Tag: Cinema

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.

Sunshine, directed by Trainspotting‘s Danny Boyle and written by The Beach‘s Alex Garland, is an absolutely maddening film. Even more than their (and star Cillian Murphy)’s last collaboration, 28 Days Later, Sunshine ends up being a movie of two parts. The first hour and change of this flick is as intelligent and gripping a science fiction film as I’ve seen in years. Borrowing liberally from 2001, Alien, The Abyss, Solaris, and other sci-fi classics, it establishes both the terrifying sublimity and rickety U-boat-style claustrophobia of space travel from its opening moments. But, near the end, the movie takes a wildly wrong turn — you’ll know it when it happens — and Sunshine spins off uncontrollably and irrevocably into the yawning darkness of mediocrity. If you’re a genre fan at all, I have to recommend this movie just for its captivating, unsettling first eighty minutes or so — it’s really some of the best hard sci-fi I’ve seen in awhile. But, be advised — sadly, the mission gets compromised well before the end.

Very quickly in Sunshine, we’re given the set-up. Earth’s Sun is dying, an endless winter covers the lands, and the last, best hope of our planet rests on the shoulders of eight young astronauts, who are undertaking what amounts to a suicide mission: They will fly the solar-powered, bomb-carrying Icarus-2 to the Sun and reignite our star with a controlled nuclear blast. (The Icarus-1 tried seven years earlier and failed — apparently, nobody warned these people about the logical consequences of naming your ship thus.) These reluctant heroes include a number of likeable actors: Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later), Rose Byrne (padding out her genre cred again after 28 Weeks Later, and on whom I think I’m developing a crush), Chris Evans (the only good thing about FF, and very charismatic here), Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, always good), Benedict Wong (Dirty Pretty Things), Cliff Curtis (Live Free or Die Hard), Troy Garity (Steal this Movie), and Capt. Hiroyuki Sanada (Ringu, The Last Samurai) But, even early in the mission, some of these otherwise-amiable spacefarers are displaying Ash-like symptoms, and that’s even before the crew receive a long, lost distress signal from the Icarus-One. Tense meetings are held, important decisions are made, but faster than you can say the Mars Orbiter, human error has further complicated an already complicated situation, and soon the entire mission — and thus by extension the survival of Humanity — has been jeopardized…

This is all well and good. There are a few narrative quibbles one might make in the early going — Why, for example is Murphy the only person who knows how to work the payload? Seems like you might train a back-up — but, for the most part, everything holds together with some moderate suspension of disbelief. More importantly, the threats seem dire, the tension palpable, the vastness of space awe-inspiring and horrible, the machinery somehow alien and calculating, the odds of success tremendously unlikely. But, at a certain point in the story, just after the dwindling crew of Icarus-2 is forced to weigh the type of heady moral quandary that all good sci-fi is based on, a new threat to the mission emerges — which I won’t give away but which is eminently guessable — and it’s at this point Sunshine just leaps off the rails. The last half-hour of the movie is stylishly done, to be sure, and there are a few good flourishes (such as [spoiler] the final fate of Chris Evans’ character), but it’s assuredly not the movie we started with, nor is it the film Sunshine had been building to so tremendously to that point. (And this isn’t like me griping about the last ten minutes of Children of Men, which in retrospect and after repeated viewings seems uncharitable to an otherwise amazing science-fiction outing– this misstep really alters the mood, character, and ultimately the final experience of the film.) Again, if you enjoy science fiction, I’d give this movie a go regardless — its setup is that good. But, unfortunately, this Sunshine isn’t spotless by any means, and ultimately ends in eclipse.

Update: I’ve since discovered after taking a look at referrals that the film’s official site linked back to this review. Hey, thanks (particularly considering the review is mixed one. Mixed-positive…but mixed.)

The Polish 12-Step.

Well, in its favor, John Dahl’s You Kill Me, which I caught Friday night down at the Angelika, has its heart in the wrong place. This tale of an alcoholic hitman trying to find the wagon works really hard to be a wicked and misanthropic black comedy akin to other, better noirs in Dahl’s oeuvre, such as The Last Seduction and Red Rock West. But, while I found myself intermittently amused by the film, the strain shows. In sum, You Kill Me is too self-consciously quirky by half, the jokes are mostly all-setup and little-payoff, and unfortunately Dahl is mining material here that’s already been done better elsewhere, from Sopranos to Fight Club to Six Feet Under to Miller’s Crossing. The result, while not a terrible night at the movies by any means, is probably at best a rental. Or, since it’s an IFC Films production, wait for its no-doubt continual rotation on the IFC Channel…in short, it won’t kill you to hang back on this one.

When we first encounter Polish-American assassin Frank Falencyzk (Ben Kingsley with an inscrutable accent), it’s a snowy winter morning in dreary Buffalo, and Frank is interrupting his daily downing of Smirnoff with occasional, half-hearted stabs at shoveling his steps. But, as we soon discover, half-hearted stabs pretty much sums up Frank’s life these days: his passionate love affair with the bottle has encroached considerably on his predatory livelihood, as evidenced by his sleeping through a crucial hit on local Irish mob boss Edward O’Leary (Dennis Farina). So, after an angry intervention by his gangland employer (Phillip Baker-Hall) and best friend (Marcus Thomas), Frank is shipped off to San Francisco with orders to clean up his act, namely by getting himself into AA and holding down a new job as an undertaker’s assistant. This Frank attempts to do, mainly because he’s being watched by a gun-toting local wiseguy (Bill Pullman) with a passion for the real estate market. But soon Frank has found a new sponsor (Luke Wilson) and a new potential ladyfriend (Tea Leoni), and starts seriously thinking about a life after vodka. Of course, just at this moment, his flailing friends in the Buffalo mafia find they need him back in the worst way…

There’s grist for some pretty dark, funny goings-on in this set-up, and one of the better running jokes is that Frank’s trying to throw off the demon rum — and his friends are helping him — mainly just so he can kill people more efficiently. But, while You Kill Me aims to aim low, it’s already been beaten to the punch by a lot of other solid and memorable films and TV shows. Even notwithstanding Frank’s Tony Soprano-ish vulnerabilities, his adventures in AA were already mostly anticipated by the bleak humor of the first act of Fight Club, and his backroom shenanigans in the mortuary business can’t help but recall similar moments in Six Feet Under. (The Polish v. Irish clan war in Buffalo, meanwhile, mostly recalls Tom Reagan’s negotiating the Irish-Italian divide in Miller’s Crossing.) Some sort of overlap is to be expected, of course — the mob movie isn’t exactly what you’d call a virgin genre at this point — but in each case here, unfortunately, Dahl’s film comes up on the short side.

What’s more, too many of the jokes in You Kill Me are telegraphed long before they reach fruition (c.f. the disgruntled guy at the toll booth), and too many of the plot devices just defy credulity: Tea Leoni’s character, for example, is given a problem with “boundary issues,” mainly because the romance here wouldn’t hang together any other way. Similarly, most of the reveals conveniently take place in the midst of AA meetings in ways that feel entirely too Hollywood to be taken seriously. All this being said, I never quite turned on You Kill Me like I probably should have — Despite its many faults, I did spend most of the film with a smile on my face (This may partly be because Bill Pullman is kicking around back there. He’s pretty over-the-top here — and hard to call a good actor in any case — but he is one of those hard-working character guys I enjoy seeing around. And, if nothing else, he pushes back against the Wilson factor…although, to his credit, Luke here is much less intrusive than his brother Owen tends to be of late.)

Watching Me, Watching You.

More casting for Zack Snyder’s take on Watchmen: Jackie Earle Haley and Patrick Wilson (both of Little Children) now seems all but confirmed as Rorschach and Nite-Owl respectively. As Dr. Manhattan, Billy Crudup. As Silk Spectre, Malin Ackerman of Harold and Kumar. And as Ozymandias, Matthew Goode of Match Point. Well, no egregious misfires in that bunch (and not much star power either, which may make the suits nervous. Fine by me.) Now, it’ll all come down to Snyder.

Firth’s Legion | Woody’s Walker.

Among today’s trailers: Mr. Darcy goes sword-and-sandal to protect King Arthur’s ancestor (I think) in the new teaser for Doug Lefler’s The Last Legion, with Colin Firth, Aishwarya Rai, and Sir Ben Kingsley. (Looks like Dungeons & Dragons…the chances of me seeing this are slim.) And Woody Harrelson’s high-society Washington life (paging Ward Just) is disrupted by a murder in the trailer for Paul Schrader’s The Walker (click on “Watch”), also starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin, Ned Beatty, and Willem DeFoe.

Lyra, daemons, and bears, oh my!

Another big fantasy trailer comes in the wake of Harry: New Line plays the LotR card to help sell audiences on the new teaser for Chris Weitz’s take on Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass. Well, the actors and the polar bears look pretty good…I’d like to see more of the daemons.

But he breaks like a little girl.

She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist, she don’t look back. (Although if I had to guess, she’s been watching the heck out of Don’t Look Back lately.) With (a non-levitating) Bruce Greenwood in tow, Cate Blanchett channels Blonde on Blonde-era Dylan and meets never-nude Allen Ginsburg (David Cross) in this brief You-tubed clip from Todd Haynes’ forthcoming I’m Not There. Other Dylans in the production: Christian Bale, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Ben Whishaw.

The Dark is Rising.


Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, director David Yates’ take on the fifth installment of J.K. Rowling’s (soon-to-be-completed!) series, is, I’m happy to report, a somber, suspenseful return to the increasingly dire matters at Hogwarts, and well in keeping with the higher standard set by Alfonso Cuaron and Mike Newell in the past two movies. While I think Newell’s Goblet of Fire remains my favorite film outing thus far, this one is right up there in my estimation, and given how much less Yates had to work with, that’s rather impressive. (For all its girth, Book V felt basically like a holding action to me — the wider narrative arc didn’t progress all that much from the end of Goblet to the end of Order, and the story suffered from a wham-bang action climax that didn’t really work on paper (it comes off better on-screen.)) Indeed, Yates’ Order not only captures my most prominent impressions of the book — Harry’s burgeoning teenage moodiness, the growing sense among the students of grim times ahead and important events already set in motion — but also significantly streamlines and distills Rowling’s most-sprawling tome into two-and-a-half hours of sleek, well-paced cinema. No mean feat of magic, that.

By the start of Order, Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) is loose, Cedric Diggory is dead, and Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), once more at the mercy of the Dursleys for the summer, is poised on the verge of adolescent rebellion. He hasn’t heard a pip from friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) for months, nor has he heard any news of goings-on in the magical world. So it is with no small amount of surprise and consternation that Harry finds himself first attacked by Dementors one gloomy evening, then expelled from Hogwarts — by authority of the Ministry of Magic — for using his wand to defend himself. Brought back into the magical loop by these events, Harry discovers that many of his former allies, including godfather Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), have banded together to re-form the Order of the Phoenix in preparation for Lord Voldemort’s next move. More troubling, it seems Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy) is not only not inclined to believe Harry that You-Know-Who has returned, but also views Harry and his mentor Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), as a political threat, and has turned the general public and popular press against them both. Finally, to further complicate Potter’s prospects, Fudge dispatches one Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) to Hogwarts with a ministry mandate to stamp out both dark sarcasm and Defense against the Dark Arts in the classroom. Thus hemmed in, Harry, Ron, and Hermione find once more they need to take matters in their own hands, and begin to defiantly assemble what they call Dumbledore’s Army, a student organization dedicated to preparing for the worst. But, all the while, Lord Voldemort is up to his own tricks…and what good is Dumbledore’s Army if its young, bespectacled leader is already hopelessly compromised by his still-unexplained connection to the Dark Lord?

As the paragraph above attests, there’re a lot of balls in the air this time around, but Yates, screenwriter Michael Goldenberg, & co. do a solid job of keeping everything moving without doing grievous harm to any of the many included subplots. (Several have been excised regardless, such as this year’s Quidditch match. No real loss, imho.) And throughout, what Order of the Phoenix gets most right — in fact, one could argue it’s actually done better here than in the book — is the feeling that things are simmering to a boil. Hermione, Ron, and especially Harry have grown from wide-eyed, trusting children to gawky, hormonal teenagers (and better actors, for that matter), seething with imminent rebellion against the powers-that-be, and their world has similarly gone from a colorful, fantastic, and ever-so-occasionally dangerous realm of magical delights to a gray, ominous land of hidden agendas, political propaganda, fallible adults, and fatal consequences. In the last movie, Harry’s Hogwarts cohort were on the threshold of early adolescence, and had just begun to discover the tantalizing mysteries of the opposite sex. Here, slightly older, they come to another classic teenage rite-of-passage: finding that the world — and, more often that not, the people in charge — aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and that they may even actually be out to get you.

Of course, Yates is helped out tremendously in bringing Order to life by his ever-expanding Dream Team of British thespians. Imelda Staunton, as the main new cast member, is note-perfect as Umbridge. A pink-festooned, unholy cross between the Church Lady and arguably the real You-Know-Who of Rowling’s books, Margaret Thatcher, she’s like something out of a Roger Waters fever dream (and continues the “The Tories are Coming!” subtext I noted in my review of the last movie.) Even with Staunton aside, tho’, Order is packed to the brim with quality actors reprising their roles from the first four films — Oldman, Hardy, Brendan Gleeson, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Emma Thompson, Jason Isaacs, Robbie Coltrane, etc., and particularly Fiennes and Alan Rickman. They’re all excellent, and frankly it’s good fun just to see so many of them around again to help further flesh out the Potterverse. (Although, having seen Naked and The History Boys since Goblet, I’m slightly more concerned about Harry hanging around the likes of Remus Lupin (David Thewlis) and Vernon Dursley (Richard Griffiths)…what would the Umbridges of the world have to say about that?)

Good v. Evil, Rock v. Spear, Naughty v. Nice.

Appearing before Harry yesterday, another spate of new trailers: Al Swearingen (Ian McShane) and Ruth Fisher (Frances Conroy) join forces to help a young boy defeat the insidious Evil that is Christopher Eccleston in the first preview for The Dark is Rising (from the fantasy series by Susan Cooper, which I borrowed from the library around the age of 12 and can barely remember, other than the “seventh son of a seventh son” schtick.) Independence Day director Roland Emmerich stages his own quest for fire (among other nouns) in the new teaser for 10,000 B.C., starring Stephen Strait, Camilla Belle, and Omar Sharif. And Santa’s deadbeat brother (Vince Vaughn) comes home to screw up the family operation in the trailer for the christmas comedy Fred Claus, also starring Paul Giamatti, Miranda Richardson, Kevin Spacey, Elizabeth Banks, and Rachel Weisz. (The joke mainly seems to be that Vaughn is tall and elves are short, but that is a pretty good cast.)

Give him the whip.

Professor of archeology, expert on the occult, and how does one say it? Obtainer of rare antiquities…Via AICN (and in case you missed the pic a few weeks ago), Harrison Ford suits up as Indy once more, this time on video (and George Lucas seems to fess up — finally — that Han shot first.)

Facing the Android’s Conundrum.

(I know, I know, they’re not androids. Sorry, that song‘s been in my head all week.) Well, I kept my expectations low and didn’t really look for anything other than two hours of air conditioning and some big dumb summer fun. But, even by that low standard, Michael Bay’s Transformers is less than meets the eye. Mind you, I didn’t go in with a litany of fanboy complaints on hand…just as car culture somehow bypassed me as a kid, I never much grokked into Transformers back in the day. I did see the cartoon (and the cartoon movie with Orson Welles) a few times, and tried to reassemble the occasional Decepticon over at one friend or another’s place. And, before seeing this 2007 incarnation, I would’ve thought it was a pretty perfect match of director and material: True, Michael Bay movies generally tend to be terrible (although I didn’t mind The Island so much), but he’s definitely in love with the strict machines, and, if nothing else, has a knack for filming sleek, impressive car chases (cf. Island, Bad Boys 2.) But, this…well, this is about as dull and unengaging a movie about gigantic fighting alien-robots as you can imagine. Sure, the special effects team earn their keep with a few brief, shining moments, but the movie as a whole is a badly paced, surprisingly boring affair…It’s an hour and a half of interminable set-up, long, needless digressions, and military-industrial gobbledygook that eventually descends into stuporous, standard-issue Bayhem. If you were going to see this movie, you likely already have. But, if you’ve been on the fence…abort, retry, ignore.

As Transformers begins, the voice of Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) booms forth the backstory: An ancient cataclysmic war between an alien race of good robots (Autobots) and bad robots (Decepticons) over the whereabouts of an all-powerful MacGuffin (The Cube) has finally spilled over to our planet, Earth. Uh, did I say our planet? I’m sorry, this is in fact Michael Bay’s Earth, where cameras endlessly flit around people like wayward moths, the NSA hires hot Australian coeds to be their top computer experts, and extended scenes involving nothing but pseudomilitary babble is considered compelling. Anyway, while the bad guys play hell with US army units stationed in Qatar, the good guys (for reasons left unexplained) already know to track down one Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBoeuf), a quirky, Cusack-ish eleventh-grader who, when he’s not trying vainly to woo the quarterback’s girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox), hawks his Arctic explorer great-grandfather’s personal effects on Ebay. Sam initially encounters these well-meaning alien life forms in the form of his first ride, a bitchin’ Camaro known as Bumblebee (Arguably the movie’s best non-robot-scenes come from the car’s early, Christine-like behavior.) But, soon, he’s met the bad guys too, in the form of a killer cop car known as Starscream. And, before you can say “My, that felt lifted from Terminator 2,” Sam and his new potential ladyfriend (who’s, conveniently, an amateur mechanic) have been irrevocably caught up in the intergalactic-robot melee, a fracas which, it turns out, the MIB-like government suits known as Sector 7 have known about since the days of Herbert Hoover. (Hmm, interesting. Is this dissertation-worthy?)

You may think I’m being too hard on this film — this is a movie based on twenty-year-old toys, after all. (One shudders to wonder if Voltron, My Little Pony, Care Bears, Cabbage Patch Kids and Teddy Ruxpin are all getting the live-action treatment in due course.) But, like I said, I’m willing to sit through a lot of deadly-dull exposition in a July 4th movie such as this to witness big robots beating on each other…but not this much exposition. After its Qatar debut, Transformers takes entirely too long to move out of first gear, and even then, it downshifts for bizarre, barely diverting digressions. (See, for example, Sam trying to hide his giant new friends from his parents.) Conversely, by the time the final battle happens in a city somewhere near the Hoover Dam, it includes so much vehicular carnage packed into fifteen-to-twenty minutes that it barely registers. Throw in the occasional blatant message moments like Sam discussing the car not taken, or the revelation of Mikaela’s checkered (flag?) past, and the movie starts to feel like a straight-up stinker. (I haven’t even mentioned John Turturro, who’s more over the top here than he was in Lebowski, and about one-twentieth as entertaining.)

The only thing that redeems Transformers in the end, is the impressive work of ILM — when two robots tumble, skate, and slide across an interstate highway, a scorpion-shaped Decepticon leaps out of the sand behind terrified troops, or Starscream lunges from car to robot back to car in one sweeping arc, Transformers offers a few tantalizing moments of real visual grandeur. In the end (and no disrespect to La Boeuf, who’s actually a pretty appealing presence throughout), it’s the number-crunching machines at Industrial, Light, and Magic that are the real stars here, however brief and flickering. But I guess that makes a certain amount of sense.