At the Movies with General Havoc

[rhoenix]

I'll just leave this here:

[youtube][/youtube]

[General Havoc]

Robocop

Alternate Title: Roboscript

One sentence synopsis: A police officer critically injured in a car bombing is rebuilt by a corporation into a law enforcement cyborg.


Things Havoc liked: Paul Verhoeven and I have a tempestuous relationship, but there's no denying the genius of several of his films. 1987's RoboCop, starring Classics Professor Peter Weller (I never tire of that bit of trivia) is unquestionably among them, a gritty, satirical take on 80s capitalism and American culture in the late stages of the Cold War, crossed with a bloody, emotional film that just happened to star a cyborg. As one of the best films of the eighties, it was probably inevitable that someone would decide to remake it, but given the abject catastrophe that was last year's Total Recall (also a Verhoeven film I adore), this was a film I was more dreading than looking forward to.

So let's get this over with right off the bat. Robocop, the 2014 remake of Verhoeven's classic, is not a travesty. It is not a cinematic crime, one which will taint the legacy of its predecessor. In a word, it does not suck. And the reason it does not suck is because unlike Total Recall, Robocop was plainly made by people who had at least watched the previous film, and perhaps even tried to understand it.

It's 2028, and remarkable advancements in robotics and cybernetics have allowed us to build humanoid drones of perfect accuracy, capable of a variety of military and law enforcement duties, as well as replace people's severed limbs with mechanized ones capable of the most delicate operations. Leaders in this field are Omnicorp, headed by Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton), ably assisted by his chief scientist James Gordon (Gary Oldman). Keaton and Oldman are, unsurprisingly, the very best things in the film. Joking aside, I haven't seen Michael Keaton since his role in 1997's Jackie Brown, but the man is and always was an excellent, understated actor, and instead of playing a typical goatee-stroking slimeball CEO, plays this one instead like someone one could actually see in office. He wears turtleneck shirts, talks in high level sales pitches, and makes decisions for his company that make actual sense using the logic of market research and focus grouping, all while knowing when to discard a terrible idea as being far too risky for his company's image. Oldman meanwhile has little to work with playing the standard ethically-challenged scientist, but as he's one of the finest actors in the world today, manages to render the part interesting even so. His confrontations with Keaton over ethical or performance-related issues to his design sound not like the standard hapless scientist oppressed by money, and more like the typical confrontations that arise in any technology-related business.

Nor are Keaton and Oldman the only draws. Robocop's partner, Lewis, is here played by Michael K. Williams, better known as The Wire's Omar. I adore Williams in all ways, and while he doesn't have a lot to do here, he manages to bring his usual veneer of cool badassery to every scene he's in. Jackey Earl Haley meanwhile, of Rorschach fame, plays the main military director for Omnicorp. Haley's character is, of all things, a robotic supremacist, who has no use for the insertion of human factors into the drones he creates, and cares little who knows about it. Given Haley's infinite capacity to play seedy, smoldering characters, he makes a somewhat compelling foil for Robocop, particularly early in the film, as he is attempting to figure out how to properly operate his own body. But best of the supporting cast is, of course, Samuel L. Jackson, who here plays a 24 news/entertainment 'personality' in the vein of Sean Hannity, who lectures from some Fox News-style pulpit on the virtues of robots and drones, and castigates the "robophobia" of the American public.

The original Robocop was only half an action film, the other half being Verhoeven's merciless pillorying of American culture at the time, something he would go on to do more and more of to less and less effect. This film, well aware of this inheritance, retains the satirical bite but modernizes the target. Corporate greed and amorality, still as much an issue today as it was thirty years ago, comes up for another shellacking this time, but rather than recite the same cliches as you'll find in half the movies of the last ten years, this one tries to project a strange, Apple-meets-EA vibe to Omnicorp, burying it in marketing lingo and focus group results, ably assisted by Jay Baruchel, as a slimy marketing "guru" spouting terrible ideas in the name of "appealing to specific demographics". An early sequence wherein the CEO suggests that Robocop's look should be made more "tactical" strikes quite close to home. More serious is the concept of drone warfare, ably dealt with in an early sequence set in Tehran, apparently under US occupation, where we watch a cadre of suicide bombers attack a company of robotic soldiers. The robots do nothing 'wrong' per se (at least nothing a human soldier wouldn't do), and the terrorists are quite plainly terrorists ("Our goal is to die on television") says one. Yet effortlessly, the film plays with the uncanny valley such that we instantly identify with Al Qaeda against the robots. Throughout the film, the movie does its best to bring up questions of surveillance, drone use in law enforcement, and the line between military and police...


Things Havoc disliked: ...badly.

Robocop is a film that has good ideas, and no real clue as to how to develop them properly. The question of drone use in law enforcement is raised at the beginning of the film, and then pushed to the back burner for the duration of it. Plenty of arguments occur over the use of drones on the streets, but we see nothing of the actual substance of it. The drones we see, after all, are not really scary once you get over the uncanny valley. They are efficient, accurate, never make mistakes (one early incident is the fault of ROE, not programming), and are generally relegated to the background of a movie with way too many "issues" on its plate.

The original Robocop was effectively a machine who had to, over the course of the film, re-learn how to be a man again. This film eschews that concept, making him a man with cybernetic parts first and foremost, and that's fine. We are, after all, more accustomed to the idea of a man with mechanical parts now than we were back then. The issue is that it never finds a primary character dilemma to replace the subject with, instead simply focusing on the mechanical process of getting Robocop fit to fight, and then seeing him go out and do so. Again, there is nothing wrong with this idea in theory, as I would not have minded a film about a Robocop who is really just another cop with special capabilities, trying to find a way to fit into modern law enforcement. But the film doesn't do that either, pulling a midway switch by artificially changing him into more of a robot, and then back again, and then not, several times, until all thematic structure is lost, and characters are acting in ways that have not been established or earned, simply because we're running out of time and we need a climax.

Speaking of characters, you might have noticed that I didn't mention the actor (Joel Kinnaman) who actually plays Robocop. There's a good reason for that, and that reason is that he's awful. His character, such as it is, is so understated and monotone that he actually seems more alive with the robotic parts than he did beforehand. I can usually tell if the problem is bad writing or a bad actor, but in this case the question is so muddled that I suspect it might be both. Lacking any chemistry with his co-stars, Kinnaman's job is not made any easier by the fact that his wife and son, characters who had very little facetime in the original movie, are also flatly terrible. Suckerpunch's Abbie Cornish is simply given nothing to do beyond react woodenly to bad dialogue from her husband or from the Omnicorp suits that have transformed him into Robocop, and his son is played by one of the least convincing child actors I've seen since Timothy Green. In a movie that discards much of the plot of the old film in favor of more of a focus on Robocop's character and that of his family, this is a terrible problem.

It's not the only one. The villain, played to such amazing effect in the original by Kurtwood Smith, is here a completely ignored cypher, forgotten about for half of the movie only to reappear when the film decides it needs an action piece. Indeed, the pacing is all over the place in this film, which devotes nearly half the runtime to what amounts to back-story, while compressing the actual plot into what feels like the last 40 minutes. It's perhaps not surprising, as a result, that the plot is full of holes, clearly the product of a rushed or stitched together development cycle. Why, for instance, would scientists about to release a revolutionary new robotic cyborg to his first-ever press conference, decide that five minutes before showtime was a good time to upload the entire contents of the police database directly into his brain, a process both untested and highly dangerous? And speaking of press conferences, let me pose another question. If the robotic policeman that a megacorporation had just unveiled were to, in the middle of a massive crowd of people, jump off the podium and randomly discharge his firearm into a member of the crowd, would your reaction be cheers, or panic?


Final Thoughts: I said at the beginning that Robocop is not a terrible movie, not a betrayal of the source material, and I stand by that, but mere failure to destroy a franchise is not the sole requirement for success. The truth is that Robocop, despite a number of excellent actors and several legitimately good ideas, is something of a mess, a film bedeviled by bad pacing, a lackluster plot, poor choice of focus, and a main character not up to the task of playing a character who is both a robot and not a robot. The film clearly tries to pay proper homage to its predecessor, with callback lines from the first film, and even stingers from the classic Basil Poledouris theme. But even on the level of basic design (Detroit in this film looks like a paradise, clean and crime free, to the point where we wonder where the demand for Robocop is coming from), this film doesn't know what it wants to do, and winds up, as a result, doing a great many things badly, none of which have all that much to do with one another.

I came into this film with no expectations of quality, but in many ways, this result is the harder one to bear. A film that had no chance of being good is simply that, but one that had aspirations of greatness and failed speaks to all sorts of missed opportunities that one can sense, peering from within the tangled plot and compressed pacing. At the same time however, Robocop at least attempts to properly placate those of us with fond memories of the original. It may fail at doing so, but the thought, ultimately does count for something.

And hell, at least it's better than Robocop 3.

Final Score: 5/10

[frigidmagi]

And hell, at least it's better than Robocop 3.

Look man, you don't have to make up movies to say something nice about Robocop (2014).

[General Havoc]

The Monuments Men

Alternate Title: The Case of the Missing Comedy

One sentence synopsis: A task force of artist, antiquarians, and curators must locate troves of priceless artwork stolen by the Nazis in the end stages of WWII.


Things Havoc liked: Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazi regime perpetrated the greatest series of crimes in human history. One such crime, though not as high profile as the Holocaust, was the theft of tens and hundreds of thousands of works of art, mostly sculptures and paintings, from all across the continent of Europe. As the war wound down, the Allies assembled a unit, the "Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program", who spent the last two years of the war, and six years thereafter, doing their best to recover as much of Europe's cultural heritage as possible from the various hidden troves where the Nazis had hid it. Called the "Monuments men" for short, this film is the story of these men, as they cross Europe trying to stop the Germans from destroying their looted art, or the Soviets from looting it in turn as war reparations.

For the task of portraying this story, the German-American producers of this film have assembled a superb cast. George Clooney and Matt Damon play Lts Frank Stout and James Granger, Harvard-educated art curators from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, who convince the government to assemble a team to preserve what can be recovered by any means necessary. Among the other experts brought in are characters played by Bill Murray, John Goodman, and Bob Balaban, along with an international contingent including a Free French expert played by The Artist's Jean Durjardin and a curator from Paris played by Cate Blanchett. The characterization for this bevy of characters is somewhat limited (more on that later), but a collection of superlative actors this accomplished can't help but produce good work, even in somewhat mundane circumstances or encounters, such as a sequence when Murray and Balaban encounter a straggling German soldier in the woods and disarm him with a pack of cigarettes, or another, later on, when they unknowingly stop by the cabin of a Nazi art thief, and gradually begin to realize who they are dealing with. Clooney persists in playing himself, as he has in largely every film ever, but he and Damon play off one another well, and when the plot calls for someone to recite sugary dialogue over patriotic horn music about the importance of art to human wellbeing (more on that later as well), Clooney's one of the best in the business.

The film is not structured, more or less, as a single plot, but rather as a series of vignettes, as various teams of Monuments men break off and scatter across western Europe, seeking for art in mines, castles, and the homes of Nazi war criminals. Some are shot at, some killed, others find themselves in strange situations, but the episodic style of the movie, while defusing a great deal of narrative tension, does manage to convey the sense of these soldiers' actions as being a small element of a much larger tapestry, either the war in general, or the campaign to recover art in specific. The real MFAA program employed hundreds of American, British, and Allied experts, who combed Europe for years, and while I understand that the film has to concentrate on a few of them in order to tell the story at all, it's nice that the movie doesn't attempt to pull a U-571 and pretend that these men were the only ones to engage in these sorts of efforts.



Things Havoc disliked: All of which is well and good in theory, but in practice, this film is simply a mess.

Advance previews for this film originally began coming out last September, with an intended release date around Christmas, and crucially, they portrayed the film as a comedy. At some point that fall, the film was pulled for additional post-production work and pushed back to a February release, not a good sign insofar as the studios' confidence levels are concerned. Moreover, the new trailers were playing the story straight, as a feel-good dramatic piece showcasing the good works these people were doing, leading me to believe that test screenings had gone disastrously badly, and editors were being brought in to salvage it. I mention all of this background because the film we have been given here bears all the hallmarks of one mutilated in editing to become something it was not originally intended to be. The film cannot, for instance, decide if it wants to be funny or not, trying to cross elements very little short of slapstick (Matt Damon steps on a landmine, for instance, and must find a way off without getting blown up), with heavy drama (the team proceeds to locate a barrel containing tens of thousands of extracted gold teeth). Admittedly, many of the individual scenes do work, either because the editorial patching is well done, or because these actors are good enough to carry them, but the overall effect is mood whiplash, robbing the movie of any momentum in terms of dramatic heft or comedic timing. It becomes a series of disconnected scenes, having nothing to do with one another, played in seemingly random order with little-to-no impact on the cast itself.

