"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.
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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.

January 2013 Review Roundup

Haven't posted one of these since forever because of my falloff of actually writing review (hard to roundup nothing), so here we finally go. Didn't make it to the theaters at all this month because we stayed home and watched a lot of screeners of the Oscar nominated movies.

I'm adding new categories to the the roundups - Most/Least Enjoyed - because with many films sharing the same score, but for different qualitative reasons (which is why you should go read the words and not just look at the numbers), it's not true to say that Film A with an 8/10 is "better" than Film B (6/10) as far as "Which would I want to watch again?" goes. We've all seen movies that we've thought were really good but wouldn't care if we never saw again; these are the movies I'd re-watch first or last.

Jan. 1 - Hugo (4/10)
Jan. 6 - Flight (6/10)
Jan. 7 - Arbitrage (6/10)
Jan. 15 - Beasts of the Southern Wild (3/10)
Jan. 20 - Silver Linings Playbook (7/10)
Jan. 22 - Zero Dark Thirty (7/10)
Jan. 23 - Dredd (6/10)
Jan. 27 - Seven Psychopaths (6/10)

Most Enjoyed: Silver Linings Playbook
Least Enjoyed: Beasts of the Southern Wild

Month's Movies Watched: 8
Previously Unseen: 8
Theatrical: 0
Home: 8
=====
Year-To-Date: 8
YTD First-Timers: 8
YTD Theatrical: 0
YTD Home: 8

"Seven Psychopaths" Review

It's hard to synopsize the plot of the shaggy dog pseudo-noir Seven Psychopaths, not because it would spoil the surprises (which it would), but because it's so all over the place, it's not really explicable.

It opens with a pair of hitmen awaiting their target at the Lake Hollywood reservoir who, shall we say, are prevented from doing their job. Then we meet writers blocked screenwriter Colin Farrell who is struggling with his latest script, a story with seven psychopaths of different backgrounds and back stories. His pal, Sam Rockwell, is a dognapper - stealing peoples' dogs at the park and collecting the reward money with sidekick Christopher Walken - who is trying to help Ferrell cope with his alcoholism and prod him along with tales of psychopaths, which are told as flashbacks/dream sequences or in the form of respondents to a classified ad. (A very weird sequence involving Tom Waits.) Complicating matters is the fact that Rockwell has stolen Woody Harrelson's beloved pooch and he's hellbent to get it back.

Eventually, the lines between legend and reality start to blur and the movie starts to become a meta-narrative contemplation about the tropes of post-Tarantino gangster movies (though not explicitly stated that way) and that's where Seven Psychopaths both starts to come into focus and fall apart. For the first half, I was wondering how this was all supposed to amount to something; as it went along and things started to connect, it seemed like it was going to pay off but as Rockwell's wild card character got more wild cardish, it started to become frenetic while believing itself to be energetic.

Written and directed by Martin McDonagh (whose In Bruges is stacked up in a to-watch pile someplace) reunites with Ferrell but he's stuck with being a passive straight man to Rockwell's driver. Walken is less weird than usual (by his standards these days), but the couple of female characters (Abbie Cornish and Olga Kurylenko) are non-entities; something the screenplay itself comments on, though they still end up on the poster though they basically have one meaningless scene apiece.


If you're in the mood for a bloody, crazy, somewhat incoherent flick with some showy performances and dark Grand Guignol comic touches, you could do worse than Seven Psychopaths. I mean, you can't just keep watching Pulp Fiction on cable every other night it's on, right?

Score: 6/10. Rent it.

"Dredd" Blu-ray Review

Movie nerds suck. Seriously. They are the whiniest little bitches; tubby nerdgins pounding out vast tracts of nerd rage over the lack of proper ultra-violent action films; griping about how Live Free or Die Hard was PG-13, thus denying us John McLane's Roy Roger's (and Ghandi) quote or the threat of a non-R Alien movie in the form of Prometheus. So you'd think that they would've been stoked for Dredd, especially as reviews and buzz spread that it was a serious, splatterific take on the cult comic book, far removed from the campy Sylvester Stallone-fronted Judge Dredd. But, unlike You've Got Mail, it was built and they didn't come. (Wait, what?) Dredd did dreadfully (heh) at the box office and so much for that franchise's hopes. The nerds asked for it, got it, then stayed home, choosing to blog about how no one makes these sorts of movies while through their inaction, justifying Hollywood's case for not making them because no one goes to see them. Chicken, meet egg. Losers.

