ANTICIPATION: SPRING 2012

Mirror Mirror

Tarsem Singh was once known for bringing some unusually gorgeous imagery to the screen with his first two films. Then he stooped a little to make mediocre imagery with Immortals, which looked inferior to an aesthetically similar film called 300. Now he has sunk below banality to make a phony looking digital production with an awful color pallet and a comic take on the Snow White story. This looks nauseating. 
 

American Reunion

I don't like this franchise. Maybe it's personal because the first movie in the series came out my graduating year of high school and I felt it depicted my generation as shallow and our taste in music to be worse. When I first saw it, I liked it and laughed quite a bit. Then I re-watched it and found that with exception of the father character played by Eugene Levy, the funniness had dissolved away with the expiration that shock-humor often has. It is a very dated movie that, yes, produced good careers for a few then-young actors. I just have no expectation that revisiting their characters will have insights on my generation, or more importantly, be a funny experience. To add to my personal contempt, this entry is coming out on my birthday. 

Damsels in Distress

Whit Stillman is an American auteur who's body of work is eccentrically intellectual and without a doubt, alienating to a general mass audience. His characters are very educated and he makes no apology for their deep discussions on social and political theory. It seems pretty rare that anyone makes films that expect such an advanced audience. Dialogue of his can go over my head quite easily but I, unlike some people, don't throw a tantrum when I'm being challenged. His earlier films were comedies that seemed to be about manners and the question of their relevance through the use of characters of an upper-class world. This one is about girls at a university who are trying to preserve their high standards in spite of the co-ed lifestyle. The female cast lead by Gretta Gerwig seems pretty appealing as well. 

The Cabin in the Woods
Joss Whedon co-writes and produces a film that appears to be a generic horror movie but turns out to have a science fiction twist about a simulated environment. Sounds engaging.
 

 The Five Year Engagement 
I wouldn't go so far as to say that I hate romantic comedies. My problem is that it is a genre that disappoints way too easily. These movies tend to exist in a safety zone where most of the characters are attractive and well-off. It's escapism. I get it. All I require then, is a little charm and wit, a combination a lot of romcom's think they have but don't. So it helps that Jason Segal and Emily Blunt are starring in a movie together. That's charm. Then there's co-writer/director Nicolas Stoller, who collaborated with Segal on other projects such as Forgetting Sara Marshall and The Muppets. That's wit. Cross your fingers.

The Raven

A thriller that has nothing to do with the famous Edgar Allen Poe poem it claims to be inspired by? It's been done. This is the first film by James McTeigue since his aesthetically astounding film V for Vendetta. I'm interested.

Sound of My Voice
Cults are creepy. The ambiguity of a crazed person or time traveler worked wonders in 12 Monkeys. I really like the actress/co-writer, Brit Marling, the girl from Another Earth.

Bernie
The trailer doesn't sell me but I'll see anything Richard Linklater makes.

The Avengers

The combination of different comic-book characters coming together in one movie has a lot of potential for disaster if you ask me. Thankfully this film is in very good hands with Joss Whedon writing and directing the film. This movie is about a team and Whedon is very talented when it comes to ensembles.

Men in Black III
I remember when special effects were still cool. Men in Black came out when the digital era was still blowing audiences away with new tricks that were not possible a short time before. MIB was like the Ghostbusters of the nineties with dark sophisticated special effects and design in the service of comedy. I liked the first Men in Black movie so much, I wouldn't and still haven't seen the second one. It looked like a sequel with nothing new to offer. I had seen enough sequels like that in my life. I see a small chance that the damage may be reversed by this very late third installment. While this is a movie no one asked for, I am a little reassured by the trailer which has the same tone as the original and a time travel plot that transports the story to the early days of the agency in the nineteen sixties where Tommy Lee Jones' character as a young man is perfectly cast with Josh Brolin in the role.

The Dictator
This is Sacha Baron Cohen's first character-comedy to not have an origin on the Da Ali G Show. It doesn't appear to be a mockumentary this time around nor does it appear to be filled with unsuspecting interview vicims to provoke lawsuits. Maybe I'm wrong. It still looks funny.

Dark Shadows

Tim! Johnny! STOP IT ALREADY! You're wasting our time.

