we like to watch

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).

First, three moments. After jumping back and forth between three distinct periods of time (evoked primarily through architectural signifiers), in which the off-screen death of a secondary character reverberates with a transcendental solemnity, Terence Malick steers the viewer way, way, way back in time, delivering a visually stunning, ontological investigation into the beginnings of life on Earth. After much fire, fluid, flora and fauna, we come across two dinosaurs: one in the foreground collapsed, perhaps dying or maybe only sick; the other towering above in the background, eyeing the vulnerable creature with some interest. The latter approaches and suddenly I’m on the lookout for an objective correlative – maybe one openly referencing Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I mean, the guiding principle of the film arrives in voice-over (and has been on a constant media loop since the emergence of what must certainly be the greatest trailer ever made): “There are two ways through life: the way of nature, and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow.” And so I sat and watched, and I waited, and yet . . . Continue reading The Tree of Life

This doesn’t really deserve its own thread, but the Enjoyable Crap thread is already too long. So, Priest is a perfectly serviceable bit of summer silliness. I don’t quite know why Paul Bettany has agreed to become the go-to guy for supernatural/scifi action flicks. He does brooding quite well, and he has honed his American drawl to the point that you can only detect the false notes on the rare occasions that he speaks in whole sentences. This could almost be a sequel to Legion, so light is the patina of religiosity, so deeply is it buried beneath the action. [How can something be both patina and deeply buried? Dunno, sounded good at the time.]

Anyway, Priest imagines an alternative history in which humankind has been at war with vampires since the dawn of time — we get images from the graphic novels of crusading knights battling hordes of vampires — and has reached the point of appearing to eradicate them thanks to the emergence of a group (how large we don’t know) of ninja-like priests. The vampires are imprisoned on reservations, the Church controls the walled cities and the priests have been disbanded. Then lo, rumor of a vampire resurgence appears, the Church denies it, and Paul Bettany defies his vows to head into the wasteland and do battle once more. The action sequences are fun, Maggie Q. is suitably in thrall to the Bettany character, and Karl Urban makes a cool bad guy. When he utters the words, “we have created something the world has never seen: a human-vampire…” you know all will be well, even if Wesley Snipes is not available to help out. The ending explicitly sets up a sequel. Worth a rental.

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.