Faster
Dwayne Johnson plays an impossibly self-sufficient ex-con who gets out of prison with only one thing in mind; to avenge the death of his brother who was killed in a double-cross after the two of them pulled a bank robbery.
It’s been many years. But the Rock has waited and planned and is going to kill everyone involved. In a matter of minutes apparently, because he is not being careful, is dropping clues like Jagger drops women, and is using a really noisy gun—he won’t last long. Oh, plus, when he gets out of stir, he runs all the way into town, into an auto junk yard, where he has a mint-condition Chevy muscle car stashed. With the afore-mentioned noisy gun in the glove-box.
The entire plot is Johnson going from thug to thug and killing them, after having a meaningful tête à tête about life, the universe, and everything. Except for the preacher. In the meantime, Billy Bob Thornton plays a strung-out detective ten days from retirement while he tries to manage a drug-habit, ruined reputation, an ex-wife and son, and catch the bad guy. His partner is Carla Gugino, a Rachel Weis look-alike, who isn’t happy about being stuck with the burn-out.
Oh, and to spice up the otherwise nonexistent plot, there is a hit man after Johnson. He is a super-rich Dotcom billionaire who is also an adrenalin junky-slash-perfectionist. As we watch, he beats Yoga. That’s right, like a video game, he goes through all the levels and has nothing else to master. The rich-boy with the violent hobby has some personal issues but is working them out. He’s deciding to propose to his über-hot girlfriend. Somehow, Johnson, a mouth-breathing ex-con bank robber, manages to elude, thwart, and defeat the hit man. Go figure. Not everyone who should, dies in this movie. They had to do it that way because everyone should have died but then they wouldn’t have been able to finish the film. This screenplay is the literary equivalent of Swiss cheese. It makes no sense, builds no interest, and makes us passionately indifferent to the characters. But it does have the Rock in it, so . . . . I went to see it.
It’s rated R for violence. I give it a three out of ten. The only people I can think of who might want to see it are Clark and James. Everyone else, steer clear.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Friday, November 12, 2010
Skyline
Skyline
This is a sci-fi, monster movie in the tradition of . . . all those other sci-fi monster movies. Like Godzilla. I really liked Godzilla.
In some ways it is fairly derivative. It has elements of Cloverfield in it (although the camera manages to stay still), as well as Independence Day, and even War of the Worlds. That is not necessarily an indictment, but it should be noted.
The only actor I recognized was Donald Faison, who played Dr. Turk in Scrubs.
It starts out in a predictable way; a couple is flying to LA to visit his recently rich and successful friend (Faison.) They party, crash, and wake up with a weird blue light shining into the luxury apartment. Like Cloverfield, they have no idea what’s going on, and neither do we. Some action occurs as they try to figure things out, but then huge construction things appear—pretty clearly alien technology but not really looking like starships other than they can float silently and apparently indefinitely. Huge monster thingies show up, stumping around the city, sucking up people—which the ship-machines are also doing—by the thousands. Then little runabouts exit the big ships a la Independence Day, except they might not be machines, and an air battle ensues.
But unlike Independence Day the story stays small, dealing with just a few people trying to survive, which was part of what made Cloverfield so effective. In fact, the protagonists (the few who live long enough to be in most of the film) never leave the luxury high-rise.
There must be an unwritten and highly hypocritical rule in Hollywood because the biggest star—the black guy—again gets killed before the halfway point. Go figure. I’m surprised he wasn’t wearing a red jersey.
I kind of liked how the people never find out anything about what’s going on. They are totally ignorant going in and coming out. The military arrives, and nukes one of the big ships, which crashes, but then it begins to reassemble itself which is creepy.
The pace is pretty good and the tension maintains a respectable level, just under spontaneous incontinence. Some of the scenes involving the aliens are grotesque, but not in a slasher kind of grotesque, more in an alien kind. I’m not sure why that matters, but it does.
The story tried to concentrate on the people and the interpersonal dynamics, but it is not entirely successful. Nothing happened onscreen to compel me to care about the protagonists, other than in the fairly abstract “fellow humans” kind of way. I think Cloverfield did a better job of that.
I got the impression that a bunch of gung-ho young Turks in the Effects industry got together and said “hey, let’s put together a project that will showcase what we can do.” For me, the special effects seemed to be the real star of the show. “We can do it in the barn!”
There was no skin and I don’t remember any cussing. Some gore, but to my jaded eye it was not extreme. Some of it could be pretty scary for some people.
It’s rated PG-13, which was about right.
I have to warn you though, if you’re planning to see it, that the ending is a little freakish. Highly unusual and very un-Hollywood. It will not be satisfying to the general movie-going audience. But I thought it was great and very compatible with the rest of the movie.
It was fun, but not a home run. I’m glad I saw it, and recommend it to Newell and James (who, like me, will go see anything) and Clark, to be specific. Let’s give it a 7.5 out of 10.
Now, for those of you who do not plan to see it, let me tell you a little more about the ending.
SPOILER ALERT
There is no ending. We never know what the aliens are doing or why they are there, but they are definitely winning. The two main characters do not escape. Both are sucked up into the big ship where some kind of biologic-machine-hybrid things are harvesting nervous systems—brains, spinal cord and main nerves, and giving them to the aliens who are ingesting them. The male lead gets his brain sucked out (the aliens detect a fetus in the female lead and do not de-brain her). But something goes wrong and the male lead somehow survives in some weird, para-normal sense, and takes over the body of the decidedly homely alien. He then begins to protect his “girl” from the other aliens, the screen goes dark and the credits begin to roll. I can’t even say it ended in a cliff-hanger—the aliens are clearly going to win. Like I said—there is no ending.
This is a sci-fi, monster movie in the tradition of . . . all those other sci-fi monster movies. Like Godzilla. I really liked Godzilla.
In some ways it is fairly derivative. It has elements of Cloverfield in it (although the camera manages to stay still), as well as Independence Day, and even War of the Worlds. That is not necessarily an indictment, but it should be noted.
The only actor I recognized was Donald Faison, who played Dr. Turk in Scrubs.
It starts out in a predictable way; a couple is flying to LA to visit his recently rich and successful friend (Faison.) They party, crash, and wake up with a weird blue light shining into the luxury apartment. Like Cloverfield, they have no idea what’s going on, and neither do we. Some action occurs as they try to figure things out, but then huge construction things appear—pretty clearly alien technology but not really looking like starships other than they can float silently and apparently indefinitely. Huge monster thingies show up, stumping around the city, sucking up people—which the ship-machines are also doing—by the thousands. Then little runabouts exit the big ships a la Independence Day, except they might not be machines, and an air battle ensues.
But unlike Independence Day the story stays small, dealing with just a few people trying to survive, which was part of what made Cloverfield so effective. In fact, the protagonists (the few who live long enough to be in most of the film) never leave the luxury high-rise.
There must be an unwritten and highly hypocritical rule in Hollywood because the biggest star—the black guy—again gets killed before the halfway point. Go figure. I’m surprised he wasn’t wearing a red jersey.
I kind of liked how the people never find out anything about what’s going on. They are totally ignorant going in and coming out. The military arrives, and nukes one of the big ships, which crashes, but then it begins to reassemble itself which is creepy.
The pace is pretty good and the tension maintains a respectable level, just under spontaneous incontinence. Some of the scenes involving the aliens are grotesque, but not in a slasher kind of grotesque, more in an alien kind. I’m not sure why that matters, but it does.
The story tried to concentrate on the people and the interpersonal dynamics, but it is not entirely successful. Nothing happened onscreen to compel me to care about the protagonists, other than in the fairly abstract “fellow humans” kind of way. I think Cloverfield did a better job of that.
I got the impression that a bunch of gung-ho young Turks in the Effects industry got together and said “hey, let’s put together a project that will showcase what we can do.” For me, the special effects seemed to be the real star of the show. “We can do it in the barn!”
There was no skin and I don’t remember any cussing. Some gore, but to my jaded eye it was not extreme. Some of it could be pretty scary for some people.
It’s rated PG-13, which was about right.
I have to warn you though, if you’re planning to see it, that the ending is a little freakish. Highly unusual and very un-Hollywood. It will not be satisfying to the general movie-going audience. But I thought it was great and very compatible with the rest of the movie.
It was fun, but not a home run. I’m glad I saw it, and recommend it to Newell and James (who, like me, will go see anything) and Clark, to be specific. Let’s give it a 7.5 out of 10.
Now, for those of you who do not plan to see it, let me tell you a little more about the ending.
SPOILER ALERT
There is no ending. We never know what the aliens are doing or why they are there, but they are definitely winning. The two main characters do not escape. Both are sucked up into the big ship where some kind of biologic-machine-hybrid things are harvesting nervous systems—brains, spinal cord and main nerves, and giving them to the aliens who are ingesting them. The male lead gets his brain sucked out (the aliens detect a fetus in the female lead and do not de-brain her). But something goes wrong and the male lead somehow survives in some weird, para-normal sense, and takes over the body of the decidedly homely alien. He then begins to protect his “girl” from the other aliens, the screen goes dark and the credits begin to roll. I can’t even say it ended in a cliff-hanger—the aliens are clearly going to win. Like I said—there is no ending.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Movie Review Let Me In
Let Me In
This is a vampire movie. At some point, we might think all the possible iterations of that genre would be discovered and done. For thirty years every time they announced a new mega-resort in Las Vegas, my dad would say “that’s it! This one is going to break the bank. Too many rooms! Too many casinos!” But it never happened. I guess there is no end to vampire movies either.
But this is not your typical vampire movie. Not by a long shot.
It begins in Los Alamos, NM, in the winter. IT is dark, night time. A winding road through juniper-heavy mesas of the high desert, snow on the ground, snow falling. Tiny blinking lights appear and slowly draw nearer until we can see three vehicles, each with flashing lights. An ambulance escorted by two police cars. A man has poured acid all over his head and torso.
It is a quiet movie. Almost solemn. The story focuses on a twelve-year old boy, living with his mom in an apartment complex while his parents are divorcing. He is quiet, a loner, no friends, tightly-wound. He is being bullied to a dangerous degree at school. No one has a clue. He keeps everything from his mother.
Someone moves in next door in the middle of the night, a middle-aged man who carries a large trunk up the stairs and into the empty apartment.
The next night, as the boy, Owen, sits in the snow and the dark on a play set in the courtyard, a bare-footed girl appears. She looks to be about his age. They look at each other.
“You don’t have any shoes,” he says to her.
“I don’t really get cold,” she explains.
Then, “I can’t be your friend,” she says. Nice. Very nice.
It is a dark movie, taking place mostly at night (how else would you show a vampire movie?) but spiritually dark as well, and morally ambiguous. Every scene reeks with loneliness and alienation.
It is so very subtle. We are lead slowly, carefully down a path of simmering intrigue and suspense, while the boy and the girl, Abby, form a strange, awkward bond.
Several stories are taking place at the same time. The boy’s, the girl’s, the girl’s “guardian” (we may as well call him Renfield) the police detective, the bully and his friends, mom and dad. They are all deftly crafted to make their ways unerringly together. ‘The mother is depressed and absorbed with her divorce, the fact that her life is falling apart. To emphasize this, we never see her face. She is always out of focus, partially hidden, her back to us, letting us know that her connection to her son is peripheral, at best. Still, he manages to find a friend. A strange one, but someone at least.
“Will you go steady with me?” He asks.
“Steady? What’s that?”
People begin dying, disappearing. The boy sees some things, hears things. Eventually, he realizes what Abby is. With twelve-year old innocence, he accepts the truth of it, and then accepts her. When he knows, he confronts her.
“How old are you really?” He asks. She looks sad, hesitant.
“I’m twelve,” she insists, “but I’ve been twelve for a really long time.” What a great line. The only other hint as to how long she’s been undead is the collection of antique puzzle-games on her dresser.
For a vampire movie, there is very little blood. Some of course, but nothing like you’re oh-so-boring, run-of-mill long-toothed slasher flicks. Most of the violence is out of the frame—hinted at. We hear it, but don’t really see it. This makes it much creepier.
The story builds carefully, slowly. It is well-crafted. Nothing flashy happens, there is no climax, only sadness, acceptance, and inevitability. We get a better look at the vulnerable side of the vampire, how dependant they are on their handler, their guardian, the necessity of a Renfield in their “lives.”
The two kids do great jobs. Owen is played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Abby by Chloe Moretz. She is haunting in her vulnerability, her uncertainty, and her loneliness. And devastating with her predation. When she is feeding, there is some herky-jerky CGI, which, despite its low-tech look, works quite well in this movie.
Abby’s guardian is played by Richard Jenkins who some of you will recognize as the Texan at the Ashram in Eat Love Pray. Or is that whom?
