REVIEW: Black Swan

Black Swan (2010): Dir. Darren Aronofsky. Written by: Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John McLaughlin. Story by: Andres Heinz. Starring: Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder. Rated R (strong sexual content, disturbing violent images, language and some drug use). Running time: 108 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is being billed as a “psychological thriller.” The term certainly fits the film though it might mislead some to believe that Aronofsky has crafted a genre film. Black Swan is a haunting and often disturbing film, but its thrills come from within the mind. This is a horror film founded on ideas and atmosphere. Natalie Portman stars as Nina, a ballet dancer who might be losing her mind. Strange marks are appearing on her body only to disappear a moment later. She’s having hallucinations. Or are they really there? Once reality is questioned, the floor drops out from underneath her and the audience follows her on a quest to understand the unknowable and invisible forces affecting her.

Nina dances for a company in New York. Thomas, the company’s director (Vincent Cassel) has promised to feature her more this season and she has an outside chance of being cast in the starring role of Swan Lake after the company's previous star (Winona Ryder) announces her retirement. The part is a double role – the White Swan and the Black Swan. Thomas explains to her that while she’s the best dancer in the company and an easy choice to play the graceful and fragile White Swan, she lacks the Black Swan’s passion and sexuality. He has a reputation, however, for being romantically involved with his dancers and Nina knows how to play her cards. After some ethically questionable casting practices, she lands the part.

Nina’s mother (Barbara Hershey) is delighted by the news. She gave up dancing when she had Nina and has been living vicariously through her daughter’s career. She pampers Nina and we see why Nina finds the Black Swan such a challenge. Her bedroom is filled with her childhood stuffed animals and her mother still tucks her in at night. Between Thomas’s sexual advances and the stress of the role, her sheltered life is slowly crumbling.

Expediting that process is Lily (Mila Kunis), a dancer who has just flown in from California. She embodies everything about the Black Swan that Nina doesn’t – she’s flirtatious, passionate, relaxed – and soon has a strange hold over Nina. Why did she suddenly appear now, on the verge of Nina’s newfound success? Whether her arrival is a coincidence or a conspiracy, she becomes to Nina a professional and sexual competitor.

In a way, Black Swan has much in common with Aronofsky’s previous effort, The Wrestler. Both films follow a performer’s struggle to live up to expectations they’ve set for themselves and in both cases their performances are destroying them. Where The Wrestler was marked by a gritty realism, however, Black Swan indulges in surreal fantasy, a testament to Aronofsky’s versatility as a director. He casts a hypnotic atmosphere over the film, drawing the viewer in and maintaining its trance over the audience through the film’s final moments.

In Aronofsky’s hands, a small New York apartment becomes a claustrophobic cell for Nina. Lily briefly draws her out of her shell and takes her to a dance club that, after a few drinks and a pill, becomes a hallucinatory nightmare. This scene, one of the film’s best, is one of several mesmerizing sequences that draw the viewer into Nina’s perspective. We see and experience her distorted reality, unable to distinguish the real from the imagined. How much of what we see is a fantasy? A dream? Delusions? Real life? Would making such distinctions really matter anyways?

With this film and his earlier work, Aronofsky has proved himself to be a skilled stylist, making it easy to forget how much of an actor’s director he is. His past films have featured performances of the highest caliber (Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream, Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler) and Black Swan is no exception. Natalie Portman carries the film as Nina, balancing the character’s fearful anxieties with sudden dark turns. She also succeeds in the difficult task of acting while dancing. When Thomas criticizes Nina for being too tense and controlled as the Black Swan, we can see in Portman's face what he is talking about.

Also excellent is Kunis, who has found her breakout role here. She brings to the film much of the charm that marked her performances in lighter fare such as “That 70’s Show” and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and finds use for it in considerably darker material. Her Lily is seductive and cavalier, and makes for a compelling foil to Portman’s Nina. Barbara Hershey is chilling as the controlling mother, and Vincent Cassel brings the right amount of sleaze and menace to his character.

Nina’s surreal experience could be taken as a metaphor for the craft of acting. As her unusual transformation takes hold of her, parallels begin to develop between the play and her life. Aronofsky does not limit the film to this one interpretation, however. He deftly moves back and forth between fantasy and reality so that the viewer is not trapped into a guessing game of what is real and what is not. The only reality is that onscreen and we accept the disturbing power of the film’s imagery.

Black Swan is a relentless film and is so absorbing that one needs a few minutes to readjust after the closing credits roll. Each scene flows into the next to make for a nightmarish whole. There are brief moments of reprieve (the film occasionally has a bizarre sense of humor), but even these maintain the film's grasp on the viewer. Black Swan is indeed a thriller, one that explores the tenuous nature of identity and reveals how fragile the mind’s hold on that identity can be.

- Steve Avigliano, 12/26/10

REVIEW: The Tourist

The Tourist (2010): Dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Written by: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Christopher McQuarrie, Julian Fellowes, based on a French film Anthony Zimmer (written by Jérôme Salle). Starring: Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp, Paul Bettany, Timothy Dalton, Steven Berkoff. Rated PG-13 (violence and brief strong language). Running time: 103 minutes.

2 stars (out of four)

Frank Tupelo (played by Johnny Depp) is an American tourist who reads spy novels. A good adventure story excites him and, like any of us, he is eager to believe an unbelievable story if it means getting caught up in some excitement for at least a little while. So when the beautiful Elise (Angelina Jolie) sits across from him on a train ride through the France, it doesn’t take long for him to get caught up in some international intrigue. By the end of the film, he becomes absorbed in the action but forgets to bring his like-minded adventure-seekers – us, the audience – with him. We sit there, willing to believe the preposterous story unfolding onscreen but the film takes advantage of our tolerance and goes from being merely unbelievable to nearly unbearable.

The film begins with Elise, a beautiful woman with a high-profile boyfriend, Alexander Pearce, who is being hunted on two fronts. The British government wants him for stealing millions and a mobster (Steven Berkoff) wants him for stealing billions. A letter from Pearce instructs Elise to find a man on a train with a similar body type to his. The Brits, led by a determined agent (Paul Bettany), know that Pearce has undergone constructive surgery and can be easily thrown off the trail with a decoy.

The decoy is Frank and from here the film becomes a Hitchcockian story of mistaken identity. The problem, however, is that the entry point into that story is all wrong. Hitchcock understood that a mysterious story on its own isn’t enough to hook the audience. We have to be lured into it. By introducing us first to Elise rather than Frank, the film takes the wind out of a good premise by letting the audience in on too much too quickly.

Awful writing doesn’t help the film either. The screenplay is rushed, banking on the film’s star power to generate interest in its thinly sketched characters. For what it’s worth though, Johnny Depp works hard to make Frank’s naïve, wet behind the ears tourist a likable character. Even when Depp is delivering the clumsiest of lines, we believe his face while we cringe at the words he’s been asked to say. Depp’s performance is an honest one that reminds us why he’s a movie star. Angelina Jolie’s lips, on the other hand, remind us why she is. Her character is a stiff, uninteresting spy film stock character, the kind of bland femme fatale that the hero usually passes over for the more homely but charming heroine. No such character exists in The Tourist.

The rest of the cast fills out their roles well enough. Bettany is good as an agent desperate to crack the case and look good to his boss (played by former Bond, Timothy Dalton) and Berkoff makes a fine villain. Were the rest of the film better, their performances might have been colorful exercises in spy movie side characters. As the film is though, they only serve to take screen time away from our protagonists, who we don’t very much care about anyway.

