Complete review of In Time available at the Herald.

I’d like to say a lot about In Time, but I’m not sure I’m going to, because I’m joining a friend in National Novel Writing Month this…month and completing 50,000 words amidst my other responsibilities (such as reviewing movies) is going to require an extra level of a word I suddenly can’t remember. Seriously, I’m blanking. It means “doing what you’re supposed to rather than what you want to.” Discipline! It will require an extra level of discipline. Meaning I don’t have a ton of time or energy to spend blogging about not-very-good movies I’ve already been paid to write about. Although I should write something about NaNoWriMo, which I think is stupid and valuable in equal measures.

But In Time is interesting because it’s seriously angry about wealth inequality in the United States and is also a Hollywood blockbuster starring Justin Timberlake. Attempted blockbuster, anyway. I think it’s only going to pull in tens of millions of dollars rather than hundreds. Written and directed by Andrew Niccol, who’s done several sci-fi movies including the semi-classic Gattaca, In Time has plenty of potential. Good concept. In on the “the rich may be too rich” zeitgeist. An interesting cast, including Timberlake, who appears to want to be a big-time movie star but isn’t yet, Amanda Seyfried, who keeps getting high-profile work despite my never being impressed by her (though she’s kinda good as a rebellious rich girl here), and the always-reliable Cillian Murphy as a semi-bad guy police officer.

The problem is In Time‘s plot is unshaped for a long period of time–Timberlake, pushed into bringing the system crashing down by a mysterious stranger, hatches a revolutionary plan that is indistinguishable from a sexy young dude deciding to spend a weekend in Vegas. Eventually, he and Seyfried go all Bonnie and Clyde all over everyone’s asses, but that is a long, long ways into the movie.

The ongoing mess of coincidence, allegory, and clumsy political zeal turns something that could be as important as it is entertaining into a thing that is neither. Too bad, because what In Time is trying to do is exactly what we could use more of. Maybe next time.

Full thing at the Herald.

I have a pretty good relationship with the found-footage horror movie. I loved The Blair Witch Project. I loved Cloverfield. I.. actually, I hated the shit out of Apollo 18, but then again I really liked Quarantineand am looking forward to seeing [REC], which I hear is even better.

Yet for whatever reason, I totally disregarded Paranormal Activity when it came at, dismissing it as a no-budget ripoff of earlier stuff I liked. Which, well, it is. But I recently learned it’s also pretty great. I’m a Netflix Instant watcher, and my routine is to throw something on the TV as background noise while I’m writing–movie reviews, martial arts articles, stories, novels, whatever. Most of the time, I only pay attention to a scene or three; some movies, the credits are rolling before I’ve absorbed a single moment. But like The Wild Hunt, a movie I started paying attention to halfway through and then had to go back and watch from the beginning, Paranormal Activity demanded I watch it.

Thus I had some anticipation for Paranormal Activity 3, despite the fact third entries in horror franchises have a worse track record than Lasty from Futurama. And what do you know, Paranormal Activity 3 was much better than I expected, too.

I gush about this in the proper review, but Paranormal Activity 3 ginned up a new found-footage technique that’s fucking brilliant. The main character, a wedding photographer/video-guy, has a problem: his downstairs is too big for his camera to see all at once. (Quick plot summary: he needs to record it because he and his wife have been hearing/seeing some spooky things and he’s trying to figure out what’s going on.) To solve this, he mounts his camera on an oscillating fan, showing him slow, steady, back and forth sweeps of the ground floor.

Good God is that a great idea! And so simple! Each sweep of the camera reveals a new scare–or shows the last one has disappeared, which may be even scarier. Meanwhile, as the camera pans back and forth, you’re just waiting and waiting for what it’s going to reveal on the other side of the screen. Jesus, is it tense.

The movie’s far from perfect. The mythology’s somewhat lackluster (though handled well enough), nothing more than the odd line of exposition tossed off here and there, tied up by an unsettling final scene. And three movies in, the general premise can’t help but feel a bit threadbare. Still, the cast is pretty enjoyable, particularly the youngest daughter and the dad’s friend.

