Actor's Director

Pre-review huddle: The Rock was the first R-Rated film I ever saw. At the same time, my generation considers it a minor classic. As such, I have some affection for it that is surely going to stain my review with prejudice.

The Rock falls into an elite category of films known as "things that give away how Michael Bay's brain works". These are fun things, usually. For example, The Rock tells us that Michael Bay thinks trolleys are every morning filled with mercury fulminate and launched down the street (presumably out of a giant slingshot) and into oncoming traffic. They don't have any passengers who aren't token black conductors or mannequins made of mercury fulminate.

Like all passable movies, though, not that much can be interpreted about Michael Bay's brain chemistry from this film. Unlike in Bad Boys, where it was revealed that Michael Bay thinks cops are rich, it seems like the studio executives were able to get him filled with downers every morning so that his brain would react at least somewhat normally to his surroundings for a few months.

The Rock is an action thrill-ride (I expect to see that on the DVD case) about US General Edward Hummel (Ed Harris), who, having seen the deaths of his covert troops marginalized and ignored by the US government, takes it upon himself to steal some poisonous gas rockets and take hostages on Alcatraz in the hopes of extorting a modest $100 million for the purpose of reparations to the families of the dead soldiers. It's up to the best rag-tag duo the Pentagon could throw together to stop him: chemical weapons expert Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage) and former MI6 agent John Mason (Sean Connery).

Mason was a convict at Alcatraz back in the 60's, imprisoned for some shady espionage stuff, and he's the only person to have successfully escaped. Blah blah blah. Bring on the shootouts.

This film is shockingly, painfully...explosively average. Everything about it is as average as I could possibly imagine and this is a film that came out in the 90's, a time when mediocrity in action movies held sway. It even has the aesthetic that I associate with mediocrity: lights shown through colored mist.

The only reason that this film has any kind of reputation is its three central performances.

Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage and Ed Harris are fantastic in the way that so few actors were in action films released in the 90's (the only other film that immediately leaps to mind is Air Force One).

That's no surprise coming from Sean Connery. Sean Connery is known to make crazy motherfucking yogurt ads into 15-second rollercoaster thrill rides. Sean Connery thinks that the list of ingredients on the back of a cereal box are a terrorist plot. Sean Connery thinks that any sentence longer than five words is a ransom note. Sean Connery drives a gun to work every day. Sean Connery makes his own beef jerky out of Barbara Walters' disapproval.

So because it's not a bad film, it's made an awesome film just because of Sean Connery's presence. We could call Connery's presence in mediocre action movies "The Rock Effect", meaning just because of his charisma and perfection of the action movie performance, he elevates the movie.

As I mentioned before, Nicolas Cage also acquits himself nicely. I've made no secret of my dislike for Cage. The only time he's ever good is when he's working with immensley talented directors, and that never happens because he spends all his time making Next and Ghost Rider. But this is one of the very, very few times that his presence in an action film makes any sense at all. His character is a nerdy chemist inexperienced in combat, which makes plenty of sense for Cage. Nicolas Cage has two looks: nerd and professional creep. He never looks like he has any reason to be holding a gun, unless he's robbing a teenage girl of her innocence.

And Ed Harris, who is always great no matter what he's in, simply because he's a great, great actor (as opposed to Connery, who's only great because he's spent the last forty years defining the modern action hero).

The rest of the movie is bog-fucking-standard. All the pieces just sit there in a pile waiting to be put together into something cohesive. Aside from the performances, the script is okay, peppered with some amusing jests, although the amateurish editing does more to derail the comedic aspects of the film than I've thought editing capable of (I've been told that comedy is as much in the hands of an editor as an actor or writer, and I believe it now).

And...Alcatraz looks pretty cool in a few scenes. And that's it. Like all of Bay's films, it's too goddamn long with a lengthy chase scene stuffed into the middle of the film for no reason at all, and it's forty minutes before we even get to Alcatraz, and even longer before our two heroes engage the bad guys. But for an action film, the action has surprisingly little appeal. It's all about those three guys.

7/10

I think it likes you

I don't claim to know shit about horror films. They don't really get to me anymore and the genre seems replete with cheap shock tactics that aren't scary. It's not scary to see someone's ribcage get torn out and used as a xylophone, it's just icky. If it was scary, being a surgeon would be the #1 occupation for horror junkies, closely followed by "shut-in amateur ghost hunter".

