Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2014.1

This is an Australian movie about drag queens in Australia, played by the now-famous Terence Stamp (Bernadette), Guy Pearce (Felicia) and Hugo Weaving (Mitzy). The movie is named after the caravan that conveys them to a show in Alice Springs.

I don’t even know where to begin. Pearce is the most flamboyant with Stamp the most staid. Weaving is somewhere in between, at one point making an appearance in a dress, bag and earrings made only of flip-flops. It’s a movie that could no longer be made, because they actually get stuck in the vast Australian desert, in a time before cell phones. They spend a good deal of time camping about in the desert.

Most people are pretty accepting, including some Aboriginals they run into, who are mystified but happy to help a trio of transsexuals out of a bind. And how could you not be? Their costumes are over-the-top fabulous and the performances are good (even if their stage shows aren’t really).

If you’ve ever wanted to see guy Pearce lip-syncing to opera while leaning back in a gigantic silver high-heel shoe attached to the top of a lavender bus in the midst of lavender smoke spewing from a smoke machine, this is the film for you. Highly recommended.

This is a Korean detective moving starring Kang-ho Song, who was so good in The Host. This is an earlier role as detective Park Doo-Man but his on-screen charisma is totally magnetic and instantly recognizable. These good feeling evaporate quickly as he goes about trying to frame a mentally handicapped kid Kwang-Ho for the string of rape/murders that he currently has on his plate. The little guy kinda reminds me of Gollum and it’s darkly comic, but quite disturbing. The actor who plays Kwang-Ho is also quite good.

The characters develop further, with increasing layers of nuance and the dialogue is quite funny (at least what I get from the subtitles). The detective from Seoul—Seo Tae-Yoon—slowly starts to convince Doo-Man to do real police work rather than torture false confessions out of whomever they manage to catch. Shots are long and steady and it’s very story- rather than action-driven. It’s not at all clichéd. Beautiful shot selection—near the end, in the rain and in the tunnel, especially—and some very thrilling chase/hunt scenes, which are both slow and nerve-wracking.

Doo-man’s old partner Cho Yong-koo meanwhile is far to stupid to change his ways and, after hilariously attacking yet another suspect (again, dark comedy), he’s severely reprimanded by his sergeant and he goes on a rampage. Spoiler alert: the stupid detective Yong-koo likes to kick suspects and he pulls this little cloth over his boot—it looks like something his mother made for him—so that his kicks don’t leave marks. Later in the movie, Kwang-Ho stabs him in the leg with a board with a rusty nail in it. He’s too stupid to see a doctor, he gets tetanus and his kickin’ leg must be amputated.

I skipped a lot of nuance and a few interesting plot points—the story’s really quite good and quite unique for a crime film. They get so close and yet the murders keep happening. It reminded me a bit of the film Zodiac, the style of which seems to have been inspired by this movie. According to Wikipedia, it’s based on a series of real murders that also occurred in and around 1986. Highly recommended.

War-torn China; some dynasty. Two foster brothers , Su and Yuan, lead the charge to save a general from a Tolkien-esque fortress/cave and are rewarded with a governorship. Su wants to retire with his family (his wife is actually Yuan’s sister) and start a Wushu school, so he asks Yuan to take the honor. It turns out, though, that Yuan’s father had been killed by Su’s father and that Yuan isn’t quite over that. So he will have his revenge. He brings a lady friend with him, who can carry 400 pounds of knives with her and throw them all at once. Both feats are quite impressive.

There’s a bunch of cable work but it’s not as exaggerated as Crouching Tiger (yet). The battles are nicely choreographed but, as usual, no one takes any damage. Despite all of them being utterly top-notch martial artists, not a single blow they land does any real damage. No one limps, no bruises appear—it’s that kind of martial-arts movie. Oops. Spoke too soon—there’s Pai Mei floating through the bamboo like gravity doesn’t exist. It turns out to be all right because it’s not happening in reality, it’s happening in his mind.

This craziness scares his wife, so she decides to rescue their son from the Venom Lord all by herself, apparently just by asking him to let her son go. That was her whole plan. “Bury her in the forest!” is the best line of this movie. It’s hard to muster up any pity for her—that is exactly the response her stupid plan deserves. Of course, she does have a whee bit of a drinking problem, so perhaps we should excuse her lack of cohesive planning abilities.

The ensuing fight scene is pretty well-done, given you’ve already accepted the fighting rules outlined above. After this, however, the Wushu master Su falls into a funk again, this time to be rescued by his son…aaaaand, we seem to be in a whole new movie. WTF? I suppose now that he’s defeated one of his enemies, he must defeat the other enemy: himself. How profound. Now we’re treated to more phantasms and a bit of Drunken Master. And then we move right into a rehash of Legend. David Carradine is utterly awful. The kid is arguably worse. For whom is this movie made? It’s so uneven…the second part has almost nothing to do with the first part. It’s almost as if they just tacked the bad sequel right onto the end of the original.

If you do watch this movie, for your own sake, stop watching right after Su finds Ying. The end. DO NOT CONTINUE. You will regret it.

Liam Neeson continues to pursue what he refuses to call his action-movie career, this time as an eagle-eyed hunter in Alaska. He’s there to protect oil workers against packs of wolves. The backstory is that the love of his life has left him, he’s got nothing to live for, etc. He’s on a plane back to Anchorage that goes down, stranding him with six other survivors in a nighttime blizzard that doesn’t seem to bother the pack of gigantic wolves that stalk them. The wolves continue to hunt them as they make for some relatively nearby woods.

The cold and conditions are pretty believable—accepting that Hollywood will always make its actors leave its faces open to the elements, regardless of realism. The cold and wind look awful and adrenalin can only do so much when you’re trudging through deep snow. One by one, there always fewer little Indians. The river scene is ridiculous. What does it take for a script to fail in Hollywood? Is there anything that’s just too ridiculous to film? What do you see in Alaska when you just stepped out of a river in the deep snow? Not your breath, that’s for sure.

It’s nice to see a darker ending instead of the standard triumph and pragmatic fatalism is a welcome relief to unrealistic egotism, but two hours is way too long. Not recommended.

It starts off as a nicely shot thriller about a domestic sniper picking off civilian targets. After they pick up a suspect, we’re all treated to overly macho and ridiculous-sounding threats from the cop in charge. Read the following and tell me I’m wrong:

“It’s life or death now, James. By that, I mean you’re doing one or the other up in Rockview. This here is District Attorney Rodin. Want to know what he’s wondering? Whether you’re gonna walk like a man or cry like a pussy on your way to the death house. See, the D.A. likes the needle, whereas me, I like to see a man like you live a long life − with all your teeth knocked out. Passed around till a brother can’t tell your fart from a yawn.”

What the hell does that even mean? Are we supposed to be impressed? It’s not even clever or funny. It’s just bro-talk stupid. We just met this cop. There has been zero character development. Are we really supposed to be cheering for the good guys already? Because they caught the sniper? Compare and contrast to the seemingly effortless character development in Memories of Murder.

It stars Tom Cruise as the eponymous and enigmatic lead and Rosamund Pike is back as a lawyer involved in the case he’s asked to work on. The bar fight was a decent set piece to establish Reacher’s chops, as was the scene with Robert Duvall at the shooting range. Werner Herzog is good as the “Zek”; it seem to be common knowledge that this means “prisoner” in Russian, but I had only just learned it a couple of days ago from watching Mark of Cain. I like Jack Reacher better than I like Ethan Hunt, although there isn’t really much difference between the characters. I found myself searching for Jack Reacher 2 on IMDb. Recommended.

Don Cheadle leads a good cast as hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, who keeps an island of refugees alive in his hotel amidst the horror washing over Rwanda. The horrific descent into genocide is detailed in Paul’s struggles to arrange for escape with Sabena Airlines and then further negotiations with U.N. soldiers when that plan falls through. Helen Hunt and Nick Nolte have supporting roles. It’s an important movie, and the world’s outlook hasn’t changed significantly, as summarized in this exchange between Cheadle and Nolte:

“Paul Rusesabagina: I am glad that you have shot this footage and that the world will see it. It is the only way we have a chance that people might intervene.
Jack: Yeah and if no one intervenes, is it still a good thing to show?
Paul Rusesabagina: How can they not intervene when they witness such atrocities?
Jack: I think if people see this footage they’ll say, “oh my God that’s horrible,” and then go on eating their dinners.”

From their point of view, an intervention is better than the alternative. However, Paul was also much better off than most of his landsmen. It is the lower 90% who suffer horribly when the West intervenes, no matter how pious the intentions. Western interventions usually take the form of military action and then only air strikes are used to avoid losing precious Western lives. There is no easy answer, but the film puts the plaintive and desperate argument for intervention well.

Hoo-rah America-is-awesome porn. Jamie Foxx is the president. Maggie Gyllenhall is his chief of security? I think? Channing Tatum is trying to get into the secret service. They also saddled an old-looking James Woods into service as … some random old, white guy in the administration. I can’t believe Jamie Foxx is literally the token black guy in this movie. At least post-Obama, the only black guy in the movie gets to be the President. I bet he doesn’t even die first since he’s on the cover of the DVD. What a step up for black America! There’s also a sullen teenager and bitter MILF (Debra Messing).

Is he seriously taking his assinine 11-year–old to a job interview with him? And is the dimwit blabbing about “gas, chemical and missile attacks” while they’re going through security? And does he joke about “checking her good” as his daughter goes through security? This is a luxury only good-looking, well-dressed white people have, I think. That seems realistic. Not that realism is a requirement here. The movie intro showed three clearly CGI-injected helicopters flying over a terribly rendered capitol building. (It gets better.)

And here comes the hacker, with all of his requisite idiosyncrasies and a hacking program that you start by typing the numbers 1-9. While it runs, it tracks the progress to ten decimal places, ‘cause that’s how he rolls. The hacker played by Jimmi Simpson is quite funny, though.

Channing and Jamie kinda won me over—at about the time they started doing donuts on the White House lawn in the President’s Cadillac. The President then instructed tanks to roll on the White House. Soon after, the President had a rocket-launcher in his hands. And then they flipped the presidential Cadillac into a pool. Sound crazy? It is, but it’s pretty well-done. The effects are absolutely incredible after the initial stumble in the opening scene.

There are some misses, of course. Maggie Gyllenhall’s character is, unfortunately, annoying. James Woods, who almost died of a heart attack, is kicking the President’s ass in the next scene. Still and all, a fun movie. It was much better than expected; recommended if you’re looking for a mindless action flick akin to Independence Day.

Seann William Scott (famous for playing Stifler in the American Pie moveis) stars as Doug Glatt, a young guy drifting through life as a bouncer and avid hockey fan. On Saturdays, he joins his family at the temple, where they never fail to make him feel bad for not having become a doctor. His best buddy Jay Baruchel is a hockey fanatic. Doug attracts the attention of the coach of the local team one night for his fighting skills, demonstrated in a crowd brawl.

He’s soon hired and proving his mettle on the ice (purely with fists; his skating and hockey skills are abysmal). He’s a really nice guy and pretty dim, to boot—what an author might call “earnest”. There’s a love interest (of course) and a nemesis, in the form of Ross Rhea, played wonderfully by Liev Schreiber. It’s kind of hilarious that the two main goons in the movie are both played by Jewish actors.

