Attack the Block

A great cast of mostly fresh faces in "Attack the Block"

**** out of ****

It is hard to express where my satisfaction comes from when viewing a film like "Attack the Block".  Here we have an alien attack movie in a creative unlikely setting containing the suspense and humor of one of those all-in-one-night John Carpenter films. This time, the setting is a rough neighborhood South London. The heroes: a gang of young delinquents and the nurse they just mugged. The aliens they are up against are simple in design, yet amazingly original.

This setup was so good, I was waiting for it to collapse. Didn't happen.

This flick stays awesome from beginning to end. The inner-city atmosphere is intense, the music is rad, and the violence is plenty-gory.  

I really liked the cast of this film. I can only think of two actors who I'd seen before. The young thugs are all fresh faces to me and I like it that way because the teenagers need to look genuinely young and free of an audience with preconceived notions of who they are except for a bunch of bad kids who will turn heroic. 

Another fresh aspect of this movie is it's writer director, Joe Cornish, who used to do work with Edgar Wright. Wright is a producer on this project and it is easy to associate it with his type of genre-bending comedies like "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz". Cornish still has a style that is somewhat different. There is obviously a strong desire on his part to portray the inner-city underworld and it's surroundings realistically. 

According to this movie's trivia section on IMDB, Cornish did in fact grow up in South London and was inspired to write this film after being mugged by a group of teens. 

Listen to David Edelstein review and compare "Cowboys and Aliens" and this film.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Motion capture of Andy Serkis and brilliant CGI from WETA create Caesar in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes"

***1/2 out of ****

In the scheme of reboots, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" had my interest right away when I heard that this new movie wouldn't be yet another remake of the original 1968 lost astronaut story. It was going to be closer to a remake of the fourth film in the original film series ("Conquest of the Planet of the Apes") which was about an intelligent ape named Caesar who started an uprising of Apes against humanity.

I suppose this is delving into another resented current movie trend, prequels and origin story reboots. I walked into this film with the same expectations I had when I went to see "X-Men: First Class": I want this to be good but it probably won't be.

Thank God. I really liked this one.

Let's get the bad out of the way first. "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" is filled with laughable science, a corporate villain among other archetypical human characters, morally simplistic cliched bits of dialogue, a few segments of computer animated overkill, and one or two references to the original film that were cringe-worthy.

Now let me release my love. At the center of what may have been a banal movie is the human-level intelligent ape, Caesar, who is the result of animal testing at a giant pharmaceutical company which has been looking for a cure to Alzheimer's and other degenerative brain diseases.

Caesar is brought to life on the screen by Peter Jackson's special effects house WETA using state-of-the-art motion capture animation through actor Andy Serkis (Listen to an interview here). This collaboration of actor and technicians helped bring Gollum and Kong to life in movies we've seen before. Like the other two characters, the CGI isn't necessarily seamless but it is effective.

What makes this a beautiful and tragic new origin story to the "Planet of the Apes" franchise is how it all begins with a story about a loving father-son relationship between a man and an ape and how the intelligent ape's resentment for the treatment of his kind in the outside world leads him to be a revolutionary in spite of how much he may love his surrogate father.

Keith Phipps of AV Club calls him an ape Che Guevara

Unlike other back-stories, it doesn't get greedy by trying to cram everything in at once. This movie was simply about a group apes being led to freedom and fighting anything that gets in their way. By the end they haven't even thought of taking over the world.

The film has us rooting for the apes and not the humans. I love that. Check out this Half in the Bag conversation.

The efforts of writing, acting, and direction all seem to be at the top of their game during the many scenes in this film featuring mute animals. When viewing these scenes, I felt like I was watching a great animated movie. Action and emotion can be so much more powerful when there is no dialogue.

This is a summer popcorn-movie the way I like it. I am tired of the notion that a blockbuster can make up for it's lack of intelligence by being convoluted and long. That's not entertainment. That's just a headache. This movie may not be brilliant, but it has tone! It actually contains a story arc! It reserves it's action with emotional buildup so that when the payoff comes, the results are gratifying. It's less than two hours and with a well-paced story, it never seems to waste it's time.

