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.

Star Wars: Episode I -The Phantom Menace in 3D

Jar Jar Binks is an anomaly in special effects history. State-of-the-art technology and special effects wizards worked endless hours to render a photo-realistic character who had been written and directed so poorly and who's human counterpart actor performed so cartoonishly, it completely undid the effect.

 

*1/2 out of ****

Okay. I didn't watch all of this movie in 3D, just a few scenes which was enough to know that 3D does nothing for it. This is really an opportunity to talk about... I don't feel like saying it's full title so let's call it: The Ruination of Star Wars.

This is a movie I currently hate because it makes me mad at myself for all the time I wished for it, obsessively followed it's production online and in magazines, skipped school and stood in line all day with other fans when the tickets first went on sale, saw it... and spent a long time in denial of the disappointment it turned out to be. Yes. I was one of those people. I couldn't allow it to be bad in my mind. I'm embarrassed for defending the movie and more embarrassed that when I could finally acknowledge a few of it's many faults, I was preaching faith that the next one would be way better.

As a big Star Wars fan, it was kind of easy to filter out the crap that plagued this movie when I was seeing the first Star Wars episode to be released in sixteen years. The old familiar sights and sounds being delivered with state-of-the-art techniques made me bounce in my seat like a little kid. The things in this movie that seemed worth defending then, may still apply now. It is a gorgeous production and it may be the best-looking Star Wars movie ever. Every CGI effects artist, production designer, costume maker, stunt coordinator, location scout, and talented artist of any kind (besides the writer/director and mystified actors) who worked on this film believed they were working on a masterpiece and were giving it their all. This is one of the best-looking bad movies ever made. If you compare the look of this one to the two prequels that followed, it is astoundingly rich-looking by comparison. All of the artificial landscapes and city views in this film look so amazingly beautiful. What a shame they didn't really amount to anything more that the environment of a pitiful story for underdeveloped characters to inhabit.

The following is Star Wars fanboy criticism. If you are not interested and would rather get back to my review of this loathsome work as a movie, just skip over the BLUE TEXT.

The Ruination of Star Wars was a poorly written back-story. So much of it doesn't fit with what we know and assumed about the beloved Star Wars Universe: 

•The Jedi, who had fallen into legend by Episodes IV-VI, are a group of peace-officers who everyone in the galaxy seems to know about. Does it only take twenty years for the extinction of Knights who once resided in the galactic capitol and displayed their superpowers all over the galaxy to be forgotten or referred to as a 'hokey religion'? I always imagined them to be a secret group of protectors who officials in the Republic called upon in times of crisis but your average civilian didn't know much about.

•Technology in the past seems more slick and advanced. Droids seem to have less physical limitations. It only took a few decades for all robots to be reduced to rolling garbage cans or anthropomorphic tin men.

•Strange creatures and aliens are everywhere in the Republic. Where did they all go when it became the Empire?

•Anakin built C3PO? Whyyyy? What does that symbolize? What kind of meaning can be gathered by that kind of needless story coincidence?

•This movie introduces lots of characters like Qui-Gon Jinn and Queen Amidala who are supposed to be very important but who's legacy has no existence in the original trilogy. 

That list of inconsistencies goes on and on.

If this is all a back-story with the idea that you're supposed to watch all the episodes in a row, don't the prequels just give away all the surprises? The identity of Yoda, Anakin Skywalker being Vader, and Leia being Luke's sister are robbed of their drama in Episodes IV-VI if you watch I-III first. It is a shame that no one realized this before these movies were made, but the story of Anakin turning to Vader, even if it had been done well, is pointless. We already know what we need to about him through the original movies. What this movie and Episodes II and III needed to be solely about was how the Republic became the Empire.

Perhaps the worst expansion in this movie is the way the Jedi are portrayed. Now that the history of the Jedi has been brought to the big screen, I can honestly say I think they're the dumbest looking so-called wise men I've ever seen in fantasy. Everything that was cool about the Jedi in The Empire Strikes Back is ruined with this movie alone. Their conduct is pseudo-mystical. They're full of contradictions. Worst of all, they try to scientifically justify the Force which is an idea that is beyond terrible.

