Sometimes, despite the odds, two people manage to find each other. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist is a movie about that.
Well, and about music that you are nowhere near cool enough to have ever heard, being played at places that you are nowhere near cool enough to be allowed into. If either (and especially both) of those elements appeal to you, I’m pretty sure you’ll like it. I did.
What is the deal with[1] Hollywood releasing identical movies within weeks of each other? Like Deep Impact and Armageddon that one year, or Volcano and Dante’s Peak that other year? In fairness, I should say that Zack and Miri Make a Porno is really nothing at all like Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, but the titles are ridiculously similar for having come out in the same month, is all I’m saying. Why does that happen so much?
Anyhow, I saw them out of order, mostly by virtue of skipping movies for a couple of weeks. At least I got *that* out of my system! What happens with Zack and Miri is that they’re penniless waifs living out their post-high school existences as the best of platonic friends, when they realize that, hey, there sure is a lot of money to be had in the sex industry! So they wander town in search of a wacky gang of characters such as you might find in a Kevin Smith movie, or maybe a Seth Rogen movie, and having once gathered them, they proceed to make a porno![2]
Oh, wait, though, it’s not that simple. ‘Cause, they’re friends forever yet sexually compatible, and finally changing their relationship like this is bound to have repercussions, right? Hence: drama! It’s like a marriage between the talky portions of Chasing Amy and the comedy sensibilities of Mallrats. I definitely liked it, but it’s probably Smith’s weakest script in some time, aside from the Affleck movie that I’ve completely forgotten other than its existence.
[1] In case you are wondering, no. I do not sound like Seinfeld.
[2] I bet you did not see that coming.
What I loved about the video game Max Payne, aside from its playability, was the noir element. They played it very straight, enough so to be clear that it was done from love of the genre, but they played it so far over the top that it was parodic and hilarious at the same time.[1] When you get down to it, that’s what makes a good game: something that’s as fun to watch as it is to play.
It’s for that reason that I was excited to see the movie Max Payne. The previews covered all the old territory, enough to make me want to play the game again too.[2] And in the end, I think it was the high expectations that were the failure. The noir was in there, but not nearly enough to suit me. The videogamey elements were mostly good rather than laughable, though there were bits near the end that, um, not so much. And the plot was perfectly serviceable, but rarely moreso.
In short, Detective Max Payne has obsessed over the murder of his wife (and child?) for the past two years, despite any real leads. He’s drifted away from his partner and his wife’s friends, despite their best efforts. But with help from vengeful assassin and (of course) femme fatale Mona Sax, the case is about to break wide open. It won’t cost Max anything much, either. Just his career, the lives of most anyone close to him, and quite possibly his soul.
Honestly, it really was good, if you disregard the inevitable video game moment. But it wasn’t cheesy enough to be awesome in that sense, and it wasn’t quite what I was looking for as a serious flick. Alas.
[1] Kind of like Brust’s treatment of the Three Musketeers series.
[2] I mean, I won’t on a PS2 from seven years ago when I have this many new games floating around, but another sequel would be fantastic. Maybe even an updated remake?
There is an extent to which horror movies are in a rut. They mostly fall into three types right now: Japanese horror in which ghosts of small children with blank faces, badly maintained hair, and black eyes rush out of closets or wells or otherwise enclosed spaces to destroy your soul; torture films in which reasonless men capture vacationing teens and gradually vivisect them, usually without consequence and with no more than one survivor; and apocalypse horror in which some event has turned the world (or our diseased and dead brethren and sistren) against us. Frequently, these types will borrow tropes back and forth from each other. And of course there are movies coming out that play against these types, such as the Saw films. But the rut is visibly there now, over a decade beyond when Scream first invented the post-modern horror film, pulling the genre back from the brink of irrelevance.
The good news, though, is that the rut is nowhere near played out, and still provides far better quality than at any point since the 1970s.[1] If anything, the cross-pollination between the types is improving things and keeping no one rut from getting all that deep. All of which is the long way around to mentioning that I saw Quarantine last week, I suppose, but the state of the genre is often on my mind as I think about what I have to say in these reviews. It’s undeniable that I’m excited to be seeing so much good quality coming out after I spent the ’90s in a video store wasteland being mocked mercilessly by all the people around me who weren’t able to see the potential I was so certain was there.
But, yeah, Quarantine, which as it turns out snagged tropes from across both aisles, was mostly a cross between the apocalypse type and a less common but very influential type I haven’t got around to mentioning yet, the camera-is-a-character type. Y’know, Blair Witch or Cloverfield. A plucky local-market TV reporter[2] is on overnight assignment in a fire station when a 911 comes in about a woman screaming and otherwise behaving bizarrely in an apartment building. Fire and police are dispatched, with the camera doing ride-along duty, to discover all the inhabitants milling around, confused over the late night and the fuss. And just when they realize that things might be more dire than a mere disoriented elderly woman can account for, they also discover that the entire building has been sealed off, with nobody allowed to enter or exit upon threat of lethal force. And then the phones are jammed. And then, things start to go horribly wrong.