X-Men: First Class

Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy among other talented actors.

** out of ****

X-Men: First Class is trying to be a prequel, a throwback to the sixties, a special effects action thriller, the story of Charles Xavier, the story of Magneto, the story of Mystique, The story of Beast, and a new entertainingly different outing for the X-Men franchise. I didn't think it achieved at any of those things. It was just kind of lazy in every area where it had potential.

As a prequel it ties itself to the other films by playing a modified version of the scene which began Bryan Singer's "X-Men" (2000). It then continues by expanding on the history of the film's characters and within minutes it is already making huge story contradictions to not only the other X-Men movies, but X-Men in general.
According to this movie Hank McCoy invented Cerebro, Mystique and Xavier had their mutant powers far before puberty, and Xavier and Magneto's friendship lasted a matter of weeks before going their separate ways. Maybe all of this would have worked as a reboot if it hadn't made such a bold cinematic declaration to be perceived as a prequel.

This is one of those movies that I simply hoped would be good but I had doubts. The most hopeful possibility was that this film would have a lot of fun with its 1960s setting. Well kind of, but not enough. Would this movie have a kind of technicolor vibrancy and brassy soundtrack of a James Bond movie? No. That would have been cool. This movie just felt a little too modern. The music sounded pretty similar to the score to the first "Iron Man". Havok has spiked blond hair and uses the word "badass".  Actors really don't attempt to change their modality to fit the way people acted in sixties movies. We are occasionally thrown in something like President Kennedy speaking on TV or someone saying "Groovy" to remind us which decade we're in.

The effects, for the most part, are substandard for a big-budget endeavor. Some are okay, some look awful. and none of them have a very natural look. It kind had the look of a SyFy TV movie

The real problem here is that the movie juggles multiple character's stories at once and none of them feel as strong as they should. The casting and performances are unmistakably good but the writing and direction are very unfocused. Scenes feel rushed and never help the movie develop a tone.  I only know a little bit about the X-Men mythology and I know that the friendship which once existed between future rivals Xavier and Magneto was supposed to be strong. Reducing it to a short period of time was one mistake but the bigger mistake was having Mystique and Xavier grow up together. Wouldn't that make her the great friend Xavier lost?

Prequelitus: The case of a back-story falling into a formula where incidents happen and character's make decisions which seem unnatural or forced in order to fulfill the obligation of bridging with the original story. See "Star Wars: Episode III"

What I really didn't understand with this movie was why every character had to meet his or her destiny within a month-long time-frame. Characters make life-altering decisions on a whim and physical transformations happen out of necessity. We get it: All of these people, by the end, have found the identity they are still standing with fifty years later. Did Xavier need to make a joke about 'losing his hair some day'?

Finally comes the most important issue for any moviegoer: It doesn't stand alone that well either. The film's villain has intentions hardly different from Magneto's in the other X-Men films. The theme of adolescent confusion and self-discovery is back again for the hero characters. Thematically we've seen it all before. Although the familiar parallels between fear of mutants and racial oppression comes through in a jaw-dropping embarrassing way. 

I suppose the real missed opportunity here was to make a movie about the friendship of the two men who would become Xavier and Magneto spanning several decades putting much more thought and strength into the only unique aspect this movie had to offer.

Drive

Ryan Gosling in "Drive"

*** out of ****

After an astounding getaway scene which was this movie's opener, pink credits appear in front of the night time LA cityscape taking up the screen and synth-pop beats boom the theater. I liked "Drive" already.

The story didn't do very much for me. It felt very familiar. 
We have a 'man with no name'-type who does shady work with a sense of emotionally detached professionalism. In his personal life he seems a bit angelic and meets someone he cares about who will present a conflict with the bad business he is involved in. He unleashes all of his unstoppable potential to protect the innocent. Action ensues. 

