Another stoppage

This would be a review of Chronicle if I were into doing this anymore.  I can’t keep up this pace at all.  Between work and catching up on TV and video games and my passion for watching tonnes of movies dwindling, it keeps getting harder and harder to devote time to not just these reviews, but watching the films in the first place.  Not to mention that my singular passion is currently being spent on pining for someone I shouldn’t (at this point, at least).  Perhaps I’ll take this back up when the inevitable blow up happens and instead of trying to pursue romantic entanglements and developing a personal life, I just hunker down in my bunker and watch loads and loads of movies again.

Rest assured that I’ll probably update this with new movies I’ve seen or older ones as well.  Probably.  Thank you to all my loyal readers, and hopefully this doesn’t disappoint you too much.

The Iron Lady (2011)

I’ve gone on some pretty angry Oscar-award-winning-movie diatribes on this blog in the past (mostly about how undeserving The King’s Speech was as a Best Picture winner), but usually I can grant that some terribly average movies contain great performances.  I have dubbed this The Monster Syndrome, based on Charlize Theron’s amazing performance in an otherwise average film.  When Meryl Streep was nominated for her performance as Margaret Thatcher in this film, well a lot of us just thought it was a nomination brought on by the vast respect that everyone has for Streep’s career.  Personally, I felt that Viola Davis was going to win for her performance in The Help but nope, only Octavia Spencer (deservedly) won an Oscar for that movie.

This biopic of Thatcher is somewhat unusual and controversial in that Thatcher is still alive, and – according to this film – in the throes of dementia, prone to extended flashbacks of her past life as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.  That about sums up the entire film, and if it weren’t for Streep’s performance, it would easily be about the quality of a TV movie.  Well, Streep’s performance and the presence of some other solid British actors, most notably (for me) Anthony Head.  Giles, from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”!  He simply must be cast in more movies, there is no excuse for it (other than he has a disturbing ability to facially transform into Christopher Walken).

Would I recommend this to anyone?  No, unless you simply must watch every Best Actress Oscar-winning performance ever, then yes, fine, clearly you have to watch it.  But it’s boring, and occasionally trite, just an average film for me.

2.5 / 5

Super Troopers (2002)

Hey, I just re-watched this and what I wrote in the long ago still holds water, so yup, I copied and pasted it and here it is.  I hope you enjoy.

Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar and written by Jay and the rest of the Broken Lizard comedy troupe, Super Troopers is about a Highway Patrol team trying to save their jobs amid budget cutbacks threatening their livelihood. The Troopers are a fun-loving gang that try to enjoy their jobs as much as possible, especially when they come up against the local cops who seem to be of the idiot persuasion. When a murder victim is found by the highway with an Afghanimation monkey tattooed on her neck, the Highway Patrol Captain John O’Hagen (Brian Cox) wants the boys to solve the case so they can curry some favour from the Govenor (Lynda Carter) so she doesn’t shut them down.

There are a few other plotlines involving all of the main cast, with Trooper Foster (Paul Soter) wanting to date Officer Ursula (Marisa Coughlan), no one seeming to know what ethnic descent Trooper Ramathorn (Chandrasekhar) is, the rookie Trooper Rabbit (Erik Stolhanske) fitting in with the rest of the crew, etc. The cast writes to each of their strengths for the most part, though I don’t know if Kevin Heffernan is as big of an asshole in real life as he is as Trooper Farva. It’s quite amazing that you can buy him as the romantic lead in Broken Lizard’s Club Dread movie that followed this one. These guys are talented improv comedy actors, even if you couldn’t pick any one of them out of a crowd.

Despite all that building up by me, the movie is essentially of the dick ‘n fart joke genre, though more Kevin Smith-y than Van Wilder-y. Or I could just be typing out of my ass here, it doesn’t matter. I enjoyed it when I originally saw it in the theatre and it still holds up years later as an entertaining movie. The cast has tremendous chemistry and you can tell they had the time of their lives making this movie. Even though the budget was only $3 million, it looks pretty good and ended up raking in six times its budget in box office gross. Yeah I know, that’s only $18 million, but that’s also enormously profitable. That has nothing to do with the quality of the movie, but it’s just a little nugget I wanted to share with you. Bigger budgets don’t always equal better movies.

