The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

This is the second week in a row, that a magician is featured in a big movie opening. I doubt that this will have the box office that "Oz the Great and Powerful" had, but it is an entertaining film that should go down pretty well with most audiences. There are some risque elements that might prevent it from being a family film, but it does have that kind of sensibility. It feels like a movie that could be enjoyed by family members together (except for the penis and sex jokes). The story is straightforward fall and redemption, with quite a few funny bits along the way. There are no real surprises in the story except for some of the pretty good laughs that many might be surprised they are experiencing.

I do want you to know that I come at this from the perspective of someone familiar with this area of show business. My Dad could have played the Alan Arkin character, without having to do a lot of acting. While he never sold Magic Kits, he did sell plenty of tricks and effects. There was one effect call "It" that could have been the illusion that launches the young Burt on his journey to magic fame. I do think there is the usual stereotyping of magicians as socially awkward outsiders, so it seems a bit much to have the poor kid burdened with bullies, a lack of friends and a absentee mother all at the same time. I do think that the motivation for a lot of kids is to be more the center of attention and to build friendships, but the sad sack loser moniker feels a bit obvious. I do remember the Marshal Brodin magic kits that did sell on television.



I bet lots of kids got inspired by this sort of thing but very few of them followed through. The idea of entertaining your friends requires that you have friends first. The most realistic part of the film comes at a kids birthday party, where we get a chance to see how real kids respond to the idea of the impossible.Let me get to the story and film issues first and then I will come back to some of the magic points.

After the two kids become friends in magic at the beginning of the movie, they grow up to be tandem magicians like Siegfried and Roy. If you pay any attention to the time lines this movie will not make much sense. The lead actors are playing nearly twenty years younger than they actually are and the legacy of big time magic on the Vegas strip is twenty years later than it makes much sense for it to be. What isn't clear is why Carell's Burt has become estranged from his friend and partner, Buscemi's Anton. Their act is shown to be intricately plotted and practiced, and maybe the boredom is enough to drive a wedge between them, but it feels like there is some back-story missing. The show they do is corny but entertaining, and they are a success. Despite the fact that young Burt was the initiator of their work together, it appears that his character has lost all interest in new things and listening to his partner. Anton turns into the driving creative force and Burt appears to be the pompous front man. Buscemi seems to have accepted that he is going to be the butt of ugly jokes, but it does seem a little painful at times to watch them being said.This might make sense in the world of Rock and Roll, but it feels like a shortcut in the storytelling here. There is some nice humor built into the Vegas style Magic act, and the Hangman's routine is not the only thing that it appears they got from David Copperfield. When Burt requires his lovers to sign a release form, it has some of the creepy shadow of Copperfield's island seduction story hanging over it.

The introduction of Jim Carey as Steve Gray, a Criss Angel clone is a good plot development. Every generation of performers looks at the next and shakes their head in disbelief at how far the world has changed on them. Carey is both a  magician and a street freak. There are elements of magic in what he does but there are so many things about the style of his act that scream "carnival geek" that I started to look for a chicken every time he was on screen. The fascination with the morbid seems to have become an obsession and part of the movie focuses on how this has changed the nature of entertainment. Carey plays it just right and manages to mock the paranormal pretensions and stupid gross out effects of the "mind-freaks".  After a convoluted but perfectly understandable series of movie plot techniques puts Burt into a position where he has to accept a booking as a kids entertainer, we get a chance to see some of the real elements of performing take place. Everyone likes money and fame, but magicians like entertaining even more. Carey's lunatic performer has some impressive illusions, the question becomes, is it entertainment? As the two engage in a battle of magic performance for a group of ten year olds, we get to see that the nuts, is not always as entertaining as we might think it is. Olivia Wilde is the wanna be magician, working as an assistant, who sees this early on. She originally worshiped Burt as a kid, loathed him as an employer, and finally respected him again as an entertainer when it is all about the audience. When the oldsters at the retirement home get the attention they need and the kids at the birthday party get the fun they should have, then you can see why someone would become a magician.

The stuff with the loser magicians in the magic bar is fun but it repeats the same joke at the beginning of the movie, that people drawn to this field have something wrong with them. Arkin adds some much needed humanity to the whole film. He is light and funny while also managing to refocus on the ultimate theme of the film. In the end, we see that there is some merit in what the performers do. When we go back to the competing magician theme to finish the movie, there is a little bit of a betrayal of that theme. In order to pull off the trick that will win them the gig, they have to return to a kind of contempt for the audience. Here we get some of the funniest stuff with the "Vanishing Audience" illusion, but we also betray the theme that made the middle part of the story work. I was also a little surprised we did not get a joke that this is what got them into this situation in the first place, making the audience disappear.

After the fantastic credit sequences and end cards we got in last week's "Oz", it was a little bit of a let down to not have some clever graphics and jokes during the exit. This was another example of how conventional the movie was. It feels like it is trapped in the 1980s in tone and style, just like Burt and Anton were. The theater that they perform in during their Vegas shows doesn't look like a Vegas showroom. It is the most conventional theater setting you can imagine, this is another element of the simplified nature of the movie.

As I look back over some of the things I wrote here it seems like I did not care for the movie, but in truth I enjoyed it immneselly. There are a lot of jokes that are subtle and funny and several that are not subtle but also very funny. You will have a good time but it won't be something that will last for long in your memory. There are two or three vulgar bits, and a couple of gross visuals, but it is all in keeping with a PG-13 time at the show. 

If you are interested in seeing some real old time magic, click the poster to the left and visit with a stage performer who always loved his audience and his work.

The World According To Dick Cheney

Cheney is probably the most reviled political figure in recent history, at least by those on the left. There are legitimate issues about his role in the War on Terror and the wisdom of his advice. Most of the criticism though comes with the burden of conspiracy fantasies and name calling that simply makes the critics seem like petulant children. The meme of Dick Cheney as the Darth Vader behind the Emperor, might raise angry voices and dollars for the Democratic Party, but it does little to let us understand the reasoning, the means and the results of Cheney's world view. This documentary actually gives a pretty fair view of both points of view on Cheney. His critics will suggest that it is too lenient on him and that he should be dragged through the streets and hung like Mussolini. His supporters will probably complain that the editing and sequencing of music and interviews and pictures, are a bit selective in pushing the theme that he was a manipulator of information.

