Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Avatar Movie Review
Avatar is set in a future in which we're able to travel to distant planets and interact (read exploit) the natives. A huge corporation, backed by military forces to keep the peace, needs to mine a rare substance from the planet Pandora. Pandora's populated with humanoid creatures known as the Na'vi. The Na'vi have blue skin, yellow eyes, elf ears, are incredibly athletic, and tall. They're peaceful but can be fierce in battle, shooting arrows dipped in a toxin which kills almost instantaneously. In addition to the Na'vi, the planet is full of exotic-looking, dinosaurish creatures, humongous birds which can be ridden in battle, and phosphorescent plants.
The substance the corporation is on Pandora to mine is located at the base of a giant tree, which is also the spiritual center of the Na'vi. The corporation is using a two-pronged attack to get to the substance. They've got the military out making excursions into hostile territory to try to get to the material. There's also a scientific research arm of the company that's working on making inroads with the natives through the use of avatars.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
The Crazies Movie Review
David Dutten is sheriff of Ogden Marsh, a picture-perfect American town with happy, law-abiding citizens. But one night, one of them comes to a school baseball game with a loaded shotgun, ready to kill. Another man burns down his own house-after locking his wife and young son in a closet inside. Within days, the town has transformed into a sickening asylum; people who days ago lived quiet, unremarkable lives have now become depraved, blood-thirsty killers, hiding in the darkness with guns and knives. Sheriff Dutten tries to make sense of what's happening as the horrific, nonsensical violence escalates. Something is infecting the citizens of Ogden Marsh with insanity. Now complete anarchy reigns as one by one the townsfolk succumb to an unknown toxin and turn sadistically violent. In an effort to keep the madness contained, the government uses deadly force to close off all access and won't let anyone in or out - even those uninfected. The few still sane find themselves trapped: Sheriff Dutten; his pregnant wife, Judy; Becca, an assistant at the medical center; and Russell, Dutten's deputy and right-hand man. Forced to band together, an ordinary night becomes a horrifying struggle for survival as they do their best to get out of town alive.
| Production Status: | In Production/Awaiting Release |
| Genres: | Suspense/Horror, Thriller and Remake |
| Release Date: | February 26th, 2010 (wide) |
| MPAA Rating: | R for bloody violence and language. |
| Distributors: | Paramount Pictures, Overture Films |
| Production Co.: | Georgaris, Inc. |
| Studios: | Rogue Pictures, Overture Films, Paramount Pictures |
| Financiers: | Overture Films, Participant Media, Imagenation Abu Dhabi |
| Filming Locations: | Georgia, United States Georgia, USA |
| Produced in: | United States |
Friday, December 4, 2009
Review: The Road Is Brutal, but Is It Worth Taking?
The Road is 2009's entry in the Movies You Admire and Respect but Don't Ever Want to Watch Again Sweepstakes. You know going in that it's going to be bleak and somber; the question is whether it's also going to be profound and touching enough to compensate for that, to make you leave the theater thinking, "I've just seen a powerfully emotional work of art!" rather than "I've just seen something very, very depressing!"
For me, it was more of the latter. The artistic and emotional highs, while praiseworthy, aren't high enough to counteract the story's miserable lows. But having read the Cormac McCarthy book it's based on, it's impossible for me not to compare the movie to it. The book is one of the most beautiful, emotionally devastating things I've ever read. The movie, even at its best, could only be a repeat of that. But a movie can't replicate McCarthy's spare, poetic writing, or at least this one doesn't, not quite.
The story is simple. In a post-apocalyptic America -- nuclear war, probably; the details aren't important -- a man and his little boy trudge through the rubble. We don't learn their names. The man is played by Viggo Mortensen; the boy, who's about 10, is Kodi Smit-McPhee. The boy has only ever known this world. In flashbacks, we see his mother (Charlize Theron), who evidently gave birth in the early days of the devastation.
Almost all animal and human life has been destroyed. The man and the boy are heading for the coast, ultimately, finding whatever food they can along the way and avoiding the few humans they see signs of. People have proven untrustworthy in this every-man-for-himself world; cannibalism is a legitimate concern. The man has a gun with two bullets in it. He and the boy have discussed what to do if they are ever in imminent danger of being captured. Could you kill your own child to save him from a fate worse than death? That's one of the questions you'll be discussing with your friends after the movie, when you've gone to a pub to drink until you feel better.
