Category: movie

I tried to go in to this movie with an open mind. I really did, I swear.

Then Total Recall told me: So yeah. Elevator through the center of the Earth.

Well. If you’re not going to take this seriously, neither am I.

And no, I don’t count that as a spoiler, because the damn movie slaps you with that facepalm-inducing concept within five seconds of the opening credits starting. (If that revelation stops you from seeing this movie in the theater, I’d appreciate it if you use some of the money you saved to send me a cookie.) That’s right. The grandeur of possibly fake saving an entire planet has been replaced with a giant elevator that somehow goes through the center of the Earth.

It’s a sad, sad day when you manage to come up with a concept that makes even less scientific sense than the original Total Recall. And here’s the thing: the elevator through the center of the Earth is actually the least aneurysm-inducing part of the world build. Don’t even get me started on how the societal set up itself makes no damn sense. (Everything is a chemical cesspit except Europe and Australia so every day all the people from Australia get shipped to the other side of the world via the elevator to go to work WHAT okay I need to lay down now.)

I’m kind of wondering if the script writer was perhaps savaged by an elevator as a child. Because there is a lot of elevator action going on in this movie. Large chunks of it, action scenes and chase scenes, take place in elevators. I don’t know, is there a Jungian archetype for this? I suppose we could get all Freudian and boil it down to sex because HEY A THING GOES INTO ANOTHER THING, only I can think of nothing potentially less sexy than Colin Farrell and Jessica Biel looking vaguely uncomfortable at each other in a giant elevator.

That, and this new version of Total Recall was so infested with lens flares that I had this crazy moment where I wondered if JJ Abrams had punched Len Wiseman in the head and taken over, only then it would have been a much more interesting and suspenseful movie. I’m not really a fan of the Abrams love affair with lens flares, but at least he manages to do it in a way that’s not actively annoying. Here, I got very, very tired of seeing ghostly blue streaks over Jessica Biel’s face. As far as I can tell, her only purpose in the movie was to look pretty, and that sure didn’t help.

The original Total Recall wasn’t exactly a festival of logic, but I think I was more willing to go with it because the movie so obviously didn’t take itself seriously. I’m more than capable of enjoying movies that have a certain sort of gleeful badness – Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter anyone? – but with this one I just spent a lot of time rolling my eyes. Total Recall took the concepts of the old movie (loosely based as it was on We Can Remember It For You Wholesale) and sucked all the joyful, ridiculous mayhem out of it. So instead, it feels ponderous, silly in a squirm-inducing way, and you don’t even get copious blood spatter as a reward.

Blah.

I did find it amusing that in the future:

• Great Britain apparently becomes the Empire, complete with stormtroopers and battle droids. Glad to see that they’re keeping up with their glorious tradition of being cartoonish villains in American-made movies.
• Enormous guns on combat helicopter things can only fire two second bursts and then have to reload themselves, which takes just long enough that they are basically useless.
• Collin Farrell gets his ass thoroughly kicked by a suit-wearing politician. 
• Stabbing someone in the intestines kills them instantly, except that it doesn’t because they subsequently come back to life just in time to be blown up.
• Bill Nighy is the leader of the resistance. (If I had somehow managed to keep it together after the ELEVATOR THROUGH THE CENTER OF THE EARTH thing, to be honest that would have killed it for me. Sorry, Mr. Nighy.)

There were precisely three things that I liked about this movie. One, the sets and backgrounds were done really well. I liked the sprawling multi-level dystopian metropolis. It looked intense, wonderful, and at times downright Blade Runner-esque, and that hits all the right geek buttons with me.

There were some great little nods to the original Total Recall that I appreciated, as someone who loves that movie in all its silly glory. There was the hooker with three breasts, the woman in the ugly yellow coat at security, and a lot of other little nods in lines. Spotting those Easter eggs were some of the only truly fun moments in the movie.

Third and most important, Kate Beckinsale almost managed to salvage the entire movie by being unbelievably badass in every single scene in which she appeared. I found myself hoping she’d show up even more often to punch the good guys repeatedly in the face. She also does the amazing Natasha Romanov-style crotch punch, which I will never get tired of seeing. The only regret I have is that at the end she gets killed by Collin Farrell. In the original movie, Quaid’s not-wife gets taken out by his girlfriend, and it’s quite satisfying. But as far as I can tell Jessica Biel’s character was basically just there to look worried and get punched, so I suppose she didn’t have the necessary reservoir of awesomeness to even penetrate Kate Beckinsale’s BAMF field.

