A Well-Worn Frontier

I'm losing all the optimism I had for this series, and I have eight more films to go. At this point, it's sort of like when a multinational company builds a new restaurant in a really small town to try out that market, but the market isn't big enough and there aren't enough people there to justify it, so they shut down the restaurant. At first they make another restaurant which is pretty successful for a few years but then they get a McDonalds and no one wants to go to the real restaurant anymore, so homeless people start living in it and eventually it becomes a halfway house and enjoys a bit of use before some dude starts selling watermelons out of it on Tuesday mornings. Eventually the multinational company demolishes it with the watermelon dude still in there and rebuilds the restaurant just so that they don't have to feel bad about giving a bunch of hill folk the technology to join modern civilization only to have them use it to sell watermelons. The restaurant becomes a big success and tourists flock to the town to take pictures of the inhabitants in black and white and make a gallery of pieces about the breadbasket of America.

And Christopher Lloyd seems like a funny guy with good stage presence and all that. I bet he's a nice guy who could give good advice to young actors. I bet he gives money to charities that no one has heard of and no one donates to like "computers for political refugees" and "flags for the foreign". You know what's outside of his range, though? Playing a Klingon warlord. Yeah, that's right. Christopher Lloyd plays an alien warlord in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and he looks positively cartoonish. All too recognizable under his stapled-on prosthetics and animated eyes. Whose idea was that?

But that's just the beginning. I'll bet you want to know the plot, don't you? Spoilers ahead, weary world-travelers. At the end of Wrath of Khan, Spock dies to save the crew of the Enterprise. Kirk, as he tends to do, gets upset, probably gets pretty drunk, and steals the decommissioned Enterprise on a whim and flies to the Genesis planet, born out of ashes of the conflict with Khan. There, he encounters Klingon warlord Kruge seeking the "secret of Genesis" (what that could possibly be is never even touched on). When they get there, Kirk's blows up the Enterprise for no fucking reason.

Yeah, that's right. If you thought that Kirk was an impulsive dickhead with no regard for the lives of his crewmembers BEFORE, wait until you see this one.

Also, the fact that Spock and McCoy are out of commission through the majority of the film, I realize what a sickening rainbow of political correctness and oldness the cast is, but I'm surprised they were never sued for not including a blind cast member.

None of those are the serious crimes that the film commits, though. The serious crimes the film commits are things like making the entire plot about Kruge completely expendable. There's nothing ideological at stake and we really don't even understand why he wants the failed Genesis project. It's just time-filler. It's just an obstacle for the crew to overcome so that they don't just fly to Genesis, pick up Spock's body and be on their way, and it feels very stamped-on. There's no reason why the Federation shouldn't be pursuing them for stealing the Enterprise, because then we'd be pushing Kirk and co. to their limits, testing their loyalties. Hell, you could even throw in a few things about them trying to control Genesis and tie it into the theme of rebirth the same way Kruge's subplot was tied to the theme of rebirth.

The only reason I can think of that they wouldn't use that story is that they wanted aliens for the villains instead of humans, clearly forgetting the recent success of Wrath of Khan.

Also, Leonard Nimoy shows very little directing competence. Not his fault, really. The studio should have known better than to have put an inexperienced director behind something this large. On the other hand, he is a bit of an improvement over Nicholas Meyer. He seems keen to throw in some nice imagery, but there's a very stilted fight scene at the end. At this point, Raiders of the Lost Ark had been out for three years. People had already grasped how to shoot and edit fight scenes much better on a relative budget. Leonard Nimoy was having none of it and instead opted for no sound effects, editing it with fingernail clippers, and putting hilariously cheap stage effects in the middle of the fight. Of course, that's my frothy action-junkie alter ego talking.

There are some nice things I can say about this film, though. The filmmakers seemed to have found the "accountant" listing in the yellow pages so they didn't blow the budget on special effects and only have enough money to redress a PA's apartment as the bridge of the Enterprise, so we spend a little bit of time exploring Genesis and taking the crew out of their element.

I realize now why that's appealing. We know that these dudes can pilot ships. That's their job. They went to school for it. Watching them pilot a ship is like watching my dad hook up the VCR. Fine, but he does it with a vague disinterest because he does this sort of thing every day. It's not something you have to be there for, it's actually a good time to make an english muffin pizza. Taking them out of that element and forcing them into situations they may not have the skills to deal with over the phone is a lot more dynamic and pushing characters to their limits and putting them in difficult situations is what gives them an arc or endears them to you. You don't learn about Travis Bickle when he's applying the parking break, you learn about him when he's interacting with other people, something very painful for him.

Another nice thing I can say is that I quite enjoyed the performances. I didn't think about it, but having Leonard Nimoy direct is the best possible way to get the best work out of the cast. William Shatner in particular is actually pretty damn good. He gets some scenes that are written specifically to his strengths and plays them admirably. The guy has stage presence, but isn't much of an actor, so it's nice to see him really take a role with some meat to it now and again. The last two films haven't focused on Kirk nearly at all; in fact, aside from blowing up his own ships and fusing his first officer to antiquated scientific equipment, Kirk has been a bit of a blank slate. We didn't learn that much about him; he's still the strapping hero and all that, but he gets something to chew on, at least.

It's not a good movie or even a mediocre movie. It's actually pretty incompetent and lazy. I'm beginning to think these things are being thrown out there because the Trekkies will eat up anything with the original cast in it.

This film has a pretty bad reputation, though, so we'll see about The Voyage Home, which seems to be a very popular, accessible film for people who date women, like me.

3/10

Summer Daze

The summer is over; I can tell because I haven't updated since Monday due to school starting. As none of you may know, I'm a huge fan of action films and blockbusters and populist garbage like that, so seeing a summer go offers me a twinge of regret.

So to commiserate the summer's end, I've written a eulogy for it. In the form of a stupid, disorganized list that I'm too lazy too edit.

BEST IN SHOW
BEST FILM

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

After I saw Up (which I regrettably did not review on this blog, although I may get the chance to when it comes out on DVD in November), I was certain that would be my favorite film of the summer, and probably the year. I knew anything that wanted to beat it would have to work very hard, and Quentin Tarantino's epic masterpiece was so strange, so brilliantly mad-cap, but most importantly, through all those things so functional, that I can't resist giving it the #1 spot. The deal is only sweetened by how popular the film already is. Between that and District 9, I have a lot of faith in America's taste again, even if it is immediately crushed by the success of Transformers.

Honorable mentions: Up, Star Trek, 500 Days of Summer, The Hurt Locker, Drag Me to Hell.

