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shtk1979
Reviews
Green Lantern (2011)
'Green Lantern' is solid and dependable...
Only mildly interested in viewing this movie after the lukewarm impact of Thor and X-Men: First Class, I was pleasantly surprised to discover Green Lantern to be a fun and artistically-inspired romp through a universe monitored by the Green Lantern Corp -- an intergalactic police force that is imbued with great mind-bending powers via the the green light of universal willpower. The brash and irreverent earthling Hal Jordan is the latest recruit, discovered and appointed by the ring of a dying Lantern, Abin Sur, and he steps in to take up arms as the newly appointed protector of our universal sector. Abin Sur's murderer is the all-consuming and nebulous villain Parallax, a former Guardian of the Universe who was literally and figuratively consumed by the noxious and unstable yellow power of fear itself. Earth is next on the menu, and it's up to Hal Jordan, Green Lantern, to stop Parallax in time and save the day.
Now, I don't know why, but it's very easy to buy into the idea of Ryan Reynolds as a superhero, even a shiny green avenger-like one that vaguely resembles seaweed. His Hal Jordan character is both comedic and light-hearted, and hides an inner angst that stems from losing his father in a routine test flight for the same company he now flies for as a test pilot. He is single-minded in quelling the pangs of fear to the point of recklessness. The premise is that this is the very reason the ring chose him -- audiences will enjoy the joyride from the discovery of the existence of Green Lanterns to the sanctuary of Oa, their home world, to the sinuous graphics of Parallax's tentacles and gastropod-like body... Parallax has a minion on Earth, the tremulous Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard), whose inferiority complex rises against his as he is infected by a piece of the Parallax and slowly loses his sanity while gaining super-kinetic powers. The transformation of Hammond is both hilarious and grotesquely fascinating, which for a summer-time flick I find a terrific combination.
Mark Strong plays an excellent Sinestro, the Green Lantern Corp leader and friend of Abin Sur. His distaste of Hal Jordan and the human race is palpable (as are those wickedly expressive eyebrows of his) and he is harsh to the point of brutal. I loved the concise lore behind the rings and the lanterns (sometimes, too much intricacy makes my head spin), and I kind of enjoyed the silly schoolyard romance between Hal and fellow test-pilot Carol Ferris, played by the nubile Blake Lively. She evokes Iron Man's Pepper Potts as a type-A personality with a thing for Hal, despite his crazy impulsiveness and consequent irresponsibility for the repercussions. Terrific scene in which Carol discovers the identity of the Green Lantern and conveys the unspoken thought experienced by those who have witnessed the perplexing dynamic between damsels and their masked crusaders in the movies... it's just a mask people! It's no procedural drama, that's for sure. But it's got great special effects, lively (no pun intended) action scenes that keep you rooting for the Corps, and impress upon the audience the simplistic notion that the antidote to fear has always been, and will always be, courage. It's like grilled cheese with tomato soup, people. Comforting in its familiarity, never out of style.
Beginners (2010)
Couldn't wait for 'Beginners' to end...
Self-indulgent piece of neo-modernist crap, people.
Buoyed by the relatively positive ratings and reviews for this film starring the amiable Ewan McGregor and the ever dashing Christopher Plummer, I was led to believe that I was going to watch a quirky, life-affirming tale about the notion of carpe diem in the lives of two proverbially lost people, Oliver and Anna. I was so WRONG. Do not set foot in the theater unless you relish feeling as though you've been completed bamboozled by the trailers for this film.
The premise seems interesting enough: three months after the death of his gay and ailing father, Oliver struggles to retain a hopeful and positive outlook on the potential for real human connection in Los Angeles. In flashbacks, we are supposed to see the tender and open relationship that Oliver and his father, Hal, strive to cultivate during the last few years of his life, interspersed with brief flashbacks of Oliver's parents attempting to make the best of their marriage of convenience. Shortly after the death of his father, Oliver attempts to start a meaningful relationship with Anna, a beautiful yet commitment-phobic French actress (is there any other kind?). The movie is mostly a kaleidescope of early-Eisenhower era Pop imagery pertaining to sexual identity and gender roles that set the premise behind the disenchanted marriage of Oliver's parents, who stayed together for decades out of social obligation and acceptance rather than attraction.