3.5 / 5

The Dark Knight (2008)

With The Dark Knight Rises releasing in less than two months, I figured the best way to get more hits would be to actually have a Dark Knight review up, and my old one went into far greater detail than a new one of mine would, so here it is:

The Dark Knight begins around six months after the events in Batman Begins, with Batman (Christian Bale) finally taking care of most of the criminal trash from Begins.  There’s a new District Attorney in town by the name of Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), and he’s being proclaimed as Gotham City’s white knight, bound and determined to clean up the police force and the streets.  The newest terror enveloping the city comes in the form of a killer clown, a rampaging murderous criminal that pisses off the established mafia as much as he terrifies the citizenry.  The Joker (Heath Ledger) has been waging a humanistic war on the morality of Batman’s vigilantism, while further plunging the city into a desperate state of decay.  Or I could just describe it as “Batman.  The Joker.  Two-Face.  It’s not Batman Forever.” and that should be enough to give even the most jaded fanboy a shiver of anticipation.

What director Christopher Nolan crafts in two and a half hours is, in a word, breathtaking.  He gives us amazing action sequences and thoughtful meditations on what makes a hero a hero.  Some of those meditations might actually be too thoughtful for the megaplex crowd, since most comic book blockbusters aren’t really known for being too cerebral.  As well, it’s not the most colourful of movies, and while I appreciate the dark look and tones of the film, it makes for some confusing and occasionally muddled fight scenes (thankfully viewing it on Blu-Ray cleans it all up).

Christian Bale continues to be able to deliver two separate and believable performances as both Batman and his secret identity, millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne.  Maggie Gyllenhaal takes over the part of Rachel Dawes that Katie Holmes previously portrayed, and well, it’s essentially a damsel-in-distress role, what with Rachel becoming the girlfriend of Harvey Dent and the transformation of Dent into Two-Face looming over the whole relationship.  I really hope no one is spoiled by the fact that Harvey Dent actually turns into Two-Face, and oh by the way, Aaron Eckhart deserves some high praise as well for the grey areas he put into his portrayal of Dent / Two-Face.  He’s transformed but he doesn’t suddenly become insane, just righteously pissed off.

Michael Caine as Alfred and Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox are two supporting players you never have to worry about and they performed admirably well, hitting all the right notes for their father figure character types.  Speaking of father figures, Gary Oldman is even more perfect as Jim Gordon than he was in Begins, and I don’t think enough things are being said about his performance since most of the audience only wants to see the freak show.

If you’re wondering whether or not the advance billing for Heath Ledger’s performance lives up to the product on the screen, well no matter how amazing you thought it may be, it will most likely surpass those levels.  Ledger’s fearless portrayal of the Clown Prince of Crime is one of the most nerve-twitching, eye-catching, depraved and darkly hilarious acting displays in recent memory.  The previous year had Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, and even Chigurh would be a little off-put by Ledger’s Joker.  There is little doubt in my mind that come next March, Heath Ledger will be awarded a posthumous Oscar for his part in The Dark Knight (and of course he was).

I’ve tried not to get myself all excited for movies these days, as too many disappointments have dampened many of my old fanboy tendencies.  The Dark Knight was the one exception, and I have to say that it lived up to the hype.  As an old school comic book fan and as a movie czar, I can appreciate it on both levels.  Christopher Nolan could spend the rest of his career making Batman movies and I doubt that I’d ever be disappointed by them.

5 / 5

Memento (2000)

Full confession here: this is only the second time I’ve watched Memento.  It has been over a decade since I first watched it, and I sort of planned that way.  I wanted to have only the vaguest of recollections when I watched it for the second time, so it could be new to me again and that I could experience the mystery of it all over again.  And it worked, to a point.  I started remembering little details, but for the most part I just sat back in awe at what a tremendous filmmaker director Christopher Nolan has been for his entire career.

If you don’t know the plot line for Memento, well it concerns Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), a man who suffers from short term memory loss.  There was an incident, and since that incident, he has been unable to form new memories.  You can talk to him for an hour and then see him the next day and he’ll have no recollection of that conversation.  Shelby is searching for the man that killed his wife (Jorja Fox), and since he can’t remember the facts he discovers, he develops a system of notes and tattoos to fill in the cavernous gaps in his memory.

The film is shown both in and out of chronological order, almost similar to what Irréversible did, minus the horrible 10-minute long rape scene.  If you haven’t seen it yet, any clues I drop here will potentially lead to the movie having less of an impact on you.  It is a masterful film, and one that I would say benefits from multiple viewings if I had not just taken a decade long break from watching it again.  Nolan gives us many clues throughout the movie, and it certainly invites a person to pay close attention to the details.  Pearce is off the charts excellent in his performance, and the movie itself should be required viewing for everyone that are sick of films that are basically commercials and don’t challenge you in the least.

