ThomasSpurlin.com

Oh, 'There Be Dragons'; But Slaying 'Em Is a Drab Affair

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 03:40:00 +0000

Directed by: Roland Joffé, Runtime: 122 minutes
Grade: D+

The bits and pieces of a proper Roland Joffé film lay scattered in the rubble of his recent historical war drama, There Be Dragons: an examination of faith during wartime, a conflicted anti-hero confronting an unrespectable past (and present), and the struggles of morality and recompense that exist between them. The same Joffé who knocked The Killing Fields and The Mission out of the ballpark might've created something singular, or even moving out of his Spanish Civil War epic, which focused on the need for both realist soldiers and idealist faith-believers in trying times. But what's created here comes closer in quality to the director's stodgy adaptation of The Scarlet Letter than his outstanding namesakes of inner turmoil and war-torn complications; There Be Dragons spins its thematic tires by mixing overplayed, woodenly-acted theatrics within a dull tonal foundation, and though a poignant point's in there, somewhere, it's lost in a strewn, drab depiction of war and moral complexity.

Before it goes back to the mid-'30s to focus on the war, Joffé's film starts in the current era. A Spanish journalist named Robert (Dougray Scott, Perfect Creature) researches his dying father, Manolo, after discovering he had ties -- uneasy ones -- with Josemaría Escrivá (Charlie Cox, Stardust), a candidate for sainthood, in his youth. As Robert digs deeper to figure it out, without much assistance from his estranged father, the film transports to the era and begins fleshing out their history, from their childhood and their scuffles in a Catholic monastery to the point when Manolo (Wes Bentley, American Beauty) splinters off and takes up arms in the war. From there, There Be Dragons tells two distinct stories: Manolo's, which chronicles a "practical" outlook on life and the importance of war, his infatuation with a beautiful revolutionary, Ildiko (Olga Kurylenko, Quantum of Solace), and his internal struggles with forgiveness and purpose; and Josemaría's, which illustrates the dangers of being a priest during that time.

I'm inclined to believe that the key difference between Roland Joffé's '80s canon and There Be Dragons primarily traces back to the person holding the pen: in this case, Joffé attempts to wear both hats as director and writer, and it's clear that he's much more adept at bringing others' work to life. The ideas of slaying inner dragons and choosing between practicality and higher-being faith during wartime sound rousing, and the Spanish Civil War offers a great time-period to do so, but Joffé's writing, in particular his dialogue, gravitates towards little more than loutish flip-flopping between cliché inspirational murmuring and bleak sulking to justify it. He's so wrapped up in creating that ersatz moral arena that he neglects to fully weave an authentic fabric for Josemaría and Manolo, allowing our observations of a priest who chooses the cloth and a pragmatist who chooses against it to be enough character-sketching to support the film's attempts at emotional clarity.

Portraying Manolo marks a poignant turning-of-the-tide in Wes Bentley's career, in that it's his first stab at a truly substantial role after completely sobering up from his post-stardom bender, sparked by his success with American Beauty (candid, eye-opener interviews with Bentley can be found at the NYTimes and at Movieline). And he does bring that life experience to There Be Dragons by lending much-needed validity to his dark, embroiled gazes and weighted stoicism, shaping a man who's chosen the practicality of destructive warfare over organized religion as his way of changing the world. He's clearly the standout here among performances that border on the one-dimensional and sporadically dull; Charlie Cox brings the jovial charm he exudes in Stardust to Escrivá, while Olga Kurylenko musters the wide-eyed romanticism of a spellbound revolutionary with eyes for a charismatic leader (played with enough gusto by Rodrigo Santoro). But that's all there is to the characters, really: the pretty agenda-driven woman who doesn't desire Manolo, the revolutionary leader who's double the man of Manolo, and the childhood chum-turned-priest who made the smarter decision than Manolo did at the same crossroads.

All of that might be filed under the category of subjective observations though, yet they play second fiddle to the more disconcerting flaw in There Be Dragons: Joffé's direction simply isn't as engaging or effervescent enough to achieve the lofty importance of its aims, which makes the film a dry historical chore as it attempts repeated evocative punches -- and not nearly enough of 'em land. Gabriel Beristain's sober photography keeps a clear eye on the well-assembled design of the Spanish Civil War, sure, with sumptuously-lit Catholic seminaries, rustic apartments, and gravelly Spanish battlegrounds, but the production polish and the remnants of its faith- and redemption-based motives merely dress up Joffé's lacking execution. And once everything in Manolo's world converges, tying into his son Robert's own discord, even the flutters of thematic fire that Joffé sparked have all but burned out. Internal dragons are slain here, but the process of watching it happen isn't a stimulating one.

Bolder, Smart Antics in 'Panda 2' Approach Original's Quality

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 17:48:00 +0000

Directed by: Jennifer Yuh Nelson, Runtime: 91 minutes
Grade: B+

So often, we're asked to enjoy animated films with an air of familiarity that harks to the first (or second, or third) entry in a series, where tag lines reemerge and the story walks and talks just like those that came before it. Kung Fu Panda 2 isn't immune to this; the mix of spirited brawls, throwbacks to classic '70s and '80s kung-fu cinema, and jabs at an unlikely, jiggly hero strays little from the formula that worked with Dreamworks' Oscar-nominated surprise hit from a few years back. Instead, the artistic gang has tweaked it a little by holding back on the humor and dialing up the explosive candy-coated action, while taking a serious angle by exploring the origin of Po, an orphaned panda fresh in the ways of the hand-to-hand art form. The result isn't a step-up in quality or originality, really, more maintaining status quo than anything else, but this brisk, action-driven romp is refreshingly free of the been-there, done-that rustiness that causes sequels to creak at the joints, and it does have a few creative surprises up its sleeve.

We're taken back to the hills of ancient China shortly after the events of the first Kung-Fu Panda, where Po (Jack Black) continues to train with the Furious Five as the newly-crowned "Dragon Warrior" -- a pre-destined hero of the land. His recent lessons focused on inner peace, led by his red panda master, Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), are interrupted by the threat of a new villain: Shen (Gary Oldman), a conniving peacock with aristocratic blood and capable kung-fu techniques, though he's more interested in the unyielding power of artillery and explosives than the honor of a fair fight. In the midst of a battle, triggered by an insignia on one of his opponent's sleeves, Po begins to have flashes of a memory filled with fire and violence that interrupt his butt-kicking, which seem to connect with his life before he started living with his dad, the chef- goose Mr. Ping (James Hong), at the noodle house. His journey to save China seems as if it'll have a second purpose this time: to discover where he comes from, and to find his own inner peace.

Nearly all of the positive comments paid to the original, from its merit solely as an action film to its consistent humor and eye-grabbing visuals (not to mention the strong voice cast, all of which return), can undeniably be carried over to Kung Fu Panda 2, a sharp and spirited piece of animation from Dreamworks that knows what it's doing when satisfying a wide-aged audience. Sure, the blubbery slapstick shtick knocking Po oafishly around grows more tedious this time around, and the cartoonish action goes overboard when watching a snake stretch, a hand-flung rickshaw fly down the street, or balls (or arrows) of fire conveniently not ignite our heroes. The excitement factor, though, rubs out these issues; you're so absorbed by the rush of energy that propels the simple story of the Furious ~~Five~~ Six charging to save China -- and, at the same time, saving kung-fu itself by defeating artillery with their bare hands -- that its zanier antics camouflage themselves against the barrage of visually-interesting delights.

Dreamworks have also ramped up the design for Kung Fu Panda 2, spicing it up with some chic, dark new artistry. The designers either must have heard the praise that the hand-drawn watercolor-esque style received or discovered the creative potential on their own, because it's much more prevalent this time around within the core computer-generated imagery. All Po's memories (and a particularly clever dream sequence, involving a renegade radish) appear in this style, creating an elegant union between the two as his mind flashes from the present to the past. On top of that, choosing a peacock as the main villain opens up the opportunity for incredible eye-popping visuals, which the film exploits; the spread of Shen's wings, often draped in the dark, ominous blues of night and the radiance of iron-forged reds and yellows, create some really striking displays. The same sort of condensed, textured ancient-China scenery returns from the first film -- flourishing, green vistas and bustling villages -- but there's a healthy dose of creativity here that's more than just a lazy carry-over of the same models.

Kung Fu Panda 2's ace-in-the-hole, though, comes in some modest intelligence that underlines the script's main action thrust, and the structure it builds around orphans, rejection, rediscovering contentment and the "scars" that form in its place. While it's not enough to elevate this sequel to the caliber of a thinking man's animated film (though the aforementioned radish dream comes close to suggesting otherwise), it does use that curiosity and inner turmoil as a clever backbone for the progression of Po's story and the surfacing of a convincing villain, instead of merely creating another "big bad" to challenge the Dragon Warrior's pedigree ... or something simple-minded along those lines. There's some heft here, alongside a very blatant anti-weaponry message, and it's heightened by the quality of the villain himself: Gary Oldman takes his voice into piercing, exaggerated mode for Shen, and when matched with his sinister, albeit frail saunter and wing-spreading around his decadently-lit throne room, keeping your eyes glued to what this thwarted member of royalty does is more than a little gripping.

That's all secondary to the main point, though: Kung Fu Panda 2 is nearly, if not just as much fun as its predecessor, and it's because of the very clear balance stricken between pleasing its two audiences and concentrating on what gives the series its pulse. Dreamworks relies less on humor, makes it more dynamic and epic-scaled in terms of action (there's a crumbling tower scene at the center that's breathtaking), and pumps it full of personality that's not insulting to either adults or children. Sure, there might be too much action and colorful explosions, and the more intimate moments involving Po's discovery of inner peace and his lineage might be crammed into, and rushed through, its 90-minute run, but when animation's this thrilling on a base level -- I don't hesitate in saying that it's one of the best action movies of 2011 -- then the lack of restraint really doesn't matter, and will be most welcome in the all-but-assured sequel that's suggested at the end.

Suspense, Historical Backdrop Bolster 'The Debt'

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 19:14:00 +0000

Directed by: John Madden, Runtime: 113 minutes
Grade: B

Fueled by one of the stronger motivations that could occupy a historical/political thriller, John Madden's The Debt is about the capture of a Nazi war criminal -- an experimental doctor -- for the purpose of holding a trial in Israel for his actions. Three hand-selected operatives orchestrate a cloak-and-dagger mission and, afterward, keep him detained, fed, and clean while their home country prepares for their arrival. That's just the first half of the story; the second explores the operatives' elder years, where they've harbored and lamented the truth of what really happened during his imprisonment. It sounds disheartening, blatantly so, and it might have been had Madden chose to stress historical mourning too heavily. But the Shakespeare in Love director creates a shrewd and skillful espionage thriller that uses reparation, justice, and ultimately retribution for the acts of World War II as enthralling drivers instead of pushy mediums for rumination, punctuated by historical magnitude instead of directly driven by it.

Remade from an Israeli production by the Stardust/Kick-Ass writer duo of Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman, as well as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy's Peter Straughan, Madden's film first centers on a modern point in 1997, where the daughter of former Mossad agent Rachel Singer (Helen Mirren) -- the youngest and only female among the operation's spies -- has written a book about the events that occurred in mid-'60s Berlin. You'd think that having a mother who took part in the capture would be quite a resource. And she is, but only to an extent; she and her two cohorts haven't been forthright with what truly happened, skirting around a few major details. As Rachel reads a passage from her daughter's book and we're shown the way the event is depicted as the Israeli people understand it, haunted pain clearly stirs in her eyes. Some probably interpret it as the aftereffects of going through the ordeal, still leaving her troubled and pensive to this day, but soon we learn it's because things aren't as they seem.

The Debt indulges our curiosity as it shifts back to Berlin in the early-'60s to recollect the full breadth of the mission's developments, clarifying how a well-trained but green Rachel Singer (filled with barefaced composure by Jessica Chastain) poses as an infertile wife to entrap the doctor-turned-gynecologist, Dieter Vogel, with the aid of her two partners -- Stefan (Marton Csokas), the roguish piano-playing leader, and David (San Worthington), the young closed-off warrior. Director Madden navigates the standard spy build-up with a dutiful cinematic perspective, painting a tidy picture of the operatives' personality types as they orchestrate their mission: how they spar in their weathered apartment, the nervousness that stirs while surveying their target, and rigidly getting to know one another as they await the green light to execute their plan. They're all patriots of different stripes and different motivations, and we're moderately drawn into the dynamic they strike in the walls of the East Berlin apartment.

But this film isn't built to meticulously explore the characters' profundity and why they've signed on for the mission, instead less-ambitiously concerned with the anticipation behind seeing how these patriots -- with a motivation that speaks for itself -- capture the war criminal and keep him detained. Some might look at The Debt's somewhat single-minded thrust as a limitation on its historical and thematic strength, and they're not wrong, but when the suspense captures an electric vintage atmosphere and edginess that's as effective as what Madden's constructed, it's reasonably justifiable. A blur of cloak-and-dagger tactics propels the lengthy stream of events, from the culmination of physical training and the exaction of a clever plan to some on-the-fly thinking during an escape, and it's thoroughly exhilarating while meeting the limited demands set for it. And once we relive the last moments of the espionage mission as they really happened, occurring beat-for-beat in the way it's originally depicted but with a different outcome, it discovers a swell of import that does, in due course, tie to historical consequence.

Don't get me wrong: The Debt does unearth some muffled soul-searching and examination within the story's central flashback, which becomes a driving force once Madden brings us back to the modern era ... and bridges the gap between the two without neglecting a suspenseful beat. When the aged, scarred Rachel comes out of retirement (somewhat by force) to smooth the wrinkles caused by the threat of their secret surfacing to their nation -- requiring her to breathlessly weave and hide in an office, fast-talk her way into buildings, and unsheathe a needled syringe -- the substance seems tailor-made to conduct the flow of suspense, while Helen Mirren captivatingly handles a distressed incarnation of the green Mossad agent we once experience. Yet, it's mostly a means to an end, the drama pigeonholing itself into mere explanations of the motivations behind decisions made in the growingly byzantine thrills, without much cathartic follow-through to the limited emotionality it introduces. This isn't powerful filmmaking; however, it is effectively thrilling against the backdrop of poignant historical circumstance.

'One Day' Shows Up a Few Too Late

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:26:00 +0000

Directed by: Lone Sherfig, Runtime: 107 minutes
Grade: C-

You practically couldn't see one of Focus Features' films in 2011 without also stumbling onto the trailer for One Day, and considering the thriving year that the studio has had -- ranging from Hanna to Jane Eyre, not to mention Bridesmaids on the Universal front -- plenty of eyes fell on its OneRepublic-powered, indie-romance tearfulness. Lots of faith was placed in the charisma that actors Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway generate, and it shows in the film's exposure. The faith isn't misguided; the charm Sturgess embodies in Across the Universe is both soul-crushing and chaste, while Anne Hathaway's mix of dainty appeal and untamed might creates something special in Rachel Getting Married and The Princess Diaries alike. Confidence in their talent won't falter after you've seen this middling, lop-sided tale of companionable friendship and romance that never was, but they should probably consider refraining from being love interests in other projects.

