At the Movies with General Havoc

[frigidmagi]

That's the problem with indie films. I mean yeah you can get really good stuff like Winter's Bone, Reservoir Dogs and so on, you also get indulgent, navel gazing, mendering shit. Which we are then told is genius.

Then again Hollywood isn't batting a 1000 either.

[Lys]

What I'm wondering is how bad a film has to be to actually earn a 1 from Havoc.

[General Havoc]

What I'm wondering is how bad a film has to be to actually earn a 1 from Havoc.

Go back and find Red Tails...

Better yet, go back and watch Red Tails.

[Lys]

You gave it a 1.5, which is a low value of 2, so the question stands.

[rhoenix]

What I'm wondering is how bad a film has to be to actually earn a 1 from Havoc.

Go back and find Red Tails...

I think Havoc still has a scar on his forehead from repeated high-impact applications upon his desk, acquired during the writing of that review.

[White Haven]

'Psychics at CalTech...'

[Lys]

I'm not sure why I didn't mention this in my prior post, but the review of Under the Skin gives the distinct impression that Havoc hated it far, far more than he did Red Tails. In his review Under the Skin he stresses the sheer awfulness of the film in a manner that goes fer past vitriolic and well into the land of madness and hysteria in what seems a futile attempt to capture in words the despair that is inflicted upon the unfortunate audience viewing the cataclysmic destruction of all the resembles pacing and coherent storytelling. Meanwhile, the Red Tails review mostly speaks of massive disappointment at a film that had most of the ingredients for a good film but fell catastrophically short in the scriptwriting and directing department. The latter just doesn't seem to manage the scale of horribleness of the former. At least as conveyed through Havoc's account.

[LadyTevar]

I will be waiting to see Havoc's review of Godzilla and of the new Xmen movie. I know he was very harsh of Pacific Rim, a Monster Movie like Godzilla, so I'm interested in seeing if the Big G's obvious mix of human drama and Monster Smash will get a better grade than PacRim's admitted lack of good plot.

[General Havoc]

You gave it a 1.5, which is a low value of 2, so the question stands.

No, it's a high value of 1. There is, ultimately, a difference.

I agonized, believe me, over what to give Under the Skin, and Red Tails (as well as films like To Rome With Love) were the primary points of comparison. I don't pretend my tastes don't change, but the whole point of scoring films is to give some idea of the relative merits of a film, after all. And while I did hate Under the Skin, I felt that Red Tails was, ultimately, a worse movie. The key point is technical competency. Under the Skin is filmed and acted in such a way as to piss me off, but the lines (such as they are) are delivered by actors who have a passing familiarity with the concept of screen acting, and the shots, pretentious, overlong, and stupid as they are, are at least pointed in the direction of objects which the filmmaker presumably wishes to film. Under the Skin is a movie made by a competent director who has lost his goddamn mind, starring actors who are decent at their craft but have no idea what they are supposed to be doing. It is a godawful movie, but at least that much can be said.

Red Tails on the other hand...

[youtube][/youtube]
(Skip to one minute in and watch for thirty seconds)

Red Tails is a complete trainwreck on every level imaginable and several others still waiting to be invented. It is not only as hard to watch as Under the Skin, it is also totally incompetent at every element of its craft. As terrible, and as enraged, as I was at Under the Skin, it is still, somehow a better film than Red Tails, by the barest of margins.

Now, as to what would warrant a flat 1 (or heaven-forbid, a 0) from me? I'll just say that even Red Tails, awful as it is, is not the worst movie I've ever seen. And there have been one or two that I saw back before I started this project that might just make the grade for that particular honor.

We'll see if I find another.

[Lys]

Red Tails on the other hand... (Skip to one minute in and watch for thirty seconds)

It's actually 45 seconds from when the action starts to when the movie titles comes up on screen. This movie wins the prize for shortest time from the action starting to my laughing my ass off. The first thing that comes up on screen is a German fighter pilot actually scowling to show how evil he is. I lost it immediately and didn't stop laughing until "RED TAILS" came up. I think I need to actually watch this movie, it has great comedy potential. Seriously, I can't believe the actor actually went "this is my evil face!" How the fuck was Lucas even directing this? "Okay, you're a German fighter pilot about to engage in a dastardly manoeuvre to draw away the fighters from a bomber formation. Your motivation is that you're the evilest motherfucker on the planet and you get off on creating widows and orphans... NOW SHOW ME YOUR WAR FACE!"

Seriously, funniest shit I've seen all week.

[General Havoc]

Locke

Alternate Title: The Car

One sentence synopsis: A construction foreman must make a series of life-changing phone calls while driving to London the night before his biggest project ever.


Things Havoc liked: If you've been following my reviews, you know that my luck (or skill at choosing movies) has not been particularly good recently. The Railway Man was a bitter disappointment, and Under the Skin was one of the worst theater-going experiences I can recall from recent memory. Both of these films were indie fare, of course, as this time of year, indie cinema is generally the only game in town, occupied as the major studios are in producing Tyler Perry movies, bad comedies, and utter dreck that would be laughed off the screen any other time of year. Experiences like this are enough to put one off indie films for quite some time, but one must soldier on, and so in quest of something I might actually like to see, I decided to go watch Tom Hardy sit in a car for two hours.

No, I'm serious. Locke, a strange pet-project by Eastern Promises, Amazing Grace, and Dirty Pretty Things' writer Steven Knight, is a film that consists entirely of Tom Hardy, playing a welsh construction foreman named Ivan Locke, who sits in his car for the nearly two hours it requires for him to travel from his job site somewhere in the British country to London, and speaks to the rest of the movie's cast on his hands-free phone. With the exception of the first couple minutes of the film, which consist of Locke getting into his car, the entire rest of the film is Locke in his driver's seat, talking to others on the phone (or to himself) as he makes his way to London. The camera may cut occasionally to the highway outside. The cinematography may shift about the car, filming Locke from various angles, but the entire film is nothing but a man in his car, talking to unseen voice actors on the other end of the line. For nearly two hours.

And yet it works, and that might be the biggest surprise of this whole endeavor, it works and it works well, to the point that by the end of the film I'd have easily watched another half hour of it. Much of the reason for this is Tom Hardy, whom I praised in Inception and in The Dark Knight Rises, but who puts on a completely different class of performance in this role. Required to emote and act while buckled into a car seat for nearly two hours, and locked into a character who isn't allowed much in the way of thunder and lightning, Hardy nonetheless gives the best performance I've ever seen from him, as a man dedicated to his craft and his family, who nonetheless makes a decision that will almost certainly cost him both based on a mistake he made and his own judgment of how he must go about fixing it. Through conversations with his wife, his son, his co-worker, and his boss, he gets across perfectly the manner of man that Ivan Locke is, a consumate, almost myopic professional, who is presently undergoing the most stressful night that it is possible to undergo without mass death. Everything he goes through is spot-right, from the frustrations of talking to someone on the phone who simply won't listen to you, to the semi-rational hilarity of a situation that finally goes so far past reasonable as to finally become funny. The pressure and the pain (and the bizarre, cathartic sense triumph that often comes with being able to cope even somewhat with a hellish situation) is written all over his face and voice, even as events dance on the edge of control at his job and his home. Bereft of the usual tools that actors use, it's a fascinating performance, one that will stick out in my mind whenever I think of Tom Hardy from now on.

