Cowboys and Aliens

Cowboys and Aliens

I was privileged to see a couple of reels of this at Butt-Numb-A-Thon last year, and I was pleased but not terribly excited about what we saw, to be honest. A lot of the character stuff felt very in media res and awkward. Despite the "meh" reviews, I went in with an open mind, and though I winced at the sight of five screenwriting credits, I was still determined to at least not hate it.

Well, I loved it, as it turns out. No, it's not as good a sci-fi/western mashup as Firefly was, but what is? (Alan "Wash" Tudyk amusingly Tweeted that it suffered from a painful lack of Chinese.) It's a little more western than sci-fi, and it's the western portions where the movie really shines. Daniel Craig proves more than ever why he's an excellent addition to the Leading Men Club, and while Harrison Ford doesn't have *quite* the spark that he used to, he's still Harrison Ford, which is more awesome than most of us will ever be. Paul Dano, Sam Rockwell, Adam Beach, Clancy Brown, and Keith Carridine are all stellar in supporting roles, and they're the movie's real strength.

The movie is beautifully shot, and I think it has one of the best-written kiss scenes in recent memory (one that actually has a plot purpose and isn't just there to make you all tingly). The alien tech is kind of generic, but then that's how it is in most space movies nowadays. The aliens themselves are duly terrifying (though nowhere near as scary as Attack the Block's aliens). I think the biggest thing that I wish had been better was the music. I know it's tough to find a balance between western themes and sci-fi themes, musically, but this score was pretty bland, in my opinion.

The movie as a whole, though, is very enjoyable.

Super 8

After work yesterday morning, I went to see Super 8, which was one of my most anticipated movies of the summer. I spent the week wallowing in some the movies that inspired it - Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, Alien, Scanners, E.T., etc. - and walked into the theater with a mixture of excitement and trepidation (because it probably was not going to live up to expectations).



The movie is certainly not perfect, but it is EXTREMELY good, worthy to be put next to the awesome geek movies of most of our childhoods, particularly those centered around child characters. I say "most of our" childhoods, because I'm still catching up to movies that everyone else my age saw when they were kids. I don't have the nostalgia to look back on these movies as the Best Ever (I mean, E.T. is quite good, but robbed for Best Picture in 1982? Not really. Yeah, I said it.), but I definitely get warm fuzzies just as if these movies were actually a part of my own childhood.

The less said about the plot of Super 8 the better. The trailer tells you everything you need to know before going in. A group of kids are making a movie, and strange things start happening that turn their little town upside down. There are a bunch of kid actors you've never heard of and one that maybe you have (Elle Fanning, who I vastly prefer to her older sister), plus the Friday Night Lights guy (Kyle Chandler), the guy who used to date Julianna Margulies on E.R. and in real life (Ron Eldard), and the guy who's in every Frank Darabont project except Shawshank (Noah Emmerich).

The mysterious element in the movie is ever so slightly underdeveloped. I think this is mainly because the movie is far more interested in the kids - as well it should be - and their point of view is limited. These are some of the best movie kids I've seen in a long, long time. They are real kids, not actors playing some Hollywood jagoff's idea of what kids are like. They talk like real kids, about topics that kids actually talk about. It's hard for the main character Joe (Joel Courtney) not to be a favorite, but he gets serious competition from Cary (Ryan Lee), the runt who's way too into explosives. Cary is just such an awesome kid, and I want to hang out with him and watch movies. I also really dug Charles (Riley Griffiths), whose family is very reminiscent of the Weasleys of Harry Potter. He's not as awesome as Ron (but then, who is?), and he has kind of an unlikeable streak, but he still manages to be a mostly sympathetic character. Notable small roles are filled by the amazing Dale Dickey (one of the great supporting actors of last year's Winter's Bone) and Dan Castelleneta (the voice of Homer Simpson). I want to see it again so I can spot Abrams regulars Greg Grunberg and Michael Giacchino in cameos as well (Giacchino also composed the wonderful score).

This movie is clearly inspired by the classic "Peter Pan era" Spielberg films, and as one of the film's producers, his stamp on the material is hard to deny. But I feel like Super 8 is very much its own film. In the same spirit as those great early 80s adventures, but it never feels like a copy of any of those films.