The man and the boy talk about the "good guys," which includes them, and the "bad guys," which includes almost everyone else they've encountered. The good guys don't resort to cannibalism, no matter what. The good guys would work together with other good guys to create a society and pool their resources. There must be some good guys out there somewhere, the man hopes. Can he continue to be one of them until he finds them, or will the cruelty of the situation inevitably lead him to badness?
The director, John Hillcoat, who made a splash with the gritty Australian Western The Proposition a few years ago, has done a magnificent job creating an appropriately desolate wasteland for the characters to stumble through, bringing the awful world in which the film takes place vividly to life. The skies are relentlessly gray and overcast, and everything is covered in soot and ashes. The characters are suitably filthy and haggard. The musical score, by Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds bandmate Warren Ellis, is simple and evocative.
Central to the novel's power is the overwhelming love the father and son have for each other. "All I know is the child is my warrant," the man says in both the book and the movie. "If he is not the word of God, then God never spoke." By putting the father-son relationship in this horrific setting, McCarthy strips away all the extraneous stuff: These two literally have nothing except each other. A father would do anything to protect his son from the terrors of the world; in the book we see that this holds true even when terrors comprise 99% of what the world has to offer. It's the discovery of this uplifting truth -- that a parent's love is unconditional and limitless -- that makes the arduous journey worthwhile.
In the movie, this message is not conveyed with much strength. Whether it's due to some missing element of Mortensen's performance or Joe Penhall's screenplay adaptation or Hillcoat's direction -- or some combination of those -- I can't tell. What I know is that while the film is often thrilling and generally compelling, it doesn't have the poignance that it should. Falling under the heading of "good, but not great," I suspect this Road will be less
Review: Ninja Assassin About What You'd Expect
I implore anyone not to smile when purchasing a ticket to see Ninja Assassin. Just saying the words "Ninja Assassin" should spark a silly grin on your face. It's not an award movie, or a movie that will spawn deep conversations about life. It's Ninja Assassin, and blood splattering action is the name of the game.
Ninjas are being hired by foreign and domestic governments in Berlin to kill certain targets. Europol research agent Mika (Naomie Harris) picks up the money trail, thus making her a target of the ninjas-for-hire (known as the Ozunu Clan), whose very existence is one of myth and mystery. Raizo (Rain) is an ex-ninja Clan member, hell-bent on killing the entire Ozunu Clan after the wrongful murder of his friend. Unfortunately for the ninjas, Raizo was the best ninja the Clan ever produced. By saving Mika from certain death, Raizo teams up with the Europol agent to destroy the Ozunu Clan forever.
To have fun with Ninja Assassin, you have to know what you're getting into: a series of ninja fight sequences splattered with gratuitous amounts of blood and gore, minus much of a plot or coherent storyline to hold it together. To put it another way, Ninja Assassin is a blood-drenched popcorn movie that knows how to have fun and doesn't waste time on story or colorful characters, nor does it take itself too seriously. And how can it? It's about an ex-ninja killing other ninjas using a plethora of impressive ninja weapons, including ninja swords, ninja throwing stars, and ninja knives connected to ninja chains. It's all very ninja. And that's where the fun is.
But unlike other ninja movies, Ninja Assassin doesn't hold back on the blood-soaked carnage, turning up the gore to extreme levels. Hands, arms, legs, heads -- if it can be chopped off, sliced up, or removed with a splash of the red stuff, it is, without blinking an eye. It's comic book violence to the umpteenth degree. When the action is unfolding on screen, you can't help but have a good time. And while much of the blood is likely CG, I couldn't tell (unlike Blood: The Last Vampire, which had similar amounts of CG blood splatter that was obviously fake).
However, the things that Ninja Assassin lacks are a coherent narrative, an easy to follow storyline, and enough steady action to keep the flow of the movie going. While the premise is fairly basic, it's also a little too complicated for a film called Ninja Assassin. A lot of time is spent on the upbringing of Raizo in the ninja camp, time that easily could have been cut in half. More scenes featuring Raizo fighting and assassinating ninjas were needed to warrant the title of Ninja Assassin; instead, we're stuck in the past watching him train, creating longer and longer down time between action sequences, thus relying on characters, dialogue, and story to move the film along. For something like Ninja Assassin, that's not a good thing.