Strange that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck helms this film, a German director whose native-language debut The Lives of Others won him a deserved Oscar for Best Foreign Film. That film, a thoughtful meditation on the nature voyeurism and surveillance, presented Donnersmarck as an exciting new voice. Why he chose such a lackluster spy flick as its follow-up is beyond me, though maybe this will take some of the pressures and expectations off him when crafting his next feature.

One can’t help though but put much of the blame here on Donnersmarck. He seems uncomfortable directing the material and he either wasn’t allowed to make many of the creative decisions or simply deferred the responsibility to studio heads. The oddly trite musical score by James Newton Howard, for example, is a disaster. It alternates between thumping techno in the action scenes and sappy strings in the would-be romantic ones, successfully undermining every scene in the film.

The pacing is off too. The film takes a long time to get started and doesn’t do much once it does. When we finally reach the absurd ending, we barely care that it makes no logical sense. Fortunately for Donnersmarck, the rest of the film is bad enough that no one would want to go back for a second viewing to find all the plot holes.

A good spy film needn’t be realistic, but there is a difference between the unbelievable and the unbelievably contrived. The Tourist straddles that line and jumps head first onto the wrong side.

- Steve Avigliano, 12/17/10

REVIEW: 127 Hours

127 Hours (2010): Dir. Danny Boyle. Written by Simon Beaufoy and Danny Boyle, based on the memoir Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston. Starring James Franco. Rated R (language and some disturbing violent content/bloody images). Running time: 95 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

In reviewing Conviction a few weeks ago, I wrote that “some great stories just aren’t cinematic stories.” 127 Hours argues quite convincingly, however, that in the hands of a skilled enough director, any story can become cinematic. At first, the story of Aron Ralston (played in the film by James Franco) would seem to be as inherently un-cinematic as they come. Trapped for 127 hours in the crevice of a Utah canyon with a rock crushing his arm, Ralston fought the elements to survive and wrestled with his personal demons during his isolation. Director Danny Boyle, fresh off an Oscar win for Slumdog Millionaire, takes up the difficult task of transforming this material into something visually interesting and the result is exhilarating.

Following Slumdog, audiences should be familiar with the director’s kinetic style. His films are fueled by an inexhaustible energy, incorporating handheld camerawork, split screens and any other device at Boyle’s disposal. One would think that being confined to such a physically small space as he is here would limit his style, but Boyle makes the most of the canyon crevice’s spatial limitations. His camera takes the viewer to the bottom of Ralston’s water bottle, miles up into the sky to provide a literal bird’s-eye view, and even inside the very muscles of Ralston’s injured arm.

Boyle’s stylistic flourishes are not self-indulgent though, but essential to bringing out the humanity of the story. The film visualizes the internal struggle of an isolated man with nothing to listen to but his own thoughts. As Ralston’s mind races, the viewer dives in and out of memories and fantasies. Here we get snippets of backstory. Ralston is confident to the point of arrogant and has pushed away the most important people in his life – his girlfriend, his parents. He’s so cocky that he doesn’t even need to tell anyone where he’s going or what he’s doing the day of the accident. From the bottom of a crevice in the middle of nowhere he replays the accident in his mind and cannot help but see his current situation as the inevitable result of his egotism.

Much credit must also be given here to James Franco, whose performance is a career-best. When presented with a story such as Ralston’s, we often wonder: What would we do if faced with the same situation? Franco understands this and brings us even deeper into the film by making his performance relatable. We see his initial bewilderment and feel his frustration and eventual despair. By the end of the film, Franco has taken us through every step of an emotional catharsis and the experience is a draining one.

Fortunately, that experience is brief and editor Jon Harris keeps the film at a manageable 95 minutes. As editor, Harris maintains complete control over the film’s chaotic style. The combination of handheld cameras and fast-paced editing can often have nauseating results, but Harris knows how to use these techniques to elicit a response from the audience. We only feel claustrophobic or dizzy when he wants us to. And despite the quick cuts in cramped quarters, the audience is always fully aware of what is happening.

Perhaps this is the film’s greatest strength. Danny Boyle has not only succeeded in making a seemingly unfilmable movie, but he somehow made it accessible too. There are a few scenes in 127 Hours not for the feint of heart (Boyle doesn’t shy away from some of the more gruesome moments in Ralston’s story), but the film does a wonderful job of taking an extraordinary experience and putting it into terms we can all understand. More so than Slumdog, 127 Hours puts Danny Boyle on the map of today’s best directors and shows that films can tell any story as long as the filmmakers are up to the challenge.

- Steve Avigliano, 12/07/10

REVIEW: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010): Dir. David Yates and Ben Hibon (animated sequence). Written by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling. Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman. Rated PG-13 (some sequences of intense action violence, frightening images and brief sensuality). Running time: 146 minutes.

3 stars (out of four)

The Harry Potter franchise has always faced a catch-22. The first film was released while J.K. Rowling was only halfway through writing the series, so for many fans, the books and movies are intertwined in a way unlike any other book-to-movie adaptation. During a summer when we were bombarded with simultaneous ads for the final novel and the fifth movie, how could one read The Deathly Hallows without picturing Daniel Radcliffe as Harry or imagining how certain scenes would eventually play out onscreen? The movies changed the way we pictured the world and characters of the novels. Similarly, it is difficult watch the films without making constant mental comparisons to the books still fresh in our minds.

This presents a problem for the filmmakers. Ideally, a film adaptation should be free to make whatever adjustments are necessary make the story work in movie form. For the Harry Potter films, however, the filmmakers feel extra pressure to remain faithful to the books. Change or condense too much and you upset the fans. Each installment in the series has handled this issue to varying degrees of success. The third, Prisoner of Azkaban took the greatest liberties with its source material but in some ways stayed most true to the tone of the novel. On the other hand, the fifth film, Order of the Phoenix, excised so many subplots that the pacing was thrown off. The movie moved too fast to tell such a complex story. Then again, maybe that was just the Potter fan in me disappointed to see my favorite book (a whopping 800+ pages long) condensed to a lean two hours.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a different sort of beast for a few reasons. The filmmakers elected to divide the book into two movies and release them eight months apart, a decision that has its benefits and its drawbacks. By splitting the story down the middle, the viewer is left with the anticlimactic feeling of having only seen half a movie. Part 1 also ends on a pretty limp cliffhanger that fails to excite because we don’t yet understand how it fits into the larger picture.

Yet in spite of this unnatural division, the additional running time afforded by the two-part release plan gives the film a chance to breathe, something the last three films rarely got a chance to do.

The film opens with Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) hissing his plan to his Death Eater disciples (as if they didn’t already know): to kill Harry Potter. Here, Fiennes finally gets the opportunity to delve into the nastiness of Voldemort and his performance reminds us why the character is such a great villain.

Meanwhile, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) are on the search to find Voldemort’s missing horcruxes – objects that contain fragments of the Dark Lord’s soul. In order to kill You Know Who, they must first destroy the hidden horcruxes. This quest leads our young heroes away from Hogwarts, which means considerably less screen time for most of the supporting characters. Series favorites such as Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) and Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) only get a handful of scenes, but will no doubt return for Part 2.

The relaxed pacing of TDH Part 1 also allows for some wonderful scenes that might not have made it into a more condensed script. The best of these is an animated sequence that tells the mythical fable of “The Three Brothers,” which plays an important role in the story. The scene, directed by animator Ben Hibon, is one of the film’s most visually inventive moments and its inclusion enriches the mythology of Rowling’s universe.

The film also strikes a balance between the bleak tone of the later films and the ever-present whimsy of Rowling’s world. There’s even room for a few laughs when the gang infiltrates the Ministry of Magic disguised as wizarding adults.

