Category Archives: Film

Robin Hood (2010)

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Last night, I learned something obvious about the new digital projector systems that are gradually being rolled out to every screen in America, signalling the death of spools of film stacked man-high in old Hollywood basements and an inability for my children to understand what’s going on during the climactic scene of Inglourious Basterds; if my life had taken a small enough turn somewhere in the past 15 years or so, I would mourn this far more than already I do, but luckily I only collect books, not spools of film. So, the obvious thing I learned about digital projectors, though? It’s that they can crash. Also that, less obviously, their crash screen is colored digital snow. And then you suddenly get free passes to the theater! So in many ways, the downside was not so much of a much, but I can imagine it happening in a fuller theater, for a newer movie, and actually during the movie instead of at the end of the last trailer, and man, that would be a pretty miserable day for the theater. It’s not like film projectors don’t run into their own problems or anything, I can just tell I’m living in the modern era when my movie had to be rebooted.

I will not make a clever “speaking of reboots” segue here, because the thing about Robin Hood is that it’s always a reboot. It might be on TV sometimes, and they make movies every so often, but each iteration is distinct. It’s just, this one was more distinct than usual. That said, it was a pretty interesting take. Basically, the story is written for maximum veritas, the kind of story you might have heard peasants telling their children before memory became the legend we know today. This accounts well for some of the oddities of the story, such as why a land-owning noble would have been an archer instead of a knight. Within these historical-minded confines is a pretty decent story of political betrayal, war, and romance. Just be aware that at some point there’s going to be a pre-enactment of D-Day performed with longbows. As long as you can swallow that, the rest of the movie should be just fine.

Also, if you are unfamiliar with the basic Robin Hood story such that you needed a more plot-minded review: really? I mean, really?

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

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You already know this story. And if you don’t, it’s not that hard to explain. A group of teens is being stalked in their nightmares by a man in a festively-striped sweater, a man who is horribly burned and has knives on his fingers. Whatever he does to them in their dreams happens to them in real life. They have to figure out that it’s happening to them in the first place, and they have to figure out why, and they have to figure out how to stop it, or they will all die. Also, they can’t go to sleep, which makes clarity of thought a little tricky. Like I said, you know this story.[1]

A Nightmare on Elm Street has been remade, is the upshot of all this reminiscing. Which leaves only one particularly relevant question: was it remade well? And the answer is, it’s good. It took me a while to get over Robert Englund’s absence from the movie, but I’m pretty sure that was inevitable. What matters is, I got over it. And what’s left behind is… well, it was not a revelatory masterpiece like Rob Zombie’s Halloween, but neither was it a disaster like his Halloween II, and neither still was it lukewarm retread like Michael Bay’s Friday the 13th. It was, you know, good. It’s been so long since I’ve seen the original that I cannot remember if it was made straight and all the campy theatrics came later in the series, or if they were always like that. But I can say for sure that this version was neither campy, nor theatrical. Seeing it without knowing the backstory, it would have been more than a little creepy, and even knowing what I knew, the tension between exhaustion, fear, and a horribly revealed past was downright compelling.

If you’ve never seen a Nightmare movie, this would be a fine start. And if you enjoyed the series, I’m pretty sure you’ll be as happy with the remake as I was.

[1] The first few books of the Wheel of Time, amirite? *fingerguns*

Iron Man 2

Iron Man 2: I liked it. That has kind of an epitaphy feeling, which is not precisely what I’m going for, as I decidedly do not presume that it marks the gravestone of a franchise. I think I may be mildly disappointed with it relative to my expectations, though, mostly based on how Spider-Man 2 turned out. ‘Cause there was a pretty great sequel. Still, though, on the whole it was a thoroughly entertaining sequel to an even better first movie, with nothing to particularly dislike about the new execution. Spectacle plus franchise equals success, right?

Also in the win column, Robert Downey Jr. maintains his essentially perfect portrayal of a billionaire superhero who is always secretly dying, having trouble forming real attachments to women, and drinking a lot. (It occurs to me that this may not be an acting job, ‘dying superhero’ aside.) This time he is facing trouble from the U.S. government, a rival military industrialist, and a brand new supervillain that shares characteristics with a couple of people from the comic book, most notably Whiplash. And while a bad guy who can split metal with his special whip may not seem all that interesting in a comic book[1], it works a lot better when he is using Stark’s own ARC reactor technology to create really cool-looking energy whips; also, when he is played by Mickey Rourke. The plot was probably a little bit muddled, but the pace was fast enough for me not to care, when combined with my knowledge that comic plots are often at least a little bit muddled in the first place. But then again, any time you sit me down in front of a movie screen where Downey either gets to be constantly awesome or gets to relearn how to be awesome after some kind of setback, that will be enough to satisfy me regardless of anything else that happens.

