Diamonds Are Forever (Bond #07) [Bond 50 BluRay Set]

After the moody On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the Bond series kinda went back to basics with 1971's Diamonds Are Forever. I kinda sense that this one doesn't get a lot of love from Bond aficionados, but I found it to be a solid (if formulaic) entry which allowed some of the campiness that would characterize the series throughout the 70s to start to creep in.

George Lazenby was offered the part of James Bond again, but he didn't want to commit to a long and restrictive contract, according to the IMDB, so he passed. The producers then flirted with the idea of hiring American actors like John Gavin (who was actually contracted at one point) and Adam West (!) before deciding to pay Sean Connery a record-breaking fee to appear as Bond one last time (at least for EON Productions... he would return to the role yet again in the unofficial Thunderball remake Never Say Never Again 12 years later). Although it's great to see Connery in the role again (he actually seems excited to be there, which wasn't always the case in You Only Live Twice), he starts to look a little old for the part at certain points of the picture.

As I said in my last update, the end of OHMSS was so strong that you kinda want to see the series continue in that direction for a bit, and it makes you curious about what Lazenby might have done with the role had he continued to play it. As a result, the pre-credit sequence in this next movie (where Bond hunts Blofeld and unknowingly kills one of his doubles) is sort of disappointing because you get the sense that the series, for the first time, is really backtracking from the interesting course it started to take in the previous movie and is veering back into tried and true territory (and it's certainly not the last time it would do so!).

Nevertheless, Connery's charisma gets you to forgive all that really quickly... I was particularly entertained during the sequence in Holland where he poses as diamond delivery man "Peter Franks." When the real Peter Franks shows up, Bond must quickly kill him and switch their wallets. When Tiffany Case looks at the dead man's wallet and exclaims that he has just killed James Bond, the look of faux surprise on Connery's face is priceless. Other standout sequences are the car chase through the streets of old Las Vegas, and the climactic fight that Bond has with Bambi and Thumper.

Another recasting for Blofeld and Felix Leiter in this one: Blofeld is now played by Charles Gray, who appeared in You Only Live Twice as a totally different character... Felix now looks like a 1940s jewish comedian who just did an extended run in the Catskills. Jill St. John plays Tiffany Case, the first American Bond girl... weirdly, she's a hard-ass mercenary in her first scene, and kind of bubbly and ditzy toward the end of the movie. Lana Wood plays the brilliantly named "Plenty O'Toole," whose character is consistently stupid throughout (even when she's dead in a pool later on). Crispin Glover's father, Bruce Glover, plays one-half of the duo of thinly-veiled gay assassins who trail Bond throughout the movie and unsuccessfully try to kill him several times.

And then there's Jimmy Dean, the once and future pork sausage king, as "Willard Whyte," an eccentric billionaire recluse unmistakably modeled after Howard Hughes. I could be wrong, but the inclusion of a character like that in this movie is the first time an aspect of a Bond picture was so clearly influenced by a real-life person or event. Many of the 70s Bond pictures would do the same (and then occasionally in more recent entries, like Jonathan Pryce's character in 97's Tomorrow Never Dies who was clearly a less evil version of Rupert Murdoch). The next movie, 1973's Live And Let Die, was made in the post-Shaft era where Blaxploitation pictures were plentiful and earning a lot of money... as a result, the movie is largely set in Louisiana and many of the villains have African heritage. 1974's The Man With The Golden Gun was made the year after Bruce Lee's Enter The Dragon hit, and therefore there's kung-fu a-plenty throughout the picture. And of course 1979's Moonraker was released two years after Star Wars and contained an extended sequence where James Bond is in space firing lasers at bad guys (a sequence which caused the series to have another major "let's get back to basics" moment for it's next picture).

Director Guy Hamilton returned for this his 2nd Bond picture (the first being Goldfinger), and he would go on to direct the next two as well, both starring Roger Moore. So far I've found his two movies to be most consistently enjoyable to watch, but I haven't seen his next, Live And Let Die, in a long time, so... onward!

Life Of Pi (01/26/2013)

Lettergrade: B-

After a spectacular shipwreck, the staging of which rivals James Cameron's Titanic in terms of power and technical mastery, much of Life Of Pi takes place on a lifeboat lost at sea, inhabited only by our title character and an underfed Bengal tiger.

I like Ang Lee movies, generally, and although I appreciate the beauty, stunning imagery, and deliberate pace of this one, the picture ultimately reached a point in the second half where I found it a little frustratingly difficult to decipher, often leaving me feeling about as lost as Pi himself is.

The first half of the movie takes care to show Pi's family life and upbringing in Pondicherry, India. His father, a small business owner who operates a local zoo, among other endeavors, attempts to teach Pi and his brother various life lessons, not all of which sink in right away. Dad is particularly dismayed at Pi's interest in (and acceptance of) multiple religions, making clear that he'd much rather his son believe in something that he doesn't agree with than to accept all things blindly.

