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.
Well, not quite. But the fine man over at Free Book Reviews did give The White Tree a very, very nice writeup. Seriously, the first sentence of the review proper includes the word “masterpiece” and that’s not preceded by the words “not a,” anti-“, or “what in Bizarro World would be considered a.” Give it a read.
It’s been a while now since I finished or reread The White Tree and it’s been very cool to see the odd review roll in and remind me of what’s between the covers. Like that main characters Dante and Blays get into and perform an awful lot of trouble. The review puts it better than I could when it says, in reference to the two, “not all heroes have to always do the right thing to do the right thing.”
One of the main things I wanted to do with that book was write an epic fantasy where the heroes are very rarely faced with obvious choices between good and evil, leaving them to make a lot of decisions that are questionable, amoral, or outright wrong–but without making them antiheroes, exactly. I’m hardly the first one to do that, but it’s still gratifying to read about someone else getting the same kick out of that as I did.
Incidentally, The White Tree‘s still available at Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble.
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, as usual, available over at ye Herald.
Why do I say Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is a Guillermo Del Toro hand-me-down? Because it is. The inspiration for it has got to be that scene in Hellboy 2 with the pixie-sized monsters who also eat teeth. Grafting that idea onto the concept from Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (an unusually effective TV movie from 1973) is a good fit, and raiding/expanding your own ideas is hardly a high crime, but it makes the whole thing feel a little tossed-off.
Especially because the story is just all wrong. I don’t know if it’s Troy Nixey’s direction or Del Toro’s cowritten script–wait, yes I do, it’s both–but it seems like the same goddamn scene repeats itself fifty goddamn times: Bailee Madison, the little girl, is attacked by tiny monsters, does nothing, then gets rescued by a grownup in the nick of time. Why is this repeated over and over and over? Well, you can’t just have her get eaten 30 minutes in, dummy. That’s why. That would be a TV episode and not a movie.
Still, in practice, it’s a boring story structure that slowly disengages you from the material until you don’t really give a shit about what’s happening in this kooky old house. What was the deal with Guy Pearce, too? His acting was all stiff–he’s normally great–and his character’s motivations seemed to be “whatever is dramatically convenient to the current scene” rather than anything consistent. There were just way too many seams visible in Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark to lose yourself in it. There was nothing terrible about it. Just nothing all that fresh, either.
They kind of got hosed on the R-rating, incidentally. I read it was for something like “heavy and persistent fear,” which is a BS rating. There’s certainly not any language, violence, nudity, drug use, thematic content, or any of the other usual suspects at play here. I think they got tagged with the R-rating (which reduces profits on just about any horror movie) because they opened the movie with a fairly grisly (but not that graphic) scene of dental trauma. That shit will make anyone squirm.
(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.
(Full review available here.)
I didn’t like Zombieland. Except for you-know-who’s cameo, I thought it was derivative and unfunny, an uninspired recycling of other, better zombie movies. Plus a lot of it didn’t even make any fucking sense! Who’s that British guy doing the Hitchhiker’s Guide-style narrative intrusions? Who’s keeping score of the “kill of the week” in this post-apocalyptic wasteland? Nobody, that’s who! I call bullshit!
I have heard from others who feel similarly about Zombieland, yet it felt like everyone else liked it, which is why I periodically burst into righteous hate-flames like above when the topic comes up. Well, our side just got some pretty strong supporting evidence: the sucky failure that is 30 Minutes or Less.
Different writers, same deal: uninspired, unwitty, and un-capable of making me want to watch it ever again. Jesse Eisenberg and Aziz Ansari are funny together, yeah. But although director Ruben Fleischer showed a bit of style with Zombieland, 30 Minutes or Less is about as bland as it gets in visuals, framing, and pacing. It’s like if Judd Apatow made a movie except it wasn’t funny and it felt much longer than it was and all right, you can stop making jokes about Funny People already.
In my book, Fleischer is now 0-2. That’s a baseball metaphor meaning he blows. Well, not really. Any baseball player who goes 1-2 or better every day is the greatest baseball player of all time. But if he doesn’t improve soon, or attach himself to better writers next time, we could be looking at the M. Night Shyamalan of comedy directors–a successful debut leading to a long and crummy career.
Full review available at the Herald.
So. Rise of the Planet of the Apes should not have been good. Did you see the last one? Thank heavens, then. Get to a secure location where the infection can’t reach you. According to both minutes of my research, the 2001 Planet of the Apes marks the exact moment Tim Burton became Crappy Tim Burton. Possibly this actually happened during Sleepy Hollow, but since I am not a Burtonoligist and this post is not about Tim Burton, it is now time to move on.
To Planet of the Apes remakes that don’t suck! By all rights, this category should consist of no movies. It certainly should not include prequels/reboots of movies about talking, Earth-ruling monkeys. Yet here we are! Life: it contains surprises.
Turns out Rise of the Planet of the Apes is well-placed, well-plotted, and tightly written. It smartly establishes just how this crazy ol’ place got started while answering the big questions about the original movie. Also, it doesn’t give a shit about the humans. This story is the story of Caesar, the first and leader of the new apes. His “father” James Franco gets a decent chunk of screen time, but when it comes to emotional content, it’s all about Caesar and his evolving perspective on the human race.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes isn’t perfect–the “bad guys” are all one-dimensional, and the CG and its physics are just a little off (though you get used to them after a while)–but it’s much, much better than I anticipated. I’m actually looking forward to the next installment.
“Pilot Part 2.” Yes. Ten times yes. If all episodes of everything were as good as “Pilot Part 2,” there would be no more episodes of anything, as we would have all merged with our couches and been eaten by our starving pets. But until our undignified end as the smell on a puppy’s breath, it would be glorious.
Two episodes in, Lost is firing on all cylinders plotwise. After scuffling with Sayid over the transceiver they need to contact help (and the interesting revelation Sayid was a member of the Iraqi Republican Guard), Sawyer leads an expedition inland for high ground and better reception–and winds up shooting a charging polar bear. In the middle of the damn jungle. Sure, grolar bears can live in less-frigid climes, but I have this funny feeling that’s not what’s going on here. Also I’ve watched enough nature documentaries to know polar bears can swim like hell, but I’m guessing the Island, wherever it may be, isn’t quite in spitting distance of Alaska.
Oh, and when the makeshift team gets to high ground? They discover their signal’s being blocked by another. It’s in French. It says she’s alone and the others have all been killed. And it’s been repeating for over a decade.
To sum up–the plane crash survivors aren’t the first on the island. They have no way to contact help. And whatever killed the French woman and her people, you can bet it’ll be coming for Jack, Kate, Charlie, Sawyer, and all the rest right quick.
Oh, and Charlie is a heroin addict and Kate was the criminal in cuffs being transported by the U.S. marshal.
Holy shit. It’s no surprise Lost is rocking on the plot. This is a high-concept show driven by mysterious supernatural forces in the confines of an unknown island. What’s really impressive here is how the show isn’t at all coy with its characters’ histories. This seems like it should be elementary. To get really involved in a show, you have to be able to know the people it’s following. But you contrast this with a show like Jericho, a show inspired by Lost which got off to a strong start but was canceled midway through its second season, and it’s night and day. Jericho tried to milk all the suspense and hooks it could from the oh-so-mysterious pasts of its two leads (played by Skeet Ulrich and Lennie James). It hardly told us a damn thing about them until halfway into the first season. Who are these two guys? Why do they know so much? Where did they learn to kick all this ass? Fun questions for a few episodes. By the time you’re eight-ten deep, those questions dwindle to a single one: Ah, who gives a shit?
That’s not what Lost is doing. Lost could have played up the mystery of the missing prisoner for several episodes. It could have stretched out that one thing over an entire season if it wanted. Instead, it’s (almost completely) answered over the span of “Pilot Part 2.”
It’s Kate. She fled to Australia to escape prosecution in the U.S., then got turned in by a kindly farmer who couldn’t resist the reward. The episode does a nice job playing on our expectations here; at one scene, Kate’s going through some money stashed away, and I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to think she’s stealing from the nice older man who gave her a room and a job. Instead, it’s the money she earned. The show can’t help itself from holding back the question of whether she’s guilty of the crime she’s wanted for, which kind of irks me. When you’re juggling so many other unknowns, you have to reveal some things or we’ll start to resent the show for being one big tease. But it’s kind of true that, as Jack decides, it doesn’t matter. What matters is they’re trapped on the island and they need to trust each other to survive. On the other hand, he clearly wants to jump all over Kate, and learning for a fact that she’s a murderer or what have you could definitely be a boner-wilter.
So is Jack doing right, prioritizing the here and now rather than the past? Or is he letting his thing for Kate cloud his judgment? At this point, either would fit his character. Could be both. Can’t say. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more of this decision and its consequences down the road.
And I can say why Lost was such a smash. Right off the bat, we have people struggling with compelling, unknown, dangerous circumstances–and we have reasons to care about how they do.
That’s an incredibly basic formula, which makes it a constant surprise that other shows, movies, and books don’t even seem to be trying. Then again, maybe they are trying, and it’s just a whole lot harder than it looks. Maybe that’s why the ones that get it right connect so hard.
Full review available at the Herald.
A movie called Cowboys & Aliens is a movie I should like. A movie directed by Jon Favreau is a movie I should like. Jon Favreau directed Cowboys & Aliens. I didn’t like Cowboys & Aliens.
I cover this pretty thoroughly in the review, but I felt like this one is a case of Too Many Writers Syndrome. Typically, if you see a movie with a shitload of writers attached, that movie will be either a) an incomprehensible, wild disaster or b) a big bland dull-fest where nothing really pays off the way it should. Cowboys & Aliens is the latter.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with it. But I have a hard time understanding how on Earth a movie with this name feels like something I’ve seen a hundred times before. Daniel Craig is a man of few words and many ass-kickings. Olivia Wilde is a semi-mysterious love interest with an idiotic secret. (The secret isn’t idiotic because it’s nonsense–it’s logical enough–it’s idiotic that it gets like one sentence of explanation before never being discussed again. It’s like the whole Armand Tanzanian thing in sci-fi western action movie form.)
I was entertained, I guess!, but I was also pretty let down. I didn’t anticipate Cowboys & Aliens would be a sure-fire slam dunk. I was impressed enough by the cast, the director, and the concept to think it could have been a big success. I don’t think that will be the case.
Somehow I watched “House of the Rising Sun” without taking down any notes. Or possibly I accidentally deleted them all, having thought I’d already written about it. This means either a) it was so great I had to watch the next episode immediately or b) so disposable I forgot that I hadn’t even said anything about it yet because there was nothing to say in the first place.
This episode takes a look at the isolationist Korean couple, kicking off with an apparently unprovoked and brutal attack of Michael by Jin-Soo Kwon. Neither he nor his wife Sun-Hwa can explain–neither speaks English.
Jin, to this point, has been a fairly large asshole. Not large enough to drop a bowling ball through, but he could handle a coffee cup with no problem. He spends most of his time bossing his wife around, correcting her modesty, and then reminding her he loves her. (In fairness, there was that one cool sequence a few episodes back where he harvested urchins and brought their meat to the others.)
Once upon a time, though, Jin was a humble waiter. In flashbacks, we see how he wound up married to Sun, the daughter of a very rich (and, it’s implied, fairly dangerous) businessman. Jin’s not intimidated. He speaks to her father, gets permission to marry her. Gets taken into the family business. He does well at whatever it is he does–sometimes coming home covered in blood–and along the way, transforms from a charming, down and out young man to a callous, rich, wife-stomping (metaphorically) prick. In fact, at the airport where they wound up boarding the doomed flight, Sun was about to run away from him forever. She changes her mind, however, when he flashes a remnant of his old ways; instead of sneaking off, she boards the flight with him.
On the island, it turns out Sun speaks English. And that Jin is outraged that Michael has her father’s watch, which he’d found in the wreckage. Michael approaches Jin, who’s been handcuffed to part of the wreck, and angrily returns the watch.
Meanwhile! The others have been exploring the caves, finding food and water. Oh, and two corpses who have been in their current corpsey state for decades. Locke and Charlie have begun to bond when Locke reveals he knows Charlie’s in heroin withdrawals–but if he gives up his stash, the island will bring him his lost guitar, which Charlie claims to miss even more than the drugs. Charlie hands over his ball of dope. Locke points up, where the guitar’s hanging from a tree.
Yet all is not so sunny in Lost-land. Jack thinks they should move into the caves rather than constantly shlepping water to the beach, but others, Kate among them, thinks they need to remain on the beach on the lookout for rescue. The survivors split roughly in half, some going to the cage, the others remaining on the shore.
Good episode. Not much in the way of island-development other than the bodies and the stones on them, though. One rock’s black, the other’s white. Parallels to Locke’s little backgammon scene in the first episode. I’m getting the idea the island has something to do with good versus evil, or at least two opposition forces struggling for control. Over what, I don’t know–the survivors, their souls, the last unopened bag of Ruffles. Maybe I’ll know more in a season or five.
The flashbacks continue to be highly effective. If there’s one thing the writers of Lost are showing right off the bat, it’s that they can tell vast character arcs over the span of a single episode that’s also got drama and infighting and tree-mangling monsters. Six episodes in, we already know the fairly complete backgrounds of what, five characters? Jack, Kate, Locke, now the Kwons. Over the 20-odd-episode run of the first season, they should be able to flesh out the entire main cast with ease. To a degree, these characters are still coming off as types (the reluctant leader, the woman on the run from the troubled past, the propriety-obsessed Asian man, the junkie has-been rocker), but still–we’re only six episodes in. An awfully long time remains for us to be introduced to the deeper wrinkles, faults, and quirks of the marooned passengers.
A group we’re finally starting to see some serious divisions within. Sure, we’ve seen Locke and Sayid and other individuals go after each other, but in “House of the Rising Sun,” not everyone’s blindly willing to do whatever Jack says. Any society, no matter how small, is going to be composed of a number of different actors and interests. I’m glad to see the ad hoc island society is no exception.
“Good vs. evil will be a running theme” is my only speculation ginned up for “House of the Rising Sun.” That, and it seems like people wash up to the island on a regular basis, at least once a generation or so. As for whether they’re brought to the island by accident or some devious island-mind intent? That, I once more have no idea.
Captives
Once, Walt Lawson saved the world. Lately, he's lived in peaceful anonymity with his girlfriend Carrie. This morning, she's been kidnapped. Walt has a...
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