SUMMERFEST '22: Lone Wolf and Cub (May 31-June 5)

I’d seen a few minutes of SHOGUN ASSASSIN, the sort of “greatest hits” movie cut together from these, but other than that this was my first trip through this saga. A huge influence on THE MANDALORIAN, these movies are very entertaining, particularly the father-child dynamic that inspired Space Dad and Green Baby. My only quibble is that I wish they didn’t feel the need with just about every one of them to include either rape or general objectification of women, even the ones who kick ass. I mean, I know these are exploitation films, but still.

Sword of Vengeance (1972)

Trailers: Tales of Ugetsu, Kagemusha

The one that starts it all and shows the audience what to expect going forward. The most iconic scene, of course, is the one in which Itto gives his infant son a choice between a ball and a sword — if he chooses the ball, Itto will send him to be with his mother in the afterlife; if he chooses the sword, he will join Itto as he becomes an assassin for hire. This was also memorable to me for featuring children singing a song about “dropping a hard turd.” I have to think this is some strange translation anomaly (is there a similar word in Japanese for “ball” or “stone”?), but the “turd” lyric kept showing up and making me laugh.

Baby Cart at the River Styx (1972)

Trailers: Throne of Blood, Ran

Lady assassins! This one makes the child, Daigoro, more of a character and we see how much like his father he is and how unsentimental Itto is about his son being in such dangerous situations. Daigoro’s efforts to help his father while he rests (bringing him water, food, etc.) are kind of amazing to watch. And the sequence where Daigoro is kidnapped and suspended over the well is such a great way of portraying what a team they are, despite Daigoro’s youth and seeming innocence.

Baby Cart to Hades (1972)

Trailers: Letter Never Sent, Shogun’s Shadow

This one gets more into the notion of honor/dishonor, especially with the character of Kanbei, who when we first meet him deals heavily with his three companions who rape a pair of women on the road. We see him again at the end of the film and hear his backstory and why he was dishonored years ago. We also see Itto endure torture on behalf of a woman who had been sold into prostitution. Itto is not a sentimental man, but he has a strong sense of honor and an impulse to defend the helpless.

Baby Cart in Peril (1972)

Trailers: Hidden Fortress, Zatoichi

The first one of these movies not to be directed by Kenji Misumi and you can see it in subtle ways, like the opening credit montage, which gives us some glimpses of the story so far. This is also the first movie to give Daigoro his own little side adventure. I like that we got more backstory on Itto’s bad blood with the Yagyu clan and what led to Itto being framed for treason and deciding to take the traveling assassin path to begin with. This movie features another badass female assassin, who disarms her prey by stripping down to the waist and distracting them with her … tattoos.

Baby Cart in the Land of Demons (1973)

Trailers: Three Outlaw Samurai, 13 Assassins

The last one to be directed by Misumi, this one has probably my favorite plot of the six films. I loved the device of the five messengers, who each give Itto a piece of the puzzle of the job they want him to do, and how it’s all complicated by another, seemingly conflicting mission. I just love how it is all resolved in a way that lets Itto complete his task and makes things right with the family he has to deal with. This movie gives Daigoro another side adventure, which leads to him being publicly flogged for keeping his word to a female pickpocket.

White Heaven in Hell (1974)

Trailers: Seven Samurai, Yojimbo

This one was just really cool, letting the story go to a supernatural place and giving Itto maybe his most formidable opponents yet. The story arc of the six films is not really resolved, ending as all the others do with Itto and Daigoro living to fight another day. But it finishes with definitely the most epic battle thus far, giving things a new setting in a snow-covered landscape. This one kind of annoyingly makes Daigoro into a bit of a cartoon, occasionally cutting to him after some brutal strike and having him make some “OMG” face. But it’s been amazing watching this little guy over six movies and how these stories have played with his assumed innocence.

 

Immortals

I was 'meh' on this beforehand. It was on my schedule, but I was ready to cross it off if there was going to be an issue of making time for it. I was also further annoyed that NONE of the AMC theaters in Manhattan (which is the only chain in NYC that does any kind of matinee pricing) were screening the film in 2D. But then I saw some wonderfully ecstatic responses from a couple of AICN screenings. So I ponied up the extra money for 3D but brought my own glasses - the nice ones we were given at BNAT1138 that you can use as sunglasses and that don't give you the 3D headache.


