At the Movies with General Havoc

[General Havoc]

My question is "Was Dominic West doing his natural accent, or his very bad B-more accent from the Wire that he regularly would slip out of?"

Best I can tell, he was using his natural accent for this one, though I admit, I didn't have a problem with his accent in the Wire.

Who would you have cast for John Carter, Havoc?

First pick that comes to mind? Chris Helmsworth, from Thor. He still looks the part of an adventure hero (as distinct from an action hero) and can actually pull off the material given. There's probably others I could come up with if I thought about it, but Taylor Kitsch just isn't right for this or any other leading role as an actor.

Plus, my understanding was that John Carter was supposed to be a 1920s dashing cavalier-swordsman, not a morose anti-hero who has to be "softened" over the course of the film. Errol Flynn, not Humphrey Bogart.

Another matter that occurs to me, having now had time to think the film over, is that while the overall design of the film was very good, Mars didn't look like Mars, in that it wasn't red. Surely it wouldn't have been hard to turn the deserts of Utah into something a little more alien-looking? A red background filter would have been enough. This isn't supposed to be yet another ride through Monument Valley, we're on Mars! It just seems like a wasted opportunity.

[Josh]

First time I watched The Wire I didn't even notice. But somewhere along the way in the second watch I saw the video of him slipping, and after that I noticed that he does it pretty much every time McNulty's excited.

It doesn't bother me, it's just funny. Now Idris Elba, he never slips once so far as I noticed. Made it pretty jarring when I saw an interview later, kind of like Jamie Bamber and Galactica.

[Stofsk]

Another matter that occurs to me, having now had time to think the film over, is that while the overall design of the film was very good, Mars didn't look like Mars, in that it wasn't red. Surely it wouldn't have been hard to turn the deserts of Utah into something a little more alien-looking? A red background filter would have been enough. This isn't supposed to be yet another ride through Monument Valley, we're on Mars! It just seems like a wasted opportunity.

I haven't seen the film in question but this point caught my eye. Mars isn't really red, unless you and I are thinking of different shades of the colour. Mars at most looks like a rusty sort of desert.

[General Havoc]

I haven't seen the film in question but this point caught my eye. Mars isn't really red, unless you and I are thinking of different shades of the colour. Mars at most looks like a rusty sort of desert.

Perhaps not, but it's sure a hell of a lot more Red than Utah is. The movie portrays Mars as looking exactly like an Earth desert, without even the slightest tinge of color shift.

Besides, this is a movie wherein Mars has liquid water in rivers and lakes on the surface of the planet, a breathable atmosphere (at Earth pressures), and an abundance of native fauna and civilizations. They were hardly going for rigid adherence to the facts. Every five-year-old knows that Mars is the "Red planet". They couldn't have at least tinted the film?

[LadyTevar]

Do you want to bitch about how they're wearing clothing too? Most Martians just wear the Metal they win from their victories.

[frigidmagi]

He never read the books Tev.

[General Havoc]

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Alternate Title: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (seriously, you expect me to come up with something better than that?)

One sentence synopsis: A biologist and a project manager try to help a Yemeni Sheik bring salmon fishing to his home country.


Things Havoc liked: Independent film will be my salvation. When the doldrums are in full swing and the theaters stuffed with utter garbage, it is independent film that makes an experiment like this bearable. And popping up out of nowhere this year was a little film with a title so absurd that I sort of had to go and see it. Lighthearted comedies are not my usual fare, I know, but bear with me here. The alternative was 21 Jump Street.

Half political satire (a genre I'm lukewarm on), half romantic comedy (a genre I cordially hate), this movie is wickedly funny, particularly in the former case. Ewan McGregor (last seen being boring as hell in Beginners) plays a salmon expert working in some forgotten corner of the British government, trapped in a loveless marriage without realizing it. His counterpart, Emily Blunt (last seen opposite Matt Damon in The Adjustment Bureau), plays a woman hired to oversee a project that appears, on its face, to be insane, and upon further close study, to be even more insane. As romantic leads go, the arc these characters go through is nothing special, they hate one another at first and grow to love one another etc. That said, McGregor and Blunt are excellent in these roles (something not always true of McGregor), and particularly in the beginning of the film, sell the archetypes they are given flawlessly. What really pushes them over the boring threshold and into interesting characters however is the influence of the two real driving forces in the movie, the Sheik himself, and the Minister.

The Minister in question, the best character in the movie, is played by Kristin Scott Thomas as a cynical press officer to the British prime minister who latches onto the Salmon project as a means of generating good will between the UK and the Arab World. Thomas is flat out hilarious in every scene, playing the character like a partially-crazy control freak who is half again smarter than everyone else in the British government, and knows it all too well. The sort of character who insults their bosses at great length, confident that their boss won't get the joke. Though there's no doubt parallels to be made, the character isn't a particular pastiche of anyone (at least nobody I'm familiar with), as the point here is simple humor. Meanwhile, the Sheik, played by Egyptian actor Amr Waked (of Syriana), almost manages to convince the audience that a man might actually seek to do something like this. A pro-Western philosophical man who uses an outsized infrastructure project as an excuse to indulge in his hobby at home, he never quite gets across why he would dump this much money into a project this insane, but he manages to infer many of the reasons through his acting.

