Movie Review: X-Men: First Class

After two weak entries in the X-Men film franchise (the juvenile X3, and the unimpressive X-Men Origins: Wolverine), I was pretty leery going into X-Men: First Class. Yellow uniforms? Magneto’s helmet? Eurgh. Has there ever been a 5th movie in a series that was actually decent? Now there’s at least one; X-Men: First Class is an intelligent, exciting, stylized addition to the X-Men film franchise, and almost supplants X2 as the best X-Men movie.

X-Men: First Class takes place in the swingin’, Commie hatin’ 60s and chronicles the friendship and conflict between Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), a telepathic university professor and Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender), a metal-kinetic Nazi hunter. I could watch “Magneto vs Nazis” all day, but the real villain of the film is the enigmatic Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), mutant mastermind.

Movie Review: Sucker Punch

I have never been more prepared to hate a movie than I was for Zack Snyder’s (300, Watchmen) Sucker Punch. This picture really sums up my ire for the entire promotional compaign:

Movie Review: Battle: Los Angeles

A note to all young men who watch this movie: If you join the Marines, you will not fight aliens in your backyard. You will go to Iraq where it is 120 Degrees Fahrenheit and you constantly hope that you don’t drive over an IED. The Marines in Battle: Los Angeles shout “Hoo-rah” a lot and kill lots of aliens, but the real military is hard work. Mostly.

Battle: Los Angeles gets into the action quickly and barely takes a moment to breathe throughout it’s two hour running time. Alien invasion flicks are nothing new, but this is the first film to really combine gritty urban warfare with an alien ground army. Think Black Hawk Down, but substitute Mogadishu with LA and Somalians with cyborg aliens. And bump it down to PG-13. It sounds crazy, it’s played completely straight, and it works.

Movie Review: Rango

Rango is the story of a cosmopolitan chameleon (Jonny Depp) leading a life of bored contentment with his imaginary friends and independent theatre productions. During a cross country trip he is ejected from his owners’ car and sees this as an opportunity to redefine himself. After telling a few tall tales and accidentally killing a hawk, he takes the name “Rango” off a bottle of cactus juice and is made the sheriff of the town of Dirt, which is in the crippling grip of a water shortage.

Rango is a parody/homage to classic westerns like Magnificent Seven and The Man With No Name. It’s a bit slow in the first act, but overall the great performances and spectacular visuals make it an enjoyable and surprisingly edgy action/comedy/fantasy/western. It really does run the gamut. Rango is a lot more enjoyable when it goes for the visual and situation humor; there are a bunch of side jokes that are very hit or miss, and it’s the misses that stop Rango from being as good as it could have been.

Movie Review: The Eagle

Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle is based on the 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff. It’s the second century AD, and when the 9th Legion of the Roman Empire and their eagle standard disappear in northern Britain, Ceasar has the Hadrian wall built to mark the end of the civilized world. Marcus Aquila (Channing Tatum) is the son of the 9th’s commanding officer, and his family bears the burden of the loss of the eagle standard. When Marcus hears rumor that the eagle is being displayed as a trophy by northern tribes, he and his slave Esca (Jamie Bell) set off into the north to recover the eagle and restore Marcus’ honour. 

Movie Review: True Grit

Oscar nominations are in, and you may find yourself wanting to chat around the water cooler about some of the niminees.You already know what I thought of The King’s Speech and The Social Network, but I only got around to seeing True Grit yesterday. If you’re in Edmonton, like I am, you need to fight -25 degree weather and third-world quality roads to get to a movie theatre. That’s a major hassle.

If you don’t want make the harrowing journey to a theatre, but still enjoy film conversation, here’s how to talk about True Grit and its Oscar nominations to your friends at the office without actually watching it:

Movie Review: The Green Hornet

Directed by Michel Gondry, (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind) The Green Hornet is an adaptation of the 1930s radio drama of the same name (it wasn’t a comic book for another decade). Pampered rich boy Britt Reid (Seth Rogan) is a slacker with serious daddy issues enjoying a balanced life of slacking and partying until his father’s death leaves him charge of the family newspaper: The Daily Sentinel. Distraught, he forms a bond with his father’s former mechanic Kato (Jay Chou). During a booze-inspired late-night desecration of his father’s grave (remember, daddy issues) Britt and Kato thwart a mugging, which inspires Britt to start a crime fighting duo. Britt calls himself “The Green Hornet” and poses as an upstart criminal attempting to muscle in on crime lord Chudnofsky’s (Christopher Waltz) territory.

