Snowpiercer (***)

Snowpiercer is the English-language debut by Korean filmmaker Joon-ho Bong (Mother, The Host), an action adventure set aboard a train that protects the remnants of humanity from a deep freeze that has, for 17 years, rendered Earth unfit for life. The cause of the calamity was some misguided attempt to battle global warning, but it doesn’t matter. Rather than an environmental theme, the story can be seen as a big parable of Marxism. (Or, it can just be seen as a violent action movie.)

At the back of the train are the least fortunate, forced into cramped quarters, and fed protein bars that look like slabs of blue gelatin, and made to listen to bizarre speeches about how each person has his place, or class. This last is delivered by Tilda Swinton, who gives an oddly entertaining performance as the representative of Wilbur, the trainmaster. She explains how each person’s lot depends on the type of ticket, with the first-class passengers in front. The language of trains — class, station — nicely reinforces the ideological themes of the film. it’s never quite explained how these passengers snagged the tickets —but metaphorically to the  Planning the latest rebellion against this rigid regime is Curtis (Chris Bell), who hopes to take over the engine at the front of the train and, at least, get better food. And find the children who have been taken away. Naturally, the resistance is met with violence.

Suggesting its origins in a French graphic novel, the movie cycles through a variety of topics, styles, and themes, frequently suggesting other films. One character is supposedly clairvoyant, but it’s only a minor (and unnecessary, I’d say) plot element. The idea of eugenics is implied, but not specifically mentioned. In one sequence, a perky teacher teacher indoctrinates pre-teens in the ideology of the train and its benevolent leader, Wilbur, cheerfully reciting poetry about how everyone will freeze and die were they to go outside. Recalling to my mind Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, It’s such an over-the-top scene that it seems intended to provide comic relief. I also thought of The Poseidon Adventure, except that instead of moving, deck by deck, upward in a ship, Curtis’s motley crew traverse the train lengthwise, compartment by compartment. (One shot in the movie seems to be Bong’s direct tribute to a scene where Gene Hackman tries to steer the Poseidon by hanging on the steerting wheel.)

Mostly this is entertaining, though I had a hard time believing that Curtis’s rebellion would have gotten as far as it did, or that Curtis himself would be such a skilled fighter. It’s probably no coincidence that Bong films the key hand-to-hand combat sequence with slow-motion and other techniques that seem to obscure the extreme unlikelihood that the rebels could succeed. And the easily anticipated (but not altogether convincing) ending sidesteps the most pointed question implied by the story. That is, despite the cruelty of the train’s class system, would overturning it result in a worse situation, as with many a real-world revolution, that would imperil the survival of everyone on board? In other words, in a world of scarcity, what happens when no one will eat protein bars and everyone demands steak? Perhaps the film is an environmental parable after all.

IMDB link

viewed 7/6/14 1:20 pm at Roxy and posted 7/7

Cold Eyes (***1/4) [screening]

You’ve seen movies like this before. (You could have even seen one very much like it, since this is a remake of a Hong Kong film.) A criminal gang with a polished mastermind faces off against an elite law enforcement squad. (A movie like that called Elite Squad is one of Brazil’s biggest hits ever.) The squad specializes in surveillance. They identify; they trace; they tag; they track. But, when it comes time to engage, they call in the tactical team, following protocol. They use tactics that, when employed against Will Smith in 1998’s Enemy of the State, seemed to obviously exceed the possible, and now, with electronic eyes surveying major segments of major cities around the world, seem increasingly plausible.

The heroine of this saga (Hyo-ju Han) is the squad’s newbie — code name Piglet. Perhaps because she is female, she gets to show a broader range of emotion than one might expect. The hero is the squad leader, Falcon, who gives her a stringent memorization test in the type of set piece that’s often a staple of this kind of movie. All of the squad have animal nicknames, and Falcon literally moves them (or wooden representations, actually) around on a chess board that represents the streets of Seoul. They even give their first suspect an animal nickname. Caught on camera buying a soft drink, he becomes a “thirsty hippo.” The movie begins with a bank heist and climaxes with a lengthy chase sequence. They’re quite well done, and while I think I missed a link or two in the chain of evidence that allows the squad to identify the mastermind, the chases are clearly shot, and the two directors have a strong visual sense generally. 

The level of violence is moderate. There’s some humor in the banter between the squad members. Again, nothing entirely new here, but a well-done thriller.

