Category Archives: Movies

John Carter: The problem with being first is being last

Disney gives me a headache. I’m not sure any other major studio goes through more high school bullshit drama than they do. And it regularly tanks movies. You could argue they’re not good movies to begin with (see also: Prince of Persia), but selling a big, SFX spectacle to a content-starved audience really shouldn’t be that hard. Yet they keep messing it up. I’ll grant you that John Carter is a challenge—based on a 1917 book by Edgar Rice Burroughs, better known for Tarzan, it’s an early science fiction epic—but it is the work that inspired George Lucas, James Cameron, and other science fiction/fantasy writers. Disney got into this late in the marketing game, using the line, “Before there was Avatar, before there was Star Wars, there was John Carter.” Which is true, strictly speaking, but those other movies came out first, so this tagline is just confusing. A better lead is, “The story that inspired them all.” It’s more accurate and doesn’t make people think this is a remake/reboot situation.Continue reading “John Carter: The problem with being first is being last”

The Grey is better than it has any right to be

I really still want to be talking about Sherlock, but I guess I can manage to tear myself away for a few minutes and talk about The Grey instead.

When I started seeing trailers for The Grey last year, I thought what everyone thought: This movie might as well be called Liam Neeson Punches Wolves. It looked like his “Liam Neeson Vendetta Project” films (thank you for that, Mindy Kaling), except with wolves. There’s even a scene where he tapes broken glass to his fists and face-punches a wolf! It did not look like a good movie. And it was coming out in January, which just reinforced that impression. But then I saw The Grey and I found myself thinking that the January release was a horrible idea and it should be coming out in September or October (there is talk of an October re-release in hopes of getting Oscar consideration in 2013). Because The Grey is way, way better than any January  movie has a right to be.Continue reading “The Grey is better than it has any right to be”

Haywire: Not awful. Gina Carano: Also not bad

I’m tellingly unenthusiastic about Haywire, Steven Soderbergh’s latest, “Hey that chick is cool, I want to make a movie for her” project (last time it was The Girlfriend Experience with porn star Sasha Grey, which is easily one of the top 10 worst movies I’ve ever seen). Crafted for female MMA star Gina Carano, Haywire is appealingly slick and appropriately paced—it runs at a swift 90 minutes—but it left me a bit hollow, probably because it had no plot.

First and foremost, this movie was meant to introduce us to Gina Carano: Action Heroine. For the most part, this worked. I accept Carano as an action star. She’s watchable and she definitely sells the physical stuff. I am not saying this as a knock on her weight or anything—Carano is NOT fat—but it’s nice to see a woman on screen that actually looks like she could kick a man and it would hurt. She’s substantial. There are muscles. And, what interested me most—she used a lot of leverage in her fight scenes. In most movies with female action characters, the chick fights just like a man. Throws a punch like a man, moves like a man, reacts like a man. But let’s be honest—women don’t fight like men. We move differently. We have a different range of motion. Carano’s fight scenes repeatedly show her using leverage to increase her force and propulsion so she can take down men bigger than her. She isn’t doing fancy parkour tricks because it looks cool, but because bouncing off that wall is going to boost her momentum so she can knock that guy down. It was visually and characteristically pleasing.Continue reading “Haywire: Not awful. Gina Carano: Also not bad”

Top 10 films of 2011

50/50

I can’t remember the last time I laughed and cried so hard in a movie as I did in 50/50. Based on the real-life story of screenwriter Will Reiser, 50/50 follows Adam after he’s diagnosed with a rare form of cancer at 27. Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives one of his best performances as Adam and he’s ably supported by Anna Kendrick, Anjelica Huston and a surprisingly tolerable Seth Rogen. 50/50 barely touches on the physical reality of cancer—we only briefly see the effects of chemo—but the emotional reality is sharply drawn, in turns painfully raw and touchingly hopeful. There was no more life-affirming movie in 2011.Continue reading “Top 10 films of 2011”

Movie Review Mashup: Horses, TinTins and Tattoos

The Adventures of TinTin

Here’s my problem with TinTin: It didn’t need to be animated. Motion capture is not only as freaky as hell to look at, it’s terribly expensive. For the $130 million budget, co-directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson could have made a terrific live action movie that wouldn’t have given me the willies any time I looked into a character’s eyes. Although to be fair, some characters worked better in mocap than others. For instance, Thomson & Thompson (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost) and Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), had distinctly cartoony designs with little beady cartoon eyes. Not that creepy. TinTin (Jamie Bell), however, made me want to beat him to death with a pitchfork every time I saw his weird, gummy face. Note for all filmmakers: If you’re going to do motion capture, don’t go for a human look. Think cartoony.Continue reading “Movie Review Mashup: Horses, TinTins and Tattoos”

Shame is the most unsexy movie about sex you’ll ever see

If you’re going into Steve McQueen’s (Hunger) Shame expecting lots of sexy scenes with Michael Fassbender having sex, you’re in for a disappointment. Yes, there’s a lot of naked Fass Ass and yes, there’s a lot of sex, but no, it’s no sexy. It’s not fun. It’s not even pretty movie sex. At one point, Brandon (Fassbender) is crying during a threesome and not tears of, “Oh man, my dreams are coming true,” but tears of, “I hate myself and I don’t want to be doing this anymore”. Fassbender absolutely makes Shame, much as he did his first collaboration with McQueen, Hunger, and he gives a performance that sets the high watermark for his career very, very high. This is the male lead performance of the year, just barely edging past Peter Mullan in Tyrannosaur for the most powerfully affecting performance from a leading actor. All the good and great bits of Shame are down to Fassbender. Take him away and the movie doesn’t actually have a lot going on.Continue reading “Shame is the most unsexy movie about sex you’ll ever see”