So, the old man is dying, the son is trying, and the gays are crying... but what is this movie really about, I ask you? This is just another disappointing attempt to create a socially conscious indie-flick set in Los Angeles, but without the dreary and discomforting presence of any part of town east of the Hollywood Hills. It was basically '500 Days of Summer' sans the effortless charm of Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon Levitt or the killer soundtrack. Oliver and Anna's passivity and unblinking acquiescence to everything from Hal's protracted death from cancer to cathartic jaunts around the city to their near-undetectable breakup halfway through the film leaves the viewer completely cold -- we're not even really sure what happened. Did they have a fight? If so, what was it about? Was I eating popcorn when it happened? Sufficed to say, this movie is really light on the plot, heavy on the symbolic imagery. And I resent paying twelve bucks to experience what basically feels like a Rorschach test. I left the theater feeling completely cheated out of two hours and not a little frustrated with the lack of flow in the film. Read-throughs of the script must have been a breeze, since there were so many breathy protracted pauses and stilted narrative readings by McGregor to make up for the lack of actual plot. The French actress-girlfriend, played by Melanie Laurent, is so simultaneously chic and weird that you have a hard time taking your eyes off her, except to note how unbelievably contrived their first meeting and pursuant relationship is. They meet at a costume party, with him dressed like Freud and she looking like a sexually-confused schoolboy. Riiiiiight... could have been cute, I guess, if the actors had even a spark of chemistry between them. The French actress comes off as slightly bipolar; not sure if that was part of the script. Nothing about this movie seemed very deep or genuine, not the tears nor the laughter, what little of it there was.
Beware this film and all the hype portraying it as a feel-good drama. Let's call it what it was -- a derivative and highly uncomfortable attempt at expressing love between beautiful people on the big-screen. And - this is just a peeve of mine - next time, let's not be so eager to cast an Englishman, a Scot, and a Frenchwoman in a movie set in a city populated by Hispanics, Asians, and African-Americans. I got the distinct feeling that Ewan McGregor was terrified to speak for fear that his Scottish accent would take over the scene.
Larry Crowne (2011)
'Hank'ering for a light-hearted recession flick...
Okay, I'm just going to say it... I still LOVE Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts in frivolous romantic comedies. I have to respect actors who know their niche in the industry and lovingly embrace it. Tom and Julia as covert operatives for the CIA? Ugh, box office disaster. But... Tom as an age-worn everyman struggling to stay competitive in today's ruthless economic climate and Julia as a slightly cantankerous and pessimistic junior college instructor whose outlook on life is just waiting to be converted by Tom's positivity and self-initiative? Golden.
This film stars Tom Hanks as Larry Crowne, a superlative retail sales employee who finds himself on the chopping block after a recent corporate overhaul on account of the completely non-relevant fact that he never attended college. Eager to gain some control over his rapidly unraveling life, he enrolls in a local community college where he meets Julia Roberts' character, a speech and communications instructor named Mercedes whose faith in public education and sobriety are both on shaky ground. The audience will have a great time commiserating with Larry and the financial woes that he struggles with: downsizing from a gas- guzzling sport utility vehicle to discovering the joys of motor-scooting across the expansive Valley, struggling to balance part-time work and classes, losing his home, to finally, losing his preconceived notions about what exactly constitutes a successful life.
Tom Hanks does a great job in keeping the thematic undercurrents of the movie from dragging us down too far -- his Larry Crowne character is delightfully innocent in this movie, seemingly unmarred by the bitterness and resentment that so often colors stories of the recent economic recession and its downtrodden, and exudes a type of go-with- the-flow positivity that I recall seeing in 'Forrest Gump.' Heck, he even gets the girl.... on a side-note, check out the actor who plays the economics professor in the fictional East Valley Community College. It's guaranteed to induce uncomfortable flashbacks about your own introductory weeder courses in college!
This movie was deliciously light and frothy, a sort of pared-down social commentary on how people need to adapt and keep adapting in these times, how fickle and unsympathetic the winds of change can be. The critics who call it trite and without substance can kiss my solid middle-class ass -- I found it to be a gentle reminder about how tough it is out there economically, and the message sat well with the audience I attended with, who weren't really interested in watching anything that hit too close to home.
Go watch this flick if you have the desire to watch an after-school special made for adults. Okay, so the likelihood that an unemployed, middle-aged man in LA would go back to school, ride with a scooter-gang, and develop an attraction for a hottie professor that was reciprocated is practically nil. We can't eat fiber all the time, right? At least this picture promotes staying positive in light of the crappy economy, and I was rooting for Larry Crowne from the second he started downsizing his life. Live long and prosper, everyone.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)
Big and shiny, but not much substance...
Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon is one of those quintessential action-fantasy-flicks that unfortunately lacks any semblance of a decent script. Now, before I get pelted with tomatoes for having the audacity to criticize what is basically the biggest blockbuster this summer, let me share some of my woes. Case and point: the resounding screech of metal against metal and the peppered pops of semi-automatic weapons are still ringing in my ears, but I cannot remember a single freaking' thing that ANY of the characters, flesh-born or computerized, said during entire three-hour long feature. Not a single one-liner. Nary a pithy comment about how we as a human race have to survive to fight one more day. Come on, man! No inspirational speech on the eve of apocalyptic genocide? Have writers learned nothing from the success of 'Independence Day,' 'Terminator,' or '300'? The premise is simple: before the destruction of the Autobots' home planet of Cybertron, a single ship containing a contingency survival plan for the inhabitants of the planet managed to escape and marooned itself on the Earth's moon. The space race of the mid-sixties was supposedly an attempt to retrieve classified intelligence on the nature of the crash material, and in the pursuit of this knowledge it is discovered that Decepticons and humans have been plotting this entire time to keep an important secret, cloaked by the dark of the moon, from falling into the hands of the Autobots and their allies.
I am not a hater, people. I grew up teething on the plastic wing-dings of Optimus Prime and Starscream myself, and if there was anyone out there rooting for this flick, it was me. But...it was a hot mess, baby. Not in terms of action -- it's categorically impossible for a Michael Bay movie to lack in visual stimuli -- but it just reeked from the lack of character development when it came to the story line and the acting. When did Sam Witwicky become such an angry little fellow anyway? He's almost shrill, and he needs to take anger-management courses. Shia LeBeouf is becoming one of those Joe Pesci types of actors that always end up yelling and pacing and angrily hitting things on-screen just to make a point. And Ken Jeong was the scariest caricature of an Asian corporate douche if I saw one. He needs to take a Xanax and call Paramount in the morning. The whole schizo-multiple personalities thing is so done. What I wouldn't give to see Ken Jeong being funny, instead of desperate.
Oh, and the model was ridiculous. This is a point that bears repeating: on behalf of bewildered women everywhere, the presence of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley as Sam's devoted girlfriend was just plain RIDICULOUS. A walking, talking Pantene commercial in the middle of Cybertronic war? What were you thinking, Michael Bay? Yes, she was freakishly long-legged and gorgeous -- but dude, there is a time and place for that type of vapid sultriness, and the eve of destruction is not it! If I were angry little Sam, I would have instantly hooked up with Frances MacDonald's powerful CIA operative character, because at least she's tough and wears sneakers and I wanna LIVE, dammit, and she has the greatest likelihood of making it out alive. Heck, even Megan Fox seemed like she could take a punch if necessary. This new Barbie-doll looked like her shin was gonna snap in half if a shard of glass fell on it (which incidentally she somehow managed to avoid, despite falling out of a damn skyscraper).
In summary, the film's three hours of non-narrative battle footage in which machines are burned, wrecked, and incinerated was just a bit too much for me to handle without the occasional glimpse into the depths of humanity. The few scenes of comrades sacrificing their lives for one another and of the military forces tirelessly re-engaging the enemy despite certain defeat just didn't have the same gravitas, due to sensation overload. Wanna know the reason news channels don't just film actual war zones for hours and replay them without editing or injecting some sort of human interest story? It desensitizes us, folks. Deadens our brains. We begin to feel ambivalent about the outcome. I stopped caring what would happen to Sam Witwicky and his ridiculously attired model-cum-political attaché girlfriend (four-inch platforms while running for your life down Wacker Drive? Really?) less than an hour and a half into the film, and the yawns punctuating the theater during the last battle scene clued me into the fact that I wasn't the only one shifting restlessly in my seat from boredom.
The scenes that really took my breath away actually had nothing to do with the Autobots or Decepticons. The audience got to see some truly awesome scenes of men (not machines) deploying from carrier planes and sailing between the skyscrapers like flying squirrels in the rain-forest. The film tempts you with the trailer of a swiftly tilting skyscraper and people scrabbling like gerbils to keep their footing... maybe it was the green-screen affecting the acting chops, but it should have engendered more feelings of tension and suspense in the audience. The chemistry was off somehow -- what should have been a nail-biter was mostly just exhausting to watch.
Go see this movie if you have a few hours to burn, but don't feel like being bogged down by a creative storyline. Just focus on the incessant clanging and gnashing of metal belonging to Autobots and Decepticons alike as they transform like they're on steroids -- a buddy of mine mentioned why they kept transforming so much, since the beloved toys of youth consisted of one, two, three, maybe four twists before yielding Optimus or Bumblebee. It was the original beauty of an Autobot -- the balance of form and function. Take that, Michael Bay.