For a film that involves terrorism, death, political assassination, natural disaster, and spin doctoring, the film never gets morose or bogged down in moroseness. A lot of the humor is implied or observational, funny moments being elicited from shot construction or a piece of furniture. The direction (by Lasse Hallström, most of whose other films have been middling to awful) is this time sure and competent. The pacing is excellent, never letting the film drag too much in message or tragedy, intercutting hilarious sequences from back in Britain where the press, the government, and the officials who blend the two seem to be perpetually engaged in scheming against one another.



Things Havoc disliked: The story does get a bit absurd at points, particularly when terrorist assassins are infiltrating private estates in the Highlands of Scotland to shoot people. One can accept a certain level of absurdity in comedies of course, but the concept of the assassination is not played for laughs (though the resolution of it definitely is). There are several other sequences similar to this, where a plot point that seems ludicrous, even in a story about fishing salmon in the Middle East, is presented without actual comic purpose (the engineers from China come to mind).

But more important than the above is the formula of the romantic comedy element in this film. I don't object to the use of a formula here, as the basic formula is well executed. My objection is the "crisis" that the characters go through, in the form of Emily Blunt's boyfriend. Tom Mison (who plays the boyfriend) does a fine job, the issue is how he is inserted and re-inserted into the plot, something I can't describe without providing massive spoilers, but involves one of the characters acting in a way that would unquestionably get her beaten with a pipe wrench were she to do this in real life (and on national TV no less). It's transparently inserted into the story to provide a forced "crisis" between our two main characters, and contributes to why the last third or so of the film is the weakest.



Final Thoughts: But ultimately, you have to judge comedies, and particularly romantic comedies by different standards, and that is what I must do here. The movie is flat out funny, and that's kind of all you can ask a movie like this to be. It's not a laugh riot like some farces I've seen, but it maintains a generally funny tone throughout that elevates it above the pedestrian formula and last-third issues. As such, if you're fortunate enough to have an independent cinema near you, it might prove a better time than the rest of the dreck available.

Final Score: 7.5/10

[General Havoc]

The Hunger Games

Alternate Title: Battle Royale with Cheese

One sentence synopsis: A teenaged girl from a poor region must fight 23 other teenagers to the death for the pleasure of an oppressive government.


Things Havoc liked: Jennifer Lawrence is fast becoming one of my favorite actresses. After an incredible performance in Winters' Bone (which garnered her an oscar), and another amazing one in X-men First Class (where she actually made me give a damn about Mystique), Lawrence here plays the title role of Katniss Everdeen, a teenager in what I assume to be Appalachia who volunteers for the Battle-Royale-esque Hunger Games to spare her younger sister. The movie rests entirely on her shoulders, more or less, and she carries it off with her. Despite being 21 and playing 16, she looks the part and acts the part, helped by the fact that her character clearly has had to grow up very fast in a dystopian, poverty-stricken world that appears to have regressed to the early 1900s. She's not a "designated action star", but when she fights people or shoots them with a bow, we believe it's her doing it, and the movie wisely never makes her do anything that breaks our suspension of disbelief.

The rest of the cast meets her highly-set standard quite handily. Stanley Tucci turns in a hilarious (and vaguely disturbing) role as a talk show host, and Woody Harrelson is hilarious as a former victor of the Hunger Games assigned to whip Katniss into shape. Donald Sutherland, playing the obligatory Donald Sutherland role of the President of the Sovereign Evil People's Evil Republic of Evil, brings his usual grandfatherly charm to a role that is actually fairly menacing, Elizabeth Banks plays an out-of-touch frilly shill with such verve that I was actually impressed, and none other than Lenny Kravitz manages a decent turn as Katniss' 'image' consultant for the all-important sponsorships that accompany the games. Finally, Lawrence (and Katniss') co-star is Peeta, played by Josh Hutcherson, whom I've literally never seen in anything good, but who actually breaks the trend here. He plays a normal kid selected for this insane competition, who has no chance of winning and knows it, but does largely whatever he has to in order to just make it through.

The movie is hardly subtle in its gradations of the world. Katniss and her people are dirt-poor coal miners from what I assume to be Appalachia, while the citizens of the Capital district (somewhere in the Rockies, I believe) look like a cross between Studio 54 and Versailles. The names of the District 12ers are either plants or traditional rural names (Primrose, Haymitch, Gale) while those of the Capital denizens are Roman (Cinna, Seneca, Coriolanus, Cato, Caesar). There's a very much bread-and-circuses feel attributed to the Capital (its' very name is "Panem"), with characters who witness or even participate in these somewhat monstrous events not from cruelty but from simple ignorance and decadence. It's not what I'd call nuanced, but it does the job.

Despite the trailers, action is not really the focus of this film, and yet when it does happen, the action is decent enough. Much of it is shot in faded-sound, a mechanic I'm seeing more and more of and hope doesn't become overused, with strategic shakes of the camera or blurring effects (this is how you're supposed to use shaky-cam, guys) to mute the violent fact that we're watching kids killing kids. Nobody transforms into a superman at any point, and when people get hurt, it freaking hurts, even if the healing salve that the characters apply several times does seem a bit too effective. Much of the movie is spent simply with tracking, maneuvering, walking, or hiding in the forest, which I suppose is reasonable enough. Were I trapped in a wooded arena wherein 24 people were meant to fight to the death, I'd probably lay low and wait for the numbers to come down too.



