Safe House (2012)

     It is conceivable that, somewhere, a world exists where Ryan Reynolds may be considered to have a "medium build" (which is how his character Matt Weston is repeatedly described).  In that world, I'd be too short to be a member of the Lollipop Guild.  Okay, that is an extreme exaggeration, but it does serve to highlight one of the problems I had with Safe House (2012) – there was an obvious gap between the character envisioned on the page and the actor hired to play the roll of Weston.
     Reynolds has the ability to play smaller than his size, and his muscle is the lean type, meaning that the right camera angles (and keeping him clothed) can give the appearance of a regular guy.  This tends to work better in the comedies he does where showing off his buff body would throw a serious wrench in the works of his being a goofy, boy-ish Everyman.  In an action film, it is nearly inconceivable.  Maybe it is his ability to play younger – Weston is likely six to eight years younger than Reynolds, not coming to the CIA in his early thirties – the made him the best available fit for the role.  It certainly seems to have had a younger Jeremy Renner in mind.
     The other issues I had follow.  Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) is a bad ass because of attitude more than ability.  I don't want to discount the attitude factor, but I really prefer when Washington is given characters with more definition.  Vera Farmiga (Linklater) just takes up space, half mumbles her lines, and does not seem to be interested enough in her role to even make eye contact with her fellow actors.  It would seem her days of being able to be the pretty face are well over, but not giving consistently strong performances is not a way to ensure more work as she drifts into the age range that Hollywood avoids.  I also get baffled every time I see Sam Shepard (Whitford) show up in a very conventional role. This is the guy who wrote The Tooth of Crime (1972) and La Tourista (1967).  I get that he is much older now, but having him stand in as part of establishment – to represent establishment through his own skill at bringing weight to a role – has never felt like a good fit to me.  That trend continues here.
     Other than those minor things, I found Safe House to be a decent, workman-like film.  Like Echelon Conspiracy (2009), I suspect that production was helped by incentives to make a movie in a non-traditional location.  Strangely, the lighting (and color correction) did more to make South Africa seem different than any effort to establish the setting.  Still, the action is steady without giving way to gore or over-the-top excesses.  The characters inhabit something resembling the real world (save Weston being of medium build), where the real enemy is entrenched corruption.  I'm not sure why it was so successful, but it is better than average.

Red Tails (2012)

    If ever there was a movie that simultaneously showcased the trademark Lucasian tone-deaf dialogue delivered in a monotone with the kind of direction that makes Flyboys (2006) look like Memphis Belle (1990), and Memphis Belle look like Twelve O'Clock High (1949) in comparison, then that movie would be Red Tails (2012).  Feeling the need to abandon any of the compelling real-life stories from the heroic Tuskegee Airmen, John Ridley and Aaron McGruder instead throw as many stereotypes at the audience as possible, never bothering to form any kind of coherent bond between scenes of characters.  This is problematic in a film where the filler material – everything that is not thrilling aerial combat – dominates the screen time.
     Most troubling to me was the choice to soft peddle the American racism towards the titular Red Tails, and black soldiers in general.  Brian Cranston has a few scenes to respectfully express his dim view of the colored in uniform, but there is no feel of institutional weight behind his prejudice.  Worse, it never seems that Cranston's Colonel Mortamus believes his lines.  He is the worst incarnation of the paper villain, one that is in place for Terrence Howard's Colonel Bullard to give a mild repudiation.  If this is Lucas' vision of addressing the racism of the era, then he never should have been allowed to contribute more to the film than money.
     There are plenty of other failings, and some that may or may not be failings.  In the latter category fall the following – the "brand new 109s" in 1945, presumably Bf-109s (arguably the best looking single engine fighter plane in the war) that would have been supplanted by a variety of other fighters; the P-40s that look less like the planes that the Flying Tigers made famous and more like modified P-35s; the timing of when the first escorted daylight bombing runs of Berlin occurred.  The obvious failings had more to do with character development, but there were a surprising number of technical issues as well.  The air combat was surprisingly dull and lifeless.  It managed to be somehow too crisp to pass for authentic and too slow to serve as exciting segments.  Add to that the inclusion of a recurring enemy pilot (who speaks Duetsch so slowly that even I didn't need a translation) who serves as a very old-school kind of villain is the only sense that the Nazis are the ones who the Americans are really fighting, and you have a movie that just doesn't have any conception of the setting it adopted as its own.
     I feel somewhat bad for the actors involves in this project, who likely signed on thinking that there was going to be a serious attempt to depict the heroism of the real life aviators.  Sure, most of them couldn't figure out how to give a reading and move at the same time (I am quite serious in that criticism; most of the actors had to stand perfectly still to give anything more than a wooden recitation of their lines).  David Oyelowo manages to bring some life to his character (Joe "Lightning" Little) away from the action, and that may have been a better movie than what was put together.  This has all the marks of a project that went into shooting without a finished script.  Instead, it seems that the decision was made to make a movie with some WWII air combat and there wasn't much consideration given to the audience's eventual concern for a compelling story within the movie.

Beneath the Darkness (2011)

     I guess I am a bit of a fan of Dennis Quaid.  If I were to look at it objectively, I would realize that there is no reason to be.  Sure, there are films like Breaking Away (1979), The Right Stuff (1983), D.O.A. (1988), and Smart People (2008) that are in the decent to great range where Quaid's performance matters.  But there are many more awful – albeit some in a very enjoyable way – movies featuring Quaid.  The brief list is Jaws 3D (1983), Enemy Mine (1985; I respect what they were going for, but Enemy Mine drags for its entire running time), Innerspace (1987), Flesh and Bone (1993), DragonHeart (1996; now, if you didn't go in expecting the action movie the trailers promised, you are likely to view DragonHeart as a fun fantasy action-comedy with heart), Switchback (1997), Traffic (2000; I know Traffic was widely praised, but I found it to be a disaster that was simultaneously too obvious and lacking in having a substantive point addressed by the material), Cold Creek Manor (2003), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Flight of the Phoenix (2004), the remake of Yours, Mine, and Ours (2005), Vantage Point (2005; I don't want to fault Quaid for the overall quality of the film – the plot is just rife with holes), Legion (2009), and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009; see Vantage Point for fitting criticism).  But there is something likeable about Quaid, a rough charisma that works when he is the man forced into the 'heroic' role.  As a villain, he has a tendency to overact to the point of ridiculousness.
     Put Beneath the Darkness (2011) in that category.  Quaid plays Ely Vaughn, who runs the local funeral parlor in a Texas small town.  It being in Texas is kind of thrown in as an aside, as no one has much of a Texan accent (from any part of the state) and the people certainly don't seem as devoted to high school football as they are suggested to be by TV, movies, and real life.  The sheriff does where a cowboy hat, but a lot of lower budget movies struggle to find distinctive headwear for small town sheriffs.  Anyway, Ely is mildly creepy guy who recently lost his wife.  Well, she is dead but decidedly not lost.  Movie wouldn't work if she were dead and lost.
      Ely is also a kind of obsessive whose tendencies are restricted to one particular province of his life.  While I'm sure somebody thought this was a good idea – because many obsessives can lead functional lives – it plays as both false and as being an obvious plot device.  What kind of guy would Ely be if he didn't keep his dead wife's body around for company?  What movie would there be?
     Chances are, a much better one.  Much of the time given to the Ely character is utterly wasted, especially given how Quaid has no consistent physicality for the character.  Is he the guy who can shrink into himself, blend in to a crowd, and appear to be the mild-mannered minder of the dead, or the brute who can lift a high school athlete off his feet by grabbing him – one-handed – about the neck?  Similarly, the teen protagonists/potential victims are given a fair amount of screen time only to be developed in clichéd broad strokes.  Even the circumstances that should make Travis (Tony Oller) unique come across like they were borrowed from The X-Files (1993-2002) and number of supernatural themed low-budget horror movie.
     For some reason, it isn't supposed to matter that Travis steals the star QB/kind-of-friend's girlfriend.  Now, if I am going to be honest in my recollection, my friends in high school didn't mind going after girls other guys (even friends) were dating.  How much more miserable would I be today if I had followed that route?  But seldom is this kind of behavior endorsed as being appropriate for teen heroes in a (soft) horror film.  The girlfriend in question is Abby, played by Aimee Teegarden.  Teegarden comes across as the kind of actress forced upon audiences, the kind that is serviceable but not quite ready for a good deal of screen time.  Moreover, she comes across as though she were playing an updated Topanga Lawrence from Boy Meets World (1993-2000).
     The are holes in the story that could have been covered with better dialogue and maybe two days of reshoots.  Instead, they stand as a testament that Beneath the Darkness was operating well beneath the desired budget.  The action, what little there is, is lifeless; the suspense nonexistent.  There are worse movies, certainly, but few that seem to be fighting every chance to elevate themselves from sub-mediocrity every step of the way.  I'm not sure Beneath the Darkness has enough of its various elements to satisfy any crowd.  It is too soft for horror fans, too lacking in suspense for thriller junkies, and too stingy with the emotions of the teens to satisfy younger viewers. 

