Category Archives: Film

Veronica Mars

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MV5BMTQ4MDc0Mjg4OV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwODk3NjYyMTE@._V1__SX1217_SY911_I don’t even know how to review this movie properly. Which is to say, outside the context of a three season television series that you may not have seen before. Inside that context, it would be a breeze, believe me. But outside, there are two giant stumbling blocks in my way. One is how immediately immersed I was in the world, just as though I’d never left, without any of the pesky (albeit brilliantly accomplished) ten minutes of introduction to all the characters you wouldn’t know about if you’d missed the show in the first place. This lack, in addition to highlighting my lack of objectivity, serves to introduce the second stumbling block, which is that I spent a minor chunk of change on the kickstarter for the movie. Having been funded by fans, there’s a really good chance that it’s not my failure to separate out my sense of homecoming and look at it externally that’s the problem. They know where their money came from and who their primary audience would be, and I think maybe it’s not concerned with newcomers in the first place. So, I’ll give up on that angle and move on.

Do you even know they made a Veronica Mars movie? Fan or not, if you missed the kickstarter, it may have slid under the radar. Anyway, it released last weekend, and you can theater it or stream it. (I think I get a bluray eventually?  But it was streaming in this case, as I live in ye olde future.) If you are not a fan of the show through inaction, you’ll get a lot more out of the show than the movie, at least until later. If you are not a fan of the show through choice, you sadden me. If you are a fan of the show… here’s that really easy review I promised you a while ago.

You know how I said it immediately felt like a homecoming? That was not a clever riff on the fact that one of Veronica’s reasons for returning to Neptune is her ten-year high school reunion. (The main reason being, of course, a murder.) Because, really, it felt like no time had passed at all since the last episode I watched. And okay, not remembering much of what happens in either of the latter two seasons meant I was playing a little bit of catch-up, but not much, and not in a way that took me out of the joy of coming home. By the end of the movie, I was ready for a new season or a new movie either one, and pleased as I could be that the door is wide open for that. So: you should really go see this movie, or stay home and see this movie, or whatever it takes to convince them to do it again soon. If not for yourself, do it for me. Aw, who am I kidding, seriously, do it for me, and I’ll hope in turn that you enjoyed yourself while doing it.

Because I am a good person.

Non-Stop (2014)

MV5BOTI3NzcxMjkzMl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMDY0NTQ0MDE@._V1__SX1217_SY911_Liam Neeson made another action movie. I could say something pithy about that being enough information for you to decide whether to see this one, but since I never even saw Taken 2, it feels disingenuous. Okay then.

I guess the most important thing to say is that Non-Stop never tries to be a good movie. Here’s the example that immediately leapt out at me. After being refused a drink that would have been at least his third of the morning by the stewardess with whom he clearly has some kind of past and receiving unauthorized and also extortionate texts from a mysterious figure who could be anybody at all but probably isn’t air marshal Liam Neeson himself or the redhead sleeping next to him, and who promises to kill a passenger every twenty minutes if his demands are not meant, Neeson pulls out his watch as instructed to set a 20 minute timer, so he will know the mysterious figure is serious. He looks at the time on the watch, clicks a single button on the side, and boom, instant 20 minute countdown timer. From one button on a wristwatch. Because that’s plausible.

Like I said. They’re not aspiring to good. What they are aspiring to, and succeed at, is tension. If you didn’t spend at least a minute suspecting each passenger on the plane, you were not watching the same movie I was.  Here I include the other air marshal, the pilots, the stewardesses, and the obligatory passenger of Arabic descent. (Well, okay, I lie. I actually didn’t suspect him, because come on. I’m never clear on whether the exception that proves the rule is a real thing, or something people say when they didn’t expect there to be an exception and were caught off-guard. But this is definitely one of those two situations.)

Anyway, long story short: sure, it wasn’t a Good Movie. But I’ve watched Good Movies that were bigger wastes of time, and it’s still the time of year when pickings are slim, so hey. Which reminds me, does anyone know if Taken 2 was any good?

