"Fast & Furious 6" Review

Does anyone remember when The Fast and the Furious was this little B-movie from 2001 about street racing in the Valley? Because the series certainly hasn't over the years beginning with the conceptual reboot it received in Fast Five as The Rock appeared as a Federal agent looking to bust the Vin Diesel-powered family of ace drivers. Suddenly the series was a heist caper picture with seriously over the top action scenes culminating with a huge bank safe being dragged through the streets of Rio like a wrecking ball. With the series back firing on all cylinders, it was time to up the stakes and the result is Furious 6 (as it's credited; no relation to Grandmaster Flash's old back-ups), a movie that's big, noisy, dumb and hella fun.

Furry Sex (sp?) kicks off with The Rock and new sidekick Gina Carano (Haywire) investigating a theft of top secret technology in Moscow. (Why a U.S. lawman is there is because he was in Rio in the last movie; in other words, because.) Since the job was done by a international crew of bad guy drivers, Rock decides recruit Diesel and Company with something that was teased in the middle of the end credits of Fast Five: that Michelle Rodriguez's Letty - last seen being killed off on the 4th installment, Fast and Furious - is working with the bad guys. If Diesel et al help take down the kingpin, everyone gets pardons, but all Diesel wants is to return Letty to his family. Hijinks ensue.

While Fast Five was pretty cool in the action scenes, the in-between parts which were meant to serve has plot and stuff were slow and boring. That's been fixed this time with lots of yuks particularly between Ludacris and Tyrese. Everyone in the supporting cast gets some good jibes in and it's funny stuff.

As for the action scenes, they've ramped up the level of craziness to 12 and the realism knob to -12. The laws of physics operate on Looney Tunes rules and human bodies take so much pounding that it's a miracle half the cast doesn't die of internal injuries or that anyone dies at all from falling. I know we don't see these sorts of movies for their realistic depiction of driving - the lengthy disclaimer at the end reminding the audience that what they just watched was unrealistic and dangerous made me chuckle because wouldn't the world be better off if those who need this helpful safety tip removed themselves from the gene pool? - but stuff happens a lot that makes the "Yeah, right!" alarm threaten to go off. (The finale - which I guessed correctly the trailer spoils - must take place on a runway 20 miles long.)

Afterwards, the silliness of the plot holes will hit you - like why have a convoy which can be attacked by car when you could simply fly the target to the location? - but you'll be having too much fun while you're watching. That said, the way they cover the reintroduction of the dead Letty is actually pretty reasonable. Diesel still acts like a narcoleptic side of beef, but that's still better than Paul Walker can muster. The Rock always tickles me with how he knows exactly what sort of movie he's in and delivers a perfectly-calibrated performance. It's good to have M.Rod back playing tough chicks after a couple years off doing European art house films and the fights (yes, plural) between her and Carano are good if only it's a change to see kickass chicks who aren't skinny twigs (think: Zoe Saldana in Columbiana or Angelina Jolie in Salt) who actually look like they can deliver or take a punch without snapping a limb.

A final note: Just as a plot point of Furious 6 (i.e Letty's alive?) was teased at the end Fast Five, there's a tease for the next flick at the end here and based on the reaction of the crowd they could have gotten the budget for Fastious 7 (I'm calling dibs on that title!) from pre-sales as people filed out. It also retcons an event of Tokyo Drift and pins down for once and all where the 3rd movie in the series fits chronologically in the Fast and Furious world: sixth in line.

Score: 8.5/10. Catch a matinee.

"Star Trek Into Darkness" Review

A major part of the publicity during the production and run-up to the release of J.J. Abrams' Star Trek Into Darkness, the sequel to 2009's Star Trek reboot, was the Romulan cloaking device over what character Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch was playing. Initial rumors were that he was going to be Khan, then original series figures Gary Mitchell or Robert April. When promo photos listing him as "John Harrison" were released, it sparked another round of speculation - "Who's John Harrison? Is that his real name or is he really Khan or Gary Mitchell or Robert April." Even though I'm normally adverse to spoiling things in reviews, it's not that big a deal and frankly I think you dear readers should be warned up front about what Star Trek Into Darkness is...

Cumberbatch is Khan and Star Trek Into Darkness is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - Rebooted Trek Universe Edition.†

STID kicks off with a rollicking pre-title sequence setting up how Kirk is still taking little things like the rules and the Prime Directive less-than-seriously. Then comes a nearly-silent sequence introducing Khan, er, "John Harrison" as a man offering to cure a dying little girl in exchange for her father becoming a suicide bomber of a Federation facility in London. This triggers a chain of events which naturally lead Kirk to instantly regain the Captain's chair of the Enterprise that he'd lost not 10 minutes earlier for being too impulsive and callow.

Apparently Starfleet doesn't have any other qualified personnel for critical positions which is why when Scotty resigns from the Enterprise later in the movie, Chekov is reassigned from his normal duties confusing the ship computer's voice recognition system to run Engineering since apparently no other crewmen in Engineering are qualified. (This is why Chekov, not someone whose full-time job is operating the transporters, had to rush from the bridge in the first movie to save Kirk and Sulu. Right.)

Assigned with hunting down and killing to death Khanisson, Kirk and company have to learn about balancing the desire for revenge with the needs of justice meted out by legal proceedings and if you think that sounds a little like an allegory for debates over the prosecution of the War on Terror, the script by Bad Robot house writers Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindeloff break out the Metaphors For Dummies flashcards to make clear that killing bad guys with drones is BAD! and there's a hidden agenda by shadowy forces to provoke war. (These guys are aware that Dubya isn't President anymore, right?)

While the political preening is somewhat annoying, what really kills Star Trek Into Darkness is a general sloppiness in writing and tone at a story level. Technology either works amazing levels like being able to teleport across the galaxy at one point to barely working from a few miles away at another. The opening sequence involves the Enterprise being hidden underwater (it's in the trailer, so it's not a spoiler) but why is it there other than to provide a cool visual? The whole reason Gene Roddenberry invented the transporter was because it wasn't possible to convincingly land the ship with 1960s VFX, so what purpose does this scene serve other than to do it because they can? Why wasn't a shuttle sent down if the transporters weren't an option.

The Klingons make their first appearance in the Abrams version of the Trek universe, but it doesn't amount to anything. There is a secret villain with a gigantic battleship that apparently he was able to have designed and built without anyone's knowledge. The "humor" is forced and limited, with Spock and Uhura bickering in the middle of missions like unprofessional schoolkids and vaguely racist jokes about Spock's lack of sense of humor offered as witty repartee. But it's when the story returns to regurgitating Wrath of Khan that it really bores and reveals its laziness. Not only will you be able to predict exactly how they'll get out of their predicament, but I defy you from not laughing at an iconic moment which doesn't work in its new context.

When the movie was meant to be the most thrilling was when I became the most bored because it was literally sound and fury signifying nothing. I tuned out and stopped paying attention to the Big Action Moments because there were no stakes at risk; all was going to end well in the end. It's too bad because the cast is uniformly excellent as they were last time out. Cumberbatch is the best Bond villain in ages, but he too is saddled with a script that's contradictory about his motivations. It's a testament to his thespian heft that you don't realize until the drive home how little sense his actions made.

Nerds don't like the Orci-Kurtzman-Lindeloff writing squad, calling them "hacks" for their work on the Transformers series but unlike Oscar-winning hack Akiva Goldsman (Batman & Robin, Lost In Space, A Beautiful Mind) it's not that they're terrible as much as so successful and insulated that no one has the ability to point out how lazy they've become. Their movies make tons of money, so who cares if plot canyons exist? [/raises hand to indicate that I care] It's too bad since they had an opportunity to make something unique from their rebooted universe and they chose to go with the path of least resistance.

Some may be concerned for what this portends for Abrams' next project, the hotly-anticipated-and-feared Star Wars: Episode VII - Title To Be Announced In 2014 Probably. I'm not panicking (yet) because the Bad Robot boys won't be involved in the scripting. I'm not sure what having the scribe from Toy Story 3 and Little Miss Sunshine will bring to the party, but Lawrence Kasdan is reportedly consulting and I don't think producer Kathleen Kennedy will allow the sloppy writing Abrams accepted from his pals. I'm just hoping he builds some sets instead of going with these giant factories, breweries and labs which don't look like they'd fit in a starship; it's the Enterprise, not the TARDIS!


Score: 5/10. Catch it at the dollar show.





† The whole "John Harrison" conceit was only constructed to hide that they were retelling Wrath of Kahn. Why the secrecy? Probably to preempt the inevitable year-plus of bitching about, "Why aren't they telling NEW stories? They're so lazy and unoriginal! Kahn isn't white! Lens flare rage!" It'd be like if Man of Steel's hype hid that it was General Zod, calling him "Bill Williams" so people didn't react, positively or negatively, to the Superman II recycling.



