Tag Archives: Movies

Movie Review: The Artist

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I was afraid The Artist would be a pretentious piece of crud, partly because it had won so many awards, and partly because it was both in black-and-white and almost without sound.

After all, using black and white now can seem gimmicky or simply too precious and cutesy. It’s not used a lot for full movies anymore, but it is used quite frequently for portions of movies — Schindler’s List, Dead Again and Oz the Great and Powerful all used black and white for various purposes and scenes, each in a slightly different way.

I’m happy to say that I didn’t think The Artist was pretentious. It was actually a pretty simple movie about a man’s downward career trajectory while he watches a woman’s upward career trajectory, and how the two interrelate. I’d hesitate to call it a romance, though it is billed that way, and there are a few moments where it almost becomes romantic, but misses the mark.

I learned something important from The Artist: most of the time, you don’t really need to hear the words to understand what’s going on in a scene. The acting is enough, and knowing the specific words doesn’t make a huge amount of difference.

I also learned that by minimizing the sound in a movie, you can make the sounds you do use especially meaningful. During the few scenes in The Artist that feature sound, that sound is always meaningful. In one it is momentous and terrifying, disturbing and upsetting. In the other scene, the sound is a triumph. This movie used sound in a different way than any other movie I’ve ever seen.

I’m not saying the movie was perfect. It dragged a bit in some places, and could have benefited by another run-through with the editorial scissors.

I didn’t much care for the lead actress, Berenice Bejo, but mostly on the grounds that she looked nothing like the movie stars of that era. Perhaps more could have been done with her makeup to give her that look–the lead actor, Jean Dujardin looked perfect for his era, so why worry about giving the woman the chalk-white-face and makeup of her time period as well? Why does the woman have to be contemporary-pretty when the man can have that old-fashioned mustache and slicked-back hair?

Finally, the music could have used a bit more variety. When the music is all your audience will hear for most of the film, you need to change the music more often. The music was very good, but some of it was quite repetitive.

All in all, I enjoyed The Artist, but if you see it, be sure to watch it when you’re in a patient mood and want to see a character-driven dramedy. It’s really a simple little movie, but you’ll need to keep your eyes on the screen and avoid multitasking while you watch it.

The New Oz Movie

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Well, after 28 years they’ve finally come out with a new Oz movie, and the critics already seem to be jumping all over it with hobnailed boots.

Fair enough. I haven’t seen it yet, so I have no idea whether it’s any good.

What I do question is the critics’ seeming universal claim that the original movie was an unparalleled classic of American movie-making, and the unspoken premise that it should be enshrined forever because it’s awesome, period.

I like “Wizard of Oz,” don’t get me wrong. It is a classic. It has some neat images (the colorchanging horse! The Art Deco Emerald City!) and a couple of good songs. It’s a fairytale quest flick, which I always appreciate, too.

… but.

But Judy Garland was in her late teens when she filmed this movie, and her dialogue would be better suited to an eight-year-old. But the Dorothy character doesn’t actually do a whole lot during the movie–she reacts to situations, sure, but mostly things seem to happen to her. And the characterizations are mostly paper-thin.

It’s a good movie, sure, but I’d argue that its strongest point is its setting, or perhaps the music– certainly not the characters, the plot or the script. Think about it: The yellow brick road. The Emerald City. The color-shifting horse, the angry trees, the flying monkeys, the dark forest and the field of poppies. All that is part of the setting.

And if the setting is great, why not revisit it and expand it?

I’m not saying the new movie is any good–I haven’t seen it, so I don’t know. I am saying that if you do see it, it’s probably best to view it as a standalone movie, or at least try not to remember the first flick through the rose-colored glasses of childhood.

Unless you’re seeing the new movie while you’re still a child as well, you’re not going to be making a fair comparison that way.

Candidates for Worst Movie

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Some of the folks on Facebook have some suggestions for the worst movies they’ve seen.

  • TB: The Sweetest Thing. “I normally like that genre, but it was drivel. Went nowhere.”
  • ML: Anything with George Clooney in it.
  • CT: Lady in the Water. “Painfully strange and annoying.” Sucker Punch, a close second. “A noisy mess.”
  • AW: War of the Worlds, in Swedish, with English subtitles.
  • AM: Black Hawk Down “There is just only so many consecutive minutes of guys peeking around corners with an M16 that I can take.”
  • JH: Apocalypse Now. “Could not watch.”

I think the only movie I’ve ever stopped watching out of self-defense is probably the first “The Fast and the Furious.” Boring, inane dialogue and some of the least sympathetic characters ever (and that’s a high bar to vault).