BEST PERFORMANCE

CHRISTOPH WALTZ as HANS LANDA in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS


Again, I totally thought this would go to Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker, and I still hope that Mr. Renner is recognized by the Academy at the end of the year, but Christoph Waltz is so good that I have a hard time putting it into words. No actor has sunk his teeth this far into Tarantino's dialogue before, and it is an awe-inspiring thing to watch. Many characters have been written like Hans Landa, but none of them have been this well-realized.

Honorable mentions: Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker, Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 500 Days of Summer, Eric Bana in Star Trek

BEST SCENE WHERE DUDES SHOOT EACH OTHER FOR EXTENDED PERIODS OF TIME

PUBLIC ENEMIES


The two-fisted beauty of those muzzle flares, caught by Michael Mann's digital cameras was the chief glory of this otherwise disappointing film.
Honorable mentions: Star Trek, The Hurt Locker.

BEST VILLAIN THAT EVERYONE HATES

ERIC BANA as CAPTAIN NERO in STAR TREK


Okay, okay. He's a touch underdeveloped, his motivations are whatever, but it's Eric fucking Bana as a badass space pirate who has a twisted vendetta against Spock. His speech patterns are strange and awesome. He flies around a kick-ass space ship, is about ten feet of pure, unadulterated intimidation and sits on a throne, holding a giant scepter in a dark, cavernous bridge where he has one of his underlings speak for him. If that's not the makings of an awesome villain, I don't know what is (and that's a distinct possibility).

BEST EMBODIMENT OF THE SPIRIT OF THE BLOCKBUSTER

STAR TREK


If the fact that I'm doing a Star Trek retrospective as an apology for getting my review wrong, and my verbal blowjob for Eric Bana's performance/character, I should get this out of the way. Star Trek is very well-tuned to my own wavelength. It's exactly the sort of movie I would love to make. It's visually exciting, kinetic, funny, and it's the sort of film you walked out of smiling and ready to see again. Its exciting and gorgeous for every second of its running time.

Honorable mention: Drag Me to Hell

GARBAGE CAN

WORST FILM

GI JOE: RISE OF COBRA
Filthy, putrid, commodity filmmaking. This is the sort of thing that people point to when they want to bring down commercial filmmaking, and it's hard to blame them. It's an insult to the medium and a violation of the moviegoer's trust. If I sound unfairly harsh, it's because this film is extra-awful. It isn't a mediocrity, it's an offensively bad heap.

I like to think that people flocked to this and Transformers based on a sort of morbid curiosity, but I really don't think so. I can't seem to get a bead on public taste. The unfortunate truth may very well be that they go see what the commercials tell them to. If it's got big explosions, it'll probably be diverting enough for two hours, but it'll have no lasting impact on them and they will probably not even pay attention to the film. My stupider detractors tell me that I'm missing out on the joys of filmgoing by being too critical. I counter with you missing out on the joys of filmgoing because you can go see GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra and then have no opinion about it whatsoever afterwards. That's called living passively.

Honorable mention: Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, The Time Traveler's Wife

WORST PERFORMANCE

ERIC BANA as HENRY DeTAMBLE in THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE



So bad it sounds like the entire film was a dub job. I can't figure out a reason that this would sound so fucking bad, but it really does just sound that bad. Everything he does is off, like he's an alien that's come to Earth and is trying to blend in. If anyone acted like this around me, I'd probably accuse them of being an alien.

Honorable mentions: Channing Tatum in GI Joe: Rise of Cobra, Shia LaBeouf in Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

MOST BORING ACTION SEQUENCE

THE DESERT CLIMAX in TRANSFORMERS 2: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN


I had nice things to say about the opening fight and the forest fight scene, but the end fight went on for fucking months before grinding to a halt and sending Shia LeBeouf to robot heaven. Then we went back to the endless fight. I remember spending that entire time trying to decide what I wanted to eat when I got home. I decided pretty quickly, but to keep myself entertained I tried to remember everything that was in my refrigerator.

Honorable mentions: Three Mile Climax in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Foundry Finale in Terminator: Salvation

BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT
TERMINATOR SALVATION


With Wolverine I figured there was a distinct possibility it would blow, but I was pretty damn sure Terminator Salvation would rock. In fact, the problems with this film were so obvious that the only way the script could be so bad would be if they were rewriting it constantly during production OH WAIT.

Honorable mentions: X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

LEAST FUN I'VE HAD WRITING THIS BLOG ALL SUMMER

MY TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE REVIEW



Positively soul-crushing. I have no better word for it. Thinking about that film puts me to sleep, I swear.

And that's it. Did you expect something more? Don't you have a job to be going to or something?

Inception Teaser

For those of you who haven't seen it, get out. For those of you who have seen it, here it is again.

Yeah, that's right. Holy shit. That's the right reaction. I would have also accepted you tearing out all your hair.

Christopher Nolan is the heir apparent to Steven Spielberg, not because their films or sensibilities are really all that similar, but because Nolan is in a position to push the limits and stretch the boundaries of the modern blockbuster. He smashed our preconceived notions about what a blockbuster can be with The Dark Knight and he is poised to do it again. And my god does this man know how to wind up the geeks. The whole production of this film has been a performance piece, and it's been bloody Shakespearean. Part of me doesn't WANT to hear a plot description because this clandestine trailer is way more fun. I had a similar reaction to the first Dark Knight teaser two years ago.

Critics whine and complain that we're in a dead age of modern filmmaking, and to that I say bullshit. I submit that critics refuse to look at blockbusters because that's where the populist films of the past have been. The filmmakers of today grew up on Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars, not the classic westerns and comedies of yesteryear. That's not to diminish their greatness, but today's young filmmakers WANT to be making blockbusters. They want to apply their gifts to the kinds films they love, and I submit that the blockbuster is the purest form of cinema. When I go to a film and am taken to a strange world or I'm shown things that I could never see or conjure on my own, I get this insane rush of excitement, high on the possibilities that film offers and that smart, ingenious young filmmakers like Nolan can get $200 million for an art film of singular vision.

God save Christopher Nolan.

Ordinary People

Forgive me if this is short, but The Time Traveler's Wife belongs to an elite crop of films that drain the fucking life out of me. Within ten minutes of the film starting, I knew this would be a difficult slough. The opening scene could have kicked off with a terrifying sense of predetermined tragedy, like flying a hundred miles an hour towards a brick wall that you can see from a mile away.

Instead, let me illustrate the opening scene. Young Henry is riding in the back seat of his mother's car. They're enjoying the December evening and singing Christmas songs like happy mothers and sons do. In the distance we see a truck swerving. Panic fills the atmosphere as Henry's mother tries to get off the road. Suddenly, something starts to happen to Henry. He's disappearing. The young actor looks panic-stricken, his mother unable to handle the unfolding crises. Suddenly it's two weeks earlier. Henry is standing naked in his living room, looking at himself sitting on the couch with his mother and father. The camera does a lovely pan around the room. Henry begins to disappear again. He reappears on the snowy side of the road in time to see his mother's car hit the truck and erupt like a fucking volcano. Henry screams out for his mother, but he's grabbed from behind by a stranger. It is Henry as an older man with a ridiculous hair cut and an American accent wholly unconvincing. Eric Bana, you just got that much more difficult to defend. He tells young Henry that there's nothing he can do to save his mother and then begins to disappear.