Haywire (2011)

     This is the kind of movie where the critical part of my brain would prohibit any level of enjoyment.  Because having hot coffee thrown in your eyes will leave you (at the very least) momentarily blinded.  That isn't a question of will.  You can't just decide that it doesn't affect you because you are USMC-tough.  No, I pretty much went with where Steven Soderburgh wanted to go in Haywire (2011) because it required less effort than noting what the superspy/assassin can do because she is the best.  If I learned anything from the action movies of the 1980s, it was that there doesn't have to be any relationship between the real world and what the action hero does, so long as it looks cool.
     For the most part, Haywire does just that.  It has the just-obvious-enough edits that sell the practicality (instead of camera trickery or CG shenanigans) of the fight scenes.  Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) is able to survive a blow that should crush both cervical and thoracic vertebrae, stay conscious and combat effective after being repeatedly punched (full force) in the face by a much larger opponent, and braid her hair (for combat effectiveness?) in a matter of mere minutes because it is simply more interesting than the alternative.  If Mallory is knocked out in the opening scene, then there isn't much of a movie.  Unless Soderburgh was going to give an audience a torture sequence like the one in Casino Royale (2006), and that really would be torture-porn.  I'm glad he went the more conventional route.
     I found myself mostly enjoying the quick pace, the lack of any real connection of the events to a sensible plot (for any of the major characters), and the soundtrack.  Haywire has quite possibly the best action film music (discounting Sword & Sorcery fare) I have heard in the last ten years.  It helps drive the action forward, and even to hide how normal (safe) the camera shots are.  Now, if I wanted to think about it, I am positive I would have a long list of problems with the movie.  But it isn't something to think about.  See.  Enjoy.  Delete from memory banks.  That is how I feel about Haywire.  It is a diversion that is not likely to do more than make one think Carano can fight (which she had already proved before getting into acting) or notice that Bill Paxton no longer resembles Hudson from Aliens (1986) at all, even while you know that it is him.

John Carter (2012)

     I get it now.  I understand how Disney's John Carter (2012) failed to resonate with audiences and ended up as the most costly film venture in recent memory, surpassing Waterworld (1995) but not Heaven's Gate (1980) (because Disney still exists) when it comes to huge budget disasters.  There was much chatter that if Disney had simply gone with Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars (1917) as the tile and advertised it in a serious manner (just where did Disney spend $100 million when the supposed target audience was barely aware of the movie, and not at all of its premise).  I think the fundamental flaw with John Carter is that so many other films have already borrowed from the concept that it cannot help but look and feel derivative.
     Now, I am not a Burroughs fan.  According to Dean R. Koontz (from his 1972 book Writing Popular Fiction), Burroughs was the most translated author of the 20th Century (again, through '72), so there were undoubtedly fans out there at one point.  My exposure to him has been having the first two Tarzan books read to me (it was the whole class who got this treatment, and it happened in the 6th grade, so I still find it a little creepy) and the various film and TV incarnations of Tarzan.  I am aware of much of the art inspired by the John Carter stories, and people started making Tharks, thoats, white apes, Dejah Thoris, and John Carter animations for use in Civ III in coincidence with the movie's eventual release (most of these being converted from an existing game it seems).  There should have been an interest in the character, but it also appears that people who are into the stories that brought adventure Sci-Fi into the 20th Century are about as numerous (and as self-important) as diehard Jazz enthusiasts.  It is cool to see the futuristic fantasy images in a painting (I have not added any of the Barsoomian units to my Civ III games, though I have thought of using Dejah Thoris animation for the king unit for my civilization of Amazons), but I don't know how smart it is to design a film around of couple of cool images.

Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris

     To be fair, when those shots to pop up in the movie, there is some undeniable charm and simultaneous cool factor immediately accessible to the viewer.  In brief snippets, director Andrew Stanton and the thirteen person art direction team have provided a glimpse into not just the soul of the story, but why it should be so appealing to everyone.  However, these are just snippets, and largely supplied by Lynn Collins ability to give the impression of a painting come to life (though not forced to wear a metal bikini or go topless – not unsurprising for a Disney release).  These cannot overcome the obvious weaknesses the keep showing themselves.
     Let us first consider the casting of Taylor Kitsch.  I am willing to admit my complete unfamiliarity with him prior to seeing John Carter, but with this, Battleship (2012), and the minimally viewed Friday Night Lights (2006-2011) as his major roles, I am hoping that his days as a forced-upon-the-audience-leading-man are over.  He isn't a very good actor (not terrible or irredeemable), and spends much of John Carter fighting against a wig that changes color and looks like somebody glued rough shorn  doll hair to his head and asked him to let it lifelessly dangle whenever possible.  It is also readily apparent that Kitsch did a lot of working out during the length of filming as his musculature changes depending upon when the scene was shot.  This isn't a huge deal, but many directors and actors learn to hide the early stages with less definition with clothing.  Stanton decides to put a fit (but not yet buff) Kitsch into the shirtless scenes right off the bat.  I found it a little distracting, but at the same time I am willing to admit this is a nit that needs no picking.  Had I any rooting interest in the actor, I am sure I would have ignored it.  But because I found Kitsch to be unable to make Carter a compelling character (I am going to have a few things to say about the writing in this regards), his shortcomings screamed out to me. 
     Next, let us ponder why the need to insert Edgar Rice Burroughs as a character in the movie.  Having not the books, I have no knowledge of whether this is appropriate.  It didn't feel like it was, and the result is the forcing the obvious fiction into the reality of the man who wrote the story.  Add to that that Burroughs seems like a bit of a geeky loser who would not have anything in common with his brooding uncle (yet the two somehow share a close relationship?).  Burroughs the character seems to exist as an excuse to have the story related (this is more appropriate to late 18th and early 20th Century fiction, but keeps cropping up in recent films as screenwriters apparently feel that a story cannot exist on its own), and then to set-up the least exciting climax possible.
     Stanton had help writing the screenplay for John Carter in the form of Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon.  Andrews also has a credit on Pixar's upcoming film Brave (2012), which may be more his speed as he largely has worked in animation.  Chabon is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of books like Wonder Boys (1995) and The Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007; I started this book in 2008 and quickly abandoned it, wondering what the critics, and my brother, saw as being so praiseworthy).  I blame Chabon – without any evidence beyond my brief exposure to him – for importing the tropes and clichés from other science fiction stories into John Carter.  I am sure that the thought was to make a more mature but relatable tale, but it felt more like an unholy amalgam of ideas that didn't quite work in other films.  From Therns that closely resemble the Necromongers of The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), to the battle in the Thark arena that looks like it was excised from Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002), and awkward sky-bike piloting that borrows first from Return of the Jedi (1983) and then Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999).  At some point it doesn't matter if Burroughs had these moments in the original story or not; good screenwriting, in combination with effective direction, would ensure that the movie would aspire to do more than to ape that which has gone before.  If you can look at the moving city of Zodanga and not immediately form an unfortunate associate with Wild Wild West (1999), then you are carrying less film-viewing baggage than I am.
     The John Carter character retains his service to the Confederacy, which may be the kind of fidelity I could have done without.  If one is unaware of the popularity of the the post-Civil War rebel turned anti-hero, I would direct you towards the legend (largely through the dime novelization) of Jesse James.  Joss Whedon milked the same teat in coming up with Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly (2002-03).  Personally, I am about as anti-CSA as one is going to get.  The idea of Southern honor is a joke that too many people appear to take seriously.  I can't fault the writers for not taking liberty with this aspect of the story, but my preference would have been to just make him a Civil War vet and leave it at that.  But then we wouldn't have the least funny and most repeated joke in the movie, where Carter is referred to as Virginia. 

