tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20469591738565006872024-03-13T05:21:24.955-07:00the movie showbrandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.comBlogger47125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-52932911360068485662013-02-14T22:44:00.001-08:002013-02-14T22:44:49.383-08:00podcast image again<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Our podcast logo.<br /><br />brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-14015757189267429582013-02-14T22:12:00.001-08:002013-02-14T22:33:16.157-08:00A Good Time to Cry Hard<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>A Good Day to Die Hard</b><b><i> </i></b>[zero]<br />
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Ever since the announcement that John Moore would be the director of <b><i>A Good Day to Die Hard</i></b> (and in the subsequent interviews he gave about the film and the tweaks to the template that would follow) I wondered how much Moore actually knew about the franchise as a whole, and if he thought the problems of one film-- to my mind, the fourth-- belonged to the series as a whole (he seems to speak as if the entire franchise is problematic and he has the cure). The film’s full length trailer made me hopeful that despite Moore’s interviews (and apparent lack of understanding the series) he might have it in him to make something worthy of bearing the <b><i>Die Hard</i></b> name. What’s not to love about two generations of dueling McClane’s bickering because they are so attitudinally alike? It seemed like, and I know this is a big thing to lay at a film’s feet based on the trailer, if they could get the junior/senior dynamic just right then this would be the <b><i>Die Hard</i></b> film we needed, if not the one we deserved. Turns out, we didn’t need this shit. Because we’re too old for this shit.
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John Moore promised us a <b><i>Die Hard</i></b> film that would be devoid of mirth and good cheer. Moore, a British filmmaker, stated in an interview that the climate of America seemed to necessitate a different kind of franchise entry. That America wasn’t in the mood for jokes and all the usual <b><i>Die Hard</i></b> rigamorole so he created something tonally different and finally made John McClane a fish out of water in a bigger more radioactive pond (i.e. Russia). All of that is a very loose paraphrasing of Moore’s words, but it underscores a couple of things: 1) As a Brit he’s in no position to pass judgment on America’s tenor or most beloved franchise; 2) he’s an idiot if he thinks that laughter and escapism isn’t good for the soul of a nation that feels as out of sorts as he believes us to be; and 3) if you want entertainment to be relevant and resonant in a post 9/11/economic recession world then leave that shit to the actual filmmakers, not the yous of the world; 4) while we’re on the subject of relevance-- try not dusting off a hoary old plot point like Chernobyl. If you’re going to do that you might as well shove a literal and proverbial hammer and sickle up the audience’s ass.
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All of those misgivings aside, <b><i>A Good Day to Die Hard</i></b> fails on some more fundamental levels. The film’s biggest misstep is in its refusal to clearly designate a villain for the film. We spend half of the film thinking that the true villain is a government official who betrayed a business partner, Komarov (Sebastian Koch), who finds himself in need of the McClane’s help when he suddenly grows a conscience and wants to turn state’s evidence. It’s one thing to have an additional villain (or a secret one), but it’s another altogether to insist that one of your villains is not the film's bad guy, and then attempt to humanize him and bond him with McClane. It can be done, but it’ll take more than what’s on offer in the screenwriting department to pull of that feat. This kind of writing would be displayed in a weaker episode of <b><i>24</i></b> in which precious moments of Jack Bauer’s power hour would be lost to padding for length and wasting time on developing a character only to have him serve the most obvious ‘shocking’ function imaginable.
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<b>SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS</b><br />
At this point, we may as well continue with the spoilers: As it turns out Komarov is the film's real villain, after all, but his old partner, Chagarin, is also a screwhead red herring whose ambitions are more political than apocalyptic (Chagarin wants the secrets he believes Komarov is hiding away, secrets that Komarov locks in a vault and presumably would keep a hard copy of if they were real. Which begs the question: why not e-mail them to yourself or keep them on a USB drive? Why hard copies? You can at least shove a key or a flash drive up your ass, the paper's just gonna be a mess. Also, what Komarov is really hiding is weapons grade plutonium and he's got an elaborate plan to get it back-- it's a super obvious one involving pretend kidnapping, BTW) And young Jack (Jai Courtney) was trying to effect a rescue that was poorly planned, and had a solid cover story about being a screw-up that causes his dad to come barreling into the country demanding answers and butting into a situation that luckily involves his son and his mad heretofore secret CIA agenting skills.<br />
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It's a shame that Koch is so thoroughly wasted. He has the look of a born franchise villain, but is stuck with ferocious genericism that makes Timothy Olyphant's villain look like Hans Gruber himself.<br />
<b>SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS</b><br />
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The film also evokes <b><i>24</i></b> in the manufacture of a magical spray that neutralizes the nuclear threat of Chernobyl. This device exists because the McClane’s, impervious to everything else so why the fuck not, must saunter into a building (unHAZMATsuited) to save the day and not die of extra arms or some such nonsense in the years between adventures. The audience should probably count itself lucky that the McClane’s weren’t the ones with this magical item because, well, that would just be fucking silly (and I don’t mean regular silly, I mean, ‘Christopher Henderson gave me a hypothermic compound and I survived biological weapons poisoning’ silly). All I’m saying and I’m certainly not saying it as concisely as possible, is if all the films subsequently strain credibility to the breaking point this one ties it down, fucks it, makes it carry it to term and names it <i><b>A Good Day to Die Hard</b></i>.<br />
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If this film is a warm up to the final act, where Jai Courtney’s Jack McClane will take the reins of the franchise from his father, it should be noted that the film doesn’t see Jack as prepared to inherit the throne. The villains are faceless and less competent, this group of bad guys might be smaller than Gruber and company, and Jack is clearly an idiot lacking in good instincts even if his muscles are impressive. If you’re paying close enough attention (and you’re not because you’re bored) this movie says that Jack McClane makes John McClane suck. And honestly, not all of those assertions are the fault of super terrible screenwriter Skip Woods. He just happens to have written a product bad enough to make all of these things true. What he has written is, in fact, so bad that director John Moore’s hideously ugly visual style could be seen as a cheeky commentary on the script’s thoroughly shitty murkiness but since Moore did interviews we know that he genuinely lacks an eye or understanding for anything worth putting on film, least of all action. There’s nothing in here worth engaging in for a minute, so how the editors of the trailer were able to find as many workable seconds that hinted at a genuinely developed relationship between the two McClane’s is a question best left for the ceremony wherein the editors are given a medal and then summarily executed.
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There’s nothing good about today, we bore witness to the international tragedy of what happened to a once great franchise. If the box office receipts are plenty it will live again (and may even redeem itself) but here and now it sure died hard.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-34312010410566830782013-01-30T12:34:00.001-08:002013-01-30T22:46:33.301-08:00A Stormare is coming.<b>The Last Stand [***] / Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters [**1/2] </b>
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While there is very little doubt that <i>Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters</i> is as anachronistic as movies can get, it's tougher to say whether the same can be said of <i>The Last Stand</i>. <i>Stand</i> is a film rife with the excesses of an 80s action picture and I think the desire to label it as anachronistic stems from the fact that it actually works as a relic from that time and not as a vague notion of what makes those kinds of movies appealing [cough]<i>The Expendables</i>[cough]. It boasts a star who understands his appeal both inside and outside of iconic characters and a director who respects the art of action and the clarity needed to make action art. So again, there is a second hash mark for why <i>The Last Stand</i> feels so out of time and place. And it also flopped...bad. I guess no one knows what to do with an action film when you do it right and it doesn't have superheroes.<br />
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The plot is simple stuff: Arnold is the Sheriff of a sleepy Arizona border town who along with his deputies and a couple of local ne'er do wells must defend the town from villains led by Peter Stormare, who are paving the way for their boss' daring escape into Mexico. A couple of things about this scenario are cool: 1) the boss is driving himself from Vegas to Arizona, 2) the FBI agent played by Forrest Whitaker is kind of a big shot, but he's not a prick. He just thinks that with more resources at his command, he knows better of what he speaks. But when Arnold dares to disagree with him he doesn't really go pulling rank. He just happens to be at an advantage as it regards resources and technology. He's also grateful and non-dickheaded at the end.<br />
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The action scenes are clearly and crisply shot by director Kim Ji Woon, an Asian action specialist, the man never shies away from headshots or violence in general. A shootout in a stairwell is one of the film's action highlights. It's a tightly enclosed space but there's just enough room from the vantage point of all the participants that any one of them could come out the victor. It's the best usage of such tight space since Iko Uwais hid in the crawl space in <i>The Raid: Redemption</i>. My only wish is that <i>The Last Stand</i> had one more hand-to-hand tussle. Perhaps Schwarzenegger is limited by his age, but it was a nice display of submission holds, punches, stabbings and power bombs. I suppose this is exactly the mentality that one develops when they're finally seeing a new player in action cinema emerge and then an icon decides to saddle up with the right people and do it right.
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If there is one arena in which <i>The Last Stand</i> could have taken a cue from <i>Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters</i> it would be in trimming the fat off of an already lean premise. <i>The Last Stand</i> feels about ten minutes too long while <i>H and G</i> remains blissfully unfettered in that regard and many others.
As you may have guessed, after killing a witch as children Hansel and Gretel find that they have a natural affinity for it and continue doing so in their adult years. What you may not have known is that they have at their disposal crossbows, machine guns and muskets to augment their pursuit of justice. They also have a surprising command of modern day profanities and exclamations. In particular, their usage of fuck, which serves as a middle man to cut exposition and/or save the audience the trouble of having to be audibly exasperated. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to say this disparagingly, but it'll sound that way. I appreciate that the film knows what the audience will say or is thinking and decides to meet you there while ultimately giving zero fucks how serious you are or aren't taking it.<br />
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Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton make no attempt at sounding German (this is a brothers Grimm story after all) or even vaguely European. In fact, they both sound like non-descript Americans. But they aren't being lazy, they're just having fun killing witches and Arterton in particular gets to break Peter Stormare's nose and hang out with an awesome/adorable/murderous CGI troll named Edward. I can only hope that in the sequel that Edward and their young charge/ reporter Ben (Thomas Mann) are able to turn their affections for her into a love triangle. It won't make sense but it will be awesome. Renner isn't given quite as much fun stuff to do as Hansel, but it is always interesting to see him be incredibly chaste and modest in front of beautiful women. Until he murders someone in front of them, then he tends to get a raging boner. For both Arterton and Renner the film seems like a working vacation, they have fun without straining themselves to do so and the results are pleasant.<br />
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<i>Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters </i>shares yet a few more similarities with <i>The Last Stand</i> because they both employ Peter Stormare, who, unsurprisingly, hams it up like a boss, does a lot with a little and dies awesomely. It also serves as an example of a premise done right. This film's director Tommy Wirkola previously missed the mark with the Nazi skeleton zombie comedy <i>Dead Snow</i>, yet here he nails absurdity of tone and premise. Both films ultimately live as examples of getting more right than wrong and making movies in January a bigger blast than you might have rightly expected.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-5073795599587584152011-10-06T16:14:00.000-07:002011-10-06T16:29:35.247-07:00If these dogs are barking don't bother coming in<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tvqM5KTmWNI/To44VTYV5XI/AAAAAAAAAHQ/blD13lIos44/s1600/SD_PK-021.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tvqM5KTmWNI/To44VTYV5XI/AAAAAAAAAHQ/blD13lIos44/s400/SD_PK-021.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5660523720282072434" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Straw Dogs [*1/2]</span><br /><br />In the forty years that separate Sam Peckinpah and Rod Lurie’s versions of <span style="font-style:italic;">Straw Dogs</span> I wondered if the same views and values would stand the test of time, much less cultures, and as it turns out they feel equally primitive in both contexts. The film(s) are a whole sticky wicket of problems and provocations, and if the films don’t need to be remade at least there is a legitimate conversation piece. Those things don‘t happen often enough.<br /><br />Before I delve into everything, I would like to state that the movie is reasonably well made, this isn’t a project you embark on if you feel dispassionate in any way about the material. From a technical standpoint it is competent and need not be discussed any further in that regard. The movie, however, lives or dies on how one reacts to it and the film can, and will, evoke a lot of uncomfortable thoughts and may even provide some much needed gravity and perspective to the casual misogyny most of us will be extremely guilty of going in.