This list has done a good job of reminding me that for every good film that I've seen, there's a bad one and a mediocre one. Though I do respect them for their craft, there are many films on this list that I absolutely loathe- and if you enjoy reading bad reviews, scroll straight to the bottom. I've written them as hastily and as spitefully as I could. But, if you want some more recommendations for good films, these first few are pretty good, despite some noticeable faults. Hey, The Men Who Stare at Goats was funny. At least I thought so. It's nearly 1 AM and I've been working on this one post for about a week now. Let's hope it was worth the effort- take a look, maybe you've seen one or two of these- and if you did, then read the review. Maybe we agree, maybe we disagree. Either way, it should be a good trip down memory lane... if it is only as far back as six years ago.
Moon
Director: Duncan Jones
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Matt Berry
Release Date: July 17, 2009
Running Time: 97 minutes
Rating: 3.5/5
Sam is an astronaut. He's also been alone for a very, very long time. Three years, to be specific. We wonder, at the beginning of Moon, why the removal of energy from the moon is a one-man operation. Why don't the company executives take into account that there could be some kind of accident? Why aren't they concerned about the lonely astronaut jeopardizing the mission by, say, going on strike, committing suicide... or hallucinating, as some people left alone for long periods of time tend to do? Duncan Jones' debut film Moon acts like it will probably not answer most of these questions... and then it surprises you by doing just that. And the truth behind that mystery is... well, unthinkable. Moon is a familiar type of sci-fi movie: rather than relying on expensive special effects, its independent budget forces it to rely on an unconventional level of intelligence. Hence, Moon is smart and original. It has a distinctive technical design that seems to borrow something from every great sci-fi movement- it even has Kevin Spacey voicing a robot named GERTY, whose ever-smiling face puts us on the edge of our seat from the get-go as we wait for the robot to turn evil. Its design remains locked down to just a few set pieces: the moon-base interior, the moon exterior, and a third room that I won't name due to its third-act significance. Cinema has shown us in the past how keeping the drama in a confined space can either imprison the story or set it free... and I'm sorry to say that in Moon it really seems like the former. When the movie opens, we have an amazing soundtrack building up such immense power- this is a score that should be set to rovers moving across the moon as the camera pans out to show the wide desolation of Sam's surroundings. Instead, the ominous music is paired to Sam's morning breakfast routine and treadmill exercise. This incoherence could really be a symbol for the incoherence of the whole movie. The film has great themes, great atmosphere, and great characters. But it places such an unnecessary strain on itself, and this has nothing to do with the confined space or the lack of a budget. This has everything to do with proper pacing and the proper buildup of suspense. When I got to the end of the story, I couldn't help feel slightly disappointed. In a way, I almost felt like I had just seen the first act to a much larger story. Not that the ending was bad. But I felt like I was getting a bare minimum in regards to a good ending. The story presented in Moon is one that has such massive inertia that when you finish the film disrupted and confused, you can't help but feel like it's only mined the surface of its potential.
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Starring: Christos Stergioglou, Angeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Christos Passalis
Release Date: November 11, 2009
Running Time: 97 minutes
Rating: 3.5/5
Now don't get me wrong- I adore weird cinema. I don't know of anyone who loves bizarre and messed-up movies more than I do. Dogtooth certainly fits the criterion for this type of movie... and yet it was by no means for me. I actually enjoyed myself during the first half of the movie- it was fun, weird, and really twisted. Then I got to the second half of the movie, when things became really weird and twisted- and no fun at all. The premise of Dogtooth is remarkably simple. When we were at school, we met all different kinds of kids- some kids had very distant parents and seemed a bit less behaved than the others- but somehow the group that got more pity was the one on the opposite edge of the spectrum. You know, those kids who were just a bit too sheltered. Of course, normally kids develop their own views on life, what with the natural process of growing up works. But when that natural process is stopped in its tracks, you have Dogtooth- and all of the frightening implications of sheltering your kids are realized in their fullest extent. Some have interpreted the film as a slam on homeschooling, but it could really apply to any family situation where drastic measures are taken to obstruct a child's freedom to interact with the outside world. Take into account Dogtooth is the extreme example. Here, the three children (who are pretty much anywhere between 16 and 22 at the beginning of the story) are psychologically forced to remain as children within their house, which they have never left for their entire life. They practice good behavior to earn stickers, they fight over toy airplanes, they are taught an alternative vocabulary where "pussy" means "a large light" and "highway" means a "very strong wind". These are fantastic ideas, and they are delivered to is un the most fantastic of ways. The movie employs brutal imagery to shock us into social awareness. But I have to wonder if all of the shock is necessary. Perhaps Dogtooth deserves a better rating than the one I'm giving it. But I find it difficult and dangerous to recommend a film where siblings are forced to sexually service each other, cats are murdered with gardening shears, and where people get hit in the head with hand weights and VCR machines, especially if the abuse is calmly accepted because it's coming from a parent. I could have been more into the film if the ending had more power and force. But even when there's a glimmer of freedom on the horizon, it's still frustratingly ambiguous. The film has an important message, yes, and it's good-looking, well-made, and delightfully puzzling. I think it's a good challenging film. But I also think that in all likelihood Dogtooth will alienate a very clear majority of its audience and leave the rest vexed and dissatisfied.