The Deathly Hallows Part 1 is one of the strongest installments of the series and will hopefully become even better when taken into consideration with Part 2. Could the two films have been condensed into one longer film? Perhaps, but at the cost of which scenes? There may be no perfect way to adapt the books, but this may be as close as the films come to delivering a satisfying and faithful Harry Potter film.

- Steve Avigliano, 12/02/10

REVIEW: Conviction

Conviction (2010): Dir. Tony Goldwyn. Written by Pamela Gray, based on real events. Starring Hilary Swank, Sam Rockwell, Minnie Driver and Peter Gallagher. Rated R (language and some violent images). Running time: 107 minutes.

2 ½ stars (out of four)

** Note: This review freely discusses elements of the plot, which is based on a widely publicized true story. There’s little in my review that the trailer doesn’t also reveal.

The real-life achievement of Betty Anne Waters (played here by Hilary Swank) is without a doubt impressive. After her brother (played by Sam Rockwell) was wrongly convicted of murder, Waters got her GED, went to college and eventually passed the bar to become his lawyer. She did all this while supporting her two sons and working part-time at a local bar, knowing there was only a slim chance of reopening the case and exonerating her brother. Waters’s story is motivational to be sure, but the awe it inspires comes from her patience and dedication over an 18-year period, and to condense her accomplishment into a film less than two hours long is to reduce that power. There may not be a way to reasonably recreate what was no doubt a long, laborious process, but this limitation keeps the film from achieving anything more than Lifetime movie-quality drama.

The film is structured with these limitations in mind, spending minimal time on the early years of her story (in other words, the dull years that involved a lot of reading and studying for exams). We are introduced to Waters already in law school amongst students half her age. Her only friend there is fellow middle-aged law student Abra (Minnie Driver). Abra sympathizes with Waters’s cause and lends her help and good humor to the case whenever possible.

We learn from flashbacks that Waters’s brother Kenny is a reckless man prone to bar fights. The police in town all know him by name and he’s a natural first suspect for the murder having broken into the victim’s home as a child. This incident led to a troubled childhood and separation from his sister. Sam Rockwell does a wonderful job of making a believable character out of Kenny. Rockwell brings his usual humor and charisma to the role but adds emotional depth in the later scenes. Kenny is grateful for everything his sister does for him, but it pains him to see her wasting her life on what may end up a futile cause.

Hilary Swank lends a great deal of credibility to her role, making Waters a woman of faith and, yes, conviction. Her performance, along with Rockwell’s, elevates the film above made-for-TV-movie quality. Swank has played roles like this before, but she’s very good at them. Just reading Waters’s story in a newspaper, one might ask, “How could someone remain so dedicated for so long?” Swank, however, makes this dedication real, never overacting. We believe Waters’s love for her brother and so we believe her unflagging hope in his eventual release.

Despite the effective human story, the film has the inevitable structural problems that come from making a movie out of a real-life case. The legal system is inherently un-dramatic and the film loses steam near the end when Waters is a given a few extra legal hoops to jump through. The founder of the Innocence Project, Barry Scheck (Peter Gallagher), joins the cause late in the film and a few legal technicalities regarding DNA testing drags the film out another twenty minutes beyond what seems to be its natural endpoint.

There is also the sense that screenwriter Pamela Gray is picking and choosing what aspects of the original story to include. Waters’s husband, for example, drops out of the film entirely about halfway through following their divorce. Apparently examining the damaging effects that the case had on Waters’s marriage would have dampened the film’s inspirational tone. Additionally, a very interesting piece of information about a dirty cop comes up late in the film and is largely dismissed.

Before the end credits role, we’re treated to a photograph of the real Betty Anne and Kenny Waters. This trend of showing a picture of the real people is one that comes up in a lot of biopics, but why? What are we supposed to take away from seeing the real people after watching actors portray them? Is it meant as proof that the story really happened? Regardless, the photo functions as a way of reminding audiences that in spite of earnest efforts, some great stories just aren’t cinematic stories, and that the film version of Betty Anne Waters has nothing on the real one.

- Steve Avigliano, 11/09/10

REVIEW: The Town

The Town (2010): Dir. Ben Affleck. Written by Ben Affleck, Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard, based off the novel Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan. Starring Ben Affleck, Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall, Jeremy Renner, Blake Lively, Pete Postlethwaite and Chris Cooper. Rated R (strong violence, pervasive language, some sexuality and drug use). Running time: 123 minutes

2 stars (out of four)

There is a conversation in The Town where Doug MacRay (played by Ben Affleck, who also co-writes and directs the film) tells the beautiful bank manager Claire (Rebecca Hall) everything he knows about police investigations. As the leader of a highly successful team of bank robbers, he knows a good deal. When Claire questions how he became such an expert, he’s quick to respond – he just watches a lot of CSI, he says. That line, which gets a laugh and is one of the film’s few authentic moments, suggests that director Affleck is at least aware of the crime genre’s recent ubiquity in TV and film. Strange, then, that he would willingly throw his film into that exhaustive sea of material without offering anything new. The Town makes an effort to be a lot of different things – a heist film, a redemption story, a straight-up action flick, The Departed – but never develops its ideas enough and ends up a rather underwhelming affair.

The titular town is Charlestown, a neighborhood in Boston the opening text informs us is home to more bank robbers than anywhere else in the country. The film opens with one of those robbers, MacRay, about to embark on his latest job. With him is his childhood friend Jem (The Hurt Locker’s Jeremy Renner) and two more buddies of theirs who are more or less interchangeable and forgettable throughout the film. The job is a familiar one (for both them and us), involving rubber masks, automatic rifles and a safe. Things go as planned, but to ensure their getaway they take the aforementioned Claire hostage and dump her off blindfolded once they’ve made their getaway.

All this happens before the opening title, leaving the rest of the film to explore the aftermath of the opening heist. MacRay may be becoming interested in Claire, Jem is anxious to score again despite the threat of an FBI investigator (Mad Men’s Jon Hamm) on their tail, and a local kingpin (Pete Postlethwaite) tempts the team with a dangerous job. Each of these storylines has dramatic potential, but a script full of stock characters and familiar situations keeps the film from realizing that potential.

Viewed as a heist film, The Town doesn’t involve us enough in the robberies (of which the film gives us three) and Affleck makes little effort to breathe new life into familiar scenes. The crimes themselves are of course not the film’s main focus, but the action scenes fail to raise the dramatic stakes or add anything more than a generic car chase or a shootout.

The Town would like to present itself as a story of redemption, one where our hero MacRay tries to bring himself up from circumstances beyond his control and get out of Charlestown. We never get a sense, however, that his life of crime is one that he’s been forced into. There may be socio-economic conditions forcing young men like him to rob banks but the film neglects to present them. MacRay gets even harder to sympathize with the more he becomes involved with Claire. Rebecca Hall, who was wonderful in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is wasted here playing the attractive woman who’s only allowed to react to the men of the film, never act of her own accord. Claire is lied to and manipulated, and makes some choices late in the film that are hard to believe anyone would make considering all that has happened to her.

Meanwhile, the very reasonable FBI detective Adam Frawley is trying to catch the bad guys. The film perhaps wants to paint him as the antagonist but mistakenly casts the likable Jon Hamm in the role making it unclear where our allegiance is supposed to lie. MacRay isn’t enough of an underdog to root for, Frawley isn’t mean enough to root against, and there is not enough interplay between the two to create some good cat-and-mouse tension.

