Star Trek

So I went into J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot thinking that there would be a lot of nerds to beat up and a lot of lunch money to collect. Unfortunately, in a "Pac-Man collects the little blue ball and eats all the goddamn ghosts" sort of moment, I was the one who ended up the brunt of this assault. Until my heart burst my tormentors goaded me and harassed me to their hearts content, and now I know what all the nerds felt like all those years. I would vow to turn over a new leaf, but this far exceeded any torture I ever subjected them to. No, now I must head out on a mission of revenge, collecting bloodied pocket protectors as proof of success.

Do you want to know the torment leveled against me? I pray your stomachs can withstand a tale so vile, for it was truly a malevolent assault.

Some cocksucker in front of me clapped at every fucking thing that happened in the film. When Anton Yelchin showed up sporting his native accent (although I don't know if that's Mr. Yelchin's real accent) the guy laughed so loud and clapped so hard that I couldn't hear the dialogue, try as I might. Later, he took out his cell phone and held it up to record the film. I had already complained to the management twice about other people in the theater (and gone to the restroom once) and missed enough of the film, so I decided I would put up with it.

For the first five minutes of the film, a group of people climbed over seats (including my seat and my friend's seat) so that they could reach the seats in the corner without disturbing the people in the aisle. They then proceeded to talk about their seating arrangement. And then talk through the rest of the fucking film.

And for the last 20 minutes of the film, a girl talked loudly on her cell phone. My friend attempted to get her attention, but to no avail. The girl simply proceeded to talk over my friend.

That, and the audience must have been gassed by something noxious before they walked into the theater because they laughed at everything. EVERYTHING. They laughed hysterically when Leonard Nimoy showed up.

But there's a film to be reviewed and I won't allow my distasteful experience soil my (un)professional obligations to my reader(s).

From the trailers, I gathered this would be a rollicking good space adventure film. I expected it to define, in my mind and at least for this summer, the concept of fun with an evil villain, a charismatic hero, huge space battles, awesome gun fights and exciting non-combat setpieces.

And it did. Excellent work, Abrams.

I suppose I shouldn't stop there, though and since I've already said such nice things about it, I think I'll start with the bad.

Chris Pine is good, but not great. He's got charisma but sort of comes off as a dick, and while I'm not against protagonists being assholes (as it's the ultimate cop-out for a critic who hasn't met their quota of films to bash for the month), it's not always a great idea for the hero in an action film to be a dick. It can make it hard to root for him. I really wish Matt Damon could have played this role (he was rumored for the part and actively sought it, but Abrams deemed him too old).

Also, the editing in the fight scenes tends to be a bit hectic and doesn't always serve the scenes well, particularly in an early bar fight.

Anyway, those are relatively small complaints and they're my biggest ones. This film is a well-oiled machine but doesn't move so fast that you don't get a feel for the universe. It's tight without being constricting, a lesson many summer movie helmers could learn from (no, I'm not referring to Christopher Nolan, dumbass).

I've heard a lot of complaints leveled against the film's use of lens flares, but that didn't bother me in the least. In fact, I thought it gave the film a unique and (dare I jump the gun) iconic look, making the Enterprise especially look ethereal.

Most of the performances are very good. I'm a big fan of Simon Pegg and he nearly steals the film as Scotty, while Eric Bana does a great job as the very sinister Captain Nero, an over-the-top role that he nails like nothing he's done since Munich four years ago.

I highly recommend this film, and it's the one to beat as far as summer action films (I imagine I'll like Up more). I hope they only get better from here.

9/10

Franchisicide Vol. 1, Book Four

X-Men Origins: Wolverine leads me to one, and only one conclusion: Gavin Hood has never seen an action film. I don't think there's anything really wrong with hiring a journeyman to helm an action film. I'd much prefer to see someone like Zack Snyder or Bryan Singer behind the camera on this, but one misguided hack is probably worse than a journeyman who will do what the producers and star tell him to do. Probably.

