Monday at the Movies - September 2, 2013

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies” – this week, we review two films that are really quite draining in an entirely delectable sense.

Drive (2011) – Here’s a movie that’s way more intense than I was expecting.  In Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, Ryan Gosling plays a stunt driver, moonlighting as a getaway driver, who becomes embroiled in the underworld after falling in love with his neighbor (Carey Mulligan).  I don’t really know what I thought I was getting into; I’d only heard rave reviews, and I’ve never seen a Gosling performance I didn’t like.  But Drive is such an oddball captivating flick, its glacial pace tempered by Refn’s keen cinematographic eye – the result is something closer to There Will Be Blood than 2001: A Space Odyssey.  All this is not to say that the film is boring; rather, Refn directs the daylights out of some car chases without resorting to shaky cameras or even quick cuts, relying on the natural tension of the narrative and a well-placed close-up on Gosling’s steely stare.  Drive is undeniably Gosling’s show (Refn’s direction, though, giving a run for his proverbial money), but an astounding array of supporters – Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman, and Albert Brooks as a spooky mobster sans eyebrows – fill out the film with that who’s-who delight enjoyed by moviegoers such as myself.  But boy, is this a violent flick, with some of the most jarring violence I’ve seen in movies recently – and, remember, I loved Django Unchained.  But Refn’s use of violence is sparse, used to jar and interrupt and not to delight; essentially, it does what violence actually does in real life, which makes it all the more effective and/or disturbing.  Drive, then, comes highly recommended.

Take Shelter (2011) – Is there any working actor more intense than Michael Shannon?  He’s always wound tighter than Taft’s bathtub, but when that simmer boils over it’s explosively good fun to watch.  Take Shelter might have been a dull picture with any other front man, but Shannon does fantastic work in an Oscar-snubbed lead performance as Curtis, a family man haunted by nightmares of an impending apocalypse.  As his behavior becomes increasingly obsessive and erratic, Curtis risks alienating his wife (Jessica Chastain), who’s especially worried about the fate of their deaf daughter and what will happen to the family if Curtis’s burgeoning psychosis threatens his own employment as a construction worker.  This is not a movie where much happens; instead, the film relies on the capable performances of Shannon and Chastain, who are more than believable as beleaguered Midwestern spouses.  The film is undeniably Shannon’s, his clairvoyance/psychosis (depending on how you read the film) taking a clear toll on his wellbeing as he grimaces and twitches in quiet moments before squinting into the horizon or, in one of the film’s strongest moments, unleashing his manic frustrations on his friends.  While she stands in a long shadow, Chastain is the emotional anchor of the film, the audience’s point of interaction as voice to a thousand doubts and frustrations; I don’t know where she came from all of a sudden, but her work in the past few years (particularly Zero Dark Thirty) demonstrates that Hollywood needs more of her kind of actress.  More indie than blockbuster, Take Shelter flew low enough under the radar that more people ought to see it – especially those of us needing a little more intensity from General Zod.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!  And don’t forget that this Saturday is the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month...

Pacific Rim (2013)

If you’ve ever wanted to watch someone else play a video game, or if you’re one of those people who thought Transformers could have used a little more Godzilla, Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim is exactly the movie for you.  As for me, I think I need a little more from a movie.

After the government decommissions the giant robot “Jaeger” program, Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) seeks out former Jaeger pilot Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) on the eve of the next big kaiju attack.  The kaiju, enormous monsters, have been rising from the ocean and attacking coastal cities for years, leaving humanity desperate to turn the tide.  As Becket is paired with skilled rookie Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), the kaiju attacks increase in frequency, with multiple monsters rising at once.

Readers know that I’m always a bit uncomfortable dismantling expensive passion projects from behind my keyboard, so I’ll say this about Pacific Rim – it’s entirely unpretentious, inoffensive, and governed by an obvious sense of the creators’ enthusiasm.  And as far as big-dumb-loud movies go, Pacific Rim is undoubtedly the most earnest and the most triumphant.  The trailers promise big machines punching big monsters, and you get that promise fulfilled to the nth degree; once you surrender to them, the action sequences are fun and imaginative – at least, within the parameters of “How could one CGI thing beat up another?”

So for a film that had to have been storyboarded by playing with action figures and making sh-boom noises, Pacific Rim is about as diverting as the trailers make it out to be.  It passes that lower bar of “summer popcorn flick” but in a summer where we’ve seen action films that grapple with important issues alongside stellar beat-’em-up sequences Pacific Rim pales by comparison.  Upon leaving the theater, the one adjective that dove to mind was “distanced.”  At no point did Pacific Rim convince me to care about what was going on.  Instead, it relies on the assumption that the audience already thinks that the premise is cool and, by extension, worthwhile.  Yes, the premise is mind-numbingly cool, but the film never convinces the audience to invest in the concept.

