Nathan Adams and the Temple of Reviews

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2012) */*****

2012-02-20T19:21:00.000-06:00

The first Ghost Rider movie, directed by Mark Steven Johnson, is a contender for worst comic book movie ever, which pretty much puts it in line to be a contender for worst movie ever. When that massive turd hit theaters it didn’t seem very likely to anybody that a sequel would ever be made. But, you know, that’s the magic of opening weekends and overseas grosses. Pull in enough that first weekend, before people know what they’re dealing with, and pull in enough overseas, where big, broad stupidity seems to be the thing that best crosses language barriers, and even the crappiest of movies can be viewed as a success. So here we have Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, a sequel brought to us by Crank directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. Now that the Ghost Rider character is in different creative hands, how does it fare? Not well. This fetid sequel is nearly as bad as the original, but seeing as it is a bit more self-aware about its badness, not quite as laughably so; which pretty much ruins the whole point of going to see a Nic Cage movie.

That’s the second thing you need to know about this sequel. One might think that if you were going to take a second crack at Ghost Rider you would want to distance yourself as much from that abysmal first film as possible; start things completely over, put together a completely new cast... but here he is, Nic Cage, once again playing Johnny Blaze. This time he’s wrapped up in a plot that involves the Devil who turned him into a demon (Ciarán Hinds) hunting down a woman (Violante Placido) and her child (Fergus Riordan), because the kid is his spawn, and the fresh, young body he plans on transferring his consciousness into. Along for some of the ride as well is Moreau (Idris Elba), some sort of leather jacketed, French monk who’s presence in the story seemed completely unnecessary (though I can’t complain because, hey, Idris Elba), and a secondary bad guy who is hired to track down the boy and his mother, and who later gets turned into a demon named Ray (Johnny Whitworth).

I smooshed all of the actors’ names and the brief plot synopsis into that one paragraph because this is the last I will mention any of them. Who the characters are or how the actors fared in their roles isn’t worth discussing. This movie is so bad that they never became a consideration. Instead, I’ll just be going down a check list and talking about how stupid everything is. First off, the script is terrible. If you want to give any action movie an immediate kiss of death, making the story heavily feature a kid is a pretty sure way to do it, and, sure enough, the kid here is terrible and the fact that everything centers on him ruins any chance that this movie will be any fun at all. Note to all future filmmakers: leave little kids out of your action movie. It never works!

This script is so haphazard that you can’t even begin to analyze how effectively it tells its story, because it has a hard enough time even making sense from scene to scene. Once the kid is kidnapped Cage and the mom interrogate a goon to find out where he’s being held. Upon receiving said information Cage instantly jumps on his motorcycle, which is a sort of magical, demon motorcycle that goes about a million miles an hour, flies across the country in a screaming trail of fire, gets to the bad guy’s hideout and finds that... the mother is already there? Then there’s another scene, where the devil is turning our dying secondary villain into a demon in the middle of a murder scene. There are officials there attending to the scene, and then this guy casually walks up to one of the (still dying!) bodies, starts fiddling with it, turns it into a demon, then they both casually walk away, while none of the EMTs on the scene say or do anything about it, or even really notice that it’s happening. I don’t want to go off on a rant about how little anything in this movie makes sense, because its not worth it. Just know that this is a film that you can’t think about the particulars of for even a second while you’re watching it.

One thing I will mention is how vague and inconsistent this film is about Ghost Rider and his powers. In the first film, they made a point to mention that Cage can’t feel the effects of what happens to the Rider, and then they have a later scene where he’s feeling some effects from being shot that blatantly contradicted the statement. I thought that was about the dumbest thing I’d ever seen in a movie, and such stupidity continues here. First off, the extent of his powers and what he is capable of is never explored or explained, so the action scenes that he partakes in have no tension whatsoever. As far as we’re concerned this is an unstoppable, all powerful entity who can do whatever he wants; so putting him in tense, dangerous situations is near impossible. Secondly, they continue to be completely inconsistent about what can and can’t hurt him. At one point he gets shot a few times and wakes up in a hospital bed extremely beat up and covered in scars. At other points he’s literally taking shots from rocket launchers and he still keeps coming, seemingly none the worse for wear. Every basic lesson of how to make an action scenario compelling or purposeful is completely ignored in this rock stupid movie, so everything you watch comes off as boring and groan inducing.

