Now I can't discern if it was the poor writing or the poor acting that made me dislike Hayden Christensen's character David Rice in Jumper, so I'll blame both. The dialogue is never witty, but there are several times where Christensen is delivering lines as though he was reading Voltaire. Delivery without substance is empty. In addition, I found nothing likable about him. I was not looking for the character to be a hero or virtuous. I was just looking for something to latch onto - charm, integrity, anything but assholery. Some might think I'm being too harsh because so far I'll I've listed is bad acting and failed attempts at wit. In addition to these he robs vast fortunes from banks leaving behind I.O.U.s which seems to be nothing more then a petty rationalization on his part because he does nothing with the money, but buy every indulgence possible to keep in his overly lavish penthouse. If he were at least a Robin Hood figure this stealing could be admired. He also "jumps" with a former high school bully who teased him years ago into a safe so that the bully is placed behind bars. What led up to this was the bully on seeing Rice again for the first time in years enthusiastically greets him and genuinely wants to buy him a beer and hear how he's doing (everyone had thought he was dead, and they treat his apparent resurrection as nothing at all). It is after this Rice jumps the bully into a safe that lands him in government custody.
I've ranted without mentioning Samuel L. Jackson or his role as Roland the Paladin. Jackson's performance is well enough, and my only complaints are more with the writing. His character has superficial motivation and Jackson did what he could with this part. This motivation problem was due to the wholly incoherent doctrine of the Paladins. Now I believe that religious people are capable of performing crazy actions just as much as the next atheist, however I doubt any person who just wasn't flat out crazy would actually buy into the Paladins philosophy of: We ought to kill the jumpers because only God should be allowed to be in all places at once. This dogma is asserted twice in the film without ever being elaborated. I found this strange because I take it for granted that many Christians believe in a transcendent God who isn't very anthropomorphic which this doctrine seems to suggest - also the Jumpers clearly can't be in all places at once, so what's the deal?. Maybe the Paladins are just a throw back to an older, worse (less developed) dogma though (or maybe this was meant as a subversive statement that religion IS just this incoherent). It's still hard to see how a global conspiracy could be formed around such loose dogma or how, as we're told, the Paladins had any practical effect on the world until now. This may be confusing to those who haven't seen the film, so let me elaborate: Paladins have been fighting Jumpers since the dark ages. However, as the film shows us the only effective weapons against Jumpers are handheld, futuristic electrical shooting devices as well as some strange machine that allows Paladins to use "Jump Scars" to follow Jumpers through their jumps. If these are the only effective tools against Jumpers, Paladins would not have been able to do much against Jumpers until now. And I mean NOW the 21st century. Hell, even NOW I doubt their weird electrical devices could have batteries that lasted for very long considering the amount of electrical charge they seem to generate - but now I'm just getting nit-picky.
There are other actors (Brilson, Bell) who do well at their roles, but their characters are minor and don't offset everything Jumper does wrong. I don't recommend it.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Definitely, Maybe
At the beginning of Definitely, Maybe we are introduced to Will Hayes (Reynolds) who cynically describes his career in marketing as trying to convince kids to eat Captain Crunch instead of Lucky Charms. Right away he comes across as intelligent, funny, and slightly depressed. Hayes has just received his divorce papers, and a combination of this and his grade school daughter Maya (Breslin) being taught sex education that day (the scene where Hayes picks up Maya is fun: full of hysteric parents and children reading sex education literature like it's Harry Potter) leads us into the narrative framework for the real story: Maya wants to know how her father met her mother. But not the overly romantic, fairy tale version; the honest, heartbreaking one that leads to this divorce.
Some suspension of disbelief is required in regards to Maya not knowing her own mother well enough to pick her out of a line up of descriptions of three very different women, but the plot is executed well enough for this to be forgivable. The three potential mother candidates are Elizabeth Banks, Isla Fisher, and Rachel Weisz. In that order of actresses we are given: a Midwestern college girlfriend, a free spirited women who works with Hayes, and lastly a friend of the college girlfriend who's an intellectual and sleeping with a famous, drunk intellectual (played by Kevin Kline). It wouldn't be fun for me to give anything away, so I won't. For stories that have a sort of mystery to them on first viewing it's not fair to contaminate another's experience.
I will say though that the movie never commits one of the greatest sins a romantic film with several lover-candidates can do: It never once makes any of these women out to be horrible to a level that is one dimensional or uncaused from what we already know about them. One of the women values her professional integrity more than Hayes and his daughter calls her a "bitch" for this, but that judgment felt harsh, especially stacked up to truly bitchy characters in much worse films.
Without giving the plot away, I can say that the film is somewhat episodic. It jumps years into the future to allow time and the gaining of wisdom to affect characters. Going into the film I was worried that the narrative device of Hayes telling the story to his daughter would be nothing more than a gimmick, but it was done well and because all the women had depth and were lovable in their own ways it did create a fun, complex romance-mystery. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this film to anyone looking for a good romance.
Some suspension of disbelief is required in regards to Maya not knowing her own mother well enough to pick her out of a line up of descriptions of three very different women, but the plot is executed well enough for this to be forgivable. The three potential mother candidates are Elizabeth Banks, Isla Fisher, and Rachel Weisz. In that order of actresses we are given: a Midwestern college girlfriend, a free spirited women who works with Hayes, and lastly a friend of the college girlfriend who's an intellectual and sleeping with a famous, drunk intellectual (played by Kevin Kline). It wouldn't be fun for me to give anything away, so I won't. For stories that have a sort of mystery to them on first viewing it's not fair to contaminate another's experience.
I will say though that the movie never commits one of the greatest sins a romantic film with several lover-candidates can do: It never once makes any of these women out to be horrible to a level that is one dimensional or uncaused from what we already know about them. One of the women values her professional integrity more than Hayes and his daughter calls her a "bitch" for this, but that judgment felt harsh, especially stacked up to truly bitchy characters in much worse films.
Without giving the plot away, I can say that the film is somewhat episodic. It jumps years into the future to allow time and the gaining of wisdom to affect characters. Going into the film I was worried that the narrative device of Hayes telling the story to his daughter would be nothing more than a gimmick, but it was done well and because all the women had depth and were lovable in their own ways it did create a fun, complex romance-mystery. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this film to anyone looking for a good romance.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Cloverfield or: Let's run around the monster with a camera until we die.
I'll start this review off with a positive note: Cloverfield kept me very tense throughout the film. The shaky cam horror genre needs more films desperately for this reason (Romero's Diary of the Dead comes out in the near future). The movie's portrayal of the disaster, Cthuluzilla v. NYC, felt real to me.
Other things like motivation and human psychology did not resemble our world in the slightest. The characters are a bunch of twentysomethings (their names are entirely unimportant) and one of them is leaving for Japan soon. He recently hooked up with a girl he's had a crush on throughout college, and at his going away party she has brought another guy. He's upset, and so far everything that has happened feels real.
Then Cthuluzilla (as much as I'd like to think I'm being creative in calling the monster this, I imagine all Lovecraft geeks in the audience thought the same thing) invades the city. Disaster strikes. Attempts to escape fail and cause the death of friends and family. Logically, those remaining go find the military safe zone to be escorted away, correct?
No. Then the movie would be over after twenty minutes. Who pays $9 dollars for twenty minutes of film and fifteen minutes of military propaganda and Pepsi commercials? Twentysomething Prime decides he must go find the girl he hooked up with once and has a crush on, and his idiot friend who can't stop recording these events decides to tag along with two girls in shock.
Again, I'd like to stress that the scenes that develop from there are quite suspenseful, but I just found myself uninterested in these people and whether or not they lived or died. In a similar film, The Mist, the audience was given characters who had more depth then one would expect in the horror sub-genre that is typically nothing more than an exercise in keeping the audience in a constant state of anxiety.
Overall, I'd say the film isn't worth your money unless you happen to love monster films. It gives us a monster, but it gives us little else.
Other things like motivation and human psychology did not resemble our world in the slightest. The characters are a bunch of twentysomethings (their names are entirely unimportant) and one of them is leaving for Japan soon. He recently hooked up with a girl he's had a crush on throughout college, and at his going away party she has brought another guy. He's upset, and so far everything that has happened feels real.
Then Cthuluzilla (as much as I'd like to think I'm being creative in calling the monster this, I imagine all Lovecraft geeks in the audience thought the same thing) invades the city. Disaster strikes. Attempts to escape fail and cause the death of friends and family. Logically, those remaining go find the military safe zone to be escorted away, correct?
No. Then the movie would be over after twenty minutes. Who pays $9 dollars for twenty minutes of film and fifteen minutes of military propaganda and Pepsi commercials? Twentysomething Prime decides he must go find the girl he hooked up with once and has a crush on, and his idiot friend who can't stop recording these events decides to tag along with two girls in shock.
Again, I'd like to stress that the scenes that develop from there are quite suspenseful, but I just found myself uninterested in these people and whether or not they lived or died. In a similar film, The Mist, the audience was given characters who had more depth then one would expect in the horror sub-genre that is typically nothing more than an exercise in keeping the audience in a constant state of anxiety.
Overall, I'd say the film isn't worth your money unless you happen to love monster films. It gives us a monster, but it gives us little else.
No Country For Old Men
No Country For Old Men is the latest film brought to us by the Coen Brothers (Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou?), and based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. The film focuses on three characters in the year 1980. The first, is Llewelyn Moss (Brolin) a Vietnam vet. Early in the film he finds a drug shoot out and two million dollars. Anton Chigurh (Bardem) is a hired killer on his trail to get this money back. Finally there's Sheriff Bell who examines the brutal crime scenes left by Chigurh.
Sheriff Bell describes Chigurh as ghostlike. From his perspective, this is an apt term. He finds the aftermath left by Chigurh, and never encounters him directly. To back this up, Moss' first encounter with Chigurh never involves Moss gazing upon him, but only his gunfire. In the characters' eyes, Chigurh could be seen as supernatural. Much of this is do to Bardem's stoic, but calculatedly so, performance. He imposes a menacing figure that I found more frightening than any horror movie villain.
Though this film contains a great deal of violence, One of the most suspensful scenes involves none. Chigurh at a gas station tells an elderly clerk that he stands to win or lose everything on a coin toss. The clerk does not understand this, but Chigurh explains how the coin has traveled from 1958 to that clerk in 1980 and now it will decide everything in that moment. Much of Chigurh's outlook is shaped by this kind of fatalism. He is unconcerned in his killings because he doesn't accept personal responsibility for them. Those who die at his hands were fated to die regardless of his actions. Chigurh, in this way, lives a guiltless life, and It is this view and the consequences of it that disturb Sheriff Bell so greatly. He needs to see a reason why all these people had to die. To see the proximate causes that would lead to such tragidies, but these causes are never given to Bell.
Sheriff Bell is interesting because we encounter him so little. When we do his role is almost always inactive, though he is the only character we get narration from. Although it wouldn't be right to call Bell a coward, he tries little to stop Chigurh or help Moss. This inactivity is what has kept Bell alive far longer than his father who was also a sheriff and was killed at a much younger age than Bell is. Despite the fact that we see him little, Jones brings great delivery to a quick witted though disturbed character.
Halfway through the film we are introduced to Carson Wells (Harrelson), a former Colonial. He is the cleanest looking character in No Country, and he reminds me of the calvary arriving in the film. He has come late, but in the knick of time to save Moss if Moss will allow him. A lesser story would have allowed Wells or he and Moss to triumph over Chigurh. I won't go into details, but viewers should not go into the movie expecting a Hollywood ending.
Despite that Chigurh is presented ghostlike, we are shown several examples of his mortality. In one of the first scenes we encounter him he strangles an officer to death with handcuffs that are locked around his wrists. After the officer is dead, we are shown Chigurh's wrists and they are bloody. This is the most frightening aspect of Chigurh. Unlike Boogey Men, we cannot dismiss Chigar to a level of fiction that we may never encounter in our own lives.
I rank No Country For Old Men as the best film of 2007, and possibly the best film by the Coen Brothers to date. I give it an enthusiastic recommendation.
Sheriff Bell describes Chigurh as ghostlike. From his perspective, this is an apt term. He finds the aftermath left by Chigurh, and never encounters him directly. To back this up, Moss' first encounter with Chigurh never involves Moss gazing upon him, but only his gunfire. In the characters' eyes, Chigurh could be seen as supernatural. Much of this is do to Bardem's stoic, but calculatedly so, performance. He imposes a menacing figure that I found more frightening than any horror movie villain.
Though this film contains a great deal of violence, One of the most suspensful scenes involves none. Chigurh at a gas station tells an elderly clerk that he stands to win or lose everything on a coin toss. The clerk does not understand this, but Chigurh explains how the coin has traveled from 1958 to that clerk in 1980 and now it will decide everything in that moment. Much of Chigurh's outlook is shaped by this kind of fatalism. He is unconcerned in his killings because he doesn't accept personal responsibility for them. Those who die at his hands were fated to die regardless of his actions. Chigurh, in this way, lives a guiltless life, and It is this view and the consequences of it that disturb Sheriff Bell so greatly. He needs to see a reason why all these people had to die. To see the proximate causes that would lead to such tragidies, but these causes are never given to Bell.
Sheriff Bell is interesting because we encounter him so little. When we do his role is almost always inactive, though he is the only character we get narration from. Although it wouldn't be right to call Bell a coward, he tries little to stop Chigurh or help Moss. This inactivity is what has kept Bell alive far longer than his father who was also a sheriff and was killed at a much younger age than Bell is. Despite the fact that we see him little, Jones brings great delivery to a quick witted though disturbed character.
Halfway through the film we are introduced to Carson Wells (Harrelson), a former Colonial. He is the cleanest looking character in No Country, and he reminds me of the calvary arriving in the film. He has come late, but in the knick of time to save Moss if Moss will allow him. A lesser story would have allowed Wells or he and Moss to triumph over Chigurh. I won't go into details, but viewers should not go into the movie expecting a Hollywood ending.
Despite that Chigurh is presented ghostlike, we are shown several examples of his mortality. In one of the first scenes we encounter him he strangles an officer to death with handcuffs that are locked around his wrists. After the officer is dead, we are shown Chigurh's wrists and they are bloody. This is the most frightening aspect of Chigurh. Unlike Boogey Men, we cannot dismiss Chigar to a level of fiction that we may never encounter in our own lives.
I rank No Country For Old Men as the best film of 2007, and possibly the best film by the Coen Brothers to date. I give it an enthusiastic recommendation.
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