Indeed, the editorial seams in the story rob us not only of proper pacing, but also of a proper idea of just who these people are. There are no introductions for the various characters, save for a cursory voiceover listing their names and areas of expertise. We are given no time with them in training, or in preparation for their task in order to get to know them, and while several of them seem to know one another already, we have only the barest hints as to what their relationships are or how they can be expected to evolve. The reason for this may be that they don't evolve at all, as though the writers had no interest in the characters as characters, and preferred instead to simply use them as a means to show off the fact that the Americans care about art. What few characters that do get a moment or two to actually develop are, of course, done poorly. Cate Blanchett's Claire Simone is an art curator in Paris who loses a brother to the Nazis and fights to prevent them from looting the French collection, and yet when the Americans do finally arrive she refuses categorically to help them find the stolen artwork, presumably because she is afraid they will keep it for themselves. Without getting into the politics of such a belief, what exactly is her plan then? Do nothing in the hopes that the paintings will magically find their way back to their original owners? Or is the entire plot point invented to give her the excuse of later falling for Matt Damon's character and giving him the information she should have given him an hour and a half ago?

Furthermore, I hate to be pedantic, but, if you're going to make a film about World War II, based on a non-fiction book and rooted in the insistence that this is a true story, then the least you can do is try and get your facts straight. I'm not talking about minor quibbles like the proper functioning of land mines (they explode when you step on them, not off), but major matters like the date and time of the D-Day invasion, as this film has Clooney display a battle map to the President of the United States showing the invasion as having already occurred in August of 1943. Not only is the initiative a purely American one (the non-American members of the team are winnowed rather quickly), but the Russians, who were dealing with their own recovery efforts, are effectively turned into the bad guys, as the movie seems to regard them as rapacious thieves on the same level as the Nazis themselves, seeking to loot all of Europe to please Stalin. The real monuments men spent much of their time not only locating stolen art, but laboring mightily to save what had simply been damaged, such as their efforts in Pisa, Florence, or Aachen. None of these things figure into this film, and while I'd understand those omissions in the context of presenting a coherent story, given that it does no such thing, I'm hard pressed to excuse it.

But all of these problems might even have been salvageable, save for the damning fact that this is one of the sappiest films I've seen since The Odd Life of Timothy Green back in 2012. While we do not have time, while watching this film, to actually develop characters, we apparently have plenty of time to linger on backlit shots of the American flag, to listen to horrible, vaguely-patriotic horn music accompanying everything the characters do like a choir of angels, or have George Clooney recite dull, cliche-laden speeches about how "art is important, guys!" The movie uses broad comedy when considering most of its characters' actions, before suddenly becoming as solemn as a deacon on Sunday when one of them must valiantly give their lives to protect the heritage of Western Civilization. Not only that, but it calls back to this theme some five or six times, going so far as to have the President of the United States personally ask the commander of this little unit if "it was worth it", when he considers the men who died to save the artworks in question, a question he of course answers with the assistance of bugles, soft lighting, and copious American flags. Perhaps, if I squint, I can conceive of a version of this film and this subject matter which might have worked. But this version is as sweet as cough syrup, to the point where even I, die hard WWII historian that I am, couldn't bear any more of it by the time the movie mercifully ends.


Final Thoughts: The Monuments Men, for all of my complaints, is not a terrible movie, but it is an almost aggressively mediocre one, mired in a directionless script written by studio hacks and then mutilated by editing into a rambling, disjointed mess. The sheer skill of the many great actors involved in the production, who no doubt thought they were making an important film on a great moment in the US Army's history, is all that keeps this film from being truly wretched, but are not enough to salvage a project that, judging from the evidence, was doomed from the beginning. The story of the men who saved the treasures of Western Civilization is a worthy one, and deserves a theatrical consideration of the highest quality, but the mere fact that the story is uplifting is no excuse for failure of this magnitude.

My suggestion? If somehow a terrible war ravages the globe once more, do not exert heroic efforts to preserve this film from the flames. Believe me, the corpus of human achievement will not be lessened by its absence.

Final Score: 4/10

[Steve]

And hell, at least it's better than Robocop 3.

Look man, you don't have to make up movies to say something nice about Robocop (2014).

I remember Robocop 3. It had CCH Pounder and Jill Hennessy and Rip Torn in it. It had Mako in it.

Sure, it was a cheap action flick with some silly plot and story decisions, but how could I forget a movie with such (poorly used) talent?

(Actually, to be brutally honest.... I consider Robocop 3 to be a guilty pleasure while I consider Robocop 2 to be painfully boring, if at least a smarter film).

And I consider that Sci-Fi Channel Mini-Series "RoboCop: Prime Directive" to be utterly forgettable.

P.S. To clarify, yes, I know you were joking, Frig.

[General Havoc]

300: Rise of an Empire

Alternate Title: Go Persia!

One sentence synopsis: The Athenian General Themistocles must lead a coalition of Greek warships to defend Greece from the Persian hordes of Xerxes and Queen Artemisia


Things Havoc liked: Despite my well-founded hatred of films that take it upon themselves to rip history to pieces to suit some shallow modern obsession (Troy, for instance), I openly adored Frank Miller and Zack Snyder's 300. The film was almost comically inaccurate, depicting the Battle of Thermopylae as one of hyper-muscled Spartans in leather thongs battling the orcish hordes of a nine-foot Xerxes. Yet I had no objection to it, partly because the spectacle was so amazing, but also because, despite the bare chests and slavering monsters, the film actually did bear a relation to the historical source material, albeit not the one that most historical epics pretend to have. 300 was not the Battle of Thermopylae as it happened, but the Battle of Thermopylae as the Greeks would have described it, a record not of the history, but of the mythology that grew up around it in Greek circles. This was the version of the battle that Aeschylus and Herodotus would have presented, a visual version of the Epic Poetry that was written in volumes about one of the signature battles of the Persian War. I was therefore hyped to see the sequel, wherein Snyder and his crew took on the immediate aftermath of Thermopylae, and the turning point in the war, one of the most important battles in human history, Salamis.

What a surprise therefore, that the thing I liked the most about this film wasn't in the original.

Looking back, I think I've been waiting for an opportunity to like Eva Green, and yet I'm not sure I could tell you why. She was wooden and unremarkable in Kingdom of Heaven, Dark Shadows and The Golden Compass were awful films, and while I did like her in Casino Royale, it was hardly the sort of performance that cements one's career in memory. Yet moreso than many character actors I have enjoyed, I've always remembered Green's name and face, and wondered what she might do if given an opportunity to completely slip the leash. In Rise of an Empire, this is precisely what she was given, and the answer to the question appears to be "raving camp". Green plays Artemisia, Queen of Halicarnassus and ally of Xerxes of Persia, here elevated to the overall commander of the Persian fleet assembled to annihilate the Greeks once and for all. As the primary antagonist of the film (Xerxes himself being demoted to an occasional presence occupied with Leonidas), Green plays a character straight out of Rocky Horror, passing well beyond camp and straight into a semi-genre-savvy pastiche of an evil warlord. This is one of those villains who isn't merely evil, but gleefully, riotously evil, and while that's tremendously inappropriate for a straight historical drama, for a stylized mytho-historical action orgy like 300, it fits absolutely perfectly. Artemisia, one of the more fascinating characters of classical Greece, here becomes a cross between Nicholas Cage and Captain Ahab, whether dual-wielding broadswords against Greek hoplites, calling enemy commanders to her flagship for casual threats mixed with sex, or masterminding pan-imperial assassination plots to maneuver her handpicked selection to the throne of Persia. Moreover, Green is the only character provided with an actual backstory, explaining the passionate hatred she, though Greek herself, bears for all of Greece. Buttressed by this backstory, and the nature of the film, Green lets herself go all out, and is easily the best thing in the entire film.

300 was an action spectacle, a blood opera in keeping with the finest works of John Woo or Donnie Yen, and its sequel does not disappoint in this regard. To the customary sword and spear-play, replete with copious limb amputations, this film adds naval combat to the repertoire of stylized slaughter, with triremes ripping one another apart and naptha bombs setting the sea alight. Eschewing the dreaded shaky-cam, the film uses 300's patented slow-mo/speed-up to linger on every single mutilation and every bone-shattering impact. And while the fighting isn't quite as studded with "wow" moments as the original, that may simply be the lack of novelty. 300 changed the way action was done, at least in good films, and this one proves that the formula still bears fruit.


Things Havoc disliked: But it proves a few other things along the way.

The original 300 was not subtle, nor was it oversupplied with characterization, but it was a simple story told simply and with skill. It eschewed modern sensibilities in favor of a stylization of how Greeks might have seen the battle in question, and when you took the orcs and monsters and oiled chests out of the equation, it portrayed the Battle of Thermopylae more or less the way it actually happened. The Persian army, confronted in the pass of Thermopylae by a small force of Spartans and other Greeks, was unable to batter their way through, taking horrific losses, until finally they outflanked the position and annihilated the Greeks, winning the day, but providing a preview of the horrific defeats to come. It played like a mythologized version of the real battle, not a complete invention, which is why I defended it to those who argued its historical qualities. And yet I'm frankly not certain if any of this was apparent to the actual filmmakers, because judging from the way this movie portrays its material, it might all have been an accident.

Part of the problem is the main character, Themistocles, played by Animal Kingdom's Sullivan Stapleton. Where Gerard Butler's Leonidas was a very Greek archetype, a somewhat one-note killing machine of machismo and combat prowess, the filmmakers this time round try and make Themistocles into a modern hero, conflicted and unsure of himself before rising above his flaws to become the champion Greece requires. This is all wrong. The man who singlehandedly forced Athens to first build a navy and then use it to battle odds scarcely credible was neither "conflicted" nor "humble", but instead a leader of overwhelming arrogance and self-assured power, one who knew he was equal to the task at hand, and single-minded towards gaining it. This version of Themistocles is a mincing violet when it isn't time for him to butcher vast numbers of men, to the point where the movie has him give a pre-battle speech acknowledging that he is inadequate and telling his men that he doesn't mind if they desert him. Not only does this turn the character into the same damned reluctant hero archetype of thousands of other films (and a boring one to boot), but it shatters the illusion that we are watching anything resembling the actual Battles of Artemisium and Salamis, even ones as seen through the lens of Greek tale-making.

But then, that illusion doesn't hold up for long anyway. The original 300 played fast and loose with everything except the actual facts of the war itself. This movie throws that notion out the window instantly. In a desperate attempt to raise the personal stakes, the movie opens on the Battle of Marathon, some ten years earlier, and has Themistocles (somehow now promoted to command of the Athenian army) personally slay Darius, father of Xerxes, thus setting off some sort of revenge plot between him and Xerxes. Ignoring the fact that Darius was not at the Battle of Marathon, nor did he die during the war in question, this scene is problematic because it touches off the way in which these new filmmakers (Snyder is creditted as a co-writer this time, but the directing duties fall to newcomer Noam Murro) plan to treat the history of their subject. Battles are fought which never happened, in locations that do not exist, under circumstances that never transpired. Worse, people die who actually survived the war, fighting in battles they did not participate in, while armies that did not exist appear from nothing to save the lives of people who needed no saving in the real version of history. The film goes so far that when the Battle of Salamis finally rolls around, it is fought using a strategy completely alien to the real battle, by forces utterly alien to the ones in the real thing, with results that have very little to do with what actually happened. I understand the need to be fresh with the material, but when the entire reason that the battle was so important is junked in favor of some other battle whose repercussions would have been vastly different, one begins to question the point of the entire exercise.

If you're going to change history around though, the least you can do is try and distract us from this fact by way of providing something else interesting to watch. Unfortunately, besides the items I listed above, there isn't much of that. The characterization, both of Themistocles and of his various allied warriors, is so paper-thin that we actually wind up with better character moments when the movie turns back to returning actors Lena Headley and David Wenham, respectively playing Queen Gorgo, and Delios of Sparta. The original characters had very little characterization themselves, but it's emblematic of this movie's flaws that, when those two are on the screen, it's a serious improvement. Bereft of them, we have painfully obvious rehashes of the subplots from the first movie, complete with the whole father-and-son dynamic that the original used as a means of trying to distinguish a few of the Spartan mass. It didn't really work then, but it really doesn't work now. And given this, the movie is unable to distract us from the structural problems it has in spades. While the fighting and choreography is superb, the blood effects in this film are some of the worst I've seen in a decade, as if the movie-makers had squirted red jelly on the film stock. The Persians, Artemisia-aside, are such bumbling fools wandering blindly into certain death over and over again, that all sense of drama or tension is lost, even when the filmmakers arbitrarily reduce Themistocles' fleet from 300 triremes to 5 for the final throwdown. The effect is so bad that even the fighting becomes tiresome, as we wearily wait for the Greeks to effortlessly slaughter another horde of men eighty times their number before they can actually get around to doing something dangerous.


Final Thoughts: This movie confused me more than anything, as many films that seem to deviate from a winning formula for no reason do. Why would you make such radical changes to the characters and the story of the battle you have selected to portray when it was precisely the lack of such changes that made the original a great movie? Did Hollywood, or whoever was responsible for the first film, simply luck into 300, or did Frank Miller understand his subject matter far better than those hired to follow him up? Indeed, the very title of the film betrays confusion, as I fail to understand why a movie about the shattering defeat of what was then the mightiest polity in human history would possibly be called "Rise of an Empire". The film is not, overall, badly made, and Eva Green's performance elevates almost every scene she is in, but the ultimate result of this project is contrivance and incoherence, and not all the beautiful slaughter in the world can disguise it. Ultimately, for those who adore the poetry of an action film, as I do, Rise of an Empire is a worthy thing to see, along the lines of the Expendables or the brainless action films of yesteryear. But given the effort that went into the previous film to produce something truly unique, it is disappointing to see 300 reduced to another chop-shop tale of modern, conflicted characters, dressing up in Halloween costumes and fighting the innumerable forces of thundering idiocy.

