Among the other things I’ve been ‘meaning to do’ when it comes to the creative endeavors in my life was something I considered doing for a recent competition but did not have the time to do a justifiably decent job. It’s continued to sit in the back of my mind, and the trends in my traffic lead me to believe that, with the time I’ll have away from the day job in a couple weeks, it may be worth doing even if I may not get attention from people that see its potential. If it has any.
So, mostly for kicks, to see what would be involved and what the result will be, the IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! on Christmas Eve will be The Emperor’s New Groove as a video, with new audio and a few surprises.
Given how the schedule is falling together, there will still be new fiction on the 15th and the (hopefully) final rewrite of Citizen In The Wilds will be finished by the end of the year. I’ve also contacted some artists to give me a hand with character sketches and other promotional art.
Thank you all for your continued support and encouragement. I hope I don’t disappoint you with the results of my endeavors.
Good filmmaking is rightly lauded in modern cinema. Consistently good filmmaking is damn close to a miracle. Take a look at the films of Martin Scorsese, and it’s very possible that this little guy with bushy eyebrows is the closest thing filmmaking has to a god amongst men. Casino is no exception.
Told mostly as a narrated flashback, Casino introduces us to life-long friends Ace & Nicky, who come to Las Vegas in the service of their old-school Italian mob leaders. The old men saw Vegas as virgin territory for profit and their agents go to ensure the cash flow. Ace, a natural born gambler, quickly becomes involved with a casino, the Tangiers, helping the already-assumed house wins to grow to giant proportions while Nicky begins carving out a little criminal empire of his own, free from interference or even much oversight from back home. A grifting hooker, corrupt politicans and the hubris of these friends are the aggravating factors that cause their endeavors to start coming undone, and in the process it’s likely Ace and Nicky will come undone as well.
There was a time when a film like this would have Ace and Nicky be a close-knit wise-cracking criminal duo. Ace would be the smiling, charming face of the operation, while Nicky works behind the scenes with brass knuckles, a baseball bat and a silenced .22 to get the real business done. In other words, they’d be the villains in the story. Casino instead focuses on Ace and Nicky as protagonists. We don’t see them as victims or even great guys, but they’re still human beings with dreams and ambitions just like any other. Putting a face on ‘the bad guys’ is something Scorsese is legendary for doing, and Casino is a shining example of this work.
“I am, in fact, talkin’ t’ you, Ace.” “Yeah, well, you amuse me, Nicky.”
Scorsese is also known for having an eye for talent. Casino was the 8th film he made with Robert DeNiro. Playing Ace, DeNiro’s intensity is focused entirely on how his character is trying to keep things together. Here’s a man who knows a sure bet when he sees it, bets with confidence and never loses. The very prospect of losing doesn’t even occur to Ace; left to his own devices, he’d achieve just about anything he went after. When Nicky and Ginger get involved, though, you can feel Ace’s frustration, the sort of anger a stereotypical villain might rant abouot at the drop of a hat only to put some outrageous scheme of revenge into motion. Ace is too smart for that, though. He plays his hand close to his chest.
Nicky, on the other hand, may not be playing with the entire deck. As much as it seems sometimes that Joe Pesci only has one role, he plays things so well here it’s hard to hold some repetition of roles against him. Nicky is as ambitious as he is uncompromising. Where Ace does business with a handshake, Nicky does it with a bat. Where Ace tries to keep the peace, Nicky itches for action. Yet these two are friends, and very close ones. They really are flip sides of the same coin, a bright and lucrative coin that spins through the air and catches the lights of the Vegas strip. As the film goes on, it’s hard to say which side of the coin is going to land right-side up.
Yeah. She’s pretty distracting.
Further complicating matters is Sharon Stone as Ginger. At first appearing as the sort of arm candy that shows up with high rollers to skim a bit for herself, Ginger becomes the one unpredictable variable in Ace’s life that starts to unravel the disparate threads he’s woven together. While none of the main characters are unaffected by Las Vegas, and indeed all of them succumb to varying degrees of decadence and depravity, Ginger is the one most dragged under by the the booze, drugs and lifestyle that was Sin City in the 70s and 80s. We watch her fall apart practically before our eyes, from her inability to seperate herself from her manipulative boyfriend and pimp to the lengths she’ll go to further her own ends, especially when it comes to the daughter she has with Ace. Everything goes to hell in a gradual fashion, a painful and inevitable backslide that unfolds as the movie rolls on.
