Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2011.3
- Salt (2010) — 6/10
- Angelina Jolie (or what’s left of her after what seems like an exceedingly strict diet) stars opposite Liev Schreiber as a deep-cover Soviet/Russian agent. It meanders along predictably, jolts you with a couple of neat plot twists and then ends predictably (with a mini plot-twist right at the end again). It’s a pretty uneven movie overall, with a lot of gung-ho bravado and idiocy as well as seemingly pathetic aim on the parts of the antagonists (read: police, naturally). Jolie’s action scenes are decent, although the whole pushing-off-the-wall to super-mega-punch people and her command of mega-super-Parkour was laughable as was her ability to swim underwater in the wintry Potomac for half a mile. Note to Hollywood: getting punched hard in the nose hurts like hell; three times hard even more. You’re most likely unconscious or blind from the pain, and not likely to want to head-butt anyone after that. Just so you know.[1]
- Paranormal Activity (2008) — 5/10
- A scare film about a haunting of a modern-day suburban couple: she’s a student who wants to teach English and he’s a day-trader. She’s been followed all of her life by … something. He sets up a camera to catch this something on tape. All of the movie’s footage is from that camera, so the cinematography is very static. The acting is decent, though a bit strained at times, though kudos to the two primary actors for pretty much carrying the whole film. Quite well done, all in all and quite goddamned scary. The long delays[2] are nice touches and build suspense quite well. Pretty classic fright done with subtle looks and creepy smiles.
- Green Zone (2010) — 7/10
- An overall quite decent film about the early days of the occupation of Iraq by U.S. forces with Matt Damon in the lead. He plays an warrant officer searching for WMDs and coming up empty every time. Given the opportunity to find out why, he takes it and unravels the rat’s nest of lies that was the justification for the invasion of Iraq.[3] Whereas the details of the story are fictitious, the basic thrust of it is apolitical in that it essentially portrays what really happened: that the U.S. invaded Iraq for political reasons on wholly fabricated charges (affiliation with 9–11 attacks for the home crowd; presence of WMD for the rest of the world). A decent action thriller with Damon playing a competent soldier, but not the superman to which we’ve become accustomed in his Bourne films. The technology in the choppers at the end seems quite over-the-top and looks like it belongs on Airwolf or Knight Rider—it’s hardly likely that our troops have anything approaching technology that sophisticated.[4]
- Evangelion 1.01 You Are (Not) Alone (2007) — 5/10
- An anime cartoon about giant robots saving the Earth from what can only be described as nearly indestructible biotechnological avenging angels. It’s a vision of a hyper-militarized Tokyo with retractable guns, buildings and more techno-gadgetry than you can even absorb. The graphics and design are absolutely top-notch; the story and dialogue are embarrassingly horrible. The lead character provides non-stop whining throughout the film and the other characters are similarly two-dimensional. As usual in feature-length Japanese anime, the deep wounds of the second world war are in evidence as well as a lot of hokum about spirits and angels and souls.
- Evangelion 2.22 − You Can (Not) Advance (2009) — 5/10
- You would hope that I would know to leave the Evangelion series well enough alone, but I was feverish and ill and wanted some mind-candy, so I gave it a shot. Luckily, the dialog was in Japanese with English subtitles, so I could avoid the more painful, stilted human interactions by just not reading until giant robots started to mix it up again. There were more EVAs (giant robots) as well as more angels (not even sure how many, but they got through #10) as well as mysterious stuff going on on the Moon. A decent romp, though it can also only be recommended to anyone with a love for good animation. Those who enjoy plots, scripts and dialogue will have to look elsewhere.
- Mean Machine (Kampfmaschine) (2001) — 6/10
- A movie that claims to have been inspired by The Longest Yard, but is essentially a one-to-one British remake of the American film(s)[5], substituting football (GB) for football (US). To its credit, this latest remake is a good deal less cringe-inducingly violent than the American remake, which came later. The cast is decent and has Jason Statham in a minor role as a very odd, violent and loopy-as-f&$k lifer/goaltender who likes to play striker and goes by the name of Monk. There are a bunch of decent one-liners (even translated to German, which is the version I saw) and all’s well that end’s well (of course).