And with a $50 million opening weekend, it looks like the Paranormal Activity franchise is all ready to replace Saw as the yearly Halloween event, which thank god because the Saw series sucks like an automated sucking machine. Paranormal Activity 3 is one I look forward to ignoring on Netflix multiple times.

Full review can be found at the Herald.

Like I say over there, The Thing–the first one, I mean–is not just one of my favorite all-time sci-fi movies, it’s one of my plain favorite movies. It has Kurt Russell in a hat as large as the rising moon. Wilford Brimley bellowing and whacking a computer with a fire axe. Not some dude’s laptop, either. A 1982 computer that takes up an entire wall *AND PROBABLY SPEAKS LIKE THIS BEEP BOOP BOOP*. Beards for miles. Oh yeah, and a wickedly paranoid plot where anyone could be an alien replicant beyond the moon and the only way to survive is through the execution of makeshift yet relentless logic.

The new The Thing is supposed to be a prequel, the story of the Norwegian camp that first discovered the creature locked up in the ice. Prequel. Not remake. I said prequel.

Yet for at least the first 2/3 of its run, the new The Thing is essentially the old The Thing. Minus Brimley, Russell, David Keith, all those character actors you’ve never seen elsewhere, and any sense of suspense, paranoia, dread, or goodness of any kind, of course. You’ve got the large, ensemble cast of bearded men. Dogs in pens. Isolated antarctic base with the same set design. Grizzled helicopter pilots. A scientist discovering the Thing can thing people into new Things, then the crew struggling with how to figure out who’s still human and who’s been thinged.

There are differences, I suppose. Lead Mary Elizabeth Winstead is pretty obviously a girl. There’s no analog in the original for antagonist Ulrich Thomsen, an arrogant man of science-type. The method of deducing who’s been thinged is changed, as is most of the third act, which is simultaneously more action-heavy yet way less apocalyptic than the “well let’s just blow the whole place up!” finale of first The Thing. The thing about The Thing is it feels exactly like The Thing, except worse in every way, so it’s goddamn impossible not to compare the two and find the new one lacking.

I think this is a case of the filmmakers wanting to have their cake and eat it too: to make a prequel that’s technically not a remake while paying homage to the original by making this prequel exactly like it. It’s all there in the identical title. They took no risks and thus gained nothing. Except a crappy movie. Because The Thing is crappy. The new The Thing, I mean. The old one is great and call it and tell you that you love it. I’m waiting.

My full-length review that may or may not have less swearing at the Herald.

Real Steel provoked the critic in me. Coming on the heels of my reaction to 50/50, it’s kind of funny, in a way that’s unlikely to make you laugh. With 50/50, I thought “screw my doubts, I loved it, it’s great.” Yet despite the fact Real Steel had me cheering during the big robot fights–not literally cheering, I’m far too painfully self-conscious to make audible noises to something happening on a screen–it annoyed me too much to give in to the emotional response it provoked in me.

What’s annoying about Real Steel? Hugh Jackman’s kid, mainly. He’s supposed to be 11, but he talks like he’s at least 15 and is as self-possessed as a 35-year-old. The Hollywood cliche of the unbelievably precocious kid is one that really sets me off, so if it doesn’t really bug you, bump my grade to a C+, and if you get a kick out of kids who don’t act their age, seek therapy.

But even if this is a bigger deal for me than most, Real Steel has a lot of flaws. Hugh Jackman and son’s motivations swerve wildly. In at least two instances, they completely reverse their stances from one scene to the next. This isn’t some high-minded nod to the ambiguity and indecisiveness of real life. It’s a cheap, manipulative ploy for laughs and plot advancement. And that’s Real Steel as a whole. It isn’t awful. It doesn’t blow the deceased. In fact, it’s pretty easy to get swept up in. But that’s because the people who made it are just pushing emotional buttons. The hardware supporting those buttons falls apart as soon as you open the case.

