Skip to content

MacGruber

May 26, 2010:  MacGruber

It’s no accident that I re-watched Tommy Boy (1995) early one evening, and then went out later to the theatre to see MacGruber.  Tommy Boy is a comedy from an almost sentimental bygone era even though it’s only 15 years ago, as these days gross-out humour, extreme action violence, and inventive foul language are the things which distinguish many a successful comedy.  Hollywood seems to struggle wih the decision between going all the way to extremes with R-rated comedies which will have automatically limited theatrical audiences, and cleaning up the films for the all-important PG-13 rating in order to fill theatres with droves of the teenage boys who are and always have been the bread and butter for the genre.

MacGruber takes the full-on approach with the violence and language, an unabashedly R-rated adaptation of what is actually a fun little series of recurring sketches on Saturday Night Live.  In an obvious parody of action movies and TV shows of the 1980s and more directly of the TV show MacGyver (1985-92), MacGruber on SNL always finds himself in some disastrous situation in which he must defuse a bomb in a minute or two, but he turns out to be completely incompetent and the sketch ends up with a long shot of the entire building blowing up.  One could be excused for thinking that this doesn’t sound like enough material to expand to a feature film, but SNL players have never let that stop them from trying.  As it turns out, MacGruber is a reasonable success as a full-length film, thanks in large part to the wise writing decision to make the character more competent than he is in the short sketches.

There’s plenty to like here, with Will Forte’s likeable portrayal of MacGruber, Ryan Phillippe’s beautifully straight-faced performance, shameless over-the-top sight gags, and fast-paced violent action scenes.  The story is as good as can be expected – MacGruber is a former special ops soldier who retired after a ridiculous number of tours of duty, but he needs to step back into the game when his arch-enemy acquires a nuclear warhead, so he assembles his old team to help but then accidentally blows them up, and instead is stuck with his old flame Kristen Wiig and Ryan Phillippe helping him out.  By the way, his nemesis, played by Val Kilmer, blew up MacGruber’s wife at their wedding, which seems like a pretty good reason to want to kill him in the way MacGruber repeatedly describes.

Unfortunately, there’s also plenty to keep me from recommending this film to anyone outside a select audience, which explains the horrific opening weekend box office performance of less than $4 million from 2500 screens.  The thing is, it almost seems like the movie chose to be bad, to throw away success and brilliance, and I’m having a hard time figuring out why.  MacGruber is at its best when it trusts the viewer and throws lots of intertwined action and gags and fast rambling speeches our way, but it keeps pulling back from that approach and losing momentum.  More than once I found myself in escalating fits of laughter during the action scenes, and I found myself wondering during the slower parts why it was so uneven.  It’s almost like the movie doesn’t want to be boastful about how good it is when it’s good, so things like the hilarious opening song and the actual emotional development of the characters are there, but they are glossed over and missed by the audience.  When firing on all cylinders, this film piles on the laughs one after another, but there are too many awkward moments which are simply not funny.  MacGruber’s stupidity and inability to draw correct conclusions gets old after a while.  Kristen Wiig’s character is underwritten and I think that’s one of the major problems with the movie – she should be a core part of this story, but instead seems tacked-on.  The brutal blood-spraying violence is in keeping with the tone of parody of 1980s action movies from the likes of Schwarzenegger and Van Damme, but it sometimes seems inconsistent with the rest of the approach, such as with the “throat rips” which have been comically hinted at throughout the film but then actually happen en masse during the final action sequence.  And there’s way too much reliance on cheap homophobic gags, which is quite common for this type of movie, but as usual it casts a pall over otherwise sympathetic characters.  Making juvenile fun of sexual orientation seems to be here to stay, but MacGruber goes too far on one occasion with nothing more than clear discrimination for cruel reasons.

I suppose in the spirit of full disclosure I should point out that I never really watched MacGyver back in the 1980s, but I’m familiar with its particular quirks, and I have seen plenty of the action movies which are part and parcel of the parody here.  I’d cautiously recommend MacGruber to anyone looking for a funny and raunchy take-off on that genre, but don’t be expecting brilliance in flashes of more than about a minute here and there.

Do some laughs make it worthwhile?

