Category Archives: Film

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

In my halcyon youth, which is to say late elementary school and possibly early junior high, one of my primary goals each day was to get out of school and home to my even then twenty-year-old, cableless, rabbit-eared television and click over to one of the handful of UHF channels[1] and watch back-to-back episodes of Transformers and G.I. Joe. So when the Transformers movie hit, there was a significant nostalgia quotient even though I really didn’t trust it could turn out that well. Because, giant transforming robots just seem more plausible in a cartoon, despite that modern special effects turned out to be up to the job after all.

Surprisingly, it didn’t cross my mind then that a G.I. Joe movie might happen, even though it seems a lot more plausible that one could be successfully made. Still, once I caught wind of the film’s existence, I was pretty excited. And then, over months of previews focused on metallic combat suits that might be better placed in a game of Halo, that excitement gradually drained away to nothing. Which, really, is the way that expectations management ought to work on big budget summer adaptations of childhood memories.

The Rise of Cobra is at least as much about the existence of a secret military organization under UN authority tasked with solving unique problems on the geopolitical stage as it is about the emergence of yet another new terrorist threat. G.I. Joe, says its commanding officer General Hawk, picks from the very best of each member nation’s armed services, by invitation only. They have a secret base. They are, in short, every UN-armed-takeover conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. Luckily, instead of making a movie about that, it’s about fan favorites Duke, Scarlett, and Snake Eyes’ fight to stop an (implausibly) Scottish arms dealer from carrying out a plan to bilk the UN of a lot of research money they paid into his nanomite[2] program by stealing the weapons back upon delivery, demonstrating their power, and then selling the remaining warheads to the highest bidder. All while carrying out a second, more sinister plan that will ensure adequate sequel bait if the box office performs as expected.

But you know what? It worked. I’ll watch it again, and I already look forward to that all-but-certain sequel, and if there were a few pieces of dumb to ignore over the course of the movie, well, that never stopped me from enjoying the cartoon either. I am well-pleased.

[1] Maybe channel 39? I guess it doesn’t matter anyway; all the UHF channels either got bought up by the emerging new networks or else went Spanish when cable ate up too much local marketshare. (Also, I’m not sure who I’m kidding when I say I had to click over; why would I ever have changed it away in the first place?)
[2] Nanomites, as you shouldn’t really care to know, are tiny robots that, in this case, are programmed to eat pretty much everything until told by their software to stop. The ability to strip a city bare in just minutes, although insignificant next to the power of the Force, is a pretty potent threat; albeit perhaps a wee bit too easy to lose control of.

Funny People

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As I mentioned quite recently, I’ve never seen a full-on Judd Apatow movie. Well, had never, at least. But, last night I caught Funny People. I can say without reservation that the movie had a significant number of funny people in it. Despite that, I’m pretty sure the goal of the title was irony. Because, as funny as it was, both in the stand-up segments and the main story segments, the bulk of the movie showed people wronging themselves and each other in ways both blunt and subtle, and only sporadically taking away hard lessons on how to be better. I think it had to be a comedy, not because Apatow and Seth Rogen and Adam Sandler are known for comedy, but because if you remove the regular doses of humor, Funny People would be slit-your-wrists cinema.

Rogen stars as his increasingly common, and increasingly likeable, schlubby everyman, this time an aspiring comedian trying and mostly failing to work his way into the Hollywood scene. His life changes dramatically when his set follows that of a famous comedian, played by Sandler, who has just learned he is probably going to die of [let’s say] Robert Jordan’s Disease and then flubs his first public stand-up routine in years, due to his dark mood. Rogen takes advantage of the situation to get some fairly cheap laughs at Sandler’s expense, whereupon the comedian decides to hire Rogen as a writer and assistant, and most importantly, as the sole bearer of the knowledge of Sandler’s illness and probable death. Occasional digressions into Rogen’s personal life are interesting from a character development perspective but mostly serve to remove focus from the chemistry between the old and young comedians, their growing friendship, and the lessons that each is taking from the other. And then, as the previews made perfectly clear, Sandler’s disease goes into unexpected remission, and he decides to embrace the second chance he has been given in pretty much the worst ways imaginable, while Rogen is left the impossible task of damage control.