As MacRay’s best friend, the trigger-happy Jem causes a lot of trouble for no reason. Jeremy Renner does fine with a one-dimensional character but following a much more complex depiction of masculinity in The Hurt Locker, the role doesn’t ask much of him. Blake Lively (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) steps out of her tween-film comfort zone and is strong as MacRay’s drug-addicted former flame. Rounding out the cast is Chris Cooper in a brief appearance as MacRay’s father. Cooper establishes a tenuous father-son relationship in his one, brief scene but his role here is a minor one.

The Town runs off stock characters and familiar themes, never digging deep enough to develop its ideas of family, community or the social trappings of crime. The film passes us by, going through the motions so that we forget it faster than a witness struggling to identify her attacker in a lineup.

- Steve Avigliano, 10/15/10

REVIEW: The Social Network

The Social Network (2010): Dir. David Fincher. Written by Aaron Sorkin based off the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Brenda Song, Rooney Mara, Armie Hammer and Max Minghella. Rated PG-13 (sexual content, drug and alcohol use and language). Running time: 121 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

In the opening scene of The Social Network, Harvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) explains to his girlfriend (Rooney Mara) how gaining membership into one of the school’s prestigious final clubs will inevitably lead to a better life. The parties are great. You meet rich, influential people. You even have a better chance of one day becoming the President of the United States. When he gets into one, he promises, he’ll bring her along for the ride. After his girlfriend stands up, insulted, and breaks up with him on the spot, Zuckerberg seems surprised. She assures him though that the break-up is not because he’s a nerd, but because he’s an egotistical jerk.

Similarly, the story that follows, which dramatizes the creation of the now multi-billion dollar social networking website Facebook, is not about computers but rather the personalities behind them. Zuckerberg’s problems do not come from writing endless lines of programming, which he could do in his sleep, but from his interactions with other people.

The film begins with Zuckerberg’s first seed of an idea. Following the bitter breakup, he seeks revenge on the girls of Harvard by drunkenly creating Face Mash, a site that allows students to rank pictures of female students. Heavy traffic on the site causes Harvard’s network to crash and Zuckerberg finds himself invoking the ire of both school administrators and the female student body. The site’s initial success, however, draws the attention of fellow computer programmers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) who want to recruit Zuckerberg to help create a social networking site exclusive to Harvard called ConnectU. Almost as soon as he accepts their offer, he begins work on a site of his own with help from his roommate and best friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), who has the money to finance the project.

Zuckerberg’s partnership with Saverin begins to sour, however, when Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the founder of the file-sharing network Napster, enters the picture. Parker, who has accrued millions of dollars through his involvement in several web companies, lives life like a rock star. He knows a thing or two about getting rich quick in the Internet Age and even more about how to spend the subsequent wealth. Seduced by Parker’s life of luxury, Zuckerberg moves out to Silicon Valley and begins to gradually cut Saverin out of the site’s development. We know the end result of Zuckerberg’s actions through scenes of two separate lawsuits against him: the disgruntled ConnectU founders who claim Zuckerberg stole their idea and the betrayed Saverin who feels his friend has robbed him of his fair share of the company.

The scenes of the hearings might have been dull in lesser hands, but screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The West Wing) transforms them into engrossing drama. He manages to make dialogue about computer programming and copyright laws (and there’s a lot of both) easily understood, and keeps his focus on the characters. Jesse Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg is a thoroughly unlikable individual but Sorkin’s script allows the performance to become a character study. Eisenberg had already proven himself capable of creating likable personas in comedies such as Adventureland and Zombieland, but he broadens his range here. Though he spends much of the film sitting and typing behind a desktop, he develops a subtle and fascinating character.

The rest of the cast is filled out with talented young actors. Andrew Garfield, who was recently tapped to be the new Spider-Man, makes Saverin the most relatable face in the film, and Armie Hammer steals a number of scenes talking to himself as the buff crew team twins who seek financial retribution. Justin Timberlake is well (and perhaps ironically) cast as the young man who effectively ruined the music industry. Some questioned Timberlake’s acting potential a few years back, but he’s wonderful here as the cocky hotshot, giving Parker a layer of vulnerability late in the film.

Holding the film’s many excellent parts together is the emerging style of director David Fincher. Fincher’s underrated Zodiac was one of the decade’s best and though his follow-up, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, was less exceptional it still bore the mark of a talented director. As with those films (and earlier works such as Seven and Fight Club), Fincher’s style uses muted colors and claustrophobic angles to bring a dark edge to the material. In Fincher’s hands, Zuckerberg’s success story is filled with images of isolation and detachment. There are also a few stylistic flourishes that you can’t help but just sit back and enjoy. One sequence involving the Winklevoss twins’ close loss at crew match is a virtuosic moment of style that also showcases the exceptional work of editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall.

Fincher and Sorkin craft a story with themes of betrayal and victory worthy of a Greek tragedy, but while the film succeeds in broader terms, it falls just short of making a definitive statement about life in the Internet Age. Fincher presents honest and cynical portrayals of young entrepreneurs who want to get rich quick with the Next Big Idea, but the film never quite confronts the moral implications of what sites like Facebook introduce into the culture. The full disclosure and lack of privacy that are necessarily a part of social networking are occasionally brought up but the film never truly deals with them.

As it is, The Social Network is a fascinating portrait of the world’s youngest billionaire and what he did to get there. There is some debate regarding the film’s accuracy – which is reasonable considering Saverin was a consultant for the source material and no doubt had a biased take on the events – but this comes with the territory of a fictionalized account of real life events. The film is ultimately not about who did what and when, but rather why they did it. The who and what involve computers and a lot of dates and facts, while the why opens up a world of motivations that include sex, friendship, fame and prestige. Factually, this is murky territory to be sure, but it makes for an engrossing human story.

- Steve Avigliano, 10/6/10

REVIEW: Machete

Machete (2010): Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis. Written by Robert Roderiguez and Alvaro Rodriguez. Starring Danny Trejo, Steven Seagal, Michelle Roderiguez, Jeff Fahey, Cheech Marin, Lindsay Lohan, Don Johnston, Jessica Alba and Robert DeNiro. Rated R (strong bloody violence throughout, language, some sexual content and nudity). Running time: 105 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

When the exploitation throwback double-feature Grindhouse came out in 2007, you got the sense that co-directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino were making the movie for themselves. They had seen countless schlocky B-grade and lower horror and action flicks in their youth and they longed for a day when such films could be appreciated again and maybe even return to cinemas. The final result was an over three-hour trip down their own memory lane, complete with fake trailers for upcoming releases that didn’t exist. The highlight of those faux-trailers was Machete, the story of a Mexican vigilante (Danny Trejo) with a penchant for the titular weapon.

Now Robert Rodriguez, along with his co-director Ethan Maniquis, have made that movie, even going so far as to insert most of the footage from the original trailer into the feature-length version. While Grindhouse had occasional moments of brilliance, it was also a good deal self-indulgent, but Machete doesn’t have that problem, partly because its allowed to exist on its own, free from the earlier gimmick and the double-feature running time. Machete commits to its exploitation roots more than either of those earlier Grindhouse features, and is more fun then them too.

Much of the film’s success rests with Danny Trejo as the title character. His performance is so commanding, it was already a classic three years ago in that first trailer. He’s the kind of unstoppable action hero where all questions (“How did he do that?” “How will he survive this one?” “Why does every woman want to sleep with him?”) are answered the same way: Because he’s Machete, duh. Trejo, who might have less lines of dialogue than most of the supporting characters, stomps around the film stone-faced, blade in hand. His mustache is curved in such a way as to give him the look of wearing a perpetual frown, and his face is riddled with scars from a lifetime of fighting. Trejo is so comfortable onscreen, it’s as though this is his fifth Machete feature.

