A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Freddy Krueger is a scary horror monster in part because he's horribly disfigured, in part because of his slicey-dicey killer glove, in part because he's relentless in his pursuit of his victims, and in part because, since he's already dead, he can't be killed. Like a ghost, he can turn up almost anywhere. The catch is that Freddy haunts the dreams of his teenage victims -- and if he kills them in their dreams, they stay dead. That's a neat trick -- once his prey figure it out, they are afraid to sleep, perchance to dream. They try desperately to stay awake, until they're dead tired. And then just dead.

But since Freddy first turned up in Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the world has changed. Ritalin, Red Bull, and a Starbucks on every street corner (maybe even Elm Street) all help hapless teens stay awake a little longer. But Freddy can wait.

A Nightmare on Elm Street has been rebooted, though not very much reimagined, with a new Freddy (Jackie Earle Haley) now menacing the teens of Elm Street. Freddy likes to ask of his victims "Remember me?" That's a little inside joke, of course, although the primary audience for A Nightmare on Elm Street is teens who were in elementary school last time Freddy showed his scarred face, so they probably don't remember him. Neither do the kids he's currently stalking, and he's not especially happy that they don't -- his new mission is not just to have his revenge. He'd like his victims to remember what happened the last time he "played" with them. His backstory is much the same as in the previous Elm Streets (of which there have been eight) -- Freddy was a child murderer in his former incarnations. Now he's a pedophile, and still seeking vengeance after the vigilante parents of Elm Street killed him. It's not really their fault he came back gruesomely disfigured -- he wasn't supposed to come back at all.

As before, the heroine of A Nightmare on Elm Street is Nancy (Rooney Mara), Freddy's favorite victim in life and in death. Nancy's a scrappy and resourceful heroine, and not one to go down without a fight. She gets some help from Quentin (Kyle Gallner), a pasty-faced classmate with a ready supply of prescription uppers to help him stay awake.

The original A Nightmare on Elm Street was genuinely scary, witty, and grisly, but Freddy, played by Robert Englund, became increasingly familiar, campy, and less menacing as he stalked his way through seven sequels and becamse a pop culture fixture. Haley, a former child star whose rebooted career has been built on his ability to play unsettling characters (he was Rorschach, the only good thing about Watchmen, he played another pedophile in Little Children, and he's terrific in a recurring role in the TV series Human Target), is suitably menacing as Freddy. The character's disfigured visage has been shaped around the sharp architecture of Haley's own face, notably his prominent cheekbones and horizontal slash of a mouth. Topped off, of course, by Freddy Krueger's signature fedora. Haley returns Freddy to his nightmarish, maniacal roots as a serial killer and sexual predator.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is directed by Samuel Bayer, who previously directed music videos, and written by Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer. The filmmakers attempt to recapture the primal terror and creativity of the first (and best) Nightmare  -- it's no easy feat to imitate originality, however. Much of what made A Nightmare on Elm Street stand out from the rest of the slash pack -- the powerful heroine, the sinister mix of repressed childhood memories and unconscious fears, the inventive use of dream imagery -- is emulated in this movie. The results are adequate and passable -- A Nightmare on Elm Street is competent and sufficiently diverting, but not nearly memorable enough to have any lasting effects on the psyche. 

2May2010

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2010)

The Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is Men Who Hate Women (Män som hatar kvinnor), which is more descriptive, although perhaps it gives too much away. The film, by Niels Arden Opley, is based on the novel by the late Steig Larsson, part of his posthumously published Millennium Trilogy, and it is indeed about men who hate women, and a few of the women they hate. It's also about that girl (a woman, really, and the diminution of her status in the English title is inconsistent with her fierce persona in the film), the one with the large, dark, snaky dragon tattoo on her slender, sinewy back. She is Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), and she herself has been the object of men's hatred, and violence (sexual and otherwise), for much of her life. It has made her vindictive (and rightly so), and a ferocious fighter.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is also about another girl, one who has been missing for 40 years. Harriet was the scion of a wealthy industrialist family, the beloved niece of the aged Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), and she disappeared under mysterious circumstances when she was 16 years old. Vanger suspects that one of his hateful relatives killed her -- the family tree contains more than a few rotten branches, including three of Henrik's brothers, who were Nazis during World War II. Vanger hires Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) to find out what happened to Harriet.