I don't think you'd get very far out of the theater after the movie before you realized this, but stick around for the credits and you will see Charles's film in its entirety. It is fantastic, and I was very much reminded (not just during their little film, but in the scenes where they were making it as well) of those guys who made their own version of Raiders of the Lost Ark when they were kids. Lots of cool movie geek references are woven into their story, like the fact that Joe learned about makeup from Dick Smith's book (Smith is a legend in film makeup, having most notably created Linda Blair's super-scary demonic look for The Exorcist).

Side note: In watching all those movies in preparation for Super 8, I have discovered that - aside from it being the film Super 8 most closely resembles - I find Close Encounters of the Third Kind to be Spielberg's greatest film, period. The scope of that story is unreal, and the various human perspectives on the mysterious elements are some of the best storytelling I've ever seen. I need to do a proper post on it someday.

X-Men: First Class

Mutant and Proud!

So I went to see X-Men: First Class yesterday, which I thought was mostly excellent. My only big problem was the way they tried to shoehorn in the nicknames. There's actually a scene where the "teen" mutants are sitting around figuring out what they're going to call themselves. "And you should be Professor X! And you should be Magneto!" I mean, really. And don't get me started on the coining of the term "X-Men." I mean, I'm sure the film accurately explains where the term came from, but to have someone actually say it was unbelievably corny.

The rest of it, though, is pretty spectacular. I love the 60s trappings and that Charles says "groovy." There are also two cameos from familiar franchise faces that should please fans (and certainly pleased the audience I saw it with). The most compelling parts of the film, as one might expect, are the scenes with Charles and Erik (later known as Prof. X and Magneto, respectively, of course, but those aren't their names yet). My movie husband, Michael Fassbender, is amazing as usual and he and James McAvoy have pretty great chemistry. I've never read the comics, so I don't know if this is true to the canon or not, but I love the idea that they were friends - and very likely are still quite fond of each other. They just stand on opposite sides of the mutant issue and have very different moral values. My favorite scene by far is the sequence where they are going around the world and contacting fellow mutants, especially when they're recruiting "Angel." I almost wanted one of them to ask "Do I make you horny, baby?"

There's some great action in this movie, too (I would expect no less from the director of Kick-Ass). And I loved the integration of historical events, most notably the Cuban Missile Crisis.

This brings me to one weird thing about my screening, though. About ten minutes before the show started, about 100 children came filing in (seriously). All schools are presumably out by now, so I'm thinking this was a summer camp or something. Some of the kids were 12/13, but many of them could not have been older than about 7, which is TOO YOUNG (in general) to see a movie like this. Seriously, there are Nazis and torture chambers and mothers getting shot in the FIRST TEN MINUTES. In the rest of the movie, there are also exotic dancers, a blue but otherwise quite naked Jennifer Lawrence, and a good deal of violence. And the f-word, though only once. Earth to adults who are responsible for other people's children - just because it's a comic book movie doesn't mean it's for kids. Just, wow.

Overall, I really loved it. I don't remember much about the first two X-Men movies (which are the only ones I've seen), but this one is just as good as those, as I remember them. Maybe my favorite of the lot (if you leave out the cheesy nicknaming scene, of course :P).

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Since this is over a week out from the release date, it's probably too late to urge anyone NOT to see this movie in 3D. Audiences have apparently gone overwhelmingly for the traditional format, so perhaps the warning isn't necessary. It actually was filmed in 3D, so it probably looks better than most, especially some of the beautiful daylight scenes, but a LOT of this movie takes place at night. And since 3D makes the picture dimmer, that means it's REALLY dark. So if you haven't seen it yet, skip the 3D.


Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

So, I guess the cool thing for all the cool kids to do in CoolTown is hate on this new Pirates movie. As such, I guess I'm just uncool.

Because I really enjoyed it. A lot.

That's not to say it doesn't have problems, and it's certainly my least favorite installment (though I loved 2 and 3, so your mileage may vary). But it's still a Pirates movie. It still feels very in character with that world. Jack is very Jack. Hector is very Hector (except when ... no no, that's spoiler territory). And the biggest new addition, Edward Teach (a.k.a. Blackbeard), is as epic a pirate as the best of them. Oh, and there is a handsome shirtless young man, which no entry in this franchise should EVER be without.