Knights of Badassdom

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MV5BMTQ3ODEwMzY3NV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNTkwMTQ5MDE@._V1_SX640_SY720_The only real problem with Knights of Badassdom is its lack of depth. What you see is exactly what you will get[1]. And even that’s not precisely a weakness, because at least it’s really, really easy to decide if it’s the kind of thing that you want to get.

Let me break it down for you, and then from there it’s your call whether you’d be interested. So, you know Peter Dinklage (Tyrion from TV’s Game of Thrones), Summer Glau (River Tam from TV’s The Sarah Connor Chronicles), and Anna Paquin’s brother from TV’s True Blood? They got together with a couple of other familiar faces and made a movie about LARPing[2]. No, that’s not right. They made the movie about LARPing that all LARPers have in their heads while they are LARPing. Yep, in the middle of a war event, one of the mages accidentally summons a real live demon from hell, who wreaks havoc amidst the goings on and gives someone a chance to convince Summer Glau that they might be worth boning.

If you are a LARPer and feel that I have misrepresented any particular of your own desired experience[3], I look forward to hearing about it!

[1] Caveat: the climax of the film is completely unpredictable. Not in a way that adds depth, alas, but it’s still nice to know they had an ace up their sleeve.
[2] If you don’t know what LARP is, you are not the movie’s target audience. Basically, it’s SCA crossed with D&D. If you don’t know what SCA and/or D&D are, you’re definitely not the movie’s target audience.
[3] …that you couldn’t correct by replacing Summer Glau with Nathan Fillion, that is.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

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MV5BMjIyMjMwNDU3OV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMzYxODU5OA@@._V1__SX640_SY720_Cutting right to the chase, the cinematic adaptation of Catching Fire was superior in every way to the first film, and more than that, it told a better story than its source material did. So there’s quite a lot of good here.

See, the really quite spectacular Jennifer Lawrence[1] has been given much better material this time around, and what looked in the book like a girl stumbling blindly into the role of hero of the rebellion looks here like a game of cat and mouse between Katniss Everdeen and President Snow. (In case I’m pretending you already know what’s going on in the sequel of an adaptation of a trilogy of books, I am. In case that bothers you: there’s this girl who not only won an annual deathmatch designed to keep the common folk down on bended knee before Snow’s Capitol, she beat the system and won for her boyfriend(?) as well, which nobody has ever done before. She made Snow look symbolically weak, and people have become inspired by her, and this entire movie is basically a reaction to that premise. Also, there’s another deathmatch, since those are annual like I said.)

Whereas in the book, I contemplated that Katniss’ transformation into a symbol of the rebellion was certainly implausible but possibly not meant to seem that way, it is played note perfect here. She’s only trying to be a good person, but everything she does exposes the hollowness behind Snow’s power, so it’s easy to see why people would be inspired by her, despite her own doubts, anger, and insecurities. And it still doesn’t hurt that you can’t see inside her head, as she is growing more likable along the film trajectory instead of less so along the one that played out in the novels.

I’m still not convinced that the mess of a third novel can be rescued, but if the same writing/directing team tackle that adaptation, I will find myself hopeful all the same.

[1] I have got to see Winter’s Bone. Probably also the movie last year she got the Oscar for?

Thor: The Dark World

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THURS_003B_G_ENG-GB_70x100.inddFirst things first, to get it out of the way. Yeah, I really liked this movie. There were disappointingly obvious problems with Newtonian physics, and there was, as far as I can recall, no more than one plot turn I didn’t see coming. Nevertheless? Loved it. I mean, to start with, I’ll watch an entire 120 minutes’ worth of Darcy reaction quips and consider it money well spent.

But aside from hammer gags, cool explosions, and Kat Dennings, there are solid reasons to like Thor: The Dark World. Probably the precipitating plot, in which Christopher Eccleston is more or less wasted behind too much makeup as an inexplicably albino Dark Elf who wants to return the universe to eternal darkness and who nearly kicked Odin’s father’s ass several thousand years ago during his first attempt, is not one of them? I’m not saying I dislike comic book plots, because I don’t, but it’s impossible to deny that this one is towards the fringier end of the form.

