We Hate Hollywood

Written and directed by Neil Marshall
Starring Michael Fassbender, Dominic West, Olga Kurylenko, David Morrissey, Noel Clarke, Riz Ahmed, JJ Field, Liam Cunningham, Imogen Poots
Rated R for violence and profanity
Debuted on HDNet and is available in limited release
Rating - 2 bullet holes

Neil Marshall is no stranger to gore.  His first film, 2002’s Dog Soldiers, was a take on the werewolf genre that was actually pretty effective for a low budget film.  2005 put him on the map with The Descent, easily one of the best horror movies of the past 20 years.  He followed that up with 2008’s deliriously bloodied John Carpenter homage Doomsday.  Now he has rolled out Centurion, a blood-soaked Gladiator-ish epic featuring lots of swords, Romans, wolves, and his interpretation of what happened to the Ninth Legion.

The time is 117 A.D.  Rome is invading Britain and pushing northward.  Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender - last seen in Inglourious Basterds), a centurion in the Roman army, is one of the few survivors of an attack at his garrison in Scottish Highland by Picts, a confederation of Celtic tribes who are fighting to push Rome out of their country.  He is taken prisoner, escapes, and meets up with the Ninth Legion led by General Titus Virilus (Dominic West of “The Wire”).  Virilus is beloved by his men, not a common characteristic of a Roman general.  When the Ninth Legion is the victim of a particularly savage ambush by Picts, a large majority of their force is killed and General Virilus is taken hostage.  Dias and six other men set out to rescue him.  Saving General Virilus if you will.

After that rescue attempt, the remaining men flee for their lives while being pursued by a band of Picts led by the tenacious Etain (Olga Kurylenko) who is mute and appears to have the soul of a rabid wolf.  All she lives for is spilling Roman blood.  In fact, 90% of Centurion is a chase movie.  And, on that level, it is pretty entertaining to watch these men sprint across beautiful landscapes (great helicopter cinematography from Sam McCurdy) while dodging the Picts, cliffs, and animals.

What bothers me about Centurion is that there is really nothing new here.  We’ve seen similar sword violence in Braveheart, Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, and countless other blood-soaked films.  We’ve seen similar pursuits in better films such as Apocalypto.  One element I do admire that is different here is who the protagonists are.  Here is the gigantic land-swallowing empire of Rome whose occupation force are the protagonists, and the home team are the villains.  I like how Dias begins to realize the folly of what his homeland is doing.  Marshall seems to be making some obvious correlations to the occupation of Iraq by America and his home country of England.

We also don’t get a real sense of these characters.  For a movie of this style to be truly effective, you need to feel a strong camaraderie between the protagonists.  It just isn’t here.

Another big gripe is the use of CGI blood.  I refuse to budge on this point about modern cinema.  If you can’t do CGI blood and make it look real, then stick to squibs.  CGI blood is killing action movies.  It works in something like 300 because that film was stylized and over the top intentionally.  But with something like Centurion, all the effects do is take me out of the moment and piss me off.

So, Centurion might be a decent rental.  Aside from the ridiculous blood effects, there is some serious carnage going on here that will give you action seekers a smile.

Directed by Sylvester Stallone
Written by David Callaham and Sylvester Stallone
Starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, David Zayas, Giselle Itie, Charisma Carpenter, Gary Daniels, Terry Crews, Mickey Rourke, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis
Rated R for violence and profanity
Rating - 3 bullet holes

In a recent online interview promoting The Expendables, Sylvester Stallone said the following about the genre that has been his bread and butter for most of his career:

“Action films; past, present and future are really a device for maintaining modern mythology. In reality, evil quite often triumphs over good and its effects have devastating longevity. So I believe the action film supplies an outlet for optimism and the unwavering belief that heroes, under great physical threat, rise and vanquish the oppressors. I believe it’s a necessity that these sorts of modern day street fables continue to provide an example that perseverance and bravery prevail. Now, in THE EXPENDABLES, we tried to show, without being overbearing, that these men are misfits in society, yet still hunger to be useful, to triumph overwhelming odds, not for money, but to keep them feeling compassionate and alive. Because when one is a mercenary in any facet of life, because you do not have to be a mercenary with a gun, you could be a mercenary in any occupation, at the end of your life, you’re nothing but a hollow drum that no one wants to hear played. What’s important to me is if you can slip in a bit of spiritual taxonomy, spiritual signifiers that somehow touch a deeper cord than just violence, for example: sacrificing your life for the life of an innocent stranger, thus proving human dignity must prevail at all costs.”

