Next greatest blind-buy: Hirokin: The Last Samurai
This film's cover caught my eye: I wasn't expecting anything great, but I was at least enthralled to see some samurai dude on another planet hacking and slashing away at some aliens or something.
Surprisingly, there's not much hacking or slashing involved; a few cheap and stupid fights, but nothing more. One of the more inventive scenes involved the fighters chained to a post, and whenever the chain slackened, a big spike would come down and murder a hostage. Aside from that, the film came off as being rather dull.
The story didn't really captivate me either; it's full of dull and lifeless characters, going through the motions of some drama and plot that I really couldn't care about. The movie overall tried to hard to resemble films like John Carter and Prince of Persia, but both are miles better.
This film must have been made on the cheap. It sports okay, but never exceptional, photography and editing. Acting and writing are serviceable at times, but they are often marred with certain levels of cheese, amateurism, or plainness. This production uses a limited amount of sets, props, and costumes. Music is very generic too.
1/5 (Entertainment: Poor | Story: Very Poor | Film: Very Poor)
Recommendation: I'd recommend sticking your face into a bowl full of scorpions before I'd recommend this film.
Resident Evil: Retribution (dir. Paul W. S. Anderson, 2012)
My name is Alice...
The Good Points: Er...nothing.
The Bad Points: Everything else. Possibly the biggest, messiest pile of complete shite ever made. Terrible acting, ridiculous dialogue, poor CGI and a complete disregard for anything related to logic or physics. Strange, almost epileptic, editing style and Anderson's patented "let's film everything from 3 angles and then cut to each one in sequence!" style. It's a pathetic assault on every sense.
We don't expect much from the Resident Evil series, but Retribution sinks to a whole new level -- it's complete drivel, with no basic understanding of competent film-making or editing to save the recycled storyline, abysmal acting or boring, repetitive slow-motion action sequences. Here's hoping this series dies soon.
21 Jump Street (2012)
dir. Phil Lord, Chris Miller
The Good:Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, Ice Cube, and Ellie Kemper are all hilarious. The bathroom scene. Phases of H.F.S.. Korean Jesus. Johnny Depp and Peter DeLuise's cameos. Rob Riggle's severed dick.
The Bad:Jokes are hit-and-miss. Movie's a little uneven.
The Bottom Line:Tatum should do more comedy. 21 Jump Street is an inconsistent but often amusing buddy-cop comedy.
Hey Matt, I've just been getting into Paul WS Anderson and have been digging him thus far. I actually liked his eye in 3 Musketeers ...
He's an interesting one; he certainly has visual flair in some of his projects, but in others he just seemingly tries too hard with his multi-camera set-up and frenetic editing style.
His earlier work, such as Event Horizon is much simpler, much more controlled, than any of his recent, over-the-top and relentless fare. No score out of 10 might have been slightly harsh on RE:R but I felt it deserved it because it was such a monumental waste of time and energy.
Hey Matt, I've just been getting into Paul WS Anderson and have been digging him thus far. I actually liked his eye in 3 Musketeers ...
I got to admit that I'm a Paul WS Anderson fan. I enjoy all his work. Event Horizon has been a favorite since high school, I loved Death Race, and even though the latest RE films have been rather shallow, I did enjoy them.
Actually surprised you like his work so much.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Abdrewes
Al, I saw Howard the Duck 2 weeks ago, just forgot to mention it. Hundreds of dumb duck puns and a nonexistent story, but I enjoyed myself.
3 out of 5 ducks.
lol, awesome. It is definitely guilty pleasure territory there; I gave it the same score.
Sorry to say, I still haven't gotten around to seeing The Fireman's Ball. I gotta set something up soon...
I was super tempted to blind-buy the RE box set last week, but alas I didn't.
Ignatiy's Mubi.com review really stirred my interest though:
Quote:
Paul W.S. Anderson makes lively, unpretentious mid-budget genre movies fixated on video-gamey "cool" and distinguished by their leanness and their inventive—and sometimes even poetic—use of space.
His last film, The Three Musketeers 3D (2011), was the crassest, most ludicrous adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' novel imaginable: quick, silly, chock full of mechanical traps, flamethrowers, air ships and other cheesy sailpunk bric-a-brac. It was also the most personal, because in the process of chucking out Dumas' knottiness and ambiguity—along with the deaths of several major characters—Anderson transformed The Three Musketeers into a barely-recognizable vehicle for his own aesthetic predilections.
Anderson's work may not have a lot of narrative substance, but his visual sensibility is so well-developed that it often doesn't matter; form is substituted for theme. Composed in crisp visual shorthand, Anderson's movies are about images: strong, stoic-faced women meting out violence; characters executing somersaults through the air; tiny figures venturing into vast, foreboding spaces.
It's certainly a lot of fun, though not exactly profound. A lot in the way of characterization and development gets sacrificed to make Anderson's style work; his movies tend to be about stock characters talking in clichés in familiar situations—and, unlike the work of a Pop / camp fetishist like Roland Emmerich, it's all done with a completely straight face. Anderson's latest, Resident Evil: Retribution 3D, takes this even further: it's his most generic movie, in every sense of the term. In certain ways, it's also his ballsiest and most playful.
