We're on Netflix again today, my account, and the popular selections give us today's animated feature film...
S'kind of funny. Last week we opened up by looking at a movie produced by Richard Rich, a disgraced Disney animator who's spent the rest of his feature film direction and production career endeavoring to prove to his old bosses that he could do just as well without them. And this week, we're opening up with a film by Don Bluth, a disgraced Disney animator who oh wait.
The thing is, Don Bluth seems to have had a fair deal more success than Rich did. After leaving Disney in the early 80s due to distaste with the company's current direction, he founded his own animation company and started making movies the way he thought they should be. His early forays with his personal production company - notably The Secret of NIMH, An American Tale, and The Land Before Time, all of which achieved critical acclaim and are still touted as some of the best animated films, Disney or otherwise - and for a time seemed like a legitimate rival to the most famous animation company on the planet. However, success for those who try to take on the House the Mouse Built usually doesn't last that long, and the early 90s weren't all that kind to Bluth. His studio folded, his work with other companies failed to achieve success, and, probably most damning of all, all of his good films recieved crappy sequel after crappy sequel on DVD. Not exactly his proudest hour.
Fortunately, Bluth was given another chance through 20th Century Fox, looking for a way to break into the animation scene and give Disney a run for their money in the same way the director had in the 80s. So it was that Bluth partnered up with the burgeoning Fox Animation Studios to produced 1997's Anastasia. The film was a reasonable success (140 million worldwide) and again it seemed for a while that Don Bluth would have a chance at squaring off against his old employers and potentially winning, especially given the state of Disney animation at the time. Then they made a shitty direct to video sequel to the movie, Titan AE failed to recoup its budget, Fox Animation Studios folded, and Don Bluth never made a movie again.
So things go sometimes.
Although Bluth's 90s work isn't exactly fondly remembered, Anastasia seems well enough liked. I rarely see too many bad words spared for it online, and the film often finds itself on "remember how great the 90s were?" lists, so maybe it's good. Maybe not. Who knows. I do, seeing as I've seen the movie and I'm here to give you my opinion on it. So opinion away with us.
The film's plot is basically revisionist history in order to get the kids in the audience involved. It involves the Russian Communist Revolution and the fall of the Romanovs ACTUALLY being the result of an evil, reimagined as a wizard version of Rasputin just really, REALLY hating the royal family. So all that stuff about a dissatisfied lower class and the rise of a communist system? Didn't happen, evil wizard made everyone mad. Anyways, in this alternate history, the young Anastasia is separated from her grandmother by the chaos of the revolution, and grows up in an orphanage, yearning to learn of her real past and identity. Fortunately, as she's striking out, a young former servant boy, Dimitri, and his older former nobleman assistant, Vladimir, are searching for the real Anastasia to present to the older woman in order to claim the reward. They get together, coalesce a plan, and strike out for Paris, all while under attack from the now-dead Rasputin, attempting to make sure the last of the Romanovs really IS dead.
First off, I really have to criticize the film for the whole evil wizard thing. Christopher Lloyd does well enough as Rasputin, but he seems far too out of place. The main conflict is strong enough without needing to say "a wizard did it," and Don Bluth's tendency towards dealing with darker subject material makes it seem really odd to me that he'd shy away from the realities of the Revolution for the kids. Most of the historical violence is confined to the prologue anyways, so all the explanation does is weigh us down with scenes where evil green energy bats cause havoc every now and then, before a rather unsatisfying and unnecessary final battle at the end. Maybe it was the studio imposing it on him in order to be more Disneyesque, but it just doesn't gel with the rest of the film.
The rest of the plot, though, isn't all that much better. I can't say it's BAD by any measure, but it definitely is sort of cliched. Anastasia fits the mold of the stereotypical 90s Disney princess far better than any of the actual princesses they pumped out during the decade - yearning for a new life, generally pretty, snarky in danger, helpless around the main bad guy, etcetera etcetera. Dmitri and Vlad don't fall into the trap on their own too badly, but the romance subplot between Dmitri and Anastasia ticks off all the "no, no, see, DISNEY has romance subplots in their films, so..." boxes, which doesn't do the film any favors. There is SOME interesting stuff when they're teaching her how to be the Grand Duchess, but beyond that there's not much here you haven't seen before. Still competently executed (unlike some overly cliched films featured here...), but nothing special.
Fortunately, I don't have to bitch and moan for too terribly long, because there are elements to the film that I like. The music, for example, is a pretty solid effort. None of it is as instantly memorable as anything Disney pumps out (they were clearly trying to be like Disney in this movie, so yes I do think all the Disney comparisons are apt), but that's like saying the wire-fu isn't all that great because the Matrix did it better. Some of the tunes, like Once Upon a December and In the Dark of the Night, are definitely catchy enough to warrant having around, and the big show-stopping crowd songs (Rumor in St Petersburg and Paris Holds the Key) seem like they'd work really well with a few more go-arounds. I can't say it's a favorite soundtrack of mine, especially since it falls into the usual animated musical traps of not actually functioning as a musical - if the songs aren't the primary insight into the characters and plot points, why are we making a musical at all? - but it's solid enough.
The animation works out pretty well too. There are some elements I find distasteful, especially the way the leads' faces constantly look like they're scrunched up for no reasons, but the characters are designed well and move in a way that looks good to someone like me who has absolutely no formal education in the art form. Unlike Alpha and Omega, there aren't any moments where I'm taken out of the film by ugly characters or poorly composed shots - in fact, there's some really neat animated camera work in places. The scenes on the boat where they have what looks like a computer generated set rocking back and forth with the ocean, and this one shot where they swing around the front of a car both struck me as being really good. Even if the studio folded due to a lack of financial success, you can't say they didn't know what they were doing.
It's a pretty alright film, all things considered. I can't really say it washes over you like I have with other films I've used that phrase on. Some bits might even count as really memorable to certain people. But I just can't get past the revisionism at the start that saddles the movie with a pointless bad guy. The drive to be like Disney is understandable, but most non-Disney animated films that found long lasting success did their best to not be like Disney, Bluth's included. It feels like the studio saw their competitor floundering after the release of Pocahontas, and brought in the first guy they could to slap together all the traditional Disney elements into one movie in order to take advantage of an incoming vacuum. As such, they needed a villain, because all the Disney films have an obvious villain, and we wound up with Rasputin bouncing around set every few scenes.
Gad, I hope this wasn't the result of studio interference. A little reigning in is fine once in a while, but creators really need the room to breathe. I'm guilty of liking stuff that winds up the way it is because of corporate mandate (cough Marvel Studios cough), but I really do think that a studio stepping in and telling the director what to do in order to increase profits is more likely to ruin a film than enhance it. Short-term profits are important, sure (filmmaking is a business, after all), but there needs to be SOME consideration to whether or not the choices made will result in a good movie.
Personal digressions about creative freedom in the art world aside, I think I can recommend Anastasia. It's not really to my personal tastes, but I can definitely see the appeal. If you haven't seen it before, I think there's a solid chance you'll like it. And if you have, then it's on Netflix and that's always a good place for revisiting childhood favorites. I was surfing around earlier and saw they had Zathura, which I'm totally gonna watch later this week, so I feel you completely if that's what you wanna do.
(Assorted thoughts:
- So as a kid I had this toy that we got from Burger King or someplace of Batrok, the little white bat thing, and he had an eye clutched in his arms and legs, and you could pull it out and watch it slowly reel back into his grip. It was a neat toy, and I never knew why he had an eye until I saw the movie today. Turns out, there's a five second scene where they're playing with the fact that Rasputin's a walking corpse, and Batrok accidentally pulls his eye out of his head. Bit of a morbid thing to base a Big Kid's Meal toy on, but if I'm gonna criticize the movie for not being grim enough for its creative team's reputation, then I suppose it's a good toy by that measure.
- I don't think Rasputin works as part of the movie as a whole, but the whole thing about him being a magical, falling apart corpse is pretty neat, and leads to some fun moments with body parts winding up in places they don't belong.
- I honestly don't understand why Batrok winds up with a lady bat at the end of the movie.
- There's this bit when they get to Paris where Anastasia just goes "SHOPPING! IN PARIS!" and over dramatically swoons, and... look, it was the 90s, the world was still working on the whole "not all women are exactly the same person with different sized tits" thing. We still are, but I'd like to think we've gotten better.
- Someone on the soundtrack for the movie is credited with "finger snapping." I don't know why that interests me, but it does.
- The Incredible Hulk's early companion Rick Jones did voice work for this movie.
- Swiping directly from Wikipedia here: "Some of Anastasia's contemporary relatives also felt that the film was distasteful, but most Romanovs have come to accept the "repeated exploitation of Anastasia's romantic tale ... with equanimity."" Imagine having to be these people and constantly have your legacy exploited because the version everyone's familiar with makes them feel better. Imagine how fucking awful that must feel.
- Today I learned that Fox Animation Studios was based out of Phoenix. I don't normally take part in any kind of state pride thing, but Arizona represent.
- Best part of the movie: Rasputin delivering the usual "NO ONE CAN SAVE YOU NOW!" line before Dmitri comes out of nowhere, goes "WANNA BET?" and decks him in the face. It's completely ridiculous, and me and my roommates played it over like four times before getting back to the rest of the movie.)
Apologies for the lateness of the review. I had some family stuff to take care of over the weekend, and got hit with a pretty bad bout of depression and bad luck on Sunday. I'll try to make Wednesday's come a little earlier, but I don't have a holiday to fall back on this time, and tomorrow's open mic night, so I'm not gonna make any promises or anything.
Showing posts with label Flicking Nets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Flicking Nets. Show all posts
Monday, September 7, 2015
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
Without a Paddle - At least the creek isn't full of what you'd expect.
In what is becoming something of a trend on this blog, we once again have action adventure chosen from Netflix, this time my account, as the category from which today's film hails.
As cathartic as it is to tear down a movie in a negative review from time to time, I really wouldn't want it to be the ONLY thing I do on this blog. Having to write a bad review means I have to watch a bad movie, and that's only fun if it's bad in an entertaining and interesting way. If it's just dull and poorly made, like Alpha and Omega, then all I'm doing is subjecting myself to an unwatchable film I can't recommend. And I really do want to recommend films here - find interesting stuff to write about and hope other people want to watch it based on my write-up. If every film I watch is Alpha and Omega, I'd quickly fall into a pattern of "don't watch this" and "stay away from that." It'd get boring and depressing real damn quick.
I had all the above in mind when I rolled up Without A Paddle for today. Based on the Netflix rating and various reactions online, it didn't seem like a fun ride. Seth Green's a good actor, and I liked him in Buffy, but otherwise it struck me as nothing but another mediocre mid-2000s comedy film nobody had heard of. Hitting play, I fully expected a massive piece of shit movie full of stoner references and piss and shit jokes, the sort of thing you can only get into with a few buddies and excessive amounts of alcohol.
With the movie done now, I can happily say it's OK. Not a great comedy, not a bad one, not really offensive in any way, just OK. It happens for around an hour and a half, delivers some good laughs, and it's over without any pain or lasting memory. I don't regret watching it, even though it's not anything special, so there we are. If you'd like a little more detail than that, read on.
Three grown-up friends from back in the 80s - neurotic doctor Dan (Green), mild jackass Tom (Dax Shepard) and character trait I don't remember Jerry (Matthew Lillard) - meet up again after their friend Billy dies, and find a treasure map he left for their planned childhood adventure to find DB Cooper's lost treasure. Dissatisfied with their lives for one reason or another, they decided to go out on a journey in Billy's memory and have one last childlike adventure together before giving into the pressures of adulthood. Naturally, anything and everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and the trio must fight to survive in the Washington wilderness in what I can only describe a series of "wacky hijinks," eventually learning several valuable lessons about life.
You've seen the story before. I've seen the story before. I don't even watch all that many films of this sort and I've seen this story a million times before, mostly in cartoons. It's not in any way an original or interesting plot, but I can't fault the movie for it. There's around four or five major sequences in the film involving a bear attack, pot farming hillbilly murderers, some hippie all-natural girls in a tree, and...
Before I go on, can I just take a moment to talk about the hillbillies for a moment? I'm only bringing it up in its own paragraph because I JUST did Tucker and Dale vs. Evil last week, and this is exactly the sort of "haw haw all hillbillies are evil freaks" thing that movie was against. They both even go so far as to reference Deliverance, which popularized the trope. I know this one was made six years before Tucker and Dale, but having seen both now, I totally get how quickly the joke wears really fucking old. Even though there's a bit at the end explaining why they act the way they do, the movie still has an air about it implying that yep, all backwoods country folk are just over-the-top murderous bastards. Stay away from 'em, city folk! Don't wanna end up man-raped scare quotes go here, do ya?!?
Sorry about the interruption. Anyways, back to the review.
...a southern sheriff who lives in Washington state for some reason, and none of them are really bad. They land a few jokes here and there, and the best most of the rest get are a slightly amused smile. It all functions about as well as you can expect a comedy film without any major ambitions to function, so it's hard to say it fails on any level.
The characters, too, are largely stock, but they're at least endearing. They play off of one another well-enough to form the sense we're watching lifelong friends, and pull the right "Oh come ON" faces when called to. I personally think Green gives the best performance of the three, but that's really only because he's the only actor I know and have reason to like prior to watching this (Burt Reynolds has a small roll towards the end, but I didn't realize it until looking it up - probably because I know jack dick about Burt Reynolds). All the side characters play their parts without any special flair, but still do a good enough job - yes, even the hillbillies - to pass muster. Special mention to Bart the Bear 2 as the bear.
