Olympus Has Fallen (2013)

Slavoj Žižek famously remarked that September 11th had been the real-world equivalent of the disaster fantasies gleefully played out in American cinema for decades before – our secret cultural dream had come to life as a horrible nightmare.  If that’s the case, I’m concerned about what that bodes for Olympus Has Fallen, a serviceable if not entirely memorable political disaster thriller.

Essentially 24 by way of Die Hard, Olympus Has Fallen finds the White House under siege – then occupied – by North Korean forces who take the President (Aaron Eckhart) hostage.  With the Speaker of the House (Morgan Freeman) in charge, the United States government is about to accede to the terrorists’ demands before they realize they still have a man on the inside – former Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler), who vows to save the President.

This movie seemed to come out of nowhere for me; I hadn’t seen any trailers until the week before it opened, and the only thing I thought I knew was, “Isn’t Channing Tatum supposed to be in that?”  (Turns out he’s doing White House Down, set to release in June.  Time will tell which one is the better variation on the theme.)  But when I heard Antoine Fuqua was directing, all I had to do was remember Training Day before plunking down in the second row.  Looking back on Fuqua’s filmography, Olympus Has Fallen is much closer in tone to his more action-y King Arthur and Shooter than the tense thriller Training Day, which perhaps owes more to Denzel Washington’s astounding performance.  But Fuqua’s ability to direct the heck out of an action sequence serves Olympus well; the initial takeover scene is dreadful in that it’s full of the dread that accompanies the inevitable.  While the film slightly overplays the patriotism card by opening and closing on an American flag, the sight of the White House under siege ought to dishearten American filmgoers, and Fuqua’s direction highlights the simplicity of its vulnerability, recalling similarly unflinching terrorist attacks from 24.

But here’s the thing about comparing Olympus Has Fallen to other entries in the political action/thriller genre – this isn’t a terribly original movie.  You’ve seen a lot of iterations of this plot before, you can telegraph most of the main beats thanks to some unsubtle foreshadowing, and to be perfectly honest the film won’t live up to some comparisons.  For example, the equally hokey Air Force One, regardless of the special place it holds in my heart, is more personal and therefore more compelling, and it’s tough to top Die Hard when it comes to movies about a man alone in occupied territory.  But if originality is the biggest misstep in Olympus Has Fallen, fine – it does well within the genre, its action sequences are fine, and its protagonist is highly engaging.

Morgan Freeman is stellar as always, especially when he grapples with the gravitas of his new responsibility.  I didn’t entirely buy the idea that he’s ill-equipped for the job, as the movie seems to insinuate; wisely, though, the film doesn’t stress this issue, especially because Freeman’s played presidential before, to some acclaim.  Eckhart continues channeling that Americanness-by-Redford, his snarling defiance of the terrorists recalling the best of his role as Harvey Dent.  But it’s Butler’s show, by far, and he’s such a good action hero that you’ll never ask yourself, “Why didn’t they get Bruce Willis?”  (From what I hear, maybe this should have been the latest Die Hard?)  Between this and 300, let’s give Butler the “next action hero” crown; he’s got the physicality down, he has the relatable everyman features, and he’s the master at those snide one-liners.

At the end of the day, though, those one-liners probably won’t stick in your head.  Olympus Has Fallen won’t be making my BluRay wish list come fall, but if I see it on cable in between bouts of channel-surfing, I’m sure I’ll stop back in.  Though it shares a few cast members, Olympus Has Fallen is no Dark Knight Rises – it is, however, enjoyable enough.

Olympus Has Fallen is rated R “for strong violence and language throughout.”  This is a pretty bloody flick with a lot of shootings and stabbings, peppered with salty language in F-sharp.

Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)

For whatever reason (perhaps deservedly so), 1939’s The Wizard of Oz has attained a kind of untouchable status, casting a large shadow over any project attempting to approach any adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s work.  But after Disney made a pretty penny revisiting Alice in Wonderland with Tim Burton, now they’ve let Sam Raimi take a crack with Oz the Great and Powerful.

And it’s better than I was expecting.

James Franco stars as the eponymous Oscar Diggs, a selfish traveling magician who is transported from Kansas to the magical land of Oz by way of – what else? – a tornado.  Once his hot-air balloon lands, Oscar (known as “Oz”) meets a trio of witches – Theodora (Mila Kunis), Evanora (Rachel Weisz), and Glinda (Michelle Williams) – who contend that he is the subject of a prophecy concerning the fate of Oz.  Trouble is, Oscar’s no wizard, even if his flying monkey and china doll companions believe he is...

