Archive for September, 2009
476 – Pandorum
Echoing such luminous sci-fi classics as 2001 and Alien, Pandorum is a terrific psychological thriller, although it does struggle at times to be coherent and original. But it’s a true mindbender, and it’s packed with action that moves so quickly neither the actors nor the audience can really catch a breath, which is a good move if your plot is shaky to begin with.
As with the best deep-space movies, the context is mental illness, what the Professor on Gilligan’s Island called, oddly enough, “island madness.” Only in space. In the distant, distant future, a ship has been sent from the Earth carrying a lot of people, headed to the only Earth-like planet ever found. Sometime during the journey, things go awry. We pick up the story as an astronaut named Bower (Ben Foster) awakens from hypersleep, abruptly; he’s soon followed by his commanding officer, Payton (Dennis Quaid). The rest of the crew is gone, and the only door is locked from the outside. What’s happened here?
Making matters more difficult is the amnesia that each man suffers from, owing to their having been in hypersleep way longer than intended. Somehow, they must piece together what has happened and find out what lies behind that door – and throughout the rest of the gigantic ship.
Not only does the movie recall Aliens and 2001, you can also see similarities to The Descent and The Abyss; really, any movie in which people are trapped in claustrophobic environs. And although the pacing is frenetic at times, the movie is really chillingly shot (by Wedigo von Schultzendorff). On the one hand, the plot flows linearly – Bower needs to get to the ship’s reactor so he can reboot it and save everyone – meaning that the actors race from scene to scene, running out of time. On the other hand, they don’t piece together what’s happened as quickly as they might in other, lesser films; they seem to figure things out gradually, as if assembling a puzzle in their heads. Bowers and others – and there are others – discover right away, though, that they’re not really alone on the ship and that their enemies are extremely strong and fast and vicious.
Injected into this oh-my-goodness-what’s-out-there madness is, well, madness. The movie’s title is explained as being a sort of mental illness that affects astronauts from time to time, when they just plain go bonkers for seemingly no reason and kill everyone on board. Is that’s what’s happening here? Is Bower the crazy one? Or is it Payton? Are they, in fact, alone on the ship?
Foster is excellent as the hero who remembers a little bit more of their mission as time elapses; Quaid, in turn, shows a few more layers than we’re accustomed to seeing from him (he’s usually more of a poor man’s Harrison Ford). Both actors turn in convincing, full-throated performances that complement, rather than succumb to, the special effects and cinematic wizardry. Often, the effects are the entire show. Now, it’s true that you won’t see a lot of character development here, as you might in the most cerebral of sci-fi, but what works best here is the paucity of knowledge about the situation and the characters. By spinning the tale gradually, feeding the audience only a snippet at a time, director Christian Alvart dangles the mystery in front of his viewers without allowing them to settle back and solve the mystery on their own. When you’re constantly kept on your toes with sudden lurches of unseen shapes and reverberating noises, you – like the befuddled characters – are concurrently kept off balance. The result is an unsettling, entertaining delight.
Pandorum: ***
475 – The Informant!
Posted by frothy in Informant! on September 20, 2009
In Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!, Matt Damon is a guileless agriculture exec who decides to rat out on his superiors for their price-fixing schemes. Or maybe he’s not as innocent as he looks and is simply trying to take over the embattled company. Or maybe he’s just mentally unstable. But the result is lamebrained and uninvolving; as the movie progresses, it’s clear there’s more to things than meets the eye but little reason to care. With a protagonist who isn’t convincing as either a victim or a perpetrator, The Informant! ultimately tries way too hard to please. Damon’s characterizations are difficult to pin down, making it impossible to root for him or against him at any point, even at the very end.
The Informant! is an absurdist piece, but it just doesn’t work. You get the feeling that if this had been a straightforward industrial-wrongdoing bit, it could have been a strong, acerbic eyebrow raiser about Big Bad Companies. It could have been The Insider, an investigative movie that was just as much about the behind-the-scenes machinations of the good guys and the bad guys as it was about the evils of the smoking industry. But you get little of that in The Informant!, which apparently sees itself as a comedy of errors. As the lies of Mark Whitacre (Damon) – to the FBI, to his bosses, to his lawyers – pile up, all semblance of reality and logic go flying out the window.
