Everyone knows summer means blockbusters, and this year’s crop is as big and bombastic as any year previous. From superheroes to TV remakes to mystery-shrouded thrillers, I’m looking at the most promising summer movies for guys. If you’re like me and summer means copious amounts of time in air-conditioned theaters watching things explode, you’ve come to the right place.
For a rundown of some more girl-friendly summer flicks, check out ‘Byte-Sized’ blogger Amber Plante's list here.
Iron Man 2 
Summer kicked off this past weekend with the hugely-anticipated sequel to the breakout 2007 hit, and while some are grumbling that the story doesn’t measure up to the first film (a complaint I don’t really understand after seeing the movie; it’s a lot of fun!), the action is miles ahead of anything in the original Iron Man, and for a comic geek like me, that counts for a lot. And while I may not think much of Scarlett Johansson’s acting chops, I can’t really argue with her in that Black Widow catsuit.
Robin Hood
Director Ridley Scott re-teams with Gladiator star Russell Crowe to put a new spin on the classic folk hero. While I love most of Scott’s movies, I’m not a huge Gladiator fan – I’ll take his underappreciated Crusades epic, Kingdom of Heaven, over that film any day of the week – but I have a big soft spot for medieval movies, and I can’t think of a better team to put a fresh coat of paint on the legendary archer than Scott and Crowe. If the action measures up, this could be one of this summer’s stronger movies.
MacGruber
I never did understand why this, of all the current Saturday Night Live characters, was getting his own movie – after all, the MacGruber skits are barely a minute long, and epitomize the one-repeated-joke SNL comedy structure – but after seeing the trailer, I’m on board for this R-rated spoof of action movies. Will Forte and Kristen Wiig are two of the funniest people on SNL right now, and as a child of the ‘80s who grew up watching action flicks, this looks like it’s right up my alley. Also: Val Kilmer as the bad guy! It could be this summer’s Hangover…or this summer’s Land of the Lost.
The A-Team
The first teaser for this adaptation of the ‘80s TV show left a lot of people (myself included) pretty cold, but the longer trailer that came out a few months later was much more promising, showcasing the ridiculously over-the-top action sequences and what appears to be a cast that isn’t taking itself very seriously. We’ll see how UFC fighter Quinton “Rampage” Jackson does filling the mohawk of ‘80s icon Mr. T, but between Liam Neeson hamming it up as Hannibal and District 9’s Sharlto Copley as “Mad” Murdock, I can’t pretend I’m not looking forward to this. If The A-Team is big, dumb action done right, it could be a riot.
Jonah Hex
The buzz for this comic adaptation, about an Old West outlaw with some supernatural connections, isn’t really great, and the recent trailer reminded me a bit too much of Wild Wild West for me to get too excited. But Josh Brolin is always quality, John Malkovich is usually reliable as a fun villain. And I guess there are worse things that Megan Fox dressed up as an old-timey prostitute. Jonah Hex could be one of this summer’s surprises.
Predators
Now this is what summer movies are all about. Producer Robert Rodriguez and director Nimrod Antal (Armored) rescue the Predator from the wastes of the Aliens vs. Predator movies with a flick that looks to return the iconic movie monster to his roots. A clever inversion of the classic 1987 Predator, this time out a group of deadly humans (mercenaries, criminals, etc.) is transported to another planet where they’re stalked by a group of the alien hunters. I love the original Schwarzenegger Predator quite a bit, and everything I’ve seen from Predators suggests the people who made it do as well. It may lack the buzz of Iron Man 2 or Inception, but this may be the movie I’m the most excited about this summer.
Inception
Christopher Nolan follows up The Dark Knight with what appears to be a heady sci-fi thriller that seems to involve dreams and corporate espionage. Nolan’s keeping plot details pretty close to the vest (something that’s fast becoming his trademark), and as a fan of science fiction, I’m very much looking forward to seeing exactly what Leonardo Di Caprio and Ellen Page are doing in those mysterious trailers. If the rumors I’ve heard about the plot prove true, I have a feeling Inception might be a bit too thinky and weird to do Dark Knight-like business, but that has nothing to do with whether or not it’s good, and it certainly looks intriguing. I’m one of the few people who enjoyed Nolan’s The Prestige, so I expect at the very least a cool, twisty thriller that’ll make me think. For a summer movie, that could really be a mind-blower.
The Expendables
Quite possibly the manliest movie of the summer, director/star Sylvester Stallone assembles a murderer’s row (pun intended, and immediately regretted) of action stars, past and present, including Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, UFC fighter Randy Couture, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Eric Roberts and the amazing Terry Crews (he of those insane and wonderful new Old Spice ads), for this old-school action flick about a group of mercenaries on a suicide mission to free a South American country from the clutches of a dictator (at least that’s what I think is happening; it’s hard to tell from the trailers from all the explosions and muscles). I love Stallone’s recent Rambo, and while this PG-13 actioner won’t have nearly that movie’s levels of violence, I’m still expecting a fun time at the movies. There aren’t enough Men On A Mission movies anymore, and I’m stoked that Sly’s looking to rectify that.
Dinner for Schmucks
The magnificent Paul Rudd stars in this comedy about an ambitious exec who finds out that in order to get the big promotion, he must impress his bosses at a special dinner party they hold where everyone brings some an idiot along for the rest of them to laugh at, and when he meets a good-natured dork (Steve Carell), he realizes it’s his shot at impressing his boss. But as much as I love Rudd, it’s The Hangover’s Zach Galifinakis who looks like the movie’s secret weapon, playing a wacky eccentric who thinks he has mind powers. I’m sold.
Labels: Movie review
¶ 2:21 PM 0 Comments
blown. It never happened, and while the film was good – very good, actually – my world, sadly, remains unrocked. This movie’s been getting absolutely insane levels of hype in certain corners of the Internet (“best American action movie in a decade” and “greatest gunfights since Hard Boiled” are the two that stand out in my mind) since last summer’s ComiCon, and I’m not a guy who takes comparisons to vintage John Woo films lightly (check out my review of his 1989 classic The Killer here), to the point where I couldn’t help but let it inform my opinion of the movie. And as much as I went into it with a bit of an “Okay, let’s see what you got” attitude (which is almost never a good headspace to be in going into a review, in my opinion), I must say that while it didn’t rewrite the rules of action cinema for the 21st century, as some have claimed, Kick-Ass is a fun, foul-mouthed and gleefully violent and take on superheroes. I haven’t laughed this hard in an action movie since Punisher: War Zone, a movie I dearly love.Kick-Ass is about a geeky high school kid named Dave who decides one day to try dressing up like a superhero. His first foray into crimefighting lands him in the intensive care unit, but when he recovers his nerve endings are so deadened that he can barely feel pain. Which helps, as he rises to fame courtesy of an Internet video of him getting beaten up by some thugs. The resulting clip, which becomes the biggest thing ever on the Internet, makes Kick-Ass a household name, and brings into the light the previously unknown father-daughter vigilante team of Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloë Moretz) and inspiring the Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). All of this is to the chagrin of the local crime boss (Mark Strong), who finds himself having to add “costumed crimefighters” to his list of career headaches.
