white noise

Bullets being sweated. Halloween is coming and I gotta lot of work to do! This is going to be one sweet party, though.

I’m also excited that with Halloween (specifically the 31st) comes the release of Kevin Smith’s latest flick, Zack and Miri Make a Porno. I’ve been following the back story of this one from when Kevin was working on the script, to casting, to shooting, to the appealing the MPAA for the R rating, to the US ban on the original theater poster. Even got to exchange some words with Kevin about it back at the poker game in Jersey. All of that amounts to some serious cinema foreplay, so I’m really dying to see it (after rigorously staying spoiler-free all this time), and I’m really happy for Kevin to have a what should be a big hit on his hands.

“Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Has Ironman been knocked off from the best movie of the year? Yes, I believe so. The flick is not without its flaws, but there is SO much bad-assery to be had. Bravo!

Pros:

• It’s Indiana Jones
• Campy 50s schtick (when it works)
• Constant action (motorcycle chase, jungle chase)
• A few comedic bits that work

Cons:

• Aliens, WTF!
• Campy 50s schtick (when it doesn’t)
• Where are all the cool traps?
• Cate Blanchett’s terrible Russian accent
• Tarzan vine swinging
• CGI overkill

The verdict: Entertaining, but…weird. As they say, it’s the journey not the destination. It’s a good thing the journey in this flick is decent enough because I hate where it ended up.

Last weekend was pretty active for watching movies – which means I was largely inactive. Here’s a quick rundown:

Iron Man
Exceeded my expectations! Not a thinker’s flick by any means, but finally a comic conversion I actually enjoyed, a lot. Granted, I’ve always like the idea of this billionaire inventor who actually engineers his way to super herodom, instead of all the freak cosmic ray mishaps that transform your usual caped/web throwing reluctant hero (thinking about it now, I guess Bruce Wayne is similar to Tony Stark, but Stark’s stuff is way better). Nice post-credits teaser, too.

An Inconvenient Truth
D and I finally sat down to watch this and it was very interesting. Like any docu, I suppose the info presented can be debated, but it is well done and engaging and the data depicted (and in particular the rate of change in the data) is alarming. We followed it with watching an update Gore gave at a recent TED talk. Who’s ready for solar panels and a hybrid? This guy. Heck, you can even get both in one.

Good Luck Chuck
Just like Dane Cook’s comedy – brash, crude, and at times, so much so to a fault. There’s some genuine laughs in there, but there’s a ton of in your face lowbrow gags as well. Not even Jessica Alba can make up for vision of Dane with the penguin in the closing credits.

Like last year, the nominees for the Academy Awards were announced and there were plenty of movies I hadn’t yet seen. Not that I really care about the Oscars or anything, but I find it to be an excellent opportunity to catch up on the year’s critical best.

Atonement
This movie is up for seven Oscars, which confirms that the Academy and me don’t see eye to eye. From the silly (and eventually annoying) typewriter-sampled score to the retelling of multiple scenes, this drawn out story of a confused girl and the lives she ruins just didn’t do it for me. Somehow the movie just doesn’t seem to cover much ground in the 2+ hours runtime. The little bit of humor and intrigue with the mistaken letter at the beginning was a promising start, but the relationship everything hinges on just wasn’t given time to materialize and that leaves the rest of the film rather pointless. The only kudo I can give is to the awesome filming of the long continuous steadicam shot through the vast beach of Dunkirk. But shame on the movie for losing me to recognize those technical achievements. My pick for: Achievement in Cinematography.

Across the Universe
This movie is only up for an Oscar in Costume Design (and will likely lose to Sweeney Todd), but I viewed this in the middle of the other flicks so I thought I’d throw it in the wrap up. Across is a musical set against a soundtrack of greatest hits from the Beatles. It follows a young Englishmen who comes to the US in the 60’s and his group of friends and their varied experiences. To me, musicals are always more about telling the music than a story, and this film isn’t really any different. Essentially it’s a two hour music video (and maybe 2 songs too long), but that’s not to say it isn’t fun. Most of the songs are covered well in new and interesting ways, and there are a couple great cameo performances by Joe Cocker, Eddie Izzard, and Bono. Toss in some imagery that ranges from psychedelic to disturbing and you’ve got a fun ride.

