Hellboy II? Why the hell not?

So the relatively small action flick, Hellboy, has spawned a sequel.

I enjoyed the first film, but felt like you could almost feel the edges of the film that couldn't be explored as it was written and designed with a certain budget in mind. Multi-million dollar movie, sure... but of an unknown, untested character with some pretty terrific weirdness behind it all.

But I really liked the three main protagonists, with Abe Sapien, Liz Sherman and Hellboy. The villains were bizarre and cool, and the threat appropriately apocalyptic for our hero to challenge.


Also, I believe Selma Blair to be sort of a fox.

Mostly, though, I think Ron Perlman is super great as Hellboy. I love the direct, uncomplicated guy who happens to be able to take on world-threatening baddies. All without a Will Smith "Ah, hell naw!" In a lot of ways, Hellboy is sort of a great stand-in for how I think many guys see themselves. Unpleasant, uncouth, and hoping their capable enough working with what they know to get the job done. But a totally different guy when it comes to dealing with their significant other.

The plot has an odd ring of familiarity as so many superhero films have been hitting the screen. A villain with a plan for ending the world, some personal problems, and a nick of time ending. In some ways, the plot of Hellboy II feels, in some ways, a little too much like the plot for Hellboy I, only streamlined. Instead, director Del Toro focuses on the dreamlike imagery you might remember from Pan's Labyrinth, presented on a grander scale.


This looks like the group shots of my prom pictures

And, really, no matter what else you might be skeptical about, Hellboy II is visually stunning. The dialog can be a bit clunky, and the action sequences a bit disorienting, but the creature scenes here are the best mass creature scenes since Luke Skywalker walked into a cantina.

I'm not guaranteeing its the best movie you're going to see, but its a good summer popcorn flick with surprisingly developed characters for a movie starring a red guy with an arm that came from Steelcase.

Del Toro might always have scripts that feel like they could be a bit more developed, but you have to salute him as a visionary. He's able to bring not just cool visuals (which movies like "Chronicles of Riddick do, and yet fail), but also a solid action film with a good deal of heart.

Wanted: Not Wanted

I forgot to mention I saw "Wanted" on Monday. Before you start looking to see a movie this weekend, I want to throw in with Randy here. The James MacAvoy/ Angelina Jolie/ Morgan Freeman movie "Wanted" isn't terribly good.

I don't know why. It seemed to have lots of plot elements I should have enjoyed and the idea behind the movie sort of had potential. But (1) it sort of ripped off Star Wars in some ways from a plot perspective, and (2) it refused to actually explore the space set up by the movie, which actually seemed interesting. Also, the title "Wanted" had nothing to do with anything.

The movie seemed as if it had potential to be an over-the-top dark comedy of sorts, but that, flat out, didn't happen. Instead they went the action movie route towards a terribly unsatisfactory denouement.

I also keep hearing how great Angelina Jolie was in "28 Days", but this is like the third movie I've seen her in, and I don't get it. She seemed as if she was barely registering in the movie, and mistakes "looking as if you're thinking about being somewhere else" for mysterious. I'm also one of the rare guys you'll find who doesn't find Joile attractive. (A) I look at her and see Joe Buck in makeup, and (b) she's gotten so scrawny by this movie, its sort of tough to take her seriously as someone who could take you in a fight.

MacAvoy is okay. No problem there. The material just wasn't ready to support what he should have been doing in the role. There's a few moments of slow-mo brilliance that lets you know what he should have been doing for the duration of the movie and who the character COULD have been.

The movie spends the first 2/3rds setting up a world, which is really too long. About, seriously, five minutes showing that world in action, and then the last 1/3rd taking the world apart. It's just a terribly clunky way to balance a story, and sort of makes you feel that the action taken to get you through the first part so you can get to the second is sort of a waste. Like "Men in Black", the creators are so interested in introducing you to "how things work", there's just not much room for a story.

At the end of the day, the movie could have drawn you into the world of super-human assassins and their world of moral ambiguity. I'm reminded of the engrossing environment and characters of "Fight Club", and the unapologetic approach to characters who sneer at mundane work-a-day life. That seems to be the message "Wanted" thinks its offering up, but they sort of forget that (a) killing people is illegal and won't get you very far, and (b) most people don't suddenly find out their anxiety attacks are actually supper powers bubbling to the surface (yeah, that's a spoiler, but if you don't see it coming, woe unto you). Prescribing super powers as the antidote to modern day office work is... a curious solution at best.

Oh, and yeah... this is based on Mark "My Ego is Huuuuuuuge" Millar's graphic novel, which I've never read.

The League supports Wall-E

Mangum must be getting soft in his old age. Ten years ago the mention of going to see a cartoon would have been met with snide derision, even if it featured a robot and dystopian visions of the future.

But... in the intervening years, Mangum has become a shell of his former punk-rock self. He has begun to fill his home with photos of kittens and lots of little statues of clowns holding balloons, and is always looking for new recipes for quiche and cupcakes.

Never give up smoking, kids.

Anyway, he pitched to me a screening of Wall-E, the latest Pixar venture. So, Sunday night we met he and Nicole at the Alamo South, and we were also met by Heather Wagner. And while we were all convinced that should Nicole and Wagner ever meet, time would stop and the universe might split in two, all I noticed was a small popping sound, like bubble wrap.

Nicole also got a new haircut. She looks sharp, but for some reason she felt self-conscious about it. And I should probably apologize to her about my attempt at complimenting said 'do.

Anyhoo...

I'm always far more excited to see a Pixar movie than any other cartoon. Its not just that Pixar is consistently 3-5 years ahead of everyone else as far as technology goes, but because Pixar's ability to tell a story is so very, very, very much better than what you see in 99& of the rest of family entertainment.

I'm on record with my lack of enthusiasm for the current post-Robin-Williams-in-Aladdin, post-Shrek belief that pop-culture references make a movie, or that having known comedians constantly riffing is character. I think kids and parents deserve better. I think if they want my dollar, I deserve better.

I haven't always loved every Pixar film equally. I think "Finding Nemo" is a little blah. There are parts I like about "Monsters, Inc.", but it felt like it was drifting into "celebrity-voice-theater" as its focus. That said, I'm a big fan of both "Toy Story" movies, so go figure. And I've never seen "Cars". Because, really? Owen Wilson as a NASCAR car?



My feeling is that the Pixar creators took a look at how well their short films work, and how audiences seem entirely pleased with those shorts, and took a gamble to apply that same craft to a feature length film.

Wall-E is a movie about a lonely little robot, left behind on Earth as mankind abandoned a trash-strewn, presumably polluted Earth for the stars and greener pastures. Wall-E spends his days packing, crushing and stacking the garbage strewn about the planet. Mankind hasn't returned, and in the ensuing years, of all the many, many droids just like him, only Wall-E remains, carrying about his tasks, with only a cockroach to keep him company.

How anyone managed to make a roach sympathetic while refusing to de-buggify the thing is a testament to the craft going into the film.

Wall-E has built a small home for himself, full of items he's begun to collect. And he's a fan of the movie and music of "Hello, Dolly!" which he likes to watch on a top-loading VHS player (oh, yes. Its the small things in the movie). While the movie brings him joy, it also reflects upon his desire for companionship, which is met one day with the curious arrival of a space probe robot seemingly designed by the engineers at Apple.

I don't really want to tell much more. The pacing of the story is fantastic. And though there were actually few children in our theater, the fact that the movie is incredibly light on dialog and doesn't rely on borscht-belt humor, nor fart gags for laughs, the audience stayed with the movie every step of the way.

Like much classic sci-fi, Wall-E is really a cautionary tale. Like "Idiocracy", the movie is really about mankind's consumerist, wasteful culture... but to tell more is to both give too much away, and to suggest some sort of political agenda to a movie that doesn't have one. It is a movie for our precarious place in time and for each of us as a steward of the future of the planet, and ourselves.

The visuals on Wall-E have passed from the flat, cartoon world of Toy Story to a world in which these two eyes (as bad as they are) often couldn't tell if some items/ shots/ etc... were CGI or photo compositing. And its something Pixar absolutely makes work.

Add in terrific management of a multitude of characters who, essentially, don't speak, terrifically directed scenes, and humor based on characters, motivations, etc... that actually works, and I think you've got the best Pixar movie since "The Incredibles" (which is, by far, my favorite).