What a great scene, right? WRONG. This scene could have been edited together with sharpness and punch, it could have been horrifying and tragic. Instead it's flabby and poorly conceived, as if every shot in the sequence has just one fatal error, one badly constructed idea. Like inserting useless CGI, or having the car erupt like a fucking volcano, or the part where Future Henry arrives with his shaved head and tattoos and space ship.

There's no doubt that this film aimed for Epic Romance, and like all 19-year-old dudes, I like myself an Epic Romance. I was quite taken with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button last year if for no other reason than I hadn't seen a well-made, well-acted film of the Epic Romance variety in a while, and it gives me a good reference point on why this film can go to hell.

First and foremost, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was about Benjamin's arc. We caught glimpses of Daisy's arc across her life span, and that gave the film an epic feel. Second, Curious Case was about the gravity that brought Benjamin and Daisy back together time and time again, but how their young foolishness threw the relationship away over and over again until they were in their 40's. In The Time Traveler's Wife, Henry and Clare get together in the first scene they meet. What's left? I'll TELL you what's next: boring relationship turmoil. Will they ever decide on a name for their kid? Are they going to have pork chops or garden salads for dinner tonight? Whoops, Henry time-traveled. I'll put his dinner in the refrigerator in case he comes back tonight. YAWN.

But what's the most important part about a romance? The fucking romance. Nothing romantic ever happens and the time traveling adds nothing to their relationship. They don't feel like soulmates, they feel like an average married couple stuck in a freshman English major's wet dream. All they ever do is talk about how they're soulmates instead of demonstrating it like a proper romance does.

Maybe the writing could have worked if the actors had been better, but I doubt it. Rachel McAdams does little more than stand around and look pretty and be static and boring, while Eric Bana gives the worst performance I think I've seen all summer. After I was such a big fan of him in Star Trek (apparently the only big fan of him in Star Trek) and Funny People, he seems to be working hard to undo all my praise.

The dude looks completely out of place in the real world. He's too damn pretty. He looked perfect as an evil Romulan general, or an over-confident yuppie, but standing there with normal people pretending to be a normal person, he doesn't look right. And his accent. Jesus fucking Christ his accent. I loved his accent in Munich. I loved the holy hell out of his speech patterns in Star Trek, and I thought his Australian accent gave him an air of innocent intimidation in Funny People. But holy dicks is this thing putrid. It never gets better and I never was able to tune it out. It's just a grating American accent from someone who is quite clearly not an American.

The only nice thing I can say about this movie is that it's prettier than it should be. I just don't even want to write this anymore. I don't want to look it over it or copy-edit it. I just want to be done with it and write a bunch of articles as fast as humanly possible so that I can bury this entry and never have to think of this movie again.

2/10

Here's some money. Make me a Star War.

You have two characters as great as Kirk and Spock. You have a villain played by Ricardo "Fantasy Island" Montalban. You gave him fucking super strength and gave him a bunch of genetically engineered super soldiers to follow him around doing his evil bidding. Collect your money.

Right?

RIGHT?

Here's my impression of one of the Wrath of Khan script meetings:

WRITER #1: So we decided to use the genetically engineered superhuman Khan for the villain. He was in the Original Series episode Space Seed...

WRITER #2: Wait, whoa, whoa whoa. You said he's genetically engineered?

WRITER #1: Yeah...

WRITER #2: A superhuman? As in super strength?

WRITER #1: Yeah, that's what he's like in the original episode.

WRITER #2: It's just...

WRITER #1: What?

WRITER #2: It's nothing.

WRITER #1: No, tell me.

WRITER #2: Well, it's just that... I always thought that if you were super-strong, you'd also get super-tired and also do a lot of super-resting when you used your super-strength.

This movie could have been called "SITTING: The Motion Picture" and had the same effect. For a movie that boasts exploration of strange new worlds and a villain as great as Khan, we spend an awful lot of time sitting in the bridge. Ricardo Montalban is an intimidating guy, but he never stands up. Not to get a cup of fucking coffee and not to exact his revenge.

That poster makes a million promises of adventure and excitement, with Khan standing, as if to say "I might walk somewhere at some point", and Kirk with his phaser as if to say "I might get into a close-quarters confrontation where I have a conversation with someone", and some dudes in hoods in the background as if to say "we might do something dynamic, like put tape over the cracked hull in a ship or repair the broken air conditioning on the USS Reliant" and some words exploding as if to say "nobody does anything boring like read in this movie, because every time they try, the words fucking EXPLODE".

Nah. The whole movie is sort of aimless wandering, and nothing ever seems like it's at stake because no one even bothers to stand.

Montalban plays the supervillain Khan Noonien Singh, fifteen years ago exiled by the crew of the Enterprise to the dying planet Ceti Alpha 5. There, Khan has spent a lot of time reading, playing with giant insects and doing push-ups. When the USS Reliant docks nearby, Khan and his race of genetically engineered super-soldiers kill the entire crew and take over in the best scene that they don't show.

Kirk and Khan sitting in their chairs chatting it up over the view screens is not particularly exciting. It was the first time, but after a while I was just really crossing my fingers that they would get a face-to-face confrontation. The dude has super-strength and Kirk is, well, motherfucking Kirk. He'd probably blow up Earth if it meant he took out a handful of his enemies, and he's probably blow up a star system if he came face-to-face with someone as excellently evil as Khan.

And let me underline that Montalban totally deserves his legacy as a great villain. Is he a fantastic villain, even if he sits the entire fucking movie? Yeah. Can I imagine the Trek universe doing better? Absolutely. Maybe if Matthew McConaughey played a man that fused with the moon, and he grew anthropomorphic features like eyes and a mouth and a little stubby, nightmare-inducing torso and floated around the galaxy fusing himself with other planets. Man, I wish I had $40 million for these things.

Instead, the whole film feels rather lethargic. The special effects are nowhere near as impressive as they were in The Motion Picture and the space battles are staged with very little flair or suspense. Again, rather lethargically. They seem to move at a crawl.

I loved Ricardo Montalban's performance just as much as everyone else who sees this movie does, but I can't get over how lazy this film feels. When I see a Star Trek film I want to see great special effects and alien worlds and Kirk and Spock using their whiles against a superior threat. Instead what I got was Kirk and Spock with the infinite resources of Starfleet blowing the holy fuck out of a small insurgence of impoverished rebels using stolen Starfleet technology to try and appeal their sentence. For the record, I don't think trying to steal a spaceship is worth spending an eternity on an inhospitable, god-forsake planet.