Battleship
Wow. That looks stupid.

Moonrise Kingdom

Wes Anderson is one of the few directors who I can say I don't like but I really want to. No matter how annoyed I can be with a movie of his, I'm always back to see his next one. I felt a bit of hope when he ventured into animation with The Fantastic Mr. Fox because he was finally changing it up after spending over a decade making the same looking movie again and again. Mr. Fox was actually a little refreshing but the new environment finally allowed me to deduce my main difficulty with his movies. He is engaging with setup and lousy at payoff. Anderson delivers humorous character exposition for almost everyone and it rarely amounts to anything during the final dead act to most of his films. So here comes Moonrise Kingdom where he's doing something I've wanted him to ever since his wonderful opening scene to The Royal Tenenbaums. He's made a movie about kids. Anderson's body of work has always portrayed children as adventurous and full of adult-like ambition. I find this more entertaining than watching adults who have unresolved childhood issues. This movie also has a slightly different look being shot 16:9 on Super16mm film. The cast, as always, is great. I'll probably be disappointed again but I'd be wrong to not give it a chance.
 

 Rock of Ages

This musical comprised of songs by Journey, Deff Leopard, etc. is sure to be a hit. It was on broadway. I'm ambivalent. There's a lot of people who are nostalgic about pop-hair metal of the eighties. I'm not. I'm pretty sure that the glorification of the time will render it tame despite cocaine being a big part of it. Adam Shankman made a damn good movie musical for Hairspray, so he'll probably entertain here.

What to Expect When You're Expecting
Are you expecting a baby but too lazy to read a popular book on the subject. Here's the romcom movie version just for you, asshole.

Prometheus
Ridley Scott is returning to science fiction. I hope this movie is as cool as it sounds. It takes place in the same universe as his franchise-launching film, Alien, but it is not about the familiar creatures. I can't anticipate that this film will have the same kind of impact as Alien or Blade Runner because those were works of innovation. I hope he can uphold the same kind of slow-paced suspenseful energy of those two films. His recent style is much more fast-paced and kinetic. I can't see his recent Gladiator/Black Hawk Down-style methods ruining this movie but at the same time they won't set it apart from current science fiction thrillers.

Snow White and the Huntsman
The producers of the eyesore known as Alice in Wonderland bring us another movie that inappropriately tries to imitate the success of the battle-themed Lord of the Rings Trilogy with a classic children's story. I knew it was over the minute I saw a picture of Kristen Stewart in armor. It took the trailer for Mirror Mirror to make this movie look good. The best thing it has going is Charlize Theron as the evil queen.

Piranha 3DD 
Great title!!! This sequel should have a different tone since it is from the team who made the Project Greenlight film, Feast. Can the hilarity of the unexpected tongue-in-cheek sleaze from 2010's remake be matched? Probably not. I don't know if they can go any lower without losing my respect but we'll see.

Limitless

Bradley Cooper plays man who is liberated from his writer's block by a new super drug in Neil Burger's Limitless

*** out of ****

Limitless is one of those high-concept thrillers that I don't think has a truly satisfying resolution but is still one hell of a ride and is definitely worth seeing. Its pharmaceutical-science-fiction plot is engaging and had me intently paying attention to every decision the main character made. The worst thing that thrillers can do, is involve you with a character in a tense situation and then have them do something that you can't relate to. It's usually when a writer unintentionally sacrifices the characters likeability to move the story along. This movie avoids that pitfall during its beginning stage and carefully calculates how to put the character in an unusual situation without the audience losing interest in him and waits for the right minute to throw the guy from a dull existence in to one of excitement and danger. Very entertaining. 

Bradley Cooper is a good looking guy who's pretty good at looking smart. In this flick, he is an unfocused writer, whose messy loser image feels a bit unnatural, but maybe that is because I'm not used to seeing him this way. He happens upon a test drug that somehow escaped the lab in great quantities. It allows one to utilize one-hundred-percent of their brain power. The movie uses very clever production techniques to give the viewer the perception of what the mind sees when on the drug. My first reaction when watching it was, "Holy Shit! It's Super-Adderall". Naturally the drug has what I would imagine Super-Adderall side-effects would be like, and they are the movie's most threatening conflict.


