Category Archives: Movie Review

by | October 28, 2010 · 9:40 am

TUiW Goes to the Austin Film Festival: Day 7

Black Swan
Review: If you feel like Darren Aronofsky may be softening, with the great but relatively straightforward The Wrestler and the news that he’s directing Wolverine 2, that’s just because you haven’t seen Black Swan, his batty new film that stars Natalie Portman as a ballerina with a fragile mental state. Portman has just been cast as the Swan Queen in a production of Swan Lake and, although she is flawless as the White Swan, she has trouble tapping into the seductive darkness and lack of control that characterizes the Black Swan. Add in an overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey), an aging, unhinged star (Winona Ryder), a director with less than pure intentions (Vincent Cassel), and a rival who seems to personify all the qualities she lacks (Mila Kunis), and it doesn’t take much to push Portman over the edge.

But where does that take her? The film is ambiguous on a literal level, lending a dreamlike feel to things that seem like they are really happening and a stark violence to thigns that may not. Aronofsky focuses on the physical toll dancing can take on the human body, stretching even small injuries like cut fingers and toes to horrifying proportions. Like his past films, Aronofsky also focuses on the way obsession cuts both ways, making the obsessor great at his or her skill (dancing here, or math in Pi, for example) but sickens the mind. At times Aronofsky’s lack of restraint leads to some silliness, but it also pays off in some nauseating and shocking moments.

But mostly, it is a film that spends its first 2/3 establishing a pattern of control, only to blow that up in the last half hour (not unlike Portman herself). From the point Kunis takes Portman out drinking onward (the latter’s first remotely irresponsible act in the entire film, if I remember correctly), the movie takes on such a rapid, nauseating flow, moving from one shocking setpiece to the next, that literally anything is possible.  Is Portman going to fail onstage? Kill somebody? Turn into a swan? What is real? By that point, Portman’s psyche has cracked and fractured far too much to tell for sure. At its most ridiculous (one critic correctly dubbed this movie balletsploitation) the movie feels like an arthouse-meets-Skinemax retelling of The Red Shoes, but at its best the movie gets at the violent depths that plague talented, creative people who pursue perfection. Just make sure you bring a paper bag to thwart hyperventilation.
Jonah’s Score: 81
TUiW Grade: A-

That will wrap up our coverage of the Austin Film Festival! All in all, I was a little disappointed in the overall selections, but the films that I liked (Black Swan, Meek’s Cutoff) I REALLY liked. Thanks for reading!

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by | October 27, 2010 · 8:30 am

TUiW Goes to the Austin Film Festival: Day 6

Fair Game:
Review: On Friday, Wikileaks released thousands and thousands of documents showing the Iraq War to be even more violent and poorly managed than we thought. Even as our presence there is decreasing (but still FAR from 0), it is still important, I think, for us to understand how and why we went there because I don’t think anyone would tell you that Iraq will be the last time we get into a conflict with a country that could involve a war so we might want to learn from it for next time. Which is to say that I’m not one of those people who is going to be like “why did we make this movie, everybody already knows what happened,” especially since, judging from the gasps in the theater, people don’t know exactly what happened when Joe Wilson published an op-ed saying that George Bush was lying about whether or not Saddam Hussein acquired uranium.

But that being said, did this movie have to be so boring and smug (I guess the latter was inevitable since it stars Sean Penn; ka-pow!)? Penn is a former ambassador who goes to Niger to do the CIA a solid and look into whether or not Saddam bought houses from the Bluth Company yellow cake uranium. His wife, played by Naomi Watts, is a covert agent with the CIA who is in charge of researching Iraq. So, anyway, Penn publishes an op-ed saying Saddam has no uranium and, as payback, the Bush Administration  blows Watts’ cover in every newspaper they can find (the title comes from Karl Rove’s quote to Chris Matthews saying that she is “fair game” for reporters) (because if someone in the government says it, it must be true!) (sorry).

For the first hour, Fair Game just kind of throws a bunch of stuff out there and sees what will stick. There’s a lot of boring spy stuff that tries to be more “realistic” than Bourne but just ends up being incredibly boring (put it this way, it made me miss the scintillating, non-stop action of Rubicon), but there was also some promising stuff about what it is like to be married to a covert agent and little insights into their life. But once Penn publishes the op-ed, the movie becomes unbearably tiresome, as Penn and Watts basically just argue a ton. Fair Game ends up transforming into a whistleblower thriller, with the Joe Wilson character cast as the crusading man trying to just speak truth to power and (incredibly) the Plame character turning into the nagging wife who is trying to stop him (think about The Insider or JFK or anything movie like that where a man is trying to unravel this huge conspiracy but his wife keeps being like “THINK OF THE CHILDREN”). Now for all I know this is how it really went down, but it felt like the movie kept forgetting whose story it was as Watts receeded further and further into the background. If nothing else, it was really dull to watch her and Penn keep having the same conversation over and over again. There were about 20 interesting movies that could come from this source material, but director Doug Liman made the most boring one possible.