Woola

     Since it is a Disney film, there has to be at least one part of it that screams for merchandising.  That would be the Barsoomian lizard/slug dog, Woola.  Much like Teddy in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) or Muffit II from the original Battlestar Galactica (1978-79), Woola seems like the toy/pet that everybody would want to have.  Despite myself, Woola was the character I cared most about in John Carter.  Perhaps it is because their is no fake political machinations or manufactured angst driving the little beast.  Woola, despite seeming to exist wholly in the realm of computer constructed pixels, felt like the most honest of all the films inhabitants.  It also had the cute factor dialed to maximum, and that should appeal to all but the most hardhearted.
     Now, I have spent several paragraphs bitching about the problems with John Carter while giving it little praise.  I feel this is where I should point out the strengths (other than Woola).  It is a serviceable movie.  It looks good, better than most of the other movies set on Mars made in the last 20 years.  Strange that all of those movies lost money, because I would think it would discourage studios from revisiting it with inflated budgets.  The main fault is that it doesn't feel like something that one would think much of a week after having seen it.  Part of that is the result of the Blockbuster-ization (and now Netflix-ization) of movie watching.  Even mega-blockbusters are treated as being disposable, and when films become cotton candy instead of food, they achieve the result of momentary distraction with no lasting value.  John Carter doesn't carry the weight it should because, it would seem, Stanton and the rest of the crew only know how to do big and familiar.  Had most of the movie been done on a smaller, more intimate scale (it would still need a huge budget and lots of special effects), then the larger moments would be intensified.  As it is they play out as filler pieces, killing time until a predictable battle that itself feels more like how the House Harkonnen assault on Arrakeen would have looked if there had been a budget for it in any adaptation of Dune (1965). 
     Too much seems borrowed (even what may have been original to the story in 1917) to make John Carter feel like its own movie.  And if it isn't its own movie, then it cannot succeed as a momentary blockbuster.  So, I get it.  I get why it didnt draw a large audience.  But I am sure that the curious will give it a chance at home.

Tales of an Ancient Empire (2010)

     I did not ever expect to find a film that would make The Curse of Count Chocula (2003) look like a cinematic masterpiece by comparison (though, to be fair, the movie does have some great lines and even a few scenes that make it worth sitting through the rest).  Seeing as how The Curse of Count Chocula was made with a low-rent video camera and a budget that probably came close to $200, it would take some serious dedication to the art of making an absolutely disastrous movie.  Then I happened upon the forgotten as soon as it was made, direct-to-video effort that is Tales of an Ancient Empire (2010). 
     Why would I do this to myself?  The honest answer is that I like Kevin Sorbo.  I think that his post-Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995-99) career has not been filled with roles that showcase what he can do.  In 2005, he made a sitcom pilot that didn't get picked up where he played an athlete trying to figure out what to do after his sports career.  That would have served him well.  Sorbo can do funny as long as it is subtle, and he hasn't been able to keep the muscle mass up after whatever condition befell him late in the Hercules run.  But no, we get to see Sorbo in a string of thankless guest star roles and low-budget genre flicks.

Curse of Count Chocula.  It exists.

     And it is at this point that I want to discuss budgets, because I truly believe that Tales of an Ancient Empire had the professional equivalent to the $200 range for a backyard movie.  It shows right from the get-go.  Michael Paré and a few anonymous castmates start off the film standing in front of what appears to e a white sheet, holding weapons like they've never seen them before, and either giving cold reads from cue-cards or ad-libbing lines that somehow made it into the final product.  My guess is that these were not the first shots filmed, but rather the last ones as director Albert Pyun was desperate to get enough footage to make a movie.  Indeed, that is how this whole enterprise feels.  Like somehow trying to acquire footage without knowing how to stage scenes of what would be needed when it came time to edit it all together.
     Now, if I am going to resort to facts, the movie actually starts with an awkward introduction from Hekate (Cassy Colomb), where the character mixes tenses in an effort to let the audience know that nothing in the next 70-ish minutes is going to make sense.  It goes a little like this:
          "I am here [present tense] to bear witness to an age when sorcery and
           adventure still thrived [past  tense], a time when all things were yet
           possible [uh...past and,  I'm not sure, but I think future imperfect].  So
           listen now [present imperative] of this tale long past."
As a frustrated writer, this bothers me.  Because I don't think this is just an inability to read the lines that were written.  I'm convinced that somebody actually wrote those lines; they thought it sounded both compelling and sensible.  Another group of people went and spent money to buy the script and make the movie.  Seriously.  Read it again and tell me if you wouldn't have thrown it out just based on that.
     Michael Paré gets to play Oda Nobunaga.  Now, if you don't know who Oda is then you haven't read the Call Me Temujin script that is on this blog.  Read that after this and imagine how Trevor would feel about making his John Wayne playing Genghis Khan comment after this thing got released.  Instead of uniting Japan, Oda is a mercenary who fucks a lot of women.  Usually after helping them, but this is supposed to imply that he is a bad guy.  Except that, horrific performance aside, Oda is the closest thing to a good guy the story can put together.
     Oda has to go to the Isle of Lost Souls to fight a Sorcerer and his vampire daughter.  Clichéd, sure.  But what makes this worth noting is that with the subtitles on, Oda has to go to the Aisle of Lost Souls.  After his business is done there, Hekate tells the audience that "...Oda strolled off into the mists of legendary...".  I don't know where these mists would be, but I assumed there were on the other side of the movie from the Aisle of Lost Souls.
     After Oda is done not really doing anything, the opening credits arrive (almost sixteen minutes into the movie).  Then a string on new characters are introduced, mostly with the purpose of leading to the next character and eventually back to Oda.  Sorbo plays Aeden, one of Oda's bastard children.  He has some fun playing him as a shameless drunken man-whore/scoundrel, but at the same time it appears that he must have had something like four days of availability.  As so many of the characters don't really interact, I have to think that they just filtered them in when available.  Yet another possibility as to why the story remains – except as explained by voice-over narration – incomprehensible.
     Don't bother with it.  Not even as a dare.  It is worse than having to watch Battlefield Earth () while having John Travolta fondle you.  Okay, no it isn't that bad, but it is worse than any movie I have seen with professional actors.  It is even worse than the kind of movies aspiring filmmakers make with the video camera, a few friends, and a budget of under $200.
     Here are a few of my notes I made while watching it.  You'll notice that I quickly gave up on it.
           4:03 – "Hey, Oda.  You better get up there and kill that wizard and his
                       daughter  before he finishes his conjure." (Rodrigo)  It isn't just
                       the lazy writing (I'm hoping this was the terrible actor improving
                       the line in place of what was written), but that it is delivered with
                       a flat affect and no body language to suggest that it is important.
            4:59 – "Oda, my cursed nemesis, just in time to see my greatest feat."
                       (Xuxia)  Again, a completely lifeless reading.
            5:19 – "You realize how silly this looks?" (Oda)  This should be the
                       movie's tagline!
            7:54 – "So what now?" (Xia)  This is a perfectly acceptable reaction
                       from a vampire on being subdued by the great mercenary (and
                       Queen fucker) Oda.  Sure it is.
             8:55 – "Perhaps we should hang around in this empire we just saved
                        and experience some of its pleasures." (Rodrigo)
           11:20 – "Maybe some midwife at the palace will take you in."  (Oda,
                        speaking to his child just cut from its mother's womb.)  Uh,
                        why would a midwife have any special interest in an already
                        'birthed' child, Oda?
            No time listed – This is a movie with more VO narration than action.
            No time listed – Then vampires rules the world and Hekate goes
                         looking for Aeden.  What?

