At the Movies with General Havoc

[Steve]

I just enjoy seeing Michael Bay's work flounder against Marvel.

I mean, yeah, TMNT topped the charts for a couple of weeks, but it only maxed 68 mill its opening weekend, almost 30 less than GotG, and GoTG put in 40-something mill that weekend too. Then two weeks later it was back on top.

[General Havoc]

The Admiral: Roaring Currents

Alternate Title: Zerg Rush!

One sentence synopsis: Admiral Yi Sun-Sin leads a hopelessly outnumbered fleet in a desperate battle against a massive Japanese armada.


Things Havoc liked: In 1592, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Shogun of Japan, launched a massive invasion of the Korean Kingdom of Josoen, intent on conquering the peninsula, and using it as a base with which to invade and conquer Ming China. For seven years, this war raged on and off, as Japanese forces sought to subjugate Korea, and the Koreans, with their Chinese allies, sought to drive them back. Locally called the Seven-Years-War (a name which would be used for a different conflict in the West), this war remains almost completely unknown in Europe and the United States, but not in Korea, where it is justly regarded as one of the finest hours of the Korean nation. And front and center in the midst of this epic conflict is one of the towering figures in the annals of naval warfare, the legendary Admiral Yi Sun-Sin, a man who, despite a lowly background and no formal training in warfare or sailing, fought twenty-three major naval battles without once suffering defeat, almost single-handedly turning the tide of the war against Japan, and becoming in the process, along with Horatio Nelson himself, one of the greatest Admirals in all of history. It was therefore probably inevitable that a Korean film studio, in this case the Korean media giant CJ Entertainment, would seek to make a blockbuster film about Admiral Yi, choosing for a subject, as was also probably inevitable, his most famous and awe-inspiring victory, the 1597 Battle of Myeongnyang, in which Yi, with thirteen battle-worthy ships, stood against a fleet of a hundred and thirty three Japanese warships, and defeated them.

This is history, guys. Spoilers are gonna happen.

The highest-grossing film in Korean history, the Admiral is clearly a product of a culture simultaneously nothing like Hollywood, and yet exposed nonetheless to a century of Hollywood's works. It is a big, sweeping epic, in the vein of recent Chinese films such as Red Cliffs or more standard (to us westerners) Hollywood fare like Kingdom of Heaven or The Last Samurai. Historical epics are a particularly favorite genre of mine, and this is a good one, bright and colorful, with a cast of dozens and swarms of extras and warships filmed with lush camerawork and painstaking detail. East Asia in the sixteenth century was a flamboyant place, and this film captures every loving detail of it all, from military uniforms that approach superhero costumes in their levels of complexity and symbolism, to banners, temples, statuary and architecture, reveling in a time when even the design of warships and cannons was rife with artistic touches. Entire pagodas tower above lumbering flagships, rifle barrels and sword blades bear engraved calligraphy and religious iconography, and the styles of armor seem to grow more extravagant by the hour, including embossed masks, plumed helmets, woven inscriptions, and bright streamers. How much of all this is actually true to life, I don't know. My guess is most of it. But even if not, the film thereby earns a richness that ensures there's never a moment when we're not staring at something beautiful, even as people die by the tens of thousands.

And oh boy do they die. Battle sequences in this film are where director Kim Han-Min, whose previous credits include other historical war epics, shows off his Hollywood influences, for they are as frenetic, chaotic, and violent as anything from Ridley Scott or Oliver Stone. Warships thunder with broadsides of cannons (yes, cannons, Korea was arguably the most advanced cannon-using power in the world in 1597), volleys of musketfire, and clashes of sword, polearm, and more outlandish weapons. Ships smash through one another with bone-shattering impact, as masses of soldiers and marines engage in bitter combat until the blood runs freely through the gunwales. And yet unlike some action films that go so far beyond the point of reason that the military-connoisseur in me begins choking on my own tongue, this film manages to push riiiiiiight up to the limit of what's plausible without pushing past it. Epic battles are sanguinary affairs for all sides, and do not consist of the virile armies of right and good slaughter wave after wave of incompetent foes without taking a scratch (yes, 300 did that, but 300 was a different movie). Instead the battle comes visibly down to tactics, strategy, misdirection, and a whole heap of backs-to-the-wall last-stand bravery on the part of our heroes, as they face down legions of Samurai warriors, all of whom are allowed to be just as lethal as we've all come to expect Samurai to be.

But what of the acting and plot, the things with which I usually start my reviews? The difficulty with foreign films, even for those unafraid of subtitles, is that cultural conventions in Korea (or wherever) are completely alien to those in the US, which can render it difficult to follow complex narratives, as things that a Korean audience would pick up on automatically are opaque, or even completely invisible to us. Yet this film manages well, telling a straightforward military story of an Admiral on his last legs with a fleet falling to pieces, standing against an overwhelming force and trying to best it by any means necessary. The Admiral himself, played by Oldboy's Choi Min-Suk, is very well-characterized, a driven, calculating man, ruthless when he needs to be, yet self-sacrificing when the occasion demands it, who recognizes the exact position he is in with a faultless eye, and constructs a plan to give himself the finest possible chance of emerging victorious. He is not portrayed as some divinely-inspired super-human genius of faultless calculation, nor a Xanatos-style ultra-schemer, whose every failure turns out to be actually all according to plan. Instead the film portrays him as a man who is simply very, very good at what he does, and utterly committed to doing just that, come what may. Surrounded by lieutenants of greater or lesser ability and loyalty, and sailors and soldiers who vary from the brave to the cowardly, he sets out to do battle in a fight he knows he has done everything to prepare for, and leaves the outcome to the designs of fate. There's more than one director of Hollywood epics who could stand to take a lesson here.



Things Havoc disliked: At the risk of sounding racist, watching a film starring an ensemble cast of hundreds of Korean actors I've never seen before playing characters whose names I do not know can get... unavoidably confusing. Several times I got lost as to just who was doing what and what relationship a given character had to whom. This is not helped by several characters who would appear to be major ones suddenly disappearing from the film for the duration while others come to prominence. When one follows history, this is the sort of thing that can happen, but it did leave me wishing that Kim had tightened things a bit around the main story.

Indeed, The Admiral is not a long film (a hair over two hours), but it definitely feels like one. The battle sequences are relentless, with lengthy crowd shots of killing and beginning-middle-end structures that give us hope of a false dawn before the Japanese send in the next wave of forces. Three separate times, I thought admiral Yi had finally won the battle, only to discover that everything that had so-far happened was merely a pre-battle skirmish and that the real meat of the fighting was about to start. This unfortunately robs the film of some of its epic feel, as it gets a bit ridiculous when you have five consecutive "shocking turning points that suddenly enable our heroes to win" within forty-five minutes. I grant that the real battle of Myeongnyang was such an insane upset victory that it may well have involved this sort of thing, but we're here to watch a movie, and even if you wanted to keep all of the various hinge points in the battle, structuring the film such that not every one of them is treated like the climax to Return of the King might be a good idea.

There's also the issue of Melodrama, something that I've noticed happens with fair regularity in Korean film and television. There are moments in the film when the director lets the reins slip a bit, and allows characters to vent full reign of their most King Lear-like emotions. These can be fun, but some of them go so far over the top that we start to question whether they make any sense at all. A moment midway through the film when Admiral Yi's turtle ship unexpectedly catches fire and burns to the waterline involves him running screaming into the night in a nightgown, tearing his hair and crying to all and sundry that he will crush the Japanese with the very ship being reduced to ashes in front of his face. That the ship is a loss and the admiral distraught at its destruction, I understand, but the reaction is so over the top one might expect that his entire family was aboard, plunging wild-eyed into the water and being held back by his loyal subordinates from hurling himself into the flames. And yet the next morning he is sober and controlled again, prepared to revise his battle plan to account for the ship's loss, a change so stark that I suspected his performance the night before would eventually be revealed as a cunning act of theater designed to misdirect his enemies or somehow inspire his own men. There are a handful of such scenes, where the tight logic and control of the film suddenly deserts it in favor of Gone-With-the-Wind melodrama, each time dragging me back out of the film and into reality. Perhaps Korean audiences have a better tolerance for such things.


Final Thoughts: The Admiral is a wonderful film, not an epochal triumph along the lines of Marvel's outings, but a great movie in its own way, the biggest ever in Korean history, and justly so. Sweeping, epic, and beautiful, it sheds light on a period even I knew almost nothing about, highlighting one of the greatest captains in history in the way he deserves to be highlighted. A foreign film in limited release stateside is obviously only going to be available to a select audience, but insofar as it is on offer, I would unhesitatingly recommend it to war, history, and foreign cinema buffs alike.

After all, with the September slump upon us, your alternatives are not encouraging...

Final Score: 7/10

[Charon]

I've become a big fan of Korean films over the past few years, primarily through the use of Netflix to view them (Most of the movies on my list are foreign films now). This sounds like it'd be a fun romp, though alas I'll have to wait for this to get to Netflix (hopefully) as it's not screening anywhere near me.

