Category Archives: Film

Paranormal Activity 3

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Sure, the movie too, but there is something downright unsettling about silent closing credits. Of course, maybe that’s only true if the movie was unsettling first. It’s cool, though, Paranormal Activity 3 was. Remember how there was a demon afflicted family in 2006, these sisters who had boyfriends that liked to film the creepy stuff that was going on around them and they made vague references to similarly creepy things that happened to them when they were kids?

Well, that’s a fact. If anything, stuff was sufficiently creepy as to make me wonder if I should go back, watch the original two films, and try to find continuity errors, because seriously, these people lead severely fucked up lives that they maybe should have been willing to talk about a little bit more, maybe to therapists and exorcists? It wasn’t as good as either of those movies, alas, but really I’m completely a slave to the first person camera horror genre at this point, so I’ll see it no matter how bad I expect it to be or, indeed, am told it is by trustworthy people. Still, now that I have squandered any shred of credibility, I nevertheless thought this was pretty good.

[EDIT from 2021: Confirmed, this does not especially well fit the continuity of the first two movies at all. Unless you account for brainwashing, which is pretty plausible to be honest.]

50/50

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Meanwhile[1], I saw another movie tonight! It’s because I’ve been kind of way behind on them, y’know? Horror is just about all that’s left to me at this point[2], though there are a couple of interesting things on the horizon. 50/50, on the other hand, was pretty much an interesting thing on the opposite horizon, only showing in a handful of local theaters by now. So it’s good that I caught up to it in time!

Especially good because of how it was, you know, good. I cannot help but draw a comparison to The Road. Just as that novel was a meditation on the end of the world, this movie was (when not being funny, which it also managed quite well, but really, can you expect less from Seth Rogen at this point?) a meditation on the end of the world writ small: really, can you see 50% odds of beating the cancer in your spine that you didn’t know you had until earlier today as anything less than the end of your world? The fundamental difference between that book and this movie is, of course, the presence of hope. There are dark moments, horrible people, and of course lame Hollywood misunderstandings about the way the world actually works, because, despite anything going on in the plot or theme, that’s how Hollywood rolls. But put all that aside, and there’s still an undercurrent of fundamental hope. I guess what I’m [still] saying is that it doesn’t matter how either story turns out; what matters is what the road was paved with.

[1] The game is still on, in extra innings now. It is really hard to think about other things, much less write them.
[2] He says, as though complaining. Ha!
[3] This review is complete, and the game is still going. I guess, if you are a historian with extremely limited access to first- and second-hand documentation, you will never know how the 2011 World Series turned out, Dammit.[4]
[4] Don’t start with me about how footnote 3 wasn’t referenced. Seriously. You can go fuck yourself.

30 Minutes or Less

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It’s true, I finally started watching movies again. So, yay! If you find Jesse Eisenberg to be the premiere personable actor of his generation no matter how horrible of a human being he is portraying, or if you find Danny McBride to be a compelling poor- / gross-man’s Seth Rogen, or especially if you think Aziz Ansari’s voice makes his every line somewhere between two and three times as funny as it would have been in another actor’s mouth, and if you don’t mind your dark grey comedy having plot holes a pizza delivery guy could drive through, then you could do a whole lot worse at the dollar theater than 30 Minutes or Less.

Pretty dim praise, right? I laughed quite a lot, don’t get me wrong, but on top of the plot holes, which were pretty galling for reals, there just weren’t any likable characters. The heroes merely won the title of least hateful, and that’s kind of impressively sad. In a way, Danny McBride’s villain sidekick may have been morally better than any of the stars, and he was still quite certainly a villain.[1] But anyway, if you still think a couple bucks and the 90 minutes  are worth your time, I’ll tell you that this is a movie in which a couple of bad guys force a dead-end, largely friendless pizza deliveryman to rob a bank, by strapping a bomb to him. And while I bet there’s a potentially really solid drama somewhere in that plot, and that it is possibly named Dog Day Afternoon, this is definitely more the “hijinx ensue” version.

Enjoy. Or not. But Ansari really is kind of hilarious, so.

[1] Okay, the romantic interest had no problems, she just wasn’t enough of a character to get a handle on, aside from “I can see why Jesse wants to go to there”.

Moneyball

I have a theory, which is as follows: if my reasonably beloved Rangers were not in the chase for the World Series once again, I would have found Moneyball to be at least a little less compelling than I did. Still, I like baseball in general enough to have enjoyed it in any case. It combines several worthy sports film ingredients: the rise of the underdog, impressive success, an uncertain ultimate outcome, and the thing where it is really a lot more about the characters than the sport.

