Category Archives: Movie Commentary

Skipping Twilight: When Genres Collide

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My least favorite genre is the romantic comedy.  Or even worse, the teen love romantic comedy.  Actually, teen love is even worse when it’s not funny.

On the other hand, I love vampire movies.  The blog, Snarkerati, listed the 70 top vampire movies of all time.  The list is great because it takes a combination of IMDB user scores and Rotten Tomatoes.  IMDB represents the popular vote, while Rotten Tomatoes represents the reviewing elite.  It’s sort of like the House and Senate.  I have seen 41 of those 70 movies.  Included in the movies I’ve seen:

The Canadian Royal Ballet’s version, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) Virgins dancing for Dracula

The Eddie Murphy Movie: Vampire in BrooklynEddie Murphy as a Vampire

And the straight to video, Subspecies

Vampire breaking fingers

But Twilight seems to bring too much teen angst and romance.  Maybe I’ll see it, but probably not with all those teen-aged swooning girls.  Vampires are supposed to be evil, predatory, and ancient.  There are many variations, including hot Kate Beckinsdale vampires, but teen idol is one step too far down the road Anne Rice was treading when I stopped reading her books.

A Quantum of Solace: Pretty Good Bond Movie

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I realize I saw awesome too much.  To me, many things are awesome, at least in the moment.  Later the experience fades and I can compare the awesome moment with many other moments, and awesome fades to average.

The latest Bond movie, for instance.  We walked out of the theater, to a nearby restaurant, without anyone commenting.  Once seated, I said “I’ll open with a bid of ‘Awesome!’”  My snarkiest friend said she’d open with “pretty good.”  We turned to another friend who seemed to be resisting the urge to say anything.  Finally, “I did not like it,” he said.  He did not enjoy it in the least.

Talking about it, I realized I had seen many flaws, but had buried them while watching.  The plot runs on, there is an inconsistency in how the scenes are shot.  Some are over the top bids to be great art, and much of the action is too close up, like the Bourne Identity but without the intensity.  There is at least one character who is a complete throw-away.

But I had enjoyed it, hadn’t I?  I love the story between Bond and M.  The story started in Casino Royale, is carried forward here, and promises much more.  So I’m still loving the new Bond series.  Maybe that’s it.  Perhaps, even though this was not a good stand-alone movie, it still gave me the pleasure of being part of the ongoing story.  Like an average episode in a great television series, it still keeps you moving towards the next.

Max Payne, Minimal Fun

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There’s a movie in my head.  I built it out of trailers for Max Payne.  It has powerful, scary villains, a tortured hero, and the eternal, supernatural struggle between good and evil.  It is laden with Norse mythology, and punctuated with intense set pieces that include guns and explosions and Valkyrie.

It could be awesome.  But the actual movie has none of those features.  You might think you saw them in the trailer.  Maybe you heard a quote about “The Devil building his army” and “Max Payne is looking for things God wants hidden.”  You probably saw images of winged Valkryie and fiery skies.  Those things are said, and the images do occur, but they don’t have the meaning you’d hope.  The quotes are just one guy’s ramblings, a guy who is entirely tangental to any part of the story.  The images?  Well, apparently they aren’t meant to be taken literally.

There was still some promise.  The apparent bad guy seemed to have some kind of superhuman strength and resistence.  Maybe Max Payne shot him six times.  Maybe not.  My friend leans over and says: “promise me this is going to get better.”  Sure, I assure her.  But then the wheels started falling off.  Max Payne is only tortured in the most cliched sense.  There isn’t so much one evil bad guy as several sort of bad people doing apparently random bad things.  Some of them are highly improbable.  The rules fail to be applied consistently.  We thought someone was invulnerable, but he dies from a single shot.  The Valkyrie show up at odd times, but seem to signify nothing.

The central theme?  Nothing supernatural, or gripping, or high-tech.  It’s a concept that’s been used in a hundred lower-budget movies: somebody’s experimenting with something to make soldiers more soldiery.  Naturally, something goes wrong.  But this particular experiment is even dumber than most.  Instead of making soldiers stronger, smarter, or able to take punishment, it just makes them “feel” invulnerable.  And it only works on like 1%.  Don’t we have drugs like that?  Crack?  Cocaine?  Meth?  Even alcohol has been known to make idiots braver.  And more idiotic.  This version doesn’t seem much better, except for being blue.