- 16 Blocks (2006) — 6/10
- A decently put-together film starring Bruce Willis as a cop having a Collateral moment—like Tom Cruise in that film, Willis is an action star playing above his age—and also kind of having a Gauntlet moment as he tried to get a prisoner to the courthouse against the wishes of all of his brother officers. Mos Def is endearing and the good guys win in the end—though the movie threatens to end on a dark note, it disappoints in that regard.
- Shutter Island (2010) — 10/10
- Leonardo DiCaprio teams up, once again, with Martin Scorcese in this haunting film about an asylum for the criminally insane off the coast of New England. Featuring a many-layered story rife with possible interpretations as well as a gorgeously shot and managed film, it’s amazing to think that Inception got all of the attention for the Oscars instead of this one. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the story of Inception well enough, but it didn’t hold up nearly as well in hindsight as this one will. Plus, it’s amazingly apparent how much better and masterful a director and storyteller Scorcese is than Christopher Nolan, who feels the need to use exposition to tell us everything. Pro tip: see Inception first in order to be better able to enjoy it…because you might not be able to if you see Shutter Island first. It does a much better job of showing us dream worlds than Inception ever could.
- The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009) — 6/10
- Travolta plays an over-the-top badass; Washington plays an overly qualified MTA official/train-desk-operator; Gandolfini is the rich mayor of New York City; Turturro is the hostage negotiator. The cast is very promising, but the script is very uneven, with things happening—or not—for no good reason. The little interludes with the idiot teenager talking to his equally insipid girlfriend (and she berating him for not saying he loves her despite being a hostage) or with the little boy who is the only one to remember that the lights are all green is the purest Hollywood, designed-by-committee claptrap. It’s also a mystery why the criminal had such a ridiculously horrible escape plan—it’s almost like they were wearing GPS trackers because the cops honed in on them with unerring accuracy. No explanation was given for the psychosis of Travolta’s character—he would probably say it was engrams.[6] Oh, and congratulations Hollywood! For creating yet another movie almost completely bereft of females.
- I Love You, Phillip Morris (2009) — 8/10
- Jim Carrey plays a real-life con artist who bounces from successful scam to jail and back again. In jail he meets and falls in love with Philip Morris, played by Ewan McGregor. Both actors are at their best and put the Brokeback Mountain love affair to shame (in my admittedly unprofessional opinion). Carrey is brilliant, subtle at times and over-the-top at others, but always much more controlled than when playing his more mainstream roles. The film ends with a sobering comment on incarceration in America.[7]
- The Lake House (2006) — 4/10
- I really like Keanu Reeves and usually end up liking Sandra Bullock as well. This overly schmaltzy movie about star-crossed lovers was too much and too confusing and too boring. The plot can be described in two sentences, but I’m not going to bother.
- Greenberg (2010) — 3/10
- A bloody painful film about people with emotional and psychological problems dealing with even the smallest road bumps in their insignificant lives. Ben Stiller plays a completely different role without any of his usual manic humor or really any humor whatsoever. All of the characters are left as hollow shells, with only Ivan (Stiller’s friend) having any redeeming qualities. The overtly superficial party at the end wasn’t a credit to anyone despite providing the few interesting lines in the entire film from Stiller. I mean it kind of says some things about how people’s lives end up being different from what they expected, but most of the characters are insipid, Stiller’s included. That I know that they were meant to be so in order to show us how the other 95% lives didn’t help me enjoy the film much more. It was pretty tough to sit through this one and I can’t recommend it to anyone.
- The Rock (1996) — 7/10
- An overly macho movie that I can’t help liking and here’s why: though I like Nicholas Cage and Ed Harris, if Sean Connery wasn’t in the movie, playing a super-suave and clever and capable Scottish SAS agent who can escape from anywhere, it wouldn’t be worth sticking around. But he is, and it is.