**** SPOILER-HEAVY RANTING BELOW!!! ONLY READ IF YOU'VE SEEN THE MOVIE OR DON'T CARE TO!!! ****

AICN's Capone liked it in his review burping up at one point with regard to Khan that "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" and I posted this as a comment (thus some repetition from above):

Not only is that one of the more insipid liberal tropes - which obviously tickled Capone's happy spots about the movie; "Drone strikes bad! Marcus = Dick Cheney!" - but it's totally inapplicable here because there's no freedom Khan is fighting for. His fellow prisoners freedom? When you blow people up without announcing why - "Free my fellow prisoners from 300 years ago!*" - you don't get to claim some morally superior mantle.

Khan was thawed out to help Marcus' agenda of militarization because he's super smart and savage. Fine, so if he wants to blow the whistle, why not go to the 23rd Century version of MSNBC to tell the story rather than do a convoluted scheme to save a terminally ill child with his Magic Blood in exchange for the father being impressed into service as a suicide bomber?

What was the purpose of that plot thread? Wouldn't it have been better to have Khan himself sneak into the secret Federation weapons base, blow it up to trigger the meeting at Starfleet HQ, and then have Marcus simultaneously sending Kirk off to catch Khan and hide his connection? The only reason for the kid is to establish Khan's Magic Blood, which is then reminded of when McCoy injects the tribble, so that when Kirk is making his Noble Sacrifice, the Get Out of Death card they play at the end is set up to not seem like a total deus ex machina, like say shooting his body down to a planet which makes life from lifelessness. *cough* (Not to mention that they have a hold filled with other superpeople from Khan's ship who probably have the same Magic Blood.)

The whole "John Harrison" conceit was only constructed to hide that they were retelling Wrath of Kahn. Why the secrecy? Probably to preempt the inevitable year-plus of bitching about, "Why aren't they telling NEW stories? They're so lazy and unoriginal! Khan isn't white! Lens flare rage!" It'd be like if Man of Steel's hype hid that it was General Zod, calling him "Bill Williams" so people didn't react, positively or negatively, to the Superman II recycling. I'm wondering if I would've liked it more if I'd know for sure that they were up to instead of being let down and rapidly bored by what they did?

* I'm surprised that no one is calling out the broken math of Kahn being frozen for "300 years" since the events of Star Trek Into Darkness occur in 2259 which means Kahn would have to have been made a genetically-engineered superman and shot into space in 1959 before we had any of those capabilities. Space Seed said that Kahn was a warlord in the 1990s, but Blade Runner also presumed a far different future 37 years away, too. Orci, Kurtzman and Lindeloff could have fixed everything by freezing their Khan for 200 years, but they were too occupied with typing Bickersons dialog for Spock and Uhura to squabble with during crucial missions.

"Star Trek (2009)" Blu-ray Review

With the impending release of Star Trek Into Darkness, there has been an uptick in hating on J.J. Abrams' reboot of the franchise with these two videos bagging on the ridiculous plot holes and stuff:





I was mindful of most of the plot holes back in 2009 when I saw it and frankly didn't mind so much because Abrams had made the first Star Trek movie in ages that looked like a MOVIE and not a higher-budgeted television episode. It moved swiftly, was fun and the cast did a great job of capturing the essence of the original cast without resorting to mere mimicry.

That said, the super-convenient manner in which every member of the crew lands in their final spots seem cheesy (in a bad way) now and stuff we're supposed to accept like Starfleet has a base close enough to Vulcan to see its destruction with the naked eye, but it's not in the same system AND it's staffed by Scotty all by himself with the Oompa Loompa from Tim Burton's Willie Wonka movie. Come on.

There's a lot Star Trek does right, but enough silly decisions to give the nerd rager's a decent-sized club to beat it with. Rewatching the Blu-ray after watching the videos above made the gaffes unignorable. Also, the lens flare has lens flare.

Score: 7/10. Buy it on sale.

"Oblivion" Review

When the trailer for Tom Cruise's latest flick, Oblivion, came out there was a lot of snarky about how it looked like a mash-up of WALL-E and The Matrix (with Morgan Freeman in the Morpheus role) and having seen it I can only wish it had managed to make the sum equal to a fraction of the parts of those films.

Set in 2077, the Earth had been devastated by an alien invasion that started with the shattering of the Moon and the decimation of the planet by earthquakes, tsunamis and nuclear weapons. (More on this later.) With the Earth trashed, the remains of the human race have relocated to Titan, a moon of Saturn because the much closer and relatively warmer Mars would've made too much sense or something. Cruise plays Jack (not because he just played Jack Reacher and couldn't learn to answer to another name or anything), a drone repair tech who fixes the armed flying death spheres that protect giant pyramids sucking the oceans up and converting them to fusion fuel to propel the exodus of the final crews to Titan from an orbiting four-sided die called the Tet (short for tetrahedron).

His base of operations is Tower 49, a slick, icy-cold, sterile tri-level structure perched thousands of feet up above the clouds, looking like an Apple store in 2001. Keeping him company in his work (and bed, it appears) is Andrea Riseborough (me neither), who sorta looks like what Tilda Swinton would look like if she was a woman and not from David Bowie's homeworld and makes me think they couldn't get Emily Blunt or Jessica Chastain for the part. She monitor's operations from their base and skinny dips in their clear swimming pool (as in you can see into it from the outside) that runs the width of the station on their "front porch" with the walkway to the glass bubble-crossed-with-dragonfly jetcopter that Jack uses to...wait, what the what?!? A SWIMMING POOL?!?!

Most of the reviews for Oblivion have singled out its design sense for praise while damning the derivative and mundane story, but while the gleaming white metal and glass construct of everything is spiffy, it doesn't jibe with what a real operations base would need. Then again, it's not surprising when you consider that the director is Joseph Kosinski who helmed the also-slick but empty TRON Legacy. (The engine exhausts are like the updated Recognizers.) There's a weird disconnect between the ruined Earth and this shining spire and their supposedly urgent mission.

Also, I've had to here with the ridiculous alterations to the landscape that this movie and shows like Defiance portray where the surface is radically transformed in impossible, but picturesque ways. As the trailer shows at 0:34 of the trailer, the Washington Monument is only slightly askew and the Capitol done is visible, but a major setting is the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building which is at ground level because supposedly 1000 feet of dirt have buried it, making the landscape look like Iceland, the current hot exotic location as its use for Prometheus and Game of Thrones shows. As with everything else, making it look cool is more important than having it make sense.

Oh yeah, I never finished recapping the story, did I? That's OK, neither did the screenwriters (working from a pitch for a graphic novel by Kosinski) and as the trailer shows, it's all nonsense about secrets and dreams and mysterious women who fall from the sky and blah-blah-woof-woof. When a movie opens with a mention that their memories had been wiped because just because that's a huge warning flag because it makes no sense; it's like having a pool in your space tower. To Oblivion's tiny credit, the explanation of what's really happening isn't what most people will guess, though when that reveal starts to hint itself, you'll leap a few minutes ahead of the storytelling. The ending and the coda are also ridiculous.

Cruise and Riseborough are fine with what they're given as is former Bond hottie Olga Kurylenko as the Woman Jack Dreams About Who You Will Not Be In The Least Bit Surprised When It's Revealed She's His Wife From Before The Apocalypse. (Whoops! Spoiler alert!) Freeman has so little to do but add useless gravitas to the Morpheus role and the guy who plays Jamie Lannister on Game of Thrones has the thankless sidekick-who-doesn't-like-our-hero part. Zoe Bell is listed in the credits but I never spotted her and have no idea who that character was, not that it matters.

For some reason some people think that Kosinski is some sort of visionary director on the rise but based on TRON Legacy and Oblivion, those people are sadly mistaken. (One clown on io9.com in particular thinks he should do the next Star Trek movie. No, Bub.) A few slick sets don't substitute for solid stories well told and he's whiffed both times. I didn't get much sleep the night before, but I was dozing off at 1:30 in the afternoon while watching this and "It kept me awake" is the pass-fail for my girlfriend when she watches something. Just saying.

Normally I'd be giving this a catch it on cable recommendation, but for the luscious visuals and the super-cool sound effects for the killer drones when they're in hunting mode. If you've got a good sound system for your home theater, rent the Blu-ray; otherwise wait for cable.

Score: 4/10. Rent the Blu-ray.

"LImitless: Unrated Extended Cut" Blu-ray Review

I've been wanting to get this for over two years since it was my favorite movie of 2011, but it never seemed to go on sale until just recently, then Beast Buy never had it in stock until the other day when I was able to pick it up.

My original review is here and on second viewing it still holds up, though I was able to notice the use of color timing and camera techniques a bit more. A check online of the comparisons between the theatrical PG-13 cut and this "unrated"* cut are minor; mostly trims to sex and violence that don't seem too extreme in their unbowdlerized form. It's not profound, but it's immensely entertaining and Bradley Cooper kills it in the lead. It's also amusing to realize that he and Robert De Niro would team up in a couple of years and earn Oscar nominations for Silver Linings Playbook.