Based on the best-selling book by Dave Nicholls and draped in alternating cold blues and warm yellows in Benoît Delhomme's adept cinematography, One Day follows the not-quite romance between bright-minded writer Emma (Hathaway) and charismatic self-starter Dexter (Sturgess), spanning twenty-plus years from 1988 and onward. Starting the day they graduate from college, the story checks in with the couple every July the 15th of their "friendship" to explore how they dance around their pull to one another, finding each of them at different points in their lives: suffering jobs, mending relationships, living abroad, and coping with family illness. At first, Dex is a self-absorbed, loose-zippered TV host, wealthy and womanizing, while Emma ekes out a living while trying to find her place in the world. Eventually, the tables are turned and Emma pulls herself from her life's rut, just in time for Dex to suffer his. The suspense lies in when they'll finally drop their restraints and indulge in their palpable almost-love, if they ever can.

While One Day's arrangement sounds like gimmicky romance -- dropping in on the mismatched couple on the same day every year to see how they've progressed, as individuals and as a couple -- and Dex and Emma's faux-platonic relationship is a staple among like-minded dram-coms, there's no denying that director Lone Sherfig maintains a steady, melancholy tone that avoids the saccharine or silly. She brings a similar perspective to their pushing-and-pulling as she did to An Education, where she relishes the subtlety of conversation and the occasional bustle of excitement in their travels; that includes an impromptu holiday to clear Emma's mind, reminiscent of Jenny's eye-opening trip in that film. In fact, it could be argued that Sherfig doesn't allow for enough joy, as their progression through ramshackle jobs and painstaking relationships suggests that there's simply no happiness for Dex and Emma aside from one another. That might be part of the point, but it's rendered into a glum, overcast experience here.

The reason the heartrending romantic-tragedy elements don't work in One Day roots in the chemistry between Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway, simply because there is very, very little. On their own terms, the two maturing actors create distinct identities out of Dex and Emma; Sturgess captures brewing egotism and a strung-out '90s partier disposition well enough, as well as his cascade downward, while Anne Hathaway's catching charm and pert Brit-Scot accent transform Emma into a sarcastic, affable mate hiding underneath Dex's nose. However, there's very little romantic spark between them in their young-adult forms, and that lack of magnetism translates into an impetus for the story that doesn't maintain firm-enough footing, causing one to wonder why they'd even stick it out in the first place -- or why they'd find each other appealing. The first half of that dilemma is addressed near the story's apex, but the follow-through only convinces as far as Sturgess and Hathaway's partitioned charms will allow.

Surprisingly, when we reach the later years of Dex and Emma's life, where they reflect back on the decisions they've made and what they've been missing, things start clicking together in spite of the failed chemistry between the two leads. Director Lone Sherfig pilots these deeper-rooted, weighty components -- growing up, divorce, children, and ultimately loss -- far better than she does in convincing us of the wayward friends' reluctance to finally be together, but that still proves to be a problem when One Day demands punctuation at moments that rely on the connection they've shared from the start. And when it reaches an emotional climax, one in which Sherfig elegantly frames within the film's earlier moments, it's only once again made poignant because of the investment given towards the individual characters, and less over their relationship. There's a heartrending story present here, but it's limited to an operative character study of those forlorn over what appears to be an irritating, fruitless love.

Abysmal 'Nutcracker' Not Even Close to Saved by Visuals

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:22:00 +0000

Directed by: Andrey Konchalovskiy, Runtime: 110 minutes
Grade: D-

Within the lair of a tyrannical villain, a lavish song and dance ensues while we're watching a colossal shark swim in an enclosed tank. The war-torn streets of a city are tattered and littered with eviscerated toys and ash. And rat-humanoid soldiers soar through the air in jet-propelled gliders (think Santa Clause), while a helicopter with at least twelve propellers and a pair of mechanical legs zips along the horizon. No, you're not reading the wrong review: all this exists within The Nutcracker: The Untold Story, a UK-Hungary co-production directed by Andrey Konchalovskiy, and it's about as, uh, different as it sounds, showing inspiration from Julie Taymor and a little Sky Captain in its theatrical opulence. But it's also convoluted, out-of-place, and frustrating against the context of Christmas family fare -- and a wacky juxtaposition of holiday tidings and dystopian bleakness is only the start of its problems.

Most of that occurs in the second half of this wild deviation from E.T.A. Hoffman's story, while the first feels a little more at-ease in the spirit of holiday-focused cinema. It tells the story of a wealthy family in '20s Austria, mostly from the perspective of Mary (a charming but discomfited Elle Fanning, Super 8), a pre-teen girl who wants her whole clan together for Christmas -- something that's not going to happen since her mother (Yuliya Vysotskaya), an opera singer, has a performance that evening. Instead, she and her brother will be looked after by their uncle, Albert (boisterously accented by Nathan Lane, The Producers), and after he brings over a dollhouse and a wooden nutcracker for the kids, he sings them to sleep with the 'Relativity Song" (yeah, he's that Albert). But in the confines of Mary's dreams, or so it seems, the wooden nutcracker becomes human-sized and speaks to her of important matters, while her home also shifts in dimension and the dollhouse her uncle gave her -- as well as the handful of toys/dolls occupying it -- comes to life.

At first, for the most part, Konchalovskiy's odd holiday extravaganza treads water by spinning a bland but tolerable riff on the Nutcracker story, even though stilted performances, tonal shifts, and impromptu musical numbers still render it a perplexing and unfocused celebration of the story's tradition. A lot of it comes from its artistic perspective, easily the film's highlight; as the camera guides through a blown-up version of Mary's house, through the needles and branches of a Christmas tree adorned with candy-colored ornaments, and amidst whimsically-swirling magic sparkles, it surrounds the wide-eyed Mary with visual delights that, at first, distract from the tale's cockamamie hollowness. And even though the idea of familiar faces appearing in one's dreams has been explored- Tarsem's The Fall comes to mind -it fits well-enough here to not feel overly banal against its dreamy setting.

But once we learn more about the nutcracker, his royal lineage, the spell that turned him wooden, and his kingdom being overrun by humanoid rats, this thing turns sour just as soon as it moves away from the dollhouse and Christmas tree. Transforming the rats into warmongering imperialists and erroneously removing itself from the Christmas atmosphere -- literally and tonally -- for nearly half the picture, the path it undergoes as Mary continues her travels with the animated Nutcracker (NC, as he's goofily called) becomes one of the most infuriating, poorly-conceptualized holiday films I've seen. Due in equal parts to ungainly direction from Andrey Konchalovskiy and dreadful scripting, the magical essence that spices up the beginning is lost in the smog of peculiar dreariness, created by an ugly Burgermeister-Meisterburger villain in Joe Turturro's rat king and a dreary air that wants to say something about war-torn cities ... but can't come close.

Aside from the problematic filmmaking in its bones, The Nutcracker: The Untold Story faces its biggest problem in trying to both wildly deviate from the story proper and reincorporate the elements that hallmark a production of The Nutcracker -- including Tchaikovsky's score, now accompanied by hammy lyrics by Tim Rice. Instead, we're left with snarling Nazi rats with retractable snouts, sharks killed on a whim, and oodles of spirit-zapping oddness in the destitute streets of the smoky city in Mary's dreams, and the action or stakes that propel it through the deviations can't generate enough concern over the outcome to justify its peculiarity. So much has gone awry that it's tough to succinctly convey it, but saying there's no magic, too much fright, and not enough Christmas cheer is a good starting point, and whoever voiced this untold (albeit wall-to-wall identifiable) story and its tangents should've bit their tongue.

Secrets in the Folds of 'Secret Fan' are Sluggish, Awkward

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 14:09:00 +0000

Directed by: Wayne Wang, Runtime: 120 minutes
Grade: D

Several appealing themes and historical allures adorn Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: the camaraderie that forms amongst women, the practice of legally acknowledging that bond in 1800s China, and the use of a retracting hand fan as a means of secret communication between them. Most of these trace back the source material, Lisa See's heartrending novel that explores the pains of the era and the limited choices women were presented with, all handsomely dressed by capable photography that captures gorgeous locales and detailed garment work. But for everything that it gets right on the surface, Wayne Wang's direction takes it two steps back, resulting in a poorly-paced, tiresome, and often gratingly-acted period drama that's quite a lengthy distance behind the director's work on The Joy Luck Club.

Fans of the book will be left confused by the alterations found. The bulk of it still takes place in 19th century China, where two young girls -- Snow Flower (Gianna Jun, Blood the Last Vampire), who comes from a wealthy family, and Lily (Li Bingbing, The Forbidden Kingdom), who comes from poverty -- are sworn to one another as friends under the practice of laotong, a bond considered stronger than marriage due to the "willingness" of it. Since they're of similar age, the dissimilar pair experiences the same issues that girls of the era would endure, especially that of foot binding, the painful bending and "beautifying" of feet. We follow them through their marriages, navigated by their appearance instead of class, and see how they secretly communicate through Nüshu script (a secret women's language) written on a folding silk fan when one of their families doesn't approve of their bond.

Then, there's another side of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan that takes place in the modern era, which is where the head-scratching begins. Teenage descendants of Snow Flower and Lily -- Sophia and Nina respectively, played by the same actresses -- also undergo the legally-binding laotong ceremony as a way of keeping history alive, yet Nina's family doesn't approve of Sophie, which keeps them separated. The actual here-and-now of the story finds Nina, now a well-to-do businesswoman, flying from New York (where she works) to Shanghai after an accident puts loose-cannon Sophie in the hospital, leading Nina to discover the path that her friend's life has taken in her absence. Through some sleuthing, she discovers where her laotong partner has been living and writing, why she's been venturing to a men's bathhouse, and how she got tangled up with an Australian bar-owner (Hugh Jackman).

While I can appreciate the intent behind the intersecting story threads -- the importance of the bond between women has traversed and withstood time, no matter the challenges that a certain era brings -- shoehorning the two periods into one film leaves little breathing room for focused drama within each, giving the narrative a heavy, dreary consistency due to its involvedness. There's a lot of story jumping going on in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, and none of it is terribly satisfying to behold; watching the visual exploration of culture differences and parallels between the 1800s Chinese wives and their modern-era descendants offered a few sporadic moments of interest, but it's only on a purely cursory level. It's obvious that an earnest tale of strife and rigidity exists in the historical half of the adaptation, and that it has something profound to say, but it's not articulated here.

While Wayne Wang dresses Snow Flower and the Secret Fan with lavish colors, rustic scenery, and opulent low-key costume work, which intrigues the senses, he neglects to find dramatic steadiness or a robust thematic purpose behind his pretty but bloated period work. He shows a greater interest in allowing despondent facial close-ups and visual flair to force-feed tenderness instead of a true sense of empathetic draw, no matter which time period we're talking about, and it's not helped by the performances that either overextend or rigidly force the story's intimate and delicate moments. That's a big problem considering the personal nature of the story, and once Wang attempts to tie everything together into an evocative history-meets-modernity bow at the end, there's not enough valid emotional impetus to reinforce what should be a heartfelt and captivating cap to this arduous journey.

Oh well. At least you get to see Hugh Jackman sing in Mandarin.

Take the Journey to 'Another Earth'

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 23:18:00 +0000

Directed by: Mike Cahill, Runtime: 92 minutes
Grade: B+

Another Earth's science-fiction element is moderately self-explanatory: a recently-discovered second world, just like ours, exists within a distance to Earth that's close enough to travel. In the realm of indie cinema, filmmakers often go small-scale when handling something like this to purposefully tiptoe around budget-sapping set pieces or glitzy visual effects, instead holing up in the weighty drama that thrives in the scope they're able to achieve. Writers Make Cahill and Brit Marling clearly relish their boundaries as they operate under those parameters, where a scientific oddity seamlessly integrates into our known world as both a curiosity and a vital narrative element. What they've created is robust, assertive personal storytelling that uses its outer-reality concept as a pivot point for musings on regret and the healing power -- and damaging effects -- of social isolation, as well as an ample source of metaphysical contemplation behind a second, potentially human-inhabited world.

The filmmakers at the core of Another Earth wear several hats during the production, as is normally the case for indie projects: Director Cahill doubles as cinematographer, giving the film a harsh but compelling and intimate vibe, while Brit Marling's acting chops bring the central character, Rhoda, to life. After serving four years in jail for manslaughter due to a drunk-driving accident that killed all but one family member in the opposing car, Rhoda reemerges as a shell of the girl she was when she went in. Once a prospective college student with an eye for astronomy -- a radio broadcast about the newly-discovered planet was the distracting catalyst to her wreck -- she now elects to work remedial cleaning jobs that keep her away from people, yet she can't avoid hearing about "Earth 2" and a writing contest that will send one deserving person to the planet. Haunted by her mistakes, she considers the possibility of leaving this earth and going to the other, but not without revisiting her past beforehand.

Cahill and Marling don't shy away from the science-fiction elements in Another Earth, even if it means exposing their story to gaps in logic as they construct their big picture. The real head-scratcher, a large one, comes in the swift discovery of another planet that's of identical properties -- resources, atmosphere, even people -- to Earth's, a place within travelable distance that astronomers haven't stumbled upon until now. The pair of writers sells the idea though, thoroughly, and the meditative perspective they create around the planet's discovery compensates for that, namely with starting a new life in a place that's almost exactly like Earth's and what the mirror planet's thinking in terms of cordial communications or volatility. Perhaps Earth 2's quick emergence is something more ethereal and divine, something that the story offers a hint towards later on. There's interpretation to be found in the script's viewpoint, without question, and it's compelling and ambitious enough to leap-frog plot holes.

Another Earth's reflection on the science of dual worlds provides the environment for Rhoda's melancholy journey towards rediscovering normalcy, not merely the film's pure thrust. Cahill and Marling are more interested in her psychology and the choices she makes once she seeks out the remaining member of the family she killed -- the father (LOST's William Mapother), an ambitious composer who has all but dropped off the face of the earth after awaking from his coma, who has no idea of Rhoda's identity. In lesser hands, the dramatic developments that ensue might've felt inauthentic and far-fetched, but Brit Marling's captivating, barefaced presence elevates them to a haunting level that allows us to ignore any doubtfulness and instead embrace the raw, tough emotional context. Marling navigates the guilt Rhoda feels over her transgressions and, ultimately, conflict over her semi-anonymous companionship with John with an evocative poise that's well beyond her years.

