Category Archives: Film

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

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I mean, it’s Indiana Jones, right? Star Wars was basically imprinted upon my brain from my earliest memories, and the consecutive releases of The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark cemented Harrison Ford as the coolest guy on the planet. What I’m saying is, objectivity is basically impossible. Despite this, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out last week, and now I’m forced to try for objectivity anyway. Thanks a lot, Harrison Ford! (And George Lucas and Steven Spielberg!) Which may explain my review delay of almost a full week past having seen it in a midnight premiere showing, although my inclination is to blame my recent vacation instead.

So, it’s been twenty years since Indy was last thwarting supernatural Nazi plots and freeing slave kids and otherwise trotting the globe in pursuit of archaeological treasures. Well, no, since we’ve last seen him doing such things. It’s clear almost immediately that he hasn’t stopped doing them. The only real difference is that 1957 leaves him with slightly tireder muscles at the end of a long day’s adventure and that the jackbooted enemies have a different ideology. The graverobbery and the cool whip use and Indy’s instinctive understanding of and respect for history (both the commonplace and the paranormal), in stark contrast to everyone around him? All of that is the same. And when push comes to shove, that’s what I’m looking for in an Indy (not indie) flick. It can have goofy dialogue and it can have some of the worst effects I’ve ever seen come out of ILM and it can have slightly more pointless moments designed to make the children in the audience giggle than in previous Indiana Jones films. And I’m not saying I’ll like those things; but since it still feels like swashbuckling archaeology, since the core appeal of the film is still there, I’ll accept them.

The real problem I have is knowing that I went into the theater with extremely low expectations, and came out pleasantly surprised. It was about on par with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which is a low bar for Indy, but still pretty great overall. And now I have to think to myself, what if someone reads this and goes into the movie with higher, dashable expectations? That’s a tough responsibility to shoulder. So, if you want to avoid it because it’ll be crap, you shouldn’t, because it isn’t. But you should also bear in mind some terrible effects[1], cheesy dialogue[2], and a hilariously bad refrigerator sequence are there to temper you back down to thinking it will be bad anyway, so you can still like it. It’s a tightrope, I know.

Final thought, to the lady who was sitting next to me in the airport on Tuesday morning: look, I understand that some people have a hard time with science fiction being inserted into anything in the universe world. I can accept that you walked into the theater not expecting [spoilers]. But I also know this is not your first experience in the life of Doctor Jones. The first time you watched one of his movies, the climactic scene showed a lot of Nazis having their faces melted off of their skulls because they had the temerity to open God’s toybox. The second time, some dude pulled some other dude’s heart out of his chest, without breaking the skin. It might be worth your time to admit to yourself that your complaint isn’t really so much about the [spoilers] as it is about your decision to get rid of your imagination sometime in the last 25 years, and now you resent anyone around you who still has one, because they look like they’re having more fun. Just think about it, is all I’m saying.

[1] It’s not just the prairie dogs.[3] There was a punching battle on a couple of side-by-side jeeps that was as obviously green-screened as anything I’ve seen in the past several years in a Sci-Fi Channel original motion picture.
[2] For my part, I really didn’t mind, and was even amused. But it seems a little incestuous to have Indiana Jones “have a bad feeling about this”. I’m pretty sure I should have minded, y’know?
[3] Although it’s possible I’m wrong, I just kind of assume everyone already knows about the prairie dogs, even if they know nothing else. It’s like they were inserted just to remind everyone that George Lucas still had some creative control?

Iron Man (2008)

mv5bmtcznti2oduwof5bml5banbnxkftztcwmtu0ntizmw-_v1_sy1000_cr006741000_al_Going to a sneak preview is a thing that… well, okay, I’ve done it pretty damn recently, but I haven’t been to an advance preview for a blockbuster that everyone in the world is going to see, at least not in a while. However, I have an awesome friend named Kara who has that skill where she knows every single person on the planet, and can therefore get into clubs or crowded restaurants sans reservation, that kind of thing. As a result, she received an astonishing number of passes to Iron Man last night. Enough to fill more than an entire middle row with people that she knows (many of them people I know as well, and not incidentally including me). And this is just not an unusual event around her. So, yay Kara!

