At the Movies with General Havoc

[frigidmagi]

Alright, here's my view. It was a fun movie with some decent acting and really, really, really bad writing. The characterization is weak, seriously I can't remember anyone's name now expect Mako Mori's because everyone was screaming it all the time. Nor can I remember to many character traits beyond "Hollywood's idea of a senior officer," "Haunted Maverick," "Pilot straight from an anime," and "STRAYA PILOT!" That's -50pts movies.

I will note that they did the relationship between American and Australian troops right, snarling, snapping and no one can bond with each other until we've beat the ever loving crap out of each other. That's +10 pts. That was also a great little bar brawl that I think I enjoyed more then anyone else in the theater did (Of course I've actually been in barfights with Australians, I mean... I like Australians... But damn dude sometimes you just gotta kick their teeth in to make them listen!)... *cough* Says the American Marine. ... No offense meant.

As for scale, the first fight did establish it by using the fishing boat I felt, the second fight (I count Hong Kong has 2 fights) didn't have it and I had some of the same problems Havoc had. The 3rd fight with Gypsy Danger was the best one, using various office buildings (and that scene in the "refuge") and a cargo ship to no only set up scale but provide the best moments in the movie. I also liked the "check for a pulse" moment (another +10 movie). It did need more moments like that. Also... WHY ARE YOU PUNCHING THE GIANT MONSTER WHEN YOU HAVE A FUCKING SWORD! STAB THE MOTHERFUCKER DUMBASS! You do not stab when you can shoot, you do not punch when you can stab and so on! The last fight underwater had no scale but had fun moments (one monster getting sliced in half was an awesome moment). So the average for the fights in the movie comes to... Pretty Decent, fun overall but nothing that will really gel or stay in memory. Considering that the whole point of the damn movie is to give me these fights... Guys, you did not bring your A game.

Also I believe the pilot having to do construction work after leaving the force. I can believe him not having any access to any type of benefits. I mean he was only saving millions of lives. I mean the VA has a backlog of hundreds of thousands now, why would they get better in the future? It's a sci-fi not a complete fantasy after all. Why yes I am bitter about this and never letting it go. Fuck you.

I hated the scientists or as I call them, old nerd stereotype and new nerd stereotype. Seriously why is it movies that depend on nerd dollars go out of their way to mock nerds? The operator guy in spenders? I liked him. He was clearly a nerd but he was a badass nerd with cred. We should have had a sub plot with him instead.

The plot... Oh GOD HELP ME the plot... Who was writing this? Who was editing? Why are they still working? What the hell!?! I was distracted this whole movie by questions that could have been answered in minutes.

1: WHERE THE FUCK IS THE DAMN NAVY! look, I know the fatass squids are lazy but... Damn! What? Did they all get eaten? Was there a naval strike? Hey we have giant monsters approaching from the ocean, you know what would be useful? A FUCKING BATTLESHIP WITH RAILGUNS AND NUCLEAR CRUISE MISSILES!

2: Nuclear bombs do not work that way. Look I'm sorry but they don't. Gypsy Danger is now a pile of loose radioactive scrap on the bottom of the ocean. Good Night!

3: So because we close one portal they will never open another one? Or open several dozen at the same time? You know this one isn't important, it could be explained in a sequel.

4: If the monsters are genetically created weapons... Why is one pregnant? How did it get pregnant? When? Why would you even build a weapon with the ability to have feral children?

5: The Russians and Chinese are reduced to walk on roles in this movie. Could we have cut back on the Aussie-American pointless feud and given them some character? Just a thought.

6: Why are the suits so committed to this wall thingy when it's clearly failed? I feel like I was introduced to this wall concept for 5 minutes before it graphically failed and everyone had to be rescued by the canceled weapons project on international T.V! LIVE! There are massive protests and anti-wall riots in the streets and the politicans reaction? "Look I happen to think a giant wall that doesn't work is our best option instead of the giant robot that does."

WHY!?! Seriously! EXPLAIN MOVIE! EXPLAIN! Are we no longer a democracy? Is that why this random guy in a suit called "American Representative" can ignore millions of people? Cause I think a few more wall attacks and the elections are gonna look bad for you. Did the aliens infiltrate and he's working for them? Is the construction industry just giving him that much money that he doesn't give a shit if the wall works? Did a giant robot kill his family? Is he just that fucking high? WHAT!?! Somebody tell me! Why is the political establishment devoted to the idea of a wall that devours concrete and steel by the million ton and doesn't work instead of just building bigger guns and robots to back up those guns? Whose pushing the idea that a static unmoving, unchanging defense without any backup plan (seriously there is no backup plan for what if the wall falls) better than a dynamic, mobile, up gradable weapon system! You know what? THE BLOODY CHINESE DIDN'T PLACE THIS MUCH FAITH IN THE GREAT WALL! AND THEY'RE FIRST PEOPLE YOU THINK OF WHEN YOU THINK BIG FUCKING WALLS!

Also, a bit of note. When I was in the theater watching this, a nice young family was sitting behind me. Kids were wonderfully behaved. One of them was somewhere between the age of 5 and 10 and when they said the problem was that the monsters were learning to fast and your solution was a static unchanging wall, I heard the boy turn to his father, and in a baffled tone asked "Daddy if the monsters learn fast, why would a wall stop them? Can't they learn to knock down a wall?" Hey guys? The fucking 7 year old has cotton to the flaw in your masterplan! Maybe you should reconsider it! But of course you won't reconsider it even after it fails right in front of you! You know if the plan was a big ass wall with giant robots behind it? I could accept it. It would be silly but Eh, you know? If the story was the aliens got to the suits and they're disarming us to leave us open to the Cat 6 monsters that will be showing up next month... Perfect. I buy it. Done! But no! It's just... Strange man in a suit from the government keeps insisting that this wall thingy will work even when it publicly and completely doesn't work! Shut up! No! I'm not letting this go! It was on my mind the whole damn movie!

I'm not even gonna begin on my view of this as a combat engineer, because then we'll have a book, with Chapters and Appendixes and a big Glossery and Character List.

You know what kills me? Instead of wasting time with the damn scientists babbling about you could have made this the main subplot. Have the politicians be subverted by alien agents! The wall is an excuse to disarm humanity so when the Cat 6 monsters are assembled in force (remember the portal will start opening every 8 minutes soon) it'll be a final tidal wave of monstery death washing over a helpless and unarmed humanity. Have that be the cold trickle of sweat that pushes Marshal to launch an under maned and under equipped offensive into the heart of enemy territory. Because he has no evidence and he's running out of agents and allies. All he can do is try to win the war, while that's still even an outside possibility.

There! Just made you a better movie. No charge.

That said, I had fun. It wasn't a utter waste of 2 hours but I am a bit disappointed. I'm disappointed because while I did have fun, I left feeling that the people making this movie didn't bring their A game. And frankly they should have.

This movie gets a C.

[Lys]

So a friend of mine told me this crazy theory about why Pacific Rim was made.

See, it's not that Gillermo del Toro likes giant monsters and robots, and it's not that he got offered a big wad of money and said "Yeah, whatever, got nothing else on my schedule." No, Pacific Rim exists because before starting on Pacific Rim, Gillermo del Toro was working on a movie version of At the Mountains of Madness. Then he learned about this film called Prometheus, which was much further along the whole production process, and functionally made Mountains of Madness unfilmable, so the studio cancelled it. This made del Toro rather upset since that project was a labour of love, and now he can't do it.

Well, turns out that the same guys who mere making Prometheus had a live action Evangelion as their next project. So, what did del Toro do after Mountains of Madness was cancelled? Why, a movie that makes live action Evangelion unfilmable! Payback's a bitch and all that. So, this movie exists because Gillermo del Toro was pissed at somebody. He didn't bring his A game in because the whole thing is a gigantic middle finger directed at someone else, with the audience as collateral damage.

On the plus side though? Pacific Rim is the reason "Live Action Evangelion! Brought to you by the folks behind Prometheus!" is not going to be a thing, and for that we should all be thankful.

That is assuming all this is true.

[frigidmagi]

Well despite my ranting and raving about the wall, Pacific Rim is watchable and enjoyable. Like I said, I had fun. The last fight was a let down but the big brawl in Hong Kong rocked for me and I will hear no ill spoken of the rocket fist.

I don't care that it doesn't make sense! It's a fist! With a Rocket!

Still you got anything to back that up? Because Del Toro, God Bless Him, is claiming to all who will listen that this is the movie that he's wanted to see since he was a child.

Which now that I think about it explains alot of the problems I have with his movie. I didn't get into giant robots until I was 12 or 13, when Exo-Squad (which was fucking awesome!) came out, I saw my first Godzilla movie shortly before that (Godzilla vs King Kong, American version, it was beautiful). So this may be an age gap thingy... Huh.

[Lys]

The point at which a crazy theory has anything solid to back it up, is the point at which it stops being crazy. At least, though, it may be true that Prometheus killed At the Mountains of Madness (see here), but one has to wonder why would a Hollywood studio would be so worried about making a film similar to a $400 million success story.

[LadyTevar]

Something that was pointed out to me about all of Del Toro's movies: he focuses on VISUAL IMAGERY. Pan's Labrynth is the best example, but Hellboy 2 was the one more people have seen, so it's the better example. Think of how we are introduced to the Golden Army: via a dream of puppets, with a story overlay. While the puppets were basic anatomic artist's models, there was still enough expression to them that we could feel the Prince's disgust with his father's choice to treat with the humans. We had the Prince's motives in a nutshell, before we even met him.

PacRim does that as well. The most noticable example is Mako's hairstyle. Or, like me, did it take you someone else to point out the blue tips are the same shade as the jacket in her memory. So, visually, Mako's carrying her past with her everywhere she goes. No wonder Pentecoat knew she was out for vengence.

Next, Becket's room. First thing he does, before even opening his rucksack, start putting up his pictures. Pictures that were in his room the day his brother died. He's also living in the past, never with it out of his thoughts. Of course, having your dead brother Inside Your Head doesn't help.

The Russians (who are confirmed married). Nope, not much verbage here, but did you see how Sasha looked at her husband in the lunchroom? I'm surprised they stayed to eat instead of ran off to the bedroom when she started rubbing up against him. In the cockpit, when Leatherback hit them? Sasha was pissed. How *dare* they hurt her Jaeger! How *dare* they try to drown her, instead of fighting like a warrior. Even drowning, she was raging hate.

There's more, pointed out on a blog I was linked to on Facebook (I'm still trying to dig backwards to find the fuckin' link now..). But like music, Visual cues of that nature take more viewing to pick up on conciously, and they are something that takes a Director more effort to get right. Del Toro is one of those Directors, and he has been quoted many times to say that nothing visual is in a movie that he didn't want in there for that effect.

So, Havoc, there's more to this movie than Movie-Trope Plot.

[Josh]

I saw it. Watched it in the same frame of mind that I'd watch an anime in, and in that it worked. I mean, giant honking mecha would almost never be the pragmatic answer to a problem, so you have to make allowances.

I never really lost the sense of scale, even in the ocean battle everything felt huge and epic. I was a little annoyed at how easy the triplets and the Russians went down, but that's necessary setup for the cocky hotshot to Learn a Very Important Lesson and the Unlikely Duo to Come Through in the End.

I was also glad it didn't end on a kiss. Hint at the romance, but thank you for not having another 'thirty minutes to lifelong love' plot. Thank you profoundly.

Also: Stacker Pentecost! Such an animes name. Very awesome. Idris Elba does a fairly decent British accent, too.

(Kidding about the last, I know he's a limey.)

[General Havoc]

This is the End

Alternate Title: The Devil and Daniel McBride

One sentence synopsis: A number of celebrities try to survive the apocalypse at James Franco's Hollywood house.