Jonah’s Score: 51
TUiW Grade:C

127 Hours
Review: By now the Danny Boyle brand is pretty recognizable and 127 Horus is definitely on-brand. Boyle takes his kinetic, oft-exhiliarting storytelling to Utah to tell the true story of a hiker, biker, adventurer (James Franco) who gets trapped under a boulder for the titular length of time and ends up having to go to extreme methods to survive. Franco does a great job in what is almost completely a one-man show and Boyle constructs a number of very exciting moments, but ultimately (as happens to often with Boyle) those moments never really coalesce into a meaningful whole. The film is ultimately pushing a very bland theme about how much we all need each other and how connected we all are and it doesn’t seem like Boyle is even really interested in getting at who this guy is or how people react to extreme situations or anything like that. In the end, 127 Hours is just 5 or 6 really good music videos stretched out over 90 minutes and I couldn’t help but spend a lot of that time wondering what Werner Herzog might have been able to do with this story.
Jonah’s Score: 61
TUiW Grade: B-

Festival Notes:

-Monday night I saw a pair of competition films: Dig and narrative award winner Adios Mundo Cruel. While the former showed a lot of real potential from its filmmaker and the latter had a couple of inspired gags, they were both ultimately pretty forgettable.

-On the whole, that would have to be how I would describe most of the movies I’ve seen here. It seems like the programmers sought out the 5 or 6 biggest fall releases they could find, a bunch of really great panelists, and then punted on everything else. South By Southwest had MacGruber and Kick-Ass but they also screened Dogtooth and Winter’s Bone and Cyrus and premiered Tiny Furniture and Marwencol. And Fantastic Fest may have been lacking in big films, but those movies certainly aren’t boring and middlebrow. I can’t help but dream about what kind of great film festival we could have by merging Fantastic Fest with AFF (or really making Fantastic Fest safe for movies like Blue Valentine and Meek’s Cutoff), but that’s not really the point of either.

Tomorrow: LAST DAY! BLACK SWAN! WOO!

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by | October 25, 2010 · 10:36 am

TUiW Goes to the Austin Film Festival: Days 2-4

Blue Valentine
Derek Cianfrance’s emotionally apocalyptic depiction of a crumbling marriage seems built to capture the arthouse zeitgeist. Combining two incredibly reliable actors (Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling) and borrowing from a number of different touchstones (500 Days’ of Summer‘s timeline zipping, Eternal Sunshine‘s romantic melancholy, Funny Ha Ha‘s disconcerting intimacy). But what makes Blue Valentine so effective is the way it shapes these elements into an emotional atom bomb, without resorting to cheap manipulation. Unlike those other movies, there’s no zany humor or sci-fi underpinnings to hide behind, just a sharply drawn, completely realized examination of a poisoned relationship.
Jonah’s Score: 77
TUiW Grade: B+

The Company Men
Review: Another Sundance hit, The Company Men looks, on paper, like the most likely movie to break out and reach a wide audience, given its star studded cast and timely premise. The movie focuses on a series of businessmen (led by Ben Affleck) who find their cushy lifestyles threatened by aggressive downsizing at their megacompany (all while the CEO makes millions of dollars!) which is more the product of stocks and hostile takeovers than a total necessity. The film is well-shot (thanks to the always great cinematographer Roger Deakins) and the performances are pretty strong (Tommy Lee Jones is especially nice in an understated turn), but the whole adds up to significantly less than the sum of its pieces. The problems start with the screenplay by writer-director John Wells (best known for helping other people make ER and The West Wing) (sorry, that was a little harsh; Team Sorkin!), who seems to have never met a cliché he doesn’t like (Affleck learns the quiet nobility in manual labor in one especially strained moment). As a lot of us have learned over the last few years, there’s a lot of drama and pain in losing one’s job in an frighteningly uncertain job market, but The Company Men struggles to find new honesty in such a scenario.
Jonah’s Score: 51
TUiW Grade: C

Lone Star
There is a rather notable TV component to the festival, which this year included two screenings and panels committed to TV shows that, when they were scheduled, must have seemed like the best and brightest of the new TV season. Unfortunately, those shows were Lone Star and My Generation. At the presentation for the former, the promised “unaired episode” was actually just the show’s pilot, which sets up its conman-has-two-wives scenario with flair. One gets the feeling that creator Kyle Killen (who, to top off his depressing 2010, also wrote The Beaver – which is basically a one-man show for Mel Gibson) is a little sick of talking about what went wrong, especially because from his perspective nothing really did. Killen delivered a great show that blended the cable-ready moral murkiness of Don Draper or Bill Henrickson with the more mainstream conventions of soaps like Dallas (on paper, the show seems like another show that merged a bunch of cable-ready antiheroes with familiar network conventions: Lost), and FOX was looking for such a show. Unfortunately, these shows need a lot of time to grow (to give one example, during season three of “Mad Men” I knew maybe three or four people who watched the show; this year my friend’s can’t stop talking about it) and the realities of network TV make that pretty much impossible. Asking people to watch a new show is asking them to make a new habit (not easy) while also possibly breaking an old one (even harder) and shows like Lone Star need time for that to happen. As a viewer, the trade off is that a show with Lost’s ambition may be difficult to ever mount again, but it is a fair trade off for the rise of networks like AMC or HBO that are willing to stock up on nothing but quality dramas. Like Shawn Ryan (the creator of this fall’s most tragically underwatched show, Terriers) said, quality is now a niche in and of itself, and one available to an audience willing to look for it.

