Winter review round-up

Winter review round-up

Sep 01

Spring has apparently sprung, despite the rain forecast for the weekend and the still pretty-cold nights. That can only mean one thing: it’s time to look back over the past 3 months and take stock of what movies we saw, and whether or not we liked them very much.

As usual, this season was a bit of a mixed bag. Being the American summer, a lot of big cash cow flicks were released — Sex And The City 2, The A-Team, Twilight, Predators, Inception, etc. — and only some of them were good. I like our summer better. We get stuff like Tron Legacy and Harry Potter, and we used to get The Lord Of The Rings.

Anyway, let’s get down to it!

Sex And The City 2

“Quite apart from being one of the most offensive products ever manufactured, Sex And The City 2 is also outrageously surreal to watch. It is so surreal, in fact, that if asked “what was it about?” a mere ten minutes after watching it, you may find yourself hitting a mental blank (probably caused by the violent brain haemorrhage induced by how stupid the movie was). Did I already mention how forgettable it is?”

Grown Ups

“How did so many ‘A-list’ comedians assemble in one place and not realise their jokes were falling completely flat on a deadweight script?”

Get Him To The Greek

“There’s no rhyme or reason to any single thing Aldous Snow does — and he does some bafflingly strange things towards the end of the film — and the sheer otherness of the central character damages Greek almost beyond repair.”

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

“A vast improvement over the last installment in the series, but that isn’t saying much.”

Pandorum (While the film didn’t actually see a cinematic release here, I finally got around to watching the Blu-Ray in July, so it counts. Barely)

“Right from the start of Pandorum, I felt a creeping sense of déjà vu. As the film progressed, the sense grew stronger, and stronger, until it became an overriding axiom of truth in my brain: Pandorum is exactly like a video game, but with all the gameplay removed.”

The Karate Kid

“What made the remake harder to endure was the fact that, for whatever reason, they’ve taken those same beats and stretched them out to a challenging 140 minutes. Almost 2-and-a-half hours is a damn long time to wait for something you know is coming.”

The Expendables

“It’s all here. Big guns, big fights, big arms, square jaws, car chases, explosions, sexy ladies in distress and, of course, witty one-liners. There’s even a bad guy ‘monologing’ at the end to complete the package. It’s all been done before and there’s nothing revolutionary for The Expendables to hang its hat on.”

Splice

“A dark streak permeates the plot, an aspect that probably would have helped the film if it had stronger characters, but in reality serves to alienate the audience from what little good Splice has to offer.”

The A-Team

“When there’s parachuting tanks, stereotypically jaded-but-still-in-love ex-girlfriends, and some jerkish CIA types involved, you know the bulk of the audience’s focus is going to be on the action rather than the characters. Here The A-Team is something of a mixed bag.”

Nowhere Boy

“I can’t believe it’s the same kid from Kick-Ass. I’m glad I saw Kick-Ass before I saw Nowhere Boy, because I think that comparison helped underline how spectacularly perfect his performance is.”

Predators

“The performances are all — miraculously for this type of film – passable at least, and great at best. Adrien Brody stands out, of course, but Laurence Fishburne’s Apocalypse Now-informed performance as a bloke who’s been on the wrong planet for too long is refreshingly fun to watch.”

Toy Story 3

“I must admit that I was hoping to laugh out loud more. Heck, I think the audience I saw it with– a mix of mothers, fathers teenagers and early-twenties couples, wanted to laugh more, too– but we never did.”

Knight And Day

“It’s clear that director James Mangold is fluent in the language of cinema. He conducts the ballet between screen and speakers, actors and audience with startling precision.”

Inception

“Every shot, every cut, every sound effect and musical cue is distinctly Nolan-ish: the sound design is sharp and punchy, the visuals are moody and gorgeous, the music is as subtle as a brick and twice as threatening, and the performances are exemplary across the board. In fact, the only real problem here is the script.”

Scott Pilgrim vs The World

“Pilgrim’s strongest selling card is its humour, which, thankfully, isn’t content with the kind of geek jokes that make people like me roll their eyes.”

Today marks ReelThinker’s nine month anniversary. Incidentally, this is approximately the period of time required to cook a functioning human being the old-fashioned way. Probably not relevant, but worth mentioning anyway. Thanks for reading, and here’s to another 9 months!

For previous review round-ups, go here:

Summer review round-up

Autumn review round-up

Top 7 twist endings that sucked

Top 7 twist endings that sucked

Jul 24

A good twist will immediately set your mind spinning. You sit there in the darkened theatre with your jaw agape, breathlessly going over the last two hours of your life and combing through those memories for some kind of clue. The best twists will encourage repeat viewings; the very best twists will serve to enrich the thematic conent of the film.

The other side of the coin is the bad twist: the kind of twist that makes you go “Huh?” The worst case scenario is that the final twist is a cheap shot, a retread of a dozen other twists, or an obviously easy way out of a tricky situation. The very worst twists invalidate the entire film’s existence — such as the rightly-hated “It was all just a dream!” twist.