Things Havoc liked: My experience with Seth Rogen's work is limited, but has been positive on the whole, with films like The 40-Year-old Virgin, Funny People, and Zach and Miri Make a Porno all representing comedic high points from the last few years. Nevertheless, there has been such a glut of bad comedy around recently (much of it Adam Sandler's), that I was really not looking forward to this one, as the trailers were noncommittal as to what I was going to receive, and I put the film off for several weeks as I watched a series of mediocre action "epics" instead, finally sitting down to see it when I had no other options.

This is why I should stop listening to my inner critic's voice when selecting films.

This is the End is a cross between two genres of film in common currency nowadays, the apocalyptic disaster epic, and the Hollywood-on-Hollywood spoof, and carries a cast that between them comprises three quarters of Hollywood's comedies for the last decade. Alongside Seth Rogan and Jay Baruchel, the film involves a massive cast of contemporary Hollywood stars, several of which (Jonah Hill, James Franco, Craig Robinson) complement the aforementioned duo to form the main cast. Alongside them are smaller or cameo parts by everyone from Emma Watson to Rhianna to Michael Cera and Christopher Mintz-Platz. Yet every one of this blistering array of Hollywood types is playing not some character but an exaggerated version of themselves, sometimes twisted in some particular fashion, but in every case dripping with self-awareness. Seth Rogan, who wrote the film, has a fan stop him early on and ask him when he's going to play something other than a jackass stoner, while Jonah Hill, in the middle of a drug and alcohol-fueled brainstorm session about which films of his he'd like to make sequels for, mentions, almost offhand "we don't need a Your Highness 2". The best Hollywood-on-Hollywood films are the ones that poke fun at the insanities, egos, and typecasts of our favorite film factory, and this movie is filled with them, from Michael Cera playing a drugged-out asshole, to Emma Watson attacking everyone with an axe, to a Channing Tatum cameo so transcendentally hilarious that I refuse to say another word about it.

The premise of the movie is simple. A large number of Hollywood celebrities attend a party at James Franco's house (a Bauhaus eyesore that is subject of lengthy ridicule, despite being, of course, James Franco's actual house), when the literal apocalypse happens, complete with rapture, demons, and assorted other end-of-the-world shenanigans. After rapidly winnowing the cast down to a half dozen people, the story effectively becomes a lampoon of one of those "trapped in the house together" movies, wherein the real enemy is one another, complete with video-asides to the audience via the gimmick of a confessional camera that Franco has for unknown purposes. Each character is, over the course of this process, revealed as sleazy in his own unique way, drinks far more than is wise, and becomes implicated in a series of sequences of escalating madness ranging from an Exorcism to an ostracism to efforts to located additional supplies of food and water while under attack by demons. The energy level is high, and the ensemble cast keeps the jokes coming constantly, ripping their own personas as well as the tropes of the disaster movie genre. Some sequences seemingly come out of nowhere, such as Jonah Hill's prayer and its answer, or a sudden musical number that seems to have been added into the plot on a dare, yet the comedy is fast and the plot, such as it is, holds together well enough to get us from one ludicrous situation to the next. Standards for such things in comedies are different, and if anything, the film seems simply packed with hilarious ideas, so much so that they stumble over one another once in a while. I'm not complaining.


Things Havoc disliked: Much of the movie is clearly improvised, and sometimes improv doesn't work. A couple of sequences, such as Jonah Hill playing with the revolver, go on far too long, and more importantly, cross the line from something that an otherwise smart person who is venal and polluted by the Hollywood system would do, into something that only a blithering idiot who needs to be slapped would do. There aren't many of these moments, but those that exist serve to lower the film from a Rogan comedy to the level of a Ferrell or Carell comedy, at least while they're running.

A bigger problem is Danny McBride, another survivor of the apocalypse, who here plays one of the designated antagonists, like the others, an exaggerated version of himself, who in this case is simply a tremendous asshole. McBride is unquestionably good at playing tremendous, grating assholes (30 Minutes or Less proved that much), and is a talented comedic writer in his own right, but his character in this movie is so insufferable that I couldn't stand to watch him for any length of time. The magic in this sort of movie is balancing the characters' actions on the edge of believability, and nobody, for any reason whatsoever, could possibly put up with someone like the character McBride plays here, in this situation, for more than ten seconds. When locked in a house with five other people, and possessing only two bottles of water, how well would you take the antics of a man who, upon being told that the water is to be rationed, responds by insulting you and then upending one of the bottles over his own head?


Final Thoughts: Danny McBride though, is an archetype I simply hate, and I recognize that not everyone else does. Regardless, in a year where I've had to duck and cover to avoid largely every comedy on offer at my local theater, This is the End is one of the best comedies I've seen in a long, long time, raunchy, irreverent, madcap, utterly insane, simply funny from start to finish. I haven't liked every single Seth Rogan comedy ever made, but I've always regarded him as simply "above" the Will Farrells and Steve Carells (to say nothing of the Adam Sandlers) of the world, and at last I have a film I can point to to explain why.

And for those who are beginning to feel that I have become too "highbrow" for this task, I simply invite you to consider what this movie is once more, and then examine the following:

Final Score: 7.5/10

[General Havoc]

Something that was pointed out to me about all of Del Toro's movies: he focuses on VISUAL IMAGERY. Pan's Labrynth is the best example, but Hellboy 2 was the one more people have seen, so it's the better example. Think of how we are introduced to the Golden Army: via a dream of puppets, with a story overlay. While the puppets were basic anatomic artist's models, there was still enough expression to them that we could feel the Prince's disgust with his father's choice to treat with the humans. We had the Prince's motives in a nutshell, before we even met him.

PacRim does that as well. The most noticable example is Mako's hairstyle. Or, like me, did it take you someone else to point out the blue tips are the same shade as the jacket in her memory. So, visually, Mako's carrying her past with her everywhere she goes. No wonder Pentecoat knew she was out for vengence.

Next, Becket's room. First thing he does, before even opening his rucksack, start putting up his pictures. Pictures that were in his room the day his brother died. He's also living in the past, never with it out of his thoughts. Of course, having your dead brother Inside Your Head doesn't help.

The Russians (who are confirmed married). Nope, not much verbage here, but did you see how Sasha looked at her husband in the lunchroom? I'm surprised they stayed to eat instead of ran off to the bedroom when she started rubbing up against him. In the cockpit, when Leatherback hit them? Sasha was pissed. How *dare* they hurt her Jaeger! How *dare* they try to drown her, instead of fighting like a warrior. Even drowning, she was raging hate.

There's more, pointed out on a blog I was linked to on Facebook (I'm still trying to dig backwards to find the fuckin' link now..). But like music, Visual cues of that nature take more viewing to pick up on conciously, and they are something that takes a Director more effort to get right. Del Toro is one of those Directors, and he has been quoted many times to say that nothing visual is in a movie that he didn't want in there for that effect.

So, Havoc, there's more to this movie than Movie-Trope Plot.

I'm afraid, my lady, that there is not, at least from where I'm standing.

Yes, Del Toro is a master of visual imagery, or at least is customarily a master thereat. Pan's Labyrinth alone was enough to prove as much. But visual imagery, while important, is not the only arbiter of a story, nor is it a replacement for such things as plot or scale or characterization, especially when it's used in this way. Everything you point out may well be correct, in that Del Toro (or his DP) intended each of these little visual hints to stand for particular elements in the characters' backstories. Unfortunately, having done so, he then turned around and still spent half an hour of the movie belaboring the point over and over again about how these characters must learn to put the past behind them to succeed, having largely every character spell the matter out explicitly either as an antagonist or as a supporting character. If the pictures that Becket put up on the wall (which I confess I did not even notice) are intended to symbolize the past that he's bringing with him, then why was it necessary for Pentecost to call Becket out no fewer than three times for not having put the past behind him sufficiently, or for the Australians to get in his face about how "reckless" he was? Perhaps the answer is because most of us didn't (or wouldn't) even notice the pictures, and that's a fair answer. But the pictures don't excuse the fact that the other establishing scenes I just mentioned were all handled horribly, a laughable parade of military tough-guy cliches that worked in Top Gun only by virtue of camp, and no longer can do so. Similarly, the fact that the Russians' characters are established in such a subtle way does not alter the fact that those characters are paper thin, however they are established. The Russians are married and warriors? Fine. What else are they? Why is that considered sufficient for characters that warrant their own style, design, and personalized introduction? And if the answer is that the movie was merely a fun battle between robots and monsters, then why are such minor establishing elements relevant?

There is a fine and rich art to visual establishment in films, and Del Toro, like Peter Jackson and Akira Kurosawa and Sofia Coppola and a number of other directors I could mention, is more than capable of making use of it. But if you make use of these arts to produce characters that would be laughed off a children's cartoon, then what exactly has been accomplished? Even if we concede that the characters are well-established (and I do not believe they are), the base fact remains that these characters are stupid cliches, something that I might not mind so much if the rest of the movie's action was not also very poor, even by the standards of other giant robot or effects-laden action movies.

Contrary to what many of you might believe, I don't hate Pacific Rim because it did not give me an uplifting character experience (I did not hate it at all, frankly, but merely disliked it). What I hated was that the action and fighting, the centerpiece of the film, was flat-out inferior in quality, which in turn drew attention to the other inferior elements of the movie, such as the plot, characters, and soundtrack. I have no doubt that Del Toro, as is his custom, put a great deal of thought and effort into such minor details as the color of Mako's hair or the photos on Becket's wall. I'm simply suggesting that perhaps some of that attention would have been better spent on things like the script.

[General Havoc]

20 Feet From Stardom

Alternate Title: Singers in the Dark

One sentence synopsis: Interviewers chronicle the lives and careers of a number of highly accomplished backup singers.


Things Havoc liked: If you were ever a fan of music from around 1950 to 1990, then chances are you have heard the work of a number of the women in this film, women who are the acknowledged experts and most accomplished performers in the strange, unknown-to-me world of backup singing. Oh I knew what the profession consisted of, like everyone I've seen the women (and men) standing off on the side of the stage, moving in unison and singing choral accompaniments or harmonies with the "main" talent, but I, probably like the majority of you, never quite realized just how much backup singers actually contribute to their songs. Go back and listen to such masterworks as David Bowie's "Young Americans" or the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter", and you will find that the backup vocalist serves the way a "featured" or "guest" performer does nowadays, singing nearly half of the lyrics, including most of the ones you actually remember from the songs. "When kids sing along to those songs," says one of these backup singers, "they're singing our part." And often enough they actually are.

20 Feet From Stardom presents the careers of a number of women, particularly Darlene Love, Merry Clayton, and Lisa Fisher, all backup vocalists of great stature within their industry, with careers that span four or even five decades. Both through demonstrations of their (flatly incredible) vocal capabilities, and a cavalcade of interviews with established stars such as Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Stevie Wonder, or Mick Jagger, the movie convinces us of their skill, yet the movie is not about the mere fact that these women are not well known, but instead dives into the profession of backup singing as a legitimate, separate profession, equal in difficulty to headlining, and no less important, fulfilling, or renowned. We are shown where backup singers (or at least these backup singers) tend to come from, almost uniformly from gospel singing rooted in old black church music with its line-callback format, and given some idea of just what makes a great backup singer in the first place, the ability to harmonize and adapt one's voice to largely any style or range of music. The skillset, while similar, is not the same as that required for headline or solo singing, and while most of these women are highly proficient singers in their own right, some profess to have no desire to sing by themselves or as the leaders of groups, preferring to sing backup even when offered other chances, and believing their chosen careers to be no less valid or important than those of their leading counterparts.