IMDb link

viewed 10/24/13 7:00 pm at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and posted 10/25/13

Drug War (**3/4)

Veteran Hong Kong action director Johnny To doesn’t try to fool you. When he makes a movie about a drug war, he calls it Drug War. To doesn’t waste time on letting you get to know any of the many characters, the better so that you don’t get attached to them. At most they have one key trait, like the one called Haha, who laughs just like that about every sentence. The only surprising thing is that the war is between cops and dealers, not two rival gangs. The movie is slightly confusing at the outset, but the basic idea is that the cops have caught one of the bosses and have him setting up another one.

For most of its length, the story plays out in fairly realistic fashion, with more suspense than action (hidden recording devices play a role), and a modest body count. What happens when the cops finally find their targets is another story altogether. The best thing about the movie is the way that the end both meets and (finally) defies expectations about what should happen in an action movie. Lots of shooting, there is, however.

IMDb link

viewed 6/13/13 at Gershman Y [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/13/13

The Heat (**)

The only novelty in this buddy-cop comedy is that both partners are women. Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy are the leads, one a by-the-book New York FBI agent with a reputation for smugness, the other a potty-mouthed Boston street cop who bullies suspects and superiors alike. No points for guessing who plays who. Forced together by circumstance, they’re trying to catch a drug dealer, and all credit to anyone who after seeing this, can remember much more of the plot than that. Since Boston has lately become a geographical representation of keepin’ it real (see Mystic River, The Town, The Departed, Gone Baby Gone), that’s where the action takes place. (Here, real should be understood as “working class/unpretentious” rather than “realistic,” which it ain’t.) It comes from director Paul Feig, best known for the overrated (but superior) Bridesmaids, and screenwriter Katie Dippold, best known for her work on the (far superior) sitcom Parks and Recreation 

McCarthy, as she did in Bridesmaids, plays another out-of-control character (though not necessarily a similar one), but in this movie that makes her the heroine rather than the comic foil. Here, threatening suspects always gets truthful intelligence (and is always the best way to do so), and adultery (albeit with a prostitute) is an offense punishable via extrajudicial means. Not merely distasteful, the movie also isn’t that funny, though McCarthy makes the most of the material. Feig mixes and matches scenes in which the women clash and scenes in which they bond, including the standard get-blackout-drunk-together scene. Villains come and go. An albino character is also on hand for the purpose of being mocked. At some point, both women are about to be tortured, but there’s no feeling that they’re scared, because there are no real feelings here. Nor is the way they get out of it especially original, believable, or surprising.

There is nothing truly awful about the comedy here. The set pieces can be funny when they don’t feel forced. However, besides being an excellent argument for drug legalization, this is a pretty pointless and truly formulaic Lethal Weapon retread.

IMDb link

viewed 5/23/13 7:30 pm [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/24/13

Skyfall (***1/2)

Until recently, I had never especially cared for the James Bond series. It all seemed little cartoonish, and the various post-Sean Connery, pre-Daniel Craig Bonds seemed a bit too self-satisfied for my taste. But with Casino Royale, which made Agent 007 a little dirtier, a little sweatier, and, of course, unlucky in love (not sex), I was won over. The newest film, is, for at least the first half, the equal of that first Craig film. The opening is nearly as good as any chase sequence I’ve seen, with Bond tracking a computer drive, and the man carrying it, on a variety of wheeled vehicles, most notably a backhoe, while destroying much of Istanbul. The drive has the identities of secret agents on it; unlike other opening sequences, the chase sets up the rest of the movie.

Along with most of the other action, it’s highly improbable, but not obviously ridiculous. The primary villain, played by Javier Bardem with a blond dye job, verges on the cartoonish, but with certain human emotions and motivations. At times, the film both harkens back to the series’ past or consciously turns in a new direction. Nods to the past include the return, after an absence, of the character Q (Ben Whishaw), now retooled as the now-familiar type of the computer geek. Judi Dench again plays M; the character has a heightened role in the plot. At the same time, a scene in which Bond employs a simple radio-beacon device subtly mocks the reliance of earlier installments on elaborate gadgetry. This Bond does not order that his martini be “shaken not stirred,” but does take a picturesque drive in his Aston Martin.

But the most notable thing remains the Craig/Bond persona. He is not cocky, or especially debonair, at least compared to, say, Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan; his characteristic expression is somewhere between dour and thoughtful, rarely smiling, never smirking. The toughness and physicality recollects Connery, but I doubt if anyone would have spoken of the 1960s model as having “unresolved childhood trauma,” as happens here. Moreover, Connery would not have been seen with gray stubble, as Craig is. He’s taken some time off, for reasons the opening makes clear, and gotten rusty enough that he has to pause and rest his hand while clinging to the bottom of an elevator in a Shanghai high-rise.