After all, if I wanted to see that, I'd watch The Patriot again.

Final Score: 5.5/10

[General Havoc]

Stalingrad

Alternate Title: The Thin Extra-Red Line

One sentence synopsis: Five Russian soldiers must defend a ruined apartment building and the young woman who lives there from overwhelming German assault during the Battle of Stalingrad.


Things Havoc liked: Stalingrad was the greatest battle in human history, and yet has never gotten the proper cinematic treatment it deserves. Enemy at the Gates, the only major Hollywood attempt to portray the battle, was an uneven film with some qualities but more flaws, and outside of that, the battle has only appeared in localized German and Russian indie films, usually as part of some kind of Platoon-esque mediation on the horrors of war. It serves its purpose in this regard, certainly, but the epic scope of the battle has still eluded filmakers, perhaps because it is simply too immense to fit on even a cinematic canvas. Nevertheless, when I heard that a major Russian production was underway to try and do Stalingrad justice, I was excited to see the results, as if anyone could possibly get Stalingrad right, I would expect it to be them.

What strikes me immediately upon watching a historical film is the degree of accuracy that the filmmakers have sought. Accuracy comes in many forms. It can be scrupulous adherence to the historical facts of the period presented such as in Kingdom of Heaven, or a thematic and stylistic fidelity as evidenced by the original 300. Stalingrad's creators seem to have sought for a mixture of the two, blending careful adherence to the gritty details of the Battle itself with a larger thematic sense of what it was that the Soviet Union was engaged in. The filmmakers know their stuff, in terms of the details of the war and the soldiers. They know that for all his omnipresence in Soviet society, Stalin was the last thing on anyone's minds while actually on the front line (neither were the dreaded commissars). They know about the unspoken codes that exerted themselves in Stalingrad as in all protracted battles, and half-distilled propaganda lines such as "there is no land behind the Volga" (watchword of the Soviet 62nd Army). They know how the Russian Ppsh-41 submachine gun worked, how the soldiers handled it, and why they did not simply spray wildly with it even at close range. They know that German stick-grenades were concussion bombs, not fragmentation, and that soldiers often withstood their blasts simply by laying prone on the floor. They even know that the dense Russian greatcoats were somewhat fire resistant, and that soldiers would often plunge right through sheets of flame wrapped in them, confident that they could shed them on the other side before being cooked to death.

Most war movies are, in some way, exercises in propaganda, particularly when coming from states with a, shall we say, "elevated" history of such things. Stalingrad dispenses with such things immediately. The only actor in the film recognizable to my western eyes is The Pianist and Downfall's Thomas Kretschmann, who plays Captain Kahn, arguably the most well-developed character in the film, a German soldier and war hero who becomes obsessed with a Russian woman who proves to be a dead ringer for his deceased wife. Kretschmann, who coincidentally starred as a German Captain in a movie called "Stalingrad" twenty-one years ago, lives out the movie in some kind of purgatorial hell, condemned to attack the same house over and over and over again while trying to keep his "kept" woman (their relationship is ambivalent to say the least) from being murdered by either the Germans (who are massacring civilians with impunity) or the Russians (who are more than willing to execute 'collaborators' regardless of their circumstances).

But the main characters are, of course, Russian, specifically five soldiers who wind up defending an apartment building from repeated German attack, as well as a young woman whose home it is, and who tries to continue to live amidst her dead neighbors and ruined home even as war sweeps over it again and again. The scenario is a real one, inspired no doubt by the famous "Pavlov's House", scene of fighting for weeks on end in the real war. Five soldiers is just about the right number, frankly, as the movie is given time enough to characterize each one, with standouts being Gromov (Pyotr Fyodorov), the de facto leader (none of the soldiers seem to give rank much of a thought in the heat of battle), a hardened combat veteran of every major battle of the 1940s, and Nikiforov (Alexey Barabash), a classical tenor and local celebrity, converted by war into a lethal, silent killer. But the focus of all the soldiers' attention is Katya (Maria Smolnikova), a civilian survivor who winds up the focus of all five soldiers' attention as they battle for the house. Yet rather than turn the story into a typical Hollywood love story wherein one soldier becomes her romantic interest, perhaps at the expense of one or more of the others, this film has the soldiers treating Katya, likely the first woman they've been in close proximity to in a year and a half, as a figure almost of reverence, perhaps a representation in their own minds of loved ones at home, or some idealized version of Russia herself. Cheesy though this may sound in text, the film portrays this dynamic sermon-straight, with a sincerity that is frankly convincing. Men under the stresses of battle do not always revert to animal behavior. Some seek for any shred of human decency they can find, if only to remind themselves that something exists beyond the war.

I mentioned last week in my review of the new 300 movie that Zack Snyder's stylized action style from the original laid its mark on the films that followed it, and nowhere is that more evident than here, a non-Hollywood Russian war production. War movies since Saving Private Ryan (at least the good ones) have not sought to glamorize the experience of killing in war, instead focusing on the gritty, bloody realism of the participants. But in a battle such as Stalingrad, in the midst of an incinerated city, fighting a tide of evil, Director Fedor Bondarchuk seems to have decided that the horrors of war will attend to themselves, and fills his movie's combat with glorious, expertly choreographed slaughter. By knife and grenade, sub-machine gun and pistol, the soldiers in this film kill one another in poetic, artistic ways, replete with cinematic trickery and well-placed slowdowns, sparing neither the violence nor the blood attendant in such activities. War is indeed hell, the film seems to be indicating, and yet there is an awful majesty to it as well, particularly given the stakes involved, and when Russian soldiers storm the bluffs above the river, covered in burning oil like demons from hell, and charge into machine gun fire to throw the Germans back, it's rather hard to argue that the film isn't showing the war with sufficient reverence. The spectacle of this film's violence, though not so over the top to invite laughs, cements the central thrust of what actually happened on the banks of the Volga in the autumn and winter of 1942.


Things Havoc disliked: Stalingrad is an extremely Russian film, by which I mean the style of cinema that has been a hallmark of Russia since the days of Sergei Eisenstein. Big, elaborate showpieces are separated temporally by lengthy, almost willfully restrained sequences filled with characters locked in emotional turmoil staring at one another or out of windows, whispering dialogue that takes... seventeen.... seconds.... between.... words. As such, it shouldn't really be a surprise that for a movie supposedly about the greatest battle in human history, this film is awfully slow, particularly the second half, wherein the movie seems to forget its a war film at all, pulling out almost all of the action in favor of more character moments and scenery. I don't mind a humanized war film, with a battle the size of Stalingrad it's almost mandatory, but the film begins, I fear, to lose track of just what it's supposed to be about, neglecting the battle until it's time for the movie to end, in favor of some kind of artistic statement on the purity of love, or something. I'm not entirely sure myself.

There's also the other facet typical of Russian films (as it is with Russian literature), in that narrative tightness has never been a particularly important element of the equation. Russian movies and books think nothing of simply dropping subplots, characters, or entire thematic constructs whenever they are no longer convenient to the writer, without feeling any particular need to resolve such elements. Consequently, the film introduces characters to us who are then never seen after the first ten minutes, or elements of people's backstories that we assume are being set up for later, only to never be given any form of payoff. Perhaps this was intentional, or perhaps this is the mark of a film that had to be edited rather heavily, but given the slow pace mentioned above, this lead me to start wondering, during the last half of the film, if the movie actually had any idea at all of where it was going with any of this.

Finally, one of the issues that afflicts a film that chooses to go the accurate route in dealing with history is that it's no good to only be strenuously accurate in part of the movie. As the film comes to its foreordained end, the filmmakers' grasp of the reality of Stalingrad seems to desert them, as tanks line up in ranks so tight that they would be unable to maneuver or turn their turrets, the better to present an imposing sight for the audience, and hundreds and hundreds of men are routed with almost contemptuous ease by the actions of half a dozen Russians, none of whom ever seem to engage more than one or two German soldiers. Moreover, I hate to nitpick, but if you had an airstrike available to you on command, and saw what could not be less than an entire regiment of enemy forces forming up in packed ranks in the open to attack you, would you call that airstrike in on them, or wait until they had already entered the building you were endeavoring to defend?


Final Thoughts: It's always hard to criticize a foreign film, as the conventions of cinema are simply not the same from one place to another, and while it's somewhat churlish to criticize a Russian movie for failing to be American, the film ultimately has to entertain me if it wishes for my wholehearted recommendation. How much of Stalingrad's failings are due to its place of origin and how much are actual errors I cannot say, but the movie, ultimately, had me wishing by the end that it would simply get on with it. There are good elements, even good sequences in Stalingrad, particularly the surprisingly-rare battle scenes, done with a style and panache that would make most of the film's Hollywood contemporaries green with envy. But it's a very difficult task to hang a two and a half hour film on twenty minutes of action, especially when all of the action is front-loaded.

My suggestion? Catch the battle sequences on Youtube, and otherwise wait for the next try. Stalingrad was the biggest battle in the history of the world. Filmmakers will get it right some day.

Final Score: 5/10

[General Havoc]

Noah

Alternate Title: Not Your Grandmother's Genesis

One sentence synopsis: Noah and his family must create an ark to save the Earth's wildlife in the face of God's intention to destroy the entire world.


Things Havoc liked: I should have seen this coming. I should have expected that a movie written and directed by Darren Aronofski, a man who has never met a story he didn't think could be made more insane, was not likely to be your bog-average late-March studio-castoff. This is the man who brought us Pi, Black Swan, The Fountain, and one of the shortlist candidates for the "Best Movie I Never Want to See Again" award, Requiem for a Dream. Nevermind that this is a major studio film in March, Doldrums season exists not for studios to dump terrible movies, but for studios to dump movies they don't know what to do with. Often these are the same things, but sometimes they are simply films too challenging or complicated for the dullards who run most Hollywood studios. And if nothing else Aronofski has long ago proven that he simply doesn't have a simple movie in him.

It is the distant past, or perhaps it is a far-flung, post-apocalyptic future (the movie actively hints towards the latter). The Earth is overrun with evil men, the descendants of Caine, the first murderer, whose children are nomadic scavengers, seeking to survive in a world whose natural resources have been utterly exhausted. Once, they ruled great empires and mighty cities, but all has crumbled to dust, and they have been reduced to cannibalistic savages, desperately seeking any means of survival as they wander a barren earth. Dodging these wandering bands are Noah (Russell Crowe) and his family, including his wife (Jennifer Connelly), his three sons, and a young girl (Emma Watson) taken in after being found abandoned and half-dead in the middle of the wastelands. A series of apocalyptic visions convinces Noah that the end of the world is coming, and he takes his family on a fantastically dangerous trek to a lonely mountain, where he builds an Ark to survive the coming storm. This much is the biblical narrative, and yet Aranofsky's vision for these events seems drawn from some mad mish-mash of Christian eschatological films such as The Rapture, Roland Emmerich disaster films, and Cormac Macarthy's "The Road". The world that Aranofsky has produced is nothing like the standard visions of biblical tradition, in which robed and sandaled men roam vast deserts to the accompaniment of string orchestras. Wrapped in ragged coverings like neo-apocalyptic barbarians, Noah's family passes the charred skeletons of skyscrapers and the rusting remnants of once-vibrant civilizations, bearing witness along the way to mad bacchanalian meat-markets in which the last desperate remnants of humanity devour one another in orgies of mass-cannibalism and barbarity. Barren, incinerated wastelands stretch across the screen as far as the eye can see, even before the first of the many apocalyptic events commences. When finally God pronounces his judgment, the imagery is terrible and bloody, as teeming masses of the damned are swallowed up by the cataclysmic flood, explicitly sparing neither the innocent nor the just. The weight of an event like the Deluge is front and center here, as is the immensity and inhumanity of what is, ultimately, the wrath of an omnicidal deity. In theory, the Flood was a purgation, a cataclysm that selectively punished the wicked and spared the righteous, yet Aranofsky seems to regard this notion the way we might regard the apocalyptic pronouncements of Jim Jones. God is sparing Noah and his family not because they are the righteous and the just, but because of reasons that may be completely arbitrary. Though the film never comes down one way or the other, it is unstinting in presenting an end-times that may or may not have anything to do with higher justice. It may well instead be a simple matter of indiscriminate, purposeless death.