2010 08 01 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Tommy Boy

May 26, 2010:  Tommy Boy

What is there to say about Tommy Boy that anyone who cares hasn’t already said?  Having seen this in the theatre upon its initial release in 1995 and having been of the appropriate target demographic (20-something male), my perspective on the film is of course terribly biased, even more so due to repeated viewings over the past 15 years.  One of an endless parade of silly concept films at the time starring Saturday Night Live veterans, though in this case not based on characters from a sketch on the show, Tommy Boy fired on all cylinders and was a perfect showcase for then-rising stars Chris Farley and David Spade.  But does it still hold up all these years later?

The answer is yes and no.  I found that the film still comes across well, in part because of the comic chemistry between Spade and Farley, but particularly because of the terrific supporting cast.  However, it definitely has weak spots, which stand in higher relief for me now that time always seems to be at a premium and my mind wanders toward thoughts of tighter editing and abandonment of scenes and jokes that aren’t working.  Tommy Boy will still always hold a place in my heart, but I now have better insight into why some people don’t see the appeal.

The story is about a young college grad, played by Chris Farley, who has barely passed his final year and returns to his hometown with no idea what he will do next.  Fortunately for Tommy, his father owns a successful auto parts manufacturing business and sets him up with an office job.  David Spade plays Richard, right-hand man to Tommy’s father in the business, well-educated but geeky and friendless in contrast with Tommy’s affable doofus who makes friends everywhere he turns.  Based on the opening scene of the film, we can tell that nothing has changed about these guys since they were little kids in this small town.  Moving along in the story, taking a decade and a half as long enough to permit spoilers (fair warning), Tommy’s father’s sudden death throws the company into turmoil, and its future is seriously in question.  Eventually it falls to Tommy to go on his father’s scheduled sales trip, to try and get the orders which are needed for the company to survive.  Richard, knowing all the technical details about the products and the history with the customers, is assigned to go along, and suddenly we have an odd couple road trip, the perfect setting for a silly comedy movie.

From this point, Tommy Boy becomes more episodic, as various jokes and scenarios around driving, motels, sales techniques, and tension between the two men are presented.  Fear not, though, because it never becomes disjointed, since we get into a comfortable pattern of days and evenings, and spreading the trip out over multiple days allows the jokes to be spread out a bit more – for example, there are two evening motel scenes rather than just one – so that things seem more realistic and not like just an excuse to pack in every gag they could think of.  Tommy grows up and finds himself fairly quickly, but the setup before and the scenes after the road trip emphasize that this growth didn’t come out of nowhere.  Tommy just didn’t have anywhere to focus himself before.

So what we have is more or less a buddy/road movie, and the two leads have good chemistry together, being real life friends as well.  I thought it was courageous and a step above what this type of film typically does, to kill off Tommy’s father early in the film.  Played by veteran character actor Brian Dennehy, he is a real presence on the screen and it’s a shock when he’s suddenly gone.  I think it brings real tragedy and heart to the movie, where many similar stories don’t dare to tread, and I think it goes a long way toward keeping this film from being just another shallow excuse for sophomoric jokes.  Tommy’s character is an exaggeration, to be sure, but his interactions with a young lady at work and his rapport with the line workers in the plant and even his gentle ribbing of Richard where he could be more cruel as others obviously have in the past, clearly paint Tommy’s character as inclusive and fair and moral, and his ascent to a respectable position of authority in the company wouldn’t have rung as true if we didn’t see that all those moments through the years have been preparing him for leadership.

The above-mentioned supporting cast is a sight to behold, and indicative of the cachet of such roles at the time, sparked in 1992 by Wayne’s World.  Dennehy is a respected actor with decades of experience.  Bo Derek played his new wife, and she’s a legend from when she blasted on the scene in the late 1970s, if not actually well-known for her actual acting.  Dan Aykroyd is an SNL and comedy veteran and plays the pivotal part of a rival auto parts company owner.  Rob Lowe (also in Wayne’s World) has built a solid reputation for being able to laugh at himself and the pretty-boy image he cultivated in the mid-1980s as a fringe member of the brat pack.  And the underrated Julie Warner, as Farley’s love interest, turns in a sweet performance as a lonely small-town girl who never gets her due attention.  The parallel with Warner’s own career strikes me as I write this, since it seems to me that she had a promising up-and-coming film career at that point, but has more or less bounced around on TV since then.

