Half-Assed Movie Reviews

June 21, 2009:  The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)

I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to resist Tony Scott’s new take on this New York City subway terrorist story, so I decided that I should at least have a refresher on the original.  I’ve seen this once or twice before over the years, but was surprised on this viewing to discover that The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), a Walter Matthau star vehicle, isn’t so much the action classic it’s perceived to be, but rather, it’s much more of a psychological suspense-drama.

This film used to be shown here and there on late-night TV, which is where I had seen it before.  I had thought of it as being a made-for-TV movie, and while the swearing and violence of course indicate that it’s not, it’s instructive to note that aside from those factors, it could have been exactly that.  The scale of the story is classic TV time-filler, with Matthau as a transit police detective trying to foil the plans of a team of hijackers who have seized a subway train in New York City, demanding a ransom in exchange for their hostages.

I found the plot to be engrossing, although as a bit of a transit geek, my fascination with the equipment and technology of the time may be boosting the film more than I know.  There’s lots of talk and negotiation, and actually very little in the way of chases or other action.  The final showdown is abbreviated and decidedly odd, which alone sets this film apart from similar efforts.  The coda, particularly the very end with the trademark Matthau pout, is corny and noticeably distracts from an otherwise serious and straightforward story.  I can be counted as a fan of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, but it is definitely diminished in my memory following this recent viewing.

Classic story, maybe not classic film.

June 16, 2009:  Partly Cloudy

Partly Cloudy was a short film presented in the theatre before the Disney/Pixar film Up.  Sentient clouds are creating baby animals and people for storks to deliver, and one poor stork is stuck delivering the babies from a lower, darker cloud.  This is where all the dangerous animals are made!  Porcupines, rams, alligators and sharks are all born to loving parents awaiting the stork’s arrival, right?  So somebody’s got to do it.

Personalities are fully realized without any dialogue and in only a few minutes.  It’s a delightful little film.

Short does what many “longs” can’t.

June 10, 2009:  Star Trek

I had heard plenty of positive things about the new Star Trek film, the Rotten Tomatoes rating was in the 90s, and even Star Trek purists were pleased with the results.  This is usually a recipe for disaster, with raised expectations going into a movie, but Star Trek really does deliver.

This is an appropriate reboot of the franchise.  The original cast (from the 1966-69 series and movies from 1979 and on) are significantly older now and would be out of place in an action film.  The Next Generation crew from the 1987-1994 series (and the films since 1994) churned out some decent entries and some stinkers over the past 15 years, and it’s time to let them move on as well.  So where do you go from there?  Well, in this case you go back to before the beginning – when the original characters were just starting their careers.

This technique opens up the best of all worlds.  We’re wall-to-wall with familiar characters, but mostly with fresh faces portraying them, allowing for new interpretations but tying into the fun personality traits before they became tired caricatures of themselves.  Foreshadowing as well as blissful ignorance of future events are exploited for both drama and comedy.  We’re also witnessing the start of several decades-long friendships, and it’s startling to see how unlikely they were.  I’m often struck by the realization that every person’s entire circle of friends is built through a series of coincidences, and circumstances largely beyond their control.

Researching after the fact, I had completely misunderstood the career of director JJ Abrams, which probably explains the higher-than-expected quality of the film.  I had thought of him as being another mindless action director like Michael Bay or McG, but it turns out he’s a geek culture visionary, having earlier been involved with the TV shows Alias and Felicity, primarily as a writer, and more recently being the writer/producer behind the popular TV series Lost, which I’ll admit for the record I’ve never seen.  His only previous feature directing job was Mission: Impossible III, which might explain where I got the impression that he was a mindless action director.  So in JJ Abrams we have someone who is prepared to respect the concept and the canon and turn out a faithful film which the fans can get behind.

The main focus of the story is on the young and rebellious James T. Kirk, as he struggles to find his career direction and meets his new friends.  The parallels among generations are extended even further back as we learn more of Kirk’s father and the influence he had or didn’t have on the choices young James has made.  Suitable action set pieces are put forward, with Romulans this time around, and there are time travel elements (which I always like) although the story doesn’t hang exclusively on these.

I have some scientific objections to the details, primarily with the particulars of the “red matter” people are worrying about, and how it is super-explosive when it suits the story, but not quite so powerful when it would obliterate the good guys.  The pacing of the two-hour film is great, and it flies by.  I might have shortened it but only by 5 minutes or less.  This is a compact movie which packs in a lot.  I can definitely add to the pile of recommendations the reader will undoubtedly have seen elsewhere in the months since the film’s release.

Faithful, gripping reboot of a franchise.

May 31, 2009:  Angels and Demons

The faithful Half-Assed Movie Reviews reader will know that at times in the past I’ve asked in frustration why I bother with all this, and I think we all know that I’ll ask again in the future.  At present, the sentiment applies to Angels and Demons, an ostensible sequel to the controversial and storied The Da Vinci Code which was released in 2006 to big worldwide box office business and massive religious controversy, although I got a curious sense of a missed opportunity for greater success.  Still, a grossing half a billion dollars is a good way to ensure a follow-up.  Both The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons are based on novels by Dan Brown, and both stories involve the character of Professor Robert Langdon, played in the films with a dash but not a full dose of gravitas by Tom Hanks.

I’ve read and seen The Da Vinci Code, but decided not to bother reading the earlier Angels and Demons.  I suspect that was a wise choice.  The reason for my suspicion is because while I actually found the story arc in The Da Vinci Code to be fascinating, the writing style was very frustrating, and based on the adaptation of Angels and Demons, I probably would have disliked both the story and style in that novel.  The plot involves some intrigue concerning stolen anti-matter, with preposterous science behind the action set-pieces, primarily focusing on a battery-powered canister keeping the anti-matter from destroying everything around it.  Professor Langdon needs to dig into the Vatican archives in order to solve the mystery of who did whatever was done, and we set off on an adventure in which the professor spends as much time focusing on the details of his profession as Indiana Jones usually spends on archaeological preservation efforts.

I really couldn’t get into the story, the imprecision of the clues and research was frustrating (statues pointing vaguely in the direction to go for the next clue), and temporal shifts such as flashbacks were shoddily used to maintain tension.  Angels and Demons is also way too long, and even at that, if I thought the previous film was oversimplified, I wouldn’t be shocked if this one has taken it a notch further towards discarding details and subplots.  I like director Ron Howard, but he’s here for a paycheque rather than for solid art or even solid entertainment.

Sequel or not?  I don’t care.

May 28, 2009:  Terminator Salvation

I find myself wondering how much time I should bother spending to tell you all how bad this movie is.

Where do I even start?  The Terminator (1984) was an instant sci-fi classic.  Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) was more than just a worthy sequel, it was a top-notch action-adventure film which was almost universally loved.  Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) disappointed many and was certainly flawed, but I still found it to be a worthwhile addition to the franchise.  This brings us to 2009 and Terminator Salvation, with an admittedly well-intentioned entry which ultimately insults the franchise as the film moves from shoddy to terrible, with a story which is not only inconsistent with the other films, but also doesn’t make sense within its own parameters.

The story here has John Connor, the son of the Terminator’s original target and himself the target of more advanced Terminators in the second and third films, now finally working with the resistance to fight Skynet.  We’ve never before seen this future setting except in brief scenes in the earlier films.  The resistance has discovered a new type of experimental terminator, as well as a weakness to exploit and possibly bring down Skynet.  The muddled nature of the story is clear early on, as Christian Bale ostensibly plays the lead as John Connor, yet is clearly a supporting player who is upstaged by a couple of other resistance characters, both in their performances and the dramatic usefulness of their characters.  Unbelievably stupid, wooden dialogue throughout doesn’t help, and Bale really is hamstrung by the fact that he’s required to be in the film but it isn’t really about him.  Additionally, Bryce Dallas Howard is completely wasted as Connor’s pregnant wife.

Then we launch into a whole mess of inconsistencies, concerning the plot, sci-fi conventions, the Terminator storyline, and the passing off of impossibilities as plausible.  Skynet’s capabilities vary depending on the level of tension needed for a given scene – it sends out killer robots to a fire in the woods, but doesn’t notice an entire airfield full of resistance fighters?  The previous movies all hinted at epic battles between men and machines in the future, but it’s hard to conceptualize how they would actually play out.  Wouldn’t the humans just get their asses totally kicked and it would be over?  Maybe that’s why there really aren’t any large-scale battles depicted here.  This is only 15 years after the new Judgment Day (which I suppose was delayed from 1997 to sometime in the 2000s), but the technological advances don’t seem consistent with that passage of time.  Gasoline doesn’t have a long shelf-life, so the cars people are driving around in would be mostly dead unless they somehow managed to steal gasoline from Skynet, which might not even use gasoline if everything runs on fuel cells.  Similarly, the submarines in which the resistance leaders hide out would be in pretty rough shape and would probably no longer have power.  And seriously, a heart transplant in a field hospital?  All of these points ripped me out of the story and threw me into sheer bafflement so frequently that I really never got into the movie.

As I said, I think Terminator Salvation is well-intentioned.  It does expect full knowledge of the story up to this point, otherwise the viewer would be lost.  However, I’m not against this approach, particularly with such a well-known franchise, since I really don’t want to see half the movie spent explaining what happened before.  Shortly after he film’s release, I read an article about it whose mere concept really nicely summarizes up the problem – it was a list of 20 things that sucked about the new Terminator movie and 10 things that were good.  The careful touches and well-placed references to earlier events really were outnumbered two to one by boneheaded plot devices and glaring inconsistencies.  I would probably chalk up the failure of Terminator Salvation to two things.  First, we have the PG-13ification of an up-to-now solidly R-rated movie franchise.  I don’t think this is the major contributor, since there’s still about as much violence as you’d expect, and there never really was much sex or coarse language in these films.  The impact certainly wasn’t as jarring as the butchering of the fourth Die Hard film.  The second thing is the director.  McG, as he’s known, is most closely associated with the Charlie’s Angels revival films which have been floating around over the past decade or so, and he brings that exact same slick, overstylized, hyperactive style to a film which should be gritty, and unrelenting in a completely different way.  Sorry, McG, but you killed the Terminator franchise for me, and this one is not going on my shelf.

Ruins one of the great stories.