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.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
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.
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