Immortals (2011)

     I was on the fence about whether or not a should hate Immortals (2011), Tarsem Singh's re-imagining of the legend of Theseus.  It isn't that I am wholly against rewriting old stories.  I just think that if one is going to mess with something that has endured for more than twenty five centuries (and at least five distinct languages) by the time a writer or writers sits down to work the magic and change the details, those changes need to make marked improvements that won't leave anyone familiar with the tale sitting there thinking, who is responsible for this sacrilege? – or at least must make the story relatable to a modern audience without gutting the essence of the original.
     Immortals fails in that regard.  Instead of having Theseus (which, incidentally, should be pronounced THAY-soos) be the half-god who battle's with King Minos' beast in the Labyrinth and who founds the city of Athens – you know, perhaps the most important city in the history of Western culture – writers Charley and Vlas Parlapanides cast him as an angry iconoclast (intentionally and unintentionally) who thinks primarily only of himself and has a last minute conversion to the typical Ancient Greek concept of immortality being capable only through performing deeds that were certain to be remembered.  For some reason, this Theseus needs to be not only thoroughly uninteresting but still the center of attention for all the other characters.  Just as baffling was the notion of the Ancient Greek gods having a 'no interference' rule with humanity in general, and specifically with the heroes. 
     Let us also consider that the Parlapanides place the action in the 13th Century BCE and refer to the assembled 'peoples' as Hellenics.  Not Hellenes, which would be appropriate, at least after the Greeks came to see themselves as sharing a common culture and heritage.  They also imagine Ancient Greece as a cross between Arrakis and a post-apocalyptic Dover.  There are no signs of life other than the people.  The single body of water we see is thick with an oil that would preclude the chance of finding any life there.  Theseus comes from a cliffside village that is built up in a pseudo-Pueblo style, where the only activity seems to be either getting ready to be a warrior (though not being one) or hanging out in the temple.  The stark nothingness over which these non-characters fight only highlights the lifelessness of the whole enterprise.

Hank and his bow.

     All of that wasn't enough to make me hate the movie.  It was bad, sure, but not without a few moments.  Putting Hank's bow from theDungeons & Dragons cartoon (1983-85) sure stretched the credulity of the film, but it is nice to know that it would look good in a major motion picture.  The torture bulls were an effort to get something right, and they worked in spite of the ridiculousness with they were employed.  Henry Cavill (Theseus) has all the right moves for an action movie, even one set in the ancient world, and Stephen Dorff gave a good turn as the rapscallion lieutenant and ally of Theseus.  Even the movie having the worst lighting I have seen in years wasn't enough to make me despise it. 
     No, that came from making the mistake watching one of the extras where so-called experts argued that since the Ancient Greeks changed their mythology (this was more the result of the different regions and city states having different takes on the same stories or replacing characters from one story with their own heroes or city-sponsoring deity), it was fair game to change the story.  Kellan Lutz, an alum of the Twilight film franchise, challenged why people expect to see Poseidon as an older man with flowing white hair and beard.  'Because you saw that in some movie?' he asks.  No, jackass.  Because the Ancient Greeks presented him that way.  Always.  Without fail.  Because, as a people whose lives revolved around the sea, they saw the need to have the master of the waves – and the guy who gifted them with horses – appear as an authority figure.  I see Immortals as being in step with Lutz's lack of understanding.  Too stupid to actually do research on the people and gods being portrayed, and too in love with big budget effects to notice that there wasn't much of a story put into the works.

Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

     Somewhere, there are people who would just assume end all association with me forever because I made the effort to see Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) but I could not be bothered to go see The Avengers (2012).  I'm not sure why having more interest in fantasy – faerie tale or not – than superhero stories is somehow a disqualifier for contemporary American manhood.  For the record, I'm a little surprised that I haven't seen The Avengers, but now that I have to choose between seeing it in 3D at matinee prices or paying full freight for a 2D ticket I'm not sure I will see it before it jumps to the home market.  I'm sure that I'll be entertained by it whenever I see it, but I have taken to watching how much I'm willing to spend just to see a movie sooner rather than later.
     Anyway, I didn't know what to expect from Snow White and the Huntsman.  I've seen quite a few awful movies of late – I imagine at least two of them will be discussed here this week – and figured there was a chance that this re-imagining of the fairytale would do everything in its power to hit the wrong notes (at least for me).  And as I was sitting next to a small child (I would guess that he was nine or ten), I had an idea that I was decidedly not the target audience.  Well, the trailer for the Katy Perry movie let me know that straight out.  But I had paid my $4.50, so I was in for the duration.
     Though it started slowly, intermixing laborious narration with character development, Snow White and the Huntsman started moving right along once they managed to get the titular princess out of the castle.  From that point on it is more of a small scale travelogue, with a hallucination-inducing forest, a fishing village, and an enchanted glen on the way to the necessary rallying of the troops.  The effects are better than I expected, hampered only by director Rupert Sanders aversion to focus (or deep focus in scenes that practically call out for it).
     I am positive that there will be legions who savage Kristen Stewart for her performance here, but I found that she showed some restraint in a film where most everyone was overacting at the audience.  Sure, that is quite fitting for a fairy tale, but I want my hero and/or heroine to be something more than a caricature of an archetype.  Sanders could have helped Stewart out by giving her better direction on how to interact with the not-there-yet CGI creatures (Stewart's eyes darted back and forth, a cross between showing that she is engaged in the scene and that she doesn't know where to look).  Sam Spruell, playing the evil Queen's brother/lackey, could have used a character who didn't slowly build into being a force to be reckoned with because it makes most of his early scenes contradictory to his ultimate character.
     What I liked the most was how the movie evoked the feel of a 1st Edition AD&D adventure.  That is in part due to the fact the the two badasses on the side of good are in the Ranger-mold (William uses a bow in melee combat, I'm calling that more AD&D Ranger than Fighter).  As every LoTR fan knows, Rangers are the guys who kick evil's ass; the other character accomplishes the main goal only because it would make the rest of us feel inadequate forever if the Ranger does that, too.  No, the good forest and creatures had such a classic feel that it dragged me right back to how I felt with AD&D leading me into fantasy stories and artwork.
     Having said that, I have a feeling that this isn't going to rank as one of the new classic films.  Because it moves along so quickly (once it gets going), the story does not seem as epic as it could have been.  There was also a missed chance in making more out of Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron) and her complicated backstory.  It was nice to have the story couched in the dangers of a world where men can – and do – take what they want from women and dispose of them when the interest fades, but I think it didn't dig deep enough into that metaphor.  Maybe that was to avoid upsetting the littler ones seeing it.  Maybe it was because if it came off as man-hating, the audience would quickly shrink.
     Whatever.  I would have preferred bolder, but I liked it.  I think that if one can accept that Stewart is not acting as the same intensity (or at the audience), there won't be any problems with her performance.  It certainly is a more interesting take on the tale than the one Disney did, and it almost looks as good.  I say give it chance...probably at home.