I mentioned before that Steven Knight's background is as a filmwriter, and given that this movie is almost pure dialogue, that makes a degree of sense. The writing is crisp and evocative, giving us snippets of character in both the seen and unseen cast without advertising itself as designated character building scenes. Despite not seeing them, Locke's son, his wife, his co-worker Donel, and his boss Gareth (IDed on his phone system as "Bastard") are all brilliantly characterized through voice (and a bit of background sound) alone. Shot selection is necessarily somewhat limited, but manages at least to avoid being boring, cutting between scenery and various angles of our titular character as he tries to navigate the course he's chosen for his life. The score is minimalist, which is the right call, underlying only the most important scenes and then only in the most restrained way. Everything sums together to produce an experience that, far from being boring, is actually one of the more interesting ones I've had in some time.


Things Havoc disliked: Unfortunately, it appears that the fact that this movie actually works, despite the lack of action or change of setting, came as a surprise not only to me but to the filmmakers, as they decided that there was a risk that the audience would not understand what was going on, and so decided to add in a series of scenes in which Locke talks literally to himself (or more precisely, to his dead father, whom he blames for many of his life's problems), which serve effectively as exposition scenes wherein the character explains his own motivation to us. These scenes are bad mistakes, as they clash with the overall style of the film and of the character itself. Locke is portrayed as an almost ruthlessly rational person, and to have him suddenly start talking to people who aren't there (though in fairness, the film is a bit coy as to whether or not he's physically speaking aloud for some of these scenes) undermines our sense of who Locke is. Given all the work of characterization that goes into Locke, this is all completely unnecessary. Having established so much about Locke solely through his conversations, there is nothing that we learn from these rants that we could not discover the way we discover everything else.

There's also some unavoidable issues arising with any film presented in what amounts to real time. The life-changing events that Locke undergoes over the course of his drive to London are not the sorts of things that can be resolved in an hour and a half, we get that, and so when some of the various threads do not wind up tied into a bow, that's fine. And yet several of them are terminated so abruptly that it's not left clear what the point was in the first place. It's as though the film has reached the end of its allotted runtime, and everything is allowed to drop. If that's what the film was going for, then fair enough, but this is a narrative medium that has built several compelling stories, and to have not only no resolution but precious little concept of what sort of resolution might be expected in the future from a story that was previously important enough to devote 45 minutes to is... jarring to say the least.


Final Thoughts: But flawed though this film is, there's no denying that despite having one of the stranger conceits in indie films this year, Locke is a very solid piece of work. Not only the finest thing I've ever seen from either Hardy or Knight, this film proves that what I said last week about Under the Skin was appropriate. A slow film (and this is necessarily a slow movie) does not have to be boring. Indeed I'd gladly have doubled this one's length if it meant skipping last week's fare.

Indie films this time of year tend to paper over the long, ugly gap in Hollywood films between January and May. They're no sure thing either (obviously), but at the very least they can still offer something worth watching. After the month I've had, that's a reminder well-appreciated.

Final Score: 7/10

[General Havoc]

Godzilla

Alternate Title: Oh Where Oh Where Has My Kaiju Gone

One sentence synopsis: Godzilla battles monsters across the Pacific and in San Francisco as US military forces try to stop them all.


Things Havoc liked: What was I expecting, really, walking into Godzilla? Was I expecting cinematic gold? Dramatic weight? Acting performances worthy of the Academy Award? In theory any movie is capable of producing these things, but let's be real for a second about what Godzilla actually is. A movie like this, a series like this, cannot really be seen in the context of Citizen Kane. Kaiju films, of which Godzilla is the grand dean, must be seen in their own context, a context I have to confess I'm not the best person to speak to. But since these are my reviews, let's see what we can do.

Godzilla comes to us courtesy of British-born director Gareth Edwards, whose sole credit prior to this was 2010's Monsters, unseen by me. I'm always nervous when a new director is behind the helm, especially for a blockbuster film, but it must be admitted here that Edwards, unlike many that have taken on the task of making a Godzilla film (Roland Emmerich comes to mind) knows what he's doing. The destruction of cities and the grappling of monsters is the draw here, and while the editing does deserve comment (and will receive it), when Godzilla or his quarry are on screen, absolutely nothing is allowed to interfere. Sequences involving the great monsters are lovingly-shot, with long, slow takes to enable the audience to drink in the spectacle that they are being shown. Battles between the monsters are lumbering affairs, slow and methodical, with immense weight and power lent to the beasts, as well as to the buildings they are casually erasing in their gyrations and struggles. "Signature" moments, such as the revelation of Godzilla's famous Atomic Breath are front and center, shot without artifices like Shakey-cam. Nor is Edwards' cinematography limited solely to the monsters. The film is riven with gorgeous, lush shots, often using smoke or dust to artfully frame an image and rivet the audience's attention to it. A flaming locomotive emerging from the fog, a monster disappearing into smoke or water, the trails of smoke left behind by skydivers descending into an arena of dust and fire, these are the images that Edwards plays with, and I must admit that several of them remain fresh in my mind a full week after watching the movie.

Edwards understands that the visuals are the draw here, which is why it is so important that this film, the thirty-second movie to feature everyone's favorite destroyer and defender of Tokyo, has a budget larger than the previous thirty one combined, and before we go anywhere else, it's important to note than unlike the catastrophic Roland Emerich version from 1998, the money for this film at least shows up on screen. It is not merely that Godzilla devastates everything, but he does look good doing it, not an oversized iguana but a monster straight from the old Toho films, huge and lumbering, a towering dinosaur whose enemies, by contrast, look like they've been ripped straight from Pacific Rim. Their movements are realistic and hefty, and their battles, though consequence-free until it becomes time to "finish them", have the proper earth-shattering feel to them. Compare these creatures to those of Transformers (or Pacific Rim itself), and you will notice quite the difference. The city backdrop enables us to avoid the lack of scale that bedeviled Guillermo del Toro's take on the genre, presenting objects that we know the scale of in every frame and letting the monsters contrast against it.

Speaking of the city, while San Francisco is often destroyed in films (Pacific Rim opened that way), it's usually a sideshow, its destruction used as a quick beat before returning to the main action elsewhere. This may be the first time I've seen San Francisco's annihilation take front and center, and as a native of my fair city, I must admit to being surprised at just how well the film stuck to the actual geography of the city in question. It's not perfect by any means, but the flow is roughly accurate, in terms of where the monsters (and soldiers) go, and the buildings that are annihilated are not simply the usual landmarks that everyone would recognize, but real buildings of the SF skyline. I doubt anyone outside the city actually noticed it, but I appreciate such things.



Things Havoc disliked: Well I suppose there's no use putting it off any longer. Yes, the plot of this movie is stupid.