Sweeney Todd
Coming in with three nominations including Best Leading Actor is this musical centered around revenge, blood, and tasty meat pies. How could you go wrong with another Depp/Burton collaboration with more blood and gore than ever? You make everyone sing everything, that’s how. Ok, yes this is a film adaptation of a musical and I pretty much got what I expected. It isn’t a bad movie by any means, but it isn’t the high water mark for either Depp or Burton either. As expected, Burton’s visuals are excellent, Depp’s acting (and singing!) very good, and the pace of the film moves well. The supporting characters are well cast, too; it’s hard to imagine the movie without Helena Bonham Carter and Alan Rickman. But in common musical form, the characters are really all flat and predictable. And then there’s the music. Although some of the songs have entertaining lyrics, I really thought too many were musically written in exactly the same fashion. I don’t mean that in the sense of reprisals of themes, but the actual composition. For example, almost all the songs end with a traditional huge build up and an extended high note. You can almost sense the subsequent pause for applause in a live performance while the set is changed. I guess that the music should have be reworked a little more to suit the medium. In the end I’d award the movie Best Art Direction and Costume Design, but sadly I need to snub Depp for Best Leading Actor. The nature of the film just didn’t let him exercise his acting chops to the extent of some of the other nominations.

There Will Be Blood
With eight Oscar nominations you’d expect a lot of this movie. Unfortunately I just ran out of time to watch this pre-awards…I’ll come back and update this in a day or two.

No Country For Old Men
Here’s another potential powerhouse coming in with eight nominations. In the supporting (but I’d say heavily supporting) role of the cold blooded pycho killer, Javier Bardem deserves the Oscar in my book. The rest of the movie was pretty enthralling – despite the feeling that you walk in and out in the middle of a bigger story with loose ends on either side. It’s got a sense of the Cohen brother’s quirkiness darkness, but with little humor this time. Yes, it’s a grown up drama, but not a boring one at all. Actual the story looks and feels like a traditional western, but redone is a more modern timeless setting. I think it’s also a contender for Best Film Editing and Adapted Screenplay, but the Oscars for Best Directing and Best Picture are probably a tad out of reach…at least in my book.

Juno
And lastly that brings me to the little film that could. Juno may come across to some like a ton of indie film bricks, but I don’t mind being smashed under the weight of its cuteness. After a year of Transformers, Pirates III, and all the other formula blockbusters, this flick chock-full of originality hit the spot. Sure, maybe the dialog (more in the beginning) is a little heavy handed in the hipster department, but there were a few gems in there, too (like, “He is the cheese to my macaroni”). Ellen Page did a great job with the title character; she was smart, cute, and really delivered the lines on point. Kudos to Jason Bateman, a character who I first thought was hurting the story, but in the end really deepened it. Michael Cera didn’t do much to carry the film, but he didn’t drag it down either. I feel he’s really just the same character as in Superbad, which was another movie with him as the ancillary straight man. What impressed me the most was how adeptly the film steered clear of being just another raunchy teen comedy or a preachy after-school special. Instead we get a fun, but not frivolous, and warm, but not sickeningly sweet, look at making the most from of a shitty situation. A realistic candidate for Best Picture? I doubt it, but it’d get my vote. Above all the other films, this would be the one I’d most likely watch again. As for Best Leading Actress, I haven’t seen any of the other nominees, but Ellen’s got this one in the bag. Best Original Screenplay has a strong shot, too, with “orignal” being the key word. And Reitman may be in the running for Best Director, but I’m not sure there’s enough here to get him the win.

Somehow there was a big buzz leading up to the release of I Am Legend, and it opened accordingly big in theaters, but I missed all that. Then someone told me it was basically a big budget zombie flick and I was suddenly intrigued. A zombie flick with a big budget? Starring Will Smith? This just seemed all wrong. I had to check it out. (As with all my reviews I’ll be vague enough not to give spoilers – even for a movie as predictable as this one).

Going into the film I new nothing of the original book from 1954, nor the other two film adaptations that came before this one. Knowing this now, I can understand why the premise is so strikingly unoriginal. As the trailers and movie posters state, Will Smith is the last man on Earth, but he is not alone. A virus has run rampant and wiped out most of the population and left a few as some part vampire, part zombie flesh eating subculture.

The best parts of the movie are when Smith is alone (except for his dog Sam) while the movie traces his daily routine. In this first act of the movie the pace is slow enough that you take in the amazing scenes of a deserted New York City and wonder what it’d be like to be truly alone. Not a month, or a year, but three years living alone. The set designers and CGI artists are some really talented folk making the post-apocalyptic NYC the real star of the movie. If you’ve been to New York (and probably if you haven’t) you just can’t stop wondering how they created such a believable, vast and desolate scene.

