Category Archives: Reviews

Aug 09 2013
Leave a comment
Reviews

“THE BOURNE LEGACY” Review (✫1/2)

This movie has the wrong title.

The Bourne Legacy is a misconstrued mess, an absolute miscalculation and train wreck of a film that it has no business being made into a movie in the first place.  I hated this idea months before this was released, and I hate it even more now after having seen it.  Who, in their right minds, thought it was a good idea to make a Bourne movie without Jason Bourne???  That was my biggest concern going into the movie.  Believe me though, fellow moviegoers: that is the least of your worries.

Taking place shortly after the events of The Bourne Ultimatum, The Bourne Legacy shows the repercussions of Bourne’s actions, how it affects Treadstone, and what marks it leaves on the people involved.  Erik Byer (Edward Norton) is a government official who was directly involved with the affairs of Treadstone during its days of operation.  Shortly after Jason Bourne escapes their custody, however, Byer believes that all of the agents now are a potential threat to the government, and is convinced that he needs to shut the project down in order to protect themselves.  By “shut the project down”, I really mean kill all of the agents in the field.

One of these agents is Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), an experienced field agent who is carrying out a mission in Alaska for Treadstone when the order was released.  While taking refuge in a wooden cabin with another fellow agent out in Alaska, they are suddenly attacked by robot jets, and Cross barely escapes with his life intact.  Surviving only because of the medication he is on (Treadstone agents are required to take two pills, a blue one for physical boosting, and a green one for mental boosting), Cross looked into his stash to realize that he only has a couple days worth of medication left.  Now low on food, supplies, and ammunition, Cross must now find a way to get back to America and survive against Treadstone long enough to find a way to counterattack their onslaught.

Let me start with the most obvious flaw here: Tony Gilroy.  Looking at his filmography, you would think he would be the best man for the job here.  He was credited as co-writer for the three previous Bourne movies, he wrote and directed the Oscar-winning drama-thriller Michael Clayton as well as the 2008 caper film Duplicity.  I enjoyed all of those movies, and thinking that this one would be the same, made the mistake of thinking that it would be just as good.

Trust me, this couldn’t be any more of a dissapointment.  Everything wrong with this movie has everything to do with Gilroy’s script and direction, which couldn’t be more forced, erratic, confusing, and half-lapsed than this.

The problems start with the premise: a Jason Bourne movie without Jason Bourne is a bad enough idea.  But let’s take a step back here and try to be open with this.  Let’s just say, for facetious effort, that Aaron Cross’ story is just as fascinating and compelling as Bourne’s is.  What are the conflicts?  In his first three movies, Jason Bourne’s struggle was against his morality, identity, and the confronting of his past.  What is Cross’ magnificent, epic struggle?  Survival by trying to find a green pill.  If this movie dwelved any more into the conflict than it did, I would have said Cross was a junkie.

“Funny”, I think.  “I don’t remember these pills being used in the original trilogy”.  Correction: I vaguely remember them.  In a brief flashback sequence in The Bourne Ultimatum, I remember Jason Bourne taking a blue and green pill during his initiation into Treadstone (this memory is hazy though).  Bourne obviously didn’t need to take the pills further because his body adapted to the drugs.  Here, Cross is dependent on the drugs like a junkie is on cocaine, and if he doesn’t get his daily dose of the green pill, he’ll apparently revert to the level of intelligence of Forest Gump, according to him.

Okay, that’s fine.  Jason Bourne isn’t in the movie, check.  Super pills gives Cross super powers, check.  I would be able to buy the premise and its characters if A) it were handled well, or B) it was anywhere near as smart, interesting, or even remotely readable as it was to The Bourne Identity.  Here, instead of intelligence we get confusion, instead of cleverness we get forced easter eggs to earlier movies, and instead of interest we get on-the-nose, ham-fisted writing.  The editing in this film is choppy, leaping all over the place, jumping from one timeline to another, one flashback to the next, and it becomes so repetitive and convoluted throughout the picture that by halfway through I stopped caring about it.

Oh, I don’t deny Jeremy Renner is a knockout in this role.  Neither do I deny the talents of Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, and especially not Joan Allen or Albert Finney.  All of the performances are great, but the story is a complete wreck, and Gilroy clearly has no idea how to handle his premise or the cast he’s been given for this.  What more proof do you need, besides this convoluted script, an uninteresting story, and a tedious chase sequence at the end with a sharply abrupt cliffhanger?

This is exactly the reason why I hate sequels.  When done well, like the original Bourne trilogy, they are compelling, brilliant expansions furthering the story set up by the first one.  When done like this however, they are nothing but forced, awkward, nonsensical garbage.

Again, I ask this: why did this movie have to get made?  The Bourne Legacy is exactly what you expect it to be, a Bourne movie without Jason Bourne, equally without the compelling character drama or real conflict in it. And now they’re talking about a possible sequel to this mess.  Only if Jason comes back and kills Aaron Cross.  That’s the only way they can redeem themselves at this point.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Aug 09 2013
Leave a comment
Reviews

“42” Review (✫✫✫✫)

Thanks, Jackie, for showing us white folks how its done.

You’re not watching a movie when you watch 42, you’re watching a legacy.  You’re watching one man’s story as he started from the bottom, as a black baseball player living during the accursed segregation era of our country, who is suddenly called to greatness and is demanded to be a bigger and better person than he thinks that he is.  It isn’t entertainment as much as it is a retelling of one man’s life, and everything he had to go through during the turmoil and cruelty of the 1940’s.

This man, of course, is Jackie Robinson, the black man who did to baseball what Rosa Parks did to buses.  Portrayed here by newcomer Chadwick Boseman, the movie starts off showing the beginning of  Robinson’s career with the Kansas City Monarchs, a primarily black baseball team who gets treated the same way at a gas station in the way a homeless man would be.  Robinson doesn’t stand for it, but it doesn’t matter: he is soon recruited by a man in a black van asking him to come with him to meet with baseball executive Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford), who wants to be the first man in American history to recruit the first African-American ballplayer onto the Brooklyn Dodgers.