It really is a very funny movie. I said that and I meant it. And a lot of the time, it’s funny like things that are funny, and that’s pretty sweet. But sometimes, it’s funny like watching a crash between a car full of clowns and a limo full of midgets, which crash has happened in full view of the Special Ed bus. You can’t look away and you know you’re going to hell, and there’s a voice inside you desperately trying to convince you that those kids are going to have nightmares for months, that midgets are totally people, and that clowns… well, okay, the clowns are probably better off. But you still choke out laughter, because you can’t not. That kind of funny, is, y’know, probably less good in large doses.

Land of the Lost

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Unemployment plus dollar movie plus having failed to catch a lot of my secondary summer movies equals a pretty good deal, right? The moreso, of course, because only paying $1.25 to see Land of the Lost feels a lot better, even in a substandard theater, than paying full price would have done. They did a pretty good job of hitting up on a couple of nostalgia-meters, and a halfway decent job at a plot, and an occasionally decent job at being funny. And then, of course, there was the rest of the job they did at being funny, which ranged from iffy to my being able to see what they were going for to solidly unfunny to scientifically offensive.[1]

The story, lifted straight from decades of Saturday morning kid television, revolves around the fate of [Dr.] Marshall, Will, and Holly, who, while on a routine expedition, accidentally go over a waterfall and through a rift in the space-time continuum, landing in a lost world populated by monkey people, lizard people, dinosaurs, and all kinds inexplicable modern detritus that has fallen through, one supposes, other rifts that were less waterfall-accessible. The chick was pretty hot if unfortunately lacking in story relevance otherwise, the Judd-Apatow-friendly actor was about as funny as you’d expect him to be[2], and Will Farrell… it’s like, when he’s playing a pompous blowhard, I appreciate his talent. But as soon as the physical comedy shows up, I just want him to stop, as quickly as possible. This movie, alas, had a healthy mix. For the record, despite me coming down mostly negatively, I did not at all feel like my childhood had been raped.

[1] I should note that that eight-year-olds in the audience did find the last part pretty damn funny, to my chagrin.
[2] This is true whether you are an anti-fan of Apatow or not, I expect. I still haven’t seen any of his movies yet, only the ancillary stuff that floats around in his wake, but I’m pretty okay with him, to date.

Lost and Delirious

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MV5BMjYzMDk0NDEzNl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNzQzNTcxMTE@._V1__SX1217_SY887_My latest Netflix movie is Lost and Delirious. And I’ve watched it, which was a positive experience. Yet I have been staring at this mostly blank screen for the majority of the day. I think it’s that my opinions are too many and too contradictory. In short, the chick from The O.C. is sent to an all-female boarding school, where she becomes roommate with a pair of seniors, one hard-nosed and feminist, the other vivaciously popular. At first, it looks like one of those coming-out-of-the-shell stories in which Mischa Barton would have been the main character embarking on her journey toward personhood. Then, at the end of the first act, it veers sharply into one of those obsession thrillers in which our purported main character mostly serves as the audience’s window on the action when it is revealed that her roommates are engaged in a sexual relationship.

And I think it could have made a fine obsession thriller too, except that it couldn’t make up its mind to commit to that. For every scene in which a new boyfriend is about to die in a sword fight and simply isn’t taking it seriously enough yet, there are three in which someone screams and runs out of a room / across the school lawn. And it’s not like that’s unrealistic high school obsessive behavior; it’s that the swords and the pet falcon are, and after it was hinted that I might get that movie, it became the one I wanted. Still, what was left behind was good stuff. Surprisingly good acting from a variety of very young actresses, modernly relevant sociosexual politics, not terribly many overwrought or thematically pushy scenes. And, y’know, sword fights.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

I’m genuinely unsure what to make of the 6th Harry Potter movie. It took its time and worked hard to include what was necessary, unlike some of the previous films. Lots of backstory was ditched, but it kept the important bits. And they did a great job with the character interactions. Every cylinder fired really well[1], honestly, except for the parts that dealt with the central storyline and mystery. The Half-Blood Prince’s identity scarcely registered as a mystery in the first place, despite so many revealed reasons as to why it might be troubling. Voldemort’s secret was mostly an afterthought, though I suppose it being the main focus of two more movies will make up for that. And the climatic scene felt, well, rushed.