I thought I had lowered my expectations.  But I guess I really had something I was looking for out of this movie.  Given the trailers, I think my hopes were somewhat justified.  But like Epic movie, where the jokes were actually funnier in the trailer than in the context of the movie, the scenes from Max Payne were better without the context of the movie.

Overlooked for Best Picture: Goodfellas

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The first time I really remember being outraged at The Academy was 1991.  That was the year that Dances with Wolves beat Goodfellas for Best Picture.  I was talking to a friend about The Departed the other day.  That movie seemed too convoluted, too soupy, for my taste.  They gave Scorcese his Best Picture award, but it wasn’t the right Scorcese movie.  Goodfellas was right Scorcese movie.

Of course everybody knows this.  I watched the movie again this week, and it is clear and focused in a way that The Departed utterly fails to achieve.  The only question I had during the movie was the post-Lufthansa robbery killing spree.  How did that make sense?  Wouldn’t somebody notice that everyone else was getting knocked off?  Why have a criminal organization if it’s going to eat itself like that?  I thought that the mafia served to bring stability to crime.  To give a sense of rules and responsibilities to the lawless.  That way you can plan much more complicated capers, and place some element of trust in your partners.  Though the movie seemed very true the character, I wondered if they had perhaps over-dramatized this portion.  So I looked it up on Wikipedia.   Turns out the truth was even crazier.  This is the list from Wikipedia:

The following were all murdered after the heist: [2] [3]

I also learned a lot about Italian cooking from this movie.

Appaloosa: Westerns Like They Should Be Made

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I have a friend who loves westerns.  I love westerns.  Unforgiven is one of my all time favorite movies from any genre.  And 3:10 to Yuma was great as well.  The one thing I really don’t like is romantic comedy.  I will, at some point, write an essay on why I don’t.  I also really don’t like when they shoe-horn romance into places it just doesn’t belong.  Top Gun, which is over-rated as an action flick, and very over-rated as some kind of guy cult movie, suffers badly from this.  If it does belong in the story, I’m okay with it.  Officer and a Gentleman?  Yes, the love story was very much part of the overall story.

Anyway, my friend had the same reaction I did when reading the reviews about Appaloosa.  “What the F(*&ck” is Renee Zellweger doing in this movie?”  She not only just seems wrong, she’s also almost as iconic of romantic comedy as Hugh Grant.  He decided not to see the movie.  I swallowed my fears and, partly due to peer pressure, went anyway.

I won.  Ed Harris, who co-wrote, directs, and turns in a starring role, must really understand the western.  He gets down into the roots of the genre, capturing the violence, the shifting sense of right and wrong, the slow pace at which everything happens in the wide open desert.  Having read over 50 Louis L’ Amour novels and a scattering of other westerns, as well as growing up in a small desert town where you can shoot guns in your back yard, I consider myself knowledgable enough.  This is another great entry in a genre that is marked with some masterpieces, and which somehow always captures more about America than other genres.

He gets that the West was a microcosm of civilization, going from lawless to quasi-civilized in just a few short years, and that the people who became the pillars of the community came from both sides of the law.  And honor.

Harris also understands just where love fits in all this.  Renee Zellweger showed up and my hackles rose.  But her character was exactly right for the time and for the story.  As the town whore explained, women have it hard out here.  Love is mostly for men.

I hope my friend gets over his little RZ wall and sees this movie.  He’ll love it.

Eagle Eye Expectations

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How come expectations are such an integral part of how we enjoy movies? Not just good or bad, but also type, genre, tone. We know who’s in the movie, we think we know the genre, maybe we know the story. Maybe we’ve scene trailers and think we’ve got it pretty much down. Eagle Eye looked like it would be dumb. The plot looked stupid, and the characters seemed questionable. Mostly, it was pretty dumb. But because we weren’t expecting anything good, we enjoyed it. It stayed very close to expectations, often by stealing from other, better movies.

Meanwhile movies that really are good got trashed by some critics because they weren’t what critics expected. Hancock fell to this critical inflexibility earlier this summer, while Burn After Reading took a lot of flack for it more recently. You could blame to publicity people who put together the trailers. In both cases, the trailer weavers went for pure, light-hearted slapstick. Neither movie falls into that role. Both hit a turning point where the movie is no longer the thing you were promised. Something better, perhaps, but your expectations are already fixed.

