Winter-Spring 2013-2014 Movie Preview - Part 1

Since I didn't manage to see anything this week that's worth spending a blog entry time, I find myself in sync again with the end of November and with the usual preview list for the next six months. So, let's kick it ...

In the beginning of December we have "Out of the Furnace". A drama that reminds me a bit of "Winter's Bone". We'll see if it also confirms at the same level. The trailer seems relatively promising ...
I had some second thoughts before including "The Hobbit II" in the enumeration. I'm wondering what else can be squeezed out of this franchise, after making three movies out of a short children's book: the 1st consistently filled with dwarf-orcish martial arts to justify its length, and the 2nd apparently teleporting Legolas in the story due to lack of ideas. Just to raise more the box office by dragging in Orlando Bloom's teengirl fans (I actually considered re-reading the book to convince myself he's not there, but a quick look on Wikipedia confirmed it). But well .. I can still hope for a miracle = that the adaptation gets the kids story a bit closer to the much more complex subject of LotR ...
The end of December brings something that some already consider to be the worst movie of the year: "47 Ronin". To be fair, neither the directing, nor the screenwriting credits recommend this. But after past experiences like "Ninja Assassin" or "The Warrior's Way", unjustly buried by some U.S. critics, who knows ? Maybe we'll have another surprise ...
January seems quite scarce in announced releases, so forgive me but I'll switch to some horrors (I'm anyway writing this entry late into St. Andrew's night so the "atmosphere" fits :P). Let's start with "Open Grave", an indie with a sufficiently catchy subject. You're waking up with amnesia in a ground hole filled with corpses. Who are you and how did this happen ? (unfortunately the trailer cuts a bit from the mistery ...)
"Devil's Due" seems more hardcore. Again I thought a bit if to add it or not in the enumeration, not as much due to the bloody disgusting stuff which I can get over with, but more because I'm fed up with lame reused stories ("Rosemary's Baby" meets "The Omen"). Even more, the movie's done in the overused and already annoying mockumentary style. But if 20th Century Fox financed this, maybe there's something I don't see yet ...
I'm closing January with something that I didn't do before in the preview entries. An anti-recommendation. Which is not a horror (although when you hear "I, Frankenstein" probably that's what's coming into your mind). And not being a horror is probably the only part it has in common with "Frankenstein" - the classic novel, which is actually a drama with some SciFi and romance nuances. A drama with so many senses hidden there that a blasphemy as what's shown in the trailer doesn't deserve any single extra comment ...
In February, after some delays, we finally get "RoboCop", the remake. I've heard many doubts about this movie. I still prefer to give it some credit, and I hope at something at least as decent as the "Total Recall" remake. After all, the original story was a good one, and the director is Jose Padilha ("Tropa de Elite"), so he's not exactly a randomly picked no-name ...
Ok, if there is to be a comedy in the today's list, let it be a guilty pleasure :P : "Vampire Academy". Maybe unbelievable, but the movie is actually based on a novel. And to raise a bit more the expectancy the directing belongs to Mark Waters who was responsible for "The Spiderwick Chronicles", one of the few fantasies from the flood following LotR that managed to be less ridiculous and more heart-warming ...
At the end of February Liam Neeson returns in "Non-Stop". Under the same director as in "Unknown" and with the same attitude as in "Taken". Should I say more ? ...
That's it for the winter. Next time, the spring ...

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990)

"That we find out the cause of this effect, or rather say, the cause of this defect. For this effect defective, comes by cause: Thus it remains, and the remainder thus." ... I think I got old, or I'm too tired, or both. To which I can add that I've never been too much into Shakespeare or into lines in iambic pentameter as the intro above (although they have their charm here and there). Enough premises not to be able probably to fully appreciate "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead". Even though it's not exactly Shakespeare, but a bit more close to present = Tom Stoppard. Maybe it's better to start with a more clear description of who bears the exotic names in the title. Shall we begin, therefore ...

The movie is the adaptation of a theater play, directed by the play's author named above. The subject is centered on the ephemeral existence of two secondary characters from "Hamlet": Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In the original Shakespearean version, the two in the title are sort of .. Hamlet's buddies let's say, but under the influence of the usurper king of Denmark. Who asks them to observe and report on the mad prince. There's also a follow up on that, but I would spoil too much from the movie, which naturally intersects with the original play. More important is that in Shakespeare's version Rosencrantz and Guildenstern don't have much action space given (if my memory is not completely failing). Concise, what we have here is an absurd comedy. Which gives us a story of their own, or otherwise said, builds up on the idea: where and what are doing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when they're not present on the stage. Which ranges from absurd philosophy, existential theories, discovering the hamburger, the gravity or a perpetuum mobile .. and others, coming back into the original subject in the parts where they have a role to play. A role that isn't though very clear for them, getting so confused that they don't even know anymore who's Rosencrantz and who's Guildenstern. I don't remember "Hamlet" very well, but at least the current movie puts them in a more neutral light than a negative one. Sort of like the improper persons placed by who can influence them at the supposedly proper place.