Emotional heft becomes the impetus driving Another Earth, which smartly explores the philosophical connection between a mirror-image Earth and the prospect of running away from one's mistakes. Subtle dramatic developments between Rhoda and John in the walls of a dark, dreary house render the film quietly harrowing, with Cahill's direction and photographic eye emphasizing the narrative's quaintness through self-assured, hushed close-ups that encompass them in deftly-felt human energy, gloomy as it may be. Once it reaches a somewhat alarming middle-point, where, after an attempt at radio communication, the truth comes out about what (and who) inhabits Earth 2, the way it provokes thought about the nature of remorse and second-chances escalates its melodrama to a mysterious and potent stratosphere. There's complexity at-play within Cahill and Marling's intimate exploration of the unknown, of both mental and dramatic types, that skillfully creates a convoluted emotional testing ground within the gravity of stripped-down science-fiction.

'Griff the Invisible': Lighthearted, Romantic Vigilantism

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:35:00 +0000

Directed by: Leon Ford, Runtime: 90 minutes
Grade: B-

I suppose we've reached the point where a subgenre has emerged from the "everyman superhero" idea. It makes sense, considering the recent surge of popularity towards Batman (the pinnacle of the no-superpower hero) and the adaptation of Mark Millar's subversive comics to the big screen, that differing perspectives on what comprises an effective examination of aggrandized, pushed-to-the-limit vigilantism would stake their ground. They all have their strengths, from Kick-Ass's candy-coated violence and Defendor's shocking dramatic streak to the down-and-out nasty fury of James Gunn's Super, as well as areas where they slave away at filling in gaps where the others neglected. The fresh ground that Leon Ford's Griff the Invisible adamantly tries to explore is that of romance and returning to normalcy in a contorted, introverted hero's mind, while retracing the same weatherworn tracks that others of its kind have already traveled. Good intentions go a long way with this one, though.

Even though True Blood star Ryan Kwanten tries to prove otherwise, we've seen the likes of Griff before: a submissive, recoiled, socially-awkward office monkey, not unlike Wesley from Wanted, moonlighting as a costumed night-watchman who looks strikingly like Tim Burton's Batman in a riot helmet. With his apartment planted in the dark corner of a city overrun with vandals and prowlers, Griff pours the money he makes at his dime-a-dozen cubicle job into his "true" profession, where he's orchestrated an elaborate camera, telescope and alarm system (Harry Caul would be proud) to monitor the area and notify him that "Griff the ______" (he's working on that) is needed. Some seem to know about Griff's secret identity, though, such as his caring brother who moved back to the area to keep an eye on him, supposedly after a run-in with the law. And another might've stumbled onto his secret: Melody, an "experimental researcher" dating his brother, who might be just as imaginative, idealistic, and potentially unhinged as Griff.

Balancing vivid color use with the thick and gritty allure that comes from shooting on 16mm film, Griff the Invisible stands out among others of its type with a distinctive, albeit modest aesthetic perspective, the vibrant palette painting Griff's war on street-level hooligans with broad comic-inspired strokes. It heightens the environment around the hero to appear like he's encapsulated in dire situations as they'd appear in the panels of a graphic novel, counterbalanced against the sterile, empty look befalling his work environment, reflecting on his emptiness while going about his unhappy "real life". Director Ford minimizes the action to emphasize the ways that Griff copes with balancing the two sides of his life, even though he does execute a few low-key action set pieces that reveal the hero's no joke. Even down to his crime-fighting toys and his suit, clearly (and suggestively) inspired by a certain famous Caped Crusader, careful thought lingers in the budgeted but appealing look of Griff's heightened-reality world.

Yet, when it comes to the challenging components surrounding explorations of the do-it-yourself superhero -- their loosening grasp on reality, a disconnect with society, and the legality of what they're doing -- Griff the Invisible mines areas that have already been tapped by its recent predecessors, only in a glib, easier-to-swallow, yet admittedly charismatic fashion. Even if that's the case, director Ford commits to making them feel individual to Griff's story, exploring the mindset of this particular cubicle-dweller who finds purpose in making the streets around his apartment safer. Granted, the story's fairly anemic, a more blithe pastiche of its precursors that semi-humorously follows the same beats, whether we're talking about Griff's psychology or his invigorated uprising in the real world due to his off-the-clock activities. Considering that, there's still something to be said about Ford's perspective on the hero, alongside some of the complexity behind introverted, slightly-off citizens going about normal lives.

Turns out, Griff the Invisible isn't about saying something regarding the vigilante nature, but in a decidedly sweet-natured romance blossoming within it, and how a pair of askew minds counterbalances one another despite their distorted view of the world. Through a handful of scenes that might faintly remind one of the fingerprints that Michel Gondry could leave, creative and inventive but practical in their usage, director Ford takes the skeletal structure it establishes and fleshes it out with the off-kilter, quirky relationship between the deceiving superhero and an attractive corner-shop researcher who has an eye for his obscurity. Pure charm -- alongside an infectiously chaste chemistry that stirs in the conversations between the discomfited Griff and the resolute, science-minded Melody -- becomes the glue that latches the film's components together, especially with the bold, accepting personality Melody brings to the conversation.

Despite its spotty successes, and even considering the adult-minded twist of a climax that the film arrives at, Griff the Invisible is a tough one to pin down. Those weathered to the subgenre will find less brutality, gloom, and provocative content than they're accustomed to, while those drawn into in its defiantly indie-film romance will still have to juggle its scattered focus and a stale narrative that smacks of an overdose on influence. Down to the way the film's presented in marketing, it's sizing itself up for an audience that it's not likely to satisfy, but Leon Ford's viewpoint has one watertight attribute going for it: it's stubbornly likable, from the polished look to the unswerving performances from Ryan Kwanten as Griff and Maeve Dermody as Melody, and in that, it's wholly reasonable to embrace this as the subgenre's romantic-comedy riff -- roughly realized as it may be. A touch of sincerity and a touching, gracefully-built purpose give it reason enough to coexist among its like-minded contemporaries.

'King and the Clown': Substantial Period Tale of Pansexuality

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 18:45:00 +0000

Directed by: Lee Jun-ik, Runtime: 119 minutes
Grade: A-

There's humor to be found in South Korea's The King and the Clown, but not the type first imagined upon hearing the title: gallivanting jesters and lavish shenanigans, in the key of Danny Kaye's The Court Jester, aren't the chief orders of business here. Sure, you'll see wildly-dressed clowns, hand puppet shows, and stern agenda-driven royals, but the film's strengths don't hinge on lightheartedness and double entendres. Instead, the laughs will (mostly) be those of surprise, where the sexual lewdness and aristocratic satire of their context will stun due to the audacity it'd take to perform them in the 16th-century Chosun Dynasty setting. Yet, this isn't a batch of innuendos and quasi-perverse gags solely crafted to rile up an audience (well, the film's audience); the resolve The King and The Clown puts behind freedom of choice -- either in mocking those in charge or the uncontrollable draw of sexual attraction -- cements meaning underneath why they're being, and should be, performed in the face of higher-ups.

It takes a while for the duo of street entertainers -- Jang-seng (Kam Woo-seong), confident and masculine, and Gong-gil (Lee Joon-gi), whose feminine and delicate posture brings him close to androgyny -- to get in the halls of King Yeonsan's (Jeong Jin-yeong) court. At first, their routine of tightrope-walking, undergarment-flashing, and eloquent purple-prose chatter only earns them enough money to eat, sleep, and live to perform the next day, while their "stage manager" pimps Gong-gil out to more deeper-pocketed onlookers. Jangsaeng reaches a boiling point and confronts the manager over the unsavory practice; in the middle of their tussle, the manager is erroneously killed. The pair decides to flee to the capital of Seoul because of it, and once there (like many gypsies do), they pair up with another trio of street performers. In a combination of desperation, a rattled mind-frame, and simple ingenuity, Jangsaeng cooks up an idea to lampoon the lavishly pleasure-seeking king himself -- and his new concubine (Seuong-Yeon Kang) -- in their new act. Naturally, it catches the interest of some important people.

Right up to the point where they gain the attention of the royal court, these street performances are confident, daring, and riveting to watch against the period-appropriate locations, as if we're standing at the front of the commoner crowd and marveling in the dusty streets alongside them. Shrewd editing and camerawork fluidly mix with the self-aware choreography, which creates a low-key stir of energy within mindfully-used gymnastic flips and displays of vulgarity, generating laughs and cheers among their onlookers. Once invited to present their sexually-charged parody in front of the king, however, their coolness turns into a jittery fear for their lives; as it should, given that their satire pokes fun at the unhinged ruler's sex life. Their sweaty shift in temperament when waiting to see how King Yeonsan will react is a demanding performance -- wearing the same quaint costumes and executing the same tricks, only with fidgets, trembles, and fumbles -- and the waning elegance is skillfully realized by the gypsies.

The King and the Clown is about more than the simple immediacy behind seeing what the king will think of the sex-driven satire, though, and whether he'll have them executed. As King Yeonsan continues to watch the troupe -- who, surprisingly, have been asked back to perform for the royal court -- he starts to develop a draw towards Gong-gil. This naturally creates a stir in the royalty's infrastructure (his advisors warn him of such), and redirects the film in a complex and provocative direction. The scenes involving the king as he explores the nature of his pull towards the effeminate man pivots on their implications: royalty succumbing to his attraction, both towards a commoner performer and, well, a man. His frantic movement around his chambers when Gong-gil arrives, suggesting maddened curiosity, is an animated representation of bottled-up, unpredictable attraction, where the king feels truly alive. And it's intense to watch, as the livelihood of the gypsies essentially hangs on what's occurring behind closed doors.

Enough positive things can't be said about the charismatic cast, from the supporting players breathing life into the ragtag gypsies to Kam Woo-seong as Jang-seng, but Lee Joon-gi deserves specific recognition as the choice for Gong-gil. Finding a male actor that's right on the line between masculinity and femininity, that can handle the struggle between apprehension and strength properly, isn't easy; the soft features that Lee Joon-gi presents hits the right notes, and it's wholly convincing to assume that King Yeonsan, a patently straight man, would feel that conflicting draw. His gender neutrality proves alluring, which makes the (not very lurid) scenes involving their romantic endeavors -- at first rigid, then slowly developing into one-sided mania -- emotionally dynamic and captivating to watch in context of the film's scenario. This film pivots so intently on that dramatic device that, without the right actor, the core purposes underneath it might've collapsed. Selecting Lee Joon-gi reinforced the story's effectiveness.

You get the sense from the opening moments of The King and the Clown that there's a veil of tragedy draped atop it, as if a downhearted fate awaits these destitute but enduring gypsies, which proves true once it follows through with an anticipated barrage of treachery, sexual confusion, and ultimately death surrounding the king's cloak-and-dagger affair. There's beauty in its melancholy fabric: it's easily one of the most accessible and absorbing films about pansexuality, "gender-blindness", out there, and the reason for its accessibility lies in the fact that it's telling a heartrending story which doesn't have to be affective simply because of its angle. While the structure of the king's defense of his attraction -- and the aristocracy's resistance -- becomes an overt but pointed representation of the struggles of modern-era sexuality, where he lays claim to his choices as an individual instead of adhering to precedence, the film's earns its poignancy because of the way that the actions effectively blur those lines.

Jovovich, Disorder Only Bright 'Faces' In Toothless Thriller

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:44:00 +0000

Directed by: Julien Magnat, Runtime: 102 minutes
Grade: C-

In Faces in the Crowd, a serial killer has been tearing through town with a straight-razor and a penchant for crying over his victims, all women, and the cops have no real leads over whose DNA they're pulling from the tears. One night, after clunking home in her high-heels from an evening out with the girls, lower-grade schoolteacher Anna (Milla Jovovich) spots the killer dicing up his latest victim. And, wouldn't you know it, he catches glimpse of her witnessing his latest conquest, and bolts after her. An accident occurs: soon after she steals a look at the killer's face, Anna stumbles, hits her head, and falls far out of his reach. She's safe; however, when she wakes up in the hospital with all her friends around, she can't recognize any of their faces -- and not in an amnesia kind of way. If she looks away even for a second, the facial features of her boyfriend Bryce completely change. This makes it pretty difficult for Anna to identify the storied killer, either in a line-up or, incidentally, simply on the street if he walked passed her.

Faces in the Crowd uses a real disorder, prosopagnosia ("face-blindness"), as the cornerstone for its tension, and the science behind it stands out as the most compelling feature of Julien Magnat's thriller-horror hybrid. Magnat, doubling as writer and clearly researched, cherry-picks scenarios that someone with the condition might experience, then ties them into his story: a schoolteacher unable to identify their students, a club-hopper unable to distinguish the date or group they're with, and a lover unable to recognize the face of the person they're having sex with ... even seeing their features change mid-act. He then explores the ways in which Anna copes with the condition, the little tactics -- standout feature recognition, body language, day-to-day articles of clothing -- taking center stage as it attempts to generate sympathy for the character, while outlining her post-incident turmoil. Great ideas course through the film's veins, a framework for an effective and bizarre whodunit.

While the science -- and the emotion cascading off of it -- draws us into Anna's maddening psyche, albeit too drawn-out in an effort to over-emphasize the severity of her situation, the elements that fill out the rest of Faces in the Crowd drag its competency way down. Its biggest problem is an intentional one: too many alternating faces and actors (sometimes driven by dodgy CG effects and obnoxious ADR), which makes for a discombobulated experience not grabbing enough to justify the erratic shifting. That doesn't go for all of them, since it amplifies the mood when Anna wipes the condensation from a bathroom mirror and emphatically curdles at the sight of multiple strange faces. It's her morphing friends, boyfriend, and the police officers hunting the killer that weakens it; Magnat puffs up their mannerisms to make voices and gestures bluntly identifiable, but he neglects to make them authentic moving pieces. I might've thrown a conniption fit had I heard one character say "chica" one more time. It doesn't help that the performances surrounding Jovovich are either uncomfortably inflated females, or bland and limp males.

Milla Jovovich herself, on the other hand, jibes with Faces in the Crowd enough as a fearful woman losing her grip on one of humanity's inborn senses, a diversion from the actress who typically handles resilient, in-control female roles. She allows her vulnerability to pour through as Anna; as she visits psychologists, interacts with an awkwardly-goateed police detective (Nip/Tuck's Julian McMahon), and frantically holes herself up on trains in fear of seeing the killer, her emotions-on-the-sleeve dramatic poise weaves together with the film's overt temper. Even when she's interacting with the misdirected, wooden characters that surround her, Jovovich's barefaced charisma comes through in a way that's not purely a rehash of her previous roles, though it's largely a reflection of her raw human temperament. There's no denying she's more put-together when navigating rough-and-tumble feminine parts -- Alice in Resident Evil and Violet in Ultraviolet, obviously, along with her assertiveness in Stone -- but her acting chops don't falter much here.