Actually stupid may be the wrong word. 'Pointless' comes to mind instead, for while stupid things do about in this film (and we'll get to them), the base story, of a soldier (Kick Ass' Aaron Taylor-Johnson) trying to help his father (Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston) prove that Godzilla (or something like it) killed his mother years ago, is so pointless and tangential to the action of the film that the movie itself jetisons the entire idea halfway through, in favor of a sort of travelogue, wherein Johnson follows Godzilla from Japan to Hawaii to California and... bears witness to it I guess? The main action of the film takes place without the intervention of humankind in general, as neither Godzilla nor the Kaiju he battles seems to take much notice of humanity in general, save on the rare occasions when the humans manage to annoy them with their pea-shooters. Johnson's role then becomes that of escorting a nuclear missile being shipped by rail to San Francisco in the hopes of luring the Kaiju offshore and destroying them, which becomes an excuse for a series of scenes that I would call "action" were there any action really involved. Action implies a fight or struggle to survive, whereas in this movie, the monsters do as they would, and the humans die or do not die, largely without input from anyone. On top of that, the entire plot with the nuclear missile makes no sense whatsoever. We get no real idea as to what the plan with the nuke actually is, nor why it is necessary to escort this particular nuke to the city through such torturous adventures. The entire US navy is sitting offshore of the city. Did the filmmakers forget that aircraft carriers and ballistic missile submarines (ships clearly established to be present) also carry nuclear weapons? Ones that can be fired on any point required?

I fear that they did forget this, and it's not the only thing they forgot. For one thing, while I applaud the notion of putting actors like Ken Watanabe and David Strathairn in films like this, it is only polite to actually give them something to do. Watanabe's role this time is to play the concerned scientist, to look worried at the screen and intone meaningless garbage about how man's hubris is causing Godzilla to rip cities apart, even though the film has already established that Godzilla is an ancient being from the wilds of pre-history, and that man has had no role in his actions or intentions save as debris. Watanabe's insistence that the US military should not use a nuclear weapon to destroy the monsters advancing on San Francisco is not buttressed with any suggestion other than allowing Godzilla and the other monsters to battle freely within the city, something they seem inclined to do whether the military interferes or not. Strathairn meanwhile, who is a wonderful actor, manages to avoid the usual "cigar-chomping military officer" trap in favor of the cool efficiency that he displayed in the Bourne films, but there is simply nothing for him to do other than to stand in the center of large war rooms and narrate Godzilla's actions to the audience.

And why does the audience need Godzilla's actions narrated to them? Because this film is astonishingly reluctant to actually let us watch Godzilla. I understand the Spielberg technique of leaving the monster offscreen as long as possible, the one he used to such effect in Jaws, but that movie had compelling characters, a story we cared about, and a sense of tension and menace lurking offscreen, as men hunted the shark and the shark hunted them. This film has no tension, by design, being merely a destruction extravaganza, which makes the decision to let us see none of the destruction until the last ten minutes of the film a baffling one, to me at least. Unlike Pacific Rim, the filmmakers cannot have deluded themselves into thinking that they were producing compelling character drama, as there are practically no characters worth speaking of here. And yet the movie is so insistent on not allowing us to watch the monsters play that it begins to infect the plot, such as it is. A sequence wherein soldiers search through a nuclear waste repository built deep underground, looking for any signs of the monster, would appear to be going the Thing/Alien/hidden-monster-attacks-from-the-darkness route, until we are shown that while they were searching, the monster they sought literally tore its way out of the mountain that the facility is built into, and leveled most of Las Vegas, all without any of the soldiers noticing. These are the lengths the film has to go, cutting away from battles between Godzilla and his enemies in such a transparent fashion, all in the service of ensuring that we never get to see what the filmmakers know we came here to see.



Final Thoughts: Godzilla is a bad film, of this there can be no doubt, and yet I must confess that I did not hate it the way I expected that I might. Unlike movies such as Pacific Rim (yes, I will continue to reference it. Too bad), Godzilla's failings are not a hackneyed plot and cardboard characters, they are instead sins of omission. It is not that the characters that we see are terrible, it is that they do not have any purpose in the film, and the film seems to know it, which makes the decision to focus solely on them one that I simply cannot understand. And yet, despite my complaints, the heart of Godzilla is in the right place. The reason Roland Emmerich's 1998 version of Godzilla was so reviled was because it was ironically quite unlike a typical Roland Emmerich movie, and much more like a Michael Bay film, with its relentless focus on dopey characters performing stupid comic relief while inept idiots failed to contain the titular threat. This film, meanwhile, plays much more like what I would expect a Roland Emmerich Godzilla film to look like. It is a movie with a massive scope and an eye for the majesty of disaster and ruin, about a giant monster who battles other giant monsters in a city.

In attempting to present this spectacle on film, Edwards' Godzilla is unquestionably a failure. But at the very least Edwards tried to get it right. Some directors can't even be bothered to do that.

Final Score: 4.5/10

[frigidmagi]

That was a fairly brutal review, but while I haven't seen the movie, I'm gonna to say I think Havoc was trying to be fair. This does raise what seems to becoming a trend lately.

The hamfisted interjection of badly done character "drama" into movies that don't need them, serving some strange belief that that's what people came to see.

For example, Micheal Bay was recently qouted as believing people came to the Transformers movies to follow the story and struggles of the human character (a character I was so apethic to, I can't be bothered to look up his name) instead of the giant fucking robots. Pacific Rim did a much better job in regards to the human drama but it was still rather lack luster in my view (the visuals were grand, the dialogue and everything else less so).

I'm not saying that you shouldn't have characters or drama in your monster pieces, the orginal Godzilla movie did it grandly (yes, yes the special effects are horrorible, now actually pay attention to the movie) numberous transformers stories across different medias have pulled it off (although usually having drama between non-human characters). But if you're going to do it, you have to do it well! You have to really bring the A game, or it's going to stand out to the point that average attempts will look awful due to the tone shifts and surrealness of what you're doing.

You should also admit to yourself that most of the people are coming to watch giant robots or monsters (or both!) beat the shit out of each and not stint on that. Whatever you do, don't dick tease the fights (I'M LOOKING AT YOU BAY! WTF WAS THAT BIT IN THE FIRST MOVIE WHERE MOST OF THE PRIME/MEGATRON FIGHT WAS OFF CAMERA WHILE YOU MADE ME WATCH LAJACKASS RUN AROUND LIKE A FAT KID IN A FOOTBALL GAME ASSHOLE!).

[General Havoc]

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Alternate Title: Retcon

One sentence synopsis: Wolverine is sent back in time from a hellish future to help Professor Xavier, Beast, and Magneto stop it from coming about.


Things Havoc liked: At the beginning of each year, right about the same time that I sit down to work out my ten best and worst for the year previous, I like to look ahead to the movies to come and determine, unofficially of course, which ones I am the most interested in seeing. There's nothing formal about this process, it's really just a way for me to remind myself, several months later when the doldrums are burying me in utter crap, that there are in fact films to look forward to on the horizon. But with anticipation comes apprehension, for I have seen far too many bad films, and more specifically far too many bad films that I originally hoped would be good, to not be worried about Hollywood (or whoever) living up to my heightened expectations. It was thus with a great deal of trepidation that I went to see this movie, my most anticipated film of the year, sequel to 2011's film-of-the-year X-men First Class, a movie that promised to unite the various timelines of X-men movies into a single, cohesive whole. The trailers were inconclusive after all, and X-men is not a series with a flawless pedigree. My concern was that this would turn into a calamity on the level of X-men 3.

I do love being wrong sometimes.