Maybe I haven't been looking in the right places for good horror films and my resistance is weak, but Paranormal Activity has burrowed deep under my skin and established colonies with their own respectable economy and morally gray conflicts with the natives.

The subject of a marketing carpetbomb, Paranormal Activity was shot for $15,000 and has been kicked around to film festivals for two years, slowly building a reputation until it found its way into the hands of Steven Spielberg and a handful of Dreamworks executives.

THIS IS THE PLOT: There's something in Micah and Katie's home. It's been following Katie since she was a girl, and now it's really kicking up a fucking fuss, knocking on doors and tripping down the stairs.

Micah buys a video camera to record the strange goings-on, especially at night when strange things occur as they sleep.

They come to realize that the strange creature is a demon, a malevolent creature whose motivations are never completely clear (which makes it all the more frightening). Everyone they talk to is useless, every precaution they take is laughed at by the demon and they can't even run away from it. That's a feeling I associate with "the walls are closing in" and is rarely implemented well in horror films.

But for all the things the film does right, and it does just about everything right, the key is that it's patient. We spend a lot of time in the company of the characters, getting a feel for the house, their relationship and Katie's history with this supernatural happening. A horror film this well-paced could have all kinds of other flaws and I would give it a pass just for having the gaul to actually build tension. But, as I said, Paranormal Activity does just about everything right.

Horror films are especially subject to backlash because you have so many macho dickwagon trains saying "Pfft, it wasn't scary (FOOTBALL FOOTBALL)". People don't like to admit that a series of moving images and accompanying sounds managed to change their body chemistry, so I'll be the first to say it: it got under my skin. I got dropped off at my house after I saw the film and I sat down at my desk. I heard my cat scratching at my sliding-glass window, and I stood up to let her in. When I got to the door, she had climbed up the screen window to eye-level and was staring at me LIKE A FUCKING DEMON DOES. Needless to say, my heart swelled to the size of a canned ham (does that sound like tough-guy dialogue?) and I started pouring anything I could find into my eyes to get them to stop dilating.

Too many reviews have given away too many of the great scares, and so I won't go into detail here. The only thing I will say is that this film takes advantage of my newly published book Throw Your Composer in a Dumpster and Hire a Sound Team Free of Track Marks: Why You'll Never Make it in Hollywood if You Bought This Book and designed a soundscape free of music and full of creepy noises.

I won't say it's virtuoso filmmaking, I won't say I'll run out and see it again and I won't say you're missing out big time if you haven't seen it. I will say it's a goddamn great horror film, and if that's your cup of tea then Paranormal Activity is a name-brand product served with fresh crumpets.

8/10

When Swines Flew

My plan was to see A Serious Man, Big Fan and Paranormal Activity this weekend, but there's a distinct possibility I have either swine flu or bacterial pneumonia and if I caused the next Black Death I would feel at least a little bit bad.

In the meantime, I'll try and get the next few Mindscape of Michael Bay reviews up and maybe get a classic review or two in there. Sorry to all my loyal readers for the recent lull in activity, I've been dealing with school and personal problems, not to mention I'm sharing a Netflix account.

So while I burn the buboes off with a torch and suck the puss out with a cobra, go find something else to do. But don't leave me forever, my self-esteem is tied to your comments.

All Things Must Pass

I can say so many nice things about Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are that it's hard for me to admit that the film doesn't "click". It's missing a mystery factor that subverts all its prettiness, all its thematic density, all its technical accomplishments, all its wonderful performances and all its love-lettering to Maurice Sendak's original book.

As I'm sure you all know, the original story is that of a young boy named Max who is sent to bed without dinner. There he imagines a tropical island populated by strange creatures that crown him their king. Its text is minimal, allowing the gorgeous watercolors to tell the simple story.

Spike Jonze has been working on his film adaptation for the better part of a decade (if my sources are correct, he started working on it after Being John Malkovich and before Adaptation.). Plagued by casting problems, disastrous test screenings (I've heard tell of children running from the theater in tears) and unhappy studio heads, the finished product sits in front of us.

Spike Jonze's story is a bit different from Sendak's original, in that, being a two-hour film, it's fleshed out. All the same elements are there, but they're dramatized in a way that the book was not.

The Wild Things are now more acute renderings of Max's id, most of them given a single personality trait like Alexander (Paul Dano), who represents Max's sense of rejection, displayed earlier in the film when his sister and her friends crush his painstakingly crafted snow fort.