We begin with the Spanish and the start of their quest to find the Fountain of Youth. This was, admittedly, a little hastily conceived and could have been given more weight. We then make for London, where we're reunited with Jack (in the type of reveal we've come to expect) and Gibbs, who is the only crew member left from the old crowd (we shall see in the fullness of time what presumably became of the others).

The main plot is deceptively simple. Everyone and their brother is out to reach the Fountain of Youth. Our major players are Barbossa, who seems to be working as a privateer for the King of England (Richard Griffiths) in his race to beat Spain to the prize; Spain, of course, though we see very little of them; and the famous dread pirate Blackbeard (played to wonderful piratey perfection by Ian McShane, who will always be Judas Iscariot to me, but that's beside the point). Oh, and Captain Jack Sparrow is in the mix, though he actually has little interest in the Fountain (though that's not what everyone else has heard - look, this is the Pirates franchise, it's complicated, okay?).

Add to this the impossibly beautiful Penelope Cruz, playing Angelica - a former flame of Sparrow's who may or may not be Blackbeard's daughter. Daughter or not, she's still his first mate. A lot of people seem to have problems with her (both in this film and in general) but I thought she was fine, neither wonderful nor horrible. She has a good chemistry with Depp, but it's put to better use in another film (2001's Blow, if you're curious). Jack, for his part, may or may not have had ... feelings for her. But make no mistake - Jack's true love is himself, and he even says so at the end of the movie (love that line, but I think a lot of viewers are missing it). Blackbeard, by the way, has some black magic mojo going on, and not just around his eyes - he has powers over his ship (and others, apparently) that seem to emanate from his sword, he's zombified several crew members, and he has dabbled in dopples voodoo. I love the implications of these powers and who they eventually pass to.

Contrary to what most of us have always probably thought, it takes more than simply drinking from the Fountain of Youth to receive its full effects. There is a ritual (I loved Jack's response to being asked if he believed in the supernatural - oh yes, he's seen his share). It takes two special chalices and one tear. A tear from a mermaid, no less. I felt the introduction to mermaids and what they are like in this universe was mishandled. We're given the tease of White Cap Bay first and just expected to accept that mermaids are something to be afraid of, and then in a later scene we get the explanation of why they're scary. The explanation should have come first, in my opinion, because most people don't think of mermaids as terribly scary - even the spear-wielding ones in Harry Potter.

There's no Will and Elizabeth, but there's still a romantic subplot with a missionary and a mermaid. This was actually one of my favorite parts of the film and the chief redeeming portion of the interminable island hike segment. There were a lot of useless or pointless scenes here, perhaps none more so than Blackbeard's attempt at Russian roulette. I kind of hated Jack for playing games about diving off the cliff, just because it led to this. :P

There weren't many truly spectacular set pieces in this movie, and certainly nothing like the more iconic scenes in the other films (the moonlight reveal, the underwater walk, the mill wheel, the Kraken, and the absurd final ship battle in AWE). Jack's chase on top of carriages across London was a bit lackluster, but his sword fight with "himself" wasn't. I really loved Blackbeard hanging the mutineers from the rigging and Jack's escape up the trunk of a palm tree. And most of the third act was pretty incredible, if you ask me. I especially loved how director Rob Marshall envisioned the actual Fountain and the entrance to it. Oh, and LOL at Jack's suggestion that everyone else hang back, have some drinks, and place bets, while Barbossa and Blackbeard duke it out just between the two of them.

This film was less about spectacle and more about character and story, which I thought was a welcome step back from the increasingly ludicrous (though admittedly entertaining) antics of the second and third films. I enjoyed it immensely, and even went back to see it a second time. I feel it's also worthy of a DVD buy and a place on my shelf along with the other three. True, Marshall didn't add anything special to this franchise, but nor did he ruin it (as some people seem to believe, judging from some overemotional responses I've seen).