For one, you can forget about character development beyond Michael Bay levels of cliché and central casting stock.  It’s a shame that the characterization in the film is so poor, because it’s almost a waste of Idris Elba.  Elba, an actor so good he convinced fans of The Wire that he wasn’t British, does the best he can with the script, even when lines like “I’m a fixed point” draw attention to the script’s dearth of personality.  I don’t begrudge the film its five minutes of introductory exposition; I do, however, shake my head at characters who make Ellen Page’s “exposition queen” in Inception look like Molly Bloom.  Charlie Day’s only plot function is to shout science at us, and Kikuchi – who is, like Elba, doing the best she can – actually yells her character’s motivation, even though the script’s already given intelligent audiences that answer.  (Hint:  she’s an orphan.)  Why do we root for the main character?  Because he’s the main character, duh (and total first-act trauma, duh).  We deserve compelling protagonists, and Hunnam ain’t it.  (Sidebar:  was Garrett Hedlund busy?)

Then there are the tonal inconsistencies, which make me wonder if this isn’t actually a Michael Bay film signed by Guillermo del Toro in some weird Howard Roark/Peter Keating pact.  The introductory montage sets up a grim future for mankind against the kaiju, while the first action sequence plays like a tragic buddy picture.  Enter the exposition scientists (Day and Torchwood’s Burn Gorman), a pair comprised of a Justin Hammer knockoff and a grotesque caricature of a foppish snob; as my father remarked, “What movie do these two really belong in?”  Finally, I’ve said nothing about Ron Perlman’s black marketer Hannibal Chau, in part because he’s another tonal inconsistency (included, I’m sure, because of Perlman’s Hellboy history with del Toro); Perlman has compelling screen presence, and his character is just the right amount of bizarrely-out-of-place, but Pacific Rim becomes an entirely different movie whenever he’s on screen.

It’s not that I went into Pacific Rim looking for brilliant character studies and subtle storytelling; I went in looking for characters and plots – y’know, the things we expect from a movie.  What I got was a big, dumb, loud movie about pixels punching pixels.  If that’s your thing, Pacific Rim is right up your alley.  Me?  I’ll pick substance over style any day of the week.

(Go ahead, take to the comments and tell me I’m missing the point.  Just be sure to tell me what the point of the movie actually was.  That’s not a joke.  What is the point of this film?)

(Also, if you know the point of tofu, that’d be helpful, too.)

Pacific Rim is rated PG-13 for “sequences of intense sci-fi action and violence throughout, and brief language.”  Giant monsters fighting giant robots:  the former bleeds fluorescent blue flubber, while the latter get torn apart like papier-mâché.  A few civilians get eaten (bloodless), and an F-bomb gets dropped amid other milder profanities.  Oh, and my eardrums hurt.

It turns out that there are people in this world who liked Pacific Rim better than Man of Steel.  I can’t fathom such a poor life decision, but be sure to click back here on Friday for my list of “The Top 10 Reasons Why Man of Steel Is Better Than Pacific Rim”!

Monday at the Movies - September 10, 2012

Welcome to Week Thirty-Four of “Monday at the Movies.”  This week we continue our long-promised look at the “Alien Quadrilogy,” concluding the series proper.

Alien Resurrection (1997) – As the final installment of the “Alien Quadrilogy,” Alien Resurrection is an entirely bizarre film that never quite knows its own identity and consequently very nearly resists being enjoyable.  Sigourney Weaver is back, this time as the clone Ripley-8 who’s been induced to give birth to yet another Alien Queen.  Wonky biology ensues, and Ripley-8 ends up helping Winona Ryder and Ron Perlman escape from yet another ship filled with Xenomorphs.  There’s a definite tension between the script by Joss Whedon and the direction by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, a written tongue-in-cheekness that never comes across in the hypersexualized horror of the visual.  Instead, we have a film with a tonally uncertain first act (in which Dan Hedaya’s broad caricature of a military man is never played as anything less than genuine), a too-pat second act that doesn’t do anything new, and a third act that’s so far beyond the pale that it’s more grotesquely uncomfortable than thrilling or entertaining.  As not-quite-Ripley, Weaver’s work is difficult to assess, in part because the film never knows quite how much of her core is still Ripley and how much isn’t; the other cast members aren’t well-developed and often devolve into clichés (Ryder’s character seems to exist only to drop F-bombs for unintentional comic relief and to retread issues of otherness from Alien and Aliens).  There are a few moments worth mentioning – the aquatic Xenomorphs end up being scarier than you’d expect, and Brad Dourif’s obsessive scientist doesn’t get enough screentime – but overall this is a disappointing end to a series that I’ve enjoyed more than I expected.