Tommy Boy was a moderate box office success, and did well enough to trigger a carbon-copy repeat (i.e. another Spade/Farley goof-fest) the following year.  Black Sheep turned out not to be as strong even as Tommy Boy, being a poorly written mess.  Tragically, Farley passed away in 1997 at the age of 33, another hard-partying victim of success and a frightening parallel to John Belushi, who had died the previous decade at a similar age and with a similarly promising comedy and acting career taking flight after a solid run on SNL.  It’s sad that the world never got to see how Farley might have developed as an actor.  While Spade remains quirky and not particularly bankable despite good success on TV, I always thought that Farley had bigger acting chops and could have taken a path more like what Adam Sandler has done, with dumb comedies mixed in with smart and perceptive comedies and the occasional successful dramatic turn.  Oh well.

Tommy Boy remains one of my cherished films, although time hasn’t been as kind to it as I might have hoped.  Still, it’s refreshing to see these comedies by SNL veterans from before the days when things started to get really raunchy in the late 1990s, because even I will admit that excessive coarseness can easily obscure the valid emotional moments which are essential in order to have a film really connect with its viewers.

I remember the good old days.

2010 07 30 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

I.O.U.S.A.

May 25, 2010:  I.O.U.S.A.

When asking typical Americans on the street if they know the US national debt, some of them guess in the millions, and even the high guesses are still less than $100 billion.  This is not a good sign.  The US national debt is now over $10 trillion.  I.O.U.S.A. examines how and why the debt continues to grow.

I.O.U.S.A. has the wisdom to look beyond the budget and even beyond dollars to explain clearly how this is not a simple problem to fix, and not one which arose out of the blue or over a short time.  Broken down into four major parts, the film examines deficits in the budget, savings, the balance of payments, and leadership.  Too often, analyses of the fiscal troubles of the USA, and other nations for that matter, don’t pay attention to global trends in manufacturing, or a lack of political willpower, as factors in the continuing escalating spending.  But the fact is that continued reliance on old economic and political models of short term thinking and vote-buying can only lead to disaster.

The rational analysis in I.O.U.S.A. leads to the conclusion, without question, that there will be budget deficits for the foreseeable future, based in large part on examination of huge programs such as Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid (the health care systems for the elderly and those with low incomes).  Released in 2008, the film pre-dates Barack Obama’s election and subsequent passing of legislation to bring US universal health care closer to reality, but it’s all still expensive, regardless of who is paying.

It sounds to me like the US is screwed.  It’s entirely possible that most of the rest of the developed world is similarly screwed, so at least we’ll have some relative perspective when it all comes tumbling down.

Enjoy the fun while it lasts.

2010 07 22 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders

May 24, 2010:  Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders

This lightweight documentary about how cheap credit has led to the typical American being too heavily leveraged (i.e. in debt), is a fascinating window into a recent but completely vanished era.  Released in 2006, just before the oil price spike and later credit collapse, it seems obvious in hindsight that trouble was unavoidable, and it’s a bit scary how quickly the expected results played out.  It’s even more scary how well known the troubles were long before they got so far out of hand that nobody could stop the carnage.

A mix of interview footage with regular people, interviews with a few academics, and stock footage from congressional hearings and gatherings, Maxed Out focuses on presenting individual stories in order to generate outrage at the companies irresponsibly handing out cheap credit, but the film doesn’t make a big point of personal responsibility or about how the system itself should fundamentally change, other than specific suggested changes in order to prevent the particular cases it examines.  Presented with an array of personal interest stories from people who were caught off guard but clearly should have known better, I felt that it cheapened the experiences of people who got caught in a broken system and were wronged or otherwise chewed up due to circumstances beyond their control.  I was particularly struck by the differences between Canada and the US because of health care.  That is one big factor which is outside of people’s control in the US and can take down even financially prudent Americans, but can’t as easily cause trouble for a Canadian.  Outside of that factor, on either side of the border, it’s typically personal choice which puts people in debt.

Since 2006, TARP and other bailouts have completely dwarfed the numbers this movie is looking at, when it examines government spending habits.  The aftermath of hurricane Katrina was still fairly recent at the time of Maxed Out, which now seems like such an innocent earlier time.  Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders is a valuable snapshot of a particular time in recent years, before the bloom was off the rose but well into the time when it was clear to anyone who looked that doom was imminent.  It’s amazing the difference a few years can make.

