ParaNorman

Don't use the Z-word!

ParaNorman is the new stop-motion animated movie from Laika, the makers of Coraline. It's a story of Norman Babcock, a kid from New England who can speak to ghosts. When the story starts, this ability is old news to him, and the people around him just shrug his insistence of possessing this trait as him being a pathological liar who wants attention. Norman is a loner, misunderstood by his own family and schoolmates alike, but is forced out of his recluse life when he finds out that the curse of an 18th century witch hanged in his hometown is going to hit the town very soon, and he's the only one who can stop it.

This setup for the story is kinda basic, which undermines the genius of the film. The beginning is rife with really funny and clever gags with the ghost-speaking stuff, the movie knows exactly how to pace itself so the wackiness fades away slowly to make room for the plot, and the eventual story with the witch is really well-written and, dare I say, moving. By far my favourite thing about the movie is its tone; the premise and the characters are treated with a lot more weight and seriousness than what kids' films nowadays tend to. It's not a happy-go-lucky comedy movie with a dark third act, but feels thematically uniform. There's more laughs early on than in the end, but the drama and the humour are balanced and their mixture feels natural.

There is one big story misstep about the movie, a kind of "wait a minute, what was up with that" element that I only realised two minutes after leaving the cinema. If I had come to think of it in the middle of the movie instead, my opinion would surely be considerably lower, so I have to point it out, just to be fair and make clear that ParaNorman's plot is not without error. Highlight here if you don't care about spoilers: The ghosts that seem to be everywhere around Norman during the early parts of the movie are nowhere to be seen during the climax of the plot. He doesn't run into any random ghosts during late parts of the movie that he could ask for help. Spoilers end.

The animation is fantastic. There's just some things that work so well in this form of stop-motion, and Laika went out of their way to put in things that are normally really hard as well, and it all blends together perfectly. It's a shame this stuff takes forever to film, though on the other hand, that means the directors (Sam Fell, Chris Butler) have to take their sweet time planning everything out. They can't half-ass anything, and they have all the time in the world to plan every shot out perfectly while the others are being filmed. Maybe that's why pretty much every camera angle and every shot fits together in a harmonious, beautiful cinematography.

In addition to how it looks, ParaNorman has a surprising strength in characters. Norman is a surprisingly flexible kid whose social issues ring very true to me at points, and the four elements of his appearance, animation, vocal performance (by Kodi Smit-McPhee) and writing fit together perfectly. He's a good kid, and even when he's doing something dumb or inconsiderate, you cheer for him, because you can totally see how the situation he lives in has given him the flaws he possesses. The supporting cast are great as well. I'd give short descriptions, except that I think it would do a disservice to the movie to try to sum up the characters with a few adjectives. Besides, some of the character traits are really surprising, and played laughs, so I don't wanna spoil anything. The standout vocal performance (standout as in it stands out - not necessarily in a bad way - while Smit-McPhee's blends in) comes from John Goodman as the town bum.

Aside from the afore-mentioned story hiccup, the movie works damn well overall. Its gags are really good, and there are some really funny background jokes as well. It's a treat to watch, and a definite must-see for animation fans. I don't think it's quite as good as Coraline, but I liked it more than Brave, if that's any kind of measurement.

Total Recall (2012)

Please don't remake Scanners, though.

The Total Recall remake it out now. A Robocop remake is going to be released next year. All we need is a reboot of Starship Troopers and the Paul Verhoeven Sci-fi Trilogy will be all ruined!

Nah, just kidding. I actually liked this Total Recall about as much as I liked the original. The original had decent action scenes, really cool set designs and costumes, and some interesting sci-fi concepts. The new one matches those strengths beat-for-beat, and aside from trying to be a bit too serious, measures up to the original.

For those not in the know, Total Recall is the story of Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger/Colin Farrell), a lowly labourer having a boring life with his absurdly hot wife. For some reason, he is not satisfied in his life and finds himself drawn to news about the conflict between the evil authority and the rebels of the colony. He sees news for a company called Rekall, which sells virtual vacations in the form of lifelike memories inserted right into the mind of the customer, and decides to try it out. However, in the aftermath of the procedure, he finds out that in truth he is a secret agent gone rogue who has been captured and fed with false memories of being a labourer to keep him down. He embarks on a quest to find the truth about himself, and save the colony from its evil oppressors.

The major story differences between the versions are the following: in the original, the colony is in Mars, while in the remake it's in Australia (connected via an elevator that passes straight through the core of the Earth); in the original, the bad guys are an evil corporation, while in the remake they're the government; in the original, the added intrigue of the plot comes from secret Martian technology and mutants, while in the remake it comes from the evil government having robot soldiers and the politics of the situation; the original has the villain's right hand man Richter (Michael Ironside) as the secondary bad guy, while the remake promotes Quaid's fake wife Lori (Sharon Stone/Kate Beckingsale) to fill this role.

The remake puts a lot of effort right from the start into making the viewer believe Quaid is unsatisfied with his life on some strange level he's not able to explain. I really like that, though what I don't like is the fact that instead of having really vague dreams about being in the colony, he has really specific dreams about the exact circumstances of being captured by the state, which removes all ambiguity about whether or not the whole movie is just a dream.

Another thing they do their damn best to sell is the world. The opening info dump is a bit ham-handed, but makes sense (aside from a later, really weird scene that implies that London is an irradiated wasteland, even though Britain is among the only places in the world that's habitable), and then there's the set design. The establishing shots of the Colony and Britain look too similar for my tastes, but the actual streets of the countries look so radically different, with the hovercar highways and the floating buildings and whatnot. The roofs and back-alleys of the Colony serve as the locales of some really intense chase scenes that make great use of sets for scripting.

Overall, the first half of the movie has really good action, while the ending falls short on this. The previously-mentioned chases at the Colony and a fantastically tense extended action scene involving futuristic elevators were my definite favourites. The movie's advertising focused a lot on hovercar-chases, but they put all the hovercar-stuff worth seeing into the trailers, so... pointless.

The movie's main problem is its tone. It tries a bit too hard to go for deep emotional drama, which causes its shortcomings on the narrative side to be all the more visible. The girlfriend character is sorta one-note, the evil scheme of the villain makes little sense and the rebels are left really vaguely defined in regards to what they actually do to accomplish their goals. All this would be easily overlookable if the tone was campy and bright.

It's a fine movie, and a worthy remake. The references toward the original were a bit too on-the-nose at times, it's too serious for its own good and it's more straightforward, but other than that, I liked it. Go see it to get your action fill, if you're short on running and gunning right now.

(PS. Throughout this review, I have referred to the 1990 film as "the original". I know both movies are adaptations of a novel.)

(PPS. There is a three-breasted woman in the remake. So if you only want to see an update on that, good for you.)

Brave

Pixar, Pixar, Pixar. I have a strange relationship with that company. That is to say, I don't really see what the big fuss is about.

I mean, all the Pixar movies I've seen have been good, but none of them have really been fantastic. And I can't really even list any notable flaws and faults in them: I just can't get into 'em for some reason.