And what careers they have. 20 feet from Stardom is in many ways a trip back through four decades of music, from the first days of Motown to the climax of the 80s. Merry Clayton, just as an example, sang the backup vocals on everything from Gimme Shelter to Sweet Home Alabama to Feelin' Alright, in between stints with Tom Jones, Bobby Derron, Elvis, Carol King, and of course, becoming a member of Ray Charles' backup group, the Rayettes. Darlene Love, meanwhile, contributed her voice to songs from the Beech Boys, Dionne Warwick, Sonny and Cher, Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner (footage of the "Ikettes" dancing in the old Ike and Tina Turner Review is worth the price of admission alone), and on and on and on it goes. Indeed, one of the great astonishments of this movie is just how small a pool major backup singers seem to be drawn from. I'm sure the profession extends well beyond the women presented here, but based on the evidence provided, one good backup singer is able to elevate literally dozens of acts to stardom, and most continue with their starring bands for as long as those bands exist. Lisa Fischer, for instance, has been the Rolling Stones' primary backup singer for twenty-five years. She remains so today.

Of course not every backup singer is content to remain in the shadows. Most made efforts at solo careers here and there, releasing LPs of singles, christmas albums, or even their own work, but almost to a woman, they regard their experience with attempting for stardom negatively. One backup artist, a woman named Tata Vega, explains that her weight (she is a large woman) and image were held against her when center stage in a way they never were bare paces to the side, and all of the women speak of the cutthroat, dirty business that is actual stardom, one that seems to have very little to do with talent and much to do with a willingness to play "the game". Darlene Love, for instance, signed a solo contract with legendary producer and asshole Phil Spector, and then watched in horror as he took songs she recorded and gave them to other groups, piping her voice through the sound system while the designated star lip synched to it. Her efforts to break away from Spector stymied by the incestuous nature of the recording industry, Love simply gave up music for a time, as did many other women whenever the strain of the dirty business that is rock stardom became more than they could bear. Some express regret at having done so. Others say that the experience taught them that they had no real interest in being stars, and preferred their careers as professional backups. After all, says one, more people have heard her voice (given the sheer number of songs she has appeared on) than Elvis.


Things Havoc disliked: If it sounds as though I've merely been recapping what the movie has to say, rather than offering a criticism of the way it says it so far, there's a reason. The best Documentaries play much like their fictional counterparts, telling a story that is captivating and engaging but simply happens to be true. Last year's incredible Searching for Sugarman is an excellent example of this. 20 Feet From Stardom however seems content simply to drift, haphazardly, from one topic (and one singer) to another, only to double back at seemingly random intervals. We follow Darlene Love's career for a while, then Lisa Fisher's, then back to Love, then someone else, with no real sense of progression or reason to it all. There is no attempt, for instance, to categorize the material by era or genre, showing the evolution of backup singing or how it changed with the different styles of music between the 50s and 80s. We get very little information as to how any of these women got into backup singing, what qualities they had (beyond simply being "good") that allowed them to get those coveted spots behind the Stones or Skynard and not someone else. That the film wishes to draw attention to these women is laudable, but a Documentary exists to inform the audience of a fascinating story, and there is really no story here, other than "these women exist".

Moreover, if there can be said to be a lesson from this movie, it is that backup singing and headline singing are two different disciplines with two different sets of pressures applied, and that the majority of singers cannot transition from one to another, either because they have no interest in doing so, or because the transition is fantastically difficult. I'm prepared to accept that this is indeed true for most, but in actuality there are a large number of leading, major acts in the music business who began their careers as backup singers. Elton John, Phil Collins, Sheryl Crow, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Cher, Pink, Gwen Stefani, all began as backup singers, and all managed to negotiate the transition with apparent success (I am listening to Phil Collins as I write this review). I recognize that these people are exceptional by definition, and that they, unlike the women whose lives are chronicled here, clearly desired careers as music stars above all else. But to simply leave the subject as "the transition cannot be done", as this film does, we are left without any idea of what separated these singers from those, which gives an uncomfortable impression that the filmmakers, having chosen as their subject women who did not become stars, have chosen to pretend that becoming a star is due entirely to politics and backstabbing, and requires no skill at all, only a cutthroat desire to succeed at the expense of others. To an extent, I'm prepared to accept this. But I find it difficult to believe that someone like Whitney Houston owed her solo career to nothing but luck and politics, and not at all to her voice.


Final Thoughts: Ultimately, 20 Feet From Stardom, is not a classic documentary destined to change one's life, but a soft, easy look back at the careers of a number of tremendously talented and accomplished backup singers. The majority of the women in this film are now in their 60s and 70s, and yet to all appearances, they continue to perform with their favorite bands, or for compilation albums and awards shows. One (Love) even found success as a supporting character in the Lethal Weapon movies. The lack of focus and the soft-shoeing of the whole transition question is disappointing, but this film is still worth the watch, particularly if one has any interest at all in how all the music you remember so fondly was put together, and by whom.

Final Score: 6/10

[General Havoc]

The Wolverine

Alternate Title: Adequate at What he Does

One sentence synopsis: Wolverine travels to Japan and becomes embroiled in a plot to steal his powers of regeneration.


Things Havoc liked: I must confess, I never really understood all of the hate that X-men 3 received. No, it wasn't as good as the other X-men films, being both sloppily put together and involving several baffling decisions, and yet for all the sound and fury, I merely thought the movie was "okay", not great certainly, and no equal to the other fantastic movies (to say nothing of First Class), but hardly a disaster on the level of Origins. As such, while the aforementioned Origins was a titanic piece of crap, I had some hopes going into this movie that it might not suck. For one thing, the posters (yes, the posters) were astonishingly good, presenting Wolverine and other characters from the movie done up in Japanese brush-stroke style, with no explanation offered. For another thing, I simply like Hugh Jakcman as Wolverine, and always have, and for a third, this movie, unlike the last one, is actually based around a major arc from the original comics.

The arc in question is Chris Claremont and pre-insanity Frank Miller's 1982 take on the character titled simply "Wolverine", one of the best regarded in the character's history, that re-imagines the archetypical lone badass into a setting and role suited perfectly for him, that of a Japanese samurai. Why this is so is somewhat difficult to explain, particularly to those who see one comic book movie as much like another, but Wolverine as a character has always been rather difficult for some fans of the genre to take seriously. A morose, brooding badass gets tiresome quickly when all he is allowed to do is act like an asshole and otherwise smash people. This is why the best X-men movies involving Wolverine paired him up with such people as Rogue (in X-men 1), or explored his origin story in a way that gave him hard decisions to make (in X-men 2), playing down the gruff loner in favor of factors that would stretch the character. It should therefore be no surprise that the best parts of this movie are those where Wolverine dials the persona back in favor of more personal material, particularly an extended sequence in the middle of the film where (for plot reasons) the movie pulls out all the action, all the heroics, and even all the superpowers, in favor of just Wolverine and a woman named Mariko whom he winds up protecting almost accidentally. There's nothing particularly innovative about these scenes, but they're actually done surprisingly well, like something from a particularly good romantic-action film.

Frankly, when the movie is working, the above could be said over and over again. The early sequences, where Wolverine is plunged into a strange, byzantine world of complex politics and traditions he does not understand has been done before, but that doesn't make it any less effective, with a particularly good idea being the unsubtitled Japanese that most of the people around Wolverine are speaking. Action sequences in this film are not quite as spectacular as some, but that tends to help the film, grounding it in a bit more of a realistic context. One particularly good sequence on the roof of a bullet train actually provides Wolverine with nothing to fight beyond a pack of Yakuza thugs, and still manages to be reasonably tense (and fairly badass), as these sorts of things go.


Things Havoc disliked: But all of the above only applies when the movie is working. And when it is not...

We'll forget the plot, which is insane and needlessly complicated, involving triple-switches and a badly telegraphed main villain who exists solely to provide an excuse for one of the stupidest looking interpretations of a villain I've seen since last year's Lizard, and just cut straight to the problem. The Wolverine is boring. And it is boring not because there is insufficient action, but because the action, like most of the characters and a large chunk of the plot is without purpose.

Consider Yukio, a female ninja from the original comics, who in this film has undergone a terrible anime-inspired re-invention that turns her into a pink-haired schoolgirl-uniform-wearing swordmaster who looks all of nineteen and yet who can, on multiple occasions, effortlessly defeat machine-gun-wielding triad gangsters with a large stick. This is stupid, and yet I would not have minded so much, if the movie had given her character some depth, or even a consistent motivation. She is effectively the adopted sister of Mariko, the woman Wolverine must protect, fine, but at times her actions seem motivated by some unrequited devotion to Wolverine himself, whether romantic or platonic, I can't even tell. If the film had just bothered to pick something with her and stick with it, I could have accepted it. Witty banter in the style of a buddy cop film between Wolverine and a pint-sized ninja is the sort of thing I would love to watch, regardless of how stupid it is empirically. But instead I have no idea what the film was going for with Yukio, beyond (and I fear this is the correct answer), "nerds like anime, right?"

Similarly, one of the several villains this movie sports is a marvel villain by the name of Viper, a mutant with powers over poisons and alchemical chemistry, who early on manages to suppress Wolverine's mutant healing powers (not a bad idea). Unfortunately, despite getting a large chunk of screentime, Viper is completely one-note, playing up the "ha ha ha look how much smarter than you I am" routine, even when dealing with a character she has never met before and has no reason to actually hate. Or what am I to make of Harada, a childhood friend of Mariko's and a character of some awesomeness in his own right in the comics, who in this film switches sides no fewer than five times, not once developing anything that could impersonate a motivation? By the end of the movie, when he selflessly leaps into action in defense of a man who just stabbed him against a horde of ninjas he previously commanded and a giant robot samurai with a sword made of fire, we have no idea why.

Oh, and speaking of giant robot samurais with swords made of fire, that is stupid. I know it doesn't sound like it in text, but the robot samurai exists for no reason whatsoever. I'd call it shoehorned in if there was even a shoehorn in play. As it stands, the film simply says "welp, here's a giant robot" because nerds also like those (insert Pacific Rim joke here). The robot isn't even the problem, the problem is that no element of this film exists for any reason other than the fact that the filmmakers thought it should be in the movie. For example, if you were an indestructable killing machine with claws of unbreakable steel in your hands, and ninjas fired arrows into you connected to ropes, would you perhaps cut the ropes as you made your way towards your goal? Or would you ignore them, struggling vainly onward as more and more ropes snared you, only so that you could fall dramatically to your knees in a cruciform pose while pathos-laden music played in the background? I recognize that on some level, every superhero in film is required to become Jesus once in a while (or in this case, St. Sebastian), but most of them don't go looking for opportunities to do so when the tools to avoid being captured are literally in hand.


Final Thoughts: Look, I appreciate the effort here, I really do. And it's true that this film never comes close to the depths that Origins plumbed, but the mere fact that this film is not as bad as that piece of crap does not magically transmute it into a good film. Ultimately, The Wolverine, while not unpleasant to watch, is completely pointless, with no consequences for the characters involved whatsoever beyond a handful of cosmetic alterations. The original comic was about Wolverine leaving his gruff asshole persona behind, immersing himself in a culture that was foreign and yet made complete sense to him, and finding a purpose in his immortal life that had previously eluded him. A film prepared to grow the character in that way would have been awesome (tell me you wouldn't pay to watch The Last Samurai starring Wolverine), but this movie has no ambitions beyond existing and keeping the character in the public eye prior to the big crossover throwdown to come next year.

As with most of Marvel's films, The Wolverine has a mid-credits teaser sequence, setting the wheels in motion for the next film in the series. I like this policy, by and large, but this is the first time I've ever seen the credits teaser also serve as the most exciting and interesting part of the entire movie.

Final Score: 4.5/10

[General Havoc]

Kick Ass 2

Alternate Title: Tipper Gore's Recurring Nightmare

One sentence synopsis: Kick Ass and Hit Girl try to reconcile their lives as superheroes with their lives as High Schoolers, while confronting the menace of the Motherfucker and his army of legbreakers.