Movie Review: The King's Speech

Nothing is easier to hate than wealthy, powerful people. They live lives of opulence and fancy, have off shore tax shelters, and never take public transportation. So how do you make a compelling story about a pampered rich man that rules over ¼ of the world’s population? You make him as real and sympathetic as Colin Firth makes The Duke of York, Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George (“Bertie,” to his family and for the sake of expediency) in Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech.

The year is 1925. After a disastrous speech at the British Empire Exhibition, Bertie (Colin Firth) reluctantly takes speech therapy sessions from the unorthodox Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). Frustrated by his own insecurity and Logue’s methods, Bertie resigns to live life in the shadow of his charismatic brother Prince Edward, first in line to the throne. However, his brother abdicates within a year of assuming the crown, and Bertie is made King George VI. With a second Great War looming on the horizon, the Empire needs a king that can inspire confidence at home and abroad.

Movie Review: Tron: Legacy

Set decades after the original Tron, Tron: Legacy is the story of Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) -- a brilliant slacker/prankster content to live off of the inheritance of his missing father, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges). But when Sam becomes trapped in the virtual world of The Grid, he must survive the trials of the games and escape the wrath of the tyrannical Clu (also Jeff Bridges).

There are a few logical leaps in the story, but nothing so gaping that it takes away from the film. I managed to watch the original Tron for the first time the week before legacy opened, and if there one that I wanted from Legacy is for it to be a bit... well... goofier. Kevin Flynn is a outlaw tech hippie turned Zen dude, and he brings a much needed levity to some of the heavier moments in the film.

Movie Review: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Emo Harry Potter got you down? Then you need an injection of good old fashion Christian optimism in Michael Apted’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third film in the Chronicles of Narnia series.

Lucy (Georgie Henley) and Edmund (Skandar Keynes) are former Narnian royalty living out World War 2 with their intolerable cousin Eustace (Will Poulter). Eustace has a penchant for collecting insects, terrible social skills, is a meticulous note keeper, and has impeccable hygiene; all symptoms of a burgeoning serial killer. But before Eustace can preserve Lucy and Edmund in formaldehyde, the trio is whisked away to Narnia via a magical painting. They reunite with Prince Caspian (now King of Narnia) and set off into the Eastern Sea to investigate the disappearances of the seven Lords of Narnia. Along the way there are dragons, magic swords, sea serpents, magic spells and a Very Important Lesson is learned by all. 

Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

Making a movie in two parts is tricky because even though you have a perfectly logical place to put your first act (beginning of first movie) and third act (ending of second movie... duh) your second act is inevitably chopped off in an awkward place. Some movies do it well (Empire Strikes Back), some movies do it poorly (Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest), and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 falls somewhere in the “poorly” spectrum. At least they had the decency to put “Part 1” in the title. I remember the fury that came from the audience at the ending of The Matrix Reloaded and Dead Man’s Chest. With HPDH-P1 (yes, sounds like some sort of flu strain, but I’m not spelling out the whole movie title anymore than I need to, nya) we knew the cut-off ending was coming but the second act still felt like it was cut in half with a rusty saw and left writhing on screen like an unprofessionally severed, but still anesthetized, appendage: not as painful as it could have been, but still messy.

Movie Review: Tangled

Tangled is Disney’s take on the story of Rapunzel, the classic fairy tale of the girl with super long hair who is locked away in a tower for reasons I can’t be bothered to look up on Wikipedia. It’s a medieval fairy tale, so I’m assuming somebody gets horribly slaughtered and children are taught a good lesson. Leaving the grim world of classic literature behind, In Disney’s Tangled Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) is a princess who’s hair can magically restore youth and heal wounds, but loses this property when cut. As a baby, she’s stolen by the sinister Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy) who uses Rapunzel to maintain her immortality. Rapunzel is warned about the (exaggerated) dangers of the outside world, but longs to venture outside her tower to see the strange lights that fill the sky every year on her birthday. She finally gets this opportunity when the dashing thief Flynn Ryder (Zachary Levi) encounters her tower while escaping from a horse. Not on a horse, from a horse. If that notion alone has you intrigued, then Tangled is right up your alley. 