Blomkvist is an investigative journalist, recently convicted of libeling a Swedish tycoon. He has six months of freedom left before he starts a prison sentence (they're tough on libelers in Sweden). As it happens, Blomkvist once knew Harriet -- she babysat for him when he was a young lad, during a family vacation. And as it happens, Lisbeth has been investigating Blomkvist in her job for a security firm. She's a hacker, and something of a genius, and watches Blomkvist's investigation from afar by snooping in his computer. She becomes interested in the case of the missing girl.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is long (152 minutes) and pretty slow going for a while -- there are a lot of pieces to be put in place before the story begins to move forward. After a plodding and fitful start, it does start to move, and when it does, it moves in unexpected directions. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo turns out to be about multiple crimes -- Blomkvist and Lisbeth uncover several murders that seem to be connected somehow to Harriet's disappearance. Unlike most films about murders, this one is more interested in the victims of violence than in the perpetrators. Indeed, typical for a murder mystery, it doesn't reveal the perpetrator until near the end, when the various pieces fall into place. What leads up to that, however, is atypical: a twisted, violent portrait of gruesomely dysfunctional families -- including Lisbeth's. The film wants to keep Lisbeth somewhat shrouded in mystery -- she doesn't care to reveal much about herself -- but it provides enough glimpses of her past (and present) to offer some clues about her rage, her damaged state, and the source of that massive chip on her shoulder. But despite the intriguing clues, and one satisfying scene in which she exacts some well-earned revenge on a tormenter, Lisbeth never develops very much as a character, and so the fascination is mostly in the mystery that surrounds her. Lisbeth is a commanding presence nonetheless -- it's impossible to take your eyes off of her. And she's far more compelling than Blomkvist, who is dogged, and nice (where Lisbeth is dogged but definitely not nice), and a bit of a dullard. Perhaps they'll flesh the pair out more fully in the two planned sequels.

What's interesting and unusual about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is that the film goes to some pains to avoid fetishizing the gruesome murders, and neither does it make any attempt to humanize the killer. To discover the killer, Lisbeth and Blomkvist have to connect the dots and uncover the motive, but there's never any doubt that they are dealing with a monster, and an especially ugly one at that. It would seem, on the evidence, to be a hard thing for a movie about murder to avoid at some point showing sympathy for the devil. That sympathy seems to play into the public fascination with serial killers and their crimes, although why we find them so compelling (and why they make for such compelling entertainment) is an interesting psychological question, and one that we might be happier not fully understanding. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is not terribly exciting or action-packed as thrillers go, but it dares to question the appeal of the murder mystery/serial killer thriller by telling a story that is frequently quite ugly and hard to watch, and which is ultimately compelling because it is about a woman  who is ferociously committed to surviving. The film manages to keep its focus and its sympathies decidedly and unwaveringly with its fierce femme fatale, and not with the men who hate her.

29April2010

Kick-Ass (2010)

Why, wonders teen schmo Dave Lizewski, don't ordinary Joes such as himself ever try to be superheroes? Surely the lack of superpowers is no impediment, as Batman proves. Ah, but Batman has super gadgets (and millions of dollars), Dave's friends remind him. Dave and his pals spend much of their free time reading comic books, talking about comic books, and thinking about comic books. They are well-versed in the logic and lore of superheroes. Dave (Aaron Johnson), despite his solidly middle class family and scrawny physique, is unpersuaded that his superhero dreams are doomed to fail. So he buys a green and yellow scuba suit, sets out to fight crime and... almost gets himself killed for his troubles. This does not deter him, and when one of his heroic escapades is captured on amateur video, Kick-Ass the superhero goes viral. An anonymous star is born.

That's the basic premise of Kick-Ass, a scrappy, weird little superhero movie directed by Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake, Stardust), and adapted (by Vaughn and Jane Goldman) from the graphic novel by Mark Millar and John Romia, Jr. Kick-Ass is fast, furious, extremely violent, and sporadically funny as it both satirizes and embraces the cliches of action movies. 

Kick-Ass soon discovers that he's not the only DIY superhero in Manhattan. Notably, there's Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), who sports a Batman-esque rubber suit, and daddy's little girl Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz), a leather-jumpsuited spitfire in a mask and purple wig. Hit Girl, it must be said, totally rocks -- she's equally deadly with a katana sword, a switchblade, and a gun. (Moretz, who is now 13, was only 11 when she played the potty-mouthed, super-violent Hit Girl, which has prompted consternation in some quarters about the exploitation of child performers in movies they are not old enough to see themselves. This issue seems to pop up every now and then -- Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby, Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, Natalie Portman in The Professional -- and aside from hand-wringing, nothing much ever comes of it. Indeed, Shields, Foster, and Portman all seem to have survived both being child performers and Ivy League students. Whether it's the language or the violence in Kick-Ass that's setting off alarm bells, the movie fully and consciously intends to push those buttons. And so it does.)

Hit Girl and Big Daddy are vigilantes who are particularly intent on destroying a drug kingpin named Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong). D'Amico thinks it's Kick-Ass who's after him, so his teen son Chris hatches a plan to catch the superhero by inventing yet another superhero, Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Before long, Gotham is crawling with superhero wannabes.