The Blu-ray looks and sounds great, but it's really thin on the extras side with a pair of fluffy short EPKs - the most techy thing mentioned is the film stocks used for different phases - that add up to about 15 minutes and an alternate ending that's remarkably not as good as what made it into theaters. (Reshoots can help!) I haven't listened to the commentary track yet.

Score: 9/10. Buy it.

* The dirty little secret of the "unrated" label is that it's meant to imply more sex and violence in a movie cut - which in the case of horror or action movies that studio demand a profit-enhancing PG-13 instead of an R-rating lives up to its implied meaning - all it really means is that the MPAA didn't rate it. If Pixar wanted to insert a few more shots of sunsets into Finding Nemo and put it out as the "Unrated Edition", they could even though there'd be nothing risque about it.

"Iron Man 3" Review

Marvel's "Phase Two" - the post-Avengers slate of movies which will include the upcoming Thor: The Dark World, the shooting Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the in pre-production Guardians of the Galaxy, all leading up to Avengers 2 - kicks off with Iron Man 3 which serves as a conclusion to the trilogy; an impression that the closing credits being a greatest hits clip reel from all three Iron Man movies reinforces.

After the events of The Avengers, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr. killing it as usual) is a wreck - racked by crippling anxiety attacks, unable to sleep, drifting away from his lady love Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow, who's never been hotter and when you see the movie, you'll get what I mean by that), spending his nights tinkering on a literal army of suits, implanting sensors into his body to act as magnets that attract the pieces to him. The man inside the iron is corroding.

Meanwhile, a shadowy terrorist called the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) is reining terror via television hacks portending doom for the President as a lesson to America which is never really made clear. After Tony's pal Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) is critically injured in a Mandarin attack, Tony dares the Mandarin to come and get him, which he does in a spectacular assault, showcased in all the ads and trailers, on his Malibu home. Barely escaping with his life, Tony crash lands in Tennessee where he needs to find a way to repair his broken suit and psyche and figure out what the Mandarin is up to and how it connects to soldiers working for a slick Guy Pearce who has developed a tech called Extremis which may have miraculous powers albeit with terrible side effects.

While there is plenty to like in Iron Man 3 - especially some great quippy stuff and a scene involving Rhodey's (Don Cheadle) account name and password - there are some weird flaws in the script which hurt things overall. Comic book fans who were already at Nerd Rage Level Orange over the casting of a non-Chinese actor as the Mandarin will go full Level Red/DEFCON 1 when they see how the character is handled in the movie. Non-comic fans probably won't mind, but comic fans will howl. The overarching plot of revenge targeting the President never makes sense and the motivation of the villain seems specious. They really should've had Joss Whedon do a hardcore polish on things.

When watching the Avengers, as awesome a feat it was of juggling so many balls, I felt like something was missing though I couldn't quite put my finger on what could've been improved. Here it's easy to easy to diagnose the core problem: the weakly-motivated villain who seems aimed at the wrong target. Somehow co-writer/director Shane Black (who wrote Lethal Weapon and collaboated with RDJ on Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) decided that Tony Stark's nemesis should be fear and thus the villain villain was given short shrift. It's like how the awful Skyfall wanted to make Bond getting old the problem so we were given a terrible villain who was little more than a disgruntled ex-employee who should've taken his grievance to his union rep.

I've seen a lot of hyperbolic bashing of Iron Man 3 around the Internet from Manichean nerds whose binary mentality can't see anything between flawless victory and epic failure, so they're calling this the "Worst. Marvel. Movie. Ever." In a world where the first Hulk, Elektra, and Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer (not to mention DC's pathetic The Dark Knight Reloaded) are fighting for last place, perhaps the twerps need a trip to the optometrist to have their sense of proportion checked.  There's also an element of "it doesn't feel like the other movies" from the same people who'd be first to whine that "they're just recycling the same stuff over and over instead of doing something different." Ignore them.

It comes down to this: Is Iron Man 3 good, does it have good writing, acting, action and is it worth seeing. The answers are yes; mostly, but could've been improved in the plot; yes; yes; and yes. Nuff said!

Score: 8/10. Catch a matinee.

While there are a couple of spoilers in the trailer, it's interesting to see how much isn't in the trailer and I've chosen to skip over those parts in the review because it's nice to be surprised.

April 2013 Review Roundup

Another slow month as I had other things on the plate, though this month did witness my first trips to an actual movie theater since December when I saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in HFR 3D and didn't review it. Yes, I suck.

April 14 - The Big Hit (9/10)
April 15 - The Avengers (9/10)
April 21 - G.I Joe: Retaliation (6/10)
April 23 - Mimic: Director's Cut (5/10)
April 30 - Warm Bodies (6/10); Skyfall (4/10)

Most Enjoyed: The Big Hit (it's just so much fun)
Least Enjoyed: Mimic (Skyfall has such good cinematography it was at least nice to look at)

Month's Movies Watched: 6
Previously Unseen: 4
Theatrical: 2
Home: 4
=====
Year-To-Date: 23
YTD First-Timers: 21
YTD Theatrical: 2
YTD Home: 21

"Skyfall" Blu-ray Review

I'm calling it now: The Daniel Craig Bond era has to end. Period. Full stop. End of discussion.

I liked Pierce Brosnan just fine and while Tomorrow Never Dies was a the best of his quartet of outings, Die Another Day was OK, too. While my girlfriend can't stop fixating on Daniel Craig's ears, I just think he should be remaking Steve McQueen's catalog. I don't dislike Craig, I don't like him as Bond and while Casino Royale (with cheese!) was adequate, Quantum of Solace was an empty nothing that I can't remember a thing about. (The only reason I have it in my library is because my Bond 50 box set included it.)

Which brings us to Skyfall, the most-successful financially, but frankly worst Bond movie I can recall offhand and I'm including Moonraker and The World Is Not Enough with the ignoble tag team of a villain who's only meaningful trait is that he can't feel pain and Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist in shorts. I don't claim to be a Bond connoisseur but man does Skyfall seem to utterly fail at being a Bond movie at all.

After a raucous pre-credit sequence which ends with the loss of a sensitive hard drive which was in an Istanbul hotel room for some reason, Bond is presumed dead. M (Judi Dench) is typing up Bond's obit and being eased toward retirement by the government to be replaced by Ralph Fiennes who has a name that starts with an M, so he's an obvious pick. Meanwhile, Bond is hiding out in some tropical paradise, shagging the local wahinis and participating in a ridiculous drinking game involving a live scorpion.

When a mysterious hacker blows up the MI-6 office, killing several agents, it spurs Bond to get back into the game. Unfortunately, he's out of shape and more like 003-1/2 than 007, but M puts him in the game anyway. And this is the first of many problems Skyfall has by making the villain time and age and progress making dinosaurs like Bond and M obsolete. Since a metaphysical concept isn't much of an adversary, a very campy and flamboyant (get the inference?) Javier Bardem is the supposed bad guy, Silva, who has the hard drive and a vendetta against M.

Unfortunately, his beef is similar to what happened to Bond himself during the credits of The World Is Not Enough and Bond didn't wage war on his employers over it. Frankly, it's pathetic. We've gone from Bond villains who want to rule the world to a disgruntled employee who should've filed a workplace grievance with his union rep. I'm not kidding; it's that lame.

I'm not a Bond aficionado though I do have every movie on DVD and Blu-ray (it doesn't mean I've watched them), but there are several things that typify a James Bond movie: him shagging numerous beauties (whoops, AIDS stopped that in the Eighties); nifty and impossible gadgets like invisible cars and pens that turn into guns; a super-cool villain with a diabolical scheme; and Bond being a nearly infallible and indestructible. All these things are missing for the most part in Skyfall; sorry, a pistol with a grip coded so only Bond can shoot it isn't impressive. (What's next, requiring upper and lower-case letters, a number and a special character on his MI-6 login password?) While the producers said they wanted a more realistic Bond when they tossed Brosnan for Craig, they seem to be unaware of what the audience wants from a Bond flick.

While the plot is weak, the action sequences are uniformly above-average and the cinematography by ten-time Oscar-loser Roger Deakins is simply lovely. People I know who aren't hardcore cinephiles remarked about how beautiful Skyfall is, but Deakins went home empty-handed again.While Life of Pi was a beautiful film, most of its look came from special effects and post-production wizardry and its victory over Skyfall was a bad call on the part of the Academy. Better luck next time, Roger.

Score: 4/10. Rent the Blu-ray.

"Warm Bodies" Review

As anyone with access to the media can attest, zombies are hot. The Walking Dead is one of the hottest cable TV shows despite pretty much sucking most of the time. (Admit it: Andrea was the worst.) Zombieland is enjoying a possible second life as an Amazon show. But while zombies are hot as entertainment, no one has thought these rotting biters are sexy-hot, but that's not stopping the sweet-but-slight Warm Bodies from trying to change that up.