5 / 5

Insomnia (2002)

I have suffered from insomnia all of my life.  Until a couple of years ago, I just classed it as insomnia, but then I Wiki’d it and I self-diagnosed myself as having something called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome.  Basically, if it’s before midnight when I try to go to sleep, I’m going to toss and turn until then anyways, so I tend to keep late hours.  Unless I’m drop dead exhausted, I can’t fall asleep before then, so I don’t even bother trying.  Then there are the nights where I just can’t fall asleep, and those nights are the worst.  I know I have to get up at an early hour for work, but my brain will not go into that sleep cycle.  This is especially worse on nights when I haven’t had any alcohol.  I’m trying to find a way to segue from my own insomnia to talking about the film Insomnia but I’m just not getting there, it’s just a journal entry on my own misery, the bleakness that I feel when I can’t just go the fuck to sleep.  THERE, I found the segue way!

The film Insomnia takes place in a place called Nightmute, Alaska which goes through months-long periods of daylight or darkness, depending on the time of year.  Now sleeping at night is mostly a psychological thing, since we’ve been trained all our life to sleep when it gets dark out, that is when we sleep.  It’s not a required sleeping time period or anything, it’s just how we all function for the most part.  Sure, there are people out there that are on graveyard shifts that have to function oppositely, but there’s a bit of an acclimation period for that.  We humans can adapt to pretty much anything.  It’s an important plot detail, as Will Dormer (Al Pacino) is an LA detective brought up to Nightmute to help solve a recent murder, and he never gets a wink of sleep in the week long period of the movie.

Sleep deprivation is extremely damaging, as our brains need time to rest and decompress, which is why if you stay awake long enough, your dreams will start to invade your waking moments.  Or hallucinations, whatever you want to call them.  Holy shit, let me talk about the movie here.  It’s another masterful Christopher Nolan-directed film, and it expertly builds tension through Dormer’s desperation for solving the murder and to just get some shut eye.  There are other external forces at work, but you should really watch the film and discover them for yourselves.  I’m of the contention that Nolan is the greatest living director right now, and he’s one of the few that I will happily plunk down money for.

This movie might move a bit too slow for some audiences, but it’s an effective tool in building the tension and it’s an excellent movie all around.  Gorgeous cinematography, and I’m definitely going to have to pick it up on Blu-Ray someday.

4.5 / 5

The Prestige (2006)

I wrote this review up a few years back, and the movie still holds up the exact same way for me, so here’s that review with slight edits.

When The Prestige first started playing, I was immediately worried that Christopher Nolan was going back to the Memento well, starting a movie with the ending and so forth. My fears were put to rest soon enough, as I grew familiar with the non-linear story structure and immersed myself into the magical world Nolan crafted for this film. Essentially the movie is all about the obsession two magicians have with besting the other in their chosen field. Former partners Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) head off in different directions after breaking away from magician ringleader Cutter (Michael Caine). Angier is a natural showman and while his tricks aren’t of the cutting edge variety, he’s a far better entertainer than Borden is at first. Borden’s got a few tricks up his sleeve though, one of which completely mystifies Angier to the point of stealing it and adapting it for his own show.

That’s all the backstory you get. The rest is shrouded in mystery for now… unless you’ve seen the movie of course. Let’s get it out of the way now, yes, it’s Batman vs. Wolverine. Christian Bale brings his trademark A game to the part of Borden, giving him a shady feel to the point where you wonder just how far he’ll go to triumph over Angier. It makes you wonder exactly what you were witness to in that first big scene, the real ending or a variation on it. Jackman is fairly decent as the relatively upper crust magician, though at no point in the movie are you sure whom you should be rooting for.

As you may have read elsewhere, the twist is somewhat predictable but in a fairly good way. It’s not a cheat by any means, there were hints dropped throughout the movie and it bears mentioning that this movie demands a second viewing.  There are wonderful performances throughout, the story is fantastic, the supporting cast is excellent and David Bowie is tremendous in his small part. The movie looks gorgeous, capturing the perfect moods for every scene.  The one thing I didn’t like was the constant one-up-manship that reached a ridiculous level late in the movie. Yeah, I get that they’re both smart and cunning, but apparently not smart enough to allow the same trick to be played on each other.

4.5 / 5

Tropic Thunder (2008)

Generally speaking, movies about the inner workings of Hollywood and how fake the industry is usually don’t too well at the box office.  Sure, they’ll be critically acclaimed and such, but for the most part it seems that audiences don’t care about how movies are made, they just like the movies.  And most audiences like terrible movies.  How else can you explain a painfully average and boring film like Avatar becoming the #1 grossing movie of all time?  The championing of mediocrity and the higher cost of 3D movie tickets I guess would also be completely plausible reasons, but in my opinion it was just catering to the marketplace, and the market loves unchallenging shit.  Anyways, rant over, let’s talk about Tropic Thunder.