Kick-Ass has got the usual complement of teen boy troubles -- he's ignored by girls, except the hottie who thinks he's her gay BFF -- to go along with the  superhero sturm und drang. But never mind him; he's not actually that interesting. Well, okay, what's moderately interesting about Kick-Ass is that he regularly gets the snot beat out of him -- he bleeds real blood, and never develops any discernible fighting skills, yet he continues to fight the good fight until it becomes too much of a drag for him. Hit Girl and Big Daddy are far more compelling. Cage does one of his fun n' creepy weirdo turns here as a father who brainwashes his little girl, creating the perfect avenging angel assassin. He's nuts, and it's child abuse, of course, but he adores his daughter and Hit Girl loves her daddy and seems to be having a good time. Plus, she's got mad skills and the weapons are the neatest. (Cage also has Big Daddy talk in an Adam West-as-Batman voice -- an incongruously funny bit of campy homage for a guy who takes his crime fighting very seriously.) Moretz, with her cutie pie looks and voice, completely holds her own as the wall-climbing, knife throwing, guns-a-blastin' half-pint killer. She and Cage are great together, and, at any rate, aside from a quick backstory that reveals the source of Big Daddy's animus for D'Amico, the movie's not terribly motivated to dig into this nutty and unsettling parent-child relationship. It might be quite interesting if it did, but there's little time for that with so many bad guys to annihilate.

The movie ends with a big blowout, a battle royale in which Kick-Ass has to decide if he's really a superhero, or just a poseur. To end an action movie with a big ol' fight is de rigueur, and Kick-Ass isn't so original that it's going to forgo that tradition. Nonetheless, it's in the denouement that Kick-Ass puts a (slightly) new spin on the superhero story -- Hit Girl was groomed for vengeance from toddlerhood, but Kick-Ass has to will himself to heroism, setting aside fear, ineptitude, and a pretty lame costume if he's going to kick some bad guy ass. 

18April2010

Date Night (2010)

He's a tax lawyer. She's a realtor. Together they are... a boring suburban couple from New Jersey. Claire (Tina Fey) and Phil Foster (Steve Carell) have a nice, simple life. It's a pretty quiet life, except for the rambunctious kids. Friday night is date night, when the Fosters go to a local eatery where everybody knows their names. Ordinary. Routine. But when they find out that their friends (Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig) are getting divorced, it gets them to thinking that maybe their lives are too quiet, and too routine. Which is how they end up at a tony Manhattan hotspot, swiping an unclaimed table reservation, which results in a severe case of mistaken identity. Turns out the no-show couple -- the Tripplehorns -- are wanted by a couple of thugs. Suddenly, recapture-the-romance date night turns into Date Night, the wacky marital action screwball comedy. 

The thugs (Jimmi Simpson and Common) demand a mysterious flash drive, wave guns around, and refuse to believe that the Fosters -- those table thieves! -- are not the Tripplehorns. Suddenly boring suburban routine isn't looking so bad. The thugs turn out to be crooked cops working for a local mafioso (Ray Liotta). Whatever. The plot is quite beside the point. It makes sense, in that each perilously wacky incident follows fom previous perilously wacky incidents, but really, you could throw Carell and Fey into a caper involving a Starbucks murder mystery, or a pencil factory corporate espionage caper and they could probably make it work. (Although come to think of it, Fey played an exec for a Whole Foods-esque company in *Baby Mama*, and it wasn't that funny.) The point is, Fey and Carell are likable, and the Fosters are likable, which makes it easy to care about what happens to them, even when what happens to them -- car chases, gun fights, strip club escapades -- is straight out of the been-there-done-that book.

Fey and Carell are best known for their TV roles on 30 Rock and The Office, respectively. They are both very funny people, but in Date Night, they more or less play it straight, in the screwball tradition. All hell breaks loose around them, and they remain the boring suburban couple from New Jersey, except they're on the lam in the big city, and a little overdressed for people who are crawling through hedges and climbing fire escapes. Almost everyone in Date Night plays it straight. This is not a jokey movie in which sarcastic people trade wisecracks. This is a movie in which the characters behave, for the most part, like human beings. Human beings in a fairly ridiculous and not entirely plausible situation, but believable human beings nonetheless.

Directed by Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum) and written by Josh Klausner, Date Night gets its laughs not from the overworked and half-baked plot, but from the characters. Claire and Phil are not the sort of people you would expect to find in this kind of situation, which is why it's funny that they're in it. They're dazed and confused and scared to death, which is the appropriate reaction to being chased by murderous hooligans. They don't have any remarkable crime-fighting talents, or unexpected skills. Claire and Phil are not in the urban wilderness all alone, however. Claire knows a guy -- a "security expert" named Holbrooke (Mark Wahlberg) -- who never wears a shirt, and has a fabulous bachelor pad filled with nifty spy gadgets. Wahlberg is funny just because he's shirtless -- and extremely buff -- which is not in itself an inherently funny thing. He also speaks Hebrew, which is also not really funny, although contextually, both the shirtlessness and the Hebrew end up being funny. Part of what makes Holbrooke funny -- and what makes the Fosters funny too -- is that they don't know that they're funny. The Tripplehorns (James Franco and Mila Kunis), when Claire and Phil find them, don't know they're funny either. They're more than half baked, and exactly the sort of people one might expect to have unwittingly instigated the current crisis. 

