early-adolescent gateway drug to the world of fantasy, and I loved Peter Jackson's film simply for the opportunity it gave me to spend time in its world.

This is the paragraph where I tease the plot, to help you decide whether it interests you. But this is The Hobbit we're talking about. If you don't know the plot, just go read the book. If you're a reasonably fast reader, you can plow through it in about as much time as it'd take you to get in the car, drive to the theater, see the film, and drive home.

That said, the film is a prequel done right. Yes, it puts pieces in place for the LOTR movies (discussed here, here, and here), but it tells its own story, with its own dangers and its own heroes and villains. I cared about Bilbo qua Bilbo, and not just because of the effect his actions might have on other people in other movies down the storyline. Sherlock's Martin Freeman does great work in the role, giving us the very much settled adult hobbit, as opposed to Elijah Woods's young adult Frodo. James Nesbitt, alternately chilling and charming in BBC's Jekyll, shows a whole different side as a particularly cheerful and resourceful dwarf (whose names I never could keep strait, in print or on film). And it's always nice to see 7th Doctor Sylvester McCoy getting work, this time as nature wizard Radagast the Brown.

When I inevitably purchase this film, I'll be particularly interested in watching the special features about the technical aspects of its creation.  With as much care as Peter Jackson and his team put into creating Middle Earth for The Lord of the Rings, they had to work even harder here. See, Jackson chose to film in 48 fps, the kind of super-high definition you may associate with sporting events on an HDTV. That means that spray paint over styrofoam wasn't going cut it, this time around. This stuff needed to look better that low-def real: it had to look real real. In this, Jackson succeeds perhaps too well. His vision, at 48fps 3-D, is so clear and detailed that we find ourselves moving into the uncanny valley, where our brains shift from willing suspension of disbelief to unwillingly noticing that things are not quite right. While the film's hyperreality works to breathtaking effect in sequences like the battle of the stone giants, I had to consciously suspend my disbelief when it returns to a bunch of actors on a stage who look just like a bunch of actors on a stage.

Nevertheless, I was happy to keep on believing. I cared about Bilbo, I loved the action set-pieces, and I just plain enjoyed spending 2 hours and 45 minutes in Middle Earth. I look forward to going back again.

Get The Gringo

I've heard Get The Gringo described as the unofficial sequel to Payback. That's about right.

As you may recall, Payback is the story of a bad man who is doublecrossed by other bad men and seeks revenge. Its advertising slogan, as I recall, was "Get ready to root for the bad guy." Its unique charm lies in the fact that its protagonist really is a bad guy, but we let that go because he's played by Mel Gibson (Also, apparently, a bad guy. But an incredibly magnetic screen presence.).

Get The Gringo begins with Gibson making a run for the border with three duffel bags full of cash, a clown costume, and an associate who's bleeding out all over his money. Gibson is very concerned. About the money.

And that's about all you need to know about this picture.

Now, I liked Payback, and the comparison was enough to get me to queue up Get The Gringo.  I'm happy to report that this newer film hits just the right tone of relentlessly amoral, yet curiously fun, scumbaggery. Gibson steals and kills and generally behaves badly, yet he does exhibit a moral core, even if it is tainted by self-centeredness: there's just enough of a flicker of a soul in there to allow us to root for him.

And the film itself, well, it's direct-to-video yet it looks like a full-budget, big screen production. The Mexican prison where Gibson finds himself has an understandable geography, recognizable citizens, and lived-in feel that makes it seem organic, and not just a studio lot. The music accentuates the action without overwhelming it. The cast, featuring a number of well-known supporting actors in crucial roles, hits its marks and sells the material. And the action set-pieces, well, let's just say some stuff blows up real good.

So it comes down to this: if you liked Payback and you can still stand to look at Mel Gibson, I think you'll find that Get The Gringo comes through. It stays true to its premise, it's utterly professional, and it delivers a scuzzily entertaining hour and a half at the movies. It worked for me.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

I pity the cold and withered heart that doesn't quicken at the very notion of a film entitled Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. I can't imagine the psyche that doesn't thrill to the idea of a Timur Bekmanbetov (of Night Watch) vampire movie that combines the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Harriett Tubman and the Underground Railroad, and the Battle of Gettysburg into a thrilling, funny, and action-packed hour and forty-five minutes of Historic Undead Battlin' Action. Why, of course Jefferson Davis was in cahoots with the Vampire Nation all along. Of course Mary Todd Lincoln used a Springfield Rifle to put silver bullets through undead foreheads. Of course Abraham Lincoln, rail-splitter in his youth, could handle a silver axe like Bruce Lee of the Frontier.

And of course Rufus Sewell, who was a marvelous villain in The Illusionist, is a 5000 year old Alpha Vampire who just wants freedom for his people. I mean, whom would you cast?

Oh, how I loved this movie. Benjamin Walker is the Young Mister Lincoln Henry Fonda only wished he could have been. Alan Tudyk, who hit a home run with Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, is the perfect is-he-or-isn't-he Stephen A. Douglas. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is, well, {sigh}.

