"The Wolverine" Review

Everyone hates X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I don't - I mean it's got problems with too many characters and a totally poochscrew of Deadpool at the end which made everyone mad - but compared to real garbage like Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Elektra, it's an OK flick. That said, everyone is comparing The Wolverine to Origins when they should be judging it on an independent basis and on that basis, it's a good movie, though it stumbles toward the end due to our old friend, poor writing-by-committee.

This is a direct continuation of X-Men: The Last Stand - another movie everyone claims to hate beyond its flaws - with Logan (the even more ripped HUGE JACKEDMAN) living in a cave in Alaska or Canuckia, drinking whiskey and having nightmares in which Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), his lady love whom he had to kill at the end of the last movie, appears to him, basically encouraging him to die and join her in eternity. He's Emo Grizzly Adams.

While getting into a scrap with some illegal hunters in town, he's assisted (like he needs help!) by Yukio (newcomer Rila Fukushima), a kickass anime-looking chick with a wicked sword who has been sent by her boss, a billionaire Japanese tycoon whose life Logan saved while in a prison camp outside of Nagasaki when an atomic bomb was dropped on it. He's old and dying, but wants to thank Wolverine by taking away his immortality. (Yeah, kind of a weird thanks, no?) After the old man dies, Yakuza thugs attack the funeral and attempt to kidnap his granddaughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto). While rescuing her, Logan is shot and for some reason isn't healing like normal. Something has happened and he's vulnerable.

Partially based on an acclaimed run by Chris Clairmont and Frank Miller (I haven't read it), there were high hopes, especially when Darren Aronofsky - who directed Jackman to what should've been an Oscar nom in The Fountain - was supposed to direct, but after the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear plant disaster he bowed out and James Mangold (Walk the Line and Girl, Interupted; both of which earned acting Oscars for Reese Witherspoon and Angelina Jolie, respectively) stepped in and does a good job with things. The action scenes are respectable, but it's even better in the quieter moments that allow Jackman to get into the conflicted state he's in. The best parts of the first two X-Men movies were the moments in which you really got the feeling that while superpowers are nice, not being alone because of those powers because the world is terrified of you would be better.

Where The Wolverine gets its paw stuck in a trap is the convoluted plot involving the old man, control of his company, that he skipped his son in favor of his grandfather and what side the Yakuza and a ninja army are on. By the time we get to the third act and the obligatory, studio-pleasing battle royale between Logan and a giant metal mecha-samurai (thus enraging nerd purists about the Silver Samurai), it's all cards produced from sleeves and who cares? It doesn't help that Mariko is too bland to be a compelling love interest, too. She's attractive, but dull. Give me the weird ninja chick any day.

Still, it's good to see Wolverine slashing (bloodlessly) up the silver screen again and make sure to sit through the first part of the end credits (you don't need to wait until the end like others have done) for a very cool scene which directly sets up next year's uber-team-up, X-Men: Days of Futures Past.

Score: 7/10. Catch a matinee.

"Edgeplay: A Film About The Runaways" DVD Review

As further prep for my interview with Cherie Currie I watched Edgeplay: A Film About The Runaways, a film by one of the band's bassists, Vicki Blue (ne Victory Tischler-Blue), released in 2004. Unlike the Hollywood take on the band which focused primary on Joan Jett and Currie, Edgeplay has Currie, guitarist Lita Ford, original bassist Jackie Fox, drummer Sandy West, and Svengali Kim Fowley - but no Joan Jett, a MAJOR problem - telling their story in their own words, albeit with a slant that my later interview explored. (Hit the link above and check out the second part of the transcript for Currie's problems with it.)

The lack of participation from Jett really cripples the movie because without the rights to use the music she wrote, that means there's almost no footage of the band performing other than covers of "Wild Thing" and Lou Reed's "Rock & Roll." The rest of the score is monotonous background tunelesses of Suzi Quatro and Lita Ford tracks that are sonic wallpaper, not a proper score. Blue's use of self-indulgent editing techniques like making the image B&W and grainy also gets tiresome quickly.

While there are some interesting details to be learned, this is mostly a fan-only flick for those deeply into the band than most. Combined with The Runaways, you get a partial picture of what it was like for the band, but it skews too heavily into the soap opera and drama than the music of this seminal act.

Score: 5/10. Rent it if you're a fan.



YouTube playlist with the whole movie. Yay for copyright infringement.

"Olympus Has Fallen" Review

The first of the two "White House invasion" flicks to come out this year suffers from being not as much fun as White House Down, the second of this pair to come out, but the one I saw first.

Gerard Butler serves as a Secret Service Agent to President Aaron Eckhart. (A white male President?! Wat?) After a bizarre auto accident claims the life of the First Lady, he's tossed of the President's detail for the sin of saving the President and not his wife. (Huh?) Some time later, while a Korean delegation is visiting the White House, an AC-130 gunship appears and opens fire on the White House while a simultaneous ground assault occurs. As he's evacuated to the Secret Underground Bunker, the President nobly commands the security to bring his guests along (yay!) only to discover too late that they're part of the attack force (whoops!).

With the White House, the President and many top Cabinet officials held captive - at least Morgan Freeman is able to step in as Acting President (whew, we're saved!) - it's a good thing there's a disgraced Secret Service agent willing to single-handedly take on over three dozen heavily armed attackers while others second-guess whether he can be trusted given his supposedly shameful past record. (No, I'm not kidding. These are the same clown characters who never trusted Jack Bauer on 24 either.)

Compared to White House Down, Olympus Has Fallen is darker, grittier, more bleakly violent and frankly less fun than the Tatum-Foxx flick. There are too many plot holes like what if the President had adhered to protocol and left the delegation to fend for themselves? Oh, and there's a traitor in the midst with an personal axe to grind again? Peachy. Both of these White House invasion movies were dopey and someone offensive, but at least White House Down had a brighter, more entertaining wrapping.

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.

"The Runaways" Blu-ray Review

Rewatched in prep for an interview with Cherie Currie later this week. My theatrical review was here and the Blu-ray was covered here.

UPDATE: The interview, which ran 85 minutes with music(!), can be heard at the Culture Vultures Radio website: Cherie: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway.

"Movie 43" Review

Frequently when watching a lousy movie, one tends to rhetorically ask, "How did this movie get made?" The underlying premise is that surely someone had to have realized the the script was junk or that the dailies showed it wasn't getting better on film, etc. However, the question REALLY applies with the mind-boggling in its very existence Movie 43, in which Oscar winners and nominees - we're talking serious AAA talents - gleefully appear in the lowest of lowbrow raunchy comedy. While rocking a tragic 4% at Rotten Tomatoes, the truth is that Movie 43 is pretty funny, but a huge chunk of the laughs come from exclaiming, "OMG! Is that [insert Big Star name here]?!?!? I can't believe it!" repeatedly.

