Category Archives: Movies

Movies, TV

Batmobile sells for $4.6 million…

…and the price doesn’t surprise me all that much:

http://theclicker.today.com/_news/2013/01/20/16605895-batmobile-sells-for-46-million-at-auction?lite

Just thinking about the most famous (and recognizable) movie and TV automobiles ever created, is it possible that the 1960’s Batmobile lies atop that list?  To my mind, it most certainly does…

What others might be “up there” in terms of fame?  Off the top of my head, I can think of only one vehicle that approaches the level of recognition of the Batmobile:  James Bond’s Aston Martin from Goldfinger and, more recently, Skyfall…

For "Skyfall," Daniel Craig's Bond dusts off the DB5 once again. "We've used different cars from time to time but we always do come back to the Aston Martin," producer Michael G. Wilson says.

…and after those two cars, what else do we have?  Doing a simple Google search of “famous movie cars images” reveals a plethora of other cars.  Here are some of my favorites:

The 1968 Ford Mustang from Bullitt.  In my humble opinion Bullitt is actor Steve McQueen’s all time best film and the car chase he has against a pair of hitmen remains one of the best car chases ever committed to film.  Love, love, love his Mustang…

The 1977 Trans Am from Smokey and the Bandit.  Always loved this 70’s era muscle car.

Back to the Future’s time traveling Delorean.  Another really cool vehicle!

I loved the Mad Max “Interceptor”, a 1973 Ford XB Falcon Coupe, from both Mad Max and The Road Warrior (aka Mad Max 2)…

Finally, a bit of whimsy.  Who isn’t familiar with Scooby Doo and the Mystery Machine?

Of course, there are a ton of other vehicles out there that people could mention, from the General Lee to the Ghostbuster’s ambulance to the Herbie bug to you name it.  I still maintain, however, that the Batmobile from the 1960’s TV show is the most famous of the lot.  Your opinions, of course, may vary.

Now, a personal anecdote…Years ago, most likely in the late 1980’s or very early 1990’s and while driving along a highway, I happened to notice a very beautiful black Trans Am in front of and on the lane to the right of me.  The car, from the rear, looked like an exact duplicate of what appeared to be the K.I.T.T. vehicle from the recently (at that time) defunct TV show The Knight Rider.

Something about seeing the car from the rear raised my curiosity and I sped up a little and was soon alongside it.  There was only one person in the car and he (not David Hasselhoff) was a fairly young guy, perhaps in his thirties, who sported shockingly white spiked bleached blond hair.  Astonishingly, he lay very, very relaxed in the driver’s chair with both arms behind his head!

Yes, the man was making it look like the car alone was doing the driving!

Needless to say, I was stunned by this and simply had to see what lay in the front of the car.  So I sped up a little more and, once in front of the Trans Am, gazed into the rear view mirror and, lo and behold, the Trans Am had the same red scanner lights rigged up on its front as the K.I.T.T. car had in the TV show.

I drove on, never figuring out what exactly that was about, but guessed that perhaps the owner of the car was either leaving from or going to a car show (again, The Knight Rider had been cancelled a few years before so even if this vehicle was one of the originals from it they most certainly weren’t doing any filming) and had rigged the vehicle to operate solely with the use of his feet/legs.

Regardless, it was a weird, weird experience!

Movies

Dredd (2012) a (mildly) belated review

While there have likely been thousands upon thousands of comic book characters created since approximately 1980 and thereabouts, it is my belief that only two of them have thus far stood the test of time.  Sure, there are many creations that have achieved a great deal of fame and public notice.  At one point The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Crow, Tank Girl, Barb Wire, and Spawn were incredibly popular characters.  So popular that they all had subsequent movie adaptations, though the success of said films varied wildly.

As the years passed, however, so too did these characters’ popularity.  While it certainly can be argued that The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles remain well known, I suspect the other characters may not be as familiar to the general public as they used to be.  So…of the thousands of characters created in the comic book format, which two do I personally feel have thus far stood the test of time?  One would be Hellboy.  The other is Judge Dredd.