That wraps up our look at the “Alien Quadrilogy,” but you can read the review that started it all with Prometheus (2012), Ridley Scott’s demi-prequel to the series.  There are, of course, more Xenomorph movies yet to be reviewed – two entries in the Alien vs. Predator series.  Is there interest in seeing reviews of those?  Let me know!

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

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

One thing's for sure: with Hellboy 2, Guillermo del Toro is assuredly getting comfortable with his wholly unique cinematic sense of sight. Visually, this superhero sequel is a mesmerizing tour de force replete with stylizations to make even Tim Burton blush at outperformance.

That, and how cool is a superhero whose catchphrase is "Aww, crap"?

Ron Perlman is the titular Hellboy, a devilishly good hero rescued from a Nazi ritual by American forces led by Professor Broom (a nice cameo from original cast member John Hurt). Now a member of the BPRD (a supernatural covert task force that for all intents and purposes "does not exist"), Hellboy joins fellow adventurers pyrokinetic Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), aquatic Abe Sapien (Doug Jones, vocally and adequately replacing David Hyde Pierce, though the motions are still all Jones), and German ectoplasmic ghost Johann Kraus (the voice of Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane). Hellboy's mission here is threefold - defeat the villainous Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), who's bent on destroying humankind; frustrate Tom Manning (George Bluth himself, Jeffrey Tambor), the boss of the BPRD; and find out what secret girlfriend Liz is keeping.

Where the first movie had all the earmarks of a Mike Mignola comic book - deep shadows, talking corpses, larger than life (literally) characters - Hellboy 2 couldn't be more Guillermo del Toro. I'm not sure how to encapsulate his particular "look," but you know it when you see it: lanky creatures with multiple eyes in all the wrong places, fascination with global mythologies, and an underreliance on CGI effects that have similarly earned Christopher Nolan a few heralds for his work. While superhero sequels often allow the writer to expand on a character without the burden of an origin story, this one allows del Toro to spread his visionary wings to create the artistic sight he's been bearing his whole career.

That's not to say that the movie is too dark or too "del Toro." Kudos to the team for finding a way to integrate humor in small doses to keep the tension of the film from crushing its audience; kudos also for the Baby Bear way of finding a "just right" amount of humor to inject without creating a self-mockery like Spider-Man 3. Perhaps the most classic example here, without giving too much away, is a moment right in the middle of the movie in which an intoxicated Hellboy and Abe sing along to Barry Manilow's "Can't Smile Without You" over discussing girl troubles (Abe has been smitten by Nuada's twin sister Nuala). Too much of this would have destroyed the movie, but a few sprinklings here and there can only help.

Admittedly some of this movie smacks of a cry for a threequel - Hellboy's "destiny" for example seems fertile soil from which a threequel can grow, as does Liz's penultimate-frame delivery of the peace sign (not quite the intention, but I'd hate to spoil it). And I'm glad to hear that A) del Toro has a plan for a third movie involving the Universal Monster crew, and B) del Toro and Perlman are more than willing to keep doing Hellboy movies as long as they can.

If nothing else, though, this one is visually stunning in a way that comic book movies seldom are. Good thing the rest of the movie lives up to the eyeball assault. We'll have to wait a few years for the next one? Aww, crap.

Trailer Park: Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

This is actually the second trailer for Hellboy II: The Golden Army, but aside from being mostly similar, I think this trailer does more than the first trailer. Granted, I'm going to be seeing this movie regardless of its ad campaign, but I like how this trailer is distinct from others in that it doesn't have as much of the corny narration the first one did, and it introduces the movie by giving us a full scene before letting us know what the heck we're seeing.

Inspired casting in Ron Perlman as the big red devil Hellboy, and it's always good to see Jeffrey "George Bluth, Sr." Tambor getting work. This looks visually more complex than the first Hellboy movie, and I guess this is my only criticism of the trailer. This looks more like a Guillermo del Toro movie (in the style of Pan's Labyrinth) than a Hellboy movie. I know it's both, but I suppose I'm just spitting at a lack of visual continuity with the first one.

Oh, and despite how this trailer appears, Hellboy does use his "Aw, crap" catchphrase. That's just in the first trailer, though.