Spider-Man 3

Warning!  Spoiler Ahead!

Here’s the problem with Spider-Man 3: at the end of the film, Peter Parker and Harry Osborn, in their Spider-Man and (new nemesis) Green Goblin costumes respectively, team up to fight the big, scary villains.  They’re old friends in great danger, yet they’re having a ball.  They fall into sync.  They help each other out.  They’re a couple of guys we’d love to spend an hour and a half with.  In other words, Spider-Man 3’s climax shows us what we’ve been missing, thus making us feel like we’ve been missing out.  Spider-Man was fun.  Spider-Man 2 was fun.  Spider-Man 3 doesn’t get fun until the last twenty minutes.  By then, it’s too late.

Spider-Man mastermind Sam Raimi set out to make a relationship movie in this, his third installment in the franchise.  Unfortunately, it’s the kind of relationship movie that makes you want to throw your remote at the screen and yell at these people to just go grab a beer and talk to each other.  If they’d done that, they’d have been much happier much sooner, and so would we.

Spider-Man 2

Many critics call Spider-Man 2 the best superhero movie.  I think that distinction belongs to The Incredibles, but I can see their point.

When the film opens, Spider-Man has been web slinging for a while.  He's also been trying to hold down a job, go to school, and be there for his friends, but he’s a juggler with too many balls and not enough hands.  Fighting crime is a full-time job, and he’s no millionaire playboy.  Something’s gotta give.

And so goes the maturation of Peter Parker.  He’s found his calling, but he hasn't found his balance.  What results is a work of surprising maturity, balancing the requirements of the ‘spectacular blockbuster’ with those of a carefully told story about growing up and out, about learning how to be a man.

So, how does Spider-Man 2 do in the ‘spectacular blockbuster’ department?  Very well, thank you.  The film has a very cool, very cinematic villain in Doctor Octopus, played by Alfred Molina.  Doctor Octopus is attached to enormous cybernetic arms, and the film brings them to life with a masterful combination of practical and computer-generated effects.  We believe in this contraption, and in the menace it represents, and this helps bring the film to life.  Of course, it doesn't hurt that the film continues the tradition of hiring world-class actors to play its villains.  Molina can do charm with the best of them, but he can also do a version of sneering contempt that’ll make you recoil.

So yeah, I can see why so many critics are in love with this film.  It’s thrilling and cool and rewarding, and it succeeds in every way.  I love it, too.  it isn't The Incredibles, a legitimate classic, but it belongs in the same sentence.

Spider-Man

Spider-Man ranks among the best superhero movies ever made.

You know how it goes: nerdy high schooler Peter Parker gets bitten by a radioactive spider, develops super powers, and fights bad guys.   It’s an origin story, like so many others, but Spider-Man’s theme, that with great power comes great responsibility, resonates because it’s a lesson that we all must learn, over and over again.  Spider-Man, as a character, has abilities that make him strong and fast and agile, as well as give him the ability to do neat stuff in involving lots of very tall buildings (Pity the poor, nerdy high schooler who gets bitten by a radioactive spider in Barstow.).  But it doesn’t necessarily follow that he’ll use these abilities responsibly.  In fact, he behaves like a child, with disastrous consequences.  And how many times has each of us done that?  How many times have we taken our unique gifts and used them irresponsibly or in service of our own narrow self-interest?  How has that usually worked out?  That’s part of Spider-Man’s appeal: we don’t need to be nerdy, or a high-schooler, or a New Yorker to relate to this character.  We look at Peter Parker, at Spider-Man, and we see a fanciful version of ourselves as we are and as we aspire to be.  That’s pretty good stuff for a superhero movie.

Thematics aside, Spider-Man also succeeds as pure entertainment.  Star Tobey Maguire nails the role, bringing just the right combination of gee-whiz excitement over his transformation and insecurity as he develops into a man.  Perhaps more importantly, he conveys how much Peter Parker enjoys being Spider-Man.  Sure, he must have looped much of his in-mask dialogue, but his wahoos and shouts of joy as he swings from building to building feel like the authentic whoops of a young man having a ball.  Willem Dafoe, as the villain, proves yet again that he ranks among his generation’s finest actors.  His reading of an easy cliché, “We’ll meet again, Spider Man,” belongs at the top of Villainy’s Greatest Hits.  He goes big and broad, and just the right amount of over the top, without devolving into silliness. 