The best aspect of this work is that there is an extensive interview with the Vice President, where he explains in his own voice the decisions he made and the point of view that he supports. I suspect that many will be infuriated by his indifference to the criticism he has received. After all the sound and fury of their attacks, he seems completely unruffled by those voices. That is just the thing to stir a hornet's nest. What I found so disheartening is how different he comes across than the current Vice President. Anyone who disagrees with Cheney would still have a hard time arguing that he expresses himself so much more effectively than Joe Biden. Joe is a amiable buffoon in comparison to the reserved gravitas of Cheney. His confidence in what he believes comes across very effectively and when he is disappointed in the actions of Congress or President Bush, it comes through in a resigned smile and a more level tone. The deliberate way in which he expresses himself might be convincing to even hardened leftists if we were simply comparing styles.

Of course it is not about style but about policy that Cheney is most severely judged by. The second half of the documentary focuses on the controversies concerning the case for WMDs,   the prosecution of the war in Iraq, and the case against Scooter Libby. Cheney was a consequential player in the Bush administration, not simply a figure head to be rolled out for fund raising and funerals. The first hour of the film shows why Cheney had the influence that he did. From a very early age he was part of the highest echelons of government. he was an insider on National Security issues from his time in the White House as Chief of Staff to Gerald Ford, and Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush. He was not a neophyte but a politically savvy insider. I found his personal history interesting because in part I was not familiar with all of it. In twelve years he went from two time Yale reject to Chief of Staff to the President of the United States. He went from being a serial DUI offender, to experienced and intelligent adviser to  the head of state. The foamers out there will probably argue that his role in the Halliburton Company was not explored in any depth here, but it seems more likely that instead of him operating on behalf of that company, he largely functioned based on his long political career and that the economic exigencies of Iraq and Halliburton are coincidental.

It was very clear at the end of the film that Cheney was on the outside at the end of the Bush administration. His advice was largely ignored in the last two years in office and the ascendency of Condi Rice marked the decline of the Cheney  as  Bush's go to on security issues. The documentary does not try to answer whether this was a good or a bad thing but simply show that a shift in the administration had occurred. His impotence is shown as he recounts that there were no hands raised when Bush asked at a meeting of National Security advisers, who supported the Vice President' suggestion to attack the Syrian Nuclear Processing site. Cheney is respectful of the President as the film finishes but you can tell by his tone that he was disappointed in Bush, especially for his failure to pardon Scooter Libby.

Like all documentaries, "The World According to Dick Cheney" has an abundance of political agenda to push. Neither side will feel like it has been fair in the way the subject has been presented, and that may be the best proof that the film makers tried to be historians rather than advocates. Both critics and supporters of the Vice President are given voice in this piece, and both voices are modulated to a pretty reasonable tone. Regardless of whether you think Cheney is evil incarnate or an heroic figure of determined intelligence, I think you will find this film rewarding. It treats the subject seriously and tries to allow the viewer to sort out the information and arrive at an informed rather than impassioned conclusion.

KICK ASS 2, YaHoo

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King Kong/King Kong/King Kong

One of the best things I have enjoyed in the last few years is finding others who like sharing their opinions about films. The whole process of using social media and blogging has connected me to several writers on line that I follow regularly. Most are not film professionals nor do they aspire to be. They are passionate enthusiasts of a medium I have loved all my life. They have opinions and ideas that they feel compelled to share with others, and I am usually happy to read them. While I occasionally disagree on some level with them on a particular film or genre, most of the writers I follow are committed to having a friendly dialogue about movies. I am not shy about getting into an argument, but a dispute over opinions is just that, and does not necessitate a flame war. I much prefer to be inspired by the voices out there in a positive way as I am with this post.

My movie memories are a big part of why I write about films. I like to think I understand a little about story telling thru film, but more than that, this is an opportunity to document my feelings and impressions. I suppose that is a little narcissistic, but all good conversations start with some sense of narcissism,  we think others might give a damn about what we think. So I am inspired to write about the three King Kong films because one of the writers I follow devoted three posts to King Kong movies in the last few days and I want to piggyback on the idea. He stuck to the movies he saw on Thanksgiving marathons on the East Coast. Out here on the West Coast, Thanksgiving Day Marathons were devoted to the Twilight Zone, but I could easily have settled in for a Kong Thon before my turkey and dressing.

For someone devoted to movies like I am I must confess it is hard for me to remember my first film. I know my parents took me to 101 Dalmatians right before my brother was born and I have a vague recollection of the experience, thought I would not yet have been four. I do know that by the time I was six, I had seen King Kong, the 1933 classic. I know because we went to the World's Fair in New York in 1964. It was my first time to the Big Apple and I kept looking for Kong on the Empire State building whenever we went out. I remember my mother pointing out the World's Tallest Building (at least I think it was at the time) and telling me to look for Kong. A kid of six takes such advice seriously and I was disappointed that he never showed up, even when we went to the top to check it out. The image of the giant ape climbing the skyscraper is one of the iconic moments in cinema history. It has been lampooned and appropriated for a thousand ads, sketches and performances. At the end of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", as Rocky climbs the RKO Antenna tower with Frankenfurter on his back, the defiant fist pump is a salute to the 1933 original.

I have written before about my desire for emotionalism in movies. I don't need the irony and coldness of most modern motion pictures.  I can take it and enjoy it for what it is, but I like a movie that thrills me, frightens me, makes me laugh or cry. King Kong did all of those things for me when I was a kid. I remember having a nightmare about Kong reaching in his big paw and pulling me out the window. I know I sat on the edge of my seat with a pillow over my face as a kid, watching Kong fight the T-Rex on Skull Island or roll dozens of men off of the giant log that spanned a crevice over which they were pursuing him and then escaping him. I remember two vivid emotions of anticipation in the film before they ever reached the island. Carl Denham is in New York, at the depths of the depression, seeking a woman to take to the island to film his movie. He meets Ann Darrow and gets carried away in recruiting her. " It's money and adventure and fame. It's the thrill of a lifetime and a long sea voyage that starts at six o'clock tomorrow morning", he nearly shouts at her in the diner. That over the top moment thrills me to this day. He is a grown man, excited beyond his ability to contain himself and throwing his whole heart into the adventure. At that moment, I knew I could never resist the siren call of King Kong. The acting style must be thought of as quaint now a days, but to me it has the heart that drives the picture in it. Later on the boat, when he is testing her for photographing and costume, he gives her this direction "Throw your arms across your eyes and scream, Ann. Scream for your life", and that is probably when I learned of foreshadowing in movie story telling.

 

As a kid I always loved the movies of Ray Harryhausen, stop motion is the most amazing special effect because you can see all the work that goes into it. Willis O'Brien was chiefly responsible for Kong, and the effects while dated still work if you are willing to watch without the jaundiced eyes of a hipper than thou modernist. Just as the dialogue, and set design and treatment of primitive people  is of it's time, so are the effects. Films had only had sound for six years when this came out. I can just imagine how audiences of the time were thrilled by it. I once saw what was purported to be the original armature of Kong at a museum exhibit, it looks like it was probably not the main piece but I am still happy to have had a chance to see the detail that went into producing the greatest special effects character of the first half of movie history.