This movie has characters who are boring or annoying. The same can be said for the situations they're in. When it was written, I'm sure that this movie was constructed like many other action flicks: Come up with a bunch of cool ideas and action scenes. Then attempt to connect them together with plot and you have a story. It is the plot that seems very lackluster and hardly thought through. What wasn't so clear to me until recently, is that one of the worst things about this movie is that so much of the story doesn't make sense. It uses the cheap-trick of convoluted plotting to get the audience to think it's smart. When you break it all down, none of it is logical. This revelation came in full-force when I first saw the fantastic PLINKETT REVIEW which gave me closure on my frustration with The Ruination of Star Wars to this day. The review hilariously shed light on everything I didn't even consciously realize was wrong with this movie. There were so many instances when I thought to myself, "That's why that scene felt so weird!"

Screw the review I'm posting. Just go here to the Plinkett Review. If you're embittered over Star Wars and have never seen this. You owe it to yourself. It'll make you feel better.

In the end it is my fault that I put so much faith in Star Wars. It became an important life lesson to not idolize my heroes. Everyone and everything is fallible. Some more than others. 
 

George Lucas is completely responsible for the failure that took place here. The success of his beautiful space saga from years ago made him the unquestioned maestro he wanted to be. Lucas stands for everything that is true and right in the world of film and it's need for a voice and no interference from a meddling studio system. He also makes the worst case for such a cause. If some studio executives had the ability to interfere with Lucas's vision on this movie, it would have only been improved. The legacy of George Lucas will be that of a visionary man who changed movies forever with his entertaining innovative techniques and collaborators, became a powerful businessman as a result, gained the full artistic control he had always wanted, and had nothing interesting left in his soul to do with all that power.

It hurts to lose a hero.  

Moneyball

Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill in Moneyball

**** out of ****

Moneyball is a movie that feels so relaxed and flawless. I admit I missed this one in theaters. It was lower on my priority list because the subject didn't interest me. I'm not a sports fan. At the same time I knew that Bennett Miller (Capote) is a good director. Screenwriter Steven Zaillian can romanticize any subject as he did with child chess players in Searching for Bobbie Fischer. Co-screenwriter Aaron Sorkin can write intelligent people with attractive wit. Brad Pitt has a really good talent for picking interesting projects. This was a movie that didn't attract me and yet I knew it had all the artistic and intellectual support to deliver a great product and it did.

Here's a very good review from NPR.

Billy Beane is a very interesting character and this movie treats his true story with a kind of effortless grace. The movie never really tries too hard because the facts are so close to sports-drama escapism, it avoids the glamor most sports movies have. Actually it avoids the amount of game play most sports movies have. This movie is about the thinkers behind the game who dwell in a sterile enclosed environment as they discuss the survival of an underfunded baseball team. Wally Pfister's gloomy cinematography adds an unusual edge to a baseball movie.

 

Haywire

Michael Douglas and Gina Carano in Steven Soderbergh's Haywire

*** out of ****

Gina Carano may be the first female lead I've seen in an action movie, who seems like the equivalent of a male action star. This isn't just because of her amazing physical skills. I draw the comparison because of her acting limitations. She works well in this movie because it has been tailored for her and designed to show what she can do. For that, we get a pretty good show. She's a fascinating person to watch. I guess I'm trying to say that there's a bit of character to be desired.

Haywire is a movie that had a trailer that looked embarrassingly generic. Like Drive, it's a question of execution. Steven Soderbergh is the last person to make a genre movie in a run-of-the-mill fashion. We've had a lot of 'chicks who kick ass' type movies in recent years but they all star Hollywood actresses. This one stars a professional Mixed Martial Arts fighter. It's the supporting cast in this film, who are the movie stars.

Check out this AV Club interview with Soderbergh as he talks more on his 'no-nonsense' stance on film-making. I like where he mentions the action directors he borrowed from.

The diner scene in the beginning of this movie is a great example of how Soderbergh effectively frames the action. He avoids the typical shaky, quick cutting and gives us a perfect shots of two operatives spontaneously fighting in the middle of everyone eating breakfast. The assaulting moves appear to connect without the aid of editing. It's very effective.

David Holmes (A Soderbergh regular) does one of his best music scores ever for this film. Like his music for Out of Sight he creates smooth tracks that are kind of like neo-exploitation cinema music.

The story and screenplay by Lem Dobbs (The Limey)feels simply worthy of an action movie and nothing more. 

I was a bit disappointed to learn that Carano's voice was altered in post-production for this movie. It kind of reminds me of how Schwarzenegger was dubbed in Hercules in New York. It just seems like a cheat unfitting for a director who cares so much about what his performers bring to the screen.