But wait I’ve seen all this before. Only it wasn’t NYC, it was London, where a virus outbreak turned the gen-pop into a different, but more believable breed of speed zombies. 28 Days Later came out back in 2002, and since then speed “zombies” (virus victims) have become all the rage (pun intended) (see also Resident Evil and Dawn of the Dead) rather than the slow, stumbling dim wits of the 70s and 80s. It’s like at some point the scariest thing about the slow, masses of traditional zombies – the shear number of them – just wasn’t enough. Film makers wanted to turn up the scary gain. And so zombies got fast. Wicked fast.

Maybe Freddy Krueger is at the heart of the zombie evolution. Of course Freddy wasn’t a zombie, but he was one of the few mainstream characters in the horror renaissance of the 80s, who would run you down. Freddy wasn’t full speed all the time, but he broke the tradition set by Romero and followed by Jason and Micheal Myers. Suspense gave way to terror. And it was only a matter of time before it hit the zombie genre.

With I Am Legend I get the impression the creative team wanted to turn the gain to eleven. Faster, stronger, with bigger months, and if that’s not enough maybe we’ll make them smart, too. Yeah, take that you seasoned horror movie fan. But wait, this movie is PG-13 (it’s a Will Smith flick after all) so we can’t get too gory. As a result, I’ve never seen a zombie movie with less blood and guts.

So all that becomes clear in the second act, and just like Smith’s acting you feel the baddies are a notch too over the top. As the movie barrels through the third act, you’re in the familiar territory of a big budget Will Smith action flick. Luckily the writers keep Smith’s wise cracks to a minimum. I wasn’t crazy about the ending, but it really could have been MUCH worse. In the end I actually wanted to see more of the movie, so I’d have to give the movie a pretty good mark. Unlike most big budget movies it wasn’t more of the big action ending that I was craving but just more of that surreal New York daily life. Although there were some seriously creepy missed opportunities in the subways stations or Grand Central, I dug the Bob Marley theme and soundtrack. And it helped up make up for Smith’s shameless, shirtless workout scenes.

I caught the film adaptation of the Stephen King novella, The Mist, a couple weeks ago after much anticipation and a blog post back in May. This story, after all, was the first thing I remember reading from King plus it inspired the game Half-Life many years later. Although I didn’t have a chance to re-read the story prior to the screening as I’d hoped, I remembered quite a bit of the story from many years ago. And from my memory the film held pretty true to the book – except for the interesting, but heavy-handed ending they tacked onto the end. Without giving anything away, the filmmakers decided to answer more questions than the original did. For a creepy story rooted in a lack of information, having answers and resolution provided at the end just felt all wrong.

By far this is director Frank Darabont’s weakest King adaptation. Of course it will take a miracle to pull off one better than Shawshank and The Green Mile. But it wasn’t bad either. Surprisingly, the visual effects didn’t disappoint as in so many other King movies. I went in with the attitude that’d we’d be best entertained by seeing very little of what’s in the mist, and if they had to show us, well, they better bring it. And they did. You practically can’t impress an audience anymore in this post-LOTR era, but the cgi has to be believable, else it’s a distraction. In this flick, all the baddies from big to enormous were done quite well.

In this film, it was the flatness of the characters that left this movie short of the others in Darabont’s resume. There just wasn’t much character development throughout the movie – characters were introduced quickly, and what you saw is what you got. Most fulfilled their very typical roles, and few had any kind of arc. Really the only development you see are stereotypical characters becoming bigger and more exaggerated caricatures of themselves…the bible thumper, the reluctant hero, the uppity out-of-towner, the town yokels, etc. In fairness I think Darabont didn’t have much to draw from – the simple characters worked fine in the short(ish) story, but on film where less is left to the imagination their shallowness was too obvious. Still, there’s plenty of action to keep things moving, and I personally managed to quickly forget the bits of dialog that were either lifeless or way over the top.

Overall it’s a fun watch. I just hope when Darabont takes on King’s The Long Walk, he returns to his old self and knocks one out of the park.

Over the weekend I checked out the latest flick from Judd Apatow, the creator of “40 Year Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up”. In a lot of ways Superbad gives you exactly what you expect in a silly, ranchy teen movie, but there’s plenty of originality as well. Apatow definitely has a penchant for making coming of age movies, he just keeps tweaking that age from film to film. In this installment the awkward male leads plot to score booze and girls before finishing high school.