If you saw Sly's version, the setup is pretty much the same: It's the future; America is mostly bombed-out nuclear wasteland; the remaining area is MegaCity One, a solid megalopolis with 700 million people packed into an area from Boston to Washington D.C. In MC1 are "megablocks" - kilometer-high, 200-story towers with 75,000 residents, mostly living in slum conditions. In the Peach Trees megablock lives Ma-Ma (Lena Headey), a former prostitute who killed her pimp, formed a gang, cleared out all the other gangs in the place, and now is the manufacturer and distributor of a formidable new drug called Slo-Mo which makes users feel that time is passing at 1% normal speed.

When Ma-Ma has a trio of crooks who crossed her tossed to their deaths in the tower's atrium, Judges Dredd (Karl Urban) and Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) - a rookie on her first day evaluation - investigate, rapidly capturing one of Ma-Ma's lieutenants to take in for interrogation. Knowing that if he gets grilled, he'll eventually spill the Slo-Mo beans, she locks down the entire megablock, trapping Dredd and Anderson inside, and sending every bad guy in the place to hunt them down. Hijinks ensue.

While the setup is pretty simple and the violence so ultra that it's surreal, what with shots of bullets tearing through heads, spraying digital blood in ribbons, there is a tidy lean and meanness to Dredd. I don't read the comics, but know that this version sticks to the text by never removing his helmet, forcing Urban to convey his stoic rage with just his grimacing mouth and jutting chin. (Thirlby is helmetless because it interferes with her mutant psychic abilities, which is shown with some nifty effects.) Urban plays Dredd like a pissed-off Clint Eastwood and a slyly unironic humor. When he hisses, "I am the law," it plays a lot better than, well, this...



Yeesh.

On the downside, though, with such a limited brief, it surprisingly slows down a tad much in a couple of spots and the violence could've actually been a little more amped up. There are some subtle details in the script which provide unexpected depth in spots, but for the most part it's just cracking skulls and capping foo's for 90 minutes. Headey is a trip with her spikey hair and slash-scarred face; she's one tough mama. (Yeah, I punned that.)

Visually, the 2D/3D combo Blu-ray looks OK, though I only watched it in 2D. Audio is super bass-heavy, so if you've got a booming system and hate your neighbors, this will work nicely. On the extras front, there's a superficial 15-minute overview of the 35-year history of the comic book and another 15 minutes of making-of, concentrating on the 3D cameras and special effects to convert Johannesburg, South Africa into MegaCity One; plus a handful of 2-3 minute bits about costumes and gear; it's all pretty superficial.

Should Dredd have been a blockbuster or could it have been if the emo bitch nerd babies had left their basements for the multiplexes? I don't know if it could've been big - probably wouldn't have been - but it's hard to demand movies like it if you don't support them when they do get made.

Score: 6/10. Rent it.

"Zero Dark Thirty" Review

Zero Dark Thirty - the docu-dramatic portrayal of the hunt for and ultimate killing of Nickleback frontman Al Qaeda kingpin Osama bin Laden by Kathryn Bigelow, the Oscar-winning director of The Hurt Locker - has been fraught by controversy all through its development, filming, release and even now that it's a multiple Oscar nominee.

First it was suspected to be a cheesy campaign ad for President Obama's reelection which led to its release date to be pushed until after the election; then there were multiple rumors from both sides of the political spectrum that secret CIA intel was shared with the filmmakers; and upon its release it was praised by conservatives as showing our intelligence and special operator forces positively while liberals decried what they called glorification of torture, organizing boycotts which have pretty much shut it down for awards season.