But what I can’t decide is how it would have looked to a newcomer. Were the scenes unsatisfying because the script and the direction weren’t quite up to it? Or because I was able to choose the pacing in the book, and the movie simply didn’t live up to my preferences? You’ll have to ask someone who came at these from a different direction, I guess, because I’ve got nothing to go by here, except what I’ve already said. On the bright side, it was pretty good in itself, just not as satisfying as I had hoped. Alan Rickman, as usual, is the tops. Oh, and speaking of bright sides, I think I recommend an afternoon or evening viewing. It’s a very dark film, visually, and emerging into the bright of summer would be… disorienting, at best.

[1] Okay, Daniel Radcliffe is simply not keeping up with the emerging talent of his co-stars. Pity.

The Real Cancun

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Going into it, I considered that this may be my most embarrassing review ever. And if you’ve been reading this for any amount of time, you know that’s saying kind of a lot. It’s like, The Real World, right? Sort of the first big reality TV show, took over MTV and removed all hope of music videos ever gracing those airwaves again? Yeah, that. Some years later, they decided, hey, what if we made a movie about these kinds of people going to Cancun for Spring Break and getting nakeder than MTV generally approves of since the early ’80s? And then they did so.

And, y’know, The Real Cancun really is about what you’d expect. It’s like, let’s take a whole bunch of college age students, give them way more than they can afford, and let them do random stuff. In the Real World, that turns into weeks of annoying drama interspersed by fake community service work, or maybe that stuff like happens on Donald Trump’s show? The point here, is that I don’t really watch much reality TV and have no clear idea what happens except what I’ve tried to ignore while others were watching. But it turns out that if you reduce the time they spend together to just a week or so, put them into lots of wet t-shirt contests (and beefcake contests, to be fair), and (especially this one) change the show’s duration from weeks of 23 minutes down to about 90 total, it’s a lot more palatable. I, ever so slightly, cared about what happened to these characters.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

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Remember what happened in Transformers? Me neither, so I’ll join you in reading that review before I proceed. Yeah, right, okay, no new giant robots, missing Allspark, etc. Anyway, I know they had a happy ending in which the bad guy was vanquished and I guess the Allspark bit it, so no more giant robots? Except: now there’s a new bad guy that’s even badder and more important than Megatron, except we’ve never heard of him before. Which, okay, fine. And the giant robots have been on Earth for 17,000 years instead of showing up when their Allspark crash-landed by random chance. Which seems maybe less plausible?[1] And they have a new plan for making giant robots, although it technically involves the death of every living thing on the planet. Lucky it’s the giant robots having this debate; if it was humans who needed to destroy Cybertron to perpetuate our species, the giant robots would all be toast before you could finish Clapping Off.

Still, Transformers 2 was a pretty good movie. Megan Fox remains hot and occasionally runs in slow motion. There were a lot more tiny robots, the same amount of giant robots[2], a few distressingly racistly-typed robots[3] to detract from that, and at least two ancient robots. The military dudes were acceptably military, the conspiracy dude was John Turturro, and he’s generally good, right? And Shia LeBeouf was that young guy that gets lots of big roles for teenagers in movies these days; whether that is deserved, I choose not to speculate.[4] Plus, another cosmic-scale plot. So, yeah. Michael Bay has done quite well, here, putting together a solid, entertaining, explosions-filled movie filled with only a few missteps. Ninety minutes’ worth of adrenaline, entertainment and such, and through the art of movie magic, skillful casting, and blindingly-talented script oversight, he was able to cram that ninety minutes of entertaining film, with I’m sure no small amount of effort, down into a mere two and half hours of screen time.

Oops. Still, the good movie is in there, if you want to dig for it and can let your lizard brain be entertained by explosions, overt racism, and Megan Fox in the meantime.

[1] I grant the possibility that I missed some explanation for this during the first reel. But I’m pretty sure not.
[2] Though they look distressingly similar in robot form
[3] I could have gotten past the accents and attitudes with little more than an eye roll, but buckteeth, and one of them gold? You’ve got to be shitting me. I mean, seriously.
[4] Clearly, starring opposite Megan Fox is not deserved, though. I mean, it’s possible she’s going to be the better actor of the two of them in another year or so, which just indicates what I’m trying to say here.

