Some Other Movies I Saw in 2014 (Part One: The Less Worse, I Guess)

 It's fair to say that you might see the first few movies on this list and say "really, _____ made it on your 'Worst' list, but that didn't?" That's fair, I suppose; I could hide behind the veil of "subjectivity" and argue that this is my list, not yours, but the name of the blog isn't "General Cranpire's Den of Filmduggery" (note to Cranpire - that's a great title and you should use it, post-haste), so that should be obvious who the opinions belong to. Spoiler Alert: The Highest Bidder! But yes, okay, it's under a weird criteria that I determined where to stop the "worst of" without including one of last year's Liam Neeson movies (not the one where he fights vampires, I assume strictly from the title). That's how I roll, kids.


 So it makes sense to just get Non-Stop out of the way, and by that I mean mostly just link to my review from earlier this year. It was short enough to sandwich in with Bye Bye Birdie and Die, Monster Die!, so while I didn't hate it, clearly the movie didn't make much of an impression, review-wise: but, looking back at it, it's way longer than needs to be in a recap. This section of the review does seem to sum things up pretty well:

"It's almost ridiculous enough to recommend in and of itself, but the fact that the first half or so is also a decent game of "cat and mouse" works in its favor. In the "Liam Neeson, man of action" genre, it falls somewhere between Taken and Taken 2 - neither as enjoyable stupid as the former, nor as inane and redundant as the second [...] If you're inclined to enjoy movies like this, or saw the poster and said "I'll rent that," you're better off watching Non-Stop than, say, Drive Hard. If you're more predisposed towards, say, Neeson in The Grey, this is not going to be your cup of tea, but if you liked Flightplan... well, um, you liked Flightplan. Congratulations?"

 Fading Gigolo is a movie I'm guessing most of you didn't see, because it came out not long after last year's "is Woody Allen a pedophile or not" row that was everywhere between the Golden Globes and the Oscars but was pretty much gone by the time Magic in the Moonlight came out (a movie I'll be discussing in another part of the recap). At this point I'm going to stop talking about that, because I learned what a bad idea it is to mention the words "Woody Allen" or "Roman Polanski" and "controversy" on the internet. But yes, Woody Allen is in Fading Gigolo. He did not direct it - John Turturro did, along with writing and starring as the titular character, Fioravante. He's a florist, and his friend Murray (Allen) just lost his bookstore and needs money. Fioravante agrees to become an escort with Murray as his manager, in the service of eventually fulfilling the fantasy of Murray's dermatologist (Sharon Stone) and her friend (Sofia Vergara) to have a three-way.

 That's probably enough of a movie right there, but Turturro also includes an entirely separate plot about an Orthodox Jewish woman named Avigal (Vanessa Paradis) who Fioravante falls in love with, much to the chagrin of Dovi (Liev Schreiber), a community police officer. At some point, a council of Rabbis get involved, and it plays out like a bizarro version of being confronted by the mob, complete with Murray needing his lawyer (Bob Balaban) to save him from charges of being a pimp. It's a mostly harmless and sometimes amusing movie, even sweet sometimes, but not something that stuck with me for very long afterward. There's a better movie with John Turturro that will be showing up later in the recaps, so stay tuned for that.

 While we're on the subject of "better movies," I feel like there's a better movie somewhere in Alexandre Aja's Horns. Maybe it got lost in the editing, or maybe it's just inherent in the adaptation of Joe Hill's novel, but the finished product just don't quite work. It's as though Aja made a bitterly funny, black comedy, and also made a more generic, teen-friendly story of good and evil, and then smashed them together at the worst possible junctures. For the opening twenty minutes of Horns, you're probably going to think the movie is great: it has a wicked mean streak, Daniel Radcliffe is spot on as a guy everyone thinks is a murderer, that embraces the horns he grows and the power that comes with it. The way people react, first telling him their darkest fantasies and then acting on them when he says they should, is often hilarious.

 And then we hit the first of what turn out to be several, lengthy, flashbacks, giving us the backstory of Ig (Radcliffe) and Merrin (Juno Temple), leading up to her death - the one everyone assumes Ig is responsible for. Everyone, including his family - played by James Remar, Kathleen Quinlan, and Joe Anderson - is positive he did it and that he's lying, with the exception of his friend, Lee (Max Minghella). The "whodunit" is pretty easy to work out for yourself, even if Aja, Hill, and screenwriter Keith Bunin throw in a number of red herrings. I bet, without telling you anything else, you can guess who the real killer is. That's not the problem, so much as the flashbacks that put the mystery together. There's a massive tonal shift from black comedy to slightly tragic story of temptation and of good and evil (on a biblical scale), and for some reason, ne'er the twain shall meet in Horns.

 I can understand how it might have worked in Hill's novel - which I haven't yet read, but plan to - but as a film, the structure of the story is at times jarring and disruptive. Maybe there was no way to properly balance the two in a film, because Horns alternates between wicked and bland, between clever and obvious, without ever finding a good middle ground. There are some fantastic moments sprinkled throughout the film, and the cast is game for anything, playing both the best and worst versions of themselves as they encounter "evil" Ig, but Horns gets away from them. It's never quite the movie that it could be, so I'm left feeling ambivalent with the end result.