A video game adaptation that is also emphatically about video games, Retribution could be described as Anderson's answer to David Cronenberg's eXistenZ (1999) or Brian Neveldine and Mark Taylor's Gamer (2009)—though, if you can believe it, Anderson is actually even less high-falutin' than the dudes who directed Crank. It also recalls Drew Goddard's Joss Whedon-scripted Cabin in the Woods; both films place generic characters in generic situations, and then turn the cliché narrative machinery into spectacle.
Retribution opens by playing its first scene backwards and in slow-motion, and then forwards at normal speed. Then there's an extensive summary of the events of the preceding four (!) Resident Evil movies, addressed at the audience by the disembodied head of series lead / Anderson muse Milla Jovovich (the technique recalls the info-dump opening of David Lynch's Dune). Anderson goes out of his way to make it clear to the viewer what has happened and to whom and why—which makes the rug-pull that follows all the more potent. It's emblematic of Anderson's genre ethos that when he chooses to deliberately confuse a viewer, he wants them to know that they're being confused.
For the next twenty or so minutes of the movie, Anderson toys with the audience's perception, subverting the clean and crisp spatial sense of his style (exterior scenes are revealed to be set indoors, etc.) and playing with the interchangeability of his characters. People who died in earlier Resident Evil movies reappear with different personalities; one sequence finds Jovovich seemingly reincarnated as a suburbanite getting her daughter ready for her first day of school.
Anderson's obsession with space isn't limited to his visual sensibility; it's also at the center of his plots (Anderson wrote the screenplay for Retribution, as well as the other four Resident Evil movies). His films have a locked-room quality, where "story" is often synonymous with "setting;" many of them are set largely in a single (preferably cavernous) location: a prison (Resident Evil: Afterlife), a vast underground temple (Alien vs. Predator), a spacecraft (Event Horizon). As eventually revealed, the same is true of Retribution: its doppelganger-populated spaces-within-spaces-within-spaces are all part of a massive testing facility / live-action video game that pits the characters / players against a sinister computer—the Red Queen, named after the character from Through the Looking-Glass (Jovovich's character is, of course, named Alice).
After introducing (and over-explaining) this premise, Anderson spends the rest of the movie cutting between three perspectives—that of Jovovich, that of the team sent to rescue her, and that of the Red Queen (shown through security-camera footage and wire-frame models of the facility). Retribution foregrounds the mechanics of the Red Queen's testing facility, which constitute a parody of game design: scripted events, "city" locations that are laid-out in a way that obscures their small size, non-player characters with one-note personalities (the film has a lot of fun with casting Michelle Rodriguez as two different characters—one programmed to be a Whole Foods hybrid-car sort of liberal, the other a relentless killing machine).
This is not, however, a po-mo genre indictment like Gamer or Cabin in the Woods; rather, Anderson celebrates the clichés and the mechanical storytelling, and sets up the game so that the audience can better enjoy watching Jovovich beat it. Aside from a distrust of Big Corporations (present in most of his films, including all of the Resident Evil movies)—an attitude that is in and of itself a genre cliché—Anderson is uncynical. His work is eye stuff: entertainment that rewards the viewer for watching rather than for being clever.
And there's, frankly, a lot to look at. Anderson's style is tailor-made for 3D, and Retribution—his third film in the format—further confirms his status as the most surefooted filmmaker working in this young and often fickle medium. He avoids all of the current 3D technology's weak areas—murky lighting, shallow focus, shaky handheld, strobic cutting—and concentrates on its strengths: wide shots, visual depth, dollies, rain, slow motion. Anderson makes especially fine use of the latter. Though slow motion is used by most filmmakers to distort or subvert action—think, for example, of Sam Peckinpah's sad, languid slow-mo violence—Anderson's use of the technique is appreciative. Often framed wide, his slow-mo sequences savor every drop of choreographed movement (in this sense, he has a lot in common with another Anderson—Wes, who shares his fondness for slowed-down deep-focus tableaux).
Nothing in the film registers as kitsch or camp—in part because Anderson, unlike many of his genre contemporaries, never gives the impression that he thinks he's making art. No scene feels drawn out, no image (not even a slow motion one) overlingers its use, no moment feels like a filmmaker imposing something on his audience, everything fits neatly and tidily into the setting / premise—and yet nothing about the film feels remotely routine, or workmanlike, or impersonal. Certain moments are pure, unaffected B-movie poetry: Jovovich teaching someone how to use a gun ("It's like a camera; you point and shoot."); a submarine's conning tower breaking through a sheet of ice; a pyramid-shaped swarm of zombies swimming up to the surface; the "sky" rebooting in a simulated New York City. It's guileless visual pulp—pleasure with nothing to feel guilty about. ■
I was super tempted to blind-buy the RE box set last week, but alas I didn't.