It’s hard to argue against the notion that action films represent “an outlet for optimism and the unwavering belief that heroes, under great physical threat, rise and vanquish the oppressors”.  Think about some of the most popular action films that came out soon after 9/11 - Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers, The Bourne Identity.  There were some other action movies soon after that weren’t that good but still attracted crowds such as Schwarzenegger’s Collateral Damage.  With all of these films, I remember the evil that 9/11 represented being in my mind.  Watching those films…seeing these various evils vanquished (okay okay I’m not going to get political about it) was cathartic to me.

There is definitely an intrinsic desire in us to root and laugh during action films as we see evil get obliterated.  When our hopes sometime sag under the weight of reality, action films are a great outlet.  So why didn’t I feel this way during The Expendables?

After all, Stallone has assembled an impressive cast of former icons of 1980s brawn and the current stars of muscle cinema.  There is no shortage of testosterone or hubris here.  All of these guys are highly skilled at kicking ass.  Unfortunately, they are saddled with terrible dialogue and poorly directed action sequences.

In the above quote, Stallone says that they’ve tried to show that these men are “misfits in society”.  Fail.  For one thing, we never know very much about where these guys have come from or what they have done.  We get little glimpses through stories they tell, many of them cheesy and formulaic, but I never really a strong cohesion between them because I didn’t know who the hell they were.

The dialogue is bad.  I mean really bad.  Like forget-it-as-soon-as-you-hear-it bad.  At least give us those cheesy but awesome lines the heroes of the 80s used to utter before shooting a guy in the throat.  I can’t think of one quotable line from this movie.

The action in the film is seriously inconsistent.  Some scenes are well executed (especially when Stallone and Statham take to the skies and rain fire down on the evil island people) but many of them - particularly the closer hand to hand fighting and gun battles - are so disjointed and chaotic that they are hard to follow.  The action scenes play out as if the editor finally just gave up.  And with a high budget action movie, shouldn’t the special effects be better?  Several moments are so poorly green-screened that they took me out of the action.

Maybe the biggest problem is that there are no real stakes.  For a truly effective action movie, the stakes have to be  high.  Think of Die Hard.  Cop goes to a business party to reconnect with his estranged wife.  Terrorists take over the building.  His wife is taken as a hostage.  Add to that John McClane’s exasperation with local law enforcement and his glee with taking out the terrorists, and you have a character that the audience can bond with.

In The Expendables, Barney Ross (Stallone) and gang are tasked by a mystery man (Willis in a brief cameo) to take down a Central American dictator (David Zayas) on a fictional island that produces cocaine for a ruthless drug lord (Eric Roberts).  Barney’s competitor (an even briefer cameo by Arnold) passes on the job.  When things go south, and the general’s daughter becomes a hostage, Barney sees this as an opportunity.  An opportunity to, as Stallone puts it, “sacrifice your life for the life of an innocent stranger, thus proving human dignity must prevail at all costs”.  Okay that’s noble and all but really…those are the only stakes?  I think maybe with a better script and more fleshed out characters, this could actually be  an effective theme for an action film.  But, here it just kind of limps along.  There is no gravitas whatsoever.

And that title.  Why not look more deeply at why these guys call themselves expendable for crying out loud?  Outside of a couple of poorly delivered pieces of dialogue, I have no clue why these guys are such outsiders wanting redemption.  This leads to another big gripe of mine that I can’t get into without spoiling the film.

The film isn’t all bad.  If you want your bloody violence, you will get it.  The opening scene is one of the best as Barney and crew take on a group of Somali pirates.  Let’s just say that the pirates will not be joining us for the rest of their lives. While the action is poorly directed, there are some pretty funny moments of bad guys in red hats getting dispatched.  Ex-NFL player Terry Crews and his shotgun provide some of the most memorable scenes. But when you convene a group of action icons like this, you have got to bring your A game and deliver more.

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Michael Caine
Rated PG-13 for violence
Rating - Golden Gun

A truly great movie can sometimes feels like Haley’s Comet.  In the universe of film, you see it so rarely that you begin to think you never will.  When it arrives, you are awestruck with its power.  This is especially true with action films since they tend to burn brightly and fade into mediocrity quickly.

But is it fair to classify Inception as an action film?  It is so much more.  Christopher Nolan has crafted a film so bold, so daring, and so unique that it doesn’t just transcend but obliterates the boring genre of “summer blockbuster”.

The less you know about Inception going in, the better chance you have of a truly unique film experience.  With that in mind, I am going to reveal very little about the plot except to say that Leonardo DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon-Levitt play agents of corporate espionage whose job it is to extract ideas from people’s minds.  Literally.  In their world, it is scientifically possible to enter someone’s mind via dreams.  But now, their client (Ken Watanabe) hires them for a different job…he needs them to plant an idea in someone’s mind.  That’s your action movie.  And that’s as far as I’ll talk about the plot.

