At the Movies with General Havoc

[General Havoc]

Hyde Park on Hudson

Alternate Title: The Handjob that saved the World

One sentence synopsis: Franklin D. Roosevelt hosts the King and Queen of Britain at the cusp of World War 2, while carrying on several affairs.


Things Havoc liked: Bill Murray is a better actor than most people realize, I suspect. While his comedic roles are well known to anyone my age, his more recent work either in the semi-comedic Lost in Translation or the outright bizarre Wes Anderson films (Rushmore, Life Aquatic, Moonrise Kingdom) has demonstrated decent range beyond the Ghostbusters and Caddyshacks of yesteryear. As such, his take on FDR, a man he does, it must be admitted, somewhat resemble, was something I was rather eager to see. Though Murray does not sound much like the quintessential New Yorker, his portrayal of FDR is refined and restrained, a man surrounded by powerful personalities (most of them women) who deals with them by remaining aloof and slightly detached, but never impolite, or even unwelcoming. Some have described him as bland or boring, but I've known people such as this, people who retain control of their lives in demanding circumstances by simply floating above it all, and his calm performance anchors the movie in place.

Hyde Park is about the 1939 visit of the King and Queen of Great Britain to the United States, and more specifically to Hyde Park, FDR's country house in the Hudson River in New York. The visit was an important one in many ways, as it formed the very first stages of the transatlantic relationship that would eventually crush Nazism, form NATO, and last into the present day, and Samuel West and Olivia Colman, playing the King and Queen respectively, underscore quite well just what the stakes are. Newly crowned as a replacement for his ne'erdowell brother Edward, and still visibly uncomfortable with his position as King, George is here with his hat in hand, and he knows it, and so does everyone else. His wife, the future Queen Mother, is hyper-sensitive to the supposed hate that the Americans bear for the British in general and the Royal Family in specific. In a telling rant early on, she rails against Americans as a collection of "Irishmen, Italians, Germans, and Jews" all of whom are in her mind implacably hostile to the British. Yet in the conversations with Roosevelt, we can see the nervous beginnings of the relationship that will come, as the older Roosevelt offers his advice, gently though it is couched, to the King who will soon be leading his people into war. The sequences dealing with this are the highlights of the film.


Things Havoc disliked: If only they were the focus of the film.

The movie is really not about FDR, nor the King of England, nor World War II nor diplomacy nor any of the other interesting topics it brings up. The movie is about a woman named Margaret Suckley, played by Laura Linney, and her whimsical pining for FDR, her lover.

Yes, in the grand tradition of what appears to be every President who ever lived, FDR had mistresses. Several, according to this movie, at the same time, all of whom knew one another and formed a sort of coterie around him. Elanor Roosevelt, portrayed here as a lesbian, was apparently aware of this and accepted it, and they were all expected to live happily together as one extended family. It is this that the movie is about, and as this is a much less interesting subject than the previous element, we are therefore left waiting for the movie to actually go back to the reason why this subject was considered relevant for the making of a film at all. Worse still, no effort is made to liven the material with anything at all. Idyllic drives through the countryside and slices of life in rural New York are intercut with soporific voiceovers by Linney in which she looks longingly into the screen and describes her frustration with having to "share" Franklin with the others, though gosh darn it, she can get over it if she has to. Words cannot describe how slow these sections of the film are, as the filmmakers seem to think we care as to whether or not Margaret is insulted that Franklin didn't invite her to a diplomatic dinner with the King more than we care about the dinner itself and the weighty issues at work around it. But never fear, every time Franklin so much as mildly annoys somebody he will no doubt invite them in and apologize, because we can't have anything going wrong in this perfect little world of ours.


Final Thoughts: I really don't know what else I can say about this movie. It takes a decent rendition of FDR in an interesting moment in his enormous presidency and then proceeds to hide the entire affair behind the maddening notion that we are actually here for whimsical reflections on a woman we've not heard of, or the shocking revelation that FDR might have had mistresses. The film is not poorly made, but the experience of viewing it is more chore than pleasure, and while FDR definitely does deserve to have a great movie made about some element of his works and life, this one is nowhere near what the doctor ordered.


Final Score: 4.5/10

[Charon]

That's a second spy thriller I need to see. Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. I admit I had been worried about seeing this for the same reason as you, namely "Oh boy, here comes the politics". But I hadn't known it was done by Bigalow. So yeah, I'm gonna want to check that one out.

Hyde Park... I admit I had been curious but if that is more romantic affairs then political affairs I will give that a pass.

[General Havoc]

Les Miserables

Alternate Title: Misery: The Musical

One sentence synopsis: A convict breaks parole to try and better his life, while being pursued by a fanatical policeman.

Note from the Authorities: We have no explanation for what happened here and declaim all responsibility. All those responsible have been sacked. We regret nothing.

Things Havoc liked:

Sung to 'I Dreamed a Dream'

I saw a film in time gone by.
A film I saw with some misgiving.
The actors all were singing live.
A process which is unforgiving.

Samantha Barks and Ed Redmayne,
Both sing with passion and conviction.
Yet best of all is Hathaway
For whom the style is no restriction.

The design's exactly right,
Filthy extras grub and suffer.
All of which serves to impart
A sense of tragedy and pain...

A live-recording's best applied,
To choral songs of rousing thunder,
With these the film is well supplied
Though 'Red and Black's still kind of lame.

And through this film, I think I see,
Why some find opera such a pleasure.
A song done live will simply be,
More passionate than one at leisure.

I had a dream this film would be,
So different from my scared misgiving.
Much better than the crap I've seen,
It could have been the film I dreamed.

Things Havoc disliked:

Sung to 'Do you hear the people sing?'

Do you hear the actors sing.
Singing their songs like crazy men.
It is the singing of some actors who should never sing again.
Jackman tries with all his heart.
But he just doesn't have the lungs.
It is enough to make you cringe when the music comes.

But the worst offense of all belongs to Russel Crowe's Javert.
What they thought when they were casting him, I'm simply unaware.
He sounds like a man with his testicles caught in a chair.

Oh the actors scream and cry,
Singing their songs as best they can,
But it's a simple fact: the songs are pitched too high for mortal man.
Jackman's tenor's fairly low.
Crowe is a bass or baritone.
Neither could ever hope to sing stuff like "Bring him home."

Even if we drop the singing, there's just no way to be kind
For whoever was directing Crowe, appears to have been blind.
He looks and he acts like he's terrified out of his mind.

Yes, I heard the actors sing,
But the result was just bizarre,
This is what happens when the film producers won't use ADR.
All the efforts of the cast
All are a waste of time and pluck,
There's only so much you can do when your leads both suck.

Final Thoughts:
Sung to 'One Day More'

One film more,
Another week, another travesty,
This never-ending search for quality.
All that I've ever tried to find's a movie that won't waste my time.
One film more.

I did not think before today,
I would pass up an easy target.

One film more.

And yet I think it was okay.
Although my praise is somewhat guarded.

One more film that's overblown
Not a critic's rant again...
One more film with flaws so glaring
Not as bad as some we've viewed
It will make you cringe and groan.
That one isn't even true
Make you wish you weren't there...

Do not go in misinformed
Do not go inside at all
It's a film of great ambition
But the quality's not there
Though it's flawed, it still has charm
It just wasn't made with care
If the play's your cup of tea...

The film's a cow

It worked for me!

One film more!

One more season of pollution
Crap is flowing in a flood.
Awful movies every winter,
It's enough to boil your blood!

Not all of them suck.
Some just hit a stall.
Never know your luck when e'er the curtain falls.
Find a golden flick,
There amidst the slime.
Some of the best movies land in Doldrum time.

Find a gem amidst the garbage.
Why persist in having hope?
So what if they couldn't sing?
So what if they couldn't sing!?
There's a new year just beginning
Yet another year's begun.
Who knows what the year will bring?

That's one film down, of fifty-two!

One film more!

If the film is not exciting,

Every week another movie,

Wait a week and try again.

Every week another chore.

Maybe one day we will find one,

Why go into all this effort,

Worth a score of ten for ten.

When the film is just a bore?

One film more!

Who can tell what next arises?

One more season of Pollution,

Who knows what we soon will see?

Crap is flowing in a flood.

All the best films in creation...

Awful movies every winter...

About this film, we've had our say,
Tomorrow is another day.

Tomorrow we discover what Two Thousand Thirteen has in store.

One more day,
One more film,

One. Film. More...

Final Score: 6.5/10










Yes, I asked the Gay man to help me with musical theater songs. Shut up.

[Comrade Tortoise]

[General Havoc]

Silver Linings Playbook

Alternate Title: Madness ensues

One sentence synopsis: A Bipolar man gets out of a mental hospital and tries to reconcile with his ex-wife with the aid of a neurotic sex addict.


Things Havoc liked: Please take a moment to consider the fact that we live in a world where a movie with the above synopsis not only exists, but is being seriously considered for an Academy Award.

Romantic Comedies are a genre wasted on me, by and large. I couldn't even name you the classics of the genre with any sense of accuracy. But when the Academy gives one an Oscar nod, it's generally a sign that this might be a good time to branch out. And having actors like Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and Robert DeNiro involved doesn't hurt, even if DeNiro has made an unpleasant habit of phoning it in for his last few films. Cooper plays Pat Solitano, a wound up Bipolar sufferer just getting out of prison for having nearly beaten his ex-wife's illicit lover to death in an explosion of rage. I've always liked Cooper despite the awful movies he's often been associated with (Yes Man, Wedding Crashers, The A-Team), but I've never seen him quite like this. Solitano is not a fun, wacky, crazy man, but a legitimate Bipolar nut, who early on in the film becomes very hard to watch as he wakes his parents up in the middle of the night to rant and rave, screaming in rage and frustration at the turns his life has taken, all while steadfastly refusing to take the drugs he has been prescribed. His life, such as it is, is centered around getting back together with his wife, who has not only taken out a restraining order against him, but moved away, and his insistence that he can patch things up with her by reading her course syllabus would be hilarious if it weren't so painfully pathetic. I can't say I enjoyed watching him throughout the film, but Cooper is exceptionally good in this role, pushing his condition to levels that make sense realistically without ever going into comic book zanyness. At times he will explode over the most minute of issues, and at other times, he will calmly endure provocations that would make any reasonable person erupt. Such is the nature of mental illness.

Lawrence's portrayal, while perhaps less drawn from reality (she plays a nymphomaniac who got fired from her job for sleeping with literally everyone else), still has the proper verisimilitude for the subject matter. An early scene at a dinner party where she and Cooper manage to have a 'normal' conversation by comparing the effects of the various mood-altering prescription drugs they've been on sounds remarkably like depraved conversations I've had or been witness to among people in similar circumstances. At other times, Lawrence can be as violently rage-fueled as Cooper, calling passers by to accost him for "harassing" her, or cutting her own sister dead by interrupting a dinner party moments after everyone sits down to announce she's leaving because she's 'tired'. Last I saw Lawrence, she was playing a teenage archer in the Hunger Games, but this role is to that one like Taxi Driver is to Meet the Parents. The two of them play well off one another, as she tries to convince him, by hook or crook, to help her in a dance competition, despite neither one of them showing much in the way of aptitude.

But it's really the supporting cast that holds this movie together, from De Niro and the indomitable Jackie Weaver (last seen being awesome in Animal Kingdom), who play Cooper's long-suffering parents, to, and I can't believe I'm writing this man's name in the 'liked' section, Chris Tucker (last seen being an insufferable dunce), who plays one of Cooper's fellow mental patients. Every supporting actor is excellent individually, but it's the overall sense that they give the film, between De Niro's OCD-fuelled football rituals, to Cooper's brother's axiomatic competitiveness, to Lawrence's sister and her husband, who are their own bag of unresolved issues, that allow the movie to walk a tightrope between extremes. We get to see that the illness that Cooper and Lawrence suffer from is clearly one of degrees, as there is nobody in the movie one might call perfectly sane. And yet those degrees make all the difference, something apparent as, over the course of the film, some characters do begin to master their conditions, and others do not.


Things Havoc disliked: Before we get to anything else, I have to mention that this movie posits an NFL season in which the Philadelphia Eagles defeat the 49ers, Giants, and Cowboys, on their way to the playoffs, a posit which catapults the film past fiction and into outright escapist fantasy. It also posits that Eagles' fans are all criminally insane, but I have less of a problem with this.

I've kept a fairly spoiler-free policy in these little reviews, which in this case is something of an issue, as my major problems with the film arise in the last third or so. The movie, which had been a reasonably interesting story of how two messed-up people helped one another through their mutual issues, took turns that I admit I did not foresee, but seemed rather forced, considering everything. The ludicrous "bet" that De Niro makes with his friend over the Eagles' game is so foolish that it transparently exists only as a means of generating forced tension for the last bit of the film, while the 'twists' that take place over the last act not only make no sense (how many people would willingly violate their own restraining orders on the advice of 'friends'?) but twist the film into a much more formulaic piece than it had previously been. Why this all was done is beyond me, perhaps the source material had it, or perhaps the narrative rhythm of romantic comedies is simply different. But for all the logical sense of the ending, it simply felt flat to me, thanks to contrivances aplenty that led up to it, though I cannot say more without giving the ending itself away.

Final Thoughts: I saw this movie on the strength of superb reviews and, of course, the Oscar Buzz that surrounded it, and while I didn't think it reached the rapturous heights that the professional critics did, the movie was still a very solid piece, buttressed by excellent performances by everyone, including several actors I had sworn off entirely (Tucker, for instance). I wouldn't call it the best picture of last year, nor even place it in the top ten, but as the romantic comedy genre goes, one can do far, far worse.


Final Score: 7/10

[General Havoc]

Quartet

Alternate Title: The Grand Finale

One sentence synopsis: Four retired operatic singers must perform a celebrated piece from earlier in their careers to save their retirement home.


Things Havoc liked: Maggie Smith is a gem. She's been in something like a billion films, plays and television shows over the course of her career, and amassed a haul of awards for them so long that wikipedia had to give the list its own page. I'm aware of course that her career spans six decades, but to me and those my age, Smith has always been an old lady, defiantly disposing of the notion that there exist no roles for women above a certain age, and being continuously awesome as she does so. Yet ageless as she might appear to me, Smith, like all of us, is not eternal, and at 78, one does wonder how many years she will be able to continue her epochal career. If such a question appears overly morose to lead off a review with, then I must beg indulgence, for it is with such concepts in firmly in mind, that we turn to Maggie Smith's latest starring role, in Dustin Hoffman's directorial debut, Quartet.