[frigidmagi]

I really want to see this one. Also as a side note, the melodrama sounds alot like some of the stuff I'm reading in the book about Japan in WWII. I don't like using just one country as an example, but Japan did have control over Korea for awhile, so maybe it's a cultural thing? My Father (who is a big fan of Korean soap operas... Never saw that coming.) told me once that one of the reasons he liked it was because the characters by our standards over sell the emotions of the moment. Which made it easier for him to follow along (there's also the fact that subtitles are not a barrier to deaf folks watching something).

[General Havoc]

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Alternate Title: Miller Time

One sentence synopsis: Three tales of betrayal, sin, and revenge intertwine within a stylized noir city.


Things Havoc liked: I adored the original Sin City, 2005's sordid, stylized tale of cops and dames and hoods and giant, lumbering psychotics doling out bloody retribution to a host of worthy targets. It was gritty and uncompromising, striking and bold in style and horrifically violent in execution, and while it was something of a mess at points, I was, and remain, convinced that it was a beautiful mess, buttressed by the many, many fine actors who joined its cast, and I enjoyed it considerably more than I expected I would. I knew that the film was based on a series of comic books that legendary graphic novelist Frank Miller created in the early 90s, and I wondered, then and as the years went by, when we might see another installment.

They say that good things come to those who wait. Nine years after their first success, Miller and director Robert Rodriguez have come together to give us more violence, more stylization, and more noir, with a fresh set of adventures in the eponymous Sin City. With much of the original cast returning, and those not being replaced by actors of equal skill, I had high hopes for this one.

Let's start with the positives then, shall we?

A Dame to Kill for, like Sin City before it, is a masterpiece of style and cinematic artistry. The trademark black-and-white-and-color-burst palate is still intact here, complete with gorgeous shots of such mundane things as the light reflecting in the lenses of someone's glasses, or a skylight casting a pool of illumination down on someone's bed. The sax-heavy score, also by Rodriguez casts exactly the right tone as well, a pastiche of hard-boiled noir detective and crime stories from the 30s through the 50s, the sorts of things that Dashiell Hammett and his imitators might have imagined after an all-night bender. Through the relentless voiceover narration, a staple of noir from German Expressionism to Max Payne, we get a sense of a massive, sprawling city, each corner of which contains its dirty secrets, where heroes and villains are much of the same, and people flow through one another's stories with impunity and total disregard for such things as a reasonable continuity. Combined with the Pulp Fiction-like temporal dislocation, the film obtains an almost timeless, ethereal feel to it, much as the first one did, as the narratives wind around one another, coming into and out of focus before moving on to another, unrelated tale.

Based on a fresh series of stories, both from the original 90s run and new material created specially for the movie by Miller himself, A Dame to Kill for, as I mentioned, uses a combination of new and old actors for its purposes. Many of these are excellent, such as small roles for Ray Liotta and Christopher Meloni, as respectively a businessman and a cop undone by their irresistible attraction to one of the many dangerous dames to be found in the city. Dennis Haysbert, filling in for the late Michael Clarke Duncan, evokes casual menace with the same facility that his predecessor did. But one of the standouts is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, an actor I've finally decided I was wrong about and embraced, and who here plays Johnny, a young gambler and cardsharp who manages to get himself in a heap of trouble with returning arch-villain Senator Roarke, played as before by the inimitable Powers Boothe. Boothe's role is substantially increased this time 'round, an excellent decision as it allows him to do what he does best, play a snarling, growling villain of ferocious presence, a perfect match for the cast of over-the-top characters that surround him. I've been an immense fan of Boothe's since 1993's underrated Tombstone. The same can't be said of Gordon-Levitt, but his character, a cocky smart-ass who gets in way over his head, also strikes just the right cord. A dextrous, preternaturally-lucky gambler, he and his story of hubris and revenge into the overall look and feel of Sin City like a hand in a glove, to the point where this story could easily have come from the original film.



Things Havoc disliked: The rest of it, though...

I had some sense that something like this might happen, as this project was the lovechild of Miller and Rodriguez, neither one of whom has had a particularly good run of things lately. Miller, who was always something of a fringe character in comics, has spent the last two decades going progressively more insane (Holy Terror and All Star Batman & Robin proved that much), while Rodriguez, once a fiery young director who created such brilliant blood operas as El Mariachi, Desperado, or the gleefully schlocky From Dusk Till Dawn (to say nothing of the original Sin City), has recently gotten into the habit of badly aping his own material in disasters as varied as Machete Kills, the endless parade of Spy Kids sequels, or, it must be said, here.

Indeed, the parallels to Machete 2 are disturbing here (as they are to Miller's 300: Rise of an Empire, but that's another story), and not simply because this is another movie with over-the-top violence. Rodriguez is a director with no sense of restraint, it's something I've always admired from him, but that lack can only be justified if combined with the skill to pull off the absurdities you choose to put on screen, and while Rodriguez used to have that skill, I'm becoming increasingly hard-pressed to find it. Like with Machete 2, wherein he somehow got the idea that the popularity of his first film was due to its plot, Rodriguez seems to have missed, somehow, what it was about the first Sin City that made it so popular. It wasn't because we were engrossed in the labyrinthine plot (or rather plots), but because of the style and the characters that he populated his world with. And while Rodriguez does make an attempt to conjure lightning a second time for this installment, the results are simply not up to par.

Consider Eva Green, who is fast becoming my favorite actress in otherwise bad movies (Rise of an Empire again). Her character, Ava Lord (word to the wise, never name a character after the actor playing them, it's distracting), is a femme fatale who manipulates and discards men like a spider devouring her mates. Good idea in theory, and yet Green is allowed to play the character so far over the top that even Sin City's stylized format can't handle it. Sin City worked, despite wooden dialogue, because the stiffness of the characters fit in perfectly with the style of the film. Green seems to be constantly winking at the audience, as though acknowledging that her character makes no sense, which of course means that it does not, and that we don't have the attractive pull of the world at large to cover for it.

Green isn't the only one. Josh Brolin, reprising a role originally played by Clive Owen, is simply not up to the task of emulating his predecessor. Owen's character looked and felt special, a noble killer who partnered with the heavily-armed whores of Old Town to destroy corrupt cops and mobsters out of principle. Brolin feels all wrong for this task, a tired, old, weatherbeaten paparazzo who gets roped into a situation far beyond his control. Not a problem were the character a new one, but not only is this supposedly a returning character, but his story is heavily tied into the original. So is Jessica Alba, whose damsel-in-distress is elevated this time around to a booze-soaked killer, seeking to revenge herself and Bruce Willis' deceased Sgt. Hartigan on the aforementioned Senator Roarke. The issue here is that Jessica Alba is incapable of taking on a role like this, something Rodriguez was unaware of in Machete and remains unaware of here. But the worst of it is Marv, the centerpiece of the original film, played to absolute perfection by a barely-recognizable Mickey Roarke. Marv was a fascination in the first film, an unstoppable, psychotic murder-machine, whose internal monologue revealed depth, vulnerability, and unbending self-awareness as he tried to do what he thought was right in a world of violence and sleaze. He's here in this movie, as unflappable as he was in the previous one, but as a side character, he gets no internal monologue, no insight into his motivations or character. We only see the exterior, which is that of a comic book pastiche of a hero, invincible and wisecracking, denying us everything that made the character unique and interesting in the first place. This is a catastrophically bad decision, one which robs the original film's most memorable creation of its nuance, leading me, once again, to wonder if Rodriguez even understood what he was doing in the first place.


Final Thoughts: Looking back at A Dame to Kill for, I am left with the question of why? Why was this movie made? I know the literal answer (to make money), and that's fine, but I mean the artistic one, which must exist, even if alongside the financial one, for any movie to be good. The first film existed to be awesome and stylish, which is its own justification, but this movie exists because... because the first one did, I guess. Unfortunately, neither Rodriguez nor Miller, at this point in their careers, are up to the task of making something as great as their original film, Rodriguez because he has lost the plot, and Miller because his latent tendencies towards angry misogyny (not an accusation I make lightly) have been getting the best of him for more than a decade. It's no co-incidence, I suspect, that none of the characters I liked in this film are female, not even Rosario Dawson's Gail, a valkyrie mother-hen/warleader in the first film, reduced here to stripperific eye candy.

But I'm not here to heap yet more scorn on the already marginalized Frank Miller. I'm here to review a film based on his work. And that film, I'm sad to report, is simply not as good as its predecessor, not by a wide margin. Flashes of the original shine through, in the style, in the tone, in a handful of scenes or characters who retain the sensibilities of the first film. But by and large, those of us who appreciated the original Sin City are reduced to watching the antics of characters that resemble those we remember, but are not them.

Perhaps, expectations and memories being what they are, you can simply never go back to something like Sin City. But in that case, it might behoove someone to warn Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller before they decide to try their luck at re-inventing another one of their classics from long ago. Trust me, the world does not need a Planet Terror 2.

