War Inc.

War Inc. (Netflix)

a parody movie

I know I saw a preview of this when it was out in theaters. I know I didn’t hear anything about it in between then and now which sounds like it would be a dis-recommendation. However many movies exist about which I have never heard, things like The Station Agent and Bagdad Cafe and several others. So a movie’s level of invisibility has nothing to do with  whether I will enjoy it. With that said, this movie sucked.

Most of the time I find that things either are funny or they are not and trying for the funny causes the humor to fail.  This movie was so busy trying to be funny that it ended up looking like a narcissistic advertisement for washed up actors. There was no chance to sit back and enjoy the movie because things that were supposed to be funny were constantly being shoved in the audience’s faces.

The movie is supposed to be an obvious parody of the current US occupation of Iraq.  The problem is that I think it is probably close to 100% accurate, including the horrible parts that were supposed to be funny because they were fake. As soon as you don’t see soldiers risking their lives and buzzing on caffeine after having not slept for 5 days as an exaggeration, showing that while a soldier is dropping off someone’s dry cleaning seems like the kind of thing that probably happens in real life. How can that possibly be funny?

In a very strange way, I watched this movie like I watch The Daily Show, where they are incorporating as much humor as they can find because that’s the only way they will be allowed to show the truth. Once you have that perspective, that this is a horror documentary masquerading as entertainment, the people trying to make it funny seem warped and dementedly sick in the head.

John Cusack tries to carry this movie but is not believable. Joan Cusack is bizarrely miscast in this. Hilary Duff is plastic and unappealing— no idea whether that was great acting or her normal personality. There wasn’t anything redeeming in the acting for this movie, unless the definition of success was making the audience loathe all of the characters universally.

Not recommended.

Iron Man

Iron Man
an action movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 7/10
Meets Expectations: +1 (which is amazing considering the hype)
Apparent Rating: 8/10

If there can be said to be long-time readers of a months’ old blog, let me say that long-time readers should know that I have an immense love for superhero movies. Iron Man is no exception. I really enjoyed it. I think the live action version is superior to the cartoon version I saw recently too.

So much of this movie is funny, like when the S.H.I.E.L.D. guy says the whole name every time and every time, the person says, “Ya needa new name!” and he says he gets that a lot. It’s one of those things that’s funny because of the repetition.

The Pepper Potts woman was less of a caricature than I expected, but still managed to hit all those character identifying notes that I’d expect from the woman who is the personal assistant to her playboy boss. It was a little less successful in terms of me believing she was really witty and really in love with him because the line about trash was a bit off-rhythm and  she was way more squicked about saving his life than grateful it had worked. Considering that the role was entirely a caricature in the original stories and in all previous versions, the actress did a tolerable job. But I didn’t feel her devotion or understand her rationale for it and that would have helped sell the movie to me.

Tony Stark was good. I think there could have been a bit more exposition, but we’re meant to think he’s shallow. That shallowness would have worked better if it hadn’t been played in a flashback after he’d gotten taken hostage, because I sort of felt like he deserved to have some fun after the hellish experience…. intellectually I realize the kidnapping was supposed to look like Karma, but because it was out of sequence…. I didn’t like how casually he dealt with the hostage situation. He’s got all that money and doesn’t think to go back for the pieces of his creation? The helper translator guy story bothered me and it seems like anyone who has gotten that far in life would not have just accepted it at face value. But what I did really like about Tony Stark is even in the midst of his shallow playboy lifestyle, it’s completely clear how brilliant he really is. He didn’t just inherit the company, he inherited the brains to make something of it.

Overall, I can’t say if the actor, Robert Downey Jr, was good in this role; I’ve read reviews saying he was, but I thought some of it looked like acting—especially the parts where he’s supposed to be brilliant. I remember him from the nightly news where they kept showing the perp walk when he’d been arrested on drugs use and drunk driving and some other things that show really bad judgment.  So when Tony Stark is driving like a maniac in a quarter-million dollar car through magically empty Los Angeles streets, I kept expecting DUI behavior. I think he was probably adequate and it really is unlikely that Hollywood has anyone who can seem brilliant, since being actually smart is such a taboo societally that even brilliant people can have no practice looking smart. It was still vastly superior to the “I’m like totally stoned right now!” performance from Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man. Comparatively, since they’re supposed to both be roles of brilliant men, RDjr turned in a much superior performance.