The one downside I should mention is that Quarantine is far more interested in the ride than the destination. This doesn’t really bother me much, because the confusion, sense of betrayal, and mounting-terror-as-character-study of the handful of people who are more than cardboard cutouts are more than enough to keep me happy. And although the movie eventually provides something akin to answers, that move is very cursory and unlikely to satisfy anyone who needs a Reason behind Events.
Anyway, I guess it’s like I said back at the beginning. This is well-trodden ground, and it has nothing much new to offer. But what it offers is certainly entertaining and still manages to pull in enough disparate elements to not feel copied, unlike the bad days of the ’80s that nearly killed the genre in the first place. Although I could wish someone had handed the reporter chick a paper bag at some point, or possibly a calming slap. ‘Cause there are a number of minutes of hyperventilating that are impossible to listen to, regardless of how realistic the action might be. I’m not sure what that number is, and it might vary from person to person. But it is at least two minutes shorter than the number portrayed by this otherwise delightful little film.
[1] Which, okay, sounds unimpressive, but then again movies in general haven’t been around all that long, so calling this the Silver Age of horror to the Golden Age of the ’70s really isn’t such faint praise as it might look at first glance.
[2] Who you hopefully know as Deb Morgan from Dexter.
Last week, I watched a show in which a self-aware computer AI spread ominous shadows over a dystopian future. Later, after the Sarah Connor Chronicles was over, I also watched Eagle Eye. No, I’m kidding, Eagle Eye was pretty good, and it knew better than to trod the thematic ground so well covered by the Terminator series. Instead, it split time between tension-filled thriller/action and Big Brother dystopianism, which is subtly different in that Big Brother only craves control, not humanity’s demise.
Into this scenario leaps Shia the Beef, 20-something slacker twin of a talented military intelligence officer who has died in a car crash just days ahead of massive infusions of cash and terrorist paraphernalia, all of which is mistakenly sent to the living twin. And just seconds ahead of the feds, a woman’s voice on the phone starts giving Mr. the Beef instructions that he had best follow, lest he face certain death. Throw in an equally frantic chick under similar constraints, and then: rollercoaster engaged. And honestly, it was pretty darn good. Sure, I had to turn my brain down a little bit and enjoy the ride, but there was only one major plot hole, which is fewer than most action/thrillers, so. If candy is your thing, this will be better than most such offerings.
Awesomely, I got to go to another screening yesterday after work. Well, technically, after leaving work early with broken glasses and a giant headache, and more closely after 750ml of 9.0% alcohol in the form of a pretty tasty Belgian, Allegash Tripel Reserve.[1] My point, though, is that movie sneak previews are awesome, even if I mostly only get to go to the ones for comedies; maybe more awesome for that, as I would often skip them if I was paying.
Every preview I’ve seen for Sex Drive has reminded me deeply of John Cusack’s The Sure Thing, enough so that when I saw it was based on the familiarly-titled book All the Way, I just assumed it was the same source material. But that book turns out to be modern and the movie an apparent straight port of it. So I guess not. But still, they look very much alike, y’know?
The plot is probably exactly what you think it is, preview-unseen. Sensitive Everykid drives across the country to meet an internet hottie, accompanied by his worldly evil-angel-on-the-shoulder friend and the unrealistically hot girl-next-door who somehow isn’t surrounded by guys, but who nevertheless only sees the lead character as a friend; plus, unsurprisingly, he has hopeless feelings for her. Hijinx and life lessons ensue! And honestly, there’s not a lot to recommend it above any other movie of this type; it’s funny, and that’s enough. (Also, there is one thing to recommend it above the herd: Seth Green makes a seriously awesome turn as a wise-cracking Amish man. Easily worth the price of a paid admission, much less mine.)
[1] Because my bar is right down the street from the theater. That, my friends, is convenience. (It turns out that I like having a bar, which is a surprise to me, but there it is. I spent most of my time there reading, which possibility may explain the appeal.)
I saw Choke last Sunday, and… well, it’s not so much my schedule that has delayed the review as my inability to find anything to say about it. It’s just that it defies description. I mean, I can write down a sentence, and it will be factual; that’s not a problem. It’s that I despair of any ability to really capture the essence of the thing, so that you can judge for yourself if you want to see it or not. I’m pretty sure you should want to, but that’s really beside the point.
Choke is a black comedy about a sex-addicted historical re-enactor who is trying to come to grips with his mother’s failing mental faculties, while pointedly not trying to come to grips with his personality defects; he acknowleges these[1], but revels in them. See, and that’s my point: there’s no way you really know what the movie is about from that description. You don’t know that Victor is potentially a partial clone of… well, I can’t ruin that surprise. You certainly couldn’t guess that it’s at heart a sweet movie that is the biggest cheering section for all of its characters’ happiness, despite how impossible that probably is. You might have a better idea if you want to see the movie now; at least, I hope so. But no way did it come from the description, because that was a tangled, misleading mess, despite being completely accurate in every way. But at least you had fair warning!