Foul mouthed Seth (left) delivers most of the movie’s hilarious lines, and Evan (right) plays a good straight man to his antics. They are joined by uber-geek, ‘McLovin’, who steals most of the scenes from the man-child cops played by Seth Rogen (Kocked Up) and Bill Hader (SNL). Much like “Harold and Kumar”, the movie plays like collection of skits all loosely threaded together in a overall journey. And as with all journey movies, it’s the trip, not the destination, you remember. Between the stellar moments of home ec tirades, Superman lunchbox stashes, and liquor store dream sequences, some of the movie’s scenes fall flat. The interjection of the adult characters (the cops, the creepy driver) sometimes works for a laugh, but mostly feels like it pulls the movie off course. But as soon as you figure the best parts of the movie are behind you, Seth gets hit by a car, and things are right again.

All in all, Superbad is a fun time, and you should check it out when you’re in the mood for vulgarity and slapstick. No, I don’t think it’s the “Fast Times” for the iGeneration, but it is one of the best comedies of the year.

I’m actually on top of some of the big releases this year (typically I’m months behind what everyone else is talking about). You might recall earlier this year Pirates didn’t win me over, how about the latest rush of blockbusters?

Transformers

I went to this, like a lot of aged transformer fans, with caution. Let’s face it, there’s was plenty of potential for suck here. But like most fans I was pleasantly surprised. Make no mistake, there’s not much substance to the plot, but the flim makers played to their strengths and delivered an action packed, CGI-engorged boner for all of nerdom.

The movie is very fast paced, which is perfect because it keeps you from thinking too hard about the storyline or the creative liberties taken by the designers with the look of each mechanized star. The action is so fast, however, that it became my main complaint while watching the movie. The robots were so detailed, the transformations so complex, and their motions so fast, that after all the post production motion blur, frantic scene editing, and gratuitous camera movements you get a strong sense you’re missing a lot of eye candy. There was also the multi-million dollar GM product placement deal, which ruined the original auto-identities we grew up with. Still, between the visuals you could see, the original voice of Optimus Prime, and some unexpected humor, the movie was good fun. Yes, it could have been better, but man could it have been a lot worse.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

After four previous Harry Potter movies, what exactly do you go to the forth expecting? Well I don’t go in expecting to see a 2+ hour trailer for the next movie, but I think that’s what I got. Part of the unwritten pledge of creating a long line of movie sequels should be to ensure that each movie tells enough of a story to stand on its own. Yes, the movie will pick up as if it hasn’t been a year and half since the last, and everything is still fresh in mind. Yes, there will be lose ends leading to the next sequel. But even with those disclaimers, Phoenix just doesn’t deliver.

I should mention that I’ve never read any of the Potter books, and as such I’m judging the flick without any additional knowledge. I’m sure a large portion of the audience had plenty of context they could frame this movie with (provided they remember the book which was released four years ago).

While the previous HP films never blew me away, I thought they were all pretty impressive. Apparently this installment had a new director and screenwriter on board and the change (for the worse) is very apparent. This movie is quite slow and dialog heavy. Yet despite all the exposition, there seems to be so much left unsaid and so little accomplished. I’d say roughly the first third of the movie is more of an epilogue to the “Goblet of Fire”, and the other two thirds a setup for something to come later. The scenes of Dumbledore’s Army in training were entertaining, but it didn’t lead to much. Even the final battle with Voldemort came off to me as another bump and run fight like at the end of Goblet. What about those Centaurs, the giants, and of course the Death Eaters? I guess I’m looking at November 2008 before I learn anything more.

Knocked Up

The buzz for Knocked Up has been circling for a while now and I finally got the chance to check it out. The film makers did a great job of crafting a movie to fit most audiences. From the married “Cheaper by the Dozen” demographic to the “Harold and Kumar” college crowd, there’s a little humor here for everyone. And despite the fact that I passed the mid-thirty water mark, I can definitely tell I still fall toward the later since I found myself busting up at the scenes of bong hits and Cirque du psychedelia a lot more than those in the gyno office or delivery room. If anything doesn’t work about the movie as a whole, it’s that at times it seems like separate skits were sewn into the movie to keep the laughs going. None the less, the laughs are there, so I can’t complain too much. I imagine editing sessions where there was a lot of “we can cut that scene, it’s hilarious”.

The real gems in the movie are not the stars, but the cast of supporting weirdos. Paul Rudd does a good job as the husband at wit’s end, and Kristen Wiig was even better as the bitter-under-breath co-worker. The casting for Ben’s friends is also great – as are their continual beard jokes. Throw in Ryan Seacrest dropping F-bombs, and what more do you need. Overall, I put the film on par with “The 40-year Old Virgin” (same writter/director). It doesn’t rank among my most favorite comedies, but it might be for this year.