His assistants are baffled.  “A black baseball player on a white baseball team”?  What are his reasonings?  Rickey makes multiple excuses, from the financial benefits to simply being different.  It isn’t until later in the film where a much deeper reasoning is found in Rickey’s baseball history, though I dare not spoil it just for the sake of you being able to experience it yourself.

Eventually, Robinson has his meeting with Rickey, and he’s surprised when Rickey tells him that he wants to recruit him on the Brooklyn Dodgers.  There’s only one condition Rickey has for Robinson: he wants him to control his fiery hot tempter when white players act out unfairly against him.

“I don’t want a man who has the guts to fight”, said Rickey.  “I want a man who has the guts not to fight”.

There are two things that make this movie stand out from the typical baseball-biography picture: the director, Brian Helgeland, and its lead, Chadwick Boseman.  Boseman, who is mostly a no-name actor, dives headfirst into his character, and inhabits the role so well that it is impossible to think of anyone else replacing him.  You just need to see this guy in action: the way Boseman puts himself out there is just like how Robinson would have played on the field, from digging his hands in the dirt to firm his grip, to stealing second, third, and home bases like he was taking candy from children.  It’s especially funny watching him getting ready to steal bases: he jogs his legs together and shoots a look at players with a face that says “Come at me bro” to which pitchers get obviously frustrated at him.  Jamie Foxx couldn’t have done better than Boseman did.

But its just not the movements, the pitches, and the home-run hits Boseman delivers that makes him a convincing actor: his expressions are flawless, his dialogue delivery spot-on, and his performance so affectionate, with his every spoken line coming across truthfully and genuinely from the heart.  I could name multiple scenes in the movie, on the field and off, that genuinely touched me.  Perhaps the most memorable with Boseman was when he was out on the field ready to bat when a baseball manager starting shouting racial expletives at him.  I’m not even kidding: if every other word he was shouting wasn’t a profanity, it was the N-word.

This scene was powerful, frustrating, and maddening all at once, and we could feel our anger channel through Boseman when he had to hold his tongue, when he had to walk off the field, and when he screamed in the locker room, breaking his bat against the walls in furious anger.

Oh yes, many emotions were felt in this movie, and writer-director Brian Helgeland does a great job at expressing all of them.  Surprising, I think, that the same man who wrote and directed the tonally inconsistent A Knight’s Tale was able to make a movie this sincere and heartfelt.  I’m being unfair though: I forgot that Helgeland also wrote the screenplays behind movies such as L.A. Confidential and Mystic River, and here he brings that same sense of grounded realism from those pictures into this one.  Throughout the course of the picture, Jackie Robinson grows as a person and as a player, and so do the people around him.  Relationships become bigger.  Bonds become stronger.  Intimate details are revealed through each character to Jackie, and through his stressful, agonizing, and roller-coaster emotion journey Jackie becomes the hero that nobody expected him to be: not even himself.

If a weakness exists, I’ll admit that 42 is straightforward storytelling, with little room for originality or surprises.  That’s only because we already know the history though.  What 42 lacks in innovation, it makes up for in emotion, in gripping and well-written storytelling with a great cast compelling us through it, with especially one of the performances being completely unexpected.  The best moment of the picture comes after Jackie grows closer to one of the players, the player encourage to not feel fear when openly associating himself with a black man.  As they run back out to their respective places in the field,  the player calls out to him: “Maybe tomorrow we’ll all wear the number 42.  That way they won’t tell us apart”.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Aug 01 2013
Leave a comment
Reviews

“PITCH PERFECT” Review (✫✫)

Special appearance from the cast of “Glee”!  

Pitch Perfect is a predictable, formulaic film, a movie enveloped in its conventions, forcing in cliche characters, and bolstered only by its joyous music, which cannot help but seem misplaced in a movie like this.  It’s the sort of movie that doesn’t deserve the word “perfect” in its title.  I’d offer an alternative title, something shorter and more subtle such as simply Pitch, but I’ll advise against that for the fear of people mispronouncing it.

The story begins on a young and rebellious Beca Mitchell (Anna Kendrick), an aspiring DJ who dreams to one day become as popular as Skrillex or David Guetta (80’s kids, look them up on wikipedia).  Her father however, who just happens to be a professor at Barden University, encourages her to become more immersed in her education and to get more involved on campus.  Beca hates school and hates socializing even more, but will put up with it because her father will help her out with her DJ career if things don’t pan out at school like he wants them to.

She gets a job as an intern at a radio station, and ends up joining the Bellas, a group of diversified female singers who all compete at an acappella competition at the end of the year.  These girls are Aubrey (Anna Camp), the snotty, stuck-up leader of the Bellas, Chloe (Brittney Snow), the more civil and more approachable Bella out of the group, and Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson), a woman who is determined to throw herself out there despite her weight and her unattractive appearance.  Just so you know, I’m not calling her “Fat Amy” on purpose.  That is the specific name she instructed the Bellas to call her when they mistakingly called her “Amy”.  I’ll bet her mother is proud of that, hearing her daughter wanting to be called Fat.

The Bellas were disqualified from the last competition because Aubrey vomited all over the front row of the audience last year (believe me, that wasn’t a pretty sight to see).  Aubrey, as a result, is even more strict about protocol, behavior, and song selection than before, and so now she functions as a sort of an acappella Hitler to these poor college girls who are just trying to find their place at this university.

Let me say something here: there is something seriously wrong with your picture if your best comedy comes from a girl called Fat Amy and the worst involves girls swimming in pools of vomit.  That’s not figurative, by the way, that is a literal reoccurring joke in the picture.  This is perhaps the biggest problem with the picture over everything else: the comedy is not funny.  It is not original, clever, precise, or even remotely well-written.  It is unbelievable, insincere, forced, and extremely ham-fisted.