Although really, it was the act of impersonating the Tripplehorns that got the Fosters in over their heads. Suffice it to say that one of the lessons learned in Date Night is that decent people who want to avoid trouble don't steal tables in trendy Manhattan restaurants, no matter how rude and imperious the maître d' is. And the other lesson is that a little boredom isn't fatal to marital bliss, and when you consider the alternative, it might be downright conducive to it.

11 April2010

Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

The title Hot Tub Time Machine is rivaled in its spot-on obviousness only by Snakes On A Plane. A movie called Snakes On A Plane can only really be about one thing, while a movie abut time travel -- even in a hot tub -- could be about just about anything: a little love, a little science, some swords and scorcery. Or not. The titular tub in Hot Tub Time Machine takes three middle aged men, aging ungracefully and badly handling life's little letdowns, and returns them to their salad years, when they were green. Will it be as good as they remember? What would be the fun in that?

Just to make sure it's fun, Hot Tub Time Machine throws in a pile of pop culture references and a whole lot of raunchy humor. Nick, Lou, and Adam are formerly best friends who have drifted apart. Nick (Craig Robinson) is married, with a job in a dog spa -- not exactly the music career he once dreamed of. Adam (John Cusack) has been recently dumped by his girlfriend. The parting was not amicable. His nephew Jacob (Clark Duke) lives in his basement, where he plays Second Life in lieu of having a life of his own. Lou (Rob Corddry) is the most miserable of all -- and potentially suicidal -- which is why his friends decide that it's time for a trip down memory lane. They book a weekend in the ski resort where they cavorted as youths back in the 80s. The place is now a rundown dump with a malfunctioning (or is it?) hot tub that -- I'll spare you the scientific details -- transports them back to their glory days in the 80s, when the mountains were white with equal parts snow and cocaine, and everybody sported brightly colored spandex and really bad haircuts. Nick, Lou, and Adam have fond (if vague) memories of fun and debauchery, and of the girls that got away. 

In the interest of full disclosure, I must say that I loathed the 1980s, and I feel not the slightest nostalgia for the Reagan years, which might unfavorably color my perceptions of Hot Tub Time Machine if it turned out that the 80s were even remotely worthy of revisiting in the movie. They are not. The fellas discover that their youthful indulgences were not actually that much fun, and are even worse to relive. Nick, Lou and Adam don't just go back in time -- they are forced to relive a particularly eventful and distressing weekend of break-ups, beatings, and assorted indignities. As the only member of the party who did not yet exist in the 1980s, Jacob cautions them to change nothing, lest the future be irrevocably altered such that he might not exist to spend his days in a dimly lit basement. Such are the rules of time travel, if you believe Stephen Hawking. I say, if you can't change the past, why bother visiting it? (For the record, Hawking doesn't actually say you shouldn't change the past while traveling in time -- he says quantum effects will always conspire to prevent time travel. Quantum effects are like time cops, ruining everybody's fun, but making the universe safe for historians.)

But lo and behold... the guys realize that, as miserable as they are now (or whenever they are), they were pretty miserable back then too. Wallowing in misery and self pity is a skill they've been perfecting for decades. It's pretty obvious that they're in for some old school enlightenment, and male bonding will occur if they survive the sex, the drugs, the rock n roll, and the bullies. Hot Tub Time Machine doesn't let them off the hook -- they are the architects of their own unhappiness, and if their trek through time teaches them anything, it's that. 

Despite all the nostalgia on display, and the overworked crassness, the movie is not, ultimately, nostalgic about either the 80s or misspent youth. I can get behind that. Remember Back to the Future? This movie does. Crispin Glover (aka Marty McFly's father George) shows up in Hot Tub Time Machine as a belligerent, one-armed bellhop. He shows up again in the past as a cheerful, helpful, two-armed bellhop. What happened to his arm, and his temperament, makes for one of the better running gags in the movie. Chevy Chase turns up too, and so does that guy (William Zabka) who played the bully in Karate Kid and a bunch of other 80s movies with bulies. And of course, Cusack is himself a walking, talking allusion to the movies of the 1980s (Say Anything, Better Off Dead). Ready to revisit Reagan-style red-baiting? Hot Tub Time Machine has got you covered. If you miss the homophobic, misogynistic sex comedies of the 80s, well, Hot Tub Time Machine has got something for you too. The movie is totally loaded with 80s pop culture references, visual homages, and stolen snippets of dialogue, but it also aims to be crude, rude, and goofy. Like, totally. Director Steve Pink and the film's three screenwriters (Josh Heald, Sean Anders, and John Morris) cram every square inch of the movie with Jheri curl, legwarmers, magic mushrooms, MTV-when-it-still-had-music (now I'm showing my age), and everything else that might send one's hippocampus skidding helplessly back to the dreaded era of Flock of Seagulls. It's overload and overkill, an absurd, slapstick farrago of everything that was sad and ridiculous and mockable and laughably horrible about the 80s (which is a lot), and then some. For all that, Hot Tub Time Machine as experienced is not as much fun as one might think, which is a kind of meta-unfun-ness that mirrors the letdown of traveling to your past and discovering that it was less great than it looked from the distance of time. Is that good? It's kind of a bummer, actually.

