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Tag: film (page 17 of 20)

IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! Centurion

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The movie version of 300 has definitely made an impression. It’s given us a ton of Internet memes, helped shape all sorts of workout regimens and pushed Gerard Butler towards being the stereotypical big scowly action star. But it also had the subtle benefit of introducing the world to Michael Fassbender. In between his memorable supporting turn in Inglorious Basterds and being exactly the sort of Magneto fans have been craving in X-Men: First Class, he took the lead in another period action-adventure called Centurion, but to say this movie and 300 couldn’t be more different is something of an understatement.

Fassbender is cast as Quintus Dias, a centurion serving as second-in-command at a Roman border post in Britain around AD 117. His garrison is destroyed and he captured by the vicious Picts. When he’s rescued, it’s by the legendary 9th Legion, which is given orders to stomp their way north to wipe the Picts out. This, unfortunately for the Romans, goes pretty horribly and Quintus tries to lead the handful of survivors home while a Pict hunting party lead by an exceedingly scary young woman tracks them down.

At first, Centurion seems more driven by plot than characters. Unlike other movies that establish their ensemble cast as quickly as possible, writer-director Neil Marshall carefully paces the opening to give us the information, atmosphere and tensions of the age before really diving into the characters we’re going to spend the next 90 minutes with. I haven’t seen any of Marshall’s other work – Dog Soldiers, The Descent or Doomsday – but he certainly seems to have a good grip on pacing in his writing, and clean shots in his direction, as well as an unflinching and visceral taste for combat.

With those metal weapons, Magneto would have sorted the Picts out in about 3 seconds flat.

As the characters begin to emerge, their roles grow organically out of the flow of the story. Most of them are cyphers or stereotypes, but their delivery is earnest and the writing of their lines decent without either verging into ham-handedness. When the 9th falls, it’s a sad moment, but it’s difficult to care as much as Our Lady of Soundtrack Sorrow wants us to. The deaths of individuals later in the story means far more than the wholesale slaughter of faceless Roman soldiers. It’s not that I’m expecting Marshall to compel us to care about all 3000 of the Romans, and the characters we do get are certainly better than many of their modern counterparts, I just feel that some of the drama’s a little overwrought.

This is a tale that owes far more to HBO’s Rome mini-series than to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. As these characters grow and interact they do so in ways that seem earnest and unforced. Fassbender’s Quintus in particular shows not only brotherly concern for his fellow men but a growing bitterness at their circumstances and a grudge against both sides in the conflict. And neither the Romans nor the Picts emerge as the ‘good guys’ in the war. Keeping the moral ground gray between the two of them was very wise on Marshall’s part, as it keeps the focus on the dwindling number of actual characters caught between these rather dickish powers.

Trust me. She’s pretty scary.

While many other period pieces go for a stew of anachronisms, playing devil-may-care with the technologies and languages available to a given set of peoples, Centurion actually has a great deal of authenticity going for it. While the Romans speak English for our convenience, their arms and armor are right out of the Empire’s heyday, and the dwellings and lifestyle of the Picts is masterfully depicted, from their means of restraining prisoners to the status of their women. Between this, the characters and the smart plotting, there’s a lot to like about this movie.

It doesn’t quite delve into the naked melodrama of Edward Zwick’s Last Samurai or Defiance nor does it play up the violence or spectacle for its own sake as 300 does. Centurion opts instead to tell a decent story about survivors behind enemy lines and does that job rather well. The characters we do get are interesting and well-acted, the story never bogs down or feels overly contrived and the action feels authentic and visceral without being completely over-the-top, which all adds up to an enjoyable adventure story bordering on the excellent. It does everything right that pointless slapped-together flicks like The Expendables get wrong. Consider checking it out on Netflix Instant if you’re on the lookout for an action-adventure or period piece with at least a bit of a brain in its head. And while I mentioned I haven’t seen any of Marshall’s other work, considering he’s put together a movie about werewolf soldiers and one that’s described as Mad Max driving headlong into 28 Days Later… I think I’m going to have to correct that.

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.

IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! The Expendables

September 16, 2011 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

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With the unfortunate shutdown of Non-Social Media, I’m under no further obligation to do video versions of this feature. This may be a blessing in disguise, as I’m unsure how much free time I’ll have on my hands in the future, not to mention the fact that I’m not feeling very well. On a possibly unrelated note, I watched The Expendables this week. I invite you to sit back and relax as you bear witness to me potentially becoming audibly ill.