Why do I say this?  Because not a single laugh was genuine.  Nothing was funny.  The jokes all involve typical cliches or moronic conventions, things you can find easily on a television network like ABC or Nickelodeon.  What other examples do I need to give, besides the vomit jokes?  How about awkward parents, preachy life lessons, bad singing, rapping, stereotypes, hazing and topics about sex?  I’ll thought I was watching a musical here, not an episode of “Kids In The Hall”.  

Oh yes, this film is not funny, but even worse are its characters, who are so unbelievable and overly-dramatized that they can only be in a movie.  These girls are an annoying, rambunctious sort, a group of absent-minded drama queens who worry only about what tradition they uphold or which boys they are sleeping with.  I know they’re meant to be seen as overly-expressive college archetypes, but for Pete’s sake, at least try to be more creative.  “High School Musical” had more interesting characters than this.

Anna Camp is both spoiled and paranoid, a woman who is an over-exaggerated negative picture of sorority girls.  Snow is meager, idle, and useless, there only to inspire Beca to join the Bellas, but not much else since she’s so passive when confronting Aubrey.  Kendrick is good as Beca, but not really that compelling, and even when she first appears on screen we get a sense that the script is going to force us through some deep, meaningful character romance even though it isn’t really that deep or meaningful.  The most compelling and talented actress here is Rebel Wilson as Fat Amy, who is so spirited and so enthusiastic in her role that she ends up more appealing than any of the other sorority brats in this movie.  Her attitude and her humor was uplifting and energetic, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she served as a sort of inspiration for overweight girls everywhere.  Dare I say I was turned on by her energy?  No, but she was close.  Really close.

Ultimately, Pitch Perfect is a flat, typical experience.  It provides nothing we haven‘t seen before and its immature handling only reveals more of its desperate copycat nature.  Why, then, am I giving it two stars when it’s story clearly deserves one?  That is because of the music.  If the movie accomplishes nothing else (and it doesn’t), it has the most beautiful covers and acappellas I’ve ever heard, even better than what most of what the TV show “Glee” produces.  There was one great moment where Kendrick even does an original acappella with only her voice, hands, and a plastic cup to use at her instruments.  That does not happen by insincere chance, fellow readers.  That is genuine, passionate talent, one that is evidenced in every beautiful note in these acappellas (although I don’t understand how a woman is capable of singing in baritone.  That’s another issue though).

Oh boy, am I going to get roasted for this.  What, I wonder, do people find so entertaining about this movie?  Look, I don’t expect a perfect film.  I don’t go into these things expecting to dislike them from the outset.  All I ask is that you have good singing, a solid story, and appealing characters for me to appreciate.  Here, the singing is incredible, but the dialogue is flat, the story is predictable, and the characters are more annoying and high-strung than the Kardashians.  Pitch please.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Jul 30 2013
Leave a comment
Reviews

“NOW YOU SEE ME” Review (✫✫✫)

And now you don’t.  

We open on a black screen, similar to how a magician opens up his show behind the secrecy of a red curtain.  A deck of cards can be heard flipping through the background with the presence of a calm, cool, and serene voice to accompany them.  “Pick a card”, he says.  “Any card”.  But before his volunteer can pick a card, he is quick to remind her “But look closely.  Because the closer you look, the less you will actually see”.

The words of a true magician, and the fact that he flipped this deck and actually picked the card I choose impressed me even more.  This character is named Atlas, who is played by Jesse Eisenberg, and he is a street magician on such a skill level to where he can make skyscrapers light up in the night.  As he impresses a crowd of ongoing viewers, one stands in the audience with a hood over his head quietly observing Atlas.  We can’t see his face and we don’t know who he is, but he carries a card in his pocket, and leaves it for Mr. Atlas at the end of the performance.

Atlas isn’t the only magician to receive special treatment: three other magicians have also been observed by this strange visitor and have been left cards for each of them.  There is the mentalist Meritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), the pickpocket Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), and the escape artist Henly Reeves (Isla Fisher).  All four of these talented magicians have been recruited by a secret cult called “The Eye” to carry out a secret mission for them.  One year later, they come together in their first show as “The Four Horsemen”: and during their show, they rob a bank all the way in Paris while still performing in Las Vegas.

The FBI are called in to investigate, and they bring in Agent Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) to arrest and interrogate the four horsemen.  Pressing as he is, the horsemen are equally as clever and deceptive.  Henly is spinning chairs, McKinney keeps reading his mind, and Atlas ends the interrogation by taking off his handcuffs and snapping them onto Rhodes.  The rest of the film shows Rhodes chasing the four horsemen, trying to figure out their plot, and to stop them before they succeed.

This film is all about style over substance, a movie that is more concerned with tricks and showcase over character depth and dimension.  Do I care about dimension, however, if the film is more than fun enough to take it over?  The success of movies do not just come from how deep or complex they are.  They also come from how well-made the picture is, how sharply the cut is edited, and how cleverly the narrative is structured.

And boy, if Now You See Me is anything, its definitely clever.  Directed by Lois Letterier (Transporter 2, The Incredible Hulk) and written by screenwriters Ed Solomon (Men In Black) and Boaz Yakin (Remember The Titans), Now You See Me is a movie driven to the brim with its cleverness, its wit, deceit, and effervescent charm in its characters, in what they do, and how they do it.  In many ways, this movie reminds me of caper films such as Oceans Eleven and The Italian Job: its a movie where characters cleverly trick and deceive their pursuers and expose them to their traps and their decisive plans.  They don’t use muscle, brawn, or big guys with guns to get what they want: they use their wits, their brains, and their thievingly cunning plans to accomplish their goals in the plot.