While Casino Royale was adapted from an Ian Fleming story, and Quantum of Solace directly related to events in that movie, the story here stands alone. Screenplay credit goes to Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who’ve collaborated on all Bond films from 1999’s The World Is Not Enough on, and Josh Logan (Hugo), with Sam Mendes (American Beauty) directing. Ralph Fiennes, as a British spy chief, and Naomie Harris, as a field agent who appears in the opening and later, are welcome cast additions with, it appears, recurring roles. Harris and Craig share some of the wittiest banter in the movie, but French actress Bérénice Marlohe, appears as the more traditional Bond girl. It would give away a plot point to say why her character arc is slightly distasteful, but in any case “romance” is a small part of the plot. After a nice sequence in a Shanghai skyscraper, the action flags in the middle before the literally explosive conclusion, whose setting finally explains the title.

IMDb link

viewed 11/17/12 11:50 am at Riverview and reviewed 11/18–25/12

Act of Valor (**)

The big deal about this film is that real Navy SEALs took part in the filming. The bad deal (besides the storyline) is that they aren’t great actors, and, unlike having a real mixed-martial-arts star in Haywire, their presence probably doesn’t add much to the action scenes either. You can see Gina Carano’s fighting skill on display in the former, but a sniper’s shooting skills and quick response time could be more easily faked. Still, there seems to be some realism to the first action sequence, in which a team of SEALs take down kidnappers in the Philippines. A couple of later set pieces, while upping the action quotient, bring diminishing returns in terms of dramatic tension.

Directors Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh had previously made a documentary short, but this is the first feature for both. Waugh was a former stunt coordinator, so it makes sense that the action is good in terms of technical quality, though only average in terms of how they’re filmed. Where the movie is weak, though, is in supplying an interesting storyline or characters. I forgot the credentials of each of the SEALS even as they were recited (in a voiceover), save for the “chief,” who is said to be a fearsome interrogator. Aside from the chief, there’s very little to differentiate the heroes, though one of them, shown leaving a wife at home and heard quoting Tecumseh (“A single twig breaks, but the bundle of twigs is strong”), is sort of a main character.

The bad guys are more interesting (and more convincingly portrayed) and have a novel new weapon at their disposal. One of them, at least, is given a little more dimension than your typical action-movie villain. When interrogated, he even appears to care for his wife and children. Given the movie’s reverence for the military, it’s not surprising that, when we get to see the chief in action, there’s no waterboarding, but actual interrogation. This is a welcome novelty, but the questioning is so brief that it’s not a whole lot more realistic than movies in which beatings produce uniformly reliable confessions.

As for the plotting, it basically comes down to the team being told of some bit of intelligence, then progressing to somewhere else on the globe, now the Philippines, now Africa, now Mexico. How the intelligence is actually gathered is not of concern; basically the goal is to provide an excuse for the SEALs to go somewhere else and kick some ass. Those who like their action with a patriotic patina may find Act of Valor stirring, and the screen crawl at the end listing SEALs who have actually died in combat is sobering, but this is still a pretty mediocre movie at best.

IMDb link

viewed 2/8/12 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 2/9/12 and 2/27/12

Haywire (***)

These are good times for ass-kicking movie heroines. While Saoirse Ronan in Hanna, Zoe Saldana in Columbiana, or Angelina Jolie in Salt may have convincingly looked the part, Gina Carano is the real deal, a mixed-martial-arts fighter in her first starring role, in a Steven Soderbergh film as it happens. So maybe she could really knock around Channing Tatum, as she does in an opening scene that teases the audience by setting it up so that her character, Mallory, seems like the victim of an abusive boyfriend. But Mallory, an operative for a government contractor doing high-risk undercover jobs, gives as good as she gets (better, actually), whether she’s outrunning a kidnapper in Barcelona, nearly destroying a hotel room in Dublin, or fleeing the police in upstate New York.

You’ll recognize Soderbergh’s hand if you’ve seen his Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels, or Traffic, or The Limey, his previous collaboration with screenwriter Lem Debs. Note the way, when Mallory and her team go into a building, guns blazing,  tones down the artillery he noise and turns up the music instead, opting for panache over thunder. Style points don’t quite overcome what is still essentially a genre exercise. The non-linear structure, confusing at first, doesn’t quite hide a familiar plot. The Limey, for one, has richer characters, even if this film has some well-known actors (Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Bill Paxton) in small roles. And Hanna had a fairy-tale quality that made me overlook its basic implausibility. But this film does boast the best rooftop foot chase sequence since The Bourne Ultimatum. Its fight scenes are very good if you don’t insist on strict reality. I imagine even MMA champions wouldn’t get up so quickly from a couple of the blows inflicted here.


