Prometheus (Sunday, June 10, 2012) (55)

So in 1979, Ridley Scott re-wrote the look, style and tone of scifi movies with his brilliant Alien -- the best movie he has ever made (or ever will). Of course, that film launched a multi-movie franchise, including James Cameron's 1986 sequel, Aliens -- which is arguable better than the first film. 


So now that everyone in Hollywood is totally out of ideas, Ridley is back with Prometheus, a prequel to the earlier franchise. This is a very big and thick scifi movie, filled with all the stuff that the original films didn't have: sex and love, god and existentialist quandaries, near-human robots and power-hungry billionaires. It's all so dumb, clumsy and boring, there's basically nothing good to say about it. 


The film begins with an alien dude standing on the edge of a waterfall. He takes a drink of a mysterious substance and jumps to his death in the falls. This is supposed to mean something or connect for us, but it just seems random and disconnected. We then see a team of scientists, lead by Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) discovering how cave paintings from around the world all have a similar constellation in them -- and that that set of stars is in some far-off part of the universe... so they get in a spaceship with a team of "scientists" (funded privately by billionaire Peter Weyland (Guy Pierce)) and ride off into the cosmos deeply in love.


As the crew sleeps (because they're traveling at light speed, natch), a humanoid android named David (beautifully acted by Michael Fassbender) takes care of the ship. He styles himself after Peter O'Toole from Lawrence of Arabia and reads all the dreams and memories of the people (because that's deep, you see... an android who wants to be human). 


They land at some planet where they find a big pyramid and decide to go into it -- because as scientists they know that fucking with their study subject is the best way to do research. They realize there's living stuff there and they bring some of it back on to their ship (again - that's the scientific method). The leader of the mission on the ground is some skinny blond lady called Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) who is probably not a robot, though she seems to be one... and also seems to be the daughter of Weyland -- though that is presented in a way that could be sarcastic (and it doesn't really matter... like everything in the movie, it's more about loading the story with informational stuff than really exploring anything). 


Ultimately the aliens, who are probably our forebears, infect the ship and kill all sorts of people in boring ways. We ultimately see the famous phallic-vaginal alien guy from those earlier movies emerge from people's bellies -- three times like the great scenes in those early movies... because once you have a good trick you should do it over and over and over and over.


In most big, heady (or fake heady) movies today almost no clear information is presented, and instead, we are given with lots of texture and information, but no synthesis. I firmly reject the notion that a movie has to be oblique to be worthy of discussion or analysis. Great movies are frequently presented straightforwardly, but it seems that many directors can't just leave well enough alone and have to overly complicate stuff. 


The questions this movie presents about our origins are facile at best. Does god exist? Did he create us? What about aliens? Can a robot be a human? It's all so boring. 


On top of this, there's a really uncomfortable and bizarre element that Elizabeth wears a cross around her neck and several times makes it clear that despite finding out that human existence has more to do with aliens than with a creationist myth, she clutches her totem closer and reaffirms her faith. Why? I dunno. Some upside-down ef-you to athiests and scifi geeks who deny god's existence? It's hard enough to believe that an evolutionary scientist would trust so closely in a Judeo-Chrisitan god -- but then that she reaffirms her faith when shown that it's all bunk is just annoying and dead-ended. What am I supposed to do with that information? Does that make me think about my own faith more? No - it doesn't. 


Most of the problems with the film are in the script (by Jon Spaihts and Damon Linelof... of Lost), which is undercooked and banal. We don't need a love story to make us care about people and certainly don't need to see the same gags three times to appreciate them. There's nothing clever or interesting in the film and it all comes off as totally flat and dull. What a disappointment. 


Stars: 1 of 4

The Avengers (3D) (Sunday, May 6, 2012) (45)

The most important component in the dumb Summer blockbuster movie is escape. That is to say, I don't expect much intelligence -- and quite the opposite -- I'm looking for dumb visceral fun. Loud explosions, big settings, maybe some good ol' T&A. They are more spectacles than pure cinema, having more in common with a circus, a freak show, a sight seeing trip to an unknown land where I can turn my brain off and enjoy the experience washing over me. The Avengers is nothing like that. It is a slow, dull, dialogue-heavy Russian novel of a film that is so complicated in its detail that I was unable to just "sit back and enjoy" because I was trying to figure out and interpret what was going on -- mostly because it was so goddamn stupid!

It seems Disney and Marvel have been anticipating this film for a few years now, releasing individual monograph films relating to many of the prominent characters. Last year there was Thor, Captain American and Iron Man 2. There was also a re-boot of the Hulk story (though that featured a different guy playing him). I thought that Thor movie was a horrible abortion of storytelling and excitement and only saw the first Iron Man (which was pretty fun). So at the beginning of The Avengers the idea is that we understand who all the characters are and what they are doing in the world.

It seems Thor's (Chris Hemsworth) little brother, Loki (Tom Hiddleston), is upset that his big bro is all godlike and living in America, so he steals some blue rock that has magic powers (though I didn't catch what kind... something about connecting beings from his world to our world... or something). A guy named Nick Fury (Sam Jackson), who has an eye patch and who I only sorta remember from the first Iron Man movie, rounds up all the super heroes, Thor, Cap America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (RDJ), Hulk (Ruffalo), some lady who's good at kickboxing (ScarJo) and a dude who's a really good archer (that dude from that Iraq movie that lady won the Oscar for), and makes them work on an invisible flying aircraft carrier. Seriously, I'm all about fiscal responsibility and I think that's the first thing the Republicans should cut from the Pentagon budget next year. It seems... too much.

They are all individuals and firmly believe in doing things on their own. Cap likes working with others, but he's from the 1940s and is prolly a Red. Bruce Banner doesn't like being the Hulk because it fucks up his clothes, but is generally an amiable guy. Tony Stark is too rich to give a shit about working with others... so he should prolly just become mayor of New York and break FAA helicopter laws on the weekend. So all these people proceed to sit around tables talking about the rules their drawers have given to them about what they can and can't do (Hulk can't be controlled; Thor has issues with his magic and sometimes can't lift his awesome hammer). Oh - and these two norms, ScarJo and HurtLocker, waste time and screen space trying to be interesting, but failing badly.

Let me say this again: in a world where you have a Norse god (even if he's from another planet), a billionaire who builds unbreakable rocket suits, a green super beast and a dude who represents all that is great with America (that's a lot to represent!), why do you need a lady who's a super spy who doesn't dress in revealing clothes and a dude who's really good at archery? (Also - as this is the second movie with archery prominently in it in recent months, what does that say for America's chances at the Olympics later this year? Why can't Gina Davis get work, people?!) Hawkeye and Black Widow (oooh - such scary names!) are as lame on screen as their names suggest. Neither actor is very talented, they're given terrible, boring lines to read (by director/writer Joss Whedon) and they have no powers or traits that the remaining team couldn't live without. If you're going to give me a useless woman, at least make her show me some skin and sex.

Aside from all this on-screen dramaturgy, there are basically two big action sequences, one at the beginning as all the heroes are fighting not together and one at the end, when they realize that they should work together (again, they're all fucking commies... Stark is clearly a Randian fundamentalist and should be ashamed of himself for working with less-than-capable teammates). This movie basically has two enormous acts and crumbles under the weight of this structure. This is not a fun movie to watch because you're mostly waiting for the next thing to happen... but it never really seems to come. And, no, I don't think this is some Marxist film theory that Whedon is getting into. I think this is just a misfire of a script and film.

This movie is not particularly loud or big. The second battle sequence destroys most of midtown Manhattan (thank god!) but isn't really memorable and just feels like the similar sequence in the third Transformers movie (I think that was Chicago they were blowing up there). The 3D I saw the film in added nothing to the experience for me.