*ROBOT JOKES COMPLETE*

Regular newspaper-sized review available at the Herald.

I really, really liked 50/50. When I was driving home, I was mulling over the grade I’d give it, and my critic-brain was all “Yeah, that was quite enjoyable, but how does it stack up to the canon? What does your puny emotional response mean in the face of more than a century of classic films? Let us bestow a B+ upon it and be done.”

But then I thought about it some more, and my non-critic brain was all, “Yeah, but this movie really got to me. I thought the emotions felt really human and it was funny and the acting was great and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is like the Brando of my generation. It’s not your prototypical classic, but did we enjoy ourselves more at any other movie this year?” And then the critic-brain said, “Huh. No, there’s been some good stuff, but nothing awesome. Give it what you want.” For a funny, moving, well-written, great-actor film that had a deep understanding of human behavior and feeling? Thus was born my first A of the year.

There’s always a little hesitation to declare something great. Much easier to say “This was pretty good, but I’m not so sure about that milkman’s motivations!” and ding it a point or two. Nobody can do much complaining when they love something and your response was only mildly loving. And it’s not like loving 50/50 is that contrarian a position–its Rotten Tomatoes score is currently 93% (editor’s note: holy crap).

Ultimately, my reviews are written of the moment, composed 24-48 hours after a single viewing. It’s easy to get swept up in the moment or overly focused on some flaw that seems trivial with more perspective. With 50/50, I might look dumb a year from now. But I know how I felt in the minutes I was watching it.

As always, my professional review’s available over at the Herald.

My unprofessional review: I’m a big fan of sports, but I’m lukewarm at best towards sports movies. The dramatic arc is about as predictable as it gets. New coach rolls in, finds his team is filled with losers who no one believes in, belief in them ensues, they start winning, beginning an improbable comeback which leads to the championship, which they win, or which they sometimes lose, but you know they’ll be even better next year. Someone is hoisted onto someone else’s shoulders, credits roll, hooray.

Moneyball kind of follows that pattern but also not. Brad Pitt isn’t the Oakland Athletics’ coach, he’s the general manager. And he’s not taking over, he’s just facing the offseason loss of this three biggest stars. And if you know your recent baseball history–as a fan of the Seattle Mariners, Oakland’s division rivals, I am painfully familiar with this–you’ll know the A’s didn’t win or even go to the World Series in 2002, leaving Moneyball‘s dramatic climax to focus instead on their history-making 20-game win streak. Some of the old cliches are here, like when Pitt and assistant Jonah Hill rake together an “island of misfit toys” nobody else wanted or valued, but, well, that really happened, so. Anyway, I’ve got this theory that good stories are a balanced mix of the cliched and the original. Moneyball has both.

Pitt turns in another solid Pitt performance as a guy who failed young and can’t stand losing now. Hill’s pretty great, too, as a bottled-up geek-type whose ideas about baseball are about to revolutionize the game. Although the history’s already written, and it’s a sports movie so you know there will be triumph in the end, Pitt’s gnawing doubt and worry about whether his crazy new plan will pan out is so effective your stomach will be churning right along with him. Writers Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian paint a lot of extras into the margins; I loved how they nailed Pitt’s ex-wife’s new man as a soft-spoken, gentle, caring wussbag who’s probably the exact opposite of Pitt, the former pro player willing to take a huge gamble with an MLB franchise.

I gave Moneball a B+, and I feel like I might have short-changed (sweet pun, me) it a bit. It’s thrilling and competent in the very best way. A few years from now, we could be looking at this one as a classic.

Except at the place where I get paid to, of course.

