It figures. Right when I take the time to craft a new word for Tony Scott to describe his over-directing, he goes ahead and tones himself down considerably, leaving me with a perfectly worthwhile runaway train movie that doesn’t have any of the big camera or CG flourishes that we’ve all slowly come to be annoyed by with him.
The film stars Denzel Washington and Chris Pine as two new partners working for the Pennsylvania railroads. Their first day together finds them with some problems, however, when a horrible screw-up far down the line leads to an unmanned train going full speed down their line. As one by one all the rail company’s plans to stop the train fail miserably, it becomes clear that the only way for disaster to be averted is for Captain Kirk and Malcolm X to stop it themselves.
One thing I was rather fond of with this film was just how the train got going through a perfect storm of fairly plausible mechanical errors and one tremendous bit of human error (before the end credits, when the film is giving us a textual account of where the various survivors are today, the guy that screwed up initially gets a particularly amusing outcome). Then, because it is of course an action movie and not a documentary, we have to ratchet up the tension by explaining how the train simply has too many cars -- and thus, far to much weight on it -- to be stopped by any ordinary runaway train means, and then we naturally also discover that eight of its cars are carrying a highly toxic and flammable substance, making sure that if the train derails when it reaches the tight curve in Bellaire, Ohio, the entire city will be destroyed.
The film works both in how it sets up its various crises and in how it solves them (or doesn’t, as the case may be). For instance, early on, before they realize just how fast the train is moving (they originally just think it’s drifting slowly, not realizing it’s plowing ahead at full speed), there’s a brief subplot with a train full of schoolchildren on the same track that winds up being diverted just in time. A less confident film might have spent a half hour or more on them even though everyone watching knows full well a damn train full of kids isn’t going to be wiped out. Here, they’re diverted almost immediately after the runaway train is reported, and though they get off the track just in time for the kids to all ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ as it whizzes past them, the film doesn’t try to insult us by spending any undue time pretending what’s going to happen.
I worry that I may be overhyping it to much here now. The problem arises in that, while it’s nothing particularly fantastic, there really isn’t anything appreciably wrong with it, either. The acting is solid down the line (if it‘s occasionally overdone, this is exactly the kind of movie that requires it), it’s nice and fast-paced, there’s good buddy cop-style banter between Washington and Pine, it doesn’t insult our intelligence, and it’s directed both competently and without any of Tony Scott’s excesses. The only real problem is that it never actually excels at anything; it’s unfortunately probably going to wind up one of those movies that you’ll watch whenever it happens to be on TV, and will simply drift out of your consciousness almost immediately afterward. Still, that hour and a half you’re watching it? Solid.
Rating: ***
P.S. The film is supposedly based on a true story. I have no choice but to assume, however, that it took a few more liberties with the facts than 127 Hours did
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Unstoppable
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
127 Hours
And I now narrow my list of Best Picture nominees I have yet to see down to just Black Swan and True Grit. Hey, it matters to me, alright? Anyway, this wasn’t really one of the better nominees, but it’s still a pretty solid if somewhat over-directed film.
James Franco stars as Aron Ralston, an energetic part time hiker that is spending yet another weekend canyoneering (See, movies can teach new words!) in Utah when, after meeting two cute girls and getting invited to a party they’re throwing that evening, he finds himself in a bit of a pickle. Specifically, he finds his arm trapped underneath a rock that came loose and fell on him during his adventure. We are then stuck with him for the next 127 hours (Hey, like the title!) as he tries every way available to free himself, before finally accepting that he’s going to need to use his knife to chip away at something other than the rock pinning him.
It’s a really interesting story, and is really well acted, but I found it being occasionally overdone pretty heavily. I know director Danny Boyle has a bit of a history of over-directing, but this is a story that screams for something a bit more low key. Instead, he directs chunks of it as though he were trying to make an extreme sports fan’s ultimate fantasy movie, very loud and in-your-face and more than slightly abrasive. Even when the story’s been reduced to just him stuck under a rock, Boyle throws in constant flashbacks and daydreams, complete with split screens, ugly fishbowl lens shots, and anything else Boyle can think of to keep from letting us just focus on the story at hand. It’s all very unnecessary and distracting, and weakens the film considerably.