And then, on top of being surrounded by awesome, there was the whole ‘crowd of people who all love this idea too’ that I’ve mentioned liking from time to time. The energy of a theater full of real fans, in a big event movie like this, is something I really dig. (Even though, sometimes, I felt a little like our row was appreciating everything on a more visceral level than the rest of the crowd. I don’t know if this is factual or just proximity to what I could hear best, and if it is true, I don’t how much to blame on the huge press section just below us in the middle.) The downside of crowds is that, even in shorts and a t-shirt, I was dying of heat by the final act. Too many people and lack of air-conditioning spells consequences, my friends. But they did sell me a milkshake, so that was pleasant.

The careful readers among you may be noticing that I haven’t said very much about the actual movie yet. There’s a good reason for this, which is that I don’t wish to set anyone’s expectations at an unfortunate level. Realize that my Iron Man experience essentially consists of the first couple of years of him in the comics, plus the first many years of his time with the Avengers, and whatever odds and ends I’ve heard about his doings in the Civil War thing that just happened, but my feeling is that the latter has no real bearing on anything for these purposes. But, with the amount of Iron Man experience I have, I’m prepared to say that this is the best Marvel movie that wasn’t Spider-Man.

Contributing factors to this claim include the awesomeness of Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Tony Stark, more special effects than you can shake a pointed stick at, the tastefully understated but always clear and heartfelt interactions[1] between Tony and his friends (which casts a wider net than you may initially think), the ease with which origin story and Iron Man versus a bad guy were shoehorned into the same two hours, and I’ll have to reiterate how great Robert Downey Jr. was. Even though I’m only familiar with the 1960s versions of the characters, it’s instantly apparent that at least Tony Stark and Pepper Potts were meant to grow into these two characters when adjusted for modernity. There’s no way to ask for more than pitch perfect characterization in a comic book adaptation; if you have that, the rest is guaranteed to work, says me. And this? Did.

[1] Later, you’re going to realize that this is hilarious.

Zombie Strippers

mv5bmti5mtm4nta5mv5bml5banbnxkftztcwnzc0mtu2mq-_v1_sy1000_cr006681000_al_It’s probable, I think, that having provided the name of the film, there’s really nothing left to say. I mean, when a movie is named Zombie Strippers, is there really any other factor that’s going to go into your decision-making process? On the off-chance that there is, though, here I am!

But seriously, it’s pretty great. Okay, the acting is a little wooden towards the beginning, and okay, there’s a brief interlude after the initial outbreak during which both comedy and zombification are lacking, in favor of plain-jane stripping. But other than these things, there’s a lot more to like than you’d probably think. I mean, you’ve got stripper rivalries, a goody two-shoes girl forced to strip by circumstance, a philosophical zombie, a jawless zombie, a goth zombie, a zombie head, literal zombie-stripping, and even a lesbian zombie, plus Robert Englund as the awesomely sleazy strip club owner and some Transylvanian chick as the proprietress.

Mix all that with over-the-top political humor, deep (well, shallow, but still present) philosophical underpinnings, and more naked mayhem than you can shake a pointed stick at, and clearly this is one for the ages. I weep that all of these kinds of movies are direct-to-video these days; even with a mere handful of people in the theater, it was a clearly moving group experience for us all. You should’ve been there too!

The Forbidden Kingdom

True confessions time: I never really got deeply into kung fu movies. I mean, I watched Bruce Lee movies when I was a kid, because they were just there for the taking on weekend afternoons on the UHF channels, and how could you not watch them? And it was awesome to see all the ass-kickery as Bruce (or whoever) made his way through an army of lesser men and then took out some bad guy or other in an ultimate confrontation. But I never really got into the storyline, just the chopsocky. And then later Jackie Chan appeared with his death-defying stunts of pure awesome but the same kind of storyline. And then Jet Li and his hidden snapper brought wuxia to my attention, with its emphasis on magical realism and Chinese folklore, and finally there were plots that I could get into, but I knew there was a ton of background to it that I somehow managed to miss on those long ago weekend afternoons, and I’ve felt kind of out of the loop ever since. It’s very tragic.