While I can see where both sides are coming from, the reality is that Zero Dark Thirty is a meticulously reported, gritty telling of the hunt for Chad Kroeger bin Laden that ultimately suffers from being to distant, dry and detached from its own thrilling story.

Opening with audio of terrified 911 calls from 9/11, ZDT jumps ahead two years to a secret interrogation site where a suspected Al Qaeda member is being shown an unpleasant time. Watching the show is CIA analyst Maya (Oscar-nominated Jessica Chastain playing a fictionalized version of a person whose identity must obviously be kept under wraps.) Eventually the prisoner spills intel which eventually leads after several dead ends, detours and double-crosses to discovering where Osama was hiding, culminating in the climactic recreation of the SEAL Team 6 strike that put three shots in his dome.

Screenwriter Mark Boal, who also wrote The Hurt Locker, brings his journalist eye to the script which has its pluses and minuses. On the plus side, the details feel authentic though it's a little mind-boggling to see the assault which opened with one of the choppers crashing into a wall not seeming to put the entire town and Osama's compound on alert. (While resisting the temptation to Hollywood up the action is laudable, it's almost ludicrous to watch while thinking, "No one heard a flipping helicopter crash in the middle of the night?")

On the minus side of the ledger, by chugging through procedural details and random bombings spread over eight years without as much as a hairstyle change on Maya to mark the passage of time, it never felt like it was going someplace specific. Knowing going in that they find their target isn't the problem, it's that the process isn't exciting, ending up generally dry and detached like The Hurt Locker, but without a rich central character to follow.

Chastain is very good, but hampered by a woefully underwritten role - an archtype of the driven, lonely woman, bucking the Old Boys Club Establishment who won't believe her which is very familiar after a couple of seasons of Homeland, except Claire Danes' Carrie is mentally ill. We never know of Maya's life other than an interesting factoid that she was recruited out of high school, but can't discuss as to why? Because she spoke 15 languages or had bitching red hair? Who knows? Why not make up something - anything - to humanize her? Because it wouldn't be accurate? We'd forgive some embroidery in service of giving us a rooting interest, guys.

By being simultaneously telling its story from 30 inches away and 30,000 feet up Zero Dark Thirty ends up not satisfying those seeking minutia or a comprehensive overview. The odd thing is that they were getting ready to roll on this movie as just a procedural about the ongoing hunt for OBL when events suddenly dropped a tidy ending in their laps, but I can't imagine how a movie about people looking for World Enemy #1 that fades to black with a title card reading "And the hunt continues..." would be very satisfying.

Score: 7/10. Rent it.

"Silver Linings Playbook" Review

With nominations for Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Editing and all four acting categories, Silver Linings Playbook has a shot to benefit from difference-splitting between the epic Lincoln and the controversial Zero Dark Thirty (which I haven't seen yet), but it would be a shame if it did because while the performances are solid and the script is mostly solid, it sells out everything that came before with a rushed and cliched finale.

Bradley Cooper is a bi-polar mess, getting out of a mental hospital after an 8 month stint for nearly beating to death the man whom he caught with his wife in their shower. He desperately believes that he can win his wife back, restraining orders and basic reality notwithstanding. When he encounters young widow Jennifer Lawrence, who has a connection to his wife by which he can slip her a note (under the restraining order's radar), he agrees to help her with a ballroom dance contest which ultimately has ramifications upon his father's (Robert De Niro) business plans to leverage his bookie business into a legit restaurant.

Silver Linings Playbook starts off-kilter as we're introduced to the characters and realize they're all messes - Cooper is bi-polar and delusional; De Niro has OCD and a hefty dose of sports superstition (which makes those Bud Light "It's only weird if it doesn't work" ads look like an endorsement of mental illness, in addition to alcoholism); Lawrence was extremely promiscuous after her husband's death. Since we know that lurking in the distance are the usual rom-com tropes of whether Cooper and J.Law are going to fall in love or not, it's interesting in the early going to see them tear into each other, though it's one-sided because Cooper is the one with problems.

Speaking of Cooper, he's excellent in the role. I've always thought he had the same problem as Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise in that no one wants to take him seriously as an actor because he's so preposterously handsome. (Not that he's had the off-screen meltdowns the others have had.) He manages to make what is a sick, mean, self-deluded guy appealing, but never by winking at us to let us know he's just funning. A bad haircut helps.

J.Law's only competition for Best Actress is likely to be Jessica Chastain because she is riveting playing a role that's somewhat older than the 21 she was when shooting this. Unlike most blank starlets, she is able to project her feelings through her eyes and more than holds her own against De Niro and others. (Along with Emma Stone, actresses like J.Law are why Lindsay Lohan's career is over.) De Niro is much less mannered and self-parodying here than he's been in ages, too.

It's hard to explain how Silver Linings Playbook blows it without spoiling the ending but to say that after nearly two hours of subverting the expectations of the rom-com formula, it succumbs to them in an unsatisfactory manner. Cooper's denouement with his estranged wife is done silently (a la Lost in Translation), coming off not as profound but as if David O'Russell couldn't think of what he should say, feeling rushed and tacked on.

I can't fault the temptation to deliver a happy ending to send audiences out of the theater with a smile on their faces, but after setting up a twitchy, itchy milieu and characters, it's too bad Silver Linings Playbook didn't have the guts to finish off as bravely as it seemed to want to when it started.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable.

"Beasts of the Southern Wild" Review

One of the big shockers of this year's Academy Awards nominations was the quartet of nods (Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actress) for Beasts of the Southern Wild, a little indie flick that took Cannes by storm. But the bigger shock is watching it with the knowledge that it's been showered with all the accolades because all I kept thinking was,"Are they high? This is a Best Picture?"

Beasts is the very slight and extremely aimless story about a little girl named Hushpuppy (an adorable Quvenzhané Wallis, who was 6 years old when this was filmed and is the youngest Best Actress nominee ever now at 9) living in conditions that can be fairly described as being several notches below squalor in the Gulf Coast podunk of The Bathtub (between Bedroom Heights and Beyondville?) with her erratic, troubled father; mom is dead, of course. Then there is a scene of revelry with the ethnically-mixed neighbors (old white people?), some talk of ancient monsters and melting ice caps, a storm which floods the 'Tub out of existence, shouting, dynamite, road trip (over water) on a magic boat filled with chicken biscuit wrappers to a floating dream brothel, death, the end. Or something like that. I think. Oh, there's a lot of shellfish. I'm allergic to the things, so I'd starve if I was in this movie.

I've been getting annoyed - OK, more annoyed - lately about the overhype of movies whose main trait is that they're "different" from the mainstream, homogenized pap excreted by the Hollywood pablum factory and if I was someone who was forced to sit through every rom-com and Adam Sandler movie as part of a critic gig, I'd probably be prone to moisten myself with joy at something, anything, that seems original. But while critics losing their minds is one thing, what's the Academy's excuse?

My problems began right off with director Benh Zeitlin - who is a 30-year-old white guy from Queens, in case you were wondering - and his jittery camera work. Hey, kids, it's not selling out to put the camera on sticks from time to time. It had a feel of what I imagine a Terrance Malick movie to be like (I've seen negative reviews that confirm this) and my constant internal monologue only shifted from saying, "What the heck is this about?" at the end when I was asking, "What the heck was that all about?!?" From wondering why social workers weren't interested in an effectively orphaned girl living on cat food stew to why being rescued from their inundated hovels was anathema to the locals to what the deal is with the giant horned magical beasts that apparently came from thawing glaciers and showed up on the bayou to...well, I don't rightly know. I guess global warming? (They don't look like ManBearPigs.)

Beasts has a lot of mood and detail like the boat made of a pickup truck bed lashed to pickle barrels, but very little characterization. I think part of the appeal to those who've bought into this thing is the utterly alien landscape of Bathtub. If you live in comfy urban surroundings, the exotic landscape and mystical pretensions must seem more spiritual than a Swamp People and Hillbilly Handfishing marathon, but in reality it's just elucidating why everyone hates white people. (The piece linked below has even harsher thoughts on the subject.)

