02 - Multi-Reviews

I'm more than aware that I have a terrible habit of failing to commit to things. I had hoped this blog would not be one of them, but it did become a victim, at least for a while.
That said, I am going to review quickly a few movies I've watched recently.


"The Marine" Starring John Cena, Kelly Carlson, Robert Patrick

John Cena plays John Triton (shocking, a name not dissimilar to his own), a discharged soldier whose attempts to vacation with his wife result in her abduction by a ragtag team of jewelry thieves led by Robert Patrick.
This is one of those "Not very good, but fun" movies. But even with that qualifier, the movie does not really succeed in living up to the precedence set by the likes of Stallone and Schwarzenegger.
At the same time I'm not about to criticize Cena's acting ability. The problem with his character is that his personality is barely above paper flat - this plain-cut, yes-sir no-sir brick-headed army boy with more muscles than brains. The amount of time they spend introducing his history and personality is pitiful, in all insufficient to make you really care about him. In contrast, the lead villian, Robert Patrick, demonstrates why he was probably the second-best paid actor in the production. The man has reputable work in his resume, and you can bet even he was thinking "What am I doing" during most of this film.
The points on which I may choose to defend this movie pale in comparison to the extent of the overdrawn, overused action typifications I can criticize. The vehicles are sprayed with bullets and the hero has nary a scratch. The explosions - after the first few I started counting - damn near every explosion in thie movie are framing lights to show Cena in midair, diving away from them. Once is an homage, four times is just obnoxious.
The trailers for the film had me believing the body of the action took place in a more urban setting, but it actually stages entirely around Cena chasing the thieves and his wife, their captive, through the South Carolina swamplands. As far as combat goes, they took every opportunity to let Cena beat the enemies with his bare hands, rather than toss him a gun. But of course, you have to show off the muscle-man's arms. The guy looks hulked out even when he's in casual happy mode.
His wife, Kelly Carlson, suffers the same problem as Cena's character. You don't care about her. Her problem stems from the fact that she is as made up to look like a living Barbie as she is in early seasons of Nip/Tuck. If you want your audience to feel for her, to care about her, she needs to be less of a glam face - cuter, with a sense of innocence, so that her abduction seems genuinely threatening. Now, clearly they've tried to indicate that she has likely been given some defensive combat tips by her husband, but even with the pitifully disorganized crew of thieves, she can barely break free for one second (granted, she spends a fair bit of being-hauled-around time unconscious).
With any action movie, you do want some sense of closure. While it achieves this in terms of the husband-wife closure, there is no sense of 'the world around them' closure. The sum total of the chase has seen the death of multiple cops and countless scenes of destruction (see explosions), but the film ends on the emotional resolution. Even Schwarzenegger's 'Commando' had his former officer there to see him off. The bottom line - if The Marine was an attempt to jumpstart a hopeful muscle man's career as a wanna-be action hero, it is a certain failure. It's what I call a dumb movie - fun to waste 90 minutes on, but you are definitely not taking anything deep away from it.


"Rambo" starring Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Paul Schulze

The fourth film in the franchise, we have the aging Sy plucked from the indefinite slump he's been in and put back in the heat of the action. Now, this is also a pretty dumb movie, packed with the same fast-paced and senseless action as the previous film. However, compared back to back, this movie succeeds everywhere The Marine failed.
We all know John Rambo. He's the post-traumatic-overload Vietnam veteran who came home to a bunch of idiots who thought it would be cool to humiliate him. They do, and Rambo loses his shit in an appropriate action-movie manner. As of film number four, he's living the life of a reclusive river farmer in some border territory to Burma, a pleasant little country rife with civil war and genocidal terror factions. A happy-go-lucky church group (aren't they the best) come wandering in, hoping to bring food and aid to the poor helpless displaced citizens. As luck would have it, the terrorizing faction shows up, shoots shit up, kills half the place, and takes the white people hostage.
In comes Rambo, the reclusive river farmer who ferried them up into hell-on-earth in the first place. Julie Benz' happy optimism seemed to have unearthed some feelings of responsibility in his withered, war-ravaged heart, so he rolls in with a mercenary team to get the church people back to safety. "Live for nothing, or die for something."
And he's going to near-single-handedly kill the entire terrorist faction in the process.
Right here we have the reason this movie succeeds where The Marine failed. Here, the villains are so unrepentingly evil that you pump your fist a little with every blow and bullet Rambo puts into them. There's a dark satisfaction when he kills an enemy that doesn't even register in The Marine. And in classic Rambo fashion, he's particularly brutal about his methods. For a brief engagement he uses a bow to snipe several faction soldiers; at the peak of the film he uses an anti-infantry machine gun to blow bright gory holes through every unfortunate burmese terrorist. I have to make clear - I do like gore, when done realistically, and when a person is hit by what looks like a 20 cal round from a mounted machine gun, yes, you are going to have a hole the size of a softball blown from your back. It's an effort to preserve the feel of gritty, dark disturbing reality, to recreate the battlefield as every veteran remembers in his worst dreams. One classy moment sees a refugee caught directly under a mortar shell, limbs flying in the cloud of dirt. And such is the reality of this war. We're the camera in the heat of the fight, and at any moment dirt will fly in our face as shrapnel takes our fingers off.
Despite the adrenal entertainment, it's still not a particularly great movie. Stallone speaks around ten lines through the whole film, despite having more screen time than any other cast member. The plot shares a level of complexity equal to Commando, our time-tested dumb action flick. But it's the dirty excessive violence, the lean towards believable mortality driven by a realistic political climate, that makes this movie that much more entertaining than the many imitators. Of course, it entirely pales alongside First Blood, but no one ever expects a stage four sequel to stay on par with it's parent film.

Review 01 - The Incredibles

I’ve made a tactical decision to start with this movie, both for the purposes of using it as a pilot review and because I like it. Very often I can find myself in the position of defending movies everybody else hates and offering harsh critique to movies that the masses love. This happens because - speaking strictly outside of genre - there are only three types of movies – Good movies, Fun movies, and those that manage to capture both aspects. Good is an academic term – the cinematography was excellent, the acting believable, the lighting and effects done realistically, and so forth. Fun is the complete un-academic end of things – how it appeals to your need for explosions or martial-arts beat downs, or hot girls in tight leather, and so forth along this angle.
The Incredibles is a film that successfully falls into both categories. I’ll start with the fun aspect of it, because it is very easy to understand those qualities. It’s a movie about superheroes, which is guaranteed to draw in the geeks. It’s an original realm, so it doesn’t carry the responsibility of accurately representing a generation of comics that could have come before it. There are explosions, fights, and everything a superhero enthusiast can expect from the genre.

As a sum of its parts, the movie owes its fun factor to its goodness. A typical superhero franchise structures the first film around the origins, as we’ve seen time and time again. In this movie they don’t – they jump right in, using a newsreel style interview to introduce the characters, leading straight into action. In this film the origin story isn’t the interesting part, because Brad Bird took a unique approach to the script. Instead of it being the tale of a man becoming a hero, it’s the tale of a hero becoming a parent, where the question posed is “how does a man live as both a superhero and a dad?”
I think we can safely say this was the first superhero movie to ask that question, and it is the family aspect that makes the movie enjoyable for everyone. Parents can identify with the struggles of Bob and Helen; kids can identify with the children Violet and Dash. Realistic characterization makes you take the characters seriously, and thus you will come to sympathize.

The movie also succeeds in an artistic fashion. The design of the houses, the retro-modern feel of the setting, and even the facial structure of the people all give a sort of pop-art feel. It creates a very 1960’s suburbia experience, a time period which was incidentally a significant peak for the first fans of the superhero genre.
Essentially, I think what serves the film so well is the setting, that retro suburbia feel, a world that looks old fashioned and is driven by old-fashioned ideals but is smack in the center of a superhero generation. The story itself uses an old-fashioned convention – the singular villain, a megalomaniac with a secret fortress and a plan for world domination. Modern superhero movies tend to use modernized concepts of villainy, which at times can overcomplicate things. The atmosphere in The Incredibles has such a ‘James Bond’ feel to it, right down to the Bond-influenced musical score that underlies the film flawlessly.

Personally, I believe the key reason this film is both good and fun is the medium. Computer-generated animation is by no means a new venue of filmmaking. Story-telling through pure animation gives filmmakers the ability to do something unique - a seamless blend of character and fantasy. With live action superhero films, we enjoy them because of their fantastical nature, but the state of the genre these days is one subject to harsh critique. We look at movies like Spider-Man or X-Men and we can point out exactly which moments are computer-generated and where they flow back into actual stuntman. With animation and CG animation the boundaries are erased. The characters interact with their environment one hundred percent - the animated world is where fantasy can take a more successful leap. The actions of superheroes become acceptable and dare I say ‘believable’ because you’ve already suspended your disbelief with the detail in your mind that you’re watching animation.

Being a fan of this specific genre in particular, I had been hoping for a while following the movie’s release that there would be news of a sequel, or a prequel as I felt it would be more structurally interesting. To see the entire gallery of these heroes in their golden years a la Justice League would be right up my alley. Granted, there is so little room for originality in comic book heroes anymore, since it seems as though every interesting superpower available to the human imagination has been exploited, and those that haven’t border on the absurd or obnoxious. But I will cling to that hope, that some day in some form Brad Bird will bring his fantastic family of heroes back.

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Welcome to the blog, the atrium of appraisals, the compound of criticism, and the brunt of my blunt judgment.
this blog was once a very weak and inconsistent attempt at reviewing movies seen in theaters, and I've since done away with that aspect of it. I felt it needed a more consistent element, and what is more consistent than the movies I own?
From here on I will be reviewing the movies from my DVD collection, an ever-growing wallpaper of plastic spines and intermingling fonts that often taunt, tease, and torment me when the night comes that I desire to watch something. How will I choose which movie to review? I have recently made an effort to systematize my personal schedule into a rigid format designed to force upon my weeknight evenings, amongst other elements, at least one of my movies a week (a schedule disregarding weekends, of course).
I would be best to begin with the movies I both own and have never in my life seen - and oddly enough there are a handful of them, sadly to say. Some have the valid excuse of being so utterly terrible, a fact known purely by seeing the packaging, the cast, or the franchise into which the film is trying to crowbar itself. I own these movies because for whatever personal particular, they in some minuscule way, are connected to a movie that is NOT half bad.
What is far more likely to happen is my critiquing of movies I like and watch with some repetition. This is because I am human, I do like good movies, and good movies get watched more often than bad ones. I am a creature of moods as well, and often I am in a "mindless explosions" mood rather than a "thoughtful, sit and pay attention" mood.
So with my next post, we will begin this journey, and say hello to some old friends.
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