IMDb link

viewed 1/16/12 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 1/16/12 and 1/19/12

The Yellow Sea (**3/4)

I made a point of seeing this at the Philadelphia Film Festival because it was South Korean director Na Hong-jin’s follow-up to The Chaser, one of the best action films of the last decade.

In this case, Chaser star Jung-Woo Ha plays a hapless Chinese taxi driver and gambler offered a contract killing job to pay off his debts. Both the driver and his intended victim are ethnic Koreans, but the driver lives in a Korean enclave just north of the Korean peninsula, while the man he plans to kill is in South Korea.


I strongly preferred the first half, which shows the driver’s being perilous transported into South Korea, stalking his prey, and making inquiries about his wife, who had already left China in search of work. Although only background to the story, it’s an interesting parallel with American immigration issues. The driver has to work so as not to appear like a rube, as immigrants everywhere sometimes do to those more assimilated.

The second half will no doubt appeal to real action junkies. With less time given to sentimental concerns, it ups the violence quotient significantly. One thing different about many Asian action films—versus Hollywood ones—is that films like this don’t mind making the hero unsavory, or the violence seem as brutal as it is. Here, not only are guns a rarity, so you get a lot of murders with knives and other implements (and lots of blood), but even the car crashes feel louder and crunchier, frightening like a real car crash, if you’ve been in one. Technically, the movie seemed pretty flawless, but way too brutal for my taste. Once the main character’s transformation from meek cabbie to fearless killer is complete, I lost some interest, although there are twists and turns as he becomes the target of a slew of Korean and Chinese mafioso. Too bad, because the final sequence is very well done.

IMDb link

viewed 10/28/11 9:15 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 12/3/11

Point Blank (***1/2)

This has everything you want in a thriller and nothing more. It’s a classic wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time story. There’s a nurse’s aide in Paris (Gilles Lellouche). He’s a nice guy. His wife is pregnant. That’s all you need to know, and all the story tells us about him. No sappy drama here. There’s another guy (Roschdy Zem), a criminal, who winds up, sort of, in the same mess as our nice nurse’s aide. And then there’s some other cops and criminals, but it’s awhile before we learn who the good guys and who the bad guys are. (I say “guys,” but the cops are male and female.) Anyway, this movie doesn’t even last an hour and a half, but excepting a few minutes at the start and a few at the end, it never lets up. You get enough plot to propel the story—through the streets, metro stations, etc., of Paris—but not so much it becomes convoluted or ridiculous.

Director and cowriter Fred Cavayé previously made a movie called Anything for Her that was remade as The Next Three Days with Russell Crowe. As Hollywood thrillers increasingly rely on spectacle and superheroics, the slightly lower budgets of television (think 24) and overseas allow the story to shine. You like that, you’ll like this.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 8/14/11

13 Assassins (***)

This samurai adventure from the prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike starts off being slightly confusing, with a bunch of characters being quickly introduced. But it actually follows the familiar formula, pioneered by The Seven Samurai and followed by The Dirty Dozen, Ocean’s Eleven, and so on, of having a cast of heroes join together to defeat a common enemy. That enemy is also a samurai, one poised to wield political power cruelly, but that’s of secondary performance once established. The second act is sort of a road movie, albeit one without motor vehicles, or any vehicles at all, as the assassins plan to meet the enemy. It’s occasionally gruesome, but with a minimum of actual battle scenes. The third act, the finale, is the payoff, at least if you like watching spectacular mass battle scenes with the dirty dozen plus one vastly outnumbered. Besides lots and lots of swordplay, some novel battle techniques aid the underdogs.

The film’s most notewortthy aspect is serving as an antidote to many of the mythic Asian period films that make warriors and aristocracy into larger-than-life figures, not to mention the sentimentalizing Tom Cruise vehicle The Last Samurai. (It suggests that many samurai weren’t really great fighters, and least one of the warriors turns out to be scared of bugs.) This is set a few decades earlier than the Cruise drama* but also explicitly deals with the impending decline of the samurai. Despite having samurai protagonists, it also depicts the flaws of Japan’s feudal (pre-1867) system. The main characters, in fact, are explicitly violating the code of loyalty in order to protect the people. As the bloody finale foreshadows, that code would soon outlive its usefulness.

*in 1844, coincidentally just one year before the recently released Meeks Cutoff

IMDB link

viewed 5/22/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 5/23/11

Hanna (***1/2)

Once upon a time, a girl was raised in the woods in a land where winter covered the forest in white. The man she called “Papa” taught her everything he knew, and he knew a great deal. He taught her hunting and other survival skills, but also books and literature, like the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. He taught her to speak in the tongues of many lands. And finally, he taught her to want to leave.