Things Havoc liked: Mark Millar's Kick Ass, a comic about a teenaged comic book fan who decides to become a real-life superhero, is a noxious, mean-spirited slap at everyone who ever liked comic books or indulged in escapism, brought to us by one of the most despicable hypocrites working in comics today, and I'll remind you that this is an industry that employs Joe Qaesada, Frank Miller, and Rob Leifeld. And yet, the 2010 movie version of Kick-Ass, written and directed by X-men First Class' Matthew Vaughn, was a triumph on almost every level, a masterpiece that effortlessly overcame what flaws it inherited by replacing Millar's smug contempt for his audience, industry, and career, with a self-aware nod to everything both absurd and endearing about comic book power fantasies. One of the finest movies I saw in the entire decade of the 2000s, Kick-Ass was almost a rebuttal to its own source material, and I, for one, was on board. It was irreverent, it was violent, it was hilarious, it was goofy, it was touching, it was masterfully-crafted, it was everything that the films that tried to ape it (Super, Defendor) were not, simultaneously a parody of and an ode to Superheroes as a concept. And so it is that we find ourselves, three years later, facing Kick Ass 2, wondering if lightning can strike twice.

Kick Ass had so many strengths, that to list them here would take all day, but among them were excellent actors, a wonderful score, and a brilliant script that juggled ultra-violence, camp, and realism, all without dropping any of them. With almost every major character (save the dead ones) returning, it should be no surprise that the first of these categories remains just as good in the sequel. Many people did not like Aaron Johnson in the original film (one reviewer called him 'devoid of charisma'), but I thought his performance was excellent then, and excellent now. Teenagers, even ones with the balls to do what he does, are not known for over-emoting every time they step outside, and his highly-realistic portrayal of a situation that was farcical when it wasn't horrifying, anchors both films very effectively, grounding us in a real world rather than some Wagnerian hero-opera such as Thor. Another criticism leveled at him was that Chloe Moretz, as Hit Girl, blew him off the screen, which to be honest was true, and remains true here, not that I'm complaining. No longer the pint-sized murder-machine of three years before, Moretz' Hit Girl is now a teenager, and much of the film consists of exploring just what that means to a girl whose early childhood was spent slaughtering drug dealers with a halberd. I've become an unrepentant fan of Moretz' since the original Kick Ass, and she doesn't disappoint here. Her stuntwork is still superb, and unlike in the previous film, she is given the chance to act with a bigger range than "whispering badass" or "girly assassin". It should be no surprise that she pulls it off.

But it's Christopher Plasse, formerly Red Mist, now an insane, revenge-obsessed would-be supervillain named "The Motherfucker", who steals this round. His character has gone completely round the bend, raving and snarling and inhaling scenery like it holds the cure for something, and yet Plasse adds just a few touches, here and there, of the dweeby nerd that he was in the original film, relying on his money to force people to take seriously what they would otherwise laugh out the door. Every scene Plasse is in is awesome and hilarious, as he undergoes a series of psychotic breaks that lead him further and further into comic-book-villain levels of insanity. What would be absurd in any other film is practically required here, but unlike in Millar's version, he never goes so far as to become a parody of evil (or worse yet, a stand-in for what Millar thinks of his fans). A few wonderful winks at Millar's original script, and the truly horrific elements that were cut for tone here, stand out all the brighter if you know where this character originally went.

New to the films is Jim Carrey, playing Colonel Stars & Stripes, a former mafia enforcer-turned Born-Again Christian who organizes a superhero team with Kick Ass and a host of other would-be heroes. It would have been so easy to turn Carrey's character into a raving psychopath ala Roarshach, but the movie actually has the balls to play him straight, a man who, for whatever reason, has decided to live as a hero in every sense of the word. He beats (and mauls) human traffickers and rapists, yet leads his team to help out at soup kitchens, escort inebriated college co-eds home safely, and otherwise simply improve the lives of those around them. No other film would have the guts to play this character straight, for fear of appearing way too saccharine and idealistic, yet the filmmakers here know that this is Kick Ass, an orgiastic bloodfest of impeccable credentials, and that they can therefore do what nobody else could. John Leguizamo, meanwhile, plays Javier, Motherfucker's butler and personal assistant, and like Carrey, plays it completely straight, almost Alfred-like, despite the fact that his ward is not Batman, but a raving lunatic. Rounding out the cast are Scrubs' Donald Faison as Doctor Gravity, another one of Kick Ass' team who gets little material but does excellent things with what he gets, and Russian bodybuilder Olga Kurkulina as Mother Russia, a former KGB killer hired by Motherfucker to kick-start his reign of terror. Kurkulina is amazing in this film, a force of nature so gargantuan and imposing that it's hard to imagine she's not CGI. Her battles with the police and later Hit Girl are the stuff of dreams.

Kick-Ass 2's score, by returning music composer Henry Jackman, picks up where the last one left off, using the same leitmotifs stolen from Clint Mansel (not that I object). The score is more restrained this time around, more in the vein of a traditional action-comedy than Kick Ass was, but the music is still uniformly excellent, so who's complaining? Thematically, the film branches out a bit, covering both Kick-Ass' response to the escalation of the stakes in the war between him and the Motherfucker, and Hit Girl's efforts to find a normal life for herself at the cusp of high school. As the former thread plays out approximately the way it did in the first film, the latter is the really new addition here, supplying Hit-Girl with a trio of Mean Girls-inspired cheerleader types whom she tries to use to integrate into normal life. This is not the terrible idea that the synopsis sounds like, and the resolution for it is one of the most hilarious (and disgusting) things in a film well supplied with both.


Things Havoc disliked: I really cannot speak highly enough of the original Kick Ass, and I fear that fact is tainting both my reaction to the film, and that of others (more on them in a minute). Kick Ass was a remarkable film in a whole number of ways, one that simply felt different than anything around it. And perhaps it's because we're no longer in 2010, or perhaps it's the change in directors and writers, but Kick Ass 2... just isn't.

The pieces are all here, the cast and the concept and everything else that made Kick Ass so awesome, and yet the whole movie doesn't connect as strongly as the original did, in basically any way. Though the action scenes are decent enough, the cinematography has taken a big step downwards, to the point where shakey-cam has begun to rear its ugly head again, spoiling, as usual, all of the hard work that goes into whatever scene they've engaged in. But beyond that, the action sequences just lack the explosive punch that they did in the first one. There is nothing in the film to match the jaw-dropping splendor of the strobe-lit warehouse fight scene from Kick Ass, nor the sheer manic absurdity of Hit Girl's corridor fight from the first movie. Several scenes seem to want to recapture the magic of the originals (quite visibly in fact), but the shot selection, and frankly, the writing, is just not up to par. Hit Girl's one-liners feel more stale than they used to, and while Moretz is as badass as ever, there's just an unavoidable sense that we're watching the low-rent version of Hit Girl's antics.

This, effectively, is the issue with the entire film. Nothing is particularly wrong with the movie, and yet there are cracks in the facade that the original papered over with skill and awesomeness. The new characters, several of whom are truly amazing, do not receive the same level of introduction that Hit Girl and Big Daddy did in the original, something which particularly harms the ones that are not so amazing. Kick Ass' new love interest, another would-be superhero called Night Bitch, is completely undeveloped, used for nothing but to generate some cheap heat for our villains, who truly do not require it, given the lengths they're already going to. Mother Russia is amazing, but the remaining supervillains from Motherfucker's army (the Toxic Mega-Cunts. Yeah, you heard me.) are completely one-note, or more accurately half-note, given a couple of lines of introduction and then effectively discarded until it's time for them to serve as punching bags for our heroes. Perhaps this is a product of the wider scope of the film, which has to juggle Hit Girl, Kick Ass, and Motherfucker's stories, none of which have a lot to do with one another until the end of the film. As a result, the movie has to gloss over elements that, in the original film, were given front-and-center treatment. There are no scenes, for instance, to compare with those of Hit Girl and Big Daddy simply sitting around and talking, partly because there is no Big Daddy in the film, but mostly because there is simply no time, something I don't understand at all, given the sub-two-hour runtime of this movie.


Final Thoughts: This movie was not well received, not by the mainstream critics, nor by those in the nerd community who lauded the original. Some of this is the inevitable disappointment when a movie does not live up to its illustrious ancestor, but I won't deny there are some fair points among those who have declared Kick Ass 2 to "suck". But that said, the mere fact that Kick Ass 2 is not the equal of the first one does not make it a bad film, and I will be damned if I didn't laugh my head off all the way through it. No, the magic of Kick Ass is not intact in this version, but bereft of that magic, we are left with a film that is flawed but still perfectly serviceable, not the equal of its parent, but worthy in its own right. Ultimately, all I can really report on is that, whether because of this movie's inherent qualities, the sheer strength of the underlying premise and characters, or some lingering, misguided sympathy for the original (I acknowledge the possibility), I heartily enjoyed the experience of watching Kick Ass 2, and fervently hope that it does well enough to warrant a third film.

And frankly, so long as that's the case, what more is there to say?

Final Score: 7/10

[General Havoc]

Elysium

Alternate Title: Sociology 101: The White Man as Satan

One sentence synopsis: A blue-collar worker dying from an industrial accident must find a way onto the exclusive orbital habitat of Elysium to access the life-saving technology there.


Things Havoc liked: I've never been the biggest fan of Matt Damon, despite the good movies I keep seeing him in. Simply put, he always seems to play Matt Damon, regardless of the circumstance or role, and while there are times his witty-loser schtick works (Adjustment Bureau comes to mind), it doesn't exactly provide new and refreshing ideas week in and week out. Still, I'm willing to give Damon a shot, as he has an even chance of being good in anything he does, and several of his films have been pleasant surprises in this experiment of mine (once more, I cite Adjustment Bureau). In Elysium, Damon plays Max Da Costa, a former car thief and factory worker who, through a series of plot reasons, finds he needs to access the miraculous healing facilities available on the offworld enclave of Elysium, an obvious stand-in for the first world relative to the third. Damon doesn't do a vast amount with his character beyond brooding monotone, but his performance never dips below adequate. He is not the problem with this movie.

Neill Blomkamp, the South African director of District Nine, clearly has an obsession with the immigration debate. But ignoring that, his preferred visual style, that of rusted, lived-in supertechnology, is a welcome one in a world where Michael Bay and his clones dominate the surface of Hollywood. His Cinema Verite style is an acquired taste, but if nothing else it lends a wonderful continuity to the rusty, dirty, overcrowded world that he is attempting to portray here. Shot on location in one of the poorest slums in Mexico, the movie certainly feels real, even when flying cars are passing overhead or futuristic weapons and shields are being employed. The super-technology available to our poor heroes looks cobbled-together out of recognizable spare parts, in some cases literally duct-taped to one another. Following movie after movie in which supertech is considered so ubiquitous as to require no explanation, it's actually kind of refreshing to see our futuristic hero desperately trying to blow the dust off his vintage laptop, while his buddy covers him with what appears to be an AK-47 taped to a grenade launcher, all without consciously going for a post-apocalyptic vibe. The style is not the problem with this movie.


Things Havoc disliked: No, the problem with this movie is every other goddamn thing.

Elysium is a stupefyingly bad film, a film so terrible that it flies right past outrage and into wonder and awe at the sheer achievement of having created such an atrocity. Following the surprise success of District 9, a film I enjoyed, Blomkamp had what amounted to carte blanche to pick his next project, and this movie, like so many other epochal disasters (Heaven's Gate, Connie & Carla) proves just why that practice, while inevitable, is rarely a good idea. Nothing works in this movie, not the acting, not the cinematography, not the premise, not the plot, not the ham-fisted political commentary, not the racist color-coding, not a goddamn thing at all. And having written, produced, and directed the film (not to mention run his mouth about its virtues at length), Blomkamp has left us with absolutely nobody else to blame.