Days of Future Past is a fantastic film on largely every level, and the reasons for this are, as they were with the previous film, threefold. The three in question of course that I speak of are James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and Jennifer Lawrence, who respectively play Charles Xavier (Professor X), Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto) and Raven (Mystique). I spent practically the entire review of First Class praising these three, and the wonderful dynamic that their characters offered, and if I don't stop myself I will probably do so again. All three are note-perfect in their roles, as they were the last time we saw them. Xavier, who has degenerated into a recluse following the events of the first film, and the progression of failures culminating in the conscripting of most of his students and staff for the Vietnam War (clever idea), must claw his way back into the Roddenberry-esque figure that we know from both the comics and the first film. I don't often see characters undergo hero's journeys in reverse, but McAvoy sells every scene perfectly, humanizing a character that all too easily turns into a mouthpiece for the scriptwriter. Fassbender meanwhile, while he doesn't get material as meaty as he did in the last film, has come full circle. His Magneto is by now a hardened fanatic, dedicated to the point of megalomania to his cause, and yet we see so clearly how all of this is simply layered atop a normal, likeable person. Magneto has always been one of my favorite characters in comics (you don't see many empathetic megalomaniacs), and without disrespect to Ian McKellan, this is the version I've come to prefer.

But to my astonishment, not only is Lawrence's Mystique still the only version of this character that I can stomach, this film actually does the impossible and turns her into my favorite character of the film. Though her role is a bit more plot-heavy this time round, there is still plenty of time allotted for Lawrence to bounce off of everyone else. Embittered by the campaign being waged against Mutantkind, disenchanted with Xavier's attempts to force her onto the straight and narrow path, and tired of Magneto's excesses, Lawrence plays Mystique at times unsure of what she's actually trying to accomplish, at times driven with an unshakeable certainty to safeguard "her" people against what is being done to them. Every meeting she has with either Xavier or Magneto is perfect, be it surprise and joy at seeing one of them after so long, or a bitter reunion between two driven people who have simply parted ways. The dynamic she and the others established in the first film is perfectly intact here, and twists and shifts in different directions, just as it ought with characters like these.

But I have to stop praising these three characters, because there is simply so much more to talk about. One such thing? Wolverine. Hugh Jackman, who plays Wolverine perfectly even in bad movies, here has the fascinating task of coming full circle. His Wolverine is older, wizened, finally restored to some semblance of peace with all of the turmoils and terrors that have been inflicted on him. Jackman's version of Wolverine has long been the only one I could actually stand, and here he takes the character to a new level, tasked with turning around and dispensing the same sort of level-headed support for a younger generation of mutants that was dispensed to him by these same characters in the future. Time travel plots are fun. But Wolverine's addition to the past-time cast is barely the tip of the iceberg, as largely every character from every rendition of every X-men film, past and present, shows up here, if only for a cameo, turning the film into a veritable farewell tour for a series that has spanned seven films in three different decades. On top of that, we have new additions, including Evan Peters as a hyper-powered Quicksilver, played in this case like a teenage stoner whose capabilities are so immense that he is simply bored with the wider world. Quicksilver's role here left me with a number of questions (not the least of which are how the alternate version of the character in next year's Avengers 2 is going to avoid confusing the hell out of us all), but his role is transparently an excuse to show us awesome things, including a hilarious battle inside the Pentagon's kitchen that will forever change my feelings towards Gordon Lightfoot (don't ask). But the biggest newcomer to the scene is undoubtedly Peter Dinklage, playing Bolivar Trask, a weapons designer dedicated to exterminating mutants with a series of powerful mutant-hunting robots. Dinklage admittedly does occasionally slip into Tyrion Lannister mode, but his portrayal is perfect, not a screaming psychopath but a scientist and engineer who regards mutants as nothing more than a particularly interesting civic engineering problem to be mastered and dealt with. I always love watching Dinklage, and interestingly, the film not once makes mention of the fact that Bolivar Trask, in this version, is a little person, the fact in question being utterly irrelevant to the plot, the characters, and the world at large.

So much said, and I haven't even spoken of the plot, which despite gyrations and the insanities of time travel, manages to hold together well. I haven't even spoken of the action, which is crisp and inventive and violent to a degree previous X-men films have not been. I haven't spoken of John Ottman's score, an inventive mix of action beats and period music (the period in question lending itself to some trippy sequences). I haven't spoken of the shoutouts to previous films, the unending stream of inspired cameos, or the fact that this movie, as a time travel film, manages to unwrite a fair amount of X-men canon that nobody, least of all me, is sad to see thrown aside. I haven't spoken of any of these things, because the core of the film, the connection between the characters I enjoyed seeing so much the first time around, eclipses everything else, good or bad, that the movie produces. Believe me, this is not a complaint.



Things Havoc disliked: Which is not to say that I have no complaints.

For one thing, this film takes a while to get started, with an ill-conceived opening segment that, while effective in establishing the credentials of the antagonists, necessarily is mired in an infodump to end all infodumps, one that is badly-paced, awkwardly-written, and is clearly rushed through in order to get us to the meat of the material. I don't mind when films concentrate on their strongest elements, mind you, but throwaway stuff like this should either take thirty seconds or should be expanded into something more palatable. After all, at barely over two hours, it's not like this film couldn't have had another five or ten minutes added onto it.

The plot of this film is, of course, demonstrably goofy, which is forgivable in a movie that has to use time travel and astral projection to make its plot work. What is less forgivable is some of the decisions made in regards to what the film has several of the characters do. Magneto's abilities, always exceedingly potent, are in this film extended to the point of ludicrous absurdity, something which Magneto has been subject to before, admittedly, but generally not to good effect. If Magneto can exercise control of his abilities to the extent that he demonstrates in this film, surely he would simply win, at everything he chooses to do, instantly. Similarly, Quicksilver, though a fun addition here, has a power-set so absurdly over the top that he would, if used properly, obviate the entire plot in twelve seconds, which is likely why the main cast leaves him behind once his admittedly awesome sequences are complete. One must set boundaries on one's super-powered characters if they are to be compelling at all, for if not, any difficulty they encounter can only be rendered a challenge by making them an idiot.



Final Thoughts: There are good movies, there are great movies, and then there are great movies that retroactively render bad movies either better or obsolete, and X-Men: Days of Future Past is unabashedly one of these rare third category. A wonderful, sweeping, brilliantly-executed film, if this film fails to live up to the quality of its predecessor, it is only because of a greater focus on plot and less on character establishment. Prior to this film, the X-men franchise had produced six films, three good, and three less so, but this movie puts all (but one) of them into the shade, not content with redeeming characters that I imagined irredeemable, but erasing the flaws that originally rendered them so annoying in the first place. Gleefully shredding the continuity of the X-men, it leaves us in a place from whence, once more, anything at all is possible. And if the makers of the previous six films should choose to use this movie as a launching point for another six, then they can count on me being there to watch every one of them.

I have seen franchises born, and I have seen franchises die. But not often do I see a franchise return to vibrant and wonderful life after being all but left for dead.