Here is a list (by no means exhaustive) of the film twists that annoyed me the most:

7 – Remember Me (2010)

Robert Pattinson spends a most of the movie trying to un-estrange himself from his distant father, Pierce Brosnan. He finally manages to pin him down for a meeting, to reconcile their differences. They agree on a time and a place. Pattinson arrives early, but Brosnan, as always, is late. Pattinson looks out the window, and the camera tracks out to reveal he’s halfway up the World Trade Centre. We find out the date — 11 September 2001 — and the film fades to black. I guess that’s one way to solve familial relationship problems, but it’s no way to end your movie.

6  – Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (2008)

The infamous “space between spaces” line came after the all the fridge-nuking and monkey-swinging, and as such isn’t the target of as much vitriol as those earlier indications of inanity. But it is still mind-bogglingly stupid. The Indiana Jones movies have always had a creeping sense of the supernatural about them –  Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull took it a step too far.

5 – Planet Of The Apes (2001)

People often forget that Tim Burton made The Planet Of The Apes. They’re too busy swooning over Edward Scissorhands and … well that’s it, actually. People often forget how awful the twist ending of The Planet Of The Apes is, too, because it doesn’t make a lick of sense. Mark Wahlberg travels into the future, hangs out with some cranky apes, comes back to his own time, and finds … the planet overrun by cranky apes. This sucks twice as hard because the twist of the original Apes was so much better.

4 – Saw (2004)

The first time I watched Saw, I guessed that the genial old fellow in the hospital was the killer, purely because the camera lingered a beat too long on him in the first act. What I didn’t know was that he could paralyse himself for extended periods of time, and stop his breathing, in order to convince two people in the room with him that he was a corpse. That’s an impressive skill. So impressive a skill, in fact, that it’s quite clearly bullshit.

3 – Inception (2010)

Inception was such a cortical strain that it really needed a powerful finish in order to validate all the hard work your poor cerebellum did over the past two and a half hours. What we got instead was a cheap trick, a sleight of hand that denied the film a real sense of purpose or higher meaning. Nolan delivered such a satisfying twist in Memento that we all thought he couldn’t possibly fail. Then, he did.

2 – Most M Night Shyamalan movies (2002, 2004, 2008)

It started with Signs: aliens for whom water is like acid is to us. It’s like humans landing naked on Venus and complaining about all the sulfuric acid everywhere — that is, outrageously stupid. Plus, biologists have shown that water is one of the few reliable mediums for live to get started in. So chances are, any alien life-form (especially if it looks suspiciously human-shaped) we come across will be water-dependant, not -intolerant.

Then there was The Village: all those monstrous beasts you spent the entire film evading were just people in fake-looking suits! And also you’re living in the modern world, but you’re trapped in the woods so that you’ll never escape and find out that science can cure all your illnesses! The twist ending ruins the movie, drains any sense of horror, and causes your empathy for the characters to dissolve in seconds.

Finally, there was The Happening: turns out all plants everywhere in the world have evolved a very specific airborn neurotoxin that breaks down the brain’s inhibitions! And it only applies to one species out of ten million — us! There are so many things wrong with this — including the implication that plants are sentient — that The Happening officially destroyed what little faith I had in M Night Shyamalan to deliver anything resembling a half-decent movie any more. I didn’t even watch The Lady In The Water — did that have a stupid twist as well?

1 – All those mid-noughties thrillers that tried to copy Fight Club

People watched Fight Club. A lot of people. Some of them were filmmakers. Forgetting that so many other people had also watched Fight Club, these filmmakers decided to pull the same final-reel twist over and over again in the following decade that it became something of a running joke.

Hide And Seek: the menacing killer is the protagonist’s (Robert DeNiro) split personality. Secret Window: the menacing killer is the protagonist’s (Johnny Depp) split personality. The Number 23: the menacing killer is the protagonist (Jim Carrey), before he got amnesia. Perfect Strangers: the mancing killer is the protagonist (Halle Berry) — the kicker is that she knows what she’s doing — and keeps doing it anyway.

The rash of mid-00s twist-based films has finally abated, and hopefully we can look forward to films that offer decent, rather that deficient, twists.

What final-reel twists bugged the hell out of you? Did you think Inception‘s twist was that bad, or am I crazy? Any thoughts are welcome and appreciated.

INCEPTION review

INCEPTION review

Jul 22

You’ve got to love a good old-fashioned rug. Perhaps a woollen one, faded with age, covering the long cold hall and preventing you from freezing your toes off on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. It’s not hard to become attached to rugs, especially such ancient, familiar ones; a good rug can be as comforting in the long dark tea-time of the soul as a good towel.

