2011 - FLYING SWORDS OF DRAGON GATE - sort of a remake of Dragon Gate Inn

Filmmaker Tsui Hark's sort of update of Dragon Gate Inn which came out in the mid 1960's and was directed by one of the best wuxia filmmakers King Hu.  Tsui Hark brought his usual vigorous staging over the top action and crazy visual effects while updating the plot to fit his style of storytelling.

 

Hark cast Jet Li who was pushing 50 when this film came out.  Li still was pretty agile of course it didn't hurt that he was assisted by the wild wire work that the Asian stunt arrangers like to use during the action scenes.  As usual with Hark the film was loaded up with not one but in this film three gorgeous Asian female actors, Zhou Xun, Chris Lee and Gwei Lun-mei.  As in many of Tsui Hark's films the women are equally as good at  sword fighting as the men.

 

Flying Swords of Dragon Gate involves the Emperor's main consort (mistress) attempting to eliminate the Emperor's harem in order to retain power.  One of the harem's consorts flees into the desert where she ends up at the Dragon Inn and is protected by Jet Li.  Throw in a roving gang of outlaws, soldiers loyal to the main consort, a mystical desert dust storm which threatens to blow the Inn off the face of the earth and you have a lot of opportunities for Tsui Hark to top one action scene after another.  Just for good measure there is also a hidden city buried in the desert made out of gold for the outlaws to loot when the pacing of the film slows down which it never does.

I usually enjoy Hark's films.  Watching one of his films usually guarantees you are in for a pretty entertaining time.  Hark is definitely one of the masters of the action genre and at age 75 he's still working.

This film was written by Tsui Hark, Zhu Yali and Ho Kei-ping.  The running time is kind of on the long side at 125 minutes, but it's never dull. 

2011 - WE BOUGHT A ZOO, entertaining thanks to one really good performance

A very slight film from one time wonder boy Cameron Crowe.  No need to rehash this story since it's in the title.  It's generally known that Crowe was a big admirer of Billy Wilder a director who really knew how to blend comedy and drama into his films.  However We Bought A Zoo seems more like a Frank Capra film than a Wilder film and we're talking a Frank Capra film from the 1950's when Capra was in his big time artistic and creative decline.

This film is kind of a mix of comedy, family drama and romance.  It has some good scenes and some good actors but it you are allergic to cute little kids beware because this one has a real scene stealer.  The underrated Scarlett Johnansson is a zoo keeper and potential love interest and Thomas Hayden Church plays the brother of the main protagonist.  He isn't in the film enough but he's very funny

 

What makes this film very watchable is Matt Damon as the widower father looking to restart his life with his family by buying a decrepit zoo.  Damon pulls off the comedy and family drama stuff expertly and manages to sell even the silliest scenes in the film with his sincere performance.  He makes this film worth seeing.

 

An uneven film at best, this is another example of actors coming to the rescue of a less than perfect screenplay.  

The film was written by Cameron Crowe and Aline Brosh McKenna.  The running time is an overlong 124 minutes. 

1973 - PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID, Peckinpah's eulogy for the western film

Sam Peckinpah directed yet another one of those "end of the west films" which puts him in good company with John Ford. Don Siegel, Sergio Leone and George Roy Hill.  Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid is about the friendship of Garrett and the Kid.  As the frontier ends and civilization i.e. corporate greed takes over Garrett chooses to take the side of corporate interests at the expense of getting rid of his outlaw friend

Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid was a difficult production for Peckinpah.  Peckinpah's alcoholism, production overruns and a very hostile relationship with the failing MGM studios resulted in Peckinpah losing control over the final cut of the film.  The history of this film gets even more complicated as the film actually exists in three different versions.  The studio cut, Peckinpah's preview cut and finally a cut that assembled scenes from the studio cut and the preview cut which is called the special edition cut. Confused yet?

 

Peckinpah hired a cast of performers that he had worked with in the past. It's almost a curtain call of western actors,  James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Slim Pickens, Richard Jaeckel, Chill Wills, Barry Sullivan, Katie Jurado, Jack Elam, R. G. Armstrong and in some really offbeat casting Bob Dylan. Dylan wrote the score for the film which really displeased Peckinpah.  Peckinpah himself shows up as what else, an undertaker towards the end of the film.

Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid's reedited versions are now considered something of a masterpiece.  No question Peckinpah has a great feeling for western landscape.  He's also good with his actors and no one can photograph gunfights like him.  However I though  this film was very choppy and disjointed as the story moved from scene to scene.  I think you can blame this on Peckinpah's tampering with Rudy Wurlitzer's original script.  