 Speaking of ambivalent, here's a good time to mention Bad Words, a movie people seemed to like a lot more than I did. While it's true that I liked Horrible Bosses 2 less than Bad Words, Jason Bateman is jerk instead of beleaguered everyman was not novelty enough to win me over what is essentially a one-note joke. If Bateman hadn't directed the film and the star was, oh, let's say Billy Bob Thornton, I somehow doubt anyone would even be talking about this, another film in the "bad" series of comedies. (For the record, that review is probably NSFW, just based on the first sentence).

  The best thing I can say about Automata is that it's a better version of I, Robot than I, Robot is. Actually, there are a lot of things to like about the film, which is not-so loosely based on I, Robot, but for some reason the film as a whole is underwhelming. There's little doubt in my mind that the film is trying to skirt by under the radar without people noticing the similarities to Alex Proyas', kinda loud, kinda dumb Big Willie Style / Shia LeBouf CGI action fest, including scaling back to rules of robotics from three to two (and changing one of them to suit the narrative - that robots can't self repair). It's a visual feast, for what I have to imagine was not a large budget (director and co-writer Gabe Ibáñez shot the film in Bulgaria).

 Stop me if you've heard this before: in the future, there's been a catastrophic global weather shift, which caused most of Earth to be irradiated. People live in cramped cities, with some living in zeppelin-like housing units. Robots help humanity, although they've so permeated the culture that they're considered just as useless as any of the other trash (shades of Elysium, if you remember that movie from, you know, last year). Cop Sean Wallace (Dylan McDermott) finds one repairing itself, and blows it away, causing the ROC Robotics Corporation to send insurance adjuster Jacq Vaucan (Antonio Banderas) to investigate. What he finds could change the ROC corporation forever, as well as endanger his boss, Robert Bold (Robert Forster) and his wife Rachel (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) and their unborn son.

 And what does he discover (SPOILER???): that the robots are evolving, some past the point where they require humans at all. But they just want to be free, man. This doesn't sound familiar or anything, so I'm not going to belabor the comparisons to I, Robot any more. You get it. It's a more visually stylish, more sober approach to the story, after Jacq is rescued by the robots (one voiced by Melanie Griffith, who is also another character in the film, and one voice by Javier Bardem, although I didn't realize that until I saw his name in the credits). The ending is kind of predictable, but it feels like there's more at stake than in I, Robot, and that violent ends can and will come to any character.

 So why didn't I like it more? That is an excellent question, and I'm not convinced I can give you a good answer. Despite the fact that it does almost everything I, Robot does, but better, in part by giving is a Neill Blomkamp sheen or grime and decay over everything, there's something strangely inert about Automata. I can't quite put my finger on it, but instead of being invested, I found myself distanced, at times bored. It wasn't that you can see where the movie is going a mile away - that can be said of Horns, too, which is at least partly a fun ride - but that despite all of the effort into making the film look great, Ibáñez never quite makes the humans interesting. Banderas certainly gives it his all, but neither he nor the robots are all that gripping as characters. It's a very nice film to look at, and has a lot of things I would recommend about it, but I hesitate to recommend it over any of the better science fiction films released in 2014. And there were a lot, as you'll see when we get near the top of my list.

 There's a degree to which I enjoyed Batman: Assault on Arkham, one of the better DC Animated films that I've seen in a while. Despite the misleading title (this is, make no mistake, a Suicide Squad movie that Batman pops up in periodically), it's fast paced, sporadically funny, surprisingly violent, and pushes the PG-13 as far as they can with animated sideboob. Being that it's a Suicide Squad story - one tied to the Arkham games, and specifically Origins - the death toll is quite high, including many of the main characters. Unless you're a massive DC fan, you probably won't know many more characters beyond Harley Quinn and Deadshot. Maybe Captain Boomerang, and if you didn't, yes, that's a real thing. It has the odd distinction of having Kevin Conroy as Batman but not Mark Hamill as the Joker (although Troy Baker does a fine job) - also odd because Conroy isn't the voice of Batman in Arkham Origins, which ends with the setup for this movie. It's short, and I'm struggling to remember much more than a few offhand references to The Dark Knight and using the layout of the asylum you'll immediately recognize from the first game. So, uh, recommended?

 On that decisive note, we'll leave it here for now, but there's more. Next time, I'll move a little farther up the list, to mixed-positives that you might want to check out (with some caveats), although I have the feeling that one of them might be more contentious than anything included in this section. Until then...

Quick Review(s): Non-Stop, Bye Bye Birdie, and Die, Monster, Die!

 Even the Cap'n has strange weekends, sometimes: while it should come as no surprise to you that I'm watching more movies than are being reviewed as of late, some weekends, even I can't account for the unusual combinations. This past weekend, for example, I sat down to watch Drive Hard and barely got through it, despite the potentially winning combination of Thomas Jane, John Cusack, and director Brian Trenchard-Smith. Then, because that was such a disaster, I watched Summer Fest alumnus Death Spa (this time on Blu-Ray) and was surprised at the level of talent behind the camera in the accompanying documentary (perhaps more on that at another point).

 Then, for reasons known only to me, I decided it was time to figure out whether I had really seen all of Bye Bye Birdie or not (I had), and then to check out an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation I didn't realize existed, Die, Monster, Die!, before closing things out with the latest "Liam Neeson 'special set of skills' Action Movie," Non-Stop. Because that's clearly a balanced weekend, right? A little action, a dash of musical comedy, and an AIP cash-in on the success of Roger Corman's The Haunted Palace.