An era not so long ago.

2010 07 22 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Rumble Fish

May 21, 2010:  Rumble Fish

My typical review, in cases in which I have read a book before seeing the movie, tends to conclude that the movie doesn’t measure up and is a pale reflection of the book.  This one is no different.  The keen Half-Assed Movie Reviews reader may note that I haven’t often read the book before seeing the movie, and it’s common enough that it must be deliberate.  The reader may also wonder why I don’t just read more books and watch fewer movies if I don’t want to be so disappointed.  If I could read typical books in only a couple of hours, I might do just that.

Rumble Fish (1983) is an intersection of various phenomena with respect to the industry and the era.  First and most obvious, this is the adaptation of one of S. E. Hinton’s late-1960s-to-mid-1970s novels, which I gather were a shocking change tone for teen literature, realistically illustrating a tough side of youth, more representative of what actual marginalized kids experienced, as opposed to the idyllic suburban lifestyle more commonly portrayed.  Hinton brought authenticity to her stories, having lived similar scenarios during her early years.  Rumble Fish is also the continuation of a rebirth for director Francis Ford Coppola, who, after rocking the cinematic world with the first two Godfather films (1972 and 1974) and then nearly destroying himself physically and mentally with his magnum opus Apocalypse Now (1979), had to figure out where he was going next, being only fortyish and having a decent amount of Hollywood clout.  His adaptation of Hinton’s The Outsiders earlier that year had gone over well, which he clearly felt gave him license to be a bit more cerebral with this entry.  Rumble Fish also captures some fascinating performances in the budding careers of the new troupe of acting talent which was taking over the youth roles at the time, again a continuation of what The Outsiders had done.  Finally, Rumble Fish occurs right at a time when the 1980s were trying to define themselves as a decade and begin to distinguish themselves from the feathered-hair-and-disco aesthetic and attitude which had continued to permeate the early years of what would turn out to be a famously material decade.  The setting of the novel was contemporary to its time of publishing, in the mid-1970s, but the film is set in the present-day (i.e. 1983), probably for reasons of convenience and because there would be nothing really to be gained from setting it a decade earlier.

Wait just a minute.  Is Rumble Fish really so pivotal a film, or am I just talking out of my ass?  More than likely, the same and more can be said about The Outsiders, and it is the more important entry.

Anyway, Matt Dillon (at age 19) plays Rusty James, a tough but somewhat delusional teenager who idolizes his older brother, the legendary Motorcycle Boy, played by the (at the time) heartthrob and icon of coolness, Mickey Rourke.  Rusty James longs for the old days of gangs and street fights, and imagines a time when it will all happen again, this time with him leading his own crew and not just being one of his brother’s loyal soldiers.  The Motorcycle Boy, on the other hand, lives mostly in his head, smart but not quite finding his fit in the world, but conveniently able to float through anything life throws at him because he is so detached.  The black-and-white aesthetic of the film reflects the Motorcycle Boy’s colour-blindness, which applies to everything except evidently some fighting fish he sees in a pet store and stares at for hours.  Their father, an alcoholic played capably if unremarkably by the recently deceased Dennis Hopper, seems distant most of the time despite efforts to get to know his boys, but shows late in the film that he knows exactly what they are each going through and he understands that they are very different from each other, and he helps them to realize that that’s OK.  Diane Lane is feisty (and only 18!) as Rusty James’ girlfriend, showing the beginnings of an underrated and courageous acting career.  Nicolas Cage (Coppola’s nephew) and Chris Penn (Sean’s younger brother) are friends of Rusty James, and S. E. Hinton makes a cameo appearance as well.

The power of Mickey Rourke’s presence back in the day can be clearly felt throughout this film and saves it from disaster.  His recent career resurgence is based on that quiet force which he still has, but it’s diminished noticeably from his charismatic earlier days.  Matt Dillon, on the other hand, doesn’t quite seem to have a handle on the Rusty James character, possibly due to his immaturity, but also exacerbated by the loss of the novel’s inner monologue explaining the reasoning, flawed though it is, for what he says and does.  Cage and Penn are awkward as Rusty James’ friends, but it’s unclear whether this is the result of weak acting, or correct portrayal of characters who are trying to act tough when really they are just scared kids.  I’d like to give the benefit of the doubt, but it may not be deserved.