Damon plays Whitacre with almost unhinged glee, but it’s as if he’s in on the joke, and you’re not. At times, he reminds you of Andy from The 40 Year Old Virgin, so innocent in the ways of the world, and the next thing you know he’s lying his butt off to anyone who will listen. Is it all part of an elaborate scheme, or is he just a chronic liar? It might not be evident even by the end of the movie, which sort of puts the protagonist’s role in a bit of stasis.
For me, there are people for whom you root, people against whom you root, and people whose intentions are nebulous. I don’t even mind it when there are unexplained actions by the characters; it’s okay if there are loose plot threads. So it’s not that I don’t agree with Mark Whitacre being this playing-all-sides sort of fellow, it’s just that all of the actions he undertakes, whether he’s working with the feds, interacting with his smarter wife, or narrating himself, are a colossal bore. That’s the crux of it right there – the movie is boring; the plot is so straightforward and vanilla that the audience isn’t likely to be emotionally invested in Whitacre or his family (we hardly ever see the kids anyway) and therefore isn’t likely to give a hoot what happens to them.
The Informant!: **
This one is for my mom.
Posted by frothy in Housekeeping on September 18, 2009
That’s it. That’s the entire post. Complaints? Take it up with managment!
474 – Zombieland
Posted by frothy in Zombieland on September 17, 2009
Zombieland is a gleefully twisted mockumentary about a world full of you-know-whats, wherein only five living people remain in the entire world. It’s gory and disgusting, but most of all, it’s terrific fun, with just the right mix of violence and off-kilter comedy.
Jesse Eisenberg plays a young man named Columbus (because that’s where he’s heading, across the wasteland that is the middle US). Columbus is scared of just about everything: clowns, the cloths people use to wipe down tables, bathrooms, you name it. A hot apartment neighbor comes down with this hot new disease that all the cool kids don’t want to have, and before you know it he’s killed her (well, rekilled) and is on the run, fleeing zombies and making up a long list of rules of how to survive in the eponymous new land. Near the beginning of our story, he meets up with a man he calls Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), who’s, uh, on his way to Tallahassee, and they in turn meet with a couple of con girls (Abagail Breslin and Emma Stone).
Comparisons to Shaun of the Dead are somewhat apt, as both movies are comedic takes on a horror subgenre, and director Ruben Fleischer was influenced by the Simon Pegg-Nick Frost movie. But. Zombieland is both funnier and more sincere; it’s not a slapstick comedy, and it’s not really a horror film, as Shaun of the Dead was. In fact, it’s sort of quirky and genreless.
There were a LOT of laugh-out-loud moments for me in this movie, and I think a chief reason it all gels is that the leads are so perfectly cast. Eisenberg is awesome as the protagonist, the vulnerable hero, and Harrelson is a real hoot as the Mad-Max-like (or maybe Ash from Evil Dead) gentle psycho who desires nothing more than to waste zombies and find one, just one, Twinkie. Yes, I said Twinkie!
I also really liked Abagail Breslin as the moppet Little Rock. It’s always tough for child actors to make the transition into more-adult roles, but she’s up to the task here. Emma Stone is tough and sweet as her sisterly counterpart.
There’s a cameo that’ll surely surprise you – and what’s more, it really works. The actor – no spoilers here! – really sells the role. Let’s just say that he plays himself. Did I mention that the main characters are headed to California and that basically everyone else in the world is either dead or a zombie? Everyone?
You don’t often hear people applaud during a movie, but applaud we did at a couple key moments. The final scene in an amusement park is witty and lighthearted, at least as lighthearted as mowing down zombies with machine guns can be.
