December 31, 2008
The Spirit
Directed by:Frank Miller
Starring: Gabriel Macht, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johanson, Eva Mendes,
Rated: PG-13 for intense sequences of stylized violence and action, some sexual content, and brief nudity.
Parental Notes: This film is so highly stylized that the violence (and nudity/sexual content) is mostly cartoonish and unreal. There are, however, a few gruesome (if bloodless) shots, so sensitive or young kids should probably be left at home.
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Coming Up In Film Got a film event you want listed? Email reviewer@ealasaid.com with details. JANUARY 2009 |
"The Spirit" is like a thoroughly distilled shot of whiskey -- sure, it has some complexity, but not much. Mostly it is what it is: a strong dose of comic book action, straight up. No mixers like character development or subtlety. Just strong men and beautiful women and a superhero facing off against a supervillain.
"What are you?" asks a woman the Spirit (Gabriel Macht) rescues early in the film (she is disconcerted by his apparent lack of concern about a knife sticking out of his torso). For most of the movie we don't really know, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that one day he found he couldn't die. So he put on a mask and set to work cleaning up his beloved city, fighting everyone on the wrong side of the law, from lowly pickpockets to The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson), a crime kingpin with very similar survival abilities to the Spirit's own.
"The Spirit" is shot in the same dramatic visual style as Miller's last film, "Sin City." The whole film looks like a comic book come to life, from the gorgeous shots of the Spirit backlit by his beloved city with his red tie blowing in the wind to the unbelievably over-the-top outfits most of the female characters wear. There are lush setting shots, unusual camera angles, and loving closeups aplenty (though some of the latter are airbrushed to the point that the women look a little plastic).
The visual style suited "Sin City," which was a dark story set in a gritty city. "The Spirit" tells us several times that the city its main character so loves is a "pit" or a "hole" but it's not shown. We see the Spirit rescue one woman from a gang of thugs and return a stolen bag, but that's it. And everyone, even the crime victims, is pristine and clean. We don't see anything in particular to make us see the city as dangerous. Worse, the characters are also so distilled down to their archetypal bones that they don't feel like people. It's hard to care for someone who seems more like a pretty picture than an actual person.
And that's where "The Spirit" fails. The Spirit himself is the distillation of every trenchcoat-and-fedora-wearing detective from the forties, blended with another of every superhero who has miraculous healing abilities. He's not a person, he's an archetype. All the other characters have the same problem. The women are all distillations of every beautiful female jewel thief, or every good woman who stays behind to patch up the hero, or every exotic beauty who is as deadly as she is graceful. And while it makes for gorgeous viewing, it doesn't make for an emotionally engaging film.
So yes, there's a story about The Octopus trying to take over the world, and an old flame of The Spirit's showing up again to complicate things, but it doesn't really matter. "The Spirit" is a film you see because you love comics, because you love the idea of a Hero taking on a Villain and romancing a Woman (or several Women) along the way. If you're looking for delicate shading of any sort, visual or metaphorical, this is not the film for you.
December 21, 2008
Yes Man
Directed by: Peyton Reed
Starring: Jim Carrey, Zooey Deschanel
Rated: PG-13 for crude sexual humor, language and brief nudity.
Parental Notes: This is a pretty standard PG-13, though a sequence in which our hero must say "yes" to an oversexed senior citizen may have some parents squirming.
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"Yes Man" is yet another Jim Carrey film in the mold of "Liar Liar" or "Bruce Almighty": Carrey plays a schmucky everyman who is, for a short time, turned into someone wacky -- and who learns and grows from the experience. This isn't to say it's a bad film, of course. If you like the formula, "Yes Man" is unlikely to disappoint. If you prefer Carrey's more serious films ("The Number 23," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"), stay away.
Carl Allen (Carrey) says "no" to just about everything -- hanging out with his friends, going to events, doing anything outside of his usual routine: wake up, go to work (as a loan officer, saying "no" to applications), rent and watch a movie, go to sleep. He divorced a few years back and has become a veritable shut-in since his ex broke his heart. But then he runs into an old friend who has lived a fascinating, exciting life since the last time they saw each other -- and who credits it to Terrence Bundley (Terence Stamp), leader of YES!, a movement which pushes its followers to say yes to everything.
Carl's friend persuades him to attend one of the YES! seminars, and soon Carl is face to face with Terrence, who pushes him over the edge into becoming a Yes Man. Carl starts saying "yes" to everything -- and just as Terrence promised in his pitch, his life turns around. He meets Allison (Zooey Deschanel), a free-spirited and beautiful girl. He gets a promotion at his job. He starts having fun! He has exciting adventures using the things he's learned from saying "yes" to things like learning to speak Korean.
But of course there's a downside, too -- saying "yes" to everything makes him easy to take advantage of (as his friends demonstrate by making him pick up their huge bar tab). Worse, once Allison realizes that he only said "yes" to them moving in together because he had to, things start to fall apart.
Carrey is an actor with chops way beyond this material, but he goes through the motions here with enthusiasm. He seems to be having a lot of fun with the role, which helps a great deal. Deschanel is charming as ever, and Stamp steals every scene he's in (as usual). But you don't see movies like "Yes Man" for the acting, do you?
"Yes Man" is a series of standard setups, one after another. Everything is telegraphed way, way in advance. There isn't much new or surprising here -- which is in some ways an advantage. When you're in the mood for, say, Kraft Mac'n'Cheese, you know just what you want. You're not looking for the latest brilliant, challenging masterpiece of fusion cuisine from the genius chef at the bistro, you're looking for the familiar -- for comfort food. And that's what "Yes Man" is: cinematic comfort food. If you're in the mood for it, nothing else will do. But if you're looking for something new, fresh, and far from run-of-the-mill, go elsewhere.
December 15, 2008
Frost/Nixon
Directed by: Ron Howard
Starring: Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Matthew McFayden, Oliver Platt, Sam Rockwell, Kevin Bacon
Rated: R for some language
Parental Notes: Most youngsters will probably be bored by this talk-heavy film, though there's little objectionable here -- very little violence (some footage of American involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia) and even less sexual content. Teens with interest in politics should definitely check it out, though -- ideally with their parents. This film would make a great starting point for a discussion of the ramifications of Watergate.
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Coming Up In Film Got a film event you want listed? Email reviewer@ealasaid.com with details. DECEMBER 2008
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"Frost/Nixon" is structured like a prize fighter film. We meet the two contenders: the grizzled, tired champion and the young, excited newcomer. We see the machinations that go into setting up their fight, the fight that all the networks think will be too one-sided to make good television. The newcomer insists, though, and finally gets his day. Round after round the newcomer is hammered against the ropes until he reaches deep within himself and manages to defeat the old champion in the last moments of the fight. The difference here is that instead of pummeling each other with fists, the two central characters battle with words.
The events that led to Richard Nixon resigning the presidency are still reverberating through American politics, even today. At the time "Frost/Nixon" takes place, the American people were still stinging with betrayal -- Nixon had just been pardoned by his successor, and it looked like he would never pay, let alone apologize, for what he had done. He simply retired to a seaside home in California and vanished from the public eye.
"Frost/Nixon" tells the story of how that apology was drawn out of the former president (Frank Langella) by a flashy British talk show host named David Frost (Michael Sheen). Frost had the help of his producer John Birt (Matthew McFayden) and two investigators, Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) and James Reston, Jr. (Sam Rockwell), but ultimately he is alone with Nixon and the cameras, having to battle a master politician on his own ground: words.
Sheen and Langella have been playing their roles since the play "Frost/Nixon" is adapted from premiered in London in 2006, and they inhabit the characters brilliantly. The film is shot in a quasi-documentary style, and it's easy to forget that it's a dramatization of real events rather than actual footage from the period.
Sheen's portrayal of Frost is layered and complex, showing us the man beneath the glitzy, famous talk-show-host exterior, but Langella's performance is the real centerpiece of the film. His Nixon is someone at once thoroughly human and larger than life, a man who can't make small talk to save his life, but who knows how to throw his interviewer off-balance with just a couple of well-placed questions. By the end of the film, he is both a villainous and a sympathetic character -- we loathe him for his crimes, but feel for him because he hates himself even more than we do and has to live with what he's done.
The full recordings of Frost's interviews with Nixon are now available as a DVD set, and well worth seeing for history buffs. "Frost/Nixon" gives us something more, though: a portrait of what went into getting the interviews to happen in the first place, and insight into the two men whose face-off resulted in Nixon finally coming clean about what he did.
December 01, 2008
Transporter 3
Directed by: Olivier Megaton
Starring: Jason Statham, Natalya Rudakova, François Berléand, Robert Knepper
Rated: PG-13 for sequences of intense action and violence, and some sexual content and drug material.
Parental Notes: This is a pretty standard PG-13 film. The violence is cartoonish and not particularly bloody, the sexual content is mild, and the drug material consists of a couple unnamed pills and some vodka.
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Coming Up In Film Got a film event you want listed? Email reviewer@ealasaid.com with details. DECEMBER 2008 JANUARY 2009 |
"Transporter 3" is precisely what you would expect from the Transporter series: car chases, hand-to-hand combat, Jason Statham shirtless while fighting people, and some spiffy explosions. Is it great art? No. But it isn't trying to be. This is a big action movie that missed the standard summer season for its genre. We're not looking for character development, we're looking for Frank Martin (Statham) to be awesome.
There's a straightforward action story, involving Frank being strong-armed into taking a job and equipped with a manacle that will explode if he leaves his car (leading to a fantastic scene where he chases his own car on a bicycle, pedaling furiously to stay in range of the sensor). But the story isn't important. The centerpiece of any big action movie, and of the Transporter films in particular, is the action, and "Transporter 3" doesn't fail in that regard.
Cory Yuen is back to handle the choreography, and while there's a bit too much frenetic camera work for my tastes, the fight scenes are still thoroughly entertaining. Statham specializes in a sort of cross between down and dirty street fighting and efficient martial arts, and he's in fine form here. As usual, he manages to get his shirt off during some of the fighting, on one memorable occasion in order to use it as a weapon.
The car chase scenes are good, though in a few spots the film was pretty obviously sped up. Frank doesn't do anything quite as ludicrous as the car-jump-past-a-crane-to-remove-a-bomb in the last film, which may be a good thing or a bad one, depending on your tastes. We do get to see him put his beloved Audi A8 up on two wheels to drive between a pair of passing semi trucks, which is pretty awesome, and he comes up with a novel way to handle rescuing the girl from a speeding train without leaving his car behind.
The secondary characters are pretty solid for an action flick. We have a villain who chews the scenery just the right amount (as opposed to the villains in the last Transporter film, who left the sets in little piles of sawdust) and a girl who has moments of being more than just a fluffy romantic interest for Frank. And, thankfully, Frank's pal Inspector Tarconi (François Berléand) is back with his dry wit and amusement at his friendship with a known criminal.
"Transporter 3" promises action and delivers in spades. It's perfect for those mourning the descent from summer action season into the depths of winter dramas, but should be avoided by anybody looking for scintillating plot, intelligent dialog, or layered characters. This is a movie about attractive people doing things involving fast cars and cartoonish violence, and it doesn't try to be anything else.