Smith's character, Jean Horton, was once an opera singer of fame and renown, now long-since retired and forced at last by ill health or penury (it's never stated which) to move into Beecham House, a stately English country manor that serves as a retirement home for singers and musicians. If there's a character archetype that Smith knows how to play with her eyes closed, it's this one, a biting, superior, elderly matron, dignified and aristocratic and vaguely contemptuous of the bedlam that she finds around her. No, the role is not really a stretch from her parts in Gosford Park or Downton Abbey, but watching her react to her erstwhile surroundings and companions feels less like a rehash and more like the reprisal of a comfortably-established character. Having done this sort of thing for so long, Maggie Smith has become an almost archetypical figure, whose appearance in different films under different names feels not derivative but warmly familiar. She is, of course, spectacular in the role, but then we knew she would be going in. Indeed, it's why we came to see her.

But Smith is hardly the only one here. The core of the story centers around Smith and three other former singers, played by Tom Courtney (who looks like an older Benedict Cumberbatch, and plays Smith's dignified, and still bitter ex-husband), Pauline Collins (playing a forgetful, oblivious, motor-mouth), and Billy Connolly (getting the best lines in the film as usual as he plays a randy old goat). Every one of the above actors is a towering veteran of the English film and theater scene, with decades of work behind them, and all of them are, of course, excellent here. Connolly in particular uses some vague excuse of a stroke to explain why he refuses to filter anything he says and hit on anything walking, while Collins acts like a cheerleader on some kind of amphetamine, finding the worst possible time to say things with unerring, mathematical precision. Courtney, meanwhile is the soul of dignity, matching Smith's performance quite handily as he tries to deal with the sudden interruption of his ex-wife and the many, many years of baggage into his quiet retirement. A scene early on with Courtney discussing opera and rap with a pack of teenagers transcends the expected cliche of the out-of-touch old fart by actually letting him talk about a subject he obviously cares deeply about, even if his knowledge of the intricacies of rap is, of course, lacking. Similarly, while the subject matter of the conversations between him and Smith, or Smith and the rest of the quartet, may be material we've seen in other films (will the old flames learn to love one another again, the audience asks expectantly), we've rarely seen it done this well, as the actors are superb, and the writing sounds like the sorts of conversations that adults might actually have.

As I mentioned before, Dustin Hoffman directed this film, his first ever, and based on the evidence, I can't figure out why he waited this long. The marks of a good (or bad) director can be hard to parse out sometimes, as they neither write nor edit nor score nor act in the film, but instead weave these things together to produce a holistic result, but even with that in mind, this film is clearly directed with a steady hand. Much time is taken with various supporting characters, most of whom are actual retired singers and musicians whom Hoffman cast to lend verisimilitude to the project. Tiny bits, such as the complaint by chorus singers and orchestral musicians that the soloists are still lording over them unfairly make Beecham House seem like a real place, or at least a place that could exist, filled at all hours with musicians and singers still practicing their craft after all the decades. A good many of these actors I have, of course, never heard of, but Hoffman does add in several other stars of British cinema to thicken the mix, including Michael Gambon, who prances about in a dressing gown and barks orders like the music director he clearly used to be, and even Michael Byrne, of Indiana Jones fame, with a small role that nevertheless brought a smile to my face. It's decisions like these, the decision to turn the film into a outright showcase of British actors over 70, the decision to focus more on the setting and tone than on the largely-derivative plot, even the decision of how to handle the basic fact that the movie is leading up to an operatic performance that, manifestly, none of these actors are capable of rendering, that shows Hoffman's skill. Unlike Spielberg or Scorsese or Polanski, Hoffman doesn't try to establish a "style". He just makes the right decisions for the film, consistently.


Things Havoc disliked: And it's a damn good thing he does, because the plot of this movie is even older than our leading actors. Stop me if you've heard this before: "We have to put on a good show or we won't be able to keep our charming-yet-quirky facility running any longer." For bonus points, try this one: "Let's take the flighty, stubborn lead actor who has finally begun to mellow a bit out to dinner and surprise them with a request to do something they don't want to do, which will in no way cause them to interpret the affair as a setup and make them hate us for the designated third section of the movie. I'm sure that bringing along the kooky supporting character who has been established as being unable to keep her mouth shut will not result in awkward revelations at inconvenient moments."

I know it's hard to write an original story. Maybe impossible. I also know that I see more movies than most people tend to. But seriously, is there any audience still left in the world that doesn't roll their eyes when they hear the old cliche of "how will we get the money to save the farm/orphanage/theater/studio/whatever" answered with "we'll win the conveniently-timed contest/competition/gala/festival/whatever"? Can there possibly be anyone who, upon hearing that Maggie Smith and Tom Courtney used to be married, but that their marriage ended on a sour note of bitterness, believes that they will end the movie still genuinely despising one another? Is it really a spoiler to answer the question of whether or not Maggie Smith puts her pride aside in the service of saving Beecham House and agrees to perform with her old friends? This is not a long film, and much of its runtime is taken up with establishing shots, colorful supporting characters, and interludes of music or singing, all decisions I suspect might have had something to do with the fact that the plot of the film is not merely tired but very thin.


Final Thoughts: But then again, I can't say that the thickness of the plot or lack thereof was on my mind as I watched this film. If it has no better reason for existing than merely to revel in the skills of the older generation of British actors, I certainly cannot condemn it on that account. And indeed, for all the lighthearted music and song of the movie, there is quite a strong undercurrent of finality to this film, whether it be shots of Smith reflecting on what her life was and what it has been reduced to, or a simple moment when Connolly, experiencing a rush of dizziness, gets an unmistakable look of 'is this it?' on his face. I spoke before of Maggie Smith's age (a gross indelicacy for which I must beg her pardon), not simply to fill space, but because the film plays rather like a swan song for many of the actors involved. Of course there has been no sign of Smith or any of the others ending their careers (Connolly will be joining the Hobbit's cast for the next two films), but inevitably, they, like the characters they play in this film, will eventually no longer appear to dazzle us anew. Yet rather than seeming funereal, the film celebrates both actors and characters for who they are, not who they were, not even if the latter was many times more lustrous than the former. Ultimately, all the film can do is afford these great actors an opportunity for yet another dignified bow. And if it should prove to be the last, then if nothing else, it can see them off to one final round of genuine applause.


Final Score: 8/10

[General Havoc]

Stand Up Guys

Alternate Title: Once More Unto the Diner

One sentence synopsis: Two old friends are re-united for one last night on the town after one is released from his 28-year prison term.


Things Havoc liked: Al Pacino is a great actor, but it does not follow that every performance he's ever given was a great one. He has a well-deserved reputation for chewing scenery in every role since 1980, with results that vary between hilarious (Devil's Advocate), awesome (Heat), and completely stupid (The Recruit). Christopher Walken, meanwhile... well... is Christopher Walken. Descriptions seem inadequate to describe either his career or acting style, but suffice to say that Walken is not famous for the restrained, understated nature of his performances. And so we come to Stand Up Guys, a movie that pairs the two of them together and sets them loose on an unstated rust-belt town for one more night of wacky antics and fun.

Gene Siskel used to ask, whenever he was uncertain about a movie's quality, if the film was more interesting than a documentary about the same actors having lunch. This movie effectively is a documentary about these actors having lunch. And dinner. And breakfast. Pacino plays Val, a convicted gangster who has finally gotten out of prison after 28 years, while Walken is "Doc", his best friend and fellow retired gangster, who is under orders from a local crime boss (played by Mark Margolis) to kill him. Lest this sound like a spoiler, the movie itself dispenses with the pretense early on, allowing us to simply watch the antics of these two old men as they live out what they know will, for at least one of them, be their last day. Pacino, playing a man who knows, and even seems at peace with what is to happen to him, comes off the best. Tamping down his tendency to overact, his character seems more or less like a man who recognizes that he's come to the point where there's no reason to fight for his life. He initiates everything the characters do, be it stealing cars, rescuing an old friend (Alan Arkin) from a retirement home, visiting brothels, doing drugs, or dancing with women at a bar, all while Walken employs his usual deadpan (for once) to actual dramatic effect, letting small hints of the conflict inside leak out as he tries to decide when and how and whether or not he can do what he is under orders to do. It may not be the most groundbreaking material in the world, but Walken and Pacino can not only play characters like this in their sleep, and manage to get across a great deal with an uncharacteristically minimalist pair of performances.


Things Havoc disliked: The film is a series of vignettes, as the characters go to hospitals, brothels, diners, and drug dens, sometimes repeatedly, and have conversations or encounters there before going on to the next one. As narrative structures go, I've seen worse, but unfortunately not everything that the characters do really seems to amount to anything. Repeated visits to the brothel, for instance, seem to be included in the movie only for the purposes of an extended Viagra gag, or to show that Alan Arkin's character is still virile, despite his age, while an ongoing subplot involving Julianna Margulies serves no purpose at all, mostly because Margulies' performance is wooden and stilted, particularly given who she's acting next to. A sequence with a stolen car that turns out to have someone locked in the trunk is interesting enough on its own merits, but once more, does not seem connected at all to the greater story, insofar as you can even speak of one.


Final Thoughts: If it sounds like I'm struggling for things good or bad to say here, there's a reason. Stand Up Guys is ultimately a movie that isn't about a plot or story, it's a concept that was brought to film because of the inherent appeal of putting actors like Christopher Walken and Al Pacino together, regardless of the circumstances necessary to do so. That's not to say the movie has no qualities beyond the cast, the last third or so in particular is reasonably strong, but there's just not much to the film that excites the mind beyond seeing these great actors acting.

My mother, with whom I saw this film, posited that as the baby boomers and their movie icons age into retirement, we will see more films like this, paeans to the giants of that period, with whom the boomers have grown old. Last week's offering was of a similar theme, after all. Being a cinephile myself, and appreciative of these actors, I can't say I mind this trend overmuch, but if it's not too much to ask of the filmmakers in question, the next time they wish to produce a love letter to an aging acting great, could they perhaps include a movie as well?

Final Score: 6/10

[General Havoc]

And now for something else completely different

Last year, around the heart of the doldrums season, I found myself faced with an impossibly poor selection of films to go and see, a time when my best options were movies like Battleship or Tyler Perry's Good Deeds. Rather than subject myself to a moviegoing experience that was guaranteed to be awful, I elected instead to go and see a collection of all of the Oscar-nominated short films, every one of which were guaranteed (I assumed) to be better than whatever crap I would otherwise be subjected to. The result was, on the whole, excellent, with several of the short films (particularly the one from Norway about the old man who massacres seagulls with a machine gun) still vivid in my mind. As such, this year, with the Doldrums in full swing and my other options consisting of films like A Good Day to Die Hard and Escape from Planet Earth, I have decided to double down, and view not only all of the Oscar-nominated shorts, but the animated shorts as well. And as the Oscars have technically not happened yet, I will therefore be giving you my personal selections for short film of the year in both categories.

Therefore, without further ado, I give you:

The 2012 Oscar-Nominated Live Action Short Films

Death of a Shadow: I'm honestly surprised to see a movie like this nominated at all. The Academy's antipathy towards anything that even hints at science fiction is well known, yet here we have a Belgian film that involves time travel, Purgatory, and steampunk soul-cameras. Death of a Shadow is about a dead Belgian soldier from WWI who must capture ten thousand souls at the moment of death for an 'art gallery' in order to return to life, all while reminiscing about a woman he met shortly before his own demise. The subject matter reads like a Steven King short story (take of that what you will), but the movie has a wonderfully creepy vibe all the way through it, without ever once segueing into actual horror. For sheer cinematographic style alone, this one gets major points.
6.5/10

Henry: Manipulative tripe. This french-Canadian soft-focus tearjerker about an old man who is losing his memory to what we assume is Alzheimers is a classic example of sentiment over substance. Within thirty seconds of the movie's commencement, I knew precisely what was going to happen and what revelations we were to be subjected to. Yes, the subject matter is incredibly sad, and yes, it drew tears from the audience, but the mere ability to reference sad things is not skill, and I've seen this particular subject handled with much greater pathos and care, for example in last year's superb Robot & Frank. Alzheimer's is a horrible, tragic thing, but it does not follow that the only action required to make a great movie is to gesture in the direction of Alzheimer's. Tragedy without context is just melodrama, material that beats the audience over the head without challenging or enhancing their understanding of the world. Shameful.
4/10

Buzkashi Boys: A bleak and starkly-photographed movie from Afghanistan, Buzkashi Boys is about a pair of young boys, one a blacksmith's son, one a homeless beggar, who are friends, and dream of escaping the misery of their lives by means of the ludicrously awesome sport of Buzkashi (or as I call it, 'Goat Polo'). Like Henry, this film is a major downer, but unlike Henry, it does not seek to manipulate its audience, instead simply showing them what Kabul has been reduced to after so many years of war, and the lives that its children must lead. A somber, quiet piece of haunting imagery, this movie was intended to kick-start Afghan cinema following years of suppression under Soviet and Taliban rule. Good luck.
7/10

Asad: Continuing our theme of 'children in Hell', we have Asad, a movie from Somalia, about a fisher-boy who wishes to become a pirate. Yet to my surprise, Asad was not another bleak descent into the pits of despair but a movie that showcases just how 'normal' life can be in even the most strained of circumstances. Being left behind by his pirate friends, threats by mujahadeen bandits from Mogadishu, near-starvation, these things are normal to Asad, who does not dwell upon the miseries of his life but simply lives. Unlike Buzkashi Boys, the film is shot in glorious, vibrant color, giving life to the setting and surrounding, and while some elements of the story make no sense (how did a pleasure yacht that size get to the coast of Somalia, and exactly what happened on it?), the movie doesn't dwell on such issues. The film ends very abruptly, even for a short film, but coming as it does from a failed state whose very name seems to be a byword for tragedy and evil, it was quite a revelation.
7.5/10

And the award for Best Live-Action Short Film goes to...