The setting and atmosphere is a huge part of Rumble Fish.  Almost like a stage play, with looped dialogue and lots of static settings, it almost evokes the innocent but under-the-surface dirty time three decades earlier in the 1950s, and I got the impression that there was a deliberate attempt to channel West Side Story (1962), which depicts a similarly theatrical interpretation of that time.  Unfortunately, some of the more modern techniques such as out-of-body floating, ringing in the ears, psychedelic music, and steam floating everywhere make the whole story seem dreamlike and fake.  I don’t think it comes across as intended.

Everything that happens in the book happens in the movie.  This is a luxury that you have when a novel is only 120 pages long.  However, the loss of the insight into what Rusty James is thinking makes his actions seem empty in the wrong way, and that is a significant enough flaw that I can’t recommend the film.  There’s plenty of value here, and it’s certainly not a waste of time, but as an experimental approach to the subject matter, it is only an interesting relic rather than a classic.

Go and see The Outsiders instead.

2010 07 22 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Save the Tiger

May 18, 2010:  Save the Tiger

It’s been months since I skipped back into the 1970s for a reminder of how unique the filmmaking from that decade was.  Being a bit of an Oscar hound, Save the Tiger (1973) has been on my list for a long time since it’s the only film for which Jack Lemmon won a Best Actor Oscar (he did win a supporting Oscar nearly 20 years earlier, so he did get appropriate recognition earlier in his career, which many actors can’t claim).  I was rewarded with a thoughtful if somewhat dated study of two days in the lives of a desperate man, and a reminder of why I like the 1970s.

The setup is jam-packed despite its apparent leisurely pace and requires close attention, which may be a result of me familiarizing myself again with the period and not automatically understanding the shorthand of some of the dialogue and decor.  Lemmon goes through his morning routine, showering and getting dressed while talking with his wife in their Los Angeles house, establishing their relationship, the status of their daughter (away at college), their financial situation, his business troubles, and the fact that his wife is going away for a few days on a trip.  When a random young attractive hitchhiker he picks up on the way to work offers sex after about five minutes of conversation, the modern viewer is reminded of the free love days of the early 1970s, and the point the film seeks to make to current-day as well as contemporary viewers is how it’s often forgotten that this new hippie culture played out alongside the still-extant social framework of the older and more conservative generation who grew up in an earlier time and were living their more traditional lives.  Lemmon is one of those older conservatives, being fiftyish at the time.

It turns out that Lemmon works with a partner in a clothing design/manufacture business which they have built up together over a long period of time, weathering the economic hard times but making a good living otherwise.  However, they have now fallen on hard times and are getting desperate.  Lemmon wants to pursue an arson-for-hire-to-get-the-insurance-money scheme, and his partner is not keen on the idea but being older and weaker, he knows he can’t stop Lemmon if that’s the decision.  At the same time, they are hoping that an upcoming showcase of their new clothing lines for the year will inspire buyers and the orders will come pouring in, but that requires them to make sure the buyers are kept happy, by setting them up to enjoy the nighttime pleasures of the big city, one of the sleazy sides of the sales business.

This is the classic story of businessmen in trouble and trying to find a way out.  The setting in the early 1970s is important, because this was a time when middle-aged successful businessmen had not lived a cushy life since their privileged youth, but rather had fought in overseas wars and been left haunted with memories of atrocities and infused with an innate sense of real human right and wrong.  Thus, these immoral and illegal business decisions carried significantly more weight, which is a point which may have been obvious at the time of this film’s release but isn’t any more.  Lemmon’s character obviously has made plenty of money, but he has not kept his consumption in check, having a luxurious Beverly Hills house, a maid, taking a cab out to lunch every day even when on the brink of bankruptcy, and talking about a run rate of $200/day, which really was quite a lot for those days.  He doesn’t seem to have connected his lifestyle excesses with a softening of character which has apparently accompanied it, which appropriately diminishes our sympathy for his situation.  He dreams of the good old days when even the professional baseball players were better.  The changing times are also illustrated in the factory by the personality and style clashes between the old Jewish designer and the young gay designer he refuses to work with.