In the contest of which movie is a better homage to We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, neither Total Recall wins. They’re based on the story, but it really should be “based” complete with scare quotes. I think I do have to reward the 1990 movie with a slight edge, though. Douglas Quail never goes to Mars in the short story, but the red planet is there, and aliens come up as well. And frankly, the 1990 movie does a much, much better job of creating that lingering, uncomfortable feeling about whether or not this entire thing was real, or just an insane fantasy.

Because let’s be honest. If you’re going for insane fantasies, standing on top of a mountain on miraculously terraformed Mars while kissing your girlfriend in a pose off a pulp fiction cover wins over celebrating blowing up the big, mean elevator by being wrapped in a blanket.

Go big or go home. You’re better off getting your ass to Mars.

I’ve got some mixed feelings about The Bourne Legacy. There was actually a lot that I liked about it. But there were certain choices that were made in the movie that I feel made it weaker, and I’m not really sure why they were done.

The non-spoiler summary:

Generally, it was a fun Bourne-style action movie. There was some suspense, interesting and wonderfully grimy settings, lots of improvised weapons. There were chase scenes where, as usual, I had absolutely no clue what the hell was going on, but I thought maybe we were winning. It was a fun way to spend my evening, though I don’t know if my opinion would be the same if I’d gone in cold.

Jeremy Renner was likeable, Rachel Weisz was actually really interesting, and Edward Norton was a standard amoral government guy in a suit. There were a lot of missed plot opportunities that could have gone for some great character development and raised Renner’s character Aaron Cross toward the level of Jason Bourne. I think instead, those opportunities got blown on making the chase scenes just a little more incoherent and shaky.

I don’t feel like I wasted my time at the movie, and if there’s a sequel (and I’m sure there will be) I’ll definitely go see it. But I hope next time they give us more. The original Bourne movies really raised the bar on spy-fi in a lot of ways – internal drama to go with all the action, for one – and I’d like to see that legacy continue in truth. 

THE WHOLE ENCHILADA WITH SPOILERS BELOW:

To begin with, there was the entire choice of making the events of the movie basically concurrent with The Bourne Ultimatum. I haven’t had a chance to watch that movie in a while, but I remembered enough that I at least knew who Pamela Landy was and why a bunch of older white guys in suits were saying “My god,” in deep, serious tones. I really don’t know what the experience would have been like for someone who hadn’t seen the original Bourne trilogy.

And of course, they kept bringing up Jason Bourne. The serious white guys in suits mention him constantly. Aaron sees his name carved in the bunk bed at the way house he stays at. We see a photo of him flashed during a newscast. But it feels like a plot point that never delivers because not once in the movie do we actually see Jason Bourne. Aaron doesn’t meet him, or really seem to have any kind of attachment to him as anything but  a name. This makes Bourne feel like something that got added in at the last moment as a way to keep his name in the title. He becomes the movie’s Godot, where he never shows up even as he provides the necessary fig leaf to explain why the characters are talking. Though at least he never triggers a serious discussion about suicide being better than waiting any longer.

I understand if they couldn’t get Matt Damon. But I think if they wanted to keep the connection between the original three movies and this one, they needed to find a better way to connect the character of Jason Bourne to the new guy, Aaron Cross. Maybe they met once in the back story. Maybe Bourne is a legend in the program and his defection has a real psychological effect on its last living lab rat. Maybe Aaron could have found out more about Bourne and taken some kind of direction or inspiration from the way that he went rogue and remade himself. (Actually, I think that would have been really interesting…)

Then there’s the issue of LARX-3. He has no name other than that. He also, to the best of my memory, has no dialog, and only two facial expressions – cold and grrrrr. He also feels like an afterthought to the plot – an oh shit we’re in the third act and the boss fight music just cued up, send in the plot device! Part of what made the original Bourne movies so interesting was that anyone significant Jason Bourne faced had at least some kind of internal life – which made his killing them more meaningful, both to the audience and to him as a character. The way the end battle with LARX-3 played out, it was really like Aaron versus the drone part two. It was another missed opportunity, I think. Even if the point of LARX-3 was that he’s a human with the humanity removed, that would have been great food for thought for Aaron had he known, I would think. Hey dude, that’s the new model, see where we’re going with this?

I really loathed what they did with the wolves while Aaron was up in Alaska. I’ll just say here that I am anti-shooting and blowing up wolves, even if it’s in movies. And the way the wolves were acting made absolutely no sense anyway, which just makes it a bit more annoying.

Otherwise I found the movie pretty enjoyable, though inferior to the original Bourne trilogy. Aaron Cross was a likable character, though he lacks what made Jason Bourne so interesting. Bourne’s character development was really about him figuring out who and what he was, wrestling with the sins of his past, and then deciding to remake himself. Aaron’s struggle is never really that visceral. While he mentions several times that he’s done bad things (and thus they seem to bother him) he obviously kept going with the program and doesn’t seem to struggle with it all that much.