But as Anna's mental integrity plummets and Faces in the Crowd navigates through a melodramatic jungle gym of serial-killer twists and elevated complications with her prosopagnosia, Magnat's peculiar thriller creates frustrating, disorienting suspense that loses its pragmatic grip on the condition's facets. The original cleverness of the script gets lost in a series of progressive plot holes and second guesses late in the game -- particularly: "Wouldn't Anna be able to distinguish body structure, skin complexion, or hair style?" -- which ultimately boil to a harebrained climax that ventures outside the zone of tolerable suspension of disbelief. Once the curtain's pulled on the owner of the DNA that's been tear-dropped on a slew of victims, and who's been hounding Anne, it's hard not to feel ambivalence towards the humdrum reveal. We're shown so many faces throughout the course of the film that eventually viewing the killer's -- at least, this one -- doesn't really give it much of an identity.

'Year One' Replicates the Book ... Maybe Too Much

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:31:00 +0000

Directed by: Sam Liu, Lauren Montgomery, Runtime: 64 minutes
Grade: B-

We've seen the origin of Batman's psychosis and motivation in several forms over the years, from Tim Burton's creative '89 reimagining to Christopher Nolan's recent reboot in Batman Begins. By relation, we've also seen earlier stretches of the Dark Knight's career that follow after his emergence, where he stumbles while finding his footing as his persona, arsenal, and tactics for fighting injustice build within the dangers of Gotham City. The previous incarnations, strangely enough, all occurred with a particular series of comics available to the filmmakers' and directors' disposal (and, in the case of Batman Begins, used as a semi-direct source): the Frank Miller-written, David Mazzucchelli-drawn Batman: Year One, which took the character's rookie year down a fierce, rough-and-tumble path. So when word arrived that the four-comic chronicle would arrive on the big (at-home) screen in the style of their recent animated pictures -- like the largely successful Under the Red Hood, with hints hearkening to Mask of the Phantasm -- it generated palpable excitement.

But what we've got in Batman: Year One is a halfway-toothless replication of the book(s) that's missing a key ingredient: a well-executed deeper purpose behind why the story needs to be told like this, now. Sure, we're shown a young Bruce Wayne (Ben McKenzie) grieving beside his murdered parents' graves and experiencing flashbacks to their murder, all after he's traveled abroad and honed his fighting skills for twelve years, while a brawny Jim Gordon (Bryan Cranston) transfers into the crooked Gotham City police force after a stint in dealing with Internal Affairs (as an accuser, not under investigation) elsewhere. The story carries natural gravity, reflected in the film's tone; the struggles Gordon undergoes as he witnesses Gotham's police corruption takes center-stage as he juggles his domestic life, while a grim Bruce Wayne endures a dark breaking-in process once he's discovered the frightening vigilante identity that'll come to personify him -- and how he can use his wealth and position to purge evil from the city.

On paper, Year One gravitates towards a brooding, stark attitude -- merging pulp-novel punch and film-noir sensibility -- an area that the motion comic portrays accurately in visual form. The creative team's diligence towards staying faithful to Miller and Mazzucchelli's content deserves hefty praise; the look and tone of the universally-flawed characters and the bleak but vivid setting feel reverent, from the neon lights of Gotham's "red light district" to the stale air of Gordon's office and the gloom permeating the mausoleum-like halls of Wayne Manor. As it tickers through the days through Batman and Gordon's lives, it feels like thumbing through the pages of the book at almost the same rate as reading it, only with a slightly more vibrant visual tone. Scenes that linger in the shadows become brighter, handled in a more pragmatic art style than the likes of Under the Red Hood: stern facial mannerisms, rigid body movement, and controlled but brutal violence. Artistically, it's all there.

But Year One might, in fact, be too on-the-nose in its replication, because while the flow checks off the days of Gordon and Batman's first volatile year in Gotham, it doesn't back it up with the right caliber of aggressiveness, grit, or even distinctive flair to marry with the story's tempo. This isn't an action- or suspense-driven narrative, instead centering on mood as it gradually escalates towards Gotham City proper. It's about Bruce Wayne's final reflections on his parents and his metamorphosis into a creature of the night, as well as the strain that falls on Jim Gordon while he's wrestling with a corrupt police department and a pregnant wife, all told in brusque snippets just like the comic itself. But the picaresque movement feels too tightly-packed into the timeframe, and without the right veil of darkness draped atop, the flow doesn't transition to a feature-length picture well. The lengthier stuff works, like a hand-to-hand brawl Gordon instigates and one of Batman's fiery intimidation techniques; shorter bits, like the memory of Bruce Wayne's parents' murder and Batman lunging in front of a speeding car, don't.

Some of the tonal issues derive from the voice acting, a big surprise given that it's one of the bigger selling points on the surface. Ben McKenzie aptly sounds the part of a young Bruce Wayne and Batman -- well, Nolan-universe Batman -- though the hole left by Kevin Conroy's absence can assuredly be felt. During dialogue scenes, McKenzie's suitably gruff and intimidating; his narration, on the other hand, drones on with a dispassionate pulse. Similar things can be said about Bryan Cranston's Jim Gordon, though the Breaking Bad actor fares better; his attitude revolves around a calm, worn-out stir where he discusses his physical capabilities and domestic qualms in his narration, to which Cranston effortlessly channels a weathered Walter White into Gordon. The rest of the cast handles their roles suitably enough: a fiery Eliza Dushku as the unique prostitute spin on Selina Kyle, as well as Battlestar Galactica's Katee Sackhoff as Gordon's assistant, Essen. They're all passable renderings, but their forgettable temperament weighs down the film's vigor -- and with the talent available here, they really shouldn't.

Ultimately, the dark and gritty elements of Batman: Year One should be experienced, but it's up in the air as to whether this animated page-for-page clone of a quick-read graphic novel is necessary. Sure, the art-style shows eye-catching flair (the scenery around Wayne Manor is particularly appealing), and several exciting moments scattered within give it some visceral, well-sketched excitement -- and, as will be discussed, it's an appealing experience in high-definition. However, when considering the brevity of reading through the book itself and the way that Nolan incorporated elements of Frank Miller's story into his live-action take, this 60-minute trek repurposes the material without offering anything additional to spice up the content. I'm not saying that Year One should've been altered or fleshed out in any way, in the slightest, but there's very little that distinguishes this iteration from merely sitting down and relishing David Mazzucchelli's pulp-noir artwork. It's just missing a necessary spark,whether that's because of an inability to transition the storytelling or the lingering familiarity of the origin story itself.

'Higanjima' Bloody yet Bloodless Action-Horror Hybrid

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 07:22:00 +0000

Directed by: , Runtime: 122 minutes
Grade: C

If you were to splice together elements of Blade and Battle Royale, you'd get Higanjima: Escape from Vampire Island, a tolerable live-action take on a Japanese manga of the same name. Blood spurts, blades fly, fangs shoot out and a cluster of high-school friends scurry to survive (and ultimately conquer) the wilds of a vampire-infested island, only there's no competition or reward other than locating -- and saving -- one of the kids' older, stronger, sword-wielding brother. Like its influences, it's heavier on the action and fast-moving tension than jump-scare horror or grotesqueness, with a plot that's barely compelling enough to support the brisk-moving activity. But instead of capitalizing on the streamlined story, this bloody hybrid never fully enthralls within the copious bustle and blunt-headed anime-esque posturing, leaving only atmosphere, visual gris-gris, and a faint lingering curiosity over which characters will survive to fuel its momentum. Surprisingly, it's almost enough to outshine its problems.

Higanjima doesn't start that way, though; in fact, even though it prepares for little more than a hack-'n-slash romp, the beginning reveals some excitement and promise. We're shown a high-school guy named Akira (Hideo Ishiguro) as he's running away from a group of hooligans, who are intermittently stopped by a scattering of his friends using their assorted talents: a bespectacled nerd causing a minor explosion, an archery-savvy girl launching an arrow in their trajectory, and a thuggish street kid who, well, drops boxes and acts tough. Once a beautiful female stranger halts Akira, pulls him to the side, and tells him that his estranged brother, Atsushi (Dai Watanabe), is stuck on an island that's overrun by bloodsuckers, he and his compadres make their way on-boat to the spooky, mist-covered island. At the very least, it suggests that chemical explosions, arrows, and deft blade work might claim the lives of some vampires, similar to Blade II's host of vampire killers -- only, you know, with novices up to the task.

But once they get to the island -- filled with ominous ghost towns, eerie forests, abandoned forts and byzantine underground temples -- Higanjima opts to tell the island's back-story (introducing us to the grand villain) and address why Atsushi's there in the first place, but it does so while removing the teenagers out of the fray of battle and into a Sophie's Choice-like imprisonment scenario that's not as frightening as it believes itself to be, or should be at this juncture. While this allows the island's history to emerge, which should be intriguing since it adds a creepy historical essence to the story, the script handles it with blunt dialogue and overstuffed flashback-heavy exposition that's almost like listening to a comic being read aloud, proving anticlimactic and uneven against the film's intro. On top of that, it occurs while also watching a bland, white-faced knockoff of Lestat de Lioncourt posture and talk in the way every grand old villainous vampire does: puffed-up and full of misguided posthumous wisdom.

All that's tolerable for the semi-schlocky B-movie anime adaptation that Higanjima seems like it's going to be, which can either move towards lavish blood-spurting action or skin-crawling horror at this fork in the road (or, if ambitious, try and nail both) and simply force us not to care about any storytelling missteps. But even while set against gritty claustrophobic environments and with danger looming around every corner (or up in the trees or behind crumbled ruins) while everyone's fleeing from vamps, it can't find firm footing in either arena, instead gravitating towards maudlin melodrama, of all things, concerning its shallow characters. While there's plenty of the red stuff to be seen, I'm hard-pressed to remember much of how it's spilled -- aside from knowing that it's not in creative use of arrows or chemicals, and little in the way of blade-wielding -- but it's easy to remember the weepy romantic beats between two of the friends and their eventual dejection towards another. I suppose that's part of the territory in entering a manga adaptation, but it doesn't gel here.

What's frustrating about Higanjima is that it's got a well-dressed, concentrated skeleton underneath its tepid action-horror flesh, with moody darkness encapsulating the steadily pace it builds. A few swordplay beats liven it up -- some occur during pertinent flashbacks, while others that involve a ninja resistance fighter and the bald-faced Akira kicking ass on the island -- while a slow simmer of plot contrivances and vampire-on-human tension allows the stylized brawling to persist. And some lively elements crop up in the action that counterbalances its sludgy story: menacing flying humanoid imps, hordes of conical-hat-adorned vampires storming a stony ruin, and a threatening (CG) monster tearing through underground passages. This is the stuff that should've been more evenly-spread throughout the script, instead of crammed into the last-third of its overlong two-hour stretch. Even if there's something inherently watchable because of its pale strengths, it's a crap-shoot whether it's worth slogging through the atmospheric but tiresome midsection to get to the brewing bloody chaos stirring below the surface.

Review of Terrence Malick's 'The Tree of Life'

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 13:27:00 +0000

Directed by: Terrence Malick, Runtime: 139 minutes
Grade: B/B-

Terrence Malick's means of communication -- both visually and tonally -- often relies on the underlying power of the periphery beauty surrounding the stories he tells. Rolling wheat fields in Days of Heaven reflect on the splendor of America's agricultural cornerstone in the early 1900s, while serving as a lingering precursor for events to come. The New World divides its focuses among the gloriousness of season- changing, from falling leaves and rushing brooks to the starving severity of snow, as it tells the familiar story of the war (both internal and external) among Native Americans and settlers. So, what happens when Malick takes on the full breadth of life itself? Something grand and flooring is expected from The Tree of Life: a symphonic poem that'll rock the soul with its artistic allure while saying plenty about its subject matter. But even as Malick accomplishes this, the span of his vision proves too sprawling, rendering his latest into a stunning, abstract, yet imprecise and scattered work of allegorical beauty.

With his signature perspective-shifting narration and sweeping aesthetic focus in tow, the magic and mystery of life's trickle-down effect becomes the root structure underneath Malick's non-linear challenge, where he aims to juxtapose the genesis of existence as we know it -- or, at least, as it's theorized on a scientific level -- against a portrait of '50s domesticity. Grand images of swirling nebulous (biological, lava-based, water-based) and, yes, several full-bodied (computer-generated) dinosaurs occupy the film's earlier moments, following shortly after images of a family grieving an unknown calamity. After we've seen the creation of life on a broad scale, we're shown another version of the creation of life on more intimate terms: the growth, development, and contorted maturation of three brothers under the parentage of a delicate mother (Jessica Chastain) and a loving but stern bread-winner father (Brad Pitt). Malick also interjects modern-era images of a man (Sean Penn) going about his own version of a domestic life and, intermittently, walking through canyon passages, while reminiscing on these past images -- memories? -- playing before us.

Everything centered on the family dynamic is powerful, breathtakingly so, in a way only Malick can orchestrate. Slight facial nuance and instinctive camera movement through rustic Americana remains an evocative playground for the director, where he follows the family's ebbing and flowing, during affectionate times and volatile, with a concise eye for the emotional spectrum. Memories of childhood, fatherly conversations, and the simple scene of boys sprinting on a dirt road possess an emotional clarity that's purely his doing, mostly centering on the eldest son Jack and how the firm hand of his growingly-terse father -- and the weak hand of his mother -- alters his composure in regards to obedience and destructive tendencies. In essence, his morphing outlook becomes a portrait within a portrait, where one can see flickers of Malick's own Badlands in the shrewd slow-boil of destructive tension and rebellion as aftereffects. Taken on its own terms and considering the astute performances, especially from a warm, stony, then menacing Brad Pitt and the disarming moral compass-spinning of newcomer Hunter McCracken as Jack, the heart of the film strikes a deft chord as it captures the passing of temperament from parents to children.

But that's not the sole point to The Tree of Life, which harbors a much more complex motivation. Malick also throws his full creative hand on the table by constructing his view-from-the-top perception of life's enduring essence, which renders images of time and space that hearken to both the free-form imagery of Stan Brakhage to the formalistic steadiness of Stanley Kubrick, all within the boundaries of the director's own cinematic meter. I understand the point that Malick attempts to arrive at -- or, at least, how I interpret what he's after -- by juxtaposing the two versions of life's development against each other. He's illustrating the gradient of growing pains in both biological and emotional forms (and, at times, one in the same), connecting the similarities of nature-dictated development spanning across time in terms of environmental shaping. And he concurrently, and daringly, dabbles in contemplations of higher-being faith, fear, and the inherent differences amongst people in the process. There's a lot going on, and it's mesmerizing in a quasi-meta sort of way.