Whether through selective editing and rigorous commands or some actually talent, Wallis is effective as Hushpuppy, never annoying, but never totally compelling; then again, there's little in the way of character to play. My girlfriend texted me that she should win the Oscar. She is incorrect in this judgement.

If I'd watched Beasts of the Southern Wild a couple of weeks ago, I may have had a mildly more favorable reaction to it. However, if its going to be playing with the big boys in the big show, we've got to judge it in that context and it's simply not good enough. Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow have every right to feel chapped that they got snubbed here.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.





This Film Drunk beatdown of the movie aligns closely to my thoughts, so since someone saved me the typing, here's some snips:

As an MGMT video, Beasts of the Southern Wild is pretty good. It’s got soaring music, pretty cinematography, fantastical imagery that borrows heavily from Where the Wild Things Are, an impossibly cute little girl, and deep south swamp locations exotic to urbanized yankees like me (“look, crawdaddies! Isn’t that a funny word, Brent? ‘Crawdaddies?’”). But if you can see past the craft, this tale of deep south swamp hobos and feral children that eat cat food has all the depth of one of those Levis slam poetry commercials. I thought we weren’t supposed to fall for the Magic Negro and the Noble Savage anymore? Yet here it is, a whole movie full of them, plus folksy Cajuns who can’t open their mouths without homespun crypticisms aw shucksing their way out.

Hushpuppy’s daddy...lives amongst a band of fellow rascals who don’t need jobs or money or possessions, because why bother with that when you can just dig in the dirt and get drunk and eat crabs with your hands all day? (It sounds great, I admit) The whole first half of the film is basically that scene in Titanic where Rose leaves her stuffy old first class soirée so Jack can show her some real fun down in steerage, where Irishmen and negroes drink frosty brews and dance jigs to lively flute music. OH MY GOD, YOU GUYS, POVERTY IS SO MUCH FUN! WHY HAVEN’T WE COME DOWN HERE BEFORE?!

You could argue that what happens next in Beasts of the Southern Wild de-glamorizes the life of the mud-poor have-nots, but the scene where Hushpuppy’s daddy and his band of primitivist troglodytes lead a cargo-cult raid on the evil levee that keeps their swamp flooded and the city dry (can someone check the science on this, please?) makes the implication pretty clear: Society = hollow, inevitable. Swamp people = romantic, doomed.

When you live in the city and you buy your meat wrapped in cellophane and styrofoam, it’s a pleasant fantasy to believe that people who sleep in the dirt and gut their own dinners are possessed of a spiritual richness that you’ve always felt deep down you’re somehow lacking. It’s also a really old fantasy. Like, REALLY old.

Also, call me cynical, but watching po’ black characters deliberately misuse words and grammar in folksy phrases written by white people (“cavemens,” for example) feels hokey at best and offensive at worst. Keep in mind, I knew nothing about the filmmakers before I watched this film. It just reeked of theater kid fantasy, and I’ve seen enough Hurricane Katrina narratives written by liberal arts students in New York to recognize this as one. Art students be lovin’ Katrina narratives like fictional Cajuns love crawdads, you all.

 Go read it all.

"Arbitrage" Review

Richard Gere scored a Golden Globe nomination and was talked up for an Oscar nom (but is unlikely to get it due to a tough year) for Arbitrage, a movie that fell through the cracks because it sounds like a Wall Street financial movie and not what it's more closely related to: The Bonfire of the Vanities. (The awesome book, not the craptastic movie.)

Gere is a investment wizard with what appears to be a great life, great wealth, and a great family. Under the surface, he's got a French mistress and a $416 million problem in the form of shady financial dealings that he's desperately trying to square away by selling his firm. Unfortunately for him (and especially the mistress), he's involved in terrible auto accident which leaves him badly banged up and his girlfriend dead. With the police hot on the trail, trying to tie him to the crime, will he be able to save the important things in his world?