The broad, vague answer is that I liked the acting. It doesn’t hurt that I’ve been immersed in 1960s Thor comics for the past few months, but it was cool to watch Odin interacting with his two sons. Far more than that, though, this movie gave me something I didn’t realize I’d been missing in the annals of Marveldom[1]. I finally have a solid, bone-deep belief that Thor and Loki really are brothers. That’s going to help me later, when I’m still reading 1960s Thor comics and Loki is still a cartoonishly annoying villain instead of nuanced and clever.

Also, Natalie Portman was in it, I guess? In retrospect, I should probably have more to say about someone who got so much screen time.

[1] Except maybe the Loki book I read years ago now, before I’d barely gotten started on my in-depth project here? Who can remember what happened in 2007, though?

Gravity

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And then I finally saw a new movie, for the first time in I really don’t want to look up how many months. Gravity pits George Clooney (charm amped up to 12) and Sandra Bullock (charm amped down to 5 or so) against space in a nailbiter of an escape movie. See, there’s an exploded satellite that, post-explosion, has become a debris field, but not to worry, that won’t stop either Bullock’s specialist repairs on the Hubble nor Clooney’s “you didn’t have to be there because I’m so good at painting the picture” stories that everyone in Houston has heard dozens of times before. ….until it does. Debris fields can be a real bitch that way.

What follows is 60 minutes of sheer adrenaline broken up by 20 minutes of philosophical musings, gorgeous tracking shots of the earth and space and the tiny objects floating above the former from within the latter, and occasional bursts of tension-relieving humor. Do you want to see it? Probably, as long as you like solid acting and are not allergic to being tense for long periods of time. Do you want to see it on an IMAX screen in 3D? Yes, unless you have that motion-sickness problem some people get, and even then, still probably yes unless you can find it in IMAX 2D, because you’ll be a pretty sad panda if you see it on some middling five-story screen. I mean, it’s space. Space is supposed to be big! Y’know?

But seriously? It was good. And absurd once or twice in the best kind of way, where you are saying to yourself, “Come on! That’s not fair!”, but you are not thinking “Come on! That could never happen!” Also, in the interests of full disclosure, I grew up in the ’80s when the shuttle program was in full swing, and was raised by a man who built parts for it for basically his entire career. So I may be more than usually locked into the idea that space missions matter, among the non-scientist set. But that said, I’m pretty sure this was a really good movie on its own merits, and not just because space is cool. But that said, it was definitely as cool as it was[1] only because space is as cool as it is.

[1] “Cool” and “good” are not the same thing, obviously. But it’s always better when they intersect.

The World’s End

I made the mistake of watching a movie the day before I vanished from the internet for a week and a half, and I made the further mistake of not writing the damned review before said vanishment. So, um, sorry about that.

On the bright side, the movie I saw was The World’s End, a movie which you no doubt already knew you wanted to see because of its links to the brilliant Shaun of the Dead and the pretty okay Hot Fuzz. The formula is not precisely the same as before, I guess? Where the other two movies were parodies of the zombie and action genre, this is less parody and more mash-up. In the unlikely event that you aren’t spoiled for the mash-up by previews, I will leave out one of the genres, but the other is…. well, okay, hard to qualify. It’s not precisely coming of age, because although Simon Pegg plays an uncomfortably old-looking man-child, all of his friends have clearly grown up[1]. It’s not precisely whatever genre The Big Chill is, if only because the mood isn’t nearly as solemn as all that.

But anyway, whatever it is, it’s funny and well-acted and building towards something meaningful and fellowshippy, when suddenly…. but, y’know, that’s why you should go see it.

On an unrelated note, I am sad that I do not have a bar named The World’s End to go to. And not only because of books Neil Gaiman wrote once upon a time.