The components of The Tree of Life, however, don't cohesively snap together as a whole, the all-embracing perspective spread out like a net cast too far and wide without catching a unified viewpoint. Some will look at the non-linear abstractness of bubbling primitive creation paired against wispy, dramatic Americana and revel in the mysterious and imaginative expression resonating in its divided parts. It's clear, though, that Malick has attempted to assemble a montage with a firmer overlying message than segmented impressions, yet the connecting-of-dots occurs in a way that isn't readily apparent -- and, even after further introspection, still isn't. He overextends his avant-garde sensibilities, from the too-lengthy churning cosmos that separates the past from the present to the clumsy usage of Sean Penn's place in the narrative as an older iteration of Jack, and by the end the big picture left me more exhausted than enthralled by Malick's enigmatic contemplations. Considering that his films are already deliberate in pacing, focus, and visual manner, stretching his topic wider in this way without clearer concentration waters down its poignancy. It's graspable, or at least parts of it, but the cinematic reward for doing so doesn't balance against the effort it demands.

While trying to figure The Tree of Life out, and depending on the level of investment that the viewer places into the film, its beauty and clandestine magnetism still casts a spell through its expressiveness, and the time passes somewhat effortlessly because of it. Aesthetically, it's beyond what's expected; the cinematography from Children of Men photographer Emmanuel Lubezki astounds with its graceful flow through '50s Texas (and elsewhere), while the elegantly-handled mix of familiar and original scoring from Alexandre Desplat creates a sweeping aural experience that marries the visual's tone flawlessly. This orchestration of sonic and dramatic potency might provoke thought inside what Malick has judiciously pieced together, due purely to his cinematic style, or it might infuriate with its scope -- or, like with me, it might do a bit of both at the same time. There's no denying his captivating vision, though, and that's to be celebrated even in the wake of strewn realization, where a great 110-minute work of art strains within 135+ minutes of entrancing overexertion.

Classic Musings: Straw Dogs ('71)

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 17:38:00 +0000

Few who have seen Sam Peckinpah's obstinately challenging Straw Dogs can forget the first time they did so. Granted, that's a distinction which falls on many of the director's works, but his subversive portrait of sex-driven power struggles and pent-up desire -- an adaptation of Gordon Williams' novel "The Siege of Trencher's Farm" -- does it in ways unlike his others. Some of it resides in his signature brand of violence, sure, brutally lavish yet keen on the scenes' geography and tolerance level for realism, while some of it comes from the wide-eyed, emotionally candid performances he generates from his leads. Then, there's the anti-war message spiked inside its symbolic posturing, which touches on the rebellious effects that the Vietnam War has on the era's youth. All good reasons, yet they don't compare to one particular hard-to-watch scene of carnal ambiguity, which truly punctuates the film's tenacity. You'll get wrapped up in the violence that ensues, but you won't be able to shake that from your mind.

An American astrophysicist, David (Dustin Hoffman), moves with his English wife Amy (Susan George) to her home village in the outskirts of England's moors, mostly so he can conduct his mathematical research away from the protests -- and drafts -- of the Vietnam War. The two seem like a highly unlikely couple; David's a stilted, mild-mannered, knowledge-rooted introvert who's concerned only with his work, while his braless wife flirts and saunters like a flippant teenager around the bucolic cottage they've moved to. And if David's not receptive to her advances, she has a tendency of diverting her attention to those around her. In this case, that includes a cluster of local carpenters working on the cottage's roof, one of which is an old flame of Susan's. As David's uncomfortable not-so-masculine persona begins to wear on the local boys, they begin mildly tormenting him, while also taking his passive nature as a gateway to zero in on Amy. While harmless at first, the tension among them escalates beyond control.

The swell of negative energy in Straw Dogs becomes its paramount driver, which Peckinpah constructs as a steady conflict of strength over gender, sexual energy, and a contorted sense of gruff countryside patriotism. He actively renders every character unlikable in the process, even -- and especially -- the underdog David. Coming off his transitional performance in Midnight Cowboy, Dustin Hoffman brings a controlled energy to the mathematician that hits a credible balance between masculine inferiority and infuriating social awkwardness, which accomplishes the difficult task in making a weak, nerdy man someone whom we won't readily sympathize with. When he's weaving around Amy's bottled-up sexual appetite (while also showing disdain for her cat) and pacifistically handling the scheming construction workers with beer and forced jollity, his poise gives off a seditious energy that's easy to see as a catalyst to the events that transpire. Not a justification, of course, but a comprehendible origin.

Straw Dogs boils at a steady pace -- both cinematically and thematically -- right up to its culmination point: the rape sequence, which earned Pekinpah an X-rating in the US and a full-on ban in England for its lurid context. By today's standards, the amount of skin or sexuality or even abrasiveness might not be enough to taper the film towards such a rating; however, the ambiguous implications stirring in the sequence -- in Amy's motives, her disposition, and her previous teasing actions feeding into this occurrence -- might still be. A mix of her terror and uncomfortable pleasure complicate the scene into a lengthy stretch of intensely-photographed claustrophobia where we're cringing at the varied emotions on her face, at whether the neglected wife actually finds joy and pleasure in being forcibly taken ... and whether it's something she actually wants. It's not an easy scene to watch and reflects heavily on a controversially-skewed viewpoint on rape, which leaves a raw feeling that lingers long after it's done.

Peckinpah's follow-through erupts in a violent cataclysm that only he could properly orchestrate, transforming the last act into a relentless, chilling home invasion scene that racks those already jittery in the audience with intense stylized violence, involving hot oil, nail guns, and bear traps. While it appears to be the emergence of David's hubris and masculinity on the surface, alongside the clear end of his rope, it's also, within the context of one of the film's subplots, a metaphor for the opposition to the Vietnam War, and for the general perception of participating in conflicts which people aren't directly involved in. While watching David shake his head and wield a shotgun at his foes as he interjects in a situation, he's gallantly fighting for a cause that he -- or anyone else, for that matter, aside from the audience -- has little to no clarity on. Straw Dogs is all about perception and the exertion of dominance while surrounded by conflicting factors, and few films are comparable in terms of moral ambiguity.

Epic-Scaled 'Little Big Soldier' a Pint-Sized Success

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:31:00 +0000

Directed by: Ding Sheng, Runtime: 96 minutes
Grade: B

Jackie Chan knows the buddy comedy/drama subgenre like the back of his hand; comfortably enough, in fact, for him to take the framework back in time (even further than Shanghai Noon) and offer a fresh, relevant outlook on its conventions, powered by his proclivity for action. Doubling as writer and actor, he brings us the history-rooted Little Big Soldier. Set during China's Warring States Period, his script flings together two opposing soldiers with starkly different outlooks in a situation not unlike Martin Brest's Midnight Run, where one drags another cross-country for monetary benefit and, begrudgingly, the two build a love-hate bond. But with an anti-war message and modestly-gripping martial arts ramping up the energy, Chan and director Ding Sheng construct a surprisingly capable and exciting epic-scaled spin on the formula, sporting an affective side that'll sneak up on you.

You've seen what Little Big Soldier has to offer in terms of story, just dressed more modernly -- and, well, without as much bloodshed. Following a battle that killed the entirety of their two platoons, a lowly farmer-turned-soldier (Chan) and a high-and-mighty general (Lust, Caution's Wang Leehom) meet amid a sea of their fallen brethren. A course of events leads the all-important general to fall captive to the foot soldier, who aims to exchange his prisoner for a plot of farming land and a modest sum of money upon arriving home. He's got to get the general there, though, which means he must keep the skilled warrior within eye- and ear-shot as they trek across the land. Along the way, the two bitterly swap stories about their past; the amiable Liang soldier offers tales of his family, while the general tries his hardest to keep his actual place among his people -- as the crown prince to the Wei throne -- a secret.

Chan's writing fills out the clear-cut familiarity with character dimension and historical breadth, making Little Big Soldier spry, amusing, and more substantial than expected. The loggerheaded bickering between the two nameless characters lets their personalities slip out and mesh, paired with Chan's appropriate jollity and Wang Leehom's subtle thaw, which makes their intro reasonably fun to watch and adept at fleshing out their individual personalities. Conversely, it's also lop-sided against the second half; following the brutal body-riddled preface, the comedy trips into impracticality more often than the solemn framing allows, reaching particularly outrageous points involving singing maidens and stray bears in the wilderness. While off-kilter against the sensible historical drama, it's also clear that Chan has taken notes from his comedic misfires -- remember The Tuxedo and, ugh, The Medallion? -- while hammering away at the humor, as it's still grin-inducing even if it feels blatant.

On the other hand, the action in Little Big Soldier doesn't feel the least bit out-of-place, slipstreaming along the story's grandness and bickering in measured, punchy doses. Against the early-China production design, complete with convincing suits of ragtag armor and cramped rustic interiors, Chan and director Ding Sheng incorporate clanking warfare and quaint hand-to-hand battles that only arrive when it feels sinuous with the storytelling. Sure, Chan's finally succumbing to the fact that he can't exert the same wide berth of maneuvers and chaos as when he was younger (or even a few years back in The Medallion), but he still flaunts his engaging fight style with the abandon that only he can exact. You'll even get to see a well-executed, albeit unassuming battle that recalls his wavering, physical-comedy-laced Drunken Master, in which he "cripples" himself to use only one leg and a wooden sword. I do take issue with the stylized editing, though, which all too often chops the scenes up into overly-brief flashes.

When the significant shift in tone occurs in the second half, Little Big Soldier meshes the build-up of the characters and involving action into a journey towards the anti-war message that Chan has written, residing in self-aware, multihued patriotism within a portrait of pre-unified China. It's ultimately about the people at-play within the sides they represent, ranging from a farmer lugging around his small country's flag to a member of warmongering royalty gaining perspective on the lands his people invaded, and their head-butting boils to a surprisingly affective -- albeit mildly operatic -- climax that requires some tonal risk-taking to achieve from its buddy-comedy tones. Pint-sized depth stirs in Little Big Soldier as a result, which conveys its standpoint convincingly while it entertains with clanking blades, cavalier humor and a grand pair of performances from its leads -- especially from Chan, ever the multi-hat-wearer.

'Hanna' a Winning Experiment in Action as Art

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 17:18:00 +0000

Directed by: Joe Wright, Runtime: 100 minutes
Grade: A

Certain things are expected from Hanna, the latest from Pride & Prejudice and Atonement director Joe Wright: a snowy tundra-bound training sequence, a trippy jolt through a flashy industrial tunnel, and a sprint across a cramped metropolitan space. But that's the easier-to-digest action factor, which the film's advertising somewhat erroneously plays up; then, there's an underlying, defiantly indie side that will take some by surprise, where an isolated girl inexperienced to the world's sensory joys screams at a overflying plane, listens to music for the first time by a Moroccan campfire, and lets sunshine and wind wash over her while she's riding in a car. Wright's film looks, moves, and breathes the way you'd expect a kinetic spy-thriller to through the eyes of a competent art-house director, with a flair for original filmmaking -- and an eye for gothic Brothers Grimm-caliber fairytales -- as its guiding force.

There's a reason for the title's simplicity: it's more about the willowy teenage girl at the center than the path that the story takes. Pint-sized powerhouse Saoirse Ronan plays that girl, brought up in the biting cold of Finland under the tutelage of her father, ex-CIA agent Erik Kessler (Eric Bana); she's taught how to shoot, fight, kill and survive in and around a rustic wood cabin that's separated from the civilized world, while she learns how to speak nearly every language and about things like biology and music from dime-store encyclopedias. But all that home-brew education can only go so far, and Hanna can only restrain herself in the cabin for so long. She soon learns she's been in hiding for a reason (one she's unaware of at first), kept away from the clutches of a conniving government operative, Marissa Viegler (Cate Blanchett), and if she chooses to live a normal life in the open, she's got to get halfway around the world and take out this woman -- who, at the same time, will be alerted to Hanna's presence as soon as she leaves the cabin.

Seth Lockheed and David Farr's free-flowing script centers on that core mystery: why is this girl, who possesses enough strength and skill to drag an elk across a snowy field after she's defeated her father in a sparring match, being kept a secret? Don't worry; any questions over Hanna's capabilities will receive an answer, though it's not a question that Joe Wright intends on exposing through blunt exposition. Instead, he guides us on Hanna's journey -- jolting between the underbelly of an industrial CIA warehouse to the expanses of Morocco and Berlin -- as she learns about the things she's only read about in books, exploring the character's wide-eyed discovery instead of rushing to blossom the seed of mystery. For the first time, Hanna sees the flicker of electricity, hears the twang of music, and even chats with other people (including an affable British family, including a verbose, loose-tongued teenage girl of her age), and we're left intrigued by her smiling, curious, unswerving absorption of the things she's missed out on during her time in "the forest".

Her sensory exposure becomes ours, to which Joe Wright diverts from his rustic period pieces and constructs a modern outside-the-box artistic vision that's unexpected of the action picture it claims itself to be. Much ado has been made about The Chemical Brothers' pulsating score, and it's utterly involving; an onslaught of forceful percussion and rhythm propels the film's active bursts, while delicate sweeps of fluttering chimes and choral vocals guide through Hanna's quieter moments. It's a gorgeously-shot picture as well, by way of Alwin Kuchler's cinematography; the snowy expanses of a frigid European landscape frame Hanna's environment in both beauty and isolation, while the warmth of Morocco and the chilly, misty confines of Berlin maintain a consistent visual mood that mirrors Hanna's. Wright employs these flourishes with a deft eye for consistent pace and momentum, which invokes shimmers of Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth and Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run in the process.

While Joe Wright lets his imaginative flag fly, something that's expected from an art-minded director, he also -- somewhat surprisingly -- knows how to capture the movement and intensity of Hanna's action. Granted, he goes a little overboard with one scene: a flashing, spinning tunnel sequence at the CIA base of operations, though thematically relevant and composed well-enough, feels out-of-place. But the rest of the hand-to-hand combat and foot races are cleanly-edited, pulled back to reveal what's going on, and highly visceral and energetic, showing that the period-piece director can compose scenes of any nature -- no matter if it's intimate drama of violent thrashing. While not persistent, the action delivers fiercely where it needs to. Oddly, the coup de grace isn't involving Hanna, but a masterfully low-key, stringently choreographed tracking-shot involving Erik and a horde of operatives in Germany.