One thing I enjoyed, from a humorous angle, was that Tony Stark and Obadaiah Stane and several other people had beards. Normally one can discern the villain immediately because he is a blond man with a beard.

Some of the most amusing parts were the construction robots with the fire extinguishers.

I would really like to see sequels to Iron Man.  If they’re all of this quality, I could see a sequel beating out X-Men for my favorite superhero movie.

Black Velvet Gown

Black Velvet Gown
an historical melodrama movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5
Meets Expectations: -1
Apparent Rating: 4

This was another movie where the title has very little to do with what happens and the description of the movie even less so. The summary of the movie says it’s about a widow who takes a housekeeping job and the master falls for her and then leaves her the house but society around her is very intolerant of jumped up servants aping gentry.

If you’re interested in this movie stop here. There will be spoilers. If you’re reading from the RSS feed, you won’t see the fold I inserted here.

Once

Once
a foreign drama movie
IMDb | Netflix
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: -3
Apparent Rating: 3/10

I know there is often a disconnect between the summary describing a movie and what the movie is really about. Some of that has to be not spoiling the viewing experience. Some of it might be the translation from Irish English to American English. But this is not a movie about two people falling in love with each other.

The songs in this have a lot of catchy bits to them but they are annoyingly repetitive. As I get older, I find even popular music from my teenage years to be inane and repetitious, but most of these songs had one verse and a 3-verse-long chorus. There’s one song that says “When your mind’s made up/there’s no use fightin’.” fine. It’s part of the chorus, and most songs repeat the chorus several times, but there were more than a dozen instances of that couplet. Even that does not convey the irritation. The guy sings it in falsetto. In a minor key. As a duet with the girl even though the drama bits of the musical indicate it wasn’t about her. And she chooses the minor-fourth harmony. It was the accoustic power ballad dirge love song set on “Repeat1″. 15 minutes of 85 minutes. Seriously. It was the song that never ends. It says on the movie jacket that the actors wrote the songs and won an Oscar for it. Must has been a low-competition year.

Bad subtitles that didn’t include the important bits.

The movie skims over the parts that made their relationship (as non-lovers and non-friends) by showing a silent clip sequence.

But the whole movie is supposed to be upbeat, showing how a man who works in a vacuum cleaner repair shop can find a girlfriend and record a demo disc— supposedly so he can “make it big”. But he was just helping his dad out in the shop, it wasn’t like he didn’t have a career before then. The girl was at least a decade younger than him, a foreigner, married, with a child— so she wasn’t for him. And by the time the one song of doom ended, I’d rather punch the guy than listen to him play.

Ireland looks beautiful when you see it on travel programs, but it looks like a hellhole in this movie. Apparently they  saved big bucks on filming rights by shooting at 4am in back alleys. Everything is grim and dark and underlit and overlaid with this miasma of filthy despair. It was odd because I couldn’t imagine anyone living there making any strides toward success, but that was the premise of the movie. I think someone put a camera filter on because a story that’s about people working hard to make themselves happy can’t be of artistic value, only suffering and pain can have artistic value, so they had to artificially make Ireland look like Tartarus.

The story might have been interesting if I could have identified with the characters.

The female lead was… what do you call it when someone moves to a country but has no intention of staying and becoming a citizen? that’s not immigration. Anyway, one of those. She doesn’t have a regular job, she accosts people on the sidewalk to sell them junk like homeless person magazines and dead flowers.  She meets this guy who is busking on the street. (I hate that too. The world is loud enough without people deliberately adding noise to it in public.) They make friends with each other and eventually she brings him home, she’s so young she lives with her mother, but she has a toddler. So we’re supposed to feel sorry for her because she’s in a strange country with a child and no husband and trying to keep a roof over everyone’s head when she can’t find a real job. But I don’t believe that. I think if you take a chance with your life, you don’t bring your vulnerabilities and try to use them as a shield. I think you don’t emigrate to a country where you barely speak the language without a job lined up. So I’m a hard-hearted person, but I had zero sympathy for her.

To sum up, I hated the guy. I hated the girl. I hated the music. I hated the setting. I might have liked the story if they had used other characters and it had been set somewhere the sun still shines and the music was less annoying. But then again, I didn’t especially like Music and Lyrics, which is exactly what I just described wanting this movie to have been.

Dreamkeeper

Dreamkeeper
a docudrama movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations:+1
Apparent Rating: 6/10

There are some movies that meander and seem rather opaque that still end up entertaining, Dreamkeeper was one of them. It was a close call though. I thought a lot of the forced parallels between the legends and the journey were blindingly obvious most of the time and astonishingly inapplicable the rest. I kept getting lost as to what was a flashback, what was story, and what was now.

The “now” part of the story was uninteresting and just next to worthless. I think it existed solely to be a framework for telling these other parables, but generally if I can see why something was done that way it seems like a staging failure. In my own writing, I call that, “Excuse me, your plot is showing.”

Some of the stories were really good. They were well told and interesting. Some of the stories relied upon outside knowledge I didn’t have and those were less successful. The stories were from a variety of tribes, even though the main characters were at one point “Sioux” and at another point “Lakota”– perhaps that’s a variant of Sioux, like when the Pawnee woman added, “Wolf Clan”. None of the Indian parables told failed as badly as the main storyline. The flashbacks, which were supposed to help the viewer sort out the rationale for the main storyline, did not start until late in the movie and by then I’d already written the characters off.

In summary, “Too bad they had all that wasted time with Grandpa and Shane.” It’s a 3 hour movie and at least half of it was very boring. I did not like the resolution in the end either. We’re supposed to see this as a happy ending, but really, the movie would have been a lot better if it had been a dozen little movielets that were just telling the stories.

Overall if you like “Native American” mythology, then you will probably enjoy this movie at least moderately. It was not terrible, but certainly a movie to have your knitting nearby to keep your hands busy.

Dragon Tiger Gate

It was filed under superhero movies. I claim that the renting of Dragon Tiger Gate was completely not my fault. I love superhero movies. My DH loves kung fu movies. Clearly this would be an amazing together-activity, right?  Not so much. We did watch it together and we did bond over it. But that moment of shared experience was thinking “What were they thinking?”

The movie jumps around a lot in the timeline. It’s based on Manga, so you just know there are whole issues that are flashback. But there is no cohesion to the flashbacks, so they go from current to recent-past to long past to possible future to current in some random order at intermittent times.

The plot is that two brothers are separated in early childhood. There was a conflict between the spoken English and the subtitle English, but it seems to have been that Dragon and Tiger are half-brothers and their father Two Wrong FuHu  (or something like that) cheated on Dragon’s mother, so they were thrown out of their home and replaced by the new and improved family while Dragon’s mother went to live in the ghetto slums. Tiger tries to keep his brotherly bond, but Dragon is having nothing of it. Then Dragon’s mother dies and Dragon is adopted by a complete stranger instead of returning to his father.

But the premise of the plot is that Dragon owes fealty to his father and must return to “The Gate”. Dragon feels he cannot because he has dishonored his kung fu.

But even now after watching the whole thing, I have no clue who the bad guys were. At first it seemed like this gang. Then it was a traitor within the gang who was Dragon’s bit of fluff. Then it was this escapee from the Power Rangers.

Oh, and a huge part of the plot is that no one seems to believe Dragon and Tiger are related because they don’t look alike. Maybe if I were Chinese I would be able to tell, but to me it looked like that ancient Parent Trap movie with Halley Mills and Halley Mills.

All the fight scenes are completely ludicrous. They look a bit like the car-fight scenes in Speed Racer where jump-jacks can shoot the car straight up and into a barrel roll. By the time we get to that part though, we’re on our fourth evil mastermind and this one looks like a cartoon reject, so I just assumed this was supposed to be hilarious and a parody. (I wonder if I might have liked Coughing Tiger, Hidden Moron if someone had told me it was all tongue-in-cheek?)

The story is all over the place with technology. Cell phones, but no one has a powered vehicle.

Some parts of the story were interesting. Love interest. Foreign Family Values. Etc. But it really was written by the three faces of Eve or something. Just completely incoherent.

Wrist Cutters: A Love Story

Wristcutters: A Love Story
a comedic movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +2 (because my expectations were artificially lowered)
Apparent Rating: 6/10

Sometimes a movie I was not sure I wanted to see works its way up in the queue. This was one of those, because really, who wants to watch a movie about suicidal teens? But it was kind of cute, kind of funny, and kind of epic (on a small scale). I liked the resolution to the story. I even liked the cinematography, despite the atmospheric washout. The subtitles did not suck hugely. Pretty much there wasn’t anything wrong with this movie.

It was well done, it was what it promises to be (a love story about suicidal teenagers).

And I still cannot believe I watched it.

Given a choice, I prefer this a lot more than I did Juno, but they’re kind of the same premise where someone young and powerless screws up hugely and attempts to deal with it. Wristcutters is better than Juno in a few ways, there aren’t logistical faults like wondering how someone without a job can afford a case of tictacs. There are some bizarre logistical faults in this, but they’re intentional, plot-relevant, and funny— for example, the car they take their road trip through the world of the “offed” has a bermuda triangle kind of thing under the passenger seat, so things are lost forever if the passenger drops them. The main character in this has a job, he works at Kamikaze Pizza. I thought that was hilarious.

The story in Wristcutters was tight. The writing was solid. That’s why I found some parts of it funny. If something is slapped together, I am never sure if it was supposed to be funny.

If I were younger, I think I might have enjoyed this more than I did.

High Society

High Society
a musical movie
IMDb | Netflix
Overall Rating: 2/10
Meets Expectations: -4
Apparent Rating: 0/10

Guh. My complaints about Philadelphia Story and its bizarre need to refer to the Hepburn woman as “Red” even though the movie was black and white generated a recommendation for High Society, which is a musical remake.

There are a number of really crushingly bad things about this movie. First, the subtitles do not include any of the musical lyrics even though roughly half the conversation in the story is sung. Second, the music in this is the dreaded jazz type that sounds like the musicians are making shit up as they go along and the lyricist thinks Dr Seuss is a god among poets… every song in this movie is pure doggerel with cacaphony. Third, they managed to rip the soul of the story out of it to the point where no one cares if the stick woman marries the stick man and everyone just wishes the house would get firebombed so we could go watch something else.

This managed to make the characters of the story completely unsympathetic. I wasn’t rooting for things to work out “the way they should”. If we had had to choose, this is the movie that should have been made in black and white, preferably before movies were “talkies”, and the previous version should have been shot in Technicolor.

The movie opens with Louis Armstrong sitting in the back of a bus. That’s a pretty good metaphor for the whole thing.

If you have not seen Philadelphia Story, I would recommend you see that instead. Even though it’s in black and white. That was the movie that convinced me classic movies could be classics for a reason. The story is excellent, but High Society seems to have lost that.

Rating is minus infinity for ruining a good story.

Miss Potter

Miss Potter
a docudrama movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 7/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 8/10

Overall, I enjoyed Miss Potter. It is one of those docudrama movies where it is supposed to be historical and based on a real person’s life, but I don’t have any clue how much of it was true. I enjoyed all the costumes but I think what I liked about this was how Beatrix Potter toed the line of convention and her parents’ desires while carving out a life and freedoms for herself.

The movie says it has animation in it. The animation is light-handed and well integrated.

One of the most impressive things about this as a story is that it was easy to see how Miss Potter ended up where she did. Each step of her life’s journey makes sense. She draws because it pleases her to take after her father. She meets with publishers and expects the rounds of rejection. When one finally takes on her book, she is surprised and shrewd about it, but agrees. When she begins seeing her publisher, it is clear why because we have seen their courting in the guise of official business. In the end when she buys the farm, it feels like coming home, even to the viewer. Each and every step is clear and is the kind of decision the viewer would make in that situation.

I felt there could have been more detail in a number of areas of the story, but the plot pulls it along.

This was a rare case where a real person’s story was as interesting as one purely imagined by the author.

Speed Racer

Speed Racer
a fantasy-action movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +1/-1
Apparent Rating: 6/10

Overall, this movie was good. Considering the dearth of non-fluffy source material and the quality of the underpinnings, the movie was excellent.

There are a lot of things in this movie that were impressive and very few failures if you have accepted the general premise. The general premise is ludicrous, of course, and the beginning of the movie does nothing to submerge a skeptical adult’s psyche in the fantasy world.

That lack of solid beginning would be my main complaint. It took me probably 25-30 minutes to overcome the first scene. The movie is about fanasty car racing, the kind of racing where cars can jump into the air and do loop-the-loops and jumps and dives on tracks that rival modern-day roller coasters. So why did they start with a lumpy looking kid filling out a multiple choice test form? It did nothing for setting the stage and convinced me that the kid was some sort of defective jerk whose sole purpose on the Earth is to keep other children from learning and succeeding in life. I was shocked that was the same character from the cartoon, where Speed is presented as some sort of brilliant prodigy and an upstanding man.

This school stuff continued a lot longer than it should have too, because we had to know that Trixie (who flew a helicopter in the cartoons and acted as Speed’s spotter for rally races) had been with Speed from almost the beginning. Mostly it seemed like an egregious pandering, “If there are kids in the movie, kids will love it!”

Then the movie starts and the whole thing is a ride as wild as the track.

The main actor, Emile Hirsch also starred in Into the Wild and he definitely has a real career ahead of him. I’m not sure I would have noticed his performance as a performance if I hadn’t seen Into the Wild before Speed Racer, but he brought real acting chops to the part. A lot of the movie was CGI, so they must have shot it in a soundstage against a green-screen, but even knowing that intellectually, I thought it looked as real as it could have. Speed really looks like he’s driving and Hirsch brings it home.

John Goodman does an excellent job as Pops Racer, though too many points he went over-the-top to the cartoony style of the original. In a very strange way, Pops Racer looked like Fred Flintstone, with that sense of “I’m an actor playing a ridiculous role and you shouldn’t take me seriously.” If it had been played straight, there should have been more focus on Pops, with the constant tongue-in-cheek attitude, I’m glad they minimized it. Spritle and Chim Chim were ridiculous sops to the original cartoon and really could have been omitted in my opinion. The girl playing adult-Trixie was not good (her counterpart during the childhood/schoolyard scenes was better.) Whoever she is, she’s a lousy actress. Her part had real solid meat in it and she couldn’t sell it. It’s the inverse of Natalie Portman in Star Wars where Portman was a decent actress and had nothing to demonstrate that with. Trixie was a real role played by someone who is good at standing around looking pretty but nothing more. Susan Sarandon was good at the acting but she didn’t jive with the rest of the look— she looked ancient. The main villain, Royston was good but way too obvious. It looked like he’d been told to camp it up.

The other racers managed to make themselves caricatures. Rex and Racer X did not get much screen time and were played by different actors. No opinion. Taejo was not as bad, there was a lot more to his part and he managed it, but he was still a cartoon.

The car modellers and costumers and CGI people were brilliant in this. I wish the movie had been edited so there were whole scenes of racing without flashbacks or cutaways and I’m not one for watching competitions.

Someone saved this movie from being campy, someone said, “Let’s play this straight and let the audience find the humor themselves.” And that made it a really fine piece of entertainment whenever that shone through. I wish it had been done that way throughout with intent. Whenever there was campy humor and “We know you’re not taking us seriously!” it was disasterous.

It could have been better if they’d been making the movie for real throughout. They had the actors and the script and the CGI and the models and the special effects. But a lot of people brought that “This is humor, I don’t have to be professional.” attitude to the movie. It is, at its heart, a fantasy. For all the action, for all the mechanics, the story is one about a magician who goes on an epic quest to save his family. And you cannot have a successful fantasy without convincing the audience to suspend disbelief. But humor requires bringing external knowledge to the experience and is contrary to suspending disbelief. Humor pulls people out of the immersive experience. And Speed Racer, despite succeeding on many levels, failed at providing an immersion for me.

It could have been an 8 or even 9 out of 10 for me, with the story they had and the material/resources. I liked it, 6/10 or so, but I resent that quarter/third of a movie experience I didn’t get. Obviously most people don’t see turning in merely good work as a failure. I see this movie as taking a great idea and wasting half of it on this product. If they had taken the great idea and really rolled with it, this could have been a phenomenal experience. +1 for some great acting, -1 for wasting an idea.