The thing about The Forbidden Kingdom is that it felt just like an introductory guide to the genre that didn’t assume you would know everything that was going on. A kung-fu-obsessed teen gets caught up in an armed robbery gone wrong, ends up with a magical staff, and is transported to historical China, where the staff must be returned to the Monkey King, lest the land be held forever under the tyranny of the Jade Warlord. Luckily, he has help in the form of traveling drunken scholar Jackie Chan, laconic monk Jet Li, and really hot chick-in-search-of-revenge Sparrow. He’ll need all their help, considering that the Jade Warlord has an army nearly as unstoppable as he is all by himself, plus a newly hired witch. (Upside of Chinese witches: they are also extremely hot, not bent and crone-y like lame Western witches. Downside: in addition to the magical powers, they also know kung fu. But, well, it’s historical China: everyone knows kung fu, is what I’m trying to say here.) And so our hero has to live out years of daydream fantasies, but with the complications that real life is a lot harder than imagination, and also a lot more deadly.

I got sidetracked by plot just now, but my point is, the hero-kid’s eyes gave me the window I needed. This was slightly ironic considering that he should have understood everything that was going on, what with his obsession with the movies.[1] But the huge blindspot between the movies and the reality (if you will) left a lot of room for explaining things to the audience. So if you’re like me and you accidentally missed this boat, or if you’ve got a kid that is in serious need of some Eastern cinema, The Forbidden Kingdom is a really great place to start. And if you’re not like me and you have been involved in these genres all along, well, my highly unscientific survey of one person says that it was pretty great through an old hand’s eyes as well.

[1] Or I guess it could be that in the movie’s reality, not unlike my apparent own, wuxia didn’t exist as a genre for him to have watched? If so, this was unclear at best and I think disproven by modern movie titles.

88 Minutes

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So I saw 88 Minutes, starring Al Pacino and Leelee Sobieski and a fair number of recognizable TV actors. (Oh, and the serial killer guy is also mostly in movies, but I can’t remember his name. You’d know him if you saw him.) Anyway, Al Pacino is a forensic psychologist for the FBI who testified to get the serial killer locked up, but it’s questionable whether his testimony was completely accurate or fair, and maybe that guy actually isn’t a serial killer at all, y’know?

Therefore, come the scheduled day of execution, things go wonky. There’s a copycat killer in town for the first time in 8 years, unless it’s the real killer? And evidence points to Al, who meanwhile has been warned that he has 88 minutes to live by someone using trademark phrases the convicted guy used during the trial. And anyway, maybe Al really is the serial killer, in which case it’s the convicted guy and not the real serial killer threatening him? Plus, there has to be an accomplice, which might be his TA, or one of his students, or the creepy motorcycle guy who’s stalking around everywhere.

That right there is where the movie excelled. It ratcheted up levels of paranoia, both in Pacino and in the audience who couldn’t be sure about his real role in events, on a non-stop basis. And there were layer after oniony layer of new questions continuously being exposed. The problems I had weren’t really enough to bring me down from that high, but they were real problems.

For one thing, the script was often wooden. I would normally blame this on the actors, but I’ve seen these actors excel elsewhere, and I know that when you’ve got a Pacino on set with you, your game is naturally raised up anyway. So I listened to the lines themselves divorced from intonation, and hotty Alicia Witt bemoaning her choice to fall for her professor while he sits beside her in stony silence, almost as if she’s supposed to be having an internal monologue, that was a terrible scene. But I can’t believe it’s because she or Pacino are terrible, which leaves few options. I suppose the directing may have been bad instead; or perhaps they colluded, partner-style, one from prison? Oh, oops. Forget I said that. Anyway, that was an occasional issue, plus the ending kind of stalled out for me. But since I can’t point to any specific complaint, it may just tie back into the original issue, that the villainous monologue had the same kinds of problems as at other script-points.

But I’m seriously about the paranoid tension. They hit that one out of the ballpark.

Run Fatboy Run

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Way back at the dawn of Delirium here, I watched a fantastic movie called Shaun of the Dead. It was a satirical zombie-laden romantic comedy which was also hilarious, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Later, I watched Hot Fuzz due to it sharing some of the same actors, including the lead actor and co-writer, Simon Pegg. Hot Fuzz was a satirically over-the-top action movie, and it was also hilarious as well as highly recommendable.

At this point, it is fair to say that I am essentially sold on Simon Pegg. Therefore, it is no surprise that I’ve been to see his most recent starred and co-written movie, Run Fatboy Run. It’s maybe a little surprising I waited this long to see it, but sometimes life jumps in the way, all scary and monster-like and you have to run through the woods while it plods implacably behind you. You know, the kind of metaphor that would be pitch perfect if I were using it to segue into Shaun of the Dead? It maybe seems a little more out of place describing a straightforward romantic comedy about marathons; I suppose life doesn’t always do what we’d like, though, and there’s no help for that, and you just have to keep on putting one foot in front of the other nevertheless. (Oh, neat, the metaphor fixed itself!)