Things Havoc disliked: I hate to sound like a teenager, but this movie could really have used more action. I don't mind a cerebral film, nor one that eschews kung fu in a case like this, but the vast majority of the action in this film takes place off-screen, a decision I suspect was made to earn the film a PG-13 rating. It's not that I want Katniss to brutally murder more people, but the film is supposed to be about the brutalization of children and the attempt to hold onto common decency in a setting like this, and allowing Katniss to get away almost clean (which it does) renders that drama inert. There is a sequence where she pairs up with a much younger girl who saves her from a swarm of mutated hornets (don't ask), and who appears to look to her as a protector, and the entire time the audience is left thinking that, by the rules of the game, these two are going to be forced to kill each other. The movie (of course) sidesteps the question, but in doing so, robs the material of the drama that it inherently possesses. The only people Katniss ever actually has to kill are 'designated bad kids' who are generally in the immediate process of doing evil, which results in the film softballing its own hard, brutal premise.

On a slightly less metaphysical note though, the movie is quite long (almost two and a half hours), and while I didn't feel that was too much, I did feel that it didn't make good use of its time. More time spent with the weird and interesting society of Panem would have been nice, as opposed to yet another hike through the woods. Don't get me wrong, I know the Games themselves are the focus here, but we can only watch shots of people staring apprehensively at the trees for so long before we begin to get bored. The strange, facile, decadent world of Panem is so well-crafted that I was left wanting to see more from it, to find out if the majority of its citizens are evil, ignorant, or simply (and most interestingly) have a set of social morals that is simply alien to our own. It would also have been nice to establish some of the other contestants better. Gestures are made in the direction that the other kids, even the "evil" other kids, are just kids who are doing what they feel they have to in a situation that terrifies them all out of their wits. More of that would have aided the dramatic weight of the film more than the fourth shot of Katniss tying herself to the top of a tree to sleep.



Final Thoughts: Based on a YA trilogy of books (unread by me), the Hunger Games seems to have done well enough at the Box Office to merit sequels, and I can't say I disagree with that judgment based on the quality of the film. While I would have liked to see more of certain elements and less of others, the film itself is well-structured, acted, and shot, and Lawrence is a very believable and likeable heroine (even if her Appalachian accent is about as pronounced as my own). Though I wasn't as rapturous about it as some people I've talked to, I did quite like this film, and I would be interested in seeing where the series goes next. In an age where YA books have spawned such movie series as Twilight, I suppose one should count one's blessings.

Final Score: 7/10

[frigidmagi]

Better the Hunger Games then Twilight, on that we can agree on.

[Josh]

Better the __________ then Twilight, on that we can agree on.

Other words that fill in that blank include bamboo torture, elevator music, and Jerry Lewis telethons.

[General Havoc]

Better the __________ then Twilight, on that we can agree on.

Other words that fill in that blank include bamboo torture, elevator music, and Jerry Lewis telethons.

Truer words were never spoken.

[General Havoc]

Footnote

Alternate Title: Grumpy Old Jews

One sentence synopsis: The undistinguished academic father of a distinguished academic son mistakenly receives his son's prestigious award.



Things Havoc liked: What a strange film this is.

Billed, or at least masquerading as a comedy from the trailers, what we have here is a quirky, psychological portrait of two men, a father and son played by Shlomo Bar Aba and Lior Ashkenazi. The former plays a man who is simply neurotic, a philologist of such extreme academic focus as to test the credulity of even a Jewish academic. This is a man who feels his life's work is validated by a single footnote in an obscure journal, and who feels no shame in publicly denigrating anyone, including his own successful son, who doesn't meet his arbitrary definitions for scholarship. Bar Aba's performance is seething and bitter, a solopsistic bastard who never does anything specific that one could call out, but nevertheless leaves his contempt for everyone around him slathered all over everything he touches. Though I would not call him comedic, his is probably the best performance in the movie.

But only slightly less good is Lior Ashkenazi as the younger, more successful Professor Shkolnik. Much less insane than his father, he spends the first half of the film trying to convince the governing authorities to grant the prize to his father and the second half regretting it. The first half is his better work, as the movie wisely does not make him out to be an asshole or arrogant about his success. We see him fight for his father in the face of men who want to give him awards, and laud his father's accomplishments before crowds of dignitaries at ceremonies in his honor. The elder Shkolnik may be an asshole, but he is this man's father, and it shows.

I described the film as "quirky" a moment ago, and that's a reasonable descriptor for the filming style. The characters of these two professors are explained to us in a series of vignettes, complete with graphical presentation and subtitles. It works pretty well for what it is. Moreover while the movie is not a comedy, it does have moments of levity, particularly a hilarious sequence with the prize committee and their meeting room. Without ever saying a word about it, the film draws attention to the pettiness and absurdity of the posturing academicians in their incredibly narrow fields. If only more of the film could have been taken up with such material, I would have liked it better.



Things Havoc disliked: But the base fact is that most of the film is taken up with sequences, the purpose of which are wholly opaque to me, even after a week's reflection.

I've seen slower movies than this, but not many. And while nothing in the film is done incompetently, the fact is that sequences that should take thirty seconds require six times as long due to the need to apply the proper "style" to them. The father's revelation, the son's descent into jealousy, all of these themes are perfectly workable, but the montages that accompany them seem to be moving much less fast than the brains of the audiences, and we are left sitting there, having figured out fifteen seconds into a montage what is going to happen, and then waiting for six minutes for it to actually finish. When this happens multiple times in a film, it becomes old rapidly.

