Ben's Movie Reviews

NJNM After Midnight!

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:34:03 PDT

Episode 12: Hot Tub Time for Movie News!

[DIRECT DOWNLOAD]
PAST EPISODES:
Go News Deep! [DirectDownload]
After Oblivion [DirectDownload]
New Podcast? [DirectDownload]
The Cinematical World of Harry Potter [DirectDownload]
State of the NJNM Podcast, Year in Review [DirectDownload]
TRANSFORMERS: Dark Side of the Moon [DirectDownload]

Star Trek Into Darkness

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:35:41 PDT

In the summer of 2009, J.J. Abrams boldly did what no director had done before: he made Star Trek cool to mainstream audiences. Four years later, he's back with Star Trek Into Darkness, a sequel which improves on his original while advancing the relationships of the Starship Enterprise crew. With killer action, a terrific villain, amazing setpieces, and stunningly good visual effects, Into Darkness provides a spectacle only Abrams could deliver; luckily for us, all of that translates into a pretty damn good summer blockbuster.

Star Trek Into Darkness
Director: J.J. Abrams
Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Benedict Cumberbatch, Zoe Saldana

(This review will spoil major and - why not - minor elements of the film.)

The story begins soon after the reboot ends, with Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban) being chased across an alien planet as a diversion while Spock (Zachary Quinto) tries to stop a volcano from erupting and destroying the planet. The whole point of the diversion is so the indigenous people don't see Spock's rescue attempt; coming in contact with them would be a direct breach of the Prime Directive, Starfleet's major rule that states there can be no interference with internal development of alien civilizations. But this is Captain Kirk we're talking about, so during a thrilling volcano rescue clearly designed to be the same kind of hook-opener as Abrams' reboot (which introduced American audiences to Chris Hemsworth, playing Kirk's father), he breaks the Prime Directive to save Spock's life. As the sequence ends, we briefly see the indigenous people drawing a picture of the Enterprise in the sand and worshiping it, but the problem is that we don't see them for the rest of the movie. The opening works, but it's as if the scene was designed as its own short film; the consequences of breaking the Prime Directive are only noticeable when Admiral Pike (Bruce Greenwood) lectures Kirk for making a bad decision.

The movie is filled with moments like this, and I can see how they could tarnish the experience for those unwilling to strap in and go on the ride Into Darkness offers. (Remember, the '09 Trek suffered from the same issue, but - like this one - its dynamic pacing propels us through the story so quickly that we barely have time to notice.) Back on Earth, we're introduced to Benedict Cumberbatch's villain character, John Harrison, a member of Starfleet whose true identity as (seriously, spoiler alert) Khan is foreshadowed by the record scratch that accompanies his on-screen introduction.

A 300 year old super-soldier awoken by a war-mongering member of Starfleet (Peter Weller), Khan is intended to be Kirk's superior in nearly every way. The imagery of his terrorist attack in London is particularly relevant in the wake of the recent Boston bombings, and one of the film's largest setpieces - in which his starship obliterates half of a city by crashing directly into it - purposely evokes the events of 9/11 (the film is dedicated to post-9/11 veterans). I'm still working out my thoughts on the choice to make Khan a terrorist: on one hand, seeing the damage he causes instantly elicits a personal reaction from the audience because of everyone's own experiences seeing terrorist acts on TV (or, God forbid, dealing with them in person), but on the other hand, something about using that as a centerpiece for entertainment feels wrong. Each viewer will have to reconcile with this in his or her own way.

Allegory aside, Cumberbatch's performance is one of the highlights of the movie. This is a showcase for his talents and he delivers star-making work, similar to the way Chris Pine's performance as Kirk in the '09 reboot shot him to the top of the shortlist for every major project in Hollywood. Khan is a leering, sneering, physically capable villain who benefits greatly from this particular actor playing him; theoretically, he's supposed to be incredibly intelligent, but even though he never really does anything to prove this in the movie, Cumberbatch's gravitas and persona make the character seem much smarter than he actually is. Still, he's an impressive force for Kirk and Co. to face off against, and he sets in motion what will likely be some Trek fans' largest problem with the film.

While Star Trek was an ensemble piece about bringing the crew of the Enterprise together for the first time, it also focused primarily on Mr. Spock. His home planet is destroyed, his mother is killed in front of him, and the inclusion of Leonard Nimoy as an older version of the same character provided an explanation of a new timeline that has been created for this franchise moving forward. Into Darkness turns the spotlight from Spock to Kirk, tracing his maturation from a cocky soldier to a true leader and patriarch of the Enterprise family. As the film comes to a close, Kirk sacrifices himself to save his friends in a scene which reverses his actions with Spock's in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Many will surely see this as a bit of fan service or perhaps an unnecessary callback, but because the moment works thematically regardless of our knowledge of the previous movies, I didn't have any issue with it.

The visual effects in this film are tremendous. Setpieces like Kirk and Khan blasting through space between starships are breathlessly riveting, and the performances from the cast are so good it's hard not to be swept away in the fast-paced thrill of it all. Simon Pegg gets a lot more to do here as Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, and though they get closer here, Abrams and writers Alex Kurtzman, Bob Orci, and Damon Lindelof still haven't managed to lock down the perfect dynamic between Kirk, Spock, and Bones that really made this franchise come alive in the TV series and earlier films. Zoe Saldana's Uhura has some solid moments this time, too, and she continues to contribute in significant ways outside of simply being a love interest. Peter Weller and Alice Eve, newbies to the series, do fine work, and Bruce Greenwood is great reprising his role as Admiral Pike from the reboot.

With a new episode of Star Wars on his plate, this might be the last Star Trek that J.J. Abrams directs. Even with a few minor squabbles, Into Darkness is a high-octane action film and a towering visual marvel that deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible. And with an ending that sets up the Enterprise's five-year mission, chances are we won't have long to wait before we see this crew suit up again. Let's just hope Paramount finds someone with as much gusto as Abrams to tell these stories - otherwise we might actually have time to think about how they don't always make a ton of sense. Until next time...

Iron Man 3

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 21:55:03 PDT

When Jon Favreau kicked off Marvel's amazing string of interconnected superhero films with the first Iron Man back in 2008, I doubt if he knew exactly what he was getting himself into. The second film (which Favreau also directed) was saddled with the unenviable task of fitting in tons of references to S.H.I.E.L.D., resulting in a disaster that felt more like a calculated piece of franchise set-up than a real movie. But now Favreau has wisely handed off directing duties to Lethal Weapon writer Shane Black, and he has reinvigorated the Iron Man series with its best entry yet. Iron Man 3 is smart, clever, fun, full of surprises, overflowing with action, and loaded with terrific moments. It's the perfect way to kick off Phase Two of Marvel's Cinematic Universe.

Iron Man 3
Co-writer/Director: Shane Black
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Ben Kingsley, Guy Pearce, Rebecca Hall

The events of The Avengers have rattled Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.). He can't sleep, spending nights in his lab tinkering with new models of Iron Man suits and worrying about protecting his girlfriend and Stark Industries CEO Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). A terrorist called The Mandarin (Sir Ben Kingsley) has become increasingly brash with his attacks against the United States, threatening the life of the President and setting off mysterious bombs around the country. Col. James "Rhodey" Rhodes (Don Cheadle) has been re-branded from War Machine to the red, white, and blue Iron Patriot and tasked with putting an end to the Mandarin's reign. Meanwhile, scientist Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) - a socially awkward Jim-Carrey-as-Edward-Nygma-in-Batman-Forever-type who Tony ignores in an opening flashback sequence - has created a new healing technology called Extremis and is trying to speed along the next step in human evolution.

It's no accident that the film's first images are of Stark's Iron Man suits being destroyed in an explosion. This movie is all about stripping Tony of everything he loves and having him start from scratch, so much so that at one point he actually builds a makeshift new suit for himself out of parts from a hardware store. It's a much more personal, character-centric story than the previous film, and though flying through that wormhole haunts Tony's dreams, that's about the extent of references to other movies in the Marvel universe. The story, written by Shane Black and Drew Pearce, puts Stark's insecurities on display and makes him question not only his superhero identity, but how much that identity defines him. It's not so much Iron Man 3 as it is Tony Stark 3, if that makes sense.

Black popularized the modern buddy cop dynamic when he was only 23 years old with Lethal Weapon, and in the ensuing years he's carved out a specific and recognizable writing style. He's only directed one other movie thus far - 2005's underseen but brilliant Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, also starring Downey - but Iron Man 3 doesn't feel like a sophomore effort in the slightest. Black has been around this business long enough to know exactly what he's doing, and he made the jump to a project of this budget and scale with ease. It's surprising how much it truly feels like a Shane Black film, too; I don't know if it's because this is the first movie in Marvel's Phase Two, making it unburdened with having to weave all of the studio's moving parts together, or that they just allowed Black the creative freedom to do what he wanted, but fans of his previous work are really going to be happy with what he does here.

The story beats all work wonderfully within the themes and parameters of the series so far. In the second movie, scenes seemed to be thrown together with very little sense paid to character motivation; in this one, everything from the "creation" of Killian as a villain (you'll see what I mean in the film) to the way Tony is forced to deal with himself as a man instead of as a hero feels totally organic to this specific story being told. Even the action sequences - of which there are a ton, and almost all of them are jaw-droppingly excellent - feel natural and not boxes on a checklist being ticked by blank suits behind the scenes. The destruction of Tony's Malibu mansion is absolutely beautiful to behold, and the sky diving sequence seen in many of the trailers instantly ranks as one of the best sky-diving action scenes ever committed to film. Iron Man 3 is fast-paced and often genuinely thrilling, and though those should be given qualities for a summer blockbuster, it doesn't always shake out that way.

Ben Kingsley's performance as The Mandarin is one of the film's highlights. He's a terrorist who uses the media as his main weapon, inciting fear and inspiring anti-American sentiment in cells around the world. His iconic line - "You'll never see me coming" - takes on a different meaning in the wake of the recent Boston bombings, but as unfortunately represented in real life events, that randomness is utterly terrifying. Guy Pearce's Aldrich Killian seems like he should have been in an X-Men movie with all his talk of recoding DNA and creating the next step in human evolution, but Pearce is consistently mesmerizing playing villainous roles, so even though his character is probably the most tonally inconsistent with the rest of the characters in the movie, he still excels. Rebecca Hall also does fine work in a small role as one of his employees, but having seen her shine in other movies, it's tough not to think she's too good for what she's given here.

As usual, Downey is perfect as Tony Stark, bringing a humanity and conflicted struggle to the character that we haven't seen before. Gwyneth Paltrow finally gets a handful of moments to shine this time, and Don Cheadle seems a lot more comfortable as Rhodey here. He and Tony have some great moments together, their banter is always a highlight, and Cheadle also gets to take part in a lot more action outside of the confines of his suit as well, so it's fun to physically see these guys actually working together instead of just hearing their voices while a whirl of CGI flies around on screen.

After a disappointing second movie and in the wake of the massive box office success that is The Avengers, the folks at Marvel seem to have righted the ship for this particular franchise. Iron Man 3 is witty, surprising, and spectacular all the way through to its fantastic end credits sequence. It's sad to think that Downey can't play this character forever, but it's also intensely satisfying to know that we'll always be able to cherish this movie, which is as close to perfect as an Iron Man film can get. Until next time...

Pain & Gain

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:22:07 PDT

It's been eight years since Michael Bay directed anything other than a Transformers movie, and if you've read interviews with him over the past couple of years, it's obvious the director has been itching to move out of Optimus Prime's shadow. But in a classic case of "one for them, one for me," Paramount gave Bay a modest $25 million budget to direct Pain & Gain if he agreed to come back and direct the fourth entry into the giant robot franchise. For Bay, it was a good deal not just because of the stacks of money he'll assuredly make by returning to his robot saga, but because this film lets him flex a different set of creative muscles. This is a small scale passion project that tells the true story of kidnapping, extortion, sex, and murder in Miami during the mid-1990s; in other words, it's a story Michael Bay was born to tell.

Pain & Gain
Director: Michael Bay
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie

Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) believes in fitness, but he also believes he deserves more than he has. He's a working class bodybuilder with a sense of entitlement, convinced that just because he's spent his life sculpting and improving his physique, the world should rain women, money, and power upon him. His heroes are guys like Scarface, Rocky, and the Godfather, who worked their way up from nothing to attain greatness, and in Lugo's demented version of the American Dream, he's just like them. Fed up with life not aligning with his expectations, Lugo enlists two friends (Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie) to help him rob a rich, spoiled jerk (Tony Shaloub) who he met at the gym where he works. After all, they think they deserve what that jerk worked to achieve, and these guys are going to take him for all he's got.