Ninja Assassin may be the definition of "entertaining trash." It's a mindlessly entertaining movie filled with gory, bloody violence that would make most horror fans cringe, featuring ninjas doing ninja things, from vanishing into thin air, hiding in shadows, and climbing up walls Spider-Man style, to kicking, punching, slicing, dicing, and throwing ninja stars with the speed and accuracy of a machine gun. As strange as it sounds, however, there simply isn't enough ninja action to hold the film together. The weak storyline, excessive flashback sequences, and boring characters aren't enough to fill the void in between the ninja killing. Ninja Assassin holds its own against other ninja films, but it isn't the defining piece of ninja cinema that you may have hoped for.
Blu-ray Review: Gimme Shelter -- Criterion Collection
When the Rolling Stones planned their answer to Woodstock, an all-day free concert at the Altamont Speedway outside San Francisco, they hired legendary documentary makers David and Albert Maysles to film it. But when the Hells Angels brought in as security killed a man just feet from the stage while the Stones played, what would have been a great concert film became something more.
The film opens in the weeks before Altamont, with live footage of the band on tour intercut with shots of the logistical headaches of planning a free concert for 300,000. What's often forgotten is how good the performances were, with Jagger dressed like an apocalyptic superhero, complete with cape, strutting around the stage with the audiences hanging on his every note and shimmy. But because we know what's to come, there's tension in every scene, no matter how joyous it might be on its own, like a raucous version of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" at Madison Square Garden.
From the beginning, we also see scenes of the Stones screening a rough cut of the film on an editing table, so we see their reactions as we're experiencing our own. Even though they aren't particularly forthcoming, forcing them to confront the chaos they created -- purposely early on the tour, goading the audience like the rock gods they were, then ultimately unable to control what they unleashed -- gives the movie much of its moral tension. (Co-director Charlotte Zwerin, who came in after the concert to edit the raw footage, came up with the idea.)
When the band finally makes it to Altamont, from the first shot, a jittery look out a helicopter window at miles of cars abandoned by the side of the road, you can sense the menace. The Hells Angels and the audience get increasingly wasted, and the Angels' crowd control turns rough quickly. During the Jefferson Airplane set, an Angel cracks singer Marty Balin in the face, and by the time the Stones come on, the crowd and the people who were supposed to keep order are openly fighting.
Watching the final, inevitable act unfold is devastating, and was hugely controversial at the time. (Click here for Pauline Kael's histrionic 1970 New Yorker review, which more or less blamed the directors for Meredith Hunter's death and made comparisons to Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda, along with the Maysles' rebuttal.)
Typically for Criterion, the extras are great, including audio commentary from Albert Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin, and collaborator Stanley Goldstein; more than an hour of KSAN's radio broadcast the day after Altamont, with calls from concert goers, promoters, and Hells Angels, and 20 minutes of a Stones press conference; 18 minutes of outtakes; two galleries of stills; three trailers; and a booklet of essays.
It may be lazy to pinpoint Altamont as the day the '60s died, but something about it really was more significant than other concert tragedies. Had something changed so drastically since Woodstock six months earlier, or was mixing massive, uncontrolled crowds with heavy drugs and incendiary music disaster waiting to happen? Part of the legacy may be due to how Gimme Shelter so skillfully shapes the whole Stones tour as an inevitable buildup to catastrophe. (Two people died at Woodstock too, but that never showed up in Michael Wadleigh's documentary.)
Whatever the true significance of Altamont, Gimme Shelter is a mesmerizing film that keeps you on the edge of your seat -- even though you know all along how this particular bad trip ends
Review: Brothers Never Fully Forms
Brothers has some very fine acting. Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Tobey Maguire make you feel the scars of war, the trauma of sibling rivalry, and the dread of wounded relationships. If you were teaching an acting class, you could credibly point to the three leads elevating the material with dogged professionalism.
There. I wanted to get the praise portion of the film out of the way because I did not have a good time with material. Because the story itself ... yeeps. It's not all there.