Gere is very good, though it's odd to see him playing his age (his character is 60) and Susan Sarandon as his wife is lively as she plays something other than an earthy aging hippie as she's done a lot lately. Brit Marling (the writer and star of Another Earth) plays Gere's daughter who is appalled at what she discovers the old man has been doing, but while she gets a good confrontation scene, the tepid denouement after the main plots are wrapped up doesn't give her the punchline it feels like she deserves.  Not as good is Tim Roth doing a caricatured take on a detective that feels like it should be in a 2nd-rate Law & Order knockoff.

Overall, the performances make the material seem better than it is while it's rolling by, but afterwards you'll realize that Arbitrage never quite leveraged its assets for maximum return.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

"Flight" Review

How badass is Denzel Washington? According to Flight - director Robert Zemeckis' first live-action film in 12 years after making a trio of lousy CGI features - so badass that while drunk at triple the limit he was able to safely crash-land an airliner resulting in only 6 fatalities out of 102 on board. So badass that 10 sober pilots given the scenario in simulators couldn't save the plane; everyone would've died if these guys were at the controls. So what's the problem, ossifer? Can't DW have some booze and blow and then save 94% of the people on his plane without people being critical? He's like Dr. Johnny Fever taking a sobriety test, getting better the more he drinks!

The reason Flight never actually takes off (har!) is that despite a raft of strong performances from Denzel and company, every single beat of the plot is predictable to anyone who's ever seen a movie-of-the-week about substance abuse or has been following Lindsay Lohan's career for the past five years. The denial, the half-assed attempts to clean up followed by falling off the Budweiser beer wagon, the woman who is also an addict who can't be with him anymore - a underwritten, why-is-she-here role played decently by Kelley Riley - the final bender leading to pseudo-redemption; it's all by the numbers and has no surprises up its sleeve.

There are a couple of tone issues I had as well. First, John Goodman's drug dealer character is played way too much for laughs; when you're trying to explore the depths of despair an in-denial drunk is plumbing, should you be yucking it up with a scene showing the best method to sober up a drunk is several rails of coke? Also, the song choices on the soundtrack are so on the nose that I began to wonder if this was some sort of ironic joke. Really? The Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Under the Bridge" playing before and during the scene of Reilly's junkie shooting up? A Muzak version of "With A Little Help From My Friends" after Denzel has been bumped into shape by Dr. Feelgood? Pfffft.

The plane crash sequence is harrowing and any movie which opens with full nudity from Nadine Velazquez, who looks like this...



...isn't totally without merit, but while Flight never crashes, it also never really soars as intended. Zemeckis is still laboring under the Curse of Oscar where he hasn't made a better-than-average film since he won for Forrest Gump, but compared to his creepy doll-eyed forays into CG animated films with The Polar Express, Beowulf, and Jim Carrey's A Christmas Carol (which I haven't seen), it's good to see him back in the land of the living. Now get a better script, Z.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

"Hugo" Blu-ray Review

We have got to stop pity-f*cking Martin Scorsese. Yes, it's a tragedy that his greatest work was snubbed by the Academy in his prime, but after tossing him a bone with The Departed, there seems to have been an overcompensation of praise for dreck like Shutter Island and the exquisitely-designed, but wonderless Hugo. Let's be honest: If his name wasn't in the credits, neither of these works would've been acclaimed and/or nominated.

Hugo is the story of a little orphaned boy named Jimmy (j/k) who lives in the walls of a Paris train station in 1931, filling his days by winding and maintaining all the clocks and subsisting by pilfering food and clock parts to repair a mysterious automaton his father was repairing when he died. Hugo constantly needs to artfully dodge station inspector Borat, I mean Sacha Baron Cohen (attempting an Inspector Clouseau vibe, not very well), and Ben Kingsley, a toy shop owner who knows Hugo's been nicking clock parts from his shop. Hugo meets Hit Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz), the ward of Ghandi who conveniently has a key part - as in a key proper - to the mysterious robot.