Final Score: 5.5/10

[General Havoc]

Love is Strange

Alternate Title: Life and Other Creative Bankruptcies

One sentence synopsis: An elderly gay couple in New York lose their condo in Manhattan and must separately move in with friends and family.


Things Havoc liked: You can't see as many movies as I do without getting familiar with the work of particular directors or screenwriters, yet despite my best efforts to indulge in Indie cinema whenever practicable, Ira Sachs is one I've missed, his most mainstream film to-date being a 2007 Chris Cooper/Rachel McAdams romantic comedy by the name of "Married Life", which I had strictly never heard of until about two minutes ago. Openly gay, Jewish, and a proud New Yorker, Sachs has introduced himself to me by means of a film that has been raking in the critical acclaim from every critic known to man, a labor of love he both wrote and directed starring John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as an elderly gay couple whose lives fall apart after they get married.

I haven't seen John Lithgow in the better part of a decade, though he's been around, on television and in the occasional film. I've always liked him, even when he's chosen not-so-good things to appear in, such as the awesomely-terrible Sylvester Stallone action flick Cliffhanger. Alfred Molina meanwhile, whom I have seen recently in roles as varied as Spiderman 2, The Da Vinci Code, and the voicecast for Elder Scrolls Online, is an excellent actor I always enjoy watching. It should not, therefore, be any surprise that the best moments in this film come when these two are on the screen together. They don't play steriotypes, nor even the standard steriotypical non-steriotype gay guys (yes, that exists), but an elderly couple who have been together for nearly forty years, and have nothing, any longer, to hide. Now elderly, and both maintaining as much of a quiet dignity as their strained circumstances afford them, both of them (particularly Lithgow) are absolutely at home in these characters, be it the fussy nervousness of their everyday morning routines on a day that is anything but routine, to a night on the town livened by Lithgow lying his way shamelessly into free drinks, to a sequence midway through the film when Molina's character, pushed to the breaking point by the dislocation his life has suffered, appears on the doorstep of Lithgow's family at the point of tears, desperate simply to see his husband after their enforced separation.

And why are they separated? Because of a series of circumstances stemming from Molina's character losing his job at a Catholic high school for being openly gay, a situation the Church was willing to ignore until the two of them officially married, and then suddenly decided was unacceptable (I believe this instantly). Unable to afford their Chelsea condo any longer, the two of them are forced to move seperately into the houses of friends (Molina) and family (Lithgow), with all the awkwardness and irritation that entails. Molina's character winds up moving in with a pair of younger, gay cops, whose apartment is the hub of a never-ending party (a sequence midway through where an exasperated Molina walks in on them all playing tabletop roleplaying games is awesome, though it would be more awesome if, instead of being driven out in a tearful huff, he were made to join in and roll up a character). Lithgow meanwhile winds up with his niece-in-law, played by Marissa Tomei (in a decent role at last) and her family, including his rebellious grand-nephew played by Charlie Tahan (the kid from I am Legend). Tomei is a writer who works from home while her workaholic husband is absent, and her teenage son is surly and makes trouble in the manner that all teenagers of that age do. The awkwardness that ensues as Lithgow tries his best not to interfere in the affairs of the family, despite the fact that he has no choice but to do so given his very presence, is very true-to-life, almost to the point of being hard to watch. I cite this as a positive because that is plainly the intention of the filmmaker.


Things Havoc disliked: I cite what follows as a negative because the rest of his intentions make no sense to me.

This film works, when it works, because the two leads are compelling and well-acted characters whom we care about. It stops working when the director, who is also the scriptwriter and one of the producers (VANITY PROJECT ALERT!), decides to trip himself up by failing to actually tell us a story about these characters. The problem isn't that the director wants to tell us a different, unrelated story, for that at least could have potentially worked if the other story was compelling enough. The problem is that the director has nothing whatsoever to tell us except that he seems to regard the very concept of "story" with unbridled contempt.

Everything, everything this movie brings up, be it plotlines or character arcs or whatnot, every single narrative element in this film is a red herring, left without even the most cursory nods towards a resolution. Bad enough that that Sachs decides to leave our two headlining main characters aside in favor of focusing on the troubles of young Charlie Tahan, whose relationship with his friend Ivan is ambiguous (the film hints towards them both being gay before suddenly backing off of that), and who seems to be acting up at school (stealing books on French Literature, of all things). He then compounds the issue by not resolving any of those things. We never learn whether Tahan or his friend Ivan are gay (or rather, while we learn they are not, we never learn what they were up to together). We never learn why he stole the French Literature books. We never learn how, if at all, Marissa Tomei's problems with her absent husband are resolved. We never learn anything, and given that the entire film is comprised of us watching the characters dealing with these issues, this is something of a problem.

Indeed, there's an argument to be made that the entire film is one huge bait-and-switch after another. Early on, we are introduced to an abrasive relative of Lithgow's (I think), who lives upstate in Poughkeepsie, and who violently insults anyone who suggests that Lithgow and Molina might not want to live upstate with her. The film shines a prominent spotlight on this character, lets her behave abominably to a number of other characters, and then drops her entirely as soon as they decide to live elsewhere. In the back of my mind I was assuming that this character's offer to take them in would be brought up as at least a possible solution to the tension at Tomei's house, but the film seemingly forgets that any of that happened or that this character ever existed. Similarly the loud and obnoxious party-cops, the best friend Ivan, the workaholic father, all of these people are introduced, set up for a storyline, and then dropped seemingly at random when the movie gets distracted. Worst of all is the one bit of payoff we do get, the ultimate resolution for the primary plot of the film, which is such a Deus Ex Machina resolution that the movie practically calls our attention to that fact, dropping a heaven-sent solution on the heads of the characters by pure chance, only to then turn around and turn the film on another right angle spontaneously, deciding with ten minutes to go that the movie was actually about something else entirely. This is not a plot twist, but an incoherent swerve of focus, a distinction I maintain if only because, in order to have a plot twist, you must first have a plot.


Final Thoughts: One is tempted, at this juncture, to chalk up the foibles of Love is Strange as simply being the product of a (forgive me) strange writer and director, and judging from the universal acclaim this film has been garnering, that's precisely what most critics did. Not me. The subject matter here is very contemporary, extremely well-acted, and handled well, when it's handled at all, but the problem is that it simply isn't handled very much. Rather than tell us a story, or many stories, or even a broken, fragmented story, this director and writer has decided to tell us the beginning third of about six stories in turn, then write an abrupt, almost laughably anticlimactic ending just to wrap things up, and run out the door before anyone can question him on it. Perhaps my taste is bad, or perhaps no other critic was willing to criticize a film about gay men, of which there are very few, but the rightness of a subject does not excuse one from the need to actually tell a freaking story. And no excuses to the contrary, not pithy explanations about how life is unstructured or artful protestations about the purity of unstructured thought, can erase the fact that film, as a narrative medium, does not reward those who have no use for narrative as a concept.

Four times now, with Boyhood, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Under the Skin and now this, I went to see an indie film purely on the strength of absolutely universal acclaim it was generating, and three times now I have been fantastically underwhelmed as to the result (a dramatic understatement in the case of Under the Skin. It's tempting, upon further reflection, to decide that the problem is with me, and not with the other critics, for they are legion, and professional, and I am neither. But ultimately, I do not accept that I am wrong about these films, as I suspect there is something else, perhaps self-censorship, or perhaps simply the jadedness that comes from seeing 300 films a year instead of 50, that renders the major critics unable to accurately judge a movie like this one, or other indie darlings such as those above.

Ultimately, I don't mind a movie that takes risks or chances, and I don't even mind one that does so and fails. But I really don't like it when a movie decides, whether because its subject matter is so pure and right, or because life has some ineffable quality that cannot be reproduced accurately in narrative form, that it's therefore okay to waste my time with incoherent rambling instead of telling me the story I asked, and in fact paid them to tell.

Final Score: 5/10

[General Havoc]

The Drop

Alternate Title: The Sopranos: Endgame

One sentence synopsis: The bartender of a dive bar owned by the Russian Mafia must deal with violent lowlifes, battered women, the vengeful ex-owner of the bar, and a dog.


Things Havoc liked: I am fast becoming a massive fan of Tom Hardy, torchbearer for the next iteration of Mad Max, who has been uniformly excellent in recent years in films as diverse as Locke, Inception, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and The Dark Knight Rises (we won't talk about Star Trek Nemesis). I am becoming a fan of Hardy's because of his ability to play all sorts of disparate roles to perfection, from a tightly-wound, soft-spoken, Welsh building engineer in Locke, to the voice-distorted, hulking terrorist Bane in DKR. This time around, Hardy takes a stab at playing a New Jersey tough guy(of sorts), by the name of Bob Saginowski (thus marking the first time I have seen someone play a working-class tough guy in a gangster flick named Bob). Bob is the bartender at Marv's bar, a local dive for the working class patrons of whatever section of blue-collar Jersey this happens to be, lives otherwise alone, and seems to be at least partly... "slow" is perhaps the best word. This is his neighborhood, and he knows it well, and does not seem tremendously interested in much else outside it, and yet rather than turning into some kind of gangster-version of Forest Gump, Hardy plays him like a none-too-bright blue collar guy who simply knows where he is and accepts it. As always, this is a complete departure from Locke or Bane or anything else I've seen him play, and he is mesmorizing throughout, particularly as the background of the character and the things he may actually be good at begin to come to the fore.