While there is something of a plot in this film, it seems to really only serve as an excuse for the cast to play off of one another. Considering the cast involves pretty much every major established action star of the last decade or so, to testosterone junkies this is probably a worthwhile excuse. For those interested in the details, the titular band of rogues are black-ops mercenaries contracted to take down the American-backed dictatorship in a fictional island nation. Actually, if you’re familiar with video games at all, I’d venture that this plays out a bit like a movie version of the sandbox shooter Just Cause 2: a general lack of coherent plot, made-up island country, explosions you can outrun, one-liners with hilarious accents, and so on.

Fans of action won’t be disappointed. If all you look for in a movie is an excuse to dim the lights, pop some popcorn, pour some cola and turn your brain off for an hour or two, I say go for it. I’m in no position to tell people how to have their fun. I mean I spend a good portion of my free time with Magic the Gathering, StarCraft 2 and webcomics. For me to lean in from the side of the screen while Sylvester Stallone and his dream team of muscle men blow away legions of faceless mooks and say it’s a pile of lifeless drivel smacks of pretentiousness, even hypocracy. And yet, as someone who takes storytelling in its various forms pretty damn seriously, I can’t really help it if I get my boxers in a bunch over something like this. So if you’re still with me after another one of my questionable digressions, let’s crack this thing open and find out how many blanks it’s actually shooting.

Writer, director, actor. When people say “triple threat” they usually don’t mean “to good taste.”

Let’s begin with the premise. I understand that this is meant to be something of an homage to the camp, over-the-top explosionfest action flicks of the late ’70s and most of the ’80s. If that’s the case, where are the references to movies like Commando and Predator? Yes, Arnold makes a brief cameo appearance and there’s one attempt at a joke at his expense (or maybe it was at Sly’s, I couldn’t bloody tell), but other than that The Expendables behaves very much like its own beast. And while some of it is certainly over-the-top in a moment or two of gratuitous violence and gun porn, most of it feels like it’s trying to be taken somewhat seriously. There’s banter and whatnot, sure, but there’s no feeling of tongues being in cheek. If there’s any sort of joke or irony at work here, our heroes are most certainly not in on it.

From start to finish I was unable to find a single surprise, genuine laugh or legitimally compelling character. What little story there is takes more than a few unnecessary turns into the personal territory of characters we really don’t care about. It’s clear from the outset that Stallone is not writing, directing or starring in the sort of film where time and resources are managed well enough to both develop deep characters and put them through creative, well-shot action scenes – Sly is no Nolan. Hell, I hesitate to put him in the same directorial company as Michael freakin’ Bay. His shot composition and ability to transition need a lot of work. At least he didn’t use any wipes, so he has better sense than Lucas.

“So, Sly, what’s my motivation again?”
“Yer shootin’ people.”
“Oh, right. Forgot.”

On a related note, let’s talk about this cast and how they’re utilized. Jason Statham showed some hand-to-hand fighting skill in his Transporter films, Randy Couture is a mixed martial artist, Dolph Lundgren has thrown down with the likes of Van Damme, Stone Cold Steve Austin beats people up all the time in staged fights and women when he’s bored, and wiping the floor with all of them would be Jet “the second coming of Bruce” Li. So where are all of the breathtaking fistfights? Where’s the mano a mano duels where weapons are discarded and it all comes down to one warrior’s skill against another’s? The moments where there’s even the potential for this are shot, cut and paced so badly Paul Greengrass is rolling his shakey-cam eyes. None of the gunfights are particularly memorable, the villain has no real motivation other than greed and what should be an exciting or at least entertaining exercise in action movie nostalgia just left me feeling bored.

Other than one neat sequence with the aforementioned seaplane and the monstrous AA12 automtic shotgun getting a moment in the limelight, The Expendables feels like another lackluster entry in the already bloated and uninteresting action film genre. It adds nothing to it, does nothing for it and says nothing about it. As I said, there’s appeal in the fact that it demands nothing of its audience if said audience wants to give their higher brain functions a break, but the whole thing just feels tired, by the numbers and dull. Despite the star power of its cast, the potential for a reawakening of the band of misfits harkening to Seven Samurai or The Dirty Dozen and the opportunity for these manly men of modern movies to poke some fun at thesmelves, there isn’t a single thing about The Expendables that would lead me to recommend it. No matter what Sly originally had in mind when he got this idea and gathered all of his friends, there’s just nothing here.

IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief

September 9, 2011 / BlueInkAlchemist / 2 Comments

Original Text:

Spoiler

Joseph Campbell is famous for basically saying that all storytellers are essentially telling the same story. Be it a myth based on the perceptions of the ancient Norse of their weather patterns or the all-caps melodrama and bright, splashy colors of a comic book by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, our stories are a way of exploring ourselves and the world around us. Sometimes, the old stories are reimagined and transitioned into new forms that appeal to the altered sensibilities of modern audiences. Sometimes this works; other times, it doesn’t. Not every middle schooler is going to have a nascent interest in the mythology of ancient Greece, so author Rick Riordan took it upon himself to set those stories in the foundations of those tumultuous schoolyards, giving us Percy Jackson & the Olympians. The first volume of this chronicle, The Lightning Thief, got the major motion picture from Hollywood treatment.

And by ‘treatment’, I mean the potential for storytelling that’s worth a damn got tied to a chair and worked over with a baseball bat.

Our titular character is a struggling middle-school student with apparent dyslexia and ADHD. His mother is married to a complete and utter douchebag while his birth father scampered off while Percy was still a newborn. His best friend, Grover, walks with crutches and has a penchant for cracking wise that works really hard to put Chris Tucker to shame. A visit to the local museum and a lecture by his wheelchair-bound Latin teacher begins to reveal some truths to Percy: his dyslexia is due to his brain being hard-wired to read ancient Greek, mythological creatures want him dead, his best friend is a satyr and his teacher’s a centaur. Oh, and he’s the son of Poseidon, Greek god of the sea. He must undertake a quest to return the lightning bolt of Zeus lest the king of the gods starts a massive war over its theft. Why Zeus would leave his trademark weapon which also happens to be the Olympian equivelant of a tactical nuclear strike laying around unattended is one of the many, many unanswered questions brought up in the course of this plot. Odin had a damn treasure vault for stuff like this, and Zeus couldn’t even slap a “No Touchie” magical whammy on the thing? But let’s move on. I don’t want to spend my entire rage quotient in the second major paragraph.

Having never read this series of books, I can’t comment on how well the narrative of the novel transitioned into the screenplay. What I can comment on is a visible shift in style and pacing by director Chris Columbus. This is a man best known for his light-hearted, kid-oriented films such as Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The Lightning Thief feels a bit like an act of teenage rebellion against those more childish forays into filmmaking. While once we might have spent more time with Percy at home or school learning about what makes him tick and how he deals with the challenges of his young life, we’re thrust into the action almost immediately and given very little time for exposition.

This is both a good thing and a bad one. Exposition, after all, is difficult to get right and more often than not becomes an anchor welded around the ankle of the story, dragging the audience into the cloying darkness of boredom. However, without even passing attempts at exposition the story is left adrift, batted without foundation between one event and the next with nary a thing to connect them. Percy’s got a quest for a series of magical MacGuffins and an incidental need to rescue his mother to keep things going, but these elements have their own problems, seperate from those plauging the rest of the film.

It would be one thing if the MacGuffins were tied one to the other by clues that needed to be investigated on the scene where each is found. Instead our heroes have a magical map that just tells them where to go. Cuts down on stuff like intellectual curiosity and character building, sure, but who needs that stuff when you have mythological creatures to battle with swords? As for Percy’s mom, her character is also given something of the short end of the stick, and while most people would be genuinely concerned with a parent’s sudden death or disappearance, Percy reacts to the incident with a bit of dull surprise, quickly lost when he spots the girl. Because, you know, hormones are a much better motivator for moving a story along than concern for a loved one.

Without decent motivation or characterization for our hero, all we have left is action and spectacle. Again, the film falls short of delivering these elements without making things either bleedingly obvious or unnecessesarily dense. Instead of discovering the ways and means of his water-based demi-god powers, Percy has to be ham-handedly told how they work. Our heroes get out of their first two major scrapes thanks to everybody in the world having seen Clash of the Titans at some point, without explaining this point in-universe. The intrepid band spends five days in a pleasure palace before Percy’s dad calls him up on the Olympin telepathiphone to inform him of the fact that they’re farting around in a pleasure palace. And this says nothing about the aforementioned girl, supposedly the daughter of the goddess of wisdom and battle strategy, not employing the most practical and straightforward means of ending confrontations possible. Sure, it’s in keeping with traditions to train with swords and bows and whatnot, but just think how many of these encounters Annabeth could have resolved more quickly, directly and painlessly with the implementation and distribution of fucking guns.

