fresh movie reviews and yum cha daily

dir: Bennett Miller
Brad Pitt IS A Ball of Money
Why would I watch a flick about baseball? Why would anyone? That is, why would anyone watch a flick about a sport they know nothing about apart from its existence, and couldn’t care less about?

Well, there have been some decent baseball flicks, for which it doesn’t matter a tinker’s dam whether you’re a fan of the sport or not. Eight Man Out, Cobb, The Babe, The Natural, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams: they're all the ones I can think of right now. You can argue that it’s not even the sport itself which is relevant in terms of whether they’re good films or not: it’s the story that goes along with it, eliciting as it does awe, hope, joy, boredom, strange sexual feelings and probably other darker emotions that I'm not privy to.

Well, truth be told the only reason I saw Moneyball is because I’d seen a lot of good reviews, a lot of praise for it, and many if not all of those reviews said stuff like “you don’t have to be a fan of baseball to enjoy the flick”. And so I watched it.

The reality is, though, if you don’t know or care about baseball, or sport in general, this film could bore you so much that you eventually hate any mention of it, or have all affection eroded you may have had for the athletic arts.

It doesn’t really give us a lot of reasons to care. Moneyball, I would argue, is the exact opposite of those flicks that you can think of, or any sport flick which has this basic premise: team of underachieving misfits band together to beat the odds and take on the snootier, nastier team in the final to just barely scrape through in the end, usually because of one really inspirational speech a captain or coach or sick child gives the team.

That’s not a bad thing, per se, but if you don’t enjoy scene after scene of Brad Pitt mugging the screen, and you don’t give a fat rat’s fuckhole about baseball, there’s practically nothing for you here.

It’s going to make me seem limited and unimaginative, but I’m going to say it anyway: I found the whole thing pretty goddamn boring, though not without some elements of mild interest. Even with its cynicism towards the sport, and the whole passionate tribalism aspect reduced to nothing before our eyes, there isn’t really enough to justify my time. And it’s over two goshdarned hours as well. And my time is ever so valuable.

Some time in the 1990s, the general manager of the Oakland As, called Billy Beane (Pitt) embarks on a controversial path after the team loses some of its best players to other richer teams, including the hated New York Yankees. Steinbrenner, one of the most hated names in baseball except for Pete Rose, gets mentioned several times (see, I do know something about the sport).

dir: John Madden
Wow, how misleading is this photo
Who would have thought a flick about three Mossad agents trying to hunt down a sadistic Nazi war criminal could be a depressing and unfulfilling trawl through the sewers of human weakness and failure?

Not me, proving how truly not bright I am, which is why I’m reviewing films instead of making them. But there’s nothing I can do about that now *sob*. So let’s just talk about the film then, shall we?

John Madden is, I’m sure he’ll be mortified to hear, not a director I’ve ever had much time for. The most famous thing he’s done is probably Shakespeare in Love, which has about as much to do with the actual Shakespeare as that recent hilarious flick Anonymous did, which argued that Shakespeare himself was too much of a bloody peasant to have ever written all those plays and sonnets, and so it had to have been the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward De Vere. But even if he had something to do with Gwyneth Paltrow shooting forth like the poisonous, leprous star that she is, and she may have even won a goddamn Academy award, if I’m not mistaken, for her weepy performance, he obviously wishes that he was directing stuff that was taken a bit more seriously.

So, instead of following Gwyneth’s lead and popping out strangely-named children, he persists in making movies, much to our collective disinterest.

The Debt is about three characters in two timelines. In the 1960s, Stefan, David and Rachel are played by Marton Csokas, Australia’s Own Sam Worthington, and delectable redhead of the minute Jessica Chastain, respectively. Worthington is trying to make up for being in Avatar, and he assays the role nobly. Chastain doesn’t have to make up for anything, because she was great in Tree of Life, though possibly less so in The Help as the white trash Marilyn Monroe-lookalike. Csokas is always commanding and awesome no matter how terrible the flick he might be in, so he’s got nothing to apologise for either. Go on, breath a sigh of relief.

