by ·Comments Off on Hanna (2011, Joe Wright)

Saoirse Ronan is raised by her rogue-spy dad (Eric “Hulk” Bana) in the woods with emphasis on survivalism and attack skills – specifically the skills to attack Cate Blanchett, who killed Ronan’s mom. Was she Ronan’s mom, or was Ronan genetically engineered to be a supersoldier in a lab somewhere? Not important. What’s important is Joe Wright has remade himself as a slick-ass music video director and filled the movie with pumping Chemical Brothers music to distract our minds from the implausibility of the story. Even the implausibility of each individual scene – for example, the one where Hanna is in a manhole, army trucks are driving over her without slowing down then suddenly she’s hanging from one Cape Fear-style, when it seems like the move required to get her into that position in a split second would’ve ripped her arms off. Oh, and she’s never seen electricity before, but sits right down at a computer and within 15 seconds she’s reading up on her mom’s death from google news. In many respects, Attack the Block was the more realistic movie.

Rushmore‘s Olivia Williams plays the hippie mom of Jessica Barden, who steals the show for a while as Hanna’s first friend. But apparently Hanna’s superspy dad never emphasized secrecy, because Hanna tells the kids where she’s supposed to meet her dad, ultimately getting him killed. The movie is just as violent as PG-13 will allow, so he’s killed offscreen, and we never see what happens to the Olivia Williams Family after their interrogation by rogue spies.

Katy didn’t watch the whole thing but rightly points out that the more interesting movie would’ve been about what happens after Hanna has killed Cate Blanchett. A girl with no friends or family, few social graces, no sense of empathy and mad fighting skills who is probably still being hunted by the government – what now?

by ·Comments Off on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008, David Fincher)

AV Club: “The script comes from Eric Roth, who would probably by accused of borrowing too liberally from Forrest Gump if he hadn’t written that too.” Wow, dude also wrote that Eric Bana gambler love story I was just mocking yesterday, and my favorite film to hate, The Postman. No wonder writing seemed to be the weakness in this would-be-spectacular movie. Huge issues (hello, racism) were ignored, episodes (hello, Tilda Swinton) weren’t well integrated with the rest of the film, and Button ended up seeming like an unambitious blank who doesn’t do much with his so-called remarkable life.

Katy suggested the unambitious-blank part and some Forrest Gump comparisons, but I wonder if that wasn’t the point, to show a regular guy with parental issues who meets a girl, goes to war, has a kid, rambles around and never quite finds his place in the world, the whole aging-backwards thing being the only remarkable thing about him. That and the movie’s obsession with mortality make it a meaningful story about life and how to live it. Maybe we unrealistically expected Button to be some kinda sci-fi superhero, while the movie was trying to speak to us about life and death, love and loss, or maybe on Christmas day we weren’t in the mood for an extended monologue about mortality, but this came out feeling like a pretty alright movie, a tearjerker to be sure but maybe not the acclaimed masterpiece to which we’d been looking forward.

Pretty nice music by Alexandre Desplat was loud and fuckin’ clear, since 45 minutes before the end of the film our dialogue track almost entirely cut out leaving us with whispered words under a huge score… thanks heaps, Regal. At least we could still hear when we tried hard, since most of the audience was either heavily concentrating or fast asleep by then. Shot NOT by Fincher’s Zodiac guy, and boy am I relieved, cuz in the parking lot I was bemoaning the lack of surprise or interest in the camera setups (figuring the CG effects left no room for surprise), comparing it negatively to the immaculately-shot Milk, which we’d snuck into before our feature started… forgetting that the Zodiac guy actually shot Milk, and some nobody (the D.P. of the last M. McConaughey romance flick) shot The Ben Buttons, thus preserving my aesthetic intuitions.

So right, Ben kills his mom being born in New Orleans on the day WWI ends, is abandoned Penguin-style by his dad, discovered and raised by Queenie and (boyfriend?) Tizzy in an old folks’ home, where unsurprisingly, people die from time to time. Ben meets a girl who is not yet Cate Blanchett but one day will be. Ben, BTW, is incredibly old, confined to a wheelchair, then learns to walk with canes as he grows ever younger. He gets a job on a tugboat, has regular sex with married Tilda Swinton in a hotel, and helps in the WWII effort while Cate becomes a dancer with hip bohemian friends & spontaneous lovers. The time is not right for those two to get together, but one day after Cate’s career-destroying car accident the time is right and they do and are very happy and have a kid. Ben finds out that his real dad is Mr. Buttons, who dies and leaves Ben the button factory he ran. Also dying: war friends, Tizzy then Queenie. Ben is afraid when he grows too young he’ll be a burden (he is) so he leaves Cate and bums around the world instead. Interesting how as his brain becomes less developed and he gets smaller, it’s effectively alzheimer’s disease – he forgets more and reverts to childish behavior living in his childhood home. Cate’s daughter grows up, her “dad” dies, and while caring for her dying mom (still played by Cate, unrecognizably) the day before Hurricane Katrina hits, she learns the whole story in a huge framing device.