Before you science fiction haters begin to flee, you must know…this is not a typical sci-fi film.  In fact, “typical” is a useless adjective for discussing this film.  Like The Matrix, it takes philosophical ideas about the essence of the mind and infuses them with jaw-dropping action and visual effects.  In fact, it surpasses The Matrix in that marriage of intelligence and violence.

The cast is outstanding.  Nolan really knows how to bring the best out of his actors (and obviously has some favorites such as Cillian Murphy, Michael Caine, and Ken Watanabe).  Leonardo DiCaprio is at the top of his game as he always seem to be.  Together, he and Joseph Gordon-Levitt redefine cool.  Ellen Page was an odd choice for this film but even she works.  I also admire  how Nolan doesn’t use supporting characters for throwaway roles. In the “actors you may not know but by name but would probably recognize” department, Tom Hardy (Bronson; RocknRolla) and Dileep Rao (Drag Me to Hell; Avatar) play characters that you root for and sympathize with.  Hell, even Tom Berenger shows up in a small but pivotal role.  And finally, Marion Cotillard continues her US invasion with a heart-breaking performance that fuels the emotional core of the film.

Christopher Nolan is truly a spectacular director.  Not only does he have a firm command of the camera (and refuses to do 3D because it limits what you can do with the camera), but he understands action.  He is not an “action director”, but there may not be anyone working today who can direct action better.  Yes, I’m looking at you, Michael Bay.  The action scenes in this film are unlike most things you have seen.  At more than one point, I caught myself literally holding my breath and palms sweating.  This is reach-in-through-your-nose-and-squeeze-your-hips suspense.

A true mind-bender of a movie, Inception may take more than one viewing to completely grasp all of its elements, but it’s not so over the top that it completely loses its audience.  The parameters and rules of the universe the characters inhabit are fully and adequately explained.  As the plot gets deeper and deeper, I was amazed at how effectively it pulls the audience down into the rabbit hole.

In this age of banal, forgetful, and dreary filmmaking, Inception is an oasis in the desert.  It is the bastion of quality, the antithesis of formula, and the epitome of originality.

Directed by Niels Arden Oplev
Written by Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg
Based on the novel by Stieg Larsson
Starring Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Peter Haber, Sven-Bertil Taube, Peter Andersson, Ingvar Hirdwall, Marika Lagercrantz
Rated R for violence, profanity, nudity, sexual scenes including some depicting rape
Rating - Golden Gun

There is a moment in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) relays some information he has uncovered to another character.  Anger flashes across the character’s face.  It is subtle but in that instant, I knew who the killer was.  That is terrific acting.  It is also the mark of an intelligent and highly absorbing thriller.

As the film opens, Blomkvist is being sentenced to a 3 month stint in jail for libel of a powerful businessman.  Blomkvist realizes he has been setup, but his verdict is his fate.  He has 6 months to get his affairs in order.  Shortly after the trial, he is asked to visit wealthy industrialist Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube).  Henrik lives on the family estate located on a remote Swedish island with only one road connecting it to the mainland.  It is a cold and desolate but beautiful place.  Henrik is still grieving for the disappearance of his niece Harriet who went missing in 1966 at the age of 16.  Henrik is convinced that someone in his corrupt family killed her since he continues to receive pressed flowers on his birthday, a tradition that Harriet started when she lived on the estate.  He likes Blomkvist, has been following his legal woes, and offers him a large sum of money to look into Harriet’s disappearance and find out who’s responsible.

In a seemingly unrelated plotline, we meet 24 year-old punk computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), she with the dragon tattoo.  Lisbeth works for a security company acquiring data for their many clients.  On her current case, she is looking into Blomkvist.  From hacking into his computer, she finds no evidence that he is guilty of libel but she is intrigued by him.  But Lisbeth has serious problems of her own.  She has just been assigned a new financial guardian of her trust fund.  This particular monster wants sexual favors from Lisbeth in exchange for money.  This leads to two very uncomfortable scenes, one of which ends in a brutal rape.  It is a very hard scene to watch, but it’s supposed to be.  Lisbeth responds to the rape in a shocking fashion that establishes her character as a very troubled person with a murky past but someone you certainly don’t want to mess with.

Through a series of events I won’t ruin, she and Blomkvist join forces and do some detective work to figure out what happened to Harriet.  And this is where the movie completely sucks you in.  This is not a frenzied and chaotic murder mystery replete with chases, ridiculous leaps of logic, and last minute surprise characters who show up out of nowhere.  It is a mature, measured, and thoroughly engrossing journey into a family plagued with evil, deceit, and Nazi-sympathizers.  At times, the suspense makes your blood run cold.