Some people have little tolerance for the unexpected. Personally, I usually like it. If it’s good. But movies that don’t deliver what they seemed to promise, but then don’t give you anything else, are at the bottom of my FAIL list. (Epic Movie fits into this slot).

Washing that Mummy out of My Brain

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It always annoys when my friends say something like: “I could have told you that,” after I report that some movie really sucked.  No, no you couldn’t have told me that.  Sure, the Mummy III: Tomb of Jet Li Phoning It In looked bad.  There were many warning signs.  But these friends would have said the same thing about Hitman, or Tank Girl, or Blade III: Trinity.  Say what you will, I enjoyed those movies.  I loved all three Resident Evil movies.  I savored the badness (and the cage scene) that was BloodRayne.  Would you deny me those pleasures?  So I take a lot of chances.  Sometimes, as with Babylon A.D., I get about what expect, a flawed movie with derivative elements and some good action.  Even the bad ending didn’t ruin it for me.

But sometimes I get the third Mummy movie.  It’s not so much bad as it is tired.  The almost ritualistic character portrayals using every old trope and stale piece of dialog dragged down the small moments in which the action actually worked.  I love Jet Li, and I like Brendan Frazier.  But neither of them showed up for this movie.  Surrounded by CGI badness, they read through the exhausting dialog with no hope of adding anything fresh to it.  Retired hero misses action.  Father has problems expressing approval of son.  Evil emperor wants to take over world.  (what to good emperors do?)

Fortunately I had already downloaded the unrated version of Hitman on my PS3.  I got home, feeling like I needed to bath in something to get that “Mummy-to-far” feeling out of my system, I started watching this hyper-cool, intense action flick, in which the characters actually seem to care about what they are doing.  Though the reviewers generally have gone negative Hitman, it’s really a lot of fun.

Why Does Boondock Saints Get so Much Love?

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Like Donnie Darko, Boondock Saints seems to receive affection, adoration, even passion far in excess of any value in the movie itself. I’d heard about Boondock Saints from many sources, compelling me to not only put in my Netflix list, but move it up near the top. It’s based on a graphic novel, and there have been some pretty good movies come out of that genre. But this movie kind of hints at why that shouldn’t work.

Many parts of the movie are fun to watch. William Dafoe turns in another “Walken -1″ performance as a gay FBI agent who channels at crime scenes. He is oddly disconnected from the FBI, instead running a group of local policemen, one of whom also tries to channel but with far less success. He’s quirky. Possibly homophobic.  Then he gets quirkier, dresses in drag, and tries to exude tenderness.

The McManus brothers are two good-looking Irish kids who work in a meat-packing plant, yet speak about ten languages.  This is never explained.  At some point, with little motivation except some apparently private religion, they go all Travis Bickle on bad guys, except with much more smoothness, coolness, and moral clarity.

Then there’s this guy, who is supposed to be the baddest assassin ever.  The beast.  Except that he’s also played as a cartoonish yokel.  With long beard, six guns, long-coat and hat.

The only character who isn’t some flat cartoon is poor ‘Funny Man’ Rocco.  He’s a stupid guy, but at least he suffers and changes through the movie.

The story-telling style would be interesting if you’re in film school, but probably only in a basic course.  The story advances to a point, stops, then skips to the consequences.  William Dafoe does his channeling explanation of the scene, then we go back and see how it really happened.  It’s just arty enough to keep the Donnie Darko crowd happy.

In the end, I don’t know what people really like about this movie.  The coolness is destroyed by the beast character, the moral undercurrents were better explored in any of a dozen revenge movies.  The action is passable, and motivation is hokey.  I’d offer a theory, but I really don’t get it.

A Defense of Uwe Boll

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Uwe Boll is, possibly, the worst director, ever. Worse, he has attacked one of my other loves, video-games in his ridiculous attempts to adapt a number of classic videogame franchises for the big screen. The primary crimes against video games, against movies, and against humanity itself include:

  • Alone in the Dark (ridiculous)
  • House of the Dead (OMG Stupid!)
  • Bloodrayne (Wow, not even Ben Kingsley can act in this POS)
  • Bloodrayne II: Deliverance (Wait, it’s bad, makes no sense, and this one has NO NUDITY!)