These early scenes are designed to show Pi's relationship with spirituality and religion and his view of the world, meaning that when all of it is tested in the film's later half, we have context and a frame of reference by which to relate to everything he's lost. I suppose this first half of the movie left much more of an impression on me than the second half… even if it is lengthy and doesn't necessarily appear to play to the movie's main substance, it provides interesting background and texture, both of which I oddly enjoyed much more than the main "meat" of the story itself.

I've spoken to a handful of people who loved the book but were similarly a little lukewarm on the movie (and vice versa). When I start to state my opinion, people often interject with, "the movie lost you when Pi got to the island, right?" - referring to a bizarre, carnivorous mass (vaguely shaped like Hindu deity Vishnu) that Pi encounters late in the film. It actually had lost me a bit before that... during the picture's impressionistic midsection which was deeply symbolic and almost plays like an abstract art film.

Even early on, though, I had a beef with the movie's hackney framing device… It's a novelist that the "present day" Pi (Irrfan Khan) tells his story to. Played by Rafe Spall, the significantly less rat-like son of Harry Potter actor Tim Spall, the "writer" is an empty cipher of a character who only really sits there looking slack-jawed, asking dumb questions, and having moving dialogue delivered at him. Plus, as a character, he's there because he's having trouble coming up with an idea for his second book and wants to hear someone else's amazing life story, which he'll then presumably turn into another successful book... all without having done much more than write everything down. Weak, man... just weak. I was kind of hoping that Richard Parker, the Bengal Tiger from the raft, would come out of nowhere at the end and eat him, but since he would have been, like, 70 at the time, I had a feeling it was unlikely.

Argo (01/20/2013)

Lettergrade: C+

We finally got around to seeing Argo last week… The movie tells the true story of how CIA agent Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck, who also directed) got six foreign service workers out of revolution-torn Iran in 1980 by posing as the crew for a crappy science-fiction movie. Perhaps I had unnaturally high expectations stemming from an awards season where the picture has gotten a lot of attention, but I thought the movie was just "okay." Big sections of it actually struck me as a little imbalanced and weirdly paced at times.

The opening of the film is strong, as is the second half (although Affleck and his screenwriter took some biiiiiiig liberties with the actual events, including a dramatic chase on an airport runway that is a complete work of fiction), but the scenes in between were the ones that came off as the most out of place and self-serving. Specifically, I mean the Hollywood scenes. To give his fake movie some credibility, Affleck recruits a Hollywood prosthetic effects guy played by John Goodman, who in turn gets a producer played by Alan Arkin involved. Arkin's character is a composite of several people who were actually involved in the real mission, but in the film he's basically just playing the exact same character that Dustin Hoffman played in 1998's Wag The Dog. They license an actual script that had been on the market for a while, hold casting sessions, set up an office at The Burbank Studios (which is now Warner Bros.), and get a couple blurbs written about them in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter on the off chance, I guess, that someone in Iran subscribes to either and follows entertainment news fervidly.

This segment, too, shows events that didn't quite happen the way the movie says they did, and I must say I wondered why they merit so much screen time. Nearly every scene ends with a snappy inside-Hollywood joke ("You want to be a big-shot in Hollywood without actually doing anything? You'll fit right in!") and I'm not sure what Goodman and Arkin are even really doing in the movie other than to give it some comic relief. They don't have anything to do with the success of the mission, ultimately, other than sitting by a phone in case someone from Iran calls to verify that this "Argo" movie is really a real movie that's really being made. Nearly all of the time spent setting up the fake movie cover in that first half is entirely inconsequential to the movie's second half.

These complaints aside, however, I just felt that the movie lacked personality and heart. You never get to know any of the foreign service workers who are trying to get out of Iran, although we are given brief thumbnail histories here and there. We get an underdeveloped backstory to Affleck's character which, even if it is true, feels like a cliché from the movie device rulebook. Breaking Bad's Brian Cranston, appearing as Affleck's boss at the CIA, leaves the strongest impression, really, and he's not even all that major a character in flick.

The real story of Argo is an amazing one, to be sure, but I always try to be careful to not confuse my feelings for a real-life event with my feelings for whatever the movie achieves independently. Does that make me a cold bastard? Yeah, probably, but I'm annoyed when people give a movie that has a lot of problems a big pass when the magic words "based on a true story" appear somewhere on the film or it's trailer. That sort of thing can give a movie a little more poignance and intrigue - and I guess it does here - but it shouldn't absolve a movie from not quite working.

The Master (12/29/2012)

Lettergrade: D

Excellent performances from Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman (plus a very brief scene where Amy Adams seems to read a letter addressed to Penthouse Forum or something) are not enough to make this oblique and glacially paced movie about a cult leader transparently based on L. Ron Hubbard worth sitting through.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: Paul Thomas Anderson sucks.

Shot in 65mm, so if you saw it projected that way, it might have at least looked really good, I guess.  

Django Unchained (12/28/2012)

Lettergrade: A-

Clocking in at 2 hours and 46 minutes, Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained fits the characterization that I've had for his last several pictures, namely that it's very talky and long-winded, but with several sensational moments of payoff.