But of course, the Drop is not famous for Tom Hardy's appearance, but because of that of James Gandalfini, in his last ever role, where (in a daring departure from his previous body of work), he plays a New Jersey tough guy with a thick accent who swears a lot. I kid, but Gandalfini here was playing to his strengths, while improvising just enough to keep it interesting. His character Marv is not a Tony Soprano analogue at all, save for the accent and location, but a frightened, bitter man, who has lost in life and knows it, and desperately wants to get back what he believes is his. The bar he and Bob work at is called Marv's Bar after all, and once it was his, until a Russian gangster (Michael Aronov) applied the right type of pressure to take over the bar. Though Marv still runs the place, it now functions as a "drop bar", where money from illicit activities is gathered and protected prior to collection by the mafia. Marv resents this interference, as anyone would, and yet the film is not precisely the story of his never-ending quest for vengeance, or what happens to those who cross Tony Soprano, but about the limits of what a guy who thinks himself tough may be when confronted with those who are truly ruthless. The toadying obsequiousness that Gandalfini displays around his bosses, and the bitter anger he offers when they're not around are wonderful to watch, clashing as they do with Bob's more pragmatic approach to everything.

And that's more or less it. The Drop is not a complex film nor a particularly violent one, but a superb exercise in staged tension and subtext, as Bob (and Marv) deal not only with the gangsters in question, but with Nadia (Noomi Rapace, in a much better turn than Prometheus), a local waitress whom Bob meets by chance, and Eric (Rust and Bones' Matthias Schoenaerts), her low-life ex-boyfriend, with whom Bob becomes entangled after he discovers an abandoned puppy in Nadia's trash that once belonged to Eric. The characters stare at one another and say very little, as in the best gangster movie tradition, in dark houses, a dark bar, the dark of night, or the slate grey of an overcast sky. Every situation is allowed to build, carefully amassing tension and building towards inevitable payoffs. The film maintains this measured, gradual approach the entire length, producing one of the more well-crafted thrillers I've seen in quite some time, an impressive feat for first time director Michaël Roskam, who has clearly seen his share of crime dramas, and deconstructed what makes them tick quite well.


Things Havoc disliked: Given the tightness that the film maintains around its central characters and story, I am left confused as to the purpose of Detective Torres, played by The Fast and the Furious' John Ortiz. His character is the token cop, a catholic (of course), who keeps tabs on our main character at confessional and who seems to be following the action with reports and briefings and all the usual stuff. Yet nothing really is ever done with this character, as he has practically nothing to do except occasionally show up and exposit information at our characters. I suppose every gangster film must have a cop in it, but it's generally only polite to give him something to do. The main thrust of the film is simply the interaction of Bob and Marv and the low-lifes and damaged people that surround them. The police have nothing to do with that, something confirmed by the end of the film.

Otherwise, all I can really point to is the fact that The Drop, as was probably inevitable for a freshman outing, is a very simple film, perhaps a bit too simple, given the runtime. It's not that it gets boring, far from it, there's just a limit to the horizons a movie that spends this much time on the question of who owns a dog can possibly have. I don't demand that every gangster film I see be the Godfather of course, but there's no end to the wonderful, triple-crossing fun you can have in movies like this, and this film, desiring as it does to avoid all the cliches of the genre, is left with a very plain story. Some may not prefer that.


Final Thoughts: I on the other hand have no problem whatsoever with being given a simple film done well once in a while. Too many directors, authors, actors, get airs about them, that they all must produce Coppolian works of earth-shattering weight and dizzying complexity for anyone to notice them, and that there is no room in their careers for subtlety or craft. Not that a big film is a bad thing, by any means, but there is room in film for a movie like this, a very simple, very effective, very tense thriller, which simply produces a number of characters about which we know little, and then lets us get to know them over the course of self-contained events that make logical sense. The Drop is one such movie, a tightly-crafted, finely-acted, highly effective thriller, about which there is not a vast amount to say, except that I wish all of my first-time directors could produce work of this caliber.

Now if he can avoid making a sophomore film like Under the Skin, we might actually be onto something.

Final Score: 7.5/10

[General Havoc]

The Equalizer

Alternate Title: Liam Neeson Denzel Washington Kills Everyone

One sentence synopsis: A mild-mannered hardware store worker with a hidden past takes revenge against human traffickers and slavers when they beat a young prostitute within an inch of her life.


Things Havoc liked: There's a great and rich history to revenge fantasy movies, movies about quiet, usually middle-aged men of dignity and simple virtue, who are either wronged or have their loved-ones wronged by the evil men that some imagine to be lurking around every dark corner in the dirty cesspools that are "the city", and who set out to take revenge. Charles Bronson made a number of these films back in the day, including the immortal "Death Wish", which touched off a firestorm by inverting the point of the novel it was based on and coming down on the side of vigilante justice. In more recent times, actors such as Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson have played these sorts of roles in everything from Air Force One to the Taken series. There are those who revile these sorts of films as nothing more than middle-aged power fantasies of paternalistic violence delivered against scary minorities by virtuous white men. Unlike such critics, I try to remember that movies in general are the stuff of power fantasies the world over, for every audience imaginable, and that it is easy to twist power dynamic theory to condemn literally anything. That said, there is still perhaps something to the notion, which is why it pleases me to see that for this latest rendition of the old revenge-movie staple, the producers have decided it's time to try the formula out with a black hero and white villains.

Based on a CBS show from the late 1980s, the Equalizer stars Denzel Washington as your typical Middle-Aged-Everyman-Who-Is-Secretly-A-Massive-Badass-And-Kills-Everyone-Who-Threatens-His-Women. The MAEWISAMBAKEWTHW has been a staple of film for years, but unlike Neeson, who has always been a director's actor and requires a steady hand to produce a good performance, Denzel is, as always, effortlessly charismatic, no matter his role, and manages here to appear far more convincingly a rational, reaosnable surrogate-dad figure to the cast of vulnerable little people that are required to surround the MAEWISAMBAKEWTHW in movies like this. This role does not exactly stretch Washington's range, but he can play something like this in his sleep, transitioning efficiently at a split second from ruthless killer to concerned, and empathetic protagonist, sometimes doing so several times in the same scene. Given that Washington is, like Neeson and Ford and Bronson before him, playing an absolutely invulnerable killing machine, it's actually nice to see some of the smaller touches the film gives him. His attempts to defuse situations without violence (which are, of course, rejected by our evil villains), actually feel genuine, such as an occasion when he simply gives an armed robber money from the cash register at his workplace, or an earlier effort to buy out the mobsters who have enslaved a young prostitute. Only when these attempts fail do the fireworks begin, something many modern movies (like the Taken series) fail to do. It's not that I have some moral objection to people striking first in films, I'm as big a fan of Han shooting Greedo as anyone. But moments like this are character moments, and help establish that we're watching something other than an armored robot in the shape of a person gunning down mooks.

It also helps if the mooks have a decent villainous leader, and for this purpose we have Teddy, a half-Sherlock, half-Ivan Drago-style Russian mob enforcer played by New Zealand actor Marton Csokas, whose last major role was as Guy de Lusignan in Ridley Scott's massively underrated Kingdom of Heaven. Like action movie villains the world over, Csokas takes refuge in audacity with this one, whether completely extraneous shirtless-flexing scenes which exist merely to show off his tattoo and physique, unflappable feats of deductive reasoning and stone-faced murder, or explosions of raging violence when confronted with the unstoppable force he is ultimately up against. Csokas played the main villain (another Russian mob boss) in 2002's wretched xXx, and was the only redeeming element of that film, so something like this is right up his alley.


Things Havoc disliked: There are times I wonder if I've seen too many films. I know that's something of a tall claim, given how many movies professional critics go to, but nevertheless, I wonder if a film like this would have been more up my alley if I'd seen it ten years ago. There are movies like this I enjoy, after all, the original Taken was decent, as was Washington's previous MAEWISAMBAKEWTHW movie, the surprisingly good Man on Fire. And yet... this time around, as Washington effortlessly slaughtered, detonated, and massacred his way through what appears to be the entirety of the Russian mafia, I was left wondering what the hell the point of all this was. The killing is decent, but lacks the artistry that would make it its own justification, and without that, the film is precisely what we expected it to be.

