Maybe Nita is right. Maybe what she has been telling—warning—people about all these years is true. Maybe I am a completely deranged lunatic. (But it just might be a lunatic she’s looking for . . .) I say this because it is the only rational explanation for having gone to see this movie.
I am a 60-year old man, a child of another generation and culture. What would possibly posses me to think I would like anything about such a strange movie?
First of all, it is another flick based on a graphic novel. Once again, I had no idea. I never read them. Never have. But apparently, I am a crypto-collector, because I end up seeing them all. Ever since Cathy and I saw Tank Girl¬—and loved it, in fact. 15 or 20 years ago.
Second, the story is as emo, indie, and metrosexual as anything could be. Scott Pilgrim is played to a Tee by Michael Cera. (Bleeker in Juno.) If you know who he is, no explanation is necessary. Scott is 22 and dating a 17 year-old high-schooler. He is the wanna-be bass player in a wanna-be indie band. The drummer, Kim, is a cute-as-a-bug red-headed dwarf. And the world’s angriest female. The hanger-on, shy and lurking, the almost-in-the-band kid, is named Young Neil. Now, as if that isn’t a sufficiently low-brow play on words, the lead singer and guitar player, is named Stephen Stills. What chutzpah! I thought I was gonna die, first from choking, then from laughing. Stills plays an old, beat-up acoustic guitar that makes Willie Nelson’s look pristine, and the music is hard and electric at all times. It reminded me of Airplane, in which each shot of the jet on the screen is accompanied by the sound of a prop plane. Every time.
Scott’s roommate, played ably by Kieran Culkin, is openly gay. They share the only bed in their apartment, which is usually occupied by as many as four other people.
A new girl arrives, and Scot is smitten. He is the biggest dork in modern history, but wears her down, and they start hanging out. This is when he discovers that in order to date Ramona, he must defeat her Seven Evil ex’s in single combat . . . to the death.
This is where it starts to get weird.
Somehow, the director manages to make a live anime-graphic- novel-rendition, of a graphic novel about anime. I can’t explain it. Literally. The fight scenes are in the best tradition of the Saturday morning cartoons—except they’re live-action—where heroes can fly and call on mystic powers, and where music summons creatures from a crazed Japanese imagination to do battle a la Pikachu. Seriously, I have never seen anything remotely similar.
It is wildly inventive, creative, and fun. Just fun. It is funny, but so full of angst I was worried the projector might suddenly turn Goth and stop the film because it just couldn’t go on. It is stupid. And smart. And highly original. It was directed by someone named Edgar Wright, who should get a special Oscar for bravery. Either that, or the Ed Wood Lifetime Achievement Award.
Here comes the Wayne is deranged part: I loved it. I could not have gone to a movie with less in common to my life-experience, and it was refreshing, in a masochistic, pathos-ridden way.
I have no idea who to recommend it to. And if I did, I wouldn’t. The tagline for this movie is “An Epic of epic epicness.” And that is about right. It is rated PG-13. One or two instances of profanity. Although one girl cusses a lot, but bleeps herself out with a sound and little black bar over her mouth. Scott asks on several occasions how she is doing that.
With the possible exception of my youngest daughter and her boyfriend, and maybe Grah, and Dredla of course, I cannot think of anyone who would like this film. It may have been made by idiot savants for the severely autistic for all I know. (Hey, they deserve entertainment too.)
When I took Nita to see Napoleon Dynamite, it took two viewing for her to really get it and enjoy it. This one may take five.
But it is a masterpiece. I instantly placed it on my list of favorite movies of all time. Yes . . . with Tank Girl.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
The Expendables
Expendables
This is one we testosterone factories have been waiting for a for a while now. It is a who’s who of action heroes. It stars Sylvester Stallone, Jason (The Transporter) Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Steve “Stone Cold” Austin, Terry Crews, and Mickey Rourke. Oh, and Eric Roberts, Julia’s less-gifted brother, plays the bad guy, as usual. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis make cameo’s as honorary members of the club. Plus of bunch of other people.
I wish they’d have been able to get a few other guys in it—like Claude Van Dam, and Steven Segal, and Mel Gibson, and Tony Jaa and Bruce Lee, and Steve McQueen and Gary Cooper, and Roy Rogers, but some of those guys don’t like each other very much, and a few of them are dead, so . . .
Besides, with that many, it would have been an army, not a team, and they would have out-numbered the bad guys. Where’s the fun in that?
Stallone shares the writing credit—we hate to admit it, but he’s a good writer—and he directed it. Bam! Home run!
Nothing about the plot is new. A crack mercenary team—rude, crude, and the best in the world, a suicide mission to rescue a girl and atone for past sins. An island kingdom being ruled by a thug with his own army, and an ex-CIA guy who is growing coca for a profit.