Hollywood Slut-Shaming

I was reading a frankly depressing article linked on ONTD about sexism in Hollywood and saw a reference to this movie, What's Your Number, where Anna Faris plays a woman who is afraid that if she's slept with too many men already, she'll never get married. First of all, the book this is based on has the woman reading in the New York Post (not exactly the most respectable bastion of journalism in the first place) that the average person has 10.5 partners in their lifetime; she then sets a number for herself, saying that 20 will be her limit before getting married. Naturally, the story has her hitting that limit and then freaking out because she's not married yet, and she goes on a quest to seek out her former lovers and determine if she let The One slip away. I haven't read this book, but I really hope the point is not to encourage that kind of arbitrary quantification system.

But then again, maybe that's exactly what it does. ONTD's linked source describes the film as being about a woman who learns in a "ladymag" (oh, what a lovely, condescending little word) that if she sleeps with one more person than the 20 she already has, she'll never get married. So the NY Post has become a "ladymag" and the woman gets her "limit" advice from the mag, not her own relationship issues. Great. But that's not even the worst part.

Apparently, the studio is haggling over the number, trying to figure out how many partners they can give the character without making her a slut.

Did you hear that? That was my foot kicking something hard.

If this were an independent movie or a foreign movie, this would not be an issue. I'm FORCIBLY reminded of a theory I had several years ago, when the script was being written for the second Bridget Jones movie. Renee Zellweger apparently had some issues with the initial script, and I was musing over the plot elements of the book to try and figure out what might be amiss. After seeing the final film, I became convinced that earlier drafts of the script must have included both Bridget and Mark seeing (and sleeping with? I can't remember from the book) other people while they were broken up. In the book, there is nothing terribly appalling about this - just your normal obstacles to getting the couple back together. But I KNEW - especially after they turned Bridget's rival into a sweethearted lesbian with a crush on her - that somewhere, in some meeting, it had been decided that audiences wouldn't forgive Bridget (and probably not Mark either) for being with someone else.

At another point in the article, Anna Faris mentions a movie she made with Kate Hudson called Gold Diggers, which was supposed to be the feminine answer to Wedding Crashers. But she says that they couldn't really make it a female Wedding Crashers because, and I quote, "the big hitch was, nobody's going to like those girls if they seem like sluts... We realized we can't make an actual female ‘Wedding Crashers,' because then it would be ‘Call Girls.' " I'm telling myself that she said this sadly and with resignation, because ... *boils*

I'm also picturing that scene from Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, where Matthew McConaughey looks out upon this sea of former flings - I don't know how many there actually are, because I've never seen the movie, but in the trailer it sure looks like more than 20. Nothing wrong with that, though, is there? No, sir. Men can have all the conquests they want, with however many people they want, because they're Manly Men of Manparts.

I could draw a parallel here to female circumcision, a practice that is still used in many places in the world to make sex painful for women so they'll look upon it as a duty to their husbands, not a pleasure, and won't seek sexual encounters outside the marriage bed. Oh look, I just did.

Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch

I should have hated this movie. I saw it under not the best circumstances. I decided to see it at the 34th Street AMC, mostly because it had the most convenient showtime and partly because it's across the street from one of my favorite breakfast places (one of the few places in NYC that serves grits). I was going to go all out and see it in IMAX. It was a matinee, so it wasn't ridonkulously expensive. But the theater turned out to be one of an alarming number of "fake" IMAX theaters, i.e., theaters with slightly-larger-than-normal screens that for some reason are allowed to use the IMAX brand name. Also, they gave us 3D glasses, and I spent the first 40 minutes of the movie trying to keep them on my face before discovering that THE MOVIE IS NOT IN 3D. Shame on you, AMC 34th Street.

This movie is, by all empirical standards, not a good movie. It has huge, HUGE narrative issues. Other folks will find many other flaws, but I think at least some of those are clever subversions. Nordling of Ain't It Cool News calls this a "kitchen sink" movie, wherein a filmmaker throws all of his passion and resources into a project in the hopes that this will be his/her definitive work. Those movies rarely turn out to be anything but hot messes, and Sucker Punch is no exception. This is a movie with big ideas, ideas that are tragically too big for the story in its current form. I think it might have fared better as a two-parter. Preferably with a different writer.