 The horror of Kong breaking through the giant gate on Skull Island is still pretty vivid. The native child screaming and the mother rushing to grab him before Kong crushes them. Others are torn to bits and chewed up and spit out. Later when Kong arrives in New York and breaks free, I saw the terror in the eyes of the passengers on the elevated train as Kong smashes the track they are riding on. Who can forget the image of the bi-planes attacking Kong, who has become a sympathetic creature due to his love of Ann? The slow motion collapse of the mighty ape on the Empire State building brings a gasp of pity for the creature that previously inspired terror. That is great movie making.

Forty plus years later, someone got it in their head that a remake of the classic would be a good idea. To be honest, the idea is nearly a sure thing because the story is so easy to relate to . Beauty and the Beast, with a giant ape in Manhattan, it practically writes itself. The year I started college, while home during the Christmas break, my family came across a full page ad in the newspaper, announcing the "Most Exciting Original Motion Picture of All Time" to be released one year from the day. My Dad and I were transfixed by the image of Kong astride the twin skyscrapers of the World Trade Center, battling jet aircraft. There was a poster premium we could order. I don't remember if it was cereal box tops or coupons from   some other product, but we immediately sent off for the poster reproduction of that Newspaper ad. We got two mini posters a few weeks later and that poster stayed on my bedroom door until after I was married and moved out of the house. I wish I had remembered it before my Mom cleaned out my old room. I could go and look for it in the garage but I know I will never be lucky enough to find it.




Many disparage the 1976 version of Kong, but I think it is perfectly serviceable and it has a few extras that were missing from the original. Mostly that consists of Jessica Lange being fondled and disrobed by Kong but what the heck. As a film it was quite successful financially if not always artistically. My hometown paper the L.A. Times gave it a very positive review and when my family saw it together that Christmas it came out, we all enjoyed it. The special effects to me are a step backwards. Despite spending a fortune on a full sized mechanical Kong, they had to rely on the old Japanese standby of a man in a suit. Of course the man was Rick Baker, who invented modern effects makeup, and the suit was not some cheap guerrilla costume from Hollywood Magic, but a nicely designed costume with an elaborate set of mechanical effects for facial expressions. The giant mechanical hand and the detailed facial expressions of Kong in this movie are the selling points. There is not really much in the oil plot line, and the New York sequences don't have quite the thrill of 1933. While I have seen the film from time to time since then, it is not a version that I own and it has been a few years since I revisited it. As much as I did enjoy it, I do remember that I stayed away from the sequel a couple of years later, "King Kong Lives", it just did not have the romance that the original story evoked in me.


Peter Jackson's King Kong from 2005 is a movie that I anticipated almost as much as the Lord of the Rings films. Jackson is a bit of a nut on King Kong and he wanted to bring all the technical innovations of the last twenty years to bear on the object of his affection. I watched the web videos and followed the progress of the movie with great care. When the trailer appeared in theaters, I fell in love with the tone and the vision of the movie.

It was a throwback to the 1933 film, a period piece with romanticism and adventure galore. I still love the movie but it is easy to see it's flaws through the rearview mirror. The movie is epic in scale and it takes it's time to tell the story. Jackson can't stop adding material in the second act, and the first was more elaborate than necessary. I do think that the final act is really strong and Naomi Watts lives up to the spell cast by Fay Ray and Jessica Lange before her. The park sequence on the frozen pond is a sweet moment that makes the sacrifice at the end even more bitter for us. For all it's excess, the 2005 version of Kong has it's heart in the right place, on it's sleeve for all of us to see. Nothing can ever top the original, but that's because it is so perfect. All three of the movies do their best to show us the eighth wonder of the world. They are all hyper emotional and romantic in different ways. I dragged my family to a midnight screening of Peter Jackson's Kong and it is a memory that we will all be able to share, regardless of evolving opinions of the film itself. My kids will recall the foggy eyed moment of walking out of the theater at 3:30 in the morning, just as I remember searching for Kong through the back window of our station wagon driving into NYC in 1964, or staring at the mini poster on the wall that my Dad and I so much wanted to get when we saw the ad in the paper. The promo for that film could apply to all three versions. "The Most Exciting Original Motion Picture Event of All Time", OK, of all three times.

Oz The Great and Powerful

So this morning I strolled down the Yellow Brick Road and revisited the enchanting land of Oz. Much as it was in 1939, the skies are blue, the forests dark and the promise of Emerald City is boundless. While Dorthy and Toto are nowhere to be found, several  original characters including the Wizard, Glinda, and the Wicked Witch of the West have joined us on our new journey. And while there are not really any glorious songs to sing, there is magic and adventure and heart all around. The technology of 2013 has managed to imitate the craftsmanship of 1939, and the view from here is most satisfying.

As a child, I owned a set of the Oz books and read several of them, but I have very little recall of them. I don't think this film is based on a specific story from Frank L. Baum, instead it is a bridge from his work to the story told seventy four years ago. This story tells the tale of the Wizard and the witches of Oz in an entertaining variation of the musical version. We learn the Wizards origins in the opening section of the movie, done in homage to the MGM classic by starting in black and white in old Kansas, and widening to a broad screen with a vivid color palate once we reach the land of Oz. Many might criticize modern Hollywood for following the lead of Baum in returning to the world of his imagination. It is often said that Hollywood is bereft of new ideas and is thus destined to strip-mine the past for material. That would be a harsh judgement to render here because the story is in fact original and the characters that we encounter simply operate in a world we think we know but for which the imagination continues to invent background.

We knew that the original wizard was a fraud, at least when it comes to the magic of Oz. Yet how does a fake wizard manage to become Oz the first, and wield power for years and be beloved by the citizens of the Emerald City? That's what this movie is all about. It does nothing to step on the lore we knew from Dorothy's visit, it fills in some blank spaces and paints a vivid adventure in the background of what we learned before. The scenes in Kansas create a real sense of place and time, where a carnival performer with big dreams might very well be launched into a giant adventure. Oz knows the kind of magic that men of his time learned to entertain the audience. He knows misdirection and story telling and pyrotechnics. He is a con man but not a malicious one. Women fall for his line but most of them seem to know in the long run that it is a line. I liked that the set up includes some elements that bring about the tragic parts of the story that come later. Oz himself is not blameless in the way wickedness grows in the Land of Oz. Yet it takes an evil twist to produce the outcome that drives the second half of the story. James Franco's Kansas showman and Lothario, has to grow in the course of the story. His shallowness must be revealed to be swept away. It is this arc of the story that makes the film work.