Also, Brad Pitt: is there a more affable actor in all of Hollywood? Anyway, though, the premise of the book on which the movie is based is how statistical analysis has started to change the way baseball works. If you like statistics a lot, you will adore this movie. If you do not give a crap or even hate math? It still works pretty okay on the straight sports formula version. If you just hate baseball, I reckon you already were going to give it a miss, and that would probably be a good idea. Even if you find Pitt eminently affable.

Killer Elite

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Did you ever see that movie where the spy has a moment of clarity and retires before the job destroys his soul, but then someone (probably his girlfriend, but someone) gets kidnapped to use as leverage against him, so he’s sent off to do one last job, and it’s not a job he wants to do, but dammit, he’s a professional, and anyway, there’s someone counting on him to succeed. Killer Elite is that movie, except the spy is a British Jason Statham[1], there are more antagonists than just the kidnapper[2], and the someone is Robert De Niro instead of a girlfriend. So, you know, if you like that movie, this is a perfectly viable version of it.

[1] Odds are excellent that he is in fact British all the time, not only at this moment. Who can ever know for sure?
[2] Actually, this is a pretty meaningful distinction, and is the main thing that keeps the movie from being one you’ve seen multiple exact copies of before. So, yay that!

Drive (2011)

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Drive is going to fill one and possibly two niches this year. It will be the best movie that many people never bother to see, and it will also be the best movie that many people saw accidentally, expecting it to be a cheap Transporter knock-off. In either case, it will almost certainly be underappreciated. There’s this guy, played by Ryan Gosling, who seems to be drifting through life at a huge remove from everyone else. While they are hiring him to be a getaway driver, or clumsily mentoring him[1], or paying him for movie stunts, he just seems to observe it all, sometimes with a slightly bemused smile, more often laconic and blank-faced. Which is a pity, because those rare smiles give a window into his inner life that implies more pure joy than most characters convey with reams of dialogue and spontaneous jigs.

But when an accident of geography entangles him in the lives of his pretty, world-saddened neighbor, her son, and her imprisoned husband, well… I don’t want to say much, since you already know that he’ll be in for the drive of his life, or else what a terrible name for a movie. I guess it’s like this. If that sounds like a set-up for the client-of-the-week section of an episode of Burn Notice, it should. But the fallout is a lot less like Michael Westen’s always slick solutions and a lot more like the 1970s era cinema that inspired Quentin Tarantino. But, okay, do you know what Drive is the most like? I hesitate to say this, because it will so easily be construed as less than high praise, but, it reminds me of nothing so much as what someone could have easily written as the plot progression of a mission arc in a modern Grand Theft Auto game. Mostly imprintable anti-hero? Check. Conflicts with cops and other criminals alike as events spiral out of control? Check. Sympathetic characters humanizing the proceedings? Most definitely.

I’m not surprised by the Fresh Air reviewer who said it was the darling of Cannes this year. Movies like this just don’t get made anymore, and lucky us that someone failed to realize it.

[1] Enough good can probably not be said about Bryan Cranston, so I will not try harder than I just have.

Bellflower

You know that movie where everything goes wrong in the worst possible way, and it’s a really funny movie, so you call its genre black comedy? What do you call the genre when that happens, but it’s not even slightly funny, a little bit? Because Bellflower, named for the street on which its events take place, may be one of the grimmest movies I’ve ever seen. (I rule this not a spoiler, even though it’s the kind of movie you should go in knowing as little as possible about, because of how the first minute or so of footage does nothing but show consequences that will be forthcoming.) On an eponymous street somewhere in what is probably the Valley part of Los Angeles, there are these two guys who are building a flamethrower (among other things) in order to be prepared for the inevitable post-apocalyptic future, in which they plan to wander the earth as, if you will, road warriors. And then they make friends with these girls, and then…. yeah, that’s about the point where I have to stop.

Don’t rule it out out of hand just because I said it was extremely grim. It is, don’t get me wrong, but you’ll be thinking about it (not its grimness, but the whole) for a long time after it’s over. Well, that’s not absolutely fair, most of my thoughts have been from a psychological angle, and if you don’t think those thoughts, I guess you possibly won’t be after all? Oh, I will say this one more thing, though: it is definitely not a date movie, regardless of how accurate my “romance” tag is.