But then, when you least expect it . . . there’s a twist. It actually has a story. It has actual characters disguised as real people, with real problems. And the mercs are aging! They’re past their prime. (by a Nano-second.) That’s clever writing because Stallone is in his fifties, and I’d guess all the other guys are fast approaching.
Not only that, but as they age, these bulging brutes are learning to act. Who knew?
The writing is above average for the genre. Okay, anything more sophisticated than drawings with a crayon is above average for the genre, but the screenplay works pretty well. I laughed several times (as usual, I was alone in that endeavor) and really appreciated the very subtle nod to Kermit The Frog in a man’s man shoot-em-up.
And yes, there is a girl. Three actually. Jason Statham is in a rocky relationship—a pretty good side story. Mickey Rourke brings one home on his hog—for exactly one scene. And Stallone falls for an island girl (the General’s daughter. Pronounce that Hen-er-al, please.) But this girl is different. She is not twenty years old, and didn’t step off the bus from central casting under the “eye candy” sign. Oh, she’s attractive enough, but no beauty. And she can act. But Stallone writes in someone a little more age-appropriate for his character. Sure, she’s 35 and he’s like, 80, but it’s a start, right?
Forget about the story. If you are overly concerned with plot, this is not your kind of movie. Even though there is one. Sort of.
There is a lot of action, and it is sometimes brutal, if quick. It does not linger, as so many directors like to do ever since Sam Peckinpah hit the scene. If anything, Stallone gives the film a ragged edge, and increases the tension, by cutting the thing as close to the bone as possible when it comes to fights, explosions, knife-throws—lot’s of knife throws—and bloody casualties.
This is some of the best violent, military-action mayhem I have ever seen. The melee’s are awesome. The martial arts are awesome. The big-badda-boom parts are awesome. And they go on and on. Truly a minor masterpiece for the genre. In fact, I am giving it an A as a genre piece, and a B- as a general grade.
Now let’s be clear. It is not a great movie. But it’s probably as great as these guys are ever going to get, and it is way better than most of the fare we’ve seen over the years.
It is rated R, for violence, mayhem, and gore. Heads roll. Arms are severed. But each of those scenes is so brief, so . . . almost beside the point, that you wonder if you really even saw it. Great stuff. And Terry Crews makes the hat-box magazine, full-automatic shot gun my new favorite weapon. Boo-ya!
There’s some cussing in this one. There is no sex, and no skin, so the R comes from an over-abundance of violence. If I had drugged Nita unconscious and taken her in to see it on a gurney, she still would have walked out. Plus, I earned another small popcorn with my points card. How great is that?
This is one we testosterone factories have been waiting for a for a while now. It is a who’s who of action heroes. It stars Sylvester Stallone, Jason (The Transporter) Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Steve “Stone Cold” Austin, Terry Crews, and Mickey Rourke. Oh, and Eric Roberts, Julia’s less-gifted brother, plays the bad guy, as usual. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis make cameo’s as honorary members of the club. Plus of bunch of other people.
I wish they’d have been able to get a few other guys in it—like Claude Van Dam, and Steven Segal, and Mel Gibson, and Tony Jaa and Bruce Lee, and Steve McQueen and Gary Cooper, and Roy Rogers, but some of those guys don’t like each other very much, and a few of them are dead, so . . .
Besides, with that many, it would have been an army, not a team, and they would have out-numbered the bad guys. Where’s the fun in that?
Stallone shares the writing credit—we hate to admit it, but he’s a good writer—and he directed it. Bam! Home run!
Nothing about the plot is new. A crack mercenary team—rude, crude, and the best in the world, a suicide mission to rescue a girl and atone for past sins. An island kingdom being ruled by a thug with his own army, and an ex-CIA guy who is growing coca for a profit.
But then, when you least expect it . . . there’s a twist. It actually has a story. It has actual characters disguised as real people, with real problems. And the mercs are aging! They’re past their prime. (by a Nano-second.) That’s clever writing because Stallone is in his fifties, and I’d guess all the other guys are fast approaching.
Not only that, but as they age, these bulging brutes are learning to act. Who knew?
The writing is above average for the genre. Okay, anything more sophisticated than drawings with a crayon is above average for the genre, but the screenplay works pretty well. I laughed several times (as usual, I was alone in that endeavor) and really appreciated the very subtle nod to Kermit The Frog in a man’s man shoot-em-up.