Nicholas Hoult, Beast from X-Men: First Class, is R (missed opportunity to make him a pirate!) for that's all he can remember of his name. He wanders around the airport with the other zombies after some plague has killed 99% of the world's population with an amusing, ironic inner monologue for our enjoyment. For some unexplained reason, he has set up house in an airplane and filled it with knick-knacks and a magical turntable that doesn't require electricity to play records.

One day, he and a zombie pack happen upon a group of humans who are raiding a medical facility for supplies and in the mayhem, he kills and eats the brain of Perry, the kinda sorta now-ex(pired)-boyfriend of Julie (Teresa Palmer). Since eating brains allows zombies to absorb the victim's memories and feelings, he falls for her (she's cute, but come on) and abducts her back to his swinging airplane pad. Despite grunting a few syllables to reassure her that he's not a threat, she attempts to escape and is almost killed, but R saves her and over time, she starts to fall for this cute dead guy even after he confesses that he killed her boyfriend. (Try that sometime if your girlfriend gets angry at you, guys; say, "At least I didn't eat your boyfriend's brain!")

As R and Julie fall in love - you did get the joke, right? If not, there's a balcony scene to really nudge you in the ribs - he starts to feel things again and is able to communicate more. Not only that, but other zombies who see them together start to feel things as well. Can love change the world or will her father (John Malkovich actually not being super crazy) who runs the city and is paranoid about its defense and the "boneys" - zombies who've given up and become mindless, desiccated and really-poorly CG-animated eating machines mess things up for our crazy life-challenged lovers?

What works best is Hoult's performance because he's got the narrowest set of behavioral options, but nails it. There is some good humor in the voiceover monologue, but they don't keep it up; they should've pitched more on the comedy side to make up for the thinness elsewhere. What didn't work is the climax when one faction suddenly seems to forget their role is to kill the other side. In the world of this story, no way would anyone suddenly say that a reversal makes total sense.

My girlfriend read the book and said it stuck pretty close to the source with some OK alterations. My friend has had a hate on for this movie since he caught wind of the concept, sneering at the idea of "sexy zombies" and I don't think anything above will sway him though it's not exactly what he thinks. I'm in the middle because it just felt too small and underwritten and cheaply done. While I may not sound super warm toward Warm Bodies, it's far from being a stiff of a flick.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.



One thing that dampened my enthusiasm may be that I saw this at the thoroughly mediocre Silver Cinemas at Macomb Mall, a 2nd-run house with uniformly poor projection and sound quality in every room I've seen movies in. They run the bulbs under spec delivering a dim image, the focus is usually soft, and the sound systems are always messed up. This showing had most of the  audio coming from the left side of the screen and thus whispered zombie grunts were frequently inaudible. A proper presentation won't fix the script's problems, but it won't hurt either.

I had a similar experience when I first saw The Incredibles at a now-defunct independent first-run joint. Muffled audio made for a lackluster experience. Jump ahead to when I got the DVD and watched it on a plain old standard television and could finally hear better; totally better experience.

"Mimic: Director's Cut" Blu-ray Review

The only reasons people remember 1997's Mimic is because of the trailer shot of Mira Sorvino being swept up by a giant flying bug and it was the first English-language film (and second feature overall after Chronos) by director Guillermo del Toro, who has gone on to notoriety for the Hellboy series and Pan's Labyrinth as well as the upcoming giant-robots-vs-giant-monsters flick Pacific Rim. That's pretty much it and it's not much.

The plot is as thin as you can get: A roach-borne disease is killing the children of New York City, so to eradicate the roaches etymologist Mira Sorvino genetically-engineers a special "Judas Breed" super roach using termite and other bug DNA that will exude an enzyme that will kill the roaches. It's a smashing success and everyone lives happily ever after. The end.

Not really.

Three years later, something weird is afoot (or more accurately acrawl) as a giant something drags a Skid Row priest to his doom and weird bugs start coming to Sorvino's notice. Seeking the source of the bugs, she and her CDC investigator husband and a subway cop head down into the tunnels, eventually finding out that the bugs have been very busy and gotten VERY large. Frantic battles for survival ensue.

I haven't seen Mimic since it came out in theaters and I couldn't remember what was going on or what was different about this "Director's Cut." Hunting down a comparison online, it appears to be not that much; mostly superfluous stuff involving Sorvino trying to get pregnant that's easily omitted. In the one extra I watched, an interview with del Toro, he explains what he wanted the original ending to be and while it sounds creepy, it doesn't help the overall fact that nothing is explained as to how the heck bugs would mimic people.

Somewhat creepy and moody, but mostly murky and icky, Mimic may've spawned a couple of direct-to-video sequels, but not many imitators.

Score: 5/10. Rent it (since it's not going to be on cable).

"G.I. Joe: Retaliation" Review

The first movie in this toy-based series - 2009's G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra - was such a forgettable mess that I've never picked up a copy for my library, which if you've seen some of the crap I've got speaks volumes. So the existence of a sequel and it's last-minute delay in release from last summer, allegedly for reshoots to capitalize on Channing Tatum's sudden star status, raised little interest. The only reason I schlepped out to the theater was because free admission coupons came with some Blu-rays I'd picked up on sale; so why not?

If you did see the first movie (or have forgotten it), it doesn't really matter because other than Tatum's Duke and Jonathan Pryce returning as the President, no one from that cast is in this one. Joining the team with Tatum are The Rock, Adrianne Palicki and some other dude. After a mission recovering loose nukes in Pakistan, the President orders all the Joes executed for treason, leading to Tatum being killed (sorry, ladies!) and the remaining three to fight for survival, find out what happened and clear their names.

It turns out that the President has been replaced by an agent of Cobra and he's working with Cobra Commander (no longer played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whose career apparently has been moving upscale) to enact a scheme to blackmail all the world's nuclear powers to disarm and swear allegiance to Cobra. Or something.


To say that G.I. Joe: Retaliation is better than the first is no great accomplishment. It's a decent, disposable, dumb action movie but I don't know if the audience is expected to come in with an encyclopedic knowledge of the cartoons and lore of the franchise, but when Snake Eyes (good guy) is captured and taken to a ridiculous subterranean prison to be held with Cobra Commander and Destro (bad guys) and discovered to actually be Storm Shadow (bad guy) and still incarcerated in this ludicrous space suit in a tube of water setup, I was like, "Huh? What?" That the fake President is able to do most of the incredibly illegal, unconstitutional, and generally bad things he does without any checks or balances strains even the low credibility threshold this sort of stuff gets away with.

There are some decent action sequences, but the fights are shot too close-up, making it just look like a mess, not calculated mayhem. More surprising is the quality of some of the banter in the scenes between Tatum and The Rock; genuine laugh lines. Too bad some of that wit couldn't have provided a little plot wisdom.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

"The Big Hit" Review

In 1998 a pair of trash movie classics were released a couple of months apart: Wild Things, which Roger Ebert described as "trash that glows in the dark" (a compliment); and The Big Hit, which he panned and sneered at those who tried to point out that it's a comedy, "If it was a comedy, I think I would've laughed." Real tactful there, Rog.Well, Ebert has gone to the Great Balcony Down Below and I'm here to correct the record: The Big Hit is an absolute gem of comedic-action filmmaking.

Marky Mark stars as Melvin Smiley, an ace assassin able to take out an entire hotel suite of armed guards while the rest of his crew hangs back letting him do all the work and then steal the credit and bonuses for his kill. Not only that, his mistress is harping at him about not paying her bills (while she's cheating on him as well) and his fiance has invited her anti-goyim Jewish mother and bad drunk father over for a visit as a prelude to dumping him. No wonder he's guzzling Mylanta like water.

When fellow gang member Cisco (Lou Diamond Phillips totally off the chain) offers Melvin a part in a side kidnapping he's pulling, Melvin reluctantly agrees. The target is a daughter (an adorable, sassy China Chow, who hasn't worked nearly enough since) of a rich Japanese industrialist. Unfortunately, her father is utterly bankrupt after making a movie with a title too amusing to share here and the girl is the goddaughter of the crime boss (Avery Brooks) they all work for and he's none to happy that an unauthorized kidnapping has been pulled on his turf, so he assigns Cisco to hunt down the perpetrators. I'll give you one guess as to whom Cisco plans to frame for the job and that same guess covers who is babysitting the hostage while trying to hide her from his houseguests.

When I saw it in theaters, the scene that alerted me that this was something special is this ransom note debacle:



There is so much gold in this scene as Chow asserts herself as not easily impressed even with a gun in her face, mocking her abductors.You can also glimpse Marky's meek persona which, coming a year after Boogie Nights and not many more from his Funky Bunch wigga days, did a lot to shed a different light on his range. (It's hard to believe Mr. "Good Vibrations" is a two-time Oscar nominee, huh?)