Curfew: The live action shorts this year were a collection of downers, alternating in subject matter between Alzheimer's, child-death, loss, murder, and hopelessness. At first glance, Curfew is no exception, a film about a man attempting to kill himself who is suddenly interrupted by his sister's demand that he look after the niece he is forbidden from seeing. And yet Curfew is a strange beast, poignant and tense and weird and even funny at times, despite its subject matter, expressing in the end (assuming it wishes to express anything) what the power of a single 'roadblock' can mean to one hellbent on killing himself. Though the other films (with one exception) were good movies, this one told the most complete story of them all, and a story I could easily have seen more of.
8/10

[General Havoc]

The 2012 Oscar-Nominated Animated Short Films

The Animated candidates for short film were a strange bunch. I don't know if this is normal or not, but many of the films were extremely short, two of them at less than five minutes' runtime and one at less than two. I grant, this is the 'short' film category, and further grant that animation is hard to produce, but the program I was at had to append several 'honorable mentions', including a half-hour long British children's tale, in order to bring the whole thing up to an acceptable feature length. Regardless, without further ado...


The Longest Daycare: Yes, the Simpsons made an animated short film, and yes, it got nominated for an academy award. Go figure. This silent Simpsons sequence consists of Maggie being dropped off at her day care and suffering through the absurdities of staff and the ill-will of her nemesis, Baby Gerald. I'm aware that conventional wisdom has it that the Simpsons have been a terrible show since 1996, but Hipster-cred aside, I thought the gags worked well, like an accelerated version of vintage Simpsons (the 'Ayn Rand School for Tots' was a nice touch). It's light, it's inconsequential, it's short and it's reasonably funny. What more can one really ask for?
6.5/10

Fresh Guacamole: Um... what? This two-minute stop-motion short consists entirely of an unseen person making guacamole out of unconventional objects such as hand grenades, dice, poker chips, and baseballs. Clever? I suppose, but it's over in the blink of an eye, and plays more like the sort of gag a longer (though still short) film would use to establish the strange world or quirky behavior of a central character. I don't hate it, but how the hell did something this limited wind up getting a nomination?
5/10

Head over Heels: A metaphorical story about an older couple who now live in different worlds (or more specifically, by different sets of physical laws), this film managed to be fairly heartwarming despite its absurd premise and lack of dialogue. The stop motion here is extensive and expressive, and the direction gets the point of the film across easily without having to burden us with oversymbolism. The best animated films let us explore human themes through stylized methods, and that's precisely what this movie does.
7.5/10

Paperman: Disney had to have a contribution in the nominees of course, and it wasn't hard to spot. Paperman is the story of a man who meets a girl in a train station and tries, for complex reasons, to find her again by means of paper airplanes with a life of their own. Hand-drawn in 2D (not a common thing anymore), Paperman is wonderfully animated, with characters that are magnificently expressive, down to subtle, complicated emotional representations. The story is inventive enough, if not groundbreaking, though told almost entirely without sound, speech, or even color. It may lack some of the emotional strength of others on the list, but it serves to remind just how good professional animation can be, even when restricting itself to the practices of the past.
7/10

And the award for Best Animated Short Film goes to...

Adam and Dog: I defy anyone who has ever owned a dog to watch this film with dry eyes. A lush, gorgeously-animated film done in the Japanese style (no, I don't mean Anime), Adam and Dog is exactly what it says on the tin, a story about the first man meeting the first dog, and that which befalls them thereafter. Entirely silent (as were all the animated shorts, come to think of it), the film tells its story entirely through the skillfully drawn animation of a dog whose movements I would have thought rotoscoped were it not for the art style. Yet the strength of the film is not in its animation, but in its story, a simple tale of the ancient bond between humans and dogs, one which can transcend anything in the world, and maybe even things beyond.
8.5/10

[General Havoc]

The Gatekeepers

Alternate Title: To Stand on the Wall

One sentence synopsis: The six retired heads of the Shin Bet discuss the nature of Israel and Palestine.

Note from the Author: This movie, and for that matter, this subject, defies facile divisions. As such, rather than review the movie in my traditional method, I will simply be expressing such thoughts as I have regarding it and its subject matter.

It has been years, literal years, since I heard anything reasonable said on the subject of Israel and Palestine. Mention Israel, or for that matter Judaism in these parts, and you will more likely than not be treated to a virulent diatribe regarding the putrid evils of the state of Israel, all who support it, and if you are unlucky, Jews in general. And should one go to states such as Texas or Georgia, the mere suggestion that Israel is deserving of criticism will be met with violent opposition from those whose rejection of the Palestinians and all their works approaches almost religious levels of fervor. I have seen and heard the most horrific things being said to those who dared offer their opinions on the subject, and heard in turn truly vile distortions of reality, common sense, and human decency offered up in the guise of "analysis" of the situation in the Holy Land, both from talking heads and ordinary people. And yet, in the midst of all this vitriol and hate, along comes a film that asks no more than our attention for a couple hours, as half a dozen old men recount to us the way things are in Israel, how they got to be that way, and where, they believe, things should go from here.

The Sherut haBitachon haKlali, more commonly known by the Hebrew acronym Shin Bet, is Israel's lesser-known, but arguably more important secret service. If the Mossad is Israel's CIA, Shin Bet is their NSA, responsible for internal security, counterterrorism, and the protection of both the populace and senior officials from whatever threats might arise. The six men that this film introduces us to are the six living former heads of the organization, representing between them an unbroken line of succession covering the twenty-four years from 1988 to 2011. Before and during this period, these men oversaw and participated in every major Israeli counter-terrorist endeavor since the Six Day War of 1967, and the film consists of them talking about these experiences, no more, no less. From the establishment of networks of informers in the West Bank to the campaign of targeted assassinations against leaders of Hamas, through scandals, Intifadas, peace accords and terrorist attacks, the movie is simply the six leaders of Shin Bet explaining themselves in as much detail as they can, buttressed only on occasion by prompts from an unseen interviewer.

And what explanations they have. The film uses the evolution of Israel's relationship with Palestine and the on-again, off-again efforts towards or away from peace as its narrative thread, and the men describing what happened do so with a complete disregard for equivocation and codewords that is almost unheard of in modern politics. "Forget about morality in a War on Terror," says one. "Find morality in terrorists first." Yet another admits, almost with a smile, that to the Palestinians, of course, he was a terrorist, something he came to understand and even accept. Descriptions of torture techniques used against recalcitrant Palestinian prisoners stray perhaps a bit from the mark, what with references to "moderate physical compulsion", yet the heads admit that there were incidents where men died under torture. Some express regret, even anger that such a thing should happen. Others defend the fact that these men were holding literal "ticking time-bomb" information that led to saving dozens of civilian lives. One outright admits "I was tired of seeing live terrorists in court." But none try to duck the issue.

It is, of course, impossible to bring up the subject of Israel without bringing ones own worldview and opinions into it, for me as much as anyone. Pro-Israeli as I am, though not to the point of rendering the state immune to criticism, I found, I will admit, much within the film to confirm what I previously believed. The movie glances at, but does not belabor the point that Shin Bet's actions, however misguided or foolish, were generally aimed at reducing or eliminating civilian deaths, primarily in Israel, but also in Palestine, particularly as the extreme right in Israel began stoking its own flames of hatred and madness. By contrast Hamas, and the other organizations Shin Bet was pitted against, were explicitly aimed at causing the maximum number of civilian deaths, Israeli or otherwise, in the service of goals related to a permanent state of war and genocide. One of the officers recounts how he met his counterpart from the PLO in a peace conference in London, and was told that the Palestinians would ultimately win, if only because "our victory is to make you and your children suffer." Two more explain how a pair of botched operations and situations (the extra-judicial killing of two Palestinian bus hijackers, and the deaths of a dozen civilians during an air strike on a Hamas cell) resulted in their immediate resignations, and the fall of the Israeli governments which oversaw them. If this was Justice, it was a thin sort for the relatives of those who died, yet the men point out that had Hamas performed such actions, the consequences would have been lionization and praise, followed by a repetition of the attacks as often as possible. That said, does the simple fact that Israel acted in a more forthright manner than Hamas (a low bar if ever there was one) excuse such actions? None of the men present think so. Several become angry, furious even, over the lapses and errors that led such things to occur. None, to my recollection, attempt to pass the buck.

Yet for all the confirmation I received from this film, I received plenty of surprises, checks, and disabusals as well. The men at the heart of the Shin Bet see a very different side of the major figures of the Middle East than the rest of us do, and I was surprised how much variance there was between these perceptions. Figures like Golda Meir, lionized by the Israeli left as a champion of peace, or Menachim Begen, who shared a Nobel peace prize for signing peace with Egypt, are considered by these men to have been completely uninterested in the Palestinians, their grievances, or the peace process. Begen is remembered by one to have bragged about how many settlements he had overseen the foundation of. Conversely, right-wing figures such as Ariel Sharon, remembered nowadays as a blood-drinking warmonger, is portrayed here as having had the most concern of any Israeli PM over the collateral effects of the targeted assassination theory. At one point, one of the Shin Bet directors speaks of pleading with him to authorize a strike to destroy much of Hamas' leadership, insisting that to hold back would be to guarantee more Israeli dead. Sharon refused to attack. Other revelations included the sheer extent of contact between Shin Bet and the relevant Palestinian security authorities, with whom they seem to have worked fairly closely, through Intifadas and even wars. "We are not helping you for your sake," one of the heads was told by a Palestinian officer. "We are doing it so that we can one day have a state." Much time is spent discussing the rise of Jewish terrorists within Israel, and Shin Bet's efforts to head them off, defusing, among other things, a plot to literally blow up the Dome of the Rock. Other attacks were not defused in time, including the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli ultranationalist, something several of them regard as their greatest failure.

Is this movie biased in favor of Israel? Maybe. I don't think so. It regards the aspirations of the Palestinian people as self-evidently justified, talks of the various upheavals and intifadas as not merely natural, but obvious and predictable outgrowths of Israeli policy in the Palestinian territories. "We as good as planned for it" says one, throwing his hands up in disgust. Is it one-sided? Yes, but the purpose is not to produce artificial 'balance', but simply to illustrate who these faceless men were, and what they think of what they did. And indeed, the opinions we receive are far more balanced than one might accept. Every single one of these former terrorist-hunting heads of intelligence, men whose lives were sought by their enemies, and who sought and took the lives of dozens and hundreds of would-be terrorists, is publicly and unequivocally in favor of advancing peace by any means. "Coming out of this job, you naturally become something of a leftist" says one, arguing in favor of shunting Israel away from its religious wing and fulfilling the two-state solution for Palestine, whatever the short-term cost. Of all six men, the one most militant in defense of his policies, also makes the claim that Israel should talk to "everyone, absolutely everyone, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, even Ahmadinejad," if it has the slightest chance of accomplishing anything. All of them make distinctions between the 'tactics' of their operations, which they claim were highly successful, and the overall 'strategy' of long-term peace, which they claim was entirely non-existent for most of their tenures. "Killing them [Hamas leaders] did reduce attacks, but did not produce moderation," admits one. The purpose of the film is not to argue for facile solutions, though some are suggested, nor to beat drums of Israeli nationalism or terrorism or any other hot button issue. It is, and remains, six men with a unique perspective, discussing their work like adults. Insofar as they can be self-critical, they make the attempt. Most men in their position would not.

Roger Ebert and I have disagreed many times on this little sounding board of mine, but in this matter we are of uniform opinion. In his review, he called the movie the most pro-Israeli film he had ever seen, specifically because it was so practical. "In recognizing Palestinian points of view (though without endorsing them), it sees Palestinian self-determination as synonymous with Israeli peace." Does it tell the whole story? Probably not. But unlike most rhetoric on the subject, it at least tells part of the story, a story that, if we are to grapple with this issue at all, deserves to be understood. In the end, we are left with six old men, whose job it has been to shield Israel from her enemies, expressing a desire to see an end to it all through dialogue and compromise. Insofar as it expresses these wishes, it is unexpectedly thus, as Ebert himself claimed, the most hopeful film I have seen on the subject.

Final Score: 7.5/10

[General Havoc]

No

Alternate Title: The Power of Positive Thinking

One sentence synopsis: A young Chilean advertising producer is asked to help run the campaign to vote down Augusto Pinochet's regime in the plebiscite of 1988.


Things Havoc liked: I've been waiting for a movie like this, I think. One that deals with the actual business of getting people to vote the way you want them to, come hell or high water. What methods you use to convince people to take action, even in defense of their own presumed best interests, are not always as simple as the straightforward polemics that one hears from talking heads and pundits. The mechanics of winning an election, whatever the subject or conditions, are fascinating to me, and thus I was predisposed to like this movie from the start.

For those who've never heard of it, No is a movie from Chile, set in the late 80s, when the rule of Augusto Pinochet had long-since solidified into a sort of society-wide apathy. In response to escalating pressure from abroad to legitimize his regime, Pinochet decided in 1988 to hold a plebiscite to determine whether or not he should remain in power for another eight years. Both the government and the opposition would get television time in the days running up to the election to present their cases, which is where our main character comes in. Rene, a comfortably middle-class advertising director, with a young son and an ex-wife who is considerably more politically radical than him, is gradually brought into the forces of the "No" camp, and asked to craft for them a political campaign to stamp out Pinochet forever.

