Tag Archives: Movies

Sunday Night Movie: 2012

So being a fan os disaster movies, and to a somewhat lesser degree a fan of disastrous movies, withe the release of 2012 on Blu-ray I had to make that movie my Sunday Night Movie this week. (before anyone thinks I slipped a cam and actually bought the Blu-ray, I ordered it via Netflix.  That’s one of the reasons I have Netflix, so I can see movies I would not ordinarily pay for.)

As I have said in other posts I thin Roland Emmerich is in a race with Michael Bay as to who can make more stupid movie. After Michael Bay raised the stakes with Transformers : Revenge Of The Fallen, Emmerich had no option but to go all in with 2012.

Like all really classy disaster movies this one has a diverse cast from all sorts of walks of life caught up in the disaster. They struggle to survive, many failing and ending up in either noble moving deaths if they were likable characters, or ironic fitting deaths if they were jerks. There isn’t a single surprise in this entire films save for the level of stupid.

For example, the scene picture above. Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) failed writer whose HARDBACK book sold less than 500 copies (a face many people know in the film, no matter how divorced those characters may be from the publishing business.) is running to catch the plane with his ex-wife, two kids, and their new step-dad in order to escape the eruption of the super volcano beneath Yellowstone National Park. Behind the character is the slowest pyroclastic flow in the recorded history of vulcanology. In real life this effect can have speeds up to 750 km/hour. Jackson has managed to outrun the bit of disaster in an old RV. Crashed the RV into a fissure from the eruption, climb out of the fissure, chase down the plane with family et al aboard, and still manage to escape the deadly winds, pressure, and temperatures of up to 1000 degrees C. Now to paraphrase Morbius from Forbidden Planet: Prepare your minds for a new scale of stupidity values. What I just describe was the most CREDIBLE disaster/action/escape sequence in the whole film.

I laughed my way, and I mean that quite literally laughing out loud, through this entire movie. From the ridiculous  psuedo-science (Sub-atomic particles do NOT mutate Mr. emmerich, they decay.) to the ignoring of the vast distances involved this film gets everything wrong and does it in the most over the top manner imaginable.

It is filled with stock character, not one of which has any spark of originality and life. It ignores the consequences of its own stupid actions and stands.  SPOILER ALERT.

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No Sunday Night Movie post tonight

This is because it took me two nights to watch my Sunday Night Movie feature.  The film was 2 hours 37 minutes long and tomorrow I will tell you what I watched and how hard I laughed. (Not a good sign as it was not a comedy. Here’s a hint, I much preferred  When Worlds Collide.)

Today I got my new computer glasses with an Rx designed for use at a range of about 22 inches. It seriously reduced the eye strain I had at work and for most of the day and early evening I was feeling fairly good. The headaches returned to full force by the end of the evening because for everything else I am still using glasses that are out of date and my eyes are just too damn sensitive.

Talk you to tomorrow.

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Movie Review: The Ghost Writer

Today my sweetie-wife and I went to the movies and saw The Ghost Writer. This film is a political thriller directed by controversial director, Roman Polanski. (The link is to Mr. Polanski’s IMDB page, but if you want to do a Google search you’ll easily turn up the nature of the heated controversy surrounding Mr. Polanski  and he decades long flight from US law.)

Adapted by Roman Polanski and Robert Harris from a novel by Robert Harris, The Ghost Writer is about an author, The Ghost (Ewan McGregor) who has been brought on to complete an autobiography for a retired Prime Minister of England, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) after the previous ghost writer has died in a accident at sea.

When the ghost arrives he finds that the political teams he is to work with is in a state of siege as a former member of Lang’s cabinet has leaked documents accusing Lang of war crimes while in office. (The plot here is very topical with the war crimes being handing terror suspects over to the Americas for torture.) Lang’s chief of staff, Amelia Bly (Kim Cattrall) run the operation with a ruthlessness that suggests her name should more properly be spelled Bligh. Lang’s wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams) is estranged and distant clearly in a contest against Bly for her husband time and possibly affections.

Naturally there are secrets afoot and perhaps the death of The Ghost’s predecessor was no accident. As I said this is a political thriller. (Ripped from today’s headlines as the cliche goes.)

Overall this film was well made and entertaining.  The casts delivered really sharp and tight performances and there was very good use of modern technology in this sort of search for clues thriller. However, that said this film in the end did not work for me.

