Moody's Movie Blog

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm DVD review

mike_moody — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:48:59 GMT

Sometimes darker means better. Especially in Gotham City.

The moody BATMAN: MASK OF THE PHANTASM stands in sharp contrast to the gaudy and goofy live-action Batman films that followed its 1993 theatrical release. Where Joel Schumaker's BATMAN FOREVER (1995) and BATMAN & ROBIN (1997) favored garish color schemes and cartoonish action scenes, PHANTASM delivered an engrossing story told with wit, style and restraint.

Some have called this feature-length spinoff to the excellent BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES the best Batfilm ever produced. I wouldn't go that far, but it certainly deserves high praise and stature. It's one of the most original and engrossing depictions of Batman and Gotham City on film.

PHANTASM's gorgeous art deco visual style and film noir vibe rival the gothic landscape Tim Burton created for his great Batfilms. The film's shadowy style compliments the densely-plotted story which balances drama, mystery and romance with exciting action and adventure.

The story finds Batman/Bruce Wayne (voiced by the awesome Kevin Conroy) hunting down a masked vigilante, the Phantasm, who's busy picking off Gotham's mob bosses one-by-one. Batman is wrongly implicated in the murders, and the plot soon takes a personal twist for the Dark Knight. He discovers the murderer has a connection to his long lost love, Andrea Beaumont (Dana Delaney). Themes of revenge, regret, and obsession crop up, and the case forces Bruce Wayne to reexamine his troubled past and his decision to become the Batman.

The film offers a number of fascinating origin-style flashbacks that add weight to the vigilante mystery. We follow a young Bruce attempting to make good on the vow of vengeance made to his parents after their murder. This leads to some fun pre-Batsuit action scenes. Things get complicated for Bruce after he finds true love with Andrea. The most compelling and poignant moment comes midway as young Bruce, wishing to ditch the Batsuit to live a happy and normal life with Andrea, begs his parents' towering gravestone to set him free of his vow. Fate, of course, tragically decides to keep Bruce under the cowl.

The flashbacks also provide a few peeks of a pre-dolled-up Joker (Mark Hamill). The Clown Prince of Crime's mysterious connection to the Phantasm drops him right in the middle of the story and the film's climactic showdown. Hamill's Joker is always a pleasure to watch. He goes from quirky to creepy to threatening in a matter of seconds, offering comic relief and some tense moments.

The Joker isn't the only cool thing about the film's latter half. The mystery surrounding the Phantasm's identity should keep most viewers in suspense. Plus, the slam-bang finale, which takes place in a rundown World's Fair site, is full of visual thrills and ends on a risky downbeat worthy of Batman's dark history.

Some might find the animation a bit aged or too flat in places, but Shirley Walker's timeless score should elevate any such scenes.

Audiences ignored MASK OF THE PHANTASM during its theatrical run, but the film became a Batfan favorite after its initial release on DVD and home video in the early 90s. PHANTASM is even more relevant today because of its thematic and tonal parallels to Christopher Nolan's BATMAN BEGINS. Those anticipating THE DARK KNIGHT could do a lot worse than revisiting ol' Bats' first big screen animated adventure.

BATMAN: MASK OF THE PHANTASM was directed by Eric Radomski and Bruce W. Timm.

Review originally published at Obsessed With Film.

Be Kind Rewind review

mike_moody — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:38:33 GMT

Some critics are slamming director Michel Gondry’s sweet new slipstream comedy Be Kind Rewind for being excessively heartfelt and overly sentimental. I caught the film this weekend and was quickly wooed by its oddball humor, charming story about a neighborhood full of cuddly wackos, and warm message about the power of community spirit.

Those hoping for a thematic sister film to Gondry’s 2004 drama Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (written by Charlie Kaufman) might be disappointed. Rewind wears its heart on its quirky sleeve, and it leaves little room for existential angst or scenes of heartbreak. Still, fans of Gondry’s narrow sense of humor and visionary music video work should find a lot to like in Be Kind Rewind. Most people reading this have no doubt seen the trailers with Mos Def, doing a great job playing a spacier version of his Ford Prefect from Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, and Jack Black remaking, or “sweding,” movies like RoboCop, Rush Hour 2 and Ghostbusters. The duo’s imaginative zero-budget remakes are an essential part of the film, but they don’t start making them until way after the twenty-minute mark. First, Gondry sets up a story about the gentrification of an historic - to its residents anyway - East Coast neighborhood.