One scarcely knows where to begin with a disaster of this magnitude, and so let us fly directly to the crux of the matter. Elysium is intended (Blomkamp has made that explicitly clear) as a parable for the immigration debate in the United States, in that it pits the overwhelmingly Hispanic inhabitants of Earth against the overwhelmingly White inhabitants of Elysium, and then frames their relationship as one of exploited and exploiter. I have no problem with this concept in theory. Science fiction has been used as parable for the debates of the day since as far back as Jack London and HG Wells, and there is plenty to criticize about American immigration policy. What I object to is how thunderously the film jackhammers its message home. It is not enough for the residents of Elysium to be uncaring about the plight of those left behind on Earth, they must demand that Earther-dwellers stop breathing in their presence and callously slaughter them with missiles when they attempt to break into Elysium. It is not enough for Elysium security to tase, shoot, and beat people as they try desperately to reach Elysium, they must throw children into livestock cages and engage in summary executions on people's lawns as a matter of policy. It is not enough for Elysium to have life-saving medical technology unavailable on Earth, the movie must go out of its way to show that this technology is unlimited and free of use, that dispensaries for it sit by the hundreds in warehouses on Elysium, unused, and that there is literally no reason why this technology is denied to the sick on Earth other than the fact that all white people are evil.

Oh you think I'm joking? This movie is so color-coded, at one point I thought we'd slipped into Birth of a Nation. There are a good thirty or forty characters in this film, counting the bit parts, and without exception, every single white character, be they Earther or Elysiumite, is an evil, murderous, psychotic killer who not only oppress everyone else but actively go out of their way to do so in the most horrific fashion possible. Meanwhile every character who is not white, including violent gang leaders, criminals, and organized crime bosses, are kind-hearted altruists desperately trying to do right whatever the cost, sacrificing themselves on the slimmest of hopes to bring salvation to their poor, benighted brethren. After a hundred plus reviews, I believe I am on safe ground when I say that I have no problem with either evil, slimy corporate types, nor with gangsters with hearts of gold, but the racial profiling of this film is so blatant as to bring to mind some inverted version of those Stormfront recruitment films that portray minorities as an evil, collective tide of mongrolism out to defile virtuous white womanhood. And lest someone retort that Matt Damon, who is white, does not conform to this categorization, I'll simply mention that the movie takes great pains to ensure we know he was orphaned at a young age and raised by Hispanic nuns at a Hispanic orphanage, and that therefore his evil "whiteness" has been purged from him.

But even if we leave aside all of the polemic and all of the ham-fisted politics that are packed into this film, the movie is simply incompetently made on the most basic levels. Action sequences are slow and plodding, and rely on heavy usage of the dreaded shakey-cam, predictably ensuring that the audience can actually see none of the elaborate action and special effects that the filmmakers presumably spent so much time and money producing. The plot, taken on its own, makes no goddamn sense, relying as it does on a series of coincidences so absurd as to beggar belief. Our heroes just happen to select as their primary agent a man who just happens to have it out for a specific CEO who just happens to be involved in a society-shattering conspiracy with the evil defense minister of Elysium, the vital information for which he just happens to be carrying at the exact moment the heroes put their plan into action. Meanwhile, the robotic exoskeleton that Matt Damon is screwed (literally) into, the one that the trailers made such a big deal about, is such an afterthought in the film that I literally could not tell what the point of it was in the first place. Yes, Damon uses it a few times to perform feats of abnormal strength, but the vast majority of the combat takes place via gun or sword, neither of which the exoskeleton assists with, and Damon's body is so ravaged by radiation and injury that he never gets the signature "cool" moments that we were assured would attend such a momentous thing. The obligatory love interest (Alice Braga) plays no role in the film except to be menaced by the psychotic madman and saved by the virtuous hero, while her sick daughter (Emma Tremblay) manages to actually stand out as the worst child-performance I've seen in years, and I remember The Odd Life of Timothy Green just as vividly as I ever did. Her spontaneous decision to recite a children's tale laced with (say it with me) deep meaning to Damon will live on in my memory as a particular example of terrible execution of a terrible idea.


Final Thoughts: At the end of this movie (spoiler alert), when our heroes have reprogrammed Elysium's central mainframe to recognize all of Earth's denizens as citizens of the enclave, a mighty fleet of magic healing-tech-equipped ambulance shuttles disembarks from Elysium under automated control, and descends upon the earth, bearing hundreds and thousands of healing machines to cure the world of its ills. What the filmmaker seems to have forgotten, however, is that this means the people of Elysium constructed a vast fleet of magic ambulances capable of curing all illness and injury upon the planet, a fleet for which they themselves had no conceivable use (every home in Elysium has one of these magic healing beds in the front parlor), and then placed them, unused, in garages and kept them from the needy people of Earth for no reason except evil. Blomkamp has gone on record as declaring that his film is not science fiction, but "Today. Now." Accordingly, I am left with the conclusion that according to Blomkamp, the immigration debate consists of a handful of psychopathic evil white people who deny life-giving resources that exist in unlimited quantities to the virtuous and deserving people of the rest of the world for no reason. I'm no fan of US immigration policy, but permit me the indulgence of suggesting that the actual debate is a little more nuanced than that.

Yes, parable is a thing. Yes, exaggerating a problem so as to draw attention to it has a long and rich history. But there is a massive difference between exaggerating an existing problem and distorting it beyond all recognition while simplifying the causes and solutions of it down to "if only the white people weren't all so evil". Of course, Blomkamp's pedigree and the politically-correct target he chooses to demonize have earned him a free pass from most of the mainstream critics I consulted prior to writing this review, as the consensus seems to be that the "rightness" of Blomkamp's cause excuse all of the lies, vilifications, and general incompetence of the film itself. They can do as they would, but it has never been my policy to give films free passes for merely having taken my side on a contentious issue. Elysium is an unmitigated disaster on nearly every level, one which, were the group being targeted anyone else, would certainly destroy the career of the man responsible. And Blomkamp's earnestness does not excuse either his incompetence nor his manifest ignorance of a subject he has the unabashed gall to presume he has "addressed" in some holistic manner.

I complained to a friend of mine recently that this year's crop of movies were a dull and mediocre lot compared to last year's, having offered neither spectacular films of staggering genius, nor truly epochal disasters of cataclysmic proportions. So much for that.

Final Score: 2.5/10

[General Havoc]

The Butler

Alternate Title: George Lucas' Homework Assignment

One sentence synopsis: The lives of a White House Butler and his activist son are entwined with the history of the Civil Rights movement.


Things Havoc liked: I am often reminded, in the course of this ongoing experiment, of the worst movie I have seen to-date under its auspices, specifically George Lucas' titanic World War II/Racism failure, Red Tails. I savaged Red Tails when it came out, still recovering from the trauma of having watched it in the first place, and yet somehow I have never felt satisfied by my response to the film, as for all the detail I went into, there was no way for me to fully sum up in text what mistakes Lucas had made in celluloid. Jean-Luc Goddard (the filmmaker, not the Starfleet Captain, you philistines), once said that the way to criticize a film is to make another film, but alas, the majority of us amateur film critics do not have the years or disposable millions to do that, and must settle for complaining in text on obscure film blogs in the dark corners of the internet to tiny audiences. Nevertheless, there remains something to the notion, as it is (I now quote Pixar), ultimately a more meaningful act to create a terrible film than it is to describe it as such. I muse on these things here because, given the evidence, Lee Daniels, the director behind Monster's Ball, Precious, and The Paperboy, has also recognized this fundamental notion, and in the spirit of responding to Lucas' atrocity in a manner Goddard would approve of, has given us The Butler.

Set in Washington and the South from the 1920s through to today, the Butler is the tale of Cecil Gaines, the son of dirt-poor, black sharecroppers in Georgia, who finds his way to Washington DC and becomes a butler in the Eisenhower White House. It is also the tale of his son, Louis, who attends Fisk University in Tennessee just in time to be caught up the tumultuous events of the Civil Rights movement, becoming an activist, a Black Panther, and ultimately, a congressman. Along the way, the film surveys more or less the entire civil rights movement, both from the perspective of the presidents that had to grapple with the challenges of civil rights, to the servants within the White House, and their elevated-but-lowly status, insulated from the chaos further south, to the freedom riders and sit-iners who bore the brunt of the violence, abuse, and arrest that the movement demanded. Along the way, we meet presidents, staffers, servants, neighbors, girlfriends, civil rights leaders, racists, soldiers, and all the various panoply of people that fill these characters lives over the course of a good forty years, played in almost every case by the single most loaded cast I have ever seen.

I'm serious, the cast for this movie is stacked, so stacked that I can't even go through it all and have time to discuss anything else. Not since Kenneth Branaugh's Hamlet have I seen such a cast, one so impressive that Vanessa Redgrave is called upon to play a bit part with one line, and Robin Williams is afforded scarcely more than a minute of screentime. Every part in the film, from the most minor to the most major is filled by recognizable, A (or at least B)-list actors, but front and center are three in particular. Forrest Whittaker, of Ghost Dog and Last King of Scotland (and Battlefield Earth) fame, plays the title role of Cecil Gaines, a sharecropper-turned-thief-turned-butler who winds up at the White House serving president after president. I wouldn't call this Whittaker's best role, as with the exception of a couple scenes, he's more or less called upon to play a reactionless servant. But the sequences where he does get to stretch the character (dealing with his family) are done well, and Whittaker plays the character at a variety of ages with perfect consistency. But it's Gaines' wife, played by Oprah Winfrey, who really steals these sequences. I've seen Oprah in a couple of films before, some good (The Color Purple), some not good (Beloved), but here she steals the entire show. Someone I know told me they had a hard time seeing anyone but Oprah, the television personality, but I had no such difficulty. Oprah's performance is the best in the film, and in many ways holds it together.

A lot of this film is stunt casting, meaning casting done for novelty value, but with actors of this caliber, this matters very little. Best of the bunch for the Presidents is Liev Schreiber, playing LBJ, who curses up a Texas storm and refers to the black population of the country by the N-word, all while signing the most comprehensive civil rights bill since the 14th amendment. Alan Rickman, a man I would not think of to play Ronald Reagan, also does a good turn, mimicking the Gipper's soft voice and extended word delivery. Meanwhile, downstairs, Cecil's fellow butlers are played most effectively by Lenny Kravitz (?) and Red Tails' Cuba Gooding Jr. Gooding, in particular, has been in a slump basically ever since Jerry Maguire, but here manages to break out of it with a role that, while small, feels drawn from real places. When Cecil's son, to whom he is no longer speaking, is arrested for some fresh protest, Gooding's character is the one to bail him out, along with a number of words concerning what he should and should not be doing. And speaking of Cecil's son, David Oyelowo, who was the best thing out of Red Tails (not that that's saying much), does an excellent turn as a college firebrand turned panther turned congressman. As with Red Tails, he plays the character straight and understated, save of course that in this movie that's more of a stylistic choice and less of a survival strategy. The sequences where his character participates in the civil rights movement are portrayed with brutal honesty towards how these episodes must have happened, particularly an early sequence where the young activists (both white and black, I was glad to see), first prepare for, and then execute a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter, ultimately being beaten, abused, and arrested by the white authorities and local militiamen.


Things Havoc disliked: It's often said that if you have to resort to a voiceover narration, you have failed as a scriptwriter, and while that notion is slightly flippant, there's something to it nonetheless. Among such films as have used voiceover to wonderful effect are the terrible theatrical version of Blade Runner, and the worst movie in the history of filmmaking, The Last Airbender. The Butler's sins do not come close to those of the films I just cited, but the voiceover in the Butler is still a bad idea, one that tells us episodes we should be shown. The inner thoughts of a character should come from within the characters actions and the actor's performance, not from the screenwriter standing up with a megaphone and shouting "this character is sad now!"