Mostly this feels like a story forced together by its constituent parts. There had to be an Avengers movie because there was a Hulk movie and a Cap America movie, etc. This is clearly setting up a franchise now, but I have no interest in it. What is coming next? Loki is going to come back with a bigger bluer rock? Whedon will cast Wally Shawn and Andre Gregory to discuss the relative merits of gamma ray poisoning around an Upper West Side dinner table? Actually, that sounds a lot more appealing!

Stars: .5 of 4

The Hunger Games (Friday, March 30, 2012) (33)

Reviewing Gary Ross' The Hunger Games is a rather unenviable task. It's an incompetent mess of movie, where clarity of story is suffocated by lavish scenery and forced melodramatic pathos. Add to this the book by Suzanne Collins, on which the film is based, is a massive hit (mostly with girls and their moms) and those readers seem to love the movie (one of the biggest box office opening weekends in history). Nothing I can say here will mean anything to the people who deeply connect to the book and the movie, and it's just gonna come off as me "not getting it" or "being too serious". Whatever. The Hunger Games is a terrible movie and one of the best examples of how a bad script and a hack director can ruin an otherwise decent story.

The banal story in a nutshell finds the world in some sort of dystopian future (I think -- though it could be some alternate universe time -- it's not really clear) where after a civil war, the country is divided into districts with a central capitol city, called Capitol City (because iron-fisted dictators know no poetry). For reasons that are unclear (outside of the intro title cards) each year the districts have to give up two teenagers to fight to the death in a reality TV show competition called "The Hunger Games". After some period of time, and with no rules explicitly spelled out, there will be a single winner left standing who will get rich for their success.

Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) is an older sister and hard working hero from District 12, which is in coal country (somewhere in the Appalachians, it seems) and is squalid and poor. She volunteers for the competition, when her sister's name is drawn out of a hat in the lottery. She's whisked away to Capitol City where she's trained by some former champions and taught a bit about how the games work. Apparently rich viewers can sponsor competitors and give them gifts in the middle of the game; there is gambling involved at some level as well, though how the players would benefit from beating the odds is totally unclear.

Midway through the film, the actual games themselves begin, pitting Katniss against 23 mostly anonymous competitors. She has to survive and outwit her rivals -- and remain a symbol of moral purity along the way.

Perhaps it's unfair of me to criticize Ross' direction, when many of the problems lie in the script (co-adapted by Collins, Ross and Billy Ray -- who has written some great stuff up to this point), which leaves out so many details, the only way to understand the movie is to cram with Wikipedia (or a female friend who has read to books) beforehand. There is so much suggested and not shown that the film really becomes a mere skeleton of what much be a richer tale. What we see on screen is an elliptical shorthand based on what one can only imagine as a rich trilogy of books. Ross doesn't really develop any characters -- not even Katniss -- but relies on one's love or hatred of them from the novels.

What is hinted at, but never really shown, is that Katniss is a perfect older sis and mother-figure constantly sacrificing herself for the greater good of her family. All we see is her performing a single selfless act (taking the place of her illfated sis) and scowling for the next 136 minutes. Lawrence's Katniss is almost totally unlovable and disconnected from any sense of naturalism. Why should I root for the nasty girl who seems to have a bad attitude and a bitter personality?

There's also a strange suggestion of a phantom love triangle that is presented, though not really shown either (I'm guessing it will play a bigger role in the remaining two movies), between Katniss, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), who is the other kid from District 12 to be selected for the Games, and Gale (Liam Hemsworth), some boy who Katniss has a thing with back home... though that relationship is particularly abstract. Imagine Ingrid Berman (in Casablanca) trying to figure out if she wants to be with Bogey or Paul Henreid -- but then take Bogey off the screen, so it's only some weird, distant Rick who we really never know or see much of. It all falls apart.

The art of directing is much more than simply getting actors to speak their lines in a particular way (and in the case of this movie, that way is a bad, lifeless, emotionless way), but really comes in every camera angle and every cut. Taken for granted too frequently are the million decisions that go into every shot. This is not a film directed by Suzanne Collins (though she probably gave some help as to her vision) -- this is a film brought from the flat page to the visual screen by Gary Ross.

What we get is a pastiche of three styles of design, mostly art-deco (which is really 1920s futurism), with some '60s futurism (reminiscent of Truffaut's Farenheit 451) and then some '90s futurism (reminiscent of Besson's The Fifth Element). It's a lot of hodge-podge that doesn't seem to have any thematic correlations. It would be interesting if Ross could connect, say, the provinces being stuck in the '60s, while the capitol was in the '90s, but the style seems to change from moment to moment within any given location.

But then, when he gets a handful of opportunities to make a strong visual punctuation, Ross blows his chances. In the lead-in to the start of the Games, we see the district teams being interviewed by the emcee (played by Stanley Tucci with a lot of colorful hair, who is clearly a futuristic Ryan Seacrest), and Katniss blandly says that she can make her dress look like it's on fire (I guess she's known in the book as "the girl on fire," or something). So we see a close up of JenLaw's face, then a close up of the hem of her gown, then some fire on the hem, then she spins in a circle - but we can't really see much of anything because we're locked in a close up.

Ross is all too interested in close ups and, during the Games, handheld shots, making the movie almost impossible to understand. Everything bounces and shakes, faces are in the frame and then out, in focus and then out. It all feels very much like a bad home movie, more than a gigantic Hollywood blockbuster. Boxing in movies works in close up because there are only two men, they're standing and the topography of the ring is simple; wrestling on the ground in the woods is impossible to figure out in close up.

Back to the narrative, this is essentially a fun story, if mostly recycled. This is basically an update of Stephen King's (well, Richard Bachman's) "The Running Man" -- but girl-centric. But just because the girl is the lead, does not make it a feminist slanted story either (and no, I don't see Collins or Ross as suggesting a genre-twisting high camp feminist dialectic here). Katniss falls into the same dumb male-centric traps and tropes of heroines for generations. She's actively forced into a mother role (both in the glimpse of life before the Games and during the games), which she passively accepts, she's a femme fatale (at least she only agrees to not kill Peeta after castrating him metaphyically), she's unpredictable and sometimes irrational (in the context of her universe).

In this political area, the one thing that I was surprised by is the stark rightwing appeal of the story, the near-Randian, Objectivist qualities of it. You have a singular figure (she's so singular you really only get to know one or two other competitors to a much lesser degree, while the others are just bodies without subjectivity), who is put into a game where she can't rely on help from others, but has to do everything herself, rewriting her own metrics of self-interest as she goes along. Sounds like Howard Roark to me. This is the High Noon version of a survival story (a man alone), rather than the Rio Bravo version (man as part of a community). This is a conservative's wet dream, down to the embarrassment Katniss heaps on the central totalitarian government.

Again, not looking critically at the film as a document, but as mindless entertainment, this is a fun experience. The good guy (girl) wins and the bad guys lose. Yay! But as a film that has a specific point of view or exists as an artistic expression or presentation, it's ham-handed and laughable. Going into the film as a total rube, I can say I got almost nothing from it, aside from 'good triumphs over evil.' I don't think the burden of exploration and illumination should lay with me, but that it rests with the director and screenwriters. Here those people did a sub-mediocre job of basic storytelling and cinematic presentation.