Final Score: 8/10

[Comrade Tortoise]

Red Tails on the other hand... (Skip to one minute in and watch for thirty seconds)

It's actually 45 seconds from when the action starts to when the movie titles comes up on screen. This movie wins the prize for shortest time from the action starting to my laughing my ass off. The first thing that comes up on screen is a German fighter pilot actually scowling to show how evil he is. I lost it immediately and didn't stop laughing until "RED TAILS" came up. I think I need to actually watch this movie, it has great comedy potential. Seriously, I can't believe the actor actually went "this is my evil face!" How the fuck was Lucas even directing this? "Okay, you're a German fighter pilot about to engage in a dastardly manoeuvre to draw away the fighters from a bomber formation. Your motivation is that you're the evilest motherfucker on the planet and you get off on creating widows and orphans... NOW SHOW ME YOUR WAR FACE!"

Seriously, funniest shit I've seen all week.

Oh, you think that is funny. German destroyer vs P51 Mustang with no bombs. Who wins?

[LadyTevar]

Once again, Havoc, I disagree with your assessment of a Movie. Godzilla, for Martin and I, is a solid 8/10. While we did have issue with the fact most of the fight in Hawaii was shown merely as TV Footage, the fact that the story followed a human is very true to the original Godzilla movies. Godzilla and the Mutos are forces of ancient nature, there is very little humans can do to stop them ... other than igniting their nest on fire.

As you said, the plot isn't the best, but it did make SENSE and it made Martin and I discuss Muto biology all the way home. It was far-fetched, but it made sense internally. I was quite happy with it, I would see it again, and I want to own it so I can have Godzilla Happiness whenever I'm in a stompy mood

[Lys]

Oh, you think that is funny. German destroyer vs P51 Mustang with no bombs. Who wins?

That depends. In real life the destroyer was Italian, and the P51 rendered it hors de combat with nothing more than machinegun fire, forcing the vessel to be scuttled later. In the movie? The destroyer looks like a light cruiser and fucking explodes like it has taken a bombs to its magazines. As it happened one of my house mates was watching Red Tails the other day, though admittedly by skipping over the parts she found boring. I managed to catch that part. Other fun things included watching Mustangs do manoeuvres that would have been difficult in acrobatic biplanes, and the most infantile depiction of racism I've seen in my life. Also, there's only one German fighter pilot, it's always the same dude going this is my evil face! I can only conclude he's the result of the fighter pilot cloning program the Nazis really, really wish they actually had. Unfortunately the movie fails to be a continuous laugh riot, because large parts of the movie aren't quite so blatantly terrible that you can just point and laugh. Havoc's right, the main cast does have chemistry and talent, it's too bad they didn't have better scripting and directing.

[General Havoc]

Well I'm glad that now at least someone understands why I keep raving incoherently about Red Tails. It's not simply "another bad movie". It's a transcendent movie.

In fact, I think it's time to repost my old review...

Red Tails

Alternate Title: Crash and Burn

One sentence synopsis: The first Black fighter pilots fight bigotry and the Nazis during World War II


Things Havoc liked: Um...

Er... well...

Okay, so, The Tuskegee Airmen: Back in the closing days of World War Two, when the US army was still segregated, a group of black pilots fought their way through a racist, bigoted system to be allowed to fly fighter planes for their country in the greatest war in history. These men formed the 332nd Fighter Group, four squadrons of black fighter pilots who were eventually assigned to escort heavy bombers back and forth from their runs on Germany. Despite opposition from the finest German fighters and pilots that remained in the Luftwaffe, these men performed brilliantly, losing very few bombers (by some accounts none at all) and shooting down the first Me-262 jet fighters of the war. In performing well above and beyond the call, the Tuskegee airmen contributed to the collapse of the color barriers in the US army and air force, and justly earned a lustrous place in military history. I applaud the notion of making a film about this subject.

The actors in this film vary in quality, but I will admit, the best job is done by the pilots themselves (which is only fair, I suppose). The movie focuses upon a small group of pilots, particularly two with callsigns 'Lightning' and 'Easy' (David Oyelowo and Nate Parker respectively). These two, and the other pilots that surround them, played variously by R&B and hip hop artists, actually manage a decent amount of what I would call real camaraderie in this movie. Scenes of them sitting about playing cards, discussing missions, lying and bragging to one another, actually strike home reasonably well, and David Oyelowo in particular does a pretty decent job with the material he's given. One does get the impression that this could actually be a group of real pilots in a real movie.



Things Havoc disliked: I could try to get glib here, try to coyly hide what I actually think, but my duty as a reviewer is to warn people when something like this comes about. So let me get right to the point. This movie is an unqualified piece of shit.

I have never in my life seen a movie torpedo itself so quickly out of the gate. The very first line in the movie is a line so transcendentally awful both in writing and delivery that I turned to my viewing companions and whispered "uh oh". Not even Last Airbender managed to make me lose faith that quickly, and when you're causing me to compare your film negatively with the worst movie ever made, you are in trouble.

I'm no stranger to bad writing in movies, but this screenplay is the worst I have seen in a long damn while. Every single line is an abysmal, cringe-worthy, disaster, so bad that I suspect that George Lucas recycled all of the lines that he thought were too bad to fit into the Star Wars prequels into this film. Characters do not stop at stating the obvious, but narrate their own actions to other people in the same room. Officers give lectures about duty, pride, and honor in such an unfathomably schmaltzy, wooden manner that they look and sound embarrassed to be there. Pilots speak to one another using language that no pilot, indeed that no human being in the history of time, has ever pronounced in all seriousness to another person. These lines are not helped by the soundtrack, comprised entirely of faux-patriotic orchestral crap, which succeeds in making the movie worse in direct proportion to how much it plays. When one is listening to an actor recite awful dialogue, it does not improve the experience by having bad Sousa marches swell up every time someone mentions the word "mission".

It's hard for me to separate the terrible quality of the writing from the acting, but the acting here is absolutely terrible. Yes, I praised David Oyelowo, but that's because my system requires me to find at least SOMETHING I liked, and he's simply the least bad of the lot. Terrence Howard, an excellent actor whom I loved in everything from Crash to Hustle & Flow to Iron Man, here turns in a performance that looks like it was generated under the influence of powerful drugs, staring vacantly into space as he recites terrible and cliche-ridden lines about the power of self-belief. Cuba Gooding Jr, who won an Academy Award for Jerry McGuire, here manages to effortlessly disguise whatever talents led the academy to give it to him. Chomping on his pipe as though it were some alien life form he did not understand, his role is completely superfluous, in that he does not one important thing for the entire movie, plot or character-wise. Gooding has been in his share of bad movies before, but manages here to trump everything he has ever done in terms of awfulness, and for a man who last 'starred' in 'The Land Before Time XIII: The Wisdom of Friends', this is not a statement I make lightly.

One might think that George Lucas, who produced this monstrosity and funded it himself, might at least know how to create stunning aerial dogfights and thrilling scenes of combat. One would be wrong. Comparing the action in this movie to a video game is to inflict a grave and unwarranted insult to video games. Planes dash about the air performing maneuvers that are not simply impossible but laughably so, even to someone with no experience at aerial combat. Our heroes have infinite ammunition in their guns, which appear to fire explosive howitzer shells that trigger stupendous explosions in everything they so much as approach. One of the pilots manages to detonate a locomotive, derailing and obliterating an entire train, by firing into it with .50 caliber machine guns for two seconds. One does not have to be a military historian to know that such events are ludicrously impossible, and as though that weren't enough, he turns around later in the movie and does the same thing to a destroyer! Worst of all, these sights aren't just thoughtless eye-candy we the viewers are treated to while the movie winks at us. At one point that same pilot is congratulated by his superiors for having destroyed SIXTY-THREE aircraft in one strafing mission, a number so absurd as to invite ridicule from people with no prior experience with anything military. I have seen five year olds describing the imagined gyrations of their magical starfighters who maintained a better sense of reality than this.

