I love bad action movies, so from the first time I saw the trailer for Lockout, brought to us from the mind of Luc Besson, I was really hoping for another Fifth Element. Which is to say, bad, yes, but also highly entertaining. Well, parts of Lockout are very entertaining. And parts of it make you want to stab yourself with a pencil. It’s basically every action movie ever made mashed together into one largely incomprehensible space mess. It would be entirely dismissible except that back-from-the-nearly-dead Guy Pearce (The King’s Speech, Memento) gives a solid performance as Stereotypical Action Movie Dude. He’s good enough that I would definitely like to see him in other, better, action movies.Continue reading “Lockout is every action movie ever made”
Category Archives: Reviews
Please, please don’t waste money on Mirror Mirror
Last summer I wrote about the “Snow White war” going on between Universal, home of Snow White and the Huntsman and Relativity, home of Mirror Mirror. At the time, I said it was bad for movies because both studios were rushing their projects in an effort to one-up each other, and that while Universal was running the risk of shortchanging a first-time features director, Relativity was making the bigger mistake as they were pushing so hard in an effort to get into theaters first that there was no way making a good movie was their top priority. It was purely about beating Universal. And guess what? I was right—Relativity’s end product, while in theaters first, is not good. Mirror Mirror is terrible and the “Snow White war” turned out to be bad for movies. And, for bad movies.Continue reading “Please, please don’t waste money on Mirror Mirror”
All the people saw The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games opened to a box-office devouring $155 million, making it the third-highest three day weekend opening of all time (behind Harry Potter 7-2 and The Dark Knight). It kicked Hollywood in the teeth and showed that child murder can, in fact, entertain the masses. It’s made Liam Hemsworth a thing, brought back Wes Bentley, launched Jennifer Lawrence into the stratosphere, and right now scores of twelve-year-old girls are drawing their name and Josh Hutcherson’s linked by hearts. For a generation of kids, Donald Sutherland will be best known as creepy President Snow, Lenny Kravitz will be an actor-turned-musician (not the other way around), and everyone will believe that’s Woody Harrelson’s real hair.
In other words, The Hunger Games just became the biggest thing in pop culture. But how is the movie?Continue reading “All the people saw The Hunger Games”
21 Jump Street is a surprisingly satisfying comedy
What surprised me most about 21 Jump Street was not that it was funny, it was that the story at the heart of the comedy was genuinely sweet and believable. Co-written by star Jonah Hill and Michael Bacall (who also had a hand in Project X and, more impressively, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), 21 Jump Street re-imagines the serious, after-school special tone of the 1980’s show (which is best remembered for giving Johnny Depp his start) as a buddy cop/high school comedy hybrid. Driven by the chemistry between Hill and Channing Tatum, 21 Jump Street works on both levels. I do have one bone to pick, though, with the foundations of the story. The opening scene is titled “2005”, and it shows Hill with bleached blonde hair, dressing like Eminem used to, as “The Real Slim Shady” plays. I graduated high school in 2001, when Eminem was super huge and some boys did jack his (dubious) style. By the time I graduated college in 2005, Eminem was not the king of the hill. That scene bugged the hell out of me because EVERYONE in the theater was shaking their heads going, “No guys, we know he wasn’t that popular in 2005”. It set up a joke in the next scene, sure, but it grated on me that an otherwise decent script botched such an obvious pop culture reference.Continue reading “21 Jump Street is a surprisingly satisfying comedy”
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”
Cinesnark 