Some scenes are pretty violent—almost as cringe-inducing as those in Fight Club. Seriously, Doug’s face is a patchwork quilt by the end of the flick. By the end, you do not want the fight between Doug and Ross to happen.[1] Both Schreiber and Scott are fantastic in the last scene. Based on the true story of Doug “The Hammer” Smith. Recommended; a must for hockey fans.

The original was marred for me by the fact that it focused so fetish-like on “Hit Girl” who was partnered with her father, called “Big Daddy”, She was wicked young then and it was kinda creepy, but otherwise a fun real-world super-hero action flick. A few years on and the sequel features “Hit Girl” as the star (because—spoiler alert—”Big Daddy” died at the end of the first one) and she’s at least 15 now, which is a bit less creepy, though not totally out of the creepy woods.

And then there’s Kick-Ass, who’s just an utterly awful superhero. Rather than being the cause of ass-kickings, he’s primarily the target of them. At least until he teams up with Dr. Gravity, played by Donald Faison. John Leguiziamo plays against type as the driver/henchman for the super-villian “Motherfucker” (formerly “Red Mist”) who is way over the top (funniest guy in the movie, played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who also played “Fogell” in Superbad). Leguiziamo says to him at one point: “Whoa, whoa, isn’t that just a little bit incredibly racist?”

The film totally takes the piss out of teenagers and millenials. There’s a bit of a Mean Girls sub-plot which segues into Carrie and shades of MMA/Fight Club. I like that they put subtitles for non-English bits into little talk bubbles. The villains seem like they’re a joke, but they are deadly serious and kill without compunction—lot’s of cops get killed in this one. And then there’s a bit of Rocky 4 at the end, with Mother Russia vs. Hit Girl, which is almost a blow-by-blow remake of Drago vs. Balboa. I found it to be way too uneven and strange; not recommended.

This is a movie with a huge roster of modern-day, young, male comedy actors playing versions of themselves at a party in LA. It must be noted that Michael Cera plays way against type here: he’s a coked-out Lothario. Jay Baruchel flies in to visit Seth Rogen and they end up at a party at James Franco’s house.

Spoiler alert: it’s the apocalypse and Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill are left in James Franco’s house. Danny McBride is the #1 terrible house guest and he’s voted out. Channing Tatum is good in a very brief cameo, only because you can’t believe that he would actually do the role he did. Poor Aziz. “It’s too late for you. You’re already in the hole.” The hole is a nice device for releasing most of the actors from the obligation of staying for the whole film.

Once the boys realize what’s going on, they try to do good deeds to get raptured and saved from the apocalypse. I love these guys but, man, is this script thin. I’m sure they had fun making this flick, but it’s not really very good. At all. Not recommended.

A series of interviews with the now-elderly gangsters who killed over a million people in Indonesia during the communist purges. They are still in power now and enjoy very nice lives. The director of this documentary asked them to tell their tale and reenact the killings, if possible. They were only too happy to do so, seeing absolutely nothing wrong with the history they helped create.

In fact, they are annoyed that the children of the so-called communists that they had eradicated are now speaking out and “trying to change history”, as one gangster put it. “This is the maintenance office, where I would always kill people […] it was like we were killing … happily.” All of the people we meet seem to be utterly bereft of any deeper philosophy or morality. The people they killed are not moral beings, worthy of consideration. It’s like asking them to feel sorry about having killed ants. The are completely bereft of shame.

The director accompanies a few of them as they make their rounds, shaking down local (mostly Chinese) shop owners for protection money.

The filming is utterly surreal. One of the guys is such a dandy, all he cares about is clothes. In another scene, the fatter one dresses up as a woman and the other two “interrogate” him, while dressed up as cowboys. Now they’re cruising the streets in a bright yellow Volkswagen Thing. Pimpin’ ain’t easy. And they reenact scene after scene of torture and killing, justifying it all the way. The reenactments are super-low in quality. Utterly surreal. One features the big guy, once again dressed up as a showgirl, reenacting a decapitation while his friends cheer him on (there’s one guy, always the same one, who seems regretful) . The makeup and effects are awful.