The basic setup is fairly simple. Our heroine, played by Lemony Snicket's Emily Browning, has just lost her mother, and her conniving stepfather is furious that the mother left all her money to the girl and her sister. After a sequence of events that's a tad confusing but culminates in the murder of the younger sister, the stepfather has our heroine committed to an asylum and arranges for her to be lobotomized. The rest of the movie consists of her attempts to escape, both figuratively and literally.

Almost as soon as she arrives, her mind constructs an alternate reality, though only slightly less bleak than her current one. Part of the inmates' therapy is to act out their issues, quite literally, on a stage. So "Baby Doll," as she comes to be called, imagines the asylum as a burlesque theater where she and the other girls dance for "clients." The asylum orderly who abuses the girls becomes a cruel boss figure, and the psychiatrist (Carla Gugino) becomes an artistic director of some sort. (Just a note, while we're here and while you may or may not be frozen with a "huh?" expression on your face at what you've read so far ... if suspending disbelief is not your thing and you demand logic from your stories, stay far away from this movie.)

Baby Doll is asked to dance. The music starts and eventually she starts to (barely) move, but suddenly we zoom in on her eye and we enter a third level of reality. Baby Doll is now in a completely different place and time within her own mind, and she meets The Wiseman (Scott Glenn), who tells her how to escape. She needs five things - a map, fire, a knife, a key, and a fifth item that is a mystery. She defeats three giant mecha-monsters in a sequence that at first might seem frivolous and lacking in risk and emotional connection, but which I think merely serve to show Baby Doll the rules of this reality and what she is capable of. After this initial battle, Baby Doll is back in the dance studio and has finished her dance, and she has apparently impressed everyone so much that she's going to use her dancing as part of the plot to get the items she needs for escape. But first she needs help from the other girls - Rocket (Jena Malone), Sweet Pea (Abby Cornish), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgins), and Amber (Jamie Chung).

We see the girls fight to secure the needed items, both in the dance hall reality and in the third reality. Baby Doll uses her dancing in the second reality to distract people while the other girls get the tokens. And, just as before, whenever the music starts, we enter that third and much more heightened reality, and the girls are on missions (led by The Wiseman) to capture items that are analogous to the escape tools. They fight Nazi zombies to steal a map, they slay a baby dragon and steal the fire from its throat, etc. One of many things I felt should have been different is that I wish the movie had cut back to the *actual* reality of the asylum at least once or twice. Maybe Snyder was trying to make the ending more surprising, when you see that she was in the asylum all along and - aha! - she really did do the things she did in those other realities, just more mundane versions of them.

As I said, there are huge story problems with this movie. It feels a lot like it was meant to be longer and just got chopped to pieces, with the action setpieces getting priority in the editing process and the actual storytelling and characterization stuck on the cutting room floor, or perhaps merely ghosts from earlier drafts of the script.

However, there are some subversive elements that I quite liked and wish had been in a better movie. I cringed like hell at the trailers and what I saw as Scott Glenn's dumb hero lines, notably "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything" (the origin of which has been credited to many historical figures, including Malcolm X, General Patton, and Alexander Hamilton). But I think they're *intended* to be awkward and somewhat meaningless. If you watch the film, you'll notice that his mentor advice is always two-fold. The first bit is the dumb hero line, the second (preceded by "oh, and one more thing") is actually useful information for whatever task the girls are trying to accomplish. I thought it was kind of poking fun at other movies/stories that use that kind of dialogue much more earnestly.

Mr. Beaks of AICN wrote a fairly thoughtful (though still very critical) review in which he proposes the idea that Snyder is criticizing the fetishization of sexy, scantily clad, fighting female badasses. I'm not sure how confident I am about it being a critique, but I don't think it's an accident that Baby Doll is made up to look eerily like Sailor Moon.



Nor do I think it's an accident that the logos for the two works are so similar.



