Tower Heist

For the first time since I have started blogging, I have lost a post in cyber space. I posted on this movie yesterday and I am sure I saved it. However when I went back to edit it there was nothing there. So I'm starting over , my comments are not going to be any different but the tone will probably change as a consequence. When I saw the trailer back in the summer, I was really hoping we were getting a new Eddie Murphy movie, in which he would be funny again. Brett Ratner is one of those directors I mentioned before that fanboys love to hate. He put this together and subsequently he was chosen to direct the next Academy Awards. He chose Eddie to be the host next time out so there is a lot of speculation that everyone is happy that the movie turned out well. This has increased my expectations and the movie now has more pressure on it to deliver.

In many ways the film succeeds. I loved the music choice. The score sounds like a brutal action picture and not some lame family based comedy. The notes reminded me of the heavy diesel sounds of the movie "The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 (the 1974 version). So from the first notes of the movie, they seem to be taking the story seriously. Murphy is in the first hour of the film in a very limited way. His character does not really become a part of the plot for the first half. This is a movie based around the theft of money which effects a group of decent hardworking people. I'll let others debate the Berine Madoff and Occupy Wall Street aspects of the story. I found the characters that had been taken advantage of to be likable, well meaning and conscientious employees. If this was a building that I lived in, I would feel well taken care of. It may be a fantasy of a wealthy apartment complex, but it was actually an appealing one for the most part. One reason that it is so appealing is because the head of operations played by Ben Stiller seems to be a genuinely nice guy, who is bright enough to know that hard work will help overcome other limitations in life. He makes the extra effort to be sure that the residents and the employees have a good life. When he discovers the betrayal of trust from one of his clients and that he has contributed to everyone getting ripped off, even though he was trying to take care of them, then he takes a personal interest in justice.

There is a scene where he is confronted by the FBI agent in charge of the financial swindle case, after he has continued to be solicitous to his resident, that we start to learn where this might go. Stiller's character appears to be taking crap from the swindler, simply because it is his job to do so. We see that he is doing it all in hopes that he will be able to salvage the fortunes of his employees. Later, when it is clear how indifferent the bigshot is to all the people that have helped make his life comfortable in the apartment building, Stiller goes off in one of the more satisfying bits during the film and the whole plot is set in motion. This movie is a slow build to the heist caper. The second act mostly involves getting the others to participate in a robbery to restore all of the employees financial losses. This is where Eddie appears and starts doing his schtick. He is an childhood acquaintance of Stiller's and has a long criminal past. He turns out to be nearly as coniving as the Wall Street bigwig they are going after. Most of the best gags are in the trailer, which is usually a disappointment, but they all work a little bit better in context and they were pretty good gags.

Stiller has been on the brink of becoming as irrelevant as Murphy, with sequels to Meet the Fockers and Night at the Museum. The originals had their merits but the sequels just scream "Product". Murphy has skipped the part where the original movie had some worth and has gone straight to the "Product" line to cash in. I know that not all movies are worth seeing again or were even worth seeing once, but at least you can tell when people are trying, even if they fail. Most of Murphy's films of late, don't even look like they try. Here they appear to at least be trying and that they succeed much of the time gives us hope that there is more to come. Hollywood is a better place when Eddie Murphy in in danger of actually being dangerously funny.

Everyone else in the movie is solid. I have had a thing for Tia Leoni since the first time I saw her in Bad Boys. There is something about her smile and weary sounding voice that hits the right chord for me, so I thought she worked as the conflicted FBI/romantic interest in the movie. Alan Alda plays the opening section so avuncular and supportive that when he turns out to be the real scum that screws everyone over, I was surprised that the two characters could exist in the same person, very obviously they can and he nailed this guy. One of the first things I ever saw Alda in was a TV movie about a guy involved in a car accident that ends up going to prison. He is an average guy in a place that scares the hell out of most of us average guys. That image helps make the possibility that this character will get his comeuppance even more appealing. There were some nice foreshadowing pieces involving chess strategy that make the heist elements and the legal element at the end more satisfying.

The heist element of the movie was a little less successful. We started with a serious story about average Joes getting screwed over and seeking justice, and finish it off with a little too much slapstick and pratfall. It is a comedy action piece, but the comedy parts take it a bit more over the top than necessary. The turnaround in the movie Trading Places was a lot more believable, on the other hand, if you are willing to go along with it, the antics here are certainly funny. The question is whether you can go along with it. I could for the most part, because the character that Stiller plays made me sympathetic, and Eddie Murphy had a lot of his swagger back. Maybe I would prefer something a little more real, but the movie does end with a touch of honesty as there do have to be sacrifices in order to win.

'Puss In Boots'

If after watching the above trailer, you did not smile and laugh at the same time, you had better skip this movie. "Puss in Boots" is all about attitude and self assurance being played for big time laughs and it takes advantage of the character voice of Antonio Banderas like you would not believe. This character is all swagger and outsized ego being put into it's proper place, but not before we get to see some great moves and smooth lines from our hero.

You may notice that I am not shy about seeing a kids movie. I am a big kid at heart as it is, so anything that is aimed at the young yearning heart of a schoolboy wanting to be a superhero has a great chance with me. I saw the first three Shrek movies, I have no memory of what the third one was about. I skipped the last one because the premise seemed tired to me so maybe I have missed something, because this stand alone story of the swashbuckling cat was really quite charming. It owes almost nothing to the story of Puss in Boots that I learned when I was a kid, and instead reinvents the fairy tail as a story that mixes in Humpty Dumpty as the antagonist. There are no further references to the fairy tale universe except for Jack and Jill and the beanstalk and golden goose (OK, so maybe there are, but they are not tossed in randomly as they were in Shrek) and the world depicted here has no visual connection to the forests of Shrek.

I have always thought that Antonio Banderas was best as a comic actor, because his voice and accent are the epitome or the Latin lover stereotype. He was perfect in Zorro a dozen years ago. The first of the two Zorro movies he made was my favorite film of that year. He is a the embodiment of the character as it should be, but also had a big comic edge to it. In Puss in Boots, he takes that comic edge to the brink and jumps over to the other side. He is mocking himself in the style that is endearing rather than maudlin. You can tell that he was told to live it up to make the movie work. I know it is an animated movie, but he is the character, so much more than any other animated celebrity voice I can think of right now.

The story telling works well, despite the abandonment of the original premise of the character. There is a long set up of the character, after we have already been in the movie for a substantial amount of time. There is even a joke about how dull it is to go back and relive that past, even though everyone in the audience wants to see it. There are some terrific comic sequences based on the behavior of cats; purring, chasing lights, and generally being cats. There was a dance fight that made me laugh at the silliness of it and still feel like it mattered how it turned out and admire the choreography of a cartoon. I also thought that there were some real emotional moments, maybe a little contrived but they worked in the context of the story.

We skipped the 3 D on this movie. I suppose there might be some things in the movie that would look good with that extra dimension but I did not miss it. The background vistas reminded more of Rango, than they did the other Shrek movies. The tale is set in what appears to be Mexico, or maybe old Spain. It is more of a western than it is a fairy tale and I probably liked it more as a result. There is nothing ground breaking here, just a good solid entertainment that makes the best use of a character voice and actor. It gets by on a lot of the charm that the cat has, if you are not charmed by it in the ads, skip the movie. If,like me, a swashbuckler is catnip to you, than this is a purrfect animated adventure which you will enjoy all your nine lives. (Yeah, I know this last part is a little precious, but I feel a little perky right now so I'm keeping it.)

The Three Musketeers 3D (2011)

I said immediately after the film was over, "that was ridiculous, and perfectly entertaining." Amanda agreed instantly saying that the description is very accurate. I noted in the credits at the end of the film, that there was a historical consultant and etiquette expert. A guy with a PhD. should not be taking credit for being the history expert on a film with scuba diving musketeers and flying pirate ship battles that end on the spires of Notre Dame cathedral. This is an over the top 3-D extravaganza, that should not be taken seriously for a moment. That does not mean that it was not great to look at or without any redeeming features. There are many things to recommend herein but if it is a true to life "Three Musketeers" you are looking for, look elsewhere.