Now, granted, there’s plenty of blood splattering, plenty of gore, plenty of cursing, and even some nudity. And yes, it’s even gratuitous. But not for a zombie movie. For a zombie movie, those things are sort of underplayed a little bit, at least in the true horror sense – they’re played much more for chuckles than anything else. If anything, Zombieland is a movie that dares you to take it seriously, just so it can pull the rug out from under you and we can all laugh. It’s an offbeat look at an overused genre that cranks out the guts and guffaws in equal, lethal doses.
Zombieland: ***
473 – Crossing Over
Posted by frothy in Crossing Over on September 15, 2009
Unlike Crash, another recent disparate-people-dealing-with-a-sociological-issue movie, Crossing Over is poignant, stirring, and rousing, capturing what must be the wrenching experience of being an immigrant, legal or otherwise, in the United States. Led by Harrison Ford, the ensemble cast touches all the bases. Although the movie can be very difficult to watch at times, owing to its subject matter, it’s a tough-minded look at the often-tragic issue of immigration.
Ford plays Max Brogan, an INS agent stationed in Los Angeles, who decides to help an illegal textile worker (Alice Braga) by making sure that the woman’s son is taken to his grandmother (the woman’s mother) in Mexico when the woman is detained. Meanwhile, Max’s partner Hamid Baraheri (Cliff Curtis), struggles to reconcile his job with the culture of his family (Iranian) and the reckless behavior of his younger sister. Ray Liotta plays Cole Frankel, an adjudicator who determines the status of immigrants and their green cards; Alice Eve is an aspiring Australian actress who has to degrade herself to lengthen her stay in the country; Ashley Judd plays Liotta’s wife, who defends immigrants in status cases. In a parallel storyline, a young Korean youth, days before his family’s naturalization ceremony, makes a decision that could have terrible consequences.
All of these storylines are intricately intertwined, but here’s where the movie differs from Crash: the interactions of the various characters never feel forced or insincere, and the characters themselves are not simple good people doing bad things or bad people doing good things.
The acting is uniformly grand. Ford, who rarely plays nonhero roles let alone supporting roles, is excellent as the crusty, world-weary agent, trying desperately to solve a serious crime that may hit close to home while also doing the right thing by the young textile-worker mother. Also shining is Judd (and, to a lesser extent, Liotta, although he plays the same character in many of his movies now – a slimeball), but really sealing the deal is Curtis (10,000 BC, Sunshine) as the conflicted agent of Iranian descent.
Like the issue of immigration itself, the movie is complicated, almost detrimentally so, but the conflict should certainly resonate with its audience, even if one is not an immigrant or part of a family that has recently immigrated. Certain scenes are almost deadly with their pathos, figuratively rending your heart as they play out. Emotionally gripping scenes such as these (particularly near the end of the film) exemplify precisely the kind of psychological gymnastics that a director must undertake for a film like this to have any sort of positive effecet on its audience. That is, the entire issue of immigration is fraught with anger, deceit, terror, and sadness, and it can be tricky to walk the line between one feeling or another, lest one be accused of bias.
Crossing Over falls into none of the traps that Crash fell into. Its character-driven storyline is brimming with plausible conflict that eclipses the usual cops-and-illegals pastiche, choosing instead to deal with problems on a more individual level. The result is an honest, illuminating look at a sometimes-vexing subject, although it is clearly not for all tastes.
Crossing Over: ***
472 – Halloween II
Posted by frothy in Halloween II (2009) on September 6, 2009
A lot of people didn’t like Rob Zombie’s Halloween, but I’m not one of them. I found his vision of John Carpenter’s classic to be stylish without drifting from the core issues of the original. Sure, it’s gorier, but you knew that going in. Zombie’s followup isn’t a direct sequel to the first Halloween II but rather to his own film, and personally I thought it (and the blood) flowed rather nicely. It’s clear the man is passionate about his horror.
You know how I know a horror movie works for me? When the killer leaps out unexpectedly. Time was, that was basically every time, but we’re a little more jaded now and really expect him continuously. You know what else works? When the characters are more than just victims, cardboard standups there for the killin’. When something happens to these people, you feel it. Example, Sheriff Brackett rushes back to his house, realizing that Michael Myers – not dead! – is probably in the middle of hacking his daughter to pieces. At that moment, we feel what Brackett feels – not just that an innocent, but the man’s daughter is being killed. Done right, this kind of scene can pack an emotional wallop, something you don’t often see in slasher movies.