To me, Judge Dredd remains an incredible creation:  A fascistic cop in a post-apocalyptic world whose face is always hidden behind his bullet shaped helmet.  He patrols the enormous streets of Mega City 1, almost all that is left of civilization and which takes up most of what’s left of the east coast of the United States.  The densely populated city overflows with criminal activity, and it is Judge Dredd who, along with the other Judges, patrols this city and serves as the proverbial “judge, jury, and executioner” to any crimes he may witness and/or investigate.  While the above description may suggest a grim tone to the comic book, the early stories (ie the ones I’m most familiar with) featured a hilariously tongue in cheek attitude.  While there was plenty of violence and action, what the series from the many other “grim and gritty” books out there was the fact that there was such a very healthy dose of humor present in almost every story.

In fact, one of my favorite bits from all the Judge Dredd comic books I’ve read involves a relatively small sequence wherein the good Judge saves a man who is has jumped from a building in an attempt to commit suicide.  As the man is falling, Dredd yells at him that “Public Littering” is a crime.  Once safely in Dredd’s hands and then on the ground, Judge Dredd sentences the distraught man to 90 days in prison for being a “Public Nuisance”!

In 1995 Sylvester Stallone starred in the first film version of Judge Dredd.  While the movie captured the visual “look” of Judge Dredd quite well, the movie itself was a huge disappointment.  Comic book fans were incensed that within ten minutes of screen time Judge Dredd takes off his helmet and remains helmet-less throughout the bulk of the film.  A very ill advised comic sidekick and a lack of a focused (or interesting) story line didn’t help matters either.  The film was a flop.  The years passed and the comic continued appearing.

And then, this past year and some seventeen years later, audiences were treated to a second film version of the good Judge, this one simply titled Dredd.  This time around, the makers of the film treated the character with more reverence and appeared to be more keen on following the comic book.  Karl Urban, who takes on the role of Judge Dredd, manages to keep his helmet on throughout most of the proceedings (you do catch a very shadowy view of the helmet-less Dredd at the start of the film but never see his actual face).

And while the Judges’ costumes are simplified a bit, the movie does use characters and situations from the comic in the telling of this new story.  Sounded pretty good, right?  Well, it is…for the most part.  Unfortunately, that sense of humor I found so unique in the Dredd stories I was familiar with is almost no where to be found in this film.

In fact Dredd is a “grim and gritty” action film, period.  Yes, there are some humorous bits littered here and there, but this film was primarily crafted as a “R” rated violent affair.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The plot of the film is quite simple:  Judge Dredd is asked to watch over a potential Judge by the name of Anderson (Olivia Thirlby, who is quite terrific) for a day and see if despite failing the initiation test -by a whole 3 points- she might still be Judge material.  Why?  Because like the comic book character, Anderson is a psychic and the head Judges are intrigued with having someone on the force with genuine psychic ability.

The movie then moves to the main plot:  In one of Mega City 1’s massive high rises, the drug dealing Ma-Ma (Lena Headey) has ordered the deaths of three rival drug dealers as a message to her rivals.  Judge Dredd and the rookie Anderson come to the high rise to investigate and manage to capture the man who actually killed the three rivals to Ma-Ma.  The fact that he’s captured alive and can thus become an informant against Ma-Ma’s drug empire forces her to act.  She seals off the building before the Judges and their prisoner can get out and sets her men after them.

From there, all hell breaks loose.

Yes, the plot is similar to 2011;s The Raid: Redemption.  But I believe both films owe a large debt to John Carpenter’s terrific 1976 film Assault on Precinct 13.

So, bottom line:  Is this film worth watching?  Yes, I would certainly recommend it.  However, if you’re like me and were looking to see crazy humor mixed in with the action, tone that particular expectation down.  Otherwise, sit back and enjoy the ride.

Movies

The Disney film you’re not allowed to see…

Check out this fascinating book review by John Lingan at Slate for Disney’s Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence, and the Hidden Histories of the Song of the South by Jason Sperb:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/01/song_of_the_south_disney_s_most_notorious_film_by_jason_sperb_reviewed.html

Consider me one of those people who are  fascinated by Disney’s 1946 animated/live action film Song of the South.  To this day, it is the only film that the Disney company refuses to release, despite the fact that it features one of their more famous songs (“Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”) and the additional fact that the Disney parks have a ride based on the film (Splash Mountain).