All of which is well and good, but what does this mean for our main characters? Aranofsky's viewpoint is, a great deal. Noah spends the majority of this movie simply crushed by the weight of the responsibility that he has been entrusted with, a responsibility he doesn't even understand the nature of. Having had a hand in the virtual annihilation of humanity, an annihilation that is neither clean nor short, Noah is left a stunned, emotional wreck, desperate to prove somehow to himself that everything he has done was not in vain. Indeed, much of the second half of the film concerns Noah's desperate attempt to comprehend the intent of the Creator in sending the flood, an attempt which leads him to conclusions and actions that may make sense (at least to him), but are inescapably horrible. Noah's eventual conviction that God intends the extinction of humanity, and that he and his family were spared merely to steward the fauna of the world through the catastrophe and to enable them to recolonize the world leads him to a cold, almost psychotic abandonment of the rest of mankind. When his son rescues a young girl from the camp of the cannibals, Noah abandons her to die as "impure" despite her impassioned pleas and the anguished screams of his family. When the floating ark is penetrated by the anguished cries of the dying multitudes, he refuses to allow his family to save even the smallest child from the waves. His embrace of the terrible, yet ruthlessly logical consequences of such things visibly corrodes his sanity, leaving him a wild-eyed fanatic of a sort familiar to anyone who watches the news. Despite his awards and accolades, I've always felt that Russell Crowe is an actor who thrives in very specific types of roles, but the tormented obsessive is plainly one of them, as movies as divergent as A Beautiful Mind and LA Confidential can attest to. Here, he is perfectly on point, riding the line between satanic and stoic, until finally he falls apart entirely. The Bible records that following the Deluge, Noah became a winemaker and a drunk. This film shows us why.

But Crowe isn't the best thing in the movie. The best thing in the movie is Ray Winstone's turn as Tubal-Cain, the king of the aforementioned nomadic band of cannibalistic scavengers. Winstone is clearly meant to be the villain of the piece, lord of a group of bloodthirsty savages that engage in unspeakable acts, and yet the film gives Winstone a surprising amount of time to establish himself and his motivations. Rather than a raving psychopath, Winstone plays the character as a harsh man in a harsh time, who does what he feels he must do to survive, and does not apologize for doing so. Tubal-Cain inhabits a world with an active, hostile God, one that has pre-determined that he and all his people are corrupt and evil, and deserving of death, thanks to their heritage from the line of Cain. His response is almost Nizchean, as he rejects God's authority to judge him and his on such terms, thunderously denouncing God and Noah alike for the casual extermination they are party to. In defense of life, he is even permitted acts that would, from any other character, be heroic, leading a charge against biblical monsters ten times his size in a desperate attempt to save some fraction of his people. He also forms a bond, of sorts, with Noah's middle son Ham (Percy Jackson's Logan Lerman), the one who had to watch his father abandon an innocent girl to be trampled to death, explaining his philosophy of unapologetic survival and his rejection of Noah's conviction that his lack of blood purity should condemn him to die. If I'm being brutally honest, I identified far more with Winstone's character than with Noah, as a sane, if harsh man, confronted with a death-wreaking god and his mad servants, surviving in spite of the odds to rage against the dying of the light.

Say what you will about Darren Aranofsky, he knows where to point a camera. Noah is a beautiful, stark film, shot in loving long takes of desolate ruin. Combat sequences are a bit frenetic, perhaps, but do not employ shaky-cam, and manage to keep everything in focus. But the best sequences of all are a series of slideshow montages of the events before the film, either the biblical account of Eden, Caine, and Abel, or (of all things) the evolution of life itself, in a progression that could have been lifted straight from Cosmos. Insofar as it posits any theology, the film seems to run with evolutionary creationism as a basis, and consequently indulges in a retelling of the famous seven days of creation to the accompaniment of a Nova documentary on the origins of the solar system. All we're missing is Carl Sagan's voiceover.


Things Havoc disliked: There are some... questionable decisions on Aranofsky's part in regards to what else he includes with the film. The movie has angels in it, voiced by everyone from Frank Langella to Nick Nolte, but these angels (fallen angels, to be precise), come in the form of gigantic four-armed rock monsters that have an uncanny resemblance to the Ents from the Lord of the Rings. This serves to throw the movie back from epic, biblical awe into more mundane fantasy, cheapening the effect that Aranofsky is going for. Worse yet, the cosmology of these Angels makes little to no sense. They are angels cast down from the heavens for the sin of having interfered with mortals, fair enough, yet we see sequences later on of them being slain by mortals in fairly large numbers, until suddenly something changes off screen, and they are immortal once again... I think. Everything else in the film works in such an obvious and unstated manner, that the inclusion of these rejects from Middle Earth really begins to muddle everything up. I know the original story spoke of Giants, but perhaps there's a better way to represent that than raiding the Neverending Story's costume closet.

Sadly though, that's not the end of matters, as not all of the actors are up to the task of portraying what they are intended to portray here. Jennifer Connelly is simply not a very good actress, never has been in my mind, despite her turn in Aranofsky's Requiem, and when she's called upon to deal with events of this magnitude, she rather unavoidably comes across like a housewife who think its "just such a gosh-darned shame" that the entire planet had to be destroyed amidst horrific scenes of suffering and death. Meanwhile, Noah's elder son Shem (Douglas Booth) is wooden and uninspired, and his dialogue sounds rather like someone reading off a cue card. This isn't helped by the general tone of the writing in the film, which is way too direct and on the nose. Noah narrates his own actions repeatedly within the first hour of the film, describing his intentions in detail to people who already know what he's about to say, including the audience. I mentioned the flashback montages before, but there are also others, including one at the beginning of the movie that is done in a strange, almost Milleresque style, one that doesn't fit at all, and gets the film starting on the wrong foot. It improves, granted, but the first few minutes of a movie are the most important, and not the ones to drop flat on. Finally, there are some special effects issues in this film, particularly with the animals that Noah is saving (or attempting to). Several of the wide shots are bad enough to fit right into an Asylum film, as if the Scorpion King was coming to join Noah on the Arc.


Final Thoughts: Noah, a $130,000,000 Hollywood biblical epic, is one of the strangest movies I have seen in years. It is a film of contradictions, scrupulously accurate to the biblical account of Noah, yet daringly subversive of the prevailing Christian narrative, built around characters and settings simultaneously everything and nothing like most people's assumptions about scriptural stories. It deals with its biblical source material with what appears to be both scrupulous reverence and thunderous contempt. It defies easy characterization. It is madness.

Did I like it?

It took me several days to figure out an answer to that question to be perfectly honest. I was ready, at one point, to give it a fairly low grade, as the writing was stale and several of the actors weak. Yet the film is so at odds with what I expected to see, so self-aware of the contradictions inherent in the story of Noah, that it almost has to be seen to be understood. Over the course of the days since I saw the film, my position on it has improved steadily, to the point now where I regard it as some kind of mad artwork. It is not a great film, nor a flawless one, and will not likely be gracing my list of classic films to be remembered throughout the ages. But it is a unique film, with a unique vision, unlike anything I can recall having ever seen. And when you see as many films as I do, a unique, yet coherent perspective is something to be savored.

Final Score: 7/10

[Steve]

When you mention your confusion at the titling of the 300 sequel, the moment I saw it I figured it was about the rise of the Athenian Empire, which is born out by Themistocles as the hero.

Well, except for all of the criticisms you levied. I've not watched either movie, so I can't judge directly.

[frigidmagi]

The Director of Noah is on the record as claiming this to be the least bibical Bible film ever made. What he's attempting to say with that I leave up to the reader.

[General Havoc]

The Director of Noah is on the record as claiming this to be the least bibical Bible film ever made. What he's attempting to say with that I leave up to the reader.

And yet in a weird way, it's also the most unflinchingly biblical one. YMMV.

[General Havoc]

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Alternate Title: Hijinx Ensue

One sentence synopsis: The concierge and lobby boy of a classic European hotel are caught up in a murder mystery involving a wealthy heiress and priceless painting.


Things Havoc liked: Last year, I described The Butler as having the single most loaded cast I'd ever seen. Apparently Wes Anderson doesn't like being one upped, because for the latest entry in his endless series of strange, right-angle films that are not entirely fantasy and not entirely not, he has assembled a simply ludicrous cast, a cast so loaded that veteran character actor Bob Balaban is billed eighteenth, and to recite the entire list would be to consume half the review with names. Just assume that all of the various actors you've come to associate with Wes Anderson (Murray, Norton, Keitel, Swanton, etc...) are all here, along with a bunch of new arrivals, every one of whom (with one exception, to be discussed later) is a veteran, seasoned actor, each one at the peak of their game, and you'll begin to see why this movie is being discussed in such glowing terms.

Set in a fake Austria-Hungary in between the world wars, The Grand Budapest is a quintessentially continental luxury hotel, dressed up like a wedding cake with an army of staff to cater to the nobility and the super-rich. Presiding over this stately chaos is concierge Gustave H, played by Ralph Fiennes, who not only runs the hotel but draws its elderly, sex-starved (yes) clientele to the place so as to avail themselves of his hospitality. Gustave is a vain, insecure man who seduces rich, elderly women, not simply out of venial greed (though there is that), but plainly because he needs the approval of someone at all times. As the film commences, Gustave takes in a new Lobby Boy (Tony Revolori) as errand runner and lobby steward, shortly before one of the elderly ladies that Gustave has been wooing is found dead of poison, amidst complications involving the widow's will, her greedy son, his lawyer and hitman, and, of course, murder allegations that immediately begin to swirl around all of the above. Indeed, the plot is almost purposefully overcomplicated, the better to turn the entire affair into a grisly, wacky, typically Anderson-esque farce. Fiennes, presiding over all of this madness, is perfectly in his element here, playing a cross between Jeeves and Peter Sellers, a character who gets neurotic about things that should prove meaningless (his brand of perfume), and perfectly blase about things that are matters of literal life and death (fascist death squads). He rides the line of madness and playing it straight as though he's been in Wes Anderson's films for years. I've never seen Fiennes give a bad performance (The End of the Affair was not his fault), but this is unquestionably one of his best.

But Fiennes isn't alone in delivering a winner here. I promised I wouldn't give a recitation of the infinite names associated with this film, but I can't proceed without talking about Adrian Brody, an actor I've always disliked, or Jeff Goldblum and Willem Defoe, two actors I secretly adore. Brody here, playing the son of the murdered widow, takes his performance from Midnight in Paris and presses the Asshole button until it breaks, becoming a murderous psychopath with one foot squarely in the Snidely Whiplash school of villainy. Goldblum plays Brody's family lawyer, in whose hands the probate of the widow's will is placed, and Dafoe his personal legbreaker, who over the course of the film breaks far more than that. It's true that Goldblum is largely playing himself, and that Dafoe is simply channeling his native creepiness (something he is well supplied with), but Wes Anderson likes to play with actors' archetypes in fun ways, and watching these two ham it up in their customary fashion is something I could go on with for days.

Anderson is a highly visual director, a term I use with precision in his case. He enjoys establishing fixed tableaux and presenting his characters before them, with his cameras moving only when absolutely required. This film exhibits his tendency towards such things far better than most. The hotel itself is cavernous, filmed in loving wide shots to take in its grandeur (or lack thereof as time goes by), as are the other monasteries, prisons, and castles that the film takes place in. Bright, primary colors are the rule, even in dismal prison scenes, where tiny splotches of color from pastry boxes (or arterial spurts) contrast off the overwhelming backdrop. The writing is Wes Anderson's writing, a bit more polished than usual here, filled with lines that would be punchlines if every person in the film did not seem entirely incapable of appreciating humor in a normal, human way. People complain in other films about wooden line delivery. In this one, it's the intended result.


Things Havoc disliked: Fiennes' counterpart through all this madness is newcomer Tony Revolori, playing Lobby Boy Zero Moustafa, and though I hate to come down on a newcomer, he's simply not up to the task of dancing with Ralph Fiennes. Where everyone else recites their lines in a wooden fashion because they choose to, one gets the sense with Revolori that he is doing it because that's simply how he acts. Perhaps it's a more difficult task than I imagine to be good at acting poorly, but either way, Revolori just doesn't have the chops for what he's up against. Neither, incidentally, does his love interest, Saoirse Ronan (of Hannah and City of Ember), who shares in Revolori's inability to act badly well. Fortunately, there is no shortage of characters that ARE capable of such acts, but when these two are the only ones on the screen, we go from a quirky movie to a badly made one, if only for a moment.

There's also an issue with the plot. I know, I know, the plot in a Wes Anderson film is secondary, but it's at least usually complete. The sheer number of plotlines, side characters and juggling acts that this movie has to keep spinning is breathtaking, and before the second act is over, the film has to start jettisoning characters and plotlines like a balloon aviator trying to lighten the load. Bit characters are fine, and Anderson's films are known for the weird, never-to-be resolved sideroads branching off the main plot, but this is the first time I've seen him drop entire major plotlines without resolution. Perhaps there's some sort of message being delivered here, and my issue is not that certain things turn out badly, but that some of them end with almost violent abruptness, a voiceover to explain what happened, and then nothing more. Perhaps Anderson is trying to make some kind of verisimilitude point or playing with our expectations or something, but it's not unreasonable for a viewer of a film to ask a filmmaker who establishes a major question as the driving force of his movie in the first half hour of it, to at least answer the question in some regard throughout the rest of the film. If the answer had been some artistic point regarding the inability to know certain things it would be one thing. But the impression we get from this film is that he simply forgot.


Final Thoughts: I doubt seriously that he forgot, of course, and as evidence I have to point to the overall quality of the film, quirky though it is, replete with wonderful set pieces and memorable shots, set up in Anderson's trademark style. The acting is uneven, but a cast like this is simply incapable of being bad, even, apparently, when instructed to try, and the overall effect is glorious insanity, the sort of thing that most of Anderson's movies eventually devolve into, celebrated in vibrant technicolor by an artist given license to do whatever the hell he wants.