IMDB link

viewed 4/24/11 at Riverview and reviewed 4/25

Unstoppable (***1/2)

Tony Scott (Top Gun, Crimson Tide, Déjà Vu) has more than two dozen directing credits, virtually all of them slick action movies and thrillers. Not all of them are good, and hardly any are great, but given the right script he can deliver the fast-paced suspense. Here, teamed with star Denzel Washington for the fifth time, he does. (The script, in this case, is by Mark Bomback, best known for Live Free or Die Hard). Oddly, Scott and Washington’s last movie, the remake Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, also featured a runaway train, though it was a subway train, not a massive cargo train. Washington again plays a regular blue-collar guy—the engineer—who unexpectedly finds himself in the midst of a disaster in the making.

Most action thrillers center around criminals wreaking havoc, but in reality the deadliest disasters are natural or accidental. Carelessness, not malice, sets this plot in motion. Sure there’s a villain—there always has to be a villain, I guess—but he’s a token, not that villainous and not that big a part of the story, just another part to the story. That’s what I liked about this, the way it’s missing a lot of cliché elements. When was the last time you saw an action thriller in which nobody even points a gun at anybody? (They do point one at the train, but that’s another story.) Another thing was that even though I don’t know anything about trains, it’s apparent that the people making the movie took care to learn something about them. As it happens, they hired Jon Hosfeld, a former CSX trainmaster, who once had to deal with a real-life situation similar to the one portrayed here.

So, we see all of the mistakes that set the train in motion, all of the ways everyone tries to respond, and all of the ways those ways might not work until a regular-guy engineer and a trainee (no pun intended) conductor (Chris Pine) find themselves in the best position to head off a horrible accident. Sound is used quite effectively—in the theater, you literally feel the power of thousands of tons of steel and cargo. Washington and Pine’s characters have a fictional backstory, but nothing too melodramatic. Yup, this just might be the best runaway train movie since Runaway Train.

IMDB link

viewed 11/4/10 at Ritz East and reviewed 11/12/10

Red (***)

This is kind of like a cross between True Lies and Space Cowboys. The one because it involves a regular guy (Bruce Willis) who turns out to be a secret agent, much to the surprise of the woman he loves. The other because it’s about a bunch of older folks (Willis being the youngest) who reunite for a new mission. The old folks include four Oscar winners—Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, Richard Dreyfuss, and Ernest Borgnine, the hardest-working 93-year-old in show business. Adapted from a comic-book series by Warren Ellis, Red has the same tongue-in-cheek vibe as both of those older films, though the action scenes bring it closer to True Lies.

Willis plays a retiree who pretends to lose his government checks in the mail just so he can flirt with the kindly bureaucrat on the phone (Mary-Louise Parker). When he shows up in her Kansas City apartment claiming he’s ex-CIA and she’s in danger, she can’t quite believe it. So he has to kidnap her in order to save her. Not the best first date she’s had, although, she observes wryly, not the worst. Parker is as sweet and light here as she is hard-edged in her other 2010 role in Solitary Man. Her I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening reactions bring out the humor in these scenes. It’s too bad the movie rushes forward to get to all the firepower.

What seems fresh in the first half devolves into formula, although it’s certainly fun to watch Helen Mirren pumping a machine gun in an evening gown. Still, it’s only a matter of time before Parker’s character is referred to as “the girl,” and you won’t be able to shake the feeling you’ve seen this before. John Malkovich plays one of those wacky sidekick characters like Doc in Back in to the Future. On the whole, Red is very slightly better than the average film of its type, not as good as its stellar cast, or as it thinks it is.

IMDB link

viewed

True Legend (**1/2)

This is one of those mythic Chinese films set in the past with warriors, martial arts, revenge and so forth. The director is Woo-ping Yuen, who directed Jackie Chan in Drunken Master. “Drunken” kung fu eventually finds its way into the story here too, and Yuen directs the action scenes well. There’s a lot of swordplay toward the beginning and more hand-to-hand combat, some fairly brutal, later on. There’s some of the gravity-defying Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style leaps, and the hero (Man Cheuk Chiu), Su, survives blows that would fell WWF wrestlers, but you expect that sort of stylized action in this kind of movie.

So that’s all pretty good. If you don’t mind the pedestrian dialogue and general hokiness of the whole thing, it should entertain. (The acting is a mixed bag, though Crouching Tiger’s Michelle Yeoh makes an appearance.) By way of example, in a very early scene we see Su embraced by his “blood brother,” who offers only gratitude as they part. Five years pass, and though nothing else happens in the meantime, we next see him trying to kill Su—to whom this comes as a complete surprise. (Su’s new archenemy stays in madman mode for the rest of the movie.) Superior movies of this type, especially those of Zhang Yimou (Hero, House of Flying Daggers), have almost an elegance to them, with stories that seem like fables. This seems more like a yarn. I will give it points for having a completely unexpected and different (though still corny) third act when it had seemed like the movie would end with Su’s inevitable revenge.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/19/10

Inception (***1/4)

If Batman Begins and The Dark Knight hadn’t done it, this movie cements Christopher Nolan’s reputation as a creator of brainy blockbusters. With its nine-figure budget, it’s like a steroid-enhanced version of his breakthrough, Memento (budget: $5,000,000). Inception features Nolan’s signatures—a tricky plot intertwined with a heavy psychological component. There are shifts back and forth in time. His use of editing remains breathtaking, and yet the orgy of special effects threatens to overwhelm the human element.

Inception’s plot is literally the stuff of dreams. The high concept is that it’s possible to enter those of other people, and even to shape them. Hence Ellen Page’s role as a dream “architect.” She’s hired by Cobb, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, and he’s been hired by a Japanese businessman (Ken Watanabe). There’s a market for this dreamy stuff. Usually movies like this start out with the simple and build to the complex. For example, The Matrix (a movie of similar appeal, albeit one dissimilar in story) begins with an office worker who knows nothing about the complex virtual world he inhabits. Nolan thrusts you right into his world with barely an explanation. Here he explores concepts (or inventions) like shared dreams, dreams within dreams, and why you should never include real places in constructing dreams. And this is just in the first 15 minutes or so.

Until about then, I had the impression I was watching a sequel to a movie I hadn’t seen. After that, I grasped the basic idea of the story, but one could easily get lost in all the explanatory chatter tossed off by (mostly) Cobb, frequently while he is being chased. Seems that if you stay too long in someone else’s dream, psychological defense mechanisms kick in.

The scenes with Marion Cotillard, as Cobb’s late wife, help explain his motivation, and why he can’t see his children, but she’s more of a plot device than a character. (None of Nolan’s films, possibly excepting The Prestige, have included female characters of any complexity.) Like Memento, this is extremely clever, but unlike Memento, I watched the central character as an action hero, not someone to identify with. Memento made real how our memory makes us who we are. Here, the dream scenes are impressive, even astounding at times, but they feel nothing like real dreams. Nolan aims to bombard the senses, and nearly bludgeons them. Perfect for the video-game generation, the story moves to fast for to you to think about it, although clearly Nolan has. Make no mistake. This is an accomplished film, and my reservations are sure not to matter to someone who just wants a thrill ride. But I still say, sometimes less is more.

IMDB link

viewed 7/29/2010 at Roxy and reviewed 7/31–8/1/10

Jonah Hex (**)

Not only is this not the season’s best action movie, but it’s not even the best one to draw on war-on-terror analogies for its tired plot. At least Prince of Persia had an exotic setting and some swordplay. It even had more of a story, despite not having this effort’s nearly 30-year-old DC Comics pedigree on which to draw. (Hex creator John Albano died before production on the movie began.) The particulars of the title character (Josh Brolin) are that the right side of face is horribly scarred and that he can communicate with the dead. The scars come from an encounter with the film’s villain, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich); the power to talk to the dead—not in the comics version—presumably comes from Neveldine & Taylor, the screenwriting duo (Crank) credited here. Without this fantasy element, the movie would simply be a bad western. With it, it has some creepy sequences in which Hex raises the dead, only to abuse them some more.

There’s more creepiness, but aside from atmospherics and the crisp direction provided by Jimmy Hayward, there’s little else to recommend. The plot is more than a little reminiscent of Wild Wild West, the Will Smith-starring turkey that similarly featured a Confederate-sympathizing villain, a superweapon, and President Grant. Neither villain nor hero are memorable, though Brolin tries, conveying the literal and figurative wounds of a man forced to watch his family burn to death. In a scene meant as dark comedy, Hex shoots a man for asking about his scar. The government comes calling with an opportunity at revenge, and he becomes a good guy.

I guess, it being 1876, Turnbull and his henchmen haven’t seen enough action-thrillers to know that you shouldn’t stop and say things like “you're not going anywhere” rather than quickly finish off the guy you’ve just wounded. However, the more sophisticated 21st-century moviegoer may feel justified at groaning at such clichés. Though Megan Fox has a supporting role as a tough prostitute (and love interest), there aren’t enough tricks to make Jonah Hex anything more than yet another action movie sporting an anti-terrorism patina while reveling in the spectacle of mindless violence.