The fundamental problem with Hugo is that Scorsese is ill-suited for the children's movie tone he's going for. In the extras it's revealed that one of his primary reasons for making it was that he had a 12-year-old daughter who hadn't seen any of his movies because they're all hardcore R-rated flicks for grown-ups, but I can't imagine a child being engaged by the slow plotting which wanders without much forward motion until it diverts into a paean to revolutionary filmmaker Georges Méliès who has an easy-to-spot-waaaaaaay-early connection to the story. Much of the overpraise has been because of these parts and about the "magic of the movies" but it simply didn't feel magical to me; it's the Marty Effect in action. Another tonal problem is Borat's shown chasing down the orphans in his train station and handing them over to the police as the villain, but there are several vignettes of him trying to ask flower girl Emily Mortimer out. Which is he - heavy or bumbling loverboy?

The material simply doesn't fit Scorsese, just like when James Cameron tried to channel Steven Spielberg's knack for wonder with the alien aspects of The Abyss. I tell people who've never seen it before, "When Ed Harris defuses the nuke, stop the movie; it's done. If you keep watching, you'll just wonder WTF?" for a reason - Cameron, for all his brilliance simply can't pull of glowing jellyfish aliens of super-superior nature. A marital breakup drama AND a heavy metal actioner about a Navy SEAL (literally) cracking under pressure? Hell yeahs! But the E.T. stuff? Nope.

As unsatisfying as I found Hugo's story, it is a visual feast. I didn't see it in 3D, but this is a good reason to buy Blu-rays and large TVs. The colors and details are lush and the obviously digitally enhanced environments actually contribute to the dreamlike quality of the film. Anyone who watches this and still doesn't appreciate the benefits of six times the resolution of DVD needs their eyes checked.

My girlfriend wondered if Georges Méliès was a real person - which was a bit of a shock - but all I had to do is switch to the featurette about him which shows a bunch of clips from his films and details how the depiction of him in the film was true-to-life. I found myself wishing they'd made a straight-up movie about him and skipped all the claptrap about the kid. There are also interesting featurettes about real automatons, the making-of the film, and how one of the special effects sequences was done. What's missing is a more extensive look at the use of digital sets and FX to create the world. This video was part of an item on Wired and there is zero reason it shouldn't have been included on the disc.

 

Sumptuous on the eyes, but empty in the head and heart, Hugo is well-intentioned, but falls like a shaken souffle. 

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

Happy New Years! (and a Resolution)

New Year's Day is a traditional day to put the previous year behind us and to look forward with a clean sheet of paper to scribble our futures upon. But to move forward, you must be able to look back with clarity as to how the last year went down. Frankly, it was a bad year for DirkFlix and it's all my fault.

2012 was the third full year of operation and if you look at the post count at right, it was the least active year by far; a third of what 2010 was. Have I been watching fewer movies? No, I just haven't been getting the reviews written and posted and considering my intentions for this site - to post up short, pithy reviews instead of the thousand-word behemoths I used to when writing for major sites - this was pathetic and inexcusable.

According to my rough count, I watched 88 movies, but only got 39 reviews posted. That's less than half and some movies I watched both theatrically AND on home video, not writing about either. I kept intending to go back and clear the backlog, but when you're looking at 24 drafts dating back three months and are having a rough time remember exactly what you'd meant to say immediately after seeing it.

So what happened? In brief, I wasted time banging my head against the walls of others' rigidly held ignorance instead of taking care of my business. I know that people choose liberal political beliefs precisely because they're immune to reason and opposed to reality, but it just doesn't seem right to just let them live in a fog of lies and allow them to poison others. Just because you can't save everyone doesn't mean you shouldn't try to save some, right? Noble intentions/damn fool idealistic crusades aside, the time spent on that was time not spent here and that's going to change in 2013.

A site like this is only as good as the quality AND quantity of content, so it's time to get back on the stick. I appreciate your continued support and readership - make sure to click on the RSS Subscribe link to not miss a thing - but realize that it's hard for you to read what's not written.

See ya at the movies!