Director: Rian Johnson
Starring: Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel Weisz, Rinko Kikuchi
Release Date: May 15, 2009
Running Time: 114 minutes
Rating: 3.5/5
"The perfect con is one where everyone involved gets just what they wanted." These are the words of Stephen (Mark Ruffalo), the older of the Brothers Bloom, two of the most famous con men in the industry. It is this idea that sets up Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom, a caper comedy that comes off as neither too bitter, nor too sweet. Three central characters motivate the story. Though the Brothers Bloom may have gained a reputation among the world's criminal circles, it's soon made clear that Stephen is the real mastermind- his younger brother, simply named Bloom (Adrien Brody) is merely playing along with the con, and really wants to give up the job altogether. So Stephen arranges one last con- this time, the mark is the beautiful and eccentric heiress Penelope (Rachel Weisz), who spends most of her days bored and alone in her mansion, learning a variety of strange hobbies. (And I can't of course forget the silent-but-deadly Rinko Kikuchi as the team's hired gun and explosives expert). The plan is to take Penelope on the world in a high-stakes smuggling caper, fake their own deaths, let Penelope drive away with the adventure she craved while they drive away with the money. The only problem? Bloom falls in love with the con's target. The affectionate tragedy at the heart of The Brothers Bloom is most clearly visible in the quirky backstory given to us at the beginning which goes all the way back to the duo's playground years, describing their first con. What this story reveals to us is the reason that the brothers deceive in the first place- while Bloom is the con, he can be whoever he wants to be. The only problem with this is that he can never be comfortable with who he really is. This opens the door for an endless of series of parallels to be drawn between Stephen as the director, Bloom as an actor, and Penelope as the audience. Sadly, that's a passageway a bit too long for me to wander down at the moment. The point us that each principle character in The Brothers Bloom is trapped in a false reality of sorts- some are struggling to break free, and some would rather lose themselves in the fantasy. Now, one thing that's bizarre about this movie is that though it may seem modern, many of its elements- fashion, architecture, modes of travel, etc, etc. seem very heavily borrowed from the 1920's. At times, this odd mixture is beautiful- and at other times, it's distracting. Regardless, it's rare indeed for a piece like this to go through such great lengths to establish a unique aesthetic, and for that I must compliment it. But if this film suffers in any place, it would be in the story itself, and unfortunately, that's a very significant area to mess up in. The actual crime-plot that the brothers try to rig up is so complex and convoluted that we can't tell what's real and what's fake. When a plot twist occurs- and this happens relatively frequently throughout the second half of the movie- it's hard for us to care because it's hard for us to think as fast as these characters are thinking. In a more cerebral movie, this would be more welcome. But this is a romance-adventure-comedy of sorts. Instead, we should be expected to focus on the characters. And if you keep your focus there, you'll be magnificently rewarded in more ways than you'd expect. But don't ask me what exactly went on with the Russian Mafia in the end, or why they were in Russia to begin with. Because I don't know. But thankfully, I don't think this is a movie that requires me to know that stuff, anyways. Though the story is surprisingly hard to follow, the humor itself is hit-or-miss, and the style of the film is undoubtedly pretentious and forced, I still can recommend The Brothers Bloom as an entertaining and warmly moving piece. Like in a good con, everyone should leave the theater, having received just what they wanted.