4April2010

How to Train Your Dragon (2010)

In How to Train Your Dragon, a 3-D animated feature based on Cressida Cowell's book, a misfit Viking lad befriends a dragon, overturns centuries of prejudice, and proves to his hard-to-please dad that it takes more than muscle to save a village. Hiccup is not much of a name for a fearsome and fearless Viking. But Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) is not very fearsome or fearless. He longs to be a brave and fierce dragon slayer, like his father, and his father's father, and every other father (and more than a few mothers) in the village of Berk, a tiny burg perched atop rugged cliffs, and regularly besieged by dragons. 

As an apprentice blacksmith in Berk, Hiccup is strictly a supporting player. The big, brawny, hairy Vikings, like his father Stoick (Gerard Butler), do all the dragon slaying while scrawny Hiccup stays in his workshop, working on brainy inventions that he hopes will make up for the brawn he lacks.

Truth is, though, Hiccup doesn't have it in him to kill a dragon, something he discovers when one of his contraptions injures one. The Night Fury is not just any dragon, however. In the annals of Berk, there are many dangerous dragons, but the Night Fury is the most mysterious and the most feared. It's so fast and dark that it's a mere inky shadow in the night sky -- and all the more terrifying because it is never seen.

Oh, but it is so darn cute, that Night Fury, like a big, sleek, jet-black kitten with huge green eyes. The dragon Hiccup shoots down is wounded and scared, and can't fly. Hiccup names the adorable beast Toothless, and fashions a contraption -- a prosthetic tail -- to help it fly again. (Turns out dragon fighting is a dangerous profession, and prosthetic limbs are a common sight, and a badge of honor, in Berk.) As the iconoclastic Hiccup comes to understand Toothless, and other species of dragons too, he realizes that his people had, for generations, been wrong about dragons. But try explaining that to Dad. As Hiccup observes, his Viking people "have stubbornness issues."

How to Train Your Dragon begins and ends with intense scenes of combat that will likely scare the more sensitive youngsters in the audience. But in between, the film, directed by Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, is sweet and funny, and often evokes other quietly moving stories of human-animal bonding (particularly *The Black Stallion*) with its nearly wordless but endlessly expressive scenes of the developing, tentative trust and friendship between Toothless and Hiccup. There's also the usual crew of funny sidekicks -- a trio of wiscracking Viking adolescents, and a spunky love interest (America Ferrera)  -- and a colorful collection of dragons who vary in shape, size, and firepower.

High quality computer animation is the rule rather than the exception these days, but How to Train Your Dragon has an exceptionally lovely and lush quality, thanks in part to visual consultant Roger Deakins, an acclaimed cinematographer. Where computer animation tends to be bright and crisp and sharply focused, How to Train Your Dragon has a softness and depth that often mimics the visual quality of live action film. How to Train Your Dragon is dark around the edges of the warmly bronzed, candlelit interiors of Hiccup's home; It's foggy and sun dappled in the forest, and the glen where Hiccup and Toothless become friends. At the same time, an animated film isn't earthbound or tethered to reality the way that a live action film is, and How to Train Your Dragon swoops and soars and takes flight on dragon wings, above the fluffy clouds and beyond. The story in How to Train Your Dragon contains the familiar tropes of family-friendly lit and movies, but it's well worth seeing how the animators mix earth, air, water and fire (and scales and hair) to invent a richly textured, almost touchably dimensional new world and new creatures in this charming fable of a boy and his dragon.

28Mar2010

Repo Men (2010)

Whatever forces were behind the coincidental alignment of the release of Repo Men with Congress's healthcare reform showdown this past weekend, the timing was perfect. Repo Men is set in a dystopic, post-war near future, but the premise is not so far-fetched that it can't serve as a pointed, gruesome satire of free market, pay-or-die healthcare.


A company called The Union has solved the chronic shortage of organs for transplant by developing an extensive line of artificial organs -- known as artiforgs -- to cure what ails you. Need a new heart? They've got one. And livers, kidneys, eyes, ears, vocal chords and even a brand new neural net in case your brain goes on the fritz. The bad news is that artiforgs aren't cheap. The good news is that The Union has several convenient financing packages. The bad news is that the interest rate is 19.6%, which is still better than some credit cards. The really bad news is that if you fall behind on your payments, The Union will repossess your vital artiforg, which, depending on how badly you need that heart to live, could significantly shorten your lifespan. Enter the repo men. Armed with stun guns, rubber gloves, and scalpels, they efficiently reclaim organs from the imprudent and insolvent.


