Holiday Season Cinema Roundup 2012 Part 2

Continuing Film Babble Blog's end of the year roundup (check out Part 1 here), we now take a look at several more movies currently playing this holiday season:

LES MISÉRABLES (Dir. Tom Hooper) 

I was surprised at how many of the songs that I was familiar with in this adaptation of the wildly popular musical based on the 1862 Victor Hugo novel. I had forgotten that a long time ago an ex-girlfriend had the CD set of the Original Broadway Cast Recording from the late '80s, so much of it came flooding back as the film unfolded on the screen.



As my memories and the movie coalesced, I took in this French revolution era tale about Hugh Jackman as an escaped convict, who after becoming mayor of a small town, agrees to take care of deceased factory worker Anne Hathaway’s daughter (played by Isabelle Allen as a child; Amanda Seyfried as an adult). As sleazy innkeepers, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron-Cohen bring on the bawdy and steal the movie whenever they appear.

Jackman, Hathaway, and Seyfried, who all sing their parts live, are in fine voice, but Russell Crowe, as a ruthless policeman who’s hunting Jackman, has a rough warble that can be painful to endure - especially when the songs go on and on, which they often do. Hooper’s epic production, which clocks in at 157 minutes, wonderfully wallows in the muck of its dark, grotesque imagery, but its messiness can be overwhelming at times. Folks who aren’t fans of the musical, or musicals in general, will find it hard to take, but for the most part, I took it just fine.

JACK REACHER (Dir. Christopher McQuarrie) 

Looks like Tom Cruise wants another franchise as this is an adaptation of one of seventeen in a series of novels by Lee Child. This action thriller formula is competently constructed, but its story - Cruise as an ex-army military police investigator tries to get to the bottom of a case involving a trained military sniper who shot five random people - isn't very compelling. 

Some excitement is there in a few set-pieces, but its climax containing a shoot-out at a construction site, only hammers home how routine a genre exercise it is. Still, Cruise fans should love it as he makes a convincing unshakable badass, and Werner Herzog makes a great villain. Read my full review here.



THIS IS 40 (Dir. Judd Apatow)

Judd Apatow’s glorified home movie is his third film to feature his wife (Leslie Mann) and kids (daughters Maude and Iris), so you know he thinks they’re funny. To his credit, for a lot of its running time (another long one at 134 min) they are funny, but this is a big sloppy comic drama with too many storylines that never really get resolved. Paul Rudd and Mann, reprising their married couple roles from KNOCKED UP, have good chemistry together, and Albert Brooks, as Rudd’s father dealing with new triplets, is highly amusing, so there’s enough here to satisfy most comedy fans. Folks who aren’t fans of heavy amounts of profanity, or Apatow’s brand of man-boy humor in general may want to skip it however. Read my full review.



ANNA KARENINA 

(Dir. Joe Wright) 



Leo Tolstoy's 1868 novel has been adapted many many times, but Wright, in the third of his “literary trilogy” with Keira Knightly, has a meta take on the material involving setting the late 19th-century Russian story in a lavish old theater that evolves within the production into whatever backdrop is needed. Knightly, as the title character, works around the ropes, pulleys, curtains, footlights, and appropriate props, to portray a virtuous woman in a loveless marriage to an imperial minister (a balding, bearded, and quite boring Jude Law) who has an affair with Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a dashing cavalry officer. It can get a bit strained at times in its second half, but Wright's inventive reworking of the well worn material makes it recommendable. Read my full review here.


Well, that's it for this not bad Holiday season. By the way, I appeared on a Special Christmas Edition of fellow Raleigh, N.C. based critic Craig D. Lindsey's podcast Muhf***as I Know last week. We recorded a commentary (of sorts) for what Craig calls “one of the shittiest sex comedies ever made: THE HAPPY HOOKER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD (1980). The movie is available on Netflix Instant, so queue it up, go here, and listen to us babble all over it.

More later...

REAL STEEL: The Film Babble Blog Review

REAL STEEL (Dir. Shawn Levy, 2011)

A father and son bond over robots bashing the bejesus out of one another in this piece of cliché-ridden formulaic fluff that is sure to be a ginormous crowd-pleaser. I'm basing that on the audience at the preview screening I attended who applauded many times throughout the film.



Like the TRANSFORMERS movies, I'm feeling a "critic-proof" vibe here. Watch this be a huge hit despite critical consensus rating it low, because, hey, people aren't going to take their kids to see THE IDES OF MARCH this weekend, are they?



The movie is set in the future, just 9 years from now mind you, where not much is different except that there's a “World Robot Boxing” league (the WRB). Obviously, it's Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots as a global sport, and Hugh Jackman as a former boxer, wants to take a bot to the big-time.



Jackman is the ultimate movie underdog - he's crusty, washed up, and heavily in debt, trying to make ends meet by entering old rusty robots in rodeos and state fairs. Then his long lost son shows up, a precocious (read: smartass) Dakota Goyo, to join Jackman on the road.



Goyo takes to a outdated robot he finds in a junkyard. It only takes a montage for the robot, named Atom, to be trained and wired into shape in order to win match after match.



This all leads to a climatic fight with the undefeated champion, Zeus, a mega-robot created by Karl Yune as an arrogant Japanese designer, partnered with an icy Russian robot owner Olga Fonda who Goyo refused to sell Atom to.



The CGI-ed animatronic robot action is certainly convincing, enough to make the packed crowd around me react as if they were watching a live event happening right in front of them.



But while they clapped, I cringed.



I cringed at the ultra-hackneyed dialogue – Hope Davis as Goyo’s rich aunt actually says to Jackman: “You'vebeen working with those robots so long you've become one,” a line that I bet made Davis cringe inside.



I cringed at the by-the-numbers plotting in which there was not one unpredictable moment.



I cringed at the dance moves Goyo does with Atom (they do “the Robot” of course) that appeared to be sponsored by Dr. Pepper from the huge amount of product placement.



I cringed at the tacked on romantic subplot that has Lost’s Evangeline Lilly cheering the father-son-robot team from the side-lines.



As unbearably cheesy in its noisy boxing ring scenes as it is in its quiet attempts to pull the heartstrings, REAL STEEL is like a robot itself – a mechanical contraption made out of parts from other movies that has no emotional depth. I know that’s an easy dig to make, but it’s what this treacly tripe deserves.



More later...