If this last point seems a bit awkward and obvious, it’s illustrative of an approach this film commonly takes, and the major flaw that I noted, though I admit that I come to the film with little context and without the benefit of having lived through those days with sufficient years behind me to perceive societal subtleties.  Much of the exposition throughout the film is also obvious in this way, including the seemingly tacked on “Save the Tiger” title, which refers to a petition some guy on the street is trying to get signed to save tiger habitats.  I guess it’s supposed to make Lemmon think of how the pace and pressures of modern life are making people destroy the existences of the defenseless in the world, and to make him yearn for a simpler time.  But by shoving our face in this consideration, I think significant weight is lost.  Even Lemmon’s childhood love of baseball comes full circle in the closing scene, in which he realizes he himself may be one of those defenseless relics of the simpler world, who is being destroyed.

I guess I’ve been beating up a fair bit on Save the Tiger, which betrays my ambivalence about it.  I do consider it to be a thoughtful film and it’s clear that it loses some impact by being very much of its time, for which I don’t suppose I can blame it.  If every film were a timeless classic, there wouldn’t be any commentary on the specfics of a particular time.  Lemmon’s second encounter with the hitchhiker, towards the end of the film, is a rich exploration of generational differences and is absolutely worthwhile.  This is a film worth seeing, and for more than just a peek at an era.

From a technical point of view, above-mentioned screenwriting weaknesses aside, there’s a solid pedigree here.  Director John G. Avildsen would go on a few years later to win the Oscar for directing the first Rocky film to its Best Picture win for 1976.  And of course Jack Lemmon is the centrepiece here, and while he’s still undeniably “Lemmon-ish”, this isn’t nearly as affected a performance as many he has turned in, and he really inhabits the character, particularly during an anguished attempt at a speech at his fashion show during which he is bombarded by memories from the war, and in a trippy sequence at the hitchhiker’s beach house.  He sheds a tear, and therefore wins his Oscar, but this is a deserving performace in a way that Al Pacino’s and Paul Newman’s only Oscar-winning turns, in Scent of a Woman (1992) and The Color of Money (1986) respectively, are roundly considered to be NOT their best works despite being in my opinion both quite solid performances.

Save the Tiger captures a particular time when the baby boomers were wrenching power from the old guard, leaving them in the gutter wondering what they did so wrong and what these spoiled kids did so right.  It’s a unique time in the North American culture of the past century, and well worth revisiting in a contemporary piece which can capture the time in a way that a period one could never do.

Shows the 1970s as they were.

2010 07 20 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Iron Man 2

May 16, 2010:  Iron Man 2

How is it that I never read comic books as a kid, still don’t read comic books now, and have generally not liked the adaptations related to anything other than the really big characters (Superman, Batman), yet I continue to get sucked into the Iron Man series despite some not insignificant objections to the logic, the villains, and the science?  I was bracing myself for a lot of specific potential problems in Iron Man 2, in large part due to some big red flags in the trailers, but for the most part it turned out to be a worthy sequel, and even the trouble spots I’d been fearing didn’t turn out to be too bad.

Robert Downey, Jr, as Tony Stark (with his alter ego, the titular Iron Man character), continues to amaze, as he brings a manic presence to a character who is understood to have levels of intelligence, energy and charm far beyond most mortals.  The plot in this second film has some weak spots, primarily related to the science, but the thrust of the conflict is believable and is a logical next step in the journey for the character.  As inventor of the Iron Man suit, Stark is under pressure from the US military to turn over the design and allow it to be weaponized.  Mickey Rourke is the son of a jilted Russian inventor who partnered with Stark’s father in the chief technological discovery decades earlier which now makes the Iron Man suit possible, and is understandably angry at the lack of recognition of his father’s contribution to this scientific breakthrough, so he goes after the son of his father’s enemy in classic literary style (the conflict itself being classic rather than the implementation details – you don’t see a lot of electrified whips cutting race cars in half in the literary canon).  As longtime second banana and assistant to Stark, Gwyneth Paltrow’s character relishes her chance in the limelight and quickly discovers how wearing it can be if you don’t have the type of personality/ego which can absorb or deflect the constant criticism and second-guessing.  The further development of these existing characters established in the first film, and expansion of the history leading up to the present day, adds a lot to what would otherwise be merely an excuse for more big action set pieces.