Saoirse Ronan is dead-on as Hanna. Reserved, sinuous, yet carefully warmed when needed, the pale blue-eyed actress gives her an other-worldly essence that befits an untamed yet skilled assassin from the wilderness, while her graceful frame makes it equally as interesting to watch in fight sequences as it is to watch her curious prying. Her rapport with Erik Bana can be brusque, but they play well off each other during intense moments -- especially in a fervent conversation near the film's climax. Bana also handles his bursts of action with aplomb, where he almost sees as much as Hanna. Cate Blanchett, however, is a peculiar addition as Marissa Viegler; she forces a thick southern accent and an overtly devilish persona, though it aligns well with Wright's aims in making her a "wicked witch". You'll also be left curious as to why Marissa has such a melancholy quasi-parental attitude about Hanna, which Blanchette sneakily slips in: is it because of the past that's being drudged up, or something more than that?

Wright skillfully marries action and art-house components into what's ultimately a modern-era fairy tale doubling as a parable of growing up, operating on his own inventive terms as his film stylishly -- and evocatively -- tightrope-walks between realism, whimsy, and a surgically-handled science-fiction element. The fable motifs aren't subtle, though, from Hanna's nook in the snowy forest to her journey to an Austrian-inspired house of magic found at the end of an abandoned, almost Chernobyl-level amusement park. But that blatancy also becomes part of Wright's assertive whimsical expression, captivating to the eyes even as the story weaves through the familiar beats of an action-suspense climax, not unlike the Bourne films. The melding of tones reaches a fever pitch in the final resolute moments that telegraph just the right punch at the end of Hanna, to which Wright has realized a hefty amount of ambition into a satisfyingly vigorous action film with complex, intuitive, and fanciful substance to spare.

'Bridesmaids' Delivers Loads of Raucous, Affective Fun

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 03:45:00 +0000

Directed by: Paul Feig, Runtime: 123 minutes
Grade: A-

Let's be honest here: comedy, as a genre, has been wading in a semi-stagnant pool for a while now, where we're lucky to see even one true belly-laugher a year -- and a swath of mediocrity or, even worse, downright stinkers cluttered around it. Bridesmaids appears as if it could be of the latter breed, another tepid dip-in-the-pond of clichéd femme focuses (sure, whatever, a "chick flick") that simply doesn't have a clue about raunchiness or genuine wit, appearing as if it'll remain safe and secure while it cheekily tinkers with the ins-and-outs of prepping a bride for her big day. While 2011 has output the expected stream of ho-hum comedies, Paul Feig's crude, unsafe, yet sincere chronicle of pre-wedding shenanigans -- penned by SNL vet Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo -- easily breaks away from the pack by surprising with its ability to embrace the boundaries of the film it somewhat purports itself to be, and then, knowingly, pushes the envelope with versatile, often side-splitting takes on what's expected.

Though Wiig has popped up recently in Whip It and Adventureland, to fine successes, Bridesmaids marks her first leading performance, and she's found the right one to start with in Annie. A broke, cynical chef who's recently closed her Milwaukee bakery, losing her boyfriend in the process, she now works in a jewelry store, sleeps with a handsome but asinine man-child (Jon Hamm) looking for a no-strings sex-buddy, and avoids her odd British brother-sister roommates. Annie's sad-sap state makes for a near-perfect character in which Wiig can flaunt her ill-at-ease style, uncomfortable in her unerring self-created awkwardness. She's a sad character, almost aggressively so, which might rub some the wrong way because of how resolutely she keeps herself at arm's length from contentment. Yet there's something relatable about her self-deprecation, especially once her childhood friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) asks her to be the maid-of-honor at her wedding -- and to do the planning and organizing that comes with the territory.

Naturally, Annie meets an eclectic group of Lillian's friends and soon-to-be family who will fill out the rest of the wedding court: a sex-minded mom (Wendi McLendon-Covey, Reno 911) with a ton of kids and a biting attitude; a virginal mouse of a newlywed (Ellie Kempler, The Office); bullish sparkplug Meghan (Melissa McCarthy, Gilmore Girls), the government-employed sister to the groom; and Helen (Rose Byrne, Get Him to the Greek), a well-to-do housewife trying to strong-arm her way into Annie's spot as maid-of-honor. Feig realizes that these are all types, and he lets them run loose with their quirky mannerisms, but he doesn't go too outlandish to make them feel like far-removed caricatures. That's also part of the fingerprint that producer Judd Apatow imparts, who worked similar magic in The 40 Year Old Virgin and, alongside Feig, in Freaks and Geeks, crafting genuine characters that serve distinct purposes -- sure, a little one-dimensionally -- without feeling too phony. And from a set of graduates from the Grounlings comedy troupe to faces from SNL and The Office, they're in capable hands.

Annie's rattled by the duties and the feeling that her friend's slipping away, not to mention her own monetary and relationship woes, which zigzags along the significant events in Bridesmaids that hallmark most pre-wedding lead-ups. Sure, if you want to boil it down to the least-common denominator, Feig's picture can essentially be labeled a female iteration of The Hangover, where the ritual of strippers, alcohol, and wild partying in the groom's rite of passage are replaced with luncheons, dress-fittings, and bridal showers. But this isn't a frilly affair, nor is it simply a fantastical lampoon on idealized planning. Compliments of Wiig and Mumolo's sharply-written script, Lillian's path down the aisle turns into a stylized elevated-reality daze of misfortune, often due to her best-friend trying to cling onto what she finds familiar by her own means. But it's got something else behind its gags: when it hits over-the-top notes that play to the dreamed-up fantasies of weddings and the gleeful pre-events, it also double-backs to Annie's shambled life, lending genuineness to the missteps she makes.

No matter how someone feels about Annie's clueless desperation, the humor delivers in droves and doesn't merely play up the gross-out gags and exaggerated lunacy of wedding events just so the girls can have the same brand of comedic fun that the boys have. Sure, there's plenty of obvious, crude slapstick and physical humor -- sharing some DNA with Apatow's comedies -- and it gets over-the-top uproarious; there's a scene in a bridal boutique that mixes food poisoning and flatulence with the haughty glitz of expensive garments, as well as a booze-and-pill-driven stretch involving Annie, dejected and poor, stumbling all over the first-class compartment of a commercial plane. But there's also delightfully uncomfortable, well-telegraphed deadpan humor as well, from an overextended back-and-forth wedding speech to watching a sick-and-sweaty Annie forced to eat a sugar-coated almond, and they're exquisitely timed to the right excruciating length. Some might claim that these scenes go on too long, but I feel they're all bravely extended as they deliberately revel in discomfiture.

Maybe it's because the humor's supported by a heartfelt backbone that it's both effective and affective, extending beyond its gags into this clever, modest portrait of a woman in a growing stage that just so happens to be hysterically funny. Annie's shown at her most desperate -- sleeping with a slimeball, losing her penniless and destitute battle with the rich-and-beautiful Helen, and slowly but unsuccessfully building a relationship with an affable cop, Rhodes (Chris O'Dowd), who's got a thing for carrots -- and her state informs the hoopla that Wiig and Mumolo have written, always with some underlying purpose that ties back to the lowly baker trying to maintain a stranglehold on her old life. Bridesmaids might be out to prove that the girls are capable of playing just as dirty as the guys, as perverse as out-there as the crudity of bromance, and it evens that playing field. But it's also as interested in expressive composure while doing so, and the comedic minds at-work here have delivered one of the year's best comedies by balancing its jocular outlandishness with an eye for the stuff that other "chick flicks" squander.

'Soul Surfer': Forced But Fine Telling of an Inspirational Story

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 23:26:00 +0000

Directed by: Sean McNamara, Runtime: 106 minutes
Grade: B--

It's tough to produce a faith-based film that's accessible to audiences outside their target demographic, and it's even more difficult to do so inside the confines of a true-to-life tale with a documented ending. To a certain extent, Soul Surfer defies the premises' limitations in telling Bethany Hamilton's story of determination in the face of misfortune and a crisis of faith, only peppering in core spiritual reflections where they're needed and, in the process, delivering an admirable share of competent sports drama amid Hawaii's gorgeous waves. While some of its tones border on heavy-handedness and the dialogue could use a lot of polish, AnnaSophia Robb admirably supports the story's inspirational weight, shaping it into an earnest-enough piece of family cinema that revels in its own cliches.

You've got to give director Sean McNamara a little time, though, because things start off rocky. Maybe it's because we're fully aware that hardcore surfer Bethany (Robb) will lose her arm in a shark attack that the lead-up moves along so clumsily, but hearing about her mother (Helen Hunt) referring to her as a mermaid, why she's a stay-at-home-student, and whether her mother and father (Dennis Quaid) would've let her go night surfing or not doesn't craft engaging-enough drama to distract from the anticipation. Adding in a villainous opponent for Bethany during an important surf meet, as well as employing singer (and non-actor) Carrie Underwood as Bethany's "perspective"-teaching youth minister Sarah, doesn't help, giving the front-end of the story a cheesy and manipulative attitude, even if it serves the important purposes of illustrating the surfer's early competitiveness, diligence, and belief in God's design and grace.

No big surprise here: the actual event that changes Bethany's life becomes the pivot point to Soul Surfer's strengths, justifying the lumbering introduction to her and her family. McNamara doesn't concentrate on the shark attack itself for emotional punch, the jerky visual effect during the scene really underscoring that fact; he wants to get over that violent hurdle as quick and "painlessly" as possible, so as not to discomfort his age-appropriate audience. He instead stresses the accident's magnitude by focusing on the blitzed moments afterwards to save Bethany's life, and it's here that Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt -- and even Kevin Sorbo in a small part -- earn their salt, as they elevate the labored paternal dialogue suitably, if a little out-of-water when circling faith-based themes. Bethany's father overtly reading a Bible at her hospital bedside and her mother begging God not to take her daughter both benefit from the seasoned actors' presences.

AnnaSophia Robb, however, feels completely in her comfort zone here, coming to life as the determined surfer girl with salt water in her veins, clear moral fiber, and an unflinching attitude. While the film overstresses her handicap for added effect -- one too many awkward moments occur in a row where she can't do something one-armed -- Robb makes every scene feel as heartfelt as possible, allowing her natural cheerfulness and resolute intensity to dim and intensify with the persuasive tones. It makes Bethany's down moments a lot more poignant than expected; there's one where she visits her youth minister and questions God's design after the attack, and Robb makes the audience care about her faltering faith without forcing them to necessarily think or feel the same. She makes us understand that it's important to her, and that's what matters.

In true underdog sports-movie fashion, sort of like The Karate Kid on waves, Soul Surfer places a lot of emphasis on Bethany pulling herself up by her bootstraps, retraining herself, and defying the odds, complete with a training montage and cheery mentorship. While there aren't a lot of surprises, especially if you've seen the exposition-heavy trailer, the way that the surfing is filmed against the Hawaiian locales -- especially the waves themselves, and how the young surfer cuts through them -- adds natural oomph to the familiar attitude, allowing the audience to get wrapped up in the natural essence of Bethany's tumble-heavy journey back to what she so richly loves. It'd be easy to overlook the surfing scenes, as they seem so fundamentally fixed in the story, but there's realized aesthetic creativity at-play here. You'll feel the impact of one particular wave when it swallows Bethany up in her first return to competition.

Soul Surfer has a number of flaws, namely a consistent ham-fisted attitude stemming from its overcooked script, but it still does a lot of things right and, in the process, communicates a message of having faith in one's self without appearing too cloying or exaggerated as it nears its conclusion. Could a more assured or hardnosed biopic about Bethany Hamilton's accomplished the same things? Assuredly. But McNamara's take on her reemergence in the world of surfing seems to get a lot of personal details right (based on the home video footage at the end of the film), and it's an attractively-handled, attentive and comprehensible portrait that, sure, offers a few twinges of inspiration along the way -- though, really, they're more hinged on it being a reflection of the true story than anything McNamara's done here.

'Poetry' a Masterclass in Harrowing Restraint

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 23:55:00 +0000

Directed by: Lee Chang-dong, Runtime: 139 minutes
Grade: A-

Korean directors Bong Joon-ho and Lee Chang-dong are starkly different artists, where one possesses a flair for aggressive and gritty theatrics, such as in Memories of Murder, and the other reservedly slips aching human drama into his pictures. Comparing their styles can almost be looked at with the apples-to- oranges analogy, even though both handle stirring, relevant subject matter, and it's an assessment that'd never really need stressing. Over a two year period, the two prominent directors assembled like-minded films -- Bong Joon-ho's Mother, something of a revenge whodunit, and Lee Chang-dong's Poetry -- and they couldn't be more different; both center on an intrepid, humble paternal figure doing things within their power to keep a child from feeling the law's wrath, but where Mother pivots on shocking developments and a thrilling tone, Poetry takes the practical path and becomes quietly harrowing.

The most notable difference is a fundamental one resting in the main characters, where the focus in Lee Chang Dong's film is a grandmother, Mija (Yun Jeong-hie), suffering from the early effects of Alzheimer's. While she lives on government welfare, she also works as a caregiver for an elderly man who suffered from a stroke to help pay for the expenses her sloppy, bullying grandson eats up around the house. To keep her mind sharp, she elects to take a poetry class at a nearby community center, though, even after some guidance from her professor to jot down pithy notes, she struggles endlessly to find inspiration. Her quality of life isn't all that terrific, from scrubbing an old man to supporting her daughter's ungrateful kid; however, it only gets worse once she's asked to attend a dinner among the parents of her grandson's friends, where they reveal a devastating secret that demands Mija to scrounge up even more money to keep it under wraps.

While the film's title reflects on the tactic Mija uses to aid her condition, and at first it seems to center on her degradation, her memory loss isn't the story's bedrock. While assertively introspective within its cautiously-paced 130-minute runtime, Poetry isn't a meditation on her dwindling condition or loosening grip on the life she's accustomed to living; in fact, aside from a few emphasized moments early in the story's foundation-laying -- a doctor's visit, difficulty in recalling nouns, and misplacing her wallet -- it actually takes a backseat and, for the most part, doesn't intrude on the central conflict. This isn't a case where the viewer explores how an elderly woman alters her life to an approaching handicap. Instead, it works as a lingering element of immediacy, of the storm that approaches while she makes heads-or-tails of the mess that her grandson's wrapped up in, and her poetry becomes a search for beauty in her everyday chaos.

Instead of a character with attributes solely crafted to propel the story, Mija's condition shapes her into a distinct individual, with her stumbles and strife as complex vertebrae within the narrative's backbone. The flesh of Poetry's story, though, is how a near-powerless, aging, dirt-poor woman can right the wrongs set in motion by her grandson and accumulate a large sum of money, as well as how her perception of the world might beautify and strengthen in the process. Lee Chang-dong, also the film's writer, strikes a versatile balance between her cumbersome difficulties and her developing observation of the world through intermittent note-taking, allowing glimpses of Mija's inspiration to slyly slip into her trek -- such as stopping an important conversation to relish a flower's blood-red hue, savoring the flavor of an apricot, and enjoying shadows. They all have a purpose, we'll soon discover, outside of simply aesthetic diversions from her discord.