Make Believe
Review: Pitched as Spellbound by way of King of Kong (Seth Gordon, director of the latter, was a producer on this) the result is a film that is not nearly as riveting as the latter or engaging as the former. Make Believe is about six teenagers who are going to Las Vegas for a teen magician competition; for the winner it is an important step on the road to becoming a professional magician. The stakes are high enough and the kids are cute (ranging from a preppy overachiever who seems like a fusion of Hannah Montana and Tracy Flick to an idealistic Japanese kid who grew up in an extremely rural area), but the movie seems content to sit on the surface and coast on those two factors. It makes for a film that is appealing but in an unsatisfying and ultimately hollow way.
Jonah’s Score: 50
TUiW Grade: C

Meek’s Cutoff
Review: Even films that purport to demythologize the mythological West (think McCabe and Ms. Miller or Unforgiven) buy into a lot of that mythology, even if they cloak it in moral grayness and an air of anti-violence. Enter Meek’s Cutoff, from director Kelly Reichardt, which is steadfast in its unflinching portrayal the extraordinary desperation and dire circumstances that actually characterized the settling of the west. Set in 1845, the movie is about a group of three families travelling down the Oregon Trail, who have been led off-course by the navigator they hired, the grizzled Stephen Meek. Reichardt’s shots are long in terms of both duration and composition, giving a sense of the vast, suffocating emptiness that the travelers face every day (where most westerns utilize the lushest cinematography possible to play up the gorgeousness of the landscape, Reichardt doesn’t even bother with widescreen, composing the film in 4:3 instead). The movie’s pace is deliberate, but necessarily so to communicate how desperate the situation is (and how tedious the journey could be). The wagon train moves slowly, water is scarce, salvation or terror could lie just out of sight, and something as simple as crossing a river or travelling down a hill means putting everything at risk. The scenario is dire enough but inches closer to combusting when the train comes across a Native American who could help them find their way or could simply be leading them into a trap. Reichardt wrings every last bit of suspense without sacrificing an ounce of realism and presents a story that works on several levels (as a look at the way women are marginalized in society or a multifaceted examination of our societal fear of otherness) without giving itself over to an easy allegory (a fact that is helped along by the movie’s unbelievable ending). The performances are low-key and fascinating (it may take you a while to recognize most of the recognizable people, since they are buried under layers of grime and malnutrition), especially Michelle Williams as a woman who takes an interest in the Native American hostage. I could go on and on about this movie but, since the movie isn’t coming out until 2011, I will shut up for now. But let me put it this way, I haven’t seen a movie released in 2009 or 2010 that I have had a stronger reaction to this one.
Jonah’s Score: 91
TUiW Grade: A

Tomorrow: Local filmmakers tackle family secrets and frisbee golf.

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by | October 22, 2010 · 8:34 am

Austin Film Festival: Day 1

Paradise Recovered
Review: Esther, the devout believer trapped in a restrictive fundamentalist sect, has never seen a movie, listened to a rock and roll song, or eaten pork, all to please God. She has been promised to marry a man she has known for three days and who seems devotion to the sect as a means to an end. Then she gets excommunicated when he tries to force himself on her, only for his fanatical father to walk in on them. If this doesn’t seem like the set up to a romantic comedy to you then you’ve hit on one of the major problems with Paradise Recovered, a film that strands an interesting main character in a sea of cliche and expository writing. Once she leaves the sect and falls in with a pair of slacker atheists the film turns into a blandly conventional romantic comedy - boy and girl fall in love, boy loses girl, boy finds the courage to get girl back. It also wastes the early insight into religion, veering instead towards a blandly obvious conversation about God and belief. That would be excusible were it not for the fact that the film surrounds Esther with far too many bland stock characters who explain what they’re feeling or thinking in the most direct way possible (“This is the proudest I’ve ever been of you, son.” “I love you Dad.”). Heather Del Rio gives a strong performance as Esther, but the film doesn’t quite know what to do with it.
Jonah’s Score: 51
TUiW Grade: C

Main Street
Review: Written, shot, and performed in a vaccuum of austerity and prestige, Main Street feels like a revivial of a 50 year old play, which is unfortunate since the film is ostensibly set in 2010. Set in a Durham, NC that is much closer in spirit to Mayberry than the city that is home to Duke University and a growing research and software based economy, Main Street deals with the bland problems of a bunch of bland Southerners, led by Colin Firth, Patricia Clarkson, and Orlando Bloom. The movie is bland to a fault, recycling and jumbling plotlines and characters that you’ve seen a thousand times and that has no bearing or basis in the way anyone in 2010 actually behaves or acts. In most ensemble films, there’s one plotline that, whenever the movie cuts to it, you silently groan to youself. “Oh no, not this again.” I did that every time the film cut to the next set of characters. At every point the film seems to come close to making an interesting point (such as the fact that one of its main plot points involves the town’s concern over storing hazardous waste in a defunct tobacco warehouse – essentially replacing one set of deadly chemicals for another), it quickly backs away, less the film become too interesting. The direction is flat and boring and, aside from the always reliable Patricia Clarkson, the cast is kind of a mess. The less said about Firth’s outlandish Texas accent, or Amber Tamblyn’s strange decision to conflate a Southern accent with a British one the better. Part of my reaction to this movie almost certainly has to do with my own issues over how lazy this movie is about portraying a region of this country that I am very familiar with, but even leaving that aside the movie is too dated, too dull, and too airless.
Jonah’s Score: 41
TUiW Grade: C-

General Observations:

-The Austin Film Festival is as much about the screenwriter’s conference as the film festival part, so its not surprising to me that both films I saw last night seemed to be more about the writing than any sort of visual accomplishment. This is probably the only festival that lists the screenwriter before the director in the program.

-Given Austin’s lack of movie theaters downtown (made worse with the recent shuttering of the Dobie), the festival’s screenings are scattered all around town, some even located extremely far north, which is already making the logistics of going from one movie to the next very annoying (especially without any sort of festival-sponsored shuttle) (why yes, some cheese with my wine would be lovely, why do you ask?)

-So there is a writing contest here that includes categories for spec TV scripts and one of the finalists is someone’s episode of Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia that is titled “Dennis and Dee Commit a Little Incest.” The only question is how this person beat the Sunny crew to writing that episode (other contenders include a 30 Rock spec episode called “Little People Boxing”).

Next time: Die-hard Cubs fans, child magicians, and the NC-17 stylings of Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling. Make sure to follow @tangledupinwire for all the action in real time!

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by | August 16, 2010 · 5:14 pm

12 Thoughts About Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World And Related Issues

  1. Edgar Wright, already an accomplished visual storyteller, steps it up several notches for Scott Pilgrim vs. the Word. From the 8-bit Universal logo, it is clear that Wright is aiming for the moon here. While most of the attention should rightfully go to the video game and comics infused visuals, Wright also does plenty of interesting things with sound and especially editing. Transitions are abrupt and jarring, often happening in the middle of sentences and moving several days ahead. It creates a kind of feverish, frenzied speed to the film that, if nothing else, makes Scott Pilgrim frame-for-frame one of the most entertaining movies of the year.
  2. But it is disappointing that Wright’s visual ambition doesn’t extend to his storytelling. For all of the interesting stuff going on here, the movie is ultimately a frustratingly staid coming-of-age tale, Knocked Up with fighting.
  3. There’s something to be said for how much fun this movie is (indeed, it is not unlike playing a video game). The fight scenes are intricately realized and detailed, the video game references never stop being hilarious, and the film is packed wall-to-wall with far too many jokes to catch on a first viewing. Shrugged off with deadpan disaffection, the fights in “Scott Pilgrim” represent just one way that the film reflects its characters’ pop culture fixation. In the world of “Scott Pilgrim” people regularly fight and explode in a shower of coins, 1-ups are distributed, and people level up. Not that there’s much competition, but “Scott Pilgrim” is decidedly the best video game movie ever, a movie that engages gamers instead of condescending to them (although it would be fair to say that it panders to them). That kind of respect for that audience and that (dare I say it) art form is pretty rare in Hollywood.
  4. That said, while it feels slightly disingenuous to complain about there being too much fighting in a film about fighting, the fight scenes got pretty tedious after a while. The middle section felt a little sluggish as the film slogged from fight-to-fight-to-fight without taking a breath. It takes so long to get through everything that by the time Scott is fighting ex number four it feels like two or so hours have already passed. Dorks like me might have complained if Ramona had only had 5 evil exes, but for a movie this tight to feel so flabby is inexcusable and I can’t help but think that it might have been a little better if one or two exes got the Indiana Jones treatment.
  5. As with most adaptations, a lot of stuff that worked like gangbusters in the comics falls flat here and vice versa. One of my favorite lines in the book (YOU HAD A SEXY PHASE???) dropped like an anvil in the movie. Alternately, while I enjoyed the way the book handled Scott’s 1-up, I thought the way the film did it was even better (with him replaying level 7). Wright, much more than directors who recently tackled beloved comic books, understands that the two are separate media and that attempting a one-to-one translation does both a disservice.
  6. Unfortunately, in making the transition, Wright pushes all the female characters to the margins. Characters who, in print, were far richer get reduced to simply one-stop advice chutes for Scott Pilgrim. Anna Kendrick’s Stacy, Aubrey Plaza’s Julie, and Alison Pill’s Kim all exist to talk to Scott and tell him about how he needs to grow up and help him through his problems. This article in The Awl makes this point far better than I will, but when the film can’t even pass Bechdel Test we have a problem. I understand this is already a busy movie, but it is problematic that, when things needed to be trimmed, strong female characters were on the top of the list. It is doubly problematic since the source material has some of strongest female characters in comics. Wright and screenwright Michael Bacall hollowed out the core and created a film that, while looking awesome, is somewhat lacking in humanity.
  7. Nowhere is this clearer than with Ramona and Knives. The former transforms from a fascinating cipher to a bland MPDG whose only character trait is that she changes her hair color. Maybe she isn’t supposed to be as complex;  the film does seem to be saying that Scott is too immature to realize that his infatuation with her isn’t exactly based on her as a person. And yet, just because that is true doesn’t make the other point false. Ramona is reduced to less than a person so she can help Scott learn something about himself; just like Natalie Portman in Garden State or Zooey Deschanel in (500) Days of Summer. The result is that the relationship between Ramona and Scott is not wholly convincing (again, I know that’s not the point but then why even bother?) and I have a hard time caring about the movie if it is just about watching another immature 22 year old learn to grow the hell up. Knives gets it even worse; her part is expanded but she only exists so Scott can hurt her and then learn what a bad person he is for doing that. The ending where she encourages him to chase after Ramona felt very false to me; a lazy and immature Hollywood fantasy without much grounding in the real world.
  8. The cast does a phenomenal job across the board. Best in show honors probably go to Kieran Culkin, whose Wallace Wells is the most consistently hilarious. I was also especially impressed with Chris Evans and Brandon Routh, who each had a little fun subverting some of their past roles as two of Ramona’s evil exes (and as weird as Ramona’s dating portfolio seemed in the books, the movie’s casting makes it doubly strange). Even Michael Cera is good playing the movie version of Scott Pilgrim: a decidedly different character from the books. While book Scott is destructively self-assured and propulsively convinced of his own awesomeness, movie Scott is frozen with self-doubt and perpetual whininess. It makes for a funnier contrast with the fighting even if it just adds to the bland “man-child grows up” story arc (ground which, btw, Wright already covered far more effectively in Shaun of the Dead).
  9. Hollywood’s go-to young romantic lead is Michael Cera. Its go-to young action lead is Shia LaBoeuf. Men ages 18 to 25, this is what Hollywood thinks of us.
  10. “Still it could be worse, you could be represented by a revolving door of underwritten, blandly supportive female companions without their own personalities” –Women ages 18 to 25.
  11. Please don’t let any of the above complaining distract from the point that this was a ridiculously entertaining movie, pretty much exactly what you want from the summer. In many ways it is like Inception: good enough to stand head-and-shoulders above the cavalcade of tedious blockbusters and deserve to be criticized on a higher level, but possessing of some serious flaws. The movie is somewhat incoherent on the point of what growing up means and tries to excuse too much of its hollowness with a “that’s the point!”
  12. I wrote a review of Scott Pilgrim and didn’t once feel the need to use the word “hipster.” You’re welcome.

Jonah’s Score: 60

TUIW Grade: B-

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by | June 17, 2010 · 1:59 pm

Review: Toy Story 3

I was 8 years old when my parents took me to see Toy Story in a tiny theater in suburban Atlanta and it completely blew my mind. Since then, I’ve pretty much grown up with Pixar. When I was younger, “A Bug’s Life” and “Toy Story 2” fed my love of movies. As a teenager, “Finding Nemo” and “The Incredibles” aligned with my growing, more sophisticated sensibilities. And now, as a full-blown and fully grown cinephile, “WALL-E” and “Up” have served as the sole shining beacons of ambition, reflecting exactly what I want big budget Hollywood film to be. Do I love Pixar movies because I’m a movie buff, or am I a movie buff because I love Pixar?

Still, I understand why there’s a comparative dearth of enthusiasm for “Toy Story 3.” The run from “Ratatouille” through “WALL-E” to “Up” has easily been Pixar’s best, infusing their work with a scope that can claim a kindred spirit with everyone from Arthur C. Clarke to Werner Herzog. Those weren’t just “kids films” they were films that literally everyone could relate to in some way. They were also insanely risky for a studio that has never produced a flop and it is not just a coincidence that, with the long lead time on animated films, “Toy Story 3” was probably put into production right around the time the advertising cycle on “Ratatouille” started. Can Pixar retain their high creative standards while releasing a movie that, at least superficially, appears to be a “Shrek” style cash grab. The answer is mostly yes. If not a home run, “Toy Story 3” is at least a solid double that extends Pixar’s streak of good movies to 11.

Set well after the first two films, “Toy Story 3” finds our favorite group of toys collecting dust in a chest in their owner Andy’s room. Andy has outgrown playing with his toys and is getting ready to head off to college. While most of the toys see the writing on the wall, Woody (voiced again by Tom Hanks) still feels the connection between them and their owner and wants the toys to be there for their rapidly aging owner. Through a couple of mix-ups, the gang ends up in a day care, on the promise that they will always be played with and spared the heartbreak of being abandoned again. However, the day care is more Shawshank  than Shangri-La and the toys quickly realize that they need to get out of there and get back home as soon as possible.

Anyone who wants to know how far Pixar has come in the 15 years since their debut feature needs to only compare the first five minutes of “Toy Story” to the opener in this film. Both depict the same action (a boy playing with his toys) but this film actually takes you inside his imagination, making for an eye-popping reintroduction to the world. From there, however, the film drags for a little while as it gets stuck in the threequel rut, running through renditions of story beats that feel a little too familiar. The toys turn on Woody, Buzz thinks he’s a real space ranger, and so on. One  character even gets a tragic backstory, but one that feels too rushed to provide the same emotional gut-punch that the tragic history of Jessie, Woody’s cowgirl friend voiced by Joan Cusack, did in “Toy Story 2.”

Like that film, “Toy Story 3’” big theme is abandonment, but unlike there, abandonment is no longer some distant abstraction. It is very real and it has already happened, which breathes new immediacy into the film. That immediacy really starts to pick up during the manic escape plan (even The A-Team would be jealous) and subsequent action sequences. It’s a theme that may have some immediacy for Pixar as well. Keeping in mind that this movie started production before their recent run, it is hard not to read some of Pixar’s real-life predicament into the story. They find themselves in an odd position. On the one hand, they have to please a generation of fans who have grown up and are now outside the traditional wheelhouse of animation. At the same time, a child who was born when “Toy Story” was released is now 15 years old, so Pixar has to reintroduce itself to a completely new generation of children (rereleasing “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2” to theaters last October was as much about familiarizing a younger audience with these characters as it was about showing off the new 3-D hotness). Pixar has become its characters, worried about being forgotten by the older generation and ignored by the younger one.

That said, the audience I saw it with was made up mostly of 20-somethings, not young children, who had also grown up watching these movies. They laughed along with inside jokes, cried at the story beats and, most of all, reacted with fear to any signs of peril for these characters. The woman next to me reacted with such visceral fear to one particularly dire circumstance – a scene that seemed so committed to torturing its audience of devoted fans that I wondered if Lars Von Trier didn’t happen to stop by and guest direct it. Personally, I had forgotten how invested I was in these characters and how much I flat-out liked them.

I saw “Toy Story 3” in IMAX 3-D, which was a little troublesome for me since I cannot really see 3-D too well. About 75% of the time its visible, but the other 25% the movie looks blurry and out of focus to me, presumably because of my prescription glasses. Still, aside from the visually stunning opener, I didn’t feel the 3-D was particularly necessary. I also didn’t hate it though, which I guess is an improvement (and while the 3-D process still problematically dulls a lot of the color, it was less of a problem than it was with “Up”). That said, the short that played before the film – “Night and Day” – was incredible in 3-D and suggested the kinds of things that would be possible for 3-D cartoons. To call it the best 3-D to date is a little backhanded, but “Night and Day” was certainly very impressive.

Ultimately, “Toy Story 3” is neither a disappointment or a step back, even if it’s also not the revelatory step forward that Pixar’s recent work has been. It is, like those early movies, a zippy, funny, moving, and engaging family film that can be enjoyed by all. All that stress is for nothing, as long as Pixar continues making movies this good, there will always be an audience for them.

Jonah’s Score: 69

TUIW Grade: B

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by | April 26, 2010 · 4:03 pm

Movie Review – Kick-Ass

I’m not sure at what point in the superhero movie craze we’ve reached, but “Kick-Ass” at least indicates that its started to eat itself. Based on Mark Millar’s comic book (from the second phase of his career, known as “chasing sweet Hollywood money with weak comic books), “Kick-Ass” comes with an appropriately high concept premise – what if some random kid in the real world put a mask on and decided to be a superhero – and plenty of the old ultraviolence to keep the kids entertained (this is a gleefully unrestrained hard R). But a little scope or ambition might have been nice.

Aaron Johnson plays an average 17 year old kid (we know this because of the number of times he tells us he’s just an average 17 year old kid. Thanks voiceover!) who is invisible to girls, all too visible to bullies, and obsessed with comic books. One day he decides to put on a mask and fight crime, under the name Kick-Ass. He has no abilities to speak off, and ends up just taking a lot of beatings. But a mix of the Internet and circumstance turn him into a minor celebrity (like keyboard cat, but with way more merchandise) and also raise the attention of a local crimelord. He also spawns a series of other caped crusaders, including Big Daddy (played by my favorite go-to loony toon: Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (newbie Chloe Moritz), who are far more effective and violent.

The problems with “Kick-Ass” begin with its main character, a sniveling, whiny, kind of annoying teenager who is essentially the male equivalent of Kristen Stewart’s character in “Twilight.” He’s pretty uninteresting and the film doesn’t seem to understand that, so we waste 2/3 of the movie focused on his boring, boring life, the boring, boring girl he like, and his boring, boring friends. There’s also the realism issue. For a film that keeps telling us it wants to be about a superhero in the real world, “Kick-Ass” doesn’t take place in anything remotely resembling the real world. The bright, comic book pastel color palette and set designs evoke Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, but also the clearly fictional comic book world they take place in. The movie never stops too long to think about the logic of its plot developments and it has no problem sacrificing realism in the name of a joke. It also gets the little things wrong, like the idea that everybody still uses MySpace in 2010.

Things get a little more interesting around the peripheries, especially with Big Daddy and Hit Girl. At times both of them, but especially Hit Girl, seem like they’re just around to court attention and controversy, but at least Hit Girl is more recognizably human than she was in the book. Its also interesting that Nicolas Cage basically brainwashes his daughter and devotes both of their lives to brutal (and unlawful) violence, even if the film doesn’t seem particularly interested in exploring that particular ambiguity. In many ways, they seem much closer to the film’s stated vision of somebody putting on a mask and fighting crime in the real world. But the film doesn’t take the road, nor does it really question how creepy and wacked-out they actually are.

So what are we left with? Yet another mediocre superhero movie with an above-average helping of blood, guts, and swearing. I’m a person who kept reading comic books long after it was acceptable for a person of my age to do so, and even I’m getting really bored with all of this. The problem here, I think, may be that the source material was weak to begin with, but an uninspired script and generic action direction (from Matthew Vaughn) don’t help matters much. If you’re 17 and a boy, then this might be a good movie for you to see. Otherwise, just wait for Tony Stark to come back.

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by | March 29, 2010 · 4:13 pm

Movie Review: Hot Tub Time Machine

Time travel is hot again within science fiction circles, most notably with last year’s mindbending season of a certain show we already write about too much around here (although I think its 2000s renaissance can all be traced back to Primer, one of my favorite movies ever). But so far, no film has had the guts to go the Back to the Future route and play time travel for laughs. And, more importantly, no one has realized the sure fire comic goldmine that is a time-travelling hot tub. But what would you call a film with such a premise? Surely it would need to be an attention-grabbing title with some immediacy. One that hinted at the numerous possibilities of such a film, without giving the whole game away.

Hot Tub Time Machine is the story of three friends (and a nephew who tags along) who travel to 1986 in their ski resort’s hot tub. They inhabit their 1986 bodies and must decide whether to protect the space-time continuum by doing exactly what they did or risk destroying the future in the name of having way more fun than they did the first time through (although, as Daniel Faraday tells us, it doesn’t matter because whatever happened, happened) (I promise this will be the last Lost reference). In keeping with our need for a deal in the current economy, Hot Tube Time Machine is really three films in one. In the first, John Cusack starts in a mash-up of High Fidelity (yay!) and Serendipity (boo!) as a guy who is scared of commitment or something and meets this flighty girl who he likes (and there’s music or something?). In the second, Craig Robinson is married to a shrewish woman who cheats on him (and wants him to take her name! Just like the ol’ ball and chain…am I right fellas???). Finally, well there’s not much of a plot for Rob Corddry’s storyline, he just acts like he dropped in from one of the weaker Apatow movies.

When Hot Tube Time Machine works, it does so in one of two ways. The first is the goofy fun it has with the conventions of time travel narratives, like the running joke with Crispin Glover’s bellhop, who has one arm in 2010, but two arms in 1986. It also head-fakes towards being an homage to 1980s comedies, like John Cusack’s Better Off Dead. But, unfortunately, the film spends waaaaay too much time on the bland trappings of modern comedy, with all the unfunny raunchiness of something like last year’s The Hangover (but none of the inspired, Galifianakis schenanigans).

It doesn’t help that Corddry, Cusack, and Robinson make for a completely unbelievable group of friends. No single member of that gang seems like he would hang out with any other one, which makes the movie’s dumb FRIENDSHIP IS AWESOME theme that much hollower. Individually, they each have some nice elements that they bring to the table, but together it is all too much. As an unabashed Cusack fan, it is disappointing to see him given the least to play, with the script sticking him in the bland good guy role. His storyline feels like someone summarizing a John Cusack movie (and not a terrible compelling one) and is just a total waste of time. Robinson is kind of funny (although his plot is even more grating than Cusack’s) and Corddry is Corddry, but the unlikely standout is Clark Duke, who gets to run around and make sarcastic comments the whole time as Cusack’s dorky nephew.

No human could rightfully expect Hot Tub Time Machine to be a comedy version of Primer or Timecrimes, but an 1980s soaked Wet Hot American Summer wasn’t out of the question for a film that clearly has such affection for the time period it’s mocking. But, unfortunately, Hot Tub Time Machine isn’t that movie. Its best moments simply made me want to go watch Back to the Future or Grosse Point Blank and, despite getting funnier towards the end, those moments were few and far between.

Jonah’s Score: 41

TUIW Grade: C-

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by | March 16, 2010 · 4:16 pm

SXSW: Monday Recap (But Really Mainly MacGruber)

Macgruber

MacGruber is not The Ladies Man, but its also not Wayne’s World. As a film, it works a lot better than I was expecting, and director Jorma Taccone (one of The Lonely Island guys) brings a very 1980s action film feel to the whole thing. He talked about Lethal Weapon and Die Hard as being influences, but the movie reminded more more of the ridiculous Schwarzennagger film Commando. Either way it definitely treads the line between homage and parody (not unlike Hot Fuzz), although, as you might expect from an SNL movie, the whole thing felt a little thin. More a long string of bits than a film, MacGruber expands one of SNL’s shortest sketches to feature length and its not hard to feel the strain of trying to turn a 30 second joke into a 90 minute film (especially given the relatively limited timeframe they had to make this movie). When the jokes work (like the two hilarious sex scenes or a small moment of subtitle fun), they tend to be playful nods and swipes at the storytelling conventions of those ridiculous action movies. But there’s too much filler, and long stretches where there’s just not very much going on. The cast is all strong, especially Will Forte, who shows that he has the charisma to carry a film like this. Kristen Wiig is very funny and subtle, and Val Kilmer is Val Kilmer (though not as gloriously so as in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). In the end, MacGruber is a relatively entertaining timewaster, but its a too uneven and disposable to have legs as a comedy classic (although it did play very well at the Paramount, so maybe I’m just being harsh).

Grade: C+

I wanted to go to the Mohawk to see Califone last night too, but it started raining pretty hard (its not a music festival in Austin without a little rain) and MacGruber got out later than it was supposed to, so I decided to bail. That’s going to just about do it for our coverage of the film festival. I may try to see No Crossover or Parking Lot Movie, but from here on out I’m switching my focus to the music and party side of things.

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by | March 15, 2010 · 12:57 pm

SXSW Film Reviews – March 12-14

So, despite my efforts at doing so here, I was not prepared for SXSW. The mass of people. The lines at everything. I’ve gone to places I’ve been to a bunch before, like the Drafthouse and the Paramount Theater, but they were unrecognizable. Nonetheless, here’s my summary of what I’ve done so far:

FRIDAY:

Friday was like an education for me in how to do SXSW. I showed up to Kick-Ass an hour before it started and didn’t get in. Then I didn’t get into Trash Humpers (which I’m kind of okay with) and the Predators preview event. So it was basically a wash.

SATURDAY:

Film: Dogtooth
So, I started my festival with the dark, dark Greek film Dogtooth, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes last year. Dogtooth is about a husband and wife who, for reasons that are left frighteningly vague, keep their three children locked up in their country estate. They teach the kids different meanings for words, so they can’t communicate with anyone except each other, and feed them with lies about the dangers of the outside world (cats are the most dangerous animals; stepping outside of the gate will cause you to die). Into this sheltered world comes an outsider who the parents are paying to sleep with their son, and things only get more messed up from there. Dogtooth swings from darkly funny to genuinely disturbing in a whiplash inducing way. The movie stays with you after its over, and some of the weirder setpieces are still eating at me a little. I wish the film was a little more stylistically polished (the colors are a little washed out and the camera work is, at times, kind of flat), but for a Lynchian contrast between a bourgey, rustic setting and the terrible things that the people who live there do, you can’t do much better than Dogtooth.

Grade: B+

Micmacs

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s follow-up to Amelie is going to be a film you either love or hate. If your tolerance for unironic whimsy, childlike magic, and absurdity are low then you will likely check-out somewhere around the first five minutes. But, if you are locked in on Jeunet’s particular brand of playful filmmaking then you’re in for a delightful and fun night out. Micmacs is the story of a band of misfits who team up to take down a couple of arms dealers, but its strength is much more in the high number of comic setpieces and the thrill of watching things play out. The movie draws from a number of inspirations – ranging from Pixar to Tex Avery to Ocean’s 11 – but the main touchstone is Buster Keaton. Jeunet uses as few words as possible, making for a visual (and visceral) experience that is able to mine laughs in a truly cinematic way. Some of its jokes are as old as Keaton films, but the flair and pizzazz that Jeunet uses to tell them makes them funny nonetheless. While its ending draws the film’s politics to the fore a little too much, Micmacs is still a delightful piece of filmmaking.

Grade: A-

Cyrus
The Duplass Brothers’ greatest strength – their emotional honesty and verisimillitude – is also their greatest weakness. Their films are so rough and unpolished that its easy to sit at the end and wonder what, exactly, was the point of it all. But that’s a feature, not a bug, and, with Cyrus, they’re poised to break out in a big, big way. Their first movie with stars, Cyrus is about a guy, played by John C. Reilly, whose life is in a lonely tailspin, until he meets and falls in love with Marisa Tomei. Things are going great, but there’s a big obstacle to their love, in the form of her emotionally stunted, 21-year-old son Cyrus (Jonah Hill) who still lives at home and is in a weird, somewhat creepy co-dependent relationship with her. The movie doesn’t strain for laughs but lets them flow naturally, drawing from a loose, naturalistic style (helped by the actors’ improvisation and the Duplass Brothers’ trademark, documentary-style camerawork) and feeling very real. Its helped on by some great performances. John C. Reilly is his typically great self, but I was surprised by Jonah Hill (best known for Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall) who gave a very natural and poignant performance that was miles away from his Apatow persona. It feels a tad slight – treading the line between loose and lazy – but its a very funny film with the potential to be a huge smash at the box office.

Grade: B

SUNDAY

Winter’s Bone
The only film I managed to see on Sunday was Winter’s Bone, a smash at Sundance that should be getting released later on in the year. The movie is set in the Ozarks, focusing on a young girl who, with her mother struck with mental illness and father in and out of jail, has to take care of her family and household (including her two younger siblings) on her own. Things get complicated when the cops show up and say that, if her Dad doesn’t show up for his court date, the family will lose their house, which he put up for his bond. The movie looks absolutely gorgeous – getting full effect out of the rustic, mountaneous backdrop – but is also an intricately realized and very full story. While the Coen Brothers are an obvious influence, this movie never mocks or satirizes its characters. The movie is all about the innate, deeply held mistrust of others and pervasive sense of “minding one’s own business” that is held by residents of the area and only exacerbated when Jennifer Lawrence’s character starts asking questions that make some very scary people bristle. The movie boasts some fantastic performances – especially Lawrence’s weighty work in the lead and John Hawkes (who was just killed off on Lost) as her tough, tempremental uncle – and the last 15 minutes are absolutely wrenching. It takes some time to get going, and a few scenes are too on-point (especially one with the only army recruiter in America who actually turns away potential recruits), but Winter’s Bone is a richly detailed mystery that forgoes the typical hyperbole and conventions of the average noir/thriller in favor of a more subtle and human story.

Grade: A-

TONIGHT: Macgruuuuuuuuber

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