The film is based on the first of three books by Stieg Larsson called “the Millenium trilogy”.  Larsson suffered a massive heart attack at the age of 50 in 2004.  When he died, his trilogy hadn’t even been published yet.  After his death, he would go on to become the second best-selling author (in 2008) as a result of this trilogy.  Larsson himself said that he sees the character of Lisbeth as a grown up Pippi Longstocking.  Interesting since Pippi had superhuman strength and would act out against adults who were misusing or abusing their power.  This film, and I assume the novel, draws heavily on themes of power and control (illustrated by the rape among other things).  The tattoo is also an interesting thematic device.  The very large tattoo covers Lisbeth’s entire back.  She is forever marked by a significant event in her life.

The film is tough to watch at times.  Aside from the rape scenes, the revelation of the killer and the killer’s motives are seriously twisted.  I was struck with how much it reminded me of a David Fincher film such as Se7en.  I guess that makes sense since I subsequently discovered that Fincher has signed on to direct the American remake.

But amidst all of this evil and perversion what emerges is a surprisingly tender story of loss and healing (a place that Fincher does not usually go with films of this ilk).  I don’t think redemption is fully realized, but its seeds are undoubtedly planted.  This is a trilogy after all.  The film is not perfect.  It has another one of those scenes where the killer explains his motives to give time for the cavalry to arrive.  Most notably, after 2 1/2 hours (which goes by fast), too many things happen in the closing moments as if the filmmakers realized “Uh oh.  We better wrap this up fast!”.  That said, who knew I had to go to Sweden to see one of the best suspense thrillers in recent memory?

Directed by Vincenzo Natali
Written by Vincenzo Natali, Antoinette Terry Bryant, Doug Taylor
Starring Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chaneac, David Hewlett
Rated R for violence, profanity, nudity, sexual scenes
Rating - 3 bullet holes

Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) are scientists working on a hybrid animal gene with the goal of creating a protein that could have significant medical benefits.  At least that’s the goal of their corporate bosses.  Clive and Elsa want to push even further and do more extensive testing with human DNA.  They reach a point of success but Elsa isn’t satisifed.  Clive bitches and moans and halfheartedly goes along with her since, of course, they are romantically involved.  By the time he decides to finally man up and put his foot down, they have created a human animal hybrid creature that they call Dren for a stupid reason I won’t go into but that you can probably figure out.

Dren begins to grow rapidly from an infant to young girl to young woman.  She has surprising cognitive skills but can’t speak.  She communicates via Scrabble letters and weird squirrel-like chirps.  She moves like a lizard with swift twitches of the head and the ability to scramble up walls and across ceilings.  This…squizzard also has a tail with a retractable barb ideal for killing prey.  A real problem child.

Vincenzo Natali is most known for 1997’s sci-fi horror film Cube, a pretty effective film about seven strangers who wake up in a giant cube with multiple rooms and have to navigate a maze of death traps.  It seemed apparent from that film that Natali had a command for the camera and could effectively create scenes of dread.  But Splice is a huge misfire.  There are virtually no scary moments.  Sure there are moments that are intended to evoke terror, but for me they never did.

The film starts out with promise as it, once again, raises the Frankensteinian themes of tampering with nature, illusions of creation, and the depths of depravity that can be reached when those illusions unravel.  But, they are handled so sloppily as the film progresses that I couldn’t buy into the story.  There are subpar special effects for Dren that make her appear comical, there is bad dialogue, and there are so many scenes of what I consider to be the cardinal sin in storytelling - having characters perform unrealistic and ridiculous actions for no reason but to move the plot in a particular direction.  For example, when Clive and Elsa have to move Dren to a more secretive location, they put her in a large cardboard box and cart her through the laboratory while constantly shushing her as she makes her squizzard chirps.  Why the hell don’t you just sedate her?

As the film progresses, it gets more and more ludicrous and thoroughly unpleasant.  Clive and Elsa continue to say and do inane things.  Their world is clearly unraveling, and they continue to make stupid decisions.  Earlier in the film, Dren witnesses her creators having sex.  Towards the end, her curiosity about sex leads to a scene that I found disturbing while the other moviegoers around me laughed.

As I left the theater, I realized something.  Since Frankenstein, just about every movie that revolves around gene tampering follows the same playbook and always has the same outcome.  I had hoped for something different from Splice, but the muses of ingenuity had undoubtedly never visited this project.

Sometimes interesting.  Often infuriating.  Never compelling.

Directed by Jon Favreau
Written by Justin Theroux
Starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Jon Favreau, Mickey Rourke, Sam Rockwell, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Garry Shandling, John Slattery, Kate Mara, Clark Gregg, Olivia Munn
Rated PG-13 for violence
Rating - 1 bullet hole

Like the Christopher Nolan-directed Batman franchise, the Iron Man franchise is ideal for people who don’t normally care for the superhero genre.  Sure they have special effects, flashy characters, and a damsel in distress but they transcend the genre with smart dialogue, sophisticated themes, and plots that don’t insult our intelligence.