And yes, there is a girl. Three actually. Jason Statham is in a rocky relationship—a pretty good side story. Mickey Rourke brings one home on his hog—for exactly one scene. And Stallone falls for an island girl (the General’s daughter. Pronounce that Hen-er-al, please.) But this girl is different. She is not twenty years old, and didn’t step off the bus from central casting under the “eye candy” sign. Oh, she’s attractive enough, but no beauty. And she can act. But Stallone writes in someone a little more age-appropriate for his character. Sure, she’s 35 and he’s like, 80, but it’s a start, right?
Forget about the story. If you are overly concerned with plot, this is not your kind of movie. Even though there is one. Sort of.
There is a lot of action, and it is sometimes brutal, if quick. It does not linger, as so many directors like to do ever since Sam Peckinpah hit the scene. If anything, Stallone gives the film a ragged edge, and increases the tension, by cutting the thing as close to the bone as possible when it comes to fights, explosions, knife-throws—lot’s of knife throws—and bloody casualties.
This is some of the best violent, military-action mayhem I have ever seen. The melee’s are awesome. The martial arts are awesome. The big-badda-boom parts are awesome. And they go on and on. Truly a minor masterpiece for the genre. In fact, I am giving it an A as a genre piece, and a B- as a general grade.
Now let’s be clear. It is not a great movie. But it’s probably as great as these guys are ever going to get, and it is way better than most of the fare we’ve seen over the years.
It is rated R, for violence, mayhem, and gore. Heads roll. Arms are severed. But each of those scenes is so brief, so . . . almost beside the point, that you wonder if you really even saw it. Great stuff. And Terry Crews makes the hat-box magazine, full-automatic shot gun my new favorite weapon. Boo-ya!
There’s some cussing in this one. There is no sex, and no skin, so the R comes from an over-abundance of violence. If I had drugged Nita unconscious and taken her in to see it on a gurney, she still would have walked out. Plus, I earned another small popcorn with my points card. How great is that?
Eat Pray Love
Eat Pray Love
This is a contemplative story, a narration, a memoir, and a travel-as-discovery story.
I read the book a while ago, on my sister’s unerring recommendation. (Jan, you should start a blog and review/recommend books. You’re batting 1000 for me.)
A woman in her thirties discovers she is married for all the wrong reasons. Traditionally they are the right reasons, but not working for her. She decides to end the childless relationship, falls into the arms of an actor as she rebounds, becomes disillusioned, realizes she is at war with herself, and decides to take a break for a year. She will go to Rome, to learn the language, which she loves, and abuse the food, which she craves, then to India to study at the Ashram of her actor’s Guru, then to Bali, because a medicine man there told her she would return. That’s pretty much the plot.
The book is superlative. It works because Liz, the narrator, is a gifted and sensitive—and honest—writer. Translating such a thing onto film would be a challenge for anyone, and the director succeeds as well as anyone else might have.
Julia Roberts plays Liz. Everyone else in the movie is a supporting role—she is the only A-list name.
Liz’s dilemma, it seems to me, is universal—that is, we never know for sure if what we are thinking and feeling is real or counterfeit, and consequently, if the decisions we make regarding those thoughts and feelings, are the right ones. Or the best ones, or at least the most necessary ones.
She does seem to learn from the experiences her travels offer her, and discovers facets of life not previously examined, in the lives of the people she meets and befriends on the journey. In that sense, it is a positive story, but one which falls short of any objective conclusions, which is true for all of us.
Most of us have the sense that—and I have written about it often—books are superior to movies as vehicles for storytelling. (Unless the story is so simple, shallow and/or universal that a book is not really necessary. Think Star Wars.) Those of us who read a lot, and consequently are often seeing the movie after the fact, often bemoan the fact that too much was left out; what about this scene; you can’t really understand without the pages of narrative or thought going on in the protagonists head, etc. And this is usually true. But with this one, I found a rare instance where, for me, the opposite turned out to be true.
There is a scene, in India, where a fellow traveler, a man from Texas, reveals a painful, life-altering, gut-wrenching truth to Liz, because in order to grow, she needs to hear it. As the story unfolds they are sitting on a roof at the Ashram. It is emotionally very powerful. I remember the scene very well in the book, and found it to be both poignant, and profound. But in the movie, it becomes transcendent. It is the force, and talent, and overwhelming honesty of the two actors which renders it so potent. To see it being delivered, and accepted, in this case, was superior to reading it and imagining it. Richard Jenkins (you would recognize him) plays the Texan. It is one of the best jobs of acting I have ever seen.
And it made me realize something I had not really thought of before. When someone is the focus of a scene—delivering the soliloquy, telling the story, involved in the action, we tend to forget about the other people. But without saying a word, Julia Roberts not only holds her own in the scene, she makes it work. My little mini-epiphany is that the watcher, the listener, the responder, is just as important to a scene like this as the active one, on whom the scene focuses. If I were teaching film, this is the one I would use to illustrate that idea. Watch Casablanca again, the last scene, at the airport. Listen to Rick as he tells Ilsa why he can’t go with her, but watch Bergman as Bogart is speaking. That’s what I’m talking about.