Using a framing device of teenagers trying to find the legendary "Movie 43" online (more later about this), they search from short vignette to another (think Kentucky Fried Movie or Amazon Women on the Moon) opening with the jaw-dropping spectacle of Oscar winner Kate Winslet on a blind date with a super-eligible bachelor played by Oscar nominee Hugh Jackman who has a massive scrotum dangling from under his chin and no one else seems to notice. No, I'm not kidding.

Subsequent scenes feature real-life couples Liev Schreiber and Oscar nominee Naomi Watts as parents home-schooling their son, but making sure he gets the full high school experience by hazing him mercilessly and Ana Faris and Chris Pratt dealing with her scatological sexual request. Oscar winner Halle Berry and Stephen Merchant engage in a massively out-of-hand first date edition of Truth or Dare; Emma Stone and Keiran Culkan are romantic young lovers sexually insulting each other at a supermarket checkout line with the whole store listening in on the PA; Josh Duhamel and Elizabeth Banks have a cartoon cat coming between them; speed-dating for Robin (Justin Long) is complicated by Batman (Jason Sudakis) showing up and being a total dick while Supergirl (Kristen Bell) is at the table; Chloe Grace Moretz is a girl having her first period in a house full of stupid guys in terror; and Oscar nominee Terrance Howard is a basketball coach in 1959 trying to deliver a pep talk to his doubting all-black team before the championship game, his basic point being, "You're black. They're white. This isn't hockey!"

While many of the sketches drag on too long (see Shakespeare's admonition about brevity, please) there are a lot of hearty laughs in Movie 43 if you're not too snooty about things and are smarter than a 2-1/2 Men mouth-breather. Just be warned that this isn't going to be Noel Coward; more like Moe Howard. I'm a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Movie (which is out on Blu-ray now; w00t!) and Movie 43 is nowhere near that classic's brilliance, but still laughs enough.

About the framing segments: When it came out in theaters for about a day, I remember the reviews mentioning these shorts were movie ideas being pitched by a desperate writer. If you look at the IMDB listing, it shows Dennis Quaid and Greg Kinnear were in it as opposed to the unknowns (plus Fisher Stevens) in the home version. It's a totally different story and I have no idea why they redid it all in what has to have been a more elaborate fashion just for the home game.

UPDATE: Apparently there were different versions for the UK and US markets, but I can't find out why, mostly because the writers of the stories hate the movie so much they don't want to be arsed. Real pro work, guys

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

"Spring Breakers" Review

The pregame hype on writer-director Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers revolved around three of its stars being Disney kiddy stars (Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens) or from tween fave Pretty Little Liars (Ashley Benson) and whether they were going to dirty up their squeaky clean images with some nudity in the course of its tale of young stupid girls on a rampage. Even Gomez seemed to hint that she'd disrobed, so when the film premiered the first (and only) question the pervs on the Internet wanted to know was "who gave up the goods?" It turned out nobody by Korine's wife, Rachel, but with the prurient interest out of the way, we can get onto whether Spring Breakers is a quality film? A: Ummm, not really, but it is an interesting mood experiment in editing and tone.

It starts a little on-the-nose with Gomez's Faith, a girl attending a Christian university it appears. (Get it? Faith? Moving on...) She's friends with Korine, Benson and Hudgens and they yearn to get away for spring break in Ft. Lauderdale, but they lack the cash until all the girls who aren't faith rob a diner with a squirt gun and a hammer. They torch the getaway ride and head for the sun, sand, booze, blow and mayhem of spring break.

Once there, of course, things take a turn for the worse as they are busted by the cops and tossed in jail. They can't pay the bail and are scared to call home, so it appears they'll languish if not for the assistance of hustler-dealer-rapper Alien (a totally-committed and nearly unrecognizable James Franco) who bails them out and wants to show them a good time. You don't need Google Maps to tell that this voyage is about to make some dark turns and by the end of the journey, you'll probably not have any idea where you are, where you were and who the people you were with were, but you'll be plenty certain you took a trip.

What's interesting about Spring Breakers is the way there are constant flash-forwards, flashbacks, and repetition of scenes and dialog with different contexts providing different results. We hear them calling home and lying to their grandmothers about what they're doing while slow-motion booty-shaking videos or see them passed out someplace. There are constant sound effects of guns being cocked (this gets grating pretty quickly) and we're constantly aware that bad things are upcoming, not that the present is all that much fun, no matter what they claim.

While the movie opens with a pounding Skrillex track over neon-garish footage of topless bimbos shaking their boobs and having beer poured over their chests by simian frat boys. It's absolutely repulsive and I'm pretty sure that's what Korine was going for. If anyone looks at these bacchanals and thinks this looks like a good time, they're as stupid as the quartet of girls.

The greater problem the movie has is that we don't really know who these girls are. They are simply behavior without motivation for the most part and when the final scenes unspool, it's even more detached from the unreality established beforehand. It's hard to root for people who are cyphers. What motivates their violent urges? Korine could've been more explicit.

There is also a weird ironic vibe going on with a big subplot involving Alien's problems with his former drug-dealing partner who now resents Alien working "his" streets and justifying calling for his murder to his posse while holding a baby, claiming that Alien is taking food out of her mouth - "My baby is hungry." - while sitting in a massive mansion with a Lamborghini parked out front.

While the performances are OK from the girls, with Hudgens and Benson putting a few dents in their images, the hands-down standout turn is Franco's Alien. While Franco has done some respectable work, he too often seems to be floating along on charm and a smirk, but here he is 110% in the game with a Dirrrty South drawl, a mouthful of gold grill, braided hair and a whole lotta guns, money, drugs and swagger.

If you're looking for a meaningful expose of wasted youth culture, you won't find it here; it's too scattered and fragmented in structure. Want to see boobs? You're already on the Internet; go find 'em - Vanessa Hudgens has nude photos out there revealing hella more than you'll see in Spring Breakers. But if you're in the mood for an experimental editing extravaganza and an off-the-chain performance from James Franco - plus anonymous bimbo boobs - then give it a peek.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"Chronicle" Blu-ray Review

Superhero origin stories generally follow a typical format: Normal Joe is exposed to some body-altering radiation/substance/whatever which imbues with them with great powers which they then use for good. While this also tends to be the origin of supervillains, what makes director Josh Trank's debut Chronicle an effective take on the genre is that it shows what happens when three teenagers are changed by exposure to a mysterious crystal and what they do with their powers.