 (To put it in perspective, the previous weekend included X-Men: Days of Future Past, Persona, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre)

 Let's take a look at this unorthodox weekend-long triple feature, shall we?

 Bye Bye Birde - Full disclosure: Bye Bye Birdie is not my favorite musical. It isn't even close (coming in well behind The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, Oklahoma, or Cannibal! The Musical), but it was a production I was involved in during high school, in a strictly "behind the scenes" capacity. Our mantra, particularly during musicals, seemed to be "copy the movie" when producing the play, so I'm certain the technical theater crew watched Bye Bye Birdie (as we did with Oklahoma and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying), but I couldn't remember if I'd ever seen it from beginning to end, so as I had the Twilight Time Blu-Ray from an order last month (with Wild at Heart and Used Cars), it seemed like a good time to find out.

 (It's worth pointing out that I've never seen any other production of Bye Bye Birdie - including [until very recently] the one I was involved in - so any mentions of "changes" is based entirely on what I know of the play as we did it vs. the film. I also have no idea how many other productions model themselves after the film, so the previous paragraph wasn't meant to disparage our drama department. Maybe everybody does that.)

 The film adaptation certainly has a fine cast, not limited to a star-making performance by Ann-Margret, although she nearly lost me with the opening song. It takes a little while to get accustomed to the way she sings, particularly the title song, which in all honestly I found to be a little shrill and abrasive (it's not actually part of the stage production), but I stuck with it. I wanted to see Dick Van Dyke as Albert and Janet Leigh as Rosie, and an early appearance by Ed Sullivan didn't hurt, either (his role in the film is more significant, one of several changes in adapting the play). I also knew that I had Paul Lynde - Kim MacAfee (Ann-Margret)'s father, Harry  - to look forward to. After all, I'd already seen him sing "Kids" on his Halloween Special.

Other than the title song, I found that I enjoyed most of the numbers in Bye Bye Birdie, although there are less of them than in the play (Rosie has at least one song cut, along with another song distracting reporters from asking questions about Conrad), but by necessity we also removed all of Hugo Peabody's songs - the actor playing him wasn't a singer - something that wasn't an issue for pop star Bobby Rydell, who is arguably a better singer than Jesse Pearson, the titular character. While I had largely forgotten about how much the movie deviates from the stage production, I found myself enjoying (and recalling) moving songs around - "Put on a Happy Face" in the MacAfees' back yard with Rosie, and almost immediately following "One Boy." Perhaps it was my general ignorance about Janet Leigh, but I didn't realize she was going to be singing, or, more impressively, be directly involved in the gymnastic elements of the Shriner dance. Watching the long, mostly unbroken takes, Leigh is, as best I could tell, being flipped around without the benefit of a double.

 Reading a bit about the movie, I hadn't realized that Dick Van Dyke and Paul Lynde weren't fond of the adaptation (both were in the original play), and that the former in particular felt it showcased Ann-Margret too much. It is true that the teaser trailer is strictly about Ann-Margaret and just barely finds time to mention anyone else, but even with the lion's share of screen time (and to be honest, Albert and Rosie get a lot of the middle of the film to themselves), she's not a low point in any way. If there was anybody who I felt underwhelmed by in Bye Bye Birdie, it's Conrad Birdie.

 Pinpointing exactly what's so problematic about Conrad is tricky - part of it is that director George Sidney toned down the "Lothario" part of Birdie, and aside from one quick mention of needing a "church key" to open his beer, he's not much of a louse in the film, either. Instead, Conrad is strangely muted, not particularly charismatic, and in no way deserving of the attention he gets from the girls of Sweet Apple, Ohio. I know that he's based in some capacity on Elvis (which is how most people seem to picture him), but my understanding was that the composers (Charles Strouse and Lee Adams) actually designed the character more around Conway Twitty. There's a rumor that Elvis was approached to play Birdie in the film, was interested, but Colonel Parker didn't want him parodying his image. No offense to Jesse Pearson, but it might have at least given Conrad more "oomph." He barely makes an impression for being the titular character, to the point that the Moscow Ballet portion of the Ed Sullivan Show at the end of the film is more interesting than "One Last Kiss."

 Bookending title song and Birdie aside, there's a lot to like about Bye Bye Birdie, much of which centers around Dick Van Dyke. Mary Poppins fans should keep a close eye out during "Put on a Happy Face" to see an early version of his "penguin" dance. He elevates a largely reactive character in a way that Rydell similarly doesn't (no fault of his - Hugo isn't much to work with). It's hard to argue that Ann-Margret isn't the centerpiece of the film, and she certainly makes a splash. I imagine she had some interesting conversations with Presley during the filming of Viva Las Vegas...


 Non-Stop - I suppose the easy joke here would be to say that "Non-Stop is more of a non-starter," but the truth is that for a healthy chunk of its mid-section, the film is a serviceable to pretty good thriller with enough unfolding plot developments to keep you invested. That all falls apart if you take any time to think carefully about the story, but by the time you realize what he / she / them are actually up to, it won't even matter. It's a ridiculous explanation, followed by an even more implausible climax that will leave you shaking your head. But I've gotten ahead of myself, haven't I?

 Bill Marks (Liam Neeson) is an Air Marshall on a routine trip from New York to London, when he receives a mysterious text on his secured phone. A passenger aboard the plane threatens Bill that if he doesn't transfer 150 million dollars to a private account, someone will die every twenty minutes. Marks isn't just going to let this happen, but without causing panic on the plane, who can he trust?