The true success in Lee Chang-dong's film lies in the nuanced performance from Yun Jeong-hie, who reentered Korean cinema after a fifteen-year hiatus specifically for this role. It's a masterfully-handled one, too; Mija endures emotional turmoil that can, at times, seem almost melodramatic in consistency, but the actress never falters in her realistic composure. Much of Poetry's emotional potency resides in her subtle facial reactions and body language, where a slight tweak in her reservedly expressive face conveys distinct pain and delight. This isn't a loudly dramatic portrayal, which makes the steady increase in her browbeaten disposition -- from a steadily-weakening walk to her slightly somewhat frazzled and sweaty demeanor -- all the more poignant. And when the weight of everything simply becomes too much for Mija to handle, it's astonishing how raw she'll leave you feeling after seeing the effects.

Lee Chang-dong didn't attempt to create any sort of thriller here, but the impetus behind the story levies a blow stronger than most in the genre. Its style moves with a pedestrian grace between the shops, bars, churches, and cootages Mija visits in search of answers and inspiration, steadily but emphatically progressing towards harder-hitting developments, and it consistently feels like we're glimpsing into the life of this destitute woman instead of merely at a character. The Korean director, once a minister for the South Korean government and a professor, emphasizes hard-edged but nimble realism in his body of work, and his perspective elevates Mija's exhausted trudge to aid her contemptible grandson, swelling the impact through an organic thrust of tension that's dictated solely by emotional authenticity. It doesn't try to be suspenseful, but the uncompromising, mounting anticipation -- a staple among his films -- effortlessly achieves this anyway.

'The Man Behind The King's Speech': Documentary Review

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 02:33:00 +0000

The story behind King George VI's reluctant ascension to the throne is one of fortitude, camaraderie, and the pressure of royal leadership on a man who doesn't naturally take to a dynamic public voice, either by radio or in-person. His struggle with stammering proves to have an enduring ability to captivate by the success of The King's Speech, in which his relationship with speech therapist Lionel Logue develops amid the emotionally trying path he travels before leading his people into war. Julie Sawyer's documentary The Man Behind the King's Speech understands and respects that Tom Hooper's Oscar-winning film stanchly chronicles the events surrounding the English monarch's accession; with that, it skillfully reinforces and expounds on the history -- both pre- and post-WWII -- through extensive archival footage and restrained yet astute interviews.

The Man Behind the King's Speech could be segmented into clearly-defined halves: George VI's life before he led England to war, and the time period leading up to his death; while obvious, this partition dictates the tempo and context of the interviews. The first half essentially focuses on the same material as The King's Speech, alongside a brief introduction to his father's place in WWI and his wife, and it leads the historians and writers -- Royal Correspondent Tim Ewart and authors Peter Conradi and Mark Logue, Lionel Logue's grandson -- to reservedly retell, affirm, and expand on his story while interviews with actor Colin Firth and Tom Hooper gravitate around the monarch's speech impediment (as well as Firth having to ingrain himself with a stammer). Ewart and Conradi add insight on Edward VIII's public support through his union with a married woman, the importance of Winston Churchill' boisterousness, and, of course, the extent of the distinctive relationship George VI shared with his Australian speech therapist.

When the documentary reaches the later years of George VI's life -- the post-speech events revolving around his stalwart, empathetic leadership during WWII and his steady physical decline -- some might expect the interviews to increase in frequency to elucidate the content not covered in The King's Speech, one of its presupposed key draws. Surprisingly, Julie Sawyer finds a way to rear the rate of interviews back even further and still sustain the doc's intended tone, only elaborating on the king's political adaption and his ill health when the archival footage requires punctuation, notably around his death. Some might find this free-form direction simplistic, even though the accompanying audio from radio and news telecasters offers its own antiquated insight and narration; on the other hand, it paints a clear portrait of a man, father, and husband attempting to support the pressure that befell him after his famous speech, while avoiding belaboring the pressures themselves on a historically-elaborative level.

Wisely, Sawyer's piece lets the stretches of historical recording do as much of the heavy lifting as the commentary explaining what we're seeing. From the opening moments where George VI's voice adorns a slowed-down shot of the royal family, it maintains a graceful rhythm of lengthy recordings only being interrupted by historians, writers, and the cast/crew of The King's Speech when pertinent. Oftentimes, the audio itself accompanying the footage, whether it's George VI himself speaking or newscasters narrating the material, paints a clearer picture than the versed experts could, while also allowing the tenor of the era to give the documentary an absorbing vintage keel. Having these raw stretches of George VI on-film -- from assorted coronations to radio addresses and uncomfortably-conducted public duties -- compacted within a seamless hour-long stretch makes it worth this subtle but effective documentary's time alone, especially in the ability to witness the toll that WWII inflicted upon him.

Fukunaga's 'Jane Eyre' is Reverent, Cautiously Emotional

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 13:51:00 +0000

Directed by: Cary Fukunaga, Runtime: 120 minutes
Grade: A-

Mia Wasikowska captivates the very moment she arrives in Cary Fukunaga's adaptation of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë's long-celebrated character study folded within a tale of gothic romance. Draped in dark teal mid-1800s garb as tears stream down her embattled face, lamenting under a dark-orange sky and, eventually, torrential rainfall, it's clear we're witnessing a far cry from the wooden Alice from Burton's cockamamie adventure into Wonderland. There's a wealth of complexity that propels the character to this point, as we'll soon discover (and as long-standing readers of the novel know), which focuses on a woman granted intellect and determination over beauty and poise. Fukunaga's vision grasps Jane's involvedness as a complex sheltered female character while cautiously smoldering where other adaptations might overextend, punctuated by Wasikowska's meekly spirited presence.

Penned by Moira Buffini and considered one of the better unproduced British screenplays a few years prior to filming, the tightly-adapted and often reverent script operates on flashbacks -- a smart and effective way of condensing the book's segments -- through Jane's schooling, her time as educator and governess of Thornfield Hall, and her life afterwards as a meager cottage-girl schoolteacher. She endures physical and mental turmoil in her younger years as an orphaned cast-off, yet she expounds on that and becomes a sharp, strong woman who finds a place at wealthy governor Mr. Rochester's home as the educator of his young ward, Adele, likely his legitimate daughter. While the core of Jane Eyre pivots on their blossoming relationship, pairing Mr. Rochester's brusque manner against her secluded yet impassioned carriage, it also focuses on how she defends her integrity and wrestles with the demons of her past. And others'.

Brontë's novel has seen countless adaptations since its 1847 publication, from the snappy '40s Welles-Fontaine film to a handful of fine '70s-'80s BBC miniseries, so achieving a fresh "classic" perspective proves to be a tricky endeavor. Fukunaga, whose previous film Sin Nombre was one of 2009's finest, achieves originality by enhancing the nuance of Jane's individualism and the gothic tone that submerges the story' mildly sinister underbelly, crafting a somber yet sprightly depiction of a Victorian woman whose past troubles serve as internal tools and shackles. There's gravity behind how Jane holsters -- even masks -- her sheltered fervor and discomfiture, which turns a contemporary viewpoint towards her strong personality; in that, Jane Eyre builds momentum with fraught emotional suspense as well, from the crane lashes and shunning in her harsh school environment to the sharp-tongued subordination in the company of her intentionally curt lord.

With Sin Nombre's Adriano Goldman behind the lens, Fukunaga dresses the 19th Century period with lush but sensible detail, a transfixing atmosphere where the clothing and locations operate at the same volume as the film's frequently eerie temper. This isn't meant to be a showcase of ritzy frocks and sumptuous photography within the isolation of Thornfield Hall and elsewhere in the dampened moors of England, even if the occasional aristocratic garment and expansive vista (or fork in the road) does catch the eye. The windswept nature of Jane Eyre's artistic fabric instead emphasizes quaintness and claustrophobic gloom, where flickering candles and cool natural light elevate the stirring mood within the governess' plain frame, perceptive and restrained in terms of the broad, brooding romance that eventually arises. Alongside Dario Marianelli's haunting score, the film's outer beauty resides in its projection of the story's inner turmoil, and it vividly does so.

Buffini's script shears the judiciously-spread Jane Eyre down to its evocative foundation -- Jane's time at Thornfield Hall -- while clutching onto the elements that shape her from her youth as periphery devices, condensing the lengthy source material into a spry yet sober telling of ominous romance. Brevity does work against Fukunaga, as it's tough to fit Jane's maturation and the complex romance built between her and Mr. Rochester within a standard-length motion picture. But the unique chemistry between Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender achieves a disarming rapport that accentuates their individual introspections, and the way they uncomfortably mesh into aristocratic and gender power-struggling. Wasikowska shines as the plain but alluring Jane, articulated by her tense eyes and mousy, volume-speaking composure, while Fassbender's snarling edge crafts a deft blend of cynical distress and allure.

Some could argue that Jane Eyre lacks vigor or even passion between the leads, and that's a valid argument in its own right, but Fukunaga's restraint over the melodramatic overtones also opens up the introspective corners of the prudent governess and her Byronic lord. That way, when the floodgates of their self-possessed chemistry eventually burst open on an abnormal sunny English afternoon, the austere back-and-forth that ensues properly exposes their open wounds as individuals, both Jane's yearning for liberty and moral clarity and the shadows of the skeletons in Mr. Rochester's closet. You get a sound sense of the Jane Eyre that's sprawled across her past, present, and future, a defiant woman who yearns for some semblance of impartiality, and in this moody retelling of the oft-told yarn, it's her steadfast choices and weathered, resolute demeanor that underscore Brontë's overwrought closet-opening

'Stake Land' Excels as a Gritty, Sparse Vamp Indie

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 02:47:00 +0000

Directed by: Jim Mickle, Runtime: 98 minutes
Grade: B+

Stake Land needs a better title; specifically, Stake Land needs a more tonally-fitting title that doesn't recall Ruben Fleischer's horror-comedy hybrid, Zombieland, from a few years prior. Sure, the concepts are similar: a global plague -- or, at least, one territorial to the United States -- has crippled society into an ungoverned network of fearful part-empty towns and dangerous roads, while bloodthirsty creatures mindlessly linger for the opportune moment to attack passersby. Only there's nothing humorous about Jim Mickle's budget-defying jaunt, which trades zombies for vampires, head-shots for stabs through the heart, and jovial yuck-worthy kills for a stringent mood with the sensibility of a Cormac McCarthy novel. It scrapes the genre aspects into a melting pot, from the desperation and grit in The Road to the kinetic fear from 28 Days Later, and invokes gritty, artful grace into a voyage across fang-laden America.

The similarities don't stop there, though. An inexperienced, twitchy teenager, named Martin (an effective Connor Paolo) in a nonchalant nod to George A. Romero's sole vampire film, folds in with a rugged vampire killer -- colloquially named "Mister", played with classic Western bravado by co-writer Nick Damici -- after losing his family and home to the country's epidemic. When not trekking north towards "New Eden", a Canadian locale rumored to be free of vampires, Mister teaches Martin how to wield a stake and dodge the monsters' advances. Stake Land is an environment where people live off what they can scavenge, and they usually travel, if at all, in small packs during daylight; Mister and Martin gain and lose companions along the way, giving the narrative a location-to-location tempo as they trade fangs and medical supplies for food, drink, and shelter while interacting with a medley of destitute souls.

Stake Land thrives on Martin's melancholy outlook as he narrates through a grim string of episodic trials as Mister's copilot, captured in Ryan Samul's dour but compelling cinematography which nourishes both the blood-caked grunge and rays of faint beauty in their trek. Gothic, unnerving atmosphere lingers in Mickle's horror tale, while the companions that the duo encounter along the way insert weight with their presence, even if not explicitly stressed; a nun (Kelly McGillis) saved from a cluster of cannibals eventually offers a glimpse at a jaded holy person's perspective on the plague, while a down-home, appealing pregnant girl (Danielle Harris) spotlights the importance of continuing the human bloodline -- alongside Martin's affection for the opposite sex. No-one is disposable here, only a medley of well-fleshed, consequential survivors that invoke empathy enough to keep the dread looming over the impending danger.

Innovation might not be Stake Land's strong suit, but Jim Mickle gives it a pulse by enriching his influences with a distinct, desolate attitude. The trek towards a secure asylum arises often in post-apocalyptic narratives, as a symbol of hope and as a straightforward way to heighten the stakes, and alongside that, a rugged and reticent guide often takes an abandoned youth under his wing to show him the ropes of blade-wielding survival, illustrating the tactics needed in society-crippled direness. You'll see these elements clearly here, but in an solemn, valid fashion that reaches for earnestness; there's a point where Mister and Martin sling their wrist-latched stakes in a small field of fluttering flowers while taking a pit-stop, tiptoeing on training-montage ground, but the earthy, convivial perspective we're granted lends it gravity through the intimate knowledge-passing between humanity's "orphans".

They're not preparing to kill incarnations of Edward or Bill Compton or Lestat, though, as this breed of vampires aren't the society-mingling deviants that fiend on lustful blood-tinged debauchery. In fact, if it weren't for the need to ram a wooden stick through their chest-plate or the way they combust under sunlight, it'd be easy to mistake them for zombies or the "infected": mindlessly thirsty and inelegant, more of the I Am Legend variety. Relegating them to voracious machines opens up deeper reflections within Mickle and Damici's script, where some of the survivors -- namely "The Brethren", insignia-bearing, radio-using religious militants led by fanatic Jebedia Loven (Michael Ceveris, The Observor from Fringe) -- believe the vampire transformation to be a plight delivered from the divine. Humanity's ugly cynicism is heightened against the vampires' uncontrollable sensory hunger, giving the film a visceral edge with blatant Romero-like critical overtones.

Stake Land isn't concerned with constant brutality, rarely (only occasionally) reveling in blood-spurting violence for the sheer gory delight that accompanies entries in the genre. Instead, it becomes rousing due to its prudent shifts between Mister and Martin's scoffs with the bloodsuckers and the shrewd current of dread that rustles around their avoidance of the nasty corners of post-disaster America, either when they duck into dusty human hideouts and abandoned homes or weave through chilly, perilous backwoods. Gore hounds receive a few doses of grotesquery to sate their palate, from deftly-telegraphed impalements on convincing vampire effects to the disheartening human wounds that occur, but it's the dire imagery -- textured and dimly hopeful against the decaying fractured foundation of civilization -- that effectively crafts Stake Land's looming anticipation, not expecting crimson (or other-hued) spurts. We want the band to thrive instead of risk their lives for brash kills, a sign of solid, tense horror-laced plotting.