Up (2009)

Yesterday, I learned that my occasional free AMC tickets even count for the 3D movies. That right there is pretty awesome, what with the extra charge they carry. Yay! I also learned that with a little bit of ingenuity and an unreasonable amount of helium, anyone can get a second chance. (Well, anyone who isn’t an obsessed bad guy that’s probably older than God.)

Up tells the story of a couple’s dreams of adventure at Paradise Falls in South America, and of a lonely old man’s quest to fulfill those dreams on his wife’s behalf after a protracted, ten minute long sucker punch delivered as the film’s prologue. Along for the ride are a floating house, a cub scout, a pack of talking dogs, a pretty hilarious giant bird, and the aforementioned bad guy. That’s pretty much all I want to say, because, well, it’s yours to watch now. I’m pretty sure this is the best Pixar movie, and yeah, you should really ought to go see it.

The Hangover

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So, I like black comedy. The Hangover has a significant portion of that, and so I liked it pretty well. And yet, I can’t find much else to say about it. It was funny, but quite generically so, I guess? Or maybe I just like things to be a whole lot darker than people do on average.

Anyway, there are these dudes in Vegas for a bachelor party, which is intended to consist of light gambling, drinking, and general low-key debauchery. Which would be fine, except that after shots of Jäger on the roof of the hotel, they lose complete track of the night and awaken to a (very artistically!) trashed suite, a missing tooth, a stray tiger, and most importantly, a missing groom. And as they try to reconstruct their drunken night, the day keeps getting worse.

I could try to claim that there’s a lot of mileage in here on the importance of friendship, and, well, they do put in some effort on that score. But mostly, it’s yay black comedy and zany adventures. Laughs, yeah; thoughts, not so much. Oh, and an unnecessary (albeit well-drawn) caricature of a shrewish girlfriend who was the main downside of the movie. She was neither zany nor comedic, and mainly only existed to be disliked. I can go for one-dimensional characters, but the dimension needs to maybe not be repellent.

Drag Me to Hell

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So, you know who I like? Bruce Campbell, star of such fine shows as The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr. and Burn Notice, and of such fine movies as Bubba Ho-tep and Army of Darkness. As it happens, he is closely related via both cinema and pre-existing friendship with one of the finest horror directors of the ’80s, Sam Raimi.[1] After what feels like an extended absence, Mr. Raimi has returned to his genre of origin with what is simply the finest PG-13 horror movie I’ve ever seen.

In Drag Me to Hell, a sweetly ambitious loan officer runs afoul of a gypsy and her curse, and is then run through the gauntlet by a tormenting spirit who, in less than four days, will drag her to hell. (Unexpected plot twist there, I know.) As a technical exercise, it is quite close to perfect. From the soundtrack orchestration to the foley artistry, every moment of audio is, er, picture perfect. And speaking of that, the framing of the shots and the unusually relentless daylight[2] are every bit as well done on the visual side of things. But, however good, you didn’t come here for a piece of technical achievement. And that’s just the thing: as an actual horror flick, it is classic Raimi, straight to the hilt. The laughs are hysterical[3], in the most literal sense of the word, over the top in the kind of measure needed to make up for equal measures of jumpy scares and existential, well, horror. Because[4], the underlying message of this movie is that it doesn’t matter how underserving you are. Sometimes, you can piss off the wrong person, and your life will go extremely pear-shaped extremely quickly. That right there is an unpleasant truth that extends well beyond demonic table dancing and workplace sexism.

Really, my only complaint? No Bruce Campbell.

[1] You may be aware of some of his more recent work.
[2] I mean, relentless for a horror movie. A lot of other kinds of movies probably would not be noteworthy on this point, for even more daylight than this.
[3] There are by-God running gags. So awesome.
[4] Aside from a ten second shot of shifty-eyed Alison Lohman at the dinner party with her boyfriend’s parents, in which she signed, sealed, and delivered her ability to deliver black comedy. I am officially a fan of this woman.