fresh movie reviews and yum cha daily

dir: Lynne Ramsay
I really wish we didn't need to talk about Kevins, but we do, we really do
Goddamn. God. Damn.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is pretty brutal. Actually, it’s beyond brutal. It’s one of the most brutal depictions of the terror involved in becoming a parent that I’ve ever seen.

It’s terrifying enough becoming a parent, bringing a new person into the world, trying to shepherd them towards becoming a decent person (if you have the capability or inclination, that is, because I’m sure there’s plenty of terrible parents who don’t give a damn). Mix in with that those feelings of ambivalence, of momentary regret a parent might have, lamenting the loss of their freedom, of their self-determination sacrificed on the altar of being a ‘good’ parent, which can manifest in anger towards that child, and consider the range of emotions that conjures up.

And then wonder whether monsters are born or made, and whether that monster, which is your own, became so because of everything you did, some of the things you did, or nothing you did, and know that there can never be a definitive answer, and there you have the crux of this whole, harrowing story.

Such a complicated premise isn’t going to be told in a straight-forward fashion, so the story jumps around in time, creating parallels and juxtapositions through the different timelines that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Throughout all looms that titan of cinema known as Tilda.

To this day, I still find how great she is as an actress to be staggering. It staggers the mind. This could be one of the most difficult roles of her career, a career abundant with difficult roles, but there’s no doubt that there’s no one else on the planet that could have played it as brilliantly as she does. Meryl Streep couldn’t have touched this with a ten-foot pole constructed entirely of Oscars on her best day. Of course Tilda deserves Oscars and such, but she’s not going to get them for this role. It’s way too much, and way too dark.

Her performance is too great, and the flick is too harrowing. She’s in almost every scene, and her acting has as much if not more to do with her physical performance, her body language, her grimaces of feigned levity, the pain and grief she carries in her eyes. This woman, when we first see her, is as happy as she’s ever going to be in these opening moments. Everything else, from then on, will be agony leavened only momentarily with brief moments where she forgets everything that’s happened. Only for the briefest of moments does she get slivers of grace.

It’s a lot to forget. Those opening moments try to encapsulate the freedom and joy Eva (Tilda Swinton) used to experience as part of her life. She’s at one of those festivals, Spanish, I think, where they celebrate harvest time, or the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, perhaps, by throwing tonnes and tonnes of tomatoes at each other. She’s covered in red, and ecstatic about it.

We see her in red quite often later on; red paint, red light, but for very different reasons. The intercutting of the two timelines shows us an Eva before she became a parent, and the Eva who she becomes long after Kevin has come along. Something terrible has happened, we slowly learn, and feel with increasing dread, that has rendered Eva something of the walking dead, but we’re not going to understand entirely until long after.

dir: David Fincher
This must be a serious film based on those expressions
Isn’t everyone sick of these goddamn books and movies by now? Haven’t we been dealing with them long enough? Can’t we just let them go, and move on?

Apparently not, since they’re making American versions now, complete with American and British actors speaking with what they hope are Swedish accents. Why are they speaking with Swedish accents? Who the hell knows. We know they’re ‘speaking’ Swedish to themselves, it just ‘sounds’ English to us within the context of the flick, but why some of them would use Swedish Chef accents and some of them wouldn’t makes it all slightly perplexing.

I guess that’s appropriate, since these are meant to be mysteries. Of course, since I’ve read the books and seen the Swedish versions, which had those pesky subtitles and Swedish actors, there’s really no mystery there anymore. Making Hollywood versions presumably opens up a whole new audience of people who hate subtitles, which is a fair number of people. And since they enlisted David Fincher to direct, we know they’re going for the prestige angle, and not the trashy cash-in angle.

In a perfect world, they could do both, since all it does is keep those wretched Millennium books on the bestseller lists. But this isn’t a perfect world, so here we have the purest exploitative trash elevated yet again onto the big screen to honour our eyeballs and to make us lament that Stieg Larsson was ever born, let alone picked up a laptop and wrote these pot-boiling tales before thankfully dying.

dir: Alexander Payne
I wonder how high up on People magazine's Hottest 100 Bachelors list I am this year...
I was so surprised when this didn’t turn out to be a biopic-documentary about the great punk band The Descendents, from whose ashes rose other punk superstars Black Flag and All, blessing the world with their fast, brutal pop-punk noise, inspiring a legion of teenage boys in Akron, Ohio and Ringwood, Melbourne, to pick up guitars in their bedrooms and then put them down again once they finished their chemistry and engineering degrees.