The idea of a “real-world” take on superheroes isn’t new – Watchmen is the best, and best-known, exploration of that concept – but instead of going the grim, vaguely depressing route that Watchmen did (as well as the recent Canadian indie flick Defendor – check out my review here), Kick-Ass is an ultraviolent day-glo cartoon. See, the “realism” in Kick-Ass doesn’t go much further than the notion that if someone were to actually don tights and fight crime, they’d probably be horribly injured or killed. And they’d also probably have to be insane.
Dave (Aaron Johnson) isn’t crazy, just a geeky kid who takes a chance and does something he can’t believe nobody’s tried to do before. Naturally, it doesn’t go exactly as planned. Johnson is actually very solid in the role (I didn’t realize he was British until after I saw the movie, which is impressive), and he manages to make Dave a loser (and an idiot; it never feels like you’re supposed to think him dressing up like a superhero is a good idea) without making him unlikeable or too much of a pushover (a problem I had with Wanted, another comic-turned-movie from the same comic writer, Mark Millar; more on him later).
As much as he’s clearly the hero of the piece, Dave/Kick-Ass ends up acting almost as an entry point to a larger world that he (and the viewer) didn’t really know about, and that’s the world of Big Daddy and Hit Girl, a hyper-violent riff on Batman and Robin. (Cage is doing an utterly insane Adam West/William Shatner impression while in costume that you have to see to believe.) They’ve been fighting crime for some time, but from the shadows, as opposed to Kick-Ass, who promotes himself with a MySpace page. It’s Big Daddy and Hitgirl that get to do all the cool stuff during the film’s many excellent action sequences, and as much as some people seem to take issue with this (the complaint is that Kick-Ass is a supporting character in his own movie), it really only underlines the reality that the film has set up; Dave isn’t really a particularly good superhero, and usually ends up getting beaten up. But Big Daddy and Hitgirl have been training themselves to do this for years, and they, unlike the amateur Kick-Ass, are very, very good at killing bad guys. When they turn up, the movie’s energy level kicks up a notch, and that’s a credit to both Cage and Moretz (who has gotten a ton of attention as the vicious and foul-mouthed Hit Girl, and she is indeed the best thing in the movie), and the tragedy at the heart of their origin gives weight to characters that could have otherwise just been cartoonish and silly.
But the real star of Kick-Ass is director Matthew Vaughn (Stardust, Layer Cake), who shows with this movie that he may be one of the best new action filmmakers working in Western movies. His film moves gracefully from action scenes to character moments, and as much as this is being sold as a superhero action film (and it is most definitely that), I took it more as a comedy about superheroes that happens to have stellar action scenes. Vaughn manages to poke fun at superheroes without being too mean-spirited (though believe me, as a lifelong geek and comic reader, many of the jokes in the film ring very true indeed), and as much as he obviously there’s obviously some mockery of genre conventions here, it never feels condescending or insulting to superheroes or their fans.
Kick-Ass is even more impressive in how it eclipses its source material. The film is based on a comic series from Scottish writer Mark Millar, who also wrote the comic Wanted (which was altered much more heavily for the movie version, which is great, because the comic is among of the worst I’ve read), and the film manages to clean up a lot of Millar’s juvenile tics and make them watchable. As much as I’m slagging on Millar’s writing style, which is too clever by half, he’s actually quite good with the basics of storytelling and pacing; there’s some twists and turns in Kick-Ass that I didn’t see coming and some genuine “how are they gonna get out of THIS?” moments in the third act. But Vaughn is a far superior filmmaker than Millar is a comic writer. As a guy who considers himself more of a comic fan than a movie buff (though it’s a close No. 2, believe me), I usually prefer the original comics to the film versions, but in the case of Kick-Ass, the movie is the better of the two versions, by a wide margin.
Kick-Ass is a riot. It’s crass, violent as hell and definitely not for everyone, but it’s also the most pure fun I’ve had at the movies all year.
GRADE: A-
Labels: comics, Movie review, superheroes
¶ 11:33 AM 0 Comments
Watching Ninja Assassin was like getting a date with the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, only to realize minutes into dinner that she’s actually dumb, boring, and incapable of holding up her end of the conversation. I sat there in the darkened theater less than halfway into Ninja Assassin’s 
running time, wondering how a movie with that title (and that trailer!) could be so dull and uninteresting. Ninja Assassin is an old-school martial arts movie in the sense that any time there isn’t a fight happening – which is all too often in this film – it’s about as much fun to watch as drying paint.
Ninja Assassin’s plot (and for a martial arts flick, far too much time is devoted to it) follows Raizo, a rogue member of an ancient ninja clan (inhumanly pretty Korean pop star Rain, shredded to almost Bruce Lee proportions) whose one-man campaign against his former family lands him in the path of a researcher at a fictionalized version of Interpol (Naomie Harris), and, naturally, they team up to fight the ninja clan.
The stuff that works in Ninja Assassin is, as you'd expect (or in my case, hope), the ninja stuff. Director James McTeigue is a competent action director, and the action scenes are generally fun and fast-paced. They’re also quite dark, literally, which might make them a little hard to follow. I didn’t really mind though, as it’s thematically appropriate (ninjas don’t exactly favor broad daylight to operate), and I found I could follow the fights if I paid attention. Ninja Assassin is, however, hampered by the fact that the most fun action bit is actually right at the beginning. It’s a gleefully violent scene – not really a fight as much as a wholesale slaughter of some yakuza thugs – that unfortunately sets the bar at a point nothing else in the movie can quite reach. It also establishes the film’s style: fast action, severed limbs and torrents of CGI blood.
The stuff that doesn’t work is basically all the non-action bits, which, unfortunately, make up a lot of the movie. After that awesome opener, Ninja Assassin’s first half consists almost entirely of dull, drawn-out flashbacks (seriously, I’d guess about 30-35% of this movie is flashbacks) to Raizo’s training with his ninja clan (with a regrettable emphasis on a leaden romantic subplot with a female student), him training in his Berlin apartment in the present day, and Harris investigating the ninjas with her boss. It sucks.
The thing I just couldn’t understand is why the filmmakers – especially bona fide geeks like the Wachowski Brothers, who produced the film with V for Vendetta director McTeigue – decided to spend so much time on the Naomie Harris/Europol subplot. The whole movie slows to a crawl whenever it becomes the focus, and that happens a lot. Whoever had the notion that the audience for a movie called Ninja Assassin wanted to spend this much time watching a third-rate Bourne rip-off should rethink their career in popular cinema. Why do movies like this always have to have tacked-on global-police subplots? It’s like the makers of Ninja Assassin watched the cruddy 2007 video game adaptation Hitman and decided to emulate all the things that similar missed opportunity did wrong. Harris’ researcher has about as much (if not more) screen time that the ninja assassin of the title, which would be fine, I guess, if the movie was called Forensic Researcher, but it’s not. It’s called Ninja Assassin. So yeah. Problems.