Of course, these plans weren’t inherently inspired by the four horsemen in themselves: someone from the shadows has helped them with this plan, and is always monitoring these horsemen from shadows of secrecy.  Tonally, the film achieves what it desires, and throughout the conniving plot we’re always wondering a key mystery: who is the fifth horseman?  Why did he enlist in the help of these four?  Who could it possibly be?  Is it one of the FBI or Interpol, pretending to be on one side while coyly playing for the other?  Or is it another mystery card player, one who has hidden behind a long-aged myth and has hidden himself from all cards in the field?

This isn’t just a caper film: it is a complex and fascinating mystery, and the cast of characters is all the rogues gallery in this police questioning.   Mark Ruffallo does well as Dylan Rhodes, and in small moments of intimate revealings he shows a man who was once a boy who will always hate those in higher power oppressing the helpless underdogs.  Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman make great cameos, and each play a role we don’t normally see from them, Caine being an antagonistic money monger and Freeman being an observant expose’ of schemes.  Eisenberg, as always, is a knockout in anything he does.  Here his character combines both the social awkward and invertedness of The Social Network, and the coy, cool, sleek confidence of Brad Pitt from Oceans Eleven.  Don’t ask me how he does it, okay?  He just does.

And this is a film that has been bombasted by critics.  For what?  A few quotes I pulled from Rottentomatoes:  “Overcooked, overcomplicated and underinteresting, this heist caper turns into a mess”, one critic said. “Complicated nonsense”, and “…a flimsy plot whose logic disappears faster than a rabbit in a hat”.

There is some truth here.  Yes, the film is overcomplicated.  Yes, it is elaborate and sometimes distracting.  Yes the characters are one-note and thinly written.  And yes, the twist ending is dangerous enough to make the entire narrative collapse on itself, let alone offering the threat of plot holes.

In other words, I’ll admit I don’t understand everything by the end of the picture.  And that’s precisely the point.  There isn’t any fun with a trick that has been exposed: the fun comes in with those trying to figure it out.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Jul 30 2013
Leave a comment
Reviews

“TRANCE” Review (✫✫✫1/2)

The pocket watch is mightier than the magnum.  

Trance is a fantastic art film, a mesmerizing and fascinating thriller that uses twists, turns, hallucinations, and narrow corridors as its tools to build suspense, and dialogue and performances to form sympathy for its characters.  Its surreal, twisted, strange, nonlinear, and non-conventional, but to dust with conventionality.  This is a great picture.

As the film fades in, we are introduced to Simon Newton (James McAvoy), an art auctioneer who takes us through the ropes of what his job entails.  He tells us of the extensive steps it takes to reserve a painting, the protocols his employers tell him to do when putting a painting up for auction and what steps he must take if a robbery takes place.  Their most valuable item is a painting by Francisco Goya called “Witches In The Air”, and his employers gave him precise instructions on how to preserve the painting if thieves do happen to come into the auction in an attempt to steal it.

Sure enough, thieves break into the auction and attempt to steal the painting.  This troop is lead by one named Franck (Vincent Cassel), and he is determined and headstrong into getting that painting.  Right before Simon puts the painting away, however, Franck cuts him off, a brief struggle happens between them, and Simon is knocked out, with Franck leaving with the stolen painting in tow.

When Simon wakes up, he realizes he lost his memory from the past two weeks.  When he’s finally released from the hospital, Franck pays him an unwelcome visit.  Turns out, all that Franck got on the day of the heist was just the frame of the painting, whereas the real article itself was transported to an alternative location.  Torturing him by peeling back his fingernails, Franck comes to find out Simon truthfully does not remember where he put the painting.  So he tries a different method of extracting information, one that involves psychology and hypnotherapy at the hands of one named Dr. Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson).  Together, they attempt to probe Simon’s mind, and begin their search for the painting Simon has kept hidden from them.

Here is a film that knows what it wants, a movie that knows its characters, their motivations, its story, and precisely how to tell it.  Director Danny Boyle, who is nearly a master at experimental cinema (if you don’t believe me, look at his hallucination sequences in Slumdog Millionaire or 127 Hours) does something very rare here: he intertwines and meshes characteristics of a narrative film with that of art and experimental cinema, making a truly absorbing, gripping, and fascinating experience.

Let me make something clear here, however: I hate experimental cinema.  Nine times out of ten they don’t make any sense, they seem relevant only to those making them, and they elicit a confused response rather than an emotional one from its audience.  Here though, the result is much different.  Everything is crystal-clear and fluid, the visuals dynamic and expressive, the editing cut together neatly and crisply. It’s like a mind game of cat-and-mouse, except the cat is willing to seek out help and the mouse is more lethal than both cats are lead to believe.

Oh believe me, my attention was unadverted throughout the entire picture.  While I didn’t understand everything immediately in the film, I understood what I needed to in the moment and the plot filled in the rest for me as time went on.  And what did I understand, more than anything else?  That these are sinful characters, decrepit criminals that lie, cheat, and connive their way to success and to financial gain.  Cassel was aggressive and talented as Franck, and while his character was despicable and loathsome at first, a softer side of him was later revealed so that the audience could come to terms with his character.  Dawson is as beautiful and motivated as ever, and while she too was at first a sympathetic figure, she later reveals a darker side to her character that even I didn’t expect.  I’m not even going to go into James McAvoy.  His performance was so specific and so wide-ranged that I was compelled to care for his character while at the same time hating him.

And yes, in case you didn’t pick up on it, the movie is deserving in its R rating.  It is violent, bloody, disturbing, graphic, and it has its vast share of nudity and sexuality, with some of the violence and sex combining in many gruesome scenes.  If this were any other picture, I would take off points for that.  But like Pulp Fiction and Taxi Driver, Trance is a film that uses its bleak content as a tool to tell a story and define character, to show an encompassing yet tragic story of three fatally flawed individuals who will torture, manipulate, and kill to get whatever they want.  You have to watch a movie like this long enough to realize the point when it stops being a thriller and starts forming into something greater: when it starts forming into art.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Jul 22 2013
Leave a comment
Reviews

“WHITE HOUSE DOWN” Review (✫✫1/2)

You’d be crazy running for a second term, Mr. President.  