Immortals

Let me start by giving you the bottom line. If you loved 300, this movie is right up your alley. In fact, you might think it's the same movie. Scantily clad warriors doing battle against impossible odds, with gods in the mix and plenty of highly stylized violence ... sound familiar? It did to me, but I didn't really care because it was all so AWESOME!

Henry Cavill - who you may or may not remember as the jerkwad Humphrey from Stardust - takes the lead as Theseus and shows us why he's going to rock like a hurricane as Superman in the forthcoming Man of Steel. Mickey Rourke is the baddie, and Slumdog Millionaire's Frieda Pinto is the beautiful virgin oracle. John "Ollivander" Hurt plays a wise old man who is much more than he seems. And an actor named Luke Evans who I've never seen in a movie in my life, but he looks FOR ALL THE WORLD like Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse star Tahmoh Penikett, plays Zeus (also, he'll soon be appearing as Bard the Bowman in The Hobbit). Oh, and one of the lesser known Cullens from the Twilight movies plays Poseidon. Stephen Dorff is in it, too.

The basic story is that the ruthless king Hyperion (Rourke) wants to declare war on the gods. To do this, he's going to release the Titans (who are not what you might think they are from seeing Clash of the Titans), and to do THAT he needs this special bow that was forged by Ares. Theseus, with the help of his fellow slaves and the lovely oracle, must lead the fight to stop him. Now, I'm a huge fan of Greek mythology, and while I was fine with the different way the gods were portrayed here, my one beef with the movie was that there wasn't more of them. Because when they finally join the fight, it is a beautiful, slow-motion-y, head-exploding thing to behold.

This movie was made by Tarsem Singh, whose first film was The Cell, which had a fairly forgettable story but a truly unforgettable visual aesthetic. I didn't see his later film, The Fall, but Immortals is cut very much from the same cloth as The Cell. The visuals are like nothing you've ever seen before, and even though it's not quite as coherent a movie as 300, I liked the look of it a bit more (notably, the color palette, which I found more pleasing to the eye than 300's nearly monochromatic look).

Like I said, if you dug 300, you will probably like this a lot. Yeah, it's essentially trash, but it's GLORIOUS trash. If you can find a theater that's showing this in 2D, I don't think it will lessen the experience at all. In fact, I think huge chunks of the movie aren't even in 3D anyway. (Though Frieda Pinto's naked bootay gets the up close, 3D treatment, if you're into that sort of thing.)

Drive

"I used to produce movies in the 80s. Kind of action films, sexy stuff ... one producer called them European."

Albert Brooks, in the quote above, might as well have been describing the film he was currently in - Nicolas Winding Refn's sleek and stylish Drive. I had only seen one of Winding Refn's films before this, which was 2009's Bronson and which also incidentally announced to the world that Tom Hardy was made of awesome. I thought the film was interesting, epecially style-wise, but I wasn't in love with it like a lot of my movie nerd friends were, and I wondered if I would have responded differently if I had seen it with a bunch of them in a proper theater instead of by myself on my laptop. I was, however, completely excited about Drive after hearing about it from Cannes back in May.

I'd been counting down the days to seeing this, and had more than I wanted in adventure trying to lay eyes on it this weekend. I could have seen it first thing Friday morning, after work, and was tempted to do just that - such was my chomping at the bit. But I decided to make it a rare evening viewing - rare because it costs more than twice as much as AMC's morning screenings, and because it's difficult to find a showtime that's convenient with my work hours. It was important to me to see it with a good audience. I'd even put together a playlist with the film's (AMAZING) soundtrack and a bunch of 1980s songs that I thought had a similar chilly, urban vibe. There was some drama at the theater that night, and I was forced to wait another 24 hours, which drove me crazy. I was pretty exhausted by the time I hit the cinema and the movie was going to have to be pretty danged good to keep me awake.

Far from being pretty danged good, it was flipping awesome. Hands down, my favorite film of the year so far.