The stupidity extends to the film’s dramatic moments as well. Over the course of the movie Cage’s character spends about ten minutes with the mother and the son, and has about one conversation with them a piece; but for some reason we’re asked to believe that they’ve bonded together like some sort of family unit. Cage has literally just met these people and he’s always touching them and gazing at them with affection. It’s totally creepy. Then there’s a big finale where the kid is in a sort of trance and the devil is trying to transfer his brain into his body. Cage tries to talk him into fighting the process by basically saying, “Remember that thing we talked about the one time we talked?! You can’t turn evil because of how deeply our shared words touched you!” It’s ridiculous. If there wasn’t time to grow relationships between these three characters because there was too much dumb action stuff you wanted to get to, that’s fine, just make a dumb action movie with no character elements. But don’t spend five minutes faking it so you can pretend like your awful story has some sort of dramatic climax where the characters reach catharsis.

The script isn’t the only thing here worth complaining about either. Top to bottom, everything is horrible. The music is so generic and cloying that its cues actually telegraph what’s going to happen in scenes before anything occurs. The effect is that you feel like a blind person being led through the film by hand. And, as irritating as this sounds, perhaps it was necessary, because the camera work here is so bad that there are quite a few moments where you wouldn’t know what was going on otherwise. I mean—for real—this is some of the worst camera work of all time. I’m not going to harp on it, because it’s something that everyone probably expects going into a Neveldine and Taylor movie, but there it is. The camera is constantly moving, the shots are all pushed in too close, and generally you can’t follow what’s going on at all whenever things get actiony. At the worst point the Rider hops on a big crane-type machine that turns flaming and demonic to take out all of the bad guys and the visual storytelling of the film basically degenerates into looking like Transformers on fire. It felt like the directors were just mocking me. Transformers was hard enough to watch not on fire, what are you trying to prove?

There are a couple scenes here and there where the mess of failed sequential storytelling pauses to show off a stylized visual flourish or two, scenes where the Rider is depicted with a sort of pop-art aesthetic, and these brief moments made it look like the directors were at least trying to do something interesting with the material; but they were too brief to matter. They come off as complete afterthoughts rather than evidence that craftsmanship was a goal that anybody set when approaching this project. Instead of thinking about any of the visual choices that Neveldine and Taylor made, you spend a lot more time thinking about things like, ”What the hell was with that one scene that was still in English but randomly subtitled?”

We need to talk about Nic Cage. Once Cage’s name gets attached to a movie it stops getting looked at as a normal movie and starts getting viewed as a “Nic Cage movie,” so we should address how Spirit of Vengeance works on that level. These days you know that a movie with Nic Cage is going to be horrifically bad, but there’s always the train wreck factor of wondering how insane he can get that makes the experience of sitting through them worthwhile anyway. The one good decision that the creators of this one made was the choice to have Cage constantly fighting the influence of the Rider throughout the whole movie. It gave him plenty of opportunity to grunt, yell, and make funny faces; and generally he’s completely Cageing out every second that he’s on screen. And, as an added bonus, this time the Rider clearly has Cage mannerisms as well. In the first film the demon came off as a stiff, generic CG creation, but here they had Cage doing the performing even when he’s on fire. So the weird, jerky, robo-bird body language never stops. Like I said in the opening though, the first Ghost Rider seemed to be a little less self-aware of what a bad movie it was, so this one ends up being a little less fun to mock. But it still has enough of that how-stupid-is-he-gonna-get factor going for it that concerned onlookers documenting Cage’s descent into madness should find plenty of material to chew on.

Rampart (2011) */***

2012-02-18T23:12:00.001-06:00

The last time Woody Harrelson teamed up with director Oren Moverman, he was playing a gruff recruitment officer in The Messenger. Harrelson’s character was a bit of a hard ass in that movie, but he only played a supporting role to Ben Foster’s protagonist. This time around Moverman is directing Harrelson as a character that’s more than just gruff, he’s downright villainous; and also he happens to be our protagonist.