However, the film has not been re-released for obvious (racial) reasons.  For years I accepted the contention made by others that the movie was a “product of its time”.  Turns out I should have been more skeptical of those claims.

Check out this paragraph from the book’s review:

(Jason Sperb) first punctures the myth that the racial caricatures in Song of the South were “a product of its time.” This is an argument that the film’s defenders trot out reliably, when, in fact, Disney took uncharacteristic pains to undercut the Harris tales’ potential offensiveness. As Neal Gabler’s biography reveals, Disney hired a leftist screenwriter, Mauric Rapf, to modify the original script by southerner Dalton Reymond; Disney Company reps met with producers of the racially controversial 1943 film Stormy Weather to hear about their marketing experiences; and Disney publicists warned management of potential racially charged blowback. Walt Disney himself even invited NAACP president Walter White to California to oversee script revisions, though the meeting never occurred.

It is stuff like this that really intrigues me.  I may just have to give this book a look.

Movies

Resident Evil: Retribution (2012) a (mildly) belated review

A while back someone wrote about their favorite “guilty pleasures” and it got me thinking about what mine were/are.  This proved to be both an easy and rather hard thing to do.  The first thing that sprung to my mind was the Resident Evil movies.  Hard because, other than that series of films, I found it difficult to think of anything else that fell into a genuine “guilty pleasure” category…for me.

“Guilty pleasures,” I feel, are things you know in your heart are not all that good (you may even be willing to describe them as “bad”) yet you can’t help but enjoy the product, be it a book, a movie, or an album.  To my mind, the Resident Evil movies are far from (a) original or (b) terribly coherent.  But what they are…or at least have been…are reasonably enjoyable time killers and, yes, the definition of a “guilty pleasure”.

Until now.

Resident Evil: Retribution, the fifth installment in the franchise, starts with the finale of the previous film, 2010’s Resident Evil: Afterlife.  But immediately after this, the film goes off into its own direction and for the most part ignores pretty much everything that happened after that previous movie’s cliffhanger.  It’s telling that the film’s makers could have cut that recap sequence out completely and simply started the movie with our imprisoned heroine, Alice (Milla Jovovich), and move on from there.

So what does this latest movie in the series offer?

Well, we do have the return of some old characters, from Michelle Rodriguez’s Rain to Sienna Guillory’s Jill Valentine to Oded Fehr’s Carlos Olivera.  If you’re familiar with the series, you immediately realize that two of the characters mentioned above were killed in previous Resident Evil films, and part of what got me interested in seeing this newest film was to see how they went about returning these characters to the series.

Alas, it turned out the returning characters were both good and evil clones.  Period end of story.

Speaking of story, the story here is beyond simple.  Alice wakes up after the events of the previous film’s cliffhanger, finds she is trapped in some kind of Umbrella Corp. base, and works to break out while a group of ally soldiers are heading toward her to meet in the middle of the base and then, together, get out.  Much mayhem follows.

Sadly, the characters this time around are incredibly, ineptly defined.  It almost seemed like the film’s makers decided to focus entirely on the action set pieces and move everything forward to the end so that they could set up the cliffhanger to the next film (which, by the way, they most certainly do).  The problem lies in the fact that because the characters are so badly defined this time around we simply don’t care about any of them.  When one after the other mercenary/soldier sent to help Alice dies, we’re not bothered in the least.  There’s also the insertion of a child into the story that I couldn’t help but feel was a too blatant attempt to tap into the whole Aliens story dynamic (one of the more obvious “inspirations” to this series as a whole) of Ripley trying to save the last survivor of LV-426.  But while Aliens built up the tension and relationship between the characters extremely effectively, the relationship between Alice and her child was, like all else in this film, presented in a too rushed manner.

So, overall, my guilty pleasure really let me down this time around.  This movie, like the other Resident Evil films, made a ton of money and I suspect the sixth film in the series is already in the works.  Whatever they decide to do, I hope they focus on giving us more of a story and character next time around.

Who am I kidding?  It’s Resident Evil.  I suspect the next film will offer much more of the same.