There are four distinct characters that move his progress along. Theodora the witch who discovers and falls for Oz, represents the future without Oz growing. The beautiful Mila Kunis is a little young and not given much chance to show any depth in her character. In the long run, we will feel deeply for the impact the wizard ends up having on her. Finley, the talking and flying monkey, represents the need that Oz has to grow as a human being; loyalty and sacrifice demand from Oz, something he is reluctant to give. Many years later we will hear this echoed in the words that Oz bestows on the Tin Man when he wants a heart. This was a really effective CGI character that adds immensely to the entertainment value of the picture. The China Doll is the opportunity for Oz to act on the impulses he has always had, decency and caring, but that he has dismissed as impractical. He knows that he can't do real magic but he can do a world of good if he gives himself a chance. If you don't eventually fall in love with this ceramic CGI creation, there is something wrong with your heart and you better go see the Wizard yourself.  Finally, Glinda the Good Witch, is his opportunity to stop being a good time Charley and instead be the good man that he despairs of being at the beginning of the story. Michelle Williams was deft and light in this part. She doesn't sound like Billie Burke, but she comes across as sweet and loving as anyone could want.

Franco gets a lot of the notes wrong, but many more of them right. The director allows him to use his smile a bit too often when he could try another expression to convey his change. Sometimes the body movement is a little over the top, but it is forgivable because it is at heart a children's story and things do get exaggerated there. When the Wicked Witch of the West appears, we get excellent foreshadowing of the elements that made her a nightmare for the last six generations of movie lovers. The face, the cackle and the broomstick will leave most viewers glad that we know it will only take a little water to save ourselves. While the effects are contemporary, the style is classic from 1939. This is the stuff I think makes it all work in the long run. We get characters that are true to the world we know, and a story we don't know. The modern wizardry of computers is bent to the classic means of story telling.  The movie is marvelous in appearance and manages to evoke the musical without making itself a duplicate. We don't live in the world of 1939 anymore, and kids today grow up so much faster than they once did.This film tries to straddle the gulf between our age and the more innocent times of three quarters of a century ago. I am personally delighted that whenever they had to lean one way or another to stay balanced in that divide, they usually drift to the classical form. The battle at the end reminds us of the real wizards we had in our world, while still allowing the modern magicians to show off their craft. Just in case you need one more incentive to go, remember it hardly seems like a Sam Rami film without a little Bruce Campbell somewhere.

AMC Best Picture Showcase Day 2

Sitting in the theater waiting for Beasts of the Southern Wild. Both Anne and John Yenny have joined us this week. Let you know briefly what I think after the movie.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

I don't get it. There was some interesting cultural background here but the story is so full of abstract allegory that it made no sense to me. It was also nearly unwatchable. Does anyone use a tripod anymore? I need to stew on it some more but at the moment I am not really expecting any new insight and it may go on the pile of films that I just have no interest in.

OK, I thought about it overnight and I think this is one of those examples of people getting credit for being original without being particularly good. This is a little known culture that is being examined, and despite being American, it feels as alien as if it were from another world. There are many beautiful shots in the film but all of them are marred by the inability of the camera operators to hold still long enough for us to appreciate them. Certainly the director contributed to this. I posted on another blog about the least deserved nomination this year and I selected "Brave" a good film but not a great one. I would like to revise that opinion.  Benh Zeitlin, the director of this movie is the most undeserving nominee this year. He contributed to the music which I liked but was ultimately responsible for the look and feel of this movie and it is terrible.

I got nauseous watching "Cloverfield" a couple of years ago, I would gladly watch it twice more before I subjected myself to this mess. Even shots that are of makeshift boats floating on calm water, are made to look as if you were at sea in a typhoon. Add on top of that the frequency with which those shaky shots are closeups on the actors and you wonder why anyone would like any performance in the film. The lead is a young girl with personality plus and she is as cute as can be. Her character however goes on a journey without changing much in the process. That trip is also prompted by the unlikely  boogie man of global warming. That's right, this is in the same category as "Happy Feet", an environmental propaganda, disguised as something else. 

The more I think about this movie, the less I like it. I see that many praise this film and believe it to be the best of the year. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and here is mine: People who think this is the best movie of the year, don't like movies, they like ideas, and not very good ones at that. 

Life of Pi

The movie is incredibly beautiful and I wonder why I did not see it when it was first out. There are images that will linger in my head for days at least if not for years. The story was nicely told, there are some very spiritual elements to it and I will also be thinking about the film in those terms as well. I never felt the time pass as it was very involving.

I never read the book, it is supposed to be quite good but most thought it would be impossible to translate into film. I can't comment on that translation, but I can say that the framing device used here worked really well at letting us see the story from very different perspectives. The philosophy behind the story is given more context and it is entertaining rather than portentous, which I imagine it could easily have been.  The choice of telling the story this way gives it the feel of an adventure rather than a mediation on struggle. Ultimately the viewer will decide how they want the story to be remembered but the point of view of the writer and them director seems very clear.

This is a CGI heavy film and that usually is a negative for me. Maybe that is why I did not rush out to see it sooner. It is the most realistic CGI that I have seen in a non-fantasy film. The animals and elements are integrated seamlessly into the narrative and I don't think they go overboard (pun) in drawing attention to themselves.  This film was shown in 3D and the added dimension worked very nicely at making me care about the story. The three different actors who play Pi, are all excellent and they have the added advantage of looking like they could indeed be the same person at different stages of life. If there was CGI involved in this aspect of the film, then it has clearly earned the Special Effects accolades that have come along. The tiger is the most noticeable achievement and I can only say from an average viewer's opinion, they got it exactly right.

Lincoln

My opinion of this film has increased immensely since I first saw it. The screenplay still has some structural stiffness to it but if flowed much more smoothly on a second viewing. Of course I may be blinded by my tears of admiration and grief for our 16th President. To have spent two hours with Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln, is to feel as if we were in the presence of the President himself. What small men we have leading us these days. Lincoln had the petty and small minded to deal with as well. I would be happy to offer Daniel Day-Lewis honorary citizenship as well as an Oscar.

If you click on the title or the poster, it will take you to my original review. I stand by my comments but I do think I was able to respond more emotionally a second time because I understood the limitations the story was going to impose on us.

Silver Linings Playbook

Another film that got better on second viewing, and I thought it was excellent the first time I saw it.  Jennifer Lawrence was more impressive than I remembered. If she wins tomorrow I will have no complaints. There is no way that Bradley Cooper will upset Day-Lewis, but again if it were to happen, it is because it was a really good performance. The love story was so much more obvious this time around. Even though the mental illness elements are so up front, the romance shines through.