(Yeah, Wikipedia pages for two bear actors. I'm as surprised as you.)
If I had to fault the film for anything, it'd mostly be for a few jokes I personally find distasteful. Some stuff with pissing and bear shit, but nothing I can really hate on too much. Outside those two bits (which are at the beginning and end of the film) and the hillbilly characters, there's nothing much in this film that aims to shock or offend anyone. I suppose the half-naked huddling in the rain bit, or the jokes about being able to see the hippie girls' downstairs might not play well with some, but I didn't mind them much while watching. It's not a clean comedy film by any means, but it's not intentionally offensive or disgusting beyond a few elements, so...
It's just an alright film, is what it is. There's an appropriate level of 80s nostalgia sprinkled here and there, they use their soundtrack songs well, and it's got a good message about treasuring what you have rather than chasing something you can never get. The whole thing is by the numbers comedy with the right amount of effort put in to get you to laugh maybe a dozen times throughout the whole thing. I really wish I had more to say, but I just don't. Without A Paddle occupied my attention throughout its running time and made me smile a little, and that's the highest praise I can bestow upon it.
Consider this another one of those "if what I just described sounds like a good time to you, check it out" movies. Otherwise, I don't think you'd be hurt by giving this one a miss. Sorry for the brevity, but that's all I have to say without stretching and trying to figure out the true pain behind Dan's obsession with a C-3PO figure.
(Assorted thoughts:
- I've never smoked pot in my life, and I have no intention of doing so, but I am fairly certain based on what I know that it does not make you hallucinate. And I'm only slightly less certain that dogs inhaling marijuana smoke are gonna die rather than get stoned.
- If all of the bear's scenes are an actual bear, and if all the main actors did the majority of their stunts, then Seth Green's still one ballsy guy for letting a live bear pick him up in its mouth and carry him off.
- DB Cooper's Wikipedia page, just in case anyone's interested in learning about the guy. Stole a bunch of money, jumped out of a plane, vanished without a trace. S'pretty interesting.)
Not really a whole lot to say down here. Short review, few busy days, no big thing. I'll try to make Friday's review a touch longer.
As cathartic as it is to tear down a movie in a negative review from time to time, I really wouldn't want it to be the ONLY thing I do on this blog. Having to write a bad review means I have to watch a bad movie, and that's only fun if it's bad in an entertaining and interesting way. If it's just dull and poorly made, like Alpha and Omega, then all I'm doing is subjecting myself to an unwatchable film I can't recommend. And I really do want to recommend films here - find interesting stuff to write about and hope other people want to watch it based on my write-up. If every film I watch is Alpha and Omega, I'd quickly fall into a pattern of "don't watch this" and "stay away from that." It'd get boring and depressing real damn quick.
I had all the above in mind when I rolled up Without A Paddle for today. Based on the Netflix rating and various reactions online, it didn't seem like a fun ride. Seth Green's a good actor, and I liked him in Buffy, but otherwise it struck me as nothing but another mediocre mid-2000s comedy film nobody had heard of. Hitting play, I fully expected a massive piece of shit movie full of stoner references and piss and shit jokes, the sort of thing you can only get into with a few buddies and excessive amounts of alcohol.
With the movie done now, I can happily say it's OK. Not a great comedy, not a bad one, not really offensive in any way, just OK. It happens for around an hour and a half, delivers some good laughs, and it's over without any pain or lasting memory. I don't regret watching it, even though it's not anything special, so there we are. If you'd like a little more detail than that, read on.
Three grown-up friends from back in the 80s - neurotic doctor Dan (Green), mild jackass Tom (Dax Shepard) and character trait I don't remember Jerry (Matthew Lillard) - meet up again after their friend Billy dies, and find a treasure map he left for their planned childhood adventure to find DB Cooper's lost treasure. Dissatisfied with their lives for one reason or another, they decided to go out on a journey in Billy's memory and have one last childlike adventure together before giving into the pressures of adulthood. Naturally, anything and everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and the trio must fight to survive in the Washington wilderness in what I can only describe a series of "wacky hijinks," eventually learning several valuable lessons about life.
You've seen the story before. I've seen the story before. I don't even watch all that many films of this sort and I've seen this story a million times before, mostly in cartoons. It's not in any way an original or interesting plot, but I can't fault the movie for it. There's around four or five major sequences in the film involving a bear attack, pot farming hillbilly murderers, some hippie all-natural girls in a tree, and...
Before I go on, can I just take a moment to talk about the hillbillies for a moment? I'm only bringing it up in its own paragraph because I JUST did Tucker and Dale vs. Evil last week, and this is exactly the sort of "haw haw all hillbillies are evil freaks" thing that movie was against. They both even go so far as to reference Deliverance, which popularized the trope. I know this one was made six years before Tucker and Dale, but having seen both now, I totally get how quickly the joke wears really fucking old. Even though there's a bit at the end explaining why they act the way they do, the movie still has an air about it implying that yep, all backwoods country folk are just over-the-top murderous bastards. Stay away from 'em, city folk! Don't wanna end up man-raped scare quotes go here, do ya?!?
Sorry about the interruption. Anyways, back to the review.
...a southern sheriff who lives in Washington state for some reason, and none of them are really bad. They land a few jokes here and there, and the best most of the rest get are a slightly amused smile. It all functions about as well as you can expect a comedy film without any major ambitions to function, so it's hard to say it fails on any level.
The characters, too, are largely stock, but they're at least endearing. They play off of one another well-enough to form the sense we're watching lifelong friends, and pull the right "Oh come ON" faces when called to. I personally think Green gives the best performance of the three, but that's really only because he's the only actor I know and have reason to like prior to watching this (Burt Reynolds has a small roll towards the end, but I didn't realize it until looking it up - probably because I know jack dick about Burt Reynolds). All the side characters play their parts without any special flair, but still do a good enough job - yes, even the hillbillies - to pass muster. Special mention to Bart the Bear 2 as the bear.
(Yeah, Wikipedia pages for two bear actors. I'm as surprised as you.)
If I had to fault the film for anything, it'd mostly be for a few jokes I personally find distasteful. Some stuff with pissing and bear shit, but nothing I can really hate on too much. Outside those two bits (which are at the beginning and end of the film) and the hillbilly characters, there's nothing much in this film that aims to shock or offend anyone. I suppose the half-naked huddling in the rain bit, or the jokes about being able to see the hippie girls' downstairs might not play well with some, but I didn't mind them much while watching. It's not a clean comedy film by any means, but it's not intentionally offensive or disgusting beyond a few elements, so...
It's just an alright film, is what it is. There's an appropriate level of 80s nostalgia sprinkled here and there, they use their soundtrack songs well, and it's got a good message about treasuring what you have rather than chasing something you can never get. The whole thing is by the numbers comedy with the right amount of effort put in to get you to laugh maybe a dozen times throughout the whole thing. I really wish I had more to say, but I just don't. Without A Paddle occupied my attention throughout its running time and made me smile a little, and that's the highest praise I can bestow upon it.
Consider this another one of those "if what I just described sounds like a good time to you, check it out" movies. Otherwise, I don't think you'd be hurt by giving this one a miss. Sorry for the brevity, but that's all I have to say without stretching and trying to figure out the true pain behind Dan's obsession with a C-3PO figure.
(Assorted thoughts:
- I've never smoked pot in my life, and I have no intention of doing so, but I am fairly certain based on what I know that it does not make you hallucinate. And I'm only slightly less certain that dogs inhaling marijuana smoke are gonna die rather than get stoned.
- If all of the bear's scenes are an actual bear, and if all the main actors did the majority of their stunts, then Seth Green's still one ballsy guy for letting a live bear pick him up in its mouth and carry him off.
- DB Cooper's Wikipedia page, just in case anyone's interested in learning about the guy. Stole a bunch of money, jumped out of a plane, vanished without a trace. S'pretty interesting.)
Not really a whole lot to say down here. Short review, few busy days, no big thing. I'll try to make Friday's review a touch longer.
Friday, August 28, 2015
Repo! The Genetic Opera - Fifty-two songs is a bit excessive, don't you think?
Due to moving conditions and general laziness preventing me from rolling a film this week, I took a friend's suggestion for a film on Netflix, which I'd been putting off for months.
So guess who slept through part of Thursday and spent most of the day either lazing about watching his uncle's movies or shopping for stuff for university? And guess who spent most of Friday moving into his dorm and taking care of financial situations. If you guessed Gilbert, then you'd be right, although I am slightly concerned about how you managed to guess in such an exact manner. Since I'm a lazy bastard, I've decided that rather than squeeze in a film once I'm all moved in and frantically try to type out a review late at night, I'll just watch a movie a friend recommended to me and squeeze out a review late at night anyways. It's not a perfect system, but it's what we're rolling with.
Besides, I've been meaning to set up a reader recommendation thing if this blog ever got popular enough to have readers aside from my dad and Adept, so consider this the first one of those.
Anyways, the film Foehammer's been pushing me towards seeing for months on end now was Repo! The Genetic Opera, a recent cult film about organ harvesting intrigue set to the sort of music Meat Loaf rejects from Jim Steinman for being too over the top. It's designed as an incredibly stylized, gory film, and carries the air of wanting to pass itself as SOMETHING YOU'VE NVER SEEN BEFORE, unintentional misspelling included. Seeing as I don't exactly indulge in splatterhouse musicals too terribly often, I can't really tell you if it succeeds in doing so, but I can at least tell you if I enjoyed the result or not. So let's do that and see if I did.
The set-up involves a world completely consumed by the twin plagues of an organ failure epidemic and the inability to stop singing for two minutes. Although the second curse has no cure, a company known as GeneCo offers up organ transplants for the whole world, making it not only necessary, but trendy and fashionable to get a new heart or face. Of course, this all goes upsides down and backwards when GeneCo pushes for laws allowing organ repossession from supposed deadbeats who couldn't pay for their surgery. Now, with half the populace terrorized by the slasher villain-like Repo Men and the other half addicted to a painkiller extracted from corpses, GeneCo's top exec must figure out how to make the system run after he's gone.
All of this is told in a sliding comic book panel style, which is interesting enough, but doesn't show up often enough for my tastes. The film's aesthetic puts me in mind of Sin City, with a few sets that certainly look completely digital and deliberately designed after comic art, so a few more pop-ups throughout the film couldn't have hurt. As it stands, the panel style only shows up to open and close the movie, and provide a few flashbacks regarding the same story from three perspectives early on in the film. I'd have preferred they work as transition shots, but what are you gonna do?
Anyways, the actual plot of the film revolves around Shilo Wallace, a girl locked away in her room by her father Nathan (played by Anthony Stewart Head, in a surprise appearance that I only parsed after about fifteen minutes of him being onscreen - I'm used to him doing a British accent for Buffy). Nathan has locked Shilo up due to a rare incurable blood disease that took her mother, and to prevent her from discovering his real work as a Repo Man. However, as is wont to happen with teenage girls in fiction, Shilo wants more out of life, and sneaks out at night, resulting in her stumbling upon a conspiracy involving her favorite GeneCo pop star, pain killer addiction on the streets, and a dark secret in her family's past.
You'll notice I took the time to set up both the backstory and the actual story this time around. I did so because I feel it's a bit necessary to emphasize how complicated the movie's story FEELS while watching it. There's a huge amount of information you need to parse in order to follow the story and understand character motivations (a whole bunch of stuff regarding a three way, sexually charged sibling rivalry, and a Greek choir-like gravedigger are some of the things you'll need to pay attention to), and until the last twenty minutes, I had some trouble untangling it all beyond the most basic thread. And by the end, with that understanding, I didn't feel there was anything deeper to the story. It's a narrative presented as is, with no deeper themes or challenges or anything to be ABOUT. Some people might not mind, especially since it's a horror-comedy musical, but I spent all that time trying to understand the story, so I might as well be rewarded for it.
However, a fair deal of my confusion may have come from the musical nature of the movie. I am perfectly aware this is a somewhat popular cult film, and that what I'm about to say may be contentious for some, but the songs don't really do anything for me. They're perfectly fine, presumedly well-composed songs, and I liked listening to them in the movie (nothing ever struck me as obnoxious or bad), but they sort of clutter up the film a bit. According to Wikipedia, there are 54 distinct songs in this movie; even if some of them are only a few seconds long, that's a LOT of songs for one picture. One song tends to start before another ends, and the rapid changes in tone and tempo between them make following things somewhat difficult for me. Compounding the issue is a tendency towards incomprehensible lyrics, and a straight-up lack of anything memorable. I like Seventeen and the gravedigger's song at the beginning, but in general the only songs I remember anything from are the ones where people move into a screaming, metal growl.
(This said, I do remember getting really into some of the songs while watching, even if I don't remember how they go or even which ones they were now, so give that to the movie. For whatever it's worth.)