Movies

Total Recall (2012) a (mildly) belated review

First, a confession:  I am not a big fan of the original 1990 Paul Verhoeven directed/Arnold Schwarzenegger starring Total Recall.  While I was a HUGE fan of Mr. Verhoeven’s first American sci-fi film, Robocop, Total Recall, in the end, felt to me like a missed opportunity.  The film, which involved a worker drone named Quaid (Schwarzenegger) who longs to live a fantasy adventure and finds this possibility via Rekall Inc., an early version of a “virtual reality” vacation, perhaps is one of the first films to deal with the technology that confuses reality and fantasy, not unlike the more successful (in my opinion) The Matrix.  The more astute views of the original Total Recall were left wondering at the end of the film whether we witnessed something that was “real” or whether Quaid was permanently locked in a fantasy world, never to emerge again.

The 2012 remake of Total Recall lifts the story with only some minor cosmetic differences.  The primary change regards the movie’s setting as there is no trip to Mars.  One can’t help but be impressed with the future world as presented.  The movie’s dual settings (Great Britain and Australia) are a visual feast.  I would even go so far as to say this may be the best full scale futuristic setting I’ve ever seen committed to film.  If there is a critique to be made here, it is that this futuristic world looks heavily inspired by Blade Runner, another movie based on a story created by the late Phillip K. Dick.

The second big change is that the new version of the film has Kate Beckinsale’s villainous Lori Quiad pursue her “husband” throughout the film.  In the original, Sharon Stone’s character was disposed of early on.  This particular change turns out to be a positive for the remake as Kate Beckinsale is certainly the showiest of the characters.

Where the remake most diverges from the original is in tone.  While Mr. Verhoeven’s original featured plenty of over the top action material and in your face humor, the remake is far more somber and “serious”.  Alas, this ultimately hurts rather than helps the remake.

Now, I already confessed to not being a big fan of the original Total Recall.  Yet I have to give Mr. Verhoeven credit for delivering something that moves.  Yes, the original film is at times goofy and silly and cheesy and doesn’t give you anything approaching a resolution as to whether we witnessed imagination or reality…but audiences can forgive quite a bit when you have Verhoeven’s “in your face” direction and Arnold Schwarzenegger as the lead.

In the remake, apart from Kate Beckinsale, we have far too subdued work from Colin Farrell (as Quaid), Jessica Biel (as Melina), and Bryan Cranston (as the ultimate villain of the piece, Cohaagan).  All the actors mentioned above have done good work, in my opinion, but in this film they are all so very, very…flat.  There were no sparks (romantic or otherwise) between Quaid and Melina.  Bryan Cranston’s Cohaagan, similarly, never reached the sneering, way-over-the-top villainy of Ronny Cox’s Cohaagan.  The action scenes, while at the start quite good (the first big action sequence at Rekall, in particular, is a highlight), eventually became repetitious.  When we finally reached the movie’s climax, I was more than ready for things to wind down and end, never a good feeling.

There is a “surprise” ending after this ending, a final confrontation between Quaid and his villainous “wife”, but even that felt obvious.  I couldn’t help but wish the movie’s writers had surprised us with a different conclusion, perhaps one where our villainess does something truly surprising…like have Quaid completely at her mercy…yet she chooses to let him live.  The circumstances being what they are, it was pointless for her to still try to kill him.  Perhaps at that point, as she’s walking away, she makes Quaid truly wonder whether he is experiencing reality or illusion.

Having said all that, Total Recall 2012 is not a “terrible” film by any means.  If you haven’t seen the original, it might even prove a pleasant diversion.  At its worst, it is a distressingly mediocre film dressed in a great film’s clothing.  Given all the money, truly amazing effects, and big name cast, one wishes it could have been a little more than it ultimately was.

Movies

The Ghost Writer (2010) a (mildly) belated review

There are times I bemoan the lack of quiet, intelligent thrillers and the seeming surplus of the often more vacuous and noisy “action” thrillers.

But that’s not to say there aren’t quiet, intelligent thrillers out there.

Director Roman Polanski (no stranger to controversy) has released some intelligent thrillers in his time, and The Ghost Writer is certainly a good -though ultimately, and unfortunately, not great– example of the same.

The story involves “the Ghost” (Ewan McGregor), a mild mannered writer who is hired to polish and finish a manuscript/autobiography “written” by former UK Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan in what amounts to an extended cameo playing a character suspiciously similar to Tony Blair).  The ghost writer who did all the work until now, we find in the movie’s opening scenes, drowned.