There's also the difficulty of the film's first half hour, wherein Cecil grows up on a cotton plantation, and sees his mother (Mariah Carey) raped and his father murdered with impunity by the son of the local plantation boss. I grant that such things probably did happen in the world of 1920s Georgia, but the son is so perfectly evil in every way, murdering people openly in the fields with a racist sneer on his face, that the entire concept disintegrates into bad farce. There are excellent scenes of racism in action in this film, the aforementioned sit-in, a lengthy sequence involving the KKK's attack on a Freedom Rider bus, and other moments both overt and subtle from the civil rights struggles of the 50s and 60s. Why, then, was it necessary to headline all of these sequences with something so over the top as to be a pastiche of racism?

Finally, we have to discuss (fellow Red Tails Alum) Terrence Howard's character, a neighbor of Cecil and Gloria, who is a womanizer and general disreputable person, and with whom Gloria has an affair. Anyone who can explain to me what the point of Howard's character was is invited to do so, as I could not determine as much. His character shows up, acts sleazy, disappears, acts sleazy some more, and then is killed off-screen by a jealous husband, never to be mentioned again. Even his affair with Gloria, an episode that would seem to be important, is glossed over with a few throwaway lines and no consequences whatsoever. Cecil never discovers the affair, meaning he cannot react to it, and the very first mention of it is Gloria telling Howard that it must end. In a film this congested with actors and characters, this is time that could have gone to so many other things.


Final Thoughts: I have no idea if Lee Daniels actually intended The Butler to be a response to Red Tails (my guess would be no), but in perfect honesty, he might as well have. This movie is to that one like Interview with the Vampire is to Twilight, a movie that is not only good, but simply by being good, illustrates the manifest flaws of its inferior counterpart. Taking the same cast (Gooding, Howard, Oyelowo) and putting them in another film about racism and the struggle for equality, Daniels proves conclusively what did not need proving, that Red Tails was not the fault of its cast, but of its scriptwriters, director, and producer. Though it falls short of the oscar-worthy mark it is clearly attempting to reach, The Butler is still a very good film, a simple story about a man and his son who lived in interesting times, and what they made of them. Never overly sappy, nor flagrantly melodramatic, the movie is a very solid piece about a historical process of infinite complexity, as seen by those whose lives were played out in its wake.


Final Score: 7/10

[Charon]

What a generally disappointing summer...

[General Havoc]

What a generally disappointing summer...

Tell me about it. And I was pretty generous to a number of movies this summer.

[General Havoc]

Jobs

Alternate Title: Citizen J

One sentence synopsis: Steve Jobs rises, falls, and rises again, alongside his company, Apple Computer.


Things Havoc liked: Ashton Kutcher and I have never gotten along. For one thing, I can't tell him and Josh Hartnett apart, and for another thing, nothing he's ever done interested me in the slightest. I don't watch Two and a Half Men or Punk'd, stoner movies like Dude, Where's My Car are entirely wasted on me, and I thought The Butterfly Effect was a mediocre, sloppy mess, aping better metaphysical films such as Being John Malkovich without understanding how to make them work. Still, actors with worse resumes than Kutcher's have salvaged their careers with a single mindblowing biopic, and while I was surprised to see one about Steve Jobs appear so shortly after his demise, my status as an old-time Apple fanboy more or less required that I see this film.

It's no secret that among the very strange denizens of Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs was one of the strangest. Abandoned by his birth parents and adopted by new ones, a dropout of Reed College (one of my Alma Mater's rivals), and a follower of everything from homeopathy to eastern religions to fruitarianism, Jobs combined two attributes that would seem contradictory: An instinctual genius for business, creative design, and managerial inspiration, and a seemingly absolute lack of basic human empathy. If the movie gets nothing else right, it gets this fundamental dichotomy nailed down pat. Though some of the obligatory "inspiring speeches" fall a bit flat, the film gets across Jobs' single-minded obsession with design, style, and user-friendliness, a concept which doesn't sound revolutionary today only because he singlehandedly pounded that obsession into the entire computer industry. Yet Jobs, according to this film, did not act on these obsessions because he knew it was the right business move, but because of some sort of deep-seated need to produce things in accordance with his vision, whether buyable or not. We watch Jobs arguing with his business partners and investors and venture capital firms about whether the massive overruns and investments he is making into products from the Lisa to the Macintosh will pay off, but all along we get the sense that Jobs is making excuses, covering up his own obsessions with design, irrespective of the soundness of his decision making. This enables his struggles with the board to take on a slightly more real cast, rather than simply having unthinking stodgy suits fail to get his 'vision'.

Of course the same effect is helped by the fact that Jobs is an unlikeable asshole from the beginning of the film to the end of it. I had wondered how the movie would handle the uncomfortable reality of Jobs' Larry-Ellison-sized ego and Dr-House-class indifference to human behavior or standards of propriety. Many movies or television shows (I cite House again) have the distressing tendency to present a massive dickhead to us and then attempt to justify his behavior towards everyone by virtue of his genius. Jobs does the opposite, showing how Steve Jobs' total inability to empathize with people, even his closest friends and associates, drives each of them away, one by one. This is not merely the usual 'movie' version of an asshole, who calls out the pretensions of the 'designated bad guys' in an impolite manner. An early scene has Jobs call his friend Steve Wozniak in to help him with a technical matter and then outright lie to him about the compensation they are due to receive, while another has him reject and even throw his pregnant girlfriend out of his house, blaming the pregnancy on her and refusing to take any responsibility for it. As the movie goes on we see him coldly toss old friends to the curb once they can no longer promote his career, going out of his way to deny them the fruits of their labors, and generally acting as though he doesn't know them any longer. Portraying Jobs (who was indeed this big of an asshole) in this way is probably the only decision that would have worked, as it means that when the sparks at Apple begin to fly, and Jobs is forced to confront the Board of Directors and his own CEO, his abusive personality turns these scenes from "stuffy dicks oppress counter-cultural rebel" to "reasonable men trying to deal with a certifiable sociopath before he destroys the company." Not everything Jobs touched was gold, nor was his every move the right one, and his "triumph", upon returning to Apple, immense though it was (he turned a failing company into the most valuable one on Earth), is marred, ultimately, by the score-settling and pettiness that marks him through the entire film.

The cast is uniformly excellent. Josh Gad plays Steve Wozniak like the geeky computer nerd he was (and is, something I can confirm personally), while major figures in Apple's rise and fall, such as CEO John Scully (of the famous 1984 commercial) and Apple Board president Arthur Rock are played respectively by Matthew Modine and the always-awesome J. K. Simmons. Both of them bring a certain veneer of sanity to their roles steadfastly lacking in Jobs, as mentioned before. But the main event is, of course, Kutcher himself, who looks a near dead-ringer for Steve Jobs, and plays him with just the right combination of madness and inspiration. This is the sort of performance that alters the trajectory of careers, one that will at least get me to look a bit closer at Kutcher the next time I see him.


Things Havoc disliked: It was probably unavoidable for this movie to turn into an extended Apple commercial at times. We are dealing with a biopic about the man who built Apple from the ground up twice, after all, and moreover a man famous for the "Reality Distortion Field" (to quote Andy Hertzfeld) that surrounded him as he spoke on issues of design, excellence, and quality. Bereft of the field, however, some of Jobs' speeches sound rather like generic corporate bloviations on "commitments to excellence" (is there any company in the world that has a 'commitment to mediocrity'?). A particular sequence near the end of the film where the returned Jobs asks iMac designer Johnathan Ive why he's at a company that has deprecated style and design so much, sounds like the sort of thing I would have said back in my High School years when I was an unabashed fanboy who thought Apple could do no wrong. Apple was and remains (for the present) a trendsetter among technology companies, visionary in design and product beyond the scope of 99.9% of its peers. It does not follow, however, that whimsy and creative freedom are the sole supports of its success. After all, we all know how well "Design is Law" worked for John Romero...

The film also has a very strange sense of scope. The movie ends (spoiler alert) in 1997, with the iMac on the horizon and Jobs re-instated as CEO of Apple. All well and good, but Jobs' greatest triumph, arguably, is what he did after that point, taking a broken, marketless organization in free-fall and turning it into a company more valuable than Exxon-Mobile. Ending the film there shortchanges the actual genius of Jobs, as the iMac is barely in the film, the iPod gets a cameo appearance, and the iPhone is totally unseen. Perhaps the assumption was that everyone knows how the story ends (which is probably true), but this is not the only gap in the film's account of Jobs' life. Following his fall from grace at Apple, the movie abruptly shifts ten years ahead, to when Jobs was approached by Gil Amelio (Kevin Dunn) to resume a role at Apple. Unfortunately, when we last left Jobs he was a single, broken man, thrown out of his company and doomed at last by his own tragic flaws, the ones that drove away his friends and supporters, until he had nothing. All of a sudden, Jobs is married, has children, and is even taking care of the daughter from his previous relationship, the one he previously refused to have anything to do with or even sign visitation papers for, dismissing her as irrelevant to his life. The Steve Jobs we've gotten to know would do none of these things, indeed the movie spends a great deal of time establishing the particular fact that he would not do them, and yet we are now, suddenly, shown a Steve Jobs whose personal life is in order and his relationships fully repaired, all without a hint as to how this miracle was accomplished. To put the question mildly, what the hell happened?


Final Thoughts: Elementary flaws like this, done no doubt for the best of reasons, are what keep Jobs from being a great film. The great biopics of film's history, Ghandi, Patton, even Citizen Kane (yes), dug into the lives of their subjects to extract a narrative story from them. They did not simply recount their lives in the fashion of "this happened, then that happened", but strove to find order within the chaos of an actual human life so as to tell a story worth telling. To an extent, Jobs tries to do this, by portraying Steve Jobs as a classical tragic hero, whose flaw encompasses his own destruction, at least until he can rise again). But between the destruction and rebirth must come a change, and whether because of poor editing decisions, or an attempt to cover over the fact that Steve Jobs really didn't mend his evil ways over those missing ten years, this film leaves us wondering if the projectionist forgot to include a reel.

Still, Steve Jobs was a sufficiently influential and iconic person as to merit a film like this, and hopefully, the upcoming one from Aaron Sorkin will deal with him in an equally interesting manner. Kutcher's work, as well as that of the rest of the actors, is stellar, and the movie does not pull any punches out of reverence or narrative convenience as to the real Jobs' shortcomings. It may not be an instant classic, but if you're at all interested in what made the world's greatest computer salesman tick, then you could do far worse than this as a starting point.

Final Score: 6.5/10

[General Havoc]

Riddick

Alternate Title: Back in Black

One sentence synopsis: Riddick must adapt to survive a death planet and two crews of mercenaries bent on retrieving his head.


Things Havoc liked: I've long maintained that the Riddick movies are among the best purely speculative sci-fi-adventure movies I've seen. Pitch Black in particular was almost the ur-example of the simple-story-done-right, proof positive that the mere fact that others have done something before (in this case "survival amidst monsters") does not mean that it can't be done in an entertaining fashion if given a chance. While Chronicles of Riddick was something of a disappointment, I still held out hopes for Riddick as a return to form, and not to spoil my review or anything, but that's exactly what it was.

The Riddick series' strengths have always been attention to detail within a simple story, and Riddick, the film, is perhaps the epitome of this. The entire first act of the movie is simply Riddick, alone and without resources, endeavoring to survive on the harsh, alien planet where he has been deposited despite the efforts of the climate, the wildlife, and largely everything else around to prevent him from doing so. Though explanation as to how this situation came about does eventually arrive, for a considerable amount of time we get no context whatsoever, and are simply allowed to watch Riddick go through the motions of survival, struggling to avoid being eaten, melted, or poisoned to death, without any need for a greater narrative than this.