[1] If anything, that’s the point.

The Conjuring

A large percentage of the modern horrorscape is devoted to possessions, hauntings, and the intersection between the two. So it makes perfect sense that people would comb through the documented cases of such things and put together a movie around that. After all, nothing adds verisimilitude to a project like slapping “based on a true story” to the tagline.

Thusly, The Conjuring, in which actual people named Lorraine and Ed Warren set out to assist an actual Rhode Island family which consists of two adult Perrons and their five daughters, who mostly like to play Hide&Clap and get haunted by restless demons who are hidden implausibly poorly in a boarded up basement. Which doesn’t sound so implausible, I know, except that the house’s furnace is in the basement, and the first time it got cold (demonic or regular), someone was going to go looking for that, you know?

The thing about a true story is, you’re constrained by it. If you’re trying to be anything like faithful to the narrative at all, you will have sudden stops and starts that don’t really fit the expectations of story progression, and no particular themes, just a series of disconnected events and an unreasonably creepy doll. The upshot of which is, this is a perfectly serviceable scary story about which I have basically nothing relevant to say.

The Wolverine (2013)

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MV5BNzg1MDQxMTQ2OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTk3MjAzOQ@@._V1_The Wolverine is the first new sequel to the X-Men trilogy in seven years. That’s kind of a long time, right? I’m not going to get into a “worth the wait” discussion, since those never end well and speak to expectations, which I try not to set in the first place. But certainly it was good.

First, a recap of relevant information: Wolverine is a pretty old mutant whose DNA has an impressive healing factor, such that he can recover from nearly any wound you can imagine and he doesn’t really age. Over the past hundred, maybe hundred and fifty years, he’s seen a lot of the world. Also, he has claws that grow out of his hand. Also also, his entire skeletal structure has been coated in adamantium, the hardest substance known to comic-book man. (This was made possible by his healing factor, you see. If you pause a moment to consider what having molten metal forged around your bones would feel like, not to mention the logistics of it, you will see why this would suck more for anyone else than the prodigious amount of sucking it did for him.)

So, okay, that should have you nice and caught up. This movie? Is about a haunted Wolverine, filled with regrets over the outcome of the last X-Men movie. Then, he gets caught up in some Japanese family politics. Since this is a comic book movie, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to promise you some hot mutant-on-ninja action, and also there’s a samurai with a distinctly silvery cast to his features, if you know what I mean and I bet you probably don’t, honestly.

The most important plot issue in a mostly character-driven movie (despite all that ninja action) is in the scene after the credits, when we are promised one hell of a spectacle of a new fully X-Men sequel. So, y’know, yes please.

World War Z

First of all: while it’s possible that this WWZmovie borrowed some small amount of plotting from the book that shares its name, I would be hard pressed to name anything besides the title and its attendant premise. This does not make it a bad film, but it certainly makes it a misnamed one. Second of all: I’m probably fast and loose with spoilers here, although none plot-destroying. You’ll see why I didn’t care much about that.

Okay, disclaimers aside, was World War Z in fact a good movie? Almost. It started off pretty solidly by introducing Brad Pitt (who had gotten too old for this shit) and his family, and then immediately dumping them into Run For Your Lives! And then it exposited about how he’s the kind of guy who could help find out how this[1] happened and therefore save humanity, and then blackmailed him into doing it when “saving humanity” was somehow insufficient. Like rich, pretty people don’t know that they are part of what’s being saved? I dunno.

Then he starts globetrotting, picking up clues, narrowly escaping each place he goes to like a non-parodic version of John Cusack, and just when I started to get the impression that his arrival spelt doom for any place he might show up at, the movie kind of trickled out into nothing. I seriously expected another 30 to 60 minutes of plot, until about 5 minutes before the credits rolled.

So, shorter version: cool, albeit stolen and warped, concept; cool execution; terrible payoff. Hot Israeli soldiers, though.

[1] The zombie apocalypse, obvs.