The movie is rated R, for violence and some gore. Remember, I said it wasn’t bloody by vampire standards—it’s still pretty gory. But it is a classic. Very creative, very inventive, with lots of subtle nods to the culture of vampiric aficionados. I especially liked the scene where Abby asks Owen to invite her in (vampires cannot enter a house or room without being invited) and he asks what will happen if he doesn’t invite her. She takes a deep breath, crosses the threshold, and stands in the middle of the room. In a moment she begins to bleed everywhere. She doesn’t know why—only that it always happens. (He quickly recants and invites her in.)
I really liked this movie. It was far better than the standard fare. I will give it a 10 for the genre rating, and an 8.5 for a standard rating. Except for a couple swear words, and one or two graphic scenes, I think Nita would have appreciated this one. She’s somewhere in Utah though, having left me for a newborn, so it’s a moot point.
This is a vampire movie. At some point, we might think all the possible iterations of that genre would be discovered and done. For thirty years every time they announced a new mega-resort in Las Vegas, my dad would say “that’s it! This one is going to break the bank. Too many rooms! Too many casinos!” But it never happened. I guess there is no end to vampire movies either.
But this is not your typical vampire movie. Not by a long shot.
It begins in Los Alamos, NM, in the winter. IT is dark, night time. A winding road through juniper-heavy mesas of the high desert, snow on the ground, snow falling. Tiny blinking lights appear and slowly draw nearer until we can see three vehicles, each with flashing lights. An ambulance escorted by two police cars. A man has poured acid all over his head and torso.
It is a quiet movie. Almost solemn. The story focuses on a twelve-year old boy, living with his mom in an apartment complex while his parents are divorcing. He is quiet, a loner, no friends, tightly-wound. He is being bullied to a dangerous degree at school. No one has a clue. He keeps everything from his mother.
Someone moves in next door in the middle of the night, a middle-aged man who carries a large trunk up the stairs and into the empty apartment.
The next night, as the boy, Owen, sits in the snow and the dark on a play set in the courtyard, a bare-footed girl appears. She looks to be about his age. They look at each other.
“You don’t have any shoes,” he says to her.
“I don’t really get cold,” she explains.
Then, “I can’t be your friend,” she says. Nice. Very nice.
It is a dark movie, taking place mostly at night (how else would you show a vampire movie?) but spiritually dark as well, and morally ambiguous. Every scene reeks with loneliness and alienation.
It is so very subtle. We are lead slowly, carefully down a path of simmering intrigue and suspense, while the boy and the girl, Abby, form a strange, awkward bond.
Several stories are taking place at the same time. The boy’s, the girl’s, the girl’s “guardian” (we may as well call him Renfield) the police detective, the bully and his friends, mom and dad. They are all deftly crafted to make their ways unerringly together. ‘The mother is depressed and absorbed with her divorce, the fact that her life is falling apart. To emphasize this, we never see her face. She is always out of focus, partially hidden, her back to us, letting us know that her connection to her son is peripheral, at best. Still, he manages to find a friend. A strange one, but someone at least.
“Will you go steady with me?” He asks.
“Steady? What’s that?”
People begin dying, disappearing. The boy sees some things, hears things. Eventually, he realizes what Abby is. With twelve-year old innocence, he accepts the truth of it, and then accepts her. When he knows, he confronts her.
“How old are you really?” He asks. She looks sad, hesitant.
“I’m twelve,” she insists, “but I’ve been twelve for a really long time.” What a great line. The only other hint as to how long she’s been undead is the collection of antique puzzle-games on her dresser.
For a vampire movie, there is very little blood. Some of course, but nothing like you’re oh-so-boring, run-of-mill long-toothed slasher flicks. Most of the violence is out of the frame—hinted at. We hear it, but don’t really see it. This makes it much creepier.
The story builds carefully, slowly. It is well-crafted. Nothing flashy happens, there is no climax, only sadness, acceptance, and inevitability. We get a better look at the vulnerable side of the vampire, how dependant they are on their handler, their guardian, the necessity of a Renfield in their “lives.”
The two kids do great jobs. Owen is played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Abby by Chloe Moretz. She is haunting in her vulnerability, her uncertainty, and her loneliness. And devastating with her predation. When she is feeding, there is some herky-jerky CGI, which, despite its low-tech look, works quite well in this movie.
Abby’s guardian is played by Richard Jenkins who some of you will recognize as the Texan at the Ashram in Eat Love Pray. Or is that whom?
The movie is rated R, for violence and some gore. Remember, I said it wasn’t bloody by vampire standards—it’s still pretty gory. But it is a classic. Very creative, very inventive, with lots of subtle nods to the culture of vampiric aficionados. I especially liked the scene where Abby asks Owen to invite her in (vampires cannot enter a house or room without being invited) and he asks what will happen if he doesn’t invite her. She takes a deep breath, crosses the threshold, and stands in the middle of the room. In a moment she begins to bleed everywhere. She doesn’t know why—only that it always happens. (He quickly recants and invites her in.)
I really liked this movie. It was far better than the standard fare. I will give it a 10 for the genre rating, and an 8.5 for a standard rating. Except for a couple swear words, and one or two graphic scenes, I think Nita would have appreciated this one. She’s somewhere in Utah though, having left me for a newborn, so it’s a moot point.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Resident Evil: Afterlife
Resident Evil: Afterlife
This is the fourth in the apparently endless franchise based on the game I’ve never played—never even seen. None of them are very good, but they star Zombies, so, you know . . . . . .
In this installment, the Umbrella Corporation’s synthetic virus has killed the entire planet and left millions of walking dead illegally loitering.
The film opens with super-powered-up Alice and her super-clones killing a thousand or so heavily armed private mercs, only to be injected with little beasties which render her—the real her—merely human again. But that doesn’t stop her.
Alice is still trying to find and save whatever remnant of humanity might be left, and is following a radio signal from someplace called Arcady, which appears to be in Alaska. She flies up there and finds no sign of anything—just a field of abandoned bush planes and no explanation as to why they are there or what happened to the pilots and passengers. I guess everybody was looking for Arcady, didn’t find it, and killed themselves from the disappointment. (There is a kind of explanation later on, but only obliquely.)
But she does find Claire, (Ali Larter) from movie number three, and they fly down the coast looking for survivors, finally finding some in LA. They have holed-up in a maximum security prison, which is pretty clever—the zombies surround it by the tens-of-thousands, but they can’t get in. Not until, that is, some giant in a rubber suit with a burlap bag over his head, and nails driven into his head and shoulders, comes along with a kind of battle axe, fifteen feet long and made from an engine block, and breaks the gates down. There is no explanation whatsoever about who this guy is, or why he is there. We don’t even know if he is a zombie or not. If not, why aren’t they eating him? If he is, how is he fashioning five-hundred pound weapons, and . . . you know, thinking?
Well . . . I don’t want to give too much away. The supporting cast is fine. The effects are as gruesome and fun as we’ve come to expect over the years. The stunts are totally unbelievable and still great.
The ultimate bad guy—an Umbrella über-president or something—played by Shawn Roberts, tries to do an impersonation of Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith, but it is pathetic. Plus he’s unkillable, and that’s no fun.
There is no rhyme or reason to this story. But that’s okay, because there is no rhyme or reason to Zombies in general—any zombie story is, by definition, illogical, irrational, and unreasonable. So they can pretty much do whatever they want with it, and those of us dumb enough to go watch them get what we deserve. (Raises hand with sheepish grin.)
I went in having already decided I’d like it, and I wasn’t disappointed. It was fun. Grotesque, yes. Deviant, yes. Mindless, yes. Perhaps even Evil (thus the title), but fun. I like the whole back-story of Umbrella Corporation, and the experimentations on Alice, and Raccoon City. I really like Milla Jovovich and Ali Larter—two hot-mamas—and the cool fight scenes. (I think there’s some guys in it too.)
It is in 3-D, which I didn’t know, or forgot. I don’t like 3-D. The effect fades on the periphery, and the special glasses are too dark. It’s like watching a movie with sunglasses on. But it was okay this time. I didn’t whine.
And of course, there is no ending. The way is open for number five. Milla is going to be playing Alice when she’d eighty. And if I’m still breathing, I’ll probably still be going to see her.
It is rated R, for all the Right Reasons. Nita didn’t go. In fact, she considers divorcing me every time I go to one of these, but I can’t stay away. It wasn’t that great, but I liked it anyway. I would recommend it to the South Park kids, but no one else.
This is the fourth in the apparently endless franchise based on the game I’ve never played—never even seen. None of them are very good, but they star Zombies, so, you know . . . . . .
In this installment, the Umbrella Corporation’s synthetic virus has killed the entire planet and left millions of walking dead illegally loitering.
The film opens with super-powered-up Alice and her super-clones killing a thousand or so heavily armed private mercs, only to be injected with little beasties which render her—the real her—merely human again. But that doesn’t stop her.
Alice is still trying to find and save whatever remnant of humanity might be left, and is following a radio signal from someplace called Arcady, which appears to be in Alaska. She flies up there and finds no sign of anything—just a field of abandoned bush planes and no explanation as to why they are there or what happened to the pilots and passengers. I guess everybody was looking for Arcady, didn’t find it, and killed themselves from the disappointment. (There is a kind of explanation later on, but only obliquely.)
But she does find Claire, (Ali Larter) from movie number three, and they fly down the coast looking for survivors, finally finding some in LA. They have holed-up in a maximum security prison, which is pretty clever—the zombies surround it by the tens-of-thousands, but they can’t get in. Not until, that is, some giant in a rubber suit with a burlap bag over his head, and nails driven into his head and shoulders, comes along with a kind of battle axe, fifteen feet long and made from an engine block, and breaks the gates down. There is no explanation whatsoever about who this guy is, or why he is there. We don’t even know if he is a zombie or not. If not, why aren’t they eating him? If he is, how is he fashioning five-hundred pound weapons, and . . . you know, thinking?
Well . . . I don’t want to give too much away. The supporting cast is fine. The effects are as gruesome and fun as we’ve come to expect over the years. The stunts are totally unbelievable and still great.
The ultimate bad guy—an Umbrella über-president or something—played by Shawn Roberts, tries to do an impersonation of Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith, but it is pathetic. Plus he’s unkillable, and that’s no fun.
There is no rhyme or reason to this story. But that’s okay, because there is no rhyme or reason to Zombies in general—any zombie story is, by definition, illogical, irrational, and unreasonable. So they can pretty much do whatever they want with it, and those of us dumb enough to go watch them get what we deserve. (Raises hand with sheepish grin.)
I went in having already decided I’d like it, and I wasn’t disappointed. It was fun. Grotesque, yes. Deviant, yes. Mindless, yes. Perhaps even Evil (thus the title), but fun. I like the whole back-story of Umbrella Corporation, and the experimentations on Alice, and Raccoon City. I really like Milla Jovovich and Ali Larter—two hot-mamas—and the cool fight scenes. (I think there’s some guys in it too.)
It is in 3-D, which I didn’t know, or forgot. I don’t like 3-D. The effect fades on the periphery, and the special glasses are too dark. It’s like watching a movie with sunglasses on. But it was okay this time. I didn’t whine.
And of course, there is no ending. The way is open for number five. Milla is going to be playing Alice when she’d eighty. And if I’m still breathing, I’ll probably still be going to see her.
It is rated R, for all the Right Reasons. Nita didn’t go. In fact, she considers divorcing me every time I go to one of these, but I can’t stay away. It wasn’t that great, but I liked it anyway. I would recommend it to the South Park kids, but no one else.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Scott Pilgrim vs the World
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.
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 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.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Movie Review The A-Team
The A-Team Well. What can one say, but Hannibal Smith? If you don’t remember the old TV show of the same name, you missed out. It was terrible, but highly entertaining.
The movie version manages to lose most of the cheesy crap, and retain everything that was fun about the series. Liam Neeson reprises the role of John “Hannibal” Smith (George Peppard), the renegade Army Ranger Colonel who “loves it when a plan comes together.” Bradley Cooper plays Templeton “Faceman” Peck (Dirk Benedict), the great-looking, “leave ‘em begging for more” con-man, facilitator. He’s been in about a million movies, and I don’t think I’ve seen any of them. The Hangover would be the most notable, which doesn’t say much for his career. Quinton “Rampage” Jackson plays BA Baracus, originally played by the irrepressible Mr. T. Sharlto Copely plays “Howling Mad” Murdock (Dwight Shultz). Copely was the lead in District 9, which was a great movie about stranded extra-terrestrials and apartheid in South Africa. And he was great in it. In this one, he uses about 9 accents, all of them spot on, including his South African, probably because he’s from South Africa. He is great as Murdock, who was always my favorite character. I got a kick out of the fact that every week the Team had to break Murdock out of a different asylum somewhere.
Jessica Biel rounds out the names, and as usual, she is Hot. I mean . . . damn. So hot in fact, that Nita gave me permission to say so. She plays some kind of DOD special agent, and an ex-flame of Face’s. Of course, all females are ex flames of Face’s.
When it comes down to it, who cares about the plot? There is one, and it is suitably convoluted, with lots of situations no one could possible escape from or overcome, but the A-Team is up for it. Even with BA unconscious half the time because he is afraid to fly. Everything about the plot is improbable, which is exactly what the A-Team is about. The ridiculous. It is something about Iraq, and counterfeiting, and engraving plates, and blah, blah, blah.
It is smart and funny and full-throttle action, with great special effects, and even greater plans, escapes, and strategy’s, and counter-strategy’s. Did I say Improbable? Make that ludicrous. But it works. The actors are all spot on for their characters, and the writing is playful enough to make us forget our troubles for a couple hours. What more could we want?
It is rated PG-13. There is a little profanity, but not much. The only sex comes from Biel’s blouse being unbuttoned halfway down, and the only violence is . . . well, it’s wall-to-wall violence of the non-emotionally scarring kind. Just good fun, eh? I liked it mucho-a-lot, and Nita quite enjoyed it as well. If you go not expecting anything but a MacGyver-esque popcorn movie, you will not be disappointed.
The movie version manages to lose most of the cheesy crap, and retain everything that was fun about the series. Liam Neeson reprises the role of John “Hannibal” Smith (George Peppard), the renegade Army Ranger Colonel who “loves it when a plan comes together.” Bradley Cooper plays Templeton “Faceman” Peck (Dirk Benedict), the great-looking, “leave ‘em begging for more” con-man, facilitator. He’s been in about a million movies, and I don’t think I’ve seen any of them. The Hangover would be the most notable, which doesn’t say much for his career. Quinton “Rampage” Jackson plays BA Baracus, originally played by the irrepressible Mr. T. Sharlto Copely plays “Howling Mad” Murdock (Dwight Shultz). Copely was the lead in District 9, which was a great movie about stranded extra-terrestrials and apartheid in South Africa. And he was great in it. In this one, he uses about 9 accents, all of them spot on, including his South African, probably because he’s from South Africa. He is great as Murdock, who was always my favorite character. I got a kick out of the fact that every week the Team had to break Murdock out of a different asylum somewhere.
Jessica Biel rounds out the names, and as usual, she is Hot. I mean . . . damn. So hot in fact, that Nita gave me permission to say so. She plays some kind of DOD special agent, and an ex-flame of Face’s. Of course, all females are ex flames of Face’s.
When it comes down to it, who cares about the plot? There is one, and it is suitably convoluted, with lots of situations no one could possible escape from or overcome, but the A-Team is up for it. Even with BA unconscious half the time because he is afraid to fly. Everything about the plot is improbable, which is exactly what the A-Team is about. The ridiculous. It is something about Iraq, and counterfeiting, and engraving plates, and blah, blah, blah.
It is smart and funny and full-throttle action, with great special effects, and even greater plans, escapes, and strategy’s, and counter-strategy’s. Did I say Improbable? Make that ludicrous. But it works. The actors are all spot on for their characters, and the writing is playful enough to make us forget our troubles for a couple hours. What more could we want?
It is rated PG-13. There is a little profanity, but not much. The only sex comes from Biel’s blouse being unbuttoned halfway down, and the only violence is . . . well, it’s wall-to-wall violence of the non-emotionally scarring kind. Just good fun, eh? I liked it mucho-a-lot, and Nita quite enjoyed it as well. If you go not expecting anything but a MacGyver-esque popcorn movie, you will not be disappointed.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Movie Review Letters to Juliet
Letters to Juliette
This is a new romance, solidly in the “chick Flick” category. It stars Amanda Seyfried as Sophie, who is a fact-checker—and fledgling writer—working for the New Yorker, and engaged to a self-absorbed chef, who is in turn obsessed with opening his new restaurant in NY city. They decide to take a ‘pre-honeymoon’ (a bizarre concept) to Italy, a journey which turns into a thinly disguised business trip for future-hubby. This leaves Sophie, our heroine, with a lot of time on her hands.
She visits a tourist hot-spot in Verona, called, I think, Juliette’s House. It is a small courtyard where women from around the world go to write notes and letters to Juliette—apparently some kind of patron saint for the broken-hearted— about husbands and boyfriends, and recalcitrant and disappointing men in general, and leave them posted on an ancient wall. Sophie discovers that the city maintains a bevy of women who work full-time answering the letters, as Juliette. Then, by chance, she discovers a letter they have overlooked—for the last fifty years. She answers that letter, and in so doing, draws the author, Claudia, back to Verona to find her lost love. She is sixty-five now, and a widow. Accompanied by her grandson, a tight-sphinctered, proper, and thoroughly unpleasant Brit, Claudia and Sophie set out to find Lorenzo, her lost love. Claudia is played by Vanessa Redgrave, still beautiful, and brilliant, after all these years.
The body of the movie revolves around the humorous and poignant search for Lorenzo, while Sophie and Charlie, Claudia’s grandson, go from prickly antagonism to reluctant attraction. Naturally, just as they’ve given up the search, they find Lorenzo by chance, and old love is rekindled, while new love—ill-timed and inconvenient—is blossoming as well.
I wasn’t really liking this one for about the first third of the movie. But three things swayed me in the end. One, the absolutely beautiful locations and scenery, all shot in Italy, where light is supernatural and architecture sublime. Second, the writing rises above the formulaic nature of the story. After all, how many ways are there for people to fall into—and out of—love? And third, the casting and acting rise above the merely adequate and enter the realm of surpassing entertainment.
Lorenzo (the real Lorenzo) is played by Franco Nero. For those of you who are not familiar with that name, let me refresh your memory. The last time Redgrave and he worked together was in 1967, when she played Lady Guinevere and he played Sir Lancelot in the musical, “Camelot,” which also starred Richard Harris as King Arthur. Maybe you don’t like musicals, which makes you a philistine, but this is one of the best of all time—maybe my favorite. The two of them glow with chemistry in that movie, and it is still there in this new one.
I cannot reveal the ending, but suffice it to say, there will be tears of relieved joy. Amanda Seyfried has a noticeable presence on screen. (She plays the about-to married-daughter of three possible father’s in that peon to ABBA, Mama Mia!) Not to mention the biggest eyes since Leslie Ann Warren. Her obsessed fiancé makes himself intolerable in a fine job of supporting actor, while Charlie, played by Christopher Egan, turns in an excellent job as he goes from antagonistic spoiler to reluctant beau, while managing to maintain his core personality—no easy feat. The ladies in the group with which I went (ranging from 35 to 60ish) all agreed that Nero is even more virile, and better looking, than he was in his younger days. He also has the bluest eyes since Paul Newman.
So, despite a marked lack of interest, I’m glad I went. It is a good movie, if inescapably derivative. It manages to rise above its own cliché-ridden inertia to draw us into the captivating world of the well-crafted and believable characters.
It is rated PG-13, for adult themes. There is no skin or sexual content, and no profanity. There is the Italian countryside, which is almost enough to make me sell my guitar and take Nita for a visit. She loved it by the way. All four of the girls did.
If you are a die-hard Bruce Willis fan (get it?) or John Wayne aficionado, or think Arnold Schwarzenegger should have gotten an Oscar for his role in the Predator, this movie might not be for you.
This is a new romance, solidly in the “chick Flick” category. It stars Amanda Seyfried as Sophie, who is a fact-checker—and fledgling writer—working for the New Yorker, and engaged to a self-absorbed chef, who is in turn obsessed with opening his new restaurant in NY city. They decide to take a ‘pre-honeymoon’ (a bizarre concept) to Italy, a journey which turns into a thinly disguised business trip for future-hubby. This leaves Sophie, our heroine, with a lot of time on her hands.
She visits a tourist hot-spot in Verona, called, I think, Juliette’s House. It is a small courtyard where women from around the world go to write notes and letters to Juliette—apparently some kind of patron saint for the broken-hearted— about husbands and boyfriends, and recalcitrant and disappointing men in general, and leave them posted on an ancient wall. Sophie discovers that the city maintains a bevy of women who work full-time answering the letters, as Juliette. Then, by chance, she discovers a letter they have overlooked—for the last fifty years. She answers that letter, and in so doing, draws the author, Claudia, back to Verona to find her lost love. She is sixty-five now, and a widow. Accompanied by her grandson, a tight-sphinctered, proper, and thoroughly unpleasant Brit, Claudia and Sophie set out to find Lorenzo, her lost love. Claudia is played by Vanessa Redgrave, still beautiful, and brilliant, after all these years.
The body of the movie revolves around the humorous and poignant search for Lorenzo, while Sophie and Charlie, Claudia’s grandson, go from prickly antagonism to reluctant attraction. Naturally, just as they’ve given up the search, they find Lorenzo by chance, and old love is rekindled, while new love—ill-timed and inconvenient—is blossoming as well.
I wasn’t really liking this one for about the first third of the movie. But three things swayed me in the end. One, the absolutely beautiful locations and scenery, all shot in Italy, where light is supernatural and architecture sublime. Second, the writing rises above the formulaic nature of the story. After all, how many ways are there for people to fall into—and out of—love? And third, the casting and acting rise above the merely adequate and enter the realm of surpassing entertainment.
Lorenzo (the real Lorenzo) is played by Franco Nero. For those of you who are not familiar with that name, let me refresh your memory. The last time Redgrave and he worked together was in 1967, when she played Lady Guinevere and he played Sir Lancelot in the musical, “Camelot,” which also starred Richard Harris as King Arthur. Maybe you don’t like musicals, which makes you a philistine, but this is one of the best of all time—maybe my favorite. The two of them glow with chemistry in that movie, and it is still there in this new one.
I cannot reveal the ending, but suffice it to say, there will be tears of relieved joy. Amanda Seyfried has a noticeable presence on screen. (She plays the about-to married-daughter of three possible father’s in that peon to ABBA, Mama Mia!) Not to mention the biggest eyes since Leslie Ann Warren. Her obsessed fiancé makes himself intolerable in a fine job of supporting actor, while Charlie, played by Christopher Egan, turns in an excellent job as he goes from antagonistic spoiler to reluctant beau, while managing to maintain his core personality—no easy feat. The ladies in the group with which I went (ranging from 35 to 60ish) all agreed that Nero is even more virile, and better looking, than he was in his younger days. He also has the bluest eyes since Paul Newman.
So, despite a marked lack of interest, I’m glad I went. It is a good movie, if inescapably derivative. It manages to rise above its own cliché-ridden inertia to draw us into the captivating world of the well-crafted and believable characters.
It is rated PG-13, for adult themes. There is no skin or sexual content, and no profanity. There is the Italian countryside, which is almost enough to make me sell my guitar and take Nita for a visit. She loved it by the way. All four of the girls did.
If you are a die-hard Bruce Willis fan (get it?) or John Wayne aficionado, or think Arnold Schwarzenegger should have gotten an Oscar for his role in the Predator, this movie might not be for you.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Movie Review The Losers
Movie Review: The Losers
So my Nephew and his friend Rob and I went the next day and saw the one I intended to see in the first place.
A crack military special ops team is betrayed by a madman with apparently limitless resources and a penchant for inappropriate sarcasm. That’s pretty much the plot. We have the usual 7 guys and a hot girl (Zoe Saldana), all with nicknames and pasts. She bankrolls their return to the states and they agree to take out “Max”-the-omnipotent-bad guy.
There is nothing to recommend this movie, but I liked it. The bad guy is so bad we are willing to allow anything as long as it leads to his untimely demise. Max is purchasing a new weapons platform which destroys everything with some kind of sonic thing-a-ma-jig. He intends to sell it and start a war “for the good of America.” The good guys, whom everyone assumes are dead and have had their reputations tarnished, have hearts and even hints of personality as they plot to take out Max. Is the girl betraying them? Are they being set up again? Will Roque kill the Colonel? Will Jensen (Chris Evans aka The Human Torch) be the next Steve Perry? All will be revealed for about ten bucks.
As always, with little plot one must substitute lots of action-slash-mayhem and-or comedy. This has a good deal of the first and a little of the second. It is pretty good for the genre, and if you like unending violence and explosions like me. I give it a genre-specific 8, and a general 6.
It is rated PG-13 and should be R. For the violence obviously, but also a few “love scenes” in which we get to see a good deal more of Zoe and her antics than is appropriate for any PG-13 movie.
Zoe Saldana is the biggest name in it (Uhura from the New Star Trek, and what’s her name in Avatar), so you know the budget wasn’t what we might call “large.”
Spoiler alert:
Max is eventually killed in a really fun and highly unlikely way, and Roque does not manage to kill the Colonel. In fact he “dies very badly.”
So my Nephew and his friend Rob and I went the next day and saw the one I intended to see in the first place.
A crack military special ops team is betrayed by a madman with apparently limitless resources and a penchant for inappropriate sarcasm. That’s pretty much the plot. We have the usual 7 guys and a hot girl (Zoe Saldana), all with nicknames and pasts. She bankrolls their return to the states and they agree to take out “Max”-the-omnipotent-bad guy.
There is nothing to recommend this movie, but I liked it. The bad guy is so bad we are willing to allow anything as long as it leads to his untimely demise. Max is purchasing a new weapons platform which destroys everything with some kind of sonic thing-a-ma-jig. He intends to sell it and start a war “for the good of America.” The good guys, whom everyone assumes are dead and have had their reputations tarnished, have hearts and even hints of personality as they plot to take out Max. Is the girl betraying them? Are they being set up again? Will Roque kill the Colonel? Will Jensen (Chris Evans aka The Human Torch) be the next Steve Perry? All will be revealed for about ten bucks.
As always, with little plot one must substitute lots of action-slash-mayhem and-or comedy. This has a good deal of the first and a little of the second. It is pretty good for the genre, and if you like unending violence and explosions like me. I give it a genre-specific 8, and a general 6.
It is rated PG-13 and should be R. For the violence obviously, but also a few “love scenes” in which we get to see a good deal more of Zoe and her antics than is appropriate for any PG-13 movie.
Zoe Saldana is the biggest name in it (Uhura from the New Star Trek, and what’s her name in Avatar), so you know the budget wasn’t what we might call “large.”
Spoiler alert:
Max is eventually killed in a really fun and highly unlikely way, and Roque does not manage to kill the Colonel. In fact he “dies very badly.”
Movie Review Kickass
Movie Review: Kickass
An interesting thing happened with this one. As some of you know, Nita and I have sold the Las Vegas house and are relocating to upstate NY in July. Friday was the day the movers came and Nita had gone to SLC to babysit grandkids while their parents flew to ash-covered England to defend his dissertation, so I was alone. Even Frankie the trans-gender cat had flown to NY. It had been a busy, taxing, emotionally-trying and physically demanding two months and the end was suddenly in sight. I was experiencing a strange mix of emotions and with an empty house on my hands (no comfy-chair, no television) I decided to go to a movie. I chose The Losers, a PG-13 action formulaic thing. But when I got to the theater that movie had flown my consciousness and when I saw Kickass on the board it somehow clicked that I had intended to see that one instead. Don’t ask me why. I knew a little about it from a review I’d read and had no intention of seeing it. It was rated R and admitted to very strong language.
So I watched all the trailers (my favorite part) and was shocked and confused when Kickass started and not the movie I thought I was seeing, the title of which was escaping me. So that’s why I’m reviewing Kickass.
A little background. This movie is based on an underground comic (which I did not know and is always a warning flag), or “graphic novel” as the wanna-be writers and artists prefer they be called. Ostensibly it is about a 17 year old boy, a non-entity, who—like virtually all teenage boys—fantasizes of being a super-hero (among other things.) He discusses the idea with his two non-entity friends as he stares longingly at “the girl” who is an unobtainable beauty several casts above his own motley station. Except he decides to do something about it and orders a costume online. So far we have a fairly mainstream coming-of-age story. But then we switch scenes to a mob boss and his model family life. Someone who looked like Batman has beaten up a couple of his drug mules. Then we switch to an idyllic father-daughter scene, he middle-aged and she 12 or 13 and smallish, pony tails and big eyes and wearing, interestingly enough, a bullet proof vest. They exchange endearments. She asks if it’s going to hurt. He smiles and says yes, about like falling off a bike and shoots her in the chest with a large handgun. She falls down, he helps her up and asks what she wants for her birthday. Her answer? A Balisong—one of those Pilipino knives that have two hinged hilts and can swivel around like a hooker-loose can opener. He gives her a matching set.
Back to the boy. He is in his costume, has named himself Kickass, and is out prowling the streets looking for bad guys. Mind you, he has no training whatsoever, is not strong—is not even particularly bright. And is pretty much a coward. He is living the fantasy though. He gets the crap kicked out of him. He does it again and 3 thugs put him in the hospital for 6 months, during which half his skeleton is enhanced with metal. The x-rays look like Wolverine. The result, which we might think magically turns him into a one-man crime fighting wave, only serves to make him able to take a beating for longer periods of time.
Now the plot thickens. The father daughter team are actual crime fighters on a vendetta against the mob boss. It’s a long story. The dad (Nickolas Cage) is insane but functional and has been training himself and his daughter for her entire life to one end—killing everyone involved in his pregnant wife’s suicide. They are killing people wholesale—brutally, heartlessly and with ruthless efficiency (one of the four main tools of the Spanish Inquisition). All of which gets blamed on the ineffectual Kickass.
Enough. The movie takes a strange twist at that point and becomes a blood fest. I would compare the violence and gore with Reservoir Dogs. That’s right. If you don’t know what that means, count your blessings and make sure you never find out.
We go from teenage angst to deadly serious comic levels of mayhem, all the while maintaining the original level of familial repartee and comic-bookish writing. And somehow, it all works. It is, on several levels, a good movie—in the sense that it is well done. The language is unbelievably profane. The killing is rampant, über violent and graphic, and the vengeance is never justified. It’s as if Some Kind of Wonderful meets Napoleon Dynamite meets the afore mentioned Reservoir Dogs meets Goodfellas.
I do not recommend this one in the strongest of tones. Some of you will definitely want to see it and you know who you are. The fight scenes are wild and wooly, the little girl is a human dynamo with a filthy mouth, able to take out a dozen grown, hardened thugs without breaking a sweat—and she doesn’t just knock them out—she turns them into hamburger. Her outfit is eclectic to say the least and her moniker—Hit Girl—appropriate.
Every single character in this film is a broken, emotionally stunted, irretrievably disturbed person.
But the action is intense, viscerally exciting and unending. There’s a lot of misplaced creativity in it. Rated R for strong language and violence beyond the pale.
An interesting thing happened with this one. As some of you know, Nita and I have sold the Las Vegas house and are relocating to upstate NY in July. Friday was the day the movers came and Nita had gone to SLC to babysit grandkids while their parents flew to ash-covered England to defend his dissertation, so I was alone. Even Frankie the trans-gender cat had flown to NY. It had been a busy, taxing, emotionally-trying and physically demanding two months and the end was suddenly in sight. I was experiencing a strange mix of emotions and with an empty house on my hands (no comfy-chair, no television) I decided to go to a movie. I chose The Losers, a PG-13 action formulaic thing. But when I got to the theater that movie had flown my consciousness and when I saw Kickass on the board it somehow clicked that I had intended to see that one instead. Don’t ask me why. I knew a little about it from a review I’d read and had no intention of seeing it. It was rated R and admitted to very strong language.
So I watched all the trailers (my favorite part) and was shocked and confused when Kickass started and not the movie I thought I was seeing, the title of which was escaping me. So that’s why I’m reviewing Kickass.
A little background. This movie is based on an underground comic (which I did not know and is always a warning flag), or “graphic novel” as the wanna-be writers and artists prefer they be called. Ostensibly it is about a 17 year old boy, a non-entity, who—like virtually all teenage boys—fantasizes of being a super-hero (among other things.) He discusses the idea with his two non-entity friends as he stares longingly at “the girl” who is an unobtainable beauty several casts above his own motley station. Except he decides to do something about it and orders a costume online. So far we have a fairly mainstream coming-of-age story. But then we switch scenes to a mob boss and his model family life. Someone who looked like Batman has beaten up a couple of his drug mules. Then we switch to an idyllic father-daughter scene, he middle-aged and she 12 or 13 and smallish, pony tails and big eyes and wearing, interestingly enough, a bullet proof vest. They exchange endearments. She asks if it’s going to hurt. He smiles and says yes, about like falling off a bike and shoots her in the chest with a large handgun. She falls down, he helps her up and asks what she wants for her birthday. Her answer? A Balisong—one of those Pilipino knives that have two hinged hilts and can swivel around like a hooker-loose can opener. He gives her a matching set.
Back to the boy. He is in his costume, has named himself Kickass, and is out prowling the streets looking for bad guys. Mind you, he has no training whatsoever, is not strong—is not even particularly bright. And is pretty much a coward. He is living the fantasy though. He gets the crap kicked out of him. He does it again and 3 thugs put him in the hospital for 6 months, during which half his skeleton is enhanced with metal. The x-rays look like Wolverine. The result, which we might think magically turns him into a one-man crime fighting wave, only serves to make him able to take a beating for longer periods of time.
Now the plot thickens. The father daughter team are actual crime fighters on a vendetta against the mob boss. It’s a long story. The dad (Nickolas Cage) is insane but functional and has been training himself and his daughter for her entire life to one end—killing everyone involved in his pregnant wife’s suicide. They are killing people wholesale—brutally, heartlessly and with ruthless efficiency (one of the four main tools of the Spanish Inquisition). All of which gets blamed on the ineffectual Kickass.
Enough. The movie takes a strange twist at that point and becomes a blood fest. I would compare the violence and gore with Reservoir Dogs. That’s right. If you don’t know what that means, count your blessings and make sure you never find out.
We go from teenage angst to deadly serious comic levels of mayhem, all the while maintaining the original level of familial repartee and comic-bookish writing. And somehow, it all works. It is, on several levels, a good movie—in the sense that it is well done. The language is unbelievably profane. The killing is rampant, über violent and graphic, and the vengeance is never justified. It’s as if Some Kind of Wonderful meets Napoleon Dynamite meets the afore mentioned Reservoir Dogs meets Goodfellas.
I do not recommend this one in the strongest of tones. Some of you will definitely want to see it and you know who you are. The fight scenes are wild and wooly, the little girl is a human dynamo with a filthy mouth, able to take out a dozen grown, hardened thugs without breaking a sweat—and she doesn’t just knock them out—she turns them into hamburger. Her outfit is eclectic to say the least and her moniker—Hit Girl—appropriate.
Every single character in this film is a broken, emotionally stunted, irretrievably disturbed person.
But the action is intense, viscerally exciting and unending. There’s a lot of misplaced creativity in it. Rated R for strong language and violence beyond the pale.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Clash of the Titans
Clash of the Titans Does everyone remember the original from the 1981? It had an all-star cast, including Lawrence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Harry Hamblin and Burgess Meredith to name a few. I remember it fondly because I always liked the special effects Ray Harryhausen came up with. (I loved those warrior-skeletons in Sinbad.)
The best way to describe this remake is “better special effects but the same old story.” Somehow the story of Perseus seems to have started out old and fallen into disregard from there, no doubt as a result of literary entropy. Greek mythology reads well but doesn’t seem to translate to the screen very well.
Sam Worthington stars as Perseus. His claim to fame is having been discovered by James Cameron and cast in the leading roll of the paraplegic Marine in Avatar. He is not required to act in either movie which plays to his strengths.
The story is as follows: Perseus is born and grows up. His father is Zeus but he doesn’t know this right away. He finds himself in Argos, a city where the people are in the process of rebelling against the gods—never a clever thing to do in ancient Greece. The gods become angry and Hades talks his not-overly-bright brother (Zeus) into letting him punish the humans with his pet Kraken, the most terrible creature every to come into existence. Hades then tells the citizens of Argos that they will all die at the next eclipse unless they sacrifice Andromeda, the kings beautiful daughter, thus returning the gods to their rightful places as . . . well . . . gods. Their only chance to escape this fate is to kill the Kraken, which is unkillable and has been tasked to destroy the city. So Perseus and a few Greek warriors go looking for the one thing that can destroy the invincible Kraken, which is the head of Medusa. It’s the usual plot-driver. As you know, Greeks invented the sitcom and this is a good example of the genre. Since the story is at least three thousand years old and we all have to read it in high school, giving away the ending won’t spoil anything. Perseus wins with the help of his doting father, who gives him a magic sword and the Pegasus (although this time the flying horse is black. This is what passes for ‘creativity’ and a ‘personal vision’ for the producers and director.) Naturally Perseus and his cohorts have to pass through all kinds of tests and challenges which is how all Greek stories go, and from which only Perseus returns unscathed. And by scathed I mean dead. It is essentially a melodrama.
The special effects are as good as one would expect in today’s market. I especially liked the way Hades enters and exits a scene. The Kraken is awesome. Basically it is a mutant cross between a squid and some kind of crustacean, and it is the size of Rhode Island. One wonders how something so huge could even see the Medusa head even when it is right in front of the beast, but it does, which turns it to stone.
The best scene is where Perseus picks up a golden mechanical owl he finds and asks what it is. The leader of the Greek soldiers scowls and says, “put it back,” and that’s the end of the owl.
A thin story line, zero characterizations, no profanity, no skin and good FX. There is absolutely no reason to see this movie, much less to have made it. I went with around eight members of the Voorhies clan and we all agreed that the 3-D effect not only did not add anything to the experience but actually detracted from it. I think I’m going to stop going to 3-D versions of movies. Nita didn’t go. She wasn’t interested and the movie started at the same time as her bedtime.
No cussing, no sex. In fact, nothing interesting at all. But you should still go see it.
The best way to describe this remake is “better special effects but the same old story.” Somehow the story of Perseus seems to have started out old and fallen into disregard from there, no doubt as a result of literary entropy. Greek mythology reads well but doesn’t seem to translate to the screen very well.
Sam Worthington stars as Perseus. His claim to fame is having been discovered by James Cameron and cast in the leading roll of the paraplegic Marine in Avatar. He is not required to act in either movie which plays to his strengths.
The story is as follows: Perseus is born and grows up. His father is Zeus but he doesn’t know this right away. He finds himself in Argos, a city where the people are in the process of rebelling against the gods—never a clever thing to do in ancient Greece. The gods become angry and Hades talks his not-overly-bright brother (Zeus) into letting him punish the humans with his pet Kraken, the most terrible creature every to come into existence. Hades then tells the citizens of Argos that they will all die at the next eclipse unless they sacrifice Andromeda, the kings beautiful daughter, thus returning the gods to their rightful places as . . . well . . . gods. Their only chance to escape this fate is to kill the Kraken, which is unkillable and has been tasked to destroy the city. So Perseus and a few Greek warriors go looking for the one thing that can destroy the invincible Kraken, which is the head of Medusa. It’s the usual plot-driver. As you know, Greeks invented the sitcom and this is a good example of the genre. Since the story is at least three thousand years old and we all have to read it in high school, giving away the ending won’t spoil anything. Perseus wins with the help of his doting father, who gives him a magic sword and the Pegasus (although this time the flying horse is black. This is what passes for ‘creativity’ and a ‘personal vision’ for the producers and director.) Naturally Perseus and his cohorts have to pass through all kinds of tests and challenges which is how all Greek stories go, and from which only Perseus returns unscathed. And by scathed I mean dead. It is essentially a melodrama.
The special effects are as good as one would expect in today’s market. I especially liked the way Hades enters and exits a scene. The Kraken is awesome. Basically it is a mutant cross between a squid and some kind of crustacean, and it is the size of Rhode Island. One wonders how something so huge could even see the Medusa head even when it is right in front of the beast, but it does, which turns it to stone.
The best scene is where Perseus picks up a golden mechanical owl he finds and asks what it is. The leader of the Greek soldiers scowls and says, “put it back,” and that’s the end of the owl.
A thin story line, zero characterizations, no profanity, no skin and good FX. There is absolutely no reason to see this movie, much less to have made it. I went with around eight members of the Voorhies clan and we all agreed that the 3-D effect not only did not add anything to the experience but actually detracted from it. I think I’m going to stop going to 3-D versions of movies. Nita didn’t go. She wasn’t interested and the movie started at the same time as her bedtime.
No cussing, no sex. In fact, nothing interesting at all. But you should still go see it.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes Unless you are one of my children (none of them have a television capable of receiving network broadcasts or cable or satellite) you must have seen the previews by now. This is Guy Ritchie’s (Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch) latest endeavor and it is a good one. I’ve been worried about him because he and Madonna (or “Masluta” as Newell and I like to say) recently got divorced, but he seems to have come out of it with his creative juices intact.
This is not your classic Sherlock Holmes, Lionel Barrymore movie. This is Ritchie’s reinvention of Holmes and Watson, and it worked very well for me. It is an action movie, a thrill a second, with a smart, pepper-shot screenplay, great acting, and a truly convoluted and twisty plot worthy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Robert Downey Jr. Plays Holmes with an odd but effective fake English accent, and Jude Law is the redoubtable Doctor Watson. The chemistry between the two is spot on, displaying a deeper, more complicated relationship than the books ever delved into. They have been turned into action heroes while managing to retain the spirit and core of the two characters and the insanely elaborate mysteries. Holmes is a martial arts devote. Ritchie employs a wonderful gimmick a few times during the film, which I found very entertaining. While in the midst of a fight (where he is usually losing) the action slows to very slow-motion as we hear Holmes predict his opponents next few moves and countering with strategies of his own, the slow action following the play-by-play. Then the action returns to normal speed as Holmes actually goes through the list of blows and counter punches—all based on his incredible attention to detail and the slightest of clues—in perfect precision and order, completely disabling the poor sap on the other side of his rampant physicality. Very effective, and Ritchie knows not to overdo it. Watson is a former Military physician who has served in various exotic locals and knows his way around a brawl as well, although not with the same panache as his erstwhile companion.
Each man in involved in a romantic relationship and they spend a good deal of time making one another’s relationship much more complicated than it needs to be. Watson is about to be married and Holmes is doing everything he can to undermine that situation.
The enemy is a practitioner of the occult arts, which seemingly renders Holmes’ rationality impotent, but fear not, he is well ahead of everyone, even if it seems as if he about to be killed at least twenty times during the course of the film while the entire British Aristocracy is under the thrall of the evil-doer.
An excellent supporting cast rounds out the mile-a-minute adventure and all is brought to a more or less acceptable finale.
It is rated PG-13 and that is about right. Lots of violence in the form of brawls and fist-fights, very little actual killing, and no profanity that I can recall. I would not take a sensitive ten-year old to this one, but a world-wise twelve-year old and up will enjoy it, if they are quick enough to keep up with the action and Holmes’s racing intellect. I thoroughly enjoyed it, Nita didn’t go, but my oldest daughter did (it was a kind of experimental outing—my first since the uh, “episode”) and she loved it as well. We recommend it.
P.S. It’s nice to be back in the saddle, more or less . . .
This is not your classic Sherlock Holmes, Lionel Barrymore movie. This is Ritchie’s reinvention of Holmes and Watson, and it worked very well for me. It is an action movie, a thrill a second, with a smart, pepper-shot screenplay, great acting, and a truly convoluted and twisty plot worthy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Robert Downey Jr. Plays Holmes with an odd but effective fake English accent, and Jude Law is the redoubtable Doctor Watson. The chemistry between the two is spot on, displaying a deeper, more complicated relationship than the books ever delved into. They have been turned into action heroes while managing to retain the spirit and core of the two characters and the insanely elaborate mysteries. Holmes is a martial arts devote. Ritchie employs a wonderful gimmick a few times during the film, which I found very entertaining. While in the midst of a fight (where he is usually losing) the action slows to very slow-motion as we hear Holmes predict his opponents next few moves and countering with strategies of his own, the slow action following the play-by-play. Then the action returns to normal speed as Holmes actually goes through the list of blows and counter punches—all based on his incredible attention to detail and the slightest of clues—in perfect precision and order, completely disabling the poor sap on the other side of his rampant physicality. Very effective, and Ritchie knows not to overdo it. Watson is a former Military physician who has served in various exotic locals and knows his way around a brawl as well, although not with the same panache as his erstwhile companion.
Each man in involved in a romantic relationship and they spend a good deal of time making one another’s relationship much more complicated than it needs to be. Watson is about to be married and Holmes is doing everything he can to undermine that situation.
The enemy is a practitioner of the occult arts, which seemingly renders Holmes’ rationality impotent, but fear not, he is well ahead of everyone, even if it seems as if he about to be killed at least twenty times during the course of the film while the entire British Aristocracy is under the thrall of the evil-doer.
An excellent supporting cast rounds out the mile-a-minute adventure and all is brought to a more or less acceptable finale.
It is rated PG-13 and that is about right. Lots of violence in the form of brawls and fist-fights, very little actual killing, and no profanity that I can recall. I would not take a sensitive ten-year old to this one, but a world-wise twelve-year old and up will enjoy it, if they are quick enough to keep up with the action and Holmes’s racing intellect. I thoroughly enjoyed it, Nita didn’t go, but my oldest daughter did (it was a kind of experimental outing—my first since the uh, “episode”) and she loved it as well. We recommend it.
P.S. It’s nice to be back in the saddle, more or less . . .
Sunday, November 15, 2009
2012
2012 I really wanted to like this movie. Everything started out great too. A blockbuster, huge budget, wall-to-wall special effects. Plus I like John Cusack a lot, and Amanda Peet is fine. Woody Haralson plays another freakish crazy guy. Makes me think he is probably a freakish crazy guy in real life.
I assume you all know the plot: The world is ending because the Mayan Calendar says it has to.
Sidebar: I believe I wrote an IGM about this previously, but just in case there is someone in the world who didn’t read it, let me repeat. The Mayan calendar does not end on December 21,2012. It resets. The calendar is circular, cyclic, which is why they carved it as a series of concentric wheels, on round stones. So rather than that date being the end of the world, it is only the end of a specific period, an era. There are several million Mayans, mostly in Guatemala, who aren’t worried about it. But there will be some crazies taking it seriously. So stay away from hilltops and kool-aid.
Now back to our review. There are no surprises in this movie, and no one expected there would be. It’s all about the action, suspense and effects—which are breath-taking. And for the first two hours it succeeds brilliantly in giving us what we paid for. The story follows Cusack, a divorced writer who is trying to keep some kind of relationship with his two kids. The writing isn’t going so well, despite his first book having just been published, and he is driving a limo to make ends meet. He has to use the longcar to take his kids to Yellowstone, which as we all know, is the world’s biggest active volcano. (See my IGM titled Yellowstone: The Real End of the World). Yellowstone—apparently only an hour or so from LA by limo—is where Cusack meets Haralson who is broadcasting remotely from an RV, exposing all the secrets the worlds governments have been keeping concerning the end of the world. Something about the molten core heating up and spinning faster resulting in the curst breaking loose and going through some radical rearrangements. (See my IGM entitled The Treadmill Theory of Geological Relocation: A Creative Extrapolation of the Plate Tectonic Theory). The governments have known about the whole thing for a few years and have secretly been building “Arks” in which a few hundred thousand selectees will ride out the apocalypse based on their political juice and/or their ability to offer truly prodigious bribes. Cusack finds out about it and decides to get his family and get them onto one of the ships. Easier said than done, especially when Southern California has decided to become North Dakota.
For the next hour and a half our heroes miraculously miss being killed in interesting ways mostly involving large pieces of the planet falling on them, while they make their ways unerringly to China under less than plausible circumstances. But hey, it’s all in the script, right? It’s fun and exciting, get’s the blood up; in other words, doing exactly what we paid for. But then it doesn’t end. It goes on for another half hour (About 2 hours 40 minutes, total) and falls into a dreary, hackneyed, morass of the worst kind of melodrama. It’s as if there was a huge safe somewhere in Hollywood where every cliché in the history of cinema is kept and the writers and director got into that safe and used every one of them all at once. In a nightmare of professional idiocy, the movie leaves the world of the merely implausible and makes itself at home in the world of “who the hell wrote this slop? Kim Jong il?”
They tried to tug at our heart strings. Which works a time or two, when intelligently done, with some semblance of restraint. But this was like the Olympic Gold Medalist of over-doing it—the super-tsunami of “oh, please!”
I went in fully prepared to maintain a healthy dose of “willing suspension of disbelief,” (Which I’m really good at) but it beat me. It finally became a parody of itself. The worst stereotype since Armageddon.
It’s rated PG-13. The usual end-of-the-world mayhem and destruction. It will quicken your pulse, no doubt about it. But if you decide to see it, be sure to get a lobotomy-to-go first.
I assume you all know the plot: The world is ending because the Mayan Calendar says it has to.
Sidebar: I believe I wrote an IGM about this previously, but just in case there is someone in the world who didn’t read it, let me repeat. The Mayan calendar does not end on December 21,2012. It resets. The calendar is circular, cyclic, which is why they carved it as a series of concentric wheels, on round stones. So rather than that date being the end of the world, it is only the end of a specific period, an era. There are several million Mayans, mostly in Guatemala, who aren’t worried about it. But there will be some crazies taking it seriously. So stay away from hilltops and kool-aid.
Now back to our review. There are no surprises in this movie, and no one expected there would be. It’s all about the action, suspense and effects—which are breath-taking. And for the first two hours it succeeds brilliantly in giving us what we paid for. The story follows Cusack, a divorced writer who is trying to keep some kind of relationship with his two kids. The writing isn’t going so well, despite his first book having just been published, and he is driving a limo to make ends meet. He has to use the longcar to take his kids to Yellowstone, which as we all know, is the world’s biggest active volcano. (See my IGM titled Yellowstone: The Real End of the World). Yellowstone—apparently only an hour or so from LA by limo—is where Cusack meets Haralson who is broadcasting remotely from an RV, exposing all the secrets the worlds governments have been keeping concerning the end of the world. Something about the molten core heating up and spinning faster resulting in the curst breaking loose and going through some radical rearrangements. (See my IGM entitled The Treadmill Theory of Geological Relocation: A Creative Extrapolation of the Plate Tectonic Theory). The governments have known about the whole thing for a few years and have secretly been building “Arks” in which a few hundred thousand selectees will ride out the apocalypse based on their political juice and/or their ability to offer truly prodigious bribes. Cusack finds out about it and decides to get his family and get them onto one of the ships. Easier said than done, especially when Southern California has decided to become North Dakota.
For the next hour and a half our heroes miraculously miss being killed in interesting ways mostly involving large pieces of the planet falling on them, while they make their ways unerringly to China under less than plausible circumstances. But hey, it’s all in the script, right? It’s fun and exciting, get’s the blood up; in other words, doing exactly what we paid for. But then it doesn’t end. It goes on for another half hour (About 2 hours 40 minutes, total) and falls into a dreary, hackneyed, morass of the worst kind of melodrama. It’s as if there was a huge safe somewhere in Hollywood where every cliché in the history of cinema is kept and the writers and director got into that safe and used every one of them all at once. In a nightmare of professional idiocy, the movie leaves the world of the merely implausible and makes itself at home in the world of “who the hell wrote this slop? Kim Jong il?”
They tried to tug at our heart strings. Which works a time or two, when intelligently done, with some semblance of restraint. But this was like the Olympic Gold Medalist of over-doing it—the super-tsunami of “oh, please!”
I went in fully prepared to maintain a healthy dose of “willing suspension of disbelief,” (Which I’m really good at) but it beat me. It finally became a parody of itself. The worst stereotype since Armageddon.
It’s rated PG-13. The usual end-of-the-world mayhem and destruction. It will quicken your pulse, no doubt about it. But if you decide to see it, be sure to get a lobotomy-to-go first.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Zombieland For all you newbies out there, anything with the word “Zombie” in it, or with even a hint of ravenous, reanimated, cannibalistic humans in the trailer, is a must-see for yours truly. I know, it’s disgusting (of which Nita reminds me each and every time) but I can’t help it. Ever since I saw Night of the Living Dead back in 1970 or so I’ve been hooked. I wish it had been angels with heavenly messages and bright lights shining over their heads, but what can you do?
Zombieland is a quirky, unpretentious movie that tries to be funny in an ironic way, but ends up actually surpassing that admittedly unambitious goal. It is funny, but it manages to go beyond the usual Hollywood superficiality and find a hint of meaning in the midst of what otherwise is a plain old blood and guts flick. And make no mistake, the blood and guts are there in Technicolor, filmed in loving detail and über-graphic slow-mo. That’s part of the fun and expected in this genre.
The story revolves around a young twenty-something college drop-out—a phobia-laden, girl-challenged socially-inept boy. Some kind of plague—very briefly tied to mad-cow disease with a description of swelling brains, high fevers and ultra-violent outbursts fueled by an insatiable desire for human flesh—has rendered mankind all but extinct in a matter of months. A few normal’s are left, people who have been lucky and/or managed to survive by dint of a genetic propensity for zombie-killing. Woody Haralson is another survivor, born, it seems, to shine in the post-apocalyptic world of Zombieland. The two males accidently join forces and soon meet two females who waste no time scamming the boys out of their ride, food, guns, and everything else. It’s the classic story really; boy meets girl, girl turns out to be a grifter, boy rescues girl (and her little sister) from the zombie horde.
This movie is a good example of what decent writing (not great writing) can do for a terrible story—and let’s face it, anything with zombies in it must be, by definition, a terrible story. Tallahassee and Cleveland (no one uses names—you don’t want to form any lasting relationships in Zombieland) are polar opposites but seem to mesh as they go looking for the girls and their gear, killing zombies right and left along the way.
About a fourth of the movie takes place in Beverly Hills, in what is supposed to be Bill Murray’s mansion, and that sequence takes the film from just another pretty-good genre flick to memorable, and a sure-thing for cult classic. Murray is in it, playing himself, and that’s all I can tell you about that.
Amidst the scatological humor, disgusting special effects, and high-irony, they somehow manage to find moments (albeit brief) of sincere suspense and humanity. Which still doesn’t make it a good movie, but does make it a not-completely terrible movie. The director borrows a few gimmicks from Quentin Tarantino, with little asides in the narration, (like the Zombie Kill of the Week) and odd little scenes just for fun. It also borrows from the TV show Fringe with little 3-d labels and signs that appear randomly in the scene and sometimes break and fall down. Very odd, but I liked all that.
So . . . it’s rated R, and it wears that letter proudly, kind of like the big red “B+” my sister wore on her sweatshirt at BYU. (You English majors should get that . . .) Lots of foul language, lots of viscera being eaten, black fluids dripping (okay—spewing) from dead mouths, decapitations, vehicles running over bodies, the usual stuff. It is not for the mainstream movie-going audience, even though it is, ostensibly, a comedy. But it’s an existential comedy, full of angst, pathos and hubris, and the afore-mentioned irony. I do not recommend it for anyone. A few of you will want to see it and you know who you are. For the rest? Rent a classic. Had Nita, in her own brain-swollen fever, gone with me to see it, she would still be in the ICU.
Zombieland is a quirky, unpretentious movie that tries to be funny in an ironic way, but ends up actually surpassing that admittedly unambitious goal. It is funny, but it manages to go beyond the usual Hollywood superficiality and find a hint of meaning in the midst of what otherwise is a plain old blood and guts flick. And make no mistake, the blood and guts are there in Technicolor, filmed in loving detail and über-graphic slow-mo. That’s part of the fun and expected in this genre.
The story revolves around a young twenty-something college drop-out—a phobia-laden, girl-challenged socially-inept boy. Some kind of plague—very briefly tied to mad-cow disease with a description of swelling brains, high fevers and ultra-violent outbursts fueled by an insatiable desire for human flesh—has rendered mankind all but extinct in a matter of months. A few normal’s are left, people who have been lucky and/or managed to survive by dint of a genetic propensity for zombie-killing. Woody Haralson is another survivor, born, it seems, to shine in the post-apocalyptic world of Zombieland. The two males accidently join forces and soon meet two females who waste no time scamming the boys out of their ride, food, guns, and everything else. It’s the classic story really; boy meets girl, girl turns out to be a grifter, boy rescues girl (and her little sister) from the zombie horde.
This movie is a good example of what decent writing (not great writing) can do for a terrible story—and let’s face it, anything with zombies in it must be, by definition, a terrible story. Tallahassee and Cleveland (no one uses names—you don’t want to form any lasting relationships in Zombieland) are polar opposites but seem to mesh as they go looking for the girls and their gear, killing zombies right and left along the way.
About a fourth of the movie takes place in Beverly Hills, in what is supposed to be Bill Murray’s mansion, and that sequence takes the film from just another pretty-good genre flick to memorable, and a sure-thing for cult classic. Murray is in it, playing himself, and that’s all I can tell you about that.
Amidst the scatological humor, disgusting special effects, and high-irony, they somehow manage to find moments (albeit brief) of sincere suspense and humanity. Which still doesn’t make it a good movie, but does make it a not-completely terrible movie. The director borrows a few gimmicks from Quentin Tarantino, with little asides in the narration, (like the Zombie Kill of the Week) and odd little scenes just for fun. It also borrows from the TV show Fringe with little 3-d labels and signs that appear randomly in the scene and sometimes break and fall down. Very odd, but I liked all that.
So . . . it’s rated R, and it wears that letter proudly, kind of like the big red “B+” my sister wore on her sweatshirt at BYU. (You English majors should get that . . .) Lots of foul language, lots of viscera being eaten, black fluids dripping (okay—spewing) from dead mouths, decapitations, vehicles running over bodies, the usual stuff. It is not for the mainstream movie-going audience, even though it is, ostensibly, a comedy. But it’s an existential comedy, full of angst, pathos and hubris, and the afore-mentioned irony. I do not recommend it for anyone. A few of you will want to see it and you know who you are. For the rest? Rent a classic. Had Nita, in her own brain-swollen fever, gone with me to see it, she would still be in the ICU.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Thor at the Bus Stop
Thor at the Bus Stop This review will be a little different than usual. I am reviewing a movie that hasn’t been released yet. And, I am also pitching the movie. All will be explained.
Thor at the Bus Stop is a local production. It was written, produced, filmed, edited . . . everything . . . here in Las Vegas. It is an off-beat, quirky little existential comedy about the God of Thunder (Thor) and his date with Ragnarök, in which he is destined to fight a really big snake, die, and usher in the end of the universe. We find him, as the movie opens, sitting at a bus stop somewhere in Summerlin (a suburb of Las Vegas for you out-of-towners), with an annoying little girl, trying to find a ride to his destiny. From then on we loosely follow Thor’s progress—or lack thereof—and the myriad odd but memorable characters which inhabit this contemporary fantasy. We are treated to—as the trailer says—Thunder Claps, Fruit Snacks, and the Power of Cool.
We meet Big Zed and L’il Ned, two petty thieves who specialize in lunch boxes, White Trash Chuck who wants to be good but is having a bad life, Passenger-seat Pete, who intends to slide through life with as little effort as possible, and several others. My two favorites are the wounded guy, who has a yield sign stuck in his chest throughout the movie, and someone known only as “Milk Strider”, who we see countless times, always hurrying, wearing boxers, a tee shirt and a robe, and carrying several gallons of milk. All will be revealed.
Several people are killed, including the annoying little girl who opens the film, and two cops are on the job, trying to find clues in the small mounds of ash which is all that’s left of them. Bernard Bernard, an apparently agency-less news man with a camera-slash-sound man, a van, and a satellite dish made out of cardboard, follows the cops, trying to beat them to the scoop. The eternal questions about life, relationships, the meaning of Cool, God, and why it’s so hard to find good medical help in an emergency, are all asked and answered—sort of. In the end, everyone learns something, and Thor accepts the inevitability of his fate, enters the cavern, and faces the serpent. I quite liked it, despite the obvious lack of a budget or any name-actors. I don’t think it has been rated, but I would give it a PG. There is no cussing (White Trash Chuck used to cuss until his little sister was born—he is obviously frustrated but trying hard), no sex or skin, and only one attempted, then aborted, murder. Cool Prevails. Any violence is off camera except for our petty thieves roughing up a few elementary school kids, and Thor killing a basketball standard and the Serpent of Midgard.
The music was done by local talent as well, by two groups, “A Crowd of Small Adventures” and “Hungry Cloud”. Both are fronted by Jackson Wilcox, who is credited with the soundtrack. (Jack is a cousin, my uncle’s grandson, but those of you who know me, know I have thousands of cousins.)
Now, here is why I am pitching it. My daughter’s boy friend and his brothers made the movie. Mike and Jerry Thompson wrote and directed it, G. Scott Thompson (the boyfriend) co-produced and plays Big Zed, and they all took part in the filming and editing. One of the brothers plays White Trash Chuck, and another is Thor. Even Chani, my daughter, has a two-second scene near the end. ( Hint—She is the reason for all the milk.) The movie has played at several film festivals, including Sundance, and won some acclaim. They managed to put together a week at the Brenden theaters here in town. (At the Palms Resort). The premier is September 25 (the day after Thorsday—get it?).
I highly recommend the film on its own merit. Beyond that, I think we should do what we can to support and encourage the arts in this valley. So I am inviting everyone to go see it that week. If enough people go, the stay will be extended, and we might start a phenomenon, like we did with Napoleon Dynamite. Take a friend or twelve, make an evening of it. If nothing else think of the awesome trivia questions you’ll be able to generate, and annoying quotes you can share with friends in the know!
Those of you who live out of town are welcome to come and stay with us for a day or two while you take in the movie.
Addendum: The film is out now. We went to the world premier here in Vegas. It was kind of a family reunion for the Thompson boys. It gets better every time I see it.
Thor at the Bus Stop is a local production. It was written, produced, filmed, edited . . . everything . . . here in Las Vegas. It is an off-beat, quirky little existential comedy about the God of Thunder (Thor) and his date with Ragnarök, in which he is destined to fight a really big snake, die, and usher in the end of the universe. We find him, as the movie opens, sitting at a bus stop somewhere in Summerlin (a suburb of Las Vegas for you out-of-towners), with an annoying little girl, trying to find a ride to his destiny. From then on we loosely follow Thor’s progress—or lack thereof—and the myriad odd but memorable characters which inhabit this contemporary fantasy. We are treated to—as the trailer says—Thunder Claps, Fruit Snacks, and the Power of Cool.
We meet Big Zed and L’il Ned, two petty thieves who specialize in lunch boxes, White Trash Chuck who wants to be good but is having a bad life, Passenger-seat Pete, who intends to slide through life with as little effort as possible, and several others. My two favorites are the wounded guy, who has a yield sign stuck in his chest throughout the movie, and someone known only as “Milk Strider”, who we see countless times, always hurrying, wearing boxers, a tee shirt and a robe, and carrying several gallons of milk. All will be revealed.
Several people are killed, including the annoying little girl who opens the film, and two cops are on the job, trying to find clues in the small mounds of ash which is all that’s left of them. Bernard Bernard, an apparently agency-less news man with a camera-slash-sound man, a van, and a satellite dish made out of cardboard, follows the cops, trying to beat them to the scoop. The eternal questions about life, relationships, the meaning of Cool, God, and why it’s so hard to find good medical help in an emergency, are all asked and answered—sort of. In the end, everyone learns something, and Thor accepts the inevitability of his fate, enters the cavern, and faces the serpent. I quite liked it, despite the obvious lack of a budget or any name-actors. I don’t think it has been rated, but I would give it a PG. There is no cussing (White Trash Chuck used to cuss until his little sister was born—he is obviously frustrated but trying hard), no sex or skin, and only one attempted, then aborted, murder. Cool Prevails. Any violence is off camera except for our petty thieves roughing up a few elementary school kids, and Thor killing a basketball standard and the Serpent of Midgard.
The music was done by local talent as well, by two groups, “A Crowd of Small Adventures” and “Hungry Cloud”. Both are fronted by Jackson Wilcox, who is credited with the soundtrack. (Jack is a cousin, my uncle’s grandson, but those of you who know me, know I have thousands of cousins.)
Now, here is why I am pitching it. My daughter’s boy friend and his brothers made the movie. Mike and Jerry Thompson wrote and directed it, G. Scott Thompson (the boyfriend) co-produced and plays Big Zed, and they all took part in the filming and editing. One of the brothers plays White Trash Chuck, and another is Thor. Even Chani, my daughter, has a two-second scene near the end. ( Hint—She is the reason for all the milk.) The movie has played at several film festivals, including Sundance, and won some acclaim. They managed to put together a week at the Brenden theaters here in town. (At the Palms Resort). The premier is September 25 (the day after Thorsday—get it?).
I highly recommend the film on its own merit. Beyond that, I think we should do what we can to support and encourage the arts in this valley. So I am inviting everyone to go see it that week. If enough people go, the stay will be extended, and we might start a phenomenon, like we did with Napoleon Dynamite. Take a friend or twelve, make an evening of it. If nothing else think of the awesome trivia questions you’ll be able to generate, and annoying quotes you can share with friends in the know!
Those of you who live out of town are welcome to come and stay with us for a day or two while you take in the movie.
Addendum: The film is out now. We went to the world premier here in Vegas. It was kind of a family reunion for the Thompson boys. It gets better every time I see it.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
IGM: Mary Travers
Inter-Galactic Memo
To: All Personnel
Fr: W. Leavitt
Re: Mary Travers
9-17-09
It is with a profound sense of loss and a quiet sense of personal satisfaction that I announce the death of Mary Travers. After a long and painful struggle with leukemia, she has finally won the battle at age 72. Loss because I will miss having her in the world, and satisfaction because of a life well-lived and one of the greatest gifts I have ever been given. The gift of music.
Many of you will not be familiar with Mary. She was the full-throated blonde in the folk trio, Peter Paul and Mary. They hit it big in the early sixties singing traditional folk songs, and then expanded their repertoire to include protest music, and uplifting songs about peace and love and stuff like that. They won five Grammys and maintained an active career well into the eighties, and accidently got rich. I have no idea how many albums they sold, but I have one or two of all of them. (And by album, I mean vinyl.)
I was probably fourteen or so when I first heard them, and they changed my life forever. Peter Paul and Mary remain the single biggest musical influence in my life. By the time I was in high school in the late sixties I was playing guitar and singing their songs, then jointly formed a trio (two guys and a girl) of my (our) own and we became PP&M clones. We eventually branched out a little and did Dylan (so did PP&M . . . so did everybody) and Donovan and other, less well know stuff—like the Sons of the Pioneers—including some of our own. We played the coffee house circuit between Baltimore and D.C. In some ways, that was the “best time of my life”, to quote Bryan Adams. It is difficult to describe the extent to which their music touched me, moved me, and still does today. Those beat-up, scratchy records are still the ones that get played the most, despite the size and breadth of my collection. My kids were all raised on folk music and classic rock and roll, but if you asked them, I think they would tell you the folk was their favorite when they were growing up. (Their kids have all been raised listening to Donovan’s “For Little Ones”, among others.) Their arrangements and harmonies, their passion and technical superiority affected me immensely, and informed my own brief career in the music business.
PP&M were socially conscious. They stood for principles. Not always shared by me, but they were sincere and consistent. They donated huge sums of money to causes and did nearly as many benefits as paying concerts. They were one of several acts who performed on the Mall in DC when MLK gave his famous “I have a dream” speech. It is one of the main disappointments of my life I never got to see them live, but in his later years Nita and I went to see Peter Yarrow at a small venue in Albuquerque. He was just out of prison for cavorting with under-aged groupies (he says they lied to him) but it was a great show. Now I never will.
Mary will be missed. Her oddly put-together face, the way she snapped her head and made her hair flop around when she wanted to emphasize something. Those bangs. That throaty, hard-driving voice of hers and her sense of humor. Late in their careers they made an album called Peter Paul and Mommy, a collection of tunes for children, which is an absolute gem. At one time I knew most of the songs on that album and wore out my guitar singing them to our kids and their friends.(“Daddy’s taking us to zoo tomorrow . . .”) In fact, doing some of those songs for my wife’s little nieces (Nita and I had just met) at dinner one night, was instrumental in her deciding to marry me.
Mary will never stop singing. One of the best things about technology is our being able to save—and savor—music and art into the eternities. Peter and Paul (Noel) will eventually die as well, sooner, later, who knows? And So will I. But until I do, I will be listening to their music, and, in that sense, keeping them alive forever.
To: All Personnel
Fr: W. Leavitt
Re: Mary Travers
9-17-09
It is with a profound sense of loss and a quiet sense of personal satisfaction that I announce the death of Mary Travers. After a long and painful struggle with leukemia, she has finally won the battle at age 72. Loss because I will miss having her in the world, and satisfaction because of a life well-lived and one of the greatest gifts I have ever been given. The gift of music.
Many of you will not be familiar with Mary. She was the full-throated blonde in the folk trio, Peter Paul and Mary. They hit it big in the early sixties singing traditional folk songs, and then expanded their repertoire to include protest music, and uplifting songs about peace and love and stuff like that. They won five Grammys and maintained an active career well into the eighties, and accidently got rich. I have no idea how many albums they sold, but I have one or two of all of them. (And by album, I mean vinyl.)
I was probably fourteen or so when I first heard them, and they changed my life forever. Peter Paul and Mary remain the single biggest musical influence in my life. By the time I was in high school in the late sixties I was playing guitar and singing their songs, then jointly formed a trio (two guys and a girl) of my (our) own and we became PP&M clones. We eventually branched out a little and did Dylan (so did PP&M . . . so did everybody) and Donovan and other, less well know stuff—like the Sons of the Pioneers—including some of our own. We played the coffee house circuit between Baltimore and D.C. In some ways, that was the “best time of my life”, to quote Bryan Adams. It is difficult to describe the extent to which their music touched me, moved me, and still does today. Those beat-up, scratchy records are still the ones that get played the most, despite the size and breadth of my collection. My kids were all raised on folk music and classic rock and roll, but if you asked them, I think they would tell you the folk was their favorite when they were growing up. (Their kids have all been raised listening to Donovan’s “For Little Ones”, among others.) Their arrangements and harmonies, their passion and technical superiority affected me immensely, and informed my own brief career in the music business.
PP&M were socially conscious. They stood for principles. Not always shared by me, but they were sincere and consistent. They donated huge sums of money to causes and did nearly as many benefits as paying concerts. They were one of several acts who performed on the Mall in DC when MLK gave his famous “I have a dream” speech. It is one of the main disappointments of my life I never got to see them live, but in his later years Nita and I went to see Peter Yarrow at a small venue in Albuquerque. He was just out of prison for cavorting with under-aged groupies (he says they lied to him) but it was a great show. Now I never will.
Mary will be missed. Her oddly put-together face, the way she snapped her head and made her hair flop around when she wanted to emphasize something. Those bangs. That throaty, hard-driving voice of hers and her sense of humor. Late in their careers they made an album called Peter Paul and Mommy, a collection of tunes for children, which is an absolute gem. At one time I knew most of the songs on that album and wore out my guitar singing them to our kids and their friends.(“Daddy’s taking us to zoo tomorrow . . .”) In fact, doing some of those songs for my wife’s little nieces (Nita and I had just met) at dinner one night, was instrumental in her deciding to marry me.
Mary will never stop singing. One of the best things about technology is our being able to save—and savor—music and art into the eternities. Peter and Paul (Noel) will eventually die as well, sooner, later, who knows? And So will I. But until I do, I will be listening to their music, and, in that sense, keeping them alive forever.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Movie Review: 9
9 Here is a strange movie. The advertizing made a big deal of it being a Tim Burton production, But a guy named Shane Acker directed it, and Shane and Pamela Pettler wrote it. I guess Tim fronted the money for it. This full-length feature is animated, but it is not a cartoon. It is directed at a specific audience, like all Burton movies.
The story is post-apocalyptic. A terrible war has been fought and there are no survivors, at least in the area where the story takes place. Several small, doll-like “creatures”, automatons, are all that is left and they have no clue what is going on. They find each other, have scary, dangerous adventures, and slowly follow clues that lead them to the discovery of who (what) they are, and how they came to be. Sort of. They were made by a scientist who was pessimistic about the survival of humanity. He built a device that was able to transfer parts of his soul to each of his nine, diminutive creations.
The movie is worth seeing because of the masterful animation and the over-all style of the production. It is engaging. One of the fascinating features is the technology extant in this imaginary world. It is very similar to the retro Sci-Fi sub-genre called Steampunk, which deals with fantastic inventions of a mechanical nature, as if revisiting Jules Vern. The little entities are very inventive, building weapons and armor and all kinds of devices out of the scraps and detritus of the just-ended war. The look and feel of the movie is wonderful. The characters are fairly-well developed within the limitations of the plot. There’s the usual tension, antagonism, rivalry and even redemption.
Ultimately, however, the story seems weak. We are thrown into the situation along with the Numbers, (the only identification of the characters.) And we never really find out much about what happened or what the fate of the little creatures might be. They are mechanical, imbued with some of the essence of a human, and that’s about all they, and we, know. Can they reproduce? Will they survive an obviously mega-hostile world? There are no real answers in this story. It starts and it ends.
The one great thing it has going for it is the cast. The voices are Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, John C. Reilly, Crispin Glover, Jennifer Connelly, Elijah Wood, and several others.
It’s rated PG-13. I recommend it for Burton fans and precocious kids. Not for very young, or overly-sensitive children. People who go to movies for entertainment value only need not bother.
The story is post-apocalyptic. A terrible war has been fought and there are no survivors, at least in the area where the story takes place. Several small, doll-like “creatures”, automatons, are all that is left and they have no clue what is going on. They find each other, have scary, dangerous adventures, and slowly follow clues that lead them to the discovery of who (what) they are, and how they came to be. Sort of. They were made by a scientist who was pessimistic about the survival of humanity. He built a device that was able to transfer parts of his soul to each of his nine, diminutive creations.
The movie is worth seeing because of the masterful animation and the over-all style of the production. It is engaging. One of the fascinating features is the technology extant in this imaginary world. It is very similar to the retro Sci-Fi sub-genre called Steampunk, which deals with fantastic inventions of a mechanical nature, as if revisiting Jules Vern. The little entities are very inventive, building weapons and armor and all kinds of devices out of the scraps and detritus of the just-ended war. The look and feel of the movie is wonderful. The characters are fairly-well developed within the limitations of the plot. There’s the usual tension, antagonism, rivalry and even redemption.
Ultimately, however, the story seems weak. We are thrown into the situation along with the Numbers, (the only identification of the characters.) And we never really find out much about what happened or what the fate of the little creatures might be. They are mechanical, imbued with some of the essence of a human, and that’s about all they, and we, know. Can they reproduce? Will they survive an obviously mega-hostile world? There are no real answers in this story. It starts and it ends.
The one great thing it has going for it is the cast. The voices are Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, John C. Reilly, Crispin Glover, Jennifer Connelly, Elijah Wood, and several others.
It’s rated PG-13. I recommend it for Burton fans and precocious kids. Not for very young, or overly-sensitive children. People who go to movies for entertainment value only need not bother.
Movie Review: INglorious Basterds
Inglorious Basterds I have a love-hate relationship with Quentin Tarantino. I’ve had it ever since I saw Reservoir Dogs, thought it was brilliant, and wished I hadn’t. I haven’t seen all his movies, the previews of a few of them were enough for me. And I wasn’t going to see this one either, but my daughter and her boyfriend (he’s a movie-maker) said it was awesome. And it is. Awesome, I mean. Terrible and awesome.
(In order to assuage my guilt at having to say anything positive about Tarantino’s work, I will add a negative qualifier to each positive adjective. Thus, this movie was perversely brilliant. See how that works?)
Hopefully, by now, no one goes to a Tarantino movie innocently. Either we know to stay away or we have seen Pulp Fiction and know, more or less, what to expect. This kind of movie finds its own audience and everyone else leaves them alone. You know who you are.
Inglorious Basterds is a WWII fantasy. It has nothing, as far as I know, to do with reality other than to borrow the time period and locations of the war. It stars Brad Pitt as an easy-going hick from Tennessee who is tasked to put together a commando group of American Jews, jump behind enemy lines and kill, torture, disfigure, disembowel, dismember, and whatever other dis they can think of, Nazis. Their job is to strike fear into the hearts of the rank-and-file German soldier, a task they succeed at with obsessive glee. There are a few other threads, stories, being woven flawlessly into the weave of the Basterds story, having to do with a punctilious and flamboyant—but ruthlessly efficient SS Colonel, a young Jewess he allows to escape her families massacre for sport, and an American double-agent who is a famous German actress plotting to destroy half the high-command at the Parisian premier of the Third Reich’s propaganda minister’s latest epic movie. (Nice sentence, right?)
Tarantino works the camera like the demented genius he is. He gets brilliant work from each of his actors. Pitt as the laconic “Apache” , Aldo Raine, and a wonderful Diane Kruger (National Treasure) as the German actress, Brigit Von Hammersmark, but the best performance is Christoph Waltz as the insidiously pleasant and urbane Colonel Landa, the amoral, vainglorious, and brilliantly efficient SS “Jew Hunter.” Watching Waltz create and imbue this character is worth the price of admission. Pitt does this bizarre and creepy-charming Brando-as-Don-Corleone-thing with his face in a few scenes that is fun to watch as well. Even the guy who plays Hitler is perfect. Everything is done to perfect detail, down to the use of German, French, and Italian, with subtitles where needed. Tarantino throws in those Chapter Headings (Kill Bill) he’s so fond of, and a few asides to introduce certain characters and let us know why they are important or just that Quentin apparently really likes this one or that one. He chooses music from his favorite era, the “Spaghetti Western”, a sub-genre the rest of us like to call “terrible movies.” (Don’t get me wrong . . . I love those movies too. It’s just that Quentin seems to worship them and wants to bring them to the level of masterpiece.) This one has lots of hi-reverb harmonica and guitar—music to kill by.
I doubt I would like Tarantino if I ever met him. I can only go by what I’ve seen in interviews on television and a few of his acting parts, but he seems to be on meth all the time. He is frenetic, nervous, hyper, talks to fast, and knows way to much about the movie industry and its history. And he knows how smart he is and seems to revel in it. I don’t think he uses the violence and gore for which he is infamous in a gratuitous fashion though. I think he really, truly, loves it. It’s what he grew up with and he wants to let everyone know how he feels about it. I think he’s one of those “if you’re going to shy away from the ugly stuff you don’t deserve the pretty stuff” kind of guys, but of course, that’s a lot of BS.
Okay, down to brass tacks. This movie is, as I said, absolutely, disturbingly, brilliant. If you do not want to see violence and gore (lots of Germans are scalped for example), and are not interested in a good deal of profane language, stay away from this, or any, Tarantino movie. If you know what you’re getting into, this is a good as Pulp Fiction, maybe better. As I said, it is sheer make-believe. I won’t give then ending away; suffice it to say it does not agree with history as we know it. As usual, it is Tarantino living out another adolescent fantasy. It is rated R and deserves every bit of that rating. Oddly, there is no sex and no skin. Nita would still have to be hospitalized after seeing it.
(In order to assuage my guilt at having to say anything positive about Tarantino’s work, I will add a negative qualifier to each positive adjective. Thus, this movie was perversely brilliant. See how that works?)
Hopefully, by now, no one goes to a Tarantino movie innocently. Either we know to stay away or we have seen Pulp Fiction and know, more or less, what to expect. This kind of movie finds its own audience and everyone else leaves them alone. You know who you are.
Inglorious Basterds is a WWII fantasy. It has nothing, as far as I know, to do with reality other than to borrow the time period and locations of the war. It stars Brad Pitt as an easy-going hick from Tennessee who is tasked to put together a commando group of American Jews, jump behind enemy lines and kill, torture, disfigure, disembowel, dismember, and whatever other dis they can think of, Nazis. Their job is to strike fear into the hearts of the rank-and-file German soldier, a task they succeed at with obsessive glee. There are a few other threads, stories, being woven flawlessly into the weave of the Basterds story, having to do with a punctilious and flamboyant—but ruthlessly efficient SS Colonel, a young Jewess he allows to escape her families massacre for sport, and an American double-agent who is a famous German actress plotting to destroy half the high-command at the Parisian premier of the Third Reich’s propaganda minister’s latest epic movie. (Nice sentence, right?)
Tarantino works the camera like the demented genius he is. He gets brilliant work from each of his actors. Pitt as the laconic “Apache” , Aldo Raine, and a wonderful Diane Kruger (National Treasure) as the German actress, Brigit Von Hammersmark, but the best performance is Christoph Waltz as the insidiously pleasant and urbane Colonel Landa, the amoral, vainglorious, and brilliantly efficient SS “Jew Hunter.” Watching Waltz create and imbue this character is worth the price of admission. Pitt does this bizarre and creepy-charming Brando-as-Don-Corleone-thing with his face in a few scenes that is fun to watch as well. Even the guy who plays Hitler is perfect. Everything is done to perfect detail, down to the use of German, French, and Italian, with subtitles where needed. Tarantino throws in those Chapter Headings (Kill Bill) he’s so fond of, and a few asides to introduce certain characters and let us know why they are important or just that Quentin apparently really likes this one or that one. He chooses music from his favorite era, the “Spaghetti Western”, a sub-genre the rest of us like to call “terrible movies.” (Don’t get me wrong . . . I love those movies too. It’s just that Quentin seems to worship them and wants to bring them to the level of masterpiece.) This one has lots of hi-reverb harmonica and guitar—music to kill by.
I doubt I would like Tarantino if I ever met him. I can only go by what I’ve seen in interviews on television and a few of his acting parts, but he seems to be on meth all the time. He is frenetic, nervous, hyper, talks to fast, and knows way to much about the movie industry and its history. And he knows how smart he is and seems to revel in it. I don’t think he uses the violence and gore for which he is infamous in a gratuitous fashion though. I think he really, truly, loves it. It’s what he grew up with and he wants to let everyone know how he feels about it. I think he’s one of those “if you’re going to shy away from the ugly stuff you don’t deserve the pretty stuff” kind of guys, but of course, that’s a lot of BS.
Okay, down to brass tacks. This movie is, as I said, absolutely, disturbingly, brilliant. If you do not want to see violence and gore (lots of Germans are scalped for example), and are not interested in a good deal of profane language, stay away from this, or any, Tarantino movie. If you know what you’re getting into, this is a good as Pulp Fiction, maybe better. As I said, it is sheer make-believe. I won’t give then ending away; suffice it to say it does not agree with history as we know it. As usual, it is Tarantino living out another adolescent fantasy. It is rated R and deserves every bit of that rating. Oddly, there is no sex and no skin. Nita would still have to be hospitalized after seeing it.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
District 9
District 9 Didn’t know much about this one, other than having seen the trailer a few dozen times. It looked good, had a feel about, and I wasn’t disappointed. There are no big-name actors in this—in fact the principle has never acted before in his life. I’ve never heard of the director. Apparently he made his name doing special effects.
Here’s the back story, which is told as scenes from several documentaries. 20 years ago, a huge starship arrives in our atmosphere and settled over Johannesburg, South Africa. It doesn’t move or make a sound for months as humanity watches. Finally, someone decides to cut their way into the ship (Which is as big as a city) and they find a million starving aliens who look vaguely insectoid. They shuttle the dying creatures to the surface, set up a settlement, feed them and care for them. The settlement slowly devolves into a slum as reality hits—the aliens are stranded, can never leave again. Something broke.
So essentially, what we have is a new round of Apartheid with big bugs instead of indigenous Africans. A mid-level bureaucrat gets caught up in a resettlement scam and accidentally discovers the secret of why the aliens are stuck here while he is “infected” with alien DNA. As you can imagine, he begins to become an alien. This causes problems at home. Plus, when the government finds out, he becomes the most valuable commodity on the planet. The aliens have very advanced weaponry—which has mostly been confiscated—but it is linked to their DNA which means humans can’t use it. We can’t even figure out what each weapon does. But our hero—anti-hero really—can fire the weapons.
The movie is shot with that frenetic, rough, edgy documentary look that has become popular recently, even though it often doesn’t work well. In this case it does. If you’ve seen Quarantine, it’s sort of like that, although the middle part of this movie loses the POV camera and settles into more mainstream styles while managing to keep the suspense and tension highish.
It’s a good movie. Better than I’d hoped. It is inventive and clever and shot so well one forgets one is in a movie theater. It didn’t occur to me until I was walking out that ¾ of the movie is CGI. It was seamless. We would expect no less from Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) who produced this one.
This one is rated R, and rightfully so. They love to use the F word in South Africa. It is gory, but not in a gratuitous way. One of the alien weapons blows people up—literally. But the camera never lingers on the gore. Each sequence only lasts about half-a-second. Lots of blood spatter.
The script is good. It takes our main characters, the bureaucrat and an alien named Christopher Johnson, through interesting changes. The audience follows each as they slowly and painfully find common ground through dire necessity. The ending is bittersweet. No one gets what they want, or even need. And the movie slips back into documentary mode at the end, which is very effective. We get to see the worst and best of both species.
As I said, it is a good movie. Better than most these days, but not a mainstream affair. It is genre at its best . . . not mainstream at all, and will not appeal to many people. I liked it.
Sneak preview! I saw a trailer for a new Zombie movie! It’s called Zombieland, and stars Woody Harrelson. Woo-hoo!
Here’s the back story, which is told as scenes from several documentaries. 20 years ago, a huge starship arrives in our atmosphere and settled over Johannesburg, South Africa. It doesn’t move or make a sound for months as humanity watches. Finally, someone decides to cut their way into the ship (Which is as big as a city) and they find a million starving aliens who look vaguely insectoid. They shuttle the dying creatures to the surface, set up a settlement, feed them and care for them. The settlement slowly devolves into a slum as reality hits—the aliens are stranded, can never leave again. Something broke.
So essentially, what we have is a new round of Apartheid with big bugs instead of indigenous Africans. A mid-level bureaucrat gets caught up in a resettlement scam and accidentally discovers the secret of why the aliens are stuck here while he is “infected” with alien DNA. As you can imagine, he begins to become an alien. This causes problems at home. Plus, when the government finds out, he becomes the most valuable commodity on the planet. The aliens have very advanced weaponry—which has mostly been confiscated—but it is linked to their DNA which means humans can’t use it. We can’t even figure out what each weapon does. But our hero—anti-hero really—can fire the weapons.
The movie is shot with that frenetic, rough, edgy documentary look that has become popular recently, even though it often doesn’t work well. In this case it does. If you’ve seen Quarantine, it’s sort of like that, although the middle part of this movie loses the POV camera and settles into more mainstream styles while managing to keep the suspense and tension highish.
It’s a good movie. Better than I’d hoped. It is inventive and clever and shot so well one forgets one is in a movie theater. It didn’t occur to me until I was walking out that ¾ of the movie is CGI. It was seamless. We would expect no less from Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) who produced this one.
This one is rated R, and rightfully so. They love to use the F word in South Africa. It is gory, but not in a gratuitous way. One of the alien weapons blows people up—literally. But the camera never lingers on the gore. Each sequence only lasts about half-a-second. Lots of blood spatter.
The script is good. It takes our main characters, the bureaucrat and an alien named Christopher Johnson, through interesting changes. The audience follows each as they slowly and painfully find common ground through dire necessity. The ending is bittersweet. No one gets what they want, or even need. And the movie slips back into documentary mode at the end, which is very effective. We get to see the worst and best of both species.
As I said, it is a good movie. Better than most these days, but not a mainstream affair. It is genre at its best . . . not mainstream at all, and will not appeal to many people. I liked it.
Sneak preview! I saw a trailer for a new Zombie movie! It’s called Zombieland, and stars Woody Harrelson. Woo-hoo!
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