In terms of craft, Ninja Assassin really did feel like a step backwards from V for Vendetta. McTeigue’s 2005 adaptation of the rightfully-acclaimed Alan Moore/David Lloyd graphic novel was quite good, easily the best film of an Alan Moore comic until Watchmen. It had excellent performances, looked great, and managed to tell a fairly complex story in a way that was easy to follow. The buzz around V was that the Wachowskis were far more hands-on producers than is the norm, and essentially directed chunks of that movie themselves. No idea how true that is, or if the same is being said about Ninja Assassin, but there’s a sloppiness to the storytelling (which, to be fair, is probably tied to the weak screenplay by Matthew Sand and J. Michael Straczynski, but the Wachowskis got their start as writers, so that’s not much of an excuse either) that I didn’t see in McTeigue’s previous film. The sharpness of V for Vendetta was one of the reasons I’d had high hopes for Ninja Assassin, but the movie was a significant letdown. All Ninja Assassin had to do was showcase fun action and not drag on too much during the scenes where there’s no fighting, but they filmmakers only get half of that equation right, and even then the action isn’t sufficiently mind-blowing to excuse the limpness of the rest of the movie. For a martial-arts movie geek like me, it’s one of the more disappointing movies of the year.
GRADE: C-
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Labels: martial arts, Movie review
¶ 10:53 AM 0 Comments
nd joyous. It’s basically got everything that makes me love movies (with the possible exception of guns and samurai swords, but hey, you can’t win ‘em all).Where the Wild Things Are, as everyone knows by now, is director Spike Jonze’s adaptation of the beloved Maurice Sendak children’s book. I vaguely remember the book from my own childhood, but it didn’t resonate with me the way it clearly has with lots of other people. Which is fine; my not being a huge fan of the book clearly didn’t affect my enjoyment of this brilliant movie. And considering the source material is only a few dozens of words in length, Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers obviously have a lot of room to work in terms of narrative (I, like a lot of people, really only remember Sendak’s illustrations, and they’re recreated gorgeously on the screen). Where the Wild Things Are follows Max, a rowdy young boy who’s prone to acting out for attention from older sister and his single mom (Catherine Keener, giving her character surprising depth in the two or three scenes she has). After one particularly ugly fight before dinner (he’s mad his mom invited her new boyfriend; the whereabouts of Max’s father are never explained, but his absence clearly looms large in Max’s life), Max angrily runs out of the house and through some brush until he finds a boat, which he sails to a mysterious island populated by big, furry monsters who talk like people. Max soon sets himself up as the Wild Things’ new king – he seems to catch them in the middle of some sort of internal struggle amongst their little family unit – and before long he’s having fun playing with his new friends.
But despite the book’s pedigree, Jonze’s and Eggers’ Where the Wild Things Are is really not a kid’s movie. It’s more of a movie about childhood than it is a movie for children. Which is not to say that it’s not appropriate for youngsters or too scary for them (there are two scenes where Jonze plays up the Wild Things’ monstrous aspects, but they’re not that scary, and both serve the story), but rather too boring for kids. There was a hipster couple who brought their two young children to the screening I was at (neither kid could have been older than five), and they weren’t scared, they just weren’t interested in the movie at all; it was too talky for them, and young children who can’t sit still for two hours probably can’t really appreciate a beautifully-composed shot of Max and one of the Wild Things walking across a desert.
Where the Wild Things Are is about growing up and leaving childish things behind, and the “fun” Jonze focuses on, the kind of thing Max loves to do and nobody wants to do with him back in the real world, seems largely to consist of boyish horseplay, wrestling and “playing war” with dirt clods and smashing trees and sticks in the woods. (I did all of those things as a kid, so I had a big grin on my face during all of these sequences.) Considering Jonze’s crucial role in the inception of Jackass, it’s hard not to see his Where the Wild Things Are as a sort of childlike, wonder-filled prot0-Jackass.
But Where the Wild Things Are is also a bit of a difficult film for me to really judge objectively, as I felt a very personal connection to Max. My folks may not have split up, but I grew up an only child who kept to himself, so Max being a an angry, lonely kid who doesn’t really know how to process his feelings and who seeks sanctuary in imaginary worlds really struck a chord with me personally, so it’s entirely possible that this movie just clicks with me on levels it may not with other people. I certainly can’t tell.
I definitely have to mention the acting in Where the Wild Things Are. The ludicrously-named Max Records, who plays Max, is one of the best child actors I’ve seen in ages. It never felt like he was performing (which is a problem among even some of the better child actors), and he’s so natural that his work goes a long way to making the viewer just sort of accept the film’s reality. This kid turn into a big deal some day.
The actors playing Wild Things themselves are all brilliant. James Gandolfini delivers a real performance as Carol, the Wild Things’ sort of de facto leader and Max’s closest friend in the group. I’m sure it won’t happen, but Gandolfini deserves some sort of awards attention for his work here, because it’s really something. And Jonze deserves praise for casting “real” actors (Forest Whitaker, Chris Cooper, Catherine O’Hara, Lauren Ambrose, Paul Dano) to voice the Wild Things, all of them talking just like normal people, nary a goofy, put-on voice to be heard. It’s another thing that lifts Where the Wild Things Are above typical children’s fare.
The special effects for the Wild Things themselves are also incredible, done with a combination of Jim Henson suits and CGI effects for their faces. I was surprised at how quickly I just sort of accepted them as characters and stopped looking at them as the amazing combination of practical and digital effects they are. The Wild Things actually emote in a way that feels real, and Gandolfini’s Carol, in particular, has scenes so genuinely moving that George Lucas and James Cameron will probably sign a suicide pact after they see this movie.
Where the Wild Things Are is about the end of childhood, very much from an adult’s perspective, and the film has a real melancholy feel to it. While it only really gets sad at the end (and I admit I got a little choked up), there’s a pervading sense of sadness to even the most joyous scenes; even if Max doesn’t realize it, we all know his time with the Wild Things is only a temporary refuge from the world he ran away from. Even near the end, Jonze and Eggers do an excellent job of having the realities of the outside world subtly begin to intrude on Max’s paradise as the internal politics of the Wild Things, which were only hinted at in early scenes, begin to come to the surface and threaten his new life.
The real thrust of the film is Max basically learning his lesson and growing up a bit. He’s at the age where acting out in a childish manner – screaming, throwing fits, actively disobeying his mother, even attacking her – is starting to seem less like him just being a kid and more like him being an actual problem child. He’s getting bigger and stronger, and it’s not “cute” anymore. While he understood enough at the beginning of the film to feel guilty almost immediately after trashing his older sister’s room in a fit of childish rage, his adventures with the Wild Things really hammer home to him the impact his actions have on the people he loves.
Where the Wild Things Are is a triumph of filmmaking, and while it’s only the third film Spike Jonze has made in 10 years, it’s looking like a masterpiece. (And kudos also to writer Dave Eggers, who, between this and the wonderful Away We Go – my review is here – is proving with his first two scripts that he’s better at combining humor and true emotion better than almost any other screenwriter in Hollywood.) Where the Wild Things Are is truly amazing stuff, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
GRADE: A+
Labels: Movie review
¶ 9:40 AM 0 Comments
movie theater since Inglourious Basterds (read my gushing review here), which is actually a higher compliment than it sounds, as that was the most fun I'd had in a theater in probably close to a year.As much as I'm not a big horror fan, I tend to like zombie movies a lot because of the subtext and social commentary the genre allows. Zombieland has a bit of that – the nerdy, reclusive main character, Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), finds the family unit in the titular zombie-filled wasteland that he never had before the zombie apocalypse – but I loved it primarily because it's just so damn funny. If you're seeking a more traditional, "scary" zombie movie, look elsewhere; Zombieland is basically just a comedy that happens to take place in the world after the zombie apocalypse. There's some nicely funny splatter here, but director Ruben Fleischer is far more interested in laughs and characters than gore.
