12/31/11

2011 as a movie year

'twas all right.

I can't help but be underwhelmed by a year that didn't supply anything to my list of favourite films of all time. 2009 gave me The Princess and the Frog and 2010 introduced me to Scott Pilgrim. This year didn't really have a definite stand-out best film for my tastes.

As far as drama goes, Drive and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo were the best that I saw, representing the opposite virtues of minimalism and... blockbuster-ism.

In action, Tintin was the best. Captain America gets a honourable mention for managing to do well worldwide, while apparently North America couldn't care less for Tintin.

Even my more optimistic movienut friend was willing to admit that this was a poor year for comedy. Paul was the best that comes to mind, and though it's a pretty good film, the general level of humour was low. Midnight in Paris gets the honourable mention for Adrien Brody as Salvador Dalí, the best one-scene performance of the year by far.

Immortals was the shittiest film I saw. Transformers 3 was really bad too, but somehow I can't really get emotional about a Transformers movie being bad anymore at this point.

I don't really care that much for Oscars, myself, so no comments about my guesses or bets regarding the nominations and victories there.

Well, that's it for 2011. Let's see what 2012 has in store! Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, The Hobbit and Prometheus seem to hold a lot of promise.

PS. 13 Assassins was left unmentioned in this post because it saw its original Japanese release in 2010. If it was a 2011 movie, it'd be the best one.

Attack the Block

This is going to be a short review. I saw this movie a few days back, and honestly it didn't raise enough thoughts in my to make a full-length review, which is why I've been considering skipping it entirely. I'll just say what little I have to say.

Attack the Block is a British comedy film about a bunch of teenaged South London gansta-wannabies. It's Guy Fawkes Night, and the kids' robbery of a bypasser is interrupted by an alien invasion. The movie balances between developing the characters, having them chased around by monsters and having them deliver pretty well-written humour.

The film's greatest triumph is that it takes character types who are normally very, very, very annoying and makes the audience like them. Or at least the attempt worked on me. The accents, the attitudes, the actions, all of it is the sort of stuff I normally loathe in a film. At first, the boys seem like they've escaped out of Michael Bay's secret Transformers In London project, but in the end they earn their status as protagonists. The performances aren't anything too special, but they're fine. Nick Frost appears as a drug dealer, but honestly he's not that special without his best buddy Simon Pegg to play off of.

The aliens are designed interestingly, with a very minimalistic look aside from one visual detail that is used effectively in the cinematography. The action scenes get a bit too hectic at times, but for the most part they're fine. The climax of the movie is surprisingly tense, if a bit pretentious in its attempt to ethically redeem the main gangmember.

I liked it okay. It's an above-average alien-invasion spoof. Unfortunately, the distribution for it is kinda screwed up, so at some markets it may already have passed. Give it a watch if you've got the chance.

12/23/11

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

For those who missed it, 2009's Sherlock Holmes ended with a cliffhanger wherein Irene Adler's mysterious employer Professor Moriarty, who was only seen in shadow, stole a radio-trasmitter from the chemical weapon of that film's main villain. Holmes concluded that this enigmatic Moriarty must be planning something big indeed!

So, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows picks up from that by having Moriarty be a well-known scientist of many fields as well as a politician, and having him show his face every five minutes on screen. What's more, his sinister plans never use the radio-transmitter sequelbait.

I dunno, something about this weird disconnect between the setup and the film that it spawned just bothers me.

But anyways, Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law return as Holmes and Watson in A Game of Shadows, which is a very, very, very loose adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Final Problem, also known as "the story Doyle wrote to kill off Sherlock Holmes, since he was tired of writing him", or "the one with Moriarty". It mostly treads on familiar territory, though with every aspect (character quirks, comic relief, action) supercharged. It's very reminiscent of Pirates 2 at times, actually; Jack Sparrow was turned into a human shishkabob, while Sherlock Holmes dresses as a prostitute. You can get a pretty good impression of what the movie is like from its trailers, though the trailers also spoil a lot of the jokes, so I'd advice not watching them.