Although the songs muddle the story up a bit for me, I do enjoy the characters. All the actors turn in perfectly good performances (Paris Hilton may have won the Razzie for her turn as one of the GeneCo heirs, but "vain and image obsessed" is what you expect out of her), and as someone who likes music but has no training in it, I can't identify any bad singing in the movie. Hell, some of the vocal performances I'd go so far as to call great in places. Additionally, they're all drawn out clearly enough in their roles and visual designs that it's easy to tell who is who and what they want out of life. How they relate to one another is another thing entirely, but on their own, each character works as a functioning unit. Special shout-out to Stewart Head for making both his fatherly facade and tormented grinning madman play equally well, and Terrance Zdunich for making the grave robber the right sort of creepy - and also for having an interesting last name.
Really, the film's look is what I like best about it. It's all fluorescents and neons and black lights with a dark gothic take on the future, and like I said there's some comic book art influence running through it. I don't want to say it makes the world look dreamlike or surreal, because the whole thing feels a little too... I'm inclined to say "grounded," but it's not the right term. More like if a bunch of punk-goths decided to stage an opera in their local hang-out. Like a stage play is the phrase I'm looking for. Maybe.
I also enjoyed the costume design. As I noted, the look of each character helps define who they are and make them easily identifiable, but even the background characters had good costumes created for them. Nothing really memorable comes to mind (a recurring problem with this film, it seems) but while watching it they offer up a sense that this is a world completely obsessed with fashion. Not just clothing or make-up, mind, but body modification and the latest trendy designer organs. They add a little bit of believability to the backstory and make the world easier to get drawn into.
Overall, though, I just don't find the film terribly memorable. There ARE plenty of elements I enjoyed, but once the film ended, I could only recall little bits and pieces of it. Although enjoyability is an important aspect of any piece of media, I'd say memorable moments or beats or plot points are essential to any work actually STAYING with you. Repo! The Genetic Opera doesn't have those. When the credits finished, I didn't remember much beyond what I've reported here, and felt no desire to watch it again. That is, I'd argue, a huge blow against it for me.
However, it DOES make for quite an experience. I'd be loath to say I HATED the first reader recommendation for the blog, and I'd also be a liar if I said so. Repo! is certainly an interesting film, and I can see where the cult status comes from, but I don't dislike it. If anything, it simply doesn't do anything for me. It's worth checking out if the phrase "horror-musical splatter comedy" appeals to you, but I wouldn't expect to have it stick with you for too long afterwards. If you wind up liking it, though, I'd recommend giving it another go-around. I've already started giving some of the songs a relisten, and I'm slowly coming around on the film.
Maybe I'll give it another look someday.
(Assorted thoughts:
- "DADDY'S GIRL'S A FUCKING MONSTER" and "It's my job... to steal, and rob.... GRAAAAAAAAAAAAVES!" are the two lines that stuck in my head, for the record.
- I just remembered the line "Tell me why oh why are my genetics such a bitch," and how it instantly put me to thinking of Shilo as Liquid Snake for a fair portion of the movie.
- Although I didn't remember any songs while writing up this review, I'm still gonna look up the soundtrack on YouTube and probably have some of the stuff I liked on rotation over the weekend.
- Joan Jett makes a cameo. I think it's a neat one.
- The sibling with a face stretched over his face isn't too creepy during the live-action stuff, but the panel he gets at the end looks incredibly disturbing to me, and I don't know why.
- Any time the film makes good on the splatter part of its genre, it basically turns into Bye Body Part: The Movie. Bye eyes. Bye face. Bye spine. Etc.
- Some of the moments in the movie make it seem like everyone is actually singing all their lines and everyone around them is perfectly aware of that fact. Especially a moment early on where the grave robber screams out one of his lines and alerts the authorities to his presence.
- Of some interest - Anthony Stewart Head singing Sweet Transvestite. You're welcome.)
I'm really sorry this review got out so late. Although I joked in the set-up about working on it late, I didn't really have any intention of ACTUALLY pushing it out with only two hours left in the day. Either way, it's here, and I'm at my college now, so yay for both those things. Now to try and get some ACTUAL work to support myself and not die, hopefully.
So guess who slept through part of Thursday and spent most of the day either lazing about watching his uncle's movies or shopping for stuff for university? And guess who spent most of Friday moving into his dorm and taking care of financial situations. If you guessed Gilbert, then you'd be right, although I am slightly concerned about how you managed to guess in such an exact manner. Since I'm a lazy bastard, I've decided that rather than squeeze in a film once I'm all moved in and frantically try to type out a review late at night, I'll just watch a movie a friend recommended to me and squeeze out a review late at night anyways. It's not a perfect system, but it's what we're rolling with.
Besides, I've been meaning to set up a reader recommendation thing if this blog ever got popular enough to have readers aside from my dad and Adept, so consider this the first one of those.
Anyways, the film Foehammer's been pushing me towards seeing for months on end now was Repo! The Genetic Opera, a recent cult film about organ harvesting intrigue set to the sort of music Meat Loaf rejects from Jim Steinman for being too over the top. It's designed as an incredibly stylized, gory film, and carries the air of wanting to pass itself as SOMETHING YOU'VE NVER SEEN BEFORE, unintentional misspelling included. Seeing as I don't exactly indulge in splatterhouse musicals too terribly often, I can't really tell you if it succeeds in doing so, but I can at least tell you if I enjoyed the result or not. So let's do that and see if I did.
The set-up involves a world completely consumed by the twin plagues of an organ failure epidemic and the inability to stop singing for two minutes. Although the second curse has no cure, a company known as GeneCo offers up organ transplants for the whole world, making it not only necessary, but trendy and fashionable to get a new heart or face. Of course, this all goes upsides down and backwards when GeneCo pushes for laws allowing organ repossession from supposed deadbeats who couldn't pay for their surgery. Now, with half the populace terrorized by the slasher villain-like Repo Men and the other half addicted to a painkiller extracted from corpses, GeneCo's top exec must figure out how to make the system run after he's gone.
All of this is told in a sliding comic book panel style, which is interesting enough, but doesn't show up often enough for my tastes. The film's aesthetic puts me in mind of Sin City, with a few sets that certainly look completely digital and deliberately designed after comic art, so a few more pop-ups throughout the film couldn't have hurt. As it stands, the panel style only shows up to open and close the movie, and provide a few flashbacks regarding the same story from three perspectives early on in the film. I'd have preferred they work as transition shots, but what are you gonna do?
Anyways, the actual plot of the film revolves around Shilo Wallace, a girl locked away in her room by her father Nathan (played by Anthony Stewart Head, in a surprise appearance that I only parsed after about fifteen minutes of him being onscreen - I'm used to him doing a British accent for Buffy). Nathan has locked Shilo up due to a rare incurable blood disease that took her mother, and to prevent her from discovering his real work as a Repo Man. However, as is wont to happen with teenage girls in fiction, Shilo wants more out of life, and sneaks out at night, resulting in her stumbling upon a conspiracy involving her favorite GeneCo pop star, pain killer addiction on the streets, and a dark secret in her family's past.
You'll notice I took the time to set up both the backstory and the actual story this time around. I did so because I feel it's a bit necessary to emphasize how complicated the movie's story FEELS while watching it. There's a huge amount of information you need to parse in order to follow the story and understand character motivations (a whole bunch of stuff regarding a three way, sexually charged sibling rivalry, and a Greek choir-like gravedigger are some of the things you'll need to pay attention to), and until the last twenty minutes, I had some trouble untangling it all beyond the most basic thread. And by the end, with that understanding, I didn't feel there was anything deeper to the story. It's a narrative presented as is, with no deeper themes or challenges or anything to be ABOUT. Some people might not mind, especially since it's a horror-comedy musical, but I spent all that time trying to understand the story, so I might as well be rewarded for it.
However, a fair deal of my confusion may have come from the musical nature of the movie. I am perfectly aware this is a somewhat popular cult film, and that what I'm about to say may be contentious for some, but the songs don't really do anything for me. They're perfectly fine, presumedly well-composed songs, and I liked listening to them in the movie (nothing ever struck me as obnoxious or bad), but they sort of clutter up the film a bit. According to Wikipedia, there are 54 distinct songs in this movie; even if some of them are only a few seconds long, that's a LOT of songs for one picture. One song tends to start before another ends, and the rapid changes in tone and tempo between them make following things somewhat difficult for me. Compounding the issue is a tendency towards incomprehensible lyrics, and a straight-up lack of anything memorable. I like Seventeen and the gravedigger's song at the beginning, but in general the only songs I remember anything from are the ones where people move into a screaming, metal growl.
(This said, I do remember getting really into some of the songs while watching, even if I don't remember how they go or even which ones they were now, so give that to the movie. For whatever it's worth.)
Although the songs muddle the story up a bit for me, I do enjoy the characters. All the actors turn in perfectly good performances (Paris Hilton may have won the Razzie for her turn as one of the GeneCo heirs, but "vain and image obsessed" is what you expect out of her), and as someone who likes music but has no training in it, I can't identify any bad singing in the movie. Hell, some of the vocal performances I'd go so far as to call great in places. Additionally, they're all drawn out clearly enough in their roles and visual designs that it's easy to tell who is who and what they want out of life. How they relate to one another is another thing entirely, but on their own, each character works as a functioning unit. Special shout-out to Stewart Head for making both his fatherly facade and tormented grinning madman play equally well, and Terrance Zdunich for making the grave robber the right sort of creepy - and also for having an interesting last name.
Really, the film's look is what I like best about it. It's all fluorescents and neons and black lights with a dark gothic take on the future, and like I said there's some comic book art influence running through it. I don't want to say it makes the world look dreamlike or surreal, because the whole thing feels a little too... I'm inclined to say "grounded," but it's not the right term. More like if a bunch of punk-goths decided to stage an opera in their local hang-out. Like a stage play is the phrase I'm looking for. Maybe.
I also enjoyed the costume design. As I noted, the look of each character helps define who they are and make them easily identifiable, but even the background characters had good costumes created for them. Nothing really memorable comes to mind (a recurring problem with this film, it seems) but while watching it they offer up a sense that this is a world completely obsessed with fashion. Not just clothing or make-up, mind, but body modification and the latest trendy designer organs. They add a little bit of believability to the backstory and make the world easier to get drawn into.
Overall, though, I just don't find the film terribly memorable. There ARE plenty of elements I enjoyed, but once the film ended, I could only recall little bits and pieces of it. Although enjoyability is an important aspect of any piece of media, I'd say memorable moments or beats or plot points are essential to any work actually STAYING with you. Repo! The Genetic Opera doesn't have those. When the credits finished, I didn't remember much beyond what I've reported here, and felt no desire to watch it again. That is, I'd argue, a huge blow against it for me.
However, it DOES make for quite an experience. I'd be loath to say I HATED the first reader recommendation for the blog, and I'd also be a liar if I said so. Repo! is certainly an interesting film, and I can see where the cult status comes from, but I don't dislike it. If anything, it simply doesn't do anything for me. It's worth checking out if the phrase "horror-musical splatter comedy" appeals to you, but I wouldn't expect to have it stick with you for too long afterwards. If you wind up liking it, though, I'd recommend giving it another go-around. I've already started giving some of the songs a relisten, and I'm slowly coming around on the film.
Maybe I'll give it another look someday.
(Assorted thoughts:
- "DADDY'S GIRL'S A FUCKING MONSTER" and "It's my job... to steal, and rob.... GRAAAAAAAAAAAAVES!" are the two lines that stuck in my head, for the record.
- I just remembered the line "Tell me why oh why are my genetics such a bitch," and how it instantly put me to thinking of Shilo as Liquid Snake for a fair portion of the movie.
- Although I didn't remember any songs while writing up this review, I'm still gonna look up the soundtrack on YouTube and probably have some of the stuff I liked on rotation over the weekend.
- Joan Jett makes a cameo. I think it's a neat one.
- The sibling with a face stretched over his face isn't too creepy during the live-action stuff, but the panel he gets at the end looks incredibly disturbing to me, and I don't know why.
- Any time the film makes good on the splatter part of its genre, it basically turns into Bye Body Part: The Movie. Bye eyes. Bye face. Bye spine. Etc.
- Some of the moments in the movie make it seem like everyone is actually singing all their lines and everyone around them is perfectly aware of that fact. Especially a moment early on where the grave robber screams out one of his lines and alerts the authorities to his presence.
- Of some interest - Anthony Stewart Head singing Sweet Transvestite. You're welcome.)
I'm really sorry this review got out so late. Although I joked in the set-up about working on it late, I didn't really have any intention of ACTUALLY pushing it out with only two hours left in the day. Either way, it's here, and I'm at my college now, so yay for both those things. Now to try and get some ACTUAL work to support myself and not die, hopefully.
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil - I'd be evil too if my name was Chad.
Random.org bestows on us my dad's Netflix account, which brings us to goofy comedies, which gives us today's feature...
No offense to my dad - really, no offense, especially since I know for a fact he reads every post I make on this blog when I link to them on Facebook - but he watches a lot of crackpot stuff on Netflix. Not because he believes in any of it, mind you. The reason he always gives is watching so he can argue properly with the crazies should he ever come across them personally. Me, I don't follow the train of logic; most of the time you're not going to encounter the crazies, and when you do they're just straight-up not worth arguing on. Not to mention the repetitiveness of it all. You've seen one guy explain why his Chewbacca roar is really a Bigfoot cry, you've seen all five million.
He needs stuff to listen to while doing work at home, though, so I'm not gonna fault him for it. I just don't hold with what he puts on.
