Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

May 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) movie poster

director J.J. Abrams
viewed: 05/18/2013 at AMC Metreon 16, SF,  CA

In 2009 (really four years ago?), J.J. Abrams delivered a re-boot to the Star Trek franchise as reinvigorating and cleverly promising as any could really have hoped for.  In re-casting a younger version of the original television show’s Enterprise crew, the new versions of Kirk, Spock, Bones, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu and gang manage just the right amount of recognition, while casting a group of actors that have their own elan, verve, and presence.  It’s hard enough to cast a franchise set of actors for anything, much less ones who are bearing the weight of “being” a prior cast of pop media icons.  But Abrams and co. did it and also put together one of the better big summer movies of that year.

So it was with some reasonable amount of anticipation that accompanied the release of Abrams first sequel to the film, one which was rumored to feature Star Trek‘s villain of villains, Khan, no doubt also re-imagined for the times.  For some reason, this was meant to be some state secret, perhaps to hold at bay the many wagging tongues of internet bloggers who would dissect the casting and creation before the film had actually been seen by anyone.  In doing a modicum or research, I noted that The New York Times‘ writer A.O. Scott vowed to Paramount that he wouldn’t offer up “spoilers” around such a key component of the film’s plot and really, primary talking point.

Well, whatever.  It’s often too hard to talk seriously about a film while dancing around such obvious points.  No one will be too surprised to learn that Benedict Cumberbatch (try saying that five times fast) is the film’s key villain and is human superman Khan Noonien Singh, or simply Khan as friends and fans know him.  Khan was introduced in the original television series in an episode called “Space Seed”, which according to this new Star Trek‘s timeline wouldn’t have even happened yet (you’ll have to refer to the 2009 Star Trek for the whys and wherefores regarding this alternate universe/time travel possibility because it’s been four years and I only vaguely recall the details.) And of course Khan was made most indelibly known as getting his name into the title of the first series of film in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the 1982 high point of the Star Trek franchise and major cultural foil for Star Trek Into Darkness.  And of course, in those cases, Khan was played by the inimitable Ricardo Montalbán, a Mexican actor playing a supposedly Indian superhuman.

In 2009, the kids I think were a bit young for Star Trek, and while we’ve watched Star Wars (1977) and its sequels, I have not introduced them at all to the Star Trek universe.  So, imagine, if you can, what it’s like going into a movie like Star Trek Into Darkness, a re-booted franchise, playing off a pop cultural touchpoints from the 1960′s and 1980′s that have infused themselves evermore into our continuum…unless you just didn’t know about all that.  Let’s just say that there are a lot of jokes and Vulcan mindmelds and Vulcan nerve pinches that aren’t nearly so obvious as you might think.  Even explaining what a Vulcan is and why he’s got pointy ears and doesn’t know what “happy” is…it’s a lot of explaining.

The real question that will get asked, has been asked by people that I told that I went to see this new Star Trek film is simply: is it any good?  Frankly, I found it a bit less good than its predecessor, though maybe not by a lot.  It’s an entertaining summer action film, with tidbits of cleverness and mystery, and a good cast and a good villain (which I would argue is often the real need in these “comic book”-ish movies.   I mean to say that every superhero needs a good bad guy to fight, and perhaps part of my case in point for Star Trek would be Khan.  He is the most interesting and be him Montalbán or Cumberbatch, he’s quite well embodied.

This film is no doubt already getting pulled apart, questioned, ranted about throughout the internets and beyond, but some with good reason.  I have no prediction where this all will fall in the long run, but I will say that the very odd inversion of the ending of The Wrath or Khan, what with this time Kirk is on the other side of the window, laying down his life to nuclear radiation, restarting the warp drive to save the Enterprise, and it’s Spock who yells the manic “Khhaaaaaaannn!!!” as opposed to William Shatner.  It’s such a bizarre spin on the other film and so massively self-aware that it’s the most meta of meta moments in this post-modern summer film.  You see, Leonard Nimoy does show up onscreen to tutor Zachary Quinto (the new Spock) regarding Khan, and though he doesn’t want to effect the path of the present (he came from the future), the camera cuts away as he advises him.  Maybe he tipped him off on the ending of the 1982 film, which would have happened some much longer time in the future of the current day Enterprise.  In reality it doesn’t make sense.

It’s a pretty heavy-handed in joke.