And what motions these are. Riddick is of course a ridiculously bad dude, but one of the great strengths of the film is how well it demonstrates why he is such a bad dude. Yes, he's strong and combat-capable and ferocious and so on, but unlike the Arnold-wannabes of which action films are well supplied, the focus with Riddick is not his badass displays of ultraviolence but the preparations for his badass displays of ultraviolence. For instance, early on in the film, when Riddick finds himself confronted by a massive semi-aquatic scorpion-like monster with a poisoned stinger, blocking the one path to a more hospitable part of the planet. Rather than wade in and defeat it with his manly combat skills, the movie stops in its tracks as Riddick spends weeks preparing himself to take the creature on. We see him forging weapons, taming local fauna, dosing himself with small amounts of toxin so as to build up a resistance to it, capturing smaller versions of the creature to test strategies and capabilities against. The heroic-preparation-montage has been a staple of action films since Conan (or arguably Taxi Driver), but plainly the makers of Riddick understand why it exists. By extending the preparation this far, while still keeping the material interesting, the eventual showdown with the creature takes on more weight than it would if Riddick had fought it in a cursory duel. Great action does not come from having the hero make things look easy, but from having the hero make them look ridiculously difficult, and Riddick, like the great action movies of yore (Predator for instance) knows this.

Of course the film is not all weapon-forging and cave-dwelling. There is indeed a plot here, or more precisely a cast of characters set down in one place in the hopes that their interactions will supply a plot. These characters, two different crews of mercenaries who arrive on the planet looking for Riddick for two different reasons, comprise the majority of the character interaction for the first two thirds of the film. The list of characters and motivations is long and thick, but like before the film prefers to let the plot take a backseat to the situation and the characters. Every one of the dozen or so mercenaries that arrive to find Riddick are exceptionally well-characterized, even the bit players, and as Riddick (or other things) winnow their numbers down, they respond in ways that are both logically and thematically consistent. Confronted with the knowledge that Riddick may be in a dark cave, for instance, the mercenaries enter with a large, well-armed party and plenty of light sources, covering one another's backs and leaving once again as soon as they determine that there's no further benefit to being in it. Finding themselves attacked, they immediately hunker down to defend themselves with maximum efficiency, making it as difficult as possible to surprise or otherwise assault them, once more rendering the task Riddick has before him a tremendously difficult (and thus interesting) one. But the vast majority of the time, the mercenaries simply spend interacting, with Riddick or with one another, in ways that while not always pleasant, make a degree of sense and are consistent from one scene to the next. The unfailing ability of this film to wring interesting results out of boilerplate scenes and concepts such as these is perhaps the most surprising element of a film that could well have been as generic as Will Smith's After Earth.


Things Havoc disliked: Just because all of the mercenaries are characterized, doesn't make all those characters excellent. Katee Sackhoff (of Battlestar Galactica) plays a character who is supposedly a lesbian (this is mentioned, for no reason, multiple times), yet who flirts shamelessly with Riddick, and periodically takes her clothes off for pointless breast shots. I have no objection to beautiful women taking their clothes off, but the eye-candy here is such obvious fan-service that it mars the film's overall well-crafted style. Other characters, such as the obligatory wet-behind-the-ears newbie, and the money-obsessed mercenary who will sell anyone out for a buck are travelling well-trod paths, and not always with enough material to make them stand out from these archetypes, despite the film's best efforts.

There's also the question of scope. Riddick is a very tight film, reminiscent in some ways of last year's Dredd, and while that tightness enables the film to focus on what material it actually has, and the interactions between the characters stuck in the situation, the base fact remains that we're basically watching a remake of John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars with better writing. I'm not objecting to the improvements by any means, but the limited horizons for this film limit in turn the possibilities that the movie can entertain. The greatest films are those with a sense of ambition, ones that seek to show us things we have not before imagined. This movie quite consciously shows us something it knows we've seen done before, relying on the fact that they're going to do it well to keep our interest, and while by and large they succeed in this, the effect is somewhat akin to re-reading a book you enjoyed the first time. A pleasant experience, but not something that will fundamentally alter your worldview or present you with a new horizon.


Final Thoughts: But then again, perhaps that's the point. Not every film can possibly give us things we (or at least those of us who see as many films as I do) have never before considered, and a movie that recognizes this, and substitutes successful execution for failed ambition, cannot be doing much wrong. Riddick, ultimately, is a film I was not expecting to be any good at all, given the genericness of its premise and trailers, and the generally suspect quality of Vin Diesel-helmed movies. Yet to my astonishment, the quality of the filmmaking craft at work here, in terms of the basic elements that constitute a film (writing, scripting, directing, editing), shine through the premise and present a movie that has no right to be anywhere as good as it is. I would accuse the trailers of lying about the movie, except they did not do so. Riddick is a generic adventure-survival film about a morose badass and a gang of shrinking supporting characters being stalked by a tide of monsters, when all is said and done. Yet even within that genre, there is a wide gulf between boring tripe such as Ghosts of Mars, and standouts like Predator, and Diesel, and director David Twohy, know just how to construct the film so as to place it in the company of the latter.

You never know what you're going to get when you go see a movie, of course. But even considering that, it's not often that a movie that promised this little delivers this much. But ultimately, I'd rather have a movie tell me a simple story well, than fall all over itself failing to tell a complex one at all.

Final Score: 7/10

[General Havoc]

The Grandmaster

Alternate Title: Too Cool for School

One sentence synopsis: Famous Martial Artist Ip Man fights for position and respect in Warlord and WWII-era China.


Things Havoc liked: For those who've never heard of him, Ip Man was one of the progenitors of modern martial arts teaching, a practitioner of Wing Chun, who brought martial arts into the mainstream through a succession of students who would go on to become famous in their own right (such as Bruce Lee). Active from roughly 1920 to 1960, first in mainland China and later in Hong Kong, Ip Man lived through the warlord period, the Japanese occupation of large portions of China, the civil war and subsequent communist takeover, and all the myriad chaos woven through those difficult years. The Grandmaster is not the first movie to chronicle Ip Man's story (the eponymous Ip Man series is a particular gem for fans of kung fu movies), but it is one of the first to find a major American distributor, and thus here we are.

My knowledge of chinese actors is very limitted, and the only two actors I recognize are, providentially, the two leads, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, and Zhang Ziyi, respectively playing Ip Man himself, and Gong Er, the exceptionally skilled daughter of one of Ip Man's confederate martial arts masters. Leung has been in a hundred films, most of them unseen by me, but insofar as I can compare this performance to others of his at all, this is probably the best I've seen from him. He plays Ip Man not as a brooding badass, nor even as a young, indestructable lion, but as a martial arts master, who, when we meet him first, is at the top of his game, and knows it. His manner is refined and very restrained, with no un-necessary bragging or even needless demonstrations of his "true" power. He can, when necessary, destroy numbers of armed men who confront him in the streets, or defeat the mightiest martial artists in all of China, but failing the absolute need to do so, and to practice his craft, he seems perfectly content to allow others to attain glory and reputation, secure in the knowledge that his own place among the grandmasters is already unshakeable. Most Kung Fu movies are about the invincible protagonist triumphing over a sea of arch-rivals and evil foes. This invincible protagonist doesn't even bother to recognize his foes as worth worrying about. If they confront him, they will be beaten. And if they do not, then his life is unmolested by them.

Probably the only actor that anyone else here in the states will recognize however is Zhang Ziyi, of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Memoires of a Geisha, and The House of Flying Daggers. Though she looks roughly half of Ip Man's age, Zhang does manage to play the foil to him very well, partly because of her undisputed martial arts credentials. Indeed, weirdly enough, Zhang's character of Gong Er is the one who has the more traditional martial arts badass journey through the film, as she swears revenge against her father's finest student, who, following Japan's invasion of China, joins with the puppet government of Manchukuo and seizes control of his former master's training academy after slaying him. Gong Er's obsession with revenge (she forsakes marriage, children, and teaching in favor of vengeance) alongside her stern retainer Ding Lianshan, comprises a good half of the film, culminating in an inventive martial arts battle in a train station. Whether this actually happened or was made up out of whole cloth, I have no idea, but this thread provides the movie with much of its action...


Things Havoc disliked: ... which is really the problem.

I was prepared for many things when I sat down to watch this movie, but one thing I did not expect was to be bored. The reason for this is not the actors, who are uniformly excellent, nor the choreography, which is as high quality as one expects from Chinese martial arts movies, but because the story itself involves nothing happening. Ip Man literally does nothing for most of the film, save for the occasional philosophical discussion or sparring session. So detached that he doesn't even seem to be offended by his enemies, he simply saunters through the movie, leaving nothing whatsoever to look at. Yes, this is probably much more like the real Ip Man than the high-octane kung fu extravaganzas that have borne his name before this, but those movies at least had something in them worth watching. This movie is painfully dull, particularly in the long segments following Ip Man's appointment as grandmaster of the southern chinese martial arts schools, to say nothing of the entire last third of the movie, following the aforementioned battle in the train station, in which nothing happens for interminable periods of time.

And it's not like the movie has nothing to do in those periods either. Ip Man's fall from grace during the 1930s mirrored that of China itself. His daughters died of starvation, his wife was threatened by the Japanese puppet government if he did not join them publicly, he had to flee China for Hong Kong in the face of the Maoists or risk being killed as a symbol of China that was. Yet every one of these events is glanced over as unimportant next to scene number thirty-seven of Ip Man staring longingly out a window while Gong Er reads his letter and contemplates the beauty of snow on the cedar trees. If the film had just left these things out entirely, I could have understood it. Film is a narrative medium, and not every biography has to be scrupulously accurate. But worse than that, it actually references these seminal events in voiceover narration, passing off the deaths of Ip Man's family from starvation as though it were a minor incident of no importance. Worse yet, the movie actually goes on to treat it as such, scarcely giving Ip Man the slightest reaction to the horrific death of his entire family.


Final Thoughts: The above may sound worse than it actually is, but it illustrates the problem with this movie. Refreshing though it is to see a martial arts master who doesn't need to flex and attack every fifteen seconds to prove his manliness, this film goes way too far in the other direction, resulting in a main character who seems barely human in his reaction to the tragedies that shape his life. I appreciate the desire to do something new with a character that has, up till now, mostly been fodder for kung fu extravaganzas of mixed quality, but if the movie can't be bothered to take an interest in its own goings on, then why should we?

Final Score: 4/10

[General Havoc]

Gravity

Alternate Title: A Bad Place for a Bad Day

One sentence synopsis: Two astronauts caught in the middle of an escalating orbital cataclysm must attempt to survive and somehow return to the Earth.


Things Havoc liked: I was very uninterested in Gravity when I first saw the trailers. Impressive though the visuals of the film appeared to be, there are few things that drive me out of a theatre faster than what I call "deathwatch thrillers", movies in which the main characters are quite obviously doomed, without hope of escape by any means, and our task is to watch them panic, suffer, and die. Many dead teenager movies fall into this category, but the ur-example is probably Open Water, a movie I described once as being one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. Any film that seems to promise a repetition of that is liable to go unwatched by me, but ultimately, with nothing much else to see and extremely favorable reports from many people I knew, I decided to give it a shot.

And goddamn, am I glad I did.

It is the near future, and the five-man crew of the Orion-class shuttle Explorer, are attempting to make repairs on the Hubble telescope during spacewalk, two of whom, Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Cloony) are the sole survivors when a counter-orbit debris field from a Russian anti-satellite missile test gone awry smashes into the orbiter, the telescope, and largely everything else nearby. Trapped in nothing but their spacesuits, they now have to find a way to escape orbit and return to Earth alive. This is the entire plot of Gravity, and yet unlike the deathwatch movies I spoke of earlier, this one is an incredibly tense thriller, thanks to brilliant actors and smart decisions on the part of the writer, director, and producer, Alfonso Cuaron. Clooney and Bullock here play standard Clooney and Bullock roles, him the smooth, veteran mission commander whose confidence and wisdom are paramount, and her the frazzled, nervous technician who just wants to get the mission over with. Shallow though these things may sound in text, Bullock and Clooney do fantastic jobs, never letting the characters turn into one-note cutouts, getting much across with simple intonation and half-finished reference, no mean feat for a film wherein the character's faces are all but invisible for large sections of the film, and many scenes consist entirely of them, alone, or together, sitting in a capsule somewhere for long, multi-minute shots.