And what a task he has ahead of him. Beyond question, the element of this film I loved the most was the sheer "reality" of it all. Rene's co-workers are an eclectic collection of dissidents of all sorts, radicals, moderates, socialists (the repeated insistence on ever-more rarefied terms to avoid the word 'communism' become hilarious), exiles, indigenous rights activists, students, lawyers, anarchists, the works. Merely getting them all to agree to participate in the referendum in the first place is an exercise in near-maddening futility, as fifteen years of bitter resentments are not easily set aside in the service of actually "winning". The key issue is Rene's strategy, which is to play up the positive aspects of freedom and democracy rather than yet another kludgy sermon on the evils of Pinochet. Yet when he unveils this presentation to the assembled party leaders, one of them stands up and violently denounces him and his team as collaborators who wish to "marginalize" the suffering he and his people have undergone. Refusing to hear even a word edgewise, he tells Rene to fuck himself and storms out of the building, never to be seen again. I have met these people, people so blinded by the bitterness of their own political grudges that they refuse to allow the subject of the political conversation be anything besides the evil done to them, willing to brand anyone who simply wants to win as a traitor. Yet doggedly, Rene sticks to his message, that the only possible way to galvanize a people so brutalized by Pinochet for so long is to give them a vision of a future worth seeing. Perhaps it's just a personal reaction, but I found the character, and the voluminous flack he receives from every side (radical, moderate, and reactionary), highly compelling. Though a liberal opposed to Pinochet, Rene's exhaustion with those among the leftists who want to do nothing but complain about Pinochet to one another is palpable. "I'm sick of your fucking denunciations" he shouts at one point to an aide who suggests holding another press conference to condemn the government. It's a line I could well have uttered.

The movie is shot on what looks like either 8mm film or VHS tape, giving it a grainy, washed out look, with an editing structure that cuts rapidly between scenes without missing a beat in whatever conversation was being had. The result almost resembles found footage at times, and blends seamlessly well into the whole lunatic design and feel of the late eighties (a scene where Rene and his young son sit in front of their brand new microwave and watch it heat soup made me smile). The style lends itself to a highly-realistic feel, helped in no small part by the character relationships as established and presented. Rene's boss at the ad agency, Luis, is a conservative supporter of the government, who eventually winds up working for the rival "Yes" campaign. Yet rather than the expected scene wherein the two characters rupture with one another amidst fireworks and drama, the two continue to work together perfectly normally outside the campaign, despite Luis' ever-escalating attempts to cajole, bribe, or even plead with Rene to stop working for the opposition. At one point Rene responds to an ever-escalating series of bribes all with "No, fire me", fully aware that Luis cannot and will not fire him, as of course is Luis. What might sound like melodrama is made almost comedic by the fact that the conversation is taking place on set of an advertisement shoot, with both parties being interrupted every ten seconds by actors or lighting technicians as they try to do their jobs. Similarly, when Rene's radical ex-wife mocks him as a stooge of the government for even believing Pinochet will allow the referendum at all, the result is not an impassioned speech or a drag-out fight, but the sort of sudden subject shift that naturally comes from two people who know one another well enough to know what the other is going to do and say.


Things Havoc disliked: Of course, refreshing as this style is, it does leave us with the ugly fact of just why most movies spice everything up with drama and confrontation. Removing all of the interpersonal conflict (or muting it down to a nearly-invisible level) doesn't render the film boring, but it does leave the filmmakers with something of a quandary as to what they can actually show us for the two hours this movie runs. Their answer, by and large, is political ads, most of which I must assume were lifted directly from the actual campaigns in question. These ads are interesting, in a sort of weird retro-style, but only to a point. Around halfway through, the movie freezes the characters altogether in favor of an unending succession of three different types of scenes: Scenes of politicians and activists (opposition and government alike) discussing or filming their respective ads, scenes of those ads showing, and reaction shots of the characters watching the ads of the other side in silence. These scenes contain interesting little moments (the government ads often look shoddy because none of the first-rate choreographers or artists will work for them), but given that the thrust of both sides' arguments is established early on in the movie (Democracy is Fun vs. Chaos without Pinochet), it's hard to shake the feeling that the movie is spinning its wheels through a fair portion of it. This tendency is re-enforced with the addition of several enormous (five+ minute) steadicam shots of Rene walking through a "situation" of some sort. When that situation is a brutal government crackdown on an opposition demonstration, the result is tension and interest, but not so much when it's him walking through a celebrating crowd or an advertisement set


Final Thoughts: This isn't a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed, No is one of the better films I've seen on the subject, effortlessly cutting through the pretensions and story "dressing" that so many films like it fall prey to. But these lengthy, almost empty stretches of film really strike me as a wasted opportunity. At the end of the movie (spoiler alert), when Rene returns to work, unchanged in circumstance save for a brief mention at a pitch meeting that he was associated with the No campaign as a sort of resume point, the intention (I think) is to show how the election, big as it was, did not instantly change people's lives. Yet in showing no consequences to any of the decisions that the characters made, it makes that point too well. An election happened, a dictator was deposed, the sun came up the next day, and the world went on. Perhaps that's how the world works, but if the subject was so inconsequential, why make a movie about it in the first place?

Good material sells itself. But a filmmaker has to have the courage to present his topic as worthy of the audience's time.

Final Score: 7/10

[General Havoc]

Oz the Great and Powerful

Alternate Title: The Wonderful Wizard of Schlock

One sentence synopsis: A carnival magician is transported to the magical land of Oz, where he must fulfill a prophecy to destroy the Wicked Witch.


Things Havoc liked: Say what you will about this movie's qualities, it has an awesome title.

L Frank Baum's Oz series is a neverending source of astonishment to me, if only because of the sheer bulk of the thing. I knew only that there was a book and the classic movie made therefrom, but it turns out Baum wrote no fewer than fourteen Oz books, with another forty-odd being published by a host of authors afterwards, which would appear to make Oz the fantasy equivalent of Lovecraft (there's a crossover I'd like to see). Having never seen a thing from all this material save of course for the 1939 Judy Garland movie, I could only assume that this prequel is derived from canonical sources, and that given everything here, the film-writers were free to plunder a near-infinite quantity of material for their adaptation of what happened before Dorothy found the red shoes.

Some adaptations, reboots, or sequels, don't even seem to be aware of the existence of their previous work. No such difficulties here. The opening sequence of the film, the first 30 minutes or so of it, is a beat-for-beat remake of the opening for Wizard of Oz. We are introduced via a sepia-toned crop-formatted sequence to a series of characters that we will never see again for the rest of the film, but whose actors and voices will follow us into the land of Oz itself. This transitions, following a tornado, into a wonderful technicolor (or in this case, 3D) panorama, showcasing the miracles of modern film-graphics. Though I saw the movie in 2D, 3D and the latest digital effects are here intended to stand in for the miracle that was color in 1939, but the design doesn't just pile images on us. Backdrops are created to look rather uncannily like the expansive matte paintings of yesteryear, generally with more success than failure, while the world has a vibracy and broad, pastel palette that one doesn't often see, even in this age of oversaturated CG.

Though the movie is theoretically about the Wizard (more on him later) the focus is oddly enough on the three witches Glinda, Evanora, and Theodora, of various, shifting allegiances good or evil. A fair amount of time is spent establishing the three of them, particularly Evanora, played by Rachel Weisz. Easily the best actor in the film (helped by getting the best material), Weisz's associated antics are the most realistic (not an attribute in high supply around Oz) and the easiest to follow. Though she hams it up when necessary, she provides a nice sheen of grounding to a story that could very easily fly completely to pieces. Several of the smaller details are appreciated as well. A visit to a village made entirely of porcelain (the location of a pun only Hotfoot could love) results in the Wizard finding a small girl made of china, who joins the inevitable "party" as they make their way towards destiny. The China Girl verges on annoying at times, but the movie manages to keep her bearable, while the effects used to produce her are, in this case at least, genuinely fascinating, putting aside the big-budget spectacle in favor of real texture and sharpness to a fictional character.


Things Havoc disliked: You may have noticed that I've finished with the stuff I liked without discussing the main character, most of the rest of the cast, the writing, story, and cinematography. I think you know why.

First of all, what is Sam Raimi doing here? I understand the desire to branch out, but this is so far from Raimi's strengths that I cannot for the life of me figure out what he was thinking. Raimi cut his teeth on low-budget horror-schlock such as Evil Dead, Army of Darkness, or Drag me to Hell before breaking into the superhero business with the original Spiderman trilogy. I love these movies, but none of them are anything like Wizard of Oz, and whoever decided that Raimi, who never met a slapstick routine he didn't like, should be given the keys to a reboot of a 70-year-old fantastical wonderland classic should have their damned heads examined. Raimi, characteristically, fills the movie with wacky pratfall nonsense, particularly in the first half when he simply stops the movie for about ten minutes so that the 3D audience can get their money's worth. When things aren't being thrown at the screen, we instead get pratfalls and slapstick, not perhaps to the extent of the Transformers atrocities, but plenty. Many of these involve Tony Cox (of Bad Santa and the Epic Movie series) or Bill Cobbs (the poor filmmaker's Morgan Freeman), neither of whom belong anywhere near a movie about Oz.

But Cox and Cobbs are secondary actors. Let's talk about the main actors, such as James Franco, playing Oscar Diggs, a carnival magician turned Wizard-savior. I respect the hell out of Franco's absurd commitment to his craft and truly mad work and study schedule he follows religiously, but I've never liked him in damn near any movie he's been in, not even movies widely regarded as tours-de-force (127 Hours, for instance). His work in the Spiderman films was among the low points of the series, and he singlehandedly ruined Rise of the Planet of the Apes for me with his laconic, wooden style, a style he carries over, I'm sad to say, into this film. It's not that Franco's horrible, he's really not, but he can't act worth a damn beyond his usual vaguely-stoned, detached schtick, and while there's roles that works for, I assume, this is not among them. There's no real sense of wonder (or for that matter, sincerity) from Franco's performance, to the point where, when the movie calls for him to play the actual Wizard of Oz, complete with floating smoke-head, pyrotechnics, and fiery wrath, he comes across sounding like a parent trying to scare their five-year-old into thinking there's a ghost in the closet (Oooooooo! I'm the big bad Wizard of Ozzzzzz!). Granted, the screenplay does him no favors, sending him on a boring, predictable rote-telling of the "hero's journey", wherein he must learn to overcome his greed and be the good person he always was etc etc... But even pedestrian material can be elevated by a great performance, and Franco's not up to the task.

Neither, by the way, are Michelle Williams and Mila Kunis, playing the other two witches. I haven't seen Kunis since Black Swan, and based on this performance, I'm in no hurry for the next encounter. To describe her character fully would enter the realm of spoilers, but suffice to say she spends the majority of the movie either making a pastiche-quality attempt to imitate a classic character from the original film, or creeping out the rest of the cast and the audience with a weird, disjointed performance. The best thing I can say about her character involves a makeup effect. Williams, meanwhile, playing Glinda the Good, is caught helplessly between the roles of "mentor who sees the true potential in our hapless protagonist" and damsel in distress, possessing neither the necessary gravitas for the former role, nor the proper chemistry with Franco for the latter one. The result is an uneven, bland performance, uninteresting even when the scriptwriter decides to steal the wizard duel from Fellowship of the Ring wholesale and present us with a witch's duel which, on paper, should work, but thanks to its inept blocking and terrible pacing, simply does not. The best that can be said of Zach Braff meanwhile, who voices a winged monkey that joins Oz on his journey, is that he doesn't stoop to Jar-Jar Binks levels of annoyance. But then that's hardly glowing praise.


Final Thoughts: That's really the story of Oz the Great and Powerful. There's nothing wrong with a fresh look at Oz in principle, but neither Raimi, nor these actors, nor the screenwriters seem to have had any real ideas of substance to bring to it. Even Danny Elfman's score is instantly forgettable, not even attempting to approach Herbert Strothart's fantastic contribution to the original. Mired in modern contrivances and lacking any genuine charm, the movie simply has nothing to offer beyond a tired tramp through a thin knock-off of a classic film. Not being an obsessive fan of the original, I can't exactly cry betrayal over this tepid remake, but if you're looking for a movie to recapture some of the magic of the original Wizard of Oz, then I'm afraid this one's nothing but smoke and mirrors.

Final Score: 4/10

[frigidmagi]

Granted, the screenplay does him no favors, sending him on a boring, predictable rote-telling of the "hero's journey", wherein he must learn to overcome his greed and be the good person he always was etc etc... But even pedestrian material can be elevated by a great performance, and Franco's not up to the task.

Oh that's bullshit. Look, I saw Wizard of Oz, he hadn't conquered shit in regards to his flaws. He's a man who has conned all of Oz in order to live in a position of prestige, power and privilege! He fucking lied his ass off, not to defeat any evil, the witches were still running loose! But to be in a cushy spot!

This should be a movie about the biggest Con ever pulled! About a man who arrived in Oz saw all this weird, freaky out of your wildest fever dream shit and said "Okay, how do I make these fuckers all work for me?" The question should always be open whose side is he on? What is he really up to? Who is he gonna fuck over worst? And above all, who is getting in on the Con? Because this fucker Conned all of Oz! All of it! Molari!

This is not the Hero's Journey! THIS IS THE GREATEST LIE EVER TOLD!

[Josh]

This is not the Hero's Journey! THIS IS THE GREATEST LIE EVER TOLD!

That is an awesome line.

[General Havoc]

Emperor

Alternate Title: What do you do with a Living God?

One sentence synopsis: General Douglas MacArthur and his deputy Bonner Fellers must investigate the role of the Emperor of Japan in perpetrating war crimes in the aftermath of World War II.


Things Havoc liked: Tommy Lee Jones has gotten into the habit recently of playing himself in every movie he's in. Your tolerance for his antics will, of course, depend on how much you like his craggy, one-liner-spouting, no-nonsense Texas schtick, but I love Jones and largely everything he's ever been in. Yes, there are occasions when he turns to smarminess and camp, such as Blown Away, Batman Forever, or The Missing, but by and large, Jones' performances attract the best lines in the script, and even when he's hamming it up (Under Siege, anyone?), I can't help but smile. In Emperor, Jones has plainly decided that if he can do one egotistical American WWII General (his riotous send-up to Patton in 2011's Captain America), then he might as well go for the repeat and play Mr. Congeniality himself, General Douglas MacArthur.

As I'm sure everyone knows, at the end of WWII, MacArthur was appointed Supreme Commander of the American occupation forces in Japan, tasked with somehow rebuilding a country that had been both figuratively and literally atomized in a way few societies had ever been. Part of this task, of course, involved deciding what should be done with the Emperor of Japan, whose guilt or innocence in the crimes committed by Japan were of less importance, overall, than what his arrest or exoneration would mean politically, both in Japan and out of it. Though MacArthur himself wisely desired to leave the Emperor in place as a means of placating the national sensibility of Japan, the position in Washington was far more inclined towards vengeance or justice, depending on how you looked at it. MacArthur thus appointed one of his deputies, General Bonner Fellers, to investigate the role of the Emperor in starting and prosecuting the war, and to recommend what should be done with both the Emperor and the Imperial system itself.