This is not to say that it’s a bad movie. It’s one of the rather surprising number of films made in recent years about someone stuck in one location fighting nature for survival (putting it with the likes of Frozen and Buried, both of which also came out in 2010), and while it’s not the best in that genre I’ve seen (Frozen is my current favorite), it’s certainly one of the better ones. James Franco works his ass off here, managing an increasing amount of desperation and despair while keeping true to a core level of confidence and optimism. Not an easy task, and he definitely earns his Best Actor nomination, if nothing else.
Of course, that’s obviously not the only good part of the film, and to be fair, Boyle does manage to occasionally reign himself in and give us some scenes of quiet sadness as he stands there (because of his pinned arm, he’s unable to sit) quietly understanding that he’s almost certainly going to die. I wish the entire movie had been this calm and thoughtful, but the film still manages to get us into Ralston’s mind well enough despite Boyle’s Tony Scottization (I’m making that a term now, yes) of the visual scheme.
This is probably the weakest of the Best Picture nominees (though again, I still have two left to see), and that’s due almost entirely to Boyle going so overboard with the visual style as though he wasn’t confident enough in the material. It’s still really well acted and surprisingly fast-paced for a movie with so little action to it. If I wish it were better, it could easily have been so much worse as well.
Rating: ***
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
The Fighter
It’s gotten much easier this week for me to make predictions about which of the Oscar bait movies I’m watching is likely to actually get a nomination, since they announced the nominees yesterday (No nomination for Tangled? Nothing for The Town but a Best Supporting Actor nod?), so I think I can confidently state now that this movie will indeed have gotten nominated for several awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. As to whether it fully deserves to have been one of the most nominated films (with seven nominations, it was fifth behind The King’s Speech, True Grit, Inception, and The Social Network), I don’t know that I fully agree there.
The film follows Massachusetts boxer Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) as he struggles to improve his career. With him is his brother/trainer Dicky Eklund (a fairly unrecognizable Christian Bale), who helps train him whenever he’s not disappearing to score crack. It becomes clear very quickly that a large part of Micky’s career troubles are coming from his family: his brother is completely unreliable and obsessed with his own personal fame from his glory days years ago (we get to hear him talk of how he once knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard a great many times through the film), and his mother Alice, who also manages him, and his five or six sisters, are all as overbearing as a family could possibly be. Wahlberg has surprisingly few lines in the film for a lead, perhaps because his character’s family talks so much that he’s used to never being able to get a word in edgewise.
After a humiliating defeat (his fourth loss in a row) when he’s pressured by his family into accepting a last minute fight against a fighter in a higher weight class, his new girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams) manages to convince him that maybe his family doesn’t exactly have his best interests at heart, and he starts to look into other avenues for his management and training. As one could expect, with his new manager and trainer, he finally gets back on a winning streak, much to the consternation of his jilted family.
Let’s get one thing out of the way here: this is absolutely Christian Bale’s show. He is so wild and energetic that he steals every last scene he’s in. The film opens with Wahlberg trying to get some road work done for his main paying job, and Bale just keeps trying to box him and mug for him that he just gives up from weariness, and joins Bale in posing for Bale’s camera crew. Bale has been telling everyone that the HBO crew is there to film Bale’s comeback, though of course it’s very soon uncomfortably obvious what the documentary’s really about (Hint: Bale eventually gets to see it while in prison). Now, I’ve never thought Wahlberg was that exciting an actor to begin with, but he’s not being given a chance paired off with Bale like this. He might as well be one of the audience members that gets dragged onstage during live theater and tries to gamely play along, but mostly just stands there awkwardly smiling while everyone else just acts around him. He’s a fairly internalized actor at the best of times (The Departed notwithstanding); here, he might as well be a wooden prop in half of his scenes.
Which is not to say that he’s outright bad here, he’s just largely a nonentity, almost serving more as one of Hitchcock’s MacGuffins rather than being an actual person. Somewhat more clumsy are the fights, which almost look like old Hulk Hogan matches. In most of the fights we get a good look at, we just see Wahlberg getting pounded on mercilessly until it’s time for him to win, and then he suddenly Hulks up and drops his opponent with a few well-placed hits. Granted, the movie as a whole is a bit over the top, but come on.