I guess I'll come out and say that this is probably a better film than the first and third X-Men films, but I'm still way fucking disappointed. A character as awesome as Wolverine, played by an actor as great and perfectly cast as Hugh Jackman, throw in some big action setpieces and start exploring his tragic backstory and relationship with his psychopathic brother Sabretooth, how in the shit can you go wrong? Well, I imagine it took about thirty men in labcoats, some test tubes and at least one Tesla coil, but they got a formula going.

Here's the solution to the problem of "this movie is absolutely guaranteed to be good with this awesome plot": plot the shit out of that motherfucker.

Now, dear uneducated reader, let me explain something to you. There's a big difference between "plot" and "story". Every film has to have a story, but not every film has to have a plot. And since this is a very abstract concept, I'm going to explain it as simply as I can so that you don't get bogged down in vague extrapolations. A plot is a sequence of events, causes and effects, that lead to a climax that is the dramatic culmination of everything that's happened in the film. A film without a plot (although every film has a plot, I'm just coming up with two different words for the sake of simplicity) has a series of causes and effects, but not everything is reliant on the cause-effect nonsense. There will be many scenes with no effect on the storyline, things that may explore characters and setting, but don't help Nancy Drew solve the mystery.

See what I mean? Of course you don't.

My point is that Wolverine falls somewhere between these two. Covering a series of events that stretch over hundreds of years, the best way to do this is to have it be a series of events that shape Wolverine into the person we know him in the X-Men films.

And they do this. Sort of. For the first hour or so. And then they decide that they need more plot. So it become a race against the clock(!) for Wolverine to stop the evil Colonel Stryker for creating the ultimate mutant killing machine(!). Meanwhile, there's a twist ending, a feel-good moment that got me to put my head in my hands, a very, very, very contrived set-up for a showdown with the villain on top of something very tall and an attempt to make the events of this film mesh with the events of the other X-Men films that made my brain punch its way out of my skull and attack the screen.

My point is that if you're going to do a meandering, Scorsese-style narrative, awesome! If not, awesome! But don't pine for one and fuck the other. These two portions of the film mesh with a loud scraping sound and some sparks. And it doesn't help that characters are introduced and discarded like we're reading a J.K. Rowling book (or watching the third X-Men film) and some characters are inexplicably given an extra scene, just to turn the fanboy vaginas into swimming pools.

But all that can be ignored if the film delivers on the biggest promise of a summer action film: the action. When I saw the shots in the trailer of Wolverine duking it out with a helicopter and propelling himself onto the roof of it by vaulting off an exploding humvee, it was appropriately death-defying and exciting in the manner of old 80's action films. And when I saw the shot of him walking away from the exploding helicopter (which was apparently delivering a metric ton of plutonium to the needy farmers in the area), I was excited for a big action setpiece that was a throwback to the classic action setpieces of the 80's.

Unfortunately, this is the only successful action setpiece in the whole film, so it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, like the filmmakers weren't winking and nudging the audience, they just genuinely thought that this is how action films should look. The whole film gets stamped as cheesy because it's the only memorable action scene.

But the biggest problem, the worst sin the film commits is when Wolverine finds his way out of the Weapon X facility. In X-Men 2, Wolverine has a flashback to this moment where he remembers sprinting out of the building, naked and covered in blood before Wolverine wakes up screaming in his bed. Truly horrific. But when he escapes the Weapon X facility in this film, he seems positively enamored of his new toys and triumphantly dashes out of the building as if he just won a...naked contest. Or something.

And there are a few parts where the CGI is quite awful and where the A/V isn't synced. If I go see a $125 million film, I expect to see some synced A/V.

That's not to say the film is all bad. Well...it sort of is. But Hugh Jackman is fantastic in this. His presence is invaluable to the film, and Liev Schrieber seems like he's having a lot of fun as Sabretooth. And, while I'm a big Danny Huston fan, he's not really at the top of his game here.