The criticism I had originally, seems less noticeable to me this time around. I guess that may be the case with many films as it has been with three of the movies I saw during the Showcase. The other actors in the film also play the characters in very realistic ways. One blog I read claims that Jacki Weaver did not deserve her nomination here because all she does is simper and cry. They missed the deep caring that she brought to the Mother who is trying to hold a family together that probably would have come apart long before if not for her intervention. The fact that she is not as screwed up as everyone else in the story should not diminish the contribution she makes. 

Zero Dark Thirty

The last of the Best Picture nominees that I saw. This is a complex story put into a narrative of just two and a half hours, but it covers a decade of real life intelligence information. Sometimes details get convoluted and names that are not familiar to most American ears may be confounding. The movie also has the temerity to  acknowledge that enhanced interrogation techniques were a part of the process of finding the world most wanted terrorist. Just like in ARGO, the C.I.A. gets to be correctly labeled as heroes again. They deserve to be lauded for their efforts here, and people should recognize that inference is not a perfect science. That's how they got WMDs wrong but Bin Laden right.

The star of this movie is a terrific actress and she is very good here, but I think her part is not as vivid as it could have been. Jessica Chastain is trying to make a cypher of a human being into a memorable character, who serves as the audiences point of view in the film. The closest we come to being engaged with her character is in the final section, where she waits the arrival of the SEAL team and their cargo. The intelligence treasure trove is of course going to be something an analyst should care about, but she is the audiences surrogate. It is her visual confirmation of the bodies identity that is the catharsis we have waited for.

There are so many good actors in this picture and most of them are there for a very brief time. Kyle Chandler is in both this and Zero Dark Thirty. Two Best Picture nominees in the same year. He seems to have good taste and a good agent. All of the C.I.A. officers seem vibrant and intelligent. I liked the comment that James Gandofini's version of Leon Panetta makes, "We're all smart here". While it may be true it is also indicative of the posture of the ruling political class and it serves as a slapdown to anyone who challenges those conventions.   Along with the implied criticism of the political bureaucracy and the spoken fear the operative had of the President's policies, this film was a heck of a lot more honest than I think most expected it to be.

Thanks to the Yennys for making this a great social day also.

Academy Award Picks 2013

OK, I still have a number of films to see in the Best Picture Showcase tomorrow, but this is a list of Predictions rather than preferences. Sticking to just the top six categories for fun and simplicity.

Best Supporting Actor

Lincoln wa the most nominated film, but it is not going to win the Best Picture Award so I think there will be an attempt to spread the love around and therefore the pick here is Tommy Lee Jones.

Best Supporting Actress

Her name should have been engraved on this as soon as the first trailer came out. No Doubt about it      Anne Hathaway.

Best Actor

An even bigger lock than Anne Hathaway, he earned this one from the first poster. It felt like we spent 2 hours with America's greatest leader. Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln.

Best Actress

The toughest category to call. Emmanuelle Riva was amazing, but I think the Academy will jump on the Jennifer Lawrence bandwagon.

Best Director

Another win for Lincoln by default, no Ben Affleck in the category. Who would ever think Spielberg would be a winner in this competition as a result of attrition. The amazing Steven Spielberg picks up his third director Oscar.

Best Picture

The winner, and as of now my personal favorite,

All the Best Picture Winners in Four Minutes

Academy Awards: Best Picture Oscar Winners from Nelson Carvajal on Vimeo.

Just found this when looking around on line. Nice work by the editor. Enjoy

AMC Best Picture Showcase Day 1

Today is the first day of the Best Picture Showcase. I will be updating posts on the Kirkham A Movie A Day Facebook Page, and later will transfer them here. If you want the live updates, just go to Facebook. Looking forward to a great day.

OK, I had a little trouble here. There was a post about the first two films we saw but when I went to update, I accidentally posted an earlier draft and wiped out my comments.

So here are some insights on the movies we saw today. A little later than I had hoped for, but worth talking about nonetheless.

AMOUR

I had been warned that the movie was bleak and that it was claustrophobic. It is after all about two old people in their apartment facing death. No spoiler here because the very first scene reveals that the wife Anne is dead in her bed. The film chronicles the sudden decline and painful process of coping with a debilitating illness while still maintaining the love and dignity that a partner of many years deserves. I found it much more interesting than I had expected. There were some light touches here and there, the kinds of daily moments that all of us have that make a hard day bearable.

The dialogue is all in French, and there is basically no film score. Music does play a part in the story but it is not used in background, it is integrated as a small part of the events that take place. One blog I read said that it is not a movie, in large part because nothing happens. It is very deliberate in it's pace, but there are small events chronicled and the characters do go through an arc of developing changes.  My friend Anne sat next to me and there were two moments where she jumped and grabbed my arm in alarm. That is not a movie that has no drama in it.

Having been married to my wife for thirty two years, I understand how complex the emotions were for the two people involved. Sometimes we are at our best, but it does not take long for us to be at our worst either. The two lead actors in this are amazing. The story is small and slow and mostly painful, but it is also filled with the kind of love that is deep and abiding. May we all make it to the end with this kind of courage and devotion.

Les Miserable

I have already written about this film but I do have a couple of minor modifications. I found the music still quite good, and the main songs are often excellent. The problem with the singing transitions and lack of tunefulness continues. Anne Hathaway will deserve her award, she has the two most moving moments in the film. I thought Hugh Jackman did himself credit and the last sequence where he reconciles  his love with having touched the face of God, brought the tears that I had missed the first time around.

I think for a neophyte like me, the immersion into the story the first time, with it's talk singing transitions was a bit overwhelming. I still see flaws and it almost certainly works better as a stage show. On stage the pace would break for scene changes and applause. The big moments would feel more like they were earned rather than dumped on us. The film tries to overpower continuously, and the camera work is much to busy and excessively close.

ARGO 

This continues to be the favorite for the Academy Award and it was my favorite from the moment I saw it. Nothing has changed for me. The tension starts right away, you are plunged into a world of terror masquerading as a people's revolution, and nothing ever feels safe. I will add a couple of comments on issues that I did not discuss before. I was provoked to laughter when watching the Iranian Foreign Minister criticizing the Canadians for their supposed breach of International Law. That actually happened while the Iranians were holding the hostages. I also liked the authenticity of the era even more when I remembered that the Warner Brother's logo at the start of the film was the 1979 era design. It was a clever little touch that I'm not sure everyone noticed.