Now here’s a movie that would give President Obama a heart attack.  White House Down, much like a film released earlier this film called Olympus Has Fallen are both about the same thing.  The white house is under attack by a group of professional terrorists, the president is in danger, and our brawn yet brave hero must step in to save him.  All you need is a ripped shirt, a clean-shaven face, and a lot of guns on this guy (not just automatic) and you’re all set.

Unfortunately, that’s all the information I can give you.  This movie is so thinly written that that’s the deepest I can go without giving any spoilers.  The only other information I can provide that could give you any clue on to what this movie is like is that the brawn, brutish hero is played by Channing Tatum,  the president is played by Jamie Foxx, and Tatum owns a daughter portrayed by the sweet and talented Joey King.

I’m going to get this out of the way: Channing Tatum should never play the lead in any movie ever.  He cannot act.  There is no sincerity in his voice, no fluid movement of his body, no expression on his face to show he’s feeling anything except for when he’s shooting at something.  The fullest his acting capability reaches in the movie is the eyedrops you see in his cornea when he’s “crying” for his daughter. I’m not even kidding.  His acting is so terrible, the only use Tatum is in the movie is to provide meat for the female viewers in the audience.

(And I will admit my jealousy here: I will never look as good as Channing Tatum does.  I don’t think its possible for any man to).

Where was I again?  Ah yes, Tatum’s acting.  As always he is a stiff, awkward, and uncomfortable actor, a perfect reason why he should never be the lead character in a movie.  Admittedly though, the dialogue isn’t helping him much.  His best lines in the movie involve something like: “You have to go out there and be President”, or “If this guy keeps making those sounds, I’m going to start looking at him.”

If the above description makes this movie sound appealing to you, you should see it.  White House Down is a big case of what-you-see-is-what-you-get: a movie filled to the brim with excessive action, big explosions, cheesy dialogue, and mediocre acting, with the minor exception of Jamie Foxx, who has the most patriotic and humorous dialogue out of any other character in the movie.  In one scene, he’s reciting the history of America so beautifully to his secretary of defense over the phone that one could mistaken him as a Lincoln who underwent skin surgery.  In another scene, he’s following Tatum up an elevator shaft to evade capture when this exchange happens between them:

Foxx: What you do, I do.

(Channing Tatum ninja moves across elevator).

Foxx: I ain’t doing that.

Foxx’s character was the most appealing, the most intelligent, and the most charismatic character out of the entire movie.  Everyone other character was overly charismatic and grossly unrealistic.  One radical baddie is so stereotypical and so overpumped with tattoos, facial hair, ego, and steroids that I expected him to rip off his skin and reveal that he’s the Terminator.  A tour guide portrayed by Nicholas Wright is more worried about fine china and precious artifacts than he is about his own life and well being.  Tatum’s daughter, however, is probably the most frustrating.  She comes off as annoying, careless, and extremely absent-minded in this film.  You might say this is because she’s a child, but tell me something: how realistic is it that a teenage girl like this is smart enough to run her own youtube channel and know more about the white house than the tour guide, and yet, she doesn’t know when to stay in the bathroom or to leave a building when its going to blow up?

I remember an argument I had with a friend of mine in my first year of college.  He was an experienced videographer who understood more about the film industry than any of the professors did in that department.  We were arguing about the differences between film and art, and he told me a direct yet simple statement:

“Film is not an art” he argued.  “Film is a business.”

While I desperately want to prove him wrong through films such as Inception, Life Of Pi and Beasts Of The Southern Wild, it is movies like White House Down that remind me that the industry does in fact exist and operate like a business intended for profit.  At least Roland Emmerich didn’t release this film in 3-D: that wouldn’t have helped my side of the argument one bit.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Jul 22 2013
Leave a comment
Reviews

“SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN” Review (✫✫✫)

And thank you, Thor, for keeping up appearances.

Take a deep breath and say it with me: Snow White And The Huntsman.  Doesn’t sound very promising, does it?  Like most fantasy films, Snow White And The Huntsman seemed set up for failure.  It’s centered around a very popular character portrayed by Bella Swan, the film is based around a fairy tale known universally in every person’s mind, and it seemed tempted to fall for a formula and let down its audience.  Believe me, that was the movie I was expecting when I went into the theater.  The movie, however, is much better than the title suggests.

Based on the famous original fairy tale by brothers Grimm, Snow White And The Huntsmanfollows the story of Snow White (Kirsten Stewart), a kind and beautiful princess of the land Tabor who would one day inherit the kingdom and the throne from her father King Magnus (Noah Huntley).  Before she was born, the narrator tells us that her mother pricked her fingers on a rose outside of her castle, with three drops of blood staining the snow.  Her mother told herself that she wanted a daughter as white as the snow, lips as red as the blood, and a spirit as strong and defiant as the rose she prickled.

This opening sequence was both fascinating and revealing, a deeper introspect into Snow White’s history that I don’t believe has been visited before.  Her mother eventually died giving birth to Snow White, and so King Magnus marries a strikingly beautiful woman named Ravenna (Charlize Theron), whom he rescued from a dark army made out of glass soldiers that tried to invade his kingdom.  Magnus is so stricken by Ravenna’s beauty, in fact, that she becomes his queen in less than two days.

You already know where this is going, don’t you?  Ravenna is, in fact, the dark and conniving witch leader of the dark army.  After killing Magnus in his bed, she takes Snow White, forces her into the upstairs dungeon, and seizes power over the kingdom as the newly appointed Queen of Tabor.