Speaking of which, Cuaron's last film, Children of Men, showed his penchant for such things, and here he lets himself go wild. The entire introductory sequence is a single ten-minute unbroken shot, done with computer effects of course, but that hardly matters. Unlike Lucas' prequels, this film uses long takes for stylistic purposes instead of showing off, letting us concentrate on the gorgeous visuals attendant to simply being in space. Almost everything in the film is not merely photo-realistic but physically-realistic. Fire and water behave as they actually do in zero gravity, as do thrusters, momentum, and high speed collisions. One thing I'd never really realized is just how violent the process of getting around things in orbit can be, as people bounce into and off of space stations, satellites, and odd protrusions of every sort. Granted, the circumstances are somewhat trying, but when momentum can only be generated by pushing off of or pulling onto something, one gets whip-lashed about almost constantly. This, and a hundred other little details about how one actually gets by in space are fully realized, giving the movie an excellent pedigree, and grounding us in the absolute remoteness of space, with all its attendant dangers and inability of rescue.

But cementing everything together for Gravity is the music, an eclectic collection of electro-orchestral pieces from all around the world. With a film this light on dialogue (many sequences take place in complete silence), the music must fill the space to keep our interest, something made all the more important as (true to life) the sound effects in space are portrayed realistically, meaning there are none when the source of the effect isn't happening in an enclosed atmosphere or through direct physical contact with a character's spacesuit. The music itself, light on percussion and heavy on synthesizers and strings, is a strange beast, but powerful in its own right, reminiscent of Blade Runner as much as anything. I can't speak for everyone on a subject this personal, but it certainly fit the bill for me.


Things Havoc disliked: By and large, the movie is about one single disaster which rapidly begets new ones as though by alchemy, but on the occasions where this fidelity is lost in favor of entirely unrelated disasters that also happen to afflict our heroes at the same time, the movie begins to stretch credulity. By the end of the film, as things went wrong which had nothing to do with the initial debris storm, one begins to stop suspecting bad luck and start suspecting a sadistic writer. I grant that this is a survival movie, and that fresh dangers are required to keep us in suspense, but some of these catastrophes (I won't spoil which) begin to get a bit ridiculous, taken in summation.

There's also a few elements that just don't make sense. Early on in the film, one of the characters is stranded with nothing but their spacesuit, a hundred kilometers from help, with almost no oxygen left in their tanks. A fine conceit for suspense, certainly, but not five minutes ago, this person was working on the Hubble, in an operation that was expected to take another hour. Were they intending on running the air in their suit down to the last possible second just for fun? I don't know NASA's policies, but I would expect there's a bit of a margin of safety built into spacewalk air calculations. Similarly, a sequence wherein one astronaut is dangling from wires attached to a space station while another astronaut dangles from a rope attached to the first, straining against the forces pulling them away, seems to forget that in space, momentum, once checked, is not recovered without another external force acting upon it, and that there is no such force when one is floating weightless in orbit. Given the decisions that some of the characters must make based on these sorts of situations, this would seem to be something of a major oversight.


Final Thoughts: But then, how much does that really matter, so long as the movie is both entertaining and reasonably accurate? After all, a normal person, even an astronaut, in a situation like that would probably die instantly, or at best linger on for a few hours, thus turning the film into exactly the sort of Open Water-esque exercise in futility that I wanted to avoid in the first place. Ultimately, Gravity is a spellbinding film, tense and majestic and incredibly well-crafted, one that simply gives us a pair of excellent actors and a situation for them to be in. And if this year has shown me nothing else, it has revealed just how difficult pulling off something that simple can actually be.

Ten months into this dismal year of film, and we may finally have turned the corner into a stretch of good movies. And if not, well, at least we have this one.

Final Score: 8/10

[White Haven]

The physics in Gravity were weird, because they were so spotty. The 'little' things, how things move or don't move, so on and so forth, were quite well done, but the big things were often very haphazard. Also, you can thank Chris Hadfield for my knowledge that tears in zero gravity don't work that way.

Overall a good movie, and most definitely a gorgeous one, but one that...how to put this. A science-fantasy movie doesn't get dinged by me for physics issues as long as it's internally consistent. Gravity was clearly trying to look and behave very real, however, so those places where it falls down stand out a lot more.

[Lys]

By and large, the movie is about one single disaster which rapidly begets new ones as though by alchemy, but on the occasions where this fidelity is lost in favor of entirely unrelated disasters that also happen to afflict our heroes at the same time, the movie begins to stretch credulity.

I haven't watched the movie... and am not going to any time soon because the cinema costs money. I do know that the alchemy in question is called the Kessler Effect, wherein a space collision generates debris that causes further collisions that generate debris that cause further collisions until eventually every damn thing in LEO is hit. Real thing, not alchemy! Though the exact way in which they depict the effect is a bit dodgy... or so I've heard.

Similarly, a sequence wherein one astronaut is dangling from wires attached to a space station while another astronaut dangles from a rope attached to the first, straining against the forces pulling them away, seems to forget that in space, momentum, once checked, is not recovered without another external force acting upon it, and that there is no such force when one is floating weightless in orbit. Given the decisions that some of the characters must make based on these sorts of situations, this would seem to be something of a major oversight.

I have seen people discussing it in the internets, and that particular scene is that one that stands out for most people as not making any sense. The beginning part of that very scene is actually in the trailers, so I have seen that, and I can't help but point out something. Thanks to the law of conservation of momentum, the cables will not stop moving upon reaching maximum extension. Depending on how stretchy they are, they will either snap back, or else begin to rotate. If the cables are rotating, then the astronaut attached to them does in fact have to fight against the centrifugal force to hold on to the other astronaut. This will look exactly the same as someone dangling by a cable from a tall structure fighting against gravity to hold on to someone. They may have been going for that in the film and failed to convey it to the audience.

Overall a good movie, and most definitely a gorgeous one, but one that...how to put this. A science-fantasy movie doesn't get dinged by me for physics issues as long as it's internally consistent. Gravity was clearly trying to look and behave very real, however, so those places where it falls down stand out a lot more.

I have nothing something funny about physics in movies. People seem to get a lot more nitpicky about them when as soon as space is involved. In you average action movie there's all manner of stupid and unrealistic things that stand against all the laws of physics and even common sense. Yet they seem get more of a pass than pretty much the same thing only in space. People do complain about such things, mind, they just don't seem to do so as much.

[frigidmagi]

So I was in a waiting room while waiting for an interview and they were playing World War Z. The part I saw was pretty decent, although I am quickly realizing that among the many things Hollywood doesn't know shit about is fortification.

Let me be clear this isn't as major an issue with me as it is for Pacific Rim (Fuck you, that wall is the driver of the fucking plot, I have a right to bitch about it), just something I'm noticing as walls seem to be a thing this year.

Now I'll admit that the Israeli's didn't have alot of time, nor am I clear on the constraints they're under, so maybe I'm being overly critical. Still, why isn't there an overhang and a rampart? Just to start with.

I'll accept they didn't have time to set up decent obstacles in front of the wall (given what I've seen rolls of wire ain't gonna cut it), but seriously if there had been men on top of the wall (with a properly constructed overhanging rampart with murder holes) the fall of the city could have been averted. Additionally why isn't the wall covered by fire?

Remember this, write this down, brand it on your skin if you must. No fortification is truly secure unless it is covered by independent fire. Seriously some arty parked and zeroed in close to the wall? Break that shit right up! Fuck man some motors? Dudes with Mark 19s? Something?

I also would have leveled everything in front of that wall as soon as I could have gotten away with it. A clear killing field with an overwatch on it would have worked fucking wonders to.

It didn't ruin the movie by any means, it just stressed to me how unstudied Hollywood writers are on certain aspects of warfare.

*looks at recent war movies*

Make that all aspects of warfare.

[General Havoc]

I haven't watched the movie... and am not going to any time soon because the cinema costs money. I do know that the alchemy in question is called the Kessler Effect, wherein a space collision generates debris that causes further collisions that generate debris that cause further collisions until eventually every damn thing in LEO is hit. Real thing, not alchemy! Though the exact way in which they depict the effect is a bit dodgy... or so I've heard.

"As if by alchemy" was a figure of speech, designed to illustrate just with what facility everything reaches catastrophic levels. The actual mechanic is no mystery of course, but the effect cascades so rapidly and so absolutely as to be almost mesmerizing. I'm aware that such a thing is at least technically possible, but nevertheless, it's a heck of a vision.

I have seen people discussing it in the internets, and that particular scene is that one that stands out for most people as not making any sense. The beginning part of that very scene is actually in the trailers, so I have seen that, and I can't help but point out something. Thanks to the law of conservation of momentum, the cables will not stop moving upon reaching maximum extension. Depending on how stretchy they are, they will either snap back, or else begin to rotate. If the cables are rotating, then the astronaut attached to them does in fact have to fight against the centrifugal force to hold on to the other astronaut. This will look exactly the same as someone dangling by a cable from a tall structure fighting against gravity to hold on to someone. They may have been going for that in the film and failed to convey it to the audience.

The movie gives no indication that this is what's actually happening, relative to the station they are anchored to. In a film, we have only the evidence presented on screen, and while I'm sure there are ways to explain away physical behavior like that, it's simply not backed up by what Curazon put in.

I have nothing something funny about physics in movies. People seem to get a lot more nitpicky about them when as soon as space is involved. In you average action movie there's all manner of stupid and unrealistic things that stand against all the laws of physics and even common sense. Yet they seem get more of a pass than pretty much the same thing only in space. People do complain about such things, mind, they just don't seem to do so as much.

Part of the reason for this is that the rules of terrestrial "action movie physics" have been pretty solidly established for some time. Water can break a fall of arbitrary height, gas tanks explode when normal bullets are fired into them, car doors are bulletproof, automatic weapons involve no recoil and can fire for five times longer than their actual magazine capacity would permit, men who are punched seven times in the face by a barehanded martial arts badass are still capable of standing and fighting back, and so on. There's no point in arguing over a conceit that literally every action movie makes in order to have their film look interesting. So few films have been set in space to-date, however, that there's no established "canon" of movie physics, so every physics failing is magnified for having no automatic suspension of disbelief built into it. Moreover, a film like Gravity, which takes pains to be as realistic as it can, cannot even use the Star Wars "the physics are irrelevant" excuse.

[frigidmagi]

automatic weapons involve no recoil and can fire for five times longer than their actual magazine capacity would permit

Even that depends. A good artistic firefight can get me wrapped up in the moment and forget magazine counts. Others... Well for example in the movie Red when there's an assault on Bruce Willis' house, I almost got thrown out of the theater because I had a fit of laughter as I watched 7 men with M4's open up and keep firing for almost 90 seconds at full auto.

1st off M4s like the M16 don't have a full auto setting... For good reason. You would burn through 30 rounds in less then 10 seconds that way. It's an utterly silly way to use your rifle.

I'll admit I'm not the standard movie goer there however.

I will also not discuss the screaming fit I had over Swordfish's utter disrespect for C4.

[Josh]

It also really depends on the nature of the production. What's acceptable in a John Woo or other Hong Kong fare would totally be out of place in Band of Brothers.

A movie like Gravity is like 2001, it's going to get held to a higher standard by virtue of being hard science fiction instead of space opera a la Star Wars or Star Trek.