Still, these are fairly minor complaints, all told. The movie as a whole is just plain exhilarating and fun, filled with people that make you better appreciate your own, calmer family, and a lot of great performances by everyone not named Mark (since I haven’t really said it earlier, some mention must be made of Amy Adams, who once again shows why she’s one of the brightest stars in Hollywood). If I don’t quite agree that it’s a Best Picture worthy film, nor should David O. Russell have gotten a Best Director nomination instead of Christopher Nolan, it’s still a damn fine movie.
Rating: *** ½
Monday, January 24, 2011
The Social Network
I don’t know what it says about the general quality of the films that came out this year, but where my review yesterday of The King’s Speech was about a film I expect to be nominated for Best Picture, here is a film I am 80% sure will actually win Best Picture (the other 20% is going towards Inception). It’s kind of a combination of both films being extremely good, and there being a bit of a dearth of films this past year that have any kind of real buzz to them whatsoever. I’d hate to think they were going to go with ten Best Picture nominees again this year, because I have no real clue how they’d fill all those slots up. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The film is the story of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), the founder of Facebook and the world’s youngest billionaire. It opens with him verbally assaulting his girlfriend in a lame effort to prove his intellectual superiority (resulting in their unsurprising breakup), and his subsequent blogging about how awful a person she is for dumping him and the swift drunken creation of a new website where he illegally stole all the images of college girls from various university databases and put them online for people to compare and contrast. After this gets him on academic probation, he’s contacted by the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer), who decide he’s the perfect candidate to help them create a new social networking site called Harvard Connection, which differs from preexisting ones like Myspace and Friendster because you can only see the pages of people you’re already friends with, creating an air of exclusivity to the site. He agrees to help, then spends the next month and a half blowing them off in e-mail while creating his own site The Facebook with the exact same premise. The rest is history.
The film obviously has quite a few hurdles to overcome, and it succeeds at all of them wonderfully. First, it has the difficulty of showing a bunch of computer programmers doing their jobs without boring the audience or betraying any ignorance about what they’re doing, and director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin manage to find a way to simultaneously show how complicated everything is while explaining it all in clear enough terms for the audience to understand. There’s also the problem with the main character being pretty much a total dick to everyone around him, and that’s solved in part by surrounding him with somewhat more sympathetic characters (and apparently also by toning down Zuckerberg’s overall awful personality somewhat from how he is in real life, though he still seems fairly miserable no matter how successful he gets), giving us some semi-likable characters to root for as they’re alternately screwed over by Zuckerberg and go on to sue him for all they can get. There’s also the issue of just how illegal his operations in getting Facebook into the powerhouse it is today were, and to the film’s credit it keeps things pretty murky here, though it’s pretty obvious that he’s at least partially guilty of the various charges his former associates lay at his feet.
Two of the main things that help the film out are Fincher’s relentlessly fast pacing, taking us through the highs and lows of getting Facebook from a germ of an idea to its first million users at a constant run, aided and abetted by a fantastic soundtrack put together by Trent Reznor. Fincher, of course, isn’t exactly a stranger to making fast paced films, having previously helmed such efforts as Seven, The Game, and Fight Club, and he and Reznor manage to blend their styles together pretty much perfectly here. My favorite moment of their collaboration comes when Zuckerberg has a meeting with his friend and business partner Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the creator of Napster, at a dance club. While dozens of people are out dancing on the floor, they’re at a table while deafening music swells and ebbs around them like a physical addition to their group, keeping us from hearing entire sentences and leaving them in the inconvenient position of having to shout at the top of their lungs at each other for the entire conversation. It gave me some not very fond memories of the few times I’ve been out clubbing, and I don’t miss them at all.
Getting back on track, I meant what I said earlier about how I’m fairly sure this is going to win Best Picture. It’s got all the buzz, it’s got all the talent, and it has the benefit of coming out in a year without that many great films. It’s a film that’s well worth your while, regardless of your feelings on Facebook, and is every bit as smart and ruthless as its protagonist.
Rating: ****
Sunday, January 23, 2011
The King's Speech
It’s been long understood that British history is eternally ripe for great films based on and around it, and one need no greater proof than here, where a story of a man learning to overcome a speech impediment winds up being one of the year’s best films. It’s a funny, touching, intelligent, powerful effort, of the sort that one rarely finds in the movies these days. That it’s stuffed to bursting with great actors is just icing on the cake.
