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8月29日 28 Weeks Later (**)You've got your zombie movie in my Iraq metaphor! You've got your Iraq metaphor in my zombie movie! Though horror purists may criticize the film 28 Days Later for departing from the zombie canon with its fast-moving Ebola-powered non-undead zombie hordes, it emerged on the scene in 2002 as a brooding, innovative tale of post-apocalyptic horror which revisited the "sole-survivor after a holocaust" plot of I Am Legend. It was thrilling, thought-provoking, and in spite of the multiple endings, complete. It didn't need a sequel, but Hollywood decided 28 Days Later needed one anyway. Though the desolate London setting -- and the zombies -- come back, none of the original characters return in 28 Weeks Later. Instead of a small core cast, the movie opens with number of stock characters. We learn that half a year after the zombies from the first infestation died off, the US and NATO have established a "Green Zone" in London and begun resettlement of British subjects -- even though the threat of contamination remains. This is an unfortunately ludicrous start to the film, necessitated by the filmmaker's desire for an Iraq parallel. Naturally, the zombie infection returns, this time in the form of a woman who survived the original outbreak of the "rage virus" (as it was called in the first film), yet remained a carrier of the disease. The Green Zone unsurprisingly succumbs to a zombie onslaught, but not before the protagonists -- two children, an army doctor, and a sniper -- can escape the carnage and the napalm strikes that follow. The remainder of the film is built around whether this quartet can dodge both the zombies and the army long enough to make it to safety. Note that "and the army" isn't a typo -- the filmmakers decided to make the military villains once more. But whereas the first film showed a group of soldiers who became sick and twisted (and arguably more horrible than the zombies themselves), 28 Weeks Later asks us to despise a military which is doing something extremely sensible -- namely, annihilating every living them to prevent the rage virus from spreading. This heavy-handedness is as unwelcome as the opening conceit of quick resettlement was mind-numbing. While the original movie made us care deeply about the handful of survivors left after the outbreak, the sequel takes few steps in this direction. Perhaps it's because the film succumbs to the Hollywood horror cliche of making kids run away from the monsters, but more likely it's because this film seems more "populated" than the first. Not everything about 28 Weeks Later is grim. The music is moody and spectacular, with John Murphy's "In a House, in a Heartbeat" theme returning to add drama in several key "zombie attack" sequences. The special effects are also top-notch, and are at times too good for their own good. The campy flesh-devouring fun of classic zombies, which was parodied brilliantly in Shaun of the Dead, gives way in 28 Weeks Later to serious gore, which leads me to advise the squeamish to keep well away. With the zombies descending on Paris at the close of 28 Weeks Later -- one imagines them shouting, "branes not baguettes!" -- another sequel is almost guaranteed. A pity, then, because it will only further cannibalize the brilliance of the first film. Rating: 2 out of 5 stars 8月9日 Transformers (***1/2)
As a child of the 1980s, it is hard to approach a movie like Michael Bay's Transformers without the nostalgia -- colloquially derided as "fanboyism" -- overriding my critical judgements. My first instinct is to either hate everything about the movie or embrace everything about the movie, but setting this instinct aside, I can say that Bay manages to craft a competent human-oriented story that doesn't quite live up to its fantastic potential. The basic plot concerns a race of alien robots who have come to Earth to do battle for the "Allspark," a kind of cybernetic Holy Grail, that can create robotic life and revive the robots' home planet, Cybertron. While on the planet, the robots morph to adopt the guise of Earth vehicles, complete with hologram pilots to fool unsuspecting humans. The central role of the movie should belong to Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots -- aka the "good" giant robots -- but director Bay (perhaps with prodding from producer Spielberg) decided to make the movie revolve around Sam (Shia Lebouf), the unlikely inheritor of a secret that the Decepticons -- aka the "bad" giant robots -- will kill for. This recalls Spielberg's ET, which as much about Eliot as it was about his alien friend. The Autobots learn of Sam's identity and location early on, and dispatch Bumblebee -- a Camaro, sadly, not a VW Beetle -- to protect him, and for what seems like an endless half-hour, "protecting" Sam means helping him score with the movie's love interest Mikaela (Megan Fox). This subplot helps to drag down the movie in the first half, leaving most of the audience hungry for some giant robot action -- and thankfully, after the slow start, Bay delivers. After the Autobots arrive on Earth in what might well be the most expensive GM commercial ever, the fight