Tag: Cinema

This Will Be a Day Long Remembered.


“Obi-Wan Kenobi ‘s demise is a defining moment in the stormtrooper-led fight against terrorism, a symbolic stroke affirming the relentlessness of the pursuit of those who turned against the Empire at the end of the Clone Wars. What remains to be seen, however, is whether it galvanizes Kenobi’s followers by turning him into a martyr or serves as a turning of the page in the war against the Rebel Alliance and gives further impetus to Emperor Palpatine to step up Stormtrooper recruitment.“

After twenty years, we finally got him: Obi-Wan Kenobi is dead. “When the end came for Kenobi, he was found not in the remote uncharted areas of Wild Space and the Unknown Regions, where he has long been presumed to be sheltered, but in a massive compound about an hour’s drive west from the Tatooine capital of Bestine. He had been living under the alias ‘Ben’ Kenobi for some time.“

Mr. Lincoln’s Army.

Finally setting off on his long-rumored Lincoln biopic — with Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field as Abe and Mary Todd respectively — Steven Spielberg fleshes out his cast in impressive fashion. Joining Mr. Lincoln, among others, are Tommy Lee Jones (Thaddeus Stevens), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Robert Todd Lincoln), James Spader, John Hawkes, Bruce McGill, Joseph Cross, Hal Holbrook, and Tim Blake Nelson. A team of rivals, and no mistake.

Confederates at Gitmo.


“The military trial of civilians is an atrocity!” Why, yes, yes it is. And, if you didn’t think so already, Robert Redford’s The Conspirator, an occasionally flat but still edutaining courtroom drama, aims to sway you to that point of view by coming strong with the history — in this case, the 1865 trial of Mary Surratt for her alleged role in the murder of President Lincoln.

The good news is The Conspirator is nowhere near as preachy and inert as Redford’s last attempt at liberal muck-raking, Lions for Lambs. (I’ll confess I don’t have much patience for didactic message movies that bray at me to embrace opinions i already hold — See also Paul Greengrass’ Green Zone.) Nonetheless, this film still occasionally suffers from the same mix of well-meaning blandness and dramatic torpor that characterizes almost all of Amistad, Steven Spielberg’s similar 19th century courtroom exercise: The values being reified are all laudable, to be sure, but the story as told is strangely lifeless (and I say that as someone who probably enjoys the genre of movies-to-be-shown-in-high-school-history-when-the-teacher-is-out more than most.)

Fortunately, the movie grew on me after awhile. Its depiction of broader Washington DC often feels stagy, and some of the acting support here doesn’t help matters. (As Surratt’s daughter Anna, Evan Rachel Wood overdoes it in her every scene, and the very 21st-century Justin Long is just miscast here as a Union veteran.) But as the lens of the story narrows down to the nitty-gritty of the court case in its middle hour, The Conspirator finds a surer footing. At its best moments, Redford’s film feels like an episode of Law and Order: Civil War Unit, one whose resonances — military tribunals, indefinite detentions, victor’s justice, and whatnot — still feel “ripped from the headlines.”

After establishing that our protagonist here, Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy, with an impressive American accent — he should help out his countryman Ewan) is a Union war veteran wounded in his nation’s service, The Conspirator begins with the terrible crime that will concern us. On the night of April 14, 1865, only five days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, several men attempt to kill President Lincoln, Vice-President Johnson, and Secretary of State Seward, with mixed results. Seward manages to survive some nasty stab wounds, Johnson’s killer loses his nerve…but, as we all know, the flamboyant actor-turned-assassin John Wilkes Booth manages to kill the 16th President of the United States in cold blood. It is a horrible act of treason, the first assassination America has ever seen, and, make no mistake, everyone involved will pay.

And so, under the direction of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline, only slightly less Cheneyesque than Richard Dreyfuss in W) the conspirators (minus Booth, who is shot during capture) are rounded up and put on, for all intent and purposes, show trial — one headed by military men and quite clearly designed to come back with guilty verdicts. (FWIW, this film mostly elides over the Manhunt part of the story.) Nonetheless, according to that quaint old Constitution, even such dastardly criminals as these deserve defense counsel, and ultimately the young Union lawyer we met at the outset is roped into defending Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) by his mentor, Maryland senator Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson).