Ignatiy's Mubi.com review really stirred my interest though:
Man, I probably agree with about 10% of that, having seen the majority of Anderson movies and enjoying a few. I honestly cannot fathom there being any ulterior motive behind his films beyond popcorn-entertainment and super slow-motion fights, especially aspects such as "poetic space" and a marriage between narrative and setting.
I guess those are the joys of such a subjective medium; people can interpret things however they want, and it doesn't necessarily line-up with what anyone else believes.
Man, I probably agree with about 10% of that, having seen the majority of Anderson movies and enjoying a few. I honestly cannot fathom there being any ulterior motive behind his films beyond popcorn-entertainment and super slow-motion fights, especially aspects such as "poetic space" and a marriage between narrative and setting.
I guess those are the joys of such a subjective medium; people can interpret things however they want, and it doesn't necessarily line-up with what anyone else believes.
Be prepared for my "10/10, BEST MOVIE EVS, tots emoshe, 4 stars, makes DW Griffith look like Uwe Boll" review...
Be prepared for my "10/10, BEST MOVIE EVS, tots emoshe, 4 stars, makes DW Griffith look like Uwe Boll" review...
Honestly, if you like it, I'll be happy for you, since you've managed to overlook its flaws and enjoy its spectacle. You're an intelligent guy, so I look forward to reading your take on it, and any other Anderson films you check out!
Honestly, if you like it, I'll be happy for you, since you've managed to overlook its flaws and enjoy its spectacle. You're an intelligent guy, so I look forward to reading your take on it, and any other Anderson films you check out!
One of these days I need to commit myself to watching his stuff. Should I start with Soldier or Event Horizon?
One of these days I need to commit myself to watching his stuff. Should I start with Soldier or Event Horizon?
I've never Soldier so I have no idea, but Event Horizon is a great horror flick with a truly creepy atmosphere, although it did get critically panned for some reason.
Maybe we should both make it our missions to check out Soldier
One of these days I need to commit myself to watching his stuff. Should I start with Soldier or Event Horizon?
Quote:
Originally Posted by legendarymatt92
I've never Soldier so I have no idea, but Event Horizon is a great horror flick with a truly creepy atmosphere, although it did get critically panned for some reason.
Maybe we should both make it our missions to check out Soldier
Soldier is fairly cool, surprisingly original, but it really doesn't have much to the plot. Plenty of action though. Between the two, I prefer Event Horizon, for its atmosphere, story, and visuals.
Thanks Al, thanks Matt. Hopefully I can score both for $5 each one of these days. For horror and Scifi, atmosphere is key, so I'm all the more excited you both described it as such.
Jeez, if I don't watch it, I may be muching on supposedly low quality Scifi flicks like Sphere this time next year. May need to buy a Michael Snow box set to offset this.
"Don't you want to know the secret, of your scar?"
The Good Points: Thrilling and adventurous. Some excellent set-pieces, which are all exhilarating to some degree. Continues to feel surprisingly fresh, even when four instalments have preceded it. Yates brings a level of visual assurance, and its bleak style suits its more mature narrative.
The Bad Points: Fast-paced, choppy directorial style; Yates never dwells on themes or images for too long. Quite lean and insubstantial. Some bad acting from the child stars, and the 'big name' actors aren't utilised and appreciated as well as they possibly could be. CGI just doesn't hold up in parts. Won't win any new fans for the franchise.
Surprisingly fresh and exciting for the fifth instalment, The Order of the Phoenix is hindered by problematic, boisterous direction and some terrible CGI moments, but has enough visual flair and updated, mature themes to provide constant entertainment to fans of the series.
Yeah, I've pretty much forgotten all of them but 3 and 7. I'm not much of a Potter-head.
Well I grew up with them, so they're a bit more built into my mentality.
Philosopher's Stone/none of this Sorcerer's Stone crap) Enjoyable but rather unwatchable via how much it's dated and those lousy kid actors.
Chamber of Secrets) Actually my favourite of the films, they get rid of most the lousy CGI and replace with proper effects, it's pretty scary and a lot of fun. Plus giant spiders and giant snake, what's not to like.
Prisoner of Azkaban) Technically the best, although the direction is a bit too flashy and in your face. Noticeable for the fact the series begins to grow up.
Goblet of Fire) Don't like it, the whole main premise of the film is pretty flimsy, Harry isn't allowed to take part in the tasks but has to because a f**king cup says so. I wouldn't mind but these leads to all the bad stuff in the last four books/films.
Order of Phoenix) It's good and low key avoiding to be too flashy and cuts most the needless crap out of the book, considering it's the longest book but the shortest film.
Half Blood Prince) Rubbish, Harry Potter and Co. try to get their end away for 2 hours straight. Oh and that Half Blood Prince thing...mentioned 3 times and so passively revealed it might as well not of been mentioned at all.
Part 1) Pretty atmospheric and down beat film, does well with what it's allowed to do.
Part 2) Fun finale, although the greenscreening in some of the scenes is absolutely unforgivable for a mainstream billion dollar franchise like this one.
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