I even sat through the entirety of “Transformers”, hoping against hope that everyone in the movie would be killed somehow. Disappointingly, all the “stars” made it out alive.

Edit: And here’s a few more!

  • BB: Silent Hill, half the Resident Evils, anything involving Steven Segal, and of course, Jean Claude Van Damme’s entire collection. Clan of the Cave Bear “where they inexplicably decided to make the dialogue of the entire movie grunts and snorts because it’s about neanderthals.”
  • BR: Marked for Death and Borat. “We actually paid money to see Steven Segal in ‘Marked for Death’ in the theater… it was dreadful. Worse than dreadful. I would also count that stupid ‘Borat’ movie in my top few.”
  • JE: Shazaam and any of the Twlight movies.
  • JD: The latest installment of Die Hard.
  • PG: Howard the Duck.

And mooooooore! Really, DEEP HURTING seems to be the theme here.

  • PG: Parenthood (1989). “All the funny stuff you saw in the trailer was all the funny stuff there was. After the first 5 minutes, it descended into this hell of family life.”
  • AM: Pearl Harbor. “I think maybe there should be a second canvassing for Worst Ever Mega Blockbusters. #1: Pearl Harbor.”
  • RM: Plan Nine from Outer Space, Manos: The Hands of Fate, Birdemic, The Room, The Happening, Dreamscape, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, Uwe Boll’s entire body of work.

Worst Movies Ever?

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I watched the infamous “Birdemic” over the weekend. Yes, I did this on purpose. No, I’m not a glutton for punishment.

The movie was probably one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, even though I’ve seen “Gor” and “Battlefield Earth.” So let’s take a look at some bad movies.

Birdemic

“Birdemic” is pretty much Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” but with all the interesting parts, good writing, excellent acting, suspense and characterization removed.

Instead, the movie features animated clip art birds flapping mechanically in a sad attempt to be menacing, and some dialogue from actors approaching the woodenness of Kristen Stewart in “Snow White & the Huntsman.” It’s not quite as wooden, I admit, but it’s very close. Fortunately, none of the actors attempt to express emotion through twitching like Stewart does. They don’t attempt to express emotion at all.

And like most truly horrible movies, “Birdemic” contains both a cringeworthy dance scene and a heavy-handed moral slammed over the audience’s head at every possible opportunity.

Then there are all the driving scenes. Driving, driving, driving. Not car chases, just ordinary driving. Seriously, Days of Thunder had fewer driving scenes.

Gor and Outlaw of Gor

There were things to like about “Gor” and its equally dreadful sequel, “Outlaw of Gor.”

There weren’t a lot of them, I admit, but there were some: one, Jack Palance was clearly hammered out of his mind when he agreed to do this movie, and also while he was filming this movie. Two, rather than putting on a serious face, the movie amps up its owncampiness. Three, while it is hideously exploitative of women, and features more butt-or-boob shots than any movie I’ve ever seen before, the men Yet Another Butt from Gorwear equally stupid outfits and there are nearly as many butt shots of them. They are cringeworthy, but at least the Gor flicks made an effort, right? There are no women in chainmail bikinis and men in full suits of armor. Everybody gets loincloths and armor diapers, no exceptions!

And there are black people in Gor–some slaves, some slavers, some just wandering around wondering how the heck they got into this wretched movie, just like everybody else.

I could also mention the hilariously plastic, fake-looking props as a plus, because they are funny, and if you made a drinking game and took a shot every time you saw a silly hat while watching these films you would probably die of alcohol poisoning in five minutes.

Battlefield Purple Filter, I Mean Earth

Battlefield Dutch Angle, I Mean Earth

Battlefield Dutch Angle, Er, Earth

I think Battlefield Earth has a worse reputation than it deserves, possibly due to its connection with Scientology.

Mind you, it is a terrible movie. I just don’t think it’s much worse than most other crummy scifi flicks intended to be action blockbusters.

The writing is mediocre. The acting is so-so (which is ten steps above Birdemic). The plot is ludicrous and requires so much suspension of disbelief that your belief will probably need a vacation afterward, possibly somewhere that offers massages and mud baths.

But the movie suffers the most from directorial and filming choices, I think. One: there are weird color palettes used throughout the flick, so much so that the friend I was watching it with got queasy. It didn’t bother me, but only because I was preoccupied with… Two: Dutch angles! All Dutch angles, all the time! Has there been some terrible catastrophe causing Earth to tilt at a weird angle? No, it’s just bad directing.