Director: Grant Heslov
Starring: Ewan MacGregor, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey
Release Date: November 6, 2009
Running Time: 94 minutes
Rating: 3.5/5
First off: The Men Who Stare at Goats is not a bad film. Many critics have nitpicked it for various reasons, including, but not limited to, stereotypical characters, subpar comedy, and a lack of true edginess. I think it's unfair to criticize a satire for not going far enough, as if there is a certain degree of subversiveness that must be attained to achieve satire. To deride the film for this reason is to try to analyze the film's intentions, rather than to analyze the film itself. The Men Who Stare at Goats won't stoop to your expectations of satire as broadly caricatured politicians with their political parties labeled for our convenience, if those are your expectations for satire. Rather, it's a story that focuses more on the people involved in it, as representations of different problems and different ways of resolving them. From the get-go, we see Bob Wilton (Ewan MacGregor), a reporter, going to the war-front to mentally escape from his cheating wife. For him, running into Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) is a godsend. Lyn introduces Bob to a top-secret branch of the government specializing in the development of psychic powers and New Age-inspired fighting tactics, providing our hero with just the new sense of wonder and hope that he needed in his life at the time. Here is the film's core. Within every soldier shown to us in this movie, we see someone embracing an outlandish lifestyle in an effort to run away from their past- like a religion, this bizarre kind of warfare works to fill an existential void of sorts- even if you're not in the "psychic warrior" division, this probably isn't an uncommon reason to join the army. At the beginning of the film, we see the text tell us that "more of this is true than you would believe." The Men Who Stare at Goats is, in fact, based on the extensive research of unorthodox journalist Jon Ronson, complied and published in the book of the same name. The military/political satire in this film comes not from the fact that the military is doing this (I was surprised to learn how many of these characters were actually based on real people)- but from the fact that we, as an audience, can believe it. Our government and our culture have evolved to such a point that when we find out that taxpayers' money has funded telepathic research, we're not even surprised. That's the real joke of the movie. And believe me, I was laughing. Halfway through the film, Cassady demonstrates an exercise known as "cloud-bursting" and begins to stare at clouds while driving in an attempt to dissolve them. Moments later, we see Wilton deriding him for crashing the truck into the one rock when they had an endless expanse of desert that they could have driven into. Between psychological torture, subliminal messages, and illuminati symbols, everything presented to us here is handled with a refreshing degree of sarcasm. It's the only way a crazy story like this would have worked- if it really is a story. Half of the film is flashbacks, and even most of the flashbacks are anecdotal. Hence by not confining itself to the narrative of a traditional adventure-war movie, The Men Who Stare at Goats is able to extract the funniest and strangest stories from its non-fiction source material, and mask its A-list actors' inexperience in comedic roles. In the end, it may have a regrettably subdued ending and just as many half-good jokes as good ones, but the satisfaction of the journey will persuade you to forgive even the most glaring mistakes.
Director: Anne Fontaine
Starring: Audrey Tautou
Release Date: April 22, 2009
Running Time: 105 minutes
Rating: 3.5/5
I'd like the point out that the title Coco Before Chanel is more than just a clever convention, it's a concise description of what the film is about. This is a film that understands itself- this is not the story of the glamorous life of a successful fashion designer. Before she was "Chanel", she was "Coco"- this is not the story of a figure's plummeting rise to success. This is the story of a human being and her search for an identity. The biopic is a troubling and difficult task for any filmmaker- the result can be fascinating and surprising, or dull and unpleasant. While the film does seem to lean towards the dull end, it's still a decent piece of artistry, and there are some things that definitely stand out for me when looking back to the time that I watched it- about two years ago or more, according to memory. A great majority of the film is taken up by petty high-society conversation, outdoor scenes with blurry facial close-ups, and pretty music set to uneventful drama. Still, there's a certain amount of benefit to the exploration of the character. When the film begins, she's a cabaret singer- we see her standing on the stage, trying to sing and dance, and we immediately feel like she doesn't belong. From the start she shows determination and passion, but throughout the film she is never comfortable in one fixed place; instead she is kept in a gradual forward motion. Her affairs with a wealthy baron catapult her from impoverished barmaid to the position of a gentleman's mistress. From here she begins designing hats as a hobby, gains popularity amongst wealthy friends, and the rest is history. The film stops here and there to highlight tinges of bisexuality in the lead character, wisely choosing to refrain from bringing that to the front to distract from the story. As someone who usually sees Tautou in the role of the blushing innocent (Amelie, Mood Indigo), seeing her here in this more pensive (yet suggestive) context came an entertaining surprise. The film's focus is the soul of Chanel's fashion ideology, "less is more". The same can be said for the bulk of Audrey Tautou's performance here- so at the very least, Coco Before Chanel becomes a film that, though mediocre and a bit underwhelming, succeeds in demonstrating its star's versatility and maturity as an actress. The direction, like the story, is largely unassuming with the exception of the final few moments, where, in a brilliant nod to a similar shot in All About Eve, we see Chanel's designs paraded down a staircase by a series of models reflected endlessly in a wall of mirrors. And yet no matter how beautiful it is, Coco Before Chanel remains as plodding a drama as ever there was, really only interesting to those who are interested in Coco Chanel to begin with. But then again, even this film was a masterpiece, one would still be hard-pressed to convince anyone to watch a biopic about someone who designs clothes for a living. Hmm. C'est la vie, I suppose.