So Ewan McGregor’s “Ghost” takes the well paying -but very tight deadline- job and, after flying to the United States and entering the bunker used by Lang and his entourage, barely gets to work before finding himself in the middle of an international maelstrom.  Adam Lang, you see, has been called out by his one-time ally as having engaged in complicity to use torture to pursue terrorists.  Soon there is the very real possibility that Lang may be dragged before the World Court for his actions while serving as Prime Minister.  And, to make matters worse, the “Ghost” begins to suspect the manuscript’s original writer’s death by drowning was no accident.

Will this “Ghost Writer” wind up like his predecessor?

Though it is a thriller, the first half or so of the film slowly builds tension while offering plenty of black comedy.  The “Ghost” finds the world of Adam Lang is a maze and its hard to tell the motivations of those around him…not to mention what exactly goes on in the mind of Lang himself.  In time, the “Ghost” begins to see his way through the secrets while tension builds.

Unfortunately, as good as the first half to two thirds of the film is, the movie unfortunately began to lose steam.  It’s hard to pinpoint where this happened, but as we headed toward the climax and conclusion, the carefully built tension dissipated.  By the time we reached the movie’s climax and ultimate conclusion, the movie fell again, presenting some rather large plot holes that rendered much of what we experienced up until this point confusing and, worse, pointless.

Again, without giving away too much, the audience is expected to accept the fact that a large conspiracy initiated by very powerful political figures is behind some of the mystery in the film…and yet these incredibly powerful political figures aren’t powerful enough to get a ghost writer who is a puppet to their cause to fix Lang’s manuscript rather than bringing in an innocent who may just expose this conspiracy?

Indeed, the ending had me scratching my head so much, especially considering the cleverness of the story up until that point, that I wondered if maybe there were some cut scenes or explanation in the script that was not filmed that accounted for these plot holes.  Suffice to say there is a point in the film where it seems the “Ghost” and Lang are about to have a heart to heart talk and we might finally get some idea of what’s going on…and how much Lang actually knows.  Ultimately, that talk never happens.

And yet, in spite of these complaints, I can’t entirely dismiss The Ghost Writer.  For long stretches of time the movie is quite entertaining even if, in the end, it does stumble.

Movies

Supernova (2000) a (very) belated review

La vittoria trova cento padri, e nessuno vuole riconoscere l’insuccesso. (Victory has a hundred fathers, and no one acknowledges a failure.)  1942 G. Ciano Diary 9 Sept. (1946).

After a truly great run of movies from 1975 to roughly 1984, director Walter Hill reached the proverbial bump in the road.  While it was a pretty damn good film, 1984’s Streets of Fire didn’t light up (ouch) the box office.  Nor did many of the films he directed that followed, including the truly bad sequel to his biggest box office success, Another 48 Hrs.  Mr. Hill was hardly hurting.  He was, after all, the producer of the original Alien and Aliens, and would go on to produce all “Alien” related movies, up to and including last year’s controversial Prometheus.

But before the Alien universe truly blew up with sequels and Predator related spin offs, Mr. Hill made his thus far one and only directorial foray into sci-fi with Supernova.  Yes, Streets of Fire had a quasi-sci fi/alternate 1950’s type reality, but Supernova was a full on sci-fi spectacle complete with starships, alien worlds, and…horror.

I caught the film many years ago on DVD and found it an intriguing mess.  Mr. Hill’s original cut of the film was deemed unsatisfactory by the movie studios and they called in others, including Francis Ford Coppola, to re-edit it into something they were more comfortable with.  Ultimately, Supernova’s director credit was listed as “Thomas Lee”, a pseudonym not unlike the infamous Alan Smithee.  (That, folks, is the reason the quote is listed above)

The DVD I saw featured the “uncut” version of the film.  The other day, while watching oddball cable channels, the theatrical version of Supernova aired and, like a moth to light, I sat through it.  The theatrical cut differs from the “uncut” version in that we see a little less nudity from Robin Runney and, if memory serves, a slightly less gory death of (SPOILERS!!!!!) Lou Diamond Phillip’s character.  Otherwise, it was mostly what I remembered watching years ago.

And a fascinating watch it is.