I'm actually not a huge Tarantino devotee myself, but I've seen most of his movies at least once, and I generally like them.  This new one is a bit more like 2009's Inglourious Basterds than his earlier flicks in that it tells more of a mature, linear story, largely free of kitsch and the retro film tricks of Kill Bill and Death Proof.  Like all his pictures, however, it glides smoothly from scenes that are light and comedic into some extremely dark and upsetting territory.

Set in the American south just before the Civil War, it is part blaxploitation movie, part homage to Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, and (as his last several movies have been) all spaghetti western.  Although I'm tempted to call it historical farce - or at the very least, nothing like a credible history lesson - its depiction of American slavery and the men who profited from it is brutal and disturbing.  There are whippings, scenes of torture, messy gun-shot wounds, and slaves forced to kill each other with their bare-hands.  The N-word is deployed countless dozens of times… There's been a lot of controversy about  that, but I think of how Mel Brooks defended its use in his 1974 classic Blazing Saddles by explaining that he used the word in a way that is historically correct:  The cowboys and town-folk all hated Sheriff Bart in that movie solely because of his race.  They wanted to denigrate and dehumanize him, so they called him "nigger," a word that we now interpret as showing bigotry and hatred on the part of those who use it.  The characters in Django are not timid about doing the same.

The general plot of the movie is relatively simple when you break it down, as I suppose all of Tarantino's plots really are at their core. As the picture opens, smooth-talking German bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (played by Basterds' unforgettable Christoph Waltz) forcibly acquires the enslaved Django (Jamie Fox) in order to help him identify three wanted men who are worth a good deal of money.  Schultz's deal with Django is that he'll be rewarded with a percentage of the bounty plus his freedom once the men are bought in.  While on the hunt, Django shares that he is married to another slave (Kerry Washington), but their former owner found out and sold them to different plantations in an act of cruelty.  Schultz recognizes Django as an excellent marksman and a solid partner, and offers a further deal:  If he spends the winter working with him, collecting bounties and making money, in the spring he'll go to Mississippi with him and help him find his wife.  "Kill white people and get paid for it?," Django asks. "What's not to like?"

Although the main cast is generally fantastic, it's Leonardo DiCaprio as the particularly sadistic plantation owner Calvin Candie, and a nearly unrecognizable Samuel L. Jackson as his somehow even more terrifying head-slave Stephen that steal the movie.  The smaller roles are populated with various actors from cinema-past… such as Italian actor Franco Nero, who played the title role in an earlier, completely unrelated spaghetti western called Django from 1966, and Russ Tamblyn, sort-of reprising his title role from 1965's Son Of A Gunfighter alongside his daughter Amber Tamblyn, who is credited as "Daughter Of  A Son Of A Gunfighter" at the end.  These cameos largely provide in-jokes and references that completely sail past me unnoticed, as I have little more than casual knowledge of any of these pictures to begin with.

Part of the mystique of Tarantino's work during the 90s was that since he hadn't actually made that many movies yet, each one seemed to have an almost seismic impact on popular culture, and greatly influenced films that would be made for several years after (sometimes resulting in some fairly terrible movie trends indeed!).  A thought I had during Django is that now that he's making films a little more frequently (there have been five pictures since 2003 alone, vs. only three in the 90s), the power of a new one coming out feels a bit reduced, and his tricks and patterns are starting to become a little more detectable.  DiCaprio has a big, menacing speech at a dinner table about 3/4s of the way through Django that seems to have come from the same template Tarantino used to write David Carradine's big speech toward the end of Kill Bill Vol. 2, even with a few lines that are similar.  Both are dramatically excellent, mind you, but there are certain techniques - elliptical story-telling centering around a larger thematic point, et al - that are starting to feel like Tarantino standards rather than fresh surprises.

And here's something else… A Tarantino technique that has been used several times now is to have his characters allude to some big fight or a battle that's going to happen at some other location later... only to have the conflict abruptly end right then and there, usually with one character suddenly killing the other.  Early in Kill Bill Vol. 1, Uma Thurman and Vivica A. Fox agree to delay their fight to the death until that night so her daughter won't be around to witness it... only to have that agreement immediately broken with a drawn pistol.  Likewise, at the end of  Kill Bill Vol. 2, Thurman and Carradine determine that they should meet at a private beach to finish their business once and for-all, suggesting an epic battle royale to come… only to have her surprise him with the fabled five point palm-exploding heart technique.  There's a scene in the second half of Django that repeats this trick again:  Fox convinces his Australian captors that there's a large bounty to be collected if they help him kill or capture a group held-up at a nearby plantation, suggesting a big action scene that's about to happen there in the next scene.  The temptation is too great for the Australians, so they unlock his cage… and are immediately sorry that they did.  

My buddy Shaun saw the movie the same day I did, and commented that while he liked it a great deal, it felt like Tarantino was "genre-hopping" a bit.  (Remember what he did with WWII movies in Inglourious Basterds?  Well, he's doing it again in the pre-Civil War American south!).  I don't think that's entirely unfair, but again, I think he orchestrates it all for such satisfying and memorable payoff that his wearing of his influences on his sleeve doesn't really bother me.  In fact, it's a big part of the charm.  Tarantino's movies have always been made up of redigested bits of other movies as well as various incongruent nuggets of pop-culture.  I don't mind that his soundtracks are made up of songs and scores from other movies, for example, because he's perverted and repurposed them into some highly entertaining new context.

