At the Movies with General Havoc

[General Havoc]

Well given that Inception came out before I even started this entire escapade, I think I would have to agree that you're a bit too fussy, as I've rated more than half a dozen movies 8 or higher since beginning this. Ignoring the Superhero movies that we obviously don't agree on (if you didn't enjoy X-men First Class, Captain America, Avengers, or Thor, then nothing I say is going to convince you on that account), there's still movies like Real Steel, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Grey, Coriolanus, True Grit, Cabin in the Woods, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Intouchables, The Adjustment Bureau, and yes... even Suckerpunch. Not all of these are Hollywood pictures, nor all American, and given my weird tastes, some of them probably aren't even all that good. But a fair number do meet all three criteria, which indicates to me that Hollywood can indeed produce quality stories when they choose to.

I mean, you're absolutely right that this is art, and people will simply like different things. But... Inception was two years ago. Iron Man four. I know there's a lot of crap out there at any given moment (believe me, I know that all too well), but I think claiming that you've actually enjoyed only two movies in four years points to either not going to see many films (which is perfectly fine), or holding the ones you do see to an impossible standard. Hollywood does produce crap, but not that uniformly.

Honestly though, four separate superhero films have come out in the last two years that I gave the equivalent of four or five star ratings to. Disappointing as this year has been so far, it has nonetheless produced several amazing winners worthy of being listed among the best films of the young decade. Given that, a worthless piece of junk like Spiderman is simply unacceptable. The bar for these sorts of movies is high. There is no excuse, not even that of "Hollywood generally sucks", for a piece of shit like this. And while I have seen (Red Tails) and probably will see (???) "worse" movies this year, I may not see one for a good long while that makes me as angry as this movie did.

Not even Prometheus.

[Josh]

Well, I forgot Casino Royale which was A+++ and all.

For me, it's the story that a movie tells that trumps everything. I mean, there are a few movies that are pretty garbage that I like for whatever reason- Con Air, for example. But the style of storytelling I prefer has passed from Hollywood by and large. These days, development scenes are clipped to a minimum in favor of advancing the action, which leads to movies doing what I call dramatic shorthand- essentially assuming 'Okay, you know what happens here in situations like these.'

Problem being that I want to see the developing scenes. I want to see the characters dealing with something other than explosions and high drama.

Take Scarface, the scene with Tony and Manny at the beach early on. It's slow, no action, no particular tension. It's a straight development scene where you see their ambitions (Manny: get laid, Tony: Take Over The World), and also the seeds of what'll eventually come between them. In a modern production, that'd either be cut, or they'd zip in there with some fancy camera angles to give you the climatic portion of the conversation, resolve the whole thing in under a minute and with a very few sentences. That way they could add a car chase to the scene where the guy totally gets dismembered in the shower.

Me, I like development scenes. I like breaks where we learn about the characters. If you throw an unlikely pair together for big adventures at the start of a movie, I like to have honest-to-god time to see why they work together instead of a knowing look here and a snippet of conversation there. I don't like hyperspeed character development justified by a zippy montage unless the montage fits the nature pacing of things.

Now when it comes to superhero movies, I haven't seen Avengers yet, but basically nothing has impressed me in that field since Iron Man. Captain America came the closest, but as I said they oversped the second half for my tastes. However I didn't feel as though the movie wasted my time, it just let me down on what could've been up there with Iron Man.

The modern argument from the production standpoint would probably be that the modern audience doesn't have the patience for the slow development pace of the classics, that a movie like Scarface or The Godfather or whatever wouldn't be a smash hit in the modern day. But hell, Hollywood's been cultivating an ever-shortening attention span for over a decade now.

So what it amounts to is that I'm probably just a bit old-fashioned in my tastes, but that's not really a problem because it's not like there aren't a gazillion old movies for me to watch. You've probably watched more new movies in the past year than I've watched in the past five, but so long as we're all entertained it's all cool.

[General Havoc]

Me, I like development scenes. I like breaks where we learn about the characters. If you throw an unlikely pair together for big adventures at the start of a movie, I like to have honest-to-god time to see why they work together instead of a knowing look here and a snippet of conversation there.

I had to quote this one out because that exact thing happens at several points in Avengers (and believe me, I was real happy to see it), particularly one scene I'm thinking of about halfway through the movie. I really really suggest giving that one a shot, even if our tastes in superhero films are clearly not the same.

That said, I'm a huge fan of classic film too (though my preferences run a little bit later than yours). And I really do think that there's stuff nowadays that can stand alongside the movies of yesteryear. I've seen quite a few of them over the course of this escapade. Obviously there's all sorts of crap, but then classic movies are really just the top X% of films of their era, who continue to be seen long after the rest have been justly forgotten. After all, the same year Scarface came out also gave us Jaws 3D, Mister Mom, Staying Alive, and Superman III, all four of which (somehow) grossed more that year than Scarface did.

I've never really bought the notion that Hollywood sucks now and previously did not (or caters only to people with no attention-span now, or people with no taste now, or whatever). I mean, I get where such notions come from, especially when coming out of a disaster like this (or Prometheus) was. But the concept of Hollywood having no soul and having fallen from the age of glory when movies were grand is too universal across the decades to accept as a feature of today. I heard the same in the 90s because action movies were too cheesy, as it was said in the 80s because they were too violent, and in the 70s because they were too stylized. All three objections have an element of truth. But there's simply always junk out there, and also always just movies that you (or I) am not gonna like because the style does not appeal

There's a lot of dross to filter through to find the awesome films, and I can certainly see why one would not want to bother, believe me. After seeing a piece of shit like Spider-man (hell, after paying for it) there's a part of me that wants to watch only guaranteed classics too. And it's also true that film styles change, even within genres, sometimes leaving one's taste behind. Few movies today, even legitimately great ones, have the slow, occasionally lugubrious pacing of Godfather or especially Scarface, though there are definitely some more modern ones (AKA the last 20 years or so) I could cite that imitate it, such as Pulp Fiction, The Departed, Unforgiven, or Heat. Similarly, while I would not call the Avengers a classic-style movie (at all), if that style is more up your alley, one of the more recent films I'd strongly recommend is the American version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (I haven't seen the Swedish one), as well as another Swedish adaptation from a couple years ago, Let Me In. I can't guarantee you'll like either of them of course, but they did remind me more of a classical pacing and characterization structure, so I'd rate the odds higher, certainly than many others I've seen.

I don't assume everyone's gonna agree with my views on these films (I'm the one guy in all creation who liked Suckerpunch, for God's sake), but I do hope that you'll be able to get a sense from them of if they're up your alley or not. Generally though, I really don't think tastes have degenerated all that much. After all, the Twi-tards of today are only following in the footsteps of the Blue Lagoon fanatics of yesteryear. And while we have Prometheus as our example of a great director losing his mind, our parents had Heaven's Gate.

After all, every new film is another chance for something truly special. It's also a chance for something utterly rank, debased, or stupid. But that's the lottery.

[Josh]

Oh, I don't think Hollywood suddenly lost the ability to make good movies. I think that in the nineties they came to the realization that the international market trumped the domestic market financially. Making movies that generate the best splash in the subtitle market involves a different dynamic- dialogue doesn't count as much because nobody expects subtitles to come across cleanly anyway, and the driver in foreign sales is American special effects wizardry.

It's soulless in the sense that an industry is a soulless entity that pursues maximum return for minimal investment. It's not something I rant and rave about in terms of cosmic betrayal or anything, it's just that the style really has passed me by. I do find certain conventions offensive such as the use of the dramatic shorthand in lieu of character development because to me that's just shitty, lazy storytelling, but overall I just go on about my thing.

Also, Heat is the greatest movie ever made.

(In my opinion.)

Thanks for the recommendation. I've had a couple of other people tell me to check it out, and I will when time and opportunity coincide.

[Stofsk]

Also, Heat is the greatest movie ever made.

Heat is p. boss. Don't know if it's the GREATEST movie ever made, but it's probably Mann's greatest.

[Josh]

Also, Heat is the greatest movie ever made.

Heat is p. boss. Don't know if it's the GREATEST movie ever made, but it's probably Mann's greatest.

Shameless hyperbole on my part.

[Stofsk]

I gotta say, having watched Amazing Spider-man yesterday afternoon, i don't share Havoc's hatred for it. I don't think it was a good film mind you, but I didn't think it was a terrible one either. It seemed pretty average to me, and I guess underwhelming may be another good descriptor.

I don't really like the Sam Raimi films though, so that could be the main reason why. For example I really liked how Peter had mechanical webshooters. The Raimi films, which reputedly were about the 'classic' Spider-man mythos, failed to capture a key character trait that Peter Parker is a fucking genius. I also liked how Peter was shown to do research and shit in preparing to face the Lizard. And while I have issues with Andrew Garfield's performance, I think it's streets ahead of Tobey Maguire's performance in the first two films (I haven't seen the third), where he looked like he was phoning it in.

Some criticisms I want to level against it though: I don't know why but they kept unmasking Spidey/Peter to people. I thought the kid putting the mask on was the only sensible time this happened, since it followed the dinner scene where Capt Leary was talking about how he puts on a badge and uniform where Spidey puts on a mask (i.e. that he is nothing more than some kind of vigilante with questionable motives) but every other time it just seemed I dunno, pointless? Like when he's unmasked to Capt Leary, and the guy lets him go - Sudden Change of Heart Syndrome? Or the time when Lizard unmasks Peter (but he already knew Peter was Spider-man, because he idiotically had his name on his camera). I liked how the origin story took into account Peter's parents, which is something none of the Raimi films ever went into. But I was hoping for more. I think this film's plot was very uh, all over the place - not sure how best to put that into words. You know, the prologue is about Peter's parents and everything, and then it goes into the traditional origin story, and then it goes into the Lizard thing which just felt weak. It's like the movie didn't know what kind of story it wanted to tell.

I didn't hate the film but it didn't blow me away or anything. It didn't make me feel 'WHOA THIS IS AWESOME'. And I think a Spider-man film should have that.

[frigidmagi]

The Raimi films didn't talk about Peter's parents for a simple reason. There's nothing to say. To this day there is no real explanation to where they went to. The common belief is they are dead, which frankly is the most likely. The Ultimate storyline touched on his parents with them being involved somehow with shield and Nick Fury, but the jury is still out as to whether that'll be accepted as the main story (Ultimate Nick Fury and Ultimate Peter Parker have a much closer relationship then the main line).

So with the comics tending to keep a stoic silence on the issue of his parents... Well what's the damn movie suppose to say. Although sooner or later someone is gonna have to say something. Frankly, I would enjoyed an explanation to his parents alot more then breaking apart his marriage, but's that's another rant.

[General Havoc]

I have to admit, having put some distance between myself and Spiderman, I think I might have been a little too harsh to it. Don't get me wrong, it is a bad film, but it hasn't matured in my mind to the point of the bilious hate I eventually developed for Prometheus, and I think giving it a lower score than Ridley Scott's disaster of a movie was perhaps a mistake. I was so annoyed by the movie when I left it that I walked right home and tore it apart, but to be perfectly honest, the movie simply isn't that bad. I stand by the criticisms I made about the various characters, in that Peter Parker is a whiny git when he's not being a manic-mood-swinging lunatic in the same scene, but that said, the actor isn't... awful. There are a couple scenes with him I did sort of like, especially his confrontation with the car thief, and the montages of him learning to be Spiderman were reasonably well done. Denis Leary is actually quite good in this movie, as is Martin Sheen and Sally Field, and while they're all secondary characters, that does mean there's more to like here than Prometheus had. And while Emma Stone has nothing whatsoever to do in this movie, she's not terrible with the material given. It's just hard to get past the fact that there was no point to her character.

There are several sequences in this movie that made my teeth ache with the forced, saccharine nature of them, particularly the "citizens rally to help Spiderman" scene. The Lizard was one of the worst comic movie villains I've ever seen, and yes, I remember Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze from Schumacher's Batman. The CGI was awful, the plot meandering and stupid, the movie as a whole shockingly devoid of amazement, wonder, and imagination. The subject of Peter's parents was entirely moot as the question was brought up and then unceremoniously dropped, with no resolution or even progress towards it, save I assume as some kind of vague gesticulation towards a sequel (as with Prometheus, there is a difference between sequel bait and wasting my fucking time). This was a bad film, but perhaps not quite as bad as I originally scored it. Revising it up to a 3 or 3.5 would probably be appropriate.

[Josh]

The Raimi films didn't talk about Peter's parents for a simple reason. There's nothing to say. To this day there is no real explanation to where they went to. The common belief is they are dead, which frankly is the most likely. The Ultimate storyline touched on his parents with them being involved somehow with shield and Nick Fury, but the jury is still out as to whether that'll be accepted as the main story (Ultimate Nick Fury and Ultimate Peter Parker have a much closer relationship then the main line).

So with the comics tending to keep a stoic silence on the issue of his parents... Well what's the damn movie suppose to say. Although sooner or later someone is gonna have to say something. Frankly, I would enjoyed an explanation to his parents alot more then breaking apart his marriage, but's that's another rant.

Hickman's SHIELD teamed up the elder Richards and Stark, and I could've swore they were supposed to get the Parker family into it too. I'd actually be glad if they didn't, though because I could handle Nathaniel and Howard teaming up, but it's way too easy to get ridiculous with the metaplot with stuff like that.

[frigidmagi]

The funny thing is Nathaniel was brought in to take over parts of Reed's background. When the FF first came out, it was canon that Reed Richards served in the OSS in WWII. Imagine trying to work that today.

[Josh]

The funny thing is Nathaniel was brought in to take over parts of Reed's background. When the FF first came out, it was canon that Reed Richards served in the OSS in WWII. Imagine trying to work that today.

Kind of like retconning Stark to Afghanistan instead of Vietnam. They can keep Captain America in WWII by just sliding up his revival date, Fury is plot-immortal, and the Punisher has been through so much mystical stuff that they can keep Vietnam in his history. Punisher Max even real-time aged him.

But I digress. Where's the next movie, Havoc?

[frigidmagi]

*cough* They've actually replaced Nick with his black bastard son... Also named Nick Fury... Whose best buddy in shield is named Agent Coulson

[Josh]

*cough* They've actually replaced Nick with his black bastard son... Also named Nick Fury... Whose best buddy in shield is named Agent Coulson

...tell me he's not blatantly Samuel L. like in Ultimate.

Man, I go away for six months and whaaaaat?

Also, how many kids does Fury have?

*does some math*

Probably a lot, now that I think about it.

[Stofsk]

But I digress. Where's the next movie, Havoc?

If he's like me, he's hanging out for The Dark Knight Rises. :)

[LadyTevar]

*cough* They've actually replaced Nick with his black bastard son... Also named Nick Fury... Whose best buddy in shield is named Agent Coulson

...tell me he's not blatantly Samuel L. like in Ultimate.

Man, I go away for six months and whaaaaat?

Also, how many kids does Fury have?

*does some math*

Probably a lot, now that I think about it.

Yes, you've been WAAAY out of touch if you don't know Samuel L. Jackson plays Nick Fury.

[Josh]

Oh, I know he's playing Nick in the movies, but I was asking if they modeled the 'new' Nick in the 616 line on Samuel like they did in Ultimates.

Samuel L. as Nick is one of my favorite casting moves. He doesn't have the physicality that comes with the comic character, but he definitely has the aura and attitude.

[General Havoc]

But I digress. Where's the next movie, Havoc?

Ask and ye shall receive...

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Alternate Title: The Magical World of Global Warming

One sentence synopsis: A young girl and her father deal with hurricanes, forced evictions, and man-eating aurochs in their strange Louisiana community.


Things Havoc liked: So... there's this little girl.

Her name is Quvenzhané Wallis. She is currently nine years old. When she was five, a couple of filmmakers named Benh Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar picked her to star in an independent film adaptation of Alibar's one-act play about a girl and her father living in what I take to be the Mississippi delta. She looks between six and seven or so at time of filming, though I'm a terrible judge of these things, and frankly, she's the best actor in the movie. She plays Hushpuppy, a dynamo of stubborn wilfulness, living in a strange community called the "Bathtub" on the ocean side of an immense levy with her father and a gaggle of fellow lunatics, adult and child alike. Fearless (and serious) to the point of self-destructiveness, Wallis delivers an incredibly good (and at times surprisingly restrained) performance, never veering at all into cutseyness. She talks to animals and her absent mother, stares down gigantic carnivorous beasts, and talks back to her drunk, half-mad father, not out of precocity but from that self-evident consistent-yet-alien worldview that small children are able to conjure forth. She imagines the world to behave naturally in a given way, and thus for her it does. When she lights her trailer on fire and hides from the flames inside a cardboard box, we understand immediately her thought process, all from her actions and expression. She also evidences the terrible, biting cruelty that children can unleash when frustrated or angered, at one point telling her father, whom she loves and who loves her, that when he dies she will go to his grave and eat birthday cake upon it.

And speaking of her father (played by Dwight Henry), Wink is one of the weirder father-figures I've ever seen in a film. Terminally ill with some unspecified cancer-like disease, constantly drunk and sometimes even physically violent, Wink is nevertheless neither a villain nor a pitiable figure to be "redeemed" by Wallis. He seems to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation, (at one point exploding over the proper method of shelling a crab), and yet because his daughter is both equally energized and totally unafraid of him, the result is all over the map. They fight, throwing mutual tantrums and competing to see who can make more of a mess. They argue, occasionally bitterly and painfully, as Wink attempts despite himself to do what he thinks is best for his daughter, who steadfastly refuses to have anything done for her (except of course when she doesn't). He tells her stories and shows her how to catch a fish with bare hands, even as hurricanes blow and levies explode. And yet despite everything, the sum total of their interactions feels more real than almost any other film I can conjure to mind. Hushpuppy seems to take her father's 'oddities' as simply another piece in a world that, to her, is entirely consistent, just as she does that of her crazy teacher, crazy neighbors, or the crazy things that happen over the course of the film.


Things Havoc disliked: And what crazy things these are. This is a film in which global warming touches off the thawing out of antarctic Aurochs, who become carnivorous and stampede towards Louisiana (?) for a confrontation with our heroes. Believe it or not, that is a minor subplot of everything that's going on.

Ultimately though, that's really the problem. This movie has no "plot", so to speak, but is simply, to quote Roger Ebert, a series of events that happen. When the hurricane comes and floods the Bathtub, there is an elaborate sequence involving an alligator carcass, bottles of gasoline, explosives, a detonator, and power boats that culminates in Hushpuppy blowing a hole through a levy to drain the Bathtub. Yet once she does this, the movie seemingly abandons the whole thing in favor of another Terrence Malik-inspired mediation on the transitory nature of life, or something similar. There are occasional hints back to the fact that busting open the levy probably led to X and Y, further down the line, but no real sense to collect all of this together into a story. In choosing this mechanism, the filmmakers are probably trying to capture the world through the eyes of a particularly clever six-year-old, but it results in a lot of questions by the audience going unanswered.

For instance, the movie posits the return of the Aurochs, here presented as gigantic boars wearing mammoth hide who are apparently carnivorous and the size of buses. Leaving aside the question of how they get from Antarctica to Louisiana, the base fact is that Aurochs were not pigs but cows. Yes, the title character has never seen an Auroch (or for that matter a cow) and therefore probably imagines them in whatever form she's familiar with, I get that. But this is sort of like presenting a flying bear as a dragon and expecting the audience to infer who is making the proper mistake. If any creature would do, why borrow the Auroch (a European animal) for a story set in Louisiana? Do folk-tales in the Bayou typically revolve around creatures that never lived in this hemisphere?

The above may sound like a nitpick (though given the amount of time the movie spends building up the Aurochs, it's not), but it leads to the main issue. A movie like this, which glosses over a more structured plot in favor of transporting us into the mindset of a small child, can only work if the adult part of our brain does not constantly barge in with obvious questions about what the hell is going on. And given the goings on of this film, that's exactly what was constantly happening to me, particularly when the movie was concentrating on its favorite theme of contrasting the joyous life of the denizens of the Bathtub with the sterile, artificial life of the rest of us. I couldn't help but sit there wondering where this small (though scrupulously racially diverse) community of subsistence fishers and scavengers got the fireworks, gasoline, dynamite, and ammunition with which they appeared to be plentifully supplied. How exactly was it that the security guards at the evacuation hospital that these denizens are sent to seem to vanish whenever the plot does not wish them to be there. Where exactly did the rest of the children in the Bathtub come from, and what were all of them doing when Hushpuppy decided to swim off to the floating whorehouse in search of her mother (yes, it's that sort of film). I understand that the theme of the movie is that civilization is evil and poor people are pure, but surely the government would take exception to a bunch of armed lunatics abducting orphaned children from a hospital and taking them back to a disaster zone?


Final Thoughts: I know, I know, I'm not supposed to ask those questions, not in a film like this, which is more or less about the relationship between Hushpuppy and her father, but I couldn't help it. The movie, which had an excellent thing going with those two characters, continuously jumped around, gesturing wildly at topics as varied as global warming, the inhumanity of modern medicine, and giant carnivorous pigs, only coming back to the central core of the story whenever it felt like it. There's only so much digression I can tolerate as a moviegoer before I start to ask uncomfortable questions about what the hell is going on, especially when the film itself invites these questions by bringing up the topics.

I took a chance on this movie because it had, and I'm not kidding about this, the most positive reviews I'd ever seen. Of the major critics that reviewed this film on Metacritic, fully half of them gave it 4/4 or 5/5 star perfect reviews, praising it in immoderate terms and calling for awards and Oscar statuettes to be heaped upon it. I try not to inundate myself with reviews before seeing a film, but with indie films it's sometimes the only way to spot a potential winner amidst the dross. And while I didn't hate this movie at all, I simply do not understand what all these people think they saw. The core of this film is built around an excellent, and perhaps even moving dynamic. But try as they might, the filmmakers were simply unable to disguise the fact that this story, like many children's stories, just doesn't make sense in the cold, unfeeling light of day.

Final Score: 6/10

[Dark Silver]

what....what the hell is that?!

-stares at Havoc-

I've never even HEARD of this movie..now I'm going to have to see it. Damn it.

Do folk-tales in the Bayou typically revolve around creatures that never lived in this hemisphere?

No, our tales have nothing to do with animales who don't live in our necks of the Swamp, much less in other hemispheres. Or even Quarter Spheres (North-Western Hemisphere thanks). We create our own monsters, the Rougahrou, the Fifali, etc.

[Josh]

Okay, my suspension of disbelief dies with giant pigs actually surviving a trip through Arkansas.

Which is a damn shame because the cajuns would make a much tastier job of it than that weaksauce shit that Arkies call barbecue.

[General Havoc]

Brave

Alternate Title: Paging Doctor Phil...

One sentence synopsis: A Scottish princess tries to escape marriage and the control of her mother.


Things Havoc liked: We consistently expect greatness from Pixar. We consistently expect greatness because they consistently provide it. Wall-E, Up, the Incredibles, Finding Nemo, the goddamned Toy Story series (My alternate title for Toy Story 3 would have been "You will weep like a baby"), year after year, Pixar has given us some of the finest if not the finest animated stories I for one have ever seen. Walking into a Pixar film is therefore, to me, almost like watching a High Wire act performed with no net. The expectations are so high that they will not tolerate the slightest slip.

Brave is a Pixar film, and as a Pixar film, some things simply need to be dispensed with. The animation is, of course, breathtakingly beautiful, caricatured, yes, but significantly more realistic than most of the rest of Pixar's body of work. Long gone are the days when the Incredibles (which looked good if not great) represented the cutting edge of Pixar's human animation, and the detailing on these characters (particularly their hair) is photo-quality in all conditions. People are dirty, blood-smeared, or soaking wet, but the animation keeps pace all without drawing attention to itself. Models are far more detailed than even Pixar tends to make them, and the design is such that we can easily tell the difference in the mental state of a non-talking bear from shot to shot with only slight alterations to the eyes and jowls. The settings are gorgeous, vibrant, and distinctive from all previous Pixar works, giving us a taste of stylized Scotland that one could easily lose one's eye in and picture as real. The cinematography is classic Pixar, with a liberated camera that unerringly finds the perfect angle to illustrate the tapestry before us, and even some touches of false-reality added in such as faded middlegrounds and camera angle tricks that one generally wouldn't see in an animated movie. For the three remaining people in the world who imagined that Pixar might produce a badly-made film, you may all set your fears to rest.

Voice acting, as is standard for Pixar films, is spot on. The main character, Princess Merida, is ably voiced by native Scott Kelly MacDonald (of Gosford Park and No Country for Old Men), while her mother, Queen Elinor, receives the voice of Emma Thompson. Thompson, in particular, does a fantastic job with what is arguably the second main character, to the point where, though I've heard her voice a thousand times, and she makes no effort to disguise it here (beyond a soft Scottish accent), I absolutely did not recognize her voice, as it seemed to be a perfectly natural part of the character on screen. The rest of the voice cast is filled with actors I invariably enjoy such as Billy Connolly, Craig Ferguson, Kevin McKidd, and Robbie Coltraine. As with Thompson, I did not recognize a single one of them (save for Connolly, whom I knew about going in) until after the film, a testament to how well animated characters and voices were matched throughout the film. Finally, like all Pixar movies, Brave is wickedly funny, especially in key parts, with high-speed visual gags that fly in one after the next, some aimed at kids, some at older kids, and some at adults.

But what elevates Pixar films above the standard animated fare is not their visuals or voice-casting or even humor, but the sincerity, sophistication, and poignancy of the stories they tell. This time, Pixar made a very conscious decision to try a female main character (their first), and has brought us a story that revolves primarily around Princess Merida and her mother. There's nothing tremendously new about the material. Merida is a free-spirited teenager (in an age before that term was invented), who resents the control her mother has over her life, and the rules to which she, as a Princess, is expected to adhere. We've seen this stuff before. The "Princess who wants more" trope goes back, in animation, at least to the Little Mermaid if not long before. But the film quite cleverly knows that we've seen it before, compressing what for a Disney flick would be an entire film (Princess exerts her independence, confronts the men who would take her life over, and wins out through skill and daring) into the first act of this movie, and then turning to the question of what happens next. In doing so, it focuses the movie on two important elements not normally seen in this sort of film. One is the question of what happens after the bold declaration of independence. "Competing for your own hand" in marriage is all well and good, but the movie points out that politics and war are involved in betrothals, and that casually throwing these things aside can lead to copious bloodshed, shattered alliances, and civil war. The other (stronger) element is the core relationship between Merida and her mother, and what their different opinions on responsibility and decorum actually mean. This is not a case of the wicked (or overbearing and out-of-touch) parent unfairly suppressing her daughter out of jealousy, stupidity, or stubbornness. Both characters are presented sympathetically, and the rifts that rip them apart are given real weight.


Things Havoc disliked: Or rather they would be given real weight if the behavior of Merida was not so appalling.

Okay, yes, Merida is a teenager, and teenagers, by and large, do act thoughtlessly and selfishly. Wealth, privilege, and loving parents have no effect on this fact of life, and I've definitely seen teenage girls act even more horribly than this. That said, some of this character's actions approach sociopathy, and that's where this movie begins to lose us.

I've got to be somewhat coy here. I was not expecting to see some of the things in this movie that I wound up seeing, particularly some of the actions that Merida takes when trying to change her destiny and evade betrothal to a group of men she does not wish to marry. I accept that forced marriage is something one would wish to fight against. I also accept that in a moment of stupidity, anger, or desperation, Merida might do something as galactically foolish as she does in this film. What I don't accept is the flippancy with which she deals with the consequences. Teenagers may talk a good game about hating their parents who don't understand them, but most of them would be upset at the prospect of having poisoned their own mother (by accident or otherwise) or generally placed their parents in jeopardy of death or equally horrible fates. Merida does try to deal with the mess she makes, but we do not sense the panic or fear or even a particular tone of urgency in her efforts to repair the truly terrible things she's done, at least not for a good long while. Given the lengths to which Elinor, wrong-headed though she may be, goes to try and connect with or help her daughter, and the truly awful danger she winds up in, the lack of concern for the consequences of her actions displayed by Merida completely destroys the balancing act that Pixar was trying to produce between the two characters, at least for much of the film.

Now to be fair, yes, Media does eventually come to appreciate the jaw-dropping carelessness of her own actions, as well as the life-shattering consequences they might have. And yes, when she does so, the resulting scenes are both moving and tender, as one might expect from Pixar. But by that point we've spent half the film in the company of a girl who seems either oblivious to the point of stupidity or uncaring to the point of psychosis. In consequence, the scenes in which Elinor softens towards Merida's perspective (you did not seriously expect this was a movie about an irreparable family rift with no solutions, did you?) come across as flat and forced. I do see what they're going for, but if nothing else, the lesson of the entire journey would seem (to me at least) that Merida's mother was right all along, if only because Merida is so unforgivably thoughtless and her mother so infinitely patient and protective. There's simply no counterbalancing lesson to push things in the direction of Merida's being right, for the simple fact that the arguments against her are too damning. As a result, the ultimate solution that the movie does come to feels both forced and rushed, as characters spontaneously agree to things I did not believe they would agree to, or express opinions that the movie has not earned.


Final Thoughts: Maybe it sounds like I'm nitpicking, or at least taking one thing and harping only on it, but this issue is not a small one insofar as the film is concerned. Pixar movies are held to such a high standard because the interaction of the characters is so real (and raw) that despite their being robots, fish, children's toys, or grumpy old men, we identify so strongly with the emotions of the film that our reactions are almost written for us. This only works if the characters, idiosyncratic as they are, make sense to us within their particular contexts, and this movie simply lost me for a good long part of it. Indeed, part of the problem is that Queen Elinor is so well crafted that the dissonance of her daughter's actions makes the film seem almost uncomfortable at times, at least for me.

Pixar is a great movie studio, and even when they make mistakes, the movies they produce are still of excellent quality. That said, I have to admit that I was avoiding this film for several weeks before I went to see it, as the concept seemed forced ("Look! We can have strong, independent female characters!") and rather pedestrian for an animation studio that had, until now, eschewed Magic Princess stories entirely. To my surprise, those issues that I expected to run into did not materialize. Yet to my even greater surprise, other, much more problematic issues surfaced in their place. As a result, Brave is ultimately a good film, maybe even a very good film. But another Pixar masterpiece it simply is not.

Final Score: 6.5/10

[Stofsk]

Haovc, have you seen TDKR yet? When I saw your post, I thought maybe it would be a review of it.

[General Havoc]

The damn thing doesn't come out until Friday over here, and I'm gone all weekend. I shall have to catch it early next week, whereupon I shall, as is customary, explain my opinion of its qualities at tedious length.

[General Havoc]

The Dark Knight Rises

Alternate Title: The Batman Movie we Deserve

One sentence synopsis: Bruce Wayne must confront his own demons and a pack of revolutionary terrorists led by Bane.


Things Havoc liked: Every generation gets the Batman it's looking for. In the 60s we got a cheesy goofball foiling the ludicrous deeds of plastic villains. In the 80s it was the Dark Knight, watching over a corrupt city nearly as mad as he was while battling anything and everything in his path. In the 90s, we got a stylized Batman of haunting, neo-gothic surreality, one which ultimately collapsed under its own weight of artifice. Today we live in a world of international terrorism, violent civil upheaval, economic uncertainty, and all-pervasive fear of the future. And here is the Batman movie we have been seeking.

What use, in a film like this, to recite names of actors and characters and say what everyone has already said? This is Bale's third turn as Bruce Wayne/Batman, and he has finally grown into the role in a way I did not think he ever would, diving down into the nadir of his own soul and clawing his way back out through methods even Batman films did not prepare me for. The cost of becoming Batman has been a constant theme within these movies, but never has it been more severe than now, to the point that neither his body nor his mind nor even Alfred's eternal vigilance for Bruce Wayne's soul can stand them any longer. And yet reality is still present, waiting to be dealt with in the form of another one of Batman's never-ending rogues' gallery.

Bane is played by Tom Hardy, a choice I could not understand when first I heard it, bulked up like a side of frozen beef and wearing a Hannibal Lechter mask that turns his voice into a strange, synthesized British drone that reminded me of Deckard Cane more than anything else. Yet if Heath Ledger's Joker was a primal spirit of Chaos, Bane seems to be that of Death-the-Leveler, incarnated from a 15th-century cult text and set forth on Gotham not merely to kill, but to flatten society from the top down before he does so. He never raises his voice, never bows to an agenda beyond nihilism and the revelation of all earthly concerns as vanity and hypocrisy. His plan is buttressed by a horde of fanatical suicide-killers, loyal only to the notion of the fire that he will start, and the upheaval that will follow in his wake. He does not scream and he does not deceive, save in that he consciously permits the belief in hope before stamping it out as a tool of policy. Hardy's performance is hidden behind the embodiment of such a character (we cannot see his face, and his voice might as well be computer generated), but he sells the role perfectly, and I could not, by the end of it, picture another in his place.

Nor is he the only one I was dubious about who redeemed himself. Anne Hathaway, who while pretty, has previously starred in romantic comedy and princess fantasy films that I abhor, turns in here the best Catwoman performance I've ever seen, and I remember Michelle Pfeiffer perfectly well, thank you. In keeping with the tone of the film, Catwoman here is a cat burglar, athletic and supremely skilled, but no more, and we meet her when she is already at the peak of her prowess, effortlessly robbing Bruce Wayne himself at the very beginning of the film, and thereafter taking perfectly serviceable care of both herself and others on into the film. Her character teases any knowing audience with hints from the comics, but never veers into caricature, perfectly embodying everything Catwoman should be in a Batman film. On the other side we have Joseph Gordon-Levitt as John Blake, a young Gotham cop who deduces Batman's identity quite early on and finds himself thrust into an increasingly major role in opposing the madness of Bane. Levitt, despite his good turn in Inception, has always annoyed the hell out of me, mostly because he has a bad habit of picking shit movies to appear in. After this performance, I have to admit, I'm beginning to see why he's become so popular. Blake dodges every rookie cop stereotype I can think of and several others that I just invented, on-route to giving us a dedicated, driven cop who wants to do right by his city and his badge, all without overacting or histrionics. When he is forced to shoot two assailants in a construction yard, he visibly upset at what he's just done , and when his former idol is revealed to be flawed, he explains why he is disappointed, but in both cases, returns thereafter to his job, if only because the stakes are too high for anything else. I promised I wouldn't turn this review into my usual "list of actors I liked", so I'll just sum up by saying that Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Marion Cotillard, and Michael Caine are all as awesome in this movie as they were (with Cotillard's obvious exception) in the last one, and every one of them brings precisely the right notes to their performance.

Nolan's Batman films have always been masterpieces of style and tone, and this film is no exception. Everything that previously was here has returned, and been dialed up to reflect the even greater stakes of this film. Hans Zimmer's score, already a brooding orchestral masterpiece has been ratcheted up into a full blown, almost Wagnerian overture to the epic themes being displayed here. The city of Gotham, which seemed a post-industrial wasteland in the first film, and a glass-and-steel arena for the Joker and Batman to do battle in the second, is now a crumbling Detroit-like city on the brink of Armageddon, all mystique stripped away in favor of atavistic gutpunches. The cinematography is expert as always, symbolizing and framing Batman's fall and desperate strides towards redemption without ever becoming overbearing. When at length the movie shows us Batman standing before his foe, in broad daylight, on marble steps, we know exactly what is being told to us and why, and yet it never feels pushed into our face.

And what a journey this film is. Among comic book characters, Batman has always had a reputation for darkness, and Nolan has clearly done his homework in that regard. The entire second half of the film (spoiler alert) is an extended foray into urban hell, as Bane's conquest (yes, conquest) of Gotham city enables him to spin fortune's wheel at will and turn the low against the high (and anyone else he wishes to exterminate). We see wealthy parts of the city being looted and burnt, families dragged from their homes and shot by enraged have-nots, or the violent thugs that Bane recruits from prisons. Cops are hunted through the streets, their bodies hung from the suspension cables of bridges, and show trials presided over by madmen sentence the previously-powerful to be hurled into frozen rivers to drown. As a vision of the most apocalyptic fantasies of urban upheaval, this movie will do quite nicely, and while I'm not one of those lunatics who thinks Nolan is trying to impugn the Occupy Wall Street movement (or the Arab Spring), he unhesitatingly borrows much of their imagery to give these scenes a greater impact on the audience. The sheer audacity of the bleakness in this film, where Batman is broken and cast down, and his city, blanketed in snow, is given over to the rule of psychopathic suicide-terrorists for months on end, is almost stunning. There are many reasons to hate this film, but lack of daring is not among them. Like it or not, Nolan sought to present, in this movie, something that nobody would ever forget. I certainly won't.


Things Havoc disliked: I confess, I did not even think it was possible for a movie to simultaneously be too long and rushed.

165 minutes this movie runs, and I'll be damned if it doesn't feel it. No good movie is too long of course, but while I wasn't exactly bored at this one, I could feel the weight of time as I sat through it and realized that no, the movie still wasn't approaching something resembling an ending. What's strange is that despite the immense runtime, this movie feels like a rush job, as every one of the (at a guess) six-or-so main characters, half of them new to this film alone, must be given ample time to establish their characters and go on the journey prepared for them. The result, predictably, is that certain inconvenient things like "facts" get papered over. Despite a promising start in which Bruce Wayne is forced to acknowledge the raw physical damage that a decade spent as Batman does to a person's body, the movie quickly loses all sense of what human beings are and are not capable of. Back surgery is performed by means of punches, and the power of will to overcome mere physical limitations is touted to a point where even a Batman movie cannot sustain it. Furthermore, I know this is a Batman movie, and that the previous films involved such concepts as weaponized fear gas, microwave bombs, sub-dermal high explosive, and personal-scale radar that can track an entire building, but this film's supertech just runs off the rails. We are treated to levitating armored gunships, fusion reactors-turned-thermonuclear weapons, entire fleets of batmobiles equipped with electromagnetic cannon and Gatling guns. It gets to the point where not only are we being asked to swallow an awful lot of future-tech shenanigans, but it begins to take the focus off of the characters themselves, leaving their actual confrontations somewhat overshadowed by the clash of robots and hardware.

There are also some significant structural problems with this film. The principle of the inescapable pit-prison is cool and all, but poses some unfortunate logistical and physical issues that I had a hard time getting around (someone I was with asked if they had electricity or not). Left unexplained is how many characters seem to get from point A to points B, C, D, or E, a matter of some interest when the points are on separate continents and the characters in question are crippled, hunted, and broke. Nobody explains how a quarantine tight enough to seal thousands of police underground and prevent a single escape from a megalopolis in five months can be evaded when it becomes necessary for someone to break into the city, nor how the army of trained killers failed to notice a fully functional gunship poised on the roof of a building during those aforementioned five months. The logistics of supplying a city of twelve million severed from all contact with the world save for relief trucks is perhaps best not thought about. There are also many scenes wherein literal armies of heavily-armed men discharge machine guns at one another without effect, often eschewing their guns altogether in favor of fisticuffs and melee combat. These sorts of scenes always stick out to me if only because of how ubiquitous they are in lesser action films, and to see them in this one is disappointing, even if they're obviously done for effect.


Final Thoughts: I'm torn on this movie.

Writing this review, I found myself able to recount good and bad points, but not to sum up, as I discovered that I could make a case for giving this film a 9, and also a case for giving it a 4. Both cases could be defended. And yet to split the difference and give it a 6-7 could not. In an age when most movies play it safe in every respect, one can object to Christopher Nolan's final entry in the Batman trilogy, but one cannot accuse it of being safe. Indeed it's one of the most audacious movies I've ever seen, dispensing with the dreaded "third-act collapse" so common to movie trilogies (X-men, Spiderman, Godfather, Matrix) by virtue of turning the intensity dial up to 11, then ripping the dial off and punting it into the river. Nolan here seems to have made a conscious choice that, whatever he did, he would not make a soft landing for his trilogy, and that if the expectations on this film were so impossibly high that they could never be met, there was nothing to be lost from attempting to shoot the moon. So ultimately, I have to look at the film in all its glory and excess, all its grit and pain, all its triumph and flawed stupidity, and ask myself, simply, did it work?

And you know what? Yeah. It did.

It may not appeal to everyone. I can list, by name, at least a dozen people I know who will hate it. But the sheer scale of this film, the triumphant highs and the (far more numerous) cavernous lows to which our heroes are plunged, all of that coupled with a stylistic design that emphasized the epic, almost operatic sweep of what was being shown to us, succeeded ultimately in burying all of the flaws and issues that one might have brought up. And a film that does that much whichalso contains superb performances and very good (if occasionally too-spot-on) writing that this one did, I really can't complain. I would rather see a film that showed me something spectacular (in the literal sense of the word) with flaws than a film that showed me the same damn thing I've seen a thousand times before. And while this movie had flaws, some of them quite serious, the three-hour epic tale of the fall and redemption of Bruce Wayne was a grand enough setting to overcome those flaws. I did not leave this film in a fit of fanboyistic glee, as I did for The Avengers, but rather in stunned silence, my mind struggling to grapple with everything I had just been shown. As the weight and complexity of it all has percolated within me, I am left with the strong sense that what I saw was a movie of weight and yes, even gravitas, scarcely to be equaled in this age of Battleship and Bay-formers. A movie this bold could only be a catastrophe on the level of Heaven's Gate, or a masterpiece of the level of Lawrence of Arabia. With very few reservations, I choose to call it the latter.

This is not the Batman movie I expected. It may not even be the Batman movie I wanted. But it is the Batman movie we all deserved.

And sometimes that's the best thing of all.

Final Score: 9/10

[General Havoc]

To Rome With Love

Alternate Title: The Sack of Rome, Part 2

One sentence synopsis: A number of Italians and Americans have strange experiences in the Eternal City.


Things Havoc liked: Rome is one of my favorite cities in the world. I love the history of Rome, the atmosphere of Rome, the food of Rome, the art of Rome, the ambiance of Rome, I love everything about Rome (at least at a remove). And given that Woody Allen has recently decided that his life's goal is to chronicle all the great cities of Europe in film (Match Point, Vicky Christina Barcelona, Midnight in Paris), I was glad to hear that he'd gotten around to Rome. So what if the plot was an artificial cobbling together of a number of unrelated vignettes? So what if it's all a transparent excuse to get a bunch of A-list actors together and film a lighthearted romantic farce in the Eternal City? Midnight in Paris had no greater excuse for existing, and was wonderful. I entered this movie hopeful, expecting a lighthearted love letter to a city I also admire, as directed and written by one of the most acclaimed American filmmakers of this or any age.


Things Havoc disliked: Suffice to say, that is not what I received.

Woody Allen is an acquired taste that some people never acquire. His nebbish personality and stilted, stream-of-consciousness dialogue style are hard to take for an extended period of time, and there are some who simply dislike it, though I never counted myself one. Yes, his style is somewhat repetitive, but I've always rather enjoyed his offerings, even when they're not great cinema, and I thought it rather unfair to object to his usual in-character personality, especially when he's often portrayed precisely as the stammering, whining idiot that he seems to be.

Well goddamn, I sure get it now.

To Rome with Love is structured into a series of unrelated vignettes, chronicling the misadventures of a series of American and Italian tourists (and Roman natives) within the Eternal City. The best that can be said for this structure is that we aren't forced to put up with any particular set of fantastically annoying characters for too long, but as the alternative is only another set of equally annoying ones, that's perhaps not saying much. Worst of the bunch (by far) is Woody himself, playing a retired opera director who arrives in Rome to meet his daughter's fiance. Bereft of the superb timing and oddball detachment that previously made his characters bearable, Woody here plays the sort of character who in a better movie would be shot and thrown in the Tiber to drown. A particular scene midway through the film, where he simply refuses to shut up about some show he wants to put together with his son-in-law's father is so teeth-grinding and awkward that I was literally counting the seconds before the film finally, mercifully cut away (17). Had it gone to 20, I might have set the screen on fire.

But bad as Woody is, the real tragedy is what he has done to all the other actors in this movie. One sequence involves Jesse Eisenberg and Ellen Page as two young students who fall in love in Rome, while Alec Baldwin plays a sort of Jiminy-Cricket-like adviser, warning Eisenberg against the pitfalls of his budding romance. All three of these people are excellent actors whom I enjoy watching, and all three of them are godawful in this movie, primarily because the dialogue they are given is so wooden and on-the-nose that Lawrence Olivier could not have performed it credibly. This is the sort of film wherein a character, wishing to express how they are falling in love with someone in an unexpected and even unwelcome manner, will express this by turning to someone else and saying, out loud, "I am falling in love with someone in an unexpected and even unwelcome manner". Eisenberg is forced to narrate his own feelings at such nauseating length that he winds up sounding like a complete prat, while Page is grotesquely miscast as a "sexpot" who recites a list of cliched "free-spirited" backstory points with all the verisimilitude of a drunk at a party bragging about his 'game'. I loved Page in Juno and Inception, but this performance is so bad I'm not sure I can even blame Allen for it. And none of this is helped by Alec Baldwin floating through the movie and pointing out, explicitly, how stupid every line Page recites is.

The other two vignettes are in Italian, which normally would serve to dampen the awkwardness of the dialogue (subtitles have that effect), but here does not, simply because the plots are so stupid that there's no salvaging them. Roberto Benigni's story involves him being spontaneously treated as a celebrity, a premise which begins well enough, but ends with Benigni acting like an spastic idiot and learning a stupid saccharine lesson about the nature of fame. The other story, the only one even vaguely tolerable, stars Penelope Cruz as a prostitute mistaken for the new wife of a nervous man from rural Italy. I say 'vaguely' tolerable because of the movie's insistence on over-explaining every single joke in the movie, causing the entire movie to grind to a halt every time Allen checks his watch and decides that it's probably time for someone to be "funny" again.

And yet, reciting story by story what's wrong with this film doesn't tell the tale, as the fundamental problems with this film are so elemental that it's almost shocking. Five or six times throughout the film, characters stop and remark to one another things like "Isn't this a great place we're standing in, in full view of the Spanish Steps?" all without showing us the Spanish Steps in question. Every single vignette is intended to be viewed (I think) as farce, yet the movie's total inability to tell a joke without weighting it down means the farce is never allowed to take off. We see things like a man singing opera while standing in a portable shower (don't ask), but as the movie has no faith in our ability to perceive humor, we then are treated to the equivalent of ten minutes of characters telling each other about the fact that there's a man in a portable shower singing opera, belaboring the point until it's been mutilated past any point of humor. This happens for every single joke in the film.


Final Thoughts: To Rome With Love is one of those movies that you leave in a daze, stunned by the sheer scale of the ineptitude you have just witnessed. I have seen bad movies before, even bad movies from otherwise talented filmmakers, but never a catastrophe so baffling as this one. Given that Woody Allen made the borderline-amazing Midnight in Paris only last year, a movie which was effectively a clone of this one (neurotic American goes to European city for crazy vignettes with local color), I have absolutely no explanation for what could possibly have happened here. I thought originally to claim that Allen had somehow been reduced to ripping himself off, but I find now that even that explanation doesn't suffice. This movie plays like a parody of a Woody Allen film, a parody lacking entirely in wit, substance, charm, or even basic filmmaking skill. How Woody Allen, one of the most revered American filmmakers of the last fifty years, contrived to put something this terrible together and pass it off as a real movie is entirely beyond me, but this film was so bad that it caused my mother to swear off Woody Allen forever. I find it hard to blame her.

Ultimately, I'm left with the response I received from another woman who saw this film at the same time we did, and whose opinion I solicited as we were all making our way out of the theater. "This movie," she said, "was the worst piece of shit I have ever seen."


Final Score: 2/10