Author: Chris

This remake of the 1972 film of the same name is entirely predictable, including its choice of a different ending to the Bronson original. This version stars Jason Statham as Arthur Bishop, the long time assassin from whence the movie gets its name, Ben Foster as the apprentice, Steve, and Donald Sutherland as Steve’s father, who is targeted for assassination early in the movie. The action sequences are generally well choreographed, and there is more emphasis upon making the killings look like accidents. Statham plays this role as he does every role – taciturn, almost wincing at having to engage in conversation, not a trace of humor or twinkle – while Foster buries himself in the role; he always seems on the verge of losing control, a combination of resentfulness and exhilaration as he is initiated into the assassin’s trade. It is a perfectly acceptable action flick. Continue reading The Mechanic (2011)

I don’t have the energy to write a full review, and I’m guessing that this is one movie that will be watched by many on this blog, and they can do it more justice than I. Suffice it to say that the Coen brothers True Grit is completely engrossing. It is the funniest of their films that I can recall seeing. The humor is all in the dialogue.  I have not read the 1968 novel upon which both versions of the film are based, but I gather that the dialogue in the Coens’ version is taken much more directly from the book. It is uncannily like the archaic constructions of Deadwood, without all the “cocksuckers” thrown in. The dialogue makes every exchange a delight, whether it is Mattie’s negotiation with a horse dealer at the start of the movie, or the surprisingly tender discussion between Mattie and the outlaw Lucky Ned near the end.

Jeff Bridges as Rooster Coburn hams it up a little (OK, a lot), but he is generous enough  to yield the limelight to Mattie Ross (played by newcomer Hailee Steinfelt), and she grabs it and quietly dominates every scene she is in. It is a bravura performance.  The other star is the scenery. After so many films built around dark interiors, the Coens, in this film and in No Country for Old Men, have discovered the capacity of the open mountain ranges and forests of the American West to astonish.

This is a case where my expectations were a little too high so that, despite being a very fine film in many ways, I left the theater a little disappointed. The Fighter tells the story, based on real events in the early 1990s, of Micky Ward, an aspiring boxer, as he tries to clamber from obscurity to “be somebody.” As with most boxing movies, it is not so much about boxing as about some sort of personal struggle that stands in the way of success. The personal struggle for Micky, played by Mark Wahlberg, is his family in south Boston, and in particular, his brother, Dickie Eklund (different fathers), played by Christian Bale, and his mother played by Melissa Leo. Both put in extraordinary performances, Bale especially so. The first hour and fifteen minutes traces Micky’s efforts to get out from under Alice and Dicke’s thumbs; both are controlling,  with Alice favoring Dickie (who is hoping for a comeback fight), seeing Micky’s fights as a way to may some money for the family rather than advance his prospects, and Dickie succumbing to his crack addiction. Continue reading The Fighter

Restrepo is a documentary filmed by Sebastian Jungar and Tim Heatherington (there is also an accompanying book) about fifteen months in the life of a platoon of US soldiers deployed to the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. Restrepo is the name of one member of the platoon who is killed early on in the deployment, off-camera. We barely see him before his death but he hovers like a ghost over the rest of the film, remembered in flashbacks by his comrades. In his memory, they name a tiny outpost after Restrepo, and that outpost is credited (not very convincingly) by the commanding officer of the platoon with turning around operations in the valley. At the time of the initial deployment the Korengal Valley was considered the most dangerous part of Afghanistan for US forces, and the sense that we get of these soldiers in an utterly foreign land, with no sense whatsoever of who or what lives over the next hill, is overwhelming. Continue reading Restrepo

First entry in this category is The Next Three Days. Russell Crowe plays a college professor whose wife (played very well by Elizabeth Banks) is accused, convicted and jailed for murder. The movie first goes back three years to the night of the murder and Crowe’s efforts to play by the rules, filing endless appeals, then three months to the time at which he decides to break her out of jail, and finally to the three days of the actual breakout. The movie is conventional in almost every way, but what makes it work — to the limited extent that it does work — are the setbacks. We expect some sort of master genius plan, smoothly-oiled action, and so on. But what is striking is how often Crowe hits a dead end, or appears close to giving up. He has one plan for using a “bump key” and when that plan fails and he narrowly escapes detection, he rushes out of the prison and throws up, so close was he to leaving their young son with both parents in prison. The performances are all quietly impressive, from the multiple scenes in which Banks and Crowe try to behave normally as the appeals fail and a life in jail looks more likely, to the work of Brian Dennehy as Crowe’s father, and a cameo by Liam Neeson as an ex-con was instructs Crowe on prison breaks.

It would have been very easy to make this unwatchable, but it is worth a rental.

Twenty years ago, Sam Flynn’s father, the legendary electronics wizz and video games pioneer, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) disappeared. Sam (Garrett Hedlund) grows up angry and rebellious, and (this will prove fortuitous) very good on a motorcycle, until one day, a mysterious message sends him looking for his father. Sure enough, dad has been trapped in “the grid” all this time, and now father and son have to work together to escape and prevent an army of surprisingly life-like “programs” from crossing over into the real world and taking it over. Along the way, there is a lot of 3D and special effects, only one real equivalent to the electronic racing game that was the centerpiece of the original, but an awful lot of nifty chase scenes. It is all leavened with some unconvincing philosophical discussion of Kevin Flynn’s search for perfection, of the new beings, able to exist in both worlds, that he helped bring into being, and the kind of awkward conversation which passes for father and son bonding. Continue reading Tron: Legacy

Can someone help me out with the difference between tropes and memes, perhaps with examples of each? I’ve been having these interesting conversations with my older son about Internet-based, popular culture memes. A lot of what he describes as memes, I would have called tropes. But I don’t really know what I’m talking about and the usual dictionary definitions are not helping me much. In practice, what do “we” mean, inside the academy and out, by these terms?

Sometimes I despair of my work habits. I woke up yesterday with no teaching responsibilities, planning to write a chunk of a conference paper that is due soon. I got to my office at 7.30am and promptly re-watched Let the Right One In, streamed instantly on Netflix, and then went out to the movieplex to watch the remake, Let Me In. Watching the Swedish original and the American remake back-to-back was a mistake. Firstly because the original is just a much better film. And secondly because the remake is so faithful to the original — the same scenes, the same images (the same playground equipment, the same dripping pipe), the same shot composition, the same dialogue — that it is all but impossible to evaluate it on its own terms. That is a pity because Let Me In more clearly situates itself within the horror genre and so it necessarily jars when compared to the ethereal beauty and simple tenderness of the original. Continue reading Let Me In

The latest entry in the cottage industry of films about aging and tired hit men who just want out of the business, but have to do “one last job” which inevitably becomes more complicated than anticipated is The American, starring George Clooney, and based on the novel “A Very Private Gentleman” by Martin Booth. It is hard to know what to say beyond that every twist and turn of the plot, including its ending, is entirely predictable. The movie is freighted down with portentousness and an affectless performance by Clooney, perhaps in the hope that its pretention to seriousness can overcome, and perhaps compensate for, the obvious lack of originality. The Italian scenery is gorgeous — almost the entire movie takes place in the Abruzzo region — but The American wastes the talent of everyone in it.

By no means a particularly good movie, this British vigilante flick is better than the first ten minutes promises. There really is only one reason to watch it: Michael Caine (like Terrance Stamp, this is someone I will watch in even the worst movies) playing a role a lot closer to that of the cynical spy, Harry Palmer, that he played in the Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin.

The movie is set on a crumbling public housing estate in London (funding came from Britain’s National Lottery) which is portrayed as terrorized by brutal thugs. This is the worst, least realistic part of the setup and it produces some stupid scenes of hopped up “hoodies” randomly beating up and shooting passers’ by. Enter elderly widower, Harry Brown, who had some dark past in the Royal Marines, working in Northern Ireland, but who has tried to put his own violent past behind him. his wife dies and his best friend is killed by the thugs. Brown takes revenge, slowly at first, but with increasing ferocity.

Much of the movie is stupid and overwrought, but Caine does give it moments of real intensity as his face remains impassive but something seems to crumble beneath the surface. He never tries to become Charles Bronson, in fact one scene has him collapsing from his emphysema while pursuing one of the murderers. He simply plays what he is: an elderly man, with some weapons training and a sense of loss, not just of his family and friends but of an earlier, different sort of community. There are a couple of good scenes that were cut and only appear in the special features, including one in which he talks about the character of chess pieces; it has some resonance with the similar scene in the first season of The Wire. Perhaps only worthwhile as an exercise in nostalgia for early Michael Caine, but not a total waste.