The film follows King George VI (Colin Firth) in the years before and after his ascension to the crown. His father King George V (Michael Gambon) has decided that, due to the rise of radio, Firth’s stammer needs to be corrected if he’s ever going to make a worthwhile king (yes, he has an older brother in Guy Pearce, but even his father thinks Pearce is worthless and will never make it as England’s ruler). To fix his problem, he and his wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) enlist the aid of speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), a man with a rather unorthodox approach to fixing speech problems that may come from having never received any actual training for his profession.
Perhaps the main key to the film comes from how Logue is Australian, and so doesn’t have the same politeness and deference to royalty that most British people did at the time. He quickly realizes that the problem with Firth’s stutter is mental and not physical, and so decides the only real route to curing him is to befriend him, beginning by demanding they call each other by first names and standing as equals at all times. This is, to put it mildly, not the normal method of dealing with a prince, though it does seem to have more of an effect than the more physical exercises Firth demands they also do, such as rolling around on the floor to loosen up muscles and saying ridiculous tongue twisters, which Rush rattles off so quickly I couldn’t even hear them, much less repeat them. Still, it’s a lot of fun watching how he works his way under Firth’s skin to help the healing process, such as when he decides to lounge for a bit in the coronation throne at Westminster Abbey. Firth is outraged that he would do such a thing, while Rush just casually says “It’s just a chair. Look, people carved their names in it!”
I’ve not seen director Tom Hooper’s previous film The Damned United, but it’s clear I was missing out. He directs The King’s Speech with a sure hand, filming most of the movie in cramped interior locations to help subtly reinforce how Firth is imprisoned within his own body. When you watch it (and I know you will, you trust my opinion so very much), note how often Rush decides to help Firth by opening up a window to let fresh air in, symbolically opening up Firth’s voice in the process. It’s nothing that’s overemphasized or clumsy, it’s just a sign of Hooper’s mastery of the form.
We’ll be finding out this week if this movie gets nominated for any Academy Awards, though I will predict here that it gets a Best Picture nod. Hopefully it'll get some acting nods as well, as Firth and Rush do some incredible work together. If nothing else, it’s earned these for being such an utterly fascinating film set in England in the 1930s, as war is rapidly approaching, and managing to not need a single scene of combat to make its point.
Rating: ****
Monday, May 5, 2008
24 Hour Party People
I recently had the pleasure of doing a movie marathon with my friends Emily and Wey. While most of the films we watched have already been reviewed for this very blog, the delight that is 24 Hour Party People had not yet gotten the treatment, and so you now all get the thrill of reading about it.
The movie is very loosely based on a true story, following both the life of visionary music producer Tony Wilson, and the music scene that both inspired him and which he in turn helped shape, the Madchester scene. The film starts in the late 70s, when, in his capacity as host of a local Manchester TV show, he heavily promoted the rising punk rock movement, before eventually ending his show so that he could be more directly involved in the process by getting his own venue specifically to showcase punk bands. Later, after punk rock self destructs (also in the late 70s), he buys a larger, more elaborate venue to showcase the various strange offshoots of punk, such as New Order and the Happy Mondays, until the 90s when his poor business model eventually bankrupts his company.
What makes this film work so well is a threefold path. The first is in how it truly captures the feel of the scene that it’s discussing. This movie has an energy to it, a vitality that matches that of Joy Division, the Stooges, and all the other bands featured and praised within the film. Indeed, the film only really manages to slow down when it comes time to mourn after the tragic suicide of Joy Division’s frontman Ian Curtis. Outside of that it’s just nonstop movement and music. The second is the humor that is pervasive throughout the film. This is a movie that dramatically reenacts an incident in which the two Ryder brothers that fronted the band the Happy Mondays put rat poison in some bread and fed it to a couple thousand birds by playing Flight of the Valkyries and showing bird’s-eye-view shots with sounds of machine gun fire as the Ryders throw bits of poisoned bread at them as they swoop by on their strafing runs. It’s a film that has the main character talking to us about what’s going on and helpfully pointing out all the people in the film that were actual players in the Madchester scene itself and not just actors, even showing one and then pausing the film to say that his scene was unfortunately cut, but “I’m sure it will be on the DVD”.