Anyways, the reason I bring all this up is because while rolling through the options for today, I saw an awful lot of movies I'd REALLY prefer not to watch for today. I'm not sure how I'd review a documentary on Chatsworth or Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings, beyond just rolling my head on the keyboard to equal the amount of eloquence you'd get from a movie like that. But, fortunately, the random number god brought me to Goofy Comedies, and graciously let me sidestep such schlock as Scary Movie Five and Bebe's Kids and gave me something at least interesting looking to watch: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. Also known as AskReddit's favorite quote-unquote "underrated" movie to recommend right behind Moon (1994).
Boy oh boy did they undersell it. I largely mean in that every time reddit says something is underrated, I assume what they really mean is either something to the effect of "not underrated at all" or "the most horrific piece of shit you ever did see." But either way, based off of reddit's constant parroting of this movie's name without giving any context whatsoever to why it's good, I wasn't expecting the film to ACTUALLY be good, much less get me right into it straight off the bat.
The film's basic plot concerns the usual "hillbillies killing sex-obsessed college kids" formula as seen in movies like Deliverance (look at me, name dropping all over the place today) turned on its head. The hillbillies, stern but well-meaning Tucker and dim but good-hearted Dale, are just a pair of innocent young men looking to fix up their new vacation home and go fishing while just so happening to be born and raised hicks. By contrast, the group of largely nameless college kids, led by Chad and Allison, are paranoid, distrusting of anyone different, and easily prodded towards violence - especially Chad, who's constantly itching to go hillbilly hunting. When a series of misunderstandings lead to Tucker and Dale taking Allison to their shack to tend to her wounds, things quickly escalate into multiple violent deaths and constantly increasing tensions between the two sides.
Naturally, of course, this is all played for laughs. It's a horror-comedy film, and it plays the deaths for all they're worth. The comedy requires a bit of familiarity with standard horror movie tropes and cliches, but if you've seen even one "crazed backwoods maniac slaughters teens in the woods" movie, you'll basically have the idea downpat. The sheer ridiculousness of the group's sudden leaps to conclusions and Tucker and Dale's complete obliviousness to what's going on around them are great on their own, but when you have people start jumping into wood chippers and getting nail boards straight through the skull, the bloody comedy's just fantastic. I was chuckling throughout the whole runtime.
Of course, a movie that just repeats the same joke over and over without variation is gonna get old fast, so Tucker and Dale have much needed personalities and good human interactions. The relationship between the two of them is nice enough - they movie never makes them out as anything but hardworking, thick-headed good ol' boys who care about each other, never stooping to the obvious "looks like a hick but is really cultured" joke - but what I really like is Dale's relationship with Allison. Although he's not cultured or smart, Dale has brain problems that make him really good at remembering things and horrible at socializing and reasoning. Allison, being a psychology student, eventually comes to empathize with him and treat him like a real person who needs help. It's just really sweet watching the two of them warm up to each other and interact, and it leads to some scenes I'd say come close to being genuinely heartwarming.
(Course, as a bonus, it's nice seeing the psychology major represented as a level-headed, reasonable person whose methods only don't work because of the extremity and oddness of the situation, as opposed to just being straight-up crackpot.)
On the other end of the spectrum, I think Chad makes for a great bad guy. And no, I don't think I'm spoiling anything by saying that - it's pretty damn obvious from his first prominent scene, wherein he tries to force himself on Allison that he's not exactly a good guy. He's gung-ho to turn survival of the fittest from the very second Tucker and Dale strike him as even a mild threat, and his obsession with hillbilly murder just grows and grows and grows. By the end of the film, he's just as much of a monster as Jason, creating a psycho axe-murderer from the same cloth said axe-murderers typically chop through to get at the young adult flesh underneath. Jesse Moss plays a through and through bastard here, and I love every second of it.
From there, I can't think of much else to say about the movie without getting into spoiler territory. There's not exactly much plot TO spoil, but there are some great bits I'd rather avoid talking about because they're too good to not leave fresh. Plus there's the matter of me just not having too many other points to talk about. The film has a good message about not judging other people for how they look and advocating listening to one another through Allison's psychology talk, and beyond that, it's simply a really good, really funny film with some great laughs, great kills, and a really nice emotional center to latch onto.
Out of all the films I've officially reviewed for the blog, I'd say it's the best so far. It's on both Netflix and Amazon Instant, so give it a try sometime!
(Assorted thoughts:
- There's one scene early on where Tucker and Dale get stopped on the way to their campsite, and by a way of a poorly spilled beer and easily caught zipper, the police officer thinks Dale's sucking Tucker off. I suppose it's a means of setting up the idea of misunderstandings later in the film, but it feels a little out of place and incongruous to me.
- Thank fucking god the dog lives. I AM gonna spoil that cause it fucking sucks when the dog dies in movies. But he makes it out OK in this one. So there.
- I know I was implying earlier that Reddit always exaggerates, but after watching the movie I looked up the trailer for this film because they said it spoils everything and... well... it kinda does spoil almost every major joke and plot point in the movie. In chronological order. So maybe give the trailer a miss.
- The quip game is strong in this movie. I'm talking Joss Whedon before he decided every line needs to be a quip strong.)
Anyways, mini-review here! The night before watching Tucker and Dale, I saw another really, REALLY good movie on Netflix. An animated film out of Ireland called The Secret of Kells. It's a take on the story of how the Book of Kells (one of Ireland's oldest and most valued national treasures) was created, and it's designed to look like an old pre-perspective tapestry. The characters are all really well designed, each with their own unique look and pose (I especially love the abbot's long, towering stoop), and the colors in the film are just... look at them. There are a whole slew of strong emotional moments, and it gets really heavy towards the finish before having one of the most relieving and beautiful endings I've ever seen in an animated film.
So yeah, as a second recommendation for the day, go give Secret of Kells a look. I personally promise that you're gonna love the hell out of it.
No offense to my dad - really, no offense, especially since I know for a fact he reads every post I make on this blog when I link to them on Facebook - but he watches a lot of crackpot stuff on Netflix. Not because he believes in any of it, mind you. The reason he always gives is watching so he can argue properly with the crazies should he ever come across them personally. Me, I don't follow the train of logic; most of the time you're not going to encounter the crazies, and when you do they're just straight-up not worth arguing on. Not to mention the repetitiveness of it all. You've seen one guy explain why his Chewbacca roar is really a Bigfoot cry, you've seen all five million.
He needs stuff to listen to while doing work at home, though, so I'm not gonna fault him for it. I just don't hold with what he puts on.
Anyways, the reason I bring all this up is because while rolling through the options for today, I saw an awful lot of movies I'd REALLY prefer not to watch for today. I'm not sure how I'd review a documentary on Chatsworth or Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings, beyond just rolling my head on the keyboard to equal the amount of eloquence you'd get from a movie like that. But, fortunately, the random number god brought me to Goofy Comedies, and graciously let me sidestep such schlock as Scary Movie Five and Bebe's Kids and gave me something at least interesting looking to watch: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. Also known as AskReddit's favorite quote-unquote "underrated" movie to recommend right behind Moon (1994).
Boy oh boy did they undersell it. I largely mean in that every time reddit says something is underrated, I assume what they really mean is either something to the effect of "not underrated at all" or "the most horrific piece of shit you ever did see." But either way, based off of reddit's constant parroting of this movie's name without giving any context whatsoever to why it's good, I wasn't expecting the film to ACTUALLY be good, much less get me right into it straight off the bat.
The film's basic plot concerns the usual "hillbillies killing sex-obsessed college kids" formula as seen in movies like Deliverance (look at me, name dropping all over the place today) turned on its head. The hillbillies, stern but well-meaning Tucker and dim but good-hearted Dale, are just a pair of innocent young men looking to fix up their new vacation home and go fishing while just so happening to be born and raised hicks. By contrast, the group of largely nameless college kids, led by Chad and Allison, are paranoid, distrusting of anyone different, and easily prodded towards violence - especially Chad, who's constantly itching to go hillbilly hunting. When a series of misunderstandings lead to Tucker and Dale taking Allison to their shack to tend to her wounds, things quickly escalate into multiple violent deaths and constantly increasing tensions between the two sides.
Naturally, of course, this is all played for laughs. It's a horror-comedy film, and it plays the deaths for all they're worth. The comedy requires a bit of familiarity with standard horror movie tropes and cliches, but if you've seen even one "crazed backwoods maniac slaughters teens in the woods" movie, you'll basically have the idea downpat. The sheer ridiculousness of the group's sudden leaps to conclusions and Tucker and Dale's complete obliviousness to what's going on around them are great on their own, but when you have people start jumping into wood chippers and getting nail boards straight through the skull, the bloody comedy's just fantastic. I was chuckling throughout the whole runtime.
Of course, a movie that just repeats the same joke over and over without variation is gonna get old fast, so Tucker and Dale have much needed personalities and good human interactions. The relationship between the two of them is nice enough - they movie never makes them out as anything but hardworking, thick-headed good ol' boys who care about each other, never stooping to the obvious "looks like a hick but is really cultured" joke - but what I really like is Dale's relationship with Allison. Although he's not cultured or smart, Dale has brain problems that make him really good at remembering things and horrible at socializing and reasoning. Allison, being a psychology student, eventually comes to empathize with him and treat him like a real person who needs help. It's just really sweet watching the two of them warm up to each other and interact, and it leads to some scenes I'd say come close to being genuinely heartwarming.
(Course, as a bonus, it's nice seeing the psychology major represented as a level-headed, reasonable person whose methods only don't work because of the extremity and oddness of the situation, as opposed to just being straight-up crackpot.)
On the other end of the spectrum, I think Chad makes for a great bad guy. And no, I don't think I'm spoiling anything by saying that - it's pretty damn obvious from his first prominent scene, wherein he tries to force himself on Allison that he's not exactly a good guy. He's gung-ho to turn survival of the fittest from the very second Tucker and Dale strike him as even a mild threat, and his obsession with hillbilly murder just grows and grows and grows. By the end of the film, he's just as much of a monster as Jason, creating a psycho axe-murderer from the same cloth said axe-murderers typically chop through to get at the young adult flesh underneath. Jesse Moss plays a through and through bastard here, and I love every second of it.
From there, I can't think of much else to say about the movie without getting into spoiler territory. There's not exactly much plot TO spoil, but there are some great bits I'd rather avoid talking about because they're too good to not leave fresh. Plus there's the matter of me just not having too many other points to talk about. The film has a good message about not judging other people for how they look and advocating listening to one another through Allison's psychology talk, and beyond that, it's simply a really good, really funny film with some great laughs, great kills, and a really nice emotional center to latch onto.
Out of all the films I've officially reviewed for the blog, I'd say it's the best so far. It's on both Netflix and Amazon Instant, so give it a try sometime!
(Assorted thoughts:
- There's one scene early on where Tucker and Dale get stopped on the way to their campsite, and by a way of a poorly spilled beer and easily caught zipper, the police officer thinks Dale's sucking Tucker off. I suppose it's a means of setting up the idea of misunderstandings later in the film, but it feels a little out of place and incongruous to me.
- Thank fucking god the dog lives. I AM gonna spoil that cause it fucking sucks when the dog dies in movies. But he makes it out OK in this one. So there.
- I know I was implying earlier that Reddit always exaggerates, but after watching the movie I looked up the trailer for this film because they said it spoils everything and... well... it kinda does spoil almost every major joke and plot point in the movie. In chronological order. So maybe give the trailer a miss.
- The quip game is strong in this movie. I'm talking Joss Whedon before he decided every line needs to be a quip strong.)
Anyways, mini-review here! The night before watching Tucker and Dale, I saw another really, REALLY good movie on Netflix. An animated film out of Ireland called The Secret of Kells. It's a take on the story of how the Book of Kells (one of Ireland's oldest and most valued national treasures) was created, and it's designed to look like an old pre-perspective tapestry. The characters are all really well designed, each with their own unique look and pose (I especially love the abbot's long, towering stoop), and the colors in the film are just... look at them. There are a whole slew of strong emotional moments, and it gets really heavy towards the finish before having one of the most relieving and beautiful endings I've ever seen in an animated film.
So yeah, as a second recommendation for the day, go give Secret of Kells a look. I personally promise that you're gonna love the hell out of it.
Monday, August 24, 2015
Transformers 4: Age of Extinction - Insert witty joke about careers going extinct here.
We rolled Netflix, which gave us action & adventure and led us into today's... film...
Blegh. I'm really not a huge fan of giving out negative reviews. I think there's a place for them, but in my experience reading criticism online, the trend is usually towards just dishing it out for negativity's sake, or to appease a certain audience. Out and out saying a movie is bad and lacks any redeeming features strikes me as a really poor way to go about this, but... well... consider the film we're watching here.
The whole notion that modern films are nothing but giant explosions and mindless action and tits thrown in for fanservice is patently ridiculous. Even the vast majority of action films at least make some attempt at a coherent plot and show a modicum of restraint. But Michael Bay's Transformers films are, although I really hate to say this, representative of everything I find distasteful about modern film. Constant, never-ending action, characters with no development or relatable traits, camerawork that's hard to follow, backgrounds your eyes just can't process, a plot that feels like it's going in ten different directions and ultimately goes nowhere... Age of Extinction is just a bad movie.
