Category: 2012
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The first third of Jack Reacher is an elegantly told procedural, with director McQuarrie emulating a seventies cop movie. Of course, there are some garnishing, but nothing monumental. Tom Cruise’s cop is actually an ex-Army cop, it takes place in the twenty-first century (but I don’t think there’s a single computer turned on in the…
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Thank goodness for Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen… otherwise, someone might confuse Russell Crowe’s performance as the most inept in Les Misérables. Actually, Crowe’s quite a bit better than Eddie Redmayne and Amanda Seyfried too. Redmayne just can’t sing–neither can Crowe, but it doesn’t impair his acting too much–and Seyfried’s just misused. Director…
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It’s difficult to start And Let God Do the Rest without preconceived notions. Overindulgent movies sometimes have lengthy titles based on pseudo-familiar phrases. Rest is one of those times; it’s undeservedly overindulgent. It’s also mind-boggling. The short opens with a news report about a mental patient escaping while on a field trip. Really. A mental…
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Act of Faith feels a little like a one act play. Alan Moore’s script does whatever it can to make the short feel contained to the protagonist’s apartment–expository phone calls overheard, an answering machine in the age of cellphones. In some ways director Jenkins’s lack of exteriors is impressive. His composition, Gary Shaw’s photography and…
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Assisted Fishing opens with two major problems indicative of the film’s overall deficiencies. John Samaha plays a trailer park mom (in addition to another role) and director Crouch opens with her watching a commercial featuring her son, the film’s protagonist. In one of Fishing‘s nicer moves, Crouch infers that information. Derek Haugen plays the protagonist,…
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Ninety Seconds is so well-paced and so anticlimactic, I worried I fell asleep for the third act. I did not. Writer-director Lough simply lets Seconds run out. While it isn’t perfect, Seconds is impressive. First, Seconds is a near future movie without special effects. He implies future technology with camera angles and Cian Furlong’s excellent…
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Kill ’em All is not a film for people who like intelligent writing or good acting. It’s not a film for people who like imaginative fight choreography. It’s a film made to exploit audiences who enjoy the third, however. Director Huber is not lazy–the sheer amount of camera setups for the bad fight scenes alone…
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The Fitzgerald Family Christmas is going to be frustrating to talk about. Burns contrives a melodrama and then proceeds to remove all the melodramatic fluff. During the scenes when–after the first act concludes–more of these melodramatic events occur, there’s a brief recognition of what he’s achieved. At some point in the second act, after three…
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Doomsday Book is three stories about the end of the world. There’s no connection between the stories except the directors; the tone changes wildly between all three. The first story is a zombie tale with some humor, some religious allegory and some gore. There are a lot of Romero references in it and also the…
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A Pig’s Tail is a lovely little short, thanks to the hands-on Aardman stop motion, Cox’s straightforward but enthusiastic direction, and Catherine Taylor’s voice acting as the protagonist. The short tells the story of a determined piglet who doesn’t exactly like being in a factory farm. She decides to do something about it. The U.S.…
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The Double is not a bad short film. Director Weng has good composition, she directs her actors well and her script is decent in parts. It’s just too short of one. Weng has enough story for a short story, which would translate–with all the texture she’s trying to imply–to a feature. As a short subject,…
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Wu Dang is a mix of a martial arts competition picture and Indiana Jones. Director Leung never quite emphasizes the 1920s setting, partially because of the plot–the action moves quickly to a timeless temple–but also because everything in Dang looks so fake, if Leung doesn’t move fast, the CG shows. His direction has a lack…
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Ditching School to Whistle has some of the general problems of a documentary short subject, especially one about a quirky topic. Director–and film student–Chi recounts his adventure cutting school to compete in the International Whistlers Convention and he has these occasionally lame moments where his narration pushes for profundity. But one can forgive such mistakes…
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I thought Drowned Out about young American yuppies (circa 1985 based on their clothes), but it’s actually about young German yuppies. Maybe they just dress twenty years behind. Out is in English, which is a funny choice as the actors stumble over their dialogue–they’re German, after all. Directors Claussen and Lory should have given their…
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Painted Skin: The Resurrection is an unpleasant experience, straddling the fence between stupid and bad. The script, from Ran Ping and Ran Jia-nan, is the weakest link. This magnificent, grandiose melodrama set in Ancient China only has a handful of characters in it. The side characters populating an elaborately constructed–physically and digitally–fall away to concentrate…