Also like Batman, the hero at the center of Iron Man does not possess super powers.  It is through his weakness and brush with death, that he becomes equipped with a new set of ideals and morals that enable him to stand up to evil.  It also helps that he is rich as hell.  Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) is back as the charismatic and flamboyant weapons industrialist with an ego the size of Kansas.  Unlike other superheros, Stark has revealed to the world (in the first film) that he is the face behind the mask.  He doesn’t exactly shy away from the attention.  As he puts it, he has” successfully privatized world peace”.  No one can stand up to him.  Enter Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke).

Vanko has a score to settle with the Stark family that goes back a generation.  And Mickey Rourke rocks this performance.  He possesses a menace that I thought was severely lacking with Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) in the original film.  He represents a very real danger to Stark.  His first meeting with Stark at the Monaco Grand Prix is truly momentous.  It is a well shot scene and presents the first “Oh shit” moment in Stark’s life since he revealed he was Iron Man.  But, it is this struggle between Stark and Vanko that ultimately is a letdown.  They only meet two other times in the film and only one of those times is to fight.  And that fight is so short, I felt ripped off.

Stark has another serious challenge in his life as he has come to the startling realization that the very power core he had to create for his heart and which powers the suit is also poisoning him.  In most superhero sequels, the protagonist has to take on multiple villains.  I like how this film uniquely turns the hero’s own body into a villain.  Speaking of villains, one of the reasons to see this film is for Sam Rockwell’s performance as the slimy, backstabbing Justin Hammer, Stark’s main competitor who takes an interest in Vanko.

I think Gwenyth Paltrow is…ok here.  But, it’s not really her fault so much as Justin Theroux’s script and ultimately Favreau as the director.  I liked the chemistry she had with Downey in the first film, but she is kind of shoved aside her to make room for Scarlett Johansson’s Natalie Rushman.  There is a lot going on here as Rushman and Nick Fury (Samuel Jackson) take more screen time in their bid to recruit Stark to join their team.  This is all paving the way for Joss Whedon’s Avengers film in 2012.  So far, I think Favreau is capably handling juggling multiple characters.  But quite honestly, I’m not as interested in that storyline as I am in Stark.

Another weakness in the film, I hate to admit, is Don Cheadle.  He replaces Terence Howard as  Lt. Col. Rhodes.  I love Don Cheadle.  But, he seems like a fish out of water here.  He doesn’t seem comfortable with his lines, and he is not convincing as War Machine.

One major bonus to this sequel is that the special effects are much better.  They were admirable in the original film (except for the clunky looking final battle), but they seem much more polished here.  Favreau does a great job of handling action scenes with multiple characters and objects.  One of his greatest strengths is in keeping the action human by frequently showing us the faces inside the suits.

But, ultimately what makes Iron Man so successful is Robert Downey Jr.  He is funny, charming, and carefree as Stark.  He is like Bruce Wayne…if Bruce Wayne really did know how to have a good time instead of using his playboyishness (yes, I know that isn’t a word) as a cover.  But, when it comes time to take out the trash, he is the garbage man you want working on your street.  In fact, he’ll probably have a drink with you when it’s over.

Directed by Matthew Vaughn
Written by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn
Starring Aaron Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Mark Strong, Chloe Moretz, Nicolas Cage
Rated R for strong violence, sexual content, and profanity
Rating - 3 bullet holes

Watching Kick-Ass is a miserable experience.  The film is a morass of depraved morality, shitty acting, laughable dialogue (ridiculous lines like “I’m going to knock his lungs through his ass”), and bewildering ambitions.  I have not read the source material comic nor do I want to.  So, don’t even try to justify the film by saying that it is loyal to the source comic.  A film should stand on its own.

Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is a nerdy New York teenager obsessed with comic books and the heroes they produce.  He begins to wonder why no one in real life has tried to become a superhero.  His theory is that, like Bruce Wayne, you don’t even need special powers.  Just a flashy suit and an enthusiasm for standing up to bad guys.  So, he purchases a green and yellow wetsuit and adopts the name Kick-Ass becoming a media phenomenon.  Along the way, he meets Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz) and her father Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) who have had much better luck at being superheros thanks to Big Daddy’s intense need for revenge against local crimeboss Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong).