The film opens with a pulsing music track and credits that look like they were scrawled on a mirror in shocking pink lipstick. We meet Ryan Gosling's character, whose name we never learn (he is simply "the Driver"), and he's laying out the rules for his "getaway" services. If you've seen the trailer, you've heard this schpiel - his clients have him for five minutes. Whatever happens in that five minute window, he will get you out of there. If something goes wrong before the clock starts or after the five minutes is up, you're on your own. He speaks very directly and succinctly, and you get the feeling you should listen to him closely, because he's not the kind of person who repeats himself. We see him on a job like this, and where another movie would show you all manner of metal objects weaving in out of each other in furious pursuit and flight, Winding Refn starts slow, putting the focus on Gosling's face instead, and you can see the wheels turning behind his eyes. When the volume gets turned up, though, it's exhilirating. But even as the chase kicks up several notches, we still mostly stay on Gosling and watch as he shifts strategies (could I get any more automobile metaphors in here?) and tries to elude the police.

The Driver doesn't just do getaways; he's also a stunt driver for movies and does some work in a garage. He's kind of a genius with cars, and his boss Shannon (played by Bryan Cranston) tries to get him into racecar driving, with the help of crime boss Bernie (in a knockout performance by Albert Brooks, who is about the last person you'd imagine being as great as he is in a role like this). He also becomes involved (though not romantically - at least at first) with his neighbor Irene (the always excellent Carey Mulligan), who struggles as a waitress at Denny's while her husband is in prison. You can sense that the Driver likes to keep people at a distance, but his relationship with Irene is what sets the bulk of the film's action in motion. We see a man who is initially very reserved and calm (comparisons to Steve McQueen in Bullitt and Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver are not far off the mark here) become violent and scary in the defense of the innocent.

Nowhere in the film is this better crystalized than in what may be the centerpiece of the entire film, "The Elevator Scene." The Driver is going to walk Irene out of their apartment building, and they get into an elevator with a third person. We already know that the Driver is in danger, but when he looks sidelong at the stranger in the elevator, he spots a concealed gun and shit's officially real. But rather than ratchet up the adrenaline right away, the film slows down a bit and the Driver pushes Irene protectively behind him. He turns around and kisses her, presumably knowing that after what's about to happen this may be his only chance, and then proceeds to beat and kick the man to death as she looks on, part horrified, part exhilirated.

The film is quite violent, but what I love about it is that it doesn't fetishize the violence. There are cool weapons (I love that you rarely see a gun in this movie) but it doesn't wallow in the horror-show. What it does tend to linger on are the moments just before the violence occurs. I kept thinking, after this movie, about the Solozzo scene in The Godfather - that moment the camera seems to stay a bit too long on Al Pacino's face and you see, plain as day, the change that turns Michael Corleone from war hero to future crime boss, just before he guns down Solozzo and McCluskey. There's an especially operatic scene in Drive when Gosling's character dons one of his movie diguises (a rubber head mask) and goes to take out the penultimate baddie. The music choice here is inspired - the main theme from a film called Farewell Uncle Tom, which I saw at BNAT in 2007 and which is the most offensive movie I have ever seen, despite some excellent filmmaking elements, including the music. And for the length of the song - about three minutes (an eternity in movie time) - the Driver simply drives to where he's going and then looks through a window at his prey. You know for a certainty, just from the actor's eyes, that someone is about to die, probably painfully, because that's just what time it is.

This movie has been compared to early Michael Mann (think Thief or Manhunter) and William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. It even has a similar feel to Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai, a vintage hit from BNAT last year, and the camera work was apparently inspired by Melville's work. The plot is not anything earth-shattering - typical biolerplate stuff - but plot is not what makes this movie extraodrinary. Style and love of cinema make this film something special. (And speaking of style, this movie gave me an intense desire to own a satin jacket and a pair of driving gloves - and I don't even drive anymore!)

Drive has the trappings of all those fantastic car movies of the 60s and 70s, the flash of 80s neo-noir, and the sensibility of a dark fairy tale. I don't see anything happening on the Oscar front for this movie - perhaps a supporting nod for Brooks (I'd be overjoyed if Gosling were recognized, but I don't dare hold my breath), but that's not because it's not great. It's absolutely fantastic. This was originally developed as a $60 million blockbuster starring Hugh Jackman. Nothing against Hugh, but I'm so glad *this* movie is what got made instead.

Warrior

[Cue obligatory sing-along with Scandal's 1980s hit "The Warrior" because I'm just that dorky.]