Not based on a comic book, Chronicle takes its time setting up its characters: Andrew is an introvert whose mother is dying of cancer, his dad is a abusive drunk, and he's bullied at school; Matt, his cousin, is a philosophy-loving fellow student at his school; and Steve is the cool, popular guy at school who doesn't abuse Andrew. One night, they discover a tunnel in the ground which leads to the crystal and their transformation. What follows is a fairly realistic depiction of how kids would react if they suddenly got powers. They goof off, pull pranks, and when they learn they can fly they plan to see the world.

Of course life doesn't work out thanks to Andrew whose fury at his life manifests itself in increasingly dangerous and deadly ways. While Spider-Man told us that, "With great power comes great responsibility," Chronicle's lesson can be summed up as, "Don't give an angry kid the means to exact revenge on his tormenters because it's not going to turn out well for anyone." While the trailer telegraphs where the story will go, what makes it more than just a supervillain origin story is Dane DeHaan's performance as Andrew and Max Landis' script. Andrew isn't a bad kid using his power for evil; he's just snapping and can telekinetically throw a bus at you.

What hampers this small character study is the use of a "found footage" structure in which we're supposed to believe Andrew is videotaping everything he does and that it looks like Arri Alexa footage. While movies like Paranormal Activity use the conceit of security cameras to explain the footage, too many movies are using it when they could've been more effectively executed in a traditional manner. End of Watch was a recent example where it starts off found footage and then breaks to standard shooting for large swaths. Just tell your story normally rather than explain that Andrew can psychically control the camera like a Steadicam. (This really blows up in Trank's face when we're supposed to believe that when Andrew is hospitalized in a coma and the camera is set up on a tripod at the foot of the bed. Who did this?)

Scant extras, but it looks and sounds OK considering how it's supposed to be a camcorder.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable.

"White House Down" Review

After the impromptu double-feature of Pacific Rim and World War Z, the missus and I were heading for the exit when we passed by the room and realized White House Down was about to begin. So, a quick left turn and away we went for the hat trick.

The second of 2013's "bad guys have invaded the White House" flicks (the other being Olympus Has Fallen, which I haven't seen yet), this one stars Channing Tatum has a slab of ham who wants to be a Secret Service agent and Jamie Foxx as Obama. (Not really, but what else are we supposed to think?) This time it's the Evil Military-Industrial Complex - or more accurately, the sleazy politicians in their thrall - are the villains. But of course.

While WHD's politics are specious, the movie itself is a decent Die Hard ripoff and dumb fun, especially in the part with a White House tour guy held hostage with Tatum's daughter. It didn't need the political garbage, but director Roland Emmerich also made The Day After Tomorrow with an Evil Darth Cheney caricature and killer weather. He's a liberal hack, but he makes the noisy things go boom and it's not as heavy-handed as if could've been.

Score: 6/10. Rent it.

Or just watch this extended trailer which pretty much spells it all out.

"World War Z" Review

After the crushing disappointment that was Pacific Rim, it was up to Brad Pitt's World War Z to try and salvage the evening at the multiplex. For the most part it succeeds because it's pretty smart until it gets dumb in the third act.

I haven't read the source book which I understand is constructed as an oral history documenting a global zombie plague. Since that doesn't make for many cinematic thrills, they've turned it into a pandemic tale/chase flick in which Pitt, a retired UN guy, is forced to trot the globe searching for the source of the zombie epidemic. He goes to Korea, then to Israel, finally ending up in Wales having close calls and adventure every step of the way.

When World War Z is being smart, it's very smart - showing us how fast bitten victims turn into monsters themselves and taping thick magazines over his forearms and calves to ward off bites. But as things progress, dumb things happen that get people killed until it seems that stupidity is the zombies best ally. When they finally get to Wales, it really starts having a case of the "Yeah, right"s until at one point Pitt is literally being the dumb girl in a horror movie setting down his weapon for no reason other than the story demands he be disarmed.

The last act was famously rewritten and I sorta hope the Blu-ray includes the massive amount of stuff they shot before realizing they were barking up the wrong tree. A common problem with movies this summer has been poor scripting and when you end up scrapping a third act, it makes one wonder if the suits at the studios really know what they're reading before sending massive productions out to shoot.

Pitt is good as always and the action is frenzied buy coherent, though generally ridiculous. It's just too bad that the zombies caught the screenplay before it was done.

Score: 6/10. Catch a matinee of you're a fan of FAST zombies; otherwise rent it.

"Pacific Rim 3D" Review

The excitement of film nerds for Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim has been mounting for a year. Giant mech robots vs. Godzilla-esque monsters from the director of Hellboy? What could be better than that? This is your chance to revisit your childhood Monster Week on the Channel 7 4 o'clock Movie, right?

If only.

While reviews are time-stamped with the day and time I watched the movie (note: if I start watching something at 1 am, it gets listed as 11:55 pm the prior calendar day), I sometimes don't get around to writing the review for a while and in the 16 days ensuing my viewing of this film, which is opening the day I write this (July 18, over two full weeks later), I've witnessed some depths of crazy-talk and self-delusion that is rather depressing to witness. Everything from declarations that this is "the next Star Wars" to "Who cares if the story is cheesy? It's got robots fighting monsters! Pew pew pew!!" Everyone wants to love this movie so much that they're either blind to or apathetic of the simple, sad reality that it's a huge missed opportunity.

The trailer sets up the basics, so I'm going to skip to the first warning sign which comes after a lengthy Basil Exposition dissertation (a bunch of which is in the trailer) which sets up the world of Pacific Rim. When we're introduced to Charlie Hunnam and his brother suiting up to go to battle, his brother actual parrots Han Solo, saying, "That's great, kid. Don't get cocky." The dialog was clunking already, but this smacked of fan-fiction.

After his brother is killed in battle - you need your inciting incident according to Screenwriting 101 books - Hunnam spends five years hiding out as a construction worker in Alaska rather than carrying on the fight. That is until Idris Elba (with the ridiculous name of Stacker Pentecost - his folks must've been Folder and former Miss Shamwow Yomkippur - and an indeterminate accent) comes to guilt him into coming back to participate in humanity's last stand against the kaiju.