The two Wild Things that are given rounder development are Carol (James Gandolfini) who is Max in everything but name, and KW (Lauren Ambrose) who is clearly meant to represent Max's sister. Max assumes the role of his own mother (Catherine Keener) when he is crowned king, and we are given the first of two fascinating themes: the responsibility of a parent in dealing with the developing mind of a child. Max's mother has to deal with so many conflicting personalities emerging from Max that she is essentially raising a group of "wild things" instead of a single child. That's something that many adults don't appreciate about their children.

The other theme, and I'm paraphrasing Bill Waterson here, is "anyone who remembers childhood as an idyllic time was clearly never a child". People tend to compare their level of responsibility now to their level of responsibility as a child and concur that childhood must have been fantastic. It never fails that they can't remember how crushing childhood was. We had the same social issues we have now (only "trying to get laid" is replaced with "getting invited to a birthday party") and none of the freedoms. It was oppressive, we were not understood and we had to deal with a emotions we had no idea how to cope with. In so many ways, my life now is infinitely easier than my childhood.

But it passes, as all things do. Whatever pain Max feels, the film argues, will be offset at the end of his life by his happy memories. Death isn't a good thing, but the clarity you find at the end of your experience is. Max can indulge his wild side and hide in his own mind, but in the end, his fleeting childhood is better spent with his mother and her hot soup.

Spike Jonze shoots the whole film hand-held and from Max's eye level, giving it a sense of magic and wonder that isn't often thought of when I use the words "hand-held and eye-level". His landscapes and compositions are magnificent, but the framing bounces along like the steps of a child.

The performances are all fantastic, especially Max Records as Max and James Gandolfini as Carol. Gandolfini especially is acting in a giant puppet and makes Carol a sad little kid with razor-sharp claws and violent tendencies. His performance is tragic and is the sort of thing the Academy is sure to ignore.

Now that I've said all those nice things, it's time to say some mean things. As I've said before, some mystery factor is missing. I'm not articulate enough to say what it is for sure, but I can speculate that it's the script. While the strengths of the story are drawn from Sendak's book, the weaknesses are likely from the original screenplay. The middle section of the film is weak, with a lot of elementary school drama between the Wild Things that's fine in theory, but we don't have to watch it for forty minutes to get the idea that the Wild Things are Max's peers. The visually stunning scenes like Carol's city made of sticks are offset by dozens of scenes of the Wild Things arguing amongst themselves. My only wish is that the writers could have conjured scenes to move forward a story, like the fort-building, instead of what amounts to scene after scene of the Wild Things shooting the shit with Max.

It's far more detrimental than it sounds. Despite everything nice I can say about the film, it's still indulgent and flabby where it should be sharp and dramatic. I can spot it the marvelous imagery, the emotive CGI, the fantastic performances, but in the end it's in the service of a script that wasn't able to flesh out Maurice Sendak's ten sentences as well as it should have.

8/10

I can't really decide if that's harsh or kind, so why don't you read the goddamn review and see what I have to say? Assigning a rating to this movie is damn hard.

Jerkoffs finish first

Before I go any further I want to say a few things. First:

If you think Michael Moore is an inflammatory liberal pundit and you roll your eyes when you hear his name (as so many do), I trust you already have Bill O'Reilly, Anne Coulter and Glenn Beck in deathmatches with genetically engineered polar bears on the moon.

Michael Moore is far, far, FAR more tactful than any of those morons, and that's astonishing because Moore can display a sad lack of tact a lot of the time. It does the conservative party a great disservice when they can't find anyone competent to wave around their propaganda. It's not like finding someone like that would be impossible, or even hard. The closest thing liberals have to someone like Anne Coulter (whose job it is to scream at everyone, talk about how liberals should be hung and be a drawing of a person) is Michael Moore, who's basically a big teddy bear. And I can't help but feel like Glenn Beck is the Republican party's sad, sad answer to Stephen Colbert.

Early on I made a decision to avoid politics on this blog. People have a hard time looking at politics objectively. They cling to the things their parents told them to believe and scream and cry when someone disagrees with them. It's something I see too much of, being a centrist living in Indiana (which makes me a raging liberal, I guess).

Enough about that. Here's the film:

Financial collapse! When Wall Street came down, who got rich? And who got fucked? Michael Moore is on the case. With a series of interviews with reg'lar folk, hoity-toity business man types, insiders willing to spill their guts and a healthy supply of stock footage, Moore attempts to trace back the financial collapse and figure out who's responsible.