Another major problem with the movie is that none of the human characters are the least bit interesting or sympathetic. They act like apes a lot of the time, maybe because you were supposed to be seeing things from the evil aliens’ point of view. Protip: We don’t need to see things from the evil aliens’ point of view.

The only part of the movie that was in the least bit watchable was John Travolta’s evil alien character. This is despite the fact that the character totally fails to be menacing in any way whatsoever. He is not the stuff of Darth Vader. He’s more like Darth Vader’s secretary’s receptionist who wants to be Darth Vader but isn’t smart or competent enough to pull it off.

Instead of having a real villain to hate and fear, the audience is treated to the antics of an Less Evil, More Corrupt Cubicle-Antincompetent, controlling, abusive middle-manager fixated on profits and his own pathetic ambitions. The fact that he’s wearing dreadlocks and platform shoes doesn’t really signify–everyone has met people like this and many people have had the misfortune to have a boss like this. But the movie presents Travolta’s character as doomed to failure, so it’s kind of fun to watch him dig his own grave, hoist himself up on his own petard and spit into the wind, so to speak.

If you have less than an iron stomach this movie is not for you. The constant color filters and the apparently-randomly-tilting camera will probably make you sick, if the “plot” and the dialogue don’t. And I haven’t even mentioned the excessive use of slow-motion yet, or the blanket assumption in the movie that all females exist only to serve or in relation to males, alien or human. Yikes.

In Short

In terms of watchability, Gor and Outlaw of Gor provide the most fun bad-movie experience. Battlefield Earth is probably second to the Gor flicks, followed by Birdemic, which has far too many sections in which nothing happens at all. It’s hard to make fun of nothing, and that makes a bad movie merely bad, rather than entertainingly bad.

Real Klingons Wear Pink in Star Trek: The Animated Series

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Star Trek: The Animated Series

Star Trek: The Animated Series

Giant pink tribbles. Spock casting magic spells. The crew turning into babies, growing gills, or shrinking. Is there no weirdness that failed to occur on Star Trek: The Animated Series?

No. No, there isn’t. And that’s why the show, which ran from 1973-74, is pure, unadulterated awesome.

Though it occupies a dubious position in Trekkie canon, The Animated Series is a must-see for fans, who will be treated to a succession of wacky events involving the almost the entire cast of The Original Series.

Inexplicably, Chekov is gone. Equally inexplicably, every single alien being sounds suspiciPink Tribbles?ously like Scotty, Nurse Chapel or Uhura. Actually, the explanation was saving money by not hiring extra voice actors or Chekov’s actor, Walter Koenig.

But this enabled them to do something the Original Series could never do, by crewing the Enterprise with more aliens. Foremost among them are the six-limbed Arex, who occupies Chekov’s seat most of the time, and M’Ress, a cat-woman communications officer.

At the time of the Original Series, I don’t think it would have been possible to have shown a guy with an extra arm and leg, like Arex had, and M’Ress would have had a somewhat wooden expression if she’d been a real person with a face covered with fur.

And then there’s the fact that one of the people working on the show was colorblind.

As a result, Klingons wear pink and purple, and Klingons in Orchid?the Kzinti, who are supposed to be terrifying telepathic cat-wolverine-people, do too.

Plus there are pink tribbles. Giant pink tribbles. If there were a way to market these to 12-year-old girls Earth would be drowned in tribbles in a matter of hours. Talk about weapons of mass destruction!

Then there’s the elevator-music theme song, which definitely is worse than the theme song from Star Trek: Enterprise, no matter what anybody says, although the animated Enterprise is so darn cute it’s easy to forgive the tune.

If you have Netflix and loved Original Series Star Trek, or just want to kill a few hours watching pure, undiluted insanity in the form of the loopiest plots ever seen in any flavor of Star Trek, check out Star Trek: The Animated Series.

For more information, check out Memory Alpha, the go-to place for online information on Star Trek, and also the source of every picture above.

Bad Guy, Bad Hair

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Bad guys have bad hair.

I never really thought about this until BoingBoing linked this great article from The Awl, which features a ton of pictures from various movies, all of whom have bad guys with bad hair. There’s even a neat characterization guide to which bad guys wear which kind of bad hair.

I thought, immediately, of this:

That’s the oily sidekick in the terrible Snow White and the Huntsman movie, the brother of the Evil Queen who’s the real villain.

He hits the Eerily Unnatural Dye Job and the Dorky Lackey.

Of course, in real life it’s not always so easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, or the good hair from the bad hair.

Olympics and Spoilers

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I like to know the end of a story before I read it, and I like to know the ending of a movie before I see it. Yes, I like spoilers.

