Monday at the Movies - October 29, 2012

Welcome to Week Thirty-Nine of “Monday at the Movies.”  With Halloween coming up this week, here are a few movies that suit the season.

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) – Directed by Frank Capra (of It’s a Wonderful Life fame), Arsenic and Old Lace is to Halloween what Die Hard is to Christmas – set on the night in question but with little to do with the actual holiday.  Instead, the film flies off on its own fantastic plot, in which the holiday decorations are only incidental.  Here, newlywed Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) finds his honeymoon plans deterred when he learns his aunts have a dead body in the window seat; throw in his homicidal brother Jonathan (Raymond Massey, disguised as Boris Karloff), another brother who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt, and a drunken Doctor Einstein (personal favorite Peter Lorre), and it’s madcap mania as only the Forties could provide.  Though the plot sounds grim, Arsenic and Old Lace is fantastically funny and is easily one of my favorite movies of all time.  Grant is at his slapstick best, chewing the scenery and pacing frenetically without being “too cool for the room.”  Massey is menacing within the boundaries of a comedy film, and Lorre is as always a scene-stealer of the highest order.  In fact, as with any great film, the supporting cast here is exceptionally strong, with no one performance falling below the bar of excellence set by the film.  The standout scene here is the one in which Jonathan and his aunts haggle over which has killed more people:  Aunts Abby and Martha agree that they’ve killed twelve people, while Jonathan insists he has thirteen kills to his name.  In any other movie, it’d be a dark and dismal moment, but in Arsenic and Old Lace it’s unbelievably hysterical, one in two-hour-long line of memorable scenes.  Now if someone could get on that remake with Robert Downey, Jr. I’ve been planning.

The Shining (1980) – Out of the fog and into the smog, The Shining is a more traditional choice for All Hallow’s Eve.  It’s Stanley Kubrick’s spookiest flick, loosely adapted from the Stephen King novel of the same name.  Whether you think the movie is about Native American genocide or how Kubrick faked the moon landing or if it’s just a story about a guy who goes nuts with his family in the mountains, The Shining is damned creepy.  Jack Nicholson stars as Jack Torrance, new caretaker of the Overlook Hotel during the off-season; slowly but inexorably, Jack is driven mad by the winter weather, the badgering of his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and the interference of potentially supernatural elements.  I first saw the film when I was too young to appreciate it, mistaking the film’s slow-burn approach to horror for sluggish, dry monotony.  As usually works for me, watching it with a crowd changed my perspective on the film, allowing me to savor the unsettling elements of the film and even appreciate the significant changes Kubrick made to the source material.  Nicholson’s performance is classic id, whose insane and wild-eyed mugging for the camera immortalized the “Here’s Johnny!” refrain.  Child actor Danny Lloyd, too, is a fine foil for Nicholson; his contemplative psychic ability is a pitch-perfect counterpoint to Nicholson’s agitated energy without ever allowing the audience to relax. It may not be the best Stephen King movie, but it’s one of Kubrick’s more enjoyable films.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Taken 2 (2012)

With Taken, Liam Neeson’s gravelly threat of a “very particular set of skills” led many filmgoers to wonder what was still waiting in that bag of tricks.  While not groundbreakingly original, Taken 2 replicates much of what worked in the first film and adds enough new material to justify the sequel treatment.

When news that a sequel was en route, audiences joked, “Who gets taken in the next one?  The mom?”  Well... yeah.  Taken 2 picks up about a year after the events of the first film, at the funeral of the Albanians killed by Bryan Mills (Neeson).  The families swear revenge on Bryan, who’s currently touring Istanbul with his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) and daughter Kim (Maggie Grace).  This time, though, it’s Bryan and Lenore who are taken by the grieving father (Rade Šerbedžija) of one of Kim’s late kidnappers.  With the tables turned, Bryan uses his “skills” to coach Kim through a rescue attempt.