Here’s the story. It’s a year later, and Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) is trying to get on with her life after Michael Myers escaped from a mental institution, returned to Haddonfield, Illinois, and tried to kill her. Laurie bears the considerable mental and physical scars of her encounter with Michael, as does her friend Annie Brackett, and she now lives with Annie and her father, Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif). Michael’s supposedly dead, but we wouldn’t have a sequel if that were truly the case, so he finds his way back to Haddonfield as well, cutting a swath of bloody corpses (or leaving a path of bloody corpses).
Zombie’s great talent is style. You see it in his old White Zombie videos, you see it in his animated sequence in Beavis and Butt-head Do America, and you see it in his earlier films. The man has verve and panache. People don’t just get smacked around, they get pummeled, and not just men, either. People don’t just get stabbed in the leg, they get sliced up. Dogs, too. It’s not a movie for the weak of heart.
What also works here is that Zombie never loses sight of the story. (Yes, there is one.) Sometimes, with crappier horror movies, the director will simply go all-in and make everything as goopily gory as possible. There’s a plot here, and there are victims and good guys, too. There are other things in the movie, is what I’m saying, and Zombie makes sure we remember they’re there, too. Keep the story moving – Michael must have some reason to butcher someone, even if that reason is “they were in the way.”
One problem I had with the movie, though, was the character of Dr. Loomis. In the first-series films Loomis (played by Donald Pleasance) is a kindly doctor, terribly upset that he’s inadvertently unleashed Michael onto the world by letting him escape. In this movie, Loomis (played by Malcolm McDowell) is a greedy, self-indulgent jerk who’s pushing a tell-all memoir about the events of a year ago. Loomis seemed a lot more concerned with everyone’s well being in Zombie’s first film, but here he simply doesn’t care about anyone – even going so far as to reveal a potentially deadly secret to sell books. I’m not sure if it was just McDowell hamming it up or an oversight on the writer (also Zombie), but the character seemed way over the top, sort of like Gale Whatshername from the Scream movies, which were parodying the way newsie types profit from misery and woe.
But overall, I liked this sequel quite a bit. I was literally the only person in the entire theater this morning, which is always quite nice. I particularly liked Brad Dourif as the strong but vulnerable police chief; a great performance from an underlooked character actor.
Note: Zombie (and the studio) has said he won’t be back for Halloween III, should it come to fruition.
Halloween II: ***
471 – Last Chance Harvey
Posted by frothy in Last Chance Harvey on September 6, 2009
The trouble with Last Chance Harvey isn’t that it’s an old-time romantic comedy featuring two seasoned professionals, it’s that it’s dull, awkward, and depressing. Dustin Hoffman is a jingle-music writer who falls for Emma Thompson, a data-gatherer for the British government, while in London for his daughter’s wedding. They meet ugly, then cute, then one does something that makes the other thing the one doesn’t like them, then they reconcile, the end.
Hoffman plays Harvey Shine, a man who’s running out of chances in life. His boss (Richard Schiff) wants a younger guy to take over their firm’s important account, but Harvey insists he’ll be back after the wedding to handle the account. You can guess what happens; there are delays and other problems, and Harvey’s canned before he’s been in England more than a day. Meanwhile, turns out that everyone in the family dislikes Harvey for some reason; his daughter elects to have her stepfather give her away instead of Harvey, a decision that implies some neglect on Harvey’s part toward his daughter. Oh, and for some reason, at the last minute, the entire family is moved from their hotel prior to the rehearsal dinner to a nice, old house – except Harvey, who isn’t even told. You see what I mean?