Christopher Nolan is not a man who shares my enthusiasm for rugs. He experiences some kind of perverse glee in yanking the poor things right out from under me, in fact. The first few times he does it, it’s like “Ha ha, good one, Chris, you sure got me.” Then, not merely content with watching me tumble head-over-heels half a dozen times, Nolan gets clever. He takes the woollen threads of the rug, when I’m not looking, and uses them to tie my feet to the rug. So the next time he yanks it out from under me, I find myself unable to disengage myself from the violently bucking antique carpeting device; I find myself entirely at the prankster’s mercy. Unfortunately for me, Christopher Nolan is one hell of a prankster.

Inception relies on your willingness to run headfirst into the practical joke over and over again. It’s not like Memento where you always knew your rug was in danger, but didn’t know quite how, like it was floating on top of a very unstable body of water; this time, Nolan knows his audience is wary (as a very important idiot once said, “Fool me twice … shame on you”). So with Inception, he comes up with new and exciting ways to disorient and confuse the viewer.

There’s no point discussing the plot of Inception; even explaining the title would spoil the first half or so of the film. Suffice it to say that everything you need to know is in the first teaser: reality experiences technical difficulties; mind-bending stunts and high-stakes action scenes ensue; Leonardo DiCaprio wears an “Oh Christ, not this shit again” expression for two-and-a-half hours; and you can expect to be engaged on cerebral levels not normally associated with the cinematic experience.

And that’s the other thing Inception relies on: its uniqueness. It rockets along so fast you can barely keep a grip on the fraying threads of the rug before it’s ripped out from under you for the umpteenth time; it moves so fast that you barely have time to register that it’s kind of like The Matrix, it’s kind of like that video game Psychonauts, and it’s kind of like that episode of Lost, “The Constant.” It moves so fast that it forces you to use that wrinkly grey sponge between your ears, and it banks on you not having experienced anything quite like it before – at least, not at the movies.

For the most part, the film works. It takes a while to get going, and spends an inordinate and ultimately superfluous amount of time building rules and disgorging exposition (albeit in innovative ways), but after about the halfway point, Inception kicks into gear and takes your flying rug into outer space.

Christopher Nolan is nothing if not a cinematic perfectionist. Every shot, every cut, every sound effect and musical cue is distinctly Nolan-ish: the sound design is sharp and punchy, the visuals are moody and gorgeous, the music is as subtle as a brick and twice as threatening, and the performances are exemplary across the board. In fact, the only real problem here is the script.

I’m all for taking the formula and breaking it over one’s knee; I enjoy an unpredictable and head-scratching romp as much as the next person (assuming the next person is, give or take, identical to me). But in order to make that work, there needs to be a constant sense of purpose for the characters; the audience needs to understand every single scene on an emotional level, at the very least – like how in Memento we were reminded at the start of every scene what was at stake, where we were, and what we had left to do.

Inception throws in too many elements for the narrative to work seamlessly (spoilers follow): the dead wife, the clunky exposition, the disjointed rollercoaster of a climax, it was all too much – by about the halfway mark, I was following Cillian Murphy’s character (instead of DiCaprio’s) as my primary narrative conduit. Then I had to switch back to DiCaprio – just in time to not give a damn about his peculiar and strangely un-compelling predicament. (End spoilers)

So Inception is a victim of its own ambition. There is so much going on that it’s sometimes hard to keep track of; too often, exposition is ladled out in frustratingly small packets so that you only just manage to keep abreast of why the characters are being shot at, and by whom. Conversely, the benefit of this over-ambition is exemplified in the much-anticipated topsy-turvy hallway fight scene (incidentally rugless): the film is so busy, so tight, and so frenetic, that this scene positively crackles with cinematic energy; everything that follows struggles to maintain that level of intensity.

One element that worked for me, and kept me interested throughout the film’s long (but brisk) running time, was the way the film’s narrative works as an allegory for filmmaking itself. Building false realities for people, suspending their disbelief, and using familiar geographical and characteristic archetypes to do it, all designed to channel the “victim” / dreamer towards a preordained goal or experience – doesn’t that sound a bit like filmmaking to you? Filmmaking in particular, but art in general, I suppose.

My biggest gripe with the movie is the way Nolan concerns himself more with the rug than with the people on it. The “twist ending,” in particular, reeks of his reluctance to provide satisfying emotional closure to any of his characters’ journeys. I get it — it’s cerebral, it’s subtle, it makes clever use of cinematic techniques to subvert your expectations — I get it; it just doesn’t work for me.

Ultimately, these few small flaws recede into the shining surface of the film, a monolith that exhibits almost magisterial power over its audience: you’d be hard-pressed to find yourself bored with Inception. Some elements may not engage your interest as much as others (such as Marion Cotillard’s character, for me), but there’s enough variety and energy to keep most viewers glued to the screen even as Nolan builds up his next exercise in rug-torture. My only wish is that the film tied itself together, instead of contenting itself with pulling the rug out from under you just one last time.

Inception