Longer version of a review in Friday's Oregonian. (Oh, and I also contributed an item on the new "North by Northwest" DVD/Blu-ray to the paper's "Wired Gift Guide.")
"The Messenger" manages to calculate the cost of war without showing it.
Instead, director/co-writer Oren Moverman's stripped-down, finely tuned drama follows two Army soldiers (Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson) assigned to a "casualty notification team" -- a grim detail that sends the pair on missions to suburban homes and apartments to tell parents and spouses that their loved ones were killed in action.
Moverman shows us six separate notifications, many filmed in relentless handheld single takes, with actors including Samantha Morton and Steve Buscemi playing the next of kin. The film's power lies in the blunt, mostly unaffected manner in which it brings overseas conflict right to your doorstep. Foster and Harrelson's characters are, in effect, invading American homes with the worst news that can be delivered, in what Harrelson's character clinically describes as a "pure hit-and-get operation."
The movie's greatest strength is its restraint. Moverman eschews the message-movie lectures and respects his audience (and those who serve) with a mostly no-frills presentation of his drama, abetted by strong actors who react to bad news in ways ranging from befuddled to violent. I frankly found Moverman's handling of PTSD to be more nuanced than the much-praised "The Hurt Locker"'s, which deals with many of the same ideas from an action-movie, crying-in-the-shower-with-your-clothes-on angle. (The two films --both powerful in their own ways -- would make for a fascinating double feature, I think; they come at stress and loss from opposing angles.)
Foster and Harrelson -- playing a wounded sergeant and a recovering-alcoholic career soldier, respectively -- also do more with less. Foster puts his naturally offbeat energy to excellent use as a man furiously internalizing his pain and getting way too fascinated with Morton's war widow. A long, single-take scene with Foster and Morton in a kitchen is among the movie's best, filled with lust, grief and gentleness conveyed in tones barely above a whisper. Harrelson gives what might be a career performance as a jaded mentor who tries to conduct each notification using a well-rehearsed set of rules of engagement. The only scenes that felt "actorly" to me come when the pair drunkenly crash an ex-girlfriend's wedding party; otherwise, "The Messenger" has a verisimilitude rare in films tackling this subject matter.
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(112 min., rated R, playing in Portland at the Fox Tower) Grade: B-plus
Longer version of a review in today's Oregonian...
"Old Dogs" doesn't deserve a bad review so much as it deserves to be sent back in time for a good Puritan shunning.
This "comedy" concerns two best friends (Robin Williams, John Travolta) who run a New York sports-marketing firm. Williams finds out he fathered fraternal twins during a drunken one-night marriage in Florida seven years ago. The mom (Kelly Preston) is heading to jail for two weeks. Can Williams babysit these kids he's never met (with Travolta's reluctant help) and learn about the importance of family -- while trying to close the biggest deal of his career?
What ensues is an absolutely punishing viewing experience, the worst kind of cynical Hollywood junk. It's filled with movie stars cashing Disney-sized paychecks in a stupid, flatulence-filled story that supposedly affirms the importance of family over work. Really, what it affirms is that studio executives are already making movies for the future-audience from "Idiocracy."
How else to explain offensive "jokes" like Williams getting too much spray-on tan and people then assuming he's a member of various ethnic groups -- with the punchline being that some kid thinks he's an Oompa-Loompa? How else to explain all the gags about urinating dogs and hits to the groin? How else to explain a moment in which Williams tries to explain the birds and the bees to a 7-year-old while the kid is noisily going number two in a public restroom -- and Williams is standing above him inside the stall? How else to explain the sudden illogical tonal lurches from frenetic crassness to teary-eye, swelling-music mawkishness?
I could go on and on, but Drew McWeeny has already written the definitive thermonuclear slam of "Old Dogs," and I encourage you to read every word. It begins with the sentence "If 'Old Dogs' were a person, I would stab it in the face," goes on to list its myriad stupidities and storytelling sins, and makes this astute observation:
If it sounds like I'm going overboard on a harmless family comedy, that's precisely the problem. I don't think this kind of garbage is harmless. I am frequently horrified by the message of these "family comedies," and I think Hollywood really does give its most vocal critics fuel for when they claim that this town has no idea what basic human values are. I hate the sub-genre about the workaholic dad who just has to learn the important life lesson that his job doesn't matter and everything will magically work out if he just spends every waking hour serving each and every whim of his children.
I've always (jokingly) argued that movies containing this "important life lesson" basically represent Hollywood pulling up the ladder behind itself -- workaholic producers thinning out the competition by telling the rest of America that ambition is a sin. It's probably closer to the truth that producers make movies like "Old Dogs" because they think you're an idiot. Don't reward them for it.
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(88 min., rated PG for some mild rude humor)Grade: F-minus
During the Friday, Nov. 20 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, we yapped about "New Moon" and what it's like to watch a film that is not your personal brand of garbage with a roomful of its noisiest fans.
Also discussed: CGI gore. The Vikings-vs.-aliens spectacular "Outlander." Diva behavior. And, best of all, the return of "Fan Fiction Friday," featuring a drunk and misbehaving Jedi Master. _____
New review for The Oregonian's Web site (the studios screened it for us too late to make Friday's paper):
The quick version:
"The Twilight Saga: New Moon" -- the second film adapting Stephenie Meyer's repressed-vampire-lust series -- strikes me as being a fairly stunning improvement over 2008's "Twilight." For starters, it actually makes a little bit of sense. Director Chris Weitz ("The Golden Compass," "About A Boy") takes over for "Twilight" director Catherine Hardwicke, and he works overtime to replace the first film's empty, pretty, humorless hormonal posturing with coherent dialogue, relatable character arcs and, crucially, a gentle sense of humor. (And it's a sense of humor that goes high-camp exactly when it should -- in Europe, with Michael Sheen flicking his eyes about.)
Yes, this is a very relative and qualified compliment, and yes, the snarksters will still find plenty to pick at (more on that below), but this time around, even a complete demographic outsider like myself could at least vaguely comprehend the series' basic appeal. I expect the core audience will squee the roof off the cineplex. They sure did last night.
(I was one of maybe a dozen men in a full Bridgeport Village movie theater. Imagine deluxe stadium seating packed with tweens and Twilight Moms for whom a kiss is like the Death Star blowing up. It was hilarious. At any rate, I'll take this particular estrogen cloud over the screening rats; the Twi-hards are quiet during dialogue scenes and there are slightly fewer fistfights.)
The long version:
No one is more surprised by this marked improvement than me. I only watched "Twilight" for the first time a few days ago. (If you scroll down to Nov. 16, 2009 on my Twitter, I chronicled my "Twilight" viewing like a texting teenage girl. Chris Walsh collected all the relevant tweets in this single post.) I'd been on the vampire-baseball set back in early 2008, for the L.A. Times and my comic strip. While it was the sort of rough shoot where heavy equipment was getting wrecked in swamp-muck and the cinematographer was using the hail on the ground as a light-bounce, all the actors I talked to were relaxed and funny and cool and self-aware about the looming "Twi-hard" fan hysteria.
I didn't want to ruin that good experience by watching the actual movie. I'd read the awful shooting script -- which was rushed into production before the writer's strike -- and it had so many on-set rewrite pages in so many different paper shades, it looked like Joseph's Amazing Technicolor Screenplay.
And while the first "Twilight" movie wasn't nearly as bad as the too-cool-for-school crowd kept telling me, it was still a shaky-bordering-on-disastrous franchise launch. Hardwicke has a gift for creating feverish moods and Kristen Stewart was carrying the movie on her shoulders like a thespic Atlas, but everyone was working against that stupid script -- which was nothing but a series of disconnected, unearned declarations. Bella (Stewart) is the best Mary Sue character ever because everyone keeps telling us how rad and funny and pretty she is! She and the vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson) share the Greatest Love of All Time because they say they do, and because they're pretty and stare at each other for epic camera-spinning intervals!
But the script just wasn't earning a damned thing. It had the sort of dialogue where people kept saying sentences that paraphrased down to straight-up nonsense -- "Why didn't you just let that truck kill me so I wouldn't be confused and you wouldn't be angsty?" or "I don't like crowds (so I'll voluntarily attend high school despite being 109 years old)" or "Watching sports? Eating food? That's you, Dad, not me!" And worst of all, Hardwicke had not even a teeny tiny sense of humor about any of it. She played exchanges like "How long have you been 17?" "...A while" as deadly tragic and soap-opera serious, when they were meant to be a little funny. In the end, I found the whole Bella/Edward relationship dynamic playing out a little too close to this "chainsawsuit" comic for my own personal comfort.
Anyway. To my thinking, Chris Weitz and returning screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg have addressed most of these problems with "New Moon." They start by making the Bella/Edward relationship more relaxed and conversational, with dialogue exchanges that actually connect and push the story forward. But this time the relationship is also about something more relatable than a vague Romantic Destiny: He worries (correctly) that he's bad for her because he has no soul and wants to kill her, and she wants to be turned into a vampire before she gets old and ugly, with Edward's bite being a nice clean metaphor for, um, something else.
And when Edward understandably dumps Bella and leaves for Europe and a planned suicide-by-vampire-council, an even more relatable relationship takes its place: Native American werewolf Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner, now wickedly ripped) horns in on the grieving Bella using a classic Safe Male play. Weitz gives this segment of the movie a low-key gentleness and warmth previously missing from the "Twilight" series. Maybe that's boring, but I sort of enjoyed it. Of course, Bella is totally bored by it, so Meyer turns Jacob into a hot-shirtless-werewolf/tragic-relationship-project whose jealously and shirtlessness increase in inverse proportion to his hair length.
The most welcome improvement is that Weitz fills "New Moon" with self-aware humor that makes the more ridiculous melodrama easier to digest. The movie starts with Edward striding up to Bella in supercool slow-motion and her telling him almost immediately, "Maybe I shouldn't be dating such an old man. ... It's gross." Yes. It is. Supporting cast members also get a few moments to sketch themselves out this time, especially Jessica (Anna Kendrick) and Bella's dad (Billy Burke). I'm also pleased to report that Eric (Justin Chon) no longer has a haircut that looks like Bret's hair-helmet from "Flight of the Conchords." Also, Weitz's experience making CGI polar-bears fight comes in handy when he's making CGI werewolves fight, so "The Golden Compass" was finally good for something.
The best part of "New Moon" is when it takes Bella to Europe (on Virgin Airways, natch!) and Weitz briefly gives us this second, different and utterly hilarious mini-movie in which Michael Sheen and Dakota Fanning vamp it up as ancient vampire royalty in a Renaissance palace where they play opera in the elevators. Sheen is one of my favorite working actors, because he alternates serious performances as Tony Blair and David Frost with over-the-top performances as movie monsters, in which he yells "LLLLLYCANS!" or plays an ancient vampire who owes more than a little to Liberace. He's an absolute eye-flicking riot in this, and I hope we haven't seen the last of his character.
Of course, master sparkle-taunters like Cleolinda Jones will be pleased to find that "New Moon" still offers plenty of raw unintentional snark material, as well. (I'm actually starting to suspect that this is a legitimate part of the "Twilight" viewing experience for a significant number of its fans.) For example: After he leaves, Edward keeps appearing as an Obi-Wan ghost to Bella to protect her from danger, and nearly every time that Obi-Wan ghost is what actually gets Bella in trouble, like when it distracts her so much she falls off a motorcycle and hits her head on a rock.
There's also one unintentionally hilarious special-effects sequence/music montage that wants to show us Bella's depression and the passage of time -- but what it really shows us is Bella sitting in a chair for four months getting what I can only imagine is the worst case of piles in movie history. You'll see what I mean. There's also a magical vision of Bella and Edward running through the woods in earth-tone peasant clothing that made even the Twi-hards at Bridgeport Village guffaw. And finally, the shirtlessness in this flick gets so Abercrombie-gratuitous, I thought Jacob Black was going to stop the movie cold and try and sell me a Total Gym.
Of course, there's also the deeper fundamental problem with the "Twilight" saga -- it's selling young girls a slickly packaged primal myth about being able to "rescue" bad boys -- but I won't get into that.
"New Moon" is more solidly crafted and insults its audience quite a bit less than its predecessor, and it sets up several nice emotionally complicated cliffhangers for the next installment. I hope its target audience has a blast. _____
(130 min., rated PG-13 for some violence and action) Grade: C+
I popped by their new NASA-in-the-'70s-style studio on Friday the 13th to talk about "2012" and "Ong Bak 2" and take a couple of listener questions via Twitter, among other things. You can listen right here.
Also: After the jump, embedded video from an Oct. 18 appearance with my pal Dawn Taylor on Rick Emerson's TV programme "Outlook Portland." Dawn and I get very silly, and I share a couple of screening-rat stories.
The latest CulturePulp comic strip celebrates the release of Roland Emmerich's mega-disaster-movie "2012" -- by giving readers a step-by-step recipe for crafting their own apocalyptic soap operas. Beware the Lava Tornado!
I absolutely love Bill Mudron's magma-tastic color work on this one. Oh, and in the comic's endnotes, there's a download link for a free print-rez version of the strip's "Lava Tornado!" movie poster.
Longer "director's cut" of a review in today's Oregonian....
Last year, film writer Matt Zoller Seitz wrote a defense of the much-maligned "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," in which he recalled his first viewing of the movie in 1984. "It was the first contemporary escapist picture I'd seen that struck me as unquestionably the work of an artist -- a snapshot of the contents of the director's head," he wrote of the anything-goes sequel.
Seitz's words came to mind while I was watching the violent, unfinished and deeply weird Thai martial-arts epic "Ong Bak 2: The Beginning." The movie feels obsessive and indulgently personal in a way these sorts of movies often don't. It plays like star/choreographer/co-director Tony Jaa lifted off the top of his skull and a bunch of scary clowns leaped out of it onto the screen and started creatively punching each other. Forever.
The movie -- which has absolutely nothing to do with Jaa's debut, "Ong Bak 1," by the way -- is clearly the actor's attempt to enhance his cred with a historical-epic martial-arts vehicle, the way Jet Li did with the "Once Upon A Time In China" series. Set in the 1400s, "Ong Bak 2" tells the story of Tien, a noble lad whose parents are murdered by an evil feudal ruler, setting the boy on a muddy, lifelong quest for revenge. Naturally, this quest includes a grim, multi-year stint with a gang of bandits skilled in everything from fisticuffs to magic to swordplay to high explosives. (Tien seems to be more or less murdering people during one bandit raid, but I think we're supposed to be cool with that.) There's also much philosophizing about weapons as they relate to power and the soul, or something.
Jaa's performance as Tien is mostly wordless and humorless. He glares, dominates and does astounding leaps on and around elephants, as is his wont. "Ong Bak 2" is also Jaa's directorial debut, and if I had to sum that debut up in a single word, it would probably be "moist." The movie revels in viscous mud, water, spittle and blood in a way that feels compulsive after a while. The obsessive vibe is multiplied by the relentless length and number of martial-arts set pieces and the hilarious number of slow-mo shots of hands, elephants and various fluids. (If "Ong Bak 2" were cranked up to normal speed, it might be a full 20 minutes shorter.)
Those set pieces are frequently impressive, with an eye for cruelty. Jaa picks up different weapons he's mastered as if grabbing them off an appetizer tray (though there's nothing here as jaw-dropping as the four-minute, single-take fight scene in his awesomely silly previous film, "The Protector").
Unfortunately, "Ong Bak 2" is deeply troubled in other ways. The movie shoots for a deadly serious tone, but also features villains who actually cackle like they're in an early-'70s Shaw Brothers production. There's a whole childhood-girlfriend subplot that doesn't amount to anything but a long, out-of-nowhere dance sequence that stops the movie dead in its tracks. And the script features so many out-of-nowhere betrayals, I started worrying for Jaa's childhood right there in the theater.
Without spoiling much, the movie also ends with a comical abruptness; this likely has something to do with the film's gestation, which was apparently so rough, it included a complete production halt for a couple of months while Jaa either wrangled with the studio or went off into the woods to study black magic, depending on which Web posting you choose to believe. (The whole thing was reportedly settled with a late-shoot decision to continue the saga in the forthcoming "Ong Bak 3.")
Nevertheless: The pervading sense of Jaa the director wrestling with the material (and some sort of inner demon) onscreen makes "Ong Bak 2" absolutely fascinating to watch, at least for me. The movie's a pile of mean-spirited fight scenes, which should please the casual fan, but it's also a pile of what seem to be Jaa's fixations, clumsily stitched together -- resulting in a martial-arts flick that's off-balance and weirdly personal in a way I found kind of riveting and hilarious. (At any rate, you can only get so mad at a movie in which a large crowd cheers and the lone subtitle reads "Hooray.")
Jaa is slated to co-direct "Ong Bak 3." I hope he keeps jumping right off the cliff. _____
(98 min.; rated R; playing in Portland at Cinema 21)Grade: C-plus
The no-budget indie comedy "Splinterheads" is notable for being unfunny, excruciating and intellectually dishonest about romance in almost the exact same way as the year's worst big-budget studio comedy, "I Love You, Beth Cooper."
Like "Cooper," "Splinterheads" is about a personality-free nebbish who does absolutely nothing to earn the attention of a woman who's hot, horrible and underwritten. Justin (Thomas Middleditch) lives with his mom (Lea Thompson) and works as a landscaper for his best friend (Jason Rogel). "I think maybe my thing is that I don't have a thing, if that's a thing," he says by way of a personal manifesto. It is the closest this movie will come to wit.
Justin meets an implausibly cute tattooed carnival worker named Galaxy (Rachael Taylor) after she steals his money. Rather than having Galaxy arrested or even asking for his money back, Justin just spends the rest of the movie limply bumbling after her -- at the near-empty carnival, at a swimming hole, on hikes -- as she indulges her "quirky" habit of geocaching ("quirk" being a substitute for coherent characterization in this flick).
Writer/director Brant Sersen helmed a mild mockumentary called "Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story" back in 2004 -- but that movie was at least propped up by an improvising cast of Upright Citizens Brigade alumni. "Splinterheads" has no such advantage. The leads have no chemistry; the hard-to-distinguish supporting cast of carnies and loveable eccentrics say nothing of interest; the staging is dull; not a single gag lands; and Justin and Galaxy's one get-to-know-you conversation is never heard because it’s buried in a road-tip music montage. And don't even get me started on the creepy bit where Justin pimps out his mom to her cop ex-boyfriend (Christopher McDonald) in exchange for legal favors.
If you want genuine laughs and romance in a carnival setting, go rent "Adventureland."
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(94 min.; rated R; playing in Portland at the Fox Tower)Grade: D-minus
I was devouring IDW's "Bloom County: The Complete Library, Volume One (1980-1982)" -- the first of five hardbound books collecting every last installment of Berkeley Breathed's popular, reckless, influential newspaper comic. I was, to put it mildly, obsessed with this strip as a kid -- "Bloom County," along with "Calvin & Hobbes" and "The Far Side," marks the last time newspaper funnies were an actual destination for me. I'd argue (as I do at Ain't It Cool News) that it's the closest a comic strip ever got to capturing Chuck Jones' comic timing in print. I've been wanting a complete collection of this series forever. I noticed the top tiers of two Sunday strips (out of about 600 strips in the book) were missing some art. Wondering why, I pointed this out on Twitter (here and here), sent a few e-mails, and went back to my book and bourbon.
The next morning, I got an e-mail: "Saw your tweet about 'Bloom County.' Would you be available to talk a little later today, so I can fill you in?... Scott Dunbier, Special Projects Editor, IDW Publishing." (He apparently made a similar overture to another guy who found a few wording variations and posted them on Amazon.)
I called him. "My nemesis!" he said, and laughed. And Mr. Dunbier -- who's also edited books by Alan Moore ("League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," "Top 10"), Darwyn Cooke ("The Hunter"), and Dave Stevens ("The Complete Rocketeer") -- proceeded to tell me about his real nemesis: the frustrating scavenger hunt (detailed below) that was required to pull together this first collection....