That kind of thing is essentially what his work is largely about anyway, be it with actors, dialogue, storylines, music or sound effects.  It's interesting because more than any other filmmaker who is working presently, his pictures, while they all have sustainable plots and very effective dramatic arcs on their own, are as much about the time that he himself spent watching genre movies on endless loops as a kid, as they are about whatever happens on screen.

Frankenweenie (12/27)

Lettergrade: C-

Tim Burton's stop-motion Frankenweenie, a feature length remake of his own 1984 short film of the same name, kinda bombed back when it was released in September. I think I understand why... I was reluctant to see it myself because I wasn't sure how a story about a boy bringing his recently deceased dog back to life ala the Frankenstein monster would be able to overcome its own premise's innate darkness and survive as a entertaining family movie. Now that I've seen it on DVD, I'm pretty convinced that indeed that is what sinks it. Well, that, I suppose, plus that it feels like a 25 minute idea stretched to a feature's length.

Long ago, I remember my buddy Duane saying that part of the reason that The Simpsons show had to be animated was because a big audience wouldn't be able to take a live-action depiction a family that was so negatively dysfunctional under its comedy veneer. I think the same principle (or rather an inversion of it) sort of applies to Frankenweenie. In the original live-action short film, it is perhaps a little easier to swallow the idea of Sparky getting hit by a car (and later dug up and resurrected by the little boy who owned him) because the dog is obviously an animal actor, the boy's line delivery is a little clunky, and the movie at large sort of plays like campy farce rather than something meant to be taken all that seriously.

Burton succeeded at making this new animated version more convincing and with a much bigger heart, but in a way those same qualities make the material a lot more problematic. The dog is able to express and emote a bit more, thanks to the personality and soul the animators give him, and as such it is more disturbing not only to see his death, but also to see his poorly stitched-together body walking around for much of the movie (although it should be noted that he seems perfectly happy to be doing so). Nevertheless, parts of Sparky routinely fall off and must be reattached throughout the film (successfully giving me a serious case of the willies) and the even creepier image I can't stop thinking about is when Sparky would swallow the flies that buzz around his rotting body, only to have have flies promptly escape through a loose stitching in his neck from where young Victor had surgically reattached his head! Any touch that makes the dog more "real" also made me think about what Victor had to do to bring him back, and simultaneously makes me think that this kid is fucked up beyond all description and needs to be placed under the care of some serious mental health professionals immediately.

And that goes double for the film's ending… I'll try to talk about it without giving much away, but suffice to say that at the end of a story like Frankenweenie, you might expect the sentiment to be something along the lines of, "hey you probably shouldn't dig up your dog who was hit by a car and then run excessive amounts of electricity through him in an attempt to reanimate his mangled corpse." You know... something about not messing with the natural order of life and death, kinda like in the original "Frankenstein" story and in the similarly themed Pet Cemetary (or even Jurassic Park), et al. Nothing of the sort happens, though. This is a film where there are zero consequences - legal or otherwise - or learned lessons at the end. The dog is still around - with the town's blessing, apparently - and no one's going to jail for the massive amount of property destruction that happened during the picture's 3rd act.

Does that really matter? Probably not to the movie's core audience, but I think it's a little sad that Burton had 28 years or so to think about what he might do with a feature-length version of this material, and it came time to do it, what wound up on screen is so limp. 2005's Corpse Bride wasn't as much fun as 1993's The Nightmare Before Christmas - Burton's first foray into feature-length stop-motion - but it made up for it with a better story and by being a better movie. Frankenweenie kinda runs out of juice early and never really justifies its expanded run time.

Silver Linings Playbook (12/23/2012)

Lettergrade: B

The early scenes of Silver Linings Playbook can be characterized by a highly irritating nervous twitchiness that's nearly intolerable to sit through. That's probably how director David O. Russell (The Fighter, Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees) wanted them to feel, though, and indeed they're very effective at getting you into the headspace of Bradley Cooper's Pat, who some months earlier caught his wife showering with another man and flew into a violent rampage followed by a complete mental breakdown.

Newly released from an institution in upstate Pennsylvania, Pat moves back in with his parents and tries to put his life back together through a combination of exercise, treatment and therapy... although he desperately yearns to make some kind of contact with his ex-wife (prohibited by court order). His friends lure him to an unannounced dinner date with Jennifer Lawrence, who is also struggling to get along after her cop husband was killed in the line of duty a year or two earlier while they were in the midst of some martial trouble. Cooper and Lawrence are far too hostile and unstable with eachother to be a couple, but she tells Pat that she actually runs into his ex every now and again, and will pass one of his letters to her (illegally) if he agrees to participate in a dance contest that her husband always refused to do with her.

Sorry… I actually hate reducing the general storyline of a movie like this to a few short sentences that don't really do it justice. The strength of this movie is in the actors' excellent performances and the way in which Russell stages everything rather than what gets you from point A to B. I liked the movie quite a bit, and really appreciated that it very ruthlessly goes against one's expectations and veers into some fairly dark territory at times, but I had some big, big issues with the last third or so.