IMDB link

viewed 6/16/10 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/17–19/10

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (**3/4)

One of the very few computer action games I got into was Prince of Persia, which involved a lot of running and jumping in a palace, with nice graphics by early 1990s standards. Coincidentally, this movie has the same name as that video game. Oh sure, the credits claim that the one is actually based on the other, and the game’s creator, Jordan Mechner even gets a story credit. But it’s not really any more based on it than Pretty in Pink was based on the Psychedelic Furs song. More like if the Disney people went to the guys who wrote the remake of The Uninvited and one of the guys who wrote Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights and said, can you write us a generic action thriller with a romantic angle called Prince of Persia? And it was done.

Of course, it’s very professionally done. The director is Mike Newell, who made maybe the best of the Harry Potter movies, Goblet of Fire. And the cast, led by an impressively beefed-up Jake Gyllenhaal, features Oscar winner Ben Kingsley (as the prince’s influential uncle). Gyllenhaal is the title character, a common boy adopted by the king and fated to lead the preemptive invasion of a holy city thought, though not proven, to have extremely powerful weapons. I have no idea whose idea it was to make the film an Iraq war allegory, but there it is, although most twelve-year-old boys will fail to notice.

The main plotline is the usual fantasy-film nonsense about a magic object that, if captured, will unleash a mighty wave of CGI effects the likes of which have not been seen since the last big-budget fantasy film. This is really too bad. The video game doesn’t supply much of a plot for the movie, but it does suggest a film in which running and jumping in a palace would play more of a role. There’s a little, but the occasional parkour sequences don’t top the ones in District B13 or Casino Royale.

As for the characters, they’re pretty standard. The ancient city is led by a plucky princess (Gemma Arterton). Ever since Star Wars, I guess, the plucky princess is a requisite character for this sort of movie. In the course of five minutes of screen time, she saves the prince, then tries to kill him. She is adversary and love interest, damsel in distress and woman of action, whatever. Meanwhile, the tone of the movie shifts from straight action to Romancing the Stone-style comedic adventure, as if different scenes had been assigned to different writers. (And indeed, several are credited.)

The result isn’t incoherent, but is disjointed. On the bright side are minor time-travel tricks, an impressive re-creation of some real sites in ancient Persia, and medium-good swordfighting. Not good enough to recommend though.


IMDB link

reviewed 5/27/10

The Good the Bad the Weird (***1/2)

I don’t think I’d seen a Korean movie until maybe ten years ago, but now I try not to miss the ones that manage to get theatrical releases. That was also pretty much none until recently, but in the last few years a spate of good to very good movies have made their way to American shores. Although some of these have been arty fare such as the lovely Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, most are of the type that would be enjoyed by exactly the sort of audience that would never think of seeing a subtitled movie. And although not a few of these were action films (e.g., Old Boy) one thing I hadn’t seen was a western.

As the title, a spoof of Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti western” The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, suggests, it’s a comic variation on the genre. A noodle western was the term applied to the Japanese movie Tampopo, and so this has been called a kimchi western. Yet that doesn’t mean it skimps on the action, at all. The opening sequence, in which not one, or two, but three bandits independently attack the same train, would be the envy of most Hollywood directors. (Director Ji-woon Kim is best known for the psychological horror film A Tale of Two Sisters.) This sequence sets up the rest of the movie, in which a lot of things happen, but which can be pretty much summed up as the different bandits all trying to possess a treasure map or, failing that, the treasure, though no one seems to know what it is. The map is a classic MacGuffin, a plot device whose main purpose is to propel the action—and the comedy.

The three bandits include the Johnny Depp-like Byung-hun Lee (G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra) as the baddest, and Kang-ho Song (The Host) as the weirdest, a likable bumbler who’s sort of tbe hero. A novel element is that the film is set in 1930s Manchuria, an area of China then occupied by Japan. Imperialism becomes a subtext to some of the story, though it’s mostly played for laughs. There’s a hilarious sequence with what seems like the entire Japanese Imperial Army chasing down, or being chased by, one of the bandits. If you don’t mind some scattered gruesomeness, this is altogether entertaining.

