Fast Five

I was so bored by the first Fast and the Furious that I haven't even bothered to see any of the previous sequels. Then I started seeing a lot of positive reviews for this one (the Onion AV Club even gave it a B and they hate everything), and it looked like it might be the kind of over the top unintentionally hilarious action that I generally enjoy (see Cliffhanger for an example) so I decided to check it out. I'm somewhat surprised to say that it actually kind of was entertaining. Oh its aggressively stupid and implausible, listen to this podcast for a pretty humorous breakdown, but so were most of Sly Stallone's films and it didn't stop be from enjoying/laughing at them. The acting is about what you would expect (though I did enjoy The Rock who spent the whole film turned up to 11), and it's twenty minutes too long, but overall surprisingly not sucky (technical term). I don't want to bother going through the plot holes since that's part of the fun, but the biggest thing it did reemphasize is how aggressively apathetic I am too anything involving cars. Seriously anytime they showed a slow motion sports car peeling out, or somebody staring intently while turning (which was often), my eyes just glazed over. To be fair the vehicles I have driven in my life are:

1978 VW Bus

1982 Volvo 740 GLE

1980 Honda Accord Wagon

1989 Honda Accord

1992 Toyota Camry

1994 Toyota Camry

So what do I know. Still the musical montage in Rocky IV remains my all time favorite movie car scene and that's only because Rocky shifts approximately 400 times while trying not to cry. Art.

So yeah Fast 5 - surprisingly not completely worthless and generally watchable in a really stupid, probably racist (mainly coming from the way they portray of Tyrese Gibson's character. Really a fast talking black guy who basically spends the entire file going "Awww Schnap"? Its practically a minstrel show), super loud kind of way.

Less Than Zero

Less Than Zero may be one of the pointless films I've ever seen. Not the worst, the most pointless. Lets go through a brief plot rundown shall we:

-Open with a scene of Jami Gertz, Andrew McCarthy and Robert Downey Jr. graduating from high school. Everybody is so happy and full of life.

-Smash Cut to six months later, McCarthy comes back to LA for Christmas break and finds his girlfriend Gertz has not only slept with his best friend, but is not a crack snorting model (I know that's a redundant description). But even more dramatically Downey has in the course of six months bankrupted a record label, become addicted to smack, and owes $50K to drug dealer James Spader which he has no hope of repaying. Spader of course makes him become a male prostitute in order to get restitution.

-We have an hour of Gertz whining at McCarthy to help Downey (even though the film gives no reason why he should other than the fact that they were high school friends), even as Downey keeps getting deeper and deeper into trouble.

-Rehab scene where downey gets clean after one night of detoxing.

-Cut to Palm Springs, Spader acts Spadery, he an McCarthy exchange blows, then McCarthy drives off in his convertible with Gertz and Downey.

-Downey dies on the drive home

-Funeral

FIN

Trust me this description makes the film seem much more interesting than it actually is. I don't mind bleakness (I am someone who's watched Requiem for Dream more than once) I just ask that the desolation have a point, or at least be artfully rendered (like Raging Bull). With Less than Zero we actually have a rather puritanical anti-drug PSA (I guess), but it has none of the dark humor or energy of American Psycho and Rules of attraction (more recent films based on the works of Brett Easton Ellis) which also dealt with the shallowness of materialism but were also, you know, entertaining. Whatever I'm done, I'll just say that Less than Zero equals the number of minutes I felt weren't a waste of my time (zing!).

Source Code

Source Code is a well-executed sci-fi thriller that has a somewhat more intelligence than the average offering. It doesn't reach the level of something like Inception, and isn't as subtle as director Duncan Jones' previous effort Moon, but overall its solid and worth checking out. Other than that I only have a few comments:

-The actual ending is a but of a cop out, and almost seems like they're setting up for a sequel which makes no sense given the logic of the film. The natural ending point would have been about five minutes earlier when they essentially stop time.

-So Jake Gyllenhal's character falls in love with Michelle Monaghan over the course of the same 8 minutes (basically the hook of the film is that he continually goes back and relives the last 8 minutes of a a guy who died in a terrorists attack life to try and find the bomber). Granted he probably goes back, lets say, 20 times, but I'm unconvinced that he could become so enraptured in approximately 3 hours that he's be willing to do what he does in the film. Lets just say after he has to spend some time with her outside of that 8 minute window and it turns out she's someone horrible, like a Thomas Kinkade fan, and now he's stuck. Maybe not the best planning there. Of course Michelle Monaghan's character looks like Michelle Monoaghan so maybe I'm just completely off base.