Also, if the spoiler-laden transition of Stark Industries’ CEO position never happened in the comics run? It should have. (I mean, the details are spoilers, the fact really isn’t. So please don’t misunderstand this as me having given away the farm, over here.)

[1] For my money, that seeming is fully accurate, though he’s only appeared in one story I’ve read so far and may get better later.

Kick-Ass

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MV5BMTc0Mjg4ODc1Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNTUwNjEwMw@@._V1__SX1859_SY893_Here is an interesting true story for you. In addition to seeing Kick-Ass yesterday evening, I also happened to read Marvels (by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross) the same day. I should probably review it separately, but since I read them as someone’s loaned comics instead of in a book, I have nothing to reliably link to, which is one of my lines for “shouldn’t get reviewed after all”. But also, it makes a very convenient companion piece, and so here we are. So, quick nutshell: Marvels is a four-issue comic that shows stories from the golden and silver age through the eyes of a news photographer, a regular guy who is the stand-in for the audience. Pretty much, a reaction shot to stories that the reader is theoretically already familiar with. A way to show not what being a superhero is like, but what living in a world with superheroes is like.[1]

But, anyway, Kick-Ass. It is almost exactly the same thing, except that the world doesn’t really have superheroes (or does it?), and the stand-in character wants to be one. Named Kick-Ass, as you may have already surmised? And I understand that this doesn’t really sound the same at all, but I don’t want to go much further into the plot, because it works extremely well fresh, or at least I thought so. The similarity is that Kick-Ass is in far over his head, in a world that he doesn’t yet know the rules of and has no real power over, and yet he still struggles to impose his values upon it. To the good of the world? To the good of himself? Neither? I say, just as in Marvels, that this isn’t the point; the struggle is.

The only problem with this review is that I’m making the movie sound far more high-minded than it is. I think it is high-minded, don’t get me wrong, but only in the deep undercurrents that I could for that matter be imagining. On the surface, it’s an insane, ultra-violent[2] romp through several origin stories and culminating in an over-the-top spectacle of a battle royale with the supervillain, the way most comic books movies want to be. And it is threaded through with the essential humanity of every one of its characters, the way more comic books and their movies should aspire to, but frequently do not.

[1] It’s also pretty good / recommendable, if that matters.
[2] I am utterly mystified how it got a PG-13 rating.

Date Night

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Despite the near-universal panning of Date Night, I pretty much had to go see it, because of my very great love for Tina Fey. And the thing is, it’s honestly not all that bad. But it is barely north of mediocre, which fails in every way to match the talent involved. (I include Marky Mark in this assessment, as undoubtedly do you.) I expect its flaws were highlighted by the conditions in which I saw it, those being a completely empty theater yesterday afternoon. Inherent irony of that venue aside, I really think it needed the crutch of other people laughing aloud at things I only found amusing.

So, anyway, there’s this married couple, and they are in exactly the kind of couple-rut that has spawned so many movies in which the woman empowers herself by finding someone who is more attractive, more stylish, smarter and more funny but for whom she inexplicably didn’t look in the first place, in favor of screwing over a perfectly decent but not movie-quality husband-or-boyfriend that never did anything wrong except for failing to create the fairy tale she was expecting, and has now finally found.[1] Thankfully, this is the rarer movie that shows them trying to struggle past that and rediscover each other, actually admitting that there was a reason they were together in the first place. They break out of this rut by, you guessed it, taking over the reservation of a missing party at a swank Manhattan dinner spot, and thereby accidentally getting tangled up in a case of mistaken identity involving secret information on a flash drive, hired guns, a mafia boss, and Mark Wahlberg’s pecs. (Possibly his abs as well.) Which sounds like a perfectly serviceable zany action/comedy, except that for some reason it just wasn’t funny the way you’d expect that to be. Script problems are an inevitable aspect, and the credits make it clear that the funniest scenes were adlibbed multiple ways by Ms. Fey and Steve Carell anyhow. But I also kind of figure that they tried too hard to be both a good romantic comedy and a good action comedy, and neither element came out as well as they might have if it had been a single-genre flick.

Maybe next time! I’m pretty sure chemistry was not the issue, so letting them try again would be worthwhile.

[1] …what’s your point?