Before you accuse me (or any others who hate this film) of being a square or prude, please read my website.  It’s pretty evident that I don’t shy away from violent films.  There are some truly great ones that have been made.  Kick-Ass is not one of them.  Hit Girl is a deplorable character.  She is an 11 year old girl who brutally and almost gleefully eviscerates her opponents.  In fact, she kills some people that aren’t even armed and are guilty, I guess, by association.  She also has a mouth that would make a union organizer blush.  Hit Girl uses every profanity imaginable.  And I mean every one. She uses words that you can go through other R-rated films without ever hearing.  But even her profanity doesn’t ring as true.  There is no cadence or frequency in her profanity to make you think it’s her normal speech.  She seems to use every major curse word only once.  It is simply a gimmick, and you get the sense that the screenwriter really gets off on the fact that a little girl is cursing and is showboating.

And this is the problem…if Kick-Ass were meant to be satire, it would make sense.  But it’s, not.  Satire, to me, is exaggeration with a purpose.  The violence and profanity in Kick-Ass are definitely exaggerated.  But to what end?  They are certainly not satirizing anything because this is a film that is rejoicing in the genre…in love with it in the sense that a man might have a sick obsession with an underage neighborhood girl down the street.  When bad guys were getting mowed down, the moviegoers I were with began laughing, applauding, and hooting like mentally deranged baboons attempting to entice a mate.  That is not satire what your film elicits that kind of reaction.

Dave Lizewski is a likable enough character when we first meet him.  After he meets Hit Girl, however, he begins to become more violent and quickly becomes a douchebag…to me anyway.  He also gets involved in yet another ridiculous subplot when a girl he likes in school thinks he’s gay, so he has to go along with it to be closer to her.  *yaaaaaawn*  Another eye-rolling character is Christopher Mintz-Plasse as D’Amico’s son Chris.  Chris wants to get into a life of crime like his father and because he is also a comic book geek, he adopts the persona of Red Mist to help his dad find out the whereabouts of Big Daddy and Hit Girl.  The film sets up Red Mist to become the main villain of the inevitable sequel.  Good luck with that.  Mintz-Plasse is a terrible actor.  He was enjoyable in Superbad and Role Models but is playing the same character here.  We are supposed to just accept his capacity for evil when he is laughably awful at it (and not intentionally).  McLovin as a villain.  O…k.

Kick-Ass uses a troubling technique that I’ve noticed over the last few years - CGI blood.  I am shocked at this direction the industry is going.  Since when did using blood squibs become so expensive?  You cannot convince me that a film’s budget cannot allow for them.  Nothing ruins an action film for me quicker than seeing this.  Now, if the CGI blood is done effectively to where you can’t tell, fine.  But, I have yet to see a film accomplish this.  In this age of computer graphics and 3-D, give us something that’s real.  Use blood squibs or air compressors or something!  Give us visual effects, not special effects for our blood!

One of the only things saving Kick-Ass from being rated a bomb is the opening two minutes (which you can see most of at the beginning of the trailer below).  It is a twisted but truly funny opening.  In fact, it’s one of the funniest openings you’ll ever see for a superhero film.  Or possibly any movie.  Then, there is another darkly comic sequence involving Big Daddy shooting Hit Girl to get her used to taking a bullet with a Kevlar vest on. The rest of the film is a truly disturbing experience.  I considering walking out of it, but I was so shocked at how bad it was that I wanted to see where it was going.  And where did it go?  Straight into the toilet of bullshit cinema that tries to pass itself off as art and really pisses me off.

Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Laeta Kalogridis
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, Patricia Clarkson, Max von Sydow
Rated R for violence, nudity, and profanity
Rating - 2 bullet holes

The opening notes of Shutter Island hooked me. Apparently, they are Ingram Marshall’s 1981 “Fog Tropes”. I wasn’t familiar with the piece, but its somber and emphatic notes evoked classics such as J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 Cape Fear. That film, of course, was remade by Scorcese.  Like that film, Shutter wastes no time in creating an atmosphere of dread.

Scorsese mainstay Leonardo DiCaprio plays Teddy Daniels.  He and his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) are federal marshals sent to a remote island off Boston to investigate the disappearance of a prisoner from the castle-turned-prison for violent offenders who are criminally insane.  There, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) explains that he sees these people as his patients, not prisoners.  He has lofty goals of helping these criminals instead of punishing them.  Dr. Cawley explains that the patient in question, a mother named Rachel who drowned her children, simply vanished from her room without a trace.  The disappearance has truly perpelxed him but Daniels and Aule suspect it was an inside job.

This is a departure for Scorsese, and he certainly seems to have a firm grasp of the psychological thriller.  He effectively creates a David Lynch-like nightmare in which fantasy and reality blur.  At times, the film is difficult to follow, but that’s the point.  And what more can be said about DiCaprio?  The guy can seriously act.  Gone is the innocent, golden-haired Jack.  Though, if you’re really keeping score, labeling DiCaprio as a romantic lead is naive.  Check out What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Basketball Diaries, and This Boy’s Life which all came before Titanic.  He shines when he is plumbing the deep, dark, violent depths of his characters.  His performance here is nothing short of great once again.

