Category: movie

Goddamnit, Anne Hathaway. Must you punch me in the heart and make me cry in every one of your scenes?

This movie has some amazing things going for it. Namely, Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman. They really make the movie with beautiful singing and intense emotion. I’ve seen Les Mis on stage before, and Fantine never made me cry like Anne Hathaway did. Her rendition of I Dreamed a Dream was the angriest I’ve ever heard, and she convinced me. (And honestly, it makes sense for Fantine to be angry as well as despairing, because this wasn’t how her life was supposed to be.) And I know a lot of people were side-eyeing the Hugh Jackman thing, apparently unaware of the fact that the man was in musicals on stage for years and even won a Tony. But it shows in this movie, it really does. Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen do a pretty good turn as the scumbag Thenardiers as well, though HBC really just kind of felt like Mrs. Lovett revisited with a bit less cannibalism.

The rest of the movie, I had more reservations about. Russell Crowe does a technically competent job of singing, but he doesn’t seem to emote very well when he does it. Which is too bad, since Javert is a character that takes a lot of conviction in song. There was only one instance in the movie (near the beginning when he fights with Jean Valjean in the hospital) that I really felt anything out of him, and the rest was… pretty flat.

I also honestly did not like the way the movie was shot. I know one of the great things about movies versus stage is that it lets us get right up there with the characters and see into their eyes. Which is great. But it would have been nice if the director had given the characters some goddamn space once in a while. I felt like 90% of the movie was closeups, and it started getting both claustrophobic and annoying after a while. Half the time I completely lost sense of place with the characters because you couldn’t see anything but their face and a colorful blur for the background. I’m sure there were some nice sets and costumes in the movie, but I feel like I didn’t see a hell of a lot of them. The face is important for expression, yes, but how about some arms? Some legs? For all I know, Hugh Jackman was wearing running shorts in half his scenes because we never see him below the shoulders.

Honestly, I prefer the stage production.

Is the movie worth seeing? I’d say yes. Anne Hathaway will ruin Les Mis for every other Fontine. Hugh Jackman is excellent. (You get well acquainted with the inside of his mouth considering the amount of time the camera spends staring down it, but hey, he’s got nice teeth.) Is it worth showing to someone that’s musical phobic that you’d never be able to drag to a stage production? Definitely.

But will the movie make you like Les Mis if you didn’t before? Unless your problem was that Fontine didn’t reach out from the stage and punch you directly in the emotions and you wanted a more intimate relationship with Jean Valjean’s tonsils, probably not. Story and music-wise, it’s just like the stage version. To quote my best friend’s dad: “They sang and they died and they died and they sang and they sang and they sang and they died and they sang.”

Basically that. But it does make a lovely bit of Oscar bait. If Anne Hathaway doesn’t get a nomination out of this, I am going down to the award ceremony and flipping the entire goddamn stage.

I wish I could say I came out of this movie with my concerns about the book being split into a trilogy assuaged. I really do.

I’m afraid not.

I’m left wondering why this needed to be a trilogy of nearly three hour movies, and not, say, a two parter. It definitely needed to be longer than a single movie, but right now it feels really stretched out, sometimes palpably dragging. I wasn’t one of the people who thought The Fellowship of the Ring dragged when it came out, but this one had me wondering just how many wooden bridges I really needed to see a pack (a hoard? a buffet?) of dwarves run across. I also wondered why the hell we needed two prologues, one of which (regarding Thorin) would have been better served by being described during the story I think.

There was a lot about the movie that I loved, though. I though Martin Freeman was great as Bilbo. I almost died of squee during the riddles in the dark sequence. While I still have no idea what half the dwarves are named, at least some of them (other than Brooding Dwarf — I mean Thorin) really stand out and have very distinctive personalities so I could keep track of them. And shockingly I was very glad to see some of the additional scenes, such as the conversation between Saruman, Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel. That was very cool, and I enjoyed seeing more character development and the foreshadowing of things to come. (Also, anyone else find themselves wondering what might be between Gandalf and Galadriel?)

One small but important thing I’m very excited about is that two of the songs from the book made it in at least. I wish there could have been more of the singing, once they got away from the hobbit hole. Songs are such a major part of the book.

Visually, it was just as pretty as the original (if that’s even the right term) trilogy. I just saw it in normal 24 fps with no 3D, and I thought that was plenty. I don’t do 3D anyway since it gives me headaches, and I’m not sure if a super sharp picture would have helped anything.

I laughed, I enjoyed most of the fight scenes (until they got a little too stretched out), and I’ll be happy to see the next part. I’m looking forward to hearing Benedict Cumberbatch be an evil dragon. I do hope it’s more dragon-y and a less draggy.

If you’re one of the two people in the entire continental United States that hasn’t seen Wreck-It Ralph yet, you really, really should.

It’s definitely the best Disney movie I’ve seen in years. It’s cute, it’s funny, and it’s got a lot of heart, but not in the oh god it’s the after-school-special kind of way. You can tell the angle of approach from the bad guy affirmation of Bad-Anon: I am bad, and that’s good. I’ll never be good, and that’s not bad. There’s no one I’d rather be than me. But I really liked the approach taken; within the world of video games, bad guys are obviously a vital part of the ecosystem, and part of the movie is about the good guys learning that.

I’ve seen it twice already and definitely wouldn’t mind seeing it again. (Only there’s currently a brazillion movies out right now I want to see, holy shit November what’s up with you.) But if you’re a gamer nerd like me, the more times you see it, the more fun video game stuff you can pick out. (There’s a list of video game character cameos over at the Disney Wiki.)

You don’t have to be a big video game nerd to like it. Sure, those of us who have been playing since Atari will get a lot of the cameos and have some good laughs (OMG AERITH LIVES), but the main story takes place in two made-up games (Hero’s Duty and Sugar Rush) and you don’t even really have to be that familiar with first person shooters or racing games to get what’s going on. It’s all very evident from the story. (The script writers, by the way, deserve a hearty handshake.)

I loved all the main characters. Calhoun (voiced by Jane Lynch) is definitely my favorite, though. She has the most tragic back story ever! (I’m thinking this might seem extra hilarious if you have a few RPGs under your belt.) Also Felix sounded so very, very familiar – I had to remind myself later that Jack McBrayer is Kenneth in 30 Rock and yes, Felix sounds just like that, to hilarious effect. Also, Alan Tudyk voices King Candy, which I didn’t even realize until I got to the credits and was like wait a second, that’s Wash?

As a note for people with kids, the movie has a PG rating, and I think it’s mostly inoffensive stuff, cartoonish violence and the like. However, the bit of the movie in Hero’s Duty could be scary for little kids, since it’s got the space-marine-bug-invasion-first-person-shooter thing going on, and at the very end the bad guy looks seriously creepy to the point that my first thought was how much he would probably scare the pants off my niece. So just be aware of that.

There’s also an animated short before the movie called Paperman. It’s probably the cutest short I’ve seen in a while, and it’s about paper airplanes and love.

Nicely done, Disney.

This will come as no surprise since hey, it’s a video game movie, but Silent Hill: Revelation is a bad movie. And it’s not even gleefully bad like The Man With the Iron Fists. It’s just really… plodding and inadequate and hey look I guess Sean Bean got a paycheck, good for him.

(Spoilers of course, but trust me, you don’t care.)

The setting was nice, the monsters mostly well done (though a bit too obviously CGI for my taste, though the mannequin monster feeling up the boob of the newly made plastic lady was nicely creepy), and the musical score was excellent. The room scene with the nurse demons was nicely creepy, even if all of us were left wondering what made the two dumbest cultist foot soldiers ever decide that a room full of nurse demons was the place to go. But that’s all I can really say that’s positive, and that does not a decent movie make. The makeup on several of the characters, by the way, is utterly awful. And the story itself is completely incoherent, with all of the explanatory scenes a word salad of cultist terms that don’t actually make sense even if you have played the games.

Really, the inexplicable scene with the nurse demons points to one of the movie’s most major flaws. In these games, you do a lot of running into random places, herded by monsters, and you simply accept that sure I’m going to pick up the wax doll and the horseshoe so I can later make a handle for a trap door because that’s how I get to the next area and I want to beat the game. (For the record, that is actually a thing you do in Silent Hill 2.) That doesn’t work so well in a movie because you’re not participating. Instead you’re forced to just watch other people to nonsensical things and wonder just who the hell would even think that was a good idea.

Silent Hill: Revelation is actually an uncomfortable mix of Silent Hill 3 and Silent Hill: Homecoming. It’s got a lot of plot elements from SH3, but more of the monsters and setting are straight out of Homecoming, which makes it weird if you’re a dedicated fan of the games. There was also a lot of twisting of the SH3 plot, combining elements that it really made no sense to combine, and then the wheels just really come off at the end when suddenly Heather and Alessa basically hug it out as their epic finally battle and Claudia is actually a boss monster called the Missionary.

Also, Victor is inexplicably Heather’s teenaged love interest, and Kit Harrington can’t figure out what the hell his accent is, which doesn’t help matters.

There are a lot of things in this movie that left me wondering why these choices were made. Look, if you want to make Silent Hill 3 into a movie, it had a perfectly serviceable plot that could have worked, I think. If you want to make your own original movie set in Silent Hill because it’s an interesting setting with a lot of potential stories, I think that would actually be amazing and way more interesting than just remaking a video game. But trying to combine the two by not quite telling the story of Silent Hill 3 is really not the way to go. It confuses the fans of the series (or out and out pisses them off) and just makes for a story that has no internal logic.

For example, Claudia. She was a scary character on her own. She didn’t need to be transformed into the Missionary (one of the boss monsters). It’s not a nod to the game that Silent Hill fans would really want, since Claudia was Claudia and the Missionary was the Missionary and they were both very frightening on their own; adding them together does not multiply the scares, trust me. It also means that Heather loses much of her badassery because instead of defeating Claudia and getting closure from that woman’s manipulations, she goes on to not personally defeat the Missionary (more on this later).

To be honest, what I disliked most about the movie was what they did with Pyramid Head. I was right to be worried. Suddenly he’s been transformed from Sir Not Appearing In This Game (though arguably the monster Valtiel in SH3 has similarities) to Heather’s protector. No, really. He shows up twice to save her, once so he can chop off the arms of all the people in the asylum because they’re trying to pull Heather’s hair and scaring her, and once so he can fight the Missionary for her. The movie ends not with Heather being a badass and saving herself, but with what is basically a clash of the Titans where the audience is put in the strange position of cheering for Pyramid Head.

I’m guessing perhaps this has something to do with Pyramid Head’s popularity with the fans, but turning him into something quasi-good is really not the way to reward that.

I will note that I found the ending of the movie the most entertaining part, by the way. After Heather and Victor (sigh) escape Silent Hill (Sean Bean inexplicably decides to stay behind, I guess he just wanted the hell out of this franchise) they get picked up by a trucker… named Travis. And then pass by a prison bus being escorted by the police in the opposite direction. So that was amusing.

If you’re a fan of Silent Hill, don’t waste your money seeing this in the theater. And if you’re not a fan, really don’t waste your money.

This should come as no surprise, but The Man With the Iron Fists is a bad movie. A very, very bad movie. But it revels gleefully in its badness, a hodgepodge of one-liners glued together with endlessly spurting, ruby-red fake blood. This is not a movie that you see because you want martial arts or a decent action flick. This is a movie you see because you went to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and thought well yes, but what this movie needs is more obviously fake gore and bad Elvira wigs.

There’s really nothing to this movie but fight scenes that are comedic in their brutality and groan-worthy one-liners that are held together by weirdly laconic exposition by RZA, who informs you periodically what the plot is doing. But let’s be clear. There isn’t really plot to this movie. It’s a fabrication that exists so that characters can move from point A to point B and then throw around a lot of blood. While the movie itself has an impressive color palette (particularly the whore house, where everything is in a highly disturbing shade of pink) everything potentially emotional is flat and muted because feelings are really just there as a reason to punch someone’s goddamn head off.

Near the beginning, Yen Zi (the X-blade) gets a note that reads: Your father is dead. The circumstances of this caused everyone in the theater to laugh. This is the kind of experience you have throughout the entire movie.

According to IMDB, the original cut of the movie was 4 hours long, and then it was reduced to 90 minutes. I’m forced to wonder, had it been left at the original, epic length would it:
a) have made sense
b) not been a comedy

The plot, such as it is, is fairly straightforward. I think. There are a bunch of clans, inexplicably named after animals. The Lion Clan (extra hilarious if you’ve ever played L5R) has a coup occur within it when The Artist Formerly Known a Prince Silver Lion kills daddy Gold Lion and then tries to have his son Yen Zi murdered too. Then kills a lot of other people because… reasons, including at least one other clan. He also seems very concerned about the Hyena Clan which, to my memory, never actually appears so perhaps it’s some sort of hallucination on his part. He also steals a shipment of gold from the governor (a stern man with large eyebrows who has no actual lines and just poses on an enormous golden throne) and hides it under the whore house.

Yen Zi thinks all of this is a bad idea and tries to stop it, which means Brass Body (pro wrestler Dave Bautista) beats the snot out of him. The Blacksmith (RZA) who is incidentally the only black guy in the village, saves Yen Zi, nurses him back to health, and gets his arms chopped off for his trouble. Jack Knife (Russell Crowe), who has been hanging around chewing on the scenery and being weird, oversexed and not nearly as fabulous as Silver Lion, then saves the Blacksmith and helps him make some metal arms – and thus the movie gains its title. Together, Yen Zi, Jack, and the Blacksmith team up and kill… everyone. Basically. Well, Ultra Fabulous Lion kills Madam Blossom (Lucy Liu) as she tries to save a child for a reason none of us could figure out. Then Russell Crowe as Jack rides off into the sunset still reminding the audience that yes I am totally a British guy trust me and the Blacksmith swears off making weapons forever because violence is bad, that’s why we just sat through 90 minutes of nothing but.

The martial arts scenes are fairly unimpressive. There’s a lot of wire work  that’s all right, if you’re in to wire work. See it if you want a movie that feels like it’s having fun with all the tropes of bad martial arts movies. See it if you want to witness Russell Crowe hilariously sneaking around the village in disguise as obviously the only white guy in the entire county (who also has a prominent and easily identified facial scar). See it so you can witness Byron Mann in a bad wig being a fabulous bastard and Daniel Wu with hilariously overdone eyebrows. See it so you can witness Dave Bautista, with apparent seriousness answer the line “I thought all the tiger were dead!” with “Yes, because I killed them!”

I laughed more in this movie than I had in the last comedy I went to. If you’re the sort of person that likes MST3K and was willing to pay real money for a ticket to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, go for it, get some popcorn, and enjoy. If you demand that your movies do things like, I don’t know, make sense, this is not for you.

If you do go, just wait until you get to the (gasp) Gemini Stance! And then imagine an entire row of students from a kung fu school laughing hysterically. Because that’s exactly what happened.

This might get my geek card taken away, I realize. Oh wait, no, you can’t take my geek card. John Scalzi says so.

But this is the thing. For the most part, I actually don’t care about bad science in movies. Sure, there’s the occasional face-clutching howler (red matter? a black hole that’s going to destroy an entire galaxy? Wow, Star Trek, just wow.) but outside of that, 98% of the time, I seriously don’t care. Spaceships that don’t fly like spaceships should fly and make noise in space? Meh.

What I want a movie to do is tell me a good story. Or failing that tell me a really fun one. If the movie is doing its job at that, then I’m probably not even going to notice the shitty excuse for science. I’m going to be too busy watching villains get punched in the face or clutching the edge of my seat because oh god are these people going to make it or grow up or get back together I need to know.

I do think there are times (cough Total Recall cough) when the MacGuffin is too ridiculous to just accept, or when if the writers had actually spent five minutes on the internet and taken a look at the real science, it would have made the story stronger. But for the most part, the point is the story, not a technical lesson in how spaceships should really fly.

And frankly, I think if you or I can spend our entire time complaining bitterly about all the tortured science, that shows that the movie (or television show, etc) has failed at telling us that story and making us care. Because that means we’re so bored or annoyed or overwhelmed by the sheer stupidity of the base concept that we’d rather pick apart the technical details than pay attention to what the characters are doing. I’d argue that the problem at the base of those movies isn’t the bad science, it’s the failure of the story itself to engage.

Prometheus is an excellent example of this, I think. If I’d actually given two shits about any of those characters and hadn’t found their decisions inexplicable and stupid, I wouldn’t have cared about how grossly ridiculous the more technical details of the story were. (eg: I just had major abdominal surgery and now I’m going to basically run a triathlon. I rolled my eyes until I strained something.) For goodness sake, I loved the hell out of Looper even though if I wanted to I probably could have just gone to town on the way the time travel was handled. But I didn’t care at the time and still don’t because any mistakes (intentional or not) that were made occurred in the service of a damn good, engaging story.

Remember, you can’t take my geek card.

I’ve often heard Contact held up as a paragon to all nerddom because the science was done right. I know some people that really, really liked that movie. If you’re one of them, good on you. I thought it was all right, but I’ve seen it a grand total of once and have never felt compelled to watch it again, which is a strange thing for me since I’m a compulsive movie re-watcher at my heart. (Don’t ask how many times I’ve watched Avengers. Just. Don’t.) I think that highlights that as far as I’m concerned, the correctness of the technical background really has no meaning unless the story grabs me and won’t let me go.

I would further argue that, if it is in the service of a good story, rules should be bent and broken.

(Next: yes, but is it the responsibility of a movie to have good science?)

Saw Looper today with my best friend and it was seventeen kinds of awesome, but first, this:

Have you seen this? Has there ever been a more unintentionally(?) hilarious trailer in the history of the US with the possible exception of the one for Battleship?

The first Red Dawn was an intensely silly movie, but at least it kind of made more sense, being toward the end of the Cold War and all when Russia was still pretty scary. Obviously, remaking it can’t involve Russia any more because they’re sort of our friend (except for the part where they cockblock everything we do ever in the UN Security Council but wevs) so what are we picking instead?

North Korea? Just… North Korea?

That realization makes the trailer utterly hilarious. Come on people. North Korea can’t even manage to hit Japan with a single missile. Shots of squadrons of airplanes and tanks rolling down highways? What is this even? Plus some kind of magical secret weapon operated by a very serious Asian man in a nice set of fatigues. (You can tell he’s North Korean because he has only one facial expression; that’s a country that can’t support fripperies like soldiers that can be both stoic and angry.) Also, I can’t help but wonder why the hell North Korea, if we lived in a magical world where they had these kind of resources, would be invading the United States instead of, gosh I don’t know, South Korea.

It’s ridiculous. I’m guessing that’s why never once in the trailer do they say it’s North Korea, because it’s such a howler. Instead, it’s just a giant army of scary Asian guys invading part of America because… reasons. One can only surmise that they hate our freedom. PFFFFFFT.

Bonus points if you imagine Chris Hemsworth dressed as Thor while he’s doing this, by the way.

But anyway. Looper. This is without a doubt the best science fiction movie I have seen in years. While I’m sure you could spend ages nitpicking apart the time travel fuckery that is central to it, that doesn’t change the fact that it is a good story, told about fascinating characters.

If nothing else, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis make an intense team showing how much a man can change in thirty years, and also how little. The character of Joe is still capable of the same kind of horrific brutality in the before and after, but for incredibly different reasons. It leaves you wondering just how much the reasons even matter, however.

Pierce Gagnon is excellent as Cid, the creepiest child that has ever existed on film outside of a horror movie. And Jeff Daniels as Abe makes a wonderful mob boss. He’s so weirdly avuncular that you can’t quite understand why anyone is afraid of him up until he cheerful breaks a fuck-up’s hand with a hammer. Then you realize that he can be that jolly because he’s an absolutely horrific person.

Abe: I’m from the future. I’m telling you to go to Shanghai.
Joe: I’m going to France.

It’s a wonderful exchange.

The only complaint I really have about the movie is that it’s 2044, and apparently women still only exist as strippers and waitresses. Or the embodiment of redemption for the grizzled hero in the form of ladies they sex up. That, I find exceedingly disappointing. I would have been happy if there’d just been a few female extras in long black coats wielding ludicrously huge handguns for Bruce Willis to mow down toward the end of the movie.

Go see it. It’s excellent.

SPOILERS NOW YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

One of the things I liked most about the movie is that it chose the right moments to surprise me. There were some plot elements that were easy to call (like Cid, the creepiest child that has ever existed, being the future Rainmaker) and others that just took me off guard. I didn’t really think Old Joe was going to go around mowing down kids until he actually did. I didn’t think Young Joe would break the cycle by killing himself until the very end, when he started his final, short monologue. In fact, I thought the end of the movie would be Old Joe killing Cid’s mom, and thus the future and this endless loop of violence being preserved. (Making the movie more like 12 Monkeys and infinitely more depressing.)

Okay, and yes, now you can argue about how in the context of time travel and causality it doesn’t really make sense as a solution and then the plot continuing forward but shut up it was an excellent story.

It was obvious that Cid was going to be the Rainmaker, but the answer as to why he could be a one man wrecking crew was unexpected and a bit scary. As was the revelation that he’d made his adopted mother explode, I thought. Seeing Young Joe hug the blood-covered little terror was a turning point I didn’t expect, because he didn’t even point his gun at the kid. It was all incredibly well done, I thought. It was a good counterpoint to earlier, when Joe sells his best friend out so he can keep his hoard of money.

That sequence, by the way, was utterly horrifying, seeing what happened to Old Seth once the “doctor” had his hands on Young Seth. It certainly added to the suspense of Young Joe having to escape from Abe.

The other part of the setup I really liked was in the first loop, where Old Joe escapes and then Young Joe potentially dies. Then in the second loop, we see how Old Joe gets to the place he’s at, see why he’s doing what he’s doing and why he’s also such a giant badass. Then the real loop starts, to be finally broken at the end by Young Joe.

Good, good writing. Good, good acting. Loved it. I’m happy to give up on accuracy about the time travel if it’ll be used to tell a story this intense.