Here's where the dumbness really starts to manifest. As the kaijus have grown stronger, they've been beating the jaegers (the giant robots whose names mean "hunter" in German or that's what del Toro likes to drink; thank God he wasn't a Bud Lite fan) and so the governments of the world have decided building a 300-foot-tall wall along their coastlines and cowering behind it is better than trying to fight them. (No, really.)

With the world's four remaining jaegers - Hunnam's Gipsy Danger (that's not offensive to pickpockets at all), Australia's Maul Hogan, China's Foxconn Thunder, and Russia's Smirnov Punchikov (note: I've renamed the last three because) - bunkered in Hong Kong, the plan is to close the inter-dimensional rift on the Pacific Ocean floor with a big ol' nuke because when there's a problem with asteroids or comets, the Earth's core slowing or the sun dying out, or monsters from someplace else are attacking, the go to solution is always to blow it up real good with a big ol' nuke. As long as the monsters don't decide to attack someplace else, for example, THE ENTIRE PACIFIC RIM OTHER THAN HONG FREAKING KONG, the plan should work. Right?

But first comes the need for a co-pilot for Hunnam. You see, in another stupid idea, we're supposed to believe that these giant robots require so much brain power to control that one pilot couldn't manage without brain damage - except for the two guys who have done it, like Hunnam and one other whom you won't be surprised by - so two pilots have to be neurally-linked in a mind meld called the "drift" (catch it?) which allows them to see and feel each others memories and emotions and move in total synchronization except when they are independently flipping switches and giving verbal commands to the robots. That's right: The pilots are mentally linked to the machine, but can't just think, "PUNCH THE MONSTER! FIRE THE MISSILES!" They have to move around like they're in some sort of elliptical trainer-slash-Dance Dance Revolution machine. Huh? (I guess running these from a remote location was too intelligent, too?)

Let me interrupt myself for a moment to set my thesis for the rest of my criticism of Pacific Rim, namely that what kills this movie dead in the logic department is that screenwriters Travis Beacham (who typed the none-too-swift Clash of the Titans remake) and del Toro made of list of "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" moments and threw them on the screen without regard to whether they made any sense at all. You've been warned. The review continues in 3...2...

In order to find a new mental wingman who is "drift-compatible" Elba and his assistant Rinko Kikuchi (Oscar-nominee for Babel; she was the Japanese girl without panties) they have Hunnam stick-fighting a bunch of red shirts. None of them fit the bill, so over Elba's objections, because they have a Personal Connection Which We're Supposed To Be Too Stupid To Figure Out, Hunnam stick fights Rinko in the scene ripped-off from The Final Flight of the Osiris segment which opened The Animatrix. Of course, they are a perfect match and it's like a foreplay scene, because nudge-nudge. She also sees him with his shirt off, so you think there's a chance for romance in the End Times for these two?

Of course she has a Traumatic Past which leads to problems when first plugged into Hunnam's brain as she gets lost in a memory and almost kills everyone in the hanger and leads us to the spectacle of controllers unplugging computers to shut down the robot which would be like air traffic controllers switching off their monitors to prevent a collision between airliners. So dumb.

This leads to the greatest problem with this Drift nonsense: It is only used to dramatize a scene which normally would've been handled in a conversation, perhaps with a flashback. But that wouldn't have been cool! Remember the scene in Disclosure - the Michael Douglas-Demi Moore movie about sexual harassment - where Douglas uses a virtual reality rig to go into cyberspace to locate a file? Strip away all the CGI and what is the scene showing? A: Breaking into an office and going through a file cabinet. Not very exciting, but glitzing things up unnecessarily doesn't make it cool, just means you spent money on bling.

Then there's the issue of the other Jaeger teams. There is plenty of the macho dick-waving BS trope which undercuts the whole "We're the last line of defense to save the world" message. So shackled to the trope-by-numbers plotting which demands that the pilots disrespect each other before learning to grudgingly respect each other, then VICTORY!, that it's a tiresome grind. Not one plot point or line of dialog has spark or wit other than the explanation how Ron Perlman's character got his name. Wow. One whole line in two hours. Anyone who is surprised by anything in this movie has never seen a movie before.

The apologists for this sorry mess have trotted out the word "archetype" to excuse the flat formula. While Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces explicated the typical "hero's journey" as seen in everything from Star Wars on, what Pacific Rim does is take the familiar milestones and make them as dull, boring, stupid, incomprehensible, lazy and insulting to sentient life as possible.

I get that movies have formulas, but look at Real Steel, the smaller-scale robot fighting movie. Every single beat of that movie was also predictable, BUT it told its familiar story with flair, charm, warmth and winning performances. When the kid starts dancing around and Atom (the robot) mimics his moves and they decide to make it part of the act, it makes you smile because this is exactly what a kid with a robot would do! A skilled interpreter can make a familiar song or story seem fresh - anyone want to dispute that Johnny Cash stole "Hurt" from Nine Inch Nails? - and while Real Steel used the audience's familiarity with the form as a foundation to riff and razzle dazzle in the execution, Pacific Rim clanks like a rusty Dumpster at every turn. There's a difference between simple, simplistic, simple-minded and f*cking retarded and Pacific Rim manages to blow right through that last adjective.

Wait, I almost forgot the stupidest part! Charlie Day - whom I consider the poor man's Bobcat Goldthwait Jr. - appears as a kaiju scientist who is trying to discover what their plan is and what he does should obligate anyone who howled with outrage at the idea of a MacBook being able to interface with an alien spaceship in Independence Day to plant a virus to get up and walk out of the theater. Again, it's something put in because they mistakenly thought it'd be cool. It's not. It's ridiculous.

I know there's many who are taking the view of, "So what? It's kaijus fighting robots! Pew pew pew!" but that's the most annoying aspect about the post-release responses; the battles aren't that impressive. They're slow, ponderous, hidden by darkness and rain and ocean. Sure, there are a few cool moves, but that's like saying not everything in the meal caused food poisoning. When the awesome trailer money shot of the freighter being used as a club arrived, I didn't care because I was bored to death by the tedium.

If this review sounds more like a primal scream than a dispassionate analysis it's because I walked into the theater expecting to have my hair blown back and my inner child entertained and two hours later I was so disappointed - my girlfriend HATED it and she was as stoked as I was - and as I've watched people deluding themselves and misleading others that this is a fun time, my disappointment has turned into anger I haven't felt since The Dark Knight Reloaded took a kaiju-sized dump on Christopher Nolan's CV.

I realize that opinions are subjective, but in this case as with TDKR, that doesn't cut it: Those who like these movies are WRONG. Factually incorrect. Nerds are whoring themselves out so cheaply. They want to love it or love del Toro or something, but to give a pass to such a poorly scripted movie is to abandon standards for nothing. If you like this, you can never complain about Michael Bay or Paul W.S. Anderson again for their dumb flicks.