I wouldn't call it the WORST movie I've ever seen, per say - until Death Bed: The Bed That Eats and Serenity stop existing, I'm hesitant to hand out that particular title to anything. If it weren't for the ability to pause and make fun of the dumber parts to my chat friends for as long as I like before resuming, I don't know if I'd've made it through the whole film. It's not as offensive as 2 was, but when that's the highest praise I can offer, it's not saying much. Give the damned thing a miss.
...
...still, I am ostensibly running a blog with the aim of roughly 2000 words on each film, so I might as well give it a shot. I watched it all the way through and complained about it enough to friends during the runtime. I can spare a few words for the blog.
The plot, insofar as it stands, involves the Transformers being on the run after some huge catastrophe from the last movie (which I haven't watched, for the record) turned public opinion against them. The US military has sworn off all associations with the Autobots, but what I think is some rogue branch or a PMC or something has started working with the Deceptacons to kill off the Autobots and make them look like the bad guys, with the help of a new Transformer named Lockdown. Meanwhile, Mark "My Character's Name Isn't Important Because You'll Just Be Calling Me Mark Wahlberg" Wahlberg's work as a down on his luck mechanic with a needlessly sexualized teenage daughter to take care of results in him discovering Optimus Prime in hiding. He tries to befriend Prime, but it takes an attack by the militaryPMCwhatever unit to gain his trust and also pick up a boyfriend for the daughter, who constantly oscillates in and out of the Irish accent he's supposed to have because we really learned our lesson about making fun of minorities but not really. Along the way, they uncover a plan by a Steve Jobs come lately character who plans to use mined Transformium to create rip-off Transformers and also My Little Pony plushies and Beats headphones. However, he's also created an Optimus Prime rip-off that turns out to be Megatron, and Lockdown plans on stealing the Transformium and also Optimus so he can get his hands on a nuke that will coat the entire world in Transformium and turn everybody into living metal just like the dinosaurs who come up at the beginning except they never show up again but an entire different group of Dinobots show up and...
I don't know how any of this relates to one another. It's generally possible follow each of the plot lines pretty well. They're simple enough to understand. But in trying to actually follow how everything actually relates to one another and, more importantly, why I should care about any of it, I've got nothing. Everything is just stretched thinner and thinner and thinner throughout the movie's runtime, to the point where I just gave up by the very end. I completely neglected to mention all of the stuff about the ancient conspiracy about the origins of the Transformers, and several characters who I feel like I should know but Wikipedia tells me are completely new to the movie.
Put another way - I kept up with all the twists and turns in Metal Gear Solid 2 just fine, and swallowed every hour-long dialogue in 4, but I simply could not keep pace with this movie.
The effort might at least be worth it if the action was good, but it's really not. There's one or two little bits I like, such as the new longcoat Trasnformer (Crosshairs, I think) using dragshoots to fight Deceptacon dogs (?) in midair, or Hound's one-robot stand against the Deceptacons towards the end, but anyone who knows anything about these movies should know what the problem is by now. Supposedly high-stakes, high-excitement scenes get brought down to no-stakes and no-excitement by a lack of attachment to the characters and a focus more on huge shots where everything in the world blows up at once and convoluted situations abound. Everything's just so fucking loud and noisy, in both an audio AND a visual sense, so I can barely follow or get invested even when I want to.
Honestly, some of the set-pieces feel like parodies of what you'd expect in a decent Transformers film. Like a bit where the human characters get to do all sorts of cool car stunts while just out of frame we see two Transformers going at each other's throats. But no time for that, we've gotta use a randomly placed ramp in an abandoned building to jump down onto another perfectly placed ramp at the bottom. Or how about the bit where Mark "Be Like Me If You Want To Have A Hot Daughter" Wahlberg has crashed a hijacked Deceptacon ship into someone's car, threatens to kill the guy for demanding an insurance statement, then takes a chug of Bud Lite and asks his daughter for his gun. Could go with Optimus Prime talking about how he's all about freedom and liberty while beating several new recruits into the ground and peppering his speech with threats to kill them if they won't work with him.
Or, if we really want to go with my favorite incongruous moment, we could talk about a death early in the film. The one where Mark "I Have Many Silly Nicknames Bestowed Upon Me In Quotation Marks In the Place Where My Middle Name Should Go" Wahlberg's overweight comedy sidekick business partner - who, up to this point, had done nothing but crack wise even as his home and all his possessions were destroyed in an attempt by the military to murder him - falls behind as the rest of the group runs away, resulting in him getting hit by a Transformium minibomb that completely disintegrates everything but his now metal skeleton. They linger on this man's still-standing corpse for such a goddamn long time, acting all shocked and solemn over the fact that HEY A MAIN CHARACTER JUST DIED... despite the fact that we knew NOTHING about him. Then the scene's over and we've gotta get back to "I'm only here to fuck your daughter" quips.
If I had to characterize the movie, and possibly the whole franchise, it would be with that scene. Inaprorpiate light-heartedness during incomprehensible action scenes, followed by a really out of place moment (like a serious character death or a robot pissing on someone) before getting right back to status quo without any acknowledgement beyond the hope for an audience's laughter. Business as usual isn't any fun to hang around with, what with all its Dutch angles and jokes made out of product placement, and it's just straight-up awkward to sit through the sudden shifts.
I wish I could at least say the special effects look good, but unfortunately, they don't. The Transformers' transformation scenes still look serviceable, and I'm sure they're still technical marvels, but they still look ugly and don't read well at all, especially with their new more human faces. When they're in "real" sets, the only way to distinguish them is by color pallet, and in all CGI environments, they all just fade into one slightly clunky design. And, as a special point I really feel deserves particular mention; Galvatron's transformation sequence looks like ass.
Seriously, I do not know how a movie with so much money poured into it as a Transformers film got away with an effect like that. Instead of the usual complex but followable transformations akin to the ones in the cartoons and toys, he and any Transformers like him just turn into a cloud of CG cubes, fly through the air, and then reform into their alternate shape. They're not even GOOD CG cubes, because they don't look like they're made out of a truck or a robot, they just straight up look like CG cubes. I wasn't even IN the movie for any of its running time, and somehow they still managed to yank me straight out.
Just... ugh, it's a really bad movie. Again, not the worst I've ever seen, but certainly boring and lifeless, and that's bad enough on its own. I'm sure someone could make a GOOD Transformers movie - maybe one exploring Optimus' struggles as his friends and people are cut down by the very species they're trying to protect, with the temptation to give into his diametric opposite's ideology growing ever stronger (as opposed to the usual "OPTIMUS ANGRY" schtick) - but it seems almost impossible at this point. Normally, I do everything I can to respect others' choices in the media they consume, but with Age of Extinction and all the other films in the series, I just have to wonder why they choose to do this to themselves.
I'm gonna stop here before the relentless negativity gets to me, and just write down my assorted thoughts.
(Assorted thoughts:
-It's really weird that, out of all the franchises getting cinematic universes nowadays, Paramount hasn't tried to make one out of Transformers. They've got so many characters that, if the TF wiki is believed, could easily carry their own film, but they're still sticking to the old formula of announcing one sequel after the last one succeeds and leaving it at that. Maybe they'd have to show some restraint if they didn't pour so much money into every installment.
-Lockdown had a gun for a face, so that's kinda cool, I guess.
- "It's the MOVIES nowadays that's a problem. Sequels and remakes, all that crap." You don't get to make that joke.
- Apparently this was a soft reboot of the franchise, but aside from the absence of a certain actual cannibal, I didn't notice.
- Obama HOPE posters, but with Optimus Prime and HATE. They're only on screen for a second, but it's the definition of trying too hard.
- Why does Mark Wahlberg's robot dog make Transformers transformation sound effects, but not the Transformers themselves?
- On the matter of needlessly dark subject matter, I'm sure the best way to engender a positive audience response is by having the first Transformer you show be a fan favorite, and then brutally slaughtering him.
- I apparently called Mark Wahlberg's character Yaegherberg at one point. I don't know why I thought it was funny or worth noting here.
- "What kind of man trades his flesh and blood brethren for metal?" "The trouble with loyalty to a cause is the cause always betrays you." "I do not know if we will meet again, but every time you look to the stars, think of one of them as my soul." "I know you have a conscience because you're an inventor like me." There were a lot of meaningless meaningful quotes in this movie, weren't there?
- Do you think Galvatron constantly looking like Megatron has something to do with you keeping Megatron's head in the room, Mister Inventor Guy?
- Maybe it would have helped if they'd stuck to their "OUR TRANSFORMERS ARE BETTER IN EVERY WAY" mission statement and called him Optimal Prime instead of Galvatron.
- No "Me, Grimlock" = Bad choice. I barely know anything about Transformers, and even I know that.
-Basically I spent the entirety of the running time wanting to watch George Clooney use a jackhammer to rapidly stake vampires again. From Dusk Till Dawn, 10/10, highly recommend, watch that instead.)
Although I was complaining all throughout the post, I do find now all the complaining helped. I haven't had the best day the last few days, so getting to bash on an out and out shitty movie helped a little. Still, I'm heading up to university in a few days, so here's to hoping I get a good movie for Wednesday and Friday.
Blegh. I'm really not a huge fan of giving out negative reviews. I think there's a place for them, but in my experience reading criticism online, the trend is usually towards just dishing it out for negativity's sake, or to appease a certain audience. Out and out saying a movie is bad and lacks any redeeming features strikes me as a really poor way to go about this, but... well... consider the film we're watching here.
The whole notion that modern films are nothing but giant explosions and mindless action and tits thrown in for fanservice is patently ridiculous. Even the vast majority of action films at least make some attempt at a coherent plot and show a modicum of restraint. But Michael Bay's Transformers films are, although I really hate to say this, representative of everything I find distasteful about modern film. Constant, never-ending action, characters with no development or relatable traits, camerawork that's hard to follow, backgrounds your eyes just can't process, a plot that feels like it's going in ten different directions and ultimately goes nowhere... Age of Extinction is just a bad movie.
I wouldn't call it the WORST movie I've ever seen, per say - until Death Bed: The Bed That Eats and Serenity stop existing, I'm hesitant to hand out that particular title to anything. If it weren't for the ability to pause and make fun of the dumber parts to my chat friends for as long as I like before resuming, I don't know if I'd've made it through the whole film. It's not as offensive as 2 was, but when that's the highest praise I can offer, it's not saying much. Give the damned thing a miss.
...
...still, I am ostensibly running a blog with the aim of roughly 2000 words on each film, so I might as well give it a shot. I watched it all the way through and complained about it enough to friends during the runtime. I can spare a few words for the blog.
The plot, insofar as it stands, involves the Transformers being on the run after some huge catastrophe from the last movie (which I haven't watched, for the record) turned public opinion against them. The US military has sworn off all associations with the Autobots, but what I think is some rogue branch or a PMC or something has started working with the Deceptacons to kill off the Autobots and make them look like the bad guys, with the help of a new Transformer named Lockdown. Meanwhile, Mark "My Character's Name Isn't Important Because You'll Just Be Calling Me Mark Wahlberg" Wahlberg's work as a down on his luck mechanic with a needlessly sexualized teenage daughter to take care of results in him discovering Optimus Prime in hiding. He tries to befriend Prime, but it takes an attack by the militaryPMCwhatever unit to gain his trust and also pick up a boyfriend for the daughter, who constantly oscillates in and out of the Irish accent he's supposed to have because we really learned our lesson about making fun of minorities but not really. Along the way, they uncover a plan by a Steve Jobs come lately character who plans to use mined Transformium to create rip-off Transformers and also My Little Pony plushies and Beats headphones. However, he's also created an Optimus Prime rip-off that turns out to be Megatron, and Lockdown plans on stealing the Transformium and also Optimus so he can get his hands on a nuke that will coat the entire world in Transformium and turn everybody into living metal just like the dinosaurs who come up at the beginning except they never show up again but an entire different group of Dinobots show up and...
I don't know how any of this relates to one another. It's generally possible follow each of the plot lines pretty well. They're simple enough to understand. But in trying to actually follow how everything actually relates to one another and, more importantly, why I should care about any of it, I've got nothing. Everything is just stretched thinner and thinner and thinner throughout the movie's runtime, to the point where I just gave up by the very end. I completely neglected to mention all of the stuff about the ancient conspiracy about the origins of the Transformers, and several characters who I feel like I should know but Wikipedia tells me are completely new to the movie.
Put another way - I kept up with all the twists and turns in Metal Gear Solid 2 just fine, and swallowed every hour-long dialogue in 4, but I simply could not keep pace with this movie.
The effort might at least be worth it if the action was good, but it's really not. There's one or two little bits I like, such as the new longcoat Trasnformer (Crosshairs, I think) using dragshoots to fight Deceptacon dogs (?) in midair, or Hound's one-robot stand against the Deceptacons towards the end, but anyone who knows anything about these movies should know what the problem is by now. Supposedly high-stakes, high-excitement scenes get brought down to no-stakes and no-excitement by a lack of attachment to the characters and a focus more on huge shots where everything in the world blows up at once and convoluted situations abound. Everything's just so fucking loud and noisy, in both an audio AND a visual sense, so I can barely follow or get invested even when I want to.