Director: Greg Mottola
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig
Release Date: April 3, 2009
Running Time: 107 minutes
Rating: 3/5
Many forget that before Jesse Eisenberg starred in that movie where he battled zombies in an amusement park, he starred in this movie, where he is a zombie in an amusement park. Thus we have Adventureland: a film that seems very much to me like an indie cult hit wannabe. It's got idiosyncratic characters, deadpan dialogue, slapstick, shame, painful romance, and a hell of a lot of 80's nostalgia. It doesn't fail to deliver any of these things to us- but- a satisfying comedy-drama-romance needs to have a bit more than just the sum of a traditionally defined set of elements. You can tell that this film tries to be appealing, but the fact that you can tell that a film is trying anything, that's when a film is forced. Some may look back at Adventureland affectionately as a tender drama. Some may see it as a comedy. And some, like me, were completely bored the whole time and would rather just not remember it. But if the film is a part of any one specific genre, it is most certainly not a comedy. Even its funny moments aren't actually that funny. It's more of a droll drama about someone who can't afford the price of a European vacation, so they spend the summer at home, working at a local theme park to earn money for college life in New York. Adventureland is really a portrayal of a certain time in someone's life when they were with a certain set of people and they wished that they could be somewhere else, and then they look back and realize that even when they were at the last place they wanted to be that they were still having an amazing time and they'll never be able to revisit that place again. This nostalgia is never exhibited by the main character during the film- instead, it is laced in every corner of the film's script, design, and direction, buried in every sappy guitar instrumental that you hear on this film's soundtrack. Every moment of this movie looks like it's being remembered by someone twenty years after it happened. Someone who, rather than letting us encounter the story, drags us along on their personal trip down memory lane. Researching the film's background, I found that my theory isn't entirely incorrect: director Greg Mottola, probably in good standing with his studio after the success of Superbad, convinced them to let him do just one personal film, and then based the script for Adventureland off of his own past experiences. But frankly, no one will emotionally connect with his own story as much as he will, despite his efforts to persuade us to feel for these characters and immerse us in their situation. Adventureland is competent. I can't say that the time and effort spent on creating this film were wasted- like I said, there are people who will enjoy this film. And even if you don't like the film, the performances of the principle leads Eisenberg and Stewart are still rewarding. But that's about the most that I can say about a film that made me fidget in my seat as much as I did, waiting for the credits to roll.
Director: Jaco Van Dormael
Starring: Jared Leto, Sarah Polley, Diane Kruger, Linh Dan Pham
Release Date: September 12, 2009
Running Time: 141 minutes
Rating: 3/5
To everybody who thinks that Cloud Atlas was pretentious, I present to you Mr. Nobody. This is what Cloud Atlas would look like if it was as empty, contrived, and preachy as many people say it is. The idea behind Mr. Nobody is that a boy's parents are getting divorced and he's stuck on the station platform, forced to decide whether to leave with his mother or stay with his father. Immediately, infinite possibilities are laid out before us: we are shown both possible versions of the future, one where he stays with his mother, one where he stays with his father, one where he marries a blonde, one where he marries a brunette, one where he grows old and goes to Mars, one where he winds up in a coma, etc, etc. Now this is a brilliant idea. In fact, I could take the same footage from the same movie, slightly trim and rearrange it, and produce a considerably better movie. What would I alter, then? In one word: attitude. Director Jan Van Dormael indulges us with some of the most fascinating visual perfectionism I've seen in a movie, using a highly controlled color palette to switch between a sparkling future, a surreal space between dimensions, and a sparkling future, among other settings. But the beautiful mise en scène only barely compensates for the huge mess that is the rest of the film. The key problem with the story presents itself almost immediately: the fact that it's being told to us through a 118-year-old Mr. Nobody living in the future who claims to not remember anything about his past and then suddenly tells us everything about his past- like, all possible iterations. By this point, most of the audience should be intensely frustrated- that's not how memories work. I understand this movie is trying to through the nature of time itself into question here, but once something is in the past, it's in the past- the future has various outcomes, but you can't remember all of the possible outcomes of your past, because they didn't happen to you. And of course the movie, in the end, explains this through a cheap and unanticipated cop-out. But about fifteen minutes into the film, a future-world reporter asks the 118-year-old Mr. Nobody, "And what was it like in the past... sexually? You know, before sex became obsolete?" It was at this point that I gave up on the movie. Regardless of whether or not babies are made in test tubes, people will still have sex for recreation. And if Jaco Van Dormael's pessimistic view of technological progress dictates that people will prefer to induce orgasms by other means, then why the hell are people going out and having sex today when they could very well just stay home and masturbate? We have the "technology" for that already. This is just the first of many things in the movie that don't make any sense except in the context of the writer's self-righteous perspective on reality. We are told that the film's hero, Nemo Nobody, can see the future because some angels forgot to touch him before he was born or something. Well, if he can see the future, then why does he have such a hard time making these crucial decisions? At one point in the film, Nemo runs into his true love after being separated from her for over a dozen years. She gives him her phone number and walks away, and a raindrop falls from a cloudless sky and smears the ink. This is explained as some kind of cosmic karma caused by water vapor from a tea kettle in Brazil, put on the stove by a Brazilian who lost his job because Nemo didn't buy a more expensive pair of jeans when he was at the store. How the f*ck does not buying a cheaper pair of jeans violate economic ethics? If anyone is morally responsible for the Brazilian losing his job, it's the f*cking retailer! Even at the film's central train station platform scene, custody would have most definitely worked out before the mom actually left! The movie even interrupts itself to lecture us on the nature of the universe. Mr. Nobody has everything that it needs to succeed within the central story itself- and yet it decides to pollute itself through overused 60's pop songs, wretchedly contradictory information, and obnoxious levels of whimsy. In the end, it's nothing more than a New Age motivational poster: trying (and failing) to be more inspiring and profound than it needed to be in the first place.