The movie is fast-paced front to back and pitched at such a high energy level that it really illustrates how few flicks get the comedy-action balance right. I don't know why director Kirk Wong never did anything after this, but he went out with a bang. F-bombs are dropped like they're taking out Dresden and there are subplots about how Bokeem Woodbine has stopped having sex with girls in favor of "Straight jackin'!" and a long-overdue video rental and the crazy kid calling Melvin demanding its return. How can a movie with "Tracebuster-buster-busters" be anything but awesome? It can't!

Score: 9/10. Buy it.



Unfortunately, the Wyclef Jean track with the "Staying Alive" sample does NOT appear in the movie. That made me mad back then because it was so cool in the trailer.

March 2013 Review Roundup

A really light month as most of my spare time was spent playing the terrific Tomb Raider reboot/retcon on PC (too bad nVidia got fixed drivers out a week after I'd beaten the game) and I watched Torchwood: Children of Earth to see what all the acclaim was about. Sadly, I haven't been to a movie theater in almost five months other than The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey around Christmas.

March 10 - John Dies At The End (5/10)
March 23 - Killer Joe (2/10)
March 30 - Red Dawn (2012) (5/10)


Most Enjoyed: John Dies At The End
Least Enjoyed: Killer Joe

Month's Movies Watched: 3
Previously Unseen: 3
Theatrical: 0
Home: 3
=====
Year-To-Date: 17
YTD First-Timers: 17
YTD Theatrical: 0
YTD Home: 17

"Red Dawn (2012)" Review

This remake of the Cold War-era minor classic of the same name was held up for a couple of years due to the combined factors of MGM going bankrupt (also holding up The Cabin in the Woods) and having to perform massive digital surgery, replacing flags and logos, to change the original invading army from Chinese to North Korea, because that's more plausible and oh wait no, it's to avoid offending or soon-to-be-overlords. The results are the same, though; a mediocre muddle meandering through meadows of mehness.

A pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth leads a ragtag band of guerrilla fighters including pre-Hunger Games Josh Hutcherson, Connor "Tom and Nicole adopted me, thus the total lack of resemblance" Cruise in Spokane, Washington. He's a Marine on leave with experience in Iraq, so he's the default leader not that his surly and erratic brother, Josh Peck, seems to appreciate as he screws things up frequently with is impulsive behavior.

While there are some nice explosions and it's fun to spot the locations in downtown Detroit and (mostly) Pontiac, MI where they filmed, it never catches fire because the beats are familiar to anyone who's seen any "resisting invasion" flick whether another country or aliens from outer space. (I probably haven't seen the original in a quarter-century, but recognized the trap door ambush they use.) If anything, in the translation from ChiComs to Norks something has been lost because it prevents any sense of what they're up to, not that the script had anything much on it's mind in the first place.

It's also oddly muted in its patriotism when you'd think Team America's "America, F*ck Yeah!" would be the Wolverines anthem. Since Hollyweird equates pro-American patriotism as "jingoistic imperialism," it's not too surprising that they wanted to keep such rabble-rousing thoughts from entering the audiences mind, ending up with a bland pablum unable to rouse or incite anyone to thought or action.

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.

"Killer Joe" Blu-ray Review

What's the difference between a dirty joke that's funny and one that's offensive? A: Whether you laugh or not; if you laugh, it's not offensive. That's the best way I can explain why I found Killer Joe to be not the pitch-black comedy a LOT of critics seem to have found it because it simply crosses too many lines too egregiously to get a pass and I'm speaking as someone who considers American Psycho and A Clockwork Orange to be comedies.

Emile Hirsh is Chris, a white trash Texan with a loan shark problem that he thinks can be solved by having his mother killed. His sister Dottie (a frequently naked Juno Temple who was Catwoman's sidekick in The Dark Knight Reloaded) is a child-like young woman who I'm guessing is meant to be retarded from the same mother trying to smother her as a child, but is lucid enough to think it's a good idea. She's also the beneficiary of mom's will and lives with Thomas Haden Church (playing a dumber version of the Lowell character he always does) and his new wife, Gina Gershon. Everyone seems casually on board with the scheme. To do the deed they hire Joe Cooper (a serpentine Matthew McConaughey), a Dallas police detective who decides to take Dottie as a retainer when Chris can't pay the necessary up-front fee of $25,000. He's entranced by this simple girl with the ripe body and her amoral family doesn't seem to mind the seamy arrangement.

There are so many ways Killer Joe goes off the rails that I'm going to need several trains to cover them all. First off, none of the characters are compelling. Hirsch is a moron; Church is dim; Temple's best assets are external; Gershon almost makes something of her thin character, but suffers the most. And suffering is the fatal flaw here - the brutality and degradation suffered by Hirsh and Gershon is repellent because it's gratuitous. William Friedkin, the director of classics like The Exorcist and The French Connection had an insane defense of the violence which pulled an NC-17 rating by saying to cut the violence would destroy the movie in the same way the Vietnam War was sold as needing to destroy the country to save it. Huh? Get over yourself, Billy.

If you've heard anything about Killer Joe, it's probably a reference to "the chicken leg scene" in which Gershon simulates fellatio on a piece of "K Fry C" and with her sexy background in films like Showgirls and Bound, that sounds like fun (amirite?) but NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, it's not fun at all! At this point late in the movie, the murder plot has naturally gone sideways and bass-ackwards and tensions are running high. In an explosive bit of violence, McConaughey smashes Gershon in the face, bloodying it badly and then forces her to suck the chicken leg has he holds it in his crotch. That a lot of critics and people I've noted online raving about the movie were so cool with this level of depravity really says a lot about how our society has slid into the ravine.

It's all a matter of tone. My girlfriend was very disturbed by the movie, but she's a huge David Lynch fan and tried to equate this to Blue Velvet. I haven't seen that since it's release in 1986 in a theater full of skeeved-out suburbanites, but I think the difference is that the people in Lynch's fantasia clearly don't exist in this world - if someone like Dennis Hopper or Dean Stockwell does exist, I want off of this rock, stat! - and violent stupid people in trailer parks do. Contra Friedkin's whining, it wouldn't have harmed the movie if they'd toned down this scene and an earlier beating Hirsch takes. It's not like watching zombies stabbed in the face on The Walking Dead, you know?

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Well, since we never see the mother alive, we don't know what it's so important she be dead. Gershon's character is seeing the mother's new husband and the two apparently are orchestrating everything, but I'm not sure how Joe gets wind of the caper. The movie seems satisfied with believing smug attitudes towards hicks is enough and perhaps those who like this movie are responding to that. Also, if the cop cars didn't say Dallas Police on the side, there is nothing to indicate this isn't set in some podunk Texas plains town because you never see the city.

Needless mean and brutal and nowhere near entertaining enough to make the misery worth the feeling you'll need a shower after watching it, Killer Joe is a heap of woe thinking it's the peak of whoa. It's too bad because the performances are actually decent as far as the script allows. Between this,The Lincon Lawyer and Bernie, McConaughey's career has taken a turn into respectable thespian territory - no Surfer, Dude here - but his menace is overexposed. A judicious edit wouldn't have made this into a good film, but it sure would've been less disgusting.

Score: 2/10. Skip it.

"John Dies At The End" Review

I suppose there are some people who would take the extreme difficulty in describing the plot of John Dies at the End as a plus, but they shouldn't because despite some occasional gross-out laughs in an Evil Dead 2 sense, the movie is a scattered, inconsequential mess.

Opening with a weird series of scenes involving killing a guy, hacking his head off with a hatchet, breaking the handle, replacing the handle, chipping the head, going to the store to replace that, then the dead guy showing up with his head sewn back on with monofilament, JDatE opens with buzzy WTF energy as we're introduced to the very Caucasian David Wong played by the familiar-looking-but-new Chase Williamson. He's talking to newspaper reporter Paul Giamatti about some drug called "soy sauce" that he's on which gives him visions of different points in time and how his pal John and he deal with aliens from other dimensions and spider monsters and the ability to read other people's dreams and some other crazy stuff.

The problem with providing a plot synopsis is that the time frame and levels of reality jump all over the place meaning nothing is ever what it seems and after you realize that none of this matters; it's all just a pastiche or random collage of occasionally nifty moments like the monster made of meats stored in a freezer or how John (who died in the middle but is alive at the end thus the title is a lie) communicates with David via a bratwurst. But it never amounts to anything. I've heard rumbles that you need to read the source graphic novel, but that just means the movie has failed all the more because you shouldn't have to read the source material to appreciate a movie. (See The Lord of the Rings for a prime example.)