Hanna

First go watch the trailer , now you pretty much know what the film is about and I don't need to recap. See, we call that division of labor around here. In general the film opens strong, moves along reasonably well, and then kind of peters out at the end (kind of like your...never mind I'll restrain myself). Its reasonably entertaining, and as I've said before I always enjoy seeing kids beating up adults (or getting beaten up by adults I'm not picky, I just like intergenerational warfare). The action does get a bit repetitive, and when the film tries to interject some humanity by having Hanna interact with a 'colorful' family it doesn't really go anywhere. Indeed they just sort of disappear without any real resolution so the film probably would have been better off not even introducing them. Still thats a minor point, and generally the film is entertaining in a 'don't think too hard about the logic' kind of way.

All that said, there is a fundamental flaw in the set up that keeps me from getting wholly invested with whats going down. Basically the whole premise of the film is that Cate Blanchett's character has been hunting Hanna and her father for 16 years and will stop at the nothing to stop them. As a result Hanna has to go and take down approximately 5000 government operatives and assorted hit men in order to have a chance at peace. The problem is that the way Blanchett plays the character is more exasperated than driven. She seems generally annoyed when she gets the signal that Hanna's father is still alive, not because that she wished they were dead, but because now she has to deal with it. Really you get the feeling that if Hanna's father had just kept his head down and moved to, say, Fontana, Blanchett would have been completely fine never dealing with them again and hundreds of expendable crewman could of avoided death at the hands of a borderline psychotic teenager. As a result I never really bought that anything that happened was necessary, and felt that the father was just a paranoid sociopath who could have given his daughter a normal life if he wasn't so consumed with getting revenge. Of course that's how I roll most Thursdays so who am I to judge.

Sucker Punch/Your Highness

Well this week I saw two films specifically because the box office performance was so bad I wanted to see them before they got pulled from the theaters. Even in the face of overwhelmingly negative reviews I strode into the viewing experience with some hope they wouldn't be complete wastes of times based solely on my enjoyment of the filmmakers' prior work. I went 1 for 2 (or more accurately .75 for 2).

Sucker Punch

Unlike a lot of people I kind of enjoy Zach Snyder's work. I thought 300 was a lot of fun and Watchmen, while flawed, was interesting. At the very least he has unique visual style that I figured would keep me engaged even if the film sucked. It most assuredly did not. Sucker Punch is more than anything, incredibly boring. There's a lot of scenes where you can see Snyder trying so hard to make things look 'cool' that the effort is practically bursting off the screen. Generally when you have to work that hard to be cool, you fail (trust me, its how I spent my high school experience). Snyder spends all his time trying to make Sucker Punch Inception- lite (most of the action takes place in two dream levels) using dragons, WWI nazi robots, nuclear bomb, and women dressed as strippers, which granted sounds cool but just fails epically here. I could go on, but I was too bored to get very worked up.

Your Highness

I really enjoyed the previous James Franco/Danny McBride/David Gordon Green collaboration Pineapple Express so I went in to Your Highness hoping for the best even though the reviews had pretty much universally condemned it as offensively juvenile. And while I would agree with the last part of that description I'm not sure its really a problem. Your Highness is first and foremost incredibly silly, and incredibly filthy, but is so good natured about it its hard to get too offended. I'm not saying its a great work of art or anything, indeed no joke is too cheap or obvious, and the plot is at best perfunctory - but I laughed. The film has the good sense not to take itself seriously (even the big shift in plot when our protagonist gives his inspiring speech is undercut by the fact that he's wearing, um, a severed Minotaur penis around his neck as a trophy) and while not all of the jokes work, enough do and I generally enjoyed myself. I wouldn't watch it with anybody who doesn't have a heightened sense of the absurd, but in general I think its better than most people are giving it credit for.

Paul

Paul is kind of a tweener film. Its not that great, but it isn't bad either. I generally laughed at the appropriate times, and found certain aspects reasonably clever, but when all was said and done it didn't really stick with me. Its certainly nowhere near as good as the previous Nick Frost and Simon Pegg collaborations (Sean of the Dead and Hot Fuzz), but in general its reasonably entertaining. It is a little bloated at two hours (the beginning twenty minutes in particular are draggy) and I would have been fine cutting at least two of the ancillary characters, but (this is more equivocating than the women I date) I still generally enjoyed myself. The parts that work best are just when the characters are allowed to hang out and riff (and I'm including the CGI alien played by Seth Rogen in the group) and not try to push what is actually a pretty thin plot forward.

The only other thing I want to say is that one of my brother's name is Paul and we were actually together for a wedding the day the film opened. My other brothers and I then spent approximately 15 hours making a variation of the "Hey did you hear Paul came out today?" joke. A combined 18 years of post secondary education between us. This country is screwed.