Kids or no kids, The League thinks Wall-E needs to be on your summer movie viewing list. And, for the love of mike, see it on the big screen, where it belongs.

And now I kinda want to rent "Hello, Dolly", which I haven't seen since 1994.

HULK SMASH! - The League sees a movie

It will surprise exactly nobody that I went to see "The Incredible Hulk".

While I might not have loved the movie, but I liked it pretty well. That said, I only had a few criteria heading into the flick:

A) Hulk would smash a lot of military hardware
B) There would be impressive explosions
C) The fights would be increasingly cooler and bigger throughout the movie

I am happy to say that the movie delivered on all fronts.

I think if you go in looking for a popcorn movie with a solid storyline, strong actors delivering mostly believable dialog, and buy into the pseudo-science... sure. You'll have fun.

I've never really picked up much in the way of Hulk comics. I picked up "Planet Hulk" and "World War Hulk", but aside from that, and a single Bruce Jones Hulk trade, I'm not much of a reader (I do own the issue of Hulk where Rocket Raccoon gets his first appearance). I'm not married to any particular vision of the Hulk, including the TV program. But the cartoon that was on when I was pretty little probably went pretty far to shape how I think of Hulk.

I understand that Ang Lee's "Hulk" was a bit much for most folks, and there were bits of characterization I missed from Ang Lee's Hulk versus the new version (I just really felt they were able to tap into the source of the Hulk's rage a bit more understandably in Lee's version). But, hell... this version is pretty darn good.

As you've heard, they've reset the franchise, leaning 70% on the comics and 30% on the Bill Bixby/ Lou Ferrigno TV show. It has the best Stan Lee cameo to date, too.

I think the effects were really impressive in comparison to the last go-round with the Hulk, right down to texturing on Hulk's skin, but also in how the team was able to come up with some more imaginative ways in which to demonstrate the Hulk's... Hulkiness.

Anyhow, with as downright bad as many of the Marvel movies have been (FF, FF2, Ghost Rider, etc...), this one is a lot of fun. And.... explosions. And smashing. Oh, yes... The smashing.

And, you know, Liv Tyler, if you're into that (and I think I am).

Oh, Ed Norton is a really good Bruce Banner, by the way. His natural-built-in desperate look serves him well here.

Jamie's (micro) review: RRAAAARRRRGHH!!!

If you want to get an idea of what the movie is like:

The League sees "The Foot Fist Way"

Tonight I took League-Pal Matt M. out for his birthday to see "The Foot Fist Way" (it's a movie. Here's the site.)

I really liked the movie, but...

The League doesn't mention it much, but once upon a time when we were younger, thinner, full of much more youth and vigor, we were in TaeKwonDo long enough to earn a 1st degree black belt. Here's a link to the school I attended.

It was fun. And the experience is something that's very hard to relate to folks who haven't ever been involved. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to continue for a lot of reasons.

Despite being full of kids, the movie is NOT for kids. It's actually probably pretty funny if you've never taken a martial arts class before, but its really funny if you've ever been deep in the culture of martial arts schools and ever saw the slippery slope of the machismo and discipline for what it could turn into. It's really not too hard to live in some world of delusion when you have a small army of kids paying you fifty bucks a month, and a bunch of adults who literally jump when you say jump.

Anyhoo... Watching "The Foot Fist Way" was exactly like looking into a warped mirror of life at TKD. The martial arts portions of the movie are pretty much dead on to what I recall from the ITA, aside from the fact that my instructors weren't as... ah... anyway, my instructors happened to be terrifically educated and smart. But... that doesn't mean I didn't see folks just like the movie's protagonist, or many, many of the other characters in the movie (including the 13 year old kid who was tasked with running the school).

Truth to be told, it really made me miss TKD. I'd probably never been in better shape in my life, and I can't tell you what it does for your self-confidence to be able to punch through a few pieces of wood (eventually you start believing you can kick through anything... it's just a matter of the right kick).

And that sort of potentially misplaced self-confidence is exactly what the movie is about.

The movie fully embraces TKD and the stuff some folks might find a little cheesy. I don't think it plays those elements for laughs as much as it uses things like the tenets of TaeKnowDO as a counterpoint to Fred's struggles. And, again, if you've never been in TKD, then its kind of hard to understand why you'd take stuff like that seriously. But, you do.

I'll be honest... the movie was made on the cheap, and I don't know what it will lose if you see it on DVD. Especially if they include some of the commercials for the TKD school/ promo bits that were done for marketing the movie. But I liked it.

Not all of the acting is Oscar worthy, and the arc of the script probably needed some work, but its a fun movie. And, I expect, if I had a chance to watch it again it would be to memorize some of the better lines for use later.

The League Watches: Chronicles of Narnia - Prince Caspian

After the rush that was completing the 3 film cycle of "Lord of the Rings", getting through yet another adventure of Harry Potter (the boy wizard who collects doom like stamps), and wrapping up Lucas's 6 film Star Wars cycle... it didn't seem at all a bad idea that Disney produce the entire run of the well-loved CS Lewis children's novels, "The Chronicles of Narnia".

Before seeing "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", I actually bothered to read the book. In, like, an hour. It's a kids book, and its pretty short.

Also, for some reason I ate Arby's before going to the movie, and that was just a bad call. I go there, like, once a year, and I genuinely felt ill when I walked out the door.

*** SPOILERS THROUGHOUT ****

I've never read Prince Caspian, and I didn't plow through it before Jamie and I headed off for the matinee today, so I didn't have much in the way of expectations. I'd given the previous movie a solid "B". It was entertaining, the effects were convincing enough, and I thought Tilda Swinton was good. The kids were typical kiddie actors, mostly going through the motions rather than seeming to have any internal combustion going to really convince you that they were doing much but going along for the ride.

"Prince Caspian" is a very different story, and the land of Narnia has had the magic sucked right out of it by some vaguely Spanish humans, and the whole place has become a subplot for a better movie. Perhaps "The Two Towers", which it shamelessly lifts from throughout.

The kids are older, but their acting chops haven't improved much. The gentleman cast as the titular Prince Caspian is the sort of non-threatening pretty boy you expect out of a movie series this Disneyfied, without resorting to CW-style casting.

The plot basically revolves around a very-Hamletish power grab by Prince Caspian's uncle, whose name I never caught... but, man... can that guy do Evil Movie Tyrant #2 with the best of 'em. No scenery was free of teeth marks. The power grab leads to Caspian ducking out of the castle, which looks quite a bit like a LOTR castle, and running away. Which will become a theme throughout the movie. Caspian and Co. run away at every available opportunity.

For some reason, Caspian's fleeing causes the Evil Uncle to declare war on woods he should believe are almost entirely empty. I'm not really clear on the story, and mentioned to Jamie about an hour in "I have no idea what's going on". So I'd hate to make any conjecture that isn't accurate. Caspian blows the horn of Gondor, which summons the four kids from the last movie back to Middle Earth. Or Gondor. Where they team-up with Peter Dinklage (the respectable little person actor), and discover its been some time since they were last in Gondor. And now they're stuck fighting with Spanish conquistadors.

I didn't particularly care for the movie. Jamie suggested I entitle the review "Prince Cat-Stain". But, I told her, I don't work blue. She had a few other suggestions, but none of them were any more flattering than "Prince Cat-Stain". But that'll give you an idea of how it went.

I am guessing that the novel of Prince Caspian, like LOTR was to The Hobbit, much more complicated than its predecessor. Thus, its all about cramming in everyone's favorite scenes, advancing the plot whether it makes sense or not, and getting to the fight scenes, already.

In case you missed the press around the last Narnia movie, we're to understand that there's some religious allegory going on here. And, indeed, the last movie must have seemed a bit too subtle for the audience. As much as the plot seems full of inferences and non-sequitirs from a narrative standpoint, each hint about the nature of faith comes down like a bag of hammers.

The movie comes in at a glacial 2+ hours. I'm not sure, exactly, where things went off the rails here, but once your audience is aware of the situation (or as informed as the filmmakers ever make us), spending an hour watching your heroes sort things out is simply cumbersome. And dragging out poorly choreographed fight scenes isn't good for anybody.