with the Decepticons can begin in earnest. The CGI is extremely believable, and the physical models (several of the movie robots were built to scale) blend seamlessly with the computer versions. Transformers is quite honestly a movie that could not have been made without modern filmmaking technology. Unfortunately, just as things get going, Bay throws in another subplot, this time involving Sector 7, a government agency that comes off as a bad retread of Men in Black. As the head of Sector 7, John Turturro provides a few weak stabs at comic relief in the second half of the film, but these jokes -- and indeed the entire subplot -- deserved to be left on the cutting room floor. That said, most of the human characters are likable, and at least one of the subplots -- involving a group of soldiers deployed to the Gulf -- was interesting. Their quest to kill one of the Decepticons that destroyed their base was arguably more compelling than Sam and Optimus' quest for the Allspark. Though we learn to like many of the human characters, the same cannot be said for the robots themselves. The film offers only a brief glimpse at the Autobots' personalities and motivation; instead, the fans are left to fill in the blanks with what they know of the characters. The Decepticons are even worse off; from Frenzy, the smallest Decepticon, to their leader, Megatron, all of the Decepticons are depicted as monstrous, as if they took a detour to Mordor on their way to Earth from Cybertron. The lack of nuance spills over into their dialogue -- the Decepticon in-fighting, strategy, and plotting from the series is utterly missing in the movie. Transformers ends with the promise of a sequel, and the next film can surpass the first if it retains the same quality of special effects while shifting the focus to the robots themselves. After all, the story is supposed to be about the Transformers, not the "friends of the Transformers." Optimus Prime shouldn't be a guest star in his own movie. Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars 12月4日 Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest (***)Pirates of the Caribbean 2, while not up to the level of the first Pirates film, offers viewers the rare chance to see an enjoyable, competent sequel. Unfortunately, it's also very much a franchise film made with future sequels in mind, and the denouement may provoke a groan -- at least it did in my case. Director Gore Verbinski exercises a steady hand on the wheel throughout the film, with only a few irritating transitions between scenes, cuts necessitated by the film's 2-hour-plus running time. Fight sequences are exciting, if a bit repetitive. CGI is employed to great effect throughout the movie, with the cursed, mutated pirate crew of Davy Jones (the pirate of legend, not the Monkee) literally popping full of computer generated goodness. The Kraken, the film's CGI-powered 20,000 Leagues giant mollusk homage, doesn't hold up as well, however, and scenes with the monster are a bit fuzzy, as if the Kraken were a backdrop in the distance rather than a living, squirming behemoth of Lovecraftian excess. If viewers feel they've seen a large chunk of the movie before, they probably have. The basic plot of the first film empowers its sequel: the fate of the aforementioned cursed pirates is controlled by a treasure, and Captain Jack (Johnny Depp), Will (Orlando Bloom), and others battle it out to see who gets to use the cliched plot device (i.e. the treasure) for their own purposes. Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) is mostly along for the ride here, and with her relationship with Will already established in the initial offering of the franchise, the bulk of her lines revolve around faux-romantic intrigues with Captain Jack. This lack of "newness" handicaps Pirates 2 before she ever leaves port. Uninspiring writing can, of course, shine when given the right actors, and in their roles, the cast of Pirates 2 performs well, though not quite enough to buoy the soggy script. Bloom is slightly boring in his portrayal of Will Turner, but that was also the case in the first film. The exceedingly thin Knightley -- get her a sandwich, people! or better yet, some deep-fried Bahamian conch -- is underwritten, and in manner and appearance she's begun to converge with an everygirl Winona Ryder, as opposed to the classy Natalie Portman-alike she played in the first film. (Honestly, some of my friends saw the trailers for PotC and asked, "Is that Natalie Portman?") Despite having the de facto lead role, Johnny Depp's charms have been watered down in the sequel, and his "swishbuckler" antics are kept to a minimum. (Don't the writers know that was part of the fun?) Thankfully, Bill Nighy's turn as the core villain of the piece, Davy Jones, is memorable and threatening. Nighy sports a Scots accent for this role and does most of his acting with his voice and eyes, the rest of him wrapped in wonderful CGI. It speaks to his ability that he has a real presence on the screen where similarly constrained actors -- one thinks of Hugo Weaving in V for Vendetta -- fall short. Overall, Pirates 2 is good popcorn movie fare, and alright for teen-to-twentysomethings, though the little ones might not respond well to the monsters they see onscreen. It would've been helped immensely by a dash of originality, but this film is still good enough not to leave viewers lost at sea. Rating: 3 out of 5 stars 9月13日 Catwoman (**)At points in Halle Berry's Catwoman, I felt like I was watching the world's first feature-length En Vogue video. That's not a good thing. 