Classic Musings: The Three/Four Musketeers ('73)

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:48:00 +0000

Along with Sherlock Holmes and Robin Hood, Alexandre Dumas' "The Three Musketeers" has seen more adaptations based on their characters than can be counted on two pairs of hands. The quality ranges just like their literary counterparts, here from a late '40s gem starring Gene Kelly and Lana Turner to a, well, not-so-charming power-ballad-style picture from the '90s piloted by Keifer Sutherland and Charlie Sheen. But, like most sources with an onslaught of cinematic variations, there's a real winner that shines from the bunch, and the one-two punch of The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers from Richard Lester easily stands out as the victor. They're entertainment in the purest of forms, conducted with a firecracker eye for the period, a rowdy sense of humor, vigorous yet humor-laced swashbuckling duels, and an ensemble that wraps it together into something special.

Commonly known for his Superman sequels, Lester handles this take on the merry "all for one and one for all" band of lallygagging, gambling, rapier-slinging rogues with an attitude reminiscent of his work with the Beatles' films Help! and A Hard Day's Night. It becomes clear that we're working with what could've once been a framework set in place for the original British Invasion, complete with a hokey streak of slapstick humor and exaggerated performances, yet a more fluent cast fills their shoes and their bubbly attitudes. Micheal York heads the cast as the youthful musketeer-in-wait D'Artagnan, a role roughly two years prior to his career-defining turn in Logans Run, while the Musketeers themselves are handled by Thornbirds' star Richard Chamberlain as Aramis, the Oscar and Golden Globe-nominated Frank Finlay (Othello) in the shoes of Porthos, and an excellent Oliver Reed taking a break from horror films to give dark, brooding life to leader Athos. It turns out that using a slate of seasoned actors within an action-comedy framework originally intended for the Beatles is a recipe for charming tomfoolery.

Lester's adaptation of Dumas' novel, stretched across both films, starts with D'Artagnan leaving his home -- and his father, after being bequeathed their family's sword -- to train in the ways of a musketeer. As he arrives in Paris, following his first fumbled confrontation with Count de Rochefort (Christopher Lee), circumstance lands him amid duels with the three musketeers at three hour-apart intervals within his first day in the city. After their scuffle, which devolves into a clunky battle with the Cardinal Richelieu's soldiers, he finds lodging and stumbles upon the radiant wife to his landlord, Constance (Raquel Welch), who seems in haste to flee the house. It's there that we begin to see the plot's cornerstone begin to unfold, around the scheming underneath the king's throne conducted by the Cardinal (Charlton Heston) and the ownership of a set of diamonds by Anne of Austria (Geraldine Chaplin, Cria Cuervos), Queen Consort of France.

This two-part film series adheres tightly to the construct of Alexandre Dumas' original novel, with the first half seeing more rambunctious swordplay while the second film, the more resolute and vigorously driven The Four Musketeers , focuses on more of the "dramatic" afterthoughts on the villainous scheming in the first half and a slurry of enthralling 11th hour combat in its resolution. Both, however, carry a sense of humor that align them as comedies, complete with blade spanks, toppling potatoes, characters' shirts getting trapped in giant waterwheels, broken beds after carnal naughtiness, and a lot of (fittingly) pointless shows of wealth from the loopy, animal-loving royalty. That concentrated level of absurdity normally rubs me the wrong way, but, under Richard Lester's capable hand and a stiff focus on its other merits, these scenes never fail to strike a true chord of amusement. Kicking a wall down with horse hooves and acid-encapsulated blades aside, it's completely possible to dig into the inanity and hold a stream of chuckles and grins throughout.

Yet without the supporting cast, it's possible that Lester's Musketeers might've not had the buoyancy to carry across two pictures. On the villain's side of the coin, Charlton Heston takes the role of the manipulative kingly Cardinal, giving a muted performance compared to his more animated protagonist turns in The Omega Man and Soylent Green, while a lovely Faye Dunaway as Countess De Winter and a chameleon-like Christopher Lee melt into the film in a fashion guided away from their '73 namesakes, Chinatown and The Wicker Man respectably. Though all three go a shade underused, aside from Faye Dunaway's expected spike in screen time in The Four Musketeers , they all invigorate their scenes with fluctuating poise. You know, apart from for Raquel Welch, whose jaw-dropping allure simply mesmerizes amid Constance's goofy flirtatiousness.

What's impressive about Lester's films is the way that the humor mixes with the rough-and-tumble swordplay, choreographed by William Hobbs. The Musketeer films represent Hobbs' earlier work, which cascades into a rich Hollywood lineage that pours into the likes of Ridley Scott's The Duellists down to into Ladyhawke and the '03 iteration of Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, and it's a lot of fun to witness his control over these sequences this early on. These aren't so much fencing battles, with lots of back-and-forth parries and stiff posturing, but animated street brawls that use swords in conjunction with at-times comical knees and punches. It'll all depend on the character; Reed's Athos scrambles and flails a bit like the Tazmanian Devil, while Chamberlain's Aramis tippy-toes and Micheal York's heroic D'Artagnan valiantly maneuvers.

A handsome, expensive production from the father-son Salkind team of producers and Pierre Spengler spruce up The Three/Four Musketeers, arriving from the gentlemen behind the entire '70s Superman franchise. They embellish the French period with rich costume design and impressive set adornment, full of vivacious colors within choice architectural locales that keep our time-period suspension firmly locked. Velvety fabrics, rich colors, and intricate work offer attractions for the eyes, especially on the female cast members, executed to such a grand degree that The Four Musketeers garnered an Oscar nomination for its textile work. It's still clearly a "dated" production, but the merits within still hold charisma that's pretty stunning.

Originally intended and shot to be one grand adventure at the cinema, both of Lester's Musketeers pictures amount to around 215 minutes -- close to three and a half hours. Partitioning the films into equal segments proves to be a wise endeavor, as there's a neat little dividing point in the center that, though seemingly anticlimactic when looking at The Three Musketeers as an individual film, works as an excellent placeholder for the next installment. That much scatterbrained, eccentric material would've simply been too much for one sitting, when the slapstick gimmicks repeat and the vivacious performances begin to strain on our patience. In this fashion, the separation occurs at just the right time, complete with a montage of upcoming footage to be included in the continuation. It whets the appetite and leaves us with just the right feeling: ah, this'll be fun for next time. Individually, however, they couldn't be a better time with Dumas' characters, slinging swords, and zingy Renaissance dialogue.

'Matrominy' a Humdrum, Atmospheric Ghost Story

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:58:00 +0000

Directed by: Hua-Tao Teng, Runtime: 91 minutes
Grade: C+

In Matrimony (aka The Matrimony, or Xin zhong you gui), a spooky, dark-wooded mansion houses a movie cinematographer (Leon Lai) forlorn over his deceased fiancé, while the woman he chose as a "replacement" -- a rustic girl (Rene Liu) lacking the same appeal, considered little more than a house guest -- fruitlessly tries to fill her shoes. He keeps a room closed off, presumably with his old love's things cradled within, and it's a space he deems his wife unable to enter under any circumstance, though we're pretty aware of how well that idea will hold up. Once she inevitably stumbles into that room, filled with mirrors and furniture draped with dirty sheets for her to spookily pull away, she meets eye-to-eye with a specter (Bing Bing Fan) of the woman dominating her husband's affection, whom we determine appears from ... an unplugged radio. The big question: what does she, still adorned in the blood red coat from the day of her accident, want?

This Chinese import from romance director Hua-Tao Teng steeps itself in genre tropes while telling a somber tale of love's desperation, mixing Hitchcock's Rebecca and Mizoguchi's Ugetsu for a restrained, conventional poise that quietly flirts with traditional horror. This isn't a story to elicit dread around every corner, much like comparable films that have emerged from Japan (Ju-on) and Korea (Tale of Two Sisters); the pictorial '30s-era tale concerns itself with the mentality of both the filmmaker, Junchu, and his wife, Sansan, one unable to let go and the other unable to wedge herself in, with the ghost of Manli as the missing ingredient to their brew. It's only once the spirit proposes a seemingly warm-hearted offer to Sansan -- a plea to allow her to "possess" her living body in a time of crisis -- that it bridges the gap to chilling paranormal motives.

Focused on a stifled atmosphere, Matrimony navigates the eerie space of Junchu's mansion alongside the memories of both Manli and Sansan that pass through his mind, which In the Mood For Love's co-cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin brings to ominous life. He captures the '30s China tone with a chilly, gothic eye for detail, poring over items in the mansion -- a bathtub emitting steam, reels on a projector, the intricacy of a scratchy radio, and even the hair atop Sansan's head -- and giving them a distressing visual poise that constantly reminds of the spirit that churns in the closed-off room. Once Hua-Tao Teng starts incorporating haunting angles (peering through an upstairs banister) that suggest her scopophilic presence more directly, the mood really takes off in the picture's hazy stir. Through delicate framing and a steady, lavish perspective, the lo-fi visual appeal on display really stands out.

This melancholy ambience wraps you up while it tells a spooky paranormal yarn, a good thing considering the story that Matrimony dresses up lacks much expressive inventiveness, relying on moody photography and raw anticipation to propel its cut-and-dry theatrics. Sympathy is felt for the unwanted Sansan, sure, a lowly seamstress constantly reminded that she's essentially being done a favor by marrying Junchu, which adds magnitude to her desperate conversations with the specter -- alongside her memories of the first time she met her husband, a quaintly-beautiful scene on a snowy New Year's Eve. But when Hua-Tao Teng approaches something that would take the eerie expressive fabric to another level -- such as when Manli offers to possess Sansan's body to show her how to make love -- it recoils back into a tempo more centered on intimacy and uneager to push further, skimping on opportunities to deepen the paranormal intrigue.

Instead, Hua-Tao Teng weaves together the two women's affections into a steady swell of distress, the macabre take on a love triangle guiding its pace into terse territory once Manli's motives, unsurprising but captivating, become clear. Matrimony lets that slowly-burning flame blaze a bit brighter and more unruly nearing the conclusion, flexing the muscle behind blunt-force jolts and a spooky long-haired fiend once the paces picks up. Even so, it never loses focus on Sansan's internal anxiety while doing so, latching onto her self-effacing nature to the rush of (often easy) twists that populate its climax -- including an unnecessary cork at the end that, fittingly, pulls a punch that's best left telegraphed. None of that holds Matrimony back from the luxuriant, affective supernatural chiller that it succeeds at being, though; it just makes it less satisfying as a vision of subtle horror.

'Better Off Dead' Still Cleverly Unruly and Bizarre

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Spurlin) — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:05:00 +0000

Directed by: Savage Steve Holland, Runtime: 93 minutes
Grade: B+

Savage Steve Holland's Better Off Dead... is a thoroughly compelling but indisputably odd bird, operating under the guise of a seemingly standard '80s teenage comedy that ventures into much more bizarre, unconventional territory than the likes of John Hughes' comparatively grounded creations. Scratch out the verbose reflections and sentimental moments; instead, imagine botched suicide attempts, stop-motion cheeseburgers, and goops of slimy teal raisin casserole served over a family dinner, while an obsessive high-school guy gets used to his girlfriend dumping him for someone better-looking and more popular -- and a better skier. While the inventiveness Holland embodies occasionally stretches its wacky boundaries beyond what the clear-cut premise can handle, reveling in its often riotous eccentricity earns the director some leeway for roughness around the edges.

See, Lane Meyer (John Cusack) is obsessed. There's really no way of getting around it: he's blinded with mania over his girlfriend, Beth (Amanda Wyss), shown by the glut of photos adorning every inch of his room. So when she ditches him for ace slope-runner Roy (Aaron Dozier), the captain of their high school's skiing team who can blitz down the ever-so-dangerous K-12 course without a hitch, he's sent into a tailspin. Not just any tailspin; he attempts suicide every chance he gets, and when his attempts aren't panning out, he dodges his father's (David Ogden Stiers) stern calls to date other girls and to fix up his tarp-adorned '67 Camaro. While dealing with the universe's scheming to keep him alive just so he can see his ex-girlfriend parading around with her new hunk, a melancholy Lane starts to take notice of the French exchange student Monique (Diane Franklin) living across the street -- who, oddly, doesn't speak a bit of English, much to the aggravation of her peculiar host family.

Obviously getting its name from Lane's glum state, Better Off Dead... also takes a daring angle in poking fun at the extent of the teen's "moppishness", running the gamut of grief -- from flinging himself off a bridge to hotboxing in the garage with car exhaust -- as it generates deadpan wit. The humor flirts with darkness because of it, occurring alongside the brutish bullying from Roy at school and his family's seemingly cold-shouldered reaction to his break-up, yet the script blithely plays with his comedic last-minute ramblings and trepidation for a mix of ridiculousness and empathy as he rears back from ending it all. Holland isn't interested in a naturally solemn depiction of Lane's grief, instead using his mindset as a springboard for John Cusack to exert his quirky charm through a compilation of oddly macabre situations and absurdist humor.

Instead, Better Off Dead... operates the way I'd expect some artists' brain cells would if looked at underneath a microscope, which makes sense considering Holland's animation background. Scatterbrained, creatively unruly yet indisputably magnetic, he slaps together a collage of inventive situational oddities into a colorfully hectic and inconsistent rush, fully content in having little direction other than to hurl gags at the audience. It jolts wildly between aims; odd meals dreamed up by Lane's loony mother mix with a French-speaking girl warding off the creepy smothering from her host family, while a bloodthirsty paperboy (Demian Slade) stalks Lane and demands payment -- "Two dollars!" -- like a kneecapping thug. While these quirks recur over and over and consistently meet foreseeable ends, sometimes frustratingly so, their unconventional bizarreness always finds a way to mesmerize on some level.

Though boisterous and fragmented, Holland's chaos isn't just purely pointless gags. Better Off Dead... fits the mold of the '80s teenage fare, sure, with a misunderstood loner losing his girl to a hunkier guy, while he rediscovers his self-worth after dragging through break-up muck and pondering how to win her back. Yet while using Holland's creative larks as unique distractions in Lane's mind, where we're constantly left wondering exactly what's in his noggin and what's actually taking place in the Meyer household, it's also a clever, offbeat portrayal of a thwarted teen's anxiety. And it really doesn't matter what's real, surreal, or unreal; from a classroom full of students cheerfully fawning over their math teacher (while Lane daydreams of losing his virginity to Beth) to the last, fated race down the K-12 slope, Holland's relentlessly inventive escapade through teenage angst simply has a lot of raucous fun.