The plot of Zombieland follows "Columbus" – the human characters in the film are mostly referred to by the places they're ostensbly trying to get to – our narrator and unlikely survivor of the zombie apocalypse. He's managed to stay alive mostly because of his strict set of rules (which Fleischer finds cute ways to visually reinforce throughout the film), but also because his being a socially maladjusted shut-in uncomfortable with human contact actually left him more psycologically prepared than most people for solitary life in the wasteland. He soon comes across Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a cowboy hat-wearing badass who seems to take a bit too much pleasure in killing zombies. Soon the pair stumbles across two sisters (Superbad's Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin of Little Miss Sunshine fame) grifting their way across the zombie-filled wasteland, and before long the four are on a road trip to a California theme park rumored to be free of the mindless cannibals.
The core of Zombieland is the characters, mainly Eisenberg (who's actually better at Michael Cera's 'geeky white guy' shtick than Cera himself) and Harrelson, who have wonderful chemistry together. The pair are in just about every scene in the movie together, and their dynamic makes Zombieland a joy to watch. Both actors are flat-out hilarious, but both also manage to give their characters an emotional center that makes them sympathetic – even the secret origin of Tallahassee tugged on my heartstrings more than I thought was possible.
The other thing I loved about Zombieland is that, with the exception of a couple of brief flashbacks, it's set well after the zombie apocalypse. Fleischer and screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick wisely understand that at this point moviegoers have seen tons of movies chronicling the rise of the zombies and the fall of society, so the world they've created in Zombieland feels unique for nothing other than they don't dwell on that stuff. These are characters who've been surviving in this hell for months now, and the movie finds nicely subtle ways to examine what that means without spending more than a few minutes on their pre-zombie lives.
Zombieland is an absolute riot from start to finish. (It also has one of the greatest cameos I've ever seen, but I won't say anything more than that.) If you're not into zombie movies there's a chance some of the humor won't fly with you, but I loved it. I'd call Zombieland mindless fun, but there's a surprising amount of heart – and brains (both literal and figurative) – in this movie. Book yourself a trip to Zombieland. It's a blast.
GRADE: A
Labels: Movie review, zombies
¶ 10:45 AM 0 Comments
favorite of his films, with the possible exception of The Limey) made me really excited about Soderbergh re-teaming with Matt Damon to tell the true story of Mark Whitacre, a senior exec at food giant Archer Daniels Midland who helped the FBI bust an ostensible price-fixing scheme. Everything I saw from the movie, from the ridiculous poster (seriously, tell me that thing isn’t genius) to Damon’s awesome mustache and paunch to the exclamation point in the title had me stoked. And credit to Soderbergh and Damon, they did not let me down.But let’s get the basics out of the way early: The Informant! is one of the best movies I’ve seen this year, and Damon definitely deserves an Oscar nomination at the very least for his work as Whitacre. The movie is astonishingly funny in an absurd, Coen brothers way, and there’s also a lot of wonderfully subtle little things going on as well. While there’s certainly a lot of laugh-out-loud moments in The Informant!, most of the humor comes from the tone and the performances, none of which are “wacky” or what you’d normally associate with a comedy. (Even Damon’s sillier moments, many of which are on display in the ads and trailers, don’t come off as “jokey” in the context of the movie, but he’s still a non-stop riot.) Soderbergh and his cast play everything fairly straight, and let the comedy flow from that.
But as much credit as Soderbergh and his cast deserve for how funny The Informant! is, the movie has a secret weapon that I wasn’t expecting at all: Marvin Hamlisch. Soderbergh tapped the legendary Hollywood composer to do the score for The Informant! (which, despite being set mostly in the early ‘90s, has a definite ‘70s vibe), and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie where the music contributed so much to the comedy. And I don’t mean funny cues of pop songs, but the score itself. Hamlisch never devolves into making fun of the action we’re seeing on screen (though he comes close with some flourishes that echo the James Bond theme in a couple of moments where Whitacre’s really getting into acting like a spy), but his music adds a lot to the absurd, tonal comedy that Soderbergh creates. I don’t remember the last time a movie’s score had me in stitches.
I don’t want to give too much away about where The Informant! eventually goes (even though it's based on a true story), but the further along Whitacre gets into his work with the FBI, the more red flags about Whitacre himself start popping up, and his story – and Whitacre himself – eventually falls apart. And that’s where the movie blew me away; without really changing too much in terms of pacing or style, Soderbergh shifts the tone of the movie in the final act, and it sort of stops being funny and starts being sad and weird (and I mean that in the best possible way). And that’s also where I began to appreciate the work Damon was doing; he manages to show Whitacre slowly coming apart without really changing his performance too drastically. But as the context for Whitacre’s increasingly erratic behavior becomes clear, so does the depth of the character Damon has created in Whitacre. It’s pretty amazing stuff, and it’ll be a shame if Damon being so damn funny works against his chances of getting some sort of awards recognition.
The other performance I absolutely have to mention is Scott Bakula as Whitacre’s FBI handler. I was never into Quantum Leap and I couldn’t have been less interested in Star Trek: Enterprise, but sweet Christmas is he brilliant in here. The amount of information – often hilarious information – Bakula conveys with just a subtle change of his expression had me amazed. And the dynamic between his character and Whitacre – he’s simultaneously an adversarial authority figure to Whitacre as well as being his confidant and something almost approaching a friend – is like almost nothing I’ve seen before. What a wonderful career jump-start The Informant! could be for Bakula; I’d happily watch him in just about anything after this.
Overall, I loved The Informant!, but I’m not sure how much of that was based in the fact that Soderbergh’s movies just seem to turn my crank. Whatever the reason, it’s funny and strange and sad and delightful, and I recommend it highly.
GRADE: A
Labels: Movie review
¶ 9:50 AM 0 Comments
g animals for kids. It’s a reason that, aside from the occasional Pixar movie like The Incredibles or a genuine aberration like Beowulf, I don’t bother with big animated movies. Which is one of the reasons I enjoyed 9 as much as I did.9 was produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov (the crazy Russian who made Wanted and the totally insane Nightwatch and Daywatch), and it’s the directorial debut of former WETA Digital animator (the Lord of the Rings people) Shane Acker. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic future in which humanity has been totally wiped out by a war with machines (sort of like The Matrix, but the machines are decidedly more analogue), and follows 9, a living, stitched-together doll a few inches in height who wakes up in a mysterious workshop with no memory of who he is or the world around him. 9 (voiced by Elijah Wood) eventually finds several other doll-creatures, all of whom are similarly numbered. He soon accidentally reactivates the mechanical brain that started the war with humanity, and embarks on a quest to redeem himself, save his new friends and solve the mystery of his very existence.
If you’re thinking that sounds like pretty heady stuff for a digitally-animated movie aimed at younger audiences, it is. 9 never talks down to the audience or traffics in fart humor or pop-culture references, but that doesn’t mean it’ll fly over kids’ heads. It does deal with some pretty dark themes, and there’s some imagery in there that’s probably too scary for very young children, but 9 reminded me, in all the best ways, of beloved movies from my own childhood like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. All fairy tales have darkness to them, and 9 is no different.