Chronicle (2012)

     I am not much for the found footage approach to assembling a movie.  Rarely do I think it serves the story, nor does it do much to cover up when the tactic is employed to hide the smaller budget.  That being said, I am not against its existence.  Much of Chronicle (2012) works because of the lean approach the a found footage take on the story dictates.  Conversely, other than a handful of exceptional visuals, there isn't any real reason for Chronicle  to be anything other than a straight ahead, lower budget (for a studio film) teen actioner.
     There is too much focus on the emotional disconnectivity of Andrew (Dane DeHaan).  Rather than let a few stark examples stand as the emblems of his unhappy existence, writer Max Landis (famous for having a famous father and getting other famous people to appear in his video deconstruction of "The Death of Superman") and director Josh Trank hammer the point home again and again.  Essentially, they are trying to make the would-be school shooter a sympathetic character.  That is probably not a good route to go, and it doesn't help the story here.
     The other glaring problem, imposed by the found footage approach, is that the other characters who appear on screen do not much development.  Trank is forced to resort to cheats – cameras of all sorts are rolling everywhere, sometimes without sound – to keep the story going in a coherent manner.  Sometimes this is done in a mildly clever fashion, such as having Casey (Ashley Hinshaw) wandering about with a camera of her own.  Too often, however, it feels like more of a distraction than a means to become immersed in the story.  Casey is allowed to have some personality because she has a camera, and therefore a point of view.  Matt (Alex Russell) and Steve (Michael B. Jordan) are just somewhat mouthy guys playing at being somebody's (Landis) idea of teenagers, but only as they are seen by others.
     Now, I did actually enjoy Chronicle.  I think it has the best superhero fight ever put on film (and Landis has established his credentials with his comic book geekdom well before this), feeling all the more real because the characters seem to finally be having reasonable emotional reactions (for being teenagers) to what is going on.  I just think that it tries to make the kid who is going to kill everyone because he was bullied/beaten/ostracized the hero – or at the very least the emotional center of the film – before waving a hand and declaring that uncontrollable emotion is bad.  I think this would have been much stronger with a more traditional approach that had a few cut-ins from Andrew's and Casey's cameras rather than pretending that this wasn't an arduously plotted and shot production.

Underworld: Awakening (2012)

     Loud, poorly lit, and clocking in with less than 80 minutes of real movie, Underworld: Awakening (2012) is a prime example of a sequel that comes about not because there is a compelling story to tell in the existent setting but because there is still money to be made from attaching the title to it.  Other than Kate Beckinsale still looking good in the leather outfit and (one would assume) not complaining about the generous amount of wire work necessary for the stunts, I cannot say that there is much going for this movie.  But I could say that about all of the Underworld (2003) movies. 
     Seeing as how I am more than a decade removed from the last time I played or ran a White Wolf Storyteller System game – Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Mage: The Ascension, Wraith: The Oblivion (very under-loved), or Hunter: The Reckoning were the ones I considered worth playing – it should not be surprising that I don't have much passion left for the general high-energy vampire vs. werewolf concept.  These are beings that live quite a long time and can act rationally, but we never get to see clever politicking or subtle manipulation of the enemy.  Everything is machine-pistols, weird swords, unbelievably dangerous (to the user) whips, and bouncing off the walls.
     I remember the first movie at least being consistent within itself and setting up a coherent story.  Then Underworld: Evolution (2006) introduced the problem of geography (just where exactly were these characters?) and relied heavily on the something is after the heroes device to eat up screen time with chases and fights.  I skipped the next film (I guess I really do just want to see Beckinsale in the outfit) because I assumed that by going into the past, it would simply be going over material that the audience already thought they knew enough about.
     The only positive thing I can say about this movie is that it shows that Charles Dance was wasting his talents in The Golden Child (1986), where he was the best actor in the cast.  He again shows that a skilled actor can take over a scene without needing CGI or a tight leather outfit.  Not that I want to bash Beckinsale.  I have seen her act in movies and know that she can do better than this.  I just think Underworld: Awakening offered a better paycheck than Snow Angels (2007).

The Darkest Hour (2011)

     Wasting little time establishing characters or their lives, The Darkest Hour (2011) does everything it can to get right to its alien invasion and special effects.  Then, surprisingly, the aliens are largely relegated to the background and the characters who haven't been developed are left to wander through largely undamaged Moscow.  And it is a Moscow full of clean streets – except for people-ash – and upscale shopping malls.  The shots of Red Square essentially scream out "Come visit Moscow, Western tourists."
     Despite its many flaws (some of which I will address), I mostly enjoyed The Darkest Hour.  Even with the cast seeming like they were left on their own, I thought they did a serviceable job in moving the story along with something resembling a human element.  Director Chris Gorak (I've seen both of his feature films!) may have been more concerned with his camera angles and lighting than consistent emotion, but I suspect that the underplaying of the obvious end of the world fits with the target audience's attitude about everything that isn't them. 
     The Darkest Hour rates ahead of many other films that have been set behind the old Iron Curtain, not in small part because it had a decent production budget.  However, the limits of that budget can be seen a little too often.  There is the time killing not-quite montage that lets us know the prospective heroes have spent five days in a storeroom (that always has light, even at night, despite the fact that the electricity wasn't working at the time), the complicated overuse and under-use of the aliens making electronic devices function just by being near them (we all know that when a cell phone powers up, it rings...right?), and the very disappointing reveal of the aliens once they are made visible – it is not as awful as the CGI shark that eats Samuel L. Jackson in Deep Blue Sea (1999), but it is not much better.
     There is some poor understanding of history (or at least the presentation of it) with the Russians who will not retreat from their homeland and who will battle the aliens no matter what.  Then again, I have no idea what kind of factual history was taught during the waning days of the U.S.S.R., so maybe this is a good representation of what those characters would believe.  Of course, the story also features a pack of characters who are in Moscow (on purpose) who cannot speak nor read Russian.  But rather than have this contribute to the strangeness and sense of danger or doom, most of the Russian characters can speak English so as to move the story along.
     I do like that the film doesn't mind killing its characters, but there is one character who was screaming to be killed (in gloating over the aliens) and it didn't happen.  That kind of bummed me out, but I guess whether that death happened or didn't, it would be the same cliche.  The Darkest Hour doesn't run from cliches, but it does try to keep them in their place; they help establish the world more than the expectations of the story.  Okay, the entire plot is essentially a kind of cliche by now, but wholly reworking it would just be an avant-garde experiment. 
     Gorak tried a little bit of that in his first feature, Right at Your Door (2006).  It felt forced there, and I would like to think he thought that being more traditional approach would be more palatable.  What I think he needed was a larger cast of starting characters, and for those characters to have been developed.  The Darkest Hour is, essentially, a disaster movie.  The formula is to get us to care about the characters and their situations, and then to watch their struggles after the disaster.  Like in The Grey (2011), it is acceptable to slowly kill off those characters.  Actually, it would make a hell of a lot more sense to do it in an alien invasion movie than a trek-through-the-wilderness-while-not-being-smart-enough-to-make-spears-to-fend-off-the-wolves movie.
     The Darkest Hour – it doesn't require much thinking or commitment to its characters, not does it have the best effects (but the people turning to dust it cool), but it is a fun diversion. 