Mr. Freeman (Danny Glover) is forced to make expensive repairs to the building that houses his neighborhood video store. City hall threatens to demolish it and build condos on the site if he can’t bring the building up to code. Freeman takes a vacation to spy on a nearby Blockbuster-like franchise, hoping to ape the business model, and leaves Mos Def’s Mike in charge. Enter Jerry (Jack Black), Mike’s annoying, conspiracy theory-spouting buddy who lives next to the neighborhood power plant. Jerry gets himself zapped (with some cool lightning effects) and magnetized during a failed attempt to sabotage the power plant. Jerry’s newly magnetized body erases all the tapes in Freeman’s store, causing a desperate Mike to start remaking the store’s video catalog with a bulky, circa-1989 video camera.

The remakes are hilarious and, although low-tech, endlessly creative. Mike and Jerry use fishing poles and tinsel to recreate the Ghostbusters’ proton streams, and saucy pizzas stand in for blood pools in their version of Boyz N Da Hood. The sweded movies are a testament to Gondry’s unlimited imagination and charming, singular visual style. (Check out his music video and TV work at Youtube).

Mike and Jerry’s remakes are a hit with the neighborhood residents, who soon become part of their movie-making exploits. The creative projects unite the community and, spurred by the spirit of neighborhood jazz hero Fats Waller, the local Joes and Janes make a bid to reclaim the town from urban developers.

The right kind of person, namely the movie buff, will probably go home loving this movie, especially for its bizarre Sesame Streettone, its championing of the dirty underdog, and the delightful performances by the main cast (especially Mos Def and Glover) and a funny Mia Farrow. Yup, Mia Farrow. Sigourney Weaver even pops up in the third act, a possible signal that the A-listers are lining up to work with Gondry. I’m looking forward to his next project, a true sci-fi film based on the Rudy Rucker novel Master of Space and Time. I’m not sure what to make of his idea for a sequel to Rewind, though.

Review originally posted at SciFi Observer.

Quick Day Watch DVD review

mike_moody — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:31:11 GMT

Day Watch, the sequel to the thrilling 2004 Russian supernatural action flick Night Watch, will probably confuse fans of the original movie and alienate everyone else. That being said — er typed — director Timur Bekmambetov’s follow-up to his critically acclaimed hit is a fun, fast-paced and often inspired piece of pop moviemaking. The flick is far from perfect though, and it somehow feels a lot more hollow that its groundbreaking predecessor.

Day Watch had a limited theatrical run in the U.S., but fans can now catch it on a single-disc unrated DVD with an awkward commentary by Bekmambetov and a “making of” featurette.

Let’s talk visuals … It’s an understatement to call Day Watch a marvelous creative technical achievement. Bekmambetov and crew almost outdo themselves with some stunning visuals, CG and camera work here. “Day Watch” impresses not only with its incredibly implausible but mind-blowing action scenes but also with its gritty visual take on urban Moscow. Like Night Watch, the filmmakers again successfully sell the idea that a supernatural world full of super-powered beings exists alongside our own. Still, some things are off here. Unlike Night Watch, the subtitles on this unrated DVD, unfortunately, aren’t artfully weaved into the movie. They just sit there at the bottom of the screen instead of floating around and becoming part of the action. It’s a minor complaint, but I was really disappointed about this.

Let’s talk story … We drop in on Anton, the hero of Night Watch, presumably years after the events of the first movie. He’s still our focus point in this odd world where Light (good) and Dark (bad) “Others,” or supernatural beings, live on Earth and police each other with bureaucratic rules based on an ages-old treaty. Things go wonky when Anton’s bratty preteen son, who became a Dark Other in the first movie, fires the first salvo of a supernatural war.

From then, the plot takes some fun and unexpected comic turns and moves along at light speed. Still, this second story in a proposed trilogy feels too much like a middle movie. Night Watch did a great job of introducing us into this strange world. Day Watch just shows us more of it, and it’s hard to grasp some important plot details and character motivations in one sitting. The story doesn’t really pull you in like it should, and that undercuts what could have been a astonishing surprise ending.