IMDB link

viewed April 11 at Prince [Philadelphia Film Festival Spring Preview] and reviewed 5/9/10

District 13: Ultimatum (***1/4)

A sequel to one of the better action movies of the last decade, this one comes with a generic-sounding subtitle, but shows that the ever-fecund mind of its screenwriter/producer Luc Besson ( La Femme Nikita, The Transporter) is still fertile. (Besson also has a hand in the simultaneously opening From Paris with Love.) Certainly District B13, set in a near-future Paris where the city’s most crime-ridden section had been walled off from the rest of town, would be better known were it not in French. The simple-but-serviceable plot provided a sturdy framework for original action sequences involving David Belle, inventor of a discipline called parkour. Parkour involves efficiently adapting one’s movements to the surrounding objects, which in practice means a lot of running and jumping.

There is unfortunately less parkour than in the original. Belle’s character, a kind of thug-turned-hero, plays second fiddle to the cop character played by Cyril Raffaelli in both films. Hand-to-hand combat and martial arts are the specialties of Raffaeli, who often works as a stuntman or stunt coordinator. In an over-the-top but highly entertaining early sequence that turns out to have nothing to do with the rest of the plot, he infiltrates a corrupt club, uses a disguise to lure the bad guys one by one, and uses an original Van Gogh painting as a weapon/shield while keeping it from getting scratched. Again, circumstances require that the cop and the ex-thug team up to save District 13, this time from outright demolition. The district is portrayed as a multicultural jungle so lawless that even the cops fear to tread there, yet in the end cynicism yields to the French values of liberté, egalité, fraternité.

IMDB link

viewed 1/28/10 at Ritz 5 (PFS screening) and reviewed 1/29/10

Avatar (***1/4)

The majority of blockbusters these days are special-effects movies, but no amount of effects can save a cruddy script. Yet very occasionally effects can make a decent movie into one worth recommending. Director James Cameron’s most famous film, Titanic, probably falls into this category. Even those who found the romantic tale rather pedestrian had to admire his re-creation of the famous disaster. It may be the same with his latest venture into sci-fi turf, in which he and a couple of thousand other people create a beautiful alien world (shown in 3D on many screens) with effects whose chief virtue is that you forget that they’re effects and concentrate on the story.

As for that, Cameron has always been a better director and idea man than screenwriter, and once you get past the visual aspects the movie feels more familiar. In fact, the plot resembles nothing so much as Dances with Wolves, wherein the main character is a white guy who by turn of circumstance winds up immersing himself in the culture of the oppressed. As was frequently the case with American Indians and aborigines, the goal is subjugation for financial purposes. The fictional planet, Pandora, contains massive deposits of the amusingly named “unobtanium,” a rare mineral. One tribe, the Na’vi, resides above the largest ore deposit, and Jake (Sam Worthington), is part of a team sent to study them. Sigourney Weaver plays the tough leader of the scientific team, probably the most complex character. Zoe Saldana also deserves praise for bringing to life the Na’vi warrior who educates Jake, much like Michael Caine does the title character in Educating Rita.

From a sci-fi angle, the most interesting thing is the way that the humans interact with the Na’vi. The humans create hybrid cloned bodies using alien and human DNA; these “avatars” are controlled by the humans they resemble. Elsewhere, there are certain familiar tropes. Jake manages to learn the Na’vi language in a couple of months despite the fact that the Na’vi he talks with conveniently speak English most of the time. For reasons left mysterious, Jake is favored in other ways by the Na’vi godess. It reminded me of The Last Samurai, wherein westerner Tom Cruise seemingly manages to become a better samurai than every single Japanese person, although that level of absurdity is not reached. The Na’vi themselves seem representative of New Age philosophy; the old image of natives as savages (held by the film’s villains) is replaced with that of the enlightened primitives: without technology but morally superior and literally connected to nature. They are, however, monogamous, and their society is not too unfamiliar to us. Their harmony with nature is explained via a combination of science and religion. Many things about Pandora seem conveniently similar to Earth, like the dichotomy between plants and animals, the single intelligent species, the fact that the intelligent species look much like humans (only larger and bluer), the way many other species (trees, dogs) look like Earth species, etc. Perhaps Pandora has an evolutionary connection to life on Earth.

We know what happens to the Indians and the aborigines, but making this about aliens gives Cameron a chance to write the history. Dances with Wolves highlighted the cruelty of European conquest. Avatar asks whether, given the chance, we would do it any differently today. (Less overtly, it raises the question of whether the natives, knowing what’s coming, would prefer slaughter or subjugation.) Although there isn’t much nuance in the film’s anti-imperialist message, Cameron does deserve credit for creating a somewhat different kind of blockbuster movie and visually raising the bar for any future creators of alien worlds.

IMDB link

viewed 1/3/10 at Riverview (in 3D) and reviewed 1/3–4/10