More seriously however, the problem with this film is that Bar Aba does his job a bit too well. The elder Professor Shkolnik is such an unlikeable bastard that we start to wonder how anyone, even his own son, can possibly put up with his bullshit. The man visibly seethes with jealousy of his son, contemptuously dismissing all of his accomplishments and mocking the very notion of being a teacher ("Philologist!" he screams to himself, insulted). Having finally won the award, he turns around and eviscerates his son (and most of the rest of academia) in the press for being lesser, corrupted, charlatans, in language that would drive theology professors to reach for their knives. I have literally had college professors threaten to commit vehicular homicide against my person for lesser slanders than this, and the fact that nobody ever calls Bar Aba to account makes everyone involved seem masochistic, stupid, or both.

Finally, without spoiling too much, the entire last section of the film, intended I believe to be ambiguous, is not. A movie such as Inception can get away with trickery in their endings, because of the care and time established to permit multiple points of view that can be paid off logically. Despite what some might think, there is actually a difference between being ambiguous, and between being lazy. Telling the audience a story is the job of the film-maker, and making them do all the work in a situation wherein the audience does not have the evidence necessary to infer it for themselves is a dereliction of the film-maker's duties. One risks at such times falling into a situation where the audience begins to suspect that the film ended where it did not because the story was finished, nor because the filmmaker had crafted it to end there, but because the writers could not figure out what they wanted to happen next.



Final Thoughts: Most movies I see get a little better in my memory after a few days. This one did not. It's hard to illustrate exactly why, as nobody in it is bad, nor is the story naturally uncompelling. But the behaviors of the characters are at such odds with one another, and the filmmaker is allowed to meander on to a forced conclusion in a way that I found fundamentally dis-satisfying. Perhaps there is a cultural element at work here, and that audiences in Israel are accustomed to interacting with the stories they are shown in a different manner. But here in the States, to my mind, there was an element to this movie that simply left me feeling like I had missed something fundamental.


Final Score: 5.5/10

[frigidmagi]

I have literally had college professors threaten to commit vehicular homicide against my person for lesser slanders than this,

I gotta ask, what does it take to get a professor to threaten you with wheeled death? Because I've done hatchet jobs on professors favorite authors and they don't blink. I have kindly suggested that their heads may be wedged in a darker part of their anatomy and there were no snarls (in that one, I think the professor knew I had a point, he was trying to armchair general the Afghan war and did not take Iraq into account). I have never slurred a professor on his personal life but that would be unprofessional and shocking as it may be I do try to be professional... Try.

[Josh]

I have literally had college professors threaten to commit vehicular homicide against my person for lesser slanders than this,

I gotta ask, what does it take to get a professor to threaten you with wheeled death? Because I've done hatchet jobs on professors favorite authors and they don't blink. I have kindly suggested that their heads may be wedged in a darker part of their anatomy and there were no snarls (in that one, I think the professor knew I had a point, he was trying to armchair general the Afghan war and did not take Iraq into account). I have never slurred a professor on his personal life but that would be unprofessional and shocking as it may be I do try to be professional... Try.

We had an instructor melt down and tell a guy he needed a good whuppin' a few weeks back. In front of the whole class, no less.

On the one hand, yeah, dude is kind of an overgrown brat. On the other hand, she's an idiot who lost the class ages before that.

I've never had any professors verbalize death threats at me, though I know good and well that I've offended a couple to the point where they'd probably applaud my fiery demise.

That was back in the day. These days I generally get along much better and ignore the idiots, with an exception here or there.

[Josh]

...still don't really know why that Spanish prof hated me so. It is a mystery.

[General Havoc]

I had a History professor in college with whom I had many philosophical and political disagreements. Given that his class was essentially "why every conservative in the history of the United States has been a racist, puppy-kicking rapist of women," he and I did not get along well. When I went to drop his class he informed me that if I did not alter my political opinions, he would run me over with his car.

This from a man who commuted to work every week by private jet.

[White Haven]

...Now I'm picturing a Learjet cruising along at about a half-meter altitude for the express purpose of taking you out at the knees. Skyrage?

[Josh]

Reactionary liberalism is great.

"I hate hate!"

I sometimes wonder who Alinsky would be agitating against in this day and age, or if he'd just throw up his hands and go get a beer.

[General Havoc]

The Raid: Redemption

Alternate Title: Ass-kicking, The Game: The Movie

One sentence synopsis: An Indonesian SWAT officer must fight his way through an apartment complex filled with the minions of an evil drug lord.



Things Havoc liked: There is a part of me that appreciates the premise of a movie like this. One man is required for arbitrary reasons to beat the hell out of an entire army of bad guys using only his guns, melee weapons, and martial art fighting skills. A movie that has no pretensions of being anything except precisely what it is: a showcase for violence in the most cinematic style conceivable. There is a place in my heart for this sort of film, and I went into it expecting to see awesomeness.

The Raid is an Indonesian production, designed to showcase the panoply of indigenous martial arts known as Pencak Silat, a catch-all term for a series of martial arts practiced throughout the Indonesian islands. I can't say that I can tell the difference between Silat and other south-east-asian martial arts, but then I don't suppose I need to. Indo-chinese martial arts are infamous for their brutal, vicious deadliness, with many limbs being snapped in horrible, acrobatic fashions. This movie provides more than enough opportunities to showcase Silat in all its gory glory, as our hero proceeds from assault rifles to guns to melee weapons to bare fists, destroying a metric horde of enemies in every conceivable manner. Action sequences are varied and high-energy, showcasing the skills of our hero (Iko Uwais) over those of his sufficiently dastardly enemies. If Uwais is attempting to make it as an action movie star, this film should give him plenty of bragging rights, for he definitely comes across as a sufficiently bad dude here.