It doesn't make a lot of sense that Cooper's character waits till the film's halfway point to begin to try understanding the drug and how he can assure himself a way to safely continue a supply and a way to make it safer. If I were turned into a super-genius, that would be my first priority. I suppose if he had tried this earlier, we wouldn't have a movie filled with the entertainment of watching someone exercise the a new superpower level of intelligence for his own gratification.

This movie also has the gorgeous Abbie Cornish as Cooper's girlfriend. It is also the first decent movie for which Robert De Niro has contributed himself to in a long time.

The director is Neil Burger, who made another engaging film called The Illusionist, which also had a conclusion that felt kind of weak. He seems to be a director who insists on extreme stylization that would be distracting in most cases but tends to lend itself to the subject he's attached it to. He just needs to work with a screenwriter who knows how to end a film and he may make a masterpiece.

Jeff, Who Lives at Home

Jason Segal in Jeff, Who Lives at Home, a movie from the Duplass Brothers

 *** out of ****

There are a lot of all-in-one-day dramas and comedies such as Magnolia, After Hours, or Crash (not referring to the Cronenberg movie) that depend on a strange amount of coincidence. Actually a lot of movies do. I think it adds some level of comfort to the viewer that in the movie world, there can be something mystical at work. This is addressed in the first scene of Jeff, Who Lives at Home, where the main character, Jeff played by Jason Segal speaks of his love for M. Night Shamalan's film, Signs and how meaningful he finds it that in the end of the movie, a bunch of seemingly random elements all play a part in saving the characters. Jeff believes that he needs to open his eyes to the cosmic messages that come from unlikely sources in everyday life. Jeff smokes a lot of pot.

He is also thirty, lives with his mother (Susan Sarandon) and is unemployed. Today he is expected by Mom to go out and buy some wood glue to make a home repair while she is at work. Due to a phone call Jeff gets from a guy who probably had the wrong number, Jeff believes he needs to spend the day looking for the name, Kevin. His idiotic journey takes us out of our typical expectations for a movie to have funny coincidences so that we can watch Jeff look like a fool and then be amused when fortuitous things happen anyway, which reaffirm his faith.

Jeff is not the only delusional character. This movie is shared with his brother, Pat, played by Ed Helms. Pat seems to be successful in relation to Jeff which doesn't say much. He has pathetic materialistic priorities aimed at acquiring the image of status despite the fact that he lives in a small apartment with his unhappy wife (Judy Greer). He's just put their marriage to the test by blowing their savings on a Porsche. 

While Jeff is out on his mission, the two intersect and just when Jeff is getting a bit of undesired condescending advise from Pat about getting his life together, Pat makes a dumb mistake that makes his worse. In the middle of the trouble, they spot Pat's wife driving around with another man. Pat pressures Jeff into helping him spend the day spying on them. Jeff finds many distractions along the way.


Then there is the mother who is stuck in her office cubicle reflecting on the loneliness her life has been since Jeff and Pat lost their father as kids. She is receiving anonymous IMs on her computer from a secret admirer and is intrigued to find out who.


I don't normally feel compelled to explain the plot to movies when I write a review, but this is one where it seems kind of fun to describe these characters. The film is directed with the naturalism of brothers Jay and Mark Duplass who make character-piece comedies that feel pretty fresh but always have a slightly forced randomness in their cinematography. The camera doesn't need to zoom and shake as much as it does in this movie. Even if this were a documentary, no cameraman would be this busy moving the camera around. It's needlessly dizzying at first but I got used to it.


Jeff, Who Lives at Home basically aims to be a pretty realistic feel-good comedy drama and for the most part, it succeeds. It is about someone looking for meaning in coincidences and is lucky enough to find what could be interpreted as such. It loses believability with the character Pat. Like so many douchey characters in comedies, he doesn't come with enough background information to explain why he ever landed a self-respecting intelligent woman, except that their relationship invites a conflict for our entertainment. It also gives him the opportunity to grow maturity he doesn't seem capable of growing for our satisfaction. Everyone is funny in their roles. Something that never stops being funny, is that a person could be so affected by a movie like Signs. I suppose The Happening would have been an even funnier choice.