The thing I loved the most about 9 was its look and feel. It really felt like a Tim Burton movie, not because it’s filled with superficial goth trappings, but rather because it has such a unique visual aesthetic and sense of design. But make no mistake, this is Acker’s show all the way. There’s such a clarity of vision on display, from the oversized world the characters inhabit, where crossing a city block is an epic quest, to the heavily industrial, vaguely facist/Nazi vibe of human civilization glimpsed in the flashbacks, that seems absent from the majority of other animated movies being released today.
The designs, especially of the twisted monsters the evil machine-brain sends after the heroes, are delightfully insane, like a cloth cobra with a twisted doll’s face beneath its "hood," or a bird of prey made of shear blades and a tattered old flag. The animation itself is also wonderfully detailed, with just about every texture or fabric looking almost photo-real, from the rough burlap of 9 to the softer, smoother look of the warrior-woman, 7 (Jennifer Connelly). I fell in love with little details like the tools and weapons the tiny characters use, like fishhooks and kitchen knives and needles, or how all the characters’ eyes are camera shutters and the way Acker uses them to show emotion.
If Burton’s partner in crime, Timur Bekmambetov, has a stamp on the movie, it’s in the action scenes. Granted, nobody in 9 curves bullets or drives a car up the side of a building, but watching 7 take down freaky mechanical monstrosities is a blast, and the action has a similar sense of speed found in Bekmambetov’s directorial efforts.
But as much as I enjoyed the darker aspects of the story and the technical details, the story and characters of 9 also work quite well. As much as I appreciated the lack of toilet humor, that’s not to say there isn’t fun to be had. The comic relief characters are a pair of twins who can’t talk but instead use their eyes as movie projectors; they’re cute and funny without being cloying, and Michael Bay and company could have taken some pointers when they were crafting their own ill-advised team of comic-relief twins in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Acker also manages to inject the story with emotion without slowing down the pace, and because 9 himself is essentially responsible for the mess the characters find themselves in, his arc has as much to do with redemption as it does the traditional hero’s journey.
Overall I was very impressed with 9. It’s a really unique movie with a real sense of style to it, which seems rare these days for what’s still basically a kid’s movie. It’s probably too much for very young audiences to handle (unless you relish answering post-movie questions about concepts like the end of human civilization), but it’s quite an excellent little film. Highly recommended.
GRADE: A-
Labels: animation, Movie review
¶ 9:16 AM 0 Comments
When I was growing up reading comics, Marvel had a book that I bought sporadically (and, in retrospect, I wish I’d picked it up more) called What If...?, and the concept was to tell single-issue, “alternate universe” 
stories that diverted from famous (as well as obscure) stories, like “What if Spider-Man joined the Fantastic Four?”, a twist on Spidey’s unsuccessful bid to join the FF in Amazing Spider-Man #1. Most of the fun of the What If...? books was due to the fact that they weren’t chained to Marvel continuity, so crazy things could happen, usually involving the deaths of major characters (one issue I remember reading, “What if the Punisher killed Daredevil?”, included not just Daredevil’s death, but also the demise of Aunt May, Spider-Man and eventually the Punisher himself), and that unpredictability was the main thing that made the books fun in a way that no other comics were. Superhero stories already take place in a realm of fantasy, but What If...? took that fantasy to another level.
Which brings me, in typically meandering (and comic book-related!) fashion, to Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s World War II What If...? story. It’s already topped the box office and garnered plenty of critical acclaim, but as a movie buff and Tarantino fan (also, as a guy with a movie blog) I have to add my voice to the chorus singing this movie’s praises. Inglourious Basterds is an absolute blast. It’s the film where Tarantino combines the promise hinted at in Jackie Brown – still considered by some to be his best film, at least pre-Basterds – with the flair for balls-out action he displayed in his genre diversions Kill Bill and Death Proof, though to be honest, I was actually struck with how little violence is actually in Inglourious Basterds. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still got moments that will have some people cringing – Tarantino’s never shied away from violence, and more than one Nazi scalping is shown in grisly detail – but much of the action in Inglourious Basterds is verbal. That’s not a complaint either, as the dialogue is easily among some of Tarantino’s finest.
Speaking of finest, I also have to jump on the “Just give Christoph Waltz the Oscar now” bandwagon. He’s utterly amazing as the film’s villain, Col. Landa, a.k.a. the Jew Hunter. Tarantino’s always had a knack for finding excellent, little-known actors, and Waltz may be his best discovery yet. His performance as the surprisingly pleasant Nazi officer (who can turn to terrifying violence on a dime) is easily one of the best of the year, and right now Waltz appears to be a Heath Ledger-like slam dunk.
Tarantino’s known for filling his films with references to other movies, with the most obvious example being Kill Bill, which is more of a 4-hour homage to genres Tarantino loves than a proper movie on its own merits (but that’s also why I personally love it more than his other movies), but Inglourious Basterds is his gushiest love letter to the cinema yet. It’s dripping with movie references (the climax is in a movie theater, one of the characters is a former film critic, another a German movie star...there’s easily a dozen similar references in there, if not more). While they never threaten to overwhelm the actual plot, Inglourious Basterds is as much about the movies as it is World War II or Nazis or anything else. And while I’m reluctant to spoil too many details about the story, Inglourious Basterds is also Tarantino at his most audacious: what other filmmaker would have the stones to make a movie that changes the ending of World War II?
A few months ago, I was resigned to seeing Inglourious Basterds purely as part of my personal duty as a movie fan, but I wasn’t really excited about it at all (World War II movies have never been my thing). Imagine my surprise that it turned out to be a potential masterpiece by one of the best filmmakers working today, and proof that just because a movie’s set in the darkest period of the 20th century that doesn’t mean it can’t be one of the most fun movies of the year.
Labels: Movie review, Quentin Tarantino
¶ 10:31 AM 0 Comments
Dammit.
I've had this problem with hyperbole for a very long time, and it sort of gave me pause when I first started this blog. See, when I love a movie, I really love it, and that means I sometimes make big statements that I later have to climb down from. In this very space just a few weeks ago, I declared The Hurt Locker the best movie of the summer (though, to be fair, I did 
add the caveat in my review that it wasn’t really a summer movie in the traditional sense, like, say, Star Trek or Transformers, movies that would seem weird getting released in February or March, but rather a “real movie” that just happened to come out in the summer...but I’m digressing), and now, after having finally seen District 9 – which regular readers were probably starting to get sick of me getting worked up about – I have to eat some crow.
District 9 is amazing. It’s easily the best movie I’ve seen this summer, and a lock for my year-end best-of list. Despite my rabid excitement going into the movie, I didn’t really know what to expect (as opposed to Watchmen, another film on my best-of-the-year shortlist, but I was a devoted fan of the book so aside from the acting and some of director Zack Snyder’s choices, I had a pretty good idea of what the movie had in store for me), and Sweet Fancy Moses was I blown away. No joke, I spent probably about 30%-40% of District 9’s running time with my mouth hanging open.
