Let the Fish Hit the Fan
Piranha (2010)
Piranha is a fairly enjoyable exercise in titties-n-fish that could have been better. It's another movie that promises moral anarchy only to back-peddle and hedge its bets. And why? The people who spend their money on something called Piranha want their monsters and their body shots and their drunken fondling and their wish-fulfillment and their contrived survival-of-the-fittest scenarios delivered hard and fast and mostly without anything that could be accused of being tactful or tasteful. The picture miscalculates early on. Early bits establish that a rowdy spring break is about to commence at a lake in an otherwise sleepy Arizona community; with a Girls-Gone-Wild wannabe sleaze-maestro (Jerry O'Connell) and his game, well-endowed starlets (Kelly Brook, Riley Steele) descending upon it to make the most of the kind of eager, drunken debauchery that has presumably already made them a little bit of coin. (Not a lot though, this strikes us as ... continued
Working-Class Heroes
The Other Guys, The Eclipse, The Expendables (2010)
Actor/co-writer Will Ferrell and director/co-writer Adam McKay have a habit of making movies that promise better ones. Anchorman is a broad absurdist comedy with shards of gender resentment; the picture seems to want to blossom into something more ambitious than its' already-assured status as the next Caddyshack, but it's ultimately more or less content to color within the lines. Talladega Nights is more clearly split in sensibility; there's that long, much-discussed Sunday dinner scene with the crass product placements and the shouting and the ridiculous Jesus outbursts; and there's those occasional intrusions into the film by (pretend) sponsors. Step Brothers is the most rambunctious, insane, and complete of the duo's projects, but it never quite finds a target or a focus (clearly partially the point) even if it is still one of the better mainstream comedies in the last several years. A movie, I might add, with which I ... continued
Strands of Need
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, The Thorn in the Heart (2010)
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, based on a series of “graphic novels” by Bryan Lee O'Malley, is a romantic comedy set among the contemporary early 20s set, which means its set among the perpetually indecisive. Scott (Michael Cera) plays in a band, crashes with his gay (sexual orientation highlighted because it is – purposefully – the character's only defining characteristic) roommate Wallace (Kieran Culkin), and dilly dallies with a high-school student called Knives (Ellen Wong) who clearly adores him. Scott's issue is somewhat vague in that you can't quite tell if he's stuck, lazy, or playing at some sort of hipster malaise. A little bit of all most likely, but he strikes you as being mostly befuddled, crippled by an especially intense strain of self-absorption. There is nothing he wants, and so he does mostly nothing. Scott's saving grace – for him, at least - is that he is a ... continued
Through the Cracks
The Runaways, Rolling Stones: Stones in Exile, The Losers, Saint John of Las Vegas (2010)
For forty-five minutes, The Runaways is a good rock-n-roll movie. It's a woman-empowerment picture that holds the empowerment – primarily of Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) and Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) of the titular jail-bait rebel-yell act of the 1970s – in proper perspective, recognizing it as a hypocritical, manipulative snow job orchestrated by men, most prominently Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon), to get other men off. The picture allows this, but also understands that this sham-catharsis is still, for these girls, very real; and this gives the picture a contradictory pull that isn't fussily sentimental. The family scenes – the girls are troubled in the usual ways – are stock but that's intentional and makes sense: the desires that lay below most classic rock songs are stock. Fanning and Stewart are self-conscious performers, and this has limited them in the past, but that is obviously called for in this sort ... continued
Requiem for the Dead
Survival of the Dead, The Crazies (2010)
By this point, director George Romero is like one of those jam bands from the 1960s that once had cultural prominence that now find themselves playing their hits from bar to cool little outdoor venue, making some cash and having a few beers and just trying to live with the fact that the outrage business doesn’t really sell anymore. The “rebellion” - and Jesus are we grossly overdo for another one - is in retreat. Greed - economic depression, blah, blah, whatever aside – is still good right now, and people don’t give a shit about things that might have made cultural waves thirty years ago. (Even a rudimentary plot these days basically ensures a movie as a Video-on-Demand followed by release in approximately 2.765 theatres.) So, for that, I can’t work up much anger over the fact that Romero hasn’t made a good, or even particularly competent, movie since maybe ... continued