Rampart

Woody Harrelson in Oren Moverman's Rampart

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

Woody Harrelson has a talent for looking potentially violent at all times. His character, David Douglas Brown, in Rampart is in every scene of the film and may be remembered by film historians as the role of his career. At the beginning, you find out right away, what a creepy, dirty cop he is. Then you go into his personal life where it feels uncomfortable seeing this man around women and children of an unconventional family who seem to function in spite of him. It is a funny realization that he doesn't bring violence home with him and that these are people he wishes he could be a part of. His sweet younger daughter is the only one with any affection for him and his troubled older daughter seems geared at reminding him he is the same piece of garbage at home that he is to the rest of Los Angeles.

Officer Brown has a reputation for his misconduct. The movie is set in 1999, during public outcry to the anti-gang Rampart scandal which led to the indictment of many violent corrupt officers. Brown seems to continue his rotten behavior and is under pressure to leave a police force that is trying very hard to repair it's reputation.

Harrelson is an ideal actor for the role. Especially in tensely wound-up movies like this, he implies that he's looking at everything and then watching himself looking. His character, Dave Brown, has no moral center, but he has the survival instincts of a rat, and I say that with all due respect for rats. He always likes to know the way out of a tight corner. He knows an angle he can play or a squirm he can call on. -Roger Ebert from his review

This movie has many subjects, but at it's center it is a character study and should rank among the other uncomfortable 'We're stuck with this asshole cop for two hours' type movies like Affliction or both the Bad Lieutenant movies. Brown is a Vietnam veteran, which may be meant to imply that his behavior is that of a damaged soldier but the movie isn't simple-minded enough to jump to any conclusions about why he is such a bad person.


By the end, however, I feels as though Rampart stretches itself a little thin. This is the kind of movie that can't guarantee closure but it seems to be filled with too many slow moving ending scenes when all I could have used was one. Rampart also has a small amount of original score which sounds like the trite uninspiring stuff of common indie movies. It doesn't work against the tone of the movie but doesn't do anything for it either. This movie doesn't need music.

Rampart is very strong with it's superb cast and their performances. The atmosphere is washed out high contrast in it's cinematography. The naturalistic direction by Oren Moverman (The Messenger) is excellent. The screenplay is co-written by novelist James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) who's intense knowledge of Los Angeles Law Enforcement is unquestionable. This movie is the strong result of a strong collaboration.

Here's a cool interview with Harrelson from The AV Club.

    

 

A Separation

Leila Hatami, Peyman Moadi, and Sarina Farhadi are a broken family attempting to end a crisis in A Seperation

**** out of ****

This movie is painful. It begins with the ending of a marriage, then the trouble of caring for an aging father with Alzheimer's, and then a dispute over a possibly provoked miscarriage being handled by a legal system that is as dysfunctional as the characters.

This is a truthful drama with harsh realism. It is a movie that is important because of how many people in this world will relate to the difficulties it's characters face. It is a movie filled with characters who all have huge obstacles that come in the form of social status, honor, religion, and family. It is also very frustrating to view when it treats all of it's clashing characters with equal empathy.

I can't find many words for works of realism because the technique is almost invisible. As a foreign film, I found it a bit overwhelming because I was busy interpreting a very different culture while trying to follow the story. The angry dialogue is also so rapid-fire, that it was one of the more difficult subtitle reads I've dealt with. It was a bit challenging.

Here's Ebert's review.

John Carter

The City of Helium fully realized with amazing detail in Andrew Stanton's John Carter

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

John Carter is epic in spectacle that went straight to the vein of my appreciation for sci-fi fantasy lore. This movie's aesthetics alone gave me enough satisfaction to call it worth seeing. As a Star Wars fan, it's on a list of movies that came out since the dreaded prequels that made me think "That's how the new Star Wars movies should have looked!" The beautiful combination of the ancient and futuristic meshes so successfully here. The cast of characters are full of theatrical flare reminiscent of the best B-movies of yesteryear. And the story is just convoluted enough for me to tolerate.

