Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter has the distinction of being extremely silly while taking itself very seriously. Imagine the origin story of Jebediah Springfield without the jokes. This botched adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith's 2010 novel is slightly redeemed by an irresistible premise. The idea of Confederates as vampires is compelling stuff, though it probably worked a lot better on the page.
Director Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted) has failed to bring the goods to his latest bite pic. (Night Watch and Day Watch also featured bloodthirsty immortals.) Say what you want about the teenage vegetarians in Twilight or a soap opera like HBO's True Blood; these popular examples of the genre have seduced a sizable portion of the viewing public. The damned souls in AL:VH won't make you swoon or scare you to death. They'll bore you to tears.
A movie that reimagines Abraham Lincoln as Abraham Van Helsing and his Confederate enemies as monsters can't be all bad. Bekmambetov doesn't really know what to do with the material, but occasionally the film will give you hints of the awesomeness that might have been. A plantation scene where vampires attack their slaves is a memorably ghoulish set piece, though like almost everything else that's action-oriented in the movie, it's ruined by confusing editing. The filmmakers deserve credit for not watering down Grahame-Smith's merciless portrait of the Rebels. Hollywood has been justifiably criticized for romanticizing the Southern cause in films like Gone with the Wind and Gods and Generals. At least Bekmambetov puts slaveowners in their proper place.
AL:VH isn't an outright disaster like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Jonah Hex; it's passable entertainment that makes you wish it were a whole lot better. The historical setting, playful revisionism and relentless brutality made me hungry for Django Unchained. Quentin Tarantino's latest is due out this Christmas, by which time just about everyone will have forgotten there was ever a movie about the Great Emancipator and his double life as a fearless vampire killer.
In 2012, it’s nearly impossible to assemble a list of must-see summer movies without including at least a few sequels, remakes, and sequels to remakes. Such is the state of our movie universe. I’ve tried not to be too much of a purist, but I’ve also omitted high-profile projects that make me cringe, like Men in Black 3 and G.I. Joe: Retaliation. Here are 10 movies I can’t wait to watch, with release dates and trailers:
The Avengers
Hooray, it's finally here! Never again will I have to sit through 10 minutes of closing credits just so I can watch another awkward scene in which Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) introduces himself to a superhero. Nah, I kid the Fury. Other than Iron Man 1, I'm not much of a fan of the Marvel movies that preceded this one (unless you count Ang Lee's Hulk, which I gather most comic-book fans don't). So why am I excited to see them all supergroup'd together here? The screenwriter and director is Joss Whedon (Buffy, Firefly, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and the insanely brilliant Cabin in the Woods). In Whedon we trust. (May 4)
Dark Shadows
Tim Burton's collaborations with Johnny Depp have been a bit spotty since the glory days of Ed Wood. And for such a supposedly original, visionary filmmaker, Burton sure makes a lot of remakes. This is one of those. The trailer's jokey tone had fans of the TV series up in arms, but I've never seen the show. To me, the characters and era look like an ideal fit for Burton. Let's hope it's more like Sweeney Todd and less like Alice in Wonderland. (May 11)
Moonrise Kingdom
Am I hip enough to write about this movie? Oh well, here goes: After a delightful animated feature (Fantastic Mr. Fox), director/co-writer Wes Anderson returns to live-action filmmaking with an all-star cast. I'm in love with the trailer: the music, the quirky visual details, the offbeat line readings. I don't always *get* Anderson (especially The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited), but every film he makes is oddly perfect in its own way. (May 25)
Piranha 3DD