American audiences will most likely miss a lot of what makes this movie special, like a creative title sequence that parodies well-known Russian corporate logos and cameos by famous Russian sci-fi writers and genre actors. Day Watch is strictly for fans only. For maximum viewing pleasure, I recommend screening it as part of a double feature with Night Watch.

Beowulf quick review

mike_moody — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:18:54 GMT

I was kicking myself for not catching Beowulf in 3-D as soon as the movie’s titles started flowing across the screen. The Cinemark in my hometown of Brownsville wasn’t offering the 3-D experience director Robert Zemeckis had in mind when creating this animated take on the ancient long-form poem. It’s too bad, since the 3-D gimmick probably would have made this awkward and unlikeable movie worth watching.

Unlike the Lord of the Rings trilogy or even the Harry Potter flicks, little in Beowulf is thrilling, visually arresting or awe inspiring. The filmmakers’ take on the mostly shapeless classic story is dull, one-note and sometimes laughable. The animation and art design is unremarkable and often ugly, especially when the human characters look and move like dead, manipulated meat puppets. There are two scenes — only two — that I found potentially engrossing and fun to look at, but that’s a sad tally for a movie marketed as a rousing holiday spectacle.

Beowulf opens in King Hrothgar’s (Anthony Hopkins) mead hall with the king and his knights doing an Anglo-Saxon take on Caligula. It’s a gross display, with the vulgar animated knights slobbering all over themselves and a Hrothgar so drunk and undiginified that he doesn’t care if his robe slips off to reveal little Hrothgar in front of everybody. These characters never become sympathetic or interesting at any point in the movie’s 113-minutes.

Eventually, the monster Grendel bursts in and kills most of these guys and the “hero” Beowulf later answers Hrothgar’s call to kill the monster. The mistake made is that Zemeckis’ Beowulf, along with most of the other human characters in this thing, is about as heroic and likeable as a boasting jock or an obnoxious brute. Instead of turning the classic character into a classic pop hero, Zemeckis and crew (including writers Neil Gaiman and Roger Avery) deliver a boring braggart no one can relate to. Ray Winstone’s voice acting is fine — and loud — but this movie had me rooting for Grendel not Beowulf.

The monster Grendel’s design is too overcooked to be appreciated, but the script turns him into a sympathetic character here, and Crispin Glover’s performance had me wanting to see more of him. Too bad he’s snuffed in an early scene that’ll be remembered, more than anything else, for a ridiculous game of hide-the-exposed genitals, ala Austin Powers.

In a lazy attempt to unify the original text’s disconnected halves, the movie grossly diverges from the poem and goes on to further kill the idea of Beowulf as a hero, leaving the audience with no one to root for and little to invest in. I won’t give away the details here, but what happens after Beowulf meets Grendel’s mother (Angelina Jolie) really sinks this thing.

Beowulf seems less concerned with telling a good story than it is with delivering cheap cartoon thrills and a kinda-sorta naked and spiked-heel sporting Angelina Jolie. The character close-ups look good, and the final action sequence is fun, but that’s not enough to recommend this half-baked movie. And don’t get me started on the music …

Review originally posted at Screen Time.

Death Proof DVD review

mike_moody — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:03:57 GMT

It’s no surprise that Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, his addition to the B-movie throwback experiment Grindhouse, feels like a faster and funnier ride when separated from its double-feature partner, Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. It’s easier to sit through this chatty thriller when it doesn’t come after a humdrum 80-minute zombie flick.

Death Proof, just released on DVD, almost unfolds like a double feature on its own. Tarantino splits the movie into two distinct halves, both featuring Kurt Russel’s sleazy Stuntman Mike stalking and tormenting a group of comely young chatterboxes with his scary stunt car. The two halves are not equal though, and the disparities aren’t limited to plot points.

The first half is Tarantino’s personal take on the stock ’70s exploitation thriller. (Creating quirky homages to low-budget ’70s genre flicks was pretty much the point of Grindhouse.) The director delivers all the hallmarks of his chosen trashy genre - boy crazed girls in tight clothes, choppy editing, scratched-up film and outrageous action. We also get great music and a few subtle surprises, but some scenes are dulled by long stretches of inconsequential dialogue. The actresses who play the chatterboxes (Vanessa Ferlito, Sydney T. Poitier and Jordan Ladd) are all very natural, but the dialogue doesn’t have that usual Tarantino spark. The problem is that these characters are pretty one-dimensional. Tarantino wants you to care about them as much as he does, but in the end it doesn’t hurt like it should when they get mowed down by Mike’s “death proof” ride. This first half does have its pleasures though, mostly thanks to Russell’s great burly performance and Rose McGowan’s fine turn as his first victim.