For me spoilers don’t spoil the story–they enhance it, because then I get to watch for beautiful foreshadowing and artful little details that should have tipped me off to the ending in the first place. Spoilers give me a window into the artistry of the art, and offer me another way of appreciating the work.

Of course I don’t assume anybody else feels that way. I don’t go around telling people “Oh by the way, Darth Vader is Luke’s father,” right before they watch Star Wars for the first time. That’d be mean.

At the same time, it’s nice to be vindicated by some actual science.

And in other, totally non-related news:

Review: The Dark Knight Rises

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Every generation gets its own Batman, and perhaps each generation gets the Batman it deserves.

When movies are part of a set, like this one is, it’s hard to judge each one on its own merits, and there were a lot of high expectations from “The Dark Knight Rises,” the third movie in the most recent Batman trilogy.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why. “The Dark Knight” was indeed a great movie, with a virtuoso performance from the late Heath Ledger, but it lagged a bit in portions and featured an indifferent-to-just-bad performance from Maggie Gyllenhaal. Its aspirations toward an intellectual understanding of Batman and the nature of good and evil were worthy, though, and for the most part they were successful.

That’s not easy to do, and I’m not sure why anyone would think it could easily happen twice in a row. A great movie, yes. But not OMG AWESOME THE BEST MOVIE EVAR.

“The Dark Knight Rises” doesn’t quite ascend to that level, partly because it gets bogged down rather quickly with an enjoyably complex plot involving a full-scale war led by Bane, an intelligent, politically-astute warlord with great leadership skills.

It was an inspired choice to make Bane (Tom Hardy) the villain, but the film made one critical, critical mistake it only partially recovered from partway through the movie. That mistake was the design of Bane’s mask.

Poor Tom Hardy. Not only did he have to live up to the inevitable comparisons with Heath Ledger’s Joker from Dark Knight, but they expected him to do it with nearly the entire bottom half of his face covered up. That’s a pretty significant handicap for an actor.

And Bane is no Joker. He’s meant to be a more serious character. Saddling him with a still-slightly-cartoonish mask made it hard for the audience to find him even slightly credible. Hardy’s bizarre accent (which reminded me of Sean Connery’s in “The Untouchables”) did not help, although it might’ve been all right if it hadn’t been filtered through that stupid mask.

Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman fared a bit better, though I wished there had been more for her to do in the film. I kept getting the feeling there was more there, but the plot called for focus to stay on Bane, so we didn’t get to see it.

To be fair, the movie was extremely long, and like its predecessor it did drag a bit sometimes. Director Christopher Nolan seems to have become a victim of his own success in some measure–people seem to have been over-reluctant to cut away some of the fluff. Writers must sometimes edit out their favorite sentences and kill their darlings; filmmakers must do the same, and not enough of it was done in “Dark Knight Rises.”

There was much to like about the movie, however. The film’s ties to “A Tale of Two Cities” were interesting, and the depiction of a full-scale war of sorts in Gotham City was fascinating.

The supporting cast was stellar, as it was in “The Dark Knight.”

Gary Oldman is the best of all as Commissioner Gordon, who has to make tough choices throughout the movie, and bears the consequences as an adult conscious of the moral weight of his actions.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays a thoughtful young cop, willing to take risks to do what’s right. He has a great character arc.

Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, Batman’s Q.We don’t get to see a lot of him in this movie, and perhaps that’s because we don’t need to. When he’s there, he’s key, of course.

Michael Caine’s Cockney-accented Alfred classes up the whole dang movie. This is no Jeeves, ladies and gentlemen. This is a man who takes his obligations seriously, and tries to give the best advice he can, given his awkward position as father figure and servant.

Marion Cotillard was totally wasted on this film, but really, when you had so many other characters who were marvellous, that seems like a minor quibble.

Oh, and Christian Bale turned in another credible performance as Batman and the ever-tortured Bruce Wayne, who has become a sort of mini-Howard Hughes in between the two movies. Dark, yes, but still sarcastic and happily for the audience, surprisingly non-angsty.

It was well-written and well-acted. The action scenes popped, and while the editing job was somewhat indulgent, arguably that indulgence was earned over the course of three very good Batman movies.

It was not OMG THE BEST MOVIE EVAR!!11!!!!11! Poor Tom Hardy’s mask and permissive editing didn’t allow for that.

But it was a good one, maybe a great one, and definitely worth seeing.

Review: What Does It Mean to Be “Brave”?

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Brave

Brave

In every child’s life comes a moment in which he or she realizes parents are human beings too–neither infallible nor invulnerable, nor unreasoning. And whatever their actions, they might well have our best interests at heart.