Ultimately, I can't figure out what went wrong here. Someone like Hugh Jackman should know how to make a good Wolverine film. I think the entire thing could have been saved if Zack Snyder or Bryan Singer or Len Wiseman (who was rumored for the job before Gavin Hood came on) had directed. I'm not familiar with Gavin Hood's work, but I know he wasn't familiar with the Wolverine character when he was signed on and according to people whose opinions I trust, both Tsotsi and Rendition are quite mediocre. As far as I can tell, Gavin Hood's signature style is bland mediocrity.

Observe and Report

Observe and Report is hilarious. It's hilarious in a way that no other Hollywood comedy is allowed to be. Why this movie gets to be hilarious in this way is a tribute to Jody Hill's skill as a director, his producers in their roles, Seth Rogen as an audacious actor and Sacha Baron Cohen for breaking some new ground and freeing up comedians to do new things with potentially offensive material with his Borat film.

I've only heard murmurs about this film's early box office returns, but they aren't fantastic, so I imagine it'll be difficult to get another film like this released in the future. But variety is the spice of life. I don't want another Observe and Report, I want Observe and Report and I couldn't be happier that it exists. If this sort of thing is going to a one-off, there's no way in hell that a better film could have come out of it.

It's a film less about plot, although plots--several of them--exist, than it is about the multi-layered character in the center of it all. The plots exist to serve him and to demonstrate his fragile state of mind in the same way that everything about the film (the supporting cast, the cinematography, the costumes, the art direction) exists to serve the character. All the naysaying critics are clearly missing that this film is an exercise in expressionism. That means the off-beat pace, the strange developments in plot, the way characters seem to deviate from their assigned personalities, are all there to show the protagonist's progressively weaker state of mind.

And while I'm on the subject, I'd like to line up every critic that called the protagonist annoying, or creepy, or an asshole or whatever, and kick each and every one of them in the balls. There are tons of great films about assholes (The King of Comedy and The Godfather spring to mind), but these small-minded critics get scared when they're confronted with anything that doesn't play to its greatness and can be seen as disposable so that they can make their quota of negative reviews and bring in readers by slamming a film that they already decided they weren't going to like. There's a reason that it takes so long for a film to be considered "great", and that's because progression rarely arrives like a meteor. It arrives and people toss it away for being different. It takes an established critic with balls to point out a film that's great but different, and I am wholeheartedly convinced that this is a great film.

But I digress. The plot, for all you uninitiated. Ronnie Barnhardt, as played by Seth Rogen, is the unhinged head of security at his local mall. I don't know if it's mentioned in the film (I think it might be), but he is almost certainly bi-polar to the most extreme degree (pun). He keeps himself high with his surprisingly large amount of authority and with his lust directed at a girl working at a cosmetics counter. When she and several other people are flashed by a mysterious pervert, Ronnie decides to use this opportunity to catch the pervert, win the girl of his dreams (the slutty, vapid and hateful girl at the cosmetics counter, Brandi, as played by Anna Faris) and become a real police officer with a gun and a badge and all that.

But it's all a backdrop to show Ronnie's mental state, and a better character study is hard to find. Rarely does a film go this far to get into its protagonist's head and rarely is that film entertaining in a commercial sense at the same time. It's the perfect fusion of art and commerce.

I can't get into this film's style of comedy without any examples (because I'm an inarticulate failure of a critic) and giving examples would spoil at least some of the comedy which would be inexcusable. The last time I laughed this hard at a film was at the endlessly clever In Bruges about fourteen months ago, and any comparison to In Bruges is a mighty one.

But ye be warned: this is an enormously, twistedly, violently, tenaciously, hilariously dark film about primal male rage, delusion, depression and authority. If you can't stomach this sort of thing, get out of my sight and go watch Paul Blart: Mall Cop. You're not wanted here and you'll only make things worse for a great film with an uphill battle.

Screw you all.

10/10