Usually I'm not too fond of sequels to remakes, but this one has been directed by the affable John Gulager (Feast). We're in for a real treat if it's half as good as Alexandre Aja's Piranha 3D, which is one of the funniest, raunchiest, most disgusting bloodbaths in recent memory. It doesn't hurt that it's got the best title of the summer. (June 1)
Prometheus
I'll say this for Prometheus, director Ridley Scott's second Alien movie after his 1979 sci-fi/horror classic: it has been superbly marketed. The trailers, viral videos and publicity stills all have me licking my lips in anticipation. There had better be a good movie in there somewhere, because this series arguably went off the rails after James Cameron's masterful Aliens and it needs to get back on track. (June 8)
Brave
So it's a new Pixar movie and it doesn't have Larry the Cable Guy in it? I'm in. (June 22)
The Amazing Spider-Man
Did Sony Pictures Entertainment really need to reboot this franchise a mere five years after Spider-Man 3? I have my doubts, but at least this not-a-sequel has been cast with fresh-faced, likable performers like Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone. Prove me wrong, Spidey. (July 3)
The Dark Knight Rises
As excited as I am to see this, I can’t help wondering what might have been had Heath Ledger not died so young. David S. Goyer, the co-writer of The Dark Knight, once said that the reason why he and director Christopher Nolan kept The Joker alive was so the iconic villain could go on trial in the next installment. I get a little wistful when I imagine Ledger in those scenes. His interpretation pushed the filmmaker into uncharted territory, making the movie something wilder, more entertaining and dangerous than Nolan had done before. I don’t get that kind of vibe from Tom Hardy’s Bane, and everything about Catwoman, from the casting to the costume design, feels off to me. But this final entry in Nolan’s epic Batman series may turn out to be a Dark Knight-level masterpiece anyway; Gary Oldman, Commissioner Gordon himself, has said it’s the best script he’s ever read, and he was in True Romance, for chrissakes. (July 20)
Ruby Sparks
Paul Dano reunites with his Little Miss Sunshine directors. He played my favorite character in that movie, the voluntarily mute teen devotee of Friedrich Nietzsche. This new effort sounds like Stranger Than Fiction but told from the perspective of the creator instead of one of his creations. Bring on the Charlie Kaufman-lite whimsy. (July 25)
Lawless
This is rocker Nick Cave’s first produced screenplay since The Proposition. He also wrote Gladiator 2 for Ridley Scott, which is one of the more intriguing unrealized movie projects of recent years. If memory serves, it was to have ended with Maximus kicking ass in a bathroom at the Pentagon(!). Lawless brings together Proposition director John Hillcoat and star Guy Pearce, as well as newcomers Tom Hardy and Shia LaBeouf. The brutal, idiosyncratic style of The Proposition was unforgettable, and I’m betting Cave and company will bring a similar approach to the gangsters-and-G-men genre. (Aug. 31)
Well, they've finally done it. When Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch came out last year, I knew it was only a matter of time. The dialogue and plot in that movie were utter bullshit, mere filler, a way of killing time between the action and fantasy scenes. The Raid: Redemption throws the baby out with the bathwater, simply removing the dialogue scenes altogether. It's instant gratification on repeat, the action equivalent of hardcore pornography.
The Raid has been remarkably – some might say alarmingly – well received by critics and action fans alike. I can appreciate the fact that it's well executed. It has some novelty value in that it showcases the indigenous martial arts of Indonesia. It could have made for a great 15-minute film, but at 110 minutes it's just plain numbing. More breathtaking than the film itself are some of the reactions to it. Clearly intent on hyping up the fanbase, Nordling at Ain't It Cool News had the balls to call it the greatest action movie since Die Hard and John Woo's masterpiece, Hard Boiled. "Call it hyperbole," Nordling dares the reader. Not only that, I'll call it fucking ludicrous. I'm more in the Roger Ebert camp on this one. On his blog, the esteemed critic wished The Raid had provided "some humor, humanity, romance, suspense, beauty, strategy, poetry. Not all of those qualities, but at least several them."