In the full-length movie, Robert Rodriguez and his co-writer and cousin Álvaro Rodriguez give Machete a political agenda too. After losing his wife and daughter at the hands of the drug kingpin Torrez (Steven Seagal), Machete becomes a day laborer along the Texas/Mexico border where deportation is a constant threat for workers. There he befriends Luz (Michelle Rodriguez) who owns a popular taco truck and might just be the mysterious Latino vigilante, Shé (the accent is added over the ‘e’ for an extra nudge and a wink). Shé is said to have helped countless immigrants cross the border and so Luz’s taco truck is under the close watch of Sartana (Jessica Alba), an immigration officer looking to shut down the covert operation.

Looming large over them all is Senator John McLaughlin (Robert De Niro) who is running for reelection under a campaign that highlights a staunch opposition to immigrant rights. He wants to kick everyone out of the state who doesn’t speak English and build an electric fence along the border. Machete, meanwhile, is recruited by a man named Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey), a man who wears a nice suit, drives a limo and has some money to throw around. He wants Machete to assassinate the Senator. Of course, nothing is as simple as it seems and Machete quickly finds himself at the center of a larger conspiracy, one that may even go back to his old nemesis, Torrez.

While Trejo gets most of the glory here, Machete is populated with rich supporting characters. The indispensable Jeff Fahey is utterly convincing even in the film’s most absurd moments and Michelle Rodriguez is a lot of fun to watch in the gun-toting, skin-showing badass chick role. Alba, who has never been much of an actress, is perfectly suited to a role that requires her to look amazing at all times and occasionally scrunch her face when she’s working things out. De Niro’s character starts as an extended cameo and soon becomes a game to see how many ridiculous things the film make can the legendary actor do (a lot, is the answer). Steven Seagal camps it up as the archenemy and gets some deserved laughs, Lindsay Lohan shows up as the promiscuous daughter of Booth, Don Johnston is a militaristic border cop, and Cheech Marin reprises his role from the trailer as the priest who owns a pair of shotguns. 

Machete falls under the neo-exploitation genre that started with Grindhouse and here Rodriguez gives us another nostalgic tribute to a kind of movie that maybe never quite existed in the first place, at least not as he remembers it. No exploitation flick could have ever delivered the consistent entertainment offered here and so Machete functions as an action parody while remaining its own beast. This is a gleefully silly movie crafted for a niche audience and it succeeds in its goals, even compared to Grindhouse. The violence is excessive and wildly inventive, characters talk in corny exposition and cornier one-liners, and the editing has a deliberate sloppiness in certain scenes. The film plays everything for a laugh and yet somehow manages to deliver better action scenes than most major blockbusters even in its goofiest moments.

Near the end of the film, there’s an ingenious scene where a group of armed henchmen get together and discuss their thankless jobs. They’ve all been beaten, shot or stabbed by Machete and they wonder if it’s really worth it. “I’ve been watching the boss,” one says, “And to be honest, he seems like a schmuck.” It’s a conversation moviegoers have been waiting for years for nameless henchmen to have. Action aficionados and movie buffs alike have always wanted a movie like this, whether they knew it or not – one that recognizes its absurdity and only revels in its slashings and explosions all the more. Robert Rodriguez offers Machete like a present to those anticipating fans. He’s rewriting film history and giving exploitation flicks a better name than they ever could have made for themselves.

- Steve Avigliano, 9/3/10

Kick-Ass and the Future of Superhero Movies

Superhero movies have been so popular in the last decade it’s almost difficult to imagine what our summer blockbusters were about before they seemingly all became about caped crusaders. There were, of course, hits made from superheroes before 2000 – Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) and Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) were both huge – but it was Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) along with Sam Raimi’s Spiderman (2002) that confirmed what had already been proven by those earlier films. Superheroes are ingrained deep enough into our pop culture consciousness that even the so-so ones have a decent shot at scoring a profit in their big screen adventures.
 

In 2010, superhero films are still going strong, but for how much longer? When will a lot become too many? Are superheroes headed for overexposure? Next summer, there will be three big ones. Thor comes out in May, followed closely by Captain America: The First Avenger in July, and sandwiched in between them will be Green Lantern in June. Thor and Captain America will both set up characters for the super-sized Marvel crossover, The Avengers, to be released the following summer. All of the aforementioned films will be released in 3D, which means studios anticipate audience members spending up to $45 on superheroes at the cinema next summer, not counting repeat viewings.
 

And those are just the summer offerings. There will be The Green Hornet in January and an X-Men prequel titled, X-Men: First Class to be released sometime in 2011. In the following year, there will be Christopher Nolan’s third and final Batman movie, as well as a Spiderman reboot from Mark Webb, the director of (500) Days of Summer.

With all these movies still before us and many more behind us, it’s no wonder there have been some less conventional takes on the superhero genre. I’m tempted to label them “post-superhero” movies if it weren’t for the fact that they don’t offer much that’s truly contrary to the more traditional superhero tales.

The long-awaited adaptation of Alan Moore’s cult classic Watchmen (2009) had potential to give us something new, but under 300 helmer Zach Snyder’s direction, the film was underwhelming and confirmed many fans’ suspicions that the book was unfilmable.

The ads for Hancock (2008), an original story, suggested that Will Smith’s title character would be a change-of-pace from the typical, morally upstanding heroes. A film portraying a superhero as a drunk suffering from a poor public image was intriguing, but a sloppy script gave the film a muddled tone. As it turned out, even this supposedly tongue-in-cheek superhero movie succumbed to having a big-budget action finale.

Then there’s Kick-Ass, which I missed when it came out earlier this year but recently had the opportunity to watch on DVD. Kick-Ass is directed by Matthew Vaughn (who also directed the excellent pre-Bond Daniel Craig vehicle, Layer Cake) and based on a graphic novel that creator Mark Millar always intended to become a movie.

Kick-Ass begins as a satirical take on the genre, introducing Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) as a high-school nobody obsessed with comic books. He wonders why anybody hasn’t tried to be a real-life superhero yet and wants to be the first. He dismisses the way comics always give Joe Shmoe superpowers as a result of some freak accident, or how Bruce Wayne is able to afford all that cool equipment that doesn’t exist in reality. So he takes a DIY attitude to crime fighting, buys a wet suit and some nunchucks online and practices badass one-liners in the mirror. Like a true teenager, he calls himself Kick-Ass.

These scenes are wonderful as are the high school scenes, which take more than a few cues from Superbad (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, a.k.a. McLovin, is even here as the son of a wealthy mobster). There’s some funny stuff about how Dave unwittingly becomes the pseudo-gay friend of the girl he has a crush on, and some smart jokes about what a society populated with superheroes would really be like in the age of camera phones and online social networking. When Dave’s first successful scuffle with a couple of street thugs becomes a YouTube sensation, he wastes no time in creating a MySpace page for his alter ego and revels in the glory of the friend requests that come pouring in.

But Kick-Ass quickly breaks its own rules. After getting struck by a car, most of Dave’s bones are replaced with metal, and a lack of nerve endings allows him to get punched without feeling a thing. Maybe this twist is part of the film’s self-awareness and there’s a bit of irony in the fact that this miracle occurs after an embarrassing first attempt at heroism, but mostly it just takes the wind out of a clever premise. Then there is Damon Macready (Nicholas Cage) who goes by the alias Big Daddy and his daughter Mindy a.k.a. Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz). Much like Bruce Wayne, whom the film pokes fun at earlier, Macready sinks countless dollars into buying heavy artillery and trains his daughter in martial arts. Early in the film, there’s a joke that mocks the way superheroes are always given cheesy motives of vengeance, but Kick-Ass doesn’t hesitate to turn around a few scenes later and give Macready just that. He seeks to avenge the death of his wife, for which he blames the mobster, Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong).