I rooted for Khan from start to finish. Kirk was just being an asshole.

4/10

Men on a Mission

Several years ago there was a boy. He had a great deal of interest in a great many things, but none of them offered him that intangible something that he wanted. Perhaps a medium that best suited his tastes or something of significant depth that he could really sink his teeth into. One day, the boy fell ill and stayed home from school. There, bored, he rifled through some cabinets looking for something to do. He fell upon his older brother's DVD of Reservoir Dogs. He had little else to do, so he decided to take a gamble on something that his brother clearly liked, which, of course, doesn't always pay off.

But when that movie ended, that boy couldn't bring himself to move a muscle. Completely transfixed by the power of a medium he had never seen harnessed, he knew at that moment that he must start a blog. In four years.

So as you can imagine, Quentin Tarantino has a very, very special place in my heart. I've never regarded him as a truly Great filmmaker.

Until now.

I always though of him as a great writer who also happened to direct his writing, for he transformed the face of cinema and kickstarted the independent movement essentially based on his scripts.

Kill Bill is a great film(s), but it's not as groundbreaking or genre-bending as Pulp Fiction and it's not as gut-wrenching and visceral as Reservoir Dogs. But Death Proof really dampened my faith in the man. Not only was it overlong and terribly boring, but it somehow seemed to isolate all his worst impulses and leave out any of the things that make those bad impulses work in his other films.

If someone were to have told me a week ago, or five hours ago, that Inglorious Basterds would somehow combine the genre-bending and inspired dialogue of Pulp Fiction with the open gut wound that is Reservoir Dogs and wrap it in a flour tortilla of the loving kitsch that makes Kill Bill so unique, I would likely have declared you mad and had you spend the rest of your days having your hair harvested for wig-makers to practice on.

I would have been wrong. I would have falsely imprisoned you, and I would wear your wigs if I ever went bald so that at least one part of you would be able to glimpse the outside world again.

Inglorious Basterds may well be the perfect alignment of the planets otherwise known as Tarantino's body of work (which is very different from it being his best film). It combines everything that is great about him and rolls up his bad impulses in a rug and heaves it into a deep river where it will be retrieved as treasure by 24th century rug pirates.

But as is tradition here at Herr Machine, I'm way ahead of myself. Here's the plot for those of you who don't know (for those of you who do know, I'm purposefully insulting your intelligence): Brad Pitt is Lt. Aldo "The Apache" Raine. He is the leader of a squad known as The Basterds, assembled of the finest Jewish-American soldiers and sent deep behind enemy lines to, well, murder the fuck out of the Germans. Why? To strike fear into the hearts of the enemy. When they see the mutilated corpses that they leave in their wake, whether they be scalped, disemboweled or or bludgeoned to death the Germans will talk and fear will spread until the Basterds are the boogieman of the American army. And isn't that just a marvel of anti-history and affectionate kitsch?

Several sub-plots weave in and out of that story, including a famous German actress, a very evil Nazi officer named Hans Landa, a young Jewish woman operating a cinema in Paris and a young Nazi war hero.

The principle actors include Brad Pitt as Aldo the Apache, a role that recalls a seeming phantom of my movie-going history. His cartoonish character is required to smirk at the camera, never deviate from the speech patterns branded to his tongue and blow my mind. If American soldiers were told about a man who kills and scalps hundreds of Nazis and commands a group of soldiers that beat Nazis to death with baseball bats, Brad Pitt's Aldo is exactly the image they would conjure. That doesn't mean he's the least bit realistic, he's every bit as batshit as the mythology and it is a ballsy performance for Pitt, as anyone could easily mistake his performance for a lazy caricature. But the way that Pitt maintains this cartoonish persona at the same time as wrapping his tongue around Tarantino's tricky dialogue every bit as well as the finest actors who have found themselves in front of his lens makes Pitt's performance one of his finest, if not his very finest, performances ever.

But the real stand out is Christoph Waltz as the very evil Col. Hans "The Jew Hunter" Landa. His talent is only something that Tarantino could pull off: he is a wordsmith. Someone who can extract information and get anyone to do anything he wants with his devilish charm. Every second he circles his target, waiting for the exact. Right. Moment. To strike. That doesn't mean that he waits a few minutes, that means he draws his prey in closer and closer for an agonizingly suspenseful period of time, but the deathblow is so quick you could blink and miss it.

Waltz gives a performance so glorious and spectacularly realized, that I may have to call it the best performance ever in a Tarantino film by a significant margin, and let me stress that that includes ALL the great performances in Tarantino's films. Harvey Keitel in Reservoir Dogs. Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. Pam Grier and Robert Forster in Jackie Brown. Uma Thurman and David Carradine in Kill Bill. Writing that list of performances, I couldn't help but chortle at how far into the stratosphere Christoph Waltz blows them.

One of the chief pleasures of a Tarantino film is that the man just can't contain himself. His passion is infectious. Passion for film, passion for dialogue, passion for stories. People who complain that his scenes go on too long aren't on the same wavelength and they aren't experiencing the same movie I am. The film I saw was a 150-minute love letter to 100 years of filmmaking tradition. And not just the tradition that the critics fawn over, or even the masses, but the little things. The forgotten films that indulge our basest desires are given more cuddle time than any Citizen Kane, and why not? Tarantino loves the medium unconditionally, and that's why he's a cinephile's director. His films are a greatest-hits compilation of world filmmaking, the kind of greatest hits compilation that makes you proud to watch hundreds of movies a year.

Watch! as Tarantino slowly ratchets up the tension in his dialogue. Watch! as the dialogue sizzles and boils for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. Watch! as guards go up and tensions rise. Watch! as those tensions catch fire. Watch! as those tensions erupt like a fucking volcano. And let's watch it again. It's a trick I didn't know Tarantino had, and it is glorious. It is glorious for its ballsiness, it is beautiful for its experimental nature. Something this experimental hardly finds its way into 3000 theaters and my pulse quickens at the thought of people seeing something this bold, this sharp, this original, this flippant, this violent, this funny, this complex, this exciting, this visceral, this great.

When I say I love a film, I mean just that. I love the bloody fucking bejeezus out of this movie. I write this only a few hours after having seen the film, and every second that I'm not seeing it again is time wasted. At one point I looked at my phone to check the time and I realized there was only another half hour in the movie. I sighed a sigh of sadness. I could have gone for another two hours of this movie. I loved every frame of this film, every word of dialogue. I fucking loved this movie.

10/10

Love Will Tear Us Apart

Tom is not the victim.

