At the Movies with General Havoc

[General Havoc]

Farewell my Queen

Alternate Title: Let them eat Boredom!

One sentence synopsis: The French Revolution throws the life of Marie Antoinette and her servants into turmoil.


Things Havoc liked: The French Revolution was one of the turning points in western civilization, bringing down the old order in France and paving the way for a new...

...


Things Havoc disliked: ... you know what? No. I'm sorry. I can't do this. I can't go through this review the way I went through all the others, pointing out positive and negative things and giving the fair and balanced treatment. I just can't do it. This movie is... vapor. It might as well not exist. This film is so goddamn boring that I literally fell asleep during it, woke up ten minutes later, and missed nothing. It is the living stereotype of french films, a movie that is not only about nothing, but seems to have been made in between the shots of a different, better movie which we are not allowed to see.

Okay, a little explanation. The film takes place over four days in the French palace of Versailles, and centers around Marie Antoinette (played by Inglorious Basterds' Diane Kruger) and her "reader" (a servant whose job it was to read to the queen), played by MI4's Léa Seydoux. These four days occur just before, during, and in the aftermath of the famous storming of the Bastille, during which the King was forced to accede to the demands of the French Estates-General, ministers were beheaded, and any nobleman who could manage to do so fled the vicinity of Paris for their country estates, for other countries, or to raise armies in defense of the monarchy. It was a time of ferment and disorder, one of the great turning points in world history.

But forget all that boring crap, we have lesbians!

Yes, this movie discards all that boring riots/mobs/storming the Bastille stuff in favor of a character study of Marie Antoinette and her lesbian lover, the duchess of Polignac. At least I think that's what they're going for. Frankly, the story is so slow and mood-driven that I'm not sure what the point of all this was. We get long, drawn out tracking shots of Marie Antoinette looking longingly at her lover, while she is being watched by her servant, only for the screen to darken and a title crawl to inform us that it is now the next day, so that we can have further scenes of the same sort. There's a framing story, or to be more accurate there's about six framing stories, concerning the reader and her on-again off-again lover, and her friend, and her friend's boyfriend, and the gossip among the servants about the Duke of X or the Baron of Y and some old guy whom the reader knows who appears periodically and explains in a monotone voice that events which would be far more interesting have just happened so that everyone can stare longingly at one another again. It's not badly shot, it's not badly acted, it's not even badly made, it's just SO GODDAMN BORING that you want to claw your eyes out. I seriously wished I'd brought a newspaper.


Final Thoughts: And that's it! That's literally all I can say about this movie. You might suspect in reading this that I must have missed two thirds of the movie, but there's basically nothing else to say here, good or bad. It is a series of scenes of the Queen of France making small talk or staring longingly at things until two hours is up and everyone goes home. The movie is not badly made, the cinematography is very nice, in that it shows off Versailles not as an idyllic paradise but as a dirty, threadbare, pestilent stone prison/castle (accurate to the time), and the costumes and makeup are all quite well done. But one would find more excitement watching a Ken Burns documentary on the same subject, and certainly more to talk about.

The final text crawl reminds us that Marie Antoinette, her husband, and children were all executed by a howling mob, baying for their blood. I would recommend the filmmakers consider that example very closely the next time they purpose to waste several hours of my time with this sort of tripe.

Final Score: 4/10

[Charon]

And yet you give it a 4?

[frigidmagi]

Boredom is cheap.

[General Havoc]

As I said, there's nothing technically wrong with this movie. It's well-shot, well-acted, well-set and well-choreographed. It's just brain-gratingly boring as all hell. It is a non-film, one that slides right off your consciousness and never returns. It is undeserving of a good score, but neither does it merit comparison with disasters like Spiderman or Prometheus or Red Tails or To Rome with Love, movies that offended me on many levels with their incompetence, awkwardness, or bilious evil.

[General Havoc]

Searching for Sugar Man

Alternate Title: The World before Google

One sentence synopsis: A handful of South African music aficionados from the fall of Apartheid go hunting for an obscure American musician whose music inspired them.


Things Havoc liked: On a cold night in Detroit, in the winter of 1973, a struggling young musician known only as Rodriguez got up on stage in a bar somewhere near the waterfront, and performed music from the two albums he had released several years earlier. Unknown save to a handful of music snobs, heckled by the crowd, and beset by money and shyness troubles, Rodriguez played his last set before a sullen, heckling crowd, thanked them politely for their attention, drew a gun, and shot himself dead right there on the stage.

Such, at least, is one version of the story of Rodriguez, as related to us by a series of interviews with various now middle-aged South Africans who in the late 70s and 80s, participated in the exploding music scene in South Africa. Some tell us that Rodriguez died of a drug overdose, some that he burned himself alive on stage, and other lurid, strange tales born from the fact that Rodriguez, completely unknown here in the United States, was, in South Africa, bigger than Elvis, and yet totally mysterious to them. His music, brought by bootleggers into the sealed society that was Apartheid South Africa, became the driving force of a generation of white South African protestors in the same way that Bob Dylan did for American youth in the 60s. One such South African, who still goes by the name of "Sugar" (drawn from one of Rodriguez' songs), explains to us that in his country, Rodriguez' music was as ubiquitous to him as any other artist that could be named, and that walking into a white liberal house in South Africa, one would expect to see a Rodriguez album sitting right next to the Beatles.

Searching for Sugarman is the story of a search by a handful of these South African music fans, as they sought in the early-mid 90s to determine the story behind this mysterious musical phenomenon, unknown in his own country, whose two albums are still considered some of the finest music ever produced by the handful of people who have heard them, and who seemingly vanished without a trace shortly after completing them. In an age before Google, Wikipedia, or the widespread use of the internet, these people began to search, via contacts with record companies, postings on early internet bulletin boards, and slow piecing together of rumor and story, attempting to understand who Rodriguez was, where his music had come from, and why and how he had died. So unknown was Rodriguez domestically that nobody in the United States even knew that he had become popular in South Africa, and attempts to track down anyone who had even met him vanished into tangled webs of royalty payments and corporate ignorance. Yet doggedly these men continued to search, seeking to know more about the musician that had influenced their lives so heavily.

Searching for Sugarman is a documentary record of this search, what it uncovered, and what resulted from the discoveries they made. To tell you what happens in the turns of this story would be to spoil the point of seeing it, but I can tell you that the documentary untangles this story with amazing dexterity. From Detroit to Cape Town to Los Angeles and back to Detroit again we roam, talking to music fans, to friends of Rodriguez from his recording days, to record executives and journalists picking up the story, and on and on. All throughout the story we learn about Rodriguez himself, the son of Mexican immigrants who worked in backbreaking manual labor in the poorest regions of Detroit, and wrote music nobody (here) heard that was deeply infused with political messages and vignettes from working class life.

Rodriguez' music fills the soundtrack of the picture, and it's damn good music. His voice is a cross between Don Maclean and James Taylor's, a smooth, even voice over music that reminds me strongly of Bob Dylan's best work. Like pretty much every American, I had never heard of Rodriguez in my life, but the film spends a great deal of time with experts and record executives, explaining how revolutionary Rodriguez' sound was, and expressing their utter mystification at his failure to break through in the United States. By the end of it, we feel like experts on this obscure man's music, and I would wager that more than a few of us were inspired to go searching for these nigh-unobtainable albums. I certainly was.


Things Havoc disliked: This is a strange tale, and it's told well, with many turns that I could predict and some I could not. I will not spoil any of them here, as learning all the things that the researchers learned is half the fun, but I will talk about a subject that stuck with me. Early on, as the South Africans are looking for Rodriguez, they resolve to follow the money trail of royalty payments from South Africa back to the labels in the United States. There, the documentarians meet with a record producer named Clarence Avant, one of the original men who knew Rodriguez and produced his two albums. They confront Avant with questions concerning where all the money from the records ended up, only for him to become extremely defensive, refusing to answer questions about the money, and accusing the filmmakers of headhunting. Later on, one of Rodriguez' relatives suggests that there was no money, that the albums never made money even in South Africa, because piracy and bootlegging soaked up the sales that might otherwise have been made.

Um... excuse me?

These records were released in 1970 and 1971. Their popularity in South Africa commenced about five years later. While there certainly was bootlegging in the 1970s, this was long before we could blame Napster and Bittorrent for all the ills of the music industry. We see hundreds and thousands of perfectly legitimate copies of these albums, vinal, cassette, and CD, in stores and homes all across South Africa. We speak to record labels in South Africa who explain that they paid extravagant royalties to companies in the United States. The albums were both certified platinum by the South African Recording Industry, an award based solely on the number of actual legal sales. And yet when Avant blusters and Rodriguez' relatives wave their hands at piracy, the documentary appears to simply drop the subject, as though that answers everything. The question is never brought up again, and the strong implication that the filmmakers leave us with is that ungrateful music pirates kept Rodriguez from enjoying the fruits of his labors. I've heard some nonsensical statements on piracy proffered by the RIAA and other such groups, but never with such bald-faced gall as the subject is introduced here.


Final Thoughts: Honestly though, by the end of this film, even I had forgotten about the piracy issue. The story here is not about piracy or record sales or money lost or won or earned or stolen. The story is about a strange and unique man, and the excellent music he produced, labored over, and believed was forgotten about, only for it to unexpectedly become the voice of a generation he never even imagined. It's one of the finest documentaries I've ever seen, carrying us along a story so strange that I would not have believed it if it hadn't been laid out for me in such an effective way. By the time this story finally ends, we're left with a sense of profound wonder that all these things should have happened, and that people like this should have lived. After weeks of dross, boredom, and teeth-grinding annoyance, it's good to meet people who neither waste my time nor fray my temper, but simply wish to tell me a story of music, art, and the bizarre crapshoot that is 'recognition'. And that this story and not those was the true one is enough to make anyone smile.

So do yourself a favor, and give it a listen. And you might just start searching for Sugar Man yourselves.

Final Score: 8.5/10

[LadyTevar]

Actually, I have to wonder if the money had to drop the topic of "where's the money" because of legal issues. The family may well have believed there were no royalties, or there may have been some shenanigans by the record producer. They'd be walking a thin line accusing via film he's been hiding all the royalties the records have earned.

Since these kind of movies NEVER make it to WV (cause there's no audience), what did happen to Sugarman?

[General Havoc]

Actually, I have to wonder if the money had to drop the topic of "where's the money" because of legal issues. The family may well have believed there were no royalties, or there may have been some shenanigans by the record producer. They'd be walking a thin line accusing via film he's been hiding all the royalties the records have earned.

Since these kind of movies NEVER make it to WV (cause there's no audience), what did happen to Sugarman?

Spoiler: show

In brief, he's not dead.

The South Africans searched for literal years, getting run through hoops and in circles by company execs who either knew nothing or claimed to know nothing of Rodriguez and his fate. Until finally, in 1998, one of them set up a primitive website asking for information about Rodriguez from the general public. Somehow, one of Rodriguez' daughters became aware of this website and contacted the South Africans, and told them that her father was alive.

Rodriguez had no idea whatsoever that his music had become popular anywhere at all. After failing to break into the music business, he became a manual laborer and worked in construction and demolitions in Detroit for decades doing backbreaking work for little pay. Now an old man, he was told by the South Africans that his music was, to South Africa, more important than that of Bob Dylan. One of them called him up in his theadbare apartment in the worst parts of Detroit and told him "Here, you are bigger than Elvis." He didn't really believe them until they invited him to come to South Africa...

... where he was met with limousines and crowds of thousands of adoring fans, and found his face on posters plastered along highways and on billboards. He met the South Africans who had conducted this search, one of whom was the former frontman of a major Rodriguez Tribute Band, and asked them to be his backing band at a series of concerts in South Africa. When these concerts were held, he sold out 20 and 30 thousand-man auditoriums with South Africans of all ages in a dozen different cities, singing the music he had believed nobody ever listened to from a quarter century ago.

The end credits inform us that since then, Rodriguez has gone back to South Africa six times on tour, each time selling out stadia and singing to tens of thousands of people. And that at long last, he's about to finish his third album, forty years after his second. The movie also paints Rodriguez as a fascinating, philosophical man, who dislikes money and gives most of his money from the tours away to family, friends, and backers. Perhaps the filmmakers didn't pursue the royalty question because he asked them not to?

Look him up for yourself, if so-inclined

[General Havoc]

The Expendables 2

Alternate Title: Ooo-Rah

One sentence synopsis: A group of elite mercenaries must stop a psychopath from selling plutonium to terrorists.


Things Havoc liked: One has to adjust one's expectations for a movie like this.

I felt that the original Expendables, which came out before I started this project, was a mixed movie in many ways. On one hand, it was a love-letter to the great Action films of the 80s and early 90s, the ludicrous extravaganzas with body counts in the four digits and an extremely loose affiliation with such notions as physics and plausibility that I worshiped as a kid and still look back on fondly today. On the other hand, the movie never really seemed to cut loose, miring itself in a "serious business" plot that was plainly recycled from the same era as these films, and burdened with needless cameos intended clearly to provide trailer shots without giving us what we wanted. The movie wasn't bad, indeed I enjoyed it, but I felt that it did not live up to the potential it held, holding back instead of going for the gold.

Having seen this new movie, I think I'm not the only one who diagnosed it that way.

The Expendables 2 is louder, stupider, bigger, funnier, and significantly more recognizable as the absurd experiment that this entire project was intended to be, and I for one could not be happier. It exceeds the previous film in almost every respect, giving us everything I was left wanting from the previous installment of the film, ditching the dour seriousness of the previous film for a plot so sharply drawn it might as well have been written with sharpee markers. Not content to give us the returning spectacle of Stalone (still incomprehensible), Statham (finally playing the asshole I always thought he should return to), Lungren (who becomes the subject of riotously funny in-jokes for afficionados of the genre), Li (sadly reduced to a cameo role, albeit an extremely badass one), Couture and Crews (in tertiary roles), the movie now also adds in Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis, upgraded from their 90-second cameos in the first movie into full-fledged supporting badasses, Chuck Norris (who gets to play an indescribably badass dude-with-no-name who periodically shows up to add hundreds to the body count), and, of course, the Muscles from Brussels himself, Jean-Claude Van Damme, playing the bad guy with so much scenery-chewing evilness that he manages to make Stalone look restrained and measured. None of the above should be taken as criticism

And yet, the movie's greatest strength is not actually its cast, but the tremendous wealth of knowledge about the making and portraying of action films that is on display in this movie. With a cast this thick and rich, representing practically the entire action movie genre from an entire decade, helmed of course by the Academy-Award-Winning writer and actor Sylvester Stallone (a fact I never tire of bringing up), it should come as no surprise that the movie is designed, shot, and edited together with an expertise that harkens back to the glory days of the action movie. You will find no shaky-cam, no frenetic video-game editing, no Michael Bay-inspired SFX overloads here. You will not see what we used to call "MTV-ification" blighting the shot-lengths of this nigh-operatic spectacle of violence. What you will see is glorious, awesome action sequences, one after the next, their pace flowing and ebbing in an expertly-choreographed rhythm. The vast majority of the effects and stunts are practical effects, a decision I always applaud, giving the film a gritty reality that contrasts nicely with the ludicrous ultraviolence being engaged in. The stuntwork, even from the aging action stars, is top quality, perhaps less athletic than it might have been in these actors' heydays, but no less punishing for it. My favorite sequence of all is probably one of Statham's, involving as it does an orthodox incense censer and throwing knives, but there's frankly not one single action sequence that falls flat.


Things Havoc disliked: Wow, is this movie stupid. It wasn't just the action sequences, the cast, and the choreography that was imported from the great 80s action movies of yore, it was the plot as well, wherein our hero(es) have to go up against what amounts to "The Grand People's Army of Evil". Hundreds (and hundreds) of mercenaries are employed by Jean-Claude Van Damme for the apparent purposes of both doing evil and being slaughtered in enormous numbers. There's a concept from Hong Kong action flicks of "mooks", defined as armed men whose role is to die in large quantities so as to showcase the skills of the hero(es). It's been a long while since I saw this many blatant mooks in a movie.

There are moments in this film where the movie tries to turn away from its working formula of "all action all the time" to more character-driven or (worse-yet) plot-driven elements, and these moments are easily the weakest in the film. Anyone who can explain to me what the role of Liam Hemsworth is in this film or what Jean Claude Van Damme's overall plan was is welcome to enlighten me, because the movie does not see fit to supply either of these facts to us. Meanwhile Yu Nan, the token woman in the group this time, is shunted so unceremoniously to the side that she doesn't even receive billing on the promotional materials (granted, there's a lot of people to get through here, but she doesn't appear at all). I don't object so much that these things are badly handled, that's par for the course. But why include them at all if you're not going to introduce anything interesting via them? As it stands, all these sequences serve as are padded interludes between action scenes.


Final Thoughts: But hell, it's a bit churlish to object to the fact that a movie that sets out to replicate a stupid 80s action movie resembles it in more ways than one. Expendables 2 was a hilarious, ludicrous, awesome film, filled with reverent (and irreverent) nods to an earlier time with movies that were equal parts farce and blood opera. Is it good enough to stand in the company of the classic titans of 80s camp action such as Terminator, Aliens, Hard Boiled, or Die Hard? Probably not. But it's still a damn good and incredibly fun action flick, the likes of which we should be so lucky as to see more of.

Final Score: 7/10

[General Havoc]

Paranorman

Alternate Title: The Sixth Sense 2: Sense Harder

One sentence synopsis: A lonely boy who can talk to ghosts must stop an undead witch from destroying his town.


Things Havoc liked: First of all, shut up. I know this isn't my usual fare, but my sister insisted on seeing this movie and I consented to do so after she insisted to me that all reviews pointed to it being a good film. Of course the last few times that happened resulted in Prometheus and Tron: Legacy... but we won't hold that against her (much).

Claymation films are not exactly my specialty, and invite (for me) flashbacks to The Nightmare Before Christmas and the more forgettable rest of Tim Burton's stop motion oeuvre (including the upcoming Frankenwenie, which I shall endeavor mightily to miss). Paranorman, however, is produced by Laika pictures, a company mercifully unconnected with Tim Burton's burgeoning madness, responsible for the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Coraline, and who chose to employ a convoluted process involving 3-D printers in order to bring this film to life. It certainly paid off. The film is gorgeously done, the animation smooth and crisp, with none of the stiffness that has bedeviled claymation since its inception. Movement, even violent fighting and action scenes, are accomplished effortlessly, blending in so well with the CG-generated elements that I very quickly forgot (save in one or two shots) that the film was anything but another animated film. Designs are stylized just enough to avoid uncanny valleys, but not so much that we don't instantly identify the archetypes being employed.

And speaking of archetypes, for a film that starts out ripping everything possible off from the Sixth Sense, Paranorman quite rapidly shifts gears into some strange combination of The Cabin in the Woods, Evil Dead 2, and The House on Haunted Hill. The core story centers around Norman, a lonely, sensitive kid who sees ghosts and is relentlessly bullied for it by his peers and ostracized by his uncaring family. Rather than devolve into a psychoanalytical tale as Sixth Sense did, however, this movie quickly becomes an adventure flick when Norman is tasked by his lunatic uncle (voiced by John Goodman) with preventing a Salem-era witch from returning from the grave to devour the town, in the course of which he is forced to team up with his fat comic-relief best friend, his angry older teenaged sister, her would-be boyfriend, the brainless jock, and the school bully. And just as we're settling into the familiar five-man-band horror territory (albeit with kids), the movie does another U-turn as Zombies attack the town, angry mobs are formed, and evil witches come to life, until we're in a pastiche of a pastiche and trying to decide what the film will rip off next.

And yet, the material, derivative as it is, is handled well overall, with several touches of self-aware cleverness that I found very well done. One of my favorite sections involves a group of flesh-eating Zombies stumbling into town and being spotted by the populace, only to be savagely beaten, Tom-and-Jerry-style, by the very townsfolk that in another movie would be panicking and being devoured. The assembly of our "heroes" and the process they go through to try and solve this situation is straightforward and makes sense, and the movie wisely sidesteps the almost obligatory scenes where "our heroes are not believed by the unthinking adults" or "nobody recognizes the threat except for the child-hero." Moreover, the voice acting, from various child-stars of Kick-Ass and Let Me In, is evocative and effective, and imbues the characters properly with life.


Things Havoc disliked: That said, for all its self-referential humor and archetype swapping, Paranorman is a kids' movie, and a fairly ham-fisted one at that. The sequence midway through the film where an angry mob of townsfolk prepares to hang or burn Norman as a witch is hopelessly contrived, and the "shaming the mob" speech that gets them to stop had me rolling my eyes. I don't mind basic storytelling, or kids' movies in general, but the standards for both are high, and there's just nothing about this story that elevates it above something seen many times before. The ultimate resolution of the movie, while logically and thematically consistent, is as predictable as a drum beat, and laden with a heavy-handed moral lesson that a better movie would simply have implied. Kids aren't stupid, and can pick up a lot between the lines without needing to resort to this level of by-numbers plotting.

There's also a real lack of focus in this film. Though the movie starts off like a Sixth Sense ripoff before turning to a new direction, the shift is so abrupt that promising concepts established at the beginning of the movie are never followed up upon. An inventive sequence early on in the film shows Norman walking down the street to school, talking and exchanging greetings with dozens of ghosts apparent only to him, each with their own prsonalities and implied stories. Yet once the plot begins moving, Norman scarcely ever sees another ghost save on the rare occasions where the plot requires him to. Similarly, the five-man-band story that seems to be building is dropped unceremoniously midway through the movie as Norman has to learn the necessary lessons to deal with the threat by himself, leaving all the other characters with nothing to do. As a result, the film feels choppy and badly unfocussed, bouncing from idea and style to idea and style without much regard for what has been established before. It's all logically consistent, but not thematically so, resulting in a movie that simply doesn't know what, ultimately, it wants to be about.


Final Thoughts: Paranorman was a film I didn't expect much out of, and by that scale I was pleasantly surprised. It's a fun little movie, cute when it needs to be, hilarious when it needs to be, and biting when it needs to be (and sometimes when it doesn't need to be). I wouldn't call it classic children's cinema, destined to be remembered throughout the ages, but it's a harmless film with a good heart and a good bit of fun to be had in it. And honestly, what more can you reasonably ask for?

Final Score: 6.5/10

[General Havoc]

Robot and Frank

Alternate Title: Desperately Seeking Azimov

One sentence synopsis: An elderly, retired cat burglar plans to commit crimes using his medical assistance robot.


Things Havoc liked: An old man lives alone in the woods of New York. He is losing his memory. His son, unable or unwilling to visit him as often as necessary, decides the time has come to seek professional help, a prospect that the cantankerous old man resents and resists. At first he belittles his new caretaker, chafing against the intrusion in his life, but before too long they begin to bond over the most unlikely of passtimes, ultimately becoming close friends, despite the efforts of the rest of society to separate them. Sound familiar? Sound like a bad Hallmark special? Well that's probably what it would be, save that this movie takes place in the near future, the caretaker is an autonomous servant-robot, of the sort that Japan is presently trying to produce, and the activity that the two bond over is the old man's old profession, jewel theft.

Frank Langella is a masterful actor, and I've loved every single thing I've ever seen him in without exception (stop bringing up Cutthroat Island, damn you!). Here, he plays Frank, a man just beginning the slide downward into Alzheimer's, increasingly forgettful but still capable of planning heists, or remeniscing on his glory days as a cat burglar. Frank is not a loveable old man, but neither is he the cartoonish old bastard designed to either have epiphanies or reveal his children as secular saints. He seems to acknowledge that he was not the greatest father to his children, but that was a long time ago, and he is still on speaking and visiting terms with both of them (James Marsden and Liv Tyler), at least initially. He strikes me as the sort of person whose presence is tolerable only in small doses, which of course leads to the device of the robot.

Designed very much along the lines of existing prototype Japanese service robots, the robot (it has no name) is voiced by Peter Saarsgard's best HAL 9000 impression, though the comparison stops there. Only a robot would be patient enough to put up with Frank for an extended period of time, particularly given that his general philosophy when dealing with something he dislikes is to annoy it to death, something obviously impossible here. The robot is clearly designed with the elderly in mind, and it is its unflagging desire to improve Frank's mental capabilities by giving him a "project" that leads it to agree to lessons in lockpicking and burglary, culminating of course in grand larceny. It is in the crimes, and the aftermath thereof, that the movie finds its strongest chord, alternating between hilarity as Frank enacts convoluted plans to throw off the pursuit that his crimes have engendered, and scenes played for pathos as Frank confronts the fact that the robot, as a machine, may be used as evidence against him (a fact the robot itself brings up). All along, Frank's deteriorating memory renders an increasingly unstable narrator, leading ultimately in directions one might not expect.

And yet, despite the outlandish premise and futuristic robotics, the movie has a versimilitude to it that most films only aspire to. Aside from the robots and a couple of smart-car looking vehicles, the film feels very present-centered, interludes of high technology layered over a familiar world. The family interactions between Frank and his children feel real. His son tries, despite himself to do right by his distant, ex-con father, allowing his frustrations to explode only when the situation properly warrents it. His daughter on the other hand, a crusading social-justice-seeking control freak, clearly means well when she shows up unexpectedly at her father's house and completely takes over his life. Yet at the same time, Frank doesn't hesitate to rope his son unwillingly into his plan to evade the law, nor does his son shy away from hitting back as hard as he can when he does so.


Things Havoc disliked: The central conceit of the movie is that all evidence to the contrary, the robot is not alive, a fact it repeats to us multiple times. All well and good, but the robot is advanced enough to lie to Frank about its feelings in order to get him to agree to a course of action, and to evaluate independantly whether or not Frank should pursue a given criminal operation. At risk of quoting Alan Turing, exactly what is there to distinguish between this robot and a living thing? Self-preservation instincts?

Leaving the metaphysics aside, this movie is all over the map emotionally. Normally that wouldn't be a problem for me, as I like a little drama with my comedy and vice versa. But the pacing of the film is such that very heavy, very sad elements of the film are sandwitched between quasi-farcical numbers wherein Frank absconds with his robot and runs through the woods. Each scene works well independently of the others, but the aggregate sometimes leaves one with mood whiplash, particularly towards the latter half of the film.

Also, in a movie this real, the character of Jake, the ostensible antagonist of the film, is gratingly inappropriate. That Jake is a snooty rich asshole, I can accept. That he morphs overnight into a paranoid revenge-obsessed fanatic and that the police permit him to be such a thing while interfering in their investigations, I cannot accept. Moreover, his character's motivations open doors the movie should not be opening. Knowing what we know by the end of the film, and operating under the assumption that Jake must know these things from the get-go, why does he insist that Frank never return to the library?


Final Thoughts: These are all more or less nitpicks, and are not the reason that the film didn't score higher, really. That comes from a simple lack of ambition on the part of the film. It has a simple story to tell and wishes to tell it without diving deeper into the subjects that it takes on, which is fine I suppose. I do wish the movie had gone more into the nature of the robot, Frank's mentality, or other directions that it seemed to be hinting at, but fundamentally this film is a good story told well, and that's nothing to take for granted.

Final Score: 7/10

[General Havoc]

The Odd Life of Timothy Green

Alternate Title: Plant-Jesus, the Early Years

One sentence synopsis: A childless couple buries their wishes for a child only to find one grown seemingly out of the ground.


Things Havoc liked: I feel that some background may be necessary for this one.

There are occasions on this movie project wherein I find myself facing down a week with nothing to see. Sometimes I make the best of a bad situation, and go see something that really doesn't interest me, and sometimes I call an audible and just pick whatever looks the most interesting. This time however, I literally walk into the theatre and ask the lady at the ticket counter to recommend me something starting within the next half-hour. Her suggestion is a strange movie I'd seen posters for, but knew nothing about, called The Odd Life of Timothy Green.

I step back, take out my smartphone, and began to consult the internet. Reviews are mixed for the movie, but several of the top critics in the country, including those of the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times (the latter of whom is of course the great Roger Ebert), the Hollywood Reporter, the Arizona Republic, and my own local SF Chronicle all praise it in glowing terms. I look over the cast: Ron Livingston, James Rebhorn, Dianne West, David Morse, and Emmet Walsh (whom Roger Ebert once opined has never appeared in a bad film, a trait he shares with Harry Dean Stanton). Good actors, all of them, funny and talented, and worthy of some faith. And then I go inside and sit down, and lo and behold, the very first thing I hear is the voice of Persian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, a name that none of you will recognize until I tell you that she was the voice actress for Admiral Shala'Raan vas Tonbay in the Mass Effect series, and that I would accordingly recognize her voice anywhere. Thus re-assured by a good cast and a good voice actress, I settle down to watch what I hope will be a nice, heartwarming film.


Things Havoc disliked: Ahem...

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYY?!

What the hell? What did I do? What crimes against humanity did I commit so as to karmically deserve this fate, I ask you all? What could I possibly have done to deserve to be lied to by a complete stranger and led into this grotesque, ultra-sacharine heart-stoppingly awful Hallmark-reject of a movie? Was I Hitler in a past life or something? Why has this befallen me?

I didn't ask for much here. I wasn't looking for high drama and poignant, Pixar-class emotionalism. All I wanted was a watchable film, something I could spend two hours beholding and walk away feeling better with myself for having done so. But what I received was, literally and without exaggeration, the single sappiest thing I have ever seen. Worse than the Disney sequels, worse than Toy Story 3, worse than A Dog of Flanders, worse than the goddamn Christmas Shoes. This movie was so bad that I had to take bathroom breaks during parts of it to avoid contracting diabetes from the sheer, nauseating levels of sacharine being force-fed down my throat by means of terrible acting and worse writing.

First things first, I am done with Jennifer Garner. Yes, she's been in the occasional good film, but I cannot stand the high-strung manic mode of acting that she seems to bring to every damn role she takes that isn't Alias. And given that here, she somehow managed to trump Elecrta as both her worst performance and worst film, I feel entirely justified. Her counterpart, Joel Edgerton, has a resume whose highlights include the remake of the Thing, and the Star Wars Prequels. His character, unlike Garner's, is supposed to be reasonable, a laughable claim when he is called upon, early on in the film to hang up on a 911 operator and lie to the police so as to conceal a child, which the movie establishes, he believes at this point to be a runaway.

And speaking of the child, the titular Timothy, played by CJ Adams, has the unenviable quality of being a stand-in for Jesus. The premise of the film is that the parents bury a list of all the qualities their perfect child should have, and the resulting magic produces Timothy, which means, definitionally, that Timothy is a perfect, flawless child derived literally from hopes and dreams. I don't object to a child-character with a good heart, I'm the guy who invented Hornet for Christ's sake, but the movie is written in such a schmaltzy, direct manner that there's just no character to Timothy at all. We are told (and shown) that he has leaves growing out of his legs, and that there is some connection between these leaves and his "role" here on Earth, but nothing further, leaving us to wonder if he is some sort of angel. This wonder lasts precisely twelve seconds before the movie sends us into a diabetic coma and we lose all powers of thought, which given everything, may be a mercy.

There is literally no Hallmark-channel movie-of-the-week cliche that this film does not rob. Timothy's father (Edgerton) works at a pencil factory (har har), run by Ron Livingston (who has come full circle, and now plays Lumberg from Office Space) and which may close. His mother works at the pencil museum for Diane West, who is stern. He is picked on at school by Ron Livingston's kids. His grandfather (Morse) does not respect his father and they are estranged. There is a shy girl with a birthmark at school who is afraid to let it be seen. If you are at all questioning whether Timothy, the little saint, will miraculously resolve all of these issues with the magical power of earnestness and sunshine, then you are the sort of person who should see this movie and revel in its unexpected twists. Everyone else will probably be rolling their eyes the fifteenth time that we cut away to Garner and Edgerton talking about how wonderful Timothy is and how amazing his ability to solve everything makes them feel.

Indepedent of the film's message and style however, the thing is just incompetantly done. Scenes of rain falling are obviously looped and run backwards to pad them out in the hope that nobody will notice. A subplot concerning water rationing is brought up and then dropped unceremoniously at around the 20 minute mark when the film's attention wanders off. Much time is given to some "revolutionary" (there are not enough quotation marks to put around that word) idea for a "new pencil" (same) that Timothy "inspires" (again) with his "wisdom" (kill me), all without ever giving us the slightest idea what the new pencil is, how it works, or what's so revolutionary about it. Finally, the framing story of the movie (the parents telling this story to an adoption agent), while it did give me a chance to think about Mass Effect for a while (the agent is played by Aghdashloo), leads me to wonder why, five minutes into the story, the adoption agent in question did not call security into the room to arrest these two people on suspicion of kidnapping, fraud, and reckless endangerment. Seriously, how did this child materialize out of nowhere and live with these two people for months, attending public schools, hospitals, and soccer camp, without anyone ever asking where he came from?! No birth certificate, no medical records, no adoption papers, he simply appears without warning in these people's lives and nobody, police, school officials, doctors or otherwise, so much as bats an eye!


Final Thoughts: Yes, yes, yes, I know! I know this is all parable and fairy tales and nobody asks these perfectly logical questions because we are living in a land of happiness and rainbows. I get it. I just don't want it. I said this was the sappiest movie I've ever seen and I meant it goddamnit. Warhorse has nothing on this piece of high-fructose-corn-syrup. That said, yes, I appreciate that not every movie has to be ultra-realistic, and I do, generally, prefer that a movie err on the side of happiness and light than on the side of grimdark brooding assholery. But this movie was so bad that it was actually painful to sit through, so bad that I can remember only one scene that generally worked.

Good intentions can only get you so far, ultimately. In the end, you have to present a movie worth watching. And this one just ain't.


Final Score: 2.5/10

[LadyTevar]

Face it, the whole thing was a "Adoption Works!"commercial, and I understand the way it was framed with the parents reminiscing about Timothy just made it worse. Of course, there's the Hallmark Ending as well.

[General Havoc]

Sleepwalk with Me

Alternate Title: Dying is Easy, Comedy is Hard

One sentence synopsis: A struggling stand-up comedian must deal with a decision on whether to marry his long-term girlfriend, as well as a worsening case of sleepwalking.


Things Havoc liked: I'd never heard of Mike Birbiglia before, but judging from his IMDB and Wikipedia pages, that places me in something of a minority. My sister, who had heard of him, recommended that I see this film, based on a one-man Broadway play and a series of stand-up sketches he performed at various times on tour and for National Public Radio, detailing the lengthy process that he went through trying to define his relationship with his long-term girlfriend, break into the stand-up comedian business, and deal with a sleepwalking problem that has grew progressively worse as the tensions with the first two issues increased. To describe it as a 'problem' is perhaps understating the matter. One episode involves Birbiglia diving headfirst through a closed, second-story window in his hotel room, an incident we are repeatedly assured actually happened.

Such assurances come to us because Sleepwalk with me is filmed as a part-movie, part-Video log, with lengthy sequences wherein Birbiglia stares into a camera mounted in his car passenger seat, and explains to us his mindset or additional details concerning what we are about to see or have just seen. It's a narrative trick that used to be far more common in indie cinema, the best example of which is probably 'High Fidelity', John Cusack's greatest movie, made back in 2000. Through it, Birbiglia delivers a bewildering array of flashbacks, flash-forwards, timeskips, and other editing tricks that somehow manage to knit together into a coherent, nominally autobiographical story.

I'm normally suspicious of autobiographies, but I'm prepared to take this one on faith, considering the utter disregard this movie seems to hold its main character in. Birbiglia is portrayed here as an insensitive idiot, not mean necessarily, just clueless to the point of blindness thanks to the competing pressures he either receives or perceives from his parents (played by Carol Kane and the ubiquitous James Rebhorn), his sister, his agent, and of course, his long-time (8-year) girlfriend, played by Lauren Ambrose. We watch him as he drifts through his life, struggling to break into stand up comedy, despite having apparently no talent whatsoever for it. As Birbiglia himself is a famous comedian, with Comedy Central specials, successful Broadway plays, and now a Sundance Festival Award, I must assume that he is only pretending to be an awkward, unfunny comedian struggling to find his voice, a role he is eminently successful at. Indeed, despite the absurd lengths to which both his sleepwalking (drop kicking a clothes hamper and protesting in his sleep that it's a jaguar), and his comedy career (how does anyone continue after bombing on stage like that?) go, the film never once caused me to sit back and cynically question whether things like this had happened. It all felt entirely real...


Things Havoc disliked: ... which is sort of the problem.

Birbiglia is not only the main star of this film, but also wrote and directed it, and here we run into an issue that often afflicts projects this personal. A movie created entirely by one person and based entirely around their life story can fail in a number of ways, one of which is the 'so what' test. Events that have earth-shattering importance when they are happening to you are not necessarily going to translate into interest for a wider audience, unacquainted with the details of your personal circumstance and unconcerned with whether or not you succeed in your goals. That's not to say you can't get up on a screen and tell us your story, any audience should be willing to give a filmmaker the benefit of the doubt. But we need a reason to be interested in what you have to tell us, or else the film risks turning into the celluloid equivalent of that annoying bore who monopolizes the conversation for two hours at the office Christmas party to tell you how he rose above his Lawn Gnome addictions. And while Birbiglia is, I'm sure, a talented comedian who can tell a funny story when asked to, I'm afraid we see very little evidence of that here.

For one thing, there's nothing in the world quite as awkward as bad comedy, and to paraphrase Galvatron, there is an awful lot of bad comedy in this movie. I understand that it's intentional, that comedy is hard and that newly-starting comedians often bomb on stage, but it's still hard to watch a man get up on stage and fail to be funny. In a movie that tried to wring pathos or character out of Birbiglia's failures, this might have worked, but Sleepwalk With Me is Indie to a fault, and too afraid of appearing maudlin to give the main character any catharsis for his issues. Yes, in reality, this is probably how it went, but reality is no excuse for telling a boring story, and eventually the audience is left sitting through yet another unfunny comedy routine, just waiting for it all to end. And while we do get flashes, later on, of the more successful routines that he eventually came up with, the routines are never allowed to build any momentum. A joke (or a scene) draws a laugh from the audience, and then is abandoned, as the movie veers off into another aspect of Birbiglia's strange life. Much attention is paid, for instance, to the fact that Birbiglia begins to achieve success when he draws on his own personal life for his comedy, and his worries about whether his girlfriend will understand him doing so, all without ever paying off the question.

Even when he's not on stage though, Birbiglia's life is not just enough to hold our attention. The will-they-or-won't-they dance that he and his girlfriend do play out like slightly more self-aware sitcom formulas, their veracity notwithstanding, something not helped by the movie pausing every five minutes so that Birbiglia can explain what he was thinking at the time to us. High Fidelity worked so well because Cusack's musings at the camera served as an effective contrast to what he was doing between the monologues, giving us insight into his philosophies, tastes, and intentions of the character. Most of the time, he was not directly discussing what he had just done or was about to do, trusting to us to connect the dots between his oblique references and memories, and his present situation. Birbiglia's monologues consist mostly of him explaining his thoughts to us directly, telling us what should frankly be shown instead. This is not helped by Birbiglia's general manner of speech both in and out of monologue. Stand-up comedy involves a loose, stream-of-consciousness recitation of pre-planned material designed to make it all sound off-the-cuff. Film, a completely different medium than stand-up, does not reward hemming and hawing, and Birbiglia's colorless tone and broken cadence, which never varies between monologue, dialogue, and stand-up routine, lends the whole thing a feeling of contrivance and dispassion. This gives the film (in combination with the subject matter) a very Woody Allen-like feel, save that Birbiglia, try as he might, is simply not the same caliber of filmmaker that Woody Allen is (of course, given Allen's last project, neither is he).


Final Thoughts: This movie isn't horrible, but it never really rises above the level of mediocre. Its artifices and style, which no doubt garnered it all manner of awards from professional film critics, serve either to deaden what life is in this material, or simply try to disguise the lack thereof. There are a few moments where Birbiglia gives himself license to do what I assume he does best, which draw a couple of laughs (a joke involving him and his girlfriend discussing their worst fears is actually really funny), but these fade as quickly as they arise, as though Birbiglia was too afraid of being accused of narcissism to actually let us into his head. Ultimately, Sleepwalk with Me is a leaden, uninteresting enterprise, one that takes a story that is intensely personal and fails to convince the rest of us that it need be anything else.

Final Score: 4.5/10

[General Havoc]

End of Watch

Alternate Title: Knights in Blue

One sentence synopsis: Two cops in South-Central Los Angeles run afoul of Mexican Drug cartels while living their lives outside of work.


Things Havoc liked: I'm just gonna go ahead and say it: I hate Jake Gyllenhaal. I hate him primarily because he starred in Donnie Darko, one of the most overrated movies in cinematic history. He did not help his case when he went on from that to make movies like October Sky and The Day After Tomorrow, alternately a sappy snoozefest derived from the worst dregs of the 1950s and a preachy extremist tale of how Dick Cheney destroyed the world. Even his "good" work, such as Brokeback Mountain or last year's Source Code either went unseen by me, or had their virtues somehow contrive to hide themselves in my presence. As such, I was not exactly eager to go see this movie, headlined as it was by Mr. Gyllenhaal, but my other selection for this week fell through, and I found myself with no other options.

I should have known better. End of Watch was written and directed by David Ayer, writer of such movies as Dark Blue, SWAT, and a movie so good it made me like Ethan Hawke, Training Day. Ayer is a rarity, a Hollywood writer so good with a particular genre that he has managed to typecast himself, but given that we're working within the genre here, that's no problem. And to make this film, Ayer wisely added Michael Pena, formerly of Crash and various TV movies, to serve as Officer Mike Zavala, partner of Officer Brian Taylor (Gyllenhaal) on the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles. In a film with very few missteps, Pena steals the show as one of the most "real" portrayals of a cop I've ever seen on the silver screen. None of the usual things one means by "real" apply here, as Zavala (and Taylor) are neither "gritty" nor "hard boiled" nor "break all the rules" nor "rookies", though they are all of these things at times. Instead they are real people, partners in a Law Enforcement agency that might well exist, just as portrayed. Taylor and Zavala are less like partners and more like brothers, covering one another's backs in a sense that goes beyond professional but never veers into hackneyed cliche. They attend each others' weddings, talk about their lives, their plans, their hopes, joke and fight with one another the way only people of long acquaintance can, cementing over and over again a bond between them that seems absolutely real. In one of the best sequences in the film, Zavala offers Taylor tickets to a Dodgers game, which he turns down, as he and his girlfriend are going to attend the LA Philharmonic instead. "Oh, okay, have fun with your white people shit," says Zavala, entirely without sarcasm.

End of Watch isn't really a narrative film in the sense that we expect. It's not about a series of events that happen in sequence to characters who are changed by the experience. Instead, the movie is simply about two cops, no more, no less, chronicling their lives as peace officers in South Central LA, an area showcased so much in film that merely mentioning it brings all manner of expectations to the forefront. The film is shot Blair-Witch style with a series of cameras mounted on dashboards, jacket pockets, or within lockers, presumably as a film school assignment on the part of one of the cops, permitting us to essentially follow along with them as they go through their days. We see Taylor and Zavala cruising their patrols, serving warrants, performing traffic stops on suspicious vehicles. We see them dealing with other cops from their precinct, dealing with paperwork, we meet their families, attend their weddings and the births of their children, and are just generally allowed to get to know them without the need for an imposed storyline or narrative. Oh the story is there, certainly, involving Mexican drug cartels and the increasingly violent events that the two cops get swept up in, but it's never once pushed to the forefront, nor made to feel like the movie is about anything but the lives of these two police. In the hands of a lesser writer, this might have been boring. Instead it's almost fascinating.


Things Havoc disliked: The gimmick here is that the movie is "found footage" of a sort, compiled from cameras mounted in the cops' car, on their uniforms, etc... Unfortunately, rudimentary thinking causes this conceit to fall apart. Sequences wherein the bad guys (a gang of affiliated gangsters trying to ascend the ranks of the cartel) are filmed planning their crimes torpedo the entire premise instantly, as does any one of the many, many shots wherein someone besides the two cops is plainly holding the camera. This break in the immersion isn't terribly jarring, admittedly, but it leads one to ask why the conceit of a film-making project was necessary in the first place.

There's also a couple of sequences that are just not handled terribly well. The gangster that Pena throws down with early on in the film, thus earning respect for having the balls to handle himself, is a bit too heavy-handed. Surely it takes more for a cop to gain the confidence and admiration of a hard-core two-time felon gangster in South Central LA than said cop fighting him man to man and not bolstering the felon's charges for it? There's also the unfortunate addition of Cody Horn as Davis, the Rookie cop, who while she is not in the film terribly much, has an obviously pre-scripted role in the time-honored tradition of Rookie cops in movies. Again, nothing that would be too jarring, save for the overall high level of verisimilitude in the movie in general.


Final Thoughts: Honestly though, that's about all I can complain about here. End of Watch isn't a game-changer for actor or genre the way Training Day was, but it's nonetheless one of the most complete cop films I've ever seen, and my opinion of the movie, high as it was on exiting, has only increased with time. And while I wouldn't say it has made me a fan of Jake Gyllenhaal, if he keeps on making movies like this one, we might get there some day.

Final Score: 7.5/10

[General Havoc]

Dredd

Alternate Title: LAAAAUUUUGGGGGGHHHHH!

One sentence synopsis: The veteran Judge Dredd and a rookie psychic must fight for their lives against an arcology-wide drug gang.


Things Havoc liked: Ever since appearing in The Lord of the Rings, Karl Urban has apparently made it his personal mission to appear in as many terrible action movies as he possibly can. Oh there's exceptions here and there (his turn as Leonard McCoy in Star Trek was inspired), but I refuse to believe that movies like Doom, Pathfinder, or Priest ever looked good, even on paper. That said, I've always had a soft spot for Urban, as even in the worst of films, he always manages to avoid looking like a complete fool by playing everything as straight and simple as possible, letting others do the hilarious overacting. Given this, his selection for Judge Dredd makes perfect sense. A far cry from the 90s Stalone adaptation, Urban's Dredd is less a character than a presence, a monotone archetype of toughness, perpetually scowling, whispering in a gravelly voice filled with menace. Though I've never read the comics, Urban's Dredd is exactly what I expected the character to embody, a single-minded lawman of simply inhuman dedication. He is not a caricature, nor a monomaniacal ass, there are sequences where he expresses admiration for idealistic views of the law, but Dredd himself is a remorseless, relentless figure, not cynical so much as beyond ideology. Urban plays him as a man who feels no need to bluster over his embodiments of the Law, for he has nothing whatsoever to prove. And given Urban's solid action movie credentials up to this point, the result is exactly as it should be.

This much I expected. What I didn't expect was Olivia Thirlby, an unknown 20-something playing Judge Anderson, a rookie cop with advanced psychic capabilities assigned to Dredd for evaluation. When I heard that this was to be the setup, I damn-near wrote the movie off altogether. If there's one cliche to cop movies that I simply don't need to see again, it's the 'young, fresh-faced rookie who must prove himself to the hardened veteran', particularly when the young rookie is a woman, typically intended to bring the softer side out of our main character. To my abject astonishment however, that's not at all what I received here. Anderson is young, and a rookie, intimidated by Dredd and her surroundings, and yet when the chips are down, she does not come across as the hesitating newbie who must make good, but a confident judge learning very quickly on her feet, bringing her own perspective to the business of law enforcement. A good early sequence establishes her motives for joining the judges, and the rationale given follows her all the way through the terrible ordeal she is made to undergo. Moreover, a sequence midway through the movie, when she is called upon to employ her psychic abilities to interrogate a suspect is damn near inspired, sidestepping all of our expectations for what letting a frightened girl into the mind of a hardened killer will result in, in favor of exploring just how scary a Judge with mental powers should properly be. Thirlby does all this without ever once losing the veneer of a rookie cop, allowing the film to ride the line of viewer expectation from start to finish. I admit to being impressed.

Most of the film takes place in a massive "block" tower, a 200-story skyscraper housing tens of thousands of residents, controlled by a criminal gang that must number in the high hundreds. In addition to provoking comparisons to last year's "The Raid" (more on that later), this location (chosen I assume to keep the costs down) allows the movie to focus on practical, as opposed to CGI effects, a decision I generally welcome. The action is crisp and easy to follow, unladen with modern contrivances such as shakycam, and while there's a fair amount of slo-mo work, it's actually explained in the plot quite well, and used for aesthetic, rather than stupid reasons. The supporting cast, headlined by Wood Harris (of the Wire) is uniformly excellent, giving us a gang of drug-fiends that are entirely believable, and grounding the more absurd stuff we are shown in a realistic setting. Overall, the movie simply works, and comes out to a good, solid action flick.


Things Havoc disliked: Of course, that's not to say that there's no problems at all. One of them is unfortunately the villain, played by Lena Headey. Headey, of Sarah Connor and Game of Thrones fame is entirely wasted in this movie, playing a rote-criminal named Ma Ma who produces and sells drugs. The movie gives her no motives beyond that, despite hints of an interesting back-story, and she is required to play through the film in such a drug-addled stupor that it probably wouldn't matter anyway. I know the focus is supposed to be on Dredd and Anderson, but a villain can often make an action film, and it would have been nice to see some effort in that direction.

Frankly though, the main issue I had with this movie is going to sound a bit churlish. I've always held the position that it's neither fair nor reasonable to criticize a movie for not being a different movie, but in this case, having seen The Raid, a movie that is practically a carbon copy of this one, I find myself unable to separate the two, and unfortunately, Dredd comes out worse in the comparison. The Raid's action, though I stand by my position that it was not quite at the A+ level of some other kung fu blockbusters, was still of very high quality, and Dredd's, workmanlike though it is, just isn't in that same class. The gunfights are too procedural, and the bulky judge costumes prevent the actors (or stuntmen) from performing acrobatic stunts or hand-to-hand combat. I get that Dredd is not a typical action hero, a direct and forceful presence who simply bludgeons his way through any opposition, but the action in this film actually gets repetitive, as it never varies from Dredd shooting people with various types of ammunition while looking stern. It's all done well, but the action is never allowed to build to a transcendent "awesome" moment, instead simply running through scene after scene of shooting the same bad guys in the same fashion.


Final Thoughts: I must admit to being surprised that I liked Dredd at all, and yet while that's always a welcome development, it didn't manage to wow me the way other action films of this or last year did. That said, I did think the movie worked, and the concept and casting deserve a look. Given that the alternative for fans of Judge Dredd is Sylvester Stalone screaming at Armand Assante about the LAAAAAUUUGGGHH, I don't hesitate to suggest that such fans may want to cleanse their cinematic palates here.

After all, there's no Rob Schneider this time.

Final Score: 6.5/10

[Josh]

For me, Ma-Ma being not particularly exception was actually kind of a relief. The standard cliche here is to have a mastermind villain who either A) Has a lifelong blood grudge against the protagonist or B)Has a master anti-Judge plan that they unfurl in stages like a video game.

Instead, we just get a particularly nasty, brutal drug lord who has a scheme to defend her turf. My main problem with the movie was

Spoiler: show

when Dredd and Anderson briefly make their way outside of the jamming, one of them technical sitrep thingies might've been in order instead of 'Hey, we need backup k thx bai!' The entire back half of the movie revolves around Ma-Ma needing to kill Dredd in order to cover her tracks, which would've been entirely lost if he'd just said 'Pursuing suspect Maureen whatever for multiple murder counts, drug dealing oh yeah and she's locked the building out.' That would've also meant the judges sent as backup wouldn't have just politely waited by the door.

However, what I liked about not having Ma-Ma be a criminal mastermind was in that it turned this movie from a unique highlight episode into something almost like another particularly rough day in Dredd's life. I'm not overfamiliar with the comics myself, just read some after the movie. But that definitely seems the tone it goes for- this isn't something out there, it's just another day on the job for him. I liked that.

[Charon]

Having seen this movie and not having to compare it to the Raid like Havoc does (I didn't see that unfortunately) I would say this was a lot of great fun and I would give it an 8/10. I'm sure the Raid is the superior movie, but I can't compare the two. Like Josh, I also rather enjoyed the "just another day in Dredd's job" feel to it rather than making it some epic threat to the whole city. This is your average Bad Day for Dredd.

As a further thought on Dredd, it wasn't as bloody as it should have been. Now allow me to clarify that statement before I get odd stares. It was bloody, it was horribly bloody. But the bullets didn't do the sort of damage that they should have.

Spoiler: show

Most notably when ma-ma pulls out the three fucking mini-guns. Those things were going through people and leaving them relatively intact. In reality those people would have been turned to small chunks of meat.

[Josh]

Truth be told I'm almost ready to go back to Hollywood western 'barely bleeds'. That had the disadvantage of sanitizing violence, but the ever-increasing 'How creatively can we mangle human bodies on screen' is disturbingly voyeuristic to me.

[Charon]

Yes, you have a point, and honestly if that scene had been portrayed accurately it probably would have churned my stomach and I would have been disgusted by the movie, but I was just looking at it from a more realistic approach. The bullets were very clean in this movie.

[General Havoc]

Taken 2

Alternate Title: Liam Neeson Kills Everyone Again

One sentence synopsis: A retired special forces agent is attacked by the families of the men he killed protecting his daughter.


Things Havoc liked: I don't mean to sound critical here, but for the last few years, Liam Neeson has been progressively transitioning from his previous wide range of movie roles to a typecasting of "badass middle-aged father figure who still has it". Though he's one of my favorite actors, thanks to films like Schindler's List, Love Actually, Rob Roy, Les Miserables, and Kingdom of Heaven, I've nonetheless always been conscious that Neeson is the sort of actor who needs a strong, capable director and script in order to bring out his talents. Without such things, Neeson tends to revert to monotone blandness, as examples as diverse as Star Wars Episode 1, the A-Team, and the Haunting can attest to. That said, one of his strengths is his ability to bring a level of quiet, refined subtlety to his better roles, whether they be Oscar Bait or his more recent action extravaganzas. A good example for this would be The Grey, where Neeson elevated the entire tone of the movie out of "Taken with Wolves" and into something truly special. Despite all the dross on his IMDB page, I still like watching Neeson, and I get excited to see him in most movies.

One of the things I liked about the original Taken was that, while the routine that Neeson went through to track his daughter down was demonstrably goofy, the movie at the very least did spend a great deal of time showing him go through it. Even if the particular steps and leaps that he was making in his search for his daughter (particularly the magic CIA buddy with infinite data on everything) were stupid, the movie got across tonally just how difficult and complex the process actually was, which lent credibility to the notion of a father with badass skills chasing his daughter down like a remorseless calculation engine. Taken 2, I'm relieved to report, tries to keep this model going. Easily the best sequence in the film comes roughly a third of the way in, after Neeson and his wife have been kidnapped by bad guys (the trailers spoil this, so I shall too). For about a solid half-hour, the movie puts the brakes on the action in favor of showing Neeson progressively working out how he will escape from this situation, giving us everything from complex memorization routines of the route his car is taking, to a phone conversation with his daughter that culminates in the use of dead reckoning by means of map circles, echolocation by hand grenade, and inferences made based on weather conditions, all so that Neeson can figure out where he is, and use this information to get a weapon and escape. It's far-fetched of course (I'm impressed by how nonchalantly the Istanbul police took random hand grenade explosions), but no more so than the glazed-over handwaving you find in most action films, and the detail to which the film goes works in its favor, lending the scene a patina (if nothing more) of believability.


Things Havoc disliked: I never understood the hoopla over the original Taken. In my mind it was a formulaic, average action flick, elevated slightly by a few above-average scenes. And yet Taken became so iconic (the famous "I will find you" montage attained internet meme status) that I can today cite its title in a pun and be reasonably sure that everyone will understand what I mean. I didn't hate Taken, mind you, it was an all right action flick, but I don't understand what made it so special. And given that, I don't think this movie was made for me.

The premise is decent enough. Neeson, having slaughtered several busloads of people in the first movie through methods that were not entirely ethical (or sane), now faces a large quantity of people who have fairly specific things to say to him about having electrocuted their sons/brothers to death. As a motive to kick the action off, this is a great idea, deconstructing the first movie as a means for beginning the second, but unfortunately, outside of a couple minor scenes, the film never makes anything of this concept. The bad guys are simply another horde of faceless men out to get our determined hero, and the legitimate grievances they have with him are only ever addressed in the most perfunctory manner. The reliably awesome Rade Šerbedžija, brought in here to serve as Neeson's primary antagonist, is tied heavily into this reciprocity concept, and yet because the film drops it so perfunctorily, the result is that Šerbedžija is barely in the film at all.

So what do we get instead? Action scenes. Boring, repetitive, absurdly over-edited action scenes. The director of this film, Olivier Megaton, seems intent on proving my theory that no man who ever changed his name into something sounding supposedly "badass" has ever made a good film. Shot lengths in fight scenes are about three nanoseconds long, alternating between shots of Neeson holding a gun and looking concerned with distance shots of someone with noticeably different hair color performing martial arts. Neeson is 60 years old (though he does look younger), and I don't blame him for being unable to do all his own stunts here. But the least that a director can do is try and make the stunts look reasonably plausible, or at least sew the stunt double work together competently. There's exactly one fight scene, near the end of the film, which while completely contrived, does actually look like the sort of fight two older men with military training might have. Everything else is the invincible hero shooting, beating, and stabbing his way through villains that can't threaten him, all shot in a confused, hyper-frenetic manner that prevents you from seeing what's going on. Occasionally they add a car chase.


Final Thoughts: No, Taken 2 isn't horrible. I've seen far worse action films this year. But there's just nothing about it that's at all 'special', even by the standards of Liam-Neeson-revenge films (a surprisingly large genre). Granted, I didn't think there was anything too special about the first Taken either, but that movie at least had good, competent action with a strong narrative and interesting moral questions. This one seems to have somehow ratcheted the stakes down, like we're watching a direct-to-DVD sequel that got somehow released in cinemas, and none of the promising elements that the first film had have been followed up on.

Go see this movie if you must, but whatever it was you people found in the original Taken, I doubt seriously you're gonna find it here.

Final Score: 4.5/10

[General Havoc]

Argo

Alternate Title: The Best Bad Idea

One sentence synopsis: A CIA exfiltration expert creates a fake Hollywood movie in order to rescue American diplomats during the Iran Hostage Crisis.


Things Havoc liked: Be honest with me. Back in the early 2000s, when you had just finished seeing one of the lengthy series of disastrously terrible Ben Affleck movies that came out around then, movies like Pearl Harbor, Daredevil, or Gigli, did you ever imagine that some ten years later, you would find yourself looking forward to the newest film from critically acclaimed director Ben Affleck? I sure as hell didn't, and yet following films like Gone Baby Gone and The Town, there's simply no two ways about it. Affleck knows what he's doing behind the camera, and directing himself, he has put together a hell of a movie here.

Argo is a story so strange I would not have believed it if my own research had not backed it up. It concerns a fake CIA-financed science fiction movie that was thrown together so as to provide a cover for smuggling a handful of American diplomats out of the home of the Canadian ambassador to Iran. Yet strange as the story is, the movie about it is very down-to-earth. Every step in the process, from the initial escape to the planning, preparation, and execution is dealt with precisely and efficiently, never rushing, but also never slowing down for forced character moments, relying on the characters themselves to come through via the plot. The best of a very strong cast is Alan Alda, an actor whose appeal I've never quite "gotten", who here plays Lester Siegel, a Hollywood film producer approached by the CIA to provide cover for the fake movie. Alda's only in the film for about half an hour, but is absolutely note-perfect as a man who has played around in Hollywood long enough to know exactly how and when to bullshit people and how and when to threaten and bluster to get what he wants. Yet unlike a lot of retrospective "Hollywood on Hollywood" movies (such as Hollywoodland), the film never gets caught up in itself, relegating the Hollywood material to its proper place in the overall plot.

The film is a visible throwback to the 70s, not only in decor, hairstyles (those mustaches), but also in the overall structure. With nearly no action to speak of, the focus is on deliberation and proceedure, an intentional throwback to classic spy thrillers like Day of the Jackal or The Spy who Came in from the Cold. The fact that we know how the mission turned out (at least if we've done any cursory research on the film) does not stop it from being extremely tense, particularly in a heavily atmospheric sequence in a crowded souk where a shopkeeper begins screaming at our heroes in untranslated Farsi over an issue nobody, including the audience, is able to even understand. The cinematography, meanwhile, is superb, showcasing Tehran as a normal, functioning city that has been at least partly taken over by madmen. The normal, everyday functioning elements of the city are juxtaposed with the rampaging 'students' who are apparently free to kill whoever they want, conscript small children for slave labor, and, at will, disrupt entire sections of the city's infrastructure. And yet none of these things feel artificial or ring false. This was, we believe, what it was to live in Tehran in 1979. And it was not an experience to recommend.



Things Havoc disliked: The Iran Hostage crisis is still a contentious issue, to say the least, and the film does try to address in as balanced a manner as it can. Unfortunately, as the film is being produced in Hollywood, that balanced treatment amounts to "following thirty years of unrelieved evil, the Americans finally got what was coming to them."

Am I exaggerating? Yes, massively. But the problem with trying to condense a massively complicated political situation down into 45 seconds of title crawl is that someone is invariably going to wind up looking like a cartoonish villain, and given who and what made this film, one can guess just who that person is. It's a shame that the film does this, because this is one of the only films I can recall in which the CIA are actually portrayed as good guys doing good things. And yet lest this sound like a blip at the beginning of the movie, the film re-enforces the matter with not one but several scenes in which US diplomatic agents in hiding for their very lives, their friends and colleagues being beaten and tortured just down the road for months on end, discuss with one another how the Iranian revolution and its aftermath are the just deserts of the terrible US foreign policy they previously were responsible for enacting. While it's certainly true that there's precious little for the US to brag about in the history of its relations with Iran from circa 1950 onwards, I would submit that this is not a point likely to present itself as reasonable to people driving through streets filled with the hanged bodies of secularists while armed maniacs pursue them with assault rifles. It reads, at least to me, as a failed attempt to contextualize the events of the movie by trying not to portray the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as "all that bad", despite the visibly bad things they are attempting to do to our heroes. Again, perhaps it's just me reading this into the film, but most film critics have been praising this movie for its "even-handed" approach to the Iran Crisis. I would submit to such people that "even-handed" is not defined as blaming everything on the Americans, but that's generally not a position likely to find backers in some portions of Hollywood.



Final Thoughts: But while I may be obsessive about these obscure historico-political interpretations, I'm not so far gone to fail to recognize a good film when I see it. Argo is an excellent spy thriller, well-shot and acted, and with the additional virtue of somehow, despite its ludicrousness, being absolutely true. Oscar buzz (though I consider the possibility a long shot) has already begun circling around the movie, a clear signal to me that we are finally entering into Oscar season, the last of the three major "phases" that the film calendar recognizes. Given the worse-than-usual Doldrums and the utterly wasted Blockbuster season that we experienced this year (Avengers and Batman notwithstanding), I am hopeful that Argo represents the beginning of a much better stretch of film for the next few months.

Final Score: 7.5/10

[Cynical Cat]

Saw it.

1) It's a very good movie.

2) Havoc is way overreacting about political commentary. The short blurb at the front is accurate, the conversations about America's complicity in the Shah's regime is almost entirely confined to discussing trading the Shah for hostages where it happens to be relevant, and serves at context for the ugly revolution taking place on the streets and why the crowds are so anti-American. The average movie going audience needs to understand that it wasn't simply "they hate our freedom."

3) The Canadian contribution was minimized. Contributions in logistics, scouting, and misdirection are minimized or absent. I actually don't have a problem with that as the movie centers on the CIA part of the rescue and telling a dramatic story and a few liberties are naturally taken. As always, any history taken from even the better parts of Hollywood should include some salt.

4) See this movie.

[Josh]

3) The Canadian contribution was minimized. Contributions in logistics, scouting, and misdirection are minimized or absent. I actually don't have a problem with that as the movie centers on the CIA part of the rescue and telling a dramatic story and a few liberties are naturally taken. As always, any history taken from even the better parts of Hollywood should include some salt.

At least they did y'all better than they did the Brits with that lameass U-boat movie.

[General Havoc]

Cloud Atlas

Alternate Title: The Story of Us

One sentence synopsis: The lives of a group of people cross again and again throughout the past, present, and future.


Things Havoc disliked: Yes, I know that normally I start with what I liked, and leave the whining until later, but this time I had to get something out of the way:

I don't like it when movies decide they're too smart for you. I don't like it when they go out of their way to be impenetrable, artifice-laden slogs. I don't like having to disentangle a movie from the pretensions of their authors, and I absolutely hate it when the movie compounds this issue by playing around with the basic language of cinema for some bullshit 'cognitive effect' dreamed up by an overindulged 'artiste'. Setting, character, shot selection, coherent editing, narrative flow, these are not optional elements in a film, they are the mechanisms by which the fever dreams of a cinematographer's imagination can be translated for the rest of us, and films which abuse these elements for the purposes of showing off how superior they are tend to arouse my ire.

Cloud Atlas, based on a novel by David Mitchell, is an unfilmable mess, worse by far than the Lord of the Rings adaptations ever were. The novel consists of six different stories told across time and space, linked together by the fact that many of the characters in each one are the re-incarnations (I assume) of one another. I am forced to assume this, as opposed to knowing it, because while in the film version of this novel, these characters are played time and again by the same actors, what is actually going on is never, ever explained. Some gestures are given to magical birthmarks, some to deja-vu, some to spiritualism and some to God, but we are clearly meant to simply sit back and accept the central conceit, something that would be much easier to do if it were made clear at any point if the characters played by such actors as Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Kieth David, or Hugo Weaving (to name only the ones I recognize) are meant to literally be the same person brought forth in a new time and place, the descendents thereof, or something else entirely. I just finished the entire movie, and I couldn't tell you the answer.

Indeed, I can't tell you a whole hell of a lot about this film, not even if I had the time to sit down and parse out the various narratives of this story one by one. Part of the problem is that the stories are tied together so closely and with such rapid shift from one to the next that we scarcely have time to get our bearings in terms of what is actually happening in one tale before we're whisked off without warning or hesitation to another. Worse yet, several scenes actually have the temerity to flash-forward within the same (or even a different) narrative, further confusing everybody as to just what's happening. And as though that wasn't enough, one of the larger narratives takes place with the characters speaking some kind of post-apocalyptic argot that's effectively incomprehensible. And since subtitles (or, you know, English) would spoil the majesty of whatever brilliance the filmmakers are deigning to place before us plebeian swine, I still have no idea what most of the characters in that sequence were saying. Of course, this would be the one plot thread where the directors decide to actually slow down and linger for a time.

You can therefore imagine my frustrations as I sat through this interminable (three hour) movie, completely lost as to what was going on, who the characters were, what they were doing, and even what words they were speaking to one another. What greater point the movie was trying to make was only dimly perceptible beneath layers of artifice, confusion, and artistic chaos. And all I could think of as I sat there, was that eventually it was going to be my task to come home and try and make sense of this mess to the rest of you.


Things Havoc liked: And then, around the 45 minute mark or so, something very strange began to happen...

Each of the six stories that we are told here, taken in and of itself, carries a different theme and a very different tone, all this despite the actors occurring and re-occurring within each one. Some of these actors, like Hugo Weaving or Halle Berry, are constantly playing the same basic character archetypes (slimy villain and intrepid explorer, respectively), set down in settings as varied as a 19th century ship, 1970s San Francisco, or the distant future. But what began to dawn on me was that other characters, particularly those that Tom Hanks portrays, are not. Hanks portrays, at times, a violent thug who brutally murders people in a drunken rage (his cockney accent leaves something to be desired), at times a nebbish scientist dragged into doing the right thing against his will, and at other times a cowardly fisherman trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world of cannibalism and death. He's not alone. Jim Broadbent goes from a murderous, virulently-racist ship captain one moment to a conniving book publisher trapped in a mental hospital, while Jim Sturgess and Korean actress Bae Doona go from demure Victorian aristocrats to firebreathing rebel leaders in an Orwellian superstate. Once this became apparent, and it took some time, it dawned on me that what was being represented here was not a specific set of characters, replayed through the ages like broken records. What was being represented was a range of human experience. And how some people, for better or worse, can change over time, and some people, for better or worse, cannot.

This recognition, such as it was, was the first of many within this film's enormous running time, and as the movie moved on, I became more accustomed to what it was trying to tell me, and more importantly, how it was trying to tell it. What appeared at first to be maddening artifice slowly evolved into a different language entirely than the one I was used to experiencing in movies. The overlap between the stories, I came to realize, was not based on tone or scene tension levels (action scene links to action scene, for instance), but based around something else entirely, specifically the relationships between all of the various characters at given moments, and the resonances, not repetitions, that their interactions had as they rippled across time and space itself. And once I had gotten over my confusion, even in the slightest degree... what a tremendous landscape this film unveiled before me.

Every element to this film, taken by itself, is done extremely well, with great fidelity to the style and times required. The pastoral periods, be they pre-civilized or post-apocalyptic, are shot in glorious, vibrant color, while the futuristic dystopia setting has dark, gritty cinematography livened by bursts of bright visual effects, ones that honestly resemble Tron more than they do the Wachowskis' famous Matrix trilogy. The cinematography changes too, from broad canvasses appropriate to adventure films for the 1840s scenes, to a blocky procedural style for the 1970s segment, and to a more modern caper-flick Scorsese-inspired set of sweep-shots and held takes for the sequence taking place in the modern day. The major linking factor through all this is the truly incredible score, written by co-director Tom Tykwer, a score that somehow manages to make the same piece of music work for adventure, action, romance, and inspirational scenes all at the same time. It is able to do this because, as with everything else in the film, the important element isn't what scene is currently playing, but the overall tapestry of human experience that the movie is trying to portray, and a score appropriate to that will by definition be appropriate to every scene that represents it.

Indeed, Cloud Atlas might be one of the boldest films ever made, a sprawling, elaborate spectacle, both visually and in the sheer complexity of its narrative, which twists and turns around itself like a helix, filling every scene, every shot with detailed references to other stories, past or future. It's true that none of the individual stories that comprise this enormous offering are terribly nuanced by themselves, but taken in summation as they are, the stories buttress one another to produce a larger, more universal narrative, reflecting the themes of power, love, abandonment, indifference, and hope. Life, at times, is not terribly nuanced either, and only when combined with the stories of the lives of everyone that surrounds us does it acquire definition. This is not the sort of re-incarnation story where we see characters play out the same tale over and over again with changes of costume and scenery. Every story, every relationship, every moment of this film is unique to itself and yet rhymes in a strange, almost rhythmic way with moments and scenes scattered across creation. The various tracks that the movie jumps between with such frequency are not actually individual stories, but elements of a larger, cohesive whole, simultaneously unified and multifold, a record of human experience throughout the ages, and the ways that the black evils and selfless kindnesses that we do for one another resonate with people we never meet, whose lives we can scarcely imagine.


Final Thoughts: If the above sounds inane, meaningless, or like a particularly bad bout of over-analysis, then I apologize, but this is a film that defies easy description. Some critics have savaged the film for being a plodding bore, others for being overly full of itself, and some even for being horribly racist (several actors change their ages, genders, and even races for some of their characters, not always with the most convincing of effects). And yet, if I am to be brutally honest with everyone, I can't possibly describe it in terms other than near-rapture. I've seen dozens, hundreds of films in my life, both before and during this grand experiment. And yet I cannot name more than a handful of movies that have left me with such a feeling of awe and wonder as this one did. All the complaints I leveled against it in the beginning are true, and remained true throughout the movie, and yet at some point, I simply began to perceive what this film was trying to show me, and like an incomparably intricate Swiss clock, every element simply slid into place. What response it will generate from others, I cannot possibly speculate, yet the passion, heart, and empathy of the film are so strong as to be overflowing, all without once veering into maudlin or mawkish sentimentality. It is, without question, one of the greatest films I have ever seen.

'We are all connected to one another,' says one of the characters in this movie repeatedly, and indeed both the narrative and the thematic hearts of the film are encompassed within the above statement. This film's subject matter is no less than the interwoven nature of our lives, not in some basic tit-for-tat sense, but in all its glorious, majestic complexity. It shows us as we are, billions of individual threads dancing around and between one another, forming iterative patterns much greater than ourselves, simultaneously newly minted and long-worn. When revealed in all its glory, the resulting tapestry is vast beyond scope, yet infinitely detailed, a fractal pattern repeating itself forever, and each time in a manner wholly new. We call the result History.

Final Score: 9.5/10

[White Haven]

This thread has seen the birth of a wondrous thing...a Havoc without hate.

I find this somewhat unsettling, actually. Accordingly, I feel it incumbent upon me to ask General Havoc a single, simple question:

Who is John Galt?