<br /><br />An official plot synopsis and other information is required before diving into the muckety muck of the film proper: David and Amy Sumner (James Marsden and Kate Bosworth) are a successful Hollywood couple, she’s an actress he’s a screenwriter, who have returned to her hometown of Blackwater, Mississippi to get the family home in order. First welcomed with open arms, tensions gradually begin to mount between the Sumners and the locals (more specifically a few of her old friends/gawkers: Alexander Skarsgard, Rhys Coiro, Billy Lush, Drew Powell) before one unspeakable crime begets another. This all culminates in a stand-off in which David must protect his house and family from Skarsgard and co while also harboring the town’s local idiot/ potential pedophile, Jeremy Niles. <br /><br />A few major events that are discussed in the essay include: the rape of Amy, behaviors of the coach’s daughter and her relationship to the mentally challenged Jeremy Niles (Dominic Purcell), the arrival of Skarsgard and company looking to claim Niles after the coach’s fifteen-year-old daughter goes missing and the Sumners decision to protect him, and the general milquetoast-ness of David.<br /><br />To put it mildly, both versions of the film hate women. At least women, for sure, but probably all females. In fact, the one thing that both version of “Straw Dogs” manage to successfully convey is a disdain for women that I’m not sure most cavemen would endorse.* The movie hates women so much that it bends over backwards to let us know that girls are not women (although biologically speaking a fifteen-year-old girl would have matured to the point of womanhood), but that all women regardless of age are provocateurs (which is something we will come back to); a troubling and contradictory stance that is worth trying to wrap your head around. However, the important thing to remember at the moment is that girls are not women especially if they have a daddy to remind everybody of that fact (a crazy, terrifying nutter of a dad played by James Woods, no less). The daddy also has four twenty-something year-old yes men (Skarsgard and co.) who, by the by, don’t have a problem raping one female (Bosworth) while they rush to the defense of another (coach’s little girl). This “girl” also happens to be their old coach’s daughter, so maybe they don’t rape her out of respect or fear for her father. They don’t respect or fear the husband (James Marsden) of the woman they do rape so maybe it is that simple. Someone has to assert dominance for the animals to learn their place. With all of that said, one could make the simple argument that the reason the men don’t rape the girl is because they are not pedophiles. It is a fact, these men are not pedophiles, but the girl is, biologically speaking, a woman. And the movie will go on to make a very arbitrary distinction between girl and woman since the movie has a very specific idea of how it wants you to feel about females. In addition to the men not fearing or respecting the husband they also have a desire to destroy the woman. Not just because it is in their nature to do and because she is a woman and they hate them, but because she has chosen an outsider as her lover. The coach’s daughter whom these men so “valiantly defend” in the film’s climax has also chosen an outsider, a mentally challenged man (Dominic Purcell), whom she is friendly with and who, much to the chagrin of the locals, calls her his girlfriend (and may himself be a pervert, though this is never shown). This girl, coach’s daughter, may be being friendly because she sees him as a relatively harmless fellow, but the movie never affords us that knowledge, so because of the film’s disdain for women and the view that they are provocateurs, we have no choice but to assume that the movie’s goal is for us to hate women. Writing this I can’t help but equate the mentally challenged man to an outsider, which means that the young girl has effectively chosen an outsider (he was born mentally handicapped), but he’s not an outsider by choice so the onus of the mistake lies with him and not with her. Or that’s what we the audience is left to assume. There are moments when things get all Frankensteinian up in this bitch (moreso when the angry mob goes hunting after the big dumb lug with a gun in lieu of torches) when the retarded guy accidentally kills coach’s daughter as he tries to quiet her. This happens so that her Coach wouldn’t be drawn into a room in which he saw a mentally challenged older man with his daughter. She dies, perhaps, by accident but also because the movie needs her to, to prove on some level that a woman cannot go unpunished for choosing the outsider. The girl cannot suffer the same fate as the wife because she’s a girl but she must suffer because she is a female. It bears noting that what happens to the daughter is probably meant to show another distinction between deserving what you get and not deserving it. I have only had conversations with four people about the film and two have compared the film’s treatment of women to Muslims and two more have said that Bosworth’s character brought her rape on herself when she flashes the men who have been ogling her body. Sure, it might be a provocative thing to do (flashing men you know are looking at you and making you uncomfortable), but it doesn’t justify rape. The whole argument that she brought it on herself would mean that the two men who said this would literally have to be ok with someone saying “I’m going to go rape this woman” (and since I know them to be decent people who wouldn’t partake in such an activity) and they would have to say: “take your time. I brought a book to read, I’ll be out in the truck waiting.” It’s a terrible thing to say that someone asked to be raped and to say she brought it on herself is a pretty lousy justification or defense of any action. Although, I suppose the idea of he/she brought it upon his/herself works strictly as a series of actions and reactions and only in certain contexts: she was looking and smelling good so it’s her fault I went and introduced myself/ we talked and danced/ now we’re married. Her fault for being sexy. At the end of the day it’s just mean to say that someone deserves something bad and it undercuts one’s basic humanity to say as much.<br /><br />Another problem that the film suffers is that Amy Sumner is raped, but her husband David’s final stand against the men who performed the crime has nothing to do with the fact that they raped her. The men violated the sanctity of his home, sure, but the sanctity of his wife seems to be important only because she is in his home, but not because she is his wife. In fact, were it not for a slight deviation from the original film, Amy’s rape would go unmentioned to her husband in the film proper. And I don’t believe there are any looks telling enough between the two of them that suggest that she has communicated her rape to him in code or with a glance. While she was being raped, David was out hunting, and being abandoned by the men he will later fight, and he comes home stewing that the men left him in the woods and remains completely oblivious to the distraught looks of his wife. This moment in the woods, occurring alongside his wife’s rape, is also the one in which the milquetoast learns how to shoot straight and become a man. Giving the movie a direct correlation to empowerment through rape, not that it wasn’t obvious already, but it appears to send a mixed message when one considers that David’s wife’s rape gives him a heretofore unknown strength (that he later uses against the same men) and allows him to secretly avenge a rape he didn‘t know about; when it‘s really kind of obvious that the reason she never tells David is because he honestly can‘t be bothered to defend his wife in any previous context in the movie. When this Amy (who unlike the original film’s Amy, is no longer still turned on by bad boy aggression) reports to her husband concerns that the men have killed the family cat and that they were ogling her body as she worked up a sweat while running, David’s solution is to pussyfoot around the former issue and to take the men’s side in the latter. And while I initially couldn’t blame him for his reaction to the men ogling her it just seemed to underscore how much of a shit he doesn’t give about her concerns. This movie validates David’s flippancy when Amy goes to take a shower and exposes herself to the men who are going to look anyway by painting her as, you guessed it, a provocateur. I suppose that by ultimately allowing Amy to be the avenger of her own rape the filmmakers have at least elevated her person somewhat. Amy and David have a marriage that paints her as a not terribly bright, but not idiotic girl, who engages in some good humored and kind of flirty passive aggression with a too serious minded husband. In the original, Amy was world’s more attractive and world’s dumber than her husband, but in making the ‘11 Sumners a more plausible and attractive couple Amy gets elevated to a step above a come dumpster (the fact that she doesn‘t enjoy being forcibly taken by her ex-boyfriend in this incarnation also helps to elevate her status). However, it negates one of the chief reasons I thought casting Skarsgard for the role was a novel idea**). Let’s hear it for progress. But again, this development paints David in a worse light because he’s not avenging his wife, he’s protecting his home and he’s been spurred on this path because he is protecting another outsider (the mentally challenged man). If there is a logic to be found in Sumner’s actions it is the idea that protecting our own only applies to houses that transfer ownership, people that are outcasts like oneself and things that can’t get tainted (read: raped) by the other. One could argue that David fighting back against the home invaders is him stopping a raping and pillaging that he could not prevent before, but the gesture is meaningless when the damage has been done already and when your own wife won‘t tell you that she has been attacked. He’s not really a hero for any reason that matters, he’s like the men who come to his house looking for blood-- so full of moral outrage that the only thing that is really getting accomplished is that their anger is making hypocrites out of all of them.<br /><br />At the end of the day, one cannot help but feel about <span style="font-style:italic;">Straw Dogs</span> the way <span style="font-style:italic;">Straw Dogs</span> wants them to feel about women-- it is a provocateur, it probably wants us to hate it, but it’ll settle for any reaction as long as it gets one.<br /><br />* In my section of the Bible Belt, saying that a caveman wouldn’t endorse the films views on women got this reaction from a married couple: kind of like Muslims. Muslims being cavemen in this scenario. Also, since the rednecks in the film are churchgoing types it allows them an easy platform for unjustifiable indignation, but the audience seems pretty unwilling to acknowledge the hypocrisy of their observations. As it regards Muslims v Christianity. I’m sure the film will lend itself to a religious interpretation, but lacking the ability to analyze in that way, the people remain, on a level of basic human decency, irredeemable assholes. Being Muslims or anything like it doesn’t matter for me.<br /><br />** Casting Skarsgard as the rapist ex-boyfriend seemed to make a lot of sense if you got the impression that the movie was being “True Blood”ed (a show which features Skarsgard as an oft-shirtless vampire that ladies swoon over) up and that they were really playing up the hot, sweaty, sexy angle. I am also under a completely unsubstantiated belief that any “True Blood” loving female with a rape fantasy has one that stars Skarsgard, whose Southern accent is great, by the way.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-50500183334312802782011-08-30T20:00:00.000-07:002011-08-30T21:03:42.046-07:00Days, Nights and Years of Fright<span style="font-weight:bold;">Fright Night [****]</span> and <span style="font-weight:bold;">The Devil's Double [***1/2]</span>
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<br />This “Fright Night” is not interested in replacing the 1985 version in your memories, but it is as dedicated to being a movie that deserves to be called “Fright Night” as one could rightly hope any movie bearing the title would be. It has a sense of escalation to replace the slow burning atmosphere of the original but it remains largely the story of a kid obsessed with a neighbor who is no good for the people he loves. And he needs the help of an expert to prove it. Enter reason number one why both “Fright Night”s will remain alongside one another rather than one supplanting the other: some of you may prefer the more traditionally garbed/portrayed Peter Vincent (portrayed by Roddy McDowell) to the new Criss Angel style potty mouthed version. I get someone preferring the old version, but Vincent’s newer, crushing backstory invests the character with a level of depth that is both blindsiding and stupefying. David Tennant makes the character vulgar, hilarious and tragic. In fact, every character from “Fright Night” 2011 seems to locate the one thing that makes them tick and has at least one devastating moment that brings it to the foreground. Three viewings later a moment in which a central character meets his demise becomes exponentially more poignant. The death, a fiery and bloody one that results in ashes and forgiveness, is capped off with the proclamation: “it’s okay Charlie.” A couple of my friends insist the line is really “f--k you Charlie!” They are wrong, but the fact that the moment holds equal power either way, speaks to the movie’s utter insistence that humans are ultimately forged by the way that they hold on to traumas and the impossible grace with which they cast them off in the final moments.
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<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gLyDQ7y0eLo/Tl2xFPjLEUI/AAAAAAAAAHA/00yqpqmpxEQ/s1600/01_300dpi.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gLyDQ7y0eLo/Tl2xFPjLEUI/AAAAAAAAAHA/00yqpqmpxEQ/s400/01_300dpi.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5646864211423990082" /></a>
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<br />If finding the humanity of a character is at the crux of what makes “Fright Night” work so well then consider that as a link to director Lee Tamahori’s “The Devil’s Double” in which Dominic Cooper plays both Uday Hussein and his double Latif Yahia. There are moments in the film in which Uday tries to make Yahia execute someone for paltry reasons. Yahia might not object to having to do this were it not for the fact that, in doing so, he wants what every human needs: motivation. Hussein never obliges Yahia, he just does it himself in vivid sprays of crimson and power. And again we find another link to “Fright Night” as we have a creature so unburdened by conscience and driven entirely by bloodlust, yet, like Jerry in the “Fright Night” remake, he is capable of a façade of extreme friendliness that is so unsettling precisely because we know the monster that lurks underneath. Cooper, like Farrell, gets to play two extremes but unlike Farrell he gets to play it with a little self parody, adopting a high pitch whine and knocking things around as Hussein while as Yahia he combs his hair to the side and remains calmer, more collected. Farrell has the same sort of sultriness no matter if he is being creepy or friendly. At least until he goes into full-on vampire mode. It might be worth noting that Farrell and Cooper hail from Ireland and Britain respectively and I can’t help but wonder if their being neither American or Iraqi performers (as the roles call for) allows them to more easily highlight the inherent monstrousness of these particular cultures that they play monsters of. It might not be a relevant question for Colin Farrell's character, who could literally be anyone but is ultimately an American monster, but once I raise the question I can't ignore it (even when I can't answer it).
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<br />Dominic Cooper who plays Uday Hussein portrayed Howard Stark in “Captain America” a genius inventor and father to Tony Stark, another genius who is arrogant and also Iron Man. Does that level of arrogance and power that Cooper is cinematically responsible for make him a more appropriate choice to play Hussein? I think it does. While we're at it, the film practices American excess by being evocative of "Scarface" in addition to being a biopic and an espionage picture.