Years past, and the kingdom of Tabor falls into desolation and poverty.  Snow White has now become of age to become the new queen of Tabor, and has been blessed with the gift of kindness that will ultimately dethrone Ravenna from the throne.  Snow White eventually escapes from the dungeon, flees from Ravenna, and escapes into the dark forest, a place where people slowly lose their sanity and, in time, their life.

Raevenna cannot go to this place to kill Snow White, so she hires somebody who can: a huntsman by the name of Eric (Chris Hemsworth), a man who lost his wife to death’s hand long ago.  Nothing could convince this angry, tired old drunk to take this job willingly, but he takes the job nonetheless in the hopes of that the evil witch can revive his dead wife with her dark powers.  And so the adventures of Snow White and the Huntsman begin.

The biggest thing Snow White And The Huntsman has going for it is two things: its visuals and its handling of the premise, in that exact order.  Rubert Sanders, who is making his director debut through this picture, is very smart and very careful with his visuals, using very precise and expertly-detailed CGI in things like the Magic Mirror or in the dark army made out of glass.  But it isn’t just the visuals that makes the picture what it is: Sanders is smart enough to make the visuals mean something, and just like the camera he’s using to record the picture, the visuals are a tool he uses to tell a story and to instill some deeper meaning in the audience.

Take, for example, how Sanders uses the color of white in the picture.  The color itself only appears three times in the picture: once where Snow White rides and abandons a white horse on the beach, another time where she encounters and caresses a magnificent and beautiful white stag, and the last one being where she dies and is resurrected while being in a white funeral dress.  Go back and look at the pictures again and try to look at it through a more symbolic scope.  I promise you, if you see the picture as I do, you will see a princess abandoning her kingdom, returning to her kingdom, and finally, becoming the queen and leader that the kingdom deserves.

To find such complexion in a picture as this was both shocking and surprising, and the cast delivers just as much as the visuals do. Charlize Theron was menacing, evil, and conniving as the dark witch, and gives a stellar performance that would have had the animated version relieving in her pants.  Stewart, shockingly, is very grounded in her take as Snow White, and embodies everything her mother says she has: strength, beauty, courage, kindness, and heart, and this especially shows in the last half hour of the picture.  Hemsworth was equally as emotional and convincing as the huntsman named Eric, although there are a few brief moments where he breaks character and acts more like Thor from The Avengers.

There was another Snow White movie released earlier this year called Mirror Mirror, and it starred the lovely Lily Collins and Julia Roberts in roles opposite Stewart and Theron.  That movie was too silly and immature for its own good.  Here, we have the opposite problem: this film is dreary, dark, sullen, and bleak, a movie that for the first half of its runtime, fills us with dread, angst,  and sorrow.  Starkly different tone from the whimsical, uplifting veins of the original Disney classic don’t you think?  Whatever happened to Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy, and Dopey?

Still, its a good movie.  When there is color in the picture, it reaches out to you in striking detail, the cast is extremely strong, and the visuals and the camera angles combine to make a very provocative picture and a very sharp visual experience.  All you need left is Mjolnir and the rest of the Avengers, and you’ll be all set.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Jul 16 2013
Leave a comment
Reviews

“THE LAST STAND” Review (✫✫)

Stuff blowin’ up real good in Redneck City. 

The Last Stand is an actioneer’s action movie, a film so overstuffed with explosions, gunshots, profanity and testosterone that it might have been more appropriate as a video game rather than a movie. I had a friend of mine describe the movie as being “The guyest guy guy movie you’re ever going to see”. That much is true. Whether its the best one, or even a good one, is up to you.

Sheriff Ray Owens (Arnold Schwarzeneggar) has been the sheriff of Summertown for many years now after having quit his profession of being a cop in Los Angeles.  Summertown is a quiet place, a small town where crimes range from the Mayor parking his car in a fire lane to deputies firing at slabs of meat during lunch time.  In a small, quiet town such as this, Ray finds little excitement in his day to day routines and he is perfectly fine with that.

But one day, he receives unwelcome news from the FBI: a nation-wide criminal named Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega) escaped from the FBI’s hands and is fast on his way to the Mexican border, where he will be out of the FBI’s reach.  The only thing blocking his path: Summertown, which also sits on the United States border to Mexico.  Owens now has to rise up to the challenge to defend his home.  To defend its citizens.  This is the last stand.

This is Arnold’s first lead role after his 10 year hiatus as California’s governor.  Before that hiatus, Arnold was a standout in a slew of memorable action roles, including (but not limited to) Predator, Total Recall, True Lies, Last Action Hero, and my personal favorite, The Terminator and its sequel.  All of those movies are memorable, exciting, suspenseful, and sport great blockbuster entertainment.

Now look at The Last Stand.  This movie cannot help but look shoddy compared to those titles because of its plot, its only inconsistently funny and exciting, and whats worse, it depends on the forumula of repetitive action.  Wonderful.  We certainly don’t get enough of those, now do we?

Let’s take a deeper look at Arnold real quick.  The man has had a great career.  Before going into office, he was asked to be in these tense, highly riveting action roles, and he was damn good in all of them.  Now, he’s been dilluted to just standing tall and read lines as everyone else turns to him asking what to do when a drug cartel is ready to tear through his town.  Guys, come on.  This is the 42nd governor of California, not Angus MacGyver.

The rest of the characters aren’t really that helpful or compelling.  Zach Gilford portrays Officer Jerry, a guy who wants to see more action than he does but then gets his nose broke by the recoil of a gun.  Luis Guzman plays as a chubby mexican officer, and he’s so stereotypical he might as well have been portrayed by Anthony Anderson.  Rodrigo Santoro and Jaimie Alexander share a forced romantic conflict in the middle of all the bullets and gunfire, and while they’re coincidentally dodging all of the bullets amist their kissing, all I could think to myself was “Hey kids!  Find a shower!”