Brad Pitt, after a brief spell of manic energy in Burn After Reading, is back to his brooding-as-acting style, which should work just fine in next year’s Terence Malick picture with appropriate wistful voiceover. Cate is wonderful as fucking always – the acting highlight of the movie, she can do no wrong. Brad’s Coen-costar Tilda Swinton is fine with the tiny role she gets.

People I Thought I Should Have Recognized But Actually Shouldn’t Have include TV’s M. Etc. Ali as Tizzy, an otherwise uncredited actor as the African fella who takes young Ben to a brothel, Cap’n Mike: Jared Harris (Lady in the Water), and adoptive mom Taraji Henson (Talk To Me). People I Recognized But Didn’t Know From Where include Guy Ritchie action star Jason Flemyng as Mr. Button. People I Did Not Recognize At All include framing-story secret Button daughter Julia Ormond (Inland Empire), and People I Should Have Recognized But Somehow Missed include Elias Koteas as the blind clockmaker who kicks off the story.

by ·Comments Off on Hot Fuzz (2007, Edgar Wright)

December 2008:
Watched again on video, and it only gets better. Five (five!) commentary tracks to go, and two discs full of extras, wooo!

Peter Jackson as Father Christmas:
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Marsha from Spaced:
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March 2007:
The trailer set it up right – supercop Simon Pegg is making the department look bad in comparison, so he’s shipped to the safest small town in England and paired up with lazy son-of-the-chief Nick Frost. All is well until the town elders turn out to be involved in a Wicker-Man-like conspiracy to beautify their town by any means possible (usually murder). Very suddenly it turns into an all-out war, with the police dept. (minus the evil chief) and Simon and Nick (or Shaun and Ed, as I still think of them) against the neighborhood watch.

Extremely funny and a great action flick. Nothing much or bad to say about it. The crowd gave big response to particularly gruesome killings, the jump kick to an old woman’s head, and Bill Nighy. Edgar says they were happy to be working with an ex James Bond (Timothy Dalton) and three oscar winners in this one (Cate Blanchett, Peter Jackson and Jim Broadbent, the former two uncredited). Such a very fun movie, this and Grindhouse have put me in the mood to watch less serious-minded movies, hence the appearance of Saw 3 on this page.

by ·Comments Off on Elizabeth 2: The Golden Age (2007, Shekhar Kapur)

The latest bit of historical bio-pic entertainment from Kapur (dir. of Bandit Queen, ugh). And it’s not great. One huge weakness is the writing. The writer of the original was here joined (very unsurprisingly) by the writer of Gladiator, so we’ve got very fakey-Hollywood-period-pic dialogue. Katy says this movie defeats the ending of part one, which showed Elizabeth’s transformation into the powerful virgin queen, by having her act all girlish and weak and man-crazy over the (admittedly dreamy) Clive Owen. Owen plays Sir Walter Raleigh, and Abbie Cornish (Stop-Loss) is a lady of the court who ends up with Owen after being practically thrown towards him by the Queen who wants to vicariously experience love, but the queen flies into a rage when Raleigh and the court girl marry. Most of the movie is concerned with this love triangle, but Spain also forms their Armada and attempts to conquer England before being singlehandedly defeated by Clive Owen. We also get a miniature version of the Mary Queen of Scots story (first filmed in 1895, updated in ’71 with Vanessa Redgrave, soon to be updated again by Phillip Noyce & Scarlett Johansson), played here by the great Samantha Morton.

So yeah, we’ve got Clive Owen, but all he does is look dreamy and act cool, even during battle scenes. We’ve got generic loud symphonic music, some bad CG effects and some confusing storytelling. But there are also very good performances (Blanchett, Morton) and some plain-good ones (Geoffrey Rush, Spanish ambassador William Houston), awesome (oscar-winning) costumes, great set design, but nothing tying it all together. Katy didn’t like it either, so I’m free to complain all I like.

Apparently the same love-triangle story was previously filmed as 1955’s The Virgin Queen with Bette Davis and Joan Collins.

by ·Comments Off on Indiana Jones 4 (2008, Steven Spielberg)

There have been many films about aliens made by Steven Spielberg (E.T., Close Encounters, Men in Black, War of the Worlds) and George Lucas (Howard The Duck, Captain EO, The Ewok Adventure) but never have they made a film about aliens TOGETHER… until now. Of course the trailer misleadingly doesn’t tell us it’s about aliens, and it isn’t really, until it goes all M. Night on us towards the end, thanks to a story by Jeff Nathanson (Speed 2: Cruise Control) and screenplay by David Koepp (Death Becomes Her, Zathura).

Solid cinematography by Spielberg’s usual guy Janusz Kaminski (who also shot Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Cool As Ice). Editing by Michael Kahn, Spielberg’s main man for the last thirty years. These two along with S.S. give the movie its only interesting quality, the occasional feeling that this is good ol’ classic filmmaking, not a 2008 Hollywood blockbuster but something produced back when complicated shots couldn’t be corrected digitally in post, and when scenes were edited for clarity and not for “energy”. Of course, the scene of Shia The Beouf swinging on jungle vines with commie-hatin’ digital monkeys spoils that, but it’s a nice feeling while it lasts.