What's so depressing is that it didn't need to be this stupid. People are coming to see monster fights, so why not aspire to better storytelling? This is why the archetype defense is so feeble. Star Wars had the young man leaving up to battle evil, but it did so in a universe of evil Empire, scrappy Rebels, Jedi Knights, droids, monster bars, walking carpet co-pilots, a spunky princess, a charming rogue, and the muthaf*ckin' Force, yo! It was rich and detailed and has expanded into a broader universe for over 35 years. Pacific Rim has a three-armed robot piloted by triplets that you never get a good look at so the casting of real triplets is mooted.

In a featurette trying to explain the Drift, GDT spoke about how he thought it fascinating how figure skaters could dislike each other off the ice yet work in perfect sync while skating. Why didn't he explore that concept into the movie? Wouldn't it have been more interesting if Hunnam was a total chauvinist pig and Rinko was a lesbian and they hated each other, but were the best matches for drifting and thus had to work to save the world? That's just one little idea, which apparently there was no budget for ideas beyond kaiju feet that are never seen.

I could ramble on and on about other dumb things like the shot of the head of Gipsy Danger sliding hundreds of feet down a chute to mate with the body when it's never seen shown separated and makes no sense that it'd be detachable when it does hand-to-hand combat with kaijus. It's just something that they thought would look cool, logic be damned. Then there's the character who's been dying of radiation sickness for 15 years. Unreal.

If there's been a thread that's connected the disappointing movies of this summer, it's been timid, lazy writing undercutting the hundred million dollars in pixels pushed to make big noisy meaningless mayhem that is forgotten the moment it passes before the eyes. I've seen reviewers say there are images they'll be replaying in their minds forever from Pacific Rim and I wonder if it's the lapdance the studio provided or the flashbacks from inhaling aerosolized LSD for two hours in the theater?

The final insult from defenders is that sane people who can see the kaijus and jaegers have no clothes aren't "getting it" or "not the intended audience" or "are joyless dunces." No, I'm just not a cheap date who accepts any old crap and says thank you for it. It's almost certain that the all-Asian porno spoof - do I need to say the inevitable title? - will have more inspiration than the source material did.

Score: 5/10. Catch a matinee; 2D is fine.

June 2013 Review Roundup

A mid-month trip and other stuff lead to a light month of movie-watching.

June 4 - Resident Evil: Retribution (3/10); The Boondock Saints (4/10)
June 5 - The Heat (7.5/10)
June 10 - Overnight (6/10); Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer (8/10)
June 17 - This Is The End (7/10)
June 18 - Man of Steel (7/10)


Most Enjoyed: The Heat
Least Enjoyed: Resident Evil: Retribution

Month's Movies Watched: 7
Previously Unseen: 7
Theatrical: 3
Home: 4
=====
Year-To-Date: 37
YTD First-Timers: 33
YTD Theatrical: 10
YTD Home: 27

"Man of Steel" Review

After what seemed to be a decade of post-production, Zac Snyder's epic scale reboot of Superman, Man of Steel, flies into theaters weighed down by the gloominess of producer and Dark Knight mastermind Christopher Nolan.

The first shocks come early with the portrayal of Krypton. We've only seen it as an icy Styrofoam world in the original Superman, so to see animals (that seem left over from Avatar) and a culture that has babies like The Matrix is both jarring and surprisingly unoriginal. In this telling, Jor-El (Russell Crowe) and his wife have had the first natural birth in centuries (of course), but since the planet is dying, he's going to send this last son of Krypton to Earth, but this time also carrying the genetic code for all Kryptonians with him in a slightly different form.

Instead of recounting young Clark Kent's upbringing in Smallville, Kansas in the usual linear manner, David S. Goyer's script (with the story co-written by Nolan) uses a flashback structure showing a bearded Clark wandering around like Bruce Banner, trying to find his place in the world and experiencing the same things he did as a boy raised by the Worst Father Ever, Kevin Costner. Seriously, when you sum up the totality of his terrible advice - "Let kids die to hide your power. Let me die because." - it's a miracle Clark didn't become Superemo. While this structure spares us some of the boredom, it only really works because everyone knows Superman's origin story so well, these broad sketches suffice, but also prove unnecessary.

In mashing up the plots of the first two Christopher Reeve movies, General Zod (Michael Shannon) comes to Earth looking for Kal-El and decides that Earth would be a fine place to regenerate Krypton, even if it requires exterminating the indigenous population of the planet (that would be us humans) via terraforming with a giant "world engine" that looks like the Reaper ships from the Mass Effect games. Much destruction ensues.

The old Superman movies were hampered by the limited special effects technology of the late-Seventies. The slogan was, "You will believe a man can fly," but while the flying was sort of OK most of the time, the fights in Superman II were just painful to watch in their sluggish non-glory. That's fixed here as you definitely get the sensation of superpowered beings pounding the bejeebers out of each other. You want train engines being thrown like toys? You got it! The problem is that Snyder rapidly sails into the pure noise zone as Metropolis is pounded into dust. Forget the hundreds of billions in damage and the tens of thousands of people who are probably lost in the chaos, it's simply finely rendered particle system VFX static after a certain point. It loses its capacity for visceral impact early on and gets less exciting, not more.

As with Brandon Routh in Superman Returns, the question is whether Henry Cavill can adequately fill Reeve's cape and the answer is yes despite the problematic script. (Same as it was with Routh, whose career suffered through no fault of his own when his turn flopped; it's not like Clooney in Batman and Robin.) Saddled with lots of doubts due to his crappy upbringing, he manages to make Kal/Clark/Supes work. The rest of the cast - Shannon, Laurence Fishburne as Perry White, Amy Adams as Pulitzer Prize-winning (as she is forced to say) Lois Lane - are solid, though why did they have to make Diane Lane as Ma Kent look so weathered.

While I was watching Man of Steel, I was enjoying the huge scale but as the noise factor worked against it and things dragged on to the conclusion, I realized that I wasn't having much fun. There are perhaps two laughs in the whole movie and that's not enough for an over two-hour comic book flick. I'm not demanding an Avengers-style laugh riot, but as with Nolan's The Dark Knight Reloaded, this "dark and gritty" take on things is getting to be a drag.

Score: 7/10. Catch a matinee.