Directed by Don Coscarelli, the man behind the Phantasm series and the equally wildly-overrated Bubba Ho-Tep, JDatE gets a nerd pass from the easily-entertained nerds for just being odd, but while there are some interesting concepts rattling around, they don't add up. Bubba Ho-Tep had a similar problem in that the basic premise - Elvis (played by Bruce Campbell) is alive (it was an impersonator who died), but living in a nursing home with JFK (played by Ossie Davis!) and they have to battle an Egyptian spirit - was cool, but it didn't go anywhere. It felt like they stopped once they said, "Bruce Campbell is Elvis and JFK's an old black man."

John Dies at the End falls into my "not terrible, but not any good" zone where stuff like The Crazies lives. It's not so bad that I need to warn you away from wasting your time, but there's not much to recommend you spend the time on watching it. The less impressed you are by random weirdness, the lower your need to seek this one.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable while multitasking.

Why Not Let The Viewers Pick The Television Shows?

Some background: I posted the following on an io9.com item announcing the cancellation by ABC of a series called Zero Hour after only three episodes. One of the writers there was calling it the "wackiest show on television that no one was watching" in the car crash sense, not that it was particularly good. I tried to watch the pilot one night and gave up after the first couple of acts; it just didn't interest me.

How this show - and others which seem to utterly tank leading to their sacking after a few episodes - got on the air in the first place has been a point of curiosity for me for a while and what follows is something I've discussed with a few people during bull sessions. I put it as a comment on io9, but since it was pretty long and relevant to what goes on here (yes, it's not a movie I watched, but it is commentary), I've brought it home. Enjoy.
-------------
Here's a crazy idea that's just so nuts it makes total sense: Instead of clueless network executives picking the series, how about putting the pilots online and letting the people who will actually be watching the shows decide?

We know darn well that a lot of shows are picked up from pilots because the producers/creators are pals with the network suits or the suits want to "maintain the relationship" with that creator in for some reason (e.g. past success; they murdered a teen hooker with a Senator in the Dominican Republic; frat brothers) but none of these matter to the folks who just want to be entertained by the boob tube after a hard day's labors.

Instead of risking millions of dollars on some coked-up suit's decision, why don't the networks put the pilots on their sites and blare, "HELP US PICK YOUR SHOWS!" It's free advertising and market research as people would comment that "The show's pretty funny, but the kid playing the son is an annoying brat" or "What the hell is this show about? Nazi clocks? Is Anthony Edwards ill? He doesn't look well." Whether pilot buzz online will turn into actual viewers in the fall (see: Snakes on a Plane) is unknown, but it can't be any worse than how the nets can't seem to pick a winner to save their butts.

Several years ago as part of e-Rewards, I was surveyed on a pair of TV shows. One was an episode of Private Practice which was already running and was a trip in a couple of spots because the visual effects weren't in so it was just green screen. (It was the view from Kate Walsh's beach house deck; the beach and ocean were fake; I caught the episode when it aired.)

The other was some horrific alleged sitcom pilot called Never Better starring Damon Wayans and Jane Lynch. Even though I was literally being paid to watch this, I wanted death for all involved but Lynch, who was funny like she was in 40-Year-Old Virgin. I think I even filled in a comment that "Everyone involved in the making of this show should be forbidden to work in the entertainment industry again or killed. Except Jane Lynch; she was funny." It never aired and for a time it wasn't even on IMDB; I'm surprised it was on now.

Imagine that instead of paying for market research for a small sampling the networks applied the same methods on their own with a much larger sample. Use the same demographic info collection and code the pages to verify people watched the whole thing (e-Rewards could tell if you switched browser windows) and use the method YouTube does to track how far in people watch. If you get a bunch of good feedback from a small demo but the overall stats show people are turning off after 15 minutes, that means you've got a loser. I remember trying to watch the first episode of the Charlie's Angels reboot a couple of years back. My girlfriend called and asked if I'd watched it and I replied, "I shut it off after 12 minutes. If hot girls with guns aren't holding my attention, you're doing something terribly wrong."

I'm sure some are thinking, "It takes time for shows to develop and find their voice. Agreed. Joss Whedon at his best needs about 6-12 episodes to get his shows roaring; The Vampire Diaries didn't get really interesting for 6-8 episodes; Star Trek series seemed to take two or three SEASONS to get going; but networks aren't giving shows much of a first chance, not a even a second chance these days. Series which may have been absolutely awesome after their 5th episodes are strangled in their cribs after two. Hill Street Blues would never have survived today and the only reason it was left on for a season back in the Eighties is because NBC simply had nothing to replace it with so they just let it continue.

February 2013 Review Roundup

Not much this month as I tried to catch up on Oscar-nominated flicks.

Feb. 8 - Side By Side (8/10)
Feb. 9 - Searching For Sugar Man (7/10)
Feb. 10 - Alex Cross (6/10)
Feb. 19 - Lincoln (DNF)
Feb 20 - Les Misérables (6/10)
Feb 21 - Life of Pi (8/10)

Most Enjoyed: Life of Pi
Least Enjoyed: Lincoln

Month's Movies Watched: 6
Previously Unseen: 6
Theatrical: 0
Home: 6
=====
Year-To-Date: 14
YTD First-Timers: 14
YTD Theatrical: 0
YTD Home: 14

Oscars 2013 Livesnark

* Seth MacFarlane hits with his first joke about Tommy Lee Jones.

* Great opening segment. VERY funny. Charlize Theron can dance?

* WHOA! Christophe Waltz wins Best Supporting Actor, a HUGE upset over the expected Robert De Niro or TLJ. He seemed as surprised as anyone.

*And then the show crashes to a halt with terrible crap for Paul Rudd and Melissa McCarthy. OMGWTFBBQ?

* Paperman wins for Best Animated Short. It was cute, so that's cool.

* Another upset as Brave wins Animated Feature over the expected Frankenweenie or Wreck-It Ralph. I see a lot of people already throwing out their Oscar pool bet slips.

* What's with the trio of Best Picture clips?

* Life of Pi wins for Best Cinematography, another reminder that film is dead. It is a beautiful film.

* Life of Pi justifiably wins for Best Visual Effects. It's a sad irony that Rhythm & Hues, the main FX house just went into Chapter 11. They mentioned it in their speech, but got cut off.

* As tight as MacFarlane's bits have been, the banter for those presenting awards has been gawdawful so far.

* Another sorta upset as Colleen Atwood doesn't win for Snow White and the Huntsman. Haven't seen Anna Karenina, but the samples looked typical for this stuff.

* How come the winners for costuming, hair and makeup had both terrible clothes and hair?

* Shirley Bassey kills "Goldfinger" at age 76. I was wondering if they had a plan for the inevitable standing O. (They did.)

* Nikki Finke is bashing the show hard here in her livesnark. There's snark and then there's unhinged rage-hating and this is the latter. Lady's got more issues than a newstand.

* It appears they're moving the nominees for the lesser awards from their usual seats in the back to the boxes beside the stage to shorten the run up to the stage. Good tactic.

* The banter still sucks. The people who typed this should be unemployed.

* With four other miserable political choices to choose from, Searching For Sugar Man wins probably because you didn't want to kill yourself after watching it.

* They're playing the Jaws theme to signal it's time to go to the long-talkers.

*Wow. The orchestra isn't in the house, but down at Capitol Records studio.

* I love, LURV, Chicago, but why are they using it here for a tribute to recent musicals?

* They should've put footage of how Jennifer Hudson looked in Deamgirls behind her.

* The Les Misérables medley shows how similar most of the score's songs sounded because they were able to mash them together so easily.

* The Marky Mark and Ted bit worked because it had to be pre-written to do the CGI.

* In case anyone still had a shot in the Oscar pool, the tie for Sound Editing either doubled or halved their results as Zero Dark Thirty and Skyfall won. Who says a single vote can't make a difference?

* Anne Hathaway wins to the shock and horror of no one.

* Did they get Kristen Stewart out of rehab for this? She looks a mess and jittery.

* Barbra Streisand comes out Botoxed to near toxic levels (she's 70) and looking like Stevie Nicks to sing "The Way We Were" because Marvin Hamlisch died. She sounds good, but the show is dragging now.

* What's wrong with Renee Zellwegger's face? She looks crazy drunk, too.

UPDATE: George Takei had this on FaceSpace:



* Life of Pi wins Best Score. Could it go all the way?

* "Skyfall" wins Best Song to the surprised of absolutely no one.

* Argo wins Best Adapted Screenplay, which I think tilts the odds back to it for Best Picture.

* Tarantino looks sweaty and methed-up collecting his Best Original Screenplay award for Django Unchained. Still need to see this.

*Ang Lee wins his 2nd Best Director Oscar though he's likely to go home empty-handed for Best Picture again, if Argo wins as expected. (He won for Brokeback Mountain when it lost to the toxic and despicable Crash because Hollyweird decided to celebrate its racist self-loathing over its homophobia.)

* J.Law trips and falls going up the steps; Wolverine rushes up to assist Mystique. She seemed dazed even though it was pretty much a lock.

* DDL wins for Lincoln to the surprise of absolutely no one. I'm sure he's glad he decided to not be be a cobbler. Funny acceptance speech.