Hit Girl is another source of problems for the film. I realize, yes, that the character is supposed to be provocative and controversial, but she’s all shock. Her father has trained her to be the perfect killer, which explains the violence, but why all the vulgarity? Macready notably avoids such language in her presence, giving her cutesy pet names even while he trains her to take bullets as she wears a Kevlar vest. That scene gets some laughs because of the disparity between Macready’s words and actions. Wouldn’t Hit Girl have been funnier if amidst all the carnage she paused every once in while and acted like the little girl she is? Then there might have been a dash of irony added to a character whose actions are just gratuitous. We watch as Hit Girl pumps lead into bad guy’s heads and slashes them up with knives bigger than she is, and the film expects us to laugh simply because it’s a little girl doing all this.

The performances are mostly good. Aaron Johnson brings the right mix of everyman qualities and teen perviness to the role, Nicholas Cage strikes a balance between understatement as the father and pure camp when he dons his mask, and Chloë Grace Moretz, for what it’s worth, has a lot of onscreen charisma.

Still, once we reach the blood-splattered finale, the movie is no different than the superhero films it parodies in the earlier scenes. Everyday characters achieve great physical feats in the name of awesome fight choreography and a complex plot is resolved with simple action. The movie wants to have its cake and blow it up too.

Kick-Ass was relatively cheap to make and did well enough at the box office to spawn a forthcoming sequel in graphic novel and movie form, but are movies like this the future of superheroes? I’m still waiting for someone to make a true anti-superhero movie, one that really skewers the conventions of the genre and commits to its satire.

In the mean time, there is a host of traditional superheroes lining up to receive our money in the form of ticket sales. My prediction though? After The Avengers and the third Batman movie come out in 2012, the Golden Age of superhero movies will end. They’ll still exist for sure, but will no longer be dependable megahits for studios. That day will be a bittersweet one. Fresh, new stories will hopefully find their way to multiplexes, and our favorite costumed heroes and heroines will return to the pages from whence they came. Before that happens, movies like Kick-Ass will no doubt try to change the direction of the tide, but will effectively only push us further into a superhero overload.

- Steve Avigliano, 8/19/10

The Hype Monster vs. The Great and Powerful Backlash

Hype is tough to avoid. The dutiful moviegoer and friend that I am, I like to recommend a good movie when I see it. Plus, if a good film does well at the box office, there may be more of its kind down the road and less garbage wasting screens at my local theater. There’s a difference though between a recommendation and hype. A recommendation says, “See this, I liked it and you will too.” Hype builds the anticipation to levels a film could never possibly satisfy. As a result, people who didn’t see the movie the opening weekend and aren’t riding the hype train feel underwhelmed when they finally do get to the movies. Thus, backlash ensues.

This happens with movies of all kinds from summer blockbusters to the Oscar-nominated. It happened with Avatar last year, The Dark Knight two years ago and it’s starting again with Inception right now. All of the above are critically acclaimed and the first two have become megahits with the latter likely to follow suit. I enjoyed all of them too, but it’s important to keep things in perspective.

Critics and moviegoers alike were hailing Avatar as a game-changer. Movies would never be the same, they said. Six months later, Avatar hasn’t had nearly the cultural impact of Star Wars, which the film was repeatedly compared to, or even Cameron’s own Terminator films. For better or worse Avatar has popularized 3D and proved it to be a profitable investment for studios. Yet I’m at a loss to quote a single good line from the movie and I can only think of one memorable scene off the top of my head. (I rather like the scene when he first gets into the avatar and feels the dirt under his feet.) For me, Avatar remains in my mind what it was when I first saw it theaters: A visually stunning and creative but poorly written sci-fi action movie.

When The Dark Knight came out two years ago, there didn’t seem to be any other movie out that summer and were people so wrong to treat it as such? The Dark Knight is the best superhero movie yet (though Spiderman 2 is a close second for me) and I admire the way director Christopher Nolan gave his film the tone, structure and grandeur of a crime epic. Is it a great film though, in the Citizen Kane, Godfather or Fargo sense of the word? Probably not. That didn’t stop me from championing it as such at the time, of course, but I have to be honest and look at the film in perspective. Heath Ledger deserved every bit of hype he got, but Christian Bale’s grunt can be a bit much and I wish the movie didn’t end with such an obvious sequel set-up. (That last shot of Batman on his motorcycle was cool at the time, but it’s more frustrating than anything else now.) Still, I look forward to one day showing Nolan’s Batman movies to my kids the way my father showed me Richard Donner’s Superman movies. As a piece of pop culture, The Dark Knight is a classic. But remember, that’s pop as in popcorn.

Now Nolan is at it again with Inception, a movie that everyone and their grandma have been calling a “mindfuck.” I’m still not sure what that means and how the word qualifies as a recommendation but I think I understand the intentions. Personally, I prefer the way a Charlie Kaufman movie makes sweet love to my mind and doesn’t just leave the next morning but to each their own, I suppose.

Since Inception’s release, some critics have laid out reasonable critiques of the film, mostly arguing that the movie’s action sequences and set pieces lack the mystical and amorphous qualities of real dreaming. This is true. I admire all of the above-linked reviews, particularly the A.O. Scott one, but I think some of these critics are missing the point. Christopher Nolan set out to make an action movie sprinkled with thoughtful ideas, not the other way around. If he did, he would’ve made it more Waking Life than The Matrix. Those are two more movies I like, but for very different reasons.

Movies operate on a sliding scale of ambition and Nolan has succeeded wonderfully in making a brilliant action movie. That little trick about how ten seconds in one dream equates to twenty minutes in another and an hour in a third is ingenious and I’ve never seen anything like it before. It’s an inventive little cheat to give our heroes more time and who cares if it doesn’t hold up to anything resembling logic in the real world?

Those proudly waving the flag of backlash are shouting that the movie is not a visionary masterpiece. Who said it was? Certainly not Nolan. Ah yes, that snow-balling monster of hype did, giving a perfectly entertaining action blockbuster labels it never wanted.

When I searched for a synonym for "hype" in my computer’s thesaurus, I got "ballyhoo" as an option. I like that word more because I think it captures the ridiculousness of people's tendency to overrate. See Inception and see it again but please, let’s try and keep the ballyhoo in check.

- Steve Avigliano, 7/19/10

REVIEW: Inception

Inception (2010): Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy and Michael Caine. Rated PG-13 (sequences of violence and action throughout). Running time: 148 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

If you had something to hide – a secret, personal demons – to what length would you go to protect it? In Inception, the new mind-bending thriller from The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan, there’s a guy who keeps a vault inside an arctic fortress protected by soldiers armed with sniper rifles and grenade launchers. And those are just for his daddy issues.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an “extractor.” He has the ability to enter people’s minds through their dreams and once inside, steal whatever secrets they may be hiding. For each theft, an “architect” develops a blueprint dream world, one that the dreamer fills in with personal details and populates with projections of people from his own memory. Much like a dream, not until waking up does the person realize it’s all an illusion, if he realizes at all. Whether Cobb is the developer of the technique or simply an independent contractor isn’t entirely clear in the film, but we know he’s the best at what he does.

A businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) approaches him with a special job. He wants to convince a competitor’s son (Cillian Murphy) to make some ill-advised business decisions in the wake of his father’s death. In order to do this, Saito enlists Cobb and his men on an “inception” job, which you may have guessed from the change in prefix is the opposite of extraction. Rather than stealing something, he wants Cobb to plant an idea inside the young entrepreneur’s head and convince him that that idea is his own. To perform inception without the person realizing is a task many say is impossible, but Cobb takes on the job regardless because, well, he’s the best.