There's some inventiveness to the film, yes, the opening fight scene in particular is a lot more patient than I expected it to be, and showcases the hero's skills quite well, but it really never ceases showcasing them throughout the entire movie, long after it has established Washington as a badass, to the point of almost comical invulnerability. If Washington were shown to be getting one over on his enemies by means of wit and intelligence and proper planning (ala Riddick), that would be one thing, but we're just asked to swallow, retroactively, that he read the mind of all of the bad guys every time they laid a trap for him, allowing him to achieve his goal without fail. It gets to the point by the end of the film where I was almost as frustrated as the villain, as this superhuman death machine more or less toyed with his supposedly-lethal adversaries before dispatching them all. Again, I could understand this sort of thing if, perhaps, the point of the film was that the mobsters had gone far beyond the pale, and that Washington wished to torment them as well as kill them, plunging deep into the darker side of revenge. But Washington is so unflappable that nothing poses a threat, not to him, not to those who rely on him, nothing at all. He is a god, dispensing almost perfunctory wrath upon the insects who threaten him. For a hundred and thirty one minutes.

And maybe something could have been salvaged if those who are not invulnerable death machines were menaced effectively, but unfortunately no such luck. Chloe Grace-Moretz, a young actress I've been a huge fan of since the original Kick-Ass, is grossly underutilized as an underage prostitute in bondage to the mob, serving as Washington's obligatory trigger for fatherly violence-instincts. A few early sequences show promise, particularly ones where she, despite her youth and the terrible circumstances around her, shows off her ability to deal with awful situations through resignation and wisdom hard-bought. Yet all-too-quickly, the character is downshifted into a parody of some kind of "vulnerable young girl" complete with sparkling dreams of a singing career, before being summarily shunted off-screen for two-thirds of the movie. Perhaps it's me, perhaps I simply couldn't let my preconceptions go and sit back and enjoy the story before me, but I could not help but think, as the film progressed on, what a wonderfully-refreshing take on the MAEWISAMBAKEWTHW genre it would be if Moretz decided halfway through the film to break out her Hit Girl character again, and team up with Washington to massacre the entire Russian Mafia.


Final Thoughts: Honestly, there's nothing particularly wrong with the Equalizer by the standard of MAEWISAMBAKEWTHW films (yes, I'm sticking with that damned acronym), but then again there's nothing particularly right about it either. It does what it sets out to do, showing us Denzel Washington killing people, without a whole lot of artistry, care, or interest. Maybe I'm just too old for movies like this, or maybe I've seen the MAEWISAMBAKEWTHW done too many times, but I simply need a film to do more than hit the minimum required notes for me to praise it, even when it's a film plowing such a well-worn trail as this. I don't much care usually when a movie is derivative, but it has to bring something to the table to get me to pay attention, and merely failing to suck horribly is not enough.

Final Score: 4.5/10

[frigidmagi]

Ah that's to bad. If you're gonna make a movie about killing, you need some artistry in it or the killing just becomes gore. Or worse.

[General Havoc]

Ah that's to bad. If you're gonna make a movie about killing, you need some artistry in it or the killing just becomes gore. Or worse.

And by worse, you of course mean the death knell of any action film, boredom.

[frigidmagi]

Action movies can be many things... But they absolutely cannot be boring.

[Lys]

Is there any movie that can be boring? Whether it be action, comedy, tragedy, or drama, my being bored means that the film has failed to engage me, and thus failed at its fundamental purpose of entertaining me.

[frigidmagi]

Well my opinion is a Jane Austin based work cannot avoid being boring but that's just me.

[General Havoc]

Is there any movie that can be boring? Whether it be action, comedy, tragedy, or drama, my being bored means that the film has failed to engage me, and thus failed at its fundamental purpose of entertaining me.

No, but some movies can get away with being slow or uneventful. Action movies cannot generally be those things without crossing over into boring. There may be exceptions.

[General Havoc]

Gone Girl

Alternate Title: Genesis 3:16

One sentence synopsis: The wife of a philandering bar owner disappears without a trace, leading to suspicions that he may have murdered her.


Things Havoc liked: "I'm excited to see that new Ben Affleck movie," is one of those statements that I never expected to be saying in all earnestness ten years ago, not in the dog days of films like Gigli or Daredevil. But then we live in a strange world these days, where people speak of things like "Academy Award Winner Matthew McConaughey", and "this year's cinematic masterpiece from Marvel comics", so perhaps I should be less surprised. It is still perhaps saying something that my first thought on hearing about this film was grave concern that Affleck was merely acting in this movie, and not taking on the director's duties, but one takes what one can get when it comes to serious dramatic films with serious dramatic casts.

Gone Girl, based on the book by Gillian Flynn (who also wrote the screenplay), and directed by the incomparable David Fincher, whose resume includes such films as Se7en, Zodiac, Fight Club, The Social Network, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is the first real sign I've seen that the September slump is behind us, and that we've finally entered Oscar Season. Oscar Season, for those who have not been keeping up with my barely-comprehensible ramblings concerning the yearly film calendar, is the third of the three major seasons into which the year is divided, a time between mid-October and the end of December, wherein the studios release their big-ticket Oscar-prospects, the movies they believe and hope will generate awards for them during the award ceremonies that recap the year between January and March. Not every film that comes out around this period qualifies as an Oscarbait film of course, but Gone Girl, with its accomplished cast, its all-star director, and its dramatic, "serious" subject matter, is almost a perfect example thereof. Lest I sound critical however, Oscar Season is a time I look forward to with great anticipation, as all of a sudden the studios disgorge a plethora of excellent prospects before me, and ask only that I, like the rest of the critics, find something in them that we like.

Well I'm always game for seeing the bright side of things. Let's start, as always, with the actors. Ben Affleck, like other former-pretty-boy actors before him, has made the transition from a critical joke to a critical darling mostly by putting his reading glasses on when reviewing scripts, taking on films that offer greater dramatic range while relying on his instinctive charisma to carry him through the role. McConaughey did the same thing when he made his right-turn into relevance, and Affleck, even when not directing, knows exactly how to deliver a performance like this. He plays Nick Dunne, a failed writer who has become something of a layabout in a small town in Missouri, to which he has moved himself and his wife to be closer to his family. Affleck plays the role distantly, like a playboy who is no longer young enough to get away with such antics, and does not seem to know what else he is supposed to transition into for the remainder of his life. His marriage with Amy, his wife who goes missing early in the film, is highly strained, believably in both of their cases, and Affleck does an excellent job of provoking suspicion from both the audience and the rest of the cast without ever transcending the bounds of reason or lacking for a plausible explanation. It's not easy to balance on the edge of a mystery like this, but Affleck is easily up to the challenge, and never once slips back into the bad habits he demonstrated for the first fifteen years or so of his career.

But Affleck is a rank amateur compared to the real revelation of the film, Rosamund Pike, an actress whose resume previously included such "wonderful" films as Die Another Day, Jack Reacher, and Wrath of the Titans, and who is on a completely different level in this film. Describing the various things that Pike does in the movie would be to spoil the entire thing, but her performance here is absolutely electrifying, an order of magnitude beyond anything I have seen of her before. Through all the tribulations that the movie involves her in, Pike manages to portray everything from quotidian concern to frustrated anger to horrific victimization to... well that would be telling. Her performance anchors the entire film, whether in flashbacks to her and Affleck meeting in New York, to more recent flashbacks to their troubles in Missouri, to the events that actually touch the plot off, and with it, she has instantly elevated herself in my mind to the A-list of Hollywood actresses. This is the sort of performance that Oscar nominations are made of, a riveting, twisting role that can make or break the actor or actress in question.

And the good times don't stop there, indeed this movie was a rather stunning revelation for me, not merely because of Pike, but because of a number of different actors for which I've had no use previously, and found one here. One of these actors is Kim Dickens, a main character on HBO's Deadwood (one of the best television shows of all time), who has previously been decidedly underwhelming in everything I've seen her in, but not here. She plays Detective Boney, the only member of the local police force unable to make her mind up instantly about Affleck's guilt or innocence, whose investigation parallels that of others, as the audience tries to piece the truth together. But the one that surprised me the most, unquestionably, was of all people, Tyler Freaking Perry, once described to me as the least-intimidating six-foot-four black man in America. Perry, a purveyor and star of absolutely terrible movies for the last decade or so, here plays the first serious role I've ever seen him attempt (I contrived to miss 2012's Alex Cross), as a high-priced, high-profile defense attorney specializing in media circuses, and to my abject shock, plays the role perfectly, a sober, collected expert who knows precisely how the currents of public opinion and media cycles function, and advises his client on the best way to avoid shipwreck. Perry is not a caricature, nor an exaggerated farce, and the realism with which he portrays the role actually cements the film's central narrative about the facetious gossip-mongering that the rest of the media and legal system is mired in.


Things Havoc disliked: Given the above, and the effusive praise I have lavished upon so many actors of this film at such length, you might expect that I would have little to complain about, and that this movie was one I was preparing to strongly recommend. And indeed I must admit that when I first emerged from the theater and analyzed my feelings on the film in general, that was precisely what I was preparing to do. Normally my first impression from a film proves to be pretty close to my final thoughts, but in this case, I decided to give the film a little time to percolate before making a final decision, so that I might come to terms with some of the more disquieting elements that the movie left within me.