* Jack (No Last Name Necessary) comes out looking blitzed. Why the heck is Michelle Obama beaming in to give the Best Picture nominees? Would they have done this for Anne Romney if she was First Lady? (Duh.)

* Why the heck does Grant Heslov get to give the acceptance speech for Argo? Oh, in order to tee up Ben Affleck.

* Nicely nasty closing number paying tribute to the losers.

* It'll be interesting to see how the reviews for the show go and how hard they bash on on MacFarlane because I thought he killed. I laughed a lot at his stuff, especially the opener with Flight with sock puppets.

* Overall show grade: B+. Host grade: A

* Unlike most years, I don't have much annoyance over an undeserved win or loss. I wasn't particularly passionate over any of the contenders and of the 7 films I saw, I would've picked Life of Pi right ahead of Argo, but it's OK.

* The uptight twits on the E! After Party coverage hosts are hating on MacFarlane. Meow, babies.

* OMG, J.Law is killing it in the backstage interviews. Real, fresh, no BS answers to the dumb questions. I'm really liking her.

"Life of Pi" Review

Ang Lee has had a semi-cursed career despite his great success. First he was robbed over Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (losing to Gladiator); then he face-planted with the disastrous Gumby, I mean Hulk (two words: hulk dogs); then he wins Best Director for Brokeback Mountain while the Best Picture Oscar went to the toxic and despicable Crash (the liberal guilt trip one, not the David Cronenberg car fetish freak show). Now he's being bruited as a likely winner again for Best Director since Argo is the heavy favorite to win the top prize, but since Ben Affleck wasn't nominated, they may pity price Lee again for Life of Pi, the movie I'd vote for out of the this year's batch I've seen. (At this time I have seen Django Unchained yet and I'm skipping Amour.)

If you've seen the trailers or heard anything about it, you know that Life of Pi is about a young man who is left lost at sea with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker (the back story on that is cute) after the ship carrying his family and the animals from their zoo as they emigrated from India to Canada sinks in a violent storm. What the trailers and PR haven't really mentioned is the deeply spiritual tale being told. The first act of the movie covers with a light touch Pi's sampling of the Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, while his father encourages him to focus on reason (i.e. science) instead of unknowable god(s). People get the heebie-jeebies about religion in their entertainment, but it's not bludgeoning and it's really, REALLY important about what happens at the end.

Since the story is told to a writer by an older Pi, the matter of if he's going to survive his ordeal is never in doubt. Where some controversy has erupted is in what happens in the last 15 minutes which calls into question everything we've been shown for the past hour-plus. I'd heard many people were turned-off or felt betrayed by the ending, but it worked for me in a way the howlingly overrated Beasts of the Southern Wild didn't because its question about how people believe (or not) in God (capital G) neatly dovetail with my views on the subject. (See below if you're interested.) The way everything we've been shown gets flipped and reconsidered - and how we react - doesn't pull the rug out from under the viewer as much as tests whether they were paying attention to the setup and the implicit themes it was laying out.

Even if you don't buy into the religious aspect of Life of Pi, it's a sumptuous visual feast of surreal beauty and beautiful menace as an army of special effects wizards spent over 18 months in post-production taking the footage of Suraj Sharma on an empty boat in a wave tank and turning it into an ocean that's alternately raging and placid and creating a digital tiger so realistic that the only real giveaway that it's not real is that there's no way a real tiger could've been trained to do so many things it's required to do like be seasick or emaciated from starvation. (If you've already seen it or don't care about spoilers, look below the trailer.) It's remarkable and should earn Rhythm and Hues a Best Visual Effects Oscar in two days, which will be bittersweet because they entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy recently and will likely be dissolved, a victim of doing business in California with its punishing taxes. Pity.

Life of Pi has been somewhat of a sleeper hit around the world and it was a big risk for the studio to back because putting down $125 million to make a movie with no stars and isn't obviously about special effects and whose subject is the nature of belief in God; it takes a leap of...you know. While it'd be a stunning upset to actually win Best Picture, if I had a vote, it probably would've earned it.

Score: 8/10. Rent the Blu-ray.






And now it's time for Theology With Dirk...

I believe in God and that He created the Universe and all the stuff on Earth. (No, He didn't do it 6000 years ago, like the stereotypical "Sky Man believer" gets painted by the atheist media as believing; this ball has been rolling a looooooong time.) The arrogant a-hole atheists (alliteration!) prefer the Big Bang Theory despite the big problem that their all-holy 2nd Law of Thermodynamics doesn't explain where the seed matter for the Universe came from. Steven Hawking jumped his wheelchair over the shark when he torched his credibility claiming that the original matter simply came into being. WTF?!? It just happened? Oh, yes, that is certainly more plausible than an omnipotent Creator who made everything and then vacated the premises much like Dr. Manhattan at the end of Watchmen.

The point is that WE ARE HERE DESPITE THE EVIDENCE. Neither the Coke (Big Bang) or Pepsi (God) theories of creation/Creation work if you're honest about it, so I've long thought that people just pick the story that allows them to sleep better at night. Atheists claim to be about reason over faith, but when you examine the dogmas and rituals they follow, it becomes clear that they're just as religious, if not more so, than the "Sky Man believers" they sneer at; all they've done is kick out God from their secular church. I think most religious people understand that there's a proof deficit in their belief structure, but if there was 110% solid evidence for God, then it wouldn't be called a "faith" would it? The spin at the end of the movie requires you to make a choice of your own and that's a bold, but rewarding risk taken.

"Les Misérables" Review

While I'm a big fan of musicals - more than most heterosexual men should be according to my mean girlfriend (who doesn't live in Canada) -I've never gotten on board with the whole "Lay Miz" thing. The bits of the score I've heard seemed overblown in the orchestrations compared to the classics or even contemporaries like Andrew Lloyd Webber. (For reference, I've seen The Phantom of the Opera on stage four times, twice in Detroit and twice at the gloriously-restored Pantages Theater in Toronto, once with Paul Stanley - yes, the singer of KISS! - as the Phantom. I thought the Joel Schumacher film was a mixed bag.)

Over a quarter-century after its stage debut, the film version of Les Misérables hit the silver screen with Oscar-winning director of The King's Speech, Tom Hooper, calling the shots with a top-shelf cast led by Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, Russell Crowe, Amanda Seyfried, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen. It was lush and loaded for Oscar bear and it just doesn't work very well.

Since the story of Jean Valjean (French for John Valjohn, I think) and his miserable life after serving 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread is pretty much common knowledge, I'm going to discuss what doesn't work with this musical: There's too much music. No, not in a "too many notes" sense a la Amadeus - a reference that Phantom slyly referenced in the "Notes" number - but in the bad decision to maintain the "sung-thru" structure of the show in that all the dialog is sung instead of the songs standing separate of the dialog of the book. Having Gladiator and Wolverine bellowing in song what would've been more effective if acted is silly. If you're going to open a show up beyond what could portrayed on stage, what's preventing the crafting of dramatic scenes? Nothing but poor choices.

Compounding the damage is Hooper's insistence on shooting way too many scenes with a fisheye lens which exaggerates faces and makes things seem surreal when they should seem, well, miserable. His use of visual metaphors is also ham-handed as we watch Crowe's Inspector Javert perform two numbers while literally walking on the edge of precipices. (GET IT?!?!? NUDGE! NUDGE!) Adding another layer of mistakes is the editing which appears to have been done by kitchen blender with no regard to how to cut on the beat, frequently flipping at random from one shot to another. For editing to be noticeable, which it shouldn't be in general, it either has to be very good (e.g. The Social Network, Moneyball, or Star Wars) or very bad (e.g. Les Misérables) - this is the latter. The sequence depicting Fantine's decent into desperation and prostitution, selling her lovely hair and teeth, is supposed to take place over a period of time, but in Hooper's and his editors' hands, it looks like one really bad night.

While nominated for a bunch of Oscars, it's unlikely to take home any top prizes other than the sure-thing, slam dunk that is Anne "Yummy Girl" Hathaway's turn as the doomed Fantine. While she doesn't get naked (a surefire Oscar-bait tactic she joked when she hosted the Oscars after getting nada for Love and Other Drugs), she chopped her hair off and absolutely kills it on "I Dreamed A Dream" - aka that song that made Susan Boyle a household name. Instead of jamming a wide angle lens in her face and editing like a meth addict on a pogo stick, they simply let her sing the number in an unbroken 3:40-long shot and it's devastating. I'm sure the other nominees in Best Supporting Actress thought, "Well, at least I get to wear a pretty dress and have 'Academy Award Nominee' ahead of my name from now on," when they saw her shed a perfectly-timed tear in the middle of her plaint.