Paul W.S. Anderson may be one of the most despised directors working on a regular basis. Fanboys love to find directors to hate and then they pile up on them whenever they can. Anderson sits alongside Brett Ratner and Uwe Boll as film makers that geeks love to hate. I can say that Boll deserves such disdain, but the other two, including the director of this film are victims of taste rather than ability. Anderson is a competent film maker with a flair for the obvious. He makes movies that should be ignored, watchable. He appears to know that he is not an artist but rather a craftsman telling a story. We all love a person that can tell a good joke, and pity the guy that can't make a joke work at all. Anderson can make a joke work, although others can probably tell it better. The tough part is that the jokes are actually his sometimes, and he want to be the one to share them with us. I have no objection and I admit that there are many of his films I liked in spite of the fact that they are obvious (Death Race). So I can give him credit for putting this together and making it work. Of course it could be better, but you would have to re-write the script and cut out all the foolishness.

Many of the traditional Three Musketeers tropes are here. Milady's betrayal, Richelieu's evil and D'artangan's boyishness. The screen writers steal from other movies constantly. We get a Divinci Code reference, swordfighting tips from Errol Flynn and Bruce Lee, and even a nod to spaghetti westerns and Mr. Clint Eastwood. Once you get used to the brazen way that dialogue mimics other movies and plot devices are going to turn in on themselves repeatedly, you can give in to the fun this movie offers. It looks really spectacular, even if it is so widely based against CGI backdrops that George Lucas should get a piece of the take. I noticed how the costumes seemed so much more elegant and accurate than the stripped down vests and tunics from the Disney Three Musketeers from 1993. The choreography of the fight scenes is exceptionally elaborate and would require Basil Rathbone to go back to fencing school for twenty years. Again, we just need to go with it, this is one of those films that is self conscious of the fact that it is a movie and is therefore willing to go for the visual over the realistic.

The young leads, Logan Lerman and Gabrielle Wilde as DArtagnan and Constance are the two actors out of their depths in the movie. He looks about 12 and she resembles a beautiful staute of a California beach girl, not a sevententh century lady in waiting. On the other hand, Milla Jovovich has played these sort of over the top women before. She has starred in the Resident Evil films as a bad ass for ten years now, she can play seventeenth century slut/spy/swordswoman without breaking a sweat. (She is also married to the director who made those films and this one.) The three guy that play the Musketeers are really very good. In particular, Matthew McFadden who plays Athos, is sullen, urban and clever all at once. We have seen him in "Pride and Prejudice" where he was unaccountably sexy, "Death At a Funeral" where he was hysterical, and "Robin Hood" where he was wasted. He is the actor with the star presence in this movie and he sells in in every scene he is in . Porthos is played by Ray Stevenson, he was in one of the Punisher movies as the lead a few years ago. In this movie he was very well cast and carried off the arrogant charm of the character really well. He also strongly reminded me of my son in-law Drew (which is a good thing). I spent the whole movie wondering why Orando Bloom was playing two parts, Aramis and Buckingham. I also thought that time had not been kind to him in his facial features, at least as Aramis. It was not until the credits that I was sure he only played Buckingham (and he was fine) and not also the other part.

I am always a sucker for a swashbuckler and this is exactly what they are shooting for here. The DiVinci designed war weapons, or those inspired by his work, are fun although they make no sense. Daring rescues, last minute escapes, and palace intrigue made this movie fill my bucket of swash just fine. The great actor Christoph Waltz is scheming and treacherous in his role. Mads Mikkelson is in another movie where he has an eye problem I last saw him crying blood in Casino Royale, and here he wears an eyepatch as the one eyed Captain of the Cardinal's guard. Many actors have their crutch's maybe his involve eye fetishes. Anyway, all for one and one for all, it was very entertaining. Your brain cells may die off a little bit but I am sure not any more than would happen from a long night of drinking, enjoy.

The Thing (2011)

This is easy to take care of right off the bat. This film is in no way equal to the fantastic John Carpenter Film that it claims to be a prequel to. The Carpenter version was a classic of macho paranoia, biological creepiness and shock value all tied up in a self contained world without any outside intrusions. This movie starts someplace not anywhere near Antarctica, and continuously suggests that the occupants of the science station can leave at any point and can expect help at any point. The suspense ends up coming from whether or not they figure out they should isolate themselves rather than the isolation being imposed on them. This changes the tone for a lot of the movie and sucks out the elements that made the 82' film so much better.

I have read some nasty reviews of this movie. One of them referred to it as a steaming pile, so you know going in that there are geeks out there who hated it. That may have lowered my expectations enough for me to get some enjoyment out of the movie. There were actually a couple of things here that were pretty clever, but there is also a whole lot that is missing. Let me start with the one thing I thought worked really well at using a different twist on discovering who is real and who is "The Thing". A basic biological tell is provided that never was used in the earlier movie. It is simple and very logical. It is also only partially accurate which means we will get a chance for more doubt to build in and for our suspicions to run wild. Unfortunately, as soon as we get to a point where people are being separated out, an attack takes place that renders the need to do that divion much less meaningful.

This is the main problem with this "remake/prequel", it goes for action more than suspense and for horror more than fright. CGI technology allows the film makers to envision horrorific images of the monster in tranforming into human shape or something else. What they then do is repeatedly use that ability to show us something new and awful. Most of the time the new horror image simply jumps and attacks, and there is not much chance for us to resond to what has happened to one of our protaganists. There is one character that provides a little humor and we can have some sympathy for him, but the changes are so quick and there are so many of them that our emotions do not get a chance to settle in and appreciate the ick factor that the visuals are supposeed to be making us have.

All of the attack stuff in the Carpenter version comes late in the film, after we have developed an understanding of the characters and the situation. Here all of the attacks start early, they happen without much reason and the characters that are victimized are barely distinct from one another, much less fully formed people that would matter to us. This is not the fault of the actors, it is the script. The one character that we see as being a pig headed idiot, turns into a pig headed monster and we barely care. The herione fights back but is using tools that don't make much sense for the set up. There is an involved climax in the alien ship that feels completely unnecssary and turns the film into a peek a boo chase sequence. The storytelling problem I see is that most of the time our heros are running away. They are reactive to the Thing, they do not seem like they are anything more than the screaming girl in the woods trying to escape in any number of traditional slasher films.

The lead actor is the guy from Warrior that I liked so much last month. Here he has very little presence, and he is much more interesting than anyone else on screen. The one character that crries over into the other film is set up pretty well bu disappears for the last half of this. There is a n ok transition to the opening of the earlier movie, but it does not sell what happens during this film any more. This movie is destined to live in the shadow of the Carpenter film. I know how much better the 82' film was, because the only two chills I got in this movie were musical cues from Morricone's score from thirty years ago.

Real Steel

There is a reason that boxing movies have worked from the beginning of film history. The drama in the ring is heightened by events that occur outside of the ring, and a well planned climax can touch the emotions of even the most cynical of viewers. I saw the teaser trailer for this a year ago and I thought it looked like fun, even though it also looks a bit iffy due to the reliance on CGI robots. There were a lot of people who shook their heads and said that the movie world had hit bottom with a movie based on "Rock um, Sock um Robots". Sorry you fools, that movie was made years ago, and it was called RoboJox. Five years ago we got the first Transformers movie and it is basically the same thing. When I saw that Hugh Jackman was starring in this movie, I knew it was not just going to be a special effects extravaganza. You don't need a movie star to sell a battling robots movie. This had to be something more, and it is.

The title credits mention that the film is based on a story by Richard Matheson, well known for his work on the Twilight Zone and best known for writing the novel "I Am Legend", which has been made into a movie three times so far. In fact, on the original Twilight Zone, Lee Marvin starred in an episode titled "Steel", from Richard Matheson, that told the story of a guy with a fighting robot, who has to step in and pretend to be a robot to stay in the fight game. Many of the same ideas are in this film, but it would be unrealistic to imagine Hugh Jackman passing himself off as a robot with the massive creations featured with todays special effects. So, instead he is a robot fighting "trainer", who has to find a way to make his robot a winner, using his own skills instead of computer programmed strategies. The question is, where can he get the heart to do this and win, when he is basically a broken loser in the first place? This is where the story heads off in a direction that marks this as a drama, rather than just a Science Fiction special effects film. Jackman's character Charlie, has a son that he abandoned eleven years ago, and now he has to work out custody issues with the sister of the boy's dead mother. The kid, "Max", is a bright but resentful pre-teen and the rapprochement between father and son is the crux of the movie, not the fight game.