This isn’t a two-man show, however.  J.K. Simmons, playing Parker’s boss and newspaper editor, made my family laugh out loud as scenery-chewing comic relief.  Kirsten Dunst and James Franco, as our hero’s would-be girlfriend and only slightly baked best friend, respectively, ground Peter and help us get an “in” to the story.  The Chin, well, he does his thing.  It really is a magnificent chin.

But hey, these are professional actors.  They’re supposed to be good.  What makes Spider-Man good is that sense of joy, that fun we get as we swing with Peter Parker through the canyons of Manhattan, thrilled at our abilities and finding our place in the world.  There aren’t enough movies about joy and responsibility out there.  Even if there were, Spider-Man would be the best of them.  I just plain loved it.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is so bad it sapped my will to write about movies for over a month.  It turned my lifelong enthusiasm for the medium into a flaccid, faded memory of itself.  It drove me to bypass all the great films in my Instant queue in favor of old episodes of ’Doctor Who.’  It’s a horror; an abomination.  It ranks among the very worst movies ever made.  I’d sit through five sequels to Bollywood’s Krrish before I’d even let my neighbor across the street play this horror on his TV.

How bad is it?

It’s so bad that, about 45 minutes in, my three boys fell asleep on the couch while watching it.  Just let that sink in for a moment: here’s a loud movie about cars and robots and explosions that bored three healthy American boys.  It’s so bad that I, who sat through The Expendables, couldn’t sit through the action set pieces and, instead, found all manner of chores to accomplish around the house (Bathroom towel rack mounting – check.).

This movie is so bad that even thinking of it in any kind of a critical manner makes my head ache.  All I want to do is heap scorn upon it, sneer at those who made it, and never see it again.

So, yeah, this isn’t a review.  It’s a screed.  But some movies don’t deserve reviews and screeds are all they get.  Tranformers: Dark of the Moon, you’re an affront to the very notion of narrative film.  You have no artistic, aesthetic, or even prurient value.  You’re a cynical, worthless, boring embarrassment of a movie that I’m ashamed to have ever tried to screen for my kids.  Shame on you, and shame on me for renting you.

Now, begone and never be heard from again.

X-Men: First Class

Holy cow.  X-Men: First Class is actually good!

Some background: I never got into superhero comics.  Everything I know about the X-Men I’ve learned from going to the movies.  Consequently, my last exposure to the X-Men universe was through the odious Wolverine.  When I went in to this one, my expectations were low.

Here’s the setup: it’s the Kennedy Administration.  A dude with groovy brain powers recruits a coldblooded revenge killer to join Team Good.  As one may imagine, things do not work out as groovy brain guy might have preferred. 

The film hangs a pretty good story on that frame, helped along by fun period work, seamless effects, well-directed action set pieces, and the revelation that the amazing young actress from Winter’s Bone looks great naked.

The consensus among my filmgoing friends is that X-Men: First Class is average, at best.  I don’t get it.  I had more fun at this film than any other superhero film released this year.

Flyboys

You’ll like Flyboys if you like aviation history.  You’ll like Flyboys if you like “historical recreation” movies.  You won’t like Flyboys if you like, y’know, good movies.

In WWI, France established the Lafayette Escadrille.  Think of it as a Foreign Legion, but with American pilots.  This film is, generally, based on their story.  Many of the people portrayed here really existed, and many of the things we see them do actually happened.  So, hey, so far so good.

But here’s the problem: the screenplay’s just too tight.  Every fact about the escadrille’s planes that we learn early in the film becomes important in combat later on.  The love story feels like a detour from the plot.  We predict nearly every beat and, though the planes look pretty and the uniforms crisp, this film offers no suspense, no surprise, nothing that we expect in narrative cinema.  This feels like a story that’s hitting all the marks from one of those screenwriting books, and it certainly has the best intentions of hagiographying the Corps.  But there’s no soul here, no fuzziness, nothing that makes it feel like it’s about real people and not just lists of traits noted on index cards.

Nevertheless, I like aviation history.  I like  “historical recreation” movies.  Flyboys wasn’t much good, but it did teach me something about its world.  I guess there’s that.