My conclusion? I hated this film.

Everything I said above, praise for Affleck and Pike and Dickens and Perry, all these things I stand by, as the problem with the movie is not the acting. It is not, by and large, the direction, nor the cinematography, the former of which is at least serviceable, the latter of which is expertly-done by long-time Fincher-collaborator Jeff Cronenweth. No, the problem with the film is something much deeper, much more troublesome, something rooted in but not precisely equivalent to the writing. An accusation that all of you know, by now, that I do not make lightly, and in fact almost never make at all. The major problem with this film is, indeed, something I feel fairly uncomfortable even bringing up, knowing as I do how quick I am to reject such statements as issue-questing and axe-grinding when it is made of other films. But the fact remains that the problem with this film is that it is deeply, pervasively, stunningly misogynistic.

You all know me. You all know I do not press that button of all buttons casually. And yet I have no choice here but to hammer it home because this film is staggering in its contempt for women, all women (with a couple customary exceptions) over the course of its narrative. They are shrewish, empathy-less, judgmental harpies. They are evil, conniving, psychopathic murderers. They are twisted monsters disguising themselves effortlessly from the honest, simple, true-hearted men that surround them, whose virtuous, trusting natures prevent them from seeing the webs of iniquity and vitriol that are being spun around them. Not one woman is portrayed this way, but ALL of them, even when their characters must make right-angle turns in order to support this narrative, even when the plot groans under the weight of contrivances just to squeeze that much more evil out of the female species, even then the film is relentless in hammering home the fundamental decrepitude of women as a whole, to the point where my viewing companion suggested that the film was beginning to resemble an MRA propaganda piece, and I was getting flashbacks to St. Bernard's medieval panegyrics denouncing the race of Eve as sinful, duplicitous monsters.

The typical hypocrisies associated with bigotry of any stripe are front and center here. Some women are ditzy or brainless or simply stupid, such as the majority of the Stepford-analogues in the bedroom community that Affleck and Pike are living in, vapid people with shallow interests and a grotesque inability to empathize. A throwaway character early on in the film, a woman who approaches Affleck after he has lost his wife to a violent kidnapping for which he himself is suspected, presumptuously takes a Selfie with him for no reason whatsoever, and then reacts to his requests to delete or at least not share the picture as an inexplicable and creepy request from a selfish dick, informing him that she will share the picture with whoever she wishes and storming off as if wrongfully abused. Later that very image appears on a talk show run by an evil, shrewish Ann-Coulter analogue played by veteran actress Missi Pyle (who I'm sure is a very nice person, but whose misfortune has always been to have a face that naturally screams "bitch"). What benefit does this mystery woman draw from this act? Nothing. She's simply a stupid ditz who ruins Affleck's life for no reason and can't even realize she's done wrong. Similarly Affleck's mother-in-law, a bitter, sniping woman who publicly denounces Affleck any chance she gets, and his mistress (more on that later), a dumb college student who seduces Affleck with her bubble-headed sexiness only to turn around and put on a virgin's cowl when it's time to tearfully denounce him while being manipulated by other women. Yet on the other hand we have other women who are sublimely clever, twisted, masqued murderers and sociopaths, who delight in destroying men's lives for the fun of it, or for the crimes of having paid insufficient adoration to themselves. Women able to construct the most exquisite frame jobs, fake everything from rape to physical abuse, spend years establishing the pieces only to bring the unknowing men down just so that they can have the pleasure of watching them burn. It's not just Affleck this happens to of course, for these are man-eaters, misandrists of a sort that exist only in the depraved fantasies of men who feel themselves wronged. One man, late in the film, admits to having had his life destroyed by a woman who set him up as a rapist for the crime of not committing to her, while another (played by a surprisingly flat Neil Patrick Harris), showers a woman with money and attention, only to be the victim of a hideous crime largely out of convenience. I have literally known men who were falsely accused of sexual assault in real life, something which is vanishingly rare, and even I was unable to simply accept something like this wholeheartedly. In a film that employed ONE of these characters, such as Jennifer Lawrence's sollopsistic passive-aggressive maniac in American Hustle, I would have had no problem. But this film throws in every stereotype they can find, makes up a few more, and then afflicts them all on the thankless, aw-shucks simple man of virtue that is Ben Affleck, and expects us to accept that this is the stuff of real drama.

And maybe this all would have worked in a film that explored the deep-seated hypocrisies of seemingly-normal people, a Peyton Place-style unveiling of the hidden darkness within everyday people, but the movie refuses to play fair, because Affleck, the afflicted man at the center of this tempest, can do no wrong. Sure, he's a shiftless layabout who sponges off his wife's trust fund, but trying to be a writer is hard, guys, and he needs some time to himself. Sure, he throws his wife into a wall in anger, but she probably made that up as part of a Machiavellian plot to get back at him. Sure he, cheats on his wife with a student half his age, but she was just so goddamn sexy that he had no way to control himself! Just ask his twin sister Margo (played by Carrie Coon, whom I mistook until five minutes ago for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World's Aubrey Plaza), who almost alone among the women of the film is portrayed as neither stupid nor conniving, mostly because she has absolutely no reason to exist, either in the script or in the world of the film, save as an adjunct to Affleck's character. She has no life of her own, no family, no boyfriend, no hints of anything else going on except the ability to bear witness to Affleck's travails and fume against his tormentors. At one point late in the film, when asked if she is "with" Affleck, she responds that she was with him before they were born. She exists to complement him, which promotes her to 'honorary guy', something I don't usually mind with female characters, save when that promotion exists purely to distinguish the character in question from the dreaded curse of femininity that otherwise runs through the movie.


Final Thoughts: This review project of mine has been a weird exercise in many ways, but this, for me, is one of the weirdest. I never in my life thought I would wind up denouncing a movie with good acting, excellent cinematography, and at least decent directing (Fincher has a bad habit of stopping the film for ten-minute expo-dumps periodically, but that might be unavoidable considering the subject matter), let alone for reasons such as this, but there are occasions when one must, upon seeing a spade, call it a spade. I know this film has been praised to the skies by every critic known to man. I know it was written by a woman (Gillian Flynn, who also authored the book it was based on). I know David Fincher is a superb director who has done very little wrong in the last fifteen years, and made films of greatness and grandeur, something he will hopefully do again. I know this movie may even show up next March when it comes time to hand out Oscars. But this is my goddamn blog with my goddamn reviews on it and I cannot, and will not praise a movie this badly compromised by a deep-seated sense of misogyny as some kind of daring exploration of the nature of our modern world. I do not require that all men who philander be regarded as satanic and evil, or that all women be virtuous or kind or even sane. But I will not accept a movie that so blatantly gender-codes its roles in such a way and then turns around and tries to pretend to me that it is some sort of deep-rooted mediation on reality and its flaws. If a movie was made this way about men (and there have been some), I and others would be trumpeting outrage to the skies. It is only elementary consistency that leads me to do the same here.

A good movie can be made about any subject, but only if it is made with honesty. This movie is made with cruel and crude simplification and then gathers airs of depth and innovation because of its many virtues of acting and pedigree. I leave it to the other critics this time to praise its glories. For me it is a shallow, ugly thing, that in all honesty, I would simply sooner forget.


Final Score: 3.5/10

[frigidmagi]

If I ran into a guy who was keeping a mistress half his age while married, I don't think I would call him virtuous. But I've been told I'm to morally rigid.

That said Havoc isn't the only person to consider this moviequestionable.

[General Havoc]

I don't like being in a position to have to make these kinds of claims, as I'm usually the first one to roll my eyes at this kind of thing. And I especially don't like placing myself in the company of the Guardian of all people, whose article declares that anyone who defends the film is engaging in "Mansplaining". This instantly disqualifies the entire article from the realm of coherent thought, as that is a term one applies when one wishes to end conversations, not begin them.

Time on the other hand says: "The story of Gone Girl pits a feminist psychopath against a misogynist jerk in what might be the world’s most twisted marriage." This is a load of bullshit. The entire problem with the film is that Affleck's character is NOT a misogynist jerk. Had he been one, I might have accepted the movie more readily, as it would indeed have made the film into a duality between two characters of great moral turpitudes. But the issue is precisely that Affleck is explicitly let off the hook by the film, such that his crimes don't matter while hers do. Moreover to describe the woman in this relationship as "feminist" is to cast horrid aspersions upon the concept of feminism, and that's coming from someone who HATES the term with a passion.

Both of these articles are garbage. That they happen to come to conclusions similar to mine is irrelevant.

[frigidmagi]

They were the first things that came up on google.

[General Havoc]

I'm not criticizing the selection, just responding to what they had to say. I don't like having to do something like this, but it has to be done.

[General Havoc]

The Judge

Alternate Title: Symbolism!!!