The difference this time around, however, is the release of Prometheus.  When I first saw Supernova, Prometheus, of course, did not yet exist.  Now, however, watching Supernova proved something of a curious revelation.  For in Supernova I couldn’t help but notice that some of the movie’s elements wound up appearing in Prometheus.  That’s not to say that Supernova is something of a “rough draft” of Prometheus, just that you can see some of the elements coalesce.

To begin, Supernova involves a group of “space medics” who receive a distress signal from some far away planet (this is not unlike Alien, too!).  They head to the planet and find one person, Karl Larson (Peter Facinelli) who had a previous relationship with Dr. Evers (Angela Bassett), one of the members of the medical crew.  She finds Larson, however, very different from what she recalls.  Their relationship had grow very sour before he left her, but now, as she finds him, he looks very different…younger, stronger.  If you’ve seen Prometheus, this particular element of Supernova bears at least a little echo in the relationship of Shaw and Holloway.

Larson, we find, has discovered a strange object on that mining planet, a thing left behind by some alien culture.  In the course of the film we find that the object was made by an alien race to effectively eliminate other races they don’t want to have continue -and compete- with them.  In Prometheus, the alien engineers were upset with humanity and wanted to eradicate it with their oddball biological weaponry.  In the case of Supernova, the alien race (which in this movie remains unseen) has created a device that will entice its discoverer to take it to the heart of humanity, where it will detonate and destroy the offending race -and pretty much all the universe!- and then creating a “new” context for alien life.

What follows in Supernova is the cast and crew being killed off one by one by the infected Larson.  The way the villain is dispatched by the movie’s end is particularly groan inducing.  It involves “Flyboy”, one of the more bizarre (and extremely silly) concepts in Supernova, a robot that for no reason at all looks like a World War I flier enticing Larson into a hold before blowing him up.

Other than curiosity, it’s hard to come right out and recommend Supernova.  This is a genuinely flawed film (not that Prometheus wasn’t, as well!) that features some really good special effects but an obviously toyed with presentation.  Nonetheless I am curious about Mr. Hill’s original version of the film.  Given the fact that Supernova was a big flop, I doubt we’ll ever see a “special edition” of the film featuring Mr. Hill’s original cut.

But if one is ever released, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious to see it. Now, “enjoy” this truly awful trailer for the film.  The musical choices, none of which were in the film itself, really do no services for this already flawed film:

Interestingly, as I looked around YouTube, I found this, the alternate ending for the film.  I vaguely recall finding this on the DVD release mentioned earlier, and it features a far darker ending than the recut theatrical release:

Finally, this is another interesting cut sequence from the film.  Again, I’m getting vibes of Prometheus here, when the cast first meets up with the alien engineer creature. Perhaps its just me:

Movies

Men In Black III (2012) a (mildly) belated review

I love reading reviews of movies, books, and music, the three forms of entertainment that most occupy my increasingly minimal free time.  With reviews one can, at best, glean an interesting insight into the creative work, be it what elements make it a success or, conversely, where the creative minds behind the work may have lost their way.  At worst, reading a review involves wasting only a few minutes of your time but almost always gives you an insight into someone else’s thought process. After many years, I’ve no doubt read many thousands of reviews.  Interestingly enough, there are parts of only two reviews that I can quote almost verbatim, small sentence length thoughts that to my mind perfectly captured the flaws of two particular movies.

The first such review came from a local TV personality who was reviewing the 1989 James Cameron directed film The Abyss.  While he loved most of the film, he had this to say:  “Watching The Abyss is like seeing a runner have the race of his life, well ahead of all competitors, but stumbles and falls only a few feet away from the finish line.”  To me, that was The Abyss in a nutshell, a potentially great film hobbled by a muddled ending.  An ending made no better by the extended version offered in the home video release.

The other such film was the original 1997 Men In Black.  Upon seeing it, a now forgotten (by me) critic stated this film felt like watching “an extended preview of a great film.”  The original Men In Black, to me, felt exactly like that.  The movie had some astonishing special effects, a truly bizarre, almost Looney Tune level craziness, but the film felt…undernourished.  It was like going into a restaurant expecting a heavy buffet but being served a chocolate bar.  There should have been more there there.