His answer, although not %100 clear, seems to be "every president since FDR". I'll contend with you on that one, Mr. Moore.

Why did the economy collapse? The consumer. We're the ones who said fuck the small business, we only trust multinational brand names. We only want products produced quickly and cheaply, who gives a fuck about quality. QUICKLY AND CHEAPLY. Everything else be damned we want it QUICK and we want it CHEAP. So we threw our money at the same dozen corporations because they were able to provide the quick and the cheap. Eventually they got big enough that they could either buy out or corner every market and they swelled big enough to command the vast majority of the money and power in the country. As Moore says, America became a plutocracy.

But then the balancing act kicked in. Financial ruin! The guys that had all the control were coming down and things were preparing to level out. There would be collapse, but new powers would rise from the ashes. Consumers would have to rethink their buying habits. Then Congress did exactly what the US government is never supposed to do: they bailed them out. They gave them hundreds of billions of taxpayers dollars that we don't have to do fuck knows what with.

Moore blames the government, I blame the people. We allow all these things. It's up to us who gets the money and who gets the power, and the only reason that these dickwads have the money and have the power is our complacency.

So as is his signature style, Moore interviews some very sad lower and middle-class people to bring the audience to tears and make them say things like "Those dastardly corporations! My whole life I thought they had the employer's best interests at heart!". That's all okay, emotional manipulation and political documentaries are like me and really long metaphors. You just have to remember to ask yourself what the family crying about their dead mother has to do with capitalism (not that much).

In other words, it's scattershot, like most of Moore's films. I agree with the points, but not the thesis, like most of Moore's films. He and I have different philosophies, which is fine, because he at least tries to make a coherent argument (unlike some people I could mention).

But his arguments tend to get convoluted amongst all the stunts and interviews. His goal isn't even terribly clear. I think that's the worst thing I can say about him. He puts on a good show but there isn't usually that much substance to them.

His stunts are fun, but they're fluff and he knows it. They're there so that he can put them in the trailer and get asses in the seats. He's a likable guy and I'm always game for one of his films.

For a more informative documentary on a similar subject, check out Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.

7/10

Where is your God now?

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier has an astonishingly negative reputation. I'm not going to say it doesn't deserve it (it does), but I also refuse to dismiss it as quickly as most people.

To give you some perspective and a visual metaphor to work with, imagine that the Star Trek series is a special ed class. The first film is the normal-looking kid who you don't think has any reason to be in there. The fourth film is the kid who's constantly making jokes and you're sort of smiling at him because you know this is as good as his life will get. The fifth film is some sort of Frankenstein monster assembled from the corpses of the special ed children who have been slowly disappearing over the last month. The principle having a mid-life crisis, is acting out his childhood dream of becoming a biologist using the freest resource available at a school: the special ed children. Now this monster of Frankenstein sits in the classroom trying to color in a picture of the happy family he'll never have, as he watches through the window as his creator is dragged into a cop car.

If I lost you somewhere in there, let me clarify. The Star Trek series is already sort of a middling, bumbling little kid who everyone gives a free pass because he's trying. When the series learned to do some comedy, we all patted it on the back. But now this monstrosity, assembled from various parts of the previous films pops up and no one has any goddamn idea what to do with it. We're content to let it sit there and color, but at some point we're going to have to kill it and dissect it like a crime scene.

And so here I am, with my rubber gloves and blacklight ready to figure out what the FUCK happened here.

We open on a deserted landscape, a single alien toiling. A man rides into view, Lawrence of Arabia style. He gives the alien some sort of vision, lifting some existential pain from his shoulders. The alien swears allegiance to the stranger. That's a pretty good way to open a Star Trek film. We set up a sense of mystery and foreboding right off the bat.

Can't have that, can we? Let's cut to the crew of the USS Enterprise, vacationing in Yellowstone like a bunch of weirdos with no real friends. Kirk is scaling a mountain (yeah, fucking right William Fatner, you're not going to convince us that you are in the shape you once were) and McCoy is getting bent out of shape that Spock doesn't understand campfire songs when a distress signal is received. The crew of the Enterprise are summoned back to respond, but the Enterprise is in a state of disrepair. They must contend with the man in the desert but without a fully operational ship, and when the ship is overtaken and the man is revealed to be Sybok, half-brother of Spock, Kirk, Spock and McCoy must use their superior knowledge of the Enterprise's layout to stop Sybok from taking the ship on an obsessive suicide mission to find God.