A reviewer in my neck of the woods described this film as the movie Wes Anderson has been promising to make for the last decade. Unfamiliar as I am with the promises Anderson has or has not made, I'm not sure I'd go that far, but it is certainly a superior film, funny and farcical and insane in all the right ways. I've always sort of liked Anderson's movies without loving them, but this is as close as he's ever come to changing my mind on that score. Well done.

Final Score: 7.5/10

[General Havoc]

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Alternate Title: Morning in America

One sentence synopsis: Captain America, Black Widow, and Falcon must team up to stop a deep-rooted conspiracy from destroying SHIELD and the entire world.


Things Havoc liked: The Marvel movieverse is a miracle of modern filmmaking. It is an act of a benevolent god. This is simply not how films are made, let alone good films. There have been movie series before, sure, even some that were longer-running than Marvel's (James Bond, for instance). But most movie series are a sequential list of one movie after another, as sequel follows sequel until the inevitable reboot. Marvel, meanwhile, decided some time after Iron Man was a success to produce four separate lines of movies, all within the same universe, and then merge them together for periodic crossover mega-extravaganzas. This is not normal! And yet with the exception of Edward Norton's Hulk film, every single one of the eight movies they have produced in this line to-date has not only been a financial success, but a great film, the least of which was merely "good", and the best of which were among the finest movies produced in their respective years.

And yet for all the quality of those eight movies, number nine might be my favorite one of all.

Winter Soldier, the sequel to 2011's Captain America, is a tour-de-force, a fantastically good film from a studio I had begun, I must admit, to worry about. Following the somewhat disappointing Iron Man 3, and the fun-if-pointless Thor 2, there was some concern on my part, albeit limited, that Marvel might be milking their franchises a bit too far, that the magic might be starting to fray the way Pixar's did following Wall-E and Up. Consider my concerns officially abated. Winter Soldier is everything I could have possibly asked for from a Captain America film, bigger, deeper, crisper, and more impressive in largely every way than its predecessor. It is a fresh vindication of whatever raving madness it was that compelled Marvel to try something this ambitious. It is excellence itself.

I don't even know why I continue to marvel (no pun intended) at the casting in these films, but for what it's worth, let's go through it again. Chris Evans, whom I mentioned in my Avengers review I thought was a bit shaky in the original Captain America, has grown into his role in a big way. His Cap is defined, not by the fact that he beats people up, nor by some uberpatriotic claptrap or sermonizing saintliness, but by simply being a good, decent guy. In a world of flashy superheroes and literal gods, the filmmakers seem to have centered, ironically, on Cap's normalcy as being the proper window for his character. He beats and kills people with aplomb to be sure, but the best moments in the film are Cap simply interacting with people, relaxed, confident, willing to entertain other perspectives but ironclad in his own core beliefs. He is not a stand-in for Jesus, nor given some kind of strawman personality to "contrast" his good points, but manages to make the character interesting and compelling through small touches and quiet moments that blend together in summation to produce a holistic character. One of the strongest sequences in the film is a quiet visit that Rogers pays to his old flame from the first film, now elderly and infirm, inconsequential to the plot, but highly evocative in evidencing the yawning gulf of everything Cap has lost in missing sixty years of his life. Touches like this, his continuing efforts to catch up on modern society, his capacity to adjust his world-view without abandoning his principles, or simply his ability to put down the Captain America persona in an instant and become Steve Rogers once again, are what remind me of the Cap I always imagined when reading the comics, the Cap that I have longed to see realized.

But of course Cap is only part of the draw here. Indeed moreso than any previous Marvel film except Avengers, Winter Soldier is an ensemble piece. Returning characters Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) are elevated in this film to major characters in their own right, with their own goals, backgrounds, motives, and responses to the madness that is the plot. Fury, in particular, I've been waiting to see more of, as I could not imagine Marvel failing to utilize Samuel L. Jackson to his full potential for very long. This film gives us a welcome opportunity to see some of what makes Fury tick, his background and his values, through the tried and true method of placing him in a room with other compelling characters and letting them hash matters out. Widow meanwhile receives a serious upgrade to her screen-time over even Avengers, becoming Cap's unofficial second in command. That Johansson can beat the crap out of people as well as the next man is not a surprise, but the filmmakers here give her character time to be presented organically, with none of the "designated background infodump" sequences that occasionally arose in The Avengers. Given the little time we've actually had with Black Widow, this movie gives us enough to launch her own film, if Marvel should have such a thing in mind, as we begin to understand a bit more about SHIELD's resident spy. But the best of the newcomers by far is Anthony Mackie, of Adjustment Bureau and Pain & Gain, playing Falcon, a minor character from the comics whose primary claim to fame was as the first African American superhero in comics. Put all thoughts of tokenism aside, Mackie plays Falcon note-perfect, a veteran para-rescue soldier who is presented not as Captain America's sidekick but as his friend, to whom he goes for advice and assistance, and vice versa. Though aware that Cap is larger than life, Falcon's role is not to bear witness to his awesomeness, but to provide an example for him, a modern character whose values reflect Cap's own, a bridge of sorts to the modern world. Avengers-fanatic though I have always been, I had never heard of Falcon prior to this film, but this movie sold me on him, a perfect counterpart to Captain America, whom I could stand to see far, far more of.

The original Captain America was a pulp film at its core, a ridiculous romp through Nazi super-tech and WWII insanity. Winter Soldier, by contrast, is a relentlessly serious film, touching on questions of governmental control, surveillance, and preemptive war. These are, admittedly, well-plowed fields in film, particularly in the last couple of years, but rather than simply make sanctimonious points about how fascism is bad, this film prefers to examine these questions in the context of Marvel's super-tech-laden near-future. In a world with literal supervillains, evil gods, and alien monsters invading the Earth, the reaction of terrestrial agencies to prospective threats is liable to be a bit more draconian than their counterparts in our world, as indeed they should. The plot is complex and layered, involving international politics, terrorism, and long-buried conspiracies, worthy of classic spy thriller films from the Cold War. Front and center in the midst of these plots is Fury's boss, SHIELD director Alexander Pierce, played by Robert Redford in what appears to be a reprisal of his roles from Three Days of the Condor and Spy Game. Redford is not my favorite actor, but that's because of his insufferable tendency towards smugness, something far more tolerable in a government agent than in some sort of self-assured romantic lead. It also centers around the mysterious Winter Soldier, a character whose identity I would not dream of revealing here, but about whom I will simply say that, knowing the comics as I did, I expected him to be insufferable, either through hackneyed personal drama or oversaccharinated cloying sentimentality. Neither is the case in this film, and the Winter Soldier, surprisingly to me, actually provides a perfectly effective foil for our favorite supersoldier.

And speaking of foils, we must discuss the action of this action film. It is awesome. Choreography is bone-shattering and energetic, reminding us periodically of the terrible power that someone like Steve Rogers can unleash at need. The shield work is far more visceral this time, still PG-13 of course, but bloody for it. Fight sequences are designed intelligently, with two standouts being a crazed, cramped battle in an elevator, and the first car chase I've seen in years that was actually new and interesting. Cinematography and direction is spectacularly nuanced across the board, with shots constructed and framed to provide emotional shorthand even within quiet scenes. The actors are instructed to use body language and subtle gestures to re-enforce the relative relationships between them, relieving the script of the need to explain things that are already apparent to the viewers. And while movies like this, particularly ones locked into a larger series, are only able to go so far with their characters, I must admit that there was not one but several occasions in which I actually suspected, rightly or wrongly I will not say, that the movie was actually going to go through with the fundamental changes, be they death of major characters or reorganization of the larger world, that they had been hinting towards. What other studio, midway through "phase 2" of a twenty year movie plan, would have the guts to let their film take risks that might reverberate down the rest of the cinematic universe forever?


Things Havoc disliked: I could nitpick of course. The film has an "interesting" relationship with the nature of certain types of military hardware, particularly CIWS, which is designed to take down ballistic missiles in mid-flight, but are apparently unable to hit a single man-sized target given ten minutes to do it in. The film also fails to understand the nature of V/TOL aircraft, a quality it shares with every other film that has ever featured them. Leaving the military-wank aside, some of the fight scenes are cut so fast that it becomes hard to figure out what's going on, even to the point where the dreaded shaky-cam begins to threaten at the margins. I will never understand the impetus to spend so much time and energy producing an incredible action sequence and then deciding to let nobody actually see it.

But the main issue I have here, as I had in Avengers, is Scarlett Johansson. Not to say that she is bad, or her character is poorly done, for neither of these things are the case, but there remains something... wrong... with her portrayal in a way that is rather difficult to describe. Her character is intended to be a self-assured spy, I admit, but she plays it so laconically that it begins to interfere with her ability to emote properly. I understand that the entire point of her character is her inability to reveal her true nature to anyone, even Cap, but if she doesn't reveal herself to us, then we can't get to know her, and if we can't get to know her, there is a limit to how much we can identify with the situations she is in. Should the rumors of a Black Widow movie be true, perhaps Johansson will alter her performance to give us something more, but playing the character as an emotionless cypher can only get us so far.


Final Thoughts: I was a fan of the original Captain America, but had to couch my praise with warnings that this was a Pulp film that might not appeal to everyone. I make no such declarations here. Winter Soldier is a fantastic film, one of the finest offerings that Marvel has ever presented us, a rejuvenation of the entire Marvel cinemaverse and a perfect lead-in to next year's Age of Ultron. It is rich, emotional, exciting, weighty, visceral, and a hundred other things besides. It is a towering achievement, an automatic candidate for one of my favorite films of this still-young year, a film that anyone who has ever enjoyed a superhero movie should, by rights, adore.

When by the end of the film, we are given our customary hints as to future films from the Marvelverse, I for one was ready to watch the next film in Marvel's repertoire then and there. Indeed, if films like this are what we have to look forward to from Marvel, then I suspect, despite every spectacle we have so far seen, the best may actually be yet to come.

A man can dream.

Final Score: 8.5/10

[Steve]

CA2 almost seemed necessary given IM3's hiccups, since Thor 2, while enjoyable, wasn't good enough honestly to sustain the momentum in of itself. You're right that CA2 gives the Avengers part of the franchise a good boost.

Now we just have to see where Guardians of the Galaxy goes.

[LadyTevar]

What really got me about CA2 was it took SHIELD and blew it to pieces. It took all the movies prior, it took Agents of Shield, and threw them down the rabbit hole, and we find out that is one fuckin' deep hole, and a nasty surprise at the bottom. I wanted to find the man who wrote the over-reaching plotline and shake his hand for all the barrels he kicked over and the shout-outs he gave in the script.

I mean, loook at it: We have Stilwell, the Agent in charge of deposing of Dangerous Tech, meeting with the Senator who was trying to nab Tony's armor, and both are hugging and whispering codewords. We have a clue to who/what the Clairvoyant actually is, which makes him/it far more interesting than being precognitive mutant. This is gonna echo all thru the Avengers and Coulson's crew is gonna be facing the backlash tomorrow night.

I can't wait to see where this goes next!

[General Havoc]

I'm excited for where Marvel intends to take this, following CA2. Next year's Age of Ultron has a lot to live up to.

[General Havoc]

The Raid 2: Berandal

Alternate Title: Ass-Kicking 2: Ass-Kick Harder

One sentence synopsis: A decorated Indonesian SWAT officer goes undercover into the middle of a three-way organized crime war.


Things Havoc liked: Looking back, I suspect I was a little too harsh on the original Raid, an Indonesian Martial Arts film released stateside in early 2012. I criticized it primarily for spending too much time on a throwaway plot, which was fair, and for not having martial arts quite at the level of the state of the art movies, which ultimately I believe was not fair. Raid's fighting was, on further viewing, better than I remembered it, and I think I might have been reacting to the fact that the movie's weakest section was its last third, a terrible idea for any action film. But that said, I did enjoy the original Raid quite a bit, and was eager to see what the sequel had to offer, hoping that it might improve on the flaws of its original and deliver me something special.

I do so enjoy it when my hopes are rewarded.

The Raid 2, written and directed by Welsh filmmaker Garreth Evans (as was the first) is a serious step up from what was already a very solid martial arts film base, a movie that elevates well beyond the simple-but-effective structure of the original film to become something truly special. It is a glorious ode to the fine art that is filming men beating and slicing the crap out of one another in the most cinematic ways possible, presented with the verve of a true connoisseur showing off his finest collection. Where I compared, fairly or not, the original film unfavorably to the masterworks of the genre, Sat Po Lung, for instance, or Ong Bak, I make no such claims this time. The Raid 2 is worthy of inclusion in those lofty heights, a panoramic bloodfest of orgiastic proportions, splashed upon the screen with skill and charm, sure to delight any who glory in the violent, spectacle side of martial arts.