There’s no denying that this is exactly what Run Fatboy Run is. No satire of sports films here; the montage scene is even played straight. But there’s nothing wrong with these guys doing a normal romantic comedy, as long as they promise to remain hilarious. And, hooray, they have. If my heart was warmed at the same time, so be it! Plotwise, Simon Pegg leaves his extremely pregnant girlfriend at the altar, and 5 years later he’s finally starting to realize what a tremendous mistake that was, by virtue of spending time around her as they do the friendly visitation thing around their son. Only, now he’s an out-of-shape slob who hasn’t accomplished anything worthwhile in that same 5 years, and his ex- has a new boyfriend (will he turn out to be a prat?). So he decides to prove his love by running a marathon. Hijinx, as they say, ensue.

In review: yay, Simon Pegg, for being an awesome writer and actor both. Everyone should be watching all three of these movies!

Leatherheads

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I hate writing this kind of review, because it will look like I’m complaining when in fact I really rather liked Leatherheads. George Clooney is always a delight with his charisma and spot-on comedic timing, Jim from the Office is, if not quite as awesome as on the Office, certainly a fine addition to the cast, and Renée Zellweger, okay, her face kind of looks like a lemon to me, but as this has no real bearing on her talent, I should probably not have brought it up. Plus, it was in general a highly amusing film that also managed to be sweet and occasionally dramatic.

Of course, that last bit is what my complaint-sounding statements are all about. The movie almost seemed to have multiple personality disorder. At times it was a straight (albeit made-up and played comedically) representation of the coming of age of professional football. At times it was a romantic comedy, triangle-style. At other times it was one of those sports underdog movies, complete with the Big Game in which Everything is On The Line. At still yet times it was slapsticky in the style of the 1920s era in which it was set, complete with a Keystone Kops chase scene. And there were odds and ends of other things besides these. To be clear, it made a pretty good show of every genre it tried to hit upon, but the gestalt was nevertheless a little off-putting, not unlike this abrupt ending.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

mv5bmtyzodgzmjaym15bml5banbnxkftztcwmti3nzi2mq-_v1_After finishing the first Lucifer volume, I started reading Dzur, which is nice because I haven’t read a Vlad Taltos book in years. Both of these events (the finishing and the starting) occurred while in line to see a sneak preview of a movie coming out next month, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. After getting a couple of chapters into the book, the movie started. And then I left it behind in the theater, not to be discovered in the Lost and Found this morning as I had hoped. None of which would be particularly relevant, except that the last time I lost a book in a theater, it was Brokedown Palace by the same author and set in the same universe. I’m assuming there’s a lesson in that, somewhere. But mostly it means that when I review the new Star Wars book I’m currently reading instead, it will suffer by already not being nearly as good as Dzur was. Dammit.

But anyway, there was also this movie, right? Marshall from How I Met Your Mother is a composer who’s dating actress Veronica Mars (and writing the incidental music for her cop drama TV show), but then after several shots of his cock taking up the majority of the early-movie screen time, they break up because she’s cheating on him with some British rock star. After weeks of misery, he goes to Hawaii for a vacation, only to discover that Veronica and her new rocker boyfriend are staying at the resort. Also, Jackie from the 70’s Show is one of the hotel staff, and she has her eye on Marshall, who I should probably be referring to in some other way to avoid confusion with the film’s title. (Veronica Mars is Sarah Marshall, incidentally.) In any event, hilarity ensues, and there is a pretty great supporting cast to help the hilarity along its way. Also written by Marshall, aka Jason Segel, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is consistently funny across several genres of humor. The writing is a little looser than it could be, with a couple of characters seeming to serve no plot purpose at all, but the laughs make up for a lot.

And what they don’t cover is handled deftly by the film’s soft, gooey center. Three out of the four major characters are achingly human in between the laughs, trying to make their best of a horrible situation that we’ve probably all experienced at some point, a situation in which there is plenty of blame to share around to all parties. But, I mean, don’t go see it because of the romance and drama. Go see it because it’s pretty hilarious, and then just be pleased by the perks.[1]

[1] To sum up, these were a surprisingly realistic and adult portrayal of a rocky break-up, Kristen Bell on constant bikini display, and Marshall-cock.