While the movie is not painful in a bad or sickening way, it’s quite an ordeal to sit through. It’s nearly three hours long, and much of that is featuring fights, arguments, breakdowns and discomfort on a public or private level. There’s moments of levity and vindication, to be sure; the acting, writing and direction are all fantastic; the soundtrack is top-notch and walks us through the changing times as much as the cinematography does – but the overall length of the narrative begins to wear on the viewer. And it’s only at the very end that Scorsese delivers the ultimate point of his story.
“You sure I should be wearin’ this color, Marty?” “Bobby, I ain’t let ya down yet, I ain’t startin’ now.”
This movie is a eulogy for Vegas of old. It’s the sort of movie that longs for old-fashioned machismo, the slight haze of cigarette smoke in back rooms while the glitz and glamour flash in the eyes of suckers betting against the house run by the Mob. Nowadays, suckers bet against the house run by corporations. Ace lays it out for us: “In the old days, dealers knew your name, what you drank, what you played. Today, it’s like chekin’ into an airport. And if you order room service, you’re lucky to get it by Thursday.” His arc follows that of Vegas itself. He rises out of nowhere into the Nevada desert, fastitious and self-assured. His life begins to spiral out of control, from his ne’er-do-well wife to his taste in clothes. And when all is said and done, he’s still the same guy – but hollowed out, older, a shadow of his former self.
That’s what makes Casino such an effective tragedy. That’s what makes it worth the long running time and Sharon Stone’s chewing of scenery. That’s why it’s one of Scorsese’s many great pictures, and why it should be on your Netflix queue. It is, like many memorable and timeless stories, a cautionary tale: Excess and success are not the same thing. If you’re unable to moderate your excesses when you’re successful, life’s circumstances are likely to take it all away from you. All you can count on, in the end result, is being who you are, and if you aren’t careful, they can take that away from you, too. Just a little bit of wisdom, and a touch of keeping your goals in sight, goes a long, long way.
Sorry, this is getting preachy. Watch Casino to see DeNiro in a salmon-colored suit. He looks fabulous.
Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.
The last time I reviewed a movie that had any connection to a video game, things did not end well. On the other hand, I’ve been meaning to watch Tron, WarGames and The Last Starfighter again to see if the “holy trinity” of movies about gamers stand the test of time, especially with the long-awaited sequel to Tron just around the corner. I mean, there’s got to be more to the fervor than just seeing Olivia Wilde in a skin-tight neon future-suit, right? Then again…
Anyway, Gamer isn’t looking to compete with that high a pantheon, or any other group of movies. It’s kind of looking to be it’s own thing, and taken it’s own, it’s not that bad. You can’t take it on it’s own, unfortunately, because just about everything it does has, on some level or another, been done before.
Once again, we’re in the near future. Not the glitsy, flying-cars future of Back to the Future Part 2, the gritty, brownish-grey near-future in pretty much every action movie and first person shooter made in the last decade or so, give or take a few stand-out examples. Internet media mogul Ken Castle is flush from his success in the phenomenon called Society which allows players to take control of real people and have them do anything the player wants. Now, he’s introduced SLAYERS, in which gamers assume direct control of death row inmates and have them shoot each other for fun and profit. It’s online deathmatches with flesh and blood hardcases instead of digital simulacra. The top badass in the game is Kable. He’s close to freedom, but with not only a wife and daughter on the outside and a wrongful case keeping him locked up but also a big secret about Castle’s success, the moment we see him it’s just a matter of time before he breaks out and joins the underground resistance movement.
So yeah, this one’s playing in the same yard as Equilibrium,District 9 and Repo Men. And using a mass media distraction to placate the masses while they’re getting bent over for a nefarious purpose has also been done before, viz. The Running Man. To a lot of people, especially people who see lots of movies all the time, this is going to feel a little “been there, done that.” Especially with Gerard Butler as Kable. A lot of people can’t see him as anybody but Leonidas, having all but forgotten that he was also the Phantom of the Opera. As much as the movie might want to be taken on its own merits, the connections to previous and (let’s face it) better-done work is inevitable and waters down the experience a bit.
You keep making that face, Gerard, it’s going to stay that way.
So let’s talk about what Gamer does differently, and what it gets right. It’s not here to preach to us about the evils of video games or even to extol their virtues. It’s here to play around with some concepts that have seeped into gamer culture and write them large across the screen. Glitched NPCs, game mods, the allure of online popularity – there’s even a very brief joke about teabagging. Given that this is being directed by the guys responsible for the Crank movies, it should be no surprise that just about every aspect of gaming in general and first-person shooters in particular gets pulled out at one point or another, even if it’s just touched on in passing.
There’s also the fact that Society is very clearly a send-up of the online simulation Second Life. If you’re at all aware of the existence of Second Life, you probably know that it’s a haven for all sorts of people seeking an outlet, from counter-culture to free-form role-playing to out-and-out deviance. The approach that Gamer takes by replacing the customizable user avatars of Second Life with the real-life remote-controlled people of Society is calculated to make the entire enterprise seem sick and wrong. Not only does it make the antics of this sort of adult playground look ridiculous, it makes no bones about its portrayal of the kind of people who actually indulge in this sort of thing on a regular basis. It certainly isn’t very nice in how it sees the players of Society, and by extension Second Life, but it’s definitely funny.
Believe it or not, this is a modest outfit in Second Life Society.
While Gamer can be fun, it’s also flawed. As I said, Butler is still shaking off the stoic badass visage that seems to paralyze the ability to convey emotion. The plot of the movie is inconsistent at best and disjointed at worst, and some of the camera work is too quick and confusing. The action sequences aren’t going to set the world on fire and there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of inventiveness at work. Some characters are introduced only to have them die or disappear arbitrarily, some things happen with only the most threadbare explanation and a couple of plot threads that might have proven interesting go entirely unresolved. It doesn’t maintain the frenetic pace of the aforementioned Crank flicks and it suffers, as the manic energy that both fuels the action and gives the scorn of the Society bits its edge drains very quickly when neither of those is happening. I think a couple of plot meetings and screenplay edits could have smoothed out these rough bits.
However, the dialog does pop in places, Michael C. Hall’s fun to watch as Ken Castle, we get some great stuff from Ludacris as the leader of the resistance and while you might not be blown out of your seat by the action, the way Gamer takes the piss out of Second Life you just may catch yourself having a good time. A few moments of intelligent writing and a fresh take on a tried-and-true concept manage to poke through action sequences that would look right at home in a Transporter movie or any given game of Gears of War. Watching Gamer is like eating an entire giant Oreo cookie when all you really want is the cream filling but, for some reason, you just can’t unscrew the damn thing properly. In my opinion, it’s good to see a movie about gaming that has little to say about gaming itself from a pontification standpoint, and focuses more on the game.
Which you just lost, by the way.
Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.
The holiday season is upon us once again. Just today I saw my first snowfall. I caught sight of it while watching Trapped in Paradise, a caper comedy from the 90s. Why was I looking out the window instead of at the movie, you ask? Because, for once, we have a little truth in advertising. The key word in the title of this completely unfunny and utterly lifeless flick is not “paradise”, but rather “trapped.”
Bill Firpo is a reformed thief trying to run a restaurant in New York City. His brothers, Dave and Alvin, are let out of prison into Bill’s custody. Almost immediately, Dave yanks Bill into a plot to knock over a bank in a sleepy Pennsylvania town on Christmas Eve. The town is so sleepy and the bank’s security so lax, it practically robs itself. However, two other cons had been sizing up the bank, the local yokels running the general store are deputy sheriffs and there’s a major blizzard about to slap the town silly. And because that clearly wasn’t enough for the writers, save for the bank teller who gets a pass because she’s the love interest and Bill himself, everybody, and I mean everybody, is either incredibly nice or incredibly stupid. And… that’s funny? I guess?
I’ll say this for Trapped in Paradise – it’s shot crisply and cleanly. Considering this is a holiday movie and we want things looking nice and idyllic to get people in the mood for overindulgences in shopping, eating and passive-aggressive family awkwardness, you don’t want to catapult your audience out of the experience with shoddy camera work. And the locales do look nice. It definitely looks a lot like some of the small towns nestled into the forest-covered mountains of Pennsylvania, and I did find myself wishing I was in one of those towns. Playing a game of Arkham Horror, perhaps, or finding a local pub warmed by a wood-fueled fireplace and serving a nice stout. Hell, I’d have settled for watching rednecks waddle through Wal*Mart after a turkey binge over this crap.
And, seriously. What’s up with these hats?
The big draw of this movie is that two of its three leading men were pretty big comedians back when it was shot. Jon Lovitz is that kind of cynical comic who takes after Rodney Dangerfield, more often than not playing up his obvious lack of Hollywood handsomeness for laughs of varying degrees. His best work, in my opinion, was on Saturday Night Live as Master Thespian or on the short-lived animated series The Critic. In both instances his wit was acerbic, his timing was excellent and his physical presence adding to the comedy rather than being its focal point. Trapped in Paradise instead saddles him with either ADHD or some form of Asperger’s Syndrome, as he never seems to be able to remain focused when he’s outside of some scheme or other. Any comedian could have played this role. It wouldn’t have been any better, I’m just saying it’s utterly generic holiday caper stuff.
And then, there’s Dana Carvey. Here we have a comedic chameleon. I mean, this guy played Hans (of Hans & Franz), the Church Lady and Garth Algar, sometimes all within the same hour. He’s done all sorts of impressions, from George H.W. Bush to Johnny Carson, from Woody Allen to Frank Zappa. In this, he’s doing an impression… of a retard. Who’s also a kleptomaniac. Couldn’t they have written the script so he could be himself for once? Did they have to force him into a nasal, annoying, high-pitched voice for every line and make him stupid? Usually in a comedy of this type you have one part of the team who’s the straight man and the other one bumbling around. Trapped in Paradise tries to give us two bumblers and ends up dropping the whole enterprise when it tosses the plot to them and they start arguing about who gets to carry it.
Yeah. Hilarious.
The only – and I do mean only – saving grace in this disaster of writing and acting is Nicholas Cage. And even he gets mishandled every other scene. At first, he seemed to be yanked back and forth by his own compulsions. He wants to do the right thing but he’s something of a career thief. The moment the other two ignorant jerks get involved, however, they almost immediately bring out the worst in him. And I don’t mean in terms of crime, I mean in terms of schizophrenic flip-flopping between that straight and tortured portrayal and just plain torture. If anybody’s trapped in this movie, it’s poor Nick Cage. The director can’t even seem to give him a consistent accent or manner of speech. He’s so completely wasted in this trash it makes me want to cry.
In a comedy, if your leading team isn’t funny, the rest of the damn picture doesn’t stand a chance. The jokes fall flat almost immediately, the story nearly grinds to a halt several times, none of the lines feel genuine and Paradise is apparently built over an ancient mystical portal to another realm that constantly churns out patrol cars. I’ve seen some pretty horrible things lately: the latest round of elections in this country, the bills from my utility companies, the box off returns from Scott Pilgrim. But I would take getting told by tea baggers how much I hate freedom by supporting federal health care, get paddled by bill collectors and have anonymous douchebags on the Internet tell me how awesome The Expendables is over watching Trapped in Paradise again. Hopefully, by the time you read or hear this, I will be passed out and in the throes of a turkey coma so deep, I’ll have forgotten this stinking, steaming and utter turd of a movie ever existed.
Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.
When I was studying English at university, I came across a revelation. It was a place full of distractions that could sap the time and energy of the unwary student, and deadlines do not often change based on a hangover or waking up in an unfamiliar place. However, it is possible, under those circumstances, to produce a paper that seems to have been adequately researched even if it was not. I, however, never made the grand assertion that anything I threw together at the 11th hour contained information that was entirely factual. That sort of claim is best left to other authors. Like Dan Brown, for instance. It’s something overshadowing all of his books, as well as the two adaptations of novels to films as of this writing — The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons.
Of the two, Angels and Demons is better. I didn’t hate it. That would require interest and energy that the movie doesn’t really deserve or earn.
At the Large Hadron Collider, an experiment to harvest antimatter goes exceedingly well, resulting in three clear Pringles cans that magically contain the annihilating substance. One of them is stolen. Meanwhile, in Vatican City, the Pope has died and the cardinals of the Catholic Church are gathering for Conclave, the sealed conference in which they choose the new head of the Church. However, four of the favorites for the throne of St. Peter have been kidnapped. The only clue anyone has is a strange image that seems to be a word – “Illuminati.” Shown the antimatter container’s dying battery and given a ticking clock, the Church turns to someone they know who can unravel the mystery – Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon.
Shedding the embarrassing mullet he sported in his first outing as Langdon, Tom Hanks gives the protagonist his particular form of everyman charm. He places the professor squarely between the quiet earnestness of Ewan MacGregor and the rather seething menace of Stellan Skarsgaard. In general, the performances in Angels & Demons don’t go over the top and do what they can to lend some much needed plausibility to the plot. I do have to say that I was initially disappointed that Audrey Tautou wouldn’t be joining us this time around, but when I saw how superfluous the role of ‘the girl’ was I was glad she didn’t waste her time.
The Catholics definitely know how to liven up a congregational meeting.
Director Ron Howard shoots this movie and frames his scenes rather well. The action is clean, the actors sincere and the dialog uncontrived, save for the occasional spiral into false fact. Dan Brown, from what I understand, is a practicioner of what I will call “shock schlock” – writing that is mediocre at best framed in devices like bad research or a flimsy reinterpretation of classic horror creatures. The marked difference between what the audience knows or expects and what appears in the book is meant to stir up controversy and thus raise interest in the book, thus increasing sales. It’s entirely possible Brown had this purpose in mind when he claimed all the historical “facts” he cites to be “true.” The problem is, they’re not. A quick Google search clears up the inconsistencies that, for me, pretty much ruin the narrative.
Take Galileo, for example. In the film, Langdon tells us that his assertion that the Earth moves around the Sun caused the Church to bully him into recanting his works and releasing books that retracted his earlier writings, only he also released a book in secret that contained “the Truth” and founded the Illuminati. The implication of this Truth’s existence isn’t as damning of the Church as it is in the DaVinci Code and nobody tries to kill Langdon over heliocentricity the way they did over the idea of Christ having a child. The Church has only a limited number of assassins, you see. Anyway, it was a glaring error that threw me for a loop. Let me explain.
Painting by Cristiano Banti, 1857
Galileo Galilei was called before a papal court in 1633 on suspicion of heresey. When Galileo, a devout Catholic, discussed his work with Pope Urban VIII, His Holiness told Galileo to go ahead and write out the arguments for and against heliocentrism, but not to advocate it. Instead, he framed the argument as a narrative definitely in favor of the Earth’s movement and gave the view of the Pope through a character taken by his audience to be a simpleton. In light of this unintended slight, the Inquisition demanded Galileo recant his advocacy. He didn’t. For this he was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life, his books were banned and publication of further works forbidden, and he died alone, penniless and blind. Oh, and the Illuminati? Not founded until 1776.
This is just one example, but it permeates both this work and The DaVinci Code so deliberately and thoroughly that I can’t help but feel Brown is being systematic in his use (or abuse) of history. I do try to judge a film on its own merits regardless of its source material, but there’s so much heavy-handedness in these works it might well have been typed out by someone wearing medieval plate gauntlets. Just as Stephenie Meyer uses defanged vampires and sullen, lackluster werewolves to teach her audience about abstinence and the righteousness of traditional marriage, Brown uses falsified and mis-interpreted historical documentation to elevate science to a sort of divinity while demonizing people of faith. Any faith. But especially Catholicism. He’s one strained metaphor and misquoted date away from having Langdon sparkle in the sunlight.
“THIS IS THE SKIN OF A BOOKWORM, BELLA.”
While Dan Brown seems to be doing his utmost to drive a wedge between science and the Catholic Church, even after the big reveal at the end, the movie doesn’t seem interested in choosing a side. It presents the conflict and depicts the lengths to which the Church may go to defend itself, albeit in a much less heavy-handed manner than The DaVinci Code. Ron Howard’s aim appears to be balancing things out so that the film, on its own narrative, doesn’t declare one side good and the other evil. There’s a truth in that, as while Angels and Demons follows the trend of Brown’s work in using intellectualism to undercut the tenants of faith, Langdon’s presence ends up protecting the very faith he struggles to accept. Not for himself, mind you. He still seems to scoff at anybody who’d even consider the idea of a divine presence, let alone an invisible man controlling every aspect of creation, a viable one. And considering the nature of the work, that’s Brown’s sarcastic, “oh you’re such a child” smirk we’re seeing, not Langdon’s.
To their credit, the screenwriters, actors and director of Angels & Demons manage to keep the messages of the movie from overriding the narrative. The problem with this is, without the deliberately inflammatory nature of the sentiment running under Brown’s prose, there isn’t much here. It feels far too mediocre to illicit the sort of reaction Brown was likely going for. I’m not certain if Brown is deliberately trying to pull people away from the church by painting them as a cadre of supervillains or if his aims are just to make a quick buck with some “shock schlock,” but Howard and his cast completely destroy whatever aim he had by rendering the story of his first Langdon adventure entirely without teeth, power or even much energy. It limps along for its 150 minute run-time, never really rising above the mire of its source material yet treating that material like it’s an embarrassment. Which, let’s face it, it kind of is. Angels and Demons, for all of its star power and bestseller basis, simply can’t be arsed to care enough to tell a good story.
And if it can’t be arsed to care, I can’t be either.
Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.