To say this issue was complicated is understating the matter, and fortunately, the movie is not shy about diving into all of the complexities attendant involved in it. Generals and Field Marshals and High Chancellors of the Privy Council are identified and interviewed and interrogated in dizzying succession. Each one has his own perspective to bring to bear on just how the war began and who (or what) was responsible for the terrible things that happened within it. Our window into the investigation is General Fellers, played by Matthew Fox of Lost fame. I hated Lost (a TV show whose title adequately described the predicament of its own writing staff), and a cursory glance at Fox' movie career (his last two films were Speed Racer and Alex Cross) does not fill me with confidence. That said, Fox is at least decent here, playing a Japanophile returning to the land that long-fascinated him to find it in ashes at the hands of his own nation. Neither vitriolic nor apologetic, Fellers' conversations with the various officials he meets with as he tries to find some reason to exonerate the Emperor are the best parts of the film, particularly his conversations with General Kajima (Toshiyuki Nishida), a senior Japanese general staff officer whose self-conscious analysis of the Japanese cultural mindset is a highly perceptive exploration of what led Japan to do the things, war-related or otherwise, that it did.


Things Havoc disliked: I've had comments from readers of these reviews that they are tired of me getting on a soapbox and rambling about some political or historical issue that I felt was handled incorrectly in this film or that one. These people are encouraged to stop reading this review now.

No, I'm not about to condemn this film and all its works, far from it. Given the contentiousness of the subject matter, it actually does amazingly well in portraying the complexities of a worldwide war. But particularly given Japan's less than stellar history in facing up to the actions of its armed forces in WWII, there are still some issues here that need to be addressed. For one thing, while it's true that Pearl Harbor inflamed American opinion to a level not seen again until 9/11, it is not true that the war crimes tribunals in post-war Japan began and ended with culpability for the Pearl Harbor raid. Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack, and pissed a lot of people off, but it was not a war crime. The Bataan Death March, the indiscriminate massacre of POWs and civilians by the hundreds of thousands, these were the war crimes for which men hanged after the war, and to frame the discussion as one of America seeking vengeance for Pearl Harbor alone without ever mentioning these events is to show a very narrow interpretation of what actually happened in that war. Similarly, a flashback to before the war mentions that the Japanese went to war because of the American oil embargo, without mentioning the by then ten year war with China that Japan was mired in, the war that had already brought on the Rape of Nanking, the destruction of the US gunboat Panay, and which was the proximate cause of the oil embargo. Yes, American policy vis-a-vis Japan was hardly a model of reason and color-blindedness. Yes, Japanese officers immediately after WWII would likely have framed the discussion in exactly these terms. But none of that changes the fact that to describe the oil embargo as something the US "did to" Japan for no reason other than arrogance or racism is to completely shatter the truth of that war. And given the way that war is typically presented in Japan nowadays, that's not a neutral act.

But to return to the subject of the movie itself, the problem here is that the reason none of the above is discussed is because the film has to make room for a love story, told entirely through flashback, between our main character and a Japanese woman he meets at college a full decade before the war. This woman, played by Eriko Hatsune, serves literally no purpose in the movie other than to provide a hackneyed attempt at personal tragedy within the context of the massive, overwhelming catastrophe that has befallen Japan, as Fellers searches for her in the aftermath of the war's devastation and confronts the fact that the war he participated in may have killed the woman he loved. Tragic though this sounds on paper, it's never addressed in the film in anything but the most perfunctory, insensitive manner, as Fellers howls in agony about his lost love to Japanese adjutants whose families, cities, and entire nation have been burnt to ashes. Worse yet, though Hatsune does her best with the material she's given, Fox has no idea how to play a romantic lead, and comes across sounding like a whiny teenager annoyed that the world is not reshaping itself to suit his wishes. Given that Fellers has been established as an expert on and afficionado of Japanese culture from the get-go, and that his sympathies lean clearly towards sparing the Emperor if humanly possible (this much is established within the first five minutes), there is simply no need to occupy a third of the movie's runtime with this useless subplot.


Final Thoughts: I sort of admire Emperor more than I like it. The decision to spare Hirohito (spoilers?) and retain the Imperial system, albeit in the limited, constitutional form it occupies today, was one of the single most important moments of the post-war era, and MacArthur's stint as governor of occupied Japan remains, in my opinion at least, his finest hour. Towards the end, as the movie builds up to the famous meeting of Hirohito and MacArthur, from whence the photograph of the Emperor and the General emerged, it finally begins to gain some momentum, and build towards a sense of actual historical importance. And yet the movie overall seems like a wasted opportunity to actually delve into the issues that surrounded the war and its aftermath. Maybe it's impossible to fully explore a topic like this in 98 minutes, and I've read reviews that complained about the dryness of the subject and the lack of any human material to lighten it up. But these reviews of mine are not some objective marker of quality, but my reaction to the film, and I found that I could have stood a lot more complexity, and a lot less obligatory-love-story.

I've been accused before of filling my reviews with too much pro-American nationalistic sabre-rattling. I will, no doubt, be accused of this again. But it's not really a pro or anti-American slant that I object to here, but the fact that the causes and course of the greatest war in history are by necessity going to be a highly complicated subject. That doesn't mean that a movie of finite duration is evil for presenting a simplified view of the subject. But neither does it mean that you can get away with pretending the simplified version is all there is to it.

Final Score: 6.5/10

[frigidmagi]

I've had comments from readers of these reviews that they are tired of me getting on a soapbox and rambling about some political or historical issue that I felt was handled incorrectly in this film or that one.

I kinda like those rants.

[General Havoc]

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

Alternate Title: Sleight of Plot

One sentence synopsis: A famous stage magician must overcome his own arrogance to compete with a shock-artist street magician in Las Vegas.


Things Havoc liked: I like Steve Carrell. I like him despite the admittedly awful material he often chooses to appear in. Yes, he's schmaltzy when he's not being insufferable, but that works in some movies, and things like The 40-year-old Virgin, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Dinner for Schmucks, or Little Miss Sunshine (to say nothing of his work on The Office) showcase just how well he's able to play a sincere idiot (if that makes any sense). As such, despite the utter dreck that his career is studded with (the less said about Evan Almighty or the Get Smart remake, the better), I actually pay attention when a new film of his comes out, despite the fact that straight comedy is in no way my preferred genre. At worst, his films are inoffensively stupid, and at best, they can actually, I think, be almost moving (shut up). One need only look over the other films on offer during Doldrums Season to see just how appealing a minimum threshold of "inoffensive" can become.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone stars Carrell as a stage magician in the vein of Seigfreid & Roy, the leading half of a partnership whose other half is played by the inestimable Steve Buscemi. What Buscemi, whose pedigree needs no recitation, is doing here in the role of the hapless best friend being driven away by Carrell's arrogance is entirely beyond me, but fortunately Buscemi is an awesome actor who makes everything he's in better, and it's fun just watching him parade around on stage like a cross between David Copperfield and Liberace. The antagonist, meanwhile, is supplied by none other than Jim Carrey, whose career has been an Eddie-Murphy-level joke for the last nine years. I loved Jim Carrey back in the 90s and into the 2000s whenever he took on a project more adult than Yes Man. Here, he plays a David-Blaine style "street" magician, whose acts involve ever-escalating bouts of self-mutilation, shock-horror, and exceedingly painful endurance stunts. Carrey steals the show in this one, riding the edge of his usual slapstick insanity without ever crossing over into out-and-out lunacy. It's a pleasure to see him back in proper form at last, and his villain is just weird enough to prove the most interesting part of the entire exercise.


Things Havoc disliked: *Sigh*

So, a couple years ago, Will Farrell and John C. Reily made a movie called Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, about a NASCAR driver who falls from the pinnacle of his profession due to his arrogance, must spend time in a humble position reconnecting with why he came to love the sport he practices, and then with the help of an elderly mentor, returns to the limelight armed with the lessons he has learned to unseat an even more arrogant rival and reclaim his championship and his personal relationships. It was a fairly forgettable movie, being neither particularly good nor particularly funny, but I mention it here because Burt Wonderstone is the exact same film.

This is not hyperbole. This movie is identical, almost to the point of a shot-for-shot remake, to the Farrell film. The same journeys are taken by the same characters for the same reasons at the same moments. Everything, down to the minor details of when a character gives an inspiring speech, how long the retraining montages last, or when and in what manner the various protagonist-antagonist clashes erupt is identical, root and branch. Lest I sound accusatory, I am not trying to claim that the filmmakers here consciously ripped the other film off, but merely that the plot formula they came up with was so generic that it has literally already been done before. And despite the fact that Talledega Nights was the very definition of forgettable, this one actually comes off like the low-rent version.

I could single out this actor or that one to blame, from Carrell, whose amoral shithead of a magician is such an uncaring douchebag that nobody would believably put up with him for five minutes, to James Gandolfini, still playing Tony Soprano, to Olivia Wilde, last seen in the brilliant Tron Legacy (ugh) who here plays a completely generic love interest, but the issue isn't that this performance is bad or that one wooden. The issue is that even within the formulaic plot, there are mis-steps made. Jim Carrey's character is forced into the antagonist slot simply because it's what his character is "supposed" to play in a movie like this, all without actually bothering to make him a bad guy. He's weird of course, and arrogant, but so is our hero, moreso than this guy could ever hope to be. And as Carrell's "conversion" to being a non-douchebag is handled with such a sense of obligatory obliviousness that we never buy it in the first place, the worst thing that can be laid at Carrey's door is that he revels in showing off his superior magician skills. Similarly, the grand "reveal" that the heroes use to win their place in the end of the film is nowhere established, but simply deployed out of nowhere. It's as though the filmmakers knew the formula had been done to death, and thought it so well established that there was no need to establish it within the film. Carrell doesn't win out over Carey or become a better person because of actions that happen in the movie. He does these things because the filmmakers know we're expecting him to.


Final Thoughts: Burt Wonderstone isn't a terrible movie by any stretch. Carrell does a decent enough job once he stops pretending to be an insufferable dick (yes, it's possible to be bad at being an asshole), Carrey and Buscemi are entertaining to watch, and there's quite a bit of good-to-excellent slight-of-hand on screen. But I've seen out-and-out remakes less derivative of another film than this movie was of earlier genre comedies, and nothing here ever builds to the point of the farce that might have excused such lame recycling.

Pickings are always slim this time of year, I grant, but if your movie choices get to the point where you're considering going to see this repetitive film, then the best advice I have is to stay home.

Final Score: 4.5/10

[General Havoc]

The Sapphires

Alternate Title: Soul Sisters

One sentence synopsis: Four Australian Aboriginal women form a soul group in the late 1960s to entertain the American troops in Vietnam.


Things Havoc liked: It only takes one Doldrums season to make one reconsider the virtue of this weekly-film project, and I've now been through three. Each one had its hidden gems, but was mostly characterized by a flood of mediocrity, and films that ranged from barely tolerable to outright atrocious. Two years ago it was Tron: Legacy, last year Red Tails, and this year a slew of consistently boring, plotless, pointless films in endless succession. I knew when I started this that there'd be times when I had to drag myself to the movie theatre to see something I had no interest in watching, but I wasn't aware of how extended these times might become. And with little worth seeing on the horizon, even in indie cinemas, I have more than once considered just throwing the towel in rather than waste my time and money on a movie without hope of being any good, just so that I can come back here and inform you all that yes, Teenager Holocaust 7 is in fact exactly what you think it is.

But then I run into something like the Sapphires.

Set in the dusty outback of 1960s Australia, the Sapphires opens the film up with a stark recitation of the facts of life for Aboriginals in Australia up through the 1970s, covering such topics as the Stolen Generation, and the laws, then still on the books, that identified them as not human but "flora or fauna". And yet while the movie contains these subjects, it is not about them, insofar as the lives of the four women who form 80% of the main cast also contain these subjects, but are not comprised entirely of them. All four girls stand out individually in their roles, particularly Shari Sebbens' Kay, a light-skinned girl taken by the Australian government to live with a white family as part of the policies of the time, and Deborah Mailman's Gail, the self-appointed matriarch of the group, entirely uninterested in the posturing of those around her, perhaps to an unhealthy degree. All four women are excellent, lending their characters believable patinas as they butt heads with their Irish manager, Dave (Chris O'Dowd). Dave is a wreck, inept at best and usually drunk, but just barely competent enough to provide real help as the girls switch from Country to Soul music and refine their act into something bankable. He's also, crucially, an outsider to the world the women inhabit, enabling him to be both a window for the audience into what is going on (the movie does not generally pause to explain things otherwise), as well as a catalyst for illustrating a few uncomfortable truths from the women themselves.

If the above sounds like a particularly bad issue movie, then you'll simply have to take my word that it's anything but. For one thing, the Sapphires is wickedly funny, particularly in the early half of the film as Dave tries to forge the group into something approximating a real soul band. The dialogue is witty and real, even during bouts of exposition, all of it flowing naturally, like something real people would actually say. Given the subject matter on offer, which starts with racism and gets more serious from there, this is an almost unheard of achievement, as most films on such subjects either turn into bitter polemics or high-concept speeches on the need for tolerance. This movie manages to make the plights of our main characters fully real, all without hand-wringing and finger-pointing. The Aboriginal characters beyond the four women are not the "wise spirit people" of many misguided anti-racism films, but people, like any other. Rare indeed is the movie that manages to make everyone seem reasonable without falling into any of these traps. Rarer still is one that does so while also being wickedly funny.


Things Havoc disliked: Some of the secondary characters, the nightclub promoter in Saigon, the racist white Australians at the beginning of the film, and many of the American soldiers the group encounters along the way, are not drawn quite as well, failing the eye-test for whether a character is a real character or a cardboard stand-in for what the filmmakers thought they needed at that moment. As these are tertiary characters (at best), this matters little, but it does lead to a few issues of logic and plot. Why, for instance, does the promoter insist on sending the girls unescorted through the wilds of Vietnam to get to a special show? If the show is that important, surely an escort would be called for, especially given how easily the girls got one when they were still lowly unknowns.


Final Thoughts: Yeah, I'm really reaching with this one for bad stuff to say, and there's a reason for it. The Sapphires is one of the best films I've seen since the Oscar Season opened last year, a gem of a comedy that's more real than 99% of the films made about this or any similarly touchy subject. Funny, well-written, entertaining, and otherwise brilliantly put together, this film is a gem, especially given when it came out. In a season where the highest-grossing film is the Evil Dead remake (we'll get to that), what more can you really ask for?

Final Score: 8.5/10

[General Havoc]

Evil Dead

Alternate Title: How are the Mighty Fallen

One sentence synopsis: Five young adults go to a cabin in the woods to enjoy a pleasant evening's conversation on the mysteries of life. (I wish.)


Things Havoc liked: I've never been a big fan of horror flicks. For one thing, I don't think any of them are scary so much as just gorey, and while there is indeed artistry to gore, it's rarely found in the found footage dead teenager movies that one has seen over the last 20 years. Classics like Alien, The Exorcist, or the more recent Cabin in the Woods notwithstanding, this genre is wasted on me unless something different can be done with the material. That said, one of the few directors who ever managed to make horror entertaining to me was Sam Raimi, specifically in Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness, a pair of utterly classic comedy-horror movies starring the irrepressible Bruce Campbell. The very reason I liked them is indeed that they weren't the usual parade of horror movie cliches, the jump scares and over-the-top gore effects and teenagers backing into dark rooms one by one in search of a killer who will, obediently, kill them. Instead they were hilarious, slapstick-filled, rip-roaring pastiches of Z-grade horror shlock. Raimi went on to do bigger and (occasionally) better things thereafter, while Campbell went on to become the reigning king of B-Movies and star or co-star in awesome television shows. But as horror grew continuously stupider throughout the 90s and 00s, I occasionally looked back on those movies wishing that there was something else like them out nowadays. As a result, while I can't say I was looking forward to Evil Dead, I had some hope that with both Raimi and Campbell returning as producers, there might be some semblance of the magic of the old films here, something that would take me back to a memory of better times.


Things Havoc disliked: There was not.

Okay, admittedly, this movie has one of the better premises for five young men and women to go into the woods to an isolated cabin from whence there can be no escape (one of the characters is a Heroin addict undergoing an enforced withdrawal courtesy of her friends), but the mere fact that such an excuse has to be invented is indicative of the major problem here. Evil Dead is a movie about five young men and women going into the woods to an isolated cabin from whence there can be no escape.

I mean, is it really necessary for me to say anything else at this point? The original films were parodies of this sort of movie, mocking the pretensions of the Cabin Fevers and Friday the Thirteenths and all the other schlock horror movies that did nothing more than assemble a cast of young twenty-somethings and killed them in increasingly gruesome ways. Long before Scream thought itself original by pointing out that, *GASP*, horror movies are generally contrived exercises in nauseating stupidity, Evil Dead 2 took this notion for granted while crafting a hilarious slapstick romp around them, while Army of Darkness took the premise and ran with it straight off the Cliffs of Insanity, becoming a movie that was half Dragonslayer, half Ghostbusters. And after twenty-plus years and a budget thirty times the original, this is what Evil Dead now has to show us? This formulaic, paint-by-numbers five-man-band film in which the characters die in predictable, gruesome ways after making the most boneheadedly stupid decisions known to man? This is what Evil Dead has been reduced to? The tagline for the film declares that Evil Dead is the most terrifying film you will ever experience, but even if that had been true, whose fucking idea was it to remove the comedy from Evil Dead? Is the world not well-enough supplied with Dead Teenager movies as it is that they need to raid this franchise of all franchises? How can Sam Raimi, who practically invented the art of the horror-mockery, possibly hope to make a movie like this not 12 months after the release of Cabin in the Woods, a film that riotously skewered this exact movie premise. Is there really a single living soul in America who expects that a film in which five young people with no personalities are stranded in a spooky cabin, they will all come out the next day fresh and renewed, and ready for the challenges of a bright future?

And yes, some of this might have been forgivable (I guess) if Evil Dead actually lived up to the tagline, but this movie is neither terrifying, nor frankly even competently done. The basics here are all wrong. At times, characters die by simply being hit in the head with a door, while others linger on after being stabbed, mutilated, beaten, and shot repeatedly with a nailgun. Makeup effects, while visually gruesome, are terribly inconsistent, with characters' injuries changing or disappearing between scenes, whenever the plot "forgets" about the hideous compound fracture that someone sustained not five minutes earlier. Moreover, in grand horror film tradition, the characters are all the stupidest people alive. Even after evil forces are clearly seen to be at work, they walk alone into dark rooms and then spend long periods lingering over minute details on a wall or window while turning their backs on objects or corpses they should really not be turning their backs on. One sequence near the end of the film has one of the characters repeatedly wedge themselves into increasingly confined and inescapable spaces on purpose while being pursued by evil demons and undead monstrocities, only to be astonished when they find great difficulty in escaping from the evil forces that afflict them. Other characters do incredibly stupid things (read the evil book, pick up the evil object, summon the evil monster) for no reason whatsoever and then compound their stupidity by refusing to tell anyone else that they have just done these things. Within half an hour of the film's beginning, I informed my viewing companion that for the rest of the film, I would be rooting for Satan. I did not regret this declaration.


Final Thoughts: Evil Dead is the Richard Nixon of horror movies, a film that was once idealistic and hungry to stand out now reduced to a crumbling, reclusive ruin, aping the movies it once sought to pillory in quest of some quixotic drive I can scarcely guess at. The film is not atrociously made, but given its history, for Raimi to produce a film this generically awful is a measure of how tired he has become. Evil Dead II, for all its shlock, was a film that brimmed over with life and humor. Evil Dead, the remake, is a moribund piece of cinematic garbage, made all the worse for its association with a film series that was once great.

Final Score: 3/10

[General Havoc]

The Place Beyond the Pines

Alternate Title: Sins of the Fathers

One sentence synopsis: The decisions made by a stuntman/bank robber and a young cop reverberate down to the lives of their sons.


Things Havoc liked: What a strange movie this is.

Luke Glanton is a motorcycle stunt rider, played by Ryan Gosling, an actor I've known about but never had much interaction with. He works for a traveling carnival that stops every so often in Schenectedy, New York (the titular Place Beyond the Pines in Mohawk). One night he learns that he has an infant son from a previous fling with Romina (Eva Mendes), his ex-girlfriend who now lives with another man. He quits his job and moves in with a mechanic (Ben Mendelsohn, one of my favorite character actors) and tries to earn money to support his son whether Romina or her new boyfriend want him to or not, turning ultimately to bank robbery. I really don't have much of an impression of Gosling, as I haven't seen most of his previous work, but his character reminds me a great deal of the "Born to Lose" whack-jobs that De Niro and Pacino were talking about in Heat, the sort of guy who seems destined to fail, who may even want to. He makes bone-headed decisions, but given what we know of his impulsive, none-too-bright nature, they make sense, and it's no surprise to anybody when they finally bring him into a violent confrontation with the police.

Enter Avery Cross, played by the ubiquitous Bradley Cooper, a young cop who happens to run into Glanton. The aftermath of this run-in forms the transition into the second portion of the movie, focusing entirely on him and his temptations from the corrupt cops that surround him in the Schenectedy police department. Front and center among such corrupt cops is Ray Liotta, doing his best sleaze routine, while Bruce Greenwood (another favorite character actor) tries to bust them all and Harris Yulin (and another), Avery's father, offers advice rooted not in hoary cliches of doing the right thing, but in a lifetime of experience dealing with the law and the enforcement thereof. Like the previous sequence, this one presents the character of Avery well enough that we understand why he does the various things he does even as he's doing them, and though Avery's choices are significantly better than Luke's, the forks of the dilemmas they are on are made perfectly clear to the viewer. The consequences of the decision Avery makes vis-a-vis his corrupt fellows make sense given his character as we understand it, and sets the stage for yet another transition.

Enter Jason and AJ (unknowns Dane DeHaan and Emory Cohen), sons respectively of Luke and Avery, who fifteen years later, find themselves attending the same high school and meeting over a shared desire (like most high schoolers) to party and get high. As before, these two are excellent, capturing perfectly the twisted and even borderline-sociopathic mentality of real teenagers trying to grapple with their world. Jason seeks to know more about his mysterious father, while AJ seeks to know more about the ways in which he can mess himself up with drugs, and both searches lead approximately to where you might expect them to, though not necessarily with the results you would find in most films. I can't of course give away more than that, but despite the disjointed nature of these three stories, the film overall does an excellent job of connecting them into one solid whole.

What can I say then? The acting, overall, is excellent. Every actor, whether I've heard of them or not, brings a level of realism to their characters that one rarely encounters in film. Even Bradley Cooper and Ray Liotta, whom I like but usually see playing over-the-top crazy-men (Silver Linings Playbook, Limitless, everything-Liotta-has-ever-done) are restrained here, barely ever raising their voices as they go through motions we could actually see. The stories connect well, showing the realistic effects of the actions the characters take, be it coping with the aftermath of a shooting or the consequences of a marriage where one party is addicted to a job the other doesn't approve of. Corruption and robbery aside, the movie gets along more or less without villains. Even the "other man" (Mahershala Ali) who Romina winds up with as Luke is trying to win her back is portrayed as (ironically) the most responsible and reasonable person in the entire film. And overall, despite the knitting together of three fairly disconnected stories, the flow of events from one to the next is strong enough that we easily come along for the ride. A well-made, well-orchestrated, well-acted, well done production overall.


Things Havoc disliked: So then I'm left with trying to figure out why I didn't like it more.

I saw this movie with two other people, both of whom thought it was superb. I didn't. And yet they well be right, because when I look back on the film, I have only poor excuses to give for why I'm not singing this thing's praises.

To start with actual flaws, this movie is long. Three short-film-length stories crammed together are inevitably going to be I suppose, but it runs nearly two and a half hours, and I was checking my watch by the 100 minute mark. It's not that the movie is boring, nor that the plot can be predicted (although one can guess fairly quickly that Luke's character is not in for a particularly happy ending), just that the flow and pacing of the film are very slow. Normally I don't mind that so much... but... well maybe I do. None of the scenes in retrospect are un-necessary, yet all of them went on a bit longer than I would have held them, which in aggregate probably tacked a good 20-30 minutes of filler onto the film in packets of ten to fifteen seconds.

There are also (inevitably in a movie this complex) a number of... questionable character decisions. For one thing, if you're going to tell a teenage kid that his father was a bank robber and criminal, and give him the man's name, shouldn't you also mention the incredibly important circumstances that led to him no longer being here, ones which if viewed in the wrong light could lead to a number of unfortunate consequences? Why instead give the kid all the resources he needs to find these things out without any context? And while we're on the subject, while this film does avoid most of the cliches that come with law-and-crime character studies like this, one thing it lands hard on is the whole "I cannot bear to tell my children the truth" routine, even when the truth is explosive and the consequences of the children finding out on their own even more so. Yes, I know that not everyone wants to speak about past traumas, particularly to their kids. But no fewer than three different characters play this card at one point or another, to uniformly disastrous consequences. Family secrets are a thing, I agree, but it left me at least watching the whole last third of the film thinking that all of this drama could have been avoided if someone at some point had just said the things they should have said. Maybe that's the point of the film, in which case, well done. But it happened so often and with such regularity during the latter stages of the movie, that I began to get the impression that I was watching an "idiot plot", defined as a plot which would not exist if the participants were not all idiots.


Final Thoughts: No, Place Beyond the Pines is not an Idiot Plot, and no, I have not given the film away by saying that there is drama and tension in the last third. But these reservations are what kept me from praising this movie with the same, fulsome approbation that everyone else who saw the movie seems to have. Well-acted, well-shot, well-directed and well-written, I should not really be looking for anything else when I go to see a movie. And yet the slow pace and questionable decisions by many of the characters all conspired to leave a lukewarm taste in my mouth.

I've agonized for several days over what to score this movie, as on the one hand, these are my reviews which are intended to reflect my reaction. And yet on the other hand I do hold to the notion that it is possible for an opinion, even a subjective one, to be erroneous if not outright wrong. It is one thing to dislike Citizen Kane or Casablanca, but quite another to claim that they are "bad films", which is what a low review grade indicates in some regard. And yet on the other hand, how high can I possibly rate a film I didn't love before I'm just repeating what other people think instead of what I do. As such, I therefore must give the movie what I think it deserves from me, cognizant of the fact that the vast majority of viewers would praise it much higher than I have done. Place Beyond the Pines is probably a much better movie than I found it to be, but I can't in good conscience call it the masterpiece that others claim.

Final Score: 6.5/10

[General Havoc]

Oblivion

Alternate Title: Hail Xenu

One sentence synopsis: Tom Cruise must uncover the truth about a terrible war against an alien race that has effectively destroyed Earth.


Things Havoc liked: I like Tom Cruise. I like him because he is good in almost every film he's in, even when the movie itself is nothing to write home about. I also like the sheer pace he manages to maintain in his career. Oblivion is the fourth major film in sixteen months for him, not all of which were masterpieces (MI4), but all of them enlivened by his performance. He's not the best actor in the world but he's a very good actor, and seems especially comfortable in these sorts of everyman/badass roles that he likes so much.

Cruise here plays Jack Reacher Harper, a mechanic assigned to repair automated defense drones following a catastrophic war in which Earth was left all-but uninhabitable. This is hardly the first post-apocalyptic Earth I've seen, but the design aesthetic for this one is better than most, due to a clever decision to depict the aliens as having simply destroyed the moon and then sat back and let the effects of tidal wave and earthquake do the work for them. As a result, rather than the customary shots of smoldering ruins and heaps of dust-covered rubble, this Earth looks like the aftermath of some enormous seismic upheaval. The obligatory ruined landmarks of Earth are not blown apart by lasers, but stand forlorn and abandoned among tidal flats or the worn, eroded, grass-covered remains of blast craters. Canyons are formed from the half-buried, vine-clad ruins of New York City, buried hundreds of feet deep in what looks to be ocean sand. Above all this fly the drones and the house that the drone repairmen inhabit, both looking like something from an Ipad commercial, and above that a tetrahedral space station ("the Tet"), used as a staging point for the evacuation of Earth's population to the Saturnian moon of Titan. The overall effect is a quiet, empty world, not grubby but vast and deserted, different enough from its fellows to distinguish it from the usual Roland Emmerich fare. This design distinction carries through to the soundtrack, an electro-symphonic orchestral score by French electronica band M83, a group I've never heard of before (wikipedia describes them as "shoegazers", whatever the hell that is), but will be following from now on. Their score is haunting and potent, pushing to the fore only in dramatic moments, but always memorable, succeeding where the famous Daft Punk score of the wretched Tron Legacy failed.