And yet the worst thing of all about this movie, unquestionably, is the subject of Race. The Tuskegee Airmen, beyond being amazing fighter pilots, were trailblazers, instrumental in the first wave of the civil rights movement by proving conclusively that blacks could do anything whites could. Race is central to the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, and yet this movie manages, somehow, to both whitewash away the racism that the airmen faced, and also reduce it to ludicrous cliche. We see the obligatory racist southern senators sitting around talking about how the airmen are incompetent because they're black, and hear the virtuous (and awful) speeches that the officers of the unit give in their defense. But the pilots scarcely seem to realize that race is a factor in their lives, discussing it infrequently and in pathetic sound-bytes that do the subject no justice. When one of our heroes walks into a whites-only officers' club, and is chased away by racist white officers, their insults sound less like biting, shocking incidents of racism, and more like barely-literate idiots reading uncomfortable lines from a cue card. Every white pilot or crewman, without exception, is portrayed as a bumbling idiot (possibly because the actors are all incompetent, and possibly because the writing is so awful), so stupid and uncomfortable with their lines that we can't believe for a second that these people actually believe what they're saying. The turnaround, when our heroes finally start to get recognized by the formerly racist whites, feels contrived and unconvincing, partly because the writing is still awful, and partly because the threat of racism previously felt like a joke. There is (of course) no mention of their struggle in a wider context, no hint of the racism that might await them back home, nor of the struggles they undertook to get as far as they did. The post-script doesn't even mention the de-segregation of the US military. Instead we are apparently meant to believe that racism itself was vanquished along with Nazi Germany. The movie even goes so far as to include a long (and completely pointless) romance sub-plot between one of the pilots and an Italian girl, ignoring the fact that while any two people can fall in love, there is no way on earth that a black man would be permitted to date (much less marry) a white Italian girl in Italy in 1944. Race riots and lynch mobs were formed over less.



Final Thoughts: Sixteen years ago, HBO produced a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen called (appropriately enough) The Tuskegee Airmen. The movie starred Lawrence Fishburne, Andre Braugher, and, of all people, Cuba Gooding Jr. It did not have an enormous budget, nor was it a perfect film, but it managed to express quite expertly what the conditions for these pilots were like, and what obstacles they were faced with and overcame, all without artifice, blame-throwing, or recourse to ugly stereotypes. Compared to that film, Red Tails feels like an ugly slap in the face, not just to the Tuskegee Airmen themselves, but to the fine black actors who starred in this abomination, which may well set the cause of black actors in this country back twenty years. Men of talent created this film. Aaron McGruder (of the Boondocks) wrote the screenplay. Terence Blanchard (of Malcolm X and Bamboozled) wrote the score. And yet whether because Lucas turns everything he touches these days into galvanized crap, or because some collective mania overcame everyone involved, the result was one of the most complete trainwrecks I've ever seen.

George Lucas claimed in the press that one of the reasons he financed this film himself was that Hollywood was unwilling to back a movie that did not have a single significant white role. At the time I praised him for having dared to do what the studios would not, and given a chance for great actors to portray a story that deeply deserved a full cinematic treatment. Having now seen the result, I suspect that the reason he couldn't secure financing is because someone saw the rough cut and wisely ran away. I sat through this movie in mounting awe at the depths to which it fell, wondering at every turn if it could possibly get any worse, and discovering that it could and did. This movie was a complete disaster from start to finish, and I can only hope that those involved will recover from the experience of having produced it soon.

Lord knows it will take me a while.


Final Score: 1.5/10

[General Havoc]

As you said, the plot isn't the best, but it did make SENSE and it made Martin and I discuss Muto biology all the way home. It was far-fetched, but it made sense internally. I was quite happy with it, I would see it again, and I want to own it so I can have Godzilla Happiness whenever I'm in a stompy mood

Forgive me, but what "sense" does it make to rail a nuclear missile in from hundreds of miles away when the US navy has perfectly serviceable nuclear weapons available on-hand for use on-delivery? What sense does it make for the wife of our hero to abandon her child to the care of someone else so that she can wait in a city about to be destroyed by giant monsters for her husband to return? What sense does it make for the denizens of a city that has just been laid waste by a pair of gargantuan monsters, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dead, to cheer and praise one of the surviving monsters as he makes his way back into the ocean?

This movie makes sense in that Godzilla is big and should probably be avoided. Nothing else about it makes a lick.

[LadyTevar]

First, you do not understand the mind of a mother and wife. She sent her child off to SAFETY, while she stayed behind to help (and wait for hubbie, yes). This is called sacrifice, and it's something you see often in times of crisis.

Why cheer the monster that's leaving? He did kill the other two that were otherwise unstopable, and he was LEAVING. Two reasons to cheer in my book

[General Havoc]

And the

First, you do not understand the mind of a mother and wife. She sent her child off to SAFETY, while she stayed behind to help (and wait for hubbie, yes). This is called sacrifice, and it's something you see often in times of crisis.

Why cheer the monster that's leaving? He did kill the other two that were otherwise unstopable, and he was LEAVING. Two reasons to cheer in my book

And a great load of help she offered there, staying behind in a war zone even after all of her colleagues were called upon to leave and go set up medical care somewhere where they weren't about to be slaughtered by a rampaging monster and might actually be able to offer succor and support. As I recall she wound up simply being chased into a subway station by the aforementioned rampaging monsters. Great job.

And cheering that the monster that has killed tens of thousands is perhaps understandable given that it is leaving and the other monsters are dead. Rigging up a giant electronic billboard to display "Thank you Godzilla, for saving our city"? NOT SO MUCH. Godzilla stepped on plenty of buildings too. I certainly wouldn't be hailing him as a savior moments after he crushed an apartment building into ruin and set half the city on fire.

[frigidmagi]

In such a situation I would vastly prefer that anyone I care about get out of dodge instead of waiting for me at ground zero.

[General Havoc]

Maleficent

Alternate Title: Sleeping Audience

One sentence synopsis: Maleficent, queen and ruler of the fae, pronounces a curse upon the daughter of her old friend King Stephan as punishment for a vile betrayal.


Things Havoc liked: Disney's Sleeping Beauty is a better film than I think most people remember it being, and no small part of that is due to its villain, a terrifying, satanic figure of pure malice and savage power, voiced by the incomparable Elanor Audley (who also voiced Cinderella's evil stepmother). Disney in the olden days was not afraid to call down the metaphorical thunder when it came time to have bad guys be truly bad, and Maleficent remains one of their finest villainous creations, bereft of comic relief or silliness in favor of pure hate and evil. Nowadays, with revisionism in vogue for classic fantasy stories like Sleeping Beauty (or Oz), the notion of making a live action version of the tale from the perspective of one of Disney's great villains was an intriguing one, and if you're going to do something of this sort, you could do far worse than starting things off with Angelina Jolie.

