Movie Review

Movie review catch-up

The Island

The Island is the scariest movie I’ve seen in a long time. I’m not sure if this is because it illustrates just how easily a population of adults can be controlled by fear and the shared memory of a catastrophe or if it’s because this movie is such a perfect example of how a dark, complicated script can be remade into a hollow shell of itself with the addition of a whole bunch of Hollywood money.

Must Love Dogs

Sarah (Diane Lane) and Jake (John Cusack) both divorced and broken hearted, meet through an online personal ad and the meddling of their friends and relations. Theoretically perfect for each other, Sarah and Jake dance around the issues of love, betrayal, honesty, and vulnerability with about as much depth as the average puddle.

March of The Penguins

Antarctica is a beautiful, brutal place that’s home to species most uniquely adapted to its frigid climate. Even as I type it’s late winter there, the days getting a little bit longer, the sun rising just a little higher over the horizon each day. And right now there is a big group of penguins nurturing new born chicks – for they are chicks as the penguin is, genuinely, a bird – against the harsh climate.

This beautifully filmed piece tells of the Emperor penguin’s constant clock, one that drives them from their home in the sea unerringly across nearly 100 miles to their traditional breeding ground, a place where the ice is thicker and the wind isn’t quite so harsh during the storms of deep winter. The penguins hatched during filming by Laurent Chalet and Jérôme Maison for this French documentary (originally, La Marche de l’empereur) won’t themselves produce off-spring for another four years.

Pitched at kids with gorgeous cinematography and a lush sound track of naturalistic effects, this film is a diverting enough way to spend 90 or so minutes. Because of the concentration the film makers put on the harsh conditions there really isn’t much in the way of exposition about the penguins’ behavior; the narration for the U.S. version (read by Morgan Freeman) freely admits, for example, that we have no idea by what criteria the monogamous-for-a-breeding-season penguins pick a mate. It’s not often, though, that you get a chance to see such a rare environment on the big screen. Even with its shallow depth of knowledge, I found this film charming if a little monochromatic (by the end of the film I was wishing for some color, any color, besides white). Three popcorns out of five.

3 popcorns out of 5

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Stealth

I suppose that A Movie About The Morality of Warfare and The Implications of Advanced Technology would have been too long for the posters. That’s a shame, really, because underneath all of the special effects and the glibness of the “elite pilots have feelings too” method acting that’s what Stealth is really trying to be.
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Fantastic Four

I had to. It was like a force drawing me into the theater the unanswered question: how badly would they screw up a comic that I loved so dearly when I was a kid. The answer, unfortunately, is pretty badly.

This is, like most first movies adapted from comics, an origin story. How the Fantastic Four came to be, well, fantastic. The details really aren’t important (cosmic storm, faulty shields, genetic mutations that follow along the lines of expressed personality traits), what is important is that in their rush to bring this film to the screen, it’s shepards at Marvel managed to kill off the one thing that makes Fantastic Four different from all the other big-name comics: the portrait of a dysfunctional family.

Human and driven by their emotions, Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd), Sue Storm (Jessica Alba), Johnny Storm (Chris Evans), and Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis) are, despite their powers, the epitome of messy human behavior. They argue; they play each other’s weaknesses just for the fun of it. The problem is that in this adaptation, it’s all proforma. The entire film exists to kick off a franchise, which it may not be able to do considering the flaws.

Let’s start with the miscasting of Jessica Alba as Susan Storm (Dina Meyer, please call your agent). It’s not that she’s not easy on the eyes, more, it’s that she’s just not substantial enough to carry the role. Sue Storm and Reed Richards are supposed to be peers both in age and intellect and Jessica Alba just doesn’t have enough miles on her to make that believable.

The other major problem with this film is the gross mistreatment of one of the most compelling characters in comic-dom. I won’t spoil the ending but save to say that what screenwriters Michael France and Mark Frost do to Ben Grimm cuts out the essence of his moral conflict.

For so many reasons, not to mention the betrayal of my childhood memories, I have to give this movie a one and a half out of five.

1.5 popcorns out of 5

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Movie review catch-up

Doing a bit of movie review catch up before I get too behind…

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

It’s not often that Hollywood manages to make a movie about girls coming of age that doesn’t involve 1) pregnancy, 2) someone getting ostracized, and 3) characters that are so flat you wonder out of what bin at central casting the lazy screenwriter got them. It doesn’t hurt that this film is from a book of the same name, the first of what is now three in a series.

Tibby (Amber Tamblyn, daughter of Russ of West Side Story fame), Lena (Alexis Bledel), Carmen (America Ferrera), and Bridget (Blake Lively) do embody some basic personality types – the cynic, the wallflower, the observer, and the risk-taker (respectively) – it’s true, but the skill of the actresses and the good will that is the heart of this film overcomes a fairly predictable series of events in each girl’s life. It’s nice to see girls that aren’t perfect, and who don’t expect their friends to be anything but what they truly are in their hearts. OK, so maybe it’s not realistic, but summer is the time of escapist fantasy is it not?

3 popcorns out of 5

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Batman Begins

I admit it. I’ve always loved Batman. He’s dark, and slightly rough. He’s goth without the eyeliner and fingerless lace gloves and ridiculous frilly shirts. Batman is our worst impulses trained and harnessed for good.

Unlike Superman, who is an alien in the truest sense of the word, and unlike Spiderman, whose powers come from a mutation borne of scientific arrogance, Batman is just a guy. Albeit a rich one, but still, just a guy righteously angry at injustice, at the powerful taking advantage of the weak, at a system so corrupt that it really serves no one any longer, not even those trying to subvert it. He’s just a guy who does what so many of us have always wanted to do: give it to those who have it coming.

It doesn’t get much more escapist than that.

Strapped into the Batsuit, this time one made of kevlar^®, Christian Bale gives us a young Bruce Wayne, still tormented by his role in his parents’ untimely death. He’s made his way to what seems to be China, pursuing a strategy roughly summarized as do as those you would like to vanquish so you can know how they think. Found and trained by a mysterious mentor, Bruce returns to Gotham, to the graceful care of Alfred (Michael Caine, impeccable as always) and to the astonishment of the investment bankers who have been running Wayne Enterprises in the seven years since he disappeared.

Sparing revealing the plot, I’ll say just two things: 1)Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes, showing about as much chemistry with Bale as she does with “real life” love interest Tom Cruise) is a plot device and completely unnecessary. She’s utter laziness on the part of writer David S. Goyer and writer/director Christopher Nolan (Momento), and 2) they got it almost completely right.

You can see in Bale’s performance the seeds of the tortured man that Bruce Wayne is to become. It’s easy to see, as well, the moral lesson and the optimistic idea that good can triumph over evil, that right can trump the profit motive. The one thing they missed, though, they got totally wrong. Let’s just say that the filmmakers should pay more attention to their bible when it comes to Jim Gordon’s family if they want this franchise to revive.

And not only was Batman Begins a mostly enjoyable ride (the setup first act and the chase scene go on a bit too long), we got a preview of Joss Whedon’s new film Serenity. Hey, I like a western in outer space as much as the next person seems to: The global box office for Star Wars is at $385M USD as I write this.

3.5 popcorns out of 5

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