Remy (Jude Law) is a repo man, and so is his lumbering chum Jake (Forest Whitaker). They both coolly and methodically track down deadbeats and turn them into dead meat. They work in a seedy megalopolis, but when the day is done Remy goes back home to the suburbs, where his wife is none too happy about his job. One night, while working late reclaiming a heart from a musician (RZA), Remy suffers a near-fatal mishap and, wouldn't you know it, the heartless knave wakes up to find a shiny new artiforg heart installed in his chest. He suddenly loses his taste for the repossession business. Irony of ironies, his change of heart has resulted in a change of heart. Punny. And that is the level of subtlety at which Repo Men operates, which is to say, not much.


The kinder (but not gentler) Remy can't do his job, so he's quickly in arrears on that compassionate new heart of his (is compassion a bug, or just an unintended feature?), and on the run with what turns out to be quite a lot of people trying to avoid the repo man. He finds a lady friend, a singer named Beth (Alice Braga) who has several implants she can't pay for, and the two of them try to escape with their hot organs. Things go pretty well until Remy's pal Jake is assigned to retrieve the company's property.


Anyone looking for intelligent debate of substantive issues related to organ transplantation or health insurance reform or universal healthcare should just keep on looking, because Repo Men offers none of the above. That's not to say that, in it's crazy way, Repo Men doesn't make a strong case for universal healthcare *and* universal organ donation. It does. It just does it with lots of guns and gore and very little thinking. Repo Men, directed by Miguel Sapochnik, and written by Garrett Lerner and Eric Garcia (based on Garcia's novel *The Repossession Mambo*) is a sci-fi action thriller slasher movie that's primarily interested in knife fights and splattering blood and gory impromptu surgery. This is a movie with one idea -- it's an interesting idea -- that inspires a whole lot of violence, butchery and bloodshed, with occasional outbursts of humor. The movie lacks a consistent vision of its dystopian future -- it's not so far in the future that the cars look any different, but the cities are *Bladerunner*-style ginormous, with slummy areas filled with squatters, and spacious, nearly empty freeways, and surrounding suburbs that look oddly, ordinarily suburban.


Repo Men is apparently a movie with a very deadpan satirical style that doesn't even bother to wink at the audience. Or maybe it's not meant to be funny, in which case, it actually turns out to be kind of funny, if you can stomach all the stomachs and livers and spleens and such. Liev Schreiber is quite funny as the heartless and humorless CEO of The Union. This is a bullets flying, knives slashing, axes flailing, hacksaws hacking, brain smashing, organ snatching movie that only pauses long enough to linger on the angry red blooming of parting flesh in the wake of a scalpel blade. This is a movie about pain and fear, and lots of it -- the pain and fear of facing death, the pain and fear of financial insolvency, and even the pain and fear of being a medical repo man. Turns out they can have hearts too. As long as they can pay for them.
 21March2010

Remember Me (2010)

Film critics, like movie audiences, are fairly optimistic when it comes to movies. They go in, hoping for the best, and not really expecting the worst. So when they encounter the worst -- as inevitably happens sometimes -- it is like stealing candy from a baby. Unexpected, dismaying, disappointing. You, filmmakers responsible for Remember Me, are candy thieves.

Quite honestly, I did not have lofty expectations for Remember Me, but neither did I expect to be enraged by a cheap stunt of an ending. Remember Me stars Robert Pattinson, better known to Harry Potter fans as the late Cedric Diggory, and to Twilight fans as Edward, the dreamy vampire. To fans of both movie series, he is probably bigger than Jesus. Pattinson once said that his hair is 75% of his performance in Twilight. I believe it. His hair is fantastic in Remember Me, a gravity-defying mop of carefully tousled bedhead hair. It's devil-may-care hair, rebel hair, the kind of hair James Dean would have if James Dean were young and brooding and poetic and in his early twenties right now. The rest of Remember Me does not live up to that hair, but for a while at least, it gives it a go.

The story begins in 1991, when young Ally Craig witnesses the murder of her mother. Ten years later, Ally (Emilie de Ravin) is a college student in New York City, and her father Neil Craig (Chris Cooper), a cop, is understandably overprotective. Craig's a bit of a hothead too. Hothead cop encounters Tyler Hawkins (Pattinson), who is barhopping and protesting injustice along with his pal Aidan (Tate Ellington). Craig throws them both in jail. This is not so bad, because Tyler's father Charles Hawkins (Pierce Brosnan) is a wealthy, powerful attorney. But Tyler hates his father for various reasons, mostly because he thinks the old man is cold and heartless and drove Tyler's older brother to suicide. And he's not terribly kind to Tyler's little sister Caroline (Ruby Jerins), who has a hard enough time with all the snooty kids at her private school. Tyler, has, accordingly, taken to living in squalor with Aidan, and dressing in vintage clothing to demonstrate his anti-bourgeois cred. He also smokes like a chimney, writes poetry, and works at The Strand bookstore, so you can be sure he is very tortured. 