But y'know what? A clever idea and a terrific cast only get you so far. It's all in the execution, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter succeeds beyond all expectations. This isn't a one-joke exercise in meta-irony. Rather, Bekmanbetov plays the material completely straight, creating a full-throated horror-themed action-adventure and a tribute to the ideals of the actual President who saved the Union. Somehow, this complements his film's inherent ridiculousness. As the viewer, we don't think, "Ah, how amusing. There's Lincoln working on the Gettysburg Address while fighting the undead." Rather, we think, "Wow! Look at that stuntwork! I never thought you could do that with an axe, but I do now! Lincoln is awesome!" Then he delivers the Gettysburg Address and we cry because, doggone it, it's the Gettysburg Address and we believe in it. And still, we grin because, c'mon, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

There are films out there so delightful, so unexpectedly good, that they make us want to grab our friends by the lapels and shake them until they agree to rent them. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is one of those films. See it and rejoice.

Appointment with Danger

Appointment with Danger is a great movie.

Here’s the deal: It’s Gary, Indiana in 1951.  A nun has just seen Jack Webb and Harry Morgan strangle a man, but she doesn’t know it.  It’s raining and her umbrella’s jammed and she buys Morgan’s excuse that the victim’s had too much to drink and they’re “helping him get some air.”  The nun suspect’s something’s up and tells the next beat cop she sees, but he’s quickly distracted and nothing comes of it.  The next morning, a body in an alley turns out to be a postal inspector (FYI, the postal inspectors were America’s first federal law enforcement officers.  They’re a legitimate organization.).  Cue Alan Ladd, the best but meanest postal inspector of ‘em all, to piece together the clues, find the bad guys, and ring down the curtain.

That’s the first five minutes.  The rest of the film is moody black and white, men in fedoras and women in slinky dresses, and exchanges like, “Do you even know what love is?”  “Sure.  It’s what happens between a man and a .45 that won’t jam.”

Webb and Morgan, who went on to make television history as the cops in “Dragnet,” make convincing and dangerous villains.  Alan Ladd is clearly having the time of his life as a hard man who who gets to deliver lines like “I don’t have a heart.  I have a muscle in my chest.  When a postal inspector dies, they don’t say his heart stopped.  They say he got a charley horse.”  And Paul Stewart, one of the great character actors, delivers a mastermind who’s smart, ruthless, and flawed enough to make him interesting.

Appointment with Danger has fistfights and innuendo, car chases and shootouts.  It also has a watertight plot and great photography.  Further, it takes advantage of its unique location, snappy dialogue, and a wonderful sense of what makes a noir picture great.  Appointment with Danger works in every way.

The Amazing Spider-Man

The Amazing Spider-Man is a perfectly fine superhero film.  It's professional, it has no obvious flaws, and it rocks along along at a fast clip for a good two hours.  Would I have preferred a fourth installment Sam Raimi's version?  Sure: I loved all three (here, here, and here) and was ready for more.  Nevertheless, I credit Amazing for making me forget its predecessors and capably executing its own vision.

The Amazing Spider-Man offers an origin tale that parallels its antagonist's origin, exciting set-pieces, and seamless effects work.  While its web-swinging sequences lacked the smooth, "you are there" joy of Raimi's, this film offers a unique take on spider powers that surprised and delighted me (look for a spot where Peters binds up an opponent in a particularly creepy, spider-like way).  As far as origin stories go, this is a solid take.

The film's biggest surprise comes from its lead, Andrew Garfield, as Peter Parker / Spider-Man.  Andrew Garfield (of the brutal Red Riding: In The Year of Our Lord 1974 and the atrocious 'Daleks Take Manhattan') actually made me believe that he was an American high school student, albeit one who hit puberty perhaps a bit early.  This is an extraordinarily talented actor with significant range, and I look forward to following his career in the years to come.  Emma Stone (magnificent in Easy A), punches below her weight as love interest Gwen Stacy, but a woman's gotta pay the bills.  The rest of the supporting cast, including Sally Field, Martin Sheen, Denis Leary and Rhys Ifans are as good as you'd expect (which is pretty darn good).

So I was all ready to hate this movie, but I can't.  The Amazing Spider-Man does exactly what it's trying to do, and it does it well.  Will it find a place on my shelf beside my Raimi Blu-Rays?  Probably not, but we can't fall in love with everything.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Growing up in America, my sense of Santa Claus had been that of a nice old fat guy who brought kids presents as Christmas time. That is, that was my sense of Santa Claus until I spent one Christmas in Germany with my extended family. Their Santa Claus was more serious figure. Sure, you could count on nuts, tangerines, and chocolates if you'd been good. If you'd been bad, however, expect a thrashing.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is very much about that second sort of Santa. When excavators find Saint Nick encased in ice under a Lapland burial mound one December, they scoff at rules like "no cussing, no smoking, and wash behind your ears." But they learn. Oh, how they learn. As far as this Santa's concerned, everybody's naughty.