The worst miscalculation, however, is in the film’s villains: Eduardo Noriega as Gabriel Cortez and Rodrigo Santoro as his goatee, ponytail lackey.   Noriega is worthless as the main villain, and is just stuck to driving a car recklessly for more than two-thirds of the movie until the last 20 minutes where the climax calls for a chase scene.  But even worse is his lackey, who seems completely lacking basic motivation of reasoning behind his actions.

Take a look at the only three things he does in the movie: kill a farmer, build a bridge over to Mexico, and strike a raid across Arnold’s town.  Explain to me A) Why he killed the farmer and clued the detectives into his plan, considering the construction of the bridge was nowhere near the farmland, B) How the bridge to Mexico only took around 24 hours to complete, C) Why waste resources building a bridge when he can just bring in a helicopter for the escape, and D) What is the relevance for attacking the town when it means nothing toward Cortez’s escape?  His actions seem senseless, almost like his decisions are delegated by the script just for the sake of action sequences and explosions.  Why must an action film like this seem so mindless, so pointless in its structure and so artificial in its writing?

The film’s most entertaining character is a man named Lewis Dinkam, portrayed by Jackass star Johnny Knoxville.  Highlight, embolden, and underline Jackass.  This guy is the opitimy of stupid, most of it portrayed humorously so.  This guy is an absolute psycho, shooting off pistols and machine guns named “Betty” and “Nazi Killer” with his pajamas on and tearing off electric polls by climbing them and chainsawing the electric wire.  Is he the smartest character in the bunch?  No, but he is the funniest, although I don’t understand why he’s wearing a woolly hat in the middle of the summer.

Ultimately, I’m at a loss with The Last Stand.  There’s no doubt entertainment value here, but it is severrely misguided, almost like a misfired Colt.  Half of the film is used to just set up its premise with predictable scripting and bad acting, while the other half is used for repetitive and monotonous action, gunshots, and F-bombs.

“But David”, one fellow viewer pointed to me, “That’s entertainment!  People need entertainment because real life sucks!”  This is true that people need entertainment, and The Last Stand will satisfy some viewers.  For others however, they will be left yearning for a better story, more original action, and a more worthwhile experience.  In the meantime, what you see is what you get: if its action you want, boy oh boy, it action what you’re going to get.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Jul 16 2013
2 Comments
Reviews

“AMERICAN PSYCHO” Review (✫)

Sex, murder, and the decrease of the human condition.  

American Psycho is a vile, sickening experience, a gruesome and aching film incapable of human thought, feeling, comfort, or emotion.  This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise considering the book in which it is based on inspired this same controversy.  Regardless, its achievement cannot be denied: the filmmakers have somehow concocted an experience as brutal, uncomfortable, disturbing, half-lapsed, misogynic, and morally reprehensible as this that they’ve come to completely disconnect with their audience.  I rarely feel this upset about a movie like this.

American Psycho follows the story of Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), a successful businessman who works in his high-level office by day and parties fiendishly with his friends by night.  On the surface, Bateman looks like a normal upper-class bachelor.  He eats out at expensive restaurants, drinks exquisite martinis, has sex with beautiful women, enjoys swearing gleefully with his friends, and listens to a variety of experimental music.  In appearance, Bateman is the visible representation of the upper class: stoic, upright, eloquent, fashionable, and spoiled.

As the plot progresses, however, we come to understand more about the darker side of Bateman’s personality.  He doesn’t just have sex with beautiful women: he mutilates them.  He tortures them and fantasizes about killing them in horrible ways and playing with their bodies after he’s done dismembering them.  His kitchen pantry contains axes, blades, and tools he uses for his killings.  He draws his victims in a notebook he leaves at work.  A female head sits next to his ice cream in the freezer.  If there wasn’t wine in his alcohol bottles, it would probably be blood.

Ugh.  Just talking about the premise nauseates me.  Why do we need to experience this?  Bateman is a sickening character, a man who would dismember the head of one unfortunate female and chew off the genitals of another.  Why?  For what purpose?  His motivations are never explained in the movie and his reasonings for murdering women are a mystery to us.  Is there a reason for this?  Is there a reason for being so non-inclusive with your audience? Why must everything be shrouded in secrecy?

This is the film’s biggest problem, besides the violence and the sexuality: Patrick Bateman is a deplorable character, difficult to understand and impossible to sympathize with.  You might think its impossible to sympathize with a murderer of women anyway, but it isn’t really.  We’ve ben asked to sympathize with deplorable characters before, including a psychotic war veteran in Taxi Driver to ruthless murderers and drug dealers in Goodfellas.  Sympathy and interest worked with those characters because one character was struggling to find a line of morality and righteousness to follow, and another was hesitant and even regretful over the actions that he’s done.

Bateman doesn’t regret his decisions nor chooses to change them.  He kills instinctively, almost like he’s trying to prove some territorial point to the people around him.  To put it out there in gruesome, violent fashions like this though is just torturous.  Who wants to sit there, eyes on the screen, watching him laughing as a petite blond girl in front of him cries pleading for her life?

But American Psycho isn’t just sickening, repulsive, and pungnent: the film’s logic is half-lapsed, incomplete, and flawed, incomprehensible to the viewer and extremely frustrating to those trying to figure out.

I’ll give you an example.  There’s one scene where’s Bateman is chasing one of his victims through the hallways of a hotel, half naked, screaming manically, and revving his chainsaw like Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Someone explain to me how no one from the hotel hallway heard the ruckus from outside their rooms, or anyone from the two floors above and beneath him?  Here you have Jack Torrence running through the hallways screaming at the top of his lungs with a lawn mower, and nobody even bothers to call the police.  What?  Are the wooden doors sound-proof?  Who knows, maybe they’re afraid of poking their heads out the door so that they won’t get their heads chopped off.

