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It's been a long time since I've reviewed a film, other projects and a string of less than stellar films were the reason for my disinterest in devoting time to an extensive review, but I've decided to do a review of Repo Men, mostly because I wasn't disappointed by it, nor found the subject matter absolutely impossible to tackle in a meaningful review. (Which was the reason why I never reviewed A Single Man, simply because it was a little bit too much for me to handle and still do it justice.) No, I had absolutely no expectations other than that it wouldn't be Citizen Kane, which probably went a long way to making this film the an enjoyable one. Well, that and the extensive amounts of gore.
.: Online
I have been following the development and the marketing campaign behind the film for a little over six months now and I have to say that it came close to the brilliance displayed in the campaign to promote District 9, with seemingly life-like, high resolution posters (see below) advertising living irresponsibly, drinking excessively and eating all the junk-food you could lay your greedy hands on since "The Union Cares." You can have all your organs replaced with cybernetic "artiforgs" that often work better and longer than your normal, flesh-lumps would. You could get your heart replaced for a mere 975,000 dollars with an 18% APR on the first year and 24% the following years. In this fashion the Union provides hearts, kidneys, eyes, spines, livers and limbs. Check out the brilliantly designed http://www.theunioncares.com, the official site of The Union, and see which Union payment plans suit your lifestyle!
Brilliant, just brilliant. I always like it when they supplement an already compelling and extensive fictional universe with well thought out and designed cross-overs into our own world, blurring the lines between the real and the fictional and creating a deeper, more immersive film experience.
.: The Story
The Union is a company selling artificial organs to anyone willing to extend their life by cybernetic means. Repo Men repossess the organs from people who are more than 3 months overdue with their payments, breaking into houses, knocking people unconscious while asking a series of standard questions before cutting you open on your kitchen floor and retrieving the liver you decided not to make payments on.
"Would you like to have an ambulance present to drive you to the hospital after I'm done with the procedure?"
"Are they going to give me a new heart?"
"No, not with your credit history."
The Union works the same way credit cards companies do, offering you a product that will allow you to extend an already toxic lifestyle into infinity, while making huge amounts of money off the interest you pay on the loans they offer to pay for these life extending products. Some people take great care in making sure to pay off the loans on time, but most people tend to fall behind on the enormous payments they'll have to make. And that's where the Union makes their money, retrieving the organs and selling them to someone else and starting the cycle all over again.
Remy (Law) is a level 5 Repo Man, the best in the business, working alongside his best friend Jake (Whitaker), who have been inseparable since the third grade, went to school together, went into the military together, shared everything together. Then married Carol (van Houten) and had a son and slowly but surely Carol wants Remy to do less dangerous work, pressuring him to take a job in sales. Obviously reluctant to give up the life of a repo man, Remy keeps putting off talking to his his boss, Frank (Schreiber), who runs the local Union branch, being too content to repo other people's organs with his friend Jake. His entire world is turned upside down when he decides to do one last repo and something goes wrong and he gets hurt. After having spent a few days in a coma he wakes up with an artiforg heart (including the stranglehold contract) and his wife unwilling to continue with the relationship. More importantly, he finds himself strangely afflicted by a conscience, unable to perform the repos that he used to do with ease. His savings dwindle and he quickly falls behind on his payments until he is driven into the company of Beth (Braga) a girl he always admired from afar who's dealing with the same trouble as he is. The both of them decide to run, hiding out in the abundant dilapidated tenements in the ghetto's, far away from the skyscrapers and the luxury of the life he came from and hunted by his ex-colleagues who are trying to repo his heart.
.: The Production
The production on this film is beautiful, allowing the sleek design of hypermodernity to stand beautifully juxtaposed against the excessive violence, the gory repos and the deplorable state of the ghettos. It's a post-modern world where people have embraced the seamless integration of man and machine without their being an emphasis on overly cybered individuals, which is often the case with films that depict worlds where people opt for cybernetic modification of their bodies. The worst you see is a man with an obvious cybernetic limb, the rest of the cybernetics are all subtle, seemless and discrete. Not that there aren't cybernetic freaks, but that's not what the films focusses on as it looks at what happens when a normal person falls behind on payments. It would've been too easy to inject the film with too many displays of the fringe cyberfreaks. (Not that it wouldn't have been fun, I just admire the self-restraint.)
The acting is average, but Whitaker once again takes the crown, closely followed by the overlooked Schreiber-powerhouse. Seriously, why don't we see more of these two guys? Jude Law looks in shape without being overly muscled, just about what I would expect his character to look like, but his effete accent is somewhat out of place. Braga does not deliver a particularly good performance, but she does seem to fit the roll well. I have the feeling that van Houten's performance mostly ended up on the editing room floor. It ended up being a distraction and not much of a critical plot element.
All in all, it's an enjoyable film, with great visuals and a compelling universe and a rock solid performance by Whitaker who seems to be getting better and better with each time I see him on the silver screen.
.: Review
The best example I can come up with of a film that builds up your affection for the characters you're watching, only to completely break it all down, is Goodfellas. It does it so masterfully that you don't even care that the characters you're rooting for are really amoral and intensely bad people. Hollywood, like many other film industries, likes to root for the bad guys. It likes to root for the underdog, and it likes drama.
And Mike Tyson delivered all of that.