8月16日 Films in briefThe 25th Hour (***) It's not often that I say a Spike Lee flick is worth watching. Since his strikingly good turn in Do the Right Thing, Spike has continuously wallowed in black self-pity (with some dashes of short man self-pity through in for good measure). The height of this overwrought cinema may have been Bamboozled, a thoroughly unwatchable and implausible stab at satire. Rating: 3 out of 5 stars The Crossing Guard (**) The Crossing Guard is a wonderful vehicle to showcase the talents of David Morse, who has wasted his talent again and again in quiet cop or soldier roles throughout the 1990s and 2000s. And it would be a truly great movie overall if it weren't for the tired Jack Nicholson-Angelica Huston pairing (can we please have a restraining order to keep them from working together? pretty please?) and the heavy-handedness of the confrontation between Nicholson and Morse. Rating: 2 out of 5 stars The Stepford Wives (*) For me, the best scene in the remake of The Stepford Wives is when the token gay friend character bonds with some of the brainwashed Barbie clones of Stepford Connecticut, drawing the direct and often unconnected line between hyperfeminine (generally media-driven) gay male behavior and idealized femininity. But what would have been a sly bit of commentary is quickly dropped to return to a plot which left me wondering why, why, why did they remake this film? Rating: 1 out of 5 stars 8月5日 Closer (*)I was thinking about how to approach Mike Nichols' Closer. At the most superficial level, the film is a contest between two men touted as possible Bonds -- Jude Law and Clive Owen -- and reveals quite well why they're unsuitable to play 007. For his part, Law is too feminine and fragile while Owen is too rumpled and rough-edged. Yet these two actors, for all their flaws, provide the foundation for the story, and far outshine their female counterparts. In execution, Closer is a small ensemble drama where only half of the ensemble is working.
Julia Roberts' character is written extremely thin, a problematic development given that she's not too great of an actress to begin with. But the failure of the women of the piece to stand out isn't really her fault. Natalie Portman is given substantially more screen time, but I suspected that director Nichols really wanted her to reprise her Lolita roles from the 1990s, and Natalie does her part by downgrading her acting ability. (Portman was markedly better in Garden State, a film I should review in the near future.) Though her character Alice the stripper -- writing that name makes me feel like I just earned some cliché demerits -- is supposed to be central to the story, I was left asking, "Where are her charms?" (Aside from her naked derriere, that is.)
Thematically, Closer could be likened to a Milan Kundera novel stripped of its political background, philosophical pretensions, and Eastern European romanticism. For mainstream audiences the decomplication of a Kundera-esque love tetrangle (what is a love triangle with four sides, after all?) doubtless proves to be a relief, but I figure so long as you ape Kundera, you should ape all the way. There's one other thing missing from the film -- something Kundera was expert at crafting -- and that's a palpable sense of romantic attraction between the characters.
It's easy to understand a situation in which one man could love two women or a woman could love two men, but Nichols takes no great pains to illustrate this situation for us. The hows and the whys of what brings the hearts of the various characters together remain essentially unknown to the audience, and accordingly, the words "I love you" are rendered completely disposable and meaningless. Modern love is fast food in Closer -- easily obtained, messy, yet ultimately bad for your heart.
Finally, one thing may prove to be disorienting to audiences is the manner in which the chronology skips forward without clear visual cues that time has changed. Two characters may be on the verge of having sex in one scene but it shifts to the next and relies on casual expository dialog -- of the, "Wow, it's been four months" sort -- to tell us time has passed. It's a minor annoyance, but I can forgive it. What I can't forgive, however, is the message of Closer, or in Portman's case, the manner in which the message was delivered.
Rating: 1 out of 5 stars The Village (*)Ed. note: Reblogging the following older review seems appropriate, given the recent release of Shyamalan's Lady in the Water.
I admit to enjoying The Sixth Sense, plot twist and all. I even had a few good things to say about Unbreakable back in the day. Signs left me with an uneasy feeling, and that unease kept building until I saw The Village and decided that M. Night Shyamalan is The Hack Director Who Must Be Stopped.