Rama, played once more by Iko Uwais, has been through a rough couple of years. No sooner has he escaped near-certain death at the hands of the drug gang from Raid 1, than he is recruited as an undercover agent to infiltrate the largest organized crime syndicate in the un-named Indonesian city. Initiating a complex plan involving being sent into prison to get close to the son of the boss of the crime family in question, Rama is plunged into an escalating series of martial arts brawls, ones which start at the level of the fights from the first film and elevate from there. As the action is the focus and the draw here, it's worth mentioning once more just how good the action in this movie is. Frenetic and bloody, the film showcases nearly a dozen different fight sequences, each with their own signature moments, wherein a stone badass dismantles dozens of mooks intent on killing them, or alternately two of said stone badasses battle one another in a solo contest of skill and poise. Nothing new, save the fantastic skill of the sequences in question, better and more athletic than the original, and worthy of inclusion in the pantheon of amazing martial arts films. Fights are inventive and staged in a complex manner, with plenty of 'signature' characters and weapons, including a deaf girl who slaughters her enemies with a pair of claw hammers, and a baseball-bat-wielding maniac who, for once, kills people via the intended purpose of such objects. Best of all, the fights are staged in such a way that the film moves through them, by and large, in order of impressiveness, until by the end of the film, there are engagements worthy of any duel found in the finest exemplars of martial arts on film.

But there's more to this movie than simply the customary violence. The Raid 1 was advertised as an action film without a plot, and I, for one, was somewhat disappointed when the film did not live up to this promise. The plot of the original film was somewhat tacked on, a lackluster, formulaic entry, that marred the last third of the movie and brought it down from the heights of action awesomeness. The sequel, while still formulaic (action films are simple movies, ultimately), is a much more layered narrative, integrated fully into the plot so as to give weight and context to the acts of brutal violence that we are witnessing. The plot is complex and labyrinthine, involving well over a dozen major characters with their own motives, betrayals and twists, gang wars and false-flag attacks. I won't claim the plot is anything revolutionary, but there is room in film for a classic-style story told well, and the narrative this time round is used to buttress the main attraction of the film extremely well. Though nobody here should be in contention for Indonesia's equivalent of the Oscars, there are standout sequences, particularly anything involving Bangun, the elderly head of the crime family in question, whose instincts are for peace at any price when it comes to mob war, or Bejo, a crippled, half-Arab up-and-coming crime lord hellbent on upsetting the proverbial apple cart, and sowing chaos so as to profit off the mayhem.


Things Havoc disliked: The film makes a rather touching series of assumptions about the nature of its audience, one of which is that they have, of course, seen the first Raid. That much is fair enough, as I do prefer it when sequels do not spend the first half of the movie rehashing their previous installment. But this film doesn't just expect you to remember the Raid, but to remember it in incredible detail. Characters from the first movie, last seen by me two years ago and portrayed by actors I've not seen before or since, form important elements of the plot, all without the film reminding us who in the hell they are, relative to one another, a practice that is not helped by the film's use of un-announced flashbacks. To make everything even more confusing, several actors from the original film appear in this one playing completely new characters, leaving us completely unsure as to what, if anything, any of the characters (save for the main one) have to do with the original. Fortunately, the plot does not rely heavily upon the actions of these characters, but it took quite a while for me to realize that the answer to all of my questions was more or less irrelevant, and that I could simply get back to the business of watching the film.


Final Thoughts: The Raid 2 is a triumph, a spectacle in every sense of the term, bloody and gorgeous in all the right ways, instantly positioning itself in the ranks of great action movie sequels such as Terminator 2 and Aliens. Though it may not be a revolutionary film in the way the aforementioned ones did, it is one of the finest exercises in its genre, a crime caper fight-fest of glorious proportions, exceeding its original in largely every way, and elevating its star and director/writer from "good prospects" to "must-watch candidates". Much hay has been made recently about the decline of "pure" martial arts films, and the lack of forthcoming titles from China or Hong Kong, the traditional homes of such things, but based on this film, permit me to suggest that the dearth of great Chinese martial arts is not due to some collapse of the industry, but to a process much more familiar to us in everyday life: Globalization.

Or perhaps practitioners of Silat are simply more badass than those of traditional Kung Fu. Personally, I suggest empirical tests be run to determine this. I also suggest they be filmed.

Final Score: 8/10

[General Havoc]

Draft Day

Alternate Title: Field of Snores

One sentence synopsis: The General Manager of the Cleveland Browns must battle the team's owner, coach, media, and his own family as he attempts to build the best team possible through the NFL draft.


Things Havoc liked: I've mentioned in my reviews of Moneyball and 42 that I'm an avowed Baseball fan, but I haven't had the opportunity yet to discuss my position on Football, my favorite of the American spectator sports. Though I tend to open such reviews with scathing denunciations of teams such as the Oakland Athletics or the Los Angeles Dodgers, I feel in this case it would be unsportsmanlike, as well as unfair, for me to do something similar. Every fan deserves the right to root for their team unmolested, after all, and so I shall forebear to mention that teams such as the Pittsburgh Steelers or Dallas Cowboys are comprised entirely of communist goat molesters who employ the blackest of arts to seize tainted victory from shining beacons of progress and virtue such as my own San Francisco 49ers. To mention such things would, after all, be uncivilized.

But back to the film's virtues. Despite all the crap he's been in, I can't hate Kevin Costner, especially now that he seems to have finally left his Waterworld/Postman days behind him. Though his character was mutilated beyond all recognition, I thought he was an excellent choice for Johnathan Kent in Man of Steel, and he remains one here. Costner plays Sonny Weaver Jr, son of a (fictional) long-time Browns coach, now serving as the General Manager of the Cleveland Browns as they struggle to recover from another (real) losing season. Unlike the Head Coach, the General Manager of a football team does not run the team but assemble it, responsible for drafting and trading the players that he believes he needs in order to produce a winning team. It's the same role, albeit for a different sport, that Brad Pitt held in Moneyball, but Costner plays it completely differently. Where Pitt was a self-assured rebel effortlessly engaging in multi-latteral trades to try and fleece his opponents, Costner struggles with the weight of the decision of the year, the selection of the Browns' first round draft pick, a decision that is his alone, but that literally everyone from the rest of the Browns staff to the fans to his own Mother want to give him "advice" on. Costner's performance isn't the best in the film, but he manages to sell the sheer importance of this single call, and the sequences wherein he snaps back at those who wish to bother him with their own "opinions" on what he ought to do are among the best he has.

And what a wonderful collection of dignitaries we have assembled to tell Costner that he is an idiot. Frank Langella plays the owner of the Browns, a showman who wants Costner to "make a splash" whether the pick works out well or not, by making some kind of massive, blockbuster trade/deal to stir up excitement. Langella is always fun to watch, regardless of the role, and he hams it up in this one in his best impression of Al Davis or George Steinbrenner. Dennis Leary, meanwhile, who has been making a habit of being the saving grace of otherwise terrible films, plays Coach Penn, head coach of the long-suffering Browns, a ringer brought in from a winning team to energize a snakebit franchise. Leary in particular in the standout for this film, as his trademark blue-collar acerbic schtick works very well in the mouth of the would-be tough guys that tend to hang around the margins of NFL coaching. One could easily see him as a standin for Bobby Petrino or Nick Saban. The generally strong cast is rounded out by other standouts, many of them in-jokes for NFL fans, including Chadwick Boseman (Jackie Robinson of 42) as prospect linebacker desired by Costner and nobody else, and real life star running back Arian Foster, playing a college phenom whose father, a former Browns great, is played by Terry Crews, a decision I don't quite understand but do endorse.


Things Havoc disliked: What, exactly, is the audience for a film like this? Football fans, would be my guess, and yet based on the evidence, that's not a viewpoint shared by the filmmakers. The movie advertises itself as a hardboiled, burning negotiation film, where deals are made and unmade in split seconds and the destinies of NFL teams are forged in a crucible of calculation and gut instinct. And there is that, I suppose, but unfortunately, the majority of the film is instead comprised of, say it with me, "family drama". And who have we brought in to this little engagement to provide the requisite drama? Why Jennifer Garner, of course.

*Sigh*

No, Garner isn't godawful this time round (though she's not much better). The issue is really the idea that the movie should be about the personal and family troubles of Costner's character at all. Garner is his girlfriend/finance manager, who is suddenly pregnant barely a week after the death of Costner's father. What follows is a tired series of repeated scenes wherein Costner and Garner try to act at one another, misunderstand each other, are unable to talk about their troubles, become distant, make up, face relationship challllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllndfsmnasdf...........................

Huh? Sorry, I fell asleep on the keyboard there. You get the idea, right? Boring scene follows boring scene wherein Costner tries to act sensitive (never his strong suit) while Garner tries to act at all (same), all in regards to a subject that has nothing whatsoever to do with why we're actually here. And then, midway through the film, Ellen Burstyn, an actress I usually adore, shows up in a terrible role as Costner's mother, who seems to exist solely to make his life hard. Storming into his office the day of the draft itself, a subject she has been established as knowing all about (she calls him up to berate him for one of his draft moves earlier in the film), she demands that he drop everything to scatter his father's ashes on the practice field, and refuses categorically to consider doing it on any other day than the most important one in any NFL GM's life, nor to delay it by a single hour, and then drags his ex-wife along for no reason other than to snipe at Costner for working too much. This idea is so bad that it's actually painful to watch, as Burstyn is forced to play straight material that should have been laughed off the set. Of course she also doesn't like Garner (we have this much in common), and so we are given the obligatory sequences wherein Burstyn disrespects Garner, just so that we can wonder if they will later have a tearful scene of reconciliation to the accompaniment of string instruments.

And when we do, finally, return to the business of football, there are just too many questions. For one thing (spoiler alert?), Costner starts out the movie by making one of the most imbecilic moves in the history of bad draft moves, the kind of move that would, in reality, get compared to the infamous Herschel Walker trade between the Cowboys and Vikings. He spends the rest of the film being criticized for this move by most professionals in the organization, which is only fair, but the problem is that we see far too much of Costner's hand for the film to play the "is the move stupid or genius?" game. He has no secret plan, we know he has no secret plan, as we spend most of the film watching him agonize over the fact that he has no secret plan. So when the movie suddenly decides it wants to turn into Moneyball and pretend that Costner actually might have some kind of secret plan to turn this whole thing to his advantage, we are left with the conclusion that any good move he makes out of the aftermath of this situation is simply luck (or screenwriter fiat).

Ultimately, the film just doesn't feel like the sort of Hard Knocks, inside-the-curtain look at the backroom excitement of the NFL that it so clearly wants to be. Visits to other cities are accompanied by elaborate flyovers of the various stadiums (stadia?) complete with title cards reminding us that Seattle is, indeed, the home of the Seahawks, and Kansas City that of the Chiefs, something even a cursory fan of the NFL could probably figure out for themselves. Absent a montage sequence early in the film that seems placed there to acquaint people with the fact that football exists in Cleveland, there are no local touches, no colorful details of the Browns themselves, one of the most colorful (and storied) teams in the league. The terminology that the characters use with one another is either too vague and too detailed, with the script alternating between having characters explain concepts to one another that any professional would already know (so as to catch the audience up), and switching into the most arcane, acronym-laced verbiage imaginable, verbiage that could not possibly mean anything to any living human, and pretending that the characters (particularly Garner) understand what is being said as a sort of shorthand to the audience that "these guys know their stuff". Moneyball (and other movies of its ilk) managed to ride the line by using terms that the players or coaches might actually use, without bothering to explain them, understanding that audiences can catch up with the basics, and simply handwave away the rest, most of the time. But then, Moneyball was a movie with confidence and trust in its audience, whereas Draft Day is quite visibly not.


Final Thoughts: I don't want to make Draft Day sound terrible, for a terrible movie must take risks, and Draft Day takes none whatsoever. It is a movie that plays to a general audience that will never go see it, Doldrums or not, while failing to satisfy the specialty audience that might. Layered in personal drama that is both uninteresting and badly done, the movie thereby disguises what strengths it actually has by pretending for most of its runtime that it is about something other than football. I understand that not everyone is a fan of American football, but movies about something as precisely on-point as the NFL draft cannot get away with generalizing themselves in the hopes of drawing in a wider audience, not unless they are made with considerably more care and skill than this movie is.

If you're a fan like me, watch the real draft, and otherwise tide yourself over until next season, as you will find nothing in this film you don't already know, and in fact plenty that you likely know better than the film's creators. If you're not a fan, then frankly you had no chance of seeing this anyway, as the subject will mean nothing to you, and the film is not nearly strong enough to be worth seeing by itself.

Oh, and if you happen to be one of those hipsters who cannot tolerate the mention of the word "Football" without loudly proclaiming to all and sundry how much you don't like the sport of 'hand-egg', and how that makes you special and unique? Then I strongly recommend you go see this movie immediately. Seriously, man, it'll change your life.

Final Score: 4/10

[General Havoc]

Only Lovers Left Alive

Alternate Title: Clan Toreador: A Film

One sentence synopsis: A vampire-musician and his wife re-unite in Detroit while dealing with the wife's sister, and difficulties in obtaining a reliable blood supply.