And speaking of the jokes, most of them missed me. I guess I must either be turning into a grump or developing actual taste, but I don't find the sort of humour most of this film went for funny. The girls one row behind me were rolling on their seats from the hilarity of it, but I'd prefer for the comedy to focus on the characters of Holmes and Watson. Watching Downey and Law play off each other is very satisfying, which just serves to make it more grating when the film goes for lowest-common-denominator humour like the above-mentioned crossdressing and other such things.

The performances on the main leads are as good as in the 2009 picture, which is the main thing that saved the sequel to me. However, I found Jared Harris as Moriarty very dull. He's kind of wicked, but not on the same caricature level of ridiculousness as the rest of the movie, and thus feels out of place. A cartoonish, hammy villain would have worked in the film's advantage, like it did with Davy Jones in Pirates. Also, Stephen Fry plays Mycroft Holmes as an exaggerated version of himself.

The action scenes are pretty good, most of the time. I really liked the use of "Sherlock-vision", though the climax of the film proves that you can take even that too far. The scene ends up being really unintentionally hilarious, and basically turns Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty into Cameron Vale and Darryl Revok. Aside from that time, though, the action is well planned and executed.

The plot... is just there. It's thin and kind of hole-y, but none of the plot holes are really glaring enough to get in the way of enjoying the film. Don't expect a detective story or mystery out of a movie about the world's greatest detective (outside of Batman, of course), though.

Overall, it's fine. It's a hypercharged version of the first one. If you're into that sort of thing, go see it.

12/22/11

This just in

The Adventures of Tintin lost to Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked in the US Box Office on its opening day.

...

I'll let George Takei speak for me on this:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I don't think this movie should have been made. The only reason it exists is because North-Americans are too lazy to read subtitles, and need an English-spoken remake of a (reputedly) perfectly serviceable Swedish movie. HOWEVER, I will not count that against The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Just like I reviewed Conan by its own merits, I'll review this movie as a stand-alone work.

Based on the Stieg Larsson book Män som hatar kvinnor ("Men Who Hate Women"), David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ("Unnecessary Retitle") is a mystery/detective/drama film about Mikael Blomkvist, played by Daniel Craig, a journalist who has been found guilty for libel and witnesses his career falling apart around himself. To his surprise, he receives an invitation from reclusive ex-CEO Henrik Vanger, played by Christopher effing Plummer, along with a job proposal: Vanger wants Blomkvist to investigate his family and find out who killed his great-niece Harriet in the sixties.

Meanwhile, young deliquent Lisbeth Salander, played by Rooney Mara, who was hired to do the background check on Blomkvist before he got the job, goes through trouble with the social services, and strives to survive in a society that she has a hard time fitting into. At first her subplot seems needless, but it ends up uniting with the main story halfway through the movie... which is a bit too late for my tastes.

The setting of the movie is a delicate matter, but I am happy to report that Dragon Tattoo manages to feel like it's set in Sweden, rather than being obviously American. The street signs, the candy wrappers, the nature... it never broke my suspension of disbelief. The langauge is an interesting thing: the actors speak English with very slight Swedish accents, which reinforce the feeling perfectly. The one exception is a TV-host heard early and late in the film, who goes for the most exaggerated Swedish accent ever, and made me giggle out loud both times she spoke.

The performances are top-notch. Plummer shines especially, but Stellan Skarsgård as Vanger's great-nephew Martin manages to also be extremely convincing and kind of impressive in his big scenes. Daniel Craig, whom I've always been ambivalent toward in the past, makes a really good everyman protagonist. Rooney Mara is kind of weird: the character she plays is so obviously messed up that at times it's hard to tell if the actress is doing a bad job or if it's all a part of the movie.

David Fincher's touch is felt throughout the project: the weather is used effectively to establish atmosphere, the camera angles are really impressive without being distracting... the different elements are all sewn together with expertese.

The movie suffers from those old, well-known pacing issues that are almost inevitable when adapting a book into a motion picture. As mentioned above, the two plotlines seem really inconsequential toward each other for most of the movie, and the movie takes way too long to wrap itself up at the end. The final scene is great, but the five or so scenes before that could have been cut with almost no impact.