 That's the set-up for the film, and for the most part the entire plot, for better, for worse. Most people are really just coming because Liam Neeson is in the film and he has a gun on the poster, which brings us to his "particular set of skills" in this film, which are drinking and being a grizzled Air Marshall who hates flying. I think he's also supposed to be good at observing people, or at least that what the hazy shots of passengers led me to believe. Mostly he's good at profiling, as he picks out people who look the most threatening (and are, of course, not at all), but since most of Non-Stop is predicated on not being able to trust anybody on the flight Bill is on from New York to London, I guess it's okay for director Jaume Collet-Serra (Unknown)  to prey on our jingoistic prejudices at the outset, since he's going to totally blow our minds later in the movie. (SPOILER ALERT: the "Suspicious Muslim" stereotype is a doctor and the vaguely Easter European dude who doesn't say anything until halfway through the film is an NYPD officer. Gotcha, racist audience members!).

 Now I'm being unfair to some degree, because Collet-Serra and screenwriters John W. Richardson, Christopher Roach, and Ryan Engle do a fair bit of twisting our expectations around, even if they sometimes cheat a little bit to do it. Since we know almost nothing about any character other than Bill until well into the movie, the audience is left only with our preconceived notions about "suspicious" people on airplanes, which they toy with repeatedly. The mystery of who is sending Bill these messages (which eventually appear on screen, so we don't have to also look at his tiny phone throughout the film) and how people are going to die on a crowded flight is a pretty good one. In fact, the execution of the plan goes in a few unexpected directions early on, to the point that I was pleasantly impressed, but it doesn't last for very long. By the time that Non-Stop shifts into full on hyperbole and (SPOILER) the TSA agents believe that Marks is hijacking the plane, things strain credibility. And that's before we get to the big reveal and the even dumber thing that happens after that.

 But, just in case you wanted to watch Non-Stop, I won't give it away. It's almost ridiculous enough to recommend in and of itself, but the fact that the first half or so is also a decent game of "cat and mouse" works in its favor. In the "Liam Neeson, man of action" genre, it falls somewhere between Taken and Taken 2 - neither as enjoyable stupid as the former, nor as inane and redundant as the second. I haven't seen Unknown, so I couldn't comment, but Collet-Serra also made that, as well as Orphan, another movie with a "really?!?" twist. If you're inclined to enjoy movies like this, or saw the poster and said "I'll rent that," you're better off watching Non-Stop than, say, Drive Hard. If you're more predisposed towards, say, Neeson in The Grey, this is not going to be your cup of tea, but if you liked Flightplan... well, um, you liked Flightplan. Congratulations?

There's a surprisingly high ratio of "really, they're in this?" in Non-Stop, including Academy Award Winner Lupita Nyong'o (flight attendant "Gwen," sporting the same high-top fade she had at the Oscars), Academy Award Nominee Julianne Moore (Jen Summers, woman sitting next to Bill who ends up helping him), Guy who has been in back-to-back Best Picture Winners Scoot McNairy (Tom Bowen, dude who is going to Amsterdam), and of course, Academy Award Presenter Liam Neeson*.
Also, lots of familiar faces, like Downton Abbey's Michelle Dockery (flight attendant Nancy), Ain't Them Bodies Saints'sNate Parker (Zack, dude who Bill is a jerk to), and House of Cards and Midnight in Paris's Corey Stoll (Suspicious looking dude).

 While we're at it, why not Linus Roache (Batman Begins) as the Captain, and Anson Mount (ummm, Crossroads) as a passenger with a secret, although for a minute I thought it was Eric Bana rocking a Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code wig. But, alas, it's just Anson Mount, dude who is (SPOILER) secretly also an Air Marshall and who (BIGGER SPOILER) gets his neck broken by Bill in a pretty violent bathroom fight and who also (EVEN BIGGER SPOILER) got killed because he thought Bill knew he was smuggling a briefcase full of cocaine on the flight but (SPOILER FOR THE "BIG DUMB" ENDING) was actually smuggling a briefcase with cocaine that had a bomb hidden inside so that the mystery texter could blow the plane up. Nice job (SPOILER FOR A DIFFERENT MOVIE), "Final Boy" from All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. Bana would have had that on lock down, and wouldn't have made fun of Bill for having "drunken Liam Neeson red eye" before the flight.

  Finally, although you're likely not going to be asking "who is that guy on the phone from the TSA who won't 'negotiate with terrorists'" (e.g. Bill), it turns out to be a fairly familiar actor, particularly if you watch Boardwalk Empire. It's one last surprise, and probably the most welcome one considering that the end of this movie is so stupid that Passenger 57 looks downright plausible by comparison. Or Air Force One, for that matter. Or the one with Steven Seagal and Kurt Russell. Executive Decision? Sure, why not. That ought to give you some idea of what you're in for. But for a while, you might actually enjoy it, and depending on your level of sobriety, then you might really enjoy the ending.


 Die, Monster, Die! - Based on H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space in the same way that The Haunted Palace is based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (loosely), this AIP production has some effective imagery, but finds a way to drag on long enough to make 78 minutes feel like two hours. It's not lacking in atmosphere, and Boris Karloff certainly gives as much as he possibly can (which is saying something, as the actor was in poor enough health that he spends most of the film confined to a wheelchair), but I had trouble remembering much about the film hours after finishing it.