At the heart of the story is a conspiracy simply to fantastic to be believed. I went in prepared to let a largish conspiracy go by my suspension of disbelief. When you are dealing with political thrillers, conspiracies are the rule of the day. For most of the film I was drawn into the plot and the characters and even the conspiracy itself.  Polanski had done a fine job of not sending me into eye-rolling, you-can’t-expect-me-to-buy-that land. Then in the last thirty minutes of the film, they reveal the big turn, the big surprise and it’s simply ridiculous. Governments, hell any organization, simply cannot perform to this sort of competence and long range planning.

To make matters worse in literally the last five minutes of the film they turn things around again with a series of clues that if you think about make no sense what so ever. I have no idea what the writers were thinking or smoking when they conceived this ending. IT simply makes no sense.

As such I must down check this movie. Going out with my sweetie-wife was pleasant, but the film was not.

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I’m Back

Well, the last two days have been quite a tour de force of headaches for me. Yes my new glasses still have not arrived from the lab and so I have been suffering my daily headaches at this time of year. Friday got to near migraine quality and I left work a couple of hours early so I could do nothing and let my eyes rest.

The most frustrating part of the last two days is that it brought production on Cawdor to a halt. Thursday night was reducing to typing in edits on the chapter 3 and no original writing. Friday my head hurt far too much for me to even think of stringing words together.

However, by a bit of luck I woke up this morning without a headache. I intended to spend some quality time with my sweetie-wife, as I have not been the most fun to be around lately, and later a double feature of films with friends.

A friend and co-worker, Rachael, (No that’s not  a typo that’s how she spells it.) Is both a fan of Zombie movies and The Terminator franchise. Yet somehow she has never seen the 1978 Dawn Of The Dead and even more surprising she has never seen The Terminator. This is going to be rectified today.

Then in the evening it will be card and board games.

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Movie Review: Shutter Island

Sunday morning my sweetie-wife and I ventured to a local multiplex and watched Shutter Island, the most recent collaboration between Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio. A collaboration that clearly is enjoyable to these two very talent men. Martin Scorsese has made a number of films that I have really enjoyed and the same can be said for Leonardo DiCaprio.

Shutter Island is set in 1956 and two federal Marshals, Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and his brand new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) have been sent to Shutter Island an asylum for the criminally insane to investigate the escape of a dangerous female prisoner.

From the start we know that Teddy Daniels is a man haunted by his past. He has visions of his dead wife and nightmares of the horrors he saw liberating Europe from the Nazis. His suspicions are aroused when the director of the facility,  Dr Cawley (Ben Kingley) seems less that forthright in assisting the two marshals. With added hints of a possible nazi war-criminal and scientist in the form of Dr Naehring (Max Von Sydow) and black budget experimentation and Daniels is determined to find tou what is being hidden no matter the cost.

This film is gorgeous in its photography. Scorsese deftly blurs the line between dream, hallucination, and atmosphere. This is a story about madness and the thin line between that and inspiration. DiCaprio is wonderful in the role. He adopts a Boston accent, but never so heavily that it distracts. He simply lives in the skin of his character and as an actor he is unafraid to look unglamorous on the screen. He’s willing to go in ugly dark areas both mentally and physically.

I will say that about half way through the film I suspected the twists that lay ahead. I’m unable to switch off my writer’s brain and so I worked out a lot of the plot before it was revealed. However, I will that the final line of the film pays off for the whole journey, and I did not see that line coming.

I was only jerked fully out of the story once and it was because of another movie, L.A. Confidential. In one scene Martin Scorsese used the song Wheel Of Fortune by Kay Starr and that song has been forever welded to LA Confidential for me.

This is worth watching.

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Sunday Night Movie: Sibiriada (1979)

So this is a quite different kind of selection for my Sunday Night Movie series. Sibiriada is a sprawling Russian epic about four generations of families in a small isolated village in Siberia. The image presented in the post is of the character known as The Eternal Old Man and he is the one constant in the story of change and revolution. ( I joked as I watched this film with my sweetie-wife that in a western remake he’d be played by Anthony Hopkins. It would be a better role that that of Sir John Talbot, I can tell you that.)

When I describe this movie as a sprawling epic I am not giving in to hyperbole. The Running time for this film is 275 minutes. That’s 4 hours and 35 minutes of Russian characters, names, and history. It far too much for my sweetie-wife and I to watch in one sitting and so this sia  film we have digested in bits and pieces.