I’m a science fiction fan, and District 9 is one of the best sci-fi films I’ve seen in years. Like the best of the genre, it uses its fantastic conceit – it’s set in 2010 Johannesburg, 20-plus years after an alien mothership filled with sickly refugees appeared over the city, and in the ensuing decades a fenced-in slum for the alien “prawns” has been created, much to the chagrin of Johannesburg’s human denizens – to make a statement about human nature and society. Director/co-writer Neill Blomkamp grew up in South Africa under the apartheid regime, but District 9’s allegory can be applied to countless similar situations and regimes across the world over the years. District 9 is real sci-fi; it’s not just a fantasy adventure with rayguns and aliens, it’s about something.
Which brings me to the main thing about District 9 that I hadn’t been expecting: it’s the best damn action movie I’ve seen in recent memory. This is a movie that cost somewhere in the vicinity of $30 million (almost literally a tenth of what a major studio will spend on a “tentpole” franchise film once the promotional and marketing costs are factored in), and the climactic sequence is some of the most incredible action I’ve seen this year. Blomkamp is going to be a big deal. He was formerly attached to direct the adaptation of the massive game franchise Halo with D9 producer Peter Jackson up until the ballooning budget caused the studios that were co-funding it to effectively kill the project, and that’s a damn shame. I’m positive it would have been the first genuinely great video game movie, and it’ll go down as one of the coolest movies never made.
There’s one last thing I have to mention about District 9 (aside from the special effects – by WETA, the guys who did The Lord of the Rings movies – which are among the best I’ve seen; there’s no practical alien effects in this movie at all, and I still sort of can’t believe that) and that’s Sharlto Copley as the main character, Wikus Van De Merwe. I can’t discuss too much of what he does lest I give anything away, but this guy’s gonna be a star. Wikus’ transformation from a dorky bureaucrat to a heartbreaking action hero is some of the best acting I’ve seen since The Hurt Locker. Which sounds like I’m damning him with faint praise, as I just saw that movie a few weeks ago, but that was some of the best acting I’ve seen all year.
District 9 is an amazing piece of cinema, and I can’t wait to see it again.
Labels: Movie review
¶ 7:49 AM 0 Comments
It almost seems unfair to lump The Hurt Locker in with the typical “summer movies,” as I’m confident it will hold
up against the year’s most prestigious of the Oscar-baiting prestige films (which don’t come out until late in the year); comparing The Hurt Locker to, say, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen or Star Trek is like comparing a steak dinner to a bag of popcorn (in the case of Star Trek, fancy, delicious popcorn…but it’s still popcorn). It’s a best-film-of-the-year candidate that just happened to get a release in the summer.The Hurt Locker is a tense thriller about a U.S. Army bomb disposal unit in Iraq, but it’s not really an Iraq War Movie. It doesn’t really bother with big statements about the war itself, aside from making observations about the nature of war and what it does to the people who fight it. It was written by freelance journalist Mark Boal, who penned the screenplay after spending time embedded with an actual bomb squad, so it really takes a soldier’s-eye-view of things; Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow are clearly more interested in the characters and what makes them tick than they are in any broad political statements about the war in Iraq.
I’ve heard The Hurt Locker called an action film (it’s in a quote right there on the poster), and I guess it sort of is – it’s rare enough that a movie pins me to my seat with this sort of intensity just once, but The Hurt Locker did it to me three or four times – but there aren’t really any traditional “action sequences.” The performances are so good and the movie gets its message across so powerfully (and without being heavy-handed about it) that it deserves Oscar attention. Jeremy Renner, who impressed me with his relatively small role in 28 Weeks Later, is amazing as the reckless new leader of a three-man bomb squad, and Anthony Mackie (who blew me away in the indie drama Half Nelson) is just as good as a combat-weary soldier who just wants to make it through the few weeks left in his rotation. That the new leader of his team seems to be trying to get himself and the rest of them blown to hell provides natural tension, and seeing two great young actors going head-to-head is a treat.
But the thing that drew me to The Hurt Locker, and the thing that ultimately made it for me, was Kathryn Bigelow. I love the fact that one of the best action filmmakers is a woman; though The Hurt Locker is her first feature since 2002’s submarine thriller K-19: The Widowmaker (which I never did see), she’s helmed two of my all-time favorite movies, Point Break (in my personal Top 5, easy) and Near Dark (the best vampire movie ever, for my money), as well as the underrated sci-fi thriller Strange Days. I don’t know why Bigelow doesn’t work more, but it’s almost criminal that her films are as few and far between as they have been in the past decade and change. (Though she was the protégé – and, briefly, the wife – of James Cameron, and he’s hardly the most prolific director going.) I was excited enough about a new Kathryn Bigelow movie, but The Hurt Locker exceeded even my sky-high expectations. Even if a movie about soldiers in Iraq doesn’t seem like your thing (and it really isn’t mine), I can’t recommend The Hurt Locker enough.
Labels: Movie review
¶ 9:48 AM 0 Comments
getting savaged pretty seriously by critics from what I’ve seen – as I type this it has a 22% Freshness rating on RottenTomatoes – I certainly didn’t hate it. It doesn’t fire on all cylinders the way the original did (I still consider it a near-perfect summer blockbuster), but the action is a lot of fun, and on a scale that appropriately tops the first movie. But where the first Transformers surprised me by keeping me interested during the parts with the talking humans, that’s precisely the problem Revenge of the Fallen runs into.There’s more action in Revenge of the Fallen than the original, and it’s mostly pretty awesome, but the film itself is sloppier and not paced nearly as well. There’s a chunk in the middle that felt like it lasted over an hour where not much happens other than Sam (Shia LeBeouf) and his crew (Megan Fox as his girlfriend and three to four comedy relief characters) bounce around from place to place chasing some expository MacGuffin (instead of the cube from the previous film, it’s the Matrix of Leadership, a nice reference to the 1986 Transformers animated movie, but it ultimately means nothing). Way too much of the screen time is devoted to what is clearly filler and time-wasting, and for a movie that clocks in at around two-and-a-half hours, it’s just weird. A fun summer blockbuster shouldn’t be a slog to sit through; there’s easily 40 minutes or so (and possibly entire characters) that could have been cut from this film and it wouldn’t have affected the flow of the story one bit. That story is also overly complicated, dwelling a bit too much on the mythology and history of the Transformers universe. I love giant robots more than most, but even I found that stuff tiresome after a while. I don’t care about which Autobot begat which, I just want to see them fight.
Thankfully, when they do, it’s pretty spectacular. I’ve read a few complaints that the action is hard to follow – most of the robots look similar enough to each other that it can be tough to discern who’s doing what to whom when they fight – but I didn’t really find it to be much of a problem. There are also a ton of new robots, most of whom go unnamed and don’t get much to do, but they make the final battle scene feel more epic compared to the first movie, which ended with a skirmish between a handful of Autobots and Decepticons. Some of the new characters are awesome, like the Autobot Corvette, Sideswipe (a personal fave from childhood), and the massive Decepticon, Devastator.