Tom is only a victim of his own sensibilities and romantic outlook on life. It's not to say that Tom's outlook on life is bad, it's that it's idealistic and he leads himself into situations where he can only get hurt. Tom's real fault is that he is shallow. He begins to like Summer because she likes The Smiths, and in his mind, that makes her stand out. A lot of people like The Smiths, and it's nice to find a woman that you have things in common with, but Tom mistakes similar tastes in music with deep compatibility.

This isn't a slight on the writing in the film, it's a bear hug for the writing. I'm not pointing out a mistake, I'm pointing out something that the writers purposefully inserted that nobody I've talked to about this movie seems to understand.

Tom says as much himself towards the end of the film. His real revelation is that he's unassertive; he hasn't been in enough relationships in his life and he's come to romanticize them because the closest thing he has to real experience is movies and music and watching his friends' supposedly happy relationships, and he's so old and inexperienced that those have replaced his actual romantic sensibilities.

As a result, he seems incapable of making a serious assessment about the relationship and seen himself and Summer for what they really are: desperately wrong for each other.

I open with this because everybody on the planet has seen the movie and came away with incorrect conclusions about Tom's character.

For those of you who don't know (ha ha), 500 Days of Summer follows Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) from his meeting to his breakup with Summer (Zooey Deschanel) and up to his acceptance, in total a tally of 500 days.

Tom is a great protagonist. Like another great protagonist earlier this year, the whole film is filtered through his eyes. That means when we see his relationship with Summer and it seems so perfect and idyllic, it's not because it actually way, but because Tom refuses to remember anything that wasn't perfectly idyllic. Because of this, Tom is the perfect surrogate for the average male who has experienced a similar breakup. He reacts in a way that every man does. Lethargic rage, denying it, absurd fantasies.

The film is so stylized because that's how Tom's brain is functioning, and the essence of every aspect of the relationship is so perfectly captured by director Marc Webb. The morning after they first have sex is a giant dance number, the most perfect dramatization of of the first wave of infatuation.

Marc Webb's bag of tricks is shoulder-deep. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel are marvelous, Deschanel in particular, who plays the ultimate manic pixie dreamgirl. But Deschanel's performance elevates the material out of cliche. She's a realistic human being, likely to remind you of someone you know and make the drama of the film all the more poignant. But while Deschanel brings depth to a certain aspect of the film, the whole film relies on Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance and he is typically fantastic, which is wholly unsurprising; in the years since I first saw Brick I have followed his career with great interest and he hasn't done anything to disappoint me so far.

The decision to make a romantic comedy from a distinctly male perspective is inspired. So few romances appeal to men, but not because romance doesn't appeal to men at all, but because romances are generally geared toward a feminine sensibility. Men have a completely different set of neuroses when it comes to love and a different way of dealing with a break-up. It's almost violating to see it on the screen because it's something that we've never been exposed to this well before.

This is one of the strongest, most sincere and most realistic films about breaking up I've ever seen. It belongs with the best films on the subject, a pantheon ruled by Annie Hall and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

And comparison to those two films is high praise indeed.

9/10

Made in His Image

As a child, I was fixated on Star Trek. There are scores of home videos of me, around the age of four, where my parents desperately try to engage me over my trance-like state. One video in particular features me at three years old, sitting in the hospital after my sister is born. I don't give a shit about my new sister as long as Patrick Stewart's glistening head is within my field of vision, and I only acknowledge my father once he threatens to turn off the TV if I don't give him some sort of sign of life.

Eventually Star Trek and I grew apart. I have vague memories of watching Deep Space Nine with my mother when I was five or six, but around that time the outlet for my elementary nerddom became Star Wars.

Also around this time I remember my parents renting Star Trek: First Contact, which scared the CHRIST out of me. I spent the majority of that film's running time running into the next room and hiding my eyes on the staircase. I have particularly traumatic memories of Patrick Stewart snapping the Borg Queen's spine over his knee and hanging it up on his mantle.

But that's about it for my knowledge of Star Trek. I remember very, very little from my time as a kindergarten Trekkie outside of Patrick Stewart's sun-reflecting scalp and I don't think any amount of Star Trekking is going to pull me away from my beloved Star Wars.

But I was recently compelled to do a retrospective of the entire series for two reasons. One was that as I gave more and more thought to J.J. Abrams' recent Star Trek reboot, I realized that it was god damn brilliant and it was the most fun I'd had at the theater since The Dark Knight. I fully regret not giving it a 10/10 and must make amends. The other was a large stack of photographs my grandmother gave to my mother recently contained this:



So with that, I dive into a film with a largely negative reputation. Often referred to as "The Motionless Picture" by the dirty Trekkie scum, the serious, deliberate pace was very well-suited to the story.

As for the story, I'll give you a quick rundown. Kirk is doing what he always does, being an impulsive, selfish asshole and letting everyone else clean up the mess, only this time he's doing it as admiral of Starfleet. He essentially strong-arms Starfleet Command into giving him the Enterprise to handle an apocalyptic astro-threat over the far more qualified Captain Decker. What's this astro-threat, you ask? A giant cloud, about as threatening as a bit of morning fog. Perhaps Starfleet was worried about unsafe traveling conditions, but the more likely scenario was that every now and then they tell Kirk to go blow up a cloud or something, just to see if he will, and just to see how many of his crew he manages to get killed in the process (spoiler warning: 2).

According to Starfleet, the cloud is incredibly dangerous, and as the Enterprise gets closer to it, they realize it's also sentient. It would be a shame for me to go any further, but it's an interesting, if not exactly perfectly logical story.

The film came out ten years after the original series had been canceled and my first impression upon finishing the film was that it was Gene Roddenberry's ultimate vision of the Star Trek universe. Free from the pressure to have explosive climaxes, Roddenberry was free to use the film as a conduit to explore more hard sci-fi territory. This is surprising, because I tend to think of any science fiction film to come out between 1978-1983 to be mere cash-ins on the success of Star Wars. Good for Star Trek: The Motion Picture for holding on to its original vision and providing a stark contrast to the more shallow fare filling the theaters at the time (by God, though, shallow doesn't necessarily mean bad; we got Alien out of the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom, so I never have any intention of speaking negatively about it).

The real star of this film, though, are the visual effects. I've never liked the look of CGI and have always admired filmmakers like Christopher Nolan who avoid using it when an alternative is possible, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture is just further proof that I'm always fucking right. The model work in this film is second only to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and while the film catches a lot of flak for lingering on these shots too much, I couldn't get enough of them. The design of the ships were positively epic, and you can practically hear the 1979-oids gasping as some of the more ambitious shots come on the screen. The only thing that didn't look magnificent was the animated bits, which are the pieces that CGI can fill in for these days.

As for the acting, this is a film headlined by William Shatner, which is all you need to know about the acting.