The problems in The Village are numerous, and I'll try to detail them without spoiling the story. Firstly, Shyamalan's attempt to construct a kind of 9/11 allegory using the film is both heavy-handed and a little insulting. Some saw Signs as a 9/11 allegory but The Village has a clearer, more direct claim to that title. Ultimately, however, the allegory falls flat because the director also sees the film as a kind of cinematic love letter to the small religious communities of Pennsylvania; while the characters of the film are not quite Amish or Quakers, they might as well be.
Secondly, the awkward fusion of allegory and homage gives rise to the film's terribly hokey dialog, in which nearly every other sentence is filled with capital-letter phrases, including the overused description of the antagonists as "Those We Do Not Speak Of." Shyamalan's choice of William Hurt as the village leader further exacerbates the script, as Hurt, while reading his lines at a Painfully. Slow. Pace, manages to overact while acting subdued -- something I didn't think possible. The other actors do the best they can with the meager material at hand, though every time Adrien Brody appeared on the screen I kept wondering if he thought he was still guest-hosting "SNL" -- his idiot manboy character spoke to sketch comedy, not suspense drama.
Thirdly, I may be giving away too much of the plot here, but the biggest flaw may be that Shyamalan decided to make the story too plausible. The appeal of The Sixth Sense is that it was unreal, it was fantastic. By contrast, The Village is utterly banal, plodding, and unexciting. The plot twist doesn't even come at the climax of the story, but instead forces a false denouement upon the audience. The Village is simply badly structured drama, and I can't see how the movie could scare anyone, or even strike the viewer as a provocative work.
Finally, Shyamalan is semi-famous for his cameos, and like many directors, he borrowed the idea from Hitchcock. But while Hitch was unassuming in his guest appearances -- you could watch one of his films and miss him if you blinked -- Shyamalan has grown increasingly egotistical in the way he inserts himself into his movies. Not only does he have a tendency to make his cameo character important -- Signs was the worst in this respect -- he gives himself speaking roles, and it's painfully obvious that the man could be out-performed by members of a 1st grade acting troupe. When he finally gets around to appearing in The Village, I actually booed. You can't blink and miss him because he ensures the camera spends about a minute satisfying his vanity.
Well, unlike one of Shyamalan's films, this review has no surprise ending. The Village may not have been the worst film of 2004, but it's very, very close. At any rate, it's bad enough to be The Film I Shall Not Watch Again.
Rating: 1 out of 5 stars 7月13日 King Arthur (**1/2)Some of my friends liked King Arthur, but I regret to say I did not. It was, like a cheap chocolate Easter bunny, satisfying on the surface but ultimately hollow. This lack of a creamy nougat center stems partly from the fact that, on the whole, the film is less a retelling of Arthurian legend than it is a second-rate Braveheart. What's worse, when he's not borrowing from Mel Gibson, director Antoine Fuqua finds time to borrow from himself; several major plot elements are lifted from Fuqua's previous effort, Tears of the Sun. (Exactly which plot elements I can't reveal for fear of risking spoilage.)
But more lamentable than the filmmakers' efforts to transform Arthur into a kind of William Wallace figure is the enervation of the mystical underpinnings of the Arthur story. Like the recent Troy, King Arthur is presented as a plausible rendition of legendary events, and concomitant with this increased historical verisimiltude is the utter absence of magic and the supernatural. Now, the Arthurian canon -- which stretches from Aeneas and the Sword of Troy to "spin off" stories like "Gawain and the Green Knight" -- is large, unwieldy, and at points contradictory, but the central thread which ties all of the stories together is the manner in which Arthur is a Romantic synthesis of supernatural Christian and pagan themes. It is this synthesis -- a kind of Anglo-Germanic analogue to Neo-Platonism -- which made the stories of Arthur and his knights so appealing and so legendary. Work outside of that synthesis, and you are merely stealing names to tell a story of your own design. While any film that attempts to encompass the whole of the Arthurian canon may end up being swallowed by its vastness (see the plodding Excalibur for proof of this), it is certainly possible for filmmakers to focus upon parts of the Arthur story to produce a memorable film. King Arthur, however, is not such a work of cinema. What its makers have failed to understand is that by removing all the magic, they have extinguished half the glory. Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars 7月12日 Million Dollar Baby (****1/2)If there was an Oscar category for fight choreography, Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby would have snatched it up for sure. But since that category isn't available yet, Eastwood had to settle for Baby winning Best Picture. I think Clint can live with that.