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Maybe I’m not understanding the behind the scenes of Tears of Steel. I thought it was a sci-fi short made by users of the open source, freeware Blender CG rendering application. Apparently it’s not; it’s a sci-fi short made using Blender, crowd-funded by users. In the first scenario, there’s an excuse for the composites being…
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Walk and Talk the Vote reunites the “West Wing” cast–including Martin Sheen as President Bartlet, which I wasn’t expecting, but a lot of it feels like it could have just been impersonators. The only time the commercial–for Mary McCormack’s sister, Bridget Mary McCormack–gets any energy is when characters are actually talking to each other and…
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One could say a lot about Seven Psychopaths and how McDonough teases the fourth wall to propel the plot. But such a discussion would distract too much from the film. McDonough gleefully avoids profundity with Psychopaths, though he does occasionally find it. At those moments, he allows the briefest pause before continuing with the relentless,…
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I’m having a hard time finding anything nice to say about Simple Mind. Even the title is somewhat offensive after Newsom gets to his big reveal. The short runs seven minutes and isn’t honest at all with the viewer until minute six (at least Newsom didn’t pad his runtime with elaborate end titles). With the…
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It would be wrong to call The Master a self-indulgent masterpiece, as it’s not a masterpiece (except maybe for Mihai Malaimare Jr.’s photography and Mark Bridges’s costumes… oh, and the sound design) but it’s also not self-indulgent. Anderson shows no personality until the end credits, when he sends shouts out to family members. Well, I…
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And the award for feckless pretentiousness goes to… drum roll please… Luke Scott for Loom. Yay! Loom‘s actually not bad for most of its twenty minute runtime. The first half is about thirty times better than the second, but whatever. Both have Giovanni Ribisi and he’s great, even if the script does fail him the…
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It’s interesting to hear Peter Weller voice Batman in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1 (is that title long enough?) since Dark Knight Returns, the comic, always felt like Batman meets Robocop. Not so much because of the tone, but because Frank Miller uses media intercuts to flesh out the setting just like Robocop…
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I’m not sure what subtitle Resident Evil: Retribution should have, but it definitely shouldn’t be Retribution. The movie really doesn’t have enough story for a subtitle, actually. Unless it’s Old Friends. For the ten year anniversary of the franchise, director Anderson brings back a bunch of old faces–Sienna Guillory and Michelle Rodriguez get the two…
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I forgot Light and Dust started with protagonist Casey McDougal narrating. The short only runs about five minutes, so there shouldn’t be a reason to forget first person narration except writer-director-cinematographer-editor Covill apparently forgets too. Dust starts, then flashes back and catches up just in ctime for the finish. The story concerns McDougal, who’s recently…
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Item 47 is exceptionally lame. Though it is well-acted and Marvel did pay for a Cars song over the end credits…. 47 is an “aside” Avengers sequel, but more to the events in it. SHIELD agent Maximiliano Hernández’s mission is to find a Bonnie and Clyde team using an alien gun. But they’re really nice…
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The Expendables 2 plays a lot like an eighties “G.I. Joe” toy commercial. The vehicles all fire missiles and have detachable smaller vehicles. As opposed to having absurdly named characters with silly themes (there’s no “ninja Expendable”), the characters instead have silly names and amusing personalities. The script, from Sylvester Stallone and Richard Wenk, throws…
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This issue is sort of strange. It feels extra-sized, with Stokoe resolving his cliffhanger and also One-Eye’s capture. The witch–specifically, her sidekick–rescues One-Eye and then Stokoe develops the team dynamic for the trio. There’s a lot of funny dialogue, maybe more than since the first couple issues. The witch’s sidekick, a living, mean-spirited fluff of…
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Dirty Laundry might be the first of its kind. It’s Thomas Jane returning to a role he (somewhat) famously quit in an unofficial, self-financed short sequel. Well, a sequel without any copyright or trademark infringements, which makes it all the better. In many ways, Laundry is a proof of concept for adapting Marvel Comics’s Punisher…
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To Rome with Love is sort of hostile to its viewer. Allen sets up three (or four, depending on how you want to count) plots and plays them all concurrently. However, these three (or four) plots don’t necessarily coexist in the same Rome, certainly not at the same time they linearly play out in the…
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Ted has a number of successes; it’s a little hard to identify its most extraordinary one. Is the CG teddy bear, voiced by director MacFarlane, who seems entirely real throughout? Or is it the script, which makes it feasible for a magical, living teddy bear to exist in the real world? Or is it simpler–Ted…
The Stop Button 