During the first part of the movie, I wondered how The Weinstein Company could really justify marketing this thing as a romantic comedy. Eventually, I got my answer via a scene that marked the pictures' abrupt turn into fairly standard Hollywood product territory and kinda broke my heart in the process. Pat's dad (played by Robert De Niro, making a rare appearance in a movie that isn't completely terrible) has built up a good amount of gambling debt, you see, and so Jennifer Lawrence for some utterly inexplicable reason convinces his bookie to go "double or nothing" on "the big contest" which just happens to take place in the last part of the movie.

Now that's pretty bad, but what I think is worse is that at the end of the movie, Cooper and Lawrence seem to be completely stable and normal… as if all their struggles with mental health have vanished. So in the end, I guess this is David O. Russell's take on a bullshit Hollywood romantic comedy, but it seems so tragic that a movie which contains some disturbing early scenes detailing what effect fragile mental health can have on a life and family relationships eventually offers "find a pretty girl to take dance classes with" as a solution.

But damn… I hate doing this, too: Bagging on a unique movie that is worth seeing for many reasons, even if it is a little erratic and misshapen, and the end feels like a bit of a cop-out. Suffice to say that in spite of my petty bitchings, I'm glad that I saw it and would happily recommend that you do the same.

I'm not sure I agree with all the Academy Awards nominations it got (apart from the ones for acting and editing), but it's quite intriguing for much of its runtime, and I cannot think of many movies I've seen from 2012 that can say the same.

Hitchcock (12/04/2012)

Lettergrade: C-

I'm as big a fan of the films of Alfred Hitchcock as anybody who reasoned that a bachelor's degree primarily made up of film survey courses was a surefire way to pave the way for a bright and prosperous future, but I can't say that Sacha Gervasi's new movie Hitchcock really does either the man or his work justice.

Ostensibly, this is a movie about the trouble Hitchcock had making what would be one of his signature films, 1960's Psycho.  It also, I suppose, attempts a psychological profile of the man himself - of his various kinks and obsessions - and ventures to explain some of what motivates him.  The most screen time, however, probably goes to the film's sort-of love story between Hitchcock and his wife/creative partner Alma Reville, whom the film asserts was the key to and secret behind Hitch's amazing success.

Of those, I think the film fails a bit on all counts but the last one.  It is full of fine performances, don't get me wrong, but the whole thing feels a bit "surfacy"… as if we're getting a good deal of trivia and reenactment, but not a lot of enlightenment.  Anthony Hopkins plays Hitchcock, and although he looks the part with help from a fat suit and some Howard Berger prosthetics, he never truly stops feeling like the caricature that my generation may know from catching reruns of Alfred Hitchcock Presents on Nick At Nite.

Hitchcock could be the most talked about and heavily studied filmmaker in our brief history of cinema, and therein might be the problem.  More than any filmmaker I can think of, Hitchcock's motivations, kinks and obsessions are clear by simply watching a few of his key movies.  Although Psycho is probably the film he's best remembered for, it's tough to make a case that it's the most interesting one he made or that it's the one which is the most revealing of psyche.

The film alludes to Alma's distress over her husband's obsession with a certain type of blond actress, but this is something that began to show itself well before Psycho was made, and which got a hell of a lot creepier a little later in his career.  Jessica Biel (as Vera Miles) says at one point late in this new movie, "You know that poor, tortured soul Jimmy Stewart played in Vertigo? That's Hitch, only younger, slimmer and better-looking."  Vertigo, released two years before Psycho in 1958, stars Jimmy Stewart as a private detective who falls in love with the woman he's keeping a tail on.  After she dies, he eventually meets another woman who happens to look a lot like her, and gradually tries to turn her into the woman he's lost... giving her similar clothes, having her style her hair the same way, etc.  The two films Hitch made after Psycho… The Birds and Marnie... both starred Tippi Hedren, who Hitch had plucked out of relative obscurity and attempted to turn into his "ultimate" leading lady.  Historians note that during the production of Marnie in particular, Alma was heard apologizing to Hedren for her husband's behavior on more than one occasion, and Hedren has been pretty vocal about her dislike for Hitch in the years since.

So if we're talking about Hitchcock as a picture that's supposed to adequately detail this aspect of Hitch, I would argue that the scope is a bit too narrow.  I must say that it does not work for me as an informative history of the making of the classic film either.  After 1959's wildly entertaining North By Northwest, Hitchcock thought it might be interesting to make a horror picture using a more sparse, star-free aesthetic.  Paramount, which still had Hitch under contract, didn't want to make it, so the Hitchcocks mortgaged their house to pay for the production themselves, utilizing many of his collaborators from Presents (rather than his normal feature film team), and shooting the picture on a tight schedule.  All this is interesting, but is seeing a dramatic reenactment of this stuff more interesting than reading the trivia section on IMDB.com?  I would argue that it isn't.  And you know… whatever difficulties Hitch had in making this movie, he was still a big marquee-name director who was near the high point of his enormously successful career, working within the studio system.  It's hard to think of this as much of an underdog story.

