I've wanted to see the 2002 Sam Rockwell vehicle Confessions of a Dangerous Mind since about the time it came out, but never got around to it until now. If I were going to do a tweet-review of this, it would be "Way darker than I expected; don't watch it if you're in a misanthropic mood."
You think YOU've got it bad? Try being Woyzeck for a day. He's a grunt in an indeterminate mid-1800s European army—I assume German, but he could be German-French in the same sense that most movie Romans are British-Roman. He's being cuckolded by his young wife (who looks like Jewel Staite with a crushed spirit) and the high-school-quarterback-like drum major. He's also a human guinea pig for an ambitious scientist who's been feeding him nothing but peas, and who rewards him with much-needed cash every time he behaves crazily.
Naturally, therefore, Woyzeck's descending into insanity, and just as naturally, there's no going back…since this is a Werner Herzog film.
Imagine Time Chasers if its plot entailed not time travel but alligator smuggling, if its cast had far less investment in what they were doing, if the chase scenes were even more cheap and stupid, and if it induced Z-grade celebrity actors to somehow embarrass themselves—in this case, Michael Berryman (Captain Rixx from the TNG episode "Conspiracy"), Antonio Fargas (TV's Huggy Bear), and Joe Estevez, who of course is reason I watched this.
The success of The Lego Movie—following as it does the Toy Story franchise and the similar Wreck-It Ralph—introduces the distressing possibility that all the best kid's movies from now on will revolve only around toys. Whether that grim harbinger of things to come proves accurate or not, at the very least we'll have a curious little "golden age" of quirky kid fare.
I suppose it would not be the best use of my time in this review to tell you that "Everything Is Awesome!!!" about this movie; you likely already know that most of it is. Therefore, I will focus on expectation-management: what are the places where The Lego Movie falls a little short, so that those of you who haven't seen it don't get your hopes up?
My goal in this review is, as much as possible, to make you understand so you don't have to see it. Because whatever else can be said of this movie, it has a certain uniqueness, and unfortunately that can be attractive sometimes.
Be assured that Road House is in fact repellent from start to finish.
What's not so forgivable is when you make a movie about a flash-freezing weather phenomenon and you obviously lack understanding of what being in harsh winter conditions is actually like. I hypothesize the director and/or screenwriter must've been natives of Tasmania—the setting of the cheap disaster movie Arctic Blast, which I only assume was on SyFy—where it doesn't go below zero (Fahrenheit). There's a special kind of sadness in a movie with such scientific pretensions and yet such obvious scientific failures.
Most of the "action" in Arctic Blast takes place in rooms full of computers—which is at least the right feel for a movie like this—but when it's not staring at screens, it gets a lot of mileage out of its main flash-freezing visual effect, which is obviously cheap but not terrible. Yet the antagonist—the titular "arctic blast"—never seems to fall below -120° F for the whole movie. Dangerously cold, yes; infrastructure-challengingly cold, yes; but end-of-the-world cold? Flash-freezing cold? So cold that you can't even see your breath?
That last one's the real stake through the heart. I'm pretty sure I've never been as bored by any Bond movie, and I saw Quantum of Solace—and the '60s Casino Royale. And that boredom's not just due to this movie being a remake of Thunderball. Yes, much of the story is the same, but most scenes have no direct analog in the original, and some entire plot developments are new. It's all just…so dull. The main reason I didn't give up on this movie at the hour-thirty mark was just in case I'd miss another scene as batshit as the video game. (Also, it was directed by Irvin Kershner—director of The Empire Strikes Back, the best Star Wars film. Didn't help.)
I will answer your franchise-apostasy questions below, so that idle curiosity does not compel you to waste two-plus hours on this.
Rewatching 2001 recently, I was struck by just how slow it is. I mean, you can't not notice it, but this time through it almost felt like it was daring people to finish it (as was, inarguably, Barry Lyndon). I don't think this is, as Nicholas Carr would allege, a symptom of my personal overexposure to the Internet and its having conditioned me to expect lightning-quick gratification. Indeed, I felt less impatient with 2001 than I have during any previous viewing. But the slowness is one of the things that intensely stands out, and newcomers to this legendary film should account for it before idly sitting down to it.
This may be what I enjoy most about Kubrick movies: the space to imagine. That what we imagine should terrify the ever-loving fuck out of us is merely an added bonus.
The Avengers assembled (YEP I WENT THERE) its constituent hero team from a scattered group of uneven but generally successful superhero movies connected by rather thin and easily-ignored tendons of in-universality. This strategy obviously worked in terms of getting butts in the seats, but more than that, it worked for each hero-specific film: it freed up each filmmaker to pursue styles and stories independently for each feature, with really very little need to worry about stepping on the compound franchise's toes. This not only gives each feature a freshness that one doesn't get in more limited and repetitive franchises (such as Harry Potter) but also opens up the potential for pretty impressive feats of long-form storytelling. I personally don't feel that the Marvel films have achieved any such feats (though Iron Man 3 was a step in the right direction), but the potential is there, thanks to the Marvel formula.
Now that Western popular cinema has entered the post-Marvel, post-LOTR age—where serialization is not just accepted, but expected, in our blockbusters—it's interesting to look back on an era when such things were still pretty new. The original Star Wars trilogy began the modern version of the trend, and, alongside the Indy trilogy, the Star Trek film franchise reinforced the trend, proving it to be a viable strategy and not a series-specific aberration.
Contrast this with the comparatively abrupt opening of Star Trek IV. The opening council scene with John Shuck's Klingon ambassador provides some indirect summary of the previous two movies, then Kirk's first captain's log says "We're in the third month of our Vulcan exile," never fully explaining why they're exiled, let alone why the planet Vulcan would be harboring them. Ironic that the most financially successful Trek film (up until 2009) opens in a fashion so impenetrable, almost hostile, to the uninitiated viewer. It's not as though they could have assumed that every audience member saw The Search for Spock. (Indeed, it seems they even tacked on a weird prologue for the foreign markets under the assumption that too few people overseas had seen III.)
Those of us who are cursed to occasionally find ourselves in the mood for an Asylum mockbuster could do worse than American Warships, which came out the same time as Battleship and likewise concerns naval warfare with aliens—in this case, centered on the aging USS Iowa. Cheap and dumb by any measure, American Warships nonetheless displays minimal competence in story, pacing, some of the dialogue, and the leads' acting.
The astoundingly bad first film (Dungeons and Dragons, most notable for Jeremy Irons' absurd performance) assumes basically no familiarity at all, and indeed was likely perceived by the hardcore D&D nerds to be nothing so much as a soulless cash-in, borrowing franchise elements but not their context. See also either one of the J.J. Treks.
The far lower-budgeted, but surprisingly decent, second film (Dungeons and Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God) actually resembles many D&D campaigns in tone, rather than resembling all the worst things about The Phantom Menace as its predecessor did. Yet it doesn't assume much D&D knowledge of its audience. There's even a scene where a character explains the difference between arcane and divine magic, which would've seemed insulting to the hardcore fans if they hadn't already seen the first movie and thereby known true insult.
Readers: if you happen to possess an affection for American cinema as an art form…what are you doing even reading this review in the first place?
You know it's gonna be dire. You remember the first J.J. Abrams Star Trek vehidebacle (term © Fraught Experiments LLC), and you learned to expect more of the same from the sequel's ubiquitous promotional material. You know it's just another schlockbuster (term © somebody else, probably), one which at best—at BEST—possesses a tiny glimmer of ambition and heart.
I say this because, Into Darkness is arguably about something—intentionally or not. This is notable when we remember that the Trek franchise pre-J.J. had always tried to be about something. Specifically, Into Darkness is about the morality of targeted killings.
I wasn't really a nerd in school. I had to gain acceptance into their social stratum—I had to work up to nerddom (indeed, I never even played a tabletop RPG until college). This is largely because I moved from city to city and state to state so often that, statistically speaking, at any given point in my academic history I was probably the New Kid.
Table 1.1: School Social Strata ca. Reagan-Bush-Clinton Era
| Stratum Name (Descending Order) | Access to Sex, Liquor, or Non-Homemade Drugs | Trek Franchise Investment |
| JOCKS | Complete | None |
| JOCK AFFILIATES | Moderate to Extreme | None |
| JOCK WOULD-BES (& Vo-Tech Hicks, Where Applicable) | Low to High | None |
| ARTY COOL TYPES | Moderate to High | None to Low |
| NERDS | None to Low | Low to Extreme |
| NEW KIDS & UGLIER FOREIGN EXCHANGE STUDENTS | None | None to Extreme |
| UNTOUCHABLES | That's Pretty Funny | Let's Just Say, Probably Writes Letters to Counselor Troi |
(Don't worry, I'm going somewhere with this.) You will notice that the second and third columns above represent two major forms of escapism, for members of all strata, from the meat-grinder hellscape of their shared environment. You'll also notice that each of them is roughly inversely proportional to the other. That Star Trek was almost completely rejected by all but the lower strata is, I'm certain, a large part of Paramount's decision to not just reboot, not just reimagine, but thoroughly reinterpret the franchise with 2009's embarrassing film.
Moreover, I found Gravity compelling and realistic enough that other sci-fi thrillers will hereafter have a high standard of realism to live up to. This is why I'm reluctant to see Ghosts of Mars even though I know I should for several reasons.
But back to Europa Report. I'm pleased to…um…report that it's not ridiculous. It's got some structural problems, and many of its characters are ill-defined, but I found it engrossing and tense.
Eighties movies run the gamut between "charmingly '80s" and "painfully '80s." Innerspace is kind of all over that gamut, which makes it a densely representative example of '80s cinema.
And our leads? The oft-confused Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton. This movie's actually a helpful mnemonic for those of you who have trouble remembering which is which: who'd make a better head-in-the-clouds neurologist vs. who'd make a better corporate shark?
Pullman is the neurologist, Rex, whose livelihood is threatened by shady goings-on involving his old college buddy turned plutocrat, Jim (Paxton). Soon, Rex's very sanity is on the line; he begins to experience hallucinations after agreeing to perform experimental brain surgery on a company drone (Cort) who knows too much.
It's still an engaging, sorta creepy haunted-castle kind of movie. It features a solid story, overall avoidance of the most tired horror cliches, and a memorable antagonist. I just wish it had dispensed with the bad taste.
(Note: this review is as spoiler-free as I could make it. Which is to say, it hints at spoilers.)
Many indie horror films end up being more horror and less indie; they aspire, not to artistic profundity or hipster cred, but to scares, gore, and frequently, reliable genre tropes. Indie zombie movie Pontypool is largely the inverse of that.
I have mixed feelings about indie movies; even those I've liked, I've often found slightly irritating. And initially, I wasn't even going to do a full review for Pontypool because its ending bugged me so much. Upon further reflection, however, much of the first hour-plus was engaging and effective enough that I changed my mind. Its indie-ness is less overwhelming than it could have been, resulting in a watchable and quite different movie, which is a rare enough combination to merit attention by itself. It helps that, despite its miniscule budget, Pontypool is occasionally scary, and in a distinctive way.
Spend enough time in a nursing home or a psych ward, and there's a good chance you'll encounter some individuals exhibiting the same behavioral oddity that distinguishes Pontypool's zombies from others. Thus, despite its concept being even less plausible than that of more typical zombie narratives, its brand of scare works—and is likely to feel even more unsettling than most zombie movies to those of us who've seen people do this.