My other big problem with Revenge of the Fallen is that there are way too many comedy relief characters. There are at least five characters in this movie, human and Transformer, that serve no purpose other than to act goofy and try to elicit laughs. I realize this is a movie aimed largely at younger audiences, so I understand the need for that sort of thing (I appreciated LeBeouf’s comic talents in the first movie; sadly he gets very little of that this time around), but FIVE is simply too many for one movie (especially considering they spend most of their screen time together). Worst of all, the filmmakers – the jury appears to be out on whether the responsibility for this lies with the screenwriters, Michael Bay or the voice actors; everyone’s passing the buck it seems – have an unfortunate tendency to rely on cringe-inducing ethnic stereotypes for the comic relief Transformers. The two getting the most attention are Skids and Mudflap, a pair of twin Autobots who seem to have adopted hip-hop style. They have gold teeth, goofy features, and can’t read. A mini-controversy seems to be brewing over them, and while I didn’t like them much either, for me it was more because they were just unfunny and annoying rather than my being offended.
Overall I still had fun for the most part while watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. In terms of story it’s an unfortunate step backwards from the first, but the action is more plentiful than the first Transformers, and considering that’s what I was there to see, I’m more able than most to forgive an overlong, occasionally plodding plot. I’m not going to say I wasn’t a little disappointed that Revenge of the Fallen isn’t as tight and efficient as the first film, but it’s still a pretty good time at the movies.
GRADE: B
Labels: Movie review, Theme weeks
¶ 8:02 AM 0 Comments
I wasn’t expecting Terminator Salvation to come anywhere close to James Cameron’s first two Terminator movies, and, lo and behold, it did not. That’s hardly an insult however, as the original two are both bona fide classics (T2 being one of the greatest action movies of
all time, period), and Salvation doesn’t really aspire to being more than an above-average big-budget action picture. As a kid who always preferred playing with my Star Wars toys to my G.I. Joes, the post-apocalyptic future war between scrappy human resistance fighters and huge metal monsters only glimpsed in the first Terminator (and revisited in the sequel) always interested me more than the time travel angle that Cameron used to set the bulk of his movies in the present day. So by virtue of the fact that Terminator Salvation is set entirely in a bombed-out future wasteland (which owes more visually to the Mad Max movies than the short sequences in the earlier entries in the franchise), it’s automatically appealing to me. I love me some giant robots, and there’s quite a few of them in this movie.Terminator Salvation follows John Connor (Christian Bale), a soldier in the human resistance in 2018, a man who’s been told his whole life he’s destined to lead humanity, but he’s not quite there yet, and he frequently butts heads with the resistance’s current leaders, who tool around in a submarine to avoid detection by Skynet. Into this world comes Marcus (newcomer Sam Worthington), a mysterious wanderer last seen on death row in 2003. He eventually meets up with a young Kyle Reese (the character who eventually goes back in time to protect Sarah Connor in the first Terminator movie, becoming John Connor’s father along the way), and later a resistance pilot (Moon Bloodgood), who leads him back to the humans. But, as the trailers all reveal (and the movie doesn’t really try to disguise), Marcus is actually a Terminator himself.
Director McG, who made music videos before breaking into film with the Charlie’s Angels movies, mounts several impressive action sequences, and the special effects are top-notch. The cast is uniformly solid, too; nobody does the grim hero better than Christian Bale these days, and Sam Worthington is very good as Marcus, which is impressive for a new guy (like a lot of other Handsome Australian Actors, he sounds American 85%-90% of the time). He's apparently the Next Big Thing – he, I guess sort of ironically, is also the lead in James Cameron's 3D sci-fi epic Avatar due next year, and he's also the lead in the remake of the beloved 1981 Greek mythology cult classic, Clash of the Titans – and he does the “charismatic tough guy” thing well.
But it was Anton Yelchin (who also plays Chekov in Star Trek) who really stood out for me as Reese. I’ve been an appreciator of Michael Biehn’s work as an actor for years (he was the hero in the first Terminator, and he turns up in a similar role in Cameron’s Aliens, and he’s wonderful as an evil outlaw in my favourite western, Tombstone), but I never could have imagined such a thing as a “Michael Biehn impression” until I saw this movie. I don’t know how he does it, but Yelchin manages to mimic Biehn’s voice and body language to an almost uncanny degree. He also has a lot of screen charisma, and I found his Reese to be the most compelling character in the whole movie, despite his relatively small role.
I did have some problems with Terminator Salvation’s story, and as much as I normally give movies like this quite a bit of slack in that department (really, I just wanted to see robots blow stuff up, which this movie has in spades), I couldn’t get them out of my head and they did detract a bit from my overall enjoyment. I don’t usually like to include behind-the-scenes rumours in a review, but in this case I think it’s useful for the sake of context. Apparently McG originally wanted Bale for the Marcus role (which was in earlier drafts the only lead; Connor was a secondary supporting character at that point), but Bale wanted to play Connor, and brought in a writer to beef up Connor’s part. I mention all of this because it’s actually pretty obvious from watching Terminator Salvation that Marcus was initially supposed to be the sole lead, because his character arc is far more interesting (he personifies sci-fi’s classic “what does it mean to be human?” debate). He’s the second-most interesting character in the movie (next to Reese, who, criminally, basically vanishes from the movie to become little more than a plot point less than halfway through), and his storyline has most of the cool action scenes. He also has younger sidekicks, a romantic subplot with Bloodgood, gets chased by giant robots and blows up two or three times – all the cool stuff, essentially. This is actually pretty normal for a Terminator movie – it's what Schwarzenegger spends all of the other Terminator movies doing – but it's weird in Terminator Salvation because he and Connor spend most of the movie apart (again, presumably because Connor's part was originally supposed to be smaller).
One of the other distracting plot details that comes about because Connor's part got beefed up is that it requires him to be one of the main characters trying to achieve the goal of keeping him alive. Having the main heroic character's primary motivation boil down to "I MUST SURVIVE! AT ALL COSTS!!" makes Connor seem unfortunately self-serving – and decidedly unheroic. (Though the movie goes to considerable lengths to make clear that Connor must live so that the future can live. Still.) And they do attempt to rectify it by having Reese be the token Character Who Must Be Rescued From The Terminator going into the film’s climax (though he shares this distinction with Bale, which, again, is weird).
Still, I'm probably focusing too much on the stuff I didn't like about Terminator Salvation. I enjoyed the movie for the most part, and it’s certainly fun to watch. The action is good-to-excellent (I particularly liked the digitally-fudged "single take" bit with Bale in the helicopter in the opening sequence), which, really, is all I was looking for out of it. On that level, Terminator Salvation an above-average summer blockbuster, although it doesn't hold a candle to the first two. And it is considerably better than Terminator 3, which, I guess, is a higher note on which to end the series. Not that I think that'll be the case (I assume that like any blockbuster nowadays, the producers are hoping it’ll become a new franchise), because if it rakes in money, well, everyone knows how Hollywood works. Maybe the next one will be the leap forward that Dark Knight was to Batman Begins. The kid in me who loves giant robots can dream.