Movie Review: Monsters

Monsters, directed by Gareth Edwards, is a fascinating experiment in low-budget, guerrilla-style film making, but it’s about as fun to watch as an experiment in cleaning pennies with various household chemicals. In both experiments, you watch it for an hour and NOTHING HAPPENS.

There are approximately thirty minutes of anything interesting happening in this Monsters; it would have made a powerful short film instead of a glacial full length feature. Subtlety works in short doses or between action sequences, but the human story between Samantha (Whitney Able) and Andrew (Scoot McNairy) is spread so thin over the 94 minute running time it’s practically invisible.

As for the monsters themselves, the effects are convincing enough for a micro budget movie, but I question the alien design choice. You know how in District 9 the aliens looked sort of like anthropomorphic lobsters, and thus were nickname prauns? Well, the monsters in Monsters are straight up six story tall giant land octopuses. At times they’re eerie, but other times they’re just hilarious. Especially when they moo. Seriously, it’s a riot.

Movie Review: Unstoppable

Unstoppable is inspired by the true events of a 2001 runaway train incident in Ohio, where locomotive CSX 8888, nicknamed “Crazy Eights” wandered unmanned through 66 miles of pristine Ohio countryside before it was slowed, and then stopped. The incident ended without injury or derailment, and it’s most dangerous freight, molten phenol, was safe and sound.

In Unstoppable, the runaway train Engine 777 (nicknamed “Triple 7”) begins its murderous rampage desperate bid for freedom when a lazy train yard worker commits several acts of criminal negligence, which has his Triple 7 ambling out of the train yard unmanned and at full throttle. I’m no expert, and maybe jumping out of a slow moving train to pull a switch is common in the locomotive industry, but I’ve been through enough petroleum industry safety orientations for that opening scene to practically give me an aneurysm.

Sharing the same rail with Triple 7 is an excursion train full of children on a field trip and a passenger car full of nuns a freight train crewed by rookie conductor Will Colson (Chris Pine) and veteran engineer Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington). Can they make it to another track before a head on collision with Triple 7? Hey if new Captain Kirk can’t, then nobody can.

Unstoppable occupies a very comfortable middle ground of action movies, where the danger is real enough to build tension, but grounded enough that we don’t start rolling our eyes. A runaway train, you say? I guess that could happen. You don’t need to suspend your disbelief or turn off your brain to enjoy the story.

Chris Pine and Denzel Washington play off each other with ease, and a great supporting cast rounds off this enjoyable action flick. A runaway train is sort of an allegory for modern movies. You know exactly where it’s heading and how long it will take to get there, but what makes it interesting is the people on board and what happens when it finally reaches its destination. Unstoppable won’t surprise you, but it’s an enjoyable ride from start to finish.

Movie Review: Skyline

“Skyline,” starring Eric Balfour (24) and Donald Faison (Scrubs) is the brainchild of brothers Colin and Greg Strauss, visual effects gurus whose have worked on films like “X-Men” and “Terminator 3.”

There are amazing visuals in “Skyline;” it’s well crafted and wonderfully designed. It shows an alien invasion from the perspective of citizenry, people who don’t have any government insider knowledge of the situation. We’re in the dark for the alien’s motivation and abilities, and that’s a GOOD thing. The more pseudo-science in a movie, the stupider it seems. The aliens are bizarre and their motives are incomprehensible to us, which fits the mood of the film just fine.

Remembrance Day Special: The Devil's Brigade (1968)

Last year one of my roommates introduced me to “The Devil’s Brigade,” a 1968 World War 2 movie starring Willaim Holden, Vince Ewards, and Cliff Robertson. It’s his family tradition to watch “The Devil’s Brigade” and eat pizza on Remembrance Day. I didn’t ask him, but I’m assuming the movie is to honour the American and Canadian Soldiers and the pizza is because they successfully capture two Italian strongholds. It’s based on the true story of the 1st Special Service Force, a commando unit comprised of handpicked Canadian and American soldiers.