The plot is a mess, as all sci-fi plots are, but this one at least holds some water, and some of the more ludicrous notions brought up (Titan? Really?) are actually addressed in-plot. More important are the other actors, including the ever-reliable Morgan Freeman, whose tiny role is nonetheless fun to watch, as he plays the leader of a band of shadowy rebels still hidden on Earth (the previews spoil this much). A larger role goes to Cruise's co-worker Victoria, played by Andrea Riseborough, whose rejection of Cruise's invitations to see the various sights still left on Earth borders on the pathological, yet without ever giving away just what her role is in the devious goings-on within the film. More about the plot I cannot say, sadly, but I will leave you simply with the notion that jaded sci-fi viewer though I am, there were a few twists in this one that even I didn't see coming, a rare occurrence in this day and age and welcomed when it happens.


Things Havoc disliked: I try to turn my brain off for these kinds of movies, but when a film actually makes an effort to address the glaring faults in its own setup, then I usually turn it back on. And this time I wish I hadn't done that.

Yes, there's nitpicks to be had (would destroying the moon really do all that?), but there's always nitpicks. The issue is larger, more important questions, ones the movie draws attention to specifically. For one thing, the aliens in question here (the nature of which I cannot reveal), are apparently powerful enough to physically rip the moon apart, but have to rely on an invasion in order to conquer the planet and secure its natural resources? One defeated by humans with nuclear weapons? Shouldn't the act of destroying the moon have expended more energy than the aliens were liable to acquire domestically? And couldn't firepower of that sort be easily used to simply erase all life on the planet's surface? Questions like this, including some I can't talk about as they deal with plot reveals which would be spoiling, kept popping up as I watched the film, not constantly, but often enough to become annoying.

Equally annoying are certain traits of Julia's (Olga Kurylenko), a mysterious woman Cruise happens upon in a lifepod from an orbital spaceship nobody seems to have previously heard of. Kurylenko, last seen in Quantum of Solace isn't bad in the film, but her character is singularly unhelpful at unraveling what in the name of hell is going on, even when she could be and has no reason not to. Obviously this is done as a means of ratcheting up the mystery quotient, but unnecessary mystery isn't intriguing, it's infuriating. Similarly, the movie makes the mistake (as many movies do) of pretending that the audience has not seen the trailers for the film, thus drawing out certain mysteries whose resolutions are spoiled in the previews as though we were seriously wondering what was about to happen.


Final Thoughts: All that being said though, Oblivion was not what I expected it to be. An April release date for a sci fi extravaganza speaks to very low expectations on the part of the studios, and I read and heard many reviews warning me away from this film prior to seeing it. Yet overall, Oblivion is a reasonably well-done film, interesting when it needs to be, competently executed, shot and scored, and with lead actors that sell the material despite the demonstrable goofiness of several of its premises. Is it destined to be remembered as a shining jewel in the pantheon of science fiction films? No. But it's still a very solid, very creditable movie, whose design and score were enough to make it worth my while to see alone.

If this Doldrums season was worse than usual, and it was, then perhaps Oblivion, my last film of 2013's doldrums, is a sign that better things lie ahead.

Final Score: 6/10

[General Havoc]

Iron Man 3

Alternate Title: The Steps Without the Music

One sentence synopsis: Tony Stark battles the shadowy terrorist mastermind known only as the Mandarin.


Things Havoc liked: Robert Downey Jr. is so good at playing Tony Stark that I'm getting tired of saying so. Never, in the history of actors and characters
with origins outside of the movies, have I seen a pair as perfectly matched as Downey and Stark, and if there's anything that the up and down (but mostly up) history of the massive Avengers series has taught us, it's that Downey can play Stark in his sleep (and in this film, often does, albeit in reverse). It's possible I will never get tired of this Tony Stark, irreverent, playboyish, monomaniacal, thoughtless, brilliant, committed, delinquent, you all know what he's like. In Iron Man 3, the (oddly) fourth movie in which we get to spend an extended period of time with him, Robert Downey Jr. is no less entertaining to watch than he was in the other three. The film (wisely) leaves Stark out of the Iron Man armor for most of its run time, giving him plenty of time to simply be, act, and even fight as Tony Stark, the billionaire genius, and he manages to sell every single line, be it a throwaway one-liner or a surprisingly candid admission of his own fallibilities. Downey is Tony Stark. Period.

Iron Man has been through some chop insofar as the rest of its casts have gone, but they seem to have settled on a workable set. Gwyneth Paltrow's turn as Pepper Potts remains the only role I have ever been able to stand Gwyneth Paltrow in, and while her character is used here as the usual damsel in distress for a good portion of the runtime, the movie does manage to find ways to do several new things with her. Don Cheadle, reprising the role he took from Terence Howard in Iron Man 2 (a change for the better, then and now), has a surprisingly limited role as Colonel Rhodes/War Machine/SPOILER. His screen-time is limited by the requirements of the plot, but his interactions with Stark have just the right note of almost buddy-cop humor amidst all the chaos, as he brings a professionalism to the business of saving the world that Tony patently lacks.

But two of the bigger surprises to me were actually new characters to the series. One was Ben Kingsley, here playing the Mandarin, leader of the Ten Rings terrorist organization. Kingsley was a surprise, not insofar as he was good (for he always is), but insofar as where they go with the character. For a villain that always rode the line in the comics between racial stereotype and generic "evil league of evil" member, Mandarin here is taken in directions I, for one, absolutely did not expect. The investigation of his backstory and role in the film is, culminates, to me, in the single best sequence of the film, a sequence bereft of special effects or choreography, that simply explores a concept I don't believe we've seen in a comic book movie to date. The other surprise was eleven-year-old Ty Simpkins, who plays Harley, a boy that Stark encounters through a series of events too elaborate to relate here. I know most of you are already rolling your eyes at the very notion of Iron Man with a kid sidekick, but this one actually works through a combination of a very good child actor and excellent writing, some of it sardonic, some of it not, that elevates the scenes with the kid into some of the best in the film.

And yes, the writing, always a high point in Iron Man films, is still excellent, perhaps not quite as crisp as it was in the Avengers, but perfectly workable, with all the self-effacing human touches that the other films relied so heavily upon (the bit involving War Machine's security password was hilarious). The film's writer, Shane Black (of Lethal Weapon and the Long Kiss Goodnight), here sprinkles generous quantities of references, in-jokes, comedic asides, and other such craziness, all of which fit the tone of the perennially irreverent Marvel cinemaverse. Directing (also Black) is unobtrusive, with few obvious 3D-payoff shots (I saw the film in 2D) and effects that never serve to get in the way. Marvel and Disney know that this series is their bread and butter, and there are no corners cut to make the film as professional-grade as possible, and while none of the crew-work shines out as a particularly memorable example of the genre, the film is overall very well made.


Things Havoc disliked: *Sigh*

I wanted to love Iron Man 3, I really did. I'm on record as having loved every single previous run-up-to-the-Avengers film, to say nothing of the Avengers itself. I had misgivings about the third Iron Man, sure. Third-movie-curses are a real thing, guys (Godfather), especially in the Superhero genre (Spiderman, X-men, Superman, the original Batman series), and the materials for this film gave me the uneasy feeling that, for all Disney-Marvel's skill at producing high-quality work, we might be in for a fresh round.

Short answer: Shit...

Long Answer: What the hell happened to the plot of this movie?

So, yes, this is a superhero movie, and thus, I should not be surprised when the plot involves a genetically-modifying super-drug which can literally regenerate lost limbs in seconds and give people not only Wolverine-style healing factor but super-strength and the ability to superheat parts of their body enough to melt steel. We have to come up with credible antagonists for Tony Stark's traveling circus of one-man war-stoppers after all, and this will do in a pinch. But the plot of this movie left me wondering if I'd missed large sections of it. No explanation is ever offered as to why the Mandarin's henchmen, a group of formerly disabled US army veterans, have all joined up with the Mandarin to brutally murder civilians, women, and children, to kill Tony Stark, and to destroy the United States. No explanation is ever offered as to where the Mandarin gets his preposterous level of access, military hardware, and legions of well-placed traitors. I do not object necessarily to the notion that the Mandarin simply has these things, but in a film that tries to talk cogently about such topics as the aftermath of war and the contradictions of the War on Terror (more on this later), you can't just arbitrarily drop all question of motivation.

Part of the issue here is due to Guy Pearce, here playing Aldrich Killian, a well-connected Biotech magnate in the employ of the Mandarin. For one thing, I hate Guy Pearce. With the exception of LA Confidential, Animal Kingdom, and Memento, everything he's been in was either garbage, occasioned him acting like a moron, or both. There's an unwarranted smugness to every character he plays that just grates with me, and while he's a villain here, and grating smugness is not necessarily a bad quality, the fact remains that his character, a major one all things considered, has no motivation whatsoever. Other than literally the pettiest grudge I've ever seen in film, Killian does not have any reason at all (throwaway lines about "controlling the War on Terror" notwithstanding) to do what he does, and while I grant that grudges can be petty in reality, to ground a film like this in such an inconsequential "failing" of Tony Stark's (he literally brushes him off once at a cocktail party) robs the film of one of its strongest assets, the ability to make the central conflict a personal one. Superhero movies live and die on the personal conflict that goes on beneath the costumes and armor, and a villain this arbitrary scuppers everything you could do in that direction.

Not that the movie needs much help in scuppering things. Iron Man 3 hints constantly at interesting and cool ideas: Tony Stark dealing with the aftermath of his traumatic experiences in Avengers. The contradictions and sometimes artificial nature of the War on Terror. The nature of terrorism and of America's role in the world. Yet all the film does is hint at these topics, never pausing on any one of them long enough to actually explore anything. Tony suffers from panic attacks and symptoms of PTSD, something he tries to combat by throwing himself into his work. Yet beyond the simple fact that these things exist, nothing is done with them. We do not see how they inconvenience his life. We do not see how he works to overcome them. We do not see how he ultimately is able to triumph over this problem, as it is simply dropped without comment once the movie has established that it exists at all. The same is done with all of the other potentially interesting ideas that the movie has, as well as large portions of the cast. During the time that Tony pairs up with the aforementioned kid sidekick, the movie seems to be hinting towards one series of things for their relationship, and then rather than developing further or even subverting this expectation, simply drops the matter entirely. In this way, the film, which is very good at generating interest, proves itself even better at defusing it.


Final Thoughts: I don't want to give the wrong impression here. I didn't hate Iron Man 3. I didn't even dislike Iron Man 3. In certain ways, I can even say I liked the film, but given the exalted heights that my expectations had reached thanks to a string of awesome movies capped by a stupendous one, I must admit to a sense of almost crushing disappointment with the product I ultimately received here. It is, by one standard, fair to point out that my expectations were perhaps too high, that nothing could have satisfied me, and that my review is biased. But to take another viewpoint, if my expectations were high, it was because they had been set there. Disney and Marvel created a series of escalating masterpieces, all with the intention of bringing me in to see film after film. They established these expectations for themselves, and cannot now hide behind them when they fall short of the mark.

It is not bias to expect greatness from a series that has been great. And it is not fanboyishness to be disappointed when one does not receive it. Iron Man 3 is a movie worth watching. But it is not the one I wanted to see.

Final Score: 6/10

[General Havoc]

42

Alternate Title: Elegy for Saint Jack

One sentence synopsis: Jackie Robinson and Branch Ricky shatter the color barrier in major league baseball.


Things Havoc liked: Contrary to popular belief, Jackie Robinson was not the first black man to play professional, major league baseball. He was, however, the first one to do it in the modern era, bringing a sixty year period of baseball segregation to an end, and did so at a time wherein the risks of attempting such a thing were very real. By all accounts an unassuming man, Robinson broke the color barrier the only way anyone could, by playing lots of top-quality baseball, and his career remains the only positive accomplishment I am willing to lay at the feet of the Dodgers, then of Brooklyn, now of Los Angeles, who as rivals to my beloved Giants are axiomatically comprised of nothing but scum and dog-molesters, unfit to wear uniforms or swing bats.

Erm... sorry, where were we?

So yes, as a baseball fan of record, (see my Moneyball review for more details), I was interested in seeing 42, and finding out what it offered. As it turns out, what it offered in no small part was a hell of a cast. The main event of course is Robinson himself, played here by unknown (to me at least) Chadwick Boseman, who not only does a fine job but looks a spitting image of Robinson himself. Boseman's performance isn't the greatest in the film, but then his role is to do as Robinson himself did, and not react to things, not even when he desperately wants to. Co-starring (effectively) alongside Boseman is Harrison Ford, playing pioneering Dodgers president Branch Ricky, a man who simply wanted to torpedo the unwritten color barrier of baseball any way he could, and brought Robinson in to do just that. Dearly though I love Ford, I have always had a very hard time seeing anyone but Ford himself in his performances, with the exception of those so iconic that it's impossible to imagine anyone else (Indiana Jones, Han Solo, Jack Ryan). Here, well, he came close at least, employing a jowly growl of a voice as he glowers menacingly at anyone who dares to enter his office, be it his own staff or the commissioner of baseball itself. Yet Ford's is also not the best performance in the film. Most of the other roles go to recognizable character actors, uniformly on top of their game, particularly Law & Order's Christopher Meloni playing the Dodgers' womanizing manager Leo Durocher, a man with no patience for the racial hangups of his players, willing to fire anyone who refuses to play on the field with Robinson. Meanwhile, the games themselves are narrated by Dr. Cox himself, John McGinnley, who plays the legendary Dodgers play-by-play man Red Barber. Meloni's role is relatively small, but he is perfect in every scene, a man who simply cannot be bothered to either be or tolerate racists, as the sum total of his cares in the world are to win baseball games and make money. McGinnley meanwhile tones his usual manic screen presence waaaaaaay down to faithfully replicate Barber's laconic call style, one which defined an entire generation of sports broadcasters. Both of these performances are excellent, and yet neither one of them are the best performances in the movie.