I have not always been kind to Angelina throughout her career, and neither has everyone else, for her performances in films like Changeling or Alexander were godawful, and not helped by better appearances in worse films such as the Tomb Raider movies or Mark Millar's horrid insult to all comic book fans, Wanted. But whoever suggested her for the titular role this time around deserves some kind of award, because whatever her flaws, Jolie embodies Maleficent in this film from top to toe. Gaunt and angular, with built up cheekbones and ivory-pale skin, Jolie is a dead ringer for the stylized cartoon villain of half a century ago, with mannerisms that range from the disinterested to the downright vicious. Jolie's performance is the best in the film, easily embodying the incandescent fury of a woman (or a witch) scorned, alongside more subtle facets of a character who is, after all, our protagonist. Jolie's Maleficent is capable of terrible rage, but also astonishing pettiness and even dry wit, something that always goes well in a non-heroic protagonist like this one. I don't know if I'd say that this is Jolie's best performance, as I've not seen all of her work, but it's a step up from a lot of "dramatic" work she's done in the past.

The rest of the cast is a mixed bag, but tends towards the good side of things. Sharlto Copley, the South African actor last seen in District Nine and (*Shudder*) Elysium, plays King Stephan, father of the aforementioned Sleeping Beauty, who is driven to mad distraction, first by power lust, and then by fear of the loss of that power in general and Maleficent in specific. Thinking back on Elysium (an exercise I do not recommend), Copley was plainly one of the better elements of it, and I did enjoy his turn here as an inversion of the typical wise king, a man who makes a terrible mistake in an act of desperate greed and winds up paying for it the rest of his life. Meanwhile Sleeping Beauty herself is played by Elle Fanning, a young actress I can't say I've had much use for, but who does everything she needs to as the kind and wonderstruck (and fairly airheaded) Princess Aurora. Maleficent's recurring policy of peremptorily putting her to sleep as soon as she begins running her mouth about the beauty of the bluebirds was a nice touch. Moreover, it's nice to see a film wherein both Aurora and Prince Charming (Brenton Thwaites), a hopelessly inept but well-meaning young prince dragged rather abruptly into these matters by officious fairies, are actually cast as young as they are supposed to be. As a result, when the two lovebirds are awkward or naive or a bit thick, it comes across as the natural consequence of their ages, not irredeemable stupidity.

The world of Maleficent is a lush, well-realized one, filled with fantastical monsters and gorgeous scenery. This is standard for fantasy films these days, of course, but it is still worth noting when it comes. Glowering tree-monsters riding boar cavalry, hedge dragons, flying beasts of every description, all of them realized well and employed to some (at least) effect. This dovetails of course with Maleficent's design, which somehow makes the ludicrously satanic appearance of the character from the cartoon into something that looks at least plausible given the setting, even for a character that is not, initially at least, supposed to be evil.


Things Havoc disliked: It's difficult stuff, making a fairy tale for the big screen, especially when one is attempting to revise it for more modern sensibilities. One is reminded unavoidably of 2012's Snow White and the Huntsman, a movie that starred Kristen Stewart, but whose greatest sin was lacking the courage to push the envelope to the logical conclusion for a fairy tale, modern or otherwise. These are not subtle stories, but broad, fantastical ones, and if you're going to write a story about characters with hearts so pure they can melt glaciers, or true love conquering all, or other such things, then you need to actually commit to that story, not hold back for fear of appearing schmaltzy. In a similar vein, when you are making a film about Maleficent, the closest thing Disney ever came to putting Satan on screen (Fantasia excepted), then you do just that.

I'm not saying Maleficent has to be made into a nothing but a psychotic killer. Broad canvas can still encompass nuanced characters (Lord of the Rings comes to mind). But when you are dealing with someone who has been violated and mutilated (let's call things what they are here), and whose consequent wrath is so volcanic that she unmakes reality around her through her mere presence, it does not do to have her show up in a cloud of vengeful hate and pronounce a curse so mealy-mouthed and laden with contingencies as to leave one wondering where in the world she pulled it from. We've established that Maleficent has the effective power of a Pagan God, effortlessly routing armies, conjuring dragons, and rending entire castles apart, so for her to drop the "revenge" that she does, feels like Charles Bronson confronting the men that killed his wife at gunpoint and presenting them with a parking ticket. Similarly, having pronounced her infamous curse, I cannot fathom for the life of me what would possess a character this enraged to spend the next sixteen years secretly watching over the object of the curse, even going so far as to saving it from the neglect of the three fairies deputed to look after her (a trio of women performing comic relief straight out of a three stooges routine). I understand why the plot inclines that way, for we have to make a story about how Maleficent was not evil but just misunderstood, etc... Fine. But you have to ground the character's actions in a way that makes sense, no matter how over the top they are. Maleficent is evil, or at least wrath, personified. Let her be wrathful. If your movie is worthy, the audience will follow you there.

But then I'm not sure if she is actually meant to be wrath personified or not, because the movie can't make up its damn mind as to just what Maleficent is actually capable of. In one moment she is laying armies waste, erecting impermeable barriers around entire kingdoms, and transforming her minions in any manner she wishes at the flick of a finger. The next she's barely capable of handling a retinue of armed men, and must walk into obvious ambushes for lack of any alternative. Yes, some gestures are made to cold iron as a kryptonite analogue as a weakness for fairies (something that's at least grounded in sound mythology), but even still, for someone who has been established as being capable of ripping stone buildings to pieces by accident, it stretches credulity when she suddenly has no alternative in escaping from a stone castle than walking out of it and trying not to make too much noise.

And the tragedy of it is that, bereft of the things that might serve to make this character truly memorable, Maleficent, both character and film, are reduced in the end to a fairly boring re-tread of the inverted version of Sleeping Beauty. I don't object to re-imagining Maleficent at all of course, nor to giving her a character arc and more complex motivations than "Satan", but you have to at least give us a character that we can identify something in. It is not impossible to make a character who both embodies the sheer power of the original and the more modern sensibilities of the rewrite. It is equally not impossible to make a character who is drastically different from the original in every way. But it is not possible to make a character who is all of those things at once, especially not in a movie that barely has 90 minutes to make its case. Without a strong character to anchor this fantastical biopic, the movie's action climax feels almost lethargic, which is a hell of a strike against a film whose predecessor ended with Maleficent being slain by a magical sword plunged through her heart while she was meta-morphed into a dragon on top of a jagged mountain in the middle of a lightning storm.


Final Thoughts: I can, if I squint at it, imagine a version of Maleficent that would be something truly special, for the basics are all here to make it work. Jolie is easily capable of carrying a film about the sorcerous queen of Hell, with or without more humanizing character features, Copley makes for a compelling obsessive antagonist, and the two romantic leads are actually a lot more likeable than I had anticipated them being. But the film simply cannot decide what it's trying to be, going for a PG-13 (or even R) concept with a PG rating, neutering its own premise by refusing to take it far enough to match the setting and concept. A movie actually about one of Disney's greatest villains could be a triumph on the scale of Wicked, but I fear that novice director Robert Stromberg simply lacked the courage (or the clout) to drive home the version of the film that might have brought that triumph home. And without it, all we're left with is a pedestrian fairy tale that happens to star a woman with horns.

Final Score: 5/10

[LadyTevar]

I would say more it's the lack of Clout to un-Disney-fy the story to where there's no 'happy ending'. I understand that one part of looking over Aurora was simply to make sure she survived the Faeries to reach age 16, but what has been mentioned elsewhere is Malificent fell prey to one of Aurora's other gifts: "All who see her shall love her". Malificent became her unwitting godmother, because Aurora's magic beguiled her.

As for Malificent's own Curse, well, what could hurt her ex-lover more than seeing his daughter grow into a young woman, and then fall into a coma for the rest of his life, if not longer? (Plus the side-benefit of making him destroy all the spinning wheels, making cloth and clothing highly expensive, something that has to be imported. Wreck the Economy!) I'm still not sure why they didn't make it more like the movie, where the last Faerie tweaks the Curse to a deep sleep awakened by a kiss, but I'll run with it. Perhaps Malificent didn't think Stephan would have True Love for anyone. (He doesn't seem to)

[General Havoc]

Chef

Alternate Title: This Is Why You're Fat

One sentence synopsis: The head chef of a gourmet Los Angeles restaurant looks for creative inspiration by opening a food truck with his son and best friend.


Things Havoc liked: Jon Favreau, Executive Producer of The Avengers, the first two Iron Man movies (which he also directed), and Cowboys and Aliens, is not the man I would have anticipated personally creating in an indie flick about food, but then he also wrote Swingers, so what do I know? In Chef, a movie he stars in, wrote, directed, and produced, he plays Carl Casper, head chef of a fine dining Los Angeles restaurant, where he works alongside Sous-chef Martin (John Leguizamo), Maitre-d' Molly (Scarlett Johanssen), and owner Riva (Dustin Hoffman). The track record for actors who write and direct themselves is not a good one, to say the least, and I've only seen Favreau before in bit roles in Iron Man or Rudy, but to my surprise he does a fine job, wisely eschewing anything too demanding in favor of a portrayal of a real chef with real skill and real problems. Right from the start, we see him preparing, testing, refining, and producing his food with expert precision, commanding his kitchen brigade with easy familiarity, and generally convincing us that he is, at least, what he appears to be. He also, wisely, decides against writing a character for himself that is a stand-in for Jesus. Carl is not an asshole, but he is a distant, divorced father, whose relationship with his ex-wife Inez (Sofia Vergara) and son Percy (EmJay Anthony) is cordial but disconnected. No (or at least few) raging explosions or histrionics here, Carl is just a guy who happens to be an excellent chef, and given that Favreau's other roles have been those of "guys who happen to be ____", sticking to his strengths is the best plan here.

Another good plan is, when introducing yourself to cinema in a major way, surround yourself with talent. And while I had not anticipated in this little exercise associating John Leguizamo's name with talent, here we are. His character, Martin serves little purpose except to follow Carl around and help him as he goes from his stultifying restaurant job to a food truck serving Cuban Sandwiches (which look both delicious, and like they'd make you fat just glancing at them), but Leguizamo is just so damn... well entertaining as he does it, running his mouth constantly in a slew of in-jokes and references and schtick in the manner that resembles his earlier (annoying) work, but does not emulate it to the point of aggravation. Hoffman meanwhile, as a restaurant owner desperate to fill his restaurant, is as smarmy as ever, though you can't help but feel for him when it's his money on the line every time his chef decides that there is a "creative rut" being dug and that it's time to introduce people to the merits of vacuum-boiled organ meat or some damn thing. But best of the supporting characters is actually Percy, Carl's ten-year-old son, who clearly is looking for some way to get closer to his father, be it through cooking or anything else. Child actors are always a danger in any film, but this one does a wonderful job, playing not some precocious little genius, nor an enfant terrible, nor any other stock thing, but just a normal kid whose reactions to the situations the movie puts him in are entirely realistic, avoiding the designated "wise statements from the angelic child" scenes, in favor of just concentrating on him and his father. Simpler is better in this case.

And that's really all there is to it. Indeed this is the sort of movie that almost defies reviewing, so simple and easy-going that there just isn't much to say about it. And yet despite that, the film is never boring. Moving along at an brisk pace and never repeating itself, it is simply a series of slice-of-life vignettes, as Favreau's character is dissatisfied with his job, quits it, finds inspiration, and returns to glory. There are no villains to defeat, no checklist of lessons to be learned, just characters trying to do the best they can by one another and living their lives. In it's own weird little way, it's almost refreshing to encounter a movie that doesn't have ambitions of being the successor to Hamlet.


Things Havoc disliked: And having said that, I shall now complain about the fact that the movie is not ambitious enough.

There's nothing wrong with simple films, nor with simple stories done right, and I don't think every movie has to lead its characters on a torturous journey of challenge, redemption, and triumph. But there does need to be something there to keep our attention, and while Chef certainly isn't boring, it just doesn't have all that much going for it beyond the fact that these characters do exist and they do engage in the actions I described above. There are hints of more, with Favreau's other sous-chef Tony (Bobby Cannavale) being conflicted over taking his place at the restaurant, his rivalry with his boss or with food critic Ramsay Michel (Oliver Platt), or his relationship with hostess Molly, but nothing is really developed, as the characters enter or fall out of the scene entirely based on their proximity to the main character, and while that's pretty accurate to real life, realism is a poor defense for a narrative medium like film.

And the case for realism isn't helped by several, strange elements that seem to pop up almost at random. For one thing, while I'm not the kind of guy who objects to product placement as a rule, the social media apps that this movie features prominently (Favreau's son is, of course, a computer wiz, and popularizes his father's new business on twitter, vine, etc...) gets to the point of an extended advertisement. The reason product placement annoys people is because it pulls them out of the story, like a commercial break in the middle of a movie on network television. By the thirtieth time that the movie shows Favreau's son placing a "cool" tweet (with appropriate hashtags, of course), represented by a cute little graphic of a bird flying off to spread the word, even I was starting to wonder just how much the filmmakers had funded the movie out of Twitter's marketing budget. Leaving that aside, there are also a couple of characters that seem to be inserted as padding, such as Favreau's father-in-law, a cuban big-band style performer in Miami who seems to be in the film largely to humor the performer, or a cameo by Robert Downey Jr, acting like a weirdo, who seems to be there to give the character a truck. Obviously real life is composed of such vignettes, but as always, film does not reward hemming and hawing with characters or plotlines that aren't intended to go anywhere. Chekov's Gun is a principle of storytelling for a reason.


Final Thoughts: Simple films are always hard to review, as there isn't anything particularly wrong with them, but their horizons are limited enough to restrict the options insofar as the loftier scores are concerned. Any movie can, in theory, be spectacular of course, but a movie like Chef is probably about as good as it possibly could be, a nice, charming little slice of life about characters acting as normal people do in a situation that could certainly exist. It does not seek to exceed these bounds, nor does it do so, but if these sorts of films are up your alley, then by all means go see it, as you're not likely to encounter one done as well as this.

My tastes of course lie towards things a bit more daring than this, of course. But even I can recognize a simple story done well when I see it.

Final Score: 6.5/10