Review: Cosmopolis

I did like the music. Gotta say that right up front. There wasn't enough of it, but what was there, I liked. It contributed to the intermittently dreamlike mood.

But otherwise? Cosmopolis is a pretentious mess, a string of disjointed scenes whose purpose feel less like narrative advancement and more like "let's bring in this actor now." The thematic continuity, such as it is, tries to seem like it's got its "finger on the pulse" of contemporary American issues like class warfare, sexual politics, and crazed lone gunmen. But if educators in future generations decide this movie represents our time, then I feel bad for the students forced to watch it.

Maybe my vitriol is partly due to the concept's inherent appeal and potential. Cosmopolis concerns a brilliant and amoral young Wall Street bazillionaire whose financial empire begins to collapse all around him while he spends most of the movie in his borderline-sci-fi limo surrounded by riots. AND it's directed in a sterile, sleek fashion by David Friggin' Cronenberg. I can imagine a universe where I love the shit out of that movie.

Review: Side Effects

Readers of my previous reviews may have noticed how often I comment, usually unhappily, on a film's structure. I'm not sure why this is so often a focal point for me. Maybe it's because most ineffective movies fail in predictable and routine ways, so it stands out more when a film suffers from a bizarre, disjointed, and/or lopsided plot structure.

The other side of that view is just as valid: that effective movies with unusual structure get noticed for it. Pulp Fiction is an obvious example, and Side Effects is too, but not in the same way. Not only does Side Effects have structural weirdness of a different flavor (its chronology is linear), but the weirdness it has exists for a very good reason, as opposed to Pulp Fiction's showier, more indulgent structure.

Review: The Dark Knight Rises

After the impressive Batman Begins and the stellar Dark Knight, the Nolan Batman franchise ends on a sour, bleating, almost brown note with The Dark Knight Rises—a textbook study, in my view, of the tendency for highly successful film franchises to eventually lead their auteurs into disaster, presumably because success breeds yes-men and auteurs need constructive criticism.

That's the most likely-seeming explanation I can think of for the surprising number of failures evident in TDKR, and while I could probably go on a marathon rant about each one of them, in the interests of page loading time I'll instead focus on the most significant.

(Note that I am not a comic-book nerd, so my sense of what Batman "should be" plays little part in what follows. At one time I was kind of a film-and-TV-Batman nerd, but not enough that I would have avoided rejection by the REAL Batman nerds.)

Review: Dark City

And now, another one from my "I Put It Off So Long that It's Probably a Little Past Its Freshness Date" movie pile.

The prospective viewer should know that Dark City is not so much a noir film (despite its visual palette) as it is a mysterious sci-fi/fantasy film. That sentence probably gives away too much, but a fan of noir who dislikes films that delve too deeply into the realm of the fantastical will be disappointed with Dark City. However, the inverse is also true; I'm only mildly fond of noir but I liked Dark City more than either true noir or Dark City-esque films like The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix.

Structurally, the film reveals just enough at just the right times to maintain the right balance of interest and confusion. Had it tried to be more opaque—for example, had it omitted the shot of the weird creature during one of the early chase scenes—it might have kept me from guessing as much about the explanation as I did, but it also might have turned out too plodding.

Review: Shinobi: Heart Under Blade

I recently found myself in the mood for a "ninja movie," and while Shinobi: Heart Under Blade does have ninjas, and is a movie, it wasn't quite what I had in mind. Next time maybe I'll do more research.

Not that Heart Under Blade is bad or anything. But I'd hoped for more of a "ninjas doing badass shit to non-ninja mooks" kind of movie, rather than "ninja clan vs. ninja clan, but with lots of talking and romance-y moping, and also they're superhuman." That said, if you're in the mood for the latter, look no further.

The Netflix description nails it for once, describing this film as Romeo and Juliet meets the X-Men. The lead characters, Gennosuke and Oboro, are the star-crossed lovers (and yes, they use that phrase a couple of times, just in case the influence is unclear). They belong to rival ninja clans populated by a host of bizarre characters, including a Wolverine analogue with rapid healing, a male Mystique analogue, a poisonous Rogue analogue, and Sleeve Guy—whose power is telekinetic control over the fibers in his sleeves. (I'm not enough of a comic book nerd to know the relevant X-Man for Sleeve Guy.)

Review: The Specials

I like James Gunn, and I really like Slither, but The Specials? A total mess.

The loser cousin of Mystery Men, The Specials is a low-budget superhero comedy starring Thomas Hayden Church, Rob Lowe, Judy Greer, Jamie Kennedy, and the director himself (as one of the more self-deprecating heroes of the supergroup). They are among "The Specials," a B-list supergroup with so many members that the film has to spend half its running time just trying to distinguish them—and doing so via feaux-Whedonesque conversation and intermittent talking-head shots.