I love that this is a fantasy version of Mars that could be imagined at a time before we knew very much about the planets of our solar system.  This movie is entertaining because it's ridiculous. My favorite stuff in the movie Thor last year, were the scenes in Asgard. It was the kind of movie environment that Dino De Laurentiis was always trying to achieve with flicks like Barbarella and Flash Gordon. This movie resurrects the same kind of environment but tops it by leaps and bounds. The idea of a movie based on Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter series, is something that has been toyed with for eighty years now. There could have been a terrible temptation to find a modern twist to the adaptation for Disney to pander to it's modern audience. I think this material was waiting too long for that kind of crap to happen to it. On it's opening weekend, The Lorax was king at the box office, which siphons out all the whimsical language of Dr. Seuss and leaves young audiences with a Lorax from Jersey. Thankfully they didn't do anything of the sort to Carter.

I can almost say that this movie is delightful for it's flaws because those flaws are reminiscent of the storytelling mistakes that went extinct by the mid-eighties. This movie opens up like the original TRON in 1982. We start off with an action scene in another world for the sake of exposition, which is kind of like delivering the goods too early and bombarding the audience with too much alienating information. It was a mistake to open the movie this way, but at the same time that kind of messy storytelling made it feel like a fantasy movie from my childhood.

The movie is campy, yes. The suspension of disbelief is constantly demanded but somehow that didn't seem very hard. You see, this movie put me at ease like I was a kid again. When that happens, it means that I am seeing something that is familiar but in a long-lost kind of way. It's a good old fashioned fantasy that contains all the stuff I wished I could see in a movie during childhood.


There's a really good cast. Taylor Kitsch as Carter may be limited to looking like a shirtless pulp hero with a sardonic smirk on his face, but that's all you need for a macho hero. There's Mark "I'm a bad guy" Strong as a menacing deity. Willem Dafoe, Samantha Morton, and Thomas Hayden Church provide voices and motion to animated tall green warriors. Ciarán "I'm awesome" Hinds is in there too. Bryan Cranston is a Cavalry leader. Then there is Lynn Collins as the Princess... I love Lynn Collins. She's been playing small roles too long for having such a range of acting ability and a knockout screen presence.

First Brad Bird broke into live-action with the incredibly entertaining Mission: Impossible -Ghost Protocol. Now another Pixar alum, Andrew Stanton makes his debut into the medium but a little differently. Like Avatar, This is one of those movies that feels like a hybrid between animated and live-action. One is never relying too much on the other. There are plenty of computer generated images of creatures, ships and locations. There are also plenty of bold actors, practical grand sets, and real exotic locations to match.  

Michael Giaccino's score to the movie tops everything off with that escapist adventure tone that makes me hungrier for candy and popcorn.

When considering this movie's long and troubled history of attempted incarnations, I do feel sorry for all those passionate artists who tried to make John Carter but didn't get to achieve their unique vision of what it would be. Half a century ago it was almost a cartoon movie from Warner Bros. Almost a decade ago, it was to be a cost-effective stylized digital movie from Robert Rodriguez or Kerry Conran. Someone said that the most fitting movie for this material would be a hard core adult version from Paul Verhoven with plenty of bloodshed and nudity. Maybe Verhoven would be up for doing a sequel to this movie and break new ground by making the first R-rated movie to be released under the Disney name. 


I think it's great that Disney got the rights to this movie and made something descent. I've observed that Disney has a troubled history when concerning their movies of quality. Outside of Pixar they tend to look like they don't know what they're doing. When something good comes out, it usually looks like a mistake on their part. They aren't even merchandising this movie. The Rocketeer was a flop and I'm still confused as to whether TRON: Legacy was a success or not, but like this movie, it's like some crazy person a the Greedy Mouse Company thought it would be great to invest an ungodly amount of money on a project that probably didn't have a big audience. In those cases, they lost a bunch of money delivering a sight and sound spectacular show that my friends and I can enjoy. Thanks Mickey!
 
Fun stuff.  

Here's a good review from The AV Club.

Super 8

For his film, Super 8, J.J. Abrams claimed to have gathered kids with little acting experience to give a natural demeanor, but I still think he used a time machine to kidnap children from 1979.

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

Oh, J.J. Abrams: The king of lens flares and plot holes.

It took me a while to get around to reviewing this, but I am less motivated to review something I like a lot in spite of it's many flaws.  