The brave part of this film making is to actually acknowledge that our people there were just doing their jobs. Many of them despised the Shah also, but what they got in his place is not much better and in so many ways worse. The C.I.A. are the good guys in this story, and we get some Hollywood history to boot. One of my wife's friends thinks this is really just a TV movie. I'd like to subscribe to the programming she must be seeing, because this is top notch film work by everyone involved.

DJANGO UNCHAINED

Quentin Tarantino makes movie for people who like movies more than films. Yet there is also an aspect to the movies he makes that raises them to art status. This revisionist western, that attacks the easy target of slavery, does so with gusto and outrageous violence. There is so much to laugh at in the film, you might sometimes miss the stern rebuke our ancestors receive for allowing this institution to thrive anywhere in the U.S.

This made my list of the best films of the year but it is not necessarily Tarantino's best film. The three leads are all excellent but once again I suspect that Christoph Waltz has stolen the show. His bounty hunting dentist, with a clearer grasp of English than all the Americans he interacts with, is a character to treasure in your movie going memory. Django gets the big shootout, but Dr. King Schultz has all the best lines. 

 

Next week we have the other five nominees. Three of those will be new to me and I will try to write them up a with a fresh attitude. See you all next week.

DP/30: Skyfall, sound re-recording mixer Greg Russell

A Good Day to Die Hard

To say "A Good Day to Die Hard" is a disappointment is an understatement. Many people may have had low expectations for the film. There were a large number of fans who rejected the last film "Live Free or Die Hard" as not being a true "Die Hard" experience, so they had no hope for this to begin with. At our house however, John McClane is an icon, and we all enjoyed the hell out of the 2007 entry. If I can find the photo of the standup that we have, I will post it later (see below). There may have been some flaws in the last film but they were inconsequential from our point of view. From the first strains of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in the trailer, we were anticipating and excited that a new film featuring one of our favorite characters was coming. Ten minutes into the new film I started to worry and half an hour in, I knew it was pretty much a lost cause. This movie is flaccid, confusing, and put together in a way that shows a severe weakness in story telling and an utter disregard for the things that make McClane a great character.

This is a generic spy film, masquerading as "Die Hard". There is ultimately a heist element to it, but by the time you get to it, there is very little left that is interesting. We all want plenty of action in a film like this, but it has to be connected to the story and character to pull us in. There is very little set up to this movie, and the events that start the first action sequence are confusing. Within a short period of time we are plunged into an elaborate chase where people we don't know, are chasing people we don't know and are being followed by a character we should know but who gets behind the wheel for reasons we can't know. Yeah, that's the way it feels. The car chase has three vehicles chasing each other, in circumstances that are not always clear. There is a communication between McClane Junior and his C.I.A. handlers, that features a drone over Moscow, and there is some kind of time window that they are up against. There is no explanation of what the time window means, what the objective is for the lead vehicle, and the mayhem that ensues is simply random. Here is one of the ways the film fails to be "Die Hard": there are quips but they are disconnected from character. McClaine makes apologies to invisible drivers in anonymous cars for no reason at all. None of the quips are funny and they don't have the edge that characterizes our NYPD Lieutenant.

 As we spoke of it last night, there is a pretty obvious reason the film fails. There is a severe lack of a demonstrably intelligent and evil villain. Alan Rickman, Jeremy Irons, Timothy Oliphant are each solid actors that can convey smarts with a word, a look or inflection. Even William Sadler's Col. Stuart had personality and confidence. Here we have two competing villains from the beginning, neither of which gives us much of an impression of themselves. One of them is supposed to be brilliant, we know this because he plays Chess against himself. That's it for character development. There is a snotty henchman that kills randomly, including his own men, but can't be bothered to shoot our heroes at much more provocation than he gets in the rest of the movie. All of the other "Die Hards" feature exchanges between the bad guys and our hero. That's where John gets to smirk, insult and generally push their buttons to the boiling point. There is no boiling point here. Everything is hot from the beginning and one hot item is replaced with another when it is convenient for the plot despite being unbelievable for the characters. The plot turns are so obvious and dull that it would surprise me if anyone could be bothered to explain why any of it happens.

 The third and fourth films in the series, added side kick characters so that McClane could bounce off of them and they would provide some relief from all of his deliberate actions. They provide a little spark to the film. McClane's son is supposed to provide that here, but his character barely has anything to say and when he does say it, it is muttered under his breath. Samuel Jackson's colorful vulgarities and race baiting and Justin Long's hipster geek irony were fun. Jai Courtney as Jack, has little chance to match insults or vent with his dad. He mostly glowers for reasons that we are supposed to understand without being told. His role in the spy plot is partially hinted at but vanishes in an instant and we are left with a chase film where we don't understand who is chasing who. The whole movie consists of shootouts and jumping. Jack shoots and jumps but does not seem to think or analyze. John McClane apparently has second sight, because he gets suspicious twice of characters that we have barely met when they turn around on the heroes.

 There was one point a third of the way through the movie that gave me a brief moments hope. The henchman character thinks he is insulting the two Americans when he says, "it's not 1986 and Reagan isn't President." Here is a chance for some sparkling cowboy swagger to go with our long awaited Yippee Ki Yea, instead there is just some laughter used to cover an escape attempt. Nothing creative or connected to what the other characters are doing or saying. Where is John McClane? Look Bruce Willis can still sell a movie but he has to have more than his looks to do so. The stunts, shootouts, chases in this are all so by the numbers that, you can count the moments till the next one, in your head. We went to an advance 10:00 pm screening and were the only people in the theater. Somewhere some one smelled this coming. We would not have listened, but that doesn't mean that we should not have.

The Impossible

If you can get through the trailer without a tear in your eye, you might be able to make it through this movie dry eyed. I freely admit I could do neither. The story of one family's survival in the face of the 2004 Tsunami is truly moving and quite frightening to anyone who has a family that they love. The pain and hardship that all families effected by the disaster is hard to imagine. Visualizing it for us is a harsh reminder of all that was lost but also an inspiring story of hope and love. Once upon a time, disaster movies were all star affairs, where nightmares were invented. "Earthquake", "The Towering Inferno" etc. Getting through a fictionalized story with cardboard characters is an exciting vicarious experience. Watching a real family, even though portrayed by actors is nearly traumatizing.

In 2004, there was no YouTube and the clips of the tsunami were limited. Two years ago, in the Japanese event, the cameras were ubiquitous, and the clips on-line were numerous. The terrifying power of the ocean, rising across the vista, sweeping away all in it's path fascinated me. I spent hours watching in torment as I could see people and cars being swept away from helicopter shots overhead. This film brings us to the ground level and puts us in front of those waves with the endangered family. The sequence of the tsunami striking the resort where the family was vacationing is incredibly realistic. The vision of being pulled under and tossed about while objects bashed you or cut you or worse is something that the film makers have recreated with intimate reality. Because the focus is on one family, this does not feel much like an entertainment, but more like a well realized visual diary of their experience.