Honestly, some of the set-pieces feel like parodies of what you'd expect in a decent Transformers film. Like a bit where the human characters get to do all sorts of cool car stunts while just out of frame we see two Transformers going at each other's throats. But no time for that, we've gotta use a randomly placed ramp in an abandoned building to jump down onto another perfectly placed ramp at the bottom. Or how about the bit where Mark "Be Like Me If You Want To Have A Hot Daughter" Wahlberg has crashed a hijacked Deceptacon ship into someone's car, threatens to kill the guy for demanding an insurance statement, then takes a chug of Bud Lite and asks his daughter for his gun. Could go with Optimus Prime talking about how he's all about freedom and liberty while beating several new recruits into the ground and peppering his speech with threats to kill them if they won't work with him.
Or, if we really want to go with my favorite incongruous moment, we could talk about a death early in the film. The one where Mark "I Have Many Silly Nicknames Bestowed Upon Me In Quotation Marks In the Place Where My Middle Name Should Go" Wahlberg's overweight comedy sidekick business partner - who, up to this point, had done nothing but crack wise even as his home and all his possessions were destroyed in an attempt by the military to murder him - falls behind as the rest of the group runs away, resulting in him getting hit by a Transformium minibomb that completely disintegrates everything but his now metal skeleton. They linger on this man's still-standing corpse for such a goddamn long time, acting all shocked and solemn over the fact that HEY A MAIN CHARACTER JUST DIED... despite the fact that we knew NOTHING about him. Then the scene's over and we've gotta get back to "I'm only here to fuck your daughter" quips.
If I had to characterize the movie, and possibly the whole franchise, it would be with that scene. Inaprorpiate light-heartedness during incomprehensible action scenes, followed by a really out of place moment (like a serious character death or a robot pissing on someone) before getting right back to status quo without any acknowledgement beyond the hope for an audience's laughter. Business as usual isn't any fun to hang around with, what with all its Dutch angles and jokes made out of product placement, and it's just straight-up awkward to sit through the sudden shifts.
I wish I could at least say the special effects look good, but unfortunately, they don't. The Transformers' transformation scenes still look serviceable, and I'm sure they're still technical marvels, but they still look ugly and don't read well at all, especially with their new more human faces. When they're in "real" sets, the only way to distinguish them is by color pallet, and in all CGI environments, they all just fade into one slightly clunky design. And, as a special point I really feel deserves particular mention; Galvatron's transformation sequence looks like ass.
Seriously, I do not know how a movie with so much money poured into it as a Transformers film got away with an effect like that. Instead of the usual complex but followable transformations akin to the ones in the cartoons and toys, he and any Transformers like him just turn into a cloud of CG cubes, fly through the air, and then reform into their alternate shape. They're not even GOOD CG cubes, because they don't look like they're made out of a truck or a robot, they just straight up look like CG cubes. I wasn't even IN the movie for any of its running time, and somehow they still managed to yank me straight out.
Just... ugh, it's a really bad movie. Again, not the worst I've ever seen, but certainly boring and lifeless, and that's bad enough on its own. I'm sure someone could make a GOOD Transformers movie - maybe one exploring Optimus' struggles as his friends and people are cut down by the very species they're trying to protect, with the temptation to give into his diametric opposite's ideology growing ever stronger (as opposed to the usual "OPTIMUS ANGRY" schtick) - but it seems almost impossible at this point. Normally, I do everything I can to respect others' choices in the media they consume, but with Age of Extinction and all the other films in the series, I just have to wonder why they choose to do this to themselves.
I'm gonna stop here before the relentless negativity gets to me, and just write down my assorted thoughts.
(Assorted thoughts:
-It's really weird that, out of all the franchises getting cinematic universes nowadays, Paramount hasn't tried to make one out of Transformers. They've got so many characters that, if the TF wiki is believed, could easily carry their own film, but they're still sticking to the old formula of announcing one sequel after the last one succeeds and leaving it at that. Maybe they'd have to show some restraint if they didn't pour so much money into every installment.
-Lockdown had a gun for a face, so that's kinda cool, I guess.
- "It's the MOVIES nowadays that's a problem. Sequels and remakes, all that crap." You don't get to make that joke.
- Apparently this was a soft reboot of the franchise, but aside from the absence of a certain actual cannibal, I didn't notice.
- Obama HOPE posters, but with Optimus Prime and HATE. They're only on screen for a second, but it's the definition of trying too hard.
- Why does Mark Wahlberg's robot dog make Transformers transformation sound effects, but not the Transformers themselves?
- On the matter of needlessly dark subject matter, I'm sure the best way to engender a positive audience response is by having the first Transformer you show be a fan favorite, and then brutally slaughtering him.
- I apparently called Mark Wahlberg's character Yaegherberg at one point. I don't know why I thought it was funny or worth noting here.
- "What kind of man trades his flesh and blood brethren for metal?" "The trouble with loyalty to a cause is the cause always betrays you." "I do not know if we will meet again, but every time you look to the stars, think of one of them as my soul." "I know you have a conscience because you're an inventor like me." There were a lot of meaningless meaningful quotes in this movie, weren't there?
- Do you think Galvatron constantly looking like Megatron has something to do with you keeping Megatron's head in the room, Mister Inventor Guy?
- Maybe it would have helped if they'd stuck to their "OUR TRANSFORMERS ARE BETTER IN EVERY WAY" mission statement and called him Optimal Prime instead of Galvatron.
- No "Me, Grimlock" = Bad choice. I barely know anything about Transformers, and even I know that.
-Basically I spent the entirety of the running time wanting to watch George Clooney use a jackhammer to rapidly stake vampires again. From Dusk Till Dawn, 10/10, highly recommend, watch that instead.)
Although I was complaining all throughout the post, I do find now all the complaining helped. I haven't had the best day the last few days, so getting to bash on an out and out shitty movie helped a little. Still, I'm heading up to university in a few days, so here's to hoping I get a good movie for Wednesday and Friday.
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
The Taking of Tiger Mountain - Less strategy, more skiing.
Roll one gives us Netflix, which leads into my uncle's Netflix, which takes us to international movies, which gives us our pick for the day...
My exposure to Asian entertainment is limited largely to the anime my dad and brother watch on adult swim. S'good stuff, pretty well put together most of the time, but it's only one form of entertainment, and one oftentimes defined by cheapness and poor dubbing at that. I've only watched a small handful of really, properly foreign films (when I say that, I mean films not made over in the UK, which for all the differences you could mention still subscribes to enough of the same conventions as US films that I can keep up without much effort), most of which are either martial arts or Godzilla flicks. I say all this because going into today's film, The Taking Of Tiger Mountain (courtesy of my uncle watching Iron Sky and rating it high enough for international movies to pop up on his dash), I expected to be completely alienated. A historical action film set in the aftermath of World War II focusing on a bunch of Chinese soldiers in the middle of nowhere? The cultural differences alone would be enough to put me off, not to mention my complete lack of knowledge of Chinese history. It was a film I went into with a certain degree of wariness.
After having seen it, I have only one thing to say.
Holy shit, why didn't anyone tell me about The Taking of Tiger Mountain sooner?
OK, OK, maybe I should back up just a touch. I really liked the movie, but I should probably provide some backstory before getting into gushing over it, because I feel it's important to the review making sense, and also showing that for as great as the movie is, there's reasons to have reservations about liking it.
The original story Tiger Mountain takes its inspiration from comes out of Chinese novelist Qu Bo's first book, 1957's Tracks in the Snowy Forest, a series of tales about members of the People's Liberation Army tracking down bandits and marauders in the snowy mountains of China's northeastern mountains, largely drawn from his own experiences as a member of the PLA. During the reign of Mao Zedong, a portion of the book was adapted into the opera Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, which became one of the eight model operas in China - the plays used by the government to emphasize China's strength and power while limiting the citizenry's exposure to outside or contrarian ideas. Director Xie Tielli created a film adaptation in 1970, and the opera remained a popular mainstay of the Peking Opera.
All of this is to say the story of Yang Ziorang and the 203rd unit is, to my understanding, a very familiar, well-worn story to the Chinese people. It's so inherently Chinese that, upon reading all this information after finishing the film, I was all the more impressed with how accessible it is. Director Tsui Hark is apparently a very popular, highly regarded director in his home country, and even directed Double Team stateside (a film which, for those like me whose first experience with internet film criticism was the Nostalgia Critic, is notable for helping to reveal that Doug Walker does not have the slightest clue how internet memes work), but if I had read any of this BEFORE watching the film, I might not have had any inclination to check out the rest of his work. Now, having seen how he managed to communicate the story in such a timeless yet effortlessly cool and relatable manner, I'm all for seeing what Flying Swords of Dragon Gate.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The story first, then. In the aftermath of the second World War, bandits run rampant across China, and only the People's Liberation Army stands between them and the helpless, famished villages in the mountains. While moving through northeastern China, Commander 203 and his unit come across a group of bandits working for Lord Hawk, a ruthless warlord who has holed himself up in the fortress at Tiger Mountain. They soon discover his plot to assemble the three Advance Maps, which will allow him to assemble hoards of Japanese resources and dominate the region - and soon after, all of China - from his isolated mountain fortress. Only with the aid of a new arrival, the spy and counterintelligence expert Yang Ziorang, can they infiltrate the fortress and find a way to take down Lord Hawk's gang once and for all.
Right away, I want to note the story is very well paced. Despite being a 140 minute movie, the runtime only occassionally makes itself known during some of the slower scenes with the villages. Everywhere else, from the opening battle, to the slow yet steady reveal of Lord Hawk's plot, from Yang's adventures while infiltrating to the tense protracted wait for Hawk's men, moves so smoothly that I don't even care time is passing. And this is without getting into the numerous subplots with characters on both sides. I will note that I don't exactly remember any of their NAMES (especially not the various brothers in Hawk's gang), but they all give such good performances and have such interesting designs that I could probably pick them out of a lineup and rattle off their role in the film easily.
Speaking of performances, we get some great stuff from the leads. Commander 203, Tank and Gao all get pretty solid ones out of their actors, but it's our hero and lead villain who give the best shows. Zhang Hanyu plays Yang Ziorang, who seriously reminds me of a somewhat more comedic Chinese take on James Bond. Once he starts going, he doesn't stop, either chewing the scenery or speaking in soft, serious tones as the scene demands it, and generally giving off an air of a man who untangles every situation inside of ten seconds without letting you onto the fact that he did so in the first place until after he's done it. He's definitely playing a proto-spy character in a nontraditional setting, which gives him a really good villain to work off.
Tony Leung Ka-fei's Lord Hawk is, in theory, just a good villain. For the first hour of the movie they only let you hear him, which gives Ka-fei ample chance to do his best Doctor Claw (I don't know enough about China to come up with a suitable substitute), and when he's finally revealed, he takes on a fair deal of large ham, slightly comedic traits. In another movie, he might be a nonthreatening bad guy. But in this movie, his sudden outbursts through slow, self-contradicting speeches and displays of both ruthlessness and gentleness with his men give him just enough unpredictability to add tension to every scene he's in. Overall, Ka-fei just plays him wonderfully, and acts as a great foil to Yang.
But a movie like this isn't going to win just off its characters. The action has to play well too. And, admittedly, there aren't all that many action scenes in this movie. Going off my memories, the big set-pieces are the skirmish at the start, Yang fighting a tiger at fifty minutes (silly and out of nowhere, but effective), the battle at the village at around an hour and a half, and the final assault on Tiger Mountain at the end (plus one more, but I'll get to that in a moment). Fortunately the plotting in the first half and character of the bandits in the second half more than make up for the lack of action, and when they aren't available, there's a good tense argument going to fill the gaps. Yet even for the lack of action, it's all really good. There's a slow-mo, slightly 3D effect going on in certain shots, and they add a certain flair to the scenes that I'm a big fan of - although I could see why others might call it hokey.
I want to pay special attention to the bits in the last two action scenes where the characters employ skis; first as a means of getting around the battlefield faster and making themselves harder targets, and then to jump the crevice towards the back of Tiger Mountain and create a zip line across for the rest. It might be a silly thing to like, but I've never seen an action or war movie using skiing as a prominent aspect, and it's a refreshing addition that makes perfect sense for the snowy mountain setting. Plus, it just looks cool. Can't really fault anything in a movie like this for looking cool.
It all just works and blends together in a manner I can't help but love. Like I said, I was expecting a movie I couldn't penetrate for the cultural differences, but Tiger Mountain is very accessible to an American whose palette is more used to the Avengers than anything else. Beyond the setting and scenario (which they explain within the first ten minutes), there's not much need to understand the Chinese culture at the time, and the direction plays everything off as more a timeless tail with modern trappings, something anyone can get into. It's less like reading a different language and more like listening to a different accent of action films - unfamiliar, but still understandable. I'm definitely interested in seeing more of Hark's work, and more Chinese action films in general.
For all my praise, though, I do have my fair share of issues with the movie. I've already noted some of the village scenes have a tendency to drag, but my main problem is with the framing device. For some reason that I can't begin to understand, the film starts with a modern day Chinese-American man hearing a song from the original opera during a karaoke party and deciding to return home for New Years. He then vanishes until the end, when he arrives at home in the same village the soldiers defended, and his grandfather was a child they'd rescued during their adventure. Then he imagines how Lord Hawk's defeat MIGHT have gone in a manner that reminds me of James Bond played completely unironically. Then he and all the soldiers (still played by the same actors) eat New Years dinner, and the movie ends.