The casting and writing are both important here.  The casting is largely good, with the above-mentioned trio as well as Scarlett Johansson as a new female presence to mix things up, Samuel L. Jackson as a recruiter for the Avengers, and Sam Rockwell as a smarmy defense contractor competitor to Stark.  But Johansson’s character is used to only about 1/3 of her potential, Jackson is clearly there only for studio franchise tie-in potential and he knows it, and Rockwell almost hits the nail on the head with his portrayal but leaves a nagging feeling that while his character arc is OK if taken at face value, it’s not believable that he would have achieved that position in the first place, since he doesn’t have the charm or intelligence which would have been needed.  Rourke is not overused, as I had been afraid of from seeing the trailers, so that was good to see.

I still don’t like the physics of the “arc reactor” which is a key to the operation of the Iron Man suit, but I’ve come to accept that as a matter of necessity.  But just as I reach that compromise with the film’s writers, they insist on spitting in my face with this second film and the conceit that Tony Stark creates a “new element” to replace the palladium in the first-generation arc reactor, which turns out to be poisoning him.  I’m sorry, but you can’t synthesize a new element and have me believe it without telling me its atomic weight and number of protons and so on, or at least trying to come up with some silly explanation about previously undiscovered electron shells or something.  To have a big computer run a contraption which makes some bright lights and then announces the creation of a new element, which happens to be molded into a metallic-looking triangle this time instead of a circle (how, by the way, is this new element actually stable, since the last dozen or so “discovered” elements are synthesized and then decay and are gone within a fraction of a second?), is an insult to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of high school chemistry, which should be a large segment of the population, although apparently nobody in Hollywood.

Iron Man 2 strains credibility again, and the departures from physical reality are getting annoying, but Robert Downey, Jr, keeps the franchise afloat and energetic despite the weak points.  Jon Favreau proves himself to be not just a fluke as an action director, which is heartening to see.  See this if you like, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Comic book physics get even dumber.

2010 07 07 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Saw VI

May 14, 2010:  Saw VI

I’ve been a long-time proponent of the Saw series, largely because of the groundbreaking complexity of the themes explored in the first film.  That examination of voyeurism and the value of life and people’s limits quite reasonably spawned a sequel to delve deeper into the motivations of the main villain, known as Jigsaw.  But in this sixth entry, I can conclusively say that the series has jumped the shark.

Saw VI is reliant on the viewer having seen, and (gasp!) remembered, all of the complex minutiae and double-crosses of the preceding films, particularly the last 2 or 3 entries in which the stories have become more flashbacky and self-referential.  This is because Jigsaw, the “protagonist” if you will, has been dead since the end of the third film, so while he remains prominently featured, it’s all in visions and recollections and reminders and replays of what has gone before.  Actually, I don’t have a problem with this approach, and it’s not the main problem with Saw VI, since I understand that the series needs to work within some logical limitations and it would be even worse if, Jason-style (from the Friday the 13th series), Jigsaw kept inexplicably returning despite being apparently killed by the end of each movie in some suitably brutal fashion.

Indeed, there are numerous other weaknesses, such as the confusing (to me) presence of two tall dark and handsome guys who look very similar – and keep in mind that everyone typically becomes more and more bedraggled and blood-soaked as each film progresses – one of these guys is good and one of them is bad, and that’s kind of important.  In addition, a police detective who was supposedly killed a few movies ago shows up here again, and her survival just happens to have been kept a secret from the “bad cop”.  Betsy Russell (how many of us remember her from Tomboy in 1985?) continues to bring a reliable woodenness to her role as the late Jigsaw’s wife.  And several of the character arcs, while fascinating in a comprehensive deconstructive analysis, are muddled enough as presented that their impact is largely lost.  These are not minor quibbles, though not enough to bring down the movie or the series.

Where it really falls apart for me is that in the search for ever more gruesome and inventive torture porn, the Saw stories have ironically departed from the very message and inspiration that Jigsaw was trying to impart.  As a man dying from cancer but surrounded by selfish and abusive people, he built arresting and imperative challenges for people to make them think about their motivations and come to appreciate life by redeeming themselves through some significant personal (usually physical) sacrifice, allowing them to go free if they were strong enough to make that sacrifice.  More and more, the stories focus on one key person forced through a series of challenges in which they hold other people’s lives in their hands, and often it’s not possible for everyone to live, but rather it is required for the subject to choose who from a group will live and who will die.