If you see the second trailer, you know how the story is going to play out. All you have to do is know that the kid is involved and you have a pretty clear idea of what is coming. There are virtually NO surprises in the movie. It follows the path of least resistance right up to the end. Yet, as I have said, there is a reason that boxing movies have worked for so long. This is a combination of "The Champ" and "Rocky" with battling robots. I have made no secret of the fact that I am a sentimentalist. It is not a result of my age, I have always worn my emotions on my sleeves and I find that movies which stir me are the ones I can care the most for. The intellect behind a film such as "Raging Bull", can be admired for it's frankness and willingness to look at the ugly in life, but it can't stay in my heart the way a beat down Philadelphia club fighter managed to do. I admire films that force us to think, and I appreciate them for the questions they ask and the mirror that they sometimes hold up to our faces. At the end of the day, I would not want them to be any different. "The Wrestler" from a couple of years ago is a good example of this kind of film, it flirts with sentimentality but demands that we be realists. It is a great movie, but I saw it once and may never see it again unless someone else wants to watch it when I am around. Same thing with the movie "Eight Men Out", which I thought was the best film of the year when it came out. I've seen it only once since then, and I still admire it but do not love it.

"Real Steel" is not a great movie in the sense that it is art. It is mainstream entertainment that understands that emotion is the key to bringing an audience to your movie. It is not hamfisted, the film makers don't slap you in the face with the obvious. It is told as a good story should be told, with care and a little bit of audience manipulation. There are large sections of the movie devoted to the cardboard characters of Charlie and Max. They are needed though to make the fights mean something. The robot fighter "Atom" is a machine, but he represents the struggle of their relationship. It is the emotional bond between the father and son that needs the robot to be a surrogate heart. Everything that happens does so to bring us emotionally to the point where we want this relationship to be saved. and "Atom" is the savior.

The performers are fine. Jackman starts out as an indifferent ass, that can't think straight enough to see the things that are obvious to everyone else. His acting meets the demands of the script, but it is a professional job not an outstanding one. The kid, is not a natural actor, but he has the right kind of face and a grace about him when he does his dancing with the robot. He sells the moxie of the kid, and the script calls for the kid to have big dreams. His is a case of casting saving a movie when acting might not have. If George Lucas had done the same kind of careful casting with the Star Wars prequels, we would have better childhood memories. This is a crowd pleasing, well made entertainment, if you have disdain for the idea going it, you will probably be surprised that there is more heart here than you expected. I had higher hopes for the movie, and it lived up to them. I'll be able to watch this for years, and although my intellect will not grow, I know my heart will not shrink.

Star Trek

In the minds of the Kirkham family, this was the best film of 2009. We could not understand how after expanding the nominees for best picture to ten, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences could neglect this exciting, artful relaunch of a historic franchise. This movie got fantastic reviews and did very good business when it came out and there was no reason that anyone should shy away from it. There have been criticisms I have seen from trolls on a number of sites that refer to J.J. Abrams as Captain Camera Flare. I think the camera flares were used in a great way in making the movie visually dynamic and removing some of the stodginess that plagued the films when they made the original leap from the small to the big screen.

AMC Theaters was running a series of films to promote their IMAX screens this last week. You could see "Fast Five", "Inception", or "Star Trek" for seven bucks. We went last Sunday and we went to an evening show which is why this post is just now going up (I've been pretty busy this week). Amanda and I both object to AMC using the "IMAX" label to sell these theaters. I know that they have special projection and sound, and you can tell that the theater screen is slightly larger than a traditional movie screen. Still, it hardly constitutes a justification for picking peoples pockets of an extra 5-7 dollars just to say you saw it in IMAX. Back when the film was originally in theaters, we did spend the extra money to see it in real IMAX, with the steep seating and the immersive seven story screen. That was worth the extra bucks. We decided that since they were showing it for a discount for all screenings for $7 , we were not really endorsing "Faux MAX", but rather we were exploiting it. Still the sound and picture were great, but as big as the screen is, there is no way to compare it to the stand alone theaters that IMAX originally represented. This screening took place at a theater we have been going to for a dozen or more years. The Covina 30 is now really the Covina 17, they had to close half their screens because they are down from the peak number of guests at more that a million in 2000, to the 70,000 they had last year. One of the reasons that attendance might be down is that people dislike being hoodwinked by the promise of one thing and the presentation of something else.

OK, let me get off my high horse and just talk about the movie a little. This film is spectacular to look at and is filmed in a very dynamic way. The space battles are shown from a variety of dimensions. Which can be a little disconcerting but is less problematic than the shaky cam that most other films employ now a days to show action. The story sets up an alternate reality featuring the familiar characters but in younger forms and slightly different relational circumstances. It uses a time travel device to accomplish this without attempting to erase all of the history that those of us who love Trek care about. I first saw Star Trek on TV in 1966, it was a color show and the day my father brought home and set up our first color TV, Star Trek was on that night. I was not a regular Trek viewer until the show was in reruns, playing on afternoon early evening TV on our local stations. Both of my brothers watched it with me in the giant family room in a house my parents rented in the MidWick section of Alhambra. I continued to be a fan after we had moved and my brothers shifted to other interests. There is so much that is admirable about the original series that there was some trepidation concerning this reboot.

The casting is perfect. Mr. Scott is much more mischievous than in the original series, and he serves as comic relief her. That is a shift from the use of Checkov in the original series as the comic foil, but it works. Spock and Uhura have a vastly different relationship in the new movie, and it promises some interesting future plot lines. The two characters that are pretty much the same and both perfectly cast are Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy. Chris Pine is a handsome young man with solid acting chops and he makes the future of Kirk look bright. Karl Urban has channeled DeForest Kelly and got it perfect. My only complaint is that Dr. McCoy and Captain Kirk need more by play in the main part of the story. Again, I see great room for growth in future episodes. It appears that we have had the last big screen acting from Leonard Nimoy, and he gets to leave on a winning note. Eric Banna is better in this movie than anything else I have seen him in.

It may be too late for you to get out to the AMC to catch this during it's current run, but don't fear. Filming is scheduled to start in a few months on the next big screen adventure of the Star Ship Enterprise, and I hold great hope that all will go well. Until it hits the big screen in 2013, "Live Long and Prosper."

Signs of life in the 3rd dimension: 13 recent films that show 3-D shouldn’t die | Film | Inventory | The A.V. Club

Signs of life in the 3rd dimension: 13 recent films that show 3-D shouldn’t die | Film | Inventory | The A.V. Club

A Nice List that makes a case for 3D in the right circumstances.

The Lion King 3D

I know that the 3D boom that has hit in the last few years is about to burst. Too many films have used the effect to try and sell an mediocre movie as something special. It worked for Disney's Alice in Wonderland, which became a big hit despite being a big mess. There have been a number of movies in the last few months that have not increased box office because of the presence of 3D and they have alienated the audience with the unnecessary intrusion of the optical glasses. However, just because it is a gimmick that is too often unwelcome, does not mean that it can't be used in select circumstances. This is one of those cases. The truth of course is that "The Lion King" did not need any real buffing up for an audience. When it came out seventeen years ago, it was the first animated movie to make over three-hundred million at the domestic box office. It was the culmination of the Jeffery Katzenberg era at Disney and the start of animation box office avarice ever since. Dreamworks exists because the vacuum created at Disney by the death of Jeffery Wells, Disney's then President, was not filled by the guy who was largely responsible for the revival of the animation studio. His acrimonious departure and lawsuits, set the stage for other animation studios, particularly Pixar, to step in and steal the marketplace away. "The Lion King" was the last great roar of traditional hand-drawn animation before the thunderbolt of Toy Story and the dawn of the computer animated age.

So it might seem ironic or blasphemous, to use digital tools to turn "The Lion King" into a 3D special presentation. I did not find the 3D effect disconcerting during the viewing we went to this morning. In fact there were several traditionally drawn scenes that the added depth made more beautiful without becoming simply a novelty. The flock of flamingo like birds flying over the savannah looked more spectacular with the 3 D. The elephant's graveyard seemed a more dangerous place as Simba and Nala tried to flee the hyenas. The wildebeest stampede did not seem more threatening to me with the added 3D, but Rafiki's tree, and the vision of Mufasa in the water did seem richer with the extra depth. So much of the movie is bright, that the drawback of dim projection, which is inherent in a 3D presentation, was not noticeable. The best reason for the release of the movie in this format however, is to get parents to pull their kids into a theater to see a classic, animated movie on the big screen. I know I just paid to watch a commercial for the Blu-ray release of the Lion King, but I was glad to do it because many movies deserve to be enjoyed in a theater. The added 3D will not be enough to make me commit to a 3D television. Life is already complicated enough. There is no anger however from having been hooked into the theaters by the 3D gimmick.

We originally saw this movie in it's release in 1994. That was the year all hell broke loose in our lives. My mother had passed away, my Dad was living with us and he was suffering Alzheimer's related dementia. We were buying a house, and the move is beyond almost anything you can imagine. My parents had a three bedroom apartment filled with the equipment from their lives (having been professional entertainers for nearly fifty years). We had our own three bedroom apartment to move as well. Also, every storage unit in the apartment building we lived in was filled with my parents possessions as well. As were the two large storage rooms in the garage. During the escrow process, my wife and I spent every week night packing material. I moved hundreds of boxes back and forth from our apartment to the new house twenty miles away. Sometimes I made two or three trips a day in our overfilled mini van. This was all in advance of the real moving day that would not occur until late July. Father's Day weekend however, we took off and went to see this with our fiends ans my Dad in tow. It was a great break from all the work we were doing. The story of Simba, losing his father really pulled at my heart at that time. My Dad no longer called me by name, and he did not know exactly who we were most of the time. He did however love all the kids we went to the movie with, and it was a little bit like Mufasa in the stars when he was laughing and talking to us that day.

Revisiting a movie that you love and have not seen for a while is a wonderful experience. There is so much about the Lion King that is memorable and worth enjoying again. The exuberance of "I Just Can't Wait to be King", is energizing. The whole sequence of Scar and the hyenas plotting a take over of the pride land was so reminiscent of a Nazi rally in Germany of the thirties that it is a wonder it made it into the film. Of course the humor of Timon and Pumba is broad but also very clever. The story works it's wonders from the very opening. In fact I remember that the trailer for the Lion King in it's original run was not really a trailer at all. They simply ran the first few minutes of the movie with the "Circle of Life" section ending with a crashing title card to punctuate at the end. Today, I heard the people behind me, suck in their breath, just as I had done we we first saw that opening.

The songs from Elton John and Tim Rice were just as charming today as they were seventeen years ago. Hans Zimmer did the score and the African themes are so effectively used that they sound familiar, even if you don't listen to world music on a regular basis. I had completely forgotten that Johnathon Taylor Thomas provided the voice of the young Simba. I don't think I ever knew that Moria Kelly was the voice of the adult Nala. Like most animated movies, the voice actors are the key to making the images come to life for us. Everyone was well cast and I don't mean to diminish their work, but Jeremy Irons and James Earl Jones just completely own this movie. Iron's Scar is one of the truly evil characters in the Disney stable of villains. His oily delivery and bored indifference to the suffering that comes later in the film is just right. Jones had already cemented the title of world's greatest voice casting in the Star Wars movies. It seems unfair that he should get to be the voice of Mufasa also, but there could never be anyone else that would have been right.

I understand if you don't want to give in to the Disney marketing machine and see this in 3D in the theaters. It may appear to be manipulative to add the unnecessary third dimension, and it takes hutzpah to ask people to pay to see a commercial. I however can live with my choice because I got to relive a wonderful movie, remember my father in better times, and I did not even get a headache from the experience.

Warrior

Over the years, I have seen a lot of movies that were successful that are largely bits and pieces of ideas. There is so much crap out there that a certain amount of it is likely to draw flies if it meets some minimal elements demanded by today's audiences. The last three "Pirates of the Caribbean" films are all gassed up by the presence of Johnny Depp in the role he has played so perfectly. I myself am willing to give into a sloppy film if there is something about it that I can hang onto. Those kinds of movies come out nearly every week and they drain my wallet almost as often. I can't begrudge the machine it's due too much, since I am a willing participant at times in feeding it, despite the fact that it is delivering inferior entertainment.  That mea culpa aside, I get incredibly frustrated when the opposite happens. Good and even great films get ignored by the movie going public way too often. Sometimes it is because they are small films that will need to be sought out. Very often it is the marketing of a movie that keeps people from going to see a movie that is worth their time. Once in a while, it might be that a great film has a tough subject matter that people can simply not wrap their head around.  Today however, we have the most frustrating of all such experiences. A movie that has been marketed well, is available on all your local theater screens, and has a setting that is widely popular in the culture; mixed martial arts.Despite these things going for it, "Warrior" is likely to be out of theaters in another week, and hoping to do some bushiness on video.

This is one of the two or three best films of the year. It is a high quality production which tells a solid dramatic story, and it is told in a crowd-pleasing dynamic manner which should have people lining up to see it. Instead, Amanda and I saw this in a nearly empty theater. Three other people came in just as the movie started so five of us got to enjoy it together. I don't think the movie would be better if more people were there, but the experience would have been terrific if the audience was packed. There are moments of high drama, tension, and an occasional light humored touch that would all go down together as a collective moment if more people were there to share it.  I really wanted to stand outside the theater after the movie and tell everyone who was buying a ticket to something else this weekend, to open their eyes and go see this film.

I am making an exception to my usual format for these posts. There is no trailer included for this movie, because the trailer gives too much away. You will like this film more, the less you know about it. I loved it and I knew quite a bit about what was going to happen. It still worked for me, but if you are not clued in to the story as much, there will be more suspense and pleasure for you as a viewer. I can say that it is a film that focuses on family dysfunction in a way that seems really accurate for the events that are supposed to have occurred outside of the timeline of the story. We get hints here and there, and large pieces fall into place as the narrative moves through the events of the film, but there is not a huge amount of exposition. We find out what has set all of this up in pieces of character, or dramatic dialog in an active context. I really like the tools the screenwriters used to fill us in on the characters. It feels much more organic and it build to surprising emotional reactions.

This is ultimately a story about the redemption of a family, not just a single character. We know what has happened and we largely know who's fault it is. In another movie, that characters story arc would be the main focus. Here, we see some of that characters attempts at making things right, but we are not lead to feel that his restoration is the key element of the film. Nick Nolte has aged, and not entirely well. His skills as an actor are used well here and I suspect that his performance will be remembered at the end of the year, even if the film is not. Yet, it is a testament to casting as well as acting that makes him so perfect for the role. His beefy frame, and bloated facial features, are a perfect match for the character and circumstances.

The two younger actors are not familiar to me, I am sure they have passed my radar before, but they did not stand out in whatever roles I might have seen them in. I will definitely remember them in their future movies because they are both terrific in this movie. I have never watched a mixed martial arts match in my life, and I probably will never become a fan of it to the degree that so many others have. The work it took to stage the bouts and the physical prowess of the actors to pull it off are awe inspiring. I know how movie magic can work and that editing can fix a lot of problems, but these guys need to be in the ring for the fights and they had to sweat to get the performances that I saw. Sometimes there were pieces of business that I did not understand, but there was never any confusion about what was happening and what it all meant.

There are strong themes of family, responsibility, determination and country in the movie. There were moments when I could not keep my face dry, and there were moments when I would have wanted to engage in the same kind of smackdown with some of the characters that I saw on screen. There is so much anger in the characters that it might seem like the movie is going to be unpleasant, and then a moment of tenderness shines through. All three of the main characters go on a journey in the story. It has many traditional elements that any sports story would have. The best sports movie however are rarely about the accomplishment in the big event at the climax of the story. The best sports movies are about the challenges that the character faces, the demons that drive them, and the ways in which they try to reach their goals. If "Rocky" had just been a boxing movie, no one would remember it today. If "Miracle", had only been about hockey, I would never have seen it. Warrior is a Mixed Martial Arts movie, the same way that "Pride of the Yankees" is a baseball film. If the idea of Mixed Martial Arts is what has kept you out of the theaters, KNOCK IT OFF!!! This is a film that is much more than some kickboxing Jean Claude Van Dame crud. Let's all celebrate that a real movie has sneaked into theaters and see this while you have the chance.

Twin Towers in Movies

Twin Tower Cameos from Dan Meth on Vimeo.



This is a different movie related post on the 9/11 events. Appearances by the Twin Towers in Movies. It did not include the Spiderman Teaser that disappeared right after the tragedy.

9/11 Tribute

This has the Jerry Goldsmith music I mentioned from my post a couple of weeks ago. I have added some images in memory of that day. I wept for a week and still feel pain in my heart every time I hear about the families that had to go on without a loved one. Thousands have stepped forward in the intervening years to stand guard and protect us in a number of awful places. Each of them deserves our respect for the valor they have shown on our behalf. Please feel free to share this with anyone who might appreciate it.

Shark Night 3D

The end of summer is the perfect time for a stupid, gore laden horror film that involves animals attacking humans just for the fun of it. Five years ago we had Snakes on a Plane, last year there was Piranha 3D, and now the highly anticipated "Jaws" rip-off "Shark Night" in 3D. It's Labor day weekend, let the mayhem begin. This movie was directed by the same guy that did "Snakes" and you can tell by the performances and the cheesy set ups and payoffs. David Ellis may not be an Auteur, but he can tell a solid scary story with broad enough appeal to bring in the audience for this kind of movie and satisfy them. I think he also did the first "Final Destination", so you know he can make a gruesome set up work.

I doubt that this movie will do a great deal of business, it is Labor Day weekend and one of the slowest dates of the year in the film business. This kind of silly horror is an acquired taste and there may be limited appeal to a mass audience. It is my oldest daughter's birthday however and she and her sister have learned well in my shadow. They enjoy the heck out of this kind of stuff. Allison is a little more discriminating than Amanda on these things. Amanda will watch all the cheap SyFy made for cable movies with me, in fact, she is now usually the instigator, but Allison likes the cinematic extravagance of a visceral disembowelment. Last year, at the Midnight Showing of "Piranha 3D" we were the only three people in the theater and we still laughed and hooted like you could not believe.

There was a slight hesitation on my part in queuing up for this movie. It is rated PG-13, which means that the gore level will be very low, the cursing will not exceed one or two F-Bombs, and there will not be any nudity, (or it will be racy TV from the side nudity). All of that was required last year because that is all there was in the killer fish movie. This movie does try to tell a little bit more of a story. It is a stupid story, but it does have one. The plot helps create a lot of the suspense because without all the bells and whistles of an "R" rated horror film, you need something to hold stuff together. The performers here are not thespians, most of them come off as pretty people hired for the shoot. They are however ten times more effective than any performer in one of those SyFy movies, so this is at least tolerable. I will also add, that at the very end of the credits, there is a stinger section that made me appreciate the actors a helluva lot more. If you do manage to see this, make sure to stay for the extra at the end. It does not add to the movie plot, but it does add to the movie experience.

The characters are cardboard but each one at least has a function in the story. The two leads are not bad, they just have little to do beyond reacting to the CGI sharks and assorted other bad guys. I was a little let down by the lack of additional gore when some of the truly evil characters get their comeuppance. We have been given good reason to want to see some of these characters die, and their deaths while appropriate, needed to be done with more flair and panache than the deaths of characters with which we are supposed to sympathize. It is limited by the rating that the movie makers were seeking. I understand but I yearned for more dismemberment. The shots of the sharks are fine, they never look as frightening to me as "Bruce" did in Jaws, but they do sometimes look more real.

The makers of this movie are having a laugh. They know that the plot is not serious and they treat some of the scenes with the appropriate tone. I don't want to give too much away, but I will say that when a shark attack victim, who has lost too much blood to transport on a boat, walks out into the water with a spear in his one hand and swears to kill the shark that has wronged him, well, it is a moment of absurdity to savior. To me, this is exactly the kind of movie that should be in 3-D, viscera is splashed in the screen and explosions launch pieces of wreckage at the audience. We get a corny experience that draws attention to how corny it is. No one is pretending that the 3-D here is anything other than a gimmick, and they use like a gimmick should be used.  I enjoyed this thoroughly despite the limitations of the rating. It is exactly what you want, if you are attracted to this film at all. It is a sign of mental health if you avoid it, but if your sense of humor is twisted like ours is, you will be waiting for the sequel.

ScriptShadow: 10 Screenwriting No-Nos you can learn from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull

ScriptShadow: 10 Screenwriting No-Nos you can learn from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull

Here is an excellent analysis of action screenwriting as it failed in the last indiana Jones picture we are likely to see.

Jerry Goldsmith-A Few Notes

I just finished watching a concert that was a tribute to Jerry Goldsmith and I can think of no finer tribute to make than to say every piece of music played made me want to go and watch those films.There are dozens of film makers that I admire immensely; actors, editors, cinematographers,directors writers and more. The only fan letter I ever wrote however was to a musician/composer that had made me wish I had tried harder with Mrs. Liggett and my piano lessons. I love music as most people do, but I understand very little of the complexities that are required to make a piece of music work. Film music must be especially difficult because it has to match up with a visual reference, enhance that visual but at the same time remain subtle so as not to distract from the screen. Jerry Goldsmith is the film composer that I have enjoyed and admired the most in all the years of my movie going life. I would not want this in any way to detract from my admiration of other great film score composers. All of us who love movies know a dozen composers off the top of our heads that we can say " Yeah, he's the best", or "I love that guy, he's my favorite." I do love them all, but the first composer that I ever listened to separately from the movie was Jerry Goldsmith.

When I was twelve years old, I saw the movie "Patton" and I was convinced it was the best movie ever. In 1970, there was no waiting for the video release of the movie to relive that passion. In those days, unless you had a thirty-five millimeter projector and a friend in the business, you were only going to see the movie again on television. It would be played on one of the three networks (most likely ABC) and it could not be paused, rewound, or scheduled for another time. Things in those days happened in real time. So, how could I get my Patton fix if I had to rely on some future network programmer to run the movie when I wanted. The answer came in the form of an LP. For you younger readers, that is the format before the format that was replaced by the digital format that you listen to music on. The record version of the soundtrack started off with the George C. Scott monologue from the beginning of the movie. I had that speech committed to memory within a short time. It is followed by nearly ninety minutes of the most fantastic music I had ever heard. I knew movie music before this, but mostly just songs from movies, not the scores. The Jerry Goldsmith score for Patton was the first time I paid attention to the background music of a film. I could see the images in my head and feel the emotions swelling in my chest and it was as if I was seeing the movie again. When I watched the Academy Awards that next year, the biggest surprise to me was not that George C. Scott turned down the Oscar, it was that of the eight awards the movie won, the score was not included. What an injustice!

After that introduction to movie scores, I started listening to film music in my Dad's record collection. There were James Bond soundtracks, and some scores from war movies that filled many of my hours at home. As I look back on all the films I had seen before then, I know that I heard the scores but I did not always remember them distinctly from the films. Jerry Goldsmith is the composer that I remembered. The score from "The Omen", was the next time I remember hearing his name, although some of my favorite films of the early seventies were scored by Mr. Goldsmith. It was at that time I started to pay even close attention to the craftsmen that put movies together but did not appear on screen. As a teen, I realized that many excellent people worked behind the scenes and that is where film appreciation begins. My admiration for Jerry Goldsmith's work is what helped elevate my movie watching from pastime to appreciation. I became a more critical consumer of movies because of his work.

Others can comment on the process and technical accomplishment of Jerry Goldsmith's work. I can recognize a music cue, but I could not tell you the key, style or tempo that it is being played in. I do know that his work is what makes some of my favorite movies of all time so much more successful. The Wind and the Lion, Alien and Poltergeist all lead me up to the moment that I officially became a movie geek by writing a fan letter. When I saw "Gremlins" for the first time, I was stunned by how much I loved that movie. What was really gratifying to me was that I could recognize the work of Jerry Goldsmith immediately. I'm not sure how, because I am musically illiterate, but something in that score hit me as his distinct creation. It had a wild exuberance to it, and the joyous mayhem  of the creatures in that movie were matched by a carnival like soundtrack that came across to me as if it were a circus gone wrong. Again, I acquired the soundtrack immediately and listened again and again. My enthusiasm could not be contained and that is when I wrote the one fan letter I ever sent. I never received a response, I sent the letter to the studio, but I also never needed a response. My goal was merely to express my personal gratification at the work that Jerry Goldsmith did for that movie. Those of you who don't know, he is included in a quick shot of the inventor's convention that Mr. Peltzer goes to.

Of course there are dozens of movies that he did in the following years that are also memorable because of his work. There is not much point in listing them all, what you should do is seek them out and listen to the music. I can say that I was present at the Hollywood Bowl for an appearance he made, and then later, there was a tribute concert that he was too ill to come to in person but for which he joined all 18,000 of us on the telephone for. He also composed a very moving piece presented either by the L.A. Philharmonic or the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, commemorating the 9/11 attacks just a few days after they happened. As we come up on the tenth anniversary of that tragedy, I need to make sure to find that piece of music in my collection. There was so much real horror to relive, that I think it will only be tolerable if there is some beauty surrounding it. Thank you Jerry Goldsmith for making movies better but also for making my life better.

Fright Night 2011

The original Fright Night is one of my favorite genre films of the 1980s. It featured a fantastic vampire, a terrific vampire hunter and a teen sex comedy combined into a nice tight horror film. If you have been to the movies in the last ten years, you know that 80s films are being strip mined for remakes on a weekly basis. We have had remakes of Halloween, Friday the Thirteenth, the Fog,Nightmare on Elm Street and a bucket load more. None of those remakes have been very good. They lacked the inventiveness, suspense and brilliant make up effects that made those 80s movies work so well. Most film makers today think that CG I effects can replace the inventive in camera work that was done on those movies, and they are wrong. There is a prequel to the John Carpenter's "The Thing" coming, and it will be next to impossible to match the crazy practical effects in the original, which leads me to fear a CG I crapfest. So you can easily understand why I would be nervous about a remake of "Fright Night". It turns out I had very little to worry about. This is exactly how you do a remake without desecrating the memory of the original.

To begin with, this version of Fright Night finds a vampire that is an equitable replacement for the original Jerry Dandrige. In the 1985 film, Chris Sarandon created a sensuous, wickedly funny, Lothario as the threat to all the neighborhood women. Behind his smirk lived a sad, lonely hedonist with whom many would be able to identify. Despite the fact that he is evil and the villain, we still like him. Colin Farrell does not try to replicate that. He has some of the same smarmy character traits, but he is more clearly a prick. He barely notices Charlie when first introduced, he is so busy licking his chops over Charlie's mother and girlfriend that he mostly just revers to him as "guy", like in "Hi guy". Later he is so sure of his superiority he does not think through some of the risks he is taking as he fights the vampire fighters. We get a good sense of his smooth ways early in the film but we also see his fierce hunting abilities even before the main story has started. Farrell is perfect as a contemporary "bad boy"who really is bad. Instead of the lounge-wear of his predecessor, this Jerry Dandrige prefers a wife beater t-shirt and jeans. An early and solid joke in the film is that Jerry is a terrible name for a vampire. Well that, and his wardrobe are some of the things that help mask his true nature. Farrell is all coiled menace, with an indifferent attitude toward the threats and the prey that he is confronting.

The second character that is so important to get right in this story is the vampire hunter "Peter Vincent". That name is a tribute to horror actors of the fifties and sixties Peter Cushing and Vincent Price. In the 1985 movie, Peter Vincent was a over the hill actor from those very films, trapped into repeating himself as the host of a late night horror film show. The very best thing about the 1985 movie was Roddy MacDowell's performance as a gone to seed hero, willing to make one more stand for self respect. I remember being outraged that he was neglected in the awards season that year. Sure it was just a summer horror movie, but his work was top shelf and made the whole story click. When I heard that the new movie would make the character a Criss Angel like magician in Las Vegas, I was not sure it was going to work. The script however is clever enough to give some background to the character and make it somewhat believable that a Vegas showman would care about vampires. David Tennant does a good job conveying the douche bag nature of the performer, but also the frightened well read vampire mythologist. Clearly changes had to be made to make the story work in current times, and the switch in this character is necessary and largely successful.

The story remains quite similar to the original, with a couple of good twists. The Las Vegas setting is perfect, because it justifies a lot of the night time activity of our vampire and it allows the real estate developments of the area to serve as a realistic background. Another change that works is the integration of Charlie's mother in the story. It makes more sense than her sleeping through most of the events in the story which is what happened in the original. That beefing up of the part also allows the casting a very strong actress like Toni Collette in this film. She is not the focus of the story but she is a good addition to the cast and the way the story unfolds. One other element that is slightly changed is that Charlie's friend "Evil Ed" has a much better background story, and his part in the film is advanced to a spot significantly earlier in the movie than the first movie. Christopher Mintz-Plasse has appeared in two of my favorite movies of the last three years, Role Models and Kick Ass. He is still young enough that he can play young and that baby face of his helps set up one of the emotional back stories in the movie. He is the friend that gets left behind, the one that Charlie might have helped in more ways than one. The character is nothing like the one from the 1985 movie. In the original, Stephen Geoffreys is a young Jack Nicolson knockoff with a sense of humor and a chip on his shoulder. He was the main comic foil in the movie. That role shifts to the Peter Vincent character in the update, and the Evil Ed character becomes the guilty conscience of our hero. 


There is a good combination of make up and digital special effects to create the monster images in the movie. We saw this in 3-D, which was a little odd since I did not know it was in 3-D until earlier this week. There were some good three dimensional shots that poke at the audience or spray us with blood. They are not necessary but they do not detract from the story and they add a few good moments on the screen. There are two very good scenes that did not exist in the first film and add to this one immensely. Ferrall's vampire is limited by the traditional rules on vampires and he can only enter a house if invited in. This limitation is used in a long suspenseful character segment in which Jerry wants to borrow a six pack of beer. Later, the convention forces the vampire to find a way to drive his prey into the open, and that scene starts a really good action sequence. The sequence includes a frightening shock or two, a very funny visual gag, and a really nice surprise for those fans of the original movie.

I am very happy to report that Fright Night 2011 is a superior horror remake. It equals the original in many ways but it is also it's own film and that is the real joy in a good summer horror film. After you see this, go check out the original if you have never seen it before. I can safely say that both movies should leave fans of real vampires delighted.

'The Help'

The trailer above is focused on a lot of humor and sells this as a light-hearted story of empowerment. Well there is a good deal of humor, the story here is far from light, it is a dramatic imagining of the stories that reflect a culture and attitude that we hope is well in the past. There are dangers nibbling around the main characters, there are civil rights murders in the background, and the choices that everyone is making in the story are often much more somber than would be expected from the marketing. My guess is that readers of the book might be worried by what they see, but if the movie holds as true to the book as I have heard, they should not be afraid to go and embrace this movie.

It is sad but true that the events depicted in the movie take place in my own lifetime. I don't live in a southern town, so I cannot say that the attitudes reflected here by some of the white characters are all in the past, but we can rejoice that much of the official endorsement of those attitudes has been eliminated. The movie is probably perceived as a chick flick because of the dominance of female characters in the story. Why would a guy want to see a movie where there are no featured male leads? The two or three men that do appear are ineffectual and primarily comic in nature. While the reason to see it is that history is not all about men and the wars they have fought. It is about ideas and the changes in the world that they achieve. This story illustrates the reason those changes were needed on a human level. When people speak of racism, the phrases are often bandied about without much definition. Here we get to see what racism is up close and personal. We see how it robs the dignity of the oppressed as well as the oppressors. It is not always hatred of a group that creates racism, but fear of change, uncertainty and the opinion of our peers that create this sort of world to thrive.

The main criticisms of this movie that I have heard and read about are twofold. First, it is suggested that this film is nothing more than a made for TV movie, being shown in theaters. Second, the movie commits the unforgivable mistake of allowing a black story to be told through a white point of view. The first criticism is easy to dismiss because of the production value, photography and performances of the actors. There are many great TV movies made these days that are far better than some of the crap that passes for films made in Hollywood. You don't have to start making those kinds of comparisons though because the polish on this movie lets you know immediately that it is quality. The care in the performances and attention to production details help immerse us into Jackson Mississippi in 1963. If you think that only special effects make a movie theatrical, than maybe there is an argument, but I don't know anyone that sees that as the criteria. The second criticism is more complicated because it is social/political in nature.

I know that film makers from a variety of ethnic groups, have a legitimate complaint that their cultural stories are filtered through a white sensibility. In the last few years many of those film makers have been able to focus on the issues they see as important, without having to cater to the needs of a white audience. If you want a film to be a broad success and to speak to all movie goers, I think you miss a trick by excluding access to the subject by whites. That access should be provided by an appropriate narrative channel and it should not overwhelm the story but supplement it. "The Help" features a white character that initiates the process of writing the book, but it would have to be so in the world of the South in 1963. It would be unrealistic to suggest that the main characters could get their stories out in a widespread manner which would have an impact on the world, from the social positions that they occupy. The white woman journalist is a catalyst, but she does not become the focus of the story. The good, bad and weak white characters are a part of the story. How do you tell the story of oppression without looking at how that oppression occurs? The young journalist played by Emma Stone is not the hero of the piece. She is one cog in the process that allows us to see the true hidden heroes.

Viola Davis is the real star of the movie. She is the moral center of the story and a key player in the events that occur. Her performance is also the kind of thing that tells you this is the star of the movie. It is subtle and honest. There are no histrionics in her speeches No yelling, or over emoting about another character or injustice that she has had to endure. She shows us the face of a woman of courage, one who has been worn down by the world but still has love in her heart, despite the crushing treatment she receives in everyday events. Her eyes convey sadness, her voice humor and her shoulders the weight of too many disappointments. This is an award caliber performance and that is not a piece of tokenism in a white film, it is the legitimate accomplishment of the actress as a professional. Octavia Spencer steals much of the movie as the sharp tongued and vengeful Minny. She proves to be a  desirable friend and a fearsome enemy, and her character is a nice counter point to her friend. She gets most of the laughs in the movie but also earns them with an ernest voice and an expressive face. The great Allison Janney is also wonderful in a two sided role which ultimately helps us see that racial injustice is an affliction for all of us, and not just the population that is put down.

This is not the greatest movie ever made on these subjects, but it is a worthy entry and deserves it's audience.  You should not avoid this movie because it looks like it is social medicine, or that it is a film that uses whites as rescuers of blacks and is therefore demeaning. It is a well told tale of a world that most of today's film audience will be only vaguely familiar with. I admit I was a little hesitant about seeing this because it looked too much like a film that would be good for me rather than good. I am happy to say that it is good, and it did not hurt me to take the medicine because the cure was delightful.

The Captains 2011

This is a documentary that basically consists of William Shatner interviewing the actors that played the part of the Captain in the various Star Trek manifestations. There is actually more to it than that but not in the way of production. Shatner is an interesting guy and he is a little off center. If you ever see an episode of his interview show "Raw Nerve", you will see that he can come at an issue in a very different way. Most interviews are straightforward, asking specific questions about particular topics. That is not captain Kirk's style. He asks questions in a demanding almost metaphysical way. Sometimes it comes across as a bit obstinate, but most of the time he is just trying to get something original from his subjects.

The interviews here are inter-weaved by subject matter rather than performer. Each of the interviewees is given a good amount of time and attention, and the differences in which they relate to Shatner are what make this a more unique experience. Sometimes the transition material wanders around a bit without much focus. Usually we are brought back to the Star Trek universe with a clip from a convention or a short segment from one of the series. I watched all 79 episodes of the original Star Trek, dozens of times over the years. From when I was a kid and Star Trek was a new series, I have always been a fan. The next Generation series was consumed by me as it first unfolded. I saw all the episodes but I don't know them as intimately as I did the Original series. Voyager and Deep Space Nine held my attention for a while, but I did not complete euither series and I have that to look forward to. I have seen only one episode of Enterprise, and I am a little ashamed that I was not more involved in supporting the legacy. From the things all of the subjects said, It was clear there were worthy elements to each permutation of the show.

Much of the interview process is charming and there is a great deal of warmth from the actors toward their legacies and the other actors. You can see from the movie that Shatner and Patrick Stewart have a very warm friendship and a health analytical view of their history. Avery Brooks and William Shatner are just weird together. They are doing jazz infused interview riffing. Sometimes it is uncomfortable but it often ends up as charming and a nice smile will finish a segment. The movie is not for everyone, but if you like Shatner and you love Star Trek, I don't see how you could miss it, or not love it.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Here is what you would call a thinking mans science fiction film. There are ideas and themes that are explored but they are done so in the context of an involving story that plays with variations in science. There is drama, humor and suspense and it all ends with a lot of visual fireworks. This is one of the best films of the summer and it was one that I was largely indifferent to until I saw it. Ten years ago, 20th Century Fox tried to revive the "Planet of the Apes" franchise with the Tim Burton "reboot" of the story. While it made money, it failed to inspire further development of the idea and actually ends with a very stupid revision of the first Planet of the Apes final shot. "Rise" does not attempt to mimic the original story and get the same emotional effect which the original films kicker left audiences with. Instead, it does what a "reboot" or "reimagining" of a movie story should do. It takes the idea and runs with it instead of trying to recreate the moments from the original. The idea is the driving force of the story in this movie. That and the relationship story that develops between our human star and the special effect star of the movie.

As usual, I will try to avoid merely recapping the movie for you but there are a couple of story points that I do want to discuss. The story of man's folly in playing with nature is as old as the hills. In science fiction, Frankenstein is the touchstone for this concept. The basics of this story are laid out almost exactly the same as in a summer picture from 1999, "Deep Blue Sea". There we had sharks that develop intelligence, but that movie is mostly about a horror action plot. "Rise" uses the same pursuit of a drug to fight Alzheimer's disease, and turns it into a mediation on what it means to be humane or intelligent. For the first two thirds of the movie we are treated to a story dealing with family and devotion. Both the humans in the family and the chimp Caesar are warm and caring and faced with matters concerning the functioning of the brain. One character is going backwards and one forwards and it puts immense pressure on the scientist at the center of the story to try to do the right thing. James Franco's character does not want to put his father in a home, he sees that as giving up. When he has to put Caesar into a facility, he basically is mirroring the pain and process that he needed to go through with his dad but could not. No one is a clear bad guy in this situation.


We are expected to empathize with Caesar and we get good reason to. His interaction with the family is warm, and his loyalty to the father suffering from Alzheimer's is admirable and sad at the same time. When he ends up separated from them in a facility with other apes, we can sympathize with his plight because we have all been the new kid on the block and we have seen enough prison movies to know how the system can be oppressive. The hardest plot point for me to get by is the rejection of a chance to return to his life with Franco. I guess at this point, we are to understand that Caeser has made an intelligent decision that his mind is more important than his heart. Once the events that lead to an ape uprising begin to unfold, Caeser is still admirable, but our sympathy for him is diminished a bit by some of the emotional baggage. There are some points late in the film where that sympathy needs to be recalled and it does not quite get there. From my point of view the last act is the weakest emotionally in the film.

The revolution of the apes is not as strong as the evolution of Caesar. While the story of Caesar's maturation and growth all seems real and well developed, the follow through with the other apes seems rushed and overly dramatic. That is not to say it is not exciting and frightening because it is both of those things, but it seems to be in a slightly different movie. The original series of films in the 1970s often ended up as cheap ways to bring an audience in and use a brand name as a way of keeping us coming back. "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes" was the best of those sequels and it had the most valid themes. This version tries to tell the same story in a different way using very different themes but still covering the same territory. It is far superior in believability to any of the earlier movies, and is only out-shined by the first "Planet of the Apes" due to it's originality and lead character. There are a couple of lines that are mimicked in the current movie from the first. The change in context makes them punch lines for a joke rather than effective homages to the original. The screen writers should have had enough confidence in their material not to go for those two lies. I won' tell you what the lines are but I will say that they are spoken by a human in reverse of the original intent. Tom Felton, the actor who played Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, gets more opportunity to show his acting ability in this movie than he did in most of the Potter films (Half Blood Prince being his opportunity to shine in that series). He gets stuck doing the two lines and it takes away from the performance.


James Franco is solid, and John Lithgow is excellent as the father making the long goodby. The true star of the movie are the special effects folks and the actor Andy Serkis, whom may become ghettoized in motion capture performances because he is always so good. The setting of the film is San Francisco, and the wild animal sanctuary and the research lab and corporate offices seem like they could be part of the city by the bay. The music is strong but not nearly as distinctive as the Jerry Goldsmith electronic score from more than forty years ago. My minor reservations about the third act aside, this film should go a long way to erasing the memory of the Tim Burton version of the story, and it can easily inspire additional films in the series or stand completely alone. If there are more "Apes" movies to come, I hope they are as intelligent and competently put together as "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" is.

Crazy Stupid Love

Once upon a time, a movie would be classified as a comedy. or a drama, or a war picture or western. In these days in which a science fiction film is presented as a western or music videos are sliced together to create a drama, it should come as no surprise that a movie largely billed as a comedy would also have the poignancy of a heartwarming drama. There is a history of movies that manage to accomplish both things, "It's a Wonderful Life" is the first example that pops into my head. So many movies today are billed as romantic comedies, when there is either to much romance and not enough comedy (Letters to Juliet) or there is comedy without any romance (Bridesmaids). They sometimes try to force a little bit of one or the other into a film so it will be easier to market to the current film audience. "Crazy Stupid Love" is a romantic drama with comedy elements. You can clear see in the trailer that the emphasis is on the humorous, but the movie actually emphasizes the human. It does rely on some basic film cliches in the story telling but the dialogue, and the acting manage to overcome those weaknesses to make the film work pretty well.

Steve Carrell is cast so often in the roll of schmuck, that he has an edge as an actor from the beginning of the story, we do not need to be convinced that there is something of a loser here. 40 Year old Virgin, Little Miss Sunshine, Get Smart,  Date Night, all create an atmosphere that allows us to accept his character without much work. The question is never is he believable as a sad sack loser, it is whether or not he can be redeemed into something more worthy. His character in this movie is Cal Weaver, a nice enough guy whose wife confesses to cheating on and wants to divorce him. His pitiful circumstances would elicit sympathy for the most part except he goes overboard on the self pity and and he annoys a local Lothario, who responds by trying to make over Cal. Jacob is played by the always excellent Ryan Gosling. He appears to be a man in charge, and maybe he will be able to rescue Cal from his circumstances. Of course, this is a dramatic story, so there is actually more going on and the plot thickens.

The developments that occur as the story goes on will not surprise anyone who has seen a few movies in the last twenty years. Some plot twists are straight out of a Cary Grant movie, while others will be familiar to fans of John Hughes. There are cliches galore in the way the movie is told. For instance, we get a foreshadowing shot of a dropped photograph with Cal and his wife and the glass has shattered to suggest a division between the two of them. Movies like Babel and Crash, have used parallel storytelling that ultimately comes together at the end to reveal connections between characters and their situations. So those kinds of developments are a big part of the film here as well. Most of the convergence is designed for a laugh, but there are a couple of dramatic lines as well and they do a good job at pulling at the heartstrings.  I think we would be better off if we knew more about why Cal's wife succumbed to an office affair, and  even more importantly, why she wants a divorce. Julianne Moore plays Emily as if she were as sad as Cal is. The only real motive I see for her claim that she wants a divorce is guilt over the betrayal of her husband.

This is an ensemble piece, with excellent work done by all of the actors in the movie. John Carrol Nash is a favorite at our house, he has a small role as a friend of the family and he gets two big scenes that provide excellent laughs, one very subtle and the other over the top. Emma Stone is in one of the parallel stories and she is quite charming and beautiful. The kid who plays the son of Cal and Emily is an actor that I was not familiar with, but he has to be solid because the heart of the movie really depends on us believing some of the feelings he has as his parents marriage is crashing and he himself is facing love.  Lisa Lapira steals every scene she is in with Emma Stone, playing her funny and opinionated best friend. Marisa Tomei is also worth a special mention because she is in a small part that develops the plot, and she is so funny in it that the term comedy can be legitimately applied to the movie.

The climax of the movie occurs in the biggest cliche setting of all. As a Speech Teacher, I can tell you that the events that take place here can only happen in a movie. The town would have to be so small and the residents so patient and caring about the family, for this device to really happen. The thing that saves it from itself is the dialogue. If the words coming out of the characters were not compelling and warm and funny, the movie would be groaned off of the screen. We can forgive the ridiculous nature of the event as shown because we are listening to good actors doing lines that we want to hear, despite the fact that the way events unfold is so darn impossible. It is entertaining as all heck, and the characters are real even if the stories are not. We want them to be true because of the actors and their lines. So we will suspend our disbelief and live with the imperfections because so much of the rest of the movie is what we want; intelligent and heartfelt and interesting.

History of the Title Sequence

A History Of The Title Sequence from jurjen versteeg on Vimeo.


A brilliant little film showing major innovations in Movie Title in a simple graphic format.

Cowboys & Aliens

When we saw this trailer months ago, it was pretty exciting. James Bond and Indiana Jones in the same movie and they play cowboys. Then you add on a layer of WTF, just to make sure that the geek in all of us is salivating for this. The concept is fun, just saying the title. You would have to do serious damage to screw this up. I am pleased to say that no serious damage is done. This is the movie that you expect it to be, it relies a lot on the appeal of the stars but more than anything, it is the concept that makes this payoff. Cowboys on horseback, shooting guns at aliens in spacecraft.  Yep, it is as simple as that.

One of the reasons I like doing the blog is that I have been burned by professional reviews and critiques on a number of occasions. If a storyline or actor or concept is appealing, I think I should give it a chance. Sure I may end up seeing something that pisses me off, but at least I am pissed off because I made my own judgement. If I stay away from a theater, because some one else"s opinion scared me away, I am putting a lot of trust in that other persons opinion. Once upon a time there were critics that mattered and I would listen to.  I have found though that I am much more satisfied being driven to a film by criticism than being driven away from one. Positive comments have brought me to movies like last year's "City Island". The negative commentary on a film may be accurate but if it contradicts my natural instincts, should I trust it?  There were a number of weak notices for the current film. One clever writer subtitled their Review, "Cowboys shoots itself in the foot." I sure don't want to be disappointed but I also don't want someone else telling me to ignore my core instincts. When they are right, I have only myself to blame for spending money on trash, but if they are wrong and I listened to them, then I blame myself, and them for missing out on something that would have been a pleasure. I can find things to like in most films, when something irritates me I'm glad to share. I don't think people should read my opinions and deny themselves a movie they would enjoy, but I do want others to know how I feel and I am happy to have them share with me. Reviews in mainstream papers and other media outlets could discourage you from seeing Cowboys and Aliens, if they do, you are missing something you probably would have liked.

One of the professional reviews I read said that this movie adds nothing to the western genre and it uses a lot of western cliches to simplify the storytelling. Except for a movie like last years remake of "True Grit", there are nearly zero westerns released most years. I can think of a half dozen over the last five to ten years. So who is going to be overly familiar with those western cliches except old guys like me that used to see westerns in theaters and still watch them on video? My daughters best friend watched "Silvarado" at the house a few weeks ago, she is twenty three, it was the first western she had ever seen. "Cowboys and Aliens" is made for casual viewers of the western genre, not John Wayne enthusiasts or obsessive viewers of Sergio Leone. You get a solid set up of the western conventions, and then a huge twist is thrown in to make it different and fun. The term "mash-up" is being used to describe this film, but I think a mash up is more about genres that make no sense together. This movie is told as if it were a straight action film, and the events could have actually taken place in the old west. Now if Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford started dancing and singing, that would be a mash up. Here, they are conventional western archetypes, put into a different kind of conflict. Very little of this is science fiction. The aliens could simply be a different Indian tribe the cowboys are encountering.

There is a central mystery, several character lines and an action story being told in the running time of the movie. Harrison Ford is so grizzled, he could be playing the Gabby Hayes role in the movie. Daniel Craig is more stoic than Clint Eastwood. My guess is he has fewer lines than just about any Eastwood western ever. Some good character actors get to play in a western movie. Keith Carradine belongs in a movie like this, it would be nice if there was a little more for him to do because he is so good. Walter Goggins is an actor we have found in the TV series "Justified", which is basically a modern western. He is doing the Strother Martin prairie scum part very effectively and has some of the funniest moments in the film. Sam Rockwell is just good in everything he does, his part does payoff here but it would be nice if there were more to it.

The alien stuff is fun, but they do not dwell on scientific explanations, or drool over the technology that has been invented for the movie. Yes the aliens are the antagonists but we do not really need to know much more about them than they are nasty and see humans as little more than insects. This is a shoot em up, with some fun images, a wacky idea and some terrific actors. everybody has fun for a couple of hours and then we go home. My oldest daughter said when the movie was over, "That's exactly what I wanted from this movie." I must concur. If you are interested in the premise and the combination of the actors, you will get what you are looking for. If you want groundbreaking genre transforming cinema, then I guess you might be disappointed. I would only have been disappointed if I had let weak word of mouth keep me out of the theater. It's pretty much exactly what you think it's going to be, and that's why you are there in the first place, right?