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<br />At the end of the day, both films despite large mostly non-American casts feel utterly truthful because they can happen in our streets and in our countries. The monsters are heightened to a fever pitch, but the need to rule by fear and the desire to simply survive are utterly relatable feelings. Such mad displays of power and struggles against it are also rarely this entertaining.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-12649541742927642502011-05-24T17:10:00.000-07:002011-05-24T17:55:02.963-07:00The Roommate: with choice blurbs<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qfKM1Eqk580/TdxKAWAJW4I/AAAAAAAAAGk/OH2K1D-36ho/s1600/0001_RM_1SHT_Lyrd_RVSD.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 275px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qfKM1Eqk580/TdxKAWAJW4I/AAAAAAAAAGk/OH2K1D-36ho/s400/0001_RM_1SHT_Lyrd_RVSD.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5610440605563444098" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Roommate [zero]</span><br /><br />I thought it would be easier to make a fake poster with insulting pull quotes rather than be self consciously asshole-y and, consequently, unamusing in a review. I don't know exactly how one deed cancels out the other, but my photo shop skills are as shitty as the movie so we're in pretty good company with one another.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-71684651061511205612011-05-22T11:38:00.000-07:002011-05-22T12:14:46.512-07:00Plundered BootyPirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides [**]<br /><br />It seems, given the box office receipts, that not nearly as many people are/were clamoring for a fourth installment as was expected. $90 million is nothing to sneeze at, but perhaps it foreshadows the diminishing returns that a sequel laden summer should eventually suggest. However, money making acumen aside, the fourth film has taken a refreshingly simplistic approach in its storytelling: now we have three disparate groups (Spaniards, Barbossa leading the Navy, and pirates) looking to reach the same goal (the Fountain of Youth) for their own ends. A mermaid's tear is also needed to enact the life expanding properties of the fountain and a golden chalice. It's no more complicated than that despite a couple of betrayals which are necessitated less by plot demands than the weaselly nature of being a pirate. <br /><br />Johnny Depp as per usual goes big as Captain Jack Sparrow, but he plays the role with such ease and old hat non-chalance it's hard to tell if he's still being game or just sleepwalking through the role. All of that said, no one seems particularly committed. No one is bad, but the revenge that Barbossa seeks has lost all weight while the threat that Ian McShane's Blackbeard should imply is diminished to about five minutes worth of CGI trickery and a couple of lightly evil deeds. It's a peculiar waste of McShane's charisma, but also a waste of a lot of other opportunities: a zombified crew and a ship that does Blackbeard's bidding when he touches his magical scabbard are curiously under-utilized. Blackbeard also has a daughter who seems to ground and humanize him in a way that voids him of any menace. Her entrance which obscures her face in shadow is a reliable cliche meant to mask that she is a woman, but also underscores how woefully ordinary the whole affair is. It's a fourth adventure, but it isn't big, game changing or anything like that. It is designed simply to be one of the forgettable adventures in a pirate's life. When reflecting upon this year's later Jack Sparrow might say: "Did I ever tell you about the killer mermaids and the Fountain of Youth? Well, it happened once and then life went on."<br /><br />It's a fine two hour diversion and considering how little of our time and money the franchise deserves after parts two and three it's nice to see them cut the clutter and try to get back to the basics of telling a story that doesn't rely on exposition. However, they accidentally diminish the fun of the spectacle by not giving us enough and ignoring some of the more intriguing elements they've left in play. I can't help but wonder if this is a way of testing the waters to see if there is life left in the franchise. Are there are plans to truly blow us out of the water with a fifth installment? I can see them trying to figure out what audiences really want and cutting the fat, I doubt they'll succeed but as far as part fours go they've totally succeeded at making a quick buck while improving on the efficiency of a franchise in the slightest of ways. I didn't hate the movie so maybe it doesn't secretly hate me and want my money. Maybe it wants to please me and is just too exhausted with its own part fourness to care? I guess I'll just have to wait until the next wholly unnecessary sequel to figure out if complacency is the deliberate modus operandi of every number four.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-41931104627747154872011-03-18T20:09:00.001-07:002011-03-20T14:09:11.375-07:00Alienation Nation<span style="font-weight:bold;">Paul [**]</span><br /><br />For me the films of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have always been something of a comedy event. I didn't know who they were the first time I went to see <span style="font-style:italic;">Shaun of the Dead</span>, but I learned to make them synonymous with people who understood why we liked certain kinds of movies, people who respected and crafted those kinds of movies and as people who did it while making us laugh unabashedly, unashamedly. It was, and maybe can be again, wonderful. But it is not this time.<br /><br />I have to admit I was excited for collaborator Edgar Wright not to be a part of this film because Greg Mottola has made some pretty excellent, unshowy comedies and I was still reeling from how flashy and empty (and unappreciative of its audience) <span style="font-style:italic;">Scott Pilgrim v The World</span> appeared to be. I wanted something that was going to be more sincere, funny, honest and less flashy. I thought Mottola was going to nail this film. I didn't get what I wanted in any case. Without the injection of energy and crafty editing that Wright would have brought to the project the action that kicks in around the last half hour feels a little still born. There's no exclamation marks on the jokes, which is okay, I don't need that. I understand that it is not necessarily part of Mottola's arsenal to be over-the-top and high energy but it really might have benefited from such things. I think the magic of Simon Pegg might be lost outside of Hollywood blockbusters and I think the magic of Pegg and cohort Nick Frost is certainly lacking without Edgar Wright. The three of them are like Dr. Pepper when mixed together and without one of the ingredients you have a Mr. Pibb type beverage that no insistence from the masses is ever going to make taste the same. It's okay when that's what you want, but it isn't necessarily what you were expecting.<br /><br />Don't get me wrong I don't mean to insist that Mottola is the Mr. Pibb of directors, but I must insist that Wright-Frost-Pegg never not collaborate together again and if a Greg Mottola kind of movie, with funny jokes and thoughtful characterization is going to peak its head out of the veil of coulda/shoulda/woulda that <span style="font-style:italic;">Paul</span> wears over it's oddly shaped little green head then it is probably better that Mottola have the room to be himself.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Paul</span> for anyone who didn't see the preview is about two comic book/sci-fi aficianados who are touring the country's UFO sights post Comic Con when they pick up an alien and end up with homophobic rednecks and government agents on their tail. They also kidnap a woman who runs an RV park only to have her gun toting father also head out after them.<br /><br />The film's two nice surprises are that a gun toting secret agent played by Jason Bateman is not exactly who he appears to be, in the best possible sense. That he also resurrects a long dormant grade school phrase ("motherfucking titty sucking two ball bitch") is one of the film's two unmitigated pleasures. The other is that Paul in all his miracle working tendencies cures a woman of blindness in one eye, which her father later hails as a miracle from God, and gives the woman (a devout Creationist) a moment's pause. It's a shrewd moment that allows for the most important and successful element of science fiction to be acknowledged: that faith and what science teaches us be allowed to intermingle; possibly to challenge or even reaffirm our beliefs. I think the fact that an otherworldly being participates in this moment says more about the possibility of a God than not but the movie is quick to rebuff any notions of a higher power. That moment is also where the film finds a problem that I think speaks to the relative lack of success of this general enterprise. This close mindedness about its subject, that no other Pegg-Frost collaboration has had, seems to hinder their ability to embrace the totality of their story, transcend it and create a lasting work that can stand alongside whatever they're loving and lampooning.<br /><br />In the past, Pegg and Frost are able to understand the appeal of Michael Bay films and zombie films without saying they are ridiculous. In fact, the two of them go hog wild celebrating the films without ever uttering the r word, but they can't for a moment acknowledge the possible lynchpin of science fiction. Even if only to say that man's ambition is what drives him to be closer to God, but they don't even say that, they just find a target to give the middle finger to. It's not the most troubling thing in the world, but it is definitely coming from two guys who should know better.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-27834549580369375522011-03-05T18:29:00.000-08:002011-03-05T19:24:18.567-08:00fighting and settling<span style="font-weight:bold;">The Adjustment Bureau [***]</span>, <span style="font-weight:bold;">The Green Hornet</span> and <span style="font-weight:bold;">Take Me Home Tonight [**1/2]</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pwLpKsFOXMk/TXL7OvNXAWI/AAAAAAAAAGI/Bo3CNv2qTao/s1600/5643_D016_00100R.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 265px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pwLpKsFOXMk/TXL7OvNXAWI/AAAAAAAAAGI/Bo3CNv2qTao/s400/5643_D016_00100R.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5580799118874706274" /></a><br /><br />Since the world probably would have exploded had Ben Affleck and Matt Damon released competing films on the same day audiences had to wait six months to see the Matt Damon starrer <span style="font-style:italic;">The Adjustment Bureau</span> and, to be honest, had it come to pass it would have been a pretty depressing double header. Not because both films share an optimistic and downbeat quality, but because Affleck's film is on a whole different plateau of goodness while Damon's primary goal (for me, at least) is to wash the taste of <span style="font-style:italic;">Green Zone</span> out of the collective American mouth. I will say that both Damon and Affleck have stellar chemistry with their leading ladies, but Affleck could have brought the heat with anyone (luckily it was the lovely Rebecca Hall) while Damon's not inconsiderable conviction is entirely dependent on how radiant Emily Blunt is. I'm not saying another actress couldn't have done this part, but I'm saying I don't want to imagine it. Blunt is the ray of sunshine that Damon spies when he surfaces for air against the dim tide of the fate controlling Adjustment Bureau.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-f7DY_T5BGm4/TXL8SkPuZJI/AAAAAAAAAGY/8T7_Bx7wu5Y/s1600/DF-00948.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-f7DY_T5BGm4/TXL8SkPuZJI/AAAAAAAAAGY/8T7_Bx7wu5Y/s400/DF-00948.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5580800284162942098" /></a><br /><br />On a slightly less enthusiastic note, but an enthusiastic one just the same, I found Michael Gondry's take on <span style="font-style:italic;">The Green Hornet</span> to be a surprisingly fun film. It occasionally strains under the obviousness of shots that seemed tailored to the wholly unnecessary 3-D, but having seen it in two glorious dimensions I'm lucky to have had the experience in "presentable vision."<br /><br />The movie strikes me in just the right way early on with a pretty amusing James Franco cameo where he latches on to the insecurities of a crime boss and trashes his legacy before being put out to pasture. But Franco and Waltz do it so gamely, with much relish that it is hard not to welcome the movie with open arms from that point on. Jay Chou, who was not welcome news to me following a Stephen Chow departure before the project even lifted off, manages to acquit himself nicely as an ass kicker. Having only been previously exposed to him in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Treasure Hunter</span> and ever-so-briefly in the excellent <span style="font-style:italic;">True Legend</span>, I wasn't convinced he was the right replacement ass kicker for the job, but he does fine and I appreciated the near instant chemistry he had with Rogen. I also appreciated a great brawl between friends that destroys everything in the room a la <span style="font-style:italic;">Commando</span> and Rogen and Franco's own <span style="font-style:italic;">Pineapple Express</span>.<br /><br />The action also surprises with a certain level of clarity, destructiveness and a well executed boxing the heroes in for certain doom moment.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--Evh5S4xBJ8/TXL72MGYwBI/AAAAAAAAAGQ/LUmprMgWJQk/s1600/M_109rv2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--Evh5S4xBJ8/TXL72MGYwBI/AAAAAAAAAGQ/LUmprMgWJQk/s400/M_109rv2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5580799796644986898" /></a><br /><br />The vulgar 80s set introspective life after college romp makes a return with <span style="font-style:italic;">Take Me Home Tonight</span>, a film that lacks the heart of <span style="font-style:italic;">Adventureland</span> and the confidence wrecking comedy that can be wrought on characters by family members that <span style="font-style:italic;">She's Out of My League</span> brought to the table, but it has drugs and boobs and a fat guy. These elements don't always converge to make an ideal comedy, but I always admire films that deal with issues of aimlessness because I can very much relate to the pussy in flux aspect of the protagonist. I can't say that I get triumph in one hundred minutes, but I take comfort in the message: love thyself, take a risk, etc.<br /><br />I find it even more refreshing when a movie is honest enough to tell me that if I went for the things I wanted years ago I would not have gotten them, but maybe now I might get some of them. It's not exactly saying that it's never too late to chase after your dreams, but if you get loaded enough on drugs or booze or life experience you might just grow the stones to get some version of the life you wanted.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-15768989498477917702011-01-23T10:32:00.000-08:002011-05-05T14:14:57.917-07:00Relationshits<span style="font-weight:bold;">No Strings Attached [**]</span> and <span style="font-weight:bold;">I Spit On Your Grave (2010) [***]</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TUWvVaDIijI/AAAAAAAAAFs/SrV3yhRmxwI/s1600/URP-01897.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TUWvVaDIijI/AAAAAAAAAFs/SrV3yhRmxwI/s400/URP-01897.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5568049296618064434" /></a><br /><br />More often than not women dictate the terms of a relationship. Usually because they're sexier and we'll heed to their every beck and call, but also because we men are usually the dumber and more primitive half of the coupling. These films, <span style="font-style:italic;">No Strings Attached</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">I Spit on Your Grave [2010]</span>, are two instances where I think women lose complete control, but also monogamy rears its head and stakes a claim pretty loudly on the modern relationship type landscape.<br /><br />First, we have director Ivan Reitman's <span style="font-style:italic;">No Strings Attached</span> which allows Natalie Portman a rare opportunity to flex comic muscles and allows for the third film in a row in which Ashton Kutcher really owns as a leading man. He's likable without seeming bland or putzy and he has a couple of killer lines. My favorite line comes a few scenes after we discover that his perpetually stoned father is dating one of his former girlfriends: "I can't date you either. You're not my dad's type." <br /><br />The plot such as it is involves summer camp acquaintances who reunite some twenty-odd years later to rekindle (or kindle, depending on your view of their first meeting as pre-teens and college students, respectively) a relationship. It starts out as blissful, consequenceless sex but soon feelings enter the mix and while Kutcher submits to the feelings immediately Portman does not and thus the typical complications of romantic comedy ensues.<br /><br />Along the way there are a few laughs to be had, but not a great many. We often get to watch likable people being the best they can be in a movie that isn't terribly interested in letting people be the best versions of themselves that they can be. <br /><br />I like that the movie plays up Kutcher's nice guy image but never makes him feel weak for wanting what he wants. The movie, in fact, respects the kind of guy he is so much that fate intervenes in any attempt to undermine his values. Kutcher isn't one hundred percent sold on the notion of monogamy at first, but from the beginning his attempt at casual sex ends in a drunken, crying sex-free stupor and his 'no strings attached' relationship with Portman is still defined by his exclusivity to her.<br /><br />Portman's character is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a raging slut but she is unpleasant in the character's initial scenes and remains resistant to the pull of love in such a way that it becomes hard to root for them as a couple. There is a moment where Portman not only insists on abandoning their Valentine's Day date, but needs to be taken home by the very man she is dumping. <br /><br />As I knew the film would ultimately end with their coupling and I couldn't get behind them as a couple, I had to remove myself emotionally from the rest of the proceedings. I don't like not being emotionally involved in romantic comedies, particularly the more vulgar ones, because they distill emotions more honestly and despite all the character woes they give an honest treatment to things like fear of commitment or what have you. "No Strings Attached" finds a way to make a selfless devotion to one person feel like a bad choice.