Hanna

Hanna is terrific!

Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) is smart, athletic, capable, and almost entirely innocent.  Her father (Eric Bana) taught her how to hunt, shoot, and fight, but nothing of the actual world and the people in it.  When the deliciously evil Cate Blanchett comes after them both, young Hanna must learn on the run.  And learn she does.

And so goes a fast, exciting action thriller punctuated with rousing set-pieces and propelled by a driving electronic score.  Hanna’s fights make sense in that we know who is doing what to whom and why.  Her journey makes sense both in terms of her personal development and its service to the plot.  We care about her, we hate her enemies, and we have a great time at the movies.  What more can we ask for?

The Conspirator

The Conspirator tells the story of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright).  She owned the boarding house where the Lincoln Assassination conspirators met.  She didn’t do anything wrong.  She hanged for it.

That’s the hook, at least.  It really tells the story of Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy), an idealistic young attorney and Union war hero who takes her case.  Aiken’s a believer, you see, in the Constitution and due process.  He believes in the jury of one’s peers and the rule of law.  He can’t imagine America as a wounded, bloodthirsty nation, one out for revenge even at the cost of its soul.

That’s the text, at least.  The subtext is an exploration of hubris and vengeance and the injustices they wreak.

That’s the subtext, at least.  The context is an America ten years on from 9/11, an America that has recoiled from its own lashings out and now seems more interested in taking its own measure than sharpening new swords.

And of course it’s very well done.  Robert Redford knows how to direct a film and he can attract the best talent around.  But that subtext, at least in today’s context, feels a bit too on the nose.  We can tut at cynical old men, now long dead, and compare them to cynical old men who still haunt the studios of Fox News.  But this film can’t teach us anything about them because it focuses too closely on its text.  It assumes the rest and assumes that we’ll assume it, and it leaves those of us who refuse the easy answer on the outside.

So there I sat, admiring the film’s recreation of post Civil War Washington, admiring its performances, and enjoying the courtroom drama of a case whose outcome I already knew.  But I couldn’t shake the film’s simplicity of viewpoint and its almost too casual judgementalism.  The Conspirator will engage your imagination and it may break your heart, but it should light off at least one alarm bell in your brain.  It certainly did in mine.

King Kong Escapes

Oh, King Kong Escapes is absolutely horrible.  It features gratingly bad American actors in critical roles, ugly monster design and story that feels like it was designed to put its audience to bed as quickly as possible.

Here’s the story: a “research submarine” commanded by a hunky American guy and crewed with a capable Japanese dude and a comely American woman with indeterminate responsibilities, goes to an island in the South Pacific.  Of course, it’s that island, and some pretty standard Kong-type stuff happens, including a fun little Kong-on-dino battle for the ship’s bimbo.  Kong gets captured, eventually, and there’s a battle with a Mecha-Kong that exists for no other reason than to give its inventor the rather amusing name of Doctor Hu.  The film winds up on the Empire State Building, for reasons I don’t entirely recall, the ship’s bimbo screams a lot.

But I didn’t care about Kong, or the bimbo, or He-Captain, or much of anything here.  King Kong Escapes conjures no sense of wonder, danger, or delight.  It gives us no characters of interest and does nothing to compel us to watch it all the way through.  It’s just bad.  Bad bad bad.  I wouldn’t even see it to mock it.  Neither should you. 

Gamera vs. Barugon

Gamera vs. Barugon is dull. It’s mostly talking. It doesn’t help that the people who do the talking are completely bland. I rented this movie for the fight scenes. There were only like, I’m not sure, 30 seconds of fighting?

This movie was very boring. Avoid it. All said.

King Kong Escapes

King Kong escapes was perfect!... Perfectly disappointing, that is.        

King Kong was so tiny. He was smaller than a blue whale. He was only 60 feet. He should be a lot larger, like 30 meters. Also, the adult protagonists were annoying, unlike the kid protagonists from Gamera vs. Guiron. The blond-haired damsel in distress keeps shouting “Kong!” in a really whiny voice.

So I suggest you do yourself a favor and stay away from this movie.

Oh, well. It’s kind of hard to appreciate slurm like this after you’ve watched a great movie like Gamera versus Guiron. 

Slowdown

Reader,

If you check this site from time to time, you'll have noticed that I've gone from posting new material several times a week to posting only occasionally.

If you're a regular reader, you know that I'm an airline pilot and that I also fly in the Navy Reserve.  Well, the Navy has entrusted me with command of a squadron.  I've found that it's an all-consuming duty, leaving me with limited time to watch films, much less compose my thoughts on them.

Nevertheless, I enjoy writing and I hope to snatch the occasional moment to share with you my impressions.  Please do keep this site in your RSS feed.  In the meantime, simply take my advice and avoid King Kong Escapes.

Have a wonderful day,
Alex

Gamera vs. Guiron

Here's another review from my 6-th Grader, Ian!

Gamera vs. Guiron is perfect.

The monsters are fake looking, which is great. I like fake looking monsters. So if you like cheesy movies featuring giant monster battles in which the monsters are so fake looking they’re actually cute, then this movie is for you. If you’re a kaiju fanatic, you’ll love this. If you’re not? Well, naturally, being a kaiju fanatic, I wouldn’t know what the average Joe would think about it. This movie is meant for kaiju fanatics. If you’re not one, I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t like this flick. The movie itself is good, but the DVD cut out one of the best fight scenes: The one where Guiron chops up Spacegyoas (who is just like Gyoas, except white) into pieces using his knife head. This isn’t a big deal however, because you can find the entire battle on youtube, or go on Netflix instant to watch the Mystery Science Theater 3,000 version. They make fun of the battle of course, though. 

I really liked this one. it was just plain terrific! =^D

The Earrings of Madame de...

The Earrings of Madame de… is a relationship movie for people who don’t like relationship movies, a fashion movie for people who don’t like fashion movies.  Why?  Because it’s so good that it doesn’t matter what kind of movies you like: The Earrings of Madame de… will captivate you.

The premise is a twist on ­Daniel Deronda.  A young woman pawns some jewelry after losing big at the roulette wheel.  Complications ensue.  Where Daniel Deronda goes on to use the jewelry as a catalyst for growth and redemption, The Earrings of Madame de… uses it to drive a tragedy.  And oh, what a tragedy.

Master director Max Ophüls (born, coincidentally enough, in my ancestral home of Saarbrücken) sets his tragedy in the Geneva of the late 1800s.  His characters, mostly aristocrats, adhere to the social mores of then-contemporary France, in which one married for business and one loved whom one chose, so long as the love remained discreet.  This may seem off-putting.  After all, who wants to spend two hours ogling the lifestyles of the aristocrats of yesteryear?  It works, however, because it allows Ophüls to do two things: create a world of lavish sets, beautiful costumes, and extraordinary jewelry, and show how the rules of that world can bind and constrict and kill. 

It also works because we care about the members of the film’s love triangle.  Danielle Darrieux (now 96 years old and credited in the remarkable Persepolis), Charles Boyer, and Vittorio De Sica (director of the hilarious Divorce, Italian Style), bring humanity to their roles as Madame de…, General de…, and the Great Love of Madame de…’s life, respectively.  We see through their wealth and their pretensions to the real, needy people beneath their exteriors, and we feel for them.  Director Ophüls and cinematographer Christian Matras brings them to life through a high-gloss, high-beauty black and white photography that would count as realism if the world were just a bit more poetic. 

The Earrings of Madame de… is beautiful to look at and heartbreaking to watch, and entirely successful in every way.  I loved it.

Godzilla vs. Gigan

Here's a review of Godzilla vs. Gigan, courtesy of my 11-year-old, Ian:

Godzilla vs. Gigan is a decent kaiju movie complete with giant monsters flailing around. In the movie, cockroaches invade earth using the alien dragon King Ghidorah, and the cyborg Gigan. Gigan has a chainsaw in his belly and resembles a chicken. Godzilla and his sidekick Anguirus come and save the day. The movie, however, is very cheap.

They keep using stock footage, so the scenes are always changing from night to day (I could see Larval Mothra for a split second in one scene). But, who cares? Not me. The action is great, but a major annoyance throughout the movie was the fact that the movie had soooooo much talking. It was annoying to have to constantly fast forward through all the talking in order to see the action. But, go ahead and rent it. Even if it is annoying to constantly fast forward or watch all the talking, it's still worth the giant monster fight scenes.