The film starts in the 1800 when the Czars still ruled Russian and it introduces to the feuding families, the wealthy and prosperous Solomins and the poor and unfortunate Ustyuzhanins. Across the decades we watch the families feud and fight, why possessed  by their passion for the land of the small forgotten village of Elan.

We watch as each generation deals with the hardships of their age. The brutal police of the Czars, the chaos of revolution, the struggle for survival in WWII, the desperate search for resources in the fifties and sixties to satisfy the central committee and finally the treat of the land itself being eradicated in the name of progress.

This is not a film for light viewing. It’s dense with a strange narrative structure. There is an element of the mystical  — as seen in part by The Eternal Old Man — which seems at odds with the normal Soviet insistence on realism and scientific processes. (Though the Soviets were horrid about perverted that process for political ends.) However if you like dense films with dozens of foreign characters to keep track of and no sense what so ever of the three act structure, then Sibiriada may be for you.

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Sunday Night Movie: Casino Royale(2006)

So, one the gifts I got for Christmas was a gift card to Borders. Now, as regular readers of the blatherings know I have purchased an ebook reader in 2009 and so I have transitioned to e-books for my pleasure reading.

Sunday I was at Borders with my sweetie-wife and I used the gift card to upgrade my DVD of Casino Royale to a blu-ray collectors edition of Casino Royale.  I got a much better picture and sound quality and additional bonus feature. Which is like crack to me.

I really liked this reboot of the James Bond Franchise. Frankly the Bond films had slipped into fantasy and as such were not very satisfying.  Now, don’t get me wrong, Bond in the books is not about realism. Bond is a larger than life character. He’s a tough man who can win any fight and knows what to do to survive and to win. As a character he is interesting because of what he went through in the story Casino Royale. These are the events that armored Bond, that until the story of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service rendered him cold to women. If you want gritty complex spy novels with a heavy dose of realism you should read the works of John Le Carre. There’s nothing wrong about either approach. James Bond is what we would like to have out there on our side and John Le Carre’s characters are what we fear are out there on our side. Continue reading →

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Movie Review: The Wolfman(2010)

So today my sweetie-wife and I went out to see The Wolfman, the recent remake of the classic Universal Horror film. I am a big fan of the original The Wolf Man (1941.) Perhaps I’ll cross post my essay on Werewolves and the pivotal position the 1941 film had on our understanding of this beast, but for right now I will concentrate on the screening we just attended.

I went in with lowered expectations and they were not met. This film is a mess, the script doesn’t know what story it really wants to tell, the plot is filled with holes that a pack of werewolves could dive through, the acting was telephoned in, and there is no chemistry between the leads.

It’s clear that the writers certainly started out using the Curt Siodmak screenplay as there basis for a remake, but quickly they lost the heart and soul of the writing. This has been a troubled production and it shows. I know the director, Joe Johnston, was not the first director and that he had been brought in to save the project. He did not. Continue reading →

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Sunday Night Movie: Back To The Future III

After last weekend’s Sunday Night Movie it seemed only right to select the final film in the trilogy as the weekend’s movie.

Back To The Future III completed the story arc started with Back To The Future II. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), when the time machine is struck by lightening it stranding Marty in 1955 and Doc Brown in 1885 the old west, seeks out Doc Brown — of 1955 — (Christopher Lloyd) to get home. Upon learning that Doc Brown was murdered in the  Old West, Marty travels back into time in the new repaired time machine to save his old friend . Their plans for a quick return home are complicated by Biff Tannen’s murderous ancestor Mad Dog Tannen. (Thomas F. Wilson) and Doc’s growing feeling for the new school Marm of Hill valley, Clara Clayton (Mary Steenburgen.) There are plenty of stunts and action and even middle-aged romance in this film and in fact I think it plays better than the second film of the trilogy does.

Again the time travels story is simplified by the malfunction of the time machine upon arrival. This is the most classic method for maintaing drama in a time travel story. Even the progenitor time travel story, The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells, strands the time traveler by having his machine stolen shortly after his arrival.

I have not seen this film since its original theatrical showing and I was unsure how well the film would stand up over time in my mind and emotions. It did so pretty well. I had forgotten a few details but I remembered the arc of the film well enough. The cast was good and it was nice seeing Christopher Lloyd getting a chance to stretch his own acting and dramatic muscles.

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