Rampart is one of those corrupt cop dramas, set in L.A. at the end of the 90s, back when the LAPD was still feeling the sting of the Rodney King fiasco. Harrelson plays Dave Brown, a Vietnam vet turned police officer who isn’t afraid to rough somebody up to get a confession, put a gun in someone’s hands to justify shooting them, or shake a dealer down for his cash. When we first meet him it’s during a pretty innocuous lunch scene, and even there he’s spouting racist lingo and bullying a female officer, treating her like a child and telling her she has to finish all of her fries before she’s allowed to leave. Basically, Brown is a real jerk.

Creating a character who is a cop and also a jerk isn’t really enough of a reason to make a movie though. There have been roughly one million corrupt cop movies down through the decades, so in order to make another one and have it stand out, a filmmaker is going to need to have some tricks up his sleeve. The problem with Moverman’s latest is, for the majority of its runtime, it doesn’t have anything special going on at all. Brown is divorced, he has kids who he’s not the best father to, he’s a womanizer, he’s down on his luck, and everything he does seems to stem from the rage and helplessness that comes from extreme loneliness. That’s fine and all, but it’s nothing that hasn’t already been done to death on film. Moverman gives us clichéd situations, hard boiled dialogue that sounds like it could have come out of any number of early 90s thrillers, and scenes of Brown wallowing in the shadows while smoking cigarettes; it’s all very moody, but ultimately shallow. I really like Harrelson as an actor, and I was thrilled to see him getting a starring role here; but I would have liked him to get slightly better material.

One aspect of his character that I did enjoy was a running gag that he’s good enough at weaving technical jargon into his bullshit that he’s often able to bully higher ups into ignoring his misdeeds with threats of litigation. I wish the way he uses charm and pseudo-intellectualism as a crutch could have been explored further, but instead the focus is all on angsty, angry guy stuff. By the end of the film Rampart does manage to go places that I haven’t seen many cop dramas go before; it goes so far down the rabbit hole that we spend time watching hallucinatory sequences as Harrelson’s character loses his mind, and we spend time in seedy, underground sex dungeons as we watch him attempt to hit bottom. This isn’t just a dirty cop, this is a Bad Lieutenant level dirty cop, and in the third act he had started to get interesting, but the movie just took too long to get there. I would have responded stronger to it if it was all crazy, all the time.

I feel like I’ve done a lot of complaining here so far. There were plenty of things I liked about this one too, so don’t write it off as not being worth your time. Mostly, this one is worth your time just because the acting is all really good. Harrelson is strong in the lead, despite his character being a generic archetype. Also, Ben Foster shows up playing a homeless man in a wheelchair, and every second that he’s on screen is just a delight. He’s authentic as a downtrodden wacko but, at the same time, still charismatic in the role, and I wish his short-lived relationship with Brown could have been a more important part of the story. Robin Wright plays a sort-of love interest for Brown, a mysterious intentioned lawyer named Linda. She had a lot of sadness going on in her eyes in this one. This Linda character has been through something, but we’re not told what; her past is only hinted at through Wright’s facial expressions and closed off body language. It’s a subtle performance, yet I almost didn’t recognize Wright because she was looking so hard-traveled and dour.

Moverman and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski do good work with the camera as well. Rampart has a documentary feel. A lot of the camera work is handheld, and often we’re peaking at the action from behind something, getting half of the conversation obscured. When done wrong, that can be really annoying, but here it’s pulled off well enough that it added an element of realism and voyeurism to the story that elevated it a notch. There was one conversation scene in an office where we got a Michael Bay-style camera spinning circles around the room that I don’t really want to talk about, but other than that I would say that Rampart manages to look great and present its story effectively. If you’re in the mood for a cop movie some lazy afternoon, this would be a good one to grab and check out. But seeing as it only has a limited theatrical release, I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it. Ultimately, it doesn’t live up to the potential that The Messenger showed.

This Means War (2012) /***

2012-02-18T04:28:00.000-06:00

The thing about This Means War is that it should have been the perfect date movie. The story of two rival government operatives (Tom Hardy & Chris Pine) competing over the same woman (Reese Witherspoon) has a little something for everyone. For the guys in the audience you’ve got the spy games, which add a kinetic thrill to all the relationship talk. For the ladies you have the romantic element to take the bad taste of all the macho posturing that comes with the action scenarios out of their mouths. And the comedic slant that everything is presented with, heck, that appeals to everyone. Yes, This Means War has so much wide spread appeal that it almost seems like it was created by committee. Or, actually, maybe it was made by committee, and maybe that’s why it’s so miserably bad.

The overarching problem that sabotages every aspect of this film from top to bottom is that every second you’re watching it you’re aware that this was a product that the people involved were paid to make and not a story that anyone was excited to tell. McG is a director that I’ve generally always disliked. He seems to be more focused on spectacle than he is character or story, but he’s not good enough at creating spectacle to make that remotely worthwhile. But the thing is, his stuff is generally too dumb and disposable to react to it very strongly, so he kind of gets a pass from the public. And here we’re dealing with the same sort of thing. Sure, This Means War is unsuccessful and incompetent at every level, but it’s just a stupid romantic comedy, and it’s never so bad that it’s infuriating, so who really cares? Turns out, not the director, not the actors, and certainly not me.

First off, let’s talk about the action element. It doesn’t work for several reasons. Of course, there’s the typical for McG reason that the man just doesn’t know how to construct, shoot, and edit an action scene, so every time someone tries to run, jump, fight, shoot, or what have you, it just comes off as choppy and incoherent. The camera never stops moving, the edits never stop coming, and it only takes about two minutes for the whole thing to become visually tiresome. But the action also doesn’t work because it just doesn’t get enough focus to mean anything. There’s a mini-subplot about a dangerous criminal who is coming after our protagonists because they caused the death of his brother, but it’s completely boring, it’s relegated to the background, and whenever it pops up it just feels like it’s taking away from the romantic plot that gets the bulk of the focus. Plus, its inclusion made things painfully obvious that the third act was going to degenerate into a stupid chase scene where the characters would have to deal with surviving instead of the destructive consequences of the lies and infidelities they perpetrated in their interpersonal relationships.

Which I guess brings us to the romantic element. It doesn’t work because these characters are all just so miserably gross and unlikable that you don’t want to see any of them end up happy. It’s not just that these two knuckleheads are agreeing to compete over a woman as if she were some sort of sports trophy. That’s creepy enough on its own, but it’s typical romantic comedy nonsense, and to be expected. No, the real grossness of this film comes in the way these guys play out the competition. They use government resources, they divert attention from anti-terrorist concerns to focus on their love lives, they bug the girl’s apartment, they stalk and spy on each other. There’s actually a scene where Pine’s character just says “patriot act” to justify using surveillance equipment to document somebody’s most intimate moments, and it’s treated like a light gag. Sickening. And this girl, she’s got no problem juggling two guys at once, leading both of them to believe that she’s serious about having a monogamous relationship, sleeping with them, meeting their families... yet when she finds out that they’ve actually known each other all along she has the nerve to pull the “I trusted you!” card. Can you believe that we’re supposed to become invested in all of this inane duplicity? People be tripping.

The action and romantic elements look like the work of a skilled genius when compared to the comedy, however. This movie is so uncomfortably unfunny that I found myself audibly groaning every five minutes or so at the lameness of a gag, or the stupidity of a situation. As soon as we meet the two agents and see what they do we get a scene where they’re chewed out for being reckless by their always screaming commander; and with none of the self aware parody of films like National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1 or Last Action Hero. This wasn’t included for fun, it was just hackneyed and obvious because the lazy screenwriters couldn’t be bothered to come up with any situations that weren’t well tread and easy. We’re treated to a scene involving a grill where Witherspoon and Pine trade grill-related sex puns that could have come out of a joke book from the 40s. We sit through multiple scenes of characters sneaking around in the same space, unaware of each other, like a big budget episode of Three’s Company. And, once again, none of it comes off as self-aware or playful. Instead what we’re watching just plays as out of touch attempts at humor that would have been more at home at a Dental Convention Talent Show (not that I’m an antidentite).

It’s almost fruitless to talk about how the acting is, because none of the members of the cast are given anything worth doing. And that’s especially a shame here, because the three principals are all very talented performers (to varying degrees). Witherspoon’s Lauren is nothing more than a generic dream girl; cute, successful, and fun, but without any unique or discerning personality traits whatsoever. This is the sort of role that she could sleepwalk through, and generally that’s what she seems to do. She isn’t good, nor bad, but mostly she just seems disinterested. And who can blame her when it feels like she’s already regurgitated this material time and time again?

Chris Pine and Tom Hardy are both fine actors and charismatic to boot, but they’re a little mismatched here. Pine has some charm, he has some presence, I totally bought him filling the shoes of William Shatner and taking charge of the crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek; but he just doesn’t have what it takes to stand next to Tom Hardy. Hardy is a once in a generation talent, a concentrated adrenaline shot of star power, and it was absolutely inconceivable that Pine was going to go toe-to-toe with him here and come out looking like anything other than a second banana. Joel Edgerton shocked me by refusing to wither in Hardy’s presence in Warrior, but here things just don’t work out. Pine is scrambling, working double time to try and keep up with the intrigue that just naturally oozes from Hardy’s pores, and he ends up coming off as desperate and cloying, like a big screen version of Tom Haverford (and I’m not talking about the scene where he does actually try to play the big shot regular at a posh nightclub, there he came off more like Jim Carrey in The Mask).

Before we wrap up the acting portion of this review, special mention has to be given to Chelsea Handler. While the rest of the members of this cast are good actors slumming it with bad material, Handler is actively, wretchedly bad as Witherspoon’s sassy best friend. She is given mouthfuls upon mouthfuls of dialogue, and she isn’t able to make any of it sound natural. She’s dead in the eyes, not engaging with Witherspoon on any human level, and she delivers her lines with the rapid-fire, sardonic rhythm of a standup comedy routine, never at any moment trying to recreate the natural cadence of two people having a conversation. She’s showing up to do schtick, to work in her routine, and she stands out like a sore thumb whenever she’s on screen. Forget any chemistry between her and the other actors, Handler and the rest of this film don’t even feel like they exist in the same universe, and I can’t figure out how the decision to include her could have possibly came about (*cough*studionotes*cough*).

If you want to end things on a nice, meditative note, all of the reasons this film doesn’t work can be summed up pretty well by the way it chooses to end. The whole film builds up the choice—Hardy or Pine, Pine or Hardy—and all of the tension is supposedly supposed to come from the fact that one of them will be chosen and the other will be heartbroken. But, of course, this is a film that was built by committee and rigorously sculpted through focus groups, so there needed to be an easy out happy ending for everybody. Well, there is, and it’s the one that you’re going to see coming a mile away. The obviousness isn’t why it’s so awful though. It’s awful because of the way it happens, and the way it needlessly paints one of the side characters as being horrendously shallow and painfully irresponsible. The guy who doesn’t find love with Witherspoon, he gets a consolation prize alright, but the film just expects us to ignore the fact that the person he ends up with is an awful, awful woman. I’ll give this one a small bit of credit because Hardy is fun to watch at times, but, other than that, This Means War is a tedious movie that’s silly and immoral, yet still manages to somehow be joyless. Good grief.

The Vow (2012) /***

2012-02-14T12:17:00.000-06:00

The thing you should know about The Vow before you sit down to watch it with a loved one is that it isn’t the movie it was advertised as. This isn’t a movie about the transcendent power of love. It’s not about a man who refuses to quit fighting, no matter what, when it appears that the love of his life has been lost to him. That was all just manipulation by the marketers because Valentine’s Day is coming up. Actually, this one is much more an exploration of identity than it is a romance, although it does have plenty of romantic elements. The Vow tells its story with a bit more subtlety than you might expect from a movie that uses phrases like “once in a lifetime love,” and it grounds itself in reality much more than you might expect from a story dealing with amnesia. That’s not to say that this one isn’t a pick appropriate to go see with a date on Valentine’s Day, however. While The Vow isn’t anything special, or even a success, it’s still solid enough when stacked up against the usual, sappy nonsense that men get dragged to on February 14th.

The couple we’re focused on here are Paige (Rachel McAdams), a former rich girl from the suburbs who dropped out of law school to move to the city, be poor, and become an artist, and Leo (Channing Tatum), an almost impossibly supportive and loving Bohemian type who plays music and runs his own recording studio. They met at the DMV, fell in love, and had a charming, hipster wedding alongside all of their charming, hipster friends. Tragedy strikes one snowy night after they take in a film at an art house theater, however. After stopping at an intersection and unbuckling themselves to do a little spontaneous canoodling, the slick roads cause a gigantic truck to smash into their car, and the impact sends Paige hurtling through the windshield. The effects are that she is temporarily put in a coma, and when she wakes up the damages to her brain have caused her to forget the last few years of her life. She doesn’t know that she has dropped out of law school, doesn’t know that she has stopped talking to her family, doesn’t know that she is no longer engaged to a smarmy, preppy type (Scott Speedman), and doesn’t know that she and her husband have ever met. No, as far as she’s concerned, she’s still a daddy’s girl law who lives out in the suburbs, eats meat, and is soon to be a lawyer. What’s a Channing Tatum to do?

Romantic movies like this are usually only as good as their leads, and this is the first place we can look to understand why I consider this one to be a poor to middling effort. Rachel McAdams is fine here, as she usually is in most things. When Paige wakes up and suddenly starts acting like a spoiled little brat who spurns the affections of her hopelessly devoted husband, the instinct is to hate her. But McAdams is always able to show enough conflict on her face, and give us enough indication through her body language that she’s a nice person who would like to remain loyal to her man, but who can’t be expected to live a life that she doesn’t remember, that we never fall into the trap of hating her; even when she starts doing things that we don’t like. We have sympathy for her, even though Leo is the one who really takes the brunt of this tragic accident’s consequences.

Channing Tatum, though, I didn’t respond to him as the male lead nearly as strongly. And though this guy gets a lot of hate thrown his way for being a big handsome lump who can’t really emote or project any kind of charisma, I don’t think that the fact that he mostly fails in this role is his fault so much as it is the fault of those who cast him. Tatum never gets any big scenes where he’s asked to have any meltdowns, and if anything Leo’s reaction to the reality of losing the love of his life is pretty subdued, but I thought that he did a decent job of selling the little crying and dramatics that came his way. The problem is that Tatum is just too chiseled, beautiful, and dull to pull off the scraggly hipster character he’s supposed to be playing. You can’t put a vintage sweater and a goofy hat on the captain of the football team and tell me that he’s the artsy type who lives in a trendy loft and spends his free time writing songs in cafes. I’m just not going to buy it. And though Tatum pulls off the limited crying stuff he’s asked to perform well enough, in a scene where he’s supposed to be giving an impassioned speech about the magic of a live recording session, and the warmth of sound that you just can’t get composing on your computer, he just looks like a real dope. He doesn’t sell it at all, and I started to understand where all of the hate for his performances comes from.

Plus, Leo is just never a complex enough character for us to sympathize with. He’s going through about the worst thing I can ever imagine, but you can’t help but think that he could just walk out of the situation and be in just as amazing a marriage within six month’s time. He’s painted as a superman whose love is purer than everyone else’s, whose heart is more open than everyone else’s, who is handsomer than everyone else, is a better musician than everyone else, is more charming than everyone else, has cooler friends than everyone else, a better life than everyone else, a career that’s booming more than anyone else’s... it’s as if the screenwriters and casting people wanted to create an ultimate fantasy man for women to watch this movie and swoon over more than they wanted to create a real person who we could relate to (a shocking accusation, I know). I can’t help but think that if someone other than Tatum had been cast, we might have got a more nuanced characterization, some bigger choices might have been made as far as how to depict the dramatics of losing the love of your life, and the whole movie would have been a lot more affecting. As is, the romance angle of the film almost takes a complete backseat to the Paige reconnecting with her estranged family storyline. When Leo vows to do whatever it takes to make his wife fall in love with him again and then gives up about fifteen minutes later the whole film just starts to feel hilariously pointless.

The crafting of the Paige character doesn’t help in that regard either. The pre and post amnesia Paige are just too different from one another for us to buy any of the drama that she’s going through. Somewhere in the second act it’s revealed that her change of character was jumpstarted by a secret that she learned about her father, and a fight that followed. Admittedly, it’s kind of a bastard of a secret, but the change that it spurns is ludicrous. So a girl doesn’t feel that she can trust her dad anymore, does that mean that she would respond by changing her career, her political views, her diet, the way she dresses, her taste in literature, etc... ? It’s all a bit much. Somebody can go through some immense changes over the course of a few years, but these two Paiges are complete opposites, and it all feels falsely crafted in order to create drama: first between Paige and Leo when she can’t remember him and then between Paige and her family when she relearns what she had unlearned.

The great failure of this film as far as its status as a romance goes is that the drama between Paige and family supersedes the drama between Paige and husband. Toward the third act of the film Tatum’s character disappears almost completely, and the whole thing becomes about Paige’s struggle to figure out who she is. That’s a shame, because I think the people who go to see this movie are in it for the husband vowing to make his wife fall in love with him again plot more than they are the art school vs. law school question. And, actually, the romantic elements of this story were generally better told than the identity elements. Sure, there was a lot of clunky voice over narration from Tatum that came off as mushy nonsense and didn’t amount to anything, but at least it wasn’t as ridiculous as watching a woman decide whether she wanted to live her life as either Anne Coulter or your hippy aunt. The Vow works better than most contemporary romances because it doesn’t abjectly fail at anything, and it, at least, doesn’t try to be funny. You can go see it without being afraid of walking away completely miserable. I just wouldn’t recommend you do so unless somebody cute forces the issue.

Short Round: The Weather Man (2005) /*

2012-02-14T04:44:00.000-06:00

I remember seeing the lame advertising for this one back in the day, thinking it was a dumb movie where Nic Cage goes a little bit nutty and starts carrying a bow around everywhere, and happily writing it off. But after a bunch of years of people telling me that it’s surprisingly good, I was finally motivated enough to give it a chance. I’m glad I did, because this is one of the most complex, interesting movies I’ve seen in a long while. I’d blame the guy who cut the trailers for doing a bad job of beating the drum for this one, but really, how do you adequately describe this weird ass movie?

Cage is playing a Chicago weather man, one whose life is pretty much in the gutter. His wife has left him, his dad is dying, and people randomly throw fast food items at him on the street. The world as he experiences it is a confusing, aggressive place always looking to knock him on his ass and humiliate him. When there’s counselors trying to molest your son, there’s no way you can keep kids from picking on your chubby daughter, and you find yourself powerless and impotent in every aspect of your life, how do you go on? I’ve never seen a film that has painted a better picture of what a confusing, assaulting experience it is to get out of bed every morning and go out into the world. This movie nails it.

This strange piece of work is giving you a dissertation on camel toes one minute, and then it’s getting poignant the next. It goes inappropriate places, but it always feels honest. Cage’s inner monologue is so scattershot and random, it sounds like my brain in a way no movie narration before ever has. And Cage himself, of course he’s insane and awkward, but finally he’s in a role where his crazy persona accentuates the material rather than takes it over. There are so many layers of ideas here, the tying of corporations to the physical assaults, the fact that Cage is a weather man, the guy who can never get it right, the confusion of the old man in the face of modern crassness... I’m going to be digesting it all for a while. And that’s exactly what I loved about this movie. That and the fact that it’s the only place where you can hear Nic Cage explain to Michael Caine what a Frosty is. Lord, this movie is so dark—we’re all doomed!—but isn’t that kind of funny?

The Woman in Black (2012) */***

2012-02-07T18:17:00.000-06:00

Some might say that if you’ve seen one haunted house story you’ve seen them all. There’s not really many different directions we’ve seen these movies go. Generally a person gets locked in a spooky house, they start to see shadows out of the corner of their eyes and hear mysterious thumps in the distance, and eventually the disturbances get so intense that they develop an air of danger, even likely causing someone physical harm. Then, when the danger reaches a fever pitch, we get the big finale, which is generally a full body apparition of a ghost doing something crazy. Does it have to be that way though? Isn’t there plenty of room for somebody to make a different interpretation of what a spirit haunting a house would be like? If there is, The Woman in Black isn’t the movie that’s going to show it to us. In crafting and conception this is a traditional ghost story in every sense of the word. And while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s also not very memorable.

Daniel Radcliffe is our star here, and he’s playing a down on his luck lawyer tasked with the job of traveling to an abandoned old house that is going up for sale soon, going through all of the legal documents that are stored there, and doing something lawyery with them. This task isn’t as easy as it sounds, because the townsfolk are pretty adamant about not letting anybody get to the remote estate, and if you’re somehow able to find a ride out to the house, you then have to deal with all of the ghosts that live there; including the woman in black, who has a penchant for causing the death of children. Given such impossible odds, a lot of people might just quit, but Radcliffe’s character has bills to pay, a son to support, and this is his last chance at making good on a duty and not losing his job. The stakes are huge.

As far as the acting here goes, all of the spotlight is pointed directly at Radcliffe’s face. Much of the film’s runtime is him alone with the things that go bump in the night, so the task of keeping us engaged is largely on his shoulders. He does a pretty good job. I guess after eight Harry Potter movies he has quite a bit of experience stumbling around in the dark and looking scared, so he was probably the most qualified person to take this job. And as far as him making the transition from being Harry Potter to doing other roles, this was probably a safe way for him to do something similar but show a little diversity at the same time. Still, qualifications and newly grown sideburns and beard stubble aside, I’m still not convinced that Radcliffe is appropriately cast. I’m not ready to accept him playing the role of a lawyer, especially one who is raising a child. This kid is barely old enough to be done with his undergraduate work, and he looks it. Probably he would have been better off choosing something more young adult and less adult adult for his first post-Potter starring role.

You can put all of that aside though, because where a haunted house movie lives and dies is in its scares, and The Woman in Black’s greatest strength is its spookiness. Director James Watkins and his crew do a masterful job setting the mood. The sets are elaborate and lived in, and that goes a long way toward making a ghost story legitimately scary. You have to feel the history in everything you’re looking at, imagine the untold horrors that might have taken place there over the years. This film’s Eel Marsh House is the best scary building I’ve seen in a movie in a while, and that’s because it includes all three of my important pillars of creating a horror movie; shadows, cobwebs, and fog. Scaring an audience is all about establishing an atmosphere of dread, an environment that invites doom. You have to convince an audience to let you scare them, and renting a fog machine, turning down the lights, and stringing up some fake webbing goes a long way toward accomplishing that. Too many modern movies try to scare me in a set that looks like the guy who lives across the street from me’s house. That’s not an environment where I’m ready to be scared, it’s an environment where I’m ready to watch the big game.

This movie takes advantage of the infamous “jump scare” as well. You know, those moments in a horror movie where there is sudden movement out of nowhere, usually a cat jumping on a table or something, that are designed to get a cheap rise out of the more nervous members of the audience. The secret to these is first engrossing people in your story, convincing them that danger lurks everywhere, and then not telegraphing when you’re going to go for a scare. You want to get them when their guard is down. The Woman in Black cheats a bit by cranking up the volume of whatever is causing our scare to ear splitting levels. That’s a pretty common trick, but it feels a little cheap here because all of the scares are just so much louder than everything else going on. Sudden noises like this could get somebody to jump in the middle of an Adam Sandler movie, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve earned the reaction.

Still, plenty of the scares here are earned. With as much time as you spend alongside Radcliffe going room to room in this mansion, chasing after specters, you’d think that you would get bored after a while. But this one manages to always ramp up the danger and creepiness so that the horror elements build upon one another and eventually reach a crescendo. If only there was anything in this movie that struck me as new, anything that didn’t feel like well-worn material, this could have actually been a really strong horror film. Unfortunately, from the townsfolk ducking behind doors when Radcliffe arrives in town, to the over reliance on little children acting creepy, to the storyline where the ghost is sticking around because it has “unfinished business” (business that I guess it plans on finishing by making a bunch of thumping noises whenever someone is around), this movie offers nothing but haunted house clichés that you’ve already seen a million times before. It’s not a bad time while you’re actually watching it, but it’s not something that’s going to stick with you after you leave the theater. Sleep soundly.

Seriously though, what’s the deal with all of these little children in horror movies? They’re like the new go-to. Weird little kids can be scary every once in a while, but you know what’s really scary? Weird grown adults!

Nathan Adams and the Temple of Reviews

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2012) */*****

Rampart (2011) ***/*****

This Means War (2012) **/*****

The Vow (2012) **/*****

Short Round: The Weather Man (2005) ****/*****

The Woman in Black (2012) ***/*****

Rampart (2011) */***

This Means War (2012) /***

The Vow (2012) /***

Short Round: The Weather Man (2005) /*

The Woman in Black (2012) */***