One sentence synopsis: A hotshot lawyer returns to his hometown to defend his estranged father, a local judge accused of murdering an ex-defendant.


Things Havoc liked: I've always liked Robert Downey Jr, even back before he was Iron Man. I liked him in things like Air America and A Scanner Darkly and Tropic Thunder and Natural Born Killers, and one of the only negative things I can point to about the Rise of Marvel is that since the advent of this remarkable run of films, we've not gotten to see Downey in much besides the Avengers and the occasional Sherlock Holmes flick. I can't exactly complain, given the result, but when the opportunity arose to see Downey in a more "normal" film, alongside Robert Duvall and Billy Bob Thornton no less, I immediately jumped on it. For all I appreciate Marvel's output and other such blockbusters, there are times I simply want to watch good actors acting at one another, and Oscar season is as good a time as any.

And these are good actors. Robert Downey Jr. in particular is a phenomenal actor, whose role is not all that distinct from his turn in the Iron Man/Avengers films, but that's hardly a complaint. He plays Hank Palmer, an abrasive hotshot attorney from Chicago who fled his small hometown long ago and never looked back. Downey showcases here his patented sardonic wit, a little more abrasive than Tony Stark is ever allowed to be, showering contempt on those less intelligent than he is, convinced that he knows what’s best, for the simple reason that he often does. This kind of character can be hard to swallow, and easily turn into an entitled dick, but the film gets around this with another phenomenal actor, Robert Duvall, playing Hank’s father Joseph, a domineering, moralizing bastard, cantankerous and harsh to all three of his sons, particularly to the one that got away from him and left to form his own life. The dynamic between Downey and Duvall is effectively the movie, which is a fine decision, given the sparks these two are capable of.


Things Havoc disliked: *Groan*

The Judge has a good idea behind it. Duvall and Downey are two actors that could bounce off one another for days. But in order for them to do so, they would need either a script worth a damn, or license to invent their own dialogue. This film supplies them with precisely none of those things.

Oh there’s a script here, of a sort. A script laden with every family-bonding cliché known to man, but a script nonetheless, one that lets Downey and Duvall interact as little as possible in favor of the most ham-fisted symbolism I’ve seen in a while. I’m all in favor of showing rather than telling, but after a certain point of clunkyness, showing is telling, especially when you’re relying on such iron-handed devices as two people facing away from one another on a road in a wide-shot that emphasizes the distance between them, or that oldest of the pretentious old-time-writer’s tricks, a family argument to the backdrop of a raging storm, into which characters stalk angrily the better to frame their emotions. Symbolism works best when done subtly, something to analyze after the fact, a detail in lighting or tone. This has all the subtlety of an anvil dropped off a roof, crude analogies so bluntly framed as to be laughable in their attempt to preserve mystery. When someone is trying to decide whether they should take their father’s place or not, how subtle is it to have him spin his father’s desk chair around, which comes to a rest framed in soft, yellow sunlight, the seat facing the man in question, rocking back and forth invitingly?

But movies have survived thunderous symbolism before. 2011’s Real Steel was barely any more subtle than this, and it made my best-of-the-year list. Unfortunately for The Judge, Real Steel buttressed its anvilicious symbolism with a wonderful cast and a heartfelt, though derivative script. The Judge has several excellent actors as I mentioned before, but it also has Vera Farmiga (far and away the weakest link in Scorcese’s The Departed), a complete waste of a performance from Billy Bob Thornton (whose character is allowed to hint towards an interesting angle, as the prosecuting attorney who sees the opportunity to squash Downey’s frankly arrogant perversions of justice, before being dropped entirely), and worst of all, God’s gift to bad acting himself, Vincent Freaking D’Onofrio, a man who has made many movies, and was good in only two of them, one as a marine suffering a psychotic break, and one as an alien faccimile of a human being. As in all previous occasions in which I’ve had the misfortune to encounter D’Onofrio (Kill the Irishman, Escape Plan), he is more or less a waste of time here, playing Downey’s older brother, a former baseball star whose career was ruined in a car accident Downey caused. Once again, a potentially interesting idea with which nothing is ever done, though in fairness that's less his fault and more the script's. Neither he, nor their mentally challenged brother Dale (Lincoln's Jeremy Strong) has a character at all, being used instead for more goddamn symbolism, such as the home movies of the car wreck that destroyed D'Onofrio's career which Dale "accidentally" plays (why exactly are there home movies of the car wreck spliced into a movie about them as children?) during a storm, just so it can afford Duvall the opportunity to break things and rage at the heavens.

Ultimately that's the real problem. There are neither characters nor a real story in this film, there is just a concept, saccharine as it is, and nothing more, and the characters (along with everything else) exist solely to symbolize things within it. Farmiga, for instance, plays Downey's love interest, who has no character of her own, merely serving to "symbolize" the bucolic existence he has passed up. His daughter, played by the same little girl from Elysium (I remember a child performance that bad) serves to "symbolize" his innocence or some damn thing. Even the final confrontation with his father comes, for no reason other than to symbolize even more, at the pinnacle of the old man's murder trial, culminating in a schmaltzy "I love you son" series of epiphanies that I would wager most courtrooms probably would not allow on the witness stand.

But boy does it sure symbolize a lot...


Final Thoughts: The Judge is a sad waste of time, not merely for me, but for the actors who wrongly thought it was an opportunity to make a good film this Oscar season. I cannot say that director Jeremy Strong, formerly of Fred Claus, and co-writer of such masterpieces as Jack the Giant Slayer and R.I.P.D. really plays below par here, given the above resume, but this film does not elevate his name into one I will be looking for when it comes time to select something to watch. But as to this dreary, sappy, over-long piece of kludged-together gunk, my only hope is that it will soon be forgotten thanks to the flood of excellent films I have to assume are coming just around the corner. The alternative would be for the entirety of Oscar Season to be comprised of nothing but the kinds of terrible disappointments that have filled my last two weeks. And there's no way that can continue forever...

...

... right?


Final Score: 3/10

[LadyTevar]

The Wikipedia "Plotline" is two paragraphs, and so simplistic I wouldn't watch it at all

[General Havoc]

Fury

Alternate Title: The Crucible

One sentence synopsis: A young typist is drafted as a replacement tank crewman, and joins a veteran crew during the bloody, bitter end of World War 2.


Things Havoc liked: War movies are their own genre with their own rules, and over the years I've seen spectacular ones (Das Boot, Platoon, Lawrence of Arabia), and terrible ones (The Thin Red Line, Pearl Harbor, War Horse). One of the things I've noticed though, something which makes me nervous every time a new War film is in the offering, is that while there's a wide gulf of quality between an excellent war film and a terrible one, most war films look more or less identical when reduced to thirty-second trailers. As my policy in selecting films is to consult neither other reviews nor industry buzz, this poses something of a problem, as the trailers are the only things I have to go on besides my own intuition to make the selection. And to be perfectly frank, insofar as it's possible to differentiate one war movie from another via trailers, Fury's were not encouraging, being comprised of nothing but the usual "rookie joins the war and becomes a man while winning the respect of his comrades in the crucible of war" jargon that is more or less the plot of two thirds of all war movies ever made. As a result of all this, I very nearly decided to skip Fury entirely, figuring that the film had nothing new to show me beyond a tired, cliche-ridden plot, and it was only a lack of viable choices (Dracula Untold was the best of my alternate options) that led me to reluctantly see what this film had to offer.

Well I was right. Fury does have a tired, cliche-ridden plot. And it is awesome.

Let me be clear, I do not mean the film is awesome in the sense of something like the Expendables, I use the term in its strict, literal definition, in that Fury, contrary to all my expectations walking in, is a thing which produces awe. It is a shattering, stylized, tremendously well-made film, acted, directed, shot, and scored beautifully, one of the finest renditions of the "rookie joins the war" plot I have ever seen, and a well-deserved reminder that one should not judge a film by its one-paragraph synopsis. Writer/Director David Ayer, a veteran of cop films such as Training Day, Dark Blue, and one of my bigger surprises from 2012, End of Watch, has outdone himself, producing a war film that deserves to be remembered in conjunction with the finer examples of the genre, and doing so with a throwaway plot, questionable actors, and a subject (the mechanical art of driving and commanding tanks) that does not lend itself well to screen. Tanks, of course, are imposing, highly-cinematic objects. Five men crammed inside a metal box peering through peepholes for two hours are generally not. But then this film is anything but general.