The second half is instantly breezier and mostly devoid of the intentionally dingy visual style of the first. We get more scenes featuring talky ladies, but the characters are more dynamic here, and the dialogue is funnier. Stunt woman Zoe Bell has a natural charm and Tracie Thoms’ hilarious, wiry performance alone is almost enough to recommend the movie. All the talk is cut up between a few farcical scenes and some of the best car chase and CGI-free stunt sequences I’ve ever seen. Watching Bell slide around the hood of a speeding muscle car that’s being slammed by Stuntman Mike’s deathmobile is nerve-wracking and fun. Like most everything in “Death Proof,” the action is pure lowbrow sleaze entertainment, but it’s done in high Hollywood style.

The twist the movie takes in the end is pretty rewarding. Russell really delivers here, especially when we get to see what Stuntman Mike is really made of. Rosario Dawson and Mary Elizabeth Winstead make the most out of their small roles.

Some viewers might find Death Proof a little tedious. I did when I first screened it at a theater on a double bill with Planet Terror, but the thing plays a lot better on its own. Those looking for a truly original, offbeat thriller - or a Tarantino fix - won’t be disappointed.

Key DVD Features: The 2-disc set features a number of decent documentaries mostly about the movie’s stunts and stunt performers. The bizarre Double Dare trailer is also included.

Originally posted at Screen Time.

Transformers 2007 vs Transformers 1986

mike_moody — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:53:30 GMT

Michael Bay’s fun but bloated epic Transformers hits stores today in a single-disc DVD, a two-disc DVD set and a high-definition HD-DVD version. Did they include bonus features? You betcha. There’s tons of ‘em on the two-discer, including featurettes about the Autobots and Decepticons backstory and the movie’s special effects.

Great, but I think the good people at Paramount missed an opportunity to include the ultimate special feature on the two-discer, 1986’s animated Transformers: The Movie.

Was Paramount afraid to include the two films in the same package? Did they figure that Bay’s flick would pale in comparison to the 1986 Sony Wonder Video classic? Well, of course not. They just didn’t care to do it. But what do you think, die-hard Transformers fan? Is the 1986 version better, or at least more fun, than Bay’s CG crunch fest? In the interest of serious scientific debate, cultural progress and killing time, let’s compare ‘em.

ACTION:

2007: That 30-minute blast of mindless urban destruction that ends the movie is almost worth the ticket and DVD price alone, but the flick takes way too long to get there. Plus, all the short bursts of action before it are cut in between long stretches of characters just standing around or, worse, trying to be funny. The special effects are amazing though.

1986: This one is all action all the time. The thing opens with the brutal killing of a bunch of beloved characters and the fighting never seems to stop. If the Autobots aren’t battling the Decepticons, they’re racing each other, blasting other alien robots or flying through outer space. Of course, it’s all animated in that flat, ’80s, you-gotta-be-pushing-30-to-love-it style.

Winner: Tie

DRAMA:

2007: Shia Labeouf tries to get it on with Megan Fox and seems to have a disturbing relationship with his pet Chihuahua. That’s about it. Oh, and there’s something about a “cube” or “all-spark” (they never stick to one name) that’s gotta be found to save humanity. The drama gets bonus points here since everything Peter Cullen (Optimus Prime) says sounds awe-inspiring.

1986: This movie is almost too dramatic. Prime dies in the first act, as do other favorite Autobots, Megatron has a disturbing identity crisis, Hot Rod goes through robot puberty, the noble Ultra Magnus realizes his limited potential, and everybody has to fight an evil planet-eating robot monster voiced by Orson Welles. (More points for Cullen’s voice here).

Winner: 1986

COMEDY:

2007: Um, Bernie Mac is in it. He’s funny right? Like in most Bay flicks, most stabs at comedy here are all too obvious or awkward (Example: What’s the deal with Josh Duhamel getting the runaround by an unfriendly phone operator during an intense battle scene?). The scene where the Autobots try to hide from the Witwickys is good for a laugh, though. Labeouf is funny throughout too.

