Category: (by verdict)

Super

James Gunn’s version of the superheroes-are-really-pathetic-losers film didn’t, on paper, seem to cry out for my attention. People said it was a lot more Travis Bickle than Kick-Ass, which was less deconstructive than delirious about the silliness of certain genre set-ups. And while most of its cast made my eyebrows go up (Andre Royo! Michael Rooker! Nathan Fillion! Kevin Bacon as the baddie? Ellen Page as a lunatic sidekick?) I was a little nervous about star Rainn Wilson. It is hard to displace Dwight Schrute’s high cheekbones and fake hard smile. But Super, while hitting a lot of familiar notes, also hits them with a wrench, repeatedly and confidently bashing expectations, shifting tones.

It manages a level of emotional engagement and complexity that is impressive, largely because of Wilson and Page, who are each excellent at turning from outsized insanity and mayhem to a pervasive sadness; their actions almost seem a continual surprise to themselves, and at heart the film isn’t troping the creaky superhero trope about good and evil (and the thin line, ye innocents!, between the twain); Super (like Taxi Driver) is about alienation and loneliness.

Which makes it sound grim, when it is often quite funny; bloody in a manner that teases a Troma-like eccentricity but also critiques the comic-book indifference to consequence; cautiously hopeful despite its dark worldview. I thought it was really pretty darn good.

Don’t squeeze the chairma…. ah, hell.

That a mysterious spiderlike executive called the Chairman circles around behind the scenes, spinning (and respinning) the Plan, while minions dressed like castaway extras from The Thin Man run around, turning peoples’ phones off like so many stiff-shouldered well-coiffed gremlins, should not put you off this film. Nor should the fact that the Chairman is not, as I had begun to hope, Frank Sinatra. Nor the relentless humbuggery of its metaphysics.*

For 3/4 of its running time, who cares? Continue reading Don’t squeeze the chairma…. ah, hell.

Deathly Hallows Part 2

More than any other movies, including those from the Pixar studio, the Harry Potter series is one I can only really watch through the eyes of my children. The publication span of the books almost exactly mirrors my older son’s time from entering kindergarten to entering high school, with the movies occupying the same period for my younger son (who starts high school in a month). There was a time, right after the Goblet of Fire appeared, when my older son read the four books in a continuous cycle for what seemed like months, to the point that he barely looked at each page before turning it, so well did he know the lines. As a result I have evaluated them as events in my children’s lives, for how satisfied or disappointed they were; my own reaction has been much harder for me to parse. Continue reading Deathly Hallows Part 2

Movies about Labor

I feel sure that there is already a thread on this topic but I can’t find it, even by typing in Matewan. So a short post about Made in Dagenham, mostly to say how much I disliked it. The movie tells the important story of 187 female machinists at the Ford Dagenham plant, who went on strike in 1968 for the principle of equal pay. It is an important story, both because it was path-breaking, and because the strike played some part in the passage of equal pay legislation both in Britain and elsewhere (though not as much as the movie claims).

But this movie is just a shining example of the worst kind of tear-jerking, melodramatic, feel-good crap that passes for social realism these days. Is there some factory buried deep beneath the BBC building in central London that pumps out these miserable excuses for movies about the class struggle? Brassed Off, Full Monty, Billy Elliot… we have got a steady diet of films feeding off a caricature of British class society to give us heart-warming drivel. This is little more than class porn.

Anyway, Made in Dagenham is utterly predicable: strong working class women; their menfolk who first support them, but then prove to be more sexist than interested in class solidarity; cowardly unions; personal tragedies that throw obstacles in the way of the strike; evil American Ford management (the UK Ford management is just incompetent); a ludicrous portrait of Barbara Castle (Labour minister for employment at the time); and most nauseating of all, a side story of the friendship between Rita (Sally Hawkins), the strike leader, and Lisa (Rosmund Pike), the wife of one of the Ford bosses. We even have Lisa visiting Rita in her council house to tell her how proud she is of the struggle for equal rights. Oh, and Bob Hoskins plays an adorable and saintly union steward. At a time when we desperately need good films about labor, when we need to be reminded of the central role the working class has played in constructing a civilized society, we get this instead.

13 Assassins

Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins is set in the middle of the 19th century, as the age of the samurai became unsustainable, and the clash of its values with those of modern politics rendered the former more quaint than noble. Of course, these values were always at least as mythologic as real, but Miike offers a fresh take on the familiar theme of competing notions of duty: service to authority versus honor in the face of the immorality of those in authority. The film opens with a graphic, yet almost bloodless, act of harakiri. The camera lingers on the man’s face, but the sound of the blade tearing at his insides is powerfully gruesome. The story follows a band of samurai who take it upon themselves to assassinate the half-brother of the Shogun, a man whose careless brutality threatens the entire social order. Much of the film is taken up with the recruitment of the assassins, and their own internal moral debates, but the final 35 minutes is a tour de force of swordplay. The 13 take on close to 200 retainers without the noticeable help of CGI. The quiet dignity of the samurai, as they face near certain death in their quest to rid Japan of a madman, is hardly original to the genre, but somehow it works here. I have often found Miike to go way over the top in his films, for my taste at least, but he gets this one just right.

A quick word about the previews on the DVD for 13 Assassins. There was Hobo with a Shotgun, starring Rutger Hauer in the title role, an extraordinary movie called Rubber, about a killer tire (yes, the thing you put on the wheels of your car), and a bizarre and macabre horror flick starring David Hyde Pierce and entitled Perfect Host. Watching these was like being invited to an evening of grindhouse with Quentin Tarantino.

The Trip / Steve Coogan: She Was Only Sixteen

Loved this. I never imagined they’d try to make make a sequel to Tristram Shandy – or rather Coogan/Winterbottom’s film version of it – yet here it is, much more casual, charming and enjoyable.

Rob Brydon – a guy I had completely forgotten about – reprises his role as himself as well, accompanying Coogan on an Observer (newspaper) sponsored trip of fine restaurants around the north of England. Coogan had originally intended to take his American girlfriend on the trip, but they’ve semi split-up, so he asks Brydon, who, while seemingly much less of a louse than Coogan, is incredibly annoying, never more than 2 seconds away from an impersonation of Al Pacino or Anthony Hopkins.

Michael Caine also plays an important part, as anyone who has seen the preview knows.

Continue reading The Trip / Steve Coogan: She Was Only Sixteen

Transfo… ah, the hell with that — The Unjust

I did see the latest Baypalooza, notable only for being somewhat more visually coherent than the last two robots-bashing-robots films. Alas, that’s still only about 3 or 4% overall coherence. It was reasonably entertaining; the 7-year-old with me was itchy for much of the first half and then rapt for the last. This 43-year-old went away wishing he’d cared more.

But tonight I watched Seung-wan Ryoo’s 2010 pitch-black noir The Unjust, a film that’ll eventually show up on Netflix, but probably won’t make it to any theaters near any of us, except maybe Mauer. It’s scripted by Hoon-jung Park, who wrote I Saw the Devil, and if I say this latest film is a wee bit less nihilistic, that’s like saying Steve Jobs has less money then Bill Gates. One of the dark pleasures of this latest is the almost gleeful skipping down a steep slope of people behaving unethically. It starts with a montage of people in public settings watching various newscasters recount the great social anxiety around a series of rape-killings of young children, and then cuts into surveillance footage of a footchase between two police and a suspect. Ryoo zooms in and the film kicks into high gear.

But the serial killer’s a mcguffin, and much of the action is psychological — two protagonists (well….)–a lead detective (the stoic, ever-more-tightly-wound Jeong-min Hwang) and a public prosecutor (the frequently unwound Seung-beom Ryu) are charged with resolving the kid case, while also tussling over dueling dirty developers. The film plays out like Sidney Lumet via Takashi Miike, with a lot of high-wire editing which keeps your pulse high. But what really sold me were the performances — always two or three steps over the top, but carefully modulated; it’s a wicked, entertaining thriller, as good as I’ve seen this year.

Hanna

Joe Wright’s trippy little “action film” seems to have begun as a straightforward high-concept no-brainer — teen girl, raised by father just inside the Arctic circle, is a survivalist wunderkind with a backstory just waiting to be booted up. And, sure enough, a few minutes in dad (Eric Bana, with a German accent) digs up a transponder, asks his daughter if she’s really ready, and she flips the switch to transmit.

Cue their rapid departure, the arrival of secret super-spy teams led by twisty clearly-evil Marissa (Cate Blanchett, with an American-Southern accent), and set things running. There’s an awful lot of running, which even the Chemical Brothers can’t fully justify. Hanna (Saiorse Ronan, playing in a bunch of languages) is Candide via Jason Bourne. There are some great action set-pieces–many pastiches of various of Wright’s influences, but all filmed with joy and wit and aforementioned thumping techno soundtrack, even if it’s a bit long, not terribly tight.

Wright gave the genetic blueprint for this story–all too familiar–some great goosing from Grimms’ fairy tales, and it’s filmed with all kinds of digressive style, too. I loved Ronan, loved the energy of the film, enjoyed its willingness to play by the rules and its equally firm commitment to perverse dislocations. It’s a bit too quilted–there’s a Kubrick fetish I kind of dig, but you can see a lot of the stitching, and the film could probably have used another script revision, or even better a willingness to go a lot more strange. (There’s an aggravating subtext about the evils of the childless witchy Marissa that could go away. Let her be the wolf; Blanchett doesn’t need to be saddled with the tired trope of the barren feminine.) But mostly the film is a sign of filmmakers in love with all kinds of genre films, and it’s definitely worth a look.

Super 8


A spirited, infectiously engrossing homage to Cold War-era creature features, Steven Spielberg, and assorted Amblin Entertainment films from the 1980s, J.J. Abrams’ Super 8 generates a crackerjack narrative kick and could very well be the most entertaining popcorn movie of the summer (though I suspect Cowboys and Aliens will give it a good run for it’s money). Much like the creature at it’s center, Abrams has concocted a plot made up of spare parts, skillfully blending elements from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, * batteries not included, The Goonies, and Jaws into a movie which feels organically whole. There is certainly a kind of self-reflexive glee in the way the pieces all come together, which should amuse anyone who grew up in the seventies and eighties, but Super 8 is more than a nostalgia trip. The actors fully commit to the material (the kids are really great), the camera work is nimble and the editing sharp and propulsive, the special-effects are top-notch, and the big emotional moments are well-earned. Trading Spielberg’s SoCal suburbia for a more lived-in, mid-western, rust-belt milieu, Abrams amps up the suspense with each turn of the plot. Stick around for the credits (which includes, I think, a humorous nod to the recent indie hit Paranormal Activity).