GRADE: B
Labels: Movie review
¶ 10:03 AM 0 Comments
some way now that I’ve seen it.First of all, I loved it. Watchmen is not a perfect film by any means – I could pick nits about tiny plot points and what was excluded or changed from the graphic novel, or which performances didn’t quite work for me – but that’s sort of one of the reasons I loved the movie as much as I did. If I’d walked out of Watchmen saying to myself that I’d just seen something akin to a perfect movie, I’d know deep down that I was lying to myself. But I’m a big fan of the book, and Zack Snyder has done what I (and many, many others) had long thought impossible, and actually translated the “unfilmable” graphic novel into a movie. It hits all the notes the book does, and the changes, while minor, are for the most part totally understandable (I’m also not the kind of person who gets all uppity just because something was changed; I try to understand why it was changed, and with maybe one or two very small exceptions, I get and agree with all the changes Snyder made), and I got a huge charge out of seeing characters I love in the book truly represented on the big screen. There’s a small moment between Rorschach and Nite Owl late in the film where Rorschach basically apologizes for being so difficult that’s probably my single favourite scene in the book, just a tiny little character moment, and I got chills seeing it recreated onscreen – it was a scene that very easily could have been cut with little or no effect on the plot, but Snyder included it. Snyder’s on record saying he’s as big a geek for the source material as just about anyone, and his goal was to make a film for Watchmen fans, and on that count he was amazingly successful.
But that same devotion to the graphic novel is also what’s been dividing many critics because of the film’s density and the argument that you need to be familiar with the book to follow what’s happening. While I’d say the latter argument probably has some merit (if I hadn’t read the book I very well may have been lost too, or at the very least needed to see the movie once or twice more to fully process everything, but obviously I can’t really access the headspace of someone going into the movie cold), and I guess how the movie performs at the box office beyond the first week will reveal whether the word-of-mouth on Watchmen is positive or negative. It made a ton of money this weekend, but it’s still unknown how much of that was due to the hype. I have no empirical evidence on this, but
in the Friday afternoon screening I attended, I detected more than a few people who seemed to be losing patience with the movie by the mid-point. Whether this was due to a lack of traditional “action” or the dense, more cerebral story I have no idea, but I think people who paid their money thinking they were getting the next Dark Knight or, god forbid, Iron Man probably were disappointed, and rightfully so. Watchmen is nothing like any other superhero movie; it’s an attempt to examine how superheroes would affect American culture and society, not just an excuse to show people in cool costumes beating up thugs (though there is a bit of that as well). It’s less a “superhero movie” in the traditional sense than it is an “alternate history” sci-fi story about a world very much like our own in which superheroes live. Which probably sounds like a minor distinction to make, but I think it’s a distinction that will help people who aren’t familiar with the graphic novel understand why this movie isn’t hitting the traditional superhero-movie beats. I’ve heard the comparison to Blade Runner already, and while I’m reluctant to make that comparison myself (if I had to pick one, I’d probably take Blade Runner as my No. 1 favourite movie of all time, so I should excuse myself from any comparisons between it and Watchmen, a movie that just came out and I’ve only seen once), I can sort of see the argument. Blade Runner was seen as a flop when it came out, and audiences largely didn’t “get” it. It took years and the advent of home video for Blade Runner to find its audience (I know I didn’t care for it the first time I watched it back when I was in high school), and despite the big opening weekend, I suspect things will go similarly for Zack Snyder’s Watchmen. There’s a lot of information in the film to chew on (and Snyder’s already said he’s planning an even-longer extended cut either for a limited theatrical run this summer or, at the very least, on DVD), and my first-hand experience watching the film in a packed theatre left me with the impression that a sizeable chunk of the audience didn’t really “get” the movie either. While Watchmen obviously isn’t for everyone, I suspect a number of people who were initially left cold by the film will eventually come around, presumably on DVD. Another reason I’m sort of reserving final judgment on Watchmen is that I still haven’t seen the full version (there’s a comic-within-a-comic pirate story subplot from the book that was animated and will be released in a couple of weeks on DVD as Tales From the Black Freighter, and it’s expected some or all of that footage, as well as many more smaller moments from the book, will be incorporated into the “final” DVD version of Watchmen). Now that superheroes are a full-on film genre of their own, the time is right for a movie that examines them as seriously as Watchmen does. Whether or not audiences are ready for it right at this moment will remain to be seen – I know that most people ascribe Blade Runner’s initial failure to it being too far ahead of its time, and I have a feeling the story on Watchmen will run somewhat similarly. Either way, the movie was made, and it’s an amazing piece of cinema, and as a Watchmen fan, the movie’s existence is enough for me.
Labels: comics, Movie review, Watchmen
¶ 10:42 AM 1 Comments
est fan of the horror genre, particularly vampire movies, but this one had an interesting twist: it’s about a vampire who appears to be a 12-year-old girl. Between the the premise and its origins – one of the reasons I like foreign movies is they typically lack the more formulaic, clichéd aspects of most Hollywood productions, vampire movies being among the worst offenders – I was curious to see if Let the Right One In could live up to the hype. I’m happy to report that it more than surpassed my expectations. The story of Let the Right One In follows Oskar, an awkward, solitary 12-year-old boy who gets picked on at school and divides his time at home between his separated parents. A new girl moves in to the apartment next door to his mother’s, along with a silent older man who appears to be her father. The girl, Eli, soon introduces herself to Oskar one night when he’s outside fantasizing about fighting back against his tormentors with his knife. (It’s the dead of winter in Sweden, but she’s out in her pajamas, but she insists she’s not cold. “I guess I've forgotten how,” she tells Oskar.) The two children strike up a friendship, and Oskar slowly realizes there’s a lot more to his strange new friend than he first realized.
Let the Right One In is a haunting, beautifully-crafted film from director Tomas Alfredson, and written for the screen by John Ajvide Lindqvist, based on his own novel. It’s not your typical vampire movie – it’s quiet, moody, and builds slowly to its astonishing climactic scene, and some people in the theatre with me who were presumably expecting a more traditional vampire movie seemed bored by its deliberate pace. That’s not to say there aren’t scares in the movie, because there are, but it’s more psychological and atmospheric, the sort of tension you find in a good thriller. Alfredson fills the film with gorgeous shots of the snowy landscape, and the scenes set outdoors at night, with the contrast between the stark white snow and the oppressive darkness beyond, are particularly creepy.
But the thing that impressed me the most about Let the Right One In was its emotional punch; this is one of the most genuinely moving films I’ve seen this year. The young actors (Kåre Hedebrant as Oskar and Lina Leandersson as Eli) are both amazing, and as their friendship blossoms into something more, I realized that not only is this a phenomenal vampire movie, it’s the most affecting love story I’ve seen
in a long time. I went into Let the Right One In expecting a good vampire movie, but I didn’t expect to have my heart broken.I know the teen-girl-friendly Twilight, based on the massively successful series of novels by Stephenie Meyer, is the vampire flick getting all the attention right now, and I’m sure it’ll be a big box office success. But that really (to me, at least) looks like more of the same; dreamy, vaguely Eurotrash-looking blodsuckers brooding and looking pretty and all that other played-out, gothic claptrap. But Let the Right One In (an actual European film) doesn’t have time for clichés, and while it does delve into vampire mythology – the title alludes to the “rule” about vampires needing to be invited into a person’s home – it’s a truly unique and wholly original film. It’s not only the best vampire movie I’ve ever seen, but it’s a lock for my year-end best-of list. Let the Right One In is simply a brilliant piece of cinema, and it comes with my highest possible recommendation.
GRADE: A
Labels: horror movies, Movie review, vampires
¶ 10:18 AM 0 Comments