1986: Two words: Robot mustaches. Seriously, watch it again. Also, there are tons of laugh-out-loud scenes featuring the Dinobots, the funniest and dumbest robot dinosaurs ever. Oh yeah, there’s also robot sharks controlled by a floating brain with tentacles. Funny, no? Sure, but you laugh at it, not with it.

Winner: Tie

MUSIC:

2007: Linkin Park. Disturbed. Goo Goo Dolls. No thanks.

1986: Stan Bush’s ‘The Touch.” There’s never been a better theme song for a young robot Pinto’s evolution from scrub to savior of the universe.

Winner: 1986. You can’t beat “The Touch.”

Originally posted at Screen Time.

3:10 to Yuma quick review

mike_moody — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:51:26 GMT

The initial TV ads for 3:10 to Yuma didn’t appeal to me at all. Sure, I saw Christian Bale’s sharp mug and the reliable Russell Crowe staring back at me, yet I still wasn’t interested in the thing. Bale is one of my favorite actors and Crowe rarely turns in a drab performance, but I surely wasn’t going to be first in line to catch a lightly-hyped remake of a ’50s Western. The movie looked like something my granddad would enjoy but would leave me shifting in my seat. Then a few critics I respect starting tossing out words like “glorious,” “riveting” and “Oscar” when describing it. Then it hit number one at the box office on its first week out. Then I finally caught it on Saturday.

3:10 to Yuma is much, much more than the slow-burn exercise in genre those TV ads made it out to be. It’s an extremely compelling and well crafted tale loaded with powerful (not showy) performances, great action and soul to spare.

Bale, one of the best actors working today, has rarely been better. As Dan Evans, a wounded and noble Arizona rancher fallen on hard times, he takes on a dangerous mission in order to feed his family and save his homestead. After Crowe’s super-criminal Ben Wade is captured in Dan’s one-horse town, Dan agrees to help a few lawmen escort Wade to a far-away train station. There, Wade will ride to his fate, which lies under the noose.

A good number of thrilling shoot ‘em ups follow, but the real meat of this movie is in the quieter moments, especially the verbal confrontations between Bale and Crowe. Dan and Wade are two fully-realized characters which Bale and Crowe perform with restraint and poise. Their exchanges provide a strong emotional context to the violence and expertly staged action scenes that follow, which makes the action incredibly rewarding to watch. Themes of duty, anxiety and nobility drive the movie. When Dan and Wade draw their guns against each other - or when they refuse to - it’s not just because they’re in a Western. They each have their deeply rooted reasons, and you want to side with both of them. The disparity between these two seemingly different characters slowly starts to disappear as the end nears, and their relationship decides the fates of everyone around them.

Along for the ride, and doing some great work, are Alyn Tudyk (”Serenity”), veteran actor Peter Fonda and Ben Foster, who plays Crowe’s creepy and obsessed right-hand man. Foster’s boyish face was put to good use as a near-mute angelic figure in “X-Men: The Last Stand.” He’s dark and quirky here as a slick and slim baddie with a beast inside. He’s scary, funny and unforgettable. Someone will cast him as the devil soon, mark my words.

“3:10 to Yuma” reminded me a lot of Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed” in tone and because of the great performances. But, where the mob mystique was almost a character itself in “The Departed,” the Old West is more of a backdrop in “Yuma.” Instead of romanticizing the cowboy outlaw, “Yuma” reminded me that great stories can be told in any genre. Don’t miss it.

Review originally posted at Screen Time.

Volver review

mike_moody — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:38:21 GMT

Volver, a charming minor work by Pedro Almódovar, is probably my least favorite film by the great Spanish director.

Since the 1980s, Almódovar has delivered a successful string of florid and risky melodramas about Spanish women and their families. For his last two films, Almódvar focused his lens on men, with glorious results. He won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay for 2002’sHabla Con Ella (Talk to Her), a tender drama about two very flawed men in love with comatose women. 2004 saw the release of La Mala Educación (Bad Education), the director’s acclaimed and gripping Hitchcockian suspense tale about two male lovers connected by sexual abuse.

Volver, which means “to return” in Spanish, is an apt title for Almódovar’s latest, his comeback to the land of the lady. It marks another film about strong women, another great role tailored for Penélope Cruz (the two worked together on 1999’s Todo Sobre Mi Madre), but a small regression for the director.