Inglorious Basterds (2009)

     I don't think Quentin Tarantino is a genius filmmaker.  Not even a little.  He made a good – especially given budgetary constraints é adaptation of City on Fire (1987) with Reservoir Dogs (1992), making it his own in the process.  That was 20 years ago.  Okay, it was less than that when he was making Inglorious Basterds (2009), but it was still a long time.  Since then he has made a series of overloved films that, when divorced from the adulation people seem to need to heap upon Tarantino, look like the trainwrecks I've taken them to be.  Okay, maybe they are fine films and I dislike them because I find Tarantino to be habitually unfocused and too in-love with extraneous bullshit to be bothered with telling an actual story.
     Inglorious Basterds is a little different.  It is loaded down with too many elements that don't seem to have any needful relation to the central story.  This would be fine in a novel (if well written), but there is a reason why movies need to be leaner than books.  Tarantino devotes a twenty minute scene to introducing a character and then kills that same character off in the following scene.  And neither scene plays particularly well because they all feel like they have no real relation to the heart of the story.  But Tarantino isn't interested in more than the loose framework of a coherent central plot.  It wouldn't allow him to indulge in various strange side characters, or to kill them off at the drop of a Nazi scalp.
     This is an odd war fantasy, but more than that, it is a movie that has no love of the actors in it.  Michael Fassbender (Lt. Wilcox) and Mélanie Laurent (Shosanna Dreyfus) try to rise above the mediocrity Tarantino wants to enforce in the cast, but there isn't enough of them or their characters to salvage the film.  Yes, I'm aware that many people (critics included) had praise for Christoph Waltz as Colonel Landa.  I have no idea what they were watching.  Other than Tarantino wanting Nazi officers to have some occult supernatural ability to spot imposters or weakness in their enemies (it isn't just Landa who gets this), the character is an unfunny joke.
     I had originally intended to give a better accounting of my thoughts on the film.  Why bother though?  Those who needed to see it did so when it came out.  Tarantino fans undoubtedly love it and cannot be swayed to think otherwise.  All I can do is hope that Brad Pitt never gives a performance as bad ever again.

Helena from the Wedding (2010)

     I want to say something positive about Helena from the Wedding (2010), so I'll go with something like Lee Tergesen (Alex) looks younger than he did during his time on Wanted (2005).  Maybe that's good living.  Or maybe it is karma for having the misfortune of having to make his bones – in part – by playing Chet in the TV version of Weird Science (1994-97).  But he certainly deserves something better than this movie.
      Actually, all of the cast does.  Melanie Lynskey (Alice) – best known as Rose from Two and a Half Men (2003-present) – doesn't get to do much more than mope and drag exposition out of Dagmara Dominczyk (Eve) about an unfulfilling marriage.  (Ms. Dominczyk appears to be a serial TV guest star, but I'm guessing she does most of her work on the stage.)  Alice and Eve don't seem to have much in common, except that they like each other.  No reason to figure out how they came to be such close friends, or to even hint at it in the film.  Corey Stoll (Steven) – an actor best remembered for boldly trying to bring the big cop mustache back to prime time during his run on Law & Order: Los Angeles (2010-11) – is a mostly vacuous character, who tries to find some level of redemption (in terms of development) with a pair of lines late in the movie.
     Other TV vets include Dominic Fumusa (Don), Paul Fitzgerald (Nick), Jessica Hecht (Lynn), and – with the worst British accent this side of Madonna – Gillian Jacobs (Helena).  All have acted well in other projects, but none of them seem comfortable in this.  Fumusa comes closest to finding any sympathy from writer/director Joseph Infantolio, but he just can't get there.
     The movie was clearly shot quickly and on the cheap.  None of the shots are specifically lighted for those shots.  It shows (I wouldn't have thought it would be this obvious, but it is).  And Infantolio favored labored, lingering shots that did nothing other than make the story drag.  This was made worse by the ten second dissolves he thought made the metaphors work.  Not so much.
     Oh, and the story?  Imagine a bunch of mostly WASPish couples (and a pair of singles) were together, drinking, doing some drugs (let's not judge, right?), and finding out that there are problems in their relationships.  Life crises included: having a play that only ran two weeks, not being liked by coworkers, and (apparently) not knowing when to use your British accent.  There is a couple with real problems, but since their only settings are she's a bitch & he doesn't earn any money (she makes quite a bit as a successful lawyer) and vigorous fucking, it is hard to view them as anything other than caricatures.  Helena is supposed to be a plot device, but she doesn't do much more than occupy space.
     I want to believe that the actors did this movie as a favor to someone, probably Infantolio.  It would have been nice if he could have returned the favor and given them a better script or at least taken care to shoot it better.  This movie is one that should be avoided.  There is no real point to it, at least not the point it seems to want to make.

The Box (2009)

     At 2009's Flashback Weekend (a Chicago area horror convention), I was afforded the opportunity to see The Box (2009) for free.  I declined the offer.  Much like with Dolph Lungren's I Come in Peace (1990) – which at the time was titled Dark Angel – it seemed like the offer didn't merit the time investment (because it would mean having to go somewhere else to go and see it).  The Box had the additional burden of having a director who had yet to put together a coherent film. 
     That trend continued.  Unlike his nearly unwatchable Southland Tales (2006), there is no sense of fun or enjoyment going on in which the audience can coach the experience.  Indeed, Richard Kelly seems to have aimed at delivering as much of a straight-ahead story as he can manage, and he does that for about thirty minutes.  Not incidentally, this is the best portion of the film.  Then, as he always does, Kelly descends into some sort of dream version of reality where connections don't matter and time is frangible.
     While most of the minor players are so poorly handled that it must have been by design (Kelly appears to be going for a creep factor that arises from how un-creepy his automatons are), the real problem lies with Cameron Diaz.  While I can honestly say that I have only seen her give one performance where she added rather than detracted from the final project, she is such a black hole here that I found myself wondering if her involvement (and the reason she wasn't replaced after shooting started) was because people believe that she will draw people to the theater.  If Frank Langella were not in the film, I never would have given it a chance.  I spent my time wondering how much better Langella's (and Marsden's for that matter) performance could have been if he weren't forced to interact with the human equivalent to a block of wood that is Diaz.
     There is no point to The Box.  Fine.  But I'm positive that Kelly thinks that he made one.  That is a problem.  He is like a writer who is sure he is a genius author, but is instead just scribbling just-above-nonsense into countless notebooks.  This film is an abject waste of time.  Not unpleasant, but very unrewarding.  And as intellectually immature in regards to a take on morality as I can imagine.