It is the end of World War Two, and fanatical die-hard holdouts from the German Volksturm (People's militia) and SS (Irredeemable shitheads) fight hopelessly on against the all-conquering tide of Allied might and steel now blanketing Germany. In the midst of the savage fights that end the war, Sgt. "Wardaddy" Collier (Brad Pitt) commands the five-man crew of his M4A3E8 Sherman medium tank, "Fury". I've always regarded Brad Pitt as a very good actor when he's not playing a sardonic pretty boy (at age 50, he can still manage to do as much), but this is not his first war film, and with an exception or two (last year's World War Z for instance), the results have been pretty dismal (Troy, Inglorious Basterds). Here however, he is anything but, a consummate, professional non-com, veteran for so long that he no longer even needs vocalize what he's thinking about the war or his circumstances. When he stands at a depot and is ordered to do foolish things by a fresh-faced Lieutenant, he does not curse his luck in being saddled with a fool, but simply rolls his eyes, for this is war, and stupidity is something he has long-since gotten used to. And yet the war has hardened him as well, the mechanical act of waging brutal warfare for this long having convinced him that men must be blooded in order to survive at all. Willing to kill helpless prisoners in full view of thousands of men and yet equally willing to reprimand his men for a misplaced insult, his dual nature manifests in a lengthy sequence midway through the movie where he and his rookie assistant driver (who we'll get to) enter the apartment of two young German women, the results of which we spend nearly half an hour building towards, unsure if he's going to rape them, shoot them, ask them to make him some eggs, or some combination of the three.

And sharing our confusion is Private Normal Ellison, played by Logan Lerman (Percy Jackson to you YA fans out there), a young man I've been highly impressed with in everything from 3:10 to Yuma to The Perks of Being a Wallflower, to Noah, one of the strangest movies I saw this year, wherein he was very good playing Noah's rebellious middle son. He's better here. Eschewing the usual "young kid who must earn respect from his fellows" tropes that these sorts of movies are well supplied with, Lerman instead plays his character like a sane person dropped without warning (having been trained as a typist before being sent to the front by a paperwork snafu) into some kind of Dantean hell. The war he is plunged into is brutal beyond comprehension, and he reacts as anyone might, with disbelief, undisguised horror, blind panic, and pure, adrenaline-fueled rage. The semi-reflexive attempts by his new crewmen to denigrate his inexperience and to force him into the necessarily brutal mindset of the war itself he regards, not as terrible trials to be overcome, but rank insanity, screaming that no amount of forced atrocity will "make him a man" and instantly responding to the customary threats ("shoot the prisoner or I shoot you") that those issuing the threats should shoot him. It helps Lerman's case that the crew of dispassionate war veterans around him are all excellent as well, particularly End of Watch's Michael Pena, and most astonishing of all, none other than Transformers and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull's Shia LeBeouf, an actor I assumed I would never have any use for in any context whatsoever, and who in this film might actually be the best actor in the entire thing! His character, like the others, is not that new (a bible-spouting born-again Christian), but the weariness with which he plays the character, and the casual manner in which he and the others bounce off one another is staggeringly good, done as real as any portrayal of these sorts of classical archetypes that I've ever encountered.

But it's the style of the film, particularly the cinematography and the score, that really push this movie over the top. We're all used to exciting battle sequences in drab olive-and-brown ruins, but never before have the ruins of Europe been this dreary, nor the battle sequences this awe-striking. Tanks deploy tracer rounds of a thousand technicolors, lighting up the sky like electrical storms, lustily eradicating everything in their path with clouds of incandescent white phosphorous or eruptions of volcanic shellfire. Anti-tank shells and machine gun bullets streak past like the colorful lasers from a Star Wars movie, ricocheting in all directions in clouds of sparks or violently ripping armored vehicles apart like volcanic eruptions. A particularly memorable shot involves the contrails of thousands of barely-visible high-altitude bombers, silhouetted against the leaden skies, carpeting the vault of the heavens in formation like a phalanx of angels as a handful of ragged German warplanes rise to offer futile battle. The footage of war in this film is horrible, bloody stuff, and yet it is gorgeous, even memorizing, a reaction made even stronger by an ethereal electro-choral score from veteran composer Steven Price, whose work last year on Gravity I praised immoderately, and must again here. Eschewing all traditional war movie themes, the military marches, the pattering drums, or the customary orchestral stings, Price gives us a score that sounds like the electrified version of a Baroque Requiem or Fugue, an accompaniment not for Band of Brothers, but for the Last Judgment. The entire effect borders on the very edge of magical realism, as if the combatants were locked in some kind of purgatorial hell, doomed to fight a bitter, bloody war until all the seas run dry.



Things Havoc disliked: Staggering as the style of this film is, there were moments when my rational brain, and more particularly my historical brain began coughing and asking pointed questions. One of these comes early on, when Pitt's character "inducts" Lerman's into the brotherhood of misery and brutality by physically forcing him to commit a war crime. That American troops committed war crimes in WWII I accept, of course, but this one is committed in full view of hundreds and hundreds of witnesses, and involves action-by-proxy that can only be understood in the context of Pitt being a literal psychopath, ala Tom Berenger in Platoon, yet the movie soon makes it abundantly clear that he is nothing of the sort. Why then this grotesque display of sociopathy, one so absurd that I can safely say nothing of the sort ever took place in the US army during the war? Perhaps the intention is to signal the duality of Pitt's character, but there is, I'm afraid, a difference between duality and multiple personalities.

There is also the question of the battles. Though they are, in the main, scrupulously accurate (the best involves a fight between a squadron of Sherman tanks and a fearsome German Tiger I, portrayed in the film by the only functioning Tiger left in the world, and resolved approximately the way a battle between a Tiger and four Shermans would probably go), the film's final engagement seems to drop all pretense of realism in favor of pure spectacle. I don't mind pure spectacle at all, especially when it's done this well, but this is a historical war film, or at least it has been masquerading as one. For the movie to suddenly turn into a mook fight at the end is rather disappointing, as the enemies our heroes face are so absolutely overwhelming that, well-disposed towards the film as I was, and knowledgeable about the war as I am, I was absolutely unable to construct a rationale for why any of them remained alive for more than about forty seconds, given the situation they were in and the enemies they were faced with, nor was I able to construct one for where the Germans managed to derive this massive, well-trained, and dangerously lethal force mere weeks before the final collapse of the Third Reich, at a time when the US Army was overrunning Germany at flanking speed, and the Air Force despairing over having literally run out of targets in the entire country. Perhaps I simply am too close to the source material here, but my ability to sit back and admire the final sequence was hamstrung by this problem, to the point where it cheapened most of the actions, heroic and otherwise, that the characters were going through. It does not make you seem heroic if you appear to have an invulnerability cheat code on, or if your enemies appear to be monolithically stupid.


Final Thoughts: Fury is a wonderful film, a brilliantly-acted, stylish, gorgeous war epic, which neither glamorizes the war, nor wallows unnecessarily in the horrors of it (which is not the same thing as not wallowing in them at all). Indeed, such criticisms as I have seem almost unfair in retrospect, as I'm not certain the intention wasn't more artistic than accurate, that Ayer did not seek to make a film that encompassed the platonic essence of war, using World War Two as its medium. Some scenes may stretch credulity, even within their own context, but it is still one of the most complete war movies I've seen in a decade, a lustrous achievement that I am very glad I had the opportunity to see.

My track record of late has not been the best one, and last week I nervously wondered if there was any way out of the mire of crappy movies that I seemed to be stuck in. How fitting that in the middle of Oscar season, typically a time for tense dramas and soulful biopics, I found salvation in a movie about the beauty and horror that comes when fifty-ton war machines battle one another with flaming darts and blossoming shells.

Oh and it turns out that Shia LeBeouf can act. Who would have ever guessed?


Final Score: 8/10

[Lys]

Oh and it turns out that Shia LeBeouf can act. Who would have ever guessed?

I always figured he could act given a good script and direction, especially the latter. I don't think he ever had a director able to push him in a direction other than utter mediocrity before. Probably also helps he's older, most people do eventually mature, even in Hollywood.

Oh, also, the Sherman was 34 short tons. In fact, most allied tanks in the Western Front were below 40 tons, the only exception I know offhand is the 46 ton M26 Pershing.

[LadyTevar]

(the best involves a fight between a squadron of Sherman tanks and a fearsome German Tiger I, portrayed in the film by the only functioning Tiger left in the world, and resolved approximately the way a battle between a Tiger and four Shermans would probably go),

All four Shermans in flames and Tiger barely touched? The Sherman was built to fit on a train, not built to stand up to a battle where the enemy shoots back. As I recall, someone childed me for having a Transformer in WWII as a Sherman, and quipped that Cybertronian Armor might be the ONLY thing to make a Sherman a viable tank.

And, cause I have to know... did the German ladies make breakfast for them?

[Lys]

No, no, it ends with all but one of the Shermans in flames, along with the Tiger, the surviving Sherman having killed it by shooting it in the back. Alternatively, they retreated behind a hill and called in an artillery strike, hopefully killing or disabling it, but definitely forcing the Tiger's crew to button-up, allowing them to flank it and kill it. Anyway, Sherman had issues but it gets a worse rap than it deserves. Really, its main problems were low velocity main gun, poor ammunition stowage, and high profile. The first of those two issues were quickly fixed, and the third wasn't crippling. In the movie they're using Easy Eight model Shermans, which were good contenders with the T-34-85s for the title of best medium tank of the war.