Combine that with Sybok giving the crew of the Enterprise visions of their most painful memories and a Klingon captain hunting Kirk for sport, you've got what is surely the most compelling story in a Star Trek film.

It's actually a mind-blowing carnival of weirdness, comparable only to a bunch of midget clowns singing Ring Around the Rosey in slow motion, that derails this film. I don't even know where to begin. I suppose I'll start with the good.

The opening scene is one of the better scenes in the last few films. My first impression was that at least William Shatner, who was irresponsibly given the director's chair (although I don't think it's any more irresponsible than giving Leonard Nimoy the position in the last two films), has an interest in imagery and a desire to give these films a distinguishable look instead of "Are the cameras pointed at the actors? Action."

Also, the whole cast gets a bunch of dynamic things to do. They get into their first real shootout, they're chased around the Enterprise, they explore strange worlds.

And that's where the nice things end. I made an effort to like this movie because it was trying so hard, but I can't even begin to understand why Kirk is being chased by a giant, floating 2-D head shooting lasers out of its eyes. I have no idea why Spock spends the whole movie making retarded puns. It's like a kaleidoscope filled with acid.

The whole sub-plot with the Klingon captain starts with him shooting space garbage and then folding his arms and complaining about how there's nothing to do. He then sees the Enterprise on his radar and decides to kill Kirk as revenge for Kruge two films ago. The subplot ends (I wish I were making this up), with his superior officer making him say he's sorry to Kirk.

In fact, this movie's weirdness is absolutely endearing. The way it sets up a story about finding God, THE metaphysical Holy Grail, and then does absolutely nothing with it is almost avant-garde. I'm tempted to take the whole movie as an avant-garde experiment, and I'm not saying this in a snarky, mean-spirited way. I literally suspect that those involved attempted to make the weirdest Trek film possible. How else can I explain a scene as poignant as McCoy reliving the cruelly ironic death of his father sandwiched between scenes of Scott comically bonking his head and Spock making puns about rocket boots?

I don't understand it, but I can sort of love it.

2/10

Car-Fu

I know, I know. "We get it, Oliver. You like fucking action movies. Let's do something else, okay?"

Fuck you, reader I just made up. You're my least favorite reader. Not only have you just insulted me, but you've insulted The Motherfucking Road Warrior, one of the all-time best action movies.

The 1980s were a whirling dervish of pastel colors and Duran Duran, but if we got anything out of it, it's the four great action movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard, The Terminator and The Road Warrior.

Between those four films, The Road Warrior is the one with the most dirt on its knuckles. When I mentioned it to my dad, he said "that shit is nasty", and I've got to hand it to the old man: that's the perfect way to describe the film. Although he'd say it with a grimace and I'd say it with a smile.

I chose to write this review because I watched my copy of it yesterday and when I started trying to talk to people about it, I could barely find a person who had seen it. So, in the interest of enticing you morons to watch one of the best films of the 1980s, the plot:

It's a quarter past the future and some janitor was dusting the big red button on a doomsday device. Now Australia has been turned into a wasteland (waaaakka wakka wakka) ravaged by evil gangs in search of gasoline to continue their dominance. If you have a car, you have life. If you don't have a car, if you can't keep moving and savanging, you die. The rules are very simple and implicit. Like so many mysterious drifters in so many westerns, Max is a man with a past and a grumpy disposition. He doesn't like or have much use for people. He stumbles upon a gasoline-rich community under siege from the brutal gang The Humongous and through a series of escalating events, finds his fate inexorably tied to theirs.

Now, ideally the whole film would be Max battling his way across the wastes, just trying to find enough gasoline to make it to the next gallon, fighting the gangs for it along the way and encountering strange folk. Like The Road but with more nitro-cars.

I came to this conclusion after watching it this last time. The best scene in the film is the opening scene, where Max silently battles the marauders for the gas leaking out of a destroyed car. The high-speed chase shot from a camera on the hood of a car in that lovely widescreen, the tight, breathless editing. That shot of Max drawing his gun, standing off against the raiders as they both desperately eye the gasoline leaking out of the ruined vehicle. Scenes like that is what action movies are all about.

Silence. Let the visuals tell the story. Action speaks louder than words.