Drive is good. You can tell Drive is going to be good from the opening scene, where Ryan Gosling, moonlighting as a getaway driver for a pair of robbers, shuttles them away from the crime scene through a net of cop cars and helicopters. It isn’t a car chase, though Gosling flips a couple sweet maneuvers along the way. It’s more of a car hide, with Gosling slipping out of view, holing up, and finally blending in with the crowd to escape being caught. It’s tense, it’s gripping, and it’s a hugely welcome break from your typical “vroom vroom VROOM bash *cop car flips over median, explodes*” chase scene.

This movie should be big for director Nicolas Winding Refn. It’s incredibly stylish and awash with righteous performances out of Gosling, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman, and Oscar Isaac, who I don’t think I’ve seen before but whupped all kinds of dramatic ass as a man released from prison to find Gosling sniffing around Isaac’s wife Carey Mulligan. It’s a non-action action movie that’ll have you questioning whether Gosling is a hero or maybe just a psychopath who’s finally found the chance to lash out.

I liked Drive so much it convinced me to finally watch Refn’s Valhalla Rising, which had been languishing on my Netflix queue for some time. Unfortunately, the review never appeared online, but I liked that one too. Not for everyone, though–very moody and light on dialogue. Drive is, too, but it should have much wider appeal as–perversely–a sort of indie crime drama romance sandwiched around or possibly by meaty scenes of vicious action.

Full review available at the Herald.

Yeah, that headline isn’t a joke. I really do love “lethal virus threatens society as we know it” movies. It’s a serious contender for my favorite subgenre, right up there with “alien fleet threatens society as we know it” and “natural disaster threatens society as we know it.” I might have some hostility issues? Well, what can you do.

Besides watch Hollywood’s Contagion! That’s good transition. While many breakdown-of-society stories like 28 Days Later keep the focus on a single character of family’s efforts to survive the chaos, Contagion, much like 2012, takes a broader view. Family man Matt Damon is the stand-in for the guy on the street; wife Gwyneth Paltrow dies within the first minutes, evoking cheers across the internet and leaving Damon to try to protect his surviving daughter from disease. Most of the movie is about the CDC and WHO’s efforts to track down the virus’ source, identify its characteristics, and create a vaccine.

The result is a race against two things: the clock, and a force of nature that could mutant at any time. Even more horrifying, however, is Steven Soderbergh’s relentless illustration that we’re all totally boned against infection and the only chance of staying healthy is to seal yourself in a bubble. A bubble with a lot of machine guns strapped to its sides. Stop touching things, people! You’re going to kill us all!

Contagion doesn’t just have an ensemble cast (you got Bryan Cranston, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, John Hawkes, and Marion Cotillard–oh, and the always-awesome Enrico Colantoni), it’s got an ensemble plot. Some of its threads are stronger than others, but they work great as a whole, building to a disturbingly plausible and pleasingly comprehensive look at how something we can’t see could threaten everything we’ve built together.

Full review available at the Herald.

I was looking forward to Apollo 18. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while now–its original release date was something like April 22, I think, and somewhere around that time, I saw a trailer for a movie where a secret moon mission was investigating something strange we’d found there. Oh man! I thought. That concept is exactly the kind of thing I would love! I can’t wait to see this. Then, a few seconds later, a logo appeared and I realized it was fucking Transformers: Bark at the Moon.

Then something bizarre happened. A couple weeks after that, I saw a trailer for another movie revolving around a secret moon mission. It was as if the universe had yanked my secret-moon-mission football away from me only to say “Just kidding, here it is after all. Have fun!” Amazing! When does something like that happen to you? Never, that’s when.

Then I went to see Apollo 18. In the ultimate Lucy-football move, it was worse than Dark of the Moon.

It isn’t immediately obvious that Apollo 18 will be shitty. Not to me, anyway. I find this is true of a lot of bad movies (the big ones, anyway). Generally, as I’m watching something that turns out to be terrible, I’m thinking “Well, this hasn’t really grabbed me, but maybe the second half will do something with the kinda boring stuff that’s happened so far.” Then everything shoots off the rails and the movie’s total badness becomes clearer than the void of space, which is as clear as you can get because it is a vacuum. Space.