[1] Among them is a penchant for intentionally blocking his windpipe with food, in the hopes that the person who does the Heimlich will, in the long run, give him money. Plausibly, this is the source of the title.
The only serious problem with Lakeview
Terrace was the advertising campaign. It went from Hey, cool preview! to Why didn’t that movie ever come out? to I am so tired of these previews, hooray that the movie finally being out means I’ll never have to see them again! Maybe there was a delay in the release? Dunno. Anyhow, I’d pretty much written it off, but last Wednesday I found myself with some time to kill, and it was the best fit for my schedule and interest level. Which is good; I would have needed closure.
Surprisingly, and to the film’s benefit, it’s not really the boilerplate thriller it appeared to be. Sure, all that ratchety tension stuff is in there, and played quite well on all sides. But mostly, it’s a character study about two people who simply don’t like each other. There are all kinds of proximate causes: racism features heavily, but jealousy, loneliness, power imbalances, and family values differences all play their roles. But I really think the underlying issue is that some people just can’t stand each other, and these two had the misfortune of living next to each other. (Well, and the misfortune of Samuel L. Jackson being just enough off-kilter to turn it from the typical coldly polite avoidance into a constantly escalating conflict. But make no mistake, the other guy[1] was carrying around plenty of his own contributory macho bullshit.)
I think what really impressed me, though, was that despite all of that, SLJ was frequently sympathetic. Not, y’know, a lot, but more than enough to take him out of the caricature territory one expects from his boilerplate thriller character type. To balance that, the travails of Not SLJ and his wife were mostly disinteresting; real and depth-creating, just like SLJ’s sympathetitude, but it just never fit the tone of everything else that was going on, at least to me. Still, minor quibble in an otherwise above-average experience.
[1] Not Samuel L. Jackson, I think, is what his name is?
So, it’s been too long since I saw this movie, plus also I’m tired of being behind on reviews and also also I am semi-limited in time to type right now? So quick and dirty is what you get. Which is kind of the opposite of the movie itself, in that the plot was gradual and thoughtful in the majority of possible ways. I’d been kind of expecting an actiony movie from the previews, but it was still quite good even despite the breaking of expectations.
The always excellent Don Cheadle portrays an arms dealer and devout Muslim caught up in a raid on an alleged terrorist camp, who is then left with few choices but to join his fortunes to a different, more committed terrorist group as they plan to carry out a reasonably devastating attack on U.S. soil. Only, of course, there is more going on than that. Like I said above, though, the upside to the movie is how thoughtful it is. There are bad guys, but probably a lot fewer than you might think from the plot description. And the primary theme, unsurprisingly, is betrayal. Which makes it a fairly bleak movie, yes, but quite good for all of that. I doubt it’s in the theaters anymore? But you might want to catch it on DVD at least. Like I said: Don Cheadle? Always excellent.
To be perfectly clear, the new X-Files movie didn’t have very much to offer a newcomer to the series. It avoided the pitfall of delving into the series’ long-winded mythology that, on TV, ultimately failed to deliver on any significant portion of its promise, instead opting for the much stronger “Monster of the Week” oeuvre that popularized the show in the first place. This episode (or movie, if you will) pits Mulder and Scully against a possibly psychic priest and gay Russian organ traffickers in the wilds of West Virginia. And in all honesty, it’s a pretty good episode, at that.
Where it fails for the new viewer, and therefore as a movie in general, is that it cannot escape nine years of collected backstory between the principle characters. And with as many old viewers as were dissatisfied by the conclusion of the series, it had to be open to some new viewers to have even a chance of success as a movie. Which is not to say that I think it was in any way a failure as an episode. As easy as it might be to make a joke[1] that the title is a quote from Chris Carter, “I Want to Believe that I can make some quick money off this and remind people that I am alive,” the truth is that, buried underneath all of the accumulated continuity, there is a deep and thoughtful exploration of two people who have lost or are on the verge of losing their belief: in God, in the presence of the truth, out there somewhere, in themselves, in each other. And it’s not like the theme of belief is limited just to our heroes.[2]
In short, the crew came back together to make a good movie that you will probably never watch, and that you’ll, for the most part, be right to avoid. It’s unfortunate, but these things happen every day, I guess. On the bright side, I think it makes for a pretty good (albeit unintentional) coda on the series. As a fan, I can live with that.
[1] I am willing to bet that someone already has, and probably weeks or months ago.
[2] Billy Connolly in particular as the fallen (in an all too modern way) priest: wow, the depth of a) theme and b) acting.