It may be that I just had low expectations for a prequel to the aforementioned Wizard, but I found myself rather enchanted by Oz the Great and Powerful.  Raimi goes a long way to redeeming himself for Spider-Man 3 (redemption he had begun with 2009’s Drag Me to Hell), and the movie is clearly the creation of someone enamored with the art of filmmaking itself.  Of course, I’m a bit of a sucker for this kind of meta-film, but it’s particularly clever when, for example, we learn that behind the curtain lies a movie camera.

After learning that Robert Downey Jr. was under consideration for the role of Oscar, I was disappointed that it came down to James Franco, but Franco actually does a pretty good job with Oscar, capturing the bogus charisma and accompanying self-doubt that the character inhabits.  I can’t tell if Franco’s clueless perma-smile is the result of good casting or good acting, but it works in the context of the film.  He’s also an effective gateway character, his obliviousness helping us get acclimated to Oz and any dramatic ironies therein.

The witches are perhaps better cast, more interesting because of how recognizable they are from the 1939 movie.  I can’t tell if we’re meant to recognize Theodora and Evanora on sight (so it might be spoiling to say what each one does), but Kunis and Weisz are quite good as two very different kinds of witches.  But I say it’s Williams who steals the show as Glinda, adhering closely to Billie Burke’s iconic performance while adding some of the good-girl-snark that’s become popular these days (see also Peppy in The Artist). 

Younger fans will likely adore Finley the flying monkey (Zach Braff) and the China Doll (Joey King), but for me the standout feature of the film is the way that it pays tribute to some of the 1939 film’s formal attributes without retreading them.  For instance, in a shot that I wish wasn’t spoiled by the trailers, Oscar’s arrival in Oz is marked by a transition from 4:3 fullscreen to 2.35:1 widescreen.  It’s a great way to recapture the magic of 1939’s shift from sepia-tone to color for an audience already ultra-accustomed to that kind of twist (but don’t worry, you still bet a color change, too).  The film also plays up the dual-casting from the 1939 film, with Williams, Braff, and King making appearances in Kansas and Oz; it perpetuates the surreal quality of Oz while also inviting interpretation as to the reality of what’s going on.

It’s to Raimi’s credit that these formal nods never feel like obligatory deferential references.  Instead, they pay homage to the long legacy of Baum’s work while reinventing and/or reintroducing the Land of Oz to a new audience.  All told, Oz the Great and Powerful is quite good.

Oz the Great and Powerful is rated PG “for sequences of action and scary images, and brief mild language.”  This movie is quite tame, appropriate for most audiences; the flying baboons are a bit ooky, and maybe the Wicked Witch might creep some out when she appears, but all in all this is a pretty wholesome flick.

Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

Academy Award winner Silver Linings Playbook makes this year’s list of “movies I got to because of the Oscars,” and it demonstrates a few important lessons to be learned going into 2013:  the romantic comedy as a genre isn’t as dead as I thought, Jennifer Lawrence is one of the most versatile actresses around, and Robert De Niro can still act his way through a movie without phoning it in.

Bradley Cooper stars as bipolar Pat, recently released from a psychiatric hospital after a messy separation with his wife.  While trying to reconnect with her in spite of a restraining order, Pat meets troubled widow Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), and the two strike up an unlikely friendship as they attempt to help each other through their problems.  Tiffany promises to help Pat reunite with his wife if Pat helps her win a dancing competition – and, incidentally, help his Eagles fan father (De Niro) win a bet in the process.

After The Fighter, this seems like a step away from what I’d come to expect from David O. Russell; the romantic comedy genre is a bit far from the heady biopic which finally won Christian Bale that Oscar.  But thank heavens that a fresher voice like Russell’s comes to a genre which has been otherwise formulaic, uninspiring, and often predictably pathetic, matching improbability with impotent self-importance.  The romantic comedy is a genre I’d long since written off, the clichés riddling it like so many bullets at the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre; give me Hepburn and Tracy any day of the week.  But Russell does something different here, creating something that still plays by the boy-meets-girl rules of the genre but without toadying to them.

While we’re on the subject of romantic comedies, thank goodness also that Russell didn’t cast someone like Katherine Heigl here.  Instead he’s gone with Lawrence, who is past shaping up to be one of the best actresses of her generation – she’s already there.  Lawrence is in that rare position of someone who does great genre work (see also X-Men: First Class and The Hunger Games) while knocking it out of the park with heavier stuff like this and Winter’s Bone (though the latter wasn’t really my bag).  Indeed, Silver Linings Playbook is not a perfect movie; the film stumbles between whether Pat’s devotion to his wife is endearing or delusional.  As such, the movie really takes off once Tiffany enters the picture; Lawrence imbues this potentially confusing character with an honest and unapologetic realism.  Where we’re not sure what to make of Pat, Tiffany isn’t transparent so much as she’s accessible and relatable; Lawrence is such a deft craftswoman that the character’s steely exterior doesn’t obscure the truth of her character.

The other cast members are quite good; Cooper is solid as ever, and Chris Tucker pops in to help you forget about the lackluster Rush Hour trilogy with an engaging supporting role as Pat’s confidant.  But the real surprise in the cast is that De Niro, after a long stint of roles alternating between uninspiring (Limitless and all those Fockers) and scenery-gobbling (Stardust and Machete), reminds us why he’s a great actor.  As Pat’s father, who’s sifting through his own issues while stepping on eggshells around his son, De Niro enters the pantheon of “movie dads you wouldn’t object to having.”  He never quite acts out of his own ethos, since you’ll always be thinking of him as De Niro first and Dad second, but he’s able to handle the extremes of his character with aplomb.  When he begins to weep over his son’s condition, it’s difficult not to be moved with him, but when he makes a key decision about betting on the dance competition he’s back to the same stammering repetition that elicited so many grins in Goodfellas.

All told, I’m still a bit surprised that Silver Linings Playbook got as much Oscar love as it did.  It’s not that the film is bad by any stretch of the imagination; no, once it gets going it’s quite enjoyable.  But it seems so far removed from the stalwart significance of the rest of the crop, like Argo, Django Unchained, and Zero Dark Thirty.  But perhaps if the film restores our confidence in the romantic comedy genre it also reminds us that sometimes the Oscars get it right; there’s enough good work being done here that I would have been complaining – especially had Jennifer Lawrence not taken home that trophy.

Silver Linings Playbook is rated R “for language and some sexual content/nudity.”  The F-word is used liberally (IMDB says 70+ times), and Pat is prone to erratic violent outbursts.  We see a woman nude from behind in a brief blurry flashback, while Tiffany and others speak about her promiscuous past.

Goldfinger (1964)

1964’s Goldfinger, the third outing in the James Bond franchise, is almost unanimously regarded as the greatest of the series, the (unavoidable pun alert) gold standard against which all other entries have been measured.  If you’re looking for an alternate take on the film, I suggest you look elsewhere, because this film is so good that I watched it two nights in a row – only because I didn’t have time for two immediately consecutive viewings.  (And I might watch it a third time before I get to Thunderball!)

What is it that works so well about Goldfinger?  Most notably, the film is incredibly tight, with no scene wasted; everything either builds up to or pays off on another element, and the film is so well crafted that even scenes that don’t appear to matter are engaging.  Opening sequence aside – in which Bond marvelously busts up a heroin ring, woos a second-rate femme fatale, and stops a would-be assassin, while still finding time to sneak in a droll one-liner – the film offers a series of disconnected encounters between James Bond (Sean Connery, better than ever) and Auric Goldfinger (a perfectly brutish Gert Fröbe) before we realize that Goldfinger is involved in an international plot to attack Fort Knox.

Connery and Fröbe play beautifully off each other, particularly in the famous “laser” scene where their repartee shines brightest (“Do you expect me to talk?”  “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”).  In fact, the dubbing of Fröbe by Michael Collins augments the performance by giving Goldfinger a gregarious, larger-than-already-large presence that smartly mixes showy dialogue with stoic body language.  It is in some respects a shame that Goldfinger never reappeared in the franchise, since he makes a perfect adversary for Bond – disdainful of the super spy (yet competitive with the punch lines), relentlessly avaricious, and controlling the mute giant Oddjob (Harold Sakata).

Goldfinger improves upon my critique of From Russia with Love, which is that Bond didn’t do very much.  Here, though, Bond returns to his sleuthing roots and tracks Goldfinger to find out just what his game is.  Consequently, we’re put more fully in his shoes, piecing the clues together in between rousing action sequences, ably directed by Guy Hamilton (arguably his finest hour).  Additionally, the film even improves upon the Ian Fleming novel by tweaking Goldfinger’s end game to make it more plausible; this change is subtle but self-conscious, revealed in a clever scene where Bond muses that Goldfinger’s robbery would take twelve years just to move the gold.