This documentary chronicles the life of Mike Tyson, narrated by Mike Tyson in his now almost iconic, high-pitched, rambling, ranting way. It starts with him talking about his childhood, about the crimes and the drugs and the juvenile detention centers. How he found boxing and how he was taken in by his first trainer, Cus D'Amato. How he lived in his house, was trained by him, in both the mental as well as the physical art of fighting. D'Amato was everything to him, the very first person to ever make him believe in himself. The way Tyson talks about him is very moving, very touching. Very honest. I guess that's the prevailing sense; honesty. He tells things how they happened, either real or imagined.
It's obvious he's a deeply troubled individual with some deep-rooted psychological problems. He's beyond redemption, knowing that he's broken but ultimately unable to fix things. You can see that he's older, wiser and that the sharp edge in his personality has dulled considerably. He's got his rage under control to the point where he can discuss his problems without getting angry, without losing his temper and without lashing out at everything and everyone.
He's also, obviously one of the most gifted boxers to ever live. The reason he started losing later on in his career, after he went to jail, is because of either complacency or his inner demons standing in his way. But when he was in his prime, his speed was crazy and his punching power far above that of his size; a small heavy weight at 220 pounds. His footwork, his stamina, his ferocity and his accuracy were only matched by his speed and power. It's amazing to watching him shadowboxing at the age of 18.
This documentary is a recommendation for anyone with an interest in boxing, Tyson, or to watch someone tell the story of his own self-created trainwreck.
.: Introduction
I was really surprised at the premise of this film when I first learned about it. Relatively inexperienced director. First time actor as the lead role. Aliens come to the planet, but they are relatively retarded and without guidance. It's set in Johannesburg. I'll let that sink in for a second. Let me repeat; it's set in Johannesburg. Did you get that? Sometimes you'll see a film that picks one of these and manages to achieve critical acclaim and then that's all that's being talked about, how the director had next to no experience besides some music videos or how the actor turns out to be the hottest new breakthrough prospect out on the market. This film was pretty ambitious down to its amazing marketing gimmick of putting up anti-alien posters all over major U.S. cities with no further explanation. I'm rambling a bit but I think I'm getting across just how unusual this film is and that if things had gone just a little differently, the delicate promotional equilibrium would've been disturbed and we would've never been able to see this film. Especially in the era of mega-budgets hardly anyone really wants to take a chance with something out of the left field (out of the far, far, faaaar left field) and hope to see some return on investment.
.: Set up
Aliens have come to earth in a gigantic craft that eventually settles above Johannesburg, South Africa. For long months nothing happens and unrest pressures the South African into action. They contract a private security firm called Multi-National United (MNU), a la KBR and Blackwater, to breach the craft and see what's going on inside the craft. They do so and it turns out that the aliens inside are actually the "worker" aliens, not too bright, with under-evolved intellects, who are severely malnourished and neglected. There's no sign of the leadership and the aliens are taken off the ship and put in internment camps on the outskirts of the city.
Years later aliens are given a limited form of citizenship and are treated as degenerates, the symbolic nod to apartheid is unmistakable. Communication with them is difficult and they seem really primal, concerned with few things like procreation and food. Nigerian gangster have taken hold of almost all trade within District 9 as they provide prostitutes and cat-food, which apparently is like a drug to the aliens, who, due to their appearance, are referred to as "prawns." In return, they will accept almost all alien technology, especially weaponry. Sadly, the alien technology can only be used if the wielder has prawn DNA, so it's useless to humans, something MNU has been researching from the moment their soldiers breached the craft and found the aliens inside.
Wikus accidentally discharges an alien device.
.: Wikus
Queue Wikus van de Merwe (Copley), a bureaucrat at MNU, the company who has been charged with the welfare of the prawns but are secretly only interested in their weapon technology. He is the subject of a documentary on the move of the prawns from District 9 to a different camp outside of Johannesburg after growing disapproval of their presence from citizens of the city. The documentarists follow him around as he prepares to head out to District 9 to deliver notices on the move to the prawns. They can't just move them, since that would be illegal, so they have to deliver notices to each of the inhabitants of District 9. At the same time, they'll do a sweep for contraband like dangerous alien technology. Wikus seems inept and is disrespected by the mercenary units under the MNU employ for what they consider to be weakness.
While delivering the notices in District 9 he stumbles upon what he thinks is a cache of alien weaponry. He tinkers around with a small device that accidentally discharges and sprays him with a strange black mucus. Because he's being filmed for the documentary he shrugs it off and tries to get the documentarists to cut that part from the film. They continue with their mission and while not everything goes according to plan, it went well. Later, he starts to feel ill and a strange transformation starts to take place... Oooeerr!
.: Verdict
This film is absolutely awesome and I recommend everyone who likes science fiction films to have a look at it. It's new, it's refreshing and the production is superb, especially consider the relative inexperience of the film's makers. I'm looking forward to seeing where the careers of the director and main actor are going to go. I'm hoping that Copley will pick up the reigns that Christopher Lambert left vacant as his career degenerated into nothingness as the go-to-guy for kind of out there science fiction leads.
Having witness the steady decline in Quentin Tarantino's work since Pulp Fiction, I was a little hesitant about watching this film. Jackie Brown was, in my opinion only a success because it's an Elmore Leonard story that any half decent director can foster into a success. Out of Sight is a good example, Soderbergh did a great job and made JLo look interesting. Get Shorty is another success, done by Barry "Who?"