The third (and most important) is the sheer directing style of the film. It has no problem with using cheesy filters and scratchy prints to match the style of the rock videos of the time, is constantly looping back and forth in time from one plot point to another, and finds a way to throw an encyclopedia’s worth of information at us without ever really losing us within it. This is a film that is at once fun, uplifting, hilarious, touching, and even heartbreaking. Even if you’re unfamiliar with the music on display here, or aren’t a big fan of it, you owe it to yourself to check this film out.
Rating: *** ½
Friday, November 30, 2007
Rescue Dawn
What a harrowing, draining film this was. Werner Herzog is one of my favorite directors, and is perfectly suited to this, the story of Dieter Dengler, an American pilot shot down in Laos back when the Vietnam war was still being called a confrontation, and who escaped a P.O.W. camp and a treacherous jungle to make his way back home. Indeed, Herzog is so perfectly attuned to this story that this is the second time he’s filmed it; a decade ago, he made Little Dieter Needs to Fly, a documentary featuring Dengler himself telling his story.
I didn’t see that film, but this filmic retelling, with Christian Bale as Dengler, has a great deal of power to it. I have this listed as a war film, but there’s virtually no combat to be had in this; rather there’s virtually no soldier-versus-soldier combat to be had, instead giving us people on both sides of the conflict just being relentlessly beaten down by the environment around them, and by time itself. As soon as Dengler arrives at the camp, he starts talking with his fellow inmates about plans of escape, before being told he would have to wait until the rainy season for any chance of survival, which is five to six months away. Half the film is spent with the cast slowly wasting away at the camp, with food so scarce that even the guards are hungry enough to begin considering executing all the prisoners and claiming they tried to escape, just so they could go home and try to find food there. Bale is no stranger to weight loss for a movie role, as his 63 pound loss for his horrifying role in The Machinist holds the known record for weight loss by any actor for a role. It was interesting to see Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies as fellow inmates, though, both of which had been there months before his arrival and who are basically broken-down husks more than people. Davies in particular looks barely there, as his shirtless physique resembles a concentration camp survivor more than anything else.
Eventually, of course, they make their escape, and Bale and Zahn strike off together in search of rescue. As was predicted by Zahn, this is every bit as perilous as the camp itself was. If there is a constant theme in Herzog’s work, it is that nature is an all-powerful, chaotic beast that is fully capable of destroying us if we are not constantly on our guard, and that theme is fully on display in the jungles of Laos. They are continually beset by the likes of mudslides, leeches, patrols, and the ever-present curse of starvation, which wears them down so much that they eventually make the foolhardy mistake of exposing themselves to a villager in the hopes that he will let them have some food. The ending is obviously not very much in doubt, since Dieter’s story would never have been known if he didn’t make it back (indeed, Little Dieter Needs to Fly would have been particularly hard to make), but the journey he takes along the way is just brutal and agonizing.
Rating: *** ½
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Talk To Me
I had seen Don Cheadle in a number of films without really noticing him before becoming completely entranced in Hotel Rwanda, and he keeps up the momentum he gained with that film here. He has an amazing level of versatility to himself, so much so that I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I didn’t even recognize him until I went to write this review.
As with Hotel Rwanda, here he again throws himself into the role of a real-life person, the legendary D.C. radio DJ Petey Greene, who rose to fame in the 60s after a chance encounter with WOL employee Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor, in another great performance, though not as flashy as his role in Serenity) while serving out a prison term. After pretty much conning his way into a job as a new morning show, he rises into becoming pretty much a radio legend before completely self-destructing.
One thing I really enjoyed about this film was in how it subverted the standard routine these biopics tend to move in. While he did have a big rise to fame, complete with the apparently required self-destructive behavior to accompany his newfound success (one particularly telling incident – when MLK Jr. is killed, he gives a powerful broadcast about it that leaves his audience and co-workers in tears and makes him an instant legend, and then immediately afterward he goes to introduce James Brown at a free concert in memory of King and shows up both late and piss-drunk), he never seemed to actually want success, openly preferring to remain small time, and his career doesn’t recover after his path of ruination reaches critical mass.
Another thing that works nice is that his friend/co-worker/eventual manager/enemy Dewey is just as important a character in the film as Petey is, and their interactions with each other really form the crux of the film. Each man seems to need the other to fulfill something lacking inside, and both end feeling somewhat disappointed in the other. That this film came and went through theaters without making a ripple is baffling to me. Something this powerful and intelligent should at least have made waves among critics if nobody else.
Rating: ****
