Thursday Night Summer Night of Movies

I'm going to be honest.  This was the worst movie I've seen all summer.  Tied with Transformers 3.

It's hard to say what went wrong besides almost everything.  It was one of those movies that makes good actors seem amateur and pretty people seem plain.

Right from the get go.

A stranger awakes, he doesn't know who he is except that he's good at squinting and grumbling.

Then that guy from Lost pops in, pulls a gun then sews him up.

The Paul Dano jumps around like he's in a tenth grade drama class audition.

Then Sam Rockwell, then Adam Beach, then Keith Carradine, then Olivia Wilde, then Harrison Ford, then aliens, then...

Every line sounded like a bad audition tape.

Every word sounded like a bad idea.

Every explosion a miss.

Every escape stupid.

Every reason an excuse for a bad line.

Every plant a bad seed.

It started bad.  It got worse.

I would have left but I don't do that kind of thing.

You could have called it "People vs Non-People" or "Bad guys and Balrogs" or "This guy vs that guy who has cliche'd hatred for those guys who are being killed by bad things who have no reason for what they're doing."

SPOILER ALERT

It sucks.

ANOTHER SPOILER ALERT

Gold?  Seriously?  Gold?  They brought their massive spaceship, powered by who the hells knows what futuristic power source to earth to mine for gold?  Do you know how much fucking gold you would need to collect to make traveling to another planet worthwhile?  And what the fuck was the point of capturing and killing everyone?  So you could get their watches and glasses?  We're going to land and power a massive spaceship, capture your innocents, hold them in a hypnotic stare while we suck gold from the ground because gold is as precious to us as it is to you and when you chase our spaceships with your horses we'll either shoot you with lasers or let you catch up and train-robbery style hijack us and when you need to take the bracelet off you just need to use your mind like you did when you shot it and if that doesn't work I'll kiss you because we have so much chemistry and seeing that I'm an alien trapped in a body that can't die until it can I can convince you that losing your girlfriend before me isn't as important to you as this fake body of mine.

FUCK!

I hated this movie.  Hated it.

Zero gold pieces out of a million.

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Directed by
Jon Favreau 

 Writing credits
Roberto Orci (screenplay) &
Alex Kurtzman (screenplay) &
Damon Lindelof (screenplay) and
Mark Fergus (screenplay) &
Hawk Ostby (screenplay)
Mark Fergus (screen story) &
Hawk Ostby (screen story) and
Steve Oedekerk (screen story)

Starring

Here's the thing.  There are a shit-tonne of superhero movies out there.

They blur into one another.  Meld if you will.  Alloy.  Like the adamantium-vibranium shield of our patriotic subject.

The movie was good.  I'll say that.  It didn't suck and was worth the time and energy.

That sounds shallow and selfish.  People put a lot of time into making this thing, so to say it was worth the two hours I spent seems trite.

But that's that.

The acting was decent, particularly in the first half.  Stanley Tucci brought it home.  He made it real.  The CGI head of Chris Evans on the skinny body was great.  There were a few parts where he seemed like a bobble head and the deep booming voice felt somewhat off.  Some of the special effects in the second half felt off, like they spent their money on the beautiful production design.  New York in the 40s was really very good.

But back to the point.  If you'd never seen a superhero movie in your life, I'm sure this would excite, thrill and entertain from the opening, icy frame to the post credit sneak peak.  But I have.  And it didn't.  These movies aren't clever.  They don't rely on inventive story telling and creative problem solving to bring the hero through the mire.  The superhero succeeds because he's a super hero and he succeeds in the way he does because he's a superhero and that's how superhero's succeed.

How does he get across the massive pit of fire when the bridge breaks?  Oh right, he jumps.  How does he get into the locked cockpit of the underwater car?  Oh right, he punches the window.  How does he beat the bad guy in the end?  Oh right, he jumps higher, punches harder and moves faster.

There are no stakes involved here.  There is nothing to lose because we know everything there is to know about everything going in.  Is it cool to see these comic book characters brought to life?  Yes.  Absolutely.  Is it important to remain faithful to the source material?  I guess.  Probably.  

But.  

But what?

But unless you're going to tell the story on Showtime or HBO and span the arc across 14 episodes, we need something more.  And it's not more special effects or more bad guys or more good guys or more money.  We need...

Well, I guess if I could really answer that, I'd be writing the next superhero movie instead of writing about the last one.

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Vera Farmiga is awesome.

I had to get that off my chest.  Feels good to finally say it.

I read the screenplay to this movie a few month ago, so I didn't go into it with a blank slate.  No matter.  It was great.  

Could you elaborate on, "great"?

Sure.  