"This Is The End" Review

A bunch of Hollywood stars riding out the Apocalypse is the premise of the frequently funny, but slightly disappointing This Is The End the co-directorial debut of co-writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg whose previous works include Superbad (cool), Pineapple Express (OK) and The Green Hornet (uh-oh).

Originally a four-minute short called Jay and Seth Versus the Apocalypse, This Is The End stars Rogen and Jay Baruchel (She's Out of My League, Undeclared) as old Canadian friends getting together after a year apart. Rogen is in L.A. making movies and Jay stays in Canada because he doesn't like the Hollywood scene and Seth's new friends including Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson and James Franco. After smoking pot and playing videogames, Rogen drags a reluctant Baruchel to Franco's house-warming party where a ton more stars make cameos as outlandish caricatures of themselves, especially Michael Cera as a coked-out lunatic.

As promised by the trailer, the Apocalypse occurs and the surviving party members hunker down in Franco's place. What does it all mean? How long will the food last, especially with Danny McBride with them? Is this really the end and, if so, how do these selfish Hollywood celebs redeem themselves and get to Heaven? Of course, hijinks ensue.

While my girlfriend and friend absolutely loved it, I was left a little chilly by This Is The End. It's not that it's not funny - it's very funny when it clicks - it's just that in trying to root the story in a human exploration of friendship, it kept the pace a bit slower than it should've. A perfect comparison is last year's Ted (the obscene teddy bear movie) which managed to be warm AND throw a zillion jokes at you non-stop.

Comedy is naturally subjective, so even though I laughed more at The Heat than This Is The End, don't take this as a lukewarm endorsement. It's just that I could've stood for some more random funny.

Score: 7/10. Rent it and hope there's an hour of alternate takes.

"Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer" Review

The latest HBO Documentary Series kicks off with Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, an interesting film documenting the persecution of the Russian feminist punk rock/performance art collective Pussy Riot, who pop up in public places protesting the government of former KGB strongman Vladimir Putin and the heap of trouble they found themselves in when they decided to stage one of their happenings in a Russian Orthodox Christ the Savior Cathedral in February 2012.

Told even-handedly by a pair of filmmakers who clearly were already documenting the group (UPDATE: Apparently not; this EW interview indicates they got on the case after their arrest, so the other footage was done by others) when they stumbled into the crosshairs of the Russian "justice" system, it follows the three girls who were arrested for their shenanigans as they face up to five years in a penal colony for what is basically a disturbing the peace and trespassing rap worthy of a wrist slap and fine, not a trip to the gulag. Interviews with the girls' parents, offended Orthodox members who view the incident as reminiscent of the Bolsheviks persecution of them, as well as prosecuting and defense lawyers round out the copious footage of the trial and subsequent appeals which led to one member being released while the other two serve two years in prison.

What's fascinating is how the legal system, whether at the direction of Putin or not, never seems to consider the ramifications of what over-prosecution may cause to stir up further protests. This isn't to say that what they did was totally harmless and being obnoxious brats in sacred places doesn't deserve some sanction, but what the Russian system did was take an unknown group and turn them into international symbols as prisoners of conscience. (If you think that making martyrs isn't bad for business, you should talk to Pontius Pilate.)

It's also interesting to compare the opprobrium cast against Putin for his treatment of these dissenters with the ongoing situation of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the Egyptian filmmaker whose crappy video was chosen as the official scapegoat by the Obama administration for the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012. In a tight race for reelection after a failed first term, Obama sent the police to grab this poor chump on a probation violation and send him to prison for a year.

The difference between the cases is that while the artistic world has collectively rallied to the banner of Pussy Riot and against the thuggish reign of Putin, none of those voices are being raised against Obama as it's been learned how he's used the vast, powerful machinery of government to spy on, threaten, bully, persecute and punish those who dare speak against him. Somehow I don't think we'll be seeing an HBO documentary anytime soon about those who challenge the system here. It appears bravery is situational.

Back to Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer - I wish they'd delved into how the music was recorded and played back at their performances and what the story was about the English-fluent husband of Nadia, the strikingly beautiful member - seriously, check her out...

...who never showed up in court looking bad after months in jail as if she had a stylist the others passed on. I knew that one member of the band had been let out and I joked to my girlfriend, "Wanna bet that they let the hot one out?" (Spoiler alert: They don't. Whoa. And wait until you see the "exhibition" she took part in before. Yikes!)

Score: 8/10. Watch it.

"Overnight" DVD Review

As I referenced in my review for The Boondock Saints, a greater part of my interest in that mess was because I wanted to see this documentary, uh, documenting the rapid self-destruction of Troy Duffy, the egomaniac writer-director who managed to snag multiple breaks and then screw them all up, ending with nothing much and unlike most rags-to-riches-to-rags stories, you're pretty much rooting for his failure the whole way.

Co-directors Mark Brian Smith and Tony Montana (for real?) were pals of Duffy's and his band, The Brood, which also included his brother Terry. I'm sure the intentions when they started documenting (there's that word again!) what happened after Miramax paid $300,000 for the script and bought him the L.A. bar he was slinging brews in was to have a record of the next Tarantino's emergence upon the cinematic landscape. It starts well enough with Marky Mark, Jake Busey, Patrick Swayze, Jeff Goldblum and others coming to the bar to meet with this supposedly hot newcomer. Not only will he be allowed to direct despite no previous experience, not even film school, but his band gets offered a deal on Maverick Records, unheard. Good times, indeed!

Then Duffy works his anti-Dale Carnegie tragic and within months, Miramax has put the project into turnaround and the band's deal offer disappears. Eventually, alternate financing is secured and the movie is made and Jason Flom's Lava/Atlantic imprint signs the band and puts them in the studio with former Doobie Brother Jeff "Skunk" Baxter producing. Back on track, right? Not really, for the recording process is hampered by Duffy's ego (seems to be a theme) and when the film is screened at Cannes, no one makes an offer to pick it up for distribution. Is Harvey Weinstein having the film blackballed or does it suck that bad? Regardless, when it finally gets put out, it shows in only five theaters for a week and grosses about $10,000, making it's name on home video when easily impressed viewers glom onto it. As for the band's album, after six months it sold 670 copies. The band got dropped like a bad habit.

While Overnight is a schadenfreudetastic look at a guy who bought into his own hype, it's somewhat hampered by a one-sided perspective because it was shot to tell Duffy's tale and there is very little heard from the other side of his tantrums on the Hollywood side. We see him screaming into phones, but the targets of his wrath aren't interviewed as to what they were thinking. There is also absolutely no footage of the band performing, recording, jamming or anything; something I'm guessing was due to an inability to secure the music rights. This means we have no idea what the labels thought they were getting in signing the band. For what it's worth, the bandmates don't look too happy with their lots either, but they're not interviewed either. More perspectives are needed.