Stars: .5 of 4

Bellflower (2011) (Wednesday, March 8, 2012) (160)

I'm always a bit suspicious of movies that are hailed by the press for being made on a shoestring budgets because that's way too inside-baseball for me and says nothing about how good the film is -- and most of them are terrible. Such was the case when I first heard about and saw trailers for Evan Glodell's Bellflower. It was made for almost no money over the course of a long time while writer/director/producer/editor Glodell and his co-stars Jessie Wiseman and Tyler Dawson helped to scrape money together to get it made. Big freaking deal, I thought.

Then I saw the trailer, which looked like a silly Mad Max, post-apocalyptic story of cars and motorcycles with lots of fire, explosions and blood. Hmm -- doesn't look promising. Then I read a few synopses of the film: Two friends spend all their free time building flame-throwers and weapons of mass destruction in hopes that a global apocalypse will occur and clear the runway for their imaginary gang "Mother Medusa". Every single article or interview said the same thing (so did Netflix). So when I finally watched the movie, I was shocked to find that this summary has almost nothing to do with the actual film (which makes me think that most people who write about movies don't actually watch them but just borrow from press releases ... written by publicists who also don't watch movies).

The only elements that are correct is that it's a movie about two friends, they build a flame thrower and twice mention an imaginary gang called "Mother Medusa". But that's sorta like saying Casablanca is about a drunk American who hates Nazis more than his ex-girlfriend's husband. It really misses the whole point of the film.

Bellflower is named for the street in LA where Woodrow (Glodell) lives. He's a pretty normal hipster with unclear direction, hanging out at bars and building machine stuff with his best friend Aiden (Dawson). They moved to LA for no particular reason, but are a bit obsessed with Mad Max and other motor-themed apocalypse movies. They are trying to build a flame thrower, though it's not clear why, and they love tinkering with cars and motorcycles.

One night they meet Milly (Wiseman) at a bar along with her best friend Courtney (Rebekah Brandes... who might not be able to act but is totally gorgeous). Woodrow and Milly fall madly in love and go on a first date... to Texas. Something about Milly makes Woodrow a tough guy and he starts making crazy decisions and getting in brawls. After a few weeks together they stats to fall apart, and he catches her in bed with another dude, leading him to start sleeping with Courtney. All this time, Woodrow has fantasies about fast cars, blowing shit up and violently getting revenge on Milly.

This is a bit of a post-mumblecore movie (considering the budget and the amount of young people fucking and talking about relationships), with a bit of a fantasy twist. It's a pretty clever pastiche -- the exact kind of movie Woodrow and Aiden would make if they were shooting movies instead of building a flamethrower. Glodell's clever script turns from romantic drama to post-apocalyptic story, but only in Woodrow's mind. This is not an end-of-days story, as the synopses would have you believe, this is a story of love and loss and a dark fantasy that comes out of the contemporary world.

Yes, it was made for almost no money, but it looks great and has a very nice and relatable lost-Generation-Y narrative. It should be seen -- but not for the explosions and flame throwers or Camaros painted matte black (cool), but because it's a pretty good movie and well made.

Stars: 3 of 4

Miss Bala (Friday, February 24, 2012) (17)

The title to the Mexican drug gangster film Miss Bala is rather clever. "Bala," of course, means "bullet," and, furthermore, the main character in the film is a contestant in the Miss Baja beauty pageant. This near-homonym is the core of the story, although it might also be as interesting as the film itself.

Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman) and her best friend enter themselves in the Miss Baja California competition, rather on a lark. The night before the event, the friend, who is dating a drug dealer, takes her to a nightclub just as the Federales get there to arrest everyone. Laura gets away, but her friend does not. As a witness to the events, and knowing what she knows about the identities of the leaders of the gang, she becomes an important witness in an elaborate game of back-and-forth between the police and the cartel. The drug lord insists that she remain in the pageant as a way of keeping an eye on her and not drawing too much attention to them, but it also puts her in a gray position of appearing to work with them... which is the wrong place to be when the cops are rounding up all the associates of the gang.

This is a fun movie, but not really particularly emotional or gripping. As much as Sigman is gorgeous, I never really found it easy to connect to her, either because of her acting or the script. She's mostly a weak pawn through the film, which is particularly frustrating because she seems to be a smart cookie. She's so unaware of her situation in the greater game that the only makes one bold move through the whole event.

Still, it's an entertaining story and has a nice gritty look. It was only a matter of time before the ever-increasing Mexican drug war would hit the big screen, and I'm happy enough with this. Still, I hope that the next effort would look more at the corruption on both sides of the battlefield and how the cops and the system are dirty as the cartels (in fairness, we get a certain amount of that here, but it's a bit secondary to the action and the gunfights).

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Grey (Thursday, February 23, 2012) (16)

A movie about the survivors of a plane crash in the remote icy wilderness with bleak hopes for rescue sounds like something you've seen before? Well, yes and no. The Grey gets its name from a pack of wolves (I guess they're grey wolves... I'll have to check with Sarah Palin to know exactly) who live in the middle of nowhere in Alaska. So aside from all the other stuff about starvation, frigid temperatures and random cuts and bruises, the lucky men who don't die on impact have to figure out how to get rescued without being eaten by an angry bunch of wolves. Sounds tough.

Liam Neeson plays Ottway, an Irish gun-for-hire who is employed by an oil company to shoot the wolves that live near the oil drilling operation in northern Alaska. He's upset that he's lost his wife months before and is about to shoot himself in the face (happy story!), when he decides not to, but rather to to fly home instead. That ill-fated flight then crashes leaving only seven men alive (including Dermot Mulroney and Dallas Roberts). They soon realize that a pack of wolves is hunting them so they have to move from the wreckage to have a chance at not being eaten. As the trek along the Alaskan backwoods their odds get slimmer as they realize they are very well outnumbered by the animals.

This is a fun movie, though not a particularly brilliant one. It certainly plays some of the Val Lewton games where you hear noises but don't know if they're wind or wolf howls. It's all very unsettling and a bit eerie, even though there's nothing really magical about the wolves... they're just hungry.

I always appreciate a movie with a good elliptical ending, and this has one. It's a bleak story that is told efficiently, if sentimentally (I really don't care about Ottway's back-story; when we find out what it is, it doesn't change anything because he's still being hunted by wild animals), and has a cool look to it with lots of sequences set at night and in blizzard conditions. Writer/director Joe Carnahan has done better work in the past (like Narc, which is great), but this is still solid and fun.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Bullhead (Saturday, February 18, 2012) (13)

I'm not really convinced that the story told in Michael Roskam's film Bullhead is at all scientifically possible, but it's a pretty enjoyable one, if a bit silly. The film opens with Jacky (Matthias Schoenaerts), an absolute hulk of a Belgian man, posing naked in the mirror after a shower. He has muscles everywhere. He then goes to a mini-fridge and gets vials of some drug and takes out a syringe. We then jump to an exchange between a group of Flemish cattlemen talking about how the cops are arresting some of their brethren who use hormones to increase the size of their cows.

We then see a flashback to how when Jacky was a kid his father bought growth hormone for his cattle. One day, the daughter of the hormone dealer caught Jacky's eye and before he could make a move on her, her brother, chased Jacky away and ended up effectively castrating him with rocks (ouch!). It seems that from that point on, Jacky was injected with growth hormone (human, we have to assume, rather than bovine) until he got to be the enormous size he is in the present.

Now, years later, the girl who once interested Jacky as a kid is his main fascination. He begins to stalk her (somehow she doesn't know who he is) and as the cops begin to figure out that he's involved in a massive cow doping cartel, the woman finds out who he is as well.