Canned Chaos
Inception (2010)
The beginning has an arbitrary intensity. A man - eventually called Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) - washes in from the ocean with just a great crisp suit and gun handily tucked into the back of his pants. The shore is a wasteland littered with huge, strange crumbling skyscrapers that suggest the apocalyptic finale of the original Planet of the Apes. Cobb, understandably disoriented, is scooped up by guards and taken to a Scenic Fortress presided over by a seemingly centuries old Japanese man who recognizes him from a distant – perhaps illusory – past. Cobb spins what appears to be a top, and we flip back to the Encounter That Started It All. Cobb is revealed to be some sort of dream thief, a pro at a new kind of corporate espionage. Aided by a team (each equipped with obligatory, contrasting “specialty”), Cobb turns his prey’s dreams into videogames, using heist symbols ... continued
Sex Panic
Solitary Man, I Am Love (2010)
One of the more effective ways of wriggling out of responsibility for bad behavior is to outwardly atone for it, to admit it, to display remorse, to beat everyone to the punch. This is one of the chief defenses of the bullshitter and the con artist, and they probably more than half the time fool themselves just as well as they do friends and family. It’s a way of expediting forgiveness, which ultimately means these overtures of atonement are more often than not self-serving. A show. Michael Douglas plays such a bullshitter in the new Solitary Man, which is ultimately just as self-deceiving. The idea is that we watch this character, a variation of the classic Douglas “greed is good, pussy is better” womanizer, as he sinks lower and lower: refuting more optimistic stories of redemption. The character this time is Ben Kalmen, a washed-up-once-great car salesman ruined by a scam ... continued
What We Always Want
Toy Story 3, Get Him to the Greek (2010)
Most stories, whether they be movies or paintings or print, are stories of people finding their place in the world, or of not finding that place. The Toy Story movies are a remarkable series of mainstream American pictures in that that subtext grows more and more urgent with each entry: more urgent, more original, more powerful. The first Toy Story, as my memory allows, is a fun, streamlined adventure that was basically a tale of sibling rivalry. Toy Story 2 was, particularly in its “to be or not to be...packaged” dilemma, a mortality play – a symbolic story of young people's first realization that they are destructible. Toy Story 3 bridges the concerns of the first two pictures together: it's about characters who, understanding their impermanence in this world, need something that allows them to be truest to themselves while they're here. Reading myself, it occurs to me that I'm making ... continued
Fun with Genre
Edge of Darkness, From Paris with Love, Splice (2010)
Been awhile hasn’t it? It annoys me when people I follow on the internet disappear only to waste their reappearance elaborating on said disappearance. In that spirit, let’s get back to it. A few weeks ago I caught up with Martin Campbell’s American remake of his own British miniseries, Edge of Darkness, which is probably most notable for being Mel Gibson’s first starring vehicle since Signs, which was, of course, before that drunken escapade that led people to read more into the themes that tend to dominate the actor/director’s work than before. I was curious about Edge of Darkness (though evidently not curious enough to pay for it) for primarily two reasons: the return of Gibson, and the return of Campbell, who last gave us Casino Royale, one of the better Bond pictures. I haven’t seen the original Edge of Darkness, which is several hours long, so I’m afraid that I will ... continued
Twisted Up
Or: An Abandoned Essay That Became a Review of Iron Man 2 (2010)
I’ve long suspected that audiences aren’t as sensation-‘splosion happy as both movie producers and they themselves presume them to be. Pauline Kael once wrote that the movies were so bad they didn’t attract audiences so much as inherit them, and I can’t for the life of me find someone who, to use recent examples, actually liked Transformers 2 or G.I. Joe or any number of other similarly-minded movies. Audiences go to these pictures to be in on Monday’s watercooler, and because the media saturation is so overwhelming that many of them - those who don’t read fifteen different critics, and who don’t maintain their own blog - presume those pictures to be the only ones playing, to be the only ones “worth seeing on the big screen”. It’s a pointlessly unpleasant chicken/egg circle jerk: audiences pay to see mindless, derivative, deadly dull formula movies because the producers essentially pay them ... continued