And it's those action sequences that are so glorious. The cars aren't just a prop to push the action scenes forward, they're the lifeblood of these characters. If there's one skill you need to master in these wastelands, it's driving stick. In the old west you used a gun to keep yourself alive, but now we have these marvelous ballets of roaring engines and screeching tires.

And George Miller avoids the biggest mistake made by so many car-centric action films: he never makes the cars the combatants. Despite most of the action being fought with cars, they're nothing more than guns with engines. Max always has something dynamic to do in the chases. He never sits there, dead-eyed and sipping his coffee. Whether the doors are being ripped off his car or the raiders are trying to pull him out of the driver's seat, he's never the static center of car-porn.

The Road Warrior is to car chases what The Terminator is to foot chases, what Raiders of the Lost Ark is to fist-fights, what Die Hard is to shootouts, and I can't help but feel like that sells all those films short. It's so marvelous and perfectly paced. It's so exciting and original, it's vision of society after the collapse of civilization so dark and gritty and functional.

Maybe I'm biased. Maybe I'm biased because I can't wait for the bombs to drop and to tie a cowcatcher to the front of my Geo Metro.

11/10

Clever Hobbits, to climb so high

If it hasn't already become apparent, I have a fascination with film franchises. I can't really explain it, the appeal tends to be different depending on the franchise (in the case of Star Trek, the appeal is how the filmmakers tried to keep the series relevant over several decades).

Over the past week, I rewatched all of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films. Everyone's seen them, everyone knows them. But a curious thing happened. From 2001-2003, people went buttfuck over these movies. My mom and I must have watched the first two films a dozen times each before the third film came out. When the third film did come out, everyone saw it a hundred times, smiled to themselves and agreed on what a great three years it's been following the little people on their quest to return their faulty jewelry to the jeweler. We all forgot about these films and were on our way.

I realized I hadn't watched any of these films in years and decided it was time to revisit them. Having not seen them in years, I was able to approach them with fresh eyes.

Spoilers ahead for both people in the entire world who haven't seen these films.



My initial reaction was "this looks kind of shitty". My overall reaction is "thank God and all the pretty angels for Peter Jackson".

The Fellowship of the Ring
Despite the first film's Academy Award for cinematography, I thought it looked pretty bad. There's a lot of digital noise (I say "a lot", but there's hardly any; my point is any is too much in a fantasy film) and the colors seem to have had nothing done to them. The scenes taking place in daylight look very straightforward and simple. It's not stylized. During those scenes, and particularly the scene where Arwen is being chased on horseback by the Nazgûl, I never forgot that I was watching a stunt crew ride through a field of pines, planted so that they can be sold as Christmas trees. The darker scenes, Moria in particular, are much better, and that'll become a trend throughout the series.

The film as a whole is far more leisurely than the latter two. It allows us a long time to take in Middle-Earth and get to know the characters and their histories. It's all relatively small-scale and character-driven, and all the better for it. A tribute to the three editors and Jackson's unifying vision that the series gets tighter and more plot-driven as it goes, ratcheting up the tension and building to the final battle.

The sets are beautiful, and that's something that we won't see enough of in the later films. Sure, the next two films have lovely sets, but we never spend the same amount of time exploring them that we do here. Bag End and Rivendell especially benefit from the slow tracking shots and long dialogue scenes.

A scene I never had enough appreciation for as a lad was the fight in Moria between the Fellowship and the goblins. That scene is edited to perfection, staged immaculately. The lack of a musical score and the confined nature of the room the scene takes place in, especially when the cave troll lumbers in, makes this possibly the best-realized combat scene in a trilogy of films fraught with combat sequences.

Another kind thing I can say about the film is that it has my favorite ending of any of the films in the trilogy. The splintering of the Fellowship and the death of Boromir lead so perfectly into that heart-stopping shot of Frodo and Sam looking over the mountains and into Mordor.

Outside of individual scenes, I can't stress enough that this is very small-scale. It's a great film, and on its own would easily be one of the best fantasy films of all time. Unfortunately, it's improved upon in almost every area by the succeeding two films in the series. So let's move on to them, shall we?

The Two Towers
Here's where the cinematography gets better. The colors are still unsaturated and unstylized, but the picture is crisper, less digital. The whole film gets a naturalistic look that makes it easy to believe that Middle-Earth is a real place and the exotic New Zealand locales only add to this strange-but-believable world. It's not how I would have thought to shoot the trilogy, but it's probably the best possible way to shoot the trilogy.