As disappointing as the movie is on so many levels, though, I still really dug it. I'd much rather see an ambitious failure, where I'm certain that everyone involved believes in the story they're telling and are having a good time telling it, than a lazy cash grab. Perhaps this is why I have an unusually rosy response to the Harry Potter films (not that I think those are failures AT ALL, though some of you may). It puts a grin on my face to see David Heyman and his posse trying (and yes, usually failing) to do Rowling one better. They REALLY want those movies to be good. You can feel it (or at least I can), and that's pretty intoxicating to watch (again, for me, at least). And I can tell how much Zack Snyder wants Sucker Punch to be good, which is why, even though it's mostly a mess, I respect it and I respect the effort. [NOTE: I hope no one thinks I'm comparing this movie to the HP films, by the way. I AM NOT, BY ANY MEANS.]

If you're wondering whether you should check this out ... I honestly don't know what to tell you. If you're intrigued by what I described of the plot above, I'd say it's at least worth a matinee. I personally think it's worth seeing for the pretty stunning visuals of the "third reality" alone, especially (OMG!) the "bomb on the train" sequence. There's some good music on display, too, but it's kind of wasted. But if you decide to see it, don't make the mistake I did. This is NOT a 3D movie, and there are theaters posing as IMAXes that are NOT IMAX. It probably looks great on an IMAX screen, but it looks good on a regular (or slightly larger) screen too.

Final Girl Film Club - Blood and Roses

This month's Final Girl Film Club pick is Roger Vadim's vastly under-appreciated Blood and Roses. If you remember the series I did a couple of years ago on vampire movies, you might remember the well-established trope of the lesbian vampire, originating from Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's short novel Carmilla. Carmilla the novel actually pre-dates Stoker's Dracula by about 25 years and there have been several interpretations of it, either literal retellings of the story or other tales that follow the female vampire trope with varying degrees of lesbian subtext (and often plain text). Perhaps the best known and most faithful adaptation is The Vampire Lovers (1970), part of Hammer Horror's Karnstein Trilogy. I'm quite fond of that one, but I do believe I like Blood and Roses even more.


Blood and Roses (1960)

The story begins on an airplane - a setting far removed from the 18th century trappings of the original novel. We hear some vague drivel in voice over about the spirit world, and there's no explanation as yet for why a vampire who has been alive for hundreds of years is flying the friendly skies. We travel to Italy, to a branch of the Karnstein estate. A count, Leopoldo, is about to be married and he's consulting a pyrotechnics expert to design a fireworks show for his engagement party. The fireworks expert has found the perfect spot for the spectacle - the abbey on the estate. This causes some concerned looks from several people in the room, because this is where the old Karnstein cemetery used to be. Thankfully, all the tombs have been empty for a couple of centuries, but this leads to some half-amused/half-serious discussion of the old Karnstein vampire legend.

Leopoldo's cousin, Carmilla, tells the story of her ancestor Millarca (anagrams yay!), who died the night before her wedding in the arms of her lover Ludwig, who swore eternal faithfulness. There is a clear parallel between Carmilla and Millarca and, in turn, between Leopoldo and Ludwig. Leopoldo is marrying a young woman named Georgia, though, and it's clear from the start that Carmilla is jealous. At the engagement party, Carmilla sulks and drinks in her room but eventually joins the party at Leopoldo's infuriated insistence. After a few moments at the party, however, she wanders off again, toward the cemetery. Some unexpected explosions from the fireworks display open Millarca's tomb, and voila - Carmilla is dead, her spirit replaced by that of the sleeping vampiress.

I'd only ever seen one other of Vadim's films, Pretty Maids All in a Row, but I knew enough about Vadim as a filmmaker to be aware of his reputation for sensuality. This seems more restrained than I'd have expected from him, but it still manages to have definite erotic undertones with little winks of partial nudity and, of course, the lesbian subtext which is not as overt as in The Vampire Lovers but is certainly still there. In particular, I have to love Leopoldo's strangely gleeful expression as his fiancee undresses the unconscious Carmilla. See something you like there, dude?

I really, really dug this film. The look is very dreamlike, and a lot of credit must go to Annette Vadim (who plays Carmilla/Millarca) for giving the film its melancholy soul. The highlight of the film, though, is a surreal sequence where Millarca seduces Georgia and enters her subconscious. Wonderfully bizarre stuff and quite ahead of its time. And man, I love the ending.

Great movie. Thanks to Final Girl for picking it.