Clever set up.  Slow build.  The confusion of the character came across and through to the audience, or at least to me.  Did I say Vera Farmiga is awesome?  Good.  She is.  Michelle Monaghan and Jake Gyllenhaal were pretty good too.  

I think one of the hardest parts of science fiction is creating a world that's believable (even though it's not possible) and then having the guts to stick to the rules of the world you've created.  Source Code managed to do that pretty well, but fell short for me, only, I believe because I read the story first.  Science Fiction is a wondrous playground for the mind.  It's a world made for the pages of a book.  Details, inventions, make-believe, open-ended.  Bringing the pages to life is a difficult task.  My imagination had already built the sets and had painted these characters a certain way.  It's always hard to see the movie after you've read the book, but I would argue this is especially true with Science Fiction.

Also, I felt the one thing the story lacked was real, effectual stakes for the characters.  Without giving too much away, except for the possibility of an impending doom on an unwitting Chicago, there wasn't really anything at stake during each iteration of the sequence.  Succeed or fail, it didn't really matter.  I thought they have tied it closer to the same reality through and through to give more weight to each iteration and higher stakes for each of the characters.

But that's a bit nit-picky.  

It was a great, inventive ride and I'm looking forward to whatever Ben Ripley is writing next.

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Directed by: Duncan Jones 
Written by: Ben Ripley
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal (Colter Stevens), Michelle Monaghan (Christina Warren), Vera Farmiga (Colleen Goodwin), Jeffrey Wright (Dr. Rutledge), Michael Arden (Derek Frost)

This is a movie that reminds you how movies were meant to be.  

Creative.  Self-indulgent.  Inventive.  Funny.  Disgusting.  Entertaining.

It's good in all the ways it should be.  It's over the top in every way it can be.  Probably mores ways than that.

Was it good?  

What is good?  This made me laugh, it made me uncomfortable and it provided me with the wonderfully memorable and quotable phrase, "But look at me.  What do I got?  I'm just a hobo with a shotgun".

Jason Eisener, the director, first produced this as a fake trailer for Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's awesome Grindhouse double feature.  Rodriguez went on to turn his trailer Machete into a movie (now a trilogy in the making) and Eisener recast, rewrote and turned Hobo into the delicious gorefest it is today.

Watch it.  Love it.  Preach it.

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Directed by: Jason Eisener 
Written by: John Davies & Jason Eisener (story) & Rob Cotterill (story) & John Davies (story)
Starring: Rutger Hauer (Hobo), Pasha Ebrahimi (Bumfight Filmmaker), Rob Wells (Logan), Brian Downey (Drake)

This movie is what it is and isn't anything more.  

You know going in what to expect and you get pretty much exactly that.

Bad aliens invade America, Americans rise up and in the final moments snip the single achilles heel and win.

Don't see it if you don't like this kind of movie. 

See it if you do.

Here's my sidelined thought.

This movie plays out in typical fashion like most high-action movies in a way that is very much like a video game.  At the beginning, the one single alien bad guy is almost un-killable.  Guns, tanks, missiles, nothing can kill him until eventually they 'figure out' how to kill him and suddenly, like they've just levelled up their skills, they can now easily kill those guys except wait, oh, no.  The bad guys have even bigger bad guys.  Same scenario.  Can't kill it, can't kill it, can't kill it - oh killed it.  ZOOOP.  Level up.  Now the same bullets that couldn't kill the first baddie can somehow kill the new baddie.  And it goes on.  Bad guys get badder, good guys level up by figuring out how to kill it, bad guys get badder, etc.

Aaron Eckhart was good.  There were some touching moments.  I wonder what goes through an actors mind when they're memorizing a cliche though.  When Eckhart delivers his "rally the troops" speech, it must be hard not to vomit in your own mouth.  He did well in that regard.

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Was it believable? 

That's the main question on these high concept premise movies for me.  Was the fact that the train couldn't stop believable and did they break any of their own logic rules on the way to finally solving their diesel engine problems?

The accidental get away train was something of a stretch.  I think part of the problem was that you knew it was coming.  You knew it had to be coming.  So when the pieces started lining up it felt forced in a small way.  Like a movie about a married couple that starts with a prologue of them meeting and falling in love.  There's no doubt that they will meet and then fall in love and then get married.

Pine and Washington did a great job.  The writing was sparse without a lot of silly speeches. The resolution was earned and even appreciated.  

Taking the corner?  I don't know.

Take it for a spin if you have the time.  It's a tight little big budget sneak attack.

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Directed by: Tony Scott 
Written by: Mark Bomback
Starring: Denzel Washington (Frank), Chris Pine (Will), Rosario Dawson (Connie), Ethan Suplee (Dewey)