 Lovecraft's town of Arkham, Massachusetts, is relocated to England so that American student Stephen Rinehart (Nick Adams) can travel to the Whitley manor on the outskirts of town. Nobody in Arkham wants to talk to him about the Whitleys, nor will they provide him with any means of transportation, so Rinehart has to walk. It gives us the opportunity to see the desolate lands on the outskirts of the manor, and what looks like a huge crater, surrounded by dead trees that crumble to dust when touched. After dodging a bear trap at the gate, he enters the Whitley manor to find himself unwelcome by its patriarch, Nahum Whitley (Karloff), despite having been invited by Nahum's daughter, Susan (Suzan Farmer).

 Something is obviously very wrong at the Whitley house, and Nahum's wife Letitia begs Stephen to take Susan away (they were students at an unnamed university in the U.S.), against Nahum's objections. Letitia is bedridden and refuses to let anyone see her, and Nahum is opposed to taking her to a doctor in town. Their maid went insane and lurks around the grounds under a black veil, and their butler Merwyn (Terence de Marney) is barely capable of lifting silverware without collapsing. A strange glow is coming from the (locked) greenhouse, and it's rumored that Nahum's father, Corbin Whitley, practiced black magic (because, you know, it kind of makes it sound like it's connected to The Haunted Palace, maybe?), which seems to be confirmed from the artwork scrawled in the cellar of the mansion.

 Unfortunately, for all of the mystery surrounding the Whitleys and what writer Jerry Sohl cobbled together from The Colour Out of Space and more topical concerns (circa 1965) about radiation, Die, Monster, Die! is mostly a movie about wandering around a spooky house with candles until something jumps out. Audiences who bemoan "jump" scares in modern horror films will roll their eyes at no less than three such moments in Die, Monster, Die!, all of which have the bad form to continue well after it's clear they aren't scary. There are some nice images - the matte painting of the meteor crash looks very good, and the "zoo" of deformed creatures / aliens (it's never very clear) in the greenhouse "shed" make an impression, but the pacing of the film drags on endlessly.

 Lovecraft fans will, in all likelihood, not enjoy the explanation given to why the meteorite causes strange and horrible things to happen to the vegetation (SPOILER - it's Uranium) or the way that Die, Monster, Die! devolves into a "we have to fight the monster before we escape," wherein Boris Karloff is replaced by a stuntman wearing a glowing prototype of the "Green Man" outfit under his suit. I honestly can't remember if they even explain what happens to the maid after she tries to attack Stephen and falls down, but it's not the kind of plot point I'm even worried about following up on. While I've seen worse adaptations of Lovecraft stories, I'd be hard pressed to say I've seen one that's more of a slog to get through than this one.



 * I'm just messing with you - he was nominated for Kinsey, but I had you going there for a second, didn't I?

Retro Review (Part One): Batman Begins

 As some of you may know, the final chapter of Christopher Nolan's "Batman" trilogy comes to a close this Friday with The Dark Knight Rises, and in the spirit of pre-gaming I decided to watch Batman Begins and The Dark Knight again this past weekend. If each part is a stand-alone entry in a larger story, it makes sense to take a look at the first and second chapters again. That way, I can walk into The Dark Knight Rises with plot points and small moments fresh in my mind. After all, if we are to believe the hype, Nolan has tied all of the films together with his third entry.

 I had actually seen The Dark Knight more recently than Batman Begins (quite a few times more recently) so I thought I'd focus on the first film today, a movie that I enjoyed with a few caveats. At the time it did wonders to erase the memory of Bat-nipples and "ice" related punnery, but I can't quite go so far as to say that Batman Begins was a total success. I gather you've seen the film by now (it's been seven years and if you're even considering watching The Dark Knight Rises this weekend, I strongly urge you to) so rather than deal with a plot synopsis, I'm going to jump right into what I think works, what I think doesn't necessarily work, and some adjustments to my reaction after seeing it again two nights ago.

 First, let's look at what works:

 - Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne
 - Treating Batman like the monster in a horror movie for his first outing.
 - The supporting cast (including Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Rutger Hauer, Mark Boone Junior, and yes, Katie Holmes)
 - Keeping the villains (mostly) simple: mobster Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) and Jonathan Crane / The Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) with limited use of Ra's al Ghul (Liam Neeson).
 - In general, the idea that most of the film is grounded in reality, including how Wayne gets his "wonderful toys."
 - The chase scene between the police and the Tumbler (which is admittedly surpassed in The Dark Knight using similar geography).
 - Keeping the retelling of the "origin story" short and to the point, and extra points for Joe Chill (Richard Brake) killing the Waynes (Linus Roache and Sara Stewart) instead of  Jack Napier / the Joker (I'm looking at you, Tim Burton!).
 - How little Batman figures into the first half of the film, and when he does, how Wayne uses each outing to improve his skills.
 - The hallucinations resulting from Scarecrow's toxin, especially when we see Batman through Crane's drugged vision.

 What doesn't work so well:

 - Ra's al Ghul's ultimate plan, which is of a James Bond villain caliber, complete with a super gadget, speeding train, and exposition spouting guy at waterworks who tells us the same things Gordon, Batman, and Ghul have already said.
 - The cowl for Batman just looks clunky. Sure, they address this in The Dark Knight, but this isn't The Dark Knight, so I have to dock it points for the suit being cumbersome.
 - The fight scenes are a little "meh" and not always easy to follow, from the opening Chinese prison fight to the League of Shadows ninja battle to Batman's final showdown with Ra's.
 - As much as I like Liam Neeson as Ducard / Ra's, it might have been more effective to keep "week one" of Batman's tenure devoted to Crane and Falcone. If you really needed to add someone else, Mr. Zsaz is already in the film but mostly underused.
 - When Ra's arrives, Gotham begins to look less like a real city and things turn into "movie" reality, where the train fight looks like a soundstage and so do all the streets it passes over. It's a shift from what made the film so interesting to the typical "comic book movie" showdown.
 - Setting everybody in Arkham free in the "Narrows" turns out to be basically a wasted opportunity, as the film quickly shifts Gordon and Batman back to mainland Gotham as they race to Wayne Tower.
 - Similarly, Rachel Dawes' arc as a prosecutor ends up being much ado about nothing, as all of the setup in her building a case around Falcone and Crane disappears so that Batman can save her three times. She doesn't even do much in the chaotic prison break, other than protect a little boy (future Joffrey Baratheon Jack Gleeson) and taser (taze?) Scarecrow.

 What I didn't mind so much this time:

 - Really, it's just Bale's Batman "voice," which is kind of a Clint Eastwood growl. It used to bother me and sometimes make me laugh but to be honest with you, I don't mind it distinguishing Bruce Wayne from Batman. That he doesn't use it consistently is still a peeve, but otherwise it didn't bug me.
 - I mentioned Jack Gleeson, now famous for Game of Thrones, as appearing in the film, something I didn't realize until I put Batman Begins on again. It's not a big part, but he does appear in the middle of the film and then again during the climax.
 - In light of where it goes in The Dark Knight, I no longer mind the sequel-baiting "Joker" scene that closes the film, and the discussion between Gordon and Batman about escalation really sets the stage for the next film.
 - This is total speculation, but I suspect that The Dark Knight Rises will have a lot more in common with Batman Begins than The Dark Knight, especially with early reviews citing Ra's al Ghul as an inspiration for Bane (Tom Hardy)'s master plan. Also, it drives the "full circle" concept home more than simply continuing the post-Harvey Dent saga.

 Okay, so Batman Begins is pretty much the way I remember it: a mostly good film with touches of great that I enjoyed a whole lot in 2005 and still dig today. I think its flaws are more evident than The Dark Knight's, a review I'll get to on Thursday, heading into the weekend of the Batman. In the Nolan filmography, I'd have to put Batman Begins before Insomnia but after The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception, and Memento. It's more polished than Following, and this isn't a "favorite to least favorite" scale, because I think there are fascinating aspects about all of his films, but it's not a movie I leap to revisit (like the first four are). It's a solid reboot of the Batman story when it was desperately needed and it set the stage for a spectacular sequel.

Retro Review: Star Wars Episode One - The Phantom Menace

 While talking about Star Wars last week, it occurred to me that like many movies I hold near and dear I've never given them a proper write-up. This still won't really be a proper write-up for The Phantom Menace, but I do want to continue the thread I began in the triple feature review of Rush Hour 2, The Siege, and Star Trek: Insurrection. In that I laid out the pattern of an obsessive Star Wars fan (one who'd gone batty at seeing the Special Editions but was old enough to have seen at least one film the first time around) and this is the payoff. This was what it all boiled down to: no more teasers, trailers, leaked audio from ADR sessions or pictures or crazy rumors / script reviews*; it was time for the real thing, at midnight.

  May 18th, 1999 came too soon - I didn't have tickets for the midnight showing because I'd just returned from school an hour-and-a-half away and hadn't been able to procure any. Even working for a local theatre proved futile in getting to see The Phantom Menace on opening day. I was convinced it would be sold out by the day before (and I say the 18th because most of this takes place before midnight, May 19th, 1999) and was scrambling to find anybody who had an extra ticked. A friend of my brother's had one at the appropriately named Imperial Cinemas (now it's the Galaxy), and I got there around... 9:30?

 Young, delusional, and buying into the hype, I was convinced that the massive line would already be happening in short order, so two-and-a-half hours early seemed like a good idea**. I was probably the seventh or eighth person in line, which gives you some idea of the level of fandom for The Phantom Menace and the futility of my fears. By the time 11:45 rolled around (when they opened the doors), there was a line wrapped around the front and side of the building, although it was nothing compared to the one I was in for Revenge of the Sith, where we were in a parking lot for the grocery store next to the theatre two hours before the film started.

 We all piled in, got our popcorn and drinks, had a seat (third row) and waited for new Star Wars. Holy shit, can you believe it? NEW Star Wars! The sensory overload, the crowd's adrenaline, and the glow of lightsabers sustained two hours of wooden, stilted line delivery, personality-less characters, dumb jokes, and soulless fight scenes. We were too overwhelmed by the event to care that the movie didn't live up to its tremendous hype, let alone to the minimum expectations of a competently made film. For days, I would continue to delude myself into thinking that The Phantom Menace was a film that needed to be, one that I was better for having seen.

 The fundamental flaw of Episode One isn't any of the litany of illogical plot developments or the "kiddie" tone (for that, I direct you to the notorious Mr. Plinkett reviews of the prequels, which are hilarious, brutal, and often illuminating). The problem is one inherent in any prequel: you already know where the story is going. New characters introduced are going to be killed off or shoved to the margins in order for the characters the audience already knows ARE in the original films to step forward. So unless you really want to know HOW Obi-Wan Kenobi came to train Anakin Skywalker or WHY Yoda decided to go into exile on Dagobah, there's not a lot for you in these films. But we were willfully ignorant of this, and I did ruin at least one person's experience by casually mentioning that Qui-Gon Jinn was going to die before the movie ended.

 I watched The Phantom Menace in its entirety four times that summer: the midnight screening, twice with friends, and once with my Dad, who was unimpressed. I kept trying to convince myself that it wasn't the disappointment that everyone said it was (and that I knew deep down was true) by sneaking off during breaks at the movie theatre I worked at to watch the Obi-Wan / Darth Maul lightsaber fight. I'd time breaks so I could walk in just in time to see it. All this time, this interest, invested for naught? It couldn't be. Twenty year old Cap'n Howdy couldn't believe that. It can't be true; it's impossible.

 But search my feelings I did, and I knew it was true. You could hear it drop like the proverbial turd when The Phantom Menace dropped on VHS. Already Lucas had made changes - extending the Pod Race and including a longer sequence where our heroes fly through Coruscant. Why? Because he felt they "improved" the experience. The really just made the film longer, and without the big screen and crowd enthusiasm, The Phantom Menace was as bad as I knew it was. I just couldn't pretend otherwise.

 I tend to think of that experience as the point at which I became more cynical about the hype surrounding films - I'd been burned, and so had many other geeks my age. Sure, we went to see Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith (sometimes at midnight), but more out of a grudging sense of completion, a "let's get this over with." The excitement turned to caution, then dread, then relief. The scratch had been itched, and I was no longer outraged by Lucas' incessant tinkering with his films on DVD (and now Blu-Ray); this was the man who brought us the Prequels, his undiluted vision of the Star Wars universe, and they were not good. They were barely watchable, and I don't own them any more. It grouses me a bit knowing that if I want to see the bounty of extra material Lucasfilm has been ferreting away for decades that I'll have to own them again. I tried watching the end of Revenge of the Sith on TV yesterday and howled with laughter at how bad the writing was.

 At this point, I don't really feel like it's worth piling on to George Lucas for his rotten prequels, but they are the reason that I have to temper expectations for movies I really like. Yesterday's Attack the Block review is a great example - I really enjoyed the movie, but don't want the film to get bogged down by people who think it's going to fix their car or something. Somehow we got on this kick that any movie that's better than "pretty good" has to be elevated to transcendent levels, and a lot of that has to do with the built-in cynicism that came for geeks in a post-The Phantom Menace world. Half of the geeks automatically assume something is going to suck because "they" will "mess it up," so the other half pushes too hard to counter that attitude and movies suddenly have to be the second coming to be worth seeing. I remember going to see just about everything pre-Godzilla and The Phantom Menace with a blissful ignorance of whether it would be good or not - The Big Hit? Lost in Space? Suicide Kings? The Faculty? We were there. Hate it, love it, going was fun. I think that The Phantom Menace took some of that away, or at least changed the way I looked forward to movies.


* Like this one, for example. I can't find the one on Ain't It Cool that goes over-the-top about a SPOILER that can't be revealed - and I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out what people coming into this movie could have been "spoiled" by. On the other hand, I don't think Jeffrey Wells feels too bad about his column now, or even six months after the release of The Phantom Menace.
** True story: on a whim, two friends drove by Mission Valley and Park Place 16 to look at the lines for The Phantom Menace only to find empty parking lots.

Quick Bits and Taken reconsidered.

First things first: I saw Star Trek today. Prepare for a full write up some time early next week. The quick review is that I liked it and think the super nerdy comic book lead-in was helpful in filling in the gaps.

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Last night the Doctor Who party ended up being a little too hastily planned, so those in attendance ended up joining me in scrapping the Who action in favor of some good old-fashioned "Guy Movie" fun. We watched the most ridiculous scenes from Commando and Rambo, including the "Schwarzenegger kills an entire compound of drug lord soldiers and Rambo destroys pretty much everything with that huge gun" before watching Taken. For two of us, it was a repeat viewing; for the others, it was a first time experience.

Upon re-watching Taken, I noticed a few things not apparent on the first viewing. For one thing, the whole "setting things up" trope takes much longer the second time around, mostly because you know the movie can and will be more effective once Liam Neeson gets to France. That renders the first fifteen to twenty minutes pretty much unnecessary and they accordingly feel much longer.

The second tidbit we fixated on is that Taken pretty much takes the position that "Mass Murder is preferable to Selling People" in moral equivalency. In Commando, Arnold is killing everyone guarding the person who kinapped his daughter and because they're shooting at him. In Rambo, John Rambo gets all medieval on the bad guys because they want to kill missionaries for pretty much no reason and someone hires him to find them.

In Taken, Bryan Mills not only kills the Albanians who kidnapped his daughter, but he pretty much kills anyone he meets before and after that. If you're involved in any way in the human trading business, you're dead meat because Liam Neeson is going to murder you and continue killing. Even if you're just kind of hanging out on a boat, you'll be lucky if he doesn't just throw you overboard. In fact, that's the nicest thing he does to anybody in the second half of the film.

After the Albanian shootout, Taken introduces us to a number of characters simply so Liam Neeson can kill them, and at the end (SPOILER) he gets to go back to America, no questions asked. It was also pointed out that he took advantage of France's health care system beforehand to recoup from being stabbed by an Arab stereotype. Now that's some lesson in morality.