Young Adult (2011)

     Having suffered through Juno (2007) and Jennifer's Body (2009), I wasn't super eager to give Diablo Cody another chance at trying to hide a lack of sensible plot with forced, imagined hip youth catch-phrases.  Okay, if I am going to be honest, I didn't hate Juno, but I did find it to be a pale imitation (unintentionally, I'm sure) of Saved! (2004).  But there didn't seem to be much in the writing to make me think that this woman deserved the praise she had been getting.  (Note to everyone: I really need to stop bitching about how qualified a writer is once they are successfully working in the field, because I cannot finish my own projects and it just makes me look petty and small.)
     Still, there was something about Young Adult (2011) that looked interesting (it didn't look all that funny, at least not from the previews), so I gave it 93 minutes of my life.  Well, if I am going to keep being honest, I gave it about 110 minutes.  Mostly because I needed to take momentary breaks from just how damn uncomfortable the movie could be at times.  That is not a complaint.  Cody and director Jason Reitman found the right mix where unsettling meets less than diligent soul-searching, and it is the most perverse experience to sit there watching the pain and distress that plays out in Mavis' (Charlize Theron) attempts to recapture her life by reclaiming the promise she felt she had back in high school.
     The problem that I had with the movie was that Mavis did have some level of success.  If she were a total failure, I would have felt like I were watching a documentary about how people end up like me.  It could have been a little more biting (where were the notes that her YA heroine was supremely unlikeable?), but how much more could an audience take?  Sure, I would have thought there would have been more Minneapolis music scene music.  Sure, it was creepy that Theron found a way to look like a cross between Meg Ryan and Nicole Kidman (a kind of psychotic, emotionally stunted sweet everywoman).  But so much more worked in this tale of bottomless sadness and lack of self that I can't bring myself to do my regular nitpicking of meaningless crap.
    

Echelon Conspiracy (2009) vs. Eagle Eye (2008)

     Right or wrong, I am solidly of the opinion that everyone but Shane West signed on to Echelon Conspiracy (2009) because they liked the idea of being able to see Prague and Moscow on somebody else's dime.  Shane West clearly just needs the work – unless he saved all of his money from ER (1994-2009).  Between this and Red Sands (2009), he clearly showed that life after major network television wasn't full of open doors and opportunities in shown in theaters movies.  Then again, Ving Rhames may just live in Sophia, Bulgaria waiting for opportunities to make top-end low budget unofficial zombie sequels.  And Ed Burns, well, I may be the only fan of him as an actor.  I keep wondering why he hasn't landed in some kind of franchise film or as the lead in a premium cable channel show. 
     Echelon Conspiracy has a lot in common with a major motion picture that was released at about the same time, that being Eagle Eye (2009).  However, its real roots stretch back to War Games (1983), with West having all the machismo of a nerdy, near shut-in Seattle teenager.  But there is at least some degree of internal consistency and thought put into Echelon Conspiracy.  It may all be ridiculous, but there is a sense that everyone involved – excepting, perhaps, Martin Sheen – knows that the premise of the movie is beyond any rational belief, and that allows for the action to be fun without imposing any threat of real consequence.
     There is the oddity that everyone in Prague, at least those we see, speaks English (and most seem to be American).  One would think that Czech, Slovak, Russian, and German would be more common, but that wouldn't allow for our American technician, FBI agent, former FBI agent, and combat-trained agent girl to just go around like they were in some kind of not America that accepted English as the default language and the Americans as the guardians of order.  Actually, there is some nice, if overstated, commentary on that last bit to close the film. 
     Without a huge budget, Echelon Conspiracy does not rely heavily on special effects to move the action along.  There are a fair amount of practical effects, most of them in that range between oh my god, this is as bad as those Sci-Fi original movies and the Jason Bourne films.  Yes, using a shotgun blast to blow up a gas tank and thus send the car twenty feat in the air is stupid, but it is the fun kind of stupid.  It takes the false toughness of the 1980s and manages to treat it with nostalgia while admitting that there is no way to take it seriously.  Watching someone implore a computer – or rather a complex set of programs that allows for a Skynet-like diffusion over all connected computers – to learn how its stated programming is
    

     Somehow much worse – to the point of not even being that entertaining – is Eagle Eye (2008).  Operating along the same lines of a computer or super complicated set of integrated programs that has found a way to access each and every computer, cell phone, and remote-operated giant scrap metal scooping crane-claw with zero lag time, Eagle Eye manages to be leaden and boring at almost each step of the way.  Maybe that has something to do with casting Shai LaBeouf.  This is the guy who was uncompelling in Holes (2003) and managed to take his general deficit in charisma in new heights in (at least the first two) Transformers (2007; 2009; 2001) movies.  At least he is comfortable in special effects dominated films.
     The same cannot be said for the rest of the cast.  They seem universally confused as to why they are not allowed to do more than spend long sequences reacting to things that will be added in post-production.  If there were more continuity to the story, maybe the scenes where Billy Bob Thornton and Rosario Dawson are together wouldn't feel so damn awkward to watch. 
     Where Echelon Conspiracy may have some destructive chase sequences, they are limited to cars operated by actual people, Eagle Eye decides that wholesale destruction from mysterious sources should rule the day.  So mass transit trains can get thrown in reverse like it is nothing (which shocked me, because as a regular rider of the CTA, I know that this cannot be done via remote access), construction booms can be swung around with exact timing (and we should ignore the fact that they cannot generate the force to rip through half a floor of a steel building), and the aforementioned scrap metal claw cranes operate like some demented form of the coin operated grab-a-toy crane games. 
     There is also a complete and total lack of internal consistency.  The overriding program is supposed to be in some sort of a lock down stopping it from going through with its dastardly plan.  Mind you, this isn't a plan that is essentially what it has been programmed to do – which is how Echelon Conspiracy handles it – but rather something it has extrapolated to being a good and necessary step towards being able to perform its stated function.  However, it takes all of its steps during this lockdown.  There is no need to get Jerry (LaBeouf) or Rachel (Michelle Monaghan) at all, and no computer would go through the trouble of picking people from a thousand miles away from the objective.  They are selected so the audience can watch them have adventures while trying to survive the various dangers.
      Eagle Eye doesn't even look that much more polished than its lower budget counterpart.  It looks hurried and ill-considered.  It doesn't seem to be at all aware of just how stupid it is, which makes me think that the people involved thought it was a serious type of thriller.  It isn't.  I'm sure there are people who would enjoy it, but I can't imagine why.  At least Echelon Conspiracy had a better grasp on balancing the plot with the improbability of it all. 