With Eat Pray Love, Nita and I both bemoaned the fact that much had to be left out. A film like this could be nit-picked and second-guessed to death. Yes, it is sparse in some places. Yes, it is a little flat here and there, as if the director did not want to get too close, too intimate. It is a quiet, deliberately-paced film, without any big action. Not one explosion, if I remember correctly. But overall, it works very well, and we both recommend it.
It is rated PG-13. There is no sex, or skin in the movie (and there is in the book—handled well, I thought) and very few instances of profanity. Maybe 3. I’m not sure anyone will have any kind of eureka moment as a result of watching this one, but no one will leave having lost precious brain cells—which is not true of a lot of movies.
This is a contemplative story, a narration, a memoir, and a travel-as-discovery story.
I read the book a while ago, on my sister’s unerring recommendation. (Jan, you should start a blog and review/recommend books. You’re batting 1000 for me.)
A woman in her thirties discovers she is married for all the wrong reasons. Traditionally they are the right reasons, but not working for her. She decides to end the childless relationship, falls into the arms of an actor as she rebounds, becomes disillusioned, realizes she is at war with herself, and decides to take a break for a year. She will go to Rome, to learn the language, which she loves, and abuse the food, which she craves, then to India to study at the Ashram of her actor’s Guru, then to Bali, because a medicine man there told her she would return. That’s pretty much the plot.
The book is superlative. It works because Liz, the narrator, is a gifted and sensitive—and honest—writer. Translating such a thing onto film would be a challenge for anyone, and the director succeeds as well as anyone else might have.
Julia Roberts plays Liz. Everyone else in the movie is a supporting role—she is the only A-list name.
Liz’s dilemma, it seems to me, is universal—that is, we never know for sure if what we are thinking and feeling is real or counterfeit, and consequently, if the decisions we make regarding those thoughts and feelings, are the right ones. Or the best ones, or at least the most necessary ones.
She does seem to learn from the experiences her travels offer her, and discovers facets of life not previously examined, in the lives of the people she meets and befriends on the journey. In that sense, it is a positive story, but one which falls short of any objective conclusions, which is true for all of us.
Most of us have the sense that—and I have written about it often—books are superior to movies as vehicles for storytelling. (Unless the story is so simple, shallow and/or universal that a book is not really necessary. Think Star Wars.) Those of us who read a lot, and consequently are often seeing the movie after the fact, often bemoan the fact that too much was left out; what about this scene; you can’t really understand without the pages of narrative or thought going on in the protagonists head, etc. And this is usually true. But with this one, I found a rare instance where, for me, the opposite turned out to be true.
There is a scene, in India, where a fellow traveler, a man from Texas, reveals a painful, life-altering, gut-wrenching truth to Liz, because in order to grow, she needs to hear it. As the story unfolds they are sitting on a roof at the Ashram. It is emotionally very powerful. I remember the scene very well in the book, and found it to be both poignant, and profound. But in the movie, it becomes transcendent. It is the force, and talent, and overwhelming honesty of the two actors which renders it so potent. To see it being delivered, and accepted, in this case, was superior to reading it and imagining it. Richard Jenkins (you would recognize him) plays the Texan. It is one of the best jobs of acting I have ever seen.
And it made me realize something I had not really thought of before. When someone is the focus of a scene—delivering the soliloquy, telling the story, involved in the action, we tend to forget about the other people. But without saying a word, Julia Roberts not only holds her own in the scene, she makes it work. My little mini-epiphany is that the watcher, the listener, the responder, is just as important to a scene like this as the active one, on whom the scene focuses. If I were teaching film, this is the one I would use to illustrate that idea. Watch Casablanca again, the last scene, at the airport. Listen to Rick as he tells Ilsa why he can’t go with her, but watch Bergman as Bogart is speaking. That’s what I’m talking about.
With Eat Pray Love, Nita and I both bemoaned the fact that much had to be left out. A film like this could be nit-picked and second-guessed to death. Yes, it is sparse in some places. Yes, it is a little flat here and there, as if the director did not want to get too close, too intimate. It is a quiet, deliberately-paced film, without any big action. Not one explosion, if I remember correctly. But overall, it works very well, and we both recommend it.
It is rated PG-13. There is no sex, or skin in the movie (and there is in the book—handled well, I thought) and very few instances of profanity. Maybe 3. I’m not sure anyone will have any kind of eureka moment as a result of watching this one, but no one will leave having lost precious brain cells—which is not true of a lot of movies.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)