Of course a hero is nothing if not pitted against sufficiently nasty antagonists, and this movie establishes several excellent ones, particularly the inventively-named "Mad Dog" (Yayan Ruhian), a reasonably small man who exhibits terrifying skill at demolishing those people who cross his path. Several other antagonists, including a terrifying-looking man with a machete whose name I have been unable to determine, serve as excellent foils for our heroes efforts to smash his way through every floor of the run-down apartment building. All of these men perform stunt-work that is truly impressive, and succeed in selling the ruthless, brutal violence that the movie uses as its raison-d'etre.



Things Havoc disliked: You may have noticed that I didn't mention the plot above. The reason for that isn't what you think.

A movie like this is not going to be plot-heavy. The plot exists as a vehicle for fight sequences of greater or lesser length, and is generally dispensed with. Many martial arts films actually take pride in this fact, producing advertising that hinges on the notion of having a complete, 90+ minute film without any of that boring plot stuff to get in the way. Walking into this movie, I felt as though I had been promised such a thing, and was disappointed to find that I did not receive it.

Before anyone pillories me, I'm not saying that movies should not have plots. I am saying that the plot in this film, which is necessarily forgettable and foolish, was not worth the sacrifice of 30-or-so minutes of the runtime. Standard movies must have plots, of course, but the martial arts film is a genre unto itself, and while there are plenty of martial arts films with excellent plots, characters, and story (Fearless, Kung Fu Hustle, etc...) a lazy, half-MacGuffin plot simply does not add to the experience. One is reminded of the old saying about pornographic movie plots, that they are expected to be there, but do not form the attraction of the film. It is a similar case here. The filmmakers should have had the courage to actually follow through with their plotless convictions, or alternately should have put in the time Aand effort to give us something worth seeing for half an hour of their movie. They unfortunately did neither.

But while the plot is secondary to a film like this, the action is not, and much as it pains me to say, this action, while good, is not world-class. Films like Ong Bak, or Sat Po Long have really raised the bar in terms of what superb action choreography and filming can be these days, and the fight sequences in The Raid, impressive as they are, athletic as they are, are not in the league of the reigning champions of this genre. The battles seem too choreographed, too forced, too close to the old saw of one man destroying legions of foes with one move each as they obediantly attack him one after the next. The durability of the hero and his major opponents becomes ludicrous after a point, and while none of this makes the film bad, it doesn't elevate it to the stratospheric heights of the great films in the genre.


Final Thoughts: Lest I seem too harsh though, this is a movie that more or less does exactly what it was intended to do, provide a spectacle of beatings and violence to entertain those who have an affinity for such things. Nothing here is done particularly badly, but neither is it elevated above its material. Still, if one is eager to see one man beat the tar out of many in a flashy, cinematic fashion, one could do far worse than this. Anyone else simply need not apply.


Final Score: 7/10

[frigidmagi]

Myself and a young friend went to see this movie, his experiences with martial art movies are... limited to say the least. This movie hit him like a hurricane and he was raving about it as we left the theater. He really enjoyed it, calling it the best action movie in a long time. I should note he hasn't seen movies like Ong Bak or Sat Po Long though.

[General Havoc]

The Cabin in the Woods

Alternate Title: Deconstructing Horror

One sentence synopsis: Five college students go to a remote cabin and fall prey to a horrible fate.



Things Havoc liked: I am not a fan of horror movies. The entire genre is basically lost on me, as I don't find the spectacle of watching awful things happen to undeserving people to be either fulfilling or beneficial. I recognize that this is an unfair characterization of the genre, the pinnacles which are films such as Alien, Exorcist, or the Thing, masterpieces of craftsmanship and atmosphere. It is simply a matter of taste in my case, similar to my antipathy towards Romantic Comedies, and I have avoided reviewing horror films for this weekly exercise to-date because I simply do not believe that I have the proper background or objectivity to speak to their quality. So it was with some reluctance that I sat down to watch The Cabin in the Woods, on the strength of very strong recommendations from friends and family, and prepared myself to witness the usual routine of teenagers and twentysomethings being transformed progressively from living beings to dead meat.

That expectation lasted ten seconds.

The Cabin in the Woods was created by the always-polarizing Joss Whedon, in conjunction with Cloverfield screenwriter Drew Goddard, a partnership that has already produced many hit television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Whedon is many things to many people, and there is a current within the nerd community that believes him strongly overrated, but he has always been fond of twisting the genre conventions of whatever genre he happens to be working in at the moment in a way that most other directors and writers merely pay lip service to. As such, describing this film as a horror movie does not properly do justice to it. The movie plays with expectations to a degree I don't think I've ever seen in any film before, changing entire genres not once but multiple times, in a send-up to every horror film concept imaginable. The best comparison I can give is perhaps the Scream movies, only where Scream merely toyed with the concept of a self-aware horror film, this movie doesn't merely dive into the concept, but then rejects that notion in turn, and peels back another layer. It's actually fascinating.