In general Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid is a good film but it is probably of greater interest to fans of the director.  

The film was written by Rudy Wurlitizer with uncredited rewriting from Sam Peckinpah, the running time is 115 minutes.

2011 - COLOMBIANA, is a girl watching film with the girl being Zoe Saldana

This is one of the action revenge films where the protagonist reeks havoc on the gang that killed her family.  But what the film is really about is the actor Zoe Saldana in really short outfits or in really tight  outfits or is some cases really short tight outfits shooting people for  about 100 minutes of screen time.

There is absolutely no question that Saldana is very fit after watching only a few minutes of this film.  She's also good at holding big heavy guns and bending and twisting her body around as she crawls through the main villains lair.  Saldana is such a dominating presence in this film that it's impossible to recall the names of any other actor. 

 

The producer of Colombiana Luc Besson has filmed a lot of these hot chicks with guns films.  La Femme Nikita, Anna, Lucy, and The Family to mention a few.  If Besson isn't producing these weird hyper violent/erotic action films he is directing them.  Besson does know how to film action so if he wants to include a beautiful woman in his action scenes why not.

 

To give Zoe Saldana her due she is actually a talented performer.  She was the best thing in Emilia Perez and she should really get all the credit for holding that very wobbly mess of a film together.  I guess if you are in the mood for a very doopy but good looking action film Colombiana is one to watch.

The film was written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen.  The running time is 108 minutes.

2011 - THE IDES OF MARCH, sort of interesting politial drama

 George Clooney directs a little better than usual for him.  Clooney also plays a very liberal Democratic governor running in a president primary for the party nomination.  Ryan Gosling is a supposedly idealistic junior campaign manager.  Phillip Seymour Hoffman is Clooney’s campaign manager.  As you can see Clooney pulled together a good cast for this political drama.

The performances are at a high level, the story telling is fairly good for a Clooney film.  In his other films, Clooney has not always been the best judge of the scripts that he picks.  But with the Ides Of March he seems a little more engaged in the plot this time.  Clooney has donated a lot of money to Democratic candidates in past campaigns so he probably knows a thing or two about back room political manipulations.

If there is any criticism of the film, it would have to be of the character Ryan  Gosling plays.  He suddenly seems to switch from political idealist to hardened political operation mostly because of the one indiscretion of the candidate he is trying to get elected.  Also Clooney's very liberal governor seems just a little too over the top politically to be a viable candidate running for president.

Still the film is not without interest.  It didn't do well commercially possibly because the general public is already extremely pessimistic about the political process and doesn't need a film to tell them that.

The film was written by George Clooney, Beau Willimonn and Grant Heslov.  The running time is 101 minutes.

2011 - CARNAGE, a black and funny chamber comedy

Carnage the film is based on a play by Yasmina Reza called "God Of Carnage: in the theater.   It is a very black comedy.  After an altercation by two grade school children results in one child losing some teeth, the parents of the respective boys meet to discuss the consequences, let the fun begin.

As they attempt to iron out the problems between the two children it's safe to say that decorum breaks down as the accusations of blame fly left and right.  The nastiness between the two couples and at times the men between the women is highly amusing.

This film has an excellent cast, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly are the parents of the injured child. Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz are the other parents.  Foster had been focusing her career on directing but she was always a talented actor and gave a great performance as a reasonable person who slowly descends into anger and incrimination.

Kate Winslet has always been a "go for it actor," and she certainly went for it in this film.  John C. Riley is good as Foster's kind of dopey husband and Christoph Waltz as the checked out husband of Winslet is amusing as the the only one who sort of has a clue about the situation between the two boys even though he is basically a misogynist and kind of a jerk.

Roman Polanski in his late 70's directed and you can see what appealed to this guy with this play. He has always had a fairly dark view of the human race and this story certainly fits the bill for him.  Carnage is essentially a four character play set in an apartment, but Polanski knows how to photograph the story in such a way that is visually interesting.

The screenplay was by Polanski and Yasmina Reza, the running time is 80 minutes. 

2011 - DAMSELS IN DISTRESS, an attempt at a "civilized" comedy

From cultist comedy director Whit Stillman, who after a very long break between films comes this comedy about college life.  Greta Gerwig the future director of Little Women and Barbie is Violet Wister who along with a group of college girls, run a suicide prevention center.  The center's idea of working with suicidal people is to feed them donuts and coffee and have them take up tap dancing as a form of therapy.  The film pivots to the love lives of the girls and has a lot of amusing and occasionally funny moments involving smelly college guys and discussions about sex as practiced by members of a religious sect called Catharism.