The movie consistently feels like it's "not enough."  The hiring of Joseph Stefano to write the screenplay is reduced to a brief, awkward job interview, followed by a close up on a script page informing us that he got the job.  Shockingly, Stefano is played by a totally unrecognizable Ralph Macchio (of The Karate Kid and My Cousin Vinny fame!).  If his character is present in the background of later scenes, I sure didn't notice him.  Similarly, the editing and scoring of the picture are blown through at warp speed.  At one point, a few lines are exchanged between Hitch and "Benny" about whether or not there should be music during the murder scene in the shower.  An informed viewer might quickly understand that this is composer Bernard Herrmann and the piece of music that wound up in the scene is probably one of the most famous and imitated in modern film music, but the scene is over before there's much time to think about it.  I suspect touchstone moments like this will be somewhat lost on those who do not already know a little about the making of Psycho.  And if you do know a little about the making of Psycho, I have to wonder what much of this movie is saying that you don't already know.

Screen time is frittered away detailing an association that Alma may-or-may-not have had with a writer named Whitfield Cook, who tries to persuade Alma to help him revise his novel into something that Hitch will make into a movie... while Hitch himself watches from the sidelines growing increasingly suspicious.  Numerous other sequences have Hitch imagining conversations with Ed Gein, the real-life serial killer profiled in Robert Bloch's "Psycho" book, loosely used as the foundation for the screenplay.

I'm unsure if either of these things have much basis in what Hitchcock and his wife were really going through during the making of Psycho, but even if that stuff did happen, I question how the film makes use of it.  If Alma's relationship with Whit did exist, wouldn't it be more interesting to see it only from Hitch's perspective (that is, from the point of view of a jealous husband watching his wife quasi-flirt with another man across the parking lot) than it is to sit through lengthy scenes of Alma and Whit working on his screenplay together?   We'd be robbed some damn fine acting from Helen Mirren, sure, (really, she's the most interesting thing about the movie by far) but isn't the film's title Hitchcock and aren't we supposed to be seeing a story about him?

The supporting cast is quite stellar... especially Scarlett Johansson who does a pretty uncanny Janet Leigh impersonation and James D'Arcy who has Anthony Perkins' look and mannerisms down pat.  Michael Stuhlbarg plays Hitch's agent (and future MCA mogul) Lew Wasserman, and Toni Collette steals a scene or two as Hitch's long-suffering personal assistant Peggy.

The real heart of the picture, though, is clearly Mirren.  I suppose that overall you could say that this is a picture about Hitch and Alma falling apart and then coming back together again.  That's fine for a fictionalized movie, maybe, but anyone who knows a little about the real Hitch and Alma know that her frustration dramatized by this movie would continue on for years to come.  This movie kind of suggests that all is resolved once Psycho comes out and becomes a big hit.

Certain key bits of Hitch's dialogue feel like they were probably taken from statements that the director is known to have said (or to have thought) throughout his career.  Sometimes he's rude, sometimes he's dismissive, and sometimes he's a little harsh, but there's always a lilt of devilish glee there - perhaps with a little more malevolence in Hopkins' portrayal than was present in the genuine article himself, who had a somewhat kinder and dopier face than that of his counterpart here.  Nevertheless, for a supposedly biographical picture that bears his name, I feel like it leans a little more heavily on bumper-sticker quotes than on substance.  Maybe there wasn't more much more to Hitch in private than the slightly goofy TV host who underlined words like "fieeeeendish!" and never missed an opportunity for a pun, but I suppose I find it hard to believe that the guy's behavior when he was in his bathtub at home wasn't that different than how he acted and spoke when he was on television.

Brave (12/02/2012)

Lettergrade: C-

As I've mentioned in other posts, the arrival of our son 10 months ago has knee-capped our trips out to see current movies at the cinema, in addition to limiting our knowledge of what many recent movies are even about.

In some ways, this is a great thing:  You sit down to watch a flick with very few expectations about what you're in for, largely because you haven't seen a ton of trailers which reveal key aspects in advance.  My sister Sarah sometimes talks about how seeing The Matrix when she was living overseas in 1999 was amazing because she knew virtually nothing about it beforehand.  The flip-side of this, though, is that the early scenes of a movie can kind of set expectations that the rest of the movie doesn't follow or entirely live up to.  I'll never forget when I took my friend Ryan to see 1995's From Dusk Til Dawn...  He really enjoyed the first 40 minutes or so - where it looked like the picture was a gritty thriller about two brothers who kidnap a pastor and his family in an attempt to get across the border into Mexico.  Of course, midway though everyone arrives at a mysterious bar that happens to be a hang-out for the undead, and the film suddenly erupts into an uber-violent vampire slaughter picture ala Evil Dead 2.  Moments after the "turn" happened, I remember looking over at my buddy who was completely slack-jawed.  "This just became the stupidest movie I've ever seen," he said, and he hasn't let me live it down since.