Without spoiling the story, I'll say that Eastwood's film ranks as one of his bleakest. Since I spend most of my time watching Asian movies these days, my initial reaction was that Baby is almost bleak enough to be a Korean film. Chinese movies have happy endings, Japanese films are over the top, but Korean films are intended to depress the hell out of you, and the latter effect seemed to be Eastwood's desire with Baby, and he's not above stacking the deck to arrive at the film's controversial ending.
Acting-wise, as the grizzled boxing manager and his assistant, Eastwood and Morgan Freeman -- is there a better film narrator than Freeman working in the business these days ? -- seem less to be playing roles and more just playing themselves, a couple old geezers shooting the shit. As far as gravelly-voiced boxing managers go, Frankie Dunn (Eastwood) is far less campy than Burgess Meredith in Rocky, and I appreciated that. As Maggie Fitzgerald, the boxer whom Eastwood reluctantly takes under his wing, Hilary Swank does a good job in yet another "pretty girl dresses down" role, and in fact it's hard for me to imagine another actress having the kind of physical heft it takes to perform that role well. (Michelle Rodriguez could have done it, but since Girlfight she's been slumming.) The surprise ending is going to rub some people the wrong way. I wasn't entirely happy with it myself. But the first three-quarters of the film represent highly competent, Oscar-caliber filmmaking. That said, good copies of the other films aren't out on the streets here yet, so I can't compare Baby to its competition. Maybe this really was the best movie America made in 2004. Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars 7月11日 Blade Trinity (**1/2)Successful movie adaptations of comic books are pretty rare; for every Spider-Man or The Crow you'll find two-dozen Captain Americas or Punishers. One of the movies that helped to break the comic books = suckage trend during last decade was Wesley Snipes' Blade, which let Wesley play a badass while cashing in on the urban vampire mythos popularized by "Buffy."
Blade was a pretty good vamp flick, all in all. It had style, Eurotrash vampire elders, and great martial arts scenes. (Exactly why vampires would instinctively know martial arts bothered me a little, but I'm a sucker for great fight choreography.) Snipes followed up on Blade with a sequel, which was decent even though it followed the all-too-regrettable pattern of abusing CGI for monsters, and even though the anti-vampire technology required the audience to make many leaps of faith. (UV bombs, anyone?) Alas, Snipes decided to make one sequel too many, leaving us with the steaming pile of celluloid Blade: Trinity. When you have a solid formula it's unwise to toy with it unless you're absolutely sure you can make it better. The first two Blade movies showcased Snipes' physical prowess and gave the audience vampire villains who were ruthless and interesting. In the third movie, the filmmakers seemed to believe ol' Wesley was getting a bit long in the tooth (pun not intended), so they decided to trot out Ryan Reynolds for laughs and Jessica Biel for looks. Let's talk about Jessica first. Biel's part was shallow with hints that the screenwriters had some ideas of making her role bigger. In the end, however, she wound up being little more than eye candy. But at least I can't say she detracted from the film. Reynolds, on the other hand ... well, it seems the director felt that all Reynolds needed to do was recreate his character from Van Wilder in a vampire movie setting. While I'm all for punctuating action movies with a little humor, Van Wilder the Vampire Slayer was not a good idea. When Reynolds' Hannibal King begins to crack wise, the film shifts into a craptacular analogue to bullet time: the action slows down so that the hero can deliver a fatal comedy blow to the unsuspecting audience and his fellow castmembers. During an interrogation scene I honestly believe the screenwriter told Reynolds to improvise his jokes, and I swear Parker Posey (one of the supporting villains) looked like she was going to cry -- and it wasn't tears of laughter welling up on her face. The special effects were decent, but represented no major improvement over the previous two films. In fact, some of the CGI creature effects were just popped in from Blade II. The fight scenes were entertaining -- the ones that weren't boring as hell, that is -- yet the overall aesthetics suffered from a general lack of creativity and style. If the visuals suggest "been there, done that," so does the storyline. The plot forces Blade to get together with his dubious new comrades-in-stakes to fight the Latest Vampire Menace™, which in Blade III's case is also the Oldest Vampire Menace™, Dracula. The vampires, tired of having their butts kicked by Blade in the first two movies, decide to call upon Unca Drac to even the odds. Dracula has all of his usual powers in this movie -- shape shifting, super strength, immortality -- as well as a power Bram Stoker forgot to write about: the ability to mimic a hunk of wood. No, really, I've had cactuses with more charm and personality than the Dracula pitted against Blade. When their final confrontation comes, it is every bit as underwhelming as you expect it to be. Avoid, unless you have a free rental to waste. Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars Ray (****)Between Ray and Collateral, Jamie Foxx has proven that his acting abilities extend far beyond sketch comedy into the realm of serious drama. Comedy, especially impressions, should be recognized as a form of method acting, because rarely has an actor inhabited a role the way Foxx does in the case of Ray Charles Robinson.