So begins an original horror adventure that stays true its premise without losing the twinkle in its eye. There's a scary Santa. There's a protective father. There's a naughty boy who just might be more good than he thinks. Best of all, there's a real sense of place. Rare Exports feels like a movie about actual people in an exotic setting, dealing with something terrifying and quite outside their experience. Its story develops naturally, with no left-field moments and characters that stay true to themselves. Best of all, it's exciting and horrific and a great time at the movies.

So if you're looking for something a little different this Christmas, see Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. Its Santa is the baddest of them all.

Wreck-It Ralph

My kids loved Wreck-It Ralph. My wife loved Wreck-It Ralph. I liked Wreck-It Ralph. Two out of three ain't bad.

Here's the setup: Wreck-It Ralph is the bad guy in a video game that's a cross between Donkey Kong and Rampage. He's tired of being the villain, however, so he sets out on a quest to find the legendary Dumont, the oldest program in cyberspace. He's blocked by the Evil Master Control Program. With the help of his allies Tron and Yori, he defeats the Master Control Program and takes his place as a hero.

Sorry, I got lost in my imagination there. While Ralph does set out to be a hero, he does so in a universe that's just one step to the left of Tron. Where Tron's vision of the world inside computers and video games (which are ... but you already knew that) is both awesome and a little scary, Wreck-It Ralph's is a lot more fun. While the film states that a game character can die if it leaves its own machine, we sense that the odds of that actually happening are really quite slim. This played well with my three and six year-olds, who thrilled to the film's dangers rather than hide behind my arms, as they sometimes do. Further, much of the film takes place inside a game Ralph visits called "Sugar Rush," a cart racer set in Candyland. Scary monsters become decidedly less so when they can get stuck in gum.

This reasonably non-threatening milieu makes for a nice place for kids to lose themselves for a couple of hours. Plug in a redemption quest, a cute sidekick, and sweet romantic B story, and you've got yourself a movie. Of course, none of it could work without good voice acting, and John C. Reilly voices the title character with a winning combination of soulfulness and lovability. While the other major voice actors basically do their schtick, Alan Tudyk (CDNW) outshines them all. His King Candy, with a voice reminiscent of Ed Wynn on a Fanta and Twizzlers bender, is the most energetic, exciting, and delightful villain you're going to find at the movies this season. (By the way, you really should see Tucker & Dale vs. Evil. It's available on both Amazon Prime and Netflix Instant right now.)

So why did I just like, instead of love, Wreck-It Ralph? Well, I'd been up for 20 hours, so perhaps I wasn't at my most receptive. Thing is, I felt like I knew every beat of this movie before it happened. Don't get me wrong: the script is tight and the whole thing flows, but it felt, maybe, a little too perfect for me. It offered no real challenges, no insights beyond "Hey, be yourself." And that's fine, really. It just takes a little more to make me flip for something.

So, what am I telling you? I'm telling you that your kids will probably love Wreck-It Ralph. You very well may, too At worst, I bet you'll like it. Wreck-It Ralph is a good time at the movies.

Religulous

Religulous is great fun for fans of bullying.

In this documentary cum op-ed piece, comedian and public thinker Bill Maher seeks to explore modern religion.  In his quest, he mostly sticks to the three Yahvistic religions with which most of his presumed viewership will be familiar: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  (There's material on Mormonism, Scientology, and a few other belief systems, but the viewer in search of a comparison of Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism will come away disappointed.)  Maher, a funny guy, uses his comic instinct to challenge and ridicule his interlocutors.  His point?  That it's time we evolved past religion before our beliefs lead us to destroy the world.

So far, so good.  The movie is well made, Maher is a genial host, and the proceedings succeed in being both thought-provoking and entertaining.

But there's a problem:  Maher avoids engagement with his intellectual peers, meaning people who are smart and theologically sophisticated and comfortable in front of a camera.  He discourses with well-meaning but intellectually unarmed truck stop evangelists.  He shows up frauds and hucksters and villains, but he often does it with subtitles or voiceovers, which speaks to a lack of either preparation or courage.  When he does talk with someone who, in my opinion, "gets it," he doesn't seriously engage him.  Rather, he appears to realize that he's swimming in deep waters and disengages fairly quickly.  In editing, the film, focuses on the man's disability, one which saddles him with distracting vocal ticks.

It was this interview, with a Vatican theologian, that turned me off to Religulous.  I mean, this guy was interesting.  He actually listened to Maher's ideas and built on them, rather than merely trying to joust with a professional comedian (always a bad idea).  He put Maher on his back foot without really trying, merely by being a smart and interesting guy to talk with.  And this made me realize what a missed opportunity Religulous really is.  Rather than follow Maher around for two hours as he picked on lightweights, I'd have gotten so much more out of two hours of conversation with this guy and his intellectual peers from other religions.  Could Maher have made this entertaining?  I think so.  Would it have helped him prove his point?  Probably not.  But it would have been world-class entertainment.

As it is, Religulous is content to tee off on the scrawniest kids in the playground.  It's funny as long as you aren't one of the scrawny kids.  But it's lazy and it's cowardly.  Ultimately, it makes us turn on the bully.  Religulous has a great idea and a capable host.  It deserves to be better than this.