Now, I bring all this up because we watched Pixar's Brave over the weekend, knowing virtually nothing about it in advance.  At first, it appeared to be about the fiery and independent daughter of a medieval Scottish king who does not want to be forced to marry a prince from one of the other tribes.  It was a little slap-sticky for my tastes, but I was surprised by how interested I was in the story of Merida (voiced by the ever-fetching Kelly MacDonald) and that I really cared about her right to make her own choices in life and to choose her own path.

None that ultimately mattered, though, because about 35 minutes in, the movie totally shifts gears and becomes a full-blown fairy tale, complete with an ambiguous witch and all sorts of other fantastical shit that has nothing to do with the earlier storyline at all.  I was pretty ho-hum on the "second" movie... like my friend Ryan so many years earlier, I would have really liked to see where the first one was going instead.  Was the fantastical stuff in the trailers?  Had I seen them, would I have been braced for what was coming?  Unsure, but regardless I found myself a bit unsatisfied by what actually came.

And my wife pointed out something curious... when Merida asks the witch for help in changing her parents' rigid view that she marry a royal son of another tribe, the witch responds by giving her a magic pastry that, unbeknowst to Merida, will turn her mother into a bear.  Huh?  Later in the movie we find out that there was some other asshole in the past who came to the witch and asked to have "the strength of ten men!," to which she replied by also giving him a magic pastry that turned him into a bear.  So that's it, is it?  Anytime anyone comes to this woman asking for help, a baked good that turns someone into a bear will be the universal fix-all, will it?  What bullshit.  Sounds to me like she suspiciously really only has this one trick.

And then later, I guess it's supposed to be a big reveal that it's this earlier bear who mauled off the leg of Merida's father (voiced by the wonderful Billy Connolly) in the prologue of the movie... as if that's supposed to be some kind of meaningful bombshell to the overall story.  Once the "mom-bear" shows up later, the dad leads a blood-thirsty mob against the bear with the intention of brutally killing it upon capture.  My buddy Shaun said that his five year old was extremely disturbed by this aspect of the plot, and I've got to admit that I, a 34 year old, found it to be pretty dark and fucked up myself.

But wait, let's end on some positive notes here...  Um, the animation was really amazing and pretty.  And I appreciate that they got a lot of "actually Scottish" actors to do the voices, and a real Scotsman to write the music.  And I guess it was only 85 minutes or so, making it significantly shorter and nowhere near as excruciating as Pixar's last movie, 2011's puerile Cars 2.  So... you know... all that's good, but jeeeeeeeeeesus does the story get weird.

The Dark Knight Rises (7/29/2012)

Lettergrade: C

I liked The Dark Knight Rises well enough while watching it, I suppose, but nevertheless something about it felt really "off."  As time goes on and I think back through the various scenes and plot turns, that feeling only intensifies... the whole thing makes less sense to me, and the "whats," "whys," and "hows" of the movie grow steadily more baffling and less satisfying.  It concludes the series, no doubt about that, but in order to get there it amps everything up to a preposterously epic scale that feels completely out of step with the other movies in the series.

Now I thought Batman Begins was good when it came out in 2005, but it didn't necessarily feel like the Batman I knew as a kid right away.  This is the part where I should admit, as I feel I have to in pretty much every blog post I've written this summer, that I'm not a comic book reader at all.  I mostly know Batman from his other films, from the terrific animated series that was on in the 90s, and from the classic Adam West rendering from the 60s, which, while not faithful to the source material at all, was (and still is) a hell of a lot of fun.

But anyway, if Begins didn't entirely sell me on director Christopher Nolan's take on the material, its sequel - 2008's fantastic The Dark Knight - is what turned me into a believer.  I probably saw it 4 or 5 times in theaters (including twice in IMAX, where the 65mm footage was completely thrilling), and whenever I've tried to revisit the Tim Burton movies from the late 80s / early 90s in the years since, I find them almost unbearably thin and simplistic by comparison.  Nolan's Dark Knight kinda redefined what Batman was for me, and even made Begins seem like a better picture after the fact... a rare case where a sequel pulls that off.

If there's a downside to liking a movie as much as I liked that one, however, it's that any potential follow-up has nowhere to go but down, almost to point where I was kinda hoping they would not attempt one.  I tried to be cognizant of that when we went to go see the third picture this weekend, but I am convinced that multiple aspects of it would have still rubbed me the wrong way regardless.

Rises starts some eight years after the events of the previous movie.  New legislation enacted after the murder of Harvey Dent (who became the villainous Two Face toward the end of the second movie, unbeknownst to the general public) has made organized crime in the city practically disappear, and Batman himself has disappeared along with it.  The reclusive Bruce Wayne hasn't been seen publicly in years, and mostly limps around the recently rebuilt Wayne manor, suffering from the emotional and physical effects of the last movie.  He's drawn back into action, however, when the sinister Conrad Bain arrives in Gotham, and puts a plan in motion that ultimately allows him to recreate the exact same scenario from Escape From New York: Quarantining the city off from the rest of the United States by blowing up all the tunnels and bridges so no one can leave, etc, and essentially holding everyone at ransom.