The 15-minute premise: A SWAT team infiltrates an apartment complex, and must fight its way to the top floor to apprehend a ruthless druglord. This scenario will be familiar to action fans. It's usually contained within a single sequence, like the takedown of the Carter building in New Jack City. There have been countless sequences like this in vastly superior films, such as Luc Besson's The Professional. Is Nordling saying The Raid is better than the fucking Professional? It's not even up to the standards of the lesser action pictures that Besson writes, produces and distributes through EuropaCorp. In those movies, Besson will take a far-out concept and build the action from there, as he does in the current Lockout (Guy Pearce vs. the inmates of a maximum security prison – in outer space!). The Raid isn't a high-concept picture; it's a no-concept picture. It takes my plot description of Lockout and removes everything but the !
The Raid also brings to mind Walter Hill's brutally efficient Trespass, which takes place almost entirely within the confines of an abandoned building in East St. Louis. Though it eventually devolves into fairly routine bloodletting, Trespass had the benefit of a crackling script by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale. With its eerie incorporation of video footage, including a murder captured on tape, the movie stirred up quite a bit of controversy, drawing comparisons to the Rodney King beating and the ensuing L.A. Riots. Similarly, Besson's District B13 was frequently cited in late 2005, when the international media covered the riots in the poorer suburbs of Paris. When a genre film is well made, it can stumble onto relevancy. I'm not sure what relevant statement The Raid has made, other than to say we're in for a slew of brainless, heartless, hopeless action pictures.
Andy: I understand you're a man that knows how to get things. Red: Yeah, I'm known to locate certain things from time to time. What do you want? Andy: Rita Hayworth.
By the time Andy Dufresne, a quiet young banker wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of his wife and her lover, asks to have Rita Hayworth smuggled into Shawshank Prison, he's served two years of two life sentences. It's a significant moment that will ultimately lead to his salvation; not for nothing is the novella on which Frank Darabont's film is based named "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption." Part of what makes The Shawshank Redemption such a great and popular movie is that it shows us how our passions and hobbies – whether they're books or pin-up queens or chess or other interests – can liberate us from our present circumstances. In the case of Andy Dufresne, they provide a literal means of escape.
Andy (Tim Robbins) asks for Rita Hayworth during a picture show. In Stephen King's novella, the movie that's playing is The Lost Weekend with Ray Milland and Jane Wyman. Instead of The Lost Weekend, Darabont uses the 1946 film noir Gilda, which provided Hayworth with her most iconic role. The change is good for several reasons, the most obvious of which being that we immediately get to see the amazing beautiful woman Andy is talking about. There are also some nice parallels between the movie that Red (Morgan Freeman) and Andy are watching (Gilda) and the movie that we're watching (The Shawshank Redemption), which I'll get to shortly.
I'm not all that impressed with Gilda as a piece of film noir. It lacks the complexity of The Big Sleep, and Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity is miles beyond it. In Wilder's classic, we understood why Barbara Stanwyck held Fred MacMurray spellbound. Hayworth's femme fatale and the movie she's in don't have that kind of pull. I had more fun imagining Andy Dufresne watching Gilda (he claims to have seen it three times during the month he asks Red for the pin-up poster) than I did actually watching it myself.
One thing that occurred to me while watching Gilda is how the characters and setting would have appealed to Andy. Gilda and the two men she's involved with are all Americans hiding out in Buenos Aires. Seventeen years after the picture show, Andy will also be an expatriate living in a Latin American country, hoping to forget his past in "a warm place with no memory." Another parallel: in Gilda, the cartel that allows the Americans to live so lavishly abroad is run by German businessmen who cover up their shady dealings by using Gilda's husband (George Macready) as a front. Years later, Andy will have a similar scheme going when he conjures Randall Stevens ("second cousin to Harvey the Rabbit") out of thin air, so as to render the schemes of Warden Norton (Bob Gunton) untraceable.
The characters in Gilda are so irredeemable and Hayworth is so sexy that I'm surprised corrupt, pious Warden Norton would allow his inmates to watch it. Indeed, Hayworth is shockingly uninhibited in the role. Early on she states bluntly, "If I'da been a ranch, they would have named me the bar none." Later, in a vaguely S&M scene, she brings a whip to a costume party. You can imagine what kind of effect this screen goddess (described by King in the novella as "Woman in Heat") would have had on a mostly heterosexual audience of inmates locked up for decades. It's easy to understand why Red shushes Andy so he can watch Hayworth do "that shit with her hair."