One interesting aspect to the story is that the setting is some place right on the Flemish and Wallonian border and we see clearly that the two peoples hate each other. Only a few of the Flemish speak French and only a few of the Walloons speak Flemish (Jacky is Flemish and his lady obsession is Walloon). I feel like we don't see this schism in film very frequently and it's interesting. Both parts make the whole, but they don't trust and resent each other. This brings up a clever link between the split duality of Belgium and, of course, the duality of testicles (ooof - that's a bit silly, isn't it?).

There is a great Belgian look to the film that I love. It has the stark reality of blues, grays and browns that have become synonymous with other Belgian filmmakers, like the Dardenne brothers, or the blessed Chantal Akerman. I guess it's this natural quality that is most compelling about the film, but also it's biggest problem.

In the end, the film is a rather over-the-top light action flick, certainly with more ennui and more pathos. Many details of the story fall apart because they seem like deus-ex-machina devices rather than plausible elements (such as how Jacky's childhood bully is now in a hospital mostly paralyzed and unable to speak due to an accident or how the grown woman doesn't know who Jacky is). The story begins to fray at the edges with all these silly parts.

I like this film, but I admit it has some problems. It's a pretty good story and the idea of a man-giant being ball-less and miserable because he's less of a man is interesting. Perhaps the bovine and human hormone link is too neat and tidy for me. Still, it's well made and has some compelling moments.

Stars: 3 of 4

Haywire (Sunday, January 29, 2012) (5)

Steven Soderbergh is a good and talented filmmaker. Above everything else, he's a great watcher of other, older movies. Maybe that's why I generally like his movies, or, at a minimum, find his work interesting, because I feel like he's a movie watcher just like I am.

His newest film, Haywire, is a really fun, small action film that plays very much like one of those sleek post-Bond action flicks, like John Boorman's Point Blank (with Lee Marvin). The story here is not too complicated (well, there are lots of moving parts to it, but it's not too hard to follow), the action scenes, fights and chases, look great, it does not spending too much time dwelling on character development and pathos (it's an action film, after all) and it all ties up well in the end.

Mallory (MMA star Gina Carano) is a super spy who works for some private firm that consults with the CIA. When a job goes pear-shaped she finds that people on her own team might be out to get her and she looks to find them before they can find her. She seems always a half-step ahead of them and is not afraid to put on heels and a black dress and kill people (like a girl James Bond). It's a very sleek movie, though nothing too deep or psychologically rigorous.

It's always a big risk to cast a non-actor in a major role, especially one like this which is not really autobiographical. I think Soderbergh rather enjoys making the audience feel uncomfortable with non-actors in major roles, a bit of a thumbing his nose at Hollywood tradition.

Carano does a very good job here, actually (much better than the last non-actor SS had in one of his movies, when anal porno superstar Sasha Grey was in The Girlfriend Experience in 2009), and comes off as an aw-shucks girl next door... but a badass one. She's totally sexy - and thick, which is doubly sexy - and plays well opposite the various males who want to lay her (Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor). I'm not sure she has a lot of other acting roles left in her career, but this is a great effort here.

I also appreciate that this is a pocket-sized action flick. It's a lot of fun and doesn't have the bombasity of a bigger-budget action movie, like a Mission: Impossible or a late-model Bond. It's got a great look, a great soundtrack (by David Holmes), and is a lot of fun.

Stars: 3 of 4

Warrior (2011) (Thursday, January 26, 2012) (148)

I had no interest in seeing Warrior when it came out. It looked like any average boxing movie that have been made over the years (there have been a lot of them recently). But then it got an Oscar nomination for supporting actor for Nick Nolte, so I decided I'd give it a change. Well, it's really nothing more than your average boxing movie - though this time it's not boxing, per se, but mixed marshal arts (MMA).

The film follows two brothers, Brendan Conlon (Joe Edgerton) and Tommy Conlon (Tom Hardy), who live in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh respectively. They were both raised partly by their drunk dad, Paddy (Nolte), who was an ex-Marine and a high school wrestling coach. It seems at some point their mother took them to the West Coast, from where they split up. Later, Brendan became an amateur MMA fighter and Tommy went to the Marines and served in Iraq.

Back to the present day, they are both having a hard time in life, both underemployed and looking for a shot of cash to make everything better. They both begin training for some big super MMA tournament that apparently people care a lot about (because that's just like it would be if this happened outside of a movie!). Against big odds they both make their way to the final match where they have to face one another. Oh - and there's something about both of them dealing with their drunk dad, who is soberish but still a jerk.

There's really nothing special about this movie, aside from the fact that it runs about 130 minutes, which is way too long. All the traditional tropes of fight movies are present here, the pretty but powerless wife/girlfriend, the underdog gaining respect by brawling, the fighter who is also a physics teacher (no, he doesn't also play the violin).

Nolte is fine here, though there's really no reason for him to have gotten the Oscar nom. He's basically playing himself again, drunk who can sober up here and there, but is generally a psychologically underdeveloped man. He's not a leader and hero the way Mickey from Rocky is, nor is he an outright scoundrel. This is much more of a boxing movie for kids who prefer MMA to boxing than any sort of interesting or compelling narrative.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

X-Men: First Class (2011) (Wednesday, January 18, 2012) (141)

X-Men: First Class is the origin story for this comic-book series. After a CIA agent sees a group of people behaving with super-human powers, she enlists the help of Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) who is a researcher in human mutations. Xavier himself has powerful telepathy abilities and his best friend is a girl named Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) who can transform herself (clothes and all) to look like anyone she sees.

Meanwhile, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor, Eric Lensherr (Michael Fassbender), who has the magnetic power to move and control metal, is out trying to avenge the death of his mother at the hands of the Nazis as well as years of experiments performed on him for the Nazis by Dr. Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon). Shaw, the consummate eugenicist, believes normal humans are terrible and they should be wiped out and replaced with mutants.

At some point Xavier (with Raven) and the CIA meet up with Lensherr and they all join forces. It seems the CIA is trying to collect all the teens in America who have these mutant powers. With the help of a massive computer helmet, Xavier is able to find all these kids and bring them in. Shaw uses the Cuban Missile Crisis as the stating ground for his massive overthrow of humanity and Xavier, Raven, Lensherr and their teens have to stop him.

This is a fun movie and I generally like "origin" stories. It's neat to see where characters I know come from and what they looked like younger (hotter, yes). There are lots of fun set-ups with the teens training their powers and learning how to use their skills for good rather than evil.

Still, the dialogue throughout the film is ridiculous and much of the acting is too. Jennifer Lawrence (who I really liked in Winter's Bone) is particularly bad here (and is certainly not helped by the silly lines she has to speak). Fassbender, who is a great actor, again struggles with his accent here. It's all a bit of a mess, as it was with him in the film Shame, where there was a ridiculous line about how he was born in Dublin and moved to New York, as a way to get around his terrible Americun accent.

This doesn't really take away from the fact that this is generally a fun action super-hero movie set in the 1960s that generally looks great and tells a good story of choosing to be good or evil.

Stars: 2 of 4

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) (Monday, January 16, 2012) (138)

Somehow I missed Mission: Impossible 3, directed by J.J. Abrams. I can't say I really regret missing it, but it is a fact I had to deal with as I watched Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. It seems that all that's really important about the third film is that hero Ethan Hunt (wow - that name totally screams "straight American man"!) (Tom Cruise) got married to a lady and killed some dudes on a train and went to jail in Russia. That's basically where this fourth movie begins.

Ethan is broken out of jail and his team is all there and they're working on getting back some Russian nuclear submarine launch codes from some French people who stole them. Because 2011 is actually 1979. It seems the Frenchies want to sell the codes to a Swedish journalist, Mikael Blomkvist... er... rather a Swedish arms dealer (there are lots of them. Really. The unfinished Bergman film was a sequel to Lord of War. Really.) who wants to create a nuclear war to kill weak humans. Eugenics is fun! Oh - and the French lady super thief loves diamonds... and is willing to sell the codes for something like $300,000 in loose stones. Because that's the cost of nuclear war.

