2/24/12

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.

2/19/12

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.

2/10/12

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.