More than just a chance to ogle at an unattainable object of affection, what Rita Hayworth provides the men of Shawshank is an opportunity to forget about the mess they've gotten themselves into. This is a thread that runs throughout the movie. When Andy plays Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" over the prison's loudspeakers, Freeman sums up the opera's transformative power in one of his most unforgettable voiceovers:
I have no idea what those two Italian ladies were singing about... I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you those voices soared, higher than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was like a beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man at Shawshank felt free.
A slow pan of Andy's prison cell in the mid 1960s reveals the ways in which he's pursued his interests on the inside – as a chess player, rock hound, bookworm and admirer of the female form. These have helped him keep going for 19 years, and they illustrate the movie's central theme: that no matter what you have to hold onto a sense of hope. Of course, by now, Rita has been replaced by Marilyn, who has in turn been replaced by Raquel. The secret Raquel spills when Warden Norton throws a chess piece at her is about the best metaphor I can think of for how our passions can set us free.
"'Look, teacher,' the New York Times reported a child shrilling as the Twin Towers were becoming pyres: 'the birds are on fire.' Here was a sweet, infantile rationalization for an uncommon sight: human beings who had hesitated too long between the alternatives of jumping to their deaths or being burned alive, and who were thus jumping and burning." – Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22
Directed by Stephen Daldry, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is perhaps the most controversial of the nine films nominated for this year's Oscar for Best Picture. I'm not sure it's best-of material; the young hero's emotional outbursts could have been toned down, and the last 10 minutes drift into syrupy Pay It Forward territory. But overall this is a very powerful film. I disagree with those who maintain it has somehow exploited our national tragedy. Like Pan's Labyrinth, it's a whimsical tale with a very dark heart, showing an imaginative child dealing with unimaginable horror.
From its opening moments, the movie confronts that horror head on. We see a man with a familiar face (it's Tom Hanks) falling from the World Trade Center. My initial reaction was, "You can't show that!" But then I realized what the movie was doing. That terrifying shot isn't meant to be taken literally; we're in the headspace of Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), the movie's preteen hero. This is Oskar imagining the fate of his father, who was killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
I'll grant that it's a risky proposition, but I don't see why this is an invalid or inappropriate subject to tackle. A lot of kids must have gone through the same kinds of emotions Oskar goes through in the days, months and years following 9/11. He refers to the day his father was killed as "the worst day," and is bewildered by the idea that "you can be killed by people who don't even know you." Putting us in his shoes is an easy way to give the audience's tear ducts a good workout, but do the filmmakers overreach or have him do or say anything that a gifted, intelligent little boy wouldn't in the wake of catastrophic loss? I don't think so.
The movie has been adapted from the bestseller by Jonathan Safran Foer. I've read none of his books and only one of his short stories, "The Sixth Borough," which I highly recommend you read and which I gather from Wikipedia is part of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. He's accused in some circles of making twee bullshit, but I think I'd enjoy most of his writing. I end up admiring most artists (like Wes Anderson) who have that charge leveled against them, if for no other reason than the sheer breadth of their creative resources. Foer's creativity is evident in Oskar's narration (having flipped through it, I know many of the lines in the film are taken directly from the novel), like when he talks about everyone swallowing microphones so we can listen to each other's heartbeats. And you can't say Foer doesn't know how to build a dramatic centerpiece; the secrets Oskar is hiding about the voicemails his father left on "the worst day" are absolutely devastating.