Attack of the Monsters

Attack of the Monsters, also knows as Gamera Vs. Guiron, is a late-‘60s giant Japanese monster (or kaiju) movie for kids.  It stars a gigantic, jet-powered flying turtle with really large tusks.  He fights a gigantic lizard-thing with a head shaped like a giant Buck knife and knees that clearly hadn’t been reinforced, because they start to tear in the film’s later stages.  It’s all great fun, with nice model scenery just waiting for destruction and monsters scary enough for an eleven-year-old yet fake enough for a two-year-old.

Here’s the story: Gamera (the turtle) rescues a couple of boys who explore a flying saucer that had touched down near their home (And really, what self-respecting boys wouldn’t?).  See, the saucer is a trap!  It’s remote controlled by evil, brain-eating aliens who look just like attractive Japanese women in shimmery silver leotards!  When the saucer takes off and flies to the Planet of Attractive Japanese Women in Shimmery Silver Leotards, Gamera pursues and does battle with Guiron, the aliens’ attack knife-lizard thing.  Meanwhile, the boys, brave and resourceful, must find a way to escape the clutches of the attractive Japanese women in shimmery silver leotards.  Stuff like this is what popcorn was made for, and my kids ate up every minute of it.

Me?  Well, I had a good time!  Attack of the Monsters so earnestly tried to entertain my kids that it charmed the heck out of me. The Gamera franchise occupies a pleasant sphere as Daiei Studios’ child-friendly answer to Toho Studios’ more teen-oriented Godzilla.  This outing’s aliens were just menacing enough, its sets and costumes just good enough, to help me suspend my disbelief and roll with it.  This isn’t half the movie that my next entry, The Earrings of Madame De… can boast of being.  But it isn’t trying to be.  It’s trying to be light entertainment for monster-hungry preadolescents, and it succeeds.  Attack of the Monsters is a winner.

The Red Shoes

Most movies try to make you believe that you’re watching reality.  The Red Shoes tries to make you believe that you’re watching a stage production.  The sets obviously look like sets.  Players wear so much powder on their faces that we can actually see the line where makeup ends and flesh begins.  Things seem heightened, theatrical.  And that’s before the music starts and the dancing begins.

Here’s the setup:  it’s Europe, in something approximating the ‘20s.  The Ballet Lermontov has just hired a new composer who’s a genius.  Now, it needs a new prima ballerina because the previous one got married.  I guess that’s just how they rolled in the ‘20s.  The composer (Marius Goring) belongs in front of an orchestra.  The new prima (Moira Shearer) belongs onstage.  They belong together.

Here’s the execution: heightened, dramatic, delirious with aestheticism and creativity, The Red Shoes doesn’t care if you suspend your disbelief.  It just wants to blow you away.

It succeeds, through an audacious combination of dance, theatricality, set design, and special effects.  It doesn’t just show you what a ballet looks like, it shows you what’s happening inside the minds of the creators, the performers, and the audience.  Its music is extraordinary, its dancing is fantastic, and I found myself swept away even though I knew I was watching a show.

What a movie.

House

You have never seen a movie like House.  Director Nobuhiko Obayashi made sure of it.

It was the early ‘70s and Jaws had just hit.  Toho studios, looking to capitalize on the horror market, asked commercial director Obayashi for a script.  Obayashi thought, ‘If Jaws is a success, what’s next?  Movies about bear attacks and bee attacks and ant attacks.  How boring.’  He talked over the project with his ten year old daughter, talked about what scared her.  He wrote down her ideas as scenarios including mummies, skeletons, ghosts, vampires, hungry pianos, murderous reflections, demonic cats ,and much more.  He gave the scenarios to his writing partner and told him to have at it.  The result?  A film that processes a little girl’s night terrors through the sensibilities of the men who made the classic Charles Bronson “Mandom” commercials.

The result is a bold, creepy, and funny horror fantasy.  It gathers seven young women whom the camera will love, fetishisize, and terrorize in combinations that’ll alternately make you smile, squirm, recoil, and guffaw.  It sends them to a spooky house on a hill.  It introduces them to a friendly old woman who may not be friendly at all.  Before long, the flying head of a decapitated Japanese girl will take a bite out of the rear end of one of her former classmates.  And away we go.