Due to a revelation revealed later on in the plot, one could argue this is a “dream sequence”, or a “vision” Bateman had.  But how is there any way to know?  With Bateman’s maniacal, wretched mind, dreams feels like reality and reality feels like dreams.  How is there any way to read the subtext when you’ve made your narrative so damn hard to figure out?

And this is a movie that is being hailed as a dark comedy.  A comedy for what, exactly?  The film is two graphic hours of bloody, sickening, gruesome violence and pornography.  When, at any point, is it set up to inspire laughs?  In movies like Pulp Fiction and Fight Club we are at least given subtle moments of clever dialogue to clue us in to the humor, and even though stomach-curling things are happening on screen, we are able to suspend that  briefly in order to enjoy the humor.

American Psycho is not subtle, smart, clever, humorous, or any of the related adjectives.  There’s a point director Mary Harron is trying to express through the film, but that point is convoluted, vague and shockingly illiterate.  As a result, what we’re ultimately watching is an idle, pointless, and misconstrued film, and our reward for watching is hours of punishment, nudity, sexual immorality, blood, torture, macabre violence, and sickening indecency.  To be fairly honest, I probably need a second viewing in order to fully understand the picture, but the plain fact is that the movie doesn’t deserve a second viewing.  If I end the film feeling as punished and as mutilated as Bateman’s unfortunate victims, why on earth would I want to subject myself to that again?

At the end of the film, Bateman himself admits that he finds neither closure nor catharsis for his bloody, violent, sexually immoral and murderous journey.  For that matter, neither do we.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Jul 01 2013
Leave a comment
Reviews

“PAN’S LABYRINTH” Review (✫✫✫✫)

The perfect blend of fantasy and reality. 

Now here’s one you’re not going to be expecting.  Here is a spanish-language fantasy film that blends elements of reality and war drama with that of horror and psychological thrillers.  It’s rated R with a healthy amount of blood, violence, and language, it has a child as its lead character, and it is a fantasy film with no cuddly creatures and no misplaced sense of optimism.  It’s also in spanish, one of my most frustrating languages.  And it is also probably one of the best films of its kind.  Maybe the only one of its kind.

Written and directed by spanish filmmaker Guillmo Del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth is a post-Spanish civil war story about a young girl named Ofelia (brilliantly portrayed by Ivana Bacquero), who is fascinated and enticed by the many stories and fables she finds in her books and novellas.  Her mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil) is pregnant with her unborn brother, and they have been ordered to move to an outpost located on the outskirts of Mexico so the boy can be born next to his father: Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), a cruel and heartless product of war that knows nothing of decency, morality, kindness, or human life.  This is a man who would kill a father and his son thinking that they lied about being hunters, and a second later pulls out their quarry in the bottom of their knapsack.

This is the situation Ofelia is trapped in: the cruelty and strictness of Captain Vidal, and the negligence and weakness of her pregnant mother.  In the stories that she reads, however, Ofelia finds escape: she soon discovers a cave hidden deep within the gardens of the outpost, unnoticed to the human eye.  It is here deep within the cave where she finds odd inscriptions, a plethora of fairies, and even an anonymous Faun (Portrayd by Doug Jones, voiced by Pablo Adan), who informs her of her true destiny: that she is the lost princess Moanna of their sacred kingdom, and she must complete three specific assignments tasked by the Faun in order to become a princess once again.

This is the kind of story Pan’s Labyrinth is: the kind that deftly blends elements of wondrous fantasy with that of tragic reality.  This is rare treasure for foreign-language cinema: a film that while it is visually expressive, it is also a deep and personal commentary on the tragedies of war and its effects on a torn country.  Del Toro has elaborated on such subjects before: his 2001 film The Devils Backbone also took place during the Spanish Civil war, and it also featured a child in great distress.  Here though, I feel that he has a better handling of his premise, and if it is not better, it is at least more creative and dynamic in approach.

The visuals reach out in stellar, gritty, and striking details, the fairies light and whimsical, the faun towering, ancient, and brutish.  There are so many visually stunning scenes in this movie, at times it is overwhelming.  Del Toro, with the help of his cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, do something rare here: they paint a world here as fascinating as it is dangerous, a mesmerizing and gripping world that hypnotizes you with its appeal and its imagination.  One might say Pan’s Labyrinth is an adult version of Alice In Wonderland: I disagree with that.  I think this is the realistic version of Alice In Wonderland.

Why do I say this?  It might be because the movie is very deserving in its R rating.  Besides the occasional F-word uttered in spanish, there is a great deal of gore and violence in the movie, some of it aimed towards children.  I’ll be the first to admit, Pan’s Labyrinth is heavy on violence.  People are shot frequently in the film, often in very bloody manners.  People’s limbs get cut off.  In once scene, a man smashes a farm boy’s nose in with the butt of an alcohol bottle.  And in one terrifying scene, Ofelia is fleeing capture from a pale man-eating monster, who proves his monstrosity by biting the heads off of the fairies assisting her.  Don’t take your kids to this, folks: the movie is extremely violent.

While I would normally take points of a film for using excessive violence, here I believe it is warranted.  Through every gunshot, through every murder, and through every droplet of blood, Del Toro is saying something provocative about war and innocence, most of it being things we need to hear of.  I don’t believe Pan’s Labyrinth is just memorable, stunning, and poignant entainment: I believe it is relevant storytelling.

And at last, we come to the films conclusion, which is so mesmerizing and emotionally overpowering that we don’t know what to make of it.  Did Ofelia complete all of her tasks?  Was the Faun telling the truth?  Did she become the fabled princess?  Was it all a ruse?  Or did she simply become a victim of the earthly world from which she was born of?  The ending is eloquent, vast, and beautiful, open for many possible interpretations.  You decide which one fits you best once you see the movie.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
← Older posts
Newer posts →