Tobey Maguire is Marine Captain Cahill, proud veteran of war, soon to head back to Afghanistan for another tour of duty. His brother is ne'er-do-well Jake Gyllenhaal, freshly released from prison. In case you're not quite certain if he's a "bad guy," the filmmakers helpfully give him a neck tattoo. There, done. Natalie Portman is the doting wife of Tobey, mother of their two darling little girls. But things go brutally bad, terribly wrong, in Afghanistan for Tobey. And somewhere in there is the third act of Brothers.
Now then, I haven't seen the original Danish film, Brodre, so I'm not sure if it's a faithful adaptation. I do feel confident in saying this is a tale of two conflicting stories, neither of which ever form any real cohesion. You've got Tobey's time in Afghanistan, jarring and awful. And you've got Portman and Gyllenhaal back in America, slowly learning to trust and depend on each other ... as humans tend to do in the absence of a spouse. It's hard to figure if this film is meant to educate or entertain, as it never gets around to having a central thrust. And therein lies my tremendous reservations about the work. What is this film about? How terrible war is? The oddness of interpersonal relationships in a time of grief? The method filmmakers use to make you squirm? You can't help but feel terrifically manipulated during the running time of Brothers; you're feeling something, but it's impossible to say why you are.
I've seen it written that this is a "war film" and that we should finally confront our current squeamishness with that topic. But this is no more a war film than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a film about martial arts, and the casual and unbalanced look at the Afghanistan conflict does the movie no service.
We certainly do need directors and artists to remind us that war is consequential. We also need films that make us consider our loved ones, and the support we rely on every day. What we don't need is a story that does 30 percent of each, a depressing tale of contrived melodrama that fails to make any point at all.
Review: Everybody's Fine is Fairly Decent
Everybody's Fine has cuteness and wholesome charm in its very DNA. It was written and directed by Kirk Jones, who made the twee Waking Ned Divine, and it's a remake of a 1990 Italian film by Giuseppe Tornatore, who also made the sentimental Cinema Paradiso. The risk was that Jones' film -- about a widower reconnecting with his children -- would be unreasonably sappy, but he pulls it off OK, thanks in part to a grounded and sincere performance by Robert De Niro.
De Niro plays Frank Goode, a retired blue-collar worker whose wife died recently, leaving him with the realization that she was the one their children confided in, not him. Frank has invited the four Goode offspring, now living in different parts of the country, to come home for a weekend, only to have them each cancel for various reasons. So what the heck: He'll take some buses and trains -- that's how old people travel, you know -- and pay surprise visits to each of them.
Frank is the kind of good-natured coot who tells strangers what he did for a living and what he's doing now, and shows them pictures of his children. It's a good change of pace for De Niro, who has lately been a buffoonish old man in comedies and a scary old man in dramas. Here he gets to play a pleasant codger of the sort that actually exists in real life and that you wouldn't mind associating with. It isn't a showy performance; rather, it's notable for being un-showy -- solid, honest, and sweet. That alone makes it out of the norm for De Niro.
Frank's son David is an artist in New York City, but he's not there when Frank shows up, so Frank heads to Chicago to see Amy (Kate Beckinsale), an advertising executive with a vast modern home, a husband (Damian Young), and a teenage son (Lucian Maisel). Robert (Sam Rockwell) is a musician in Denver, and Rosie (Drew Barrymore) is a dancer in Las Vegas. Everywhere he goes, Frank finds his children surprised to see him, somewhat glad, but skittish. They're each hiding at least one secret from him. In between, we catch snippets of phone calls between them, urgently discussing the whereabouts of David and what to do about Dad.
At times it feels like Jones is trying too hard to make us feel sorry for lonely old Frank; it helps that De Niro refuses to go too far in making Frank seem pathetic. (That didn't stop a few women sitting near me from going "Awwww!" several times, though. I can only imagine how emotional -- and audible -- their reaction would have been if De Niro had actually angled for their sympathy.) But aside from a few cheap laughs (like the fountain in Frank's back yard that looks like a peeing cherub), most of the comedy is sharp and most of the drama is plausible. Nothing is contrived -- well, I mean, the whole premise is contrived, but within that framework the story adheres to realistic interactions between siblings and parents.
Is it anything special? No, not really. It's one of Those Movies, the kind about families reconnecting and airing their dirty little secrets and exploring their relationships. You know the kind. There's at least one every holiday season. But it's not a bad example of that kind of movie, an agreeable and even touching little snapshot of family life.
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