I can't, for the life of me, work out why the film is contextualized this way. It doesn't add anything to our understanding of the plot or characters, or even the man at the center of the framing device. I glanced around at some other reviews, and found a few hypotheses as to why it's here. Two that stick out to me particularly are Hark resenting the restrictions the government placed on his creativity and added the final sequence as a means of showing what he REALLY wanted to do, and Hark making fun of younger Chinese people for twisting a classic tale into something over the top. Me, after watching the film but before doing my supplementary reading, I thought it was an attempt to let off steam after finishing the movie and have a bit of fun poking at American styles of filmmaking (as the character in the framing device is Chinese-American). None of it really seems right though, and the film's final sequence just confuses me.
And... well, as I alluded to in the last paragraph, the Chinese government apparently had a pretty big hand in funding the film. The Chinese military in particular. Given the history of the Tiger Mountain story being used as a means of promoting compliance amongst the populace (although the characters are heroic, they're also communist revolutionaries trying to claim China for the party that would eventually lead to an oppressive regime in the late 20th century), this raises some questions as to the intentions behind this remake. Is it just the director's desire to give a fresh take on an old story, or the government funding a retelling in an effort to forward its interests? And if it is the latter, am I in the wrong for recommending the movie as heartily as I have?
I really don't have the answer to that question. As I've stated multiple times here, my knowledge of China and its culture and politics is especially limited, so even passing negative judgement on what may be a propaganda piece in disguise would be foolhardy without proper cultural context. I will say, however, that for whatever it is, The Taking of Tiger Mountain impressed me greatly while I was watching it, and turned out as a great find from Netflix. I'd say look into the matter and decide for yourselves how you feel, but still do recommend the film, if only on the basis of being a great action film.
(Assorted thoughts
- While the film's description purposes a degree of historical accuracy, I highly doubt anyone quite so lavishly costumed and flamboyant as Lord Hawk and his gang were running around northern China after World War II.
- Seriously, I don't think I can emphasize how much combat-ready skiing makes me feel all giddy inside.
- A 1970 recording of the original opera is up on YouTube as of this writing. I might give it a look over the weekend, and I recommend you do the same.)
I wound up with a few things coming up during the writing of this article that prevented a second pass at polishing and editing from being done, so I hope the raw text I have here is good enough. Also, I'm not sure what happened with Elena, but she never got around to writing her review of Black Christmas. Here's to hoping she's able to start up tomorrow.
(There IS a reason why the sidebar says the schedule is only hypothetical, though...)
My exposure to Asian entertainment is limited largely to the anime my dad and brother watch on adult swim. S'good stuff, pretty well put together most of the time, but it's only one form of entertainment, and one oftentimes defined by cheapness and poor dubbing at that. I've only watched a small handful of really, properly foreign films (when I say that, I mean films not made over in the UK, which for all the differences you could mention still subscribes to enough of the same conventions as US films that I can keep up without much effort), most of which are either martial arts or Godzilla flicks. I say all this because going into today's film, The Taking Of Tiger Mountain (courtesy of my uncle watching Iron Sky and rating it high enough for international movies to pop up on his dash), I expected to be completely alienated. A historical action film set in the aftermath of World War II focusing on a bunch of Chinese soldiers in the middle of nowhere? The cultural differences alone would be enough to put me off, not to mention my complete lack of knowledge of Chinese history. It was a film I went into with a certain degree of wariness.
After having seen it, I have only one thing to say.
Holy shit, why didn't anyone tell me about The Taking of Tiger Mountain sooner?
OK, OK, maybe I should back up just a touch. I really liked the movie, but I should probably provide some backstory before getting into gushing over it, because I feel it's important to the review making sense, and also showing that for as great as the movie is, there's reasons to have reservations about liking it.
The original story Tiger Mountain takes its inspiration from comes out of Chinese novelist Qu Bo's first book, 1957's Tracks in the Snowy Forest, a series of tales about members of the People's Liberation Army tracking down bandits and marauders in the snowy mountains of China's northeastern mountains, largely drawn from his own experiences as a member of the PLA. During the reign of Mao Zedong, a portion of the book was adapted into the opera Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, which became one of the eight model operas in China - the plays used by the government to emphasize China's strength and power while limiting the citizenry's exposure to outside or contrarian ideas. Director Xie Tielli created a film adaptation in 1970, and the opera remained a popular mainstay of the Peking Opera.
All of this is to say the story of Yang Ziorang and the 203rd unit is, to my understanding, a very familiar, well-worn story to the Chinese people. It's so inherently Chinese that, upon reading all this information after finishing the film, I was all the more impressed with how accessible it is. Director Tsui Hark is apparently a very popular, highly regarded director in his home country, and even directed Double Team stateside (a film which, for those like me whose first experience with internet film criticism was the Nostalgia Critic, is notable for helping to reveal that Doug Walker does not have the slightest clue how internet memes work), but if I had read any of this BEFORE watching the film, I might not have had any inclination to check out the rest of his work. Now, having seen how he managed to communicate the story in such a timeless yet effortlessly cool and relatable manner, I'm all for seeing what Flying Swords of Dragon Gate.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The story first, then. In the aftermath of the second World War, bandits run rampant across China, and only the People's Liberation Army stands between them and the helpless, famished villages in the mountains. While moving through northeastern China, Commander 203 and his unit come across a group of bandits working for Lord Hawk, a ruthless warlord who has holed himself up in the fortress at Tiger Mountain. They soon discover his plot to assemble the three Advance Maps, which will allow him to assemble hoards of Japanese resources and dominate the region - and soon after, all of China - from his isolated mountain fortress. Only with the aid of a new arrival, the spy and counterintelligence expert Yang Ziorang, can they infiltrate the fortress and find a way to take down Lord Hawk's gang once and for all.
Right away, I want to note the story is very well paced. Despite being a 140 minute movie, the runtime only occassionally makes itself known during some of the slower scenes with the villages. Everywhere else, from the opening battle, to the slow yet steady reveal of Lord Hawk's plot, from Yang's adventures while infiltrating to the tense protracted wait for Hawk's men, moves so smoothly that I don't even care time is passing. And this is without getting into the numerous subplots with characters on both sides. I will note that I don't exactly remember any of their NAMES (especially not the various brothers in Hawk's gang), but they all give such good performances and have such interesting designs that I could probably pick them out of a lineup and rattle off their role in the film easily.
Speaking of performances, we get some great stuff from the leads. Commander 203, Tank and Gao all get pretty solid ones out of their actors, but it's our hero and lead villain who give the best shows. Zhang Hanyu plays Yang Ziorang, who seriously reminds me of a somewhat more comedic Chinese take on James Bond. Once he starts going, he doesn't stop, either chewing the scenery or speaking in soft, serious tones as the scene demands it, and generally giving off an air of a man who untangles every situation inside of ten seconds without letting you onto the fact that he did so in the first place until after he's done it. He's definitely playing a proto-spy character in a nontraditional setting, which gives him a really good villain to work off.
Tony Leung Ka-fei's Lord Hawk is, in theory, just a good villain. For the first hour of the movie they only let you hear him, which gives Ka-fei ample chance to do his best Doctor Claw (I don't know enough about China to come up with a suitable substitute), and when he's finally revealed, he takes on a fair deal of large ham, slightly comedic traits. In another movie, he might be a nonthreatening bad guy. But in this movie, his sudden outbursts through slow, self-contradicting speeches and displays of both ruthlessness and gentleness with his men give him just enough unpredictability to add tension to every scene he's in. Overall, Ka-fei just plays him wonderfully, and acts as a great foil to Yang.
But a movie like this isn't going to win just off its characters. The action has to play well too. And, admittedly, there aren't all that many action scenes in this movie. Going off my memories, the big set-pieces are the skirmish at the start, Yang fighting a tiger at fifty minutes (silly and out of nowhere, but effective), the battle at the village at around an hour and a half, and the final assault on Tiger Mountain at the end (plus one more, but I'll get to that in a moment). Fortunately the plotting in the first half and character of the bandits in the second half more than make up for the lack of action, and when they aren't available, there's a good tense argument going to fill the gaps. Yet even for the lack of action, it's all really good. There's a slow-mo, slightly 3D effect going on in certain shots, and they add a certain flair to the scenes that I'm a big fan of - although I could see why others might call it hokey.
I want to pay special attention to the bits in the last two action scenes where the characters employ skis; first as a means of getting around the battlefield faster and making themselves harder targets, and then to jump the crevice towards the back of Tiger Mountain and create a zip line across for the rest. It might be a silly thing to like, but I've never seen an action or war movie using skiing as a prominent aspect, and it's a refreshing addition that makes perfect sense for the snowy mountain setting. Plus, it just looks cool. Can't really fault anything in a movie like this for looking cool.
It all just works and blends together in a manner I can't help but love. Like I said, I was expecting a movie I couldn't penetrate for the cultural differences, but Tiger Mountain is very accessible to an American whose palette is more used to the Avengers than anything else. Beyond the setting and scenario (which they explain within the first ten minutes), there's not much need to understand the Chinese culture at the time, and the direction plays everything off as more a timeless tail with modern trappings, something anyone can get into. It's less like reading a different language and more like listening to a different accent of action films - unfamiliar, but still understandable. I'm definitely interested in seeing more of Hark's work, and more Chinese action films in general.
For all my praise, though, I do have my fair share of issues with the movie. I've already noted some of the village scenes have a tendency to drag, but my main problem is with the framing device. For some reason that I can't begin to understand, the film starts with a modern day Chinese-American man hearing a song from the original opera during a karaoke party and deciding to return home for New Years. He then vanishes until the end, when he arrives at home in the same village the soldiers defended, and his grandfather was a child they'd rescued during their adventure. Then he imagines how Lord Hawk's defeat MIGHT have gone in a manner that reminds me of James Bond played completely unironically. Then he and all the soldiers (still played by the same actors) eat New Years dinner, and the movie ends.
I can't, for the life of me, work out why the film is contextualized this way. It doesn't add anything to our understanding of the plot or characters, or even the man at the center of the framing device. I glanced around at some other reviews, and found a few hypotheses as to why it's here. Two that stick out to me particularly are Hark resenting the restrictions the government placed on his creativity and added the final sequence as a means of showing what he REALLY wanted to do, and Hark making fun of younger Chinese people for twisting a classic tale into something over the top. Me, after watching the film but before doing my supplementary reading, I thought it was an attempt to let off steam after finishing the movie and have a bit of fun poking at American styles of filmmaking (as the character in the framing device is Chinese-American). None of it really seems right though, and the film's final sequence just confuses me.
And... well, as I alluded to in the last paragraph, the Chinese government apparently had a pretty big hand in funding the film. The Chinese military in particular. Given the history of the Tiger Mountain story being used as a means of promoting compliance amongst the populace (although the characters are heroic, they're also communist revolutionaries trying to claim China for the party that would eventually lead to an oppressive regime in the late 20th century), this raises some questions as to the intentions behind this remake. Is it just the director's desire to give a fresh take on an old story, or the government funding a retelling in an effort to forward its interests? And if it is the latter, am I in the wrong for recommending the movie as heartily as I have?
I really don't have the answer to that question. As I've stated multiple times here, my knowledge of China and its culture and politics is especially limited, so even passing negative judgement on what may be a propaganda piece in disguise would be foolhardy without proper cultural context. I will say, however, that for whatever it is, The Taking of Tiger Mountain impressed me greatly while I was watching it, and turned out as a great find from Netflix. I'd say look into the matter and decide for yourselves how you feel, but still do recommend the film, if only on the basis of being a great action film.
(Assorted thoughts
- While the film's description purposes a degree of historical accuracy, I highly doubt anyone quite so lavishly costumed and flamboyant as Lord Hawk and his gang were running around northern China after World War II.
- Seriously, I don't think I can emphasize how much combat-ready skiing makes me feel all giddy inside.
- A 1970 recording of the original opera is up on YouTube as of this writing. I might give it a look over the weekend, and I recommend you do the same.)
I wound up with a few things coming up during the writing of this article that prevented a second pass at polishing and editing from being done, so I hope the raw text I have here is good enough. Also, I'm not sure what happened with Elena, but she never got around to writing her review of Black Christmas. Here's to hoping she's able to start up tomorrow.
(There IS a reason why the sidebar says the schedule is only hypothetical, though...)
Monday, August 17, 2015
Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn - Eh kills aliens and doesn't afraid of anything for maybe twenty minutes or so.
Roll one gives us Netflix, which gives us my brother's account, which leads us into Violent Action and Adventure, which gives us our film for today...
Unlike Hulu Plus and Amazon Instant, Netflix's list of choices isn't exactly the same thing every time. They always tailor the movies and shows you see based on whatever you happen to have watched before, which means my options are always tailor-made to my interests. The purpose of this blog, however, is not to constantly explore my own likes, but to randomly subject me to whatever movie happens to come up as a result of my viewing habits. Thus, in order to avoid any sort of stagnancy with my reviews when Netflix is rolled, I've decided to add an extra layer, and roll on whether or not to make the choice from my Netflix, or the ones shared with me by my dad, uncle, and brother (all of whom use the same account.) This should keep the exposure at least somewhat fresh, as all of us have rather different tastes in our browsing habits.
This role brought up my brother's account, which he has never used for anything at all, and should give us the closest thing to a completely unbiased set of Netflix suggestions as possible.
However, this lack of bias leads to dangerous territory. Dangerous territory such as movies I know absolutely nothing about and have no interest in being recommended, and subsequently chosen through the random rolls. Such is the situation I'm in today with the movie I am stuck with because of my refusal to reroll - Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn.