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TUWvruyxXeI/AAAAAAAAAF0/AwvgxHeZEC8/s1600/MG_6636_5494-Approved.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TUWvruyxXeI/AAAAAAAAAF0/AwvgxHeZEC8/s400/MG_6636_5494-Approved.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5568049680143703522" /></a><br /><br />There is little doubt that writer Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler) has had men wrapped around her finger before. That's not to say that Jennifer is a tease or deliberately manipulates men, but she's definitely so pretty that considering it a foregone conclusion is not so out of line. She's definitely sweet and cute and a welcome breath of sexiness for the backwater area she is calling home as she writes her next book. But the men in that area are just forward enough and unkempt enough that they can come across as unnerving; what causes panic in Jennifer is something the locals call an uppity city bitch-ness. A kind punishable by verbal abuse and, eventually, rape. It seems to be a pretty frank resentment of the way women consciously (or not) hold sway over men.<br /><br />While the men in the film certainly seek to usurp her power (though it is not explicitly the power of a sexual being but rather the power of a "city bitch") and in so doing the film becomes a rallying cry against the unfair amount of power females yield in relationships both real and imagined, it's strongest argument actually becomes one in favor of monogamy. <br /><br />BIG SPOILER AHEAD<br /><br />One of Jennifer's assailants is the town sheriff, who happens to be married and skips out on church to attend to some business involving the debasement of a visiting local writer. As the film's only married and committed character he later receives a punishment (that a lesser director might have decided to heap on the female victim with as much detail) akin to the rape he committed earlier in the film. He's actually the only character to receive a rape in kind and while he wasn't the only character to rape her he is the one to get the most literal sin turned against the sinner type punishment. It's no accident that. If monogamy is against our basic biology then why are we capable of higher thought? If one doesn't endeavor to evolve what's the point of giving them capacity to make choices? It seems like an awful waste of a brain if you ask me. I guess the question goes both ways, if we're so evolved why do we do such animalistic things? If we are given the tools to reason then I suppose we have to decide these things for ourselves. But I think both movies suggest that we have evolved past animal urges or that maybe the animal urge is to restore monogamy. It's an interesting discussion point no matter how wrong I probably am.<br /><br />That being said, the <span style="font-style:italic;">I Spit On Your Grave</span> remake is worth discussing for other reasons.<br /><br />I like that the film shows restraint in graphically depicting the abuses heaped on Jennifer Hills. A lot of times they degrade her with insults and treat her less than human, but they don't go for ripping the clothes off right away. When her attackers mock her writing it seems like a bigger, more devastating exposure than anything they can do to her body because what they choose to read aloud is like pulling a secret out of her. Butler, I think, plays these violations very well.<br /><br />For something that falls in the torture porn vein the murders aren't terribly graphic in the way they would be if the film were from Alexander Aja or any of the <span style="font-style:italic;">Saw</span> filmmakers, but they have a very precise way of getting to the point and being very literal. The filmmaker has his eyes pried open with fish hooks, the sheriff receives a rape in kind, the mentally handicapped guy is the recipient of failed strangulation, another is drowned, etc. I like to think that the on the nose quality of the murders comes from the fact that the heroine is a writer so she makes things literal, brings them full circle and even relies on various and sundry cliches like sneaking up on people and knocking them out with lug wrenches or baseball bats. I want to believe that her job allows her to tap into creative impulses and the familiar. It's easier believing these things come from a creative reservoir she has as a writer than being the terrible things that everyone has simmering just below their own surface. It probably isn't true, she's as guilty of having an animal just below her skin as the rest of us, but if we can believe for a second that she learned this because of her job and not because we all have an evil nature then we can believe we've evolved past an animal state, we can believe in monogamy and even that what we suffer doesn't truly destroy us. It pushes us through to hope.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-32005247902885247762010-11-30T12:09:00.000-08:002010-11-30T15:03:38.115-08:00Blood Simple<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TPWCvbqQDkI/AAAAAAAAAFg/x207nfqyx74/s1600/i%252Bsaw%252Bthe%252Bdevil-review.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 311px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TPWCvbqQDkI/AAAAAAAAAFg/x207nfqyx74/s400/i%252Bsaw%252Bthe%252Bdevil-review.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545482267567066690" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">I Saw the Devil [****]</span><br /><br />I don't know why but the casting of two of Korea's premiere villainous actors Lee Byung-Hun and Choi Min-Sik as the respective hero and villain of Kim Ji-Woon's <span style="font-style:italic;">I Saw the Devil</span> strikes me as utterly genius. I think it's rare for a movie to have a hero so dangerous you feel sorry for the villain, but that's exactly the case with <span style="font-style:italic;">I Saw the Devil</span>. Don't misunderstand me, though, the villain doesn't deserve sympathy but I don't want to be on the wrong side of the line when Lee Byung-Hun's Korean Intelligence Officer with revenge on his mind is my number one adversary. Having prior experience with Lee's brand of villainy makes it easier to cut through the formalities of having the hero realize that operating outside of the law is the swiftest road to justice. All of our experience with movies tell us that's what he'll do, but all our experiences with him as an actor tell us that the bad guy(s) is(are) going to regret it.<br /><br />The villain of the piece, however, is Choi Min-Sik and if ever there was a force capable of absorbing all that Byung-Hun can dish out it's him. Min-Sik has experience as a hero in Park Chan Wook's <span style="font-style:italic;">Old Boy</span> but his hangdog, weather beaten face suggests a man who has spent his life falling short, being bad and getting back up to do it all over again. For all of his masochistic tendencies, we wonder how it is that Min-Sik can keep going. For ninety minutes of the film's one-hundred forty-five minute running time, Byung-Hun mercilessly engages Min-Sik in brutal fights and cat and mouse games and each time he emerges the victor. Min-Sik has endured more brutality than we believed to be humanly possible, but between each fight he brutalizes an innocent and seems to be completely rejuvenated. It is the chief reason that for as impossibly outmatched as Min-sik is he can't gain our sympathy even though we wonder if he'll be able to stand another punch.<br /><br />When Min-Sik's character is first introduced in the film he is playing the good samaritan to a pregnant woman (we'll quickly learn the woman is the wife of our hero) who has already insisted that help is on the way. This causes her husband concern, but he figures that if he stays on the phone and comforts her it'll ease her mind and make up for the fact that he can't just skip out of work to help her. The introduction is also worth noting because Min-Sik is glimpsed only in shadows. First, we see his cold, unforgiving eyes and then his emotionless face and I'll admit that my first thought was that a mold of Min-Sik's face would make for an ideal Michael Meyers mask. Truthfully, Min-Sik's character more closely resembles the kind of character you'd end up with if Michael Meyers and Scorpio from <span style="font-style:italic;">Dirty Harry</span> had a baby. <br /><br />If Min-Sik is analogous to an unstoppable force of evil like Meyers then Lee Byung-Hun is the Wrath of God. This brings us to an interesting point. <span style="font-style:italic;">I Saw the Devil</span> is clearly a reference to the most vile form of evil one can imagine, so why bring God into this? First, the old testament is all about vengeance. Second, if you go to enough sermons in a year you'll hear more than your fair share of talk about smiting enemies and, believe me, Byung-Hun is one of the best smiters of Ye Olde Motherfuckers that the movies have to offer. Plus, God is the Devil's opposite. I'm not treading new ground here, but I'm getting to the point that our natural inclinations towards vengeance cause us, at times, to see the Devil within ourselves more clearly than we see God. <br /><br />It also works on another level because the hero and villain stand for different things but mirror each other in a lot of ways. Both have broken families; the hero's shattered by the villain obviously, but in his crusade the hero is certainly working on estranging his would be in-laws (at one point they ask him to stop, but he's not finished yet because he wants to make the guy suffer). The villain has a mother who can't stop loving and wanting to help her son, but his father thinks he's good for nothing. They both get a real charge from preying upon those that are weaker than them and in that way, Min-Sik and Byung-Hun are most alike. In their initial confrontation Min-Sik displays a level of arrogance that awakens the worst in Byung-Hun, but I would be loathe to say whether or not Byung-Hun's dogged pursuit constitutes an arrogance on his part or just righteous fury. A better question might be whether or not those two things are the same.<br /><br />For all of the myriad ways that the film's title can be interpreted and how it informs the movie's content I like to imagine that the title, though never spoken in the film, is derived from the following scene: when Byung-hun confront his first suspect he chokes him with a phone cord, ties him to a chair, interrogates him then causes great trauma to his genitals. The suspect, utterly terrified, turns himself in to the police for all of his (unrelated) crimes and when they interrogate him he mumbles and the film doesn't bother to translate it. I like to imagine this guy told them that he saw the devil. But it works on a lot of levels because it's rich and layered and can encapsulate a whole mess of feelings and events. The title, for the first time in a long time, is not to be taken lightly.<br /><br />I highly recommend this movie not only for it's expert cat and mouse games, but the stark, bloody poetry of the ending and the way it holds a mirror up to us so we can see the toll that revenge takes on us. Make no mistake the movie is too bold and bloody to preach, but it recognizes that we're only human.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-20286768794900236412010-11-22T09:50:00.000-08:002010-11-22T11:30:32.011-08:00Five Reasons you should buy Isaac Florentine's Ninja on Blu-Ray<span style="font-weight:bold;">Ninja [***]</span><br /><br />I wrote a review for Isaac Florentine's <span style="font-style:italic;">Ninja</span> about a year ago and it was done in a jokey, snarky, disdainful way. I liked it, but I wasn't quite being fair to it. I decided to give it a little more reverence since I bought it on Blu-Ray. The original review isn't going anywhere but I want what there is to appreciate about it to be brought to light.<br /><br />1) Isaac Florentine, director of the two <span style="font-style:italic;">Undisputed</span> sequels, numerous episodes of <span style="font-style:italic;">Power Rangers</span>, is a fan of coherent action sequences that display the martial prowess of star Scott Adkins. It utilizes slow motion to great effect as well, there are numerous shots of Adkins doing a backflip and kicking some poor sap right on his noggin in mid-backflip. Slow motion is a tool I've noticed being employed to show people with the bulk of Adkins (and Chilean martial artist Marko Zaror) do something we might normally see a smaller martial artist do. Florentine doesn't believe in wasting the talents of his stunt team so we get clear, concise shots in every location.<br /><br />2) The editing builds up the mayhem very precisely. From thirty-nine minutes on the action sequences gradually escalate from a subway train smackdown that culminates with one fighter being thrown through a window and obliterated by a train on the opposite track to a police station invasion in which a ninja cuts the power in a police station, and cuts a vicious swath through the police to get to his prey. The hero and villain even briefly find themselves on the same side as they take on the film's extraneous villains.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TOrEogLQ-uI/AAAAAAAAAFQ/0W_hA0GEuj4/s1600/ninja_still_04.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 266px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TOrEogLQ-uI/AAAAAAAAAFQ/0W_hA0GEuj4/s400/ninja_still_04.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542458491543812834" /></a><br /><br />3) Scott Adkins shirtless in 1080p. This one is mainly for the ladies and some guys I suppose. Adkins is totally ripped, it's not a long shirtless scene but it's very Van Damme-ian in that it is as unnecessary as his splits in everything. Unlike the <span style="font-style:italic;">Undisputed</span> sequels shirtless fighting is not the norm here, but the camera does like its star. On the flipside of the coin female lead Mika Hijii is tied up by the villain using some Japanese bondage knots if you're into that (Gyaku ebi or Reverse Shrimp Tie it looks like). She's also tied up using blue rope which denotes a serious crime. <br /><br />4) The subway fight allows Mika Hijii to show off some of her fancy martial arts moves, but with a refreshing degree of plausibility. When Hijii gains the upper hand in a fight she only keeps it for about thirty seconds. Sometimes she's lucky enough to dispatch one bad guy but then another pops up to knock the wind out of her. If you're the type of viewer who prefers a woman to struggle admirably while still adhering to the general truism that women are smaller than men and their hits less powerful then <span style="font-style:italic;">Ninja</span> has exactly what you're looking for as it doesn't get to carried away on the issue of women's competence. She's tough, but humble-able and always down for a good tying up.<br /><br />5) <span style="font-style:italic;">Ninja</span> is a comforting throwback to the action movies we spent our youth watching on HBO. It may not have the nostalgia factor of casting childhood ninja stalwart Sho Kosugi as the villain, but it does exude a competency in action scenes and a complete go-for-broke spirit without sacrificing any of the sheen of a bigger, budget film. Well, except the bad CGI during the film's rooftop fight. The villain also does a really nifty hang-glide/parachute type move that reminds me of Batman. It's awesome.<br /><br />For eight dollars on Blu, Ninja is definitely worth the investment.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-37004408327950801342010-11-21T15:06:00.001-08:002010-11-21T18:26:58.072-08:00Harry Potter: The Beginning of the End<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TOnUa8DNrTI/AAAAAAAAAFI/DIFH83EGcgE/s1600/HP7-1-FP-0196r.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TOnUa8DNrTI/AAAAAAAAAFI/DIFH83EGcgE/s400/HP7-1-FP-0196r.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542194375717399858" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 [****]</span><br /><br />I admit it, I'm a blasphemer. I never read the <span style="font-style:italic;">Harry Potter</span> books so my impressions may lack the necessary gravity. I like not being burdened with fan baggage and expectation. I like being surprised. I'm sure you <span style="font-style:italic;">Potter</span>s get surprised in different ways. When the results are like this I'm pretty sure we all win. <br /> <br />The more oppressive the atmosphere is the better I like the series. The movie drops us deep into the proverbial shit as Harry is spirited away by an army of friends-cum-impostors looking to protect him from an attack by Voldemort. The plan is to break off into groups disguised as Harry (with the exception of Mad-Eye Moody and Hagrid who go as themselves) in the hopes of splitting up and fooling Voldemort's search party of assassins, but of course they already know what's going on and Voldemort makes an unsuccessful attempt on the real Harry's life.<br /><br />Harry soon decides that the risks being taken by his protectors is too much. He tries to go it alone, but Ron and Hermione aren't hearing that bullshit and decides to accompany him on wherever his journey takes him. He goes undercover in the Ministry, they destroy a horcrux, escape from a prison and other shit. It's pretty exciting and dark, slightly funny, too. The comedy is mostly just nervous titters to lift the mood a little.<br /><br />I think it's really important to address the film in terms of performance. My choice might not be the most popular one in a large crowd of <span style="font-style:italic;">Potter</span>y aficianados, but I saw it by myself so my choice was one hundred percent unanimous. Rupert Grint.<br /><br />As the character with the big destiny weighing on his shoulders, Harry still comes across less developed than the others because in this film he's still young (16) and still being tracked. Everyone that he loves and cherishes has to protect him willingly and get him to safety. He's at the mercy of his destiny and if we never got the sense before that Harry has been powerlessly waiting for that defining moment in his life, we feel that pressure now as the film opens. We also feel it in the fleeting moments when he dances with Hermione. Is the dance to relieve the stress of the mission, say thanks, just to do something? It's all three but when Harry isn't making forward progress in his mission I can see how he might come across as inert.