Monday, November 26, 2007

Oldies

Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977) - B+

Not much to contribute, but I just want to note: wasn't disco infinitely better than what passes for music in clubs these days?


Latter Days (C. Jay Cox, 2003) - D-

Rented this solely for Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who is brilliantly hateful in the few scenes that he has. Sadly he outclasses everyone and everything else here by a factor of roughly 500, and when he departs the film roughly 50 minutes in, everything goes to hell. Misconceived from the start, as it clearly should have been about the missionary instead of the playboy, but it doesn't even really matter, since the film is incredibly stupid and thinks we are, too. Most of it is just painfully sappy and laughable, but there are no words for the cruelly manipulative monstrosity of an ending, except maybe "outrageous." I don't watch many gay niche movies -- are they all this terrible?

Friday, November 23, 2007

Hitman; The Mist

Hitman (Xavier Gens, 2007) - C-

It's dumb as a rock and nearly incomprehensible, but the dealbreaker is how inconsequential it all feels; the backstory has no weight whatsoever (sorry, Xavier, but color-drained flashbacks of a little tattooing don't equate to pathos), and Agent 47's "mission" -- to figure out why a Russian politician he's assassinated has come back healthy and happy -- has all the emotional pull of, well, a level in a video game. Paramaters of the film's universe are unclear -- we're not even sure if Agent 47's "brotherhood" of assassins is secret or not (I'm guessing not, judging by the enormous bar codes tattooed on the back of the members' shaved heads), for-profit or not (they have "ties to every government" but what the hell does that mean?), or mandatory or not (I'm guessing they don't ask those little outcasts and orphans whether or not they'd like in) -- which makes the main character even more problematic: it's already hard to build a movie around a protagonist intended to be a cipher, but even harder when he doesn't have a convincing context to play in. Timothy Olyphant has nothing to work with, and the action is ho-hum and uninspiring. A loud, confused bore.

The Mist (Frank Darabont, 2007) - A

"There's something in the mist!" Holy fuck! A dream come true -- horror made as more than a lark, with real scares and suspense, attention to character and detail, something on its mind, and a wide-eyed sense of wonder. This is the Stephen King adaptation that 1408 wasn't, filled with terror at something otherworldly and utterly beyond human comprehension, which, for all that King can get sappy and ponderous sometimes, is a brand of horror he understands and does extremely well. First and foremost, a masterful piece of survival horror, with the sort of lucidly thought-out logistics I haven't seen since the original Dawn of the Dead. Then, awe-inspiring sci-fi, with a premise no less frightening for its simplicity -- mostly because the film convincingly conveys that there is infinitely more that we don't know simply by virtue of our perspective. Finally, an unforgettable, pitch-black parable about human nature, with an ending that's both incredibly upsetting and strangely optimistic, suggesting that, though it may sometimes not seem like it, we're better than the worst among us. Blisteringly anti-sectarian, too, which is particularly gratifying this fall given the sterilization of The Golden Compass.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

P2; Finishing the Game

P2 (Franck Khalfoun, 2007) - C+

Aggressively insecure villains in horror movies are hard, because they tend not to be terribly menacing, and there's usually not much satisfaction in seeing them dispatched. Wes Bentley busts out a pretty generic, dimestore crazy here, and Rachel Nichols makes for a pretty boring woman in trouble; the concept, on the other hand, is nifty and simple -- those underground parking garages can be pretty creepy in the off hours, can't they? Bottom line, then, is that there's some suspense but not much catharsis -- the heroine is nowhere near aggressive enough until the very end, and the villain is never really that scary, since he's really just a shrimpy guy with some keycards, handcuffs, and a mean dog. Profoundly unremarkable and instantly forgettable, though Khalfoun's peers should take note of the good, judicious use of gore here; it really is so much more effective when it can surprise you.

Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee (Justin Lin, 2007) - B

Even when it's trite, it's bizarrely so -- e.g. we get the lily-white guy who insists that he is half-Chinese and writes turgid poems about the oppression of the yellow man in America, but then we see his mother and it turns out he really is half-Chinese; the casting director has a prototypical Christopher Guest vibe -- unshakeable confidence + complete incompetence -- but then the movie gives her an inexplicable crush on a comically average-looking Asian dude. Generally very sharp and self-aware (the boom mike joke toward the end had me rolling), but weird enough to be interesting even when the gags veer toward the cheap and easy. People seem to really dislike this, and I can't figure out why; I suspect anti-Asian bigotry.