As mentioned earlier, Oskar can be a bit shrill at times, but I think that's more the director's fault than the actor who's playing him. Horn gives a performance that's extremely loud but incredibly convincing. 2011 was apparently beat-up-on-Tom Hanks year, which is unfortunate and unfair. The movie he starred in and directed last year, Larry Crowne, is about the sweetest, most harmless thing I can think of. I agree that his post-Cast Away filmography is spotty, but he's consistently made thoughtful choices; by no means has he sunk to the I'll-do-anything level of latter day Robert De Niro. This story needs an Everyman to give us the full weight of the 9/11 atrocities, and who better than Hanks? Best Supporting Actor nominee Max Von Sydow does fine work as an elderly man who befriends Oskar, though I find it amusing that this extraordinary Swedish actor, who possesses one of the most unforgettable accents in all of movies, has earned his second Oscar nomination for playing a mute. (Eleven Ingmar Bergman movies and only two nominations? Sheesh!) Maybe the filmmakers have successfully manipulated me, or maybe I'm just a sucker for movies that invite me on a tour of New York City. But I think Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is pretty underrated. It shouldn't (and won't) win Best Picture, but it's worth two hours of your time.
With just a few days left before Oscar's big night, I've decided to review two nominees for Best Picture that I haven't blogged about yet: The Artist and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. A quick recap of what I think about the other nominees: Hugo, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life and War Horse all made my best of the year list. The Descendants is arguably the year's most overrated film; with Sideways and now this, director Alexander Payne seems to be making movies that appeal primarily to middle-aged movie critics. And while I wouldn't mind seeing Viola Davis or even Octavia Spencer take home the gold, I found The Help to be a problematic portrait of the civil rights era; you can read about said problems in my review.
In my next post I'll let you know what I think about Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. This time I'll be reviewing Michel Hazanavicius' silent romantic dramedy, The Artist. This is the year's frontrunner, and after finally seeing it I have no idea why. (Okay, I have a hunch; I'll get to that in a minute.) People I respect really love this film, and that combined with its reputation makes me want to revisit it to see if I can figure out what all the fuss was about. My impression right now is that this is a very minor film. It tells a story that's been told before (and with a lot more wit than Hazanavicius can muster).
Best Actor nominee Jean Dujardin plays George Valentin, a movie star whose refusal to make the leap from silent pictures to talkies leads to his ruin. George's downfall is contrasted with the rise of Peppy Miller (Supporting Actress nominee Berenice Bejo), a dancer whose killer moves send her shooting to the top in the earliest days of talkies. Djujardin and Bejo are both faultless, and indeed the movie is splendidly cast across the board. It was particularly nice to see Joel Murray (from One Crazy Summer) and Penelope Ann Miller, even though she appears in a thankless role. Hazanavicius has chosen performers with very expressive faces, so that the beats in each scene are always clear without the actors reading any lines.
That's not to say the movie doesn't have any dialogue. It crops up sporadically in the form of intertitles, providing what is perhaps the film's most moving moment: When a despondent George says of his beloved doggy/co-star, "If only he could talk." As the intertitles indicate, The Artist plays by the rules of an earlier era of filmmaking, which explains why there's not a whole lot of cutting in the dance and action scenes. Forced to think in strictly visual terms, Hazanavicius comes up with some real beauties. I'm especially fond of the scene where George and Peppy meet on a stairway; he's on the way down while she's on the way up, which is nice way of showing what's going on in the story.
Still, for a movie that's often described as a nonstop charmer, I found much of The Artist to be depressing. George spends much of the time moping around and pining for his glory days. I think the reason the film has failed to ignite at the box office has less to do with its silent method and more to do with Hazanavicius' failure to give us an endearing hero to root for. The story of the washed-up showbiz figure has been told countless times before – and in much more engaging fashion. Just look at the average Krusty the Klown episode of The Simpsons (especially "Krusty Gets Kancelled" and "The Last Temptation of Krust"), or Tim Burton's treatment of Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood.
Burton’s Ed Wood shames this movie on all levels: as comedy, as period piece, as an emotional human story. Most of all, it shames The Artist on a technical level. Burton’s mid-‘90s masterpiece was a loving, visually impeccable tribute to Z-grade genre filmmaking. Hazanavicius doesn’t approach his material with the same sort of seriousness or panache. For example, he shot The Artist in color and converted it to black-and-white in post. When he employs silent movie techniques, it’s like he’s winking at the audience, as if to say, “Look at this cute thing we’re doing.” The entire movie is like Uggie the dog: It’s being cute for a gag.