Probably due to the time constraints, and therefore rushed scripting and poor editing... the movie has a few scenes which just sort of happen and make no sense. Somehow the four Brit kids know all about prince Caspian and his plight, when nothing which occurs before that scene would lead the kids to know anything about Caspian or his plans. There's another odd scene in which there's some grafitti on a cart, and the Ming-like bad-guy uses this an excuse to get his general to kill three his men... and it... makes no sense. (Plus, wow... how is that going to help morale?)

Like I said, there were large portions of the movie I simply wasn't following. There's a pretty large assumption you know the first movie very well, as well as that you're going to make assumptions about royal lineage, military maneuvering, political fact-mashing for personal gain, etc... noen of which is really outright explained. It just sort of happens.

Also, Narnia kicks ass. It's full of talking bears, minotaurs, and looks like a Dokken album cover. The kids are given royal authority over all the animals, and get to live for, like, a hundred years and wear really neat armor. So why, on earth, do they head back at the ends of these movies? That's a sucker's game.

I continue to find the mix of pagan iconography within the Narnia movie a bit baffling. It seems odd that Harry Potter and Co. take a hit in the Bible Belt, but this mish mash is okie dokey.

Perhaps somewhat more bizarre is the Aslan death clause of the movies, which depicts the teenaged heroes dispatching soldier after soldier with no qualms, all in the name of Aslan. I guess the lion is supposed to be a cuddlier version of Jesus, so we're supposed to buy into the idea that we should be stabbing people who are browner than you (yeah, I found the ethnic casting of the baddies a bit... unnecessary) for our God-allegory. Which... wow.

Further, Aslan in this film sort of talks like a huge, toothy fortune cookie. Stating things like "Things don't happen the same way twice". Which he says twice. And, apparently he never really feels like he owes his long-suffering people an explanation as to why he (God) abandoned his people to the horrible Spanish people for 1300 years, only to return when it was absolutely necessary to the plot.

Was Aslan off in Gondor on some much needed vay-cay? Appearing in a tortilla on Endor? Apparently he's a capricious allegory.

The message of "faith" in the story, at least as framed by the makers of this film, is that it doesn't do anyone but the four little white kids a lick of good. Holding out for 1300 years for a break seems like an awfully long stretch, and one couldn't really blame the Narnians for maybe thinking Aslan had turned his back on them as he reportedly left Narnia right after the heads of state, and allowed a mass extermination of the happy talking animals.

In addition, there's a bit telling the viewer that not jumping off a cliff to certain doom is demonstrating a lack of faith. Which... what? What kind of crazy religious allegory is Aslan running here? Despite their faith in lion/ Jesus, our heroes also run away at every opportunity. I don't think at any point in the action do they stand their ground. They're quite cowardly. Apparently jumping to your death is expected by Aslan, but holding your ground in battle to protect Aslan's kingdom is a bit up in the air.

He moves in mysterious ways, indeed.

From a narrative standpoint, I'm not going to write the filmmakers a blank check because they're playing the religious allegory card. Either your allegory works, or it doesn't. And I thought this movie did a pretty poor job of doing much but dispensing mixed messages and reinforcing some not terribly Christ-like ideals, like killing folks. Putting religion out there doesn't make your narrative bullet-proof, and, honestly, I would expect more out of the film-makers as per a sense of responsibility to the viewer in maintaining a clear message.

All in all, whatever worked in the first movie just falls apart in Prince Caspian. And there seemed to be some commentary of the wisdom of pre-emptive military strikes not going the way you think they will, which I wondered if I was the only one noticing that...

I did not like the constant jokes about the little people/ dwarfs being short. Including a belabored scene between a mouse and poor, poor Peter Dinklage. And teh bad guys all wore 300-inspired masks which looked like their Ming-like leader and his "look, I'm evil" Satan-inspired chin slinky.

Add in items lifted from LOTR such as set design, story elements and sequences like the Ents... and, it was kind of embarassing. And the end dragged and dragged. And was, for reasons I can't put my finger on, unintentionally hilarious.

Bleh.

I want my afternoon back.

The League Reviews: Speed Racer - The Next Generation

I was asked by some nice folks at the same marketing company that had me review "New Frontier" if I'd review a DVD of what I think is the pilot of the new TV series "Speed Racer: The Next Generation". I haven't seen the new feature film of Speed Racer, but I thought I'd pop in this DVD and give it a whirl.

I knew it was going to be a trouble when the low-fi credits rolled and the writers were listed as "Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray", the DC Comics writing team who never met a cliche they didn't like. The opening is horrible CG with a re-imagined Southern California rockin' take on the great Speed Racer theme, that literally sounds like a guy, his guitar, and Garage Band. Its... not good.

But, I confess to a warm place in my heart for DJ Keoki's inspired circa 1993 club re-mix of the Speed Racer theme.

So, after the credits? Yeah, uhm... it never really gets better.

The premise is that a young man of the name "Speed" arrives at a "racing academy" of some sort which is run by the now middle-aged and oddly grandfatherly Spritle. "Speed" gets hassled by upper-classmen who are mean, because that's what happens in these coming of age stories, in order for our hero to have an external as well as an internal struggle. There's a quest to become the best racer, and despite the fact that Speed seems like a nice guy, pretty much everybody has it in for him but his wacky roommate with a deep, deep crush on Speed Racer (who also built a robotic Chim-Chim), and some busy body girl whose significance is never really fleshed out.

And, as with the original Speed Racer, the fate of the world seems to be hanging somehow in the balance of the who is the best race car driver in the minds of all the characters.

The animation is some sort of odd mix of CG and what looks like Flash. Or something. And I'm not kidding when I say this, but the character design and animation both really, really reminded me of Planet Unicorn (ed note: I feel bad about bagging on Planet Unicorn. Its actually a lot like the educational comics I remember getting in elementary school on the dangers of THC, or the recent comic we got from the vert on flea control. As in, "well, it's recognizably a person, and my art-student kid needs the work, so we're forging ahead"). I mean, its really, insanely bad.

The vehicular animation sorta looked like someone with 3D Studio Max and some free time. Its the sort of stuff that truly does seem as if it were designed as some sort of web freebie. And, honestly, if I thought that this was the future of animation, I would despair.

There's some particularly crappy CG in a portion where the laws of time and space breakdown and Speed drives on a "virtual track". Its tough to explain, because it makes no sense and sucks, but the animation here is a weird mix of bad CG and, maybe, Q-Bert.

Also, Speed has an oddly bad haircut. I don't know how they got to actual animation with that particular hair-don't, but it looks a bit like a ladies' haircut of some sort. Like a wedge gone bad or something.


Behold, Speed Racer Jr. and his stupid, lumpy face

It all sort of made we wonder. The quality of the original Speed Racer cartoons was always kind of iffy in both the animation and plot departments. I was never a huge fan of the original show. As I recall, it was usually just on between other cartoons, and I always felt the show was a little light on Racer X and Chim-Chim. But the show did have a particular look, which this show did nothing to preserve, even while including stock Speed Racer art in the show in various ways.

All in all, the overall cheapness of the movie just reeks of a fairly cynical money-grab on the part of Warner Bros. Which makes sense. I sort of think that's how the whole Speed Racer enterprise has been handled since they started running those E-Surance/ Speed Racer TV spots.

The voice acting is poorly directed, and uniformly flat. The guy playing Speed sounds like he's perpetually apologizing. His roommate (Gordon? It's been twenty minutes, and already I can't remember), is shrill and irritating. But no matter the scene, all of the voice actors use exactly the same intonation. Its weird, and kind of reminiscent of when people make funny Flash movies on their own and just do the voices themselves or get a girl from their class to speak in one of the parts.

There's an odd Luke Skywalker storyline to this story, which Palmiotti and Gray go ahead and acknowledge early on in the movie. In fact, the only thing I really liked about the movie was when the characters would occasionally make comments on the action, which seemed to almost acknowledge the lack of effort on the part of all hands.

Whatever magic folks might have felt the original series contained isn't part of the equation here. Even the races feel dull and lifeless. What was considered to be life-or-death struggles in the original series is reduced to some sort of VR racing in this version, with cardboard cut out characters, 100% recycled plot elements and bland and/ or annoying protagonists. The family dynamic of the Racer clan is intentionally missing in order to give our hero a journey of discovery, and teh school yard setting takes away any weight that the international racing in the original series contained.

In many ways, this pilot reminded me of a lot of the first issues of comics from the post Spidey-boom of 2002 or so. Teenager with a mysterious gift gets hassled by his peers for simply existing, plus there's a shady adult businessman with dire plans for our hero. Unsurprising this might feel familiar, as few have ever accused Palmiotti and Gray of blowing readers' minds with original concepts.