Captain Aiken takes to his new position reluctantly, especially since he feels pretty certain that Surratt — the proprietress of the boarding house where the conspirators plotted — is guilty as all Hell. But as he learns more of Surratt and her pious Christian, Ur-mother ways, he starts to wonder if maybe she’s just taking the fall for her son John (Johnny Simmons of Jennifer’s Body), who is still on the lam. And, as he grows ever more sick of the obvious railroading happening at trial under the direction of Judge David Hunter (Colm Meaney) and prosecutor Joseph Holt (Danny Huston, doing his officiously sinister bureaucrat thing), Aiken becomes a convert to his duties, even as proper Washington society begins to shun him for seeming to take on the Confederate cause. Sometimes a man has to make a stand, etc. etc.

I don’t know much about the Mary Surratt trial other than what Wiki has to offer, so I can’t tell you if Redford and screenwriter James Solomon have done justice to the specifics of the story — It seems to have a versimilitude about it, at any rate. But one place where I thought The Conspirator faltered is in establishing the Big Picture. True, the film begins grimly with Lincoln’s assassination — hard to fault it there, I suppose. But particularly once the courtroom scenes take hold, it doesn’t do a very good job of putting everything in emotional context — that all of this is happening mere days and weeks right after the close of America’s bloodiest war. (Nor, for that matter, is slavery mentioned.) And so, while the Law and Order aspects of the story are often compelling in their own right, the trial also feels flat, and strangely disconnected from all the events that put it in motion.

Which is too bad, really. Since, if anything, that Civil War backdrop adds depth to the viewpoint Redford seemed to be trying to uphold. There we were after four years of bloody war, 600,000 dead and the president assassinated, and Aiken is still taking a stand for the constitutional rights of Mary Surratt — even though an innocent verdict might well put the sides at each other’s throats again. (Contrast this with the cowardly behavior our past two administrations have shown with regard to tribunals, detentions, Gitmo, etc, even though, neither on 9/11 or since, has Al Qaeda ever represented the kind of existential threat to our republic that we faced in 1865.)

Speaking of the Civil War angle: In a way, I admire the shrewdness of this film: It tries to pitch a civil liberties morality play in such a way that the people who will feel most aggrieved about the injustices being shown, civil libertarians notwithstanding, are the folks among us with residual sympathy for the Confederacy — not normally a left-leaning or libertarian bunch. But, let’s get real: They’re not going to see this film, or, if they do, see it as anything other than lefty propaganda. Like Inside Job or Casino Jack and the United States of Money, The Conspirator is for the most part just preaching to the choir. One of the best things you can say about it is that, for the middle hour at least, you may not mind humming along.

Groundhog Train.


If Hanna was Run Lola Run meets Bourne meets True Grit, then Duncan Jones’ enjoyable B-movie Source Code — another film that has sat in both the viewing and reviewing queues for several weeks — is Groundhog Day meets Deja Vu meets Quantum Leap. Jones’ second film is nowhere near as great or gripping as his heady sci-fi debut, Moon, but it doesn’t really aspire to be either. Instead we have an amiable and breezy popcorn flick that hits at about the level of a quality episode of Amazing Stories, and I mean that as a compliment.

The agreeable, low-key feel of Source Code matches not only its two leads, Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan — both of whom have their usual affable guy/girl-next-door appeal about them here — but also the patron saint of the reliving-the-past-so-we-can-make-it-right genre: Scott Bakula, formerly of Quantum Leap. (He’s here not just in spirit — Bakula also has a voice cameo late in the film. Well-played, Mr. Jones.) And if you enjoyed the time-traveling do-gooderism of Dr. Sam Beckett at all back in the day, you basically know what you’re getting here — A slightly longer and more high-budge episode of the show (alas with no Dean Stockwell — although Vera Farmiga is here, doing a lot of talking to a television screen, and Jeffrey Wright has fun muttering and puttering around in the background as a mad scientist of sorts.)

If for some weird reason you’ve never seen Quantum Leap, the conceit of Source Code is this: Captain Colter Stevens (Gyllenhaal) — a helicopter pilot who thought he was on duty in Afghanistan — wakes up on a train bound for Chicago, sitting across from a comely brunette (Monaghan) who seems to think he’s a teacher named Sean Fentress. Eight minutes later, before he can disentangle what’s happened to him or what’s going on, that train goes boom, killing all aboard. Then Capt. Stevens wakes again to find himself strapped within a futuristic-looking metallic pod, a la Jodie Foster at the end of Contact, with a military handler (Farmiga) trying to ping him over the radio. Most expensive training simulation evar?