<br /><br />Hermione is the unquestionably loyal friend, who gets the film's most loaded moments. She casts herself out of her family with a memory erasing spell and devotes herself to Harry's mission. She suffers having the words "mudblood" etched into her skin and suffers all manner of persecution. Hermione's always been a really lovable character who has suffered far too much for the inauspiciousness of her birth and I credit Watson with that, but here she suffers in silence. The moments are loaded, yes, but I wanted her to convey outwardly how she felt instead of being the logical Spock-type. She's not bad, but not exactly doing enough with her anguish for me.<br /><br />Ron Weaselly has taken all the pent-up frustration of being the lovable goofball and in one nice moment he rails against feeling like a third-wheel in the Harry-Hermione crusade against Voldemort and gives it to Harry with both barrels. He doesn't believe that Harry understands what it is that those who love him are giving up. Ron is caught up in someone else's destiny-- he has a family to lose and he wonders, as anybody would, whether or not it's worth getting caught up in. Ron, of course, is loyal but he does the human thing and assesses the risk. He stares into the darkness and asks if the light that comes when the darkness passes will be enough. Stoicism is overrated. But Ron proves loyalty never will be.<br /><br />Speaking of loyalty, my favorite most heroic house elf is back. Dobby. Or Harry Potter's Yoda. From the first moment I saw Dobby in <span style="font-style:italic;">Chamber of Secrets</span> I was smitten. Dobby came into my life when I really needed him. It was November 2002 and just a few months earlier Yoda had become a green ball of fury in <span style="font-style:italic;">Star Wars Episode II</span> and it was ridiculous and unbecoming. Dobby had similar giant ears and a propensity for fending off the bad guys with magical arts, but he was subtle and powerful. His English, better. What happens to him is the most wrenching moment of cinema this year. Sorry <span style="font-style:italic;">Kick Ass</span>.<br /><br />So far, <span style="font-style:italic;">Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows</span> is shaping up to be everything you want the encroaching darkness and the fight of your life to be. Makes me wish I'd read the books, but allows me to appreciate the baited breath a little more. And a little differently.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-66335435249657698762010-11-14T10:47:00.001-08:002010-11-16T13:05:09.804-08:00Screeching fault<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TOB8Z6c8MxI/AAAAAAAAADw/F-xJxyB2ry4/s1600/unstoppable-US-348_rgb.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 296px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TOB8Z6c8MxI/AAAAAAAAADw/F-xJxyB2ry4/s400/unstoppable-US-348_rgb.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5539564326294926098" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Unstoppable [**]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Unstoppable</span> is the kind of movie I feel bad for not liking. The bare bones plot moves with forward momentum from frame one and the charisma of stars Denzel Washington and Chris Pine should go a long way towards making the film critic proof, but as I am wont to do I get hung up on a sequence of events so idiotic that it is probably fairly accurate and, thus, infuriating. <br /><br />Be warned, here there be spoilers:<br /><br />The film opens with two rail yard workers tasked with moving a thirty-nine car train from one section of track to the other, a simple enough job, but they're running a little behind. Rather than take time to connect the disconnected air brakes (that one guy said was pretty important not to overlook) they decide to move the train while leaving it in the idle position. They also have to give the train enough power that it creeps along at about ten miles an hour. In a perfect world the train would've remained in the idle position, but doesn't. When the engineer disembarks from the train to flip a switch, ghost like, the gears inside shift from idle to throttle, the engineer completely unaware of this, struts toward the switch. As the train picks up speed, one engineer races the train until he falls. Meanwhile, the guy standing the next to him, presumably unable to switch a flip or outrun the hundred pounds heavier guy, stands there and does nothing. I can only assume the fear of being sat on looms large. I don't know if it's supposed to soften the blows of their idiocy more when we realize these characters are played by Ethan Suplee of <span style="font-style:italic;">My Name is Earl</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Chasing Amy</span> fame and T.J. Miller of <span style="font-style:italic;">She's Out of My League</span>, but I'll tell you that their incompetence is not charming if it's not a comedy.<br /><br />More jaw dropping than their flat out stupidity and negligence is the idea that I'm asked to believe these guys don't know the content of the trains they're moving. I'm sure that training manuals and previous mistakes have underscored the importance of not cutting corners, but often times it still happens. I'm okay with someone choosing to do a piss poor job, but asking me to believe they remain completely ignorant of this day's thousands of pounds of explosive chemicals seems kind of insulting to me. I have a summer job that allows me to be massive amounts of lazy, but when someone tells me that we're being audited I try to bring my A-game. Explosive chemicals are A-game needing shit, too. I was pretty flummoxed by this, I can only accept laziness as the cause of this. I don't believe people would have been allowed to remain ignorant. <br /><br />Spoilers pretty much end here.<br /><br />Did I also mention that the guy in charge of all rail yard operations and the station master were all unaware of what was on that train? Maybe it's weird that they don't know about their cargo, but Denzel Washington's character seems to know everything about what he's hauling that day, the length of his train and everything else. I'm sure the other workers from the beginning weren't conductors or engineers, but clearly everyone on every level can make a costly mistake and they have to know that sometimes the consequences of those mistakes vary. In some ways I can sympathize with the CEOs, that the movie shows, who don't want to get screwed because of the negligence of a couple of idiots, but I also think it's their fault for keeping employees poorly apprised of shipping manifests and cargo read-outs. If this isn't the kind of thing that would normally happen, if these guys would know what was on their train then I blame the movie for resisting the temptation of giving us a human villain. It makes everyone look stupider, even if, only accidentally.<br /><br />It's a shame too that this is such a persistent hang up because I think Chris Pine and Denzel Washington do some quality first-day-of-work-together bonding Yet my petty grievances are getting in the way of enjoying it. Chris Pine plays Will Colson, a kid from a well connected family whose part of the rail company's ongoing initiative to hire young turks to replace overpaid old timers. Denzel is one of the old-timers who we discover is not just a guy who loves doing the right thing, but a guy who is going to do something completely stupid and heroic because they're already going to push him out the door and he wants to exit in style. As the two of them embark on this impossible mission they bond over their marriages and Denzel tells Pine how much he likes him by saying how much he is annoyed by him. To be fair, Pine is a little cocky, but it's not hard to see that beneath that he's a guy who wants to do the right thing.<br /><br />Kevin Corrigan and Rosario Dawson are not bad as a Railway Safety Inspector and the Station Master who are both incredibly quick on their toes and seem like exactly the kind of bureaucracy you want to deal with in such a dire situation. Their effectiveness stems from a reasonable level of concern and interest in the safety of people. In contrast, anyone concerned with the company's bottom line, as a result of this situation, is more prone to cook up an extravagant and stupid situational response. An effort to transport a Marine onto the runaway train ends with him being thrown through the locomotive's windshield in front of a television news chopper. It's fairly evocative of Bruce Willis' great line from <span style="font-weight:bold;">Die Hard</span> ("I'm not the one who just got butt-fucked on national television, DeWayne.") because, well, it just happened. <br /><br />One of the things that <span style="font-style:italic;">Unstoppable</span> does is filter every bad response through the prism of television news. I don't know if it was done on purpose, but it only makes the situation worse, we get to watch the trouble escalate, but a lot of times we get to watch people as they watch the situation escalate. I'm not talking about the good guys behind the scenes who aren't on the news but regular folks. Being removed from the action like that makes the story less intense, but also shows how disconnected people are from the decisions they make. Weirdly, though, it doesn't flatter the movie. Both the film's audience and the movie's audience get to see the wrong decisions play out on the news while the people actually coming up with the plan and doing it don't get seen at all or through news cameras that make them look like more idiots making bad decisions. <br /><br />I guess what I'm saying in as long winded a way as possible is that the movie is more interested in screw-ups than heroics. Not even the fact that it's heroes are screw-ups, but it's interested in what people do wrong more than right. Again, I'm not talking about characters who have something to attone for but people who take unnecessary risks and/or are stupid. Even when the movie tries to take the time to explain the heroic decision by Pine and Washington it can't help but look like another misguided idea.<br /><br />Perhaps it's unfair to get hung up on the actions of a guy who sets the plot in motion. Had this mistake not happened there wouldn't be a story here but this was neglect, not an accident. It's a big deal that no one actually reprimands the guy whose fault it is onscreen. Relegating his fate to a punch line in the end credits character post-script speaks poorly of the comically incompetent light the movie puts the character in and everyone else in the movie by association, except Washington and Kevin Corrigan (Corrigan deserves credit for actually making the plan Denzel proposes in the trailer a workable one).<br /><br />One day I'm sure I'll get over this. You know how I get about mole hills.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-21273178621588942242010-11-01T16:54:00.000-07:002010-11-16T15:34:36.038-08:00All Hallow's Eve<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TOMUv5ADZEI/AAAAAAAAAE4/-uslPQc8ry4/s1600/05_300dpi.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TOMUv5ADZEI/AAAAAAAAAE4/-uslPQc8ry4/s400/05_300dpi.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5540294779583292482" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Saw 3D [*], Paranormal Activity 2 [***]</span><br /><br />This Halloween weekend I partook of a horrifying double feature. Last year, a short lived rivalry began between the <span style="font-style:italic;">Saw</span> franchise and a "we didn't know it then but we do now" upstart young franchise called <span style="font-style:italic;">Paranormal Activity</span>. The latter was the superior film last year and this year the competition yielded the same results.<br /><br />After seven films the <span style="font-style:italic;">Saw</span> franchise has finally managed to wear out its welcome, although it started to show serious fatigue with the fifth entry. <span style="font-style:italic;">Paranormal Activity</span>, on the other hand, shows no real signs of fatigue. The scare ratio is about the same and the characters come across in equal portions of sympathetic and likable, but doubtful or sympathetic, likable and eventually terrified. If anybody seems like they're being an asshole it's not because we need a character to root against but because they think the leap people around them are making is a little ridiculous and they'd be right if it weren't so horrifyingly true.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TOMU5OAHcxI/AAAAAAAAAFA/pBUpqmWeNn4/s1600/PN2002A.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 210px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TOMU5OAHcxI/AAAAAAAAAFA/pBUpqmWeNn4/s400/PN2002A.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5540294939839525650" /></a><br /><br />For me the most effective aspects of <span style="font-style:italic;">Paranormal Activity</span> have to do with the complete lack of reverence men have for the spiritual world and how this complete disregard for the things that go bump in the night seems to drive everything to a fever pitch. You can say it's about a demon looking for a soul until you're blue in the face but you still can't ignore the fact that its about man's ignorance and superiority if they think that certain handshake agreements don't exist between the worlds as well. Remember, a handshake or a promise (a word handshake) is the reason this started to begin with so of course they honor them.<br /><br />All of this being said, both films are dependent on their predecessors to deepen or worsen (here's looking at you <span style="font-style:italic;">Saw 3D</span>) the franchise's mythology. <span style="font-style:italic;">Paranormal</span> expounds on something hinted at in the first film and while it contains some slightly redundant exposition it is ultimately comprised of new and satisfying information. <span style="font-style:italic;">Saw 3D</span> asks us to believe in the mother of all fail safes in the form of an answer to an oft-asked question about the film(s) that no one really cares about the answer to. That being said, <span style="font-style:italic;">Saw 3D</span>'s efforts to bring the film's full circle goes so far over the rails into lunacy that it actually ends up being a little endearing. That's not to say that the film is actually good, but its wide eyed optimism and stupidity can't be ignored. Doesn't mean you have to like it.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-76693855496230892842010-10-12T18:32:00.000-07:002010-10-13T12:44:13.505-07:00Depth of Love<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TLYLS_HM7-I/AAAAAAAAADI/XLS6sJ8JXq4/s1600/544740Ocean-Heaven-1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 287px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TLYLS_HM7-I/AAAAAAAAADI/XLS6sJ8JXq4/s400/544740Ocean-Heaven-1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5527618013451055074" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Ocean Heaven [***1/2]</span><br /><br />Following the rather stunning one-two punch of Jackie Chan's performances in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Shinjuku Incident</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">The Karate Kid</span> that proved there was more to Chan than just being an adept physical performer, Jet Li follows up his turn in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Expendables</span> with <span style="font-style:italic;">Ocean Heaven</span>, as the cancer stricken single father of an autistic son. Like Chan and <span style="font-style:italic;">Shinjuku</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Ocean</span> eschews his typical gifts, but allows Li to deliver a strong and nuanced character that packs a punch in its own right.<br /><br />If this premise sounds like it is designed specifically to tug at your heart strings and make you cry then chances are it probably will. If you take a gander at the poster above you can see Jet Li's face, he looks like a man with a depth of patience and understanding and you can practically see his halo as he smiles through the pain of his cancer. Li doesn't disappoint, he really embodies that saintly fellow of eternal patience. I suppose it's worth noting that he looks like a dude whose ass you could kick but don't want to because his smile is so adorable.<br /><br />The movie is not about cheap sentiment despite a premise with an inherent minimum handkerchief limit. It takes the time to address some real concerns that Wang has. His son, Dafu, is twenty-one and severely autistic. I'll admit that because of TV's <span style="font-style:italic;">Parenthood</span> and the movie <span style="font-style:italic;">Adam</span> I was expecting a high functioning Asperger's Syndrome afflictee because I, somehow, forgot for a moment that other kinds of autism existed. If only <span style="font-style:italic;">The Shield</span> were still around to remind me of such things (because, apparently, I learn nothing from actual life experience). Without his father's guidance Dafu has no way of taking care of himself so Wang spends his free time at work calling orphanages, mental care facilities, nursing homes and schools for the disabled wondering what exactly can be done. Dafu has the burden of being both too old and too young for the state to take care of him. Dafu's apparent unteachableness is magnified in numerous situations and you begin to feel, like Wang, exhausted. <br /><br />Who knew that knowing you were dying had so much politics involved? <br /><br />I imagine it's tough knowing you're going to die soon without really having a clear sense, in spite of preparation, of any sort of emotional or financial straits you may leave your family in. It's probably worse for anyone to whom the concept of death may be ungraspable and I think that Jet Li and the screenwriter have given these questions due consideration and created a very honest movie about death. It's so honest I don't know whether to cry or get my affairs in order. I honestly feel like I don't have time for the former.