But even though he convinces himself and his friends that he knows what he's doing, Lugo is mostly winging it. He lives his life according to platitudes delivered by an obnoxious self-help guru (Ken Jeong), and his planning and strategy expertise comes only from movies he's seen. Pain & Gain is Michael Bay's take on Spring Breakers told from a male perspective, and the ideal American Dream is just as twisted here as it is in Harmony Korine's film. With materialism as his primary concern, Wahlberg's Daniel Lugo isn't too far ideologically removed from James Franco's Alien character. (Fantasizing about owning a lawn mower and a patch of grass to call his own, Lugo also shares a dream with the title character of Hobo With A Shotgun.) Wahlberg plays Lugo as a flustered lump of testosterone, delivering some terrific moments along the way.

Dwayne Johnson gets to play a much more complex character here than he's used to. He's a born-again former convict who is against the whole kidnapping plan from the start, but even though his physical prowess is impressive, he finds himself too mentally weak to resist temptation. His inner battle with his faith and his subsequent return to a drug-addicted life gives him a somewhat tragic arc, different from most of the actor's past work. Mackie is fine as comic relief, but he has far more talent than this role calls for. Shaloub is fantastic as the douchebag victim in this whole wild scenario, at first making you root against him and then slowly bringing you around to his perspective. Ed Harris shows up halfway through as a private detective who takes Shaloub's case when Miami PD doesn't believe the story, and he's just as good as you'd expect. Rebel Wilson, Rob Corddry, and Israeli model Bar Paly round out the cast in small roles.

As for Michael Bay, his direction is actually far more restrained than I expected. Fear not, you can tell it's a Bay film - his style oozes across every frame, especially when women are framed into the shot - but the film generally reflects the size of its reduced budget. But for fans of his, there are a few signature Bay moments to be found in some epic slow motion low angle rotating shots, and particularly in a house party scene in which the camera moves in a circle through holes in the wall, rotating through two rooms in a way that calls back to this shootout sequence in Bad Boys II.

For once, though, the film's most impressive aspect isn't the direction, actors, or production design: it's the story. So many utterly insane things happen in this movie that it's easy to forget this stuff actually occurred, resulting in a funny moment when the film literally pauses to remind the audience of that very fact with text that reads "This is still a true story." Pain & Gain's depiction of class warfare is the most interesting subtext Michael Bay has had to work with in a long time, and this movie should prove to his haters that he has more to offer as a filmmaker than only making mega-budgeted mindless blockbusters. Until next time...

Oblivion

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:09:03 PDT

After taking the reigns on the sleek-but-hollow sequel TRON: Legacy a few years ago, director Joseph Kosinski is back with his second feature, Oblivion. It's a sci-fi passion project that shows a marked improvement over Kosinski's debut film, and while it certainly fuels his reputation as a filmmaker that loves to use gorgeous visuals to tell his stories, it also proves he isn't as soulless behind the camera as his first effort led us to believe. Despite some eye-rolling moments and more than a few derivative plot points, Oblivion is a solid science fiction film filled with beautiful cinematography, strong performances, exciting action, and a sense of heart that ties it all together.

Oblivion
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Starring: Tom Cruise, Olga Kurylenko, Andrea Riseborough, Morgan Freeman

Sixty years after a war with aliens made the Earth uninhabitable, drone repairman Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and his communications officer Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are the only two people left on the planet. Harper fixes drones that protect massive machines that convert sea water to energy, the sole source of power for the rest of humanity that has taken refuge on one of Saturn's moons. During the day, the curious Harper makes his rounds and collects mementos of 21st century civilization while keeping his eyes open for Scavs - remnants of the alien force that decimated the world - and by night, he hooks up with Victoria in the glass-bottom pool of their luxurious Sky Tower situated in the clouds.

Just a few weeks before the duo's tour on Earth is scheduled to end, Harper investigates a crash and discovers human survivors have been jettisoned onto the planet's surface, including a mysterious woman named Julia (Olga Kurylenko) whom he's been seeing in his dreams. When a repair goes wrong and he's captured by an underground group led by Malcolm Beech (Morgan Freeman), Harper soon discovers that his job, his relationships, and even his very existence are not as they appeared.

Kosinski initially wrote this story eight years ago as a graphic novel with the aim to make this his first feature, so he's been living with this world and these characters for a long time. Though the story unfolds as a sort of mishmash of dozens of classic science fiction films, the director's design skills (he's a former architect) and visual flair can't be denied. He's a technical craftsman still waiting on the perfect story that will match the power of his images, but here he's able to tell his story, his way. The universe he's created with Oblivion is sleek, to be sure, but instead of the digital blues and cool tones of TRON: Legacy, there is a warm, lived-in feeling to everything we see. The impressive technology isn't 100% pristine or brand new; there are scratch marks here and there, Harper's costume is a little bit dirty, and devices don't always work exactly as they should. The movie was shot partially in Iceland, and occasionally we get a glimpse of the same level of breathtaking scenery that was featured in Ridley Scott's Prometheus (which also filmed in that country), shot by Kosinski's longtime collaborator Claudio Miranda (who just won an Oscar for cinematography for Life of Pi).

To mention which films influenced Oblivion would be to give away huge elements of the movie, but if you're into science fiction, you'll likely get some enjoyment out of seeing the ever-watchable Tom Cruise go to work in a genre in which he truly shines. Morgan Freeman is about as Morgan Freeman-y as you'd expect in a typical "wise old man" role that seems written specifically for him, but he does get a laughably enjoyable moment where he grabs a .50 caliber machine gun and blasts away while yelling at the top of his lungs, so that's a first.

The most surprising talent here comes from the film's female cast. British actress Andrea Riseborough does a lot with a little as Victoria (I swear half of her character's dialogue is just saying the name "Jack" over and over again as the communications cut in and out), and former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko shines as the mysterious Julia who - again - I can't really say much about without giving away what happens. Kurylenko is beautiful but Quantum of Solace wasn't exactly a proving ground for her talent; in Oblivion, she feels much more like an actress than a model wearing a costume.

The mysteries of the film are played out until the very end, and though the story isn't told sequentially, it's not hard to figure out exactly what happened by the time the end credits roll. And for all of its borrowed plot twists and rehashed moments, Oblivion still manages to tell a contained story that, unlike TRON: Legacy, doesn't feel like sequel-baiting or franchise building. This is a tale well told, equivalent to settling in and watching a "Seinfeld" episode you've seen a hundred times already: just because you've seen it before doesn't mean it doesn't have value. Kosinski's visual prowess continues to blow me away, and I can't wait until he gets all the pieces in place for his eventual masterpiece. But until then, Oblivion will do just fine. Until next time...

The Company You Keep

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 14:45:58 PDT

Just so we're all on the same page, I want to put it out there that I'm normally a sucker for these kinds of journalism movies. Throw on All The President's Men, Network, Shattered Glass, Anchorman, and even lesser films like State of Play and Scoop (plus, Netflix's terrific new series "House of Cards" and the fifth season of HBO's legendary show "The Wire") and I'm hooked. The Company You Keep has so many things going for it - an awesome director in Robert Redford, a story with an interesting hook, and the most impressive ensemble cast this side of Spielberg's Lincoln - but its slow pacing and meandering plot removes much of the film's liveliness, ultimately rendering it a boring and unfulfilling entry into a genre I normally love.

The Company You Keep
Director: Robert Redford
Starring: Robert Redford, Shia LaBeouf

As movie studios continue to make a lot of their money by churning out films based on board games, comic books, and toy lines, I'm thrilled to see a modestly-budgeted film directed at adult crowds. But while The Company You Keep is definitely an outlier in the current film landscape, the movie itself is such a lukewarm piece of work that it almost certainly won't have any impact on the larger market. If this film had been amazing, perhaps it could have breathed life back into these mid-budget thrillers that studios rarely risk making these days; sadly, we're left wondering what could have been instead of celebrating a new modern classic.

The film follows Nick Sloan (Robert Redford), a former member of a 1960s radical group called The Weather Underground who now lives under an alias in Albany, New York, working as a lawyer and raising his 11-year-old daughter. The group was responsible for the death of a bank guard in their rebellious days, and when the FBI finally arrests one of the now-middle-aged former members (Susan Sarandon), a cocky local newspaper reporter named Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf) is assigned the story and starts digging into the other members of the group, all of whom vanished after the incident but are still on the FBI's Most Wanted list. While Sloan heads across the country to meet his old flame (Julie Christie) and clear his name, Shepard goes from lead to lead to discover the truth behind what happened all those years ago.

Redford and his editor move the action along at a crawl, slowing to a halt as characters argue about the morality of their previous choices. When Christie and Redford finally meet, the film essentially stops for 10-15 minutes as they bicker back and forth with no progress being made on either side; these characters haven't seen each other for 30 years and they'd likely have a lot to say to each other in that time, but they spend what seems like an eternity rehashing their pasts. Watching this is like being trapped on an airplane and listening to the couple in front of you argue about who left the stove on, without anyone apologizing, owning up to it, or presenting a solution for how to move beyond it.

The only thing that got me through the film was seeing familiar faces pop up in every scene, even in tiny roles. Terrence Howard and Anna Kendrick play FBI agents hunting Redford. Richard Jenkins, Nick Nolte, and Stephen Root appear as former Weather Underground members. Brit Marling plays Brendan Gleeson's adopted daughter, a sort of half-baked love interest for LaBeouf's character. Sam Elliott and Chris Cooper also have small parts, and Stanley Tucci plays LaBeouf's editor at the newspaper. It's a ridiculously stacked cast, and they all do fine work making these characters feel like real people. LaBeouf in particular does a great job, adding to the indie cred he's been building lately.

Still, the film's methodical pacing seems to be at odds with the immediacy of the story it's telling. It takes the time to make observations about its central conflict in lines like "Terrorists justify terrorism," and Sarandon's almost haunting confession that "we made mistakes, but we were right" seems to communicate the director's personal thoughts on the controversial subject. But by making the story almost as much about LaBeouf finding the truth as it is about Redford's closure, it loses some of its focus and emotional impact. A last second plea for LaBeouf to consider the power his words wield seems like an afterthought, and the film's closing shot - designed to be a tender moment - doesn't resonate at all.

Writer Lem Dobbs (Dark City, The Limey, Haywire) adapted the screenplay from Neil Gordon's 2003 novel, and everything that happens in the movie feels as if it would make much more sense in book form. Logical gaps are likely the result of having to cut elements of the book in order to create a separate story for the screen, and as much as I wanted to love it, I just couldn't shake the feeling that it didn't tell this story in the most effective way possible. I was hoping for the next great journalism thriller, but if you're looking for some excellent performances wrapped in old-school filmmaking, The Company You Keep delivers. Until next time...

Jurassic Park 3D

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 10:12:00 PDT

Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park is not only a fantastic adventure movie, it's also a brilliant science fiction film and a pulse-pounding horror thriller. The 1993 film has been converted into 3D for its twentieth anniversary, and though the new layer of depth doesn't add anything essential to the viewing experience, this re-release provides fans with another opportunity to see one of Spielberg's biggest blockbusters on the big screen, where they can reassess its themes all over again and find depth in the storytelling while the extra dimension gives more physical depth to the image.

Jurassic Park 3D
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum

Look, you already know this movie is terrific. The 3D is passable but totally unnecessary, only becoming worthwhile during a few camera moves in which it highlights the height of the camera as it peers down on its subjects (the tree rescue, the electric fence, the park gate, when the raptor jumps at Lex in the vent). That said, I'd still recommend seeing this in a real IMAX theater if you can, because the movie has never been seen on a screen of that size before and it's worth it to get immersed in this world again. Some of the effects are starting to look a little dated twenty years down the line, but the animatronics still look incredible and that T-Rex still looks as horrifyingly real as it did all those years ago.

[Since I was far too young to review it when the film was originally released, this was the first time I watched Jurassic Park with a critical eye, and I made a ton of observations about it seeing it from a fresh perspective. I'll try to present them as cohesive as possible, but forgive me if I bounce around a little bit. This won't be a "review" in the same sense that I'd write about the latest new release, so stick with me on this one as I work through some of these observations and I'll be back to writing about other movies soon.]

One of the themes Spielberg returns to most often as a filmmaker is fatherhood, and the director often deals with his own personal "daddy issues" through characters in his own movies. (Including Hook, the movie Spielberg worked on right before JP.) But unlike many of his previous efforts, Jurassic Park isn't about an absentee father: it's about a man discovering his potential to become one. As the film progresses, we discover that the underlying story is about Grant proving his fatherly capabilities to Sattler. From the moment she puts Lex in the same Jeep as Grant at the beginning of their park tour, Sattler uses this trip and Hammond's grandchildren as part of an elaborate test to see if Grant is the kind of man with whom she could one day have a family.

It's worth noting that even though Grant and Sattler are romantically involved, the film rarely (if ever) has those characters give any physical indication of their relationship. Dr. Ian Malcolm - with slick hair, black leather jacket, and "rock star" nickname bestowed upon him by Hammond - is the most sexualized character in the film, and he introduces a half-hearted love triangle aspect to the story as he tries to charm Sattler with his lesson on chaos theory. But Grant's decision to protect the children shows her his parental instincts, something far more important to her than Malcolm's fleeting sex appeal.

The concept of reproduction is addressed multiple times, from an early conversation between Sattler and Grant about Grant's reluctance to have children, to discussions of how Hammond's scientists breed dinosaurs on the island, highlighted by Malcolm's iconic and semi-spooky declaration that "life finds a way." Spielberg even explores this theme visually in a brief sequence on the helicopter as the scientists descend to the island for the first time. Grant attempts to put his seat belt on, but comes up with two "female" ends; pressed for time, he comes up with a quick fix, tying the two ends together to secure himself through turbulence. This mirrors the Jurassic Park scientists' methods of using frog DNA as their own quick fix to complete the strand, as well as Dennis Nedry's ultimately fatal mistake of planning to sell dino samples to the highest bidder as a fast-track solution to escaping his financial troubles. The movie is clear on this point: quick fixes do not work, and those that employ them will be punished.

John Hammond, a character I never paid much attention to as a younger viewer, struck me this time as a tragic figure who begins with good intentions but whose hubris brings about the destruction of his life's goal. He's a guy who clearly has a love for the past but doesn't have the foresight to understand the consequences of his actions, and despite Malcolm's continued warnings and the collapse of the park around him, by the end he still hasn't learned his lesson. In a scene with Sattler late in the film, Hammond talks about his first attraction - a motorized flea circus which tricked his guests into thinking they could see fleas operating the pieces - and describes how, with Jurassic Park, he "wanted to give them something that wasn't an illusion. Something that was real." He goes on to say that "creation is an act of sheer will. Next time it'll be flawless." These notions apply to the act of filmmaking as much as to the planning of this fictional theme park, and it seems as if Spielberg - a fellow showman, albeit of a different kind - can relate to Hammond in that sense.

Twenty years ago, Jurassic Park became a cinematic touchstone for its pioneering use of special effects technology. Since that time, it seems as if most of the conversation around the film has remained centered on that focal point, but seeing it on the big screen again proved that there is much more to this movie worth discussing than the realism of CGI dinosaurs. This is a timeless story of human arrogance, nature's wrath, and the fallout between the two, and even among Spielberg's insanely good filmography, Jurassic Park is one of his most interesting accomplishments. Until next time...

Upstream Color

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:52:39 PDT

In 2004, former engineer Shane Carruth released his debut film - a low-budget time travel movie called Primer - which he wrote, produced, edited, composed music for, starred in, and directed. Despite its incredibly dense technical dialogue and rough-around-the-edges appearance the film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and earned a cult following, turning Carruth into something of a rock star for cinephiles. Carruth has attempted to get a few projects off the ground since then, but has remained quiet...until now. His second feature, Upstream Color, premiered at Sundance earlier this year and comes out in limited release on April 5th, 2013.

Upstream Color
Writer/Director: Shane Carruth
Starring: Shane Carruth, Amy Seimetz, Andrew Sensenig

Like Primer before it, Upstream Color is the kind of movie that dares you to figure out what it's trying to do. Compared to most other films, it's almost totally inaccessible - but Carruth is the kind of guy who doesn't give a sh*t if you can follow the story or not. He refuses to dumb things down for his audience, demanding that you pay attention to every frame and decipher his non-stop barrage of symbolism. Curious and more adventurous audience members might find this method of storytelling engaging, but the same mystery that will be such a draw for hardcore film lovers will be far too much for most viewers to handle. When the plot itself is shrouded in a haze of fractured narrative fragments, it's obvious that the filmmaker isn't setting out to make a movie for everyone. It took me two viewings before I could even understand the basics of what actually happens in this movie, but the discovery is worth a second look because of the film's rich themes and vivid imagery.

At its core, Upstream is a love story. An unnamed thief, who has harnessed the power of a rare breed of worms and distilling them into a mind control drug, captures a woman named Kris (Amy Seimetz) and puts her under his spell. He commands her to empty all of her bank accounts, write out pages from Walden novels by hand, and make paper chains out of the hand-written pages before he eventually abandons her. Another man, known as the Sampler (Andrew Sensenig), records sounds from nature with a microphone and manipulates them into a chilling distortion which he plays over loudspeakers at his pig farm. Following the sounds, Kris shows up and the man transfers the worms from her body into that of a pig, which he then releases into his compound.

Waking up in a van on the side of the road and completely unaware of her actions while she was hypnotized, Kris slowly puts her life back together, meeting and falling for Jeff (Shane Carruth), a man with whom she shares a strange and inexplicable connection. Strange connections seem to be the currency of Upstream Color, whether it's the constant cross-cutting between Kris and Jeff to show their connectivity, juxtaposing shots of the couple with shots of pigs, the confused memories the two lovers seem to share, or the weird repetition that Carruth creates by staging the couple at two different places at seemingly the same time. It's a bizarre movie, to be sure, and the imagery is often beautiful and dreamlike, but I just couldn't connect with it the way many of my colleagues did because I was too busy scrambling to put all of the pieces together. (It doesn't help that the thief looks a lot like Jeff, making things even more confusing.) Carruth wants you to have an emotional response to his story, but I spent so much time reeling that I could never fully invest in the characters.

Upstream often pummels the audience with its sound design, and the initial reaction is to call it "good" just because it's recognizable. Though detractors may pinpoint this overuse of sound as a film school gimmick, Carruth actually does some pretty impressive work in this category. The movie occasionally gets loud, but there's always a reason for it that's tied to the narrative. There's even a sequence that goes on for probably ten minutes without any vocals at all, just relying on natural audio and Carruth's dreamy visuals to tell the story. It's a bold move, and little moments like this confirm that even though the film is undoubtedly tough to interpret, the director knows exactly what he's doing. (It should be noted that things became decidedly more clear for me upon a second viewing.)

A contemplative score filled with somber piano notes and xylophone tones nicely accentuates the movie's purposefully opaque aesthetic, and though I spent the entire movie silently screaming "what the hell is going on?!?!", the feelings and experience are what you're supposed to connect with here. I wouldn't say I liked Upstream Color, but its technical mastery and ballsy, unconventional approach make it very easy for film fans to appreciate. Until next time...

Trance

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 09:32:31 PDT

A slick narrator sets up a daring art heist, but things go south when he's hit in the head and can't remember where he stashed the multi-million dollar painting he just stole. His colleagues aren't pleased with his forgetfulness, so after torturing him, they take him to a hypnotherapist to try to unlock his mind. He doesn't think he's met her before, but she clearly recognizes him. Are they secretly in cahoots? Is he faking the amnesia? Could they escape together with the money and leave the bad guys in their rear-view mirror? This is the set-up for Danny Boyle's Trance, an intense psychological thriller loaded with suspense, deception, and more twists than a corkscrew factory.

Trance
Director: Danny Boyle
Starring: James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson, Vincent Cassel

Since his career began, Boyle has been able to accomplish a feat which has eluded many directors before him: he hops between genres and experiences success each time. He's tackled crime films, dark comedies, zombie thrillers, science fiction, and more, all while crafting a style of his own and making his work vibrant and unique. Similar to his 2007 film Sunshine, Trance plays with the concepts of memories, identity, perception, reality, and tons more, and Boyle infuses the movie with his trademarked high-energy visuals and propulsive sense of momentum. The film grabs you from the opening and never releases its grip, toying with you as it shifts its characters around like pieces on a chess board. The story is a giant secret, and Boyle and writer John Hodge dole out fragments of information as fractured as James McAvoy's psyche while we race to build the bigger picture in our minds.

Boyle creates a visual landscape that seems to constantly be askew, using Dutch angles - it felt like there were more here than in Kenneth Branagh's Thor, which is quite a feat - and reflections to obscure the reality of situations and keep the audience off balance. The visual style keeps us disconnected from the story as we are constantly fed more information and try to put the pieces together to "beat" the movie to its conclusion, but terrific performances from McAvoy, Rosario Dawson, and Vincent Cassel pull us in and give an emotional connection. We're never quite sure what's happening behind McAvoy's shifty eyes, and Dawson does particularly impressive work as the hynotherapist who wants her own piece of the art theft pie.

That's not to say this movie is completely flawless. The film opens with an amazingly efficient and realistic robbery sequence, but by the end the characters' actions have become so heightened and outlandish that all realism is hurled out the window. Picture the Ocean's 11 guys robbing Terry Benedict, then burning every casino to the ground afterward. (That's not exactly a perfect metaphor for what happens here, but it's fun to picture it anyway.) Boyle clearly favors an emotional payoff over a logical one, and while I won't give anything away, he seems to be influenced by the ending of Christopher Nolan's Inception here. Like most psychological thrillers, the truth is revealed in a climactic rush, and while we do get the necessary catharsis, Trance didn't exactly leave me spellbound. Until next time...

G.I. Joe: Retaliation

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 17:08:03 PDT

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was a ludicrous but satisfying big budget blockbuster based on a toy franchise, and it's clear the studio was aiming for the type of mindless entertainment for which director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy) was famous. For G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Paramount wanted something different: a more realistic, authentic look at the Joes, concentrating more on mythology and less on spectacle. In most situations I prefer the mythology-first option, but - and maybe this is because I didn't grow up watching the cartoon or playing with the toys - in this case, director Jon M. Chu (Step Up 2: The Streets) never struck the right balance between campy, over-the-top action and the film's more dramatic moments. Retaliation is still an entertaining adventure, but it's simply not as fun as the first entry into this series.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation
Director: Jon M. Chu
Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Ray Park, Lee Byung-hun, Channing Tatum, Bruce Willis

A graphics-heavy introduction piece sets the stage: a few years after the first film left off, Duke (Channing Tatum) is leading a team of Joes consisting of his buddy Roadblock (Dwayne Johnson), Lady Jaye (Adrianne Palicki), Flint (D.J. Cotrona), and Snake Eyes (Ray Park), the latter of whom has gone missing. When the Pakistani president is assassinated, the Joes are sent in to recover nuclear missiles before the enemy can snag them, but they're ambushed in the desert and left for dead. The U.S. president (who is actually a villain named Zartan in disguise) frames the Joes for the murder and essentially initiates Ghost Protocol, unwittingly leaving the surviving Roadblock, Lady Jaye, and Flint to find out who betrayed them and why.

Storm Shadow (Lee Byung-hun) - who has miraculously and inexplicably survived what I could have sworn were fatal wounds incurred in the last film - and Firefly (Ray Stevenson) free Cobra Commander (Luke Bracey, taking over for Joseph Gordon-Levitt) from an underground high security prison to join Zartan in Washington. Snake Eyes and his new female ninja protoge Jinx hunt Storm Shadow while the surviving members of the Joes seek help from the original G.I. Joe (Bruce Willis, who totally mails in his performance) to stop COBRA's villainous plan, which involves worldwide nuclear disarmament so Zartan and the Commander can threaten the world with their powerful space satellites unless everyone swears loyalty to the new army.

If you've seen this film's trailers, it shouldn't come as a shock that Channing Tatum's Duke dies in the early minutes and the weight of the movie falls squarely on The Rock's chiseled shoulders. He's a much better actor than Tatum (circa 2009 anyway) and his Roadblock character brings a gravitas to the proceedings that the blank-faced Duke never could. The dude practically is an action figure in real life, so he's totally believable here. But after some quick set-up that establishes a pretty terrific rapport between the two actors, Duke's absence is brushed over in about thirty seconds. Maverick threw Goose's dog tags into the water at the end of Top Gun; Roadblock's friend doesn't even cross his mind at this film's end.

That lack of reaction characterizes the film's overall attitude toward consequences fairly well. During a disarmament summit, Zartan (as the President) obliterates the entire city of London as a bullying tactic. The city is wiped off the face of the Earth, but we don't even get to see how the British ambassador (or anyone, really) reacts to this unspeakable display of death. It's never mentioned again. Similarly, as the film wraps up its predictable happy ending with the proper President restored to his rightful office, there is no mention of the public reaction to the years of time he spent being impersonated and the fallout regarding the decisions made while he wasn't technically in power.

The characters are about as one-dimensional as you'd expect (they're based on toys, remember?), and the film's only interesting character work is the dynamic between Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes. In the first movie, their origin stories are revealed in flashback form; here, we find out further details that completely recontextualizes their relationship, making one a much more tragic figure than he initially appeared. Flint is completely useless as a character (and Cotrona is as bland as Tatum was the first time around), and though Lady Jaye has a tiny bit more to her than meets the eye, it's still not enough to convince anyone that Palicki is a talented actress. Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick craft a Mission: Impossible-esque sequence that uses her sexuality as a weapon, but overall, any attempts to give her character significant heft are laughable. (She unloads a personal story about never gaining her father's approval to Flint while he secretly watches her change clothes, which undercuts anything serious happening in the scene.)

Credit where it's due, though: Chu's direction is excellent. Retaliation is a much tighter, more compact movie than the original and Chu's previous work making dance movies equipped him with the gift of knowing how to make the human body look fluid in motion; this translates to some excellent fight choreography, especially in the film's mountainous centerpiece battle featuring dozens of ninjas. This is undoubtedly the best sequence in the movie, though it's place in this specific story seems forced at best, especially considering how astonishingly bad RZA is at delivering the dialogue to set it up (he plays a blind sensei, which is somehow even worse than it sounds). Even though the script isn't very good, there's the feeling that Chu genuinely likes it, and that passion at least comes through in the final product.

