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.

Review: Mr. Bean's Holiday

You know how, when an American comedian's act becomes successful enough, he gets a sitcom and sheds all of what made his act praiseworthy in exchange for becoming more widely accessible and family-friendly? Mr. Bean's Holiday can be seen as the English version of that phenomenon—watching it made me realize to my horror that, in some parallel universe, there's a Monty Python Land at Disney's Hollywood Studios.

A cute but never hilarious film, Mr. Bean's Holiday comes off as Rowan Atkinson using a Mr. Bean movie as an excuse to go to the south of France. To provide a semblance of plot, there's also a wiseacre kid who Bean has to reunite with his father after his own bumbling separates them. Later in the film there's even a love interest, which means all it's lacking is a dog or a monkey or something to complete the Family Movie Trifecta.

Review: Hellraiser: Bloodline

Well, I said I wasn't gonna watch any more Hellraisers. So what are we doing here exactly? What strange appeal do these adequate-at-best movies have that keeps me (and presumably enough audiences to justify eight sequels) coming back? Is it the hint of a vaster and more mysterious mythology than what we see in the first three movies? Is it the hunch that these villains have not yet attained the heights of scariness that they're capable of?

If either of the above are the answer, then I'm definitely done after the abysmal Hellraiser: Bloodline, the fourth installment in the franchise. Really, in my case, I think what's kept me vaguely curious enough to make it this far is the non-Cenobite cast members. I watched Hell on Earth for Terry Farrell, and learned a short time ago that Bloodlines has Adam Scott (Ben on Parks and Recreation and the Defiant's helmsman in Star Trek: First Contact). As it turns out, he dies quickly, but not before getting a few slightly entertaining scenes.

Review: Crackerjack

Oh Die Hard, what hath ye wrought?

Crackerjack tells the timeless tale of a gang of terrorists being outmaneuvered and eventually defeated by a lone Cop on the Edge—our titular "Crackerjack," Jack Wild (I can't decide which of the character's names is more ridiculous). Crackerjack makes for a cracking dull protagonist as portrayed by Thomas Ian Griffith, whose career seems predominantly defined by soaps. (The hair is kind of a dead giveaway.)

The setup is that McClane Crackerjack has come to L.A. Colorado from New York Chicago for a vacation with his estranged wife brother's family. His nemesis is a smiling East German terrorist played by Alan Rickman Christopher Plummer. They engage in spirited banter and taunting over walkie-talkies while the L.A.P.D. Marines (who initially don't trust our hero when he calls them from inside Nakatomi Tower the ski lodge) bungle an attempt to save the hostages. In the end, not even the villain's long-haired assault-weapon-wielding male models can save him from defeat.

If MST3K were still on, this would belong on it. The performances are continually laughable, the plot is dumb without being agonizingly slow, the corny synth score actually sounds lifted from Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders, and the superfluous nudity would be easily edited out.

Review: Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue

If you're a horror film buff, you should probably see the documentary Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue, but mainly because it's a fun historical review of American horror cinema, and not for any especially profound genre insights. You'll see clips from a few titles you might not be familiar with, and you'll enjoy the convention-panel-like ruminations of legends like John Carpenter and George Romero, discussing their work in the context of their personal lives and their perceptions of American history.

I've never owned a copy of Fangoria, but I enjoyed this documentary on the above basis. Where it lost me was in some of its attempted connections between American history and the trends in American horror films. When those connections seemed legitimate, it was largely because the films in question were so beat-you-over-the-head-with-something-rusty obvious about it—e.g. the '80s consumerism satire The Stuff, whose creator Larry Cohen is among those interviewed (not to mention the wonderfully endearing They Live). When those connections were more strained, you feel like you're watching the audiovisual version of an undergraduate film studies essay, and a fairly insightless one at that.

Review: License to Kill

After re-watching both Timothy Dalton Bond movies—this one and its predecessor, The Living Daylights—I have to say I think Dalton gets over-maligned as Bond. He's not completely right for the role, at least as the role came to be defined by earlier films, but the Dalton installments themselves are a welcome respite from the increasingly ludicrous Moore installments that preceded them.

License to Kill has a stronger story and a more interesting cast than Living Daylights. In a pretty atypical pre-credits sequence, Bond is attending the wedding of his old friend, CIA agent Felix Leiter, when they learn a notorious and untouchable drug lord, Sanchez (Robert Davi), is in the vicinity. They work together to nab Sanchez and make it to the wedding at the last possible moment, naturally via parachute—and then the Binder titles begin, so we know something's amiss.

Review: Sneakers

Sometimes you notice an unexpected similarity between two very different works that you happen to consume around the same time; when I re-watched Sneakers recently, I had just finished reading Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work, a once-controversial book from the mid-'90s concerning inevitable changes in the world's economies as a result of ever-more-efficient automation. (Short summary: most people will lose their jobs, and we have to move beyond the entire notion of jobs ASAP, or huge and enduring economic disaster will ensue.) I'm no economist and I rarely read this sort of thing, but the book was tough to put down in spite of its often encyclopedic feel—largely because I like to think about all the ways in which the world has changed since recent technologies came along. Rifkin only mentions the Internet once, yet his book, remarkably, isn't very dated at all. In much the same way, and for some of the same reasons, 1992's Sneakers isn't as dated as I feared it would prove to be when I re-watched it. I guess we have Wikileaks and Anonymous to thank for that—or maybe they have movies like this to thank for their own conception.