Don’t let the synopsis fool you, though – the star is very much still Neeson, with Grace’s role amped up to, mercifully, prevent her from being the damsel in distress once more.  While the premise isn’t wholly original, the film plays up more of Bryan’s “set of skills,” of which I’m sure this filmgoer wasn’t alone in wanting more.  While some of Bryan’s abilities defy any standard of realism, the laughter they elicit isn’t one of incredulous scorn but rather one of unforeseen inevitability.  Of course Bryan could deduce his location using only a grenade and a shoestring; he’s MacGyver by way of Jack Bauer, something the film pulls off by never letting up.

But what the film invents in Bryan’s talents, it never quite innovates beyond the formula of the first one – protective father singlehandedly defends family from evil Albanians.  Many of the scenes in the first film are reused here without new purpose.  Again we have Bryan’s trio of CIA buddies who don’t do much beyond drink beer and giggle at Bryan’s unrequited love for his ex-wife.  There’s the same framing technique of Bryan attempting to do something to help his daughter (singing lessons in the first film, driver’s license here).

Disappointingly, the one thing not replicated is the first film’s sense of humor.  While the audience is chuckling, we’re never really laughing with the characters, as we did in the first; Bryan is more humorless this time around, never really dropping one-liners or quips to accompany his kills.  This different mood is attributable in large part to the fact that Bryan doesn’t have a foil in this film as he did with Jean-Claude in the first; this lack is even more apparent since we see Jean-Claude in an early scene, never to return to him again.  If there’s a third film, I’m for bringing the French policeman back.

Instead, the focus is on the action and the deployment of unseen “skills.”  If the film could be used as a marketing tool for a seven-week course on “How to Acquire Bryan’s Skills,” it’d be successful by leaps and bounds.  The action is thrilling, unrelenting, and enviable; though humorless, the fight and chase scenes are unremitting.  Perhaps, though, the action is less compelling because of how inevitable it seems; having already seen what Bryan can do, the stakes seem somewhat lower here.  In Taken, it seemed he was up against an insurmountable 96 hours to rescue his daughter in the middle of Paris; here, though, his own abduction in Istanbul never seems more threatening than a mosquito bite.  (I haven’t yet decided if this is a strength, which allows the film to focus on how badass Bryan is, or a weakness, which doesn’t give sufficient stakes to justify a Mills-level response.)

Taken 2 does add a new thematic layer – the idea of the cyclical nature of vengeance and the inevitability that blood begets blood.  “Because I am tired of it all,” Bryan wearily intones near the film’s climax; it’s an oddly smart moment nestled inside the film, rejecting the easy popcorn-fueled “Kill ’em dead” attitude you might expect.  This is an idea I’d like to see explored more in a subsequent installment, but its inclusion here demonstrates that the filmmakers have done more than just give us a bigger version of the first film.

Ultimately, Taken 2 is a great sequel but perhaps not a great film.  Newcomers to the franchise won’t find much to thrill them and indeed might wonder, like the song goes, what’s it all about.  But fans of the original will find enough to enjoy here, a few worthwhile additions and enough amped-up repetition; where The Hangover 2 merely replicated the first film with more male nudity, Taken 2 repeats what worked and embellishes it so that it’s not a mere revision of the first.  Though it’s not an A-list cult film like the first, Taken 2 is a B-film that never disappoints.

Taken 2 is rated PG-13 “for intense sequences of violence and action, and some sensuality.”  As in the first film, there are plenty of shootings, stabbings, and fist fights, but only one knife wound is bloody.  Kim has a boyfriend in this film, with whom she makes out in one scene; she runs in a bikini in another.

Monday at the Movies - October 22, 2012

Welcome to Week Thirty-Eight of “Monday at the Movies.”  In anticipation of Wednesday’s review of Taken 2, we take a look back at the original.