His real motivation is to keep his enhanced mental capabilities because he doesn’t want to regress to being an idiot, and it sounds like that regression process is really horrible. That’s something that is sympathetic, but it lacks the punch of the “who was I? who will I be?” that we learned to expect from the Jason Bourne movies. There were a few tantalizing lines thrown in there – maybe predators don’t think Aaron is human any more – but that incredibly interesting question never really seems to cross his mind.

I was actually far more interested in Dr Marta Shearing, the character played by Rachel Weisz. She does go through a really good character arc, where she starts out as someone who was “just doing science” without any real thought to the ethics, and has that come home to roost. She does struggle with that, and grows. Unlike Aaron, I think she comes to accept responsibility for her involvement, realizing how pathetic her own sacrifices (I didn’t get to go to conferences! I couldn’t talk to people about my work!) really were in light of the much larger, darker picture.

You weren’t bad, Bourne Ultimatum. But I want more. Give me more. I expect better of you.

Tragedy or no, of course I had to see this movie. I love Christopher Nolan. I loved the other two movies in the trilogy.I’m a nerd. Duh.

(Oh, and in case you missed the news? Christian Bale is a fucking superhero. For reals.)

I liked The Dark Knight Rises, quite a bit. Though I didn’t like it as much as The Dark Knight. I think it felt like it was just a bit too long, and a few of the expository points were a bit too heavy-handed. Which is to say it was still an excellent movie and you should definitely go see it. It was dark and moody and a fitting end to the trilogy, action and suspense and more bat toys than you can shake a stick at. All of the actors did great work. Anne Hathaway has now fully erased the horrors of Halle Berry and her CGI butt from my mind. Tom Hardy deserves a medal for managing to convey so much emotion with most of his face obscured by a ridiculous mask.

Really, Michael Caine stole the show as Alfred, though. That man made me cry. Twice. Best Alfred ever. He puts so much depth into everything, and just the weight of the relationship between Alfred and Bruce is crushing.

Of course, I never get tired of Christian Bale doing the Batman voice. I admit it.

And then there will be some spoilers.

SPOILERS BELOW

Honestly, there were a couple of things that did kind of bug me about the movie. First and foremost was Bruce Wayne sleeping with Miranda. It just seemed very out of the blue, particularly considering all the real chemistry there was in that movie was between him and Selina. Pretty much at the time that happened, I remember thinking, “…what?” Then by the end it just feels like a cheap trick to squeeze a little more impact from Miranda’s betrayal, when she really wasn’t enough of a character to even begin with. I didn’t feel all that shocked at the big reveal, because there just hadn’t been quite enough time setting her up.

I think the problem really was the movie wanted to have only one interest.Catwoman really crowded whatever development there might have been to build up Miranda. Or at least to get me to care about Miranda at all.

The other thing that bothers me a little is the setup for the “rabble” taking over Gotham. Now, on one hand I really don’t get all the bitching that I’ve seen on Twitter about this movie being quasi-fascist, or about fearing the mob, or anti-99% or whatever. I don’t think that was the point at all. The way the upper classes of Gotham were presented there was nothing to sympathize with, and the plight of the poor was made pretty damn clear. Rather, I easily saw the parallels to A Tale of Two Cities as soon as that plot line ramped up. My god, the first time you ever see the court room, it should smack you in the face.

But then the problem becomes that it’s not a real revolution or a good parallel to the Reign of Terror, because it’s something that was imposed top down by Bane. It wasn’t the underclass rising up against the worthless rich; it was Bane telling everyone he was going to turn the city into a sea of glass if people didn’t play by his rules.

So that setup didn’t quite work for me. I’m not sure I buy Gotham falling apart quite like it did. Though I can buy that once things have gone totally to shit, people who have nothing to lose probably wouldn’t feel too bad about seeing the decadent get their comeuppance.

I will tell you this. The Dark Knight Rises managed to do the impossible. I’m actually thinking of reading A Tale of Two Cities again. That’s even more amazing than the level of emoting Tom Hardy managed with just his eyebrows.

I’ve owned the soundtrack for this movie since it came out, actually, and I never bothered to watch the movie itself. I actually liked the first Transformers movie all right, in that sort of well it’s got explosions and giant robots and it makes okay background noise kind of way. Revenge of the Fallen left me in an underwhelmed place of slow-motion explosions that I didn’t manage to return to again until I had the misfortune of watching Ghost Rider 2.

Though as an aside, I’d still rather watch Nic Cage chew the scenery any day than Shia LeBouf whine.