Sonnenfeld. The counter argument here would be Be Cool, Get Shorty's sequel, which F. Gary Gary managed to turn into a turd, albeit an entertaining one. -- thank you, Vince.
So with Tarantino's unpredictable performance as a writer/director, compounded by the fact that Inglourious Basterds (IB) was an alternate take on the second world war, something I have found to be really sensitive to, I just didn't give IB much chance to amaze me. I was fairly certain it would entertain me, but I just wasn't sure it would amaze me. And then there was the opening scene and I had to readjust my expectations.
Upward.
The beautiful countryside of southern France. Perrier LaPadite (Menochet), a dairy (?) farmer with a small farm and three stunningly beautiful daughters, finds being visited by Col. Hans Landa (Waltz) an officer for the SS charged with finding and capturing any fugitive Jews in France. The scene starts calm, between an overly polite and cheerful Landa and the calm and strong LaPadite. You get the feeling that Landa is not cut out for the brutal work he's doing with the air of a bureaucrat, and you feel that LaPadite is a man as solid and as strong as the rock that makes up the jagged French coastline. You watch him cooly, calmly answer each of the sociopathically cheerful Nazi's questions and you think; "this man will never bend, will never break or give in" and you actually start worrying about the fate of his beautiful daughters as the underlying tension between the two rises, as you feel there is no other outcome to this meeting than a violent one.
The rest of the film isn't nearly as consistently great as the opening scene, but there are some beautiful, moving, funny and brutal scenes that make this film absolutely worth watching. Is Tarantino back? I can't say for sure, but this is definitely a step in the right direction on the road to recovery of his once surprisingly fresh style of writing and directing. I dunno, perhaps it's just that tribute thing he's been doing that irked me.
The story is a rather simple one -- well, actually, there are two stories that merge into one right near the end. A group of Jews are assembled to wreak havoc and go on a terror spree behind enemy lines, killing as many Nazis as possible in the most brutal way, each disfigured corpse they leave behind adding to the growing legend of "the basterds." (Why Tarantino purposefully misspelled the title of the film he will not reveal.) When they find out that all the top National Socialist officials, including Adolf Hitler himself, will attend a premiere of a new Nazi propaganda film in Paris, France, the allied command sees it as a great opportunity to sever the head of the Nazi beast once and for all.
Brad Pitt in the role of the ultra-manly, not too subtle military man and Nazi hater Aldo Raine was disappointing since they completely under-utilized the potential performance Pitt can bring to the table.
I got the feeling that much of Aldo "The Apache" Raine's backstory got lost on the editing room floor to make sure they could shoe-horn the film into the 150 or so minutes it ended up lasting. Where did he get that massive scar on his neck, for instance?
I was impressed with what I saw of Stiglitz (Schweiger), German officer turned Nazi killer, one of the few non-Jews in the Basterds.
Til Schweiger has such an iconic, bad-ass face that he fits his sociopathic role rather well. I've been a fan of his ever since he played one of the replacement killers in Replacement Killers.
The cold hearted Shoshanna (Laurent) who lives in Nazi occupied Paris as an undercover Jew who operates a cinema and finds an opportunity to get revenge for her family's death is a good guy you can root for, while Sgt. Donnie "The Bearjew" Donnowitz (Roth) is a brutal specimen of Jewish retribution as he prefers to club Nazis to death with his battleworn Louisville slugger that people might have a harder time rooting for. Another honorable mention should go to Diane Kruger as the German actress Bridget Von Hammersmark, who's cool for the name alone and plays a double agent helping the basterds perform their mission. She's charismatic incarnate, which is really how actors in that age must've been.
And then there is the villain of the film, Col. Hans Landa, portrayed masterfully by German actor Christoph Waltz, who, in my opinion, absolutely steals the show with his razorsharp acting and rather eccentric character. This character keeps intriguing and entertaining from the opening scene of the film, which I described above to the finale. He is so outside of the normal portrayal of an SS officer that you are almost suckered into thinking that he's the main attraction, the hero of the story. Somehow, some way, Waltz and Tarantino make you care for and like this unlikeable Nazi.
With all the Jewish retribution portrayed in the film, and not in the most heroic of ways either, I wonder what the Jewish liga thought of this film, considering how it could be argued that the Jews are portrayed as the aggressors which makes them look worse than they did in the Passion of the Christ. I guess Tarantino might avoid their wrath because he finally lifted their victimhood a little bit, if only for two-and-a-half hours. I've not made up my mind about how I feel.
Anyway, go and see the film, if only to see the Jews kick ass for a change, or do it for Waltz' outstanding performance.
Tony Scott, famed director Ridley Scott's younger brother, has developed a style of direction and editing that's never going to appeal to the masses. Considering how the early 80s are often harkened back to as an example of when directors took time to set the mood of a film and the general pace of the film was a lot slower than most of what is produced today. As fate would have it Ridley was the master of this as shown by such iconic examples as Alien and Blade Runner. Perhaps it is Ridley's prowess in this field that made the younger Tony choose the polar opposite style, laced with a high pace and an epileptic editing that reminds me of all that is wrong with this MTV generation. But that's not to say that it doesn't work very well for certain films.
The most recent example of this style of directing and editing is showcased in The Taking of Pelham 123 (or simply, Pelham), the remake of the 1974 classic starring Walter Matthau. This time it pitts Denzel Washington as Walter Garber (as opposed to 1974's Zachary Garber played by Walter Matthau) against John Travolta as Ryder (as opposed to Robert Shaw who played Mr. Blue whose real name was Ryder. Incidentally, the 1974 Pelham is also the inspiration for the colour-coded nicknames in Tarantino's Resevoir Dogs.) Ryder has hijacked a subway cart full of people in a strategic tunnel somewhere underneath Midtown Manhattan and demands 10 million dollars for their safe release. He has 19 hostages and will kill one each minute they exceed the one hour deadline. That starts a long dialogue between Ryder and Garber as Ryder seems to trust him more than the NYPD hostage negotiator (Torturro). That dialogue is surprisingly more intensive and involved than in the 1974 version and in the era of fast cuts, short attention spans and Michael Bay films that's pretty unique for a remake.
Denzel is solid, as is Gusman and Torturro. Travolta plays a great unstable, strong sociopath, but he had a hard time convincing me of Ryder's backstory as a powerful, shrewd and shady stockbroker. He did some parts nicely, but that was probably more a clever screenplay than the spin he gave to it, like doin the math of ten million dollars divided by 19 hostages, which he does correctly to the cent. It happened before his revelation as a talented broker so it gave you some early insight into his intellect. He's wilder than the awesome, coiled spring of tightly packed violence he played (well) in Broken Arrow, but it's similar. The person that actually pleasantly suprised me was James Gandolfini as the mayor of NYC who has to come up with the money while closing in on his retirement from public office and coming under heavy assault in the media for cheating on his wife and the resulting, rather public divorce. It was good to see him back on the big screen, given his talent, and also shrug off the Soprano type-cast a little bit.
All in all a very enjoyable movie if you don't expect a remake that's very loyal to the atmosphere of the original. Oh, and don't think that the timeline is going to be very acurrate either. Seriously, getting from midtown to Coney in seven minutes?
I really wanted to like this film but I couldn't. With a pretty stellar cast and one of my favourite directors, I was waiting for weeks and weeks for the spark to kindle the flame within me, but it never happened. Not that this film didn't have its moments, and I will try to remain fair as I collect my thoughts about it.
.: Disappointing
The story is that of John Dillinger (Depp), the notorious bankrobber who gained notoriety as the most wanted man of the United States and J. Edgar Hoover (Crudup), the founder and director of the FBI, his personal nemesis and thorn in his side. He was well-connected and charismatic enough to have the public on his side, and while people were starving due to the great depression he was seen as a Robin Hood character who did what others only dreamt of. The film follows his downfall, only showing a small part of his rise to riches and infamy, which is, to me one of the fundamental problems of the film. More traditional films that tell the story of a bad guy -- especially one as charismatic as Dillenger -- is that usuually the audience gets the chance to get to know the character and to share in their success before the fall sets in. You become invested and you feel like part of the team, or in this case, the gang. Not here. The film starts when Dillinger is already successful and quite well known, even though later you find that only a short time has passed since he came off a nine year stretch for knocking over a grocery store for a fifty dollar haul. Not exactly the mark of a professional bank robber. Anyway. So the film feels like one big decline.
On the other side of the story is FBI special agent Melvin Purvis (Bale), who quickly rises through the Feds ranks as a promising soldier in the war on crime that Hoover just declared. He starts heading the Chicago office and is charges with the apprehension of Dillinger. He is provided the next generation in law men, more CSI that The Shield, relying more on brain than brawn. I was glad the approach failed and the got some back up from some Texan hardballers with some spit in their eye and grit in their gut, otherwise it would have been very, very dull. (I was very happy to see my man Don Frye as one of the hardcases -- an MMA pioneer!) and so the rather one-sided cat and mouse game starts.
The acting was, unfortunately rather bland and stereotyped with hard men talk either like cowboys or with an unnatural amount of gravel in the back of their throats. Ribisi, who I was glad to see make an short appearance in two scenes as a train robber looking to enlist Dillinger and his gang for a job, was probably the worst of them, but even Depp overdid it a little bit, which is fine when he's doing Jack Sparrow, but here it seemed out of place. Apart from that Depp did a great nob playing the shwashbuckling bankrobber, charming as ever but withou many means to showcase his talents. There is exactly one scene with some gravitas and that's pretty short. It had occurred to me that men from that era hardly showed their emotions to begin with, so perhaps the lack of it wasn't an oversight but was by design. Somehow I find that hard to believe since they tried to tie in a love story. (Oh, I didn't mention that yet? Must've made an impression on me.)
Bale gets absolutely no opportunity to shine, and the scenes that he shares with Depp he is overshadowed. His whole character is meant to be that of the stiff law man, which is why at the start of the film, in his first scene, he's out-acted by Channing Tatum for chrissakes! Purvis shoots Pretty Boy Floyd (Tatum) in the back as he tries to flee. Standing over him, Purvis tries to get the wounded Floyd to betray his friends without appealing to...well, anything sensible. So Floyd spits on him in dramatic fashion and dies. Throughout the entire exchange Purvis hardly changes expression. To borrow a phrase from U.S. congressman Barney Frank; "It was like having a discussion with a dining table." Anyway, not the most memorable performance from the man who brought you The Machinist and American Psycho. I guess even great actors can have a bad day.
Luckily, there are some nice surprises in the film as well. The relatively unknown (to me) Jason Clarke, who plays Red Hamilton, one of Dillinger's side-kicks. He doesn't get a lot of scenes, but the ones he does get made me take notice. Also, Stephen Graham, the guy who played Tommy in Snatch, plays the deranged and sociopathic Baby Face Nelson, and does so very, very well. Although he didn't really show his stuff, like Ribisi, I was glad to see Stephen Dorff again, as the slick, con-man Homer, and then there was Domenick Lombardozzi, Branka Katic, John Ortiz and especially Stephen Lang as the hard-nosed Texan law man Winstead, who was amazing. Sadly, none of these people had roles big enough to lift the film from its depression.
.: A Matter of Direction
It's interesting to look over all these names since I recognise a lot of them from Miami Vice, which Mann also directed. People who know me know that I dig Michael Mann and his direction, Miami Vice (TV), Miami Vice the movie, Heat, Collateral, The Insider, Crime Story (TV), Thief...hell, I even watched L.A. Takedown, the precursor to Heat. I loved all of it. After watching this film it comes as no surprise that I never saw his other big hit, The Last of the Mohicans, because I always felt that this guy should stick to what he really excels at, which is crime stories. Over the years, and throughout his career, no director has shown himself to have such an understanding of modern day crime and be able to put it in such a cinematic light. When you think of crime films, you quickly end up at the likes of John Woo, who does a mean crime film, but it's always a bit absurd and romanticized, like he's directing an epic tragedy -- which I suppose he is. He never gets the nitty and the gritty, or the technical details down on film properly, which is what Mann can do like no other. It doesn't look good, it's not sexy and he makes it look slightly mundane and routine, like a job, only illegal.
And so he attempted to do the same with this film, and you could say that he's the guy for the job, and in places he did manage. Especially with the relation between Dillinger and several other crews, like Ribisi's trainrobber's crew, and the mafia, is all really well done. Sadly, Mann really "grew up" on the crime in the seventies and got into his own during the crime-waves of the eighties and nineties. He shouldn't try to apply the same rules to other eras. I think it'd be easier for him to move forward along the timeline instead of moving backwards. The new millennium will probably have elements of crime that he's not too familiar with -- though he did do an awfully good job on Miami Vice, and incorporated technology and new tracking mechanisms pretty well, so perhaps I'm talking out of my ass. He didn't, however, manage with Public Enemies...unfortunately. I really wanted to like this film but I couldn't.
Ever since the first Terminator was released in which snippets of the future were visible through Kyle Reese's flashbacks to his time in the future (!?), I have been curious to see more about the future, about the resistance and their struggle in the war against Skynet. As a result I got very excited when this film was announced, and it didn't disappoint, though I did have some criticism.
All of the acting is pretty decent, the visuals are good, the concepts are nice...everything is pretty good. Well, except the logic behind the story, but whatever, for a fourth instalment in a franchise, it was pretty fucking sweet. My main gripe with the film is that it doesn't take its time. It's the same problem I have with many McG/Michael Bay films (I swear, they're the same person!), they drag you into the rollercoaster and it doesn't stop until the credits roll. They take so little time to delve into the why and how of things. They throw fluff information at you while simultaneously assaulting your senses with explosions and shoot-outs. That's cool when you're there for the popcorn, but it sucks when you're really taken by the franchise. When McG said that he wanted to make it more like Aliens, I was really hoping that he would have the same timing as Aliens did. Here and there they took the time to let the mood and the atmosphere of a moment sink in. Not so much in Terminator Salvation, unfortunately.
One of the things that I thought really stood out in the film is how they managed to bring alive all the machines. Not just the terminators, but all of the machines in Skynet's arsenal. They gave them personalities, but not to the point of it being anything more than their hardwiring. They also gave them speech - sort of. There were a few scenes where there was a strong, loud, metallic, grating sound that felt almost like it was used to intimidate the resistance, or perhaps an audible communication device. I love it!
All in all, I really liked the film, even though it's obviously flawed and didn't come to fulfil its potential.
This film is not going to be for everyone. Let me just throw it out there before I start this review. Considering that the film has a spell-check defiant name and will be, for most people who are unfamiliar with the works of H.P. Lovecraft, on which the story is based, even harder to pronounce than to spell, it got a cult-status even before the film had its premiere at the Seattle Film Festival in 2007. That cult status was cemented when about half the people who saw it came out the theatre scratching their heads in puzzlement. First time director Dan Gildark, who helped write the screenplay, did a very good job of transporting Lovecraft's vision to the silver screen without alienating everyone. Just half the audience, it seems.
Russel Marsh (Cottle) is the chair of the history department of a university in Seattle. One morning he gets a call to inform him that his mother has passed away. Reluctantly he goes back to Rivermouth, Oregon, where he grew up. It's a place he desperately tried to get away from due to his unaccepted homosexuality as well the discord between him and his bizarre, eccentric family. During his drive over to Rivermouth you can make out snippets of the news on the radio, which hints at a slowly degrading civilisation and environment, with reports of Eskimo terrorists trying to block the U.S.A. from opening up strategic, polar sea ports. It paints a rather bleak picture of the world, which gets even bleaker when Russel gets to Rivermouth, where, on the drive in, he is confronted with some local thugs in a souped up truck who harass him, obviously recognising him from years ago. Even stranger is that when they are done, speed up and disappear around the bend, Russel stumbles upon their crashed truck and helps out the injured. As a result he misses his mother's funeral when he finally arrives. He is greeted by his sister, whom he seems to have a fairly normal bond with, and his eccentric father, a man in an odd, purple suit, and the head of a secretive doomsday cult called the Esoteric Order of Dagon, which has the locals terrified and are suspected to be involved in the disappearance of many Rivermouth residents. The followers are also reported to follow an strange creature known as Cthulhu.
While Russel is trying to keep his stay in the village as short as possible and tries to avoid his family as much as he can, he does get back in touch with Mike (Green), a boyhood friend with whom he always shared a special bond. He also gets in touch with a wino who makes claims about strange rituals being performed in the area. Not just that, but an odd young woman who works as a clerk at the night store begs him to find her missing young brother. Through his sister he meets Susan, an aggressively seductive babe who wants him to impregnate her. He also visits his aunt, who resides in an asylum and tells him his mother has hidden a gift for him in his grandmother's house, which is up for auction as part of his mother's estate. His aunt is obviously a loon, as she sometimes speaks in tongues and spends her days eating the crayons she uses to draw disturbing images. All the while, he is assailed by strange dreams, horrific encounters and he slowly starts to find out more about his family and their role in the Esoteric Order of Dagon.
All in all, it's a way better film than it sounds when you sum it up like that. It's scary, and creepy, and very well shot. The isolated village along the Oregon coastline is a beautiful setting for one of Lovecraft's stories, even though it's not set in the traditional New England setting of his stories, it works very well. The acting can be a little forced and wooden at times, but the overall quality of the film makes up for a lot. Have a look at the trailer below and check it out for yourself.
The world over just love to complain about live-action adaptations of beloved anime series, usually months – if not years – before they come out, determined to hate the final product regardless of what it is. It could be argued that they're not giving some of these projects a fair shake from the get-go; they're hating just to hate, swearing fealty to the original show or manga, convinced Hollywood just can't ever get it right.
Dragonball: Evolution was no exception. Fans decried every scrap of material they could get their hands on, from leaked screencaps to shots of unpainted action figures to the teaser trailers, each time their derisive laughter and scorn growing louder and louder. A tiny handful of people remained cautiously optimistic, praying that 20th Century Fox had managed to distill the essence of the eternally popular, internationally beloved and downright legendary Dragon Ball story into a 90-minute action adventure that, while perhaps not adhering so closely to the exact plot and pacing of the original story, did provide a faithful and entertaining homage that might pave the way for increasingly loyal adaptations down the road.
Here's what happened instead: a bunch of talentless hacks with studio money slapped together a big steaming pile of baffling garbage that fails utterly on every possible level and will please no one at all.
The fans were right.
Here's how it goes: the movie opens with a brief montage about an evil alien named Piccolo and a monkey lookin’ god of destruction named Oozaru who destroyed the earth's population 2000 years ago and were sealed up by an order of monks (or something) who imprisoned Piccolo and I guess sent Oozaru away to space jail or whatever. So now it's 2000 years later and we're introduced to scrappy young Goku, who is training at his grandfather Gohan's ranch-temple-Karate dojo thing out in the country, and has trouble at high school because he's so special and different (why his classmates think he's different or weird, we are never told nor shown). After taking out some bullies (who menacingly call him “Geeko” over and over again, for no discernable reason, especially considering he looks and dresses exactly like them) he catches the eye of ChiChi, a cute girl who knows he's using his Ki power after he opens her stubborn locker for her with his amazing airbending skills. Turns out ChiChi is a fighter too, and she's totally digging on Goku's style. Love interest alert! Who'da thunk?
So then Piccolo – who has somehow broken out of imprisonment, the hows and whys of which are never explained at all - shows up in his big flying office building thing that nobody seems to notice hovering around in the clouds, crushes Gohan's karate ranch using the Power of the Force after he discovers Gohan no longer has the 4-star Dragonball. After all, he gave it to Goku for his 18th birthday, and wouldn't you know it, Goku is at ChiChi's bangin’ high school party at a McMansion in the San Fernando Valley the futuristic city of Who Cares. So Goku returns to conveniently find Gohan, just about to die, but just alive enough to tell Goku to believe in himself (among a handful of other convenient noble one-liners destined to be repeated later in the film) and that it's his destiny to sniff out all the Dragonballs he can (which, as everyone knows, will grant the ball-handler a wish when collected together), stop Piccolo from destroying the world and do it all in 90 minutes so the kids can make it home in time for Spongebob and the rest of the paying audience can drown their sorrow in a bottle of cheap whiskey while lighting their Dragon Ball manga collections on fire in front of the 20th Century Fox offices.
Then Bulma (sample dialogue: “I'm Bulma Briefs!”) shows up out of nowhere with a Dragonball detector and she and Goku become buddies, teaming up to stop Piccolo and to find Master Roshi (sample dialogue: “Punk, prepare for your clock is going to be cleaned!”), the only person who knows Goku's destiny and can train him not only to battle Piccolo, but to also assist in their quest to gently cup as many Dragonballs as possible. Along the way they run into obnoxious bandit Yamcha (sample dialogue: “Cheese and rice, my nads got scorched!”) who serves no purpose other than to deliver unfunny punchlines and become Bulma's love interest 12 hours after meeting her. There's also Piccolo's unnamed shapeshifting henchwoman, who sometimes shows up long enough to get punched, show off her terrible wig and lose a fight. After about an hour and 15 minutes Piccolo has caressed all 7 Dragonballs (and has had maybe 5 minutes of screentime total and around 4 or 5 lines, not one of which really offers a good solid reason why exactly he wants to destroy the planet), and Goku, now conveniently dressed in his trademark orange Gi and silly ribbed boots, which he managed to change into while his hovering transport jeep was exploding, Bulma, Yamcha and Roshi all show up for the big final battle. Goku turns into an embarrassing CG monkey thing for a while, there's a lot of yelling and whatnot, and then it's over. They hint at a sequel (actual dialogue: "where are the Dragonballs?" "Looks like they're gone again!" "Well, we better go find them!"), and that's about it.
There's a lot wrong with Dragonball: Evolution, but the one huge thing that overrides nearly everything else is that the script is an absolute, unmitigated disaster. It's clear that a metric ton of material was hacked out, but this thing would need another 30 minutes rise from “unforgivably retarded” to “only mostly retarded”. If you walked into this movie cold – with only a cursory knowledge of who Goku is or what the original story is about – your jaw will be agape at what unbelievable horsecrap is unfolding before you. They explain virtually nothing. There is little to no character motivation. Things just sort of happen – it's not difficult to keep up with (once you realize the movie has no internal logic at all and is just checking off character names and plot points) it's just that so little of it feels connected or sensible at all. Stuff happens, but who cares? Earth is basically unrecognizable and looks like the first 5 minutes or so of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, the distant future circa 1992. None of the characters are compelling or interesting at all and they're all caught up in this big nonsense story that feels like it was written in crayon. It'd probably be easy to excuse this trash pile of a script by claiming that the original material was pretty zany too, but while Dragon Ball may have been silly and overblown, it wasn't insultingly stupid and senseless. You can't even use the ‘it's a live-action cartoon!’ excuse – compared to Dragonball: Evolution, your average episode of Chowder or Batman: The Brave and the Bold are shining examples of depth and meaning on par with the work of Dostoyevsky. Kids aren't dumb enough to fall for this.
In terms of production values, nothing there works either. The special effects are all Sci-Fi Original Movie-level quality, and the costume design is questionable to say the least. Hell, even the makeup sucks – Bulma has cosmetics plastered on like a whore in a Ratt video, all heavy rouge and electric blue eyeliner, her hair teased and highlighted to where she'd look much more comfortable writhing around on the hood of a 1987 TransAm than playing a “badass” genius scientist. The film's climactic moment – spoiler alert, it's the Kamehameha – is so outrageously goofy looking and badly executed that you will laugh out loud. It is perhaps the most enjoyable moment in the film, unintentionally so.
It's hard to blame the actors for their across-the-board mediocre performances when they're dealing with material this mind-boggling, but they can't be let off the hook either. Justin Chatwin occasionally delivers his ridiculous dialogue with some measure of quality but most of the film requires him to grimace and flex his neck muscles, which he apparently isn't quite capable of doing in a convincing way; imagine someone doing a bad job at faking "desperate, painful constipation" and you're about there. Emily Rossum spits her lines out like she just can't wait to get rid of them, and nobody can blame her for that, but she's less engaging than your average Power Rangers guest star. The guy playing Yamcha – Joon Park – is just not very good at this. His delivery is godawful, like the guy who's stuck playing the tired ‘surfer dude’ stereotype character in a Japanese roleplaying game from 1997, back when they'd hire convenience store employees and hobos from the local YMCA to do the voiceover work. Chow Yun-Fat does what he can, but even he stumbles over this stuff; the role requires him to behave like a cartoon character and it just comes across as trying way, way too hard.
In the end, it all boils down to one thing: this movie appeals to nobody. It was made for no one. People who aren't familiar with the Dragon Ball story at all will be so flabbergasted by what's happening that they will likely tell everyone they know that it's one of the worst movies they've ever seen. Fans who do know what the general story is will be furious at just how unbelievably badly they screwed this entire thing up. Kids are used to better writing than this in their weekday afternoon cartoons (although you may run into a kid who has never actually seen a movie before, and they might dig it until you show them another movie). It's a clunky, tiresome, badly executed, horribly written pile of shame that deserves no quarter.
In short, it's as bad as the fans said it would be.
The eighties played host to the rise of the mindless action film, which went hand in hand with the insurrection of Arnold Schwartzenegger's film career. Predator is probably the most famous of the many films in this particular sub-genre of 80s popcorn action films, mostly due to the compelling story, easy to digest plotline and the superb quality of the overall film. The direction, and cinematography are all top notch. The acting, while simple and a little caricaturish, is solid and certain doesn't stand in the way of the solid production. Everyone on the set knows that they're not remaking Citizen Kane, and as a result it all works really well. And now a little about the story...
Major Alan "Dutch" Shaeffer (Schwarzenegger) and his team of SAR specialists (Search and Rescue) are called into a South American jungle hell in order to rescue a diplomatic attaché to a friendly South American nation whose helicopter went down on the wrong side of the border. Dutch starts to suspect that more is afoot when it turns out he was recommended for the job by Dutch's old army buddy, CIA agent George Dillon (Weathers) who is supposed to escort the team of veterans on their mission, something that doesn't sit well with the group.
Dillon: "I heard about this little job you pulled up in Berlin, very nice, Dutch..."
Dutch: "Good old days..."
Dillon: "Yeah, like the good old days... How come you passed up on Lybia, eh?"
Dutch: "Oh, it wasn't my style..."
Dillon: "You got no style, Dutch, you know that! C'mon, why? Why did you pass?"
Dutch: "We're a rescue team. Not assassins."
The rest of the team, gatling gun-toting Blain (Ventura) and his long-time friend Mac (Duke), the stoic Native American tracker Billy (Landham), the nerdy, comic book reading Hawkins (Black) and the intelligent scout Poncho (Chaves) reluctantly accept Dillon as a third wheel, but give him various degrees of a hard time. From Blain's attempt to fuck with Dillon by spitting chewing tobacco on his boots while they're in the "choppah," to Mac giving him shit for not being the stealthy veteran out in the bush that they all are and promising him that he'll do horrible things to him if he keeps giving away their position with his bumbling. It's here where you start to realise that Mac's probably suffering from some severe PTS and is a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
Mac: "You're ghostin' us, motherfucker. I don't care who you are back in the world, you give away our position one more time, I'll bleed ya, real quiet. Leave ya here. Got that?"
By this point, it's obvious by the interaction that this group of people are long time veterans of many campaigns, who have worked together on many, many occasions and have developed an equilibrium that is upset by Dillon's presence. Small snippets of conversations hint at a rich background with many missions, each of which could be turned into their own film;
Mac: "I seen some bad ass bush before, but nothin' like this."
Blain: "I hear ya. This shit's somethin. Makes Cambodia look like Kansas."
Poncho: "Do you remember Afghanistan?"
Dutch: "I'm trying to forget it."
The group is trekking through the jungle and eventually find the crash site for the helicopter and notice that the diplomats are missing while the pilots have been executed. Also, the helicopter was taken down with sophisticated weaponry, not the stuff Dutch expected to encounter in a jungle populated by guerillas. Again, his suspicion that Dillon's motives aren't what he says they are is strengthened, especially when Billy finds tracks of the guerillas and the two prisoners, as well as a separate set of tracks of six men wearing U.S. issued army boots following in pursuit. It seems a small group of Americans soldiers had preceded them, though Dillon denies knowing anything about it. Soon after, Billy stumbles upon the mutilated bodies of the soldiers, stripped of their gear, hanging upside down, skinned and eviscerated, from a tree. They manage to salvage their dog-tags, and it turns out to be soldiers familiar to Dutch and his crew. Dillon still maintains that he doesn't know what those soldiers were doing there.
Then they stumble upon the guerilla camp where they witness one of the diplomats being executed by a Russian-speaking commander. They decide to lay waste to the entire camp in an epic and memorable battle. The action scene is ridiculous in the way this group of veterans manage to lay waste to an entire camp of guerillas, while taking (almost) no casualties. The only one that's wounded, though barely, is Blain, who has taken "Old Painless" out of the bag, his gatling gun. (These things are usually reserved as helicopter mounted rotary cannons.)
Blain: [Looking up to a machine gun nest at the top of a cliff] "Son of a bitch is dug in like an Alabama tick."
Poncho: "You're bleeding, man. You're hit."
Blain: "I ain't got time to bleed."
Poncho: [Amused] "Oh... Okay..."
Poncho: [Poncho shoots a bunch of grenades up to the top of the cliff] "You got time to duck?"
After the camp is demolished by hip-fired automatic weapons fire and explosive grenades, Dillon searches through some documents and the real purpose of the mission becomes clear; they were never meant to rescue the prisoners, they were meant to take out the camp and retrieve some intelligence on a planned, Russian-backed invasion. Dutch is furious and confronts Dillon, who rebuts Dutch's objections by telling them that he did what had to be done to get results.
Dutch: "So you cooked up a story and dropped the six of us in a meat grinder... What happened to you, Dillon? You used to be someone I could trust."
Dillon: "I woke up. Why don't you? You're an asset. An expendable asset. And I used you to get the job done, got it?"
Extraction from the base by helicopter is impossible due to guerillas moving in on their position, so they have to move towards a safe landing zone quite a bit of travel away. On top of all of that, they've got themselves a prisoner, a woman named Anna (Carrillo), who refuses to speak. Dutch and his men want to leave her behind, but Dillon wants to take her along in order to extract information from her. When Dutch objects, he's put in his place, but does defiantly promise him that if she slows any of the group down, he's going to leave her and necessarily Dillon behind. They start moving. And then the story really starts.
A mysterious killer is stalking them, picking them off one by one. First Hawkins, then Blain. They try to make a stand, but the killer seems to be aware of all their traps and ambushes. Slowly but surely everyone is driven to the brink of insanity. Billy, who remains stoic throughout the entire expedition, seems ill at ease, peering out into the trees, as if he's listening to something that the jungle is whispering into his ear. People are getting unnerved by his silence, until Poncho confronts him, his voice dripping with fear. Billy calmly addresses him;
Poncho: "You know something, what is it?"
Billy: "I'm scared, Poncho."
Poncho: "Bullshit! You ain't afraid of no man."
Billy: "There's something out there waiting for us... and it ain't no man. ... We're all gonna die."
But will they!? If you're one of the four men in the world, ages 16 to 30, that hasn't seen this film yet, I won't spoil the ending for you, and I seriously recommend you go and see it. If you don't, you risk merciless ridicule and bodily harm. Not convinced? Here's the trailer:
