OZ the great and powerful/side effects

Oz the great and powerful

I don't really have much to say about this.  A friend wanted to see it, we went, time passed, and it was over. Its ultimately an inert, somewhat pointless film, but has just enough decent execution not to be completely boring (which I'll wholly attribute to director Sam Riami).  The 3-d is about a 5 on the obnoxious scale, and don't think too hard about how it fits into the Wizard of Oz universe because the logic really breaks down.  Really the most interesting part about the film is to see how much referencing of the original film it could get away with without having to pay Warner Brothers (who owns the rights to the Wizard of Oz) any royalties.  The answer is more than I thought.

Side effects

Since this was a Soderbergh film I was inevitable going to see it.  Its well-made and entertaining, its not anywhere near my favorite of his works.  I think the problem is that its a little bit too clever and clinical, lacking the energy of his best films (i.e. Out of Sight or Magic Mike).  Basically even though its well executed and impressively slips between multiple genres, I never quite got engaged on more than an intellectual 'lets see what happens narratively' level.  Its definitely worth seeing, but I think it'll ultimately be viewed as a minor work (by Soderbergh (or your mom's) standards).

Life of Pi

The trailer for this didn't excite me at all.  It looked a little too much like a genre I (and whoever I stole the term from) like to refer to as 'White Middle Class Porn.'  This basically means that its vaguely spiritual with some non-threatening ethnicity, and you feeling like something profound happened, even when it really didn't.  However, I kept hearing good things, Ang Lee won an academy award, and I heard the Smurfs 2 trailer was going to be shown, so I decided to see if my feelings from the trailer were wrong.

They weren't, but that doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't see the film.  Its beautifully shot with some tremendous scenes that Lee obviously put a lot of care into.  It also makes pretty good use of 3-D, with only one really distracting 'pokey' scene.  That said the dialougue is expository at best, and cut rate new-agey at worst.  Since most of the film is one guy on a boat with a tiger I half-wish they had just shot without any talking.  You could have easily followed what was going on without the voiceover, and it would have left more time to focus on the phenomenal imagery.  Also the ending is really stupid.  Completely crosses the line into the White Middle Class Porn/Super Cliched NPR listener territory that I was afraid of.  Its not enough to torpedo the film, but it did make me almost laugh out loud.  Really if they had chopped a half an hour and spent the whole time on the boat with minimal set up the film would have been much better.

Final Note:  Gerard Depradieu get a 'and' credit in the title sequences.  Dude is literally on screen for 45 seconds and has about six lines of dialougue.  I have to figure more of his part got cut because it's a completely extraneous role (to be fair that's pretty much all of them except the dude on the boat and the tiger) and for the life of me I can't figure why they felt the need to pay a 'name' to play it.  Maybe I'll read the book to find out.  Probably not.

Rust and bone/Zero Dark Thirty

Rust and Bone

Here's a pretty fair review.  I really only went to this film because the director's last work was A Prophet, which was great.  This one has a similar sense of style to the earlier one - lots of dreamlike, almost impressionistic, imagery and wordless interludes - but lacks the narrative push.  Really for being such a high-concept film (orca trainer gets legs bitten off and falls in love with a street fighter) not much happens.  Its pretty content with just letting the relationship play out in a muted and unhurried pace, and (until the ending) no overt dramatics and histrionics.  On balance I think it generally works, but I can easily see viewers being really annoyed and possibly bored by the pacing and lack of clear resolution.  You really have to be in the right kind of mood for this type of film.  Its not non-linear like The Tree of Life, just very mannered and matter of fact while avoiding the obvious emotional beats (until the aforementioned ending where it forces in too neat of a resolution).  I don't know if this means you should check it out, but I can say I wasn't bored and much of it did stick with me.

Zero dark thirty

This film on the other was pretty much a straight adrenaline rush from the beginning to end.  Chronicling the ten year hunt, and killing, of Osama Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty focuses on one CIA analyst who pursues the terrorist for over a decade.  I appreciated that the film avoided making any large statements, and I think the criticism leveled at it over its portrayal of torture has been misplaced.  I didn't get the sense it was glorifying the practice, and to not acknowledge that it happened would have been completely disingenuous.  I I also think the criticism of its lack of politics is misguided.  The film is pretty narrowly focused on the mechanics of what happened and not more.  While its true that a more political tact might have given the film more dramatic oomph (that's a technical term), it would have distracted from what I think director Katherine Bigelow was trying to do.

Its not perfect, and it surprisingly lacks the tension of any of the bomb-defusing scenes in Bigelow's previous film The Hurt Locker, but overall its still entertaining.  Really the thing that threw me off the most was the casting of Chris Pratt (Parks and Rec's Andy Dwyer) as one of the SEAL team.  It's not that he does a bad job but every time I saw him onscreen all I could think was BERT MACKLIN FBI!   It was actually really distracting.  But anyway, this is a well executed thriller, and Jessica Chastain does a nice job with a fairly underwritten lead character.  Its not the best picture of the year, but then not everything can be Cabin in the Woods.

Django Unchained

Most of this is going to be some random thoughts, but let me just say up front that this delivered on all its promise.  Its one of the most entertaining experiences I've had at a theater all year.