Naomi Watts plays the mother of this group, and she and the oldest son are the main focus. Her performance has been nominated for an Academy Award and it is understandable why she was singled out. She is strong and terrified all at once. The stunts and makeup must have been grueling, and it is hard to imagine the difficulty of being able to act in those contexts. Her performance is primarily in non-verbal expression of love and determination. Although she has dialogue, it is not the words that anyone will remember from her performance, it is the anguish of her scream as she clings to a tree. It is the breathless facial expression she gives to her son in the overcrowded and frustratingly chaotic hospital. The look of hopeful gratitude she conveys to everyone who helped her and her son is an expression that I imagine all of us would have when aid is offered to the desperate.

Ewan MacGreggor plays the anguished dad. He is also excellent but with far less screen time and a story that does not have the same traumatic physical action to it, I think he has been overlooked when passing out praise. I have to say however, that the real star of this film is the young actor Tom Holland, who portrays "Lucas" the oldest son. Much of the film rides on our ability to relate to the story through the eyes of a ten year old boy. His actions are heroic at times, and when there was selfishness, he made it seem like the natural reaction of a scared child. There are long periods of time where the camera lingers on his face and sagging shoulders. This is not a performance that is overly emotive. His tears come at appropriate moments and do not overwhelm the story. This is what a great child performance looks like.

The other two children are also very good but they largely get by on the sweet faces and innocent manners of kids everywhere. Geraldine Chaplin turns up for one brief memorable scene and she gives the boy playing the middle son an opportunity to shine and make us care even more about this family. While the family is the center of the story, in the background we can see the story of thousands of others. The details are not delved into, but the difficulty is something we will be able to related to. This is a true horrifying story of survival. It did not need to be tweaked to bring the drama to home and change the label to "Inspired by True Events". That human beings of any type managed to crawl out of the debris left by this powerful event is amazing. That a family of five, including three small children, survived, got lost, and separated and found each other again is Impossible.

Spiders 3D

Here is a film that sneaks into theaters today and will be in your video store in a month. It is a movie that is clearly planned for a straight to DVD release but probably had contractual obligations to play in a certain number of theaters to get the kind of promotion and upfront fees it needed. I went and looked and even BoxOffice Mojo did not have the number of screens it was playing on. Spiders (3D) is being played off pretty quickly because that is the way the movie business has gone. It won't be long until all these kinds of movies never play in real theaters, just home theaters.

I have to say from the standpoint of a guy who grew up in the 1960s and 70s, that's too bad. Creature feature ought to be enjoyed in a theater on a Saturday afternoon with a bag of popcorn and three of your buddies. Spiders (3D) is not a self aware camp classic. There is no tongue in cheek here. I saw a trailer for a very similarly themed film called "Big Ass Spider" and it looks like it will fall in the same venue as "Snakes on a Plane"or "Eight Legged Freaks". Movies with a high level of irony and hipster sensibilities. Spiders (3D) is not hip, it doesn't try to be funny or fresh. In fact in some ways the story is downright creaky. All it does is tell a traditional Sci Fi/Horror story for a brisk ninety minutes. It has a lot of traditional elements to it and it is exactly the kind of movie that you might have found as a second feature attached to the main attraction in a 1970's film release.

 Basically, spiders from an experiment on a old Soviet Space Station, end up in the subways of New York and bad things start to happen. There have been dozens of movies with giant creature themes and almost all of them have been entertaining in one way or another. The giant bunnies in "Night of the Lepus" are so silly that you will laugh at the movie. The swarm of spiders in "Arachnophobia" will make your skin crawl as you are laughing and squealing. The giant ants in "Them" are clunky but creepy for the time, and the bugs that attack the Earth in "Starship Troopers" are swarming with CGI badness. "Spiders" has some of the same kinds of thrills but they are all very mild. Early on we get the creepy from the way spiders move and the idea of them planting eggs inside a body. In the later parts of the movie we are treated to Godzilla style spectacle with Army and Air Force units fighting against the arachnids. None of it is very gruesome, this is not a spatter zone like Troopers was. This is just fighting back against big spiders.

 Two very traditional archetypes are present here. First you have the splintered family being tested and restored by adversity. The lead characters are a NY Transit official and his soon to be ex-wife public health inspector, who discover the nature of the threat. They have a tween daughter that is neglected but loved and an older babysitter who plays protector when the mom and dad can't be around. The second cliche in the movie is the military conspiracy which wants to weaponize the species. There is a hard headed colonel who leads the network of evil insiders against the general population but also the troops themselves. Nether story goes very far, they are just convenient frameworks upon which the story can rely to move to the next scene. There are no surprises in the resolution of the story, there is not a high level of fear, just a little bit of creepy.


The film was competently made, none of the actors seemed amateurish even when the story and dialogue seemed to be. The special effects are mostly screen work and CGI with a few practical on camera prop pieces. I did think there was a nice shot early on in the film when the one of the small spiders aggressively attacks a rat in the subway tunnel as the bureaucrats are talking in the background. This is a family friendly little science fiction flick that was put together on a budget, tells a conventional story and finishes quickly. It would be a very high class film for the SyFy network, but it would only rate graveyard hours on most cable networks. Don't go out of your way to find it, you can show it to the ten, eleven and twelve year olds in your house on a rainy day. Afterwards you can play a game of "Monopoly" or "Clue" and have a safe,pleasant evening at home.

Kirkham A Movie A Year

I posted on the Letterboxed Site but some of you may not be on there. Somehow I managed to make it to 55 and I can't quite believe it. To show you how long a period of time that is, I have listed one movie from every year that I have been alive. These are not necessarily the best movies of the year. In fact many of them are obscure, but I loved them at one time or another and I would heartily endorse all of them and be willing to argue the point. As I did with my James Bond List in November, I simply cut and pasted screen shots of the Letterboxed page. I will also include a link if you want to see it closer.

 

 55 years of movies on Letterboxed.

Warm Bodies

OK, here is an analogy for you; "Twilight" is to Vampires, as "Warm Bodies" is to Zombies.I've never been one of the haters of the "Twilight" series, but I never understood why the brooding emo kids were supposed to be vampires. The only thing they had in common with traditional vampires was that they drank blood. Well the only thing the Zombies in this movie have in common with traditional Zombies is that they eat brains. I don't see an automatic problem with playing with the conventions of a genre, but the whole purpose of this movie is to take those conventions and sweep them away, to tell a story that has almost nothing to do with the original set up. It feels like more of a cheat here than it did in the teen werewolf/vampire soap opera. It was a fun idea for the duration of the trailer, but for the length of a movie it kind of irritated me.