<br /><br />Honestly, as good as Jet Li is and he's good enough to be considered for a Hong Kong film award, he is eclipsed by Zhang Wen who plays Dafu. Dafu appears to never be paying attention to his father, content to let everything be done for him while he pays attention to his few obsessions: swimming, dolphins, juggling, hide and seek and a girl. In a role with very little dialogue, Wen is able to convey his feelings with a series of finger twitches and a particular way of walking. Those gestures mean he is content or evened out while any shifts into anger can still be portrayed with screaming or crying jags. Wen never displays any sense of an actor playing a part, he lives and breathes the character and gives the character a sense of understanding we might not have thought possible. I don't mean to sound like those with certain severe forms of autism are incapable of higher thought, but until the film's final twenty minutes I didn't know if he'd ever understand the gravity of his situation. He seems to have gotten it, though. And not only gotten it but understood the magnitude all along. I like to think that Dafu's initial refusal to listen was an attempt to hold on to his father because if he doesn't understand then who will take care of him? You can't take him away, right? It wouldn't be fair.<br /><br />The best thing about <span style="font-style:italic;">Ocean Heaven</span> is that it never stops exploring or probing its deeper questions. The movie could've milked you for tears or taken you on a bullshit series of misadventures, but the movie isn't eager to throw caution to the wind. It addresses questions of legacy when it isn't dealing with the red tape of dying on a time table. The rare moments in the film when Dafu and Wang find themselves separated allows us to see the unconscious influence they've exerted over each other all these years. Wang stands in his son's favorite hiding place one night as if he expects, like Dafu does, that the other will materialize out of thin air. My favorite, of course, is the triumph represented by the moment when Dafu finally moves his stuffed dog from atop the television without having to be told. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Ocean Heaven</span> is a simple story told with remarkable care and precision. It's not just about what it means to be a parent or a son, but about what we carry with us when one leg of the journey is over and the next one begins.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-44443197454055891752010-09-20T14:00:00.000-07:002010-09-20T15:25:25.891-07:00Mass. affection<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TJfeUemic-I/AAAAAAAAAC8/3_iLQe5ZATo/s1600/thetown0002.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 288px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TJfeUemic-I/AAAAAAAAAC8/3_iLQe5ZATo/s400/thetown0002.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5519124311759287266" /></a><br />The Town [****]<br /><br />There are two Ben Afflecks on display in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Town</span>, one is the poised visual stylist who in the space of two films manages to stand shoulder to shoulder with some of cinema's heavyweights. The other is the actor whose own rise and potential fall is echoed in that of his character, former hockey player and bank robbery mastermind Doug MacRay. MacRay like Affleck was raised in a single parent home, like Affleck enjoyed notoriety (Affleck as a screenwriter and actor, once upon a time, MacRay as a hockey player who blew two chances and now leads the fated life of a Townie-- a born and bred criminal) and through the love of a good woman and divine providence comes to a point where redemption seems the next obvious step. Affleck is enjoying his second life as an actor and receiving well deserved praise for his proficiency with a camera. He has also settled into the role of family man with a wife and two daughters, but both Affleck and his fictional counterpart play their roles with a tentativeness. As men who have had it all before and know what it's like to lose it all.<br /><br />In many ways the ease with which Affleck has settled into being a director, a legitimately great one at that, has a way of calling attention to itself. If we can evoke comparisons to Michael Mann (<span style="font-style:italic;">The Town</span> is <span style="font-style:italic;">Heat</span> in Boston, after all) from a narrative standpoint and in the crisp, concise way he shoots action, for those reasons we can also draw upon Sam Peckinpah too. Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood for how quickly he established himself as a force to be reckoned with then we must acknowledge a debt to everything that has come before. Affleck the director can shoulder that burden, but Affleck the actor turns the film into a naked, emotional plea from an artist.<br /><br />Most of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Town</span> is spent with Affleck's character getting to know the woman he and his crew kidnapped during a bank robbery. She didn't see their faces, but knows one small detail that can send them all down the river. So post kidnapping he befriends her to assess the risk (which is fairly big as evidenced by the above sentence) and begins to fall in love with her. During one of their dates he cracks a joke about how all of his TV watching gives him insight into the mechanics of crime fighting. It's not the joke that matters so much that it's the first time Affleck has cracked a joke on film in seven years. His old charm and charisma begin to shine through, but it's self conscious, a tentative baby step towards the easygoing, confident Affleck of yore. The man is probably more loved now than he's ever been but now that you see his face it's probably easier to hold him accountable for the sins of the past so you don't let the smile linger too long, you remember that it's all a house of cards. <br /><br />You might be wondering, how does his tentativeness translate into a plea? Well it's the first time he's joked on film in seven years and it's on a date. Saying the wrong thing could send everything crashing down, but he can't unsay it. It's out there to be accepted or rejected. The film's final image also offers up Doug MacRay as a character on the cusp of redemption. Affleck the director has a way with actors (including himself) and in the coda of his film he makes peace with who he was, but knows that what his audience thinks of him matters so he leaves it to his audience to unify the two halves.<br /><br />But the part of Affleck that is liked and respected continues to flourish. Ben Affleck elicits flawless performances from everyone in his ensemble. Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner, Affleck and Rebecca Hall are all expectedly terrific. I also like the return of working class grit embodied by Slaine Jenkins as getaway driver Albert Maglone and Titus Welliver as a Charlestown bred FBI agent. His action scenes as previously stated are terrific. Crisp, concise, intelligible. Jeremy Renner's last stand with the police is evocative of Steve McQueen's shootout with the police in Sam Peckinpah's <span style="font-style:italic;">The Getaway</span>. He's not anywhere near as stoic as McQueen or calculating but he goes for broke in a fairly hopeless situation and it's a thrilling sight.<br /><br />When you get right down to it, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Town</span>, more than being an exceptional acting showcase or action picture stripped down to it's bare essentials is a love letter. Ben Affleck has a way of framing his fair city in a way that gives it character, but also as the place that defines him as a performer and an individual.<br /><br />If every city is drowning and all of it's inhabitants are just waiting to be saved Affleck is the benevolent God who will do so. Consider scenes from both of his directorial efforts: in "Gone Baby Gone" hero Patrick Kenzie has reunited a young girl with her drug addled mother and an uncertain future. By the letter of the law he has done the right thing and by the burden of Catholic guilt he has done the thing that lets him sleep at night. In his heart of hearts is it the right thing? Probably not, but it's an acceptable risk. Another hero is willing to make the same trade off with a similarly lifestyled mother in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Town</span> and it speaks to Affleck's unconditional acceptance of the denizens of Boston and their myriad flaws.<br /><br />One of the most haunting images in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Town</span> is an establishing shot of the prison that houses Doug MacRay's father. It's desolate, lonely and cold reminding us that we live in a city of ghosts, but that ghosts are the sum of our experience. That being said the coda of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Town</span> offers us the chance to reconcile with the ghosts of our past and anyone who hasn't taken the opportunity to forgive Affleck the sins of 2003 would do well to offer him the grace he affords his characters.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-17439998803380458292010-09-14T11:15:00.000-07:002010-09-14T12:42:14.989-07:00Something Something Button Mash<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TI_Oo4uvbcI/AAAAAAAAAC0/-6EN15oENUk/s1600/2010_scott_pilgrim_vs_the_world_007.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 273px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TI_Oo4uvbcI/AAAAAAAAAC0/-6EN15oENUk/s400/2010_scott_pilgrim_vs_the_world_007.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516855270370667970" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World [*]</span><br /><br />I have to admit upfront that the previews for <span style="font-style:italic;">Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World</span> does pretty close to nothing for me. Michael Cera despite his infinite sameness can be charming, Edgar Wright because of his ability to understand our base, simple desires and affections and validate them with excellent motion pictures and a few actors gamely hamming it up could've/should've been the wild cards that make this film better than it looks. It doesn't work. Edgar Wright brings nothing short of his usual visual coherence and crisp editing to the film, but aside from one genuinely satisfying, pulse quickening sequence Wright is powerless despite what he brings to the table.<br /><br />This might be the first Edgar Wright film to feel paced exactly like an evening with Michael Cera. It doesn't really move so much as mope, the narrative never gains any moment even as the stakes grow and the climax approaches. The film remains so evenly keeled and unenthusiastic. Speaking of which, a bored looking Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays pink haired Ramona Flowers. Scott's unrequited crush/ love interest/ Amazon delivery girl that literally travels through Scott's empty headspace that motivates him. Sure he'll fight for Ramona, but he'll also string along an immensely sweet and more likable seventeen year old girl with whom he is in a sexless non-relationship. But Scott <span style="font-style:italic;">only</span> fights to be with Ramona (read: in Ramona), his struggles don't actually include any self improvement, at least, not in the way the film leads you to believe there will be.<br /><br />So then comes a series of less than exciting battles against exes that employs the usual video game tropes of sixty-four hit combos, extra lives and people exploding into coins. Although to be fair, the one truly inspired set-piece involves Scott being "controlled" (gotta love the wordplay) by Ramona when he expresses his reluctance to fight her ex-girlfriend because, well, he doesn't hit girls. It's the only moment in which Scott displays a genuine awareness and concern for anyone not himself. I'm also a sucker for the other person as weapon and an inversion of the chivalrous idea of a man not hitting a woman and child (at the insistence of another woman of course).<br /><br />The arched eyebrows and over enunciation of Chris Evans as action star Lucas Lee culminate in the movie's biggest missed opportunity and anti-climax (he rail grinds to his own doom) while Brandon Routh's super powered Vegan sub-plot offers up a delightful pair of cameos, but all inspiration remains but a blip on the map of Scott Pilgrim's world.<br /><br />I've begun to consider the possibility, as I write this review, that the Scott Pilgrim source material is not meant to be affectionate in any way, I don't know how or why you pick video game loving, garage band hipster geeks as your target of derision(comic book lovers and film lovers, too, if we're considering all mediums the story is presented in). According to the IMDb page it is sometimes referred to as <span style="font-style:italic;">Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life</span> which I have to take as derogatory. It says to me poor Scott Pilgrim, sharing a house and bed with his gay roomie, has a seventeen-year-old girl fawning all over him, is in a band called "Sex Bob-Omb" (also deeply sarcastic) and no means of visible income or support, man life is rough for this poor sap. I think the reason Scott's sister is always yelling at him is because he's a bum that life always seems to work out for and he's only motivated to fight for someone's vagina meanwhile she's ALWAYS working. I also think after the excellence of <span style="font-style:italic;">Up In The Air</span>, Anna Kendrick is not so secretly frustrated with going back to being that one girl with a small part in a bad movie played by a one note actor.<br /><br />I also can't help but wonder if Edgar Wright's participation is some sort of a warning that he's done with the clever/affectionate geek out shit. I know he has respect for genre films, video games (as evidenced by his UK series <span style="font-style:italic;">Spaced</span>) and comic books and that he approached the film with the utmost professionalism, but it has also been eleven years since <span style="font-style:italic;">Spaced</span> and from what I can tell everybody in all of Wright's other work may have had arrested development and simple pleasures but they were adults with jobs who tried so they deserved a little bit of a fantastical respite when life got too much for them to bear. Scott Pilgrim is five years out of high school, unemployed and sees life through the prism of a video game which puts him well within the realm of needing to grow the hell up.<br /><br />As someone who is probably in the minority in disliking this film I'd like to point out something to its champions: the film's Universal logo is down in the 8-bit graphic style smacking anybody with an affection for video games square in the nostalgia bone. But I believe it betrays the integrity of that love by having Scott initially lose to the final boss and before activiating his extra life for a do-over all of Scott's mistakes are explicitly spelled out and he is told what lessons he needs to learn. Part of the sense of accomplishment, appeal and fun of those games was the <span style="font-style:italic;">earned</span> ending. We made our own mistakes, figured them out for ourselves and corrected them. What happens to Scott Pilgrim is tantamount to having a cheat code for life and, maybe even, the simplest and most undemanding existence of all.<br /><br />What I'm saying in the most explicit way possible is that you have all been mocked. Anybody who has dared to take an interest in the story no matter the medium has been mocked. If you don't believe you're being made fun of then understand that you are at least encouraging the most dishonest movie of the year to spread more poison.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-29759738172170365442010-09-08T15:54:00.000-07:002010-09-09T18:03:30.302-07:00The Cutting Kind<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TImDP9mM2pI/AAAAAAAAACs/lp02Wj-NfZU/s1600/machete_ver10.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 264px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TImDP9mM2pI/AAAAAAAAACs/lp02Wj-NfZU/s400/machete_ver10.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5515083528947948178" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Machete [***1/2]</span><br /><br />Robert Rodriguez's <span style="font-style:italic;">Machete</span> comes dangerously close to being the first wholly successful competitor in the recent throwback sweepstakes that has beset cinema since mid-August. First, Stallone took the can't lose premise and casting of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Expendables</span> and made a mediocre disjointed mess. Next, Alexandre Aja's <span style="font-style:italic;">Piranha 3-D</span> saddled us with its most boring characters for the biggest chunk of its running time then <span style="font-style:italic;">almost</span> made up for it with a full-on blood bath and great Christopher Lloyd appearances. Sure there were boobs (and good ones), but that doesn't make up for the wealth of Jerry O'Connell the movie gives us. Then along comes Robert Rodriguez's finally feature-length <span style="font-style:italic;">Machete</span>. The first theatrical trailer didn't quite have the trash appeal of the original, but I was hoping for the best and largely it delivers.<br /><br />The plot such as it is concerns Danny Trejo as the titular ex-Federale betrayed by his boss and displaced to America after a drug lord murders his wife. He becomes the patsy of a conservative senator's advisor (Jeff Fahey) in an attempt to assassinate said senator so that his chances at election rise exponentially and his border closing initiative can begin. The initiative stands to greatly benefit the aforementioned drug lord (Steven Seagal) and this betrayal greatly benefits Machete because it puts everybody who needs Machete's blade up their ass right in his path.<br /><br />Machete ends up becoming allied with an ICE agent (Jessica Alba) and a mysterious woman named She (like Che (Michelle Rodriguez)) to help him fight his war. Machete is a big bad ass who really doesn't need help with the physical stuff but the scope of betrayal necessitates that he make friends whether he likes it or not. She runs a group called the Network that helps illegals find jobs, feeds them when they have no work and helps them escape from hitmen in a crowded hospital.