Taken (2008) – Taken is the film that established Liam Neeson as an action star, and rightly so – his turn as Bryan Mills is forceful and exciting, an earnest breath of fresh air in a genre that is currently often too self-aware to be compelling.  While the first half-hour is a bit slow, it establishes Bryan’s dedication to his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), so that we can fully enjoy the final hour of the film, which revolves around Bryan’s quest to save his daughter from Albanian slave traders in Paris.  Indeed, if the film is a perfect action film, it’s on the strength of this last hour, when Bryan deploys his “very particular set of skills” to great effect.  Though the film sometimes borders on incredulous, Neeson sells it by playing it straight, never winking at the credulity-straining moments.  All of this is not to say that the film, co-written by Luc Besson, is humorless; in fact, some of the film’s best scenes are its funniest, as when Bryan impersonates a French police officer in order to identify the voice of his daughter’s captor, Marko from Tropoje.  Bryan’s scenes with Marko, as well as his scenes with corrupt French policeman Jean-Claude (a suitably smarmy Olivier Rabourdin), let Neeson show off his acting chops while also layering on enough menace to prove that Bryan’s enemies have made a huge mistake.  What the film does best, though, is keep moving during this last hour.  There are no dull bits, only scenes that push Bryan and the plot forward with a clue or direction.  It’s a surprisingly good film, an A+ action film that under any other circumstances would have been a B-movie.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” Stay tuned for Wednesday’s review of the sequel, Taken 2!

Looper (2012)

I don’t want to say that the current interest in sci-fi cinema is due entirely to 2010’s Inception, but I do think that audiences are more open to high concepts thanks to Christopher Nolan’s dreamy mind-bender.  The latest such offering, Rian Johnson’s Looper, is an engaging examination of free will in a soup of time travel.

Set in the year 2044, Looper stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Joe, an assassin for the mob.  Known as a looper, Joe kills targets sent back in time from 2074, but when it’s his future self (Bruce Willis) staring down the barrel of his own gun Joe has to make a difficult choice.  Joe’s pursuit of Old Joe leads him to a farmer (Emily Blunt) and her son, who may or may not be the future’s most dangerous man – and Old Joe’s next target.

Looper is certainly one of the better post-Inception science-fiction films; it’s far and away better than the disappointing Justin Timberlake vehicle In Time, and it’s less gimmicky than the still-fantastic Chronicle.  It’s also more accessible than Inception, requiring fewer of the mental calisthenics that made the earlier film such a hit.  It’s a smart choice, though, allowing Johnson to focus on the story rather than the mechanics of time travel; films like 12 Monkeys (also starring Willis) got bogged down in what wasn’t possible and why, but Looper wisely allows the story to run unfettered.

Though liberated from wibbly-wobbly time travel technicalities, Looper has plenty of fun with its main “rule,” that anything that happens to the past self happens to the future self.  The special effects here are neat and fresh, playing with paradox without burdening the viewer with working it all out.  That’s not, however, to accuse the film of not being “smart enough.”  There are very clever moments that examine how choice affects the future, but it’s less challenging than Inception.

Aside from the high sci-fi, the film’s biggest attraction is the smart casting of JGL and Willis.  It’s an unlikely pairing, perhaps, one usually skirted in such films by double-casting the same actor, but it works here.  The make-up effects are uncanny, bulking up JGL’s jaw, but while Willis essentially plays himself one more time JGL does a lot of good work to imitate Willis and make the transition less jarring.  And it’s always a delight to see Emily Blunt in a major film; has she arrived yet, or do we have to wait for those Avengers 2 rumors to pan out?

And let’s not overlook what might be the best performance in the film – the young Pierce Gagnon as Cid, Old Joe’s target.  Without spoiling too much of the fun surrounding the character, Gagnon turns in one of the best child performances in recent memory, doing more to toe the line between menacing and adorable than most contemporary actors do at the top of their game.  If it’s a welcome surprise when Emily Blunt appears in the middle of the film, it gets even better when you see the chops on this kid.

Perhaps it’s a result of paying too close attention to a film that isn’t as confusing as you think, but Looper may feel a little long.  But at just under two hours, it may just be a matter of perspective.  Looper is smart and engaging, anchored by compelling performances.

Looper is rated R “for strong violence, language, some sexuality/nudity and drug content.”  The violence is quite bloody, as large guns are fired and people quite literally explode in bloody rain; characters use the F-word a fistful of times, and Joe is seen in bed with a topless stripper for one scene.  Drug content consists of futuristic eyedrop addiction.

Be sure to come back next week for a full week’s worth of Taken coverage – stay tuned!