No. That would have been too real, too awesome. Instead, here’s George Clooney Clooning things up for the rest of us, based on the novel of the same name by Kaui Hart Cummings.

We see, for the briefest instant, a woman riding on a jet ski, who seems very happy. That’s the happiest we’re going to see her, because Clooney’s sonorous voiceover ensures that we will know quick smart that these people aren’t or can’t be happy for very long.

It turns out that the woman we beheld in all her glory is now in a coma, and her husband, Matt King (Cloons) is looking after her, and dealing more so with the fact that he now has to reengage with his family, being two daughters, which he thinks he’s not ready to do. The youngest, Scottie (Amara Miller) is getting in trouble for acting out (by saying ever so rude and hurtful things to other girls), and his elder daughter Alex (Shailene Woodley) has her own problems unsuccessfully hidden away at her elite boarding school.

Though he uses and abuses voiceover throughout the flick, Matt’s main problem, and Payne’s intention, as it often is the case with his films, is to point out that even with people living in paradise, which is what a lot of people would consider Hawaii to be, their lives can still suck a bit, and they can do shitty things to each other.

I’m not sure that’s going to come as a surprise to anyone, but maybe it needed to be said. I never really thought life was easier for emotionally distanced people living in a hot, tropical place, because I always assumed the humidity and heat would drive residents into semi-regular alcoholic rages.

dir: Spielbergo
Horse lover
It’s not much of a stretch to say that Spielbergo gets to make whatever films he wants in ways that most other directors couldn’t dream of.

It’s not his skills as a director that I’m referring to; it’s the fact that he’s Spielbergo: the most successful director in the medium and in the industry thus far in the last 110 years. He's someone who makes any movie with the understanding that the payment for his services is 30% of the gross box office earned by whatever film he puts out there.

Few people have that level of clout. Peter Jackson is the only other one I know of. Let’s not get bogged down into the merits of such a system, since all I wanted to point out, which, in retrospect, is pretty obvious, is that he gets to make whatever flick he wants to make in whatever way he wants to.

So if he wants to make a flick set during World War I about a lucky horse and the boy from Devon who loves him, and all the people whose lives are touched by the horse as he makes his journey through that despicable war, well, that’s what he does.

And that’s what the pretty literal title refers to: War Horse is about a horse that goes to war. How’s that for subtlety?

dir: Brad Bird
Look at poor Simon Pegg, way way back in the distance. He looks lonely
Sweet Zombie Jesus, if you’re going to make more of these monstrous Mission Impossible flicks, then continue getting Brad Bird to direct, because this one’s pretty amazing. From a pure action point of view, this is probably the best action flick I’ve seen in a long while, and I watch a lot of violent action flicks. Sure, a lot of them involve Chipmunks or are on the Nickelodeon channel, but my point still stands.

These lapdog American retreads of the James Bond espionage action genre have peaked right here, and it would probably be best if they just put it aside and backed away from the franchise. But they won’t, like we all know. Success breeds laziness, so Tom Cruise will probably be making these when he’s in his 80s and still puttering around looking like a 40-year-old thanks to foetal grindings and other secret Scientological super serums. I still find Cruise somewhat scary at the best and worst of times, but I can’t fault him for his work here. This flick exemplifies its own formula, excelling with the stuff that it’s known for, which is a bunch of incredibly orchestrated heists / break-ins, high-tech trickery, complicated impersonations, and saving the world at the very last second after travelling around it first.

The travelogue this time around requires visits to Russia, Dubai and finally Mumbai for their globe-trotting fix, before returning to that wretched den of scum and villainy, known as San Francisco. This isn’t some Eat Pray Love-type journey of self-discovery where they see the world, eat rich food for the first time in their lives and sleep with gorgeous Spanish men with bedroom eyes and washboard abs. They’re out to save the world from nuclear destruction, you sighing, overly romantic ninnies!

Brad Bird is probably best known for directing one of the best of a good bunch of films; they being Pixar films, and it being The Incredibles. This is his first non-animated flick, and he handles it very well. It’s pretty emotionally spare, it just flies along and doesn’t get bogged down by anything. It waits for no man or woman to catch up, and just keeps powering ahead whether you want it to or not. It’s not going to be mistaken for one of the Bourne flicks, but nor would you want it to be.