The writer/director Whit Stillman specialized in these kinds of what I can only describe as very coy comedies beginning with Metropolitian, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco.  Stillman is not a prolific writer.  There was about a 13 year break between The Last Days of Disco and Damsels in Distress.  Everyone talks in a rather mannered, (some would say stilted) way. Overall Stillman's films are kind of an acquired taste.

 

What the film really has going for it is the performance of Greta Gerwig.  Her character of Violet Wister is very funny as she attempts to bring a civilizing influence to a bunch of drunk college frat boys.  The film is worth watching for her alone. Overall this film is entertaining if you are in the mood for some real eccentric humor.  This film is so strange it even has a couple of musical numbers tacked on to the end of it.

The film runs 99 minutes.

2011 - THE LINCOLN LAWYER, a good crime thriller

 The brief no give away synopsis of this film is, a defense lawyer who works out of his car gets involved with several cases which turn out to be interconnected.  This is a film adaptation of the book's author Michael Connelly's story.  The film follows Connelly's book fairly closely which is probably the reason it works as well as it does

Michael Connelly is good at atmosphere in his novels and the film version of The Lincoln Lawyer does have a nice feeling for Los Angeles.  Connelly had been a crime reporter for many years so he brought that experience with him when writing this novel and his other successful book series about detective Harry Bosch.

 

 The creators of this film were smart enough to leave what worked in the book alone without signifciatnly changing things.  The end result is a tricky crime thriller.  The film  also has a decent mainstream Hollywood cast starting with Mathew McConaughey as Mickey Haller the defense attorney who is a bit of a shyster.  The rest of the cast has been carefully put together.  Marisa Tomei is Haller's ex-wife, William H Macey is a private investigator,  one time pretty boy Ryan Phillippe is one of Haller's clients.

 

It's actually kind of refreshing to see a mainstream commercial film that hit’s its targets for a change and produce an entertaining story.

The screenplay is by John Romano, the running time is 118 minutes.

2011 - PINA, a well done film about dance

I suppose it anyone was going to make a film about a German choreographer names Pina Bausch and make it interesting it would be Wim Wenders.  Pina Bausch died before Wenders shot this film and her dance company had to persuade Wenders to finish the film.

What we have in this film are several very interesting and good dance pieces. In between the dancing Wenders has the dancers speak about Pina Bausch. However it's a voice over narration instead of the usual talking head stuff.

 

Gene Kelly had tried unsuccessfully to make a film about dance called Invitation To The Dance but couldn't pull it off.  Wenders on the other hand has carefully thought out how to photograph the dancing in this film and it comes out very well.

 

The film was written by Wim Wenders and runs 106 minutes.

2011 - WISHFUL DRINKING - Carrie Fisher bummer weekend part 1

Had an opportunity to watch a couple of personal films about the life of Carrie Fisher, actress/writer/Princess Leia.  First up is this autobiographical film, Wishful Drinking.  This show is based on a book that Carrie Fisher wrote which appears to be essentially a memoir of her growing up in Hollywood in a chemical haze.

Fisher was the daughter of Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher and while watching this film she sure doesn't let you forget it.  The show is basicall  a therapy session with Fisher recalling her apparently unhappy childhood.

I guess the theme of this film is that money and celebrity can't buy you happiness.  Fisher spends a lot time on her screwed up family and extended family tree.  Fisher suffered from mental illnesses and had a drug problem which she apparently was able to get a handle on which is no small feat.

Wishful Drinking is not exactly a fun hour sitting in front of the television set, it's kind of like hanging out with a friend who relates their personal problems in excruciating detail that after a while you want to yell "enough."

76 minutes

2011 - A DANGEROUS METHOD - literate treatment about a crazy person and situation

Michael Fassbinder is analyst Carl Jung, Keira Knightley is his crazy patient who he treats with some unusual psychiatric methods which include sleeping with her and spanking her.  Into this mix is Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud.

For all the implied kink in this film, this is a very talky story.  There are lots of discussions about psychoanalysis.  This film is a real blab fest although the actors make the dialog sound pretty interesting

Keira Knighley gives either a brave larger than life performance as the crazy patient or she is so over top it's hard to know where the top exactly is.  Either way it's certainly interesting.

Christopher Hampton adapted the film from his play.  Hampton is known for his classy adaptions of his plays like Dangerous Liaisons and Atonement.  The director is extreme film maker David Cronenberg so it's easy to guess where the emphasis on sadomasochism came from.