Director: James Cameron
Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver
Release Date: December 18, 2009
Running Time: 161 minutes
Rating: 3/5
It's easy to pardon Avatar's mistakes because it is a blockbuster. If it were a B-picture, critics would have no problem tearing it apart. And yet it is an A-picture with a B-level story. To try to attack the film at the time of its release would be impossible- it was the biggest film of the year in many respects, and its excessive promotion and cultural hype moved it to an unassailable height. Its technical prowess also had something to do with it, I suppose. But now that I have the opportunity, I'm afraid I'll have to speak my mind about this. Avatar is quite possibly the most overrated film of the decade. Now hold on one moment there before you take up your torches and pitchforks- please, just give me a chance to list a few decent reasons, and then throw me to the dogs if you must. One of the things about Avatar that garnered so much praise was its use of computer-generated imagery to conjure an imaginary landscape. As an experiment in CGI, Avatar was considerably more successful and realistic than the earlier films of, say, Tim Burton or Robert Rodriguez. However, culturally, we've kind of grown to acknowledge large usage of CGI as a mistake- the first two Star Wars films exemplify this. Avatar's visuals may have impressed at the time, in 3D, but on a regular DVD home viewing, the effects seem highly outdated- CGI can be immersive, but only when there's enough traditional sets and special effects to balance it out. We've seen the trick done so many times, that we now see it as a trick, and we can no longer lose ourselves in the illusion. Second, the film's plot remains frustratingly unoriginal. Avatar borrows its main storyline from Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, and practically every other revisionist-minded "cowboys and indians" story that's ever been done. The only difference is that the main character is paralyzed from the waist down and partakes in a scientific mission that enables him to telepathically live through the body of an alien as an "avatar" and intermingle with the Na'avi tribe to help the military seize the assets of "unobtainium". (In a earlier review of this film, I criticized the word "unobtainium": I retract this now, as it is a word used by scientists in hypothetical examples involving rare materials. However, it still say it sounds dumb within the movie). The problem with this trope, though, is that when done wrong, the result is Avatar: I am perfectly okay with films that adopt new-age ideology, but this film is more preachy about its philosophies than some Christian films are about theirs. The aliens in this film are not a stand-in for Native Americans, but rather, they are a stand-in for our stereotypes about Native Americans as nature-worshipping, spiritualistic, magical, and deprived of anything resembling cultural structure at all. (Even when he's making a film about the beauty and divinity of nature, though, Cameron still can't resist overloading the work with enough carnage and explosions to bore even your standard action movie fan.) Avatar constantly misrepresents different ways of life by dichotomizing them and reducing them to stereotypes, thus totally skewing the actual complexity that lies behind the concept of "harmony with the environment". Avatar basically seems to imply that the only way to truly respect nature live in a tree fort with a group of half-naked animists, and that if you don't align with that world view and start worshipping "mother nature", you're a warmongering nitwit who just wants to drop a bomb on all his problems. I know this is probably not the agenda or the message of the film, but the illogical way in which the story presents itself involuntarily conveys this message to audiences who most likely won't even recognize it. My point is, Avatar is entertaining as movie in and of itself, but it never stretches out to be more than that. In the end, it's got some pretty pictures and interesting ideas, but that's about it- the film is too obnoxious and lazy to really be anything more. So yeah, it's not a bad film. But to say that it's anything new is to insult the modern audience.