And in middle-class America, every woman must decide how to balance the traditional demands of womanhood (for many, husband, home, family) with the demands of her own life (for many, career, goals, freedom).

At the crossroads of these ideas stands Pixar’s “Brave,” its first movie with a female heroine, and one of the only movies I have ever seen, of any kind, that is focused on a woman’s relationship with another woman without much reference to any man.

I didn’t know the plot of the movie before I saw it, for once, because the previews don’t really give you any idea of what the plot is. I can tell you with no spoilers that although the movie does indeed focus on Merida, a wild-red-headed Scottish princess with a bow, it mainly concerns her conflict-filled relationship with her mother, Elinor.

Had the movie not been a Pixar film, Queen Elinor could easily have ended up a flat character, a paper-thin semblance of motherhood: Don’t do this, don’t do that, be a perfect lady. Oh, how smug and perfect she could have been!

As it is, there are enough tantalizing glimpses of Elinor’s own struggles to be the perfect woman–a yamato nadeshiko, Scotland style–to let us know that she has her own doubts about ladyhood. Pixar doesn’t belabor the point, though–there’s just a throwaway line here and there and a bit of a hint from the first scene of the film that only seems clear in retrospect.

And Merida’s stubbornness and Elinor’s stubbornness turn into the classic parental clash.

When her parents want Merida to marry a son of one of the three local lords in order to cement the alliance between them, Merida rebels and seeks a magical solution to get Elinor to change her mind about the marriage. The spell, offered by a helpful witch, does indeed change Elinor’s mind, but not in the way Merida intended, and the princess has to find a way to reverse the spell before it becomes permanent, as the concerns about arranged marriage fade into the background a bit.

It sounds like your standard fairy tale, and had Merida been a boy, or had the movie focused on the suitors or proffered a SOP, perfunctory romance, it might have been. But it doesn’t. It would have been so easy to slip into the cliches of the genre (which plenty of still-great movies do–Aladdin, the Little Mermaid, etc. etc.).

“Brave,” much like its heroine, paves its own path and finds its own balance.

Reporters Are Never Realistic on TV

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There are a few movies that I am, for the sake of other people’s fragile sanity, no longer permitted to watch.

The most notable of these is probably “Shakespeare in Love,” which missed the mark for me for the sole reason that the woman pretending to be a man (pretending to be a woman) who was Shakespeare’s girlfriend in the movie did not have the initials W.H. To me, this meant the writers of the film clearly did not care about Shakespeare, which made the whole film evil.

Other than that, though, I am no longer allowed to watch movies about reporters–specifically, newspaper reporters and news writers.

These are the characteristics of reporters on TV:

  • They do not carry a notebook and a pen, nor any technological equivalents such as recorders. Because we all memorize everything we hear and/or never have to have quotes in a story.
  • If they have a job writing features, they hate that job, and want to write big, important political news instead. Because that’s what everyone likes to write, without exception, you know! Not stories about saving puppies or the new restaurant in town! (Actually, my ambition in life is to become the official Puppy Editor for the Sun, but that’s a story for a different time.)
  • Alternately, they cover big, important, political stories. They never have to sit through four-hour meetings about ditch repair in order to do this.
  • These types of important-things-reporters very often get shot at by conspirators. I have been shot at exactly once in my years of reporting, and that was a result of covering a small-town shooting tournament in which people shooting at a metal bird managed to ricochet a shotgun blast about ten feet from where I was standing. It was an accident. And they probably should have put the “Do not stand past this line” line a little further away from the metal bird.
  • They have some sort of axe to grind, some sort of agenda. This extends to the reporter in “Star Wars: The Old Republic,” who doesn’t have a recording device and is bent on getting dirt on some guy. You know, some of us just like to write down what happens, with as little bias as possible and as accurately as possible.
  • They are hardened to tragedy and love mayhem, eagerly chasing after it like a lion hunting a wounded gazelle. I’ve cried at least a few times in my reporting career, and I know at least a few people who go and cry in the bathroom when a story hits a little too close to home. Stories do that sometimes, even to the hardened newsroom veterans. Some people do love mayhem. But a lot of us chase it because we have to, and would much rather cover puppies, thank you.
  • They are irreverent and smart-alecky, often with a fairly morbid sense of humor. This is actually somewhat true, not of all, but certainly some reporters. Humor is a defense mechanism, and it does work. Don’t mistake it for not being genuinely sorry about a tragedy, though. If my obituary’s not hilarious, I fully intend to haunt whoever writes it–or maybe just their puppies.