You will notice I'm not saying much about the plot. The reason for this is that I don't believe I can say much about it without spoiling something, and here, the very explanation of what even the initial plot is will serve as a spoiler of sorts. Better, perhaps, to discuss the cast, which though comprised mostly of people I've never heard of, is spot-on-point from start to finish. The five leads play characters that are superficially the usual archetypes that one finds in the film, the Jock, the sexpot, the stoner, etc, but all of them are played with subtle nuance that renders them into actual characters, rather than simple sketches, and provides the answer to the age old question of why such disparate archetypes would ever associate with one another. The only one I recognize is Chris Hemsworth, of Thor fame, who here is frankly just as good as he was in that previous film. Special accolades should go to Fran Kranz, whom I've never heard of before, whose stoner philosopher is drop-dead hilarious (and not in the usual 'laugh at the stoned guy' way, and who truly steals the show in at least half a dozen scenes.

The antagonists, of which there are many, are headed off by, of all people, Bradley Whitford (of the West Wing) and Richard Jenkins (of The Visitor), both of whom turn in wonderful, funny(!), believable, and tremendously entertaining performances that remind of me of Aaron Sorkin's work (though that may be because Whitford seems to be playing Josh Lyman in his post-White House career, not that I object). If you're having trouble imagining how these two men in their 50s and 60s, both famous as realistic, sardonic character actors, manage to play the antagonists in a horror film and do it well, then all I can say is that the film manages to do just that. To say more would be to reveal matters that of plot, and in this case, the plot is the point. Finally, there are a couple of cameos, particularly one at the end which, if one is congizant of the genre (which one ought be if one wishes to get everything out of this film), are simply wickedly-awesome, and must be seen to be believed.



Things Havoc disliked: Of all the five main leads, I wasn't wildly fond of Kristen Connoly, who seemed a bit too worldly to be playing the character she was (the bookish shy girl). As I said, everyone's archetype is twisted here to round them out and make them actual interesting characters, but I thought her rounding wasn't done as well as everyone else's, and that her performance as a result felt less real. This may be a factor of the high standard to which she is being compared, but it did stick out.

More importantly, and you all must forgive me for being coy on this subject, I did not find the ending of the film to be satisfying. I understand where it comes from, given the irreverant disembowlment of the usual rotes of the genre, and I certainly can't accuse the movie of either failing to make sense logically or failing to have the courage of its convictions. But given the characters that we've been presented with, and their general likeability, the decisions made at the end of the film struck me as very off-putting, a case of the screenwriters ceasing to simply wink at the audience and stepping out from behind their curtain. That can work sometimes (Inglorious Basterds for instance), when the film's tone has lent itself to the decisions made at the end of the movie, but as the tone, irreverant as it was, did not establish itself properly in this case, I felt the ending was a let-down. Your mileage may vary.



Final Thoughts: I've been surprised by the quality of movies before, but rarely have I been as surprised as this. The Cabin in the Woods transcends its genre, indeed it may transcend all genres, and stands as a film that I can unhesitatingly recommend not only to aficionados of Horror (of whom I am not), but to any moviegoer mired in the still-lingering doldrums and looking for something different to see (of whom I definitely am). Say what you will about Joss Whedon's quality as a storyteller, the man knows how to produce daring and even riveting work, and here has generated a true masterpiece, one that, if there is any justice in the world, will easily displace Scream as the archetype of a truly modern horror film.



Final Score: 8/10

[General Havoc]

The Raven

Alternate Title: The Plot and the Pandering

One sentence synopsis: Edgar Allen Poe must catch a serial killer inspired by his own work.



Things Havoc liked: There is a scene in this film where Edgar Allen Poe, broke and in desperate need of a drink, thunders into a bar and announces who he is, only to be met with ridicule and non-recognition, to which he responds by exploding and calling his audience 'philistines'. These are the sorts of bribes that movie directors put in their films when they really want me to like them.'

John Cusack is something of an acquired taste, and I've never really bought most of his forays outside of the romantic comedy genre in which he got his start. That said, he's a decent enough actor, and in this movie tries to infuse his character with all the blinding Gothic madness he can muster. I'm not sure the result is terribly accurate historically, but it certainly provides a bit of interest in a film that would otherwise be very procedural. His Poe is not the real Poe, but it's an interesting enough character (possibly more so than the real one would be), and he enlivens the movie more than he detracts from it with his attempts to channel Nicholas Cage.

Also coming out on the positive side of the line are veteran Irish actor Brendan Gleeson and Brit Kevin McNally, both of whom are fine actors here playing various cantankerous old men (Poe's love interest's father and his publisher, respectively). Neither one has a particularly rounded character to play, Gleeson hates Poe for wooing his daughter and the McNally despairs of Poe ever offering him another masterpiece, but they do manage to infuse both roles with a modicum of interest. Gleeson's character even manages to play against type later in the film, a spark of imagination in an otherwise pedestrian script.


Things Havoc disliked: I didn't even get two paragraphs before I had to start on this stuff, did I?

The Raven is a very formulaic film, aping the style and concept of police cat-and-mouse games like Seven, Zodiac, or Copycat, to name some of the better examples. The serial killer sends clues to Poe and the police detective (Luke Evans), daring them to catch him in a game of wits. We've all seen this plot a hundred times before, and better executed, yet the film seems to think that this idea is fresh and new, and that the audience will be shocked by the very notion of a killer who dares send clues to the very people trying to catch him. I played a video game last week made in 2003 wherein a man pitches a script very similar to this one to a Hollywood studio and is laughed out the door for being an unimaginative hack. That should suffice to explain my objection here.