The involvement I felt was with the characters and their undeniably strong screen presence. The only surprises I felt were during the scenes of sudden graphic violence, which I found kind of amusing, but unfitting for this kind of film.

Style is what impresses here. Like Tarantino's "Death Proof" we have car chases similar to an era when they were well-done. This is well-crafted action that reminds us that less is more. We are in sync with the exhilaration of vehicles in motion and not the quick cutting chaos that plagues action cinema today. 

See Chaos Cinema 1 & 2.

Perhaps the best aspect of "Drive" is that it is an auditory experience reminiscent of David Lynch films. Scenes featuring the nameless main character are very light on words and strong on atmosphere and hypnotic white noise. The synth-pop selections and the ambient score by Cliff Martinez add to the effect of an other-worldly tone. 

In general, I think what we have here is a really high quality B-Movie. It's a story of obligatory coincidences and cheap thrills assisted by thoughtful direction, stylish medium-budget production, and a GREAT cast.

Check out a much better review by Scott Tobias.

Contagion

Matt Damon in "Contagion"

***1/2 out of ****

Okay, this is my third review blog post and it is of a movie that had a great line spoken by Elliot Gould: "Blogging isn't journalism. It's graffiti with punctuation."

Disease is scary. While watching the pandemic thriller, "Contagion", I found myself squirming with discomfort in my seat as I was hyper-aware of how many people cough an sneezed in the theater. Though they could have been doing so out of a psychological reaction to how realistically threatening this movie felt. I don't go to the movies to feel bad, so why did I have to see this one? Well I see everything Steven Soderbergh directs. I'm a fan. I also can feel reassured that he wouldn't make a film like this to give anyone a sense of despair. He also wouldn't make a film about such an important concept without making it informative. Soderbergh an writer Scott Z. Burns avoid cheap thrills and produce a gripping piece of cinema where we as an audience are shown the spread of a disease and the web of separate characters dealing with it's terrifying effects. We see experts from the Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization speaking unapologetically like smart people with no one to put their statements in laymans terms.

Beaks: It’s a procedural where there’s a lot of information flying at the audience, a lot of jargon that we don’t understand, but there is something thrilling… Soderbergh: The context. You know they know what they are talking about. Soderbergh discusses his no-nonsense approach to filmmaking and other fascinating movie nerd topics here.


The ultra-realism is only hindered by the use of an all-star cast. All of these people do their job quite well but they bring with them a reputation as a famous person. Early in the film when we see Gwyneth Paltrow's character getting a graphic autopsy there is a feeling of comfort knowing that Paltrow, the actress, is alive and well. If an unknown actress were playing this movie's tragically diseased wife and mother, we would no doubt feel more horrified when we can only associate that face with the film we are watching. Soderbergh joked that he has made an Irwin Allen picture. In other words, a disaster film with an all-star cast. I'm not going to stress my criticism here because I don't think you can sell a realistic movie about disease without star-power on board.

Roger Ebert points out in his review that Jude Law's character is the only weak ingredient to this film. I am persuaded to agree. Law plays a freelance blogger journalist who has followed the pandemic from the beginning and is crusading against the CDC's reaction to it.. This is a movie that displays all of it's main characters with empathy understanding their thoughts and feelings so we can understand everything from their angle. Law is the exception here.  Jude Law's undeniably intense screen presence doesn't outweigh the fact he is the only one of the principle characters whose motives are ambiguous. If Law's character is someone for whom we are meant to feel skeptical of, his part should be reduced to a minor character seen through the eyes of the trustworthy main characters. Seeing the world of the story through this character's eyes and not knowing what he wants breaks the movies structure.

I am always fascinated by Soderbergh's abilities as an artist to continue moving. He seems to be in a period of avoiding sensationalism. His two part epic on Che Guevara was such a straight-forward history lesson, I don't think I would ever recommend it to someone who wanted to be entertained. His eye as a digital filmmaker in recent years has me very impressed.