Things Havoc liked: Jim Jarmusch is insane. I know this isn't a terribly unique spin on things, but it's true. Like many of the other Indie filmmakers I've run into over the course of this experiment (Anderson the Whimsical, Aronofsky the Deranged, Mallick the Pretentious), Jarmusch has his own style, save that his particular style is semi-dazed, plodding insanity, films which not only make no sense, but seem to take perverse pleasure in willfully abolishing sense from their presence. His films always appear to be made by someone who was simultaneously perfectly lucid and edited by someone under the influence of powerful sedatives, with shots constructed in an interesting, professional fashion, which are then allowed to simply sit there on screen until the audience begins to suspect equipment failure. This technique generally does not impress me, particularly in such horrific miscarriages of boredom as Dead Man, but Jarmusch is not some affected poseur like Mallick, and can still occasionally surprise you with flashes of sanity peering through the fog of madness.

In this spirit, I decided to go see a Vampire Movie.

Only Lovers Left Alive is Jarmusch's attempt at a vampire film, and strange though it is, there's a fascinating undercurrent to it, a brooding, trance-like quality that permeates the film's structure and leaves you unsure of just what it is you're seeing. Set mostly in the abandoned parts of Detroit (and exclusively at night, of course), it stars Loki himself, Tom Hiddleston, alongside Tilda Swinton, one of the strangest actresses alive, as a pair of centuries-old vampires who have the misfortune of residing within a Jim Jarmusch film. Hiddleston is Adam, a musician and scientist who has become a recluse, producing music he does not want traced to him while brooding on the dark and diseased nature of the world from his warren-like house on the outskirts of Detroit, while Swinton's Eve (subtle!) is his wife, residing in Tangier, and sustaining herself on blood acquired from Vampire-Christopher-Marlowe (John Hurt). Consumed with his brooding pessimism, Adam convinces Eve to come to Detroit to see him and...

... well not much, to be honest, and yes, there'll be more on that front later, but let us first speak of good things. Though the film is as slow as any Jarmusch production, this time the movie at least gestures towards earning it with mood and imagery and score. If you're going to force the audience to stare at a single image for over a minute, for instance, it helps if the image is well crafted, if good, trippy music is playing underneath it, or if the underlying tension and theme of the sequence is worthwhile. It also helps if the audience has some idea of what your movie is actually about, which is an issue Jarmusch has had in the past, though not here. That said, the overall point of the film is plainly not the plot, but the overall feel of these two characters, characters who seem less like Twilight-inspired hipster-douches and more like people who have simply run out of reasons to be interested in the wider world. There is a strong sense of age behind Hiddleston and Swinton's performances, every line weighted down by centuries of disappointment and discontent. Some artistic or scientific pursuits still spark a flicker of interest (Adam apparently has built a perpetual motion machine out of one of Tesla's old designs), but only occasionally. And yet the theme is not overly funereal either. The characters may not be interested in the rest of the world, but they are still, at least, interested in one another. And perhaps that is enough.

Still, not everything in this movie is long, dark brooding. Midway through the film, Eve's sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) appears to inject some energy into the film, if only by annoying the other characters into taking some action against her. Of all the characters in the film, Ava seems to be the only one who embodies some of what we classically imagine from Vampires, specifically the predatory, dangerous nature of them. While Adam and Eve get their blood from blood banks and never go beyond appearing a bit spooky, Ava's policies are considerably more "traditional", with results that can be predicted. Other side characters, from Hurt's Marlowe (who claims to have written Shakespeare's plays and describes the bard as an "illiterate zombie") to Jeffrey Wright and Anton Yelchin as two of the only mortals that Adam ever interacts with, the former a ghoulish hospital attendant with a penchant for nicknames, the latter a procurer of rare instruments and musical equipment, who seems to take the antics of a cloistered vampire in the wilderness of suburban Detroit as just another normal facet of reality. Yelchin in particular is as good as I've ever seen him, playing well off of Hiddleston's wooden reserve as just another musical groupie dealing with just another eccentric artist.


Things Havoc disliked: A good Jim Jarmusch film is still a Jim Jarmusch film, and lest we forget what that means, this is a man who managed to make a slow, leaden, plodding movie about a Samurai Mafia-assassin. Only Lovers Left Alive certainly isn't the worst offense against narrative timekeeping that Jarmusch has ever committed, but it's still a movie fully in his style, with slow trance-beats (from his own band, SQÜRL) over near-motionless shots of characters taking lengthy, pregnant pauses between each line of whispered dialogue. At this point, I know what to expect from Jarmusch, but that doesn't make it any easier to bear when you start to get the undeniable urge to check your watch every fifteen minutes.

But it's not just the pace of this film that messes about. Far from having a weak plot, the film barely has a plot at all. It is the experiences of two vampires in the world, which would be fine if those experiences were in any way indicative of the world Jarmusch is trying to create, or for that matter, of anything else. I get that the characters are bored, I get that they have lived forever and I get that they are sick of humans screwing everything up (impending vaguely-implied apocalypses, ecological or war-related, are suffused throughout the characters' dialogue). But once we've established all that, which takes barely half an hour, it would be nice if our characters went on some form of journey, as with most of the other films in the world. I don't demand that they change, they are vampires after all, and some of the best stories are about characters who attempt to change and cannot, but if the author won't let the characters even consider change, then all we're doing is watching an over-long vignette, leaving me, at least, with the question of what the point of everything is. Yes, I know Jarmusch is notorious for his rejection of common screenwriting conceits (he actually goes so far as to drop a literal inversion of Chekov's Gun into this one), but it is not good filmmaking to simply not do a thing. You also need to convince me that there's a good reason for you to not do it, and Jarmusch, for all the prettiness of some of his shots, never goes that far.


Final Thoughts: It's possible I'm not making a lot of sense, but then neither was the film, and I can only work with what I'm given. Based on other reviews I've seen from people struggling to find some meaning in this odd picture (I've seen interpretations that range from the Decline of the United States to a study of incest-taboos), I don't seem to be the only one left a bit mystified as to how I'm supposed to react to this picture. To sum up then in a manner hopefully a bit more helpful than the previous meanderings, I found in retrospect that Only Lovers Left Alive was a better film than I expected, but not different than I expected. It was, upon reflection, exactly the sort of Vampire movie that Jim Jarmusch would make, a slow, brooding movie filled with literary allusions and flirting with the edge of becoming downright boring, not because of its subject matter, so much as because Jarmusch is a director who seems to be incapable of producing any other sort of film. Indeed, at this point, the only thing Jarmusch could likely do to surprise me would be to make an action-comedy in the style of Michael Bay.

Is it possible to get too repetitive in your rejection of convention? Because if so, then perhaps it's not coincidence that Jarmusch decided, at this point in his career, that his next film should be about unchanging vampires, vaguely disgusted with the state of society around them, and yet completely unable to channel that frustration in anything but the same old way.

But then again sometimes a vampire is just a vampire...

Final Score: 6/10

[General Havoc]

The Railway Man

Alternate Title: Lifetime Presents: The Bridge on the River Kwai

One sentence synopsis: Decades after being tortured by the Japanese as a prisoner of war, a traumatized ex-soldier confronts the man who tortured him.


Things Havoc liked: I was really looking forward to this film. You would too if you had seen the trailer I did. How am I supposed to resist a film with Colin Firth (The King's Speech, Conspiracy, A Single Man), Stellan Skarsgard (Thor, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Good Will Hunting), and Hiroyuki Sanada (The Last Samurai, Sunshine, The White Countess)? How am I supposed to resist a movie about the Second World War, and indeed about an element of it (the abuse of Allied POWs during the war) that deserves to be better known about? How am I supposed to resist the prospect of such a film landing at the tail end of Doldrums season, always one of the most fallow periods in the film calendars, when the big budget flicks are all stupid bombs and a glorious indie film can slide in under the radar. This is the time of year that gave me last year's Best Film Award-winner The Sapphires, for God's sake. What else can you really ask for?

The Railway Man, directed by newcomer (to me) Jonathan Teplitzky, is a film about a weighty subject. In 1942, following their capture of the fortress-city of Singapore, the Imperial Japanese Army forced tens of thousands of Allied POWs and hundreds of thousands of conscripted local peasants to build a railway from Thailand to Burma over some of the most inhospitable terrain in the history of engineering. Tens of thousands of slave laborers died in the attempt to carve a railway through the jungles and mountains of South-East Asia, a section of which was so horrific in terms of lives lost and atrocities committed by the Japanese Guards that it became known as "Hellfire Pass". The film is the story of Eric Lomax, a railway enthusiast and soldier who is made part of this terrible project, during the course of which, he is tortured by a Kempetai (Secret Police) officer named Takashi Nagase. Yet all this is really just backstory for the main event, which is the decades-older, traumatized Lomax discovering Nagase's location, and seeking him out, hell-bent on revenge. This represents an... interesting take on the real story which underlies this film, but when it's actors like Firth and Sanada portraying these roles, the effect is potent. The confrontation between these two men, one a tortured victim boiling over with long-suppressed rage, and the other a man who has tried for decades to reconcile his wartime crimes with himself, cores the film, and provides an engaging denouement to slowly work towards. Lesser actors would not have been able to make this scene work, but these are not lesser actors.

Indeed, if you've read any of my reviews, you'll know that I'm an actor's critic, in that if everything else fails, I can always simply appreciate the chance to see good actors doing their thing. Even actors I'm not particularly fond of, Nicole Kidman for instance, who here plays Lomax' wife, can produce performances to surprise me here and there, and working off Firth, even Kidman has her moments in this movie. An opening sequence, one that has nothing to do with anything in the plot, simply portrays Kidman and Firth first meeting, and has a wonderful awkwardly-real tone to it, as does the quintessentially British reaction Firth has to having met someone he has actually fallen for. All throughout the movie there are touches like this, moments or individual lines made possible by the craft of the actors involved in the film, that vindicate my faith in their abilities. And this is why, despite the fact that there are no sure things in film, I had every faith that, even with a middling plot or questionable direction, The Railway Man was destined to be a highlight of my experiences early this year.


Things Havoc disliked: "Had" being the operative word.

The Railway Man is a catastrophically bad film. A film so wrong-headed that nothing, not a wonderful premise or a gift-wrapped dramatic plot or the services of many fine actors to portray these things had the slightest prayer of salvaging it. A middling story and questionable direction can indeed be overcome, but there is no salvaging a film this clunky, this overwrought, this maddeningly blind to all sense of nuance or subtlety. How is such a thing possible? One need look no further than the screenwriters, Frank Boyce and Andy Patterson, both of whom are known for producing children's books and television. Picture, if you will, a version of Empire of the Sun produced by Nickelodeon, and you will begin to understand the problem here.

What do I mean? Every decision, every plot point, every bit of exposition in this movie is produced as though the intended audience were seven-year-olds. An early sequence in which Lomax is tasked by the script to explain just what the Burma Railway is to his fellow POWs (and by extension the audience), a sequence which could have easily been handled with a few words, or even a pre-screen title card, is instead treated almost like a ghost story told by campers around the fire, complete with ominous music, and slow, "important" line-reading ("The British thought building a railway through there would be.... BARBARISM!!!" *orchestra sting!*). Despite the subject matter, which includes torture, PTSD, guilt, and forgiveness, never once does the film shy away from having to jackhammer everything it's doing into us with all the subtlety of a brass band. Nicole Kidman's entire role in the film seems to be to explain to the audience that a man who spends his nights shrieking in agony and attacking solicitors with box cutters is "not coping well" and "must have experienced something bad". Worse yet, the movie seems to believe that we are incapable of handling astonishing revelations such as these without unobstructed concentration, and tackles subjects such as Kidman and Firth's relationship, his trauma, and his quest for closure one at a time, as though these things had nothing to do with one another. Firth shows no signs whatsoever of being a broken victim when first we meet him, until finally he and Kidman wed, at which point he spontaneously morphs into the shattered vet he supposedly was all along, much to both Kidman's surprise and our own. And when we've managed, at length, to establish that Firth is a wreck, every other element of his life, including Kidman's entire role, is summarily dropped, left in waiting for nearly an hour as Firth journeys to Thailand to find his tormentor, confident that having abandoned his wife without a word so as to travel for weeks and murder people in another country, everything will be perfectly fine when he gets home.

I cannot possibly overstate just how pervasive this tendency towards simplistic exposition is within the film, so deeply ingrained that many characters are either reduced to passive observers, unable to act for fear of introducing complexity into the narrative (Kidman) or forced to act in ways that nobody, not even the most traumatized victims of horrific abuse, ever act (Skarsgaard). Paradoxically, this obsession with simplistic storytelling makes many elements of the movie very hard to understand, as characters act in ways that make no sense unless someone truncated all concerns or motives but one narrow one out of their personalities. Skarsgaard, playing Firth's best friend and fellow POW Finlay (how a Sweede wound up in the British Army is left unanswered), acts in ways that I still do not quite understand, not even if I assume that he is as broken as Firth is. His solution to the plain fact that Firth's PTSD is not curing itself is to conspire with his wife to encourage Firth to find and murder his old oppressor. And when Firth speaks of setting the past aside, something he wishes to do despite not knowing how to do it, Skarsgaard's reaction is so baffling and completely out of left field that I reacted as though I'd just seen a jump scare in a horror film. Meanwhile, the sections set in the past, with Lomax and Nagase played by War Horse's Jeremy Irvine and newcomer Tanroh Ishida, are almost painful to watch for the same damned reasons. Ishida, at one point, is literally tasked with standing over Irvine and screaming "You have no honor!", a line that could never possibly have worked, and certainly not when delivered with all the bombast of King Lear screaming at the stormclouds. Irvine, meanwhile, at one point builds a clandestine radio so as to get news from home and "keep the lads' morale up", a process that consists of finding a shaking, broken British officer, who is instantly cured of his afflictions upon being told that the Russians have re-captured Stalingrad. Clearly, this is the most important information imaginable to a man being beaten and starved to death by an unrelated enemy some ten thousand miles from a city he has likely never heard of. Later, having been beaten and tortured for weeks for possessing this forbidden radio, the film actually goes so far as to have Lomax deliver a defiant speech to his tormentors about how they will be beaten in the end, and how they will never break his spirit, the filmmakers having apparently forgotten that they were trying to make a realistic movie about the scars left by war. Arnold Schwarzenegger can get away with backtalking the people who have physically abused him for weeks. Terrified teenagers destined to suffer decades of tormented abuse in dramatic movies about the horrors of war cannot.