The film tracks Charles from his beginnings as a country and western pianist through the turbulence of his early career paths. Along the way, viewers are treated to the soulful art that was Charles' music. The story follows him down his heroin-fueled descent, but, for lack of time or inspiration, does not fully document his return to normalcy. In fact, like many biopics, Ray focuses on the "most interesting parts" of Charles' life. This, in and of itself, is not a misstep. Where the film loses its chance to be great is the moralistic narrative in which success makes Charles "discard" his friends. While it's true that I expect celebrities to forsake their old friends as they rise to the top, the film becomes perilously close to parodic in the way it shows Charles moving on to embrace new people. I would have preferred longer resolutions to the fiilm's relationship conflicts, rather than having Charles and one of his friends part ways as they do. Another sticking point for me, considering that it contributes greatly to the film's length, is the overuse of flashbacks in a psychedelic manner. Expository scenes which show when and how Charles lost his sight were important, as was his mother sendiing him to school for the deaf and blind at St. Augustine (a school my great-uncle, who was deaf, attended as a boy). Some helpful cuts from these scenes would have improved the film's pacing immensely. Overall, Ray was an above-average film with a thoroughly excellent performance from its leading actor. Watch it for Foxx's performance, and listen to it for the music. Rating: 4 out of 5 stars 6月27日 Bloodrayne (1/2*)Uwe Boll is a dangerous man. Why do I say that? Because, somehow, he got Sir Ben Kingsley -- that's right, ol' Gandhi himself -- to star in the wretched wretchedness that is Bloodrayne. I can only suspect blackmail was involved. I kid Uwe not, this movie lived up to the standards of game-based movies of the past, which is to say, it's almost unwatchable. I didn't play the game the movie was based on, but I was familiar with the basic plot, which was concerned with a hot female half-vampire who hunts and kills Nazis and their supernatural minions.
Killing Nazis is good, and had Boll's screenwriter stuck to the original plot of the game when adapting it to the big screen, I could have enjoyed Bloodrayne as B-grade trash. Aye, but there's the rub, as Hamlet would say -- they decided to make this movie an "origins" picture and tell us about how the titular character came to be.
Telling Rayne's backstory requires taking audiences to a European netherworld where the actors sport bad, mix-and-match accents (check out Michelle Rodriguez's bad impression of Gwyneth Paltrow) and bad costumes (including a horrible wig on Billy Zane). I can live with this sort of treatment if there's a texture of "cool" or humor beneath the dreck. Look at Army of Darkness for one example. Unfortunately, Bloodrayne wants to take itself too seriously, and inflicts punishment on viewers in the process.
A quick word about the plot: it borrows heavily from the anime classic Vampire Hunter D, with Rayne hunting down her vampire father who is the lord of the lands. What's missing is much in the way of exposition about the artifacts she wishes to use to defeat her father, or an explanation of the vampire hunters that first come to hunt her, then join her in the fight. The story is all a jumble, which should not surprise anyone familiar with Boll's body of work.
The acting, from the aforementioned Kingsley down to Kristanna Loken as Rayne is uniformly bad. It's as if the actors are sleepwalking their way through their performances, or perhaps their performances are actually superb but the rest of the film makes them seem not so. Kingsley in particular came across as a half-embalmed human marionette, and is only slightly more threatening than the average door-to-door salesman. His awful performance as the Big Bad proves to be deathblow to a film already struggling to get by on life support.