The team in question, being the team of agents? Operatives? Supergeniuses? I dunno, but they have to break someone out of a Russian prison. That’s our starting point. Although, when you start watching a flick that you know has Tom Cruise in it, and you don’t see him within the first five minutes, you start to get nervous. Where is he, when will he appear, is he okay, that sort of thing. And you also know that it would have to be him that they’re trying to rescue. Or else our minds will be blown.

There’s high tech guy Benji (Simon Pegg), and attractive agent Carter (Paula Patton), and that’s it. Sure, some guy died in Budapest, but I’m sure that had nothing to do with the rest of the story we’ll be watching unfold in Mother Russia.

Why would they do something so unkind to Ethan Hunt (Cruise)? I mean, that’s where the guy wants to be, in a Russian prison, having Russian things done to him. As some kind of punishment, I guess, they end up getting him out, and some other Russian guy as well. Two for the price of one.

dir: Steven Spielberg
Bloody Belgians
Spielbergo’s first foray in the field of fully animated films is not going to set the world alight. The fact that it’s in 3D isn’t going to dazzle the masses much either. Whether it makes its money back, or results in dozens of sequels, or honours the Hergé source material matters not to me. But I am interested in being entertained.

There I was, then, stupid glasses perched upon my nose. Entertain us, I whispered to the screen.

And he did. It did. I had a ball watching Tintin. I remember reading the books as a kid, but they never made that much of an impression upon me, in that these aren’t to me like what the comic-book faithful often moan like sad cows over when their treasured properties are rendered unto the big screen. I feel no ownership of the character or the stories. To me they’re artefacts of the old world, like polio, diaphragms and vinyl records, when racism was cool and colonialism rocked. It’s also a kind of adventure tale which we miss, since today these stories seem to be bogged down by setup, thematic bullshit, meaning, significance and purpose.

This is just straight-ahead Boy’s Own adventure with a capital A, or T in Tintin’s case, where the emphasis is on movement and buffoonery over character or message, to everyone’s relief. The Steven Spielbergo of thirty year’s ago, of the Raiders of the Lost Ark era, would have been perfect to direct this. Instead we have the current weighty titan of unsubtlety who beats us over the head with his ideas wrapped up as they are in the best cinematography or cinematic technology money can buy.

Still, the compromise is that it’s present-day Spielbergo helped out by Peter Jackson. You may have heard of the New Zealander, Peter Jackson? They named some cigarettes after him, I think. And there’s this suit shop in the city named after him, too. Other than that, he’s done a few films here or there. Wait, he did that engorged and colon rupturing King Kong film, didn’t he?

Boo, hiss. Fuck him and everyone he knows. Well, regardless of that, he knows how to work with the new technologies, and who better for Spielbergo to pretend to take advice from, eh? Honestly, if you were Spielbergo, would you be taking advice from anyone, let alone a jumped-up New Zealander? You’re the most successful director in the industry’s history, feted and rewarded beyond anything imagined and everyone else, and you’re going to take criticism or guidance from a bearded Kiwi?

I don’t fucking well think so. Still, they must have done something right, because instead of appalling me, they delighted me.

dir: Jonathan Levine
Now boys, getting cancer is no reason to become neo-nazi skinheads, okay?
Cancer is a hard sell. It’s okay for those four-hanky weepies they make for the abundance of chick channels on cable, but for a comedy drama with nice, liked actors in it, you have to think a lot of people apart from the creative ones involved would have been a bit leery or at least anxious.

“Who’s going to see this?” muttered one studio executive, tugging on his soul patch and massaging his shoulder where Consuela, his usual deep-tissue masseuse had failed to work out the knot that had been bugging him all week.

“I mean, it’s a bit of a bring-down, isn’t it? Can’t he have, like, a cold or something less depressing?”

“What about lupus?” said his female counterpart, fighting the urge to think about food denied to herself at least until daylight hours were over. “Lupus would play well to 27 to 39-year-old one legged lesbians who like blue blankets, at least that’s what our data shows. What about an earache? No, we don’t want to alienate the people with sore eyelids. How about AIDS? Everyone loves AIDS. That’ll get the, you knows, into the theatres.”

