Short description: Better than Skyline, but no great shakes in the SF department…
Posts Tagged ‘movie reviews’
Howard Waldrop and I Review Battle: Los Angeles
Monday, March 14th, 2011Howard Waldrop’s Review of the Decade of SF/F/H Film Now Up
Friday, February 25th, 2011He took a little different approach than mine, just covering things we reviewed.
Movie Review: Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Tuesday, December 7th, 2010Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Director: Sidney Lumet
Writer: Kelly Masterson
Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, Marisa Tomei, Michael Shannon
This is a “heist gone wrong” film that had gotten lots of great reviews, including from some of my friends. And having seen it, I can see why; it’s extremely well-done. (You would hope the guy who directed Network would remember a thing or two about making movies.) But I’m not quite as enthusiastic about this film as others, mainly because it’s sort of like Fargo, but without the laughs or Marge Gunderson. It’s like being in a car at the top of steep, icy hill that almost immediately starts sliding. And pretty much the entire movie is the characters sliding down that hill, with the only question being exactly how bad the crash will be. And the answer, after nearly two hours of watching them squirm, screw up and go blood simple, is very bad indeed.
The action unfolds in non-linear fashion, following first one character and then another. We see the heist go wrong in the first 10 minutes of the film, but its only later that we understand just how wrong it went, and how the consequences from it just keep getting worse.
The performances are uniformly excellent, while the script is interesting without being engaging; Hoffman’s character is so unlikable, and Hawke’s character such a weak-willed pushover, that we regard them less with sympathy than critical detachment. The direction is solid, but many scenes could have been edited; Lumet likes to watch his characters flail and squirm a bit too much, and this film could have easily been 10-15 minutes shorter and have more impact.
Whether you’ll enjoy watching it depends on how much you like watching that long, agonizing slide down the icy hill. And Marisa Tomei is still quite lovely (and, here, frequently undressed). But many viewers will find it an uncomfortable ride.
Movie Review: Winter’s Bone
Sunday, November 28th, 2010Winter’s Bone
Directed by Debra Granik
Written by Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini (based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell)
Starring Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Dale Dickey, Lauren Sweetser, Shelley Waggener, Ashlee Thompson, Isaiah Stone, Garret Dillahunt, Tate Taylor, Ronnie Hall
It’s interesting that the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of True Grit (which was a very good Charles Portis novel before it was a John Wayne film) is coming out in December, since Winter’s Bone is, in many ways, much the same story. Except instead of tracking down the man who killed her paw with Rooster Cogburn, Ree has to track down her paw Jessup herself, and instead of her paw farming he cooks meth, and instead of justice she needs to bring him back because he put their house up for bond and skipped bail, and instead of 19th century Indian territory, she’s traveling deeper into the 21st century rural Ozarks. But the heroine in each case is just as strong, smart, determined, stubborn, and winning.
The movie has been getting enthusiastic reviews across the country, and deserves them all; it’s astonishingly good. It’s also set very far away indeed from the places and people that Hollywood loves to focus on. I’ve never been through the Ozarks, but I have relatives who live in the sticks, and the details I do recognize (the trampoline, the dogs) make the rest ring true. The poverty on display here is very different from that of the urban poor, but seems just as bleak and grinding. “He’s cooking meth now,” Ree says to a friend. “They all are” she replies.
Jennifer Lawrence’s turn as Ree is at least as good as Ellen Page’s turn as the title role in Juno, and maybe a little bit better. Not only does she have to find her father, but she has to take care of her crazy, helpless mother, her two younger siblings, cook the food, cut the lumber, and do everything else to keep her family scraping by. She needs every bit of that determination when she goes asking her daddy’s no-good friends where he is, going ever deeper into the back country to question ever-more-hostile members of her own extended family, and she knows when she’s being lied to. The deeper she goes, the darker it gets, as it begins to look likely that not only are they going to lose the house, but that her father is probably dead, and the people that killed him might be just as willing to kill her too. And yet she still keeps going, too desperate and stubborn to quit. Or just too strong. If there’s any justice in Hollywood (I knew, foolish idea), Lawrence will be an Oscar nominee.
Another exceptionally strong performance is that of John Hawkes as Jessup’s brother Teardrop, who starts out as a frightening, scuzzy drug abuser, but by the end of the movie is…well, still a frightening, scuzzy drug abuser, but one with a strong sense of family. “To tell the truth, you always scared the hell out of me,” Ree tells him late in the film. “That’s because you’re smart,” he replies. Hawkes has been in about a hundred things, but this is a career-making turn, and another Oscar-worthy performance.
Director Debra Granik (who co-wrote the excellent script, and of who I was completely unaware before this film came out) turns in direction worthy of her main character: strong, direct, and deeply unsentimental. There was much made of Kathryn Bigelow being the first woman to take home the Best Director Oscar for The Hurt Locker. That Oscar was, I think, well-deserved. Winter’s Bone is a better film. I’d be astonished if it wasn’t an Oscar finalist this year, as I’m pretty sure that (sight unseen) there can’t be ten better films out this year.
There may not be one.
Here’s the trailer:
And, since I mentioned it, here’s the trailer for the Coen brother’s True Grit:
Roger Ebert Reviews Monsters
Sunday, November 21st, 2010Just like Howard and I liked it.
If it seems like I’m pimping Monsters a lot, it’s only because I am. It’s the sort of independent film that doesn’t have enough of an ad budget for people to hear about it without word of mouth. So I try to do my part to encourage people to see it if it’s playing in their area. Consider that a recommendation, and remember it for Hugo and Nebula voting.
Howard Waldrop and I Review Skyline
Monday, November 15th, 2010Over at Locus Online. We were not impressed.
Sadly, Skyline 2 is already in development.
As the first post put it in this Fark thread:
Skyline was a bigger budgeted SyFy movie of the week. I am waiting for the sequel, “Skyline vs MegaHorizon”.
Howard and I Rave About Monsters
Monday, November 1st, 2010Read the review, but the short version is that we really liked it. Here’s the short trailer:
The problem with that trailer is that it makers you think the movie is something from the “BOO shock” school of horror films, and it really isn’t.
And here’s an interview with director Gareth Edwards:
If it’s playing anywhere near you I would encourage you to see it.
Zardoz!
Tuesday, September 7th, 2010Zardoz
Directed by: John Boorman
Written by: John Boorman
Starring: Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, Sara Kestelman, John Alderton, Sally Anne Newton, Niall Buggy, and a whole bunch of people who would really prefer you not bring it up.
Sometimes, through no fault of their own, certain science fiction films garner undeserved reputations as horrible failures, despite many sterling qualities.
Zardoz is not one of those films.
Given that John Boorman wrote, produced and directed this fiasco, you have to wonder what the pitch session was like:
Boorman: It has a giant floating stone head!
Studio head: (dead silence)
Boorman: It has an immortal society where everyone bakes bread and no one has sex!
Studio head: (dead silence)
Boorman: There’s a group of Apathetics who just stand around, and another group called the Renegades who are old people who wear formal clothing and have dance parties!
Studio head: (dead silence)
Boorman: Uh, there are also a lot of half-naked hippie chicks standing around.
Studio head: OK, here’s some money.
Today, Zardoz is most remembered (if it’s remembered at all) for Sean Connery running around in a loincloth, as well as the immortal line “The gun is good, the penis is evil.” But in truth that only scratches the surface of a film that’s by turns portentous, bizarre, badly dated and incoherent.
Perhaps the most risible of all the film’s elements are the overall production design, and especially the costumes. The hippie dippy utopia Connery’s character visits looks like it was outfitted in costumes left over after a community college production of Hair or Godspell, complete with billowy peasant halters (the film’s high naked breast count is one of its few non-camp virtues).
Believe it or not, this is one of the most coherent scenes in the movie.
Outside the Utopian bubble, the “outlanders” all wear tattered wool suits that make them look like extras from Oliver!, despite it being some 200 years since the (ill-defined) collapse of civilization. The furnishings inside the bubble are heavy on reflecting mirrors and bead curtains. English manor houses are rendered “futuristic” by attaching plastic bags to them.
The scene where Connery is “sucked” into the vortex is almost as bad as people pulling the ravenous carpet samples up over them in The Creeping Terror.
Every now and then an interesting idea floats to the surface (immortals can’t be killed, but they can be aged as punishment, bringing up shades of the struldbrugs from Gulliver’s Travels), only to sink again beneath another wave of improbable schlock.