I know fucking nothing about Halo. I've never owned an XBox of any sort, and the series never wound up as one I obsessively read about on Wikipedia when it became apparent I'd never play it in depth. The only time I've even seen it in action was when I was ten and played it for twenty minutes at someone's house. I tried to use the energy sword and got killed a lot. That's the entirety of my Halo experience. So as you might guess, I'm about as qualified to say whether or not this movie is good or bad or enjoyable as someone dropped dead into Act 3 of Metal Gear Solid 4.
That said, the movie isn't quite as impenetrable as I just made it sound, but it IS a film primarily for fans. The big draw seems to be around seven or eight moments where a thing from the games shows up and does the thing it does in the games. Beyond those, the story - told through the flashback of some military guy at the start making a decision to save Master Chief from deep space cryostasis despite nobody liking him much - looks to exist entirely as a means of saying, "So THAT'S who generic military commander from the opening cutscene of the new game is!" There's nothing wrong with that sort of goal, and I think it could have led to an interesting stand-alone story with elements from the games thrown in to appease fans while still creating a satisfying narrative for newcomers and casuals.
It's just too bad they didn't roll with it.
The bulk of the film concerns itself with the misadventures of Tom "the wiki informs me his last name is" Lasky - whose first name I only remember because it's the same as his actor's, Tom Green - at Corbulo Academy of military science, and his various conflicts with his drill instructor, general and headmistress of the academy, and, most disastrously, his teammates. I do not know a single thing about them. The film spends a fair deal of its opening moments dedicating a series of reality TV/start of a serious military documentary introductions to them (and just a lengthy side note - it never bugs me much, but the fact that they're 500 years in the future and at a hig-tech military academy on the eve of a war against aliens and all still talk and act like young adults do today just really tweaks me. I don't know why), and they're on screen for a fair deal of the film, but even the ones who are actually important and not just cannon fodder later on left no impression on me in the slightest. I remember one of them was sort of a dick, and one was Russian and then never spoke again, but beyond that, nothin'.
Lack of character is a big problem with this film. Everything really picks up once the Covenant (an earlier draft of this article said aliens for every instance of Covenant, until a friend virtually slapped me around and told me it made me sound like I wasn't paying attention) attacks and Master Chief shows up to do his thing, but it happens around fifty minutes into the movie, and even taking its origin as a five-part web series into account, spending three-fifths of the running time on generic military training plots just doesn't cut it. I barely consume any military fiction, and I've seen all these plot points before a million times over. New cadet doesn't like orders but he still functions well under the right conditions. Older sibling already in the forces who he has to live up to. Same with a parent. Reacting poorly to a part of the training that almost disqualifies him. Everything about clashing with his teammates. It doesn't make the film boring, but it does make it hard to care about any of the characters when the aliens attack.
Fortunately, things DO pick up when the Covenant attacks. Despite not caring about the deaths of anyone in the cast (or even realizing when a death happened sometimes), the action and effects look great, especially for a web series, and everything has a good layer of tension to it. Not edge of your seat pulse pounding, but more like "Where is? Is he gonna get 'em? Is he gonna get 'em? I know he's gonna get 'em but when's he gonna get OH LOOK HE GOT 'EM!" It's probably a result of finally using the stuff from the games everyone came to see, but it's still well done.
By the same merit, I also like Master Chief in the film. Having never played the games, I can't really say if he's portrayed accurately or lacks any depth he might have, but what's shown is pretty good. He's appropriately strong and heroic, but also cold and distant enough to cause tension amongst the main cast. A savior who won't turn on you but you're not sure you can trust until he's blown up a giant alien tank monster twice for you (I'm informed the tank monster is, in fact, a Hunter). His character's more badass than compelling, but given the "GET HYPE FOR HALO 4" reasoning behind making this, I can't complain.
Even with those positive merits, though, the film waits too long to actually use them. There's a bit I like after Chief first shows up where one of the surviving cadets talks about him like he's a robot and inferior to the ACTUAL soldiers, which intrigued me a bit. I wish it had been more than a throwaway line, because further tension between Master Chief and the soldiers could have helped Lasky's arc throughout the film. Something along the lines of being terrified of his "inner soldier" by the cold, callous Spartan, only to realize what a hero he is and save his life in return. Would have given his arc a lot more punch.
Really, the whole movie could have benefited from the Covenant showing up a half hour earlier. It would have alleviated the problems with the rest of the squad being too shallow, and might've even made them more memorable, by drawing out stronger performances during stressful times. The filmmakers might have even been able to spread out the limited amount of "Oh SHIT it's the WARTHOG, you guys know the WARTHOG, right?" moments instead of cramming them into the last half hour, and generally had more of Master Chief around - which, again, given the mission statement of this film, can't possibly be a bad thing.
I rated this film two stars out of five on Netflix, but I don't think the descriptor of "didn't like it" is accurate. I enjoyed the movie, and it actually made me want to learn a little more about the Halo universe (a wiki binge might be in my near future), but I was disappointed in its overall structure and lack of punch where it was needed. "Flawed but still enjoyable, even for a nonfan" would be a much better description of my thoughts on this one.
(Assorted thoughts:
-There's way too many slow motion shots that last for three to five seconds, which are quite obviously made for trailer purposes.
-Seeing as the energy sword is the one thing I remember from my one time playing Halo, it was neat seeing it here, and everyone's confusion about it helped me work out that this was supposed to be a prequel to the entire series, and not just something tossed in the middle of the chronology.
-How the hell do you kill a planet's entire human population in fifteen minutes but leave all the trees perfectly intact? (Something about using plasma cannons to glass the planet)
-How the hell are you certain the only living people left on the entire planet were these four or five people? (The answer is apparently they used their tech to scan the planet.)
-How the hell do four or five people manage to be the only surviving individuals on a planet at ground zero of a ruthless alien attack?)
Anyways, I'd like to thank my co-contributor, Elena Young, for talking to me about the film afterwards and clearing up a few things so I don't sound like a total idiot. Elena, for the record, is going to fill in the blog's Tuesday-Thursday slots, using the same methods I do to choose movies, except only with Netflix. Look forward to her first article coming tomorrow. I'll see you guys Wednesday with another movie - one I'm hopefully more qualified to review.
Unlike Hulu Plus and Amazon Instant, Netflix's list of choices isn't exactly the same thing every time. They always tailor the movies and shows you see based on whatever you happen to have watched before, which means my options are always tailor-made to my interests. The purpose of this blog, however, is not to constantly explore my own likes, but to randomly subject me to whatever movie happens to come up as a result of my viewing habits. Thus, in order to avoid any sort of stagnancy with my reviews when Netflix is rolled, I've decided to add an extra layer, and roll on whether or not to make the choice from my Netflix, or the ones shared with me by my dad, uncle, and brother (all of whom use the same account.) This should keep the exposure at least somewhat fresh, as all of us have rather different tastes in our browsing habits.
This role brought up my brother's account, which he has never used for anything at all, and should give us the closest thing to a completely unbiased set of Netflix suggestions as possible.
However, this lack of bias leads to dangerous territory. Dangerous territory such as movies I know absolutely nothing about and have no interest in being recommended, and subsequently chosen through the random rolls. Such is the situation I'm in today with the movie I am stuck with because of my refusal to reroll - Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn.
I know fucking nothing about Halo. I've never owned an XBox of any sort, and the series never wound up as one I obsessively read about on Wikipedia when it became apparent I'd never play it in depth. The only time I've even seen it in action was when I was ten and played it for twenty minutes at someone's house. I tried to use the energy sword and got killed a lot. That's the entirety of my Halo experience. So as you might guess, I'm about as qualified to say whether or not this movie is good or bad or enjoyable as someone dropped dead into Act 3 of Metal Gear Solid 4.
That said, the movie isn't quite as impenetrable as I just made it sound, but it IS a film primarily for fans. The big draw seems to be around seven or eight moments where a thing from the games shows up and does the thing it does in the games. Beyond those, the story - told through the flashback of some military guy at the start making a decision to save Master Chief from deep space cryostasis despite nobody liking him much - looks to exist entirely as a means of saying, "So THAT'S who generic military commander from the opening cutscene of the new game is!" There's nothing wrong with that sort of goal, and I think it could have led to an interesting stand-alone story with elements from the games thrown in to appease fans while still creating a satisfying narrative for newcomers and casuals.
It's just too bad they didn't roll with it.
The bulk of the film concerns itself with the misadventures of Tom "the wiki informs me his last name is" Lasky - whose first name I only remember because it's the same as his actor's, Tom Green - at Corbulo Academy of military science, and his various conflicts with his drill instructor, general and headmistress of the academy, and, most disastrously, his teammates. I do not know a single thing about them. The film spends a fair deal of its opening moments dedicating a series of reality TV/start of a serious military documentary introductions to them (and just a lengthy side note - it never bugs me much, but the fact that they're 500 years in the future and at a hig-tech military academy on the eve of a war against aliens and all still talk and act like young adults do today just really tweaks me. I don't know why), and they're on screen for a fair deal of the film, but even the ones who are actually important and not just cannon fodder later on left no impression on me in the slightest. I remember one of them was sort of a dick, and one was Russian and then never spoke again, but beyond that, nothin'.
Lack of character is a big problem with this film. Everything really picks up once the Covenant (an earlier draft of this article said aliens for every instance of Covenant, until a friend virtually slapped me around and told me it made me sound like I wasn't paying attention) attacks and Master Chief shows up to do his thing, but it happens around fifty minutes into the movie, and even taking its origin as a five-part web series into account, spending three-fifths of the running time on generic military training plots just doesn't cut it. I barely consume any military fiction, and I've seen all these plot points before a million times over. New cadet doesn't like orders but he still functions well under the right conditions. Older sibling already in the forces who he has to live up to. Same with a parent. Reacting poorly to a part of the training that almost disqualifies him. Everything about clashing with his teammates. It doesn't make the film boring, but it does make it hard to care about any of the characters when the aliens attack.
Fortunately, things DO pick up when the Covenant attacks. Despite not caring about the deaths of anyone in the cast (or even realizing when a death happened sometimes), the action and effects look great, especially for a web series, and everything has a good layer of tension to it. Not edge of your seat pulse pounding, but more like "Where is? Is he gonna get 'em? Is he gonna get 'em? I know he's gonna get 'em but when's he gonna get OH LOOK HE GOT 'EM!" It's probably a result of finally using the stuff from the games everyone came to see, but it's still well done.
By the same merit, I also like Master Chief in the film. Having never played the games, I can't really say if he's portrayed accurately or lacks any depth he might have, but what's shown is pretty good. He's appropriately strong and heroic, but also cold and distant enough to cause tension amongst the main cast. A savior who won't turn on you but you're not sure you can trust until he's blown up a giant alien tank monster twice for you (I'm informed the tank monster is, in fact, a Hunter). His character's more badass than compelling, but given the "GET HYPE FOR HALO 4" reasoning behind making this, I can't complain.
Even with those positive merits, though, the film waits too long to actually use them. There's a bit I like after Chief first shows up where one of the surviving cadets talks about him like he's a robot and inferior to the ACTUAL soldiers, which intrigued me a bit. I wish it had been more than a throwaway line, because further tension between Master Chief and the soldiers could have helped Lasky's arc throughout the film. Something along the lines of being terrified of his "inner soldier" by the cold, callous Spartan, only to realize what a hero he is and save his life in return. Would have given his arc a lot more punch.
Really, the whole movie could have benefited from the Covenant showing up a half hour earlier. It would have alleviated the problems with the rest of the squad being too shallow, and might've even made them more memorable, by drawing out stronger performances during stressful times. The filmmakers might have even been able to spread out the limited amount of "Oh SHIT it's the WARTHOG, you guys know the WARTHOG, right?" moments instead of cramming them into the last half hour, and generally had more of Master Chief around - which, again, given the mission statement of this film, can't possibly be a bad thing.
I rated this film two stars out of five on Netflix, but I don't think the descriptor of "didn't like it" is accurate. I enjoyed the movie, and it actually made me want to learn a little more about the Halo universe (a wiki binge might be in my near future), but I was disappointed in its overall structure and lack of punch where it was needed. "Flawed but still enjoyable, even for a nonfan" would be a much better description of my thoughts on this one.
(Assorted thoughts:
-There's way too many slow motion shots that last for three to five seconds, which are quite obviously made for trailer purposes.
-Seeing as the energy sword is the one thing I remember from my one time playing Halo, it was neat seeing it here, and everyone's confusion about it helped me work out that this was supposed to be a prequel to the entire series, and not just something tossed in the middle of the chronology.
-How the hell do you kill a planet's entire human population in fifteen minutes but leave all the trees perfectly intact? (Something about using plasma cannons to glass the planet)
-How the hell are you certain the only living people left on the entire planet were these four or five people? (The answer is apparently they used their tech to scan the planet.)
-How the hell do four or five people manage to be the only surviving individuals on a planet at ground zero of a ruthless alien attack?)
Anyways, I'd like to thank my co-contributor, Elena Young, for talking to me about the film afterwards and clearing up a few things so I don't sound like a total idiot. Elena, for the record, is going to fill in the blog's Tuesday-Thursday slots, using the same methods I do to choose movies, except only with Netflix. Look forward to her first article coming tomorrow. I'll see you guys Wednesday with another movie - one I'm hopefully more qualified to review.
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