“They have so much disposable income, they’ll buy a hundred tickets each! And we’ll make it in 3D! Perfect! Francine?”, he bellows into the adjoining office at his assistant, “get these Seth Rogen and Will Reiser shmucks on the line, and tell ‘em to change the screenplay to say the main character’s got AIDS. Whaddya mean the person it’s about, Will Reiser, had cancer? If I tell him it’s AIDS he had, then it’s AIDS, or I’ll run his weedy ass outta town on a fuckin’ rail. And Seth Rogen doesn’t get to tell me what to do just because he lost some weight and went all Hollywood. Fuck that Canadian wheatgrass drinking derelict. I’ll send him back to Saskatoon if he doesn’t change the goddamn script…”

And so on, and so on. That’s my pained and convoluted way of saying that while studios put out a fair number of flicks dealing with illness and cancer, they generally err on the side of weepy or stupid, or often two for the price of one. Even the true stories get so mangled that they’re less a life-affirming example we can all relate to, and more an exercise in torment. Apropos of nothing I’m just going to scream really loudly that The Bucket List was a fucking terrible film about two guys with cancer.

Just so you know, that’s how I feel. And a lot of reviewing is about feelings. It’s not about mise en scene and diagetic sound, or thematic complexity and Tarkovskian scene composition. It’s just saying “this film worked for me, because it felt like they got it right.” And I really liked this film. It was touching and sweet, and affecting without being manipulative or treacly.

dir: George Clooney
I Believe in Ryan Clooney
Cloons. Cloooooons. He’s not content having every woman over forty getting wet in the gusset or drooling over him, or buying coffee just because of his ads. No, he has to direct flicks too. He has to get shiny golden statues to make him feel loved too.

And he’s directed a doozy here. Sure, the point of the flick is that politicians are arseholes, a novel and radically new idea never captured on film before, but the solid performances and commitment to following through on its depressing premise carries the picture through. And mostly these prized hams don’t overact, so they’ve all done pretty well.

Clooney can’t resist being in the flick as well as everything else, including the catering, but he doesn’t give himself the plum role, nor could he. He is Governor Mike Morris, the genial, charismatic front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in some fantastical place where democracy actually works. But he’s not the main character. That role is taken by man of the moment Ryan Gosling.

He plays Stephen, a young campaign manager on the governor’s staff, whose brash and cynical enough for the role, but not so brash and cynical that he can’t be disappointed in the brashness and cynicism of others. Hey, he’s Ryan Gosling, he can do anything at this point and people will take it and say thank you no matter how good or terrible.

Thankfully, he’s very far from terrible. He’s actually quite good here. I do feel like I’m seeing him in a film every two weeks or so, but this is probably a good performance from him. It’s much better, at least, than Crazy Stupid Love and Drive, though there’s nowhere near as much washboard abs action.

I’m going to get cut with a straight razor for saying that. Anyway, as a campaign manager, he’s not a babe in the woods, but he believes, at least, that Mike Morris actually intends to do some of the things that he claims he’s going to do, and that he should win so that he can do them, for the good of some / many / all, take your pick. Yet Stephen is not so much of a true believer that his ego can’t lead him astray when the other side come knocking.

Morris’ main opponent in the primaries (the lead-up which decides who the Democratic nominee will be) is some other guy called Pullman, who barely exists as far as the flick is concerned. But Pullman’s campaign manager is played by Paul Giamatti, so obviously the character matters. At least to them.

He has a meet-and-greet with the other side’s Karl Rove, and Stephen is completely floating on a cloud of his own awesomeness. All the flattery in the world doesn’t convince him to change teams, though, but he is told that it’s a moot point anyway, because Pullman has the endorsement of a key senator, which will really fuck up Morris’s plans for world domination.

dir: Evan Glodell
I can't imagine it gets decent fuel mileage
I couldn’t tell you what it’s about. I’ve watched it twice, and I still don’t know.

But I can tell you that it connected with me, for reasons I cannot fathom as yet.

Let’s fathom those reasons out together, dear reader. Maybe over the course of the review, I’ll be able to figure it out for myself.

This could be a flick about two youngish alcoholics, Woodrow (Evan Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson), who really wish they were living in post-apocalyptic times. They don’t seem to have jobs or money, but they have a close friendship, I guess defined by the frequency with which they bellow ‘dude’ and ‘so awesome’ to and at each other. They’re really close, even just for best friends.