But even an old story can be done well. Sadly, the acting generally lets this script down. Evans, as the police detective, is a complete cypher, speaking in a persistently gruff, "serious" voice and without any character points save that he is determined to catch the killer. We get no hints from the actor as to a deeper motivation (not that a phoned-in one would have helped much, but anything would be nice), no clues as to his personality and character, nothing but the bare minimum required to proceed with the plot. A similar fate befalls Alice Eve, who plays Poe's love interest, kidnapped (of course) by the killer in circumstances that are flimsy even by the standards of this film, and who appears to be acting under the influence of heavy sedatives. When captured by a raving serial killer and buried alive in a coffin, she can barely muster enough interest to raise her voice.

The plot, meanwhile, is not worth the sacrifice of characterization. While I won't spoil everything, I will note that the killer in this case claims to be a criminal mastermind, yet his master plan requires that all of the many dozens of bullets fired in his direction over the course of the film somehow contrive to miss, that none of the people he gruesomely murders look upwards at any given moment, and that the incredibly wealthy man whose daughter has just been kidnapped will not, in fact, hire large numbers of armed men to escort him as he rides to a location at which he expects to encounter the kidnapper. Moreover, some elements simply don't make sense. At one point, the killer fools the police by escaping out of a window that has a spring mechanism built into it that only unlocks when the correct button is pressed. The problem being that the killer is escaping from his victim's apartment, meaning he was lucky enough to select a victim who happened to build an elaborate escape hatch into her own windows drawn from a sketchy reference in an Edgar Allen Poe story. Simple issues like this point to a script that was not properly thought out.



Final Thoughts: This isn't an awful movie, by any stretch, but it is strictly mediocre in almost every way. Though Cusack may do his best, the material here leaves him nothing to work with, and his performance, odd though it is, simply isn't quirky enough to carry the interest of the audience. While the film isn't exactly predictable, the only reason it's not is because the logic to the movie makes no sense at all, and the revelations about the killer's identity and motives seem to come from left field, leaving us (or at least me) wondering what the point of the whole exercise was.



Final Score: 4/10

[General Havoc]

The Avengers

Alternate Title: How it is done

One sentence synopsis: Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, and Captain America must team up to stop Loki and save the world.



Things Havoc liked: This is it. The payoff. The final countdown. This is where Marvel, having begun this franchise of films four years ago with Iron Man, and having built up the tension through Thor and Captain America and Iron Man 2, finally had to cash in their chips. This is where all the plot threads, all the characterization, all the implied awesomeness that we've been promised for five years was supposed to finally deliver. And despite the excellence of the other constituent movies in this amazing series, there remained an unanswered question. Could Marvel, having promised so much, actually make good?

Frankly, I need to stop asking that question.

The Avengers is a masterpiece. A glorious, artfully-designed masterpiece, filled with writing, acting, and spectacle of the highest quality. It encompasses the individual strengths that made all of its predecessors great, and melds them together seamlessly to produce something truly special. Written and directed by Joss Whedon (of Firefly, Serenity, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and most recently, Cabin in the Woods), this film should, if anything ever can, silence his many critics once and for all. If not before, Whedon has finally delivered the magnum opus that many in the nerd community long suspected him capable of producing, and has, at least in my mind, catapulted himself into the ranks of such modern filmmakers as Chris Nolan and Peter Jackson.

I've waxed eloquently about these characters and actors before in their constituent movies, and to attempt to do so here would result in three pages of me gushing like a waterspout over the transcendent brilliance of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark. His portrayal of my favorite comic book character of all time is, as it was in Iron Man and Iron Man 2, absolutely flawless, and Joss Whedon's trademark dialogue only serves to sharpen the character still further. I stated in my review of Captain America that Chris Evans' performance, while excellent, was a bit unpolished for my taste, in that the character, still forming in WWII, was not yet the Cap I knew and loved. All such objections are negated here, as Evans plays, if anything, an even better Captain America than he did previously, an anachronistic, world-weary hero who nonetheless rises effortlessly to the occasion from his core of grit and iron. Chris Hemsworth's Thor has come full circle from his movie, and matured into a sobered, yet still utterly viking thundergod, whose confrontation with Loki, his younger brother and arch-nemesis, now takes on an hints of the Shakespearean tragedy we were promised initially. Loki himself has darkened significantly from his incarnation in Thor (as is only appropriate), giving in to megalomaniacal dreams of conquest and rule. Yet for all his bluster and rage, when he confronts his brother in combat, he weeps.

New to the franchise is Mark Ruffalo, though his character, the Hulk, is unfortunately not. Hulk has had a bad run in film for the last decade or so, and actors as varied as Edward Norton and Eric Bana have tried and failed to portray him well. Where they failed, Ruffalo succeeds. He plays Bruce Banner exactly as he should, a man who has been living with his condition now for some time, and who has evolved effective, though not foolproof, means to manage it. Ruffalo doesn't play Banner as a shrinking violet, nor as a cannon waiting to explode, yet the undercurrent of menace is always there, and when he becomes the Hulk, the result can be absolutely terrifying. Hulk was never a favorite of mine in the comics, and yet watching this film, I at last began to understand why so many liked the character so much, and what it was that set him apart from all the other superheroes in the Marvel universe. The raw, unfettered rage of the Hulk comes across here as clear as day, and in a film packed this tightly with action, character, and superheroics, that is not a statement to be made lightly.