So this deal is going to take place in Dubai, because Dubai is very friendly to film crews who don't care about slavery, inside the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. It will also require Ethan to scale the outside of the building with special suction gloves... which don't work, of course. Ooops. It seems the deal goes wrong and there's more chasing and explosions.

Aside from the totally dated, recycled and ridiculous plot, this is actually a lot of fun. Lots of the story elements were big and blew up well. The final battle inside an automated garage tower was clever, though silly. I was a bit upset that the scaling-the-outside-of-the-tallest-building-in-the-world scene was so quick (like about three minutes). Director Brad Bird made it look great, but it was over before I got a good sense of it.

There was also a ton of homoeroticism between Ethan and William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), a new team member. They're both really skinny and good at "hand-to-hand combat". They both run really fast and their verbal jousting was only lightly veiled. ("I'll tell you my secret if you tell me yours.") This was mostly fun and didn't get in the way of the stupid story otherwise... though I would have loved if they had just decided to screw... which would have been the biggest bang of all. Alas.

Stars: 2 of 4

Hanna (2011) (Wednesday, January 4, 2012) (131)

Hanna is the story of the eponymous girl (Saoirse Ronan), raised by her father in the wilds of northern Finland to be a super spy and super killer. It seems her dad (Eric Bana) used to work for the CIA and left around the time she was born. When they decide her training is complete (she's about 16 or so), she is "released" into the world and recaptured by the CIA. She escapes and kills a bunch of people and then goes on a killing spree throughout Europe to Germany, where she discovers things about her conception and life that she was not expecting (though none of it is much of a surprise to us).

Hanna is a totally great looking movie. At times it looks polished like a big Hollywood sci-fi movie (actually McG's Charlie's Angels comes to mind... though that has a lot to do with the stylized camerawork and fight scenes) and at other times it feels like an indie Euro movie, like Tykwer's Run Lola Run or Assayas' Carlos (yes, I know they're different, but they both have that sorta crummy late-20th-century Euro look to them). Everything is art directed to within an inch of its life - and then some. It's right on the edge of being a bit too much, but it's a lot of fun. The final chase sequence takes places in an old amusement park under overcast skies and looks particularly great. On top of all of this is a very tone-appropriate score by the Chemical Brothers (no surprise, this film feels like what a Chemical Brothers song would look like). More great look and feel...

Sadly the content of the narrative is hackneyed and not thrilling. It's basically The Bourne Identity with a girl instead of a grown man. I guess geeks like stories about girls (because they can't have sex with them in life...?). To add to the silliness, there CIA back story, involving a Cate Blanchette with a painful Americun southern accent, is more over-the-top than the rest of the film, which is rather moody and dirty. The two styles create an interesting juxtaposition, but I don't think it totally helps for telling the story. Rather, it feels too obvious an intersection, clean and polished versus dirty and rough. I'm gonna fall asleep...

The whole film feels a bit too facile and ultimately less-than-gripping. It really does look great, but that's about all that's worth much in it. The rest you've seen a million times before.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Thursday, December 22, 2011) (122)

I recently re-read my review of the Swedish adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo from last year in advance of seeing this newer update from David Fincher and screenwriter Steven Zaillian (it's fine, you can tell me my methods are unfair). After seeing this new version, I can tell you it's almost exactly the same movie and the things I said about that version I would say again here.

This film has a nice fast pace, the acting is solid throughout -- even considering the corny Swedish accents all the actors have to use (including the honest-to-goodness Swedes in the cast who almost sound more American than anything else) -- there is nothing particularly Swedish or Scandanavian in feeling in the style here (sorry, Ingmar and Carl Theodor), and overall it's a fun, pulpy movie that leads you down six different roads and pulls them all back together nicely at the end.

The story has not changed much from the book (which I've never read) or that other movie. Mikael Bloomkvist (Daniel Craig) is a journalist who starts to research a murder on a remote island for a billionaire industrialist. At some point he hires a research assistant, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), who has a checkered life, an awesome libido and an inky back. The deeper they dig into this family history, the more they find Nazism, sexual abuse and weird culty murders. Add on top of this a sprinkling of leather camp and sexual torture and you got yourself a blockbuster!

It's hard to say if this is a particularly Fincher-ific movie. Much of the story happens to take place at night (when Fincher really comes alive, like the cyber-noir director he's meant to be), the heroine is written as a Goth who rides a motorcycle and there's already some delicious torture porn elements to the story. Having never read the book and only knowing the story from the Swedish film, I can't say much about any details that were in the book that Fincher extracted or what he might have injected himself, but I will say that this seems like a generally light amount of Fincherese (mostly seen in the sex torture parts). Mostly this feels like a very well made, polished Hollywood movie -- a bit of a director-for-hire piece than any standout in his oeuvre (like Se7en, Fight Club or Zodiac are).

There's really nothing negative to say about this film. It's very long (as was the Swedish version... I guess that's the result of a long and intricate book... and I'd much rather a 160-minute movie to a two-part piece, like they did with the last books of the Harry Potter or Twilight series), very detailed and somewhat complex in terms of familial relationships and who did what to whom and when. I guess I would say that all of that is a bit of complexity for complexity's sake; I'm not sure it's a particularly richer movie because of the baroque plot. It's a bit of bread and circus, but it's pretty tasty.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (Thursday, December 22, 2011)(121)

Much like its steam-punk aesthetic, Sherlock Holmes 2 spends a lot of time spinning its wheels making a simple story really, really complicated, in the end being effective, but much more complicated than is necessary. This is an action movie, not a mystery. It has much more in common with Batman or James Bond (in Victorian machines) than it does with Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett.

The story here is much too multi-layered and unnecessarily veiled to get into in detail here, but generally is seems that Holmes and boyfriend Watson are chasing Moriarty around Europe for no reason, until it becomes clear that Moriarty wants to start World War I 25 years early. There are lots of fun set-ups with classic film chestnuts (formal-dress balls, trains, ships in shipyards, waterfalls, chases through forests) that all lead to an elaborate, clever finale involving a literal and meta chess game.

It's filled with typical Guy Ritchie jump cuts and crash zooms, this time spiced up with lots of fun slow-mo affectations. There's also lots of fun homoeroticism and opium jokes, played for laughs rather than sadness or love (which is rather disappointing... though I totally understand that gayness isn't half as entertaining as fake gayness).

This is a big movie with a lot of big action scenes. It's very light on the brain and heavy on special effects. All in all a fun ride, but rather shallow ... exactly as a holiday blockbuster should be!

Stars: 2.5 of 4

In Time (Tuesday, November 22, 2011) (104)

In Time is a dystopian sci-fi movie that is totally silly and terrible, but actually really fun and very close to being interesting. The film is a straight-up Marxist polemic about a future world (of downtown LA) where all money has been turned into time. In this world, humans are genetically modified to live until they're 25 and then stop aging. At this point, a digital clock on their arm (genetically built into them, you see) turns on and begins to tick off one year, after which they're supposed to die.

This being a hellscape, it's not so simple, though, as one can work and earn more time (as one would earn more money) and the "rich" of this world are able to buy and sell time, as if it was money. Ersatz "billionaires" live wonderful lives, and, because they don't age past 25 and have unlimited resources (time), they lead totally different lives in another "zone" from the poors. Of course they're all hot. (This is complicated.)