Now, it's that last bit (the "taking-the-whole-city-hostage-for-months-on-end" thing) that totally lost me.  While I didn't find Bane or Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle / Catwoman to be terribly interesting baddies, it's the size and scope of what they're up to in this picture that seemed to betray the more reality-based spirit of the earlier films and take the movie into "bullshit summer time-filler" territory.  In fact, this whole aspect of the movie undercuts one of the most interesting decisions that Nolan made with the earlier two pictures: To discard anything relating to the series' lore that was fantasy-based or even mildly supernatural or far-fetched, and to instead concentrate on grounding Bruce Wayne / Batman in as real of a modern urban environment as possible in which there could still plausibly be a costumed vigilante crime-fighter with a bunch of cool gadgets.

Now, none of the Nolan Batman movies have entirely pulled this off (part 1 opens with a lengthy segment where a billionaire ex-pat trains with a bunch of ninjas in a remote mountain-top lair, for fuck's sake), but in The Dark Knight especially, the view we get into the corrupt inner-workings of Gotham City politics and its police department felt sleek, modern, and real enough, as does the irrational way in which the citizens panic when the Joker's relatively modest attacks on the public start to heat up.  The Gotham City mafia in the first two movies largely consists of Tom Wilkinson and then Eric Roberts putting on the most stereotypical Italian accents imaginable, and yet there's still something there that felt very real and relevant to the cities of today... as if at least some of it could happen..  There was an omnipresent dread in the air, as if all judges and government officials had been bought off everywhere and anyone can be gotten to just by making a call.

That earlier Nolan take on Batman was effective because it existed in the framework of a city that felt more plausible than the Burton / Schumacher films.  This new one doesn't.  It exists in fantasy land:  Where there are flying cars, and you can apparently create massive tunnels under a major metropolitan area and pack them with explosives without any of the utility workers noticing, and where there's a secret prison on the other side of the world that you can get to and from instantly and without explanation (and which also has electricity and cable television, somehow).

Another overall comment is that although the picture is quite long, it also feels like it is missing a great deal of connective tissue that might have better sold what was happening.  Let's pick on the title character again... to recap, Bruce Wayne is supposedly completely wrecked after the events of the last movie (although he didn't seem that beaten up to me when the end credits rolled last time).  Bruce hadn't been Batman or even spent much time out in public for EIGHT YEARS, but seems to return to both with almost casual ease in the course of a single afternoon in this movie, in spite of how extreme his injuries apparently were.  Once he decides to be Batman again, the movie very easily slides into "bat-business as usual" for a while, as if very little time has passed since he had last prowled around the city fighting crime.  No readjustment period, nothing... just right back into it.

And although I don't want get into too much minutia here, there are several big questions that I keep wondering about… So Bruce retreated into a reclusive shell, but was apparently still working on a massive energy project at the same time that just happens to figure prominently into the second half of the movie, huh?  Why did Wayne Enterprises CEO Lucius Fox keep making expensive Bat-gear between this movie and the previous one?  It is established way early in the movie that Wayne Enterprises is having significant financial problems, and furthermore Bruce was very adamant that he was retired from vigilante crime fighting...  Seems like Lucius was pissing away an ungodly amount of cash on the off chance that Bruce didn't really mean it.  On the night that Batman returns to action - when he breaks up the Bane's positively ludicrous heist of the New York Stock Exchange (which now seems to be in Gotham City, by the way) - how did Batman have the clairvoyance to park his new hover-car in a random alley downtown just in case he might need it?  When Bruce Wayne loses all his money, how come his car is repossessed and the electricity is turned off his mansion within, like, a couple hours?

Bane himself, played by Tom Hardy with a voice that falls somewhere between Patrick Stewart's and Goldmember from Austin Powers 3, is an empty shell of a character who spouts bullshit platitudes about "starting fires" and "people rising up" endlessly.  It's a weird anti-rich sentiment that oddly mirrors 2011's "Occupy" movement, but with none of the substance or logic.  There's a positively ridiculous scene where he releases most of the inmates of Gotham City Prison and stands atop a van giving a lengthy and long-winded speech that I could barely comprehend because I fixed on how undeniably stupid he looked while giving it.  

Plus, both in that scene and elsewhere, what he was talking about didn't make any sense, and by "giving Gotham back to the people" he mostly meant all the criminals, but only long enough so Bane and his cohorts could blow the whole thing up in anyway.  Why did he want to create some sort of class uprising when the end-goal was just to destroy the city?  Why didn't he just do that as soon as he had the quarantined off the city and had the doomsday device he needed instead of giving Batman so much time to regroup?

Anyway, I don't know... Perhaps the most damning thing I can say about The Dark Knight Rises is that I looked forward to seeing for years, and I typically don't feel that way about comic book movies or summer tent-pole product anymore.  Now that I've seen it once, however, I can't really envision any scenario anywhere down the line where I'd want to take three hours to sit through it again.

Check out my post on The Dark Knight from 2008 here.

And read this parody from Cracked.com... although the guy who wrote it said he really liked the movie, I think it's the most concise road map of everything about this movie that doesn't add up or entirely make sense:

If 'Dark Knight Rises' Was 10 Times Shorter And More Honest

Oh, and when you've done all that, watch this: