At the Movies with General Havoc

[B4UTRUST]

just plain childish fun.

Honestly, Havoc, these four words surrounded by a much deeper and well written review of the movie sum it up succinctly. The movie was just plain childish fun. Why, despite the problems you listed did you love it so much? It's just plain childish fun! It's every little boy's prepubescent joygasm brought to the big screen. You've got giant robots crossed with Rocky! You've got Rock'em Sock'em Robots being played out in real time in a far cooler setting than the stupid plastic game ever gave you.

I was a bit leery of this movie myself when I first sat down in my living room to watch it, however I too loved it. It's a damned good movie. And I'm not sure why it is. Except that when I sit and think about it, really it does for me, as Havoc said, what I wish Bayformers had done for me. It hit that sweet spot. It touched that inner kid who use to get excited about Saturday morning cartoons and cool robots and cheesy sports movies from the 80's and 90's. And more importantly, when it touched that inner child, I didn't find myself wanting an adult and a doll to show them where the movie touched my inner kid like some other giant robot movies have done in recent years.

*Begin less reviewy part here*
A majority of the members of this board are in their 20's and 30's. Most of us grew up in the 80's and watched G.I. Joe and Transformers and Rainbow Brite and all the others while eating our bowls of Coco Puffs or Captain Crunch on Saturday morning, followed by Looney Toons shorts and random episodes of Tom and Jerry. Or maybe that was just me. But really, when I think back over the last few years and I think of the amount of movies that have tried to cash in on these memories, I have to say that most of them fell short. We were the children of this age, and now we're the ones with the jobs and money and that want to reclaim, even if for only an hour and a half, part of our childhood. I know that for me, a lot of these cartoons were a very important and precious part of my life and something I've always treasured and looked back on with great fondness. I think most of us do to some extent. I know when I was growing up we moved around a lot with my dad in the military. So it wasn't uncommon for me to make friends for a year and then move to a new state or country and have to start over again. It sucked. But no matter where I was in the world, no matter what country I was living in, I could always watch those shows. No matter what when I got up on Saturday morning Optimus Prime would be kicking Megatron's tail across the galaxy and Duke would defeating another one of Cobra Commander's plots. Skeletor and He-Man would still be fighting on Eternia and Gargamel would still be trying to get the Smurfs. I may not have understood anything my classmates said or had any friends, but I had those shows.

To quote havoc one more time, Real Steel is just plain childish fun. And it's fun and great in a way that so many movies over the last few years have never been. It's hard to describe exactly why or show the point in the movie that one would say that 'This, this is the moment of greatness.' But it is great. And I loved the absolute hell out of this movie and the first thing I wanted to do after I finished watching it was go out to my garage and build myself my own gods damned robot boxer! It was that same feeling you use to get as a kid when you turned a cardboard box into whatever the hell you wanted it to be. For that little bit, it was possible. And that's the feeling right there that has been sorely lacking from the other nostalgia dollar movies. That feeling at the end of it that made you feel like a kid again and you'd just seen something so unbelievably cool for the first time. Childhood wonderment? I don't know. But I loved Real Steel for it.
*End*

[Charon]

I saw Real Steel, and I'm going to have to echo the above sentiments of praise. They follow the track that others have set before them, but they do it while obviously giving a shit about the movie they are making and so they make it work. I loved Dakota Goyo and Hugh Jackman in this. They played well off of each other and there were actually times where I was more impressed by Goyo's acting than I was jackman's, if for no other reason than how much he was actually holding his own in this movie. With so many movies where the child actors are a blight, this was very refreshing to see.

Yes, the villains were hammy, but that didn't matter. The rest of the movie made up for it and the robots that we see are simply fantastic in their design. I especially liked the ending.

Spoiler: show

Where Atom "loses" and there's no sappy bull about Charlie getting Max back because... reasons.

That in my mind helped to elevate the movie as well.

[General Havoc]

Hugo

Alternate Title: Lights, Camera, ...

One sentence synopsis: An orphan boy and the goddaughter of the first filmmaker try to solve the riddle of an automaton connected to silent films


Things Havoc liked: Martin Scorsese is the great film director to ever live. That's not a statement I make lightly, but there you have it. I have literally never seen a film of his that I disliked, even if some were, of course, better than others. And while this movie was not what one might normally expect to see from him, such is his draw in Hollywood, that he contrived to pull an incredible cast together for the purposes of it. Ben Kingsley, Christopher Lee, Jude Law, Ray Winstone, and Sascha Cohen (yes) among others are in this film, and, as one might expect, every one of them turns in an excellent performance, even Jude Law, who almost never does. Particular acclaim should go to Ben Kingsley, who plays Georges Meliers, one of the world's first real filmmakers, now an embittered old man selling magic tricks and toys from a train station shop.

But the two stars of the movie are actually the kids, specifically Asa Butterfield as Hugo, an orphan who lives in the work spaces of the Montparnasse train station in Paris, evading security guards, stealing food, and keeping the clocks in working order (for reasons that actually make a degree of sense), and Chloe Moretz as Isabelle, adopted daughter of Meliers, who befriends him. I've been a big fan of Moretz since both Kick Ass and Let me In, both awesome films in which she stole the show as something you wouldn't normally see a kid doing. As to Butterfield, I've never seen or heard of him before, but if anything, he does even better than Moretz. Both kids hold their own in this movie, and when you're doing that while Ben Kingsley is on the screen, you know you're doing something right. Neither one is the steriotypical cute kid, and both do awesome jobs, including scenes with real dramatic requirements that both of them (particularly the boy) sail through effortlessly. Forget stars in the making, these kids are simply stars.

Nothing about this movie looks or feels like a Scorsese picture, but that's not a bad thing. The shots are gorgeous and full of whimsy and life, without lapsing for an instant into fantasy. Paris is one of the world's great cinematic cities, and whatever the CGI involved, it definitely shows in here. The film is set vaguely in the early 30s or so, but there's no Depression era nonsense involved. It's a gilded age of a gilded city shot lovingly by a spectacular director who knows how to establish every shot.

The story is nothing tremendously special, but that's because it serves as an excuse for the real subject of the film, a loving tribute to the wonder of film, via an examination of one of its earliest advocates. Georges Meliers, for those who've never heard of him, was one of the first people to use film to create stories and art, rather than just a sideshow penny arcade attraction. His films, of which there were nearly five hundred, invented everything from practical effects to narrative storytelling through shot selection. Everyone from DW Griffith to Sergei Eisenstein were inspired by Meliers, who practically invented an entire form of artistic expression. Scorsese is plainly using this movie to pay homage not just to Meliers, but to the medium of film to begin with, and this love for film and its magic infuses the movie so much that there's no need for overt fantasy, for the whimsical sense is there between the shots. This movie was a love story to its own medium, and it shows.



Things Havoc disliked: The story in this film is pretty forgettable, due to the fact that it's not the main purpose, but merely an excuse for Scorsese to have his love affair with early cinema. This isn't my problem. My problem is the pacing.

The pacing in this film is awful.

You might think this is a bit of a nitpick. It's not. The entire first half of the film is so slow that it verges on absolutely unwatchable. NOTHING fucking happens. So much time is taken in establishing shots that the movie looks like a travelogue. So many subplots and extraneously un-necessary characters are brought into the mix that the film risks collapsing. The same damned chase scene occurs at least five times, and some of the characters, particularly the station agent played by Cohen, are given huge blocks of time to establish themselves. Normally that would be a good thing, but nothing fucking happens there either, and the character is not established further, simply placed on screen to act weirdly over and over again. Half an hour into this film, I was on the verge of walking out, something I didn't even do to The Last Airbender.

Now, granted, the film did get better as it went on, but never did it fully escape the almost unbearably slow pace that it had established. When I finally left the theatre, it felt like the movie had run for about two and a half hours. The real runtime was ninety minutes. Roger Ebert once said that no good movie is too short, and no bad movie short enough. This one feels like it's actually never gonna end. The pace is so slow that great stretches of the movie are simply... well... boring. No matter what effort the actors put in or how sweeping the imagery or lovely the idea of the movie, it fails to entertain. No failing is ever as bad as this one.



Final Thoughts: I really don't know where to go on this one. A movie I threatened to walk out of is definitionally not a good movie. And yet looking back, I don't feel any ill-will towards it. The parts of it that work really work, and there's something inescapably charming about the whole thing. The last couple days have softened my view on the thing somewhat, and while I wouldn't call it the masterpiece that most critics seemed to, I'm coming around to the idea that it wasn't as bad as I originally thought. The pieces are all here for a great movie. It's just a shame that Martin Scorsese forgot to make one.

Final Score: 6/10

[General Havoc]

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Alternate Title: Einie, Meenie, Miney, Soviet

One sentence synopsis: A retired british spy seeks to ferret out a mole within the British Intelligence service.


Things Havoc liked: Ah, Gary Oldman. I love Gary Oldman. He can play insane, he can play straight, he can play supremely powerful, and he can play schlub. Whatever's going on, I always love watching him, especially when he's given interesting things to do. Here, he plays George Smiley, the protagonist of John LeCarre's famous set of cold war spy thrillers, who has been involuntarily retired and then approached by the British government to look into rumors of a mole working at the "Circus", British Intelligence. The Circus here is presented much as I imagine it really was, an office building filled with dumpy, paranoid English upper crusters, played by such awesome actors as John Hurt, Colin Firth, Cirdan Hinds, Mark Strong, and the man with the most British name ever invented, Benedict Cumberbatch (no, I did not make that up). Seriously, any one of the above men I could watch doing largely anything. A cast like that cannot place a foot wrong, and therefore does not.

The movie eschews the usual James Bond tropes (not that I dislike those) in favor of the grind and misdirection of an actual spy case. There are no car chases, no duels with machine guns or swords, not even dead drops in the middle of the night while being chased by agents of the Stasi. One does not catch moles by beating them like Jack Bauer, one catches them with careful deduction and research. This research in the hands of lesser filmmakers might get boring or tired, but it does not here, and there's actually a fair bit of tension when one man is trying to pull off a complex yet subtle scheme to steal documents from a secure facility. The story is told mostly in flashback, but without losing the audience in terms of where and when we are situation, and otherwise proceeds at an even pace towards the end.



Things Havoc disliked: That said, while we never lose the setting of the film, we do lose more or less everything else.

I am not an idiot. I enjoy complex thrillers with labyrinthine turns. I have no fucking idea what actually happened in large portions of this movie. It's not that the movie obscures these things behind misdirection and twist, don't get me wrong, it's that I cannot follow the line of logic that leads our protagonist to sniff out the mole he is hunting for. Entire subplots of the film, such as everything Mark Strong does, and most of what Tom Hardy does, have, as far as I can tell, nothing whatsoever to do with anything, or if they do have something to do with anything, it's a complete mystery to me. The movie takes great pains to establish a situation where the Mole can be any one of a half-dozen men, all well-placed within the Circus. Yet how it is ultimately determined that the mole is This man rather than That man or Those ones is totally mysterious to me. Perhaps if I went back and viewed the movie several more times, I would be able to sort it all out, but the movie's pace was so slow and methodical that I frankly was not given any reason to desire to do so. But more importantly, there doesn't seem (to me at least) to be any major underlying logic to why one person is a mole and not another. Perhaps that's the point, I don't know, but it left me feeling like the movie had arbitrarily chosen somebody to be the bad guy.



Final Thoughts: The book this movie was made from is much longer than the film, as was the original british miniseries made about it. Perhaps those elements are in play here, as the movie seems like it forgot to actually include the important information of how we got from A to B. Still, I can't call this a bad film by any stretch of the imagination. It's shot well (if dumpily, but that's the point, I suppose), acted very well, and does hold together for a coherent viewing. There's nothing particularly wrong with this movie, certainly, but it didn't really leave me with a good sense of what had just transpired.

Final Score: 7/10

[General Havoc]

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Alternate Title: A moose once bit my sister...

One sentence synopsis: A convicted libelist and an anti-social hacker try to solve a murder mystery in rural Sweden.


Things Havoc liked: Normally in these reviews, I start by going on at length about the actors I love in the films. And I could easily do that here, as this movie has, among others, Daniel Craig, Stellan Skarsgaard, and Christopher Plumber, all three of whom are awesome, badass actors whom I love to watch, and do a wonderful job here. But I'm not going to extol these men as much as I normally would, because, before anything else, we need to talk about Rooney Mara.

Who is Rooney Mara? She is the actress who plays Lisbeth Salander, the aforementioned Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and she is, without question or doubt, the best thing in an amazing movie. It is rare, in this day and age, to see a character in a film that actually feels unique, different from everything else that one has seen before. Most characters, even excellent ones, are related to others that have existed before them. This is not a bad thing, it simply is. I however have never met anyone in any movie quite like Lisbeth Salander before, and most of that, I think, is due to Rooney Mara's acting.

Lisbeth is basically a walking case of Asperger's syndrome, but not in any way you've seen before. Anti-social she is, no doubt, to the point of misanthropy, strange of look and manner to the point of repulsion, yet also possessed of what appears to be an almost eidetic memory (though this is never elaborated upon), as well as an almost monomaniacal capacity for concentration and focus. Though there is clearly something 'wrong' with her, never is she portrayed as some kind of Rain Man savant genius, merely as a woman whose disinterest in everything besides her current task is total and absolute. Yet lest she appear to be a simple bitter librarian type, she is given full opportunity to be anything but. Sexual and dispassionate, violent and yet completely controlled, she is an incredibly interesting person to spend several hours watching. It helps of course that she gets several scenes wherein she gets to be completely, balls-to-the-wall, awesome in inflicting terrible retribution against characters who manifestly deserve it. Really, the only person she ever forms any sort of bond with in the entire film, is Daniel Craig's character, a (much more normal) journalist currently in disgrace who hires her to help him solve a set of serial murders and a disappearance that dates back forty years. He seems to get something out of her by simply taking her as he finds her, a refreshing approach in a movie landscape where most films would have him try to "fix" her somehow.

I could go on about this character at length, but I must speak to the rest of the film, which is violent, brutal, and yet tremendously watchable despite (or because of) it. Craig and Mara's characters are hired to research the disappearance of the niece of an industrial magnate, whose family owns a private island in the north of Sweden, upon which all of them live in separate mansions. The landscapes are cold and stark, suiting the mood of the film, and the settings are almost sterile in a very (forgive me) Ikea way, punctuated periodically by interruptions of terrible brutality. Rape, incest, murder, torture, psychopathy, and other such fun topics enter into the film, yet it never turns into a slasher movie or a gorefest, because the overall level of production and acting is so high, and the bloody stuff is intercut with sequences of mystery and research, covering great amounts of detail and conveying vast bodies of information to the audience, all done without ham-fistedness or "designated exposition".

Additionally, though this movie is not short (more than two and a half hours), the pacing in it is lightning fast. It moves with speed and poise from scene to scene, never giving us a chance to get bored or to guess what might be coming. Enormous amounts of stuff happen in this movie, be it simple plot, or complex character development. Never however does it feel rushed, never does it feel like we're being hustled along without time to determine what's going on, nor do any of the characters feel like they were shortchanged for time and not given room to grow and develop. The movie simply has a lot to say and show, and allocates its time perfectly, giving us time when we need it, and cutting anything we don't. I don't think I've ever seen a movie whose pacing was this rapid and yet this good before, and I may never again.



Things Havoc disliked: For an American watching a movie about Swedish characters, I admit that the names get tied up in my head. I very quickly lost track in this movie of who was who and who was related to whom in what way. Fortunately it didn't matter too much, but it got confusing at a few points.

Unfortunately, what was less forgivable was the ending, which I shall not spoil here. I grant that, as an adapted film, the movie has to sort of go where the book took it, but the entire last half-hour or so, while still good stuff, felt somewhat tacked on, as the main thrust of the film had already been achieved. Again, the pacing never slows in the ending (if anything it gets faster), so it's not like it was a bore, but I don't know that its inclusion, at least in the form it took, helped the film much.


Final Thoughts: Honestly though, the above concerns are just nitpicks. This is a fantastic movie, memorable and interesting from opening sequence (a trippy CGI wierd-out set to Led Zepplin), to ending credits. Not often do I encounter 150+ minute movies that I would gladly watch another two hours of if only they would give me more of the characters in it. Given, however, that the book has several sequels, I expect that's exactly what I will be receiving in a year or two.

Final Score: 8.5/10

[General Havoc]

The Artist

Alternate Title: Why the French can't have nice things

One sentence synopsis: A silent film star is destroyed by the advent of talkies, while his one-time protege rises in his place.


Things Havoc liked: 'Tis, apparently, the season for retrospective love letters to early film. First Hugo and now this movie, of all things a black-and-white, silent film dedicated to the last glorious days of, well... silent film. Art-house fare is not my cup of tea, normally, but I started this project so that I would see more than just the occasional blockbuster, so here we go.

The Artist stars Jean Dujardin, a french actor I've never heard of, as George Valentin, a swashbuckling silent film star at the end of the 1920s, an obvious stand-in for the famous (and much lamented) real silent film star Rudolph Valentino. Dujardin's take on the silent film star is frankly the best thing in the movie. In a medium where only expression and mime can stand out, Dujardin manages to evoke great breadth and even subtlety of character through look, posture, and gestures, giving us a character who seems lifted out of a more technically advanced film. The movie starts with him at the top of his career, and shows his ruination as the stock market crashes and talkies become popular. Meeting him on the way up as he slides down, is Berenice Bejo, playing (and I'm not making this up) Peppy Miller, a wide-eyed girl-come-to-Hollywood type who meets Valentin by chance at the beginning and rapidly eclipses him in popularity as the transition to sounded films occurs.

One of the things I like most about this film is that it doesn't turn into a bad ripoff of Sunset Boulevard, Any Given Sunday, or any other damned movie you've seen about one star crashing while another is born. Specifically, the movie doesn't turn the two against one another. Valentin, at the height of his career, is a egotistical showboat, certainly (the sequence where he refuses to stop taking ovations is awesome), but (crucially) not an insufferable prick. When he runs into Miller by chance, and later as she is extra-ing in a scene in one of his films, he is more than willing to humor her, uses his clout to prevent her from being fired, and later offers what turns out to be career-making advice on how to stand out from the crowd of would-be actresses. And rather than paint him as just looking to get laid, the movie seems to show this as a sort of noblesse-oblige act on his part, without condescension or lechery. This establishment helps tremendously, in that it gives him a certain impoverished nobleman air that sticks with him when later he loses everything. His reluctance to be helped out by Miller, when she is the rich star and he a penniless victim, comes across not as conceit, but as simple unwillingness to be coddled.

The rest of the cast, though not as good as Dujardin, do a decent job. John Goodman (of all people) actually comes the closest to Dujardin's skill at silent theatricality, playing the studio boss as a comedic, yet gregarious character. Missi Pyle (she of the angular face) also steals her relatively small role as Valentin's long-suffering co-star. The rest of the cast are certainly competent, if not amazing.

The movie also has fun little meta-touches to it, playing with the conceit of having a silent film in a modern setting. The sequence where sound effects start to occur inside Valentin's dressing room is actually fairly trippy, given that the audience has now had enough time to accustom itself to the lack thereof. Similarly, the ending sequence (which I will not spoil here), is a sort of fun wink at the audience, noting the artifice of the silent movie, while maintaining the style throughout. It's clever enough, I suppose.



Things Havoc disliked: Silent films, by necessity, relied heavily upon melodrama. Gestures and expressions had to be exaggerated absurdly both because of the limited quality of the film process at the time, the need to stand out dramatically in a black and white medium, and the impossibility of relying on spoken word or sound effects to convey anything. Such melodrama has to be taken with the old films of the 20s and early 30s, but in a modern movie, to a more jaded audience, strikes something of a wrong chord. And while this movie isn't overly melodramatic, and is extremely competently executed, there are sequences (such as Valentin burning his apartment, or preparing to commit suicide, or the antics of the dog) that really come across as hilarious in all the wrong ways. It may not be fair to blame the movie for this, given that it comes with the territory of a silent film, but I have to review these based on what I thought, and what I thought and what the critics thought are not gonna be the same.

And speaking of unfair criticisms...


Final Thoughts: There are great silent films. City Lights, Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Gold Rush, Battleship Potemkin, October, Out West, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The General, The Kid... I could go on. These films pushed the bounds of their medium to the utmost limit, and are justly regarded as great works of art. There is, however, a tendency among film critics to regard silent films as more 'worthy' than sounded films, and black-and-white films as more 'intellectual' than films in color. Permit me now to quote Roger Ebert's review of this film:

Is it possible to forget that "The Artist" is a silent film in black and white, and simply focus on it as a movie? No? That's what people seem to zero in on. They cannot imagine themselves seeing such a thing. At a sneak preview screening here, a few audience members actually walked out, saying they didn't like silent films. I was reminded of the time a reader called me to ask about an Ingmar Bergman film. "I think it's the best film of the year," I said. "Oh," she said, "that doesn't sound like anything we'd like to see."

Here is one of the most entertaining films in many a moon, a film that charms because of its story, its performances and because of the sly way it plays with being silent and black and white. "The Artist" knows you're aware it's silent and kids you about it. Not that it's entirely silent, of course; like all silent films were, it's accompanied by music. You know — like in a regular movie when nobody's talking?

With respect to Roger Ebert, and to the rest of the film critics of the world: Fuck yourselves.

A film's choice of medium, style, and content, are artistic choices, not moral agents. The decision to film this movie in black and white and in silence was one made by the director and producers, insofar as they believed that the film they most wanted to create necessitated these means. It was not done because silent films are inherently more virtuous than sounded ones, nor black and white films rendered more intellectual and highbrow than their colorized counterparts. Well permit me to disagree. A film is rendered into great art based on what it contains, not what it does not contain. Great children's movies are not defined solely by their lack of violence and sex, but by the artistry, imagination, and sheer bloody-minded work that elevates them to a higher level. And while it is certainly possible for a Black and White, or even a silent film to be excellent, even in modern times (consider Schindler's List), they are not made so purely by lacking sound and color. Spielberg's choice of filming in Black and White for Schindler's List was inspired, in that it lent a style and an feel to the film that color would have leached from it. It does not, however, follow that a preference for films shot in glorious color, or with full sound and voice, is the mark of a boor and a hick. Black and White stiffens the film, reduces its depth of space, alters and, yes, limits the ability of the camera to find expansive angles or shades of metaphoric meaning within the visual art style. Silence goes much further, eliminating the possibility of lengthy dialogue or intonation, and preventing the editor from using sound as a tool to supplement the action, and forcing the actors to over-emphasize their actions to compensate, eliminating subtlety and fine characterization. Neither of those things are to say that silent or B&W films are all bad, but the medium as a whole was immeasurably enriched by the development, first of talkies, and then of color.

In painting talkies as nothing more than pedestrian garbage (as this film somewhat does), the movie seems to regard the development of sound in films as a net-loss to the artistic merit of film. And in regarding those who prefer color or sound in their films as uneducated rednecks, most movie critics seem to be indicating the same. I would ask these critics if any of them would prefer to see the Godfather done silently, or in black and white? Or Lawrence of Arabia? And I would further ask how preferring these films over those of the 20s and 30s is somehow evidence of an uncultured heathenism. After all, of the hundreds of great directors and filmmakers to be found in Asia, America, and Europe over the last fifty years, working both within and without the studio system, how many chose to produce their magnum opuses without benefit of sound or color? Yes, there are films such as Schindler's List, Raging Bull, Great Dictator, and others, I know. But contrast that with the libraries of films made with these benefits. Is anyone seriously suggesting that Godfather would be better as a silent film? Or Fantasia in Black and White?

Of course nobody is suggesting that. They are instead however constructing a world wherein The Artist is a good film solely because of what it lacks, rather than because of what it contains. Though I place myself in poor company, I choose to act otherwise. The movie is a perfectly workmanlike exercise in filmmaking, but is only that: A melodramatic, overacted film elevated by good performances and a few quirks.

The simple lack of sound and color does not make a damn bit of difference.

Final Score: 6.5/10

[General Havoc]

The Adventures of Tintin

Alternate Title: What do you do with a drunken sailor...

One sentence synopsis: A boy reporter and a drunken sea captain race an evil criminal mastermind to uncover a secret treasure.


Things Havoc liked: 3D animation has come a long way since Final Fantasy, and for the last ten years, people have been trying, off and on, to make fully animated 3D movies. By and large, these have all sucked. Why they have sucked has varied from the normal problems that plague typically bad movies (incoherent plots, bad writing, lackluster voice/character acting, etc...) to reasons tied to the animation in general, particularly the famous uncanny valley effect.

And so we come to Tintin, a movie directed by Steven Spielberg, produced by Peter Jackson, scored by John Williams, and written by Stephen Moffat. With a lineup like that, one expects excellence, and, frankly, one by and large receives it. To conclude the point from above though, while I wouldn't call the animation here perfect, it is very very good animation. Faces are expressive, characters detailed, the visual style is rich and bright and colorful, and while there's still the occasional twinge of the old uncanny valley (mostly from Tintin's face, in specific shots), the characters in general are wisely caricatured enough to avoid it overall. The motion animation is stunningly real in movement and flow, enabling everything from acrobatics to swordfights to subtle character motions during dialogue to be portrayed perfectly. The Polar Express this ain't.

Based on the comics by the Belgian artist Georges Remi (known popularly as Hergé), Tintin's story and feel is essentially a version of Young Indiana Jones, which makes sense given who directed, scored, and wrote this film. The production, directorial, and writing teams associated with this movie have a long, rich history of adventure flicks to their credit, and Tintin fits seamlessly into that stable. The movie wisely eschews telling an origin story for Tintin himself, establishing him at the beginning as a boy reporter who goes on crazy adventures semi-constantly. Think Jimmy Olson crossed with Indiana Jones, and you'll get the proper idea. Though Tintin has been accused of being bland in the past, this movie moves so fast from set-piece to gorgeous set-piece that we never get the chance to notice if he is or not, and Jamie Bell (last seen as a slave in the terrible "The Eagle) voices him well, if not memorably. His signature look from the comics is replicated faithfully, as is his character as a boy scout who is perfectly willing to engage in complete insanity in order to solve this particular crime, mystery, or dastardly plot.

More impressive though, is Andy Serkis' take on Captain Haddock. Since the Lord of the Rings, Serkis has become the reigning prince of motion capture animation, playing everything from King Kong to the lead in the Planet of the Apes. Here he both voices and provides the motion capture for Captain Haddock, a drunken buffoon who is easily the best thing in the movie. Not only is his art design perfect, but he gets some of the funniest slapstick moments in entire film. His characterization is nothing to write home about, a gregarious, drunken Scott who feels like he isn't living up to his family's legacy, but he nonetheless provides great fun whenever he's on the screen.

The rest of the cast varies from decent to good, particularly Daniel Craig as the villain Sakharine (doing what sounds like a sendup to David Warner), and the Shaun of the Dead pairing of Nick Frost and Simon Pegg as the bumbling interpol agents Thomson and Thompson. But the characters in general are meant to take second place to the relentless, frenetic action and adventure going on on-screen. Spielberg is said to have remarked that animation freed him to direct action sequences the way he always wanted to, unlimited by such crass concerns as safety, budget, and the laws of physics. He certainly tries to make the most of it here. Sequences of almost frantic action hit you one after the next, including intricate, complex long-shots of swooping action that leave one dizzy. Many of the set-pieces are very inventive (particularly the dueling shipping cranes), and thanks to the superb motion capture, all of them feel like they have real weight and heft to them, elevating them above what could easily become a particularly well-animated Tom & Jerry cartoon.


Things Havoc disliked: Except, that is, when they don't.

The temptation with animation, as with any technology that allows more freedom to the filmmaker, is to go completely over the top, saturating the screen with imagery and density of element until the audience is simply buried in effects. This mentality is one of the major things that doomed the Star Wars prequels (one of many, I grant), and Spielberg, no stranger to film-making, wisely does his best to avoid it whenever possible. Action in central and in the foreground, and is not compromised by anything else happening on the periphery of the screen, and several of the sequences are actually very technically impressive, animated film or no animated film. Yet despite the skill on display here, the incredible action and adventure scenes left me... astonishingly underwhelmed. Rather than getting caught up in the awesomeness, I really felt like I was watching a cartoon, wherein the occurrence of strange and fantastic events is not necessarily impressive. Not to say that one can't have amazing experiences in a cartoon, but a cartoon has to craft them more carefully, as the simple sight of amazing action is not going to wow the audience without something else to elevate it. We are all conditioned to expect the impossible in a cartoon, making it that much harder to generate interest when the impossible happens.

And that's really the problem here. The movie, while competent in every level, a piece of flawless execution of filmmaker's art, never really connected with me in any way. None of the adventure, none of the action filled me with the wonder that similar sequences in many live action films I've seen have. As nothing was done particularly wrong in this film, I have to conclude that there's an element to animated films, no matter how close to a live action film they are, are simply not able to work on the same levels as live action ones. Again, I'm not trying to say either that I dislike this movie or animated movies in general, but a sight that would floor me in live action did not do so here.


Final Thoughts: There is nothing particularly wrong with this movie. It is eye-catching, interesting, well-acted, superbly-well animated, shot with care and love, and yet it left me strangely unsatisfied, for reasons I have chosen to attribute to the experiment being performed here. Ultimately, no matter how good the technology, you simply cannot create an animated film in the same manner as a live action one and expect it to work on the same level. That said, the movie does work, firing on most if not all pistons for the vast majority of the time. There are inspired moments ("Hands up!") and even entire sequences ("Crane fight!") that I thought were awesome. But overall, the movie simply failed to connect with me in a way that makes me wonder about the limits of animation. One simply cannot make an animated movie in the same way one makes a live action film, not with all the talent and skill in the world. Such is the nature of film.

Final Score: 7/10

[Charon]

The whole concept of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy really intrigued me as a great chance to see some old school spy wetwork and intrigue. Not the "spy" schlock that we have seen in, for example, the last two (make that three soon) Mission Impossible movies.

And I know little of Tin Tin, being American, but I do kind of want to check that out. The difficulty for me with both of these movies is going to be finding the crowd to go see it with (I hate seeing movies at the theater by myself).

As for the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Man, I really need to get my hands on those books some time. And maybe check out the movie too.

[General Havoc]

The Iron Lady

Alternate Title: Decline and Fall of the British Empress

One sentence synopsis: One of the most important Prime Ministers of Britain looks back on her career and life.


Things Havoc liked: Meryl Streep is the greatest actor in the world. In fact, as far as I can tell, she has been the greatest actor in the world since the early 80s. Though there are films of hers that I do not care for (Out of Africa), there exists, to my knowledge, no film in which she is not uniformly excellent. It therefore should come as no surprise to anyone that in The Iron Lady, Meryl Streep does a flawless job playing Margaret Thatcher, a job so perfect that for any other actress it would be considered the performance of a lifetime. In Streep's case, it's merely January.

Though Streep does not look much like Thatcher did (Thatcher had an very bird-like face in my opinion), Streep evokes Thatcher in mannerism, voice, gesture, and overall presence effortlessly, whether playing Thatcher at the height of her power, or in the midst of senile dementia (more on that in a moment). She gets across without a word what made Thatcher the Iron Lady, what qualities she evoked that enabled her to become the first female head of government in the western world, how it was that she was able to rule as prime minster longer than anyone else in the Twentieth Century, as well as what attributes finally drove her from power. Never once in the entire film did I imagine I was watching anyone but Margaret Thatcher, even when the person I was seeing was twenty years' removed from the Thatcher I remember from old footage of the end of the Cold War. Insofar as a biopic must evoke the character it focuses upon, Streep does so flawlessly.

This isn't to say that the rest of the cast is bad. Jim Broadbent, one of my favorite English supporting actors, plays Dennis Thatcher, the long-suffering husband of the Iron Lady, in a performance that evokes quiet middle-class comfort and quotidian contentment perfectly. Alexandra Roach and Harry Lloyd (whom I last saw being awesome in Doctor Who) play the Thatchers as young adults, and do credible jobs of portraying the people they would one day become. Roach in particular never goes completely off the deep end with material that could make Thatcher out to be a shrill lunatic, but instead plays her as a perfectly normal young woman whose sense of social inferiority has simply been amputated. She seems less angry that men want to dismiss her as merely a young girl (and a grocer!) than bemused at the spinelessness of the men in question. Thatcher herself, while a trendsetter, was not a feminist, and the movie does not attempt to turn her into one.

It is perhaps impossible to be neutral on the subject of Thatcher's politics (Roger Ebert spends half his review bashing the Falklands War). Even today, she is described variously as a miracle-worker and the Antichrist, depending on one's opinion of her cold-war era conservative politics. To the movie's credit, it neither sides with either camp, nor tries some sort of artificial "balance" between the two sides, but rather presents her politics and behavior as it finds it. Thatcher's economic policies are given quite a bit of time, and shown to work at times and produce hardship at others. What is key, however, is that she is given the opportunity to present the rationale and theory behind her politics, in a manner that is neither reverent nor a straw-man designed to make her look evil. We see why she did what she did, even if we don't agree with it. Her handling of the Falklands is shown in some detail, and presented as the victory it was, while her pitiless and petty bullying of her colleagues and even cabinet officials is displayed in full, and shown to have real consequences. Coming out of the film, I could not decide whether I thought the film sided with or against Thatcher on the whole, nor did I believe that the movie had ducked the question. Such is perhaps the best thing they could have done.


Things Havoc disliked: If only I could say the same about the focus.

The major, abiding flaw of this movie is the lopsided focus that it places upon Thatcher as she is today: old, frail, suffering from dimentia, and gradually losing her ability to live and act independantly. Of the two hours or so that this movie runs, I would guess that 40-50% of that time is taken up with scenes of Thatcher in this state, twenty years or more removed from her days of power, watching her struggle to keep names and people straight, or hallucinating the presense of her dead husband. That is an enormous amount of time, way more than the requirements of a framing plot requires, and as the movie rolls on, it begins to feel almost perverse, as though the film were glorying in showing the Iron Lady brought down at last by senility and old age.

In fairness, looking back, I don't actually believe that was the intention of the filmmakers, and yet I cannot conceive for the life of me of what they were thinking in presenting the movie this way. The framing story is of Thatcher trying to let go of her dead husband, whom she still hallucinates, and to move on, which is fine, except that the film is supposedly a biopic of one of the most powerful and influential women of the twentieth century. As such, we sit there wondering where exactly the filmmaker is trying to go with all of this endless footage of Thatcher barely able to hold a conversation.

To her credit, Streep's performance in these scenes is no less convincing than her performance in the rest of the film, and she even manages to infuse traces of Thatcher's indomitable spirit into them, but ultimately the film is not about Thatcher in her twilight years, but Thatcher's remarkable career and achievements, and taking so much time up with the senility topic denies the film the chance to explore more elements of Thatcher's career. Ronald Reagan, whose close relationship with Thatcher was so instrumental in maintaining the "Special Relationship" between Britain and America, is not in the movie at all. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War is barely mentioned. While I applauded the delicate balance that the film took with Thatcher politically, I cannot help but be baffled by its belief that Thatcher imagining her dead husband for the thirteenth time is more important than Thatcher's role in winning the cold war.


Final Thoughts: I almost feel as though I'm being unfair to this movie by criticizing it as I have. It is, after all, in poor taste to criticize a movie for not being another movie. And yet, given what this movie was purported to be, I feel deeply unsatisfied by it. Margaret Thatcher was one of the greatest women in modern history, and deserved to have her story explored and portrayed by the greatest actress in the world. And while that is more or less what happened here, I get the sense that in their haste to tell some other story of their own invention about old age, dementia, and grief, the filmmakers forgot to actually tell the story of Margaret Thatcher.

Final Score: 6.5/10

[General Havoc]

Red Tails

Alternate Title: Turn Tail and Run

One sentence synopsis: The first Black fighter pilots fight bigotry and the Nazis during World War II


Things Havoc liked: Um...

Er... well...

Okay, so, The Tuskegee Airmen: Back in the closing days of World War Two, when the US army was still segregated, a group of black pilots fought their way through a racist, bigoted system to be allowed to fly fighter planes for their country in the greatest war in history. These men formed the 332nd Fighter Group, four squadrons of black fighter pilots who were eventually assigned to escort heavy bombers back and forth from their runs on Germany. Despite opposition from the finest German fighters and pilots that remained in the Luftwaffe, these men performed brilliantly, losing very few bombers (by some accounts none at all) and shooting down the first Me-262 jet fighters of the war. In performing well above and beyond the call, the Tuskegee airmen contributed to the collapse of the color barriers in the US army and air force, and justly earned a lustrous place in military history. I applaud the notion of making a film about this subject.

The actors in this film vary in quality, but I will admit, the best job is done by the pilots themselves (which is only fair, I suppose). The movie focuses upon a small group of pilots, particularly two with callsigns 'Lightning' and 'Easy' (David Oyelowo and Nate Parker respectively). These two, and the other pilots that surround them, played variously by R&B and hip hop artists, actually manage a decent amount of what I would call real camaraderie in this movie. Scenes of them sitting about playing cards, discussing missions, lying and bragging to one another, actually strike home reasonably well, and David Oyelowo in particular does a pretty decent job with the material he's given. One does get the impression that this could actually be a group of real pilots in a real movie.



Things Havoc disliked: I could try to get glib here, try to coyly hide what I actually think, but my duty as a reviewer is to warn people when something like this comes about. So let me get right to the point. This movie is an unqualified piece of shit.

I have never in my life seen a movie torpedo itself so quickly out of the gate. The very first line in the movie is a line so transcendentally awful both in writing and delivery that I turned to my viewing companions and whispered "uh oh". Not even Last Airbender managed to make me lose faith that quickly, and when you're causing me to compare your film negatively with the worst movie ever made, you are in trouble.

I'm no stranger to bad writing in movies, but this screenplay is the worst I have seen in a long damn while. Every single line is an abysmal, cringe-worthy, disaster, so bad that I suspect that George Lucas recycled all of the lines that he thought were too bad to fit into the Star Wars prequels into this film. Characters do not stop at stating the obvious, but narrate their own actions to other people in the same room. Officers give lectures about duty, pride, and honor in such an unfathomably schmaltzy, wooden manner that they look and sound embarrassed to be there. Pilots speak to one another using language that no pilot, indeed that no human being in the history of time, has ever pronounced in all seriousness to another person. These lines are not helped by the soundtrack, comprised entirely of faux-patriotic orchestral crap, which succeeds in making the movie worse in direct proportion to how much it plays. When one is listening to an actor recite awful dialogue, it does not improve the experience by having bad Sousa marches swell up every time someone mentions the word "mission".

It's hard for me to separate the terrible quality of the writing from the acting, but the acting here is absolutely terrible. Yes, I praised David Oyelowo, but that's because my system requires me to find at least SOMETHING I liked, and he's simply the least bad of the lot. Terrence Howard, an excellent actor whom I loved in everything from Crash to Hustle & Flow to Iron Man, here turns in a performance that looks like it was generated under the influence of powerful drugs, staring vacantly into space as he recites terrible and cliche-ridden lines about the power of self-belief. Cuba Gooding Jr, who won an Academy Award for Jerry McGuire, here manages to effortlessly disguise whatever talents led the academy to give it to him. Chomping on his pipe as though it were some alien life form he did not understand, his role is completely superfluous, in that he does not one important thing for the entire movie, plot or character-wise. Gooding has been in his share of bad movies before, but manages here to trump everything he has ever done in terms of awfulness, and for a man who last 'starred' in 'The Land Before Time XIII: The Wisdom of Friends', this is not a statement I make lightly.

One might think that George Lucas, who produced this monstrosity and funded it himself, might at least know how to create stunning aerial dogfights and thrilling scenes of combat. One would be wrong. Comparing the action in this movie to a video game is to inflict a grave and unwarranted insult to video games. Planes dash about the air performing maneuvers that are not simply impossible but laughably so, even to someone with no experience at aerial combat. Our heroes have infinite ammunition in their guns, which appear to fire explosive howitzer shells that trigger stupendous explosions in everything they so much as approach. One of the pilots manages to detonate a locomotive, derailing and obliterating an entire train, by firing into it with .50 caliber machine guns for two seconds. One does not have to be a military historian to know that such events are ludicrously impossible, and as though that weren't enough, he turns around later in the movie and does the same thing to a destroyer! Worst of all, these sights aren't just thoughtless eye-candy we the viewers are treated to while the movie winks at us. At one point that same pilot is congratulated by his superiors for having destroyed SIXTY-THREE aircraft in one strafing mission, a number so absurd as to invite ridicule from people with no prior experience with anything military. I have seen five year olds describing the imagined gyrations of their magical starfighters who maintained a better sense of reality than this.

And yet the worst thing of all about this movie, unquestionably, is the subject of Race. The Tuskegee Airmen, beyond being amazing fighter pilots, were trailblazers, instrumental in the first wave of the civil rights movement by proving conclusively that blacks could do anything whites could. Race is central to the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, and yet this movie manages, somehow, to both whitewash away the racism that the airmen faced, and also reduce it to ludicrous cliche. We see the obligatory racist southern senators sitting around talking about how the airmen are incompetent because they're black, and hear the virtuous (and awful) speeches that the officers of the unit give in their defense. But the pilots scarcely seem to realize that race is a factor in their lives, discussing it infrequently and in pathetic sound-bytes that do the subject no justice. When one of our heroes walks into a whites-only officers' club, and is chased away by racist white officers, their insults sound less like biting, shocking incidents of racism, and more like barely-literate idiots reading uncomfortable lines from a cue card. Every white pilot or crewman, without exception, is portrayed as a bumbling idiot (possibly because the actors are all incompetent, and possibly because the writing is so awful), so stupid and uncomfortable with their lines that we can't believe for a second that these people actually believe what they're saying. The turnaround, when our heroes finally start to get recognized by the formerly racist whites, feels contrived and unconvincing, partly because the writing is still awful, and partly because the threat of racism previously felt like a joke. There is (of course) no mention of their struggle in a wider context, no hint of the racism that might await them back home, nor of the struggles they undertook to get as far as they did. The post-script doesn't even mention the de-segregation of the US military. Instead we are apparently meant to believe that racism itself was vanquished along with Nazi Germany. The movie even goes so far as to include a long (and completely pointless) romance sub-plot between one of the pilots and an Italian girl, ignoring the fact that while any two people can fall in love, there is no way on earth that a black man would be permitted to date (much less marry) a white Italian girl in Italy in 1944. Race riots and lynch mobs were formed over less.



Final Thoughts: Sixteen years ago, HBO produced a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen called (appropriately enough) The Tuskegee Airmen. The movie starred Lawrence Fishburne, Andre Braugher, and, of all people, Cuba Gooding Jr. It did not have an enormous budget, nor was it a perfect film, but it managed to express quite expertly what the conditions for these pilots were like, and what obstacles they were faced with and overcame, all without artifice, blame-throwing, or recourse to ugly stereotypes. Compared to that film, Red Tails feels like an ugly slap in the face, not just to the Tuskegee Airmen themselves, but to the fine black actors who starred in this abomination, which may well set the cause of black actors in this country back twenty years. Men of talent created this film. Aaron McGruder (of the Boondocks) wrote the screenplay. Terence Blanchard (of Malcolm X and Bamboozled) wrote the score. And yet whether because Lucas turns everything he touches these days into galvanized crap, or because some collective mania overcame everyone involved, the result was one of the most complete trainwrecks I've ever seen.

George Lucas claimed in the press that one of the reasons he financed this film himself was that Hollywood was unwilling to back a movie that did not have a single significant white role. At the time I praised him for having dared to do what the studios would not, and given a chance for great actors to portray a story that deeply deserved a full cinematic treatment. Having now seen the result, I suspect that the reason he couldn't secure financing is because someone saw the rough cut and wisely ran away. I sat through this movie in mounting awe at the depths to which it fell, wondering at every turn if it could possibly get any worse, and discovering that it could and did. This movie was a complete disaster from start to finish, and I can only hope that those involved will recover from the experience of having produced it soon.

Lord knows it will take me a while.


Final Score: 1.5/10

[Dark Silver]

I actually have fond memories of the HBO Tuskegee Airmen from the 90's - so much so that as soon as I was able, I located a copy of the movie online so I could watch it since it no longer plays on HBO anymore and I CANNOY find a copy of it on DVD.


To hear that HBO with a low budget managed to do a far superior job 16 years ago on their movie, than a major motion "blockbuster" is both saddening, and makes me glad Lucas said that Red Tails was last movie he will have involvement in (this was more due to people bitchiing about releasing yet ANOTHER version of Star Wars to milk the franchise for a few more dollars).

[Charon]

Ouch...

Lowest score to date.

[General Havoc]

The Flowers of War

Alternate Title: The Rapists of Nanking

One sentence synopsis: A drunken American mortician and a chinese prostitute try to save a group of schoolgirls during the Rape of Nanking.


Things Havoc liked: In 1937, the Japanese army destroyed the city of Nanking, then capital of China, with a thoroughness and a bestial cruelty unrivaled since the depredations of Genghis Khan. For eight weeks, the Japanese almost literally tore the city apart, slaughtering men, women, children, dogs, and every other living thing with indiscriminate cruelty, until fully half of the city's population (all who were unable to hide), had been exterminated. It was one of the worst atrocities of modern times, rivaling in intensity the worst incidents of the Holocaust, and is today all but forgotten in the annals of history.

Enter Zhang Yimou. One of China's most well known directors (at least in the West), Zhang has been responsible for some of the finest Chinese movies I've seen, including masterpieces such as Raise the Red Lantern and To Live, and the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic games. Yimou has a very distinctive style to many of his films, flowing landscape shots of stark color contrasts and dreamy, almost slow motion sequences, even in the midst of wire-fu action sequences. It's a weird pairing, I admit, but Yimou pulls way back on his stylization for this film, with only a few shots displaying his tendency towards over-symbolism.

The movie stars Christian Bale, who plays John Miller, an alcoholic undertaker called to a church in Nanking to bury the head priest. As it happens, this church is also the chosen refuge of two groups of girls, one of young schoolgirls, led by Shu (played by Zhang Xinyi), and another of high-class prostitutes from the city's red light district, led by Yu Mo (played by Ni Ni). Bale's character is based on several real people, westerners caught up in the hell of the fall of Nanking who tried to save whoever they could. Bale has certainly been in his share of bad films (Reign of Fire and Terminator Salvation come to mind), but here he's actually quite good, confronted as he is with one of the hardest character archetypes to play, the reforming drunk. More solid props should go to the other actors. Zhang Xinyi and Ni Ni both play their characters very well, in scenes that run the gamut from introspective to violent to terrified. Another very good performance is turned in by Tong Daiwei (whom I swore initially that I had seen somewhere before, but apparently had not), who plays Major Li, one of the last Chinese soldiers left in the city, and who provides the movie with its action hero, and is the catalyst for the (surprisingly few) fight sequences.

The film's pace is slow and effective, dwelling more on the potential terror of the character's surroundings than on the horrid atrocities themselves (though there are those). Conversations shift effortlessly from English to Chinese to Japanese, relying on the audience to simply keep up with who can understand what at any given point, and yet we never get lost. The chromatic choices are overwhelmingly gray and muted, as befits the setting of a ruined city being torn apart, but Zhang's trademark flashes of intense color pop up periodically, lending a somewhat dreamlike quality to many scenes. The writing overall, despite dipping into fairly well-trod territory ("you can overcome your drinking by finding faith!") never gets schmaltzy (something helped, I find, by the subtitles), and holds the drama together quite well.



Things Havoc disliked: On occasion, Zhang's addiction to cinematic prettiness gets the better of him. There are several shots (such as Bale unfurling the red cross flag) that strike a grating tone, due to sheer pretentiousness. One can almost feel the director screaming in the background "wait 'till they get a load of this sweep-shot I've got planned'. Similarly, a couple lines sound pretty forced, at least in English, though nothing continuous enough to get super-annoying.

The movie is also very long, nearly two and a half hours, and admittedly, it feels it. While the movie's pace doesn't drag too badly, it does get pretty slow towards the end of the film, when we already know how the plot is going to resolve itself as the movie takes the time to explain it to us five or six times. At that point, we're simply waiting for the plot to turn out the way we know it will. Finally, there's quite a few cases of some of the girls doing things so galactically foolish (I need to get my cat!) as to strain belief, solely for the purposes of producing tension (or atrocity).


Final Thoughts: I really shouldn't keep doing this, I know, but this is yet another movie that I liked quite a bit which was more or less excoriated by the critics at large. With movies like Suckerpunch, I can see why this happens, as I am able to identify that there are movies that are objectively bad which I will like. But a movie like this, made with care and craft by an award-winning director and starring actors who give honest and even moving performances, I cannot help but conclude that there is something wrong.

And then, of course, I read the reviews, and found gems like this:

One of the ancient ploys of the film industry is to make a film about non-white people and find a way, however convoluted, to tell it from the point of view of a white character. "The Help" (2011) is a recent example: The film is essentially about how poor, hard-working black maids in Mississippi empowered a young white woman to write a best-seller about them. "Glory" (1900) is about a Civil War regiment of black soldiers; the story is seen through the eyes of their white commander.

[...]

Now let me ask you: Can you think of any reason the character John Miller is needed to tell his story? Was any consideration given to the possibility of a Chinese priest? Would that be asking for too much?

The entirety of Roger Ebert's review of this film is comprised of the above sentiment. It was the sole reason cited for him giving it a lower score than Red Tails.

I have two replies to this.

One, this movie is, amazingly enough, based on a series of historical events, surrounding real people who acted in this way. I stated above that half of the population of Nanking died in the Rape. Almost the entirety of the other half were saved by taking refuge at the international safety zone established by a handful of westerners of all nationalities and stripes who happened to live in the city for one reason or another. These men and women were led by (of all people) a Nazi named John Rabe, and contrived to save hundreds of thousands of civilians from the Japanese by a variety of methods.

Obviously this film is not specifically about John Rabe, but the point is that Westerners were deeply involved in the survival of most of the city of Nanking. Replacing the actual American priest who did these things with a Chinese priest would be to distort history in the name of political correctness, changing events that actually happened because they do not suit your modern political agenda. I would be no less scandalized if they had recast the Japanese soldiers as white (or for that matter, black) to avoid demonizing Asians. The fact that a Westerner could do things and move about in the city more freely than a Chinese person could (thanks to the Japanese being less willing to simply slaughter every westerner in sight) is a plot point of the goddamn movie, and the sole reason why the hero is able to make several important discoveries and decisions throughout it. Moreover, it is a simple fact that a Catholic cathedral in Nanking in 1937 would not have had a Chinese priest officiating over it, and casting one would be completely anachronistic. Or is the fact that Catholics had something to do with saving civilians in China also inconvenient for our sensibilities today?

Secondly, look again at who made this movie.

Zhang Yimou is one of the most important directors in China today. He has been accused of being both anti-authoritarian and pro-authoritarian at various points. He was chosen to choreograph the Beijing Olympic opening and closing ceremonies. He filmed this movie with a budget of more than 90,000,000 and was given carte blanche to cast any actors he wished or could acquire. His film was co-produced by William Kong, the famous Hong Kong producer of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and other staples of wuxia cinema. I categorically refuse to believe that, given these circumstances, Zhang Yimou, one of the finest directors in mainland China whitewashed his own film.

Glory, The Help, and this movie all did have White characters as points of view (though in Glory it was one of about five). Glory, The Help, and this movie were all also excellent films, all three of which were based around true stories about real people, white and otherwise, who did the things they did. George Shaw, from Glory, existed. Making the film without him would have been an intolerable crime committed against the pages of history. Similarly, Westerners, and yes, western priests, were instrumental in saving hundreds of thousands of lives in Nanking. This happened. And to remove them from the story because you don't like that they were in it is as absurd as moving the setting of the movie to Chicago. This is literally the only complaint that Ebert (and some others) make about the film. He admits late in the review that "The Flowers of War" is in many ways a good film, as we expect from Zhang Yimou." He, and those like him, have fallen into that ultimate trap of criticism, wherein they are criticizing the movie not for what it is, but because it is not some other imagined movie that they would have preferred to see.

And to suggest that this artfully-crafted movie was inferior to the dreck that was Red Tails simply because that movie had no white characters in it, and this one did, is simply contemptible.

Final Score: 7/10

[frigidmagi]

The Ironic thing for me is Ebert lists the movies in his compliant that have the least to do with it. If he had said listed The Last Samurai for example... This is a problem I keep having with Ebert, when he's good, he's very good but these days it often seems like he sleeps through a number of the movies he's watching. I see the movie, I read his review and find myself asking, hey did we see the same movie.

I'm going off on a tangent now, buckle up.

John Rabe, himself is one of those few historical figures who seems to exist to prove two points, the first being simply that Good Men Exist. The second being, the Powerful Don't Like Them. This man, a German Nazi of all things, saved over 200,000 people and was punished for it. Recalled from his post, he gave lectures showing pictures and videos of Japanese actions in Nanking across Germany and wrote to Hitler to plead with him to try and pull the Japanese back. The Gesapto arrested him and it was only through the intervention of friends that he was allowed to keep the evidence he gathered.

After WWII, he was forced to go an extensive de-nazification process which drained all his savings (in short he was arrested by the Gestapo, the Soviets and the British, he could claim to have been subjected to imprisonment by all sides). It's at this point that the citizens of Nanking stepped in raising over 2000 dollars and sending their mayor with the money and food, along with the thanks of a grateful city. The city would continue to send food and clothes until the communist overran the city.

John Rabe wasn't the only westerner in the city in this effort, it was an event that stepped over national lines, seeing future antagonists putting things aside to save lives. John Rabe however was vital, as a Representative of Nazi Germany, one of Imperial Japan's few allies, he was someone the Japanese couldn't dismiss. The members of the safety committee were Danish, American, British and German.

The Japanese did not bombard or shell the safety zone but did send troops into it. Westerners would shadow every patrol and vigorous refuse to comply to any Japanese demands. The risk they took to do this cannot be understated, while at the time Japan did not wish a war with the west (yet), a number of events had occur proving that being American or European did not grant blanket immunity.

Despite the best efforts of the committee several hundred of the thousands sheltering in the Zone were kidnapped by the Japanese Army, the men were executed and the women raped, then killed. The zone was disbanded in January 1938 by the Japanese who proclaimed they had "restored order."

Ironically there is one group who would agree with Ebert comments, right wing Japanese writers have repeated claimed that either the safety zone never existed... Or that it was set up and run by the Japanese.

[General Havoc]

Coriolanus

Alternate Title: Voldemort Ad Portas

One sentence synopsis: A victorious Roman general is banished by the people and seeks revenge.


Things Havoc liked: It takes a certain kind of madman to do Shakespeare justice. Masked behind tormented psyches and archaic language, actors who attempt Shakespeare, particularly the tragedies, are often unable to get the essence of their characters across unless they can properly channel a certain modulated intensity (it also helps if one is British). Fortunately, with films such as Red Dragon, In Bruges, and Schindler's List behind him, as well as a long history with Shakespeare on the stage, Ralph Fiennes is more than qualified to bring one of Shakespeare's crazy protagonists to life. Here he plays Caius Martius Coriolanus, a general in the Roman army who is brought down by his unwillingness to play demagogue. Fiennes, always at his best when playing a man on the verge of a psychotic episode (see the above films), plays Coriolanus like some kind of enraged demon locked up within a frame of icy professionalism. Rejecting fame and flattery, indifferent to pain and injury, conscious of his own superiority without feeling the need to have it flaunted, he seems almost lost when he doesn't have someone to shoot at. Unlike many of Shakespeare's heroes, Coriolanus doesn't indulge in lengthy soliloquies to explain himself to the audience, and Fiennes gets all this across just through his stare, expression, and the occasional clipped word. It's quite impressive.

This is also Fiennes' directorial debut, and for the occasion, he has surrounded himself with a superb supporting cast. Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Cox turn in outstanding performances as Coriolanus' mother and friend respectively. Redgrave is a match, intensity-wise for Fiennes himself, speaking and acting with the same ferocious glare to her eyes, such that when she says she'd be perfectly happy for her son to die as long as he dies well, we believe her. Cox, who usually plays a slimy bastard, here plays the only non-slimy politician in Rome, who tries again and again to soften Coriolanus' woeful public image. Smaller parts are still entrusted to other excellent actors, among them James Nesbitt as one of the rabble-rousing Tribunes, and John Kani as the arch-patrician General Cominius.

In keeping with what seems to be a rule nowadays, this movie is shot in modern times, with period language. I'm not usually a huge fan of this method, as it often (Romeo+Juliet) comes across as pretentious and jarring. This time, however, with actors good enough to sell the dialogue, the style is allowed to stand on its own and even update the material with modern takes. Soliloquies and herald messages that would be awkward in person are handled cleverly through talk shows and broadcast news reports. Coriolanus' meltdown happens on the set of a Face the Nation-type political interview show, which adds to the frenzied, almost tabloidish atmosphere of the entire event. Meanwhile the competing armies are a study in contrasts. The Volscians (Rome's enemies) carry eastern-bloc weapons and dress like Cuban guerrilla fighters, while the Romans are in full modern infantry gear, carrying western assault rifles and satellite uplinks. Battle sequences are violent and gritty, and look like something one might see from one of the Balkan wars of the 90s, while the city of Rome itself is half-industrial park, half tenement-housing. Still, a modernized Roman setting is the sort of thing calculated to make me happy, and I particularly appreciated the little touches thrown in here and there (such as Fidelis TV and the Latin headlines on the scrolling news bar).


Things Havoc disliked: The only major actor who doesn't keep up with Fiennes and company is Gerard Butler, who plays Aufidius, enemy of Coriolanus and general of the Volscians. It's not that Butler is bad, but he's just not in the league of people like Fiennes and Redgrave, and moreover his character just isn't as interesting. This isn't helped by the fact that, for some reason, Butler decides to dive deeply into a thick Scottish accent for this role. Why he chose to do this is beyond me, but when the language is as dense and archaic as Shakespeare's, muddling everything up with an accent this thick renders half of his dialogue completely incomprehensible, at least to ignorant American me.

Additionally, the soundtrack in this movie is very sparse, to the point of being nonexistent. There's certainly a time and a place for less-is-more insofar as soundtracks are concerned, but whole sections of this film seem like they forgot to score them, which becomes particularly problematic in scenes where, for stylistic reasons, the sound effects also are cut out. Twice during the film I thought that the theatre's sound system had failed, only to find that there was "symbolism" being done.


Final Thoughts: Coriolanus is not one of Shakespeare's most famous plays, and rivers of ink have been spilled debating just what's wrong with it. It's certainly more straightforward than most of the Gordian Knots that Shakespeare usually tied his characters into, and has a protagonist who says much less, overall, than other Shakespeare protagonists I could mention. The film, cleverly, improves on the sparseness of the play in ways only film can perform, enabling the actors to infuse their dialogue with far more subtle nuance than would be possible on stage. This turns the screenplay's relative sparseness into an asset, as much is implied between each line. Couple that with an alt-history setting that appeals to the romanophile in me (and probably bumps the film's score by half a point or so), and we have a winner here. The material frankly isn't awe-striking enough to turn the movie into a true masterpiece, but as Shakespeare films go (to say nothing of directorial debuts), one really can't ask for anything more than this.

Final Score: 7.5/10

[General Havoc]

Intermission

So, it occurred to me to do this back in January, but other projects intervened, and I wasn't able to get around to it until now. In the spirit of my renewed efforts towards these reviews which I am writing for no conceivable reason whatsoever except to hear myself talk, I present a roundup of my top five best and worst films of 2011.

Bear in mind that my movie viewing habits were somewhat spotty over the course of this last year, and even were they not, it was never my intention to see every movie released in a given year, but only a sampling of such films as struck my interest for one reason or another. With all that borne in mind, here are the best and worst movies I saw all year:

Best Films

5: Sucker Punch. Ten months after the fact, I still have no defense for this one. Zack Snyder's opus of action and style was a blast from start to finish, and remains to this day the biggest surprise of all my movies since the inception of this project. I can only conclude that I suffered from some invisible and yet serious form of brain trauma when I viewed this film, or perhaps that every other critic in America had their minds possessed by evil dopplegangers from Mars.

4: Thor. A superbly-written, wonderfully-directed, brilliantly-cast extravaganza, bright and colorful and interesting in all the right ways, managing to get by on implication instead of exposition. With a villain given actual depth, supporting characters that are both memorable and interesting, and direction worthy of Shakespeare, this is easily my favorite of the Avenger-buildup movies, and has me hoping for great things once the Avengers comes out.

3: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Probably the most "legitimate" movie on my list, this movie was a revelation, a procedural murder mystery that simply did not have time to screw around. Graphic without being exploitative, innovative without being pretentious, and with characters that were sharply defined without lapsing into caricature, this movie caps off a several-year period with adapted Swedish movies of great quality. Who would have thought that Sweden was a nexus of modern storytelling?

2: Real Steel. What a difference a bit of effort can make. This movie had no business being any good at all, and yet through some mystical process, it turned into a masterpiece. Practical effects, superb writing, excellent performances, this movie was everything Transformers wasn't, and took the concept of Rock'em Sock'em Robots, the movie, to a level I didn't even think was possible. I saw many movies this year, but none of them enabled me to simply switch off and enjoy the fun of the film like this one did.

1: X-men: First Class. Yet another film I had no expectations for going in that managed, despite it, to blow me away. The X-men were my comic group growing up, the most interesting of all of Marvel's creations, and this movie right here is the one that got them right. There were dialogue sequences in this film that made me want to stand up and cheer, sequences that lifted this movie effortlessly out the admittedly exalted company of other comic films and into something special. This, simply put, is how you do it.

[General Havoc]

Worst Films

5: Cowboys and Aliens. One of the stupidest things I've ever seen, a wretched, by-the-numbers 'action' film with terrible writing and a plot stolen from Battlefield Earth (bad move), completely wasting the talents of the fine actors appearing in it. Burdened by sloppy editing, lazy design work, and awful pacing, the movie is ultimately nothing but a boring mess, a series of unimportant events that happen and then are over.

4: Atlas Shrugged, Part 1. A deeply unsettling film, as though it were created by people from a moral and cultural context entirely alien to ours (which might well be the case). Mired in bad pacing, awful acting from Taylor Shilling, and an overall sense of boredom, this film nonetheless leaves a strong impression, albeit an intensely negative one. I've never before seen a film that actually managed to generate the uncanny valley effect from characters who were entirely human. After watching this, I appreciate Bioshock all the more.

3: Kill the Irishman. Easily the worst thing I've ever seen Ray Stevenson do, this turgid gangster flick can't even use practically every typecast gangster in Hollywood to effect. It plays like a hagiography, giving us a mobster who at no point resembles an actual human being, and whose life is patently not interesting enough for a feature-length movie. People talk in this movie in a manner nobody has ever spoken before, and things are not improved when Vincent D'onofrio tries to be "tough".

2: The Eagle. Not even my love of all things Roman is enough to save this absurd piece of shaky-cam crap. With two deathly boring leads who look completely out of place in what's supposed to be 2nd century Britannia, this film doesn't even reach the debatable historical "accuracy" levels of Spartacus or Gladiator. Mustache-twirling villains of the worst sort and characters whose motivations are completely opaque, coupled of course with the obligatory awful writing turn this film into a total waste of time.

1: Tron: Legacy. Disastrously-written, pretentiously-shot, languidly-choreographed, this follow up to the original cult classic has nothing at all to say, and takes an interminable amount of time saying it. It fails not only as an incisive movie about the nature of computers, but even on the level of a mindless action flick. Fight scenes are so dull that not even the characters or the cinematographer can take any interest, and the set-piece Lightcycle sequences look like something out of "Fast and Furious 16". Couple that with a plot that makes no sense at all, lead actors you could not pay me to care about, and one of most eye-gouging 3D treatments I've ever seen in a movie, and we have a film worthy of being called the worst of the year. Well done.

[General Havoc]

The Grey

Alternate Title: A Series of Cries in the Dark

One sentence synopsis: The survivors of a plane crash try to escape a pack of man-eating wolves in the wilds of Alaska


Things Havoc liked: Fifteen years ago, Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins starred in a film called "The Edge", about survivors of an airplane crash who must outwit hostile wild animals in Alaska and make it back to civilization. Having apparently decided that the aforementioned film was insufficiently authoritative on the subject, Ridley Scott decided to make another film on the exact same subject, this time starring Liam Neeson and a whole crew of unknown actors, and replacing the Kodiak Bear with a pack of wolves. While this situation certainly lends itself to comments on Hollywood's lack of new ideas, it is worth mentioning that The Grey essentially works itself out to be the movie that The Edge was trying to be.

Directed by Joe Carnahan, an action director known for making awful action movies (The A-Team was his last feature), this film is, astonishingly, nothing of the sort. I've heard it described as a character study, but that's not really accurate either. At times it plays like a horror movie, as our heroes are stalked by a pack of ruthless, almost supernatural wolves (more on that below), and yet at other times it feels like a travelogue of men hiking through the scenic backwoods of Alaska. The pace is slow and deliberate, and the writing on-point and brisk, and the score (one of the best I've heard in a long while) is atmospheric and haunting, particularly during the last third or so, and serves to give the events of the film an almost operatic quality. The cinematography, clearly taking inspiration from the film's title, is bleak and dour, giving us half-glimpsed shadows at the edge of perception that might be figments of our imagination, or more wolves come to devour us. The best comparison I can make is actually with Alien, another excellent Ridley Scott film about a dwindling group of people being stalked by a super-human menace. But while Alien reveled in Geigeresque horror, this film has a dour, almost Bergman-like feel to it.

Liam Neeson is not always the wisest of men when it comes to selecting scripts, and his most recent films (The A-Team, Unknown, Taken, the upcoming Battleship) are mostly brainless action extravaganzas wherein he plays a morose silent badass who efficiently kills everything in sight. This movie takes the same character (here a professional wolf-hunter named John Ottway) and drops him in a setting wherein he's no longer the apex predator. The result is startlingly effective, particularly because the movie surrounds him with other characters (mostly no-name actors), all of whom act and behave the way men in a situation like this might well act. While we get the usual cliches of the disaster-survivor-film genre, including the "braggart who claims to be without fear", "the believer", and "the nerd", none of these archetypes are overplayed. They feel like a bunch of oil workers on the edge of the world, tough men who find themselves in an even tougher situation. The writing does not let any of the characters down, not even Neeson, and gives them lines to say that actually sound like real people might say them. This is more of a rarity in this genre than one might think.



Things Havoc disliked: I hate to be a pedant, but wolves do not work that way.

Yes, wolves do occasionally kill people. I accept this. But no wolves in the history of the world have ever behaved the way the wolves in this film does. No man-eating wolves have ever behaved like this, not even desperate, starving wolves, which these are explicitly not. I get that the film required a legitimate antagonist to threaten the heroes, but the wolves here resemble real ones in the same way the gorillas from Congo do the real thing. While I can accept a certain level of suspension of disbelief for a movie, that these wolves act so unlike real ones in attacking a group of large, armed men risks breaking the immersion that the film has so lovingly created.

It's not just that the wolves attack the men, though that does stand out. The wolves in this film are an almost diabolical force, inexorable and omnipresent. They negotiate cliffs and rivers with ease, pursue the men for days on end with no food or sleep, and the snapshots of their behavior that we see resembles that of a biker gang more than a pack of animals. At one point, one of our heroes is surrounded by dozens of wolves, all of whom back away so that their leader, can finish the human personally in a mano-y-wolfo duel. This isn't an alpha wolf, this is Lord Humongous. Equally, scenes of synchronized funeral howling sound like the filmmakers are trying to find some kind of noble-savage parallel in the wolves. I have no doubt that wolves are smart enough to recognize and mourn their own dead. I doubt, however, that they are able to give choreographed eulogies in the style of Pericles.



Final Thoughts: I'm almost hesitant to cite all of the above as a negative, because while the wolves are plainly not real wolves, the effect that the wolves have within the film really works. About halfway through the film, once I had gotten over my nitpicking objections and the cast had been thinned enough (spoilers!) so that I could keep track of them all properly, the movie began to gel for me in a way I'm not entirely sure I'm equipped to describe. Partly it's the effective, though sparse, use of back-story and character implication in the main and secondary characters, that seems to feed so well into the grim tone the film presents. Characters die in this film in horrible, uncompromising ways, yet the movie doesn't lapse into grimdarkness, nor does one get the sense that the deaths are cynical calculations by filmmakers seeking shock value. As such, the movie succeeds where most of the awful 'cast slowly winnowed by evil monster' films (Anaconda, Deep Blue Sea, Event Horizon) all fail. The last third or so of the movie in particular is brutally, wonderfully effective, thanks in part to an inspired score, and in part to wonderful directorial choices, and the movie's ending, which I will not spoil here, cemented the film for me as a surely-guided work of tremendous skill.

Nothing, on paper, about this movie, points to excellence. I only saw it when I ran out of other films to see. And yet walking out, I knew I had seen a special film. I wasn't then, and still am not now entirely certain that I could articulate why, but this movie might well be the pinnacle of its ill-defined genre, and given that the trailers advertised nothing more than Liam Neeson punching wolves in the face, a most unexpected one.

Final Score: 8/10

[General Havoc]

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Alternate Title: Exactly what it says on the Tin

One sentence synopsis: An elite team of super-spies must stop a madman from starting nuclear war.


Things Havoc liked: Tom Cruise may actually be crazy, but nobody's ever claimed that he was unable to act. With thirty years of action (and non-action) movies under his belt, it's no surprise that in this, the fourth installment of his now-venerable Mission Impossible series, Tom knows exactly what he's doing. I don't mean to imply that he's sleepwalking through it, merely that Cruise looks relaxed and confident as Ethan Hunt in his latest, desperate attempt to avert global catastrophe. For someone who's pushing fifty, the ability to convince an audience that it's really him performing martial arts, running down fugitives, or scaling enormous buildings is not to be taken for granted. Cruise does so effortlessly, and even manages to sell the relatively few dramatic or comedic scenes he's given without much trouble.

Of course it helps to have a good supporting cast. One of the better decisions Cruise made with this film was casting Simon Pegg (of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead fame) as the technical specialist for the team. Pegg plays the funny man on the team, but toes the line between an idiot and a competent agent very effectively, and is responsible for some of the better moments. Meanwhile Jeremy Renner (last seen in The Hurt Locker, and playing Hawkeye in Thor), plays an analyst-turned-field-agent effectively if not spectacularly, delivering at the very least an effective rendition of the material he's given.

One goes to see a Mission Impossible film for action and spy gadgets, and both of these are present here. The action is workmanlike and effectively shot, with none of the ludicrous stupidity of MI2 or 3. No shaky-cam, no insta-cuts, just effective hand to hand and gun fighting most of the way through the movie (even if the accuracy of our heroes' shots is clearly plot-dependent). The gadgetry on offer is actually quite well done. The constant use of retinal scanners becomes a mildly amusing running gag, and a sequence early in the film with a rear-projected screen controlled by an eye-following computer is actually very well done. The best spy gadgets in all these sorts of movies are the ones where the function and limits of the gadgetry are instantly apparent to the audience without need for explanation, and, for the most part, those are the sort that one encounters in this film.



Things Havoc disliked: There are, unfortunately, other things that one expects from a Mission Impossible movie, among them a ludicrous plot, awful "dramatic" moments, and a boring villain. And like the above items, these ones are also present. Central to these issues is Paula Patton, who plays the token female (and minority) agent, and essentially does nothing to rise above those categories. Her attempts to convey anguish over the death of her partner (yes, we're in that territory here) are laughable at best. Given that Cruise is never allowed to emote anything beyond "badass", and Renner nothing beyond morose, she has to carry the dramatic weight (if you can call it that) of the film, and is unable to do so. As Patton was excellent in Precious, I have to conclude that this is because there was simply nothing there to carry.

The Mission Impossible series isn't exactly Godfather, but the original film at least had a plot that was mildly interesting, if only from the sheer complexity of its ludicrous gyrations. Even by the standards of the movies that followed however, this plot is paper thin. The film's villain, played by Michael Nyqvist, has one of the most absurd motivations I've ever seen, even in an action film. At one point we watch footage of him standing up at a scientific conference and publically discussing the positive sides of global nuclear war, a war he apparently decides to start for the purposes of advancing the human species. Why any of his henchmen support him in an effort to exterminate their own nations is left completely unstated. This is the sort of stuff that would be laughed off the set of a bad Bond film.

Yet apparently we are intended to take great interest in this dastardly plot, even as it comes down to the wire in an action sequence so gratuitous and overplayed that I thought for a moment it was meant to be a joke. Pro tip: if the audience starts walking out of the film to take a bathroom break in the middle of your climactic action sequence, you may have made a mistake somewhere along the line. This scene is so absurd, both in terms of the punishment the characters deal to one another, and in terms of the down-to-the-wire pacing it employs, that it destroys the previously effective tone of the action overall, leaving the audience with a bad taste as the film (finally) ends.



Final Thoughts: I skipped seeing this film when it first came out because I was certain I had already seen the entire film from the trailers, and while I've been wrong about such beliefs many times (including last week), I was not wrong here. This movie is exactly what you might expect it to be, an action/spy/adventure film whose pretensions and expectations are kept low. There are occasional flashes of self-awareness or an interesting concept, but they disappear as quickly as they surfaced, and I must conclude that they were added only by accident. This is a make-work film, intended simply to make money and disappear, leaving behind no legacy whatsoever. There is a time and place for such endeavors of course, but bereft of ambition as it was, the movie succeeded only in doing just that. In another five days, I doubt seriously I will remember a thing about it.

Final Score: 5/10

[Charon]

Mission Impossible 2 and 3 killed any desire I had to see MI:4. I liked the pacing and plot of the original. I liked that while it had actiony sequences, there was a lot more mind game going on with events and I really enjoyed the "Who dun it", the betrayals, the double agent maneuvers. It was a good movie. Then two was a blatant bland action movie with spy elements and I was sorely disappointed. Then three looked the exact same and I was even more disappointed. 4 looked like it would continue this trend so I had no desire to see it in the first place.

Concerning other movies. I always kind of enjoyed Coriolanus, so I might have to find that one some time. And I totally need to get some friends together to go watch The Grey.

[General Havoc]

Act of Valor

Alternate Title: Band of Extremely Badass Brothers

One sentence synopsis: A squad of navy SEALs undertakes a series of harrowing missions to stop a Chechen fanatic from launching terror strikes in the US

Things Havoc liked: There is an art to a good action film. Despite what haters of the genre might think, one gun-soaked blood opera is not the same as another, and the classic action films remain classics to this day for specific reasons. As a connoisseur of action films, I feel somewhat qualified to speak to the distinctions between good and bad action, and thus I shall begin by saying that this movie, unquestionably is an example of very good action.

Act of Valor is a strange movie, produced by a couple of documentary filmmakers who decided to convert their project into a fictional film starring very real navy SEALs, men still on active duty whose identities are so secret that their names don't appear in the credits or on any publicity item. The villains and secondary characters are all played by professional actors (though none I recognized), but the men themselves are all men who do precisely this sort of thing for a living, and that lends the film a certain sense of weight it might otherwise not have. Wisely, the filmmakers enhance this effect by making the film look and feel different than the standard action movie. The soldiers are workmanlike and professional, not bombastic, and utter neither one-liners nor catchphrases. When the bullets start flying, they keep command of their voices and emotions, neither screaming like banshees, nor obviously pretending to be calm for the sake of appearances. Briefings are conducted in a normal tone of voice, without either bombast or over-formality (I actually quite liked the CO referring to terrorists as "a group of heavily-armed assholes". When the officer asks for questions after explaining the mission, the men ask questions one might actually ask, as opposed to asking about things they already know so as to provide exposition to the audience. Moreso than any team of movie badasses I've seen before, this unit looks like it could actually be a SEAL team, which probably has something to do with the fact that they actually are one.

The plot is nothing special by the standards of action movies, an evil terrorist who wants to kill Americans, and the virtuous heroes who have to stop him. But as before, it is the adopted realism of the film that sets it apart. The movie opens with a harrowing scene referencing the Belsen School massacre, one of the most horrific atrocities of the modern age. Many films with evil villains only imply the evil as a theoretical possibility, either because they fear to offend, or to obtain a PG-13 rating. This movie makes no such compromises. The villains are evil men, such as we are reminded actually exist in the world, and the heroes we are watching are the real people tasked with destroying them. Their impersonal hatred and calculated cruelty, while never made to appear completely sourceless, is not couched in any way, giving what might be a mindless action scene in another movie weight and interest. The action scenes themselves (to get back to what I began with) are involved and well-shot. Shaky-cam is used sparingly, and many shots are done in a helmet-cam style of perspective viewing. Unlike the pointless video-game analogues in Doom or Resident Evil though, these shots reflect well the chaos of a real battle, and help further ground the film in a realistic style. Though outright gore is kept to a minimum, the movie does not shy away from showing the actual effects of modern infantry weapons on the targets they are used against. Finally, several sequences of non-combat operations, including an excellent (non-enhanced) interrogation scene, are done very well, grounding the film in the overall sense that we are watching the way things actually operate in the real world.



Things Havoc disliked: As I mentioned before, these are not professional actors, and it shows. The dialogue sequences, when not involved with the technical details of combat and preparations for more combat are badly stilted and hollow, emoted as they are by men who are trying their best, but clearly have no idea how to act. Line delivery in the civilian sequences is middling-to-poor, particularly at the beginning of the film, when we are meeting (briefly) our heroes, and seeing them live their "normal" lives. Given the contrast between this and the workmanlike delivery we get during the actual action, I must conclude either that A: the writing for these civilian scenes was pretty poor, and spiced up by the SEALs themselves when it got to the finer points of combat, B: the men were simply better able to emote lines that had relevance to their actual lives (fighting and combat communications), or C: both.

The story, meanwhile, is pretty lackluster as well. Tearful farewells as our heroes go out to place their lives on the line, calls back home to see how everyone is getting on without them, much flag symbolism and patriotic horn music, you all know the drill. A deep analysis on the roots of war this ain't. Instead, the film is a love letter to the special forces of the US Navy, and plays (and feels) like the recruitment film I suspect it originally was. The shocking, brutal violence of the bad guys contrasting with the down-home, aw-shucks patriotism of our clean-cut heroes makes the film play like a slightly more modern version of John Wayne's "Green Berets", and we are left waiting for the filmmaker to stop trying to convince us that he loves America sufficiently and get back to the meat and potatoes.