With Volver, Almódovar tells a female-centric story that touches on all of his hallmark issues — death, abuse, deceit, family and friendship — but he lets the melodrama simmer instead of boil.

Most directors categorized by their penchant for the melodramatic offer laughable or cold results, but Almódovar has always turned high drama into high art. Check his earlier work, especially Madre, and you’ll find visually explosive and powerful films that can essentially be read as artful soap operas. Volver is a story made to be told with such roaring operatics and only traces of the intimate tone present inHabla Con Ella. Almódovar opts for the opposite this time, dampening what could have been a more lively, hot-blooded tale of lives rekindling with a tone too muted. It’s almost like he was timid about displaying his knack for flamboyance.

Cruz plays Raimunda, an overworked mother married to a vulgar drunk in Madrid. We meet Raimunda on one of her many trips to her hometown village, scrubbing away at her parents’ tombstone with the help of her teenage daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) and her sister Sole (Lolela Dueñas). After refurbishing the gravesite, the women visit their geriatric and comically loopy aunt (Chus Lampreave), who’s on the verge of death herself. The first twenty minutes of the film play out slowly, establishing the central characters’ tight bonds and complicated relationships. Things pick up after Paula kills her father with a kitchen knife defending herself from his sexual advances, spurring Raimunda to hide the body and, in essence, take charge of her own life. Then, Sole returns to the village for her aunt’s funeral and comes back accompanied by her mother’s ghost.

Almódovar plays all of this surprisingly straight. He documents the strangeness and struggles Raimunda must endure after her husband’s death — which includes stuffing his body in a large freezer and burying it by a lake — with much less of the dark wit and high style he’s famous for. What follows are a number of diverting and funny, but only mildly compelling, scenes of Raimunda and her clan making sweet music, sometimes literally, out of their hard lives and painful pasts. Life changing secrets are exposed, the dead rise from the grave and a once-broken family finds solace from the harsh world within itself. It’s all well done, steadily tailored and glossed, but the bigger moments don’t pull you in like they should.

Cruz delivers like a champ despite the film’s mostly flat tone. The early raves for her performance are dead-on. She’s never been better, not even in her other much lauded Spanish-language work. Her verve here is infectious and her pain believable. She knew she was making a Pedro Almódovar film. It’s too bad the director seemed to be aiming for something else.

Review originally posted at Blog Critics.

Children of Men review

mike_moody — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:17:12 GMT

It’s hard to single out one moment in director Alfonso Cuarón’s Children's of Men that doesn’t feel urgent, tense or, more frighteningly, very plausible.

Set in a dystopian, war ravaged future Britain where no child has been born for 18 years, the film effectively draws a straight line between the bleak, bombed-out future on the screen and current events, including the war in Iraq and the crackdown on illegal immigration.

“This is where we’re heading,” Cuarón is trying to say, but Children of Men, based on the book by P.D. James, is remarkable not because of its social commentary, but for the way it doles the commentary out.

Cuarón — clearly a follower of the “show don’t tell” philosophy — has crafted a thrilling technical achievement here, creating a gray, violent British police state full of visual exposition that shows us everything we need to know. We’re not told the world is in chaos, we see it in the newspaper clippings with wartime headlines, the downbeat TV news reports about casualty counts and terrorist bombings, the political graffiti and in the faces of caged refugees on the street.

Corporate structures and bureaucratic buildings are all that stand intact — it’s hard times for sure. It’s anyone’s guess who started the war or who’s on the right side, but that information isn’t really pertinent to the film’s sim-plistic story.

Clive Owen cuts a decidedly glum figure as Theo, a former revolutionary turned beurocratic drone who now kills time by getting high with an aging pot dealer (played warmly by Michael Caine). Theo’s revolutionary past comes back to tap him for a favor in the form of his ex-wife (Julian Moore), the leader of a political extremist group. Moore’s faction is protecting a young woman (Claire Hope Ashitey) who, somehow, is pregnant. It’s up to Theo to use his political pull to get the pregnant woman, named Kee, to another political group called The Human Project. There, supposedly, Kee will get the medical treatment and care her and her baby will need to survive.

Children of Men is a surprisingly economic film of ideas, but the film’s driving story is too simplistic. While the world around them is burning with conflict, the film’s main characters follow a standard road movie formula. There are a few shocking scenes along the way, but if you’ve seen the trailer, you know where the film’s heading.

Children of Men is most effective when the turbulent world outside comes crashing in on the main characters, leading them into chaotic and shockingly realistic scenes of guerilla warfare and terrorist action. There’s a tense, stunningly shot stretch in the second half of the film in which Owen runs through an urban war zone, evading sniper bullets while those around him fall bloody to the ground. The scene rivals anything I’ve seen in recent war films, including the opening shots of Saving Private Ryan.

There’s much to recommend here, including good performances by the cast (especially Hope Ashitey), great music and profound cinematography. I only wish the main story would have taken a few more unexpected turns. Maybe then the film would have held the gripping pace it sometimes achieves.

Review originally posted on Gold Teeth.

Three beautiful film failures

mike_moody — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:02:54 GMT

Have you ever watched a movie and thought, "Wow, that was a mess, but I loved it"? I have, and I have a name for movies that make me feel that way. I call 'em "beautiful failures."

Beautiful failures are usually too long, too weird, too sloppy or just plain stupid, but they're always strangely compelling and, well, beautiful. They're the movies you think you hate but you can't stop thinking about. You come back to them over and over and you can't figure out why. They can be very complex, pretentious or even too simple or mass appealing. Other film buffs might tell you different, but there's really no formula to creating a beautiful failure.

Some of my favorite beautiful failures are Steven Soderbergh's Solaris, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and David Cronenberg's awkward 1996 thriller Crash. I love these films for different reasons, but I recognize that they're all a little ... dreadful.

Here are a few titles I've recently added to my list of beautiful failures.

The Science of Sleep

The problems start with the packaging and advertising for director Michel Gondry's follow-up to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The trailer and DVD box try to sell the film as a quirky romantic comedy full of whimsical dream sequences and cute one-liners. What you really get is a seemingly chaotic but densely structured character study of an unlikable, mentally ill manchild (Gael Garcia Bernal).

There's a lot of good here, though. Bernal's character has trouble disassociating fantasy from reality, and Gondry illustrates this with some charming and singular visual tricks. Also, the ending is somewhat of a stunner that brilliantly unites all the disparate ideas and elements that came before. Unfortunately, most viewers will be confused and sick of all the seeming randomness before the third act. Bernal and the rest of the cast are great, but most of the characters are unappealing or hard to relate to. Still, I'll go back to this movie again for its brave storytelling, strange comedic bits and great visuals.

The Fountain

Where to start? The Fountain is the perfect beautiful failure. It's at times fiercely incoherent, silly and pretentious, but it's also visually impressive and features a very strong lead performance by Hugh Jackman.

All of the "big ideas" director Daron Aronofsky (Pi, Requim for a Dream) attempts to convey here can be gleaned from the preface of one of those Don't Sweat the Small Stuff books, but he delivers his dime store philosophy in an extravagant package that constantly switches from compelling to laughable (picture a bald Jackman reaching nirvana while sitting in a lotus position). Add to that a bunch of muddled biblical references, plot strands that go nowhere and performances that range from sleepy (Rachel Weisz) to irrelevant (Ellen Burstyn) and you have a "bf" that somehow demands repeat viewing.

Ghost Rider

This campy comic book adaptation is about a guy with a flaming skull for a head, but that's the least ridiculous thing about it. After delivering two joyless duds based on Marvel books (Daredevil and Elektra) writer-director Mark Steven Johnson ampsGhost Rider's absurdity factor up to 11. Unfortunately, that's way too high -- even for a comic book movie.

The film is a poorly written, painfully simplistic and predictable popcorn flick, but its worst attributes are what will keep me coming back to it. You have to admire a film that so economically delivers the cheap thrills and seems willing to suck ass to do so. The cast members do their best to make sure that Ghost Rider makes you smirk for 90 minutes and slips out of your system faster than a Diet Coke. It's a sick and fascinating thing to watch Nicholas Cage violently hammer tons of trite quirks and ticks into his character (He eats M&Ms from a champagne flute! He listens to The Carpenters! He speaks with an undefinable accent!). Peter Fonda and Sam Elliot ham it up, but the real kick here is Wes Bentley as the film's impossibly witless and fruity villain, Blackheart.

Originally posted at Gold Teeth.