Let’s see, what else is wrong with this flick? Grover’s irritating from start to finish, the only character who has interesting motivations and character beats in the slightest gets maybe five minutes of screen time, there’s no real tension and any attempt the story makes at trying to be more than a pandering and predictable distraction for middle schoolers just trying to make out in the back of the theater is slapped down in favor of more of that blunt telling over showing bullshit I’ve harped about for the last three minutes. Given my personal interest in stories like this reworked into other settings and genres to prove their viability and longevity, I wanted to like The Lightning Thief, but the more I watched the angrier I got. No amount of Sean Bean or Kevin McKidd can save this flick. Harry Potter does a much better job of giving us relatable adolescent characters in a fantasy setting, and cribbing notes from Clash of the Titans made me yearn for the early 80s schlock of that original film and wonder about how bad the new version is. I guess I’ll find out next week. For now, skip Percy Jackson. Give the books a try if you’re part of the target demographic, but if you’ve already read Harry Potter and aren’t frothing at the mouth for more of the same, I doubt you’re missing much. Find Madeline l’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time or T.H. White’s The Once and Future King instead. They’re classics, they’re poignant, and you don’t have the token black character weighing the whole thing down with his attempts at being both the ethnic wisecracking sidekick and the Magical Negro. But at least you can make a fun drinking game out of every moment the so-called heroes of The Lightning Thief just get a solution handed to them and don’t have to think for themselves, much like the audience.

Wait. Scratch that. I don’t want to be responsible for any of you dying from alcohol poisoning.

IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! Ringu

September 2, 2011 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

Original Text:

Spoiler

This is Darth Vader. Right-hand man of the evil Emperor Palpatine, Lord of the Sith, and lately the poster child for the outcry of “They changed it, now it sucks.” While in that case we’re talking about a man somewhat bloated by his own ego ham-handedly forcing things into what were perfectly servicable scenes, the argument in general comes from the fans of an exercise in entertainment adapted into another medium or by another creative mind. The trepidation with which an established fanbase can approach a new adaptation is the reason why the various iterations of the movie called The Ring have meet with disparate degrees of success. Since the original novel Ring was Japanese, it was the Japanese version of the movie I watched.

Four teenage school kids, returning from a resort cabin they shared, all have stories of a weird videotape they watched, and the phone call that followed telling them all they would die in one week. It was a great story and good for a laugh… until all four of them dropped dead. One of them is the neice of a reporter, and when she finds and watches the tape herself, she too gets a phone call. Unwilling to leave her small son alone in the world, she enlists her ex-husband for help, trying to find the way to break the videotape’s curse and discover its origins with the days she has left.

There are a few things of note in Ring once it begins. While the budget for the film sounds laughable by the standards of many modern Hollywood productions – only 1.2 million US dollars in 1998 – there’s nothing that feels cheap or chincy about it. I know there will be nay-sayers who say it lacks action or high energy moments or blood spatter or something like that. But this movie is proof positive that you don’t need those things for an effective horror story. What we have here is storytelling that is two things: very taut, and very intimate.

The tension in the story comes from amorphous things in production and direction. It’s cut in such a way and paced deliberately to highten the sliding scale of oddness in given situations during this week of hellacious mental torment, from slightly unnerving to full-on batshit. The musical score is subtle, for the most part, and sounds are geared to creep into your perceptions rather than overwhelm them. It’s like being serenaded during dinner with the soft sounds of a string quartet as opposed said quartet being interrupted by a roving mariachi band.

As for intimacy, here’s where some fans of the novel might have gotten their dead little girls in a bind. The gender of our protagonist was swapped and she was not only given a small child to protect but a tenuous relationship with her ex-husband. However, this not only serves as a source for drama but also subtle feelings of protectiveness, understanding and even attraction that comes across as extremely mutual and heartfelt. Excellent writing and acting convey this relationship with only a few words being spoken outside of the crisis at hand. It’s clear where the spark was between these two romantically, just as much as it is clear why the relationship didn’t work out. Coupled with the VHS Sword of Damocles, it’s very difficult not to feel empathy not just for our heroine, but for just about everybody involved.

That is what a lot of horror-based entertainment seems to miss more often than not: empathy. If we care about the characters, we care about what happens to them and we don’t want to see them killed. It’s why Silence of the Lambs is still a breathtaking piece of work, and Ring is just as good. When we don’t care about the characters, and they’re more or less lined up for a monster or monsters to turn them into five-foot piles of chunky salsa, things get very boring very fast. Despite it’s “lack of action” or “absense of gore”, Ring is a film that will have you on the edge of your seat. It shows us not just a great story with tension, intimacy and truly shiver-inducing horror, but the way to tell that story with the barest of tools in the author’s arsenal.

They didn’t even need CGI for the iconic TV shot. All you need is a tattered nightgown, some makeup and a very talented contortionist. … Actually, that sounds like a recipie for a rather entertaining evening, horror movie or not.

IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! Robin Hood

August 26, 2011 / BlueInkAlchemist / 1 Comment

A little something different this week… thanks to Jonny at Non-Social Media.