There are a few opportunities for satire and political commentary, but the film rushes past them so quickly that it seems actively afraid to actually say something about the world we're living in today. And though the movie is ostensibly more "realistic" than the last film - no pulse cannons here - there are still some ridiculous moments that should please action fans: a bullet is sliced in half with a sword, Bruce Willis' suburban house doubles as an armory, there's a Battleship-style sequence with Willis' old pals coming along for the fight, and The Rock often smashes things with a tank and/or his fists. G.I. Joe: Retaliation loses a lot of fun in the process of trading spectacle for tangibility, and unfortunately that swap makes the movie far less memorable as a result. Until next time...

Olympus Has Fallen

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 10:29:31 PDT

When it was announced there would be two "Die Hard in the White House" movies coming to theaters in 2013, I chose sides quickly. The contenders: Olympus Has Fallen, directed by Antoine Fuqua, starring Gerard Butler and Aaron Eckhart; and White House Down, directed by Roland Emmerich, starring Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx. Based on that information alone, the latter seemed like the "better" choice, and while that film still has a chance to surprise us (we haven't even seen a trailer for it yet), I'm already confident in saying I made a huge mistake in my initial assessment. Olympus Has Fallen is brutal, insane, hilarious, and action-packed, and I hereby pledge my allegiance to it as one of the most ridiculously enjoyable movies of the year.

Olympus Has Fallen
Director: Antoine Fuqua
Starring: Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett

If you were to toss Die Hard, In the Line of Fire, and Air Force One into a blender and mix them, the result* would be Olympus Has Fallen, an absurd amalgam of action cliches so dumb and predictable that the movie really should be a total slog. But director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), along with first-time writers Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt, are able to cram so many brazen action sequences, jaw-dropping moments of unnecessary violence, and enjoyable one-liners into the story that it somehow ends up being a ton of fun.

Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is an ex-Special Forces badass who works as a Secret Service agent and is buddy-buddy with President Asher (Aaron Eckhart). He's tough - he boxes with the President in his spare time - but he has a soft side too, taking the President's young son Connor under his wing and teaching him how to be a good Secret Service agent when he grows up. During the drive to a fundraising dinner on a stormy, snowy night, a car crash claims the life of the First Lady (Ashley Judd), but Banning is able to save Asher before he falls to his icy death too. The President doesn't want to be reminded of his loss every time he sees Banning's face, so he bumps him to a desk job at the Treasury Department, which is where the story picks up again eighteen months later.

Tensions are rising in Korea, and when the South Korean Prime Minister flies to DC to meet the President to discuss how to prevent nuclear war with the North, a terrorist seizes the moment to strike, indiscriminately firing on DC with machine guns from a massive airplane. During the ensuing chaos, suicide bombers and teams of well-trained mercenary-types breach the White House borders, so the President is taken to a locked-down safe room with the South Korean entourage in tow. But - shocker! - this attack is an inside job, orchestrated by a former Secret Service agent (who, if you've seen any movie like this before, you should peg as the villain within thirty seconds of seeing him) and the terrorist himself, posing as the Prime Minister's head of security. Seeing the destruction in the streets outside, Banning shoots his way into the White House, making him the last and only hope to retrieve the President alive.

Butler is grim and grizzled as he blasts his way through the White House interior, and many of the film's "oh sh*t" moments are because of his haphazard excessive violence toward the enemy soldiers. This guy doesn't just shoot people - he stabs them in the head and doesn't think a thing about it. He's Jack Bauer reincarnate. The cultural conversation surrounding Zero Dark Thirty was dominated by the film's stance on torture, but because Olympus Has Fallen is clearly not aiming for realism, this movie can use that hot button issue as a punchline: torture unquestionably works here, and Butler's one-liners drew cheers from my audience as he threatened bad guys before dispatching them in the most violent ways he could.

Morgan Freeman shows up as the Speaker of the House, but isn't given much to do. He's there mostly to give the illusion of being someone important, to intone things like "My God" every few minutes, and be the Dramatic Voice On the Other End of the Phone while talking to Butler's character while he's stuck on the inside. (He's essentially the Glenn Close character in Air Force One.) Eckhart is familiar with playing political characters after his turn as Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight, and he does a fine job looking angry and helpless here. Angela Bassett is barely there, and Melissa Leo even shows up for a small role as has a small role as the Secretary of Defense. Rick Yune (The Fast and The Furious) plays the villain, but this movie isn't about the performances.

This is a movie that is unabashedly jingoistic, depicting American governmental officials as take-no-prisoners badasses who refuse to negotiate with terrorists; there's a tiny message built in about how our own quest for nuclear supremacy could be our undoing, but it's mostly lost among the spent bullet casings and bloody carnage. The villain's justification for the takeover seems to consist solely of the angry phrase "globalization and f*cking Wall Street!" and this is the kind of movie where an explanation like that suffices just fine. It also seems designed to remind viewers of 9/11, with imagery like the Washington Monument being clipped by a plane (its debris killing tourists below) and a shredded American flag falling in slow motion, plus a gung-ho "rebirth" speech by the President when the dust finally settles.

Olympus Has Fallen is at its best when Gerard Butler is bludgeoning a mercenary to death with a bust of Abraham Lincoln. It's that level of subtlety (read: zero) that makes the movie weirdly endearing. Though it probably won't win any awards, for the most part Fuqua succeeds in crafting a successful action film, moving things along at a quick clip and making sure there are only a few minutes between action beats. By the end, though, the movie overstays its welcome by about twenty or thirty minutes. The brutal violence that was so shocking in the beginning becomes commonplace, removing its effectiveness as the film comes to a close. But overall, this movie knows exactly what it's trying to be and fully embraces that vision, and even though it often toes the line between "straight-ahead action movie" and "parody," it's an enjoyable experience either way. Until next time...

*The result would more accurately be dozens of shattered DVD pieces in a broken blender, but go with me on this.

Spring Breakers

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 15:27:31 PDT

There isn't a cloud in the sky as college kids gyrate in slow motion on a sun-kissed Florida beach. Dubstep music blasts in the background, beer flows like a mountain spring, and nudity abounds. The opening sequence of Spring Breakers is replayed multiple times as the film progresses, but each time it's intercut, it becomes clearer that this stylized hedonism is nothing more than an idealized version of an escape from a mundane lifestyle. Spring Breakers will make headlines for casting former Disney starlets in bikinis and arming them with guns, but underneath the controversy lies one of the most interesting films of the year.

Spring Breakers
Writer/director: Harmony Korine
Starring: Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, James Franco

The movie follows four female college students from the South who are bored with waking up every day only to see and do the exact same thing. These girls don't have much going on in the way of personalities except for Faith (Selena Gomez), whose on-the-nose name means - you guessed it - that she's the only Christian of the group. But with spring break coming up and visions of non-stop partying in the group's eyes, Faith's faith falls to the wayside in favor of more basic pleasures. The foursome pools their money together for a spring break trip to St. Petersberg, Florida, come up short, and Faith's three friends decide to rob a restaurant to make up the extra cash. The robbery unfolds in a single shot from inside the getaway car as it circles the parking lot, and it's only later that Faith discovers her friends actually enjoyed the act to a disturbing degree.

Once they arrive at their destination, the movie turns into an extended episode of one of those Spring Break specials that used to air on MTV, only with more nudity and drug use. It's not quite the idealized take from the movie's opening, but by having the characters repeat, "Spring break. Spring break, ya'll. Spring break forever," in breathy voiceovers six or seven times, it's clear that popsicle-sucking version is what these characters are striving to attain. There's a spirituality assigned to these proceedings, and though it might seem ridiculous to deify glistening, sun-soaked bodies and the notion of living in the moment, that's Korine's exact point: the film holds a mirror to the YOLO generation and shows one possible outcome of how things could turn out for them. The story picks up when the girls are arrested at a huge hotel party on the beach and are quickly bailed out by Alien, a tattooed, cornrow-wearing, drug-slinging white rapper played by James Franco.

Franco's performance is already legendary, partly because of his wild appearance, partly because of his commitment to the role, and partly because we've never seen him do anything like this before. He's a self-professed gangster with a heart of gold who loves showing off his material possessions ("Look at my shit!" has already become the film's most oft-quoted line). He has shorts in every color and a bedroom that could double as an armory, full of automatic weapons and knives hanging on the wall, layers of cash stacked on the bed, and Scarface playing on repeat forever. On the surface, he's a comedic caricature of a gangster, but while he can be menacing one minute (the palpable threat of possible rape hangs in the air for a while), he also has a different, more complicated side. He plays Britney Spears ballads on the piano while the sun sets behind him in the background. In a tense reversal of power dynamics, Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson's characters force him to perform oral sex on the barrel of a gun, leading him to declare them his "soul mates." For Franco, this performance is the logical conclusion of the string of strange arthouse projects he's been involved with recently, and working with Korine has brought out the absolute best in him.

Though the booze, drugs, and music flow freely throughout, Spring Breakers is not a traditional party movie. It's more of an exploration of lifestyle choices. But this isn't like The Hangover, or Project X, or any other kind of movie that celebrates debauchery in a traditional way. Korine gives his film an ethereal quality that increases as the story progresses, with interesting non-linear editing choices that favor building a mood over directly feeding audiences the narrative. Some may question these decisions or suggest they're stylistic for style's sake, but it's not at all difficult to comprehend the plot (which basically turns into a gangster battle between Franco and Gucci Mane, playing a rival dealer), and the editing - especially in the last act - truly gives the film a beautiful, experiential feel.

Many of the movie's best moments are so bizarre I'd rather not ruin them for you here, especially considering how - despite their inherent weirdness - they actually feel strangely at home in Korine's world. This is a stylized cinematic landscape designed in part to critique the attitude of millennials: consequences are mostly an illusion, obscured through hot pink ski masks and highlighted with neon-colored bathing suits. But having grown up in Florida, I noticed that Korine simultaneously manages to portray some aspects of the state with a realism rarely seen on film: rappers with tattoos of area codes on their bodies, hats, and shirts; the brown grass; the life outside of the stereotypical images you see in tourism commercials. He captures the sense that youthful sense that nothing is happening, so the characters' desire to make something - anything - happen is justified in their eyes. For a look at the real Florida contrasted with unrealistic expectations, throw on a double feature of Spring Breakers and Soderbergh's Magic Mike.

Spring Breakers is a condemnation of everything the film hypes in its own marketing campaign, but ironically it's that very promise of babes, boobs, and bullets that will get people to come see the movie in the first place. Fans of Korine's previous works (the controversial Kids (which he wrote), Trash Humpers, and Gummo) might be disappointed in the writer/director's attempt to go mainstream, but though it may appear that way on the surface, Spring Breakers is often anything but traditional. It's a crime story full of idiosyncrasies and broken reflections, which has already been led by the enigmatic Franco into cult classic status. Until next time...

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:20:34 PDT

For a profession that certainly hasn't historically been very well-represented on film, you don't have to go very far back in cinema history to find a movie about magicians. In fact, 2006 saw the release of not one, but two magician films: Neil Burger's The Illusionist and Christopher Nolan's The Prestige, the former of which faded into obscurity when compared to what still may be Nolan's best film. Sadly, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone will likely suffer the same fate when Louis Leterrier's own magician film Now You See Me comes out later this year; not because the latter will be Leterrier's best work - though I suppose anything is possible - but because Wonderstone doesn't do itself any favors, failing to deliver anything memorable aside from Jim Carrey's performance.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
Director: Don Scardino
Starring: Steve Carell, Steve Buscemi, Olivia Wilde, Jim Carrey, Alan Arkin

Even taking comparisons with other films completely out of the equation (which, honestly, is how every film should be viewed), Wonderstone doesn't have anything that jumps out and commands your attention. Boiled down, it's a stock story of the rise and fall from fame, the effects of success and failure on friendship and relationships, the threat of becoming obsolete, rekindling a childlike passion for a job, and the hero's quest for redemption. We've seen the skeleton of this particular story applied to countless other professions on film before, and slipping it into a tight-fitting spandex suit and adding a layer of spray tanning doesn't justify re-telling it like this.

Carell plays the title character, a filthy rich Vegas stage magician bored with doing the same act for ten years straight. When Steve Gray (Carrey) comes along and shakes up the world of magic using his David Blaine-esque street tricks, Wonderstone and his partner Anton (Steve Buscemi) are forced to adapt or disappear, and thanks to Wonderstone being a self-centered asshat, he and his partner have a falling out. If you've ever seen a movie before, you know how the rest of this one plays out.

Carrey shines in his small role, and it's a return to the type of physical comedy that we haven't seen from him in a few years. That said, the movie can't even match what these guys did on YouTube years ago with no budget in their own series of Blaine parody videos. Carrey's portrayal of this street magician is funny, but it's not enough to "carry" (sorry) the whole film. Carell and Buscemi don't have much to do in the comedy realm here, and their physical gags mostly land with a thud. Alan Arkin brings a welcome breath of fresh air about halfway through, but everything that's come before has feels so stale that even the Academy Award-nominated veteran can't rescue the movie at that point.