Technically, the film is magnificent.  Who would expect less from Scorsese?  But my biggest problem is with the story.  This is a difficult film to review without giving away key plot elements.  Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island didn’t have a whole lot of surprises for me.  If you’re an aficionado of psychological thrillers and have seen the trailer, you probably have a good idea of where the story is going.  I had it pegged from almost the very beginning.  As a result, I ended up being bored throughout most of it.  As the layers of the plot begin to be peeled away, I was almost open-mouthed with shock at how much the film keeps kicking a dead horse.  Ok I get it I kept thinking.

I can’t help it.  I’m such a stickler for a good story.  I know this is Scorsese.  I know he is a legend.  I know he’s made some true classics, and I’m a fan of a lot of them.  I know he makes masterpieces.  But, I don’t think Shutter Island is one by any stretch of the imagination.  I just wasn’t engaged by it.  If you want a much better adaptation of a Lehane novel, watch Mystic River.

Directed by Paul Greengrass
Written by Brian Helgeland
Starring Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Amy Ryan, Brendan Gleeson, Jason Isaacs, Khalid Abdalla
Rated R for violence and profanity
Rating -1 bullet hole

There have been many Iraq War-centric movies since 2003. Many of them are not good. The best one, The Hurt Locker, just won the Best Picture Oscar.  One of the strengths of that film was that it was apolitical.  The strength of Paul Greengrass’s film is that it is not.

Matt Damon plays Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller.  He and his team of Army inspectors have been tasked with finding weapons of mass destruction which, as everyone knows, were the catalyst for the Iraq invasion which has just started in the film’s timeline.  Chief Miller is frustrated.  This is the third location they’ve been sent to that is empty.  At a briefing, he questions the intelligence that is sending he and his team on these wild goose chases.  An ominous Brendan Gleeson glares at him and leaves the meeting.  At this point, I kind of rolled my eyes.  Oh great.  Here we go…the stereotypical government blowhard who is going to make Miller’s life hell for questioning the intel.  Actually, no.  Gleeson is playing CIA officer Martin Brown.  Brown shares Miller’s frustrations and confides in him that he too is trying to figure out what the hell is going on.  I appreciated this break from stereotype.  Instead, the slimy bureaucrat is played effectively by the affable Greg Kinnear as intelligence officer Poundstone.  Poundstone is obviously a very powerful man.  He has a special forces squad who report directly to him and constantly clash with Miller’s team.  Miller also meets Wall Street journalist Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan) who is also on a quest for the truth.  She has penned several articles in which her source - code named Magellan - gave her very credible information about the WMDs.  But, now she is also beginning to suspect that Poundstone has his fingers even in that intel she’s been getting.  Finally, Miller meets an Iraqi named Frankie (Khalid Abdalla) who claims to have information about secret meeting taking place with an Iraqi general named Al Rawi (Igal Naor).  Miller believes that Al Rawi is his key to finding the truth, and the chase begins.

What I strongly admired about Green Zone is that while there are many characters, the plot does not get bogged down in these intricate complexities that make other espionage films like Syriana hard to endure.  The script - by Oscar winner Brian Helgeland - lays out the detailed plot in a manner that is clear and easy to follow without pandering to the audience.  The events of the plot are fiction but loosely based on the book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran.

Another asset of the film is in its pacing.  Much of the film is a chase for a man and, in a much larger sense, the truth.  It is filmed with a break neck pace and with Greengrass’s shaky cam (or queasy cam as some call it) style that he employed in the Bourne films and in United 93.  There are many critics of this style, but I like it a lot.  To me, this style is more effective than 3D in embedding you into the flow of the film.

Greengrass is obviously making a statement about the lack of intelligence that led us into war.  He infuses real life events successfully with his own narrative.  Much has been talked about the disbanding of the Republican Guard led to the current insurgency.  Charles Ferguson’s powerful documentary No End In Sight talked about this in detail.  Here, Greengrass uses this event as a key in creating unbearable tension to the plot.

It is this successful mix of politics and storytelling that is probably the film’s only weakness.  The fact that faulty intelligence led us to war is nothing new.  That aspect might have been more effective four or five years ago.  But regardless, this is one terrifically crafted war thriller that manages to get your pulse racing without devolving into a mindless action film.

Written and directed by James Cameron
Starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Peter Mensah, Laz Alonso, Wes Studi, Stephen Lang, Matt Gerald
Rated PG-13 for violence, profanity, and brief alien nudity
Rating - 2 bullet holes

I apologize that this review is a month late.  I understand that everyone else has seen the movie but thought I should still weigh in on arguably the biggest spectacle of the last decade.