99 minutes.

2011 - TINKER TAYLOR SOLDIER SPY, a spy thriller that only the British can do.

If I hadn't seen the original British mini series with Alec Guinness, I would have had no idea as to what was going on.  There is a double agent in British intelligence and former spy George Smiley is called in figure out who he is. 

This film is more or less a redoing of that miniseries and it's very well done.  It certainly captures the bureaucracy of the British spy organization called "The Circus."  The author John Le Carre had been
an employee of MI5 and MI6, the British intelligence services.  Le Carre must have also been familiar with with the "Cambridge Five" a group of students recruited by the Soviet Union who managed to work themselves up into high positions in British intelligence.  This is the basis of the plot of Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy.

This film is superbly cast.  It has a bunch of very good British actors in it.  The pivotal character of spy George Smiley is played by Gary Oldman of all people.  This is and actor who usually specializes in playing bad guys in crummy action films.  Oldman gives a very nuanced performance as a bland bureaucrat who is also a very sharp spy.

This film is so low key that you really have to pay attention to what is going on at all times.  Still, this is a very good espionage drama.

127 minutes.

2011 - THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO - the remake

A failed attempt to start an Americanized version of the Stieg Larsson trilogy chronicling the adventures of journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the goth Lisbeth Salander an almost unbelievable female character who is part Superwoman, computer genius and a scary Agatha Christie detective type of character.

 The remake was  meant to cash in on the Larsson trilogy by making a film set in Sweden without those pesky subtitles to translate the Swedish dialog.  However this was no cheap rip off.  The director is David Fincher who kind of specializes in creepy thrillers like Seven, Zodiac and Panic Room.  The writer was Steven Zaillan who has been associated with classy films like Schindler's List and Gangs of New York.   This was not some lame Roger Corman production.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo 2011 version appears to follow the original 2009 film fairly closely to the best of my memory.  Maybe it's a little to close, I felt like I was watching the same film over again except no one this time sounded like that Muppet Swedish Chef puppet.  It appears there was some attempt to streamline the last part of the plot but this version has the same issues as the original film, a very messy episodic story that doesn't seem to be able to focus on one main plot.

This is one of those films where the production company wanted to have their cake and eat as much as possible.  The filmmakers wanted commercial success and awards.  In this case the end result was middling on both accounts.

158 minutes.

2011 - COWBOYS AND ALIENS, uh huh.

Getting towards the end of my space aliens invade earth and good old American ingenuity repels these slimy creatures film series.  Cowboys and Aliens can distinguish itself from the other two films I have seen by virtue of the fact that this preposterous premise does not have one joke or lighthearted moment in it.  Not once during this film is there even a hint to the audience that this silly film is not to be taken even remotely seriously.

The casting of the film further emphasizes the lack of fun this film should have provided.  Harrison Ford is the completely dour leader of the town who is trying to get his son back who has for reasons I never understood been kidnapped by the space aliens.  Daniel Craig, probably the most humorless actor to ever play James Bond plays a humorless cowboy trying to stop the space aliens.  It appears that Craig is pretty much a "Johnny One Note" of an actor after his performance in this thing.  The guy never cracks a smile throughout the entire film.  Good thing the film has Olivia Wilde in it because what would one of these films be without a hot chick who could get a job as a "Victoria's Secret" runway model running around.

This film has some fairly heavy hitters behind it.  Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard and Brian Glazer produced it.  Jon Favreau, the director of a couple Iron Man films was not unfamiliar with handling this kind of science fiction/fantasy material.  That this bunch couldn't see the weaknesses in the story material is kind of amazing.  I assume they thought the concept and title would be enough to bring in an audience.  Apparently no one wanted to do the hard work to get a decent screenplay out of this crap.

I've seen the director Jon Favreau on You Tube doing Q and A's with directors like Martin Scorsese.  Favreau is an articulate guy and clearly seems to know what he's talking about.  So I can only imagine what was going through Favreau's head during the making of this film.  Was he thinking, "I'll stage this space alien attack the way Scorsese did in Mean Streets."

118 minutes, written by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, five writers never a good sign for a film.

2011 - BATTLE LOS ANGELES, dumb but fun science fiction action stuff

If you look at the title, the cast and the director, you should have a good idea of what you are about to watch.  Space aliens are landing in Los Angeles in order to steal our water.  To the rescue is the United States Marines or specifically one squad in particular which will apparently figure out a way to take down the invasion of these slimy things pretty much on their own.