I dunno. I've already thought too much about this, especially for something I'm highly suggesting you avoid.

I was going to do a give-away of Ol' Speed Racer here, but I like all of you too much, so I'm not going to force this DVD upon you.

There's also a trailer for an Avengers Babies movie on the DVD. Or Avengers Next. Or Something.

I am (a guy who saw) IRON MAN

I caught Iron Man today, and I have to give it the League of Melbotis rating of: 4.5 thumbs.

My expectations for the movie were somewhat tempered by a review or two from sources such as Variety and Newsarama.com, so I wasn't too surprised by the fact that I enjoyed the movie a great deal. That's sort of been the consensus.

Iron Man is a movie with one foot in fantasy, from the science-fiction of the armor and Tony Stark's household futuristic technology to the idealistic method in which Stark is able to redress his moral failings. The other (much smaller) foot is placed in the reality of the sort of combat our soldiers are facing overseas, and the responsibilities of folks buying yachts off the proceeds from the sale of scud missles.

The effects in Iron Man benefit from the fact that the armor is non-organic and there's no fear of the Uncanny Valley. Seeing the trailer for The Incredible Hulk, just minutes before Iron Man rolled, reminded me that despite the fact that I have no idea what an 8-foot green giant looks like, I can still look at CG-Ferrigno and know that I'm watching a nicely animated cartoon. Not so much here.

There's a lot of good stuff in Iron Man, and more than being a movie about two mad scientists duking it out, or a mad scientist and Afghani boogey-men, its much more about discovery of self and super-science development. And, kids, those scenes are a lot of fun to watch.

The talent in Iron Man is actually very impressive. Paltrow's Pepper Potts refuses to be another Mary Jane in distress. Jeff Bridges is more than a cackling villain, though the script does point him in some mad-sciencey, hand-wringing directions. Terrence Howard is a good James Rhodes, but you sort of hope he gets to suit up in Iron Man II.



And Robert Downey Jr.? For all the cliches of the movie, Downey makes you forget you've seen this movie before in bits and pieces. His Stark is not the boring guy with the mustache who kept me from reading Iron Man in middle school (alcohol problems or no). He's a guy who has already found his place in the world, he's succeeded in the ways of the American Dream, through hard work and brilliance, and he's enjoying the hell out of it. Unlike movies like Spider-Man, which show us a character in the transition of youth, we get a fully formed character with whom we get to see the exact why's and how's of their change of heart. And, maybe, being a few years out of high school, I'm relating a bit better to Tony Stark these days than Spidey. Although, you know, without the billions and genius.

Many will find Stark's moral awakening to be a contrivance, and somewhat childish. After all, blowing people up should be considered patriotic. But I found the reasons for the awakening to be plausible beyond just the confines of the story, and possibly asking some questions that Americans assume are usually taken care of, but... you know...

Anyhow, this is seriously one of the most fun superhero movies Marvel has managed to put out in a long time. Where Spidey 3 disappointed last summer, Ghost Rider utterly failed, and Fantastic Four went to the negative zone, Iron Man was a great ride.

I'm finding I'm enjoying superhero movies MORE when I don't know too much about the characters (or, like Superman Returns, its such a departure, I have nothing to compare it to). So I get the cool superhero action (and the action in this movie is pretty good), but I also don't spend the movie figuring out how this is different from the comic.

I'm looking forward to any potential sequels. And I may give this one another round before it leaves the theaters. Kids will want their Iron Man suit this Halloween. Adults will wish they could find a way to test drive the suit and have Stark's home management system.

Oh, and nerds will want to wait through the credits for the final scene of the movie. Oh, yes. You will want to stay.

The League sees DOOMSDAY (so you don't have to)

Holy @#$%.

Remember when you'd go to the movies and enjoy them? After seeing Doomsday, that all seems like a distant memory, as if a glimpse of a long-forgotten dream.

This is not to say that I did not enjoy watching Doomsday. I enjoyed the act of viewing Doomsday if I did not enjoy the movie itself.

Telling you Doomsday was awful may not come as a surprise. But to me, the depths of the awfulness... well, really Doomsday knew no bounds (nor shame) when it came to awfulness. Honestly, there was a minute there when I thought "oh, they're kidding. This is intentionally bad!" But, yeah... no.

Of late, it seems that many-a-sci-fi movie is but a deliberate, derivative knock off of a movie you've already seen (ie: Eragon = Star Wars). But Doomsday takes it one step farther by offering up a smorgasbord of stuff you've seen before in movies you kind of liked. The opening sort of lifts from any of a number of movies where a crowd is trying to escape an epidemic but is stopped by the military (most recently seen in I Am Legend). This is followed by some awkward expository scenes which kind of lift from the expository scenes from "Escape From New York". This is followed by a direct rip-off of scenes from "Aliens" (I mean, right down to the sort of vehicle being used), a minute or so of "Blackhawk Down", then into "Mad Max/ Beyond Thunderdome", which launches into a quick lift from... well, it's all stuff you've seen before. And when I say you've seen it before, I mean right down to editing, lighting, look and feel. It's... weird.



Also, star Rhona Mitra looks almost exactly like Kate Beckinsale. With hair and outfit styled after "Ghost in the Shell". Don't get me wrong, she's a good looking dame and all, but...

The dialog sounds like, maybe, it could have used an extra pair of eyes before the cameras rolled. However Director Neil Marshall is also, presumably, writer Neil Marshall. And, hence, nobody got between Mr. Marshall and Mr. Marshall when it came time to second guess uncreative and frequent use of the F-bomb, as well as the clunkiest exposition this side of "Monster A-Go-Go". Also, nobody seems to have told Mr. Marshall that showing every death (and method of death, of which the movie has innumerable and creative options) need not be shown in an extreme close-up. Sometimes cannibalism is also best suggested or mentioned to be something shown off-screen.

And I don't know how many of you have seen "Garth Marenghi's Darkplace", but the writing in the two has a lot (unintentionally) in common.

And, yes, I guessed they were about to eat someone by the odd use of the appearance of a Fine Young Cannibals' song. Really, this is that kind of movie. And then for some reason, they used Siouxsie's "Spellbound". Really the only pop music in the movie.

For a movie that includes car chases, knights in armor, gladiatorial combat, punk rock cannibals, plague zombies, a herd of cattle, a car chase and stuff I suppose I'm forgetting, its also kind of dull. Partially because after the initial exposition, the characters don't really talk to one another much, and a lot of stuff occurs, but not a lot happens.

Also, everything vaguely sciency that happens in the movie is wrong. A Bentley turns over after sitting in a box untouched after 20 years. The understanding of viruses is... hazy at best. And more!

There IS a plot, which is sort of messed up and ridiculous if you buy that a wall could be built in about 48 hours which would bi-sect the UK. Also, the issues between the UK and Scotland sort of run as a nasty undercurrent through the movie, making some not very flattering assumptions about what would happen in Scotland if push came to shove.

The truth is, I love me a bad movie. And this movie fits that bill on so, so many levels. We found ourselves throwing high-fives every once in a while when we were really, really feeling it.

I really don't know if movie directors/ producers are really that mercenary that they don't care if we already know this movie, and are willing to blatantly rip-off material wholesale and put it under a different label. I don't know if they THINK they're trying, or if they just have not a clue that they ARE ripping things off, or if they don't realize it, or what... There's certainly a certain video-gameness to the movie, if a video game were dreamed up by a hyperactive 8th grader. There's no payoff between our hero and a Big Boss, and, honestly, it could have used it for the trajectory of the movie. Honestly, almost nothing about the end of the movie makes sense, including an incriminating speech by one of the characters.

But, anyway, I've warned you. You're on your own from here. But, God bless it... Doomsday is here to tell us that the B movie is alive and well. And I don't mean how movies that used to be B movies are now, really, not B- movies but sheepishly claim to be so in order to bullet-proof themselves from critics who blanch at movies with superheroes, etc...

Dammit, I mean the cheap, lousy B movie with an iffy plot, clunky dialog, exploitative use of violence, ladies, car chases and shoddy science in the science fiction. You, B-Movie, are the real spirit of the silver screen.

The League Watches: Confessions of a Superhero

I had planned to try to see "Confessions of a Superhero" a while back. I think we'd planned to go with CB, but something came up.

Anyhoo... It showed up from Netflix today, and as I'm a bit under the weather, I popped it in and watched.

A long time ago, I recall some joke about the best way to get the respect of your peers in film school was to go shoot footgae of a neighborhood hobo in black and white for a few hours, get the person to tell you a sad story and then call it "Umbrellas Under Sadness". Or something of the sort. If anyone knows the exact quote, please share. But, ultimately, the idea kind of describes how I feel about a lot of "character" based documentary. Up close, everyone comes off as bizarre, and so its kind of an easy trick, especially when you can get someone living outside of normal expectations to talk to you, and a director and editor making a narrative from the whole cloth of a life.

It goes without saying that people who make a living by standing in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater dressed as Superman, etc... have, at some point, taken the path less traveled. Yes, these subjects have a story to tell, but it's never really clear if this is a new story we haven't heard before, even without the superhero angle. The documentary points out somewhat unintentionally "Going to Hollywood and maintaining a delusion of impending stardom when all Signs Point to No makes for a kind of pathetic story". And it's a story most people already know or we'd all be in LA wondering when we were going to get our break as a leading man or lady.

The movie is mostly about the shattered lives of four Hollywood wanna-be's, and seems to be trying to use the costumes of superheroes as a symbol of their hope, but only occasionally. Unfortunately, the movie fails to answer too many questions, and so whatever message they were trying to say, what the movie winds up conveying is "these people are off their nut, and they have no marketable skills. Also, 3 of 4 of these people is certifiable, and number 4 is working her way toward some bitter disappointment."

Folks who see the movie and who know me will, no doubt, wonder about my reaction to Christopher Dennis, the movie's Superman. Mr. Dennis seems like an affable enough guy. And while I admire his collection of Superman memoribilia (which easily dwarfs my own), he's a fan who has chosen to follow his obsession to the exclusion of everything else. The fact that he has found love is, to this viewer, not a surprise. He's found someone who finds him endlessly fascinating and who has accepted him as he's accepted her (she seems to have her own quirks). The Dennis segments are an unintentional cautionary tale for folks like myself, I guess. I did appreciate the advice he gave "Ghost Rider" about what behavior is acceptable when in costume/ character. But the film also demonstrates why I never want to go to the Superman Festival in Metropolis, Illinois.

The biggest issue was that the movie raised literally dozens of serious questions about the subjects of the film, and then does nothing to resolve those questions. In effect, you feel almost as if you know less about the subjects at the conclusion of the film than you did at the beginning, and its a frustrating way to view a documentary.

The film's subjects somewhat casually tell stories which demand follow up, but the film never does the work for the viewer. Our Batman tells tales of working in the Italian mob, killing the family of a former lover, and acting as an enforcer. Superman claims to be the child of actress Sandy Dennis, while Ms. Dennis's family claims she never had any children. Our Hulk discusses being homeless, but we're never told why. And Wonder Woman isn't much of a mystery, but we never get why she and her husband split, but the fact that they married two weeks after meeting sort of suggests what may have happened.

The film's creators spend entirely too much time on cinematography and still photos and almost none actually crafting the story. They mostly take the folks involved at their word, even when their spouses are saying "you can only believe 50% of what he says." The fact that the producers didn't chase these clues down (possibly to reveal that the guy playing Batman was responsible for the deaths of many people) goes beyond laziness and into outright irresponsibility. If Batman was lying or believes what he says, he needs help. And so they send him to the shrink in a full Batman outfit.

There's never a question of where the money came from for the costumes in the first place. There's never a question of why the subjetcs chose the character they did, or what they actually know about the character (pretty clearly in the case of Dennis: a lot). Heck, there's never even a question of "is dressing as a superhero on Hollywood Boulevard the best investment of your time if you want to be a serious actor?" Like so many Hollywood producers who've generated so many bad, bad super-hero movies, to the documentarians, the costumes are just a prop on the way to a paycheck. But I suspect that's a complaint only a comic nerd like myself might have.

The documentary seems to want for the audience to root for and support the characters, but there's simply no reason given as to "why"? If they aren't putting on the costumes to make the world a better place, but for self-promotion, and this is the step they've taken toward their goals of money and power, why should I care if they fail or succeed?

Part of this, I suspect, is that the filmmakers are in line with the platitudes provided by the film's subjects regarding the movie industry's placement of value on fame and money. Perhaps the film is intended to indict this idea, but it seems to be cheerleading the subjects.

The omissions of the film act as a huge distraction and mostly point out that, aside from long, lingering views of Dennis's Superman memoribilia-rich apartment, they just don't have much to show. A quick trip to Wonder Woman's hometown suggest she had a mother who indulged her every whim and may hvae chosen poorly when she gave up an iron grip on a town of 2000 for asking for tips for dressing as Wonder Woman.

Interesting characters, perhaps... but perhaps the movie could have spent less time on musical interludes of the Hulk in litter strewn alleys and more asking him "Hey, four years on the street? How did that happen? And why didn't you just go home to North Carolina?"

The sad answer to a lot of these questions is probably: the person is crazy or not-all-there. And absolutely no evidence is given to the contrary.

In short, I can't really recommend the film. My hope was that it would be more about the histories of the subjects, but instead the producers chose to just focus on the present tense of the situation, half of which seems to be a steady stream of fabrications.

REVIEW: Justice League: New Frontier

Well, Anonymous, I watched the movie, so here we go.

New Frontier

I liked it.

Like any movie from a book, JL: New Frontier does not completely manage to capture what made the book great, but it does a pretty darn good job of translating the comic to animated format. Rather than beat around the bush, I will say that the single biggest problem with the movie is that at 75ish minutes, the movie feels about 20-30 minutes too short.

I'm not sure if viewers of the movie are going to necessarily miss the bits about Dinosaur Island (from Weird War Tales), the greater development of a few plotlines, or more about the Challengers. But they may want to see more of the Superman/ Lois relationship, get a better feel for the existing relationships among the characters, and maybe get a bit more background on The Flash.

I don't envy director Dave Bullock, or writer Stan Berkowitz. New Frontier as a comic was a sprawling epic, taking place over an extended period of time and containing both explicit and implicit inclusion of historical events and a truckload of DC publishing history. Whomever the powers that be at TimeWarner might be, they've been kind enough to greenlight this sort of project and short-sighted enough to dictate the same running time for children's movies.

New Frontier is PG-13, suggesting that DC Animated expected the movie to reach an older audience than, say, the latest installment of the Air Bud puppies series. One of the oddities of comics and their translation to television (especially to animation) is that what happens in comics is often PG to PG-13 rated. And with the opening sequences taking place in a warfield in Korea in the final days of the Korean War, they don't pull too many punches.

Whether the voice talent took part as a lark or because the pay was right, this movie has a great voice cast. Kyle MacLachlan as Superman, Jeremy Sisto's Batman is a worthy heir to Kevin Conroy. Lucy Lawless is a good Wonder Woman, and I was a fan of Vicki Lewis as Iris, and Brooke Shields as Carol Ferris. David Boreanaz of Angel fame plays Hal Jordan, and Miguel Ferrer is a great Martian Manhunter.

The art-style approximates artist Darwyn Cooke's original conception, under the steady guidance of director Dave Bullock. Coincidentally, I used to really like Bullock's cover work on Superman comics about three or four years ago, as he shared a bit of a retro-style with Cooke. Some will make the mistake of believing the late-50's style of cartoon art is imitating The Incredibles, but that's an unfortunate coincidence. New Frontier pre-dates the release of the Incredibles. I did miss some of the characterization, especially of Wonder Woman, that Cooke brought to the page, but budgetary concerns and a slightly more modern style was probably required for a general audience.

The plot holds up well, and in place of the sprawling story of the original mini-series/ graphic novel, the story is tightened up nicely in the film, with most of the major beats getting attention. From The Flash is Vegas, to the origin of Hal Jordan as Green Lantern, it's pretty well covered. The overarching storyline of The Center, that holds the film together, was surprisingly well-paced and handled with an appreciable amount of narrative economy, all while building tension.

The action scenes are very well choreographed and maturely handled. There's a great big-screen feel to the whole movie with well-staged scenes, from art direction to "blocking".

There are some scenes where they've taken some liberties, and where they've integrated sequences, etc... but as far as a film goes, I don't have any complaints.

Folks not particularly familiar with the Justice League or superheroes beyond Batman and Superman will find something to like.

Folks who are DC geeks will find a bag of things to enjoy, from the Challengers of the Unknown just sort of being there, to Madamoiselle Marie as a Fed. It's just a lot of fun.

Extras:

The preview copy I received was not the two-disc set, but did contain the film and a short documentary on the history of the Justice League.

Superman/ Doomsday contained a similar documentary, produced as a companion piece to the movie you may have just finished watching.

In this case, the documentary covered the publishing history of the Justice League, and contains some great interviews from folks who were there, or who worked with the original creators (many of whom, like Gardner Fox, have passed). Comic geeks will be excited to see the faces and hear the comments from well-known creators, but may have known some or much of the history of the Justice League of America. Non-comic geeks may be surprised at the grown men talking so lovingly about the Super Friends, but will still enjoy.

On the Whole:

I think this came out extremely well. It's tough to separate out my love of the original book from the movie, and that works in two ways. I am somewhat bothered by what was excised for time, but I'm also finding it hard to pick at the movie too much as it animates and brings to life a comic I think is top notch.

If there's one thing I think was missed, its at the very end when Lois sees Superman again. I recall seeing that page the first time I read the comic and felt it was just a perfect Superman moment. If comics can slow when you read and really impress a feeling upon you, Cooke had pulled it off. Here, I kind of felt it was rushed. But, you know, 75 minutes.

I still recommend. I will mention that I wouldn't show this to, say, very, very young kids. But if they can handle Star Wars, they can handle this.

Zero Effect Tenth Anniversary

Join Chronological Snobbery for a 10 Year anniversary investigation of the 90's-era detective movie "The Zero Effect".

Read here.

Zero Effect - 10 Years Later

The League has been asked by the powers that be at Chronological Snobbery to participate in a bit of a movie review round-robin for "The Zero Effect". It seems that the movie, Zero Effect came out ten years ago. I saw it on DVD within a year or so of its release on home video.

Rather than try to remember a movie I hadn't seen in about 9 years, I picked it up from Netflix.

I admit that I wasn't a huge fan of "Zero Effect" when I saw the movie the first time. I definitely got that the movie was a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, with Bill Pullman in the role of Daryl Zero/ Holmes and Ben Stiller in the role of Steve Arlo/ Watson. While working, Daryl Zero has superhuman abilities of deduction and intuition. Off the case, he's a drug-addled lunatic who plays the guitar. Badly. Just as Holmes was supposed to play the violin and partake in a bit of, if memory serves, cocaine, the analog is pretty straightforward. And just as Watson was supposed to declare "by jove! How the deuce did you deduce that, Holmes?", so is Stiller put the position of being both impressed by his employer's abilities, as well as assisting him and representing him to the public.

And while I certainly wouldn't want a "modern day Holmes" movie, I wasn't sure what, exactly, Kasdan was trying to create. Was this Holmes through the eyes of the modern day detective movie? Or was it Holmes through the eyes of the son of a successful Hollywood producer?

The plot/ mystery of the movie is an excuse for the audience to meet Daryl Zero and Steve Arlo, and to challenge the status quo we're to understand they share when the movie begins. Should Steve Arlo give up his working relationship with Zero for the way it interferes with his personal life? Can Zero find love?

What starts off as an amusing premise never really works. The movie isn't funny, and I don't think it's intended to be so. So I'm not really sure what Kasdan was intending. Too much time is spent concerned with the quirky relationship of Zero and Arlo, and the mystery plot isn't necessarily engaging enough on its own to work as a feature film. Perhaps this would be a great pilot leading into a television series. Long story short, its tough to ever know what is supposed to be the A-plot of the movie, and what is intended to the B-Plot. Are we watching a movie about Zero and Arlo or the blackmail case they're supposed to be uncovering? Is this a standard case for them, or is this one particularly unusual?

Part of the problem is that Pullman is only occasionally convincing as an unhinged eccentric genius. Too much of the time, perhaps, he's on the case, and so seems together. Other shows, such as Monk or Psyche feature quirky detectives (Monk, most specifically comes to mind as an example of a detective program which is completely dedicated to the protagonist's psychoses). Prior to that, Columbo and others had been pretty wacky detectives working through convoluted plots. There's nothing here in "Zero Effect" to defy expectations. Instead, not a whole lot seems to happen. Character bits that are revealed skew towards the depressing, but with so little time to get to know Arlo and Zero, its tough to get invested. Pullman has never struck me as an actor of great range, and Zero Effect does nothing to erase that notion.

TV and movies are full of such characters, and drug-addled mood swings may look good on paper, but in a movie where we're given little room to feel sympathy for our leading man to begin with, profanity-laced binges don't really draw you in. Honestly, the idea seems like something lifted out of a completely different movie, as does the intentionally awkward "Zero plays the guitar" scene.

Ben Stiller's portrayal of Steve Arlo is hampered by stilted dialog he delivers mostly through clenched teeth. This would have been a post-"Ben Stiller Show" Stiller, but pre-Super Stardom from "There's Something About Mary" and the schticky groove Stiller would carve out with films like "Meet the Fockers". Honestly, I'd forgotten he was the Watson-archetype in this film, and raised an eyebrow in the first frames when he appeared. He more or less disappears going into the third reel, with one scene which resolves his character arc and a tacked on wedding scene to give our character an out at the end of the film.

Readers may recall that the Sherlock Holmes stories were told from the perspective of Watson in order to give the reader the same surprise the audience might feel upon hearing Holmes spout out an amazing deduction. However, director/ writer Kasdan switched the POV from Arlo to Zero somewhat abruptly early on in the film, taking away the exasperated amazement that Arlo might feel working side by side with an unknowable genius. In many ways, this gives the feeling that the screenplay was cobbled together from various parts of various drafts and that there's never any solid, single point of view to the movie. No doubt this was done to accommodate the scenes with GLoria Sullivan, which, by necessity to the plot, could not include Arlo. Unfortunately, this makes Arlo semi-redundant within the structure of the story.

For someone with so much screentime and who is supposed to win over Daryl Zero, Kim Dickens' Gloria Sullivan is a surprisingly dull character and never feels like the foil she's described to be in the film's final moments (I literally paused and thought to myself... "oh, yeah... I guess she did do all of that..." as Zero re-capped why he admired her so.). Ryan O'Neal is really the only other player, and so in a mystery such as this, there just really isn't much mystery to go around. But he pretty much plays Ryan O'Neal, if you're wondering.

Director/ Writer/ etc... Jake Kasdan would have been about 23 at the time of the film's creation, and that may account for a lot of the problems with the film. Too young, perhaps, to really realize he was recycling material. Mistaking drudging, monotone dialog for moodiness, and Dennis Hopper-channeling mania for Zero as "quirkiness", whatever humor he finds in the inconsistent pill-popping of Zero simply doesn't work.

Perhaps these characters had lived in Kasdan's head too long as a writer, and as a director, he was unable to get the performances out of his seasoned cast. Fresh out of school and with a father like Lawrence Kasdan to call in favors, movies can get made. Perhaps had Kasdan waited a bit before bringing this movie to the screen, the movie would have found its footing.

I'm not familiar with the box office on Zero Effect, but I do not recall the movie doing well at the time of release, and only rented it originally at the suggestion of someone else.

Kasdan's follow up efforts haven't been as serious in tone. He directed the dispiriting, laughless "Orange County" (a movie which seemed as if it was written by the most entitled priviliged kid for other entitled privileged kids.). It is telling, I think, that I left the theater before "Orange County" was over. We had technical problems with the film in the final reel, and rather than wait for the theater to fix them, we demanded a refund and left.

Kasdan also directed this winter's musical/ comedy "Walk Hard", which was funny when relying on the improv talents of the players and otherwise awkward and clunky, and certainly stretched on about twenty minutes too long.

Perhaps Kasdan had originally intended to write a comedy with Zero Effect. Perhaps he even believed that's what he was shooting until he got back his footage. Who knows? The movie begins on a an absurd note, suggesting some dark comedy... and abandons any humorous aspects about twenty minutes in before giving up and plodding to a finish.

My guess is that I am missing something here that has kept the film alive with a certain group of fans. But on a second viewing, there's still not much to pull me in. For a movie that seems to think it has some great characters, they seem derivative. For a movie that ostensibly is about deduction and detecting a mystery, the plot just isn't really engaging enough to really feel like the greatest challenge of the career of Daryl Zero, which it must be, lest why would the movie exist?

As someone participating in a round-robin of "Zero Effect" reviews, I'll be curious to see what others say.

I was going to close the post with something dickish about how the movie had "zero effect" on me. And that's probably still true. But, mostly, I feel the movie is forgettable, and has been largely forgotten. It's never a good sign when you realize upon watching a movie again for the second time that you have no recollection of the plot or characters from the first viewing. It's a worse sign when you are dead-certain mid-viewing that your brain may be erasing the movie from your memory before you've even finished watching it, and that's not going to help when it comes time for the big reveal.

Cloverfield: Man in Suit

On Saturday Jamie, Jason, Julia and me (breaking the chain of alliteration) went to the Alamo-ized Village Cinema to catch "Cloverfield".

SPOILER LADEN REVIEW

Cloverfield is pretty much exactly (EXACTLY) what you think it is from the previews. It takes the concept of the big-budget monster movie and tells it from the pitiable angle of the person on the street, rather than from the angle of the sexy scientists and military folk who usually fill Godzilla movies. In some ways, its very similar to a zombie movie in that we're getting the perspective of the folks simply trying to not get killed, not the folks trying to bring the crisis to an end, which, really, brings us all the way back to the original novel of "War of the Worlds".

But the buzz hasn't been so much about the shake up in narrative, its been about the first-person perspective of the movie. As you probably already know, the movie is supposed to be found footage of a handi-cam which captures the desperate set of circumstances of the seven or eight hours around the attack of the monster, which I just call "Cloverfield" as, very intentionally, the movie never names, nor does it try to explain the monster. From the perspective of the characters, this makes complete sense, and, really, that's the point of the movie. This is a film about "what if you or I were minding our own business and found ourselves the screaming pedestrian in the rampaging monster film?" What I did not want to see was the scene in which our everyman heroes stumble upon a scientist who explains the entire situation. In so many ways, the movie relies upon the confusion of the characters to tell the story.

And, no, I have no idea why the movie was called Cloverfield. The movie never actually says why that was supposed to be the name at any time I saw (even in the opening minute of the movie). I probably missed something, so fill me in if you know.

In a world in which we've all seen endless footage of the WTC falling and modern military strikes on cable, the cinematographer of Cloverfield is the real hero. The scenes are captured well enough for the viewer to see what is going on without being lost in the herky-jerky camera movements, and only occasionally did I stop to think "gee, he was lucky to frame that exactly that way while running away in terror". We now know what it looks like when a huge building collapses, we understand what it looks like when missiles are flying from an armored military vehicle. All of this is brought to the screen in a manner that suggests You Are There.

A lot of folks are going to not necessarily dig the camera work, and that's a matter of both taste and whether or not you got vertigo when you saw Blair Witch.

This, in the end, is what the movie brings that "20 Million Miles to Earth", "King Kong", or any other rampaging monster-in-a-populated-area movie didn't bring. There will be the inevitable comparisons to The Blair Witch Project, and that's okay. But I don't think its fair to assume that a single movie should get the monopoly on first person genre films, especially in an era of YouTube, video cameras on phones and the everyman as creator of media. To say "Blair Witch already did this" is, to me, oversimplifying things a bit.

Some Leaguers are beholden to the whims and needs of the babies they've made and will not be able to go out to the local cinema to take in the spectacle. And I'd say that watching this on your TV will probably still get you into the experience. After all, subconsciously video shooters are thinking TV, not 40' movie screens. While the movie certainly doesn't always stick to the rule, seeing the conventions of the home video play out on your TV rather than at the movies may make for a satisfying experience.

What viewers will probably believe less than a twenty-story monster rampaging through Manhattan is the premise of the plot of the film. This is not, I say again, a movie about folks actually defeating the beastie. I think I, at age 32 or at age 15 would have a hard time buying the premise which to our film's subjects wandering through the firefight. Or that someone would feel safe walking around with a camera in their face through a disaster of cataclysmic proportions.

The leads are fairly typical young Hollywood, what producers assume I want to see when I go to the cinema (but is really intended to appeal to males, 13-25). The movie begins more or less with the beginning of the "found" tape. The first footage occurs before the disaster, capturing two young folks who are trying to decide if they're in love. A camcordery-cut later, Flash forward to the awkwardly scripted good-bye party where one of the leads is off to Japan for work, and a very high-school-like lovers' quarrel. The technique works in the narrative in a way that would have seemed ridiculous as flashbacks in any other movie, and uses the device (both plot and actual handi-cam device with its known technical quirks) to show what would otherwise have to make up for some really inappropriately timed exposition.

In all honesty, I wasn't sure I was supposed to feel deep empathy for the characters, or if that was a product of the usual poor characterization when style takes place over substance. I really didn't care about the B-plot of the movie, and I certainly didn't buy that the characters would have been knuckle-headed enough to walk back towards the danger as they did. Like a lot of zombie movies, I suppose, I was expecting our protagonists to get picked off, and was simply much more invested in the unfolding of action than what was happening to who, and who loved who. I mean... really. There's a 50-ton monster eating people. Who cares about yuppies in love?

I might also mention that the movie has no score or musical cues. You won't miss them, but if you hang around through the credits, you'll find the music over the credits sort of jarring when it does pop up.

Like Blair Witch, its unclear if its a good movie or a novelty, but I'm leaning toward a novelty that will inform future, perhaps better, efforts. It's a good popcorn flick, and it shows promise that perhaps the rampaging monster in an urban setting isn't totally gone from the world of genre movies.

But, as the Alamo pre-show reminded me, I was pretty happy with a classic Man in Suit movie. I'm not sure I really need a $150 million thrown at me to have a good time.

Three Movies I saw

During my days off, I saw some movies...

Juno: Occasionally you wander into a movie and realize that the movies aimed at the hip, the young, the with-it, the tastemakers... are no longer aimed at you. And that movie has unintentionally informed you that you are either too old, too unhip or too cynical to enjoy the movie in the way it was meant to be watched.

People love this movie. I thought it was okay, but I don't really get why people are falling over each other to praise the flick. At best, it seems like a good starter vehicle for star Ellen Page.

I found the dialog oddly stilted and stylized for a fairly concrete sort of movie, and I was sort of having trouble buying the hipper-than-thou'ness of the lead character and references that seemed to place the movie about ten to fifteen years ago. Toss in a nigh-lack of consequence for the lead characters, and a somewhat insidious cry for conformity, and the movie just didn't work for me.

Walk Hard: Is Exactly what you think it is. Only a little less funny. I do wonder if it would be funnier on a second viewing as the movie is terribly quotable. Unfortunately, in spoofing a film like "Walk the Line", the characters need to follow the same path as the late, great, screwed up Johnny Cash, you have to pretty much follow the many beats of the source material. This makes the movie seem a bit bogged down, and occasionally those familiar with Walk the Line or Cash's bio may not find much humor in scenes as they're played.

A renter for a boring Friday night, I'd say.

And, I know I am alone in this, but I think Tim Meadows is one of the most under-appreciated comedians on TV or film. That guy cracks me up. And, yes, I have both seen and ENJOYED The Ladies Man.

I am Legend: If Juno was not aimed at me, I am Legend is pretty squarely targeting me directly. Part action movie, part character piece, part Zombie flick, and featuring explosions and the affable Will Smith, they might as well have written "with The League in mind" right on the poster.

That said, the movie left too many gaps that I filled in from viewings of The Omega Man, but successfully changed the "mutants" into something far more frightening than the albino goobers of Omega Man.

Still, one feels that the movie seemed like it could have been larger in scope somehow, and that the movie seems too often like its trying to get you to jump and too seldom like there's much past the spookiness in the shadows.

Probably worth seeing in a dark theater at matinee. Or go rent Omega Man for an ending that has a really grim downer before the credits, the kind that you just don't get any more thanks to the suits wanting to offer the audience either hope or a chance of a sequel.

The New Flash Gordon on Sci-Fi

...totally sucks.

Wow. Monday evening I made poor Jason and Jamie sit through this no-budget train wreck.

Flash Gordon has successfully existed as a comic strip, 1950's TV show, radio serial movie serial, 80's camp classic, 90's cartoon, reprint series, whatever...