Even the night scenes, particularly Helm's Deep, have a very natural look that doesn't detract from the very real fear of seeing genetically engineered soldiers assembled out of H.R. Giger paintings and death row inmates as far as the eye can see.

I would describe the look of the film as "exceptionally functional, but unexceptional". Of course, the look of this film doesn't begin or end at the cinematography, because this is the ultimate effects film. Never once gratuitous, always working hard to blend the CGI and visual trickery into the shot as seamlessly as possible, every filmmaker dealing with CGI has learned almost their entire modern effects vocabulary from these films and not one of them (with the possible exception of Chris Nolan, but I attribute that to his notorious hatred for CGI) has attained the heights of beauty that Jackson has for this film.

It speaks to Jackson's desire to make his audience live and love the world of Middle-Earth and his resistance to the studio's pressures that he never once goes for cheap, flashy CGI. Sure, he takes a lot of shortcuts with it, but he's not relying on it to sell his films. As a 12-year-old going to see this movie, I was amazed by the realism of the Ents, of the massive armies. I never once recognized it as CGI or a special effect. I thought there were thousands of actors murdering each other for the sake of this film.

And that's not even the most impressive effect. Yes, Gollum is beginning to show his age. His skin is a bit textureless, his eyes unemotive, but his movements are so perfect and Andy Serkis's performance...my God, Andy Serkis's performance. Perfect. Magnificent. Iconic. Sick, sad, pathetic, endearing and adorable all at once, wrapped together with the hint of malice in his every inflection and topped with that voice that everyone will remember forever. He's our generation's Yoda. If I were to present a case of the Academy's egregious oversights in its acting categories, Exhibit A would be Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, Exhibit B would be Andy Serkis for The Two Towers and Return of the King.

That said, the three converging plot strands are fantastic. Aragorn-Legolas-Gimli's story is exciting and breathless with all the exciting action and heroics. Frodo-Sam-Gollum is the dark side of the trilogy, the part that wears you down and makes you remember what's at stake. Elijah Wood's performance is darker and sadder as Frodo begins to lose his will and lose his mind. But the overlooked middle child of this film is Merry-Pippin. Here we begin to see Merry take charge of his life and his responsibility. He starts to grow up and fight while Pippin stays naive and confused.

It's a marvelous film, as if you didn't already know that.

The Return of the King

Can your books do this, book fags? CAN YOUR BOOKS DO THIS?

Let me back up. If you have memories of scraping your brains off the back of a theater wall with a chisel, congratulations, you've seen The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (or The Dark Knight). It's one of the most awesome uses of film to tell a story on an enormous scale, comparable only to Lawrence of Arabia.

This trilogy has been an epic since frame #1, but by this film it's the epic to end all epics. There's a reason The Lord of the Rings is synonymous with the word "epic". There's a reason I just used the word epic four times in one paragraph. There's no other way to describe this film. Every vista, every aerial shot, every mind-blowing set or effects shot just hammers home what an incredible achievement of scale this whole series has been and how we've been building since the first second to a climax unlike anything the modern filmgoer has ever seen.

The cinematography is dark and stylized, finally. Especially in the Frodo-Sam-Gollum plot line, the sun seems to have been blown out of the sky. The only colors we ever see are the nightmarish greens of Minas Morgul and the furious reds of Mount Doom. Gondor is all glossy white marble, shining swords and armor. The orc makeup seems to have metastasized and exaggerated, like an orc looking at itself in a funhouse mirror. The editing never once stumbles during its tour-de-force juggling act.

Almost everyone in the cast is doing the best work of their careers, throwing themselves recklessly against the material, clinging to Peter Jackson's vision, taking the leap and hoping it doesn't become the biggest disaster, the biggest laughing stock in filmmaking history.

Despite that, Aragorn's arc was finished long ago, and so he doesn't spend much time on screen. Mostly he's the eyes through which we see the War of the Ring. It's the Hobbits that get the dynamic acting. Elijah Wood is haggard, barely a shell of a man being manipulated, controlled, led and fighting it every second of the way. Sean Astin plays Sam as barely being able to keep Frodo, let alone himself, sane in the face of the task that never should have been theirs.

Still, Merry and Pippin's story is sadly overlooked by admirers of these films. Dominic Monaghan's and Billy Boyd's performances, like everyone's performances, is more full of urgency and force than in the previous films.