No, the best performance in the film belongs to (of all people) Alan Tudyk, who plays Ben Chapman, manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, and one of the most virulent racists ever to set foot on a baseball diamond (yes, including Ty Cobb). Chapman's hatred for Robinson and everything he represented was legendary, even by the standards. He would stand on the field shrieking vile epithets at every at-bat, and ordered his pitchers to hit Robinson in the head as often as they dared. Tudyk, whom I've only ever seen play comedic or semi-serious roles, here transforms himself into something wholly new. Not only does he play a despicable scumbag with great vigor, but he even manages to capture the self-righteous justifications that allow him to behave in such a way (his reaction to an article condemning his vile racism is to declare "a Jew wrote that.") I've seen Tudyk in a number of roles since Firefly, not always to his credit, but never before have I seen him transform himself into a role this divergent from his traditional body of work.


Things Havoc disliked: There's a fine art to hagiography. You can't expect a movie like this to provide you with the same character experience that you might see in a wholly fictional story. This movie is not here to give us a full accounting of Jackie Robinson's life, it's here to tell us about a pivotal moment in the history of baseball. And that's fine, except that this movie goes completely overboard with the saccharine element.

Look, I'm not objecting to a sentimental film. Pixar's films are sentimental. Spielberg's (better) films are sentimental. There's nothing wrong with a sentimental film, indeed there's often much that's right, as a sentimental film can pierce the cynicism with which we go through our lives and touch us on a human level. Sentiment is one of the ways that film reminds us that it is an art form as well as a commercial enterprise, and thus has value in and of itself. 42 is not sentimental however. 42 is sappy, and sappy films are a completely different beast than sentimental ones. Sappy films include such scenes as when a little black boy prays aloud to God that Jackie Robinson get a hit so as to "show everyone that we can do it too". Sappy films involve sequences where Jackie's teammates walk over to him on the field and thank him for having the courage to "bring out the best in them". Sappy films focus on a home run he hit in the middle of the pennant race as though it was the most important single event in the history of time (did we forget that the world series also exists)?

Yes, I'm sure most of these events actually happened in some form (Pee Wee Reese putting his arm around Robinson during a Cincinnati game has been memorialized in a statue), but I seriously doubt they happened like this, with actors reciting unutterable dialogue while swelling violin music plays in the background and they stare off into the distance as though savoring the moment of history. However good your intentions are for a film, you simply cannot produce scenes wherein people speak in a manner nobody in the history of the world has ever spoken and expect the audience to buy it. No, not even if your subject matter is as "uplifting" (or "correct") as that of Jackie Robinson's career. Very few things are able to drive me out of my immersion in a film faster than hacky dialogue intended to induce diabetic comas, and this movie produces that exact effect more than once.

But as though that weren't enough, there's a specific moment in the film I have to call out. One of the many antagonists that Robinson faces among major leaguers is a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates named Fritz Ostermueller. In the film, Ostermueller is a violent racist who throws at Robinson's head and screams at him to get off the field, as black people (his term is less polite) do not belong in baseball. Nothing special relative to what else Robinson faces, yet unlike the various other racists Robinson encounters, this one is a complete distortion of the truth. The real Ostermueller never accosted Robinson, on or off the field. He was on the record multiple times as having supported the idea of Robinson and other black players joining the Major Leagues, and the infamous HBP (hit by pitch) that the movie claims was a racist assault, was actually an inside pitch that hit Robinson in the wrist, something that happened quite often, as Robinson had a tendency to crowd the plate against left-handed pitchers. It's one thing to get facts wrong in a movie. Every movie does this. But it's quite another to blacken a man's reputation by accusing him of being a vile racist when he was anything but. Ostermueller was no hall of famer, certainly. Few people have ever heard of him outside this movie. But does that make it right to arbitrarily re-assign his memory into that of a race-baiting hatemonger? Were there really not enough genuine villains that Robinson faced to fill two hours of screen time?


Final Thoughts: I wanted to like this film, I did, but I can only take so much in the way of sappy preaching on the saintliness of someone, genuine hero or otherwise, especially since the film seems to think that the heroic patina surrounding Robinson excuses a hatchet job on an undeserving player. 42 is not an unpleasant film nor is it a particularly bad one, but I walked out of it without any particular need to see it again. The sappiness quotient wasn't enough for me to condemn it the way I've condemned other sap-fests (Timothy Green, for instance), but it certainly was enough to let this one pass by. Given that Brian Helgeland, who wrote and directed this film, was previous to this employed on Salt and Ridley Scott's Robin Hood, I feel confident enough in pronouncing this movie to be a third strike.

But don't worry Helgeland. There's always next year.

Final Score: 5/10

[frigidmagi]

his career remains the only positive accomplishment I am willing to lay at the feet of the Dodgers, then of Brooklyn, now of Los Angeles, who as rivals to my beloved Giants are axiomatically comprised of nothing but scum and dog-molesters, unfit to wear uniforms or swing bats.

Someday we'll have a decent movie about Jackie Robinson.

[General Havoc]

Star Trek Into Darkness

Alternate Title: The Wrath of Spock

One sentence synopsis: Captain Kirk and his crew must save the Federation and Starfleet from a terrible adversary bent on destroying both.


WARNING: The following review contains spoilers. There is literally no way that I can discuss this movie at all without employing them. You have been warned.

Things Havoc liked: J.J. Abrams' reboot of the original Star Trek back in 2009 was a goddamn revelation to me. Though the movie was hardly perfect (what was Eric Bana thinking?), it was miles beyond the sorts of remakes and reboots (Hulk, Transformers) that I had by then become accustomed to. Much of the reason for that was the casting. Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto were James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock in the same sort of way that Robert Downey Jr. was Iron Man, encapsulating everything that made the characters who they were while simultaneously updating them for a new vision on the classic series. The result was one of the finest reboots I've ever seen, a hilarious action romp held back from classic status only by a lackluster villain, something the writers clearly decided they were going to look into this time round (more on him later). For the second installment, Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine reprise their roles with gusto, in both cases (particularly Quinto's) actually surpassing how on-point their performances were for these two iconic characters. Pine's Kirk is slightly more restrained, still cocksure and headstrong but less the brash, arrogant, kid he was when he took command back in the first film. The question of what lessons he has really learned and how suited he is to put them into practice forms a major element of the film's narrative, and are on full display here. Quinto's Spock meanwhile, has seemingly come full circle, mastering his human emotions to the point of being able to suppress them at will, he must now confront a situation wherein less-than-vulcan detachment may well be necessary in order for him to function. Whereas Kirk was my favorite character of the original movie, Spock actually wins my prize this time round, as Quinto embodies the character through a roller-coaster of states and circumstances, owning it to the point where I would gladly have watched a few hours more.

That said, Star Trek is an ensemble piece, and all the pieces must mesh to work. Everyone here remains as awesome as before, from Sulu getting his first taste of command, to Scotty's much-upsized role (still my favorite Simon Pegg performance) to Karl Urban's Bones' sardonic southern wit, to Uhura's moments of linguistic badassery. The standard cast is rounded out by a number of others, returning and new, including the ever-reliable Bruce Greenwood as Admiral Pike, Kirk's commander from the last film, and now a senior admiral at Starfleet whose task it is to beat sense into Kirk by any means necessary after another hijinx-laden stunt. Also playing an Admiral is Peter Weller (whose post-Robocop doctorate in renaissance art and architecture has served me well as a party anecdote over the years). Weller plays Admiral Marcus, a military-minded admiral in the vein of Star Trek VI's Admiral Cartwright, willing to bend the Federation's lofty standards of morality if necessary in order to safeguard it from clear and present dangers. I don't get to see enough of Peter Weller in general, and this movie makes me regret the lack all the more, as he doesn't play the standard thuggish military officer, but rather a man who could credibly come from the Federation, who simply sees it as his duty to protect the good thing that Earth and the rest of the UFP has.

But best of all among the non-returning stars is the ever-British Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays (a subject of much debate prior to the movie's appearance) Khan Noonien Singh, the great enemy of Captain Kirk from the original series and Star Trek II. Cumberbatch here is a presence of terrible dread, nothing like the vaguely-charming self-satisfied techno-barbarian that Ricardo Montalban portrayed so effectively before. In keeping with the new, sleeker vision of Stark Trek that these movies have embodied, this Khan is a cold, violent killer, pitiless and savage, while still retaining the brilliance and calculation of the Augments of old. Yet this Khan has motivations that are quite stark, and his explanations for the actions he takes have more than a ring of truth to them. The best villains are always those who never see themselves as villains, and Khan, for much of the film, rides that difficult line as to what his intentions actually are, and what the reactions of the rest of the cast should be relative to them. Though I've previously only ever seen Cumberbatch play such wonderfully British roles as Sherlock Holmes and MI6 agents (in 2011's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), here he shows no trace of English quaintness, presenting instead a terrible force, of direction unknown, fully capable of utterly destroying anything in his path.

Criticism was leveled at the first JJ Abrams Star Trek movie for its design, its "iPod chic" look and overuse of lens flares. The former there's not much to do about, if you don't like the look of the new Enterprise, then you will continue to not like it here. I do like it however, reflecting as it does a more recognizable future setting for the adventures of the Trek crew. It's not as though the various television Treks didn't change design, after all. As to the lens flare overload, this movie tones that element down considerably, releasing the full palate of visual colors (an opening sequence on a gorgeous planet of red jungle for instance) unfettered by the over-saturation that did, admittedly, mar the first film. Indeed Abrams seems to have replaced his lens flare obsession with a Firefly one, as the movie now makes full use of Firefly's famous effects focusing and spot-zoom shots, the ones that surprisingly few sci fi directors have picked up on since then. While I still did experience some of the "what the hell is going on here" problems I had in the first film (caused primarily by the sheer business of the ship-to-ship shots), everything here is considerably more cleaned up, and several of the sequences (particularly an early one involving the Enterprise under the ocean) are simply breathtaking, easily delivering the sense of awe and wonder that Star Trek is meant to embody.


Things Havoc disliked: It was, of course, inevitable that a movie like this would be compared with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Arguably the best of the Trek movies (my personal favorite), and of course the only other one to star Khan himself, Star Trek II was always going to be a benchmark that this movie would have to aim for, whether they wanted it to or not. On the one hand, I do have to applaud the filmmakers for actually recognizing this fact in writing the movie, as opposed to pretending that Wrath of Khan never existed. On the other hand, however, it is a dangerous game to try and overtly compare yourself to the best film in a twelve-movie series. And when that comparison fails... oh boy...

I mentioned it before, but I'm serious this time. Spoilers. Those who have not seen the movie should skip ahead to the last paragraph before the final thoughts.

Spoiler: show

The decision to re-create the famous death sequences from Wrath of Khan was a bad one. Not that it's the actors' fault, for it isn't. Quinto, and particularly Pine do an incredible job in portraying a tremendously emotional moment. Kirk admitting his fear at the moment of death was an inspired idea, and Spock's visible pain as he watches his friend die helplessly beyond his grasp gives excellent context to the scenes to come. Yet in paralleling Wrath of Khan so carefully (especially with the famous line), the movie shattered my immersion in what was supposed to be the climactic scene, pulling me completely out of the film and punting me back into critic mode. And that's where the problems lie. Wrath of Khan was a sweeping epic tale of personal revenge, of hubris and failure, of humanity and friendship in the face of the inevitability of our own deaths. It was a slow, careful move, that resembled Das Boot more than Top Gun, a movie filled with literary and Shakespearean themes, that ultimately came down to a duel of wills between Khan and Kirk. This movie could never have matched the grand drama of Wrath of Khan, not with this runtime and cast and the responsibilities it had to all manner of other issues, and yet rather than standing out and trying to be its own film, it seeks to pretend it is the same as its predecessor.

There's also the question of pacing and foreshadowing. The movie is roughly two hours in length, but carries enough material to support another half hour if not more, and the result of compressing everything into this short of a runtime is that the entire movie feels like it's being played on fast forward. Dialogue is recited with great speed, action scenes are short and to the point, everyone seems to constantly be in a hurry to do six things at once. Granted, I prefer this method to the alternative option of cutting massive segments of the movie, but every blockbuster nowadays clocks in at 2:30 to 3:00. Was there really no way to squeeze another ten to fifteen minutes of runtime out of the producers? As to the foreshadowing, there's a difference between trying to respect the rules of establishment (Chekov's gun, etc...) and telegraphing everything that's going to happen in the movie, and sadly this movie does the latter in its last half hour or so. There was a discrete point about thirty minutes from the end where I knew exactly what was going to happen, in detail and in order, for the next twenty-five minutes, thanks to a series of clunky establishing scenes seeded throughout the movie up until that point. I was right on every single item, which left me sitting in the theater patiently waiting for the movie to catch up with me, not a situation you as a filmmaker ever want to find me in, especially when those twenty-five minutes include both your action crescendo and your tearjerking emotional climax.


Final Thoughts: All things considered though, the question with Star Trek Into Darkness (STID?) was really twofold: Is it a good movie? And is it good Trek? As a trekkie of some standing, I can safely report that the answer to both questions is 'yes'. Both thematically and through the performances of all of the actors involved, Into Darkness is a fine film, albeit not of the caliber that brought us the immortal Wrath of Khan. For all the missteps it makes in pacing, foreshadowing, and scene construction, the movie has the right heart and soul, the proper blend of madcap antics and human (and humanist) themes that make a good Star Trek movie (or hell, a good sci fi movie). Is it as good as the previous film? No. Is it going to convert people thrown off by the design choices (or whatever) of the previous film? Probably not. But is it a movie I enjoyed the hell out of, and would watch again? Hell yes.

A good heart and good performances can't always get you to greatness, but I'll be damned if they can't get me to smile.

Final Score: 7.5/10