There’s plenty of low humor to be had, such as the scene where the women quiz Connery to find out what this thing called “an erection” is, since they’ve done away with sex entirely. (Evidently this Utopia was founded by Andrea Dworkin.) And the film is so bad it’s the perfect target for a viewing party to make fun of. And it’s so oddly wrong-headed that it’s seldom boring.
Indeed, Zardoz is so bad, and so emblematic of a particular type of cinematic excess and incoherence that was only on display in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that it actually gives you a new appreciation for other early 1970s science fiction films. Silent Running and Logan’s Run had their problems but, lord, at least their directors had some idea of how to tell a story.
Boorman’s film is so oblique, so deeply personal and relentlessly anti-commercial, with such a thoroughly unpleasant protagonist (it’s hard to get an exact count on just how many women Connery’s character rapes in the film, since there are some flashbacks repeated, sometimes he starts to rape someone, only to have her resistance turn to sudden ardor, and sometimes he only gets started raping before changing his mind…), that you wonder how it got made in the first place.
We watched this at A.T. Campbell’s video party, and it was so bad we had to follow it up with The Incredibles, which is looking more and more like not just one of the greatest films of the last ten years, but one of the greatest films ever, period. You’ll enjoy watching it for the ninth time much better than you’ll enjoy watching Zardoz once.
Movie Review: Silk
Saturday, August 7th, 2010Movie: Silk
Director: Chao-Bin Su
Writer: Chao-Bin Su
Cast: Chen Chang, Yosuke Eguchi, Kuan-Po Chen, Kar Yan Lam, Barbie Hsu, Bo-lin Chen, Chun-Ning Chang, Fang Wan,
I can honestly say that this is the first horror movie I’ve seen using fractals as the main plot device.
A modestly-budgeted Taiwanese film, Silk follows a team of researchers using a Menger Sponge in an attempt to trap a ghost, ostensibly as part of government-funded anti-gravity research. More specifically, they plan to capture the ghost of a child trapped in a single room in a Taipei tenement, repeating the same actions over and over again. Hashimoto (Yosuke Eguchi) is the crippled leader of the team with an ulterior motive, while Tung (Chen Chang, the desert bandit love interest from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is the “man of action” brought in because of his skills at keen observation and lip-reading. Naturally, as the research progresses, complications ensue. For one thing, the ghost really doesn’t like people looking at him, and he can reach into their chests and stop their hearts…
This harks back to a number of early SF works on scientific methods for capturing ghosts or the soul. The Menger Sponge functions as a sort of universal plot device: because of its ability to store different wavelengths of energy, not only does Hashimoto intend to use it as a ghost storage jar, but they also use special Menger Sponge film to photograph the ghost, Menger Sponge eye-spray to see the ghost, coat the walls of the room to prevent the ghost from escaping, etc. It has just enough of a veneer of plausibility to engage your sense of disbelief, and is certainly more plausible than the magic icky fluid in District 9.
This is a very solid, well-paced ghost story with some intellectual novelty, albeit one that owes a number of stylistic elements to recent Japanese horror movies like Ringu and Ju-On. While modestly budgeted, it doesn’t come across as cheap, and the special effects are simple but effective. (The only place where they fail is in the CGI for an SUV crash, which looks like it could have been rendered in the latest Grand Theft Auto. Even so, it’s still miles above the digital bloodshed in Ugandan action films.) Best of all, they’ve eschewed all the boo-shock scares that infest modern horror films in favor of a certain amount of depth and subtlety.
The DVD contains deleted scenes and outtakes that were properly excised. However, do watch the director’s original ending, which is considerably darker, more effective, and more appropriate than the one in the film.
Here’s a trailer:
Like all fractals, Menger Sponges engender a certain geeky fascination, so I’ve found a couple of videos that show various Menger Sponge animations and recursions.
Here’s a Menger Sponge recursion (which is far less disturbing than The Hasselhoff Recursion):
A level 6 Menger Sponge:
It is not, to my mind, as interesting as a Mandelbox:
Jonah Hex Review Now Up
Monday, June 21st, 2010Over at Locus Online. Howard and I agree that it was better than Wicker Man.
Taking a look at the current movie top ten, the only thing I would say Jonah Hex looks clearly superior to is…Marmaduke.
I can see the poster now: BETTER THAN MARMADUKE AND WICKER MAN! That should pull the crowds in…