Review’s here.

I don’t really have time to get into this, as vodka extended my sleep schedule past to the point where I should have been writing novel already, but after Taken, this was something of a disappointment. Fun, and competent enough, but it felt much more like a typical Hollywood action movie. If Pierre Morel does nothing but movies like From Paris with Love from here on out, I bet I’ll enjoy them all, but I hope his second American feature was more about proving he wasn’t a one-hit wonder than a sign of the direction he plans to take from here on out.

I appeared to like Edge of Darkness more than most critics. The skinny: Mel Gibson doing a slightly better version of his “seething pot of suppressed anger” thing; seriously competent direction; some awesome dialogue.

Dialogue’s no surprise, since it was cowritten by William Monahan, writer of The Departed. I didn’t know he’d contributed to this one going in, but about halfway through Edge of Darkness, I thought “Huh, this writing reminds me of The Departed. Sweet.” I’m not sure I’ve ever had that experience before; movies, given how collaborative they are, tend to disguise a writer’s style on several layers. For his voice to ring out through the differing interpretation of director, actors, editing, etc. is remarkable.

Late, but here!

This movie couldn’t decide if it wanted to be Star Wars or make fun of Star Wars. Fun, especially if you’re a sci-fi fan, but very uneven.

Available hyah (that is a flawless New Orleans accent).

This just released here. We have three big theater chains here in our three-city town. Two of them divvy up new releases pretty evenly while the other one just plays everything. One of the local movie-splitters–the Carmike–has twelve screens, though, and either to fill them all up or because they’re just cool like that, they bring in a fair amount of indie movies and small releases you wouldn’t expect to get from a big chain in a mid-sized and (*adjusts snob hat*) generally uncultured market.

Thus I was a little disappointed when Bad Lieutenant didn’t release here last year–a drug-addicted maniac cop! Directed by possible maniac Werner Herzog! Even played by Nicolas Cage, that’s got to be good. When I saw it on the local Fandango listings last week, I knew I had to jump all over that. It paid off.

Here.

This was a weird one–I only saw one trailer for it, ever, and I’m pretty sure it featured a shitload of angels killing other angels. I thought we were in for some crazy action.

Instead, we ended up with an unspectacular zombie movie. Weak.

To be found, as usual, here.

Toughie in that Denzel Washington’s character was literally sent by God: he started his epic, thirty-year bible-delivery quest because a voice in his head told him to.

I try to minimize personal politics in reviews except a) when I’m making jokes and b) when the message onscreen is so flat-out stupid it has to be addressed. As an average human I’m just seething with violent opinions about everything, but I approach my job–the sacred task of watching movies and then talking about how I felt about them–from an entertainment perspective rather than a political one.

But from my unreligious personal perspective, Washington’s actions look irrational. And a lot of what happens to him flirts with the fantastic. The miraculous. I think the directors made some of this stuff out to be deliberately ambiguous, and that’s something of a cheat; what looks implausible would be believable, within the context of the film, if God’s presence were real. Instead, it’s just strongly hinted He’s around with a helping hand.

Separating my uncharitable private beliefs on all that from my critical assessment of how The Book of Eli functions as a movie is a challenge, but at least it’s usually an interesting one.

Here it is!

This is a crazy, crazy movie. Ragingly anti-consumerist, it’s like what you’d get if The Communist Manifesto were filled with aliens and set on film. I almost can’t believe it got made. John Carpenter has done some amazing work.

Up at the Herald.

Although I kind of liked it, I’m not sure how well I got across the overall dumbness threaded through this movie. I think it would have been much more obvious if anyone but Dafoe had played the wild and woolly roughneck character who’s full of deliberately memorable lines and pragmatic folksiness. If someone had played the role as it was clearly meant to be played–i.e., to the awful hilt–I think the whole movie may well have collapsed.

From a speculative fiction perspective, however, I liked some of the extrapolation they did here. It’s possible the Spiereg brothers will do some interesting work in the future.

Here it is.

I thought this book was dumb when I read it in high school (something like twelve years ago, frowny-face) and I thought the movie was dumb when I saw it a few days ago. This dumbness was for varying reasons–even though the book was clearly written for oversmart, undersexed teens (i.e. right in my high school wheelhouse), I thought the characters were almost uniformly repellant, downright sociopathic, and their utterly singleminded focus on sex wasn’t anything like the perspective of my peer group.

Maybe I knew the wrong people. Maybe I was the wrong person, if I’m allowed to use the past tense on that one. But the thing about smart kids is they tend to be interested in a stupid amount of smart shit, and however heavily sex may have suffocated our brains, we spent a lot of time thinking and talking and doing other things, too. Even, sometimes, homework.

A couple of my friends did like the book, but even as a freshman I found it sophomoric.

After seeing the movie, which preserved the exasperating and overwhelming selfishness and singlemindedness of the characters, I walked out thinking “Gosh, the plot wasn’t anything like the movie at all.” Then I did a little research, which I understand writers who care do sometimes, and found out the plots were nearly identical. Shows how well the book stuck with me.

That really crippled the movie, though. The book is a tome. It’s 544 pages. In stomping all that material into fewer than 100 minutes of cinema, it robbed the central romance of the time it needed to be emotionally significant. I’m starting to repeat my review here, but this movie barely clung to the slippery edge of its C- rating. Once you drop down into the Ds, it’s hard to properly call whatever you’ve made a “movie.” At that point it can better be termed “a confusing and regrettable waste of what little jerk-off time I have left these days.”

Also: please take a different role, Michael Cera. You’re a multimillionaire movie star, and as such I find it increasingly impossible to believe you as an awkward, friendless virgin. It worked a few times, and may be worth revisiting later, but for now it’s time to find something new. You probably shouldn’t be taking career advice from someone who doesn’t have one, but I’m not the only one who feels that way.

Available here.

In my minimal research, it looked like a lot of people really, really liked Let the Right One In. I thought it was pretty good; probably a B+ by my usual standards. It had a literary feel to it, which I appreciated, but it also felt a little loose in a sense that may work wonderfully in the novel but which doesn’t play quite so well in movie form. Still, a good take on vampires, and it did one of the things I like best in books and movies: while playing perfectly well as a genre piece, it also dove with equal skill into real-life drama.

That’s no mean feat, and I may be underrating it just a bit. Big ups to the director, though. Hope more of his work makes its way stateside in the future.