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Finally, whilst surfing the Playstation Store, I noticed that two movies are inexplicably available in HD. I've never heard of Robot Holocaust before, but I suddenly need to see it and $4.50 doesn't seem so unreasonable.

The other movie available in HD for no apparent reason: Troll 2.

Guess what just made its way onto the Summer Fest lineup. No seriously, take a guess.

If you guessed "Not Troll 2", you are wrong.

Blogorium Review: Taken

I really wish there was a lot to say about Taken, because I did enjoy the film, but other than "it's a lean, efficient action movie," there's not much to add. For you guys, I'll try though.

When I first saw the ads for Taken, what surprised me was how many people I knew seemed surprised to see Liam Neeson playing the "bad ass" character. I guess I never thought of him as the sensitive dude who doesn't fight, so that reaction was a little weird.Admittedly, I don't have much justification for this: yes, Neeson was a Jedi in one of the worst Star Wars prequels, and he was Rob Roy which involves some degree of swashbuckling. Then again, he does do all kinds of "period" films like Les Miserables and Schindler's List where he broods and steals bread.

I think what many of you forget is that when he's not Love Actually-ing it up, he's brutally murdering people in small roles like Kingdom of Heaven and Gangs of New York*. While technically a voice, it's hard to call Aslan a total wuss, no matter how anemic The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is. More importantly, Liam Neeson was Darkman. Maybe I am totally justified after all**.

Anyway, Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a retired "preventer" ex-military whatever. At the expense of his family (ex-wife Famke Janssen and way too old to be 17 year old daughter Maggie Grace), he spent the better part of his life wandering around in countries doing things that he can't tell people about. Since we all know the movie is about his daughter being, well, taken, we the audience will at some point see Bryan go "bad ass" on the kidnappers. Taken realizes that we don't have all day to wait around for this, so they dispense with the family strain quickly and then move on to the "how tough is this guy" trope.

This means, in action movie terms, we need two scenes: 1) a get together with his "team" to demonstrate their bad ass stories, and 2) a sequence to demonstrate that his "particular set of skills" alluded to in the trailer are still intact. We get both in rapid succession as his pals (including personal favorites John "Real Genius" Gries and Leland "Se7en" Orser***) come over for a cookout and then talk him into "one more mission."

This mission, however, is the closest thing to a subplot Taken ever has. Mills ends up saving some pop star from a would be murderer and she gives him her phone number. See, Mills knows that his daughter wants to be a singer and rather than take advantage of his single status, he decides to give his daughter the phone number so she can take lessons from the pop star. See? Bet you didn't hear about that part of the movie.

But we all know that's not what happens. Instead Maggie Grace goes to Paris (against Bryan's better judgment) and gets herself kidnapped. Just so that we like Liam Neeson's negligent dad more than Famke Janssen's remarried mother, there are two scenes of her giving him hell for not wanting their daughter wandering around Europe following U2. Bryan is such a class act that even when she's kidnapped, he doesn't say "see, I told you so", he just starts gathering information.

And that's pretty much it. I keep wanting to compare this movie to Commando but then I have to weed out all of the unnecessary turns. His team doesn't get picked off by a traitor. There is no Rae Dawn Chong character. There aren't any puns or plot twists. Taken has not twists to speak of, unless you count the French secret police being crooked as a twist. Mills goes to France and in short order tracks down everyone involved in his daughter's kidnapping. He maims, cripples, or kills all of them, including people who are only involved in ancillary ways, like the wife of the crooked cop or a bouncer for the "sex slave" underground bidding club.

When I say that Taken is lean and efficient, I mean it. Luc Besson and Rober Mark Kamen wrote a script that doesn't waste time on anything else. Once we've established the necessary information in the US to know Mills is a bad ass, we move to France where he demonstrates it with as little necessary dialogue as possible. I do like that Mills goes the extra mile to make sure he really gets the right bad guys.

For example, if you've seen the trailer, then you know that Neeson gives his "I'm going to kill you" spiel on the phone and the Albanian kidnapper replies "Good luck." In order to find the correct guy, Neeson buys an Albanian to English dictionary, writes down "Good Luck" in Albanian, and then tricks the bad guy into translating it for him. So what does Mr. "Good Luck" get for his translating skills? Sewing needles through his thighs.

That alone would have been mean enough, but Mills uses those as a way to electrocute the guy into getting information. And since Mr. "Good Luck" thinks he's tough, Neeson promises to "keep it going until they shut off the power for non-payment", and then does just that. He leaves the guy there, screaming, and moves on.

In a way, Taken is kind of like if you took Commando and then stripped it down to Punisher: War Zone simplicity. Only it's not as silly as the former or as violent as the latter. Taken does exactly what the trailer promises it will do and nothing more. And sometimes that's enough.

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Remember, you have a few days left to vote on what I watch next week. Right now there's a three way tie, so be that tie breaker!



* Another problem may be that most of you haven't seen Kingdom of Heaven and forgot that Liam Neeson was in the beginning of Gangs of New York. I can't really explain the Darkman thing though.
** He also plays "Father" in Fallout 3 which many regular readers pester me about playing.
*** The name might not register, but check the face. I had to include Se7en rather than Alien Resurrection only because he's credited as "Crazed Man in Massage Parlor", rather than "guy that Kevin Spacey puts the spiked codpiece on."