The much-hyped technique of recording the vocals live during filming instead of lip-synching to a pre-recorded track does help in making the performances more immediate, but it's dependent on the talent level of the performer; Jackman is good, Hathaway and Samantha Barks are great, Seyfried is surprisingly good, Crowe should stick to gladiatoring. The production design and costumes are your usual prestige period movie quality, but who cares about the frame with the portrait is substandard. Film musicals are tricky beasts to tame and there aren't many who can seem capable of doing it, not that Hooper deserves a participant ribbon for trying.

A final note: To tell you how unenthused I was about writing this review, while it appears on Dirkflix on the date/time I watched it, it's actually May 29th as I'm finally clearing this off my spindle in order to keep my pledge to review everything in some form. You're welcome.

Score: 6/10. Rent it if you're a fan; otherwise catch it on cable.





UPDATE: I saw this the night after posting the review despite it being around for a couple of months and I'm a fan of these guys. Really funny though he's too hard on Amanda Seyfried's singing.

"Lincoln" Review

This will be short: Daniel Day-Lewis will win his third Best Actor Oscar and Lincoln is an insufferably boring movie that I couldn't force myself to watch in two attempts. Sorry, kids, but I'm not being paid enough to spend the time on this tedious drivel.

The first attempt lasted about 30 minutes before my girlfriend asked if we could stop because she was bored and I wasn't enjoying myself much either. With the Oscars coming up this Sunday and having seen only four of the Best Picture nominees, I figured I should make the effort and that's the problem with Lincoln - it requires more effort than entertainment should require. (If PBS made history shows this droning and dull, Big Bird would be arguing for funding to be cut!) After another 25 minutes of yammering, I gave up because I wasn't even done with the first hour of this 2-1/2 hour slog.

In between my viewing attempts, I listened into a conference call with screenwriting teacher John Truby as he ran down his thoughts on this year's screenplay nominees and he was particularly harsh on Lincoln because it wasn't a screenplay as much as a play that's been filmed. Written by playwright Tony Kushner, it is talky, wordy and verbose so speech after speech unfurled. Truby feared it would win because, "It's directed by the first god of directors, Steven Spielberg; written by one of the top three playwriting gods of the American theater, Tony Kushner; and it's about the first god of Presidents, Lincoln." Yep, pretty much.

I made it as far as when Sally Field (as Mary Todd Lincoln) held up a reception line while blathering at Tommy Lee Jones (as Agent K sent back in time by the MIB to ensure that his future partner would be a free man - what, too soon?) for what felt like forever. Toggling the time counter, I saw it was 55 minutes in and that was enough for me.

DDL's performance looked terrific, humanizing what has been a remote image cultivated by $5 bills and the Hall of Presidents at Disney World, but by setting the story in the five-week period when the 13th Amendment (abolishing slavery) was debated and passed in January 1865 it means we get lots of political speechifying which should be interesting, but it isn't. Spielberg trades in his usual golden look for a monochromatic chiaroscuro style of cinematography, but it just makes the Really Important Movie pretensions more unbearable.

This was what I call a "broccoli movie" - something we're supposed to eat because it's good  for you - but for all the clearly committed and talented people involved (though it gets distracting when another familiar face shows up in period drag), it simply can't make what should be riveting and compelling even passingly interesting. Ken Burns did a 57-part series about the Civil War with nothing but still photos and people reading letters and it was a smash. Why couldn't Steven Spielberg with a towering Daniel Day-Lewis come anywhere remotely near? Blame the writer and the hubris of those who thought importance trumped brevity and focus.

Score: DNF. Skip it.

"Alex Cross" Review

Alex Cross is like Big Momma's House in reverse in that instead of Martin Lawrence as a cop who dresses up like a lady, Tyler Perry ditches his Madea drag to play ace Detroit police detective Alex Cross, a role previously assayed by Morgan Freeman in Along Came A Spider and March of the Peng...oh wait, no, that should be Kiss The Girls.

When Madea Cross and partner Ed Burns are called to a murder scene where four people were killed (including a beautiful woman tortured to death), they find themselves on the trial of psychopathic hitman Matthew Fox. When they interfere with one of his hits, he turns his sights on the cops and their loved ones. Brutal hijinks ensue.

Alex Cross is a taut and efficient thriller which moves so quickly to its conclusion that it feels like it's half its length. In fact, if it wasn't for a ridiculous and in one aspect confusing subplot involving a woman who took a fall for a crime boss's murders, it'd be even shorter. (Though it could've been entirely lopped out without breaking the plot in the least.) It's also fairly predictable to the point that when characters are introduced, my girlfriend would remark, "They're gonna die, aren't they?" (Yes, dear, they are.)


Shot for the most part in Detroit, they get most of the local geography correct except that the crime scene on tony Lakeshore Drive is about five miles outside of their jurisdiction in the Grosse Pointes and a couple of skyline shots reveal the unfamiliar downtown locations are actually Cleveland, but this is stuff only natives would catch.

Perry is fairly believable as Cross though he could've stood for some more grit in the more dramatic moments. Ed Burns is the same as always but the shocker is Fox as the psycho killer Picasso; he is prison-ripped, pumped up and cut down into little more than muscles and sinews, absolutely unhinged and deadly. We never really get an explanation as to what his deal is beyond he's a Very Bad Man (no backstory about how he was a bottle baby or anything), but he makes his mark.


Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

"Searching For Sugar Man" Review

History is full of musical artists who never made it. Maybe they never got signed or never broke through when they did, ending up getting dropped and fading into history; it's an old story oft told. But what if an artist's record became a massive hit on the other side of the world, influencing a nation, and yet he never knew of or profited from it? That's the bizarre hook of Searching For Sugar Man, the story of Detroit-based singer-songwriter Rodriquez music and belated (re)discovery.

Discovered by Motown legend Dennis Coffey playing in a waterfront bar called The Sewer, Sixto Rodriguez was signed and released a pair of albums which sold almost nothing and he was dropped in the early-Seventies. However, a copy of his first album, Cold Fact, made it to apartheid-oppressed South Africa and his Bob Dylan-ish lyrics and warm vocals a la Cat Stevens or Harry Chapin caught on with the people there, leading to bootlegs and then legitimate releases of his albums, selling an estimated half-million copies and influencing many upcoming Afrikaner musicians.

Almost nothing was known about the enigmatic mono-named musician, but legends of grisly onstage suicides that would cause envy in GG Allin (if that loser hadn't ODed like a bitch after threatening to kill himself onstage forever) cropped up. Eventually in the early days of the Internet (i.e. the mid-1990s) a couple of fans and music writers in South Africa attempted to locate him with little success until close examination of a lyrical reference cracked the code and led to the discovery of Rodriguez, alive and kicking, back in Detroit. You'll have to see what happens next and what he'd been doing for yourself.

While the first 2/3rds of Searching For Sugar Man are an interesting mystery even if you know how it turned out (fun fact: he used to come into a bar my girlfriend booked around 1990 and though he was known as a musician, no one had the slightest idea of his backstory), the last section seems to go somewhat flat when it should've climaxed. Swedish filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul lightly explores, but underplays, the vital question of "Where did all the royalty money go?" He interviews Clarence Savant, the former Motown CEO and owner of the long-defunct label Rodriguez was signed to, and while the inference is clear that he ripped him off, how getting paid would've impacted Rod's life isn't asked. Rod's three daughters are interviewed, but there's no mention of who their mother is. (I've read that she was interviewed, but then declined to participate in the final cut.) Most maddeningly, when Rodriquez is interviewed, he's left almost as much as an enigma as he was before he was found. You've got the guy sitting there; ASK HIM EVERYTHING!!!

As interesting a tale as Searching For Sugar Man tells, it would've benefited from a little less reverence and style and a little more hard-edged investigation.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable.

"Side By Side" Review

Everyone divides up on everything all the time: Coke vs. Pepsi; Fender vs. Gibson; Star Wars vs. Star Trek; so it's no different that there is a divide amongst filmmakers over film vs. digital. It's this technological advance and the benefits and deficiencies of both formats that are explored by the documentary Side By Side.

Keanu Reeves(!) conducts interviews with a parade of directors including George Lucas, James Cameron, Christopher Nolan, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, Robert Rodriguez, the Wachowski Starship, as well as numerous cinematographers about their preferences for one over the other and how some have changed with the times while others will have to have celluloid pried out of their cold dead hands.

Combining a good primer of how movies are "filmed" with interviewees expressing themselves about what it all means, Side By Side takes a refreshingly unbiased approach toward the subject rather than trying to skew the audience toward a preferred conclusion. If there is a bias, it's that the flexibility of digital tools to execute the filmmaker's vision makes for a bigger box of crayons to color with. When you see the differences in color timing and correction between the old photochemical process and something like Da Vinci Resolve (see reel below), it's hard to defend to archaic ways. (No one with Blu-ray is pining for VHS, you know?) I think holdouts like Nolan are like people who insist vinyl is better.

Score: 8/10. Rent it. If you've got Amazon Prime, it's streaming for free; see link below.