Month: April 2011

I guess the summer starts in April now. If you like the Fast and Furious franchise, you won’t be disappointed with this iteration. In the internal chronological sequence of these movies this is technically the fourth, with Tokyo Drift being the last. That allows the director, Justin Lin, and writer, Chris Morgan (hilariously spoofed on The Onion for this movie) to reunite co-stars from each of the previous movies, including Han (Sung Kang), who was supposedly killed in Tokyo Drift. It also throws in Dwayne Johnson and a handful of other newbies for fun. The result is exactly as you would expect: bigger, louder, more of everything. But it still sticks to the essence of the franchise: lots and lots of fast driving; supernaturally beautiful women; and the brooding presence of Vin Diesel. And that makes it work, within the confines of the genre. The final chase scene, however implausible, of two cars pulling a giant bank vault around Rio de Janeiro is a tour de force. It is a heist movie, and a buddy movie, and a stunt movie, and a story about family values. What can I say, I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. I’m pretty sure I never took my car out of third the whole drive home, and some of that was on interstate.

All right – this has hooked me big time. Two episodes in and I can barely wait for the next one.
Well directed, scripted, acted. Great action, suspenseful… Geez, all this and Peter Dinklage too. And, so far at least, he is far and away the best thing in a show that’s full of great stuff.

Apparently he’s been a much busier actor than I have been a watcher of his work, because his CV is a mile long. But from those early Alexandre Rockwell films In the Soup and 13 Moons to The Station Agent, I’ve always dug his style. He’s excellent here. The scene in the second episode where – despite having slept in a stable, or passed out there drunk – he slowly tips his hand just enough to show he knows much more than anyone around him – I watched it twice. And well, he’s just a blast in every scene he’s in.

I’m going out on a limb to say that this won’t disappoint me as it goes along. Sean Bean dressed in pelts = always a good bloody time. My only small upset comes from the fact that Roger Allam is not being listed as a regular cast member after having a nice role drawn for him in the first episode. A whole show that consistently features Bean, Dinkalge and Allam would just be too much fun to take.

My favorite thing about Skyline is that aliens with astonishing technology travel lightyears across the stars to eat our brains. That is, unfortunately, the only thing I liked about the movie. But it seems such a carefully-constructed piece of marketing, I get intrigued: the right blend of youthful stars, a certain WB-flavored twenty-something romantic-angst (and a subplot involving Love that carries through–in wonderfully risible fashion–to the film’s final moments), a leeriness about being too gory… pitched right in the 13-23 sweet spot. Sucked royally, but it was exactly what it wanted to be.

How Do You Know, on the other hand, is a fascinatingly inept blunder. There is here a very, very, very familiar romantic triangle with perfectly-cast leads, just enough in the way of subplots to make that trite central arc seem character-driven rather than generically-predestined. And yet the beats and rhythm of every scene are off. There is a first meeting between beleaguered nice-guy businessman-under-fire Paul Rudd and nice-gal serious-athlete-cut-from-the-team Reese Witherspoon that boggled my mind: if I saw the script, hell even if I sat in the editing room with these very takes, I could imagine this being punchy dialogue, coy revelations of character which set the stage for the two to come together . . . but the scene slows to a crawl, long pauses between dialogue, weirdly-intense two-shots, a treacly soundtrack (with a hint of a sad Rufus Wainwright song?) cuing the audience in an entirely different direction. It’s like a Billy Wilder script got directed by Sammy Maudlin.

Okay, it’s not a Billy Wilder script. But there’s something smart in much of the dialogue, and there are strong actors everywhere — what the hell happened here? It’s kind of amazing, because it’s so incompetent, by a guy with a helluva track record of more-than-competent.

for reasons unknown i just watched something called hunter prey on netflix instant play. science fiction. ship crashes on a planet–soldiers have to track and capture alive an escaped alien prisoner. some not so surprising reveals, some ham-fisted war on terror allegory. it’s not too bad, nor is it good. but it was cheap. as per wikipedia it cost $425,000. it doesn’t look so much cheaper than many big budget sci-fi epics though. what on earth do the fuckers spend the money on?

Late in Hereafter, tsunami victim and once-ruthless hot French journalist Marie DeLay reads from her investigation _Hereafter: A Conspiracy of Silence_, some lines about how we have such trouble dealing with death that we come up with foolish accounts that cover up our difficulties really engaging. I almost expected her to look into the camera, turning the film on a dime from its painstaking hours of staking out people’s rather dull pain to a bitter send-up of such hankie-baiting twaddle.

Alas, no. The sad boy gets to cry (finally) and then gets a hug from mom, and the sad man gets to feel a connection with others’ pain (finally) and then the promise of a kiss, and so on. Tidy. Tedious. Twaddle.

Is anyone watching this? It is the new AMC series, an American remake of the wildly popular Danish series. Each episode is one day in a police investigation of a killing, so presumably it will be solved in 12-13 days. I have not seen the Danish original, but apparently this first US season hews pretty faithfully to the original. It is too soon to say how good it is — I am three episodes in — but there are promising signs. It is highly derivative of… well, countless dramas of the recent past. There are elements of Twin Peaks, without the supernatural gloss, and several interesting echoes of the X-Files. It is set in Seattle, and the rain and gloom are a major part of the atmospherics. The lead detective is Mireille Enos, and she bears a striking resemblance to a young, harried Gillian Anderson. You don’t get clues so much as new elements of horror. The cast of potential killers gets longer every episode. But while it tiptoes along the edge of melodrama all the time, there is something that sets this drama above the run-of-the-mill police procedural. The depictions of the family of the slain girl, Rosie Larsen, are especially poignant: that father trying to comfort the remaining children; the mother holding her breath under water in the bath to try to imagine what it was like for her daughter to drown to death; the younger son setting a plate for Rosie by mistake. This may not deliver on the promise, but there is promise.

Sherlock, the reboot which has Holmes texting to taunt Lestrade and Watson recently returned from Afghanistan, is a kick. Episode one (of three) recreates “A Study in Scarlet” with a lot of nice flourishes that an old Holmesteader could enjoy while delighting the complete newbie sitting on the couch next to me, aping the stiff arrogant voice of Benedict Cumberbatch, who nails his portrayal of Holmes. Martin Freeman is another precisely-calibrated choice, reminding of and revising our sense of Watson. We’ll see where it goes, but while I sort of enjoyed Guy Ritchie’s manic boys-will-be-etc. hyperbole, this was a lot better. . .

Mesrine tells the story of the real-life French gangster Jacques Mesrine (pronounced Merine), who was active as a bank robber, kidnapper, gun-runner and occasional radical in the 1960s and 1970s. He was finally gunned down in a deliberate execution by the French police in 1979, an execution that opens the movie before returning to the late 1950s when Mesrine returns to Paris from Algeria. Continue reading Mesrine