While watching Once is a prerequisite before going into this film and having a love for the band’s non-film related material will help, the audience for this film really begins and ends with Swell Season fans and the mildly curious.
While there’s much to praise and little to deride about Contraband, there are only so many ways to say that the movie holds very few surprises and everything happens in exactly the way one expects it would happen. This smuggling thriller does pretty much everything right, not a heck of a lot wrong, and viewers will be engaged enough to keep from checking their watches every few minutes. It’s a very competently made piece of Hollywood machinery, but it’s also the kind of a movie one would watch with a laptop open or while doing chores because of how little an impression it leaves.
Sometimes a movie that deserves a spot on a critic’s ten worst films list ends up being excluded because of a technicality. The beetle-headed Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady should almost dead to rights be quite high up on the list of 2011's cinematic atrocities, but thanks to limited Oscar qualifying runs in New York and Los Angeles at the end of the year I felt it wrong to talk about the film in too much depth before its proper wide release. It wasn’t embargoed at all, but I felt it was still too early. That time for charity is over. This movie’s an outright trainwreck with a central performance that isn’t half as good as the work that Meryl Streep has shown in the past.
The first film to be released in any year often isn’t very good. They are the films that are quietly released amid award season fare and during the period where the kiddies are going back to school. Even by those low standards, one would be hard pressed to think of a worse start to a year than The Devil Inside. If there is a worse film than this dreadfully inept “found footage” horror coming out in 2012, I hope and pray I don’t have to sit through it. Six days into 2012 and it feels like the top of the worst of the year list is already in the bag. That record has to count for something, right?
Sometimes it’s obvious when a big name director is actively trying to win ALL THE OSCARS. Steven Spielberg’s War Horse is one of those painfully obvious movies, but that's not to say that the film is at all bad or unwatchable. This tale of a young man and the horse that touched the lives of everyone who came in contact with it is a splendid World War I yarn made with the skill and craft one would expect from a Spielberg production, but one can’t seem to shake the feeling that it’s all a bit overbearing.
It is rare that a film is released in Europe before North America, unless it is a European production. And while The Adventures of Tintin is technically not European, its roots are, and so its release here in the United Kingdom last week was appropriate.
Sometimes movies take themselves far too seriously for their own good. Writers will come up with ridiculous premises that directors play a bit too straight in hopes that the film ends up saying something meaningful about the human condition. Young Adult is one such film.
Sometimes a press release comes along that’s just too implausible to pass up. There’s just something about it that catches the eye or something in the content that contains a hard to refuse offer. Such is the case with this week’s direct to DVD release of the film 13. The release stated that the film starred Jason Statham, Mickey Rourke, Alexander Skarsgard and Michael Shannon in a remake of director Gela Babluani’s wonderful 2005 film 13 Tzameti with Babluani returning to helm the new version.
The only real issues with David Fincher’s take on Stieg Larsson’s best selling The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are problems that were in the original story to begin with. It’s overlong, needlessly convoluted in terms of pacing, and the plot is sleazy and dumb as a box of hammers. Having said that, this remounting of the Swedish pop culture juggernaut firmly establishes Fincher as one of the best in the world at what he does. A technical maestro of the highest order, Fincher teams up with two pitch perfect leading actors to make the pulpy material vastly more watchable and entertaining than it probably should be.
Are 12 new characters, additional modes and updates enough to justify a $40 disc release 10 months after its predecessor? How will the changes to the previous characters affect the high-level tournament scene? And what the hell is a raccoon doing with a repeater cannon?
Hugo is the kind of ambitious and earnest miscalculation that could only be made by someone with great love and passion. For his latest film, Martin Scorsese adapts author Brian Selznick’s children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, but at the same time takes the material so personally that the film’s good intentions are often ungainly and out of alignment with the actual story of the film. The material is definitely within Scorsese’s field of vision, but the famed director loses sight of audience expectations and creates a film wholly for the most academic fans of film studies.
While it’s as funny as one would hope a Muppet film would be, the rebooting of this finely-felted gang of friends does have a few fairly big problems. Structurally the film is a bit wonky and the script feels like the result of many different people having a lot of different feelings about the tone of the film. To call a film like The Muppets out on such seemingly trivial issues might sound like the groaning of Statler and Waldorf, but despite any such complaints The Muppets are undoubtedly back at the top of their game comedically.
The Addams Family musical, now in its second year on Broadway, is based on the artwork of cartoonist Charles Addams and the popular film and television productions that followed. The comedy musical pushes our favourite gothic family into new territory -- into genuine, unironic happiness. Happiness that was not achieved through decapitation, poisoning or the like. It's kind of weird.
In Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, the most catastrophic events that befall the main characters happen off screen, making it a kind of glossy kindred spirit to the more youth oriented romance Like Crazy and the much beloved cult drama Martha Marcy May Marlene. Payne creates a story about privileged people dealing with real world issues without a sense of detachment or boredom. Sofia Coppola should see this film and take notes.
Director Tarsem Singh previously made two visually stunning, but incredibly boring and boneheaded films (The Cell, The Fall) before taking on his latest film Immortals. Undoubtedly talented when it comes to visuals, his latest film somehow manages to rank as the least of his efforts, but not for lack of trying. Whereas his past efforts have been ambitious failures, there simply isn’t anything in this sword and sandals epic that hasn’t been done before, or better, hundreds of times before.