In case Tom Stoppard doesn't sound very known, he's the screenwriter of "Shakespeare in Love". But as a better reference for what we have here he also co-authored the script of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil". Which for me was easier to grasp. Here we have a bit too much depth in the comic absurdity, or at least I don't have the patience anymore to unwrap all the hidden threads that are supposed to be there between the lines. Normally I appreciate this kind of stuff, but this script is too dense and becomes exhausting to follow. Plus that, I repeat myself, you have to like Shakespeare. On the good side, since I've mentioned Gilliam, I can positively notice the nuance of surrealism (although clearly isn't at the same level as "Brazil"). But the best part of the movie are are the excellent roles made by Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. Which makes me think that the play in a theater, where the acting has a much bigger impact, can be better appreciated than on film. And that shall be all for now ...

Rating: 3 out of 5

3y & Odd Thomas (2013)

Incredibly enough, it seems that I managed somehow to catch up with the original .ro blog thread, where I write my entries first, and which was somewhat like a month ahead this one. It's already 3 years and a few days since I've started an English version for what I write, so bear with me for a couple lines for the sake of the "event" :). I have to admit that it was a pain to find time to translate, doing it typically at weird hours when I can barely keep my eyes open. That's probably one of the reasons why my English sucks, and the quality of the entries is therefore at least questionable grammar-wise if not more than that. But I managed somehow to keep doing it for 3 years now, and I'll do my best to continue .. no guarantees given though for how long. So, let's cut the blah-blah short and get to something more interesting = a movie = "Odd Thomas", which hopefully is good enough to fit the occasion ...

The movie is based on a book by Dean R. Koontz. My memory doesn't help me now to quote more from his work, but as genre is let's say somewhere between SciFi, thriller and a bit of horror (or at least showing some dark nuances from time to time). To give a hint, if you like Stephen King, probably you won't dislike Dean Koontz. Getting back to the topic though = "Odd Thomas", the movie is from what I heard, the only adaptation which the author liked (and seeing some of the others I can tell why). The story goes like this: Odd Thomas is one of the inhabitants of a tiny town (by name too = Pico Mundo), but with a police force and apparently a crime level a bit above what you would expect from a quiet country settlement. The guy, around the nice age of ~20, works as cook at a local diner, is still faithful to his childhood girlfriend, and lives an apparently simple life without many obligations, but he's gifted with a secret talent. He can see dead people :) And to make the "experience" more intense, in particular he intersects with victims of a violent life ending event. For who he feels the need to bring peace - that's why the poster tagline says: "I might see dead people ... but then, by God, I do something about it."

Fortunately the story is not just a variation of "The 6th Sense". Odd Thomas has also some derived abilities, like a sense to foresee situations which will increase the number of inhabitants in the netherworld. To close the summary, Odd's secrets are not just his, but known also by a small group of close friends like the local chief of police, or Stormy - his girlfriend. Friends who seem to have accepted during time Odd's oddness, especially since life seems a bit more safe with him around. The things get complicated though, when the regular "normal" solving of a new murder in town, is replaced by events which seemingly will bring the hell on earth. Or at least to Pico Mundo. How's this happening, you can see in the movie ;) ...

The production is directed by Stephen Sommers ("Deep Rising", "The Mummy", "The Mummy Returns", "Van Helsing", "G.I. Joe"). It might not sound very promising, looking at the last titles especially. Who has seen the first though, and is able to appreciate a movie which, as "Lone Ranger" as I was saying last time, is sufficiently fun and catchy, knows that this guy can produce something capable to drag you in a story. And I was expecting this since I've seen the "Mummy". Well, it's not exactly the same thing (the lack of success in time = lack of cash) but is probably the best movie since then made by him. It shows that's on a tight budget. The actors are generally quite unknown, and from what you see without much experience, except Anton Yelchin as lead and Willem Dafoe in a secondary role. The effects look nice, but you can feel that it could've been more. And still it doesn't really matter .. Because the movie's catchy. Especially if you're somewhere between 30 and 40 years old and you were spending time in cinemas on a regular basis in the 90s = if you're left with some nostalgia for the period :) It's true that the book contributes a lot, but the charm comes from elsewhere. Let's take the air of the little town under pressure + "the teen movie flavor" from Wes Craven's "Scream", the witty lines and the superb chemistry of the couple from "The Mummy" + the dark comedy nuance from Peter Jackson's "The Frighteners" (when he wasn't as known as now and wasn't exaggerating with the movies length as in LotR). How does all this sound stacked together ? Enjoy ;)

Rating: 4 out of 5

PS: By the way, if you didn't see "The Frighteners" and you like "Odd Thomas", check the first out - you'll love it. The subject is very similar and the movie's I guess a bit better than what we have here + Michael J. Fox probably makes his best role in a SciFi/action outside the "Back to the Future" series.

The Lone Ranger (2013)

I don't even know where to start. I could do it with the five negative reviews I've read to find out why the bashing for this movie, asking myself if it's sabotage against Disney's superproductions that try something else than what already worked with the public (= pirates series and reboot to pirates series), or is just pure dumbness and flock behavior from the critics. Getting more into this would transform though this entry in one directly attacking others, by taking line by line what's written here and there and proving how shallow or hypocrite it is, and the result would be probably extremely boring and won't make any justice for "The Lone Ranger".

Don't take it the wrong way. If I'm looking at my entries, is most often the case that I'm in the line with the ranking on pretty much every site. So, it's not a general opinion, but I see that I'm stumbling more and more often on cases (as "Gravity" recently) when I'm actually astonished by how consistently is either appreciated or bashed a movie which is clearly far from the pole of value where the "experts" placed it. Ok, I'm outraged, I assume it's already clear :) .. Let me try to say something more useful for the de facto subject of the current entry ... First, this is not a movie to be taken as a standard western. Gore Verbinski's option for "Lone Ranger" is so "westernish" in the classic sense as it's "Rango" to "quote" from the same director's CV. It's clear from the first minutes that this movie doesn't take itself seriously, even more that's actually trying at least a bit some irony or satire on the genre. And it's probably sufficiently stylish and discrete to be completely missed by who was waiting a product that mandatory should've been a mix between John Ford and Sergio Leone and nothing else.

The story is simple. I don't want to give too much. The Lone Ranger, a pacifist attorney disappointed by the helpless attempts to enforce justice by the book in the wild west, and .. let's say his pal, Tonto, an indian who's a bit "gone" in this version, have some score to settle with a series of bad guys, more bad guys and very bad guys. That's one of the major issues of the movie by some. If there is more than a villain, already the critics' neurons start to get confused. Even worse, if the bad guys are gradually introduced instead of having a simple long fight from start to end with a precise target, it's already too much story (although honestly, you have to be naive not to get from start who's the mastermind, but well, those neurons ...). Yup, the movie is long. It has two hours and a half. And yes, the story is short. But wow, there is a story, not just some 10 minutes long explosions linked by dumb scripted lines a la Michael Bay. Ok, we have some secondary threads which are a bit more than necessary, but they still connect somehow with the story. The script is, again, quite discrete in some nuances, with a dark to grim tone here and there to tell you that "life in the wild west was wild indeed", and some surreal scenes thrown from time to time (very nicely integrated, but that's more a matter of taste). All these aren't doing anything else than underlining again, clearly, for who has eyes to see, that what's given to the viewer is a story, a fairytale, not a western.

Technically, the movie is superb. I hope I'm not mistaking and there's a version I don't know about, but what I've seen is the perfect example that you can live without 3D (I'm wondering if this is one of the hidden reasons for which it took the bashing, but I already start to feel that I'm generating a conspiracy theory). The camera work is above everything I've seen in a movie with some solid action since long ago. I don't even know what other comparable example to give. The scenes are shot in such a way that, in 2D, to give you an intense feeling of movement in space. I'm not even getting into filters and light, but that's something I'm used with from Verbinski since I've seen "The Ring". I don't know though how much is his touch or the cinematographer's, Bojan Bazelli. Getting to the audio area, I'm trying to convince myself lately that Hans Zimmer starts to get overrated for the last scores he did, but apparently I'm again wrong. It's indeed a soundtrack that reuses stuff, with clear influences from Morricone, and of course an arrangement for the Wilhelm Tell overture, but it fits so well the scenes where it's played that I can't say anything bad about it.

To give an example of another movie that gets slightly closer as feeling, probably the best one is "The Mask of Zorro" from '98 with Banderas. Not that much because it's another masked hero, but more for the comical element and the deviation from the standard western. Something else .. it's the type of movie that you should take as an exit from the real life, and enjoy the story as much as you can = a reason for I really don't see a problem with the length. It's not a story to put your mind at work, but also not one to make you roll your eyes at each overly dumb line you hear, or to give you ideas to check your watch for timing the action scenes because you're anyway bored of them and that's the best option you have. It is though a story witty and nice enough to keep you there. Maybe it's not "Star Wars", "Indiana Jones", "Back to the Future" or "Neverending Story". Neither "Prince of Persia" or "John Carter" didn't get there, but I hope that Disney will keep releasing such critic failures, even though it ends up losing money with them. Because besides these, the surprising exception "Pacific Rim", and obviously "Star Trek", I don't remember any other blockbuster in the last years to leave me at the end with the same feeling of "my brain got trapped in a story for the last hours, and it was nice ;)".

Rating: 5 out of 5 (to make some justice that I let myself influenced by the rating and I didn't see the movie in cinema, and it deserves that)

Ravenous (1999)

Considering that I'm writing about the movie based on some far memories, I don't know how much I'll miss or not, and forgive please the (probably) chaotic order of the following. I hope I'll catch the essence though, since I've seen the movie around seven times throughout the last 13 years. Also, during this time I reached the conclusion that's a movie which either you like a lot, or not at all. I don't know if I've met somebody to tell me that it was "so and so", and if I would count the opinions for the plus and minus sides, they're probably evenly split. It's a horror, but with a less touched subject - cannibalism - handled in a context and in a way which maybe surprisingly make the topic more "digestible" :) (no pun intended). Because the movie goes a bit more far in essence getting beyond the surface theme. It starts that with the intro taken from Nietzsche "He who fights with monsters must be careful not to become one" which, ironically, probably remains the only part connected to his philosophical ideas that's not attacked by the movie. I actually should give credit for this insight to some blog entry I've read once, I don't know where, that was debating in detail the subject "Nietzsche vs. Ravenous" :). Because the movie, besides the horror nuance it's a fine satire on the human condition, and more specifically targeting the importance of life. Probably it doesn't say much what I've written until now, but I hope at least I managed to generate some curiosity to who's reading, so let me drop a couple words also on the subject itself ;) ...

The action is set at some point in the middle of the 19th century. Following the "bravery" shown during the Mexican-American war - to be read: hiding under a pile of corpses, and managing to victoriously survive an impossible situation - John Boyd (Guy Pearce) avoids getting sentenced for deserting by being advanced to captain and getting sent to fill up the army personnel detached on an isolated fort, somewhere in the mountains before a passage to California. So, with a moral like it would've been better to get killed in battle, he joins the group of seven inhabitants at the place - 5 army members and 2 civilians, each weirder than the other. During a cold winter night the fort's "calmness" is disturbed by a guy who's more dead than alive (Robert Carlyle), frozen, who after getting on his feet starts telling a grim story. So, we find out about a trip to California ended badly by getting lost in mountains, and topped by the hunger effects on the travelers group. Our frozen guy apparently escaped before getting to be the main course during the next dinner. The rest of the story, in the movie ;) ...

Besides the acting, which is superb in building up the characters, something to be noticed in the movie is the soundtrack - Damon Albarn and Michael Nyman, which is probably one of the best and in the same time interesting scores ever made for a horror. I would even say it's on par with the masterpiece you can hear in Hitchcock's "Psycho", although the effect it creates is totally different. Hard to describe, you need to see and hear it.

The horror nuance is probably given, besides the general dark theme, by the bloody scenes, which are plenty, but we don't have anything extreme (as in "Saw" to give the "classic" example). At least for me it's not a movie to generate nightmares or to make you jump from the chair. More, the satire and the comic (even dark and grim as it is) relax the movie almost completely in respect to the "terror effect". Besides that, as I was saying, the movie's idea is a bit deeper and revolves around the motivation for living (or the lack of it), the price for that, and why paying it. I'll refrain from getting into philosophy right now, especially since I don't have the movie very fresh in my head, but it's not a title to take easy just as entertainment. In particular, there are plenty of details, from the used symbolism to lines lost in the context when you see it first, but which you might discover at a second view. As example, the fort commander breaks nuts with some books (I guess) in the beginning of the movie and with his bare hands in the end. This is just something going on in parallel with some conversation carried. The sense connects with the character state and also with some lines at those given points in the timeline, and I don't think you'll normally get the nuts detail from the 1st viewing. There are more like this one. I don't know how much is from the script (Ted Griffin) but the directing by Antonia Bird was flawless. It's the only movie I've seen by her, and since I've found out that she recently passed away, I felt the need to give some credit for who, at least for me, gave the best horror of the '90s. For the reader .. you might hate it, you might love it, I don't know ;)

Rating: 5 out of 5

A soundtrack sample, on movie scenes ( or 4 minutes compressing all the bloody moments :) ) ..
The final scene (Warning ! = major spoiler, but it's the best clip quality wise that I found, although it doesn't catch much from the merits of this movie) ..
And a perspective on the movie from when was done by the people involved (unfortunately embedding disabled, so you need one more click) ..