Doomsday

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Spring is a weird time for movies. I mean, usually not for me, because it’s often full of horror options, but it feels like there are fewer this year than usual, and thusly I join the ranks of people for whom spring is a weird time for movies. Or I could get off my ass and start catching up on the horror movies that are available to me, but I’m getting way the hell off topic here. What I’m actually trying to say is, there are all kinds of movies that I sort of want to see, enough to keep me going twice a week for probably the next month solid. But there are practically no movies that I want to see so badly that I can immediately point at the listing and say, “That’s the one, no question, how are we not already eating popcorn?!” I suppose this also happens a little bit in the fall, but by then I’m so glutted on summer fare that I barely notice.

This is the exact situation that occurred on Monday, after having dismissed the pointlessly bad movies about high school kids using underground mixed martial arts competitions as a metaphor for growing up and the flooded with Spring-Breakers kid flicks. The remaining options were Vantage Point, wherein a lot of people witness and try to unravel a Presidential assassination, and Doomsday, wherein a semi-recognizable actress faces off against post-apocalyptic Scotland. I wanted to see both in a vague sort of way without expecting awesome out of either of them, but we ended up going with Doomsday because it was showing earlier, and also because there’s clearly something about post-apocalyptica that revs my engine.

Apparently, sometime later this year a flesh-ravaging deadly virus breaks out in Edinburgh, say, and England walls off Scotland to contain it. Then thirty years pass. Now the virus has resurfaced in London, and tough-as-nails hot chick Rhona Mitra is sent behind the wall with a small military team on a suicide mission to recover a cure that has only been speculated to exist. What follows is an adrenaline-filled hodge-podge of politics, cannibalism, pole-dancing, gladiatorial combat, piercings, and car chases populated by every single person that’s seen Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and really wished they’d been old enough to be an extra when it came out. And if the Road Warrior motif doesn’t float your boat, things change directions in an equally awesome way about two-thirds of the way in. All this, plus gory sensibilities and a slick, dark sense of humor surprised me out of my former blasé attitude into having genuine fun at every turn. If the summer were not exclusively reserved for sequels these days, Doomsday would have been a perfect July action flick, and you should consider it an early treat for 2008’s season.

The Signal

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I’ve been sitting on this review for a goodly while now, and it’s just not getting any easier to proceed with. Some of the delays were valid, some were due to being busy, but still mostly I’ve just been stuck. Somehow or other I caught wind of this indie horror film, The Signal. Very limited release (two theaters in the area), interesting concept reminiscent of Cell by Stephen King, and some of the descriptions implied that it was also very funny. Which sounds like basically everything I’d want out of a movie. I even talked Jessica into going, though she claims to find such movies far too scary. (And yet she watched 28 Days Later. This is a dichotomy that warrants further consideration.)

So, one night in the thematically named city of Terminus, a staticky image appears on all of the televisions (which are turning themselves on), and staticky sounds emerge from all of the cellphones, landlines, and airwaves. And after a very short period of time, some people are affected. The short description is that they’re all going crazy, but from the characters that we got to spend time with, I’d say instead that they are all being amplified. Whatever primary emotion they are feeling, be it resentment, jealousy, fear, concern, most everything is being blown out of all proportions, such that people are wandering the halls and the streets, committing wanton murder. In the midst of this, we are presented with a love triangle between a woman, her husband, and her lover, which is an excellent use of the background space, particularly after the husband seems slightly unhinged even before any serious effects of the signal are being felt. The story is told in three parts, one from the perspective of each member of the triangle, which is potentially interesting. And it is written by three different writers, which is more or less disastrous. The first portion focuses on the fear and claustrophobia of both the external and internal situations, and was extremely well done. The second portion is a black comedy, and also extremely well done, except for how little it fits with the first act. And the finale is a surrealist nightmare which was possibly well done, except that it failed to match the previous two acts in a new and different way, as well as suffering from the modern short story’s flaw of going all confusing right at the end and allowing you to draw your own conclusions about What Really Happened. That choice is so far outside the horror genre that I have no choice but to be offended and rule the movie lame. Which is a pity, as prior to the last ten minutes, flawed or not, it had at least been constantly interesting.