1.  This is very much a close cousin to Inglorious Basterds.  Except rather than killing tons of Nazis, this time its slavers.  I'm fine with both.  The first big difference between the two is the approach to violence.  Where the fight scenes in Inglorious at least had a modicum of reality (at least within the logic of the film), in Django Tarantino fully embraces the hyper-stylized, over the top, nature of the spaghetti westerns that influence it.  As a result Django is more overtly comic with plenty of laugh out loud moments, whereas the humor in Inglorious was more subtle.  This mainly comes from the fact that the Basterds was predominately driven by  dialougue, and Django is more visceral.  I give the edge to Basterds (mainly because Django doesn't have a scene approaching the opening to Inglorious), but they make a great double feature.

2. Christoph Waltz is still amazing.  Yes he's just playing a variation of his Hans Landa character from the former film but that doesn't make him any less enjoyable.  I also need to figure a way to grow his facial hair.

3. There's been a lot of criticism that the film is too humorous, given its subject matter. I'm not sure that's a fair charge (bear in mind this is coming from a solidly middle class white guy).   Yes Tarantino treats the slavers like buffoons, but doesn't that lack of any respect for them work as a form of criticism as well? They want to be seen as hardcore competent killers, not clowns.  Anyway, the scenes that are meant to horrifying, come off as such.  He doesn't whitewash the atrocities against slaves, he just treats the responsible parties with the disdain they deserve.  And you better believe everybody gets what's coming to them.

4. This is by far the best role by Sam Jackson in years.  He actually seems engaged, and his interplay with Jaime Foxx and Dicaprio is a joy to watch.

5.  Yes its too long, but whatever.  Its a ton of fun, and I was never bored.  I don't know if it will be as re-watchable as some of his other work, but I'm going to find out.

Jack Reacher

Plot summary

I wanted to see this for two reasons:

1) Christopher McQuarrie - writer of The Usual Suspects and director of the criminally underrated Way of the gun was the writer/director.
2) Werner Herzog, director of The Bad Lieutenant and frequent Comedy Bang Bang guest was making his acting debut as the bad guy.

Well Herzog was fine, though barely in it, and the director half of writer/director was great.  The film has some nice set pieces, and all of the action is clever and well-executed.  The problems begin whenever there's expository dialogue.  I don't know how much to blame on the source novel, but anytime there was a scene that didn't involve a fight things just ground to a halt.  It doesn't help that the plot had a ton of holes in it, but plenty of other films have dealt with that.  Here you just wanted everyone to stop talking, and donn't really care what happened with any of the ancillary characters.  Really this could have been a 45 minute film with minimal talking, and would have been just as effective.

Don't get me wrong, the entertaining parts are very entertaining.  Its just too bad the script didn't match up with the direction.  Though since the director wrote it I guess I can just blame him for everything. 

Les Miserables

I'm not sure I can top this review  but I'll try.

Les Mis is a difficult thing film for me to review because I think the book is one of the truly all time great works of literature and my familiarity with it is going to significantly affect how I receive the film.  This can cut one of two ways.  On the one hand I may find the story to be more powerful than someone unfamiliar with the details since I can fill in all the backstory of the different relationships that's, by necessity, missing from the film.  On the other hand, my familiarity with what's missing might also just end up making the film seem like an inferior version.  I guess what I'm saying is that adaptation's difficult, and I can't really comment on how someone unfamiliar with the source material (book or stage musical) would receive the film.

Anyway,  the best way to summarize the film is that it feels simultaneously rushed and a bit of a slog; has some nice, and powerful, moments and while overall it isn't bad, isn't great either.  I think it helps to have at least some familiarity with the basic story going in, because otherwise a lot of what the film sells as significant will just feel trivial.  Given how its a pretty straight adaptation of the stage musical I'm not sure it was really necessary to make, but its not a waste of time (and Russel Crowe's singing isn't as bad as the talk suggests.  Its not great, but not a train wreck). I'm sure it will get a bunch of awards nominations, but I don't know that I'll go out of my way to see it again.

Silver Linings Playbook

Here's the plot recap.

I enjoyed Silver Linings, and it reminded of David O. Russel's last film the Fighter.  Like the former film, he takes a pretty conventional genre (sports movie in the fighter, romantic comedy here) and gives it enough edge and quirks so that it doesn't feel as utterly conventional as the story actually is.  This is entertaining, but (again just like the Fighter) I'm sort of surprised at how much love this film is getting in critical circles.  In no way does it reinvent the wheel, or try to realistically portray mental illness.  Its an above average genre exercise, with a strong cast, that has just enough skewness in it to elevate it above typical fare. Even if the mental illness is portrayed more as quirky than debilitating.

Really the most interesting part of the film revolves around Bradley Cooper's relationship with his father (played by Robert DeNiro), and I'm not sure what interests me is intentional.  First, Deniro only expresses any love for Cooper when his favorite teams win, which he associates with Cooper's good luck charm qualities.  At first this is portrayed as the disturbing behavior that it is, but by the end the film just sort of accepts it and treats it as a merely quirky.  Even their big reconciliation comes immediately after DeNiro wins a bet.  Second, Deniro makes Cooper take part in a bet so irresponsible and psychotic that you can't believe everybody just shrugs it off (after some initial protests) and the whole thing is portrayed as a heart-warming bonding exercise.  I suspect that some of this is Russel's effort to send up the idiot plot devices of most romantic comedies, and in that sense it works.  If its meant to be played straight though, then the whole is a gross miscalculation.  

It's too bad that this film is being hyped so much because I think the acclaim ultimately hurts it by skewing expectations so much.  I guess its not the film's fault and I shouldn't complain.  Except this is my blog that nobody reads and I'll complain if I want to.  Suck it.