Final Thoughts: It's very easy to be cynical about a film like this, where the patriotism is front-and-center, and the lines so clearly drawn between good and evil. Many of the professional reviewers (Ebert included, of course), have done just that at length. But lest I sound like I'm beginning another rant, I would like to propose that just because Platoon was an amazing film does not mean that every war movie needs to be Platoon. In the world of today, when shocking and senseless violence perpetrated by men whose motivations seem unfathomable to most of us can occur at any time, a movie like this, purporting to show the world as seen from the eyes of the men who actually fight the War on Terror, may well have a place. The action sequences in this film are some of the best I have seen in a long time, easily beating out the over-scripted eye-candy one finds from the average blockbuster, and I'll admit, it is somewhat refreshing to occasionally see the same level of uncompromising glare turned on the enemies of the US as is so often turned on the US itself.

One can accuse this film of many things, but despite the over-patriotic undertone and the simplistic story, mindlessness is not one of them. This is a film made by people deeply associated with the subject matter in question, and their expertise and desire to represent the heroism of these elite soldiers shines through, and redeems what might otherwise be just another jingoistic exercise in nationalism. Ultimately, I can't say this was a great film, but I can say that, despite appearances, it was not something I had ever seen before, and if it influences the direction military-action movies take in the future, I think we might all be the better for it.

Final Score: 7/10

[General Havoc]

And now for something completely different

One of the things one notices after watching films for long enough is that movies have their seasons, just like fruit. There is Oscar Season, late in the year, when the studios release the movies they think have the best chance of garnering awards from both the Academy and other ceremonies. There is Blockbuster Season, generally from mid-May to late September, when the schools are out and the studios drop their big-budget action and effects showpieces to rake in as big of a young-male demographic as possible. And then we have the period I like to call "The Doldrums".

The Doldrums stretch from February through April, and consist of the period when most studios drop the movies that they think, in-house, cannot compete with either the Oscar-dramas of late fall, or the blockbusters of high summer. These are the films that, for one reason or another, have not inspired faith from their own producers, and are therefore released against as little competition as possible, in the hope that the sheer lack of anything else worth seeing will enable them to do well. Studios don't always know what they have on their hands, and sometimes a movie can be relegated to the Doldrums by mistake, because of studio politics, or just lack of imagination on the part of bosses. But that said, most films wind up in the Doldrums because they're total crap.

Last year, just as an example, the Doldrums brought us such scintillating films as Tron Legacy, Battle Los Angeles, and Suckerpunch (which I loved, but I admit is clearly a bad film). This year, the Doldrums have already given me Red Tails (an early candidate for worst film of the decade), Mission Impossible 4, and would have given me several more turds had I not managed to stretch out Oscar season deep into February. Looking ahead, I have to look forward to such shining lights as Battleship, 21 Jump Street, This Means War, and the Lorax, all of which are either currently in or about to enter theaters. Having exhausted most of the hidden gems I can sense coming (there's always a few) and with six weeks minimum of the Doldrums left to go, my stated goal of a film a week is likely to lead me into unpleasant places in the near future.

Which is all a fancy way of explaining why, this week, I wrung a little bit more moisture out of the last remnants of Oscar Season by going to see all five of the Academy Award-nominated Live-action short films. My alternatives were on the order of Tyler Perry's Good Deeds. Sue me.



Pentecost: Shortest and thinnest of the bunch, this 11-minute send-up to a single joke is kind of out of place, given its fellows. The story (if you can call it that) is about an irish altar boy who is preparing to "perform" (what do you call what altar boys do?) at a particularly important mass in his home parish. The movie essentially plays like a particularly long Monty-Python joke, with the priests and deacons speaking about the boys like they're the coaches of a soccer team. The soundtrack is excellent, and actors have good comic timing and expressions, but there doesn't seem to be much point to it all.
6/10

Raju: The most "Oscar-like" of the movies by far, and the one I was certain had won the award until I got home and found out that it had not, Raju is about a German couple who goes to India to adopt an orphan, only to find themselves in the middle of a corrupt kidnapping ring. The write-up makes it sound like an action film, which it is not, as well as an unflattering portrait of India's society, poverty, and problems with corruption, which it absolutely is. Very well-acted and shot, the film is quite uncomfortable to watch, and gets across the utter alienness of a place like Calcutta (to a westerner at least), as well as the ugly reality of many "charities" in the third world.
7.5/10

The Shore: Longest of the five movies, and the one that actually did win the award, this movie stars Ciarán Hinds (aka Gaius Julius Caesar) as a Northern Irishman returning home for the first time in 25 years, and re-uniting with his ex-fiance and best friend. A careful, gently meandering film, centered around a legitimately funny sequence involving misunderstandings, mussel collectors, and a horse, the movie doesn't have much of a point to make really, save that Ireland is pretty and it's good to forgive people. A decent film, but light on substance, and I admit to being surprised that the Academy chose it.
6.5/10

Timefreak: A hilarious send-up to movies like Back to the Future or Primer, this one's about a guy who invents a Time Machine and begins obsessively returning to the previous day to "get everything right". Very brisk and tight, the movie gets a lot across purely with its editing, and compresses what feels like a longer movie's worth of material into an eleven-minute running time. Michael Nathanson, playing the lead, gets the mad-scientist role down pat, and the film's ending is perfect for its style. A real gem.
8/10

Tuba Atlantic: A movie like this could somehow only come from Norway. An old man finds out he has six days to live, and tries to complete his life's work with the help of an "Angel of Death", a young girl sent to keep company of the dying by her church group. Despite the subject matter, this is the funniest by far of the five films, if only because it grants us the sight of an octogenarian massacring seagulls with dynamite and a machine gun. Twisted and yet oddball, this is one of the least morose dying-films I've ever seen, and is filled with dark comedy, hilarious one-liners (made more hilarious, I must admit, by how odd Norwegian sounds to my American ear), and a completely ludicrous premise taken to its illogical extreme by the end of the film. My personal selection as best of the bunch, and by itself worth the price of admission.
8.5/10

[General Havoc]

John Carter

Alternate Title: Last Samurai of Mars

One sentence synopsis: A confederate veteran is transported to Mars and tries to stop an evil warlord and his shadowy backers.

Things Havoc liked: I know nothing of the Barsoom saga. Edgar Rice Burroughs has gone unread by me to-date. As such, I have no conception of what the source material for this film was supposed to look like, nor what was and wasn't cut out of it to make it fit. Based on what research I've done, several books were concatenated together and turned into this one screenplay, but I'm not here to evaluate how good of a job they did. I'm here to evaluate the film they produced, irrespective of how faithful it was.

Let's start with the cast. To begin with, this movie starts out by giving me the dynamic duo of Ciaran Hinds and James Purefoy as Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius, (although for some reason they insist on calling them Tardos Mors and Kantos Kan) respectively King of the city of Helium, and his chief Lieutenant. The very concept of putting those two together in roles like this is the sort of terrible bribe that film-makers use when they want me to be nice to them, and I am helpless to resist grinning like an idiot every time I saw either one on screen (particularly when they do awesome things. 'Take me hostage' was a hoot). They are menaced by the evil Dominic West (of the Wire), playing a ruthless general given a god-like weapon by Mark Strong (of general badassery) and his band of evil shapeshifters. These characters are both stock and ridiculous, but these actors are so much fun to watch that they pull it off regardless. Hinds screaming that he has no choice but to act the way he does, Purefoy being a smarmy badass, West mugging for the camera evilly, or Strong exuding his typical bad-guy charm are all things I love seeing when I go to the movies. Any film that gives me all of the above can't be doing too much wrong.

But the humans are only one half of Barsoom's characters. There are also the Thark, giant-sized four-armed barbarian aliens whose society is if anything even more important than the human (Martian, whatever). CGI is nothing special anymore, but the characters we are presented with in this one are actually characters, identifiable despite their visual similarity. The king of the Tharks is voiced by Willam Defoe, a strange man whose work is always a pleasure to watch, and he infuses Tars Tarkas with a real personality that shines through the CGI effortlessly. The Tharks overall are well designed, still looking quite alien while retaining enough humanizing traits for us to appreciate their characters, and the movie actually spends quite a bit of time on their society, giving us a good picture of a coherent alien species without lapsing too far into base caricature.

The overall design of this film is awesome. The rival cities of Helium and Zodanga are instantly distinctive, both from themselves and everything else on Earth. Costumes, sets, props, vehicles, weapons, everything seems consistent and wonderfully detailed, even if the practicality of many of these things is an open question. The sense is almost Lord-of-the-Rings-like, in terms of a larger world with greater detail than we are presently being shown, giving the film a grounding it may not normally deserve. Monsters and creatures are reasonably interesting, particularly the large six-legged hyper-speed dog-like creature that Carter adopts as part of his campaign across Barsoom.

The action, an important element in a film like this, varies from decent to awesome. One sequence in particular, an all-out brawl featuring our hero against a horde of multi-limbed giants, is damn near awe-inspiring (thanks to excellent direction and editing choices). Even the fights that aren't amazing are at least very competent. Why everyone is running around with swords when there are flying machines, cannons and guns is unclear, but this is clearly the sort of movie wherein one is intended to simply accept that cool shit is happening for the sake of being cool. I'm honestly okay with that.



Things Havoc disliked: Taylor Kitsch can't act.

He couldn't act in Wolverine, couldn't act in Snakes on a Plane, won't be acting in Battleship (I feel safe in this prediction), and could not act here. And given that Kitsch is playing the titular John Carter of Mars, that's something of a problem. We'll ignore the fact that his Virginian accent was less convincing than mine (assuming he was even trying to produce one). The speeches he has to give are completely unconvincing, particularly in the second half of the film, where he is required to address large crowds of Martians and sway them to his side. I have gotten to the point where I can tell when a bad line is the fault of the screenwriter, and when it is the fault of the actor, and while the script of this film is nothing to write home about, in this case it's Kitsch who lets the writing down with a boring, uninvolved, and plodding performance that makes Cowboys and Aliens look exciting. Whoever decided that this man should be the lead and not any one of a dozen others I could mention needs to turn in their casting license.

Leaving the main character aside for a moment, the plot here was nothing to write home about. I know this is an old story, one that literally invented many of the cliches that we are now so tired of, and there were some shots and elements that attempted to freshen the matter (I liked the "reciting the qualifications of our hero" sequence at the beginning of the film), but frankly, pointing at the age of the source material is not an excuse for making a lackluster plot. If your problem is that audiences have seen all of this before, then it is your responsibility as filmmakers to ensure that this time they see it in a new way, or with a fresh twist. Not enough effort was done to do that in this film, and so it winds up coming across as competently done, but a story we've all seen before.



Final Thoughts: I had very low expectations for this one going into it. A March release date for an action movie in particular is a sign not just of lack of faith but full-on panic on the part of the studio heads, who are signalling that this film can't compete with the likes of Dark Knight Rises or Avengers. And while they're ultimately right about that, the movie isn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be. It's not some transcendent masterpiece that shines above its genre, but despite the boring plot and terrible main character, there's real quality buried in this film. I didn't like it as much as some of my fellows did, but neither did I hate it as much as many of the professional critics. Go figure.

Final Score: 6.5/10

[frigidmagi]

Who would you have cast for John Carter, Havoc?

[Josh]

My question is "Was Dominic West doing his natural accent, or his very bad B-more accent from the Wire that he regularly would slip out of?"