Every few years or so, Shakespeare's immortal tragedy Romeo and Juliet, is reinvented for the cinema. Zeffirelli and Baz Luhrman, stay true to the text and visualize the story differently. "West Side Story" turns it into a musical, "Valley Girl" turns it into a teen romance without the tragedy. I had missed the name of the female character in this movie until she returns back to the protected compound of uninfected humans. As soon as she was greeted by her name, I saw all the connections to the Shakespeare play. "Warm Bodies" is Romeo and Juliet with Zombies, but pretending to be something else. Frankly it is less a romance than a comedy, and the story, as classic as it may be is not quite strong enough to hold all the disparate elements together.

The leads are attractive enough and the unusual nature of their romance is played up.Nicholas Hoult was the star of one of my favorite films from the previous decade, "About a Boy". From the gawky kid he played in that movie he has grown to be the kind of handsome young man that girls might swoon over, even if he is dead. Of course he never really is, at least not from our understanding of zombies. If you are willing to accept that Zombies can be sentient, then I guess there is a chance that this will work. The internal monologue of the Hoult's lead character, "R", is funny in a self knowing and mocking way. Of course it immediately undermines all the horror elements of the movie and there is never a single moment of horror or fright. There is one jump, but it has to do with our lovers as hero survivors rather than the Zombie Apocalypse. This movie is really designed as a Valentines Day date movie without Nicolas Sparks.

You really have to shut your brain off on this one. There is an early joke about how slow the zombies move, but five minutes later, "R" is running with Julie down corridors and across airport tarmacs. Zombies can't talk, according to the internal monologue, but again, just a few minutes later, "R" is doing Tarzan speak with Julie. Except for the one incident of brain eating, he could easily be the cute mute boy next door and not a zombie. Most of the humans in the "safe zone" act more zombie like than the "corpses" they supposedly fear. With the exception of Julie, and her cute best friend (and nurse, wink, wink Billy) no one seems to be doing much in the human world. Her father, the head of the security for the "safe zone" is played by John Malkovich, in the least John Malkovich way possible. There is nothing about his character that suggests that Malkovich was a good casting choice. It is a waste of a good actor with cache to spare in oddball parts. Here he could be anybody.

If you are a fifteen year old girl, you will like the film for the cute boy and girl love story. If you are anyone else, I hope you go with a fifteen year old girl because otherwise the experience will be wasted on you. Two or three small laughs in the beginning, followed by an hour of "what the hell is this?" and then an attempt to turn the death of Romeo and Juliet into the restoration of life to our main character. The word "exhumed" is used as a punch line for a lame bit in the movie, but it is prophetic, because after I saw this, I needed to be "exhumed" from the stupor that it induced.

Bullet to the Head

I saw a couple of sites that were hating on this film. I can't understand why they would despise it so much, unless they were expecting all the punchlines from the trailer that did not show up. Two weeks ago, Schwarzenegger returned to the action scene with a movie tailored to his age and cut to fit his style. Sly is doing pretty much the same thing here, only it looks like they cut down on the humor and built up the violence to make it work for his style. Arnold has always been a little bit of a cartoon, so some of the over the top gags were appropriate there, but Stallone is much more based in the real. His milieu has always been gritty. From Rocky to Rambo and a dozen others, Sly films have always hung around the edges rather than in the glamor. "Bullet to the Head" is pretty much a grim action feature that follows a standard pattern and provides a huge dose of violence. That's it, pretty much end of story.

Stallone did not write or direct this one like he did with the last of his Rambo, Rocky films and the first Expendables. He appears to be an actor for hire here and that means his input may have been somewhat limited. He does not exactly walk through the role, but there is nothing in this that feels the least bit personal to him. The movie was directed by the once great Walter Hill. He has had a hand in dozens of movies that I have loved, but he too appears to simply be working here not invested. The movie was competently shot, in focus and used standard modern film making techniques, but nothing about it stands out. Except for Stallone's age and the amount of blood on the screen, this could have rolled out in the highlight period of both their careers, the late 1980s.

Hill wrote the book on spinning the body cop formula off into new directions. In "48 Hours" the buddy was a con, sprung from jail to help on the case (it helped immeasurably that the con was Eddie Murphy in his breakout role). In "Red Heat" the buddy was a policeman from the Soviet Union, and the Austrian Oak adds charisma to Jim Bulushi as the American cop. Here, Stallone plays the odd man out. He is the criminal enforcer who teams up with an out of town Korean American cop in New Orleans. Sung Kang is an actor I did not recognize, but when I looked him up it turned out I'd seen him in three or four films. Unfortunately, the fact that I could not remember him is indicative of his presence in this movie. There is nothing in his character that was special or fun and there was even less in the performance. Like Sly, he's just here to earn a paycheck. He does his job but does nothing to lift the movie.

Stallone is 67 years old this year. His body is pumped up and the veins in his arms pop in that style of most committed body builders. His face looks like it has aged, but normally. There are no obvious signs of the plastic surgery that many older performers suffer from. When people warn youngsters about tattoos, they often visualize the tattoo on a sagging body and wrinkled torso. I don't think the tats he sports in the film are real, but you would have a hard time using his physique as a warning to the teens thinking about body art. I had no trouble seeing him as a still tough guy, even at that age. Late in the story he has a one on one fight with a much younger and I think bigger opponent, played by recent Conan star Jason Momoa. Their fight is still believable, or at least as believable as you are going to get when guys are facing off with axes.

The axes actually reminded me of maybe the worst Stallone vehicle I ever saw, "Cobra". In that film, a cult of serial killers are after Stallone and there was a scene where they held axes in each hand and clanged them together like the thundersticks you might see at a baseball game. It was stupid there, and only slightly more real in the current film The ridiculous nature of the face off gets the one good joke in the movie as Sly's character wonders if he and his opponents are supposed to be vikings. That's about it for the jokes. I did appreciate the irreverent politically incorrect insults that his character throws at the Asian American cop. It's not that they were good, or funny, it's just that it seems like the way a person like his character would speak. It isn't cleaned up to avoid insulting anyone, it simply shows the mindset that his criminal lives in. If there was something in the movie other than Stallone to recommend it, I missed it. This is another one that is what you expect it to be. Not as entertaining as "the Last Stand", but very much a workable action flick for as couple of hours. I want Stallone to keep working, but if he makes more movies like this, his career will return to the icebox times of the early 2000s, and no body wants that.