Felix thought the film was okay.  Clara enjoyed it, though was confused by a lot of things.  I liked it.  I thought it was pretty good myself.  It will surely be interesting to see who takes the helm of the next Star Trek film and where they end up taking it.  Abrams has left them in good standing, paths cleared for more adventures with a good cast and a pretty open universe to explore.

All while he jumps universes over to Star Wars.  And given what he’s done, the anticipation for that will be most fervent.

Filed under Theatrical, With the kids

Iron Man 3 (2013)

May 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Iron Man 3 (2013) movie poster

director Shane Black
viewed: at AMC Metreon 16, SF, CA

Most of the time, even with all the films that I take the kids to see, they aren’t necessarily asking in advance to see a movie like Iron Man 3.  We hadn’t watched the prior installments together, though last summer we did watch The Avengers (2012), which they did like.  But Iron Man has become the favorite character of some of Clara’s schoolmates and they play Avengers (which I found kind of surprising, don’t ask me why).  So, when Clara asked if we could go see Iron Man 3, I said sure.  I’d seen the others.  I like keeping up with the summer movies and superheroes.

Co-written and directed by Shane Black, Iron Man 3 is surprisingly funny, lively, violent, and fun.  Black had worked with star Robert Downey, Jr. in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), one of Downey’s first successful films post-rehabs, and after Iron Man (2008) and Iron Man 2 (2010)  Jon Favreau stepped out of the directorial chair, Black seems to have been a choice selection as director to work with Downey again.  Black had made his name writing the first two Lethal Weapon films (as well as some lower lights like Last Action Hero (1993)), so his abilities at punchy dialogue is no surprise.  But as often is the case in filmmaking, putting the right person in charge of the ship is as good a hope as one has to likely success.

I actually think I liked Iron Man 3 perhaps the most of the three films.  There is some debate going on in entertainment media about whether or not Downey will return for any more films.  The denouement of this latest film gives him some available finality should he choose to take it.  Certainly Marvel Studios has proven out that all characters will be reinvented as long as properties seem to have future value, so whether Downey does reprise his role (outside of eventual Avengers 2), Iron Man will not likely be down for the count.

The movie has a massive bait and switch with its villain.  Ben Kingsley plays the much hyped and advertised terrorist baddy The Mandarin, a character extracted from the comic books (not one with which I had any familiarity).  But Guy Pearce shows up as Aldrich Killian, also of the comic books, with an Extremis drug that grows back ruined flesh and missing limbs, but also endows its takers with nuclear hot superstrength and a side effect that must be managed lest they blow up like a human bomb.  Spoiler Alert: The Mandarin is a sham, and Ben Kingsley winds up being very funny as the besotted English actor hired to play him.

It winds up being a kind of interesting point, though.  The Mandarin character as played by Kingsley and shown in advertisements was a weird, tone-deaf villain, pan-global-seeming.  Is he Asian? Middle Eastern? What kind of ideology is he meant to represent?  Terrorism and weapons technology are themes through the three films (perhaps through the comics as well), but pointedly so in the past five years that this movie franchise has been rolling.  This idea of a fictive terrorist seemed sort of problematic, such as what does he imply or signify in a world with real world terrorists who are human beings, not fictional super-criminals.

Black, by turning The Mandarin into a sham, a fiction of the film, a fiction of the real villain, the vengeful Killian, the amoral mad scientist who wants to have the government and the terrorists in his pocket so that he can rule by fear and rake in the dough for his technical weaponry.  It’s almost as if there is a criticism of this image-based villainy.  The image of the terrorist is not the real evil, but rather those behind the scenes who have crafted his image for their own purposes and manipulation.

Maybe, very likely, I am over-reading here.  But I do feel that what looked quite potentially lame and problematic turned out to be one of the film’s funnier gags and quite the twist on the whole “bad guy”/”supervillain” thing.  Those The Mandarin action figures are going to be interesting.

More than anything, the film is pretty fun, albeit very violent.  I don’t do body counts in movies, but I think if I did here it would have been disturbingly large.  The film also manages a story about Tony Stark befriending a kid in Tennessee that manages to feel reasonably valid and not too smarmy.

Both Felix and Clara enjoyed the film, by the way.  Both thought it was good.

And finally, I feel that I would be somewhat remiss if I did not mentioned Gwyneth Paltrow’s abs, glistening under her sports bra in her big finale.  Apparently that woman does have it all.  Abs and all.

Filed under Superheroes, Theatrical, With the kids

Blancanieves (2012)

April 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Blancanieves (2012) movie poster

director Pablo Berger
viewed: 04/25/2013 at Embarcadero Cinemas, SF, CA

A Spanish “Snow White” by any other name… or literally Blancanieves.  An oddity of sorts, it’s a modern silent film, shot in the style of the 1920′s, in black and white, even using what would have been the typical aspect ratio (4:3) of the time as well.  Perhaps less odd after the success of The Artist (2011), though the film’s creator, Pablo Berger, swore that this film was in production before The Artist became such a thing.

It is perhaps not ridiculous to compare the two films, though they are not really alike outside of their cinematic throwback concepts.  Many have considered Blancanieves a superior film.  I would not say that myself.  It has its charms but it’s not a particularly good film.  It’s a little hard to judge perhaps but I didn’t find it so wonderful.

It is a “Snow White” minus the magic (mostly), set in the bullfighting world in Spain in the 1920′s.  A child is born to a famous singer mother and a famous toreador father at a point of great tragedy for both.  The mother dies in childbirth and the father is gored and turned into a paraplegic.  In steps the wicked step-mother, a conniving nurse, who seeks to punish the young girl, whose existence causes her so much ire.  She even sends her to the woods to be killed by a henchman.

And Carmencita (Blancanieves to her friends) even encounters some dwarves, a group of traveling entertainers who also “fight” bulls.  She even sort of falls in love with one of them (there is no handsome prince in this telling).

It all sounds quite good and lovely.  And it is certainly not without its charms.  It’s even a little extra interesting (sort of) for me as I’ve seen a few “Snow Whites” of late: Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), and Snow White (1916).  In fact, in concept the whole thing seems pretty cool.  Which it is.

It’s just not very well-done.  Which is a shame.  It will be interesting to see if other silent films get made now into features.  It’s quite a different thing to make them today.  In their day, they were the medium.  It wasn’t as if something additional, like sound or color, was available and forgone.  Even silents that were made after the advent of sound production were commodities or artistic choices.

These two films are both intentional throwbacks, full of homage, and even set in the period of the Silent Era.  They are what they are.  But they can never be what they emulate.

Filed under Silent Film, Spain, Theatrical

Oblivion (2013)

April 23, 2013 by 1 Comment

Oblivion (2013) movie poster

director Joseph Kosinski
viewed: 04/20/2013 at CineArts @ the Empire Theater, SF, CA

Trailers for Oblivion, the new Tom Cruise sci-fi vehicle, didn’t inspire me to see it.  Set on a post-apocalyptic Earth, where Cruise and pretty, English actress Andrea Riseborough are sole caretakers of these giant sea-sucking machines (collecting sea water to convert to energy) and their drones left on the planet, the world is abandoned.  Riseborough is the monitor, Cruise the handyman.  But Cruise runs into odd things in the desolation, not the least of which is the scavengers, supposed leftover aliens from the invasion that broke the moon and wiped out the human race.

Directed from a screenplay that he co-wrote from a graphic novel that he also co-wrote, Joseph Kosinski isn’t yet an inspiring name for science fiction or film.  His only other movie to date is the slick but lame Tron: Legacy (2010).  So, matched with a trailer that seems to tell you too much (the supposed scavengers are humans! led by Morgan Freeman! in a leather suit! and they’re whole existence seems to be a lie!) didn’t urge me on to see it either.

And of course Tom Cruise.  I guess that I don’t hate him.  But he’s not someone that I want to see in a movie.

What it came down to was timing.  Free day and happened to be at the theater at just the right time.

The movie has a slick, refined aesthetic.  Especially the design of the housing and craft that Cruise and Riseborough abide in.  It’s a penthouse perched above the world, with a dangling, see-through swimming pool (how cool!).  And while Cruise wears functional futuristic adventure gear, Riseborough is clad in some pretty haute couture.  The craft that Cruise flies around the planet is a cool design, with pivoting spheres allowing multi-directional flying, shooting, seeing.  It’s all very nice.  But in the context of the movie: Who designed it?

Outside of the movie, sure, there are designers fantasizing all cool about the future.  Designs perhaps not practical or real today but might be possible.  And the aesthetics of the house…it’s a rich fantasy.

But here comes the spoiler.

In the movie, it turns out that Earth was invaded by an artificial intelligence.  It is in the form of the giant spacecraft floating in Earth’s atmosphere and presumably in the forms of the drones and the sea-sucking mechanisms.  For some reason, they needed a couple of humans around to maintain things, a maintenance crew.  Why not robots?  Not clear.  Thus we have the duo, duped as they are with erased memories, working to solve the mystery of what is really going on.  And it does have some twists.  Maybe I haven’t spoiled them all.

I guess the bottom line for me about Oblivion is that it’s a pretty decent movie.  Not great, not special, not unique.  Very slick-looking.  I’m not sure that it reflects any greater depth.  Like I kept wondering about the false family of Cruise and Riseborough and their lush penthouse life as in what does that mean to signify?  The false life they lead, does it mean to represent society or something?  Marriage?  Science fiction typically is loaded with social commentary.  Oblivion is mostly oblivious to this, I believe.  It’s a scenario but not necessarily one for us to think too much about.  A devastated Earth with a broken moon floating in space looks cool.  It’s just not too likely to happen this way.

Filed under Science Fiction, Theatrical

Jurassic Park (1993)

April 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Jurassic Park (1993) movie poster

director Steven Spielberg
viewed: 04/07/2013 at Century San Francisco Centre 9 and XD, SF, CA

Twenty years ago, the year 1993, the film Jurassic Park, the big blockbuster of the summer, the breakthrough film for computer generated special effects.  In acknowledgement of this anniversary, Jurassic Park has been “spruced up” with a 3-D-ification and trundled out to the cinemas to cash in.

While I avoid 3-D if I can, I don’t mind catching an older film on the big screen if it was one that I wouldn’t mind watching again.  I had been considering Jurassic Park for the kids for a while, so this was up our alley.  We did indeed forgo the 3-D.

Frankly, I don’t consider Jurassic Park to be a great film.  Steven Spielberg has made better films before and since, and despite the film’s notoriety of employing digital effects so significantly and successfully, it is an enjoyable, at times memorable, fairly entertaining thrill ride of a movie.

Actually, the thrill ride factor I think is the way that I’ve come to think of the film.  The best bits of the film are bits: shots, moments.  The ripples in the water cup’s surface as the stomps of the T-Rex become audible.  The T-Rex in the wing mirror (“The objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.”)  The refracting eyeball of the T-Rex as he looks inside the jeep.  The image of the velociraptor as its silhouette mimics its illustration on the wall.  The slide down the tree from the falling van.  The velociraptors hunting the kids in the kitchen.

The whole, however, is not the sum of its parts.  There are several “Wow” moments.  The first reveal of the living dinosaur (Clara actually said “Wow” in the theater at that — thus still effective 20 years later).  The sick triceratops.  The death of the lawyer on the toilet.  The death of the conniving tech assistant in his vehicle in the rain.

But like a thrill ride, it’s just a track through a series of diorama-like set-pieces, albeit some quite memorable flashes.  It actually scared the kids pretty good.  It’s effective, certainly, in that sense.

There is perhaps an even more elaborate discourse on technology regarding the film.  I reckon that I’m not knowledgable enough to be the one to articulate it well, but this film, whose crux is the digital beast has an interesting portrayal of technology within its narrative.  Being made before the dot-com/Internet explosion, the technologist of the film is Dennis Nedry (played by the puffy and slimy Wayne Knight, most notable as “Newman” from Seinfeld.)  He’s a bad guy, who tries to steal dino DNA to sell to a competitor.  He’s a junk food-eating slob.  He is callow, and while smart enough to design the systems of the park’s security systems, he finds an ignoble death.

While Samuel L. Jackson is the terse engineer who understands the work that Nedry has done enough to filter through its “2 million lines of code”, the tech hero is the young girl Lex (Ariana Richards), who is able to recognize the platform (“It’s Unix. I know Unix.”) and then gets in and hacks the system to enable doors to be automatically locked to withstand the velociraptors.  She’s “not a nerd” but a self-proclaimed “hacker”.  While a lot of this depiction comes down to the writers, Michael Chrichton and David Koepp, showing what they know or don’t know about technology, it is an interesting portrayal of the types that made the creatures “live” perhaps.

It’s always amused me the way computer screens are depicted in films.  Whether it’s a futuristic science fiction universe in which computers would theoretically be thousands of generations evolved from our present day to just showing what computer geeks of our time see when they are in “the matrix”, it’s always very dissociative from reality.  When Lex is in the Unix code (supposedly), she’s actually looking at a low-res 3-D map of the park’s buildings.  And the schematic that she finally stumbles upon is like an electronic blueprint, the audience never sees a line of code.

There is also a weird little moment when Wayne Knight’s character’s face appears on the computer screen with a cartoon body, remonstrating those who try to “break” his password.

This idea of technology represented in film often catches my eye.  I don’t know if there is anything of significance in it.  It just always strikes me as weird.

As for the film as a whole, it’s entertainment.  It’s good entertainment.  As cinema, … well, it’s good entertainment.  That the thrill ride based on technology of 20 years ago still delivers its thrills and chills is a testament to the workmanship on it.  Spielberg is no slouch, even when he’s slumming (as arguably he was on the film’s sequel).

Filed under Science Fiction, Steven Spielberg, Theatrical, With the kids

The Croods (2013)

March 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The Croods (2013) movie poster

directors Kirk DeMicco, Chris Sanders
viewed: 03/23/2013 at AMC Metreon 16, SF, CA

I can’t say as I went in to see The Croods with much hope or expectation.  The trailers for the film showed polished animation design but a pretty stilted and heavy-handed narrative and characterization.  But as I often note, I’m happy to take the kids to see a lot of things, and I was willing enough to see The Croods.  The strange thing was that I thought it was the best big feature animation since Wreck-It Ralph (2012), another film that kind of surprised me.  Lower expectations can serve a good purpose.

The Croods are a dying breed.  Neanderthals to be exact.  And as Pangea starts to break apart, they are forced to change with the times.  And in changing with the times, they meet their biological usurper, a homo sapien.

While it’s all prehistoric, it’s also your classic family conundrum.  Nicolas Cage voices Grug, the big father figure of the film, who preaches fear and survival to his whole family.  His daughter, Eep (Emma Stone), is a teenager, dreaming of freedom and life experience.  So, the major plot points do turn on some extremely traditional ideas.

The film’s greatest strength is in its design.  The vivid world they inhabit features a hilarious menagerie of weird cross-creatures such as land whales, turtle birds, elephant giraffes, and tons more.  The incidental fauna and flora make up a vivid and clever and consistently surprising universe.  And the character designs, while at first glimpse maybe not as innovative perhaps, are actually very rich on their own.  The family is given clever physical traits, uniting them.  And Eep in a lot of ways is as beautifully rendered and realized as Princess Merida from Brave (2012), which got a lot more attention.  The Neanderthal family all have interesting, quirky stances and movement, and truth be told, the whole of the film struck me as really pretty good.

For someone who sees as much children-oriented animated feature films as I do, I think I’m relatively cynical.  But I liked The Croods.  Grug, Ugga (Catherine Keener), and Gran (Cloris Leachman) aren’t the most interesting of characters.  Gran actually is a pretty annoying cliche.  But Nicolas Cage, whose incongruous voice doesn’t exactly sound like it should be coming from a caveman, has enough to work with to make the father-daughter-boyfriend scenario funny and amusing.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not epic or necessarily great, it’s just a beautifully designed, clever, enjoyable computer animated film in an ever-more crowded field of weak fare.

Filed under Animation, Nicolas Cage, Theatrical, With the kids

Jack the Giant Slayer (2013)

March 21, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Jack the Giant Slayer (2013) movie poster

director Bryan Singer
viewed: 03/17/2013 at AMC Metreon 16, SF, CA, 

2013 isn’t utterly bleak on the movie front, but it’s also quite far from inspiring.  For every Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), Pacific Rim (2013), or Elysium (2013) coming soon to a theater near everyone, there are a lot of weekends ahead with a huge spate of new releases, but an almost equal dearth of anything to get excited about.

I like taking my kids to movies.  And I’m willing to take them to almost anything that looks even half-decent.  I enjoy seeing films with them more than just seeing them on my own, so not only do we go see more films that I would not see on my own, but I probably even see more kid-oriented fare in the theaters than perhaps even the more adult stuff that they wouldn’t enjoy or which wouldn’t be appropriate for them.

Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Slayer hasn’t been on any “must” list of mine.  But it’s come at a time when nothing had been coming out for a while and I leaned toward seeing something rather than nothing.  Singer first broke out with The Usual Suspects (1995) which he followed up with his breakthrough in the comic book superhero film with X-Men (2000).  His take on Superman Returns (2006) failed to successfully re-boot that franchise, and while no one is exactly comparing him to M. Night Shyamalan, his early promise belied his career to some extent.

Jack the Giant Slayer is part of this fairy tale modernization that seems to be perhaps working its way through its cycle.  Is it over yet?  So much so that this film just seemed kind of like….why exactly?

When Clara’s friend was eager to join us, we at least had some excitement onboard.

The film stars Nicholas Hoult as Jack, who is almost as pretty as Eleanor Tomlinson who plays Isabelle, the princess in the tale.  It also features the always likable Ewan McGregor as a handsome knight, all fighting against a massive group of massive giants.  And it all conflates the classic stories of Jack the Giant Killer and Jack and the Beanstalk so much so that I can’t hardly think of them as separate stories anyways.

The giants are CGI/motion capture brutes.  They all speak in working class accents and bear various deformaties and physical atrocities from lack of hygiene that tell you about all you need to know about them.  I did find myself wondering if there was some form of classism at play here.

It’s overlong (what film isn’t these days?) but it’s entertaining.  With expectations kind of low, it’s hard to feel too disappointed.  And actually the girls quite enjoyed the film.

My feeling is that this film will swiftly fade from memory, its strengths, its weaknesses, its pleasures, its failings.  And in some ways, that is a worse criticism, I think, than simply being a bad movie.  It’s decent, but unremarkable.

Filed under Fantasy, Theatrical, With the kids

Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)

March 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) movie poster

director Sam Raimi
viewed: 03/16/2013 at CineArts @ the Empire Theater, SF, CA

Sam Raimi’s faux-Technicolor fantasy, Oz the Great and Powerful, is quite the spectacle.  Unfortunately spectacle only goes so far in a movie.  Both a great homage to the classic The Wizard of Oz (1939) and optimistic founding of another modern movie franchise, Raimi taps into old and new and lets the art designers go to town, not just the Emerald City, to give vivid, new digital life to the work of L. Frank Baum.

Baum’s work has weathered the years, probably in no short measure aided significantly by MGM’s cinematic masterpiece, but the depths of the many Oz books have never been fully plumbed by Hollywood.  While Oz the Great and Powerful is poised as a prequel and doesn’t actually tap its roots into any of Baum’s novels (only his “universe”), the landscape of Hollywood deals and marketable names offers a long line of potential re-workings.  I’m not overly familiar with Baum’s novels, but the ones that I’ve read are rich, strange, and fantastic.

Raimi’s film suffers two major problems.  The one that most have noted is the casting.  James Franco, for what he’s worth, does indeed seem utterly miscast as the prestidigitator-turned-fake Wizard, swept up from a black and white Kansas via cyclone to the lurid daydream of Oz.  Mila Kunis, for all her charms, is also an actress so much of the present that she seems utterly awkward in a period/fantasy piece.  And while I’ve always liked Rachel Weisz, the only one who felt to me like some sort of classic timeless character was Michelle Williams.  I’ve read critiques of her performance too, but I thought she was adequately ethereal and good, the only person in the film that felt right.

But perhaps more than anything, the problem is the script.  It’s not that the story idea is bad but the whole film lacks verve, magic, even comedy.  Even in a weak film, the comedic bits are usually functional “relief” but the film’s humor was as flat as any part of the film.  And the dialogue was pretty uninspired all around.

I watched the film with Clara and in 3-D, the latter of which I usually avoid at all costs.  Very typical of 3-D, I would say, the added “depth” added nothing.  Sure, it made a few of the visuals “pop” a bit more, but c’mon!  For an extra $3 I would rather have had a better film at the core.

All this complaint, sure, but it’s not a disaster of a film.  It’s extremely weak in parts, sure, but it’s entertaining enough.  The designs are certainly the highlights and Michelle Williams, one of my favorite actresses, stands out.  Clara and I enjoyed it.  Though it is not a beneficent omen of the movie season to come.

As for Raimi, we’ll always have Evil Dead II (1986).

Filed under Fantasy, Michelle Williams, Theatrical, With the kids

Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

February 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Silver Linings Playbook (2012) movie poster

director David O. Russell
viewed: 02/23/2013 at CineArts @ the Empire Theater, SF, CA

Though I wasn’t all that interested in seeing Silver Linings Playbook from trailers, despite reviews, awards, et cetera, I did reach a tipping point with it.  Chalk it up to Oscars hype or what-have-you, when it showed up in the local West Portal cinema, the Empire, I thought to myself, why not?

I liked writer/director David O. Russell quite well through Three Kings (1999).  I then really anticipated I ♥ Huckabees (2004) which I ended up hating.  And like his latest prior effort, The Fighter (2010), I found Silver Linings Playbook of an ilk that didn’t really do anything for me.  Drama/dramedy with some pretty standard story elements.  The Fighter looked like any number of any other boxing movies.  Got good reviews, won Oscars.  I didn’t need to see it.  Silver Linings Playbook, a dramedy about people with bipolar issues, with their family units, with its doubtless happy ending, added with a dance contest?  Oscar and audience pandering that usually doesn’t appeal to me.  I avoid it.

But it’s pretty good.  It is a “feel good” film, sends you through some awkwardness, but ends on its feet with boy and girl happily kissing in Christmasy lushness.  After performing in a dance contest.  It’s a crowd-pleaser.  The actors all get pretty juicy roles.  It notably got nominations in each Oscar acting category.  It is what it is and that’s fine.  It’s pretty good.

Really, though, for me, the movie was all about Jennifer Lawrence.  I’ve liked her in Winter’s Bone (2010) and The Hunger Games (2012).  She’s much different in Silver Linings Playbook.  It’s arguable that her characters in Winter’s Bone and The Hunger Games are really not terribly different.  Here she’s the young, gorgeous, angry widow of a police officer killed in a car accident.  She sees in Bradley Cooper’s manic train wreck of a guy fighting his way through recovery a kindred spirit, and among other things, gets him to partner with her in a dance contest that turns out to be good therapy for them both.  She’s a combination of angry, vulnerable, and utterly believable.  And totally gorgeous.

I had to wonder if it was my red-blooded male heterosexuality blurring my objectivity in her qualities.  Though there is that, I am far from alone on the opinion that she is both a very good actress and a very attractive young lady.  For me, she made the movie work.  Everyone is good in it, but she just makes it.  My opinion.

And then she got the Oscar, too.  So, I guess I’m not alone.

Filed under Theatrical

Escape from Planet Earth (2013)

February 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Escape from Planet Earth (2013) movie poster

director Cal Brunker
viewed: 02/19/2013 at AMC Metreon 16, SF, CA

When I look back on my life, I hope that I don’t find myself wondering why I wound up taking my kids to the cinema to see such obvious dreck as Escape from Planet Earth.  As much as I try to steer us to the better experiences of cinema, I’ve led us to a moderate amount of these bad digital animation films that I could tell from the trailers that it was not going to be good.  And it’s me that has led us.  While the kids might express interest in certain films during pre-movie trailers, it’s quite rare if there is a film that they are actually clamoring to see.  I guess they know that I’ll take them to most of the movies out there so clamor is not needed.  While I’ve certainly tried to skip the blatantly worst of the worst, and occasionally have missed a couple of decent ones that the kids saw with someone else, I iterate again that I hope that these are not the moments that I look back on in assessing my life.

Escape from Planet Earth is not the worst of the worst.  It’s not even necessarily deplorable.  Clara enjoyed it.  Felix thought it was okay.  I thought it was, for being a polished-looking piece of design, a most incredibly uninspired, unfunny, ham-fisted tale of flick I’ve seen in a while.

One thing that kills me about bad children’s movies or television is the blaring pandering that goes with it.  Morals are literalized in the words of the characters.  And the morals are always of the most cliche variety anyways.

In this story, the nerd alien brother who runs mission control for his popular hero brother in space missions finds himself on a rescue mission to Earth where the hero brother has been captured.  It turns out that the government has been keeping every alien that ever landed here prisoner and force them to churn out all of the technology we use today.  The sequence that explains this caricature-wise name drops all the biggies in tech, apparently trying to cast jokes at supposed peers.  The worst name-drop joke mentions Simon Cowell.  So much for timelessness.

I honestly did not enjoy this film at all.  It’s not by any means among the worst I’ve seen, but it’s something that I would gladly store in the less accessible parts of my memory in hopes that I don’t have to consider it again.  Ever.

Filed under Aliens, Animation, Canada, Theatrical, With the kids

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