With that said: Brave. It's a movie about the red-haired Scottish princess Merida (Kelly Macdonald), who strives to be a warrior like all the menfolk around her, picking a special affinity for archery. This puts her in conflict with her mother, Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson), who wants a proper daughter who minds her manners and marries a dashing prince.

Those who expect Brave to be an adventure with a you-go-girl protagonist will be disappointed. It's actually a pretty serious character piece focused on the relationship between Merida and her mother. I was actually surprised by how few locations the movie has, fooled by how proudly they were flaunting highland vistas early on.

I love how the movie looks and sounds. I mean, when I saw Tangled, my mind was blown by the fact that Disney managed to animate Rapunzel's hair. Now comes Merida and her red locks, and daumn, that's some pretty hair. As alluded above, the environments are really beautiful too. The music is fine on the ears (aside from the somewhat bland halfway-through song), and I can't help but adore everyone's Scottish accents.

Usually in animated movies, I tend to be annoyed by the comedy side cast, and gravitate more strongly to the protagonists and antagonists, but Brave provides an exception to the rule. The menfolk and their clan politics and boisterous noise were the highlight of the film to me. King Fergus (Billy Connolly) is a perfection of what Disney attempted with their characterisation of Zeus in Hercules: a loud, dumb, but lovable father figure. The chieftains and heirs of clans MacGuffin, MacIntosh and Dingwall are all funny and memorable characters too.

The film's plot is kind of formulaic, but it only gets predictable once you figure which formulaic plot they're going for. As soon as the movie starts in earnest, I feel it starts to get weaker. Despite the very strong start, it just didn't hold up my interest for the second half.

Overall, it's a good movie that's definitely worth checking out for all fans of Pixar, animation in general, Scottish history, and Celtic music. It's not a masterpiece, and aside from the advances in animating curled hair, I don't think it's a milestone in anything, but it's a good way to spend ninety or so minutes.

Summer Wrap-up (Spider-Man and Batman)

A dramatic re-enactment of this post

It's been two and a half months since my last update. Lots of stuff has happened in my life during the summer (a trip to Malta and being approved for college, for example), but I've only seen two movies in the cinema. I didn't write reviews because the first one I saw was so bad I couldn't make myself review it, and then I felt like I couldn't review the second until I'd reviewed the first.

To catch up and get started with the autumn season, here's my thoughts on them:

The Amazing Spider-Man:

A wretched pile of shit, and the worst kind of superhero movie. The Amazing Spider-Man is a tale of Peter Parker as you've never seen him before: a bland non-character with no defining traits, whose role in the story and overall personality are whatever the writer feels like making them at any given moment. His stalker-crush Gwen Stacy falls in love with him for no adequate reason, other than because [insert your own Twilight comparison here].

The Lizard looks like crap and has motives almost as vaguely explored as Peter's. The story is bloated with way too many subplots, some of which never get any kind of resolution since this is assured to get a sequel due to the presence of Spider-Man in the title. Awkward pacing and dialogue, lame performances and so-so action scenes finish the unholy combination of elements which make up a movie that manages to only be the second-worst film I've seen this year because I happened to see This Means War.

Also, Peter Parker skateboards. Seriously, fuck this movie. Seeing Spider-Man raped like this, I can finally understand people who get really personally upset about Michael Bay's Transformers.

The Dark Knight Rises:

A worthy, if a bit shoddy, end to the trilogy, with surprisingly large ties to the Batman comics which the previous two movies seemed to be afraid of associating themselves with. The villains work damn well, the directing and dialogue are awesome, and the music is fantastic. The film drags a lot, though: it feels like it's two scripts mashed into one.

There are some minor plot holes that I only realised afterwards, and Batman still sounds really funny. The final twist about Bane is really unnecessary, and seems to only exist to please comic nerds. It was a really poor choice to undermine the climax of the film with that move. I really liked the ending, even if it was a bit cheesy and predictable.

Batman Begins ends up being my favourite of this series, because I really liked the Gotham in it, and it felt the most like a Batman movie.

The Avengers was my favourite superhero film of the summer, but it's such a different movie than The Dark Knight Rises that I don't think you can really compare them on any objective level. Apples and oranges.

Snow White and the Huntsman (rant)

I'm a bit late on this one, but I guess it's better late than never. As far as I know, the general word on the street about this movie is that it's "not as bad as it seems". I respectfully disagree.

Well, not so respectfully. By the way, this review is going to be considerably more spoilery than what I usually write, so if you possibly believe your "enjoyment" will be hampered by knowing plot details, turn back now. Know, though, that I have little positive to say about the movie.

Snow White and the Huntsman is damn bad. Really bad. Laughably bad. It's a two-hour fantasy spectacle with next to nothing fantastical or spectacular about it, with some of the worst casting I've ever seen in my life. I don't think I've ever before complained about casting as a part of a movie. Sure, I've done it about individual characters, but never as a whole. I don't think there's a single character in this film who's cast well.

Where do I start? The name of the film is completely misleading. Did you know that the Prince Charming character still exists in this retelling? There's actually a love triangle. The huntsman (who is never given another name in the film, in some sort of attempt at "deep and meaningful"), played by Chris Hemsworth, is really arbitrary to the movie. His relationship with Snow White is barely developed at all, and in the end he just leaves when she's crowned Queen.

Snow White (Kristen Stewart) herself is one of the blandest, least interesting heroines I've seen in a movie in a long time. Her character is so inconsistent it's almost impossible to name any sort of qualities about her personality. They try to paint her as the Super-Good Holy Mega-Pure Maiden of Destiny, but she doesn't really come off as especially pure in spirit at all. She acts like any person who's being first imprisoned and then pursued. Later, before the laughably bad action finale, she suddenly becomes this fierce military leader just because, with no kind of explanation other than "it's her destiny to win". If you're trying to go for the Pure Maiden Who Can Ride the Unicorn and Is Flocked Around By Animals archetype, you are not allowed to make that character a military leader who rides a horse into battle and swings a sword to kill people. Read The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren sometime. In it, the characters discuss this dilemma.

The Queen (Charlize Theron) is one of the few enjoyable things about the movie, in the same sense that Bruce Payne is the most enjoyable thing about Dungeons and Dragons (playing the respectful role of That Blue-Lipped Guy): she is unintentionally hilarious. I couldn't stop laughing almost every time she was on-screen. The completely original character of the Queen's brother Finn is also really funny, which is partly because the character isn't the least bit threatening and partly because he sports the funniest haircut I've ever seen. That hairdo is so silly that there are no pictures of it online. I guess the actor demanded to be kept out of the marketing.

After Snow White escapes into the forest, the bad guys hire the Huntsman to track her. He immediately chooses to save her instead and they run from one horribad action scene to another. The movie tries to justify the Huntsman's presence by saying that he is the only man who has ever went to the Black Forest and returned. Yet, when he guides the villains into the forest, he basically just says: "Wait here, I'll go get her." And then he follows her tracks and finds her nearby. The Queen's men didn't need him at all, it seems, because it's later established they have a tracker of their own. The titular characters then escape through the forest and find this hidden village. The Queen's minions show up there within hours. They followed the heroes' tracks through the forest? I thought only the Huntsman was able to navigate through! Why do you lie to me, movie?