Original Text:

Spoiler

You wouldn’t think, at first glance, that the actors Errol Flynn, Kevin Costner, Cary Elwes and Russell Crowe have all that much in common other than their profession. We are, after all, talking about actors from different genres and even eras of film. However, they have now all portrayed versions of perhaps the most famous rogue of British folklore: Robin Hood. Flynn’s Robin was a man of high adventure, Costner’s was barely British and Elwes was in a spoof. As for Russell Crowe, his Robin was the central character in Ridley Scott’s 2010 more ‘historical’ adaptation of the story, and by ‘historical’ I mean that very special kind of history that conflates years of people and events into something that fits a theatrical running time and the attention spans of your typical movie-going audience.

While in the past Robin has always been at least peripherally attached to noble title and lands in Nottinghamshire, this time around our hero is plain Robin Longstride, an archer in Richard the Lionheart’s army of the Third Crusade. Robin himself isn’t much of a holy warrior, though, and when he makes his distaste for the slaughter of innocents over the name given to inscrutable omnipotent beings known to his sovereign, he’s put in the stocks. Richard gets himself killed and Robin takes it upon himself to escape, but not before stumbling across a few plot-relevant items that give him a way back to England. Events unfold around him that will set him on the path of becoming an outlaw whose fame will live on hundreds if not thousands of years after he’s dead.

Historical fiction is a road both Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe have walked down before. Crowe has been a lifelong fan of the legendary archer, but was never quite satisfied with the way Hollywood portrayed him. Scott, on the other hand, found a spec script in 2007 that tried to take the legend in a new direction. However, he eventually became dissatisfied with the evolution of the story, and what had begun as a revisionist film of the legend called Nottingham became a film simply entitled Robin Hood, styling itself as a Crusades-era Batman Begins.

For the most part, this actually works. We have a brilliantly talented cast, with nuanced and interesting characters delivering well-paced and balanced dialog in period settings that feel, for the most part, authentic. I get the feeling that this sort of thing has become something of a comfort zone for Ridley Scott, and all of the main selling points of Kingdom of Heaven are present here. From gorgeous shots of the English countryside to the inclusion of historical figures like Eleanor of Aquitaine, this film has a lot going for it.

Of course, true history buffs are likely to be somewhat put off by Scott’s interpretation of historical events. Things take place years before they actually happened, perpetuated by different people. Some figures meet ends differently than they did in life and liberties are taken with important documents and items. And like Kingdom of Heaven, at least in the theatrical release, some elements of the plot feel cobbled together with rubber cement and a staple gun. There’s at least a couple bits missing that would have smoothed out rough patches in the story, and some elements feel like holdovers from the original Nottingham notion. That’s not likely to be the case, however, as the writers of that original treatment were shouldered out of the production entirely. Now you’ll need to poke around online to see what they originally had in mind.

As much as it seems harsh that the original creative spark for the movie was removed from the hands of those writers, the end result could certainly have turned out worse. Prequels, by and large, have earned a stigma for being unnecessary works of fiction that fill in too many of the blanks audiences would probably prefer to populate themselves. While I can’t help but agree with the spirit of this sentiment, if a work is aiming to present the origins of a character in an intelligent, relatable and at least somewhat unique (but not superfluous) manner, I’m inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Like the aforementioned Batman Begins or X-Men: First Class, Robin Hood gives us a look at a character we think we knew in a way that we can understand, relate to and cheer for. Prequels may not always be necessary stories, but if the job is done well enough, the story will still feel worth telling.

While the mileage of this film with the individual film-goer is likely to vary, I do feel that Robin Hood does its job with more than adequate aplomb. Some of the moments in the third act feel a bit over-the-top, most notably King John’s declaration at the end, and I am curious as to how a Director’s Cut of this movie would compare to its original release. However, in its theatrical version, the story is relatively free of overt contrivance, the characters are solid and the acting is poignant without being melodramatic. Some may feel there are too many echoes of Braveheart or Gladiator or other movies here, but Robin Hood manages to find its own place and I feel it’s worth seeing since its merits do outweigh its flaws.

There are some universal things present here, outside of the legend of Robin Hood: Don’t get into a swordfight with Russell Crowe, don’t make Kevin Durand (here playing Little John) angry, and most of all, do not mess with Cate Blanchett anywhere near a forest. You piss off Galadriel or perpetuate wickeness in her wood, you are entering a world of pain.

Tag: film (page 17 of 20)

IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! Centurion

IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! The Expendables

IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief

IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! Ringu

IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! Robin Hood

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