Admittedly, as things have grown more complex with the inevitable revelation that Jigsaw has helpers and eventually the torch was passed along, this evolution of the games can be attributed to the assistants having a less pure motivation and losing sight of the limits to what they should be trying to do.  But can we really give that much credit to the evolution of the story arc, or is it just more convenient to construct a horror film narrative with a single person going from one set-piece torture scenario to another, rather than to devise an intertwined set of challenges for a series of individuals linked by some connection beyond their knowledge, as was done in the first two films?

From a scientific/educational perspective, this film did inspire me to read about the physical properties of Hydrofluoric Acid.  Pretty nasty stuff.  This is an acid which can’t be stored in glass vessels, because it dissolves the glass.  Needless to say, human flesh doesn’t stand up well to it.

In my view, another significant failing of Saw VI or at least a major irritation, is its focus on the troubles with the US health care system as the thread to tie together the story, with an HMO executive forced to choose who lives and who dies in the torture setups, perversely mirroring his day-to-day office life.  This is an interesting approach, but I found it to be cloying and obvious, with the point having been made half an hour into the movie but then beaten into the viewer over and over again just to make sure we got it.

On the positive side, both the colour palette and the production design of Saw VI are very much like all of the previous entries, although it has morphed over the years into a calculated and stylized interpretation of the dingy, metallic and cold vision of the original film.  It’s an aesthetic which has been copied by other horror films, and for good reason, since it is so evocative of dread and clinical violence, even before anything has actually happened.  Also, director Kevin Greutert has been the editor for all of the previous Saw films, and his intimate familiarity with all of the earlier material allows him to keep this presentation mostly coherent, despite it being a complicated and interwoven web of characters and timelines.

Saw VI really is only for fans of the series, and it’s stretching pretty thin even for them.  Will 3D help or hinder the next entry in October 2010?

Horror franchise wrapped up in itself.

2010 07 07 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Human Terrain

May 7, 2010:  Human Terrain

The last of the Hot Docs documentaries for me this year, Human Terrain tells the story of a US military strategy in recent years to train their soldiers in cultural awareness, since those in the middle east are operating overseas in territory populated by people whose customs are unfamiliar to those raised in the insulated western world.

As training sites are built to resemble Iraqi and Afghani towns, with location-appropriate civilian players, the soldiers grumble about how well the simulation actors are paid.  At the same time, military leaders seem to understand that they need to do something differently, but they don’t always see the problem for what it is.  Many of the soldiers gamely try to make use of their new training once they are in the field, but those on the front as well as those behind the scenes have a hard time accepting that culture can’t be put on a laminated card in your wallet.  It’s more than just translations.

I found the film to be fascinating for its first half, but then it got fairly dry, with lots of transcribed audio recordings as the film explored the conflicted experiences of anthropologists who were hired to help design the training.  One of the anthropologists became heavily involved with the military and was working on the front lines, and was killed in an ambush.

This film was playing to a Canadian audience, and the filmmakers said they hadn’t originally envisioned an audience outside the US, but I happen to think that it’s probably even more powerful in other countries, as the viewer can compare the attempt at understanding local culture, from an outside perspective, with the blunt techniques used to implement the understanding.

Examines the human scale of misunderstanding.

2010 07 07 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

1000 Voices

May 7, 2010:  1000 Voices

1000 Voices is a short film which briefly examines the plight of detainees in UK prisons in the post-9/11 world.  With no limit on their detention time, these people, suspected terrorists for whatever reason, are put aside and forgotten until it’s convenient to deal with them, which might be never.  A darkly comic animated prologue has a bureaucrat presenting a proposal for one of these facilities, showing bright airy sunny buildings with lots of windows.  The reality is dark and isolated situations, as illustrated by the cacophony of actual recorded phone calls from these detainees in the background.  Regardless of the scale of the events of September 11, 2001, as compared with worldwide daily atrocities, it cannot be denied that it was a turning point in the world’s attitude towards national security and the extent to which individual rights were suspended in order to maintain a sense that the situation is under control.

This is reality for many people.

2010 07 07 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink