Feb 19 2012
I personally don’t care how many millions of dollars ‘This Means War’ brings in at the box office; it’s hands down the worst movie of the year so far. Supposedly a romantic comedy about two spies who end up fighting over the same woman, there’s nothing romantic or funny about it. I guess it’s also supposed to be an action movie, but good luck there. More
Feb 18 2012
Jacky is a quiet and solitary guy, but he’s not exactly a likable one; working as a low-level thug for the Belgian hormone mafia, he spends his days intimidating cattle farmers into using steroid injections on their livestock. In his down time, he’s injecting testosterone cocktails of his own into his burly body, training and shadowboxing and trying to outpace the shadows of his past. No, he isn’t a good man, but he’s presented as a fascinating one, a cog in a larger system that’s choking him in the same way it’s steamrolling the put-upon farmers. It helps that he’s the moody center of Michael K. Roskam’s Bullhead, a dark, grim character study masquerading as a crime thriller. More
Feb 13 2012
Valentine’s Day. It can be a nightmare. Maybe you have that someone special and the holiday ratrace is driving you mad. Maybe your flying solo and the endless parade of candy hearts and goopy sentimental slop have you howling at the moon and wanting to disembowel Cupid. More
Feb 10 2012
One of my most cherished childhood birthday presents was a collector’s edition of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, complete with handsome ink illustrations. It was given to me by intrepid relatives who gambled on an 19th century adventure novel being of interest to a kid of the video game era, and in retrospect it was a relatively safe bet. More
Feb 9 2012
Studio 4C have released their animated film Berserk Golden Age Arc I: Egg of the Supreme Ruler (Berserk Ougon Jidaihen I: Hao no Tamago) in Japanese theaters this weekend and are promoting it by way of putting the opening ten minutes online. More
Sep 9 2011
The most foreboding image in Steven Soderbergh’s new outbreak thriller Contagion is an uncovered bowl of bar peanuts.
I mean that as a compliment. At the heart of this star infested, globally minded, medical thriller, there’s a maniacal—even healthy if you will—sense of paranoia and anxiety surrounding our habits and social structures. Soderbergh takes a break from his personal art projects to deliver a monster movie for the masses where the unyielding beast in question is a nasty microbe that plans to eat its way through Hong Kong, London, San Francisco…the world.
Sep 5 2011
There is a man. He may be a scientist or a therapist. He keeps a young woman locked in an antiseptic room and conducts experiments to test her emotional threshold. Many of these tests are incomprehensible, most seem to tax the woman on a level more spiritual than physical. Both the man and the woman occupy a stark and empty commune known as the Aboria Institute. The woman eventually escapes and the man gives chase. These are, more or less, the events of Beyond the Black Rainbow, the first film by new director Pan Cosmatos.
Sep 5 2011
“What is this, anyway, some kind of comic book? We got robots, we got cavemen, we got kung fu.”
Some kind of comic book indeed. The Eliminators is a great example of why the 1980s was such a fun decade for movies. You could head into your local multiplex and find oddball craziness like this right alongside big-budget blockbusters. The whole thing plays like a 12 year old boy’s wish-list for a movie; cyborg heroes who are part tank, hot babe scientists, time travel, centurions, flying robots, cavemen, ninjas, pirates, butch lesbian river boat captains. Ok, maybe that last one is too esoteric, depending on the twelve year old.
Sep 1 2011
Seeing a movie like Cargo at the start of a 30 day sci-fi binge is very fortunate. The unassuming Swiss thriller by Ivan Engler is a sweet sort of surprise and a reminder of how real science fiction can be concocted on a small budget. If it were sandwiched in between bigger or more successful films it might look more slight, but positioned at the start of a potentially rocky road, it gives hope for the rest of my journey.
The specific sub-genre Cargo targets is the ‘old dark spaceship’ scenario, with a small crew of workers on an interstellar freighter discovering that they aren’t alone and that something is alive in the cargo hold of their ship. For awhile the film threatens to become a version of Ridley Scott’s Alien, but then does a thematic flip halfway through and starts channeling Solaris or The Matrix. I was entertained throughout, due in no small part to the methodical and detailed pace that Engler creates for the film. The only real weakness is that once Cargo reveals itself in the second half, it never achieves theappropriate dramatic heft it aims for. The acting is solid, but Engler isn’t as good at differentiating the different characters and his desire to let the thrills manifest organically crash against the potboiler expectations of the premise.
But let me back up from criticism and express my gratitude that Cargo doesn’t end up being a half-hearted creature feature or a low budget laser-blaster extravaganza. There is a part of me, probably blossomed in childhood, that reacts strongly to this particular breed of film. I sit up in my seat with interest at the sight of mammoth, cathedral-esque ships chugging forebodingly through space while (technically silent) thrusters blare menacingly on the soundtrack. There’s something enticing when the dark, labyrinthine corridors of the ship are revealed and actors make arcane references to engines and devices, their functions often a mystery even to the characters. And when people start going missing, and the mission is slightly off course and there are questionable sounds emanating out of locked parts of the ship, you have officially got me hooked. In the first hour of Cargo’s running time, it does all of these things with unquestionable skill.
Also written by Engler, the plot is a hybrid of influences that does an efficient job of setting everything up and getting the mystery rolling in between the extremely impressive special effects. According to the world of Cargo, the Earth will become desolate and uninhabitable sometime around the 23rd century. In an attempt to continue their existence, the Earthlings occupy small, dingy space-stations while a new planet is prepared for them by the Kuiper Enterprise. This planet is Rhea, and its image, along with bright cheerful infomercials, is plastered all over the diseased, over-crowded stations that carry the forlorn and disenfranchised.
Some inhabitants are already on Rhea, and that’s where young doctor Laura Portmann (Anna-Katharina Schwabrohis) is headed at the start of the film. She’s signed onto the crew of a small cargo freighter as their medic for an eight year journey to and from Rhea. At the end of the mission, she will have earned her passage to the new planet, where her family is waiting for her. Of course, it’s the last leg of the eight-year mission, Laura’s last shift, when she suddenly realizes that whatever it is they are carrying in the cargo hold is registering signs of life. Then, members of the crew start dying in unexplained ways and the mystery deepens. Laura doesn’t know who she can trust, and the rest of the crew don’t know what to make of her wild claims. As the film continues, things seem to be more sinister than anyone could have guessed, the truth extending all the way to Rhea and it’s promise of a new future. The remainder on the ship must band together to face the threat or perish, and the truth with them.
Cargo is a very atmospheric and tense film, its aesthetic elements easily its most strong. There’s an eerie, claustrophobic sense of isolation in the vast, shadowy chambers of the ship’s hull and the icy, frost-covered ledges of the cargo hold. The production designers have done their job and then some. These ships and space-stations look futuristic and advanced, but also lived-in, impersonal and pushed to their limits. The future humans are grungy, sick vagrants who sit coughing in clumps around pillars of cold, grey steel under sputtering green lights. Like an old, derelict house, the cargo hold looks like it contains a whole plethora of fearsome ghosts even if there’s none to actually be found.
The cinematographer allows his camera to climb and peer into every suspect nook and cranny. The exterior shots of the ships and the unforgiving space that surrounds them are first-rate and add distinction and conviction to the narrative. When we reach the big finale, that takes places largely with characters in space-suits floating outside a breathtaking structure, it’s nearly impossible to believe that this picture was made for only 2 million dollars. An economic combination of models and computer generated imagery, Cargo gives its sea-faring vessels a weight and reality that complements the grounded realism of the story.
The acting is strong and understated, which feels a bit subdued for a tale of intergalactic beasties trying to eat colonists but makes more appropriate sense the film shifts gears to something more psychological and speculative. Schwabrohis in particular is convincing and engaging as the lead, a woman who juggles compassion and cynicism equally, both sparked when she finds out about what’s being transported on the ship. The other members of the crew fall on typical sides of the hero/villain quotient, although I will go as far as to say that even the bad guys are more opportunists than simple, sinister black hats. At every turn, there’s great care to make this seem like a scenario that could happen.
In the end, it’s that very quality that prevents Cargo from being a great movie. The dramatic needs of the story require a bit more fanciful artistry, even if the details stay grounded in reality. Those who stumble ontoCargo will remember its twists and turns and strong sense of dread, but they won’t be talking about this conclusion with the same urgency or awe that we use when recounting the reveal of Dark City or the final passages of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In some ways, the bait switch also hobbles the urgency and immediacy of the film. The acting, score and filmmaking—as well as the use of close-quarters sets and lighting—prepare us for a good, solid monster movie. When the scope changes to something decidedly more epic, the feel and tone of the pic don’t change with it and the audience gets cramped. The twist itself is well-handled but not unique in the annals of science fiction. Real diehards of the genre will salute it, but they won’t be impressed.
This won’t, and shouldn’t, prevent you from seeking out Cargo. It’s an impressive debut and a great example of what can be done in the realm of hard sci-fi with a smallish budget. You don’t have to sacrifice eye-popping visuals or gobs of atmosphere. On the page, a financer could automatically assume Cargo would work better as a short story, but Engler imbues it with such a sense of the neo-gothic that we can be glad it made its way to the screen.
Next up, I’ll go back into the far reaches of my childhood and the 80’s for The Eliminators, a film featuring ninjas, caveman, cyborgs and Denise Crosby. This will be the first time I’ve laid eyes on it since the fourth grade. Can’t wait…
Aug 9 2011
PCN RATING: 
Although it’s being marketed and pitched as a prequel to the 1968 Charlton Heston classic, Rupert Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes is actually a remake of sorts. Mirroring some of the events and characters of the fourth sequel in the franchise, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Rise uses that earlier movie, a hokey, dated tale of social unrest, as a jumping off point to tell a story that sets the stage for the world Chuck’s astronaut finds in the original.
Fortunately, Rise isn’t just one more slap-dash light show aimed at siphoning a few bucks off any remaining Apes fans. It has all of the color and energy of a proper summer event picture, but it surprises us in the way it sells a silly premise and makes us care deeply about the motivations, emotions and ambitions of its central character. No, not James Franco. I’m talking about Caesar, brought to life by the combined efforts of WETA studios and actor Andy Serkis, employing the same techniques and performance that he used for Gollum and King Kong. Caesar is the emotional focus of the new film, and most of Apes triumph and poignancy come as a result of our investment in his character. And as unlikely as it seems, we do come to care for and connect with him as an individual.
The film begins in a conceivable near future—looking just like our own world –where man has made breakthroughs in gene therapy and threatens to achieve a cure for the incurable; Alzheimer’s. When Dr. Will Rodman (James Franco) tests his miracle drug on chimpanzees, it sets off a chain reaction of events that culminates in a young chimp named Caesar gaining sentience and an unwanted understanding of his place in the world. There’s a clear three-act structure that benefits the film’s simplicity and impact.
In 90 minutes we watch the young simian go from a loving suburban home with the Rodman’s to a brutal ape preserve in the heart of San Francisco where he must grow into a leader of diverse and divisive primates, and then enter the fray of that last act much touted in the trailers. This sequence is a poignant bid for freedom culminating on the mist-shrouded battleground of the Golden Gate bridge. Built into the cracks of this central struggle are teases and glimmers as to what really contributed to the downfall of the humans. Hint: It’s not as directly related to Caesar and company as you might expect. Stay a few minutes into the credits for the lowdown.
What Wyatt brings to the table is a satisfying sense of drama. I enjoyed Rise as much as any movie I’ve seen this year, and what endears it to an audience isn’t the sci-fi as much as it is the wonder of seeing things from a different, alien point of view. We’ve witnessed the talking apes before, watched test chimps gain emancipation in Project X, and marveled at Kong cut down in his grandeur in the midst of human civilization.Rise takes all of those elements and folds them into something new. This film doesn’t belong to the humans, it belongs to Caesar and his kin, and it is they—much like Heston’s Col Taylor in the first film—who are the crusading outsiders, trying to find a place in a world that looks set against them. This is accomplished through remarkably strong writing and plotting and exceptional, ground-breaking special effects. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a great reminder of the way imagination and technology can work together in the service of a good story.
The apes are nearly photorealistic and with the exception of a few hastily rendered shots that deny Caesar appropriate gravity when he leaps, it’s often hard to know if what we are looking at is physically there or just a series of ones and zeroes. The performance capture, particularly by Serkis, is worthy of high praise. The last time the mannerisms and behavior of primates was this well choreographed and integrated into human pantomime was 1984’s Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. Sure, Jackson’s Kong was in between but that film had one gorilla, while Rise captures the spectrum of the species, from jabbering chimps and stoic silverback gorillas to wooly, world-weary orangutans. The kicker is that every last one of them is a singular character with motivation and substance.
Serkis commits so completely to his creation that we never see Caesar as a simple chimp or as a furry human. From the moment he’s led from the San Francisco suburbs to the towering Red Wood forest and looks up with awe and wonder, I was sold on the soul behind those creepy expressive eyes. The intelligent gleam, the extraordinary compassion, and that wary suspicion of those around him make this ape as fascinating and dramatic as his Shakespearean namesake. The way he navigates the social enclave of the sanctuary in the later scenes reminds of Andy Dufresne changing the dynamics of Shawshank prison. Such a heavy comparison would not be likely if there wasn’t a character to relate to there.
The humans all do well enough, but none of them are truly front and center. Franco’s Rodman is a surprisingly nuanced father figure for Caesar and not your average mad scientist or naïve crusader. Lithgow as a man losing himself to the fog of Alzheimer’s is legitimately heartbreaking and tender and his interaction with Caesar is some of the movie’s most potent emotional stuff. Frieda Pinto is an afterthought as the love interest, while Brian Cox and Tom Felton as the father and son jailors running the sanctuary are appropriately menacing. Rightfully so, they all pale and fade in comparison to Caesar and his fellow revolutionaries.
That stand-off that closes the film would be silly in other circumstances, but it’s so painstakingly thought-out and tied into what’s come before that it ends up being uplifting and thrilling. The most absurd moment of the trailers—that great gorilla leaping at a helicopter hovering next to the bridge—is transformed into a moment of emotional power because when the brute makes that jump, there are stakes for his survival. The entire film is like that really. It’s stuffed with some needlessly cute references (do we really need the damn dirty apes line again?) and a few easy contrivances, but the context and depth running under the characters lifts it up and away from an easy cash grab and sets about a curious evolution that would see it be it’s own brand of satisfying pop art.
Jul 29 2011
PCN RATING: 
Crazy, Stupid, Love is the romantic comedy I’ve been waiting all summer for. Not necessarily that I’ve been anticipating this specific movie, but what the final result represents; a gentle, clever comedy about people we like, sympathize with, and root for. There’s no excessive hostility aimed at the characters or the instituiton of marriage, and the ultimate message is surprisingly optimistic and, dare I say, romantic. It has as many flaws as a loaded baked potato has bacon bits, but here’s a movie that’s actually appropriate for a date night, provided you don’t think too hard on it the next morning.
The script by Dan Fogelman is both an ally and enemy of the film. What he’s put together here is a branching view of several individuals trying to make a go of this whole love thing. Some of them, like Cal (Steve Carell) and Emily (Julianne Moore), are married. Others, like Cal and Emily’s son Robbie, are finding love for the first time, in his case with his 17 year old babysitter Jessica (Analeigh Tipton), who is too busy crushing on his dad to care about the awkward declarations of a thirteen year old.
One night, Cal and Emily discover over dinner that their mutual spark is flickering, poised to whiff out. Cal moves out when he learns Emily had an affair with a coworker, David (Kevin Bacon), and goes to a cocktail lounge where he starts a new relationship; a friendship of sorts with Jacob (Ryan Gosling) a pick-up artist who has honed his skill to a shark’s precision. Jacob takes the sad-sack Cal under his wing, reinvents him, and instead of pointing him back towards his wife—who he clearly misses and longs for—aims him at a bevy of emotionally vulnerable women lurking around the lounge. There’s another relationship too, between the calculating Jacob and the sweet, smart Hannah (Emma Stone) who spurns his transparent advances until one day, there he is, legitimately in love and all of that without even having slept with her.
These threads advance the central narrative of Crazy Stupid Love and they all do eventually intertwine with one another, although in more specific and surprising ways than a character-heavy ensemble like Love, Actually or Valentine’s Day might. The characters and their issues are front and center here, and one of the virtues of having several different viewpoints is that we get to perceive Cal and Emily’s marriage—the most focal of the relationships—from many different angles. What Jacob understands about the situation is filtered through what he thinks he knows about Cal, and what Cal tells a fiery, loopy school teacher (Marisa Tomei) he meets at the lounge returns later to inform the internal state of his heart towards his wife. Even Kevin Bacon’s snaky adulterer is significant because he’s not a simple villain, but just a guy who allowed himself to romance and ensnare a woman who was already wandering away from things at home. Now he’s in the middle, and not completely sure what to make of it. There are no excuses made for him, as there are none for Jacob’s womanizing in the first half, but both are so wonderfully acted that we see them as people and it makes everything resonate more deeply.
The problems with the script come down to a tension between trying to give us believable people and scenarios and simultaneously meeting the demands of the romantic comedy template that requires a certain number of asinine misunderstandings, meet cutes, false dawns, and big speeches. Realistically, its hard to force organic characters, once created and breathing onscreen, into the little boxes the plot has made for them. The actors, which turn out to be the real saving grace of the film, refuse to surrender and give us people we can put our sympathy in even when their actions don’t feel completely genuine.
Gosling and Carell make a good comic team, and Gosling and Stone are absolutely delightful together—their reenacting of one of the dumbest moments of cinema history is probably my favorite scene of the movie. Clearly, they are having the time of their lives. Tomei is unfortunately underutilized, but she’s so good she makes her scenes stand out with her bubbly, vibrant energy. You can put Tomei in just about anything and she’d be able to illuminate it. My favorite character, surprisingly, is Robbie and Jonah Bobo, seen previously in Favreau’s Zathura, is consistently funny when playing off his adult counterparts. He’s one of the few young talents to understand what precocious actually means.
Most problematic for me is the script’s inability to recognize some of its own ickiness, particularly in the convenient placement of model Tipton (who is actually only days younger than Emma Stone) as a teenage girl tempted to take racy pictures for the man she babysits for. While Carell’s Cal has no awareness of this crush, his own behavior towards the women he picks up doesn’t feel right, even for a guy dealing with a broken heart. I believe he would seek solace in the arms of other women, but I don’t believe he’d actually take Jake’s advice to the point of actually hurting them. There’s also the unfortunate state that Moore’s Emily is mostly seen as a confused shrew, only the actresses’ innate warmth and timing saving her from being seen as simply shallow.
There are revelations, twists, betrayals, alliances, and hopeful moments of reconciliation. There are enough of these in fact, it could have been a Shakespeare play with a few rewrites and some onscreen death. Much of it works and gains a sincerity because of the likability of the cast and how the film lets us feel about them. In the moment, Crazy Stupid Love soars, giving you that warm, sweet sense of adoration. It’s only the morning after that might give you second thoughts, and all of that could have been avoided if there had been a more honest screenplay to support it.
No matter, it’s a minor quibble for a film that gets so much right, and gives us what we tend to want most out of the movies; a couple of hours with the lives of people we find interesting . Fans of the romantic comedy, you can come back out of hiding and husbands, you needn’t fear Crazy Stupid Love. It’s a movie about couples, made for them. What a concept.
Jul 29 2011
Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens is a decidedly old-fashioned movie. Although the title drums up comic-book imagery and the special effects are the state of the current art, everything else about the film suggests it could have been made some 40 years ago, perhaps starring Steve McQueen in the Daniel Craig role and John Wayne in the Harrison Ford one. There are two genres here, one a western and one science fiction and both done with enough goofy b-movie ingenuity that we go along for the ride. This is a deeply silly picture but the trick is it pretends not to know this fact. There’s more fun to be had that way.
The film begins in 1873, with an amnesiac stranger (Daniel Craig) ambling into the town of Absolution. Absolution is one of those dingy little waystations that looks like it might just sink down into the Arizona earth and vanish. A sparse crop of citizens wander through the arid streets, steering clear of trigger-happy Percy Dolarhyde(Paul Dano) who carries on with the knowledge that his cattle baron daddy has the town in his pocket. There are classic western types all over the place; the kindly gun-toting preacher (Clancy Brown), the stoic sherrif (Keith Carradine) and a saloon owner named ‘Doc’ (Sam Rockwell) who has brought his beautiful wife to the middle of nowhere to make a go of it. Then of course, there’s Percy, and Nat Colorado (Adam Beach), the Native American man who the elder Dolarhyde (Ford) raised from a boy. Lurking about in the saloon is a wide-eyed damsel (Olivia Wilde) who knows more than she’s letting on. And, yes, for the Sunday afternoon crowd, there’s a kid and a dog too. No extra points for figuring out how far they make it.
The good news is that Favreau takes the time to make all of these people characters and we don’t mind so much that we recognize their traits because it’s great fun watching the way this set of actors rises to the occasion. Craig’s mystery man, whose real name is Jake, wakes up in the desert with an extraterrestrial trinket strapped to his arm. He’s lethal, no-nonsense, and apparently wanted for stagecoach robbery. Craig plays him with a variation on the rugged charm that he brought to his James Bond, mixing in token nods to classic western icons as varied as Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood. He’s embraced Jake’s humanity and this supports the character when he’s knee-deep in the more fantastical elements of the story. The way he handles that fancy piece of weaponry is particularly entertaining—offering a fresh spin on the way a cowboy’s firearm defines his character.
Harrison Ford, for the first time in ages, seems to actually give a crap. His Col Dolarhyde is no less a cliché than the rest of the townsfolk, but Ford dials into his world-weary warrior’s heart and makes him both formidable and occasionally admirable. In a lesser film we’d expect him to go bad or get picked off early. It’s Ford, so we know he’s going to be there for mostly the long haul, but there was no guarantee he’d be this good at it. Ford’s awake, on edge, and using his well-worn book of tricks to make Dolarhyde his own brand of iconic. I’d love to see this character again, perhaps in a different story. Olivia Wilde has a role that develops into lady exposition and then later into lady gunslinger. She’s got an unearthly kind of beauty that makes sense for her role, but there’s no depth to the character. In an odd turn of events, her arc here directly mirrors her turn in last year’s Tron: Legacy.
One of the things I really enjoyed about Cowboys and Aliens is the way Favreau has peopled the edges of the film with sturdy character actors. Rockwell, like Gary Oldman before him, is welcome in any role because it can be expected he’ll put his own unique spin on it. Doc isn’t much of a hero, but the thing we most remember is his curious agnostic bent, even in the face of the ‘demons’ who arrive from the sky. There’s a graveside prayer that feels earnest and real and stands Doc apart. Beach has played a number of disenfranchised Native Americans over the years but here he’sdoing a spin on the matinee vision of the ‘indian’. It’s good work and he has a fine chemistry with Ford. Keith Carradine and Clancy Brown are not nearly in enough stuff for my taste, and it’s good to see both escaped briefly from the SyFy ghetto to remind they are formidable and fascinating actors. Dano is just filling out his resume with a popcorn flick, but he’s good just the same—this younger Dolarhyde houses some of the same sniveling contempt that his boy preacher possessed in There Will Be Blood.
And then, what of the aliens? They come swooping out of the sky and into the town after the first half hour, cloaked in the darkness of night snatching up the inhabitants and whisking them off to an unknown location. We don’t see them at first, just their onslaught and the first time the night sky ignites with those unearthly lights, Favreau makes it’s a moment to savor. There’s a choreographed chaos perfectly timed to visually and thematically turn on its head what has, up to this point, been a traditional western adventure. However, it’s the science fiction part of this mash-up that gets short-changed. The alien invaders themselves are not exactly novel, and their origin is clearly not another planet but a drive-in cheapie from decades ago.
Goopy, malevolent monsters, they seem to have spawned from the same pod that has given birth to many recent alien incarnations; the Cloverfield beast, Super 8’s stringy critter, the invaders from both Skyline and Battle Los Angeles. All pincers, exoskeleton and luminescent, lanky tendrils, these extraterrestrials turn out to be nothing more than intergalactic prospectors with a penchant for demolishing and terrorizing the local indigenous. The parallels to our own history’s human behavior in the West isn’t forced, but it still reduces the intruders to a less specific and personal evil. None of them have identifiable personalities, and the most distinct is identified by a scar given to it by the hero.
What works better than the creatures is how their presence affects the world –and movie—they arrive in. Favreau uses this pervasive menace that threatens all people—pioneers, gunslingers, bandits, Apache, ranchers—in much the same way that Harry Turtledove employs his race of reptilian invaders in his alternate vision of World War II. It forces unlike entities to join together against a common threat. The best and most exciting image of the movie isn’t some special effects milieu, but the sight of a conjoined posse of all Western mainstays—cowboys, Indians, outlaws and lawmen—riding roughshod towards the alien stronghold.
Cowboys and Aliens is a simple concept and the execution is straight-forward. There’s no 3-D, no erratic camera work or hyper-stylized visual nonsense. Favreau knows the value of sweeping shots across dry brush land or craning panoramas of dusty streets and shabby saloons. Even the alien starship, embedded in the harsh desert earth, looks like a set piece from a 1950’s monster movie. The actors stare out from under wide-brim hats and look for nearby scenery to chew. The more familiar you are with the genre, the more fun it is. It’s not the best Western of the year (that’s still Rango and Meek’s Cutoff), and it’s not even the best alien vs. humans flick opening today (that would Attack the Block). What it does achieve is an earnest matinee joy that is hard to find in the crowded multiplex these days. We are used to the big battles and crazy light shows. What’s more rewarding is arriving at that scene where the mysterious hero rides his horse down the quiet main street of the town and heads out towards the lonesome prairie.
Cowboys and Aliens image gallery:
Jul 10 2011
PCN Rating: 
Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face is a true original, built from the familiar. With its French art-house sensibilities and Universal horror movie tropes all jammed together into a crusty old shell of pulp contrivance, the movie is a monster mash gone wild. Rejected by the snobby French critics of the time and dumped over here in the U.S. to double-bill with The Manster, this psychological thriller was far ahead of its time. I was legitimately shocked by how graphic the surgery sequences are and how stately and poetic the rest of the film is. The movie hides its madness underneath a high-class painterly veneer but make no mistake–it delivers a wicked jolt. 
The opening scene of Eyes is a strange moonlight car ride that ends with the driver–an older woman with a pearl necklace–dumping the body of a younger woman into the river. Made all the more disorienting by a feverish theme reminsicent of off-kilter carnival music, this sequence opens the film on a particularly dream-like note. The movie never leaves that state, and everything that occurs afterwards is akin to an Expressionist nightmare. The darkened French countryside looms up out of the shadows and we are introduced to an imposing chateau not far from Paris where the renowned plastic surgeon Prof Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) resides with his resurrected lover (Allida Valli–the same woman who dumped the body), kennel of snarling dogs and his presumed dead daughter. When the body surfaces and the police investigate, they find it missing all of its face except for the eyes. Génessier identifies the body as that of his daughter Christiane, but we learn the truth is far more sinister.
Génessier has a hidden laboratory underneath his sprawling estate–as all good movie mad scientists do–and he’s been taking the kidnapped girls here and removing their faces. He isn’t just your average deviant nutbag, disfiguring women in the name of science or for his own immoral thrill, but instead he’s a concerned father who caused an accident that claimed the visage of his own daughter, Christaine and he will do anything to restore her beauty. Wearing one of the creepiest flippin’ masks I have ever seen in a film, Christaine floats ethereally through the mansion, crying at her own warped appearance and communing with the birds and beasts of the estate.
The good doc has tried to give her a new face several times, but his process of grafting living tissue onto dead has a very short shelf life. Within a few days Christaine’s new ‘look’ has begun to rot and Génessier must remove it. Each time he does, the process begins again, with a new girl in danger of becoming the next victim. As the film documents these events, it also follows a pair of detectives who are closing in on Génessier and his experiments.
I was quite impressed with Eyes Without a Face and can easily understand why it’s regarded these days as a masterpiece; in its own way, it is. It shames the current crop of ‘edgy’ gore films that studios have been puking out. Recent genre pictures have insisted on giving us a level of detail and cruelty so great, that it becomes questionable if the experience is really any different than what one would get from watching a snuff film. Still, those films wear down their viewers, forcing them to dull their senses and blunt their conscience, and they become boring as a result. Franju’s film develops a disturbing hyper-reality that never allows the viewer to become comfortable or acclimated to its tone. The result is far more abrasive than simple shock tactics.
Eyes has a terrifying and harrowing–though visually outdated–surgery scene in the middle of the film where the doctor removes the face of one of his sleeping victims. But the scene is played for what it is; a surgery scene, not a grand guignol gore bath where a sadistic loon cackles merrily. The discomfort and cruelty in the scene are not derived from how explicit it is (it really isn’t) but by the callous and unfeeling way in which Génessier takes what he thinks his daughter needs. In fact, the poor girls who lose their identities–and usually their lives–aren’t the only ones trapped and victimized by the mad prof. Christaine herself longs to be free of this cage in which she is trapped, but the price of innocents to procure her freedom is too much.
By the time the film ends, she has achieved a certain sense of cosmic release from her plight, and all of the remaining characters recieve more or less what they have coming to them. That inexcorable sense of ‘justice’ is what adds a few layers to Eyes Without a Face. The film develops each pplayer as a fully rounded character with needs, wants and fears and each one behaves according to these qualities. The doctor is plagued with a guilt that only compounds his own self-absorbed madness, Christaine battles personal demons that peer out at her through her physical face, and even the ‘secretary’ has remorse over her part in these events.
From a visual standpoint, this is one of the most unique horror movies I have ever seen. It is never less than riveting and often excessively creepy and often there is nothing going on except characters conversing or Christaine wandering about her father’s house. The dark, catacomb-like kennel and the austere laboratory are amazing set pieces and the evocative mask that Christaine wears is singularly iconic. I’ve not seen another image quite like it anywhere else. This movie is a feast, not just for the eyes, but the senses too. Franju compiles every element of the production in such a way that when we look back at it, the seams are gone; it has transformed into an organic whole that feels like a living-breathing entity that was not created but has always just been, lurking there in the dark waiting to take a bite.
Jul 10 2011
As the release date for Marcus Nispel’s Conan the Barbarian gets closer, I find myself cautiously optimistic for it. The previous posters and trailers have made it look like a potentially good time at the movies. The cast is good, the production values are there, and there looks to be more Robert E. Howard here than in Milius’ 1982 version with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Additionally, after seeing Jason Momoa do his berserker thing on HBO’s Game of Thrones, I’ve convinced he can give us a Conan worthy of the character’s legacy.
Now we have this latest poster, which will no doubt look nice sitting in a theater lobby. Still, Nispel’s last movie, Pathfinder had some striking posters and still amounted to a limp swashbuckling disappointment.
What do you think? How does it fare against the promo art for previous Howard adaptations?
Check them out below. For kicks, I’ve even included Kull the Conquerer.
Jun 29 2011
PCN RATING: 
Transformers: Dark of the Moon may be the ultimate Michael Bay movie. Featuring skull-rattling action sequences, state-of-the-art special effects, over-heated set pieces and a severe lack of anything pretending to be intelligence or modesty, Transformers 3 comes off like a hyperactive kid’s afternoon playtime; a golden-age alien invasion flick as directed by Toy Story’s Sid, the boy who tied rockets to his action figures so he could watch them explode. There’s a certain cracked intensity at work here—a stubborn insistence on going over-the-top and beyond—that eventually translates to entertainment. At any rate, it’s a huge improvement over Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
Equipped with the shiny new toy of 3D, Bay hones his own diabolic craft and sets to the purpose of capturing some of the most explosive (this isn’t synonomous with good) cinematic action ever witnessed by human eyes. Yes, Bay loves explosions, and this was never more obvious than in the last installment of the franchise, where the frantic director threw every kind of concussive force he could at the screen; deafening, sonic waves, ground-shaking laser blasts, and in an epicly wrong move, several odious bursts of robotic flatulence. A titan of moronic and ill-advised blockbuster bloat, Fallen ham-strung the goodwill Bay had accrued with the first film, an enjoyable, if flawed, B-movie hiding out as an expensive A-movie. What he and Ehren Kruger do with the third installment is streamline and consolidate their ambitions. They haven’t made a shorter film–this is the longest of the three by a few minutes–but they have moved everything that isn’t a visual or visceral assault on the senses into the background. In essence, Bay found a way to build a better bomb.
Although it spends about an hour and fifteen minutes forebodingly ticking away, when this thing finally does go off it’s cinematic chaos that deserves to be seen, even if enjoyment passes you by. There’s plenty of Bay’s disaster-painting in the final third, but before that there’s more that meets the eye; a deliriously stupid conspiracy story involving downed Cybertronian space craft, interstellar gates, and a sublimely nutty scene where the real Buzz Aldren meets with Optimus Prime and tells him the truth of why mankind went to the moon all those decades ago.
Krueger wraps the foundations of the previous two pics into this one, and there’s something admirably insane about the way Moon’s primary arc emerges from the narrative wreckage of Transformers 2. The problem is, if you were able to follow along with the first two (and that’s a big if) then these new developments might not make logical sense. The All-Spark, the Matrix of Leadership; all just MacGuffin’s leading up to the sacred cargo housed on the dark side of the moon. Optimus Prime and his Autobots fear it’s power, while the outcast Megatron (losing his mind in a podunk backwater in Africa) races with the remaining Decepticons to harness it for no-doubt nefarious purposes. Enter several new robots, the most significant of which is Sentinel Prime (Leonard Nimoy) who looks like some kid took their Spock action figure and melted legos on top of it. Sentinel was the pilot of that starship and holds the secret to restoring the home-world of Cybertron. His exodus from the burning planet in the film’s prologue is one of snazziest visual moments.
The humans of Transformers have never been very interesting, but here they seem more perfunctory than ever. Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) may have saved the world twice and have a secret medal from Obama, but none of that translates to the workplace and now that he’s out of college he needs a job. Of course, that should be easy for Sam since he’s apparently managed to grab a full degree in a mere two years, quell an alien attack, and nab a major hottie in Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whitely), all while being a major spaz. LaBeouf doesn’t seem to know what he’s supposed to do, so he either adopts a quizzical scowl or just starts screaming and shaking, like Jerry Lewis on speed. Huntington-Whitely replaces the glossy sleaze of Megan Fox and while her acting ability amounts to blinking like a lighthouse S.O.S., she’s more natural in the physically taxing action scenes. The adolescent ogling isn’t as flagrant as the last go-round, where Bay made Fox’s curves so abstracted it was akin to looking at the rolling dunes of the Arabian desert. Whitely is more concerned with being an action hero herself; now it’s like a toy-line crossover with Barbie showing up to help the Autobots kick some Decepticon tail.
Also along for the tail kicking are all the returning heroes from the previous films; Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, John Turtorro and new faces in Frances McDormand, Patrick Dempsey, Alan Tudyk and John Malkovich. It’s always strange to see Coen Bros alums like McDormand, Malkovich and Turtorro riding the Bay train, but if they are going to drop in for a paycheck, one wishes he’d fine something genuinely quirky for them to do. Once the destruction started seeping into Chicago for that last hour of rowdiness, I was hoping to see John Goodman, maybe as a working-class trashman whose garbage truck has just revealed itself as a powerful player in the robot war. That at least, would be something of note. But no, none of these characters are people as much as they are a machine’s idea of what people would be like.
That probably explains why, for the most part, the robots fare better . And while there may be less robots here overall, Bay has certainly managed to diversify the Transformer line-up. There’s Optimus Prime, Ironhide, Megatron, and Starscream, but now there’s also a revamped Shockwave, with his own malicious drill that looks like a graboid made out of saw blades, and the Wreckers, a motley group of Brit thugs that work for Optimus. Imagine Ray Winstone crossbred with a propane tank and you have the idea. The designs are also fresher and cleaner and cinematographer Ami Mokrir creates compositions where the robots can spread out and fill the frame without the visual incoherence associated with the previous Transformer outings. For the first time in the franchise I got the impression this was an actual race of beings, and it was easier to identify their individual foibles and details. Still, what was true before is true here; Bumblebee, with his novel voice patterns built from pop culture fragments, is the most striking and engaging creature on display. The scene where he’s being chased by a pack of robotic wolf-beasts and transforms from a car to a robot and then back again,grabbing a screaming Sam as he ejects, is a masterpiece of effects and timing, and perfectly evokes the 80’s namesake.
Visually praising Dark of the Moon is no problem, and that’s where the real interest and juice of the film lie. The script is a behemoth of inelegance and dense, chugging drive. But Michael Bay is steering this particular beater and he pushes it to the max, right before racing it off a cliff with the audience strapped in. Thisn’t the death of cinema, it’s more like a celebration of its most sensational aspects. There are moments where a team of soldiers are skydiving through the ruined canyons of Chicago’s business district, dodging alien spacecraft as they go, that is as immediate and as visceral as the early world of silent filmmaking.
This is escapism that you eventually need to escape from. When the heroes are sliding down the front of a crumbling skyscraper I was transfixed by the illusion, alert to the reality on-screen, even if I wasn’t emotionally engaged. There’s a point where you have to applaud the chef, even if you don’t want another slice of the pie. I enjoyed it for what it was, but miss those early moments of the first film, where the most interesting thing onscreen was a young boy who just found out his first car could talk.
Dark of the Moon is all Bay, jettisoning some of those Spielberg touches (he’s a producer afterall) that were apparent in the first film. Ultimately, there’s no heart here and everything feels like it has been modified to the point of amoral voyeurism. We don’t question the stereotyping, don’t blink at the misogyny, and happily munch popcorn through scenes of terrorism, genocide and graphic murder because the filmmakers have purposefully leeched the human impact of those events from the experience. You don’t have to share Bay’s twisted world view to enjoy Transformers 3, and you don’t necessarily have to feel guilty either. This isn’t a movie where just turning off your brain is required, it’s insisted upon. Start firing up those neurons and you won’t make it far. Its a movie about robots, seemingly made by them too.
Do androids dream of electric sheep? No, they dream of Michael Bay movies.