And so, when Aidan figures out that Ally is the daughter of the cop who arrested them, he talks Tyler into asking her out, to get back at her pop the cop. There's no reason for Tyler to go along with this jerkwad scheme, really, except that later in the movie, when Ally finds out, it will give her a reason to get mad at Tyler and walk out on him. This will give Tyler another reason to feel alienated and mopey, in addition to the aforementioned. Remember Me is a love story about Tyler and Ally, and how two souls, one pretty tortured, and the other just a little traumatized, find happiness together in this crazy world and as a result, some good stuff happens. 

Remember Me, written by Will Fetters, has a labored and contrived plot, a chatty script, and a title that implies impending doom. And indeed, doom looms. But first, love blooms for Ally and Tyler, and Remember Me brings to mind Love Story, in which star-crossed young college-aged romantics dither and bicker and fall in love and so forth, and Ordinary People, with its family traumatized by the death of a son. Mostly, though, Remember Me pretty shamelessly rips off Rebel Without A Cause, with Pattinson as a faux James Dean doing everything except yell "You're tearing me apart!" He does yell at his dad, and broods and slouches quite a lot, and engages in fisticuffs more often than one would expect. I don't think anyone could have really made Tyler a convincing character -- he's a walking, talking collection of disaffected  youth cliches with a three day stubble. To his credit, Pattinson convincingly plays the part of cool, caring older brother in Tyler's scenes with Caroline. 

Director Allen Coulter does not manage to inject any realism into all the affected torment. Neither does he reign in the wandering Noo Yawk accents that the very un-New York actors gamely wrestle with. Cooper and Brosnan are both fine actors utterly undone by unfamiliar vowels. Pattinson doesn't bother, and neither does de Ravin (who is Australian), but both manage to sound American.

In addition to love and good stuff, a lot of bad stuff happens in Remember Me, but nothing as bad as what happens at the end, which pretty much pulls the rug out from under the movie in a big, cheap, manipulative, exploitative, infuriating twist. I'm not the sort to spoil a movie, although if ever a movie was spoilin' for a spoilin', it is this one. I'll just say this: terrible things happen in the world sometimes, and movies ought not exploit those terrible things for no good reason. And there was no good reason to exploit this particular terrible thing. There weren't even any bad reasons to use this particular terrible thing in this particular terrible (as it turns out) movie. The ending does serve one purpose: it turns an otherwise forgettable movie into one I will long remember, but not fondly.

18Mar2010

Alice in Wonderland (2010)

In his adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, director Tim Burton has reimagined the fanciful tale. After umpteen variations on Lewis Carroll's story, something new is not a bad thing, although I'm not sure the story really needed to end in a desultory battle scene. Alice (Mia Wasikowski) is older in this version, written by Linda Woolverton and adapted from both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. She's a rebellious 19 year old, a young woman who has been plagued all her life by strange dreams of a land filled with eccentric weirdos. Just as she is about to become engaged -- to a man who shows her as little regard as she shows him -- a white rabbit in a waistcoat appears, and leads her down that fateful rabbit hole.

That Alice in Wonderland is a 3D movie necessitates, I suppose, that the fall down the rabbit hole be rendered in 3D, with miscellaneous detritus flying about and occasionally flying towards the front of the screen, but it cannot be said that Burton embraces 3D with anything like artistic enthusiasm. He's a director with a keen eye for design and a distinctive visual style, but the 3D feels like an aferthought in Alice in Wonderland, a tacked on and unnecessary contrivance. There's plenty enough to look at in Burton's movies, without having to see it in simulated 3D. The 3D technology tends to mute colors and darken the picture, and Alice in Wonderland, like most of Burton's films, is plenty dark enough.

This is a particular gloomy elaboration on the Alice in Wonderland tale, one in which Alice, according to Underland (for that is the place's actual name, we are told) prophecy, will slay the menacing Jabberwocky on the frabjous day. Alice would really rather not, but circumstances conspire to force her hand when her friends are captured by the wicked Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), who, as she is wont to do, has decided to separate them from their heads. Alice spends much of the movie wandering about Underland, hiding from the Red Queen's henchman the Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover) and his toothy, frumious Bandersnatch. Alice shrinks and grows and shrinks and grows and interacts with the various oddities who live in Underland, most notably the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), a foppish milliner with horizontal tendrils of flaming red hair, very, very large green eyes, and a tendency to periodically lose what little bits of his mind are left. In time, Alice learns that she has been in Underland before, as a small girl, and that the Underlanders have all been waiting for her to return and end the Red Queen's reign of terror and wanton decapitation.

Now, the Red Queen is wicked indeed, with a gigantic noggin that's oddly reminiscent of Bette Davis in Queen Elizabeth. Which makes her that much more menacing. Her sister the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) waits for Alice, but Alice isn't terribly keen on battling the Jabberwocky, even though inevitability, and the story, apparently demand it. And there's the chief problem with Alice in Wonderland -- Alice is a bit wan and indecisive, a heroine pushed grudgingly along towards her destiny, but not really feeling it, despite the best efforts of the Mad Hatter and others to inspire her. The Red Queen plays croquet with a flamingo and a hedgehog -- she hits the hedgehog with the flamingo -- how evil does she have to be before Alice finally gives a whit? As Absolem, the hookah smoking blue caterpillar tells her, she's lost her "muchness." She could use some more muchness, to be sure. On the other hand, the Cheshire Cat (voiced with sly, silky slinkiness by Stephen Fry) is fantastic -- he's got some of that muchness Alice lacks, and so do several other more tangible critters who turn up to prod, assist, and generally run circles around Alice. This is a pretty grown up Alice in Wonderland, and this Alice has some growing up to do.