Another major question unanswered is what the unholy heck did Hollywood think they were buying with this guy. The Boondock Saints is a mediocre mess, a fifth-rate pastiche of Tarantino imitators, not even QT himself. A zillion bands pay their dues and never get a deal, but these jokers are handed a contract because one member is making a movie?!? WTF?

In an interview with the directors included as an extra, they say that a case of collective madness which led movie and music industries to fall over themselves for this twit would never happen again, but it would've helped if they had been able to explore why it happened in the first place.

Shot on Super 8 and 16 mm as well as home video, the image quality and sound is rather rough, but watchable. It's presented in non-anamorphic full frame, so if you haven't made the move into HDTV, you'll be fine.

Score: 6/10. Rent it. (Only because I doubt it will ever surface on cable.)

I couldn't find an embeddable trailer for the film, even on Tony Montana's YouTube page, but he did post Ebert & Roeper's review of the film which is where I heard of it.

"The Heat" Review

When Bridesmaids shocked Hollywood in 2011 with a global take of $288 million and a pair of Oscar-nominations for the script co-penned by SNL veteran Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy. Potty-mouthed, low-brow, R-rated comedies had always been thought of a boys-only club so for women to succeed in the genre raised the question of whether it was a one-off fluke or a untapped market. The first real test of this will be The Heat which reunites Bridesmaids director (and Freaks & Geeks creator) Paul Feig and McCarthy, adding Sandra Bullock to the mix to gender-swap the well-worn buddy cop comedy formula. Can comic gold (and box office loot) be found by having girls get wild again? In this case, it just might.

The trailer sets the bar pretty low as it appears Bullock is revisiting her Miss Congeniality character as an FBI Agent who isn't respected by the boys despite her investigative chops. She doesn't have a man, practically steals her neighbor's cat for companionship, and hungers for a supervisory position promotion. Sent to Boston to work a big narcotics trafficking, she meets not-cute with local Detective McCarthy, one of those noisy loose cannon types whom we just have to accept managed to stay employed and promoted to Detective despite their obnoxious personality. (This is apparently not a documentary.) Will these two cops with their clashing styles and personalities be able to get along and crack the case while cracking heads and also cracking up audiences?

Duh.

Pretty much every beat of The Heat follows the Odd Couple Buddy Cop Flick playbook that animates these things dating back to 48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop or Lethal Weapon, so it comes down to execution to make it sink or swim and for the most part it swims, uh, swimmingly. That the script is by Parks and Recreation writer Katie Dippold provides a little insulation from criticism that what Bullock and McCarthy do is degrading to professional women, but let's be honest, when's the last time you ever heard anyone worrying about whether male cops are harmed by being fooled by a banana in the tailpipe.

As with Bridesmaids, the secret weapon is McCarthy who is utterly without vanity as she spews a torrent of F-bombs, though they manage to make her unmistakably, ummmmm...let's say zaftig figure not the cheap and easy (and offensive) gag it could've been by giving her a running gag involving spurned lovers. She's a force of nature and Bullock gamely plays the straight man (you know what I mean), but gets a few licks in. Everyone's got a mushy center and learns something in the end. You know the drill. It's just that we've seen Bullock play the "attractive woman who doesn't know she's attractive" part so many times I coined the term "Sandra Bullock Syndrome" to describe any female character played by an actress that would rate an 8 or higher on the looks scale.

With so much that is familiar in the formula, it almost seems charitable to recommend it because all they've really done to freshen it up is put women in the leads. If this was made in 1996 with Tom Hanks and Chris Farley as a retread of Turner & Hooch with Farley as the slobbering dog, would it have be notable? More damningly, would it have been as funny with someone like Kristen Wiig instead of McCarthy? Does aggressive comedy require someone of a certain size whether it be a John Belushi and Chris Farley or a McCarthy and Rebel Wilson? (Ugh, political correctness isn't very amusing to ponder.)

So The Heat is just the same old formula with a flavor we haven't seen before? Is that enough? Sure, why not because despite the familiarity of format, it delivers the funny in sufficient quantities to merit watching. (There's a quote you won't be seeing on the DVD box!) I laughed a lot and I think you will too. The studio must be expecting great things because The Heat 2 is supposedly already in the works which means the downside of successful buddy cop comedies - the unneeded sequels (does anyone remember Another 48 Hours or the sequels to Beverly Hills Cop?) - will be coming too. Why should the ladies be exempt from that?

One warning: The violence isn't too bad, but it's a little more graphic than you'd expect from a comedy starring women. If you watch The Walking Dead, it's not anything that bad, but just a warning; a heads up about the head shots.

Score: 7.5/10. Catch a matinee.

NOTE: This opens June 28, 2013. The trailer says April. Also, several of the gags are different in the movie

"The Boondocks Saints" Blu-ray Review

1999's The Boondocks Saints has carried the sobriquet of "cult classic" with legions of fans holding conventions and screenings for the past decade. My interest was more limited, mostly because I've had a DVD of the reputedly-good documentary Overnight, about how the writer-director Troy Duffy got his break to make the movie and pissed it away in a haze of ego not matched by talent, and I figured it'd make more sense after having seen the movie proper. Secondarily, co-star Norman Reedus is now the hot cool dude after three seasons playing Daryl on The Walking Dead. Now, after watching The Boondocks Saints, I'm super in the mood to have a nice bowl of schadenfreude flakes watching Overnight because this movie is a mess and those rabid fans need their heads examined.

I'm not sure what Harvey Weinstein was thinking when he paid $300,000 for the script to this thing from a Boston bartender and then allowed him to direct despite having never made anything or even attended film school, but considering he had Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith in the Miramax stable, that this illiterate mess caught his eye is a head-scratcher. The story is simplistic, the dialog inane, the whole thing sloppy, though with a few charms that help it avoid being a total washout.

Set in Boston, it stars Reedus and Sean Patrick Flannery as Irish brothers who work in a meat packing plant. One night, the owner of their favored watering hole tells them that the Russian Mob is buying up properties and isn't renewing the lease. When a pair of Mob goons show up, the crowd at the bar roughs them up badly. When the Russians appear at the brothers cruddy apartment for revenge, they find themselves on the wrong end of that fight and are let go by the cops by reason of self-defense. With a sense of self-righteous justice, they embark on killing off other Russian mobsters, eventually branching out to hitting members of the Italian Mob with their numbers runner pal Rocco, played by David Della Rocco which confused me when they give him a title card introduction.