To skip ahead a bit, there's the part with the apple about half an hour before the end. It's established that Snow White is the only one who can kill the Queen, and the Queen can gain eternal youth by killing Snow White. So she poisons the girl and then proceeds to incredibly slowly drain her soul or whatever. The other good guys show up, and the Queen flees. Why? They can't kill her! The only person in the world who can kill her is comatose in the ground! JUST KILL HER FRIENDS AND THEN TAKE YOUR TIME IN FULFILLING YOUR PLANS! AAAARGHBAGFHG!

So here's the very short list of good things: I kinda like the concept of women committing self-mutilation to stay under the Queen's "fairness radar". That was clever, and actually carried dark ideas that could have been explored more if the movie wasn't preoccupied with trying to be super-hip for the young-uns or whatnot. Secondly, the visuals for the fairy forest are initially really cool, and I like the design of most of the stuff. Though that changes quickly with some of the worst CGI magpies I've ever seen. They look like something out of a 90s educational feature with a special effects budget of fuck all. Thirdly, the Queen's glass-shard minion would have been really cool if basically all of its screen-time hadn't been in the trailers already (and if it wasn't basically stolen from Medi-Evil).

It's just a really bland and dumb movie. I only got this upset about it in retrospect, when I realised it had initially fooled me into thinking it was average. Don't go see Snow White and the Huntsman. It has horrible performances (both bland and overblown in nature), incredibly large plot holes, very weak drama and suspense, and insults the intelligence of its audience.

Also, there's eight dwarves. Why?

Prometheus

Welcome back to Sci-fi (and horror, I guess), Ridley Scott! We missed you very much!

Prometheus is a prequel to 1979's Alien, though only in the sense that it's set in the same universe. Don't expect facehuggers and chestbursters, or for Ellen Ripley to show up. The film is intimately tied with the Alien mythos, but still works as a standalone story. The best thing is that it completely and utterly exiles the two Alien vs. Predator films from continuity by giving Wayland Industries an origin that's completely inconsistent with the one told in them. Yaaaay.

In the late 21st century, an archeologist couple find cave paintings from Scotland and compare them with carvings and pictures from half a dozen other parts of the world. All seem to depict the same constellation in the sky, along with Ancient Astronaut fuel. Wayland Industries funds a trillion-dollar expedition to an Earth-like moon revolving around a planet found near one of these depicted stars, with the belief that humanity's creators ("Architects") can be found there. After a few years of stasis, the crew wakes up and sets to explore this world, but the scientists discover that the company may have ulterior motives for funding the trip...

The film has a really interesting cast of characters, aside from a couple of extras with no lines, who are kind of distracting because they don't show up for most of the movie and when they do, you've most likely forgotten them. The main characters are really memorable, though. You've got the archeologist couple (played by Logan Marshall-Green and Noomi Rapace), who are kind of naïve and optimistic, which is why the most horrible things happen to them. Charlize Theron plays the cold-hearted Wayland representative, while Michael Fassbender does a stunning job as David, the Synthetic crew-member.

Prometheus is a horror movie, but thankfully doesn't have many jump scares. It's the atmosphere of desolation and uncertain doom that hangs over the setting that makes it eerie. What made Alien so scary in the first place was how, well, alien the threat was. Over time, we've learned exactly how Xenomorphs work, which is why they work better for action than horror nowadays. Prometheus throws a curve ball by featuring original monsters that work by their own rules. I really hope that other directors take a hint and start relying more on this kind of horror instead of cheap scares.

The design for the movie is great, with fantastic sets, props and costumes. It's obvious the creative team has spent a lot of time thinking about how everything works on the spaceship and the alien structures the crew explores. Not all of it is crammed in as exposition, mind you. The film raises way more questions than it answers, and it deliberately mysterious regarding things such as whether David has real emotions and many things about the aliens.

Prometheus isn't perfect, though. There's one action scene near the end which feels like it's taken from a completely different movie, the dialogue has some really awkward moments (most of them with Theron's character), and the film maybe goes a bit too fast near the end and doesn't stop to catch its breath before the climax. Also, pointless 3D that adds nothing. Oh, and the trailer spoils a huge detail about the film. If you've managed to either avoid the trailer or forget it, don't watch it!

Nevertheless, I really recommend it. This is the perfect way to pitch an original sci-fi movie to Hollywood today: have it be tangentially related to a really famous film for marketing purposes, but have the main plot be completely standalone. I've heard talks about Prometheus 2 being a possibility, and I'm kinda torn about that. In my opinion, the Alien saga can end here, but if they can think of a really good plot for another picture... why not?

(Mini-review) A Dangerous Method

Characters in reverse order of importance.

Hey kids! Do you like David Cronenberg? (The correct answer is yes.) Do you like Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen? (Also yes.) Do you like Keira Knightley? (Ehh...) Do you think psychology is interesting? (Hell no.) Whatever answers you gave, maybe you ought to go see A Dangerous Method.

It's a movie about Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Sabina Spielrein (Fassbender, Mortensen and Knightley, respectively), whose personalities clash all over early 20th century Europe. Friendships turn to rivalry, sharing of thoughts becomes theft of ideas, and love is tainted by envy and guilt. Deep discussions about sexuality, the nature of science, Wagner, and ethics are had.

The actors are fantastic. I never knew Keira Knightley had this much range, and Fassbender is quickly climbing his way up among my favourite contemporary actors. Mortensen is almost unrecogniseable from Lord of the Rings, but damn he does a good Freud. He's like this passive-aggressive douchebag father figure, and I found it very easy to relate whenever Jung ranted about how obnoxious the man is.

The film's weak part is the editing and story structure. There's way too few characters, in my opinion. We don't really see the psychologists interact with that many patients, so in the end they talk about psychotherapy way more than they actually practice psychotherapy. The transitions from scene to scene are way too sudden, and sometimes it'd hard to keep track where the characters are, currently, and how long it's been since the last scene.

What else... it's got beautiful scenery and really good Wagner-inspired music. Not much else to say than that. It's an artsy movie, and yet, I think it may be David Cronenberg's most mainstream production since The Fly. By the way, Cronenberg, I'm sorely disappointed by the lack of psychedelic mindfuck dream sequences in this film. Even Dead Ringers had one. Don't be afraid to be you!

My Top Ten Guilty Pleasure Films

My first top ten list on this blog! Are you excited? I sure am. I'm sick with Angina, and at points have a hard time sitting upright. At least I have a lot of time to make up for not seeing any films in two weeks.

I've seen a lot of different takes on the concept of a "guilty pleasure", so I'm going to clarify what I mean by it before we go into the list: my guilty pleasures are things that I unironically enjoy, but I'm intellectually aware that they're shit. Stuff that I can't deny loving, but which makes me feel like a tasteless bozo for liking at all. In comparison, Dungeons and Dragons (2000) is my favourite bad film of all time, but I enjoy it for its shittiness, and therefore have no reason to feel guilty about it. So camp classics won't appear on this list.

But without further ado, let's get this party started. It's time for the ten worst pieces of shit that I like for no adequate reason...

"Special Edition" does not, in fact
mean that this box contains the
good cut of the movie.