J.J. Abrams is a force in modern entertainment who places less importance on story and more on emotion. This is also true of Steven Spielberg but I think Abrams represents a new generation that has taken the Spielbergian vision and mutated it into something with a stronger contrast between the emotional and intellectual. His work tends to introduce a smart idea and mix it with characters who have deep passion. Somehow in the end, the two never really fuse, but at least it was a hell of a ride.

I've liked Abrams's directorial features and productions so far. His production standards are very high, he knows how to entertain, and create suspense. He's kind of like Michael Bay... with a soul. Super 8 had me at it's title. It's a monster movie named after a dead home movie format? Sounds like fun and nostalgia. I'm there. 

This movie is set in 1979 and follows a group of kids who are making their own Super 8 horror movie, but encounter a real unworldly event while shooting. It pays constant homage to flicks of the Spielberg age: Close Encounters, E.T, The Goonies, etc. This movie couldn't have been aimed any closer towards me or whatever my demographic is.

I can't say that the movie disappointed me. Abrams knew what was important. He puts entertainment value first. I just wish that he would finish the job. Super 8 is very good but could be better. It's like looking at a beautiful painting where sections of the canvas have been left blank. The movie creates mystery and suspense by having odd things happen that are never followed up. Dogs running away from home, a pickup truck derailing a train -What? If you're going to use story elements as tools for creating mystery, it helps to justify them. I think Abrams believes he can get away with this because he knows that these elements are not the heart of the movie. I suppose it counts that his heart is in the right place, but it is still selling the audience short.


The real heart of this movie is the kids and how the events surrounding them look like the inflated imaginings of juveniles come to life. Their interaction is gold. Like The Goonies, it sounds the way kids actually talk to each other. Abrams's genius stroke on this movie is during the end credits. After a slightly forced E.T. ending that you may or may not like, he plays the entire Super 8 horror movie the kids were working on in all it's natural clumsiness as the credits roll. This worked like a fail-safe device.

Wanderlust

Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston with a mostly-amusing cast in David Wain's Wanderlust

*** out of ****

Wanderlust didn't amaze me but I laughed. There is something potentially profound about the story of a financially exiled New York couple who look for their place in regular-America and find themselves between the world of idiot materialists and idiot hippies. Happiness must be somewhere. For the sake of this being an enjoyable comedy, they decide to stay with the hippies in a commune. We then have a relationship comedy where the innocent couple are challenged with the free love ideology that the free-spirits embrace.


The story winds up being weaker than it should, but a half-assed story can't stop a movie from being funny. Most of the humor in this film flies but a bit of it seems misplaced. I may be alone here, but I thought the movie had a too much invested in Justin Theroux, who plays the influential alpha male of the commune who winds up being the comic antagonist. Theroux is a talented man but he brings nothing to the douchebag-hippie caricature that feels fresh or comically insightful. I felt it was a very generic performance.

Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston work well as the film's leads. Rudd's deadpan ability helps the comedy survive and it's nice to see Aniston at least trying to be in interesting movies again.  

The co-writer/director David Wain is still one of my favorite people working in comedy today. As much as I liked his last movie Role Models, I felt like it was his first step into formulaic studio comedy that could find more success. I feel like this movie sinks a little deeper into that kind of banality. There are funny jokes, yes, but the passage of the story seems a bit lazy and lacks the uncontrollable twists and turns of his hilarious Wet Hot American Summer and his short-lived TV show for his comedy group, Stella.

As in all of Wain's movies you have plenty of alumni from The State who add a lot of comedy. Joe Lo Truglio terrifyingly bears all as the commune's resident nudist. Co-writer/actor Ken Marino never fails to play someone I hate. Kerri Kenney is a character stuck in her own la-la land and can't stop talking. Best of all, Stella (Wain, Michael Ian Black, and Michael Showalter) appears as Atlanta Georgia newscasters.

There's further support from great cast members like Alan Alda as the commune's slightly oblivious founder. Catherine Hahn is great as a hypersensitive hippie. Michaela Watkins, an actress I wasn't familiar with, made quite an impression as a borderline insane housewife. The beautiful Malin Ackerman is perfectly cast as someone to tempt a man to abandon monogamy.

Wain is a great force in modern comedy and I hope that he can find a way to take his resources and produce a successful comedy movie that has the same unpredictable spirit of his previous work.

Here's a good review from David Edelstien.