Argo (2012)

I’ve been on record as saying that Ben Affleck is a better director than an actor (the former often helping the latter), and with Argo Affleck three-peats with another suspenseful thriller that, despite a true-story foregone conclusion, ratchets up the anxiety.

In addition to working behind the camera, Affleck stars as Tony Mendez, the CIA’s top exfiltration agent.  Since he specializes in getting people out of hot spots, Mendez is called to consult on the case of six Americans in Iran who escaped the 1979 embassy hostage crisis but are holed up in the Canadian ambassador’s home.  To do so, he forms a fake movie company with the support of a prosthetics designer (John Goodman) and a once-was director (Alan Arkin).  Thus armed with “the best bad idea we’ve got,” Mendez flies to Iran to establish cover stories to disguise the refugee embassy workers as a film crew.

Surprisingly for the man who starred in such trainwrecks as Gigli and Daredevil, Ben Affleck is shaping up to be one of this generation’s better directors.  With Gone Baby Gone, Affleck established a cinematic style for himself that relied on tension and suspicion, while in The Town Affleck added himself in front of the camera, demonstrating both directorial consistency and better acting than he’d done in years.  Argo, then, completes the hat trick with another taut thriller in a nail-biting setting.

Affleck uses claustrophobia to great effect here, giving the sense that the walls are closing in.  Absent are the spacious CIA interiors we’ve come to expect since Homeland or the James Bond flicks; instead we get an intelligence office where the ceiling is too low, the lighting dim, and the tempers high.  Similarly, Iran is a place swarming with bodies, physically and ideologically oppressive.  All of this is captured in the film’s visual language, which builds an effective sense of discomfort even though we know that the ending is going to be a happy one.

But the film isn’t all gloom and doom.  In the best film tradition, the film defuses weighty subject matter with a talented cast of lighthearted characters, where the humor isn’t always dark.  As a CIA head honcho, Bryan Cranston continues his inter/post-Breaking Bad career revival by popping tense moments with an expertly timed one-liner (the result, no doubt, of his comedic training).  Also fun to watch are Goodman and Arkin, the film’s ostensible Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who manage to balance patriotism with pathos, solemnity with comedy; true, they play the same characters they’ve always played – the gregarious goliath and the cantankerous old man – but they play it well, their star power and recognizability even helping their performances as Hollywood power brokers.

Conversely, Affleck wisely casts relatively unfamiliar character actors as the escaped hostages.  You’ll probably recognize them in passing, in a “Where have I seen her” kind of way, but it won’t distract; rather, it underscores the universality of the story Affleck is telling.  Likewise, familiar face Victor Garber hides under a wig and thick glasses to portray the Canadian ambassador as a paternalistic shepherd.  The cast clearly has chemistry among themselves – the refugee hostages in particular – but they’re also quite good at subtle glances to indicate internal stress or some emotional backstory.

While it isn’t enough to put him in the same strata as Scorsese or Nolan, Argo does demonstrate that Ben Affleck’s recent string of successes has not been a fluke.  Rather, I’d say we’re looking at a contender once the Oscars roll around.


Argo is rated R “for language and some violent images.”  The F-word is dropped several times in the film, often as part of a hilarious catchphrase, and the film’s depiction of Islamic fundamentalists may be disturbing or frightening for some, though the film is mostly bloodless.

Come back on Wednesday for The Cinema King’s review of Looper – stay tuned!