#10 -The Theatrical Cut of Kingdom of Heaven:


That is to say, the version you've most probably seen. The Director's Cut is three hours and ten minutes, and contains whole subplots that were cut by executives from the film. However, we're not here to talk about that awesome movie. We're here to talk about silly, stupid Theatrical Kingdom of Heaven, disowned by Ridley Scott himself.

I'm a sucker for historical action movies. I'm an avid history geek myself (though I tend to focus too much on the awesome parts instead of the boring parts, which is why I'm far from a perfect history student). Gladiator was my favourite movie ever when I was twelve (yeah, I cried at the ending). Then came along Kingdom of Heaven. It's a movie about how Legolas becomes a crusader and somehow becomes a master swordsman after one lesson. Then the princess of Jerusalem falls in love with him and they boink each other out of wedlock, and a bunch of stuff happens and he's like: "Dudes! Religion is the cause of all this suffering! You should all be secular humanists like I am! This is totally befitting to a story about the 12th century!"

The complete and utter raping of medieval history to make a political statement is excused in the director's cut by having actual interesting character arcs and giving it all increased weight by showing more of what the characters are going through. The theatrical cut removed a lot of scenes that were important to understanding who Legolas is and what drives him, but it didn't take away those where Legolas is like: "I don't see a difference between the Muslim prayer and our prayer."

And yeah, I eat this shit up. It's such a completely goofy no-brainer story with great costumes and sets and Jeremy Irons and Ed Norton and huge action scenes. Also, two actors from Game of Thrones are in it (Jaime Lannister is the Sheriff who tries to arrest Balian early on in the movie, and Jorah Mormont is King Richard the Lionheart).



#9, #8 and #7: The Star Wars Prequel Trilogy:

I think these movies get way more shit than they deserve. Still, I've got to admit... not terribly good. They're confused about which demographic they want to sell themselves to (especially Episode 1), have piss-poor cinematography outside of action scenes (especially Episode 3) and horrible story-choking subplots (especially Episode 2). A lot of the hate toward them is from entitled nerds who won't accept anything less than the golden image they've constructed in their mind of the nostalgic Star Wars of ages past.


I was nine years old when Episode 1 came out, and I saw it in the cinema with my big brother. It's my first memory of going to the movies. Can't help but have a fondness for that. Yeah, I'm just as guilty of nostalgia as the people I just spoke of. Though I've at least grown out of blindly defending the prequels.

They aren't bad movies, but they do have a lot of flaws I'm way more willing to tolerate than I should be.



#6: Alien Resurrection:

My father insists that this is the best Alien movie ever. I...  disagree. It's a complete mess, because the scriptwriter wanted to make it a satire of the whole franchise, the director was aiming for a really sick Cronenberg-style body horror film (the human-alien hybrid at the end was a hermaphrodite with visible genitalia of both genders until they were edited out in post-production), and the executives once again stepped on the whole project and demanded that it be a straightforward action flick.

The only real saving grace is that they managed to get Sigourney Weaver into the film. Also, Ron Perlman at his dullest. Yay! After the aliens break free, it's a sci-fi dungeon crawl: the heroes go one room forward, they fight some aliens, one of them dies, repeat ad infinitum. Maybe it's because I watched it so many times as a kid, but I like it. This was the first time that all the clichés of the franchise clicked into place and created the formula that writers have still been unable to escape. Here's to hoping Prometheus will give me no cause for guilt.



#5: National Treasure (2): The Book of Mysteries:

I feel no guilt for liking the first National Treasure movie. It's a cool little adventure hunt with Nicolas Cage... admittedly not at his most enjoyable. It had the "we have to steal the Declaration of Independence" thing that they could advertise without spoiling half the movie, because that was only the first step toward the treasure. I really like that, because I hate trailers giving away too much. The ending was kind of bleh, but it would have been fine if they'd left it at that. It did have Sean Bean, though, in one of his extremely rare roles where he doesn't die.

Book of Mysteries is a model example of what I like to call "a lazy, goddamn sequel". The (really bad) love subplot? Brought back to square one in between movies. All that money they made? It got stolen away by the taxman! All that fame they got? The villain is slandering them! Seriously, every aspect of the script is written to make sure that it starts with no real kind of continuity to the last movie, aside from a couple of offhand mentions, because the writer didn't want to make an excuse for why a bunch of happily married billionaires are going on a treasure hunt.

Even within itself, the sequel makes no sense. Does the villain really need Nicolas Cage's treasure-hunting wits so much that he's willing to launch a huge mudslinging campaign against one of his ancestors and telling him that the only way to disprove the accusations is to find the treasure? Do Nicolas Cage and his dad really care so much for their ancestor's good name that they're willing to go to all these lengths to clean it? It's idiotic, but I kinda prefer it to Temple of Doom.

Unlike Temple of Doom, it has Nicolas Cage acting like a drunk Brit. No George Lucas movie will ever top that.



#4: Alien 3:

Yes, more Alien. This was David Fincher's first movie. Boy, has he come a long way. Though interestingly enough, you can see some of his later trademarks this early, such as the effective use of weather for mood purposes. The production of the film was a complete mess, with directors and scripts being exchanged every other day. In one version of the film, Ripley was going to crash-land on a forest planet populated by Space Monks instead of crash-landing in a junk planet populated by Space Prisoners.

But anyways. It's a shitty movie where almost nothing happens. The characters spend most of the film talking about nonsense, and when the Alien does start killing inmates, we don't know anything about their personalities and have no real reason to care for them. Well, except for one of the first victims, Ripley's love interest... wait, is that Charles Dance? Holy shit, Charles Dance is in this movie! He used to be so young, once.

But anyways, I can't help but have an affection for this shit. By all logic, I should be bored out of my mind by two hours of admiring good cinematography and cool sets, but I guess I just have a weak spot for Alien.

By the way, isn't it just ironic that by the time they released this film on DVD, David Fincher had gotten so famous he could just refuse to participate in making an extended cut? They only brought him into the movie in the first place because he was a newbie and they'd run out of famous people to ask for.



#3: Alien vs. Predator: Reqiuem:

Now we're starting to reach the bottom of the barrel.  Yeah, another Alien movie, this one infinitely worse than the previous two. The first Alien vs. Predator was merely lame and formulaic. Its sequel is gut-wrenchingly bad. It does the worst possible thing an Alien, Predator or Alien vs. Predator movie could do: it takes place in modern Earth, in a completely mundane location, and has the trappings of a teen slasher movie.

Ridley Scott's Alien isn't really in the top of my favourite films of all time, but it did teach us one really important lesson: If you want your alien horror movie to have any kind of dignity, you have to base it in space, because "alien menace terrorises the countryside" is such a 50s genre that no one will take it seriously. AVP2 disregards the wisdom of RIDLEY FUCKING SCOTT and has the movie be about this teenage boy who has a crush on this girl but there's this bully who throws his keys into the sewer and he has a brother who just got back from the prison and then the girl invites him for a late-night swim and does a striptease and OMIGODALIENS!

Oh, and there's a predator in there too.

I have no freaking idea why I like this film. When I saw it for the first time in the cinema, I somehow managed to convince myself it was good. It gets extra points for somehow tricking me into that conclusion. Even when I watched it for a second time, I was like: "Well... it wasn't that good, but I still liked it..."



#2: The Patriot:

So yeah, The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson, is Braveheart, except about the United Statesian War of Independence. It's not nearly as bad a movie as AVP2, but it goes higher on my list because I usually loathe patriotic shit like this. Especially when it's a Yank circle-jerk (ironically directed by a German and starring an Aussie). It couldn't be a worse whitewash of history, or a worse libel toward Brits everywhere, if they gave Jason Isaacs horns!

But goddammit, it's one of my favourites. I'm a sucker for stories where an underdog faction wins a war through guerrilla means, and goddammit, The Patriot delivers! Even the dumbass, creepy love subplot between the protagonist and his sister-in-law somehow manages to have some kind of emotional resonance on me, and when Heath Ledger dies (uh... Heath Ledger's character dies), I can only say: "It's on now!"



#1: Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children:

Over an hour of buildup to one big fight scene, where nobody else except Cloud gets to contribute, and Sephiroth has been reduced to this kind of dumb brute whose only real purpose is to make his gay crush kneel before him. Characters who died in the game are brought back with little to no explanation, the protagonist is an emo bitch, only one cool location from the source material is featured, and most of the original locations are dull gray and brown.

That's Advent Children for you. Me? I love it. If you hate it, I can totally see why. FF7 isn't even near to being my favourite game in the franchise, and I don't have any kind of special attachment to these characters, so that seeing them in a movie would make it all worth to me. There's some some kind of inexplicable appeal in this film for me. There's nothing more shameful for me than liking shit like this without even being able to explain how.

And then there's Advent Children Complete, which makes the movie a third of an hour longer. Of those twenty minutes, exactly one is anything worthwhile. Most of it is crap about Denzel, that freaking annoying orphan boy who's even more emo than Cloud. And somehow, I've managed to convince myself that the extended version is better than the regular cut.

I should have higher standards than this.

The Avengers

The huge crossover film which the Marvel movie continuity has been building up to, The Avengers is a Joss Whedon blockbuster about Captain America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) teaming up to fight Thor's evil brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who is poised to take over Earth. However, "teaming up" is easier said that done, and Director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has to do a lot of managing to keep the team from tearing itself apart before Loki and his allies from another dimension can.

Finally, we get a movie that depicts superhero comics accurately: you need to know the central characters and premises of about half a dozen different stories to understand anything that's going on. Yay!

I was kind of wary about this film because of two things: The trailers mostly focused on a huge metropolitan battle that was cut so that it looked like it was taken right out of Transformers 3, as well as Robert Downey Jr. doing his thing, which I feel is starting to get old. Well, screw marketing, because once again it has done a great job at making a good movie look bad. Not only is that action scene they hyped way better when you don't have to butcher it to keep the invading army from appearing on screen, but they picked the worst jokes in the movie for their adverts. Not only does Downey get a lot of good lines, but everyone does. There's a surprising lot of comedy, and every character gets to crack jokes, not just the clown.

Thor and Captain America both had pacing as their biggest issue. Cap had way too little stuff happen in between his becoming a superhero and the final battle. Thor took its sweet time starting, and then had way too much build-up to a way too small climax. Avengers gets this just right. We already know these characters, there's no need to establish them any more. Let's just start off with the crisis presenting itself, then get the characters together, and then see what we can make happen with them. I'll admit I was getting worried about a quarter way in that the movie is going to suffer from having too many subplots, but thankfully most of them are resolved by the way the final action climax hits home. The movie is two hours and a third, but it accomplishes so much that you'll swear there's no way they fit all that in one hundred and forty minutes.

The performances are really good. I never saw Ed Norton's Hulk for comparison, but Mark Ruffalo is a fantastic Bruce Banner. He has the body language of a person who's trying really hard to keep themselves in check. All the returning cast keep up the high quality up, but to my surprise the standout star of the film was Tom Hiddleston. I was kind of indifferent toward Loki in Thor, because he was way too obviously evil but they tried to play him as this tragic character. Here, he's past being sympathetic, so Hiddleston gets to be a straight-up villain, and it works greatly. He does his slimy villain speeches, he addresses the people he wants to rule, he gets arrogant and he gets furious. It's just a really good basic evil villain, who is still kept fresh with expert writing.

The action is really well-done. All the characters get to shine, and their individual superpowers are used well together and never conveniently discarded to fit a scene better. The big battle scenes flow well, and you can keep track of where everyone is and what they're doing. There's this really great sweeping battle shot that I can't really describe to you all: it has to be seen to be believed. I think that Loki's evil army allies are maybe a little bit too... Stormtroopery, though at least unlike Stormtroopers, they don't get taken down by teddy bears (who would be the New York police department in this allegory, I guess).

The 3D was... okay, I guess. There was one scene early on where I had trouble telling what was happening because it was so dark, but other than that I was never bothered. There were a couple of cool 3D shots, mostly having to do with Hawkeye's crazy arrow skills, but I doubt you'll be missing much if you see it in regular 2D.

Overall, it's just a damn good film, with a tightly packed and well-crafted plot, lots of interesting and memorable characters, some good humour, great action and superhero goodness. Dark Knight Rising has to work its ass off to surpass this for the best superhero film of the summer.

The Cabin in the Woods

This is gonna be a tough one to review, because I honestly don't want to spoil anything. I went into this movie without so much as having seen a trailer. I knew from other sources that it's a Joss Whedon film, that twists are a huge part of it, and that it's about a cabin in the woods. Honestly, I think it benefited me to go in blind. If you have seen the trailers, you can probably tell whether you'll like it or not. If you haven't, please don't watch them.

You know, I think I have to confess right here and now that I this is the first Joss Whedon product I've seen. Well, aside from the ones he co-wrote (Titan A.E., Speed, Captain America) or originally wrote but had his script basically rewritten entirely (Alien Resurrection). I have a bunch of friends who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer religiously, though, so... whatever.

So, Cabin in the Woods is about five teenagers (played by Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz and Jesse Williams) who go to the countryside for a camping trip. While there, they awaken something evil, which tries to kill them... but all is not as it seems.

Yeah, that's all you're going to get from me.

As you might have guessed, Cabin is a parody of horror films. It even becomes a satire at points. However, its particular brand of satire never has the characters be meta-aware. Scary movies are never mentioned in the film, and the heroes never say "This is like a crappy horror movie!" only to have the film follow the conventions anyhow. I can see why some people have criticised it for being less clever than it thinks it is, but I really liked the humour here, and the third act is so completely out of control, I'm not sure if it's awesome in a hilarious or badass way.

The actors all do a great job, though Kranz's take on "the stoner" is especially memorable. I think that the other character pool, whose existence is a spoiler, is a little bit too excessive. They could have done it with fewer people there, but it's not really a flaw that hurts the overall product much. The special effects are fantastic. There are a few too many jump scares, in my opinion. If you're going to assault and destroy one overused convention from modern horror, then please kill jump scares.

Anyways, I think it's a fine, fine film. I dunno if I can call it game-changing, visionary or masterful, but I really liked it. Please keep this pace up, Joss Whedon, as The Avengers gets nearer and nearer.

Iron Sky

You guys saw Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, right? I hope you did. That movie kicked ass, considering it was made for practically no money during the makers' free time.

So, what if the same guys made a movie with a budget of 7.5 million €, and decided to skip the specific parody and instead focus on a more broad sci-fi concept?

You'd get Iron Sky, a movie about space nazis who escaped WW2 to the moon, and now decide to bring the fight back to an Earth that forgot about them.

And it is fucking awesome.

I'll admit, I'm not impartial about this film: it's a Finnish production, and I'm a huge fan of Star Wreck. However, I think Iron Sky has a lot going for itself in addition to the freaking awesome concept. The C-list actors they got to play in the movie are really good, the script is unconventional and has some really clever satire, the music is fantastic and the special effects are almost perfect. I really hope this film gets any kind of proper distribution around the world.

Okay, but in an attempt to be a bit more objective: The main plot of the film is about an astronaut named James Washington, who gets sent to the Moon as a publicity stunt to get the president of the USA reelected, and to snoop around for a sci-fi fuel called Helium 3. There, he runs into the aforementioned nazis, and gets taken prisoner. The two people in charge of his captivity are Klaus Adler, the second-in-command of the Moon-Führer, and his fiancé Renate Richter (no relation to the vampire-hunter family). Once they discover Washington's iPod, they find out it has enough processing power to run their ultimate doomsday weapon, and demand him to take them back Earth and show them where they can acquire a new palm-sized supercomputer (one with a full battery).

The movie's pacing and structure are interesting. Even somewhat troublesome. The first act of the film takes its time, making sure the audience understands the whole deal with the moon nazis as well as they should. However, when the characters arrive on earth the film suddenly jumps up in pace tremendously, and the transition to the final much-advertised battle is almost jarringly sudden. The structure makes it feel unlike almost any Hollywood movie, even though the production values are as good as a proper blockbuster's, and it's written so as to appeal to worldwide audiences. Star Wreck was originally just a bunch of silly internet videos made by a guy on his computer in the 90s, and a part of its parody was that Tampere, Finland is the central hub of all civilisation in the galaxy. In Iron Sky, Finland is only mentioned once, in what I consider the best joke of the film.

The most famous actor in the film is Udo Kier, who plays the Moon-Führer. Though he's been in Ace Ventura, Blade and Armageddon, to me he will always be Yuri from Red Alert 2. And really, when he commences der meteorblitzkrieg, the silly-yet-awesome craziness is like something right out of the Red Alert series (and RA3 had parachute bear troopers, so that's saying something). No one else present has any kind of cred I'm aware of, but I think the performances are really good overall. I respect that the creators of the film kept themselves out of the screen, lest they break disbelief with their accents.

The comedy is somewhat hit-and-miss. There's a couple of low-hanging-fruit gags here and there, and I know some people have criticised the film for making the president of the USA a Sarah Palin parody. However, I really liked a lot of the gags, even though they represent a kind of humour that may not work so well to audiences on the other side of the Atlantic. My main problem, though, is that the main characters aren't that interesting or well-developed. I didn't really care whether they survive in the end.

If this film is shown anywhere near you, go see it. The guys who made it deserve the success, and big Hollywood studios need to be made aware that there's an audience for over-the-top silly sci-fi fun.

Wrath of the Titans

The 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans was one of the most lame, clichéd, boring blockbusters of the past few years. It consisted of hard-to-follow action scenes, glued together by contrived exposition scenes and a plot that I want to nominate for most predictable of all time.

Wrath of the Titans is the fresh-out-of-the-oven sequel, and I can't believe they managed to outdo the original in badness.

Sam Worthington returns as Perseus, the demigod son of Zeus (Liam Neeson). In the end of the last movie, Zeus resurrected Perseus' love interest Io (despite Hades being the lord of the dead) so the two can live happily and mortally for all their years. In the beginning of the sequel, Io has died again, and left Perseus with a twelve(ish)-year-old son. Now that the gods are losing their power, the walls of Tartarus are... actually, none of this matters. They go and fight a bunch of monsters, as well as Ares and Hades, to save Zeus from being used as a catalyst to resurrect Kronos (SUPER BIG LAVA MAN). There's your plot.

None of the characters are consistent between movies. Zeus has suddenly turned into Jesus Christ, apparently so overwhelmed by his character development in the first movie that now he's become a xerox of the human-loving Zeus in Immortals. Also, his war with Hades at the end of Clash is handwaved away, so that Hades' "betrayal" at the beginning of Wrath can be made shocking. Perseus apparently got over his hatred of the gods so well that now he thinks he's "not worthy" because he's not a full god. Andromeda, damsel in distress of the first film, is now the Queen of Greece (what?) instead of being the Princess of Argos.

The movie isn't even consistent with itself. It's established early on that the Gods are becoming mortal because humanity doesn't pray to them anymore, but later on a big plot point is made about how the soldiers Perseus is saddled with have a reflex-like habit of praying to Ares, and if they do he'll know where they are. And here's another: At the end, the Redshirt army stays back to "hold the line" while Perseus finds the means to kill Kronos. ...except that they're not really defending anything. They're just camped out in a valley. What are they trying to keep Kronos' army from reaching, the stone wall behind themselves?

I mean, I can see why they just gave up: The first film had a terrible plot, and other than "Zeus vs. Hades", it didn't have much material to work on in a sequel. But at least it tried. I can't believe I'm giving Clash of the Titans this admission: it tried.

But okay, a worthless story can be forgiven for other strengths. Wrath's trailers showed some cool stuff with the Titans coming and killing people and stuff. Well, I guess they would be cool if the action scenes didn't suffer from some of the worst Too-Rapid-Editing-Syndrome I've ever seen, as well as really bad scripting. Perseus kills like three monsters by choking them. Come on, the least this movie can do is have some imaginative kills. And by "imaginative", I do not mean "Perseus suplexes Ares".

Oh yeah. Perseus suplexes Ares. There's professional wrestling in this movie about Greek Mythology.

There are only two good things about this film. Bill Nighy gets a fifteen-minute role as Hephasteus, whom he plays as "Davy Jones with an even thicker Scottish accent trying to act like Jack Sparrow". That's some of the funniest shit I've seen in a while. Also, Sam Worthington no longer has a buzzcut.

Don't see this film. It's shit. If you decide to ignore my warnings, then at least don't see it in 3D. The 3D is pointless and doesn't add anything to the movie. You'll just be wasting even more of your money.

John Carter (of Mars)

Neither of the Martian moons are that big.

I recently saw The Artist. However, I didn't end up writing a review, because really, what can I say about a movie that already won Best Picture and thus became the official target for all "OVERRATED OSCARBAIT" accusations in the world? In the same way, reviewing John Carter is kind of hard now that it's turned out to be the biggest box office bomb in the history of cinema. Disney is losing 200 000 000$ on this film. Now that's a statistic, which is hard to wrap your head around, so let's put it in perspective: Chronicle and The Artist (films far superior to John Carter) both cost fifteen million to make. In 1994, True Lies was the most expensive film ever made. It cost somewhere between 100 million and 120 million. With just the money Disney lost on John Carter, you could make True lies, Chronicle, The Artist and still have tens of millions to spend.

And this movie isn't even doing badly, per se. It has made plenty of money (most of it in the "foreign" market). It's just that when your movie costs a quarter billion to make, it has to be miraculously good or it bombs. Simple math.

But yeah, aside from preferring Chronicle and The Artist over it, what did I think of John Carter? Now that's another tough nut to crack. My brother pointed out that while I said it was "pretty okay" when I came from the cinema, I've been talking about it very excitedly since. The thing is, the movie isn't really good, so much as it's interesting. It's based on a series of books by the author of Tarzan, which premiered a hundred years ago. The books influenced the sci-fi and fantasy genres so much it's not even funny. Everything from Superman to Super Mario Bros lives in this franchise's shadow.

So when you're adapting something so archetypical to a movie in present day, you've got two choices. Either leave the plot as it was, and thus suffer accusations of unoriginality and clichédness, or change it around to make it more fresh, and thus suffer the wrath of purists. I don't have any answer to this dilemma, and I'm not sure if the choices to pick Answer #1 worked for Carter or not. Make no mistake: this plot is very predictable and bland, but what did you except from something a hundred years old? I went in to see interesting visual designs and cool action scenes, and I kind of got what I went in for. It's hard to be disappointed by the film that lost 200 million to its makers.

Oh, I assume you want to know what it's about, then? Well, I can't blame you. It's not like I knew the books that well until a month ago, and the marketing for this film has been atrocious. John Carter is a former cavalryman of the Confederate army of the United States. He tries to find gold in Arizona, but instead finds a strange bald man who tries to kill him. During a brawl between the two, John gets zapped to Mars. There, he gets tangled in a crazy-ass civil war where shadowy figures are manipulating one side. Also, since Mars has lower gravity than Earth, John can jump super-high and is super-strong. So he saves a princess and becomes a hero and settles down on a world that feels more like home than Earth does.

Now whether you can handle the clichéd plot like I can, that's up to you. But what I can criticise in a less subjective light is the script. The comedy is really bad (in fact, the more light-hearted beginning set on Earth is so out of tone that thinking back on it after the movie has ended feels like you're remembering a different film altogether). The romance comes off as annoying. I also think that the altered framing device they use, instead of the book's "he died and then he woke back on Earth" thing, is a really bad move. The last ten minutes of the movie are really bad and rushed.

The action works well most of the time. It succumbs to Too-Rapid-Editing-Syndrome (TRES) at times, but I have to say that the scene where John is jumping from airship to airship during a mid-air skirmish is damn impressive. Other than that, it's the basic good action-adventure thing you'd expect from a Disney blockbuster. The effects are really good, and all the Martian species look damn impressive, but there isn't really any jaw-dropping scene you'd expect from a quarter-billion film. As for the 3D... I actually forgot this film was in 3D until just now. It added jack shit to the movie, but at least it didn't harm it because most of it takes place in bright environments.

Yeah, overall John Carter is a pretty average film. I liked the mythology and the design of everything, and I didn't really get bored at any point. I'm not sure whether I can actually recommend it to anyone. As I said, it's more interesting than it is good. Take it for what it's worth.

Chronicle

The film isn't nearly this gray.

Chronicle is another attempt to "grittify" the superhero genre. No costumes, no epic secret origins, no secret identities. It's even shot in a "found footage" style (y'know, like Cloverfield, except from the POVs of several different cameras instead of just one) to tap into the spirit of the modern time. I don't think it's really revolutionary or anything, but I did like it.

The film's about three high schoolers (Andrew, Matt and Steve) who get telekinetic superpowers from exposure to a mysterious crystal in an underground cave. Andrew is the quiet, friendless geek who has a really hard life at home and has coincidentally decided to start filming everything with a camcorder. Steve is the party animal whom everyone in the school likes, and who tends to act impulsively when he gets excited. Matt is... uh, Andrew's cousin. Who likes philosophy, I guess.

The teens start to explore different uses for their powers. Much of the middle of the movie is like a youtube video of a bunch of idiots doing really reckless stuff, but only with superpowers instead of booze. However, things heat up and the guys' new-found friendship breaks apart in a conflict where each combatant has the power to rip through buildings with just a thought.

The characters and plot are an interesting thing to me: I tend to be really averse to stories (both real and fictional) where a bunch of idiots mess something up and act like jackasses while filming everything. However, Chronicle makes it work... most of the time. Even though the "training phase" takes place over several weeks of in-universe time, the three protagonists don't really seem to put "not being discovered" very high on their list of priorities. A lot of the time, their antics are actually kind of amusing, but every now and then there's a scene that makes me groan.

The performances are okay, but nothing spectacular, and the overall story is pretty well done, except for a weird character arc thing. I felt like the "training phase" in the movie stopped all character development on its tracks for about half an hour, and when the third act nears, Andrew and Matt suddenly get traits that were never there before. The film suddenly feels it needs to have a hero and a villain, and the characterisation shift just feels forced. Also, Andrew gets a scene with his mother where she gives him his big motto (which is used a grand total of twice in the film), but the dialogue makes no sense. Why is she saying "You are stronger than this"? Stronger than what?

The "found footage"-style is done well, in my opinion. I felt a little dizzy early in the movie (though that may have been hunger), but once the heroes start levitating the camera steadily around themselves, it gets less disorienting. The final fight scene uses a lot of different cameras, including security footage and news footage, for different angles. It doesn't feel gimmicky, and the characters rarely talk to the camera.

Overall, I think it's a damn fine film. It has great effects, nice comedy and a somewhat thought-provoking story. It's worth seeing, unless you get motion sickness really easily or can't stand high school drama.



---



There's something I want to talk about in this movie, but which requires me to spoil the film. I'm putting it here, after the review proper. SPOILERS ARE BELOW THIS PARAGRAPH.

The movie ends up making Andrew the bad guy. He loses his shit, accidentally kills Steve and goes on a rampage so Matt has to stop him. As I mentioned above, the writers added random evilness to Andrew in the late second act, which come out of nowhere. Conversely, Matt's random love interest feels really intrusive and plays almost no role in the film other than underlining this guy is good for the audience.

Personally, I really identified with Andrew for most of the film. Almost to a worrying extent. When he starts going nuts, I was totally with him. He tears three teeth off the mouth of one of his bullies. I don't know what it speaks about me, but I can totally get behind that, though I'd think it would be wrong if the story had Andrew use non-fantastic means to achieve this feat. If he kicked the shit out of his bully, I couldn't root for him. When he uses telekinetic powers, I cheer.

Andrew's father is one of the worst monsters I've seen in a film. Period. One of my main issues with Chronicle is that the character survives. He deserved to die a thousand times over, and Hell would have been too good for him. In the end, they do a scene where it looks like the father is about to get sympathetic, which made me groan, but to my relief he actually gets even worse. If they'd tried to do a "he's not so bad" turn for him, I'd have been seriously pissed off.

The writers probably weren't intending anything by making the awkward nerd turn into a psychopath, but some of the parts of the story are a bit unfortunate. Andrew's bullies are all jock idiots, but later he gives into peer pressure and tries to conform. He fails, and that's when his big turn to evil happens. I think the movie tries to put the good old "peer pressure makes you evil" thing, but it ends up feeling more like "he's so bad at this that he can't even be the cool guy everyone likes! Obviously there's something wrong with him."

I dunno. I like a movie that makes me think. Hope this rant makes any sense.

The Grey

The premise for The Grey is very simple, and kind of familiar. That is to say, the same movie basically already exists in the form of 1997's The Edge. Only, in that case it's Anthony Hopkins instead of Liam Neeson, a bear instead of a pack of wolves, and if I recall correctly, that movie was way less good.

Liam Neeson plays a hunter who works for an oil refinery to keep the wildlife at bay in Alaska (apparently they can't afford fences). He is depressed and finds no purpose in his life, only to have things shaken up when his plane crashes into the snowy wilderness. He has to rally the survivors and try to make it back to civilisation. Unnaturally persistent wolves hunt for them, picking the group apart one by one.

Right, so it's a survival drama movie. What's it got going for itself? Well, I'm a fan of Neeson, though that's mostly because he looks uncannily like my dad. He's a good actor, though, and I can't recall a movie where he'd been bad per se. The other actors are also good, and the side characters are written well enough that they don't come off as stereotypes who are only there to be killed. The wolves are really well executed, and come off as really menacing, their presence hanging over the film throughout.

Now here's something the marketing really lied about: There's way less action in the film than the trailers would let you believe. It's a more about suspense and the characters. I prefer it this way, but I can see if some people are put off by the difference. The ending may also disappoint some people, but I liked it.

Now here's something I rarely comment on or notice in a film: The Grey has excellent sound effects and sound editing. When the plane crashes, the film does its best to deafen half the audience, and it really feels like a huge hunk of metal is ripping apart. Every impact in the film is accompanied with a violent sound that makes the viewer feel the blow. The howling of the wolves is damn scary. I actually think that watching this outside the cinema will be way less impressive due to the lowered sound fidelity.

The directing and editing are top-notch: in the beginning, the main character's depression is portrayed more through camera angles and muted sounds than Neeson's melodramatic monologue. Throughout the journey, the cameraman and composer are playing with the viewer's expectations to make it as hard to tell as possible when a wolf is going to show up.

I really liked it. Aside from some pacing issues, faulty marketing and an over-reliance on Liam Neeson, it's an A-grade drama/suspense/action flick. And though this is really ridiculous, I have to add in the fact that Ridley Scott is the producer and they had someone wear a Weyland-Yutani baseball cap. I'm way too easily amused.

This Means War

The film is as dull as this poster.

This movie suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked.

I don't usually put things that bluntly. I mean, I gave Transformers 3 and freaking Immortals a fair treatment, but this film was just so bad. I went in knowing it would suck ("you gotta see one shitty movie a year to appreciate the good ones" was my mantra that day), only to be thoroughly surprised by the depths of suckitude contained within.

This Means War is a romantic comedy/action film about two CIA agents who are grounded after they fail a mission. To pass off the time, they decide to get back into dating, and accidentally both hit it off with the same girl. They decide to let her choose which one to keep, but slowly start to utilise their CIA equipment and resources to spy on her and sabotage each others' dates.

It's basically "True Lies meets There's Something About Mary". Except without the fantastic action of the former and the genuine amusement of the latter.

The three lead characters are played by Chris Pine (as the slick, super-arrogant ladies man), Tom Hardy (as the safer divorcee) and Reese Witherspoon (as a love interest whose only real personality is her wacky job and even wackier best friend). All of them at least try, but none are given good enough material to make their characters likeable. The guys come off as creepy and obsessed, and never get punished for probably wasting millions of dollars on their childish antics, and the girl only exists to present new challenges for them to overcome.

The script is annoying and really bad. There are "running gags" which only happen twice in the whole movie, and thus make no freaking sense and are not funny. The different "romantic" scenarios are badly planned and make little to no sense. The subplot with a vengeful gangster trying to get revenge of the CIA agents is so thin it might as well not exist. What's more, the film is really badly paced, with an over-reliance on montages to pad itself out.

The action is badly shot, and it's hard to tell what's happening a lot of the time. None of the chase scenes or shootouts are memorable at all. The few jokes that could have been good are all shown in the trailer. The cinematography is bad. The music is forgettable, other than the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" when the guys are ruining each others' dates (GET IT?). The resolution at the end is so predictable and unimaginative, it's bad even by romantic comedy standards. It's just an all-around bad movie...

And I had a blast watching it. Me and my friends were laughing so hard at how bad this was, and at how most of the audience seemed to eat it up (or maybe they were being as ironic as we were). We had a great time in the cinema, that day, but the movie is still shit, plain and simple.

Carnage

This poster sums up the movie perfectly.

Two eleven-year-olds have a fight. Zachary hits Ethan in the face with a stick, causing him to lose two teeth. The parents of the kids meet up to have a civil discussion about the matter, and talk about what needs to be done over espresso and cake.

Penelope Longstreet (Jodie Foster), Ethan's mother, is an artistic soul who believes in humanitarianism and strives to help the peoples of Africa by writing a book about their suffering. Her husband Michael (John C. Reilly) is a rough and honest man's man who sells kitchen and toilet apparel for a living. Nancy Cowan (Kate Winslet), Zachary's mother, is a sophisticated, calm woman who wants to get this all over with, while her spouse Alan (Christoph Waltz) is a lawyer who can't go ten minutes without answering a phone call about "the most important case in his life", and who believes his son is a lunatic who'll never learn to not hit people.

As the four characters talk, their civility starts to erode, their conflicts start to heat up, and eventually they get drunk off some scotch and have violent arguments about increasingly irrelevant topics.

It's readily apparent that Roman Polanski's Carnage is based on a stage play: for 95% of the movie, there are only four characters and only one locale. It happens in real time: it's a 75-minute film about a 75-minute argument between four people. Due to the minimalistic approach, the quality of the movie depends solely on two things: the writing and the acting. And those two things are great. I love how flawed these characters are. They're all scumbags in their own way, and all their character flaws get critiqued and examined by the others. The various shouting matches between them see all kinds of alliances: at several times, the spouses are arguing amongst themselves and the other couple splits up on their view of the matter.

The actors all do a great job. Christoph Waltz manages to be so very, very arrogant and annoying. Almost every time he opens his mouth, you can't help but laugh and shake your head at his delivery. Jodie Foster has one of the best on-screen nervous breakdowns I've seen in a film, Kate Winslet does a fantastic job at portraying a character who becomes a completely different person when drunk, and John C. Reilly sells his role so well, I'm having a hard time believing he acted at all.

There isn't much else to say. The editing and shooting are both done in a minimalistic style, where you don't notice them. It fits the style of the movie. The only real criticism I have is that it ends too suddenly. It was just the right length, but I wish there had been more denouement for the characters.

I definitely recommend this film, if you're the sort that likes talky, character-focused movies. Movie year 2012 started out strong for me, with a film I first heard of two days before I saw it.