Lastly, the worst thing we can say about Bloodrayne is that as bad as this movie is, it wasn't bad enough to end Boll's career. His next project, Postal -- also based on a game, naturally -- is on the way. It seems like the only way to stop Boll is to stop making games for him to base movies on. Would it be worth giving up a few first person shooters and survival horror games to deny Boll new material? You rent Bloodrayne (or one of his other masterpieces) and tell me.
Rating: .5 out of 5 stars 6月14日 Basic Instinct 2 (**1/2)Different viewers of Basic Instinct 2 (all ten of them) will offer up their own impressions of when exactly the movie descends into farce. For some, it's the tired revisitation of the once-titilating interrogation scene from the original film. For others, it's the opening reel, where Sharon Stone contributes to the vehicular death of her heavily drugged lover. For me, however, it was the appearance of the deranged Dr. Gerst (Heathcote Williams) who lectures on Nietzsche while sporting an absurd accent and an even more absurd fright wig. This was the proverbial What the hell? moment -- I actually said those words aloud -- and it comes so early in the film that I remained distracted for the remainder.
And it's a shame, really, as I was expecting some memorable cheese from the second film. While a few called it a great film, Basic Instinct would qualify in most circles as a "guilty pleasure," but there was little pleasure and certainly no greatness to be found here. One of the reasons for the sequel's lack of punch is that Stone's character Catherine Tramell has been flattened considerably since screenwriter Joe Eszterhas first conceived of her as a misogynist's wet dream-of-a-femme fatale. Instead, we are forced to endure rotten come-ons and faux-sultry looks as if Catherine were being played a frat boy inhabiting the body of Sharon Stone (who still looks mighty fine, by the way) portraying his idea of sexually adventurous older woman.
Secondly, the film is crippled by the lack of originality. One reason why the first movie worked is that there was an element of mystery in the story. Was Catherine the icepick murderer? Would Michael Douglas' "Shooter" be her next victim? In Basic Instinct 2, little time is spent inserting doubt into viewers' minds, and instead of a satisfying suspense thriller, we're left with a low-grade horror film. The twists are easy to telegraph, and the male lead (David Morrisey) lacks the necessary charisma to make us care about his fate (unlike Douglas).
Thirdly, there's the direction ... or the lack thereof. Most of the problems I've mentioned above can be attributed to Michael Caton-Jones' sloppy filmcraft. He's not a bad director -- I liked Rob Roy, The Jackal, and a few of his other works -- but in Basic Instinct 2 he was underperforming badly. I missed the steady hand of Paul Verhoeven, even though the man's certifiable.
By the end of the film, one of the main characters is left drooling in a wheelchair. It's not much of a spoiler to say that the victim isn't Catherine. I was left wondering if the character's downfall was a deliberate reflection of the price the audience had to pay to endure the film. But no, no one involved with this movie would be so clever.
Stick an icepick in this franchise -- it's done.
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars 6月8日 Date Movie (*)If the US government ever wanted to use a non-invasive method to torture suspected terrorists, repeated showings of Date Movie might suffice. Just one showing might be enough to break most suspects -- or make innocent men confess to unspeakable crimes. Having grown up on the Airplane films and later, the Naked Gun series, I admit to enjoying a good parody. But what makes parodies work is primarily their mocking of serious subjects. A parody that mocks comedies is on shaky ground to begin with, and, alas, that's what Date Movie attempts to be.
Not only are the jokes (jokes about jokes, to be precise) spectacularly unfunny, the comic timing is almost nonexistent. During several lulls in the story, one expects the actors to turn to the audience and say, "I admit, I'm slumming here."
I could go on but I can sum things up in one sentence: Avoid this movie at all costs.
Rating: 1 out of 5 stars 1月30日 Broken Flowers (****)Half of the fun of watching Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's finest comedic performance, is in seeing his sly, sleazy, self-confident character break Phil down into a moping mess after failing to hook up with Andie MacDowell time and again. The mopiness amuses us because we know Bill really is cool and above all that. Little did we know that Murray would turn that sad-sack routine into the centerpiece of nearly all of his characters in recent years, from the standout Rushmore, to the sometimes-brilliant Lost in Translation, to the all-over-the-place Life Aquatic.
Here Bill is again in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, playing the same unhappy middle-aged man, more of a lothario than the other roles, and less capable of manic behavior. Every note he sounds, every facial expression, every mark of desperation comes from those other films. And I wonder, is anyone laughing at the sadness anymore? I wasn't.