Directed and co-written by star Ben Stiller, it’s a sorta spoof of the movie industry that touches on numerous topics.  Endorsement deals, revenue streams, awards baiting, method acting, contract riders, all those and numerous other topics are touched upon, in some cases almost too spot on.  Robert Downey, Jr. actually scored a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his performance as Kirk Lazarus, an Australian method actor who performs in blackface for almost the entirety of the film.  There was no way Downey was going to win, as this was the same year that Heath Ledger’s phenomenal Joker performance in The Dark Knight was released.  Still, props to the Academy for legitimizing that role of Downey’s.

I’m not going to go into too much detail about the plot of the movie, because you’ve probably heard about it by now, and it just comes across as preposterous.  The strength of the movie is in the performances, and actors knowing their role and playing to it.  Stiller’s character of Tugg Speedman is probably the most on-the-nose role in the movie, and if he wasn’t surrounded by an able supporting cast, honestly, the movie wouldn’t be as good as it is.

As it stands, it’s not a perfect movie by any means, but it is highly enjoyable and one that certainly lends itself to multiple viewings (do yourself a favour and watch it with Downey’s commentary at least once, the man is a national treasure).

3.5 / 5

Haywire (2012)

Remember No Holds Barred?  Come on, of course you do.  The entire movie was centred around catapulting Hulk Hogan into the pop culture stratosphere.  He was a pro wrestling icon at that point, and of course the easiest role for him to play would be a world famous wrestler and then $$$$, right?  No.  It fucking sucked and people actually said they couldn’t buy him as a pro wrestler in the movie, even though that is what he was.  Did it make him a huge movie star?  No, he is not starring in The Expendables 2: Expending All Over Your Asses like other action hero icons of the ’80s.  So I was super skeptical when it was announced that MMA athlete/fighter/whatever they call them Gina Carano was going to be acting in a Steven Soderbergh movie.  Not because of Hulk Hogan, but because Carano’s career didn’t really seem to jive with most of the Soderbergh movies I had seen.

Generally speaking, a Soderbergh movie can sometimes come off as too clever for its own good.  Yes, Ocean’s Eleven was a super great movie, and Out of Sight is still in my All Time Top Five Movies, but Soderbergh has also bravely misstepped.  To be fair, none of his missteps were altogether awful, they were just average movies, something we didn’t expect from him.  Haywire is somewhere along those lines.

It’s a sorta spy thriller focused almost entirely upon Mallory Kane (Carano), an ass-kicking agent working for some agency doing some sort of agent-y things for shady people.  Seriously, Carano is onscreen for probably 80% of the film, and she’s almost James Bond-esque.  You never truly believe she’s in any danger because she is MALLORY KANE.  The movie is a vehicle for her to achieve success in another type of arena than MMA.  The part wasn’t created for her only because she is a legit ass-kicker, but also because duh, she’s an attractive woman.

Unfortunately, the movie never really showcases that playful side of her.  It’s a fairly paint by the numbers spy thriller / intrigue film, with some decent action set pieces, but ultimately so dry that it’s almost lifeless.  There’s no suspense because MALLORY KANE owns all.  I enjoyed it, but it was pretty much exactly what I expected from it, though I had no idea so many great actors were in the cast.

3 / 5

Contraband (2012)

Americanized remakes of foreign films are sometimes just an excercise in pointlessness.  There are very few instances that I can recall off the top of my head where the American version actually accomplished something that the original foreign devils version didn’t.  I’m only speaking from experience here, those being the movies that I’ve seen both versions of, like Quarantine/[REC] or Let the Right One In/Let Me In and even the two The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movies.  I’m sure there are many more that aren’t coming to my mind right now, but the point is that most of the time, the foreign versions are the better ones.  For some subtle reasons, I enjoyed Let Me In better than the original, same with [REC].    Anyways, Contraband is a remake of Reykjavík-Rotterdam which I’ve never seen, so I’m just judging it on its own merit.

Now I’m not a Mark Wahlberg fan at the best of times, so I wasn’t expecting anything great out of this film.  He plays a former smuggler who has gone straight, opening up his own security business and having a hot wife (Kate Beckinsale) and kids and shit, you know where it’s going from here.  Hot wife’s little brother (Caleb Landry Jones) gets in trouble smuggling and dumps the product so he owes the dealer (Giovanni Ribisi) for the dumped product and etc. etc. ONE LAST JOB.  It’s not a terribly inventive premise at all, but whatever, most movies aren’t terribly inventive at all.

I will give this to Contraband: it wasn’t completely boring and bland, and it wasn’t hate-worthy.  You’ve got a solid supporting cast with Ribisi, J.K. Simmons and Ben Foster providing the acting chops, and everything else is predictable window dressing.  But it’s not terrible.  You know what will happen, you can probably write this stuff yourself.  For the most part, the film overachieves because I really expected full-on suckitude, but it was merely alright.

3 / 5