Yet somehow with a household name at their fingertips, untold hours of reference material and a public perception regarding the franchise, the geniuses behind this show decided that what they really needed to do was scrap all of that, make up a bunch of nonsense that's never plagued the concept before, and then spend most of the pilot in a Canadian suburb. It seems that, faced with a non-existent budget and a casting director with a pretty specific taste in women, the creators apparently had something other than Flash Gordon in mind and just borrowed the name of the property.

Seriously, nothing resembles anything you know about Flash Gordon.

A list of offenses includes:

-All of the women are thin brunettes with sort of almond eyes. I couldn't tell Dale, the princess or the bounty hunter apart in close-ups
-Flash's mom is, like, three years older than him and sort of uncomfortably attractive
-The show sorta takes a line on Latino immigrants that could be construed as racist
-Ming is the least threatening villain ever. Seriously. Ever. It's like having a record store manager mildly miffed with you.
-they've ditched the now well established, crazy, space opera look of Mongo for generic Sci-Fi channel BSG and Star Trek costuming rejects and bland hip design with no eye to the gilded age wonders of the comics and movies
-the pacing is glacial, nonsensical and meandering
-Flash is given a token black sidekick so someone can say "That's whack!" a lot
-The acting is uniformly awful
-Lines clearly intended to be played for laughs are played straight. Whether this is the director or actors' fault, I have no idea
-No Hawkmen
-No Lizardmen
-No awesome football game
-clearly filmed in a lush Canadian suburb
-Mongo: Also clearly the exact same suburb. Plus a water treatment plant possibly used in several "sci-fi" films from the 80's seen nowhere else but on MST3K
-Zarkov is now a quirky guy who will be play "The Professor" to Flash's "Gilligan"
-The girl who plays the princess seems puzzled as to what show she's on. Maybe the OC?
-absolutely no action to speak of
-And Flash can hop between a field near his house and Mongo at any time. pretty much defeating the point of the entire Flash Gordon concept

On every level possible, the program fails. If you're going to claim you're giving me Flash Gordon, Sci-Fi Channel, then give me @#$%ing Flash Gordon. Don't try to "update" a concept that's been honed and perfected over the better part of something like 70 years. You and your crappy budget are not smarter than the millions of folks who already passed judgment on the idea the way it was.

Leave it alone. Sometimes aliens just need to dress like color blind Prussian generals, weird Eastern stereotypes, pirates and barbarians.


The show is crap in a hat.

The League Surfs with the Alien

Saturday I wound up going to see Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

I might also add that due to logistical reasons, this was the first time in months I've been to a movie anywhere by the Alamo, and while the crowd was really good, it just isn't the same going to a movie when I can't drink a beer and eat a pizza.

Anyhow, the past few years have seen superhero movies which have defied all previous expectations, merging special effects, well crafted stories and respect for the source material to bring terrific entertainment to the screen. In no way should you make the mistake of believeing FF: RotSS, is to be included among these films.

FF: RotSS is a bit of a throwback to 80's era comic adaptations wherein the source material was briefly glanced at, and a few production designers who may have done their homework slipped in a bit or two from the original comics, but otherwise, the movie was pretty clearly not taken terribly seriously as producers cashed in and tried to keep a straight face when reporters asked them about what drew them to the material.

In this movie, any memory of Sue Storm as a brilliant scientist is swept under the rug as she's offered the task of Reed's girlfriend/ administrative assistant, while mostly whining a lot about a fancy wedding (oh, you girls and your romantic notions!). Sue is one of my favorite Marvel characters, and its disappointing to see her reimagined as an "E! Network" watching girl who has defined herself by her relationship with Mr. Fantastic. Reed is unable to remember he's about to get married, the Thing is... uncharacteristically happy throughout the film, and Johnny comes to some sort of nebulous conclusion about not being a jerk. I think.

The whole thing has the production value of a late 90's TV movie, with some upped CGI. That said, a lot of Reed's stretching looks... not good. And Michael Chiklis as Ben Grimm is hammy enough that one expects a trombone after each line to blurt out a "wahhh-waaahhhhhhh". Plus, man, that makeup sucks. If we can have a CGI Surfer, why not a CGI Thing?

The threats in this film are double as Victor Von Doom returns from the dead and... I dunno. That guy is nowhere close to the Von Doom of the comics, although the script does play toward Doom's tendency to always try to tilt the game in his favor. But this Von Doom is like a smarmy Owen Wilson character more than an Eastern European monarch hellbent on worldwide domination.

For being mostly a well mimed CGI effect (thank Pan's Labyrinth's Doug Jones) The Silver Surfer seems to be partaking in a completely different, far less stupid movie. Based loosely on the original FF comics featuring Galactus and the Surfer, the Surfer arrives ahead of Galactus as his herald, preparing Earth for his master's arrival. The Surfer seemingly believes he has no choice in the matter, and goes numbly about his tasks until confronted by the FF.

From here, things sort of go downhill for the FF as the bravery of their task from the 2/3rd points in the movie mostly seems to consist of breaking the Silver Surfer out of jail and then getting their butts handed to them by Doom. The actual presence of Galactus and mode of defeating the planet eater from the comics (which didn't leave the FF acting like slack jawed yokels, but Reed figuring out how to freak Galactus out by threatening existence if Galactus didn't back off) isn't invoked. Instead, it's a bit more abstract, and nebulous. It works, but it means that at no pint in the movie do the FF actually succeed at anything they attempt aside from running away. They just don't seem all that competent. And the final plan when Johny Storm does leap into action actually contradicts everything we thought we knew about the problems we believed he was having with his powers.

The producers also decided that of all the things in the FF comics to scrap, the one thing which just wouldn't work was Galactus' physical appearance. So, he's a cloud. Which is very Star Trek Next Generation, but not very satisfying. The movies are already horribly devoid of the Kirby styling which defined the comics for decades, so it would have been nice to see our guy, who has one of the most stylized appearances in comicdom... but, no... we get a sort of silhouette glimpse of his helmet.

BTW, I also think Ultimate Galactus blows. Bugs? Come on, man...

The movie is full of cute/dumb moments, meant to play to the same crowd who really likes Rob Schneider movies and who roared at the trailer for "Daddy Day Care 2: Daddy Day Camp" (Eddie Murphy was apparently too busy for this sequel, so cue Cuba Gooding "My Career is Over" Jr.). You can almost imagine the story session in which the writers thought NOTHING would advance the story like a dance sequence featuring Reed "stretch-o" Richards. It's funny 'cause he's strechy and stuff.

Oh, and the product placement... including a "It's got a hemi!" joke during some awkward Dodge product placement.

I really didn't have high hopes for this movie, and it still stunk. Weirdly, the portions featuring The Silver Surfer operate on a whole different level that, had the rest of the movie shown that sort of care, might have made for an enjoyable film.

This, however, is not that movie.

GRINDHOUSE

I am not a child of the 70's, nor was I raised in Southern California or any of the other places where "Grindhouses" may have once existed. I'm a child of the 80's, and multiplex theaters built into shopping malls. (For reason I cannot fathom, I always associate the Willowbrook Mall theater with my first viewings of Jurassic Park and Freejack, although I saw literally dozens of movies at that theater. And why Freejack, for God's sake?).

Anyhow, I don't think the "Grindhouse" idea was ever as prevalent in the US as Mssr's Tarantino and Rodriguez would have us believe. At least seeing a series of crappy movies on a single bill wasn't as fondly remembered.

But if you're going to see two movies on a single bill, Alamo Drafthouse is the place to go. We intentionally broke up our orders into appetizers and a main course over the two movies and managed to really settle in. And, prior to the movie, the Alamo showed trailers from classic "Grindhouse" movies such as "Vanishing Point", "The Thing with Two Heads" and "Dracula Meets the Seven Brothers (and their one Sister)".

So how was the actual movie?

It's possible that the entire movie might have been better off as nothing but a series of trailers. After all, trailers always show the best parts of movies, and in some ways the directors seem to know that trailers are more fun than what you actually get in a movie.

So, yes, the "trailers" between the two movies are almost more fun than the two features.

"Planet Terror" is a fun zombie movie. Flat out. I would have gladly paid to see this movie without any of the additional Grindhouse baggage. It's gross, it's an action movie, it casts Freddy Rodriguez as a bad-ass, and someone finally makes good use of Rose McGowan for t