At some point, Justin Timberlake gets sick of always being poor, that is, close to being dead, and he is given a century by a rich guy who is sick of living anymore. JT goes into the world of the rich looking only to see how they live, but once he gets there, he finds that he's not trusted and not wanted.

The idea of the film is actually pretty clever, and I totally give writer/director Andrew Niccol credit for making such a blatant and angry Marxist film (it fits in very well with the current Occupy Wall Street movement). Still, the dialogue is totally laughable throughout the film, either totally banal or filled with every "time" and "clock" pun you can imagine ("I'm gonna clean your clock" - literally; "your time is up"). Also, the acting by JT and Amanda Seyfried is really terrible and hard to take seriously. It feels as over-the-top as Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, but it's played as totally serious.

The art direction and costumes are really wonderful here, probably some of the best art direction and production design of any film this year (Gattica looked great too, by the way). Everything is 1960s-70s futuristic. The cars are either '60s Lincoln Continental sedans or '60s Dodge Chargers (or some such Mopar car) but always painted matte black. There is something wonderful about how part of the nightmare of this world is that they went back in time for their future. It's a very clever thing and looks amazing. In spite of this, though, it's a goofy movie that's much more unintentionally funny than serious.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Friday, August 5, 2011) (65)

So, it's pretty special right now that there's this new blockbuster called Rise of the Planet of the Apes and there's also a documentary called Project Nim and they're both about chimps and human-chimp interactions. In fact the first 20 minutes of Apes lines up almost directly with the first act of Nim. Special. Of course one film is more or less scientifically rigorous and raises questions about our humanity and methods and the other is a popcorn-seller that feigns those things, but really just gives us a bunch of shrieking primates (humans and chimp) and no story, structure or sense.

Will (James Franco) is a scientist working for a lab to develop an Alzheimer's drug. When one of the apes he does his tests on goes crazy he smuggles its baby out of the building and into his home attic for safekeeping. It seems that this chimp, Caesar, has been genetically enhanced by meds given to his mother. OK. Will's dad (John Lithgow) suffers from Alzheimer's, but when he's given these still-untested meds, he shows tremendous mental recovery. Will thinks he's on to something... .

What he's not onto (what would have been clear if he had watched Project Nim) is that living with a chimp is not easy and that chimps are really strong and can be very violent. At some point, Will meets a veterinarian (Frida Pinto) who explains to him that he has to let Caesar run around in the outdoors out of the house (he's been living with the feckin' chimp in the attic for three years! Jesus!). They fall in love.

Five years later, they're still living with the chimp (by which point it's probably bigger than a human and many times stronger) until he attacks a neighbor (stupid gag: the neighbor gets attacked or harassed several times in the film; it's actually not funny). He's sent to a primate collection center run by Brian Cox and Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy), who apparently hate primates, or something. Over time we see Caesar becoming the king of this zoo (oh, I get the significance of his name now!) and ultimately his revolt against the humans. Then there's a big fight on the Golden Gate Bridge (even though they start on the North side and then end up on the North side... confusing).

It's never clear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are here. Draco and Brian Cox are clearly bad, but Franco is good (even though he's the worst scientist in the history of the world and Frida Pinto is the worst vet and the least interested girlfriend/wife ever) (there's a scene where, after living with him for five years, Franco shows Pinto the research he's been doing... and it's all out in plain view in his study in the house... as if she never though to wander in that room and read the stuff). The big pharma lab Franco works for seems to be bad, but we really don't care about it; the apes are good, then bad, then good again. There are a lot of people who die but no blame is assigned for their deaths. It's not as if this is ambiguous and interesting, it's just confusing and impossible to align with anyone (or anyape).

Technically this film is a big steaming pile of apeshit (question: why is 'apeshit' a synonym for 'crazy', but 'horseshit' is a synonym for 'shit'? Ima change that.). Baby Caesar looks like a special needs child (crossed with a Conehead) and looks nothing even close to real. The CGI animation here is a joke, particularly in the early stages of the film.

At some point when Caesar gets to be "fully grown", he is animated with the help of human-puppet-like-person Andy Serkis (who also did the "acting" for Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies). Much attention and praise has been given to Serkis - and I absolutely can't figure out why. It basically looks like it could have been animated the same crappy way with or without him in a motion-capture suit. And really, if we're giving credit to the actor playing the ape, doesn't that mean the actors playing humans are doing a terrible job? (They are.)

(I want to add a few points here: 1) Most people don't know what the heck apes look like or how they move, so to say Serkis looks natural as an ape is bunk because that's an assessment based on no reference; 2) The original 1933 King Kong looked much more "natural" than this, whatever the hell that means; 3) I don't think Serkis does anything that thousands of modern dancers/Cirque de Soleil people couldn't do and I don't know why he's getting such attention.)

To say the wrting and directing in the film are bad is to insult bad writing and directing. (And yes, this might have a worse script and be directed more ham-handedly than Transformers 3.) Director Rupert Wyatt so totally doesn't know how to organize a competent sequence or scene that most of the time we're left wondering about basic things like what we're looking at or the geography of floorplans. The crowning jewel of the film is a totally unnecessary shot of Caesar and his crew, having busted out of ape jail, on top of a San Francisco trolly-car going over a hill and posing; the reverse shot of their backs show the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, mostly obscured by the apes themselves. This is terrible shot construction (all digital, of course, meaning they could have put any of those elements anywhere on screen) and fits in nowhere to the continuity of the story.

The script, by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (veterans of schlock horror garbage), is a structural mess: the first two acts are really about nothing but Caesar being locked up and not being an interesting character and only the last act has any action in it. It also has some of the worst dialogue in recent memory. When Will finally finds Caesar after he's thrown his feces all over San Francisco, all he can do is to ask him (nicely) to come back home with him. Yes, Will, your pet chimp just went fucking crazy all over town, killing people and destroying a major steel bridge; I'm sure he'd love to move back to your suburban attic. Stupid.

I can't imagine why so many reviewers are so kind to this film. It's an absolute turd and has no redeeming qualities to it. Everything from the wooden acting (Franco has that in him, to be sure) to the terrible technical stuff to the terrible artistic stuff makes this movie just awful. Rather than seeing it, you should see Project Nim. It's a very similar story and done much better.

Stars: 0 of 4

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 - 3D (a.k.a. HP7P2-3D) (Sunday, July 17, 2011) (56)

So here we are. We've reached the end of the Harry Potter movies. The seven books, having been stretched out to eight films and nearly 20 hours of screen time and are now totally over forever (until J.K. Rowling writes a new book that is turned into a new movie). It's one of biggest, longest, most profitable film franchises ever. It's also a lot of fun. (If you haven't seen any of these movies, or none since the first, ignore the rest of this post as you will be bored miserably, I'm sure.)

HP7P2-3D is basically the second half, or really the last third, of the seventh and last Harry Potter book. It begins with a running start with the Harry, Ron and Hermione trio on the hunt for more of Voldemort's horcruxes (small things into which he injected parts of his soul to make it harder for him to be killed). They go to Gringott's to get one of them, and then realize one of the last ones is back in Hogwart's, from which they have been truants for the whole school year (no comment on how in a book about seven years at a school, they only spend about six there, with the last one a year of non-lesson-based Evil Lord-fighting. But J.K.R. wants kids to stay in school, or something).

When they get to Hogwart's they find the school in dark lock-down, now run by Snape, where the professors teach the kids all sorts of terrible magic to inflict pain on others. There are Death Eaters all about and all sorts of people in black leather (hot, if you're into that sorta thing). Harry gets a little help from his friends (students and teachers) in Dumbledore's Army and what's left of the Order of the Phoenix. They fight a massive knock down, drag-out fight with the bad guys before Harry's final one-on-one with Voldemort.