This is a movie I probably wouldn't have seen had it not been for very enthusiastic responses coming out of an Ain't It Cool screening. I put it off a little while (hence my lateness) because fight movies aren't typically my thing, unless they are largely about something else (such as Million Dollar Baby). As such, I feel like I could have skipped this one. That's not to say it's a bad movie, but it's just not my kind of movie. I also have to say that the fact that the director also made Miracle was not a selling point for me. "Inspirational" "sports" films are rarely my cup of tea.

That's not to say that Warrior is a bad movie or that there weren't things I enjoyed about it, because it's not and there certainly were. I thought the performances all around were really great. Nick Nolte, I thought, was especially strong in a pretty thankless, generic role. The fight choreography was incredible, and the ending was surprisingly suspenseful.

It was an interesting decision to leave the abuse backstory mostly off-page, with only a few references here and there, but it doesn't do the characters any favors. The brothers seem less sympathetic, because we never see what they suffered at the hands of their father. Nick Nolte's character passes 1000 days of sobriety (and then falls off the wagon briefly), but we can't be invested in it because we haven't seen what he was like when he was a drunk and a wife/child-beater. And the one time we see him drunk he's just kind of sad, not scary like we've been told he used to be. It's just hard to get invested in a family's history when you're only allowed to hear about it.

Another thing I found a bit strange was a handful of shots of people watching the "Sparta" tournament on television. There were crowd scenes in the actual arena, sure, but all the reaction shots of people watching were of people just by themselves, which felt a bit unnatural (until the end, of course, when the students are watching the final fights at the drive-in). You want, when you watch scenes like that, to be inspired to jump up and cheer yourself, and I just wasn't feeling it, and it didn't feel like the movie was even interested in arousing that response.

I did like the (somewhat) suspense of the ending, because all the way through the tournament you're cheering for both brothers. I say somewhat because if you've seen the trailer you already know that they end up fighting each other in the final. You want to see them both win, and they both have very sympathetic stories, but I found myself wondering who to root for in the end. It didn't take long to figure out who the winner *had* to be, from a narrative standpoint, and I guess you could imagine that the winner could have shared a bit of the prize money with the other brother. I wondered how that all worked out as the credits rolled, but I was kind of relieved the movie didn't show it to us.

I sort of giggled at the big confrontation scene on the beach, because it looks like both brothers randomly decided to go walking on the beach and just happened to come across each other. That scene is probably the strongest in the movie, and I'm so glad they got all that out there and didn't have a bunch of dialogue in the actual fight. There's almost none there, which is perfect, until the very end. It got a bit weird at that point - there's just something about two men rolling around with their legs around each other saying "I love you." :P

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).

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.

The Town

Saw a few movies this weekend and fully intended to post about them sooner, but I've had a kind of weird weekend. Here we go, though, and I'll start with the one many of you have probably already seen, and which has taken the top box office spot. Gigli who?!


The Town

This was a pretty awesome movie. I've seen some folks say they wish it had just been an action thriller, without the "trying to be a better man" plot, but that plot was kind of the point. The story is set in Charlestown, Massachusetts - a working class subset of Boston. Charlestown is heavily populated by people who make their living robbing banks, and the trade is very often passed down through generations. You get the idea that being born into Charlestown is a trap, and that it's near impossible to get out. Doug McRay (Ben Affleck, who also directs) is the ring leader of a particularly successful robbery crew - they've done four armored cars and two banks. They report to "The Florist" (Pete Postlethwait), who is the guy who really runs shit and tells them what jobs to pull. Meanwhile, an FBI agent, Adam Frawley (Mad Men's Jon Hamm), is trying to bring down McRay's gang, with the help of a witness/hostage from their most recent robbery, Claire Keesey (the always amazing Rebecca Hall).

Things start to go screwy Doug introduces himself to Claire as just another guy and falls in love with her. He wants out of the life, but his best friend and partner in crime James (played by The Hurt Locker's Jeremy Renner) is reluctant to let him go. "The Florist" is even more reluctant to do so. Doug belongs with them, period, and they're not going to let him walk out on them.

There are loads of great character dynamics at play here, and both those dynamics and the general story remind me of Michael Mann's brilliant film Heat. Affleck, Hamm, and Hall all bring their A-game, but I found myself even more impressed with Jeremy Renner and (wait for it) Gossip Girl's Blake Lively, who plays James's sister and Doug's sometime girlfriend, Krista. James is a tough guy, and it shows on Renner's untypically weathered face, but you can't help loving his affection and loyalty for Doug. In one of my favorite scenes, Doug asks for James's help - he's found out that some thugs have threatened Claire while she walked to work and he wants to take James with him to kick some ass. Doug doesn't tell James what is really going on and asks his help on the understanding that he can't ever ask about it, and James amusingly agrees. It's a great little relationship moment, but it's also a specific character moment for James, to show us what a violent person he is and that he really doesn't care about "who"s or "why"s - he just likes to make people hurt.

I was pleasantly surprised by Blake Lively, though. Krista starts out as a kind of generic trashy, drug-addicted girl with cheap pick-up lines. She has a kid which may or may not belong to Doug (he claims not), and while you get the impression that she sleeps around a lot, she claims a kind of ownership over Doug and does not like it at all when he expresses his intention to beat a path out of town with someone else. Frawley uses this to his advantage, and while I hated that this had to happen, I still felt sorry for Krista.

The movie ends as satisfyingly as it can, and there's a certain inevitability about it, which I think ties into the theme of inescapability rather nicely. I don't know that it's better than Affleck's other directorial effort, Gone Baby Gone, but I like The Town immensely.

The A-Team

The A-Team

This plot isn't nearly as convoluted as in his previous film, Smokin' Aces, but director Joe Carnahan brings the same unabashed sense of gleeful mayhem to his take on the 1980s action-comedy series The A-Team. The movie is an origin story - a two hour expansion on essentially the opening credits of the show. How did these guys meet? What crime were they accused of that they didn't commit? Why is B.A. afraid to fly, and what's with the mohawk? All these questions and more are answered.

I really couldn't tell you with any certainty what the plot of the film is, so I am cribb. Hannibal (Liam Neeson) and Face (Bradley Cooper) already know each other when the movie begins, and very soon after the opening scene Hannibal meets B.A. (Quinton Jackson) and they rescue Face from some Mexican badasses. The threesome, in desperate need of a pilot, recruit "Howling Mad" Murdock (District 9's Sharlto Copley). And by recruit, I mean break him out of a mental hospital, because his insanity is all too real.

There is a ridiculously over-the-top opening action sequence, culminating in Hannibal uttering his famous line from the show - "I love it when a plan comes together!" And "eight years and eighty successful missions later", the Alpha Team is stationed in Iraq. They take on a mission, against fairly sound advice, and though the mission is a success, the only person who could have testified that they were acting on the U.S.'s behalf ends up being killed, and the four of them are dishonorably discharged and sent to separate maximum security prisons. Pretty darn close to the background of the show.

The rest of the film is about them breaking out and attempting to clear their names and be reinstated. This doesn't quite happen, but it effectively serves as background for the canon of the show, where we were told each week:

"...a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... The A-Team."

Something I used to love about the show back in the day was that the good guys always won and nobody got hurt (or at least killed). There have been complaints (from Mr. T, for one) that the movie doesn't follow this formula (he also complains about the sex in the movie, which makes me think he went to see something else, because there is nothing sexual except some innuendo and one kiss in the film). But I submit that both the nature of the times and the nature of the medium of film make the violence necessary. And something I appreciated is that the movie, as empty as it is in most respects, manages to deal with the violence in a surprisingly thoughtful way, giving Quinton Jackson a lot more to do with B.A. than Mr. T got to do on the show - and even giving the mohawk a backstory!

One thing critics complained about that I kind of loved - the flashbacks to things that we saw half an hour or so before. The biggest example of this is in the climax. We've already seen Face lay out the plan, but when we see the plan executed, we flash back to that "plan" scene again, and the lines have a little more meaning. Tons of movies have used this effect, and I think - at least in the climax (perhaps using it more than once was overkill) - it was crucial to understanding what was going on and the knowledge that everything that happened was part of the plan.

It might be silly, but I loved this movie to pieces. There are some weak spots, sure (most notably Biel's character, who is pretty badly written), but the good stuff far outweighs any of that. Neeson is surprisingly good in such an uncharacteristic role. Bradley Cooper is hilarious, and gorgeous. Quinton Jackson, as I said above, gives B.A. a lot more meat than just the fool-pitying. Sharlto Copley is the best thing about the "Team." And Patrick Wilson as the CIA heavy is possibly the best thing about the entire movie.