The Expendables (2010)

     It took quite some time for The Expendables (2010) to turn into a hyperactive, old school action cum modern kinetic fight film.  But once it got there, it was just fucking awesome.  Sure, it is incredibly dumb.  That just means it is playing it true to its old school roots.  Chances are that most of the cast wouldn't know what to do with an intelligent script.
     Still, ten minutes of awesome, stupidity inducing action does not justify a movie, so there is an attempt to offer more than just that an remember that guy? moments.  It is full of those.  Dolph Lundgren?  Didn't he try to be an actor after Rocky IV (1985)?  Eric Roberts?  Didn't he have a brief run of sobriety and a sitcom on ABC?  Randy Couture and Steve Austin?  There used to be a lot of advertisement for...well, it had to something, likely different somethings...whatever the hell you did over a decade ago?  Mickey Rourke?  Well, you've been quite active lately, but since I best remember you from Diner (1982), every film you do these days is another reminder that you really fucked up your face.  Terry Crews?  The name sounds vaguely familiar.  Charisma Carpenter?  Well, maybe this will have more of an impact on your post-Angel (1999-2004) career than posing for Playboy.
     The actors who are closer to relevancy – Stallone, Statham, and Li – have more to do than most the others, though Li's inability to say more than a few lines of dialogue (at least in English) at a time keeps him as a sort of star among the other guys in the mercenary crew run by Stallone's Barney Ross.  That's right, Sly set out to make us find the name Barney scary, tough, and intimidating.  You know he is brooding because he has a fascination with ravens.  That is the kind of character development that...well, it makes no sense at all, but in a way it is entirely true to the old school action flicks.  Statham gets a slight break from just being the guy from The Transporter (2002) or Crank (2006), or even Ghosts of Mars (2001), but he does not get the kind of dialogue that would convince a viewer that he enjoyed his time on the set of London (2005).
     There isn't much to say about the plot.  When I was referring to movies that are crap, where one can mentally check-out and just let the pretty pictures dance across the screen, The Expendables is one of the films I had in mind.  It may be drenched in testosterone, but it is the more modern variety where the women are objects to be respected instead of just objects to be captured/fucked. 
     For total and utter crap, The Expendables really is awesome.  Except for Bruce Willis, who looked like a cancer patient and read his lines like the humor was supposed to be shard and off-putting.  It is not a great movie, and probably not even a good movie.  There is a wholly needless action sequence between the main action sequences that seems to be there to remind us that these guys are complete and total action stars; they can do more than throw knives, shoot guns, and go all MMA on your ass.  But I get the appeal and understand why so many were stoked about it.  Just don't count me as eager to see the sequel.  Because I don't think there is going to be anything new.  Because new isn't old school.

Doubt (2008)

     Doubt (2008) is the kind of film that I make a weak effort to see in the theater, fully comfortable in the fact that I will eventually see it at home.  It is what I really should be watching, but I am just too damn comfortable watching crap. Why take the time to watch something that invites me to think?  There are times when most of us like to be able to just have a movie play out without having to worry about it ever deviating from formula, but it is important to remember that thinking is good.  It is the defense against an endless and enduring stream of crap.
     Not that Doubt is the most demanding film to watch.  There is a smooth, sensible progression of the plot.  The characters are largely defined through their roles, with their personalities being defined more to show the contrasts between them and the range of humanity within the Church.  The conflict is intensely personal, avoiding the larger implications in direct presentation, but wholly engaging the audience to explore the implications of both the personal rivalries and damages covered up by the Church for such a long time.

     It isn't as though I did my homework and read or saw Doubt: A Parable (2004) before seeing the movie.  I read it shortly after seeing the film, but that sort of spoils the experience.  The dialogue takes on the cadence and rhythm of the actors who performed it, leaving the reader to simply remember the lines and scenes rather than to experience them anew.  But what it did allow was for me to better appreciate how John Patrick Shanley expanded his Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play.  The film has no need to be as sparse or constricting as the play, and it brings extra life to it to have the children, other sisters and priests, and parishioners inhabit the same space as the essential characters. 
     I am positive that many qualified critics have dissected, critiques, and (largely) praised Doubt.  I am not going to lie.  I don't want to invest the time to even attempt to do that.  I am just going to encourage those who have not seen the movie or play (or read the play) to make time for it.  And to not be afraid of thinking.  Because one cannot question without thinking, and once cannot have doubt without questioning. 

The DVDs I haven't reviewed

     Apparently, I don't give an opinion on everything.  Here's what I haven't posted about, either because I was too lazy or didn't care enough.

AUGUST

Blessed (2006) — So, this was pretty awful.  It is slow, overly low-key, and Heather Graham puts close to nothing into her performance.

Heartland: The Complete Second Season (2008-09) — I only watched one episode, out of devotion to Katharine Isabelle.  But it looked like a decent, mostly wholesome show.  Better than most of the other Canadian offerings as of late.

Snow Angels (2007) — It is hard to make a movie that doesn't note just how unbelievably attractive Kate Beckinsale is.  But there is too much going on in this one, to the detriment of the two major stories at play.  Not a bad movie, but not as focused as it should have been.

SEPTEMBER

Rec (2007) — Good, but I still prefer Quarantine (2008).  There is certainly a different central element at play here.  Much more horror in concept than its American cousin.

The Resident (2011) — This was horrible.  Plodding.  Predictable.  Completely lacking in tension.  I have a hard time believing that both stars wanted to do this movie, but it is hard to criticize working actors when it comes to taking jobs.

Fanboys (2009) — There is a good concept at work here, but the delivery is lacking.  Maybe it would have been better if the movie hadn't be reworked and scenes re-done in an effort to make it more mainstream.  But my main problem was the idea that more Seth Rogen is ever better.

The Special Relationship (2010) — This was a disappointment.  It essentially shows how necessary, but not always friendly, the relationships between Great Britain's Prime Minister and the American President.  Too much time was spent on tidbits and too little on the meat of the relationship.  Really felt more like an old-school Network TV movie.

Limitless (2011) — Not bad, but I found myself eager for this one to end.  If Cooper weren't so charismatic, I don't know if it would have gotten a release.

Thor (2011) — I hated this movie.  Just hated it.

X-Men: First Class (2011) — I liked this prequel, but will continue to wonder why starting the X-Men as the comics started is an impossibility.

OCTOBER

Definitely, Maybe (2008) — I have a man-crush on Ryan Reynolds.  He is great in this, as is Isla Fisher.  This could have been tighter, but it is one of the better rom-coms I've seen in a while.

Scream of the Banshee (2011) — Ugh. 

Mirrors (2008) — Too much early action, not enough of a slow build for my tastes.  I also couldn't understand why prime real estate was just sitting there waiting to claim victims with its haunting.

Ann Rule Presents The Stranger Beside Me (2003) — Yeah, this was a TV movie that did nothing to give a better idea of how the people close to Ted Bundy had no idea he was a serial killer.

NOVEMBER

Feast (2005) — Hey, Krista Allen keeps her top on.  I actually like Feast, but it is a flawed horror film.  One of the better creature features I've seen from the modern era, but too casual with how the characters are disposed of.

Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda: Season One (2000-01) — Much worse than I remember.  Hard to see how this ran for five seasons.

Killshot (2008) — Mickey Rourke as a Native American hitman.  If the film had centered on him, I think it would have appealed to me more.  The victim characters are underdeveloped (but played by likeable actors), and that means that there isn't any investment in terms of what happens to them.

DECEMBER

Bond of Silence (2010) — TV movie that wastes the talents of Kim Raver and Greg Grunberg.

Red (2010) — A little too over-the-top for me, but at least Red was entertaining.

Gene Roddenberry's Earth Final Conflict: Season One (1997-98) — Wow.  There was actually a good show here in the first season.  Sure, it had too many campy moments, but it really looked like it was laying the groundwork for a great humans vs. aliens, cloak and dagger series.

Attack the Block (2011) — I was rooting for the aliens for most of this.  Just couldn't root for the wanna-be thugs.

JANUARY

Adventureland (2009) — Hey, its Ryan Reynolds having sex with Kristen Stewart.  I kind of expect that to happen in real life.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) — Somehow, this was worse than the original trilogy.  And they managed to add a bunch of characters I couldn't be bothered to care about.  Note to Disney: these movies can all be an hour shorter.

Gene Roddenberry's Earth Final Conflict: Season Two (1998-99) — Robert Leeshock (not pictured above) takes over as the lead and the show goes to hell.  Coincidence?  Maybe.  But killing off the main character and removing the subtlety made this show go from good to awful in about two episodes.