- The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) — 6/10
I saw the 2008 remake starring Keanu Reeves dubbed in German. The film is pretty decent and only partly ruined by Hollywood’s desire to improve their youth-market penetration by adding children that act like adults. It could be argued that the child represents humanity and its simplistic desire to fight back or be loved unconditionally, but there is no reason to base a large part of the otherwise interesting plot around the child. It’s not a minor complaint—the movie could have been more interesting without all of the pandering to various market segments. The film is best summed up by Jennifer Connelly when addressing Klaatu, the alien:
“What are you doing here?”
“You’re destroying your planet.”
“You’re here to save us?”
“I’m here to save the planet.”
“But from what?”
“…”
“Oh.”
- Ein Schatz zum Verlieben/Fool’s Gold (2008) — 7/10
- A fun treasure-hunt flick in Key West with Matthew McConaughey, Kate Hudson and Donald Sutherland making it work. McConaughey doesn’t really seem to be acting (as usual) and it didn’t take long for him to get his shirt off (as usual) for no discernible reason (as usual). Still, a fun flick. Watched it in German.
- Speed (1994) — 7/10
- Watching Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in French was surprisingly entertaining. I totally forgot that the movie didn’t end when the bus blew up.
- New Police Story (2004) — 8/10
- Jackie Chan in an entertaining yarn about a gang of rich youth who terrorize a city. Lots of interesting plot points that you’d never see in a Hollywood-style film; that is, it was cheesy, but in new and interesting ways. Spoiler alert: for example, when the sociopaths put a bomb around Chan’s girlfriend’s neck, you actually believe she’s going to die. Then you think she won’t because Chan will rescue her. But she sent him on a goose chase so that she could sacrifice herself. So she tries, but inadvertently defuses the bomb instead (i.e. her gamble pays off, but you didn’t expect it to). Then they’re both surprisingly still alive and grateful when they notice that the bomb timer has started again, so they sprint out of there, but she gets trapped under rubble and looks dead. But she’s not, she’s barely alive. It sounds cheesy, but it was original enough to feel like a rollercoaster instead of hackneyed. Also lots of Jackie Chan kicking ass and taking names.
[1] I know that I mentioned nothing about Sylvester Stallone’s ridiculous fight scene in The Expendables in my mini-review a few weeks ago. That’s because Stallone saw fit to make it look like none of the blows were doing any damage, which while also not believable, is more believable than having the makeup artist make Jolie’s face look practically stoved-in with damage that would fell a rhino, not to mention a one-hundred-pound woman, then have her get hit again and again in the same place and have her—super-hero-like—not seem to be affected at all, not even dazed for more than a second, not even a little bit. The guy she’s fighting is also ostensibly a professional and not likely to be pulling his punches; unfortunately for him, his opponent seems to be from Krypton. The only other less believable fight scene that comes to mind is the one from Die Hard 4, in which Maggie Q plays a similarly indestructible, indefatigable woman completely impervious to pain.↩
[2] Spoiler alert: when she just stands around while sleep-walking—or when the something is in the driver’s seat, it’s ultra-eerie.↩
[3] The plot for this movie is especially damning in light of the real-life “Curveball’s” recent confession that everything he told the Bush administration was more-or-less made-up.↩
[4] Spoiler alert: although the chopper’s systems seemed able to track two suspects fleeing on foot through the twisting alleyways of Baghdad slums/neigborhoods, they were no help in detecting the other enemies who blew it out of the sky with an RPG. Pity.↩
[5] Both the original with Burt Reynolds as well as the remake with Adam Sandler and Chris Rock (as well as Burt Reynolds in a different role).↩
[6] If I recall correctly, engrams are the reason anyone does anything crazy, according to Scientologists. Or perhaps Travolta would have blamed psychiatrists.↩
[7] Carrey’s character is caught trying to free Philip Morris from jail and sentenced to 170 years of prison without parole, to be served in 23-hour solitary confinement. This for a man who never killed or harmed anyone and stole far less money than many who have gotten far lesser sentences. It is clear that the judge gave the maximum allowable for Carrey’s having humiliated the State of Texas. That it is even possible to legally sentence so much jail time to someone for grand larceny is a travesty in itself.↩