The story is a bunch of silliness… Indiana is kidnapped by commies and forced to lead ’em to the titular skull, which is an actual alien skull, one of thirteen from the peruvian lost city of gold. Skull is returned, lost city turns into a spaceship and flies off. Oh and Shia The Beouf is Indy’s son, which I saw coming as far back as the trailer.

Better than following the story is to follow the touchstones… the pointed references to history and past Indy movies. I haven’t seen a movie more desperate to establish its setting (1950’s America! 1950’s America!) since the Spielberg-produced Back to the Future. From little things like college-town diner gang rumbles between The Wild One-attired Beouf and some preppie kids, and comments on how large and thick refrigerators used to be (also done in BTTF 3) to big boys like nuclear bomb testing and anti-communist blacklists. Then we’ve got the presence (and child and climactic marriage) of Marion from Raiders and loving tributes to dead former collaborators Dr. Brody (Denholm Elliott, actually dead) and Henry Jones Sr. (Sean Connery, alive but retired), that theme music, Wilhelm screams, references to Indy hating snakes, nazi-like villains (hot chick-in-uniform Cate Blanchett) getting their faces melted Raiders-style by supernaturally powerful artifacts, the actual Ark of the Covenant in a comic cameo, and so much more. This, not the story, is the true reason the movie was made… to make us remember how much we loved Raiders in an attempt to make us love this one by association. Too much association!

H. Ford lacks some of his former charm and either his speech is slowing or he’s overplaying the old-man angle. The Beouf, a decent leading man, is really going places after this and Transformers. Nice to see Cate B., Ray Winstone from Sexy Beast, and Karen Allen who was apparently in In The Bedroom. Ringers Jim Broadbent and John Hurt (best of the bunch) round out a cast overqualified for an action flick, but not for a Spielberg action flick.

by ·Comments Off on The Good German (2006, Steven Soderbergh)

“You’re out there sellin’ love you don’t have.”

Modern black-and-white movies with awesome photography (Man Who Wasn’t There) or at least very good photography (Good Night and Good Luck) are great to watch (though it might be greater to see a non-period piece for a change, to watch modern people in modern clothes doing modern things shot in nice b/w [but not crappy and worthless people/things, as in Woody Allen’s Celebrity]), but that’s not what this is. The filmmaking is capable of course (it’s Soderbergh) but he’s using the b/w to attempt to recreate a movie from that period; not to shoot a modern film set in the 40’s but to shoot a 40’s film set in the 40’s.

Some part of Bloodshot Records’ company manifesto (or maybe I read it in the liners of one of their tribute compilations) says that they don’t choose artists who wish to pay “tribute” to an older artist by treating the songs as sacred, precious and remote objects, but rather artists who feel the joy and heartache of the originals and then play the songs as if they wrote ’em. Artists who practice the former method, who play “sacred cover songs”, may see the latter artists (“Bloodshot artists”, if I may generalize) as disrespectful, but actually it’s the sacred ones who are being disrespectful by acting as though a classic song is a historical artifact to be reverently studied rather than a still-relevant piece of music, as though adding their own passion into the mix might somehow damage the original. The Bloodshot artists realize that the original recordings of this song still exist and won’t somehow be injured by one more cover version. A Bloodshot artist isn’t playing the song to pay his (or more often “her”) dues to songwriters of olden days who paved the way for the new guys to achieve his current success… instead he’s admitting that he’s found a song with a better tune and better lyrics than he could hope to write, and so he plays it as wish fulfillment, working and sweating to assure that he can convey the passion he feels from the original, to prove to the listener that this was a song worth revisiting.

If Bloodshot was a film distributor rather than a record label, Steven Soderbergh would not be on their roster. As much as the man seems to love movies, his idea of “covering” a 40’s movie is dry and dull, accurately rendered but with no life or spirit to it. He’s the anti-Guy-Maddin. Here Soderbergh recreates historical cinema in such a way that makes you want to never see the original (“old movies are boooring”). Maddin sees more than was even there, glorifies, even fetishizes old movies, wants to crawl up inside them and wishes he could cast stars of the 20’s and 30’s in his modern movies as they were back then. Soderbergh, just happy to use George Clooney for the umpteenth time, tries to capture that film-noir feeling that he must consider lost from today’s cinema, meticulously recreating his idea of a 40’s film, draining it of all fun in the process. Someone needs to watch Confessions of a Dangerous Mind again.

Clooney (One Fine Day) is some kind of military investigator who falls for Blanchett (Charlotte Gray), who is the ex-girl of Tobey (Duke of Groove). Tobey gets killed, and I think maybe Cate kills him? She’s protecting her ex husband, thought to be dead but alive and hiding in the sewers because he saw Welles do it in The Third Man. Everyone gets killed or implicated in the end. Katy didn’t watch it.