Somehow his work here almost reminded me of a made for HBO or Showtime movie since that seems to be the current source of dialogue-driven entertainment for a more thoughtful audience. But it's in theaters. It's even on IMAX. There really is a payoff to seeing a movie like this on a big screen. There is a sense of atmosphere and strength you can't get even when viewing a nice HD screen.

Source Code

Michelle Monaghan and Jake Gyllenhaal in "Source Code"

***1/2 out of ****

"Source Code" is a science fiction film about a man who is forced to relive the last eight minutes of a bomb-victim's life over and over until he can find out who planted and detonated the explosion. It mostly takes place aboard a commuter train bound for Chicago and it is expertly directed by Duncan Jones ("Moon").

As a thriller, this flick delivers in the best ways. There are rules and there are stakes. You can't get up to take a break because every moment counts. Above all, it keeps you guessing along with the protagonist in completing his given task and figuring out how and why he wound up in this unreal situation. This is a thriller that keeps you involved.

The hollywood conventions for a successful science fiction film are there too: Yes, it has computer generated action. Yes, it has a romantic subplot... I forgive it. This is a high-concept script with good actors who make these things work.

Although it does make the unfortunate mistake of trying to elaborate on the science of this fiction and the explanation we're given doesn't help the film. We would have been better left in the dark on the technological explanation than this failed attempt at scientific credibility. We have been given a good understanding of what our hero is experiencing versus what his instructors tell him he is experiencing. That is all that matters.

This error could have been corrected but many "Outer Limits" and "Twilight Zone" episodes managed to be moving and profound with sometimes even worse jargon. Like a lot of good science fiction that can't manage to live up to the genre's name, it is distracted by relatable human drama and that is not a bad thing.

Near the end there is a moment of bittersweet beauty where I would have been perfectly satisfied if the credits started rolling... but the movie continues in a direction that is sentimental but at least stays thought-provoking. After seeing the disappointingly simple resolution to similar "The Adjustment Bureau", I can give this movie credit for giving it's audience some.

Jones has made a movie that like his previous feature, "Moon," seems to involve a protagonist who slowly learns that his role in an operation is less human and more machine.

Listen to Kenneth Turan's review.

Rango

***1/2 out of ****

"Rango" is essentially the first animated movie to be made by Industrial Light and Magic if you don't count the Star Wars prequels. ILM puts a strong competition against Pixar and Dreamworks by avoiding the unnecessary challenge of engineering their movie for 3D presentation and concentrating on how much more you can achieve when you designate your efforts to making the best 2D movie you can make. I was reminded of how good Pixar's "Wall-E" looked where the aesthetic was leaning more towards the photorealistic. "Rango" is a movie full of whacky cartoon characters who all look as though they are being lit and shot by a real-world camera crew. It helps that the movie is full of homage to classic movies (mostly westerns) and humorously imitates their cinematography. Like "Wall-E" the great cinematographer Roger Deakins was brought in as a computer-camera consultant.

The voice acting in this movie is also successful for bringing a stellar playful cast together in a small studio and shooting the entire movie to capture their voices while really interacting and physically performing their parts for future visual reference material the animation department could work with (This wasn't a motion capture set).  

I could go on and on about the whimsical spectacle this movie is in all of it's technical greatness because this is the stuff that makes this movie good. Gore Verbinski ("The Mexican", and the "Pirates of the Caribbean" trilogy) is very talented at style and spectacle and is also quite scatterbrained when it comes to a central theme or meaning. Sometimes I don't like him for this. The first "Pirates of the Caribbean" was silly fun but way to long and it didn't help that it's next two sequels stretched every delightful aspect of the first movie completely thin. His work isn't sincere enough to be put in epic context. "Rango" is a project I'm really glad he got accomplished for the absurd humor, loving tribute to classic cinema, how stunning it is to look at, and it's less than two hours.

But you don't have to take my word for it!