No remorse, except maybe one of them, who seems to understand a bit more. There’s also a scene at the end where the main narrator (Anwar Congo) also seems finally to be overwhelmed, but it’s hardly redemptive, after all we’ve already seen.

Another thinks international conventions shouldn’t apply to him—because he’s a “winner”. But he goes to ask “Americans killed all the Indians. No one’s been punished for that. Punish them, too, then.” Man’s got a point. On the whole, though, they’re just stupid monsters who barely understand any of what’s going on. Their families, too, are clueless. Another guy describes his career pragmatically, pointing out that

“when a businessman wants land where people are living, if he just pays for it, it’s expensive. But we can solve his problem. Because people are terrified of us, when we show up, they say ‘just take the land, pay what you want.’”

And then he shows off his spoils and riches, proud of all that he has, despite the stultifying poverty all around him. And he seems borderline mentally handicapped. Surreal. And the people in the orange camouflage, the members of the Pancasila paramilitary, horrific and base to the last man, gleefully taking part in the re-filming of their finest hour, when they slaughtered communists indiscriminately. Just terrible, terrible, crude people, all seemingly without a sense of irony. And yet, amazingly accepted and still in charge after several decades. Were the extras there just for the cash? Or are they, too, so brainwashed to accept this reality as normal?

Disturbing, but masterfully filmed and edited, with some truly lovely juxtapositions of beautiful scenery and colorfully dressed characters (the credits sequence, for example). Error Morris and Werner Herzog, legendary documentarians in their own right, are listed as co-producers. Highly recommended.

This is a martial epic about warring clans in what looks like late 19th-century or early 20th-century China (there are Gatling guns at one point). It is the tale of two generals and blood brothers, both warring with other clans and taking over cities and more-or-less sharing the spoils. Sensing betrayal, one preemptively betrays the other and barely escapes with his life, though his wife is injured and his daughter is fatally wounded, after which his wife leaves him.

He joins the Shaolin monks and is taken in by a monk played by Jackie Chan—who seriously shows up so late in the movie that’s I’d forgotten he was even in it. He plays a supporting role as a cook and has a few choreographed scenes, but they’re quite tame by his standards. The plot is relatively straightforward: monks are trying to help the poor and are beleaguered by greedy warlords and encroaching European would-be–colonialists. The former warlord’s nemesis is his former lieutenant. The chastened monk whose eyes have been opened by Shaolin implores his protégé to stop pursuing more wealth and violence. The pleas fall on deaf ears because the lieutenant—and now warlord—is almost cartoonishly evil, right up until his quasi-redemption at the end.

The monks hew to their ways, releasing and defending refugees, engaging in ass-kicking and sacrificing themselves where needed. The choreography ranges from relatively believable to off-the-hook, with a general disregard for the physical mass of human beings throughout. I don’t care how good you are at martial arts, you still need leverage. The story was decent and the scenery and cinematography quite beautiful. Recommended.

You can watch this one online at The Light Bulb Conspiracy (YouTube). it’s in English, French and German (with English subtitles). This is a one-hour documentary about planned obsolescence in the context of dwindling resources and energy and that it only works at all because the true costs of products, transportation, resources and so on are not actually factored in. We subsidize the present from the future. It includes some very interesting interviews, portions of which I’ve transcribed below.

“if happiness was dependent on our consumption level, we would be 100% content. We consume 26 times more than in Marx’s time. But all studies show that people are not 20 times happier. For happiness is always subjective.”

“Critics of [the] de-growth [movement] fear that it will destroy the modern economy and take us straight back to the Stone Age. […] To return to a society of sustainable development is not to go back to the Stone Age but to the 1960s. It is far from the Stone Age. Anti-Growth Society meets Ghandi’s vision: The world is big enough to satisfy everyone’s needs, but will always be too small to satisfy individual greed.”