Die Even More Harder Than Ever Before- The action genre is basically a silly one. I watched the first three in a row, and it had occurred to me that even the makers of these things have to acknowledge that. For instance, the line, "I don't believe this!!" or a variant thereof pops up in every Die Hard film. I'd have to look through a bunch more to confirm this, but I believe this type of line comes up in every action film ever made, since the beginning of the genre. It's an understanding of the filmmakers that the fundamental premise is ludicrous, and if you stopped to think about the actual mechanics of the film in question, your enjoyment of it would be seriously hampered. I'd say it's also a subconscious acknowledgement by the filmmakers that what they are engaged in is a fundamentally silly genre that, while it puts bread on the table and gas in the Hummer, is not really what they signed up for when they first entered the movie business.
Still, the action movie's continued success indicates to us that culturally, we haven't progressed much from the early days of cinema, where the novelty of showing top-hatted patrons the thrill of having an onrushing train come directly at them hasn't worn off quite yet.
Transformers-the movie- Here's something to think about: Let's say that 'Demolition Man', that Stallone movie from years back, where Sly is frozen and put into a futuristic overly-politically correct world (where fine dining is Taco Bell and popular music is radio jingles), became a t.v. show. A running gag in the show would be where the camera would pan by a movie theater, and the titles on the marquee would be advertising ninety-minute commercials. "Country Crock Margarine-the movie" "Diet Pepsi-free: the movie". Do you see where I'm going with this?
Michael Bay is just a more successful version of Uwe Boll, really. There'll be explosions, swooping camera shots, bombastic scores, and the Magical Black Guy. (The MBG, in Bay's movies, is a colourful urban character that's thrown in to comment on the movie for no other reason than to add a bit of 'hipness' to it. Sort of the same broad reason T.V. in the 70's had Ray Charles do a walk-on now and again. He was a bike courier in Armageddon, he conducted a rail car in The Rock, he was Michael Clark Dugan in The Island, and in Bad Boys he was, um, Martin Lawrence and Will Smith. Here he plays a used car dealer.)
The Bourne Supremacy- The well's running dry for this particular franchise. Still, for what it's worth, it did motivate the James Bond franchise to bring their character more down to earth. Matt Damon's okay, I guess. Though if you put Matthew McConaughey or even Luke Wilson in the lead, you probably wouldn't notice any difference.
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Reviews:
Hostel II (F)
The sub-genre of 'gore-no' films, however, is like sticking our hands in really hot water to see how long we can last. A more intense form of inoculation, if you will. What keeps it from being more prevalent is in it's low budget and spotty distribution. The better ones, like Peter Jackson's 'Dead Alive' and Takashi Miike's "Ichi the Killer" work because their tongue is planted firmly in their cheek. Being low budget, the creators of these films have to spend their time and money in a more thoughtful way than someone like director Eli Roth is capable of. (If his mock horror trailer from the movie, 'Grind house' was really made, you'd have seen all the good parts already...)
What really sucked about Hostel is that, a) Eli Roth plays his work straight, so much that the torture segments throw you out of the movie. b) he spent way too much money in making and promoting it, and c) when the box office receipts started to fall off, he acted really hurt and surprised that not too many people feel like spending their evenings at the local cineplex watching young women get tortured and murdered. Cue my monocle popping off my face into my gin and tonic. When you think about it, if you think about it, while the premise is creepily logical (an underground company stages events for clients to sadistically torture and murder wayward tourists), the way they procure their victims is ludicrous. If the company is in Eastern Europe, wouldn't it make more sense economically to grab impoverished locals off the street for fodder than to undertake the time and expense, (and legal risks) to procure young American tourists?
Ratatouille (A-) What a pleasure to see craftsmen being allowed to do that what they do best. It says something about the creative culture at Pixar in that even their mediocre stuff, like 'Cars', is still watchable at least, and still heads and shoulders over everything that comes out of the 3d animation line these days. In this case, the pleasure is not in the story, which is okay in and of itself, (Rat that loves food comes to Paris and becomes a chef) but in the subtle details that add up to make the sum more than its parts.
Notice how the various textures all have their own specific glow. Notice how all the rats move. In a bunch, they're repulsive, one on one, they're adorable. See how much better animated the water is in this picture than 'Finding Nemo'. (So much so that I'm sure they worked to make it a bit more 'cartoony' in the final steps, if you know what I mean.) The craftsmanship here is so advanced and surefooted that a character's glance and heave of the chest is all you need to know about them.
The only nit I have to pick, well, two - The little monologue by Anton Ego (Peter O'Toole) rings a tad false for me - is that Pixar tends to run out of story before they run out of movie. You could sum up their last three movie endings as: "And, uh, trust us on this, everything worked out for everyone in the end. Bye!" Still, it would be the height of corporate stupidity on Disney's part if they started mucking around with the good thing they've got with John Lassiter's band of geniuses.
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