Reviews for 2010
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Starring Logan Lerman, Brandon T. Jackson, Alexandra Daddario, Sean Bean, Pierce Brosnan, Steve Coogan, Rosario Dawson, Catherine Keener, Kevin McKidd, Joe Pantoliano, Uma Thurman, Jake Abel.
Directed by Chris Columbus.
Rating: 6/10
It continues to be a surprise to me that Greek mythology, with its vast and fantastic array of stories, doesn't get much coverage in the movies. So perhaps this accounts for my relatively pleased reaction to Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. It's a movie one can be easily critical towards -- for starters, it's very clearly a Harry Potter ripoff, what with a kid (Logan Lerman) discovering his real past with ties to the supernatural, his going off to a training ground for just such kids, and his partnering with one male (Brandon T. Jackson) and one female (Alexandra Daddario) peer to head out with on adventures together. The movie is also based on a series of popular books (by Rick Riordan) for youths, and is even directed by Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone's director, Chris Columbus. Meanwhile, it has a goofy feel to it, from its so-so special effects to its rather dorky sense of humor.
And yet the movie somehow manages to pay its respects to the Greek myths and actually convey them as fun. Yes, all the usual suspects are here -- Medusa (a rather funny Uma Thurman), the Hydra, a Minotaur -- but it's the little attention to details that made me smile, like making sure we understood that the Olympians are always in the midst of a power struggle amongst the brothers Zeus (Sean Bean), Poseidon (Kevin McKidd), and Hades (Steve Coogan); that Hades has a reluctant wife Persephone (Rosario Dawson) (who even alludes to her allotted time away each year); that there's a lair of the Lotus Eaters (and it's in Las Vegas, ha!). There's a ferryman to hell, winged shoes (OK, winged sneakers), centaurs and satyrs -- the whole thing is a mash-up of the delights of Greek myths. Perhaps the most bothersome part to me was that all their key locales were in the United States, but I suppose the mythological figures would move on to whatever was the most powerful civilization at the time. In any case, it was good to see that these characters were being introduced to a new generation of kids through a fun, updated interpretation. (added 8/4/2010)
Starring Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Reda Kateb, Hichem Yacoubi, Jean-Philippe Ricci, Gilles Cohen, Antoine Basler, Leïla Bekhti, Pierre Leccia, Foued Nassah, Jean-Emmanuel Pagni, Frédéric Graziani.
Directed by Jacques Audiard.
Rating: 8/10
I confess that I found the idea of yet another movie about the goings-on of the mobster underworld unappealing. It's certainly a genre that's been done to death so much that every aspect of such stories is now a cliché. And I couldn't see what a A Prophet might have to offer -- its only wrinkle is that a mob is being run from prison by a ruthless boss whose faction of inmates controlled the guards -- an idea that's been thought of before, I believe. But the movie focuses on the "career" of a new inmate, one Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), and here's where it does get interesting. Aside from being an Arab with no religious loyalties, he's morally blank. His only faith is to self-preservation, which he initially enacts by trying to be a loner, but that doesn't work when the mob boss, Luciani (Niels Arestrup), forces his involvement with a brutal task -- murder a certain prisoner or else. With right or wrong serving no place in Malik's instated six-year sentence, he forces his way past his fears and trepidations, assimilates all the knowledge that he can, and simply tries to survive -- and if that involves having to deal with gangsters or assassinate others, that's the way it goes.
A Prophet turns out to be a mob story with no concern for the redemption or salvation of its protagonist. We are not asked to worry about his soul, nor, on the other hand, to judge any baseness of his character, or to vicariously experience the thrill of such a lifestyle. We end up wondering if he can just get the hell out of this situation in one piece. With this approach and the genre machinery installed well in place by director Jacques Audiard, the movie is an epic-styled comment on the practical side of getting through modern life, with spirituality and loyalty playing side parts to gaining raw skill, nerve, judgment, useful connections, and experience. And it also might have something to say about the perceived effectiveness of prison systems, seeing as how one is shown here to be a perfect training ground for aspiring kingpins. (added 8/17/2010)
Starring Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, Anna Kendrick, Alison Pill, Brandon Routh, Jason Schwartzman.
Directed by Edgar Wright.
Rating: 10/10
Movie critics, like anyone else, are subjective creatures, but readers expect us to be objective anyway, so most of the time a reviewer will try to maintain a balance between the two sides. However, there are times when objectivity will just have to go straight out the window. For me, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is one of those times.
I was already mightily looking forward to the movie because it's directed by Edgar Wright, the yet-to-be-household name who directed two of my favorite recent comedies, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Yet I had no idea just how much his next project would be meant for someone like me. Scott Pilgrim, based on a series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley, is about a 22-year-old bassist (Michael Cera) in an aspiring rock band who falls for a girl (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), but in order to win her hand he must defeat her seven exes (as in "ex-boyfriend"). And here "defeat" means to actually beat them in one-on-one combat -- video game-style.
The movie immediately shows how different it plans on being by reveling in an array of visual gimmicks, mostly meant to emulate the style of comic books -- sound effects get written out on screen, labels point things out, certain moments are revealed in a series of split panels, etc. But steadily and surely, the video game references come out -- and not just any video games, but stuff from that classic block of time when Nintendo ruled gamers' households. 8-bit style graphics adorn the shots, music from a Legend of Zelda game is used in the background, and the name of Scott Pilgrim's band -- the "Sex Bob-Ombs" -- is a direct reference to a character in Super Mario Bros. games. Even if the movie only felt cute and teasing in these moments, it truly invites you to take the plunge once the first "evil ex" shows up. As he rockets fist-first towards the stage where the band is performing, challenges Scott to a fight to the death, and Scott actually responds with graphically-enhanced fighting moves, you will either check out completely, or embrace it with a grin that says, "I get this... I totally totally get this." Before you know it, the word "VS" flashes on the screen, the frenetically shot fights are lit up with colorful effects, and the bad guys get eliminated in a burst of coins and the appearance of a score.
Wright's handling of this material is some kind of revelation -- based on his Simon Pegg collaborations, I always knew he was a visually attentive humorist with great comic timing, but Scott Pilgrim shows he understands a whole mindset about the way an old-time gamer is geared. It's not only in the way the world is filtered through an obsessive attention to mathematically-oriented details -- levels and meters and rigid adherence to numbers and structure -- but also through the ways those games set up patterns of thought. Goals are there to be climbed towards, no matter how absurdly; every mini-task built up to a boss; every boss had to have a weakness, and so on. All these games, in a rather funny way, were about growth, refinement, and analysis, and here this idea gets applied to the real-life mess that is romance (and, perhaps more to the point, the straightening up of one's self). Wright delivers on the idea that the strongest appeal of many video games involves the sense of defined structure and dramatic embellishment that's absent in real life. The most brilliant application of this may be in the climax, which uses a very common video game element to solve a relationship crisis.
Scott Pilgrim speaks to a shared attitude many of us had during those days in the late '80s and throughout the '90s when it was our time, in high school or college or freshly post-college, to geek out over video games, comic books, indie rock, and anime. The movie tosses its elements together to create what is effectively a fantasia -- probably better termed a "geek-tasia" -- of a world its target audience can indulge in.
Now I almost never talk about the ratings I assign to movies, but for this one, so much about numbers and scores as it is, I'll make an exception. If I had to lean more toward objectivity about it, I might give it a 7 or 8 out of 10 because it has wondrous inventiveness, style, and technique, but it could be considered lightweight and it's also certainly not for everybody. But since it's definitely for people like me, and it does everything so right, I'll give it a 10 out of 10 on principle. So there you have it -- a 10 out of 10. You win -- perfect! (added 8/15/2010; edited version featured at ReelTalk Movie Reviews)
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, Patricia Clarkson, Max von Sydow.
Directed by Martin Scorsese.
Rating: 6/10
Martin Scorsese flexes his filmmaking muscles by taking on an old-fashioned mystery thriller with Shutter Island. The key term here is "old-fashioned," as the movie uses a plot (based on Dennis Lehane's novel) full of psychological overtones that Alfred Hitchcock might've found comfortable to work with. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) are sent to an island which houses an insane asylum to investigate the escape of one of its inmates, Rachel Solando. Once there, Teddy suspects sinister government-backed experiments are taking place on the island, while his own tragic past continues to haunt him in his sleep, revealing a possible connection to the happenings at the asylum.
Scorsese's film hums along like a well-oiled machine, and the first half of the movie, when all of the intrigue is set up, is easily the more enjoyable half. There's just something about genre conventions done well, and at first Shutter Island capitalizes on that. Unfortunately, the ending lets the air out of the balloons -- to give any hint of it would be to risk spoiling the movie, but it might be enough to say it plays fast and loose with what's believable in a movie without giving much hint of irony. There is admittedly a dose of poignancy to it, and it does allow Scorsese to touch upon the debilitating effects of self-inflicted guilt, but it still feels a bit too sobering and wilted after we'd gotten drunk off of the power-punching first and second acts. The unfair, unwritten rule of a mystery is that, no matter what it's about nor how deep it is about it, the ending should be impactful, moreso than in any other genre. Shutter Island, after an involving and entertaining beginning, settles for a victory by judges' decision rather than a final knockout. (added 6/23/2010)
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©Jeffrey Chen, 2010
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