The movie’s sequel, released in 2002, was considered by many less of the same: Another wild and crazy special effects extravaganza…but with less of a story than the original film.  It seemed like the whole Men In Black franchise was done…until this year.

There were some scary rumors concerning the creation of Men In Black III.  Most frightful was that there was word filming began without a complete script.  The budget of the film was also very extravagant, rumored to be well over 200 million dollars.  Add to the fact that the last film in the series came out some ten years before and you couldn’t help but wonder if the film was a fiasco in the making.

In the end, the film did well, grossing some $600 million worldwide and earning a very healthy 70% positive rating among critics and a similar 72% positive rating among audiences at Rotten Tomatoes.

Having finally seen the film, I would tend to go positive.  Strangely enough this film, even though filming was supposedly started without a full script, feels the most complete of the three Men In Black films, story wise.  Yes, you still get those wacky aliens and even wackier special effects, but the story feels far more complete and features Agent J (Will Smith) going back in time to the late 1960’s to save his partner Agent K (played in the present by Tommy Lee Jones and in the past by Josh Brolin) from being killed and wiped out of time.

No, the story isn’t some kind of blazingly original concept…in fact, it seems most filmed time travel stories nowadays involve the old “going back in time to kill someone so they don’t exist in the future” saw.  In fact, we saw this similar plotline in Looper, also released this year.

Still, I have to give Men In Black III credit:  It is a generally fun and breezy film, the type where you put your mind in neutral and let things happen and, if you don’t think about it too much, you should have a good time.  On the other hand, I kind of hope this is the last of the Men In Black films.  As enjoyable as this film was, I couldn’t help but feel the premise is a little used up.  Worse, Tommy Lee Jones looked really old and uninterested in the whole thing this time around.  Given how truncated his role was in favor of Josh Brolin, one can’t help but wonder if he did this film more as a favor/paycheck than anything else.

The bottom line is this: Men in Black III turns out to be a surprisingly good popcorn film despite the by now familiarity audiences may have to this particular subject matter and whatever intrigue happened behind the camera.  If you’ve got an hour and a half to kill, you could do far, far worse than spend some time with the Men In Black.

(The trailer below, by the way, features a sequence involving a grafitti artist.  This scene was not in the home video cut of the film I saw)

Books/Literature, Movies, Music, TV

Bored of the Rings…and Creative Self-Control

The first part of the above headline happens to be one of the more obvious take downs one can expect an unimpressed critic might use for the review of the new Peter Jackson directed The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first of his three part (!) cinematic adaptation of the J. R. R. Tolkien “prologue” to his famous Lord of the Rings trilogy series of a few years past.  Certainly its the headline used by Dana Stevens of Slate Magazine for the review of this film (check it out here), but its hardly an original insult, seeing as how this was the title of a parody book published way back in 1969.

I haven’t seen the first part of this new trilogy, but given some of the early writings regarding the movie, I suspect I’ll pass.  Not that I dislike the whole Lord of the Rings thing, be it novel or cartoon or movie.  On the contrary I was very impressed with the first two Lord of the Rings movie adaptations.  They were incredibly ambitious in scope and scale and presented some great cinematic fun.  The only complaints I heard were from Lord of the Rings purists who felt the movies at times did not follow the spirit of the books as well as they should have.  Regardless, I really liked those first two Lord of the Rings films.

Unfortunately, the last of that original film trilogy, The Return of the King, really, really tried my patience.  Indeed, even many of those who liked and/or loved this trilogy were bothered by the way this concluding film had something like twenty climaxes/conclusions before finally…FINALLY!…reaching its actual end.  It was at that moment, when I realized I loved The Fellowship of the Rings and The Two Towers but didn’t like The Return of the King, that I feared director Peter Jackson may have become a little too enamored of his work.  So enamored that he might have developed a hard time “stepping back” and shifting what should remain in the final cut of his film and what didn’t need to be there.  Or, to put it another way, he lost the ability to edit down his movies.

Mr. Jackson followed the original Rings trilogy with a remake of King Kong, and my fears were further confirmed:  King Kong clocked in at an eye-popping 3 hours and 7 minutes in length versus the original, which ran a little over an hour and a half.  When I heard he was taking over the direction of The Hobbit, I was curious but worried.  Would this film be more like the first two Ring films rather than the third?

When I heard it would be two films, then three, I feared Mr. Jackson was once again going to deliver a bloated, too long production.

Given the words of some critics, this may well be the case.  And we’re only into the first of three Hobbit films!

But before it feels like this blog entry is nothing more than a slam piece directed against Mr. Jackson, let it be noted that he would be far from the first -and certainly far from the last- creative person who may have fallen under this spell.  Criterion, the gold standard in home video releases, just put out Michael Cimino’s notorious studio-killer Heaven’s Gate, a film that many feel is the very definition of creative hubris.  Despite the fact that it was a mega-flop when it was released, the movie does have its admirers, but there is no doubt that this two and a half hour film tried many people’s patience.  In the realm of books, I’ve also seen writers -too numerous to name- who have disappointed with either undernourished or overly bloated works.  And in music, I’m sure just about anyone can name a few albums featuring normally very creative individuals who created a bloated train wreck of a work, at least in your opinion.

If there’s any sort of conclusion to made regarding this topic it is this:  Creative folks are as fallible as the next person.  They’re as capable of making mistakes as everyone else and they’re certainly as capable of getting too fond of their work, to their own detriment, as anyone else.

Somewhere along the line when I first started writing I too realized that there was a danger of falling into this trap.  One of my earliest novels took an inordinately long time to create, then it sat in the disk drive for a few years.  When I came back to it, I realized the first third of the book was waaaay too long and I chopped it down to a minimal size.  Originally I was incapable of seeing the bloat, but the passage of time allowed me to move away from the work, to become less tied into it and to see it from a fresh perspective.

Hopefully, I learned my lesson and my subsequent works have been crisp and to the point…something I feel any good novel should be.  But let there be no doubt:  The most difficult thing in the world to do with your creative works is to examine them with a cold and clinical eye and not be afraid of taking a chain saw to your “babies” and cutting down whatever should be cut down and expanding where it may be needed.

In the end, it is work well worth doing.

Movies

Safe House (2012) a (mildly) belated review

What’s worse:  (a) A low budget film featuring a cast of unknowns in what turns out to be a mediocre to poorly conceived action/adventure story or…

(b) A very big budget film featuring well established actors in what also turns out to be a mediocre to poorly conceived action/adventure story?

For me, (b) will always be worse.  In the case of (a) I tend to go easier on the people before or behind the cameras for I suspect they had to deal with more difficulties regarding creative choices…if only because of budgetary limitations.

But with films like Safe House, one comes away wondering what it was that drew all this talent and big money to make what turned out to be a very predictable and ultimately disappointingly mediocre film.  How predictable was Safe House?  Let me put it this way:  If you can’t figure out who the “real” bad guy is the very moment he first appears on the screen, you’re clearly a movie newbie.

The film’s plot goes like this:  Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) is a young CIA agent stationed in South Africa whose job it is to sit bored for hour after hour at a secret CIA “safe house” and await any sort of “company” company.  He’s little more than a high tech housekeeper as he’s been at this obviously very boring job for a few months now and nothing has happened there.  In the brief glimpses we have of him, we’re to understand he’s itching to move up the CIA ranks.

Meanwhile, we’re introduced to Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington), a renegade ex-CIA agent wanted for treason who appears in South Africa, contacts an ex-MI6 agent, and is given some kind of microchip with some kind of “explosive” information on it.  Before he can leave clean with his prize, he is assaulted by a mysterious group of killers and is forced to retreat into an American Embassy and admit who he is.  From there, he is cuffed and taken to, you guessed it, Weston’s safe house and soon all hell breaks loose and the young agent has to move the seasoned (and dangerous) ex-agent/traitor away from the killers.

The movie strives to be perhaps a more “serious” attempt at something along the lines of the Bourne films, but the action sequences never really resonate and, after the first fifteen or so minutes, the film falls into a groove and never really rises or falls below that level.  We move from one scene to the next and are never as invested in the characters or the situation as we should be.  Ultimately, the film climaxes in another safe house and the “real” bad guys -you know, the one’s you should have figured out a very long time ago- are revealed and…well… it doesn’t really amount to all that much.

While Safe House is certainly not a terrible film, it never engages or surprises.  It never rises above being another mediocre action film, in spite of the big budget and A-list cast.  What a disappointment.