And let us not underestimate the value of a good soundtrack.  Shirley Bassey’s bombastic opening number has deservedly entered the hall of fame for title tracks, its melody unforgettable and its words so catchy you’ll be singing them throughout the film.  From then on, though John Barry delivers an amazing score that plays off the two motifs – Bond’s and Goldfinger’s – with brass and percussion so spot-on that it is difficult to imagine the movie registering the same success without Barry at the conductor’s podium.

Simply put, there is nothing about this film that does not work.  From Honor Blackman as the quintessential Bond girl Pussy Galore to the unforgettable Aston Martin Bond drives in the Alps, Goldfinger is filled with memorable moments (which have been frequently been repeated, by admirers and satirists alike) and an infectious enthusiasm that leaves one smiling throughout.

This, friends, is how you do a Bond movie.  Ten out of ten – highest marks all around.

Goldfinger is rated PG.  This film is quite tame by today’s standards; Bond romances a girl in a bikini, as well as several others who show less skin.  Several deaths occur, though all are bloodless, and most occur off-screen.  There is little if any objectionable language present, though we do have “Pussy Galore” named several times with all the innuendo you’d expect.

James Bond and The Cinema King will return in a review of Thunderball (1965) on April 7, 2013!

Monday at the Movies - March 4, 2013

Welcome to this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  This week, two DC Animated films adapting popular storylines from the comics.

Justice League: Doom (2012) – One of the best Batman stories of the last fifteen years took place in the pages of JLA, when it was revealed that Batman kept files on all his Justice League teammates detailing their weaknesses and how to exploit them should a Justice Leaguer go rogue.  This animated film adapts that storyline, reuniting the Justice League animated voice cast (Tim Daly, Kevin Conroy, Susan Eisenberg) in a battle against themselves when immortal caveman Vandal Savage steals and enacts Batman’s contingency plans as part of a larger scheme for – you guessed it – world conquest.  The film works almost as a coda to Justice League Unlimited, showing the cracks in the team as well as the expanding roster (Cyborg finally joins the team).  The voice cast is first-rate, as always (even if I’m sorry Mirror Master isn’t Scottish), but the animation style is a little too stripped down for my tastes, with streamlined features resembling Saturday morning anime more than the Timmverse style I’ve come to expect from these features.  Overall, there are parts that work and parts that don’t – the choice of supervillains in the Legion of Doom is mostly insignificant, as most characters here are interchangeable with any other rogues.  But the characterizations of Superman and Green Lantern (voiced by Nathan Fillion) are spot-on, with Superman shining in a suicide intervention scene while Green Lantern swaggers through a rescue mission.  Ultimately the film is hit or miss, though it finally achieves Justice League status by creating a threat so big that everyone has a role to play.  Justice League fans will appreciate it, though it’s not quite the caliber of the animated series from the last decade.

Superman vs. The Elite (2012) – My favorite Superman stories always ask the question, “Why do we need Superman?”  The answer provided in Superman vs. The Elite (adapted from Joe Kelly’s “What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way?”) interrogates Superman’s refusal of lethal deterrent against a team of superpowered policemen who aren’t afraid to kill the bad guys (the execution of a long-time Superman villain is a perfect demonstration of that).  George Newbern (late of Justice League) and Pauley Perrette (Abby on NCIS) star as Superman and Lois Lane, doing good work that melds the animated sensibility with the repartee of the Donner films, and as Manchester Black, the central antagonist of the film, Robin Atkin Downes is repellently smug, spouting language that I think is deliberately out of place in a cartoon like this.  The film creates a new arc for The Elite, establishing them first as budding heroes before their moral code puts them in opposition to Superman – an improvement from the comic, which dropped them into the story without first building conflict.  What works less well is the animation style, which is quite two-dimensional and gives most characters the look of overfed bulldogs with Buzz Lightyear chins.  It’s a shame that the film doesn’t look better, because the writing in it is solid, particularly the ending, in which Superman attempts to prove to a bloodthirsty Metropolis that his way is better.  While not as quintessential as All-Star Superman, Superman vs. The Elite offers an alternate approach to the ongoing relevance of Superman.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week, but don’t forget that this Thursday is the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month, and you know what that means...