<br /><br />Danny Trejo has been around since the days of <span style="font-style:italic;">Desperado</span> and with his first starring role it's nice to see that Trejo really has talent and charisma rather than just a look that Rodriguez finds gives his films character. He's a really authentic part of the Rodriguez verse, he's got pretty good deadpan comic timing and when he says the classic "you just fucked with the wrong Mexican" line you believe it. The guy's wife was killed right in front of him, bosses, beautiful ladies and politicians betray him and now he's used somebody's guts as a rope. I'd say the entire ordeal is starting to wear on him. He's also pretty good with machetes, blows people's brains out with relative ease too. He's pretty much who I want Antonio Banderas to grow up to be. Most of the other questionable casting actually works out pretty well. Big gambles were made on Jessica Alba and Lindsay Lohan and they actually pay off. Lohan's character is saddled with a lot of the same real life baggage she has (i.e. someone in serious need of rehab with a possibly perverted father and skanky mother) and while I won't say it makes her performance raw or honest I think it made it easier for her to come to work prepared. Jessica Alba might be too pretty to be plausible but ever since she got her face pummeled in by Casey Affleck I'm more willing to give her and her work a chance. I think one of these days somebody is honestly going to figure out what purpose she best serves in a movie and give her the right role. <br /><br />Sadly, though, <span style="font-style:italic;">Machete</span> still performs a major misstep. As the film goes on and gains momentum it isn't simply about revenge it becomes a film about the immigration issue. As Machete pursues his quest for revenge the myth of himself grows and he starts to represent the downtrodden masses caught between the worlds of their nightmares and their dreams. Machete's allies take up arms alongside him and this leads to an all-out actual war. Machete's personal revenge is given short shrift and the movie's politics take center stage. I don't have any grievances with what the film has to say on the issue of immigration. When Lindsay Lohan's character comes gunning for DeNiro's uber-conservative senator and then, upon achieving her goal, literally shoots the guns from the hand of every man fighting to help along the movie's climax I appreciated what was being said: another war isn't going to solve this problem. On the other hand, in a damning way, I think it was also being suggested that without a personal stake in the fight we should just walk away. Perhaps leaving the border fence question as an eternally debatable one is better than turning it into an avoidable tragedy.<br /><br />The issue seems too big for this particular movie, not that the movie doesn't have the right to address it, but the importance of this particular discussion is too much for the movie to bear. On the one hand I look like I don't care about the larger themes of the film, but I do. I also wanted the satisfaction of a revenge film and I don't quite get that. It's a double edged sword this film.<br /><br />However, if we're going to get the two promised <span style="font-style:italic;">Machete</span> sequels I'll take him in whatever strength we get him: avenger, superman, folk hero. But whatever evolution he undergoes I hope the ending of this film serves as a reminder that every transition can only bear so much weight on its shoulders.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-40749728700967509012010-09-05T12:26:00.000-07:002010-09-05T13:20:15.050-07:00To the limit<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TIP7Tc4ZTsI/AAAAAAAAACc/la28MgA1FpE/s1600/american-3208R_1272932088_640w.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TIP7Tc4ZTsI/AAAAAAAAACc/la28MgA1FpE/s400/american-3208R_1272932088_640w.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5513526680420437698" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The American [***]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Control</span> director Anton Corbijn's second picture as director, <span style="font-style:italic;">The American</span> evokes memories of yet another picture about control, the aptly titled <span style="font-style:italic;">Limits of Control</span> by Jim Jarmusch. Both are films that unfold at a speed roughly the pace of a Sunday drive (that probably sounds like a negative when phrased in such a way, but it is actually a pretty high compliment), both films feature a leading man whose expressionless face could bore holes through stone, they love espresso and often find themselves in the company of a beautiful naked woman (although only the hero of Jarmusch's film has the capacity to resist urges of any kind). What makes both films smashing successes is the way the hero is often left alone with his own thoughts. As a hitman how often do you contemplate, in your loneliness, your own death? Do you ever wonder if the only other guy who knows where you are is conspiring against you? That's how a movie in which nothing much happens is able to pull you in. It gives you time to think about the aforementioned questions, but also given the right actor you can see past the stone-pokerfacedness and watch those introspective gears turn. It's a way of knowing that we're asking ourselves the right question as an audience.<br /><br />Admittedly, <span style="font-style:italic;">The American</span> is a fairly typical George Clooney role. An equal in tone and pacing to <span style="font-style:italic;">Michael Clayton</span> in which his character, a consummate and unflappable bad ass in his chosen profession, who comes to the late in the game realization that he's been working for the wrong side all along. And if he has always known that fact, and let's assume that he is smart enough to be aware of this, the movie is usually about the final job in a line of work that threatens to destroy his soul entirely. <br /><br />Clooney has always had an understated world weariness to him and he uses it to great effect here as he typically does. I like best the smaller moments that let us see the constantly engaged hitman's brain in action. When visiting a local mechanic he quickly scans the shed for the parts he'll need to build a sound suppressor for a rifle. It's a deftly edited sequence that shows a man quick on his feet, a contrast to the slightly frazzled trigger man we see in the film's opening. Editing aside, Clooney brings a keen sense of awareness to the proceedings. He's constantly calling his boss and delaying the job because he's starting to grapple, perhaps for the first time ever, with an inability to detach himself from his work. If his work is to be in Italy he will, of course, fall in love with someone. He also becomes friends with a priest, both are ways of passively and aggressively searching for an avenue out of his life of crime.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The American</span> is not a typically breathlessly paced Hollywood thriller but a slow burner that examines the consequences of a certain kind of life with a certain amount of speed and care. It is also another worthy addition to the typical George Clooney character pantheon.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-16816838485860077602010-08-28T19:00:00.000-07:002010-08-31T16:14:08.877-07:00The Patriot Act(ion)<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/THnfnGBGcbI/AAAAAAAAABw/uDUwIN3P2jU/s1600/true+legend+stills.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/THnfnGBGcbI/AAAAAAAAABw/uDUwIN3P2jU/s400/true+legend+stills.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5510681481787634098" /></a><br />Yuen Woo-Ping's <span style="font-style:italic;">True Legend</span> is a certifiably grand entertainment that traffics in ridiculously over-the-top fights, unrequited love and hate, vengeance and patriotism. In short, it's everything I've come to expect from every martial arts movie I've seen since Donnie Yen's phenomenal starring vehicle<span style="font-style:italic;">Ip Man</span>. Vincent Zhao essays the lead role of Su, a fearless warrior who wants to settle into family life and teach wushu, so he refuses a promotion. This means good things for two colleagues, Ma and Yuan, but Yuan resents Su for always being given the things he turns down. Yuan's jealousy comes to a head when he loses the woman he loves to Su. He murders their adoptive father and, using the five venom fist, vanquishes Su into what should be a lonely, watery grave.<br /><br />However, the woman he did this for forsakes her child and plunges in after Su. This really angers Yuan who has to put up with Su's little brat in the hopes that the kid's mother will one day come to reclaim him. Maybe in the meantime he can come up with a better plan to woo Mommy or, assuming they didn't have such things at the time, invent a foundation that will make him look not so deathly gray. <br /><br />At this point, I should comment on a couple of the film's really nifty touches: the villain has a super lightweight armor fused to his skin and his deathly gray pallor comes from the poisons injected in him by various scorpions and spiders. He sticks his hands into a box full of them, much like Tong Po did with glass in <span style="font-style:italic;">Kickboxer</span> or Charlie Sheen did with caramel and gummy bears in <span style="font-style:italic;">Hot Shots Part Deux!</span> The second things is that when Su begins rehabilitating his hair is grown long and he's punching a tree to build up his strength. The heart warms at this unexpected homage to <span style="font-style:italic;">Hard to Kill</span> and why shouldn't it? Because if there's one thing Su proves by the end of his crazy journey it's that he's hard to kill.<br /><br />Another point of Su's rehab is his training with the Old Sage (Gordon Liu) and the God of Wushu (Jay Chou). The sage cackles maniacally and strokes his long white beard while the God of Wushu handily deflects Su's every strike and knocks him from countless precipices. The "training sequence" and a showdown with another drunken boxer compromise the two worst sequences of the film. The training is full of horrendous computer generated images of mountains that make the film look like a sub Monkey King adventure film. The sequence with the other drunken boxer isn't too bad, but it's marred by what looks like breakdancing moves and a desire to speed the competitors up via CG so that it looks like they're trying to drill holes into the floor. They're pretty ugly mistakes in a film that doesn't make many at all.<br /><br />Besides the above mentioned sequences the fights in the film are pretty exceptional. The first being Su's showdown with Venom Fist Master, Yuan, which is the kind of righteously angry battle you should expect from a guy whose come to claim his wife and son from his most mortal enemy. There's a particularly impressive sequence in a snake pit where both men make exceptional use of the confined space, doing the splits to hold themselves in place while just wailing on each other or shimmying past each other to avoid attacking snakes. A real person couldn't get that much mileage out of confined spaces, but it seems like a surprisingly normal and plausible person in a confined space type of fight for a <span style="font-style:italic;">wuxia</span> movie.<br /><br />The film has a third act that's entirely different from what I expected. Su's showdown with Yuan happens with about forty minutes left in the film and when it's over there's a whole other direction for the film's last half hour. It moves in a cycle of Fall, Revenge, Redemption and Redemption is inarguably the most crowd pleasing-est part. <br /><br />Haunted by the failure to save his wife Su is a raging drunk and a beggar. In one scene his son barters to buy a sweet potato and when he goes to split it with his father (they don't show what I'm about to tell you in its entirety) it seems like the guy eats the whole potato when his kid's back is turned. But he receives charity from Ma, one of his fortunate buddies from the beginning, who is the head of the Wushu federation. Su decides to pay Ma back by defending the country's honor in a free for all against fighters of other disciplines. But Ma failed to defend his country's honor first, so it's more like he's getting a redemptive revenge to make up for not saving his wife, which is slightly less honorable, but not much because the stakes are higher than they were previously. Su fights a trio of wrestlers played by mammoth seven footers. The mammoth seven footers angle is typical of films like <span style="font-style:italic;">Jet Li's Fearless</span> in that they are non-Asian, but that isn't always the case. However, the specimen in films meant to please the crowd is always ostensibly physically superior. With the exception of <span style="font-style:italic;">Ip Man</span> it's hard to know for sure if the hero will survive if their opponent is non-Asian. I guess you can gauge whether it is truly the country's honor at stake or personal honor to determine the hero surviving, but this is usually a metaphor for national Chinese honor all the same.*<br /><br />The finale is brutal, with wrestling moves like tombstones and power bombs contributing to the requisite head trauma induced by a small guy being attached to wires and doing impossible things to impossibly big guys who beat him impossibly bad before realizing his spirit and body cannot be broken. It's a tense fight because people fighting for their country's honor in exhibition matches tend to receive Apollo Creed in<span style="font-style:italic;">Rocky IV</span> levels of brokenness. And the film's final fight gloriously milks that tension and patriotism. The tension is also sold by the bond Su shares with his on-screen son who shows a genuine concern for his father and can cry like nobody's business. The scene where he declares that he won't leave his father despite it being his best option is genuinely touching. He was pretty much abandoned by one parent once before and his other parent is a mess because of what happened to the other parent. This kid knows his parents love each other and him, but he openly and directly suffers as a result of it twice. But he is wonderful and selfless about it. It gives the excitement of the fights an extra layer of emotional resonance. <br /><br />Despite an unfortunate act two setback, <span style="font-style:italic;">True Legend</span> is thrilling and appropriately warmhearted with only a couple of regrettable details to be found. On that note, I'll leave you with a final detail to ponder. On the set of <span style="font-style:italic;">Kill Bill</span> it was rumored that David Carradine and Woo-Ping were not big fans of one another. I don't know if that's true or if they share a stubborn old martial artists animosity that results in the occasional blow up that seems like a big deal to everyone but them, but Woo-Ping has dedicated this film to Carradine's memory and cast him as an unabashedly cartoonish asshole of a villain who dopes up his wrestlers to ensure the destruction of the "Chinaman." Is this a fun tribute to your a-hole buddy or a final middle finger? I don't know. But I like it.<br /><br />Note: Objections to my use of the phrase Chinese honor are expected. Sometimes I also say things like "not rape, but date rape." It's not a distinction I make for any reason other than it was an accident and I said it in later conversations almost reflexively. It is, however, a hilarious language gaffe.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-63962817791435488772010-08-24T10:36:00.000-07:002010-08-24T12:28:32.164-07:00Three And Out<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/THQdVYXTAvI/AAAAAAAAABY/a1qO3qY5-TQ/s1600/2010_brooklyns_finest_023.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/THQdVYXTAvI/AAAAAAAAABY/a1qO3qY5-TQ/s400/2010_brooklyns_finest_023.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5509060497335583474" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Brooklyn's Finest [***1/2]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Brooklyn's Finest</span> tells three different stories involving a police officer at a cross roads: First, we have Sal (Ethan Hawke) a morally compromised cop who may or may not have been a bad guy before his wife's sickness and ever expanding family caused the sudden need to move to a bigger place. A need that can only be met with cold, hard (and ultimately dirty) cash. Next is Doogan (Richard Gere), a hair's breadth away from retirement who wakes every morning and puts an unloaded gun in his mouth and squeezes the trigger. Doogan is reluctantly assigned as a training officer his final week on the job and we see that his style of policing (for the most part) matches his one foot out the door approach to life. Finally, we have Tango (Don Cheadle) an undercover detective working as a drug kingpin in a particularly violent Brooklyn apartment complex. He's close to getting the desk job that he always wanted, but his last assignment requires betraying his only real friend in the life, Casanova Philips (Wesley Snipes), who saved his life during his job related stint in prison. The three stories never really connect on a deeper level, characters cameo in each other's stories in mostly superficial ways, but they all end up in the same crime ridden apartment complex on a fateful night and pretty much remain strangers. <br /><br />Director Antoine Fuqua is no stranger to stories of police corruption, he and Hawke navigated similar terrain in 2001's <span style="font-style:italic;">Training Day</span>, where Hawke's character only dabbled in ways of villainy. Here Hawke is a full-on bad guy with a badge, not necessarily a bad man in general, but in close proximity to drug money he is the worst morally compromised sort. He's got a pregnant, sick wife, the doctor keeps telling him to move out of his mold infested house and just when you think you've met his entire brood there comes another child. Six including the twins his wife is carrying. No wonder Sal is seen in a church not asking for forgiveness, but chastising God for his dire straits and asking for help. If your God won't let you have birth control maybe he owes it to you to help get a bigger house.<br /><br />Ethan Hawke is always good at playing The Guy with a Choice, sometimes like in <span style="font-style:italic;">Daybreakers</span> there's a clear right way to go and there's no moralizing to it while in other film's he's just a born criminal (<span style="font-style:italic;">Before The Devil Knows You're Dead</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">What Doesn't Kill You</span>), but <span style="font-style:italic;">Brooklyn's Finest</span> gives Hawke the fertile middle ground that allows him to justifiably seethe with righteous anger and kick himself for saving a friend instead of taking the money and running.