Sort of. As the disoriented captain soon discovers, Stevens is actually the Army-donated guinea pig for a new time-traveling technology called (wait for it, wait for it) Source Code, which allows him to relive the last eight minutes of a dead man’s life — but only for informational purposes. In this case, his charge is, a la pretty much every season of 24, to figure out who the bomber of the train is before, in real time, he or she can strike again in downtown Chicago. And so Stevens dives back in, and in again, until he knows exactly when the coffee get spilled and where the gun on board is, all the while developing a closer rappaport with Monaghan. Is it possible he could use Source Code to change the past, rather than just learn from it, and save her life? Be a whole lot cooler if he could…

So, like I said, Quantum Leap — although there’s a lot of Groundhog Day here as well, particularly as Stevens gradually hones his eight-minute runs through trial and error (and learns how to get on the good side of some of his crustier travelmates.) More than anything, tho’, Source Code feels like an exercise in video game logic. Replace the train blowing up with “you have been eaten by a grue,” and for all intent and purposes Stevens is just playing an Infocom game here (or, for the unplugged, reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book.) And so there’s not much sense of danger here in Source Code — The pleasures to be had are less of the will-he-beat-the-ticking-time-bomb variety than of watching someone work out a “Bombing on the Orient Express”-style text-adventure puzzle.

Still, the movie is good fun, not the least since Gyllenhall (who’s already done time as [spoiler] an already-dead time traveler in Donnie Darko) moves along the story at about the pace of the audience: The script is a smart one — Once Stevens understands the ground rules, he runs with it, trying the things that you or I might try to sort his way through the situation.

Now, that being said, the movie’s ending doesn’t make much sense when you think about it. (It’s also unwittingly creepy, in a Being John Malkovich kind of way, if you take time to remember that somewhere before all this started there existed a teacher named Sean Fentriss.) But, hey, it’s a time-travel flick. More often than not, the logic is going to break down at some point regardless. Take it for its B-movie worth and Source Code is a fun, smooth, and involving ride, and a perfectly fine way to spend 90 minutes on a spring or summer day. And if you really like it, you can go ahead and relive it again — just watch out for the grues.

The Bourne Adolescence.

I know one couldn’t tell from ole GitM here, which continues in its recent state of languish — hopefully not for much longer! — but the Easter holidays (and accompanying congressional recess) have finally given me a chance to catch up on some of the movies I’ve missed in recent weeks. First on the block, Joe Wright’s stylish spy thriller Hanna, a reasonably entertaining cross between Run Lola Run and one of the Bourne movies, with a splash of True Grit.

Hanna has some pacing issues for sure — The film peaks in its first forty minutes, and the middle hour, in which our young, ninjafied protagonist makes nice with a free-spirited family on European holiday, even flirts with boring at times. But the movie still has the benefit of some solid action setpieces, a soulful anchoring performance by Saiorse Ronan, fun (if sometimes over-the-top) character work by some real pros (Eric Bana, Cate Blanchett, Tom Hollander) and a catchy kinetic groove supplied by the Chemical Brothers. As with last April’s vaguely similar tale of father-daugher mayhem, Kick-Ass, Hanna makes for a smarter and more engaging thrill ride than we usually see this time of year.

Perhaps the main reason Hanna seems to lag out in its middle hour is that its opening moves so fast. We begin in a snowy wilderness, and a pale young girl (Ronan) is hunting an elk with a bow and arrow. As soon as she makes the kill, she is set upon by another stalker, who proceeds to pummel her for being unwary. That would be her father (Bana), who through a combination of warrior training, tough love, and choice encyclopedia-readings is instructing his daughter in the ways of the Super-Spy. Apparently, we soon discover, these two have been living hand-to-mouth and off the grid, somewhere near the Arctic Circle, since Hanna was an infant. But, now, her Jedi training is close to complete — girl, you’ll be a ninja soon — and it’s time for young Hanna to be released back into civilization, with a very specific target in mind.

That target: Marissa Wiegler (Blanchett, reprising her southern drawl from The Gift), a CIA hand with longstanding connections to the feral father and daughter duo. And so, pretending to be a guileless innocent, Hanna gets herself taken into CIA custody to meet her quarry. Alas, she misses her first shot at the ruthlessly efficient Wiegler, and soon all of the parties are engaged in a cat-and-mouse chase from Morocco to Berlin. But who’s the cat and who are the mice? The film helps clarify roles by having Wiegler enlist a creepy assassin (Hollander in a ridiculous tracksuit) to find her quarry, while Hanna falls in with a family caravan of innocents (headed by Olivia Williams and Jason Flemyng.) Unfortunately, Dad never got around to explaining collateral damage…

It’s this middle section of Hanna — in which our heroine makes her first friend, has her first kiss, etc — where the impressive energy established in the early going begins to leak out of the picture, and the film never really gets it back. It is not helped in this regard by the clunky decision of the writers to have Hanna channel Data from Star Trek: TNG and/or Arnold Schwarzenegger in the second Terminator whenever she’s confronted with the vagaries of modern life. (For example, Hanna’s reaction to having a boy lean in for a kiss: “Kissing requires thirty-four muscles in the face” or somesuch.) Nor, given what we see of her skill set, does it even make much sense for Hanna to be running half the time regardless — The question of whether she is going to fight or flight her way out of any situation seems to be completely arbitrary and script-driven.

That being said, Hanna does have its share of bravura action moments. Even if it makes no sense for an underground secret CIA lair to have sequentially-flashing nightclub strobelights, I dug the heck out of an early, Chemical-Brothers-driven sequence when Hanna unleashes carnage and then makes a run for it. Later on, there’s a pretty great Batman Begins-ish reversal — the hunters becoming the hunted — in a nighttime chase scene through a container park. And, while I complained about a needlessly flashy and distracting stunt take at Dunkirk in his adaptation of Atonement, Joe Wright tries something similar here — when Bana runs into some trouble at the train station — to much better effect.

It helps that, its occasional Brothers Grimm pretensions notwithstanding, Hanna really has no subtext to live up to. If the title card (introduced with a bullet) didn’t give it away, this is a well-made genre exercise, no more, no less, and it’s really just about having fun. (It seemed like Blanchett and Hollander, the villains of this fairy tale, were especially having a blast.) Taken for what it is, and allowing for its sagging middle hour, this film mostly delivers. If you watched one movie about a young woman kicking ass and taking names while on a grand adventure this past month, I sure hope it was Hanna.

The Brazil Burlesque.


2011 so far has not only been tough on the ole blog — It’s been tough on the movie-going. There have been a number of flicks I’ve been on the cusp of seeing in the weeks since The Adjustment Bureau — Paul, Limitless, Jane Eyre — and some I’ve even been really looking forward to, like Source Code and Hanna. Alas, the only movie I’ve actually managed to catch these past few weeks was…Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch. Oof.

As you probably already know by now, Sucker Punch is a rather terrible film. Ok, to be fair, it isn’t Gods and Generals-bad or Richard Kelly bad. Just on the basis of its occasionally diverting, fan-service-y visuals — clockwork Huns and ninjas vs. robots and whatnot — it’s probably ever-so-slightly more entertaining than recent drek like The Tourist and Alice in Wonderland. But, let’s be clear, this movie is still atrocious. Sucker Punch basically feels like sitting through an extended cutscene from a lousy, nonsensical, and rushed-to-release video game, and one with a shoddy English translation to boot.

Worse, every single lousy habit of Snyder’s — the fratboy sensibilities, the repetitive slow-fast-slow action sequences, the derivative and/or middlebrow pop culture tastes, the “Dude, that’s so extreme” Mountain Dewness of it all — is wallowed in here. If nothing else, Sucker Punch should answer once and for all whether or not the degree of difficulty for Watchmen was over Snyder’s head. It plainly was. Here, the guy the New York TImes somehow deemed “the purest geek-auteur of the geek-film era” (Uh…PJ? Del Toro? Cameron?) is given carte blanche to do pretty much anything he wants on the studio’s dime, and his big idea seems to be: “Duuuude, let’s re-make Brazil with hot chicks! That’d be so righteous!” Alan Moore, he’s not.

Oh, sorry, was that a spoiler? Well, you probably figured it out once you saw the big samurai in the trailers. In any case, as Sucker Punch begins, a young woman we come to know as Baby Doll (Emily Browning) — I’ll get to the stripper names in a bit — tries to shoot her abusive stepfather after what looks to be an attempted rape, hits her little sister instead, and ends up in a Shutter Island-like sanitarium for her troubles. See for yourself — This is all shot like a mid-90s’ music video and set to a hushed cover of the Eurythmics’ not-at-all-played-out “Sweet Dreams.” Oooh, edgy choice! (Keep an ear out for equally lazy and literal-minded picks by The Smiths (“Asleep”), Bjork (“Army of Me”), Jefferson Airplane (“White Rabbit”), and The Pixies (“Where is my Mind?” — grifted from Fight Club) also.)

Anyways, this Arkham Asylum for the Scantily Clad is run by a European psychiatrist with unorthodox methods (Carla Gugino with an appalling accent), presided over by an orderly with a dictatorial streak (Oscar “OUTLAAAAAAAAAAW” Isaac), and brimming over with young fetching patients (a la Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn), most notably sisters Sweet Pea (Abbe Cornish) and Pilot (Jena Malone). Or at least that seems to be the case — For when Baby Doll overhears she is scheduled to be lobotomized in five days (by none other than Jon Hamm, who’s apparently trying to pay the mortgage until Season 5), she escapes into a fantasy world where the asylum is actually a cabaret/bordello, her imprisoners are the proprietors, and she can simultaneously melt the mind of any man and become a ninja warrior everytime she does a risque dance. Um, what? (And, hey, wasn’t this the plot of Burlesque?)

You know, it’s not really worth talking about the story for another paragraph. Suffice to say that, to escape their plight, Baby Doll and her sisters-in-captivity kick a lot of ass in these fantasies-within-fantasies. And yet, even though these sequences all involve totally extreme fan-service stuff like robots and dragons and bi-planes and zeppelins and Scott-Glenn-playing-David-Carradine (You really want to impress the fanboys? Get Peter Weller next time), they’re increasingly boring to sit through. This is one of those movies where you’re told early on that there are FIVE (5) super-important Maguffins that must be reclaimed for the heroine(s) to prevail, and you spend the rest of the movie wishing they were looking for the last one already. As with Snyder’s 300, I tried to sit there and just lizard-brain my way through the terrible stuff, but it’s just impossible. The dialogue is awful. The story is incoherent. The exposition is cringe-worthy.

And, yes, the gender politics are rancid. Look, I paid for the ticket — I’m not above watching women in revealing outfits face down genre baddies. (I mean, wasn’t that the whole point of Underworld?) But Ellen Ripley does not exist in this dojo. Everything about Sucker Punch — the characters with zero personality but their stripper names, the whole trapped-in-the-bordello and magical-striptease angles, the constant scenes of implied sexual violence and/or Women in Peril — reeks of emotionally-stunted, puerile fratboyism, or worse. Since release, Snyder has gone out of his way to suggest his film is totally un-sexist and empowering, and, besides, he’s just giving the audience what they want, you know? Duuuuuude, it’s like he flipped it! That’s so extreme! Yeah, not so much. It is, however, more than a little embarrassing to sit through.

More than anything, I spent Sucker Punch feeling bad for the actors (especially Cornish and Isaac, and I have a soft spot for Gugino and Hamm) who were clearly better than the material. Well, that and feeling grim about Superman. It looks like the Big Blue Boy Scout will be rushing the frat scene next year. Dude, it’s gonna be so extreme.

A Costume, A Kent, and a Carrie?


Another update for DC’s Big Three: Adrianne Palicki is now filming in the full Wonder Woman garb for David E. Kelly’s new TV reboot. (The costume looks better than their first attempt.) Kevin Costner now appears to be officially in Zack Snyder’s Superman as Pa Kent. (One presumes he didn’t see Sucker Punch before closing the deal.) And, while confirming Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Alberto Falcone, Variety says Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises is looking to cast Juno Temple as “a street-smart Gotham girl.” Is that code for Robin?

Back Down in the Hole.


“Warner Bros. has officially announced the beginning of production on The Hobbit, Peter Jackson’s two film epic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s timeless classic. The Hobbit is set in Middle-earth 60 years before Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which Jackson and his filmmaking team brought to the big screen in the blockbuster trilogy that culminated with the Oscar-winning The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.“

Oh, wait, it’s a prequel?!? Never mind, then. (I kid, I kid.) In any case, many years and pounds later, PJ’s The Hobbit finally begins its Greatest Adventure. And the best news yet? The Return of the Figwit! Bret, you’ve got it going on…

Agent With Shield.


Among the trailers I’ve missed in recent weeks is this — arguably the most promising-looking comic book film in the summer of Thor, Green Lantern, and X-Men: First Class — the teaser trailer for Joe Johnston’s Captain America: The First Avenger, with Chris Evans, Hayley Atwell, Tommy Lee Jones, Stanley Tucci, Sebastian Stans, Toby Jones, and, above, Hugo Weaving looking pitch-perfect as the Red Skull. Granted, Johnston’s The Wolfman was terribad, but I’m holding out hope for this one (and to be fair, Johnston was basically a hired gun on Wolfman, coming in four weeks before shooting to replace Mark Romanek.)