Alice in Wonderland looks great, as can be expected from a Burton movie. It's full of curiouser and curiouser sights, and many perils, and it whipsaws between visually arresting, candy-colored castles (tinged with menace) and dreary, bizarre, ominous hinterlands. The movie is, in its doleful, baleful, peculiar way also quite bewitching until it falls apart in a halfhearted, perfunctory, oddly uninspired action sequence, a battle scene that really offers not much as a story climax, and is every bit as uncertain and noncommittal as Alice. It's an ordinary, predictable ending to an offbeat movie that had been bursting with the unexpected. 

11Mar2010

Cop Out (2010)

I'm not sure how the title of Cop Out actually refers to the movie, except that there are cops in it, and said cops are on the outs with their chief after they screw up a major drug investigation or something. But that's not really what "cop out" means, unless you're being punny, and then it still isn't what it means. But  whatever. Cop Out is this: it is the first major studio movie by filmmaker Kevin Smith, and the first time Smoth has directed a picture he didn't write. I can't say I'm a huge fan of Kevin Smith's movies, but I can accept that they fill a niche that is otherwise mostly empty: movies about potty-mouthed young people who mostly talk about sex and stuff that would titillate an 11 year old, and which often star Ben Affleck. Cop Out does not star Ben Affleck, but it does star Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis. Morgan's character talks about sex, and his toilet habits, and likes to riff on movies. He also gets into a bruising fight with a foul-mouthed 11 year old car thief, which is really no way to treat the movie's key demographic.

Paul (Morgan) is half of a buddy cop duo; Willis's Jimmy is the other half. Paul is the goofy half. He thinks his wife (Rashida Jones) is cheating on him. Jimmy is the weary half. In *Lethal Weapon*, Jimmy would be the Danny Glover character, the one who always says he's too old for this stuff (although he doesn't say it in exactly those words). That would make Paul the Mel Gibson character: the mentally unstable live wire who does wacky, unpredictable things. And if Cop Out were Lethal Weapon... for one thing, it would be better. It's more like Lethal Weapon 4, in which we're all pretty tired of these buddy cops, and they're tired of each other too.

As Cop Out begins, we learn that Paul and Jimmy have been partners for nine years. In short order, they are suspended without pay and forced to turn in their badges and guns. Never mind that they use badges and guns throughout the rest of the movie, when they try to redeem themselves by busting up a vicious Mexican drug cartel. But that's just one of many plots in this overworked movie, written by Robb and Mark Cullen. Jimmy has a valuable baseball card, which he needs to sell to finance his daughter's expensive wedding, so that his ex-wife's new husband doesn't pay for it. The card is stolen by a goofy thief named Dave (Seann William Scott), who trades it to drug lord Poh Boy (Guillermo Diaz). Poh Boy, remarkably, is not only an avid baseball memorabilia collector, but he's also the brutal kingpin of the drug cartel that is being investigated by the police department. That's the investigation that Paul and Jimmy disrupt during a botched stakeout of something or other. It doesn't really matter. The point is, Paul and Jimmy want the baseball card back, and a whole bunch of other stuff happens while they try to retrieve it.

Meanwhile, they talk a lot. Talking a lot is something characters in a Kevin Smith movie do a lot, and Cop Out is no different. Most of the talking is done by Paul, who natters on about many things in that odd baby-voiced way that Tracy Morgan talks on *30 Rock*. His character in Cop Out is more or less the same as his character on *30 Rock*, which might just be the way Tracy Morgan is. The key difference is that in Cop Out, he has a gun, and a patient sidekick in Jimmy. Cop Out is a regular blabbathon, and it is one of the movie's saving graces that it is, because there are regular collisions of crude and pointless dialogue that is much enlivened by vivid, high-speed delivery and the way that nobody in the movie ever seems to care at all what anyone else says. The dialogue isn't especially funny, but the characters just keep yammering away in their own annoying little orbits, and that's okay because Cop Out doesn't have much else going for it.

Smith has never been what you might call a competent director, but in his smart alecky, seat-of-the-pants way, he has managed to keep making movies anyway. Cop Out is well above his pay grade, despite the interracial buddy cop movie one of the most played-out, predictable and reliable genres of movie. Smith doesn't do anything new or original with this one, and he's not much of an action director. Cop Out is serviceable, unsurprising, and good-natured, but not, however hard it tries, offensive. That makes it, all in all, pretty forgettable.

4Mar2010