In the ‘present’, which is the 1990s, Stefan, David and Rachel are played by heavy-hitters David Wilkinson, Ciarin Hinds and Helen Mirren, sporting a wicked scar on her cheek that Lucky Luciano would have envied. As people age, I guess a lot of them lose, because of all the bad shit that happens, their capacity for happiness. Maybe that’s why the three of them are so glum all the time. They’re so glum, in fact, that the old version of David kills himself within minutes of the film beginning. And Rachel looks even more miserable than David does, if that’s possible.

dir: Paul W. S. Anderson
But there are four of them! I'm so confused
You might ask yourself: why would you voluntarily see a movie that you know can’t be good? You might specifically ask me: Why would you, a person of moderate intelligence who thinks every movie made by Paul W.S Anderson is shite of the highest order, see another flick made by him, especially one that seems like the dumbest thing since someone passed a law allowing children to legally own guns?

It would be a good question. It’s not one I have a satisfactory answer for. I’ve hated this shmuck’s flicks for decades, and his flicks are definitely not improving.

But an opportunity presented itself, and so I watched it.

Historians and philosophers, centuries from now, if there are people still around then, and let’s hope they’re not, will wonder if this is the dumbest version of the Three Musketeers story, or if it’s the awesomest. Rivalries will angry up the blood. Factions will form. Lines will be crossed. Feelings will be hurt.

It’s a prelude to the war to come, you see. The two sides will eventually meet in a war to expunge the earth of those they perceive as their blood enemies, without all realising the deepest, most saddening and salient fact: it doesn’t matter, because both sides are right and both sides are wrong, simultaneously.

The Three Musketeers might be an old story written by Alexandre Dumas centuries ago, but surely he, rolling around in his musty grave, was hanging for the moment whereby the story could be rendered in eye-popping 3D? Surely all he wanted was that a film version be made that demanded the 3D surcharge for those ill-fitting glasses that work about as well as a granite condom, and that finally has the technology to add CGI airships to his ye olde story of swordplay and derring-do?

dir: Kevin Smith
What a kind-looking, wise old man
You know, for a Kevin Smith flick, it doesn’t suck too much.

But does it suck enough? Well, these things are always relative, aren’t they?

I’m not sure if Smith thinks this flick makes him seem like a director with his finger on the pulse of society, but it at least shows that he can make a flick about something more serious than his own sexual obsessions and his desire to get back at those who’ve ever wronged him.

Red State takes a decidedly different tack from the one, and only, smutty track his flicks usually take. It’s serious, man. Entire sections of Red State could have come from one of the Hostel movies. And there are long, agonising sections where a preacher (Michael Parks) lectures his congregation, telling them, and us, about how much God hates humanity. And the gays, especially.

And it’s not played for laughs. It might sound inelegant to describe this flick as Smith’s most ‘serious’ flick, but it’s pretty much played straight, if you’ll pardon the pun, and I’m sure you won’t.

The flick also has three distinct shifts in its tone and content, to the point where it makes it hard to describe just what kind of movie it is, in terms of genre. Not that it’s important to wedge it into the most appropriate pigeonhole, or to find the most fitting pigeonhole, or to just shoot the fucking pigeon so that it leaves you alone for ever more. No, just sit back and endure the ride.

In our real world, there are these lunatic members of a lunatic church called the Westboro Baptist church, led by a lunatic called Fred Phelps. There aren’t that many of these lunatics, but, as Alexander Pope said of narrow-souled people, comparing them to narrow-necked bottles: the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring out. These prize dickheads make a lot of noise and get a lot of notoriety out of all proportion to their actual relevance or importance to this world or any other. Their hatred of pretty much everybody, but especially gay people and the Jews, and the actions they take to express this hatred, has made them strange fixtures in the media, more for curiousity value than anything else.

dir: Seth Gordon
Aren't they all?
Everyone hates their boss, apparently. A flick like this is mining a rich seam of resentment, universal and eternal, that bubbles malevolently under the surface of every working stiff.

And at a time when people in the States either don’t have jobs, or are nervous about job security, a flick, ostensibly a comedy flick with protagonists so trapped by their evil bosses that they contemplate murder, doesn’t seem that outlandish.

It’s probably not that zeitgeist-y, since people have long imagined (or unfortunately, actually) going postal, and cruel petty bosses are a staple of pop culture and literature. It has been for thousands of years, if you believe the Bible. Let’s face it, if you don’t, you’re a godless heathen and I applaud you for your winning ways.

This flick is not a black comedy, despite the premise. It sounds ‘dark’, but it’s not. It’s utterly harmless, and I don’t think that hurts the flick at all. If anything, the fact that it’s so gutless, and that the protagonists are so gutless means that the superficiality allows us to enjoy a bit of fantasy wish-fulfilment without feeling guilty.

Wait, that’s a bad thing, isn’t it? I should be cursing the fuck out of this flick.

But I’m not going to. I actually laughed a fair few times, and didn’t care how silly any of it was, because it was enjoyable.

Three friends each suffer under the reign of terror their bosses embody. Nick (Jason Bateman, playing the same Jason Bateman role he plays in everything) is an obsequious lickspittle who even Smithers would look at with disgust. He licks the boots of a far greater man, being his boss, played by Kevin Spacey. Though thoroughly nasty, the boss Spacey plays here is nowhere near as evil as the one he played in Swimming With Sharks, so this one’s practically a humanitarian by comparison.

Still, the ungrateful fuck Nick still complains and complains about his terrible circumstances to his friends, who have their own problems. Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) is himself a scumbag, but his coke-head new boss (Colin Farrell, sporting an awesome comb-over), is an even bigger scumbag. He is asked to fire the disabled and the overweight because they disgust the boss, and who is Kurt to argue with managerial prerogative?

dir: Joe Johnston
Carved from granite, and acts like it too
This makes up for enduring Green Lantern, but not by too much.

Captain America, despite being Captain America, was enjoyable enough. The film, especially the back end, doesn’t entirely satisfy, but it was so much more enjoyable an experience, and not as actively irritating as the aforementioned shitheap masquerading as just another franchise, that it could not help but look better.

I am aware that Captain America is a relatively ancient comic book property, dating back to the World War II era, famous for a cover that showed Cap punching out Hitler. The fact that this was drawn and published during the war makes it all the more important that, thankfully, Cap’s origin story (which most of the flick is) occurs during that vital time.

So, for me, the film is of two halves; halves not of duration, but of what ‘works’ and what doesn’t. The half that looks after the evolution of Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) from scrawny Brooklyn kid so feeble he couldn’t even peel potatoes for the Navy, to super soldier, works. The bit that governs the detailing of a supervillain’s plans for world domination, that villain being Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), doesn’t work as well, for me. For my money the flick made something of a mistake by shielding us from some very obvious aspects required when you set something like this during the war. I’m ignoring the stuff they do to keep the rating down (making people disappear in puffs of smoke due to convenient made-up technology is more about getting a PG-13 rating than it is about looking ‘cool’, which it doesn’t).

I know that the Red Skull is the primary villain for Cap. I just think it was a bad idea for this flick, to give this particular villain such complete prominence. The main reason is this: um, correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t there already a set of potential bad guys running around the world wrecking up the place and exterminating peoples willy-nilly?

dir: Ed Gass-Donnelly
That's some serious policeman's mo you've got there, Stormare
No, it’s got nothing to do with Nick Cave, and it’s not an album. But it is a Canadian film, about a murder, in a small town, and there are some songs.

The songs are great. They’re Great. Genuinely bracing songs, mixing elements of church spirituals, violent percussion, very dark bluegrass (I guess?), and probably a bunch of other influences as well. Imagine the bastard love child of Steve Earle and Nick Cave, sitting in some muddy weeds, crying while toking on a meth pipe.

So the soundtrack, I think we’ve painfully established, is pretty amazing. The Canadian film itself? Perhaps not so much.

The setting is rural Ontario, and the small town is so very, very small. They never mention the population specifically, but it’s probably in the hundreds. It’s such a small town that the last murder was before the time of the current town police chief, being Walter (Peter Stormare).

It sounds, from my description, and that pesky title, that this is a crime movie, a police procedural about a murder, that someone has to solve. It would be a mistake to believe that. It’s a mistake I made. Sure, there are elements of that, but the flick is aiming for something very different.

The town is a strange one, in that it has an old population of Mennonites, who often speak in a German dialect. The film opens with a scene where a car drives past a horse and buggy. So, yeah, it’s kind of like the Amish, except they don’t do barn raising, don’t wear those cool clothes, and they use electricity.

We don’t get much of an insight into the Mennonites at all. For all that it matters to the film, the townsfolk could have been Hindus, Rosicrucians or Scientologists. It does matter in the sense that these are people completely unsuited to the modern kill-crazy world the rest of us live in, and they’re very much opposed to violence, goddamn them.

dir: Gore Verbinski
I think Johnny Depp's aging okay, for such an old man
I guess it was inevitable, but it still comes as something of a surprise. Considering the extra cost slapped on tickets for 3D flicks at the cinema, one day a studio was going to decide that it was a safe bet to make a CGI animated flick for adults.

I don’t mean like a 3D porno CGI animated flick for the cinemas, which would probably be as eye-gouging as it sounds. I mean a flick that has all the cutting edge visual effects stuff, but a screenplay no kid on this planet could give a fuck about.

Rango is as much Western homage as it is a testament to the power of Johnny Depp. To a lesser extent, it’s also a testament to Gore Verbinski’s sway, being able to convince a studio to sink a shitload of money into something kids would find duller than vegetables and algebra.

If I walked into a studio and said “Hey, give me a hundred million dollars, and I’ll make an animated movie which quotes and references Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns, Once Upon a Time in the West, Cat Ballou and Chinatown, and I’ll even quote that other kid favourite flick, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I guarantee you not a single kid in the whole world will like the flick, and there’s practically no merchandising opportunities as well”, they would have thrown my corpse out of a window from a great height. But Verbinski and Depp say it to a studio, a studio aware of the fact that the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks made billions of dollars, and they apparently said “Yes, absolutely we’ll give you absolutely everything we can, and please, fuck our sisters as well.”

dir: Catherine Hardwicke
Lots of red, virtually no riding, and barely any hood
So, chicks dig this stuff, huh? Tame mixtures of the supernatural and the melodramatic, and the direct competition of two hunky lunkheads wanting to kill each other over you, and that’s the ticket for fiddly remembrances in the bath?

Surely women have higher standards than that? Surely it takes more to satisfy them than that?

I’m going to quote famous dead film critic Pauline Kael for a second, but not in a filmic capacity. She once expressed surprise and shock that Nixon won re-election, because she didn’t know a single person who voted for him. Of course, this quote has been used more to show how self-selecting her circle of acquaintances was, rather than the validity of her knowing what a likely political outcome would be.

In that spirit of same insular cluelessness, I don’t know a single girl or woman who likes this kind of supernatural – romantic bullshit, whether it’s explicitly Twilight or not, or ersatz Twilight like this movie. Not a one. Sure, most of the women I’ve ever known are too intelligent for this bullshit, but can I really use them as my sample size for judging the population of women?

Surely not, since someone has to buy those mentally defective celeb magazines, and those products promising eternal youth, eternal desirability and bras more torture device than structural support. And it’s not me.

To capitalise on the perceived Twi market of Twi-teens and Twi-moms and Twi-handbaggers, they’ve recrafted the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale to allow for the insertion of both an anti-religious / fascist theme as well as having two doofuses with contemporary hairstyles to fight over our little lady who’s trembling on the cusp of womanhood.

dir: Simon West
If Jason Statham wants to do ballet in the middle of an action flick who is going to argue with him?
There are remakes and then there are remakes. In theory, and it’s a very Hollywood-based theory, anything remade that puts Jason Statham in the lead role is going to be inherently better than the original, and will make lots of dollars because everyone loves Jason Statham.

Surely, he’s a household name? Your mum even knows who he is, clucking her tongue at his violent onscreen antics, but finding him a charming man all the same. Although she probably doesn’t remember his name.

As strange as it sounds to assert, Jason Statham would have to be the biggest action star in Hollywood currently. Who else has been in as many arse-kicking, explosions and tits movie recently? He’s the king, and he’s uncontested, for now.

Though I can’t really figure out why.

Sure, he looks like he’s carved from granite, and acts like it, and can glower with the best of them, but surely someone needs something more than that to climb to the lofty heights of action moviedom?

Apparently not. This is a remake of a Charles Bronson flick from 1972, which I remember mostly for the long stretches forgoing dialogue, and the relatively slow pace for a flick of its kind. Also, Chuck Bronson is a god, and was always the best thing about any of the great or crap flicks he was in. It posited the idea of a contract killer meticulous and patient in his actions and planning, who, at his best, killed people without it even being known that they’d been assassinated.