Filling out the rest of the team are Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobb’s right hand man, Ellen Page as a promising young student who becomes the team’s new architect, and Tom Hardy as the brawns with brains of the operation. Michael Caine shows up too for a cameo as Cobb’s father, but this isn’t an actor’s movie. Everyone is fine for his or her part though, particularly DiCaprio who has a way of bringing emotional credibility to roles you wouldn’t think needed it.

The inception job proves to be rather complicated; there’s a dream within a dream within a dream and there’s more after that but what would be the point of explaining it all here? The team also runs into trouble when they find that their victim’s mind has been trained for this very moment. Apparently it’s possible to turn your subconscious into a sort of cerebral militia.

This is a film that demands a fair amount of mental energy if you want to keep everything straight but Nolan, who also wrote the screenplay, structures the film in a digestible way, keeping its mysteries intriguing rather than frustrating. Late in the movie, when he cuts between three layers of consciousness within more than one person’s mind, we wonder how anyone could have thought The Matrix was difficult to follow. And yet we’re always entertained. There are the occasional lines of bland expository dialogue, but they’re necessary to clarify the complex plot.

Though the premise is high science fiction, the film is essentially a heist movie where the endgame is leaving something behind rather than burglary. Nolan understands this and even if you don’t follow every bit of scientific jargon, he gives us plenty of exciting sequences and moments of CGI wonder.

The film is also more thoughtful than most summer sci-fi or action flicks, meditating on the human consequences of experimenting with the dream world. These people spend as much time in dreams as they do the real world and they’re constantly suspicious that their mind is deceiving them, spinning tops and rolling loaded die to ensure that gravity is functioning as it should. The emotional side of the equation is also treated when haunting memories of Cobb’s wife jeopardize the mission. The film explores in some surprising ways how the mind handles feelings of guilt and denial.

Thoughtful and smart as it may be, Inception, like Nolan’s Batman films, is still a summer blockbuster. Just when we start wondering how the subconscious projections of a man who has probably never held a gun are able to fire submachine guns with impressive accuracy, something cool happens to distract us.

The ending is deliberately ambiguous, leaving you wanting to see the film again, but even without that there is enough here to warrant a second viewing. Christopher Nolan is the rare big-budget auteur that consistently delivers, reminding us that Hollywood hasn’t run out of original ideas. It just needs a few more people like Nolan to sneak in and plant those ideas.

- Steve Avigliano, 7/16/10

REVIEW: Predators

Predators (2010): Dir. Nimród Antal. Written by Michael Finch and Alex Litvak, based on characters created by Jim Thomas and John Thomas. Starring: Adrian Brody, Laurence Fishburne, Topher Grace, Alice Braga and Danny Trejo. Rated R (strong creature violence and gore, and pervasive language). Running time: 107 minutes.

2 stars (out of four)

I’ve never seen Predator or Predator 2. I’m not sure how these pop culture gems slipped past me all these years – perhaps I spent too much time watching the Alien and Terminator movies instead – but I think I can infer enough from their titles and trailers to know everything I need to approach this film, which thankfully ignores the embarrassing Alien vs. Predator crossover movies in hopes to breathe new life into the franchise.

New hope means new blood and Predators begins by introducing a not-so-merry band of murderers and trained killers, led by an American mercenary (Adrian Brody) and an Israeli military woman (Alice Braga), who the camera sometimes catches looking at Brody long enough to suggest attraction, but there’s no time for romance when there are aliens to be killed, and these few shots are all we get of that subplot. The rest of the crew is filled out by a checklist of requisite minorities including a big Russian, a bigger Mexican, a samurai-slinging Asian, and an African who has a habit of starting his sentences with, “In my culture.” I won’t spoil who dies first.

The movie categorizes these characters by race and killing specialty, keeping them one-dimensional because ethnicities are more fun in action movies when a personality doesn’t get in the way of delivering cool lines in broken English. When Topher Grace shows up too in the jungle, they ask him who he is. He responds, “I’m a doctor.” Of course, the funny doctor. Yeah, we could use him too.

There’s a lot of grunting and threatening each other with guns, but the humans eventually realize their commonality: they’re all killers. But why were they dropped into the middle of a jungle? After cycling through a few seasons’-worth of LOST theories in under minute (This is an experiment! This is a dream! This is Hell!), they arrive at the conclusion that they have been brought here for the purpose of being hunted by the More Dangerous Game – those dreadlocked aliens known only as the Predators.

Everything up to this point is pretty tedious and carried out with dialogue that consists of either clichés or inane questions (“Who are you?” “Where are we?” or my personal favorite, “Wanna see something fucked up?”), but it’s just obligatory exposition before the action kicks in. Unfortunately, even the action feels as if it’s going through the motions. We get a lot faux-tension from gun reloading drama – don’t characters realize that when a spiky alien dog is running at them, they’ll always have enough time to reload before shooting it mid-jump? – followed by some post-battle pondering about whether it’d be better to find cover or search for high ground.

While these are hardly transgressions in an action movie, they become too much to bear without a single relatable character in the bunch. The aforementioned killers all have their cool moments, but they’re too flat to generate anything in the way of audience sympathy. When one dies, we shrug it off and get excited for the next action sequence the survivors will find themselves in. Worst of all is Brody’s character, the supposed protagonist who dismisses each death with such callousness we soon despise him when we should be cheering for him. The film seems to expect that we’ll champion his cold heart simply because he’s the first character we meet, but when a character is this morally devoid, I’d just as soon root for the Predators.

There is a glimmer of hope with the introduction of Laurence Fishburne as a military man who, after holding out on the planet for “ten hunting seasons,” has developed some clever survival tactics as well a split personality. His performance is a reminder of the actor’s charisma and in his limited screen time he brings some much-needed humor and intrigue to the movie.

Predators isn’t terribly interested in either, however, preferring to stack the movie with aimless action sequences. The characters are trying to survive and maybe even make it back to Earth, but we never get any idea of how many Predators they’re fighting against, so there’s no sense of their progress. With great difficulty, a few Predators get killed, but the death toll for humans is twice that and the aliens are barely trying. Finally, after all the shooting and stabbing and exploding, the film doesn’t even have the courtesy to end its narrative with a satisfying conclusion. Yes, the ending is a sequel set-up, but judging by who’s left at the end, I can’t say I’m all that interested in investing more time in their struggle for survival.

Somewhere in this film there’s an interesting parable about the inhumanity of violence, and you wouldn’t have to lose any of the action to turn it into one. When Adrian Brody solemnly decides to sacrifice the weaker men in the pack, director Nimród Antal expects us to nod in agreement. He’s just telling it like it is. But when our lead man has no discernible humanity, maybe we are better off rooting for the aliens. If in the mind of Predators, the last mud-slathered man standing is right and all his preceding decisions are irrelevant, then what the hell was the point?

- Steve Avigliano, 7/11/10

Do We Need 3D?

I don’t fully understand the technical reasons why watching a movie in 3D is worse than a normal viewing, but I do know these things: 1) The picture is dimmer in a 3D movie. 2) The 3D effect is distracting. 3) It adds a surcharge to an already expensive ticket.

There are technical reasons why 3D gives us a dimmer picture, but you don’t need to be an expert on film projection to notice the difference. Should you see Toy Story 3 in 3D, consider for a moment past Pixar movies. The studio’s films have always been vibrant and colorful and yet here (and when Up came out in 3D last year), everything is a shade too dim, as though the entire film were taking place at dusk. Why is this? Something about the 3D process makes the image dimmer, but those glasses don’t make it any better. Granted, they’re a marked improvement from those red/blue glasses that used to be the standard, but they’re still a discomfort. And if you already wear glasses, they’re even worse, having to awkwardly place them over your prescription lenses.

But this gets more into my second problem with 3D – that it’s a distraction. When Avatar came out, the buzzword everybody used was “immersive.” James Cameron’s innovations in 3D technology were supposed to pull the viewer in and make them a part of the experience. For many, the effect worked. For me, it was frequently distracting. Yes, those sweeping shots of oceans and flying mountains looked pretty spectacular in 3D (though I suspect they’d have been just as memorable without it), but what about the dramatic scenes in between the sweeping effects shots and action sequences? Did you notice the way the image blurs a little when two people are just sitting and talking to each other, or walking? Some call the effect “ghosting” and it was all over the place when I saw Avatar. The 3D blends nicely in action scenes, but for those quieter moments, it became very noticeable that I was watching a 3D movie, pulling me out of the experience rather than into it.

3D is being touted as the next great innovation in movies, as if 2D movies are suddenly inferior and outdated. Even using the term 2D is a misnomer. Were you ever unsatisfied with how “flat” movies used to be? No, of course not. That’s because since birth, our eyes and brain have worked together to interpret pictures and film as representations of depth and movement. Adding the artificial third dimension only calls attention to the fact that we’re watching a movie.

And then there’s the price. We’re paying extra money for an inferior product. I’m dazzled enough by Pixar’s animation, or the latest CG effects, why do we need 3D? The simple answer is that we don’t. Studios like it because they can make money off it, and they are. Avatar is the highest-grossing movie of all-time, largely thanks to the 3D surcharges. Then there’s the IMAX surcharge that, in an AMC theater, charges you for putting a faux-IMAX screen in front of the regular screen.

These scams will exist as long as people are paying for them. Christopher Nolan spoke out recently against 3D in response to questions about how the third Batman will be filmed. He explains that the choice is not up to him. Audience members speak through ticket sales and studios listen by looking at box office receipts.

So ask yourself: Do you need to see Toy Story 3 in 3D? Or Harry Potter? Or (God help us) the new Jackass movie? You can voice your opinion one way or the other with a ticket purchase.

Further reading: Roger Ebert’s “Why I Hate 3D (And You Should Too)”

- Steve Avigliano, 7/01/10

REVIEW: Toy Story 3

Toy Story 3 (2010): Dir. Lee Unkrich. Written by Michael Arndt. Featuring the voices of Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Ned Beatty, Don Rickles, and Michael Keaton. Rated G. Running time: 103 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

We all outgrow our toys eventually, but the wonderful thing about great films, and this is especially true of great children’s films, is that they grow with us. I was 6 years old when the first Toy Story came out and 10 when I saw the second in theaters, and in revisiting the films I found they’ve not only lost none of their charm, but in fact resonate with me more than ever. Toy Story 3, arriving nearly 11 years after the first sequel, is the most sophisticated of the series, in both its animation and its message, ending the series on a poignant and wholly satisfying note.

Toy Story 3 finds Woody and Co. in a dark place – and not just in the literal sense of their placement in the forgotten toy box. Toy population in Andy’s room has shrunk after years of yard sales and garbage days, leaving only a handful of sentimental favorites left – both an economical decision by the filmmakers to not overcrowd the film with unnecessary side characters and also a heartbreaking reminder of the toys’ impermanence. As Andy packs for college, he must decide whether to hold on to these mementos of his childhood, donate them to a local daycare or forsake them to the dump. Andy, the sentimentalist he is, elects to store them in the attic with the exception of Woody, who gets an honored placement in the college box. When Andy’s mother mistakenly brings them out to the curb – a reasonable misunderstanding considering Andy packs them in a black garbage bag – the toys decide they’d rather be donated than trashed and they hitch a ride to the Sunnyside Daycare Center.

Sunnyside, in typical Pixar inventiveness, is an exciting new world filled with vibrant colors and the promise of being played with by children all day long. It seems to them Toy Heaven, an eternal life of playtime. When children grow up at Sunnyside, explains a stuffed bear and leader of Sunnyside named Lots-O’-Huggin’-Bear (Lotso for short), a new generation of kids replaces them. You’ll never need to feel the heartbreak of your owner outgrowing you because there will always be another child ready to play with you.

Woody, who has accompanied his friends this far, refuses the invitation to this seeming utopia and, in spite of his friends’ behest, embarks on a journey back to Andy’s. His failed escape, another of the thrilling toy’s-eye-view action sequences we’ve come to expect from the series, ends when a little girl, Bonnie, snatches him off the ground and brings him home. Bonnie’s room proves to be another temptation for Woody, a place where he can get all the loving, one-on-one playtime he no longer receives from Andy.

Woody’s dilemma is rendered temporarily moot, however, when he learns from Chuckles, a less-than-cheerful clown and Sunnyside veteran, that Lotso is in fact running a totalitarian regime under the guise of a toy’s paradise. The flashback sequence detailing Lotso’s past and the subsequent breakout plan that Woody hatches have more excitement than most contemporary crime films and serve as a reminder of why Pixar is still tops in animation. The studio crafts complex stories that don’t insult a child’s (or an adult’s for that matter) intelligence, and thrives on visual and narrative inventiveness.

And this is only the main narrative thread. The film is peppered with clever details and inspired tangents that come together nicely by the climax. Watch how the film shows Mrs. Potato’s ability to see in two places at once, after she leaves her detachable left eye in Andy’s room, or how the “men” of the Sunnyside toys gamble in their spare time. There’s also an ingenious subplot involving Barbie’s seduction by fashion of a Ken doll, a comedic highpoint of the film. There are a few recycled ideas – as an antagonist, Lotso recalls Toy Story 2’s Prospector in both his voice and cane-assisted walk, and when Buzz is set to “demo mode” it's a bit of a retread of his encounter with a fresh-off-the-shelves Lightyear model from Al’s Toy Barn – but even these familiar elements improve upon the original ideas enough that they remain fresh.

Toy Story 3 is every bit as imaginative and funny as the first two installments (without getting too joke-y, something the previous were even at their best), but has an emotional core that elevates and enriches its predecessors. The film, and the series on a whole, teaches acceptance of life’s changes and shows how this leap of faith is often rewarded with joys previously unknown. In the first film, Woody doesn’t want to accept that Andy might have found a new favorite toy in Buzz, but he ultimately forges an indelible friendship with the space ranger. In 2, Woody and the gang begin to accept that their owner will one day grow up, an acceptance that becomes fully realized in this film. This theme is echoed throughout the film and we see how Lotso’s reluctance to accept his own abandonment has corroded him.

The opening scene of Toy Story 3 recalls that of the first film, with Andy as a child acting out an imagined battle between Woody and Mr. Potato Head. But while the first film allowed us to observe a child playing with his toys, this one invites us inside his imagination and we see the action play out with all the dazzle Pixar’s animation team can afford. Andy’s experience is not one that we watch from a distance, but is in fact representative of what we all go through in our adolescence… and beyond.

The final shot, of white clouds on a blue sky, is a direct reference to the first image of Andy’s wallpaper at the start Toy Story. As Andy leaves his room and his toys for college, we realize that he is not abandoning that old room, but rather moving on to a larger arena, that of the real world. The room is a training ground, preparing Andy for life until he is ready to go out on his own. The films, now a completed story, offer us a similar training, showing the value in letting go and moving on to better things. And that’s something I’ll never get too old for.

** NOTE: I saw this film in Disney Digital 3D for an extra $3 and it added little to the film experience for me except a dimmer picture. More on 3D next week though.

- Steve Avigliano, 6/18/10