Movie Review: Megamind

When you walk on the tightrope of archetype, you risk falling into the swamp of cliché. Dreamwork’s “Megamind” (Will Farrel, Tina Fey, David Cross) is the story of a Superman analogue (Metro Man) versus a Lex Luthor analogue (Megamind), but with the twist: what would happen if Luthor finally won?

Movie Review: Red

In our modern hipster world of ironic entertainment it’s really hard to tell if “Red” is glibly self aware or obnoxiously cliched. Considering director Robert Schwentke’s last two films (“Flightplan” and “The Time Traveller’s Wife,”) I’m inclined to believe the latter, but “Red” is just so darned charming that I choose to believe the former. “Red” is a high quality action-comedy that steadily builds up energy an maintains it consistently throughout its two hour running time.

Review - The Social Network

The worst part about being born in the mid to late 80s is that people my age have never quite had a very definitive generational definition. There are 60s flower children, 70s disco freaks, 80s neon fanny-pack enthusiasts, and then everything sort of petered out around around 1994, when neon stopped being cool. My generation went straight from post Cold War ennui to post 9/11 paranoia, and popular culture in the 00s was either 80s nostalgia (which I was too young for) or extremism on either side of the political spectrum (which is always lame, ex: Marvel’s Civil War crossover). But with the spread of broadband access and the rise of mobile Internet, identity thieves are scarier than terrorists. Instantanious worldwide communication is the new norm, and Hollywood has only recently realized that the Internet is neither a fad nor a sub-culture.

EIFF Week: Wrap Up and Reflections

I don’t normally watch six movies in six days, so immersing myself in cinema gave me a bit more appreciation for what I like in a film and what I don’t. To be honest, I had pretty low expectations going into the Canadian films, and I saw an example of one that works (The Academy) and one that doesn’t (The Corrupted). So what were the major differences between these two films?

The Audio

“The Corrupted” has a lot less action than “The Academy,” but the short lived gun rampage in “The Corrupted” is marred by downright embarrassing gunshot sound effects. Nothing takes me out of a movie experience faster than poor audio; it’s the difference between “independent film” and “home movie.”

Continuity

The characters in “The Corrupted” only have a few scenes where they are splattered with blood or injured, and even then it’s inconsistent from scene to scene. One character is sprayed with monster barf, is writhing in pain while his arms have an chemical-burn special-effect on them, and in the next scene his arms are fine. And the blood splatters on his shirt are way off. I can understand the difficulty of reproducing a blood splatter from a take where the splatter on his shirt is randomly applied by practical effects. Simple solution? Drench him in the crap. If he’s covered in one scene, he’s covered in the next. The characters in “The Academy” get beaten worse and worse as the film progresses, and they still managed to have dried blood patterns and bruises on their faces that are both escalating and consistent.

The Energy

“The Corrupted” starts out like you typical horror movie and stays that way. There exists “using subtlety to create tension” and then there’s “boring.” You could cut half an hour out of the beginning of “The Corrupted” and not lose anything. “The Academy” has a clunky opening; it’s five minutes of exposition served on a plate, but it’s interrupted by a guy crashing through a wall and beating the snot out of another guy while bagpipe music plays. Why break through the wall? Walls are meant to be broken, obviously. Why bagpipe music? Why the hell not?

The Ending - Spoiler Alert! Highlight to reveal

Taking a brief trip to bizzaro world, I actually liked the ending to “The Corrupted” a lot more than “The Academy.” The ending of “The Corrupted” is both unsettling and ambiguous, which is fitting for a horror movie. The danger presented by the monsters is still out there, and we’re not sure if the heroes have really escaped. Meanwhile, the ending to “The Academy” should have been bittersweet, but instead feels like the directed fell in love with the characters and wanted them to have the happiest, sugariest, candy-coated, jelly-filled ending ever at the expense of all logic. I should have have got choked up at the ending. Instead I got type 2 diabetes.

And there we have it. So if you are an aspiring filmmaker looking to create a film catered exactly to my tastes, make it ridiculously violent, kill all the main characters in the end, and invest in good audio equipment. And put robots in there somewhere.