Ok, so far so good.  But you’ve seen Sam Raimi pictures and you’ve seen early Peter Jackson flicks.  What makes House so very different?  Execution.  This horror fantasy luxuriates in the fantastic.  It uses every imaginable camera trick to focus the eye, to leap from image to image, and even to play within an image to give the impression of a story told by someone whose mind is racing through and among characters and events faster than she can get the words out.  House’s sets, including deliriously colorful matte paintings and generous helpings of cobwebs, heighten the sense of unreality.  Its use of color, music, and editing make it feel like it has so much story to tell, that it wants to pile on so many ideas, that it can’t squeeze them all into 90ish minutes of classical narrative film.

In other words, House stands as a delirious exercise in excessive, feverish, joyfully weird and innovative filmmaking.  It’s the most fun I’ve had at the movies since Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and I can’t wait to see it again.

And the second time through, I’ll still have never seen anything like it.

Colombiana

Colombiana’s tagline is “Vengeance is Beautiful.”  I’d have made it, “You’ll believe a 115-lb wisp can kick a grown man’s ass.”

The film begins in Bogota, a hot, dusty, and overcrowded series of favelas in which sweaty, grimy men kill for a dollar.  Coincidentally, I’m in Bogota as I write this.  As I look out my hotel window in this city at 8600’ above sea level, I see pines and walnut trees, green grass and a park.  It’s 68°.  The people are better-dressed than the average American.  So really, the film doesn’t begin in Bogota at all.  It begins in the Scary South American Drug Haven of Euro-American imagination.  That’s fine, because the film exists in the world of imagination.  It imagines that Zoe Saldana, an attractive and athletic woman who looks like she never ate a cheeseburger in her life, can deliver a punch that’d actually, y’know, hurt.  It imagines that a villain sophisticated enough to pull off a $50M Ponzi scheme would be a Z-grade vulgarian willing to blow his entire take in the first five years, going by his choices in housing, entertainment, and personal protection.  It imagines, well, it imagines a lot of things.  Your enjoyment of this film will hinge upon your willingness to imagine along with it.

Are you willing, for example, to imagine that a parkour-inspired chase sequence actually happens, since the film cuts so quickly from shot to shot that we never actually see any of the stuntmen do anything?  Are you willing to imagine that Zaldana is capable of learning and performing a fight routine, since the film never actually shows us one?  Are you willing to imagine that a top-notch revenge thriller is unspooling before you?

Me, I’m willing.  And not just because Saldana looks great in a catsuit.  I’m willing because Saldana sells it.  She sells smart and menacing and deadly so well that I didn’t even consider the film’s implausibilities until I sat down to write this.  When Saldana declares her need for vengeance (yes, this is just another revenge thriller), when she chaos-cinemas her way through an army of bad guys, I believe it because she believes it.  This woman’s gonna be a big, big star because if anyone can make an audience believe that a 115-lb wisp can do whatever she damn well pleases, it’s Zoe Saldana.

So enjoy your trip to Fantasyland and groove on the ‘splosions and dig the gunfights and all that.  Let your imagination run wild.  Zoe Saldana will help you believe; and it’s beautiful, man.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead

Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Undead had me at the opening credits.

That’s a good thing, because it isn’t a very good movie.  The story’s lame, the acting’s bad, the jokes fall flat, and the makeup sucks.  But hey, it’s a mashup of Shakespeare, Stoker, and Stoppard called Rosencrantz And Guildenstern are Undead.  I’m in anyway.

Here’s the setup: Jake Hoffman is a layabout who answers an ad for a “theater director, easily controlled, human.”  The theater?  It’s a vampire theater, putting on a production of “Horatio,” in which Hamlet is the bad guy.  Many theater-nerd jokes will be told.  Much blood will be sucked.  You will probably check your watch.

But hey, I like theater-nerd jokes, and this film delivers them with gusto.  It also delivers a breezy, “ain’t this fun” attitude that bounces things along for an hour and fifteen minutes.  It looks and feels cheap, but it gets by on silliness and goodwill.  If you like theater-nerd jokes and vampires, you just might like Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Undead.