Dishonorable Mentions
Director: Terry Gilliam
Starring: Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, Verne Troyer, Lily Cole, Andrew Garfield
Release Date: December 25, 2009
Running Time: 123 minutes
Rating: 2.5/5
There has always been a theme of melancholy within Terry Gilliam's films- and it becomes more and more visible with each film he releases. Gilliam reached the perfect intersection between brilliant fantasy and painful social commentary right around the mid to late 90's- the 12 Monkeys period- but his two latest films, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and The Zero Theorem, have been almost too misanthropic to stomach. What's the difference? I would say that it has something to do with content- simple enough. 12 Monkeys is about a time traveller trying to make sense of a cataclysmic puzzle; Brazil is about an everyman caught in the machinery of an insane dystopia; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is about a writer searching for the heart of the American dream. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, on the other hand, is about an artist whose work is under-appreciated by the selfish hedonists of today's world who ignore him because the art that he presents has grown quickly outdated. One discernible difference between good storytelling and mediocre storytelling is the relationship between the main character and the other characters: all of the characters in this story seemed to exist to relate to or interact with Parnassus; yes, they had lives on their own, but those parts of the story weren't convincingly written- neither were any parts of the story, for that matter- because it's all from the perspective of Parnassus himself, stand-in for the author. What I'm saying is, this film is Gilliam's complaint that people don't like him anymore because the truth makes them uncomfortable. No, Terry. People don't like you anymore because you're making garbage like The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, that's why. The entire story is dripping with the atmosphere of poverty and decay, but this time instead of using that to create a state of morbid detachment (12 Monkeys) it uses it to create an environment of emotional overload, where we have to watch people hang on the edge of their rope financially and spiritually as they get pissed on by everyone in London. Doctor Parnassus is hundreds of years old; all he really does is just mope around and make bad decisions. He's been given a magical mirror through which he can teach people about the path of enlightenment and goodness, but through which people are also able to fall into the trap of their hedonistic pleasures. But the film never goes into a good explanation of how that sort of thing is defined. If you go into the mirror and succumb to the dark side, you don't come out. And yet they decorate this "imaginarium" as if it's a regular traveling side-show act- that's not only dishonest, that's dangerous and everyone has every reason to be suspicious and upset about this group of people. Things make no sense outside the imaginarium, but they make even less sense inside of it. During the climax of the film, when rooms start twisting and turning, and our hero moves from one fantasy into the next, we have absolutely no idea what's going on or why we should care about it, because the rules that have been established are too complicated and petty, and the rules of the "imaginarium"- that is, the rules that actually matter- aren't elaborated on at all. Much of this can also be blamed on the disorienting CGI- Terry Gilliam has shown that he doesn't need CGI to make his films, so the lame animation done here is doubly disappointing. The computer textures within the "dream world" of the magic mirror are lifeless and artificial, and beyond that, simply awkward. By the midpoint of the film, we're not only confused, but bored because we're confused. Another trademark of Gilliam's is his ending. No matter what kind of a film he makes, he always likes to top it off with an ending that completely turns the tables, reminding us that we can't dwell too much on the film, because it is, after all, just a story. These endings are supposed to make us upset, but also satisfied- at the end of this film, I just felt upset.
Director: John Lee Hancock
Starring: Sandra Bullock, Quinton Aaron, Tim McGraw, Lily Collins, Jae Head
Release Date: November 20, 2009
Running Time: 129 minutes
Rating: 2.5/5
The Blind Side is a film that seems all too much like a magazine article. Great drama films, especially biographical films, take an anecdote and then use that to reflect on a much larger issue. The Blind Side, on the other hand, never really feels like it's more than an anecdote. This may be a good thing; if it tried to be anything more, things could definitely get messy. It's a football movie that's not about football, it's a movie about race relations that doesn't really say all that much about race relations: all of the places where it could have been actually thought-provoking are instead sappy, awkwardly tiptoeing around all of the politics present in the subtext. Every biographical drama has a reason for choosing the true story that it decides to retell. The story of The Blind Side is that of Michael Oher, who was adopted into the family of Leigh Anne Tuohy, giving him the ability to pursue his great talent in the field of football. The reason that The Blind Side wants to tell the life story of Michael Oher has nothing to do with social commentary, and everything to do with how much a story like this will appeal to its niche target audience: the audience being right-wing Southern Christians who would like to believe that the actions of the heroine in this movie make them seem more generous to the less-fortunate by default. But on a different level, The Blind Side is also just a really boring movie. Most of it is dull drama, with very little going on- aside from a few key scenes, many of the interactions between characters seem like filler content added in to stretch out the story. This is funny, because the movie is two hours long. The film even begins on an interrogation scene which seems very pivotal, a scene constructed to look like something it's not- an hour and a half later, this scene is revealed to be very inconsequential to the larger plot. Placing it at the beginning of the film is a cheap trick to involve us in a story that we wouldn't be involved in otherwise. Of course, the performances of leading actor Quinton Aaron and leading actress Sandra Bullock carry the story through. But aside from that, there's practically very little else in this movie that makes it worth the time spent watching it, even if you do happen to be a Baltimore Ravens fan.