Duffy uses what he thinks is a clever structure by showing the brothers planning their hit then the cops with FBI Agent Willem Dafoe (more on him in a moment) investigating and theorizing about the crime scene before jumping back and showing us what happened. Duffy does this over and over, but it only works in an interesting fashion once when Dafoe appears in the scene, acting out what happened along with the actual participants. But even that sequence ends with a ludicrous gun fight which makes a late-film twist thoroughly ridiculous. (Also, why would the brothers be carrying ammonia to spray on their spilled blood to make evidence gathering useless?)

What saves The Boondocks Saints from total failure is Dafoe's absolutely off-the-chain performance as the gay, smacktalking, FBI Agent who begins to appreciate what the brothers are doing. I'm surprised I've never heard of this performance before as he cross-dresses and generally freaks out in every scene he's in. He's a hoot.

Reedus and Flannery are bland cyphers whom Duffy figured tattoos, some brief prayers (not the least bit ripped-off from Pulp Fiction *cough*), and thick Gaelic accents would suffice as "characters." In one scene they show off fluency in several languages, but no explanation for this skill is given. It's just some "cool" (again *cough*) business stuck in as trimming on an empty package.

Speaking of empty packages, I purchased The Boondocks Saints Truth & Justice Edition Blu-ray and upon watching it discovered I got the original pressing without the "The Boondock Saints - The Film and the Phenomenon" retrospective feature listed on the packaging. Checking reviews, I see that the old disc had the script and this one does, too. I did a search and found other people reporting getting the wrong disc, too. I'll have to chase Fox down for a replacement. Bother.

Score: 4/10. Skip it unless it's on cable when you're flipping by and Dafoe is getting his crazy on.

"Resident Evil: Retribution" Review

After the craptastic Resident Evil: Afterlife stunk to high heaven, I can't believe there was any demand for more of this series, but apparently there is and thus Hollywood begat Resident Evil: Retribution, the penultimate chapter (meaning there's another on the way; oh joy) of the saga of Alice (Milla Jovovich) vs. the Umbrella Corporation. Please, make it stop!

The hook this time is that a whole bunch of characters who died in previous films return, but the manner they come back - as clones and simulations or something - renders all the noisy action meaningless. I had to look up a synopsis this afternoon to refresh me what I watch last night (from this writing) and now I can't recall what was what. Something about Alice having to escape from an elaborate undersea complex that Umbrella converted from post-Cold War Soviet submarine pens where they have massive virtual environments like The Truman Show recreating Moscow, Tokyo, Times Square and a generic suburban neighborhood. The mechanics of the simulation never make any sense even by the loose standards of realism of this series and it's just noise, action, boom-boom, blah-blah-woof-woof.


In my RE:A review, I slagged hacky writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson, saying, "It's a testament to his hackitude that Anderson makes wet and dirty Milla and Ali kicking ass both not hot and not entertaining." In this regard he outdoes himself by making Milla, the back-from-the-dead-Michelle Rodriguez (who also pulled a Lazarus in Furious 6), series newcomer Bingbing Li as game character Ada Wong, and Sienna Guillory (back for the 3rd time as Jill Valentine) not hot as they shoot guns and cat fight. Some of the action choreography is flashy, but it has no heft or consequence. It's just action that causes no reaction.

Milla Jovovich has a bad habit of marrying her directors, but at least Luc Besson has Le Femme Nikita, Léon: The Professional and The Fifth Element on his CV. Anderson has a mostly mediocre to average genre stuff; when the first (and ONLY the first) Resident Evil and the flawed Event Horizon are your acmes, well, you hit the jackpot, Tiger. Too bad she's wasting her career making crappy movies with her hubs.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

May 2013 Review Roundup

Summer's here and the time is right to head to the megaplexes to see some movies the way they're meant to be seen. I nearly quadrupled my theatrical viewing total.

May 3 - Iron Man 3 (8/10)
May 6 - Limitless: Unrated Extended Cut (9/10)
May 8 - Oblivion (4/10)
May 13 - Star Trek (7/10)
May 16 - Star Trek Into Oblivion (5/10)
May 27 - Fast & Furious 6 (8.5/10); The Hangover Part III (6/10)


Most Enjoyed: Furious 6
Least Enjoyed: Oblivion

Month's Movies Watched: 7
Previously Unseen: 5
Theatrical: 5
Home: 2
=====
Year-To-Date: 30
YTD First-Timers: 26
YTD Theatrical: 7
YTD Home: 23

"The Hangover Part III" Review

Following my viewing of the revved-up and better-than-ever 6th installment of the Fast and Furious franchise, I strolled down the row at the multiplex into The Hangover Part III, which is advertised as the final chapter of the Wolfpack Trilogy and we can only hope so. It's not that it sucks, it's just that there's nowhere left for this series to go.

Eschewing the blackout-and-try-to-figure-out-WTF-happened formula of the first two films, The Hangover Part III opts for a linear structure. After Alan's (Zach Galifianakanisasnuffleupagus) man-baby antics have driven his father into the grave, the family decides it's time to send him to a clinic in Arizona to get him back on his meds and the Wolfpack consents to drive him out there. On the way, their minivan is forced off the road and Doug (the one who was missing in the first movie whom no one knows the actor's name) is taken hostage by John Goodman. It seems Leslie Chow (Ken Jeong) ripped off $21 million in gold bars from a heist they pulled and he thinks the Wolfpack can find him now that Chow has escaped from the Thai prison he was in and is back Stateside. They have three days to find Chow and the gold or Doug is dead.

How much you enjoy this non-hangover-induced Hangover is dependent on how much you love/like/tolerate/hate the Chow character because he gets a lot of screen time. I like Chow, so I was cool with the emphasis. Alan is more of the same and while Galafreyanklebiteris (sp?) remains fully committed to the the character, at this point I really don't know why the Wolfpack didn't skip simply skip the clinic and drive out into the desert and bury him. (Whether he was dead first is irrelevant.) Ed Helms doesn't has much to do this time and Bradley Cooper really emails his performance in. Considering how many weeks it takes to shoot a feature film, you somewhat have to respect the amount of work Cooper put in to make sure he didn't look like he wanted to be there. (Yes, that's an ironic comment.)

The Hangover Part III was a surprise box office disappointment as Furious 6 left it choking on its dust but where the Fast and Furious series was able to reinvent itself, The Hangover series can't because this chapter was the reinvention and there's simply not enough there there to make further trips to the well advisable.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

"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.