In this case, signs of Apollo 18‘s suck didn’t appear to me until they reached the moon. That’s when director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallago decided that scenes are not something that should be coherent. I get that it’s found footage from the ’70s that was recovered from the inky void of space/the dusty, windless surface of the moon, but I also get that I am a human being whose eyes have a hard time making sense of grainy, distorted, jumpy, cut-happy sequencing.

Of course, it doesn’t matter so much, because it turns out there just isn’t that much to see. SPOILERS to follow.

What’s on the moon? Rock-monsters. Small stones that are actually crab-bug things that burrow inside one of the astronauts, give him a plague, and make him insane. A lot of people have ragged on this concept, which okay, but it really is no less silly than giant fucking truck-people from beyond the stars showing up to stage a war on planet Earth. On the sci-fi silliness scale, I give rock-monsters on the moon about a 6.5. Maybe a 7. Faintly ridiculous, sure, but not irredeemably so. I mean, they’re not actually rocks. They just have space-camouflage.

But we learn essentially zero about them. Where did they come from? Have they always been there? Do they hibernate when food sources don’t come along? Because in the 4-billion-odd-year history of the moon, there have only been what, like a couple of guys who actually walked around on it. There may also have been a monkey at some point. Unless these things eat gray, potential prey sources are a little scarce. As for the particulars of the space madness they introduce to one of the crew, or who the crewmembers are themselves, all of that is pretty much left up to the imagination. It’s like the creators came up with the whole crab-rocks on the moon idea, looked at each other, and said “Well, that’s it then. Let’s roll!”

Thing is, you don’t even need much if any exposition. Cloverfield hardly begins to answer anything about its Manhattan-stomping monster. But we know plenty about the characters. And the pacing and story beats of the script are impeccable (whatever you think of the movie itself).

Apollo 18 has neither material nor execution. It’s just there. If “there” is ever “on your TV,” you should probably turn it off.

(Full review available at the Herald.)

Despite liking a lot of his other movies, I didn’t see the Arnold Schwartzenegger Conan the Barbarian until just three or four years ago. I was shocked, then, to discover it wasn’t just the cheesy pile of oily pectorals, chicks in chainmail, and spilled flagons of mead I’d expected. Instead, it was.. good? Yes. It was good. A good time. Conan was an unstoppable force, a man of simple pleasures who did what he wanted when it felt right to do so. Zen-like, in his way. Except for all the murder. And the sex with Sandahl Bergman. I don’t remember any koans about that stuff, that’s for sure. Meanwhile, James Earl Jones’ Thulsa Doom (a sure contender for the Oscar’s Most Awesome Name category) was creepy, charismatic, and commanding. The support cast was fun, the world wild and wide-open.

The first Conan the Barbarian made Schwartzenegger a star. I’m thinking the remake was meant to do the same for Jason Momoa, he of “Khal Drago from Game of Thrones” status and little else. I’m afraid the big man is going to have to try again with something else.

Because the new Conan the Barbarian is that bland kind of lifeless that’s perhaps most depressing in all the land of Moviedonia. It isn’t especially terrible or ridiculous or over-the-top. Like I said in my proper review, I enjoyed the efforts to capture the Egypt-but-not-Egypt, Europe-but-not-Europe vibe of Robert E. Howard’s original stories, as well as the reintroduction of Conan’s animal cunning. They were remaking Howard’s work as much as Arnold’s.

It’s just that there’s no depth to it. No true worldbuilding. Just a shitload of exposition about a magic mask which, despite a full Lord of the Rings-style prologue by universal voice of authority Morgan Freeman, is never really all that clear. The result is one part Conan, one part LOTR, and about four parts generic costume action dullery like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

Conan the Barbarian isn’t the kind of movie you watch to amp yourself up before riding out to meet your enemy. Instead, it’s the kind of movie you watch on a Sunday morning, quietly hungover on the couch, when it’s not important what’s on the TV so long as it’s tuned to something.