So Harvey’s a put-upon schlub. Meanwhile, Kate Walker (Thompson) is a statistician, the kind of person who bothers you as you deplane, asking you how your flight was. Harvey brushes her off at first – as we all do – but then runs into her later at the hotel bar as they commiserate over their lack of good fortune. Then they walk and talk and walk and talk and talk and talk and oh my goodness get to something. She talks Harvey into attending the wedding reception (he was going to head back to New York for his job, but oh well), and naturally that lets them both cut loose a little bit.
Apparently this project came to be after Hoffman and Thompson worked together on 2006′s Stranger than Fiction. The idea of two older people – and remember, Hoffman is a good twenty years older than Thompson – falling for each other, even that quickly, is a sweet one, and the two leads are certainly capable of such delicate emotions. But the pacing is awful, something that can be largely blamed on the director (Joel Hopkins). The first thirty minutes or so before Harvey and Kate meet are just cringe worthy – you feel bad for Hoffman, but you’re not entirely sure why. Maybe he deserves the bad treatment he gets, you don’t know. Maybe he’s kind of a jerk. And his maladies and issues are so drawn out before Thompson shows up that you keep checking your watch to see if you can travel back in time, or something.
That said, the two leads click rather well, but the leaden pacing of the film really does them in. By the time their chemistry really kicks in, the movie has settled into a rut of traditional romantic-comedy actions and reactions, and eventually you just plain stop caring what happens to either one of them. There’s no explanation given for Harvey’s maltreatment, nor is there a suitable explanation for how a movie with these two leads could miss its mark so badly.
Last Chance Harvey: **
470 – Hell Ride (***)
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a huge influx in outlaw-biker movies, thanks in no small part to Easy Rider. Audiences loved the lone wolf riding a hog, bad men who were sort of good inside because they took on badder men. Lots of guns, naked women, and violence. Larry Bishop’s Hell Ride is a throwback to these drive-in flicks (he’s a refugee from them, himself), and it’s a wild, crusty, profane, and ultimately entertaining dirtball of a movie.
The only way to make a bad-ass biker look like a hero is to make his enemy even worse. In Hell Ride, Pistolero (Bishop) seeks revenge for the murder of Cherokee Kisum (Julia Jones) back in 1976. Cherokee had a son, Comanche (Eric Balfour), who may or may not still be alive, and the biker gang who killed his mom thirty years ago, the 666ers, is reforming and hoping to wreak more havoc.
Riding with Pistolero and Comanche is The Gent (Michael Madsen), while the 666ers include The Deuce (David Carradine), Billy Wings (Vinnie Jones), and maybe Eddie Zero (Dennis Hopper). They sound like good, down-to-earth boys, don’t they? Fellas you could raise a family or two with. Good, honest, law-abiding old dudes.
Well, you know what you’re gonna get with this cast. There’s bloodshed, there’s plenty of naked women and drug use, and even naked women using drugs. There’s a guy who shoots his victims with a crossbow, always a hoot. There’s doublecrossing, and there’s the wide expanse of the vast California desert serving as a stark, realistic backdrop to all the shenanigans.
Obviously, you’re not going to enjoy this much if you don’t like violent movies to begin with. One of the producers is Quentin Tarantino, and some of his trademarks abound, such as a view from a box looking up, like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Tarantino, a film scholar of his generation if there ever was one, takes great pains to capture the spirit and look of those early-era biker movies. The opening scene is a homage to Hopper’s own Easy Rider (1969), and the whole movie was done as sort of an update/nod to Bishop’s own The Savage Seven (1968). Love him or hate him, you have to admit Tarantino loves to get the details right, and damned if this movie doesn’t look great.
You couldn’t ask for a better hardcore, leathery cast, either. Hopper steals every scene; his character could be seen as a cross between his Billy in Easy Rider and his unnamed photographer in Apocalypse Now. Carradine has only one scene, but it’s as powerful as his Kill Bill appearances, which is saying a lot. Madsen gets more screen time than either of them, and he runs away with the entire picture from Bishop, who’s probably better suited to supporting roles.
Regardless, Hell Ride is a dusty-fingernail, rubber-burning thriller full of gut-shooting, incredibly gorgeous women, and peyote. Excellent for fans of the genre.
Hell Ride: ***
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