The Losers (2010)

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I think that I had been vaguely aware that The Losers was based on a comic book title of some kind. But even if I hadn’t been, the editing wastes no times providing that information, and the plot doesn’t wait much longer to clear up any lingering doubts. Another thing about the plot is that it would have been pretty reminiscent of the A-Team premise even if I hadn’t seen a preview for that summer movie shortly before the credits rolled. On the bright side[1], this is likely to be the better of the two iterations of the same premise for this particular Hollywood season. So, anyway, comic book movie about a group of commandos on the wrong side of law and order but the right side of morality. With me so far?

This particular plot revolves around said commandos finding themselves in a lot of trouble on behalf of a shadowy government agent known only as Max, after they defy his orders to blow up a druglord’s house on the grounds that it happens to be full of Bolivian children. And then, in typical action movie planning montages and execution vignettes, they proceed to fight back against Max, who is the kind of cartoonishly evil villain that lets you know that absolutely for sure, this was once a comic book. In any event, it’s a perfectly fun action movie that may or may not do a good job of translating its source material but has left me interested in both that material and any sequels derived from the film itself or the source material.

[1] At least, for this month. Later, when the other movie is the current one, the side will be less bright if I’m right, or on the other hand both sides will be pretty damn bright if I’m wrong.

The Black Waters of Echo’s Pond

Anyway, I was right in my prediction about having already seen the better of my two scheduled horror movies, but not just because After.Life was so good. The Black Waters of Echo’s Pond just was not so much of a much, too. And more’s the pity, it took itself entirely seriously, so there was no post-modern black humor mixed up with all the gore and mayhem. The film quality did remind me now and then of one of the ’70s movies that predated the slasher genre, when everything good was European and had a great deal of weight to it, and I can respect what they were trying to do with this and other similarities. I just don’t think they ever quite got there.

However, there were several valuable lessons to be taken away from the night’s festivities. Suppose that you have traveled with several friends, some of whom are not entirely comfortable with others, to a small island off the coast of Maine[1] for a weekend getaway at somebody’s uncle’s old house. And further suppose that said uncle has been telling ghost stories. And further suppose that the house is old and rickety and sometimes the fuses just fail. Under these conditions, I present a few suggestions for how to conduct the rest of your evening.

1) If you fall through rotted boards into an otherwise inaccessible room beneath the basement stairs, and then find boarded up within the already inaccessible room beneath the stairs a very large, ornately carved box and several ancient scrolls, you should probably leave them alone.
2) If you bring them with you up into the living room and upon examination find them to be an old board game referencing Greek mythology, most notably a handful of misnamed Furies and an iffy retelling of the doomed romance between Narcissus and Echo, you should probably not play the board game.
3) If you play the board game and it encourages several of you to engage in sexual encounters that run contrary to your current relationships with people who are right there in the room, you should… well, who am I kidding, this is a horror movie, you’re pretty much gonna do that part no matter what. But if you insist on doing it, have the common decency to actually be naked on the screen as a result of important plot developments, instead of in one inexplicably gratuitous shower scene.
4) If you have disregarded the rest of my advice, and as an inevitable result find yourself standing on a dock, looking for a way off the island and having just fought off a possessed killer who used to be your friend, but not in such a way that you are certain beyond any inkling of doubt that he is dead, don’t leave your chainsaw unattended on the dock.
5) If you have disregarded my fourth piece of advice, at the very least take notice of the fact that the chainsaw isn’t there anymore the next time you are on the dock. I mean, Jesus Christ!
6) If you are one of the last two non-murderous people on the island, it is probably okay to stop picking fights with each other until you have made it safely back to the mainland. Not just because murderous people are still unaccounted for, either. I mean, what if the one of you that you just picked that fight with goes insane? I’m just saying, it’s been kind of a trend, alright?
7) But mostly, if you are friends, maybe stop being such dicks to each other. If you are not friends, maybe don’t go to a small, creepy island off the coast of Maine for a weekend together. Not that the other suggestions are in any way unimportant, just this one would head off most of the real trouble before you got around to ignoring the others. I mean, I’d play the mysterious old board game that had been hidden away for decades, it’s not like I can really kid anyone on that point, right?

[1] It’s kind of always Maine, isn’t it? Or else maybe Washington, but mostly Maine. I think I blame Stephen King, but plausibly he is just another symptom of the real cause, which is that Maine itself is some kind of shadow dimension extruding into our rational world. I should probably ought to visit it sometime.

After.Life

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Last night, I made a mad dash out of work to the one of three theaters in the area that had a late enough showing of After.Life for me to get to it in time. Yes, really, even though I am well aware of just how terrible the name is. Because the concept made up for it, and it’s not like it was a book where I would have to see the text over and over again. And I’m definitely glad I did. Of the two late night horror movies that I see this week, it will almost certainly have been the best, and by a wide margin.