The squad is the usual bunch of marine movie cliches.  There's the veteran sergeant who's about to retire, the green first lieutenant whose first command this is.  The black guy, the guy about to get married etc.  Their mission is to rescue some civilians trapped behind enemy lines which naturally includes a couple of cute kids in need rescuing.

The film is shot in the now overused "shaky cam" style with the camera bouncing around and following the squad to give it a look of "you are there" realism.  At times the camera is so shaky it's almost impossible to figure out exactly who the marines are shooting at with the spastic camera racing around all over the place. 

OK,  his film is essentially Independence Day crossed with every war movie cliche I ever sat through.  My expectations for this film were so low I actually kind of enjoyed it for the most part.  I just waited to see when they would dredge up the next film trope which was kind of fun.

Written by Christopher Bertolini the running time is 116 minutes.

2011 - TRANSFORMERS: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, or more crap for the treadmill

Unbelievably 2 hours and 30 minutes of robots bashing and busting each other and anything else that gets in their way.  This is the third in the Shia LaBeouf trilogy not to be confused with the Apu trilogy or Pagnol's Fanny trilogy.

The appeal for Michael Bay seems to be in staging elaborate scenes of improbable mass destruction while slobbering over the latest female flavor of the moment Rosie Huntington something or other.

The third film in this series is basically the same as the first two films no better or worse than the previous films.

154 minutes.

2011 - HAYWIRE, an attempt to update a 1960's spy film

Quirky director Steven Soderbergh and the writer Lem Dobbs seem to have a few ideas on their minds for this film.  They want to make an action star our of a mixed martial artist named Gina Carano, they are attempting to update the serious spy thriller which was usually competing with the James Bond series to a more contemporary time period and finally they are trying to make the action scenes in this film a little more realistic.

Since Carano had limited acting experience, Soderbergh put together a fairly high powered cast to support her.  Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum and Ewan McGregor are essentially supporting characters for Carano.

This is a modest but good action film.  The fight sequences are staged as realistically as possible and whatever Gina Carano lacks in acting ability she is certainly in very good shape physically when it comes to the running, jumping, fighting and shooting stuff.

As with all of Soderbergh's films this a technically well made and competent film that avoids a lot of overblown director's "touches."

93 minutes.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - GHOST PROTOCOL - a slick action thriller

Got this one out of the way.

Same old same old with a couple of variations in the formula.  Cruise and Paramount hired Pixar animation director Brad Bird who was able to stick some humor into this series.  The film is still pretty darn shallow even for a lightweight entertainment.

The humor in this film comes from the failure of the high tech gadgets when the team needs them the most which is probably the main contribution of Brad Bird.  However I have to assume that Paramount and the producer kept a tight lease on Bird because the film is still essentially the same as the previous three films.

A very watchable time killer although I couldn't remember most of it and really didn't care.

Mission:  Impossible - Ghost Protocol is over two hours which is way to long for this kind of film.

132 minutes.

2011 - TOWER HEIST, is OK

The old "let's pull off a heist with a team" story.  Tower Heist is about as good as the original Ocean's 11 which isn't saying much since that film was no masterpiece of the crime thriller heist genre.

Film nerds dump on Brett Ratner but he's no better or worse than any other director pulling together a by the numbers studio project.

A time killer, you can stop the movie, get a beer out of the fridge, go to the bathroom, get something to eat, etc.

104 minutes, written by Ted Griffin and Jeff Nathanson.

2011 - THE ARTIST, the overrated

Only the charm of the actors Jean Dujardin, the star of those silly "OSS 117" films and Berenice Bujo, keep this thing from sinking like a rock. 

The Artist is a comedic take on the romance between Greta Garbo and silent screen star John Gilbert.  Gilbert's career was destroyed by the coming of sound and his alcoholism so naturally that would make a funny movie.  This isn't really a silent comedy, it's just someone's idea of what a silent comedy was like back in the good old days.  It takes more than just  shooting the film in the old film ratio with black and white to make this a silent film.  The Artist lacks the special technique that a Chaplin, Keaton or Lloyd could bring to a pantomime performance.

For a French film, the supporting cast is weirdly loaded with American supporting characters like John Goodman, James Cromwell, Penelope Ann Miller and character actor Ed Lauter, none of them really make much of an impression, and I'm not even sure exactly why they are in this film other than to evoke some kind of memory of old Hollywood.

This film is just incredibly slight, yet it's getting good reviews by many critics and winning many awards.  Apparently none of them have seen any Ernest Lubitsch or King Vidor silent films

100 minutes,  written by Michel Hazanavicius.