I’m not implying anything, I’m just saying. They spend their days talking about some fairly strange stuff, and they do it in a fairly casual way. Mad Max – The Road Warrior seems to have had a fairly profound impact upon them. They don’t just dream of modified beasts of cars, or flamethrowers; they build flamethrowers and modify cars in practical but cumbersome ways.

And, for fun, they chain up a propane tank and shoot it with a shotgun, just to watch it burn under escaping explosive pressure. They are, or at least think they are, preparing for something that the rest of us would desperately hope would never come to pass.

On the other hand, they’re never really talking about this post-apocalyptic stuff in any deep way, or from the perspective of survivalism. It’s mostly about looking cool and being awesome. They’re not even talking about it ironically. They’re not even taking the piss out of themselves, or their motivations, or their actions.

Their spiritual mentor, their Dalai Lama, if you will, is Lord Humongous. To those of you not familiar with the second Mad Max movie, Lord Humongous is what they call the monstrous chap who leads a band of marauders gently killing and raping their way across the Australian wasteland outback.

dir: Ruben Fleischer
Less would have been more
Getting Jesse Eisenberg and director Ruben Fleischer together again after Zombieland must have sounded like a good idea, since they did pretty well on their first time out. Inserting Aziz Ansari into the mix might have sounded good, because Aziz is pretty funny, whether as a stand-up or as a comedic actor.

But then someone somehow thought Danny McBride would improve things as well, and so we have 30 Minutes or Less: a mediocre flick so pointless and ineffable that the rage it could inspire doesn’t have time to coalesce before the film evaporates.

I’m telling you for free, Hollywood: Danny McBride improves nothing. Smearing shit on a Picasso doesn’t make it more valuable. Au contraire, fuckers.

Not that, oh no, don’t get me wrong, not that this flick would have been a Cubist masterpiece without McBride’s value-adds. No, it would still have been utterly pointless and forgettable. It just wouldn’t have been as annoying.

I have been accused a fair few times in my reviews of often focussing on other films instead of the one I’m actually trying to review, to the review’s detriment. I’ll cop to that, only because sometimes it’s more interesting to talk about those other flicks. Who wouldn’t rather be talking about Aliens instead of Cowboys and Aliens, or Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter instead of The Lincoln Lawyer, or The Bride Wore Black instead of Bridesmaids?

Be that as it may, the review for 30 Minutes or Less is the place to talk about 30 Minutes or Less, and not the thousands of other better movies I could be discussing.

This flick is decidedly....meh. Jesse Eisenberg plays the same hyper-verbal emotionally leotarded young chap he always plays, and Aziz plays a guy who talks in a high-pitched whine a lot, but mostly they’re meant to be friends. And we’re meant to find them likable. Danny McBride and Nick Swardson play two other close friends, who are even more pathetic and painfully stupid than the first pair.

Wow, two dramaturgical dyads, mirroring each other for comparison and contrast. Hooray for us!

dir: J.C. Chandor
Why so serious, gentle fellows?
This is a non-stop rollercoaster ride of Armageddon-like thrills and fucking spills. If you’ve seen Children of Men, the incredible action / dystopian sci fi flick about a planet where no children are being born, then imagine that level of cinematic amazement, only set in an office populated entirely by shmucks working in the finance industry.

Yes, the finance industry, or the financial sector, if you want to be pedantic, and who, splayed seductively across the tubes of the internets, doesn’t? It’s the place where the best, brightest and most amazing people in society work with the largest sums of money that anyone outside of the accountant for an oil-rich country’s brutal dictator gets to play with.

Margin Call is not about a specific firm (cough Lehman Brothers cough) or a specific time (hello Global Financial Crisis circa 2008), but it does seem to be trying to represent a certain kind of muted catastrophe that some of us might remember, seeing as its effects are still reverberating, and, if you believe certain doomsayers, hasn’t even peaked yet.

It follows a day in the lives of a bunch of traders, analysts and executives at The Firm, which, from the view from the building’s top floors, is the crème de la crème of Wall Street. Though we’re meant to assume that they are a money factory, they’re still shedding workers at film’s beginning, either because they’re not dead inside yet, or because they’re not unethical enough.