Director: Roland Emmerich
Starring: John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Danny Glover, Woody Harrelson
Release Date: November 13, 2009
Running Time: 158 minutes
Rating: 2/5
Though on its own, 2012 actually has a leg or two to stand on, its impressive special effects can't mask the fact that it's nothing we haven't seen before- especially as far as director Roland Emmerich is concerned. In Independence Day, we are introduced to the story by a few scientists observing strange phenomena, phenomena which the whole world soon becomes witness to, escalating into a catastrophe of global proportions, and forcing people to band together in a fight for survival. In The Day After Tomorrow, we are introduced to the story by a few scientists observing strange phenomena, phenomena which the whole world soon becomes witness to, escalating into a catastrophe of global proportions, and forcing people to band together in a fight for survival. Guess what happens in 2012? The exact same thing, with no differences. Each film also follows three or more story arcs of different survivors, alternating between them with no rhyme or reason. Roland Emmerich is not my least favorite director because of his style or his desire to make disaster films- he is my least favorite director because he displays a complete lack of originality in making them, repeating the same story over and over again. It's bad enough when I have to watch a bad film- it's unbearable when I have to watch the same bad film three times over, in different incarnations (though Independence Day wasn't so bad). Everything good about this film comes through seeing a volcano blow up, seeing Washington and St. Peter's Basilica destroyed, seeing giant waves crash over the Himalayas, and seeing giant boats knock up against each other like bumper cars. But what we see in between these doomsday thrills is hardly enough to keep us entertained in the meantime. We're bogged down by complex and bogus scientific explanations of the disasters, and presented with a variety of unlikeable, droll characters. There's not even a need to discuss the ridiculousness of the premise, where the end of the world occurs for practically no reason (the title is inspired by the year in which the Mayan calendar ends). What's really hilarious is how many leaps in logic the film makes even with this as its operating premise. The scope of this film is nothing to be scoffed at, but massive films can still be massive failures, and this one is too bloated and frustrating to be anything else.
Director: Ron Howard
Starring: Tom Hanks, Ewan MacGregor, Ayelet Zurer, Stellan Skarsgard
Release Date: May 15, 2009
Running Time: 138 minutes
Rating: 2/5
I seriously never thought that I would see a movie about a serial killer that bored me. I thought wrong. Angels & Demons, sequel to the film adaptation of the highly popular book "The DaVinci Code", features a series of brutal murders committed upon high-ranking Vatican officials. These murders happen to correspond to Illuminati symbols, so a professor of symbology is called in to inspect the situation and help predict the pattern and stop the next death. The film starts implausibly, and becomes more and more implausible as it continues: hence the image of a helicopter in St. Peter's Square flying up into the air to detonate a case of antimatter stolen from CERN. The same can very much be said about our expectations of the film that we develop from the onset: it starts disappointingly, and continues to grow more and more disappointing. Our central character, Robert Langdon, is one of the most uninteresting detectives I've seen, and his female counterpart in the film is equally bland, added in to the plot for purely customary reasons. The problem with thrillers centered around conspiracies is that a majority of the detective work has to revolve around history reviews and tedious exposition. The plot to a mystery isn't always required to make sense to the audience, but to make things needlessly complicated and to expect the audience to catch up is simply irritating. There is little to no reason for us to really care about the characters within the film, and hence our involvement in the film's story is something that remains on a purely intellectual level- and unfortunately, this tends to get tiring after the second act. By the time you reach the end of the film, you've either passively given up on the plot or you've gotten a headache trying to stay involved in it.
Director: Iain Softley
Starring: Brendan Fraser, Paul Bettany, Helen Mirren, Andy Serkis, Jim Broadbent
Release Date: January 23, 2009
Running Time: 106 minutes
Rating: 2/5
We go to see fantasy films to see worlds and stories bursting with magic and imagination: which is why Inkheart, for all that it is, is such an embarrassment to the genre. The plot of Inkheart is as follows: a man has an ability to bring items and characters from storybook worlds into the real world just by reading out loud. Inconvenient, yes, but that's only the tail end of the problems this magical "gift" causes. What we're left with is a series of complex rules which lead to frustrating situations: when you read someone out of a book, someone from the real world gets transported into world of the book. Hence the main character's wife disappears into the world of a book entitled "Inkheart" which is apparently so rare and hard to find that he can't bring her back out of it again. This protagonist (played by Brendan Fraser) refrains from explaining his magical abilities to his daughter until they get kidnapped by a villain that came out of "Inkheart". The story has good elements: we get to see some interesting objects and monsters from beloved stories, but the idea is too concerning: what happens in the story world? How can the content of a book change without the text in the book itself changing? What happens when they read from a history book? Can they time travel this way? There's certainly enough imagination present, but by no means is there enough of it to really propel things. Instead, we're stuck searching for loopholes and red-herrings, as the plot distracts itself in all of the wrong places, leading up to a climax that really fails to be climactic. A giant CGI dark cloud just doesn't cut it; sorry. This might even work well as a beginning to a much larger story (which it is), but the way that this film handles the subject matter, it really just opens doors instead of walking through them, not to mention the clichéd acting and two-dimensional dialogue. Despite all the promises of high-stakes adventure it makes, Inkheart misunderstands the basic laws of creating a fantasy, in the end failing to satisfy on nearly every level.
Director: Shawn Levy
Starring: Ben Stiller, Amy Adams, Owen Wilson, Hank Azaria, Robin Williams
Release Date: May 22, 2009
Running Time: 104 minutes
Rating: 2/5
The most difficult and shameful sequels are the ones that really didn't need to happen. Don't get me wrong, Night at the Museum was a pretty good film to begin with, but it wasn't that good, and it certainly didn't leave us wondering what would happen in the future of its bland stock character protagonist. When we saw Night at the Museum, we knew that the movie was just an excuse to entertain us by bringing to life all of the historical figures and museum statues that we would all love to see interacting with each other. And Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian manages to do the same thing, with an entirely new set of characters... and yet it has none of the magic of the original. When we were seeing this for the first time, it was gimmicky, and yet it was fresh and fun. Now that we're seeing the same thing for a second time, it's not as strong, and like many sequels it has the fatal flaw of leaning on the idea rather than on the characters. We liked Ben Stiller because of the human characters that he interacted with: his son, his ex-wife, his romantic interest, and the museum guards that worked at the museum before him. This is true even in spite of the fact that Teddy Roosevelt, Sacagawea, and that dinosaur are the characters that we really remember. In this film, all of the characters (besides Stiller) are just reanimated museum pieces- we know they'll be gone with the morning, so we deliberately refrain from rooting for any real attachment Stiller may develop with them. Yeah, there's an interesting plot concerning the Pharaoh's brother and a plan to usher in the apocalypse from the dark realm of Horus, or whatever. And there's one of the most hilarious Deus Ex Machinas I've ever seen. But like other fantasy films, it relies too hard on its own arbitrary "rules" to take up space in the dialogue, so the film winds up half wild-goose-chase, half exposition. If there's any fun or joy in seeing it, that joy would most likely come from watching the Al Capone, Oscar the Grouch, and Darth Vader interact. But in all other respects, Battle of the Smithsonian is just another emotionally lacking follow-up to a heartfelt original.
Director: Hoyt Yeatman
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Tracy Morgan, Penelope Cruz, Jon Favreau, Zach Galifianakis
Release Date: July 14, 2009
Running Time: 88 minutes
Rating: 0.5/5
There are good films, there are bad films, there are terrible films, and then there are just stupid films. G-Force is a film with an idea so inherently dumb, so inherently gimmicky, that promises us before it's even begun how terrible it's going to be- that it's probably one of the dumbest, if not the dumbest film I've ever seen. And I seriously don't even know how I wound up watching it in the first place. Who thought that guinea pig spies were ever a good idea? It opens the door for a combination of every spy movie cliche and every pet movie cliche that there ever was- it spares us no torture device that it has available. The problem with family-friendly comedies is that writers who will usually write in a sex joke, will try to sub in a poop joke or a fart joke instead. Because hey, kids love that stuff, right? The mindset that operates this way has no appreciation for the art form of film itself- and what I mean by that is, a desire to produce something that will have a degree of beauty and quality through its ability to entertain. Instead, we have G-Force, an exemplifier of the summer Disney comedy that clearly just doesn't care. And to add insult to injury, the fart jokes are all delivered to us by CGI guinea pigs. What's most surprising about this film is the A-list cast. Zach Galifianakis? Rhys Ivans? There's even a Steve Buscemi cameo in the middle, for goodness' sakes! What on earth are Sam Rockwell, Penelope Cruz, and Jon Favreau doing in a film like this? I can't provide answers for these questions, but I can leave you to guess. The fact that I've seen the film obligates me to give a slight nod to it. But I go to bed tonight happy knowing that G-Force's popularity died at the box office. May it sink to the bottom of the $5 bin at Wal-Mart and let no mother buy it for her kids, and may it be forgotten amidst the countless terrible films of this decade, as it probably will be. Whatever 5-year old laughed at the fart jokes in this movie will grow up to become an adult who will never remember this film- but for every G-Force, there's a Wall-E, a How to Train Your Dragon, and a Toy Story 3 that they will remember. And thank God for that.
-Julian Rhodes
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