Unlike Ed Wood, who is often given that title, Uwe Boll isn’t trying to express some strange, complex vision, yet failing. Ed Wood had odd plots, mixing aliens and transvestites in some kind of pattern that you think secretly must make sense in his head. But Boll’s pattern is just derivative crap. You know pretty much what he’s trying to say, because other people have already said it better.  His best shots are clearly copied, his worst show that he didn’t understand what he was stealing.

All this I knew, but when I discovered my PS3 could actually sell me movies, the only thing worth downloading and watching was In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.  I’ve only played a few minutes of that particular game, so I have no particular fondness that could be violated, but I was definitely up for an evening of Uwe bashing.  Many parts are bad, and everything good is not original.  But, still, Jason Statham is putting it all out there, doing his athletic action coupled with sullen intensity.  Ray Liotta is at about half creepy, but that’s still pretty creepy.  And Matthew Lilard is nasty enough that you find yourself really rooting against him.  By the predictable ending, I was engaged.  Not impressed, or blown away, but I wanted bad things to happen to the bad guys and good things to happen to the good guys.

Of course it wouldn’t be a Uwe boll movie without some inexplicable old, but still respected actor phoning it in.  Bloodrayne had Ben Kingsley, this one has Burt Reynolds!  As the King!

But I’m not changing my mind about Uwe just because he directed one mediocrity amidst all his crap.  I loveUwe Boll because the world would be less mysterious without him.  How does he get money?  How does he get medium-large names to appear in his obviously bad movies?  Why does he insist that he’s a mis-understood artist?  Also, he’s the only director I know of who challenged his critics to a boxing match.  Two took him up, and were defeated.  How about having Spielberg fight anyone who didn’t like the last re-hash of Indiana Jones?  I’d be up for that.

The other thing about Uwe Boll is that he’s trying the best he can.  He doesn’t have much talent, and he doesn’t make up for it with technique.  He sucks, but he’s trying to make the best movie he can.  Not so much Spielberg and Lucas.  They have talent coming out the wazoo, but contine to foist crap like the latest Indiana Jones movie on us.  That smacks of contempt.

Leaving Lost Vegas

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Why am I writing this blog?  It’s not as if there aren’t enough reviews our there, or that Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t do a pretty good job of aggregating all those opinions into something you can use.  But people often ask my opinion about movies, and I find myself explaining.  And sometimes, with movies like Leaving Lost Vegas, my view is a bit different.

I saw this years after it came out.  I had long heard that it was a gripping, but tragic performance by Nicholas Cage.  I was never quite in the mood to watch a drunk slowly die, though, so I kept skipping it.  Netflix is where I put movies that I know I should watch, but not right now.  Sometimes, because I don’t alway check to see what’s coming next, a movie like Leaving Los Vegas gets through.  So, instead of letting is sit, I decided to watch it.

First, I can’t say anything bad about the acting.  It’s all good, spot on, gripping.  But the story, I just didn’t buy.  I know a lot about alcoholism, a little about despair, and something about being a frustrated creative.  The story here seems to romanticize those elements, seeing something slightly noble about falling down the hole, knowing full well there’s only death at the bottom.  Waving away all offers of help.  Maybe, but I got bored after a while.  In fact, I started playing World of Warcraft while watching the movie.   I was doing this quest where you have to take some kind of magic cloak to some guy in a cave.  The only way to find the cave is to attract the attention of his pet bear, and it will point the way.  But the mechanics of getting the bear’s attention eluded me.  Stand in front, type wave, stand to the side, right click the bear, left click the bear, I kept trying different things.  It occured to me that I was playing a game that had me waving at a bear.  Over and over.  This is the game that somehow has me addicted.

I finally figured out the bear when the movie went off the rails.  Instead of sticking to the dying drunk, it went off to trail the somewhat random life of Elizabeth Shue’s hooker.  Dead pimp, frat rape, being thrown out of a casino, flashbacks to an abusive father, the cliches piled up quickly.  All bad men in her life, somehow contrasted with the drunken guy lying on her couch.  It didn’t make sense to me, either, but then she ripped off her top and he poured booze all over her at the pool.  That was pretty good.

In the end, I did feel guilty about the World of Warcraft distraction.  There was some sort of meaning going on, and it was passing me by.  But I think the movie could have done more to hold my attention, and I really think that the central premise never gave me anything to by into.  It’s always possible I would have enjoyed this in a theater.  Trapped in the darkness, alone in a sit, but anonymously part of a much larger crowd, I may have been open to the depths of the movie.  You never know.