What happens is this: after an unfortunate argument and a brutal car accident, Christina Ricci is trapped between life and death in the basement of a funeral parlor, at the hands (malevolent or beneficial? That is the central question of the plot) of funeral director Liam Neeson; and erstwhile boyfriend The Mac Guy lingers forever around the edges, possibly to lighten the dreamlike quality of the central interactions or possibly to add moderately unneeded melodrama to an otherwise extremely thoughtful film. Because that central plot-driven question is completely beside the point; it is the theme of crossing the veil between life and death that gives the film its real weight. There are certainly hints throughout the opening frames that Ricci is already dead long before any collision occurs, and as each interminable[1] day between death and burial gives way to the next, she looks ever more pale and bloodless and gothic; by the end, she is reminiscent of Wednesday Addams more surely than she has been in years. Despite all these indicators, she clings to her life with a tenacious grip that leaves Neeson ever more exasperated at her unwillingness to accept his assistance in letting go. And that tension between the pull of life and the inevitability of death drives the film along even farther than probably 20 minutes of nudity did[2], much less that potential horror plot I mentioned earlier.

If I may, I think I would like to see more indie horror scripts that explore the same kinds of human questions that are usually relegated to sfnal settings. Thinking man’s horror, if it were to take off, would I’m pretty sure be the first new movie genre I’ve seen in a very, very long time.

[1] To her, that is; despite being slowly paced, nothing ever felt as though it was dragging to me.
[2] Because, yeah, if you can keep me interested in the questions you are raising while Christina Ricci is naked, you’ve probably done a pretty good job with your movie.

Clash of the Titans (2010)

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I’ll say first what most everybody else is saying first, which is that the Clash of the Titans remake is actually more of a reimagining, in which there are a lot of visual elements that match the original film, but its plot and characters are really its own, with as little overlap as can reasonably be imagined considering the sheer number of visual milestones that are reached as the film progresses. Or, in shorter monkey speak: looks about the same, feels very different. And at the beginning, I was preparing in my head to put together a reasonably clever riff on how the movie was making a sincerely bold and certainly rare stand against the gods in our society. It would have inevitably been flavored with Battlestar Galactica, of course; you can’t mention Greek gods in a modern setting for a few years yet without that being an automatic comparison. But, y’know, good company and all. I even think I might have been able to conceal for a few sentences the reveal that I was talking about Greek religion in modern times rather than Judeo-Christian religion. It would have merited at least a chuckle.

The problem, you see, is that I can’t really do that because despite scripted grumblings over 75 percent of its length, the movie actually didn’t have the courage of its convictions; when push came to shove, it completely stopped being a diatribe against man’s reliance upon his gods and a paean to man’s ability to care well for himself, even with the gods ranged against him, and far more so if they would just leave us all alone. And that is the disappointment of the movie. If it had been content to be sound and fury, I would have been content to enjoy it on its own merits. But to, all sly references aside, start that diatribe which I think we all know validly works as a modern metaphor once you disregard that the gods being impotently raged against are Greek, and then right at the turning point of the movie when things are the darkest to unnecessarily cave in and undermine what had apparently been your entire message? It doesn’t make the movie any less loud, or pretty, or by-the-numbers humorous, but it makes it a lot less satisfying than mere popcorn would have been.

The Blind Side

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I have, I am sure, mentioned that I see a lot of Wednesday afternoon movies, in an effort to avoid adding a random 60 miles to my weekly drive schedule. I may also have mentioned that I welcome attendees, because that is a lot of filmage to see by oneself. The upshot is that I will sometimes see something that isn’t at the top of my personal list, or even something I didn’t really want to. In this particular case, the movie I didn’t much wanna see was The Blind Side, by virtue of it being one of those “feel-good picture[s] of the year” that is pretty much guaranteed via that descriptor to be twee and annoying.

But, y’know, I’m a big enough person to admit when I’m wrong, and right here? I was wrong. Through an unlikely (but not unthinkable) series of events, a white Memphis socialite family meets and takes in a black teenaged ward of the state, and they each learn a lot about the ways the world works; also there is football. And it still sounds pretty twee, plus I don’t know how to say only a little bit about it; it’s either keep adding details until I’ve told the whole story, or the probably better option of knowing only that much or even slightly less than what I wrote above, as I did. The important part is, it was a genuinely sweet, sincere movie about how people are only different if we insist that they are, and about whether opportunity can triumph over fate. And no matter how twee this review may be, the movie really wasn’t.

I’m honestly not sure if I’ve ever watched this genre of movie in my adult life without rolling my eyes. I hope I’m reporting accurately, instead of having somehow changed internally to become a sucker. That would be embarrassing.