The weird thing about Dragon Tattoo is that it inherits certain elements from the source material, which make it at times feel like a European detective story in the trappings of a Hollywood blockbuster. This is especially visible in the research montage: it's exactly the sort of thing that is used to drive the plot forward in The Old Fox and other German detective shows my parents used to watch, but it's edited and shot in such an exciting and efficient way, it almost becomes a music video at times. So yeah, best research montage ever.

I recommend this movie to everyone, and especially people who like detective stories. It's not too American for Europeans, and it definitely isn't too European for Americans. I still have two weeks left to make up my mind, but this may be my "movie of the year".

12/6/11

The Unknown Soldier (1955)

Happy Finnish independence day! I have mentioned in the past that I'm not big into nationalism, but I'm taking this occasion to review the cornerstone of Finnish cinema, Edvin Laine's The Unknown Soldier, which is shown on TV every year on the sixth of December. It is the most viewed film in Finnish cinema history, though the Finnish film with the most views internationally is Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning (thank you, internet).

Based on the 1954 Väinö Linna novel by the same name, The Unknown Soldier is a about the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union, taking place in the years 1941 to 1944. For a brief summary of the historic background of the events, Stalin had invaded Finland two years prior (around the same time as he did the Baltic countries), but the Red Army was blocked off in the 100-day-long Winter War. Afterwards, the Finnish government signed a pact with Nazi Germany to receive equipment for the next war, which they felt was inevitable, and in June of -41, mobilised its army to invade the Soviet Union and reclaim lost territories. Finns tend to be very defensive about all of this, and it's easy to offend them by saying Finland was a part of the Axis. In the movie itself, when the soldiers cross the old border onto territory that was never Finnish, one of them points out they're all robbers and thieves now, and they later discuss who is the blame for the war with some Russian civilians.

The film is about a machine gun regiment full of soldiers from different backgrounds, as they fight their way to Petrozavodsk and retreat from the Soviet counterattack. Its led by three lieutenants, each of which represents a different method of wartime leadership, but the soldiers are the true protagonists. There's the merry comedian with a funny accent, the straight-laced socialist who hates the officers due to class differences, the always-cool Karelian farmer whose hometown fell to Soviet rule after the last war, the theatrical would-be inventor, the young and naivé recruit who refuses to listen to advice from his elders, and so forth. A lot of emphasis is put on outlining their different world views and personalities... but unfortunately, their names are very rarely used and many of them look alike. I know I have a bad facial memory, but this is my greatest criticism to the movie: I can't tell most of the characters apart from each other. It takes the drama out of a lot of the scenes when I can't tell whether the person who is getting shot has a name or not.

The actors are actually pretty good most of the time, aside from some of the cringe-inducingly bad bit players, who only get a death scene. There's one soldier who gets shot and asks an officer to pray for him, and if this movie wasn't fifty-six years old, I'd swear he's doing a really bad William Shatner impression. All the main actors are good, though. I especially like Tarmo Manni as Private Honkajoki. He doesn't get nearly as much screen time as the other actors, but he manages to steal every scene he's in.

The action scenes are kind of hit-and-miss: most of them consist of the characters lying in brushes and firing machine guns at some unseen enemy. The Russians are rarely seen at all, and most of the time the opposition's only mark on-screen is a constant artillery barrage. I think that the pyrotechnics used to achieve the shelling are really impressive, even today, and have a real impact. Personally, I would have preferred for the enemy to have more of a presence in the film, but other than that, the actual war in this war movie is pretty good.

Another problem I have with this movie is the script and editing. You can really tell it's a novel adaptation because the pacing and narrative cohesion are really poor. In a book, you can tell the readers via narration about how the war is going, and thus just show the important scenes between the characters. In the movie, there's no narration. It's replaced by minute-long montages of extras in uniforms marching. Thus, it's hard to keep track of how the war is going and where the protagonists' unit is moving to next. There are also many stand-alone scenes that don't really contribute much to the film overall, and are most likely just remnants of subplots in the book that were mostly cut for the movie.