<br /><br />I've always liked the films of Antoine Fuqua they're swift and entertaining and occasionally they deliver larger than life characters, but until this film there hasn't actually been a legitimately great dramatic moment in any of his previous works. Gere's Doogan lives a burnout's life. Other younger cops harass him and call him a coward, his only friends are apparently fish and the prostitute he visits on a weekly basis. Doogan's proposition to the prostitute to run away with him (wherein he serenades her with "Sea of Love") is a sweet emotionally naked moment for Doogan and it really backfires on him. Or does it? He makes the proposal to her because she buys him a watch as a retirement present, she rejects him and it's sad. Maybe he even contemplates killing himself, but he bought his fishing gear already. He knows he's a born loner, but maybe he needs to see if he has a chance of retiring with someone at his side. So he tried it, and the thought of suicide that he entertains every morning, is faux suicide. Doogan's way of saying, it could be worse, now let's get going. It's like having back pain and taking twelve Aleve in the morning just to get up. You're old, you're broken but you're not dead. <br /><br />Until this third viewing I never realized that Doogan could just be being overdramatic at being a man defeated by life. He's done with the job, sure, but his last week is also threatening to get pretty interesting and he doesn't want that either. He's so uninterested in accolades or work that he refuses to fabricate a story that could save a rookie's career and earn him a citation, but more importantly he's ready to go home.<br /><br />It's nice to see, if also brutal and horrifying, that before he can walk into the sunset Doogan has to go renegade to save a missing girl. The sense of purpose infused within Doogan in the film's final moments is a lot like reading George Pelecanos' novel "The Night Gardener" without the bitter irony of what happened to the ex-cop in that book. In general, I think <span style="font-style:italic;">Brooklyn's Finest</span> is capable of doling out humanity and irony and valiant violence in a way that is evocative of Pelecanos.<br /><br />Don Cheadle and Ethan Hawke's stories come the closest to fully intersecting, but the character played by Cheadle is never mentioned by Hawke even though it is his lackeys that Hawke and other cops are constantly busting and/or murdering. Cheadle's character struggles with the idea of whether or not to descend fully into his street persona and he confides this much in his boss (Will Patton), but what keeps him from doing exactly that is his loyalty to Philips' moreso than the job. He doesn't have anything to prove to fellow gangster Red (Michael K. Williams) by not wanting to beat a snitch to death, but any indulgence of his undercover persona makes Philip's harder to help out and it's Tango's desire to have it both ways that fuels the story. I like the chemistry between Cheadle and Snipes, a roof top scene between the two is similarly evocative of the final scene between Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale. Men on top of an empire, the betrayal of one, by another, inevitable. You get a sense of their history in the way they interact with each other and talk about their hopes and dreams and even plan a final score. Had it gone that far, the scene of confession between Cheadle and Snipes probably would've been heartbreaking.<br /><br />What the film does give us, introspection from another action stalwart of a bygone era, is pretty good stuff. This might be the last time a movie allows Wesley Snipes to be this good. I'd like to be wrong, though. Cheadle is really good, too, wielding the righteous anger and calling Ellen Barkin a dude. The situation is tense and the choice yet another unenviable one. Somehow this feels like the weakest section of the film, maybe because it traffics too much in familiarity from a pop culture standpoint with vets from TVs <span style="font-style:italic;">The Wire</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Brotherhood</span> but also countless other films. It's tough to say, after all, the Gere segment did elicit a Pelecanos' comparison. Maybe, and probably, it's as simple as "I can't betray him he's my friend" isn't as compelling as "I will buy my family's new house with your blood" and "all I'm trying to do is live my life unnoticed and I can't" are much more compelling dilemmas to be faced with.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-37294263335829185172010-08-21T15:51:00.000-07:002010-08-21T17:25:53.152-07:00Neither Vital Nor Necessary<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/THBswUbCQKI/AAAAAAAAABI/eyVLFvyIR-Y/s1600/expendables-new-stills-1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/THBswUbCQKI/AAAAAAAAABI/eyVLFvyIR-Y/s400/expendables-new-stills-1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5508021921645740194" /></a><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Expendables [**]</span><br /><br />Of course it was too good to be true. All these stalwarts of action in one place. Stallone working once again under the Millenium Films/ Nu Image banner that brought the glorious bloodbath <span style="font-style:italic;">Rambo</span> to the masses a couple of years ago. Everything about this film should ostensibly speak to the action lover in all of us, but it doesn't really, except, as a roster of names, a wish in one hand and a pile of shit in the other.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Expendables</span> such as it is, is the story of a team of freelance mercenaries led by Barney Ross (Stallone leading <span style="font-style:italic;">et al</span>) hired by Bruce Willis to take down the General (David Zayas) who overthrew the government of a fictitious Latin American country. A lengthy bit of surveillance and one action scene later Barney and his best buddy Lee (Jason Statham) discover that the real target is a former company man (Eric Roberts) who has teamed with the general to profit from the country's drug trade. We also learn that Barney and his men are more expendable than even the fact that Stallone has a tattoo that says 'expendable' implies.<br /><br />In the action department, the film is a more miss than hit affair. Perhaps we should've known that we were going to be letdown in the first action scene. After Terry Crews' Hale Cesar blows a Somali pirate in half the film switches to night vision so the rest of the Somali pirates can be decimated in shades of pink and yellow, robbing me of the blood I have so rightly come to expect from films under this banner and from Stallone's brand of choreographed chaos. If this only happened once perhaps I could forgive it, but every action scene boasts a failing of one sort or another. Except a great car chase where Stallone and Jet Li are pursued by gunmen. It's exciting in a way that none of the one on one duals are. Perhaps the idea of having so many good fighters in one place is such a daunting task that the only sensible thing to do is to give the best tiny understated action scene to the prettiest guy in the cast, Jason Statham. Everyone from this film except Couture and Crews has been in a better action film at some point or another during their careers. I'll be fair here and say <span style="font-style:italic;">The Expendables</span> is undoubtedly crushed by the weight of expectations, but it's not like the film only misses the mark by a little <span style="font-style:italic;">sometimes</span>.<br /><br /><br />The one element of Stallone's pictures that remains present and accounted for since <span style="font-style:italic;">Rocky Balboa</span> is the introspective nature of the lifelong bruiser who realizes he has one last good fight left in him. Perhaps, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Expendables</span> lacks the finality of this realization (as evidenced by sequel talk after the film's strong opening weekend), but is certainly capable of observing finality in some way. Rourke delivers a stunning monologue about his final moments in the mercenary life while the camera zooms in on Stallone who looks haunted and saddened but for unfathomable reasons hasn't been broken yet. To be fair, if this were Stallone's monologue I think it would close the book on this character as well, but he's not ignorant to the way a certain kind of life wears on you and he feels the need to address it. So he gives moments such as this to his most seasoned heroes (Rourke, Lundgren) and they wear the moments that break them so very well. It should also be noted that David Zayas of <span style="font-style:italic;">Dexter</span> fame plays the General and he looks so incapable of doing bad without a heavy heart that he endears in surprising ways.<br /><br />I could probably say a little more about the failings of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Exepndables</span>, how any attempt at humor falls as hard and unceremoniously as mythical figures often do, how if this film were a steak then Dolph Lundgren is the steak sauce it could use a little more of, but instead I'll take the performances of Rourke and Lundgren as an acknowledgment that sometimes when the war is over we're only left with shadows of our former selves.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-35284272977011144512010-08-20T19:27:00.000-07:002010-08-20T21:17:06.247-07:00The Killer (Performance) Inside of Him<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TG9TMhxXPMI/AAAAAAAAABA/ZOLHx9LsWl4/s1600/default.jpeg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 136px; height: 109px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZDfj4O3eRA8/TG9TMhxXPMI/AAAAAAAAABA/ZOLHx9LsWl4/s320/default.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5507712343986355394" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Killer Inside Me [***1/2]</span><br /><br />In reality Casey Affleck is probably as nice and charming as the day is long (recent accusations of sexual harassment not withstanding) and one of my favorite performances of his is as the titular, amiable loser <span style="font-style:italic;">Lonesome Jim</span>, but he's more famous for roles like Patrick Kenzie in <span style="font-style:italic;">Gone Baby Gone</span> and Robert Ford, the coward, from <span style="font-style:italic;"> The Assassination of Jesse James ad nauseum</span>. In both of those film's Affleck is compelled to draw his gun because no one takes him quite seriously enough. Compared to other cowboys and other tough talking Bostonians he's tall, lanky, polite and slight so it's easy to misjudge him. It's also dangerous. Michael Winterbottom's <span style="font-style:italic;">The Killer Inside Me</span> is the first film of his career to effectively exploit that aspect of his screen persona.<br /><br />Affleck plays Lou Ford, the polite, amiable, and closeted psychopath of a deputy sheriff to a small Texas town. In voiceover, Ford extols the virtues of being well mannered and folksy while he drives to the edge of town to encourage a suspected prostitute (Jessica Alba) to get out of town. The exchange is brief and polite up to the point where the prostitute strikes the sheriff. Repeatedly. He strikes her back, too. Delivering the same kind of "justice" Ned received in <span style="font-style:italic;">Unforgiven</span> but only to the meat of her buttocks. Eventually, this little fracas leads to rough sex and a plot to swindle the dipshit son of the richest man in town out of ten thousand dollars.<br /><br />Such plotting awakens in Lou the desire to settle old scores and as with all plotting of this nature things go horribly, horribly wrong. The reason film's like this work is not in seeing how it all goes wrong, although that certainly helps, it's in watching the man caught in the eye of the storm fray and fall apart at the seams. Casey Affleck does his fraying and falling apart with a perfect poker face. He listens, he attacks only the weakest people and only at their most vulnerable moments. Because of his position and his trustworthy face he enjoys the benefits of being a silver tongued devil. The viewer only gets to see the madness take root through use of flashback. Lou kills a girl as a teenager and his stepbrother takes the fall, his propensity for tenderizing female backside is given an origin story and his dalliances with the prostitute from the beginning also occupy a place in his mind. The flashbacks pop up a couple of times throughout the film showing that Lou's vices have taken root and festered like a virus. The dormant monster begins to consume him.<br /><br />There are some other nice touches to Affleck's performance. He's a real charmer, but like I said before he's a good talker. He can make anything that comes out of his mouth sound pretty believable, so naturally he's pretty good with '50s style hard boiled dialogue like this movie has. Then again Affleck is a good everyman type so it stands to reason that he can slide into the role like a chameleon and pull it off. One of the nice little touches Affleck brings to his character is that when he assaults his two female victims he either dons gloves or takes off his dress shirt. It's either vanity regarding his hands and his clothing or it's something that you shed from yourself or burrow into to distance yourself from the crime. It's either smarm or the only sign that Ford is losing it and can't keep a safe distance from his own worst nature. <br /><br />It must also be said that the entire cast of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Killer Inside Me</span> is game, but the best moments belong to Affleck and Elias Koteas as a suspiciously well informed union man who knows the information he supplied Ford is part of the reason the son of the town's construction magnate is dead. Most everyone in town is smarter than they look, but some are burdened with a gender or an age curse that makes them blind to who Ford really is and what he's capable of, only Koteas' character has the audacity to come at him full throttle time and time again. <br /><br />I suspect that <span style="font-style:italic;">The Killer Inside Me</span> would be a really good film no matter who was in it, but with Affleck in the lead role it becomes yet another case of the difficulty in imaging that the actor can exist without the character or vice versa. Casey Affleck rises to the occasion and sears himself into our memory yet again.<br /><br />Note: In regards to Casey Affleck's alleged sexual harassment I say the fact that he asked the plaintiff her age before asking her if she thought it was about time she got pregnant clearly speaks to his concern for her unfulfilled wish of being a mother. Had he simply asked her if she wanted to get pregnant without asking her age then it would be crass and unacceptable.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2046959173856500687.post-84046018853774266092010-08-20T01:15:00.000-07:002010-08-20T02:12:58.043-07:00The Blank Identity<span style="font-weight:bold;"> Salt [**]</span><br /><br />If there's one thing the Philip Noyce directed- Angelina Jolie starring vehicle <span style="font-style:italic;">Salt</span> can't be faulted for it's wasting time getting down to business. The film opens with Jolie being tortured (off-screen) in North Korea and her husband and some of her CIA fellows arriving in tow to spring her. Next thing you know it's a year later and Salt is preparing to celebrate her anniversary with her husband until some Russian ex-pat shows up and tells her she's a Russian spy who is supposed to assassinate the visiting Russian president at our vice president's funeral. Call it the worst anniversary ever.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Salt</span> is essentially a feature length chase scene in which Jolie spends fifty minutes running away from the CIA proclaiming that she isn't a Russian spy whilst doing all the things a suspected Russian spy does in between bouts of pleading for her co-workers to find her husband. Then she tells the Russians that she's actually pretty fucking American (by murdering all of her handlers) and spends the next portion of the movie running towards them. To be fair they have another traitor in their midst just not Salt. Salt, it should be noted, is and always was an American but she spent some time under Russian interpolation when her parents died there and she was taken in to be trained as the perfect spy in the "mythical" KA program.<br /><br />For a movie so boldly concerned with the identity and loyalties of a single spy, am I with the Russians or Americans? Did my time in a Korean prison break me in a way Dolph Lundgren from <span style="font-style:italic;">Rocky IV</span> never could? <span style="font-style:italic;">Salt</span> never manages to distinguish itself in any discernible way. The film was written for Tom Cruise but when he jumped ship it became a vehicle for Angelina Jolie. It's also the one film Jolie's been in that never manages to objectify or sexualize her in any way. It was admirable when I thought it was done on purpose, but less so when I discovered they'd just traded one star in for another. Perhaps you could play the "this movie needs a star" card, but really it doesn't. The charisma of Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor is dialed down a great deal, although in the spirit of honesty they are character actors with leading men looks who can't help being badasses, but in this film they just need to be faces. Andre Braugher's inclusion in a blink and you miss it role speaks as much to the idea that we need those who can blend in more than we need stars as the scenes in which Jolie is buried under latex so that she goes unrecognized at the start of the film's climax. What I'm trying to say is, in this case, the star makes not one iota of difference because they bring no sense of identity to the role even though they bring movie star baggage with them. This casting switcheroo effectively kills the tension and negates the crux of the film.<br /><br />The action scenes in the film are not bad. I'm a sucker for a good car jump and the climax has a well staged close quarters shootout and the shaky cam doesn't take away much at all from the coherence of the action but it happens to someone we never know at all. When you're movie begs the question "Who is Salt?" Make sure the answer matters.brandoncurtishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17280295660325055756noreply@blogger.com0