Additionally, it IS a slow-moving film tat doesn't always justify its existence with a story that makes complete sense. At times it reeks of a script that was re-written several times during the shoot.

It's a strong film thematically, and I was engaged throughout. I'm not terribly familiar with Roddenberry's original series, but from what I gather this is exactly the sort of thing he was going for. For a film without a single shootout or spaceship blowing another spaceship to hell, it was surprisingly rousing and exciting in the only way that hard sci-fi can be rousing or exciting.

It's not perfect or great, but it is good, and I enjoyed my time with it more than I thought I might.

I gather that this experience may be less punishing than I had originally thought, and I'm looking forward to The Wrath of Khan.

7/10

For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky

The second season of Heroes catches a lot of shit for, well, being the second season. As far as I can tell, people seem to hold the Writer's Strike against it, and far be it from the guy who holds a grudge against Paul Newman for being dead to tell you that's unfair.

But I didn't think it was bad. In fact, I thought it was roughly as good as the first season, with some cool plot twists stuffed in along the way. Most people seem to think that the first season was some rip-roaring adventure tale, full of excitement and peril, but I never really felt that way. The writers of the show never seemed to figure out how to pace the show well. Episode-to-episode, the show was paced very well, but scene-to-scene the show displayed an amateurish knowledge of what makes things suspenseful, often undercutting its own hard work with stupid sentimentality.


The exception to the rule, though, is the abso-fucking-lutely fantastic episode "Homecoming". I'm only through the second season, but I have my doubts that the show will ever be able to top its excellent work there, where all the problems I have with the show were temporarily caged in favor of kicking ass. As much as I love Zachary Quinto in this show (and I fucking love Zachary Quinto in this show), his character was a lot more fun when he just stood in the shadows, making things fly around and taking peoples' brains in the most spectacularly violent method possible. And I miss the whole Isaac Mendes premonition business.

People also seem to hold the last episode in high regard. The final showdown between Sylar and Peter seemed very small-scale and anti-climactic, although they only made it worse with Nathan's fucking monologue that did nothing but sap any suspense out of the scene.

The second season resolved a lot of problems and introduced a host of new ones.

First problem they introduced. Where the fuck did Sylar go? I couldn't help but feel like his line was artificially lengthened by sending him on a road trip with some Nikki and Paulo.

And something that has been an issue from the beginning is that we are never given a clear indication of the lengths and limits of the characters' abilities. For example, at the beginning of the second season, Sylar kills the chick who makes illusions, and then freaks out when he doesn't absorb her ability. The whole fucking first season he's been snatching up brains, and now he doesn't and all of a sudden he's shitting himself over how he lost his powers. In any case, the whole brain-snatching thing doesn't make tons of sense. Is he eating them? Rubbing them on his skin? Making a necklace? Putting googly eyes on them? How does he absorb abilities that aren't necessarily mental through the brain? Does the brain tell your body to have super strength? If so, shouldn't he be able to develop powers by sheer force of will?

One of the nice things about this season was that Nikki-Line was pretty much shoved to the back, so I didn't have to watch more characters fawn over how beautiful Ali Larter is just because she's banging the producers. Unfortunately, Micah-Line is just as bad as it was the first season, and we pretty much have to watch Claire go through the exact same arc, except this time with some flying loser nerding all over the place and babbling high school cliches about how being different really is good. Maybe all the middle-aged housewives that are watching this show will give up football tryouts and join the math league now.

The plus side of Claire-Line is that Jack Coleman really gets a chance to stretch, and he has been one of the best parts about the show (even if they won't shut up about his glasses).

And Peter's line continues to be really boring, ever since they retconned his power to "taking off his shirt". This time he doesn't even have the more-interesting Nathan character there to boost that lamewad story.

But the real crime in this season is Hiro-Line. I get that making Kensei the villain in present day is pretty inspired, but there's no reason in the cosmos to make the ancient Japan story go on for so long. It had all the aesthetic pleasures of an episode of Reading Rainbow, the thematic value of one of their featured books and the breeziness of Ayn Rand.

But it wasn't a monstrosity like everyone made it out to be. It about evened out with the vastly overrated first season. It's still a pretty good show, but it has been, and always will be, the over-eager but well-meaning little brother of Lost.

Diversity Day

Traditionally I hate movies that identify "racism" as their central theme. It's something that's been done hundreds of times and there's really very little territory that hasn't been mined, strip-mined and blown to pieces with a bunch of miners trapped inside.

Anyone who has been educated has been taught to treat other races with dignity, despite whatever feelings you have towards them. It's something that we've all figured out by grade school and it's not something that needs to be explored anymore.

There's something peripheral to that hackneyed theme that District 9 explores: our fear and distrust of things we don't understand and the way a simple language barrier can give us an asshole sense of superiority.

And District 9 never gives easy answers to these problems.

Also I think that the real theme of the film is the unifying power of cat food.

For those of you who don't know, District 9 is a part fictional documentary, part narrative feature about an alien spaceship that has been stalled in Johannesburg, South Africa for twenty years. Alien affairs have been handed over to a private organization called MNU, who have ferried the aliens off the ship and into a shantytown below. There, the aliens, called by the derogatory "prawn", have developed a society with a group of Nigerian criminals who are hoping to learn how to operate the advanced alien weaponry.

Our lead is an MNU officer named Wikus who is in charge of an operation to move the aliens to a smaller, isolated and heavily guarded location away from the general population. There he comes in contact with an alien contaminant that has strange and sickening effects. I won't go any further than that, because the twists and turns the plot goes through are one of the chief pleasures of the film.

It's weird to get good performances out of entirely CGI characters that speak in an alien language with no discernable emotions, so by using CGI not just well, (like so few films do) but extraordinarily well the film immediately endeared itself to me.

This is the sort of filmmaking that makes me wonder if the director had to negotiate with the devil (trade some PAs' souls or something) to give these characters life. This is the SECOND film this summer to use a small budget (District 9 was shot on $30 million) to outclass the big-budget films that cost the studio executives their first-born children and all their body hair to make, and which would probably have a hard time turning a profit against a budget inflated enough to keep Paris Hilton busy for a week. Every alien in the film is CGI-rendered and they all look fantastic.

The lead performance is great, the direction is excellent and would never suggest that Neil Blomkamp hadn't been directing films for decades and the script is quite strong.

What's most interesting to me is the way the aliens are treated by humans. Despite their pretentions towards giving them a safe place to live, they constantly raid and harrass them, don't accommadate their lifestyle and in one scene, burn down a nest to keep the prawns from being born, all the while laughing and joking.

But what's new about that? The interesting part is that they don't paint the aliens as victims. The best example I can give is a scene where an alien starts to pull apart a tire, and as the cameraman explains that the aliens like to eat tires because of the texture, a soldier walks up and begins to prod the alien. Wikus shouts not to prod the alien, but it's too late. The alien grabs the soldier and tears his arms off.

With behavior like that, it's not surprising that the general population fears and distrusts the aliens, and it's not unreasonable for them to want them sent somewhere that they'll never see them again. Despite one species' extreme mistreatment of the other, it's hard to sympathize with either side. Even Wicus is a scheming, selfish bigot who only has a small revelation at the end, fueled by his own selfish, but understandable reasons.

It's not all perfect, though. I'm not convinced that the documentary aspect worked all that well, or was necessary in the least, considering how schizophrenic the viewers window into the story tends to be (sometimes we're watching it through the lens of a documentarian, other times we are watching it from a third party perspective like a regular movie).

In the end, though, the film has a great story and that can do a lot to work against some unsuccesful narrative choices. The effects work is simply spectacular given the budget. It's a lot of fun watching how the alien society would operate under those conditions and how people would react to the situation. It's very believable and compelling, and we're all expecting great things from Mr. Neil Blomkamp.

8/10

Because I'm poor and live in the middle of nowhere

I won't be seeing 500 Days of Summer until next week, at which point it would be completely useless for me to review it because everyone on the fucking planet will have seen it already. That won't stop me from reviewing it (probably), because I have a will of iron and I, like most critics, won't let something like irrelevance keep me from writing 10,000 word diatribes on formalisms that I am probably misunderstanding and that the average viewer (or pier of mine who I've forced to read this) will give a bean about *.

While we patiently await my shallow, pedantic review, let's ease the suffering of the stab wound I've likely inflicted to get you to read this with a video that was recently brought to my attention.

This video was brought to my attention this morning, and I have been watching it over and over again. Mostly because the stimulating effect of a video will keep me from falling asleep, where I'll only have more fever-dreams about the Dutch. But this video rules; who knew Joseph Gordon-Levitt could dance like that? He's like an angel.

A clogging angel.



[photo not found]



And this is topical because I just reviewed G.I. Joe and need to cleanse my pallet.

* I just made that up. Is that cool?

Deadbeat Summer

I don't know shit about G.I. Joe. Well, that's a lie. My older brother sometimes watched it when we were kids. I will now list everything I know about G.I. Joe:

- The US knows where Cobra Island is, and every week those wacky Cobra folks come up with some new hair-brained scheme and the Joes have to shoot around their feet until they give up. For some reason (probably the UN), we can't just nuke Cobra Island.

- There was an episode where they found a mermaid.

- They had enough R&D funding to make money-powered space-jets that fired money.

I was too busy being a four-year-old Trekkie to watch any G.I. Joe shit.

But my god, that stuff must be Jody Hill compared to this movie. Anyone who knows my taste knows that I'll give free passes to action movies on a lot of things because I think it is a horrifically underrated art form. I love kitsch, and movies with characters named things like Dr. Mindbender, and villains that dress in black with mechanical apparatuses attached to their bodies, and underground lairs and heroic heroes and over-the-top action. I have genuine love and affection for these things and I was hoping against all logic that G.I. Joe would put these elements together in an exciting, original and fun way.

I couldn't have been more wrong. I can't even figure out where to begin on this monstrosity. With the plot, I suppose. Through a series of endless flashbacks we find out that Cobra are the bad guys and the Joes are the good guys. Who gives a shit. Flubber gets shot at the Eiffel Tower in one scene.

It stars Channing fucking Tatum and Marlon "Little Man" Wayans, two of the worst actors alive as a couple of buddy soldiers. The acting in this film is so bad that it makes Dennis Quaid look like a good actor. The only thing redeeming about this film, and I mean that quite literally, is Joseph Gordon-Levitt when he gets in his scientist garb. His voice is cartoonishly evil and the only time I got the impression that I was watching a brilliant piece of kitsch action was when he did that voice. It's the only time the film felt like it should have.

More than any of those problems, more than the endless flashbacks and misuse of great material, is that the action in the film sucks. It looks like an action film from 1993. Specifically, Street Fighter. There's a scene where the Joes chase the Cobras through Paris as they try to fire their flubber gun at the Eiffel Tower that could easily have been a lot of fun, but it's undercut by something very simple: the suits that the Joes wear. They look heavy and cumbersome. It doesn't look right when they move in them and it takes you out of the excitement. Additionally, there's a lot of misplaced slow-motion and general ineptitude behind the camera. I won't even go into all the editing problems the film has, not the least of which is how the action is edited so poorly that all sense of location is lost.

What else? The visual effects. My god, the visual effects. At least Transformers 2 had some incredible visual effects to look at, but G.I. Joe's wouldn't have been cutting-edge five years ago. The whole film looks really cheap for a summer film and it feels like a tax write-off. The only person who seems to be putting in any effort is Gordon-Levitt, who suffers some awful makeup work at the end of the film as punishment.

Although it's not as bad as being the mascot for high in iron Gushers like Christopher Eccleston, the poor bastard.

And the title doesn't make any fucking sense. The whole film Cobra just gets their asses kicked and at the end they've been fucked into submission by the hyper-masculine, electrical tape-wielding Joes. It would be like calling a film about The Black Plague "The Rise of Hand-Washing and Regular Baths in Western Europe". If I shouted "From now on, you will call me Cobra Commander!" at a crowd of strangers and started signing the card reader at the gas station "Cobra Commander", I would have accomplished roughly the same thing as Cobra actually accomplished in this film.

Additionally, it's the most tangential film of all time. We spend about half our time in flashbacks for minor characters that we don't give a shit about. I'm not joking when I say we spend about ten minutes learning the backstory of a character that DOESN'T SAY A FUCKING WORD. The entire movie. Who gives a shit that he was a street urchin when he was a kid? It's a weak way to try and raise the stakes in the final battle. We just keep flashing back to this guy's childhood completely unprovoked because, well he never says anything.

This is a putrid, assaultive, boring movie that could have been great. The wasted potential makes it all the more sad that it's so incredibly awful. I'll give it half a point for Joseph Gordon Levitt's voice, and half a point for the shot of the majestic polar bear.

2/10

Cure is Simple

Apatow's films have always captured natural humor a lot better than large-scale gags or irony. I've said on several occasions that I want to see an Apatow film removed of all its physical comedy and such, and just focus on people sitting around, talking jive and making jokes. He has accumulated a very gifted group of comic actors who specialize in this sort of humor, and it's about time he let them loose.

Funny People achieves this above all else. At their best, Apatow's films give you the sense that you're just hanging out with a group of really cool friends. By not having large chunks of plot to move through, this feeling is the predominant mood of the film. And with an ensemble that includes Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Jason Schwartzman, Leslie Mann RZA and Aziz Ansari this should be the ultimate Apatow film.

I admit I was wrong. This film is undisciplined and dry; even with almost an hour of footage cut it still feels very, very long. I enjoyed every minute of it, but I FELT every minute of it.

It's not an easy film; like a certain other comedy this year, we're given a very unlikable protagonist in Adam Sandler's George Simmons. An enormously successful, if questionably talented comedian and film star who is quite clearly modeled after Sandler himself; he is a loathsome cocksucker of enormous cocksucking capacity. He is a selfish, egotistical and completely pathetic piece of shit who learns nothing from his experiences throughout the film. I always thought pathetic assholes like that make great protagonists and the irony of them learning nothing from all their experiences is a great arc. And since the part is well-written, I feel like I have to blame this on Sandler.

I'm hurt that I have to say that, because Adam Sandler gave a balls-out brilliant performance in Punch-Drunk Love, one of my favorite films. For now, though, I'll simply point out that every lead actor in a PT Anderson film has given a career-best performance.

The best thing I can say about Sandler is that he has nice chemistry with Seth Rogen, who I hold in high esteem (this generation's Bill Murray?) as a comedian and actor. And thank god he looks so damn weird skinny, because I thought he might lose some of his everyman appeal with his weight loss. I thank all the haystacks in the middle east for weirdness that transcends weight boundaries.

On the other hand, all the supporting cast is fantastic; while Rogen sort of plays himself as an everyman and Sandler plays himself as an egotistical bastard, Jason Schwartzman plays an up-and-coming idiot who has been given a recent ego boost by being hired to play the lead role on an idiotic sitcom. Eric Bana plays a friendly Australian businessman who seems to accidentally intimidate the shit out of everyone he talks to with his enormous stature, Australian accent, fancy clothes and grotesque confidence.

And so on and so forth.

It's a very relaxing film to watch, but it's never really engaging. You sit back and let the situations wash over you and laugh at the jokes. But it's messy and undisciplined and sloppy and needs to be anchored by a stronger lead performance or a director who's willing to get into the trenches with the actors and tighten up the editing.

I'm really a big fan of Apatow and his stable of actors. I don't wish to see them go away any time soon and I think that he still has many good films left in him. In fact, I think a film like this could work if he uses Funny People as a guide and recognizes its strengths and weaknesses.

I enjoyed the film. It was a serious comedy; something that I hope is getting more common. It was an ambitious comedy, again something I hope is going to be more common. But it just wasn't that successful.

6/10

The Lovely Bones Trailer

Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones Film Trailer

I was immediately disappointed upon turning on this video. I had often heard that Peter Jackson had lost a lot of weight after King Kong and my hopes were high that he had injected it into his skull to give himself more brain power, but his normal-sized head seemed to make this theory quite impossible. Minor setback, in the scheme of things, though. Now I have to say "SPECIAL EFFECTS WIZARD Peter Jackson has injected all of his fat into his brain and has managed to stay fashionably small-headed". If I were really ambitious I would work something about his ego in there.

As we move along in the trailer, we notice his English accent. I'm pretty sure he's from Australia (accents?), but this accent must be a side-effect of the brain thing I was just talking about.



Also, I don't think I'm allowed to have a crush on Saoirse Ronan for another three years. In the meantime, I'll covertly hit on her like I do with women that find me repulsive. She could be one of the youngest ever best actress nominees for this film, and I mean that. Furthermore, I can buy you cigarettes.

As far as the actual film, I continue to be disappointed that they didn't just glue a mustache on Ryan Gosling and have him play the fucking role, considering that Mark Wahlberg has done nothing but disappoint me for a few years now.

Stanley Tucci, a guy who looks a lot like a child-murderer, is unrecognizably normal-looking and hair-tastic for his role as a child-murderer.

And Susan Sarandon is still trying to win a second Oscar (keep swinging, girl!). I always expect her to smash some plates whenever she's in a movie.

But what's really selling me on this, and the reason I've watched this thing five times already, is the scenes depicting heaven. They look mind-blowing. Don't take my word for it, though.

Only the dead have seen the end of war movies

Take note, aspiring filmmakers. Take note. This is a film that turns the sickening slow-burn of modern combat, waged from miles away with a sniper rifle or a remote detonator, into one of the tensest, most exciting action pictures of the summer. This is a film that does something I'd essentially given up on seeing: having a soldier character in active duty be a fascinating and original human being, but not be an avatar for soldiers the world over.

Newcomer Jeremy Renner gets the honor of playing this exceptionally well-written role, and he manages a simple yet difficult feet: I can't imagine anyone else in the role. Already. Isn't this supposed to take years and years? Aren't I supposed to be able to picture Colin Farrell in the role if someone tells me that Colin Farrell was originally going to play that role? I can't imagine anyone but Brando in the Godfather because he's so well-established in that role, not because Laurence Olivier couldn't have been just as good.

As is standard operating procedure, I'm far ahead of myself and have to shove a plot synopsis somewhere in this behemoth of a block of text.

Jeremy Renner is Staff Sft. William James, a bomb dismantler assigned to Bravo Company's Bomb Disposal Unit a few weeks before he's due to leave Iraq. There, the members of Bravo Company begin to wonder how mentally stable James is.

There's something strange about the ground Renner finds between the way an over-confident human being would act and the way an overconfident soldier would act that makes him seem a touch otherworldly, and it gives you the feeling, far ahead of where the script demands it, that he doesn't exactly belong in either world and he has his own strange reasons to be fighting this war.

What Renner accomplishes with this role is nothing short of awe-inspiring. At this moment, he's my choice for Best Actor. I could have liked another performance better, but at this point I'm blinded by my debilitating crush on Jeremy Renner.

While we're on the subject, let's talk Kathryn Bigelow. I know what you're saying. "A woman not only found her way out of the house, but to Jordan? Better not let the civil rights movement find out about this one!", but hear me out. She deserves a Best Director nomination. What a strange feeling it is to be so worked over by the tension of a film that you feel sick. Every second of her scenarios is perfectly paced and edited, building up to the final confrontation and then executed with a whisper, then a bang.

There's a whole group of extended cameos that are well-served to the film, oddly enough, with Ralph Fiennes especially showing up in the middle of the film as a mercenary contractor who seems to be as unstable as Sgt. James.

This is the first great film about the Iraq War. It's the first film that has made serious commentary about the nature of war and the strange tolls it can take on the men who fight them blah blah blah.

If I have any SERIOUS complaints, it's the very last scene is absolutely unnecessary and completely undercuts the tone the film has spent so long building up.

Kathryn Bigelow has never done anything before to make me think she was capable of shepherding a film of such quality through development, and it almost gives me faith in women as a whole.

9/10