So the question that I asked myself before I started watching these films was: do they hold up?

Yes. Absolutely, yes. Every laurel thrown its way, every award was deserved. It's our Star Wars. It's the reason movies have mass appeal. It's an experience that brings people together. Maybe it'll end wars.

Thank god and all the pretty angels for Peter Jackson.

The Fellowship of the Ring - 10/10
The Two Towers - 10/10
The Return of the King - 10/10
The Lord of the Rings - 11/10

A Night At the Living Opera

I know what you're thinking: "Oliver, you can't review Zombieland. You were in it! That's a conflict of interest!". But I assure you, that's Woody Harrelson in the movie, not me. And let me say, if I were to have anyone play me in a movie, Woody Harrelson is right up there with Ronald Reagan and Chewbacca.

Normally, though, I would not appreciate having my likeness put in a zombie movie. For many years zombie movies have been lazily chewing on the independent horror mold, trying my patience and giving me plenty of reason to ignore them. Zombies have to be the most boring antagonists. They lumber around and gnaw on things. Oh, no, don't shuffle in my direction, Mr. Zombie, I'll never be able to out-walk you! Second, for whatever reason (possibly that the zombie film was essentially invented as a tool for independent filmmakers when George A. Romero released Night of the Living Dead), zombie films have been like a playground for boring young filmmakers. In recent years, only Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later... and Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead have been worth watching.

And now Ruben Fleischer's Zombieland. Here's the gist of the movie: take Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg, give them a population of zombies and try to make it the most fun movie possible. And isn't that almost a novel concept? To just make a movie as fun as possible? No heavy-handed sub-plots, no Shia LaBeouf in robot heaven, Channing Tatum begging the mind-control device puppeteering his long-lost love to let her go. Just two funny guys with guns, a list of awesome ways to kill zombies and a burning desire for the world's last Twinkie.

In fact, this may be the most purely enjoyable movie I've seen all year. It's the sort of movie you go to a midnight showing for and no one gets mad when you yell at the screen.

It's the sort of movie that makes going to the movies feel like an event and makes you wonder why you don't do it more often. Every time the audience erupted in laughter or simultaneously reeled at the gore on screen, I realized that going to a horror film isn't about seeing a movie, it's about the atmosphere. If my mind were weaker, I would compare it to gladiatorial games with its atmosphere of bloodlust, only missing the live children being eaten by live lions for the metaphor to be complete.

Let's discuss the technical aspects before I waste all your patience on ill-conceived metaphors. The performances are essentially flawless. Despite their differences in age, stature, background, style and character, Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg have a marvelous, easy chemistry that makes every scene that much easier to have fun with. Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin are given considerably less to do, but Breslin stands out in a few key scenes. Ruben Fleischer's direction calls to mind Edgar Wright's manic comic tone, but with more visual flair and fewer sight gags (if that makes sense). He maintains a zany, kinetic tone where everybody seems to be having a great time.

That said, it doesn't break the mold. It's not the best movie of the year, but it is a marvelous counterpoint to all the idiotic summer blockbusters with ten hour running times and budgets large enough to make third-world countries weep. Michael Bay can blow $300 million on the most boring movie of the year, but I'll take Ruben Fleischer's $25 million mini-masterpiece any day.

8/10

Carnival of Pretties

I was watching a video about the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy this morning. After today's events I'm quite concerned that we may have entered that black hole and emerged in some parallel universe.

How do I know? Because horror film trailers look fucking gorgeous.


I always thought to qualify as a horror film you had to shoot your film with a used garbage bag fixed on the lens and cast people you find outside the YMCA.



Both of these films look very good, despite the further use of things like "jump scares", which I thought horror films would eventually move away from, or at least get classy about (Drag Me to Hell, Signs). But one step at a time, I suppose. That the average horror film actually looks like care was put into every shot is more than my ski mask-clad heart can take.

Historically I've never had much interest in horror films. So few of them are scary in any way. Listening to horror enthusiasts talk about their favorite films is to listen to gorehounds talk about their favorite kills. None of it's scary, it's about CHEAP THRILLS AND COOL KILLS.

Maybe I'm just imagining this whole thing. Perhaps my sanity has finally slipped beyond what is manageable and my appreciation for cinematography was lost along with my ability to chew. Or maybe tomorrow we'll wake up and all have carrots for hands and juicers will become the dominant species. That'd make a good horror film. Why don't I write these things down?