So why is this featherweight film considered a lock for Best Picture? The answer starts with Harvey and ends with Weinstein. Back in the '90s, the movie mogul mastered the art of Oscar campaigning, so that whatever prestige picture Miramax had just released became, in the minds of voters, the crossword puzzle answer to, "What was the best film of the year?" I'll love him forever for championing filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Anthony Minghella, but Harvey seems to be up to his old tricks again. The Artist is not without its charms, but if it wins big on Sunday night it'll go down as the most eye-rolling choice since Paul Haggis' Crash.
"The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive." – Pvt. Joker, Full Metal Jacket
One of a handful of very satisfying movies to be released in the first several weeks of 2012, The Grey caught me completely by surprise. Liam Neeson's last few star vehicles (Taken, Unknown) have rebranded him as a cartoonish he-man. That image, along with the pumped up ads for The Grey, had prepared me for an all-out brawl between man and beast, something along the lines of the final scene of Legends of the Fall (in which Brat Pitt wrestles a grizzly) stretched to feature length. What I got instead was a remarkably contemplative action picture in which death is given its full weight, one that invites comparisons to John Boorman's classic Deliverance. Not bad for a movie directed by Joe Carnahan, a filmmaker I'd pretty much written off after his and Neeson's disastrous screen update of The A-Team.
The Grey is structured like a teen slasher flick, in which the characters are picked off one by one by a merciless foe. It's about a group of oil rig workers whose plane crashes in the Alaskan wild. Soon after, the men discover they've touched down in the hunting territory of a pack of gray wolves. These early scenes do an efficient job of explaining why the men are being hunted (they've crashed near the wolves' den), and of setting up the expertise of its main character, Ottway (Neeson), whose job it is to kill wolves that threaten the safety of the drilling team.
Deliverance and The Grey both tell stories of modern men tested in the woods by pre-civilized forces. They also share a subtext: payback for environmental atrocities. Boorman's city slickers go on vacation to enjoy the "last wild, untamed, unpolluted, unfucked-up river in the South," and end up encountering the mountain men whose home is being taken over by a power company. Similarly, the oil rig workers in The Grey are confronted by wild animals whose habitat is being threatened by the plundering of natural resources. What's different about the films is that, unlike Boorman's ill-fated vacationers, Ottway and company don't go from "soft" city men to backwoods survivalists; no, their main transformation is to go from breathing to not breathing.
I can think of few other films that depict death in such an unsettling, realistic fashion. Krzysztof Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing comes to mind, as does the powerful, bizarre, stand-alone scene in David Lynch's Wild at Heart in which Lula (Laura Dern) and Sailor (Nicolas Cage) witness the final few moments of a teenage car crash victim. ("She died right in front of us, Sailor.") All of the killings in The Grey are shocking because these men are strong enough to work in the harshest conditions imaginable, and we're seeing their lives cut off in midstream. Two killings that stand out for me: the astonishing scene after the plane crashes where Ottway talks a man through his own death, and a drowning late in the film.
The latter scene is especially disturbing because the victim is fighting hard for his life, screaming at the top of his lungs underwater. It hits us really hard because we understand exactly what he's fighting for. For such a bleak film (one that takes an arguably atheistic stance on whether we're alone in the universe), The Grey places a very high value on family and emotional ties. These are what keep you tethered to the world. Thoughts of loved ones give a majority of these men the will to survive, and provide a final moment of grace and comfort for some of them before the inevitable.
The effects in the wolf attack scenes aren't always convincing, but you never doubt the degree to which the men are in danger. Carnahan and his cinematographer, Masanobu Takanayagi, capture the harsh beauty of the Alaskan wilderness. A post-credits scene is unnecessary, adding nothing more than a tally of the final body count.