Also new (or at least elevated beyond their previous cameo status) are Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). Both of these characters are variations on the Jason Bourne theme of ultra-badass spy/soldier, providing an interesting sense of scale for the more outlandish heroes (and gods) that they are paired with. I've been a fan of Renner's since the Hurt Locker, and this movie exemplifies why, as he gives Hawkeye an icy, professional mien that while not groundbreaking, is certainly effective in the context of the movie. Johansson plays her character in much the same vein, though she has more of a role to flesh it out in, and while there is clearly much that she has done that she isn't proud of, she doesn't deal with that guilt or pressure the way one normally sees movie heroines dealing with it. The scenes with Renner and Johansson together (as the token normal-if-badass humans in this fantastical parade of demigods and robot warriors) are actually quite good, as we get a pair of people who have clearly been through a lot together. Best of all, the movie lets their relationship remain mostly unstated, without ever once hinting towards a romantic one. This may actually be unheard of for a superhero movie with a female lead, and I appreciated it.

But as with all of Marvel's recent hits, it is the writing, and beyond that, the pacing of the film that really elevates it into the next dimension. A long film (more than two and a half hours), Avengers wastes none of its runtime, barely pausing to orient new viewers before launching into its tale. With six major and a slew of minor characters to establish and show off, Avengers simply has no time to waste, and does not. The writing is snappy and distinctive for each character, with very few expo-dumps and a varied (though generally fast-paced) tempo to the many dialogue sequences. Joss Whedon has a distinctive "style" to his writing, but Avengers bears his mark somewhat less obviously than Cabin in the Woods did. This is a film that knows that its characters well, and respects the lengthy comic, television, and film history behind them, and Whedon manages to make every character sound like themselves, rather than like him.

Finally, the spectacle of the film itself is simply gorgeous. Enormous, elabroate fight sequences are crafted with such care and discretion that it melts into the background of one's consciousness. No shaky-cam, no tilt-camera, not even much in the way of slow-mo-speed-up (only one shot I can think of, and that one truly awesome). The action is simply front-and-center and shot in such a way that the characterization of each character (forgive me) shines through, even when they are doing battle. Every character is given time in and out of battle to establish themselves and be awesome, leaving us with a sense, moreso than any other team-hero movie I've ever seen, that this is actually a team of awesome badasses. It's truly breathtaking.



Things Havoc disliked: Of course, the film isn't perfect. There are a couple occasions when Whedon's tendency towards snarky one-liners gets the better of him, and some of those lines fall flat (usually because of timing problems). One of the secondary characters (played by Cobie Smulders, I think her name was Agent Hill) is a bit below the others in terms of performances, and does drag some of her scenes down, and there were a couple sequences (Loki's confrontation with the lone elderly German dude in Stutgart, and Fury's speech about teamwork) that I thought were blocked out a bit too obviously. Neither sequence lasts more than about ten seconds, but in a film of this overall quality, it did stand out. There were also occasions when the CG-real footage transition was a bit obvious, particularly in the climactic action sequence, though none where it was immersion-breaking.

I was also somewhat disappointed with Loki. His character was a revelation in Thor, and remains so here, a villain with a real motivation and arc to his character. But though the film does give Loki room to breathe, there isn't enough room here to really continue the arc that was initiated in that previous film. His interactions with Thor are excellent, and carry over the thematic elements that Loki previously embodied, but the movie just isn't able to push them forward at all, instead turning him into a megalomaniacal would-be dictator. Granted, he suits the movie just fine as this, but I was hoping for a little more.

Finally, I had a few problems with Scarlett Johansson in this one. It's not that she's bad, far from it, but there were scenes (her expositional talk with Loki for instance) that I just didn't buy. It didn't help that, playing a Russian spy who describes herself in those terms, she has no trace whatsoever of a Russian accent (Others have pointed out that a good spy would have no accent, and I acknowledge this, but it still jarred).



Final Thoughts: I don't think I'm likely to turn many heads with this review, as at time-of-writing, The Avengers is busy shattering every box office record ever produced, earning accolades from almost every reviewer online or off. I can do nothing in this case but add my voice to the collective. The Avengers was a triumph in almost every respect, a film that took my nervous expectations for it, set them gently to one side, and then showed me something great. It exceeds the bar set by Iron Man, by Thor, by Captain America, and places itself in the stratosphere of the greatest comic book films in existence. To speak of The Avengers in the same breath as the Dark Knight is not heresy.

Welcome to Blockbuster season. May it be blessed with such films as this one.

Final Score: 9/10

[Stofsk]

Wait until The Dark Night Rises. If my calculations are correct, we'll be seeing some serious shit.

[Comrade Tortoise]

Loki's confrontation with the lone elderly German dude in Stuttgart

Corrected the spelling for you

:P

Spoiler: show

That said, this scene struck a cord with me. I could see not just terror, but mortification on all of their faces. Then the little old guy stood up, obviously old enough to remember the last megalomaniac to taint the soil of germany and even though he was facing down a god, the answer was still no. Maybe it is because I know a certain german entomologist raised in the 40s who would do exactly that, but that struck me in the right place.