Oh and speaking of the damned radio, it symbolizes the greatest crime that this oversimplification produces, namely the fact that it actually serves to genericize the actual events in question. The horror of the Burma railway was the randomness of the brutality. The Japanese guards, inflamed by terrible conditions and the general culture of violent discipline in the Imperial service, brutalized their prisoners for no reason, beating them to death, decapitating them, arbitrarily torturing dozens of them to death for no reason whatsoever. It was the same mentality that led to the atrocities of Nanking, of the Bataan Death March, of thousands of other incidents across the Pacific War. Yet in this film, Lomax is not tortured randomly, but because of the damnable radio he decides to build. To be sure, the abuse he suffers following the discovery of his secret radio is a war crime, but by framing the story around it, it turns what Lomax suffered from the horror of the Burma Railway into yet another fictitious "sadistic guards beat the prisoner" story, the sort of which could be found in any war on any side. Anyone can be abused by someone in power, but what actually happened on the Burma Railway was so, so far beyond the usual abuses that one can encounter in any prison, as to constitute one of the most shocking atrocities in the history of war. Not here. Here, the worst crime perpetrated, a crime so terrible that it caused the place it transpired to be called "The Railway of Death", the one that necessitated decades of soul-searching, and an act of forgiveness so sublime as to defy belief, was that a man who violated the rules of his prison camp suffered a disproportionate punishment. This is the equivalent of making a film in which a German officer beats a person up for insulting Hitler, and then calling it the Holocaust.


Final Thoughts: I have labored mightily to get this far without making a "trainwreck" joke, but The Railway Man is precisely that, a complete disaster of a film that not only fails to do justice to its own story, but seemingly misses the point of it along the way. Though elevated by a handful of scenes wherein the cast is able to bring their talents to bear, the movie is a leaden, simplistic, undignified mess, one which grows steadily worse as it lurches on from scene to seemingly-disconnected scene, blissfully conjuring up "cathartic" moments that it has done nothing to earn. I have long maintained that a good cast can cover any fault, but there appears to be a limit to the amount of damage that even the highest caliber of actors can overcome. Paced and written like a Edutainment cartoon for learning-challenged adults, the film lacks any of the charm or drama that its trailers promised, and serves as a sad reminder of just what Doldrums season represents, even for can't-miss indie films.

Some terrible films leave you in a frothing rage (Timothy Green, Amazing Spider-Man), while others leave you in a stunned daze (To Rome with Love, Red Tails). This film, on the other hand, just left me sad, wishing that somehow I could go back, and see the movie that the trailers had actually advertised, instead of this botched rendition of one that they had not.


Final Score: 3/10

[frigidmagi]

... Ow, I'm sorry you had to sit through that man. It sounds pretty awful.

[General Havoc]

... Ow, I'm sorry you had to sit through that man. It sounds pretty awful.

Oh it was, but as it turns out, not the worst there was to see...

Stay tuned.

[General Havoc]

Under the Skin

Alternate Title: Purgatory

One sentence synopsis: An alien masquerading as human kidnaps and murders lone drifters in Scotland.


Things Havoc liked: So um... let me explain.

Some weeks on this project are easy. Some weeks I have a plethora of films that I want to see, and the hardest decision I have to make is picking which one to see first. The week that Winter Soldier came out was not a particularly hard one for me to make up my mind about, for instance. That's not to say that these films are always amazing, reading back through my archive will reveal that much, but movies like that are no-brainers. Yet some weeks, particularly around Doldrums season, are not so simple, where it becomes increasingly hard to find something I want to watch. Normally in such cases, I take a guess as to what might look good or at least interesting, and see what I see. The results I experience with this policy vary (obviously), as it has led me to godawful movies at times (Timothy Green comes to mind), but also to hidden gems that I might not otherwise have seen (the original Raid, for instance). Indeed, I tend to approach occasions like this with a mixture of dread and hope, bearing in mind the whole time that hands down the best film I ever saw on this project, Cloud Atlas, was the product of one such week in which I had nothing to see and decided to take a chance. It is good to remember, when going into a film that one knows nothing about, that sometimes you get something wonderful.


Things Havoc disliked: And sometimes you get this.

I have seen bad movies in the course of this experiment, dear readers. I have seen horrors the likes of which would send a lesser critic screaming into the night. But even at the nadir of my experiences with cinema over the last three years it is rare that I run into a film as bad as this. A classic mark of a bad film is that it makes you start checking your cell phone to see how much time is left. A really bad film has you wondering if your phone's timekeeper has stopped. This film convinced me at one point that we had actually reached the end of linear time, and that all that was left was to watch Under The Skin. Forever.

First, the plot, which consists of [TO BE FILLED IN WHEN THE PLOT FINALLY SHOWS UP]. But forget the plot, let us focus on the characters, which include Scarlett Johansson as [???] and [is anyone else IN this movie?]. No seriously, that's about all I've got. Johansson's character is credited as "Laura", but she is never named within the film, nor given any sort of character or opportunity to develop one. Oh there are gestures in that direction, to be sure, as she revolts against the unseen forces leading her to commit her heinous acts such as "Motorcycle guy" and... um... "OTHER motorcycle guy" (in retrospect that might have been the same guy). But nowhere in the film do we get the slightest hint of who or even what she is, and given that the film is entirely about the question of "who she actually is, really", this is something of a serious problem!

I'm not making any sense, am I? Let me try this again.

"Laura", or "complete cypher" as I call her, is some kind of alien, a fact I, at least, discovered only at the end of the film. Why then am I spoiling it? Because the movie does not go out of its way to hide this fact from us, concealing it for some kind of narrative payoff. It is simply so shockingly poorly made that vital information such as this is not conveyed to the audience, even though the film clearly believes that it has been. Disguised as Scarlett Johannson (or something), she makes the rounds of the Scottish countryside, looking for drifters, loners, and people who will not otherwise be missed. She picks these men up under the promise of sex, taking them to dark, abandoned buildings where they strip naked before being drowned in some kind of oily fluid and rendered down into gory mulch, save only for their skins, which are (I think) harvested for the purposes of being worn by the other aliens. If this sounds horrifying or shocking, understand that this entire process is filmed in the style of a Calvin Klein ad, wherein everything is muted, and characters not only do not speak, but do not act in anything but the most foreordained manner, walking blindly ahead into pools of translucent oil so as to be stripped for parts, never once endeavoring to escape or even struggling. That men would wish to sleep with Scarlett Johansson I can easily believe, but are they being mind controlled? Have their libidos completely overwritten their sense of self-preservation (or sight)? If you, lured into a creepy building by a sexy woman, found that the floor had been converted into a gelatinous substance filled with mummified corpses, would you wade into it with nary a glance in the hopes that it was nothing but foreplay? Would you maybe at least ask a question? Possible answers could be given to this fundamental connundrum, but none are offered, leaving us watching people acting in self-destructive ways, wondering what the hell the director is trying to say.

But then, Under the Skin is not a film interested in telling us anything. Entire sequences appear and disappear at random and for no purpose. At one point, Johansson finds herself on a remote beach in Scotland, speaking to a Czech surfer about why he has come all the way out here. He gives her vague answers about trying to get away from it all, and then runs off to try and rescue a couple who have become caught in a riptide trying to rescue their dog. The couple drown, the Czech man nearly dies saving them, their baby is left abandoned and dies of exposure, and nothing about this subject ever comes up again, save for the fact that we later hear a report on the radio that the people in question are missing, a report to which nobody reacts. Perhaps the film is attempting to show us that Johansson's character is learning from the example of humanity around her, but if so, the lesson she learns is entirely opaque to me, as is the effect of every other thing that happens in the movie. She seduces a man with severe facial deformities. Why? We do not know. She strips the clothes from another woman brought to her by a man on a motorcycle. Why? We do not know. She is dragged unwillingly into a nightclub, attempts to escape, then changes her mind and seduces a patron, taking him back to the skinning factory where he obediently drowns himself like all the others. Why? How the hell should I know? Every action taken by every character in this film has zero context to it, such that when the film starts having characters act out of character, we barely even notice, as nothing the characters have done up to this point has made the slightest sense. It was forty-five minutes into Johansson's spirited rebellion against her alien masters before I even noticed that she was rebelling at all. You can't replace nonsensical bullshit devoid of context with other nonsensical bullshit devoid of context and then expect the audience to tell the difference.

And maybe it's me. Maybe I would have caught on earlier, except that my brain was busy trying to chisel its way out of my skull in a desperate attempt to escape the soul-devouring boredom that is sitting in the theater, watching this film. I've seen and enjoyed plenty of slow movies, including sci-fi and alien ones, from Stanley Kubrick's masterful "2001" to David Bowie's semi-sensical "The Man who Fell to Earth" to Andrei Tarkovsky's haunting, Soviet-era masterpiece, "Solaris". But those films were slow because the filmmakers wished to give the audience time to settle on images, or moods, or subconscious conjurations, so as to properly craft the experience that they were endeavoring to present. This film, on the other hand, is simply boring as paste, and tries to disguise this fact by showing us a lens flare for three and a half minutes while atonal electronic feedback is playing, perhaps in the hopes that if they drive the audience mad with disinterest, someone will mistake their film for avant-guard. Addicted to images stolen from better films, the movie takes six times longer to do every single thing than it has to, showing us, for instance, the process of Johannson walking towards a cabin (30 seconds), then staring at the door to the cabin (30 seconds), then the sign that tells us that the cabin is there for hikers to use (30 seconds), then her opening the door and walking inside (25 seconds), then the interior of the cabin as she selects where she wishes to lay down (45 more seconds), all of which is in the film so that the next morning she can leave the cabin (35 secondsohGODMAKEITSTOPILLTELLYOUWHERETHEBODIESAREBURIEDJUSTMAKEITSTOP!!!!!!!) A friend of mine, with whom I saw this film, asked me midway through to make her a solemn promise that this movie would, at some point, actually end, and that we would then be able to leave the theater. I'm a veteran at this sort of thing by now, dear readers, but I must confess, that by the time a seemingly major subplot of the film (a mysterious man on a motorcycle pursuing Johansson), one that had occupied 15 minutes of screentime, resolved itself with a two minute, unbroken shot of the man slowly turning a complete circle while standing in a snowfield... I was beginning to have my doubts.


Final Thoughts: If The Railway Man, last week's abysmal cinematic failure, was, as I described it, a "catastrophically bad film", then Under the Skin is the cinematic equivalent to a Biblical plague, a desolate, empty, thought-siphoning vacuity of a film that would be laughably bad if the experience of watching it were not so unremittingly unpleasant. Director Johnathan Glazer, whose debut film was the brilliantly sleazy Sexy Beast, has supposedly been laboring on this film for nearly a full decade, and based on the result, I'd say this shows every sign of a project that simply ran away from him, until finally he was forced to give up and release it without the coherent story that he was unable to provide it. I know that this review stands in stark contrast to the rave, universal acclaim that this movie is in the process of generating from film critics on either side of the pond, (Britain's Independent and Daily Express, and America's Hollywood Reporter providing lone voices of sanity amidst it all), but I do not care. I recognize that my own opinion is fallible, particularly on something as subjective as a movie, but this is plainly a case of bandwagonning hacks being unable to distinguish between the cerebral and the simpering. This is not a "deep" film, nor a "complex" one, nor a "masterpiece" nor a "work of genius". This film is a fraud, perpetrated against moviewatchers and abetted by professional critics, in the hopes that nobody will notice just how bad it actually is. And those critics (I have made a list) who had the bald-faced temerity to compare this movie to Cloud Atlas of all things should be driven from their offices with a horsewhip.

I went into this movie to see if Scarlett Johansson, an actress I've had problems with before, could act in a serious role. Unfortunately, I still don't know the answer, as no serious role was ever permitted to even come close to this movie.

Final Score: 2/10

[rhoenix]

So, my question is - has the War On Drugs made Hollywood decide that they needed all the hallucinogens?

That's the only explanation I can come up with to explain some of the movies out lately.

[General Havoc]

Neither Railway Man nor Under the Skin were Hollywood productions. The former was a BBC production, the latter a Scottish indie flick. But the point does stand regardless.