Monday at the Movies - October 8, 2012

Welcome to Week Thirty-Seven of “Monday at the Movies.”  Our Quentin Tarantino coverage is on hold this week for two animated films that are well worth your time.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1 (2012) – The DC Universe Animated Original Movies have been quite good as of late, particularly in adapting classic stories.  Here the team takes on Frank Miller’s uber-iconic Batman story from 1986 (and one of the inspirations for The Dark Knight Rises), and it’s perhaps one of the studio’s best efforts.  Where Batman: Year One, also a Miller comic, was an adaptation too tethered to its own source material, The Dark Knight Returns takes what works in the comics and strips away what won’t work in the cinematic medium.  Gone are the overdrawn and slightly dated monologues; instead, we’re left to focus on the story of retiree Bruce Wayne retaking his city from Two-Face and a gang of mutant thugs.  The film is full of action with none of the dragging bits that pulled down Year One.  Though I’m a diehard Kevin Conroy fan, his absence may be noticed but not mourned, as Peter Weller (alias Robocop and the guy who trained Jack Bauer) turns in a suitably gritty but tongue-in-cheek performance as the eponymous Dark Knight.  This Batman, though, might be funnier than the title promises, but it’s all in good fun; the satire Miller may have been attempting in the comic comes through perfectly in here, as when the milquetoast mayor meets his match or when Batman drawls taunt after taunt at armed but outgunned goons.  Finally the filmmakers wisely chose not to cram everything into the 70-minute DCUA format, allowing the film its space to breathe and create an atmosphere (especially through the newscaster segments) without merely translating only the fan-favorite moments.  Though I’m still peeved about this business of splitting movies in half, I can’t say I’m not excited for Part 2 – and Michael Emerson’s turn as The Joker.

Phineas & Ferb The Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension (2011) – Phineas & Ferb might be the best cartoon on the air right now, exuberantly fun for kids and delightfully earnest and nuanced for the over-12 crowd.  Count me in the latter, among the viewers enamored with P&F’s absurdist non sequiturs and insider references.  Fortunately, their first film, Across the 2nd Dimension, retains in long form all the traits that make the television show a real treat.  Genius step-brothers Phineas and Ferb accidentally help the blundering evil scientist Dr. Doofenshmirtz open a portal to another dimension, much to the chagrin of their pet platypus Perry, who’s also a secret agent and the evil Doctor’s nemesis.  In this alternate dimension, there’s a more evil version of Doofenshmirtz who’s conquered the earth, while the alternate dimension Candace – Phineas & Ferb’s sister – is leading the resistance.  It’s less complicated than it sounds; young viewers won’t stumble over the plot at all, but more sophisticated filmgoers will find much to appreciate.  The story is surprisingly strong, grappling with heavy issues of loyalty, faith, friendship, and revolution... all with a series of memorable musical numbers.  My favorite part of any episode of Phineas & Ferb is always the wealth of allusions; the show has previously dealt homages to Memento, the James Bond franchise, and the Lord of the Rings series.  The film continues this majestic tradition, including impromptu nods to Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and Georgia O’Keefe.  (The ending also has an odd relationship with the climax of The Avengers, though I’m not sure what to do with that just yet.)  This all comes, though, in a tight package that does not insult the intelligence of the viewer nor sacrifice emotional payoff (see the big kiss at the end of the film).

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Monday at the Movies - October 1, 2012

Welcome to Week Thirty-Six of “Monday at the Movies.”  In recognition of the impending release of Django Unchained, and having already reviewed some of his films here before, we’re going to take a look at the rest of the oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino.

Reservoir Dogs (1992) – The auteur’s debut film, Reservoir Dogs is an odd case for me.  I’ve seen it at least twenty times, and when I was younger I was madly in love with it.  It’s the story of a jewel heist gone wrong, with the bandits interrogating each other to identify which is a police informant.  The plot is not quite original, but it’s an entry point for audiences into the oddball flair of Quentin Tarantino – the snappy dialogue, the unflinching violence, the romanticized nostalgia for the Seventies.  Honestly, this time out the film seemed more boring (but not unwatchable) than I remembered; there are long stretches where the characters do nothing but talk, and while this is fabulous for an enthusiast of the written word it doesn’t make for the most engaging moving pictures (this in a post-Avengers world, which also used an ensemble cast, but to more thrilling success).  What I must have loved as a young’un is Michael Madsen’s turn as the cold psychopath Mr. Blonde, which still works, as does Steve Buscemi as the rattled Mr. Pink.  But on the most recent watch, the real treasure isn’t the trademark Tarantino screenplay; it’s the performance of Harvey Keitel as Mr. White, whose dedication to the dying Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) meant more to me now than it could have as a child.  Looking back on Reservoir Dogs as a “first film,” it does what a first film ought to – demonstrate the potential of a new filmmaker with promise but without peaking.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!