I think the movie smooths over some rough patches that I never liked in the book, particularly with Snape. I always felt like the 'Snape is a good guy' thing that we're told near the end was a bit too hard to swallow in the book. Here, however, director David Yates and writer Steve Kloves do a wonderful job of showing how Snape was always massively conflicted about Harry, about his eternal love for Harry's mom, Lilly, and his deep hatred for Harry's dad, who was probably a total douchebag who deserved to be killed by dark magic. The last 20 minutes of the film are particularly wonderful. The epilogue especially always felt forced and precious, but here feels totally natural and necessary. It's a lovely ending to a great epic story.

What I particularly like about this last film is how it brings in traditional themes from human existence and classical art: the idea of one person doing something alone versus someone working with their friends and allies to get a job done. It is very reminiscent to me of the classic story from Hollywood lore that after seeing Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (a story about a marshal who can't get help and is forced to defeat a bad guy singlehandedly), Howard Hawks decided to make Rio Bravo (a story about a sheriff who gets all the help he needs from his friends to defeat the bad guys) in response.

Voldemort is Marshal Will Kane and Harry Potter is Sheriff John T. Chance. We are constantly reminded here about how Voldemort (né Tom Riddle) is one of the greatest wizards ever, for better or worse, and how Harry is really only an average wizard who excels at making friends and having them help him. (There is even an suggestion, posited by Snape, that Harry is a proud prima dona and somewhat of a talentless jerk.) When Harry goes searching for the missing horcruxes, he does find a few on his own, but also needs help from his associates to find the others. Meanwhile, Harry is told that Voldemort found all of them on his own. I guess the idea that this Lincolnian leadership style is more effective, at least less demagogic and less evil.

I'm also very interested in the revisionist look at Snape as a reluctant collaborator. In this film, he's Maréchal Pétain, a stooge put in a position of power and told to stay quiet while terrible things happen inside his domain (the school). Unlike the general understanding of Pétain, however, Snape is hiding the fact that he's really on the side of good and not evil. Was Pétain trying to work against the Nazis and destroy the Reich from the inside? It's a very hard sell.

(Of course, we shouldn't forget that Snape did witness lots of evil things happen at Hogwarts and his Death-Eater days and it's hard to forgive him for those things. I don't care that Colin Powell didn't believe in the testimony he gave at the UN Security Council in 2003, he said it and it sent us to war and thousands of people to their death. He should have resigned if he was so morally torn. I won't forgive him now.)

The 3D worked really well in this film, probably better than I can remember in any Hollywood picture where I've seen it used. Some of the scenes play very well with the depth of focus and the disorienting quality of the enhanced image, like Gringott's sequence at the beginning. In other scenes, where there is little action, the 3D is used gently to simply show us how basic things recede into space. I would hope in years to come, directors use 3D more in this way than they do with some movies where it seems that dumb tricks are inserted into every shot to make sure we know we're seeing it in 3D and make sure we feel like we're getting our money's worth (we never get our money's worth as it's still way too expensive).

As with the last film, there is no need to see this movie if you haven't seen all the other ones, and particularly if you haven't seen the first part of this one. It is, however, very solid, much more interesting than I would have expected and a lot of fun from a sheer entertainment point of view.

Stars: 3 of 4

Transformers: Dark of the Moon 3D (Saturday, July 2, 2011) (48)

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

-- Martin Niemöller

On a space shuttle launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, Simmons (John Turturro), a government-worker-cum-freelance-Transformers-hunter-expert paraphrases this poem as he speaks to the heroic Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf). He's talking about how as a gesture of weakness and conspiracy, the U.S. government agreed to the demands of the Deceptacons to send the Autobots out of the country and off into the wilds of space. Simmons is upset that the holocaust of the humans at the hands of the Decptacons will continue and, like the German pastor before him, he will have tacitly endorsed the heinous act by not fighting against it.

You might say that director Michael Bay and writer Ehren Kruger are being a bit heavy-handed, invoking the Holocaust to a sci-fi action story like Transformers: Dark of the Moon, but you would be wrong. They are presenting a deeply searing critique of modern consumerism and a deep post-structuralist analysis of the past 60 years of world history. "Was it all worth it?" is the question that they wrestle with. Taken down to it's basic parts, we see how the hope, good fortune and lessons that came out of the Second World War was all an illusion, that capitalism and the concept of "freedom" are broken systems and that there is only a bright future for us today if we embrace femininity.

The basic story of the film is much too complex to understand from a wide point of view in the context of this column (a fact which is, in itself, a comment on American consumerism, of course), so to put it simply, you have to know that the Deceptacons have come back to Earth, are more Communist than ever and are trying to get a bunch of fuel rods that were crashed on the moon in our pre-human-history. It seems these rods (read: phalluses) are the basis for re-building the Transformers' home planet of Cybertron. If they can insert the rods into our buildings, they'll be able to summon Cybertron inside of Earth's atmostphere. (Spoiler alert: When they succeed in bringing Cybertron to Earth, it looks like a big breast with a gigantic nipple.)

The role of sexuality is ever-present and central to the story. It reminds me of Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Salo: 120 Days of Sade, although here most of the sexual torture is replaced by violence and we are left only with symbolic rape. The Deceptacons are a class of super-masculine bourgeoisie, in the waning days of their own empire. They are led by a Prime (see: The President, The Bishop, etc. from Salo) whose goal is really just to dominate and subjugate. They have their own set of laws, which can be amended at a moment's notice; they appreciate youthful vigor and seem to have as much of an interest in boys as they do in girls.

Their main tool of destruction is Shockwave, a robot that can grow to infinite lengths (like an awesome erection) and burrows through the land and buildings with sharp teeth (like an awesome erection). He is, of course, a gigantic penis with teeth, a Freudian nightmare far worse than the vagina dentata. He is a clear symbol for the Deceptacon culture of over-excess, fucking the world, force feeding people excrement and acting on the most depraved thoughts and desires one could conceive.

But Bay and Kruger are not making a direct parallel to Pasolini, of course. In a very post-Roland-Barthes way they take the predicate of the Holocaust and twist it. Here the Capitalists (the Autobots and the US Government) are the Fascists and are fighting the Communists (the Deceptacons). The American freedom they are tying to defend is best symbolized in the hundreds of brilliant product placements throughout the film. One of the cars is a NASCAR stock car that is sponsored by Target. As we see our heroes fighting the bad guys, we see Target right there in the mix. The film is a polemic about American consumerism. What they are fighting to defend is a world of no choices, corporate overlords and the force-feeding of industrial crap (read: excrement). In the middle of the wreckage of post-battle Chicago, a brand new Ferrari drives down the street unscratched. Overconsumption and the post-feeling world have won and we can celebrate by dreaming of buying cars we'll never be able to afford.

The fact that Bay made this in 3D and has begged people to see it in that format, promising us more than we've ever seen, is a cynical commentary by him on the state of the movie industry and the filmic format. Like Werner Herzog did with Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Bay shows us here how everything we see is not just done well, but amazingly overdone and and we have to pay more money for the honor of beholding it. We already live in the world he's showing us in the film.

Even the human characters and locations are tied to this theme of post-choice hyper-saturation. The film is set in Washington, D.C. where Witwicky (even his name is a comment on the outsourcing of encyclopedias to the crowd-sourced Internet) is dating a bodacious blond English girl named... uh, I don't remember, but she's a Victoria's Secret model (even here, the poor woman's humanity is stripped away and she becomes a symbol of her employer in the real world; the nightmare that Marx feared has come true and we are all just drones to our corporate masters). In this post-hellish reality, there is no United States or United Kingdom. All Western governments are the same and they're all are marching in lock (goose) step to subjugate the masses with garbage (and to make us bend over so they can rate who has the best ass, so they can then kill that person).