Being a Jarmusch film, Broken Flowers was bound to be quirky, and here it does not disappoint. The plot finds an aging Don Juan, conveniently named Don Johnston ("That's Johnston, with a T."), and played by Murray, going through a midlife crisis after he loses his latest girlfriend and discovers an unsigned letter from an ex-girlfriend telling him that he has a son he never knew about, and that the son is looking for him. After some heavy prodding from his crime story-addicted, marijuana-smoking neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright), Don decides to go on a quest to discover which of his ex-girlfriends was the mother of the child. Winston gets a list of ex-flames from Don and Googles them, then sends Don out on a great American midlife crisis road trip, something familiar to anyone who's seen About Schmidt.
Like Schmidt, which was a superior movie overall, the story unfolds in a series of travel encounters between Don and the people Winston has arranged for him to meet. Naturally, each of the women is odd and memorable; personal favorites were the NASCAR mom (Sharon Stone) with a promiscuous daughter Lolita and the "pet communicator" (Jessica Lange). The dialogue between Don and each of the women is precious, as he delicately tries to discover which one is the mother of his child.
Everyone in Broken Flowers turns in a wonderful performance save an actor who plays a character introduced at the end of the film. His weak acting, and more to the point, the weak scripting around the use of his character, produces the one sour note in the movie. Unfortunately, this happens at the end, so it may make an undeservedly large impact on viewers.
Those who watch movies expecting a "point" may come away from this film unsatisfied. But if you enjoy interesting character studies, then Broken Flowers can be a treat. Just don't expect something very novel from Murray.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars 1月24日 Doom (**)The best thing to be said about Doom is that, with a cost of $70 million and a gross of $28 million, it's not very likely to have a sequel. And with good reason. 1月19日 Dark Water (***1/2)Yet another Hollywood remake of a Japanese horror film, Dark Water, based on the 2002 film Honogurai mizu no soko kara, wins points for drama and atmosphere but comes up short on scares -- if scares were what you were expecting, that is. If you've seen The Ring or The Grudge, the plot will seem instantly familiar: a single mother and a child move into a new apartment that is haunted by the watery spirit of a girl who died tragically. The mother must confront the ghost to save her daughter while fighting off demons of another sort. Jennifer Connelly plays the young mother, Dahlia, who is troubled by her divorce and by memories of her own mother, who abandoned her when she was young. In this performance, Connelly, who was one of my favorite "babe" actresses in her twenties, gives a softer echo of her tormented character from House of Sand and Fog. It is natural to compare her to Naomi Watts in the American Ring movies, and in this I think Watts outshined Connelly. Still, the performance is good and Dahlia is a sympathetic and tortured character. The remainder of the cast was adequate, sometimes more so. Dougray Scott has an exceptionally nasty turn as Dahlia's husband, a character who you instantly hate, though he redeems himself in the end. As Dahlia's daughter Cecilia, Ariel Gade is suitably wide-eyed and kid-who-talks-to-ghosts spooky (thought not as much as Osment way back in The Sixth Sense). The real treats for me were Pete Postlethwaite, who adopts a weird accent and even weirder mannerisms as the building's custodian, and John C. Reilly, as a shifty real estate agent who characteristically can't stop talking and consistently lies through his teeth. The real star, aside from Ms. Connelly, is the cinematography. The director's presentation of New York is cold, wet, and decayed, from the cityscapes to the inside of Dahlia's apartment. Nearly every scene is painted in rust, brown, and moldy green tones, which evoke the presence of death in a different way than the cold blue palette of The Ring. On top of this, the ghost makes her presence known through different kinds of water -- clear water, white water, grey water, dirty water, and dark water of various hues. These visuals, and not the story, are what I suspect most people will remember about the film. Despite the presence of the ghost, the movie is low on chills. Viewers are more likely to be disturbed by the scenery, as noted above, and by the deceit and treachery that underscores the different interactions between Dahlia and the rest of the cast. Even Dahlia's pro bono divorce lawyer (Tim Roth, who I didn't even recognize) feels the need to tell her small lies about himself and his life. While some may appreciate the manner in which human character has become as rotten as the decrepit scenery around Dahlia, the cynicism of it all put me off, much as I was put by the "sad happy" ending (which I won't reveal for spoiler purposes, but which was easily foreseen if you've seen other Japanese horror adaptations). Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars |
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