Contagion (2011)

MV5BMTY3MDk5MDc3OV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNzAyNTg0Ng@@._V1__SX1859_SY893_I do not have a whole heck of a lot to say about Contagion, but that is mainly because it is so well-packaged that it does most of its speaking for itself. First, you take a ridiculously powerful cast (well, it’s also extremely large, so I guess the dilution might make it a merely powerful cast, but then again, through the powers of homeopathy, it may instead be the strongest cast imaginable), then you put them into a terrifying script where an unknown disease is running rampant through pretty much the whole world. But it’s not like The Stand, because instead of proceeding to tell a religious story, they tell the story of how the world might really look in such a circumstance. Sure, it wasn’t a horror movie, but it was tense and dramatic all the time. But it was also really damn scary.

Shark Night 3D

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When[1] you watched Snakes on a Plane, did you catch yourself thinking, man, this movie is perfect, but I wish it didn’t have one of the coolest people on earth in the lead role, because, you know, that is just way too cool, for this movie. And also, maybe, I don’t care if it’s this specific title, it could Spiders in a Barn or Badgers on an Easement or Sharks in a Lake, whatever, just give me my monsters and tell me where they’ll be! And perhaps you also thought, wait, I don’t understand why there was thoroughly gratuitous nudity in this movie, I’d rather watch a movie where it would make sense at several moments throughout to script to have naked college students but then keep them essentially clothed instead, just to completely invert the paradigm.

If so? It’s pretty sweet to know that someone intimately involved with the creation of Shark Night 3D reads these reviews, because there can’t be very many people in the world with that thought process, for it to have taken 5 years to create this particular cinematic gem. The plot doesn’t make a lick of sense, though at least several of the character motivations do. My favorite part of the movie is when the main chick character tells the main guy character a story about how her ex-boyfriend tried to murder her, only she didn’t notice that it was attempted murder, and she still hasn’t noticed it as she’s telling the story, and the guy listening to the story doesn’t notice either. …and then the film goes on to never actually admit it at any later point, too, even though it also doesn’t explicitly deny it in a shocking twist where Sara is in fact the Shark Queen or something and has set up the whole situation to feed her children.

Y’know, come to think of it, that would have been pretty bad-ass. But this movie was okay too. Incidentally, the most shocking and horrifying moment of the film follows the credits, in case you were considering taking it in at this late date.

[1] Yes. When you watched it. Not if. Don’t make me come over there.

Cowboys & Aliens

A number of years ago now, I was given a graphic novel that a friend had acquired at either the first Free Comics Day, or the first one I heard about[1]. And it was, well, not very good, despite an eye-catching title/concept. Fast forward four years, and I started hearing rumors about a movie based on said graphic novel, and in fact that it really hadn’t ever been a graphic novel per se, so much as an attempt to woo movie studios with their script concept. Which kind of explains the extremely free aspect of the book.

So I started downgrading my expectations hard and fast, since I knew that sooner or later I’d be bound to see it despite my foreknowledge, because who is going to listen to me trying to explain that, no seriously, I’ve read this story and you just aren’t gonna like it, I don’t care what you think, when the title I’m railing against is Cowboys & Aliens? And, as is often the case, that worked out pretty well for me.

The movie (as opposed to the comic) had three really strong things going for it. The first was Harrison Ford playing a morally dark asshole[2], and the second was the exploration of the unfortunately-renamed Jake’s amnesia and how absolution[4] is affected by people’s perspective on your history. But the third and most important thing is that Favreau focused his remaining energy on alien tech and cool explosions, instead of a trite, overused indictment of Manifest Destiny. Not because I disagree with that message, believe me, but because there are so many more interesting messages for science fiction to thematically provide us[5].

[1] Or, having re-read my review to figure out the discrepancy between book and movie reaction, none of the above. Oh, fickle memory. Why you gotta be that way?
[2] I don’t mean morally grey anti-hero a la Han Solo before Lucas started fucking around with the footage, I mean dark. The guy is a prick, and maybe it’s too much[3] of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ excellent blogging of his grapple with the Civil War talking, but I could not stop thinking about how, while a real point was made of Colonel Dolarhyde’s wartime brilliance, which side he fought for was conspicuous for not being mentioned.
[3] by which I mean the right amount
[4] Remind me to come back to this.
[5] So, right. Footnote Four. Absolution. I love that this was the (blink-and-you-missed-it, the reference was so fleeting in the opening scene) name of the town around which the film’s events were set. That’s the kind of “heavy-handed” theme I can get behind. It doesn’t make the entire coming plot an exercise in eye-rolling the way the book’s did, it just gives you the tools to watch each character struggle towards their own individual version of absolution. If the movie had been based on this book, instead of the one it actually was? It would belong in junior high literature classes. (Which is praise, to be perfectly clear. There’s no shame in being a stepping stone.)