The cinematography and score are unremarkable, except for the opening scene, from which the novel and film get their name. The unit carries the corpse of a soldier whose face is never shown and buries him, leaving a pine-branch as his tombstone and walking away, while Jean Sibelius' Finlandia plays in the background. The camera angles, the music and the lack of dialogue are a winning combination. Another standout scene is the one where Corporal Lehto and two privates are ordered to stand in attention for two hours in punishment for accepting munitions for civilians, and choose to remain still even when the Russians start bombing the field they're in. The editing between the stock footage of bomber planes and shots of the actors is done really well, and the explosions on the set have a real feel of danger.

Overall, I can see why The Unknown Soldier is a classic, but there are several noticeable flaws, and it shows its age in negative ways as well as positive. It's worth seeing... but it gets a bit boring at times. Maybe next year I'll review the 1985 remake, and see if it's superior, as some people told me it is.

12/1/11

In Time

"For a few to be immortal, many must die."

In a dystopic future, aging has been cured. When people turn 25, they stop getting any older. However, to stop overpopulation everyone has an artificial limit to their lifespans. Everyone has a green, glowy counter tattooed to their wrist, allowing them to see their life tick away before their eyes. When someone runs out of time, they fall over, dead. Time can be exchanged, and has replaced money as the effective currency of the world. Working-class people have to earn time every day just to keep themselves alive. Beggars walk the street, asking people for a minute. Robbers, referred to as "minutemen", literally steal people's lives in back alleys. In the rich parts of town, the privileged gamble away decades, have been 25 for hundreds of years, and have the same biological age as their own grandchildren.

If that isn't an awesome premise for a film, I have no idea what is! This is exactly what science fiction is supposed to be: talking about issues with our own world by using fantastic allegories. In this case, the subject is the increasing income gap. The poor get poorer and the rich get richer, and in this allegory, the poor have to literally give away their lives to pay the rent, or put food on the table.

In Time stars Justin Timberlake (who's actually a good actor, if you can be adult enough to not hate him because he was in a boy band) as Will Salas, a young manual labourer with a chip on his shoulder. Amanda Seyfried plays Sylvia Weis, the daughter of an immensely rich banker, bored with a life of dull safety. Cillian Murhpy is Reymond Leon, a zealous policeman tasked with making sure the time-system remains intact. However, the real star of the movie is the setting; real effort was put into communicating the sense of urgency people live in, and trying to change even the little details to fit the difference their ways of thinking and doing. Poor people do things fast, and mostly run from place to place, while the rich have time to spare. Likewise, those who are low on time tend to wear clothes that make it convenient to check their wrists almost twice a minute, while those who don't need to worry keep their arms covered. My favourite little touch is that killing someone by stealing away all their time is referred to as "cleaning their clock".

The actual plot is not quite as good as the premise would promise, however. In Time is all about raging for this very real issue, but at times it gets dangerously close to becoming a power fantasy: "Will Salas is the man who can fix everything, because he knows what's right and he's got the balls to do it!" The protagonist's solutions are actually pretty simple, but we're left to assume nobody else has ever tried them before. The film does question whether one man can change anything several times, but in the end seems to ignore all that. It's not quite as extreme as Surrogates (which was about people living out their lives with robotic bodies so they never have to leave their rooms), where the end had Bruce Willis shut everything down and the implication is that everything worked out fine, but I could have used a more subtle resolution nonetheless.

Though In Time is an action movie, its action mostly focuses on chases, whether they be on foot or in cars. Most of it is well-executed, except for one really fake-looking CGI car in a crash scene. It may bug you that nobody uses any future-weaponry, or has a flying car, but in truth such details would only have distracted from the main gimmick of the setting.

I don't have much else to say. Mostly, In Time is just a pretty good movie with pretty good acting, pretty good action and a pretty good script. To me, it's the imaginative premise that elevates it to something special. It's a fine way to spend 100 minutes of your precious time, if you've got any to spare, but becomes a must-see if you're into that sort of thing. Director/writer Andrew Niccol already had my approval from his masterpiece Lord of War, and I now look forward to seeing his future projects as well.