Everyone by now knows the plot.  In the year 2154, a mining corporation led by the ruthless Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) wants to snag a load of - ahem - unobtainium from the planet Pandora.  Unobtainium is worth a fortune and desired so badly that military force is being used to drive out the natives (the Na’vi) who live in a giant tree atop this mineral deposit.  The military is led by the bloodthirsty Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) whose ace in the hole is Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), an ex-marine who is now paralyzed.   Sully’s twin brother was involved in a revolutionary experiment led by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) to have his genetic identity imprinted into the body of a Na’vi.  His brother has just been killed, and Sully is the only viable candidate to take his place.  His mission is to infiltrate the Na’vi and gain intelligence that will help Colonel Quaritch in his mission.

First of all, I will agree with the masses that this is a visually stunning film.  I am not at all a fan of 3D, but this is actually a film where 3D enhances the viewing experience.  I don’t think this film will work near as well in 2D on DVD.  Here, the 3D gives depth to the film which is necessary for the expansive, lush, jungle environment of Pandora.  We get very little of that 3D gimmickry with objects flying towards the audience.  And speaking fo 3D…in the year 2010, can we not get better 3D glasses?  At our screening, we were given these huge awful green plastic glasses with huge rims that only Carol Channing could love.  It made us all look like overgrown grasshoppers.  At one point, I looked around and the first thought that came to mind was My God, we look stupid.

Speaking of stupid, I want to get back to the story.  Avatar is exceedingly heavy-handed.  A planet named Pandora?  Not exactly subtle.  Then again, Cameron has never really been the subtle type.  But one of the worst blunders of the script is in the name of the mineral - unobtainium.  Unobtainium!!  The more I think about this, the angrier I get.  Yes, I know the film is an allegory, but we aren’t that stupid.  Or are we given the gargantuan box office numbers?  Unobtainium!!!  A sixth grader could have come up with a better mineral name.  Even worse, we are not told why unobtainium is wanted so badly or what the hell it is used for.  We just have to accept the fact that this is a mining operation worth killing over.  Deal with it.  Sorry, but that isn’t good enough.  We have to know what the stakes are for this story to work.

A good story needs a solid hero and villain.  A believable hero and villain.  Jake Sully works for me.  While his journey is far from original and offers pretty much nothing new in the whole knowing-your-enemy-and-becoming-one-of-them plotline, I believe in his compassion for the Na’vi and his fight for what is right.  Where the film took another huge misstep for me was with Colonel Miles Quaritch.  And I know the nerds will attack me for this since I’ve heard a lot of praise for Stephen Lang’s performance.  His performance is ok but it’s the script I have a problem with.  Lang is given so many cliched lines such as muttering “Let’s get this over with.  I want to be home for dinner.” before attempting genocide.  He comes across as cartoonish, and I just found myself laughing internally at him.  Again, I feel the heavy hand of Cameron “The guy is evil.  Accept it dammit!!”.  That was the biggest surprise to me, actually.  I have liked all of Cameron’s previous films and he has given us some memorable villains.  Not here.

I was actually bored with a large portion of Avatar.  I knew exactly where the story was going from the beginning.  There was not one surprise along the way.  None.  I’m not saying that I need a “wow!” or “aha!” moment every 15 minutes, but the story needs to engage me.  Because I knew where the story was going, all I could do was look at the pretty colors for 160 minutes.  The film has been compared to Dances With Wolves, and it’s a very valid comparison.  If you’ve seen that film,  you’ve seen Avatar.  I’d heard this accusation before going into the film and thought “Surely, it can’t be that obvious”.  Yeah.  It pretty much is.

The film isn’t without its merits.  In addition to the visuals which I appreciated, there is a good chemistry between Sully and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the daughter of the Na’vi chief who teaches Sully about their ways and falls in love with him.  I believed their relationship with each other and with the world around them.  With a better script, they could have had something even more special.  There are also some good battle scenes between the military and the Na’vi.  Cameron certainly has an eye for action, and it definitely is on full display here.  Speaking of action, here’s another chuckle I got from the film.  In a briefing, Colonel Quaritch discusses how the 10-12 foot tall Na’vi are designed physically and warns “They are very hard to kill”.  Yet later, we discover that a couple of bullets to the chest is pretty much all you need.

In all fairness, will a younger generation not familiar with Dances appreciate the story and be moved by it?  Possibly.  And that is cool.  But, I hope this isn’t seen as the gold standard for story-telling.  I fully realize I’m in the minority here.  The film is breaking box office records, winning awards, and garnering the acclaim of popular film critics that I respect.  To me, the film is a pile of dog shit wrapped in a pretty box made of unobtainium.