Now, of course, the idea is commonplace in these kinds of hitman-for-hire flicks, because it makes it look like these characters are geniuses. You know, admirable intellects and cultural aesthetes and total badasses.

They’re not geniuses. They’re usually morons. A cursory glance at the legacy of the Melbourne Underworld murders immortalised in the Underbelly series is that none of these thugs-for-hire who murdered for money or kicks could have finished a Sudoku puzzle without help, let alone planned something to kill their targets and avoid detection completely.

dir: Tsui Hark
Dig our funky facial hair: my eyebrows, your moustache
Some directors win their way back into our good graces by making a transformative leap in their filmmaking in order to deliver a great film after decades of slumming. Other directors delight or depress us by consistently putting out the same kind of film, year after year, Woody, decade after decade.

Other directors win us over again by going way back in style and intent, and delivering the kind of flick they delivered way back when they were still making good flicks.

Tsui Hark’s great claim to fame is, in my opinion, being part of that new wave of Hong Kong film in the late 80s – early 90s which reminded the rest of the world that Hong Kong was still making some awesome action flicks. Along with the John Woo flicks The Killer and Hard Boiled, Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China flicks were part of that vanguard reinvading the West with hyperactive action and a complete disregard for the safety of stuntpeople that blew the tender sensibilities of audiences away all over again.

Of course, with success comes money, hookers and moving to Hollywood to make horrible flicks with Jean Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman, which will kill your career if there’s any justice in the universe.

Against all reason or justice, someone, possibly Triad gangsters or the Chinese Government, keeps giving Tsui Hark money, and here he’s delivered a film that is both good and bad, though probably not in equal parts.

The character of Detective Dee, or Di Renjie as they know him, is like a Chinese folk hero Sherlock Holmes dating back from the Tang Dynasty. There’s probably little likelihood of Robert Downey Jnr playing him, so they brought in the next best thing, being Andy Lau, probably one of my least favourite Hong Kong actors of the last twenty years.

But he’s an awesome Cantopop singer, mark my words, brethren and sistren.

dir: Robert Schwentke
RED - Really Extreme Dubiousness
Old people. What to do with them. This movie’s entire purpose seems to be just to remind the rest of us not to turn our backs on these wrinkly potential badasses.

Because, you know, just ‘cause they’re old, doesn’t mean they can’t kill you three ways from Wednesday.

I’m not entirely sure how Bruce Willis gets to swan around with decent older actors and pretend they’re contemporaries, but then, if that’s the least plausible part of this flick, it would be a doddle to accept. As it is, this is a total fucking cartoon that makes James Bond flicks look like documentaries.

This flick is such a cartoon that it makes computer generated owl and toy films look like actual reality instead of animation. In this flick called Red, or RED, or R.E.D, a bunch of people mostly in their late 50s and beyond, all the way up to Morgan Freeman’s tender 70s, show the young ‘uns that they can still kick arse like it’s 1989.

The title is an acronym standing for Retired – Extremely Dangerous, or, to put it differently, there ain’t no school like the old school. It is a premise so tired and so tiring that just typing it out makes me feel a tad sleepy. None of these main actors: Willis, Freeman, Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich, Helen Mirren or Richard Dreyfuss are exactly wanting for work. They aren’t sitting forlorn by the phone on Saturday nights desperate for some casting agent to call. So the premise, mockingly linked with Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys as an example of this superannuated genre, doesn’t really bleed into the real world. Though it’s likely that the dubious audience hook was meant to be some kind of older audience-goer bait, to make them think, “Get off my lawn, and, I really would like to see some old people besting some young people in gunplay and fisticuffs”, it seems pretty obvious that the quirk of having old people ‘act’ all young and stuff was meant to be universally appealing.

You know, just like when we appreciate it when grannies rap or oldies ride skateboards and play guitars while drinking the latest iteration of Spazzie Cola.

Maybe it’s an American take on the old people problem. Longer life spans, better health care thanks to a certain president, all this means is that older people will be lingering longer and stinking the joint up for the rest of us. So instead of shuffling off this mortal coil with dignity and making room for the rest of us to spend their inheritances on jet skis and bigger TVs, now they want to be gainfully employed into and past their dotage. The nerve of the fuckers…