The thing is, I actually really like the soundtracks for these movies. They make excellent writing music even if the movies themselves make me hope for a nuclear winter. What I’d like to know is how did movies this incoherent manage to have such nice music?

It’s a zen riddle.

I decided to watch Dark of the Moon tonight, just because why not, I had some braincells to kill.

Well. It sure was a thing.

I wish I could write a mocking examination of the reality-bending badness of this movie, the way io9 did back when it came out. But I’ve been working 10+ hour days all week and spending most of my time having my neurons slowly drilled into submission by Microsoft Powerpoint. I just don’t have it in me.

I am as incoherent as Dark of the Moon.

The movie can’t decide if it’s a romantic comedy, a stupid buddy comedy, an action movie, or something else entirely and I don’t even care. I don’t know who Leonard Nimoy owed money to, but I can’t fathom why he got within a thousand miles of this pulsating mass of disagreeing plotlines. Shia LeBouf seems to be a three-year old trapped in a man’s body, vacillating between soulful eyes and quivering lower lip and incoherent tantrums of petulant rage. And how the hell could something make me miss Megan Fox? How is such a thing possible unless we truly do exist in a godless universe of pain?

I never thought a movie could make me long for the smooth and logical plotline of Ghost Rider 2, but Dark of the Moon managed it. It would be a better movie, and more coherent, if you just cut together all the scenes of the Transformers fighting and just enjoyed the pure, explosion-laden eye candy. It would also be shorter, which I consider a good thing, considering every scene involving the human characters is approximately seventeen years long.

The good news is, I will still be able to listen to the glorious soundtrack without having it ruined for me, because nothing in this movie made any kind of impact beyond a vague existential discomfort caused every time Shia LeBouf screamed like an eight-year-old girl.

Next time, self, remember that curiosity caused the cat to watch really terrible movies.

To reward myself for surviving the never-ending defensive driving course from somewhere not nearly cool enough to be hell, I went to a movie. The only thing I felt motivated to see was The Amazing Spiderman.

My reaction was: …meh.

Yes, I know my nerd card deserves to be taken away. Try it, buddy. I know kung fu.

Part of the problem here is that I just wasn’t all that excited about it to begin with. Not because I have a problem with Spiderman as a character, but let’s be honest. The last of the Tobey Maguire Spider man movies was only five years ago. And maybe you’ve managed to forget the horror that was emo Peter Parker and the inexplicable dance scene, but it’s still pretty well seared into my brain. While I can normally get my juices going for a reboot (Batman Begins anyone?) I need a little more than five years.

Spiderman, how can we miss you if you never go away?

Honestly, I’m concerned that the cycle is ever-shortening between movie release and the following remake of the movie. We may be approaching some sort of remake critical gravitational collapse point, where the remake and movie it’s remaking are released simultaneously, signalling we’ve crossed a ghastly event horizon where Hollywood has just shrunk into a singularity clothed in nothing but special effects. Spaghettification and increasing popcorn prices will inevitably follow.

My enthusiasm level was admittedly pretty low going in. But I was prepared to be entertained, and I certainly was. Don’t get me wrong; I didn’t emerge from this movie bearing Prometheus-levels of steaming nerdrage. Rather, I left the theater with the only thought on my mind as, “Man, I could murder the shit out of a taco salad right about now.”

So that’s really to say, the movie didn’t make much of an impact on me.

It’s got good things going for it. Andrew Garfield is definitely a superior Spiderman compared to Tobey Maguire. The dialog for Spiderman was generally superior as well – finally, all the snark and sarcasm that the comics promised us for years! (Plus, the stunts were definitely better, and hey – electronic web shooters!)

I can’t say I’m impressed with Gwen Stacy as a character over Mary Jane Watson, not that this is necessarily Emma Stone’s fault. (And she had some good on-screen chemistry with Andrew Garfield so I bought their relationship no problem.) There are other problems I have with Gwen Stacy, but it’s all said much better here than I could, other to note that yeah, she did seem a little too perfect. Mary Jane definitely has a much richer internal life going in the first movie than poor Gwen Stacy did in this one.

I think part of the “meh” problem was have the Lizard as the villain. He wasn’t all that exciting, and Rhys Ifans tried his darndest, but he’s no Willem Dafoe. With an unexciting villain, the plot of the week “oh no the city is doomed” wasn’t anything to really write home about.

So it was a fun way to spend an evening, and I don’t regret what I paid for the ticket. But I’m not excited for a sequel the way I was with the original Spiderman, even if Tobey Maguire wasn’t really the ideal Peter Parker.

It’s not you, Amazing Spiderman, it’s me. You should have given me more time to get over the other guy first so I could have come at you with fresh eyes and renewed enthusiasm. Too late.