Olivia Wilde shows up as the female lead, and while the writers attempt to make her into a functioning character with career aspirations of her own, they miss huge opportunities to make her feel like a fully fleshed out woman who can actually help the narrative. Instead, she mostly sits on the sidelines and plays a standard love interest to Burt as he figures out his own character arc, which is both totally predictable and completely uninteresting. Still, Wilde - who hasn't had many chances to do much on screen other than stand around and look pretty - plays the role well, and if the actress has no higher career aspirations, she can surely carve out a niche for the next few years playing parts just like this one. (Hopefully she takes a different path.)

For a studio comedy, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is remarkably unfunny. I enjoyed Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley's last movie, Horrible Bosses, and though this film's cast is just as impressive on paper, the movie itself just doesn't work. It's not offensively bad in the way that Adam Sandler movies have been lately, which is to say it doesn't feel as if the filmmakers are shoving your face into a fart, let you come up for air, and then expect you to laugh while they repeat the process for two hours. Wonderstone doesn't have contempt for its audience, but it doesn't have any respect for it, either; it just sits there, as bland and boring as they come. Say what you will about The Illusionist, but at least that movie felt like it had a heartbeat. Until next time...

Upside Down

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 11:59:13 PDT

Upon first glance, one might be tempted to praise Upside Down for its visual splendor and original concept. After all, this is a movie about two worlds with opposite fields of gravity that hover right on top of each other. But look a little deeper, and you'll discover that writer/director Juan Solanas' film is just a substandard love story wrapped in a gimmick that isn't nearly as interesting as the filmmaker thinks.

Upside Down
Writer/Director: Juan Solanas
Starring: Jim Sturgess, Kirsten Dunst, Timothy Spall

The film opens with an agonizingly long voiceover narration from a young man named Adam (Jim Sturgess). In the most breathy way possible, he prattles on about the wonders of the universe and describes how unique his planet is, describing the "three basic laws of double gravity": all matter is subject to the gravity of the world it comes from; gravity can be offset by matter from the other world called "inverse matter;" and after about an hour, matter that touches inverse matter will burn. If that wasn't enough, he continues his offscreen narration and goes into a diatribe about pink bee pollen he and his aunt find on a forbidden mountaintop (yes, seriously) that has some sort of magical properties that offset gravity. All of this information is necessary to the plot, but there's absolutely no need to present it in such a clunky way; a good writer would have worked it all in organically to the story, but it's clear from the opening minute that Solanas is not a good writer.

Upside Down centers on Adam and Eden (Kirsten Dunst), two adorable kids that first meet when Adam is at the top of the forbidden mountain searching for his pink dust. Eden is from the world up top, where everyone is rich and a massive corporation called TransWorld rules all, and Adam is from "down below," the lower world which is constantly sh*t on by the players above. His world is full of ugly, dirty people who scrounge for food in the streets and dodge oil spilling from TransWorld's pipeline, jammed into their ground and transporting oil between worlds so everyone can live a glorious life above while those below suffer. THERE ARE TWO WORLDS, AND THEY'RE VERY DIFFERENT, OK? Anyway, the two kids grow into teenagers and sometimes cross the world boundary to be with each other, but always briefly because otherwise they'll be set on fire.

But of course, things can't stay groovy forever. The gravity police show up and try to separate the lovers. Adam's house is burned, he's ripped away from his only remaining relative, and he thinks Eden's dead, so he turns into a mad scientist (?) while he develops some kind of formula involving the pink bee dust. Ten years later, he sees Eden on TV and discovers that she's working for TransWorld, so he leaves his bros behind and goes to work for the enemy, presenting them with his pink dust anti-gravity product that the evil corporation wants to sell as an anti-aging creme to the Upper World. (Ooooh, social commentary!) While there, he finds out that Eden has amnesia - naturally - so he assumes an alternate identity, wears inverse matter counterweights, and goes over to her side to try to remind her of the burning love they used to share.

Solanas is clearly in love with his own visuals, but either the budget isn't big enough or the visual effects department isn't good enough to make them truly awe-inspiring. Instead of the majesty he's sure we're basking in, the film feels as if we're travelling through the computer game "Myst" circa 1995. Try as he might, he did not make anything remotely close to the wonder that Aronofsky achieved in The Fountain. Many of the exterior effects here look cheap and unconvincing, and while there are admittedly the occasional moments in which the movie looks like a moving, living painting, the ratio of good to bad VFX shots is not nearly what he thinks it is. It gets so obnoxious that only a few minutes in you can almost sense Solanas just off screen, smirking to himself about how amazing he thinks everything looks.

I'll give the film a tiny bit of credit. Some of the interior stuff is impressive, particularly when characters from different worlds occupy the same room (with some people on the ceiling and others on the floor) and transfer objects to one another in a continuous shot. Conceptually, there are a few things that ended up translating pretty well: in the Upper World, people order expensive drinks from Down Below and drink them upside down in martini glasses; a furnace located Down Below contains little pieces of inverse matter stuck to its ceiling that constantly burn to provide heat; in a centerpiece action sequence, Sturgess leaps into the ocean, strips off inverse matter counterweights, and then flies through the sky only to crash into the ocean Down Below. But these tiny moments don't justify the premise, and Sturgess and Dunst aren't given enough in the script to make the love story feel plausible enough for us to invest in it, so the whole thing just feels like we're watching a pretentious film student screen the most obvious movie ever about class warfare and constantly asking us if we "get it."

The dialogue is cringe-worthy, which I suppose is to be expected from a first time English language movie that's putting all of its eggs in the VFX basket. And I won't ruin it but the climax is anything but climactic, instead inventing a laughable, unearned deus ex machina that comes out of nowhere to sweep all explanations and problems away simply because the story is coming to an end. The ending makes exactly zero sense, but by that point, the audience has probably realized that there's no way this story is miraculously going to become rational, so you're either with it or you're not. (If it's not clear by now, I was as far from "with it" as possible.) Half-assed action setpieces, piss-poor character interactions, and a half-baked romance all serve the worldbuilding. Solanas has it backwards; worldbuilding is supposed to enhance the storytelling, not the other way around. Because the filmmaker doesn't understand the difference, Upside Down is a failure from the opening frame. Until next time...

The Place Beyond the Pines

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 17:22:38 PST

Ryan Gosling reunites with his Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance for The Place Beyond the Pines, a riveting generational crime drama that explores the lifelong consequences a father's actions can have on his son. A sprawling narrative that shifts between multiple protagonists, Pines is being billed as an action movie when in fact it's more of a familial study that contains performances that are career highlights for practically its entire cast. This is one that cinephiles won't want to miss.

The Place Beyond the Pines
Director: Derek Cianfrance
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, Dane DeHaan

Gosling plays Luke Glanton, a motorcycle stunt rider who works with a travelling carnival. He's covered in tattoos, wears a beat-up Metallica t-shirt, plays with a butterfly knife, and has some pretty impressive moves on a bike. When the carnival rolls back into Schenectady, New York, Glanton encounters an old one-night stand, Romina, played wonderfully by a subdued Eva Mendes, who reveals that she's just given birth to Glanton's infant son. Wanting to do the right thing, he quits his job and stays in town to help raise the baby. Glanton takes a gig working at a garage for a shady dude named Robin, played by The Dark Knight Rises actor Ben Mendelsohn, and soon they're utilizing Glanton's moto skillz to pull off exciting bank robberies, with Robin driving the getaway truck.

After a long chase following one of the bank robberies, the film's perspective switches to rookie cop Avery Cross, played by the clean-shaven Bradley Cooper. He takes a bullet while bringing Glanton to justice, but the movie loses steam as it sifts through some typical "injured hero" tropes and introduces crooked members of the police force, led by Ray Liotta. As a new father himself, Cross is shocked to discover Glanton also had a son, and he's broken up about taking the boy's father away from him. Fifteen years pass, and the POV switches yet again to Glanton's now-grown son Jason, played by Dane DeHaan. He interacts with Cross's son, a wigger with a bad attitude, and as the story comes to a head, events from the past are brought into focus for characters in the present, resulting in compelling face-offs, a few beatings, and an intense interrogation in the woods.

Cianfrance manages to give the movie meaning despite the fractured narrative, weaving themes and deep connections between protagonists and providing a sense of inevitability while somehow simultaneously cultivating a feeling that anything can happen. It's a neat trick, and searing performances from DeHaan and Gosling in particular add an emotional component that occasionally lacks when they're not on screen. The action is well staged and well shot, and though comparisons to Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive can (and will) be made, Cianfrance is not interested in recreating someone else's world. He has his own detailed playground here full of his own fascinating ideas, but aside from Gosling playing a similar badass-with-a-heart-of-gold character, there is another cool reference I picked out: during a chase sequence, the camera stays inside the car that trails Gosling's motorcycle, a reversal of how the camera stayed inside Driver's car in the opening chase of Drive.

If you're looking to get your money's worth at the theater, The Place Beyond the Pines is the way to go: it's basically three movies in one, and terrific acting, solid action, and mesmerizing cinematography ultimately outweigh an occasionally overwrought narrative. By the time you get to the end, it feels as if the movie has come in waves, with the events in the beginning seeming as if they happened ages ago and only a distorted ripple stretching out and affecting the action in the third act. It's an original, audacious movie, and despite the fact that it doesn't quite come together as cohesively as Cianfrance would like, that doesn't mean we shouldn't encourage him to continue making thoughtful dramas like this as he moves forward. Until next time...

Oz the Great and Powerful

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 09:25:51 PST

Victor Fleming's 1939 adaptation of The Wizard of Oz remains one of the most famous and beloved movies in film history, so when Disney announced production on a prequel, the news wasn't exactly well-received. The popular Broadway show "Wicked" tells a different origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West (and a film based on that show has been in development for years), so the idea of a studio producing a separate origin story for the wizard seemed at best unnecessary and at worst like shameless capitalization. But thanks to a solid screenplay and energetic storytelling by Sam Raimi, this trip down the yellow brick road is surprisingly worth taking.

Oz the Great and Powerful
Director: Sam Raimi
Starring: James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams, Zach Braff

Like Fleming's classic, Oz the Great and Powerful opens in a black and white Kansas; the aspect appears to be in 4:3, cutting off the sides of the image even while the 3D immerses the audience deep into it. (The 3D in the entire film is terrific, and the opening credits are particularly impressive.) Oscar Diggs (James Franco), a womanizing circus magician who goes by the name "Oz," performs for a small crowd with the aid of his sidekick Frank (Zach Braff). Oscar dreams of greatness but has never bothered with "goodness," conning his way through multiple women and using his cheap illusions to scrape by as he rolls from town to town. He's soon reunited with a woman he actually deeply cares about, but she reveals that she's marrying Henry Gale, a good man who can provide a steady foundation for her. Oscar is disappointed, but is aware of his flaws and realizes she'll be better off without him.

When a jealous boyfriend storms in to get revenge, Oscar uses some of his old tricks to escape onto a nearby hot air balloon, quickly getting sucked up into a tornado and - as the film switches from 4:3 to widescreen and from black and white into color - the magician finds himself in the colorful land of Oz. Franco does a great job in the lead role, playing the part with just the right mix of wonder and incredulity. Production designer Robert Stromberg also worked on Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, and the early marketing for Oz indicated that we were in for a similar brightly-colored journey here. But instead of a calculated attempt to recapture a billion dollar success, Oz the Great and Powerful feels like its own thing, and you can feel director Sam Raimi's touch all over this picture. From the occasionally canted angles to the way he plays up the witch's flying monkeys as horror movie monsters, this is unquestionably Raimi's vision. (If you were scared of flying monkeys after watching the 1939 movie, you'll be terrified of these guys.)

Oscar meets three witch sisters (Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams), and it's his relationships with these women that form the core of the story. The script does a nice job of slowly unveiling the witches' true intentions and using Oscar's character flaws as a catalyst for one of them to become the Wicked Witch of the West. The actresses are all solid, but Williams is clearly the standout talent of the trio. There are some familiar images in the movie - Glinda's bubble transportation, "horse[s] of a different color," etc. - but Raimi never gets too cute with the references. Oz works as its own self-contained story, and though it adds something to the experience if you're familiar with the original film, it isn't necessary to understand the dynamics at play here.

Instead of a cowardly lion, a tin man, and a scarecrow to accompany him, Oscar meets a nice flying monkey named Finley (voice of Braff, who is one of the film's highlights) and a young girl made of breakable China (voice of Joey King). They aid him on his quest to destroy one of the evil witches so he can become king of the land, but as you might expect, Oscar learns how to be a good man over the course of the film and realizes that maybe power and ultimate wealth aren't the most important things in the world. The movie is rated PG after all, and though there are a few moments (mostly comedic ones) clearly aimed at a younger crowd, it doesn't feel overly cheesy or simplistic; Raimi and his actors treat the material with respect and everything feels more legitimate as a result. There are even some cool parallels with the filmmaking process in the climax, as Oscar and his friends use his knowledge of Thomas Edison's work and his skills with illusion to create the iconic image of the Wizard of Oz, pulling back the curtain and revealing the artifice of storytelling in a meta sort of way.

I was extremely skeptical heading in, and though Oz the Great and Powerful could have easily felt like a cash-grab from one of Hollywood's biggest studios, it was thankfully a genuine fantasy adventure with great special effects, tons of heart, and a lot of laughs. Fans of Fleming's original might think this film's very existence is blasphemous, but Raimi and his team crafted something truly rare these days: a prequel to a known property that doesn't exist solely to reference another movie, but one that actually stands on its own as a good film. Until next time...

Snitch

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:46:48 PST

One of Hollywood's longest running truisms is that studios use the early months of the year to dump their less desirable movies into theaters (despite the occasional exception, like Cloverfield or The Grey), so when an action film is released in February, audiences can typically assume it won't be very good. But here's the thing about Snitch: it's actually surprisingly solid, and despite the star power of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, it's much less of a pure action movie than the trailers would have you believe.

Snitch
Director: Ric Roman Waugh
Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Barry Pepper, Michael Kenneth Williams, Jon Bernthal

Inspired by true events, the story follows John Matthews (Johnson), a well-off construction site owner who has a strained relationship with his ex-wife and their teenage son Jason, but has formed a happy life with his new wife and their young daughter. Jason seems to be a decent kid, but in the opening scene it's revealed that he's experimenting with drugs and a friend plans to ship him a big supply that's worth a lot of money. Despite Jason's protests, his buddy sends the drugs anyway, and after a quick chase sequence, Jason is busted by the DEA for intent to distribute narcotics. Turns out the friend set him up to take the fall in order to reduce his own prison sentence, and the DEA wants Jason to set up another domino so they can continue their war on drugs.

When Jason refuses to play ball, lawyers say he could serve between ten and thirty years in prison, so Matthews offers to step in and become a snitch instead. The incredulous U.S. Attorney (Susan Sarandon) reluctantly agrees, passing Matthews off to her DEA team led by Agent Cooper (Barry Pepper, sporting a majestic goatee). Since Matthews owns a truck yard that employs some questionable characters, he runs through his employee records until he locates Daniel James ("The Walking Dead" star Jon Bernthal), an ex-con conveniently busted for distributing narcotics, and enlists him to set up a meet with a local drug dealer ("The Wire" star Michael Kenneth Williams). Things eventually move so far up the ladder that Matthews finds himself in way over his head, dodging bullets and driving mega-sized shipments for a cartel leader (Benjamin Bratt) and continually having to go a step further for the greedy U.S. Attorney, who keeps backing out of her promise to release Jason when she realizes she has the opportunity to bag a cartel leader instead of a low-level player.

Director Ric Roman Waugh is a former Hollywood stuntman who doesn't exactly have a famed directorial history, but it's clear that Mr. Waugh spent enough time hurling himself around in front of cameras that he learned how to effectively tell a story. The action beats are surprisingly few and far between, but when they do arrive, they're competently orchestrated and pack a punch. I don't want to hype the film too much - after all, there is a scene in which a car catches on fire when it ramps off a freeway exit - but a lot of traditional "action movie" moments are minimized in favor of building relationships, so that those action beats actually have a tangible impact on the story at hand. Thankfully, this is not "explosions for explosions' sake" filmmaking, and the movie often feels much more restrained than expected. It's more family drama than shoot-em-up, and though a lot of the family moments lean toward hysteria - both between Matthews and his wife, and between James and his wife, who is crushed when she discovers he's no longer on the straight and narrow - I'd much prefer that to excessive action sequences that don't mean anything.

The entire movie is made as a condemnation of harsh real life mandatory minimum sentencing laws, which are put in place to crack down on drug trafficking and the violence that is associated with that business. But the movie seems to undercut its own point slightly: yes, it sucks that Jason was busted, but after watching Matthews go through hell to free him, we're subject to the entire way of life that those rules are in place to cripple. When Benjamin Bratt jumps out of the backseat of a sedan and starts blowing guys away with a huge gun during a construction site shootout, it's tough to argue that the world wouldn't be a safer place without these punks on the street.

No thanks to the stilted script, Snitch is far more entertaining than it should be and coasts on the talent of its leads. Johnson gives a strong performance in one of the few roles that doesn't require him to remove his shirt, Bernthal (who I found tremendously annoying in "The Walking Dead's" first season) did some great work as the reluctant cohort, and anyone who has seen "The Wire" knows what they're getting when Michael Kenneth Williams appears on screen. Sarandon, Pepper, and Bratt all add considerable substance, and while Snitch is overall more emotional than explosive, it's a better film than its February release date would indicate. Until next time...

A Good Day to Die Hard

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 15:09:49 PST

When Die Hard was released in 1988, Bruce Willis' wisecracking NYC cop John McClane instantly became one of America's greatest action movie characters. He redefined what an action hero could be in an era of movies starring meatheads like Schwarzenegger and Stallone, and it was refreshing to see a relatable, flawed protagonist that didn't look like he was the result of coked-out Hollywood execs attempting to transfer the concept of a "god mode" hero from a video game to the big screen. But after the first entry, the Die Hard series fell prey to the old industry maxim "bigger is better," expanding the confined sensibilities of the first movie* from a building, to an airport, to New York City, to the entire United States, and now - in A Good Day to Die Hard - across the world to Russia.

Let's face it: by this point, the franchise has lost whatever magic the first film created, and all of the sequels pale in comparison. But since the studio seems hellbent on expanding the continuing adventures of John McClane rather than focusing them down, we'll probably never see this character in his 1988 glory again. So with the notion that "no Die Hard sequel will truly feel like a Die Hard movie" in mind, how does A Good Day to Die Hard fare as an action movie that just so happens to star Bruce Willis as John McClane? Sadly, not well.

A Good Day to Die Hard
Director: John Moore
Starring: Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch, Yuliya Snigir

McClane discovers that his estranged son Jack (Jai Courtney) is in custody in Russia for what appears to be criminal behavior, so he flies across the world to straighten things out. Unbeknownst to him, Jack is actually an undercover CIA operative (of course) who's spent years trying to stop the convoluted plot of two warring terrorists planning to take over the world. Within a few minutes of touching down on foreign soil, McClane runs into his son - inadvertently screwing up his mission - and gets involved in one of the most destructive and ludicrous car chases you'll ever witness. Right out of the gate, it's clear that director John Moore is running with the "McClane as a superhero" template that Len Wiseman created with Live Free or Die Hard.

But even after you accept Moore's portrayal of the protagonist, it doesn't excuse a terrible script, questionable action sequences, and lackluster direction. Imagine the father/son dynamic in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, water it down until there's barely anything left, and that's what you get here. Willis and Courtney spend the entire movie competing and arguing about whether or not John was a good father, but while Ford and Connery actually felt like they were related (despite Connery only being 12 years older than Ford at the time of filming), the actors here never once feel like family. Mary Elizabeth Winstead even reprises her role as Lucy McClane to bookend the film, and she doesn't even hug John when he steps off the plane. There's no familiarity to this family.

Willis spends half of the movie talking to himself or shouting to anyone who will listen that he's supposed to be on vacation, but he never reacts to his environment and actions in the same awestruck ways that he did in Live Free. Courtney is straight-faced and joyless, coughing out bursts of exposition between gun battles in a boring, thankless role. ("Breaking Bad" star Aaron Paul dodged a bullet on this one; he was once up for the part.) The actors playing the villains are totally forgettable, constantly double-crossing each other and decrying the brash personalities of the American "cowboys," but never doing anything memorable. Hans Gruber these guys ain't.

Moore inexplicably thinks it's a good idea to shoot all of his action sequences using heavy snap zooms, a tactic that proves incredibly disorienting when combined with shaky camerawork and grimy, nondescript production design. When it came to Live Free or Die Hard, Len Wiseman was all about style over substance; there was a sheen to everything that felt sanitized and studio mandated. A Good Day is certainly a darker sequel (both visually and in tone), but Moore doesn't give his movie any style or substance. He spends too much energy on spectacle and not enough on character. We aren't ever given a reason to care about McClane, and since Willis and Courtney can't sell their relationship, all of the setpieces don't matter to the story.

By the time our heroes go to Chernobyl to retrieve some stupid MacGuffin and the bad guys have magic technology that removes radiation so everyone can walk around without hazmat suits on, I had already checked out. And for those that thought it was ridiculous that McClane hung on the wing of a fighter jet in Live Free's climax, prepare yourselves for an even more unbelievable ending here. A huge part of the reason that the first movie works so well is that McClane forges actual relationships; we see how he interacts with Holly, and his conversations with Al Powell give us the most heartfelt moments in the entire series. If the Die Hard movies can at least get back to that version of John McClane, they might have a chance at being good again. Otherwise, expect more pointless explosions, empty franchise building, and soulless situations into which a shell John McClane is tossed in the years to come. Until next time...

*Even 20th Century Fox seems to acknowledge that a huge part of the first film's success is its claustrophobic setting. They just unveiled a new mural on the studio lot to celebrate the series' 25th anniversary, and the image they chose was of McClane crawling through an air duct.

Stoker

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 16:48:24 PST

Filter Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt through Korean director Park Chan-wook's off-kilter sensibilities, and the result is Stoker, Chan-wook's English language debut feature. It's a nicely shot thriller that's very well-acted, but methodical pacing, a nontraditional story, and some intense violence could easily alienate audiences unfamiliar with the director's prior filmography.

Stoker
Director: Park Chan-wook
Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, Nicole Kidman

India (Mia Wasikowska) is an overly serious high school girl whose father dies in a car crash on her 18th birthday. As friends and neighbors gather at her mother's (Nicole Kidman) gothic mansion to mourn the family's loss, India is surprised to meet an uncle she never knew existed, the perfectly-groomed and handsome Charlie (Matthew Goode). He's mysterious, well-traveled, and India's mother seems to be taking an inappropriate interest in him while he stays in their home. Charlie, however, is more concerned with India; he shows up at her school, follows her around, and fixes his steely gaze on her at every opportunity. She avoids him at first, but over the course of the movie she finds herself drawn closer to him as secrets are revealed: Charlie is a killer, and India kinda digs it.

Wentworth Miller, star of the former FOX series "Prison Break," makes his screenwriting debut here, and I must admit, the film is a lot more layered and sophisticated than I gave Miller credit for on first glance. He peppers in references to works of classic directors like Hitchcock - the film could almost be considered a remake of 1943's Shadow of a Doubt - and Fritz Lang - Uncle Charlie whistles throughout the movie, a motif that was used to signal guilt in Lang's 1931 serial killer murder mystery M - while also crafting a compelling (if extremely strange) character study of India.

Chan-wook's stamp is all over the movie, from the amazingly detailed transitions (Kidman's hair fades into a shot of a meadow, a door opens in one sequence but someone entirely different walks through, etc) to tension-filled quiet moments around the dinner table. The sound effects are ramped up to mirror India's seemingly superheroic hearing abilities, and when death could be around any corner, even the sound of a light switch turning on can cause a jump scare.

While the film features plenty of blood and some gruesome murders, it is more of a coming-of-age tale than anything - albeit a bizarrely sexual and incestuous one. India's growth into adulthood and her kaleidoscopic relationship with her mother becomes the focal point as the movie comes to its unexpected climax, but some of the character motivations lost me as the suspense came to a head. Having only a few hours to reflect on Stoker, I can't quite pinpoint the film's overall message; once the wave of blood ebbs, I'm not sure if there actually is one. That'll be fine for some, but for a film that so clearly has a lot to say (and definitely has interesting ways to say them), I just wish the final piece came together a bit more clearly in the end. Until next time...

Identity Thief

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 23:07:00 PST

Following up her breakout performance in 2011's Bridesmaids, Melissa McCarthy stars alongside Jason Bateman in Identity Thief, the newest comedy from Horrible Bosses director Seth Gordon. Gordon has directed some really good stuff in the past - The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, episodes of "Parks and Recreation," "The Office," and "Community," even Horrible Bosses was solid - but the trio of McCarthy, Bateman, and Gordon is no match for the profound crappiness of writer Craig Mazin's abysmal script. Identity Thief isn't as terrible as a post-2005 Adam Sandler movie, but it's definitely one of the worst movies I've seen so far this year.

Identity Thief
Director: Seth Gordon
Starring: Jason Bateman, Melissa McCarthy, Robert Patrick, Amanda Peet

The premise is simple: Diana (McCarthy) is a sociopath who lives in "the worst place in America" - Winter Park, Florida, which actually isn't that bad in real life [I lived there for a year] - where she steals identities from any schmuck dumb enough to give up their Social Security Number over the phone. Her latest mark is a Denver accountant named Sandy Patterson (Bateman), a family man who takes abuse from his boss (Jon Favreau) and quits with his co-workers (led by John Cho) to start a new accounting firm. But due to Diana's antics - she's created a fake ID with Sandy's name on it, charged thousands of dollars to his credit cards, and has a warrant out for her (his) arrest - Sandy is busted and faced with a situation that is only possible because this movie is so stupid: due to some idiotic laws, it's up to him to head across the country, capture the imposter, and return her to Denver in order to keep his job and provide for his pregnant wife (Amanda Peet).

As you may have guessed, hijinks ensue. Sandy and Diana continually beat the crap out of each other, two assassins (Genesis Rodriguez and rapper T.I.) who take orders from a jailed mob boss (Jonathan Banks) come after the hapless duo, a Southern-fried bounty hunter (Robert Patrick) slides into the mix, and through car chases, horrifying hotel trysts, failed escape attempts, snake attacks, and more, we're supposed to believe that Sandy and Diana actually start to become friends. One thing that never really pops up? Humor.

McCarthy loses much of her charm and essentially turns into a foul-mouthed female Kevin James, performing pratfalls, forcing jokes, and spewing profanities at every opportunity. It's a shame she's stuck with such godawful material here, since she's proven in films like John August's underrated The Nines that she's actually a solid actress who can handle comedy and drama alike. In Identity Thief, her character ruins peoples' lives with absolutely no remorse, and I spent the entire movie hoping she'd go to jail. Despite Mazin's best efforts to pepper the film with scenes that are supposed to make us empathize with this woman, and despite McCarthy's sincere attempts to make those moments work, they all fell flat; no amount of road trip bonding shenanigans can make up for a lifetime of screwing people over.

Bateman clearly isn't afraid of being pigeonholed as the flummoxed everyman, since his work here is practically the same as every other comedy he's been in since playing nice guy Michael Bluth on "Arrested Development." I'd love to see him take an acting risk and step outside of his comfort zone, but he excels at playing this kind of character, so I can't fault him for finding something he's good at and milking it. Those who have enjoyed his previous work will likely find him watchable here, since his performance is the only aspect of this movie that didn't have me wishing someone stole my identity and had to watch this nonsense in my place.

Gordon is a fine director, but writer Craig Mazin (The Hangover Part II, Scary Movie 4, Superhero Movie) should never work as a screenwriter again. He has a fundamental misunderstanding of how his own characters should react to scenarios, and when the audience spends most of a comedy's run time questioning every decision every character makes, the film is not accomplishing its goal. Weak attempts at raising questions of body image, self esteem, and social class structure are the only laughable elements in this "comedy," and I'm hoping Bateman and McCarthy are smart enough to choose better material than this in the future. Sandy Patterson's identity isn't the only thing stolen in this film: Mazin's atrocious writing robbed Identity Thief of any memorable moments, worthwhile laughs, or quality of any kind. Until next time...

Bullet to the Head

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 15:25:34 PST

Bullet to the Head is an ode to the kind of movies director Walter Hill (The Warriors, 48 Hrs.) and star Sylvester Stallone used to make in their 1980s heyday. Even though this is their first time collaborating, the two are clearly cut from the same cloth; worse, they both share in the delusion that modern audiences want to relive mediocre action cinema. The Expendables films at least have the gimmick of uniting some of the biggest action movie heroes of the 80s and 90s, but Bullet to the Head brings things back to a tired buddy cop scenario, pairing Stallone with Sung Kang (The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift) as the unlikely duo goes out for revenge. This film would have been terrible even among its competition if it was released thirty years ago, but it's especially awful when dumped in the early months of the 2013 movie landscape.

Bullet to the Head
Director: Walter Hill
Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Sung Kang, Jason Momoa, Christian Slater, Sarah Shahi

Sly plays Jimmy Bobo, a hitman with a conscience whose partner is killed in the opening minutes by a ruthless mercenary (Jason Momoa) after a job didn't go exactly as planned. Bobo wants revenge, but get this: his old school ways don't mesh with the tech-savvy methods of the Asian detective (Kang) who teams up with him to get to the bottom of all this, which - as you can imagine - results in some totally hiLARious banter between the two of them. There's a half-baked plot about land development and bribing Senators that's supposed to justify the existence of Christian Slater and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje's villainous characters, but we all know from the trailers that the real showdown comes in the form of an ax battle between Stallone and Momoa in a condemned warehouse. Did I mention Stallone's character has an estranged tattoo artist daughter (Sarah Shahi) who gets kidnapped and then becomes the de facto love interest for the straight-laced detective?

(*sighs, drops chin to chest, closes eyes, rubs bridge of nose*)

Stallone scowls and mumbles through his lines in tones so low it's as if his throat has been replaced with a pit of gravel, but he manages to do a decent job of selling his performance considering how terrible the script is. He delivers some of the most generic voiceover narration ever committed to the page and fires off racist, stereotypical, and ignorant comments about Kang's ethnicity as quickly as he pulls the trigger on brutal headshots. It's Rush Hour minus the personality of Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan, but instead of being funny, the insults in Bullet to the Head are so politically incorrect they come off as cringe-inducing.

Kang doesn't seem to care what's happening, but he isn't miscast so much as his entire character should be cut out of the film. He shines as the laid-back Han in the Fast and Furious movies while he plays off of meatheads like Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, but when he's left alone to deal with Stallone's rouge tough guy behavior, he's way out of his element. As an actor, he doesn't seem to get the vibe the old guys on set are going for, and he seems as out of place as this movie does being set in New Orleans. (Characters wander through a jazz band performing in the street just to ram the point home). Momoa and Agbaje are all physicality and no charisma, and though Christian Slater tries his best as a whiny bad guy, you can never shake the feeling that he, like this entire film, belongs in another era.

Even though the movie is bad, at least it quickly bounds from one set piece to another, and Stallone leaves such a trail of blood in his path that his devotees might actually find a few moments enjoyable. Considering Hill is a relic from another time, though, I was expecting the action to be a lot more coherent; instead, he seems to have fallen prey to fast cutting and overbearing musical cues, so we're robbed of any memorable action beats. The sound design is an aural assault, with every punch sounding as if it would kill the recipient upon delivery, and though the characters don't react realistically to the violence they encounter, I wouldn't be surprised if you felt bruised walking out of the theater. It's clear Hill wants you to feel something, but I'm not sure that "annoyance and a headache" meet his criteria. Despite the movie's overwhelming shortcomings, credit goes to Hill and his team for bringing the film in at a brisk 90 minutes.

I'm sorry to disappoint those who hoped the teaming of Hill and Stallone would result in recapturing a slice of action cinema's past glory, but Bullet to the Head should have stayed in the chamber. Until next time...

Parker

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 00:00:19 PST

Parker is the latest film to feature author Richard Stark's literary character on the big screen, though it's surprisingly the first to actually refer to him as "Parker." Mel Gibson played the same dude in Payback but he went by "Porter," Lee Marvin's character was called "Walker" in Point Blank, and now it's Jason Statham's turn to play the career criminal with a chip on his shoulder. But regardless of the name, this movie couldn't make the lead character interesting or memorable, leaving Statham and the rest of the cast trudging through an anemic script under a director with no sense of style.

Parker
Director: Taylor Hackford
Starring: Jason Statham, Jennifer Lopez, Michael Chiklis, Wendell Pierce

Parker (Statham) is your standard thief who lives by a code - don't steal from those who can't afford it, and don't hurt innocent people - and he's been living like this for a long time. He loves his wife (or girlfriend, not sure if that was ever made explicitly clear) but her father (Nick Nolte) has no problem hooking him up with potentially easy scores around the country. The film opens with one of these, a convoluted heist at a state fair in Ohio from which the team (including Michael Chiklis, Wendell Pierce, Clifton Collins, Jr. and one other not-so-famous guy) barely escapes with their loot. But when Parker doesn't agree to donate his share of the spoils toward a bigger gig the gang has coming up, they shoot him and leave him for dead on the side of the road. Big mistake.

But after a halfway decent set-up, the movie begins to drag and never picks back up. Parker begins to initiate a series of moves that make little to no sense for someone of his supposed intellect, the worst of which includes him wearing a cowboy hat, speaking with one of the worst Texas accents I've ever heard and creating an elaborate backstory for this Texan character in order to discover where his former teammates purchased a house in West Palm Beach, Florida, so he can exact his revenge. Of course, the annoying real estate agent (Jennifer Lopez) gets caught in the mix, and while these sorts of intricate plot details might work in the pages of a crime novel, the story beats translate horribly to the pace of an action film.

The thing about most movies is that we've likely seen the basic plot in another film somewhere else, and that might be doubly true for action movies. So when another familiar story comes into theaters, one of the surefire ways to get movie lovers to check it out is to shake things up a bit with the presentation. There was a time when you used to be able to cast a superstar and that would be enough to bring people in. But even though The Last Stand (another action film currently in theaters) featured the return of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the studio still hired Korean director Kim Jee-woon because his kinetic visual style would spice up the screenplay a little. Hiring Jason Statham indicates the studio wanted a certain type of movie, but bringing on director Taylor Hackford (Ray, The Devil's Advocate) was not the person to actualize that vision.

Discounting 2010's Love Ranch - because, really, who's ever heard of that movie? - Hackford hasn't made a feature film since 2004's Ray, and it seems that he's lost whatever touch he may have once had. Parker is completely passionless, and even the sequences that should be exciting (the occasional heist and action climax) are devoid of anything compelling. Hackford is the current president of the Director's Guild of America and has eighteen credits to his name, so it's clear he knows the technical aspects of putting a film together; that being said, you can practically feel his apathy oozing through the screen, seemingly infecting every performance and filmmaking decision along the way. Even the moments in which the film desperately tries to try to comment on something vaguely engaging - a hamfisted Robin Hood metaphor here, a critique about the decadence of the rich there - all fall flat.

Chief among this film's many faults, though, was casting Jennifer Lopez in a lead role. Her character is a walking disaster, but you can't blame that on Jenny from the block. (The blame for that, and the rest of this godawful script, falls on writer John J. McLaughlin.) Lopez is simply miscast, never imbuing her character with a personality or the emotional heft needed for us to care about what happens to her. Maybe hiring her was political, or maybe the studio thought her presence would ensure a specific audience quadrant, but her work here feels about as cold as the decision to bring her on board. The audience is supposed to be invested in whether or not she ends up with Statham's character, but the movie's dull narrative and cliched plot points stacked the deck against her; any actress would have had to have possessed an incredible amount of charm and screen presence to breathe life into that character, and Lopez has nothing of the sort.

The supporting cast is rounded out by people whose work I respect and admire in other things, but they're all totally wasted here. Michael Chiklis, who was a force to be reckoned with as the morally complex Vic Mackey on FX's "The Shield," is reduced to a second-rate bruiser without a brain. Wendell Pierce, who played the terrific Bunk Moreland on HBO's "The Wire," is relegated to a leering idiot who speaks maybe ten lines in the whole film. Clifton Collins, Jr.'s character has even less personality and even less to say and do. It's like the casting director thought the same thing we did - "hey, these guys are good, let's get them!" - but they all forgot to read the script before signing on. Or again, perhaps they felt pressured to work with Hackford because of his position in the DGA. Either way, the fact that I'm talking about this and can't tell you one interesting thing that any of these people did in the whole film tells you all you need to know about how effective they are as characters.

I'd like to respond in advance to any criticisms in the vein of "what did you expect? It's a Jason Statham movie?" by pointing out that just because Statham leads a film doesn't mean it has to be bereft of value. The Bank Job isn't great, but it's not a total slog to sit through like Parker, and last year's Safe was actually one of the better movies he's toplined even though its premise was far dumber than this film's. Parker should have been an enjoyable heist flick, but thanks to some miserable decision-making on nearly every conceivable level (even the score, production design, and costumes are subpar), it's instead the sort of pathetic attempt that just makes you feel sorry for those involved. Until next time...

Side Effects

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 21:00:09 PST

Steven Soderbergh remains one of the great cinematic chameleons behind the camera, able to craft a convincing heist thriller with as much apparent ease as an introspective story of male strippers or a multi-tiered drug drama. And while you might think you know what Side Effects is about, Soderbergh expertly guides us through the twisty plot and uses some clever surprises to keep us guessing, making this a much more enjoyable experience than the uninspired trailers make it out to be.

Side Effects
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Rooney Mara, Jude Law, Channing Tatum, Catherine Zeta-Jones

It's a shame that this is Soderbergh's last theatrical release before his retirement (although for HBO subscribers, he does have the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra hitting the small screen this year). The director seems to have found a very interesting second wind in the past couple of years with movies like Contagion, Haywire, and Magic Mike, and while there isn't much that thematically ties those projects together, they're all unmistakably Soderbergh films. He reteams with Contagion writer Scott Z. Burns here, and while Side Effects appears on the surface to be a similarly cold exploration of pharmaceutical drugs and their effects on humanity, the film is surprisingly much more of a mystery noir that just happens to use medicine as a backdrop.

The story follows a young woman (Rooney Mara) who suffers from depression after her husband (Channing Tatum) gets out of prison in the wake of a four year stint for insider trading. She visits a therapist (Jude Law), who meets with her previous doctor (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and he prescribes her some medication, which has some devastating effects on her marriage. The therapist gets caught in the aftermath, and as his life falls apart around him, he has to figure out what went wrong before he loses everything and everyone that's important to him. I realize that summary sounds very vague and potentially boring, but I'm omitting large parts of the story in order to preserve the viewing experience for you; when a movie's marketing doesn't automatically give everything away, I figure I don't have the right to do so in my review in case you haven't seen the movie yet.

The film broaches some interesting and topical material concerning the responsibility doctors have for their patients' behavior, the moral grey zone of participating in pharmaceutical testing, the difference between being guilty and committing a crime, and much more. I was all ready for another Contagion, but halfway through the film, this shifts to something totally different. While Contagion followed multiple characters and kept them all at a distance in favor of making a larger statement about the way the world would react to a global outbreak, Soderbergh and Burns give us a much more personal story here, manipulating our emotions by slowly leaking bits of information as the film churns forward. We're very much meant to feel certain things at certain times, and while being manipulated like that can often feel insincere, this felt very much like a classic thriller with Jude Law as a modern day Bogart tasked with solving a larger mystery before it's too late. Because of that shift, a lot of those compelling topics are brushed aside in favor of the narrative. (It's a good story, so I didn't mind too much, but I couldn't shake the feeling that there's another movie buried in here in which Soderbergh could really explore these issues without being sidelined.)

Mara plays the fractured, depressed lead role very well, and the actress has one of the best blank expressions in the industry. That doesn't sound complimentary - and isn't, really - but it actually works in her favor in this film. Soderbergh seems to bring out the best in Channing Tatum (who has been something of a muse as of late) and Catherine Zeta-Jones (who hasn't made a good movie in years), and he also secures another wonderful performance from Law as the conflicted therapist. It's a pretty tight story, and there isn't a lot of room for supporting performances outside of the main four, and in because of that it almost feels like it could have been a stage play almost as easily as a film. The camerawork is fine (and the alternating warm and cold lighting helps to identify Soderbergh's distinct aesthetic), but there's nothing about this movie that screams, "see this in a theater."

Side Effects is an intelligent, adult mystery that succeeds largely due to stylish direction, a good script, and solid acting, despite occasionally treading in conventional waters. This feels like the sort of mid-budget movie for adults that studios don't really make anymore. Open Road Films, who has a questionable track record since forming in 2011, seems to be a haven for this kind of lower to mid-budget fare, though, so hopefully they can continue to produce content like this and Joe Carnahan's The Grey and less like the Wayans spoof A Haunted House. Until next time...

The Last Stand

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 12:00:00 PST

Watching The Last Stand is like pouring a shot glass full of a classic western, dropping it into a full glass of Red Bull, and chugging the whole concoction. Korean director Kim Jee-woon makes his English language debut here, and his first Hollywood effort is brimming with frenetic pacing and a plot that's so brilliantly simplistic, it's sort of shocking it hasn't been done before. Sure, we've seen "stand off" movies in the past, but few have the kind of furious energy, lighthearted humor, and focused vision that Jee-woon brings to the table. In short, The Last Stand is fast-paced, action-packed, and a total blast.

The Last Stand
Director: Kim Jee-woon
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Johnny Knoxville, Forest Whitaker, Luis Guzman, Jaimie Alexander

Barring a couple small appearances in the Expendables movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger has been out of the acting game for nearly ten years; color me surprised, then, that Arnold doesn't miss a step when returning to the genre that he so dominated in the 80s and 90s. His advanced age serves as the fodder for some occasional jokes in this film, but the guy is still incredibly capable for a 65-year-old. Everything you liked about him back then, he still has: the charming lughead persona, the inability to pronounce a few English words correctly, and, of course, the larger-than-life screen presence. Most of his huge action moments come around the third act, but they're worth the wait. Where the script lacks in iconic one-liners, it makes up for with creative and crowd-pleasingly ridiculous kills as we watch Arnie and Co. send the bad guys to meet their makers.

Schwarzenegger plays Ray Owens, a sheriff in a small, sleepy American town that borders Mexico. He used to work narcotics in the L.A.P.D., but sh*t hit the fan and he headed for a more quiet life elsewhere. Surrounded by well-meaning (but mostly untrained) fellow officers played by Luis Guzman, Jaimie Alexander, and Zach Gilford, as well as a local gun lover played by Johnny Knoxville, Owens and his unlikely crew become the last line of defense when a notorious cartel leader (Eduardo Noriega) escapes the clutches of the FBI (led by Forest Whitaker) and tries to race a souped-up sports car from Vegas down across the border. It's a modern western - High Noon by way of Neveldine/Taylor - but in lesser hands, it would have felt tired and played out. Thankfully, it's in the hands of the man who made the terrific Korean western The Good, The Bad, The Weird.

Jee-woon isn't afraid to go overboard with violence, and in fact the movie gets relentless during some of the firefights between evil henchman and unprepared lawmen and in its cartridge-filled climax. But after seeing Tarantino's latest opus Django Unchained and that film's usage of practical effects and squibs, situations in The Last Stand are almost cartoonish in comparison because it uses mostly digital blood added in post-production, removing some of the realism from the story.

To be fair, realism doesn't seem like it was high on anyone's list of priorities for this film...and that totally works. After all, this is a movie in which a bad guy sneaks up on two speeding FBI SUVs in a sports car, does a 180 in front of one of them, slams on the brakes, and ramps one of them off the front of his own car for the other to crash into. There are a few "holy sh*t" moments like that, and most induce laughter at how outrageous they are. It reminds me a lot of some of Arnie's big 90s action movies: bombastic and preposterous, yes, but also sort of endearing how hard the filmmakers tried to give us moments we haven't seen before.

There's also a decent amount of humor, led mostly by Schwarzenegger's deadpan reactions to things and the amusing supporting cast, which serves to balance the tone when things occasionally get dark. Many of the townsfolk conveniently leave to follow the local high school football team to an away game during the weekend of this big showdown, but the people who stay behind (including a particularly no-nonsense granny) also provide some of the movie's biggest laughs. Perhaps there's something to be said about the homegrown justice being doled out by gun-toting locals in this movie in the wake of the mass gun murders that have happened in America over the past few months, but I'll side with Schwarzenegger's feelings on the matter: guns in entertainment are separate from tragedies of real events, and films shouldn't be blamed for the actions of people who are mentally unstable.

Frankly, I had my doubts going into this film about whether or not Schwarzenegger could successfully come back after being away from acting for so long. But if he continues to team with visionary directors who consistently elevate material and writers who can craft stories that play to his strengths, then it's possible audiences will return to see a former relic of the action genre come back to shake things up a bit. Everyone loves an underdog story, and while in some respects his character's story in The Last Stand is a good metaphor for Arnold's own career trajectory, I have a feeling we haven't seen the last of The Governator. Until next time...

Gangster Squad

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Pearson) — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 11:36:54 PST

Great production design, props, and locations can only get you so far in a period piece, and even with a stellar group of talent in front of the camera, Ruben Fleischer's Gangster Squad is a empty and tonally inconsistent film that may be the most dumbed-down gangster movie ever made. The film loves its R-rating, showcasing ridiculous violence every chance it gets, but it's a shame that the only audience that would likely fall for the movie's gags - 15-year-old boys - are too young to legally see this in theaters.

Gangster Squad
Director: Ruben Fleischer
Starring: Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn, Emma Stone, Anthony Mackie

It's the late 1940s, and transplanted gangster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) is slowly taking over Los Angeles. World War II may be over, but the war against organized crime in L.A. is just getting started, and the city's crusty police chief (Nick Nolte) essentially gives bruiser cop John O'Mara (Josh Brolin) carte blanche to get Cohen and his drug-running thugs out of town. Despite initial protestations from his wife, O'Mara rounds up a motley crew of cops who speak his language, including the slick-talking charmer Wooters (Ryan Gosling), technical guru Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi), gruff sharpshooter Kennard (Robert Patrick) and his sidekick Ramirez (Michael Pena), and the rough and tumble Washington (Anthony Mackie), to bring Cohen to justice using their very particular set of skills.

It's a solid premise, and one that's been mined in dozens of gangster movies before this one. (Most recently, though, this territory has been covered in the video game L.A. Noire, which hits on all the story beats that appear in this film in a much more satisfying way. Since directly comparing a video game to a film isn't quite fair, I'll leave it at that.) Just because the topic has been covered before doesn't automatically mean this film couldn't stand among the classics in the genre, but from the opening moments, it became clear that Will Beall's infantile screenplay wasn't going to allow that to happen. This is Beall's first produced feature screenplay, and as a former LAPD cop, you'd think there would be a hint of intelligence under the surface of his swagger-filled, guns-blazing detective story. Sadly, that's not the case.

The dialogue tries so hard to be smooth and cool, especially from Gosling's womanizer character ("Who's the tomato?" he asks in regard to his redheaded co-star Emma Stone), but even though the leads look dashing in their tailored suits and fedoras, they can't make this nonsense sound good. There is no subtlety here. Penn's evil gangster delivers insanely cheesy one-liners with all the personality of a brick wall, and savage violence flies in and out of the movie like a haphazard tornado lost in the multiplex, occasionally wandering into your theater every few minutes before abruptly leaving. (Don't you hate those?) "You know the drill," Penn says to his henchman, immediately before said henchman drills a man to death. It's that kind of surface level stuff that I would have absolutely loved when I was 15, and if I hadn't seen The Untouchables, L.A. Confidential, or any other respectable gangster noir film, my fifteen-year-old self might have proclaimed it one of my favorites of the year. (Although to be fair I must give props to the best line of the movie: "The whole town's underwater, and you're grabbing a bucket instead of a bathing suit.")

As with many stories set in this time period, the shadow of the war looms large over the male psyches here. But though the end of the war is directly addressed multiple times - the chief asks O'Mara to fight in "occupied territory" yet again, O'Mara's wife continually has to remind him that the war is over, and O'Mara even uses it as an inspirational point in a speech to his men - the movie never actually takes the time to dig in and explore what that means in the context of these different characters. All of them essentially act the same, busting into every situation ill-prepared and with guns at the ready, but when Gosling asks Brolin if he "wants to win or die trying," it isn't a meaningful character moment. It's just another thing that sort of sounds cool. There's no emotion behind the delivery or the response; despite the surface differences between characters (the smart guy, the sharpshooter, etc.), these men are all soldiers that are constantly pulling triggers even when they don't have guns in their hands.

Along with a lack of satisfying character development, grown men often behave like children here, refusing to learn from their mistakes even after they admit to making them. The gangster squad bursts into place after place, roughing up Cohen's thugs and getting into close calls without ever having a solid plan, and at one point I started hoping that one of them would die quickly just so it would give the rest of them their cliched newfound resolve to finish the case and avenge their fallen brother. There's a simplified wire tapping story shoehorned in, but after watching HBO's "The Wire," it makes these supposedly professional characters look like total morons. At times the movie is a live action cartoon (complete with a comical jailbreak straight out of a Looney Tunes episode), but then it becomes gravely serious, and then switches again to a sort of pop-infused fun, soaking up the glitz and glamour of the era. It never finds its footing, and as a result the whole film feels like it's treading water for the whole of its runtime.

Ruben Fleischer, who earned some geek cred with his work on Zombieland, makes some pretty baffling choices when it comes to the action sequences. A night car chase midway through the film was especially disappointing, with poorly established spacial relationships rendering it almost completely unintelligible. Speed ramping (ala Zack Snyder) is employed often, and whether it's Mickey Cohen's bulging vein swinging at a punching bag or a series of Christmas decorations systematically destroyed in a hotel shootout, there is nothing interesting about the effect on display here. Whatever novelty it once had has long worn off, and it's going to take some sort of monumental shift in usage to convince me that it should ever be used again by anyone.

As for the cast, Brolin is stoic and hard-jawed enough to pull off the one-dimensional lead character. Gosling is good (even with a strange affectation), but his schtick gets old by the halfway point. Emma Stone is fine as a piece of eye candy, but third act attempts to turn her into something more than that are laughable. Ribisi is the movie's moral center, a nice change of pace from weasels and weirdos he's been portraying over the past few years, and Mackie's talents are totally wasted here. (He randomly throws knives at people. That's about it.) Penn clearly put some effort into his portrayal of Cohen (complete with what appeared to be flesh-colored Play-Doh attached to his face, his visage channeling the villains of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy), but again, he can only do so much with comically bad dialogue.

So I'll leave you with this awesome joke I just came up with: Gangster Squad? More like Gangster Squandering A Great Premise, am I right? But seriously folks...for a film with so much talent on the screen, it's a shame that this script was so abysmal. And with writer Will Beall having already taken a crack at the screenplay for Warner Bros. upcoming superhero teamup Justice League, something tells me that Marvel is going to continue its cinematic dominance for years to come. Until next time...