Similarly, though the film is set in Washington, it is shot in Chicago (home of awesome tax breaks... again, a comment on the film making process) -- before the action ultimately moves to Chicago. This is a brilliant way of showing that all American cities are the same. There is no capital city and no "Midwest". There is just one big nightmarish post-Capitalist stretch of cities in American tied together by Interstate 88, the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway. The American government is a fascist organization, it will rape you. In the words of Pasolini's Duke, "the fascists are the only true anarchists." And, I'll add, in the words of his Bishop, "all is good if it's excessive".

Indeed.

Finally, the film shows us that the hyper-masculine nature of the Deceptacons cannot be defeated simply by complimentary warriors fighting a battle, but femininity is the key. It is only after Optimus Prime loses his trailer and rocket arm (is castrated) that he's able to beat Megatron and Sentinel Prime (a new character, a Prime who switched to the Deceptacons when he wasn't able to sell more product). And Wikipedia's girlfriend this time has even bigger lips and more amazing flowing hair than that Megan Fox chick, which means she's able to deflect danger with her feminine charms (read: her gigantic tits and super short skirts... and, by the way, she totally flashed us her crotch when getting out of the Mercedes SLS AMG Gullwing car... a car once described to me by an Italian man as a "pussy magnate"... true story). But it's really only when WikiLeaks is totally emasculated, after he's beaten by Dr. McDreamy and that dude from the Las Vegas TV show, that he's able to help out in any significant way.

This is a deeply moving comment on our world and on our lives. It is a film that I would call *important* (and at 157 minutes, you can't not understand that). It needs to be studied more for it's intricate symbols and allusions. We need to understand better why Cybertron looks like a breast when the Deceptacons are so masculine (is it an Oedipal relationship they have with their world? Is that why there are no female Autobots?) and to figure out why exactly John Malkovich is needed in the story at all. I think he's the key to something. His three-piece suits stand out as some sartorial commentary, I think. They're certainly of the same quality as the members of the cabal in Salo. Woah, it's getting even deeper as I continue to think about it....

Stars: 7 of 4

Super 8 (Sunday June 12, 2011) (44)

Super 8 is J.J. Abrams' ode to Spielberg movies of the 1970s and 1980s, E.T. most specifically. Unlike those film though, this movie has no charisma from its actors or alien. It has a bunch of explosions and nothing exciting or interesting. It's a weird stealth blockbuster, where the moment you leave the theater, you forget what you just saw.

The title of the film comes from the fact that it is set in 1979 in some small Ohio town where there are a group of kids who are making a zombie movie on a Super 8 camera. The main kid, Joe (Joel Courtney) is the son of the deputy sheriff and he's sad because his mother just died (this background is really just noise, because it has nothing to do with the story). The female star of the movie is Alice (Elle Fanning), the school hottie who Joe has a thing for.

When they're shooting a scene outside, they see a big train crash (which goes on for a Passion-like 10 minutes... like, enough already. We get it. It's loud and explosive). Then there's an alien who goes loose in their town banging into things and stealing people, and then the Air Force comes in and locks down the area. Joe and his friends decided they're gonna find the alien (that the Air Force can't find). I'm already asleep. Wake me when we get to the teary alien farewell.

The major problem here is that we never really know what the hell the alien is and why we should care about it (hint: it's got eight legs... get it!?!). It is more than raising the curiosity or tension - it's just frustrating. All we see is that people are snatched up by a weird tentacle/arm thing (see: the first episode of Lost where the pilot is taken out of the plane by Smokey) and a bunch of stuff is blown up and pushed around. I think it's not until the end of the second act that we get a sense of what the thing looks like, and then it's moving around the whole time (it seems to have the vagina dentata face typical of post-Alien, post-Predator monsters). What's worse, we get the whole story told to us in an audio cassette near the end. So at that point we should all just pack our things and go home.

Worst of all is that Joel Courtney has absolutely no screen appeal and is totally forgettable. I guess it's hard to cast kids, but this one is a dud. Fanning is fine. There is almost no meat in her role, but the does well in the one scene where her character is acting. All of the characters are written so broadly there's not much anywhere for them to dig their teeth into.

Aside from being a movie about an alien monster who wants to go back home, this movie has nothing to do with E.T. and is much closer to Shyamalan's laughable The Happening. It's a loser and more silly than compelling or scary.

Stars: 1 of 4

Thor (Tuesday, May 24, 2011) (35)

There's something special about the size and slickness of an action movie released in May, which these days they all seem to be comic book movies. Big stories of Good vs. Evil; great computer-generated special-effects; lots of explosion. It all adds up to a big "popcorn" movie experience where you can turn your brain off and watch something fun and easy. Thor offers none of those things - it's neither fun nor easy. It is slow, cumbersome and confusing.

Based on the Marvel comic book, this is the story of Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the oldest son of Odin (Anthony Hopkins), king of a land called Asgard, which is in some other part of the universe, but where they wear Viking costumes, speak English and have Celtic design motifs on their weapons and clothes. The idea is that the Asgardians had a major battle with the beings from Jötunheim who are "ice giants" and freeze people wen they fight them (see: Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze in Batman & Robin, un film de Joel Schumacher). This fight happened in the not too distant past in Norway (so the idea is that the Norwegians got the whole viking thing from the alien Asgaridans who brought it...).

Anyhow, Odin took the ice giant's source of power, a blue crystal that has icy goodness in it. There's a confusing thing where the ice giants try to steal it back, but fail, so Thor goes to fight them at their place and when he gets back, his dad is angry that he went to fight them there, so he banishes him to Earth without his super powers. Then Thor's runty brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) takes power from his dad and organizes a confusing thing where he tries to work with the ice giants to destroy Asgard. Meanwhile, these people can travel between Asgard, Earth and Jötunheim on a special worm-hole maker that's controlled by a big black dude with a sword (Idris Elba).

Oh, and on Earth, Thor works with Natalie Portman, Stellan Skarsgard and Kat Dennings, who are astrophysicists looking at weather or something... and there's a thing with a men-in-black-like government organization who wants to research all these things coming from outer space (never seen that one before). And they're in New Mexico, which is (also) home to wonderful tax breaks for film productions. And Thor's mom is played by Rene Russo, who literally hasn't been in anything since 2005... or anything you've seen since 1999. In the meantime, she apparently lost her tongue because she doesn't have a single line here... Oh - and this movie was directed by Kenneth Branagh. Wha...?

This is one of the loudest movies I can ever remember seeing in my life. Every time the Asgardians go from one place to another in Idris Elba's teleporter, there is such a gigantic noise with lighting and crashing that I really wished they would have skipped that part totally (I mean, I get it - it's a teleporter). It was one of the most painful movies I've ever been in - and I mean that physically painful to my ears.

There are so many problems with this movie it's hard to know what to mention. For reasons that are never clear, the Asgardians speak in a proper English accent, even though their king is Welsh and prince is Austrialian. Hemsworth really struggles with the accent... and with the acting. Why can't all the characters speak whatever accent the actors speak with? Did the Asgardians also give English to humans when they were in Norway? Why don't they speak Norwegian? And who exactly are the bad guys in this? Loki? The Ice Giants? The men-in-black?

This movie is a big mess and gets worse the more you think about it. Of course it's set up for a sequel - or at least they'll bring Thor back for more movies in The Avengers... I wish they wouldn't. Ugh.

Stars: .5 of 4